CHAPTER TWO

FINDING ZION

The handcart trail to Zion was paved with two and a half decades of messianic visions on the part of Mormon leaders and relentless persecution at the hands of the church’s enemies. What is today by far the most successful homegrown American religion, with nearly six million adherents in the United States and twelve million worldwide, might well have fizzled out early on, like such contemporary American faiths as the Millerites, the Campbellites, or the celibate Jemimaites. In his 1930 essay “The Centennial of Mormonism,” Bernard DeVoto—born in Ogden, Utah, to a mother who had been raised in the LDS church—alluded sardonically to an “anonymous Frenchman” who had “remarked that America, which could contrive only one soup, had invented a hundred religions.” (One wonders what soup the Frenchman had in mind.)

The very survival of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the nineteenth century, not to mention its burgeoning appeal at the beginning of the twenty-first, owes everything to the extraordinary characters of its first two Prophets, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. (For its December 2006 issue, The Atlantic Monthly polled ten “prominent historians” to rank the one hundred most influential Americans in history. The list, headed by Lincoln, Washington, and Jefferson, included Joseph Smith [at number 52] and Brigham Young [at 74]. Only two other religious leaders made the list—Martin Luther King Jr. [8] and Mary Baker Eddy [86].) Indeed, during the 1860s and 1870s, many sagacious observers of the Mormon colony in Utah were quite certain that the religion would collapse shortly after the death of Brigham Young.

It is something of a coincidence—but something not—that while Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were both born in Vermont (in Sharon, in the eastern Green Mountains, and Whitingham, just north of the Massachusetts border, respectively), both moved while still in childhood to western New York state. Driven by poverty and illness, Smith’s farming family resettled in 1816 in Palmyra, a town of about four thousand situated some twenty-five miles southeast of Rochester. Smith was ten years old at the time.

Born on June 1, 1801, Young was actually four and a half years older than the Prophet who would lead him into the church he would found in 1830. Like Smith’s, Young’s father was a down-on-his-luck farmer, a man who supplemented his earnings as a part-time carpenter. By 1804 the Youngs had moved to Sherburne, in central New York state; eight years later, when Young was eleven, they fetched up in the rural burg that is known today as Tyrone—fifty miles due south of the Palmyra to which the Smiths would emigrate in 1816, during the famous “year without a summer.”

There was no more propitious time or place in American history for the concoction of new religions. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, Americans were hungry for millennial proofs that God was among us, watchful, punitive of sinners, but promising abundant and imminent rewards to the righteous. The whole country was lurching in violent counterreaction against the irreligion and moral looseness of Tom Paine’s Age of Reason—itself a violent reaction against the Puritan thunderings of Jonathan Edwards and Cotton Mather a generation before.

Nowhere was that zeal for new faith more rabid than on the semi-frontier of western New York state. The region centering on Palmyra acquired among circuit-riders a sobriquet as “the burnt-over district.” In biographer Fawn Brodie’s gloss: “One revival after another was sweeping through the area, leaving behind a people scattered and peeled, for religious enthusiasm was literally being burnt out of them.”

Latter-day Mormon hagiographers have tended to portray the young Joseph Smith as an upstanding teenage citizen of Palmyra with an insatiable curiosity about the metaphysical, but there is plenty of evidence that he had much of the scamp and scallywag about him, and even a bit of the con man. Brigham Young’s iconoclastic 1925 biographer, Morris Werner, finds the flawed image of Smith more appealing than the gilded icon:

The Mormons would do better to accept this picture of him, which wins our sympathy by virtue of his roguery. However, it outrages the moral sensibilities of stern religious enthusiasts to admit that Huckleberry Finn could have grown up into a Prophet of God.

Fawn Brodie, whose 1945 biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History (revised in 1970), remains the definitive life, concurs. She sees her subject in adolescence as “a likeable ne’er-do-well who was notorious for tall tales and necromantic arts.” Later, after Smith became famous, a number of his erstwhile Palmyra neighbors published unflattering vignettes of the rogue who had grown up in their midst. One former friend wrote, “He was known among the young men I associated with as a romancer of the first water. I never knew so ignorant a man as Joe was to have such a fertile imagination.”

Some of these retrospective slurs were solicited by anti-Mormon polemicists, and are thus perhaps no more to be credited than the hagiographers’ rosy portraits. Among them is an affidavit signed by fifty-one Palmyrans asserting that Smith was “destitute of moral character and addicted to vicious habits.” It is a matter of record that at age twenty-one he was arrested for being “a disorderly person and an impostor.” But the affidavit seems too harsh. Smith himself, in a church publication, admitted at the age of twenty-eight that in his teenage years “I fell into many vices and follies,” but he insisted that “I have not…been guilty of wronging or injuring any man or society of men.”

In any event, while still a teenager, he took up the hobby (a common one in the “burnt-over district”) of digging for buried treasure, and soon he was selling his talents as a diviner of riches hidden in the earth to credulous neighbors. Brodie sees this avocation as initially the innocent outlet of a restless spirit: “Nimble-witted, ambitious, and gifted with a boundless imagination, he dreamed of escape…. He detested the plow as only a farmer’s son can.”

By his early twenties, Smith was over six feet tall, good-looking, and vigorously athletic (wrestling being one of his favorite pastimes, even after he had become the Mormon Prophet). In Brodie’s sketch,

He was big, powerful, and by ordinary standards very handsome, except for his nose, which was aquiline and prominent. His large blue eyes were fringed by fantastically long lashes which made his gaze seem veiled and slightly mysterious.

In the best-known portrait of the man, he is dressed to the nines in a collarless black frock coat worn over a white silk shirt and white tie. His wavy, combed-back brown hair has tints of auburn in it. The eyes stare unblinking and hypnotic at the viewer, but the mouth, pursed in a tight half-smile, exudes smugness. The overall effect of the likeness hovers on that ambiguous border between the strikingly handsome and the foppishly vain.

At the age of nineteen, on a wild-goose chase in search of a lost Spanish silver mine in the Allegheny foothills of western Pennsylvania, Joseph met and fell in love with Emma Hale, two years his elder. Brodie describes her as “a dark, serious-faced girl with great luminous hazel eyes.” Against the unbending opposition of Emma’s father, Joseph wooed her, ran away with her, and secretly married her in January 1827. In important ways, Emma would prove to be the bane of Smith’s existence.

At some point, while still a teenager, as he dug a well for a neighbor, Smith discovered what he called a “seer stone” twenty-four feet underground. With this magical aid, he launched a serious if intermittent career as diviner of subterranean riches.

At this remove, it is perhaps impossible to judge whether Smith’s treasure-hunting was a deliberate con game or sprang from sincere belief. The fact that he did little digging himself but charged others for his secret knowledge, and that he always had a ready excuse why days of shoveling turned up only rocks and dirt, suggests the former explanation. Yet legions of frontier settlers in places like western New York were utterly convinced that buried treasure abounded in their neighborhoods, a conviction reinforced by the prehistoric Indian mounds scattered across the landscape, in which diggers regularly hit paydirt of an artifactual sort.

Joseph Smith, however, would be forgotten by history, but for a pair of miraculous visitations that seized him, the first at age fourteen, the second at seventeen. In 1820, a latent religious instinct in Smith’s soul was sparked by several recent revival meetings near Palmyra. One day the youth went into the woods alone to pray to God for guidance. Almost at once, as he later wrote, he was struck dumb by some “astonishing influence,” and he found himself surrounded by “thick darkness.” As he prayed now for deliverance from this “evil” miasma, suddenly all was light, and two “personages” stood before him. One pointed to the other, saying, “This is my beloved Son, hear him.”

Smith’s initial purpose in beseeching God in the forest was to get an answer to a question that was plaguing him: which of the many sects and denominations whose doctrines had been blazoned forth at the revival meetings was the true church? Now one of the personages told him that all those sects were wrong, that “all their creeds were an abomination in His sight,” and that he must join none of them. “Many other things he did say unto me,” Smith recorded years later, “which I cannot write at this time. When I came to myself again, I found myself lying on my back, looking up into heaven.”

The second vision, which came to Smith on September 21, 1823, was even more vivid and revelatory. In his room at home, that night he knelt by his bed to pray to God “for forgiveness of all my sins and follies.” Again, a light “brighter than noonday” suffused the room and a “personage” appeared, floating in midair. As Smith later recounted,

He had on a loose robe of most exquisite whiteness. It was a whiteness beyond anything earthly I had ever seen; nor do I believe that any earthly thing could be made to appear so exceedingly white and brilliant. His hands were naked and his arms also…. His head and neck were also bare. I could discover that he had no other clothing on but this robe, as it was open, so that I could see into his bosom. Not only was his robe exceedingly white, but his whole person was glorious beyond description, and his countenance truly like lightning….

When first I looked upon him, I was afraid; but the fear soon left me. He called me by name, and said unto me that he was a messenger sent from the presence of God to me and that his name was Moroni; that God had a work for me to do…. He said there was a book deposited, written upon gold plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent, and the sources from whence they sprang. He also said that the fullness of the everlasting Gospel was contained in it, as delivered by the Savior to the ancient inhabitants; also that there were two stones in silver bows and these stones, fastened to a breastplate, constituted what is called the Urim and Thummim deposited with the plates; and the possession and use of these stones were what constituted “Seers” in ancient or former times; and that God had prepared them for the purpose of translating the book.

Moroni (pronounced “Mo-ROAN-eye”; Mormon proper names ending in “i” almost always take the long form of the vowel) was not only an angel, but a prophet who had lived in America many centuries before the first Europeans arrived. It was Moroni, in fact, who had buried the golden plates around A.D. 421.

The very next day, Smith went out to work in the fields, but he was so weak, his father sent him home. On the way, he fell into a swoon, only to be visited again by Moroni, who now told him exactly where the plates were buried. “Convenient to the village of Manchester, Ontario county, New York,” Smith later wrote, “stands a hill of considerable size, and the most elevated of any in the neighborhood. On the west side of this hill, not far from the top, under a stone of considerable size, lay the plates, deposited in a stone box.” Smith dug up the box and, with the aid of a lever, pried it open. “I looked in, and there indeed did I behold the plates, the Urim and Thummim, and the breastplate.” But just as he started to seize the plates, Moroni again appeared, warning Smith that he was not spiritually prepared to receive this testament of the true church.

As directed by Moroni, Smith returned to the hill once a year for four years on the anniversary of his discovery. Finally, on September 21, 1827, the angelic messenger allowed the youth (now twenty-one years old) to carry the plates away with him.

The hill, named Cumorah, stands a mere several hundred feet above the surrounding fields, just off State Highway 21, which connects Palmyra and Manchester. However unprepossessing it may be as a geologic eminence, Cumorah is today a prominent stop for Mormon history tours. Every July since 1937, a Hill Cumorah Pageant, lasting seven days, has attracted as many as ten thousand visitors (both Saints and non-Mormons) from all over the country and the world.

The golden plates were densely inscribed with a hieroglyphic script, a sample of which Smith later transcribed. But a condition of his custodianship of the sacred objects, Smith insisted, was that no one else be allowed to look at them. Somehow the young treasure-hunter recognized the language of the glyphs as what he called “reformed Egyptian.” With the aid of his seer stones, the Urim and Thummim, he set out to translate the plates. His wife, Emma, was his first scribe, as he dictated out loud. Though the plates often lay on the table, wrapped in a linen tablecloth, she never saw them; she did, however, dare to handle them when she dusted the table, and later reported that the plates “seemed to be pliable like thick paper, and would rustle with a metallic sound when the edges were moved by the thumb.”

Eventually Smith collaborated with a more credulous scribe, a farmer friend named Martin Harris, who in turn was succeeded by a schoolmaster named Oliver Cowdery. The procedure must have seemed a bit bizarre, even to true believers. With Harris, Smith sat in a room partitioned by a blanket thrown across a rope. Smith sat on one side, staring painfully at the plates with his Urim and Thummim, while Harris sat on the other side, writing down the sentences as Smith translated them. Smith repeatedly warned his scribe that “God’s wrath would strike him down” should he even sneak a look at the plates.

