By Allen Wyatt
When Jon Krakauer’s book was released midway through 2003, it made quite a stir among those interested in Mormon culture and history. It quickly made its way onto several bestseller lists, and critics of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints heralded it as a fair and balanced portrayal of both Mormon life and LDS history.
I read Under the Banner of Heaven in July 2003, shortly after it first came out. In the course of my reading, I kept notes on assertions made by the author and my reactions to those assertions. This article is a recounting of my notes. Taken in total, they can serve as a snapshot of one person’s view of the book.
The following sections represent the notes for each day, written at the end of the day right after I finished my reading. They are, in effect, a journal of notes kept during the reading. The notes largely represent references to those assertions by the author that I knew to be false or that presented a twisted or incomplete view of LDS history. Those familiar with LDS history will recognize the outrageousness of many of the assertions, and the biased language used by the author to frame religious belief–particularly the religious belief practiced by faithful LDS–in an egregiously unflattering manner.
In providing citations in this article, I have not provided scholarly references to the original assertions in Krakauer’s book. Any quotes provided are found in the chapters indicated, roughly in the order presented herein. Those interested in more details can, of course, refer to Under the Banner of Heaven on their own.
One convention I have followed in this article is to provide links to where more factual information can be found on some of the issues raised by Krakauer. Feel free to click on any link desired in order to find out the real story.
18 July 2003
I purchased Under the Banner of Heaven tonight, and have read through the first five chapters. I wanted to record my first impressions.
First, I must say that Krakauer is a gifted writer. His prose flows smoothly, and he knows how to weave thoughts that are enticing to the reader. His words draw people into the story, and he presents information so effortlessly, that it makes it very easy to accept his presentation as unquestioned truth. As a writer, I envy his talent.
Therein, however, lays the problem. He weaves a good story, but he presents largely anti-Mormon stories and sources as if they were truth, and LDS sources as if they were biased propaganda. This is done, again, effortlessly, pulling the reader along through the pages. (I found the book really hard to put down.)
Let me go chapter by chapter, so far.
In the Prologue, we are introduced to the Lafferty family. We learn of the brutal murders of Brenda and Erica at the hands of Dan and Ron, who had previously flipped out on fundamentalist tenets, and had been excommunicated from the Church. It is here (page XX) that we learn that Dan Lafferty, serving a life sentence, is cellmate to Mark Hofmann, and that the LDS Church has purchased “more than four hundred of [Hofmann’s] fraudulent artifacts…believed they were authentic, then squirreled them away in a vault to keep them from the public eye.” (This amazing revelation was countered in the Turley review). We also learn on the last page of the Prologue (XXIII) that “faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion.” This telling comment provides a hint as to the reason for his literary attack on religion in general and Mormonism in particular.
In Chapter 1, “The City of the Saints,” we are introduced to the Mormon-dominated Salt Lake City. We learn that “Temple Square is to Mormons what the Vatican is to Catholics, or the Kaaba in Mecca is to Muslims.” In an apparent attempt to make the Church sound secretive and sinister, Krakauer points out that “the affairs of Mormondom are directed by a cadre of elderly white males in dark suits who carry out their holy duties from a twenty-six-story office tower beside Temple Square.” He points out that Mormons and fundamentalists have all the same beliefs (which will greatly surprise both groups), but “diverge on one especially inflammatory point of religious doctrine”–polygamy.
Krakauer says “there are more than thirty thousand FLDS (fundamentalist latter-day saint) polygamists living in Canada, Mexico, and throughout the American West. Some experts estimate there may be as many as one hundred thousand.” In his words, “Mormon authorities treat the fundamentalists as they would a crazy uncle–they try to keep the ‘polygs’ hidden in the attic, safely out of sight, but the fundamentalists always seem to be sneaking out to appear in public at inopportune moments to create unsavory scenes, embarrassing the entire LDS clan.” Krakauer deftly establishes a connection between the Church and fundamentalists, so he can color the lot with the same spray paint. (Of course, deftness has never been a synonym for accuracy, but such a distinction would be largely lost on a reader uneducated in LDS history.) Krakauer never does indicate why the LDS Church should accept responsibility for offshoots of the main Church, nor does he indicate what form any supposed responsibility should take. Apparently it is not enough to excommunicate them from the Church and cooperate with law enforcement authorities, where appropriate.
Chapter 2, “Short Creek,” tells the story of the polygamist community of Short Creek, Arizona (now Colorado City), and the raid on it in 1953. He paints a picture of a town ruled by the iron hand of the FLDS prophet, and how he exerts control. He tells how the town is growing quickly through breeding, and how it bilks the state and federal governments out of millions of dollars each year. Later in the chapter he quickly recaps the Kingston convictions in 1998 and the Tom Green polygamy case in 2000. He then drops back into Colorado City and points out how the police and politicians there are corrupted and compromised by the fact they are all FLDS and beholden to the FLDS prophet.
Chapter 3, “Bountiful,” takes us up north, just across the Canadian border, to examine the polygamous community in that town. He ties the fundamentalism back to general Mormonism by saying that it is “a patriarchal religion, rooted firmly in the traditions of the Old Testament. Dissent isn’t tolerated.” Further, “only prophets may receive the revelations that determine how the faithful are to conduct their lives, right down to the design of the sacred undergarments individuals are supposed to wear at all times.” (People just love to talk about our underwear.)
We also learn that “the primary responsibility of women in FLDS communities (even more than in the mainline Mormon culture) is to serve their husbands, conceive as many babies as possible, and raise those children to become obedient members of the religion.” We also learn the long, fascinating story of Debbie Palmer, one of the fortunate few to escape from the clutches of the FLDS.
