Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon at 24 and was dead by 38
A Vermont farm boy who once hunted buried treasure with a seer stone went on to publish the Book of Mormon in 1830. Within fourteen years Joseph Smith had tens of thousands of followers, had founded cities in Ohio and Illinois, and was running for president when a mob killed him.
Smith was born in Sharon, Vermont, on December 23, 1805, one of eleven children of Joseph Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith. Crop failures in 1816 pushed the family to western New York, a region then ablaze with Second Great Awakening revivals. Childhood was hard: at seven he had painful surgery on an infected leg bone and used crutches for three years. Like many neighbours, the Smiths practised folk magic, and Joseph and his father built a reputation as hired treasure seers.
He later described a vision in 1820 of two personages, whom he came to identify as God the Father and Jesus Christ. The family consistently dated a second key night to September 21, 1823, when he said an angel revealed where a book of golden plates lay buried. In January 1827 he eloped with Emma Hale, whose father thought him a fraud. Dictation of the text began in Pennsylvania, funded by a neighbour, Martin Harris. When Harris lost the only copy of the first 116 manuscript pages, the work stalled. Smith resumed using the chocolate-coloured stone from his treasure-digging days, placed in a hat, and finished around July 1, 1829. The book went on sale in Palmyra in March 1830.
In 1831 he led followers west to build a communal Zion, gathering at Kirtland, Ohio, and planning a centre at Independence, Missouri. Hostile residents drove the Mormons out of Independence. In Ohio the collapse of a church-backed bank and rumours of polygamy brought lawsuits, and in Missouri clashes with vigilantes ended in a state order expelling the Mormons. Smith was arrested for treason and escaped.
At Nauvoo, Illinois, he built another city and temple. In 1844 he launched a presidential campaign, but when dissenters printed a newspaper attacking his power and his secret plural marriages, he and the city council had its press destroyed. He declared martial law, then surrendered on the governor's promise of protection, and a mob stormed the lightly guarded jail and killed him on June 27, 1844. The movement he founded now counts millions of adherents, the largest body being the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Source: Joseph Smith
