| 227 Gentiles were to let the Mormons alone as long as the latter were peaceable, and vice versa. Each party, too, was to disband its military organization. But on the morning of the 29th the Mormons learned that a company of Livingston militia, a few miles to the eastward, were menacing them, and so they maintained their organization and that night set watches. The latter company was commanded by Captain William Mann, and for some days had been operating at and in the vicinity of Whitney's mill, on Lower Shoal Creek (where the village of Dawn now stands), stopping Mormon emigrants on their way from the East to Caldwell County, turning them back in some instances, taking their arms from them in others, etc.
"On the 29th, at Woolsey's, northeast of Breckenridge, an agreement was reached by the Gentiles for an attack upon Haun's mill. There companies, numbering in the aggregate about two hundred men, were organized. They were commanded by Captains Nehemiah Comstock, William O. Jennings, and William Gee. The command of the battalion was given to Col. Thomas Jennings, an old militia officer, then living in the Forks. Nearly all of the men were citizens of Livingston County. Perhaps twenty were from Daviess, from whence they had been driven by the Mormons during the troubles in that county a few weeks previously. The Daviess County men were very bitter against the Mormons, and vowed the direst vengeance on the entire sect. It did not matter whether or not the Mormons at the mill had taken any part in the disturbances which had occurred; it was enough that they were Mormons. The Livingston men became thoroughly imbued with the same spirit, and all were eager for the raid. The Livingston men had no wrongs to complain of themselves, for the Mormons had never invaded their county, or injured them in any way; but they seemed to feel an extraordinary sympathy for the outrages suffered by their neighbors.
"Setting out from Woolsey's after noon on the 30th, Col. Jennings marched swiftly out of the timber northwest of the present village of Mooresville, and out on the prairie stretching down southwards towards the doomed hamlet at Haun's
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