Devil's Gate

by David Roberts

  All this controversy would amount to a mere footnote to the history of the nineteenth century in America had Mormonism caught flame briefly and then flickered out, like so many other religions of the day. Whatever Smith’s shortcomings as a prose stylist, he possessed in spades those two essential qualities of the messianic leader—charisma and oratorical eloquence. The testimonies to his ability to hold an audience spellbound when he preached are legion. One of his first and most important converts, Parley P. Pratt, related, “I have ever known him to retain a congregation of willing and anxious listeners for many hours together, in the midst of cold or sunshine, rain or wind, while they were laughing at one moment and weeping the next.”

  Traveling all over the region, Smith slowly but doggedly made converts. One of the first to fall under his spell was Brigham Young, who had moved in 1829 to Mendon, a village only fifteen miles southwest of Palmyra. Twenty-eight years old, married, with a three-year-old daughter, Young was eking out a living, like his father, making chairs and baskets that he sold door-to-door.

  Young, however, was no instant convert. At age twenty-two, he had joined the Methodist Church, but he was far from satisfied with that faith, having also attended services in Mendon of half a dozen other Protestant denominations, ranging from Episcopalian to Quaker. One day in 1830, only two or three weeks after it had been published, a copy of the Book of Mormon was thrust into his hands by his brother Phineas. Brigham struggled with the dense tome for two years before he became convinced, as he later wrote, that “I knew it was true, as well as I knew that I could see with my eyes, or feel by the touch of my fingers, or be sensible of the demonstration of any sense.”

  An important and unresolved question about Brigham Young is how literate he was. By his own admission, he had received only eleven days of formal schooling in his life. The hundreds of letters that he “wrote” after he became Prophet of the church were all dictated to scribes. Some skeptical visitors to Salt Lake City during Young’s heyday claimed that the official epistles he regularly issued were ghostwritten by his right-hand men, and that Young himself could scarcely write more than his own name. Such calumnies must be taken with a grain of salt, for the nineteenth-century authors of exposés of the Mormon empire had their own axes to grind. Many a close acquaintance observed him reading a book now and then, and even his ex-wife Ann Eliza Young, whose Wife No. 19, or the Story of a Life in Bondage is perhaps the angriest of all those exposés, wrote in 1875, “He loses his temper every morning over the Salt Lake Tribune—the leading Gentile [i.e., non-Mormon] paper of Utah.”

  On April 15, 1832, Young was baptized into the LDS church. A few months later, with his friend Heber C. Kimball, who would become one of the most important men in the Utah theocracy, he traveled to Kirtland, Ohio, to meet the Prophet. (Kirtland was the first of several places where Smith tried to establish an autonomous colony for the Saints, free from Gentile distractions and attacks.) Kimball and Young found Smith in the forest chopping wood. “He was happy to see us and bid us welcome,” Young later testified. That evening, in Smith’s house, the Prophet urged Young to get on his knees and pray. All at once, Young spontaneously began to speak in tongues.

  This performance, which was to become a mainstay in the mystical apparatus of Mormon church services, is dryly explicated by Morris Werner, Brigham’s skeptical biographer: “It consisted of a babble of incomprehensible sounds which were supposed to be the spirit of God resting upon the speaker, and these sounds were interpreted by another person in the congregation as soon as the speaker had uttered them.”

  THE DUTY OF every Saint to gather to Zion was announced by Joseph Smith within six months of the founding of his church. As befit a man who would set himself up with the formal title of Prophet, Seer, Revelator, and President (a title Brigham Young would inherit), Smith received frequent revelations from God. One of the first decreed: “And ye are called to bring to pass the gathering of mine elect…they shall be gathered in unto one place upon the face of this land.” Moreover, “The glory of the Lord shall be there, and it shall be called Zion.”

  The only question was where Zion might prove to be. From the start, Smith looked westward, for the revelation also specified that the gathering place “shall be on the borders of the Lamanites.”

  According to the Book of Mormon, the Lamanites (pronounced “LAY-man-ites”) were the American Indians. All the different tribes found in North America were the descendants of Laman, one of the sons of Lehi, the patriarch who had built a ship and sailed with his people from the Holy Land to the New World around 600 B.C. Another son of Lehi was named Nephi.

