by Jack Kelly
Glorious times, but in 1837 it all fell apart.
Construction of the temple had left Mormons deeply in debt. The settlement in Missouri soaked up assets. So did caring for the poverty-stricken converts streaming into both Far West and Ohio. Smith and the Kirtland leaders thought that starting a bank would help firm up the settlement’s shaky finances. The group possessed plenty of good farmland but little cash. With the land as collateral, they could issue banknotes to pay their debts and fuel the local economy. They joined the many others around the country who plunged into private banking during the Jackson years. The practice was being encouraged by policies set in Washington.
Andrew Jackson, following his hard-money ideology, had vetoed a bill to recharter the Second Bank of the United States. He moved federal funds to favored state banks. States in turn authorized hundreds of private banks, each of which issued its own notes. The nation’s paper currency became a crazy quilt of bills with varying and often dubious value.
In the autumn of 1836, the Mormons formed the Kirtland Safety Society and applied for a state charter. Investors, mostly Mormons, were allowed to buy stock in the company by pledging land. Heber Kimball was granted a $50,000 interest; he put up only $15 in cash. Brigham Young received 2,000 shares for a $7 investment. The result was a disastrously undercapitalized enterprise.
Ohio authorities refused to charter this feeble institution. The Mormons decided to turn the Safety Society into an “anti-bank,” whatever that meant. They stamped “Anti-” before the word “Bank,” on all of the $100,000 worth of the notes they issued.
The anti-bank opened for business January 2, 1837. As customers came in to redeem notes, the bank’s reserves of gold and silver coins quickly evaporated. “Mormon money” was trading for twelve cents on the dollar before February was over. By summer, the bank was largely insolvent. Anyone who had accepted the notes at face value lost heavily. Many Mormons harbored deep grievances against Church leaders.
Facing financial ruin that year, the Mormons had plenty of company. The flood of notes from state banks undermined currency all over the country. Big New York banks, stripped of federal deposits, cut back on lending. President Jackson decreed that western public lands could only be purchased for specie—gold or silver. His action jabbed a pin into the bubble in western real estate, which the Erie Canal had pumped to bursting. All of these factors combined to create a severe financial panic. Credit froze, banks failed, businesses went broke, and the country descended into its first serious economic depression, a slump that would not lift for six years.
Currency and prophets both depend on confidence. The value of a dollar bill requires faith in the issuing party. A revelation is worth as much as one’s belief in its source. Brigham Young understood this. “If I was to harbor a thought in my heart that Joseph could be wrong in anything,” he noted, “I would begin to lose confidence in him.” In particular, he would find it hard to believe in “his being the mouthpiece of the Almighty.”
Young, Rigdon, and other loyalists kept their faith. Others did not. Joseph had promised glorious things in Kirtland, yet the local economy was collapsing. Doubt shot through the community. Whispers about sexual antics spread. By the summer of 1837, Heber Kimball estimated, the vast majority of Mormons had lost faith in their prophet. Parley Pratt publicly accused Joseph of “great sins.”
By autumn, dissenting Mormons had virtually taken over in Kirtland, and Joseph was rapidly losing control. He excommunicated forty men, but the dissenters claimed to represent the legitimate authority of Mormonism, and they insisted on holding their own services in the temple. Joseph Smith, they said, was the one who had strayed from the faith. Harassed, denounced, threatened with violence, Joseph gave up on Kirtland. He relinquished the temple. A third of the high officials of his Church turned away from him. So did a large portion of his followers.
On the night of January 12, 1838, Smith and Sidney Rigdon mounted fast horses and fled from Kirtland. The Mormon printing office in town went up in flames. The perpetrators were not hostile gentiles but disillusioned Mormons.
Emma and Rigdon’s wife, Phebe, along with their children, joined their husbands. The small caravan continued through the dead of winter toward Far West, the Mormon settlement eight hundred miles away on the Missouri frontier.
