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Early Days

Hell may pour forth its rage like the burning lava of Mount Vesuvius, or of Etna, or of the most terrible of the burning mountains; and yet shall “Mormonism” stand.

—Joseph Smith

So why is Joseph Smith so important in this cowboy story? Because he left behind systems and beliefs that continue to motivate a growing group of people, many of whom aren’t even Mormon. When looking at the Bundys, and the many supporters who back them, we see specific and notable pieces that Smith put forth to provide basis for their row. Among these pieces: God talks to the faithful and gives them higher truths. The world is in its latter days—hence their appellation, the Latter-day Saints (LDS)—so time is of the essence. And the Saints are entitled to homeland, and as such must serve as soldiers in defending their land, beliefs, and God-given liberties.

The way these facets became embedded into early Mormon worldview is based on the experience of the Mormon Church as much as Smith’s character. The ideas came about over years as he defended his people and his community from oppression, violence and repeated exiles. But in the beginning, with the Book of Mormon in hand and in ongoing dialogue with God, he set about building both a collection of followers and a culture to enwrap them. That culture would combine talismanic elements of Americana with supernatural dashes, together with a commitment to punishing those they perceived had wronged them.

When rumors spread about the plates and the Book of Mormon, Smith began to draw devotees. A handsome fellow of six feet, with bright blue eyes, long eyelashes, and a profile defined by a striking Roman nose, he set about securing his own authority and muffling other religious enthusiasms and assertions that might detract from his new status as prophet and the credibility of his divine messages. Very early in his career, he crafted some rules, issued a few disclaimers, and made an example of an errant follower in order to ensure his own power.

In 1830, the year the Book of Mormon was published, Hiram Page, a jowly man who was among those who swore to the existence of the golden plates, told friends that he had received his very own prophecy from God using his very own seer stone. This boast was alarming and carried with it a challenge to the prophet’s preeminent position, so Smith confronted Page before the small group of men who made up a nascent body of governance, telling them Page’s insight was bogus. Smith said that God had decreed, in the form of a revelation, “No one shall be appointed to receive commandments and revelations in this church excepting my servant Joseph Smith, for he receiveth them even as Moses.” Smith asked that Page’s prophecy be discounted and the offending stone destroyed. And so, it was done.

Still, Smith did encourage his first followers to experience God and urged a personal relationship with the Almighty, but he recognized that this type of egalitarianism came with some risk. He did not want God talking to those who might contradict him. Historian Richard Lyman Bushman points out in his exhaustive biography of the prophet, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, that part of the appeal of Joseph Smith as prophet was “the promise of gifts and visions.” Smith recognized the charismatic merits of having rapport with God, and he conceded that, indeed, direct communication from God to other church members could occur. But each such message, he insisted, would need his vetting before it could be believed. Members receiving divine dispatches had to, according to Bushman, “follow the Spirit of the truth, not the mindless ecstasies of visionaries,” and visions must “edify” and bring forth the “bright light” of truth, rather than sidetrack, create confusion, or devolve into passionate paroxysms. Joseph Smith aspired to create a system, even “rules,” as described in the church Articles and Covenants, that would separate wheat from chaff—good prophecy from bad. Within a modern context, to someone outside the church, divine communication and individual prophecy sounds arbitrary and slippery. The power of a personal revelation among the credulous can be used to manipulate and mislead. Still, today the Mormon Church cites the story of Hiram Page to illustrate the difference between “imitation” (Page’s assertion) and “truth” (Joseph Smith’s true revelation). Page’s claims, they say, came from Satan’s whispers rather than from the real “work of God.” But what is truth and what is imitation? Who acts as spiritual arbitrator now that there is no Joseph to do the vetting? And if someone feels “inspired” with deep passions, what keeps him or her from claiming to know, then act upon, the true words of God? This is a sticky wicket.

After the incident with Hiram Page, though Joseph Smith’s authority was confronted in various other ways during his tenure as prophet, dueling revelations with congregants did not seriously jeopardize his leadership role during his lifetime. It was after the prophet’s death that some church adherents, and a handful of excommunicated members, turned to the idea of personal revelation to confront church policies and the laws of the land. Author Jon Krakauer, in his chilling and jaw-dropping book Under the Banner of Heaven, illuminates, among other things, the menaces of individual prophecy. “In the beginning Joseph Smith had emphasized the importance of personal revelation for everyone,” writes Krakauer. He goes on to detail that this imagined aptitude has triggered murders and many cases of statutory rape in modern Mormon fundamentalist circles. Although Smith tried to control revelation in his lifetime, “the genie was already out of the bottle,” Krakauer asserts, and the appeal of personal prophecy persisted. Just ask Cliven Bundy and his sons.

