Gospel Story Finder

A year ago I went with President Kimball back to his home in Arizona. And we visited the home where he grew up as a little boy. We climbed the winding stairs up to a bare room. And there the little boy, before he was a deacon, read the Bible by lamplight. We looked out the window from that upstairs room, and we saw the barns out in back where the cows had been. He used to milk nine cows every morning and night, the old-fashioned way. And as he milked the cows he learned the Articles of Faith, he learned the hymns, and he learned the Ten Commandments. He wrote them down on a little card and put them on the ground where he could look as he milked the cows.

And as he did these things, he decided to make up his mind. He was growing up, and he knew there were a lot of things that were good and a lot that were bad. He decided that when someone offered him a cigarette, he would say no. If someone offered him tea or coffee, he would say no. If they suggested that he be immoral, he would say no; to lie or to cheat, he would say no. He made up his mind when he was a little boy, before he was a deacon. He would do as his mother had taught him. He would keep the commandments.

And so as he grew older and the boys all came around and said, “Spencer, will you have a cigarette? Will you have a drink of whiskey? Will you have some coffee?” he didn’t have to stop to think. He didn’t worry about hurting their feelings. He had made up his mind just once to say no, and after that it was easy always to say no to the bad things. And that is how he has lived his life all these years.

One Sunday before church, I took my dog, Cesar, for a walk. We were approached by two dogs. At first, I thought they were wanting to play, but then they attacked us. Cesar was getting all the bites because he was protecting me. I screamed at the top of my lungs. When my parents came running outside, Dad rushed to our side and chased the dogs away. Cesar wasn’t badly hurt, thank goodness. Later, Mom told me that God protected both Cesar and me. I knew that that was true because I felt it inside. Cesar and Dad and Heavenly Father are my heroes, but I hope it never happens again.Matthew Salisbury, age 10Auburn, New York

Quorum members still talk about the time they touched down in a remote pasture to change crew members and found themselves right next to two campers who were slumbering peacefully in sleeping bags. The crew quietly made the transfer and, without a word, were off again. Awakened finally by the roar of the burners as the balloon lifted, the sleepers rolled over in time to see a huge balloon hanging in the sky above them. They may still be talking about the fantastic “dream” they both had.

It was in the Queens Ward that Robert, a college sophomore, met Mary Crandall, also a college student, whose family had recently moved to New York from Los Angeles. “After I met her, I never went out with anyone else,” says Elder Hales. “We were together every evening after work for the first two months sharing family activities. She’d help me wash my car, and I’d help her baby-sit her brothers; it was as though we were never going to be apart.” At the end of the summer, they both went back to college in Utah—Robert to the University of Utah and Mary to Brigham Young University. The following summer, on 10 June 1953, they were married in the Salt Lake Temple.

As a family, we decided that temple and family history work would be a major part of our married life. We have now completed thousands of ordinances for our kindred dead, including hundreds of Samoan names, which we had learned were very hard to find because of the lack of recorded history. However, my husband Sosene Faleofe “Fe” persisted and spent many hours and days in the family history centre reading microfilms of old documents. After much effort, he was able to process the names found and link them to his family lines. When we took those names to the temple each month, it was exciting to know that we were binding our families together forever.
To expand this work, we arranged several yearly temple days for four generations of our family: my parents, my husband and myself, our son and his wife, our older grandsons, my sister, and her family. We did the baptisms, confirmations, and washings for several hundred family members on these special family temple days, uniting our extended families in a way that could never have been accomplished otherwise.

We know that many wards lately have staged service projects featuring cemetery cleanups, but youth in the Goldsboro North Carolina Stake added another dimension: a historical visitor from the past.

After the youth weeded, hoed, mowed, scrubbed, and cleaned, Brother Allen Holloman, dressed in a Civil War uniform, appeared beside the tombstone of his great-great-grandfather and talked about the hardships that were faced during the war.

