The Boy Who Would Not Be Bound

“I Will Not Be Bound”

The surgeons arrived at the Smith house in Lebanon, New Hampshire, in about 1813, and Lucy Mack Smith met them at the door.

They had already operated on her son’s leg twice. Now they had come to take it off. Lucy showed them into a room apart from the one where seven-year-old Joseph lay, and asked them plainly what they could do to save the leg. “We can do nothing,” they answered. “We have cut it open to the bone, and find it so affected, that we consider it as incurable; and amputation absolutely necessary to save his life.”¹

“This was like a thunderbolt,” Lucy remembered. She turned to the principal surgeon and pleaded with him. Could they not make one more trial, cutting around the bone and taking out only the diseased part? “You will not, you must not take off his leg until you try once more,” she said. “I will not consent to have you enter the room, until you make me this promise.”² After a few moments’ consultation, the doctors agreed.

When they came to his bedside, Joseph spoke first. “I see you have,” he said when they greeted him, “but you have not come to take off my leg, have you, Sir?” No, the surgeon told him. “It is your mother’s request that we make one more effort.”³

Then the surgeon ordered cords brought to tie the boy to the bedstead. Joseph objected. “No, Dr, I will not be bound,” he said. “I can bear the opperation much better, if I have my liberty.” The doctor offered brandy, then wine. Joseph refused them both. “I will not touch one particle of liquor, neither will I be tied down; but I will tell you what I will do: I will have my father sit on the bed and hold me in his arms, and then I will do what is necessary to be done.”⁴

He looked at his mother, his eyes swimming with tears. “Mother, I want you to leave the room,” he said. “I know you cannot bear to see me suffer so: father can stand it; but you have carried me so much and watched over me so long, you are almost worn out.” He made her promise. “The Lord will help me, and I shall get through with it.”⁵

Lucy folded sheets under his leg and walked several hundred yards from the house so she would not hear. We can imagine her standing in the field, hands pressed over her ears, counting the minutes.† There was no anesthesia in 1813. The surgeon bored into the bone on one side and then the other, then broke away pieces of it with a kind of forceps. At the first piece Joseph screamed so loudly that Lucy ran back to the house. “Oh, mother, go back, go back,” he cried. “I do not want you to come in—I will try to tough it out, if you will go away.”⁶

When the third piece came out, she burst into the room again. “And Oh my God! what a spectacle for a mother’s eye!” The wound was torn open and the bed was covered with blood. “Joseph was as pale as a corpse, and large drops of sweat were rolling down his face.”⁷ They forced her out until it was over.

When she was allowed back in, the bed was clean and the instruments were gone. Her son lay quiet, pale and exhausted, but in a measure free from pain. From that day, Lucy wrote, he “commenced getting better.”⁸

A seven-year-old who would not be tied down, who would not drink, who asked only that his father hold him and that his mother be spared: it is hard to read that scene and not see in it the man he became. The same boy would one day face mobs and jailers in much the same spirit. He would not be bound.

A Fever in Lebanon

The trouble had begun with an epidemic. In 1812 and 1813, typhoid fever swept through the upper Connecticut River valley. Lucy called it “the typhus fever,” and it “raged tremendously” in Lebanon. One after another, every one of the Smith children fell ill.⁹

The family had finally been doing well. They had settled in Lebanon, were “greatly blessed” in their labors, and had begun saving for their old age. They had even sent their son Hyrum to an academy in nearby Hanover.¹⁰ Now Hyrum came home sick from school, and Alvin and the others followed.

Their daughter Sophronia came nearest to death. After eighty-nine days, the doctor said medicine could do no more for her and stopped coming. That night she lay motionless, eyes open, with what Lucy called “that peculiar aspect which bespeaks the near approach of death.” Lucy and her husband knelt by the bed and pleaded with God to spare her. When they rose, the child seemed to have stopped breathing. Lucy wrapped her in a blanket, took her in her arms and began walking the floor. The neighbors told her she was crazy, that the child was dead. Lucy would not stop. “At length she sobbed,” Lucy wrote. “She sobbed again,—then looked up into my face and commenced breathing quite freely.” Lucy laid her on the bed and collapsed beside her.¹¹

Joseph had seemed to be recovering when, sitting in a chair, he screamed with a pain in his shoulder. A doctor diagnosed a sprain and rubbed in liniment. It was not a sprain. After two weeks a deep infection was found and lanced. Then, Lucy wrote, using her son’s own words, the pain “shot like lightning down his side into the marrow of the bone of his leg.”¹² “Oh father,” the boy cried, “the pain is so severe, how can I bear it?”¹³

Today we would call it osteomyelitis, an infection of the bone. In 1813 it usually ended in amputation or death.

Lucy carried him in her arms until she made herself ill. Then Hyrum, “always rather remarkable for his tenderness and sympathy,” asked to take her place. For days and nights he sat beside his younger brother, holding the diseased part of the leg between his hands and pressing it, so that Joseph could better bear the pain.¹⁴ Hyrum was about thirteen. The bond between the two brothers would last until they died together, thirty-one years later.

