She snatched the book from him and found the place quickly again. “But don’t stop there, Joshua. Go on.” She held it out, but he didn’t take it. So she read it for him. “ ‘Awake, my soul! No longer droop in sin. Rejoice O my heart, and give place no more for the enemy of my soul.’ ”
He looked away. “I don’t understand what all of it means, but it is beautiful.”
Suddenly Lydia was embarrassed. “I’m sorry, Joshua, here I am going on like a young girl. I haven’t even thanked you for telling me.” She waved the book. “And for bringing this back to me. I was so disturbed when I thought I had lost it.”
“I know. I don’t know what possessed me. I guess I was afraid to let—” He stopped, his face troubled now. “Will you not say anything to Caroline? I don’t want to give her any false hopes, Lydia. You know what she’ll think. And then when nothing happens, it will be a bitter disappointment to her.”
“Are you sure nothing will happen?” she asked, trying to make it sound as if she were merely teasing him.
He shrugged. “Joshua Steed getting religion? Doesn’t sound like much of a possibility to me.” Before she could respond to that, he went on. “Will you not say anything, Lydia?”
She nodded slowly. “I won’t tell a soul without your express permission, but I urge you to tell Caroline, Joshua. She needs to know.”
His mouth pulled down into a stubborn line. “Maybe so, but not yet.”
She nodded, not necessarily agreeing, but understanding. “Then at least tell Nathan, Joshua. You’ll have time together over these next few days. Talk to him. If you have questions about what you’re reading, you can ask him.”
There was a droll smile. “You think his heart can withstand that kind of a shock?”
She laughed gaily. “I’d like to find out. Oh, Joshua. I can’t tell you how happy I am.” Then on impulse she thrust the book at him. “I don’t want it back, Joshua.”
“What?”
“Not yet. Take it with you. Without your family these next few days, you’ll have more time to read. Finish it. Then you can bring it back to me.”
“No, I—”
She pressed it into his hand. “Yes! I want you to keep it.” She tossed her head back and laughed. “Besides, if it shows up now, Nathan is going to want to know where I found it. How would I explain that without telling him everything? Please, Joshua.”
He took the book back, looking down at it.
“I’m not asking for any promises, Joshua. There are no expectations. Just take it, okay?”
He smiled sardonically. “I thought I was supposed to pray about it too.” Then, before she could answer, he turned away. “Well, Nathan will be ready to leave. I’d better go. Thank you.”
“Why me, Joshua?”
Again there was that enigmatic shrug. “It’s your book.”
She shook her head immediately. “No. You could have just left it somewhere for me to find.” Now her face filled with wonder. “You wanted to tell me. Why?”
He thought about that for a moment, realizing that he hadn’t really answered that question for himself. “I guess because of all the family, I thought you’d understand more than the others.”
“Yes,” she said softly, remembering back so many years before when Nathan had tried to get her to read this book with the leather cover. “Yes, I do understand, Joshua. And that’s why it’s so important that you keep reading. And that you pray about it. It wasn’t until I read it all the way through and asked Heavenly Father if it was true that I came to know.” She smiled, embarrassed a little by her own fervency. “Who knows, maybe it will come easier for you than it did for me.”
There was a short bark of bitter laughter. “It’s not the same for you, Lydia. You were never . . .” He stopped and looked away.
“I was never what?”
“Never mind. I’d better go before Nathan comes back.”
She grabbed at his arm. “I was never what, Joshua?”
A deep gloom had settled over him. “You were never as bitter as I was.”
“Maybe not, but I was bitter, Joshua. I hated Joseph Smith. Remember that day in Palmyra when the crowd had cornered Emma and was mocking her? I was right there, cheering them on.”
His head came up slowly. “You call that bitterness? How about sticking a pistol in your father’s face and coming so close to pulling the trigger that you still have nightmares about it? Or how about getting blind drunk and beating your wife until she is forced to flee with an infant baby? Were you ever that bitter? Did you ever drive women and children barefoot out of their homes into a winter’s night like I did in Jackson County?” His face was twisted with contempt—self-contempt. His voice dropped to a mere whisper. “Did you have your own brother bullwhipped until his whole body was a mass of bloody flesh?”
Now she understood. How many times had she run her fingers over the scars on Nathan’s back and chest and marveled at the emotions that had driven Joshua that night? She wanted to reach out to Joshua now, to somehow touch his wounds and heal them. But she didn’t know how. She was close to tears now. “You’ve changed, Joshua. That’s not you anymore.”
He shook his head, despair filling his eyes. “If I had changed, Olivia would be here with us now.” And with that, he swung around and plunged out of the tent, leaving her to stare after him in sorrow and wonder.
It was the year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred forty-six. In retrospect, it would prove to be one of those years that later historians would label as “pivotal,” “monumental,” “a watershed year.”
It was a year when a poem called “The Raven,” written by a neurotic genius named Edgar Allan Poe, a man who had flunked out of West Point, was being quoted all across the nation; when poetry by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier was being published in the East. West of Boston, a man by the name of Henry David Thoreau dwelt in a small cabin he had built on the shores of what would come to be known to the world as “Walden Pond.” In New York City, a man by the name of P. T. Barnum was shocking society—and making them pay dearly for it—as he displayed what he called “all that is monstrous, scaley, strange, and queer” to vast audiences. A song, “Jim Crack Corn, or the Blue Tail Fly,” was published and quickly became an American folk classic.
