by Jon Krakauer
* After Sidney Rigdon's ambition to replace Joseph Smith was quashed by Brigham Young's ascendancy, Rigdon and a few hundred followers established a church of their own in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but it quickly dwindled to nothing. Apostle Lyman Wright broke away with numerous unhappy Mormons to form another short-lived church in Texas. And a charismatic charlatan and onetime Baptist named James Jesse Strang drew seven hundred disenchanted Saints away from Brigham's church—including Joseph's mother, his lone surviving brother, two of his sisters, and Martin Harris, the man who'd mortgaged his farm to pay for publication of The Book of Mormon. Strang attracted this following by pronouncing that an angel had visited him at the exact moment of the prophet's murder and anointed him Joseph's successor. Fifteen months later, Strang claimed to have discovered an ancient text titled the Book of the Law of the Lord, inscribed on a set of brass folios he called the Plates of Laban, which he found near Voree, Wisconsin, buried on a hillside; according to Strang, this document had originally been part of the set of gold plates unearthed by Joseph in 1827 that yielded The Book of Mormon. Impressed by these plates, the “Strangites” joined their prophet in establishing a colony on Beaver Island, off the northwest coast of Michigan's lower peninsula, where Strang had himself crowned “King James I of the Kingdom of God on Earth,” began taking plural wives, and ruled with absolute power. It was to be a brief reign, however: in 1856 a gang of disgruntled Beaver Island denizens ambushed King James and fatally shot him. Even before Strang's murder, moreover, several prominent Strangites who objected to the king's polygamous proclivities broke away to form the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Joseph's widow, Emma Smith, joined these “Reorganites,” and her son Joseph III became the group's president and prophet. Today this church—now called the Community of Christ and headquartered in Independence, Missouri, in a striking $60 million temple designed by Gyo Obata—has 250,000 members, making it by far the largest of the Mormon spin-off sects.
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* Brigham once famously bragged, “We have the greatest and smoothest liars in the world.”
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* The Saints proposed naming the new territory Deseret, a neologism from The Book of Mormon meaning “honeybee,” which struck Brigham Young as an apt symbol of the Mormons' industry and their belief that personal freedom should yield to the welfare of the collective whole. But a skeptical Congress nixed this suggestion and named the territory Utah instead, after the Ute Indians who populated the region. Among themselves, nevertheless, the Mormons pointedly continued to call their homeland the Kingdom of Deseret, and it became the name they inscribed on all their maps. Today, the beehive remains prominent on the official state seal of Utah, as well as on road signs designating state highways. Additionally, the second-biggest newspaper in Utah, which is owned by the LDS Church, is called the Deseret News.
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* Brigham Young took at least twenty women as wives, perhaps as many as fifty-seven. He sired an estimated fifty-seven children, and his direct descendents now number in the thousands. The most famous of them is Steve Young, Brigham's great-great-great-grandson, a star quarterback for both Brigham Young University and the San Francisco 49ers of the National Football League, and the Super Bowl MVP in 1995.
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* McLernand's remarks were almost certainly influenced by a pseudoscientific study—patently preposterous yet widely accepted by both the medical profession and the general public—first published by the U.S. Senate and later republished in numerous periodicals and professional journals, in which a surgeon named Roberts Bartholow claimed that the sexual depravities of Mormonism resulted in a whole host of readily visible physical deformities. The Mormon “countenance,” according to Dr. Bartholow, was “compounded of sensuality, cunning, suspicion, and a smirking self-conceit. The yellow, sunken, cadaverous visage; the greenish-colored eyes; the thick, protuberant lip; the low forehead; the light, yellowish hair; and the lank, angular person, constitute an appearance so characteristic of the new race, the production of polygamy, as to distinguish them at a glance.”
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* Although Joseph Smith had been opposed to slavery on moral grounds (in 1836 he'd even ordained an African-American man, Elijah Abel, as an elder in the Mormon priesthood), Brigham Young was an unapologetic racist (as were a great many other nineteenth-century Americans) whose interpretations of scripture institutionalized racism within the LDS Church. Under his leadership, Utah became a slave territory, and the Mormon Church supported the aims of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Brigham's lasting impact on LDS doctrine made blacks feel exceedingly unwelcome in the church until more than a century after his death. Through most of the twentieth century, African-Americans were strictly banned from the priesthood, and black-white marriages were considered an outrage against God. Then, in 1978, President Spencer W. Kimball had a revelation in which the Lord commanded that the LDS priesthood be open to males of all races, initiating a slow but profound shift in Mormon attitudes about race. In February 2002, the student body of Brigham Young University, though only 0.7 percent African-American, elected a black man, Rob Foster, as their president—the first black student president in the school's history. Given the strongly held views of BYU's namesake, Foster's victory was regarded as an especially potent symbol.
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* Although the wagon train took its name from forty-five-year-old Alexander Fancher, who headed one of the company's most prominent families, the “Fancher party” was actually a loose affiliation of at least four distinct groups, including one led by Captain John T. Baker—hence the other name by which the wagon train was commonly known: the Baker-Fancher party.
