by Alex Beam
With each passing month, however, Strang revealed more of his personal eccentricities. He knew that Joseph Smith had created secret conclaves for chosen Saints, so he quickly introduced a secret organization called the Halcyon Order of the Illuminati. Strang, the order’s “Imperial Primate,” ordained a few dozen of his followers as chevaliers, marshals, earls, and cardinals. In the initiation rite, he escorted new members to a dark room, where he anointed them with a mysterious, luminous oil that created a halo effect above their heads. William Smith discovered that the oily mixture contained phosphorus and could set a man’s hair on fire. Strang pooh-poohed the risk, likening his initiation to the miracles of Christ.
On July 8, 1850, Strang summoned his followers to an odd event inside his partly finished tabernacle on Beaver Island. Attended by seventy dignitaries wearing scarlet robes, Strang presented himself to his followers seated on a throne, wearing a long red-and-white gown. In accordance with the teaching of the Book of the Law of the Lord, the Lake Michigan prophet declared himself to be the king of Beaver Island, and beyond. A follower lowered a paper crown studded with stars onto Strang’s head, while an apostle brought forth a “royal diadem” and placed it in Strang’s hands. The congregation testified that “the Kingdom of God is set up on the Earth no more to be thrown down.”
This was the fulfillment of Joseph Smith’s prediction that the Saints would establish the Kingdom of God on earth in preparation for the Second Coming. Joseph had already secretly crowned himself king of the Kingdom of God, although not in public. Joseph correctly guessed that the United States wouldn’t tolerate any monarch, no matter how vaporous his realm. As the leader of perhaps 20,000 not very popular Mormons adrift in an ocean of Gentiles, Joseph hid his kingship under a bushel. Strang had no such inhibitions, apparently unaware of the farcical effect of his claims. He aped Joseph in yet another sphere, baptizing dead celebrities in the chilly White River that flowed just north of Voree. Lord Byron, Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon Bonaparte, John Adams, and John Quincy Adams all became Strangite Saints in their respective afterlives.
Soon it became clear that Strang intended to copy yet another of Joseph’s doctrines; he was a secret polygamist. William Marks and the Smith family rallied to Strang mainly because he publicly abjured polygamy. But Strang’s private life proved to be complex indeed. For seven months starting in 1849, Strang traveled the country with his young nephew, Charley Douglass, who served as his assistant and secretary. “Douglass” was in fact a comely nineteen-year-old Mormon girl named Elvira Field, whom Strang had secretly married in the summer of 1849. At the time he was thirty-six years old, and already married to a wife who had borne him two children. Strang, who had campaigned so militantly against spiritual wifery, said the plates made him do it, specifically, the Plates of Laban, with their secret Law of the Lord. “Strang translated the plates that he claimed were genuine,” a follower explained
and found in them the principle of polygamy; and after the translation he published it, and then he indorsed the doctrine of polygamy after he was commanded to do so. . . .
“Charley Douglass’s” secret wouldn’t last long. One Saint raised the question of Charley’s “physiological peculiarities” with Strang, who quickly answered that Charley had a look-alike sister on Beaver Island.* Around the time that Elvira delivered her first child, Strang’s first wife, Mary, fled Beaver Island, for reasons one can only surmise. Strang was soon openly espousing plural wifery, and eventually had five wives. Just as the Hancock County Gentiles deemed polygamy to be sinful and perverse, so did the fishermen and lumberjacks who were Strang’s neighbors along the Lake Michigan shoreline. They didn’t like the Mormons casting their votes en bloc, either, and they didn’t like Strang’s autarkic economic policies, which made lake traders unwelcome in Mormon settlements. In 1856, the man who claimed to be the next Joseph Smith died just as Joseph did, cut down by vigilante assassins who enjoyed the protection of the powers that be. Strang was killed with the connivance of the US Navy, which quickly spirited his killers away from Beaver Island, and away from prosecution. The difference between Strang and Smith was that Joseph’s church continued to thrive and grow for 170 years after his death, while Strangism devolved into a comical footnote to the history of religion.