It takes hard work to bring about success. You are furthering your education and preparing for your life’s work. You are developing good habits that will have great power in your life. Nephi suggested that sowing seeds, reaping in abundance, and the raising of animals of every kind brought joy into his people’s lives. Our 11-year-old son Ala is learning this lesson well. In the spring, he was contacting people via Craigslist in hopes of starting his own chicken farm. He purchased a dozen Rhode Island Red chicks, built them a home and nesting boxes, and has diligently cared for them for many months. When they started laying eggs a few weeks ago, he was overjoyed with his contributions to the breakfast table. I’m hopeful that these lessons and responsibilities early in his life are paving the way for him to develop good work habits that will bless his life. I believe that developing these kinds of characteristics help us be better disciples of Jesus Christ.

Sister Jensen was facing some difficult problems. She had prayed for help and for peace of mind, but the answers seemed slow in coming. One particularly frustrating day, she cried out in prayer, “O God, why hast thou turned away from me when I need thy help?”
“Then to my mind,” she recalls, “came the still, small voice. It seemed to say, ‘When have I forsaken you? Was I not there when … ?’ Suddenly I remembered the many, many times in my life when I had received the Lord’s help and when I had felt of his great love for me. It was I who had not remembered him.”

In 2016, Charlotte learned that she had breast cancer. With treatment, her cancer went into remission but returned in 2019. She continued to serve and strengthen others until she passed away in April 2021, at age 50.

Charlotte had joined the covenant people at age 20 in Montpellier, France. And while she would quickly say that she was far from perfect, she treasured her covenants and stayed on the covenant path for the remaining 30 years of her life.

During her struggle with cancer, Charlotte wrote in her journal: “I am so thankful, so grateful for the Holy Ghost and the ability … to receive personal revelation. I do not know what I would do in my life without it. I would be lost.”

When I read her words, I thought of President Russell M. Nelson’s counsel to all of us on the covenant path: “In coming days, it will not be possible to survive spiritually without the guiding, directing, comforting, and constant influence of the Holy Ghost.”2

Connie Ruesch Cosman was a sister missionary in France as Charlotte entered the covenant path. They remained friends, and Connie came from Arizona to help care for Charlotte in her final two weeks of mortality. Sister Cosman wrote: “Charlotte never doubted and would do whatever the Lord asked of her. She sought for her own answers and received them. She continues to be an immense example for me and others.”

The day following Charlotte’s passing, her brother, Morgan, wrote to me, “I horribly miss her; we were very close.” He then spoke of a spiritual experience that came to him in the first night following her passing.

“[I know] she is happier than ever,” he said, adding that his spiritual experience “strongly confirmed what I already knew, and it healed my broken heart.”

A dear friend whom I admire greatly is particularly gifted with lovingly balancing her time. She always has been able to pay attention to what matters most, regardless of everything else going on around her. She once told me that the most important person to her is the one she is with at any particular moment...whether it is the mailman, the grocery clerk, or the next-door neighbor.

In the midst of the chaos and confusion of getting her six children off to school in the mornings, I recall seeing her stop everything and gather her children around the front door for a morning prayer. I remember picking her up for a meeting one busy morning when it was very apparent she hadn't taken the time to do her breakfast dishes or pick up the living room. Instead, I watched as she quietly and sweetly finished reading a picture book to her three year old before we rushed off to our meeting. She understood that anxiously engaged does not have to mean hectically engaged or frantically engaged. She has been a perfect example to me of "deep, quiet commitment" because of the way I have watched her use her time in serving the Lord and His purposes.

The small conversational correctives matter so much. If we have that quality, we will appreciate what General Robert E. Lee reportedly did on one occasion. Asked for his opinion of a military colleague, Lee replied candidly but generously, after which the questioner said, in effect, “Well, he doesn’t speak so highly of you.” General Lee replied, “Sir, you have asked me for my opinion of him, not his opinion of me.” Lee had, as one writer described another leader, “furnished his mind . . . with fixed principles” (Walter Bagehot, “Memoir of the Right Honourable James Wilson,” The Works of Walter Bagehot, ed. Forrest Morgan [Hartford, Connecticut: Travelers Insurance, 1889], 3:384). If you and I can process life’s tactical situations through a mind furnished with fixed principles, integrity is the result.

