by Jon Krakauer
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* Mark Hofmann's criminal activities have been deftly recounted in A Gathering of Saints, by Robert Lindsey, and Salamander, by Linda Sillitoe and Allen Roberts.
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* Asahara is the charismatic “Holy Pope” and “Venerated Master” of Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese sect that carried out a deadly 1995 attack in the Tokyo subways using sarin nerve gas. The theological tenets of Aum Shinrikyo (which means “Supreme Truth”) are drawn from Buddhism, Christianity, and Hinduism. At the time of the subway attack, the sect's worldwide membership was estimated to be as high as forty thousand, although it has now dropped to perhaps one thousand. According to terrorism expert Kyle B. Olson, Asahara's followers can still “be seen in Aum-owned houses wearing bizarre electric headsets, supposedly designed to synchronize their brain waves with the cult's leader,” who is currently incarcerated in Japan.
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* Control of the LDS Church resides in the hands of fifteen men. At the top of the hierarchical pyramid is the “President, Prophet, Seer, and Revelator,” who is believed to be God's direct mouthpiece on earth. The LDS president appoints two trusted apostles to serve as his first counselor and second counselor; collectively these three men function as the First Presidency. Immediately below the First Presidency is the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and, together, these fifteen men (they are always men; women are excluded from positions of authority in the Mormon Church) hold sway over the institution and its membership with absolute power. All fifteen men serve for life. At the time of the president's death, the Quorum of the Twelve appoints as new president the apostle from their ranks who has served the longest; hence the exceedingly advanced age of most Mormon presidents.
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* Mormons esteem three books of scripture above all others: The Book of Mormon, The Doctrine and Covenants (often referred to simply as D & C), and The Pearl of Great Price.
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† It's likely that in the nineteenth century, polygamy was actually abhorrent to many more Americans than slavery was. The latter, after all, had a multitude of proponents in numerous states, whereas it was hard to find many advocates for the former outside Utah Territory.
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* The part of town lying on the Arizona side of the line is officially called Colorado City, and the portion on the Utah side is officially named Hildale, although old-timers ignore both appellations, preferring to call it Short Creek, which was the town's name until 1962, when it was legally incorporated and renamed. The United Effort Plan is the legal name of the financial trust that owns all the church's assets, including virtually all the land in town.
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* In the unique lexicon shared by Mormons and Mormon Fundamentalists, all those who have never subscribed to the teachings of Joseph Smith are known as Gentiles (e.g., among Mormons, even Jews are referred to as Gentiles). Those who were once devout but have left the faith are apostates. Nonpracticing Saints are “Jack Mormons.”
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* Governor Pyle said about the raid, “We didn't make a single move that we didn't clear with the Council of Twelve”—the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, which runs the LDS Church. “They were one thousand percent cooperative, a hundred percent behind it.”
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* In 1993, LDS Apostle Boyd K. Packer (currently second in line to become president and prophet of the Mormons) pronounced that the church faces three major threats: “the gay-lesbian movement, the feminist movement, and the ever-present challenge from the so-called scholars or intellectuals.” Over the years, the Mormon leadership has made numerous pronouncements about the “dangers” of the feminist movement and has excommunicated several outspoken feminists. But perhaps the greatest rift between Mormon general authorities and advocates for women's rights occurred when the LDS Church actively and very effectively mobilized Mormons to vote as a bloc against ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (despite the fact that a poll published in the church-owned Deseret News in 1974 showed that 63 percent of Utahans approved of the ERA). Most political analysts believe that had the LDS Church not taken such an aggressive position against the ERA, it would have been easily ratified by the required thirty-eight states, and would now be part of the U.S. Constitution.
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* Not his real name.
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* It was in fact Winston who christened the community Bountiful. Until he took control, it was called Lister.
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* Not his real name.
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* Not his real name.
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* Not his real name.
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* The 116 missing pages have never turned up. Some evidence suggests that prior to his conviction, Mark Hofmann (the forger who is now Dan Lafferty's cell mate at Point of the Mountain) had hatched a scheme to “discover” the long-lost text. Because Hofmann's forgery, taken at face value, would presumably have reflected poorly on Joseph Smith and The Book of Mormon, the LDS Church would probably have paid him handsomely for the document, then hidden it in the president's vault with the other potentially embarrassing historical documents that church leaders have thus far managed to keep away from the prying eyes of scholars.
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* Even abridged, The Book of Mormon is a fantastically complex story that requires no small effort to digest, and the names of the protagonists do not always lodge easily in the non-Mormon memory. But an attempt to recall Moroni and Nephi will be rewarded later in this book, for both these fabled personages figure in the modern saga of Dan Lafferty.
