W. W. Phelps returned to Nauvoo permanently, presumably in November 1841. The previous month in Kirtland, he’d kept the minutes of the October 2 conference, at which time he’d been urged to start a newspaper in Kirtland.[1] After receiving those minutes, the First Presidency in Nauvoo, with Hyrum Smith as spokesman, charged Kirtland branch leaders to cease their plans to publish a newspaper and forthwith to gather to Nauvoo. Back in March 1841, Hyrum had counseled Phelps to gather to Nauvoo permanently.[2] The Phelpses had heeded this counsel.

Back in Nauvoo

In late November W. W. Phelps, with obvious approval of the First Presidency and the Twelve Apostles, could work at a church-related newspaper in Nauvoo instead of the one that had been proposed in Kirtland. His extensive writings in the Times and Seasons began with the December 1, 1841, issue, although his pieces carried no attribution.[3] A prime evidence that Phelps was in Nauvoo by late November is that he composed a poem, entitled “The Sectarian Millennium,” that was published in May 1842 but carried a November 1841 composition date.[4] The contents of this poem show that Phelps was in Nauvoo and well aware of discussions of church leaders at the time of the poem’s composition.[5]

The church headquarters that William W. Phelps returned to was considerably changed from the church that excommunicated him in 1839. Nauvoo was the center of it all. About eight farming communities of Saints in Iowa and Illinois encircled Nauvoo. The Saints were for the most part safe from outside persecution, at least for the present. Joseph Smith and his advisers had started building a “Kingdom on the Mississippi”[6] that was rapidly growing in population, prosperity, and renown.

The Twelve Apostles had embarked on a mission to Great Britain in 1839, and by the time Phelps came to Nauvoo, most of the apostles had returned from their highly successful labors. Under Joseph Smith’s direction and tutelage, the Quorum of the Twelve assumed ever-increasing stewardship over the entire church. Phelps immediately interacted with Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, Orson Pratt, John Taylor, Wilford Woodruff, Willard Richards, George A. Smith, William Smith (who had remained in Illinois), and, when they returned from their missions, Orson Hyde and Parley P. Pratt. With each of these men, Phelps would have close working relationships throughout the Nauvoo years.

The charismatic and eventually notorious John C. Bennett had also come to Nauvoo and joined the church. Bennett used his considerable outside connections in Illinois to persuade the legislature to grant the valuable “Nauvoo Charter.” Joseph Smith invited him into the inner circle. Within weeks, Bennett was elected unanimously as Nauvoo’s mayor and was given a significant command in the Nauvoo Legion. He was also called as the church’s “assistant president” while Sidney Rigdon was incapacitated with ill health. For five months, Phelps would have frequent contact with Bennett. When Bennett was exposed in May 1842 for the scoundrel that he was, Phelps aided Joseph Smith and the church thereafter to deal with Bennett’s anti-Mormon speeches and writings. Phelps’s contributions would mostly be in the Nauvoo press.

Working with Joseph Smith Again

Joseph Smith was pleased to bring back his friend of ten years—W. W. Phelps—into his regular orbit. In January 1842 Smith completed his modern “red brick store” on Water Street near the shores of the Mississippi.[7] The store had a relatively spacious office on the second floor. Phelps would work in that office a few hours nearly daily for the next two and a half years and then spend the rest of his time at the printing office. He and his family lived conveniently near the store. Throughout the rest of his life, President (or Mayor or General) Joseph Smith would rely on Phelps immensely in church leadership and civil service.

Phelps’s assignments and considerable achievements in Nauvoo from late 1841 to Joseph Smith’s death in 1844 can be placed into three categories: (1) helping compile the “History of Joseph Smith” (what would become History of the Church), publishing it serially in the Times and Seasons, and helping write other histories; (2) providing editorial leadership in the church’s printing office and contributing multiple writings to the three periodicals published there: the Times and Seasons, The Wasp, and the Nauvoo Neighbor; and (3) assisting Smith politically with the governing of Nauvoo, the campaign for the presidency of the United States, and the formation of the “government of God” through the Council of Fifty. Phelps’s activities in these areas are discussed in order in this chapter and the next two chapters.