President Spencer W. Kimball read the Bible when he was fourteen years old—all 66 books and 1,519 pages. “If I could do it by coal-oil light,” he said, “you can do it by electric light” (The Teachings of Spencer W. Kimball, ed. Edward L. Kimball, Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1982, p. 131).
President Kimball was a very special teacher for all of us. He didn’t have a car or a bicycle, but he did have nine cows to milk every morning and night.
He said, “I thought, ‘What a waste of time, to sit on a three-legged stool. Maybe there is something else I could do while I am milking.’” He placed a copy of the Articles of Faith on the ground beside him and went through them, over and over, until he had memorized them. Then he repeated the Ten Commandments over and over until he learned them. He memorized important scriptures that would help him on his mission—all while he milked the cows. He didn’t have time to waste; he had things to do with his life (see The Teachings of Spencer W. Kimball, p. 131).

For a long time the Baum family—Brandon (12), Amanda (9), Laura Lee (7), James (3), and their parents, Terry and Karla—had been working on their goal of going to the temple to be sealed. It wasn’t an easy goal, but something happened that made them realize just how important that goal was.
Sister Baum was going to have twins, and the family was eagerly awaiting their birth. But when the tiny boys were born, they weren’t very strong. One died right after birth, and the doctors and family didn’t expect two-pound James to live either. A priesthood blessing, however, and lots of prayers helped him survive.
Although it was a sad and difficult time for the family, when they learned that they could have their little brother who had died sealed to them forever, their goal to go to the temple grew stronger.

In the spring of 1876, Brigham Young called Karl G. Maeser to preside at the first of these schools, Brigham Young Academy in Provo—which, at that time, was already in its first term under the interim principal, Warren Dusenberry. During his interview with Maeser, President Young gave Maeser the now famous charge “that you ought not to teach even the alphabet or the multiplication tables without the Spirit of God.”2
Maeser could scarcely have been better prepared for the job. He had obtained a world-class education in his native Saxony, served three missions after his conversion, and administered and taught in schools in Salt Lake City for about a decade and a half.
Maeser took over the academy at the beginning of its second term in late April. Before he left Salt Lake City for Provo, the Territorial School Association gave him a magnificent desk in recognition of his service3—a desk that will figure importantly in our story.
On a Friday afternoon at the end of the first week of school, Maeser received word that in three days President Young would be in Provo. The prophet wanted to see Maeser’s plans for a program that would fulfill the charge to teach every subject by the Spirit of God.
So under the pressure of the prophet’s pending arrival, Maeser sat at his desk through that Friday night trying to develop an educational plan that would incorporate President Young’s momentous conception of the Spirit’s role in true education. Nothing came. All through Saturday he worked, into the night, and then again on Sunday until the afternoon turned into evening. Finally he dropped, disheartened, to his knees, pleading, “O Father, show me the way, help me to make the plans for this great work. I cannot do it of myself.”4 Immediately the confusion of the preceding days was lifted, and within an hour or two Maeser had written out the plan for the new school. It had come to him as an answer to prayer.
Maeser’s plan ingeniously worked out many ways in which the students would grow morally and spiritually in the very same educational process that developed them intellectually.5 One of the factors that would make this process work was Maeser’s determination to have the ­teachers do nothing that the students were able to do. Students participated in the academic planning meetings, conducted discussion sessions following the theology classes, assisted administratively, and looked out for one another in a program much like our home and visiting teaching programs today. In this school each would serve the others, and all would progress together.

I think of some of the people who have had to do with the work in some of the areas where I have had responsibility. One able thinker, and I do not remember whether it was Emerson or Carlyle—I took them both the same semester—said that every great institution is but the lengthened shadow of a great man. I have thought, as I have met some Koreans here, of the status of our work in Korea, where today we have two strong missions and a strong stake of Zion. All of this is the lengthened shadow of Dr. Kim and the two young men who taught him the gospel while he was a student at Cornell University—Oliver Wayman and Don C. Wood. They stirred within their associate student an interest in reading the Book of Mormon. Their interest in him, their activities with him were entirely separate from the reasons for their working on an advanced degree that could have consumed every minute of his waking time, but they took time to teach and to learn; and when the Korean Ph.D. returned to his native land, he took with him his love for the Book of Mormon and for the Church whose services he had attended in Ithaca, New York. American servicemen involved in the Korean War had also shared the gospel with some of their associates. And the presence of Dr. Kim, man of learning and man of responsibility in the nation of Korea, became a catalyst that led to the establishment of the work, including the sending of missionaries from Japan. Dr. Kim is dead, but the work lives on in splendor, touching for eternal good an ever-increasing number of lives in the “Land of the Morning Calm.”

