Books Reviewed:

1. Glen M. Leonard. Nauvoo: A Place of Peace, A People of Promise.

2. Robert V. Remini. Joseph Smith.

3. Dean C. Jessee. comp and ed. Personal Writings of Joseph Smith.

4. Armand L. Mauss. All Abraham's Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage.

5. Donna Toland Smart, ed. Exemplary Elder. The Life and Missionary Diaries of Perrigrine Sessions, 1814-1893.

6. Jeffrey S. O'Driscoll. Hyrum Smith: A Life of Integrity.

7. Don S. Colvin. Nauvoo Temple: A Story of Faith.

8. James B. Allen, Ronald W. Walker, and David J. Whittaker. Studies in Mormon History, 1830-1997: An Indexed Bibliography; with a Topical Guide to Published Social Science Literature on the Mormons [by] Armand L. Mauss and Dynette Ivie Reynolds

9. Leland Homer Gentry. A History of the Latter-day Saints in Northern Missouri from 1836 to 1839.

10. Dan Vogel and Brent Lee Metcalfe, eds. American Apocrypha: Essays on the Book of Mormon.

11. LaMar C. Berrett, general editor. Sacred Places: Ohio and Illinois, A Comprehensive Guide to Early LDS Historical Sites.

12. A. E. Cannon. Charlotte's Rose.

13. Craig L. Foster. Penny Tracts and Polemics: A Critical Analysis of Anti-Mormon Pamphleteering in Great Britain, "'1837-1860.

14. Robert D. Anderson. Inside the Mind of Joseph Smith: Psychobiography and the Book of Mormon.

15. Colleen Whitley, ed. Brigham Young's Homes.

16. Edward Leo Lyman and Larry Lee Reese. The Arduous Road: Salt Lake to Los Angeles, the Most Difficult Wagon Road in American History.

17. Reid L. Neilson, ed. The Japanese Missionary Journal of Elder Alma O. Taylor 1901-10.

18. Alexander L. Baugh. A Call to Arms: The 1838 Mormon Defense of Northern Missouri.

Glen M. Leonard. Nauvoo: A Place of Peace, A People of Promise. Salt Lake City/Provo, Utah: Deseret Book/Brigham Young University Press, 2002. xxiii, 828 pp. Photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $39.95 cloth. ISBN 1-57008-746-6
Buy it now!

Reviewed by Alma R Blair (Reviewed April 2004)

Glen Leonard's Nauvoo: A Place of Peace, A People of Promise is the most important contribution to the general history of Nauvoo since Robert Flanders's Nauvoo: Kingdom on the Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965) and Marvin Hill's Quest for Refuge: The Mormon Flight from American Pluralism (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1989). Leonard's Nauvoo surpasses those works in the scope of subjects covered and brings new information to bear on important topics but does not replace Flanders or Hill. The section covering post-Mormon Nauvoo is excellent. Most "faithful" Mormon readers will welcome Leonard's themes and treatment of Joseph Smith and his city. More critical readers will be both pleased and frustrated.

His main theme is that the Saints rejected the democratic individualism and republicanism of Jacksonian America in favor of a covenant, theocratic community. Leonard's emphasis on the pervasive influence of religion in all aspects of Nauvoo life is a welcome perspective. More suspect is his declaration:

Because the enduring legacy of Mormon Nauvoo for those who care the most about its history is religious, it makes sense to tell the story from the perspective of revelations and doctrine. That is what we [sic] have chosen to do.... The story of spiritual yearnings necessarily plays out on a stage where political strains, economic realities, and social strivings in everyday life interact with the Latter-day Saint world view.... The real story of the Church in Nauvoo is essentially one of a people of faith. (xxiii-xix)

Throughout the book I have allowed the Saints themselves to speak, to share their feelings about the meaning of the unfolding drama that defined the Nauvoo years. (xxi)

This approach presents a danger of writing parochial, hagiographic history and abrogating the historian's responsibility to interpret the past from a larger perspective than that held by the participants.

Leonard develops two subthemes: the Saints' actions were directed by a search for their own safety and justice, and questionable political activities such as voting as a bloc or trying to have Nauvoo declared a kind of U.S. territory were essentially defensive, not expansive or aggressive. He is less successful in presenting the extent of the fear and reasons for the antagonism of non-Mormons and dissenters. Their negative reactions are usually attributed to cultural disparities, unfortunate misunderstandings, or a lack of spiritual maturity.

For instance, he suggests that those who opposed control of temporal affairs by the church "in a religiously motivated (communal) plan to share with the poor were not prepared, either by political upbringing or religious maturity, to live [the plan.] In their concern over theocratic government, they appealed to the traditions of their political fathers. They preferred the safe haven of republican society and the secular, collected community" (12). It could be argued that it was the non-dissenting Saints who lacked religious maturity and sought a "safe haven" in a prophet-directed, controlled, and intolerant society. Oliver Cowdery was driven from Far West, Missouri, in 1838 under threat of physical harm for, among several charges, criticizing "what he called `a kind of petty government, controlled and dictated by ecclesiastical influence, in the midst of this national and state government"' (12) and for selling his land in Jackson County, Missouri, against Smith's counsel. Ironically, shortly after Cowdery's expulsion, the Prophet encouraged the Saints to sell their land in Missouri to salvage what resources they could.

In his discussion of Joseph Smith's experiences in Liberty jail in the winter of 1838-39, Leonard accepts Joseph's disclaimer that he knew nothing about the Danites' raids on non-Mormons (a much-debated point), and postulates that a softer, gentler Joseph emerged who "claimed no ill feeling toward those who had wronged him or the church" and who counseled the Saints "`to have patience, and ... bear with all manner of afflictions; that ye do not revile against those who do cast you out"' (16). Leonard says that the "inspired guidelines" in Smith's letters "defined the ecclesiastical organization of the church as noncoercive." He seems to see no disparity between these points and the problem of Joseph's role in determining what would constitute "strident internal opposition" leading to excommunications in Nauvoo. Nor does Leonard raise the question, as others have, of whether Smith might personally fit the pattern he had learned "by sad experience that it is the nature and the disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion" (18).

Leonard had access to the voluminous research done under the direction of T. Edgar Lyon and to a wealth of new scholarship. He has added many details to our understanding of Nauvoo's merchandising and commerce, agricultural and industrial character, class structure, social activities, and entertainment. The maps showing Nauvoo land purchases, locations of stakes, areas outside Nauvoo where the Saints were concentrated, and names of important towns are very useful, although some are difficult to read. The Nauvoo Legion's size, organization, armaments, drilling fields, and uniforms are given in detail, as is significant information on the legion's relationship to the state and county militia system.

Leonard's most impressive contribution is his treatment of the Nauvoo Charter. He suggests that, instead of adopting a municipal form of government, the Saints combined styles of governance used in their "quorums" and in Church meetings, similar to New England town meetings. For sixteen months the high council ran Commerce and Nauvoo, filling legislative and judicial functions in both religious and secular affairs. The chartered city council tended to follow these models, and "the lines between church and state sometimes blurred" (91). "In all of these municipal arrangements," Leonard argues, "it was in their use rather than their definition that Nauvoo city officials offended their neighbors" (103).

He also points to the existing confusion in the nation over the relative powers of local, state, and federal governments, with local home rule a popular position. He contends that the charters of Springfield, Galena, and Quincy enabled the city councils "in their jurisdiction" in "effect" to "pass ordinances that contradicted state law, as long as those ordinances did not conflict with the state or national constitution" (102-3). It was not illogical, therefore, for Joseph Smith to ascribe wide jurisdiction to Nauvoo's government.

Despite these generally positive contributions, Leonard's Nauvoo is apologetic in tone. Joseph Smith is treated with uniform deference, not as a leader who may have made major mistakes or had serious character flaws.

For example, an early revelation establishing a communal, common stock system as God's economic plan was modified in two later revelations. Leonard outlines the changes but omits the fact that legal challenges forced a rewriting of the early revelation. By Nauvoo there had been a complete policy reversal. Leonard describes that Smith "preached for an hour, `designing to show the folly of common stock. In Nauvoo,' he said, `every one is steward over his own."' Adds Leonard, "The prophet had concluded that the leveling effect of the New Testament ideal could not be realized in the world of ordinary men" (143). A more critical writer, rather than accepting Joseph's revelations at face value as being from God, might wonder about external influences involved in the formulation and modification of revelations, and might explore the pragmatic nature of Joseph's prophetic character.

As another example, Leonard points out that political opposition consolidated against the Saints in the 1843 congressional election when religion was directly injected into the campaign. Joseph had long contended that he did not control the Saints' votes; but, Leonard notes, the Saints understood that "union" meant agreement in politics as well as in doctrine. So, although Joseph had promised his personal vote to the Whig candidate, the Saints shifted their vote to the Democratic candidate (Hoge), after Smith told his followers:

I have not come to tell you to vote this way, that way, or the other.... The Lord has not given me Revelation concerning politics. I have not asked the Lord for it. I am a third party [and] stand independent and alone.... Brother Hiram [Smith] tells me this morning that he has had a testimony that it will be better for this people to vote for [H]oge and I never knew Hiram say he ever had a revelation and it failed.... (Let God speak and all men hold their peace). (299)

Leonard's conclusion is frank and tantalizing:

The Latter-day Saint effort to protect their rights through bloc voting for their political friends ... created the very problem the Saints had hoped to prevent. The citizens of western Illinois reacted against what they saw as untenable political and religious threats. In a religion that merged earthly and heavenly kingdoms, attempts to publicly separate them failed, and the Saints themselves shared in both the causes and the consequences of that failure. (300)

The reader is left to wonder, however, whether, Leonard saw this development as only a tactical error or whether there really might be a fundamental conflict between the two systems.  Also, the extent of Smith's responsibility for Nauvoo's political debacle is not clearly delineated in the discussion. Surely the Prophet should have known that his support of Hyrum's revelation could not be tolerated in the larger society. It would appear that Joseph was, at the least, politically naive in this instance. And although Joseph honestly claimed to love and support the U.S. Constitution, he was unable to see how his ideas of the covenant community might clash with the Constitution's separation of religion and state. In this situation, as in Smith's insistence on his interpretation of the Nauvoo Charter and his willingness to violate Illinois laws forbidding polygamy, the question of hubris arises.

Issues that presently are sensitive to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are smoothed over in the narrative, and solutions are found where debate still reigns in the historical community. For instance, Leonard points to attempts to control liquor by the drink in Nauvoo but neglects to mention that the early laws were primarily concerned with "hard" liquor, that consumption of beer, ale, and wine was common among the Saints, that Smith gave permission to Theodore Turley to build a brewery next to the Mansion House and allowed Orrin Porter Rockwell to install a bar in the

Mansion House, that laws became less restrictive over time, and that in December 1843 the city council authorized Smith to sell spirits in his house in any quantities he thought wise. By 1844 anyone who could afford the expensive license could sell liquor by the drink.

Leonard also avoids the controversy over the Book of Abraham by never discussing non-Mormon Egyptologists' conclusions that Smith's papyri have nothing to do with Abraham. Instead, he suggests that we do not know how Joseph translated the papyri, except that it was by revelation and quotes an article from The Encyclopedia of Mormonism:

Studies of Egyptian temple rituals since the time of Joseph Smith have revealed parallels with Latter-day Saint temple celebrations and doctrine, including a portrayal of the creation and fall of mankind, washings and anointings, and the ultimate return of individuals to God's presence. Moreover, husband, wife, and children are sealed together for eternity, genealogy is taken seriously; people will be judged according to their deeds in this life, and the reward for a just life is to live in the presence of God forever with one's family. It seems unreasonable to suggest that all such parallels occurred by mere chance. (258)^[1]

Leonard concludes: "This explanation satisfies Joseph Smith's revelatory promise of a linking of both ‘ancient things’ and `things which have been kept hid from before the foundation of the world'" (258).  However, the explanations do not satisfy non-Mormon objections that the "parallels" are broadly drawn, that Egyptian rituals are not those found in Latter-day Saint endowment ceremonies, that scholarly translations of the papyri by non-Mormons show they have no connection with Abraham, and that Smith's identification of figures and his Egyptian alphabet are incorrect.

Leonard's discussion of the Council of Fifty, a group responsible for making economic and political preparations for the Kingdom of God to be established at Christ's second coming, only obliquely mentions, and never explains, Smith's being crowned "king" and other members of the Council "princes." Instead, Leonard says that the council was "organized under a monarchical pattern with Joseph Smith as standing chairman over a cabinet of ministers" (326). Leonard's hesitancy is somewhat justified since the exact role the members expected to play is uncertain. However, the Saints envisioned real, functioning government in the future with priesthood-holders as officers and foresaw a time when the Church would have to step in to save the nation. The titles may, therefore, have been more than symbolic. Editors of the Nauvoo Expositor feared that they were, proclaiming that they wanted no "king or lawgiver" over them except Jesus Christ. The matter was potentially dangerous to Nauvoo given Americans' historical sensitivity toward kingship, John C. Bennett's exposes, and rumors about a filibuster by Aaron Burr and James Wilkinson. Leonard's statement that dissenters caused problems by spreading "reports that Joseph Smith and his followers were being made kings and queens in secret ceremonies" (360) likely referred to endowment ceremonies rather than to offices in the Council of Fifty.

Leonard treats non-Mormons and dissenters more sympathetically and accurately than have many earlier Mormon writers but still places them uniformly in the wrong. After noting that Smith frequently counseled patience toward those who disagreed with him, Leonard writes: "Several Nauvoo residents struck such a strident tone of dissonance in their private and public behavior that decision makers could no longer tolerate the threat to harmony and righteousness in the gathered community. . . . Ultimately, the open resistance of these few led to the legal crisis that ended in the murder of Joseph Smith and Hyrum Smith" (342). This seems an unfair characterization of the dissenters who did not count polygamy as "righteousness" and who disagreed with some of the new doctrines on theological principles. Leonard deceptively charges that "many" of them had been denied sealings because of immorality and so "turned against the Lord's spokesman and His church" (343). It can be argued that, rather than striking "a strident tone of dissonance," they brought into the light of day Smith's new doctrines and practices that so profoundly troubled them, including the deep secrecy with which he tried to keep them shrouded. Joseph and Hyrum told the city council that the Nauvoo Expositor was twisting the truth and that the only polygamy Joseph discussed pertained to "the order in ancient days" (364); such statements were clearly falsehoods deliberately designed to destroy the character of the dissenters and legitimatize the destruction of the paper.

In the interests of historical accuracy, Leonard should also have mentioned that charges of immorality on the part of "apostates" are suspect and that William and Jane Law were not notified of their church trial and could not defend themselves. At some point readers might expect an admission that, for whatever reasons seemed good to them at the time-and no doubt out of a sense of desperation-Church leaders nevertheless acted illegally and unethically.

Although Nauvoo: A Place of Peace, a People of Promise lacks candor at critical times, it makes many important contributions and gives a scholarly view of Nauvoo through Mormon eyes that is well worth reading.

ALMA R. BLAIR {alblair@grm.net) taught Latter Day Saint history at Graceland University, Lamoni, Iowa, for thirty-nine years and has instructed student guides at the Joseph Smith Historic Center in Nauvoo for twenty-eight years. He has had responsible roles in the restoration of the Mansion House and Liberty Hall (the Joseph Smith III home in Lamoni). He has also been active as a member and officer in the Mormon History Association and the John Whitmer Historical Association.

Buy it now!

Robert V. Remini. Joseph Smith. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2002. xv, 190 pp. Sources, bibliography, index. $19.95 cloth. ISBN 0-670-03083-X Buy it now!

Reviewed by Thomas G. Alexander (Reviewed April 2004)

Like a breath of fresh air, Robert Remini's Joseph Smith has wafted in among the horde of recently published tomes. In contrast to recent works such as Richard Abanes's One Nation Under Gods: A History of the Mormon Church (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002), Will Bagley's Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), Sally Denton's American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 11, 1857 (New York: Knopf, 2003), and Jon Krakauer, Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith (New York: Doubleday, 2003), each of which argues in one way or another that violence epitomizes Mormonism, Robert Remini finds Joseph Smith "unquestionably the most important reformer and innovator in American religious history" (ix). Moreover, instead of relying on critical secondary sources or affidavits from Mormon haters, Remini decided "after considerable thought ... to present (Joseph's) ... religious experiences just as he described them in his writings and let readers decide for themselves to what extent they would give credence to them" (x).