Compiling and Publishing the History of Joseph Smith

Because he placed prime importance on the writing of his history, Joseph Smith was pleased to find a qualified person in W. W. Phelps to assist him. Phelps had been closely connected with Joseph in discovering the land of Zion in Missouri back in 1831, and that portion of the history lay just ahead in chronological order to what had been recorded by earlier scribes. Writing the history had stalled because two of Smith’s most recent appointees to write his history—James Mulholland and Robert Thompson—had died in November 1839 and August 1841, respectively.

By August 1841, Smith had successfully dictated his history from his birth in 1805 up through events in October 1830. Scribes had used some original documents in addition to the Prophet’s dictation. But nothing had been done with the history since August until Phelps arrived on the scene in November 1841.

Joseph Smith appointed Elder Willard Richards of the Twelve on December 13, 1841, to be his private secretary, the new Nauvoo Temple recorder, and general church clerk. Richards oversaw all office duties, including Phelps’s work on the history. Richards knew of Joseph Smith’s anxiety about the history. Writing in Smith’s voice, Richards penned this item that later went into the history for December 1841, soon after the arrival of Phelps in Nauvoo:

Since I have been engaged in laying the foundation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I have been prevented in various ways from continuing my journal and history in a manner satisfactory to myself or in justice to the cause. Long imprisonments, vexatious and long-continued law-suits, the treachery of some of my clerks, the death of others, and the poverty of myself and brethren from continued plunder and driving, have prevented my handing down to posterity a connected memorandum of events desirable to all lovers of truth; yet I have continued to keep up a journal in the best manner my circumstances would allow, and dictate for my history from time to time, as I have had opportunity so that the labors and suffering of the first Elders and Saints of this last kingdom might not wholly be lost to the world.[8]

No record exists as to when Phelps actually started compiling the history, but it could have been as early as mid-December after Willard Richards set up the clerk’s office. Probably in spurts over the next twelve months, Phelps would record in his own handwriting eighty-two pages of history, pages 75–157 of volume A-1 of the Manuscript History (also known as Historian’s Office History of the Church), which covered the period from October 31, 1830, to November 1, 1831. Phelps himself was a major participant in that period of history, that is, from June 1831 onward. Thus he would have access to several documents of his own and his own personal memory.[9]

On June 16, 1842, Phelps wrote a letter to Parley P. Pratt, then serving as British Mission president, that highlighted his work on Joseph Smith’s history. It reads in part as follows: “I am now on the largest amount of business that I have ever undertaken, since I have been in the church: It is to write and compile the History of br. Joseph embracing the entire history of the church. It will occupy my time and talents for a long time should nothing interfere.[10] Nauvoo, gains very fast and the prophet gains: he seems to be strengthened according to what is necessary to accomplish the great work of the last days.”[11] W. W. Phelps was truly excited about his new opportunities with Smith’s history, perhaps especially so because he realized the Prophet had forgiven him for his previous indiscretions.

As was done previously in Joseph Smith’s scribal culture, Phelps inserted Joseph Smith’s revelations into the history that later were incorporated into the Doctrine and Covenants and also employed Smith’s first-person voice. It could be that Phelps interpolated a great deal of his own thoughts in that process. An example might be this statement: “Edward Partridge was a pattern of piety, and one of the Lord’s great men.”[12] This is easy to conceive since Phelps himself had these feelings toward Partridge.

Working with Willard Richards in Writing the History

Joseph Smith designated his chief clerk, Elder Willard Richards of the Twelve Apostles, as official church historian on December 21, 1842. Thereafter in Nauvoo, Willard Richards compiled the history in his own handwriting and used W. W. Phelps as an assistant in the project. In June 1844 Richards employed additional scribes as helpers.[13]

Joseph Smith repeatedly informed Richards and Phelps how important the compilation of the history was to him.[14] For example, on November 7, 1843, Richards and Phelps went to Joseph Smith’s residence to complain about the noise in the red brick store brought on by a school for children. The clamor prevented progress on the history. Joseph immediately told the headmaster that he had to find another location for his school. The next day the Prophet met with Richards and Phelps and had them read recently compiled portions of his history dealing with events in April 1836.[15]

The nature of Richards’s and Phelps’s writing in Joseph Smith’s history typified the historical writing of the period. One historian makes the following observation:

Because Richards and his assistants [Phelps being the most prominent up through mid-1844] did not write history in a literary vacuum, their history should exhibit the same characteristics and flaws of other historical works of the period. Plagiarism, ghostwriting, the alteration of sources, a lack of documentation, too sparing a use of quotation marks, relativism, emotionalism, and a lack of balance and objectivity were all common features of nineteenth-century historical writing both within and without the Latter-day Saint Church.[16]

