One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  Such dismissive opinions perhaps slowed the spread of Hindu ideas throughout American culture, but they by no means stopped it. By the time Swami Vivekananda arrived and intoned the words “sisters and brothers,” he spoke them to a people that had been prepared to hear them. He offered them to a nation that—in the manner of the Emersons, Margaret Fuller, Matilda Gage, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Herman Melville—had been shaping itself in response to India, as both distant trading partner and an ever more proximate idea, for more than a century.

  It perhaps goes without saying that Mary Moody Emerson did not become a Hindu after her encounter with Our Stranger. Far from it. No matter her level of interest, such a transformation would never have been possible in her world. Moreover, as she aged, even as her other eccentricities ran wild, she become more traditional and strident in her Christian faith. She may have even come to regret the seeds she had planted in impressionable young Waldo. She feared that his faith lay in shiny splinters, and when he left his family’s well-worn path to a life spent in the pulpit, she worried his soul was lost. Yet even in this she was, as her nephew would call her, a “representative life.” Americans have never been a people of fixed faith; they are, instead, a people whose spiritual lives are works in progress, open to the influences of the world at some points of their lives, as unchangeable as a closed book at others. Conversions come and go for reasons pragmatic as well as divine.

  In this, Mary’s life—singular though she was thought at the time—is quite like others of her age, each of whom might remind us that American history is a parlor game of unlikely contemporaries. Men and women whose experiences have nothing to do with each other may seem to have hidden resonances based on the simple fact that they walked the earth at the same time, within the borders of this improbable nation. As far as possible from the experience of Omar ibn Said wandering as a Muslim runaway in a Christian land, the New England matron Mary Moody Emerson lived through precisely the same era and was herself a kind of fugitive. Because she was a woman and an intellectual at a time when those two categories were thought rarely to overlap, she was the kind of outlier who looks beyond expected explanations to form an understanding of the world. As she pursued her interest in what seemed to her a new way of thinking of divinity, she became, in Waldo’s words, an oracle speaking “the arcana of the gods” in a “frivolous and skeptical time.” More than he could have known, she was also an example of the ways those on the margins of faith can influence widespread cultural change, just as a rock dropped in the Ganges might send ripples across Walden Pond.

  The angel Moroni delivering the plates of the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith, 1886. (Library of Congress)

  CHAPTER 13

  A Tale of Two Prophets

  1800–1856

  Nine years after they had arrived in the valley of the Great Salt Lake, the people who called themselves Saints gathered beneath the tree-branch roof and rough-hewn beams of a bowery to hear the preaching of their leader. The founder of their community had been dead now a dozen years, and his revelation had been made known long before many of these pioneers had been born. As they struggled to build a safe haven for their faith and a settlement that would prove a foothold for the expanding nation on the frontier, more than ever they hungered to hear an affirmation of their beliefs from one who had been there since the beginning. Brigham Young was the man to give it.

  “I appear before you to bear my testimony to the truth of ‘Mormonism,’ ” he declared to his followers in 1856, “that Joseph Smith Jr. was a Prophet called of God, and that he did translate the Book of Mormon by the gift and power of the Holy Ghost.”

  Young was at the time fifty-five years old, a man of the same generation as his martyred prophet, though he was more skilled at managing a burgeoning empire than attracting murderous mobs. A suitable stand-in to the many youthful Mormons around him, he had come to the faith upon reading the newly published scripture in 1830, and soon was recognized as one of Smith’s original followers, known as the Twelve Apostles. Preaching in the bowery, the worship area the Saints had built at Salt Lake even before their homes, Young stressed that though he was there near the start of this great movement, the truth of Mormonism was equally available to anyone who heard him. “This same testimony all can bear who have received and continue to retain the Spirit of the Gospel,” he said.

  Most in attendance knew Young’s testimony well. They, too, believed that some forty years before, a young man in western New York had discovered golden plates buried in the ground of a hill called Cumorah. Given the gift of two “seer stones” by an angel, Joseph Smith placed them over his eyes as if wearing a pair of spectacles and through them was able to comprehend the ancient writing on the plates. What he found there was a remarkable story. According to this new scripture, which Smith dictated in translation to his wife, Jesus Christ had visited earth far from the Holy Land of the Bible. After his resurrection, the son of God had walked in the forests of America, appearing to the only people who lived there at the time, the lost descendants of one of the tribes of Israel, known by Mormons as the Lamanites.

  When Smith published this saga as the Book of Mormon in 1830, it offered both a vision of the ancient past and a prophecy of the future that foretold Jesus’s eventual return to the heart of the continent. Smith and his Twelve Apostles soon brought together believers by the thousands, first in New York, then at various sites of “gathering,” the term they used to refer to the process by which Smith’s followers and the Lamanites, also known as Native Americans, would be joined as a renewed Israel.