Moreover, Remini consulted with scholars who have engaged in intensive research on Joseph Smith and his work. These include such authorities as Richard Bushman, Scott Faulring, Ronald Esplin, Dean Jesse, William Hartley, Grant Underwood, and John Welch.

Still, readers should not expect a full-scale biography. Like other books in the Penguin Lives series, this work provides a short overview of the subject's life. The editors undoubtedly chose Remini because he is an expert on the Jacksonian era when Joseph Smith did his work. Most significant are Remini's multi-volume biography of Andrew Jackson, his biographies of other political leaders, and his general works.

Since Remini knows the early nineteenth century intimately, instead of labeling Mormonism a bizarre sect, he places the religion and Smith within the Second Great Awakening, the extraordinarily rich and diverse religious milieu of the time. He recognizes, for instance, that folk magic flourished during this period as an aspect of culture compatible with other religious experience. Moreover, he points out that intense – and to the twenty-first century sensibility, alternative – religious experiences occurred frequently.

Following the discussion of the religious context, he moves to consider Joseph Smith's family and the First Vision. Although he tells the story much as a Latter-day Saint might, he is quite open about Smith's money-digging and other occult activities. Moreover, like Richard Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism  (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984),  Remini believes that Smith gave up the occult activities as his religious condition changed. Remini then turns to Joseph's experiences with Moroni and to the Book of Mormon. Far from considering the Book of Mormon chloroform in print as Mark Twain did or a delusion as Alexander Campbell asserted, Remini considers the book "an extraordinary work in several particulars" (71). These include its rapid translation, its religious narrative coupled with political and military history, and such features as the sermons and prophecy it contains. Furthermore, Remini understood that in chronicling "bringing the Gospel to the Americas ... (the Book of Mormon) is a story that people of the Jacksonian era could easily relate to and understand" (72). Moreover, while Campbell criticized the book for addressing the "great religious questions and controversies that raged within the Burned-Over District" (73), Remini sees it as a positive feature. He seems quite fair in his treatment of events surrounding the book, presenting, for instance both Martin Harris's version of the visit with Professor Charles Anthon and Anthon's later contradiction of Harris's memory.

Following the discussion of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, Remini turns to the early history of the Church in New York and the developments in Kirtland. Using the methodology he promised, Remini details revelations such as the three degrees of glory, the inspired revision of the Bible, and the gathering. The author's familiarity with the Jacksonian era facilitates his comparison with other communitarian experiments. The narrative considers rightly such negative experiences as the attacks on Joseph Smith and the failure of the Kirtland Safety Society as well as the struggles and success in constructing the Kirtland Temple.

Succeeding chapters consider the horrors of Far West. Remini describes Joseph as encouraging the activities of the Danites but repudiating the organization after it "grew more and more violent" (129). The narrative chronicles Lilburn Boggs's infamous extermination order, the flight of the Saints from Missouri, and the jailing and eventual escape of Joseph and his associates.

In describing the Nauvoo period, Remini tells of the community's development under Joseph's leadership and his incarceration and murder. Joseph Smith's return after escaping, Remini argues, "resonates with a clear echo of Christ in Gethsemane" (169). Desiring the cup to pass from him, Smith went peaceably to jail, tried to defend himself, but finally died a martyr to his beliefs.

In evaluating Joseph Smith, those who supported him, and those who opposed his work, Remini rightly emphasizes first that the Church was a religious organization which generated antagonism in part because it rejected many contemporary teachings. Beyond this, he recognizes that Mormon economic cooperation and clannishness generated opposition. Remini attributes Smith's assassination to "the simple reason that his political activities had become extremely dangerous to the citizens of the surrounding towns" (177). "His murder," Remini argues, "was a political act of assassination" (178).

Remini ends with an evaluation. The church Joseph founded has succeeded far beyond contemporary expectations. Nevertheless, he acknowledges that Smith had "human frailties." He "craved recognition and appreciation" for his work (180). Still, though a "man of little formal education," he possessed "striking intellectual power" (180). Finally, Remini again attributes much of Joseph's success to the context in which he worked -- the Jacksonian era and the Second Great Awakening – which also engendered the "religious bigotry" that eventually "brought about the violent death of a decent man who claimed to be a prophet of God" (181-82).

Clearly the strength of Remini's work lies not in his telling of the life of Joseph Smith. Most of the information about Smith's life which Remini presents has been told elsewhere. Rather, he helps readers by placing Joseph within the context of the time in which he lived and worked. Remini understands the Jacksonian period and the Second Great Awakening, and as such he emphasizes their creativity, religiosity, contentiousness, and violence.

THOMAS G. ALEXANDER is the Lemuel Hardison Redd Jr. Professor of Western American History at Brigham Young University.

Buy it now!

Dean C. Jessee, comp and ed. Personal Writings of Joseph Smith. Rev. ed. Salt Lake City/Provo, Utah: Deseret Book/Brigham Young University Press, 2002. xxix, 751 pp. Front matter, photographs, maps, biographical register, bibliography, index. Cloth: $32.95; ISBN 1-57345-787-6 Buy it now!

Reviewed by Ronald E. Romig (Reviewed April 2004)

This updated and revised edition of Dean Jessee's celebrated 1982 volume offers readers nearly all of the personal writings of Joseph Smith – whether written in his own hand or dictated to a scribe – in a single resource. The revision includes photographs of original documents, journal entries, letters and other source materials that reveal much about the life and character of Joseph Smith Jr.

Those fortunate enough to personally know Dean Jessee are aware that he is both a dedicated professional and a caring human being. Because he has devoted his life to making quality source materials available to the scholarly and wider community, all of his publications are worthy of note. Jessee deserves much credit for refining what has become a now-familiar genre of historical Mormon source materials. Jessee's work provides a model of excellence worthy of emulation.

Since this is a revised edition, readers will probably find the overall organization and content familiar. Jesse continues to provide a straightforward, chronological arrangement of Smith's writings. These offerings reveal the development and growth of Smith's ideas and their expression. Jessee's goal is, as it has ever been, to provide the best transcription of Smith's holographic material possible. And he succeeds, with admirable attention to detail. He has studied and worked with these historical sources perhaps longer than any other person. His work builds upon and extends earlier publications of portions of Joseph's writings made available by H. Michael Marquardt, Joseph Smith's Diaries (Salt Lake City: Modern Microfilm (Utah Lighthouse), ca. early 1980s) and Scott H. Faulring, An American Prophet's Record. The Diaries and Journals of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1987).

As a personal friend and long-time admirer of Dean Jessee's work, I asked him directly why researchers would want or need a revised edition of his earlier work in their libraries. He answered that Personal Writings had been "out of print for several years." Furthermore, "reprinting provided another opportunity to improve the format, share current interpretations of familiar content, make needed corrections throughout, and remove some mistakes." Perhaps the most notable correction was to remove six Hofmann forgeries included in the first edition. Even though subsequent scholarship and events have cleared up all speculation about their origins, their presence in the first edition could have been confusing to some.

This second edition, while removing the forgeries, adds six items not included in the 1982 edition:

To the Reader, March 1830; To the Elders of the Church, September-December 1835; To Heber C. Kimball and Brigham Young, 16 January 1839; To the Wilkinson Family [February 1840]; Resolution, March 1842; Proclamation, 11 June 1844.

Further, (Jessee explains) the book's format and content has been improved in the following areas: endnotes were changed to footnotes; a biographical register was added to identify people mentioned in the text (pages 657-703); journal dates were set off from the entries; and republication allowed for the comparison of the text of the documents against the original manuscripts one more time. (xvi)

Then there are the wonderful maps! Maps in this edition were upgraded and improved. Utilizing contributions directly from Larry Porter, James L. Kimball, Mark L. Staker, Donald L. Enders, and Max H. Parkin and informed by an ever-improving body of geographical literature emerging from the larger Mormon scholarly community, the maps prove a valuable resource. They are the most current series of Church history maps now available. The maps alone are worth the price of the book. Map artwork was generated by computer, by Richard Erickson, the art director at Deseret Book Company who also may be credited with the overall design of a very attractive book, and by Robert Erickson (relationship not specified). But no matter how carefully an editorial team rechecks every detail, there are always unintended problems. In this instance, Jessee explained apologetically to me that the maps of Kirtland and Palmyra "were cannibalized somehow after the final proof."

Jessee has faithfully presented the content of Smith's writings, while allowing the reader to come to his or her own conclusion about much of its meaning. Both editions of Personal Writings include a remarkable letter from Smith to Sidney Rigdon, 27 March 1843. Jessee notes: "By 1843 Rigdon's influence had diminished, due partly to his ill health and partly to a strained relationship that developed between him and the Prophet. Joseph was convinced that Rigdon was practicing `deception and wickedness' against him and the Church stemming from Rigdon's position as Nauvoo postmaster":

(e)ver since soon after the first appearance of John C. Bennet in this place. There has been something dark & my(s)terious hovering over our business concerns that are not only palpable but altogether unaccountable in relation to the Post office, and Sir from the very first of the pretensions of John C Bennet, to secure to me the Post office, (which, by the by I have <never> desired, if I could have justice done me in that department,) <without my occupancy> I have known, Sir, that it was a fraud practiced upon me, and of the secret plottings & conniving between him & yourself in relation to the matter the whole time, as well as many other things which I have kept locked up in my own bosom but I am constrained at this time, to make known my feelings to you. (580-81)

Jessee's commentary provides insights into the context of the episode but leaves the reader wondering about the quality of the interpersonal interactions that prompted the exchange.

Therefore, my only concern with the work is that, while Jessee's accurate and insightful footnoting provides an invaluable resource tool, his annotations tend to be both neutral and frustratingly reserved; furthermore, they draw too exclusively on internal LDS scholarship. The Community of Christ Archives has been pleased to have the opportunity to contribute to this effort by making primary Smith materials available to supplement this collection but would have been even happier at finding the occasional inclusion of nonsympathetic interpretations of Smith's experiences. Such an approach would have allowed a deeper, richer context within which to discuss Smith's activities. A tendency to focus on some issues while minimizing others may well succeed in hiding his moments of human failing but may also actually obscure the true scope of Joseph Smith's triumphs.

Notwithstanding such modest reservations, Jessee may be justifiably proud of this outstanding edition. Significantly, the revised edition of Personal Writings again makes available in print nearly all of Smith's significant holograph writings. Furthermore, the revision clearly accomplishes its goals, improving accuracy and furnishing a considerably more reader friendly edition. Scholars and interested readers will not want to be without a copy close at hand.

RONALD E. ROMIG (rromig@CofCrisht.org) is Community of Christ Archivist, Independence, Missouri.

Armand L. Mauss. All Abraham's Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. xvi, 343 pp. Figures, tables, appendices, references, index. Cloth: $36.95; ISBN: 0-252-02803-1 Buy it now!

Reviewed by Bron B. Ingoldsby (Reviewed April 2004)

This eagerly awaited book is a distillation of the work and thought, over the course of his career, of Armand Mauss, emeritus professor of sociology, Washington State University, on the topic of race in the LDS Church. Since researching his dissertation in 1970, he has investigated the attitudes and behaviors of Mormons toward certain racial/ethnic groups, particularly Native Americans, Jews, and African Americans. While he provides the reader with an historical chronology of these evolving attitudes, he does so within a sociological framework or interpretation of those materials.

Those who enjoyed his The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994) and others of his writings will want to read this book as well and will not be disappointed. In the first two chapters, Mauss explains the gradual development of the concept of lineage identity among Mormons. In his view, this process was cultural rather than revelatory. The Book of Mormon appears to identify the early Saints as "Gentiles" assigned to bring the full gospel back to the Lamanites, or Native Americans of Jewish descent.

However, Mormonism's founder, Joseph Smith, received other revelations that led him to believe that his family and those of other early Church members were of the leading Israelite tribe of Ephraim. Actual Gentiles who converted to the true religion would also become Israelites as well. As Mauss explains: "The Mormon prophet Joseph Smith was among those who took literally the relationship between lineage and blood, declaring in an 1839 sermon that converts from Gentile lineages would miraculously undergo an actual change of blood, making their conversion a somewhat more physical experience than would be the case for those converts of literal Israelite descent" (23).

The majority of early Church converts were either descended from or residents of Western Europe, Great Britain, and Scandinavia. They brought with them fairly commonly held ideas, among them the notion that they were a superior race which included descendants of some of the "lost tribes" of Israel. Eventually, most Mormons came to believe that humans are born into mortal lineages which reflect the talents and faithfulness they developed in the premortal existence, each having certain birthrights and destinies, with the chosen Israelites at the favored end of the continuum and the cursed descendants of Cain at the other.

Mauss documents that present-day Church leaders now make almost no reference to favored lineages and that Mormons now hold a view similar to the rest of Christianity-which is that all who follow God's laws, regardless of background, are "Abraham's children" by virtue of their faith. How did this doctrinal development occur historically? Mauss's central thesis is that the root cause driving the change has been the Church's missionary focus. Early Mormons believed that descendants of chosen Israel would find themselves irresistibly attracted to the gospel message; success in northwestern Europe supported the Mormon founder's beliefs that that is where the Israelite descendants, particularly of Ephraim, had clustered. Worldwide expansion of proselyting efforts has resulted in a number of adjustments in Mormon lineage beliefs as successes have not always occurred where they were expected. Mauss quotes Andrew Jenson, assistant Church historian: "We are of Israel, and ... when our genealogy is revealed in detail, it will lead us back ... to England and thence to Scandinavia and Germany, and from there to ... that part of Asia where the Ten Tribes were lost" (28). He went on to indicate that lack of missionary success with the Latin and Oriental peoples was due to their lack of Israelite blood. Later successes in those very areas, however, have led to a more recent redefinition of lineage. By the 1950s, Church Patriarch Eldred G. Smith had declared lineage to mean simply "the tribe through which the promises of inheritance shall come" (35).

In chapters 2-5, Mauss details the Church's struggle to find the true Lamanites. Early Mormons clearly expected North American Native Americans to convert and become "civilized" in large numbers. This never happened, and Church members over time came to see them in the same basically negative ways shared by other Euro-Americans. During the 1950s-1970s, under the leadership of Spencer W. Kimball, first an apostle and later Church president, the Church sustained another major effort to convert Native Americans; but Indian seminary, placement, and BYU programs were eventually evaluated as not cost effective and were eliminated.

In recent decades, however, the lack of interest by North American Indians has been counterbalanced by dramatic missionary successes in Latin America, with significant LDS populations in countries such as Mexico, Brazil, and Chile. Mauss explains that the Church's missionary efforts in Latin America and Polynesia merged nicely with these people's needs to construct their own identities, which would help distinguish them in positive ways from that of the Europeans who had colonized their countries. Mauss explains: 

LDS converts throughout Latin America have been able to use the Lamanite identity to claim a special or divine distinction in contrast to both their Hispanic colonial conquerors and their Anglo-Mormon coreligionists. Already in 1972, Latin American Mormons were being encouraged to do so in the official church magazine itself. . . . Polynesian Mormons have made similar uses of their constructed Israelite heritage for more than a century. Despite a rather tenuous basis in the Mormon canon for the Polynesian claim to such an identity, the claim has been widely embraced among Mormons in both North America and Polynesia. (149-50)

These new members have been happy to assume the Lamanite identity as one that is uplifting for them, and U.S. Mormons are pleased to have finally found someone to fit their Book of Mormon expectations. 

Readers who are old enough to remember living through many of these various LDS ethnic boundary shifts will enjoy Mauss's retracing of them. I remember as a young Book of Mormon reader, trying to understand how we white Mormons were both Gentiles and Israelites. I pondered the failures of the many programs designed for Native Americans and was excited to learn of Book of Mormon geographic theories which placed the Nephites and Lamanites in Mesoamerica, rather than North America. During my own proselytizing mission in South America, I met many devout Latter-day Saints who were thrilled to identify themselves as Lamanites. I would have enjoyed it if Mauss had been able to add a few more pages on how this identity was also transported from the Book of Mormon American shores to those of the islands of Polynesia.

In Chapters 6-7, Mauss discusses Mormon attitudes toward the Jews.  Here Church members tend to have a more favorable view than Christians in general. Instead of seeing them as those who "killed Christ" and need to be converted, Mormons identify with them as fellow Israelites who have a special latter-day mission in their part of the world. As a result, according to Mauss, they are one of only two groups that the Mormons have purposefully chosen not to proselytize. (The second group was those of black African descent.) The few exceptions included short-lived programs in California and New York by Apostle LeGrand Richards and swimsuit designer Rose Marie Reid.

