“The river? Yes, it is.”
“I thought the River Ribble in Preston was one of the grandest in the world. Then I saw the Mersey River in Liverpool and thought that had to be the biggest ever.”
“Some of the men I sailed with, they claim there’s a river in South America that is so big at its mouth you can’t see from one shore to another.”
“I can’t imagine such a thing. This is big enough for me.”
“
Mississippi
is an Indian word meaning ‘big river.’ They also call it the Father of Waters.”
She turned now to look at him. “Have you seen a real Indian?”
He was tempted to laugh. It was such a childlike question. But then he remembered he had asked Joshua Steed exactly the same question that day in Savannah when he had told Will he was from Missouri. “Independence—that’s in Jackson County, Missouri—that’s where I lived. It’s only about twelve miles from Indian Territory. We saw Indians all the time. There’s thousands of them out there from a dozen or more tribes.”
“Jackson County,” she said in sudden awe. “You actually lived in Jackson County?”
Puzzled, he bobbed his head. “Yes, why is that so surprising?”
“That’s where Zion is. That’s where the New Jerusalem is going to be built.”
“Oh,” he said, feeling suddenly deflated. Mormon talk. He had heard it from the settlers in Jackson County. It was partly what had brought on the war.
“Why do you hate the Mormons so?” she asked abruptly.
Startled, he turned to look at her. “I don’t hate the Mormons. I . . . I just used to. I thought they were the ones who killed my father.”
“But they weren’t.”
“I know. So I don’t hate them anymore.”
“But you’re having a hard time getting rid of it.”
“Look,” he said, enjoying this too much to let it end. “I said I was sorry. And I meant it.”
“And I’m sorry too,” she said with sudden contriteness. “I guess I’ve just seen so much of it back home. Ever since Mum and me joined the Church, people laugh at us, jeer at us. We’ve even had rocks thrown at us from time to time.”
He stared at her.
She looked up at him from beneath lowered lashes. “I guess that’s why your comments about not liking Mormons kind of set me off.”
He gave her a rueful grin. “Kind of?”
She laughed, then totally surprised him by sticking out her hand. “What say we’re friends, then,” she said. “I’d like someone to tell me all about America.”
He took her hand and shook it once, then withdrew it quickly. “Well, I don’t know everything. But I’ll be happy to tell you what I do know.”
“Tell you what,” she said, giving him a full smile, the first one he had seen from her that was directed at him. It completely dazzled him. “Let’s meet out here on deck. Right at the front of the boat. Eight o’clock every morning. Then you can tell me about everything we are seeing.”
He hesitated only for an instant, and then he remembered he wasn’t crew anymore. He was a passenger, just like her. Just like all the rest. “I’d like that,” he said.
“Good.” She started away, after her mother, then abruptly turned back. “Will?”
He looked up, half-startled.
She blushed slightly. “Do you mind if I call you Will?”
“Of course not.”
“Good. And I’m Jenny. No more of this Miss Pottsworth.” She hesitated, growing very serious now. “It won’t be anything more than just friendship.”
“What?”
“It can never be anything more than friendship, you know. Because you’re not a Mormon. I’m saving myself for a Mormon boy. Like Peter.” Her color darkened even more. “Or Matthew.”
He just stared at her, his lips parted in amazement. He couldn’t believe what she was saying. Was she always like this, just blurting out whatever was going through her mind?
“I just wanted you to know that,” she said, then turned and was gone.
Chapter Notes
The proposal to build a temple was approved by the Saints in the October 1840 conference. Excavation for the basement began shortly thereafter, and a stone quarry was opened on the outskirts of the city (see
CHFT,
p. 242). John C. Bennett, who would figure so prominently and so disastrously in later history, joined the Church in the late summer of 1840. He was the one primarily responsible for drafting the Nauvoo Charter and getting it passed through the Illinois legislature in December 1840. (See
CHFT,
pp. 222–23.)
Brigham was sensitive about his poor writing abililty and his phonetic way of spelling. Some lines from a letter to Willard Richards show his willingness to poke fun at himself: “Be careful not to lay this letter with the new testment wrightings. If you doe som body will take it for a text after the Malineum a[nd] contend about it.” (Quoted in
MWM,
p. 158.)