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* Over the years, more than twenty fundamentalists—Ron Lafferty, Rulon Jeffs, and Brian David Mitchell (the abductor of Elizabeth Smart) among them—have claimed to be the “one mighty and strong” sent by God to reinstate the doctrine of plural marriage and “set in order” the modern LDS Church.
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* In the Old Testament, Onias was a Jewish high priest who lived in Jerusalem two centuries before Christ. Onias gained renown for defying the ruling tyrant, King Antiochus Epiphanes, and refusing to worship his idols. To punish Onias, the king stripped him of his priesthood and installed a toady, Menelaus, in his stead. Onias responded by gathering an army of one thousand men, storming the temple in Jerusalem, and banishing Menelaus, enabling the Jews to worship within its sacred walls once again. Coincidentally (or perhaps not), Robert Crossfield had an ancestor named William Onias Crossfield, born in Quebec in 1879.
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* Benson, who served as secretary of agriculture under President Eisenhower, eventually became president and prophet of the entire LDS Church, holding that position from 1985 until his death in 1994.
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* Joseph was not the only person to draw parallels between the founding prophets of Mormonism and Islam. Most such comparisons were made by Gentile critics intending to denigrate the Saints and their faith, but certain undeniable similarities were also noted by those sympathetic to Joseph's church. Among these admirers was Sir Richard F. Burton, the famous nineteenth-century libertine and adventurer who had extensive firsthand knowledge of Islamic cultures. Upon visiting Salt Lake City soon after the Mormons arrived there, Burton observed that Mormonism, “like El Islam,” claimed to be “a restoration by revelation of the pure and primaeval religion of the world.” In 1904 the esteemed German scholar Eduard Meyer spent a year in Utah studying the Saints, which moved him to predict, “As Arabia was to be the inheritance of the Muslims, so was America to become the inheritance of the Mormons.” And in 1932, after acknowledging in a book called Revelation in Mormonism that “similarities between Islam and Mormonism have been misunderstood and exaggerated,” George Arbaugh nevertheless went on to assert, “Mormonism is one of the most boldly innovating developments in the history of religions.
Its aggressive theocratic claims, political aspirations, and use of force, make it akin to Islam.”
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* Joseph's opponents were the Whig candidate Henry Clay, Democrat James K. Polk, and James G. Birney of the Liberty party. In an extremely close election, Polk emerged as the winner with a 48.1 percent plurality, defeating Clay by a scant 38,367 votes.
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* “Religious genius” is a wonderfully apt characterization that originated with William James, who introduced it, generically, in the first of the lectures collected in Varieties of Religious Experience. It was borrowed by Harold Bloom some ninety years later, in his book The American Religion, as the perfect way to describe Joseph Smith.
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* Lee would become infamous in 1857, after the Saints had emigrated to Utah, for his role in the Mountain Meadows massacre.
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* “Celestial marriage,” “spiritual wifery,” and “plural marriage” are among the terms Joseph Smith coined as euphemisms for polygamy.
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* William Clayton, Joseph's loyal personal secretary, declared in a letter twenty-eight years later, “I did write the revelation on Celestial marriage given through the Prophet Joseph Smith on the 12th day of July 1843. When the revelation was written there was no one present except the prophet Joseph, his brother Hyrum and myself. It was written in the small office upstairs in the rear of the brick store which stood on the banks of the Mississippi River. It took some three hours to write it. Joseph dictated sentence by sentence and I wrote it as he dictated. After the whole was written Joseph requested me to read it slowly and carefully which I did, and he then pronounced it correct.”
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* Each LDS congregation (called a “ward”) is headed by a bishop—a lay member, always male—who must be approved by the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the topmost peak of the hierarchy that runs the world church from Salt Lake City. The bishop in turn appoints two counselors, who together function as a three-man bishopric that closely oversees everything within their ward.
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* All Mormons are supposed to adhere to these strictures, most of which can be traced to a Draconian, late-twentieth-century interpretation of a confusing revelation Joseph Smith received in 1833—commonly known as the “Word of Wisdom” and canonized as Section 89 of The Doctrine and Covenants—in which the Lord commanded his Saints to abstain from “strong drink” and certain other vices.
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* In recent years the annual average has been slightly more than two conversions per missionary.
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* Currently the popular co-anchor of the evening news on KUTV, Salt Lake City's CBS affiliate, Michelle King graduated from the BYU communications department just two years before Brenda did.
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* The Book of Onias is an alternative title for The Second Book of Commandments; they are the same book. The LDS Church is organized into “stakes” of approximately three thousand members, which are the rough equivalent of archdioceses in the Catholic Church, and “wards,” which are the neighborhood congregations within each stake. Typically each stake is made up of between five and twelve wards.
