Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith

by Jon Krakauer

  Although “money digging,” as the custom was known, was illegal, it was nevertheless a common practice among the hoi polloi of New England and upstate New York. The woods surrounding Palmyra were riddled with Indian burial mounds that held ancient bones and artifacts, some of which were crafted from precious or semiprecious metals. It therefore comes as no surprise that a boy with Joseph's hyperactive mind and dreamy nature would hatch schemes to get rich by unearthing the gold rumored to be buried in the nearby hills and fields.

  Joseph's money digging began in earnest a few months shy of his fourteenth birthday, two years after his family's arrival in Palmyra, when he heard about the divining talents of a girl named Sally Chase, who lived near the Smith family farm. Upon learning that she possessed a magical rock—a “peep stone” or “seer stone”—that allowed her to “see anything, however hidden from others,” Joseph harangued his parents until they let him pay the girl a visit.

  Sally's peep stone turned out to be a small, greenish rock. She placed it in the bottom of an upturned hat, then instructed Joseph to bury his face in the hat so as to exclude the light. When he did so, he was treated to magical visions. One of the things that appeared to him was a pocket-sized, white-colored stone “a great way off. It became luminous, and dazzled his eyes, and after a short time it became as intense as the mid-day sun.” He immediately understood that this rock was another peep stone; the vision also indicated its precise location underground, beneath a small tree. Joseph located the tree, started digging, and “with some labor and exertion” unearthed the first of at least three peep stones he would possess in his lifetime.

  His career as a “scryer”—that is to say, a diviner, or crystal gazer—was launched. Soon his necromantic skills were sufficiently in demand that he was able to command respectable fees to find buried treasure for property owners throughout the region. By 1825, his renown was such that an elderly farmer named Josiah Stowell came from Pennsylvania to meet Joseph, and was so impressed by the encounter that he hired the twenty-year-old to travel with him to the Susquehanna Valley to locate, with his peep stones, a hidden lode of silver rumored to have been mined by the Spaniards centuries earlier. Stowell paid Joseph the generous salary of fourteen dollars a month for his services—more than the monthly wage earned by workers on the Erie Canal—plus room and board.

  These and other details of Joseph's money digging were revealed in affidavits and other documents generated by a trial held in March 1826, People of the State of New York v. Joseph Smith, in which the young scryer was hauled into court and found guilty of being “a disorderly person and an imposter.” Although Joseph had applied himself to scrying with vigor, dedication, and the finest tools of his trade, it seems that he had been unable to find Stowell's silver mine. Nor, in fact, during the previous six years he had worked as a money digger, had he ever managed to unearth any other actual treasure. When this had come to light, a disgruntled client had filed a legal claim accusing Joseph of being a fraud.

  The trial, and the raft of bad press it generated, brought his career as a professional diviner to an abrupt halt. He insisted to his numerous critics that he would mend his ways and abandon scrying forever. 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.

  One night in the autumn of 1823, when Joseph was seventeen, ethereal light filled his bedroom, followed by the appearance of an angel, who introduced himself as Moroni and explained that he had been sent by God. He had come to tell Joseph of a sacred text inscribed on solid gold plates that had been buried fourteen hundred years earlier under a rock on a nearby hillside. Moroni then conjured a vision in Joseph's mind, showing him the exact place the plates were hidden. The angel cautioned the boy, however, that he shouldn't show the plates to anyone, or try to enrich himself from them, or even attempt to retrieve them yet.

  The next morning Joseph walked to the hill that had appeared to him in the vision, quickly located the distinctive rock in question, dug beneath it, and unearthed a box constructed from five flat stones cemented together with mortar. Inside the box were the golden plates. In the excitement of the moment, however, he forgot Moroni's admonition that “the time for bringing them forth had not yet arrived.” When Joseph tried to remove the plates, they immediately vanished into the ether, and he was hurled violently to the ground. He later confessed that greed had gotten the better of him, adding, “Therefore I was chastened” by the angel.

