Early Mormon Lamanism, Forgotten Apocalyptic Visions, and the Indian Prophet

The year 1890 looms large in American history. It ranks up there with 1776, 1877, and 1945 as important dates that historians have used to organize our past. It also shapes collective memory. Mormons most readily associate 1890 with the Woodruff Manifesto and the ?official? end of polygamy. For Americans, and westerners more specifically, 1890 represents the end of the Frontier, the most American part of our history, to paraphrase Frederick Jackson Turner. According to C. Vann Woodward, the 1890s marked the hardening of segregation in the South.

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Book Review: Jared Farmer’s On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape

Dale Topham is a 4th-year Ph.D student in American history at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. His research interests include the American West, the Southwestern Borderlands, and environmental history. He received his B.A. and M.A. in American history from BYU, where he studied the fur trade (he was also my TA when I took US History, 1890-1945 from Brian Cannon as an undergrad, so we go back aways). While at BYU, he worked for two years as a researcher and writer for the Education in Zion exhibit. Dale is not only a top-notch historian but he’s also an Orem native, which adds to this review of Jared Farmer’s On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape, which we’ve discussed before on the blog. See also here. Farmer’s book has won a ton of awards, most notably the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. Please welcome Dale and enjoy the review.

On Zion?s Mount, a derivation of Jared Farmer?s Ph.D. dissertation

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Perspectives on Parley Pratt’s Autobiography: Persecution, Memory, and Mormon Identity

A year ago, almost to the day, I found myself discussing my masters’ thesis on the role of memory and persecution in shaping Mormon identity during the 1840s and 1850s with Mary Richards, a professor of history at BYU. She mentioned wryly that she enjoyed my thesis a great deal, but that she had noted my heavy reliance on the writings of Parley P. Pratt. She suggested in a joking way that perhaps I should change my title to ?Parley Pratt’s Memory of Persecution.? I laughed along with her, but defended myself by saying that Pratt had written far more about the persecutions than anyone else. Historian Ken Winn agrees with me, arguing in his Exiles in a Land of Liberty that Pratt was the foremost Mormon commentator on the Missouri conflict (147).

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Through Missourian Eyes: Remembering the Mormon War in Missouri

We recently had a stirring discussion over at BCC concerning the causes of the 1838 conflict in Missouri. Much of the discussion concentrated not on the historical evidence that has survived, but on the role of bias in determining what gets included and what gets left out when individuals narrate the past.

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Parley P. Pratt, Writing, and the History of Reading

Beginning in the 1830s, Parley P. Pratt produced a tremendous amount of literature describing his people’s persecutions. Pratt wrote not only for his fellow religionists, but also as a means to inform other Americans of the Mormon plight and seek redress.[1] Of the hundreds of pages of his prose, among the most significant included his Extra of the Mormon newspaper The Evening and the Morning Star entitled “?Mormons,’ So Called”, which is perhaps the most comprehensive contemporary description of the 1833-1834 Jackson County expulsion.[2] Pratt included this Extra as part of his eighty-four page history of the Missouri persecutions that he published in 1839.[3] In turn, this history later formed the basis of parts of Pratt’s autobiography.[4] Beyond his narrative contributions, Pratt also wrote several poems describing his people’s sufferings that he published in 1840 in The Millennium and Other Poems.[5]

Historian Kenneth Winn has described Pratt as the leading Mormon commentator on

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“Our forefathers, by their blood, have purchased for us liberty; but as far as the rights of the weak are concerned, the Revolution has progressed slowly.”

Happy Independence Day. Here’s a discourse given by George A. Smith on the fourth in 1854. Remember that at this time the Saints are struggling with the federal government over the right to self government. Notice how Smith negotiates in his narration his commitment to both an American identity and a Mormon identity.

George A. Smith, “Celebration of the Fourth of July,” July 4, 1854, Journal of Discourses, 6: 364-67.

Gentlemen and Ladies-Fellow-Citizens,-I arise here to address you a few moments upon a subject which has, perhaps, been worn threadbare by orators, statesmen, and divines, for the last seventy years, in the minds of a great portion of

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For never, since the Son of God was slain/ Had blood so noble, flow’d from human vein

No time for a real post dealing with the martyrdom today, but here’s ERS’s memorial of Joseph Smith’s death.

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?That Saints shall have power?the kingdom to take??

The language of martyrdom and persecution provided Latter-day Saints the linguistic tools by which they could reverse the power relations as they had been defined by the Missourians and Illinoisans. Mormon opponents were successful in expelling the Latter-day Saints from both Missouri and Illinois, prosecuting and imprisoning Mormon leaders for crimes, all while avoiding legal sanctions for non-Mormon vigilantes. Mormon authors were well aware of these inequalities, leading them to imagine a time when God would vindicate their people.

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Thomas Jefferson, Statesman, President, Mormon?

I found this while going through the Times and Seasons, and it reminded me of Chris’s post on Mormonizing John Wesley. Apparently Mormon J. M. Grant (Jedediah, I presume) wrote a letter to the New York Messenger, and included an excerpt from a letter from Jefferson to John Adams, and asked his readers if they thought Thomas Jefferson was a Mormon. Grant’s letter was later republished in the Times and Seasons.

… 

An extract from a letter written to JOHN ADAMS BY THOMAS JEFFERSON, of Virginia, published by Mr.

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“With All They Have to Perform That Work” – Narrating The Manifesto

The following is a portion of my research from last summer’s Bushman seminar, in which I examined how Mormons between 1890 and 1940 vacillated between embracing and marginalizing their polygamous past.

With Protestants continuing to be suspicious of a possible attempt by the Latter-day Saints to bring back the practice of plural marriage, Mormons at times narrated their polygamous past leading up to the Manifesto to emphasize their loyalty to the nation. In this context, the potential to marginalize the importance of polygamy was evident. For example, in 1916 Talmage told a news reporter that “when the federal statutes prohibiting its practice were declared constitutional, plural marriage was forbidden by action of the Church, officially assembled in general conference.”[1] By arguing that Mormons immediately discontinued the practice of plural marriage when the anti-polygamy statutes were declared constitutional

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