Frederick M Huchel

Joe Sampson, Written by the Finger of God. Salt Lake City: Wellspring Publishing and Distributing, 1993. 350 pp., with appendix and glossary. $15.95. Reviewed by Frederick M. Huchel Virtually no one would disagree that Joe Sampson's Writren by the Finger of God is an unusual book. However, that may be the end of consensus on this treatise concerning Joseph Smith's translation of ancient documents. This book does not make for light reading. It is, at best, a difficult book; but then , it treats a difficuh subject, and one which has been a topic of debate since the very beginning of the latterday Restoration. Questions concerning Joseph Smith's unorthodox methods of translating, and indeed, questions regarding Joseph Smith as a translator, have sparked lively debate in both scholarly and nonacademic circles for over 160 years. Enter Joe Sampson, a man as unorthodox as his subject. Part of his unorthodox y is his paucity of formal lingu istic or scholarly training. His back...

Antecedents of the Restoration in the Ancient Temple Review of Margaret Barker. Temple Themes in Christian Worship. London: T&T Clark, 2007. xii + 286 pp., bibliography and indexes. $130.00 (hardcover from Continuum Books); $29.95 (paperback from Continuum Books). Margaret Barker is an unassuming British scholar whose primary engagement is with the Old Testament. Her expertise and research have also embraced the New Testament and, more recently, a consideration of Mormon sources. When I say she is unassuming, I mean that her personal manner is utterly devoid of pomposity. By contrast, her writing is bold and direct—she has not hesitated to turn the world of biblical scholarship on its head. And when she speaks, her crisp, direct delivery takes charge of the audience from the very first sentence. Well trained, she writes and speaks with authority, but she has chosen to be an independent scholar, free from the constraints of mainstream academia. Her first published book, The Older Tes...

One approach to reconstructing the Prophet Joseph Smith’s pronunciation of the proper names in the Book of Mormon is to determine how his close associates in the early days of the church later pronounced the names. In the Deseret Alphabet we have a record of the pronunciation in vogue in 1869. It is plausible that pronunciation of the names did not change much between 1830, when the scripture first appeared in English, and the publication of the Deseret Alphabet Book of Mormon in 1869. This article includes a table of pronunciation of eighteen names from the Book of Mormon according to the phonetic Deseret Alphabet characters compared with the sounds recommended in the “Pronouncing Guide,” which appears in all English-language editions today. Title

The prevailing belief among historians is that the settlement of early Utah’s towns and villages was chiefly a result of hiving off from the mother settlement in “Great Salt Lake City, Great Basin, North America.”  As it turns out, the actual cause of the early diaspora of settlements in Utah had not so much to do with the natural process of growth as it did with other factors which caused that settlement process to begin far earlier than it otherwise would have done.
A half-century after that initial colonization of the geography of Deseret, there was another major colonization process in Utah — at least in Box Elder County, located in the far Northwestern corner of the state.
This paper, based in the research of the author for his 1999 book, A History of Box Elder County discusses those two colonizations, particularly as they relate to the settlement and growth of Box Elder County.
The original edition, published by the Utah State Historical Society, was heavily edited — due in large part to requirements that the volumes not exceed 450 pages — and was significantly truncated from the author’s original submitted manuscript.  The project was actually a first in the United States. It was the first time that any state had authorized and published a series of book-length volumes on every county in the state, at one time.
That original volume is out-of-print, now, seventeen years after its publication.  A new edition, bearing the title, Box Elder County: a History, is subtitled “author’s original text edition.”  The new addition contains the entire, unedited text of the author’s original manuscript, as written. As such, it contains material which did not find its way into the 1999 published volume.
The material covered in this paper is taken from that larger manuscript.

This paper discusses a little-known chapter in the history of southern Utah.  The first organized expedition south of Utah Valley, with a view to colonize what became known as the "Mormon Corridor" — roughly the area traversed by US Highway 89 and I-15, was made by the "Southern Exploring Company," in late 1849 and early 1850.

This colonizing effort by Brigham Young and his Mormon people was necessitated by the California gold rush of 1849-1850. Brigham Young had brought his people from their city Nauvoo, on the banks of the Mississippi River, across plain and mountain range to escape further persecution, after the murder of their prophet-leader, Joseph Smith, and armed attacks upon their city.

They built a settlement in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. Because those who had, shared with those who had not, the little settlement nearly starved during the first winter. Before the colony had a chance to build up its strength, thousands of "Argonauts" came from the eastern states to seek their fortunes in the gold fields of California.

Realizing that some of those gold rushers, not finding their fortunes, would be tempted to settle on the peaceful and inviting streams in the valleys of what the Mormons called the Provisional State of Deseret, Brigham Young sent out exploration parties and then colonizing companies to take possession of all the settle-able places before others could.

The first major exploration of the territory to the south of Utah Valley was the Southern Exploring Company. The place they identified as the site for the first major settlement in the southern part of the territory was on the Little Salt Lake. After a couple of ultimately-discarded choices, the new settlement was named Parowan.

Not long after Parowan was initially settled in 1851, a group of men from the community set out to explore the territory to the east and to the south along the Virgin River. This paper discusses that expedition.