Display Review

Polygamy on the Pedernales: Lyman Wight's Mormon Villages in Antebellum Texas, 1845 to 1858

By Melvin C. Johnson

Reviewed by Jeffrey Needle
On 5/23/2006

Utah State University, 2006. Paperback:
240 pages.
ISBN: 0-87421-628-1
Suggested retail price: $21.95 (US)

Mormon history is filled with colorful characters and wonderfully contentious leaders. Born in a time of great uncertainty, weaned in a time when intense spiritual seeking and rugged individualism were the norm, Mormonism's story is one of faith, determination, high adventure and constant conflict. It should be no wonder that biographers and historians are so interested in the Church's leaders and members.

One such leader was Lyman Wight, friend of the Prophet and independent thinker. As a member of the notorious Council of Fifty, he held a high position in the early Church. When the death of Joseph Smith brought about a succession crisis in the Church, Wight battled with the Quorum of the Twelve, and its leader Brigham Young, as to identifying the next Prophet. Of course, Young was successful in gaining the reins of leadership. Wight, as well as others, chose not to align themselves with Young's leadership, and set out to establish his own Zion.

Melvin C. Johnson's book is a fascinating chronicle of Wight's ongoing efforts to, in effect, colonize the Texas territory, establishing polygamous communities there and in surrounding areas. It describes in wonderful detail Wight's refusal to join the Saints in Utah, instead carrying out orders from Joseph Smith to establish a place in the Texas territory.

Although he was a man of powerful charisma and strong determination, Wight's ability to lead was compromised by a bushel full of personal failings. As his disaffection from the Utah leadership developed, we see signs that other leaders in the Church held him in outright contempt. His ongoing problems with alcohol moved one leader to say:

Orson Hyde...as editor of the Kanesville (IA) Frontier Guardian, opined that the Wight colony was doomed to failure because "poor Lyman can't keep sober long enough to get 'on the perfect right track.'" (p. 113)

And his chauvinistic attitude toward women evoked this from Joseph Fielding:

Lyman Wight's attitude toward women was patriarchal and patronizing. In his journal in June 1844, Joseph Fielding noted the dismay he and his wife felt about Wight's comments about women, particularly women who were bothered by plural marriage...Mrs. Fielding took offense at Wight's public statement in their presence, "that if a woman complained of being insulted by any man, she ought to be set down as a strumpet, on the ground that no man would do it unless she gave him some liberty." (p. 47-48

Wight demonstrated an ongoing inability to play nice, to use a popular phrase. Friendships were, at best, transient. Accused not just of drunkenness but also of opium use and, at times, financial instability, he always lived on the fringes of respectability in the eyes of Saints and gentiles alike.

Central to understanding Wight is his undying devotion to the Prophet Joseph Smith. It was Joseph who directed Wight to explore a lumber mission in Wisconsin, in search of wood to build the Temple and for other needs. It was Smith who instructed Wight to seek out a possible sanctuary for the Saints in Texas. Wight, until the day he died, argued that

neither Brigham Young, nor James Strang, nor William Smith, nor any other Mormon leader could permanently replace the Smith family patrimony. Wight's refusal to subordinate his authority to those at Nauvoo, or Beaver Island, or Salt Lake City, or Covington was founded on his belief that only Joseph Smith Jr., "the seventh angel," could remove him from the Texas mission. As the oldest apostle in the Twelve and in the Fifty, he considered himself at least equal, if not senior, to his apostolic peers. His defiant letters became increasingly exasperated with those who tried to direct him or question his leadership. Coupled with his autocratic nature, these traits meant that no one could control him after Joseph's death. (p. 204)

Polygamy on the Pedernales wastes no words; its prose is spare and precise. And while it is primarily a history of Wight's accomplishments, and failures, as a Mormon leader, it appealed more to me as a critical character study of the man and his associates. Wight emerges as a multidimensional leader, a bit more complex than some of the histories might describe.