Mauss shares sociological research which indicates that Mormons have significantly lower rates of anti-Semitism than do other groups, much of it summarized in the appendices. Unfortunately, a printer error in Appendix C resulted in the diagrams for C.1 and C.4 being switched. The titles are correct, but the path models themselves need to be interchanged.

Chapters 8-9 recount the historical development of the concept that African lineage was "cursed," and recent events surrounding the ending of that curse by Spencer W. Kimball in 1978 with its consequences. Mauss explains the origins of the Church's decision to deny priesthood ordination and temple access to those of black African ancestry. He also addresses the confusion and controversy during the time of the civil rights movement and the range of "racialist" (his term) views by Mormons. I think that many readers will find this section less detailed than they had hoped for. It would have benefitted, for instance, from a more detailed explanation of the doctrinal/scriptural supports that the Church used in defending its priesthood ban.

However, the story of how that ban ended in 1978 and the role played by missionary work in Brazil and other places in that decision is fascinating. Those who served LDS missions before 1978 may remember the difficulties of coming across good people who might have "the blood," with virtually no help from Church headquarters on how to deal it with. The unofficial books, articles, and stories that circulated attempted to explain and support the ban; but in the end, it all still sounded racist. As a young man, I was shocked when I read James Michener's Hawaii (New York: Random House, 1959), which included this outsider's view of Mormon beliefs: "Do you know why the Mormons had so much success in these islands? They admit frankly, `In heaven there are only white people.' I suppose you know that a nigger can't get a place to sleep in Salt Lake. So they tell us that if we are real good on earth and we love God, when we die God's going to make us white, and then we'll go to heaven and all will be hunky-dory" (837).

Rather than denounce the previous doctrine as incorrect, Church leaders have taken the approach of simply not discussing it anymore. On this point, Mauss steps out of his usual position of objective observer:

The identification of blacks with Cain, however, has never been officially dropped or even mildly disavowed by church leaders. At least the traditional notions about the origin and significance of that lineage are no longer repeated in official discourse or literature. Yet they remain scattered throughout authoritative church books from the past that continue to be reprinted under the auspices of the church.... As long as the folklore about Cain continues to circulate among white Mormons, many of them will continue to impose an identity on blacks that will greatly complicate racial relationships and church growth; black Mormons, for their part, can never be quite sure how white Mormons look upon them. (275)

I really did like this book. My biggest complaint is Mauss's overuse of the word invidious. Chapter 10 is an excellent summary of the process of identity construction by the Mormon people for themselves and for others in relation to them. As missionary work around the world made it more difficult from the 1950s on to sustain a coherent framework for where Israel really was, geographically or theologically, these views gave way to a more universal interpretation. Mauss concludes: "Old notions from early Mormonism (and early America) simply could not be sustained in the face of the manifest eagerness of various peoples to embrace the Mormon message. This purging of the preoccupation with lineage has been the gift of the world's peoples to Mormonism" (268).

BRON B. INGOLDSBY (bingoldsby@byu.edu) is an associate professor in the School of Family Life, Brigham Young University, where his research focuses on cross-cultural family relations.

Donna Toland Smart, ed. Exemplary Elder. The Life and Missionary Diaries of Perrigrine Sessions, 1814-1893. Provo, Utah: BYU Studies/Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History, 2002. ix, 362 pp. Photographs, map, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth: $18.95; ISBN 0-8425-2509-2 Buy it now!

Reviewed by Carol Cornwall Madsen (Reviewed April 2004)

One of the richest legacies of the Mormon experience is the large collection of personal writings by the well known and the lesser known. Perrigrine Sessions is one of the latter. His diary tells the story of the "daily living and dying of men and women both weak and valiant," as William Mulder once characterized the unnoted Saints of early Church history. "Their story is not epic," he wrote "except as life and many days together give it sweep – it is the sweep of daily existence, the great movement that is the result of countless little movements."^[2] His life, like so many others, was a tributary to the mainstream of Mormon history, being best remembered as the founder of Bountiful, Utah, and as the son of his better-known mother, Patty Bartlett Sessions, a midwife and diarist.^[3]  Born in Newry, Maine, in 1814, Perrigrine was converted to Mormonism in 1835 at age twenty-one and became an unwavering believer and obedient follower, serving seven missions, marrying eight women, fathering fifty-five children, settling the second community in Utah, and serving the Church throughout his adult life.

He followed the westward odyssey of the Church, traveling to Kirtland, Ohio, where he met Joseph Smith, and then to Far West, Missouri. He experienced the expulsion from Missouri and noted that the liberation of Joseph Smith from Liberty jail "gave us much joy... (and) caused our drooping spirits to revive as we were like sheap with out a shepherd that had been scattered in a cloudy and dark day" (43). In 1839, Perrigrine filled a one-year mission to Maine and in 1843 served another. Although his chronicle is largely cursory, it is enlivened by intermittent forays into colorful writing: "As the Saints met together," he wrote on one occasion, "the Devils with his imps came also and howld like Missouri Preachers/mobers by druming on tinpans and jumping jim Crow" (64).

In the trek west, Sessions was appointed a captain of fifty, traveling in the "big" company which followed Brigham Young's vanguard expedition. Three days after arriving in the Valley in September 1847, he took his family north to establish Sessions' Settlement, now Bountiful. In 1852 he served another mission, this time to Great Britain. He and seventy other men traveled to Europe with the assignment to preach the gospel and introduce the principle of plural marriage, which had just been publicly announced. His graphic description of the arduous journey back across the plains and harrowing voyage to England invites respect for those who served missions during that period. Suffering from ill health for most of his mission, he returned home in 1854 with chronic problems from which he never fully recovered. Yet he served four more missions, all to Maine, where he labored to convert family members. He served his last mission when he was seventy-two. Afterward, he wrote only sporadically until his death seven years later in 1893.

Perrigrine Sessions left eight diaries, some of them rewritten as memoirs, covering the years 1834 to 1893 and including an extensive "geneanology." Following the dictum of Wilford Woodruff, Sessions was energetic in keeping an account of his missionary experiences but was less diligent in recording his life between missions. There is little mention of his wives and families and only brief references to his life in Bountiful. Donna Smart has wisely arranged the diaries/memoirs in chronological order, divided them into 13 chapters, and provided an explanatory introduction to each chapter. She has included ancillary information in boxed inserts, much of it from the "History of Bountiful" written by Perrigrine's son Carlos, and amplified by letters, articles from the Millennial Star, brief biographies of Perrigrine's wives, and other related documents. These inserts are sometimes placed within a chapter, occasionally interrupting the flow of the diary, but appear more often at the beginning or end. They provide the social environment in which Perrigrine lived and worked, which is missing from the diaries. The footnotes are exhaustive, sometimes overwhelming the terse notations in the diaries. They also account for a good portion of the book.

Perrigrine's record of his 1852-54 British mission is the centerpiece of the book, comprising a third of this published collection. He was appointed president of the Manchester Conference with duties that included preaching, supervising the elders and the branches, and chastising, if not excommunicating, wayward converts. His diary is often numbingly repetitious, recording his almost daily journeys on foot to each village and giving meaning to the term "traveling elder." A week in July 1853, for example, begins:

Thursday 14 to Stock port and preacht to the Saints ... staid to brother Antony Rites Friday 15 Visited many of the Saints and staid to brother Dunns Saturday 16 to Ashton and staid to brother Lees health poor had a soar mouth Sunday 17 preacht twise to Ashton with good Atention and a good spirit prevailed thence to Stely Bridg preacht to a small congragation and the Most of them saints thence to Dutonfield. (204)

Perrigrine then returned to Antony Rites and "slept with him and his Wife as they have but one bed in the house" (208).

Occasionally he describes a place, person, or event in memorable terms, demonstrating his eye for detail and imagery which well rewards the patient reader. He remembered his grandfather, for example, as a man "who never made any pretensions to christianity and was never daubed with the untempered morter of sectarianism" (17). He took two full pages to describe a visit to Belle Vue Gardens in Manchester: "On the borders of the pond of water is plesent walks with their borders adorned with the finest trees that gro in the world with their fruit and flours and in the sides of these walks are summer houses with tables for you to take some refreshments on and sit and read or Amuse your self as you please with a good brass band of Musick" (208). Obviously, the urban pleasures of this industrial city were, to this Bountiful, Utah man, a heady experience.

Donna Smart is to be congratulated for bringing to life one of the "ordinary" Saints through his own writing. She has given meticulous attention to detail in identifying the names, places, and references in the diaries. She has included a simple map of the towns near Newry, Maine, and Manchester, England, both useful in following the route of this itinerant preacher. Exemplary Elder reflects J. Reuben Clark's book, To Them of the Last Wagon, affirming the value of the followers as well as the leaders in the process of "kingdom building."^[4]   Far more missionary experiences were patterned after Perrigrine's than Wilford Woodruff's. As a man in the trenches rather than on the hilltop, he represents the thousands whose stories still lie hidden in unseen diaries.

CAROL CORNWALL MADSEN (ccm@comcast.net} is a senior research historian at the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.

Jeffrey S. O'Driscoll. Hyrum Smith: A Life of Integrity. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2003. xix, 444 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, chronology, appendix, bibliography, index. Cloth: $29.95; ISBN 1-57008-857-8 Buy it now!

Reviewed by Richard K. Behrens (Reviewed April 2004)

As his first book, Jeffrey O'Driscoll has undertaken the massive if not monumental task of systematically documenting all of Hyrum Smith's contributions to the Restoration. A medical doctor, O'Driscoll, has previously delivered papers at the Sperry and Book of Mormon Symposia at BYU and has served on the LDS Church Writing Committee.

O' Driscoll's stated objective in this biography is to update "Pearson H. Corbett's biography of Hyrum Smith that has been a useful resource for four decades but additional source material and the need for documentation invited another opportunity to write on Hyrum's life" (xviii). In addition to Hyrum's writings published in the Millennial Star and Times and Seasons, O'Driscoll has also, in many cases for the first time, quoted from the Hyrum Smith diaries and account books recently donated to Brigham Young University, the patriarchal blessings he gave recorded in the blessing book later taken over by William Smith, and various letters and affidavits. O'Driscoll's biography of Hyrum grew out of an original effort, suggested by an anonymous descendant of Smith's, to gather all of his words recorded directly or indirectly, to better identify his contribution to the Restoration. The end result, however, is to define a relationship of near parity between Hyrum Smith and his younger brother, the prophet Joseph Smith, while carefully not allowing Hyrum to ever get very far ahead of Joseph in any circumstance. Hyrum's role is always that of totally reliable first-level support for all of Joseph's efforts. Whenever Hyrum does appear to get ahead of Joseph on a particular issue or in a new situation, O'Driscoll readily and deftly transfers control back to Joseph with Hyrum being chastened on occasion.

Hyrum's relationship with Joseph is initially defined by his attendance on Joseph while Joseph was recovering from leg surgery as a child in 1813-16. That relationship steadily builds through family economic challenges, through the Book of Mormon's preparation (1827-30), and through the Church's dynamic growth and persecutions, finally culminating in the martyrdom of the two brothers (1844). It is refreshing to see this relationship from Hyrum's perspective. Though Hyrum always defers to Joseph as the ultimate spiritual authority on matters to be decided, his readiness to act and to take appropriate independent initiative is widely portrayed but carefully contained.

O'Driscoll systematically organizes the recorded events of Hyrum's life and encourages further research into the earlier enabling events that contributed to his later success. O'Driscoll uses some of the new material that has become available on Smith's early education which begins to foreshadow his Palmyra roles as school teacher and trustee. Further use of new material may have been helpful in better understanding his later assignments on building projects in Kirtland and Nauvoo and possibly even in identifying contributions to the evolution of Mormon doctrine.

Of particular interest are the numerous situations in which the brothers were able to rely upon each other. For example, the longest time they were ever separated was the five months from October 1839 to March 1840 when Joseph and Sidney Rigdon went to Washington, D.C., seeking redress for persecutions in Missouri. During that time, Hyrum was given total responsibility for resettling the Missouri refugees in Illinois and organizing their new settlement around Nauvoo, Illinois.

O'Driscoll tells the Restoration story through Hyrum Smith's words, relying on the records of others present with Hyrum at a specific event when Hyrum made no recorded comment. Therefore the text is rich in building a contemporary assessment of Hyrum's role in the early Church. For example, O'Driscoll relates this Nauvoo anecdote, recorded in Wilford Woodruff's journal:

At one meeting in Joseph's home, Hyrum stood by the dormant fireplace, delivered a lengthy discourse about the scriptures and said, "We must take them as our guide alone." As he sat down, Joseph requested Brigham to speak. "I had become pretty well charged with plenty of powder and ball.... I felt like a thousand lions," Brigham recalled. He took the various books of scripture, piled them on top of each other, and said, "I would not give the ashes of a rye straw for all those books for my salvation without living oracles. I should follow and obey the living oracles for my salvation instead of anything else."

Hyrum, the Patriarch and assistant president of the Church, had been soundly and publicly corrected by the president of the Twelve, but Hyrum did not chafe, balk, or complain. The mantle of leadership rested softly upon him. His mild manner yielded neither guile nor pride. When President Young finished, "Hyrum got up and made a confession for not including oracles." In Brigham's words, "Hyrum arose and made handsome apology, and confessed his wrong which he had committed in excess zeal, and asked pardon." Is it any wonder that Joseph loved Hyrum so much? (250-51)

O'Driscoll credits Hyrum with many high-performance achievements which have often been lost in past presentations. For example, Brigham Young is often given credit for bringing Artemus Millet from Canada to work on the Kirtland Temple, but the author more correctly states that Young converted Millet and Hyrum then called him to come to Kirtland to work on the temple (86-87). O'Driscoll's twenty-five-page appendix, "The Teachings of Hyrum Smith," displays the depth and breadth of Hyrum's thought.

Hyrum is depicted as the ultimate in faithful service-as someone who completed all of his assignments as well as many previously assigned to others, such as his appointment to the temple committee after the death of Elias Higbee. There seem to be few, if any, matters of substance that the brothers do not thoroughly discuss and upon which they do not come to a final agreement. In the case of plural marriage, however, it takes four pages of text to describe their coming to agreement (288-291). O'Driscoll quotes Hyrum's assessment of Joseph: "There were prophets before, but Joseph has the spirit and power of all the prophets" (380; from History of the Church 6:346).

O'Driscoll succeeds in focusing attention directly on Hyrum and his actions. Hyrum is seen as a true complement to Joseph, not just a supplement. However, Hyrum frequently seems to be given assignments for which he has no apparent preparation, and at times the reader is left groping for linkage between events through time. What qualified Hyrum to be a school teacher and trustee, Mason initiate, and building project overseer. Where did he learn to quote Josephus (350)? Perhaps a better understanding of his years at Moor's School (Dartmouth College's precollegiate department) when integral aspects of the curriculum included Christianizing the Indians, their Israelite origin, ancient scripture study, Arminian theology, and the concept of multiple peopled worlds would further illuminate Hyrum Smith's contributions to Mormon theology and mission. Other underweighted preparatory experiences may include Hyrum's Presbyterian and Masonic training in Palmyra.

The presentation of the book itself is of high quality, with useful maps, illustrations, and a chronology of Smith's life. The index has some shortcomings, lacking, for instance, the Josephus reference. The front cover rendering from Hyrum's death mask suggests a gentler countenance than traditional portraits that suggest a more hardened administrator. The back cover painting by Lee Greene Richards depicts Joseph teaching chiefs and braves of the Sac and Fox Indian tribes after being introduced by Hyrum. The selection of this illustration incidentally reinforces the fact that among Hyrum's schoolmates at Moor's School were Indians who could read the New Testament in Greek and Cicero and Virgil in Latin.

RICHARD K. BEHRENS (r.k.behrens@att.net) a graduate of Dartmouth College who did his graduate work at Northwestern University, is preparing a book on Hyrum Smith's schooling at Moor's School and its curriculum for 1754-1817. He has presented his findings at conferences of the Mormon History Association and the John Whitmer Historical Association, among others.

Buy it now!

Don S. Colvin. Nauvoo Temple: A Story of Faith. Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2002. ix, 308 pp. Photographs, drawings, notes, appendix. Cloth: $29.95; ISBN 1-59156-014-4 Buy it now!

Reviewed by William Shepard (Reviewed April 2004)

Nauvoo Temple: A Story of Faith is intelligently written, a beautifully constructed book published by the Religious Studies Center at Brigham Young University in 2002 to coincide with the dedication of the restored Nauvoo Temple. Obviously, this book was designed to tell the world about the faith, sacrifice, and dedication of the Mormons who constructed the original temple and to let the readers share a vicarious identification with the original builders.

