It was a time when it seemed the entire young nation was peopled by prophets and doomsday cults—and New York was ground zero for the coming apocalypse. Among the earliest religious movements that gave voice to the fervent end-times yearnings for which American religion would ever after be known, the Shakers established themselves in the central part of the state on the eve of the Revolution. They were devotees of Mother Ann Lee, who, like so many others, had come to America in hope of finding religious freedom but found instead further persecution for her heretical visions and strange ways, which included lifelong celibacy and a pacifism that came to seem treasonous as the war raged. The Shakers—so called because they physically shook in their devotions when moved by the spirit—were formally known as the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing. After their leader’s death in 1784, they came to believe that this “second appearing” had already occurred in the person of Ann Lee herself. Through the century that followed, this unlikely movement spread through the Burned-Over District and beyond, establishing Shaker communities in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, and New England, where the last active Shaker village—two believers strong at the time of this writing—remains today.
While the Shakers saw the Second Coming of Christ and the apocalyptic era it would usher in as an ongoing concern, other groups in the Burned-Over District looked into the future and prepared for the worst. One such group was the Millerites, followers of William Miller, who, like the Quaker Elias Hicks, was a farmer turned preacher whose religious visions became deeply unsettling to those around him. Miller advocated maintaining an ever-watchful state for Christ’s return, and so believed that drinking alcohol would make his followers ill-prepared for the Second Coming. He was not such a literalist that he let the biblical notion that “no one knows the time or place” deter him from calculating that Christ would return precisely on October 22, 1844. When the day came and went, the Millerites proclaimed the date ever after to be “The Great Disappointment.”
At the other end of the sexual and apocalyptic spectrum from the Shakers and the Millerites, John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida Community proposed that Jesus Christ had already returned, and so it was up to communities of believers to strive toward perfection in this life rather than wait for the hereafter. Noyes’s proposition for how this might take place involved “complex marriage,” which consisted of—as one observer called it—a “combination of polygamy and polyandry.” The participants in this experiment had less luck than the Shakers, at least as far as continuity of the religious purposes of the community were concerned. While the Shakers still have a few stubborn followers, all that remains of Oneida is the thriving flatware business started by Noyes’s son.
But of all the movements that were born and flourished in the Burned-Over District during the Second Great Awakening, the most successful by far was the one founded on a hilltop in Palmyra, New York, by Joseph Smith, a twenty-four-year-old farmer’s son.
According to Mormon history, Smith was still a teenager when he had the first of the series of visions that would provide the Church of Latter-day Saints with endless opportunity for interpretation. Pride of place is often reserved for this First Vision, yet in some ways the second was more important. It was this Second Vision that led him to discover the golden plates and the seer stones with which he read and translated them.
Mormon scholar Lori Taylor points out the interesting coincidence that weeks before, emissaries from the Six Nations of the Iroquois made a momentous stop in Palmyra. The principal speaker was none other than Handsome Lake’s nephew, now a famous chief called Red Jacket. A detailed report was published by the Palmyra Gazette:
We were last week visited by the famous chief, Red Jacket, together with other chiefs belonging to the Six Nations, to wit—Blue Sky, William Sky, Peter Smoke, and Twenty Canoes, who arrived there on Monday about sun-set.
To answer the solicitations of our inhabitants, Red Jacket delivered a speech in the evening, at the academy, which was almost instantly filled with an attentive auditory. His speech, if it had been properly interpreted, no doubt would have been both eloquent and interesting. But as it was, merely enough could be understood to know his object, while his native eloquence and rhetorical powers could only be guessed at, from his manners and appearance.
He commenced by representing the whole human race as the creatures of God, or the Great Spirit, and that both white men and red men were brethren of the same great family. He then mentioned the emigration of our forefathers from towards the rising sun, and their landing among their red brethren in this new discovered world. He next hinted at the success of our armies under the great Washington;—our prosperity as a nation since the declaration of our independence; mentioned Gen Washington’s advice to the red men, to plough, and plant and cultivate their lands.—This, he said, they wished to do, but the white men took away their lands, and drove them further and further toward the setting sun:—and, what was worse than all, had sent Missionaries to preach and hold meetings among them:—that the whites who instituted and attended these meetings, stole their horses, drove off their cattle, and taxed their land. These things he considered their greatest calamity—too grievous to be borne.
The principal object of this visit by these Chiefs, was, we understand, to intercede with the Friends, in whose honesty they appear to place the most implicit confidence, to use their influence to free them from the Missionaries now in their borders.
It is impossible to know for certain if Joseph Smith attended this lecture, but given what we know of him—mainly that he was a boy of sixteen apparently obsessed with the history and culture of the Indians—it is difficult to believe that he would not have been present when the most famous Iroquois in America showed up in his small town with an entourage of chiefs, and spoke at length “to answer the solicitations of our inhabitants.” Red Jacket’s speech in Palmyra was reported as far away as Boston, Hartford, and Alexandria, as well as, of course, in the local Gazette—so even if he was not there in person, the teenage Joe Smith certainly would have heard something of the event after the fact.
