Mormon Polygamy before Nauvoo? The Relationship of Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger

by Don Bradley

On April 3, 1836, the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith and his assistant church president, Oliver Cowdery, closed the curtain by the Kirtland temple pulpit, isolating themselves from them congregation, and prayed. As later recorded, the two shared a heavenly visitation of Jesus and the biblical prophets Moses, Elijah, and "Elias," likely John the Revelator, a spiritual crescendo for both and an event that gathered "keys" from across sacred history and across the testaments into a single movement of restoration. Yet despite this shared experience of the holy, Cowdery, within a matter of months, was painting a public picture of Smith as somewhat less than sanctified, spreading rumor that he had engaged in an illicit relationship with a teenage girl living in his home. Still affirming the truth of these accusations against Smith in early 1838, he wrote to his brother, Warren, of "a dirty, nasty, filthy affair of his and Fanny Alger's."¹ Cowdery soon faced accusations of his own in an ecclesiastical trial, including the charge of defaming Smith by "falsely insinuating that he was guilty of adultery." The assistant president was ultimately excommunicated.²

Of all Joseph Smith's reported non-monogamous relationships, this, perhaps the earliest, has engendered the most controversy. Fanny Alger, as accounts go, had lived happily in the Smith home for some time when Smith's first wife Emma unceremoniously decanted her from the house in the night, after finding her on a hay loft with Joseph. Joseph reportedly sent for Cowdery to keep the peace between himself and Emma. One of the two men arranged for Alger to temporarily stay with Chauncey and Eliza Webb.³ Alger, reportedly pregnant, soon headed west toward Missouri with family. She stopped in Indiana, where she lost no time in marrying non-Mormon Solomon Custer on November 16, 1836, and laid down roots where they raised a large family.⁴

By 1837, many Latter Day Saints had heard whispers of a close, and reportedly immoral, connection between Smith and Alger. When the main source of these rumors, Oliver Cowdery, was excommunicated, the story should have been largely discredited within the church. But it was not. The Alger family in later years consistently affirmed the occurrence of the relationship--and its identity as a marriage. And in 1886 future LDS Assistant Church Historian, Andrew Jenson, published Fanny Alger's name as of one of Smith's earliest plural wives.⁵

The controversy over the relationship then, as now, involves three central questions: the factuality, timing, and nature of the relationship. Did it occur? If so, when did it occur? And, most importantly, was it a marriage or an affair?

The question of Mormon polygamy's beginnings may have implications for understanding its purposes and justification. If it began in 1841, when Smith was married to Louisa Beaman in Nauvoo, Illinois by her brother-in-law, Joseph B. Noble, who alleged this was the first Mormon plural marriage, then its purposes must be understood in the light of the Nauvoo theology of progression toward exaltation, or deification. Similarly if it began in either the early or mid-1830s with a solemnized relationship between Smith and Fanny Alger, then it must be set in the context of Kirtland theology, and Kirtland theology must reciprocally be understood in light of it. And, if it began with an extramarital affair that Smith had with Alger, a relationship driven by sexual, and perhaps romantic, motivations, devoid of theological justification and religious motive, an affair rationalized years later as polygamy, then Mormon polygamy's theological underpinning should be seen as a conscious or unconscious overlay on Smith's private passions.

Though some sources place Smith in other non-monogamous relationships before the institution of plainly recognizable polygamy in Nauvoo in 1841 (such as one with Lucinda Pendleton Morgan Harris in 1838 Missouri⁶), the reported Fanny Alger relationship is the only one for which there is substantial documentation, and therefore, the only one on which confident conclusions about timing, nature, and even occurrence might be drawn. It is the best test case for whether Smith had any such relationships before Nauvoo, and whether they were marital or extramarital; in short, for whether polygamy as such existed at the highest levels of the LDS Church prior to Nauvoo.

When Oliver Cowdery spread stories of Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger in 1837-1838, there appears to have been considerable dissension over whether an intimate relationship had occurred. At present, such dispute is minimal or nonexistent.

There are two reasons to suppose Joseph Smith may not have had a sexual relationship with Fanny Alger. First, at Cowdery's trial Smith denied having committed adultery with Alger, and the high council judging the case became convinced he was not guilty of this crime. Second, the earliest case of polygamy for which there is a definite officiator is that of Louisa Beaman in 1841, and the officiator, her brother-in-law Joseph B. Noble, asserted in succeeding decades that this was the first of Smith's plural marriages.⁷ These reasons, however, are problematic. Cowdery's conviction on the charge of "falsely insinuating that [Smith] was guilty of adultery" need not indicate the high council was convinced no relationship occurred. And the testimony of Joseph B. Noble provides weak evidence, at best, that no relationship occurred between Smith and Alger. Noble, the source for the idea that polygamy began with the 1841 Beaman marriage, neither stated that he understood this from Smith, nor spoke without bias. Believing this was the first of Smith's polygamous unions conferred on Noble the special status of having performed the first plural marriage. Yet Noble's report, assumed true, would show only that Smith and Alger were not married, not that they had no relationship.

Given the weakness of these objections and the volume and reliability of the sources reporting the relationship (which will be reviewed in discussing its nature and timing), few deny a relationship occurred. Indeed, no scholar of Joseph Smith's polygamy has taken the position in print that there was no intimacy between the pair.

Timing

The beginnings of the relationship between Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger are cloudy. Although there is one source that purports to narrate how Smith approached Alger for a plural marriage and pinpoint a time for the marriage, this late source has fully persuaded only one major scholar and the relationship's beginnings remain an open question. Mystery also surrounds the relationship's demise. Although some have inferred that Emma Smith discovered the intimacy between her husband and Fanny around the summer or fall of 1835, no unambiguous evidence for this has been adduced.

The sole detailed account of when and how the relationship began comes from Fanny Alger's first cousin Mosiah Hancock (1834-1907). Hancock, who was a toddler at the time the relationship was discovered and not yet been conceived at the time it supposedly started, wrote his account in 1896 as an addendum to the autobiography of his father, Levi Hancock.⁸Although Levi Hancock had written regarding about his own life at the time in question, he had omitted any direct reference to Joseph Smith's relationship with his niece Fanny (daughter to his sister Clarissa Hancock Alger).⁹ Mosiah, believing he had accurate information to fill this lacuna, did so.

On the younger Hancock's account, the marriage of Joseph Smith to Levi's niece came about through a kind of swap. In 1833, Mosiah reports, his father fell in love with Clarissa Reed, but it was presumed that she, then living in the Smith home, was intended as a polygamous wife for Smith. Mosiah's father nonetheless approached the prophet to see if he would relinquish her. Smith, apparently uninterested in Reed, offered Levi a deal: "Brother Levi I want to make a bargain with you--If you will get Fanny Alger for me for a wife you may have Clarissa Reed. I love Fanny."¹⁰ Levi then reportedly sought the permission of both sets of parents, who promptly gave their approval. Smith then had Levi Hancock perform the marriage for them, and gave his blessing for Levi to marry Clarissa Reed.

This account has the following strengths: It provides an explanation for an otherwise mysterious event. It comes from a relatively close family source who may have had access to inside information on a Smith-Alger marriage, particularly if his father were the officiator. And, finally, there is an inherent plausibility in the account of Levi Hancock's niece moving into the Smith home when his new wife moved out.¹¹

The account also has weaknesses. The author could have known of the events only indirectly and recorded them sixty-three years after the fact. Although he recorded what he believed his father should have put into his autobiography, the father does not appear to have agreed. Rather than report the historically significant first plural marriage in the church, reveling in his role in such an event, as Joseph B. Noble did, Levi Hancock omitted it altogether.

The Mosiah Hancock account is also anachronistic to the Mormonism of 1833. His narrative assumes an established polygamous culture, in which an unrelated girl living in a married man's house might be expected to become his wife and in which parents would readily agree to such a marriage.¹² Although these social conventions made sense to Mosiah, who came of age in polygamous 1840s-1850s Nauvoo and Utah, they would have made no sense to Mormons of the 1830s, who were still thoroughly immersed in the larger pre-Victorian monogamous culture.

The account also places Joseph Smith's marriage to Fanny Alger under Emma's nose for at least two and a half years before its discovery, and contradicts earlier information attributed to Mosiah's aunt, Clarissa--Fanny Alger's mother. Clarissa Hancock Alger, according to an 1876 letter from Eliza Jane Churchill Webb to Mary E. Bond, "says Fanny was sealed to Joseph by Oliver Cowdery in Kirtland in 1835--or 6."¹³ The author, Eliza Webb, had been close to Fanny and was an insider regarding Fanny's relationship with Smith: when Emma threw her out, it was Eliza who took her in. To the extent that Eliza Webb's letter is accepted as reflecting the mother's understanding, Mosiah's account must be questioned. If Levi Hancock had secured her permission for and performed the marriage in 1833, she should have known Cowdery had not performed it in 1835 or 1836. Though her reported belief that Cowdery was the officiator is problematic in itself, it is one that, on Mosiah Hancock's account, she should have known better.¹⁴ Given the lateness and difficulties of Hancock's narrative of the origin of the Smith-Alger pairing, it is unfortunate that it is the only one available.

Though the beginning of the relationship eludes us, its ending can be more definitively pegged. Sources on Emma's discovery of Joseph and Fanny and her eviction of the girl are less detailed but more abundant, closer to the event, and more trustworthy.

The few scholars who have attempted to date the discovery of this relationship have generally placed it around summer to fall 1835, on the basis of four evidentiary dots connected by Richard S. Van Wagoner.¹⁵ First, Benjamin F. Johnson, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, recalled being told in 1835, when he was a youth of about Fanny Alger's age that biblical polygamy was to be restored and hearing it "whispered" of Fanny "that Joseph Loved her."¹⁶ Second, it is evident from the "Article on Marriage" drawn up and published in the Doctrine and Covenants in August 1835 that an embarrassing polygamy incident had occurred before that time. The article reads in part: "Inasmuch as this church of Christ has been reproached with the crime of fornication, and polygamy: we declare that we believe, that one man should have one wife; and one woman, but one husband, except in case of death, when either is at liberty to marry again."¹⁷ Third, Joseph Smith left Kirtland for Pontiac, Michigan shortly before the special conference that voted on the Article and returned not long after, possibly suggesting the Article was passed in his absence to minimize embarrassment.¹⁸ And fourth, Joseph Smith's diary for October 17, 1835 alludes to his dealing with household issues including evicting non-family residents:"called my family together aranged my domestick concerns and dismissed my boarders."¹⁹

These fragments fit together neatly, but an 1835 dating of the incident is not above critique and serious challenge. Johnson's recollection, written sixty-eight years after the fact, may be imprecise as to the exact timing of the rumors. And Smith's reference to dismissing his boarders, though referring to multiple persons, is completely ambiguous on their identity and why they were required to leave. Mark Ashurst-McGee, an editor with the Joseph Smith Papers Project, suggested the boarders evicted from the Smith home were employees at the nearby printing office, where Smith had reported attempting to settle some "difficulties" the previous day.²⁰ This coheres perfectly with the autobiographical account given by one of the printers, Ebenezer Robinson:

In May, 1835, went to Kirtland, Ohio, and obtained a situation in the Latter-day Saints' Church printing office. . . .. The firm consisted of Joseph Smith, Jr., F. G. Williams and Oliver Cowdery. We engaged to work by the month and be boarded by our employers.. . . .

We boarded the first two months in the family of Oliver Cowdery, the second two months in the family of F. G. Williams, and the third two months in the family of Joseph Smith, Jr.²¹

Robinson's account yields a timetable something like this for the printers' mid-1835 boarding arrangements:

May-June: Oliver Cowdery household

July-August: Frederick G. Williams household

September-October: Joseph Smith household

Robinson's narrative places the printing employees in the Smith home as boarders during October and likely leaving the home that month, making it more than probable they were in fact the boarders evicted after the October 16 "difficulties" at the printing office.