By 1829, working with Cowdery, Smith had replaced the Urim and Thummim with the seer stone that he had found in the well, which he placed in an upturned hat. He then plunged his face into the hat, cutting off all surrounding light, as with the stone he deciphered the plates one character at a time. Starting on April 7, Smith dictated all 275,000 words of what would become the Book of Mormon in seventy-five days, at an extraordinary pace, averaging around 3,700 words a day.

Five thousand copies of the Book of Mormon were published by a local printer in 1830. On April 6 of that year, Smith formally founded his new church.

By then, in accordance with his promise to the angelic messenger, Smith had returned the golden plates to Moroni. No one would ever see them again.

 

TO THE AGNOSTIC or the skeptic, virtually all religions may seem to be founded on events and concepts that are absurd and implausible. (The Trinity? The Virgin Birth? The Second Coming?) Yet from its inception, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been singled out for ridicule on account of the wildly far-fetched story of Joseph Smith and the golden plates. To Bernard DeVoto, for example, the Book of Mormon seemed “a yeasty fermentation, formless, aimless, and inconceivably absurd.”

At first blush, there seem to be three separate and mutually exclusive explanations for what was going on in and around Palmyra, New York, in the 1820s. One is what twelve million Mormons steadfastly believe: that the angel and prophet Moroni really did appear to Joseph Smith; that the golden plates were not only real, but had inscribed on them the authentic gospel; that Smith translated them with the aid of various seer stones; and thus that the Book of Mormon corrected more than a millennium and a half of Christian error and gave the world the only true message of God’s dispensation. All other religions are wrong.

For nonbelievers, however, two other explanations immediately present themselves. The first is that a teenage treasure-hunter and con artist set out to perpetrate a deliberate fraud, one that would become the most successful in American history. Fawn Brodie would seem to be of this camp. “Perhaps in the beginning,” she writes in No Man Knows My History, “Joseph never intended his stories of the golden plates to be taken so seriously, but once the masquerade had begun, there was no point at which he could call a halt. Since his own family believed him (with the possible exception of his cynical younger brother William), why not the world?”

Brodie had grown up Mormon in Utah, but became more and more skeptical as she went through high school and college. At the University of Chicago, where she did graduate work, she lost her faith entirely. “It was like taking a hot coat off in the summertime,” she told an interviewer in 1975. In 1946, the year after she published her biography of Joseph Smith, the church excommunicated her.

The alternative agnostic explanation is that, while the whole business about the golden plates was nonsense, Smith sincerely believed it—that he was in the grips of the sort of profound self-delusion that afflicts many religious visionaries.

At second blush, however, the three explanations turn out not to be mutually exclusive. Writes Morris Werner in his biography of Brigham Young:

It is impossible to determine exactly whether the golden plates of the Book of Mormon were an imaginative delusion of Joseph Smith’s, or whether they were a piece of conscious fakery instituted at first for fun and later developed for their financial possibilities. His later acts seem to favor the opinion that he had succeeded in deluding himself, however much he may have been interested at first in deceiving other people.

Some extraordinarily intelligent men and women have devoted the best parts of their lives to defending the authenticity of the Book of Mormon and the truth of the LDS church. One of them was Brigham Henry Roberts (1857–1933), whose six-volume A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints remains unparalleled. One scholar calls Roberts “intellectually the most eminent and influential of all the official leaders of the Church.” Another hails him as “the greatest Mormon thinker of his generation, or perhaps any generation.”

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Roberts vigorously and eloquently defended the Book of Mormon against its learned critics. The terms upon which the debates hinged seem quaint and hyper-scholastic today: whether, for instance, 553 years intervened between Zedekiah’s reign as the last king of Judah and Christ’s birth (the biblical version) or six hundred years, as the Book of Mormon specified. Yet in one controversy after another, Roberts reportedly put the doubters to rout.

Then, late in his own life, the great Mormon thinker was apparently assailed by his own doubts. He had always striven to reconcile science and religion; he believed passionately that one could be a devout Mormon and a rational pragmatist at the same time. In the 1920s, perplexed by how Darwin’s theory of evolution and the discoveries of New World archaeologists seemed to contradict Mormon doctrine, he drafted a pair of manuscripts that he titled “A Book of Mormon Study” and “Book of Mormon Difficulties.” Joseph Smith’s gospel claimed that long before the first Europeans arrived, the natives of North America had possessed such domestic animals as horses, cows, sheep, and pigs, as well as weapons and tools of iron and steel, crops including wheat and barley, and wheeled vehicles. The archaeologists insisted that none of the above was true.

Roberts’s superiors in the church deemed these late works too heretical to bring to light without major revisions. Roberts declined. The problematic manuscripts were not published until 1985—fifty-two years after Roberts’s death.

There is a school of Mormon thought that in these late treatises, Roberts was not truly plagued by doubt, but was rather playing the devil’s advocate, positing all possible rational objections to the Book of Mormon in hopes of finding the loopholes that would leave the LDS doctrine unscathed. Yet the problems Roberts raised remain unanswered: as far as we know, before Columbus, no Native American had ever seen a horse, a steel weapon, or a vehicle with wheels. The integrity of the greatest Mormon theorist’s willingness, late in life, to open his mind to the fundamental historical problems raised by the Book of Mormon should win him admiration, not excuses.

Whether or not Joseph Smith concocted his 531-page gospel out of his own runaway imagination, or was simply the amanuensis for a divine revelation, the Book of Mormon is an astonishing performance. To be sure, it is not an easy book to read, and many a good Mormon has nodded off long before reaching the closing “Book of Moroni.” Mark Twain famously called Smith’s book “chloroform in print,” and, singling out the work’s recurrent verbal tic, added, “‘And it came to pass’ was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.”

The Book of Mormon is riddled with grammatical errors and apparent anachronisms of diction and style. Whole chapters of Isaiah are lifted verbatim from the Old Testament. One of the antagonists Roberts debated claimed that Joseph had quoted not only from the King James version of the Bible (not published until 1611, or almost twelve centuries after Moroni supposedly buried the golden plates), but from Hamlet’s famous soliloquy.

From almost the time it was first published until the present day, the Book of Mormon has been accused of being a wholesale plagiarism, either from the manuscript of a romance novel by one Solomon Spaulding, or from a popular 1823 treatise written by a Vermont pastor named Ethan Smith called View of the Hebrews, which advanced the then voguish theory that American Indians were the remnants of the lost tribes of Israel. Neither plagiarism claim has been proved or disproved (Spaulding’s manuscript is apparently irretrievably lost), but B. H. Roberts himself was sufficiently troubled by the similarities with View of the Hebrews that he compiled a twin-columned document that he called “A Parallel,” laying without comment the overly close passages of the two Smiths side by side. This study, too, was not published until 1985, but it gives serious pause to anyone who peruses it today.

Quite aside from allegations of plagiarism, Smith has been long accused of recklessly borrowing not only doctrine, but later, ecclesiastical rituals from the secret practices of the Freemasons. Yet astonishing the Book of Mormon remains, especially in view of the fact that its “author,” having kicked around with his vagabond farming family through the backwaters of Vermont and New York, had absorbed precious little schooling by the age of twenty-four, when the new gospel was first published.

In the face of such early criticism, Smith obtained the written affidavits of eleven of his friends and Palmyra neighbors (including Martin Harris and Oliver Cowdery), who swore that they had not only seen the golden plates (despite Smith’s initial warning against such a violation), but also that “we did handle [them] with our hands,” that “we have seen and hefted” them. For the skeptic, it is curious that although several of these witnesses later left the church, none ever recanted his testimony. This fact bothers Brodie enough to make her speculate, “Perhaps Joseph built some kind of makeshift deception. If so, it disappeared with his announcement that the same angel that had revealed to him the sacred record had now carried it back into heaven.” Brodie and others have wondered whether Smith in effect hypnotized his witnesses.

All this controversy would amount to a mere footnote to the history of the nineteenth century in America had Mormonism caught flame briefly and then flickered out, like so many other religions of the day. Whatever Smith’s shortcomings as a prose stylist, he possessed in spades those two essential qualities of the messianic leader—charisma and oratorical eloquence. The testimonies to his ability to hold an audience spellbound when he preached are legion. One of his first and most important converts, Parley P. Pratt, related, “I have ever known him to retain a congregation of willing and anxious listeners for many hours together, in the midst of cold or sunshine, rain or wind, while they were laughing at one moment and weeping the next.”

Traveling all over the region, Smith slowly but doggedly made converts. One of the first to fall under his spell was Brigham Young, who had moved in 1829 to Mendon, a village only fifteen miles southwest of Palmyra. Twenty-eight years old, married, with a three-year-old daughter, Young was eking out a living, like his father, making chairs and baskets that he sold door-to-door.

Young, however, was no instant convert. At age twenty-two, he had joined the Methodist Church, but he was far from satisfied with that faith, having also attended services in Mendon of half a dozen other Protestant denominations, ranging from Episcopalian to Quaker. One day in 1830, only two or three weeks after it had been published, a copy of the Book of Mormon was thrust into his hands by his brother Phineas. Brigham struggled with the dense tome for two years before he became convinced, as he later wrote, that “I knew it was true, as well as I knew that I could see with my eyes, or feel by the touch of my fingers, or be sensible of the demonstration of any sense.”

An important and unresolved question about Brigham Young is how literate he was. By his own admission, he had received only eleven days of formal schooling in his life. The hundreds of letters that he “wrote” after he became Prophet of the church were all dictated to scribes. Some skeptical visitors to Salt Lake City during Young’s heyday claimed that the official epistles he regularly issued were ghostwritten by his right-hand men, and that Young himself could scarcely write more than his own name. Such calumnies must be taken with a grain of salt, for the nineteenth-century authors of exposés of the Mormon empire had their own axes to grind. Many a close acquaintance observed him reading a book now and then, and even his ex-wife Ann Eliza Young, whose Wife No. 19, or the Story of a Life in Bondage is perhaps the angriest of all those exposés, wrote in 1875, “He loses his temper every morning over the Salt Lake Tribune—the leading Gentile [i.e., non-Mormon] paper of Utah.”

On April 15, 1832, Young was baptized into the LDS church. A few months later, with his friend Heber C. Kimball, who would become one of the most important men in the Utah theocracy, he traveled to Kirtland, Ohio, to meet the Prophet. (Kirtland was the first of several places where Smith tried to establish an autonomous colony for the Saints, free from Gentile distractions and attacks.) Kimball and Young found Smith in the forest chopping wood. “He was happy to see us and bid us welcome,” Young later testified. That evening, in Smith’s house, the Prophet urged Young to get on his knees and pray. All at once, Young spontaneously began to speak in tongues.

This performance, which was to become a mainstay in the mystical apparatus of Mormon church services, is dryly explicated by Morris Werner, Brigham’s skeptical biographer: “It consisted of a babble of incomprehensible sounds which were supposed to be the spirit of God resting upon the speaker, and these sounds were interpreted by another person in the congregation as soon as the speaker had uttered them.”

 

THE DUTY OF every Saint to gather to Zion was announced by Joseph Smith within six months of the founding of his church. As befit a man who would set himself up with the formal title of Prophet, Seer, Revelator, and President (a title Brigham Young would inherit), Smith received frequent revelations from God. One of the first decreed: “And ye are called to bring to pass the gathering of mine elect…they shall be gathered in unto one place upon the face of this land.” Moreover, “The glory of the Lord shall be there, and it shall be called Zion.”

The only question was where Zion might prove to be. From the start, Smith looked westward, for the revelation also specified that the gathering place “shall be on the borders of the Lamanites.”

According to the Book of Mormon, the Lamanites (pronounced “LAY-man-ites”) were the American Indians. All the different tribes found in North America were the descendants of Laman, one of the sons of Lehi, the patriarch who had built a ship and sailed with his people from the Holy Land to the New World around 600 B.C. Another son of Lehi was named Nephi.

By about A.D. 231, the followers and descendants of Laman and Nephi started a war with each other that lasted more than 150 years. Finally, the Lamanites—unbelievers in Christ (who himself had appeared in the New World between his resurrection and his ascent into heaven), reduced to the state of savages—wiped out the righteous Nephites. (Moroni, the last Nephite alive, buried the golden plates shortly before his death.) For their wrongdoings, God cursed the Lamanites with dark skin. The Lamanites of today, however, are not beyond redemption. If they accept the Christian God and convert to the LDS church, they can become in the next life “a white and delightsome people.” (Later editions of the Book of Mormon changed the phrase to “a pure and delightsome people.”)