The family, who set sail from Liverpool, England, in 1856 on the ship Thornton, welcomed a new baby boy just three days into the voyage. The Thornton had been chartered to carry 764 Danish, Swedish, and English Saints. They were under the direction of a missionary named James Grey Willie.
Six weeks later the Thornton sailed into New York Harbor. The Moulton family then boarded a train to make the long journey westward. They arrived in Iowa City, Iowa, in June 1856, which was the starting point for the handcart companies. Only three days before their arrival, Captain Edward Bunker’s handcart company had pulled away from Iowa City, taking many of the available handcarts.
About two weeks later, the Willie company was joined by another company of Saints, under the direction of Edward Martin. Church agents at Iowa City, who had worked hard to equip and send off the first three handcart companies, now had to struggle frantically to provide for an unexpectedly large body of late arrivals. They had to construct 250 handcarts before these Saints could continue their journey.
Every able-bodied man was put to work making handcarts, while the women made dozens of tents for the journey. Many of these amateur cart makers did not adhere to specifications but made carts of various sizes and strength, which would prove a handicap to them. Of necessity, the number of needed handcarts required that they be built out of green, unseasoned timber, and in some instances, using rawhide and tin for the wheels. Each cart carried food as well as the total earthly possessions of many of the Saints.
Often, 400 to 500 pounds (180 to 230 kg) of flour, bedding, cooking utensils, and clothing were loaded onto each handcart. Only 17 pounds (8 kg) of personal luggage on a cart was allowed each person.
Thomas Moulton and his family of 10 were assigned to the fourth handcart company, again under the direction of Captain Willie. It comprised over 400 Saints, with more than the usual number of aged folks. A report made in September of that year listed “404 persons, 6 wagons, 87 handcarts, 6 yoke of oxen, 32 cows, and 5 mules.”1
The Moulton family was allowed one covered and one open handcart. Thomas and his wife pulled the covered cart. New baby Charles and sister Lizzie (Sophia Elizabeth) rode in this cart. Lottie (Charlotte) could ride whenever the cart was going downhill. Eight-year-old James Heber walked behind with a rope tied around his waist to keep him from straying. The other heavy cart was pulled by the two oldest girls—Sarah Elizabeth (19) and Mary Ann (15)—and by brothers William (12) and Joseph (10).
In July 1856 the Moultons bade farewell to Iowa City and began their 1,300-mile (2,090 km) journey westward. After traveling 26 days, they reached Winter Quarters (Florence), Nebraska. As was customary, they spent several days there, mending carts and taking on supplies since there were no major cities between Winter Quarters and Salt Lake City.
It was so late in the season before the Willie company was prepared to leave Winter Quarters that a council was held to decide whether they should go or remain until spring. Some who already had been over the route strongly cautioned them against the danger of traveling so late in the season. But Captain Willie and many company members felt that they should go on because they had no accommodations to spend the winter in Florence.
With inadequate provisions, members of the Willie company started their journey again on August 18, thinking they could replenish their supplies at Fort Laramie (north of present-day Laramie, Wyoming). In the face of the warning they had received, they placed an extra 100-pound (45 kg) sack of flour in each cart and trusted that they would meet supply wagons sent out from Salt Lake City. However, the drivers of the supply wagons, thinking there were no more immigrants on the trail, headed back to Salt Lake City in late September, before the Willie company reached them.
In Florence, the Moultons found it advisable to leave behind a box of supplies because the load they had to pull for a family of 10 was just too heavy. By then, they had left baggage at the port in Liverpool, a box of clothing onboard ship, a trunk of clothing at New York City, and a trunk of supplies containing most of their personal belongings at Iowa City. Even on the trail, they looked for ways to ease their burden.
Scotts Bluff National Monument in western Nebraska, USA
Photograph from Getty Images
It is difficult for those who enjoy all the comforts of modern life to imagine the daily misery of the Moulton family and the other remarkable men and women of those handcart companies. Can we imagine the blistered hands and feet, sore muscles, dust and grit, sunburn, flies and mosquitoes, stampeding buffalo herds, and Indian encounters? Can we imagine the river crossings and the difficulties of sand and slippery rocks as they tried to get the handcarts across swift or deep-running water? Can we understand the weakness that comes from a lack of sufficient nourishment?
During their travels, the Moulton children went into the fields with their mother to glean wild wheat to add food to their rapidly diminishing supplies. At one point the family had only barley bread and one apple a day for every three members.