Along the way, the prophet became reacquainted with poverty. He begged for work chopping wood and threatened a tavern keeper who turned his ragged family away. Five-year-old Joseph III, for whom the journey was a combination of romp and nightmare, clung to his mother’s hand as he marched through the cold. His father might have told the story of his own winter journey from the fairytale land of Vermont to Palmyra, where visions of angels awaited him.
In early March, after two months on the road, the party encountered a welcoming committee from Far West. As they neared the town, a brass band waited along the road. Crowds rushed out to celebrate the arrival of the prophet.
“We were immediately received under the hospitable roof of George W. Harris,” Joseph later wrote, “who treated us with all kindness possible.”
Harris was a high priest of the Church and a member of the Far West city council. His wife had, for a time, been one of the most famous women in America. Lucinda Pendleton Morgan Harris was the widow of William Morgan. The disappearance of her husband more than a decade earlier had rattled the country and remained fresh in many minds.
At thirty-seven, Lucinda was four years older than Joseph. Small, blond, her face lit by intelligent cornflower eyes, she was still a striking beauty. She had married two men, each twenty years her senior. She now stood face-to-face with the man who would become her third husband.
The Smiths stayed at the Harris home for two months before moving to their own house in the center of Far West. Years later, Joseph Smith would make a sexual proposition to Sarah Pratt, the wife of the missionary Orson Pratt, who had baptized the Harrises. With her husband off on a recruiting mission, Sarah expressed her concern to her good friend Mrs. Harris. “To my utter astonishment she said, laughing heartily: ‘How foolish you are! I don’t see anything so horrible in it. Why I am his mistress since four years!’”
Mormons had built the city of Far West on the open Missouri prairie after being forced from Independence, their original Zion. From Jackson and Clay counties, they had trekked thirty miles north to Caldwell County, where they established towns and farms. Missourians continued to mistrust them. “They are Eastern men,” one said, “whose manners, habits, customs and even dialect, are essentially different from our own.”
While the animosity of outsiders grew, internal dissension followed Joseph from Ohio. Now it broke out even among his closest supporters. Oliver Cowdery had taken up the practice of law and was accused of “selling his lands in Jackson County contrary to the Revelations.” Cowdery felt that personal business was not a Church matter. He would not subject himself to “any ecclesiastical authority or pretended revelation.”
Cowdery came before the Far West High Council, charged with “seeking to destroy the character of President Joseph Smith jr by falsely insinuating that he was guilty of adultery &c.” It was a reference to Smith’s seduction of his young servant Fanny Alger. Smith did not deny a relationship with Alger, but he insisted he had committed no sin. Cowdery was excommunicated.
Soon David Whitmer was expelled as well. Martin Harris, who had bankrolled the printing of the Book of Mormon, had not followed Smith to Missouri. All three of the original witnesses to the gold plates had separated themselves from the prophet. Other departures followed.
Some of the dissenters still owned land in Far West, and felt they had a right to live where they pleased. One of them, George Robinson, said that in a republic, he felt free to “oppose his own Judgment to the Judgment of God.” Sidney Rigdon declared in a sermon that those who had been excommunicated had no rights among the Mormons. He called on the people to rise
up “and rid the county of such a nuisance.” Shortly afterward, eighty-three of Far West’s leading citizens signed what amounted to an ultimatum. Cowdery, the Whitmers, and others dissidents were to leave voluntarily or “we will put you from the county.” The apostates cleared out, the Church confiscated their property.
Ready to back up the threats against the rebels was a Mormon brotherhood known as the Sons of Dan. These Danites, like Freemasons, were bound by oaths and bonds of secrecy. The shadowy brotherhood served as enforcers within the community and as a counterpart to the mobs that were rising among the non-Mormon settlers of Missouri.
By all accounts, Joseph Smith had an aversion to violence. But in Missouri the law was weak and vigilante mobs strong. He and Rigdon may have tolerated the paramilitary Danites as a force that could protect the Saints from gentile nightriders.
