Book : Coming Out of the Water Dry

ISBN Number :	9781637471883
Book Name :	Coming Out of the Water Dry (The 1838 Missouri Extermination Order)
Book Pages :	124
Book Size :	5.06 x 7.81
Book Weight :	0.32

“The Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the state.”

So ordered Governor Lilburn Boggs of Missouri on October 27, 1838—issuing one of the only government-sanctioned religious extermination orders in American history. Executive Order 44 remained legally valid until 1976.

But this isn’t a story about religion. It’s a story about money.

Through twenty-five voices—Mormon farmers and political advisors, slave owners and abolitionists, land speculators and shopkeepers, a vigilante sergeant and an Osage entrepreneur—Coming Out of the Water Dry reveals the economic machinery behind the persecution. The Mormons operated their own banks, ran their own stores, bought land as a collective, and didn’t purchase whiskey, tobacco, or coffee. In frontier Missouri, that made them dangerous.

Follow the money, and the massacre makes sense. Banks that lost depositors. Merchants who lost customers. Land speculators who lost commissions. Politicians who saw voting blocs shifting. When economics masquerades as religious conflict, ordinary people become accomplices to atrocity.

Steve Levi’s polyphonic narrative resurrects an American atrocity most Americans have never heard of—and reveals a pattern that echoes into our own time.

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History is about money. Alexander the Great was the first one in recorded history to understand that. —Sister Elizabeth”

Author : Steve Levi

Author Tag Line : Master Of The Impossible Crime

Steve Levi is Alaska's most published author and a charter member of Author Masterminds. A historian by training and a teacher at heart, he holds degrees from UC Davis and San Jose State University. With more than ninety books to his name, Steve has spent decades unraveling overlooked stories from America's past—the ones that didn't make it into the textbooks. Coming Out of the Water Dry is vintage Levi: follow the money, and history makes sense. Through twenty-five voices, he resurrects one of the only government-sanctioned religious extermination orders in American history—and reveals that it was never really about religion at all. It was about banks, land, and political power. Whether writing mystery or historical fiction, his aim is always the same: help readers see past the surface story to the machinery underneath. Coming Out of the Water Dry is a prime example of his trademark approach—smart, inventive, and one twist ahead of expectation.