Joseph Smith, Unknown Author

Another very ordinary young man was Joseph Smith, born on a hard-scrabble farm in Vermont, who caught a whiff of spirituality from the Secon Great Awakening in Palmyra in upstate New York, where in 1827 the Angel Moroni showed him the hiding place of a set of golden tablets. From behind a curtain and with the aid of seer-stones called Urim and Thummin he translated the mystic utterances they contained, which others transcribed to his dictation. This 500-page Book of Mormon, put on sale in 1830 (at which point Moroni removed the original plates), describes the history of America's pre-Columbian people, who came from the Tower of Babel, crossing the Atlantic in barges, but survived only in the form of Mormon and his son Moroni, who buried the plates in AD 384. The language of the book clearly derives from the King James Bible but the narrative, with its tribulations overcome by courage and persistence, fits into frontier life well and the movement attracted thousands.

Smith was murdered by an Illinois mob in 1844 but his successor Brigham Young, another Vermonter and a man of immense determination and considerable skills of organization, led the Biblical 'remnant' in a historic treck over the plains and mountains to Salt Lake City, 1846-7, where he virtually created the territory of Utah, of which Washington made him governor in 1850. Young and his followers expanded their Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints into a world religious empire of over 3 million souls and made the people of Utah among the richest, best educated, and most consistently law-abiding in the United States. The creative nation-building posibilities of evangelical religion were well ilustrated.