It is easy to see that his prophecy filled a need of the
Saints in the West. And one would be tempted to suppose that the memory had
added some precision to his actual remarks. But working backwards, as with the
Constitution-by-a-thread prophecy, I find a time when something like this might
have been said by Joseph Smith with considerable plausibility. Anytime during
the last four years of his life, with never to end and especially with the
organization of the anti-Mormon movement in Illinois, the prophet had good
reason to consider possibilities for relocation. It can be demonstrated that he
considered the possibility of settling in Oregon (or on Vancouver Island). (Journal
History, May 13, 1844) He was attempting to negotiate some kind of colonization
venture in Texas and had gone so far as to commission the small Wright company
to move there. (Lyman Wight, An Address by way of an Abridged Account and
Journal of My Life from February 1844 up to April 1848 [Austin, Texas
[?], 1848], p. 14) And in February 1844 he was organizing an exploring
expedition to get to the West. There are some interesting changes in the way
the description of this expedition was written by Willard Richards, secretary
of Joseph Smith at the time, and the later revisions. The original handwritten version
reads, “Met with the Twelve in the assembly room concerning the Oregon
Expedition.” This has been modified to read “the Oregon and California
Exploring Expedition.” Continuing, the Richards manuscript reads, “I told them
I wanted an exposition of all that country,”—which has been changed to “exploration
of all that mountain country.” (Joseph Smith, History of the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 7 vols., 2nd ed. Rev. [Salt Lake
City, 1964], 6:224; Joseph Smith Diary, 1843-44 [kept by Willard Richards])
There are other such changes that make one suspect that the later compilers of
the history, notably George A. Smith and his assistants in the 1850s, were
determined to have Joseph Smith contemplating the precise location where the
Saints had by then settled. Oregon would not do; Oregon and California as then
defined at least included the Rocky Mountains. If the prophet could be made to
say “mountain country” instead of just “country,” it would appear that he
clearly and in mind the future history of his followers.
Earlier, on February 20, 1844, the Richards diary, kept
contemporaneously with the events, makes matters a little less suspicious: “I instructed
the Twelve Apostles to send out a delegation and investigate the locations of
California and Oregon”—both places are mentioned—“and find a good location,
where we can remove after the temple is completed, and build a city in a day,
and have a government of our own. . . .” (Joseph Smith Diary, February 20, 1844)
Even in this passage the editorial tinkering has added the words “get up in the
mountains” that were not in the original, but at least there seems to be clear
contemporary evidence that the prophet contemplated a westward move.
August 6, 1842, is the date of the alleged prophecy that
the Saints would move to the Rocky Mountains. The manuscript history covering
this period was written in 1845, prior to the exodus, with Thomas Bullock
serving as scribe under the direction of Willard Richards. If the famous
prophecy were there, it would provide evidence very close to the event. Unfortunately
the handwritten manuscript shows a degree of confusion. The lines for August 6
are filled with a description of the prophet’s visit to Montrose, Iowa, to
attend the installation of the officers of the Rising Sun Masonic lodge.
Inserted into the entry as an afterthought were the following words:
I prophesied that the Saints would continue
to suffer much affliction and would be driven to the Rocky Mountains, many
would apostatize, others would be put to death by our persecutors or lose their
lives in consequence of exposure or disease, and some of you will live to go
and assist in making settlements and build cities and see the Saints become a
mighty people in the midst of the Rocky Mountains. (Joseph
Smith Diary, August 6, 1842; cf. Joseph Smith, History of the Church 5:85)
Was this quotation a later insertion based on the
testimony of someone like Anson Call who had been at this meeting and who, in
the light of later events, recalled the prophecy in these terms? From what we know
of the preparation of the manuscript history, this procedure is quote possible.
(Dean C. Jesse, “The Writing of Joseph Smith’s History,” BYU Studies
11 [1971]: 439-73) The insertion is in the hand of Bullock himself, who could
have made the correction as early as 1845, when he was occupying himself with this
portion of the history, or as late as 1856, when he ceased his labors as
scribe.