Chapter 4, “Elizabeth and Ruby,” tackles the news about Elizabeth Smart. We learn that by “adroitly manipulating the religious indoctrination Elizabeth had received since she was old enough to talk, [Brian David] Mitchell cowed the girl into becoming an utterly submissive polygamous concubine.” We also find out that “the white robes Mitchell and Barzee wore, and forced Elizabeth to wear, resemble the sacred robes she had donned with her family when they entered the Mormon temple.” Such statements, of course, only serve to underscore Krakauer’s ability to manipulate reality to fit a good story. He never points out that Elizabeth was kidnapped when she was fourteen, and youth in the LDS Church don’t attend the temple until they are at least twelve. Assuming that Elizabeth had attended the temple during those two years, the clothing she would see while there would be little different from a young Catholic girl’s communion dress. At her age, Elizabeth never would have “donned” any robes in the temple, nor seen anyone else there in those robes.
Krakauer reveals how closely Dan Lafferty had followed the Elizabeth Smart case, and that he correctly guessed early on that she was kidnapped by a polygamous fundamentalist. Dan wasn’t the first to surmise this, however. Flora Jessop, an anti-polygamist activist in Phoenix, also guessed early on that was the case. We then hear the story of Flora’s escape from Colorado City, and how she has fought to save her much younger sister from forced marriage in the FLDS church, all to the deaf ears of those in government who could help rescue her.
Chapter 5, “The Second Great Awakening,” tackles the story of Joseph Smith, the First Vision, and the formation of the Church. Krakauer states that “to comprehend Brian David Mitchell–or to comprehend Dan Lafferty, or Tom Green, or the polygamous inhabitants of Bountiful and Colorado City–one must first understand the faith these people have in common…and any such understanding must begin with the aforementioned Joseph Smith, Jr.”
Krakauer recounts how Joseph Smith, Sr., was the product of failed schemes and hard times. The Smith family finally made it to Palmyra, and Krakauer quotes from an anti-Mormon newspaper account that confidently states “we have never been able to learn that any of the family were ever noted for much else than ignorance and stupidity.” (If this were true it would be even more amazing that Joseph Smith started a major world religion.) We learn that Joseph’s young life included “an extended foray into the necromantic arts.” Without substantiation he notes that Joseph practiced money digging for years and gained fame in his abilities. He also supposedly learned how to use a peep stone from Sally Chase, who he visited just before his fourteenth birthday.
We also find that Joseph was “found guilty” in his 1826 trial, and two pages later–in describing why Isaac Hale didn’t like Joseph–he states that “young Joe Smith had been convicted of fraud in a court of law.” (Neither assertion, of course, is supported by the record. One should never let the truth stand in the way of a good story.) We also learn that after the 1826 trial, Joseph agreed to get out of necromancy, but that “only eighteen months later, however, peep stones and black magic would again loom large in Joseph’s life. Just down the road from his Palmyra home he would finally discover a trove of buried treasure, and the impact of what he unearthed has been reverberating through the country’s religious and political landscape ever since.”
Krakauer then jumps into the story of Moroni and the gold plates. We hear how Moroni “conjured” visions in the boy’s head that lead him to the plates, without any indication from Krakauer as to how something he clearly considers a figment (Moroni) could conjure anything in anyone’s head. After Joseph showed initial greed related to the plates, Moroni set up an annual schedule of meetings, and each year Joseph left the meetings “empty-handed, to his great disappointment.” In their 1826 annual meeting, Moroni told Joseph that he could possibly get the plates the next year, if he were to marry Emma Hale and bring her to the next meeting. (Krakauer indicates, without substantiation, that it was Moroni who insisted that Joseph marry Emma. This is an interesting, albeit questionable, assertion.)
Sure enough, Joseph wooed Emma, and the next year they showed up for the meeting. “Carefully adhering to the time-honored rituals of necromancy, the young couple was dressed entirely in black, and had traveled the three miles from the Smith farm to the hill in a black carriage drawn by a black horse.” (The sinister overtones, manufactured through the author’s choice of words, are almost palpable.) They got the plates, and the translation commenced. Krakauer tells about the loss of the 116-page manuscript, and in a curious footnote tells how Mark Hofmann was planning to forge those pages. Krakauer says “the LDS Church would probably have paid him handsomely for the document, then hidden it in the president’s vault with the other potentially embarrassing historical documents that church leaders have thus far managed to keep away from the prying eyes of scholars.” (It’s too bad the Church didn’t know they were supposed to be hiding these documents before they published the other ones.)
Krakauer also reveals that Martin Harris had “usually been putty in Joseph’s hands,” and he was able to convince Harris to sell his farm to print the Book of Mormon. How Harris, a well-known and respected farmer in the region, could be “putty” in anyone’s hands remains an unanswered question.
19 July 2003
Last night I hit the highlights from the Prologue and chapters 1 through 5. Tonight I read chapters 6 through 13. I found out many more wonderful and amazing (and incorrect) things about the religion I have practiced for the past 37 years.
In Chapter 6, “Cumorah,” Krakauer starts with a discussion of the Palmyra Pageant, and digresses to explain the Book of Mormon and how it came about. He incorrectly points out that “the Hill Cumorah is one of the holiest sites in all of Mormondom, and sooner or later most Latter-day Saints make a pilgrimage here.” He talks about the Palmyra Pageant, and the well-behaved people who attend. “Order, needless to say, prevails. This is a culture that considers obedience to be among the highest virtues.” (Obviously Krakauer didn’t attend any Primary Activity Days or Elder’s Quorum basketball games during his research.)