The new faith got off to a slow but steady start. Founded with a congregation of only six adherents, the church plucked converts here and there from the towns around western New York and Pennsylvania, until by the autumn of 1830 Smith could count sixty followers. Having divined the prophecy that Zion would be located “on the borders of the Lamanites,” Smith sent Oliver Cowdery, Parley Pratt, and two other disciples on a mission to the west, with instructions not only to preach to the Indians but to scout for a place to establish Zion.

On their mission, the scouts met thirty-seven-year-old Sidney Rigdon, a prominent preacher who had founded a utopian colony in Kirtland, only a few miles east of Cleveland. Reading the Book of Mormon, Rigdon was impressed, and started to doubt the validity of his own sect. Mormon history is full of narratives and parables that sound almost too good to be true. According to one of these, not only was Rigdon at once converted to the LDS faith, but so was every member of his colony.

Once Rigdon met Smith, the idea of Kirtland as the gathering place began to seem inevitable. Yet the Prophet had a hard time convincing his New York flock to pick up and move, for they would have to sell the homes and farms they had worked so hard to build and cultivate. To persuade the recalcitrant, Smith received another revelation, which proclaimed in part that Kirtland lay on the eastern edge of the promised land, which stretched all the way from Ohio to the Pacific Ocean.

Kirtland lasted as the Mormon stronghold for seven years, but almost from the start, serious problems arose there. Rigdon and Smith had minor fallings-out; a number of Rigdon’s former congregation did not take easily to the younger man’s assuming supremacy in the church; and curious nonbelievers flocked to the town to gawk at the Saints as they might animals in a zoo. Smith made the mistake of curing, in front of his congregation, a woman with a paralyzed arm. When the doubters later challenged him to perform other cures, he failed to make a lame man walk or to revive a dead child.

Antagonisms with non-Mormon Ohio neighbors sometimes erupted into violence. The nadir of Smith’s Kirtland years came in March 1832, when a mob in the nearby town of Hiram broke into the house where he and Rigdon were sleeping and tarred and feathered them. In Fawn Brodie’s vivid evocation,

They stripped him, scratched and beat him with savage pleasure, and smeared his bleeding body with tar from head to foot. Ripping a pillow into shreds, they plastered him with feathers. It is said that Eli Johnson demanded that the prophet be castrated, for he suspected Joseph of being too intimate with his sister, Nancy Marinda. But the doctor who had been persuaded to join the mob declined the responsibility at the last moment, and Johnson had to be content with seeing the prophet beaten senseless.

Kirtland set the pattern for the first fourteen difficult years of the LDS church’s existence in the United States. Loyalists tend to paint this period as a continuous ordeal of persecution of the Saints by intolerant neighbors, but there is abundant evidence that the Saints themselves often provoked those neighbors with aggressive actions of their own. For one thing, the Mormon colony sometimes behaved as though it were exempt from the laws of the state in which it resided. Thus in 1837, Smith organized the Kirtland Safety Society Bank Company and began to issue the church’s own paper money. The Ohio legislature refused to incorporate the bank, and warrants for the arrest of both Smith and Sidney Rigdon as counterfeiters were issued. (Rigdon was brought to court, and as a result, the Bank Company stopped making its own money. In January 1838, Smith fled Ohio rather than submit to arrest.)

Smith’s solution to the Kirtland crisis was to announce a new locus for Zion. As early as 1831, Oliver Cowdery and Parley Pratt had pushed their mission to the Lamanites much farther west. They came back from Missouri raving about the felicities of Jackson County, on the western edge of the state, bordering the Missouri River, beyond which the Indian Territory stretched. Cowdery himself urged the fledgling town of Independence (founded only four years earlier) as the new seat of Zion.

Smith sent a small body of settlers west to establish a colony near Independence. Meanwhile, he was visited by further divine revelations. One of them delivered the surprising information that the Garden of Eden lay not in the Holy Land of the Near East, but in Jackson County, Missouri.

Yet Independence would never become the Mormon Zion. Frictions with neighbors there grew even more heated than they had in Ohio. In 1833, the colonists were driven out of their homes by a mob, and in November an armed battle that cost the lives of two Gentiles and one Mormon ended with the withdrawal of the Mormons from Jackson County. Most of the refugees moved to neighboring precincts to the north.

In August 1836, two of those refugees founded the town of Far West, about thirty-five miles north of Independence. Caldwell County was created from scratch to accommodate the Saints. Arriving there two years later, Smith declared that Far West lay in the exact place where Cain had slain Abel.

Smith was nothing if not ambitious. Even as the Kirtland colony was disintegrating before his eyes, in June 1837 the Prophet sent three of the church’s leading missionaries to England to preach to the poor. Thus began the wildly successful campaign of conversion in Great Britain, which would send so many of the hundreds of pioneers to Utah in the 1850s, including the vast majority of the handcart emigrants of 1856.

The year 1838, by far the most troubled yet in Mormonism’s brief existence, could well have seen the extinction of the church. In January, Smith abandoned Kirtland and moved to Far West. Brigham Young, by now one of Smith’s most trusted aides, went with him. In July, the remaining Kirtland colonists, about five hundred to six hundred strong, traveled by wagon train to the new Zion in northwest Missouri.

During these tumultuous years, Mormonism’s darkest secret was polygamy. There is good evidence that Smith practiced “plural marriage” as early as 1831, and that not long after that he gave orders to his closest lieutenants to do likewise. Rumors of the practice inevitably leaked out. In 1835, the church promulgated the first of its numerous official denials, in a resolution at its annual conference: “Inasmuch as this Church has been reproached with the crime of fornication and polygamy, we declare that we believe that one man should have one wife, and one woman but one husband, except in case of death, when either is at liberty to marry again.”

For the next seventeen years, LDS authorities continued to deny that the church authorized polygamy, until Brigham Young came publicly clean in 1852. Brodie characterizes those denials as “a remarkable series of evasions and circumlocutions involving all sorts of verbal gymnastics.”

Meanwhile, through the late 1830s and into the 1840s, Smith secretly married one wife after another, with a crescendo of such liaisons sanctified in 1843 and 1844. Brodie offers a list of forty-nine plural wives during Smith’s lifetime; there may have been more. The man, of course, could hardly keep his polygamy secret from his first wife, Emma. From the start, she was intensely distraught over her husband’s intimacies with other women, and could never be reconciled to his arguments in favor of the practice. Her obstinacy grew so truculent that in 1843, Smith put an extraordinary revelation in writing. In it, God spoke directly to Emma Smith, commanding her to “receive all those that have been given unto my servant Joseph.” The punishment for her refusal was extreme: “But if she will not abide this commandment she shall be destroyed, saith the Lord; for I am the Lord thy God, and will destroy her if she abide not in my law.”

Yet Smith and his high-level confederates managed to keep any confirmation of the rumors of polygamy away from the ears of the rank and file. One may credit the remarkable keeping of this secret for more than two decades to a sheeplike credulity on the part of ordinary Saints, or to a masterly job of spin control among its hierarchy. As late as the early 1850s, Fanny Stenhouse, an English Saint living in France, met with a group of fellow female believers in Boulogne-sur-mer to discuss the gossip. Their gathering was sternly admonished by Apostle John Taylor (later to play a critical role in the handcart emigration): “We are accused here of actions the most indelicate and disgusting, such as none but a corrupt and depraved heart could have contrived.” Taylor went on to cite early proclamations from the Prophet himself about the sanctity of monogamous marriage, scolding the women for their lack of faith.

Skeptical observers of the church point to this twenty-one-year denial of polygamy as proof of the most arrogant hypocrisy on the part of Smith and his chief confederates. Defenders argue that “plural marriage” was so radical a doctrine in mid-nineteenth-century America that disclosure could have meant the dissolution of a faith that had already been hounded by its persecutors out of Ohio and Missouri.

Those camps divide along similar lines when it comes to the question of why Smith came up with the doctrine of polygamy in the first place. The skeptics see it as a simple rationalization of his own propensity for womanizing (evidence of which preceded the founding of the church). Brodie imagines “a man of Joseph’s physical charm” growing tired of his older wife, worn out from childbearing; and “Kirtland was overflowing with women who idolized him.” Smith is also reported to have confessed to a close friend, “Whenever I see a pretty woman I have to pray for grace.”

Yet when Smith came to argue for the logic of plural marriage, he did so by citing the example of Old Testament patriarchs such as Abraham and Jacob, who took more than one wife. In a twist of Mormon doctrine, a woman’s eternal salvation can be gained only through marriage. Polygamy could actually save the old crones and maiden ladies who might otherwise get passed over from exclusion from heaven. There are numerous later nineteenth-century testimonies by Mormon women defending polygamy, and of course there are breakaway Mormon groups today that practice polygamy.

 

AS THE NEW Zion, Far West, Missouri, would last less than a year. The Saints must have thought that by removing themselves to a sparsely settled region, they might flourish free from outside interference. Yet they could hardly have chosen a worse place. In the words of Brigham Young biographer Stanley Hirshson, “Within the state raged every imaginable conflict: slaveholder fought abolitionist; Indian battled white man; and Democrat clashed with Whig. To this was added another struggle: Saint versus Gentile.”

By 1838 the numbers of Mormons in northwest Missouri had swelled to between eight thousand and ten thousand, 1,500 of them in Far West alone. It was too large a throng to be ignored. And the Saints did their part to stir up trouble. The paranoia engendered by very real persecution and vilification around Palmyra and Kirtland transmuted in Far West into grandiose assertions of superiority.

One of Smith’s closest associates, Sampson Avard—Brodie calls him “cunning, resourceful, and extremely ambitious”—proposed forming a secret Mormon army. Rigdon was enthusiastic, and Smith listened.

Thus was born the most nefarious organization ever to coalesce within the Mormon church. Referred to at various early stages as the Brothers of Gideon, the Daughters of Zion, or the Sons of Dan, the band—less an army than a kind of secret police—soon became known as the Danites. They took their name from a verse in Genesis: “Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse heels, so that his rider shall fall backward.”

Men handpicked for their skill with guns and their courage, the Danites were sworn to secrecy and invested with cabalistic handshakes and signals. They would prove, across nearly half a century, well into Brigham Young’s reign in Utah, a devastatingly effective cadre of assassins, targeting apostates, enemies, rich Gentiles, and even Indians—in effect, the KGB of the Mormon church. Both Smith and Young would aver that the Danites never existed. In 1859, the famous journalist Horace Greeley arrived in Salt Lake City and won from Young one of the first interviews he ever gave to a professional newspaperman. Greeley pressed the Prophet hard, asking, among other questions, “What do you say of the so-called Danites, or Destroying Angels, belonging to your church?” Brigham smoothly countered, “What do you say? I know of no such band, no such persons or organization. I hear of them only in the slanders of our enemies.”

Leonard J. Arrington, whose Brigham Young: American Moses, published in 1985, is considered by orthodox Mormons to be the definitive life of the second Prophet, turns somersaults to deny the existence of the Danites in Utah. He insists that Young had instead “created a small force of Minute Men” charged with recapturing stolen livestock and establishing emigrant way stations, not with perpetrating murders and assassinations. As for the Danites, Arrington insists, “They played and continue to play a major role in western fiction, and many readers have imagined Brigham as a military dictator with a personal army of avengers who carried out his orders to capture, torture, and kill people who crossed him.” (Many non-Mormons regard Arrington’s voluminous biography as a partisan whitewash, and insist that the definitive life has yet to be written.)

There is simply far too much evidence not only of the existence of the Danites, but of the specific murders and assassinations carried out by thugs whose names and characters we can identify. One of the most notorious, Bill Hickman, who eventually fell out with Young, collaborated in 1872 with an anti-Mormon journalist to publish his confessions of many a murder and robbery ordered by the Prophet, under the lurid title Brigham’s Destroying Angel. And from 1838, within weeks of the founding of the secret society, a text survives in which Smith himself sums up Avard’s clandestine orders to his Danite captains. Among other duties, they were instructed “to go out on a scout of the borders of the settlements, and take to yourselves spoils of the goods of the ungodly Gentiles” and “you will waste away the Gentiles by robbing and plundering them of their property; and in this way we will build up the kingdom of God.”

