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Volume 42, No. 1

Spring 2009

The Spring 2009 issue begins with Todd Compton recounting a transformative event in the life of former pioneer, Jacob Hamblin. This is followed by "Who's in charge here? Utah Expedition Command Ambiguity," which takes an in-depth look at the confusing command structure and bizarre chain of events that led to the assembly of the Utah Expedition. Finally, we have Ryan T. Cragun and Michael Nielson who look at the ways the LDS Church tried to distinguish itself from LDS offshoots following the raid on the FLDS compound in 2008. This is followed by a fascinating conversation about the Mountain Meadows Massacre, several works of poetry, and a beautiful sermon by Kate Holbrook.

  • Topics
  • Mountain Meadows, Mormon

Contents

Articles

Becoming a “Messenger of Peace”: Jacob Hamblin in Tooele



On March 13, 1852, two men, one white and armed with a rifle, the other a Goshute armed with bow and arrows, confronted each other in the Stansbury Mountains west of Tooele, a small, two-year-old settlement some twenty-five miles southwest of Salt Lake City. The first man, Jacob Vernon Hamblin, a lieutenant in Utah’s Nauvoo Legion, had been given specific instructions by his military and ecclesiastical superior to kill all Indians, as they had been raiding the whites’ cattle. However, when Hamblin and the Goshute faced each other in the mountains, neither could kill the other despite multiple arrows loosed at Hamblin and multiple attempts to shoot the Indian. Finally the Indian fled after Hamblin threw a stone at him. This was a tense, dangerous, yet almost comic confrontation that would profoundly shape Hamblin’s subsequent life. He concluded that the incident was a sign given him from God that he should not kill Indians and that, if he followed this directive, he himself would never be killed by them.



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“Who’s in Charge Here?”: Utah Expedition Command Ambiguity



Many Utahns may call the Utah War of 1857-58 “Johnston’s Army,” but the U.S. Army and most historians surely do not. It seems to me that this shorthand label for the war trivializes, personalizes, and localizes it, much as the term “Seward’s Folly” was used to deride the secretary of state’s 1867 push to purchase Alaska. By focusing on Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston—or at least on his name—this label’s users have, in effect, taken his Utah War leadership for granted.” They should not . . .



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Fighting over “Mormon”: Media Coverage of the FLDS and LDS

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Establishing legitimacy is a fundamental process that is basic to social organization. All organizations intending to grow or continue to exist require widespread acceptance and some degree of congruence with the surrounding culture. In the months following the raid on the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints’ (FLDS) ranch in Texas, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) began an initiative to distinguish itself from the many polygamous groups that have branched out of the Mormon trunk over the years.



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Awards

Best of Dialogue 2008 Awards



Dialogue Best of the Year awards are for contributions judged as superior in their respective categories:  ARTICLE  John-Charles Duffy, “Can Deconstruction Save the Day? ‘Faithful Scholarship’ and the Uses of Postmodernism”  Spring issue, $300 award …



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Fiction

In a Better Country



But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly home . . . Heb. 11:16 “You don’t have to go,” she whispered, the morning grogginess in her voice betraying an urgency that was…



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Personal Voices

Realissimo



At nineteen, a Mormon missionary in Brazil, I felt foreign in every part, torn from language.  “Boy, it’s cold out,” I’d quip to the natives.  “No, Elder, hot” they’d say. “The word is hot.”  At…



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Poetry

Sober Child



How many times had he dashed past me? 
He’d run and run, climb onto the thick 
stone walls, stretch his arms into the ribs 
of morning light, shake his head, 



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What Rocks Know



Before Joseph Smith saw God, he had this pretty thought
that you can know the world by putting your face in a hat
to look at a rock. Which makes sense if you think about it,
since a rock is able to know what rocks know; especially
a good rock, and even inferior stone: enough to keep a rock
rock, to keep any pebble what is most likely for it to be. 



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Reviews

A Missive on Mountain Meadows | Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley Jr., and Glen M. Leonard, Massacre at Mountain Meadows: An American Tragedy

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In some ways, this volume is just the latest in a long line of books written on the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857. Historians, journalists, and others have told this story and furnished analyses from a variety of angles and perspectives, suggesting this devastating tragedy’s multiplicity of explanations and implications. Nonetheless, this book is sui generis, in that it was supported by the LDS Church with astonishing commitments of financial and human resources. All three authors are practicing Latter-day Saints, and are employed by or are retired from the LDS Church and the LDS Church History Department (xv; back jacket flap). The participation of Richard Turley, now assistant Church historian, signals an unprecedented degree of official cooperation. 



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Roundtable

Roundtable on Massacre at Mountain Meadows

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The publication of Massacre at Mountain Meadows (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) by Glen M. Leonard, Richard E. Turley Jr., and Ronald W. Walker, a history of Mormonism’s darkest hour, is itself a history-making event. A scholarly discussion of their book and its significance in Mormon and Western studies was held at the Salt Lake Public Library on September 5, 2008, sponsored by the Charles Redd Center for Western History at Brigham Young University, the Mormon History Association, the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah, the Tanner Center for Non-Violent Human Rights also at the University of Utah, and the Salt Lake City Public Library. 



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Sermon

The Beings I Love Are Creatures



Lately, I have been thinking a lot about mortality—meetings and partings and human frailty. The poet Geoffrey Hill is retiring from teaching at Boston University this year, and a few weeks ago I heard that he had said life gets easier when you accept the fact that you live in a fallen world. Wilbur Jackson of our bishopric furthered the development of my thought on this topic during that wonderful fifth-Sunday April meeting when he reminded us that we’ve left Paradise. We’re not in Paradise; it’s gone, so we’re going to suffer, get sick, sin, and die. The important thing, Jackson reminded us, is to be on the right path so we can return to Paradise. 



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Volume Art