  Moroni was nevertheless willing to give Joseph another chance to prove his worthiness. The angel commanded the boy to return to the same place each year on September 22. Joseph dutifully obeyed, and every September he was visited by Moroni on what would later be named the Hill Cumorah to receive instruction about the golden plates, and what God intended for him to do with them.

  On each occasion Joseph left empty-handed, to his great disappointment. During their annual meeting in 1826, though, Moroni gave him reason for renewed hope: the angel announced that if Joseph “would Do right according to the will of God he might obtain [the plates] the 22nd Day of September Next and if not he never would have them.” By gazing into his most reliable peep stone, Joseph further learned that in order for him to be given the plates, God required that he marry a girl named Emma Hale and bring her along on his next visit to the hill, in September 1827.

  Emma was a winsome neighbor of Josiah Stowell's in Pennsylvania whom Joseph had met a year earlier while searching fruitlessly for the silver mine on Stowell's property. During that initial encounter, Emma and Joseph had felt a strong spark of mutual attraction, and he made several trips to the Hale home to ask for her hand in marriage. On each occasion Emma's father, Isaac Hale, strenuously objected, citing Joseph's disreputable past as a money digger. Mr. Hale pointed out to his love-struck daughter that only a few months earlier, young Joe Smith had been convicted of fraud in a court of law.

  Joseph grew despondent over Hale's dogged refusal to let Emma marry him, and desperate. September was fast approaching. If he and Emma weren't betrothed by then, Moroni would withhold the golden plates from him forever. Borrowing a horse and sleigh from a fellow scryer, Joseph made one more trip to Pennsylvania, and on January 18, 1827, he persuaded Emma to defy her father, run away with him, and elope.

  Eight months later, shortly after midnight on the appointed day, Joseph and Emma went to the Hill Cumorah. After being denied the plates on his previous four visits, this time Joseph left nothing to chance. Carefully adhering to the time-honored rituals of necromancy, the young couple were 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. High on the steep west slope of the hill, Joseph again dug beneath the rock in the dark of night, while Emma stood nearby with her back turned to him. He soon unearthed the stone box that he had been prevented from removing four years earlier. This time, however, Moroni allowed him to take temporary possession of its contents.

  The box contained a sacred text, “written on golden plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent,” which had been hidden on the hill for fourteen hundred years. Each of the gold pages on which this sacred narrative was inscribed, Joseph reported, was “six inches wide and eight inches long and not quite as thick as common tin. They were filled with engravings in Egyptian characters and bound together in a volume, as the leaves of a book with three rings running through the whole.” The stack of metal pages stood about six inches high.

  Joseph gathered up the plates and headed home with them. Later, nineteen witnesses would testify that they had actually seen the gold book; as eight of them swore jointly in an affidavit printed in The Book of Mormon, Joseph “has shewn unto us the plates . . . which have the appearance of gold; and . . . we did handle with our hands: a
nd we also saw the engravings thereon, all of which has the appearance of ancient work, and of curious workmanship.”

  Although the text was written in an exotic, long-dead language described as “reformed Egyptian,” Moroni had also given Joseph a set of “interpreters”: divinely endowed spectacles that would allow the person wearing them to comprehend the strange hieroglyphics. By means of these magic glasses, Joseph began deciphering the document, dictating his translation to a neighbor named Martin Harris, who acted as his scribe. After two months of painstaking work they completed the first 116 pages of translation, at which point the two men took a break, Moroni retrieved the golden plates and magic spectacles, and Joseph reluctantly allowed Harris to borrow the manuscript to show his skeptical, disapproving wife.

  Disaster then struck: Harris somehow mislaid all 116 pages. The prevailing view is that his wife was so furious that Harris had gotten involved in such nonsense that she stole the pages and destroyed them. Whatever became of the vanished translation, Joseph was devastated when Harris confessed what had happened. “Oh, my God,” Joseph exclaimed. “All is lost!” It looked like his sacred mission had come to a premature end, with nothing at all to show for it.

