What was discovered at Hawn’s Mill? Archaeologist Paul Debarthe from the Community of Christ details musket balls, and why he refuses to find the well where 17 men at boys were buried following the massacre at Hawn’s Mill. Check out our conversation…
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Musket Fire at Hawn’s Mill
GT 00:31 Well, I know I’ve kept you long time Paul and it’s getting late. Do you have any last thoughts? Is there anything as far as Hawn’s Mill that we didn’t cover? Actually, I think there is something, you did say that you found Musket Balls.
Paul 00:51 Yes. Yes, we found both the rifle and pistol balls. So it’s very good evidence of the battle that was conducted there. Some probably close to 500 Missouri regulars came in and there were probably as many as 30 people in Hawn’s Mill at the time. The Hamlet was pretty small. It was a scattering of maybe a dozen buildings. And yes, there was a significant military incident that occurred there. And sadly, it was really a massacre for those 17 people. And, again, I would call to people’s attention that it’s so much better if we love each other.
GT 01:37 I agree.
Paul 01:41 It’s not that difficult. I mean, I understand that there are people who get angry and want to go to war. We have an awful lot of heritage, that wants to go to war. But the call, as I understand it, of God to mankind, is that you don’t have to be a dysfunctional family. You can overcome the dysfunctionality of your past. If you will learn to love each other, follow the teachings of the Christ. Recognize that to use a bit of compassion can be a good alternative. And when we are compassionate and follow the compact for compassion, it’s just amazing how much better our lives can be. Look what difference it is, when, for example, you have the Iroquois Confederation where leaders take a vow to keep in mind the welfare of the children in every political decision they made. Even the unborn children. That was a priority. The women were the one that selected the men to go on the council. And if you offended a woman then you probably didn’t get on that council. So, you had better mind your manners throughout your growing up life. But the tug and pull here, making it so that you have to keep in mind the benefit of the children with every political decision you make, made it so that the Iroquois Confederation was a powerful, strong, beautiful Confederation. We have a lot to learn from them. I am so convinced that the cause of Zion that Joseph Smith advocated so much is the promised land that is still before us. And we can learn to not be so dysfunctional. If we follow the message of my sweet wife.”Don’t forget to love each other.”
GT 03:30 I think that’s a great place to leave. All right. Well, Paul DeBarthe, remind people what the name of your book is again.
Paul 03:41 Oh, here I had it open for the map. Hawn’s Mills Hamlet.
GT 03:46 Okay.
Paul 03:47 And it’s an archaeological investigation. Phase three archaeological investigation conducted by hands on history students in high school and college. The map inside will show you just a little bit of a sketch of what Hawn’s Mill looks like. It’s in Caldwell County, Missouri. It’s a site that is an example of lessons in history that we need to learn. There’s an awful lot of those. We’re walking on 10,000 years of cultural residue, virtually everywhere we walk in America, or more. And we generally don’t appreciate it. The fact we bulldoze the buildings that are 20 years old and replace them because we got something better now. And we put parking lots and apartment houses on the ancient sites and pay no attention to the people that were covering over that way. We can do a better job of appreciating and respecting our heritage, our own culture but other people’s cultures. And the more we can learn from other people’s cultures about how to live in harmony with the environment, the longer we are going to survive.
GT 05:09 Well, that’s great. Well, I’m going to tell you to go out and buy it. It sounds like it’s a fantastic book. I wish I’d had a chance to read it so I can ask you some better questions, but it’s brand new out, and
Paul 05:23 It’s available on Amazon. It didn’t make it here to the conference, except for that one copy that my daughter got that was on loan to me. I wrote in it for her. So, nobody else is able to take advantage of that. I was going to sign books for people that bought them here, but the books didn’t get here yet.
GT 05:43 Well, Paul DeBarthe, thank you so much for being here. And I guess I’ll just put in another plug. If you guys want to go to the or want to attend the Zoom Monday night meetings and Book of Mormon forum, send me an email at [email protected] and I will forward it on to Robert and Paul.
