An American original

When Mormon missionary James Brown carried his message to the frontier in the 1850s, he found a tribe of Shoshone Indians willing to listen. They had heard about Jesus before, but never about this new book Brown had brought. He told them of a distant and now dead prophet who had been given the Book of Mormon. Brown passed it around so tribal members could see it and turn the pages. The young men of the tribe balked. They grumbled that this was another fantasy of the white man. But then, as Brown recalled in his memoir, Chief Washakie silenced them. He picked up a Colt revolver and held it before the group. “The white man can make this,” Washakie instructed, and it proved that “the face of the Father is towards him.” The Shoshone should take the Book of Mormon seriously, the chief concluded, because they took guns seriously.

The Book of Mormon did not always need power to become prominent. It was a fascination even before it was first published in 1830. Unearthed (or invented—whichever word you please) in upstate New York by the young Joseph Smith, it became the founding document of the new Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It traveled far and wide with missionaries like James Brown, hopping from place to place as the Mormons fled from frontier to frontier until the bulk of them settled in the Great Basin of Utah. It went through revisions, illustrations, translations and even a new subtitle as the LDS church grew throughout the world. And now, with the ascendance of Mitt Romney in the Republican Party, the power of the LDS in conservative politics and the jokes of the animated sitcom South Park’s creators, the Book of Mormon is a work every American should take seriously.

It has become fashionable in recent years to narrate the lives of books. Without doubt, books have histories, and some books—such as the King James Bible, Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Mao’s Little Red Book—have had the power to make history.