E26: Straight to the Celestial Kingdom

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:16)
It's a cool spring day in 1841 Maybe a little bit muggy though. You're walking down a dirt road coming back into the main section of Nauvoo, when you notice three people standing under a tree off to the side. So they're like kind of far away, so you have to squint to see what it is. But in the distance, Joseph Smith, his profile, his figure is easy enough to recognize. At over six feet tall, no other man isn't quite so recognizable. But on second glance, you realize it's Joseph's friend, Bates Noble. But who is the other person? They are dressed very similar to the other two. Unless you're crazy, that's something's off there. Is that a woman?
Turns out your husband just happened to pass by them a little before you did, and he saw that the third person was Louisa Beeman, whose sister is married to Bates Noble. He overheard them, and he says he swears it sounds like Bates was saying something about what is sealed on earth is sealed in heaven.
What in the name of Mahanrai Moriankumar was going on?
Hi, this is Lindsay Hansen Park.

**Bryan Buchanan** (1:26)
And this is Bryan Buchanan.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (1:28)
Bringing you the story of Mormonism from the shadow of the Everlasting Hills, straight out of Zion, this isn't your grandpa's Mormon history.

**Bryan Buchanan** (1:55)
This is the tale of Mormon saints and sinners from our roots until present day.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (2:00)
Gird your loins, lock your hearts, and pay your tithing, because we're bringing you the story of Mormonism in all its paradisiacal glory.

**Bryan Buchanan** (2:09)
It's the Sunstone History Podcast.
Question, how many episodes can Bryan and Lindsay make it into Nauvoo before talking about polygamy? Answer, not many.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (2:43)
I think we, have we talked about it every episode?

**Bryan Buchanan** (2:47)
Pretty much, it's kind of everywhere.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (2:49)
I see it everywhere.

**Bryan Buchanan** (2:51)
Well, as the Fugees said, AOL, you know you got the lyrics.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (2:55)
Nauvoo certainly has a reputation for being colorful, and polygamy is absolutely as it should be at the center of the reputation. So what happened during those seven short years? We're going to do concise flyovers of the principle. It's going to be very hard for me.
As it went down in Nauvoo, in this first episode, we will talk about the practice sort of generally, including others besides Joseph Smith. Then in the second part, we're gonna talk about Joseph Smith and the women who were sealed to him. It won't be the kind of detail that I included in Year of Polygamy, but we will talk about some general trends and how their lives and relationships were part of the fabric of Navu. I think Bryan and I go in some of the stuff on the podcast and I've covered this with more historians. So that's the deep dive, but today's the general overview.
The Deep Dive.

**Bryan Buchanan** (3:57)
The Deep Dive. Before Mavu, there's at least one and maybe two cases where Joseph Smith had a relationship with someone other than Emma that could fall under the heading of polygamy. We talked at some length earlier about Fanny Allger during the Kirtland period.
It is pretty certain there was something. Whether it involved a formal ceremony, or it looked more like a garden variety affair is, if you haven't picked up on this yet, one of the most hotly debated topics in Mormon history.
While later it becomes common to depict this episode as Joseph Smith's first plural marriage, really no one at the time seems to have thought about it in those terms. Pretty much anyone who was aware of it was quick to put it under the affair heading. Whatever. It seems equally conclusive that the relationship, again, whatever it was, ended badly and Allger was done with Joseph Smith and Mormonism.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (4:47)
And I sent the script over to historian Ben Park because he's going to weigh in on some of this in the Nauvoo period this season, which is awesome. And he just wanted to register his strong stance that Fanny was not a plural wife.

**Bryan Buchanan** (5:02)
That's actually a question that Ben gets because he talks about, I think the phrase he uses is Louisa Beeman was Joseph Smith's first plural wife.
And multiple times people are like, they named a Ford after her. Ben, you know there were earlier ones. The point he's making is that these earlier relationships don't look quite like Nauvoo. They're not as formal and they're different.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (5:23)
And they were understood posthumously as plural wives. People back then didn't really necessarily look at it that way.