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1 Letters from Obscurity In 1857, the tenth anniversary of the arrival of the Latter-day Saints (Mormons) in the Rocky Mountains, a series of events was about to unfold that would ultimately change the destiny of the church, the territory, and the Mormon people. The great Mormon “reformation” begun the year before had continued into the summer. And every Saint was expected to repent of his sins, be rebaptized, and renew his covenants to uphold and sustain the church and its leaders—to consecrate himself to the work and glory of the Kingdom of God. The Saints in the territory now numbered upwards of 40,000, and, despite the specter of polygamy, the possibility of statehood was being actively explored. Yet strong and bitter feelings existed toward non-Mormons and certain federal officials. Open conflict had occurred from time to time, the most serious of which was a shocking tragedy in September that left over 120 members of a wagon train dead at Mountain Meadows in westcentral Utah. Much of the tension and hostility that produced the Mountain Meadows affair was fostered by the presence on the Wyoming plains of a large military force authorized by the United States government to enforce “obedience ” from the Mormon people. In order to resist this military force, the Mormons called home their foreign missionaries, abandoned many of their outlying colonies, and greatly restricted immigration to “Zion.” During the late summer and autumn of 1857, the Mormons prepared their defenses. To further complicate matters, Alfred Cumming, recently of St. Louis and a former mayor of Augusta, Georgia, had been appointed governor on July 30 to succeed Brigham Young. However, Young, president of the Mormon church, refused to acknowledge him, and by late November the Utah Territory found itself with two governors—an unofficial one in Salt Lake City recognized by the territorial citizenry and an official one at Camp Scott with no local constituency. Amidst these critical circumstances it is hardly surprising that a curious letter dated December 7, 1857, addressed “to si exelency Governor young” 12 The Making of a Prophet and signed by an obscure territorial citizen named Joseph Morris, received scant attention from the church leader. There is no evidence that Brigham Young answered this letter, but neither did he entirely ignore it. For penciled boldly on the letter’s margin are three cryptic words: “He’s weak minded.”1 Although Joseph Morris received no reply from Governor Young, he was undeterred. Over the following three years he addressed more than a dozen letters to Young, yet apparently not one received an answer. Young did not take the letters seriously, for he frequently made disparaging remarks on their margins. Nonetheless, the letters were remarkable. They were couched in a grandiose style, yet were so ungrammatical and poorly spelled as to make them almost unintelligible. At first glance they could be quite justifiably dismissed as the incoherent mutterings of someone with even less mental than literary ability. Yet when taken together, the letters display a certain coherence, unity, and creativity that belies their unceremonious dismissal by Brigham Young. Although Young did not take Morris seriously in 1857, within a few short years Morris produced hundreds of pages of revelations , founded a church in the very center of Mormondom, and attracted hundreds of followers who accepted him (at Young’s expense) as prophet, seer, and revelator of the Mormon church. Joseph Morris was deeply troubled by his own domestic and religious problems in 1857, but his near illiteracy made it difficult for him to communicate these problems to Brigham Young. The letter of December 7 fervently begged Young to consider Morris’s complaints against certain church authorities, most specifically James C. Snow, president of the Provo Stake of the L.D.S. church, who Morris believed had wronged him. Although not entirely clear, the letter also alluded to Morris’s appointment as a prophet. He wrote: “Dear sir, according to my impressions the time of my deliverance has come and as I have born the sins of those men for almost eleven months, I think that it is only right that I should appear before the public as I am, and that they should appear as they are.”2 1 Since Brigham Young had one or more secretaries who might have read the letters of Joseph Morris and since others might have had access to them over the years, there is no definitive proof that marginal comments such as “He’s weak...

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