In describing the plot line for the Book of Mormon, Krakauer tells how “Lehi drummed into the heads of his offspring that the most important thing in life is to earn God’s love, and the one and only way to do that, he explained is to obey the Lord’s every commandment.” He also identifies Nephi as Lehi’s “youngest and most exemplary son.” He quickly goes through the events of the next 1000 years in less than a page, and states that “the reprobate Lamanites slaughtered all 230,000 of the Nephites (which explains why Columbus encountered no Caucasians when he landed in the New World in 1492). Facing starvation, the handful of Nephite children clinging to life at war’s end were forced to cannibalize the flesh of dead family members, but in the end they, too, succumbed.” Bummer. (Joseph obviously should have had a ghost- writer such as Krakauer.)
Krakauer blithely points out how “the Book of Mormon is riddled with egregious anachronisms and irreconcilable inconsistencies.” He talks about “many references” to horses, wheeled carts,steel, and seven-day weeks. He points out how “modern DNA analysis has conclusively demonstrated that American Indians are not descendants of any Hebraic race.” He then, turning to our belief, states that “such criticism and mockery are largely beside the point. All religious belief is a function of nonrational faith. And faith, by its very definition, tends to be impervious to intellectual argument or academic criticism.” In other words, Krakauer does not understand any religious faith, but the Mormons make a titillating story possible, even if the story is only passably recognizable to those who practice the faith.
I found it interesting that he says, “Those who would assail the Book of Mormon should bear in mind that its veracity is no more dubious than the veracity of the Bible, say, or the Qur’an, or the sacred texts of most other religions. The latter texts simply enjoy the considerable advantage of having made their public debut in the shadowy recesses of the ancient past, and are thus much harder to refute.” Good point. Too bad our Evangelical critics don’t understand this perspective.
Krakauer points out how Joseph Smith asserted “that the Book of Mormon was an essential update to both the Old Testament and the New Testament.” (Joseph did no such thing.) Further, Joseph developed the ideas concerning the Great Apostasy and “divulged that virtually all Christian doctrine that had developed thereafter–Catholic and Protestant alike–was a whopping lie.” (Again, he did no such thing.) Joseph Smith’s other revelations are also “compiled in a thin volume titled The Doctrine and Covenants, which in some ways has supplanted the Book of Mormon as the Latter-day Saints’ most consequential scriptural text.”
In Chapter 7, “The Still Small Voice,” we learn about prophetic and personal revelation. This lesson begins with the story of Robert Crossfield, a.k.a. the Prophet Onias, who eventually left mainstream Mormonism and set up shop first near Bountiful, in Canada, and finally in Salem, near Provo, Utah. After learning about the Prophet Onias, we skip back to the Prophet Joseph and learn how he “emphasized the importance of personal revelation” and “denegrat[ed] the established churches of the day.” Quickly, however, Joseph saw the error in such import to personal revelation, and in 1830 received a revelation that said only he could receive revelation for the Church. Krakauer points out how “God had belatedly given him” this revelation,” but the genie was already out of the bottle, and personal revelation would be the lynchpin on which fundamentalists would splinter off from Mormonism over the years.
It was interesting to learn that Provo is really the spiritual center of Mormonism, and that “many Mormons regard [Salt Lake City] as a sinful, iniquitous place that’s been corrupted by outsiders.” BYU, tightly controlled by the Church, is a “jarring” place for outsiders to visit, and students are so clean cut and obedient that “nobody would think of attempting to shave a few precious seconds by treading on the manicured grass” of the campus, choosing instead to always stay on the sidewalks.
I found it interesting that “Utah County has the highest birth rate in the United States; it is higher, in fact, than the birth rate in Bangladesh.” Utah County is also, “not coincidentally,” the “stronghold not only of Mormonism but also Mormon Fundamentalism.” (Such assertions make one wonder why Krakauer spent several chapters on Short Creek and Bountiful and described the iron-fist rule in those places.)
Close to Provo is Salem, hometown of Dan Lafferty, and home to the Dream Mine, which attracted the Prophet Onias. Onias eventually started his own School of the Prophets where he could teach people the “crucial Mormon principles that had been forsaken by the modern LDS Church.” These included polygamy, the Adam/God doctrine, and “the divinely ordained supremacy of the white race.”
In Chapter 8, “The Peace Maker,” we learn more about Dan Lafferty and how he turned from Mormonism to fundamentalism. We learn about his early life with an authoritarian father who was highly impressed with the ideas of “Ezra Taft Benson–the prominent Mormon apostle, Red-baiter, and John Birch Society supporter.” We see how Dan, in the early 1980s, nosed around the special collections at BYU and uncovered The Peace Maker, by Udney Hay Jacob, published by Joseph Smith in Nauvoo in 1842. We learn that “scholars and others have long speculated that Joseph was the author” of the pamphlet. The rationale for polygamy put forth in the pamphlet was enlightening to Dan, and he applied its principles in his family. (It is interesting that something as sinister and damning as Krakauer makes The Peace Maker out to be isn’t hidden away in the First Presidency’s vaults, where critics–along with Krakauer–insist such damaging documents are always hidden from the world.)
In Chapter 9, “Haun’s Mill,” Krakauer starts by discussing the opposition faced by the early Church. Joseph’s “widespread reputation as a charlatan” led the Saints out of Palmyra to Kirtland, and from there to Missouri. In Missouri, Joseph taught about “something he called ‘free agency’; everyone was free to choose whether to be on the side of the Lord or on the side of wickedness; it was an entirely personal decision–but woe to those who decided wrong. If you knowingly chose to shun the God of Joseph and the Saints, you were utterly undeserving of sympathy or mercy.” The Missouri non-Mormons did not like this very much, and they started harassing and attacking the Saints. Under Joseph’s direction, the Saints finally retaliated. Governor Boggs then issued the extermination order, and three days later the Saints at Haun’s Mill were attacked and killed by state militia.