In 1843 Willard Richards and W. W. Phelps began adding more lengthy documents to the official history to supplement what they and others had already written. It appears that most such documents were furnished to the church by Phelps, who had retained them in his possession during his 1838–1840 apostasy.[17]

“Church History”

Even as W. W. Phelps began to compile a significant portion of the official History of the Church in early 1842, he assisted Joseph Smith with another historical piece that over time has come to be one of the most beloved early histories by the Prophet, namely, “Church History,” more commonly known as the “Wentworth Letter.”[18]

As Smith’s designated historical scribe in January and February 1842, Phelps likely received considerable of the Prophet’s dictation for this history. At a minimum, Phelps helped edit “Church History.” He helped Smith draw from Orson Pratt’s previously published pamphlet A[n] Interesting Account of Several Remarkable Visions, and of the Late Discovery of Ancient American Records (1840). Much of Pratt’s language and content are found in the Wentworth Letter.[19] Logically also, Phelps ghostwrote the paragraphs dealing with events in Missouri with which he was more familiar than Smith was.[20]

A portion of “Church History” likely written by Phelps is the following about events in Jackson County in 1832 and 1833. Phelps was a direct participant in these events. Joseph Smith was not, and Orson Pratt was not (and Pratt had not reported on this period). The writing style is also that of Phelps, the language being similar to what he had otherwise written about the period.

[A] considerable settlement was formed in Jackson co.; numbers joined the church and we were increasingly rapidly; we made large purchases of land, our farms teemed with plenty, and peace and happiness was enjoyed in our domestic circle and throughout our neighborhood; but as we could not associate with our neighbors who were many of them of the basest of men and had fled from the face of civilized society, to the frontier country to escape the hand of justice, in their midnight revels, their sabbath breaking, horseracing, and gambling, they commenced at first [to] ridicule, then to persecute, and finally an organized mob assembled and burned our houses, tarred, and feathered, and whipped many of our brethren and finally drove them from their habitations; who houseless, and homeless, contrary to law, justice and humanity, had to wander on the bleak prairies till the children left the tracks of their blood on the prairie, this took place in the month of November, and they had no other covering but the canopy of heaven, in this inclement season of the year; this proceeding was winked at by the government and although we had warrantee deeds for our land, and had violated no law we could obtain no redress.[21]

Phelps is either a ghostwriter or editor of other historical material in the Wentworth Letter pertaining to at least the Missouri period up through 1839. He likely also contributed to the language of the concluding paragraphs dealing with recent missionary successes and future expansion as well as the thirteen declarative statements now known as the Articles of Faith, particularly the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth articles that Orson Pratt had no hand in composing.

“Latter Day Saints”

Joseph Smith assigned W. W. Phelps to another history-writing project in July 1843. The Prophet had received a letter from Clyde, Williams & Co. of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, requesting an account of the rise of Mormonism. Smith and Phelps decided to respond by including what they had already published in March 1842—the Wentworth Letter, or “Church History.” Phelps wrote to the publishing company and promised an article that would be “matured and forwarded in season to meet your anticipations.” In September, Phelps sent an article entitled “Latter Day Saints,” a revised version of the Wentworth Letter along with five additional paragraphs composed by himself. Phelps’s additions were about the Missouri persecutions, the ever-increasing growth and prominence of Nauvoo, the preaching of the gospel in faraway lands, and the importance of continual revelation. This new article, “Latter Day Saints,” was published in April 1844 in a compendium, He Pasa Ekklesia (The Whole Church), edited by author and translator Daniel Rupp.[22]

Among other things he wrote in “Latter Day Saints,” Phelps was effusive and exaggerative with the following:

Since the organization of this church its progress has been rapid, and its gain in numbers regular. Besides these United States, where nearly every place of notoriety has heard the glad tidings of the gospel of the Son of God, England, Ireland, and Scotland, have shared largely in the fulness of the everlasting gospel, and thousands have already gathered with their kindred saints, to this cornerstone of Zion. Missionaries of this church have gone to the East Indies, to Australia, Germany, Constantinople, Egypt, Palestine, the Islands of the Pacific, and are now preparing to open the door in the extensive dominions of Russia.

