The Mormon Trail, Part 1
These statues stand on the great front lawn of the Mormon Temple in Nauvoo, Illinois, and they fulfill a dream that had been floating around the brain of at least one of these guys since he was 14 years old. This is Joseph and Hyrum Smith, two brothers who, the story goes, were riding hard on the path to restoring the true church of Jesus Christ on Earth when they were brutally martyred in their prime 20 miles from here. The restoration was mostly Joseph's doing. So was the jump into martyrdom. Hyrum went along with it and followed the path his younger brother laid down to the bitter end, and I have to wonder how he felt about that in those last moments outside that jail over in Carthage.
So, here's the story of Joseph Smith, the man who turned Nauvoo, Illinois, into the origin point for a religion followed by 17 million people around the world, almost 7 million of whom live in these United States. It's a complicated tale, and there's a wide range of takes on it, and your feelings about it probably have a lot to do with how close you lived to Utah when you were growing up.
Joseph Smith was born to a farm family in Vermont two days before Christmas in 1805. He was the fourth child -- the third son -- born into a family that would eventually include eleven children, and that turned out to be too many children for a little Vermont farm to support. Around the time Joseph turned 11, the family moved to western New York near what would soon be the town of Manchester. You could say Joseph's entire life turned on that move.
This was near the peak of a period known as the Second Great Awakening, when religious fervor ran rampant through the American frontier, and people were holding massive tent revival meetings all over the place. The fervor was especially strong in western New York, and it hit Smith's family hard. Joseph Smith grew up in a world of people speaking in tongues and seeing signs and having visions. The family got deeply involved in "religious folk magic," stuff like faith healing and divination. Several members of the family, including Joseph, made money looking into "seer stones," which supposedly revealed the location of hidden treasures. People would give the Smiths money to tell what they'd seen in the stones, then go off looking for whatever treasure the Smiths didn't really see. (Unless you're Mormon ... in which case, you likely believe something along the lines that God kept the treasures hidden from people unworthy of finding them.) There's no historical evidence that any of the Smiths ever actually led anyone to treasures. But rumors spread and grew, and people were eager to believe, and it didn't take long for the Smiths to develop a reputation.
But Smith's vision involved something bigger than just a random treasure here and there, and his divine sight started seeing his true mission when he was 14. He didn't tell anybody about it at the time, of course, but years later he said that he was out in the woods praying one day when he ran into both God the Father and Jesus Christ. This all comes from Smith, of course, because visions don't usually have witnesses, but according to Smith, God the Father and God the Son dropped by the woods to tell him all his sins were forgiven, that the church on Earth had strayed from the path of righteousness, and that it would be Smith's job to rebuild a new church that restored Christianity to what it was meant to be.
That all by itself is pretty heady stuff to lay on a 14-year-old, but it was just the start. The big vision came three years later in 1823, when the Angel Moroni came down from Heaven to guide Smith to a hill near near his home. There, Smith uncovered a set of golden plates inscribed in the words of some foreign language -- "reformed Egyptian," he said later -- along with some other gold artifacts and a translation key. The next decade or so would have gone a lot easier on Smith if he could have just taken the plates home with him, but Moroni said the plates had to stay on the hill (which would make a skeptic wonder about the point), so Smith had to spend the next four years going to that hill and translating what the plates had to say in short little bursts whenever he found the time.
Meanwhile, he and the rest of the Smith family kept looking into their seer stones, telling people where treasure was and coming up with a constant stream of excuses why nobody ever found anything. Smith wound up in court for it in 1826 when a rich farmer looking for a lost Spanish gold mine -- and, sure, there could have been a Spanish gold mine lost in upstate New York -- decided he'd been swindled and swore out a warrant. The documented outcome of the case didn't survive in the records, but it made the news at the time and caused a stir all across western New York. It started preying on people's minds, and the mood toward the Smiths began to shift.
It didn't help in 1827 when Smith ran off and eloped with Emma Hale, the daughter of a rich man who thought Smith was a rube and a charlatan. The story goes that Smith took Emma to the hill and showed her the plates, and she helped transcribe the translations Smith was dictating. Word got around, and neighbors (many of whom happened to be wealthy) started paying attention to what Smith had to say, taking particular interest in the golden nature of the plates. Some of these neighbors wanted to see the plates for themselves, but unfortunately, Moroni was kind of a priggish angel, and other than that one time with Emma, he'd only give access to Smith.
It wasn't long before some of Smith's associates came to the obvious conclusion: Smith had stolen the plates, and was keeping them for himself! (Which ... yeah, that's not the obvious conclusion at all.) This prompted Smith to leave town, and he and Emma moved to Harmony Township, just over the line into Pennsylvania. Smith spent the next three years gathering new followers while dictating his translations of the plates to various scribes. He finally gathered it all together, and on March 26, 1830, he published it as the Book of Mormon, a new set of holy texts about a group of ancient people who left the Holy Lands near Jerusalem around the year 600 BC and wound up in North America, where their descendants were eventually visited by Jesus Christ. Two weeks after Smith published the book, he founded the Church of Christ, the first denomination of the Mormon faith.
But this turned out to be the final straw for the people of New York and Pennsylvania, where Smith was increasingly seen as a swindler at best and a dangerous lunatic at worst. The families of people who joined Smith's new church started getting worried, especially those who remembered that 1826 court case where visions were supposed to have led him to treasure. The authorities soon took notice, and Smith was arrested in April of 1830 for being a "disorderly person."
He managed to stay out of prison, but he took this as a sign that maybe he and his faith would be better off someplace besides New York. Maybe it was time to hit the road. Maybe go looking for some kind of Mormon Trail.
