The Fall of Frank Worrell: The Carthage Guard Commander Stopped by Bodyguards Redden and Rockwell (September 1845)

Return Jackson Redden was born September 26, 1817, in Hiram, Portage County, Ohio. A riverboat hand on the Mississippi in his youth, he was baptized in the Ohio River in 1841 and moved to Nauvoo, where he served as one of Joseph Smith's bodyguards until the Prophet was killed in June 1844. After the martyrdom he lost his young wife and infant son at Winter Quarters, and in 1847 he joined Brigham Young's vanguard company — scouting ahead of the pioneers, scouting the sandstone cave near the trail that the company named Redden's Cave (today Cache Cave), and entering the Salt Lake Valley as one of Heber C. Kimball's selected advance men.

In September 1845, as anti-Mormon terror escalated in Hancock County, the mobs turned their night-riding against Sheriff Jacob Backenstos, the Mormon-elected county sheriff who was trying to capture the marauders. On the road to Warsaw, a small party of riders began chasing the sheriff's carriage. Backenstos whipped his horses to a railroad siding where several Saints were watering their horses — among them Porter Rockwell and Return Jackson Redden — and quickly deputized the two bodyguards of the slain Prophet. "Don't worry," Rockwell said, "we've got our pistols and two rifles."

As the pursuers came galloping on, Backenstos shouted for them to halt. The lead rider — whom witnesses later said was reaching for a pistol — was Frank Worrell, the lieutenant who had commanded the Carthage Greys' guard detachment at the jail the day Joseph and Hyrum Smith were killed, and who had refused at trial to answer whether the Greys' rifles had been loaded with blanks. A slug from Rockwell's rifle took him just above the belt buckle, and Worrell died before his companions could get him to Warsaw. Backenstos and Rockwell were tried for the shooting; both were acquitted.

The hand of divine justice was not lost on the Saints: the officer whose guard stood aside while the Prophet was murdered fell sixteen months later, on a Warsaw road, stopped by two of the very bodyguards he had helped make famous by his failure. Redden — "a bold and fearless man" in the pioneer camps, later a U.S. deputy marshal and justice of the peace in Grantsville, Coalville, and Hoytsville, Utah — carried the story of that day as part of the long reckoning of Carthage.

Fuller account of this event (as retold in Council of Fifty, Minutes, March 1844–January 1846; Volume 3, 6 May 1845–13 January 1846, Page 45):

Backenstos was accused of complicity in the killing of Franklin A. Worrell. On 16 September 1845 Backenstos had been accosted on the road by a party of anti-Mormons that included Worrell. The armed mob pursued Backenstos for nearly two miles before he came across Mormons Orrin Porter Rockwell and John Redden and requested their help. As the mob neared the sheriff and his new deputies and refused the sheriff’s command to halt, Rockwell fired a single shot that struck Worrell in the chest and killed him. Worrell’s death further incensed anti-Mormon passions.