by Alex Beam
“I told you, you didn’t know Emma as well as I did,” was the Prophet’s quiet rejoinder after learning of the eruption.
Alongside Hyrum sat Willard Richards, a longtime church loyalist, also bailing frantically while Rockwell wrestled with the oars. Richards was huge and ungainly, weighing three hundred pounds. He was about to turn forty years old, but his fleshy face had already collapsed into jowls, and his neck was a roll of fat. He was called “Dr. Richards” because he studied and practiced herbal medicine in Massachusetts before moving west. Like Rockwell and Hyrum Smith, Richards was an intimate acquaintance of Joseph’s. As the target of many lawsuits filed by a panoply of detractors, Joseph kept a meticulous record of all his daily activities; Richards was his chief scribe and recorder. Richards was also Joseph’s brother-in-law. His older sister Rhoda was one of Joseph Smith’s dozens of polygamous wives.
In Nauvoo, Illinois, the tightly controlled theocratic city-state that Joseph founded and ruled with a velvet fist, many other ties linked Richards with Joseph and Hyrum Smith. For instance, all three were officers in the 2,000-man Nauvoo Legion, a Mormon militia formed to defend the Saints against their enemies. Joseph, who had no military experience, was the Legion’s commander in chief and assigned himself the title of lieutenant general. Smith liked to tell visitors that he was the only lieutenant general in the United States, which was true. George Washington had been the last one, and Ulysses S. Grant would be the next. Lately, Smith had taken to parading around Nauvoo in his dark blue general’s uniform, with accompanying ostrich-plumed headgear.
Willard Richards and the Smiths were also members of the secret Quorum of the Anointed, one of Joseph’s many overlapping councils that ruled over the 10,000 or so Saints gathered in Nauvoo. The three men had received the secret Second Anointing, a religious ritual that Joseph said would confer eternal life. All four men in the skiff were members of the Mormons’ secret Council of Fifty. Joseph appointed the Fifty, whose membership was unknown to Nauvoo’s citizens at large, to be the core of the world’s government when Christ returned to earth. “The whole of America is Zion itself from north to south,” Joseph thundered at a speech in April. At a secret Fifty meeting, Smith “suffered himself to be ordained a king, to reign over the House of Israel forever.” The Council of Fifty explored the possibility of annexing Texas, restive under Spanish rule, and also Oregon, jointly administered with the queen of England, into a putative Mormon empire. To this end, Smith and the Fifty asked the US Congress for permission to raise a filibustering army of 100,000 men. That request was politely ignored.
Richards and the Smith brothers shared another secret in Zion, albeit a poorly kept one: They all had multiple wives. Richards had sealed himself to four different women. Hyrum Smith, who violently opposed the doctrine of “plural marriage” when Joseph first described it to him in 1843, later took three wives. Smith himself had between thirty-three and forty-eight wives, depending on who was counting.
The fourth man bobbing on the waves of the swollen river was thirty-eight-year-old Joseph Smith—prophet, seer, and revelator, the president of the High Priesthood, candidate for the presidency of the United States, king of the Kingdom of God, commander in chief of the armies of Israel, judge, mayor, architect, recorder of deeds, postmaster, hotel operator, steamboat owner, and husband, many times over. Born in Vermont, Smith was a far cry from the stereotypical New England man of God. “People coming to Nauvoo expected to find a kind of John the Baptist, but they found a very jolly prophet,” a convert remembered. “He used to laugh from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, it shook every bit of flesh in him.”
He was no hair-shirted prophet. Joseph, reared on subsistence farms, scorned the pious pharisees of the preaching profession. “I love that man better who swears a stream as long as my arm and [is attentive to] administering to the poor and dividing his substance, than the long smoothed faced hypocrites,” he told the Saints in 1843. Perhaps Mormons were supposed to shun alcohol, as prescribed by the revelation known as the Word of Wisdom, but Joseph didn’t. When he heard that some of the “brethren” had been drinking whiskey, “I investigated the case,” he reported. “Satisfied that no evil had been done,” Joseph “gave them a couple of dollars with directions to replenish the bottle to stimulate them in the fatigues of their sleepless journey.”
A very jolly prophet, to be sure.