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* Although the valley seems originally to have been named the Mountain Meadow, most maps refer to it as “the Mountain Meadows,” in the plural, and the slaughter that took place there is almost universally known as “the Mountain Meadows massacre.”
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* Indians made a clear distinction between Mormons (whom they called “Mormonee”) and other Americans (referred to, in the phonetic rendering of the Paiutes, as “Mericats”).
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* The Mountain Meadows Massacre, published in 1950, is an extraordinary work of history, the seminal portrait of Mormondom under Brigham Young. Will Bagley's updated treatment of the same subject, Blood of the Prophets, published in 2002, must now be considered the definitive work, but as Bagley acknowledges, he owes an immeasurable debt to Juanita Brooks, whom he praises as “one of the West's best and bravest historians.” In a very discernible sense, every book about the Mormon experience in nineteenth-century Utah published after 1950 is a response to Brooks's book—just as every post-1946 treatment of the Mormons under Joseph Smith was written in the immense shadow cast by Fawn Brodie's masterpiece, No Man Knows My History.
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* Parleys Canyon, the valley Interstate 80 now follows between Salt Lake and Park City (the site of a ski resort and celebrated film festival), was named in honor of the martyred apostle, one of the most popular figures in Mormondom after Joseph Smith, and an estimable man by any measure.
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* St. George, the largest city in southern Utah, was named after George A. Smith.
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* The actual text of Brigham's letter remains in some doubt, because the original has disappeared (along with almost every other official document pertaining to the Mountain Meadows massacre). The excerpt quoted above is from a purported draft of the letter that didn't surface until 1884, when an LDS functionary came upon it in the pages of a “Church Letter Book.”
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* Those children not killed were taken to Mormon homes to be raised as Latter-day Saints; some were placed in the households of the very men who had murdered their parents and siblings. In 1859 an agent of the federal government managed to find all seventeen survivo
rs and return them to their Arkansas kin, but before handing the kids over, their Mormon keepers had the audacity to demand thousands of dollars in payment for feeding and schooling the youngsters while they were in the Saints' care.
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* Several Saints who took an active part in the 1857 slaughter were the forebears of modern Americans of some renown. Current Utah governor Mike Leavitt, for example, is a direct descendent of massacre participant Dudley Leavitt, as was Juanita Leavitt Brooks, the author of The Mountain Meadows Massacre. And among the descendants of John D. Lee are members of the Udall political dynasty: Stewart Udall was a three-term congressman from Arizona and served as U.S. secretary of the interior under President Kennedy; his younger brother, the late Morris Udall, succeeded Stewart to serve fifteen terms in the U.S. House of Representatives; and Morris's son Mark Udall currently represents Colorado's Second District in the U.S. House.
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* On December 25, 1832, Joseph received a revelation, later canonized in The Doctrine and Covenants as Section 87, in which God explained that civil war
will shortly come to pass, beginning at the rebellion of South Carolina, which will eventually terminate in the death of many souls. . . . For behold, the Southern States shall be divided against the Northern States. . . . And it shall come to pass, after many days, slaves shall rise up against their masters, who shall be marshaled and disciplined for war. . . . And thus, with the sword and by bloodshed the inhabitants of the earth shall mourn; and with famine, and plague, and earthquake, and the thunder of heaven, and the fierce and vivid lightning also, shall the inhabitants of the earth be made to feel the wrath, and indignation, and chastening hand of an Almighty God, until the consumption decreed hath made a full end of all nations.
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* In those years it was called the Grand River, rather than the Colorado.
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* The nine-man expedition also included a melancholic Civil War veteran named George Bradley and twenty-year-old Andy Hall; both these men maintained good relations with the two disputatious factions. The expedition had embarked from Green River with a tenth member, as well, Englishman Frank Goodman, but after Goodman's boat capsized and he nearly drowned in Disaster Falls, he told Powell on July 5 that he “had seen danger enough” and left the expedition—well before the group entered the Grand Canyon.
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† Evidence corroborating the authenticity of Dunn's inscription atop Mount Dellenbaugh was discovered in 1995: a young man from Cedar City named Wynn Isom was looking for arrowheads on the eastern slope of Mount Dellenbaugh, well off the trail, when he caught sight of “a little glint” on the ground, perhaps thirty feet away. It turned out to be a thin piece of badly tarnished brass, two inches long and just over an inch wide, with the name William Dunn engraved on its face in cursive script. From indentations at the plate's corners, it appears to have been riveted to a gun stock, perhaps, or some leather article that belonged to Dunn.
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* In his fascinating book Colorado River Controversies, the surveyor, engineer, and amateur historian Robert Brewster Stanton (1844–1922) wrote,
When I first became acquainted with Major Powell's Report giving his account of that first exploration, it was to me the most fascinating story I had ever read. Even after completing the railway survey and finding many of his descriptions of the conditions of the canyon and the river, to say the least, misleading, I found the narrative of the adventures of the party as beautiful and as fascinating as ever. . . . With all this in mind, however, I nevertheless experienced one of the greatest regrets of my life when I learned in later years . . . that a large part of the story credited to the exploration party of 1869 was taken from the experiences and notes of the expedition of 1871 and 1872.
