Polygamy on the Pedernales

Polygamy on the Pedernales
Author: Melvin C Johnson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2006-03-31
Genre: History
ISBN:

In the wake of Joseph Smith Jr.’s murder in 1844, his following splintered, and some allied themselves with a maverick Mormon apostle, Lyman Wight. Sometimes called the "Wild Ram of Texas," Wight took his splinter group to frontier Texas, a destination to which Smith, before his murder, had considered moving his followers, who were increasingly unwelcome in the Midwest. He had instructed Wight to take a small band of church members from Wisconsin to establish a Texas colony that would prepare the ground for a mass migration of the membership. Having received these orders directly from Smith, Wight did not believe the former’s death changed their significance. If anything, he felt all the more responsible for fulfilling what he believed was a prophet’s intention. Antagonism with Brigham Young and the other LDS apostles grew, and Wight refused to join with them or move to their new gathering place in Utah. He and his small congregation pursued their own destiny, becoming an interesting component of the Texas frontier, where they had a significant economic role as early millers and cowboys and a political one as a buffer with the Comanches. Their social and religious practices shared many of the idiosyncracies of the larger Mormon sect, including polygamous marriages, temple rites, and economic cooperatives. Wight was a charismatic but authoritarian and increasingly odd figure, in part because of chemical addictions. His death in 1858 while leading his shrinking number of followers on yet one more migration brought an effective end to his independent church.

Polygamy on the Pedernales

Polygamy on the Pedernales
Author: Melvin C Johnson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2006-03-31
Genre: History
ISBN:

In the wake of Joseph Smith Jr.’s murder in 1844, his following splintered, and some allied themselves with a maverick Mormon apostle, Lyman Wight. Sometimes called the "Wild Ram of Texas," Wight took his splinter group to frontier Texas, a destination to which Smith, before his murder, had considered moving his followers, who were increasingly unwelcome in the Midwest. He had instructed Wight to take a small band of church members from Wisconsin to establish a Texas colony that would prepare the ground for a mass migration of the membership. Having received these orders directly from Smith, Wight did not believe the former’s death changed their significance. If anything, he felt all the more responsible for fulfilling what he believed was a prophet’s intention. Antagonism with Brigham Young and the other LDS apostles grew, and Wight refused to join with them or move to their new gathering place in Utah. He and his small congregation pursued their own destiny, becoming an interesting component of the Texas frontier, where they had a significant economic role as early millers and cowboys and a political one as a buffer with the Comanches. Their social and religious practices shared many of the idiosyncracies of the larger Mormon sect, including polygamous marriages, temple rites, and economic cooperatives. Wight was a charismatic but authoritarian and increasingly odd figure, in part because of chemical addictions. His death in 1858 while leading his shrinking number of followers on yet one more migration brought an effective end to his independent church.

Joseph Smith’s Polygamy, Volume 2: History

Joseph Smith’s Polygamy, Volume 2: History
Author: Brian C. Hales
Publisher: Greg Kofford Books
Total Pages: 603
Release: 2013-02-26
Genre: Religion
ISBN:

Few American religious figures have stirred more passion among adherents and antagonists than Joseph Smith. Born in 1805 and silenced thirty-nine years later by assassins’ bullets, he dictated more than one-hundred revelations, published books of new scripture, built a temple, organized several new cities, and became the proclaimed prophet to tens of thousands during his abbreviated life. Among his many novel teachings and practices, none is more controversial than plural marriage, a restoration of the Old Testament practice that he accepted as part of his divinely appointed mission. Joseph Smith taught his polygamy doctrines only in secret and dictated a revelation in July 1843 authorizing its practice (now LDS D&C 132) that was never published during his lifetime. Although rumors and exposés multiplied, it was not until 1852 that Mormons in Brigham Young’s Utah took a public stand. By then, thousands of Mormons were engaged in the practice that was seen as essential to salvation. Victorian America saw plural marriage as immoral and Joseph Smith as acting on libido. However, the private writings of Nauvoo participants and other polygamy insiders tell another, more complex and nuanced story. Many of these accounts have never been published. Others have been printed sporadically in unrelated publications. Drawing on every known historical account, whether by supporters or opponents, Volumes 1 and 2 take a fresh look at the chronology and development of Mormon polygamy, including the difficult conundrums of the Fannie Alger relationship, polyandry, the “angel with a sword” accounts, Emma Smith’s poignant response, and the possibility of Joseph Smith offspring by his plural wives. Among the most intriguing are the newly available Andrew Jenson papers containing not only the often-quoted statements by surviving plural wives but also Jenson’s own private research, conducted in the late nineteenth century. Telling the story of Joseph Smith’s polygamy from the records of those who knew him best, augmented by those who observed him from a distance, may have produced the most useful view of all.