Following the attack, Joseph decided that violence was not the answer, and he sent “five Mormons to meet with the Gentiles and ‘beg like a dog for peace.'” The militia imprisoned Smith and others, and then forced the Saints from the state.
Chapter 10, “Nauvoo,” discusses some of the Saints experiences in Nauvoo. We learn that “Nauvoo was no mere city; it was a theocratic principality, with Joseph at its head, possessing sovereign rights and powers unique not only in Illinois but in the entire nation.” The state had “set Joseph up as a de facto emperor of his own autonomous city-state.”
It was during this time that Joseph decided to run for President. He “venerated the U.S. Constitution as a divinely inspired document…yet in both word and deed, Joseph repeatedly demonstrated that he himself had little respect for the religious views of non-Mormons, and was unlikely to respect the constitutional rights of other faiths if he somehow won the presidency and were running the show.” (Historical mind reading is always an amusing sport.)
We learn about Joseph’s prophecy that Missouri’s retired governor Boggs would “die by violent hands within one year.” Because “it was commonly understood by the faithful that it was a Saint’s sacred duty to assist in the fulfilling of prophecies,” it is likely that it was a Mormon that tried to kill Boggs in May 1842. Krakauer identifies the most likely suspect (and agrees with the suspicion): Porter Rockwell. He found it interesting that “neither he nor any other Saint was ever brought to justice for the deed.”
Much of Joseph’s charismatic character is described, relying heavily on the words of Fawn Brodie and some on Juanita Brooks. We learn that part of Joseph’s religious appeal sprang from the fact that he routinely “took measure of the public’s collective yearning and intuitively shaped his ideas to fit the precise dimensions of that inchoate desire.”
Chapter 11, “The Principle,” discusses the roots of polygamy in the early Church. Krakauer treats the terms “Celestial marriage,” “spiritual wifery,” and “plural marriage” as synonymous “euphemisms for polygamy” coined by Joseph Smith. He provides enthralling accounts of Joseph’s earliest polygamous conquests in Marinda Nancy Johnson, and how that led him to be beaten, tarred and feathered in Kirtland. “Despite this harrowingly close call, Joseph remained perpetually and hopelessly smitten by the comeliest female members of his flock,” especially the “nubile” Fanny Alger. (I wonder if anyone will ever castigate Krakauer for his magical ability to read minds, much like he castigates Joseph for his magical ability to dig for money.)
When Emma got irate over Fanny, Krakauer reports that “neither Emma’s tears nor her rage were enough to make Joseph monogamous…it struck him as impossible that God might possibly frown on such a thing. … The Lord, it seemed to him, must surely have intended man to know the love of more than one wife or He wouldn’t have made the prospect so enticing.”
Later, in Nauvoo, the Prophet “entered a phase of feverish doctrinal creativity.” One such doctrine was codified on July 12, 1843, and eventually ended up as Section 132. Krakauer points out how “this burst of theological inspiration coincided with an extended eruption of libidinous energy” as Joseph took many wives between 1840 and 1844. Later he states that “it beggers the imagination to consider how Joseph managed to maintain relationships with forty spouses. Not even this profusion of wives, however, managed to sate his appetite.” Krakauer then passes on the claim of Sarah Pratt (wife of Orson Pratt) that Joseph “used to frequent houses of ill-fame.”
During this “period of frenzied coupling, Joseph adamantly denied that he endorsed plural marriage, let alone engaged in the practice himself.” However, his lies and success in those lies “incubated a dangerous hubris, which in turn increased his sexual recklessness.” According to Krakauer, “in the spring of 1844 a scandal of Monica Lewinsky-like proportions exploded in Nauvoo,” and would be the undoing of the Prophet. (Does this mean that Krakauer views Bill Clinton as more successfully libidinous than Joseph Smith, since Clinton was not undone by his exploits and Joseph allegedly was?)
Chapter 12, “Carthage,” examines the events surrounding the martyrdom, although Krakauer never uses that word or any variation on it. He talks about Emma’s abhorrence of polygamy, William Law sticking up for Emma, and the coming and subsequent destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor. Krakauer never explains, of course, how exactly William Law was sticking up for Emma by committing acts that incited local anti-Mormon sentiments and led to her husband’s death and the ransacking of Mormon settlements.
It was the destruction of the press that upset the non-Mormons in Hancock County the most, as they were “alarmed by Joseph’s penchant for theocratic governance, as well as his apparent disregard for every article of the United States Constitution except those that assured Mormons the freedom to worship as they saw fit.” Krakauer, with his magical ability to read minds, never explains why the destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor somehow excuses the subsequent violence against Smith, yet similar destruction of Mormon presses in Missouri, in previous years, does not even merit a mention.
The fellow citizens of the county didn’t like “Joseph’s avowed intent to replace the elected government of the United States with a ‘government of God,'” and they “didn’t fancy becoming subjects of King Joseph Smith.”
