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Show Page 32 12 village, New York, was a ghost town. When Orson Pratt returned to Fayette in company of Hyrum Smith, he found the Church busy packing up for a move to the Western Reserve. A new and influential convert had been made out of Sidney Rigdon, and he had persuaded the Prophet that he could find friends there. Orson determined to follow the Prophet to Ohio, and, falling in with Samuel Harrison Smith, he labored for a pioneer farmer to get money for the long walk to the Erie settlements. Orson was ten days behind the Prophet when he arrived at the village 13 of Kirtland. A hill country, dense and green, Kirtland had felt the Campbellite fire set by Sidney Rigdon at the close of the previous decade and was therefore accustomed to this distinguished-looking disciple. Rigdon now began his proselytism anew in favor of the latterday Mormon kingdom, and converts poured in heavy numbers out of Campbell's "Disciples" Church, a group which Joseph Smith considered "anticipatory." In consultation with Rigdon, Joseph Smith apparently became curious about the communitarian experiments Rigdon had tried in their neighborhood. The scene was set for such experimentation on the part of the Mormons. Hand in hand with the millennial enthusiasm which swept the United States came an eagerness to try reconstituting society itself. Of this era Emerson wrote, "There is not a man who has not a plan for a new community in his pocket." This impulse took a multitude of forms and actually emanated from a combination of influences. The earliest socialistic communities in America were formed by primitivist cults from Germany, whose tradition flowed back to the radicals of the Reformation. Robert Owen, a British philanthropist, had sparked with his theories an experimental community at New Harmony, Indiana, built on the principle of common ownership; founded in 1825, New Harmony had disintegrated within |