James Strang

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 was a recent convert to the Latter Day Saint movement when founder Joseph Smith was assassinated in June 1844. Within days, Strang produced a letter he said Smith had written naming him as successor, a document most historians and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints itself regard as inauthentic rather than genuine.

That claim was enough to draw a minority of Smith's followers away from the main body that would coalesce around Brigham Young and the eventual migration west to Utah. Strang led his own splinter church first from a base in Wisconsin, then from 1848 relocated its center to Beaver Island, in Lake Michigan, where in 1850 he had himself formally crowned king of the settlement he had built there.

The claimed succession letter, contested from the moment Strang first produced it, remained the founding act on which his entire church rested. Everything that followed, the Wisconsin years, the move to Beaver Island and the kingship declared there in 1850, traced back to a single disputed document written in the immediate aftermath of Smith's assassination in Illinois, a claim his own church's opponents rejected from the start of his brief and contested rule.

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.