The first Mormon emigrant ship to leave England in the summer of 1840 sailed to New York, and then the Saints traveled by steamboat and train to Nauvoo, a journey which, with a winter layover in Pennsylvania, took them a total of nine or ten months. Later ships sailed on from New York around Florida to New Orleans and up the Mississippi to Nauvoo, an all-water route that was both less expensive and considerably shorter in time. (See
CHFT,
p. 234.) The author has taken the liberty to have the second official group of emigrants, who sailed on the
North America,
go by way of New Orleans. In actuality, the third group, who left five weeks later on the
Isaac Newton,
was the first to take this route.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Are we crazy to even think about it, Nathan?”
Nathan looked around, eyeing the exposed rock. It was a high-quality limestone, ranging from light gray to almost pure white. In his mind, he tried to picture how deep it went below where they were standing and what it would take to quarry enough out of the site to build a temple. Then he grinned. “Probably.”
Joseph laughed softly. “You were supposed to say, ‘Not at all, Brother Joseph. I think it is a wonderful idea.’ ”
“I do think it is a wonderful idea! But that doesn’t make the task any easier.”
“I know, I know. It’s just that I keep thinking of the sacrifice it took to build the Kirtland Temple. And it took so long.”
Down below them, closer to the river, Benjamin, Alpheus Cutler, and the others of the building committee came out of the trees. They were walking slowly, heads down as they examined the quarry site. There were four different quarries in the Nauvoo area, but this was the temple quarry, which had opened not quite three weeks before. The first of the large blocks had already been cut and moved to the temple site. Nathan watched his father and the others as he considered Joseph’s words. “That’s true. But look at what happened because we did what the Lord asked.”
“Oh, yes,” Joseph said instantly. “When I think of that great season of spiritual power we enjoyed, it made every sacrifice worth it.”
“There are many more of us now,” Nathan added. “That will help a great deal.”
“Yes.” Joseph laid a hand on his shoulder. “And Nathan, it is of great significance that we do it. God has important things to reveal to us, and they have to do with the temple.”
“Like before?” Nathan asked, thinking of the stunning series of revelatory experiences that had come during the dedication of the Kirtland Temple.
“Even more. And we must have a place for our baptisms for the dead. The Lord has given us permission now to perform those ordinances in the river, but it will not always be so. The Lord wants them performed in his house.”
Nathan was nodding. Benjamin had come home one night all excited and told the family about Joseph’s plan to have a baptismal font in the basement of the temple. It was to rest on the back of twelve oxen, just like the great laver in Solomon’s temple.
Joseph turned, looking toward the city now. “Ah, Nathan, it is a wonderful time. A wonderful time.”
“It is, Joseph.”
“I feel such an urgency about this,” he said, half to himself. “The Lord has so much to give us and there is so little time.”
That startled Nathan. “So little time?”
That brought Joseph out of his thoughts. “Yes. You know what I’ve said before. Our destiny does not lie here, but in the Rocky Mountains.”
Nathan was shaken by that thought. Yes, he had heard Joseph say that very thing on more than one occasion, but that was before Nauvoo. That was before they had found themselves a new home. “Are we to leave this place, then?” he asked forlornly, suddenly feeling quite dejected.
Joseph laughed heartily. “Someday, Nathan. But for now, this is our home, and we are to do all we can to build it up. This is the task the Lord has given us to do.”
He turned back toward the quarry and the river, watching the committee below them examining the walls of exposed limestone. Then he sat down and patted the ground beside him. “I can see the brethren are taking their assignment seriously. Let’s sit for a spell.”
Nathan did so. The day was overcast and right on the edge of being cold, but they had their coats on and it was not entirely unpleasant. Joseph pulled out a dried piece of grass and began to chew on it, his eyes thoughtful and far away again.
“Joseph?”
“Yes?”
“You’re very different since Liberty Jail, did you know that?”
He chuckled. “That’s what Emma keeps saying too. She says she can’t believe I’m home so much now.”
“No, it’s more than that.”
He looked at Nathan squarely now. “Like what?”