  Great Salt Lake was then the center of a Mormon-controlled territory that comprised a full tenth of what would become the continental United States. The provisional State of Deseret, as it was known, included parts of the territories that would yield not just Utah but Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, and Wyoming. It was the latest and most ambitious attempt at achieving their scriptural “gathering” of believers, and it would prove their most successful. Following earlier settlements at Kirtland, Ohio; Independence, Missouri; and Nauvoo, Illinois; the Saints had ventured into the unsettled West largely because of Joseph Smith’s murder at the hands of an anti-Mormon mob in 1844. Faced with the loss of the man who had been both their prophet and the head of every local government they had established, the Saints followed Young as Smith’s heir, to a place where they hoped they could be free of the persecution of nonbelieving “gentiles.”

  Yet they did not face the dangers of mass emigration merely to escape one group of people who did not yet accept their message; they did so to be nearer to another.

  “I did not devise the great scheme of the Lord’s opening the way to send this people to these mountains,” Young continued in the bowery. “Joseph contemplated the move for years before it took place.” As Young recounted the creation myth of what would become the state of Utah, Smith had hoped to find the ultimate gathering place on the frontier primarily because of his fervor to preach his vision that Jesus Christ had appeared in America to the descendants of those who had originally met him, those lost children of Israel whom the rest of the United States called Indians. As Smith himself had written, “One of the most important points in the faith of the Church of the Latter-day Saints, through the fullness of the everlasting Gospel, is the gathering of Israel, of whom the Lamanites constitute a part.”

  So taken was the prophet with this part of his mission, Young explained, that for a time “there was a watch placed upon him continually to see that he had no communication with the Indians.” Young and others recognized that they had a church to build, a system of self-governance to create, and huge numbers of people to organize and protect, all of which depended upon on a certain amount of stability. Prophets, however, are rarely good administrators; Smith wanted at every juncture to push on to the next potential Zion, the models for which he found in visions of a past only he could remember.

  Smith’s own mother,
who also was one of his earliest followers, recalled that this had always been the case. “During our evening conversations, Joseph would occasionally give us some of the most amusing recitals that could be imagined,” she once said. “He would describe the ancient inhabitants of this continent, their dress, mode of traveling, and the animals upon which they rode; their cities, their buildings, with every particular; their mode of warfare; and also their religious worship. This he would do with as much ease, seemingly, as if he had spent his whole life among them.”

  It was an obsession that colored even his interpretation of the political controversies of the day. In the same year that he published the Book of Mormon, he greeted announcement of the Indian Removal Act of 1830—which allowed President Andrew Jackson to enforce relocation of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole tribes west of the Mississippi—as a step toward the great “gathering” that was to come. As Smith saw it, if the Lamanites were being driven beyond the Rockies and into the deserts of the West, that was where he would bring his revelation.

  Writing just three months after Jackson signed the law that initiated the Trail of Tears, Smith codified his entwined desire to occupy the frontier and convert Native Americans in the secondary text of the Mormon movement. This was a collection of elaborations and interpretations on his original scripture known as the Doctrine and Covenants:

  And now, behold, I say unto you that you shall go unto the Lamanites and preach my gospel unto them; and inasmuch as they receive thy teachings thou shalt cause my church to be established among them; and thou shalt have revelations, but write them not by way of commandment.

  And now, behold, I say unto you that it is not revealed, and no man knoweth where the city Zion shall be built, but it shall be given hereafter. Behold, I say unto you that it shall be on the borders by the Lamanites.

  Now that they were finally surrounded by “Lamanites” on all sides in the valley of the Great Salt Lake, Young acknowledged the debt his community owed to the people his late leader had hoped to convert, while also making it seem that it was not his doing but divine will that both Mormons and Indians had been forced ever further west. “Was it by any act of ours that this people were driven into their midst?” he asked. “We are now their neighbors, we are on their land, for it belongs to them as much as any soil ever belonged to any man on earth; we are drinking their water, using their fuel and timber, and raising our food from their ground.”

  Preaching in a rustic wooden structure near the site where the great Mormon Tabernacle would one day be built, Young did not yet know that he was part of a movement that would produce the most successful homegrown religious group in the history of the United States. Nonetheless, it was only right that this group of prototypical American spiritual originals acknowledged the debt to those they displaced. Yet there was one further debt the Mormons owed to the natives of this land that went wholly unacknowledged, perhaps because they owed to Native Americans even more than Brigham Young himself knew.

  To understand the connection between Mormonism and the indigenous peoples supplanted by the moving borders of the United States, and the nation-expanding implications of this connection, we should not merely ask why Joseph Smith wanted to convert the Indians. After all, uncountable priests, pilgrims, and Puritans through the preceding three centuries had wanted to do much the same. We might ask, however, how the untrained and unordained Smith, unique among all those would-be saviors of heathen souls, came to look upon Native Americans not merely as an evangelical challenge but as a key to understanding the Christian scriptures that the English, the Spanish, the Dutch, and the French had brought from Europe. Why did Smith alone see the New World as a missing piece in the story the Old World told about itself?