By the time Bundy’s great-grandfather, Nephi Johnson, was born into the new faith in 1833, Joseph Smith had left the Burned-over District. Though upstate New York had been a perfect place to forge a prophet, it was not the platform upon which to build his congregation. Already jammed with competing faiths, it was a crowded playing field. Plus, Smith’s neighbors had turned on him, calling his prophetic abilities and his golden plates a sham. It wasn’t just old friends—even his own fatherin-law, Isaac Hale, had it in for Smith. Joseph eloped with Hale’s daughter Emma in 1827 and, due to subsequent family friction, the fledgling prophet felt he needed to start anew beyond the reach of his indignant in-laws. So, in 1831, he headed south to Kirtland, Ohio, where Nephi Johnson was born two years later, entering a life defined by the complicated dynamics of this prophet’s new church.

A growing number of people were hearing news of Smith and his American bible. Among them was lay minister Sidney Rigdon, a severe-looking chap with narrow eyes and bushy brows, who joined the faith after reading the Book of Mormon and seeing in it a truth for which he’d been hankering. Rigdon encouraged his own congregation to follow Joseph into what would become known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The group set up shop in this small town, Kirtland, along the east branch of the Chagrin River, sixty miles northeast of Cleveland. Nephi’s mother and father, Joel and Annie Johnson, trailed the Smiths to Kirtland, where they threw themselves into church work and the responsibilities of parenthood. The Rockwells, some of Smith’s loyal neighbors who had since been baptized in the new church, left New York as well, bringing with them their son Porter, who’d befriended Smith years before. Unlike the Johnsons, the Rockwell family did not dally in Ohio but moved west to Missouri, joining other Mormon settlers buying land there.

Kirtland, by the mid-1830s, began to fill with converts who had heard about Joseph’s golden bible, or, as it had also become known, his restored gospel. But Ohio was only a way station. Missouri was where Joseph imagined his religious kingdom, one he planned to build atop the very place where the Garden of Eden had once offered apples and fig leaves. Yes, Eden, Smith assured, had always been in North America, not the Middle East. It was there the Saints would bring forth their shining city, a New Jerusalem, along the same fertile real estate where Adam and Eve were created and bestowed the fish of the sea and the birds of the air. Missouri, the prophet said, was Mormon homeland, a place they would call Zion.

While dreaming of Zion during his seven years in Kirtland, Joseph erected a grand temple, raised and lost money for his church, and organized successful mission trips that mushroomed his congregation. By the time Nephi Johnson came into the world, the Mormon population of Kirtland was maybe a hundred citizens. When Nephi turned five in 1838, the town had roughly two thousand people, those lured by the religious promises of Mormon missionaries who were bringing converts into an overcrowded chaos. By one account, “the City of the Saints appeared like one besieged. Every available house, shop, hut, or barn was filled to its utmost capacity. Even boxes were roughly extemporized and used for shelter …” The disorder in Kirtland was made worse by the fact that many new converts were arriving with no money, having given up property and family connections to come join this man who talked to God. They were promised that the church would take care of them, and many arrived expecting both spiritual and material support.

Sidney Rigdon, the lay minister, converted hundreds of Ohioans hungry for Smith’s prophecy. The two shared a somewhat tumultuous relationship and Rigdon wasn’t the first, and was certainly not the last, nagged by doubt about Joseph’s prophetic accuracy and leadership abilities. In spite of Joseph’s charm and his skills in persuasion, many, even church members, found his revelations, at times, dubious. And early on, there was the gossip about Smith’s not-so-secret carnal proclivities.

In 1832, a mob dragged Joseph and Rigdon into the road and proceeded to strip, tar, and feather them. These thugs had also engaged the services of a Dr. Dennison to castrate Smith. At the last minute, the doctor lost his nerve, but tried (unsuccessfully) to empty a vial of poison into the self-proclaimed prophet’s mouth. Smith walked away, alive and intact, with a chipped tooth that gave him a lifelong whistle when he spoke. According to biographer Fawn Brodie, the assault came in response to Joseph’s suspected dalliance with sixteen-year-old Marinda Johnson. (Bushman’s biography casts doubt on this suspected liaison.) All the same, Smith was “sealed,” a Mormon marriage, to Marinda Johnson ten years later.

In addition to nearly getting killed perhaps due to reports of Smith’s appetites, Rigdon was also concerned over another of the prophet’s revelations that members should relinquish personal and financial properties to the church. He was asking for funds from both poor and wealthy members to pay for the expensive Kirtland Temple, among other church outlays. Rigdon had tried financial communalism in another church, with mixed results, and the idea bothered him. (Smith’s call, known as the Law of Consecration, is partially practiced today through membership tithing.)