Also problematic for the 1835 timeline of the discovery of the Fanny Alger relationship is the story that Joseph Smith left town to avoid embarrassment over the Alger rumors--this occurring during the Article on Marriage vote. Brian C. Hales, in the most extensive examination of the Article on Marriage to date, demonstrates that there may have been other polygamy-related incidents in early Mormonism aside from Smith's to which the Article responded, that Smith's trip to Pontiac at the time the Article passed appears to have been for family and ecclesiastical reasons, and that the Article had to be hastily drawn up and voted on in his absence because the Doctrine and Covenants was about to go to press.²²

An alternative dating of the relationship discovery, to 1836, is supported by other evidence. As discussed below, rumors of the relationship appear to have peaked in 1837, when Oliver Cowdery was most actively discussing it, a peak which better fits an 1836 discovery date than an 1835 date. Fanny Alger left Ohio around September 1836, establishing that as the outside date. Also in 1837, likely in response to those rumors, Smith published a list of frequently asked questions about the Mormons in the Elders' Journal, including the question "Do the Mormons believe in having more wives than one?"²³

Cowdery's 1837-1838 complaints of Smith's "dirty, nasty, filthy" relationship with Alger are also significant by their absence in early 1836, when Cowdery had no apparent trouble accepting Smith's purity and worthiness to dedicate the Kirtland temple on March 27, and to see Christ with him on April 3.²⁴ This too suggests a later dating for the "outing" of the relationship, placing it probably between April 3, 1836, and September of the same.

Other sources also support an 1836 dating for the relationship's end. Clarissa Hancock Alger's dating of the relationship's beginning to 1835 or 1836 also weighs against an 1835 discovery. If Clarissa Alger believed the marriage might not have begun until 1836, she could not have understood it to be discovered and terminated in 1835. And Benjamin Winchester, a plural brother-in-law to Smith and a church leader in Philadelphia, later an apostate, stated of his Kirtland days that in the summer of 1836"there was a good deal of scandal prevalent among a number of the Saints concerning Joseph's licentious conduct," which led to some schism within the church.²⁵

Additional testimony, collected by Andrew Jenson, also strongly confirms the 1836 date. As mentioned above, Jenson was the first to publish Fanny Alger's name as one of Joseph Smith's plural wives, and others have followed in his footsteps.²⁶What has not been known is why Jenson included her on his list--on what authority he made the identification. This source was Eliza R. Snow, president of the LDS Relief Society and herself one of the prophet's plural widows. At Jenson's request, Snow recorded for him a handwritten list of her "sister wives," including Fanny Alger.²⁷ When Jenson subsequently interviewed Eliza Snow about Fanny's life and relationship with Joseph Smith, she told him, per his interview notes, that Fanny Alger was "one of the first wives Joseph married," one whom "Emma made such a fuss about." Most significantly, Eliza R. Snow explained how she knew about Fanny Alger and the relationship: Eliza "was well acquainted with her as she lived with the Prophet at the time".²⁸

Snow's presence in the house at the time of the discovery establishes the range for when it could have occurred. According to her autobiography, Eliza Snow lived in the Smith's Kirtland home twice, once in mid1836 while teaching a school term that began in the spring and again at the first of 1837.²⁹ By 1837 Fanny Alger was living in Indiana and married to Solomon Custer; so it was during the first of these two stays, in mid-1836, that Snow and Alger shared the house and the great "fuss" occurred.

The testimony of a contemporary member of the household that the relationship was discovered during her 1836 residence effectively confirms a relationship occurred, as well as he time of its discovery and consequent termination.

This timing for the discovery has important implications for the subject to be addressed next--the nature of Smith and Alger's relationship.³⁰

The Nature of the Relationship

Scholars are divided over when Smith's earliest non-monogamous relationships occurred and whether they were marital or extramarital. Compton and Hales have argued for a formal marital relationship; Van Wagoner has argued for an informal marital relationship (a mutual understanding of marriage without a wedding ceremony); and George D. Smith, Gary J. Bergera, and Janet Ellingson have argued that the SmithAlger pairing was an affair that preceded formal polygamy.³¹ On the latter argument, the relationship occurred too early to be a marriage, before the theological and authority basis for polygamy was sufficiently developed; and later identifications of the relationship as marital constitute a respectable overlay on an otherwise scandalous connection.

Evidence of Adultery

The earliest rumors about the relationship between Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger appear to have identified it as an extramarital affair. And some contemporaneous or nearly contemporaneous evidence supports this.

The earliest evidence that the relationship was an extramarital affair may be found in Emma's reactions to it. Her rage at discovering Joseph and Fanny Alger together indicates the relationship had been formed in secret and that she saw it as a violation of his wedding vows. A view on her part that relationship was immoral, and likely adulterous, can be inferred from the closings of letters she sent him while he was in hiding because of Kirtland difficulties the following year: on April 25, "I pray that God will keep you in purity and safety till we all meet again"; and on May 2,"I hope that we shall be so humble and pure before God that he will set us at liberty to be our own masters."³²

Another datum suggestive of an extramarital relationship between the Smith and Alger is the absence of an obvious officiator to perform a polygamous marriage at that time. No one performing any Mormon polygamous marriages prior to 1841 has been identified, and, aside from Smith's counselor Sidney Rigdon (a strong opponent of polygamy in the 1840s), Latter Day Saint ministers were not known to perform marriages in Kirtland until the fall of 1835. Even Fanny Alger's family appears to have been unable to identify a likely officiator. The first-cousin account identifying her uncle Levi Hancock as the officiator seems problematic and doubtful. And her mother's reported identification of the officiator as Oliver Cowdery--arguably the person most agitated about the incident after Emma--seems more doubtful still.

Janet Ellingson, responding to Todd Compton's arguments that the relationship was a plural marriage, has argued that Alger's behavior in the wake of its discovery provides a neglected contemporaneous demonstration that she saw it as an extramarital affair. Had she believed herself married to Smith, she would not have promptly married Solomon Custer in Indiana.³³ Ellingson is surely right to this extent: the fact the relationship was dissolved after being discovered and hastily replaced for Alger by her legal marriage to Solomon Custer would be more typical of an affair than a marriage.

In addition to contemporaneous behavioral indications of a nonmarital relationship between Smith and Alger, there are early reminiscences to that effect. One that unequivocally accuses the prophet of sexual immorality is the 1842 affidavit by Boston LDS convert Fanny Brewer, who describes circumstances in Kirtland upon her visit in 1837, at the peak of the gossip regarding Smith and Alger: "There was much excitement against the Prophet on another account, likewise, -- an unlawful intercourse between himself and a young orphan girl residing in this family, and under his protection!!!"³⁴

According to the April 12, 1838, trial minutes for Oliver Cowdery, who was reportedly called in by Joseph Smith to help calm Emma after she discovered him with Alger, Cowdery circulated rumors of immoral behavior between Smith and Alger implying the relationship constituted adultery. All of the testimonies describe the 1837 conversations in which the affiant asked Cowdery about the rumors. Cowdery affirmed they were true and that Smith's behavior had been abominable. When asked explicitly if Smith had confessed to adultery, Cowdery reportedly answered,"No," but only after hesitation and "considerable winking" that would tend to undermine the literal meaning of the word.³⁵

Smith and Oliver Cowdery argued over the accuracy of the latter's rumors months before Cowdery was brought to trial. In a letter to his brother Warren three months before his trial, Oliver reported on "some conversation" held with Smith "in which in every instance I did not fail to affirm that which I had said was strictly true. A dirty, nasty, filthy affair of his and Fanny Alger's was talked over in which I strictly declared that I had never deserted from the truth in the matter, and as I supposed was admitted by himself."³⁶ The letter clearly represents the relationship as sexually immoral, and its reference to an impure "affair" is almost always read as a direct accusation of adultery.

Another category of evidence that the Fanny Alger relationship was extramarital is that of late reminiscences. Such reminiscences are given by William E. McLellin, a "Mr. Moreton[,] one of the first Apostles" as cited by Disciples of Christ minister and critic of Mormonism, Clark Braden, and "Lewis and Ezra Bond," also as cited by Braden.

McLellin claimed to have heard stories in the 1830s of Joseph Smith's "polygamy and adultery" and to have confirmed these in conversation with Emma Smith in 1847. In an 1872 letter to the prophet's eldest son and presumptive heir, Joseph Smith III, McLellin related the two cases Emma had reportedly verified, the first a relationship between Smith and the daughter of a thus far unidentifiable Hill family and the second with Fanny Alger.³⁷ The Hill relationship he understood to be adultery: Smith, he said "committed an act with a Miss Hill -- a hired girl" around the time of Joseph Smith III's birth in November 1832. When caught, Smith is said to have called in Oliver Cowdery and other church leaders to mollify Emma, and next to have "confessed humbly and begged forgiveness" of Emma and the church leaders, after which "Emma and all forgave him."³⁸ Regarding Fanny Alger, McLellin was less specific but later described her relationship with Smith as "polygamy."³⁹

The two narratives are closely parallel and often thought to be variant tellings of a single event.⁴⁰ The earliest published association of the name "Fanny Alger" with Joseph Smith supports this identification, narrating the story of a hired girl having a sexual relationship with Joseph Smith, a discovery which so distressed Emma that Oliver Cowdery had to be called in to keep the peace.⁴¹ This source is an 1881 piece in the AntiPolygamy Standard by the pseudonymous "Historicus."⁴² "Historicus" relates that when Joseph Smith III was a young infant, "Emma Smith, Joseph's Wife, had a young girl in her employment by the name of Fanny Olger or Alger," and "she [Emma] discovered that Joseph had been celesitalizing with this maiden, Fanny." Emma consequently "became terrible worked up about it. She was like a mad woman, and acted so violently that Oliver Cowdery and some of the elders were called in to minister to her and 'cast the devil out of sister Emma.'"⁴³ The author narrates Joseph Smith's relationship with "Fanny Olger or Alger" as a case of adultery, but, like McLellin, backdates the affair to the infancy of Joseph Smith III. There are thus variant narratives of the Fanny Alger relationship in which she is clearly McLellin's "Miss Hill."

McLellin himself may have received two versions of the scandal, one in which Fanny Alger was described by name and identified as Smith's plural wife and another in which she was given the name "Hill" (plausibly "Fanny Hill," in conflation with the heroine of John Cleland's famous 18^th century erotic novel⁴⁴), identified as Smith's adulterous paramour, and said to have been discovered in a relationship with him around 1833, more plausibly the time she moved into the Smith home, rather than the time the relationship was discovered by Emma.⁴⁵

Clark Braden's first source on Joseph Smith's alleged adultery, a "Mr. Moreton," referred to by Braden as one of Smith's "first Apostles," is described in the 1884 transcription of a debate with RLDS apostle E. L. Kelley as having "told his daughter and her husband that Emma Smith detected Joseph in adultery with a girl by the name of Knight, and that Joseph confessed the crime to the officers of the church," another likely garbled reference to the Alger incident.⁴⁶

Braden also reports information he received from members of the Bond family, who lived in Kirtland at the time of the Fanny Alger incident:

Lewis Bond and Ezra Bond have repeatedly stated that their father and mother, who were amongst the first Mormons in Kirtland, repeatedly declared that Smith practiced polygamy in Kirtland, and that he followed a girl into a privy and committed fornication with her. Mrs. Bond made such declarations to Mrs. Hansbury and others.⁴⁷

Ezra Bond was a member of the Ira and Charlotte Bond family, and it was his sister Mary E. Bond whose correspondence with Eliza Webb on Fanny Alger is quoted above.⁴⁸ The Bonds were apparently present in Kirtland at the time of the Alger incident, and in a position to hear the gossip. In her letter to Mary Bond, Eliza Webb stated, "I suppose your mother will remember what a talk the whole affair made."⁴⁹ So the girl Smith supposedly followed "into a privy" is likely Fanny Alger, with whom he was actually caught in another outbuilding, the barn.

There is thus evidence of an extramarital affair between Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger in roughly contemporaneous events, in the Brewer and Cowdery testimonies within a few years of the event, and in further testimonies in succeeding decades. But before the sum of this evidence can be properly weighed it must be properly critiqued.

Review and Critique of the Evidence for Adultery

The evidence for an extramarital affair between Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger is of varying quality. While the evidence of contemporaneous behavior provides some direction, the direct testimony, despite surface appearances, is largely ambiguous, failing to distinguish between an extramarital affair and a secret polygamous marriage.

Even the vehement oral accusations and letter by Cowdery, for instance, fall short of stating that Smith's behavior constituted adultery. In his trial, Cowdery was charged with "insinuating" that Smith's relationship with Alger was adulterous, accused of this in the testimony, and convicted of making insinuations rather than assertions that Smith had committed adultery. Though said to have given his verbal answer with incongruous body language, he stated "no" when asked point blank if Smith's confessions to him amounted to an admission of adultery. There is nothing to indicate that "adultery" was his term. This reluctance to use the term "adultery" seems out of line with his emphatic condemnation of Smith's "dirty, nasty, filthy" behavior and his insistence that his reports had been "strictly true" and "never deserted from the truth of the matter."

Because Cowdery was alienated from Joseph Smith at the time of his trial and was being expelled from the church, it is not likely that the best construction was being placed on his words and actions. And Cowdery was not in attendance at his trial, rendering him unable to defend himself from exaggeration and misunderstanding. The wrong he saw in Smith might thus have not been adultery, but polygamy.

Evidence coincident with Cowdery's return to the church eight years later indicates his revulsion to polygamy and his incredulity that it would be allowed as a religious practice.⁵⁰ For Cowdery, polygamy was a sexual sin in itself, and perhaps arguably constituted adultery. Such an uncertain definition on Cowdery's part would account for his curious mix of vehemence against Smith's "dirty, nasty, filthy" behavior on the one hand and reticence to directly call it "adultery" on the other.

Though Cowdery's letter, with its talk of Smith's "dirty, nasty, filthy affair," would seem to explicitly identify the relationship as an extramarital affair, it does not. The letter stops short of an accusation of adultery. The key word is "affair." Although it has hitherto escaped comment, that word in Oliver's January 21, 1838, letter overwrites a pre-existing word. An examination of the overwriting on the manuscript letter, in the Oliver Cowdery Letterbook at the Huntington Library by Christopher C. Smith, confirms that the copyist first wrote another word after "dirty, nasty, filthy" and then replaced it with "affair."⁵¹ The original, underlying word appears to have been "scrape," a word also used in the trial testimony to narrate Cowdery's description of the trouble Smith and Alger had gotten themselves into. Noah Webster in his 1828 dictionary of American English defined a "scrape" as a "difficulty; perplexity; distress; that which harasses," adding that it was "a low word."⁵² The letter's original use of this word is significant for how one should interpret the replacement term "affair."

Oliver Cowdery essentially wrote, in his original letter to Warren, that Smith and Alger had gotten themselves entangled in "a filthy mess." But this was changed during or subsequent to the copying of the original text into Oliver's letterbook. Someone thought the better of this word choice, presumably because "scrape" was, as Webster termed it "a low word," not one indicative of breeding and education. And it is not clear that this someone was Oliver. The letter was recorded in the letterbook by his nephew, Warren F. Cowdery, and it is not clear whether the decision to replace the word "scrape" was made by the author or by the copyist.⁵³ Whoever it was, replaced it with the word "affair," the primary definition of which at the time was, per Webster's,"Business of any kind; that which is done, or is to be done; a word of very indefinite and undefinable signification." The word "affair" was also occasionally used to refer to a love affair in the modern sense (though not so often for this definition to appear in Webster's), but does not appear to have been in its modern sense connoting an extramarital love affair. ⁵⁴ Thus the word substitution did not turn the Smith-Alger trouble into adultery, but into an ill-defined, if still "dirty, nasty, filthy," equivalent to McLellin's 1872 term "transaction" or the 1838 trial term (from Smith or the clerk) "business." Only the phrase "dirty, nasty, filthy scrape" can be traced directly to Oliver Cowdery. But neither of the phrases--"dirty, nasty, filthy scrape," or "dirty, nasty, filthy affair"--provide any information that would distinguish between the sin of adultery and the sin of polygamy, as he saw it.

The 1842 Fanny Brewer affidavit, likely reflecting Cowdery's reported 1837 "insinuations," identifies Smith's crime as "unlawful intercourse."

The much later testimony of William McLellin,"Mr. Moreton," and the Bond family is more ambiguous. Although McLellin's 1872 letter to Joseph Smith III described his father committing adultery when it spoke of the involved girl as "Miss Hill," it was less specific in characterizing his relationship with "Fanny Alger." But in McLellin's conversation with J. H. Beadle of the Salt Lake Tribune three years later, as narrated by Beadle, he described Joseph Smith's relationship with Fanny Alger as "the first well authenticated case of polygamy."⁵⁵ Thus McLellin appears to describe two relationships, one adulterous and one polygamous, with Fanny Alger's being the latter. However, if, as most interpreters have concluded, the stories both refer to Fanny Alger, then McLellin describes her relationship with Joseph Smith inconsistently, as adultery and as polygamy, providing ambivalent witness to an extramarital affair.

Braden's "Mr. Moreton,"cited third hand, is more explicit that Smith's crime was "adultery." But the source is problematic. There was no "Moreton" among the first of the LDS Twelve Apostles, nor among any of the subsequent apostles. And research by the author and Brian C. Hales has failed to identify a likely "Moreton" (or "Morton") to provide this information. William E. McLellin was one of "the first Apostles" in the LDS Church. The father of Braden's "Mrs. Hansbury" was almost certainly not a "Moreton" but a McLellin.⁵⁶ McLellin's identity as Braden's "Moreton" would explain Moreton's reported status as one of Smith's "first Apostles" and account for the information Braden claims to have received by way of him. Like William McLellin's "Miss Hill," Moreton's lady of the "Knight" was caught with Joseph by Emma, after which he "confessed" his sin to other church authorities. "Moreton" is thus not an additional source, and this third hand account adds little that is not found in McLellin's firsthand testimonies.

Members of the Bond family, as reported by Braden, described Smith's act with a girl, likely Fanny Alger, as "fornication." Yet they also affirmed that Smith practiced "polygamy" during the Kirtland era, again communicating ambiguity over whether Smith's relationship with Alger was marital or non-marital in nature. As in the larger body of testimony reporting an adulterous relationship between Smith and Alger, the description is equivocal. Likely such ambiguities express the mixed understandings of the period when the event first became known: stories circulated of both polygamy and adultery.

The stronger evidences that Smith had an extramarital relationship with Alger are the contemporaneous events: Emma's expulsion of the girl and expressions of concern that her husband remain "pure"; Smith and Alger's termination of their relationship shortly after its discovery; and Alger's prompt marriage to another man.

It is possible that Emma Smith may have viewed polygamy as adultery during the Kirtland period, as she apparently did several years later in Nauvoo.⁵⁷ Whatever she knew or thought regarding the nature of Joseph's relationship with Fanny, it raised concerns in her mind that his absence from her could lead to infidelity.

Janet Ellingson's argument about Fanny Alger's behavior also has probative force. A relationship that is, by appearances at least, readily abandoned when discovered and promptly replaced would be quite atypical for a marriage.

But Ellingson makes too much of this data, arguing that Alger's marriage to Custer just a few months after her split from Smith demonstrates unequivocally that she had not regarded herself as married to Smith. Although their separation was not typical for a marriage, any marriage they had would, of necessity, been atypical, given its unusual circumstances, much like Smith's heavily documented yet atypical Nauvoo marriages. Though inaugurated with formal wedding ceremonies by elders with legal status as ministers, even these Nauvoo marriages themselves were non-legal and socially scandalous, and therefore carried out in secret. When these relationships were discovered, the consequences could be similar to those for Joseph and Fanny Alger's relationship: Emma's understandable rage, the expulsion of a plural wife from the Smith home, pressure to terminate the relationship, and the rapid spread of rumor. Eliza R. Snow, for instance, who had witnessed Emma's "fuss" over Fanny Alger in the Smiths' Kirtland home, faced her own "fuss," eviction, and demand the relationship cease when her marriage to Joseph was discovered by Emma in the Smiths' Nauvoo home.⁵⁸ Snow's relationship with Joseph Smith survived the turmoil. Not all plural marriages did.

Even in the Utah period, when polygamy was an established, public system of marriage, polygamous marriages were contracted and abandoned more readily than monogamous marriages. And early, secret marriages were still more precarious. Seven years after Smith's relationship with Alger ended, his relationship with two other wives was similarly terminated. In August 1843, Emma gave Joseph an ultimatum, requiring that he give up his polygamous marriages with Emily and Eliza Partridge, to which she had explicitly consented at the ceremony, and demanding the girls immediately remarry in order to preempt possible resumption of their relationship with Smith. Under this pressure from his first wife, Smith relented. He and the Partridge sisters parted with an understanding and a handshake.⁵⁹

Smith's relationship with Fanny Alger seven years earlier, contracted without Emma's knowledge or consent and before Smith had taught polygamy's doctrinal rationale, was at least as vulnerable to such pressure. If Smith and Alger did marry, their secret marriage was likely destined for a similar private or even de facto"divorce"--physical separation with the understanding the relationship could not persist in the face of domestic and communal uproar.

In either case, whether Fanny Alger regarded herself as having left a marriage to Smith or an affair with him, she had considerable motive to promptly contract a legal marriage. Pregnant and single, a swift marriage was her only chance to avoid the stigma that an illegitimate birth would bring to her and the child.⁶⁰

The evidence that Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger had an extramarital affair may be summarized as follows. In 1837 and 1838, Oliver Cowdery believed Smith and Alger to have committed sexual sin and reportedly insinuated that their relationship constituted adultery but refused to assert it as a fact. Others later ambivalently characterized the relationship as adultery and as part of his Kirtland establishment of "polygamy." More significantly, when the relationship was discovered, Joseph Smith, Emma Smith, and Fanny Alger took actions less typical for a marriage than for an affair, though also somewhat typical of later secret polygamy.

Evidence of Marriage

The evidence for a marriage between Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger also temporally divides into contemporaneous evidence, early testimony, and late testimony. But this, more extensive body of evidence also divides into further types. Some of the relevant evidence addresses the larger question of whether Joseph Smith preached and practiced polygamy at Kirtland, providing a backdrop against which claims of polygamy between Smith and Alger can better be assessed. Other evidence directly addresses the Smith-Alger relationship. This may be divided into evidence from the following sources: Oliver Cowdery's trial, Fanny Alger's family, contemporaneous Kirtland residents, and contemporaneous members of the Smith household. Also bearing on the question of marriage is the timing of the relationship.

Evidence of Kirtland Polygamy

Evidence for Kirtland polygamy predates the 1836 discovery of Joseph Smith's relationship with Fanny Alger. One of the earliest and clearest sources of such evidence is the August 1835 "Article on Marriage" inserted into the Doctrine and Covenants. The Article, quoted above, responds to a case in which some unidentified persons entered a polygamous relationship and thus brought "reproach" upon the Church. The Article makes clear that polygamy, as distinct from adultery, emerged in Mormonism during the Kirtland period, but does not state whether Joseph Smith was one of those involved or provide details of the case.⁶¹ It does, however, offer a significant, if overlooked, clue regarding the incident in the following statement:"According to the custom of all civilized nations, marriage is regulated by laws and ceremonies: therefore we believe, that all marriages in this church of Christ of Latter Day Saints, should be solemnized in a public meeting, or feast prepared for that purpose."⁶² The Article's explicit directive that marriages be solemnized at public events suggests that the case in question was not one of bigamy, in which a married person obtains an ostensibly legal marriage to a second spouse, nor one of mere adultery. In forbidding marriages performed in secret, the Article suggests the "crime of polygamy" to which it responds was likely such a secret marriage.

Additional evidence of Kirtland polygamy can be found in reminiscent accounts from the 1840s, two of them made during Joseph Smith's lifetime. The first, appearing in Oliver Olney's 1843 Absurdities of Mormonism, asserted, "Polygamy was first introduced in Kirtland, Ohio, about eight years ago. . . . . it was first said to be too strong meat for the Latter Day Saints to bear."⁶³ Olney, who had been a Kirtland resident with in-law connections to prominent Saints, understood polygamy to have originated around 1835.⁶⁴ The second, the pseudonymous letter of "An Exile" published in the Warsaw Signal two months before Joseph Smith's death, also identified the mid-1830s as the time polygamy first emerged, similarly stating that it had been prematurely introduced, and adding that it re-emerged in 1838:

In the year 1834, at Kirtland Ohio, the aforementioned step in the heavenly stairway was located. Much excitement grew out of this measure; many of the Saints demurred. . . .. The doctrine was hushed up, as being sent before its time. . . .. The next glimpse I obtained of this hellish Spiritual Wife doctrine, was in the year 1838, just on the eve of hostilities in Missouri.⁶⁵

The letter appears to have been written by the disaffected Ebenezer Robinson, who shared its author's dissenter or "exile" status, close knowledge of and dissent from Nauvoo polygamy, and critical attitude toward the practice of tithing and the city's vast temple-building project.⁶⁶ His source of information regarding an 1834 marriage is unknown, but his 1834 date for the initial preaching or introduction of polygamy dovetails well with Olney's 1835 date and the Article on Marriage.⁶⁷ And his mention of "obtaining a glimpse" of polygamy in Missouri in 1838 can be explained by Robinson's involvement in the Cowdery trial, for which he clerked and at which he would have heard Smith's full, and unrecorded, explanation of what he had confidentially "entrusted" to his "bosom friend" Cowdery regarding his relationship with Alger.

