Author’s Note

Through Cloud and Sunshine is my 100th published book. Some people write one blockbuster and then retire. That hasn’t worked out for me. I’ve been “at it” for thirty-four years. There will be one more book in this series, and then who knows? I might look around for a nice rocking chair.

Actually, I’m not ready to retire just yet, but lately I’ve thought about it. I think this has been the most difficult book of all 100. The challenge of writing about Nauvoo is not that information is hard to find, but that too much is available. It was hard to know where to stop the research and even harder to know how much historical information to include. I drafted and redrafted the book ten or eleven times, and much of my effort was devoted to cutting, trying to create a good novel, not a historical textbook. Still, I hope you learned something about the city that was called the “center place of Zion” and at the same time came to care about the characters.

In the preface to this book I described the challenge of trying to see through the filter of one’s own time to comprehend another era. But that’s not easy. I suspect that if Joseph Smith or one of the Apostles from his time were to preach in a worship service today, he might shock a modern congregation. For one thing, he would probably look unkempt. Men often owned one suit of clothes, cut and sewn with rough fabrics, and instead of sending those clothes to a dry cleaner, they brushed them off and kept wearing them. They surely looked rumpled, and they didn’t bathe or shave as often as men do now. Their teeth were often bad, and as people grew older, they usually had spaces where teeth had been pulled. But more than anything, their sermons probably would have sounded strange to us. Not only did they speak for hours, but they often speculated, starting with an idea and developing it right on the spot. Joseph Smith was not as flamboyant as some, but he was full of surprises. Many of his speeches offered a new “take” on the doctrine, and he liked homey analogies, humor, and sometimes a challenge to enemies of the Church.

Because I had the notes from many meetings held in Nauvoo, it was tempting to put them in the book, complete with some of the procedures and the interesting and sometimes quirky content of the talks. I’m sure it’s a good thing that my trusted editors helped me extract some of that, but if you’re as strange as I am, and find such stuff interesting, I’ll offer you some sources in this Author’s Note.

The point I’m making is that we can probably never fully know Nauvoo and its people. What I have tried to show, however, is that human beings, inside, don’t change very much from one era to another. The loss of a baby hurt just as much then as it does now, even though so many more were lost in the nineteenth century.

The last thing I want to do is to “tell you what I’ve told you,” but I do want to say that to a large degree, we have “made up” the early Saints. We’ve inherited stories of faith and passed them along, but we’ve tended to discard the less comfortable accounts. We’ve used our filter to make the people quite different from what they probably were. That’s the nature of history, especially the oral history that has come down to us. I keep saying this in various ways, but we do need to get over the idea that the pioneers were made of better stuff than we are. Certainly many of them were strong and stalwart, just as some in our time are, but their pains were the same, and so were their fears, their flaws, and their self-doubts.

What I hope is that you’ve come away from this book wanting to learn much more about Nauvoo. There are more resources than I can offer you here, but let me recommend some of the best books that I’ve used in my research.

I said in my Author’s Note to volume 1 of this series that the best general history of Nauvoo is Glen M. Leonard’s Nauvoo: A Place of Peace, A People of Promise (Deseret Book, 2002). It’s organized by topics and contains a great treasure of information on the Mormon years in Nauvoo.

In Old Nauvoo: Everyday Life in the City of Joseph, by George W. Givens, provides lots of insights into the way people lived. And 500 Little-Known Facts about Nauvoo, also by George W. Givens (Bonneville Books, 2010) is replete with interesting, sometimes surprising Nauvoo trivia. Samuel W. Taylor’s Nightfall at Nauvoo (Avon, 1974) has remained controversial for its novelistic style and its lack of documentation, but it’s provocative and fun to read.

Joseph Smith’s History of the Church (Deseret Book, 1978), usually referred to as the “Documentary History,” along with B. H. Roberts’s A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (BYU Press, 1965), is always a good starting place for LDS history. What has added greatly to these two sources is the Joseph Smith Papers Project. All Joseph Smith’s known papers are being published (Church Historian’s Press and Deseret Book) and made available online (josephsmithpapers.org). So far two volumes of his journals, two volumes of his revelations and translations, and two volumes of his histories have been printed, and in 2013 two volumes of documents will be in print.

Biographies have been written of most of the early Church leaders who lived in Mormon Nauvoo. There are far too many to list here, but one resource to mine first is your own family heritage if you had family that lived there. Two books that will help you understand important figures in Nauvoo’s history and tie these individuals to the events of the time are Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling by Richard Lyman Bushman (Knopf, 2005), and Brigham Young: American Moses by Leonard J. Arrington (University of Illinois Press, 1986). Women of Faith in the Latter Days, Volume 1, 1775–1820, and Volume 2, 1821–1845, edited by Richard E. Turley and Brittany A. Chapman (Deseret Book, 2011–12), along with In Their Own Words: Women and the Story of Nauvoo by Carol Cornwall Madsen (Deseret Book, 1994) help fill a void by providing histories of many women who lived in Nauvoo.