  By about A.D. 231, the followers and descendants of Laman and Nephi started a war with each other that lasted more than 150 years. Finally, the Lamanites—unbelievers in Christ (who himself had appeared in the New World between his resurrection and his ascent into heaven), reduced to the state of savages—wiped out the righteous Nephites. (Moroni, the last Nephite alive, buried the golden plates shortly before his death.) For their wrongdoings, God cursed the Lamanites with dark skin. The Lamanites of today, however, are not beyond redemption. If they accept the Christian God and convert to the LDS church, they can become in the next life “a white and delightsome people.” (Later editions of the Book of Mormon changed the phrase to “a pure and delightsome people.”)

  The new faith got off to a slow but steady start. Founded with a congregation of only six adherents, the church plucked converts here and there from the towns around western New York and Pennsylvania, until by the autumn of 1830 Smith could count sixty followers. Having divined the prophecy that Zion would be located “on the borders of the Lamanites,” Smith sent Oliver Cowdery, Parley Pratt, and two other disciples on a mission to the west, with instructions not only to preach to the Indians but to scout for a place to establish Zion.

  On their mission, the scouts met thirty-seven-year-old Sidney Rigdon, a prominent preacher who had founded a utopian colony in Kirtland, only a few miles east of Cleveland. Reading the Book of Mormon, Rigdon was impressed, and started to doubt the validity of his own sect. Mormon history is full of narratives and parables that sound almost too good to be true. According to one of these, not only was Rigdon at once converted to the LDS faith, but so was every member of his colony.

  Once Rigdon met Smith, the idea of Kirtland as the gathering place began to seem inevitable. Yet the Prophet had a hard time convincing his New York flock to pick up and move, for they would have to sell the homes and farms they had worked so hard to build and cultivate. To persuade the recalcitrant, Smith received another revelation, which proclaimed in part that Kirtland lay on the eastern edge of the promised land, which stretched all the way from Ohio to the Pacific Ocean.

  Kirtland lasted as the Mormon stronghold for seven years, but almost from the start, serious problems arose there. Rigdon and Smith had minor fallings-out; a number of Rigdon’s former congregation did not take easily to the younger man’s assuming supremacy in the church; and curious nonbelievers flocked to the town to gawk at the Saints as they might animals in a zoo. Smith made the mistake of curing, in front of his congregation, a woman with a paralyzed arm. When the doubters later challenged him to perform other cures, he failed to make a lame man walk or to revive a dead child.

  Antagonisms with non-Mormon Ohio neighbors sometimes erupted into violence. The nadir of Smith’s Kirtland years came in March 1832, when a mob in the nearby town of Hiram broke into the house where he and Rigdon were sleeping and tarred and feathered them. In Fawn Brodie’s vivid evocation,

  They stripped him, scratched and beat him with savage pleasure, and smeared his bleeding body with tar from head to foot. Ripping a pillow into shreds, they plastered him with feathers. It is said that Eli Johnson demanded that the prophet be castrated, for he suspected Joseph of being too intimate with his sister, Nancy Marinda. But the doctor who had been persuaded to join the mob declined the responsibility at the last moment, and Johnson had to be content with seeing the prophet
beaten senseless.

  Kirtland set the pattern for the first fourteen difficult years of the LDS church’s existence in the United States. Loyalists tend to paint this period as a continuous ordeal of persecution of the Saints by intolerant neighbors, but there is abundant evidence that the Saints themselves often provoked those neighbors with aggressive actions of their own. For one thing, the Mormon colony sometimes behaved as though it were exempt from the laws of the state in which it resided. Thus in 1837, Smith organized the Kirtland Safety Society Bank Company and began to issue the church’s own paper money. The Ohio legislature refused to incorporate the bank, and warrants for the arrest of both Smith and Sidney Rigdon as counterfeiters were issued. (Rigdon was brought to court, and as a result, the Bank Company stopped making its own money. In January 1838, Smith fled Ohio rather than submit to arrest.)

