Review

Title: Life and Times of John Pierce Hawley: A Mormon Ulysses of the American West
Author: Melvin C. Johnson
Publisher: Greg Kofford Books
Genre: History
Year Published: 2019
Number of Pages: 236 pp.
Binding: Hardcover, Paperback, and Kindle
ISBN10: 1589587650
ISBN13: 978-1589587656
Price: $34.95 Hardcover

Reviewed by John E. Baucom for the Association for Mormon Letters.

Melvin C. Johnson’s work follows the pious wanderings of John Pierce Hawley across the American West and through Mormonism’s theological offshoots. John Hawley is not a well-known figure in early Mormon history. His modest life, however, offers a fresh and unexpected view into this bourgeoning religious movement. In life Hawley was a hard-working lumberman and hearty frontiersman and contemporaries often noted his even temper and physical strength. But it’s John Hawley’s religious journey, as Johnson astutely identifies, that makes his life all the more remarkable and worth knowing. In retracing Hawley’s spiritual quest, the author skillfully takes the reader beyond Mormonism’s typical narrative to a time and place where individual human experience becomes more nuanced, confused, conflicted, and perhaps more recognizable.

To his core John Hawley was a dogged believer in Joseph Smith’s prophetic mission. And his devout search for the inheritor of Smith’s legacy propelled him across the North American frontier. During the first decades of the Restoration, John Hawley seems to be everywhere, a witness of the better-known chapters of Mormon history. Hawley’s patient investigation and candid documentation of these early Mormon schisms is this book’s contribution to Restoration Studies. The main theological offshoots addressed in this work—known casually as Brighamites, Wightites, Strangites, and later, Josephites—quickly established competing Latter Day Saint communities in Wisconsin, Michigan, Texas, California, Iowa, among the Indian Nations, and throughout the Great Basin.

Melvin Johnson moves briskly through Hawley’s formative years in Missouri and his early adulthood in Indian Territory. Ever so graciously, however, the author has created a useful chronology of John Hawley’s life—so before reading, it may be helpful to dogear Appendix C (p. 185). As a boy John’s parents, Pierce and Sarah Hawley, converted to Mormonism during the winter of 1833-34. Soon thereafter, the family moved from their home near Chicago, Illinois, to gather with the main body of Saints in Jackson County, Missouri. The Hawley’s Missouri experience mirrors the familiar Mormon storyline: They were forced by settlers to move multiple times, first from Jackson County to Ray County, and then from Ray to Caldwell County. By January 1839, the family abandoned their Missouri properties and gathered anew in Quincy, Illinois. They ultimately settled west of Nauvoo, in Iowa Territory at Hawley’s Grove—later renamed Ambrosia. During the construction of the Nauvoo Temple in 1843, John logged and milled the Wisconsin forests and piloted lumber down the Mississippi River to the Nauvoo.

Following the martyrdom—and as if solely for the sake of great storytelling—John Hawley moved from one Latter Day Saint community to the next. Initially the Hawley clan joined with Latter Day Saint Apostle Lyman Wight, south to the Republic of Texas. And there’s no better person to share this history than the author, Melvin Johnson, a well-published expert of Lyman Wight’s Texas colonies. The Wightites first established the religious community of Zodiac, near present-day Austin, and there constructed the first Mormon temple west of the Mississippi River. As Johnson details, Wightite temple rituals were far more public than the private ceremonies that later came to define the Brighamite tradition.

John Hawley’s comparative account of early Latter Day Saint temple worship is one of the few surviving authentic description of this sacred ritual, and can be studied further in Appendix A: “John Hawley, Letter to Joseph Smith III, June 12, 1884” (p. 167). In 1851, the Hawleys once again uprooted and resettled in Hamilton Creek, Burnet County, Texas. Only three years later, Hawley moved again and lived among a small colony of Mormon refugees at Spavinaw Creek, Cherokee Nation—northeast of present-day Tulsa, Oklahoma. This lesser-known Latter Day Saint community begs for greater historical investigation within Restoration and Mormon studies. For example, the Brighamite missionaries sent to gather the Spavinaw Creek Saints complicates standard explanations for Latter-day Saints proselyting in Indian Territory. So too does Brigham Youngs’ instruction that converts from Indian Territory should gather with the Great Basin Saints, but that “‘the Cherokees who are baptized may remain there’” (p. 41). In all, the inclusion of Spavinaw Creek should add a thoughtful twist to future scholarship regarding the Brighamite missions to the Lamanites.