Joseph, Hyrum, John Taylor, and others were hauled to jail in Carthage. All except Joseph and Hyrum made bail, and the kindly jailor allowed Joseph and Hyrum to use his family’s bedroom upstairs since it offered better security. He also gave the prisoners “unrestricted access” to visitors, and “by this means two guns were smuggled in to them.” Eventually the mob, made up of the Warsaw Militia, stormed the jail and killed Joseph and Hyrum and wounded John Taylor and Willard Richards. The bullet that struck John Taylor’s watch stopped it “at sixteen minutes and twenty-six seconds past five o’clock on June 27, 1844. Mormons the world over have committed this time and date to memory, marking the death of their great and beloved prophet.”
In Chapter 13, “The Lafferty Boys,” we learn about Dan’s education in fundamentalist issues. Not only did he learn about polygamy in his studies, but also that “both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young had preached about the righteousness of a sacred doctrine known as ‘blood atonement‘: certain grievous acts committed against Mormons, as Brigham explained it, could be rectified only if the ‘sinners have their blood spilt upon the ground.'”
Dan started reviling against the government and any form of licensing and taxation. He indoctrinated his four younger brothers in the fundamentalist teachings, and his parents needed to come home early from a mission abroad so they didn’t lose their house because Dan refused to pay property taxes.
20 July 2003
Today I was able to only read chapters 14 through 17, but they seem to be the longest ones in the book.
In Chapter 14, “Brenda,” Krakauer focuses his attention the lives of Ron Lafferty, his wife Dianna, and others of the Lafferty clan, including the soon-to-be-murdered Brenda, wife of Allen, the youngest Lafferty brother. We learn that “after four weeks of indoctrination” at the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Ron served a mission in Florida, where he was a rather independent, yet effective, missionary. We also learn that Mormons pledge “not to drink, smoke, take illegal drugs, ingest caffeine, masturbate, or engage in premarital sex.” Krakauer states that these strictures “can be traced to a Draconian, late-twentieth-century interpretation of a confusing revelation”–the Word of Wisdom. (The Word of Wisdom, of course, does not mention sex, drugs, or caffeine.)
During his mission, Ron would study scripture every morning for “two or three hours before hitting the streets to troll for prospective converts.” (I wonder if Krakauer would consider the Baptist missionaries that come to my door to be “trolling” for converts.) Such an obedient Mormon was apparently ripe for the picking, as well over a decade later he was easily converted to fundamentalism by his younger brother, Dan, in the short space of two hours. The rest of the chapter tells about how the brothers continued to sink in a fundamentalist psychosis, and Brenda–Allen’s wife–would stand up to them as the most educated of the Lafferty brothers’ wives.
Chapter 15, “The One Mighty and Strong,” talks about the blossoming friendship between the Lafferty brothers and the Prophet Onias. They enrolled in his School of the Prophets and learned how to receive their own revelations. Ron Lafferty was made bishop of the school’s Provo chapter. Ron started receiving revelations, and after two months of practice, received the revelation that Brenda, Erika (her year-old daughter) and two others needed to die. Dan believed that his brother’s revelation was real, particularly since he idolized Nephi, and Nephi had killed Laban under command from God. (We learn that Laban was “a scheming, filthy-rich sheep magnate who turns up in the pages of both The Book of Mormon and the Old Testament.” Apparently Krakauer’s reading of the Old Testament is just as inaccurate as his reading of things Mormon.
Others in the School of the Prophets rejected Ron’s “removal revelation,” and it broke up the group. Nobody–including Brenda’s husband–bothered to tell her that she was the target of a revelation to kill her.
Chapter 16, “Removal,” is the recounting of the weeks before Brenda and Erika’s death, and the actual murders. The details are sickening, and I won’t mention them. I did learn, however, that Utah was the first state–in 1915–to criminalize marijuana. The Church was the impetus for the ban, since it was “concerned about increasing marijuana use among its members.” Apparently marijuana was enjoyed by Mexican polygamists, many of whom returned to Utah and introduced the vice into the wider Mormon population. (Note: I’m being rather sarcastic in what I claim to have “learned” here. In case my attempt at sarcasim is lost on anyone, I don’t believe this recitation of history for a moment. Krakauer has a tendency to make sensationalistic off-hand comments, without citation of sources.)
Krakauer also points out that July 24, Pioneer Day, “is perhaps the Saints’ most important holiday.” (This may be true in Utah, where Pioneer Day is a state holiday, but it is doubtful that the majority of Saints outside of Utah even give it a second thought.)
In Chapter 17, “Exodus,” Krakauer takes a breather. (Good thing, since Chapter 16 was rather intense.) Here he tackles the succession crisis after the death of Joseph Smith and the subsequent exodus of the Saints from Nauvoo. I learned that the Saints’ reaction to Joseph’s death was “woe and staggering grief, vowing through their tears to exact revenge.” Krakauer points out that there were four leading claimants to Church leadership, Joseph Smith III (“whom the prophet probably intended to be his successor”), Samuel H. Smith, Sidney Rigdon, and Brigham Young.
With the Twelve away, drumming up support for Joseph’s now-pointless bid for the presidency, the non-polygamists in town arranged to have Samuel H. Smith ordained as the next prophet. He abruptly died, however, and “compelling circumstantial evidence suggests that he succumbed from poison administered by Hosea Stout…who was loyal to Brigham Young and the other polygamists.” (It is a shame that Krakauer feels the need to include unverified and unverifiable accusations based on historical innuendo. This supposedly exhibits journalistic integrity? I daresay that the evidence of Krakauer’s failure at journalistic integrity is more circumstantially compelling than the poisoning evidence averred to here.)