  Smith’s solution to the Kirtland crisis was to announce a new locus for Zion. As early as 1831, Oliver Cowdery and Parley Pratt had pushed their mission to the Lamanites much farther west. They came back from Missouri raving about the felicities of Jackson County, on the western edge of the state, bordering the Missouri River, beyond which the Indian Territory stretched. Cowdery himself urged the fledgling town of Independence (founded only four years earlier) as the new seat of Zion.

  Smith sent a small body of settlers west to establish a colony near Independence. Meanwhile, he was visited by further divine revelations. One of them delivered the surprising information that the Garden of Eden lay not in the Holy Land of the Near East, but in Jackson County, Missouri.

  Yet Independence would never become the Mormon Zion. Frictions with neighbors there grew even more heated than they had in Ohio. In 1833, the colonists were driven out of their homes by a mob, and in November an armed battle that cost the lives of two Gentiles and one Mormon ended with the withdrawal of the Mormons from Jackson County. Most of the refugees moved to neighboring precincts to the north.

  In August 1836, two of those refugees founded the town of Far West, about thirty-five miles north of Independence. Caldwell County was created from scratch to accommodate the Saints. Arriving there two years later, Smith declared that Far West lay in the exact place where Cain had slain Abel.

  Smith was nothing if not ambitious. Even as the Kirtland colony was disintegrating before his eyes, in June 1837 the Prophet sent three of the church’s leading missionaries to England to preach to the poor. Thus began the wildly successful campaign of conversion in Great Britain, which would send so many of the hundreds of pioneers to Utah in the 1850s, including the vast majority of the handcart emigrants of 1856.

  The year 1838, by far the most troubled yet in Mormonism’s brief existence, could well have seen the extinction of the church. In January, Smith abandoned Kirtland and moved to Far West. Brigham Young, by now one of Smith’s most trusted aides, went with him. In July, the remaining Kirtland colonists, about five hundred to six hundred strong, traveled by wagon train to the new Zion in northwest Missouri.

  During these tumultuous years, Mormonism’s darkest secret was polygamy. There is good evidence that Smith practiced “plural marriage” as early as 1831, and that not long after that he gave orders to his closest lieutenants to do likewise. Rumors of the practice inevitably leaked out. In 1835, the church promulgated the first of its numerous official denials, in a resolution at its annual conference: “Inasmuch as this Church has been reproached with the crime of fornication and polygamy, we declare that we believe that one man should have one wife, and one woman but one husband, except in case of death, when either is at liberty to marry again.”

  For the next seventeen years, LDS authorities continued to deny that the church authorized polygamy, until Brigham Young came publicly clean in 1852. Brodie characterizes those denials as “a remarkable series of evasions and circumlocutions involving all sorts of verbal gymnastics.”

  Meanwhile, through the late 1830s and into the 1840s, Smith secretly married one wife after another, with a crescendo of such liaisons sanctified in 1843 and 1844. Brodie offers a list of forty-nine plural wives during Smith’s lifetime; there may have been more. The man, of course, could hardly keep his polygamy secret from his first wife, Emma. From the start, she was intensely distraught over her husband’s intimacies with other women, and could never be reconciled to his arguments in favor of the practice. Her obstinacy grew so truculent that in 1843, Smith put an extraordinary revelation in writing. In it, God spoke directly to Emma Smith, commanding her to “receive all those that have been given unto my servant Joseph.” The punishment for her refusal was extreme: “But if she will not abide this commandment she shall be destroyed, saith the Lord; for I am the Lord thy God, and will destroy her if she abide not in my law.”

  Yet Smith and his high-level confederates managed to keep any confirmation of the rumors of polygamy away from the ears of the rank and file. One may credit the remarkable keeping of this secret for more than two decades to a sheeplike credulity on the part of ordinary Saints, or to a masterly job of spin control among its hierarchy. As late as the early 1850s, Fanny Stenhouse, an English Saint living in France, met with a group of fellow female believers in Boulogne-sur-mer to discuss the gossip. Their gathering was sternly admonished by Apostle John Taylor (later to play a critical role in the handcart emigration): “We are accused here of actions the most indelicate and disgusting, such as none but a corrupt and depraved heart could have contrived.” Taylor went on to cite early proclamations from the Prophet himself about the sanctity of monogamous marriage, scolding the women for their lack of faith.