John Whitmer, who was the official historian of the church during and in the aftermath of the Smith-Alger relationship, later (probably in 1847) wrote of that very time, "In the fall of 1836, Joseph Smith Jr., S. Rigdon, & others of the Leaders of the church at Kirtland, Ohio. . . .were lifted up in pride, and lusted after the forbidden things of God such as. . . .[the] Spiritual wife doctrine, that is pleurality [sic] of wives. . . . ."⁶⁸

Friendlier sources of later decades similarly report that polygamy was understood, if not practiced, by Joseph Smith in the Ohio period. Several of them place the initial polygamy revelation in or around 1831⁶⁹, and William W. Phelps is said to have identified its origin in the 1835 translation process for the Book of Abraham:

Elder W. W. Phelps said the in Salt lake Tabernacle, in 1862, that while Joseph was translating the Book of Abraham, in Kirtland, Ohio, in 1835, from the papyrus found with Egyptian mummies, the Prophet became impressed with the idea that polygamy would yet become an institution of the Mormon Church.⁷⁰

Benjamin F. Johnson attributed his own first awareness of polygamy to a conversation with his well-connected brother-in-law during the same time period: "In 1835, at Kirtland, I learned from my sister's husband, Lyman R. Sherman,⁷¹ who was close to the Prophet, and received it from him, 'that the ancient order of Plural Marriage was again to be practiced by the Church.'"⁷²

Smith's plural wife Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner did not learn of polygamy from him until early 1842, but recalled that he said he had first been commanded by an angel to take her as a wife during the middle of the Kirtland period, in 1834.⁷³

A voluminous but late and often confused set of testimonies to the Kirtland teaching and practice of polygamy is also provided by late non-Mormon recollections. G. S. Pelton recalled a Mormon man who acknowledged having two wives, and stated, incorrectly, that "[t]here was no secret about Mormons having plural wives in Kirtland."⁷⁴ Clark Braden cited J. M. Atwater's recollection of being told about polygamy in Kirtland by disaffected witness to the Book of Mormon, Martin Harris, who said polygamy was first announced by Smith's counselor Sidney Rigdon, that it was then "taught and practiced by Smith and in Kirtland under the name of 'spiritual wifery.'"⁷⁵

Kirtland Justice of the Peace J. C. Dowen recalled in an affidavit solicited by anti-Mormon author Arthur B. Deming that the Mormons were performing extra-legal marriages and also that he had once known "the names of Joe Smith's two spiritual wives in Kirtland."⁷⁶

Charlotte Bond, who (as noted above) was present in Kirtland at the time of the Fanny Alger incident, is reported by Braden to have "repeatedly declared" to her children and other of his sources "that Smith practiced polygamy in Kirtland," citing the example of a girl he followed into "a privy," though incongruously labeling his sexual relationship with her as "fornication".⁷⁷

More than one of the witnesses recalled hearing of Joseph Smith's rumored polygamy in 1837, when gossip about Smith's relationship with Fanny Alger reached its zenith. Nancy Smith Alexander recalled in an affidavit the source, place, and timing of learning the prophet was a polygamist: "I heard Mrs. Betsy Gilett, say in our house in Kirtland before the Prophet Jo Smith left for Mo. [at the end of 1837] [t]hat he practiced a plurality of wives. There was very much talk among the old women about plurality of wives. . . .."⁷⁸ Nancy's brother, Warren, told Braden of having heard the same or similar reports: "W[arren]. S. Smith and others testify that the practice of sealing women to men was so much talked of at Kirtland, while Smith was there, that it became a by-word on the streets."⁷⁹

Distinguished educator Alfred Holbrook recounted in his autobiography what he learned of polygamy during his 1837 visit to Kirtland as young man: "The doctrine was first broached in Kirtland by the revelation of Joe Smith, with reference to the daughter of one of the old inhabitants of Kirtland, who was sealed to Joe as his spiritual wife." ⁸⁰ Though the Algers were not "old inhabitants of Kirtland," the coincidence of visitor Holbrook hearing this rumor at the time Oliver Cowdery and others were most actively spreading the story of Fanny Alger strongly suggests she is the one referred to.

Tending to confirm these late accounts of prophetic polygamy rumors in Kirtland, Smith, as editor of the Elders' Journal, published a list of frequently asked questions, including this: "Do the Mormons believe in having more wives than one?"⁸¹ Though rumor had long held that the Saints practiced group marriage, Smith elided specific questions about "a community of wives" in favor of a question about "having more wives than one." Consistent with the accounts of Nancy Smith and Alfred Holbrook, the more salient rumor at the time was not one of free love, but of polygamy.⁸² These sources collectively identify 1837 as a time when polygamy gossip about the prophet spread widely in Kirtland and reached its peak. And it is not coincidental that rumors of his polygamy and his relationship with a woman later said to be his polygamous wife peaked at the same time.⁸³

Other evidence that the prophet and Fanny Alger were secretly married is given by the 1838 Oliver Cowdery trial, in testimony by her parents, brother, and cousin, and in late testimony by contemporaneous residents of Kirtland and even in the Smith home.

The 1838 trial proceedings in which Oliver Cowdery was found guilty of insinuating that Smith committed adultery offer distinct lines of evidence, ironically, not only that Joseph Smith's relationship with Fanny Alger was extramarital, but also that it was marital. Though Smith plainly denied to the high council that he and Alger had engaged in an adulterous relationship, it is not clear that he denied they had any relationship. His comment to the council about having entrusted many things to Cowdery implies the opposite--that he had confided the relationship to Cowdery:"Joseph Smith jr testifies that Oliver Cowdery had been his bosom friend, therefore he entrusted him with many things. He then gave a history respecting the girl business." Though the council clearly felt, on the basis of Smith's testimony, that Cowdery had indeed "falsely insinuated" he was guilty of adultery, the possibly sensitive details of what Smith had "entrusted" to his "bosom friend" were omitted by high council clerk Ebenezer Robinson from the trial record.⁸⁴

If Smith did broach the idea of polygamy in his explanation to the high council, this would account for Robinson's later affirmation that he "glimpsed" polygamy in 1838--which is when he would have learned the relationship was polygamous.⁸⁵ Robinson's statement might conceivably also refer to Smith's later reported 1838 relationship with Lucinda Harris. But it seems doubtful that this case, if it did occur at that time, would have been either well known or identified as polygamy. The relationship is not discussed in any available contemporaneous documents. And if had been known, Lucinda's legal marriage to George W. Harris would have framed it as adultery, rather than polygamy. The only known case at all likely to have provided a "glimpse" of polygamy at that time was, therefore, of Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger. Given Robinson's access to confidential information on that relationship, through the Cowdery trial, it very likely constitutes his "glimpse."

In understanding Fanny Alger's relationship with Joseph Smith as polygamous, Robinson would certainly not have been alone. Alger's family, in later years and likely at the time, understood it as such. When Fanny's mother and father retrieved her from Kirtland and took her to Indiana, Fanny was pregnant and at the center of a scandal. Nevertheless, Fanny's mother is said, on the authority of Eliza J. Webb, to have "always claimed that she was sealed to Joseph."⁸⁶

Fanny's brother was reportedly a more ambivalent witness. Benjamin F. Johnson, sharing his knowledge of Joseph Smith's life in 1903, reported that her brother's inquiries about the relationship after Smith's death were met with the answer, "That is all a matter of my own, and I have nothing to communicate."⁸⁷ But John Hawley, reporting on a conversation with the brother, John Alger wrote,"what I heard [from] John Olger one of the first (or among the first) members of the Church toald me his Sister was Seald to Joseph in Curtlin, this he Said to me in 1868 [sic]."⁸⁸

The account by Fanny's first cousin Mosiah Hancock also communicates the family understanding that she was secretly married to Joseph Smith. And however problematic Hancock's account is in several of its details, it seems more likely that he related garbled stories from his father, aunt, and other family than he created his entire elaborate family narrative ex nihilo.

Another type of evidence that the relationship was marital comes from witnesses who had been aware of the relationship at the time and recalled it years later to have been polygamy. Despite his ambivalence noted above, William McLellin qualifies as one of these, having described the relationship, according to the Salt Lake Tribune's J. H. Beadle, as "the first well authenticated case of polygamy."⁸⁹

Eliza Jane Churchill Webb was another. Webb, with whom Fanny Alger stayed after she left the Smith home, knew from Alger's explanations that Emma had evicted her because of her intimacy with Smith. While not committing herself to believing that Fanny's case was also one of full-blown "sealing," Webb was open to the "sealing" interpretation and expressed herself as "perfectly satisfied that something similar commenced" in Kirtland and particularly in the case of Fanny Alger. Though Eliza Webb's primary reason for holding this position appears to be that she knew Smith and Alger had a sexual relationship, her phrasing indicates that she believed a new relationship practice began in Kirtland, and not merely that Smith and Alger had a spontaneous extramarital affair.⁹⁰

Chauncey G. Webb, Eliza's husband, who was similarly situated to know what Fanny Alger said of her relationship with Joseph Smith, stated that Smith "was sealed there [in Kirtland] secretly to Fanny Alger." Further wording by Webb about the couple's "celestial relation" that resulted in Fanny's pregnancy is obviously facetious, but his statement about a secret sealing appears to be intended at face value. Webb, unlike McLellin, uses the term "sealed" to refer to something that happened to Smith and Alger, rather than to refer to what they did together in a hay loft. Webb also adds the qualifier "secretly" to the sealing of Smith and Alger, would be otiose if his term "sealing" is meant to refer only to sexual relations between the two. While Webb may not have understood the Smith-Alger relationship to have begun under the rubric of eternal marriage, he does appear to have understood it to have begun under the rubric of marriage.⁹¹

Even closer to the relationship between Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger is a witness, mentioned above, from within the Smith household, one of Fanny's co-residents in the home, the then newly baptized Eliza R. Snow. As two single women living with the Smiths, Fanny and Eliza are likely to have roomed together. And Eliza affirmed that she had known Fanny, lived in the home at the time the mistress of the house learned of the latter's relationship with Joseph Smith, and known of the "fuss" the discovery created.

Significantly, it was on Eliza's authority that Fanny Alger's name was presented to the world by Andrew Jenson as that of a plural wife of Joseph Smith. When Snow provided Jenson with the names of such wives, she omitted at least one wife she thought doubtful or problematic and then, before completing the list, deleted others.⁹² Had she felt uncertain or troubled over Fanny's status as a wife, or feared that including her as a wife might prove embarrassing, she had the option of omitting or removing her name as well. But she did not. Notably, Snow appears to have believed Fanny Alger was likely to be living at the time she presented Alger's name for publication, increasing the danger that a false identification of Alger as a plural wife might lead to embarrassment. Thus, in a few ways, Snow's inclusion and retention of Fanny Alger on her list of Joseph Smith's plural wives demonstrated considerable confidence that Fanny did indeed belong in this category.

Eliza R. Snow's confidence that Smith was not an adulterer who had used girls living in his home is also indicated by another, more momentous action she undertook. Six years after the Alger incident, while again living in the Smith home, she married Joseph Smith. She then, following a course eerily like Fanny's, reportedly found herself pregnant with his child and expelled from the home by Emma.⁹³ Though there is no doubt that Eliza Snow was taken with Joseph Smith's charisma and awed by his prophetic mantle, her action bespeaks a degree of trust in both Smith's revelations and his intentions that reasonably might, and ought, to have been lacking had she observed evidence that he seduced his former boarder, Fanny Alger.

While it is unclear whether Eliza R. Snow understood in 1836 that Joseph Smith was plurally married to Fanny Alger, it does seem evident that whatever she knew or observed of their relationship at the time did not prevent her from presenting Alger's name to the world as that of a plural wife nor from accepting a polygamous proposal from Smith herself.

The final line of evidence supporting a marriage between Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger is provided by the indications by Eliza R. Snow and others that the relationship was discovered in mid-1836. The timing of the relationship, or at least the timing of one bookend of the relationship--its termination, has implications for its nature.

