Free American Crucifixion by Alex Beam Page A

of the fact. They made a thorough search but failed to find him.
    Young Joseph, who could not have been more than ten years old at the time, confessed that he was “puzzled” by his father’s disappearance. Later, he understood that his father had melted away to the third-floor oubliette. “The suspicions of the manhunters were disarmed, and they went off about their business, leaving Father and his friend to breathe freely again.”

    WHEN HE FOUND THE TIME, JOSEPH WELCOMED VISITORS AND curiosity seekers to his “heavenly city,” often escorting them up Hyde Street—most of the boulevards bore the names of prominent Saints—to his mother’s home. Lucy Mack Smith, now in her sixties, controlled access to a collection of Egyptian mummies and scrolls renowned up and down the Mississippi and even further afield. There was a sign nailed to a board in front of Mrs. Smith’s house:
    EGYPTIAN MUMMIES EXHIBITED,
    AND ANCIENT RECORDS EXPLAINED.
    PRICE TWENTY-FIVE CENTS.
    The mummies and the papyri, or “ancient records” were a highlight of any Nauvoo tour. Joseph sometimes told visitors that his mother had purchased the collection for $6,000. In fact, he had bought them himself for $2,400 from an itinerant showman who brought his artifacts to Kirtland, Ohio, in 1833. The mummies, “frightfully disfigured, and, in fact, most disgusting relics of mortality,” according to the visiting Anglican minister Henry Caswall, were apparently genuine. Their identities, as the Smiths explained them, were probably spurious.
    After leading Charlotte Haven, a visitor from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, “up a short, narrow stairway to a low dark room under a roof,” Mrs. Smith held her candle up to a row of yellowing corpses. Lucy introduced her desiccated charges as the Egyptian “King Onitus and his royal household:” two wives, and the daughter of a fellow king. (Joseph told visitors the king was “Pharaoh Necho.”) For Charlotte, Mrs. Smith brandished what “seemed to be a club wrapped in a dark cloth, and said ‘This is the leg of Pharaoh’s daughter, the one that saved Moses.’” To yet another visitor, the young Eudocia Baldwin, Mrs. Smith (“a trim looking old lady in black silk gown and white cap and kerchief”) introduced the mummies as “the old King Pharaoh of the Exodus himself, with wife and daughter.” “My Son Joseph Smith has recently received a revelation from the Lord in regard to these people and times,” Mrs. Smith said, “and
he
has told these things to
me.
”
    The papyri were equally problematic. Joseph claimed the hieroglyphics were handwritten by Abraham, “the father of the faithful,” and bore the signatures of Moses and his older brother, Aaron. With the aid of God and a white seer stone, Joseph translated the papyri into the Book of Abraham, which purported to be a source for the Book of Genesis. His mother said the hieroglyphic scrolls were “the writing of Abraham and Isaac, written in Hebrew and Sanscrit.” Charlotte Haven pointed to a drawing of Eve being tempted by a snake standing on two legs. “But serpents don’t have legs,” the young woman remarked.
    “They did before the Fall,” Lucy shot back.
    Like the mummies, the papyri also appeared to be genuine Egyptian funerary relics. But they were not the “lost” book of Abraham, and they did not help explain the origins of the Negro race, as Joseph claimed. The scrolls cost the Mormons much future vexation, as they reinforced the prevalent racist doctrine that African Americans were descendants of the cursed Canaanites, the children of Noah’s son Ham.
    In the 1960s, a Metropolitan Museum of Art expert uncharitably characterized Joseph’s translation of the scrolls as “a farrago of nonsense from beginning to end.”

    ON MAY 15, 1844, AS HE OFTEN DID, JOSEPH SPENT THE DAY WITH two eminent visitors who hopped off the steamboat to catch a glimpse of the “bourgeois Mohammed.” The day-trippers were the young Bostonians