In his preface, Colvin reveals the scope and limitations of his book: "The text brings together in more complete form than previously published the pertinent information relating to the temple's construction, varied uses, and eventual fate" and "the most detailed and pertinent information and descriptions regarding the external and internal physical feature of the Nauvoo Temple" (viii). Both summations are correct. The descriptions of the temple are this book's strength, making it a valuable addition to our knowledge of temple building at Nauvoo. Colvin also forthrightly states his own attitude toward the subject, one which would be at home at a testimony meeting: "I do possess strong convictions and a firm testimony that the hand of God attended the construction of this great temple. It is my observation that God's Spirit guided this work and was clearly manifested in meetings and ordinances conducted within this sacred building. I came away from this experience with my faith deeply enriched" (ix). While I respect this position, as a historian I cannot help feeling that such an unquestioning faith-affirming position is a limitation both on the kinds of information Colvin has sought and the conclusions he has drawn from it.

This book is limited in range as it contains only 305 double spaced pages, numerous drawings, photographs, other illustrations, and notes. The period of Mormon settlement at Nauvoo is covered in ten pages and the "building program" of the temple in only fifteen. These abbreviated historical chapters introduce the reader to the meat of the book: chapters on the spiritual blessings, construction, uses, and dimensions of the temple. Following chapters include descriptions of the temple's dedication and its destruction. Finally, Colvin gives an interesting overview about how the plans for the restored temple were formulated, the process of acquiring the temple site, and the ultimate completion of the temple.

Although several chapters are too generic and compressed to convey significant historic information, the one on "Spiritual Blessings" is valuable for any reader interested in learning more about theological innovations at Nauvoo. Colvin explains: "Revelation through the Prophet Joseph Smith concerning gospel principles and ordinances, much of which was associated with the temple, was the most important thing happening during the Nauvoo period of Church history" (111). His explanations about such doctrines and practices as "man's destiny and relationship to deity" and "eternal marriage" closely associate the historical practices with modern temple ceremonies.

The real value of the book, however, is in the chapters on "exterior features," "early sketches," "architectural drawings of William Weeks," and "interior features." These chapters provide a wealth of information not readily available in any other publication. They help the reader better understand the magnificence of the Nauvoo Temple. Drawings and photographs used in conjunction with clearly explained commentary take the reader through the temple's measurements and physical features. Colvin's style of writing brings each area of the temple to life. For example, here is his description of the front vestibule:

Entrance from outside the temple was gained by climbing a flight of ten steps. As [Lyman O.) Littlefield entered the building in 1845, he left this observation: "Now let us examine what is properly called the first story.... We enter this at the west end, passing through either of three large open doors or arched pass-ways, each of which is nine feet seven inches wide and twenty one feet high. Passing through these we are standing in a large outer court, forty-three feet by seventeen feet wide." The area from the floor to the ceiling was 25 feet in height, identical to the main interior area of the first story (see Figure 7.1). On each end of this 43-foot-long outer lobby were stairwells, each 17 feet deep and 18 feet 6 inches long. These areas were separated from the open court by stone partition walls. Each wall had doors that opened into the large spiral staircases. Adding together the spacious outer court along with the stairwells on each side (43 feet plus 181/2and 181/2) results in a total interior width dimension of 80 feet (see drawing of the first story floor plan and vestibule area, Figure 8.7). (195)

My main criticism of Nauvoo Temple: A Story of Faith is that it perpetuates the myth the temple was built without controversy and that the behavior of the Nauvoo Mormons was uniformly beyond reproach. Such an approach is not objective history and diminishes the true scope of the achievement by denying elements of its reality. For example, Colvin did not explain the controversy stemming from (LDS) Doctrine and Covenants 124:31-32 which stipulated that if the temple was not completed "in a sufficient time . . .. ye shall be rejected as a church, with your dead, saith the Lord your God."^[5]  As a second example, William Clayton's important journal is frequently cited, but Colvin conspicuously omits the 26 December 1845 entry: "There was a necessity for a reformation of this sort, for some men were doing things which ought not to be done in the Temple of the Lord. Some three or four men and perhaps more, had introduced women into the Temple, not their wives, and were living in the side rooms, cooking, sleeping, tending babies, and toying with their women."^[6] Another omission is Hosea Stout's journal entry of 30 September 1845 which described Illinois militiamen searching the temple for the bodies of two Gentiles, Phineas Wilcox and Andrew Daubenheyer, whom they believed the Mormons had murdered.^[7]   These fuller accounts would have supplied a truer picture of the complex realities against which the temple rose on its commanding bluff.

Despite these reservations, I find Nauvoo Temple: A Study of Faith an excellent book which should be widely accepted in the Mormon community.

WILLIAM SHEPARD (shep@speeddial.net), of Strangite heritage, is currently researching crime in Nauvoo and a biography of William Smith. He has participated in the annual conferences of the Mormon History Association and John Whitmer Historical Association, and in Sunstone Symposiums.

Buy it now!

James B. Allen, Ronald W. Walker, and David J. Whittaker. Studies in Mormon History, 1830-1997: An Indexed Bibliography; with a Topical Guide to Published Social Science Literature on the Mormons [by] Armand L. Mauss and Dynette Ivie Reynolds. Urbana: University of Illinois Press in cooperation with the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History, Brigham Young University, 2000. xiii, 1,152 pp. Cloth: $100; ISBN 0-252-02565-2

Reviewed by John C. Thomas (Reviewed April 2004)

More than thirty years ago, Dale L. Morgan called bibliography the "cutting edge of historianship."^[8]  More recently, Ronald W. Walker, James B. Allen, and David J. Whittaker have observed that bibliographies and other reference works serve as "artifacts" as well as "guides."^[9] Studies in Mormon History is a path-breaking guide that presages great strides for the next generation of Mormon studies. It is also evidence of the progress made in Mormon studies, much of it since Morgan wrote. And a formidable artifact it is: nearly twelve hundred letter-sized pages of reference material, printed in double columns, and weighing about six pounds. The product of "hundreds of thousands of hours of labor," it took fifteen years of work by the authors, more than a hundred research assistants, and the shared insights of another hundred or more scholars (xii). It is a book with a history, and evidence that many people want to understand the Mormon past, present, and future.

The bibliography proper, arranged alphabetically by author, is 459 pages long, and features more than 2,600 books; 10,400 articles and book chapters; 1,800 theses and dissertations; and over 150 task papers and typescripts (ix). Since nearly half of Armand L. Mauss's and Dynette Ivie Reynolds's collection of social science publications overlap with the historical writings, the bibliography integrates both databases.

This is not an elitist collection of work. The authors define "serious scholarship" broadly, and they apply the criterion of "usefulness" liberally – so that all but the most polemical or careless of works are included (x-xi). As a result, some writings figure more prominently than might be expected in a bibliography prepared by academics and published by a university press. To be sure, Leonard J. Arrington's signal contributions fill up over fourteen columns in the bibliography, but the wide-ranging studies carried out under Kate B. Carter, of the Daughters of Utah Pioneers, occupy some seventeen columns. Helpful annotations of many of these studies forced me to reconsider the wisdom of neglecting a source such as Heart Throbs of the West.

I applaud the authors' inclusive approach, as much for its humility as its thoroughness. It seems true to the spirit of the Mormon History Association, if a little foreign to the ethos of the academy. It is a cautionary corrective to the tendency to dismiss an obscure source with a scornful remark about its "amateur" origins. After all, how many flawed works on Mormonism have slipped through the editorial boards of university presses and peer-reviewed journals? The authors acknowledged the likelihood of "lapses or errors" and invited users to "make future editions more accurate" (xiii). To notify the authors of other errors, contact the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute (jfsi@byu.edu), which hosts a web page to update the bibliography (smithinstitute.byu.edu/ref/mormbibhome.asp). (Ironically, even a scholar as well-known as Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, name correctly spelled under her own entries, appears as "Maurine" in the "Sessions, Patty Bartlett" entry where she is the series editor, 372.)

The most important tools in Studies in Mormon History are the "Index to Historical Writings" and "Social Science Topical Guide." These guides will shape research on Mormonism for years to come. Of the two, the "Topical Guide" is much slimmer, a modest eighty-five pages long. Its subject headings also seem to be more conceptually oriented. This, I suppose, reflects both the grander theoretical aims of some social science and the academic origins of the social science bibliography. It indexes only published material, omitting theses, dissertations, and conference papers.

That said, Mauss and Reynolds employed "expansive" selection rules, choosing to include even some "informed social commentary" that most scholars would not consider "social science" (1060). A noticeable consequence is numerous references to articles and essays from Sunstone magazine. As I reviewed several subject headings, I found it ironic that so many Sunstone articles met the compilers' "expansive" criteria, while not a single article published in an "official" Church periodical made the list. It may be that this imbalance reflects the limits of the search strategy, rather than the compilers' judgments about what constitutes "informed social commentary" on subjects such as Mormon religiosity, culture, church government, and family life.

The core of Studies in Mormon History is the 586-page "Index of Historical Writings." Using more than 6,500 subject headings and subheadings, and drawing on their decades of experience and consultation with many unnamed colleagues, the authors have attempted to map the many fields of Mormon historical studies. The approach is decidedly empirical, and it results in a rich if almost chaotic array of leads on people and places. I believe it is the indexing system (and to some extent the annotations in the bibliography) that earns Allen, Walker, and Whittaker the title of "authors," rather than "compilers" or "editors."

Any research project should begin (and perhaps some will end), with a literature review of relevant subject headings in the index. It is important to remember the authors' focus: the "secondary historical literature on Mormon history," largely in English (xi, emphasis mine). Rather than trying to identify and index all the source documents created within the historical drama of the restoration, the authors seek to catalog all that observers and students have written about that drama. What of the many who wrote history from within, as prophets and partisans and "participant observers"? Their role as narrators is acknowledged, but they appear in this book mainly as subjects. For example, Joseph Smith Jr. is listed as author twenty-three times in the bibliography (about one page). But in the index, the studies listed under subjects headed by "Joseph Smith, Jr." stretch on for eighteen pages, arranged in more than a hundred subdivisions. As evidence of how challenging it is to index all that has been written about Joseph, a note warns that "the miscellaneous subdivision is still the largest," and suggests more than a dozen related subjects to investigate (927).^[10]

Despite its emphasis on secondary work, Studies in Mormon History catalogs a lot of primary documents, some in almost "raw" form, others edited to high scholarly standards. It startled me to recognize how many first-person Mormon narratives, male and female, have already made their way into print. In addition to hundreds of personal writings linked to specific names and topics, one could make a fine start by perusing the long lists of references under the headings "Autobiographies" and "Diaries and Journals." And for those who want to dig in archives for unpublished primary material, "Sources" and its specific subheadings is a helpful start.

With so many index headings, some subjects inevitably prove to be duds. But there is good news. First, the cross-referencing system provides verbal pointers to keep a literature review moving. When my first search for a subject came up empty, a little persistence yielded solid leads. Second, those who find that there really are only a few studies on a subject should look upon the lacuna as a call to labor!

Even subjects featuring long lists of studies open up exciting possibilities for research. To cite just two examples, many questions came to mind as I perused eight pages tracing work on various aspects of "Doctrinal History." And even as twenty pages of references surprised me about the wealth of work done on subjects related to Mormon women, they made me think about the definition and evolution of those research fields, and the gaps that remain in the historical record. Studies in Mormon History is both a substantial artifact of the work done so far, and a humane and accessible guide for the work that lies ahead.

JOHN C. THOMAS {Thomasj@byui.edu) teaches in the Department of Religious Education at Brigham Young University-Idaho. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Mormon History.

Leland Homer Gentry. A History of the Latter-day Saints in Northern Missouri from 1836 to 1839. 1965; reprinted, Provo, Utah: Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History and BYU Studies, 2000. xi, 279 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $19.95 paper. ISBN 0-8425-2469-X Buy it now!

Reviewed by Donald Q. Cannon (Reviewed April 2004)

When Leland Gentry wrote his dissertation on the Mormons in Missouri in the 1960s, he was not alone. In that era several of his colleagues in the Church Educational System (CES) produced doctoral dissertations about the LDS Church which, taken together, constituted a major scholarly contribution to the study of Mormon history. Some of those authors include Gwynn Barrett, C. Kent Dunford, Reed C. Durham Jr., Kenneth W. Godfrey, Leon R. Hartshorn, Robert J. Matthews, Larry C. Porter, Gilbert W. Scharffs, and A. Dean Wengreen.

These dissertations have stood the test of time, as students of Mormon history still consult them regularly. Consequently, the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History and BYU Studies have begun publishing some of these works. Gentry's study of Missouri is among those recently issued in this new series.

The title of Gentry's dissertation, "A History of the Latter-day Saints in Northern Missouri from 1836 to 1839," succinctly summarizes the parameters of the work. The dissertation consists of four sections: Mormonism's historical background to that point, the Mormon settlement effort in northern Missouri, the Mormon War of 1838, and events after the war (i.e., the incarceration of Joseph Smith and his colleagues in Liberty Jail, the exodus to Illinois, and the Saints' redress efforts).

Gentry's dissertation provides solid coverage on all of these areas and is especially strong in some particular parts. His work on the Danites, for example, is of special interest for two reasons: first, Gentry's work makes several contributions to Danite scholarship; and second, he has emerged as a principal protagonist in the debate over the role of this Mormon military group. As one contribution, he points out that the Danite organization had various names: the Brothers of Gideon, Daughters of Zion, and the Big Fan. He further notes that this paramilitary organization was formed initially to expel Mormon dissenters from Caldwell County; that there were two Danite groups, one in Caldwell County and one in Daviess County at Adam-ondi-Ahman; that Sampson Avard had command of the Caldwell group while Lyman Wight commanded the unit in Daviess County; and that the original purpose of the Danites shifted from expelling dissenters to defending the Saints from the Missouri mobs. He also discusses the dominant role of Sampson Avard and the secretive nature assumed by the Danites under his leadership. In fact, Joseph Smith referred to the Danites as a "Secret Combination," referring to the group's use of secret oaths, covenants, and secret meetings. In regards to Joseph Smith's relationship to the Danites, Gentry maintains that their questionable activities were unknown to the Prophet and resulted from the influences of Sampson Avard. To Gentry, Avard is guilty and Joseph Smith is innocent.

This position has placed Leland Gentry at odds with such later writers as Stephen LeSeuer, who maintains that Joseph Smith had full knowledge of all the activities of the Danites, including their raids against the people of Missouri.

In terms of style, Gentry's dissertation is written in clear, though not particularly exciting, prose. The tone is basically one of conveying the facts, not in stimulating the reader's interest. For example, this passage comes from the introduction to Chapter 11 on the Haun's Mill Massacre:

The most tragic and long-remembered event of the Mormon War was "Haun's Mill Massacre." This tragedy, which terminated in the deaths of seventeen Latter-day Saints, occurred on October 30, 1838, just three days after the appearance of Governor Boggs's "Order of Extermination." Only one brief eye-witness account of the event is available from the non-Mormon point of view. This is due, in part, to the fact that those who participated in the occurrence were careful to conceal their deeds beneath a cloak of secrecy. Two non-Mormon accounts, written in later years by non-participants, have also been located. (153)

Gentry's dissertation on the Mormons in Missouri makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of early Mormonism. Gentry has conducted thorough and careful research, using all available sources. The material presented is forthright and easy to understand. It has stood the test of time – that is, it is still used as a good source for historical research.

The dissertation is generally still the best information available on the subject and will no doubt continue its usefulness for another generation when a projected revision, undertaken by Todd Compton, is published by Greg Kofford Books. In the meantime, more specialized studies have provided closer looks at some aspects of the Missouri experience. In addition to Stephen C. LeSueur's The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987) is Alexander Baugh's "`A Call to Arms': The 1838 Mormon Defense of Northern Missouri" (Ph.D. diss., Brigham Young University, 1996), also published in the JFS Institute series. This study places Mormon military efforts in the broader context of U.S. history, particularly how the Latter-day Saints militia contrasted with other state militias.

