William Clayton (1814-1879) was born in Charnock Moss, England to Thomas Clayton and Ann Critchley. In 1836 he married Ruth Moon and in 1837 he was baptized into the LDS Church in the River Ribble in Preston, England. In 1840 he immigrated to America and settled in Nauvoo where he became a scribe to Joseph Smith. Clayton entered into plural marriage and was the husband of ten wives and thirty-three children. In 1847 he traveled to the Salt Lake Valley. He lived there for the remainder of his life.

William Clayton is best remembered today for his hymns, especially "Come, Come Ye Saints." Less known are his contributions as a church scribe, especially where large portions of his journals have been silently incorporated into LDS scripture and history. His impressions of day-to-day activities in Illinois and early Utah are equally significant.

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: sacrament. Wm. F. Cahoon and Charles A. Terry officiated. I spoke about three quarters of an hour on various subjects touching on our journey and the policy we ought to use, etc. After I had done Elder Haws spoke on some subjects and the meeting adjourned. The captains then went over to Elder Kimball's camp about sending fot corn. We concluded to send four teams for our 50, Captain Egan and Haws then went through the camp to .see if they could obtain some money. Haws obtained $31.45 and Egan $9.00. I sent $14.00 by Egan for some. Wrote to Diantha. Monday, 6xH. It has rained again the last night and continued to rain all day very heavily. The camp is very disagreeable and muddy. I spent the day reading. About 5:00 o'clock the clouds began to break and it looks more likely for being fair. In the evening Elder Kimball came over and the band met opposite Hutchinson's wagon and played .some. After that the quadrille band met in my tent and played on the violins. All the time we were playing the lightning occasionally broke forth from the northwest and at 8:00 o'clock we dispersed just as the storm approached. Before I got to my tent the wind arrived and soon tflew a perfect gale with heavy rain, hail, lightning and thunder. It continued for an hour and then abated some. All the tents in our company except mine and Pack's were blown down. The rain beat through the wagon covers and drenched the families and effects. It was the most severe storm we have experienced and with such wind it seems impossible to preserve our little clothing and provisions from being spoiled. But in the midstof all, the camp seems cheerful and'happy and there are but few sick. Tuesday, ?th. This morning it is fair but cold and windy. The ground is frozen stiff and considerable ice. Many of the tents are st...

This awe-inspiring book is a tribute to the perseverance of the human spirit. A House for the Most High is a groundbreaking work from beginning to end with its faithful and comprehensive documentation of the Nauvoo Temple’s conception. The behind-the-scenes stories of those determined Saints involved in the great struggle to raise the sacred edifice bring a new appreciation to all readers. McBride’s painstaking research now gives us access to valuable first-hand accounts that are drawn straight from the newspaper articles, private diaries, journals, and letters of the steadfast participants. The opening of this volume gives the reader an extraordinary window into the early temple-building labors of the besieged Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the development of what would become temple-related doctrines in the decade prior to the Nauvoo era, and the 1839 advent of the Saints in Illinois. The main body of this fascinating history covers the significant years, starting from 1840, when this temple was first considered, to the temple’s early destruction by a devastating natural disaster. A well-thought-out conclusion completes the epic by telling of the repurchase of the temple lot by the Church in 1937, the lot’s excavation in 1962, and the grand announcement in 1999 that the temple would indeed be rebuilt. Also included are an astonishing appendix containing rare and fascinating eyewitness descriptions of the temple and a bibliography of all major source materials. Mormons and non-Mormons alike will discover, within the pages of this book, a true sense of wonder and gratitude for a determined people whose sole desire was to build a sacred and holy temple for the worship of their God.

In this theoretically rich work, Mason Kamana Allred unearths the ways Mormons have employed a wide range of technologies to translate events, beliefs, anxieties, and hopes into reproducible experiences that contribute to the growth of their religious systems of meaning. Drawing on methods from cultural history, media studies, and religious studies, Allred focuses specifically on technologies of vision that have shaped Mormonism as a culture of seeing. These technologies, he argues, were as essential to the making of Mormonism as the humans who received, interpreted, and practiced their faith. While Mormons' uses of television and the internet are recent examples of the tradition's use of visual technology, Allred excavates older practices and technologies for negotiating the spirit, such as panorama displays and magic lantern shows. Fusing media theory with feminist new materialism, he employs media archaeology to examine Mormons' ways of performing distinctions, beholding as a way to engender radical visions, and standardizing vision to effect assimilation. Allred's analysis reveals Mormonism as always materially mediated and argues that religious history is likewise inherently entangled with media.

Feeding the Flock, the second volume of Terryl L. Givens's landmark study of the foundations of Mormon thought and practice, traces the essential contours of Mormon practice as it developed from Joseph Smith to the present. Despite the stigmatizing fascination with its social innovations (polygamy, communalism), its stark supernaturalism (angels, gold plates, and seer stones), and its most esoteric aspects (a New World Garden of Eden, sacred undergarments), as well as its long-standing outlier status among American Protestants, Givens reminds us that Mormonism remains the most enduring-and thriving-product of the nineteenth-century's religious upheavals and innovations. Because Mormonism is founded on a radically unconventional cosmology, based on unusual doctrines of human nature, deity, and soteriology, a history of its development cannot use conventional theological categories. Givens has structured these volumes in a way that recognizes the implicit logic of Mormon thought. The first book, Wrestling the Angel, centered on the theoretical foundations of Mormon thought and doctrine regarding God, humans, and salvation. Feeding the Flock considers Mormon practice, the authority of the institution of the church and its priesthood, forms of worship, and the function and nature of spiritual gifts in the church's history, revealing that Mormonism is still a tradition very much in the process of formation. At once original and provocative, engaging and learned, Givens offers the most sustained account of Mormon thought and practice yet written.