  In September 1828, however, after much praying and contrition on Joseph's part, Moroni returned the plates, and the translation resumed, initially with Emma Smith serving as scribe (later others shared this duty, as well).* But the angel hadn't returned the spectacles along with the plates this time around, so to decipher the Egyptian characters Joseph relied instead on his favorite peep stone: a chocolate-colored, egg-shaped rock that he had discovered twenty-four feet underground, in the company of Sally Chase's father, while digging a well in 1822.

  Day after day, utilizing the technique he had learned from Sally, Joseph would place the magic rock in an upturned hat, bury his face in it with the stack of gold plates sitting nearby, and dictate the lines of scripture that appeared to him out of the blackness. He worked at a feverish pace during this second phase of the translation, averaging some thirty-five hundred words a day, and by the end of June 1829 the job was finished.

  Joseph took the manuscript to the publisher of the local newspaper, the Palmyra-based Wayne Sentinel, and asked him to print and bind five thousand copies of the book—an uncommonly large printing for a self-published volume by an unknown figure, which indicates that Joseph had giddy expectations for how it would be received by the public. He intended to charge $1.25 per copy—not an exorbitant price, by any means, but still about twice as much as most local wage earners made in a day.

  The skeptical publisher demanded $3,000 in advance to print the books, much more cash than Joseph could lay his hands on. As was his wont when confronted with an apparently insurmountable hurdle, he sought divine guidance. God announced, in reply, that it was His divine wish that Martin Harris—Joseph's acolyte and scribe—pay the printer's bill. Speaking through Joseph, God told Harris:

  I command thee that thou shalt not covet thine own property, but impart it freely to the printing. . . .

  And misery thou shalt receive, if thou wilt slight these counsels; yea, even the destruction of thyself and property. . . . Pay the printer's debt!

  Previously, Harris had usually been putty in Joseph's hands, but his involvement with the translation had already cost him dearly: his wife had grown so exasperated over his obsession with the golden bible that she'd divorced him. Harris thus balked at heeding the commandment when Joseph first presented it to him. In the end, however, a stern directive from God wasn't something Harris was prepared to ignore, so he reluctantly agreed to sell his farm in order to finance the publication.

  Nine months after the translation was completed, the 588-page book finally rolled off the presses and went on sale in the printer's brick storefront in downtown Palmyra. Little more than a week after that—on April 6, 1830—Joseph formally incorporated the religion that we know today as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The religion's foundation—its sacred touchstone and guiding scripture—was the translation of the gold plates, which bore the title The Book of Mormon.

  SIX

  CUMORAH

  The authority that Mormonism promised rested not on the subtlety of its theology. It rested on an appeal to fresh experience—a set of witnessed golden tablets that had been translated into a book whose language sounded biblical. Joseph Smith instinctively knew what all other founders of new American religions in the nineteenth century instinctively knew. Many Americans of that period, in part because of popular enthusiasm for science, were ready to listen to any claim that appealed to something that could be interpreted as empirical evidence.

  R. LAURENCE MOORE,

  RELIGIOUS OUTSIDERS AND THE MAKING OF AMERICANS

  Today, no less than in the nineteenth century, 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. To a Utah Mormon, accustomed to the eleven-thousand-foot peaks of the Wasatch Front thrusting heavenward like the teeth of God over Temple Square and the City of the Saints, Cumorah's puny dimensions must come as something of a disappointment. A mound of glacial scrapings left behind after the last ice age, it humps up no more than a couple of hundred feet above the surrounding cornfields, and most of Cumorah is shrouded in a gloomy tangle of vegetation.