Since this review has been placed in the broader context of dissertations being published by the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History and BYU Studies, it would probably be appropriate to comment on this publishing project. The paperback format is both attractive and readable, and makes these studies available in a convenient format. It would have been helpful, however, if the footnote citations and bibliography were updated. Gentry, for instance, abbreviates the seven-volume History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as the "DHC" (Documentary History of the Church). Although this abbreviation was the accepted form at the time he wrote, the preferred short title form is now History of the Church abbreviated as "HC," and the continued use of the older term may cause confusion among contemporary readers. Gentry also referred several times to the manuscript Far West Record, but contemporary readers will be able to find it more conveniently in its published form: Far West Record: Minutes of the Church Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1830-1844, edited by Donald Q. Cannon and Lyndon W. Cook (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1983). Finally, the bibliography and notes should be updated to include the newer studies of the Mormons in Missouri, chief among which is the Baugh dissertation.

In conclusion, the publication of these dissertations is a worthwhile project and Leland Gentry's work is a valuable part of that project. Both the dissertation by Gentry and the new publication series constitute an important contribution to an understanding of Mormon history.

DONALD Q. CANNON {donald_cannon@byu.edu) is a professor of Church history and doctrine at Brigham Young University. Among his books is Encyclopedia of Latter-day Saint History, edited with Arnold K. Garr and Richard O. Cowan (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2000).

Dan Vogel and Brent Lee Metcalfe, eds. American Apocrypha: Essays on the Book of Mormon. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2002. xvii, 469 pp. Paper: $21.95; ISBN 1-56085-151-1 Buy it now!

Reviewed by Paul M. Edwards (Reviewed April 2004)

American Apocrypha is the latest in Signature Book's excellent Essays on Mormonism Series. Well produced, edited by serious scholars, and containing essays by nine well-informed authors, this study of the Book of Mormon makes an essential contribution to the understanding of the complexities of Mormonism.

The collection is exactly what it purports to be, a reasoned look at the Book of Mormon. The editors introduce their perspective by stating: "The nature of faith is not what is at question here, but rather the structure of reason and theory" (xiii). The work presented is, almost without exception, outlined with clarity and kindness. I suspect that no one reading this collection would find their belief in the divine origins of the book either strengthened or weakened. However, there is little doubt that, if they pay close attention, they will at least understand the source of concern expressed by so many people. The problems that many have with the Book of Mormon are inherent in the fact that it reflects times, places, and understandings that are not consistent with what we know from other sources about these same times, places, and events.

The essays in this collection, as is often the case, are of varied interest and insight, but I found all of them well crafted and interesting. Each has supplied notes and illustrations to support his or her comments. Edwin Firmage Jr. suggests evidence to question the assumptions of antiquity concerning the book in an essay he calls "A Personal Encounter," while Old Testament scholar David P. Wright proposes a modern source, the King James Version, for the Isaiah passages in the Book of Mormon. Anthropologist Thomas W. Murphy also focuses on the book's claims of antiquity, providing a significant challenge based on patterns of DNA distribution to the popularly held Mormon understanding that Native Americans had Jewish ancestry.

Addressing concerns over the role of the "author" of the Book of Mormon, Susan Staker makes the case for a parallel between the developing message of the book and the Prophet's evolving self-image. Scott C. Dunn discusses the historical significance of "automatic writing" and raises questions about the manner in which one set of such writings might be more or less acceptable than another. Dealing with the authorship of the Book of Mormon, Robert M. Price compares Joseph Smith with the pseudepi- graphists (I wish I'd said that), presenting the possibility that the founder of Mormonism was simply trying to find a way to give ancient authority to new conceptions by the use of well-known Bible stories and American myths.

Vogel has two essays dealing with the environment in which the Book of Mormon made its appearance. In the first, he questions the legitimacy of the claims of the three and eight witnesses that they saw and, in some cases, handled the plates. He argues that their witness was more plausibly based on a visionary, rather than a physical, experience. His second essay also challenges those who would question the connection between the secret practices of an expanding Mormonism with the rites and rituals of early nineteenth-century Freemasonry.

In a delightful essay on B. H. Roberts, George Smith sympathetically documents how this remarkable man, ecclesiastical leader, and apologist began to question the source of the Book of Mormon toward the end of his life because of the vast difficulties he found with its historical and archeological claims.

What constitutes belief remains the penultimate question of men and women of faith. The degree to which the codifications of reason must be sacrificed to the fires of faith is, in itself, a matter of belief. Thus, the universal problem is created for those for whom faith must emerge from, and be ultimately dependent on, a source for which there is so little evidence of legitimacy.

Despite the degree to which some apologists have gone to preserve the internal legitimacy of the Book of Mormon, there is little that can be done to convince the rational mind (as George Smith summarizes a questioner's perplexities expressed to Roberts) that the appearances of "horses, steel, ‘cimeters,’ and silk could be legitimately included in a book set in pre-Columbian America since they are absent from the archeological findings of that period" (125). This, and the close relationship between the Book of Mormon text and previously published works, means that little can be done to make the source of the book and, by implication, what it says any less suspect. Although Roberts wrote a reassuring answer to the questioner, he candidly told a committee of other General Authorities that the answers generally given to these questions, may "satisfy people that didn't think, but (constituted) a very inadequate answer to a thinking man" (133).

The need for supernatural agents to serve as the presumed source of moral arguments has been quite apparent in Western civilization. But it troubles skeptics when they find the source of such positions implausible. On the other hand, David Sloan Wilson suggests in his excellent book Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002) that the success of a religious moral code depends on whether it motivates the religion to achieve, not on the truth or fictitiousness of the source. Certainly, like any scripture the Book of Mormon does not have to be true to be highly significant. But – it would help.

PAUL M. EDWARDS (pauledwards98@yahoo.com) is past president of both the Mormon History Association and the John Whitmer Historical Association, and is currently director of the Center for the Study of the Korean War located at Graceland University in Independence, Missouri.

Buy it now!

LaMar C. Berrett, general editor. Sacred Places: Ohio and Illinois, A Comprehensive Guide to Early LDS Historical Sites. Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2002. xi, 276 pp. Photographs, maps, bibliography, index. Paper: $19.95; ISBN 1-57345-657-8 Buy it now!

Reviewed by Lachlan Mackay (Reviewed April 2004)

The third of a projected six-volume travel series, Sacred Places: Ohio and Illinois is broken into four parts. Keith Perkins devotes seventy-six pages to Kirtland, Ohio, and the surrounding area. He then partners with LaMar Berrett to trace the route of both Zion's Camp and Kirtland Camp in Ohio and Indiana. Donald Q. Cannon explores Nauvoo, Illinois, and surrounding areas for 142 pages. Finally, Cannon and Berrett together trace the Illinois route of Zion's Camp and Kirtland Camp. References are spread throughout the book to allow the reader to check sources and to explore the history of the various sites in greater detail if they choose to do so.

I would never be brave enough to title something I had written "comprehensive," and it is probable that Berrett, Perkins, and Cannon have overlooked someone's favorite site. I would argue, though, that they have earned the right to use the term. Not only do they cover the standard pilgrimage stops, but they also lead the reader to sites that are sometimes overlooked. Among these underappreciated areas are the Elias Peabody home site in Amherst, Ohio, and Freeport, Illinois, the hometown of J. Wilson Shaffer. You don't recognize Peabody's name? He owned "Stu-boy," the bulldog that chased Parley P. Pratt out of town in 1830. Shaffer served as the seventh governor of Utah and died after seven months in office.

Also included are a number of sites not directly related to LDS history. A simple yet effective system of symbols and numbers distinguishes related and nonrelated sites and locates them on the numerous maps spread throughout the work.

In addition to the maps, the book is profusely illustrated with photographs (both historic and modern) and engravings. Like the selection of sites, the photographs range from familiar images of the Kirtland Temple to obscure shots like the Nauvoo House privy. A nice image of the Nauvoo House (foot of Main Street in Nauvoo, looking south, 133) is reversed. The captions are unusually accurate. Exceptions include a moonstone "located by the Joseph Smith Homestead in Nauvoo, IL, in 1999" (182); it had already been moved from that location before the 1991 beautification of the Smith Family Cemetery.

Perkins had the unenviable task of writing a guidebook that included a historic site under construction. In an attempt to prevent the book from being outdated before it came off the press, he wrote the section on the Kirtland Flats to reflect what was supposed to happen at the time of the writing. Unfortunately, plans changed; and readers who go looking for the newly built replica of the tannery will search in vain. However, only a few of the forty-two Kirtland entries are impacted by the evolving site plan. The Kirtland Safety Society Anti-Banking Company discussion would be improved if it were informed by the work of Marvin Hill, Keith Rooker and Larry Wimmer in The Kirtland Economy Revisited: A Market Critique of Sectarian Economics (Provo, Utah: BYU Press, 1977). The remaining entries are well researched and well written.

Although clearly penned for Deseret Book readers, there are flashes of openness. Among these is the statement from Perkins that it was apparently a faithful member of the church, Lyman Sherman, who burned the Kirtland print shop to the ground in 1838 (31).

Both Perkins and Cannon also thoughtfully include information that will primarily be of interest to members of the Community of Christ. In doing so, however, Cannon has become another victim of Mark Hofmann. When referencing the Joseph Smith III blessing in the Red Brick Store, he uses the 17 January 1844 date that Hofmann manufactured. Cannon will not be the last researcher to inadvertently include Hofmann in his or her bibliography.

The brief discussions of each site are packed with helpful information. Here is a typical entry (172); the parenthetical abbreviations refer to the volume's bibliography:

105. Parley P. Pratt Home, Store and Tithing Office. The Parley P. Pratt home, store, and tithing office is located on the SE corner of Young and Wells Streets, one block north of the Nauvoo Temple lot. The large red brick building faces west. The store was also called the Temple Store.

Parley P. Pratt, born in 1807, married Thankful Halsey in 1827 and was baptized in 1830. He wrote extensively during his lifetime and his autobiography is a classic in Church literature. He was one of the original members of the Quorum of the Twelve, serving from 1835 to 1857 (BiE 1:83-85).

The Nauvoo Neighbor of Jan. 24, 1844, advertised the "Pratt and Snow Store," run by Parley P. Pratt and Erastus Snow and featuring cheap dry goods from Boston. "No one need ask for credit, nor waste breath in bantering on the price," the ad said, "as we have but one invariable price for either cash or barter."

The store also served as a tithing office (T&S 5:728), and the room over the store served as one of several temporary sites for temple ordinances (JJT 35).

The 147 Nauvoo entries are broken into twelve separate tours to make the material more manageable. The numeric key, alphabetical key, and extensive index make information on a particular site easy to locate within the book.

The cover is attractively illustrated with a photograph of the reconstructed Nauvoo Temple. Unlike the first two titles in the series, this third volume is available only in paperback. Despite that fact, I expect to see visitors to historic sites in Ohio and Illinois carrying copies of Sacred Places for years to come. It will prove quite useful for both pilgrim and scholar.

LACHLAN MACKAY  (temple@ncoeweb.com} manages Community of Christ historic sites in Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri. He and his wife, Christin, live in Kirtland, Ohio.

Buy it now!

A. E. Cannon. Charlotte's Rose. New York: Wendy Lamb Books/Random House Children's Books, 2002. 246 pp. Illustrations, map, author's Letter to Readers. Paper: $15.95; ISBN 0-385-72966-9 Buy it now!

Reviewed by Lyndia McDowell Carter (Reviewed April 2004)

Charlotte's Rose, a young adult novel masterfully crafted by Ann Edwads Cannon, is a delectable pleasure to be savored, cherished, and shared. Cannon uses her exceptional skill as a storyteller to take twelve-turning-thirteen-year-old Charlotte Evans, the novel's first-person narrator and protagonist, on a journey of self-discovery. Cannon appropriately chose the long, hard trek to Zion in the 1856 Bunker handcart company as the setting for Charlotte's difficult transition from childhood through the confusing, complex, turbulent, and tangled emotions of early adolescence into nascent maturity and young womanhood. With the potential to reach beyond Mormon audiences, this coming-of-age novel is outstanding among young adult fiction with Mormon themes written by Mormon authors.

Cannon adroitly constructs the plot and drives the action. Emotionally adrift after the recent death of her mother, Charlotte sails from England with her father and a group of Welsh Saints who become the Edward Bunker handcart company upon reaching Iowa. Several weeks ahead of the winter storms that enveloped the late Willie and Martin companies, these handcart emigrants nonetheless face hardship and hunger on a long, difficult journey. When a young mother dies after giving birth, strong-willed Charlotte impulsively takes on the care of the infant who has been rejected by its grief-stricken father. Charlotte initially resents this burden which robs her of childhood. But as the days pass, the miles fall behind them, and she learns about love, friendship, commitment, tolerance, and self-acceptance, Charlotte loses her heart to tiny Rose and develops into a capable, loving, responsible foster mother. She dreads the day she must return Rose to her father, who has gradually come to terms with his sorrow. However, by early October when the Bunker company reaches Salt Lake Valley, Charlotte's new-found maturity gives her the strength to do the right thing.

A. E. Cannon's greatest power as a novelist is her remarkable ability to develop multi-faceted characters and endow them with life, personality, strengths and weaknesses, flaws and virtues. Avoiding stereotypes, she possesses the rare competence to make Mormon pioneers human and believable. Her uniquely individual characters are Latter-day Saints who are not always saintly despite their commitment to their faith. Furthermore, Cannon's characters evolve as Charlotte's deepening perceptions of them change. Charlotte is absolutely irresistible. Highly imaginative, quick-tempered, headstrong, judgmental, opinionated, impetuous, confused by her emotions, and hungry for love and recognition, she delights readers. Her human foibles are both very funny and deeply endearing.

      Cannon subtly teaches important values but resists the temptation to be preachy, make converts, or overtly build testimonies. However, occasional explanations of Mormon history and doctrine, likely already known by Mormon readers, may disrupt the plot for the general audience. In my opinion, the information perhaps fits better in Cannon's Letter to Readers.

Cannon's clever writing style is captivating, as this passage shows:

I didn't sleep well. No howling wolves this time. Only the knowledge that I've undertaken something enormous.

Oh, I was thrilled with myself last night. Especially after the women surrounded me and Papa looked at me with such pride. I was as grand as Queen Victoria on coronation day.

Then I went to bed and began making up stories about me and the baby to tell my children someday....

Then something horrible happened. I started to think. I hate it when I think.

So now I am waiting outside our tent for Sister Jenkins to finish nursing this new baby who is only three days old and who cannot sit or stand or feed herself or tell me what I am doing wrong.

I could die. (85-86)

In another example, Charlotte's three friends, all named Elizabeth, tease Charlotte about John, whom she no longer considers just her childhood friend:

Elizabeth the Jolly sweeps her hand to her forehead like an actress on a theater poster. "I just want to faint whenever I see him."

She flings out her arms, closes her eyes, and falls back into the other Elizabeths' arms. Have they been practicing swoons together?

They giggle. I try to smile but feel my cheeks turn pink instead.

"He's my John," I want to say, "and I don't wish to share him."

Really, how can two women share one man? Maybe it helps if you don't like him much but think he's useful when it comes to chopping firewood. I once overheard the Widow Rogers say she wouldn't mind marrying a polygamist when she gets to Utah because then she'd have other women to help her put up with the burdens of living with a man.

I can't imagine feeling that way. (170)

Charlotte's Rose has earned several literary honors. It received the Association for Mormon Letters award for Best Young Adult Novel, 2002, and the Utah Book Awards children's literature prize, 2002. It was also a finalist in children's literature in the PEN Center USA Literary Awards for 2003.  In my opinion, as a work of fiction, this novel is almost flawless.  I avidly commend this book as a meaningful and entertaining reading experience for both children and adults.

However, I cannot say that Charlotte's Rose is particularly good history and geography. Unfortunately for readers who expect historical fiction to rely on primary documentation and a thorough knowledge of history and geography, several historical and geographical inaccuracies mar the quality of this otherwise excellent novel. Cannon, according to her "Letter to Readers," (245) relied on stories passed down through families, including her own, as well as some unspecified secondary and primary sources. From these she expertly blended pieces to invent her plot, create her characters, and establish the historical setting. However, more research of trail diaries, journals and reminiscences along with scholarly secondary sources and more careful study of trail geography could have helped Cannon build on a firmer foundation of fact and avoid the errors which disappoint history buffs.

To correct some mistakes: Mormon emigrants financed by the Perpetual Emigrating Fund did not eat chicken on shipboard (15), and almost certainly did not carry chickens on their handcarts (94). It is not likely that Indians possessed sugar and flour for trade to the hungry emigrants (190). The Missouri River is actually on the west side of Iowa, not the east (79). In 1856 Wyoming and Casper did not yet exist as place names (188). The handcart route did not go near Mt. Pisgah, Iowa (78). Cannon's descriptions of prairie remoteness seem more typical of Nebraska than Iowa, which was somewhat settled by 1856. The incidents at Chimney Rock are likely impossible since that landmark is on the opposite side of the North Platte River from Bunker's probable route (168-75). Fortunately, Rick Britton's map depicts the route more accurately.

