​For background before writing “The Believers In The Crucible Nauvoo”, I read Carol Cornwell Madsen’s book “In their Own Words – Women and the Story of Nauvoo” These pioneers through their letters, diaries, and writings poignantly capture the mosaic that was Nauvoo, women speaking in their own voices. Three days before Vilate Kimball wrote to her husband Heber, Joseph and Hyrum Smith had died, and John Taylor and Willard Richards had been severely wounded. Heber and the remaining seven of the Quorum of Twelve were away on mission. Thus, Nauvoo was leaderless while under siege. The entire letter Vilate wrote can be found in Dr. Madsen’s book. Below is a scene using excerpts from her letter.

Immigration 2.0 and succeeding versions followed. The Great Potato famine (1845 - 1849) caused mass starvation, disease, and desperation, and a wave of Irish came to America. By 1850 these Catholics made up a quarter of Boston’s once Protestant population. By the 1860s, NINA (No Irish Need Apply) accompanied help wanted signs. A song of the same name became popular in 1862 in London, which Irish-Americans adapted the lyrics to reflect the discrimination they felt as they sang.

Later, French Canadians streamed down from Quebec, cheap labor  to work the textile mills along the Merrimack River in Manchester, NH, and Lowell and Lawrence, Mass. By the mid-twentieth century, French-Canadian Americans comprised thirty percent of Maine, and towns like Lewiston had their enclaves known as “Little Canada”.

Similarly, at the turn of the last century Italians arrived, congregating in an enclave in Boston’s North End. Like the waves before, they faced challenges - poverty, discrimination, and a language barrier. They were full of emotion and more swarthy than the reserved, pale Yankee Puritans who were Boston’s establishment, seemingly under siege.

And the waves continue. Today, Hispanics and Muslims are in the news. Even on this tiny island of Martha’s Vineyard, we have a significant minority of Brazilians. Some come seeking jobs and, as a source of cheap labor, their opportunities abound. They seek a new start, some seek asylum. They speak different languages, and certain groups are viewed by some Americans as terrorist, the enemy similar to the view some Puritans had of the Scottish Prisoners of War who arrived 367 years earlier.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Did John Law face greater discrimination than subsequent immigration waves would face? And how about today’s immigrants? If you read The Immigrant, you might find some answers to these questions. ​

​When I tell people The Believers In The Crucible Nauvoo is about Naamah Carter who becomes Brigham Young’s plural wife, some, particularly males, elbow my ribs while offering a lecherous, “Heh, heh.” Others mention the sensational headlines about Warren Jeffs, the FLDS President, or the HBO series “Big Love”. A few do not realize the LDS church received a revelation and banned polygamy over century ago, paving the way for Utah to become our 45th state.

Joseph Smith received his troubling revelations to engage in plural marriage three times between 1834 and 1842 before finally acting upon it. In May 1843 with his wife, Emma, at his side, he entered in “celestial marriages” with Emily and Eliza Partridge, servants in his household. Soon after, Emma rued her decision. As the Female Relief Society of Nauvoo’s President, she spoke out against plural marriage and, eventually in March 1844, Joseph suspended their meetings. Joseph is believed to have had twenty-seven “celestial wives”, which was determined years after his death and, each is supported with varying degrees of objective evidence.

​Brigham Young on the other hand is far more complex. Facts vary on what constituted a marriage and when it may have occurred. Throughout Brigham's life, he was less than forthcoming about his marriages. Some historians have him with fifty-five wives and fifty-nine children from sixteen of those wives. One wife, Emmeline Free, bore him ten children. Thus, many were childless, begging a question if some of those marriages were conjugal.  In January 1846, the month preceding the exodus west, Brigham wrote in his diary he work in one stretch twenty hours a day for a fortnight, endowing the faithful and overseeing the Herculean task to cross the Mississippi and endure a harsh prairie winter as wandering nomads; and he married nineteen women, including his widowed mothers-in-law from his first and second marriage and a widowed sister-in-law. Neither these women nor several others he married in the January bore him children. Surely, Brigham’s reasons for marriage varied.

Naamah Carter married Brigham in January 1846. She was twenty years his junior, recently widowed, virtually alone, and dedicated to temple work. What were Brigham’s reason for proposing marriage to her, and how much soul searching did she undergo before saying, “yes”? The Believers In The Crucible Nauvoo offers answers to these questions as it unfolds this unusual love story. 

If you desire a robust insight to plural marriage, you might read Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s recent work A House Full of Females.