Heaven's Ditch

by Jack Kelly

  Meanwhile, the controversy spurred sales of Morgan’s book to a gallop. An edition in Canada sold a hundred copies on the day it was issued. Whether any of the profits found their way to Lucinda Morgan is unknown. Anti-Masonic groups solicited funds to help her and her children.

  The details of Morgan’s abduction began to emerge from both official and informal investigations. The perpetrators had done little to cover their tracks. Following his kidnapping in Canandaigua on September 12, Morgan had been spirited in closed coaches to Rochester, then hurried west on the Ridge Road that stretched parallel to Lake Ontario north of the canal. The men had stopped at taverns along the way, finally reaching the town of Lewiston on the Niagara River. There, Eli Bruce, the sheriff of Niagara County and a Mason, had escorted Morgan down the river to the point where its waters poured into the lake at Fort Niagara. Masons imprisoned Morgan in the magazine of the disused fort. What happened to him after that, no one could—or was willing to—say. Month followed month with no sign of him.

  In October 1827, thirteen months after the abduction, the case took a sudden turn. A man’s decomposed body washed up on the rocky shore of Lake Ontario at Oak Orchard Creek, forty miles east of the fort. The coroner conducted an inquest, found that death was caused by drowning, and ordered the corpse buried near the lake.

  But the coincidence was too great. When Weed heard about the find, he immediately set out for the spot. So did Lucinda Morgan and friends of the missing man from Batavia. So did many others. Was this the body of William Morgan?

  By the Hand of Mormon

  Early in June 1829, Joseph Smith and his wife Emma, accompanied by Oliver Cowdery, left Harmony to return to the vicinity of the Erie Canal. They were brimming with excitement. The feverish translation of the gold plates was nearly complete. Hundreds of pages had accumulated in the past two months. Soon the entire revelation would exist in readable form for the first time in fourteen hundred years.

  The Peter Whitmer family, eager to get in on the project, invited the Smiths and Cowdery to finish the book at their farm in Fayette near the northern tip of Seneca Lake. All that was left to translate was the account by Nephi, an early and crucial prophet of the Mormon revelation, of how his family had come to America from Jerusalem in 600 b.c.

  The story had been included in the 116 pages that Martin Harris had lost a year earlier. In a revelation, God told Smith not to translate the plates again—doubters could point to minor discrepancies and cry hoax. Instead, he was to consult another section of the plates, which contained the same narrative in different words. In a strange warp of time, Nephi himself, all those years earlier, had been instructed by God to write his account twice—why, he did not know. Harris’s carelessness had been foreseen.

  Even as he worked on this final section, Smith applied for a copyright by submitting the title page to a federal court on June 11, 1829. He listed himself as “author and proprietor.” He was required to claim authorship because copyright law afforded no protection to translators. In fact, he always insisted that the book was his transcription of the golden plates, not his own work. Future editions would refer to him only as translator. His family were adamant that Joseph did not dictate the book from his imagination. With barely any formal schooling, he simply did not have the grasp of literary technique required to write a long, complex narrative. The book was a true rendering of the plates into English.

  The gold plates, Smith now knew, had been inscribed in the fourth century a.d. by the prophet Mormon and his son Moroni. They were a compilation of much older historical records and prophecies, which told a story heretofore unknown to the world. So far, Joseph Smith was the only man alive who had seen these marvelous artifacts. That knowledge, he said, made him feel “entirely alone.” He wanted others to confirm the reality of the treasure he had found buried on Hill Cumorah.

  On a warm summer day in July 1829, he told Cowdery it was time. They headed toward a wooded area of the Whitmer farm, taking Martin Harris with them. On the way, they picked up David Whitmer, who had been plowing a field. They walked in among the trees.

  The four men prayed. Nothing happened. Harris, the man who did not want to be made a fool, had yet to put aside all his doubts. He was forty-six, the others in their early twenties. He suspected that his lack of faith was interfering. As much as he longed to see the plates, he offered to leave the others alone so they might have a chance. He walked farther into the forest.