At an industrial fair in the nation’s capital, an inventor by the name of Elias Howe demonstrated an amazing new sewing machine that did the same amount of work in a manner of minutes that it took a woman hours to do by hand. And it did it better! The first telegraph lines were strung between Washington and Baltimore. A dentist in Boston, having learned that inhaling a fluid called sulfuric ether rendered one unconscious, became instrumental in establishing its use as an anesthetic for surgical operations. A rotary “lightning press” was patented in New York City that could run ten thousand sheets per hour. A portable, hand-cranked ice-cream freezer was invented by a woman in New Jersey.
Alexis de Tocqueville, a French statesman and philosopher who visited America in 1831, was greatly impressed with the new democracy but noted that Americans were “slaves of slogans.” In 1846, the slogan on everyone’s lips was “Manifest Destiny.” Coined by a New York publisher the year before, Manifest Destiny was a phrase that captured in two words the belief that it was the will of Divine Providence for the American democracy, with its constitutional form of government, to reign from sea to sea, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
At the beginning of 1846, the United States had expanded westward not even half the width of the continent. James K. Polk, a virtual political nobody, rode the wave of Manifest Destiny to the White House with his cry of “54-40 or fight,” a promise to make Oregon Territory part of the United States or go to war with Great Britain. Thankfully, Britain was not in a mood for battle and a compromise was reached giving the U.S. everything south of the 49th parallel, which would eventually include Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and most of Montana. England got to keep everything north of that line, including Vancouver Island,
British Columbia, and the vast wheat fields of what would become the province of Alberta.
The rest of the western continent—a vast, largely unexplored and unsettled territory—was controlled by Mexico and known as Upper California and New Mexico. Ten years before, the Republic of Texas had won its independence from Mexico by defeating Santa Anna’s forces at San Jacinto. Ever since, the two “nations” bitterly disputed over what constituted the southern border of Texas. Then Texas became a state of the Union, and the border dispute became the concern of the U.S. government. President Polk offered to buy California for $25 million and New Mexico for $5 million, but the offer was refused. Angry, the president ordered a two-thousand-man army into Texas—or Mexico, depending on whose border one accepted. An angry Mexican government sent an army across the Rio Grande. When the brief skirmish was over, eleven Americans were dead.
On May eleventh, an outraged President Polk sent a war message to Congress declaring that Mexico had “shed American blood upon American soil”—a statement of truth only if you accepted the U.S. definition of the border. An outraged Congress passed an act declaring war with Mexico, and on May thirteenth, 1846, the president signed it into law. Once again in its short history the United States of America was at war with a foreign power.
Chapter Notes
The original Book of Mormon was not divided into the chapters and verses found in modern editions, but the scriptures discussed by Lydia and Joshua are now 2 Nephi 4:17–18, 28.
Brigham Young’s vision of the valley described here was reported in the memoirs of John R. Young, son of Lorenzo D. Young. When word of the vision circulated through the camp, John R. recalled, it “formed the most entrancing theme of our conversations, and the national song of Switzerland became our favorite hymn: ‘For the strength of the hills we bless thee, Our God, our fathers’ God.’ ” (See CN, 18 May 1996, p. 10.)
John R. Young’s report seems to imply that the vision took place about this time on the trail. President George A. Smith reported that Brigham Young, apparently before the Saints left Nauvoo, had a vision in which he saw Joseph Smith and in which the Prophet showed Brigham what is now known as Ensign Peak, just north of Salt Lake City (see Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. [London: Latter-day Saints’ Book Depot, 1854–86], 13:85–86; see also Susa Young Gates, The Life Story of Brigham Young [London: Jarrolds Publishers, n.d.], p. 86). It is unclear whether these reports, that of John R. Young and that of George A. Smith, refer to the same vision or to two separate visions. For the purposes of the novel, it is assumed that the vision referred to by John R. Young took place while the Saints were in Iowa.
The prophecy about the gathering to the Rocky Mountains declared to those preparing to leave on Zion’s Camp was given in 1834 and was reported by Wilford Woodruff (see Ivan J. Barrett, Joseph Smith and the Restoration: A History of the Church to 1846 [Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1973], p. 278).
The details of various happenings in the United States during 1846, including the declaration of war against Mexico, come from two sources (Timothy Foote, “1846: The Way We Were—and the Way We Went,” Smithsonian, April 1996, pp. 38–42; and James Trager, The People’s Chronology: A Year-by-Year Record of Human Events from Prehistory to the Present, rev. ed. [New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1992], pp. 440–43).
Chapter 19
Parley Parker Pratt had celebrated his thirty-ninth birthday on April twelfth, less than a week following the sixteenth anniversary of the founding of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For nearly sixteen of those thirty-nine years he had been a member of the Church. Within days of his baptism in upstate New York, he had received a call to go to the western borders of the United States on a mission to the Lamanites. Since then he had left his home many times in the service of the Lord—to Upper Canada, to the eastern United States, to England. Now he was on a different kind of mission. On this morning of May sixteenth, 1846, he was one of the company sent ahead by President Young to find the Grand River, in Iowa Territory, and then choose a site where a second semipermanent settlement for the Saints could be established.
