James Strang, King of Beaver Island

Look out toward the horizon where the ferry heads, and you are looking toward one of the strangest chapters in American history. On Beaver Island, out in Lake Michigan, a man named James Jesse Strang once crowned himself king. Strang was a lawyer who converted to the Mormon faith only months before its founder, Joseph Smith, was killed by a mob in eighteen forty-four.

After Smith's death, Strang produced a letter he claimed named him the rightful successor. Church leaders denounced the letter as a forgery and expelled him, but Strang gathered his own followers and moved them to Beaver Island in eighteen forty-seven. In eighteen fifty he staged an actual coronation, complete with a robe, a brass crown, and a throne.

He was twice elected to the Michigan legislature, and at his height he led more than five thousand people. His rule was harsh, and he made bitter enemies. On June sixteenth, eighteen fifty-six, two of his former followers, Thomas Bedford and Alexander Wentworth, ambushed him on the island dock and shot him in the back near the naval ship Michigan.

Paralyzed, Strang was carried away and died about three weeks later at the age of forty-three. His killers were taken to Mackinac Island, briefly jailed, and released. They were never put on trial.

Within weeks a mob forced every one of Strang's people off the island, most of them robbed of their belongings as they fled.