  Suddenly, an angel surrounded by an aura of blazing light appeared before the three younger men. In the midst of this light, Whitmer noted, a table materialized. Resting on it were the golden plates. He also saw the sword of Laban, the sparkling Excalibur that Nephi had used to kill his enemy. Beside it was a breastplate and Lehi’s Liahona, a ball with spindles that had guided Nephi’s father through the wilderness.

  A voice out of the light flooded the grove: “I command you to bear record of what you now see and hear.” Joseph had translated the plates correctly, the voice said. Cowdery later claimed, “I beheld with my eyes. And handled with my hands the gold plates from which it was translated. I also beheld the Interpreters.”

  When the vision faded, Joseph went to find the disappointed Harris. They prayed together. Then the older man also had his chance to see the plates. Ecstatic, Harris cried out, “’Tis enough; mine eyes have beheld.” Later, Harris would hedge his account, affirming that he had seen them “with the eye of faith,” but he never denied the reality of the experience. David Whitmer told an inquirer that “I saw them as plain as I see you now.”

  A few days later, Smith showed the plates to eight more witnesses. This was decidedly a family affair: four were David Whitmer’s brothers, one his brother-in-law, Hiram Page. The remaining three were Smith’s father and his own brothers Hyrum and Samuel. They saw the plates without the intervention of an angel. Afterward, Joseph told his mother, he felt “relieved of a burden.” The witnesses, eleven in all, signed affidavits, which appeared in the first edition of the book. All testified to the plates’ reality. “We beheld and saw the plates,” the three said. The eight swore, “We did handle with our hands; and we also saw the engravings thereon.”

  The six-by-nine-inch plates were bound by three heavy metal rings. Altogether, the book weighed between forty and sixty pounds, Martin Harris estimated. All the witnesses agreed the plates had “the appearance of gold.” Once the translation was complete, Joseph said, he returned the record to Moroni. Some said that Smith and Cowdery deposited the plates in a cave on Hill Cumorah, or perhaps another nearby hill. They have not been seen again.

  Joseph was eager to publish his astounding book to the world. He first approached Egbert B. Grandin, who ran a Palmyra print shop and edited the local newspaper. Grandin, at twenty-three the same age as Joseph, was reluctant to take on the formidable project. The number of books to be printed was extraordinary. Smith wanted five thousand copies, all bound in leather. A few hundred copies would have been a more typical print run for the time. Grandin was also wary of the reaction of local people. He could imagine the type of retaliation now famously visited on David Miller, publisher of William Morgan’s exposé of Freemasonry, three years earlier.

  Aware that no printer would take the job on speculation, Joseph induced Martin Harris to mortgage part of his farm for three thousand dollars to cover the cost. Harris’s wife, who saw her worst fears materializing, divorced him.

  Smith next went to see Thurlow Weed, the Rochester printer and politician, who was planning to run for state assembly again, this time as an Anti-Mason. As Weed described it, he was approached by a “stout, round, smooth-faced young man.” Smith described to him how he had found the “golden Bible” and how he wanted the text published. The young man read a chapter of the manuscript, which Weed found “so senseless that I thought the man either crazed or a very shallow imposter.” He refused the job.

  Eventually, Joseph convinced G
randin to change his mind. During the summer of 1829, the task began in Palmyra. Physical security was a concern. Grandin feared that his shop might be ransacked or his life threatened. Money-diggers still wanted the gold bible for their own. Orthodox clergy might try to block the publication. Joseph ordered Oliver Cowdery to copy his original manuscript and never to leave both copies at the print shop.

  Cowdery took over management of the publication. The arduous duty of setting the type fell on John Gilbert, another printer, whom Grandin hired. It was Gilbert who had to supply all the punctuation for the book as he painstakingly set each letter in place to create a reverse image of the text. Cowdery checked proofs as the sets of pages came off the press. Once the work was under way, Joseph joined Emma at the Hale farm in Harmony.

