Devil’s Gate, History of the Mormon Church

By David Roberts


Mormons claim all natives of America came from the Holy Land called Lamanites, about 600 B.C. God cursed the Lamanites with dark skin.


The new faith got off to a slow but steady start. Founded with a congregation of only six adherents, the church plucked converts here and there from the towns around western New York and Pennsylvania, until by the autumn of 1839 Smith could count sixty followers. Having divined the prophecy that zion would be located “on the borders of the Lamanites.” Smith sent Oliver Cowdery, Parley Pratt, and two others on a mission West to recruit converts. On their mission, the scouts met thirty-seven-year-old Sidney Rigdon, a prominent preacher who had found a Utopian colony in Kirtland, only a few miles east of Cleveland. Reading the book of Mormon Rigdon was impressed, and started to doubt the validity of his own sect. The book almost sounded too good to be true so not only was Rigdon converted but so was his whole sect.

Once Rigdon met Smith, the idea of Kirtland as the gathering place began to seem inevitable. Kirtland lasted as the mormon stronghold for seven years, but almost from the start, serious problems arose there. Ringdon and Smith had problems and Ringdon’s disciples had trouble with Smith being the younger leader.

Even with the problems, Smith sent 3 to England to preach to the poor. Thus began a wildly successful campaign of conversion in Great Britain which would send so many of the hundreds of pioneers to Utah in the 1850's, including the vast majority of the handcart emigrants in 1856.

The year 1838, by far the most troubled yet in Mormonism’s brief existence, could well have seen the extinction of the church. In January, Smith abandoned Kirtland and moved to Far West. Brigham Young, by now one of Smith’s most trusted aides, went with him. In July the remaining Kirtland colonists, about 5 to 6 hundred went by wagon train to the new Zion in northwest Missouri.

During these tumultuous years, Mormonism’s darkest secret was polygamy. For the next 17 years the church continued to deny that the church authorized polygamy as “a remarkable series of evasions and circumlocutions involving all sorts of verbal gymnastic.”

The new Zion, Far West, would last less than a year the “saints’ thought that by removing themselves to a sparsely settled region they might flourish free from outside interference. Yet they could hardly have chosen a worse place. “Slaveholder fought with abolitionist; Indian battled white man; democrat clashed with Whig and now Saint versus Gentile.”

By 1838 Mormons in northwest Missouri were about 8 to 10 thousand strong.

The book goes into great detail (it is even a subtitle) about the handcart tragedy. When the Mormons first came to America they were given details of how to make a hand cart to transport their goods to Zion. The handcart was of very light design, The idea being they would be easier, lighter, to travel with. It also meant they broke down a lot. Individuals were only allowed something like 17 lbs of personal items. So, roughly 5 people per cart pushed and pulled them from the east coast to SLC, making 10 miles a day if they were lucky. Thousands perished along the way.

Early years.

In Smiths early years he was digging a well and found what he called a “seer stone” 24 feet underground and using this, started a career as a diviner of subterranean riches. It is unknown if this was a con-game or he actually believed it.

Smith claims to have had two close visits with god or a spiritual being. The first when he was 14 in the woods by himself and the second September 21, 1823 where he claimed an angel named Moroni “Mo-ROAN-eye” sent to him by god.

The next day he has trouble at work and is sent home whereupon he is again visited by macaroni who gave him what turns out to be the book of Mormon on a gold breast plate and two ‘seer’ stones called the Urim and the Thummim, you would have to read the connection but he wasn’t allowed to look at them, until such time as he was spiritually able. Actually they were buried on a nearby hill of considerable size. Smith was 21 years old at the time.

The golden plates were inscribed with hieroglyphic script which of course, only Smith was able to read although you wouldn’t know it, nobody else was ever allowed to see the plates, or at least that what he said at first. From these plates (there is more than one now) he was able to transcribe “The Book of Mormon”, being careful that none other was allowed to see the plates. The BoM corrected a millennium and a half of Christian error and gave the world gods true dispensation. All other religions were wrong.

So, a teen-age treasure hunter was visited by and angel of god that gave him the book of Mormon.

Mark Twain called the BoM “chloroform in print.” He said if the phrase “it came to pass” were left out, it would only be a pamphlet. Whole chapters of Isaiah is lifted verbatim from the old testament.

Quote from the book; “For the next seventeen years, LDS authorities continued to deny that the church authorized polygamy, until Brigham Young came publicly clean in 1852. Brodi1 characterizes those denials as “a remarkable series of evasions and circumlocutions involving all sorts of verbal gymnastics.”

April 6, 1830 Smith officially founded the &40;Mormon) church.

Mark twain called the BoM “chloroform in Print” and if you left out the tic ‘and it came to pass’ it would just be a pamphlet.


