The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.

—W. B. Yeats

To understand the twenty-first century conflict between Mormons, dissidents, and non-Mormons as reflected in the newspaper struggle, it is necessary to explore the intriguing origins and growth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Peggy Fletcher Stack, the Salt Lake Tribune's religion writer, and herself an active Mormon, wrote, “The tales of Joseph Smith's founding of the LDS Church have been repeated across the globe by generations of Latter-day Saints, as well as Mormon missionaries, eager to convert others to what they believe.

“Trouble is, the real history is much more nuanced, complicated and even contradictory.”1

Founded in 1830, the young and fragile Mormon Church loathed and decried public criticism from earliest days, assuming a defensive posture that has never changed. “Like many new faiths, nineteenth century Mormonism had a dark side of violence and fanaticism,” wrote Will Bagley in his Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows.²

About the only noncontroversial facts of founder Joseph Smith's early life are that he was born on December 23, 1805, in Sharon, Vermont, to Lucy Mack Smith and her husband, Joseph. Due to crop failures in Vermont, his family in 1816 moved to Palmyra in western New York. They arrived during the “Second Great Awakening”; the region was a hotbed of religious enthusiasm.³

At this point Joseph's story becomes more opaque. Joseph and some members of his family participated in religious folk magic, a fairly common practice at the time. Now the mists of history begin swirling with claims and counterclaims. There seem to be many versions of the truth of the origins of the Book of Mormon.

Joseph claimed to have had a vision in 1820, when he was fourteen or fifteen, in which God told him that all contemporary churches had turned aside from the gospel. This “First Vision” is considered the basis for the foundation of Mormonism.4 Joseph described this vision differently on separate occasions.⁵

The next act in the drama came in 1823. While praying for redemption for his sins, he said he was visited by an angel named Moroni. Joseph said Moroni revealed the location of a book of golden plates.

Meanwhile, he was making money as a “treasure seeker” for local property owners; Joseph claimed he could look into seer stones for directions to treasure.⁶ He formed a company or partnership based on these alleged abilities. In 1826, Joseph was brought before a Chenango County court for “glass-looking,” or pretending to find lost treasure.⁷

In 1827, Joseph eloped with Emma Hale (her father disapproved of his treasure-hunting ways) and returned to Manchester, Vermont. Joseph claimed to have changed, and instead of material pursuits, he was using seer stones in acts of spirituality.⁸

Joseph said that he made his last annual visit to the hill in Manchester on September 22, 1827, taking Emma with him. He claimed to have found the golden plates and hidden them. Several days later he retrieved them. He said the angel commanded him not to show the plates to anyone else but to publish their translation, a religious record of indigenous Americans.⁹

Richard Lyman Bushman, in his laudable book, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, wrote of the golden plates, “For most modern readers, the plates are beyond belief, a phantasm, yet the Mormon sources accept them as fact.”¹⁰ For those strong in the faith, the story resonates with spiritual significance.

Joseph, who at this point did not know how to write, transcribed the characters that he said were engraved on the plates. Joseph dictated a translation to his wife using what he called the Urim and Thummim, a pair of “three-cornered diamonds” bound like spectacles in silver bows.¹¹

In February 1828, Martin Harris began assisting Joseph in transcribing. A blanket was raised on a rope dividing Joseph from Harris. Joseph would place the seer stones in the bottom of a tall hat, and then he would read out his translation of what he termed “Reformed Egyptian.” Joseph warned Harris that if he dared look at him or examine the plates that God would strike him down.12

Joseph, using the Urim and Thummim, continued to dictate to Harris until mid-June 1828, when Harris began having doubts about the project. Harris convinced Joseph to let him take the existing 116 pages of manuscript to Palmyra to show a few family members. Harris promptly lost the manuscript (or possibly his disbelieving wife destroyed it), and there was no other copy.¹³

Joseph said that as punishment for losing the manuscript the angel took away the plates and revoked his ability to translate. However, miraculously, Joseph announced that the angel returned the plates to him on September 22, 1828, and he resumed dictation in April 1829, with a man named Oliver Cowdery, who replaced Harris as his scribe. The pace of the work picked up, and the 275,000-word book, which Mark Twain called “chloroform in print,” was finished on April 7, 1829. The book is difficult reading. The phrase “and it came to pass” is used more than two thousand times.¹⁴

Still, it is the work of an inspired and creative mind.

There were eleven witnesses who initially claimed to have seen the golden plates.¹⁵ According to Joseph, the angel Moroni took back the plates once he finished his translating. A Palmyra lawyer asked Martin Harris, “Did you see the plates and the engravings upon them with your bodily eyes?” Harris replied, “I did not see them as I do that pencil case, yet I saw them with the eye of faith.”¹⁶ The completed Book of Mormon was published in Palmyra on March 26, 1830, paid for by Martin Harris, who had to mortgage his farm to meet the costs. On April 6, 1830, Joseph and his followers formally organized the Church of Christ. The Book of Mormon brought Smith a kind of fame as well as opposition from those who remembered his money digging and the 1826 Chenango County trial. He was again arrested and brought to trial as a disorderly person. He was acquitted, but both he and Cowdery had to flee to escape a mob.¹⁷

The Mormons were in conflict with traditional Christianity, and Mormonism claimed exclusivity as the only true church. For some, this exclusiveness was attractive, and they embraced it with fervor. The church grew.

Joseph moved to Kirtland, Ohio, in 1831. Here religious fervor was in the form of fits, trances, speaking in tongues, and rolling on the ground.18 It was fertile territory for his new religion. Converts poured in.

In 1832 an angry group of Ohio Mormons (led by the Johnson brothers), fearing his growing power, tarred and feathered Joseph and Sidney Rigdon, his devoted counselor and partner. Joseph was left for dead. It would take Rigdon weeks to recover.¹⁹

The worst was still to come. Wherever the Mormons went there seemed to be trouble, and with the blindness of sanctimony they blamed their problems on others, “outsiders,” on “them.”²⁰

Joseph adopted communalism, called the United Order, a collectivist program in which members of the church held all things in common.²¹ Undeterred by criticism, he built a temple in Kirtland, Ohio, created a bank, and may have had an affair with a serving girl, Fanny Alger. The bank went broke within a month, leaving many Mormons in poverty. He survived accusations of an affair.

After a warrant for banking fraud was issued for his arrest in January 1838, Joseph prudently fled Ohio for Missouri.²²