Nathan shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s like you’re so . . .” He groped for a good word. “So seasoned now. So much more mature.”
“Oh,” Joseph said with a straight face, “so I was immature before?”
Instantly Nathan’s face flushed. “No, I . . . I was only trying to say—” He stopped, knowing that Joseph was only having some fun at his expense. “I mean it. There is so much more depth to what you’re teaching us now. That discourse on priesthood that you gave at conference, I’m still trying to digest it all. Baptism for the dead. Some of the things you’ve said about the second coming of the Savior. I mean, it’s almost like every time I listen to you, I go away reeling.”
“So not only was I immature, now I make you dizzy.”
Nathan laughed sheepishly. “I’m not saying it very well,
but . . . well, I’m not the only one who’s commented on this.”
Now Joseph sobered. “I know, Nathan. I’m just funning with you.” He pulled the piece of grass out and flicked it away. “Do you know what day today is, Nathan?”
He thought for a moment, then shook his head.
“It was exactly two years ago today that the attack at Haun’s Mill took place.”
“Oh.”
“We have been through the refiner’s fire, Nathan. I have. The Church as a whole has.”
“That I can agree with.”
“You say I’ve changed. Well, you’re right. And Liberty Jail was an important factor in that. I learned things there, and had things happen to me there that couldn’t—or at least wouldn’t—have happened in any other way.”
“Like what?”
“Like understanding that until a man is tested even as Abraham, the Lord cannot bless him with greater blessings.”
He saw Nathan’s puzzlement and went on quickly. “Do you remember in the School of the Prophets how we studied the ‘Lectures on Faith’?”
“I do.”
“Do you remember that in one of the lectures I said that unless a man is willing to offer his all in sacrifice to the Lord, not holding back anything, he cannot know with a certainty that his life is pleasing to God?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“Well, that is what has happened to Hyrum and me. By the time we had endured over four months in that filthy, unbearable hole that wasn’t fit for animals, without losing hope, without losing faith, then we knew with unshakable certainty that our lives were acceptable to him. And so what has that done for my faith?”
Nathan was excited now. “It has deepened it.”
“Yes. And the same holds true for the Church. Our people went through those horrible depredations, endured persecution, mobs, looting, killing, loss of property, and still did not waver. In view of that, is there any doubt in your mind that our sacrifice is acceptable to God?”
“No.” He said it slowly and in wonder.
“Faith is power, Nathan. When you see men and women of faith, they always have great power—the power to part the Red Sea, the power to heal the sick, the power to raise the dead.” He leaned forward, his voice filled with great intensity. “Last July, during the sickness? Do you think that day of great power and healing would have happened if we had not been through the purifying fires of Missouri?”
“No,” Nathan breathed softly. “I hadn’t seen it in that light, but no, I don’t think it would have happened.”
“And that is what you are feeling now. The Lord is making us into a pure people, and the purer and more refined we become, the more he can give us, the more he can reveal to us.”
“Whew!” Nathan exclaimed. “That’s a lot to chew on.”
Joseph laughed and slapped him playfully on the arm. “Well, you’re the one who called me immature.” He lay back, stretching out to his full length. “As you know, Nathan, I’ve been working on a journal history. I feel a great urgency to write a record of the Restoration. There are already things which are lost—specific dates, who was involved in certain events—because I didn’t write them down at the time. Anyway, I was going through the Jackson County period the other day, reading again what has been written.”
“Yes?”
“I ran across something I had nearly forgotten. And you were there, so this will have meaning for you too.”
“What is that?”
“Remember that summer day in ’31, not long after we arrived in Missouri? We were out in Kaw Township with the Colesville Branch—Newel Knight, Joseph Knight, and the other Saints. We laid the first log for the first house in Zion.”
“Yes, I remember that very well.”
“Well, speaking of that day, I wrote something like this. After noting that we had laid the log, I said, ‘At the same time, through prayer, we consecrated the land of Zion and Sidney Rigdon dedicated it for the gathering of the Saints.’ ” He stopped, turning his head to look at Nathan. “And then I said, ‘It was a season of joy to those present and afforded a glimpse of the future, which time will yet unfold to the satisfaction of the faithful.’ ”