The Grand River, which was estimated to be about two hundred miles west of Nauvoo and about two-thirds of the way across Iowa, shouldn’t be that hard to find, he thought. If you kept moving west, surely you would come across it sooner or later. But things were not as simple now. Since Brigham Young had made the decision not to take the Saints into Missouri, they had left the road and turned to the northwest. Guided only by compasses, they moved across the fertile but trackless prairie. Each new stream, lined with trees or underbrush, and usually with steep banks or swampy ground on both sides, presented a new challenge for the wagon train. The crossing of even the smallest creek could turn out to be a fiendish task that exhausted teams, tried men’s tempers, and broke equipment.
They had been on the road for five days now, and still there was no sign of the Grand River. By the previous night, the group had grown quite discouraged. Had they miscalculated? Were the reports they had received incorrect? Or worse, were they striking off in a direction that just might miss the river altogether? One degree off course could take you right past the river without ever seeing it. Parley discounted that one. Their compasses were reliable, and the reports said the Grand River went another fifty miles north of their intended crossing. But the gloom in the camp had been real nevertheless. So while the others were still rising and preparing breakfast, Parley had saddled his horse and ridden out to see what he could see. He had come three, maybe four miles. The sky was thinly overcast, but the light was full enough and the air perfectly clear.
He went up in his stirrups now, peering ahead, letting his eyes scan the western horizon carefully, looking for any signs of a river. Up about a mile ahead, a little north of due west, he could see what looked like small groves of trees dotting a series of gently rolling hills. There was no distinct tree line that gave promise of a river, but that was to be expected. A river as substantial as the Grand would flow along a floodplain below the bluffs.
Feeling a stir of excitement, Parley sat back in the saddle and kicked his heels into the horse’s flanks, pointing the mare’s head at the highest of the hills before him. She broke into an easy lope and he leaned forward and let her run.
When he crested the bluff about five minutes later, he reined in abruptly. There was a sharp intake of breath. Differing shades of green—the yellow-green of new grass, the deeper hues of brush and shrubbery, and the richness of trees in full leaf—were mingled with a sprinkling of reds, yellows, blues, and purples of a thousand prairie wildflowers. The river snaked through it, brown from recent rains. It was a remarkable sight, and he drank it in with breathless excitement.
Enthralled, he clucked softly and his horse moved forward. There was a sudden movement. Two deer, startled from their morning’s browsing, bounded away. A moment later he saw a flash of gray in the underbrush. Peering more closely, he saw that it was a wolf watching him warily. In a moment it was gone, like a momentary puff of smoke taken by the wind. He took a deep breath, savoring the air and the scenery. It was as if he were looking down upon an exquisitely groomed English park.
He reined in again, and for a long moment just sat there, totally transfixed. Then, unbidden, an Old Testament image came to his mind. When Moses and the children of Israel moved up the east side of the Jordan toward the promised land, the Lord had directed Moses to the peak of a mountain that overlooked the river and the land beyond. Moses had recorded that from that mount he could see the promised land, eastward and northward, southward and westward. He named it Mount Pisgah.
With a flood of joy, Parley Parker Pratt removed his hat and lifted it high in the air. “This is Mount Pisgah,” he cried. “This is where we shall make our next place of rest.” He did not ride down farther. He had seen what he needed to see. With a whoop of elation, he turned the mare around and headed back toward the camp.
The afternoon sun, combined with the monotony of the endless trail,
was taking its toll on Nathan. After several days of on-again, off-again rain, the sun felt so good. His eyes kept drooping and his head bobbing as his horse plodded steadily along beside Joshua’s. It was May eighteenth, their sixth day since leaving Garden Grove. They had started out pretty good, making a total of twelve miles the first two days. But then the rain began again. They made only five miles the third day, and four the next. Yesterday it was bad enough that they had barely gone two miles before camping again. But the weather had cleared, and Nathan guessed that they had come about another eight or nine miles already. Being on horseback, had they been alone the two of them could have made a lot better time. But in a wagon train it was not the fastest man who set the pace but the slowest. And so they rode alongside the rear wagon, reins hanging loosely to let the horses pick their own way.
“Nathan?”
Nathan’s head came up and he forced his eyes open. Joshua was not looking at him and so had not seen that he had brought him back from the verge of falling asleep. “Yes?”
There was a long silence. Nathan waited, coming fully awake, curious now.
“I’ve been reading the Book of Mormon.”
Nathan stiffened so abruptly that his horse flinched beneath him, startled by the sudden movement on its back. “You what?” he finally managed.
Joshua was looking at him and grinning now. “I told Lydia I was worried about whether your heart could stand this or not.”
“You’re reading the Book of Mormon?” Nathan repeated slowly.
“That’s what I said.” Joshua was greatly amused.
A hundred questions came in a rush to Nathan’s mind. “How long?” he finally settled on.
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