In the middle of 1838, Missouri settlers indeed began to complain of goods and livestock stolen, of barns and houses burned. On July 4, in front of a large congregation, the impetuous Sidney Rigdon gave a speech that would come to be known as the “Salt Sermon,” as the orator elaborated on a passage from Matthew: “If the salt have lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under the foot of men.”

With fiery rhetoric, Rigdon made the threat to Missouri Gentiles explicit. He summed up the provocations the Saints had so far received at the hands of unbelievers, then vowed,

Our rights shall no more be trampled on with impunity. The man, or set of men, who attempt it, does it at the expense of their lives. And that mob that comes on us to disturb us, it shall be between us and them a war of extermination, for we will follow them till the last drop of their blood is spilled.

It was almost inevitable that fighting words such as Rigdon’s would lead to real fights. The first outbreak of violence occurred on August 6, election day in Missouri. John D. Lee, who was Brigham Young’s stepson and who later became famous for his part in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, left an eyewitness account of what would come to be known as the “election-day riot.” In the town of Gallatin, in Daviess County, only a few miles northeast of Far West, as he lay in the grass awaiting his turn to vote, Lee heard one of the candidates for office stir up the crowd with derogations of the Saints: “They are a set of horse thieves, liars, and counterfeiters…. If you suffer the Mormons to vote in this election, it will mean the end of your suffrage.”

Moments later, the first Mormon approached the polling booth. According to Lee, a man blocked his path and sneered, “Daviess County don’t allow Mormons to vote no more than niggers.” As the Mormon protested, the settler knocked him off his feet.

Lee swore that a Danite captain in the crowd gave the secret signal to his confederates. By the captain’s own testimony, a supernatural power came to his aid, as the brawlers singled him out for attack. With a club, he leveled one Missourian after another. “I never struck a man the second time,” the captain later wrote, “and while knocking them down, I really felt that they would soon embrace the gospel.” No one was killed, but as the unbelievers fled, they left some nine men sprawled on the ground, seriously injured.

During the next two months, several pitched battles broke out between Mormons and Missourians, and the first fatalities occurred. The conflict culminated in the Haun’s Mill Massacre. Founded in 1835, Haun’s Mill was a small Mormon farming community well to the south of Independence. On October 30, a renegade militia from a neighboring county, two hundred strong, rode toward the defenseless settlement with mayhem on their minds. As the attackers came into sight, one Mormon ran out, waving his hat to sue for peace. It was to no avail. The militiamen started firing.

The women and children fled into the woods, while men and boys made a futile stand inside the blacksmith’s shop. It was a poor refuge, for the logs of which it was built were so widely spaced, the attackers could fire through the gaps. Within hours, at least eighteen Mormon men and boys were dead, and thirteen more lay wounded. According to one Mormon witness, a nine-year-old boy named Sardius Smith tried to hide under the bellows. A militiaman found him and hauled him out. Another attacker pleaded, “Don’t shoot, it’s just a boy.”

“It’s best to hive them when we can,” the first man answered. “Nits will make lice.” Then he blew Sardius’s brains out with his rifle at point-blank range.

Alarmed by the escalating bloodshed, Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs ordered his regular militia to drive all the Mormons out of the state or, if they would not leave, to exterminate them. As the troops approached Far West—ten thousand strong, according to the Prophet—Smith realized that his people had no choice but to flee.

What followed remains uncertain. One version is that Major General Samuel Lucas tricked Smith, Sidney Rigdon, Parley Pratt, and two other leading Saints into surrendering, under the pretense of a meeting to negotiate a truce. But John D. Lee insisted that, in an emotional speech to his followers, Smith announced that he would surrender himself to Lucas “as a sacrifice to save your lives and to save the Church.”

With his five hostages under guard, Lucas was unbending. He issued a formal order to Brigadier General Alexander Doniphan: “Sir:—You will take Joseph Smith and the other prisoners into the public square of Far West, and shoot them at 9 o’clock tomorrow morning.”

The history of the LDS church in America would be far different had Doniphan carried out his orders. Instead, risking a charge of treason, he answered in writing, “It is cold-blooded murder. I will not obey your order. My brigade shall march for Liberty to-morrow morning at 8 o’clock; and if you execute these men, I will hold you responsible before an earthly tribunal, so help me God.”

Surprisingly, Lucas relented. The upshot was that Smith and his four fellow prisoners would languish for more than four months in the jail at Liberty, a small town about six miles north of Independence, as they awaited a trial that might yet levy upon them the death penalty.

Meanwhile, under a new de facto leader, Brigham Young, the Saints began their exodus from Missouri. The only direction that seemed possible for them to pursue was eastward into Illinois. Mobs of gleeful settlers descended upon Far West and ransacked it of everything of the slightest value. In Brodie’s words, “Hogs and cattle they shot for sport.”

Finally, in April 1839, Smith and the other incarcerated Mormon leaders were taken on horseback to Daviess County, the scene of their alleged crimes, to be tried by a jury of their supposed peers.

The trial never took place. With a bribe of $800 and a jug of whiskey fortified with honey that his brother Hyrum had smuggled into the midst of the caravan, Smith bought his freedom from a weak-willed sheriff. Once the man guarding him got drunk and fell asleep, Joseph and the other prisoners mounted horses and galloped north. They managed to catch up with the last stragglers from Far West and joined them as they crossed the border into Illinois.

The Garden of Eden lay behind them to the west. The new Zion of the Saints would never rise in Missouri.

 

STILL A MERE thirty-three years old as he entered Illinois, Joseph Smith would have only half a decade longer to live. Despite his people’s ignominious flight from the Missouri mobs, in late April 1839 the Prophet remained as forward-looking as ever. Without hesitation, he chose an uninhabited neck of land protruding into a bend of the Mississippi River as the site for his next (and last) attempt to build Zion. That neck of land, ten miles north of Keokuk, Iowa (itself a fledgling village at the time), was dominated by a high hill, but surrounded by woods and swamps, the latter the breeding ground of hordes of malarial mosquitoes. Smith declared that the new town would be named Nauvoo—Hebrew, he told his followers, for “beautiful place” or “beautiful plantation.”

Despite the topographic irregularities of the site, Smith laid out Nauvoo’s streets and building lots in a rigid rectangular grid, oriented to the cardinal directions—just as Salt Lake City would be laid out in 1847, as well as virtually every other Mormon town in the West thereafter. Within months, however, malaria started to take its toll. Smith himself lost his father, his youngest brother, and his youngest son.

Such setbacks in no way diminished Smith’s ambitions. In November, “armed” (as Brodie writes) “with hundreds of affidavits and petitions,” he traveled to Washington, D.C., to lay his grievances before President Martin Van Buren. Smith sought $2 million in damages from the state of Missouri. According to a reporter who was present, the president answered him with an exasperated refusal: “Help you!” he almost shouted. “How can I help you? All Missouri would turn against me.” The two men argued bitterly before Van Buren stood up and left the room. Noting the president’s corpulence, Smith told the reporter that he “hoped [Van Buren] would continue to grow fat, and swell, and before the next election burst!”

By now, Smith had organized his leading lieutenants under the lofty title the Twelve Apostles—the hierarchical designation that still obtains today. And only months after choosing the site for Nauvoo, in September 1839, he did an extraordinary thing. He ordered all twelve to go to England to make converts as fast as they could.

Brigham Young, one of the Twelve, was shocked and dismayed by the assignment. Neither he nor his second wife—the former Mary Ann Angell, whom he had married in 1834, two years after his first wife had died—had fully recovered from their malarial fevers, and only ten days before, Mary Ann had given birth to a baby. Yet, like every good Saint, Young obeyed the Prophet’s order, and set out on the English mission without a murmur of complaint.

On September 18, with his longtime friend and fellow Apostle, Heber C. Kimball, Brigham left Nauvoo. When he arrived in Liverpool, he had only 75 cents in his pocket. In their penury, Young and Kimball followed what would become a sanctified tradition of missionaries hitting the road, in the Mormon phrase, “without purse or scrip” (“scrip” meaning money, “purse” something to carry it in), the better to put themselves at the mercy of the hospitality of potential converts.

Young had left Illinois full of doubts and insecurities. When he sought advice from Smith, the Prophet blithely instructed him, “When you reach England the Lord will teach you what to do, just as He teaches me how to act here.”

The Apostles were stunned when they saw the conditions of the working-class poor in England. George A. Smith, Joseph’s cousin, wrote in a letter home, “I have seen more beggars here in one day than I saw in all my life in America.”

The Lord, however, must have worked just as Joseph had promised he would. During the single year they spent in England, the Twelve converted and baptized between eight thousand and nine thousand new Saints, published tens of thousands of tracts and copies of the Book of Mormon, and started the Liverpool-based Millennial Star: at first a monthly publication, it came out weekly starting in 1852. (The Star would cease publication only in 1970.)

The newspaper made honeyed promises about life in Illinois. The cost of a home there was only about one-eighth as much as it was in Britain. “Millions on millions of acres of land lie…unoccupied, with a soil as rich as Eden, and a surface as smooth, clear and ready for the plough as the park scenery of England.” In and around Nauvoo, the Star boasted, there was room for “more than a hundred millions of inhabitants.”

The first British converts, two hundred strong, arrived in Nauvoo in 1840. Two years later, the influx numbered 1,600. Nauvoo started to burst at the seams. In 1842, its population was counted at around seven thousand. In a mere three years of existence, the town had become the largest in Illinois. By 1844, Nauvoo’s population would swell to twelve thousand.

Rebuffed by President Van Buren, Smith continued to nurse his grudge against Missouri. On May 6, 1842, something occurred that would have deep repercussions, setting in motion a chain of events that would end with the abandonment of Nauvoo. On a windy, rainy night, Lilburn Boggs, now ex-governor of Missouri, sat reading a newspaper in the study of his home in Independence. Nearby, his six-year-old daughter rocked the cradle bearing his newborn infant.

It was Boggs, of course, who had issued the infamous “extermination order,” instructing his militia to drive the Saints out of Missouri or wipe them out. Suddenly, the windowpane shattered as pistol shots rang out. The governor was struck four times by buckshot, twice in the head and twice in the neck. Unconscious and bleeding profusely, he was not expected to live.

A crowd that quickly gathered discovered the pistol lying in the mud near the window, but the shooter had fled. Eight days later, Smith told his Nauvoo congregation that Governor Boggs had been killed. A collective gasp—perhaps a cheer—erupted. On May 28, the Wasp, the Nauvoo newspaper, editorialized, “Boggs is undoubtedly killed according to report; but who did the noble deed remains to be found out.”

Amazingly, Boggs survived, even though two of the buckshot balls remained lodged in his brain. The case has never been conclusively proven, but the assassination attempt was almost surely carried out by one Orrin Porter Rockwell, a man who would go on to become the most notorious of all the Danites. In 1870, a journalist would accuse Rockwell of having carried out more than forty murders. Brigham Young biographer Stanley Hirshson describes this formidable gunslinger:

Rockwell’s appearance was enough to frighten to death most men. Of medium height, exceptionally strong and broad-shouldered, he possessed steely, searching blue eyes, a chest as broad as a barrel, hands as hairy and powerful as bear paws, and a heavy mane of braided hair he refused to cut after Smith told him it would render him, like Samson, unconquerable.

In an excellent surviving photograph, Rockwell’s hair hangs loose, not braided, while his eyes have the blank, unyielding stare of a B-movie fanatic.

The dates of Rockwell’s temporary absence from Nauvoo coincided neatly with a possible trip to Independence. Dr. John Bennett was an 1840 convert to Mormonism who quickly rose to prominence in Nauvoo, only to fall out with Smith, who excommunicated him in June 1842. In retaliation, Bennett wrote a series of letters that were later published in book form, with the subtitle An Exposé of Joe Smith and Mormonism. Bennett is thus perhaps an unreliable witness, but in one letter he swore that he had overheard Smith offer a $500 reward to anyone who would kill Boggs. The rumors about Rockwell having accomplished the deed were sufficiently rampant that Smith made a cryptic announcement (according to Bennett): “The Destroying Angel has done the work as I predicted, but Rockwell was not the man who shot. The Angel did it!” Meanwile, in the Wasp, Smith denied any Mormon involvement, speculating that the assassination attempt must have been carried out by one of Boggs’s political opponents.