With Samuel no longer able to ascend to the leadership position, Sidney Rigdon looked like a shoe-in, until Brigham Young returned and faced him down in a conference of the Saints. “Numerous Saints who witnessed Brigham’s address (and even greater numbers who didn’t) swore that he underwent an incredible transfiguration as he spoke. … After such a performance, Brigham had no trouble convincing most those present that he should be their next leader, and thus did he become the Mormons’ second president, prophet, seer, and revelator.” Krakauer gives no indication how he believes that Brigham could successfully pull off such a “performance.”
After the men indicted for the murders of Joseph and Hyrum were found not guilty, the Saints were outraged. “A month later, on the first anniversary of Joseph Smith’s death, Brigham spoke bitterly of the trial verdict and proclaimed that ‘it belongs to God and his people to avenge the blood {of His} servants.’ Toward this end, he instructed church authorities to issue a formal “Oath of Vengeance,” which was immediately made part of the temple endowment ceremony, one of the church’s most sacred rituals.”
In a footnote on pages 198-199, Krakauer points out that “Nauvoo had long been a notorious haven” for counterfeiters. Brigham, and Joseph before him, provided safe haven to individuals charged with crimes outside the city limits. “And like the residents of present-day Colorado City who see nothing wrong with ‘bleeding the beast’ by committing welfare fraud, neither Brigham nor Joseph believed that the counterfeiters in their midst were criminals in the eyes of the Lord; they were, to the contrary, helping advance the Kingdom of God every time they bilked a Gentile with their fraudulent greenbacks, and thus deserved to be protected from arrest.”
Krakauer points out how the exodus weeded out the “wafflers and whiners, the doubters, the malcontents–those of weak faith” and left “a close-knit tribe whose loyalty to their leader, Brigham Young, was unconditional. They would do whatever he asked of them.”
What did he ask of them? To practice polygamy. Despite “bald face lies” to the contrary, the Saints practiced it in secret, and finally in open in 1851. Krakauer venerates Bagley’s “provocative, meticulously researched history ‘Blood of the Prophets,'” concerning the other doctrine promoted through the Mormon Reformation–blood atonement.
We learn how Brigham conspired to subvert the federal judiciary in the Utah Territory by expanding the powers of the local probate courts, which he controlled. We also learned that federal officials fled Utah, “fearing that if they stayed they would receive an unannounced visit from Porter Rockwell and turn up dead–which, in fact, happened to an undocumented number of federal agents.” (There is no explanation how something “undocumented” could, in truth, be a “fact.”)
Krakauer also asserts that “Utah became a slave territory, and the Mormon Church supported the aims of the Confederacy during the Civil War.” This, because Brigham was “an unapologetic racist … whose interpretations of scripture institutionalized racism within the LDS Church.”
The chapter ends with a taste of things to come, in regards to a wagon train traveling through Southern Utah. Mountain Meadow “is now synonymous with one of the most chilling episodes in the history of the American West–an episode that exemplified the fanaticism and concomitant brutality of a culture that would be so enthusiastically idealized a century later by Dan Lafferty and his fundamentalist brethren.”
22 July 2003
I finished reading the book tonight. These notes will be from chapters 18 through 26.
In Chapter 18, “For Water Will Not Do,” Krakauer jumps into the Mountain Meadows Massacre with both feet. From the notes at the end of the book, he states that his primary sources were Bagley, Brooks, and Mormonism Unveiled by John D. Lee. There were a few other incidental books he listed, but the recounting in the chapter clearly came from these sources, with the heaviest influence being from Bagley.
In fact, in a footnote on page 214, Krakauer states “The Mountain Meadows Massacre, published in 1950, is an extraordinary work of history, the seminal portrait of Mormondom under Brigham Young. Will Bagley’s updated treatment of the same subject, Blood of the Prophets, published in 2002, must now be considered the definitive work, but as Bagley acknowledges, he owes an immeasurable debt of Juanita Brooks, whom he praises as ‘one of the West’s best and bravest historians.’ In a very discernible sense, every book about the Mormon experience in nineteenth-century Utah published after 1950 is a response to Brooks’s book–just as every post-1946 treatment of the Mormons under Joseph Smith was written in the immense shadow cast by Fawn Brodie’s masterpiece, No Man Knows My History.” The esteem that Krakauer lavishly imbues in these works is not equally shared by all professional historians.
In this chapter I found out that John D. Lee “was a blustery, brown-nosing martinet beloved by few of his peers,” but for whom Brigham Young “felt genuine affection” and “valued his unfaltering obedience.” I learned how Porter Rockwell, after learning about the approach of the US Army while on a routine mail run back east, raced back to Utah and disclosed the news to Brigham Young on Pioneer Day. “Brigham had actually been aware for more than a month that federal troops were en route to Utah, but had withheld the news until Pioneer Day for maximum dramatic effect.” It is unclear how Krakauer would know that the reason for the supposed delay was for “maximum dramatic effect,” instead of other possible reasons–such as making sure that the report of troop movements was real. Of course, one should never let charitable interpretations of history stand in the way of an irresponsible journalistic penchant for uncovering the sinister among us.
I learned that the Indians were recruited to the side of the Mormons in the impending war, and became “the inspiration for Brigham’s military strategy.” In telling how this strategy came from the Book of Mormon, Krakauer states that according to the Book of Mormon “the Lamanites, of course, had rejected the teachings of Jesus, waged war on the Nephites, and eventually killed every last one of them–crimes that had resulted in God cursing the Lamanites with dark skin.” Krakauer states that Mormon scripture teaches that the Indians would again become a “white and delightsome people” when they were converted to Mormonism during the last days. “The Book of Mormon indeed prophesied that the Lamanites, once redeemed, would join forces with the Mormons to vanquish the Gentiles, and thereby usher in the Great and Dreadful Day of the Lord.” (Such statements must be in some secret appendix to the Book of Mormon that the public is not privy to. Pity.)
