American Experience S19E13 The Mormons Part 1 April 30, 2007

Comments · 104

• JI

  @jimboc7249 · 2 months ago (edited)

  Give me the South Park version, pls.<br><br>These panelists are irritating. Should a journalist or historian be so breathless or in awe of their subject? And I love the sympathy for the people committing the massacre. Imagine using the &quot;we were just following orders&quot; defence. That&apos;s never happened before, ever.

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• IM

  @imaginationworker9144 · 5 days ago

  I LOVE these people, but how on earth can they believe such nonsense? It is dangerous for people to relinquish their critical faculties so utterly 😢

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• ED

  @Eddie-h7t3x · 2 weeks ago

  It takes a very determined people to turn a wilderness into a multi billion dollar city and international empire.Not Mormon but its incredible what can be acheived by a communitty of people who work together.❤.

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• BU

  @buckodonnghaile4309 · 8 days ago

  Where do they keep the ladders the other 364 days?

• PA

  @PabloReyes-x4p · 1 day ago

  Joeseph smith was A great conman his spritual religious cult is still around and is very strong with convincing people to join

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• CH

  @chrisstrobel3439 · 12 days ago

  A cult .. nothing more .. no archeological evidence at all for their claims .. good choir though 🙄

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• BE

  @beastshawnee4987 · 6 days ago

  Let’s be real clear about a couple things…<br>1) there were No “Native Missourians” in the 1830’s. &nbsp;They are not talking about The Osage who owned these lands- they were already being driven/pushed firmly away. &nbsp;They are saying “Native Missourians” to mean “the first squatters”/“the first white settlers. &nbsp;At most some of them occupied their lands for 50 years or so. &nbsp;They were not Native even by the old definition as to born in place. &nbsp;The Mormons were &nbsp;land scoundrels and pressured people and tried to take over land claims. They’d offer to buy from people, take claim on a tiny payment and fail to pay the rest. <br> &nbsp; &nbsp; This PUFF PIECE for the Mormons is really glossing over the nastiness that is reality. &nbsp;Joseph Smith was a complete scoundrel…

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• GE

  @geoffreydonaldson2984 · 5 days ago

  I don&apos;t struggle to understand Joseph Smith Jr: he was a con man who abused confidences to impose polygamy on his followers when some of them were shocked at the polygamy he had been hiding from them. He knew what to do. &nbsp;<br><br>A friend of mine worked at a huge dairy farm---more like an industrial factory---in southern Alberta. He remarked how many young men from the many religious communes worked there. They were from communal religious settlements which were persuaded to emigrate to the remote high prairie in the Northwest Territory of faraway Canada where they sought remoteness and appreciated the harsh climate would keep nonbelievers away. At the dairy, most were Hutterites whose tradition is to allow young men to get their ya-yas out for a year before returning to the commune, getting married, and living the pure religious life. He said the &quot;Hoots&quot; were wild men, drinking and fighting were their pastimes. The dairy has workers barracks the Hoots clamoured to get away from, to go to town, get drunk, get laid, &amp;c (apparently the camp was proscribed by their elders back at the commune). But he also met another kind refugee from another kind of religious commune. These were actually shunned teenage boys from Bountiful, British Columbia. He described them as morose, sad, even suicidal because they were suddenly told to leave their homes---and not come back. &nbsp;<br><br>Many don&apos;t know that when the USA stipulated the aspired Mormon nation of Deseret had no choice but to become the USA Territory of Utah, and then that eventual confederation as a state required polygamy be outlawed, many devout polygamists moved to more isolated areas to continue practicing plural marriage illegally. Some emigrated the Northwest Territory of Canada, loosely administered by the Hudson Bay Company which long had a commercial charter from the British Crown. By the 1890s the region had been ceded to Canada but wasn&apos;t confederated until 1905 as the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. It was remote and lightly policed, if at all. <br><br>Now, Canada was confederated &nbsp;in 1867 (the first four provinces being Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, and Ontario) because it was afraid the idled US Civil war machine might be turned toward British North America ---again: remember, &nbsp;American rebels occupied Montreal in 1775, and the new republic invaded in 1812-14. And some post-Civil War US politicians raised manifest destiny&apos;s head again in congress. But after UK ceded Oregon Territory to the USA in 1846 and sold the Alaska Panhandle to the USA in 1867, Canada worried that it needed a Pacific federate to strategically counter what looked like an attempted American acquisition of the entire Pacific Coast. Thus British Columbia (where there were more American citizens than British subjects because of the Cariboo Gold Rush) was bribed with a free transcontinental railway to confederate with faraway Canada 2,000 miles to the east across trackless shield and prairie. Between Manitoba, confederated in 1870, and BC was a troubled region where two Metis (french-speaking mixed-blood fur traders) rebellions (Red River 1875 &amp; Northwest 1885) had to be put down by force and US whiskey traders and refugees from Custer&apos;s Last Stand were trespassing north of the 49th parallel. The Canadian government found it very difficult to populate this remote, wild pale and resorted to field recruiters who targeted religious Christian communalists and Jewish stettles being persecuted in Imperial Russia who emigrated to an unknown land more out of desperation that optimism. 90% of these immigrants would move again to the USA. It took decades to populate the Canadian prairies. <br><br>But for persecuted minorities the western high prairie was a suitably isolated, a &quot;redoubt,&quot; as &apos;t were. Metis refugees, outlaws, Hutterites, Mennonites, Dukhobors, Amish and others including Mormon polygamists availed this faraway land where presumably nobody would trouble them anymore. Many of these communes still exist. The Mormons who still practiced polygamy did so discreetly. The second-largest Mormon Temple in the world today is in Cardston, Alberta. Most Mormons in this area are cattle ranchers who blend in with non Mormons. But it didn&apos;t always work out.<br><br>Every religion, especially newly formed, has schismatic episodes over doctrine. For example, the Doukhobor community of the prairies produced a radical faction which moved to the mountain valleys west of the Rockies where differences between each other often turned violent and many of their children were seized and placed in residential schools, many of their leaders were either murdered or imprisoned for arson--or their own protection. &nbsp;Likewise a splinter group of Mormons which practiced polygamy overtly moved to an isolated mountain valley in southeast BC and established the town of Bountiful. But here, too, doctrinal schism divided the community in half, each with its own school and church. It attracted outside attention for two reasons: first was criminal, the second inhumane.<br><br>Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints, or polygamous Mormons hived off the Salt Lake City mainstream to live in the so-called four-corner states of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah---before these areas were confederated with the USA. It was convenient for crossing state lines quickly to evade the many anti-polygamy raids by state police forces over the years. Eventually their leader, Warren Jeffs, was convicted of child sex trafficking ---that is, moving underage girls across state lines to be married---that is, for sexual purposes, which makes it a crime. Indeed, such movement of underage girls to enter into plural marriages (always polygamous, never polyandrous) brought Bountiful, BC to police attention where similar charges were laid upon leader Winston Blackmore for polygamy and child sex trafficking, this time across the US-Canada border. The Canadian trial introduced new and rewritten laws concerning polygamy. I happen to know the assistant Crown prosecutor in that case, which had at least one mistrial but eventually convicted Blackmore. <br><br>But the inhumane part is the so called &quot;lost boys.&quot; Since marriageable women and girls are assigned to the elder men of the community, there are no marriageable females for younger men and boys---and the old perverts don&apos;t want their fresh little wives to be tempted by strapping young men---so the boys are shunned from the community to be rid of them. My friend at the dairy farm told me these young men were pathetic, depressed, and suicidal as a result. <br><br>I&apos;ve met a few people who admit they are---or, usually, that they were---Mormons. They never want to talk about it. But there are many former LDS people who do---and they are shunned as well. You pretty much gotta move outta Utah. LDS apologists can be brutally violent to make it happen. <br><br>I find the whole thing utterly fascinating. A narrative every bit as epic as The Book of Mormon itself. It almost writes itself: the young Jospeh&apos;s epiphany, the &quot;reading&quot; of the &quot;golden plates,&quot; the westward migrations, the persecutions and violence in the Territories, the lynching of Joseph and his brother Hiram, the long trek to the desolate redoubt of Utah, the massacre of outsiders, the imposition of US law and prohibition of polygamy, and finally the diasporas. <br><br>Smith was a con man, but his successor Brigham Young&apos;s story is much more nuanced. I&apos;d also like to learn more about the twenty-odd splinter groups from Smith&apos;s and, eventually, Young&apos;s mainstream Mormonism---some of these schisms happening before Smith&apos;s religion was completely formed, some in reaction to polygamy, some along the way to Utah. Many of these communities aged out and vanished due to lack of proselytes. Fascinating, I tell you! Verily, I say!!

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• CE

  @cerealkiller193 · 13 days ago

  So happy I left this garbage years ago.

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• GA

  @gabrielzayas2251 · 5 months ago

  Thank you 😊

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• SH

  @shirleegraff-allen8787 · 2 weeks ago

  Missouri&apos;s Governor Boggs&apos; Extermination Order was finally lifted in June 1976. If someone murdered a Mormon before this date they wouldn&apos;t be prosecuted. Think about that.

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• AN

  @AnEx-MormonInformant · 4 months ago

  I LOVE how Holland avoids mentioning Rigdon’s Salt Sermon and Extermination Speech in June and July of 1838 calling for the expulsion of all non Saints at all costs, including violence. <br><br>Ironic Holland neglects to mention the attack and murder of residence of Crooked Creek a week before Hauns Mill, and that attack on Hauns Milk was retaliation for Crooked River…

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