When, in 1889, Stanton interviewed Jack Sumner, Sumner told Stanton “with a trace of bitterness in his voice . . . , ‘There's lots in that book besides the truth,' and turned away.” Return to text.
* Three years earlier, for example, two settlers were killed by Paiutes near Pipe Spring; just eight days after this attack, a group of Mormons rode from St. George onto the Arizona Strip and executed seven Paiutes in retaliation—even though it turned out that none of the seven had been party to the murder of the settlers.
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* These days, Lee's Ferry serves as the starting point for most float trips down the Grand Canyon. As a consequence, thousands of boaters now pass through John D. Lee's Lonely Dell each year, few of whom ever learn much about the man whose name is attached to the historic settlement.
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* Dan Lafferty is among the modern fundamentalists who still draw inspiration from the third Mormon prophet. “I was favorably impressed with the integrity of John Taylor,” Dan says, “and probably at times strengthened in my challenging moments by thinking about him.”
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* Samuel and Daniel Bateman were DeLoy Bateman's great-great-grandfather and great-grandfather, respectively.
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* Reprinted with the permission of The Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from Feet of Clay: Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus by Anthony Storr. Copyright © 1996 by Anthony Storr.
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* Rulon Allred's polygamist father, Byron C. Allred, was an eminent Mormon who had been Speaker of the Idaho House of Representatives before, in flight from the cohab hunters, relocating to Mexico, where Rulon was born in 1906. Alex Joseph and John Bryant—leaders of independent polygamist communities whom Dan and Ron Lafferty visited in the summer of 1984, shortly before they murdered Brenda and Erica Lafferty—were introduced to Mormon Fundamentalism by Rulon Allred. Both Joseph and Bryant, in fact, were devoted followers of Allred before breaking with him and going out on their own.
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* Chynoweth went to great lengths to conceal her involvement in Allred's murder. Although she was charged with the crime in 1978, she lied under oath at trial and thereby beat the rap. Twelve years later she wrote a breezy, tell-all memoir about the LeBarons titled The Blood Covenant (the source of these quotes), in which she revealed her culpability. When the book was published in 1990, Allred's survivors filed a civil action against Chynoweth and won a $52 million wrongful-death judgment against her.
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* Los Molinos was also where, in 1986, thirteen-year-old Linda Kunz married thirty-seven-year-old Tom Green, the Utah polygamist convicted in 2001 after boasting of his polygamous lifestyle on Dateline NBC.
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* Four years after Ray Blackmore married his adopted daughter Alaire, he took Debbie Palmer (the woman who burned down her own house in Bountiful) as yet another plural wife.
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* Utah has been called the “fraud capital of the world” by the Wall Street Journal, and within the state, no place has more white-collar crime than Utah County. According to FBI agent Jim Malpede, at any given moment the FBI is investigating scams totaling $50 million to $100 million perpetrated by con artists, like Kenyon Blackmore, based in the county. The uncommonly high incidence of fraud is a direct consequence of the uncommonly high percentage of Utah County residents who are Mormons. When Saints are invited to invest in dubious schemes by other Saints, they tend to be overly trusting. Michael Hines, director of enforcement for the Utah Securities Division, told the Deseret News that in Utah County it is common for scammers to ensnare their victims by asking them to evaluate the proposed investment through prayer. “People need to realize,” Hines warned, “that God is not a good investment adviser.”
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* Although it might sound like yet another manifestation of Dan's extreme fundamentalist beliefs, performing blessings is an entirely ordinary ritual among mainstream Latter-day Saints. Mormon men will commonly lay hands on the head of a family member or fellow Sain
t and pronounce a blessing in order to heal or to provide comfort in times of stress. Countless Mormons have testified that they were cured of serious illnesses through the laying on of hands. As Kenneth Anderson wrote in a 1999 Los Angeles Times article,
This peculiar commingling of mystical (as well as historically unsupported) doctrines on the one hand and pragmatic rationality on the other is a strong feature of contemporary Mormons as individuals. Educated Mormon culture has long been characterized, for example, by outstanding physical scientists and engineers, as strictly rational as possible in their worldly work yet devout in their adherence to many historical beliefs that would not pass the test of rational science, and believers, moreover, in deeply mystical ideas, even if they would not represent them as such. My own father spent his career as a chemistry professor and university dean, a dedicated and rational teacher of science. Yet in the Mormon Church his function . . . for many years has been to deliver blessings, to put his hands on the heads of church members and tell them things as moved by God, which are recorded, transcribed and kept by the church member as a meditative guide to God's intentions for him or her in life. Surely, to an outsider, this is very close to wild mysticism, yet my father is far indeed from being a wild mystic. Nor is it that he bifurcates his rational life from this mystical experience and has some sort of existential disconnect between them. On the contrary, his experience of giving these Mormon blessings is that the process of “following the spirit” is itself “reasonable,” in a way that is highly characteristic of the Mormon trait of perceiving mysticism as a rational practice.