This journal, written by a member of the Mormon Church, documents not only his life, but some of the early history of that church, including the "Rocky Mountain Prophecy." Contains photographic images of the journal plus transcription, along with photographs of over 100 related documents, as well as a complete history of the Call family, from its ancestors on the Mayflower, to the present.
Anson Call was an American frontiersman and eyewitness to the rise of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Anson's journal combines the histories of the wild west and the Church in a firsthand account by a seemingly ordinary guy. Anson often played important roles himself, though he was never the lead in the history books. His journal is unassuming, authentic, and fascinating. Annotated edition with maps and historical context.
Why do thousands of Mormons devote their summer vacations to following the Mormon Trail? Why does the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Day Saints spend millions of dollars to build monuments and Visitor Centers that believers can visit to experience the history of their nineteenth-century predecessors who fled westward in search of their promised land? Why do so many Mormon teenagers dress up in Little-House-on-the-Prairie-style garb and push handcarts over the highest local hills they can find? And what exactly is a "traveling Zion"? In Pioneers in the Attic, Sara Patterson analyzes how and why Mormons are engaging their nineteenth-century past in the modern era, arguing that as the LDS community globalized in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, its relationship to space was transformed. Following their exodus to Utah, nineteenth-century Mormons believed that they must gather together in Salt Lake Zion - their new center place. They believed that Zion was a place you could point to on a map, a place you should dwell in to live a righteous life. Later Mormons had to reinterpret these central theological principles as their community spread around the globe, but to say that they simply spiritualized concepts that had once been understood literally is only one piece of the puzzle. Contemporary Mormons still want to touch and to feel these principles, so they mark and claim the landscapes of the American West with versions of their history carved in stone. They develop rituals that allow them not only to learn the history of the nineteenth-century journey west, but to engage it with all of their senses. Pioneers in the Attic reveals how modern-day Mormons have created a sense of community and felt religion through the memorialization of early Mormon pioneers of the American West, immortalizing a narrative of shared identity through an emphasis on place and collective memory.
Read about the settlement of Utah through the words of Mormon Pioneer, Joseph Holbrook, as written in his journal. Also included are stories and commentary on The Next Generation who went into Star Valley, Wyoming, to settle when outlaws infested that region. Among the most interesting of these was Butch Cassidy. Fresh insights into Cassidys life and why he became an outlaw are revealed side by side with the life sketches of Anson Vasco Call II, the first mayor of Afton, Wyoming, and other stories of the settlement of the area. Shown here is the LDS tabernacle in Bountiful, Utah, (top) that Joseph Holbrook helped build and the LDS tabernacle in Star Valley, Wyoming, (bottom) that his grandson, Anson Vasco Call II. helped erect. Joseph Holbrooks legacy is far-reaching and extensive and includes the accomplishments of his many descendants.
Who was King Follett? When he was fatally injured digging a well in Nauvoo in March 1844, why did Joseph Smith use his death to deliver the monumental doctrinal sermon now known as the King Follett Discourse? Much has been written about the sermon, but little about King. Although King left no personal writings, Joann Follett Mortensen, King’s third great-granddaughter, draws on more than thirty years of research in civic and Church records and in the journals and letters of King’s peers to piece together King’s story from his birth in New Hampshire and moves westward where, in Ohio, he and his wife, Louisa, made the life-shifting decision to accept the new Mormon religion. From that point, this humble, hospitable, and hardworking family followed the Church into Missouri where their devotion to Joseph Smith was refined and burnished. King was the last Mormon prisoner in Missouri to be released from jail. According to family lore, King was one of the Prophet’s bodyguards. He was also a Danite, a Mason, and an officer in the Nauvoo Legion. After his death, Louisa and their children settled in Iowa where some associated with the Cutlerities and the RLDS Church; others moved on to California. One son joined the Mormon Battalion and helped found Mormon communities in Utah, Nevada, and Arizona. While King would have died virtually unknown had his name not been attached to the discourse, his life story reflects the reality of all those whose faith became the foundation for a new religion. His biography is more than one man’s life story. It is the history of the early Restoration itself.
Joseph Smith had only one request of the publisher of the Chicago Democrat, to whom he directed his now-famous Wentworth Letter: ¿All that I shall ask at his hands, is, that he publish the account entire, ungarnished, and without misrepresentation.¿ In accord with that request, Opening the Heavens lets these foundational documents of key events in LDS Church history speak for themselves. The relevant passages are presented in their entirety, plainness, and veracity, according to established standards of documentary editing. Here are the historical documents for the key events of the Restoration in which heavenly elements were powerfully evident: the First Vision, the translation of the Book of Mormon, the restoration of the priesthood, the opening of the heavens, the outpouring of keys at the Kirtland Temple, and the mantle of Joseph Smith passing to Brigham Young. Such events are the backbone of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The firsthand accounts contained in Opening the Heavens make it one of the most persuasive and influential Church history books you may ever read or own.
Many Mormon dreams flourished in Missouri. So did many Mormon nightmares. The Missouri period--especially from the summer of 1838 when Joseph took over vigorous, personal direction of this new Zion until the spring of 1839 when he escaped after five months of imprisonment--represents a moment of intense crisis in Mormon history. Representing the greatest extremes of devotion and violence, commitment and intolerance, physical suffering and terror--mobbings, battles, massacres, and political “knockdowns”--it shadowed the Mormon psyche for a century. Leland Gentry was the first to step beyond this disturbing period as a one-sided symbol of religious persecution and move toward understanding it with careful documentation and evenhanded analysis. In Fire and Sword, Todd Compton collaborates with Gentry to update this foundational work with four decades of new scholarship, more insightful critical theory, and the wealth of resources that have become electronically available in the last few years. Compton gives full credit to Leland Gentry's extraordinary achievement, particularly in documenting the existence of Danites and in attempting to tell the Missourians’ side of the story; but he also goes far beyond it, gracefully drawing into the dialogue signal interpretations written since Gentry and introducing the raw urgency of personal writings, eyewitness journalists, and bemused politicians seesawing between human compassion and partisan harshness. In the lush Missouri landscape of the Mormon imagination where Adam and Eve had walked out of the garden and where Adam would return to preside over his posterity, the towering religious creativity of Joseph Smith and clash of religious stereotypes created a swift and traumatic frontier drama that changed the Church.