What Joseph Smith would have heard was basically an abbreviated version of Handsome Lake’s vision: a tale of white and Indian unity interrupted by evils brought across the sea. Red Jacket’s appeal to the Friends for protection from other missionaries acknowledges the practical debt the Iroquois owed to the Quakers for their assistance with cultivation and education, even as he took a stand for native spiritual autonomy.
Just as Handsome Lake had absorbed the Quaker teachings then permeating his village, Smith was a sponge of diverse religious influences. He shared the Millerite belief that the Second Coming would occur in America as well as the Oneida belief that Jesus had already returned, though in his version of these beliefs, Christ had visited the continent’s inhabitants long before the coming of Columbus. Yet while the birth of Mormonism is often considered in relation to those other Second Great Awakening movements of the Burned-Over District, in fact the similarities pale in comparison to all that Smith’s religious visions had in common with those of Handsome Lake.
To begin with the most obvious, Smith’s movement stressed sobriety. In a further revelation of the Doctrine and Covenants, Smith instructed, “That inasmuch as any man drinketh wine or strong drink among you, behold it is not good… Strong drinks are not for the belly, but for the washing of your bodies.” This rule of Mormon life was given “not by commandment or constraint, but by revelation and the word of wisdom, showing forth the order and will of God in the temporal salvation of all saints in the last days.” Likewise, the revelation of Handsome Lake sought to protect the dwindling settlements of the Iroquois from the evils that had crept in among them, the evils Handsome Lake himself had once represented when he rampaged drunk through his own town.
Like Handsome Lake, Joseph Smith was a man visited by angelic figures, and his visions led to the discovery of secret texts that told a forgotten history of faith. And when one looks closely at hi
s visions, one cannot help but see the shadow of the Iroquois prophet who died in western New York in the very year the Mormon prophet’s family arrived there. Not only does Smith’s account of Jesus in early America seem to echo the Iroquois tradition of the son of the Great Spirit, Dekanawida, but he too sought to explain the intersection of European and American populations in religious terms. Handsome Lake’s vision can be seen as an answer, of sorts, to Henry Simmon’s syncretisms, which recast Eden with figures borrowed from local mythology. Smith seems to respond to Handsome Lake’s account of how the white men brought evil to the native peoples with a proposal for how white men such as himself might undo the damage done.
In this sense, Smith attempted to offer a positive counterpoint to Handsome Lake’s negative theological interpretation of history. Smith’s belief—that Native Americans were in fact related to the tribes of Israel—was commonly held at the time: Both Roger Williams, in the seventeenth century, and Conrad Weiser, in the eighteenth, had believed much the same. What that belief had lacked before was the full weight of narrative. Who were the heroes and villains of this offshoot of the biblical saga? Where did it begin? How would it end? The Book of Mormon provided these answers and more. While Handsome Lake’s visions told of a hidden scripture that described the religious origins of the conflict between two peoples, Smith provided an epic of two cultures, separated by an ocean and millennia, rejoined by the “gathering” he would lead.
Like the arrival of Iroquois chiefs in Palmyra a month before Smith claimed to have found the golden plates, the resonances between the Code of Handsome Lake and the Book of Mormon may merely be coincidence. Recent scholarship in the history of the Latter-day Saints and the Iroquois explores the possibility that Joseph Smith knew of Handsome Lake’s visionary experiences, but no direct connection has been found. Lori Taylor, the first to note Red Jacket’s visit, has also examined a tradition among Native Americans that Smith heard of Handsome Lake’s revelation from three of the prophet’s followers, who explained to him that a renewed spirituality had taken hold of their people. At a time when all spiritual answers seemed up for grabs in the religious upheaval of the Burned-Over District, this would have been tremendously appealing—perhaps so much so that it inspired a young man to offer to his people what Handsome Lake had offered to his own.
Not surprisingly, there is also an interpretation offering an opposite conclusion: that Joseph did not borrow from Handsome Lake, but that Iroquois religion provides proof of the Book of Mormon as not just scripture but history. In this interpretation, the Iroquois legend of the divine messenger Dekanawida is reduced to a faint echo of the supposedly historical account found on Smith’s golden plates. With the assumption that the Mormon story was primary, Handsome Lake himself becomes significant mainly for his interaction with figures from the lore of the Latter-day Saints.
Mormon folk tradition maintains that three of the original witnesses of Jesus’s coming to America remained on earth to witness his return. Beginning among Brigham Young’s pioneers, these three figures served as a lens through which to view the Saints’ struggles on the frontier, as well as the history that had brought them there. As the folklorist A. E. Fife observed in the 1930s and 1940s, “In localities of Utah, Idaho, and other states where the Mormon faith is prevalent, one frequently hears accounts of the miraculous appearance and disappearance of kindly, white-bearded old men who bring messages of the greatest spiritual or personal importance, give blessings in exchange for hospitality, lead lost people to safety, and perform various other miraculous deeds. These old men are said by the people to be the ‘Three Nephites,’ ancient apostles of the Christ on the American continent, appointed as His special emissaries to live upon this continent until His second coming, and to go among all people as special witnesses of the truthfulness of Christ’s church.” The Book of Mormon explains that these three old men were “given power over death so as to remain on the earth until Jesus comes again.… They are as the angels of God, and… can show themselves unto whatsoever man it seemeth them good. Therefore, great and marvelous works shall be wrought by them, before the great and coming day [of judgment].”
