In a listing of allegedly false prophecies of Joseph Smith, Richard Packham wrote the following:
PROPHECY
ABOUT ANSON CALL: Aug 6, 1842. Anson Call Diary [cited in Morris
PJS]. Joseph Smith prophesies that Anson Call will "go and assist in
building cities from one end of the country to the other and ... shall perform
as great a work as has ever been done by man, and the nations of the earth
shall be astonished..."
FULFILLED?: Anson Call assisted in building
Fillmore, Utah (population in 1970: 1411). He did not assist in building cities
from one end of the country to the other. He did not perform any work "as
great ... as has ever been done by man," or at which the nations of the
earth were astonished. (Richard Packham, Joseph Smith as a Prophet)
Another critic, Dick Baer wrote that
History records that Anson Call
assisted in settling Millard County, Utah, a southern semidesert region of
which Fillmore is the county seat (Church Chronology, page 44), The other
"large" cities in that district are Delta, Hinckley, Kanosh, Leamington,
Oasis and, Abraham.
Anson Call did not assist in
building cities from one end of the country to the other. He did not perform as great a work as has
ever been done by man. Certainly the
nations of the earth are not astonished at his achievements. (Dick Baer, Letter to Family
& Friends)
Firstly, it should be noted that “city” in the 19th
century did not necessarily denote our modern understanding of what constitutes
a “city.” Webster’s
1828 dictionary offers the following three definitions of the term:
CITY, noun
1. In a general
sense, a large town; a large number of houses and inhabitants, established in
one place.
2. In a more
appropriate sense, a corporate town; a town or collective body of inhabitants,
incorporated and governed by particular officers, as a mayor and aldermen. This
is the sense of the word in the United States. In Great Britain, a city is
said to be a town corporate that has a bishop and a cathedral church; but this
is not always the fact.
3. The collective
body of citizens, or the inhabitants of a city; as when we say, the city voted
to establish a market, and the city repealed the vote.
We
see this even in the 1830 Book of Mormon. In 1 Nephi 11:13, Nephi, in a vision of the
then-future mother of the Messiah, records the following:
And
it came to pass that I looked and beheld the great city of Jerusalem, and also
other cities. And I beheld the city of Nazareth; and in
the city of Nazareth I beheld a virgin, and she
was exceedingly fair and white.
It
might strike some readers as being odd that Nazareth is referred to being
a “city” in light of its very small size in comparison to ancient
Jerusalem, let alone modern conceptions of the “city.” However, the term “city”
in Hebrew, עִיר, in the words of HALOT, refers to any "permanent
settlement without any reference to its size" such as Bethlehem (Ruth
3:15), so the use of “city” in the Book of Mormon for Nazareth is not
problematic.
On
the meaning of “city” (עִיר) in the Hebrew Bible, Timothy M Willis wrote the
following:
An
Israelite “city” (עִיר) served as a gathering-place for a particular group of
people. The purposes for which they might have gathered could be military,
economic, religious, or social. It was “a site ideologically apart from its
environs.”
There
probably were four types of cities in ancient Israel and Judah. Two types were
present (in both the pre-monarchic and monarchic periods) within individual
clans. One is a simple “city,” and the other “the city of the clan.” Some clans
had several cities within their borders, some only one (e.g., Shechem, Tirzah).
Even where there were several cities within a clan, it is likely that one city
served as “the city of the clan.” The city in Zuph in which Saul finds Samuel
(1 Samuel 9) might be one example of this. The city is not named, but there is
a high place there, and the people gathered there for a sacrifice. Similarly,
David’s clan met at a regional center (Bethlehem) for its ceremonial gatherings
(1 Sam 20:6). The possibility that the inhabitants of several cities consider
one city as their common city, so to speak, is also reflected in the reference
to “the cities of Hebron” (2 Sam 2:3). A third type of city served as a
gathering-place for a broader spectrum of the population, one that performed a
common function for several clans or tribes. These were primarily religious
centers (e.g., Shiloh, Bethel, Shechem, Gilgal, Beersheba, the Transjordanian
shrine). The kinds added a couple of wrinkles to this picture. First, they
apparently incorporated these higher supra-clan centers into their
administrative structure. The kings also established new cities of another
type, the administrative city, which controlled broader areas than the
traditional clan centers. These included royal cities, fortified cities, and
store-cities. At the top of these administrative cities was the national
capital. Thus, the lines between these different types of settlements probably
became blurred in many cases. (Timothy M. Willis, The Elders of the
City: A Study of the Elders-Laws in Deuteronomy [Society of Biblical
Literature Monograph Series 55; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2001],
14-15)
Secondly, as John Tvedtnes wrote in his response to Baer, he noted
that
This is another second-hand
account. Why should we accept this one and not the one noted in No. 40?
