Excerpt: Polygamy on the Pedernales: Lyman Wight's Mormon Villages in Antebellum Texas, 1845-1858 Antebellum Texas, 1845-1858

By Melvin C. Johnson

'Polygamy and a Temple on the Pedernales'

The intrinsic cultural patterns of Zodiac (Texas) included polygamy, temple ritual, and socio-economic communitarianism, and, as such, they reflected antebellum Mormonism

RLDS president Joseph Smith III, in a letter to Joseph Davis of the Utah church in 1899, wrote, “nearly all the factions into which the Church broke had plural marriage in some form” in the post-1844 era before the Civil War. His father had been gathering concurrent wives as early as the Kirtland years. Joseph Smith Jr. further refined the practice at Nauvoo, moving it from private to doctrinal grounds. By 1860, plural marriage was an integral part of Mormonism in Utah Territory, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, and Texas.

Temple ritual and some form of economic cooperative also distinguished most of these groups from other American denominations. Just as Joseph Smith built and used temples and subjected his followers to the Law of Consecration and, later, tithing, so did temple building and forms of economic cooperation characterize the churches of Brigham Young, James Strang, William Smith, Alpheus Cutler, and Lyman Wight, who built the first Mormon temple west of the Mississippi. 

James Strang took his first plural wife in 1850 at Beaver Island, Michigan. George Miller reinforced and continued the practice when he and his polygamous family joined the Strangites later that year. Plans were drawn in 1847 for a Strangite temple, and construction was underway in September 1849 on two and a half acres. However, the design, with its incorporated twelve towers and a Great Hall, was never finished. William Smith, the only surviving brother of Joseph Smith Jr. and a man whom Orson Hyde described as one who used the priesthood as a vehicle for “sensuality, avarice, and ease,” organized a church in 1847. It had failed by 1851, because of its polygamous practices. William Smith’s attempt to merge his church body with that of Wight included encouraging the Covington membership to emigrate to Texas. There they could join the Wightites and receive “endowments and blessings” in the Zodiac Temple.

Alpheus Cutler, an intimate of Joseph Smith before his murder in 1844, and a member of the Fifty as well as a leader at Winter Quarters, led the Church of Jesus Christ (Cutlerite) from 1853 until his death in 1864. Excommunicated in 1851 by Brigham Young, Cutler and his followers lived their own form of Mormonism, first in Mills County and then Fremont County, Iowa. Eschewing polygamy, although Cutler himself had practiced it earlier, the characteristics of the Cutlerites, as with other branches of the Mormons, included a form of economic communitarianism and the practice of sacred rites.

The environs of a temple were not required for Mormon ritualism at this time. Thus, the practice of sacral ceremonies outside of a temple was not uncommon among the various factions. The Cutlerites practiced them in Iowa, and the Wightites, discussed below, did the same in Texas before they built the Pedernales temple. Brigham Young, at the request of many of the LDS at Winter Quarters, Iowa, years before the Endowment House was built in Salt Lake City, approved the performance of eternal sealings, marriages, and adoptions.

The Cutlerites’ Order of Enoch was a common-stock proposition organized and directed by its church corporation. However, it did not function well, and participation by the membership remained optional. According to Danny Jorgensen, Cutler temple ritualism “involved a secretive initiation, assignment of a sacred personal identity, passwords to the spirit world, endowments (or blessings), ritual cleaning by water and anointings with oil, the receipt of a sacred undergarment, and ritual reenactment of sacred myths.” Other ordinances included baptism by proxy for the salvation of the dead, as well as monogamous marriage for eternity. The Cutlerites, even those who had earlier practiced polygamy, had abandoned the practice by 1853. The endowment of the first generation, coupled with the quickly decreasing numbers of followers after the death of Cutler in 1864, limited ordinances to the ritual baptism for the dead.

Temple ritualism, economic exclusiveness, and plural marriage fused the sacred and the secular at the Zodiac community. From its early beginnings in Wisconsin, this community defined its familial and individual concerns in religious terms. Apostle Lyman Wight, as the community prophet, patriarch, and leader, offered direct, authoritarian guidance. The rituals of the Pedernales temple delineated the focus of family and individual goals. Temple ritualism bound the community together: husbands and wives, parents and children, leaders and followers. It gifted (endowed) families with continuity that sublimated mortal death to eternal life, and unraveled the bindings of secular time and space. Those at Zodiac believed their temple work gifted them beyond the grave with everlasting exaltation—for themselves, their families, and their familial dead. Levi Lamoni Wight wrote years later that the Zodiac years had presented his people with the opportunity to worship “according to our desires, unity, peace, and harmony prevailing.”