In the mid-1850s John Hawley joined with the Brighamites and trekked west to gather with the Great Basin Saints. He initially settled in Ogden, but soon relocated to Southern Utah. At this point in the book, rather than providing a play-by-play of John Hawley’s life, Johnson offers a more nuanced and welcomed analysis regarding race, religion, and gender within the Restoration. However, this increased scrutiny does imbalance Johnson’s desire to place this work squarely within the growing body of Restoration literature.

Johnson’s emphasis is noticeably allotted to the racial and theological boundaries within Utah Territory—relationships that have been far more studied inside the Great Basin than outside of it. Additionally, such boundaries are perhaps more prominent and thus more informative along the expansive frontier zones of Texas and Indian Territory. With that said, the author does mention that Jacob and Sebrina Croft—whose company piloted John Hawley west—underwrote their religious migration in the selling of a few of their slaves to Cherokee Chief Stand (p. 51). Conceivably, there is more substance in this passage than could be squeezed from the developing racial and theological boundaries of Southern Utah.

Nevertheless, Hawley’s life does offer greater insight into the Mormon practice of polygamy. Despite living within a “plural wife patriarchal world,” which stretched “from Wisconsin to Texas, and from the Cherokee nation to Utah Territory,” Hawley remained monogamous to his death in 1909 (p. 70). As a steadfast believer in Joseph Smith’s sacred revelations, Hawley’s abhorrence of polygamy placed him in a curious theological predicament. Hawley surely understood, as Johnson argues, that Smith had introduced polygamy prior to his death in 1844. Hawley, however, later denied hearing about the practice until after Smith’s martyrdom. Even so, Hawley tolerated worshipping alongside polygamists as both a Wightite and later Brighamite. More telling than Hawley’s later denials is his split with Lyman Wight—not over the introduction or open practice of polygamy—but Wight’s revelation to leave Texas and colonize Mexico. According to John Hawley, Wight’s revelation contradicted Smith’s initial call to settle Texas and was therefore false. In other words, if Hawley believed that Smith had not revealed polygamy during his lifetime, why did he not openly condemn this additional doctrine while a Wightite or Brighamite. At one point Hawley seriously considered taking a second wife, Emily Emmett. But for whatever reason the two never married and Hawley continued to quietly resist this peculiar institution.

Unlike his silence over polygamy, John Hawley immediately and openly condemned those who participated in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. As Hawley journeyed south from Provo to Washington in 1857, he at times traveled alongside the Baker-Fancher Party. Hawley’s vital account of the massacre not only reiterates or rehabilitates the good-natured character of the ill-fated Baker-Fancher Party, but challenges popular interpretations regarding motive and those responsible for the crime. When Hawley first arrived in Southern Utah, he noted surprise in the community’s open hostility and deadly paranoia of the passing immigrant train. According to Hawley, their hostility contrasted sentiments expressed in and around the northern settlements. Hawley strongly believed that the Saints living in Utah’s Dixie were overreacting to rumors concerning the approaching wagon train. And once he heard of the immigrants’ fate, Hawley immediately condemned the massacre and publicly denounced the participants as murderers.

John Hawley’s account of the massacre is derived mostly from an 1884 letter written to Joseph Smith III. In it Hawley claimed that his open opposition of the massacre nearly cost him his life. Some in the community even warned Hawley “to be more on [his] guard.” Significantly, Hawley recalled that the threats against his life waned only after the arrival of Brigham Young’s infamous letter carried by James Haslam that called for the immigrants’ safe passage. Only after Young’s letter, as the author explains, would Hawley regain “some standing in the community” (p. 76). Meaning, when John wrote his experience nearly thirty years after the massacre—now living in Iowa, a convert to the Josephite tradition; years after the exhaustive national reporting of John D. Lee’s trial and execution; and writing in a moment when he clearly had more to gain than lose—Hawley did not indict the Latter-day Saint hierarchy for the massacre, nor embellish a larger conspiracy. Hawley instead found solace alongside his former ecclesiastical head, now rival, Brigham Young.

