Why
this Edition?
We live in an age of visual stimulation.
Books compete with videos, CDs, television, and the internet. Yet books
are the staple of the ages. Books capture the feelings and experiences
of generations dead and gone. Books are the intimate companion of the
learning and the learned. Books were Parley’s best friends.
This book contains photographs capturing the life and times of Parley
P. Pratt. Many of his journeys took him to obscure locations in the wilds
of early America. In this volume, a new generation of Saints can see the
places Parley knew, and they can rekindle their love for the miracles
and stories of the Restoration. They can see the farm and land where Parley
was born.
They can join him on the Erie Canal as the Spirit moves him to get off
the boat. They can go to England and see the gospel expand in a new nation.
They can traverse the plains and mountains of the West to come to a new
place of gathering. And they can see the place where this dedicated apostle
was tried, hunted down, murdered, and buried.
This work captures the intimate feelings of Parley’s life taken
from personal correspondence to his loved ones and his brethren in the
leadership of the Church. Many of the endnotes illuminating the chapters
come from unpublished materials and personal communications. These endnotes
clearly reveal Parley’s absolute devotion and loyalty to the Lord
and to his chosen servants. They show Parley’s acute pain, suffering,
and struggles.
On one voyage
across the Atlantic, leaving his family behind again, he lamented in a
letter to one of his wives: “I am Alone! — Alone! —
Alone! O Horrible! — Yes — Alone — the punishment —
the Hell I always dread — and the one to which I am often doomed.
How oft has it been my lot to spend wearisome days, weeks and even months,
confined to the society of those whose spirits, ways, manners, tastes,
pursuits, hopes and jesting are so different from mine, that not a single
chord, or nerve beats in unison. This is hell to me.”i
The endnotes also reveal Parley’s exultant joy in his family and
his desires that each member receive an abundance of blessings and happiness
in their lives. In a letter from San Francisco written June 26, 1852,
to his wife Hannahette, he wrote:
Challenges
Our lives as writers and photographers appear to be glamorous
at times, chasing storms and racing against the fleeting light, trying
to capture scenes of the past on cellulose and silver. Our biggest challenges
usually are natural ones: weather and time. The weather, no matter what
it is, usually plays to our advantage; at least we strive to make it so.
Time is often a different story.
In May 1997 while on our first shoot for this work, we raced from Washington,
D.C., to Philadelphia, trying to arrive with plenty of afternoon light
to shoot a picture of the interior of the church where the Prophet preached
on January 14, 1840. Parley recorded the power of that event:
We found the church, which had become a Jewish synagogue,
behind a black iron fence on 412 Lombard Street in downtown Philadelphia.
The fence made the exterior difficult to shoot, but we hoped to photograph
the interior. Since it was Friday afternoon near the beginning of the
Jewish Sabbath, we hoped it would open at any moment. We went to the large
doors. They were locked solid. We tried the adjoining doors that opened
to offices connected to the church. They too were tightly closed. We looked
up and down the street, trying to find a clue to getting in. We found
another synagogue about two blocks away. On its doors were two or three
phone numbers. We tried them all until we reached a rabbi. He knew nothing
of the congregation down the street.
We finally located an obscure sign on the first church, found a phone
number, and went to a nearby video store to call. The rabbi was home but
lived about an hour away. He said that by the time he arrived we would
not be allowed to shoot because the Jewish Sabbath would have begun.
We asked, “Is there
anybody else with a key?” We begged and pleaded. He kindly said
that if we could arrange to come back in three or four days, he would
try to help us. Unfortunately, we didn’t have three or four days;
we only had about half an hour before we would lose the light and have
to be on our way to the next location. It had taken us three hours of
precious time to find out that we were truly up against locked doors in
every way.
Quite dejected, we walked from the video store toward our parked car.
This had never happened to us before. We had been all over the world shooting
pictures of sacred or significant places, and the way had always been
opened for us.
As we walked past the
old church, Scot paraphrased the Reverend Mother in The Sound of Music,
saying, “In all of our past shoots, whenever a door has been
closed, the Lord has always opened a window.” He glanced up at the
large stained-glass windows as we were nearly to the car. There, high
above the sidewalk, a small chunk of glass had fallen out of an enormous
window. It was just the size of the circumference of a camera lens.
Looking both ways, we climbed over the iron fence. With Maurine pushing
from behind, Scot stepped to a tiny ledge, stood on his tiptoes, and looked
inside the church. He had a perfect view of the front of the sanctuary,
including some of the first few rows of pews — the very place Joseph
had preached from the pulpit.
Scot carefully balanced
himself, with constant support from behind, and jostled the camera in
place. Not being able to see through the lens and hold himself safely
at the same time, he estimated the exposure, hoping his camera’s
autofocus was centered on the right object. He triggered the drive and
shot about sixteen exposures.
By then, Scot was beginning
to lose his balance, and Maurine’s muscles were shaking from bracing
him up. We hopped down, hoping we were done. Two weeks later our pictures
arrived. All of the shots were unusable except one — the one published
in this book. The Reverend Mother was right.
The photographs in this edition were, for the most part, taken of places
as they appear today. However, we tried to recreate scenes as they were
in Parley’s day by avoiding people, power lines, jet streams, and
cars.
We have also included maps to give the reader a sense of Parley’s
many journeys, wanderings, missions, and travels for the work of the Lord.
Parley was intrepid in every season and in every clime. He probably traveled
as far and wide as any of the early missionaries of the Church.
It was an awesome experience to handle some of the original documents
of the Restoration found in LDS Church Archives. One of the most powerful
experiences we had was finding a series of letters Parley had written
while he lay in chains during the dead of winter in a dreadful dungeon
in Richmond, Missouri. In our white-gloved hands we held the very letters
Parley had held in that dimly lit hellhole as he expressed in quill and
ink the deepest feelings of his heart to his persecuted and suffering
family, who had fled to Illinois. We felt the power of the Spirit during
those brief moments, and we felt humble and grateful that Parley persevered
through that terrible ordeal.
Scot Facer Proctor
Maurine Jensen Proctor
Editors
Salt Lake City, Utah
Manuscript completed February 22, 2000
Notes
i. See page
437.
ii. Parley P. Pratt to Hannahette Snively Pratt, June
26, 1852, Mary Jean Freebairn Collection.
iii. See page 362