The Chickasaw Rancher

The Chickasaw Rancher
Author: Neil R. Johnson
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2015-11-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1786255995

First published in 1961, Neil R. Johnson’s The Chickasaw Rancher tells the story of Montford T. Johnson and the first white settlement of Oklahoma. Abandoned by his father after his mother’s death and then left on his own following his grandmother’s passing in 1868, Johnson became the owner of a piece of land in the northern part of the Chickasaw Nation in what is now Oklahoma. The Chickasaw Rancher follows Montford T. Johnson’s family and friends for the next thirty-two years. Neil R. Johnson describes the work, the ranch parties, cattle rustling, gun fights, tornadoes, the run of 1889, the hard deaths of many along the way, and the rise, fall, and revival of the Chickasaw Nation.—Print Ed.

The Reed Smoot Hearings

The Reed Smoot Hearings
Author: Michael Harold Paulos
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2021-06-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1646421175

This book examines the hearings that followed Mormon apostle Reed Smoot’s 1903 election to the US Senate and the subsequent protests and petitioning efforts from mainstream Christian ministries disputing Smoot’s right to serve as a senator. Exploring how religious and political institutions adapted and shapeshifted in response to larger societal and ecclesiastical trends, The Reed Smoot Hearings offers a broader exploration of secularism during the Progressive Era and puts the Smoot hearings in context with the ongoing debate about the constitutional definition of marriage. The work adds new insights into the role religion and the secular played in the shaping of US political institutions and national policies. Chapters also look at the history of anti-polygamy laws, the persistence of post-1890 plural marriage, the continuation of anti-Mormon sentiment, the intimacies and challenges of religious privatization, the dynamic of federal power on religious reform, and the more intimate role individuals played in effecting these institutional and national developments. The Smoot hearings stand as an important case study that highlights the paradoxical history of religious liberty in America and the principles of exclusion and coercion that history is predicated on. Framed within a liberal Protestant sensibility, these principles of secular progress mapped out the relationship of religion and the nation-state for the new modern century. The Reed Smoot Hearings will be of significant interest to students and scholars of Mormon, western, American, and religious history. Publication supported, in part, by Gonzaba Medical Group. Contributors: Gary James Bergera, John Brumbaugh, Kenneth L. Cannon II, Byron W. Daynes, Kathryn M. Daynes, Kathryn Smoot Egan, D. Michael Quinn

Life and Times of John Pierce Hawley

Life and Times of John Pierce Hawley
Author: Melvin C. Johnson
Publisher: Greg Kofford Books, Incorporated
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781589587656

John Pierce Hawley's forty-year odyssey in the American interior was in pursuit of his dream to find a true Mormon restoration faith. The story describes John Pierce Hawley and Mormonism, particularly the Latter-day Saints and the Wightites, and the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

The Whites Want Every Thing

The Whites Want Every Thing
Author: Will Bagley
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 704
Release: 2019-10-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 0806165499

American Indians have been at the center of Mormon doctrine from its very beginnings, recast as among the Children of Israel and thereby destined to play a central role in the earthly triumph of the new faith. The settling of the Mormons among the Indians of what became Utah Territory presented a different story—a story that, as told by the settlers, robbed the Native people of their voices along with their homelands. The Whites Want Everything restores those Native voices to the history of colonization of the American Southwest. Collecting a wealth of documents from varied and often-suppressed sources, this volume allows both Indians and Latter-day Saints to tell their stories as they struggled to determine who would control the land and resources of North America’s Great Basin. Journals, letters, reports, and recollections, many from firsthand participants, reveal the complexities of cooperation and conflict between Native Americans and Mormon Anglo-Americans. The documents offer extraordinarily wide-ranging and detailed perspectives on the fight to survive in one of Earth’s most challenging environments. Editor Will Bagley, a scholar of Mormon history and the American West, provides cultural, historical, and environmental context for the documents, which include the Indians’ own eloquent voices as preserved in the region’s remarkable archives. In all these accounts, we see how some of western North America’s most colorful historical characters recorded their adventures and regarded their painful stories—and how, in doing so, they bring light to a dark chapter in American history. Ranging from initial encounters through the 1850–1872 war against Native tribes, to recitations of Mormon millennial dreams continued long after Brigham Young’s death in 1877, this is history as it happened, not as some might wish it had, at long last returning the original owners of today’s Utah, Nevada, and Colorado to their rightful place in history.