Mormons had been pouring into the county all year, and few farm sites now remained available. Settlers were beginning to eye property in surrounding counties. Their presence alarmed non-Mormons. The wary locals were afraid that theocracy could replace democracy, that the kingship of Joseph Smith might supplant republican government. They were not about to tolerate it.
On the Fourth of July 1838, the Mormons mounted a parade and raised a liberty pole. Danite leaders marched with members of the Mormon militia of Caldwell County. Rigdon again rose in the pulpit to issue a challenge, this time to gentiles who had been menacing them. “From this day and hour we will suffer it no more,” he said. “That mob that comes on us to disturb us; it shall be between us and them a war of extermination.”
Packet
The muddy ditch is only four feet deep, but on stepping aboard, the passenger feels the soft, teetering sensation of a water craft. Breathes the rancid smells. Is jostled by forty other passengers crowding onto the boat. Some climb to the deck on the roof of the long cabin, others find places on the benches or easy chairs inside.
A menagerie of people. Europeans come to get a taste of the exotic American west and not incidentally to experience the canal itself. They start their tour at New York City, take a steamer to Albany, absorb the always changing sights along the canal, and wind up at Niagara Falls. A local resident is going down the line to visit relatives, a Troy merchant is traveling to contract for wheat, a Rochester lawyer to see about a case. Laborers head down the canal to find work, the odd runaway slave to reach Canada, an itinerant preacher to spread the Gospel, a thimble-rigger to cheat the rustics.
The crew casts off. The boatmen have a “brigandish guise” and bold swagger, with bright ribbons decorating their slouch hats. They are “a terror to the smiling innocence of the villages.” So observed Herman Melville, who traveled and may have worked on the canal.
Two mules, driven by a barefoot boy, strain against the two-hundred-foot-long tow rope. The helmsman guides the craft away from the wharf. The speed limit is walking pace, four miles an hour. The canal commissioners, hoping to limit erosion, fine captains for speeding.
Yet because of the silence and the nearness of the banks, the boat at first seems to be moving rapidly. “Commending my soul to God,” said a Rochesterian of his first ride, “I stepped on board the canal boat, and was soon flying toward Utica.” The travel is miraculously smooth, no bouncing in a stagecoach or jogging on horseback.
Most passengers opt for a seat on deck. In fine weather, everyone wants to take in the scenery, first the bustling town, then a bucolic landscape of fields and farms. They skim in and out of the shadows of trees. Indifferent turtles, nervous frogs, and inquisitive dragonflies observe their passing.
The names of the boats echo the times. Old Hickory honors the president. A passenger might catch sight of the Anti-Masonic Republican. The Temperance and the Clergyman nod to the revivals, the Frolic, the Crazy John, and Cleopatra’s Barge to the youthful zest of canal denizens. At every stop, children leap aboard to offer apples or cakes for sale. The vessels are painted bright orange, green, and yellow. One is the home of E. E. Wilcox’s Bookstore and Lottery Office, another of a mobile grocery store. Knife sharpeners, dentists, barbers, all ply their trades from boats. One old barge holds a carousel to delight children in remote towns. A floating museum offers “a fair collection of natural and artificial curiosities and wax works.”
Skirting the Mohawk River, the boat heads for the gap at Little Falls. The mountains crowd in on either side until it seems impossible the canal can make it through. “We often passed between magnificent cliffs,” wrote the English traveler and writer Frances Trollope (mother of the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope), who made the tour with her two daughters. “The rocks over which the river runs are most fantastic in form. The fall continues nearly a mile.”
Riding up top, passengers have more than the hot sun to contend with. “Low bridge!” It’s already a catch phrase, but no empty warning. Injury and even death awaited the unwary. Hundreds of bridges have been thrown over the canal—farmers need to cross to till their fields on the other side. They do not build them any higher than necessary; most spans hover only a few feet above the packet’s deck.
