from a letter an upstate New Yorker named Lucius Fenn wrote from the town of Covert on February 12, 1830 (note the date), to an old neighbor in Connecticut about a curious book being published at Palmyra, some fifty miles away. It was said to be a bible which had been concealed in a stone chest in the earth for fourteen hundred years and which an angel had now revealed to a man named Joseph who could not read at all in English but who could read the book's gold leaves. Along with Freemasonry, the temperance movement (which Fenn called "the cold sober societies"), and the considerable stir religion was making that winter in the lake country, the gold bible was the news of the day. "It ismartyrdom at Carthage, were the lengthened shadow of Joseph Smith himself as he rose from village seer to American prophet. In his progress from Palmyra to Nauvoo he commanded attention in an age already full of the uncommon doings of common men. His unfolding theology seemed tuned to all the reform fiddles of the times, and he filled the breathless years of his brief but crowded career with expectations of the millennium, the Second Coming, and heavenly degrees of glory, with worldwide evangelism and practical programs of immigration and settlement and town planning, and with political aspirations and social nonconformities which the frontier, despite its vaunted individualism, could not abide. A powerful original mind, but untaught by the lessons of history, the Prophet came at length to regard