The relationship of Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger was discovered and terminated later than has generally been believed. As noted, historians have usually identified the August 1835 Article on Marriage's declaration against polygamy as a response to rumor about the Smith family drama over Fanny Alger. But given that Emma did not make her "fuss" over Alger until mid-1836 and that rumors over that situation appear not to have gathered to a full head of steam until 1837, this cannot be correct. Thus polygamy had demonstrably entered Mormondom sometime before the Smith-Alger blow-up, from at least the time of the 1834-1835 events to which the Article on Marriage responded. It is senseless to argue that their relationship had to be extramarital when discussion, and even incidents, of polygamy (however little known) were underway in the church sometime before their relationship was discovered, and likely before it even began.

Another implication of the late ending date for the Joseph SmithFanny Alger relationship is that it increases the plausibility the relationship would have been solemnized by a third-party officiator in a formal, though private, wedding ceremony. Early Latter-day Saint elders believed they were within their rights to perform marriages, as ministers of the Gospel, and did so where this was legally permissible. But they were long denied this privilege in Kirtland, barred from obtaining licenses to perform marriages under ministerial authority (likely because their religious body was not properly incorporated with the county). Among the Saints, only Sidney Rigdon, who still possessed a license from his days as a "Campbellite" minister, used ministerial authority to perform public marriages. But ultimately even Rigdon was blocked from doing so and was indicted in June 1835 for performing a marriage on a license that was presumed revoked, because of his change of denomination. Any Latter Day Saint who performed a marriage in Geauga County on ministerial authority was subject to prosecution.⁹⁴

The publication of the Article on Marriage two months later changed this. Ohio marriage statute provided that officiators could act without a license so long as the ceremony was done "agreeable to the rules and regulations of their respective churches." Because the Saints now had official rules and regulations regarding marriage, their ministers could assert the right to perform marriages accordingly.⁹⁵ Indeed, this was likely an intended effect of the Article on Marriage and may account for the urgency of including the Article in the Doctrine and Covenants and even the need for it to disclaim the recent incident or incidents of polygamy. The Saints needed an official statement of marriage rules in order to legally perform their own marriages, and a public impression that the Saints would use this legal right to form quasi-legal polygamous marriages may have undermined their ability to assert it.⁹⁶ Though the Article on Marriage responds in part to an early incident of polygamy in the church, it is not about polygamy. Its purpose, and effect, was to enable the Saints to exercise in the legal domain an authority they believed they already held in the spiritual--the power to marry.

With the Article in place and the Doctrine and Covenants printed, the prophet began asserting his rights of marriage, first in performing the nuptials of Newel Knight and Lydia Goldthwaite Bailey on November 24. In doing so he declared, on Lydia's recollection:

Our elders have been wronged and prosecuted for marrying without a license. The Lord God of Israel has given me authority to unite the people in the holy bonds of matrimony and from this time forth I shall use that privilege to marry whomsoever I see fit.⁹⁷

Newel similarly recalled that the prophet performed the marriage "the name of the Lord, & by the authority of the preisthood [sic]."⁹⁸

That Smith claimed his authority to marry from God rather than from the state is significant. If he claimed authority solely from the state, then he would be justified only in performing marriages duly authorized by the state. But since he claimed authority from God, he could feel justified in performing, or delegating the performance of, any marriage he believed to be authorized by God--including a polygamous one.

There were several months between Smith's November 1835 public assertion that he (and "our elders") held divine authority to perform marriages and the discovery of his relationship with Alger, during which he could have had a marriage performed for them.⁹⁹ But there is no reason to suppose that Smith only came to believe he held divine authority to perform marriages when he acquired legal authority to perform them. Smith's November 1835 announcement celebrated his new ability to use his divine marriage authority legally, not a new bestowal of divine authority. An account from Justice of the Peace J. C. Dowen suggests Smith may have begun marrying the Saints "according to the law of God" before that time, with the understanding that the legality of the marriage depended on it being also solemnized by one licensed to marry. In any case, Smith claimed divine authority to marry under God's law no later than November 1835, making a marriage between himself and Fanny Alger after that date perfectly plausible.

Smith's self-understood authority to bind family relationships may have expanded still further before his relationship with Alger began when on April 3, 1836 he and Oliver Cowdery experienced the delivery of divine "keys" or authority from Elijah, the authority under which later Mormons would receive eternal marriage "sealings." A mid-1836 termination date for the Smith-Alger relationship thus makes it possible that it was not only a marriage but also a sealing, as suggested by the Webbs and others.¹⁰⁰ In either case the mid-1836 end date for the relationship is significant. As the plausible timeframe for the relationship's inception comes to encompass Joseph Smith's early public performance of marriages in fall 1835, and even the reception of "sealing keys" in early spring 1836, the plausibility that it was initiated with a marriage ceremony rises sharply.

Review and Critique of the Evidence for a Marriage

The evidence for Kirtland polygamy, and for polygamy between Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger in particular, needs to be examined critically so its true value can be assayed. The first evidence to be critiqued is that provided by the Article on Marriage. Because the Article precedes the Alger "fuss" it cannot refer directly to that incident; and it may not even refer to a relationship entered into by Joseph Smith. But polygamy ideas afloat in 1834-1835 Kirtland likely reflect Smith's private teachings and demonstrate that polygamy was even then resonant with Mormon restorationism. Smith's reported entry into polygamy by spring 1836 fits the context of the time.

The early testimony of Kirtland polygamy is one of the more impressive lines of evidence in its favor. Oliver Olney and Ebenezer Robinson, both dissenters against non-monogamous practices, had no reason to whitewash as polygamy what their knowledge suggested was only adultery. Yet both, writing during Smith's life and with reasonable claim to inside information, attested to Kirtland polygamy. John Whitmer, similarly unsympathetic to Smith and to polygamy and writing within four years of Smith's death, had as little reason to recast adultery as polygamy, yet referred to polygamy being taught in Kirtland at almost the precise time rumor of the Alger incident began to ripple out from the Smith house.

The circa 1835 testimony of Lyman Sherman on polygamy to Benjamin F. Johnson and Smith's own 1842 testimony that he had been commanded to wed Mary Rollins in 1834 are more problematic because they are reported secondhand and late.¹⁰¹ Johnson heard Sherman's statement while quite young, reported it nearly seventy years later and after many years' awareness of subsequent polygamy. Yet Johnson's numerous other late reminiscences are treated as valuable historical sources because of his general accuracy, and Lyman Sherman's early death and personal non-involvement in polygamy pinpoint the remembered conversation as occurring before the Nauvoo institution of polygamy and bolsters Johnson's recollection. Mary Rollins Lightner is also a widely used, informed and evidently accurate, source. And it seems likely that she recalled when, on Smith's account, the angel had first commanded him to marry her.

Less reliable and more problematic are the late testimonies of Kirtland residents and visitors. The testimony of G. S. Pelton that Mormons were open in their practice of polygamy in Kirtland is clearly false. The testimonies collected by Clark Braden and Arthur Deming are identifiably colored by John C. Bennett's popular 1842 expose The History of the Saints and by subsequent news reports on polygamy. Some of these testimonies anachronistically place the Nauvoo term "spiritual wives" on the lips of the Kirtland Saints and backdating Smith's early 1840s proposal to Nancy Rigdon to the mid-1830s.¹⁰²

Yet these recollections presumably reflect, to some extent, the rumors that raged over the Alger incident. And it seems unlikely that so many witnesses hostile toward Smith would have converted rumors of mere adultery into a more formal practice which, though alien to their own sensibilities, had some biblical claim to respectability.

The late resident accounts may also be inaccurate in describing Rigdon as a supporter of polygamy, something the Nauvoo sources do not show. Yet the claim is made in a few of these accounts, and also in John Whitmer's earlier, "inside" history, and this despite the Nauvoo-era narrative of Rigdon's anger when Smith proposed to his daughter. The accounts provide some evidence that Rigdon may have supported polygamy for a time during the Kirtland era, which, if true, might make him a candidate for performing Kirtland-era plural marriages.

Though none of the Kirtland residents testimonies of Mormon polygamy pre-date the Bennett expose, this puts them on par with the resident testimonies of Mormon adultery, which are also late and confused. The polygamy reports are more numerous and less ambiguous than those of adultery. Some of them tend to suggest 1837 as a peak time for polygamy rumor in Kirtland, which, as described above, is also the time when the Fanny Alger rumors peaked and when Joseph Smith found it necessary to respond in the Elders' Journal to the "common" question of whether the Saints believed in polygamy. Such consistency between late Kirtland resident/visitor accounts, early insider accounts, and denials in near-contemporaneous LDS press indicate the presence of contemporaneous rumor that Smith practiced polygamy.

The evidence of the 1838 Cowdery trial and his letter to his brother is inarguably mixed. The several affiants giving testimony for the trial appear to have understood Cowdery to imply that Smith had committed adultery with Alger. And though he would not explicitly affirm this, he did not deny it either, except in one dubious instance in which his nonverbal actions reportedly contradicted the verbal denial. Oliver's letter to his brother Warren, weeks before the trial, indicates that he and Joseph Smith argued vehemently over the meaning of Smith's behavior, implying they took different positions on whether it was adulterous. Smith's behavior, it appears, was not an open-and-shut case of adultery, but a matter of interpretation.

Smith's unrecorded disclosures to the high council regarding what he had "confided" in his "bosom friend" Cowdery and what had happened in "the girl business," imply he did not deny having a relationship with Alger, but only that the relationship was not adultery. Later and even contemporaneous rumors of his polygamy indicate the grounds on which he could have made such a denial. And high council clerk Ebenezer Robinson's remembered "glimpse" of polygamy in 1838, having no other readily plausible referent, provides significant evidence that Smith acknowledged to the council that Alger had been his polygamous wife.

The testimony of various members of the Alger family also provides evidence, but is nearly always indirect. The statements of Fanny's mother, brother John, and uncle Levi are all reported secondhand.¹⁰³ The only direct family testimony comes from her first cousin Mosiah, who was not alive at the time of the events he narrates and necessarily relies on his memories of his parents' stories.

These family members are consistent in affirming a marriage. Yet they appear to have been largely in the dark regarding any marriage details. The Mosiah Hancock account seems confused and attributes performance of the marriage to his father, who failed to claim such a thing for himself in his own autobiography. The mother's reported belief that Oliver Cowdery performed her daughter's marriage to Smith is inconsistent with Cowdery's documented rage over the relationship. And Fanny reportedly refused to offer her brother any clarification on the matter.

Possible explanations for this reported ignorance among close family are that 1) Fanny never disclosed anything to them about a marriage and they inferred from the later practice of polygamy that it must have been one, 2) the reports are erroneous (e.g., on Clarissa Alger believing her daughter's marriage to Joseph Smith had been performed by Cowdery, Fanny refusing to discuss the matter with John, etc.), and 3) Fanny's mother and possibly others were told she had married Smith, but further details were kept secret. Although any of these are plausible, it seems unlikely that Fanny refused to say anything to her mother and other family during her pregnancy about how she came to carry Smith's child. So she likely said something at least consistent with the marriage interpretation.

The testimony of those who were aware of the Fanny Alger blow-up in the Smith household at the time it occurred is also valuable in assessing the nature of the relationship. McLellin's testimony is, as discussed above, ambiguous. He appears to believe that Smith's relationship with Fanny Alger was polygamous while the same time holding that his relationship with "Miss Hill" (identified in other sources with Alger) was adulterous, seemingly testifying himself to a standstill.

Whatever Chauncey and Eliza J. Webb knew from Fanny Alger and from whoever had arranged her stay with them was at least consistent with polygamy, and perhaps suggestive of it. Both Webbs offered their testimony as opponents of Mormonism, and, like the non-Mormon and other ex-Mormon residents of Kirtland, had no reason to whitewash as polygamy what their information suggested to be only adultery.