While living in the southern Utah community of Pine Valley, Hawley gravitated increasingly toward Josephite missionaries and their teachings. This eventually led to his split with the Brighamite church. Similar to his rupture with Lyman Wight, Hawley steadily began to scrutinize theological changes enacted by Brigham Young that supersede revelations or the apparent intentions of Joseph Smith. Hawley’s theological fissures include some well-worn topics, such as Young’s teachings of Adam-God, blood atonement, and apostolic succession. Intriguing, however, is Hawley’s objection to Young’s gender requirement for proxy temple ordinances of family dead.

Unlike Joseph Smith, Young required husbands to stand proxy for his wife’s male ancestors and likewise that wives stand proxy for her husband’s female ancestors. Like his previous condemnation of doctrinal alterations, Hawley doubted Young’s authority to standardize gender in proxy ordinances and “‘laid it to “One side, not considering it scripture profitable for doctrine”” (p. 148). John Hawley remained at Pine Valley until June 1870, at which time he joined Joseph Smith III’s Reorganized church in Iowa. This was Hawley’s final move across the continent and one that conclusively merited him the moniker “Mormon Ulysses.”

Before offering a final analysis of this work, I would like to make two focused criticisms. First, Johnson refers to the Southern Paiutes caught up in the massacre at Mountain Meadows as Indian “freebooters.” Johnson writes, “On September 7, 1857, Mormon militia from southern Utah, accompanied by a few Native American freebooters, surprised the immigrants with an early morning assault on the wagon train at Mountain Meadows” (p. 75) Initially, the term “freebooters” was a welcomed departure from past phrases like, Mormons “aided by” Southern Paiute “allies” massacred the Baker-Fancher Party at Mountain Meadows. Despite all the historical disagreements swirling around Mountain Meadows, historians agree that from beginning to end Mormons led the massacre. If in fact a few Southern Paiutes were present during the final massacre, mentioning Paiute or Indian “freebooter” involvement as anything greater than coercion is the continuation of stereotypes regarding Indian violence, and far more troubling, the hoped for objective of the Mormon perpetrators themselves. In this context, terms like Indian “freebooters” reads like a startling return to American Indians as “Gadianton Robbers.”

Second, there are a few unsubstantiated claims with large ramifications. Historians certainly should present a variety of likely possibilities to dispel contingency and inevitability. But such claims should be supported or substantiated. One quick example from Johnson: “[Joseph] Smith may have been considering the possibility of later overthrowing Texas power, creating a new nation, and negotiating with the Republic of Mexico” (p. 19). Smith feasibly pondered “overthrowing Texas power,” but Johnson supports this claim by citing D. Michael Quinn’s The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power (1997). Quinn, however, does not offer evidence for a Mormon-led Texas coup. Here, Quinn demonstrates that “Smith had played the Whigs against the Democrats to benefit the Mormons in Nauvoo.” And similarly, Smith most likely planned to amplify this “dangerous game” by exploiting international rivalries—the United States, Mexico, Russia, Britain, and France—to better secure a gathering place for the Saints within the disputed territories of Texas, Oregon, and California (Quinn, p. 134). In short, evidence for Smith’s flirtation with “overthrowing Texas power” could greatly inform our understanding of the period and region.

All critiques aside, Melvin Johnson has written a refreshing book that nourished my imagination and wonder. At curious junctures and in surprising ways, this bottom-up biographical approach humanized and enriched the better-known sagas of the Restoration movement. John Hawley’s “faith odyssey” across the American frontier is nothing short of astounding. If his life were a work of fiction it would be unbelievable. Hawley seems to have witnessed all the well-known events of the Restoration. Yet his life, along with his clear-eyed descriptions of these better-known chapters, challenges and expands our understanding of the American frontier. And like all books worth reading, Johnson’s tour of the Mormon diaspora animates more thoughtful questions than answers. The Life and Times of John Pierce Hawley is a welcomed and pleasant jumping off point for those looking to increase their knowledge of the Restoration’s expansive frontier.