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† In the LDS faith, all males deemed worthy are inducted into the “priesthood” at the age of twelve, which entails the assignment of specific responsibilities and privileges, as well as conferring inestimable status within the church. Before 1978, blacks were denied admission into the priesthood—a major affront that helps explain why there are relatively few Mormons of African descent. Women of all races continue to be barred from the priesthood.
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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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* Todd was Michael Todd Jeffory Judd, a beefy, fair-haired hitchhiker whom Watson Lafferty had happened to pick up one afternoon. Todd was hungry, so Watson brought him to Claudine Lafferty's home for a meal, where he met some of the other Lafferty brothers and was invited to attend meetings of the School of the Prophets. Todd stayed at Claudine's for two weeks, then, around the time Ron received this revelation, traveled to Arizona with Watson for three additional weeks to work for him on a construction project. Todd and Watson began to quarrel, however, and one day Watson returned to the apartment they were sharing to discover that Todd had stolen all of his belongings and disappeared, ending his association with the Lafferty clan and the School of the Prophets before he could be called upon to “remove” the named individuals.
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† Orrin Porter Rockwell, the “Destroying Angel,” who, in 1842, attempted to assassinate Governor Lilburn Boggs of Missouri, Joseph Smith's nemesis. Rockwell, who served as the personal bodyguard to both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, was celebrated by nineteenth-century Mormons for killing scores of men deemed enemies of the LDS Church with his .44-caliber Colt revolver. A popular, long-established restaurant in Utah County, called Porter's Place, is named after him.
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* According to several accounts, when Joseph Smith dug up The Book of Mormon on the Hill Cumorah in 1827, he found Laban's sword in the ancient stone box that held the golden plates.
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* Reprinted with permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group, from The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume 1: The Poems, Revised, edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright © 1924 by the Macmillan Company; copyright renewed © 1952 by Bertha Georgie Yeats.
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* Interestingly, in 1915 Utah became the first state in the Union to criminalize marijuana. The impetus for the ban came from the LDS Church, which was concerned about increasing marijuana use among its members. Latter-day Saints, it turns out, were way ahead of the curve when it came to smoking dope, thanks to polygamists who'd developed a taste for cannabis in Mexico, where some six thousand of them had fled by the early years of the twentieth century to escape federal prosecution. In the summer of 1912, the Mexican Revolution flared through northern Mexico, and the escalating violence compelled most of these expatriate polygamists to return to Utah, where they introduced marijuana into the broader Mormon culture, alarming the LDS general authorities.
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* After Dan and Ron were arrested, Dan made a statement from jail in praise of “spirit herbs,” which was widely publicized. “Because of that statement,” Dan says, “many people have wondered if I was on drugs or drunk when I did the killings, but neither was the case. I had smoked some good bud with my third wife about a week earlier . . . and I drank a beer Alex Joseph bought me the day I left his compound in Big Water on about July 22”; but that, he insists, was the full extent to which he used intoxicants during the period leading up to the murders.
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* Joseph, a former police officer from Modesto, California, was raised in the Greek Orthodox faith and converted to Mormonism in 1965. Excommunicated four years later when he began taking plural wives, he founded a sect called the Church of Jesus Christ in Solemn Assembly. (All told, Joseph married at least twenty-one women.) His self-deprecating wit, idiosyncratic theological views, and insatiable appetite for publicity made him a darling of the international news media. In 1983, shortly before the Laffertys visited him, Joseph successfully ran for mayor of Big Water on a Libertarian platform, promising that he would turn the town into a tax-free sanctuary; thereafter he boasted that he was the only polygamist elected to public office in the United States (he was also commander of the Lake Powell Coast Guard Auxiliary). Late in life he came to believe that Jesus had been a visionary seaman and was crucified by the Romans after He discovered the secret of transoceanic nav
igation. A prodigious smoker, Joseph died in 1998 of colon cancer at the age of sixty-two.
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* Commemorating the Mormons' arrival in the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847, after their exodus from Nauvoo, Pioneer Day is perhaps the Saints' most important holiday, marked throughout Utah by parades, public speeches, and fireworks that make the festivities of the Fourth of July pale by comparison.
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* Nauvoo had long been a notorious haven for printers of bogus money, thanks to a highly unusual provision in the city charter granting the town leaders extraordinary powers of habeas corpus. This much-abused clause permitted Brigham, and Joseph before him, to provide legal immunity to individuals charged with crimes beyond the city limits. And like the residents of present-day Colorado City who see nothing wrong with “bleeding the beast” by committing welfare fraud, neither Brigham nor Joseph believed that the counterfeiters in their midst were criminals in the eyes of the Lord; they were, to the contrary, helping advance the Kingdom of God every time they bilked a Gentile with their fraudulent greenbacks, and thus deserved to be protected from arrest.
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* 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.