Eliza R. Snow's identification of Fanny Alger as a wife was important but in two ways potentially problematic. First, Eliza may have only inferred after the fact that Alger had been Smith's wife, rather than paramour. And, second, in her autobiography she expresses the shock and dismay she experienced on learning, in Nauvoo, that polygamy "was to be introduced into the church" and reveals that she first thought this restoration was far off, probably even beyond the term of her natural life.¹⁰⁴Whatever experience Eliza may have had of polygamy in Kirtland, she did not understand from it that polygamy was to become a church practice, and may not have even recognized it as polygamy at the time (if indeed it was there). Yet such expressions of shock are a stock theme in the autobiographies of Nauvoo Saints, even when those Saints had prior inklings of polygamy. Benjamin F. Johnson and Brigham Young, who both report prior understanding that polygamy would be practiced, felt thunderstruck when they confronted it up close. The point of such narratives, which undoubtedly express genuine turmoil from the time, is that polygamy was not sought after or chosen, but dropped on the unwilling narrator, who accepts it only because God requires it. Given this function of the stock "polygamy shock" motif, Snow's autobiographical use of it tells little about previous encounters she may have had with polygamy, including whether she knew or heard in 1836 that Fanny Alger had been Joseph Smith's plural wife.

Despite her averred surprise, Snow demonstrated confidence in following Fanny's relationship course in Nauvoo and later in publishing her name as that of Smith's wife, even while she might well yet be living, suggesting that if she did not actually know from her Kirtland experience in the Smith household that her erstwhile housemate had been Joseph Smith's wife, what she knew from that experience was, at minimum,consistent with that conclusion.¹⁰⁵

The final evidence favoring a marriage between Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger is that the relationship ended much later than previously believed. This allows, and may suggest, that the relationship began relatively late as well. Given that the relationship did not end until approximately summer 1836, it plausibly began after the summer 1835 Article on Marriage reacting to polygamy within the church, and quite likely after the 1834-1835 case or cases of polygamy to which the Article responds. It also plausibly began after Smith publicly proclaimed his divine rights of marriage in November 1835, and probably after Smith began to believe he held such rights, increasing the odds that he saw it as a divinely authorized polygamous marriage.

Evidence that Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger contracted a marital relationship in mid-1830s Kirtland is of several types. Diverse lines of evidence, most of them strong in themselves, join in indicating this same conclusion. Contemporaneous evidence and late evidence, testimony and inference, family and stranger, friend and foe, all primarily affirm a marital relationship. The consilience or convergence of such lines of evidence is itself the best evidence that Smith and Alger married. This evidence is not without ambiguity or contradiction. There is evidence pointing in other directions. Yet given the mass and strength of this evidence and its solid preponderance in favor of a marriage, a marriage provides the best model for integrating the variegated data into a single picture. It seems unlikely that the voluminous and complex evidence for a polygamous marriage can all be integrated into a framework of simple adultery. The prognosis for integrating the evidence for adultery into the framework of an unfolding system of secret polygamy is much more promising. The evidence consistent with the hypothesis of adultery may not, and seems quite unlikely ever to, indicate that the relationship between Smith and Alger was a spontaneous extramarital affair, but it should inform and enrich understanding of how secret polygamy worked "on the ground."

The difficulty of identifying an officiator for the marriage, a difficulty apparently shared even by Fanny's family, may be read as indicating that there was no marriage to be officiated, but is almost certainly better understood to indicate the secrecy of the relationship and perhaps the nonstandard nature of its ceremony.¹⁰⁶ The behavior by Smith and Alger that seems atypical of marriage and could reflect adulterous intent better reflects the infeasibility of carrying on an individual marriage relationship outside of an established marriage system and demonstrates the contradictions of attempting to establish one marriage system in the shadows of another. Marriage, by its nature, is not only a personal contract but also an institution of society, helping to build societies, one familial block at a time, but also drawing strength from society, its recognition, norms, and traditions.

Conclusion

A polygamous marital relationship between Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger is better evidenced by the data than an extramarital affair, better fits the contemporaneous context, and holds greater explanatory power. It is more voluminous, of more distinct types, from a greater range of persons, and less ambiguous. The evidence demonstrates that the relationship between Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger, when we know of it existing in spring-summer 1836, was carried out in a church into which polygamy had entered and in which non-legal marriages could be justified as divinely sanctioned.

In such a case, where the evidence is thoroughly mixed, a key interpretive question is, "Which of these hypotheses best explains the evidence for the other?" The polygamy interpretation of Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger's relationship accounts for the rise of its opposite, and for a great deal of data the other cannot.

Rumors and assertions that Smith and Alger committed adultery are readily explained under the polygamy interpretation if not everyone was in the know regarding the marital relationship or regarded it as legitimate. In this case, the relationship would be assumed adulterous by default. But the adultery interpretation does not similarly explain contemporaneous rumors, early accounts, family accounts, and numerous reminiscences of polygamy, which is decidedly not the default interpretation for an intimate relationship between a married person and someone besides their legal spouse.

Though secret, atypical, and of uncertain officiator and date, Joseph Smith's relationship with Fanny Alger merits identification as his earliest known polygamous marriage. Polygamy appears to have commenced in Kirtland, which requires that scholars interpret the practice in the light of Kirtland theology, as well as that of Nauvoo, and that they interpret Kirtland theology in light of this unorthodox marital practice.

What occurred at the veil of Kirtland temple, behind which Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery, still brothers, met Christ and the biblical worthies and what occurred behind the veil of secrecy that covered polygamy, and parted the brothers, are two sides of that same uniquely Mormon work, "the restoration of all things."

Endnotes for Weighing the Case of Fanny Alger

1. Oliver Cowdery to Warren Cowdery, January 21, 1838, Oliver Cowdery Letterbook, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

2. Donald Q. Cannon and Lyndon W. Cook, eds., Far West Record: Minutes of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1830-1844 (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1983), April 12, 1838, 162-169.

3. For considerable background on Alger's life and relationship with Joseph Smith, see Todd Compton,In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1997), 25-42; and,"Fanny Alger Smith Custer: Mormonism's First Plural Wife?"Journal of Mormon History 22 (Spring 1996):174-207; and Brian C. Hales, "Fanny Alger and Joseph Smith's Pre-Nauvoo Reputation,"Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 35 (Fall 2009):112-190.

4. Alger's pregnancy is reported by Chauncey Webb, to whose home she turned when evicted from the Smiths': "In Kirtland, he was sealed there secretly to Fanny Alger. Emma was furious, and drove the girl, who was unable to conceal the consequences of her celestial relation with the prophet, out of her house." Wilhelm Wyl [Wilhelm Ritter von Wymetal], Mormon Portraits: Joseph Smith the Prophet, His Family , and His Friends (Salt Lake City: Tribune Printing and Publishing Company, 1886), 57.

5. Andrew Jenson,"Plural Marriage,"Historical Record 6 (May-August 1887): 232.

6. Compton, In Sacred Loneliness, 43-54; Hales,"Fanny Alger and Joseph Smith's Pre-Nauvoo Reputation," 129-135.

7. Joseph B. Noble offered this testimony a number of times. See, for instance, Franklin D. Richards Journal, January 22, 1869, Historical Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Noble also claimed to have sired the first child by polygamy within the LDS Church.

8. Autobiography of Levi Ward Hancock (with additions by his son Mosiah Hancock dated "Farmington Davis Co Co [sic], 1896"), 61-64, writing of Mosiah Hancock.

9. Ibid., 48-57, writing of Levi Hancock.

10. Ibid., 63, writing of Mosiah Hancock.

11. An 1833 timing for Fanny Alger move to the Smith home may also draw support from an 1876 statement of Eliza Webb, in whose home Fanny stayed when she left the Smith's. Wrote Webb, "Fanny Alger had lived in Joseph's family several years." (Eliza J. Webb [Eliza Jane Churchill Webb], Lockport, New York, to Mary Bond, April 24, 1876 Biographical Folder Collection, P21,f11, item 7, 8, Community of Christ Library-Archives, Independence, Missouri, transcription courtesy of Ron Romig.) Clarissa Alger's reported identification of 1835 or 1836 as the year of marriage (also per Webb, cited below) may reflect Fanny having not joined the Smith household until 1835 or may reflect her knowledge that the relationship did not begin until a couple years after her daughter's removal to the Smith home.

12. Note the assumption of polygamous norms that runs through Mosiah Hancock's account. He recounts that his mother, living as she did at the prophet's home,"had thought that perhaps she might be one of the Prophet's wives as herself and Sister Emma were on the best of terms. . . .. Father [Levi Hancock] goes to the Father Samuel Alger--his Father's Brother in Law and [said] 'Samuel[,] the Prophet Joseph loves your Daughter Fanny and wishes her for a wife what say you'--Uncle Sam Says--'Go and talk to the old woman about it twi'll be as She says' Father goes to his Sister and said 'Clarissy, Brother Joseph the Prophet of the most high God loves Fanny and wishes her for a wife what say you' Said She 'go and talk to Fanny it will be all right with me'--Father goes to Fanny and said 'Fanny Brother Joseph the Prophet loves you and wishes you for a wife will you be his wife'? 'I will Levi' Said She." Ibid., 63.

13. Webb to Bond, 1876 April 24. Compare the Eliza Webb letter to the following from her daughter Ann Eliza Webb Young, doubtless reflecting information from Eliza: "Fanny's parents considered "it the highest honor to have their daughter adopted into the Prophet's family, and her mother has always claimed that she was sealed to Joseph." Ann Eliza Webb Young,Wife Number 19; or, The Story of a Life in Bondage, Being a Complete Exposé of Mormonism, and Revealing the Sorrows, Sacrifices and Sufferings of Women in Polygamy. Hartford, Conn.: Dustin, Gilman, 1876, 67.

14. It is probable that if parental consent were obtained, parents would have been present for the ceremony and would have known who officiated. And even without her attendance at the wedding, it would be surprising if she did not that her brother who arranged it was also the one who performed it.

15. Richard S. Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy: A History, 2d ed. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1989), 4-16.

16. Dean R. Zimmerman, ed.,I Knew the Prophets: An Analysis of the Letter of Benjamin F. Johnson to George F. Gibbs, Reporting Doctrinal Views of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young (Bountiful, Utah: Horizon, 1976), 38-39.

17. Doctrine and Covenants, 1835 edition, Section CI, 251-252. The Article was removed from the 1876 Utah edition when the revelation on marriage (LDS D&C 132) was added.

18. See the discussion of Smith's trip to Pontiac, Michigan in Compton, "Fanny Alger Smith Custer: Mormonism's First Plural Wife?" 181, 196-97.

19. Dean C. Jessee, ed., The Papers of Joseph Smith, Volume 2, Journal, 1832-1842 (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1992), 52.

20. Personal communication with Mark Ashurst-McGee, July 16, 2010. Smith's diary for Friday, October 16, 1835, reads "was called into the printing office to settle some difficulties in that department, at evening on the same day I baptised Ebenezer Robinson the Lord poured out his spirit on us and we had a good time." The corresponding entry for October 17, reads "called my family together and aranged my domestick concerns and domestic dismissed my boarders."

21. Ebenezer Robinson, "Items of Personal History of the Editor," The Return (Davis City, Iowa), 1:4 (April 1889):58.

22. Hales,"Fanny Alger and Joseph Smith's Pre-Nauvoo Reputation," 177-187.

23. Joseph Smith, Editorial, Elders' Journal 1:2 (November 1837): 28-29. A similar inference on the date of the discovery was made by researcher H. Michael Marquardt in an October 19, 1995, letter to Gary J. Bergera: "It appears that whatever occurred with Fanny Alger probably happened in the year 1836 with Fanny leaving Kirtland, Ohio. This year is closer to the events relating to Oliver Cowdery since Cowdery had discussed the matter with Joseph Smith and others in the summer and fall of 1837." H. Michael Marquardt Collection, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City.

24. Cowdery's journal or "sketchbook" for the period leading up to the temple dedication says little directly about Smith, but gives every indication that believed in the sanctity of the temple and Smith's worthiness to dedicate it. Oliver Cowdery, Sketchbook, January-March 1836, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah. For the text of the sketchbook and Leonard Arrington's comments on it, see Leonard J. Arrington, "Oliver Cowdery's Kirtland, Ohio 'Sketchbook,'" in John W. Welch and Larry E. Morris, eds., Oliver Cowdery: Scribe, Elder, Witness (Provo, Utah: The Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, Brigham Young University, 2006), 241-262. Had Smith and Cowdery seen Christ in the temple after Cowdery became aware of Smith's relationship with Fanny Alger, then it is likely that Cowdery would have viewed Smith as unworthy of his role in the temple dedication and/or would have regarded Christ's visitation to Smith, in company with Cowdery, as an indication that Smith had nevertheless been divinely forgiven, something Cowdery's subsequent behavior indicates he did not believe.