John Hawley recorded that “Lyman told us we must build a house for to attend to the baptism for the dead and also the ordinance of washing of feet and a general endowment in the wilderness. So we . . . built a good little Temple to worship in. . . .” Completed on 17 February 1849, the first Mormon temple west of the Mississippi was a large, two-story log building that functioned as a multi-purpose center for Zodiac, with a company storehouse as well as an upstairs room for temple ritual. One of the two Mormon schools enumerated in the Census of 1850 met in the building. The Zodiac High Council gave permission for William Leyland to hold his classes in the large room on the second floor.

Various ordinances performed in the Zodiac Temple involved married and unmarried individuals. Ceremonies included baptism for the dead; washings of feet, head, and body; a general endowment; various anointings; adoptions; the sealing (marriage) of men and women for time and eternity; and the setting apart of kings, queens, and priests for eternity. Temple ritualism at times reorganized families, as well as saving them. When George Miller returned to Zodiac in early 1849, his Leyland stepchildren, who hated him, used the temple and its ceremonies to separate themselves from his rule. William Leyland recorded that on 8 April 1849, he received the endowment portion of “the washing of feet under the hands of the Twelve High Counsellors and their presidents along with sixteen elders and their presidents and on the 9[th] received the washings of the body and anointing.” The following month, William Leyland and his sisters Sophia, Sarah, and Eliza were adopted into the Lyman Wight family. Although the girls were only “adopted until they were of age,” William wrote that he was “adopted under the oath and covenant of the priesthood unto my salvation or damnation until I could save my father and raise him to be a king and priest.”

John Hawley was one of few individuals to experience the endowment ritual in both the Wightite and Utah branches of Mormonism. He celebrated the ceremony at Zodiac (1851) and later in Utah (1857). In 1893, under sworn oath in the Temple Lot Case, he compared and contrasted the ordinances and clothing associated with these rituals. According to him, Young and Wight both believed they had the authority to seal men and women together for time and eternity. Unlike the Utah Mormons, the Wightites wore their religious garments only for special occasions, including sealing ceremonies and for burial. The temple robe was supposedly patterned on that worn by the angel Moroni, an angelic messenger who Joseph Smith claimed had visited him. This outer garment was a loose frock without markings, being described by Hawley as an “entire covering of linen,” leaving bare only the hands, feet, and head. An apron, a facsimile of those allegedly worn by Adam and Eve, was as bare of markings as the garment. In contrast, the Utah garment was always worn by the initiated, who were counseled never to take it off, even to the act of leaving one leg in the garment while washing. The apron and the tight-fitting Utah garment, joined together at the waist and legs to make one piece of clothing, had special markings. The temple clothing also included a robe with a “bandage” that came down from the shoulders, moccasins, and a cap.

Hawley testified in the Temple Lot Case on behalf of the RLDS church, which defended Joseph Smith Jr. well into the twentieth century against the charges that he was the foundation of Mormon polygamy. Hawley testified that he encountered endowment practices first in Zodiac, and that “Lyman Wight was the first person that taught [to Hawley] anything about endowments according to my best recollection.” The Zodiac endowment, he alleged, involved only matrimonial concerns, the sealing of a man and women “together in order to enjoy each other society in eternity.” He described this as “spiritual wife marriage,” a negative term used in that era to attack the marriage practices of Utah Mormonism, the language of which was guaranteed to offend LDS sensibilities. Hawley testified further that sealings for time and eternity were performed for monogamous as well as polygamous couples at Zodiac. Nonetheless, having more than one concurrent wife, according to Hawley, led to the accrual of extra spiritual advantages: “Those that were in spiritual marriage were said to be in polygamy, as well as those that were not. The understanding was that they would enjoy the same glory as others, but the ones that had more than one wife would enjoy a greater portion of it.” He further offered that it “was not a necessary and logical sequence” that those that had been married for time and eternity would have to practice the doctrine of plural marriage. If a man took more than one wife, according to Hawley’s understanding, then his “glory which was in eternity would be greater” than the husband who had only one wife.

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