Episode 88: Vilate Kimball and the Nauvoo Temple Mysteries

**Bryan Buchanan** (0:12)
Priorities, you've got to have priorities. You can't have everything, you can't do everything. Best choices, people.
If you have the option of in and out, or literally anything else, up to, and including a sketchy waffle house, you choose the latter. If your choices are walnuts or slow starvation, you choose the latter.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:31)
Wrong, what's wrong with you?

**Bryan Buchanan** (0:33)
Make sure your selections line up with your values, people.
Well, Nauvoo is coming to a close. You can feel it in the air. It's chaos with hints of martial law and a whiff of bogus. How would Mormons choose to spend their precious time before they got out of Dodge?

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:47)
Animal style fries.

**Bryan Buchanan** (0:48)
Building wagons, yeah sure. Making clothes, definitely. But one element of the ending days of Nauvoo is a little surprising. I say surprising only if you don't know anything about Mormons, that is. Cheers.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (1:16)
Hi, this is Lindsay Hansen Park.

**Bryan Buchanan** (1:18)
And this is Bryan Buchanan.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (1:20)
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** (1:47)
This is the tale of Mormon saints and sinners from our roots until present day.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (1:52)
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** (2:00)
It's the Sunstone History Podcast.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (2:18)
It's time for a mini installment of Before They Were Famous.
This time, it's a little hazy, though. Technically, it's kind of a while they were famous. I guess we're moving into the while they are famous, you know, territory. And we speak today of Vilate Murray, enshrined forever as the first wife of Heber Kimball.
That's a rough gig. That's just a rough gig.
First, the most important controversy, how the hell do you say her name? Kim, I'm gonna spell it for you, and I want you all to practice saying it out loud. V-I-L-A-T-E. The natural inclination is something like violet.
It seems, however, that velate is the correct path. Every now and again, you'll hear velate, velate, which is what I think I started saying it as.
I don't know.
I'm from Utah. But we just won't even countenance such heresies. Before we settle this raging controversy, though, a word from our friends at Signature Books.
For the two months of the Nauvoo Temple was in operation, scribes carefully documented all activities and events taking place inside, including lectures on the endowment ceremony drama and sealing rituals. Their narratives begin with a lighting of fires and hauling of water each morning at 3 a.m. Many ordinance workers slept overnight in the temple. Two late night celebratory dancing and Sunday sermons deliver to the recently endowed. Historians, biographers, and genealogists will find the names and dates of the initiates and documentations of ceilings, including polygamist unions, to be of significance. Others will turn to the narrative portions of the records, including first-person accounts of minutes of meetings. For instance, as women clean the ceremonial robes for the next day's endowment companies, church officials would read from John C. Fremont's published journal anticipating their imminent exodus from Nauvoo for the Great Basin. The sources extracted in this companion volume to Joseph Smith's Quorum of the Anointed and the development of LDS temple worship include original temple ledger books and summaries of data compiled by early church scribes, the diary kept for Heber C. Kimball, as well as diary entries for other contemporaries. As scribes dutifully noted, the peace, harmony, and order prevailing in the Nauvoo temple during the closing months of 1845 and early months of 1846, the panic in their reports regarding the savage murders of Latter-day Saints in outlying areas, subsequent retaliation by church members, was equally palpable. Guards were stationed at virtually every temple door, inside and out, to prevent attacks. Marshals periodically searched the temple interior for church leaders accused of counterfeiting. The odors of scented oil and fresh paint mixed with the sweat and smells of a frontier boomtown. Initiates pledged fidelity to their lawfully wedded spouses, then, sometimes within minutes, were sealed for time and eternity to additional wives. Vowing to live their Christian lives, Temple and Daoists were nonetheless asked to swear vengeance against the murders of Joseph Smith and Hiram. Women were elevated to the status of queens and priestesses, but were told to remember their place as subservient help needs to their husbands. In Sunday's sermons, Brigham Young expanded that the purpose of Temple rites was to teach men the importance of the lesson of the Garden of Eden, that Adam being full of integrity and not disposed to follow the woman nor listen to her was permitted to receive the priesthood. Heber C. Kimball added that some priesthood holders had apostatized, being led by their wives, and if any such cases occur again, no more women will be admitted to the Temple. In other words, it was a complex time as issues of women's equality and Christian forbearance, themes central to the Temple experience, struggled against competing demands for loyalty and obedience. Yet from the furnace of crisis can emerge the highest ideals of commitment and faith. The Nauvoo Endowment Company's 1845 to 46, a documentary history edited by our friends, Devery Anderson and Gary Bergera, published by Signature Books, is now on sale. Get it at Benchmark Books. That's the best way to go. Give them a call. Get on the internets. Buy the book or wherever you get your reading list.