25. Benjamin Winchester,"Primitive Mormonism," Salt Lake Tribune, September 22, 1889.

26. Ann Eliza Webb's discussion of Fanny Alger in her 1875 Wife No. 19, cited herein, mentions a girl named "Fanny," apparently as a wife. And the 1881 Anti-Polygamy Standard, also cited herein, uses the name "Fanny Alger or Olger," but describes her as a mistress, rather than a wife.

27. This list appears as Document #1 in Jenson's folder on Joseph Smith's polygamy in the newly available Andrew Jenson Papers at the LDS Church History Library. Jenson made a list of Joseph Smith's wives in his own hand and then turned it over to Eliza R. Snow (likely on a visit with her that he records in his journal for February 14, 1887) who added an additional fourteen names to the list, including that of Fanny Alger. I identified Snow's handwriting by comparing this portion of the document to other documents in her hand and then met with Brian C. Hales and Jill Mulvay Derr, Snow's biographer, on July 25, 2008 to examine the documents with them. After making the comparisons, she confirmed that "there is every indication" the fourteen additional names on Jenson's list are in Eliza R. Snow's hand.

28. Jenson Papers, Joseph Smith polygamy folder, Document #10. For further information on the Jenson find see, Hales, "Fanny Alger and Joseph Smith's Pre-Nauvoo Reputation," 142-145, and the present author's extensive work in progress on Andrew Jenson's Joseph Smith polygamy research materials.

29."In the Spring of 1836, I taught a select school for young ladies, and boarded with the Prophet's family: at the close of the term [likely that summer or fall] I returned to my parental home. . . .. The 1st of January 1837. . . .I bade a final adieu to the home of my youth, to share the fortunes of the people of God." Eliza R. Snow,"Sketch of My Life," 7."Utah and Mormons" collection, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley, microfilm copy in LDS Church History Library.

30. A more precise dating of the relationship's end is made in my presentation at the 2010 Salt Lake City Sunstone Symposium,"Dating Fanny Alger: The Nature, Timing, and Consequences of an Early Polygamous Relationship."

31. George D. Smith, Nauvoo Polygamy: ". . . . but we called it celestial marriage," Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2008, 39-43; Gary James Bergera, "Identifying the Earliest Mormon Polygamists, 1841-44,"Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 38 (Fall 2005): [1-74] 30 n75; Janet Ellingson, "Alger Marriage Questioned," Letter, Journal of Mormon History 23 (Spring 1997), vi-vii.

32. Emma Hale Smith to Joseph Smith, April 25 and May 2, 1837, Joseph Smith Letterbooks, LDS Church History Library, photocopy of holograph in Linda King Newell Collection, Marriott Libary, University of Utah, as cited in Linda King Newell, "Emma Hale Smith and the Polygamy Question," John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 4 (1984): 4. This connection was suggested by Brian C. Hales.

33. Ellingson,"Alger Marriage Questioned," vi-vii.

34. Fanny Brewer, Letter, September 13, 1842, Boston, printed in John C. Bennett, The History of the Saints: Or an Expose of Joe Smith and Mormonism (Boston: Leland & Whiting, 1842), 85-86, capitalization standardized.

35. Cannon and Cook, eds., Far West Record, 167-168.

36. Oliver Cowdery to Warren Cowdery, January 21, 1838.

37. Regarding unsuccessful attempts to identify a candidate "Miss Hill" besides Fanny Alger, see Hales,"Fanny Alger and Joseph Smith's Pre-Nauvoo Reputation," 145-146 and 146 n86.

38."William E. McLellan, M.D. to President Joseph Smith [III]," Independence, Missouri, July 1872, typescript in "Letters and documents copied from originals in the office of the Church Historian, Reorganized Church," LDS Church History Library; from originals in Community of Christ Library-Archives. If indeed Oliver Cowdery was involved in the event described, it cannot have been around the birth of Joseph Smith III, as here narrated. Cowdery left Ohio for Missouri nearly a year before the birth of Joseph Smith III and returned when the namesake Joseph was ten months old. Cowdery was present in Kirtland in the spring and summer of 1836, making it possible for him to have intervened that point. See the Oliver Cowdery biographical sketch on the Saints Without Halos website, http://saintswithouthalos.com/b/cowdery_o.phtml, accessed July 23, 2010.

39. J[ohn]. H[anson]. Beadle,"Jackson County,"Salt Lake Tribune, October 6, 1875, 4.

40. For a discussion of this question, see Linda King Newell, and Valeen Tippetts Avery, Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1984, first edition, 66; Smith, Nauvoo Polygamy, 40-42; and Hales, "Fanny Alger and Joseph Smith's Pre-Nauvoo Reputation," 145-147.

41. McLellin's account to J. H. Beadle identifies Fanny Alger as a hired girl, as his own earlier letter to Joseph Smith III had identified "Miss Hill," suggesting the conflation or identity of the two. Beadle,"Jackson County,"Salt Lake Tribune, October 6, 1875, 4.

42. Another author writing near the same time under this pseudonym was William Gill Mills, a merchant, poet, and Irish LDS convert who abandoned Mormonism and his plural wife while on a mission to England. Mills signed his pamphlet Blood atonement. Fully established as a doctrine and practice of the Mormon Church "Historicus. Salt Lake City, Oct. 25, 1884" (Salt Lake City, 1884). An examination of other Anti-Polygamy Standard pieces by "Historicus" suggests he was a missionary who worked in the Liverpool mission office, but probably in the 1870s, after Mills had left the church. His identity is as yet undetermined.

43. "Historicus," Anti-Polygamy Standard, "Sketches from the History of Polygamy: Joseph Smith's Especial[?] Revelations,"Anti-Polygamy Standard 2: 1 (April 1881): 1.

44. Newell and Avery, in a widely adopted interpretation, suggest that the elderly McLellin, conflated "Fanny Alger, with Fanny Hill of John Cleland's 1749 novel and came up with the hired girl, Miss Hill." Mormon Enigma, 66. See Smith, Nauvoo Polygamy, 40 n90; and Hales, "Fanny Alger and Joseph Smith's Pre-Nauvoo Reputation," 145-147. Conflation of Fanny Alger with the salacious Fanny Hill could also explain why McLellin was emphatic that "Miss Hill," unlike Fanny Alger, had been an adulterous paramour of Smith, rather than a wife.

45. As discussed above, an 1833 timing for the Fanny Alger move to the Smith home appears to be supported by the Mosiah Hancock account and dovetails with Eliza Webb's report that Fanny "had lived in Joseph's family several years." But Webb also indicates a close family understanding that Fanny's relationship with Smith began no sooner than 1835.

46. E. L. Kelley and Clark Braden, Public Discussion of the Issues between The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and the Church of Christ (Disciples) Held in Kirtland, Ohio, Beginning February 12, and Closing March 8, 1884, between E. L. Kelley, of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and Clark Braden, of the Church of Christ (St. Louis: Clark Braden, 1884), 202.

47. Ibid.

48. Among the useful sources on the Bond family is the Bond message board at Ancestry.com: http://boards.ancestry.com/surnames.bond/1204/mb.ashx, accessed July 22, 2010.

49. Eliza J. Webb to Mary E. Bond, April 24, 1876. The content of the letter suggests that the mother, Charlotte Bond, was a believing member of the RLDS Church, and perhaps therefore disinclined to believe Smith had been a polygamist. Yet, according to Braden, she acknowledged a relationship between Joseph Smith and this girl, apparently Fanny Alger.

50. Cowdery wrote regarding polygamy in an 1846 letter, "I can hardly think it possible, that you have written us the truth, that though there may be individuals who are guilty of the iniquities spoken of--yet no such practice can be preached or adhered to, as a public doctrine." Oliver Cowdery to Daniel and Phebe Jackson, July 24, 1846, original letter unlocated, photographs of original letter, RLDS Archives, as quoted in Scott H. Faulring,"The Return of Oliver Cowdery," in Welch and Morris, eds., Oliver Cowdery: Scribe, Elder, Witness, 332. For more on Oliver Cowdery's attitude toward polygamy, see Brian C. Hales,"Guilty of Such Folly?": Accusations of Adultery and Polygamy Against Oliver Cowdery,"Mormon Historical Studies 9:1, Spring 2008, 41-57.

51. Personal communication from Christopher C. Smith, October 2, 2009, regarding Oliver Cowdery to Warren Cowdery, January 21, 1838, Oliver Cowdery Letterbook, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California. At my request, Smith reviewed the letter. Although the overwriting is visible on the microfilm copy of this document available at the LDS Church Historical Library, the underlying text can be discerned only on the manuscript.

52. Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language (New York: S. Converse, 1828). Emphasis in original.

53. My thanks to H. Michael Marquardt and Brian C. Hales for the information that Warren F. Cowdery served as copyist for this letter.

54. An extensive search by the author of pre-1840 texts in electronic databases fails to shows the occasional use of the term "affair" in the sense of "love affair," but without any evident connotation of adultery.

55. Beadle, "Jackson County," Salt Lake Tribune, October 6, 1875, 4. Emphasis added. McLellin reportedly also referred (though perhaps only facetiously) to the intimacy Emma witnessed between Joseph and Fanny as a "sealing."

56. The name daughter's name "Hansbury" is erroneous as well. Braden's informant was likely Helen Rebecca McLellin, who married Lafayette W. Clarke.

57. Emma's Nauvoo view her husband's polygamy was an "indulgence" that would have been comparable to an extramarital affair on her part was described by Joseph Smith to William Clayton, and recorded in Clayton's journal. George D. Smith, ed.,An Intimate Chronicle: The Journals of William Clayton (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1995), 108, entry for June 23, 1843.

58. Newell and Avery, Mormon Enigma, 132-135, 155.

59. Compton, In Sacred Loneliness, 409-411.

60. The child whose fortunes likely guided Fanny in this decision does not appear with the Custers on the census and was probably stillborn or deceased in infancy.

61. Smith was not the only individual in Kirtland said to have practiced or attempted to practice polygamy. Benjamin F. Johnson claims that Jared Carter pursued this course in 1835. Dean R. Zimmerman, ed., I Knew the Prophets: An Analysis of the Letter of Benjamin F. Johnson to George F. Gibbs, Reporting Doctrinal Views of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, Bountiful, UT: Horizon, 1976, 38. And Oliver Cowdery's 1834 letters and the 1837 Kirtland Seventies' quorum minutes may hint at individuals entering this practice. See Hales, "Fanny Alger and Joseph Smith's PreNauvoo Reputation," 175-177, 188.

62. Doctrine and Covenants, 1835 edition, Section CI, 251-252.

63. Oliver H. Olney, Absurdities of Mormonism (Hancock Co., Illinois: [no publisher], 1843), 10.

64. Whether because of his family connections or other sources, Olney had an unusual amount of "inside" information on Joseph Smith, including inklings of the temple endowment two months before it was instituted and 1842 hints that Joseph Smith was making plans to send an expedition to the Rocky Mountains. See his journal writings for the period in the Oliver Olney Papers, originals at Yale; microfilm at LDS Church History Library.

65. An Exile,"The Nauvoo Block and Tackle,"Warsaw Signal, April 24 ["25"], 1844, 2.

66."The Nauvoo Block and Tackle" reflects Ebenezer Robinson's experiences and idiosyncratic concerns, including his rejection (from the Nauvoo period forward) of the system of tithing for purportedly providing funds for the church leaders but not for the poor, his objection to the revelation that the Saints would be "rejected with their dead" if they did not complete the temple within the appointed time (LDS D&C 124), his view that the latter idea was a threat to generate fear and provide "incentive" for the payment of tithes, his rejection of polygamy, his recent meeting alongside his wife with Hyrum Smith who had taught them polygamy and likely sealed them in eternal marriage at that time. Compare the content of "The Nauvoo Block and Tackle" to Robinson's personal history and religious reflections in The Return (Davis City, Iowa) 1:9 (September 1889): 136-137; 1:10 (October, 1889): 149-151; 1:11 (November, 1889): 174-175; 2:7 ( July, 1890): 298-299; 3: 1 ( January, 1891): 12-13.

67. Though Robinson did not, by his own account, arrive in Kirtland until March 1835, he was one of the printers of the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants, including the Article on Marriage, and was thus unusually well positioned to know what incident prompted W. W. Phelps, with whom he worked on the publication, to include it.

