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Show Page 242 Orson saw as Mormon attempts to circumscribe God. Utah's "Dixie" boasted some of the most exalted zealots in Mormondom, he well knew, but their ostracism of his father and their peculiar touchiness on the subject of the massacre at Mountain Meadows set his teeth on edge. For years he had doubted the singular claims of Mormon gospel, he confessed to his High Priests' Quorum, and, though he had been a believer in his youth, did not now feel that Joseph Smith was especially sent of God. Brought up on charges against his membership, Orson Pratt Junior denounced his neighbors in severe but measured terms. They knew he bore a good character, he said, and he could not see why they would withdraw fellowship from him but not from those "guilty of ever so heinous a crime" - a veiled reference to known murderers from Mountain Meadows still in good standing in the Church. Then, pointing at the presiding authorities in Dixie, he spat out what no one had dared to speak of in public: "(My) father had not been down here long, when he found there was a secret influence working against him...and he sought for another mission...The individual is Erastus Snow." 13 What the father had suffered in quiet, the son cried out before the courts of the Church - Orson Pratt the apostle was being persecuted in secret; everyone knew it, he claimed, but no one would admit it. With that, "Veritas" left the Mormon Church and receded into a quiet family existence at Salt Lake with his books and music. The excommunication of her son probably gave Sarah Marinda Pratt the hardihood she needed to break with Orson and the polygamous system once and for all. Since Nauvoo days she had nuised the wounds of a degraded reputation among leading Mormon families, for the John C. Bennett affair was not easily forgotten; on top of this, Orson had, out of conviction, proposed to live on a more equal footing with all his wives, and this she could never accept. The polity of plural marriage in Utah generally |