Despite its glitches, Charlotte's Rose is fine literature. By drawing readers into Charlotte's life and feelings, A. E. Cannon employed her superb storytelling ability and her adeptness at characterization to make a long-ago time relevant to young people of the modern world.

LYNDIA MCDOWELL CARTER taught Utah history and English in Utah public schools and is now an independent researcher and writer focusing on westward migration and the Mormon handcart experience.

Craig L. Foster. Penny Tracts and Polemics: A Critical Analysis of Anti-Mormon Pamphleteering in Great Britain, "'1837-1860. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2002. vii, 260 pp. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth: $39.95; ISBN 1-58958-005-2. Limited edition, leather: $200, 1-58958-004-2 Buy it now!

Reviewed by James B. Allen (Reviewed April 2004)

Penny Tracts and Polemics: A Critical Analysis of Anti-Mormon Pamphleteering in Great Britain, 1837-1860 is a slightly revised version of Craig Foster's 1989 BYU master's thesis. It is worth reading, especially for those interested in the early history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Great Britain. Several significant publications deal with Mormon pamphleteering, including David J. Whittaker's important Ph.D. dissertation, recently published by BYU Studies in its DISSERTATIONS IN LATTER-DAY SAINTS HISTORY series. Craig Foster and Malcolm R. Thorp, in various articles, treat anti-Mormon literature in Britain. In this book, however, Foster provides the most extensive discussion available of, as he phrases it, the "counterpart of early Mormon pamphleteering" (6).

The book consists of six chapters. The first provides an informative social context for the introduction of Mormonism into Great Britain, emphasizing the rise of religious tracts, especially anti-Catholic tracts. Chapter 2, "Mormon Church History Within the American Context," is the most unsatisfactory chapter, at least so far as meeting the expectations suggested by the title is concerned. From the title, I anticipated a discussion of the main aspects of early Church history within the context of the broader political, social, and cultural scene in America. This would include at least a brief treatment of Jacksonian democracy, the rise of the "common man," a variety of reform movements, the politics of states' rights, the Second Great Awakening, the rise of new religions in America, immigration, and many other aspects of American life that constituted the context in which Mormonism arose. Instead, Foster provides only a superficial comment on Mormon origins, including the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, then concentrates on the Spaulding theory, early anti-Mormon writings, economic problems in Missouri, Mormon dissenters, problems in Nauvoo, plural marriage and its role in creating anti-Mormon sentiment, the death of Joseph Smith, and the early conflicts between the Mormons and the federal government in Utah. These things are all relevant to the book, of course, for they help explain the origin of anti-Mormonism in America as a background for that same antagonism in Great Britain. The chapter is simply misnamed, for it discusses neither the most important aspects of early Mormon history nor the larger American context.

Foster's main contribution comes in the next three chapters, where he divides the production of anti-Mormon literature into three periods: 1837-41 (the foundation years, including the all-important missions of members of the Quorum of the Twelve), 1842-52, and 1853-60, when the public announcement of plural marriage and the awareness of such doctrines as the Adam-God theory increased the bitterness of anti-Mormons, as reflected in such pamphlet titles as "The Gates of the Mormon Hell Opened ... " In these chapters Foster provides commentary on the context for anti-Mormon sentiment, summarizes numerous pamphlets, provides biographical sketches of some of the more prominent anti-Mormon writers, and points to various anti-Mormon themes incorporated into the literature. The final chapter offers his summary and conclusions.

One interesting and worthwhile feature of the book is that it contains ninety-four illustrations, mostly photographs of pages, generally cover pages, of various anti-Mormon pamphlets. The acrimony Foster describes seems to ooze from the pages as one examines these bitter denunciations of the Joseph Smith, the Book of Mormon, LDS doctrines, and Mormons in general. "These men are anxious to collect money for the purchase of land in their own country, and to kidnap you and your families for its cultivation," charged one publication (46). Another carried the extended title: "Plain Facts, Shewing the Falsehood and Folly of the Mormonites, Or Latter-day Saints, Being an Exposition of the Imposture, and a Proof of the Wickedness and Impiety of Following or Hearing Them" (65). A "defender of evangelical Christianity" declared that, after carefully examining Mormonism, "I was driven to the conclusion that Mormonism is a delusion, and that it could only be embraced by rogues, for the sake of obtaining an idle living, and by simpletons to provide them with it" (86).

Another tract is subtitled "An Exposure of the Blasphemous Doctrines of the Latter-day Saints; the Deception and Falsehood Practised upon Ignorant Emigrants – Specimens of Their Hymns of Praise to Joseph Smith; and the Ridiculous Absurdities of the Book of Mormon with a Notice of their Recent Suffering in America, Through Their Own Violence and Folly" (88). The essence of another is described on its title page: "Appalling Disclosures! Mormon Revelations, being the history of fourteen females ... Victims of Mormon Spiritual Marriages! Wives, Mothers, Daughters, and Sisters Lured away from their Homes, and United to the Same Husbands: The Tragic Deaths of Mrs. Hatfield and Her Husband, Through the Double Marriage of their Eldest and Youngest Daughters to Richards, the Mormon Missionary; and the Awful Murder of Maud Hatfield by the First Mrs. Richards, Who became a Maniac through jealousy and the Desertion of her Two Babes; Including the Sufferings of Other Once Happy Women, Entrapped by the Prophets and Elders of the Latter Day Saints" (168). Another read: "Mormonism Exploded; or, The Religion of the Latter-day Saints Proved to be a System of Imposture, Blasphemy, and Immorality" (209). Other illustrations show some of the Mormon publications that responded to the anti-Mormon attacks. Also shown are pages from the Millennial Star with its first public announcements in Great Britain of plural marriage and the reformation movement, both of which only intensified anti-Mormonism.

Foster reached some interesting conclusions regarding the anti-Mormon pamphleteers. First, they fall into two broad categories: (1) non-Mormon ministers and church members and (2) former Mormons – who tended to be the bitterest. Anti-Mormon writers were motivated by a variety of factors, Foster demonstrates, including a sincere belief by some former Mormons that they had been deceived; fear by clergymen of possible loss of their congregations; belief that Mormonism threatened a breakdown of traditional social values and morality, particularly because of plural marriage but also because of other doctrines, such as the Adam-God theory; and money. In addition, clerics were often concerned for the working classes, and aimed their writings in that direction.

Foster also points to several themes that emerged in the amazingly large body of anti-Mormon propaganda appearing in Great Britain in these early years. Mormonism was a political threat; it supported slavery; it espoused a heretical belief in a material God; Joseph Smith was a vile and debauched character, given to immorality and money-making; the Book of Mormon was a fraud (the Spaulding thesis appeared regularly); Mormonism was similar to Islam, with all its presumed evils; Mormon doctrines were immoral; and Mormon converts consisted mainly of the weak and the foolish.

The main problem with the book is that everything in the previous two paragraphs comes from Chapter 6, Foster's "Conclusion." The reader would have been much better served if these themes had been clarified, at least briefly, in the introduction. They appear in the book, but they are so intermixed and come out so haphazardly before Chapter 6 that it takes quite a while for the reader to be sure what patterns, if any, he or she should be looking for. Nevertheless the themes are there, and they provide important insight into the nature of British anti-Mormonism in mid-nineteenth century.

JAMES B. ALLEN is former Assistant Church Historian (LDS) and emeritus professor of history at Brigham Young University. Among recent works, he coauthored, with Ronald W. Walker and David J. Whittaker, Studies in Mormon History, 1830-1997: An Indexed Bibliography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press in cooperation with the Smith Institute for LDS History, Brigham Young University, 2000), reviewed in this issue.

Robert D. Anderson. Inside the Mind of Joseph Smith: Psychobiography and the Book of Mormon. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1999. xlv, 263 pp. Photographs, notes, index. Paper, $19.95; ISBN 1-56085-125-2 Buy it now!

William D. Morain. The Sword of Laban: Joseph Smith, Jr. and the Dissociated Mind. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1998. ix, 246 pp. Notes, index. Cloth: $29.95. ISBN 0-88048-864-6

Reviewed by Kyle R. Walker and Douglas E. Craig (Reviewed April 2004)

In recent years Mormon historians have encouraged researchers in utilizing new approaches in evaluating historical sources – including research into such basic matters as diet, disease, and family relationships in order to facilitate our understanding of historical context.^[11]   Robert D. Anderson, a practicing psychiatrist, has drawn upon his training in the mental health field to write a psychobiography of Joseph Smith. Employing a psychological approach in understanding such events offers yet another approach that may help reveal historical insights that may, as Anderson asserts, "add texture to the historical picture, fill in aspects of personal meaning and motive, and provide continuity to a history that has gaps" (xxvi).

The reader will find it useful to understand the premises with which Anderson initiated this project. He does an excellent job of outlining his assumptions and biases in the fairly lengthy preface and introduction. Anderson asserts that everything that came through Joseph Smith is suspect because the Book of Mormon has "no support from non-Mormon anthropologists and archeologists" and because Joseph Smith reworked his first vision story by changing dates and circumstances in an attempt to "dramatize his story" (x). Thus, Anderson has adopted a "naturalistic" interpretation of Joseph Smith's story – including that of the Book of Mormon. Anderson's personal thesis is that Joseph Smith suffered from narcissistic personality disorder^[12]  and wrote the Book of Mormon in an attempt to deal with his own traumatic childhood and dysfunctional family background. Anderson then undertakes to prove his thesis primarily from within the text of the Book of Mormon, supplemented by surviving historical sources.

Anderson uses an approach termed "applied psychoanalysis" in his examination of Joseph Smith Jr. and admits that the method has its weaknesses:

I acknowledge that psychodynamic concepts are a "soft science" and that applied psychoanalysis is even softer. But it is rooted in the natural world and the body of knowledge that has accumulated about how both mentally healthy people and mentally ill patients react and think, and how the works of artists and writers reflect their personalities in one way or another. In the rest of this book I will continue to look for a consistent chronological picture of Joseph Smith's life, making tentative interpretations on unavoidably fragmentary information (138).

Anderson nicely summarizes the significant problems with his method more than once. Although psychoanalysis is grounded in scientific and academic history, it is only loosely based on the body of knowledge about social and psychological phenomena. The psychoanalytic model of personality refers to observations about the various developmental tasks of childhood and then overlays a set of constructs such as the Oedipal complex, the unconscious, the id, ego, and superego, etc. At least one school of research-trained scientists has criticized and dismissed the constructs, because the concepts (e.g., the unconscious) cannot be tested in a way that can prove or refute their existence.^[13]  In contrast, the best science confines itself to observable events that can be documented. In the case of mental health science, such events consist of behavior, verbal comments, and genetic and pharmacological research. Anderson purports to offer a scientific and naturalistic explanation of Joseph Smith's character and the Book of Mormon, noting that spiritual experiences are outside the realm of "scientific replication" (xix). In using speculative psychoanalysis, he is guilty of the same error. Psychoanalysis is rooted more in a system of beliefs and constructs than it is in a body of scientific knowledge.

A second major criticism of the method of psychoanalysis centers in its dependence on individual case study, a method that is particularly vulnerable to observer bias.^[14]  To somewhat diminish that inherent bias, responsible psychoanalysts spend an untold number of hours in direct contact with a patient, listening to the patient's free association (verbalizing whatever comes to mind). Only then would a psychoanalyst report his or her conclusions in a published case study. In contrast, Anderson bases his psychoanalysis extensively on documents generated by and about a historical person and speculates extensively on Joseph Smith's childhood – speculation that goes far beyond the scant information available about this time period. Extensive speculation on scant available data would be irresponsible whether the speculation was favorable or unfavorable toward the subject.

Anderson claims that the Book of Mormon is a symbolically disguised, autobiographical account of events in Joseph's early life and asserts that the book offers much symbolic information about Smith which he can use in his clinical appraisal. However, this assumption is simply more speculative inference.

While Anderson is free, of course, to draw his own conclusion that Joseph Smith fabricated his history, a wide spectrum of Mormon readers who hold different views will be properly alert as they proceed. He announces, for instance, that he will pay "increased attention to outside documentation and the voices of others, including antagonists. These will include the townspeople in the Palymyra/Manchester area and his (Joseph Smith's) wife's relatives and friends in Pennsylvania. Generally, these voices paint what I see as a consistent picture of a progressively fabricated history" (xxvi).

Anderson does not merely draw on perhaps underutilized sources but, true to his word, relies almost exclusively on materials that are written by avowed antagonists of Mormonism (e.g., E. D. Howe's Mormonism Unvailed), while neglecting or completely discounting sources written by those who were within the movement. Additionally, he virtually ignores all modern-day literature that is either favorable or less pejorative toward Mormonism, including such landmark studies completed on early Mormonism by Larry C. Porter, Richard L. Bushman, or Jan Shipps, to name a few. His failure to, at the very least, consider other interpretations of events left us as readers feeling that his research was suspect and biased.

An example of how Anderson uses both psychological constructs and historical sources irresponsibly is apparent in his discussion on the Smith family. Attempting to substantiate his initial thesis, Anderson spends several lengthy chapters in an effort to establish that the Smith family was in fact highly dysfunctional. Yet he fails to provide sufficient documentation in making overarching diagnoses on individual family members in order to make his case. For example, Anderson diagnoses clinical depression, with "suicidal proportions," from Lucy's statement "for months ... I did not feel as though life was worth seeking after," following the deaths of her two sisters (17). One could reasonably argue that Lucy was simply experiencing a normal grief reaction. To make a case for chronic depression, however, Anderson suggests that Lucy suffered an additional bout of depression following Sophronia's birth. Lucy's history shows that this supposed depression was more likely debilitating pneumonia. Anderson attempts to strengthen his argument in this instance by taking one of Lucy's comments out of context, saying: "Lucy expressed disappointment in the various ministers she heard preach, returning from one sermon in `total despair and with a grieved and troubled spirit... saying in my heart there is not on earth the religion which I seek"' (18). Lucy's "disappointment" and "total despair" appear to be tied to her inability to find a church that coincided with her belief system, rather than the hopelessness associated with chronic depression, as Anderson postulates.

With regards to Father Smith's purported dysfunction, Anderson makes reference to a blessing that Joseph Sr. gave his son Hyrum in 1834, in which he states, "Though he (referring to himself) has been out of the way through wine, thou hast never forsaken him or laughed him to scorn." Anderson concludes: "The wording implies serious repetitive drinking" (55 note 4). Anderson's conclusion may be grossly overstated; and though he cites Palmyra neighbors for additional proof, Anderson calls Smith's statement "the strongest evidence" for diagnosing alcoholism (16, 55 note 4).

Anderson then proceeds to build his foundational thesis on these two premises: namely that Joseph Smith Jr. came from a family in which the mother was chronically depressed and emotionally withdrawn (16-17) and in which the father's behavior "approached or reached actual alcoholism" (16). Such unsubstantiated diagnoses make later conclusions questionable.

In Anderson's final analysis, he concludes that Joseph Smith, Jr. suffered from a narcissistic personality disorder, in large part due to childhood surgical trauma and family dysfunction. Because psychoanalytic theory holds that personality disorders have their origins in childhood, we surmise that the author's adherence to psychoanalytic theory accounts for his extensive speculation about Smith's childhood. Anderson likewise fails to sufficiently document a narcissistic personality diagnosis based on Smith's adult life. Anderson fails to recognize that most dynamic leaders could be accused of narcissism. For example, leaders are known for being charismatic, for helping followers see issues from new angles, and for motivating followers to transcend personal needs in the pursuit of a greater cause.^[15] Anderson must prove that these traits cross over the threshold into a personality disorder by documenting significant impairment in work and social relationships, which Anderson again fails to do. Anderson recounts Joseph's youthful involvement in treasure hunting as well his later involvement in plural marriage as examples of deceitful, exploitative, and shallow relationships. This becomes the basis for his diagnosis of "malignant narcissism" (230). Absent from the author's biographical descriptions are Smith's ability to visualize and complete major projects, to maintain emotionally close relationships, and to retain the loyalty of thousands of followers.^[16]  Selective abstraction of biographical events has once again led to improbable conclusions, as was the case with Anderson's portrayal of Joseph's parents. Documenting a pattern of impairment is not an easy process, even for the living. Research shows that even trained observers can have difficulty making a clear distinction between normal and impaired functioning, because personality traits lie on a continuum (e.g., introversion-extroversion).^[17]  This difficulty is compounded in diagnosing the deceased.

