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Datum: Sonntag, den 4. April 2004, um 15:07 Uhr

Betrifft: Mormonen und Polygamie in Texas

Salt Lake Tribune
4.4.4

Polygamy in Texas harkens back to Mormon pioneers

Will Bagley
HISTORY MATTERS

The West Texas town of Eldorado fears it is facing an invasion of polygamists from Colorado City, Ariz., proving again that Ecclesiastes was right: "There is nothing new under the sun." Polygamous Mormons first arrived in Texas in 1845, two years before Mormons settled in the Great Basin.
Their prophet, Lyman Wight, was renowned as the "Wild Ram of the Mountain" and proved every bit as colorful as Brigham Young, "the Lion of the Lord." Wight was one of the first converts to Mormonism and shared Joseph Smith’s cell in the Liberty Jail in 1838, where he claimed guards fed them human flesh.
Wight became an apostle in 1841 and then a member of the Council of Fifty, a secret organization Smith established to rule the world after the Second Coming. Wight led an expedition to Wisconsin’s "pineries" to provide lumber for the Nauvoo Temple.
By 1843 Mormon prospects in Illinois looked dim, and Joseph Smith sent Lucian Woodworth to talk with Sam Houston about establishing a colony in Texas -- and the notion of settling several thousand Mormons between Texas ranches and the Comanches had considerable appeal in the Lone Star Republic. Not long before he was murdered by a mob in 1844, Smith directed Wight to move to Texas.
By November 1845, some 200 Mormons had followed Wight on a 850-mile wagon trek from Iowa to the Red River. Over the next dozen years, these expert mill-builders established some of the first communities in Grayson, Travis, Gillespie, Burnet and Bandera counties.
The "Wightites" settled at the falls of the Colorado River and raised a gristmill not far from Austin, where they also built the city jail. The spring that drove their mill dried up, and they moved up the Pedernales River to a creek near the German colony at Fredricksburg. They named their headquarters Zodiac and built blacksmith and wagon shops, a general store, a school, a shingle mill and a storehouse that doubled as the first Mormon temple established west of the Mississippi River.
By 1850 some 160 people had made nearly $26,000 worth of improvements on 2,217 acres of land. But the treacherous Pedernales washed away their hard work in a series of floods, and the Mormons began wandering between a series of temporary settlements, each farther out on the edge of the frontier.
The flood swept away Zodiac’s expensive millstones, and the Mormons were unable to afford new ones for their settlement on Hamilton Creek. According to one of his followers, Wight summoned his people and announced a revelation. Holding a divining rod, Wight led the way to the top of a sandbar, struck it with his rod, and said, "Dig here." Lo and behold, Noah Smithwick recalled, "there was revealed the buried millstones."
Debt, disease, disillusionment and the Comanche nation led the Wightites to abandon their last settlement at Mountain Valley on the Medina River. Wight had a vision foreseeing a cataclysmic civil war and began leading what was left of his flock to an unspecified destination, probably Independence, Mo.
But in addition to being a charismatic prophet, Wight was a hard-drinking opium addict, and on March 31, 1858, he died of what appears to be a combination of delirium tremens and a morphine overdose.
The troubles early Mormons had getting along with their neighbors are legendary, but somehow Wight’s disciples won the hearts of the Texans who knew them. "These Mormons have proved themselves to be most excellent citizens of our State," wrote the Galveston News on Wight’s death, praising "the orderly conduct, sobriety, industry, and enterprise of his colony."
Utah gained statehood in 1896, six years after The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints left polygamy behind in order to join the union. That year, there were only about 64 members in Texas, but today it’s home to almost a quarter-million Latter-day Saints who contribute to the state’s diversity. In 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with an LDS family and stopped prayers at high-school football games after a teacher told their daughter that Mormonism was a "non-Christian cult."
Given the prominence of Baptist fundamentalists in the South, maybe the fundamentalists who hew to early Mormon teachings will fit right in.
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Will Bagley learned about early Mormons in Texas from Melvin C. Johnson’s forthcoming book, Polygamy on the Pedernales.

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