A Voice in the Wilderness

A Voice in the Wilderness
Author: Reid Neilson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2018-06-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0190867841

In April 1888, Andrew Jenson, Danish immigrant and convert to the Mormon faith, received an unexpected invitation from church leaders to speak at their general conference. Jenson was an outsider to this conference tradition, a layman whose only standing before the main body of Latter-day Saints came from a contracted position with the Church Historian's Office. Forty-two years later, in April 1930, Jenson offered his twenty-eighth and final general conference sermon. He had become the voice of institutional record keeping in his over forty-year career as an Assistant Church Historian. His sermons demonstrated the growth and expansion of the Mormon general conference tradition in the twentieth century, as they placed the Latter-day Saint story front and center for church members to learn from and celebrate. In addition, Jenson urged conference goers to keep better personal and institutional records and believed he was often the solitary advocate for church record keeping and historical preservation. A Voice in the Wilderness presents all twenty-eight of Andrew Jenson's general conference sermons, with introductions and annotations that set them within their historical and religious contexts. His speeches capture a unique period in Mormon history, one of institutional change, accommodation, and growth. This study of Jenson's sermons uncovers the richness and diversity that thrives just beneath the surface of official ecclesiastical discourse.

At Sword's Point, Part 1

At Sword's Point, Part 1
Author: William P. MacKinnon
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 725
Release: 2016-10-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0806157259

The Utah War of 1857–58, the unprecedented armed confrontation between Mormon Utah Territory and the U.S. government, was the most extensive American military action between the Mexican and Civil wars. At Sword’s Point presents in two volumes the first in-depth narrative and documentary history of that extraordinary conflict. William P. MacKinnon offers a lively narrative linking firsthand accounts—most previously unknown—from soldiers and civilians on both sides. This first volume traces the war’s causes and preliminary events, including President Buchanan’s decision to replace Brigham Young as governor of Utah and restore federal authority through a large army expedition. Also examined are Young’s defensive-aggressive reactions, the onset of armed hostilities, and Thomas L. Kane’s departure at the end of 1857 for his now-famous mediating mission to Utah. MacKinnon provides a balanced, comprehensive account, based on a half century of research and a wealth of carefully selected new material. Women’s voices from both sides enrich this colorful story. At Sword’s Point presents the Utah War as a sprawling confrontation with regional and international as well as territorial impact. As a nonpartisan definitive work, it eclipses previous studies of this remarkably bloody turning point in western, military, and Mormon history.

This Abominable Slavery

This Abominable Slavery
Author: W. Paul Reeve
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2024-10-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0197765041

On July 22, 1847, a group of about forty refugees entered the Salt Lake Valley. Among them were three enslaved men, two of whom shared the religion, Mormonism, that had caused them to flee. The valley was also home to members of the Ute tribe, who would sometimes barter captive women and children to Spanish colonizers. Thus, the question of whether the Latter-day Saints would accept or reject slavery in their new Zion confronted them on the day they first arrived. Five years later, after Utah had become an American territory, its legislature was prodded to take up the question then roiling the nation: would they be slave or free? George D. Watt, the official reporter for the 1852 legislative session, reported debates and speeches in Pitman shorthand. They remained in their original format, virtually untouched, for more than one hundred and fifty years, until LaJean Purcell Carruth transcribed them. In this eye-opening volume, Carruth, Christopher Rich, and W. Paul Reeve draw extensively on these new sources to chronicle the session, during which the legislature passed two important statutes: one that legally transformed African American slaves into "servants" but did not pass the condition of servitude on to their children and another that authorized twenty-year indentures for enslaved Native Americans. This Abominable Slavery places these debates within the context of the nation's growing sectional divide and contextualizes the meaning of these laws in the lives of Black enslaved people and Native American indentured servants. In doing so, it sheds new light on race, religion, slavery, and unfree labor in the antebellum period.