Paul 06:06 Thank you. The Book of Mormon Perspectives Forum, is such a pleasant taste of Zion.
GT 06:14 Yeah. And it’s not just Community of Christ. Bill Shepard, a Strangite is there all the time. We’ve got lots of people from restoration branches. It’s a very interfaith group and it’s fabulous.
Paul 06:27 Well, thank you. Thank you. And your presentations have been great. We’ve had him [Rick] talking about the various places where people think that the Book of Mormon sites should be found. And it’s just fascinating just to have people so adamant, so excited.
GT 06:43 Oh, and by the way, Paul, I’ve got to tell you this. I know you said that, because I was the first one that presented on the African theory. I just forwarded an email from somebody to Deb. You might get a first one who’s supporting an African theory.
Paul 06:57 All right. Okay, well, we’ve had six presentations on where the land of Nephi is, so far. We’ve had it in Peru and Guatemala and the Malay Peninsula, in Georgia, in Joseph Smith’s head in the Chesapeake Bay area. And yeah, well, Africa’s coming.
GT 07:18 Yeah,
Paul 07:19 We need to get the Baja California Peninsula idea as well.
GT 07:22 I can forward you his as well.
Paul 07:25 But yeah, so to have each of these people who’ve done their research and have what they think are the compelling ideas to support their theory. To me, it’s pretty convincing that it’s actually allegorical about the whole human family being so dysfunctional, and needing to move toward the Promised Land, I call Newtopia.
GT 07:43 All right, well, check it out. Paul DeBarthe, thank you so much. It’s been great seeing you here in Texas, and I hope to see you back in Nauvoo. Oh, by the way, what’s your website for Nauvoo for people that want to help volunteer with archaeology?
Paul 08:00 idignauvoo.com.[1] Robert Cook runs that. We will have Western Illinois University conducting a field school from June 3 through July 10 I believe was the schedule, if you’re asking. We’ll have it open in a couple months. We will have it open a couple of weeks before that with those BYU students coming. There’s a serious prospect that I’ll be at Liberty Hall in Lamoni.
GT 08:25 Oh, for people who don’t know what Liberty Hall is?
Paul 08:29 That’s the home that Joseph Smith III, built to move to in 1880, where he lived until he moved to Independence, Missouri with the relocating of the headquarters of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And so with that move, we have the sesquicentennial of Lamoni and I’ve been working on that project, the 150 year celebration, which would be 1879. Let me just add that testimony because the story of what happened in this last month is just awesome. July 21st, four girls were driving in central Iowa, [they] pulled out on highway 34 and got slammed by a truck. Halsey Barnes died on the spot. That was Friday night at about 10:30. By Sunday, their friend also on the softball team, Ella died. A week later on Sunday, Gabby died, she was the driver. That left Abigail in a coma for a month as the only survivor of those four girls. Abigail Barnes grew up on a farm one mile south of our farm in Iowa, west of Lamoni. My father moved there in 1943, actually moved there ‘42, but didn’t get the farm until ‘43. And so, the neighbors were the Barnes’ for 80 years. Five generations of the Barnes family have been our friends. And here was Abby in a coma. And I found out on Saturday and contacted Travis her father and they’re good people but not particularly religiously affiliated. He asked me what Bible verses to share with her. And so, I told him the twenty third Psalm, John 14 and a couple of others and he was appreciative. I told him that our Shawnee Mission congregation would be praying for him. That’s a good idea to have all congregation but that’s pretty awesome. It occurred to me I get on the internet and get some more congregations. By Sunday, {Rick chuckling} we had I think, 24 congregations praying for her of different churches.
GT 10:54 Right.