In the end, Anderson's work fails to solidly document patterns of behavior which would lead to more responsible conclusions. He is not the first psychoanalyst to be so criticized, as Alan Elms, a psychobiographer and psychologist, has observed,

The personal qualities needed to become a decent psychobiographer can be found in any field: a controlled empathy for the subject and a devotion to collecting solid biographical data. Nonetheless, leaving psychobiography largely to psychoanalysts and their disciples has not yielded a coherent, cumulative, consistently responsible discipline of individual life history.... An infusion of research-trained psychologists, skilled in diverse approaches to the study of human behavior, can remake and reinvigorate the field.^[18]

We share the belief that individuals within the mental health profession can potentially assist historians in understanding historical topics in a new light. However, such professionals must use historical sources responsibly and employ sound methodology to find general acceptance by the historical community. Although Anderson has entertained psychological issues in his analysis ofJoseph Smith Jr., he has failed to bridge the chasm between psychology and history.

Robert D. Anderson is not the first to venture into psychobiography on the life of Joseph Smith. I. Woodridge Riley wrote his dissertation at Yale in 1902 on "A Psychological History of Joseph Smith, Jr., the Founder of Mormonism," which was published the same year as The Founder of Mormonism (New York: Dodd, Mead). Fawn M. Brodie included psychohistorical elements in her controversial biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet, (1945; 2d ed. rev., New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971). Jungian psychiatrist C. Jess Groesbeck and Mormon researcher Dan Vogel have also written and presented a series of papers on Smith family dynamics.^[19]

However, only a year before Robert Anderson's Inside the Mind of Joseph Smith appeared, Thomas D. Morain, a plastic surgeon, published The Sword of Laban: Joseph Smith, Jr. and the Dissociated Mind with the American Psychiatric Association Press. His interest in researching the life of Joseph Smith began during his tenure as professor at Dartmouth Medical School – the same institution that Smith's childhood surgeons hailed from. As Morain read Leroy Wirthlin's study on Joseph Smith's leg operation,^[20]  he became convinced that, due to Smith's vulnerable age at the time of surgery and his unwillingness to use alcohol as an anesthesic, the youthful Smith could not have experienced anything other than long-term pathology (xx). Morain asserts that Smith's series of surgeries at about age seven and the death of his elder brother Alvin when Joseph was seventeen led to a lifetime of severe psychological impairment.

Morain does not assume that his work will be embraced by the historical community due to his improbable thesis and "unsupported speculation" (xxiii). Still, the author represents the book as a legitimate psychobiography, attempting to substantiate his conclusions through historical documentation. Thus, the book should be evaluated from the historian's perspective. However, in the end, Morain fails to effectively blend psychology and history due to his use of rampant speculation and scanty documentation. Trained researchers will find Morain's study lacking by historical standards, at times reading like a work of fiction. Morain frequently takes the liberty of dramatizing Mormon history in an attempt to make up for the lack of surviving information. For example, in summarizing Joseph Smith's final surgery, he writes:

The climactic moment soon arrived. Joseph found himself faced with a kind of ritualistic assembly of eleven somber doctors who had come to the house to make the final assault on his limb. He had seen some of them before and had tried to forget. He knew the bondage, the searing pain of the knives, the accursed failure of his parents to protect him, the threat of dismemberment, the punishment, the loss. How could this be happening once again? Was there no escape from this repetition of torture? As he heard the cluster of hoofbeats out front, heard the surgeons enter the front door and whisper with his mother, watched them enter the room, he knew (as surely as today's burned child knows when the stretcher arrives at his or her hospital bedside) what would come next. (18)

Mormon historians may find genuine value in Morain's insights about the typical traumatic responses of children who must undergo serial surgeries or traumatic rehabilitation. Unfortunately, there are only few snippets of Morain's use of his surgical expertise within the work (e.g., 15, 55, 110), perhaps because of Leroy Wirthlin's prior research on the subject. We were left wanting to know more about his insights as a result of his surgical expertise. Instead, the balance of the book is a speculative discussion about how Smith's surgeries were so traumatic that they led to a life filled with pathology – manifested through such behaviors as treasure seeking (Chapter 4, "The Pleasure of Treasure"), sexual conquest (Chapter 7, "The Arrow of Eros"), and dissociation (Chapter 3, "Strategic Defenses" and Chapter 4, "Trance-lation").

Morain asserts: "A cluster of three obscenely painful operations on the lower extremity of a 7-year-old boy without anesthesia could hardly have been experienced other than as a horrible emotional trauma with a worst case of psychological overtones" (xx). Morain feels so certain of the impact these surgeries had on Smith's life that he concludes: "Had there been no Nathan Smith (Joseph Smith's surgeon), there would have been no Mormon religion" (xxii). In assuming lifelong trauma, Morain fails to consider the phenomenon of resiliency common among those who experience trauma. Modern research indicates that two out of three males will experience some type of severe trauma during their lifetime (not broken down by age stages), yet most do not develop the severe symptoms that would lead to chronic pathology such as post-traumatic stress disorder or personality disturbances. Moreover, among those who experience post-traumatic disorder, approximately 60 percent recover from their symptoms within five years of the initial traumatic experience.^[21]

Like Robert Anderson's psychobiographical study of Joseph Smith, Morain's earlier work suffers from the same weaknesses: Morain (1) draws upon noticeably biased research (relying almost exclusively on E. D. Howe's Mormonism Unvailed in interpreting early Mormon history); (2) diagnoses psychological disorders without sufficient documentation; and (3) uses the psychoanalytic approach that entails a significant amount of conjecture. Our conclusion is also similar: Until psychobiographers use the surviving sources more responsibly and avoid speculating beyond the available data, they will fail to be accepted by the historical community.

KYLE R. WALKER (walkerk@byui.edu} is a marriage and family therapist at the BYU-Idaho counseling center. He has published articles on Mormon history in BYU Studies and Mormon Historical Studies. His dissertation at BYU is titled "The Joseph Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith Family: A Family Process Analysis of a Nineteenth-Century Household." DOUGLAS E. CRAIG is a psychologist at the BYU-Idaho counseling center.

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Colleen Whitley, ed. Brigham Young's Homes. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2002. 262 pp. Photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. Paper: ISBN 0-87421-441-6; cloth: ISBN 0-87421-442-4 Buy it now!

Reviewed by Martha Sonntag Bradley (Reviewed April 2004)

Colleen Whitley's Brigham Young's Homes is based on an explicit (although not stated) assumption – that places matter greatly in our lives and are poignant documents about values, history, and tradition. The attempt to track Brigham Young's life through the places he and his family inhabited is, understandably, a complicated project. Once his polygamous family arrived in Utah and spread into the corners of the territory, their homes ranged from one of the most famous urban mansions ever to be built in the city – Amelia's Palace – to simple huts used by a series of women waiting for more permanent homes or for space in the Lion House with their sister wives and children.

The book's approach throughout is straightforward and decidedly unsentimental. Contributors include Sandra Dawn Brimhall, Marianne Harding Burgoyne, Mark D. Curtis, W. Randall Dixon, Judy Dykman, Elinor Hyde, Jeffery Ogden Johnson, and Kari K. Robinson. It would have been easy for these authors to belabor the oddities of the unique spatial demands of a plural family. But instead, there is a sort of matter-of-factness to both the descriptions and the chronology. The homes were simply backdrops to the interactions of the complicated Young clan. In one way, this characteristic is a great strength of this book – it is solid history, clear-cut and understandable. But in other ways, this strength becomes a limitation. None of the authors venture into theory, analysis, or speculation about what this all means, or why it matters at all, even though both questions seem important ones to ask and perhaps attempt to answer.

It matters greatly that Brigham Young located his family complex at the heart of Salt Lake City in close proximity to a theater, a schoolhouse, public commercial buildings, and communal structures such as the Deseret Store. It matters greatly that Brigham Young provided his family with opportunities for recreation, industry, and culture. This fact reflects on the man, provides insights into his notions about the good life, and suggests what he saw as constituting a family kingdom in the secular world. It warrants some reflection and the application of some theoretical framework that might help ferret out what this built environment means and its larger cultural implications for the Mormon world of the nineteenth century.

My favorite chapter, hands down, is the centerpiece of the book – Whitley and Judy Dykman's description of the multiple dwellings which constituted Brigham Young's Salt Lake City home. This complex, which stretched throughout the city to include the Farm House, Chase Mill, numerous outbuildings, and a variety of types of buildings and architecture, reflects the complexity of both Young's family situation and his multiple building solutions for the problem of housing the activities requisite to sustain the many individuals he supported. His children needed to be educated and entertained, his wives socialized and inspired, his workers supplied with resources and occupied with production. His homes, barns, and industrial complexes provided a range of possibilities for life activities and provided both opportunities and challenges for their many users. This architecture reflected social hierarchies embedded in Mormon culture, theological ideas about family and community, and spatial practices that played out in Young's own family and with Church members and strangers who came to the city. Although this chapter provides invaluable information, I would have liked a discussion of the relationship between the pieces. The whole, the mix, or the network of spaces and structures these buildings represent created patterns in the Mormon landscape that would also be worth considering and would reveal how social realities became embedded in the spaces of the nineteenth-century world.

It was also surprising to me that there was virtually no architectural analysis or consideration of building materials, techniques, or style, all of which are reflections of larger systems of values, beliefs, and, again, traditions. The culture of Mormon architecture tells us where the Mormons came from, what they carried with them to their new homes, what they valued most or even the resources they found when they came to Utah. We can learn much about who these people were by looking at the buildings themselves – not just the curious use of adobe, but the obsessive popularity of Greek Revival detailing, or the uniformity of the Classical proportions and formality of design. Definitely influenced by the cultural mix of the mid-nineteenth century, Mormon builders also became innovators even as they religiously clung to tradition and constructed buildings reflecting New England or Midwest roots. Furthermore, at the same time, these buildings had the curious textural reality dictated by the range of indigenous materials available in a desert valley in the high mountains – a very particular place and one different from anything they had experienced.

W. Randall Dixon's solid essay about the Lion and Beehive Houses and Jeffery Ogden Johnson's insightful piece about Brigham Young's families help untangle long-held myths about the dimensions of this unusual family and how its members related to each other behind closed doors. It was first and foremost a home, less mysterious than simply private. However, the Lion House's multiple gables provoked visitors to the Mormon city to create elaborate and exotic stories about Brigham's harem and still titillate the imaginations of modern observers. The work of Dixon and Johnson helps demystify and explain the day-to-day lives of the women and their many children.

It seems fitting that Brigham Young, himself a master carpenter and lover of buildings, should be described by the homes he kept. Plural families cohabiting in wagons moving through Winter Quarters or a young pampered wife enthroned in a palace on South Temple, mirrored Young's life and the unique demands placed on it by his Mormon beliefs.

MARTHA SONNTAG BRADLEY {bradley@arch.utah.edu)  is director of the Honors Program at the University of Utah where she teaches the history of architecture. Among her recent works is Four Zinas: A Story of Mothers and Daughters on the Mormon Frontier, coauthored with Mary Brown Firmage Woodward (Salt Lake City: Signature Books in Association with Smith Research Associates, 2000).

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Edward Leo Lyman and Larry Lee Reese. The Arduous Road: Salt Lake to Los Angeles, the Most Difficult Wagon Road in American History. Victorville, Calif: Lyman Historical Research and Publishing Company, 2001. Vii + 108 pp. Photographs, maps, bibliography, index. Paper: $20.00; ISBN 0-9709525-0-3 Buy it now!

Reviewed by Will Bagley (Reviewed April 2004)

Understanding the complicated history of overland trails is a specialty that escapes most students of the American West, but Mormon country has produced such scholars as LeRoy Hafen, Dale L. Morgan, Wallace Stegner, Stanley B. Kimball, David L. Bigler, Steven Madsen, and now Leo Lyman, who have greatly extended our appreciation of the significance of the wagon roads that led to the settlement of the West.

In the decade before his death, Dale Morgan examined what gold rusher Vincent Hoover called "the arduous road" between Great Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. Morgan died before publishing his editions of the diaries of Hoover and Forty-niner William Lorton, and to this day there is no comprehensive history of what historian Andrew Neff dubbed "the Mormon corridor" (14). Fortunately, Leo Lyman has accepted the challenge of chronicling the Southern Route, "the most often-mentioned appellation for this important all-weather roadway" (vi).

Lyman's scholarly study is still in press, but he and photographer Larry Reese have filled the gap with The Arduous Road an illustrated popular history published to coincide with the 2001 sesquicentennial wagon-train reenactment of the founding of the Mormon settlement of San Bernardino. Its desire to appeal to its projected LDS audience may explain why the book devotes exactly a dozen words to the most significant event in the route's story, the "terrible" Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857 (2, 47). (The atrocity virtually stopped the use of the trail by non-Mormons for several years and led to the creation of a road up the previously impassable Black Canyon – the route Interstate 15 follows today – so it was not without relevant consequences.)

The book begins with an excellent twenty-five-page summary of the trail's history and the LDS Church's role in opening and developing it. Lyman and Reese note that Mormon Battalion veterans brought the first-known wagon over the route in 1848 (2) and outline Brigham Young's hope to establish a string of settlements that would let European converts reach Utah by way of Panama and San Bernardino (14-15). But, as Eugene Campbell observed in his 1973 study of the route, the plan was "executed in a haphazard manner, and abandoned without the usual heroic effort that characterized Mormon enterprise" (19). The Mormon corridor, these authors note, "never received the consistent emphasis necessary for development" (15).

The rest of The Arduous Road is devoted to a seventy-three-page tour of the modern trail from Salt Lake to Los Angeles, supported by historic descriptions, contemporary photographs, and six good maps. The authors describe the differences between the wagon road and the western section of the Old Spanish Trail, the pack-train route with which it is often conflated.

Trail buffs may want to offer their own candidates for "the most difficult wagon road in American history" (Arizona's Beale Road and New Mexico's Jornada del Muerto on the Chihuahua Road are good contenders), but there is no question that the Southern Route was one tough way to get to California.  Lyman’s proposition that failing to promote the road was a tragedy is debatable, since his estimate of the number of graves that lined the route is certainly low. Deaths on the Oregon-California roads may have run as high as 1 for every 17 emigrants and the 250+ Mormon casualties of the handcart disaster produced the "greatest suffering and death" in trails history, but this characterization ignores the fact that the death rate west of South Pass was actually very low. And getting from England or New York to San Diego involved a long sea voyage or dangerous crossing of Panama. Historians will have to wait for Lyman's forthcoming definitive study From the City of the Saints to the City of the Angels: Early Transportation from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles; but this entertaining and attractive book will do until it arrives.

WILL BAGLEY (wlbagley@xmission.com}, an independent historian, is working on a history of the Oregon-California trails for the U.S. National Park Service.

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Reid L. Neilson, ed. The Japanese Missionary Journal of Elder Alma O. Taylor 1901-10. Provo, Utah: BYU Studies/Joseph Fielding Smith Institute of Latter-day Saint History, 2001. vii, 471 pp. Photographs, biographical register, endnotes, bibliography, and abstract. Paper: $23.95.

Reviewed by Kenneth W. Godfrey (Reviewed April 2004)

This book began as Reid L. Neilson's master's thesis at Brigham Young University, now published in book form by BYU Studies and the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History. Alma O. Taylor kept a very interesting record as he served first as a missionary and then as mission president in Japan. The result is a trove of information on the activities, hopes, disappointments, and rare successes of the handful of men who, at the turn of the twentieth century, began preaching the gospel in Japan.

Scholars and other persons interested in Mormonism's beginnings in Japan cannot afford to disregard the thoughtful, thorough record that Taylor kept. Neilson's helpful introduction provides the historical context and background for the opening of missionary work in Japan while the epilogue outlines Taylor's life after he returned to the United States. Carefully captioned photographs, credited to BYU Studies editor John W. Welch, enhance the book.

A biographical register contains background on almost four hundred individuals named in the diary. Neilson's notes assist those unfamiliar with the Japanese language, geography, or personalities from Mormon history. Thus, when Taylor writes about a Shokugyo Gakko, we learn that he is referring to a trade school. As another example, "Mr. Ponesforte" (no first name given in the text or note) was an actor in Salt Lake City who left the Church, married a Japanese woman, and opened a boarding house in Yokohama known as the Shakespeare Race Track (452). The notes are grouped at the end of the chapters; I would much have preferred reader-friendly footnotes providing background information on the Shinsho-ji Temple or what a Furoshiki was, to cite just two examples (192).