Second-hand accounts are hard to place in the category of prophecy, whether
false or real, because we cannot know for certain if the statement was uttered
"in the name of the Lord." But let's deal with specifics here. This
quote from Anson Call's Diary does not quote Joseph Smith as saying "large
cities", as Mr. Baer reads it, but only "cities." "Cities"
were much smaller in Joseph's day than they are today, so why split hairs on
population statistics? Besides, the words may not be exactly those of Joseph
Smith. Perhaps he said "towns" or "villages" or
"townships" or "settlements" or the like. After all, Call
notes that he could not remember the "number of others" present at
the time. How can we expect him to remember the prophet's exact words? Mr.
Baer's contention that this is a "clear cut false prophecy" are
totally unwarranted, especially since there is no indication that Joseph Smith
made the declaration in the name of the Lord, which is one of the principal
criteria in Deut. 18 for a false prophecy. (John A. Tvedntes, A Reply to Dick
Baer)
One can read the source of this prophecy at Anson
Call statement, circa 1854 (MS 364, Church History Library) so it is
clearly secondary, not primary, historical source, as noted by Tvedtnes.
The following commentary on the prophecy comes from Nephi Lowell
Morris, The
Prophecies of Joseph Smith and Their Fulfillment (Salt Lake City:
Deseret Book Company, 1920), 74-75
In the diary of Arson Call the
prophet is said to have predicted that he (Call) would assist in building
cities from one end of the country to the other." As a striking
fulfillment of that particular prophecy we cite the biography of Mr. Call as
written for Tullidge's History of Northern Utah and Southern Idaho. Upon Mr.
Call's arrival in what became Utah, he settled in what is now Davis County. His
original homestead and descendants are still there. His worthy descendants have
spread over the whole county. In 1850 he was settling in Little Salt Lake
Valley, as well as in Parowan. He moved to the northern part of the state, but
was subsequently placed in charge of a colonizing company of fifty families to
settle in the Pauvine Valley. In 1851 he assisted in laying the foundation of
the city of Fillmore, Millard County. There he built roads, constructed mills
and developed farms. In 1854 he established Call's Fort, in Box Elder County,
and in 1856 was sent to Carson Valley on a great colonizing expedition. He came
back to Utah County in 1858, and in 1864 was engaged in colonizing in Colorado
and southwestern Utah. Tullidge, the historian, says of him: "Such men as
Anson Call make history. They are peculiarly adapted to the colonizing of new
countries—to laying foundations of empires in a wilderness." Speaking of
Davis County, one of the richest in the state, he continues regarding the work
of Mr. Call thus: "He had been an important factor in the development of
its resources, and he had arrived at a period of life when a man is generally
less capable of great and continued exertion."
Joseph Smith's prophecy concerning
the life's work of Anson Call is almost as complete a biography as that
recorded half a century later by the historian. What is prophecy but history
reversed?
For more, see the biographical sketch of Anson Call one finds in Edward
W. Tullidge, Biographies
(Supplemental Vol.) of The Founders and Representative men of Southern,
Eastern, and Western Utah, and Southern Idaho (Salt Lake City: Juvenile
Instructor, 1889), 262-84
One can find Anson's summarisation of his activities as a colonizer
and city builder from 1849 in "Extracts
from the private journal of Anson Call, 1875" (MS 4651, Church History
Library)
While Anson may have garbled some things, it being 12 years after the
fact (and 10 after Joseph’s death), it is evidence of Joseph offering a true
prophecy; it is clearly not an obvious false prophecy, contra Packham and Baer.
As an aside, Anson’s 1854 account is not the earliest source for Joseph
Smith’s so-called “Rocky Mountain Prophecy.” That there was an expectation that
the Saints would move to the Rocky Mountains was believed in 1842, as evidenced
by Oliver H. Olney. On this, see:
Oliver
H. Olney's 1842 Journal Entries on the Saints' Then-Future Move to the Rocky
Mountains
Further Reading:
