General editors: Matthew J. Grow, Jed L. Woodworth, Scott A. Hales, and Lisa Olsen Tait. Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2020. Paperback, first printing, 833 pages.
Reviewed by Devan Jensen, executive editor at the BYU Religious Studies Center
No Unhallowed Hand ranges widely, beginning with the Saints’ expulsion from the Nauvoo area, their travels to the Great Salt Lake Valley, the recruitment of the Mormon Battalion, and the challenges of settling Utah’s Wasatch Front, including working through tense relations with indigenous people and the federal government.
Thousands of pioneers crossed the Great Plains, seeking to build dugouts and frontier homes in the Great Basin. Sam Brannan, an emigrant leader, urged all to keep traveling to San Francisco. He was overruled by Brigham Young, president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, who soon became territorial governor.
Settlers quickly displaced and created stressful living conditions for the indigenous Ute, Shoshone, and Paiute tribes in Utah. Tension resulted in the Walker War (192–97), the Bear River Massacre (402), and the Black Hawk War (336–48). Indian missions struggled for decades but eventually resulted in conversions described “like fire in the dry grass” (405). Many of those Shoshone converts helped build the Logan Temple and performed vicarious baptisms for the dead, including those who died in the massacre (509–11). These stories are important to share.
Men and women struggled to forge communities while hundreds of missionaries traveled to distant lands, including Hawaii, Tahiti, Scandinavia, and South Africa. George Q. Cannon, Joseph F. Smith, and his “dear sister” Martha Ann Smith Harris played major roles in many of these stories.
The book takes a refreshingly candid look at complex issues such as adoption sealings (41–42), plural marriage (152–54), the temple and priesthood restriction against blacks (181–82), and the Utah War and related Mountain Meadows Massacre (254–63). Of course, race was a hotly debated issue in the stormy decades before the US Civil War. In the 1852 territorial debate on slavery, Governor Young “declared publicly for the first time that people of black African descent could no longer be ordained to the priesthood. Before this time, a few black men had been ordained.” Elder Orson Pratt strongly objected to slavery in Utah without “any authority from heaven.” Governor Young’s views “echoed a widespread but mistaken idea that God had cursed people of black African descent” (182). “Can a prophet or an apostle be mistaken?” he asked in 1858. “Do not ask me any such question, for I will acknowledge that all the time” (279). (Yes, even prophets are fallible.) Many decades later, black member Jane Manning James sought First Presidency permission to be sealed, with the poignant plea, “Is there no blessing for me?” (590). Her letters went unanswered. (Church leaders eventually returned to the original unrestricted policy toward blacks nearly a hundred years later, in 1978.)
Throughout Utah, the Saints began building temples to perform ordinances for the living and the dead. Many felt complex emotions while enduring federal prosecution to restrict the practice of plural marriage, and many felt equally complicated feelings when the Manifesto overturned that practice (602–7). President Wilford Woodruff reassured them, “The Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as President of this Church to lead you astray” (609). Most members adapted. Others struggled to change and continued the practice. (As human beings, we swim in powerful currents of culture. If currents sweep us out to sea, we need to change direction.)
The book concludes with the joyful dedication of the Salt Lake Temple (661–65). Overall, I highly recommend this book. I congratulate the authors, editors, and publisher for demonstrating integrity to the historical sources and nuances of history.
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