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Show RIVER branches were traditionally identified as Josephites, the RLDS followers who accepted Joseph Smith III as his father's heir, and Brighamites, the main LDS church that followed Brigham Young to Salt Lake and is now generally identified as the Mormon church. The main bone of contention between the two beliefs was polygamy: Joseph Smith's family maintained that it was the evil invention of Brigham Young, while the LDS church asserted it came directly from the founding prophet. An attorney by training, Joseph Smith III made a valiant legalistic defense of the RLDS position, but the facts of history ultimately overwhelmed the argument. Today the RLDS church tacitly accepts Smith's involvement in polygamy, while the LDS church, having renounced the practice in 1890, would just as soon forget about the whole thing and pretend that neither Smith nor Young ever had more than one wife. Growing up in Utah gave me an appreciation of this odd history, and despite spending half my youth in California, where historical amnesia is state policy, I had an enduring fascination with the human epic, especially in its odder manifestations. I'd long since lost belief in the faith of my childhood, but even in my late teens I realized that the story of the upstate New York farmboy who translated an ancient golden bible revealed to him by an angel was a great tale. During a year at Brigham Young University I'd come to accept Smith as charming scoundrel and an exceptionally successful confidence man. Joseph Smith's colorful career, during which he founded a uniquely American religion, raised the largest private army in the states, and married upwards of forty women, made the adventures of this Jacksonian prophet especially astonishing. At the time I considered myself an ex-Mormon, but I've since come to believe -73- |