[Sidenote: Number of the Prophet's Vexatious Lawsuits]
My clerk, Willard Richards, read the memorial to Congress, when the assembly unanimously voted their approbation of the memorial, when I spoke two-and-a-half hours, relating many circumstances which transpired in Missouri, not mentioned in the memorial. I have already had thirty-eight vexatious lawsuits, and have paid Missouri $150,000 for land. I borrowed $500 of Judge Young in Washington, to pay the expenses of the party that accompanied me, and had to borrow of others.
Daniel Avery and his son were kidnapped from the neighborhood of Warsaw by a company of Missourians, assisted by some anti-Mormons of this county, and carried into Missouri. [2]
_Tuesday, 5.--_Six p.m., met the Twelve, also Phelps, Clayton, and Turley, in council, in the office, on important business.
{ 100} Advised the Twelve to raise money to send to Elder Hyde, who is east, for him to get paper to print the Doctrine and Covenants, and get new type and metal for stereotyping the same.
_Wednesday, 6.--_At home and took the following affidavit:--
On the sixth day of December, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and forty-three, came Delmore Chapman before me, Joseph Smith, mayor of said city; and after being duly sworn, deposeth and saith that on the nineteenth day of November, 1843, a man named Richardson came to one of his neighbors living in Bear Creek precinct, in the county of Hancock, named Philander Avery, and enticed him to the Mississippi at Warsaw, by false pretenses; and from thence by a company he was forced over the river and taken to Monticello jail; and that on the second day of December, some of the same party and others came to the aforesaid Bear Creek and kidnapped Daniel Avery, the father of the aforesaid Philander Avery, and by force of arms hurried him across the said Mississippi river into the State of Missouri, to aforesaid jail at Monticello, Lewis county, where your said affiant verily believes they are both now incarcerated illegally and inhumanly in prison; and further report says that some of them are to come to Nauvoo next, to kidnap Nelson Turner; and further your affiant saith not.
Subscribed and sworn to before me, this sixth day of December, 1843.