Description

Alma Lamoni Smith

October 30, 1838, an angry mob attacked the small Missouri settlement of Hawn’s Mill. It was a vicious premeditated attack that in the end took the lives of 17 men and boys. As the shooting stopped the mob discovered two small boys hiding beneath the bellows in the blacksmith shop. They were Alma and Sardius Smith. Sardius, 11 years-old, was brutally murdered. A mobber pointed his weapon at Alma and fired at point blank range.

As the mob fled, it was Willard Smith, the boy’s older brother who crept first out of hiding to survey what he would later describe as a holocaust. Stepping over the body of his father he found Sardius, also dead, and Alma barely alive. Picking him up he started out when he was met his mother Amanda Barnes Smith. She screamed, “They have killed my little Alma!” “No, mother,” he replied, “But Father and Sardius are dead.”

Together they carried him to their tent and laid him on a bed of straw. They found that the entirety of his left hip had been shot away leaving the ends of the bones 3-4 inches apart. “It was a ghastly sight.”

Amanda gathered her remaining children around Alma and prayed fervently for him. If it was the Lord’s will, would He help her to help him? Inspiration flowed into her soul and she was directed to take the ashes from her fire and make a lye to cleanse the wound. She then prayed again and felt impressed to make a poultice from the bark of a slippery elm tree. After dressing the wound she laid Alma on his stomach and only then gave vent to her tears and terror.

By that inspiration came a miracle. A mere five weeks later, Alma Smith leaped off his bed and danced about, “A flexible gristle having grown in place of the missing joint and socket.” On that new hip Alma Smith would follow his family in their flight to Illinois and then later across the plains to Salt Lake City. Alma Smith would serve numerous missions—all on foot. But that is not the end of the story.

On one of those missions in 1864, he was in company with Elder Lorenzo Snow sailing by boat from Honolulu to LaHaina. Their boat was overturned and Elder Snow was drowned. Elder Snow was given a blessing, but still there was no response. It was Alma Smith and Benjamin Cluff who took the Apostle and rolled him face-down over a barrel to expel the water he had swallowed–still no response. The natives, standing by, gave him up for dead, but the missionaries refused to yield. They knelt and prayed again, and then felt impressed to try something most unusual for that day. Taking turns they blew into Elder Snow’s lungs to re-inflate them. They kept at it—and then, suddenly, there was a slight wink of an eye, and then a rattle in the throat.

Lorenzo Snow would live, thanks to that same faith and inspiration that had once saved the man who now saved him.

Sources:

https://history.lds.org/missionary/individual/alma-lamoni-smith-1831?lang=eng