The Secret Lives of Saints, page 3
The Book of Mormon had caused a sensation in puritanical America. Early critics dismissed it as a romance that mixed superstition with swindle. They scoffed at its fantastical tales of escaped tribes of Israel coming by boat to North America around 600 BC and of Christ appearing before those early North American Christians right after his resurrection, repeating the Sermon on the Mount and appointing twelve disciples to baptize and administer bread and wine in remembrance of him.
Smith was an unschooled young man with a reputation as a treasure hunter. He was from a family of spiritualists who had broken with the mainstream churches and sought their God in a more personal way that included folk magic, visions, incantations, divining rods, amulets and hats containing special “peep” or “seer” stones that allowed them to make out what was normally invisible to the eye. Smith’s formative teen years were spent in Palmyra, in western New York state, a place that had come to be known as “the Burned-Over District.” In this area an unusually high number of preachers, evangelicals and mystics held raucous revival meetings where people were healed and spoke in tongues. So, as strange as it all seems now, Smith and his story fit right in. Even claiming to be a prophet in direct contact with God was fairly common. What’s extraordinary is that his tale not only survived but metamorphosed into a mainstream religion with twelve million members worldwide.
Smith claimed to have used special eyeglasses made of two smooth, three-cornered diamonds called Urim and Thummin to translate the Book of Mormon from “reformed Egyptian” characters engraved on golden plates that the Angel Moroni had helped him find buried under a tree. The idea of a lost tribe of Christians on their very own continent was appealing to the pioneering spirit of Americans. Smith borrowed heavily from the King James version of the Bible, but some of his doctrine is radically different from Christianity. His God has “a body of flesh.” If this sounds vaguely pagan, so is Smith’s idea of the afterlife and the bodily resumption of family life, which is the reason for Mormons’ intense interest in genealogy.
Smith’s heaven has three realms: the “celestial kingdom” or highest order, for the most righteous; the “terrestial kingdom” for those who were honourable but not the most righteous; and the “telestial kingdom” for liars, adulterers and others who would face Christ’s judgment at the last resurrection.
In Smith’s cosmology there is no hell anything like Dante’s depiction of eternal torment—no fiery pit, no demonic legions. After Christ’s judgment, according to Mormon faith, the liars, adulterers and those who had denied him in life, and who continue to deny him in death, are believed to spend eternity in eternal blackness.
It may not be orthodox, but neither is it highly original. What provoked such enmity in the minds of other Christians was Smith’s contention that after the second century AD, Christ’s church had been corrupted and had become offensive to God. With the Book of Mormon, Smith set out not simply to reform Christianity. He believed his mission from God was to found a new church based on the old ways and invigorated by newly revealed texts, new translations of the Bible and, of course, through orders given to him by God through revelations.
All of this was blasphemy to organized churches, their leaders and their adherents. But as Robert V. Remini writes in his biography of Joseph Smith, “The Book of Mormon…imbued believers with a sense that their faith had a power no other sect possessed: Divine authority.”
Smith’s new religion was, and remains, uniquely American. He told his followers that not only was Christ’s Second Coming imminent, but Jesus would come to America, to a New Jerusalem that Mormons would build in Missouri, where Adam sought refuge after his expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Superficially, Mormonism is highly democratic. Every person has the potential to speak directly to God and to become a god, which appealed to the revolutionary, democratic and highly individualistic American identity that was just emerging. In practice, however, Smith’s church and Mormon society were extremely hierarchical; his promised land was a theocracy.
Before his murder in 1844, Smith was not only the church’s prophet, president, seer and revelator. He was mayor of Nauvoo, Illinois; chief justice; trustee of a private university; and publisher of a newspaper. He was a real estate agent, a candidate for president of the United States and lieutenant general of a five-thousand-member militia that had modern rifles rather than the more common and cumbersome muskets of other Western pioneers.
