This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
James Strang's church on Beaver Island, where he had crowned himself king in 1850, developed its own distinctive practices independent of the Utah church led by Brigham Young. Strang introduced plural marriage into his church on his own authority, a practice that ran parallel to but separate from its adoption within the larger Latter Day Saint movement gathering in Utah at the same time.
His rule over the Beaver Island settlement grew increasingly autocratic, including a dress code he tried to impose on the island's women, and that autocratic style provoked a backlash among his own followers rather than only from outside critics of his church. The resentment it produced inside his own community proved fatal to him personally, not merely damaging to his public reputation.
Two of his own followers shot and fatally wounded Strang in June 1856; he died three weeks later from those wounds. His church fragmented after his death and lost most of its following without him, unable to survive the loss of the founder whose disputed succession letter, self declared kingship and self authorized plural marriage had defined it from Wisconsin through Beaver Island, all traceable to a letter its own founder wrote in the days after Smith's death.