That denial failed to satisfy the Missouri authorities, who in early August sent sheriffs to Nauvoo, where they arrested both Joseph Smith and Porter Rockwell. (Smith was arrested as “an accessory before the fact.”) The Nauvoo municipal court issued a writ of habeas corpus that freed the two men, then appointed itself to conduct an independent inquiry of the attempted murder.

Meanwhile, Rockwell fled. He wound up near Philadelphia, where he stayed in hiding through the winter. And Smith went into hiding, too, though he was never far from Nauvoo. In Brodie’s judgment, “Joseph had a thousand witnesses to prove that he had been in Nauvoo on the day of the shooting, but he was certain that extradition to Missouri meant death.”

Disheartened by exile, Rockwell decided to return to Nauvoo early in 1843. In St. Louis, as he got off the steamboat to take a walk, authorities recognized him (how could they not, with his wild hair and penetrating stare?). He was arrested and sent to Independence, where he languished in prison, shackled in leg irons, infested with lice, for nine months. In May, with a fellow prisoner, he pulled off a jail break, sawing through his leg irons, overpowering the guard, whom the two men locked in their cell, then dashing across the yard and over a twelve-foot fence. But when Rockwell lingered to help his less athletic partner, sheriff’s deputies recaptured both men.

Finally, in August, Rockwell was brought to circuit court, where to his astonishment he was told that the grand jury had refused to bring an indictment. When he finally returned to Nauvoo in December 1843, according to Brodie, he “was a frightening apparition. His hair hung down to his shoulders, black and stringy like a witch’s; his clothes were filthy and tattered, his shoes in shreds.”

Experts, including Rockwell’s sympathetic biographer, Harold Schindler, lean toward the conclusion that the man was most likely the assassin. For one thing, several anti-Mormon writers later related scenes in which Rockwell bragged about the deed. But whether Smith ordered the attack is a far less certain matter. In Brodie’s analysis, “Certainly he had nothing to gain from it but trouble. Since Boggs was no longer in power, there could have been no serious motive but revenge, and Joseph was not a vengeful man.”

For his part, Smith soon wearied of his fugitive life around Nauvoo. With the characteristic fatalism that always counterbalanced his messianic zeal, he came out of hiding, submitted to another arrest, and was brought to Springfield, the capital of Illinois, for a trial based on the Missouri writ demanding Smith’s extradition. It is not far-fetched to discern in the Prophet a longing, however ambivalent, for the martyrdom that would perfect his meteoric career. On January 5, 1843, in a packed courtroom, a judge who would later convert to the LDS faith declared the Missouri writ invalid. Smith was free once more.

During these tumultuous years in Nauvoo, a mass paranoia welded the community together. Yet any hope that the Mormons could live in peace, undisturbed by hostile neighbors, was dashed again and again—dashed as much as anything by Smith’s grandiosity. In 1844, he had the audacity to run for the presidency of the United States.

He would not live to see the election.

 

THE FINAL UNRAVELING began with an internal schism. Though Illinois towns full of Gentiles that stood not far from Nauvoo, including Warsaw and Carthage, were growing increasingly hostile to the Saints, the trouble came from a man named William Law, whom in happier times Smith had appointed to the august post of Second Counselor, one of his highest-placed advisors. A rich Canadian, Law soon grew dismayed by the Prophet’s demand that his followers pour their savings into a pair of ambitious construction projects—including a temple in which the sacred ordinances every Saint must undertake ought to be performed.

The final breach came, however, when Smith decided to take Law’s wife, Jane, as one of his own plural wives. Jane was not interested, even after Smith allegedly spent two months trying to woo her. Fed up, Law threatened to expose the “debauchery” of the Mormon church to the whole world. In return, on April 20, 1844, Smith excommunicated both William and Jane.

Rather than leave Nauvoo, as most of the Saints whom Joseph expelled from the church did, the Laws lingered on, joining ranks with a number of other prominent but disaffected Mormons. It was not only polygamy that disturbed these Saints, but Smith’s despotic absolutism, as if he had conjoined the role of Prophet to that of a king. Meeting in secret, these schismatics decided to buy a printing press to publish their own newspaper.

The first and only issue of the Nauvoo Expositor appeared on June 7, 1844. The most damning of the paper’s assertions was contained in three affidavits signed by William and Jane Law and another man, each swearing that he or she had seen the written revelation about polygamy. (It will be remembered that Smith committed that revelation to print in 1843 only to silence Emma’s objections to the practice. Despite the growing multitude of “plural” or “celestial” wives Smith had taken by early 1844, the revelation and the practice remained a secret shared only by the hierarchy.)

As Brodie dramatizes the events of June 7, “When the prophet read the Expositor through, he knew that he was facing the gravest crisis of his life. The paper had put him on trial before his whole people.”

The retaliation Smith wreaked on the upstart newspaper, however, bespeaks a leader at once so grandiose and so paranoid that he seems to have been starting to lose control. He called a meeting of the city council, then steered it toward his preordained verdict: the Expositor was libelous and must be destroyed. Not simply the copies of the June 7 issue: the printing press itself.

On June 10, with Smith himself at the head, a legion of Nauvoo citizens marched to the offices of the offending newspaper. Its publishers refused to surrender the key. Harold Schindler, Porter Rockwell’s biographer, describes what happened next:

At a signal from the prophet, Rockwell kicked the door from its hinges and the posse entered. Seven men pulled the press into the street and smashed its bed beyond repair. The type was pied and battered, the chases were dumped on the remains of the press, and the entire pile of metal was soaked in coal oil and set aflame.

In addition, the “posse” seized and burned every copy of the June 7 edition it could find.

This violent episode did not take place in a vacuum. The citizens of nearby Warsaw and Carthage were well aware of the Expositor’s destruction. For them, it was the last straw. They held meetings, drafted resolutions calling for the citizens of Hancock County to “put an immediate stop to the career of the mad prophet,” and sent a deputation to Springfield to petition Governor Thomas Ford to intercede. The Warsaw Signal editorialized for a more militant and immediate response: “War and extermination is inevitable! CITIZENS ARISE, ONE AND ALL!!!…We have no time for comments; every man will make his own. LET it be made with POWDER AND BALLS!!!”

Governor Ford, whose role in trying to defuse this explosive clash of frontier cultures seems to have been admirably fair-minded, rode at once to Carthage, only fifteen miles southeast of Nauvoo. Prepared to send the militia to the Mormon stronghold to demand the surrender of the press-smashers, he was alarmed to find that very militia on the verge of turning into a lynch mob. Instead, he wrote Smith a letter asking him to turn himself in. He did not mince words: if Smith refused, Ford warned, “I have great fears that your city will be destroyed, and your people many of them exterminated.”

Smith made at least a token offer of surrender, under the condition that the Nauvoo legion ride with him to Carthage as an armed guard. Ford declined, apprehensive lest the confrontation of Mormons and Gentiles unleash all-out bloodshed. Instead, Smith prepared to flee once more.

The details of the Prophet’s last two weeks alive are intimately documented by the friends and colleagues who were with him during that calamitous time. Their written accounts were later published in the compendious History of the Church, edited by B. H. Roberts. Vivid though these testimonies are, they give only the Mormon side of the story, and like so many other LDS narratives, they are encrusted with myth and legend.

In any event, we know that Porter Rockwell rowed Smith, his brother Hyrum, and one of the Twelve Apostles, Willard Richards, across the Mississippi River into Iowa Territory, starting at midnight on June 23. Smith is supposed to have announced to Rockwell and other close confidants that his plan was to abandon Nauvoo and “strike out for the Rocky Mountains.” (Was this the germ of the Saints’ later exodus to Utah? Or had Smith long toyed with the idea of such a removal beyond the reach of the United States government?) The skiff in which the four men rode was so leaky, the river so swollen with rainwater, that it took all the rest of the night to reach the far shore.

Smith was in tears as he had parted from Emma, but they may have been tears of guilt as well as sorrow. He knew that he was turning his back on his people. And Iowa was no safe refuge: its territorial governor (Iowa would not be made a state until two years later) had in fact let it be known that he might well comply with the original Missouri extradition order. The Rocky Mountains were far away, and Smith had escaped with little more than the clothes on his back.

Conscience, the hard logistics of the Iowa wilderness, a letter of appeal from Emma delivered by a messenger, and his ever-latent fatalism conspired to change the Prophet’s mind. Only a day and a half after he had fled, Smith recrossed the Mississippi and surrendered to Governor Ford’s forces. It was not, however, an easy decision. The retrospective account recorded in the History of the Church has an ambivalent Prophet pleading, there in the woods on the west bank of the river, for advice from Rockwell and from Hyrum. Rockwell demurred, but Hyrum spoke out: “Let us go back and give ourselves up, and hear the thing out.”

Smith was silent for a long time before answering, “If you go back I will go with you, but we shall be butchered.”

“No, no,” insisted Hyrum, “let us go back and put our trust in God, and we shall not be harmed. The Lord is in it.”

On June 24, with the eleven other men charged with destroying the press, Smith started toward Carthage under the protection of a militia recruited not from Hancock County, but from the presumably less rabid McDonough County, adjoining Hancock on the east. To this escort (again, according to the Mormon record), Smith uttered a Christ-like premonitory lamentation:

I am going like a lamb to the slaughter, but I am calm as a summer’s morning. I have a conscience void of offense toward God and toward all men. If they take my life I shall die an innocent man, and my blood shall cry from the ground for vengeance, and it shall be said of me, “He was murdered in cold blood!”

The journey was uneventful, but as the entourage entered Carthage shortly before midnight, rabble-rousers shouted out, “Goddamn you, old Joe, we’ve got you now”; and, “Clear the way and let us have a view of Joe Smith, the prophet of God! He has seen the last of Nauvoo. We’ll use him up now, and kill all the damned Mormons!”

The story of Joseph’s last three days on earth has been so mythologized that by now it is almost impossible to disentangle truth from Mormon fiction. The most careful recent study of what took place in Carthage from June 25 to June 27, 1844, appears in the pages of Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven. According to Krakauer, ten of the arrested men posted bail and were set free, while Smith and Hyrum, charged with treason on top of the destruction of the press, were locked inside the Carthage jail.

This building, which still stands today (it was restored by the LDS church in 1938), was a two-story, six-room edifice built of locally quarried red limestone. The jailer, his wife, and seven children occupied four of the rooms; the other two were holding cells. Joseph and Hyrum were initially lodged in a downstairs room normally reserved for debtors. In Krakauer’s assessment, “The jailer, George Stigall, was not Mormon, but he was a decent man, and he worried that his downstairs cell, with its large, ground-level windows, might provide insufficient protection from the enraged men outside who wished to harm his prisoners.” So Stigall gave Joseph and Hyrum his own upstairs bedroom. He also allowed a stream of Mormon friends to visit the brothers, some of whom managed to smuggle a pair of lightweight pistols into the makeshift cell.

At this point, Governor Ford made a fatal miscalculation. He had ordered the hot-tempered Warsaw Dragoons (a volunteer militia) to leave Carthage. They had obeyed, but proceeded only a short way beyond the town limits. There, on the afternoon of June 27, 125 of these militiamen rubbed gunpowder on their faces in a token effort at disguise and marched back into Carthage. Guarding the jail was an inadequate force of only seven Carthage Greys.

According to Krakauer, even these guards were in cahoots with the attackers. They fired their muskets, loaded beforehand with blanks, at the attacking mob, in a charade of defending the prisoners.

At the moment, Apostles Willard Richards and John Taylor were visiting Hyrum and Joseph. The Dragoons stormed through the front door and up the stairs, their guns blazing. Taylor and Richards, armed only with walking sticks, stood on either side of the doorway, ready to lash out at the invaders, while Hyrum and Joseph lifted their puny pistols. The Dragoons shot straight through the door. One bullet struck Hyrum in the neck, killing him instantly.