During August 1857, “Saints were instructed to supply no provisions whatsoever to the Gentile wagon trains that continued to roll through Utah on their way to California; in a letter distributed across the territory, Mormon bishops were admonished not to let so much as a kernel of grain ‘be sold to our enemies.'” I also learned that one of the reasons that the Fancher party was doomed to extinction was because of the great wealth had by the emigrants, and the amazing poverty in Southern Utah. According to Krakauer, “such riches could not have failed to arouse the interest of people who considered it righteous to steal from the godless.” (Here, Krakauer’s ability to read minds clearly crosses into the realm of historical slander.)
I found out that the Indians who met with Brigham Young on September 1, and left for Southern Utah on September 2, were able to travel the 280 miles necessary in two days, while it took John D. Lee two days to travel the 35 miles from Cedar City to Mountain Meadow, a distance of 35 miles. (See pages 218 to 219.)
I’m sure that there are many things wrong with the chapter other than what I have pointed out here. I am not an expert on the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and much of the historical recounting surrounding the events of that fateful time seem to boil down to picking nits and reading minds across the years. Krakauer seems to enjoy reading minds, or at least handily quoting others who are equally adept at doing so.
In Chapter 19, “Scapegoats,” the follow-up to the massacre is considered. We learn how federal troops under James H. Carleton reverently constructed a stone monument at Mountain Meadow in 1858 over the gathered remains of the victims. This monument was “twelve feet high and fifty feet in circumference,” atop which they “placed a wooden cross inscribed with the epigraph ‘Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord.'” He then points out how Brigham Young saw the memorial in May 1861, and “according to Apostle Wilford Woodruff, who was accompanying the prophet, when Brigham read the inscription on the cross he pondered it for a short while and then proposed an emendation: ‘Vengeance is mine,’ the prophet smugly asserted, ‘and I have taken a little.'” The Saints with Brigham then demolished the monument and scattered the stones.
The outbreak of the Civil War “inspir[ed] in the prophet an attitude of renewed insolence toward the United States.” Brigham and the Saints were moved by their bitterness to “cheer each Confederate victory on the battlefield.” (This is most interesting since the historical records shows that Jefferson Davis asked Brigham to support the South, and Brigham turned him down flat.) According to Krakauer, the Saints thought that the Civil War was going to usher in the Great and Dreadful Day of the Lord.
Krakauer also takes a historical jaunt that considers the fate of William Dunn, O.G. Howland, and Seneca Howland, defectors from the Grand Canyon exploration party of Major John Wesley Powell in 1869. Most historians believe the three were killed by Indians, particularly since the Indians said they killed them. Krakauer presents the ideas of Wesley P. Larsen that the three were really killed by the LDS, in an LDS ward house in Toquerville, after a “kangaroo court” and their murder kept a secret by those involved.
Krakauer admits that “Larsen’s hypothesis…has been disparaged by most historians,” yet he presents the “disparaged” theory and posits that “it is thus hard to countenance scholars (and their number are legion) who blithely assert that Indians killed William Dunn, Oramel Howland, and Seneca Howland–especially given the Mormons’ unfortunate (and thoroughly documented) history of framing Indians for crimes that were actually committed by Latter-day Saints.” Krakauer, unfortunately, does not see fit to provide any of the thorough documentation he references, nor does his choice of literary tar and feathers give weight to those who discount or dismiss such documentation. The blitheness that Krakauer cites in the “legion” of scholars pales in comparison to the blitheness with which he presents and promotes Larsen’s hypothesis for his own literary purposes.
It is also convenient, of course, that the theory fits nicely with the authors’ hypothesis of the Mormons have a society of incredible and extreme violence.
Turning back to the aftermath of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Krakauer picks up the story of John D. Lee. He points out how, after Lee was first acquitted, the public uproar surprised Brigham, and he eventually had to “concede the inevitable.” He “adopted a pragmatic new strategy that was as brilliant as it was callous. He stopped claiming the Indians were responsible for the massacre and decided to blame the whole thing on Lee, offering up his adopted son as a scapegoat.”
In Lee’s second trial “the LDS First Presidency carefully screened the jurors, all Mormons, to ensure that Lee, and Lee alone, would be convicted.” At the end of the trial, “after considering the witnesses and evidence that Brigham had very selectively provided to the prosecution, Brigham’s jury found Lee guilty of first-degree murder.”
In Chapter 20, “Under the Banner of Heaven,” Krakauer points out that Lee was something of a prophet in his own right, and that “according to a family memoir, shortly before Lee was executed he prophesied, ‘If I am guilty of the crime for which I am convicted, I will go down and out and never be heard of again. If I am not guilty, Brigham Young will die within one year! Yes, within six months.” Brigham died five months after Lee’s death. (Memoirs are always written from memory, after the fact. I wonder if this “family memoir” was written within those five months before Brigham died. If not, I wonder why Krakauer would give such musings historical–or even journalistic–credence. It is sensationalistic, however.)
Under the leadership of John Taylor, Krakauer saw a renewed emphasis on “the Principle” and a renewed resistance to the US government. Only after the passing of Taylor, and the upholding of the Edmonds-Tucker Bill by the US Supreme Court, did Wilford Woodruff issue the Manifesto. That did not end polygamy; “it merely drove it underground.” Krakauer recounts the post-Manifesto plural marriages and how they were negatively received by many in the Church after they were revealed by The Salt Lake Tribune in 1910.
