After his bank fails in the Panic of 1837, Joseph Smith flees Kirtland, Ohio, to avoid arrest and heads for Missouri to rebuild his religious community.

A sensitive and religious-minded man since his youth, Joseph Smith claimed the angel Moroni visited him in 1823, when he was 18 years old, and told him he was destined to become a modern prophet of God. For four years, Smith said he made annual visits to a hill in upstate New York where he received instructions preparing him for his new prophetic role. In 1827, he unearthed gold tablets inscribed in a mysterious language. Two years later, Smith created a local sensation when he revealed his discovery and made known his plans to publish a new volume of scripture based on his translation of the golden plates.

In March 1830, Smith published 5,000 copies of a volume he called The Book of Mormon. More often met with outrage than belief, Smith’s revelations nonetheless took root in the spiritually fertile era of the 1830s. Upstate New York was already a hotbed of religious revivalism, and Smith’s new religion appealed to Americans searching for spiritual values amidst the bustling economic growth of a rapidly expanding nation. In contrast to the radical individualism of the lone pioneer, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints stressed the power of mutual cooperation and sacrifice for the good of the whole. Nearly two decades later, when the Latter-day Saints established their new theocratic state in Utah, this emphasis on cooperation would transform a desert into one of the richest and most productive farming regions in the West.