The Battle of Crooked River was a skirmish between Latter Day Saints forces and a Missouri state militia unit from southeast of Elmira, Missouri, in Ray County; the militia was under the command of Samuel Bogart. The battle was one of the principal points of conflict in the 1838 Missouri Mormon War. After the battle, the governor of Missouri issued Missouri Executive Order 44, sometimes called the "Extermination Order", which led to the expulsion of the Mormons from Missouri. Background During 1838 there was an escalation in tensions between the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and their neighbors in northwestern Missouri. Ray County was located immediately south of the Mormon-dominated Caldwell County. The two counties were separated by a no-man's land 24 miles long and 6 miles wide, known as "Bunkham's Strip" or "Buncombe Strip". This unincorporated strip was attached to Ray County for administrative and military purposes. The citizens of Ray County and their neighbors to the west in Clay County, first began to have concerns about the Mormons to the north when a group of "dissenters" from the church was expelled from Caldwell County. These dissenters, including David Whitmer, William Wines Phelps, John Whitmer and Oliver Cowdery, had been the leaders of the Latter Day Saint church in Missouri. They relocated their families to Richmond and Liberty, the county seats of Ray and Clay, respectively, and claimed that their lives had been threatened and their property had been stolen by the Mormons. Conflicts between the Mormons and non-Mormons in Carroll County and Daviess County throughout the summer put settlers in the more settled counties of Ray and Clay increasingly on edge. This unease reached a bursting point when Thomas B. Marsh and Orson Hyde of the Mormon Quorum of the Twelve Apostles arrived in Richmond and reported that the Danites had invaded Daviess County and sacked the county seat of Gallatin. They also charged that a Mormon group known as the Danites planned to burn Richmond and Liberty to the ground. This testimony sent the worried citizens into a near frenzy. Women, children and property were ferried across the Missouri River for protection against an imminent Mormon invasion, and the state militia was put on alert. It was later discovered that the alert was ill-founded and caused by an anti-Mormon who was trying to create unease to turn the people against Mormons.