said, if ye are faithful, ye shall assemble yourselves together to rejoice upon the land of Missouri, which is the land of your inheritance, which is now the land of your enemies. Behold, I the Lord will hasten the city in its time, and will crown the faithful with joy and with rejoicing. Behold I am Jesus Christ the son of God, and I will lift them up at the last day. Amen."
While preparing for the journey to Missouri, a letter was received from Oliver Cowdery, reporting on his missionary work, and speaking of another tribe of Lamanites, living three hundred miles west of Santa Fe, called the Navarhoes (Navajoes), who had large flocks of sheep and cattle, and who made blankets. W. W. Phelps,[1] with his family joining the society, was commissioned to assist Oliver Cowdery in selecting, writing, and printing books for schools. Thus the move from Ohio to Missouri was begun, Joseph and his party starting from Kirtland the 19th of June, going by wagon, canal-boat, and stage to Cincinnati, by steamer to St Louis, and thence on foot to Independence, arriving about the middle of July.
- ↑ Howe writes thus of Phelps: 'Before the rise of Mormonism he was an avowed infidel; having a remarkable propensity for fame and eminence, he was supercilious, haughty, and egotistical. His great ambition was to embark in some speculation where he could shine preëminent. He took an active part for several years in the political contests of New York, and made no little display as an editor of a partisan newspaper, and after being foiled in his desires to become a candidate for lieutenant-governor of that state, his attention was suddenly diverted by the prospects which were held out to him in the gold-bible speculation. In this he was sure of becoming a great man, and made the dupes believe he was master of fourteen different languages, of which they frequently boasted. But he soon found that the prophet would suffer no growing rivalships, whose sagacity he had not well calculated, until he was met by a revelation which informed him that he could rise no higher than a printer.' Mormonism Unveiled, 274.
lighting in novelties flocked to hear them. Many travelled fifty and a hundred miles to the throne of the prophet in Kirtland, to hear from his own mouth the certainty of his excavating a bible and spectacles. Many, even in the New England states, after hearing the frantic story of some of these elders, would forthwith place their all into a wagon, and wend their way to the promised land, in order, as they supposed, to escape the judgments of heaven, which were soon to be poured out upon the land. The state of New York, they were privately told, would most probably be sunk, unless the people thereof believed in the pretensions of Smith,' Mormonism Unveiled, 115-16.
