Facing internal dissension at an earlier settlement, Strang relocated his followers in 1847 to Beaver Island, in northern Lake Michigan, where the community established the town of St. James on the island's northern coast by 1849. In July 1850 Strang had himself formally crowned king of the colony, taking the title King James I, an act that made the settlement a genuine, if short-lived, self-declared monarchy on American soil, a claim virtually unique among American religious movements of the period.
Strang's later decree that colony women wear a loose bloomer costume rather than conventional dresses, and his order to have the husbands of two women who refused it publicly whipped, directly provoked his own death: on June 16, 1856, the two disciplined husbands, Thomas Bedford and Alexander Wentworth, ambushed and shot him from behind near the island dock, and Strang died of his wounds three weeks later. The colony grew substantially, drawing several thousand adherents at its height, before the assassination effectively ended the Beaver Island kingdom, and hostile non-Mormon neighbors expelled the remaining Strangite settlers from the island within days.
A small remnant of Strangite believers nonetheless persisted elsewhere, and organized Strangite congregations, numbering only a few hundred adherents, continued to identify Strang as Joseph Smith's true and legitimate successor for well over a century after his death.