Gold! by Fred Rosen Page A

with these small pieces of gold.
    â€œSmith was astonished and asked him if he intended to insult him. The teamster told him to go and ask me about it, Smith came in great haste to see me. I told him at once the truth.
    â€œWhat could I do? I had to tell him all about it.”

4.
    â€œALL I HAD HEARD …”
    Joseph Smith was about to take a hand in the next major event of the Gold Rush. That he was long dead made it that much more of an achievement.
    Smith had been born in 1805 in Sharon, Vermont. He was one of ten children, and the family moved frequently during his youth. The most significant years of Smith’s early childhood were spent in Palmyra, New York, where Protestant tent “revivals” were frequent and well attended. The family eventually moved to Illinois.
    There, on the family farm, the man who would later be called the Prophet claimed to have received his first divine revelation when he was fourteen years old. God came to Smith with the revelation that all religions since the death of the disciples of Christ had turned away from the true church of Christ. His job was to restore that church.
    Receiving subsequent visions of instruction that he obeyed, Smith claimed to have discovered, on a hillside, gold tablets written by ancient Indian inhabitants. A modern-day Moses, his translations of the tablets were published in 1830 as the Book of Mormon. Combined with the Old and New Testaments, plus some of Smith’s later revelations, the Book of Mormon became the foundation for a new religion, Mormonism.
    Smith’s new religion was empowering. His zealots believed in their heart and soul in God and Jesus Christ as real corporeal beings who actively intervened in human affairs. To a Mormon, human beings are innately filled with the divine essence. They can become Godlike through strict conduct. The Mormon Church, under Smith’s leadership as the divinely ordained Prophet, would provide the physical and emotional structures through which human beings could make this ascendancy.
    The Formal Church of Mormon was established by Smith in 1830 in New York. Friends and family comprised his first converts. He had such a charismatic personality, he had so much of what appeared to be a divine presence, that Mormonism quickly saw thousands of converts to its fold. Even sworn enemies of Mormonism from other religions were left stunned by the power of his presence and the authority with which he spoke.
    Feeling hostility to his growing power, Smith moved his people west, to Kirtland Mills, Ohio. There, he hoped the Mormons could thrive and erect their Kingdom of God on earth. The “saints,” as Smith’s converts referred to themselves, soon found themselves in1837 in the middle of a nightmare. The banking collapse that year caused their settlement in Kirtland Mills to falter. Rumors had spread that all Mormons endorsed polygamy; some did. Once again, the endemic hostility of outsiders to what was different—and the saints were—forced Smith to move his flock westward yet again.
    This time they settled in Missouri for all of one year before Missouri’s governor, fearful of what he perceived as the saints’ barbarous religious and marital practices, condemned them by executive order to leave the state. At first, the Mormons hesitated but changed their minds rather hastily after armed men surrounded the Mormon stronghold in Far West, Missouri, and “demanded” they leave.
    The Mormons fled east and established the city of Nauvoo on the Mississippi River near Quincy, Illinois, in 1839. Five years later, in 1844, the city had grown to ten thousand inhabitants. Mormon missionaries had been sent out by Smith around the world, and they had made another twenty-five thousand converts.
    All this explosive growth in the religion was threatening to the Mormons’ Gentile neighbors. The latter, aware of the polygamy among the saints, detested them. It didn’t help when