Alma O. Taylor was born 1 August 1882; as an adult, he told his friends that he was born in a casket and cradled in a morgue. (His father was an undertaker and sexton in Salt Lake City.) Taylor began attending Primary at age four and Sunday School at five. He found believing easy and faithfully attended Thursday fast and testimony meetings. His father was a counselor in the Salt Lake Stake presidency for many years. Alma early committed himself to the Word of Wisdom and sexual morality. At age seventeen, he graduated first in his class from the Harvey Medical College's school of embalming in Chicago. In Utah, he worked in the family's mortuary business, excelled at public speaking, and was ordained an elder at eighteen.

Shortly thereafter he received a call to accompany Apostle Heber J. Grant and two other missionaries to open the Japanese Mission. His mission lasted eight and a half years. After arriving home 26 April 1910 to a glorious reunion with his family, Alma reported his mission to the First Presidency, returned to the family business, and married Angeline Holbrook. A soughtafter speaker, he even delivered sermons over KSL Radio. In 1919, with his father-in-law he organized the Intermountain Casket Company and died in 1947(426-27).

One of Taylor's primary responsibilities as a missionary was to translate the Book of Mormon into Japanese. His record includes a moving account of the care he took in trying to get things right so that educated Japanese would not find his translation inferior in any way. His careful and prayerful scholarship over long and often disappointing periods of time should inspire every student of Mormon history. After nearly a decade and not a few set-backs, Taylor was grateful to hold the first copies of the Japanese edition of the Book of Mormon, recording in his diary: "There is no book of the same size in Japan with less mistakes in its first edition than this book. It is proof that the Lord has helped us wonderfully in our proof-reading" (415). Not only was the volume accurate but, according to Taylor, the Japanese was acceptable to native scholars and linguists.

I found myself wishing Neilson had provided a brief history of this translation. Is it still used by Japanese Saints today? Was it used when the missionaries returned to Japan in 1924? Is it still a translation Church members can be proud of? These and other questions should have been answered.

Scholars who like primary sources reproduced accurately and completely will be disappointed that Neilson "abridged Alma's journals by only selecting and reproducing certain entries" which he judged to have "the most value to the serious scholar and ... the most interest to the casual reader" (28). Many "serious scholars" prefer diaries that are copied word for word. However, to his credit Neilson has not expunged accounts of missionaries being excommunicated for sexual transgressions and even includes their names which Taylor had scratched out. Nor has he omitted the misdeeds and sometimes betrayals of some early converts. Although it is disappointing that the journal is not complete, there is enough and more to sustain interest in this 471-page volume.

Taylor was apparently careful to record significant "firsts" in the Japanese Mission, from the first Mormon hymn sung in Japanese, the first baptism performed using Japanese, etc. He also documents the open opposition from other Christian churches that seriously hampered the LDS missionaries effort. Believing they had been called to serve God, the small cadre of Mormon elders were not afraid to publicly challenge their Christian detractors by debates, pamphlets, and newspaper articles to "set the record straight." Plural marriage, although it had been abandoned for the most part in 1890, was still a point that generated much ill will against the missionaries.

Taylor's journals are perhaps the most detailed, thorough primary source regarding Mormonism's initial rather unsuccessful encounter with the Orient and its people. That Taylor remained optimistic, even as he struggled determinedly to master a new and difficult language, is a credit to him and other missionaries who learned the language as well. The mature way he handled difficult problems and the clarity of his record are apparent in this passage, written in April 1906 after he, at age twenty, replaced Horace S. Ensign as mission president:

At 2:00 p.m. Elder (Hedges), Elder Fairbourn, and I went into a room and I began to question Elder (H) about his actions in Sendai and especially about those actions which Elder F had observed and considered improper for a missionary to indulge in. This questioning lasted for perhaps an hour and a half or more. Elder F was asked to retire as Elder (Hedges) desired to talk to me privately. After Elder F left the room Elder (H), with a terrible struggle and pangs of heart that shook his entire body, confessed his sins and pleaded for forgiveness. This confession confirmed all the suspicions that were in my heart and the heart of Elder F concerning what Elder [H) had done and revealed much more. In short Elder (H) confessed to having fallen from virtue, misused a large amount of money entrusted to him for the famine relief work in Northeastern Japan and for the maintenance of the mission house in Sendai, and in order to keep his wrong doing concealed from his companion and the President of the mission, lied with word and deed.

After this elder confessed and asked forgiveness from the other missionaries, Taylor added:

In speaking before my brethren the Spirit of God came upon me to the extent that I shook from head to feet. I promised the mercies of God upon my fallen brother if he would go home, and bearing up under the sorrow and shame that he must feel in meeting his mother, father, brother, relatives, and friends, carry out his promise to keep the laws of God hereafter. We all shed tears freely. At night I wrote and posted a letter to Elder Caine telling him to gather up Elder (H's) things, discharge the cook and get someone to watch the house for a week or ten days and then come to Tokyo as quickly as possible. (277-78)

The first hundred or so pages of this volume are not as carefully edited as the remaining three-fourths of the book. I saw at least two dozen spelling errors that are apparently editorial mistakes, since they seem more logically explained as typographical errors and are not labeled with sic. In subsequent editions these errors should be corrected. The editor also does not explain whether we are reading journal entries composed on the same day or later. For example, Taylor wrote, "Not the slightest desire to return home crept over me. I felt then as I feel today that to labor in the field for some years yet will be more pleasant and satisfactory than to return so soon to loved ones at home" (141). When was "then" and when was "today"? Neither the text nor the editor's notes makes it clear.

Another unanswered question is how the mission and the missionaries were financed. The elders seemed able to engage in ambitious publicity projects, to travel at will, and to pay for housing, clothing, and food without relying on help from the Japanese people. The local Japanese also perceived them as well off, since their lodgings were robbed at least four times. Did their support come primarily from parents and family, or were they supported from church funds? There are scattered references to the Church's funding of the translation and publication of the Book of Mormon, and Taylor sometimes mentions money sent by relatives, but there are still loose ends about how the missionaries were supported.

Impressive as were Taylor's dedication and lengthy service, his was not "the longest continuous mission in the Church's history," as Neilson claims (24). Charles W. Penrose served ten years (1852-62) on his first mission in England and then served three additional missions in that land (1865-68, 1885, 1906-09) before his call into the First Presidency of the Church. This book is a fine addition to any Latter-day Saint's library and is a must for those who want to learn about Mormon missions and especially those first elders who opened missionary work in Japan.

KENNETH W. GODFREY, retired from the Church Educational System, resides in Logan. With Donald Godfrey (no relation), he has edited Charles O. Card's Cache Valley diaries (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, forthcoming).

Alexander L. Baugh. A Call to Arms: The 1838 Mormon Defense of Northern Missouri. Provo, Utah: Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History/BYU Studies, 2000. ix, 239 pp. Front matter, bibliography, appendices, abstract. Soft cover: $19.95.

Reviewed by Ronald E. Romig (Reviewed April 2004)

Beginning in August 1838, growing hostilities between residents of northwestern Missouri and their Mormon neighbors, erupted into a series of armed encounters. This publication of Alexander Baugh's Ph.D. 1996 dissertation focuses primarily on seven military episodes or incidents that occurred during the 1838 Mormon War. The conflict concluded with the surrender of the Mormons at Far West to state militia officers.

Baugh's purpose is clearly set forth in his introduction – to challenge Stephen C. LeSueur's The 1838 Mormon War in Missouri (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987). Baugh writes: "Historians of the Missouri period of LDS history have not researched in sufficient depth, nor discussed adequately, numerous aspects of the civil conflict, particularly the military operations and movements of the Mormon and Missouri participants. This study is designed to make up for that deficiency by cutting more broadly and deeply than previous studies (particularly LeSueur's)" (3).

Baugh is correct in his evaluation of the overall state of Missouri Mormon history and has produced a great work in response to this perceived need. His study makes an important addition to the literature on the Mormon experience in northern Missouri. I highly recommend it to students of Church history.

I think Call to Arms accomplished its initial purpose wonderfully – which was to meet the academic requirements for completing Baugh's Ph.D. studies. Not only did it satisfy Baugh's Ph.D. committee, but it also helped advance scholarship on this crucial formative period of Mormon culture. Then, someone decided Baugh's dissertation would make a good published resource. As part of the published dissertation series being offered by the JFS Institute/BYU Studies, this dissertation is conveniently and inexpensively made available to a larger audience, which I also applaud. However, the reader in this newer audience needs to be aware of-and duly cautious about-the perceptions and values of Baugh himself and the historians who formed his committee: James B. Allen, Mark R. Grandstaff, and Bruce A. Van Orden.

In his introduction, Baugh declares that his objective is to provide "a historical mirror that more accurately reflects and interprets events and hostilities associated with the Mormon War." But his work falls short of this goal. Unduly focusing on LeSueur, Baugh, notes that "his [LeSueur's] examination actually prompted the need for additional inquiry, investigation and analysis." Baugh, in essence, complains that LeSueur's book is not objective and that he was not sufficiently familiar with sources of the period. In particular, he intimates that LeSueur was uninformed about Missouri state law governing the establishment and function of the Missouri militia: "LeSueur's work contains a number of historical problems. For example, some subjects, particularly the Military operations and movements of the Mormon Militia, are treated too broadly and lack sufficient detail, thereby making a correct interpretation difficult" (2). Yet Baugh only occasionally challenges LeSueur directly and mentions him or his book by name in the text only a handful of times. Nevertheless, much of this work is a response to LeSueur's thought.

This is not the place to defend LeSueur's book. I believe it speaks for itself. However, an example of an indirect countering of LeSueur occurs in association with Baugh's discussion of Joseph Smith's exemption from military service. LeSueur had concluded: "Smith actively led the military operations of the Saints" (210). Baugh asserted that Smith was exempt from military service under the provisions of Missouri law "on account of `the amputation, from his leg, of apart of a bone, on account of a fever sore."' Baugh continued by quoting John P. Greene: "He (Smith) also secured a second exemption from militia service based upon his being a religious teacher or minister. Thus, in those military engagements in which he did participate, he `acted as a private character, and as an individual"' (43). Baugh admits that "Smith was an active participant in the civil conflict" but neutralizes this admission by asserting that he never "held a civil or military office, nor was he ever a member of the regularly (emphasis mine) constituted county or state militia" (210). This distinction may persuade some readers.

Although this review is not the place for a point-by-point comparison of each author's grasp of the situation, I find LeSueur's treatment of Mormon militarism more objective, though perhaps not as thorough as Baugh's. Therefore, I do not think Call to Arms accomplishes its stated purpose.

It is difficult not to conclude that Baugh apparently hoped to crush many assumptions of LeSueur's Mormon War and remove them from the serious continuing scholarly discussion focusing on the meaning of the Mormon experience in Northwestern Missouri in the late 1830s. Although I dearly love Alex Baugh as a friend and greatly respect his professionalism, this approach seems unusually personal. I reluctantly conclude that this apparent preoccupation with refuting LeSueur impacts Baugh's intent to produce objective history.

Serving up a plethora of sources, Baugh dearly demonstrates his mastery. His survey of sources is the most complete currently available, surpassing LeSueur's. It is a masterpiece in this regard. The book is worth purchasing if only used as a source book. Further, I am thrilled by Baugh's detailed reconstructions of selected events within the Mormon experience. He almost overwhelms the reader with a tumble of familiar and not-so-familiar details.

Baugh cites Mormon and non-Mormon sources and successfully joins these diverse voices into a unified comprehensive narrative. Importantly, this narrative is peppered with instances of insightful breakthrough, cutting-edge historical interpretations. As another example, in a bright flash of insight, Baugh advances our understanding of Church leaders' roles in the emergence and excesses of the secretive Danite organization: "What is more conclusive is that while Joseph Smith apparently approved of the Danite activities initially (i.e., during the summer months of 1838), and while he participated in the Daviess expedition in early August, the expedition to DeWitt and the Mormon Offensive in Daviess County in October (each of which included Mormon militia and Danite members), he may not have necessarily known of their private teachings and the conduct of their leader until sometime later" (42). Despite his insertion of conditional phrases, Baugh has given the Church historical community wider permission to discuss the participation of Smith and other Church leaders in what proved for many a regrettable course.

Also, Baugh deserves credit for bringing to the scholarly community's attention a new and exciting interpretation of Governor Boggs's Extermination Order. Baugh devotes an entire section on his chapter on Haun's Mill to explain how, "The Attack (Was) Not Connected to the Exterminating Order.

Following the Battle at Crooked River on 25 October 1838, Governor Boggs issued the extermination order on 27 October in response to Mormon depredations in Daviess County and the Crooked River attack on state troops. On 30 October, more than 200 regulators from Livingston and

nearby counties overran the Mormon village of Haun's Mill, killing unarmed men and boys and shooting at women and children. Baugh conclusively demonstrates that word of the order had not yet arrived when this event occurred:

An examination of the sources indicates that there was no connection with the governor's directive whatsoever. Rather, the attack by the county regulators upon the LDS community was actually a response or a retaliatory strike directed against the Mormons because of the raids they conducted against local vigilante leaders and settlers living in Davies County during the latter half of October, in addition to what was reported to have been the almost complete annihilation of Bogart's Ray militia in the Crooked River engagement. (127)

Here Baugh goes against predominant scholarly understandings and introduces readers to a new interpretation of events and sources. In this, Baugh suggests that the victims of the reprehensible attack on Haun's Mill were party to a wider and more comprehensive cultural clash. This is a helpful interpretation, pointing out in the end, the value of wider toleration for all cultural and religious groups.

Despite many additional vivid and valid examples of this type, on the whole, I remain suspicious of Baugh's interpretation of particular events and their meaning in relation to the larger picture. I am particularly wary of recurrent conditional phrases in Baugh's narrative. Historian John Lewis Gaddis in his The Landscape of History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), suggests that one of the values of narrative history is to help make the past usable. Creating and sharing a familiar story, he explains, helps make a community's past legible and retrievable (139).

In essence, my uneasiness with Baugh's work is that he apparently defaulted to retelling a familiar story, a la Gaddis, rather than advancing overall scholarly understandings of the period. Despite numerous sparkling insights, Baugh chose not to open the eyes of his readers beyond a point. The story, as related by Baugh, employs what Jan Shipps calls "the politics of definition" in her address, "Telling the Whole Story of Mormonism," at the 2003 John Whitmer Historical Association annual meeting. Baugh's language slants events in northwestern Missouri in 1838, decidedly favoring LDS Church interests, perpetuating and strengthening an institutionalized narrative. For example, he frequently defines wary members as "dissenters" and nonmember groups as "vigilantes." Such language complements LDS institutional purposes, keeping the official version of the past "legible and retrievable." Perhaps we are all equally guilty of such unconscious or purposeful special pleading at times. But I believe we should recognize and be suspicious about any literature that apparently seeks to minimize or distance other groups or cultures for whatever apparent purpose.

I look forward to a coming golden era of scholarship when all of Mormon history becomes the best of biography, as described by Ronald W. Walker, in his "Challenge and Craft of Mormon Biography." Quoting American biographer Henry S. Randall, Walker observes:

"I would rather be a dog and bay at the moon, than write in that sickly, silly, adulatory, mutual-admiration-society, mutual scratch-back, tickle-me-Billy-&-I'll-tickle-you-Billy spirit in which most of our American biographies have been written." Similar results occur when biography attempts to evangelize. Fervid passions not only distort personality but often refocus a book into something which is no longer biography. The religious movement or philosophy replaces the subject-person at center stage, and whatever is deleterious to the higher cause is screened from view. (BYU Studies (Spring 1982):182)

I wish my good friend Alex Baugh had simply set out to write the best history of the Mormon War possible rather than measuring his own work against LeSueur's or trying to straighten out what he saw as LeSueur's problems. I believe that, had Baugh not felt compelled to do this, for whatever reason, his resultant work would have been even more outstanding. Ironically, instead of replacing LeSueur's book, Baugh has produced a kind of companion work. It does not exactly balance Mormon War, but has fostered an interesting dynamic. Now, anyone wishing to gain a reasonable understanding of the period must read both works. In short, the two are inextricably locked together, joined at the hip in an enduring scholarly exertion aimed at better understanding the northwestern Missouri Mormon period.

RONALD E. ROMIG (rromig@CofChrist.org) is Community of Christ Archivist, Independence, Missouri.