by Jon Krakauer
Dan characterizes his dad as “strong-willed,” a “very individual individual,” and “strict about a lot of things.” In fact, Watson Lafferty was a formidable disciplinarian who did not hesitate to beat the living tar out of his children or his wife, Claudine, to enforce his rules. Commonly, the children were present to witness the punishment when Watson hit Claudine—a reserved, submissive wife whom Dan describes as “a good woman and an excellent mother.” The children were also present when Watson clubbed the family dog to death with a baseball bat.
Among Watson Lafferty's more strongly held beliefs was a deep distrust of conventional medicine. When Dan's oldest sister, Colleen, came down with acute appendicitis as a young girl, their father was adamant that she be treated at home with prayer and homeopathic remedies. Only after her appendix burst and death was imminent did he grudgingly take Colleen to the hospital. Watson ultimately died himself in 1983 after refusing medical treatment for advanced diabetes.
Despite the fact that Watson was a violent bully, Dan loved his father intensely and admired him. To this day Dan considers him a superb role model. “I was blessed to be raised in a very special and happy family,” Dan insists. “We never wanted for anything. My parents truly loved and cared for each other.” Dan recalls that his dad often took his mom out dancing, and “it wasn't unusual to hear my father ask my mother if he had told her lately that he loved her.” Once when Dan was attending the Provo temple with his family—with everyone dressed in white temple garments, and the women and men sitting on opposite sides of the hall—he remembers his father leaning over to ask him, sotto voce, “if I had ever seen anyone as beautiful as my mother” as she sat with the other women across the room. In the celestial glow of the temple's sacred chambers, Dan remembers vividly, his mother looked “angelic and radiant.”
According to Dan, his parents placed “their family at the very center of their life, along with the LDS Church.” The Laffertys belonged to a congregation in the nearby community of Spring Lake, says Dan, and worshiped at “the perfect picture-postcard church, by a lake, with just a few houses around. It was in that lake where I learned to swim and fish, and in the winter we had ice-skating parties with family and friends.” Young Dan was a model Latter-day Saint, virtuous and compliant, “zooming down the highway to heaven,” as he puts it. “I was a hundred-and-ten-percenter. I sang in the choir. I always paid my tithing; in fact, I always paid a little extra, just to make sure I made it into the highest kingdom of glory.”
Although Dan's father adhered rigidly to Mormon doctrine, he could not be called a fundamentalist. “I don't think the word polygamy was ever mentioned while I was growing up,” says Dan. “It never even crossed my mind. The first time I ever had a conversation with anyone about polygamy, it was about a group of missionaries in France who were excommunicated after they studied Section 132 together and decided polygamy was a principle that should be practiced. I can still remember thinking to myself, ‘How could anyone sacrifice their membership in the church over that old, discontinued principle?' ”
After high school Dan went on a two-year mission to Scotland, where he met Matilda Loomis, a divorced mother of two young girls, who made a powerful impression on him. Six years after returning from his mission, Dan bumped into Matilda by chance at a missionary reunion. “I was getting kind of old by then,” Dan says, “and my father and older brother, Ron, had been getting on me to get married. I had met a lot of lovely girls previously, but whenever I prayed about whether I should marry them, I realized none of them was the right one. So then I ran into Matilda at this reunion, and I thought, Well, I should probably pray about marrying her, too, before she goes back to Scotland, just in case that's what God has in mind for me. And this time I was quite surprised to get a positive answer to my prayers. So I told Matilda that we should get married.
“I thought it was going to be really awkward trying to explain that God intended her to be my wife, and I was worried how she would react. So I was kind of thrown off when she answered, ‘Yeah, I know.' I said, What do you mean, ‘I know'? She explained that God had told her to come to America just for that reason, to get married. She said that she was expecting me to ask her.” Within three months Dan and Matilda were sealed as husband and wife in the Provo temple and moved to California, with Matilda's kids in tow, so that Dan could enroll in the Los Angeles College of Chiropractic.
One Sunday near the end of their five years in California, Dan and Matilda happened to hear a member of their local LDS ward give a talk about plural marriage. “During the talk this guy said, ‘Okay, let's see a show of hands from everybody who comes from a polygamous background,' ” Dan recalls. “And there were only like four people who didn't raise their hands in the whole congregation. That really got my attention. I decided to learn everything I could about polygamy.”
When Dan completed his chiropractic training he moved his family back to Utah County, and there he embarked on an energetic investigation of the polygamous history of the Latter-day Saints. Nosing around in the special collections of the Brigham Young University library one afternoon, he came across a fifty-one-page typescript of a nineteenth-century tract in praise of plural marriage: An Extract, From a Manuscript Entitled “The Peace Maker,” or the Doctrines of the Millennium: Being a Treatise on Religion and Jurisprudence. Or a New System of Religion and Politicks. It had been written by a mysterious figure named Udney Hay Jacob. The booklet's title page indicated that it had been published in 1842 in Nauvoo, Illinois, and that the printer was none other than Joseph Smith himself.