  A snag came in October 1829 when a man named Abner Cole, who hired Grandin’s shop to print his own newspaper, The Reflector, began including excerpts of “Jo Smith’s Gold Bible” in his paper. He ridiculed the revelation as humbug, the prophet as a “spindle shanked ignoramus.” Joseph rushed back to Palmyra and confronted Cole, who wrote under the pseudonym Obadiah Dogberry, Esq.

  “Do you want to fight, Sir,” the forty-six-year-old Cole growled, removing his coat. Smith declined the offer of combat and calmly threatened the printer with the law, citing his copyright. Cole saw his point and the pirating ceased. Cole had entered history as the first critic of Mormonism. A year later, he would move to Rochester and turn his ridicule on the revivals of Charles Finney.

  On March 26, 1830, Grandin published in his Wayne Sentinel a copy of the title page of The Book of Mormon: An Account Written by the Hand of Mormon, Upon Plates Taken from the Plates of Nephi. The notice advised that the work was “now for sale” at his shop.

  Sales came slowly. Martin Harris and Joseph’s brother Sam, going door to door around the region, sold few copies. Harris would soon have to dispose of 150 acres of his farm in order to satisfy the debt he had incurred to have the book printed.

  But the mere existence of the book made Joseph Smith famous. Rochester newspapers picked up the story, then journals and weeklies in other cities. His notoriety spread across the country. “Blasphemy!” the papers howled. “Fanaticism!” A minister called it “the greatest fraud of our time in the field of religion.” An editor declared that “it partakes largely of Salem Witchcraft-ism and Jemima Wilkinson-ism.”

  No matter. With the publication of the book, life for Joseph Smith accelerated. He had made himself into a full-fledged prophet and was already baptizing converts. In the weeks following the book’s publication, he and his brothers Hyrum and Sam, along with Oliver Cowdery and two of the Whitmer boys, declared themselves organizers of the new Church of Christ. Their first congregation included forty converts. A few years later, they would change the name to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

  Mormonism had been born.

  A Battlefield

  The hydraulic machinery for Nathan Roberts’s now famous flight of locks required a great deal of masonry and a complicated system of valves and channels to move the water. But the principles were known, and construction was simply a matter of converting the details into reality.

  His other problem would be relatively simple but immensely difficult. If he stepped the locks to the very top of the escarpment, the canal would be about fourteen feet higher than the level of Lake Erie. He had to situate the top lock below the lip of the ridge, then carve a ditch southward at Erie level. At the peak of the escarpment, the bottom of the ditch would need to be thirty feet below ground level and would be passing through ultrahard dolomite limestone. The Deep Cut would continue for seven miles. Twenty miles to the west, the Niagara River had sliced a crevice of the same length through the same escarpment. That process of erosion had taken twelve thousand years. Roberts had only three years to meet the schedule set by the canal commissioners.

  The Deep Cut, Roberts knew, would be impossible to construct with the tools workers had used to dig the canal: pickaxes and plows, shovels and wheelbarrows. The rock would have to be attacked with a form of concentrated energy, an explosive. He turned to gunpowder, what we know as black powder. Twenty years earlier, a French immigrant named Éleuthère Irénée du Pont had set up a gunpowder mill in Wilmington, Delaware. Du Pont mixed together saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal to produce high-quality gunpowder on an industrial scale. The company offered a formulation designed specifically for blasting rock.

  To fracture rock, Du Pont’s powder had to be packed inside a narrow, closed hole. Drilling these holes using a steel rod and a sledgehammer was an arduous task—an inaccurate blow could smash the wrist of the man holding the drill. Drills worked well in coal mines, where the material to be penetrated was relatively soft. When workers tried them on hard rock, they found that the tip quickly flattened against the stone.

