About Angel of the Prairies

SHEILDS is run by individuals with experience in some of the rarer documents dealing with the early history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and I therefore expected their answers to my questions to have a sound basis in fact.

----- Original Message -----

From: Stan Barker

Cc: Malin Jacobs

Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2004 1:37 PM

Subject: Re: SHIELDS Correspondence form

First of all I enjoy you site very much. I'm LDS and stumbled upon the following while surfing the net:

I was wondering if this was actually written by Parley P. Pratt and if so how is it received as a document by the church. I mean the preface writes:'While purporting to be written under the similitude of a dream or vision, we will state that no such dream or vision was had by the writer, the whole manuscript having been written at Nauvoo, in the Winter of 1843-4.'

Stan Barker replied: From all that I have been able to understand, this is not a real dream and was just a made up story.  I am cc:ing this to one of my colleagues who I believe knows more about this issue than I do.

And also: 'This manuscript was read in Nauvoo, in a Council of the Church, in the presence of the Prophet Joseph Smith, but never appeared in print until last Spring, in the Northern Light, when it became at once the admiration of all the Saints who had the privilege of its perusal.'

I just want to know where I catalog this in my head...along with The White Horse Prophecy as conjecture or as a teaching tool of some kind.

I'd probably "head" it in the direction of fiction.

Thank you and keep up the good work!

Hollin Parrott

Stan,

"Angel of the Prairies" was a piece of fiction written by Pratt in Nauvoo.  It was transformed into a speech given by Pratt by anti-Mormon lawyer Theodore Schroeder in his defense of the Spaulding Manuscript Theory in the American Historical Magazine, which B. H. Roberts responded to in the same magazine (which changed its name to Americana).  We have this series (both Schroeder and Roberts) on the web site.

According to Roberts, Pratt did write "Angel of the Prairies," but only as fiction.

Malin