The Three Nephites were said to appear in times of personal distress as well as throughout American history. According to various legends, they were spotted by a member of Columbus’s crew, heard cheering Independence in Philadelphia in 1776, and seen visiting the tribes of Utah in advance of Mormon settlers. To those who embraced the legend in Deseret and elsewhere, it was only natural that these three wandering miracle workers would have visited the Iroquois as they struggled with the evils of alcohol and the dissolution of the Six Nations. Today, the Three Nephite tradition has been largely reduced to the stuff of stories for children, but at the height of its nineteenth-century popularity, it was argued that the three angelic figures who visited Handsome Lake were none other than these three immortal saints, who wandered through Cornplanter’s Town while awaiting both the return of Jesus and the birth of his prophet Joseph Smith.
Each of these interpretations of the Iroquois-Mormon connection relies on one or the other being a derivative tradition, but their true relationship is at once more simple and more complicated than that. Both traditions were born in a place and at a time when the boundaries between spiritual movements were far more porous than they are generally considered today.
Joseph Smith is often portrayed as the preeminent exemplar of the American myth of the self-made man, yet what he may be instead is one of the best examples of the collaborative nature of American belief. Depending on one’s religious sensibilities, and perhaps on one’s corresponding level of cynicism, Smith was either a religious savant so dauntless in the courage of his convictions that he attracted millions around the world with his message, or he was one of the most successful fabulists in history.
In either case, there is no denying that he offered nineteenth-century Americans something that had been sought in the New World since Columbus arrived and believed he had found the Garden of Eden: a religious interpretation of the convergence of cultures that attempted to take the full reality and history of each into account. In the process, Smith inevitably incorporated the diverse religious influences around him. Indeed, it may have been precisely his ability to synthesize competing spiritual claims that made his vision so popular.
The same can be said of the man Thomas Jefferson called “Brother Handsome Lake.” Though from the distance of centuries his success seems to be on a much smaller scale than that of a man who started the fastest-growing church in history, it is impossible to say exactly how far his influence reached, and whether or not it was ultimately good for his people. The fire of religious revelation spreads where it will, sometimes even from one prophet to another, from the Burned-Over District of New York to the Great Salt Lake of Utah, and across the nation in between.
In front of the Joss House, Chinatown, San Francisco. Arnold Genthe, c. 1900. (Library of Congress)
CHAPTER 14
“The Heathen Chinee”
1852–1906
Telegraph Hill, overlooking the northeast corner of San Francisco, was originally home to a signal station that alerted the city below to the number, make, and freight of ships arriving in the bay. Before Samuel Morse’s invention made its way west (the first coast-to-coast electromagnetic telegraph line was completed in 1861), the raised arms of the semaphore telegraph tower that gave the hill its name were the only means of immediate communication at a distance. For a city that exported more than forty million dollars in gold dust a year at the height of the prospecting boom, the comings and goings of merchandise and manpower were a daily preoccupation.
One morning in the early autumn of 1852, down the western slope from the semaphore tower’s hill, another kind of signal went up that would prove far more significant than any single maritime arrival, not only to the city but to the country of which it only recently had become a part. At sunrise that day, a group of newcomers unfurled a striking crimson banner and hoi
sted it to the top of their newly constructed temple.
A few hours later, the crowds began to gather for a dedication ceremony. First dozens, then hundreds, they came to light firecrackers and squibs, to fill the air with the smoke and smell of gunpowder. Many of these men—and they were almost exclusively men—worked much of the year in the gold camps of the Sierras and the Trinity Mountains, where they mingled with workers of a dozen nations and learned enough English to argue for their wages and sometimes gamble them away. Yet at the newly opened temple—the first in the city—they stood among others with whom they had everything in common. Here, they were all members of the Yeong Wo community association, not just Chinese but speakers of the Zhongshan dialect, former residents of the Dongguan, Zengcheng, and Xin’an districts, near the present-day industrial behemoth of Shenzhen. Here, in the shadow of the telegraph tower, they listened together to the raucous music of their homeland, and offered prayers to gods unlike any their new neighbors had seen before—gods they had brought with them across the vast Pacific to the place they called Gold Mountain.
Just three years after the first ship came to port with passengers from China, the people then known as “the Celestials”—for their supposedly otherworldly ways—had established themselves as a significant part of the fastest-growing city in America. The primary reason was the sheer numbers in which they arrived. Contemporary reports place the Chinese population of California in 1849 at just fifty-four men and one woman. A year later the number had increased tenfold, and by the start of 1851 more than seven thousand had arrived in the state. In the year of the temple dedication, twenty thousand Chinese immigrants came ashore, and that rate of entry only increased in the years that followed.
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