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This article examines John T. Clark, a relatively little-known but influential figure in the rise of fundamentalism among the Latter-day Saints during the early twentieth century. By 1921, small groups of excommunicated polygamists had begun to congregate at homes, offices, industrial buildings, and even in open-air settings. While no identifiable leaders would emerge until the 1930s, these groups would eventually coalesce to form the fundamentalist movement. Several individuals, including Clark, became prominent within the informal gatherings, either because of their testimonies, convictions, publications, financial successes, or claims to priesthood authority. Clark is unusual, however, because he was apparently never a polygamist. Rather, it was his doctrinal unorthodoxy and creative theological speculations that distanced him from the official LDS Church and made him an appealing figure to others whose ideas included the continuation of post-Manifesto polygamy. 

When Orson Pratt, apostle and LDS Church historian, revised the Doctrine and Covenants in 1876 at the direction of Brigham Young, he included Section 85 among some twenty-five other new sections. Section 85 is a portion of a letter written by the Prophet Joseph Smith at Kirtland, Ohio, on November 27, 1832. Presumably dictated by Joseph Smith to his scribe Frederick G. Williams, the letter was mailed to William Wine Phelps, a leading high priest and editor of the Missouri church’s newspaper the Evening and the Morning Star. It contained information concerning the efforts of Bishop Edward Partridge to implement the law of consecration amidst grumbling and disorder on the part of the Saints gathered there.