Under the Banner of Heaven (10 page)

An earnest, good-natured kid with a low boredom threshold, Joseph Junior had no intention of becoming a debt-plagued farmer like his father, toiling in the dirt year in and year out. His talents called for a much grander arena. Although he received no more than a few years of formal schooling as a boy, by all accounts he possessed a nimble mind and an astonishingly fecund imagination. Like many autodidacts, he was drawn to the Big Questions. He spent long hours reflecting on the nature of the divine, pondering the meaning of life and death, assessing the merits and shortcomings of the myriad competing faiths of the day. Gregarious, athletic, and good-looking, he was a natural raconteur whom both men and women found immensely charming. His enthusiasm was infectious. He could sell a muzzle to a dog.

The line separating religion from superstition can be indistinct, and this was especially true during the theological chaos of the Second Great Awakening, in which Joseph came of age. The future prophet’s spiritual curiosity moved him to explore far and wide on both sides of that blurry line, including an extended foray into the necromantic arts. More specifically, he devoted much time and energy to attempting to divine the location of buried treasure by means of black magic and crystal gazing, activities he learned from his father. Several years later he would renounce his dabbling in the occult, but Joseph’s flirtation with folk magic as a young man had a direct and unmistakable bearing on the religion he would soon usher forth.

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 midday 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 22nt 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: and 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.

* The 116 missing pages have never turned up. Some evidence suggests that prior to his conviction, Mark Hofmann (the forger who is now Dan Lafferty’s cell mate at Point of the Mountain) had hatched a scheme to “discover” the long-lost text. Because Hofmann’s forgery, taken at face value, would presumably have reflected poorly on Joseph Smith and
The Book of Mormon,
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.

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.