FOR BRIGHAM YOUNG, INTENT ON CONSOLIDATING HIS POWER in Nauvoo, Strangism was an annoyance and not much more. Discrediting Sidney Rigdon, an ordained “seer and revelator” and a comrade who spent three months with Joseph Smith fighting off rats in a fetid Missouri jail, took a higher priority. In a six-hour public trial just one month after the Young-Rigdon showdown, the Quorum of the Twelve excommunicated their former colleague, in absentia. “His late revelations are of the devil,” William Phelps testified. “Brother Joseph said he would carry him no more,” Apostle Heber Kimball chimed in. Brigham Young called Rigdon “a black hearted wretch,” and the former first counselor’s fate was sealed. Except for a few dissenting votes, including that of William Marks, the assembled Saints washed their hands of Joseph Smith’s longtime colleague.
“President Young arose and delivered Sidney Rigdon over to the buffetings of Satan in the name of the Lord,” the official church history recorded, “and all the people said, ‘Amen.’”
Rigdon quickly moved back East to end his life in poverty and humiliation. In his dotage, Rigdon’s mania became more acute. His family eventually forbade him to preach. “He seemed sane upon every other subject except religion,” his son Wyckliffe Rigdon wrote. “When he got on that subject, he seemed to lose himself and his family would not permit him to talk in that subject, especially with strangers.”
Joseph Smith’s family was a separate problem. Emma and Brigham were at loggerheads. The two feuded over money. For public consumption, Joseph had affected ecclesiastic poverty. He once claimed to own a horse, two pet deer, “two old turkeys and four young ones . . . an old cow . . . a dog, his wife, children, and a little household furniture.” In fact he had placed much of his property, and some church properties, in Emma’s name, and Emma feared that the apostles would confiscate the Nauvoo Mansion and other assets from her, leaving her destitute. Joseph’s estate was deeply in debt. His 1842 bankruptcy petition had failed, and creditors were still demanding yearly payments on his questionable property claims in Nauvoo and across the river. “There is considerable danger if the family begin to dispute about the property, that Joseph’s creditors will come forward and use up all the property there is,” his confidant William Clayton noted in a July 2, 1844, diary entry. “If they will keep still there is property enough to pay the debts and plenty left for other uses.”
Emma and Brigham were likewise irreconcilable on polygamy, which Emma started to deny had ever existed. Brigham voiced astonishing accusations against Emma: “Twice she undertook to kill him,” he charged, suggesting that she tried to poison her husband, and that she delivered him to certain death by allowing him to return to Nauvoo from his abortive flight to Montrose, Iowa. Brigham craved the legitimacy of the Smith family’s approval, reacting angrily when it eluded him.
The sulfurous William became a proxy in the war between Emma and the Twelve. On the first anniversary of Joseph’s death, the boys’ mother, Lucy Mack Smith, promulgated a dream in which God told her that “the Presidency of the Church belongs to William, according to his lineage, he having inherited it from the family before the foundation of the world.” The Twelve grudgingly appointed William to be church patriarch, a largely ceremonial position, then quickly realized their mistake. William claimed that the patriarch ruled over the Twelve, which prompted an immediate, vituperative response from Brigham and the apostles. On a day when he decided to address the Saints in the grove, William arrived to find the seats and benches smeared with feces. His challenge to the Twelve ended with his excommunication, and a long period of self-imposed exile from mainstream Mormonism. William famously observed that the Twelve “were mean enough to steal if they could get the chance even Christ’s supper off his plate,
or seduce the Virgin Mary, or Rob an orphan child of 25 cents. So damnable are their acts & conduct that old Judas would be a perfect gentleman to these men.” After Brigham’s death, William joined the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, led by the Prophet’s oldest son, Joseph Smith III.
BRIGHAM HAD CONSOLIDATED HIS GRIP ON THE NAUVOO SAINTS. But while he was shrugging off leadership challenges from Rigdon, Strang, and William Smith, the same forces that had marshaled to kill Joseph were gathering strength again. This time the “old settlers,” still led by Thomas Sharp and the marauder Levi Williams, were agitating for a final solution: the expulsion of the Mormons from Illinois. Sharp, who offered “THREE CHEERS FOR THE BRAVE COMPANY WHO SHOT [Joseph Smith] TO PIECES” shortly after the murders, had never stopped waving the bloody shirt. “It is impossible that the two communities can long live together,” the Signal editorialized shortly after Joseph’s death. “They can never assimilate. We repeat our firm conviction that one or the other must leave.”
Even the pusillanimous Governor Ford realized that civil society was doomed in Hancock County. In April 1845, he confided to Brigham Young that the Mormons would always be “enemies and outcasts” in Illinois, privately suggesting that Young take the Saints elsewhere:
Your religion is new and it surprises the people as any great novelty in religion generally does. However truly and sincerely your own people may believe in it, the impression on the public mind everywhere is that your leading men are impostors and rogues and that the others are dupes and fools. . . .
If you can get off by yourselves, you may enjoy peace; but, surrounded by such neighbors, I confess that I do not see the time when you will be permitted to enjoy quiet.
The artificial peace that followed the killings at the Carthage jail effectively ended with the trial, and its summary acquittals. The message was clear: No anti-Mormon depredation would ever be punished in Illinois. The old settlers were free to act as they pleased.
In the early fall of 1845, Levi Williams and his Warsaw vigilantes began to systematically attack Mormon farms and settlements outside Nauvoo. The attacks began in Morley’s Settlement, twenty-five miles south of Nauvoo. “The mob is upon us,” two Mormons reported. “They have burned six buildings already. . . . They are in number about two hundred. They shoot at every brother they see.” Over the course of several weeks, Williams and his “regulators” attacked Mormon enclaves in Lima, Bear Creek, Camp Creek, and La Harpe, destroying about two hundred homes and farms and torching innumerable mills and hay ricks. By September 16, Brigham had had enough. For the fourth time in recent Mormon history, their leader backed away from a shooting war with the Gentiles, saving untold lives in the process. Young issued a “Proclamation to Col. Levi Williams and Mob Party,” informing his enemies that “it is our intention to leave Nauvoo and the country next spring.” The Mormons soon hammered out an understanding with a committee of distinguished Illinoisans, including Joseph’s friend Stephen Douglas, that they would plant no new crops in Nauvoo and depart the area “as soon as the grass is green and the water runs.” That implied that they would leave around March, when the Mississippi ice floes would start breaking up, and their teams of horse and oxen could graze on the Iowa plains during their journey westward.
Unbeknownst to the Gentiles, and even to most Mormons, Brigham and the Twelve had decided to move to the Rocky Mountains, to one of two vast and uninhabited tracts of land: the Great Salt Lake Valley or Utah Valley, just to the north. “Uninhabited,” though, was a figure of speech; several Native American tribes frequented both valleys, which formally belonged to Mexico’s California holdings. But Mexico was busy losing a war to the United States, and Young and the Twelve correctly surmised that it would be several years before anyone bothered to lay claim to these arid, intermontane expanses. Getting there would be quite a trick. From Nauvoo, the trail led more or less due west, for 1,300 miles along the course of the Missouri, Platte, and Sweetwater Rivers. The last few hundred miles of the journey would require arduous mountain trekking, some of it through passes and along ranges known only to a small coterie of scouts and mountain men.
If the Saints knew anything about the land enclosed by the Rockies, they knew it was bleak. But once the Twelve announced their relocation plans, the church-owned Nauvoo Neighbor began publishing upbeat excerpts from the journals of legendary explorer John C. Fremont:
The Rocky Mountains . . . instead of being desolate and impassable . . . embosom beautiful valleys, rivers, and parks, with lakes and mineral springs, rivaling and surpassing the most enchanting parts if the Alpine regions of Switzerland. The Great Salt Lake, one of the wonders of the world . . . and the Bear River Valley, with its rich bottoms, fine grass, walled up mountains . . . is for the first time described.
