Brave Hearted: the Women of the American West by Katie Hickman

Author:Katie Hickman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Published: 2022-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

12

Utopias

While all went west to make a better life for themselves—some to find gold, others lured by the promise of land—the Mormons were looking for wealth of a different kind. Excoriated by some, and feared by others, throughout the 1850s an estimated seventy thousand made their way to the Great Salt Lake basin in Utah, to found a utopian city in the deserts of the West. Those who were too poor to provide themselves with wagons would walk the entire route, pulling their possessions behind them in handcarts.

Among these handcart pioneers was Priscilla Merriman Evans, a young Welshwoman from Tenby in Pembrokeshire. The second daughter in a family of eight children, Priscilla was seventeen when she converted to Mormonism.

“After the death of my mother we were very lonely, and one evening I accompanied my father to the house of a friend, where, by chance, two Mormon Elders were holding a ‘cottage meeting.’ I was very much interested in the principles they advocated,” she wrote, “despite seeing that my father was very worried, and would have taken me away, had he known how. When he became aware that I believed in the Gospel as taught by the Elders, I asked him if he had ever heard of the restored Gospel. He replied sarcastically, ‘Oh, yes, I have heard of Old Joe Smith, and his Golden Bible.’ ”190 Despite her father’s opposition, Priscilla believed that she had “found the truth.” “When I heard the Elders explain it, it seemed as though I had always known it, and it sounded like music in my ears.”

“Old Joe Smith,” or Joseph Smith, was born in Vermont in 1805. When he was still a very young man, Smith claimed to have had a series of visions. In one of these, an angel named Moroni had directed him to a place where a number of golden tablets lay buried deep in the ground. These tablets, which Joseph Smith transcribed, were believed to have been written by a hitherto unheard-of prophet, Mormon, containing the history of an ancient people. The church that Smith went on to found, the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, was believed by his followers to be a restoration of the Christian Church to its original and “true” form, as it had existed in the days of the apostles, and as described in the golden tablets. Smith also claimed that God had given him, and him alone, divine authority to lead the church back to its true Christian roots. More specifically, Joseph Smith had been instructed to found a “New Jerusalem,” a shining city of the righteous and godly, where all new believers should gather.

The fact that no one other than Joseph Smith himself ever set eyes on the “Golden Bible” presented no intellectual difficulties to his followers. Not surprisingly, it presented a great many difficulties to almost everyone else. From the beginning, Joseph Smith and his followers were both reviled and feared, not only for their unorthodox views, but also

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