Smith was a prolific writer and revelator. In addition to the Book of Mormon, he published two other books that are regarded as Mormonism’s holy books. One is the Pearl of Great Price, which includes material Smith said was omitted from the Old Testament. The other is the Doctrine and Covenants, a compendium of revelations Smith compiled only after some of his closest advisers said God had been telling them about errors in Smith’s work. It is one of the inherent problems with Smith’s doctrine. There will always be too many potential messiahs. And who is to judge whether a man speaks the truth about God appearing in a dream or an angel appearing in a brilliant light to give him an order?
Smith’s most troubling revelation was recorded in 1843. Doctrine and Covenants 132 is the New and Everlasting Covenant of Marriage, which proclaims that only men with multiple wives will reach the celestial kingdom. Anyone who knows about polygamy but doesn’t practise it forfeits salvation: “then are ye damned; for no one can reject this covenant and be permitted to enter into my glory.” In short, be a polygamist or go to hell.
The New and Everlasting Covenant of Marriage also supersedes God’s commandment about adultery: “If any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another, and the first give her consent, and if he espouse the second, and they are virgins, and have vowed to no other man, then is he justified; he cannot commit adultery for they are given unto him; for he cannot commit adultery with that that belongeth unto him and to no one else. And if he have ten virgins given unto him by this law, he cannot commit adultery, for they belong to him, and they are given unto him; therefore is he justified.”
Doctrine and Covenants 132 was recorded twelve years after Smith claimed it was revealed to him. By the time it was written down, Smith already had plural wives and was well aware of the furor the revelation would cause. His first wife, Emma Hale Smith, was horrified by the revelation and the idea of polygamy. When rumours began to circulate that Smith was a polygamist, Emma refused to believe them. She gave speeches insisting on her husband’s monogamy, expressing her revulsion towards plural marriage and defending Smith’s good name. It seems even God was aware of Emma’s feelings, because included in Doctrine and Covenants 132 is his warning to her, “If she will not abide this commandment, she shall be destroyed.”
No one is certain how many wives Smith had. Historians have put the number at anywhere from twenty-eight to eighty-four. There is also disagreement over the ages and identities of the wives. Some say the youngest were fourteen and that they included the wives and daughters of some of his closest friends.
Smith’s controversial new religion forced him to keep moving his family west in search of the New Zion. His hagiography is filled with descriptions of persecution. He was once tarred by vigilantes who broke into his house. He was arrested numerous times for disturbing the peace and other minor charges. It was no secret that several of his wives lived together in his house, but because polygamy was not illegal, Smith was never arrested for practising it.
In 1844, Smith was in custody in Carthage, Illinois, charged with inciting a riot after having ordered the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor’s printing press. He said the newspaper’s first and only edition aimed to destroy “the institutions of the city, both civil and religious. Its proprietors are a set of unprincipled scoundrels, who attempted in every possible way to defame the character of the most virtuous of our community.”
The Expositor had a different view of the virtuous. Its stated aim was “to explode the vicious principles of Joseph Smith, and those who practice the same abominations and whoredoms.”
The newspaper’s owners also weren’t keen on Smith’s most recent pronouncement. Only a month earlier, according to biographer Richard Lyman Bushman, Smith had told his followers: “God was one of the free intelligences who had learned to become God. The other free intelligences were to take the same path…Souls were meant to grow from smaller to greater.” What Smith was teaching was that all men (that is, not women) had the potential to be gods. In short, theological debate had sparked a religious riot.
Smith was arrested with his brother Hyrum and held in an unlocked and unbarred debtors’ cell in the Carthage jail. With assassination rumours rife, supporters who had come to visit them had managed to sneak a six-shooter to Joseph and a single-shot pistol to Hyrum.
Late in the afternoon of June 27, 1844, a crowd of armed men gathered outside the jail. A few ran up the stairs, while others fired shots through the unbarred window of the apartment. Hyrum died first, of wounds from musket balls that had struck him in the face, thigh, torso and shin. Joseph fired into the hallway before trying to escape through the window. A musket ball from behind struck him in the hip. He was shot three more times in the chest. “O Lord, my God!” he cried before he fell from the window to the street. One of the mob propped his body up against a curb and, under orders from Colonel Levi Williams, four men fired at the prophet simultaneously. Smith died within seconds. Another of the men, John Taylor, was wounded in the thigh, but survived.