Krakauer then digresses to discuss the contested revelation given by John Taylor, while in hiding near the end of his life, to those he was hiding with. He recounts how the sealing power was given to Samuel Bateman, John W. Wooley, Lorin C. Wooley and two others so that they could continue to perform celestial marriages. (Such claims, of course, have been historically dismissed by the LDS Church and are only accepted by those who follow the splinter groups of the FLDS.)
Chapter 21, “Evangeline,” talks about various fundamentalist personalities and families in different places in the Western US, focusing primarily on their violence and aberration from society. The only negative reference to the Church is in a footnote on page 272, where Krakauer states that “Utah has been called the ‘fraud capital of the world’ by the Wall Street Journal, and within the state, no place has more white-collar crime than Utah County. … The uncommonly high incidence of fraud is a direct consequence of the uncommonly high percentage of Utah County residents who are Mormons.” Krakauer conveniently fails to mention that the victims of such acts are not “Gentiles,” but other Mormons, often too trusting for their own financial wellbeing. He also does not indicate whether the consequential link between fraud and Mormonism is his connection of that of the newspaper article.
Chapter 22, “Reno,” tells about the flight of the Lafferty brothers after they killed Brenda and Erica Lafferty. It tells how they were not able to kill the others they were supposed to kill, but they headed west. When they arrived in Reno, Dan Lafferty remembered how they had earlier cured a friend’s dog from parvo by laying hands on the dog. According to Krakauer, “although it might sound like yet another manifestation of Dan’s extreme fundamentalist beliefs, performing blessings is an entirely ordinary ritual among mainstream Latter-day Saints.” (Unstated by Krakauer is the fact that performing blessings on animals is not “entirely ordinary,” however.) By the end of the chapter, the Lafferties were surrounded and caught by the police.
Chapter 23, “Judgment in Provo,” recounts the various legal trials related to the Lafferty brothers, and particularly to Ron. Krakauer examines religious belief in the irrational, in the context of Ron Lafferty’s second trial, and whether such belief constitutes insanity. By the end of the chapter he points out how extreme religious leaders are necessarily narcissistic; it is part of their character. “Many people would also argue that virtually everyone who has introduced a new framework of religious beliefs to the world–from Jesus to Muhammad to Joseph Smith to Ron Lafferty–fits the diagnosis for narcissistic personality disorder. In the view of psychiatrists and psychologists, any individual who proclaims to be a prophet or guru–who claims to communicate with God–is, almost by default, mentally or emotionally unbalanced to some degree.” The footnote to this comment states “Of course, many have argued that psychiatry is itself simply a variety of secular faith–religion for the nonreligious.”
When sentence is pronounced on Ron Lafferty at the end of the chapter, the judge asks him if he would prefer lethal injection or firing squad. Lafferty states “‘I’ve already had the lethal injection of Mormonism. And I kind of wanted to try something different this time. … I’ll take the firing squad. How’s that? Is that pretty clear?’ ‘That’s clear,’ said the judge, and then sentenced Ron to be shot to death for his crimes–underscoring the fact that Mormon Fundamentalists are by no means the only modern Americans who believe in blood atonement.” This statement makes no sense, of course, since Ron is a so-called “Mormon Fundamentalist,” and he is the one doing the choosing here.
Chapter 24, “The Great and Dreadful Day,” is almost entirely discussions between Krakauer and Dan Lafferty. It presents interesting insights into the mentality of a fundamentalist extremist.
Chapter 25, “The American Religion,” talks about the mainstreaming of the Mormon Church in the twentieth century. Krakauer gives different snippets of analysis from different authors. He states that “the mainstreaming of the Mormon Church has a distinctly ironic component. To whatever extent the LDS religion moves beyond the most problematic facets of Joseph Smith’s theology and succeeds at becoming less and less peculiar, fundamentalists are bound to pull more and more converts from the Mormon Church’s own swelling ranks. Communities like Colorado City and Bountiful will continue to win adherents from among the most fervent Saints, because there will always be Mormons who yearn to recapture the spirit and all-consuming passion of the founding prophet’s vision.” He then tells the story of one such ex-Mormon fundamentalist living in Salem, Utah.
Chapter 26, “Canaan Mountain,” is largely a conversation between DeLoy Bateman, an ex-FLDS atheist living in Colorado City, and Krakauer. DeLoy is presented as an educated man who pulled himself out of religion entirely. At one point in the chapter Bateman is expounding on how sad it is that FLDS children are taught that blacks are bad, and that interracial marriage is punishable by death. In a footnote, Krakauer states “a horror of miscegenation is something Mormon Fundamentalists have in common with their Mormon brethren: even after LDS President Spencer W. Kimball’s 1978 revelation reversing the church doctrine that banned blacks from the priesthood, official LDS policy has continued to strongly admonish white Saints not to marry blacks. Make no mistake: the modern Mormon church may now be in the American mainstream, but it usually hugs the extreme right edge of the flow.” (Need I point out that no such official policy exists, and Krakauer provides no documentation for his assertion?)
Summary
For those intimately familiar with the practices of the modern LDS Church and those at least passably familiar with LDS history, the picture painted of both by Jon Krakauer is skewed at best and maliciously fallacious, at worst. Despite his amazing gift for narrative, Krakauer chooses his sources from the most sensational available, and those invariably end up being anti-Mormon in tenor and nature. Readers are presented with an errant history, wrapped up in an entertaining package.
It is frustrating for faithful LDS to read sensationalized versions of their history, and to have it validated by unschooled reviewers as somehow “journalistic truth.” The fact of the matter is that Krakauer’s book will go down in history more as a polemic against religion as a whole–and Mormonism in particular–than it will as anything even remotely approaching the truth.