The Peace Maker offered an elaborate biblical rationale for polygamy, which it proposed as a cure for the myriad ills that plagued monogamous relationships and, by extension, all of humankind. Part of that cure was making sure that women remained properly subservient, as God intended. According to the tract,
The government of the wife is therefore placed in the husband by the law of God; for he is the head. I suffer not a woman saith the Lord to teach, or to usurp authority over a man, but to be in subjection. . . .
A right understanding of this matter and a correct law properly executed would restore this nation to peace and order; and man to his true dignity, authority and government of the earthly creation. It would soon rectify the domestic circle and establish a proper head over the families of the earth, together with the knowledge and restitution of the whole penal law of God, and be the means of driving Satan, yea of driving Satan from the human mind. . . .
Gentlemen, the ladies laugh at your pretended authority. They, many of them, hiss at the idea of your being the lords of the creation. . . . Nothing is further from the minds of our wives in general, than the idea of submitting to their husbands in all things, and of reverencing their husbands. They will boldly ridicule the idea of calling them sincerely in their hearts lords and masters. But God has positively required this of them. . . .
Here, the wife is pronounced the husband's property, as much so as his manservant, his maidservant, his ox, or his horse. . . .
It is evident that by [abandoning the sacred principle of plural marriage], an endless catalogue of crime has been created that otherwise could never have existed; and that does exist at this moment in these States. Husbands forsake their wives, and often brutally abuse them. Fathers forsake their children; young maidens are seduced and abandoned by the deceiver; wives are poisoned and put to death by their husbands; husbands are murdered by their wives; new born babes are cruelly murdered to hide the false shame created by the false, and wicked, and tyrannical law against polygamy. . . .
While on the other hand polygamy regulated by the law of God as illustrated in this book could not possibly produce one crime; neither could it injure any human being. The stupidity of modern Christian nations upon this subject is horribly astonishing. . . .
The question is not now to be debated whether these things are so: neither is it a question of much importance who wrote this book! But the question, the momentous question is: wil
l you now restore the law of God on this important subject, and keep it? Remember that the law of God is given by inspiration of the Holy Ghost. Speak not a word against it at your peril.
Because Joseph Smith was listed on the title page as the printer of The Peace Maker, because the treatise precisely reflected many of his teachings—and because it concluded with the cryptic declaration that it was not “a question of much importance who wrote this book!”—scholars and others have long speculated that Joseph was the author. Determining who wrote The Peace Maker was important to Dan Lafferty. “I really wanted to know if this was Joseph Smith's writing,” he says. “So I studied, and prayed, and after a period of time the Lord gave me enough knowledge to become quite satisfied that Joseph Smith wrote it. . . . I don't know for sure that it's Joseph Smith, but I'll be surprised if it wasn't.”
The fact that The Peace Maker was apparently the work of the prophet made Dan especially receptive to the ideas expounded in its pages. With all the zeal one would expect from a “hundred-and-ten-percenter,” he wasted no time in applying the book's fundamentalist strictures to his household, which had by then grown to include Matilda, her two daughters from a previous marriage, and four children she and Dan had conceived together.
Under the new rules, Matilda was no longer allowed to drive, handle money, or talk to anyone outside the family when Dan wasn't present, and she had to wear a dress at all times. The children were pulled out of school and forbidden to play with their friends. Dan decreed that the family was to receive no outside medical care; he began treating them himself by means of prayer, fasting, and herbal remedies. In July 1983, when their fifth child was born, a son, Dan delivered the baby at home and circumcised the boy himself.
They began raising much of their own food, scavenging the rest from Dumpsters behind grocery stores, where stale, unsold bread and overripe produce were regularly discarded. Dan turned off the gas and electricity. No publications of any kind were allowed in the home, except LDS books and magazines. Dan even got rid of all their watches and clocks, believing they should “keep time by the spirit.” When Matilda disobeyed Dan, he spanked her.
Spank was the verb Dan used. According to Matilda, the blows he delivered felt more like “thumps.” And when he thumped her, he often did it in front of Dan's mother, his brothers, and all their children. Afterward, he warned Matilda that if she continued to disobey, she would be forced out of the marriage without her children—who, according to the principles elucidated in The Peace Maker, were the father's property.
Dan also announced that he intended to engage in spiritual wifery at the earliest opportunity. And the first woman he proposed taking as a plural wife was Matilda's oldest daughter—his own stepdaughter.
“I had come to a place there was no choices,” Matilda later testified in court. “I could either go and leave my kids, or stay and accept it.” She elected to stay.
Matilda said that the first years of their marriage had been “extremely happy and hopeful. . . . And then it just disintegrated. . . . I would dream of him dying so I could get out.” By then, she said, her life had become “a hellish situation.”
PART II
The earnest cadres of bureaucrats who today direct the Mormon Church's growth across the world . . . are the spiritual descendants of those deeply disciplined Mormon pioneers. The Mormon Church, then and now, is founded upon complete obedience to hierarchical Church authority, and to the surety of revelation from above. . . .