The idea of sharing wealth came to the prophet quite early, after asking one of his scribes, Martin Harris, to hand over three thousand dollars for the first printing of the Book of Mormon. When Harris balked, Smith snapped, and as though speaking in God’s own words, threatened, “I command thee that thou shalt not covet thine own property, but impart it freely to the printing of the Book of Mormon, which contains the truth and the word of God.… And misery thou shalt receive if thou wilt slight these counsels, yea, even the destruction of thyself and property.… Pay the debt thou hast contracted with the printer. Release thyself from bondage.” Eventually Harris did heed God’s warning, or rather the threat that Joseph made in God’s name. He mortgaged his farm to pay the publisher. Misfortune befell Martin Harris anyway; his wife, Lucy Harris, angry about the transaction—and her husband’s relationship with the prophet—packed up and left him.

While Joseph ran affairs in Kirtland, he created church structure, appointed a council of leaders known as the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, and wrestled with issues of liquidity and mortgages. The church bought quite a bit of land in the region and was burdened with outstanding loans, so he schemed to find further financing. He did this all while raising Zion in Jackson County, Missouri, sending families to the lush prairies of the American western frontier. Jackson County wasn’t as jam-packed as Kirtland, and as the Mormons worked to acquire land, they bought farms alongside Gentiles (the term Mormons once used to describe those outside their faith). One early convert, Oliver Cowdery, a man distinguished by a large forehead, prominent widow’s peak, and one tuft of black curls above each ear, was appointed to help organize the new arrivals to western Missouri and to assist them in buying property. After purchasing lands along the prairie, families, including the Rockwells, put up cabins, prepared hay for winter feed, and went about the business of settlers. The region’s first Mormon wedding was celebrated in 1832 when Smith’s old friend Porter Rockwell, then a young man of nineteen who lacked the ability to read or write, married eighteen-year-old Luana Beebe, his neighbor’s pretty daughter. Hundreds attended, seizing a welcome excuse to rest the plow for a day.

As Smith had first revealed God’s promise of Zion, he warned that the land would not be easily won when he prophesized that it was in “the hands of enemies.” This was indeed correct. As a group, the Saints were hardly inconspicuous. They were a clannish, primarily Yankee presence in a slave state, and their beliefs were off-putting to the Missourians. Even more irksome was the Mormons’ unwavering conviction that western Missouri was theirs, and theirs alone—a God-given homeland. They boasted that all the land would fall into hands of Latter-day Saints, as they awaited God’s return to earth. But in their smug and staunch posturing, the Mormon people didn’t understand how much danger they were creating for themselves. Missourians were a rough type of people, and while church members comforted themselves in their certainty that God would shortly send the Gentiles packing, the Gentiles soon began forming mobs.

While the Missourians did not appreciate the Mormons’ haughtiness, the last straw was their abolitionist leanings. In the 1830s, nearly 20 percent of Missouri’s population was enslaved, and the slaveholders feared that the Saints would fill political seats to agitate for abolition. The Evening and Morning Star, a Mormon newspaper established primarily to publish the messages of their prophet, carried a story in July of 1833, welcoming “free people of color” into Missouri and into the church. The Mormon Church was encouraging African Americans to come to their state, which Missourians feared could lead to slaves rising up. Missourians went into a rage over this. Soon after the article came out, as many as five hundred Missourians assembled at the Jackson County courthouse and issued an ultimatum: no more Mormon people in Jackson County. Members of the church currently living there had to leave. Mormon businesses were required to shut their doors, most especially The Evening and Morning Star. When the Saints tried to stall the process, begging for time to confer with church leaders in Ohio, the mob took measures into their own hands, dragging church leaders through the streets and plastering them with tar and feathers. Mobbers ripped the roof from the home of the publisher of the newspaper and destroyed the printing press. Fearing further backlash, Missouri Mormons agreed to leave Jackson County, and a short lull in violence gave Oliver Cowdery the opportunity to ride to Kirtland and discuss the dangerous and heartbreaking situation with the prophet. Some church members decided to appeal to Missouri’s governor, Daniel Dunklin, asking for protection and recourse. But the governor responded by advising that the Mormon people seek legal counsel. When the Missourians heard that the Mormons were going to lawyer up, their fight against the religious sect became fierce. And sadistic.

On October 31, 1833, the mob members brutally beat Hiram Page and George Beebe, Porter Rockwell’s brother-inlaw. For days they unleashed their fury, razing homes, including Rockwell’s own—something he would not soon forget. They looted LDS-owned stores and clubbed men bloody. Mormons fought back, killing two Missourians while losing four of their own. Still, they were outnumbered and out-gunned. In early November, days after the Saints successfully routed an attack near Independence, a Missouri official promised their safety in exchange for their weapons. But this was a ruse, depriving the Saints of protection against continued attacks as marauders torched Mormon farms and crops, leaving many of the nowdefenseless people without homes or food as winter settled. The Latter-day Saints begged for mercy, but it wasn’t to be found in their putative Garden of Eden.