At first it is amusing, one passenger recorded, “to hop down and then to hop up again, but by and by this skipping about became very tiresome.” On average, a passenger has to duck “every quarter of an hour, under penalty of having one’s head crushed to atoms.”
At dinnertime the passengers gather in the main cabin. Canal boats are America’s first cruise ships, and the food is plentiful and palatable: ham, boiled beef, potted pigeons, lamb chops, venison, potatoes, calves’ feet jelly, pudding, apple pie, cider, brown stout, coffee. Diners spend little time savoring the fare—the American habit is to eat quickly, downing a heavy meal in ten minutes or less.
Afterward, patrons can relax with one of the books or periodicals in the small library. In the newspapers, even four years after the event, column inches are still devoted to the Morgan disappearance. Advertisements recommend items ranging from anti-dyspeptick elixirs and Prosser’s Liniment for spavined horses to bonnets, bridles, dancing academies, literary magazines, and lotteries (“Who wants a Fortune?”), all suggesting the growing prosperity of what was so recently a frontier. A notice says that a Reformed Church near Little Falls wishes to obtain a Minister, “one who will regard the flock more than the FLEECE.”
Weary of reading, one might get up a game of whist or backgammon, doze in an armchair, or debate with fellow travelers the latest outrages or heroics of President Jackson.
Passing the locks is a thrill at first. The process is almost magical: engineers had found a way to use the gravity acting on water to effortlessly lift a boat and a hundred tons of cargo. All they needed was a stone chamber with gates at each end and a system of sluices and valves to let in water from the upper level or release it to the lower.
The boat clunks against the sides of the chamber—it’s been constructed to fit with only inches of clearance. The closing doors create a damp box. Then the sound of rushing water, passengers catch their breath, and the boat rises. Long levers allow the lock-keeper to open the doors in front once the levels are equalized. The craft heads off on the higher plane.
But the novelty soon wears off. During the wait, many passengers hop off the boat to stretch their legs. They can be pretty sure of a chance to grab a glass of whiskey. Locks are favorite spots for locals to set up small grocery shops that sells drinks and sundries.
Reformers insisted in 1835 that there were some 1,500 drinking establishments along the canal, an astounding average of one every quarter mile. In Lockport two dozen bars crowded together within fifty feet of the locks.
The pugnacious character of canal workers is legendary, but the violence along the artificial river is sometimes real. Rough boatmen do not like having to wait in line to pass a lock. They fight other crews for position. The insolent youths who drive the mules scrap with local farm boys.
Gradually, the sen
sation of speed is replaced by the itch of impatience. In hot weather, the trip can be downright wearing. “Iced-water (without sugar) kept us alive,” Trollope wrote. “But for this delightful recipe, feather fans, and eau de Cologne, I think we should have failed altogether; the thermometer stood at 90 degrees.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, who traveled the canal a few years later, was another who fell victim to Erie ennui. He had imagined an enchanted waterway, but found instead “an interminable mud-puddle.” The jaded New Englander saw only “dismal swamps and unimpressive scenery.” He wrinkled his nose at the “dull race of money-getting drudges” he met along the way.
After the evening meal, the boat’s steward makes the cabin benches into beds. He hangs additional sleeping accommodations from the ceiling until the bunks are stacked three or four high. Charles Dickens, when he made his canal journey, pretended to mistake the narrow berths for bookshelves. The women’s quarters are curtained off and the passengers bid good-night. To sleep while traveling is a fascinating novelty, assuming the travelers can accustom themselves to the snoring, the crying of babies, and the occasional thud and gurgle while passing a lock.
Frances Trollope relied on her cologne for a reason. The smell of all those bodies, the lingering aroma of cooking, and the fetid air of the canal itself create a memorable miasma. A tourist assigned to an upper berth noted that “the air was so foul that I found myself sick.” He had to move. A Scottish traveler also found the “stench and effluvia from such a collection of human beings” intolerable. With the water a repository for human waste and the towpath for mule and horse droppings, canal air often takes on a villainous smell.