Just before dusk on September 12, a party of missionaries returning from the British Mission arrived in camp. They were led by Elder Franklin D. Richards (1821–99) of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, my wife’s great-great-grandfather. When Elder Richards and the others saw the difficulties of the handcart company, they promised to hurry on to the Salt Lake Valley and send back help as soon as possible.
On September 30 the Willie company reached Fort Laramie, Wyoming, 400 miles (645 km) east of Salt Lake City.
With the beginning of October, winter set in, and the difficulties multiplied as the company attempted to press onward. Provisions were running so low that Captain Willie was compelled to cut rations to 15 ounces (425 g) of flour for men, 13 ounces for women, 9 ounces for children, and 5 ounces for infants. Soon they would face howling wind and drifting snow. By the morning of October 20 the snow was 4 inches (10 cm) deep, and tents and wagon covers had been smashed by its weight. Five members of the company and some of the draft animals had died of cold and starvation the night before the storm, and five more members died over the next three days. Feeding the women, children, and sick first, many of the reasonably strong men were forced to go without anything to eat.
Sweetwater River near Martin’s Cove, Wyoming, USA
Two miles (3 km) below Rocky Ridge on the Sweetwater River, the company made camp and waited in starvation, cold, and misery for the storm to pass.
When the Franklin D. Richards party reached Salt Lake City, they immediately reported to President Young the precarious condition of the immigrants. The Saints in the valley had not expected more immigrants until the following year, and news of their plight spread like wildfire.
Two days later, October 6, 1856, general conference was held in the Old Tabernacle. From the pulpit, President Young made the call for men, food, and supplies in mule- or horse-drawn wagons to leave the following day to render assistance.2
John Bennett Hawkins was in the Old Tabernacle on that day and answered the call to help. He was one of the hundreds of individuals in relief parties that set out from Salt Lake City. On the evening of October 21, the rescuer wagons finally reached the Willie camp. They were greeted with joy and gratitude by the frozen and starving survivors. This was the first meeting of John Bennett Hawkins and Sarah Elizabeth Moulton, who would become my great-grandparents.
On October 22, some of the rescuers pushed on to help the other handcart companies, while William H. Kimball, with the remaining wagons, started back to Salt Lake City in charge of the Willie company.
Those too weak to pull their handcarts placed their possessions in the wagons and walked beside them. Those unable to walk rode in the wagons. When they arrived at Rocky Ridge, another terrible snowstorm fell upon them. As they struggled up the side of the ridge, they had to wrap themselves in blankets and quilts to keep from freezing to death. About 40 of the company had already perished.3
The weather was so cold that many of the Saints suffered frostbite on their hands, feet, and faces while crossing the ridge. One woman was blinded by the frost.
We can imagine the Moultons, with their brood of eight children, pulling and pushing their two carts as they struggled through the deep snow. One cart was drawn by Thomas and his wife with its precious cargo?Lottie, Lizzie, and baby Charles?with little James Heber stumbling and being dragged along by the rope around his waist. The other cart was drawn and pushed by Sarah Elizabeth and the other three children. A kind, elderly woman, seeing little James Heber’s struggle, grasped his hand as he trailed behind the handcart. This kindly act saved his right hand, but his left hand, exposed to the subzero weather, froze. When they reached Salt Lake City, several of his fingers on that hand were amputated.
Early in the afternoon of November 9, the wagons of suffering humanity halted in front of the tithing office building, where the Joseph Smith Memorial Building now stands in Salt Lake City. Many arrived with frozen feet and limbs. Sixty-nine had died on the journey. But the promise to the Moulton family in that blessing in England had been fulfilled. Thomas and Sarah Denton Moulton had not lost a child.
The company was greeted by hundreds of Salt Lake citizens anxiously awaiting their coming and ready to help with their care. Gratitude and appreciation toward one of the young heroes who had helped save the Moultons from the grasp of death soon blossomed into romance and love for Sarah Elizabeth.
On December 5, 1856, amidst the happy wishes of her loved ones, Sarah Elizabeth married John Bennett Hawkins, her rescuer. They were sealed for time and eternity the following July in the Endowment House. They made their home in Salt Lake City and were blessed with three sons and seven daughters. One of those daughters, Esther Emily, married my grandfather Charles Rasband in 1891.
On July 24 we celebrate Pioneer Day, and we express gratitude for the many pioneers who gave everything to build up the Salt Lake Valley and many other communities in the western United States. We also express gratitude for Latter-day Saint pioneers throughout the world who have blazed—and are blazing—a gospel path for others to follow.
What moved them on? What pushed them forward? The answer is a testimony of the Lord Jesus Christ. As a great-grandson of pioneers, I add my witness and testimony that their struggles were not in vain. What they felt, I feel. What they knew, I know and bear record of.