Entire chapters (in BoM) Isaiah are lifted verbatim from the old testament

Smith was nothing if not ambitious, even as the Kirtland colony was disintegrating before his eyes, in June 1837 the Prophet sent three of the church’s leading missionaries to England to preach to the poor. Thus began the wildly successful campaign of conversion in Brat britian, which would send so many of the hundreds of pioneer to Utah in the 1850's, including the vast majority of the handcart emigrants of 1856.


The year 1838, by far the most troubled yet in Mormonism’s brief existence, could well have seen the extinction of the church. In January, Smith abandoned Kirtland and moved to Far West. Brigham Young, by now one of Smith’s most trusted aides, went with him. In July, the remaining Kirtland colonists, about five hundred to six hundred strong traveled by wagon train to the new Zion in northwest Missouri.

During these tumultuous years, Mormonism’s darkest secret was polygamy. There is good evidence that Smith practiced “plural marriage” as early as 1831, and that not long after that he gave orders to his closest lieutenants to do likewise. Rumors of the practice inevitably leaked out. In 1835, the church promulgated the first of its numerous official denials, in a resolution at its annual conference; “Inasmuch as this Church has been reproached with the crime of fornication and polygamy, we declare that we believe that one man should have one wife, and one woman but one one husband, except in case of death, when either is at liberty to marry again.”

For the next 17 years, LDS authorities continued to deny that the church authorized polygamy until Brigham young came publicly clean in 1852. Brodie characterizes those denials as “a remarkable series of evasions and circumlocutions involving all sorts of verbal gymnastics.”

Meanwhile, through the late 1830's and into the 1840's Smith secretly married one wife after another, with a crescendo of such liaisons sanctified in 1843 and 1844. Brodie offers a list of forty-nine plural wives during Smith’s lifetime; there may have been more. The man, of course, could hardly keep his polygamy secret from his first wife, Emma. From the start, she was intensely distraught over her husband’s intimacies with other women, and could never be reconciled to his arguments in favor of th practice. Her obstinacy grew so truculent that in 1843, Smith put an extraordinary revelation in writing, In it, god spoke directly to Emma Smith, commanding her to “receive all those that have been given unto my servant Joseph.” The punishment for her refusal was extreme: “but if she will not abide this commandant she shall be destroyed, saith the lord; for I am the Lord thy god, and will destroy her if she abide not in my law.”

Yet Smith and his high-level confederate managed to keep any confirmation of he rumors of polygamy away from the ears of the rank and file. One may credit the remarkable keeping of this secret for more than two decades to a sheep-like credulity on the paro of ordinary Saints, or to a masterly job of spin control among his hierarchy. As late as the early 1850s, fanny Stenhouse, an English saint living in France, met with a group of fellow female believers in Boulogne-sur-mer to sicuss the gossip. Their gathering was sternly admonished by apostle John Tylor (later to play a critical role in the hand-cart immigration): “we are accused here of actions the most indelicate and disgusting, such as none but a corrupt and depraved heart could have contrived.” Taylor went on to cite early proclamations from the Prophet himself about th sanctity of monogamous marriage, scolding the women for their lack of faith.

Skeptical observers of the church point to this twenty-one-year denial of polygamy as proof of the most arrogant hypocrisy on the part of Smith and his chief confederates. Defenders argue that “plural marriage” was so radical a doctrine in mid-nineteenth-century America that disclosure could have meant the dissolution of a faith that hd already been hounded by its persecutors out of Ohio and Missouri.

Those camps divided along similar lines when it comes to the question of why Smith came up with the doctrine of polygamy in the first place. Brodie imagines “a man of Joseph’s physical charm” growing tired of his older wife, worn out from childbearing; and “Kirtland was overflowing with women who idolized him.” Smith is also reported to have confessed to a close friend, “whenever I see a pretty woman I have to pray for grace.”

Yet when Smith came to argue for the logic of plural marriage, he did so by citing the example of Old testament patriarchs such as Abraham and Jacob, who took more than one wife. In a twist of Mormon doctrine, a woman’s eternal salvation can be gained only through marriage. Polygamy could actually save the old crones and maidens ladies who might otherwise get passed over from exclusion from heaven. There are numerous later nineteenth-century testimonies by Mormon women defending polygamy, and of course there are break-away Mormon groups today that practice polygamy.