  Roberts offered a one-hundred-dollar reward for a better tool. Experts in New York and Philadelphia tried and failed to find an improvement. A blacksmith from Buffalo named Botsford showed up in Lockport with his own idea. Judging by color, Botsford heated the steel red-hot before plunging it into a barrel of water. This changed the metal’s crystalline structure, making it hard but subject to shattering. By heating it again and letting it cool slowly, he was able to retain the hardness but rid it of its brittleness. The process worked and was applied to all the drills used on the job.

  Roberts had allocated the work for the cut to contractors in the usual way, assigning each a short section to excavate. But the effort was technically too demanding and progress too slow. This was the last obstacle to the canal’s completion; cuts were already approaching from both east and west. Delays at Lockport threatened to interfere with the planned 1825 opening of the entire waterway.

  In 1823, the canal commissioners admitted that the rock was “more difficult to remove, by blasting or otherwise, than was anticipated.” They said that it had become “perfectly apparent that the work . . . would fail entirely if a new course was not adopted.”

  They decided that the state should take on the effort directly. The contractors were retained, but became state employees, assigned to implement orders from Roberts and his assistants rather than to act as independent agents.

  Workers started at both ends of the cut. The farther they moved inward, the more difficult it became to clear the rubble. Roberts turned to another ad hoc invention, a horse crane invented by a local man named Orange H. Dibble. Wooden derricks with booms were constructed every seventy feet along the top of the excavation. Workers at the bottom dumped wheelbarrow loads of dirt and stone into baskets. Horses at the top worked treadmills to draw the half-ton load over the lip of the ditch. An operator swung the crane around and dumped the debris.

  The blasting was what Lockport residents remembered most vividly. “The explosions (cannonading) were almost continuous during the day,” one recalled. Another wrote that when a warning cry rang out, everyone “flew to a place of shelter.” Then came the thud of a concussion and a hailstorm of small stones that were “anything but pleasant.”

  “One stone weighing eighteen pounds was thrown over our house and buried itself in the front yard,” a doctor’s wife remembered. A lawyer was seated in his Main Street office when a twenty-pound stone rolled through the front door and knocked the legs from his chair, leaving him seated on the floor “in a very dignified manner, and a surprised state of mind.”

  Local people took to protecting their cabins by leaning a protective wall of six-inch-thick logs against them to deflect flying debris. Pedestrians hearing a blast “would look upward so as to dodge any falling stones.” Both workers and citizens were injured and killed by the rain of rocks. “The atmosphere,” an observer noted, “was murky with the smoke of burning powder.”

  Disregard of danger was part of the culture of canal workers. Powder men went by jaunty names like “Hercules,” “Bob the Blaster,” and “Monster M
anley.” They made a point of handling the volatile material with insouciance. Other workers, warned of an impending blast, would simply hold their shovels over their heads to deflect the rain of stones.

  Accidents involving powder were particularly gruesome. Sometimes, if a fuse burned slowly or went out, men unwisely approached to relight it. If exposed to the full force of the blast, a man could be blown to bits. Arms and legs were amputated. One resident noted that “on some days the list of killed and wounded would be almost like that of a battlefield.”

  The smoky struggle took much longer than anyone had predicted, but by 1825 the end was in sight. An observer who examined the Deep Cut marveled at “the rough perpendicular walls pierced in every part with drill-holes used for blasting the rock.” He was astonished “at the perseverance, labor, and expense which it cost.”

  The cost was not just financial. The great project at Lockport held the first intimations that the nature of work in America was changing. Sam Patch had faced it firsthand in the factories of Pawtucket and Paterson. The same industrial principles governed the lives of Irish laborers at Lockport. During the 1820s, workers first began using the word boss. They were becoming alienated from their own labor.

  New England intellectual and labor organizer Orestes Brownson saw wages as “a cunning devise” that allowed the employer to “retain all the advantages of the slave system, without the expense, trouble, and odium of being slave-holder.”