Missouri Saints besieged Joseph to intercede on their behalf, but he hesitated, vacillating—first telling his Missouri disciples to trust in God, then rationalizing that the cold-blooded attacks were a deserved punishment for some lack of faithfulness among his flock—it wasn’t just Rigdon who was questioning Joseph Smith’s abilities and direction, others in Missouri were as well. In December of 1833, the prophet delivered a message to them that he said came straight from God. “Concerning your brethren who have been afflicted, and persecuted, and cast out from the land of their inheritance …,” God said to the prophet, “there were jarrings, and contentions, and envyings, and strifes, and lustful and covetous desires among them; therefore by these things they polluted their inheritances.” This dispatch further offered that, although God was still upset about the sins of those not fully supporting Joseph Smith, “my bowels are filled with compassion towards them. I will not utterly cast them off.” The decree promised that God would make available “all the land which can be purchased in Jackson County, and the counties round about, and leave the residue in mine hand.” In other words, the Missouri Saints had it coming, but God would make it right. Yet, in spite of God’s compassionate bowels, the situation in Missouri just kept getting worse.

As oppression mounted in Missouri, Joseph contemplated the best course of action, while counting on God’s intervention. He sent a plea to President Andrew Jackson and was rebuffed, with Jackson deferring to the state of Missouri on grounds of states’ rights. (It seems ironic today, with Mormon politicians in Utah comprising an exceptionally vocal contingent of this country’s states’ rights advocates.)

After Jackson’s refusal to intercede, Smith struggled further to find some way to save Zion. Until now, Joseph Smith had preached and practiced pacifism. But mounting violence in Missouri tested this stance and pushed Smith to conceive a military campaign. Despite initial plans to engage an army of five hundred men to march to Zion and protect it from enemies, he managed to round up only two hundred volunteers; a thirty-four-year-old Brigham Young was among them. Smith led this campaign, named Zion’s Camp, to Missouri, marking the beginning of a Mormon militancy with the goal of defending homeland. This ethos still echoes in Utah and Nevada today.

As it unfolded—that is, before Zion’s Camp became a rewritten and sacred memory—the operation was fraught, its strategy unclear. Militia members squabbled and challenged their prophet’s authority throughout the journey; supplies were thin and often unsuitable. A cured ham rotted and was chucked, instead of filling empty stomachs. The water supply became befouled. Army members fell ill, fourteen dying from cholera. Adding insult to injury, the expedition did not rescue the Missouri brethren, but rather turned around and marched back to Kirtland after Missourians threatened violence, again leaving the pioneers of Zion defenseless. These facts notwithstanding, historian Matthew C. Godfrey has noted that the Zion’s Camp military drive is a much-ballyhooed chapter in church history, in which bad memories have been replaced with miraculous recollections. The church casts the endeavor as a God-given trial and an essential stepping stone in the development of the Mormon Church. But in reality, it was a total rout.

But before their retreat weeks later, while Zion’s Camp marched toward the Mormon settlements in Missouri, the Missouri Saints were engaged in a last-ditch attempt to secure a peaceful agreement with the Gentile authorities. They wanted compensation for their property in exchange for their departure. But during negotiations, terms remained unacceptable, tipped to the advantage of non-Mormons. When news of Smith’s oncoming army reached Missouri, discussions came to a halt, as this armed rescue mission rekindled the murderous spirits of the Missouri mobs. The fact that the prophet was trying to protect his people did not seem to impress the Missourians; instead, the Missouri gangs became even more organized, emboldened, and bloodthirsty.

After the long weeks spent marching across the grasslands of Middle America, sometimes covering forty miles in a day, the Saints arrived just north of Jackson County, setting up camp on the Fishing River. On June 19, 1834, two hundred Missourians requisitioned ferries to confront Zion’s Camp. Later, the Saints would recollect that on this night, ominous weather rolled in, sending twisters screaming from the skies and a shower of huge hailstones that battered the ground. Though gunfire was exchanged during the long night, Mormons reported that the heavens stymied the Missourians; their dazzling and disorienting storm kept Zion’s Camp safe.

Another Zion’s Camp story, still a favorite in Mormon lore, tells of a Missouri tough named James Campbell, who boasted he would take down the Mormon prophet. If he failed, Campbell said, “eagles and turkey buzzards shall eat my flesh.” Campbell commandeered a boat to the Saints’ encampment, but it capsized, and he drowned. A few days later, his corpse was found ravaged by birds of prey, which Joseph Smith pronounced was a sure sign of God’s favor.

Soon afterward, a Missouri sheriff approached the Mormon camp, warning that the Missouri militia was planning to attack. Smith capitulated and surrendered Jackson County. With the Ohio army’s return to Kirtland, the Missouri Mormons were more vulnerable than ever. And with this failure to protect his people, Smith faced ever more upheaval. Some of his flock were beginning to worry they had placed their confidence in a poor leader. Or even worse, a false prophet.