In a matter of minutes, the mob forced the door open. Taylor—who would later play a crucial role in the handcart emigration of 1856—tried to jump out the window, but bullets struck him in the leg and chest and felled him. He started to crawl under a bed, but two more balls struck him in the pelvis and the forearm. Richards had the luck to be standing on the hinge side of the doorway, so that throughout the attack, he went unnoticed, hidden behind the flung-open door. He escaped the slaughter with only a grazed throat and earlobe.

Like Taylor, Joseph Smith attempted to jump out the window, but as he hovered above the sill, he was struck from behind by three bullets. As he fell out the window, he cried out his last words: “Oh Lord, my God!” He fell twenty feet to the yard, where he lay unmoving on his left side. At once he was shot several times by Dragoons outside the building.

Taylor’s life had been spared by a freak happenstance: the bullet that struck him in the chest hit a watch he was carrying in his pocket. The watch stopped, he later noted, at precisely sixteen minutes and twenty-six seconds after five o’clock on June 27. Writes Krakauer, “Mormons the world over have committed this time and date to memory, marking the death of their great and beloved prophet. Joseph Smith was thirty-eight years old.”

 

THE MEN WHO had murdered Joseph and Hyrum Smith were speedily tried and acquitted. John Hay, the future secretary of state, sardonically commented that it took three days to find twelve men ignorant enough to form a jury.

Brigham Young’s biographer Stanley Hirshson makes the intriguing point that Joseph Smith was the first, and until Malcolm X’s murder in 1965, the only American religious leader to be assassinated. From the distance of more than 160 years after the Carthage debacle, one might well wonder what it was about the Mormons that so inflamed the hatred of their neighbors—not only in Illinois, but in Missouri, Ohio, and New York state before that. Fawn Brodie ponders this question with her usual perspicacity. She concludes that it was not Mormon doctrine (not even polygamy) that aroused that hatred. It was instead, in her view, the “self-righteousness” of the Saints, their “unwillingness to mingle with the world,” combined, in Nauvoo, with the wild expansion of their numbers, that actually frightened the settlers in towns such as Warsaw and Carthage. Further fueling the Gentile antagonism was the influx, starting in 1840, of thousands of British converts. Poor farmers and factory workers those emigrants may have been, but in American eyes, they were still monarchists. In 1844, only sixty-one years had passed since the Revolution that had won our freedom from the despot George III, only thirty-two years since the War of 1812. Of the Mormons’ neighbors in western Illinois, Brodie writes, “To them the Nauvoo theocracy was a malignant tyranny that was spreading as swiftly and dangerously as a Mississippi flood and that might eventually engulf the very government of the United States.”

At the time of the Prophet’s martyrdom, most of the Apostles were scattered about the Eastern states. Brigham Young, who had risen to the rank of president of the Twelve, was in Massachusetts. Ironically, on July 1, four days after Smith’s death, he and two other Mormon elders spoke at the Boston Melodeon, vigorously advancing the Prophet’s candidacy for president of the United States. The speakers were drowned out by the jeers of their audience. Young did not learn of the murder in Carthage for another fifteen days. When he did, he immediately set out to return to Illinois, but it would not be until August 6 that he arrived in Nauvoo.

Sidney Rigdon was in Pittsburgh when he got the news. He, too, rushed at once to Nauvoo, arriving there three days before Young. Although Rigdon had had serious differences with Smith during the two years before the Prophet’s death, he was still perhaps the logical candidate to succeed him. Rigdon had been with the church almost since the beginning; it was he who had inspired the move to Kirtland, Ohio, in 1831.

Meanwhile, Nauvoo was in chaos. Had the anti-Mormon forces around Warsaw and Carthage decided to attack, they might have wiped out the community, sending the faithful fleeing into the wilderness. But with the brutal murders of Smith and Hyrum, their vigilante zeal had been temporarily expended.

Pundits all over America predicted the collapse of the Mormon theocracy. On July 8, the New York Herald editorialized, “The death of the modern Mahomet will seal the fate of Mormonism. They cannot get another Joe Smith. The holy city must tumble into ruins, and the ‘latter day saints’ have indeed come to the latter day.”

It was not until August 8 that the whole of Nauvoo assembled in a grove overlooking the Mississippi River to decide the future leadership of the beleaguered church. One of the most cherished of Mormon myths would attach itself to this gathering. According to this tradition, after other pretenders to the vacant throne of the Prophet had advanced their candidacies, Rigdon addressed the throng as the last speaker. By now he was fifty-one years old, decidedly portly, with an unimpressive bearing. But his smooth and tempered oration seemed to win the day, and the crowd was on the verge of conferring the leadership on Rigdon by unanimous acclamation.

But then, according to the myth, a cry rang out. A steamboat was approaching on the Mississippi River, with Brigham Young aboard. There would be one last speaker.

One historian calls Young’s oration that August day the most famous speech in Mormon history. The mythologizing tradition has transformed it into a miracle. As Orson Hyde, a future Apostle, would recall it decades later:

Well, he spoke, and his words went through me like electricity. “Am I mistaken,” said I, “or is it really the voice of Joseph Smith?” This is my testimony; it was not only the voice of Joseph, but there were the features, the gestures and even the stature of Joseph before us in the person of Brigham…. Every one in the congregation…felt it. They knew it. They realized it…. When President Young began to speak, one of them said, “It is the voice of Joseph! It is Joseph Smith!”

(No mean feat, this transformation, for Young was not only four or five inches shorter than the handsome patriarch with the piercing gaze, but already, at forty-three, he had a jowly face, a double chin, and a thickset, stocky build.)

We know that there was no last-minute arrival by steamboat: by the time the open-air meeting was held, Young had been in Nauvoo for two days. Whether or not the man was functionally illiterate, we have many a later testimony to his eloquence as a preacher and orator. On August 8, however, it may not have been eloquence so much as strategy that won the day. (Indeed, a bishop who listened to the speech would later complain about Young’s “long and loud harangue…. For the life of me I could not see any point in the course of his remarks.”)

Desperate to be anointed, Rigdon had shamelessly announced that on the day of Smith’s death, the Prophet had visited him in a vision and entrusted him with governing the church in a proper manner. Young, who did in fact speak last, took a clever tack. He began by scolding the congregation for convening a meeting to decide Smith’s successor, rather than mourning his death. He feigned disinterest: “I do not care who leads this church…. You cannot fill the office of a Prophet, Seer, and Revelator: God must do this. You are like children without a father.”

Not once did Young advance himself as a candidate. Instead, he subtly brought the congregation around to a black-and-white choice. It was a question, as he framed it, of sustaining the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, or of voting for Rigdon. Next he called for a show of hands: how many would vote to sustain the Twelve? Nearly every hand shot up. How many would not? Only a few dared raise their arms. Rigdon was trounced before his candidacy could even come to a vote. As biographer Morris Werner puts it, “The meeting then adjourned until the Church conference of the following October, and the church was in the hands of the Twelve, who were in the hands of Brigham Young.”

Like Stalin deposing Trotsky, the supremely Machiavellian Brigham Young at once set about discrediting his rival. On September 8, he managed to bring Rigdon to trial on charges ranging from illegally ordaining priests to promulgating false revelations. Whether or not the gossip was true, Young maintained that he had gotten wind of a plot in which Rigdon was secretly organizing a schism, with plans to lead the Saints to his own reformed LDS church near Pittsburgh. The upshot was that Rigdon was not only excommunicated by the Twelve, but sent packing as the congregation unanimously “delivered [him] over to the buffetings of Satan.”

Rigdon indeed decamped for Pittsburgh with a smattering of followers, and there established his “true” Mormon church. It flickered briefly, then expired. The man himself lived on for decades, humiliated by his failure. As late as 1871, from a farm in Pennsylvania, he sent a letter to Young in Salt Lake City offering to help the church weather its latest crisis. Young did not bother to answer.

 

THUS BRIGHAM YOUNG took control of the church he would head for the next thirty-three years, until his death in 1877. He would become a Prophet, Seer, Revelator, and President even more autocratic than Joseph Smith—the epithet “despotic” is not too strong. Yet during the first two years of his leadership, it was all Young could do to hold the battered, fragmenting community of Saints together. Besides the challenge briefly posed by Rigdon’s breakaway church, a very strange visionary Saint named James L. Strang apostatized and proceeded to set up his own church in Wisconsin. By 1846, he reportedly had ten thousand devotees in his flock—two-thirds as many as the faithful in and around Nauvoo. The bizarre career of Strang and the Strangites deserves a book in its own right.

The greatest threat to Brigham’s supremacy, however, came in the person of William Smith, one of Joseph’s brothers. In the aftermath of the Prophet’s murder, their mother, Lucy Smith, claimed to have received visions conferring the succession on William. In a gesture of apparent modesty, William insisted that his tenure as Prophet would only be temporary, until Joseph’s twelve-year-old son grew old enough to assume the mantle. John D. Lee, in his late, embittered autobiography, claimed that in Nauvoo Young himself had often sworn that the twelve-year-old was destined to succeed his father. “He is too young to lead this people now,” Lee swore Young had averred to Lucy, “but when he arrives at mature age he shall have his place. No one shall rob him of it.”

The feud between William Smith and Young intensified. In 1845, the former fled to St. Louis, where he began delivering public lectures attacking the “false” Prophet. Finally, in 1860, William established his own church, calling it the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Remarkably, the church still exists today as the Community of Christ, headquartered in Independence, Missouri. The chief doctrinal difference between the Reorganized branch and the mainstream LDS church was the denial, first voiced by William, that Joseph Smith had ever preached or practiced polygamy.

After a lull in the hostilities around Nauvoo, new frictions arose between the Mormon stronghold and the surrounding Gentile towns. They were brought to the flash point on September 16, 1845, when Porter Rockwell murdered Franklin Worrell, one of the leaders of the Carthage Greys, the militia that had collaborated with the Warsaw Dragoons in the killing of Joseph and Hyrum. Several prominent Mormons later admitted that this assassination was carried out by Young’s leading Danite, though Harold Schindler, Rockwell’s biographer, portrays the encounter as an act of self-defense on Rockwell’s part.

In response, Gentiles attacked the Mormon town of Lima, burning down 175 houses. A handful of further killings on both sides ensued. A newspaper in Hancock County captured the mood of the day: “Every Saint, mongrel or whole-blood, and every thing that looked like a Saint, talked or acted like a Saint, should be compelled to leave.”

In 1845, the Illinois legislature revoked the charter for Nauvoo. It was the crushing blow. Smith’s “beautiful place” was doomed. Zion would have to be raised elsewhere.

Before fleeing Illinois, however, the Saints, under Young’s energetic direction, did something that to outside observers must have seemed a very curious deed. Only months before abandoning Nauvoo, they erected its most spectacular building, a temple in which the sacred ordinances could be performed.

The temple, which Mormons claimed cost $600,000 (a wildly inflated figure), had been divinely ordained by God through Joseph Smith. The nature of the ordinances and “endowments,” which persist today, and which still can be carried out only inside an LDS temple, have always been kept secret by the church, but many a nineteenth-century apostate gleefully detailed them. Morris Werner argues that a more pragmatic motive contributed to Young’s zeal—the hope of selling the building for profit once it was built. The temple in fact was eventually put up for sale, but found no buyers.

Alas, the grandiose building was destined for a sorry end. A fire in 1848 and a tornado in 1850 destroyed much of it, and the citizens of what was left of Nauvoo pushed down its remaining walls. Between 2000 and 2002, under church auspices, the temple was completely rebuilt. Formally dedicated on June 27, 2002, by LDS president Gordon B. Hinckley, it serves today as a fully functioning temple.

During the last weeks in Nauvoo, more than a thousand Saints “received their ordinances” in the temple. Among them was Brigham Young, who was “sealed” to thirty-four of the thirty-five wives he had taken by early 1846. Young would always insist that when the doctrine of plural marriage was first revealed to him by Smith, he was revolted. “It was the first time in my life that I had desired the grave,” he would later claim, “and I could hardly get over it for a long time.”

No doubt there were dutiful aspects to Young’s wife-taking, as in the fact that he was “sealed for time” to eight of Smith’s widows (not all of whom were young or comely) so that they could be “sealed for eternity” to Smith in the afterlife. Yet if Young initially obeyed Smith’s order to take many wives with reluctance, he would acquire a taste for the obligation. In Utah, quite a few of the brides he wooed, all but commanding them to marry him, were pretty, and some were as young as fourteen.