Smith was a gregarious, articulate man, six feet tall and solidly built, with a long nose, a slightly receding hairline, and riveting blue eyes. He had a chipped front tooth, and sometimes a slight whistle crept into his speech. Like the barely noticeable verbal fluting, Joseph also had a hard-to-detect limp, the vestige of a grisly childhood leg operation. An innovative surgeon removed nine infected bone fragments from the seven-year-old Joseph’s lower leg, without benefit of anesthesia. The normal treatment for serious bone abscesses was amputation, which Joseph refused.
Essentially unlettered, he was a charismatic speaker capable of exerting extraordinary suasion on his audiences. Brigham Young proclaimed himself mesmerized when he first heard Joseph preach. “He took heaven, figuratively speaking, and brought it down to earth” was Young’s famous observation. Joseph taught that a restoration of Bible times was happening now, in nineteenth-century North America, and that his adherents were saints, as Luke and Paul called Jesus’s followers in the New Testament.
Joseph hadn’t limited himself to transcribing the wondrous Book of Mormon. He likewise undertook to retranslate the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, adding or expunging passages that he deemed to have been mistranslated or suppressed by corrupt church fathers. (He deleted the Song of Solomon, dismissing the sensuous text as “not Inspired Writing.”) Most notably, Smith added fourteen chapters to the Book of Genesis, and wrote himself into the narrative:
A seer will I raise up out of the fruit of thy loins . . . bringing them to a knowledge of their fathers in the latter days; and also to the knowledge of my covenants, saith the Lord.
And that seer will I bless, and they that seek to destroy him shall be confounded . . . and his name shall be called Joseph.
If Smith indulged in megalomania, he came by it honestly. From his humble beginnings as a diviner and scryer—a person who sees miraculous occurrences through translucent “seer” stones—in upstate New York, he had accomplished the work of several lifetimes. There were plenty of millenarian preachers with apocalyptic scenarios spinning their tales in northern New York’s “burned-over district” when Smith launched his career. Charles Grandison Finney, who became one of Smith’s detractors, claimed to have entertained Jesus Christ in his law office. The Campbellites, the Millerites, the Rappites; by 1844, they were mostly forgotten. “I am the only man that has ever been able to keep a whole church together since the days of Adam,” Smith bragged to his followers just a month before this parlous river crossing. “A large majority of the whole have stood by me. Neither Paul, John, Peter, nor Jesus ever did it. The followers of Jesus ran away from Him; but the Latter-day Saints never ran away from me yet.”
Increasingly alienated from the US government, Smith now envisioned himself as the spiritual monarch of his putative Kingdom of God. “I am above the kingdoms of the world, I have no laws,” he said. A devoted follower of Jesus Christ, Smith had been comparing himself to Mohammed, the warrior-prophet of Islam. To the world, Smith’s recently announced campaign for the US presidency seemed quixotic at best. But not to Joseph. “When I look into the Eastern papers and see how popular I am, I am afraid I shall be President,” he proclaimed.
FOR THE SEVENTH TIME IN HIS SHORT LIFE, SMITH WAS FLEEING justice. He had been tarred and feathered, tried, jailed, and exiled. A furious mob in Hiram, Ohio, once ordered Dr. Dennison, a local doctor, to castrate him. But Dennison, who by coincidence had attended baby Joseph’s delivery into the world in Vermont, couldn’t bring himself to do it. A virulent Mormon-hater, Dennison did try to force a vial of deadly nitric acid down Joseph’s throat. That explain
ed the broken tooth, sheared off in Dennison’s botched murder attempt. Joseph was once condemned to death and saved by a militia commander who refused to carry out the spurious execution order.
Joseph and his people were no strangers to biblical flights. They escaped their first settlement in Ohio just ahead of furious citizens who had lost money in a dubious Mormon banking venture. Reestablished in Missouri, the Mormons were chased eastward across the Mississippi in the winter of 1838, into Illinois. Just four years later, Joseph was on the run again from Missouri lawmen, hiding on the Mississippi shoreline and spending many nights in leaky skiffs much like the one he was now riding through the summer storm.