  All the same, this modest drumlin is the highest landform in the vicinity, and from its crest one can glimpse the office towers of downtown Rochester, twenty miles distant, shimmering through the midsummer haze. The summit is adorned with an American flag and an imposing statue of the angel Moroni. On the slope beneath Moroni's massive, sandaled feet, the unruly forest has been cleared and a broad swath of the hillside planted with impeccably groomed bluegrass. Somewhere on this part of Cumorah, 175 years ago, Joseph Smith dug up the golden plates that launched the Mormon faith.

  It's a steamy evening in mid-July, and more than ten thousand Saints are politely streaming into the meadow at the drumlin's base, on which rows of plastic seats have been set up to accommodate them. Immediately above the meadow, a multilevel stage, half as big as a football field, covers the hill's lower apron, surrounded by a steel forest of fifty-foot light towers. The elaborate stage, the lights, and the Mormon throngs all materialize here every summer for “The Hill Cumorah Pageant: America's Witness for Christ,” which is due to begin at sunset.

  According to promotional materials published by the LDS Church, the pageant is “America's largest and most spectacular outdoor theatrical event . . . , a magnificent, family-oriented production,” replete with arresting special effects straight out of Hollywood: “volcanoes, fireballs, and explosions with sound effects from the movie ‘Earthquake.' A prophet is burned at the stake. Lightning strikes the mast of a ship. A 5,000K carbon arc-light ‘star' (with FAA clearance) appears at the Nativity scene. Christ appears in the night sky, descends, teaches the people, then ascends into the night sky and disappears.” The pageant, which has been staged here since 1937, is held for seven nights every July, and draws near-capacity crowds each night. Admission is free.

  As dusk settles, the soothing harmonies of the Utah Symphony Orchestra and Mormon Tabernacle Choir drift over the field from concert loudspeakers. Two squads of sheriff's deputies direct traffic into pastures that have been transformed into vast parking lots. A surging tide of Saints is now moving from their cars and chartered buses toward the seats, and as they traverse Highway 21 to reach the meadow beneath Cumorah they are confronted with grim-faced clumps of anti-Mormon picketers.

  The demonstrators, who belong to evangelical Christian denominations, wave hand-lettered placards and shout angrily at the Mormons: “Joseph Smith was a whoremonger!” “There is only one gospel!” “The Book of Mormon is a big fairy tale!” “Mormons are NOT Christians!”

  Most of the Mormons stroll quietly past the ranting evangelicals, unperturbed, without rising to the bait. “Oh, gosh, we're used to that kind of thing,” says Brother Richard, a wide, cheer
ful man with liver spots and a comb-over, who brags that he has twenty-eight grandchildren. He and his wife drove here in a thirty-seven-foot Pace Arrow from Mesa, Arizona. This is their eighth visit to the pageant.

  “Come the judgment, we'll see who winds up in the Celestial Kingdom and who doesn't,” Richard muses. “But just between you and me? Them folks waving the signs is the ones that should be worried.” As this thought escapes his lips, the glint in his eye momentarily vanishes and his guileless face darkens with pity. “The Lord allows everyone to choose for themselves whether to see the truth or ignore it. You can't force a man to heaven, even though it's for his own good.”

  The LDS Church produces the Hill Cumorah Pageant at no small expense. Although non-Saints are encouraged to attend, and the church considers the flamboyant shows a powerful tool in its tireless efforts to convert the world, more than 95 percent of the people in attendance belong to the church already. Mostly the pageant functions as a Mormon jamboree, an occasion for members of the tribe to gather at their place of origin and celebrate one another's testimonies of faith.

  The pageant has the energy of a Phish concert, but without the drunkenness, outlandish hairdos (Brother Richard's comb-over notwithstanding), or clouds of marijuana smoke. People started arriving hours ago to claim the best seats. While they wait for the show to start, families sprawl on blankets along the edges of the meadow, eating fried chicken and Jell-O salad from plastic coolers. Clean-cut teenagers, shrieking gleefully, toss Frisbees and water balloons in the gloaming. Order, needless to say, prevails. This is a culture that considers obedience to be among the highest virtues.