Phillip McArthur, a professor in the Faculty of Culture, Language & Performing Arts, recounts a story of the work to follow the Savior in having brotherly love towards all men.
Let me give context to the story: This event took place just after the 2000 Coup in Fiji that was primarily centered in ethnic conflict. The Indo-Fijian president of the country had just been deposed by a pro-indigenous Fijian group and then there was a military take over. The coup occurred a month prior to graduation ceremonies at the end of June. It was customary a handful of student workers and presidency officers would wait for the graduates to come off the stand after receiving their diplomas and shaking the hands of the dignitaries, and then present them each with a lei. This presentation took place to the side by the student chairs so very few people focused on these exchanges while their attention was directed toward the stand.

“On this occasion I witnessed one of our Indo-Fijian graduates, after receiving his diploma, descend the stairs to be greeted by the student worker. I wanted to observe the interaction between the Fijian student worker and this Indo-Fijian graduate. When they met, the student worker placed the lei upon his friend, fellow citizen, and brother, and then they embraced with a most intense hug, burying their faces in each other necks. They held this embrace for some time, and when they raised their heads, I could see tears in both their eyes.

It was one of the most moving moments of genuine brotherhood, love, and affection among fellow saints I have ever witnessed. It was quiet, it was true, and identified what really matters, even in times of great political strain.” [8]

Joseph Daynes helped his father unload the small pump organ from their wagon. It was June 1862, and they had just arrived in the Salt Lake Valley. Their family and friends wanted to celebrate. They wanted some music, and Joseph, although just eleven years old, had been asked to play.
As Joseph began playing, people from all over camp came to listen. In the middle of a song, Joseph stopped playing when he noticed that the crowd was turning toward a man who had just stepped down from his buggy. It was President Brigham Young! He had come to greet the newest pioneers in the valley.
President Young walked over to Joseph and asked him to keep playing. Greatly impressed with the boy’s musical ability, he may have wondered, Could this be the person whom the Lord is providing to be trained to play the great pipe organ that Joseph Ridges is building for the Tabernacle?
President Young didn’t forget young Joseph’s musicianship. In 1864 he asked Joseph’s parents if they would allow their son to study with Professor Raymond, a fine musician from the East, who was now living in the Salt Lake Valley. Joseph’s parents agreed.
After considerable musical training, Joseph Daynes became the first Tabernacle organist. For many years he gave organ recitals and accompanied the Tabernacle Choir. He also wrote a number of hymns that were sung regularly in Church meetings.