The doctrine of obedience sounds inimical to American individualism and alien to Protestantism generally, and it is. Yet the American frontier where Mormonism grew up has always been riven by contradictory attitudes toward individualism. It could be deadly in a place where cooperation, and indeed absolute obedience of the kind Mormons then and now understand, might offer the only means to survive. Survival was often collective or not at all, a lesson not lost on Mormons of later generations. Though the contemporary image of Mormons may be one of conservative rectitude, hopelessly middle-class and lower-middle-brow, tinged with both the Church's nineteenth-century polygamous past and its refusal until the 1970s to give up official racism, the institutional preoccupation of the Church from its moment of inception has been with sheer survival.
KENNETH ANDERSON
“THE MAGIC OF THE GREAT SALT LAKE,”
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT, MARCH 24, 1995
It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reasons that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar that they call for constant explanation.
WALLACE STEGNER,
MORMON COUNTRY
NINE
HAUN'S MILL
Bearing persecution became the distinctive badge of membership in the church; it was the test of faith and of one's chosenness. By the end of their stay in Missouri, Mormons had accumulated a long list of trials to commemorate. . . .
Opposition gives value to struggle and inculcates self-confidence. . . . It is difficult to imagine a successful Mormon Church without suffering, without the encouragement of it, without the memory of it. Persecution arguably was the only possible force that would have allowed the infant church to prosper.
R. LAURENCE MOORE,
RELIGIOUS OUTSIDERS AND THE MAKING OF AMERICANS
When Mormonism made its debut, Joseph Smith's embryonic religion was not welcomed with open arms by everyone. The very first review of The Book of Mormon, published in the Rochester Daily Advertiser on April 2, 1830—four days before Joseph's church was even legally incorporated—typified reaction to the new faith among many in western New York. The review began, “The Book of Mormon has been placed in our hands. A viler imposition was never practiced. It is an evidence of fraud, blasphemy, and credulity, shocking both to Christians and moralists.”
Joseph's widespread reputation as a charlatan, along with a rash of malicious rumors about his “gold Bible,” had fueled animosity throughout the Palmyra region. In December 1830 Joseph received a revelation in which God, noting the hostility in the New York air, commanded him to move his flock to Ohio. So the Latter-day Saints packed up and resettled just east of present-day Cleveland, in a town called Kirtland.
In Ohio the Mormons found their neighbors to be relatively hospitable, but in the summer of 1831 the Lord revealed to Joseph that Kirtland was merely a way station, and that the Missouri frontier was in fact “the land which I have appointed and consecrated for the gathering of the Saints.” God explained that northwestern Missouri was among the earth's holiest places: the Garden of Eden had not been located in the Middle East, as many believed, but rather in Jackson County, Missouri, near what, by the nineteenth century, had become the city of Independence. And it was here, too, that Christ would make His triumphant return before the century was out. Heeding the Lord's words, Joseph instructed his followers to assemble in Jackson County and start building a New Jerusalem there. Saints began pouring into northwestern Missouri, and continued arriving in ever-greater numbers through 1838.
The people who already lived in Jackson County were not happy about the monumental influx. The Mormon immigrants for the most part hailed from the northeastern states and favored the abolition of slavery; Missourians tended to have southern roots—many of them actually owned slaves—and were deeply suspicious of the Mormons' abolitionist leanings. But what alienated the residents of Jackson County most was the impenetrable clannishness of the Mormons and their arrogant sense of entitlement: the Saints insisted they were God's chosen people and had been granted a divine right to claim northwestern Missouri as their Zion.
Everything the Mormons did seemed to heighten the Missourians' apprehension. The Saints used church funds to purchase large tracts of land in Jackson County. They engaged in commerce exclusively with other Saints whenever possible, undermining local businesses. They voted in a uniform bloc, in strict accordance with Joseph's directives, and as their numbers increased they threatened to dominate regional politics. Reflecting a common fear among Mis
sourians, a letter published in 1833 in a Fayette newspaper warned, “The day is not far distant . . . when the sheriff, the justices, and the county judges will be Mormons.”
Mormons were eager to embrace any Gentiles who cared to convert, but the Saints had little interest in associating with Missourians who remained too ignorant or obstinate to grasp God's plan for mankind. Joseph preached something he called “free agency”; everyone was free to choose whether to be on the side of the Lord or the side of wickedness; it was an entirely personal decision—but woe to those who decided wrong. If you knowingly chose to shun the God of Joseph and the Saints, you were utterly undeserving of sympathy or mercy.
This polarizing mind-set—“If you're not with us, you're against us”—was underscored by a revelation Joseph received in 1831, in which God commanded the Saints to “assemble yourselves together to rejoice upon the land of Missouri, which is the land of your inheritance, which is now the land of your enemies.” When Missourians became aware of this commandment, they regarded it as an open declaration of war—an impression that seemed to be confirmed by an article published in a Mormon newspaper promising that the Saints would “literally tread upon the ashes of the wicked after they are destroyed from off the face of the earth.”
In the 1830s northwestern Missouri was still untamed country inhabited by rough, strong-willed characters. Jackson County residents initially responded to the perceived Mormon threat by holding town meetings, passing anti-Mormon resolutions, and demanding that civil authorities take some kind of action. When such gestures failed to stem the tide of Saints, however, the citizens of Independence took matters into their own hands.