  Skeptical observers of the church point to this twenty-one-year denial of polygamy as proof of the most arrogant hypocrisy on the part of Smith and his chief confederates. Defenders argue that “plural marriage” was so radical a doctrine in mid-nineteenth-century America that disclosure could have meant the dissolution of a faith that had already been hounded by its persecutors out of Ohio and Missouri.

  Those camps divide along similar lines when it comes to the question of why Smith came up with the doctrine of polygamy in the first place. The skeptics see it as a simple rationalization of his own propensity for womanizing (evidence of which preceded the founding of the church). Brodie imagines “a man of Joseph’s physical charm” growing tired of his older wife, worn out from childbearing; and “Kirtland was overflowing with women who idolized him.” Smith is also reported to have confessed to a close friend, “Whenever I see a pretty woman I have to pray for grace.”

  Yet when Smith came to argue for the logic of plural marriage, he did so by citing the example of Old Testament patriarchs such as Abraham and Jacob, who took more than one wife. In a twist of Mormon doctrine, a woman’s eternal salvation can be gained only through marriage. Polygamy could actually save the old crones and maiden ladies who might otherwise get passed over from exclusion from heaven. There are numerous later nineteenth-century testimonies by Mormon women defending polygamy, and of course there are breakaway Mormon groups today that practice polygamy.

  AS THE NEW Zion, Far West, Missouri, would last less than a year. The Saints must have thought that by removing themselves to a sparsely settled region, they might flourish free from outside interference. Yet they could hardly have chosen a worse place. In the words of Brigham Young biographer Stanley Hirshson, “Within the state raged every imaginable conflict: slaveholder fought abolitionist; Indian battled white man; and Democrat clashed with Whig. To this was added another struggle: Saint versus Gentile.”

  By 1838 the numbers of Mormons in northwest Missouri had swelled to between eight thousand and ten thousand, 1,500 of them in Far West alone. It was too large a throng to be ignored. And the Saints did their part to stir up trouble. The paranoia engendered by very real persecution and vilification around Palmyra and Kirtland transmuted in Far West into grandiose assertions of superiority.

  One of Smith’s closest associates, Sampson Avard—Brodie calls him “cunning, resourceful, and extremely ambitious”—proposed forming
a secret Mormon army. Rigdon was enthusiastic, and Smith listened.

  Thus was born the most nefarious organization ever to coalesce within the Mormon church. Referred to at various early stages as the Brothers of Gideon, the Daughters of Zion, or the Sons of Dan, the band—less an army than a kind of secret police—soon became known as the Danites. They took their name from a verse in Genesis: “Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse heels, so that his rider shall fall backward.”

  Men handpicked for their skill with guns and their courage, the Danites were sworn to secrecy and invested with cabalistic handshakes and signals. They would prove, across nearly half a century, well into Brigham Young’s reign in Utah, a devastatingly effective cadre of assassins, targeting apostates, enemies, rich Gentiles, and even Indians—in effect, the KGB of the Mormon church. Both Smith and Young would aver that the Danites never existed. In 1859, the famous journalist Horace Greeley arrived in Salt Lake City and won from Young one of the first interviews he ever gave to a professional newspaperman. Greeley pressed the Prophet hard, asking, among other questions, “What do you say of the so-called Danites, or Destroying Angels, belonging to your church?” Brigham smoothly countered, “What do you say? I know of no such band, no such persons or organization. I hear of them only in the slanders of our enemies.”

  Leonard J. Arrington, whose Brigham Young: American Moses, published in 1985, is considered by orthodox Mormons to be the definitive life of the second Prophet, turns somersaults to deny the existence of the Danites in Utah. He insists that Young had instead “created a small force of Minute Men” charged with recapturing stolen livestock and establishing emigrant way stations, not with perpetrating murders and assassinations. As for the Danites, Arrington insists, “They played and continue to play a major role in western fiction, and many readers have imagined Brigham as a military dictator with a personal army of avengers who carried out his orders to capture, torture, and kill people who crossed him.” (Many non-Mormons regard Arrington’s voluminous biography as a partisan whitewash, and insist that the definitive life has yet to be written.)