  To answer this question, we should begin where Smith began—not with his own story but with one that came just before. Not far from the site where he claimed to have had his original revelations, and just five years prior to Smith’s birth, another man was beset with religious visions that would transform the lives of all around him—perhaps including Joseph Smith himself, and through him Brigham Young, the Saints he led to the frontier, and the nation that followed in their wake.

  In the last years of the eighteenth century, the once proud Iroquois Confederacy had fallen on hard times. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the population of the Iroquois had been reduced by half. Ten percent of all Iroquois men had died in battle, some fighting for the English, some for the Americans and the French, while dysentery and smallpox had killed more than four times that number without regard to political affiliation in the years since the war’s end. The surviving inhabitants of what had been the heart of the Six Nations had been pushed from their villages. One faction crossed into the Province of Quebec, while those who remained in the United States were corralled onto reservations far from the homes of their ancestors. With living conditions deteriorating and despair rampant, many formerly powerful sachems, hunters, and warriors had begun to poison themselves with the spirits they had learned to drink from those who took their land.

  A man called Handsome Lake was among them. Though he was one of fifty hereditary chiefs of the Seneca, there was nothing that bespoke authority about him as he lay near death in the winter of 1799. For weeks he had been wasting away in a bunk in his brother’s cabin, writhing in the grip of a fever dream while he waited for the end. The other inhabitants of the village of Jenuchshadego expected he would leave them, and many were not sorry to see him go. Though he had lurched in and out of illness for years, when Handsome Lake had returned to the village a month before, he apparently still had strength enough to cause a great deal of trouble.

  Jenuchshadego was, in the memorable phrasing of historian Anthony Wallace, “a slum in the wilderness”—like most other newly established Indian settlements. Consisting of forty dirt-floor cabins housing more than four hundred Seneca, the village was tucked away between the Allegheny River and the steep cliffs of a ridge that would be submerged one hundred sixty years later, when the surrounding valley was flooded by the construction of the Kinzua Dam. The same traits that made this area an ideal choice for a man-made lake made it, at the turn of the nineteenth century, one of the last redoubts of Seneca autonomy. Its narrow passes, seasonally made impenetrable by winter storms, served as a natural bulwark against intruders.

  Traditionally, white men were not allowed to enter this stretch of the Allegheny Mountains except by invitation. History had proven the wisdom of this within the living memory of every adult in Jenuchshadego. Though it had once been home to a thriving cultural and agricultural center for the Seneca, it had been all but wiped off the map during the Revolution, when George Washington himself had given instructions that the villages in the area should be “not be merely overrun, but destroyed.” After learning that raids on rebel forces had originated nearby, Washington gave the order to Major General John Sullivan that no matter what complaints he heard from the local tribes, he should “not by any means listen to any overture of peace before the total ruinment of their settlements is effected.” A generation later, Washington still was known as “Town Destroyer” by the Seneca, and the only rebuilt settlement in the area was given a name that means “There a house was burned.”

  While the village struggled back to life, the Seneca frequently had to venture far beyond its immediate vicinity on trade missions and game-hunting expeditions. It was one of the latter that had taken Handsome Lake away for a time, and now brought about his dire condition.

  His family had last seen him when he left with a hunting party the previous autumn. They had gone downriver with the intention of harvesting deer from the bountiful Pennsylvania forests so that the village would have a surplus for the frozen months ahead. Handsome Lake and the other hunters had been gone scarcely half a season when they came to a small town the white men called Pittsburgh. Though there were doubtless many provisions available there that would have been gratefully received back in Jenuchshadego, Handsome Lak
e and his cohort made the disastrous decision to trade their cache of dried meat and deerskins for a barrel of whisky. Whether or not they initially planned to carry this prize back to Jenuchshadego, the expedition thereafter devolved into a winter-long drinking binge.

  For the return trip home, the hunters had lashed their canoes together into a single barge and managed to make their way upriver as the liquor continued to flow. The most inebriated stayed in the center of the flotilla, while those less likely to topple overboard manned the paddles on either side.

  When finally they reached Jenuchshadego, the empty-handed hunters became quarrelsome, perhaps channeling their embarrassment at having nothing to show for three months’ supposed labor. It was later remembered that the fast-depleting barrel of fire water caused them first to “yell and sing like demented people,” and then to go on a rampage. The story of their degradation later served as a cautionary tale passed down through the generations: “Now they are beastlike,” it was said of Handsome Lake and the others, “and run about without clothing and all have weapons to injure those whom they meet. Now there are no doors left in the houses for they have all been kicked off.”