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SPECIAL COLLECTIONS, UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA-RENO LIBRARY
Slouching Towards Slaterville: Joseph Morris’s Wide Swath in Weber County By VAL HOLLEY
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? – William Butler Yeats,“The Second Coming”
E
arly in the summer of 1861, on the cusp of the American Civil War, the Utah correspondent of the New York Times announced that a “new prophet,” Joseph Morris, was claiming spiritual empower ment “far beyond the attainment of the original [Mormon founder Former Slaterville residents and Joseph] Smith or of the living Br igham Morrisites Agnes Cowan Bull [Young].” Mor r is prophesied “the early (seated, far left) and William Field destruction, by ‘judgments,’ of the incorrigi- Bull (white beard) with eleven of ble portion of the Mormon community,” their twelve children, Mottsville, after which he and his followers would inter- Nevada, c. 1889. Val Holley, a law librarian in Washington, D.C., is a sixth-generation native of Slaterville.
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