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Show Page 2 Page 2 Orson Pratt's lifetime, a quarter of a million Mormons would follow, to 4 settle and to coax up the "treasures hid in the sand." He also stood square inside the gates of American history, for the frontiers of Israel were even then under contest on the embattled Mexican plains. For a moment, this short, shambling, thirty-five-year-old apostle of Mormonism was the embodiment of "Manifest Destiny." He had not come to die in the wastes, but to beat them; and, fittingly, his creed comprised nothing less than the apotheosis of America into the Zion of God. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was only sixteen years old when it moved, like the sectaries of ancient Palestine, into the desert in 1846. Keyed on the Book of Mormon, which suddenly translated into reality all the metaphorical celebration of America as the "Promised Land" of Israel, the Church proclaimed that the United States made up, literally, the inheritance promised in Genesis to Joseph of Egypt. Founding Prophet Joseph Smith, setting himself the task of gathering nations that did not, in large part, care to be gathered, scraped a few orthodox nerves along the way, and his people soon found themselves as hated as a Mosaic plague, thrust completely and murderously out of the states of New York, Ohio, Missouri, 5 and Illinois. Even in Utah, the Mormons would not "dwell in safety alone," nor Orson Pratt with them. For orthodoxy could not abide the doctrines of Mormonism. Joseph Smith held that the universe was filled with kingdoms peopled by evolving gods, that man, himself an eternal uncreated "intelligence," could aspire to patriarchal dominion over an everlasting increase of posterity. To the Mormons, extending the "frontier" was a literally universal prospect for which the trials of earthly pioneering constituted a sort of training 6 ground. "This life is the time for men to prepare," proclaims the Book of |