Two errors have been made regarding this Rocky Mountains
prophecy. The first is to reject it out of hand as a later invention of the Utah
Mormons. There is enough discussion of possible westward moves during the later
Nauvoo period to think that Joseph Smith, in one of his prophetic moods, might
well have said something of the sort. (Oliver Olney specifically mentions the Rocky
Mountains as early as 1842, but when the 184r expedition was organized by
Joseph Smith general terms like Oregon and California were used. Lewis Clark
Christian, “A Study of Mormon Knowledge of the American Far West Prior to the
Exodus” [M. A. thesis, Brigham Young University, 1972], pp. 71-81. The 1842
Olney documents are reproduced photographically on pp. 295-98) The second
error, even more serious, is to seize on these fragments as the basis for
concluding that Joseph knew exactly what the future held in store for the Saints
down to every last detail. Like the Constitution-by-a-thread prophecy, the
Rocky Mountains prophecy probably had a basis in an actual statement. The two
prophecies are alike, too, in the fact that they were extremely popular later
on when they served the needs of the Saints for encouragement.
An interesting variation of this prediction was the
following from Oliver Huntington, written in 1883:
When we first went to Nauvoo the old
Patriarch Joseph [Joseph Smith, Sr.] came into our house one day and in a very confidential
way giving us to understand that it was not to be made public, asked a question
as to how long we thought the church would stay in Navuoo and went on to say
that the Lord had told Joseph (his son) the prophet, that we would stay there
just 7 years and that when we left there, we would go right into the midst of
the Indians, in the Rocky Mountains as this country, Utah, was then called.
This, we have seen fulfilled. (OBH 204)
His followers would not wish to have the prophet wavering
about such matters. If he sent out feelers to Texas, if he considered the
possibility of Vancouver Island as a place of settlement, if he seemed to think
that Nauvoo might be possibly be maintained, this must all be intentional
deception to mislead the enemies of the church. According to one cycle of
stories, Joseph knew not only the general destination of the Saints in the West
but the exact route:
Joseph Smith just before he was killed, made
a sketch of the future home of the saints in the Rocky Mrs., and their route or
road to that country as he had seen in vision; a map or drawing of it. (“History
of the Life of Oliver B. Huntington,” p. 50)
There were supposedly four copies of the map, one in the
possession of Brigham Young and one used by members of the Mormon Battalion as
they later made their way to Salt Lake Valley. Levi Hancock told the story to
H. C. Pender, who told Oliver Huntington; the better yet, Hancock showed Pender
a copy of the map. (Ibid.)
Not that the Saints were expected to remain in Utah permanently.
The evidence is conclusive that many of them, including several of their
leaders, expected a “return” to Jackson County within a single generation. (Benjamin
F. Johnson said in 1903, “We were over seventy years ago taught by our leaders
to believe that the coming of Christ and the millennial reign was much nearer
than we believe it to be now.” As quoted in Klaus J. Hansen, Quest,
p. 19) By the 1880s, as federal pressure intensified, some were thinking of a
move to Mexico, where Mormon colonies were established. Was this retreat a
failure of the expectation? No, for Joseph had understood all along
that the Saints would go down this river
[meaning the San Francisco River] and that the Lord and the Devil were playing
a game of checkers. The Lord had one move ahead, that the Saints were going
into the king row [meaning Mexico and Central America] and when they returned
they would sweep the board. [The Life and Times of
Joseph Fish, Mormon Pioneer, ed. J. H. Krenkel [Danville, Ill., 1970],
p. 278)
Jacob Hamblin remembered Joseph Smith saying this, and Hamblin told the story to Joseph Fish, who wrote it in his diary in 1885. (Davis Bitton, “Joseph Smith in the Mormon Folk Memory,” in Restoration Studies, Sesquicentennial Edition: A Collection of Essays About the History, Beliefs, and Practices of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, ed. Maurice L. Draper and Clare D. Vlahos, 4 vols. [Independence, Miss.: 1980], 1:84-86, emphasis in original. This was originally a paper presented on September 28, 1974 at the Second Annual Meeting of the John Whitmer Historical Association, Lamoni, Iowa)
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