26/06/2024
In June 1844, Joseph and Hyrum Smith were arrested and imprisoned in Carthage Jail. With Willard Richards and John Taylor, Jones was chosen to accompany the Smiths to jail to offer support and protection. The night before Joseph and Hyrum were killed, Joseph Smith asked Jones if he was afraid to die. Jones replied, "Has that time come, think you? Engaged in such a cause, I do not think that death would have many terrors.” Smith replied with what many have identified as his "last prophecy": "You will yet see Wales and fulfill the mission appointed you before you die."
The following morning, 27 June 1844, Smith asked Jones to deliver a letter on his behalf to Orville H. Browning in Quincy, Illinois, requesting that Browning act as the Smiths' lawyer in their upcoming trial. As Jones departed the jail on horseback, bullets were fired at him, but none struck him. In his haste and panic, Jones took the wrong road to Quincy and became lost. It was later learned that an anti-Mormon mob had been waiting to intercept him on the correct road to Quincy. When Jones finally reached Quincy later in the afternoon, he learned that Joseph and Hyrum Smith had been killed by a mob at the jail.
Dan Jones was born in the village of Halkyn, Flintshire just off the north Wales coast. He was born into a mining family but soon left the trade to travel the world as a mariner. In 1840, he immigrated to the United States with his wife, Jane Melling Jones, also from Halkyn, where he was a steamboat captain on the Mississippi River. In 1843, Dan and Jane Jones joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Nauvoo. Jones became a close friend and business partner of Joseph Smith, who purchased a half-share in Jones’s steamboat, the Maid of Iowa.
A few months after the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum, Dan and Jane Jones left for Wales. Jones preached the restored gospel in person and in print with a zeal matched by few others. In the April 1845 conference of the British Mission, Jones said “he had been in search of the principles of truth—he had sought it in almost every clime” but had not found it until he met the Latter-day Saints. Jones then pledged to be an instrument in bringing his countrymen into the Church. His words, said the clerk in the meeting, were so moving that “we ceased to write, in order to give way to the effect produced upon our feelings.”
Jones’ parents remained in north Wales, never having joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and finished out their days in Wrexham and Marchwiel…
Jones contributed a wealth of Welsh-language material for the Church. He published Prophwyd y Jubili (Prophet of the Jubilee), the first Church periodical to be published in a language other than English. He was briefly editor of its successor, Udgorn Seion (Zion’s Trumpet). Jones also published pamphlets and tracts, the most famous being “Hanes Saint y Dyddiau Diweddaf” ("History of the Latter-day Saints"). In 1852 he oversaw the translation of the Book of Mormon into the Welsh language (the third language other than English—the previous two being Danish and French). He published a hymnal for Welsh Latter-day Saints and a 288-page scriptural commentary in defense of the Church.
