Joseph Smith

At seven he had an infection in his leg bone and the surgeons cut into it without anesthetic. He refused the liquor they offered him, used crutches for three years, and limped for the rest of his life. His father lost the family farm to a ginseng swindle and a run of failed harvests, and the Smiths went 300 miles west to a mortgaged plot in western New York, into country where treasure-digging was ordinary work. Joseph got a local name for it. Josiah Stowell hired him in 1825 to find a lost mine in Pennsylvania, where he met Emma Hale, and a nephew of Stowell's hauled him into court the next spring for glass-looking.

The Book of Mormon was advertised for sale in Palmyra on March 26, 1830, dictated over about a year — much of it with his face in a hat, reading off the same brown stone he had used to hunt treasure. Twelve days later he organized a church. What followed was less a ministry than a series of forced migrations: Kirtland, Ohio, and a temple, and a wildcat bank that took the savings of his own advisers down with it. Independence, Missouri, named as Zion. Then expulsion from Missouri under a governor's order to exterminate or drive out. He bought swampland in Illinois and turned it into Nauvoo, briefly the state's second-largest city, where he was mayor, lieutenant general of the militia, and in 1844 a candidate for president of the United States.

He eloped with Emma Hale in January 1827 over her father's objection and stayed married to her until he died. He also married or was sealed to somewhere between 30 and 40 other women, starting with Louisa Beaman in April 1841 while the church publicly denied that polygamy existed. Historians' counts run from 32 to 46. Ten of the plural wives were between 14 and 20 years old. The youngest, Helen Mar Kimball, was 14 and the daughter of one of his own apostles, and she wrote that she was told the sealing would secure salvation for her whole family. A dozen were already married to other men. On May 26, 1844, a month before his death, he told a congregation that he was accused of having seven wives when he could only find one, and called his accusers perjurers.

Emma expected the bodies to be dug up, so she buried her husband and his brother at night in a hidden place and had sandbags sealed into the public coffins. They stayed lost until 1928, when Smith's grandson found them and reinterred them beside her in Nauvoo. The succession broke the movement apart — Brigham Young took the largest group to the Great Basin, Smith's own son led the church that stayed, and at least four other men claimed the office. Young's denomination passed 17 million members in 2023. Papers in 1844 were nearly unanimous that he was a fanatic. Scholars now disagree about almost everything else and agree he was one of the most inventive religious figures America produced.

Joseph Smith's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Book of Mormon book
  Dictated in about a year and first advertised for sale on March 26, 1830 1830
• The Church of Christ company
  The root of every denomination in the Latter Day Saint movement 1830
• Book of Commandments book
  His revelations collected — later folded into the Doctrine and Covenants 1833
• Kirtland Temple building
  Built by a congregation that had almost no money 1836
• Nauvoo, Illinois other
  Bought as swampy woodland and grown into the second-largest city in the state 1839
• The 1844 presidential campaign other
  Ran independent on gradual emancipation, prison reform and annexing Texas, California and Oregon 1844

• 1813 aged ~8 Surgeons cut into his infected leg bone and he refuses the liquor He was seven. Three years on crutches followed, and a limp that never left.
• 1816 aged ~11 The family loses the farm and moves to western New York A ginseng swindle and the crop failures of 1816 finished them in Vermont.
• September 21, 1823 aged 17 Tells his father a being visited him in the night and named a treasure Family and neighbors all put the date on the equinox.
• January 18, 1827 aged 21 Elopes with Emma Hale over her father's objection
• April 6, 1830 aged 24 Organizes the Church of Christ, twelve days after the book goes on sale
• October 27, 1838 aged 32 Governor Lilburn Boggs orders the Mormons exterminated or driven from Missouri
• May 19, 1842 aged 36 Becomes mayor of Nauvoo
• June 7, 1844 aged 38 Dissidents publish the Nauvoo Expositor and he orders the press destroyed The paper exposed his plural marriages. Destroying it produced the warrant that took him to Carthage.
• June 27, 1844 aged 38 A mob storms Carthage Jail and kills him and his brother Hyrum

• Brigham Young 1801–1877
  Religious and territorial leader who directed Mormon migration and settlement in the American West. succession claimed by
• Anne Hutchinson 1591–1643
  Religious dissenter whose trial and banishment exposed tensions over authority, gender, and conscience in Puritan New England. earlier dissenter tried by a colony
• Mary Baker Eddy 1821–1910
  Founder of Christian Science and a major female religious leader and publisher. later American founder
• Elijah Muhammad 1897–1975
  Leader who built the Nation of Islam into a major religious and Black nationalist movement. later American founder
• L. Ron Hubbard 1911–1986
  Science-fiction writer who founded Scientology, creating a controversial and internationally influential American religious movement. later American founder