As the new Zion, Far West, Missouri would last less than a year. The saints must have thought that by removing themselves to a sparsely settled region, they might flourish free from outside interference. Yet they could hardly have chosen a worse place. In the words of Brigham Young biographer Stanly Hirshson, “within the state raged every imaginable conflict: slave holders fought abolitionist; Indian battled white man; and Democrat clashed with Whig. To this was added another struggle: Saint verses Gentile”


• • •

By 1838 the number of Mormons in northwest Missouri had swelled to between eight thousand and ten thousand, 1500 of them in far West alone. It was too large a throng to be ignored. The saints did their part to stir up trouble. The paranoia engendered by very reap persecutions and vilification around Palmyra and Kirtland transmuted in Far West into grandiose assertions of superiority.

One of Smith’s closest associates, Sampson Avard__ Brodie calls him “cunning, resourceful, and extremely ambitious” – proposed forming a secret Mormon army. Rigdon was enthusiastic, and Smith listened.

Thus was born the most nefarious organization ever to coalesce within the Mormon church. Referred to at various early stages as the brothers of Gideon, the Daughters of Zion, or the sons of Dan, the band – less an army than a kind of secret police– son became known as the danites. They took their name from a verse in Genesis: “dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse heels, so that his rider shall fall backward.”

Men handpicked for their skill with guns and their courage, the Danites were sworn to secrecy and invested with cabalistic handshakes and signals. They would prove, across nearly half a century, well into Brigham Young’s reign in Utah, a devastatingly effective cadre of assassins, targeting apostates, enemies, rich Gentiles, and even Indians – in effect, the KGB of the Mormon church. In 1859, the famous journalist Horace Greely arrived in Salt Lake city and won from Young one of the first interviews he ever gave to a professional newspaperman. Greeley pressed the Prophet hard, asking, among other questions, “”what do you say of the so-called Danites, or Destroying Angels, belonging to your church?” Brigham smoothly countered, “what do you say? I know of no such band, no such persons or organizations. I hear of them only in the slanders of our enemies.”

Leonard J. Arrington, whose Brigham Young” American Mosees, published in 1985 is considered by orthodox Mormons to be the definitive life of the second Prophet, turns somersaults to deny the existence of the Danites in Utah. He insisted the Young had instead “created a small force of “Minute Men” charged with recapturing stolen livestock and establishing emigrant way stations, not with perpetrating murders and assassinations. As for the Danites, Arrington insists, “they played and continue to play a major role in western fiction, and many readers have imagined Brigham as a military dictator with a personal army of avengers who carried out hi s orders to capture,, torture, and kill people who crossed him.” (Many non-Mormons regard Arrington’s voluminous biography as a partisan whitewash, and insist that the definitive life has yet to be written.)

There is simply far too much evidence not only of the existence of the Danites, but of the specific murders and assassinations carried out by thugs whose names and characters we can identify. One of the most notorious, bill Hickman, who eventually fell out with Young, collaborated in 1872 with an anti-Mormon journalist to publish his confessions of many a murder and robbery ordered by the Prophet, under the lurid title Brigham’s destroying Angel. And from 1838, within weeks of the founding of the secret society, a text survives in which Smith himself sums up avard’s clandestine orders to his danite captains. Among other duties, they were instructed “to go out oa a scout of the borders of settlements, and take to yourselves spoils of the goods of the ungodly Gentiles’ and “you will waste away the Gentiles by robbing and plundering them of their property, and in this way we will build up the kingdom of god.”

In the middle of 1838, Missouri settlers indeed began to complain of goods and livestock stolen, of barns and houses burned. On July 4, in front of a large congregation, the impetuous Sidney Rogdon gave a speech that would come to be known as the “Salt Sermon.” as the orator elaborated on a passage from Matthew” “If the salt have lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, to be trodden under the foot of men.”

With fiery rhetoric, Ringdon made the threat to Missouri Gentiles explicit. He summed up the provocations the Saints had so far received at the hands of unbelievers, then vowed: “Our rights shall no more be trampled on with impunity. The man, or set of men, who attempt it, does it at the expense of their lives. And that mo that comes on us to disturb us, it shall be between us and them a war of extermination, for we will follow them till the last drop of their blood is spilled.”

It is almost inevitable that fighting words such as Rigdon’s would lead to real fights. The first outbreak of violence occurred on August 6, election day in Missouri. John D. Lee, who was Brigham Young’s stepson and who later became famous for his part in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, left an eye witness account of what would com to be know as the “election-day riot.” In the town of Gallatin, in Daviess County, only a few miles northeast of Far West, as he lay in the grass awaiting his turn to vote, Lee heard one of the candidates for office stir up the crowd with derogations of the Saints: “they are a set of horse thieves, liars, and counterfeiters....if you suffer the Mormons to vote in this election, it will mean the end of your suffrage.”

Moments later, the firest Mormon approached the polling booth. According to Lee, a man blocked his path and sneered, “Daviess county don’t allow Mormons to vote no more than niggers.” As the Mormon protested, the settler knocked him off his feet.


