Smith's journals made available to public for 1st time

They survived amid mobbings, beatings, burnings, a horse-drawn wagon journey across the Great Plains and even the ravages of mice roaming inside their wooden crate.

Now the contents of journals kept by LDS Church founder Joseph Smith have been made available to the public for the first time, word for word, as he wrote and dictated them to various clerks and scribes.

The inaugural volume of the long-anticipated Joseph Smith Papers series is now in LDS bookstores, offering scholars and ordinary Latter-day Saints alike a look at the "unvarnished words" of a man who said he was called of God to restore Christ's original church to the earth.

Richard Turley, assistant historian for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, held two of Smith's personal journals in a gloved hand on Monday as he read excerpts for reporters from a few of the water-stained pages that Smith inscribed in his own hand.

One entry described how, as a 17-year-old boy, Smith saw "another vision of angels" and became "very conscious that I had not kept the commandments" as he knew he should. The entire contents, as well as that of many others written from 1832 to 1839, appear in the new volume.

The impetus for what has become known as the Joseph Smith Papers Project began in 2000, Turley said, when LDS scholars decided to expand on a project that former Brigham Young University religion professor Dean Jessee had started. They enlisted the help of non-LDS scholars and collectors to provide insight and access to materials the LDS Church does not own — some of which were unknown at the time the project was initiated, he said.

Funding came in the form of an endowment from local philanthropists Larry and Gail Miller, and top LDS leaders gave their permission to reproduce the materials owned by the church and heretofore only available on a limited basis to researchers. Turley said it was initially like putting together pieces of a puzzle "with some significant gaps," only to find that many of those were filled when new materials came to light.

Some came from "private collections that are fairly obscure," while other missing pieces came from "tiny repositories in the eastern United States," he said, noting that original Smith documents are virtually priceless, and those who hold them avoid publicity.

The journals provide a look into the Smith's life that is "up close and personal" without the "filter of a biographer," Turley said.