[Polygamy] to 27 Jun 1844 Marriage - Joseph to Lucy Walker, age 17 ,. Elder William Clayton officiating PLACE: Smith's Store, Nauvoo, IL SOURCE: FamilySearch.com record for Joseph Smith Jr. (1)
-- May 1, 1843
[Apostle Wilford Woodruff Journal] May 1st 2d 3d, 4 5 & 6 I spent the time as usual in the printing office. (2)
Joseph Smith says he translated a portion of the Kinderhook plates and found them to be a history of a descendant of Ham. Smith says the figures were similar to those on the plates he translated to The Book of Mormon. (3)
The diary of William Clayton, Joseph Smith secretary, indicates that Joseph Smith translated a portion of the Kinderhook Plates. These were later proven to be a hoax. The Church has accepted this conclusion. This raises the question as to what Joseph Smith meant when he use the word "translate" in this context or otherwise. (4)
Joseph Smith marries Lucy Walker in Nauvoo, one day after her seventeenth birthday, while his legal wife Emma is away in St. Louis buying supplies. Lucy been adopted by the Smiths and worked as a maid in the Smith home. The prophet told Walker that God had commanded him to take her as a wife. She was angry and insulted, but she feared Smith's warning that if she rejected the "principle" of plural marriage, "the gate will be closed forever against you." Lucy later records: "Emma Smith was not present and she did not consent to the marriage; she did not know anything about it at all." Of her relationship with Joseph, Lucy says that although she "married Joseph as a plural wife and lived and cohabitated with him as such." that "It was not a love matter, so to speak, in our affairs, -at least on my part it was not, but simply the giving up of myself as a sacrifice to establish that grand and glorious principle that God had revealed to the world." After Joseph's murder in 1844 she
becomes Heber C. Kimball's wife with the understanding that "I should be his wife for time, and time only, ...and in the resurrection [he] would surrender me, with my children, to Joseph Smith." On his death bed Heber C. Kimball says to Lucy, "What can you tell Joseph when you meet him? Cannot you say that I have been kind to you as it was possible to be under the circumstances? I know you can, and am confident you will be as a mediator between me and Joseph..." (5)
William Clayton's diary says that Joseph Smith "has translated a portion [of the "brass" Kinderhook Plates dug up in Adams County, Illinois] and says they contain the history of . . . a descendant of Ham through the loins Pharaoh king of Egypt, and that he received his kingdom from the ruler of heaven and earth." The discoverers of these artifacts would later claim that they manufactured the items complete with "hieroglyphics by making impressions on beeswax and filling them with acid." The 1992 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MORMONISM acknowledges that extensive tests on one of the original Kinderhook plates "proved conclusively that the plate was one of the Kinderhook six; that it had been engraved, not etched: and that it was of nineteenth-century manufacture. There thus appears no reason to accept the Kinderhook plates as anything but a frontier hoax." This leaves unanswered what Joseph Smith meant when he said he "translated" the Kinderhook Plates, or more fundamentally what he meant b
y the word "translation." (5)
Nauvoo, Illinois. Monday, Joseph Smith paid Lucien Woodworth monies toward the erection of the building of a hotel named the Nauvoo House. (6)
[Joseph Smith] Sealed polygynously to Lucy Walker. (7)
[Joseph Smith Diary] May 1st Lucy /Woodworth/ Walker and Joseph /See Clayton's Journal/ {Listed Marriage} (8)
[Joseph Smith Diary] Monday, May 1st 1843 Rode out [in the] forenoon and afternoon. (8)
[Polygamy] Lucy Walker age 17, Wrote about her plural marriage to Smith,
"In the year 1842 President Joseph Smith sought an interview with me, and said, I have a message for you, I have been commanded of God to take another wife, and you are the woman.' He asked me if I believed him to be a Prophet of God. He fully Explained to me the principle of plural or celestial marriage that it would prove an everlasting blessing to my father's house. [Joseph encouraged her to pray] 'that the grave would kindly receive me that I might find rest on the bosom of my dear [recently deceased] mother Why Should I be chosen from among thy daughters, Father I am only a child in years and experience.' And thus I prayed in the agony of my soul. [The marriage] was not a love matter at least on my part it was not, but simply the giving up of myself as a sacrifice to establish that grand and glorious principle that God had revealed to the world." (9)
William Clayton Marries Lucy Walker to Joseph Smith. (10)
Footnotes:
1 - Joseph Smith Polygamy Timeline, http://www.i4m.com/think/polygamy/JS_Polygamy_Timeline.htm
2 - Wilford Woodruff's Journal: 1833-1898 Typescript, Volumes 1-9, Edited by Scott G. Kenney, Signature Books 1993
3 - Tidd, N. R., "Mormon Chronology"
4 - McQue, Bob; Religious Faith: Enlightening or Blinding?: Timeline of Key Events in Mormon History
5 - On This Day in Mormon History, http://onthisdayinmormonhistory.blogspot.com
6 - BYU Studies Journal, volume 46, no. 4: A Chronology of the Life of Joseph Smith
7 - Scott H. Faulring, An American Prophet's Record, 'A Joseph Smith Chronology'
8 - Faulring, Scott (ed.), An American Prophet's Record: The Diaries and Journals of Joseph Smith: Joseph Smith Diary, 1843
9 - Wikipedia, List of the Wives of Joseph Smith, Jr., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_wives_of_Joseph_Smith,_Jr.
10 - Smith, George D., An Intimate Chronicle; The Journals of William Clayton, p.lxiii, A William Clayton Chronology
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