There are no correct data by which the exact number of members composing this now extensive, and still extending, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints can be known. Should it be supposed at 150,000, it might still be short of the truth.[23]

Other Historical Activities

On January 8, 1844, W. W. Phelps received a letter from his erstwhile friend John Whitmer. Whitmer had refused to hand over his historical writings at the time of his being drummed out of the church in 1838. Now, in an attempt to obtain property in Far West that was still in Phelps’s name and that Phelps had promised to grant him for an appropriate amount, Whitmer wrote Phelps that his history could “be had for a fair price.” Phelps turned the letter over to his superior, Willard Richards, who wrote a response indicating that more than eight hundred pages of an official history had already been written and that Whitmer’s writings “would be of little or no consequence to the church at large.”[24]

Connected with Phelps’s work on the history would also be his contributions to an enlarged Doctrine and Covenants. He worked with Joseph Smith and Wilford Woodruff on a new edition.[25] The new Nauvoo edition appeared shortly after Smith’s death in 1844. Eight sections were added to what already existed in the 1835 edition—those corresponding with sections 103, 105, 112, 119, 124, 127, 128, and 135 of the latest (2013) edition of the Doctrine and Covenants.

Phelps Family Developments in Nauvoo

W. W. Phelps and his family were engaged in other significant events in Nauvoo during this period. The Prophet Joseph Smith administered the endowment of the holy priesthood to some brethren while he was still living and before the completion of the Nauvoo Temple. Later, these men’s wives were likewise endowed. He started these procedures on May 4, 1842. All ceremonies were performed in carefully prepared areas of the upper story of Joseph Smith’s red brick store. William W. Phelps received his endowment on December 9, 1843, and his wife Sally received her endowment two weeks later on December 23. A total of forty-two men and forty-eight women received their endowments while Joseph Smith was still living. William and Sally were sealed to each other by Joseph Smith on February 2, 1844, and also received their “second anointings.”[26] The second anointing is an enlargement of the first anointing and guarantees eternal life to the recipient. At the time of these sacred and glorious events, Phelps penned a poem entitled “A Song of Zion,” which alluded to anointing oil, robes, white attire, a woman goddess, eternal light and happiness, and reigning in heaven.

How sweet is the communion

Of saints that fear the Lord,

And strive, in perfect union,

To gain the great reward.

’Tis like the oil on Aaron

Anointing him a priest,

Perfumed with rose from Sharon,

And Cassian from the east,

’Tis like the dew of Hermon,

Where God began to bless.

And promised in his sermon,

Eternal happiness.

’Tis like the precious ointment

That God Almighty had

At Jesus Christ’s appointment.

Which made his heart so glad.

’Tis like a little leaven

The Woman hid for good,

When she, as queen of heaven,

In gold of Ophir stood.

’Tis like the court of Zion,

Where garments all are white;

Who’ll reign like Judah’s Lion,

In everlasting light.

Their robes alike in beauty,

Their hearts and faith agree,

They’ll ever be on duty

Till all their race is free,

They’ll eat the hidden manna,

Receive the precious stone,

And sing the great hosanna

Where God and Christ are one.[27]

With all the work W. W. Phelps was doing (mostly unknown to the public and thus to most of history), he decided he would ask a favor of Mayor Smith for his wife and family. Up through November 1843, the Phelpses had lived in small quarters.[28] On November 7 he penned a melodramatic poem (“The Goodly City of Nauvoo”) to his prophet-hero:

November 7, (and that will do.)

President Smith; how do ye do?

From me this line will speak with you

Health, peace and grace, and all things, too

Be unto thee, till life is through.

A blight o’er me, has shadow’d you;

But still my soul to you is true;

I ask no wealth of old or new,

But come what will, I’ll make it do.

I cannot lie as others do,

And be a half a man with you:

I am a man, as men can view

And god will let me die or do!

You bless the Twelve with things anew

So bless my wife with something, too.

Twelve years she’s waded through

The sea of woe without ado,

And still remains the same—and true;

Deed her a lot; and that will do:

(Clayton knows the one in view,)

May God your path with honor strew

Is Phelps’ poetry to you.[29]

Phelps’s whimsical plea met with success. City recorder William Clayton deeded Sally Waterman Phelps a fine lot (lot 4 of block 135) on November 16, 1843![30] This lot was directly east of Joseph Smith’s red brick store on the same side of the street.

