Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer

the acrid scent of brimstone in the air. The Apocalypse seemed just around the corner. “Never in the history of Western society had the millennium seemed so imminent,” the Mormon historian Hyrum L. Andrus has written; “never before had people looked so longingly and hopefully for its advent. It was expected that twenty years or less would see the dawn of that peaceful era.” It was in this superheated, anything-goes religious climate that Joseph Smith gave birth to what would become America’s most successful homegrown faith.
    An earnest, good-natured kid with a low boredom threshold, Joseph Junior had no intention of becoming a debt-plagued farmer like his father, toiling in the dirt year in and year out. His talents called for a much grander arena. Although he received no more than a few years of formal schooling as a boy, by all accounts he possessed a nimble mind and an astonishingly fecund imagination. Like many autodidacts, he was drawn to the Big Questions. He spent long hours reflecting on the nature of the divine, pondering the meaning of life and death, assessing the merits and shortcomings of the myriad competing faiths of the day. Gregarious, athletic, and good-looking, he was a natural raconteur whom both men and women found immensely charming. His enthusiasm was infectious. He could sell a muzzle to a dog.
    The line separating religion from superstition can be indistinct, and this was especially true during the theological chaos of the Second Great Awakening, in which Joseph came of age. The future prophet’s spiritual curiosity moved him to explore far and wide on both sides of that blurry line, including an extended foray into the necromantic arts. More specifically, he devoted much time and energy to attempting to divine the location of buried treasure by means of black magic and crystal gazing, activities he learned from his father. Several years later he would renounce his dabbling in the occult, but Joseph’s flirtation with folk magic as a young man had a direct and unmistakable bearing on the religion he would soon usher forth.
    Although “money digging,” as the custom was known, was illegal, it was nevertheless a common practice among the hoi polloi of New England and upstate New York. The woods surrounding Palmyra were riddled with Indian burial mounds that held ancient bones and artifacts, some of which were crafted from precious or semiprecious metals. It therefore comes as no surprise that a boy with Joseph’s hyperactive mind and dreamy nature would hatch schemes to get rich by unearthing the gold rumored to be buried in the nearby hills and fields.
    Joseph’s money digging began in earnest a few months shy of his fourteenth birthday, two years after his family’s arrival in Palmyra, when he heard about the divining talents of a girl named Sally Chase, who lived near the Smith family farm. Upon learning that she possessed a magical rock—a “peep stone” or “seer stone”—that allowed her to “see anything, however hidden from others,” Joseph harangued his parents until they let him pay the girl a visit.
    Sally’s peep stone turned out to be a small, greenish rock. She placed it in the bottom of an upturned hat, then instructed Joseph to bury his face in the hat so as to exclude the light. When he did so, he was treated to magical visions. One of the things that appeared to him was a pocket-sized, white-colored stone “a great way off. It became luminous, and dazzled his eyes, and after a short time it became as intense as the midday sun.” He immediately understood that this rock was another peep stone; the vision also indicated its precise location underground, beneath a small tree. Joseph located the tree, started digging, and “with some labor and exertion” unearthed the first of at least three peep stones he would possess in his lifetime.
    His career as a “scryer”—that is to say, a diviner, or crystal gazer— was launched. Soon his necromantic skills were