Early in February 1846, Young led some two thousand followers west across the Mississippi River, as they turned their backs on Nauvoo for good.

 

IF THERE IS a single narrative that validates the church today in the hearts and minds of Saints all over the world, it is the grand 1846–47 pageant of the pioneer trek from Nauvoo across the plains and through the Rocky Mountains to the Great Basin, where the faithful would finally build their Zion on the site of what is now Salt Lake City. The subtitle of Leonard Arrington’s comprehensive (if biased) biography of Brigham Young, American Moses, draws without irony a parallel between the second LDS Prophet and the Old Testament patriarch who led the chosen people out of bondage to the promised land. It was an analogy of which the Saints in that voyage were fully conscious, for they called themselves the Camp of Israel.

Yet fundamental ambiguities still linger about that landmark hegira. Chief among them is whether Young had his destination in mind from the beginning, or instead simply headed west along the Oregon Trail until he might stumble upon the proper place for Zion.

As he fled into Iowa to escape the militia in June 1844, one recalls, Smith had told his retainers that he would strike out for the Rocky Mountains. On the other hand, when Kentucky statesman Henry Clay had recommended Oregon as an ultimate destination for the Saints a few years earlier, Smith had replied with a sneering, indignant refusal.

We know that Young had read (or had had read to him) John C. Frémont’s famous Reports detailing his 1842 and 1843 explorations along the Oregon Trail, during the second of which he had veered south through the Great Basin on his way to California. The reports were illustrated with Charles Preuss’s exquisitely accurate maps. In fact, as it headed west, the Mormon caravan carried Frémont’s books with them.

The most careful study of the question may appear in Will Bagley’s introduction to The Pioneer Camp of the Saints, the edited journals of Thomas Bullock, a member of the pioneer party. Writes Bagley:

Much speculation has gone into when LDS leaders picked the Salt Lake Valley as their ultimate destination. By January 1845, the Saints had stated their determination to go to California, but in 1845 “California” included everything west of New Mexico and the Rocky Mountains and south of Oregon. Until July 1847 when he actually looked at the Salt Lake Valley, Brigham Young’s statements about his destination were ambiguous and wildly contradictory, perhaps intentionally so to deceive the government and Mormon political enemies about the precise location of the new Zion.

Before leaving Nauvoo, Young and some of the leading Apostles had sought out expert advice about a safe haven for the Saints from everyone from politicians to newspaper editors. The recommendations ranged from the mouth of the Colorado River to San Francisco Bay to Vancouver Island. Yet Bagley concludes,

The Mormon leaders had determined to leave the United States and move into Mexican territory and had identified the Great Basin as their destination by the late summer of 1845, when they publicly announced their plans to abandon Nauvoo by the next spring…. On 9 September they resolved to send 1500 men to “Great Salt Lake Valley” to find a location for the saints.

If in fact Young hoped to lead such a multitude (let alone all two thousand who followed him out of Nauvoo) all the way to the Mormon promised land in one push in 1846, he soon grew discouraged at the prospect. In the feverish preparations for the exodus, the Saints bought and built their own wagons in a motley assortment of styles and makes. As early as October 1845, the Nauvoo newspaper had published a list of goods recommended to be carried in each of those wagons. It is a mind-boggling roster, including a thousand pounds of flour, twenty pounds of soap for each family, a gallon of alcohol, a pound each of cayenne pepper and cinnamon, “1 good seine and hook for each company,” and “from 25 to 100 lbs. of farming and mechanical tools.” (Such baggage was a far cry from the seventeen pounds per person to which the hand-cart pioneers of 1856 would be limited!)

It did not take long on the road for the wagons to groan under their excessive burdens. Write William Slaughter and Michael Landon in Trail of Hope, “As the long journey weakened and wearied the oxen, loads were lightened. Such heirlooms as prized furniture, book collections, china, and pianos were often abandoned along the trail. Sometimes precious items were left along the trail with the hope of picking them up at a later date.”

Adding to the pilgrims’ difficulties was the fact that they seriously underestimated Iowa. The iron cold of February gave way to drenching rains in March and April. The trail turned to impassable muck. Instead of proceeding in an orderly cavalcade, the hundreds of emigrants started to get spread out, according to their hardiness and the quality of their teams, across scores of miles. Young and other leaders were compelled to travel back all the way to Nauvoo to help the stragglers. The horde of two thousand that had crossed the Mississippi with Young starting on February 4 was but an advance guard: in their wake eventually followed the other ten thousand Saints exiled from Nauvoo. As it was, even an elite cadre of skilled travelers, pushing ahead of the disorderly caravan as a kind of advance scouting party, needed a full four months to cross Iowa and reach the banks of the Missouri River.

So halting and desultory was the Saints’ progress across Iowa that they decided to build a pair of way stations for those too weak to go on. Garden Grove and Mount Pisgah, in central Iowa, quickly morphed from camps into bona fide villages. Between five hundred and six hundred settlers would spend the winter in Garden Grove. The population of Mount Pisgah eventually swelled to between two thousand and three thousand. Many of those homesteaders would push on to Zion only years later; others would never leave Iowa.

Despite the emigration’s early start, by the beginning of summer Young was reconciled to the reality that he would never be able to transport as many as a thousand Saints to the Great Basin in one year. Besides the hardships of the trail itself, the pioneers suffered from alarming outbreaks of malaria and other diseases. A substantial wintering-over settlement would have to be built. Yet the Prophet still keenly hoped to push on with a small, handpicked advance party that summer and fall.

The decision to winter over was sealed by the arrival in Mount Pisgah, on June 26, of a four-man military delegation that had traveled east from Fort Leavenworth, in what is today Kansas. The Mexican War had broken out. Since taking office in 1845, President James K. Polk had agonized over the Mormon situation. Now he performed a brilliant stroke of co-option. The delegation brought the president’s formal request for five hundred Mormon volunteers to join General Stephen Watts Kearny’s Army of the West as it marched to Santa Fe and southern California. If Mormons could be coerced to serve the cause of the United States, that would seriously blunt the edge of their threat to flee the country’s confines to establish their autonomous Zion in the wilderness.

In later years, Young would rail against Polk’s interference. “There cannot be a more damnable, dastardly order issued than was issued by the Administration to this people while they were in Indian country, in 1846,” he thundered in an 1857 speech. “That was President Polk; and he is now weltering in hell.” Yet Young was every bit as Machiavellian as the president. The request for volunteers proved an unexpected windfall. The army pay for five hundred volunteers for a year’s service amounted to $21,000, of which Parley Pratt, acting for Brigham, managed to secure as much as $6,000 in pledges to bolster the colony of over-wintering Saints. In addition, the army would effectively pay the way to Zion for five hundred Saints who would otherwise have had to finance their own pilgrimage.

The story of the so-called Mormon Battalion, many of whose members reached California, then made their way back to Utah to meet the pioneer trekkers in 1847, is a minor epic in its own right, about which numerous books and articles have been written. And attached to that story is the usual Mormon mythologizing. As Wallace Stegner sardonically sums up the response to the call for volunteers:

Some orthodox histories say that Brigham at once found among his steadfast people the volunteers their ungrateful country called for—simply asked and saw the firm chins rise, the resolute figures step forward. The fact is that he asked from Miller’s Hollow through Mt. Pisgah to Garden Grove, and in every place got mainly shuffling feet and mulish downcast looks.

In the fall of 1846, on either side of the Missouri River, the Mormons started building houses. On the east side, in Iowa Territory, they constructed Miller’s Hollow, soon to be renamed Kanesville, then Council Bluffs. On the west side, in Indian Territory (and thus technically illegal), they started to build Winter Quarters, later renamed Florence.

At last Young had given up his dream of pushing on toward the Great Basin with an advance party in the fall of 1846. Instead, he settled in to run Winter Quarters. A year-end census of the fledgling village counted 3,483 people, of whom, thanks to the volunteers who had left with the Mormon Battalion, only 502 were men. The town was laid out in the by now standard Mormon grid. There were 538 wooden houses, most of them made of cottonwood, and eighty-three sod dugouts.

It was a hard winter, as cold and scurvy took their toll. No accurate death count can be retrieved today, but a commemorative LDS Web site sets the number of those who perished at 325.

The sufferings of one resident of Winter Quarters are brought vividly to life in her retrospective account:

Winter found me bed-ridden, destitute, in a wretched hovel which was built upon a hillside; the season was one of constant rain; the situation of the hovel and its openness, gave free access to piercing winds and water flowed over the dirt floor, converting it into mud two or three inches deep; no wood but what my little ones picked up around the fences, so green it filled the room with smoke; the rain dropping and wetting the bed which I was powerless to leave.

ON APRIL 7, 1847—the day after the seventeenth anniversary of the founding of the church—Young set off westward with a handpicked party of 144 men. That number resonated throughout Winter Quarters: twelve men standing for each of the twelve tribes of Israel. In the end, however, one man backed out because of illness, while three women (including one of Young’s wives, Clara Decker Young) and two children joined the entourage at the last minute.

It would take the pioneer party 108 days to travel the 1,031 miles from Winter Quarters to the site of their new Zion, an average of a little less than ten miles per day, though the procession actually moved faster, since every Sabbath was observed as a rest day. That 1847 journey has become the founding saga of the whole Mormon odyssey, endlessly retold and celebrated by the Saints. Stegner calls it “the most extensively reported event in western history.” Burnished as myth, it seems to acquire the kind of heroic glow that Odysseus’s voyage home from Troy to Ithaca forever radiates.

Yet in many ways the pioneer trek was a routine peregrination. South Pass in western Wyoming, the key to the easy crossing of the Continental Divide, had been discovered (as far as Anglos are concerned) as early as 1812, by Robert Stuart, traveling east from Astoria, the famous outpost at the mouth of the Columbia River. After its rediscovery in 1824 by a party guided by Jedediah Smith, the pass became a regular itinerary for the mountain men. The first wagons crossed South Pass in 1832.

With the opening of the Oregon Trail in the early 1840s, the path along the North Platte, the Sweetwater River, and over South Pass became the standard route for emigrants flocking to homestead in what was still officially British territory (though Polk, running for president in 1844, would famously dispute the claim under the ringing campaign slogan “Fifty-four Forty or Fight”). In 1843 alone, some nine hundred emigrants traveled to Oregon along the trail. Though not published until 1849, Francis Parkman’s enormously popular The Oregon Trail recounted the author’s journey of 1846, a year before the Mormon exodus. The Donner Party also traveled along the trail that year, and in fact blazed the difficult route through the canyons of northeast Utah that Young’s pioneers would follow in 1847.

Long before the tide of Oregon emigration in the 1840s, boosters of westward expansion had made a vogue of minimizing the difficulties of the trail. In 1813 the Missouri Gazette, published in St. Louis, announced that there was “no obstruction in the whole route that any person would dare to call a mountain.” A Missouri senator in 1838 boasted of Oregon’s “tropical” climate and claimed that the Rockies could be crossed even by “delicate females.” The first Anglo women to cross South Pass, a pair of missionaries’ wives, did so in 1836.

And indeed the pioneer party under Brigham Young proceeded westward with relative ease. The few encounters with Indians were peaceful. There were so many bison to shoot that Young eventually had to scold his followers for wasting so much meat, as they left carcasses to rot on the plains.

As mythologized by the Mormons, the pioneer hegira seems to take place in isolation, as if those 148 pilgrims were pushing along the Platte and Sweetwater like explorers penetrating an undiscovered country. In fact, that spring and summer there were no fewer than five thousand emigrants walking and riding westward toward their own promised lands. The trail was so crowded that on April 25, the Mormon company decided to cross the Platte and continue on its north bank, rather than follow the established and well-trodden route of the Gentiles on the south side of the river. That separation, so characteristic of the Saints, would persist through the following years, so that along the Platte the Mormon Trail came to be distinguished from the Oregon Trail proper.

