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Show Page 4 „ . " Page 4 were his words. The first Mormon pioneer to enter the "promised valley," he dedicated the site of the modern city of Salt Lake before Brigham Young ever saw it. The first to announce the principle of plural marriage to the world, he became its chief exponent - ironically so, for he had suffered a five-month excommunication in 1842 for objecting to it. In pro-selytism, sixteen crossings of the Atlantic made him unquestionably the most traveled of Mormon missionaries, and his monumental series of theological pamphlets - published in the 1850s - influenced thousands into investigation of Mormon claims. "It ±s impossible to give the history of that man," said one of his brother apostles in 1881. There are several reasons why his story has never been told in a full sense - the loss of his journals; the overshadowing adventures of his brother, Parley P- Pratt; the fact that he never took absolute pre-eminence in the Mormon Church - the scope of his interests and enterprises, moreover, make the task of reconstructing his life an enormous one. In the story of Orson Pratt, however, we see the drama of inspired humanity played out against hate-ridden scenes of mockery and violence. His friends and brothers were imprisoned, thirteen of his children died in famine on the plains, and he himself fought blindness and racking ague as he repeatedly walked continental distances to spread the Mormon Gospel. Nevertheless, he was always in attendance at the school of the universe: his algebra book was warped from the waves breaking in Atlantic storms; and tramping the icy mud of the Mississippi Valley amid four thousand exiles, he wished for a telescope to observe the satellites of Jupiter. In the signs and systems of heaven he found, not only the direction to a new Palestine in the vanguard of the Mormon exodus, but also the imminent kingdom of Christ. |