If you should travel to Nauvoo and wish to locate historical sites and buildings, two good resources are Sacred Places, Ohio and Illinois by LaMar C. Berrett (Deseret Book, 2002), and Old Mormon Nauvoo and Southeastern Iowa by Richard Neitzel Holzapfel and T. Jeffery Cottle (Fieldbrook Productions, 1990). A remarkable new source contains an exhaustive set of maps, photos, and information on Mormon history and includes an excellent section on Nauvoo: Mapping Mormonism: An Atlas of Latter-day Saint History, edited by Brandon S. Plewe, S. Kent Brown, Donald Q. Cannon, and Richard H. Jackson (Brigham Young University Press, 2012). A beautiful photographic portrayal of Nauvoo is Nauvoo by John Telford, Susan Easton Black, and Kim C. Averett (Deseret Book, 1997).

Some books on specialty topics, such as The Nauvoo Legion: A History of the Mormon Militia, 1841–1846, by Richard E. Bennett, Susan Easton Black, and Donald Q. Cannon (University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), and Nauvoo Temple: A Story of Faith by Don F. Colvin (Covenant, 2002) add detailed information on subjects of particular interest.

Not all my information came from books. I “Google” a great deal these days. When I want to know about farming with oxen, coins and currency in the nineteenth-century, clothing, food—and dozens of other things—I can often find websites that are of great help. Many of the issues of the Times and Seasons, the Wasp, and the Nauvoo Neighbor can now be found online, and they offer very interesting “real time” historical records.

I often emailed or called my friend Lachlan Mackay, who manages the Community of Christ historical sites. He lives in Nauvoo and knows it well. He could almost always answer my questions or guide me to the right sources. He also recommended The Memoirs of President Joseph Smith III (1832–1914), edited by Richard P. Howard (Herald Publishing House, 1979), which contained wonderful memories from Joseph III’s childhood in Nauvoo.

Kathy and I served our mission in Nauvoo under the leadership of President Robert Ludwig. Julie Roper, daughter of Bob and Martha Ludwig, gave birth during that time to a baby with a serious heart defect. All the missionaries in Nauvoo prayed and waited for news of little Adam, out in Denver. As it turns out, Adam is doing very well, and he served as inspiration for my story about little William. The heart defects I describe were not exactly the same as Adam’s, but some long telephone calls to Julie helped me understand the experience of having a child in a neonatal intensive care unit. Abby’s reactions were not modeled on Julie’s. My story is certainly not Julie’s. But I learned much that helped me to write about the experience parents go through when heart surgery is required immediately after a baby is born. So I appreciate her help.

What taught us most about Nauvoo was living there for two years as we served a public affairs mission. We shared the experience with hundreds of senior missionary couples, sister missionaries, and performing missionaries, but we also became friends with hundreds of local people, not only in Nauvoo but in many communities in Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri. We know every street, every outlying settlement, every nuance of weather, and every historic site, but above all, we know the good people of all faiths who continue to love and look after this sacred land. We never became tired of looking up the hill toward the temple, now restored, or just knowing that we were walking the streets that so many of our honored early Saints also walked. If you want to know Nauvoo, be sure to go there sometime in your life.

Something remarkable happened when we arrived in Nauvoo. We moved into a house on Warsaw Street (which had been known as Rich Street in the 1840s). We soon visited the Lands and Records Office in the historic area to learn where our own forebears had lived. As it turned out, Robert Harris Jr. and his wife, Hannah Maria, my third great-grandparents, owned a piece of land that is now part of Nauvoo State Park and is directly across the street from the house we lived in. I often walked over there and stood on my grandparents’ land, and I tried to imagine them and their children living there. Is any of this sounding familiar? Well, the fact is, they probably didn’t live there. They owned two other pieces of land, and all indications are that they decided to live east of Nauvoo, where most of the English Saints chose to settle. But you can see where ideas come from. And you can see why Kathy and I feel so connected to this sacred place. Living in Nauvoo changed us forever. We love the city and the people—all the people, of every faith—and I hope a sense of that love came through to you in this book.

Once again I have Emily Watts and Cory Maxwell to thank for their editorial guidance. I know this book is better than it would have been without their insights and patience. As to my wife, Kathy, what do I say? She read the book one last time, just before I submitted the final version, and she said she liked it—really liked it. That was the most important endorsement I could have received. Time and again, she helped me cut the things I didn’t need and enhance the emotions and intensify the actions that go into creating a novel. I’m glad she’s a tough critic, but even more, I appreciate her trust that I would eventually get it right. I hope I did.