This story about the Aaronic Priesthood begins with a young woman, 16-year-old Lauren DellAquila of the Cary Second Ward, Apex North Carolina Stake. Lauren hadn’t come to Church for years. She had never been baptized and confirmed, “but I just knew in my heart that the Church was true.”
She also knew David Christison, 16, and Andrew Hill, 15, who attend the same school, are Latter-day Saints. “I’m in marching band with David and had a couple of classes with Andrew last year,” she says. And she knew they stood by their beliefs. “It meant a lot to see their example, because most teens at our school don’t have values like they do,” Lauren explains.
Then one day after band, some other classmates were making unkind comments about the Church. Lauren told them if they really wanted to know the truth, they shouldn’t repeat rumors; they should find out for themselves. Afterward, David thanked her and asked how she knew so much about the Church. “She said that when she was really young she went to Church, but then her parents divorced and she stopped coming,” David says. “So I invited her to come again.”
“People had tried to get me to come back before, but for one reason or another it had never happened,” Lauren explains. “But when I told David and Andrew that I did want to try again, they were excited. I started coming to meetings, and they introduced me to the bishop, the missionaries, and the young women in the ward. They helped me feel at home.”
Soon Lauren was baptized and confirmed, and today she’s a happy, confident Laurel who recently gave a sacrament meeting talk about the importance of the priesthood. “If the gospel had not been restored,” she says, “I wouldn’t have seen two young men honoring their priesthood. And I wouldn’t have had the opportunities I have had to make covenants and to draw close to the Savior.”

The day after he received the plates, Joseph went to work repairing a well in a nearby town to raise money for a lockbox. That same morning, while on an errand just over the hill from the Smith home, Joseph Sr. overheard a group of men plotting to steal the gold plates. “We will have the plates,” one of them said, “in spite of Joe Smith or all the devils in hell.”
Alarmed, Joseph Sr. returned home and told Emma. She said she did not know where the plates were, but she was sure Joseph had protected them.
“Yes,” Joseph Sr. replied, “but remember that for a small thing Esau lost his blessing and birthright. It may be so with Joseph.”28
To be sure the plates were secure, Emma mounted a horse and rode for more than an hour to the farm where Joseph was working. She found him by the well, caked in dirt and sweat from the day’s work. Hearing of the danger, Joseph looked into the Urim and Thummim and saw that the plates were safe.
Back home, Joseph Sr. paced back and forth outside the house, glancing every minute down the road until he saw Joseph and Emma.
“Father,” Joseph said as they rode up, “all is perfectly safe—there is no cause of alarm.”29
But it was time to act.
Hurrying to the hill, Joseph found the log where the plates were hidden and carefully wrapped them in a shirt.30 He then ducked into the woods and headed for home, his eyes alert to danger. The forest concealed him from people on the main road, but it gave thieves plenty of places to hide.
Straining under the weight of the record, Joseph tramped through the woods as fast as he could. A fallen tree blocked the path ahead of him, and as he bounded over it, he felt something hard strike him from behind. Turning around, he saw a man coming at him, wielding a gun like a club.
Clutching the plates tightly with one arm, Joseph knocked the man to the ground and scrambled deeper into the thicket. He ran for about half a mile when another man sprang from behind a tree and struck him with the butt of his gun. Joseph fought the man off and darted away, desperate to be out of the woods. But before he could get very far a third man attacked, landing a heavy blow that sent him reeling. Gathering his strength, Joseph hit the man hard and ran for home.31
Back at the house, Joseph burst through the door with his heavy bundle tucked beneath one arm. “Father,” he cried, “I have got the plates.”
His 14-year-old sister, Katharine, helped him set the bundle on a table as the rest of the family gathered around him. Joseph could tell that his father and younger brother William wanted to unwrap the plates, but he stopped them.
“Can we not see them?” Joseph Sr. asked.
“No,” Joseph said. “I was disobedient the first time, but I intend to be faithful this time.”
He told them they could feel the plates through the cloth, and his brother William picked up the bundle. It was heavier than stone, and William could tell that it had leaves that moved like the pages of a book.32 Joseph also sent his youngest brother, Don Carlos, to get a lockbox from Hyrum, who lived down the road with his wife, Jerusha, and their newborn daughter.
Joseph borrowed a lockbox like this from his brother Hyrum to store the Book of Mormon plates.
Photograph by Jed Clark
Hyrum arrived soon after, and once the plates were securely in the box, Joseph collapsed onto a nearby bed and started telling his family about the men in the woods.
As he spoke, he realized his hand ached. Sometime during the attacks he had dislocated a thumb.
“I must stop talking, Father,” he said suddenly, “and get you to put my thumb back in place.”33