Brigham Young, president of the group of twelve apostles known as the Quorum of Twelve, quickly stepped in to take the prophet’s place, even though Emma Hale Smith had argued that her eldest son, twelve-year-old Joseph Smith III, was the rightful successor. Young’s leadership was confirmed at a meeting on August 8, where some people claimed they witnessed the miracle of Young transfigured into Smith, “clothed in a sheen of light covering him to his feet.” “The mantle of Joseph had fallen upon” Brigham Young, said Wilford Woodruff, one of the twelve apostles, who would later also become the prophet.
Young was so committed to maintaining and practising polygamy that he married eight of Smith’s widows. But he knew that Mormons were no longer safe in Illinois and, in 1846, led more than ten thousand Mormons on a long trek west that ended at the Great Salt Lake Basin in Utah. There he began building a Mormon theocracy.
Emma Smith never went to Salt Lake City. In 1860, she made a final break with Brigham Young and the LDS. She transferred her loyalty and support to her eldest son and his Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which rejected polygamy. Both Emma and her son believed that plural marriage had been Young’s idea and that “Joseph, the Martyr” would have renounced it had he lived longer. The remnants of the reformed church survive as the Community of Christ.
Charles Ora Card’s parents were among the pioneers who had followed Brigham Young west. By the time of Card’s arrest in 1886, the territory that would became Utah was populated almost entirely by Mormons. They held all of the top positions in the government, the judiciary, the police, and the schools and businesses, as they do today. Despite that, Mormons were still subject to federal laws, including the antipolygamy law. Because of that law, hundreds of men were fugitives and hundreds more took those men in and kept them hidden.
In September 1886, after weeks of travelling at night from one safe house to another, Card bought a wagon and began gathering supplies. He planned to flee along a well-trodden fugitives’ path to one of several Mormon colonies already established in Mexico. But as he prepared to head south, Card got a message from Prophet John Taylor, Smith’s friend who had survived the shootout and succeeded Young as the church’s third president, prophet, seer and revelator. Like Card, Taylor was a polygamist and a fugitive.
Taylor instructed Card to head north to Canada to seek “asylum and justice” in the British territory. Trained as a Methodist preacher, Taylor had emigrated from England with his parents to Toronto, where the young minister quickly fell under the spell of Joseph Smith’s teaching.
Perhaps Taylor’s British heritage led him to believe that Mormons might be more welcome in Canada than in the United States. However, there was nothing in English law that would have supported this belief. Bigamy had been outlawed in England since 1603—second marriages were not allowed “until their former Wyves and former Husbands be deade.”
Taylor’s desire to establish a Canadian colony was further influenced by Smith’s prophecy that England—the most powerful country in the world at the time—would be the last to fall in the days of Armageddon before God destroys the earth. So, it would be from soil under British rule that Taylor believed the most righteous would be lifted up in the final days. There was a pragmatic consideration as well. Canada was so desperate for settlers to justify its recently completed national railway and to secure its sovereignty over the West that it was recruiting members of persecuted religious groups, such as the Hutterites and Doukhobors, to emigrate from Europe.
In mid-September, Card went north with two other men. Because Card was a wanted man, he and his companions travelled under assumed names. They went by train to Spokane Falls, Washington, where they bought saddle ponies and pack horses. They crossed the Columbia River by ferry and entered British Columbia on September 29, 1886. Card wrote in his diary that when they crossed the border he took off his hat, “swung it around and shouted ‘In Columbia, we are free.’”
Despite his initial optimism, Card could not find what he was looking for in British Columbia. Settlers already occupied the best land and Card deemed the mountain valleys too rugged for agriculture. He and his companions crossed the Rocky Mountains into what is now Alberta. There, they found a buffalo plain only nine miles from the U.S. border, deemed it suitable for settlement, staked a claim and headed back to Utah.
