My Best for the Kingdom: History and Autobiography of John Lowe Butler, a Mormon Frontiersman
1995; University of Iowa; Volume: 54; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.17077/0003-4827.9901
ISSN2473-9006
AutoresWilliam Salt Lake, Danny L. Jorgensen, William Hartley,
Tópico(s)Archaeology and Natural History
Resumonarrates the life story of John Lowe Butler, an early Mormon convert hardened by the formative development of this new religion on the American frontier.He records the story in twenty-rune well-crafted chapters, and includes a fresh transcription of Butler's autobiography as the appendix.Hartley's skillful, painstaking investigation, exhaustively drawing on primary and secondary sources, results in a derise, very detailed, yet highly readable account of this heretofore little-known Mormon frontiersman.Hartley's interpretation of Butler's life represents the "new Mormon history," a massive body of entirely professional scholarship that has accumulated over about the past twenty-five years.He employs this literature to round out and locate Butler's story, supplies new information about certain murky events, and supports other studies.His treatment of Butler and Mormonism is sympathetic, but it does not avoid sensitive topics and it is not apologetic.While other more critical interpretations are possible.Hartley's rendering is plausible and defensible.Focusing primarily on Butler and the Mormons, his account does not ponder their significance for larger, more general intellectual issues.Beginning with Butler's marriage to Caroline Skeen in 1831, Hartley fills in their childhoods along the Kentucky-Tennessee border, picks up with their 1835 conversions, and follows them to the gathering of the six-year-old Mormon church in Missouri.Then he chronicles the Butlers' lives as the Mormortô are driven from Missouri, establish a theocracy at Nauvoo, Illinois, and abandon it for the trek to the intermountain West following the 1844 martyrdom of the founding prophet.John Butler's involvement in certain events of this periodhis Danite membership, principal role in the election fight at Gallatin that excited the civil war in Missouri, extensive missionizing among American Indians, policeman and bodyguard duties for Joseph Smith,
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