The biblical nature of the proposed journey was lost on no one. Speaking to a general conference of the church in the fall of 1845, Apostle Heber Kimball announced that “the time of our exodus is come; I have looked for it for many years.” He continued:
A famous painting by Lynn Fausett depicting the Saints’ first departures from Nauvoo to the Iowa Territory. In the background, the Nauvoo Temple is fully completed.
Credit: Utah State Historical Society
We want to take you to a land, where the white man’s foot never trod, not a lion’s whelps, nor the devil’s; and there we can enjoy it, with no one to molest us and make us afraid; and we will bid all the nations welcome, whether Pagans, Catholics or Protestants.
Young stalled for time with the Saints’ tormentors, in part to prepare for the daunting journey west—the Mormons built 3,400 wagons that winter—but also to complete the prophesied construction of the Nauvoo Temple. The Twelve had promised that Joseph’s secret temple endowment ritual, heretofore administered on the second floor of his general store, would be available to any Saint in good standing when the Temple was completed. The feverish construction finally ended in December, and the long-awaited “temple work” began. Husbands and wives were sealed in eternal marriage; plural wives were sealed to men “for time”; dead relatives were baptized and assured eternal life; and the Twelve introduced a ceremony of spiritual adoption, in which church leaders sealed friends and distant relatives to themselves as children. Most Saints were desperate to receive the basic endowment ritual and don their temple garments, which Joseph and the Twelve taught they would need to meet Jesus Christ in the final days, and to enjoy the prophesied exaltation. Over 5,000 Saints received their temple blessings in November and December 1845, with Brigham Young, Heber Kimball, and other apostles sometimes working twenty consecutive hours to process believers through the elaborate rites. By February 1, the temple work had ended, and the first Mormon companies assembled at the base of Parley Street to be ferried across the Mississippi to Iowa. The river was flowing, although it would freeze up later in the month, easing the way for the hundreds of wagons wending their way west.
On February 15, Brigham Young and his brother Joseph led a company of fifteen wagons down to the water’s edge. The Mormons were running six ferries, operating simultaneously, across the frigid river. Willard Richards and his eight wives filled two of the wagons lined up directly behind Brigham. Like many Saints, Young had failed to sell his Nauvoo home. The Mormons’ Hancock County tormentors often didn’t bother to bid on properties they knew would fall into their hands as soon as the Saints left the state. Brigham carefully maneuvered his oxen onto a broad flatboat, helped pole his worldly possessions out into the roiling current, and led the Mormons west, into the mainstream of American history.
* One disaffected listener, S. S. Thornton, wrote to his father-in-law that “Mr. Young had tried to mimic Joseph for several years . . . and on his return from Boston after [Joseph’s] martyrdom even went out to get a dentist to take out a tooth on the same side that Joseph lost one, to make myself appear as much like him as possible.”
* Following the dictates of the Plates of Laban, which forbade “every form of [women�
��s] dress that pinches or compresses the body or limbs,” Strang had a predilection for dressing women in pants and enforced a dress code on Beaver Island. Females had to wear ankle-length bloomers, which he called “Mormon dress.” A visiting Gentile wrote: “I do not object to the number [of wives assigned to] each man, but the trousers I do not like.”
14
THIS WORLD AND THE NEXT
Their innocent blood, with the innocent blood of all the martyrs under the altar that John saw, will cry unto the Lord of Hosts till he avenges that blood on the earth.
—Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Section 135
MORMONS HAVE A FERVENT, OFTEN BLOODY-MINDED, FAITH in retributive justice. Here is a letter sent to Nauvoo by James Sloan, a leading Saint missionary in England:
The Marquis of Downshire, who oppressed the Saints at Hillsborough in Ireland, has had the pleasure of his son, Lord William, being killed by his horse at a hunt in England, a few weeks past, and Mr. Reilly, his agent, who aided in their abuse, has received the third attack of some paralytic affliction and obliged to resign his office; his son again, who headed a mob to annoy the Saints and prevent preaching, has gone to Cork in bad health; So much for them. [Emphasis in original.]