A less positive event took place in the Phelps family on October 1, 1843. Sarah, the Phelpses’ third daughter, at age eighteen went off to St. Louis and married Samuel Reed Shaw, twenty-nine, an engineer of the steamboat The Agatha that plied the Des Moines and Mississippi Rivers.[31] She had evidently met him as his boat docked at Nauvoo. Steamboats stopped nearly daily at the Nauvoo wharves, bearing immigrating British Saints and commercial goods. Perhaps William and Sally took the opportunity to be present at the wedding in St. Louis.[32] Phelps often went to St. Louis on assignment.

By marrying a “Gentile,” Sarah followed the example of her next older sister, Hitty, who had married Willis C. Fallis in Dayton, Ohio, in 1840. The oldest sister, Sabrina, married a Latter-day Saint, Joseph K. Bent, in 1837, but the Bents lived out their lives in St. Louis. Sarah and her husband, Samuel R. Shaw, lived with their children for years in Indiana but spent their final years as homesteaders in Furniss County, Nebraska. William and Sally Phelps probably maintained little, if any, relationship with their three oldest daughters and their families.

Young Joseph Smith III, who was ten and eleven years old during this period, wrote about W. W. Phelps in his memoirs. “He was quite a singular man.” Phelps was “spare of flesh, already sufficiently aged to wear spectacles, was methodical and studious in his habits, and not very prepossessing in appearance though of good brain and judgment. He was quite a voluminous writer.”[33] Indeed, the Prophet Joseph Smith utilized Phelps’s “good brain and judgment” immensely in Nauvoo, especially in employing him as “a voluminous writer.”

Notes

[1] “Kirtland Conference Minutes,” T&S 3 (November 1, 1841): 587–89.

[2] See “Letter to Oliver Granger, 30 August 1841,” http://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/letter-to-oliver-granger-30-august-1841/1.

[3] Phelps’s work as an editor of the Times and Seasons, The Wasp, and the Nauvoo Neighbor is the topic of chapter 24.

[4] “The Sectarian Millennium,” The Wasp 1 (May 28, 1842): 2.

[5] Yet another evidence that Phelps was in Nauvoo earlier than thought is that Times and Seasons owner, editor, and proprietor Ebenezer Robinson referred to Phelps’s role in the transfer of the newspaper into the church’s hands in January 1842. See chapter 24. Some historians heretofore have dated Phelps’s arrival in Nauvoo as the spring of 1842, but not earlier, based on a June 16, 1842, letter written by Phelps in Nauvoo to Parley P. Pratt.

[6] The “Kingdom on the Mississippi” appellation comes from Robert Bruce Flanders, Nauvoo: Kingdom on the Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965).

[7] JSP, J2:21.

[8] HC, 4:470.

[9] Dean C. Jessee, a historian of Joseph Smith who helped initiate the Joseph Smith Papers Project, worked in the church’s historical archives in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He studied carefully the Manuscript History of the Church, the documents that were the basis of the published and well-known History of the Church, edited by B. H. Roberts in the early twentieth century. Jessee identified the handwriting of each of the early scribes and thus could recapitulate who wrote what in the Manuscript History. He recorded his observations in his path-breaking “The Writing of Joseph Smith’s History,” BYU Studies 11, no. 4 (1971): 439–73. Jessee charted which scribes wrote which portions of the Manuscript History on page 441. The six volumes of the Manuscript History have been subsequently digitally reproduced on the Joseph Smith Papers website. For further discussion on the writing and compiling of the official history, see also Howard C. Searle, “Willard Richards as Historian,” BYU Studies 31, no. 2 (1991): 1–18; Dean C. Jessee, “The Reliability of Joseph Smith’s History,” Journal of Mormon History 43, no. 4 (October 2017): 1–32; Robin Scott Jensen, “Postscript to Dean C. Jessee’s Reprint of ‘The Reliability of Joseph Smith’s History,’” Journal of Mormon History 43, no. 4 (October 2017): 33–36.

[10] Phelps’s assignment at the Times and Seasons included publishing serially the “History of Joseph Smith,” which began soon after Phelps started his work at the printing office. The history went from Joseph Smith’s birth in 1805 to August 1834, when the Times and Seasons printed its last issue in February 1846. Phelps’s name and work appear often in the serialized history. I also posit that Phelps’s work at the printing office as junior editor for both the Times and Seasons and The Wasp was also in his mind when he referred to “the largest amount of business I have ever undertaken, since I have been in the church.”

