Happy 200th to man who shaped Utah

A happy 200th birthday today to Joseph Smith Jr., the man who did more than anyone, despite the fact he never personally set foot here, to make Utah the Utah that it is.

The person recognized as the first prophet, seer and revelator of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was born two centuries ago in Sharon, Vt., on Dec. 23, 1805. All his life he veered westward, first to New York, then to Ohio, then to Missouri and Illinois. He died on June 27, 1844, a little more than three years before the first Mormon pioneers, almost all of whom knew him personally, entered and settled the Salt Lake Valley.

His death by mob murder in Carthage, Ill., started the chain reaction that reduced Nauvoo, Ill., the previous church headquarters, to ruins and sent the Latter-day Saints on their 1,200-mile pilgrimage to a place where no one would bother them, largely on account of the fact no one was here.

When Brigham Young, Joseph Smith's successor, stopped his wagon at the mouth of Emigration Canyon on July 24, 1847, and said this was that place, it was because the surrounding hills matched the vision of the Rocky Mountain City of Zion Joseph Smith had shared with him.

There were maybe 20,000 members of the LDS Church at the time, strung between City Creek and England; today there are more than 12 million LDS members who live in almost every corner of the Earth, including about a million and a half in Utah.

Appropriately enough, nowhere has the church's yearlong 200th birthday celebration for its founder gotten more play than the place where Joseph's church has lived on. Over the past 12 months, I think it's safe to say no one in history has had more red-punch toasts raised in his honor.

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I chose to commemorate Joseph Smith's birthday by reading Richard Lyman Bushman's new Smith biography, "Rough Stone Rolling."

Ten years in the making, the book bills itself as "a cultural biography of Mormonism's founder" and even though Bushman, a Harvard graduate and history professor at Columbia University, is up front about being a "believing historian," he does a remarkable job of getting out of the way of his subject matter.

"For a character as controversial as Smith, pure objectivity is impossible," writes Bushman in his preface, "What I can do is to look frankly at all sides of Joseph Smith, facing up to his mistakes and flaws. Covering up errors makes no sense in any case. . . . Flawless characters are neither attractive nor useful."

The result is a comprehensive, almost exhaustive account of the 38 1/2 years Joseph Smith was alive — the highs, the lows, and the polygamy — all duly sourced and footnoted.