Lee swore that a Daite captain in the crowd gave the secret signal to his confederates. By the captain’s own testimony, a supernatural power cam to his aid, as the brawlers singled him out for attack. With a club he leveled one Missourian after another. “I never struck a man the second time.” the captain later wrote, “and while knocking them down, I really felt that they would soon embrace the gospel.” No one was killed, but as the unbelievers fled, they left some nine men sprawled on the ground, seriously injured.

During the next two months, several pitched battles broke out between Mormons and Missourians, several pitched battles broke out between Mormons and Missourians,, and the first fatalities occurr3ed. The conflict culminated in the Haun’s Mill Massacre. Founded in 1835, Haun’s Mill was a small Mormon farming community well to the south of Independence, On October 30, a renegade militia from a neighboring county, tow hundred strong, rode toward the defenseless settlement with mayhem on their minds. As the attackers came into sight, one Mormon ran out, waving his hat to sue for peace. It was to no avail. The militiamen started firing.


The women and children fled into the woods, while men and boys made a futile stand inside the backSmith’s shop. It was a poor refuge, for the logs of which it was built were so widely spaced, than attackers could fire through the gaps. Within hours, at least eighteen Mormon men and boys were dead, and thirteen more lay wounded.. According to one Mormon witness, a nine-year-old boy named Sardius Smith tried to hide under the bellows. A militiaman found him and hauled him out,. Another attacker pleaded. “Don’t shoot, it’s just a boy.”

“It’s best to hive them when we can,” the first man answered. “Nits will make lice.” Than blew Sardius’s brains out with his rifle at point blank range.

Alarmed buy the escalating bloodshed, Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs ordered his regular militia to drive all the Mormons out of the state or, if they would not leave, to exterminate them. As the troops approached Far West–ten thousand strong. According to the Prophet__Smith realized that his people had no choice but to flee.

What follows remains uncertain. One version is that Major General Samuel Lucas tricked Smith, Sidney Rigdon, Parley Pratt, and two other leading Saints into surrendering, under the pretense of a meeting to negotiate a truce. But John D. Lee insisted that, in an emotional speech to his followers, Smith announced that he would surrender himself to Lucas “as a sacrifice to save your live and to save the Church.”

The governor said take them to the square and shoot them but Lucas refused and Smith and 4 fellow prisoners languished in jail for more than four months. A jailer was bribed with money and whisky and the prisoners rode out to join their fellow Mormons and their trek to Zion.

May 6, 1842 Lilburn Boggs ex-governor of Missouri was hit by 4 buckshot probably because of his actions against the Mormons and it was probably carried out by Orrin Porter Rockwell (Dantite) but it was never proven.

The dates of Rockwell’s temporary absence from Nauvoo coincided neatly with a possible trip to Independence. Dr. John Bennett was and 1840 convert to Mormonism who quickly rose to prominence in Nauvoo, only to fall out with Smith who excommunicated him in June 1842. In retaliation, Bennett wrote a series of letters that were later published in book form, with the subtitle “an Expose of Joe Smith and Mormonism.” Bennett is thus perhaps an unreliable witness, but in one letter he swore that he had overheard Smith offer a $500 reward to anyone who would kill Boggs. The rumors about Rockwell having accomplished the deed were sufficiently rampant that Smith made a cryptic announcement (according to Bennett): “The destroying Amgel has done the work as I predicted, but Rockwell was not the man who shot. The angel did it!”

The first and only issue of the Nauvoo Expositor appeared on June 7, 1844. The most damming of the paper’s assertions was contained in three affidavits signed by William and Jane Law and another man, each swearing that he or she had seen the written revelations about polygamy. (It will be remembered that Smith committed the revelations to print in 1843 only to silence Emma’s objections to the practice.)

As Brodie dramitizes the events of June 7, “when the prophet read the Expositor through, he knew that he was facing the gravest crisis of his life. The paper had put him on trial before his whole people.”

Smith had not only copies of the paper destroyed but the printing press itself.

This violent episode did not take place in a vacuum. The citizens of nearby warsaw and Carthage were well aware of the Expositor’s destruction. For them, it was the last straw. They held meetings, drafted resolutions calling for the citizens of Hanckck County to “put and immediate stop to the career of the mad prophet,” and sent a deputation to Springfield to petition governor Thomas Ford to intercede. The Warsaw Signal editorialized for a more militant and immediate response: “war and extermination is inevitable! CITIZENS ARISE, ONE AND ALL!!!... We have no time for comments; every Man will make his own. LET it be made with POWDER AND BALL!!!”

The governor got involved and sent a letter to Smith telling him to surrender else they would all be wiped out. Smith made a token offer which the governor refused and he and several others were rowed across the Mississippi river to Iowa that night.




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