Unlike the Donner Party, whose story will always remain fuzzy, thanks to a paucity of primary sources, the Mormon pioneer trek is well documented in some twenty-seven trail diaries kept by various members of the party. The best of them is William Clayton’s voluminous journal, full of homely but welcome detail. A random sample, from April 21:

One of the Indians presented several certificates from persons who had previously travelled through their village, all certifying that the Grand Chief of the Pawnees was friendly disposed, and they had made him presents of a little powder, lead, salt &c. Heber gave them a little tobacco & a little salt & President Young gave to the chief, some powder, lead, salt and a number of the brethren gave a little flour each. The old chief however did not seem to think the presents sufficient, and said he did not like us to go west through their cou[n]try, he was afraid we should kill their Buffalo and drive them off. Brother Shumway told him we did not like Buffalo.

It comes as no surprise that this obsessive recorder would set himself the task of measuring the distances the party traveled to the nearest foot. On May 8, Clayton gauged the circumference of one of Heber Kimball’s wagon wheels, finding it to be precisely fourteen feet eight inches. A calculation revealed that exactly 360 revolutions of the wheel covered a mile of ground. So Clayton tied a red rag to one of the spokes, then counted every single revolution all day long. After a few days, the labor started to drive him crazy. With the help of a handy collaborator, he concocted an interlocking pair of wooden cogs attached to the wheel that did the counting just as efficiently as the red rag (a replica of this “roadometer” is on display in the Museum of Church History in Salt Lake City).

The upshot of this mania for measuring distances was not only that Clayton could sum up the party’s journey as exactly 1,031 miles long, but that he could rush into print in 1848 a slender book called The Latter-day Saints’ Emigrants’ Guide, a volume that every subsequent party of Mormon pioneers heading to Zion found invaluable. The entries are as quaint and useful as Clayton’s diary. Tables taxonomize every conceivable landmark:

Sandy Bluffs, west foot.

Two hundred yard further, is a creek five feet wide.

The cavalcade on the Mormon Trail amounted to far more than men accompanied by three women and two children. The pilgrims traveled in seventy-two wagons pulled by sixty-six oxen and fifty-two mules, or rode on ninety-three horses, driving along nineteen cows, seventeen dogs, and some chickens. The three women, as Stegner notes, “might as well have been invisible,” for they are mentioned only three or four times in all the journals. Of the whole menagerie, he adds, “It sounds like a dog’s dream, that trip; but the journals don’t mention the dogs much either.”

To bring order to what might have been a ragtag parade, Young imposed a military discipline. The whole party was aroused at 5:00 A.M. by the peal of a bugle. The team started moving at seven after each wagon team had cooked a dinner to be consumed at noon. The wagons were parked at night in a precise configuration with the front wheel of one interlocked with the back wheel of another. Prayers were offered to God every evening at 8:30, and by nine everyone had to be in bed with the fires extinguished. Rules included a prohibition against wandering more than twenty rods (110 yards) from camp.

Even so, the men and boys seemed to be having too good a time on the trip. Buffalo-hunting had become an addiction, as well as cards and checkers in camp. On May 29, Young blew his stack. He assembled the whole expedition and harangued them about the “low, mean, dirty, trifling, covetous, wicked spirit dwelling in our bosoms.” More than one diarist recorded Young’s diatribe:

When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I hear is some of the brethren jawing each other and quarreling because a horse has got loose in the night. I have let the brethren dance and fiddle and act the nigger night after night to see what they will do…. Well, they will play cards, they will play checkers, they will play dominoes, and if they had the privilege and were where they could get whiskey, they would be drunk half their time.

By June 12, the trekkers had reached what would come to be known as the Last Crossing, near where the Sweetwater entered the North Platte. Later in the season, the Platte would be low and braided enough to ford, but now, swollen with spring snowmelt from its headwaters in the Medicine Bow Mountains, it was running a hundred feet wide and fifteen feet deep. It was here—ironically, in the center of today’s Casper, Wyoming—where the Martin handcart company would start to come to grief nine years later.

In 1847, it took the pioneer party six days of perilous ferrying to get across the Platte. The Saints had had the foresight to carry with them a leather boat that they called the “Revenue Cutter,” which could carry as much as 1,800 pounds. The “Cutter” was up to the job of getting all the baggage across the river, but the wagons themselves presented a major problem. The men experimented with log rafts lashed together out of native timbers, with rope systems to swing the wagons from shore to shore, and with attaching outrigger poles to the wagons in an attempt to float them across. Finally, their best-built raft proved barely adequate to carry a single wagon at a time; each ferry left the men holding their breath as they anticipated a capsize.

As he would throughout his tenure as Prophet, Young now turned adversity into a business opportunity. He ordered several of the men to stay behind at the Last Crossing, where they would charge $1.50 per wagon to ferry the scores of Gentile trains bound for Oregon across the flooding river.

Ascending the Sweetwater, which meandered in endless loops through a valley flanked on either side by granite outcrops and wooded hills, the Saints were forced to share the single trail with Gentile companies. The procession sometimes took on the character of a traffic jam, as parties often raced each other to snag the best campsites. Some of the trains were peopled with emigrants from Missouri. The Saints had fresh and bitter memories of being driven out of that state in 1838–39, so relations between them and these homesteaders now grew tense. The Mormon diarists reflect the contempt for the Missourians: in one train, the “men, women and children were all cursing, swearing, quarreling, scolding, and finding fault with each other and other companies.”

The Mormon caravan trundled without serious incident up the Sweetwater valley. On June 27 the wagons crested South Pass, the 7,500-foot divide that is so gently inclined the men amused themselves by trying to determine the precise place where the Atlantic watershed gave way to the Pacific. The date was not lost on the Saints—it was the third anniversary of Smith’s murder in Carthage.

A few miles beyond South Pass, the Oregon Trail parted from the far less traveled route that the Saints must follow to the Great Basin. Grateful to take their leave of the noisome Gentiles, the Saints nonetheless began to worry about getting lost. Fortunately, the very next day they encountered three strangers near the Little Sandy River. One of them was the most famous of all mountain men, Jim Bridger, nicknamed “Old Gabe.” No one knew the country to which the Saints were headed better than he. Two decades before, leading a party of trappers, he had made what was probably the Anglo discovery of Great Salt Lake (which he mistook, because of its saline composition, for a bay of the Pacific Ocean). In 1841, as the beaver trade collapsed, he had built Fort Bridger, the only outpost of civilization in the huge wilderness that stretched away on all sides.

During subsequent years, relations between Old Gabe and the Mormons would so deteriorate that the mountain man would have to flee for his life from Saints (Danites among them) who took over the fort by force. But now, at first meeting, Bridger was happy to camp with Young’s party and tell them all he knew about the Great Basin.

Another Mormon legend hovers about this important meeting. According to this tradition, Bridger was so pessimistic about the prospect of settling near the Great Salt Lake that he promised to give Young a thousand dollars for the first ear of corn he might raise there.

The diaries kept on the trail reveal a more nuanced appraisal on Old Gabe’s part. According to Wilford Woodruff, Bridger said of the Great Salt Lake Basin that “there was but one thing that Could operate against it becoming A great grain country & that wold be frost. He did not know but the frost would effect the corn.”

Before parting, Bridger gave the Saints detailed directions as to how to penetrate the canyons guarding the Great Salt Lake on the northeast. He averred that “he was Ashamed of the Maps of Freemont for He knew nothing about the Country.” Old Gabe’s directions, however, proved so confusing that the Mormons would give up trying to follow them.

On June 30, as the Saints lingered on the east bank of the Green River to build more rafts for their last major stream crossing, they had an equally momentous rendezvous with three other men riding in from the west. One of them was a fellow Saint, Sam Brannan. This extraordinary traveler had sailed from New York in 1846 all the way around Cape Horn to California, where he arrived in time to greet the American squatters who had perpetrated the semi-comic Bear Flag Revolt, the first step in the seizure of California from its Mexican government. Having learned of the pioneer party’s departure from Winter Quarters in April 1847, Brannan had come all the way east to the Green River to intercept Young’s Saints and talk them into settling in golden California.

Brannan would grow indignant when Young ignored his propaganda in favor of the land of milk and honey. Yet as he had crossed the Sierra Nevada that spring, he had been one of the first travelers to come upon the wreckage and carnage of the Donner Party. Now he was the bearer of the shocking tidings of the disaster that had engulfed that emigrant train in the snows of the winter of 1846–47.

Another Mormon legend has it that the Donner Party was made up of the very men who had persecuted the Saints in Missouri and Illinois. Their terrible end was God’s punishment for their sins. In reality, although the Donner Party had started west from Springfield, Illinois, its members had had nothing to do with the conflicts around Nauvoo that had led to Smith’s martyrdom in Carthage.

It is beguiling to learn that this righteous Mormon myth had its origins not in a retrospective distorting of history, but on the very day Brannan met up with the Saints. One of the pioneers, Norton Jacob, so mangled what Brannan reported (unless Brannan himself mangled the truth) that that evening he wrote in his diary:

Br Brannan fell in with a company of Emigrants who by quarreling & fighting among themselves, delayed time until they got caught in the Snows on the Mountains last fall & could not entrical themselves…. Their sufferings were incredible manny of them perished with cold & hunger, all their cattle died & they compeled to eat the flesh of those that died among them!…These are the men that have Mobed & killed the Saints!

Once across the Green River, the Saints had only 169 more trail miles to reach the site of their new Zion. Five-sixths of their long journey was over. But in that home stretch, they would encounter the hardest traveling of all—none of it more arduous than the last thirty-six miles as, finding faint traces of the Donner Party’s passage the year before, they literally built a road down what would come to be called Emigration Canyon.

And now the pioneers’ progress was slowed to a crawl by an outbreak of what the Saints called “mountain fever.” It was characterized by intense headache, severe pain in the joints, and fevers approaching the delirious. The Saints themselves blamed it on sudden alternations of heat and cold, or on alkali in their cooking water. Historians have puzzled as to the true nature of mountain fever. The best guess is that it was Rocky Mountain spotted fever, which is caused by ticks. According to Rock Springs, Wyoming, Bureau of Land Management archaeologist Terry Del Bene, “The sagebrush through which the pioneers moved in western Wyoming is a huge tick farm. The ticks have thermal sensors—they’ll migrate straight toward you.”

No one was stricken more seriously than Young himself. By July 19 he could no longer walk. Uncertain whether to halt the migration until its leader recovered, the Saints ultimately sent ahead an advance party of twenty-two wagons under Orson Pratt, while Young was carried slowly along on the bed of a wagon among the main party.

On July 21, Pratt’s team broke through a last canyon barrier and suddenly gained its first view of the Great Salt Lake basin spreading below. “We could not refrain from a shout of joy,” Pratt wrote.

It is often overlooked or forgotten that in choosing to settle near the Great Salt Lake, the Saints were invading and occupying a foreign country. In July 1847, virtually all of the Great Basin was still Mexican soil, even while the United States’ war against its southern neighbor waxed furious. It would not be until the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848, that all of what are today Utah, Nevada, and California, as well as most of Arizona and parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming, would be formally ceded to the United States.

This singular moment in LDS history furnishes the pedestal for the most potent and beloved of all the Mormon myths. According to that legend, on July 24, 1847, Brigham Young beheld the Great Salt Lake valley and at once announced, “This is the place.” Today, July 24, known as Pioneer Day, is the occasion for gala celebrations not only in Salt Lake City, but in every Mormon community. It is the most important Mormon holiday, even more significant than Christmas.

On the outskirts of Salt Lake City today stands This Is the Place Heritage Park, a spacious memorial ground that includes an authentic full-size replica village of the new Zion as it looked during its earliest years. The park is dominated by a sixty-foot-tall pylon with statues of Heber Kimball, Wilford Woodruff, and Brigham Young on top, gazing out over the city below from the spot where the Prophet made his pronouncement.

Alas, Young never uttered his most famous utterance. Historian Dale Morgan, combing the records of the pioneer days, found that the “This is the place” formula does not crop up before 1880—thirty-three years after the pioneer party reached its Zion, and three years after Young’s death.

The truth, always more mundane than the myth, is that when a prostrate Brigham Young was wheeled into sight of the promised land on July 24, the advance party had already plowed three acres of ground and planted the first seedlings, built a dam on what would be named City Creek, and diverted water to the fields by means of irrigation ditches. Wilford Woodruff’s journal for that day notes only that the Prophet “expressed his full satisfaction in the appearance of the valley as a resting-place for the Saints, and was amply repaid for his journey.”