The Mormon Trail, Part 1
These statues stand on the great front lawn of the Mormon Temple in Nauvoo, Illinois, and they fulfill a dream that had been floating around the brain of at least one of these guys since he was 14 years old. This is Joseph and Hyrum Smith, two brothers who, the story goes, were riding hard on the path to restoring the true church of Jesus Christ on Earth when they were brutally martyred in their prime 20 miles from here. The restoration was mostly Joseph's doing. So was the jump into martyrdom. Hyrum went along with it and followed the path his younger brother laid down to the bitter end, and I have to wonder how he felt about that in those last moments outside that jail over in Carthage.
So, here's the story of Joseph Smith, the man who turned Nauvoo, Illinois, into the origin point for a religion followed by 17 million people around the world, almost 7 million of whom live in these United States. It's a complicated tale, and there's a wide range of takes on it, and your feelings about it probably have a lot to do with how close you lived to Utah when you were growing up.
Joseph Smith was born to a farm family in Vermont two days before Christmas in 1805. He was the fourth child -- the third son -- born into a family that would eventually include eleven children, and that turned out to be too many children for a little Vermont farm to support. Around the time Joseph turned 11, the family moved to western New York near what would soon be the town of Manchester. You could say Joseph's entire life turned on that move.
This was near the peak of a period known as the Second Great Awakening, when religious fervor ran rampant through the American frontier, and people were holding massive tent revival meetings all over the place. The fervor was especially strong in western New York, and it hit Smith's family hard. Joseph Smith grew up in a world of people speaking in tongues and seeing signs and having visions. The family got deeply involved in "religious folk magic," stuff like faith healing and divination. Several members of the family, including Joseph, made money looking into "seer stones," which supposedly revealed the location of hidden treasures. People would give the Smiths money to tell what they'd seen in the stones, then go off looking for whatever treasure the Smiths didn't really see. (Unless you're Mormon ... in which case, you likely believe something along the lines that God kept the treasures hidden from people unworthy of finding them.) There's no historical evidence that any of the Smiths ever actually led anyone to treasures. But rumors spread and grew, and people were eager to believe, and it didn't take long for the Smiths to develop a reputation.
But Smith's vision involved something bigger than just a random treasure here and there, and his divine sight started seeing his true mission when he was 14. He didn't tell anybody about it at the time, of course, but years later he said that he was out in the woods praying one day when he ran into both God the Father and Jesus Christ. This all comes from Smith, of course, because visions don't usually have witnesses, but according to Smith, God the Father and God the Son dropped by the woods to tell him all his sins were forgiven, that the church on Earth had strayed from the path of righteousness, and that it would be Smith's job to rebuild a new church that restored Christianity to what it was meant to be.
That all by itself is pretty heady stuff to lay on a 14-year-old, but it was just the start. The big vision came three years later in 1823, when the Angel Moroni came down from Heaven to guide Smith to a hill near near his home. There, Smith uncovered a set of golden plates inscribed in the words of some foreign language -- "reformed Egyptian," he said later -- along with some other gold artifacts and a translation key. The next decade or so would have gone a lot easier on Smith if he could have just taken the plates home with him, but Moroni said the plates had to stay on the hill (which would make a skeptic wonder about the point), so Smith had to spend the next four years going to that hill and translating what the plates had to say in short little bursts whenever he found the time.
Meanwhile, he and the rest of the Smith family kept looking into their seer stones, telling people where treasure was and coming up with a constant stream of excuses why nobody ever found anything. Smith wound up in court for it in 1826 when a rich farmer looking for a lost Spanish gold mine -- and, sure, there could have been a Spanish gold mine lost in upstate New York -- decided he'd been swindled and swore out a warrant. The documented outcome of the case didn't survive in the records, but it made the news at the time and caused a stir all across western New York. It started preying on people's minds, and the mood toward the Smiths began to shift.
It didn't help in 1827 when Smith ran off and eloped with Emma Hale, the daughter of a rich man who thought Smith was a rube and a charlatan. The story goes that Smith took Emma to the hill and showed her the plates, and she helped transcribe the translations Smith was dictating. Word got around, and neighbors (many of whom happened to be wealthy) started paying attention to what Smith had to say, taking particular interest in the golden nature of the plates. Some of these neighbors wanted to see the plates for themselves, but unfortunately, Moroni was kind of a priggish angel, and other than that one time with Emma, he'd only give access to Smith.
It wasn't long before some of Smith's associates came to the obvious conclusion: Smith had stolen the plates, and was keeping them for himself! (Which ... yeah, that's not the obvious conclusion at all.) This prompted Smith to leave town, and he and Emma moved to Harmony Township, just over the line into Pennsylvania. Smith spent the next three years gathering new followers while dictating his translations of the plates to various scribes. He finally gathered it all together, and on March 26, 1830, he published it as the Book of Mormon, a new set of holy texts about a group of ancient people who left the Holy Lands near Jerusalem around the year 600 BC and wound up in North America, where their descendants were eventually visited by Jesus Christ. Two weeks after Smith published the book, he founded the Church of Christ, the first denomination of the Mormon faith.
But this turned out to be the final straw for the people of New York and Pennsylvania, where Smith was increasingly seen as a swindler at best and a dangerous lunatic at worst. The families of people who joined Smith's new church started getting worried, especially those who remembered that 1826 court case where visions were supposed to have led him to treasure. The authorities soon took notice, and Smith was arrested in April of 1830 for being a "disorderly person."
He managed to stay out of prison, but he took this as a sign that maybe he and his faith would be better off someplace besides New York. Maybe it was time to hit the road. Maybe go looking for some kind of Mormon Trail.