After each setback, Smith successfully led his flock to a new town, to a new state, to new strengths and to greater prosperity. The Mormons’ theology, which places Smith’s revelations on an equal footing with the Bible, was controversial, but their social ethic was not. Firmly committed to their co-religionists and to their families, the Mormons embraced hard work. One of their symbols, borrowed from Freemasonry, was the beehive. They endured unimaginable hardships and thrived wherever they put down roots.
Compared with his previous legal scrapes, the most recent charges against Smith must have seemed innocuous. Three weeks before this flight to Iowa, a Carthage magistrate accused the Smith brothers of inciting a riot, and of breaching the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press. Smith had indeed demanded the destruction of Nauvoo’s sole opposition newspaper, the Expositor, at a public meeting, calling the broadsheet “a greater nuisance than a dead carcass.” As mayor, he ordered the city marshal to destroy the paper’s printing press, and as Lieutenant General Smith, he instructed the Nauvoo Legion to help. Illinois governor Thomas Ford, who fancied himself a skillful intermediary between the politically powerful Mormons and their many enemies in the state, had promised Smith safe passage to Carthage. But Joseph feared the shadowy, marauding Illinois militiamen who despised the Mormon religion, hated the Saints’ anti-slavery politics, reviled them as Indian lovers, and equated polygamy with orgiastic excess.
Just a few days earlier, Smith’s mortal enemy, the firebrand newspaper editor Thomas Sharp, wrote that “we would not be surprised to hear of [Smith’s] death by violent means in a short time. He has deadly enemies—men whose wrongs have maddened them—and who are prepared at all times to avenge themselves.”
Pitching to and fro on the stormy waves, peering westward to discern the far bank, Joseph believed that he was fleeing for his life. He was right.
PART ONE
“In Illinois we’ve found a safe retreat . . . ”
2
KING JOSEPH
This Joe Smith must be set down as an extraordinary character, a prophet-hero, as Carlyle might call him. It is no small thing, in the blaze of this nineteenth century, to give to men a new revelation, found a new religion, establish new forms of worship, to build a city, and make proselytes in two hemispheres. Yet all this has been done by Joe Smith, and that against every sort of opposition, ridicule and persecution.
—New York Sun, 1843
JOSEPH SMITH IN 1844 WAS A MAN AT THE HEIGHT OF HIS powers. He was a national celebrity, perhaps more notorious than famous, but a figure of renown nonetheless. Ten years earlier, Ohio newspaper editor Eber Howe dredged up rumors, innuendos, wild stories, and half truths—a half truth is half true, remember—about Joseph’s early years as a prophet in upstate New York and published them in Mormonism Unvailed. The book, which found a wide audience, portrayed Joseph as a cynical and unscrupulous treasure hunter who had plagiarized the Book of Mormon from a rival divine and published it in 1830. Damningly, Howe included an affidavit from Joseph’s father-in-law, who “considered the whole of it,” meaning the Book of Mormon, “a delusion, and advised them to abandon it.”
In 1842, Smith’s former first counselor and apostate extraordinaire, John C. Bennett, published The History of the Saints: or, An Exposé of Joe Smith and Mormonism, filled with lurid tales of plural wifery, killing, and blasphemy, all of it laid at the feet of “Holy Joe, and his Danite band of murderers.” But Smith was a hard man to bring down. By the spring of 1844, Bennett was back at work on the poultry essays that would gain him some culinary fame—he was a determined champion of the Plymouth Rock hen—and Joseph was ruling a city of 10,000 people and corresponding with the rulers of France, Russia, Great Britain, and the United States.
Joseph Smith had been tested, and he had prevailed. In the spring of 1844, he delivered a sermon at an outdoor stand before an audience of several thousand Saints. He called out his detractors: “Come on! ye prosecutors! ye false swearers! All hell, boil over! Ye burning mountains, roll down your lava! For I will come out on the top at last. I have more to boast of than ever any man had.”
JOSEPH SMITH WAS BORN INTO A HUMBLE FARMING FAMILY IN Sharon, Vermont, in 1805. Crop failures and business reverses plunged the Smiths into debt, and Joseph Smith Sr. took his wife and four children westward to Palmyra, New York, to make a new start. Life was better there. Everyone in the family worked, either clearing land, sewing small baskets for sale, planting corn, or baking cakes to sell to travelers navigating the nearby Erie Canal. Several hostile memoirists berate young Joseph as an idler, but it is hard to imagine that anyone could have been idle in a family now numbering eight, struggling to survive on newly cleared land purchased with loans the Smiths could barely afford.