68. Bruce N. Westergren, From Historian to Dissident: The Book of John Whitmer (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1995), Chapter XX, 183. Robin Jensen, of the Joseph Smith Papers Project, has dated this portion of Whitmer's book to between February 21, 1847 (a date given at the beginning of Chapter 21) and Whitmer's early spring 1848 rejection of James J. Strang (whom he calls Smith's successor in the manuscript after the reference to 1836 "lusting" after plural wives). Personal communication, June 23, 2010.

69. For example, Joseph Bates Noble, at quarterly stake conference held at Centerville, Davis Co, Utah, June 11, 1883, cited in Andrew Jenson, Historical Record (May-August 1887): 232-33; Orson Pratt,Millennial Star,"Report of Elders Orson Pratt and Joseph F. Smith," 40 (December 16, 1878): 788; Joseph F. Smith, sermon in Deseret News, May 20, 1886; quoted in Andrew Jenson, Historical Record, 6:219; Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, Why We Practice Plural Marriage, (Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor Office, 1884), 53; Orson Pratt, sermon, October 7, 1869, Journal of Discourses, 13:193.

70. T. B. H. Stenhouse, Rocky Mountain Saints. New York: Appleton and Company, 1873, 182n, emphasis added. Stenhouse states: "Elder W. W. Phelps said in Salt Lake Tabernacle, in 1862, that while Joseph was translating the Book of Abraham, in Kirtland, Ohio, in 1835, from the papyrus found with the Egyptian mummies, the Prophet became impressed with the idea that polygamy would yet become an institution of the Mormon Church. Brigham Young was present, and was much annoyed at the statement made by Phelps, but it is highly probable that it was the real secret which the latter then divulged. The Conscientious Mormon who calmly considers what is here written on the introduction of polygamy into the Mormon Church will readily see that its origin is probably much more correctly traceable to those Egyptian mummies, than to a revelation from heaven. The first paragraph of the Revelation has all the musty odour of the catacombs about it, and that Joseph went into polygamy at a venture there cannot be the slightest doubt."

71. Sherman was called by Joseph Smith as an apostle but died before learning of the calling. See Lyndon W. Cook, "Lyman Sherman--Man of God, Would-Be Apostle," BYU Studies 19:1 (1978): 121-124.

72. As Johnson recalled, this disclosure regarding polygamy was made at the same time rumors were circulating that Joseph "loved Fanny."

73."He said I was the first woman God commanded him to take as a plural wife in 1834. He was very much frightened about until the angel appeared to him three times." Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner to Emmeline B. Wells, summer 1905, photocopy of manuscript in Linda King Newell Collection, Ms 447, Box 9, Fd. 2, Marriott Library.

74. G. S. Pelton affidavit, March 21, 1885, in Arthur B. Deming, Naked Truths About Mormonism (Oakland, California), 1:12 (April 1888): 203, Col. 3-1.

75. Kelley and Braden, Public Discussion of the Issues, 202.

76. J. C. Dowen affidavit, January 2, 1885, Deming, Naked Truths about Mormonism, 2:1 (December, 1888):301, Col. 1-3 through 1-5. Dowan was elected Justice of the Peace in 1833 and 1836.

77. Kelley and Braden, Public Discussion of the Issues, 202.

78."Mrs. Alexander's Statement," ca. 1886, A. B. Deming Papers, Utah State History Division (copy of material in the Chicago Historical Society).

79. Kelley and Braden, Public Discussion of the Issues, 202.

80. Alfred Holbrook, Reminiscences of the Happy Life of a Teacher (Cincinnati: Elm Street Printing, 1885), 223-24:"I do not think, however, that Mr. Rigdon ever favored the idea of polygamy. . . .The doctrine was first broached in Kirtland by the revelation of Joe Smith, with reference to the daughter of one of the old inhabitants of Kirtland, who was sealed to Joe as his spiritual wife. It was not the prevalent doctrine, nor generally received as binding upon other persons than those who were called by a distinct revelation."

81. Joseph Smith, Editorial, Elders' Journal, 1:2 (November 1837): 28-29. Smith's response to this question, in the succeeding issue of the Elders' Journal (printed July 1838) was,"No, not at the same time. But they believe that if their companion dies, they have a right to marry again." Joseph Smith, Editorial, Elders' Journal volume 1:3 ( July 1838): 43.

82. Although the standard "community of wives" charge is not among those Smith addresses Brian Hales suggests that the polygamy question should nonetheless be read in light of that charge, particularly given that the polygamy question is preceded by one on whether the Saints believe in "having all things in common." Hales, "Fanny Alger and Joseph Smith's Pre-Nauvoo Reputation," 172-175, 188. The issues of "plurality of wives" and "community of wives" are distinct, if often associated, and the question on having more wives than one suggests that rumors of the former were at least as much a concern as the latter.

83. It should not be assumed that polygamy rumors were universally distributed in Kirtland, nor even that everyone heard about Joseph Smith and Fanny Alger. Brian Hales has documented several Kirtland residents of the mid-1830s who later reported no recollection of polygamy talk in Kirtland. And an extensive newspaper search by Hales and the present author shows no media awareness of Mormon polygamy until 1842. See Hales,"Fanny Alger and Joseph Smith's PreNauvoo Reputation," 165-172. Rumors of adultery were likely the most widespread in Kirtland after the Fanny Alger "fuss" began, and some individuals apparently heard no rumors of relationship at all. But the early accounts of Whitmer, Olney, and Robinson suggest that some were in the know regarding the relationship's polygamous nature, and the broadly agreeing resident and visitor reminiscences, along with the Elder's Journal question, indicate that polygamy rumor also spread among the wider populace.

84. Cannon and Cook, eds., Far West Record, 162-169.

85. A similar interpretation is made by Richard Bushman: "[ Joseph Smith] contended that he had never confessed to adultery. . . In contemporaneous documents, only one person, Cowdery, believed that Joseph had had an affair with Fanny Alger. Others may have heard the rumors, but none joined Cowdery in making accusations. David Patten, who made inquiries in Kirtland, concluded the rumors were untrue. No one proposed to put Joseph on trial for adultery. . . . . On his part, Joseph never denied a relationship with Alger, but insisted it was not adulterous. He wanted it on record that he had never confessed to such a sin. Presumably, he felt innocent because he had married Alger." Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 324-25.

86. Ann Eliza Webb Young, Wife No. 19, or the Story of a Life in Bondage, being a Complete Expose of Mormonism, and Revealing the Sorrows, Sacrifices and Sufferings of Women in Polygamy, (Hartford, Connecticut: Dustin, Gilman & Co., 1875), 66-67. See also Eliza Jane Webb's report to Mary E. Bond (Webb to Bond, 24 April 1876) that Fanny's mother "says Fanny was sealed to Joseph" in 1835 or 1836. That Eliza Webb had continued communication with the Algers regarding Fanny seems evident from her knowledge of the fate of Fanny's child by Joseph Smith. The letter communicates Eliza's understanding that none of Joseph's children by polygamous wives survived, indicating either that Fanny's pregnancy ended without a live birth or that the child died. Although Chauncey Webb, as quoted in note 4 above indicates that Alger was pregnant when she left the Smith home (and went to the Webb home), his wife wrote, ". . . .Emma Smith turned Fanny out of her house because of Joseph's intimacy with her. Joseph never had any living children by his polygamous women. . . .."

87. Zimmerman, I Knew the Prophets, 33.

88. John Hawley Autobiography, January 1885, Community of Christ Library-Archives, excerpts typed March 1982 by Lyndon W. Cook, in Scott H. Faulring Papers, Marriott Library, Accn 2316. Box 19, Folder 11, 97. Spelling as in original.

89. Salt Lake Tribune, October 6, 1875.

90. Eliza J. Webb to Mary Bond, 24 April 1876; and Eliza J. Webb, Lockport, New York to Mary Bond, 4 May 1876, Biographical Folder Collection, P21, f11 [Myron H. Bond], item 9. Eliza appears to have been responding to a question from her correspondent Mary Bond regarding whether the practice of sealing really began in Kirtland, as suggested in Webb's previous letter. To this implied question Webb responded: I do not know that the "sealing" commenced in Kirtland but I am perfectly satisfied that something similar commenced and my judgment is principally formed from what Fanny Alger told me herself concerning her reasons for leaving 'sister Emma.'" Members of the Bond family, with whom Eliza Webb corresponded regarding Fanny Alger and who were evidently in Kirtland at the time of the stir over Fanny Alger, also believed the relationship to have been polygamous.

91. Wyl, Mormon Portraits, 57.

92. This may be demonstrated by an analysis of the changes made to the list in current work in progress by the author.

93. Brian C. Hales identifies five accounts indicating that Eliza was pregnant at the time of the conflict with Emma that preceded her expulsion from the Smith home, but questions their accuracy. See Hales,"Emma Smith, Eliza R. Snow, and the Reported Incident on the Stairs,"Mormon Historical Studies 10:2 (2009): 63-75.

94. Bradshaw,"Joseph Smith's Performance of Marriages in Ohio," 23-24.

95. Hartley, William G. "Newel and Lydia Bailey Knights Kirtland Love Story and Historic Wedding." BYU Studies 39 (2000): [6-22], 18; and, M. Scott Bradshaw,"Joseph Smith's Performance of Marriages in Ohio,"Brigham Young University Studies 39:4 (2000): 23-69.

96. This purpose for the Article on Marriage appears to have gone previously unremarked. I am indebted to the works Bradshaw, Hales, and Hartley for providing the basis for this reinterpretation.

97. Hartley, 17.

98. Newel Knight, "Autobiography and journal [ca. 1846];" MS 767, Folder 1, item 4, 59; LDS Church History Library.

99. Chauncey Webb's implication that Fanny Alger was visibly pregnant at the time she stayed in the Webb home suggests the relationship began no later than the end of April 1836, allowing five months in which a marriage could have been performed.

100. A post-April 3, 1836 date for the beginning of the Smith-Alger relationship is certainly possible, but, given her relatively advanced state of pregnancy later that summer, is less probable than an earlier beginning date. For a more precise date of the relationship's ending consult Bradley, "Dating Fanny Alger: The Nature, Timing, and Consequences of an Early Polygamous Relationship," which narrows the discovery to a two-week window in 1836, sets it in its immediate context, and works out its implications in detail.

101. On Lyman Sherman, see Lyndon W. Cook, "Lyman Sherman--Man of God, Would-Be Apostle,"BYU Studies 19:1 (1978):121-124.

102. For discussion of the backdating of the Nancy Rigdon incident and discussion of sealing from Nauvoo to Kirtland, see Hales,"Fanny Alger and Joseph Smith's Pre-Nauvoo Reputation," 127-129.

103. Research identifying firsthand family testimony on Fanny Alger's relationship with Joseph Smith would be one of the most valuable further contributions that could be made on the question.

104. Snow, "Sketch of My Life," 13: "In Nauvoo I first understood that the practice of plurality of wives was to be introduced into the church. The subject was very repugnant to my feelings-- so directly was it in opposition to my educated prepossessions, that it seemed as though all the prejudices of my ancestors for generations past congregated around me: But when I reflected that I was living in the Dispensation of the fulness of times, embracing all other Dispensations, surely Plural Marriage must necessarily be included, and I consoled myself with the idea that it was far in the distance, and beyond the period of my mortal existence."

105. Significantly, in 1899 Eliza's brother Lorenzo Snow had Fanny Alger posthumously sealed to Smith in the Salt Lake Temple as an earthly wife for whom there had been no sealing record, likely reflecting Eliza having told him that Alger had been a plural wife to Smith in this life. Also, the delay in her temple sealing to Smith until after her death suggests some awareness by the Snows and others that Fanny was still living during the 1880s.

106. One possibility that has been suggested regarding the origin of the relationship is that Smith and Alger entered a mutual covenant of marriage, without the need for an officiator, a less formalized version of polygamy that later Latter-day Saints equated with the biblical "concubinage." Another possibility is that Smith felt authorized, in an exceptional case, to officiate for his own marriage, much as Smith and Cowdery initially made exceptions to baptismal and ordination rules, Smith baptizing Cowdery before he had himself been baptized, etc. But given that Smith claimed divine authority to marry in the fall of 1835 (and probably much earlier) and could delegate any authority he held, it seems as likely, if not more so, that he employed a thirdparty officiator who has not yet been clearly identified. Possible candidates for the officiator role include Levi Hancock and Sidney Rigdon.