Paul 10:57 My brother and I, on Tuesday following, went up to Des Moines to pray for them. We walked into the hospital room and here Abby was laying in the bed with this side [of her head] bandaged and still bloody. Her parents, Travis and Tessa were standing beside her. His brother Shannon and his wife, whose daughter had Halsey had been killed. We’re standing here with these four adults hovering over this girl, desperate to have some surviving life out of that terrible incident. We prayed for them. We then went back the following week to pray again. By this time, we had Caring Bridge working and I think we had 13,000 people on Caring Bridge by that time, which was pretty amazing. And the third week we went back again. Then the fourth week we went back again, and the doctor had warned me that after a month in a coma a person’s chances of coming out whole were pretty remote. Her father though, Travis put a belt around her because she was moving around in bed, still in a coma. He got her up and she actually did some walking. Not cogent, but her muscles wanted to work, an amazing development. They moved her to the Madonna Hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska. And I wanted to make contact. I found a pastor in Lincoln whose name was Greg Christ. C-H-R-I-S-T. And with that kind of a name, I thought that’s got to be good pastor. {both laughing} And so I called him and he and his wife met me at the hospital at noon when I got there on Wednesday. And they, to my delight, invited the Barnes’s to stay in their basement apartment so they could have a chance to get some good sleep and wash their clothes and so forth. So generous, so extraordinarily generous. But then we walked into A-19 where Abby was. Her father had warned me the night before that she had uttered some profanity, and so I don’t know what to expect. But we walked in, and she was sitting up. And she was being fed sushi by the nurse. And I saw that. I stopped. I raised my hand to say, “Hi Abby”. She looked up at me, raised her hand and said, “Hi Paul”.
Paul 13:29 I ran over to give her a hug. And she said, “I planted trees on your farm.”
GT 13:34 Oh.
Paul 13:34 She had. We’re on the same sesquicentennial committee for Lamoni. And I have a project to write about the families that have been there for 100 years. And ours is one of them. And then she got up and went running around the room and the nurse chased her because with the side still damaged, she was not well balanced with limited, short attention span. But she came back, and then she sat down and said, but I’ve got to finish my senior paper for Graceland first. And then I want to get on my master’s project.
GT 14:03 Oh, wow.
Paul 14:05 This last weekend. This is less than two months now since the accident, but this last weekend, she got to come home for the first time, for two days. And on Sunday, she got on Zoom and spoke to the congregation at Shawnee Mission Drive and said thank you for praying for me.
GT 14:20 That’s awesome.
Paul 14:22 When you see the resurrection principle alive there was an international body of people expressing their faith on her behalf. I heard the Anglican pastor, Pastor Valentine offer a beautiful prayer on her behalf. A pastor from Nepal, a pastor from El Salvador, one from the Ukraine. The Tebby folks from the Cameroons were praying for her. Rina’s friend, Moreva from Polynesia had told her friends in Tahiti, Rina’s friend in Iowa has been hurt. Pray for her. So here’s a whole bunch of people that are getting on the Caring Bridge, uniting their faith and prayers. The Amish neighbors, of course, were involved. There’s this international network of 66,000 people praying for Abby Barnes and her family. There’s only 1000 [people] in Lamoni, another 1000 at Graceland. Here’s 60,000 extra people from around the world, uniting their faith and prayers, to bless someone who comes away from the chasms of death back into the resurrected life. I so much believe in faith and prayer, and we have so much available to us when we learn to love each other.
GT 15:51 Well, I’ll just put in a plug on me and Jesse James went to Liberty Hall in Lamoni, so if you have a chance to go there, especially when Paul is there, it’s a fun place to go.
Paul 16:04 I’ve proposed an archaeological project there, so we can restore it more to what it was like when Joseph Smith III was there. And there’s some chance that I will be there as the director next year.
GT 16:13 Oh, very cool. All right. Well, I don’t want to keep you too much later. Paul DeBarthe, thank you so much for being here on Gospel Tangents.
Paul 16:20 It’s only two hours! {both laughing} Good thing we started late otherwise we would be here another hour.
GT 16:34 I know. Thanks again Paul.
Paul 16:35 Thank you my friend.
[1] The LDS Church purchased all Community of Christ sites in Nauvoo and Kirtland on March 5, 2024 so Paul is no longer doing archaeological work there. He is working on sites in Lamoni, Iowa, however for those interested in participating.
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