Joseph embarked on his unusual religious inquiries when he was barely an adolescent. Although the details of his meetings with angels and heavenly spirits changed considerably over the years, the core story remained the same. As a young boy, he said, he had noticed the multiplicity of churches. In tiny Palmyra alone, there were four denominations—Presbyterian, Quaker, Methodist, and Baptist. Joseph said he asked in private prayer, Which religion is true? The answer came when he was fourteen. Jesus Christ and his Heavenly Father appeared to him in a vision and promised to explain the tenets of true belief.
Encounters with the godhead were not rare in early nineteenth-century America, and they were not so uncommon in western New York. America was experiencing the Second Great Awakening, a breakout period of radical, passionate rethinking of traditional Christian worship. The twenty-four United States had reinvented the Old World, and American ministers and prophets were revivifying the old religions. The energy and novelty of the New World prompted many to dream of a radical new world order, highlighted by the Second Coming of Christ. New doctrine was everywhere. Ann Lee’s Shakers had established a Lake Ontario beachhead just thirty miles from the Smiths’ Palmyra home. The Shakers danced feverishly, practiced celibacy, and worshipped Lee as the reincarnation of Christ. Just twenty-five miles to the south, another striking woman, Jemima Wilkinson, claimed to be the risen Christ. Although she could neither read nor write, Wilkinson recited the Bible by heart, occasionally aided by her sidekick, Elijah. The Baptist farmer William Miller had plenty of followers in northwestern New York, which became known as the “burned-over district” because the hot fires of religious revivalism swept through so often. (“A mad mix of doctrines and preachers,” critic Harold Bloom has called it.) Miller predicted that Jesus would return to America in 1843, then revamped his prediction to 1844, and so on.
Nor was meeting Jesus a unique occurrence in that time and place. Sixteen-year-old Elias Smith (no relation to Joseph) met “the Lamb upon Mt. Sion” in the woods near his Woodstock, Vermont, home. John Thompson, a teacher at Palmyra Academy, saw Christ descend from the sky “in a glare of brightness exceeding tenfold the brilliancy of the meridian Sun.” Pamphleteer Asa Wild of Amsterdam, New York, spoke with “the awful and glorious majesty of the Great Jehovah” and learned “that every denomination of professing Christians had become extremely corrupt,” news akin to the divine message received by Joseph Smith.
As Joseph matured into his middle and late teens, his religious curiosity melded with a collection of hobbies that became his vocation: dowsing, gold digging, treasure hunting, and �
�scrying.” These pursuits were related, and all semilegitimate at the time. A dowser looks for underground water aquifers, often using the tools of superstition, for example, a branch from a witch hazel tree. A talented dowser or treasure hunter might stare through a translucent rock, or peep stone, to identify underground pockets of water, or hidden Indian relics, or buried gold. Staring through the peep stone was scrying, from the word descry, meaning to perceive or reveal.
As a teenager, Joseph gained a reputation as someone with reliable powers of necromancy and intuition. Impressed by his talent, a local farmer hired Joseph to travel with him to Pennsylvania to search for a lost Spanish silver mine. In Harmony, Pennsylvania, Joseph and his employer boarded for a few weeks with a famous hunter named Isaac Hale. Smith and Hale never hit it off. Hale reviled the money-digging expedition, describing his lodger as “a careless young man—not very well educated and saucy and insolent.” Hale’s recollection was doubtless colored by Joseph’s abduction of his tall, attractive daughter Emma. The young couple fell in love and fled Harmony to secretly marry in New York and live with Joseph’s family.
A few months before Joseph’s eighteenth birthday, the parallel strands of his life—his religious bent and his relentless search for treasure—came together. As he later explained, an angel named Moroni, “glorious beyond description,” cloaked in “a loose robe of most exquisite whiteness,” appeared to him one night and told him where to find a book, “written upon gold plates . . . giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent [with] the fullness of the everlasting Gospel contained in it.” This was the Book of Mormon, which Joseph would have to translate using two seer stones, like peep stones, that Moroni said he would find buried with the golden tablets.