When Card told Taylor about the site, the prophet ordered him to enlist colonists and return north that spring. Forty-one names were on the list Card titled “Missionaries for the Land Desolation.” These people moved north and founded the town of Cardston, which remains the heart of Canadian Mormonism.
Over the next three years, more than three hundred Mormons moved to Cardston and the villages clustered nearby. A few brought more than one wife, but most, like Card, brought only one. Almost invariably, Mormon historian Jessie Embry says, it wasn’t the first wives or even the legal wives who the men brought; it was the youngest. The other wives and their children were left to survive on their own, with help from the church and occasional offerings from their pioneering husbands, who came on infrequent visits.
In 1888, Card went to Ottawa to meet with Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald along with two members of the Quorum of Twelve—the most senior advisers to the LDS president and prophet. They wanted permission to bring their plural wives and families to Canada. In their lengthy brief to Macdonald, they asked for “an abiding place in peace in Canada where they [Mormon men] can provide for their families, educate their children and not be compelled to cast them off and subject them to the charities of the cold world, thus breaking faith with their tender and devoted wives, innocent children and with God, our Father, from whose hand we received them.”
Macdonald refused. Even though Canada had offered concessions to the Mennonites in 1874, including military exemptions and the right to teach their children the German language, there was no way the prime minister of Canada would agree to polygamy. After the Mormons left, Macdonald instructed the North West Mounted Police to watch out for any men practising polygamy.
Public opinion on Mormons and polygamy was divided. The Lethbridge News supported the settlers. In an editorial on August 17, 1887, it concluded that attacks on Mormons were “unwarranted.” “It is characteristic of some of the eastern papers in dealing with Northwest matters to jump at conclusions and make a mountain out of a mole hill. A recent example of this is the agitation which many of them are now experiencing because some settlers from Utah have found their way into southern Alberta.” One of those eastern papers was the Toronto Mail, which continued to warn of the dangers of Mormons settling the west. In June 1889, it concluded that the Mormons “must leave their superfluous wives behind them or Canada must erect more gaols in the Territories.”
Charles Ora Card’s Alberta homestead. Polygamist Mormons tended to bring only their youngest wives along for the difficult work of settling in Canada. (Glenbow Museum)
North West Mounted Police officer Sam Steele wrote a report on the Mormons to the prime minister in 1889. “The Mormons are believed by almost all of the people in the district to be practising polygamy in secret.” He said they were “as perfect slaves to the Church and Elders as it is possible for any community of people to be,” adding “the intelligence of the Mormon is far below the average intelligence of the settlers of any country.” Still, Steele concluded that Mormons were “very industrious people and have made a better show towards success than any settlement in the district.”
This was to be the first of more than a century’s worth of contradictory and somewhat exasperated (and often exasperating) assessments of polygamous Mormons. On the one hand, they were hard-working and good for the economy. On the other, they seemed determined to break the law. Such assessments have meant that, for more than one hundred years, the polygamous Saints have lived on society’s fringes and created a culture of obfuscation and distortion.
Prime Minister Macdonald received many letters from concerned citizens. One of the letter writers, Robert Scott, had lived for fourteen years in Tooele County, Utah. Scott urged Macdonald not to let the Mormons get a foothold in Canada because they judge men by their “religious proclivities,” favour the brethren by establishing positions “unknown to the law” and then pay their appointees handsomely. He also warned: “There is no equality nor republican ideas among them for the priesthood is supreme in all things.”
After Steele’s report, Charles Card’s assistant Orson Smith wrote to Macdonald in January 1890 denying that any Mormons were practising polygamy. “There has been nothing of the kind attempted or even contemplated. So far, not a single attempt has been made by any member of this colony to break the faith established between the Government and our representatives. Therefore, we can truthfully say that the charge is unfounded.”