[11] W. W. Phelps (Nauvoo, Illinois) to Parley P. Pratt (England), June 16, 1842, CHL; emphasis added.

[12] MHC, vol. A-1, 78; HC, 1:128.

[13] See Joseph Smith’s interaction with Richards and Phelps regarding the writing of history in JSP, J2:246–47 (January 20, 1843); JSP, J2:257 (February 9, 1843); and JSP, J3:149, 149n670 (December 21, 1843).

[14] Searle, “Willard Richards as Historian,” 2, 4–9. Specifically, on May 19, 1843, Joseph Smith informed W. W. Phelps informally that he had “a dream that the history must go ahead before anything else.” MHC, vol. D-1, 1553; HC, 5:394.

[15] JSP, J3:127, 127n566; MHC, vol. E-1, 1768, HC, 6:65–66. Joseph Cole and his wife Adelia had advertised their new school along with their credentials in “Nauvoo Seminary,” NN, October 11, 1843, 96.

[16] Searle, “Willard Richards as Historian,” 16.

[17] Robin Scott Jensen, “Ignored and Unknown Clues of Early Mormon Record Keeping,” in Preserving the History of the Latter-day Saints, ed. Richard E. Turley Jr. and Steven C. Harper (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2010), 135–64.

[18] For background, see JSP, H1:489. The original publication of “Church History” is in T&S 3 (March 1, 1842): 706–9.

[19] JSP, H1:491, 491n9, 517–46. Orson Pratt’s pamphlet is reprinted in JSP, H1:517–46.

[20] JSP editors concede that “it is possible that Phelps helped compose the original essay [Wentworth Letter].” Because Phelps was in the office when “Church History” or the “Wentworth Letter” was produced and that it was in his handwriting, he certainly had a hand in composing it. JSP, H1:492.

[21] JSP, H1:497.

[22] The text of “Latter Day Saints” and a thorough discussion of its origin is in JSP, H1:502–16. See also MHC, vol. E-1, 1714–16; and HC, 6:9–10.

[23] JSP, H1:515. JSP, H1:515n34 points out that the LDS population in 1846 was no more than thirty-five to forty thousand, not the 150,000 claimed here by Phelps.

[24] JSP, J3:182, 182n808. The digital copy of Whitmer’s original letter is available online at http://josephsmithpapers.org/paperSummary/letter-john-whitmer-to-william-w-phelps-8-january-1844#!/paperSummary/letter-john-whitmer-to-william-w-phelps-8-january-1844&p=2.

[25] See JSP, J1:263–64, 264n408.

[26] Devery S. Anderson and Gary James Bergera, eds., Joseph Smith’s Quorum of the Anointed: A Documentary History (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2005), xxxvi, xxxix, xli, 41–42, 44–45; WWJ, 2:331–32, 346.

[27] W. W. Phelps, “A Song of Zion,” T&S 5 (February 1, 1844): 431.

[28] For example, according to the official history, on September 27, 1843, Joseph Smith dictated, “I was at home all day, and gave Brother Phelps the privilege of occupying the small house near the store.” See MHC, vol. E-1, 1738; and HC, 6:39.

[29] William W. Phelps to Joseph Smith, November 7, 1843, Joseph Smith Collection, CHL; cited in Boyd and Black, Psalms of Nauvoo, 164.

[30] MHC, vol. E-1, 1779; HC, 6:79; JSP, J3:131, 131n582; Susan Easton Black, Harvey B. Black, and Brandon Plewe, comp., Property Transactions in Nauvoo, Hancock County, Illinois and Surrounding Communities (1839–1859) (Wilmington, DE: World Vital Records, Inc., 2006), 5:3034–35.

[31] “Married,” Nauvoo Neighbor 1 (November 15, 1843): 115. The Agatha is mentioned in some Iowa histories with its carrying of passengers and soldiers from St. Louis northward, especially to Fort Des Moines, which was near Nauvoo. The Agatha also carried cargo and passengers on the Des Moines River. See Tacitus Hussey, “History of Steamboating on the Des Moines River, from 1837 to 1862,” Annals of Iowa 4, no. 5 (April 1900): 329–35.

[32] “To Our Patrons,” T&S 4 (October 15, 1843): 359.

[33] Mary Audentia Smith Anderson, ed., “The Memoirs of President Joseph Smith, 1832–1914,” Saints’ Herald 81, no. 45 (November 6, 1934): 1612.