A Surgeon Named Smith

Years afterward, Joseph dictated his own short account of the illness. He remembered that the fever “settled under my shoulder,” that a doctor “freely applied the hot shovel,” and that the disease then “desended into my left Leg & ancle & terminated in a fever sore of the worst kind.” At one point, he said, “eleven Doctors came from Dartmouth Medical college, at Hanover New Hampshire, for the purpose of amputation, but, young as I was, I utterly refused to give my assent to the operation.” He agreed instead to “their Trying an experiment by removing a large portion of the bone from my left leg.”¹⁵

Lucy remembered the surgeon as “Dr Stone.” Joseph named “Drs. Smith, Stone & Perkins. of Hanover.” Historians believe the principal surgeon was Dr. Nathan Smith, no relation to the family, who had founded the medical school at Dartmouth College. He had developed a procedure for removing infected bone while saving the limb, at a time when most surgeons simply amputated. He may well have been the only surgeon in the United States in 1813 who could have saved the boy’s leg, and he lived just a few miles away.¹⁶ Latter-day Saints have long seen the Lord’s hand in that nearness. A family that had moved again and again had come to rest, for a few years, beside a surgeon who could help.

Recovery was slow. Joseph remembered that “fourteen additional peices of bone afterwards worked out before my leg healed,” and that he was “reduced so very low that my mother could carry me with ease.”¹⁷ When he could travel, he went with his uncle Jesse Smith to Salem, Massachusetts, hoping the sea air would help. It did. He walked on crutches for about three years and limped slightly for the rest of his life.¹⁸

Readers who remember Chapter 2 may recall that his grandfather Solomon Mack also nearly died of “a terrible fever sore” on his leg as a boy, and was saved by good surgeons. Lucy does not mention the parallel. But the Mack family’s capacity for surviving what should have killed them seems to have come down to her son intact.

The illness cost the family more than suffering. “After about a year of sickness and distress,” Lucy wrote, health returned to the household, but it “found us in quite low circumstances.”¹⁹ Doctor bills took what they had saved. They would have to start over again. Before they could, the sky itself would turn against them.

The Year Without a Summer

Snow in June. Frost in July and again in August. Across New England, 1816 would be remembered as the year without a summer, and it would finally break the Smiths’ hold on Vermont.

The family moved across the river to Norwich, Vermont, and rented a farm. The first year, the crops failed. The second year they failed again. Joseph Sr. resolved to plant once more, and if that failed, to go to New York, “where wheat was raised in abundance.”²⁰

The third year was 1816. Half a world away, in April 1815, a volcano called Tambora had erupted on an island in what is now Indonesia, one of the largest eruptions in recorded history. Its ash drifted around the globe and dimmed the sun. In New England the next year, snow fell in June, killing frosts struck in July and August, and 1816 passed into memory as “the year without a summer.”²¹ In Lucy’s plain words, “an untimely frost destroyed the crops,” and that, “being the third year in succession that the crops had failed, almost caused a famine. This was enough.”²²

Thousands of New England families packed up and moved west that year and the next. The Smiths were among them. Joseph Sr. settled his accounts, calling in witnesses where creditors had not brought their books, and set out for Palmyra, New York, with a man named Howard. Lucy and the eight children were to follow when he sent for them.

As Lucy was ready to leave, several of those creditors appeared with their account books and demanded payment of debts that had already been settled. Lucy decided it was better to pay than to risk a lawsuit with the wagon waiting, and she handed over one hundred and fifty dollars. Two neighbors, indignant at the fraud, offered to take up a collection for her. “This I utterly refused,” Lucy wrote. “The idea of receiving assistance in such a way as that, was indeed very repulsive to my feelings.”²³

A Mother’s Last Admonition

Lucy’s own mother, Lydia Mack, now elderly, had been living with the family. She helped them prepare and rode with them as far as Royalton, Vermont. There, at a tavern, mother and daughter said goodbye.

“My mother wept over me long and bitterly,” Lucy remembered. Lydia told her it was unlikely they would ever see each other again in this life:

I have lived long—my days are nearly numbered—I must soon exchange the things of this world, for that which pertains to another state of existence, where I hope to enjoy the society of the blessed.—And now, as my last admonition, I beseech you to continue faithful in the service of God to the end of your days, that I may have the pleasure of embracing you, in another and fairer world above.²⁴

It was the same counsel Lydia had given her children all their lives: to fear God, to pray, and to be faithful. Lydia had been hurt when the sleigh overturned on the road, and Lucy believed she never fully recovered. She died about two years later.²⁵ Lucy never saw her again.

“As Sure As There Is a God in Heaven”

The journey west, in the winter of 1816–17, was some three hundred miles over snowy roads. It turned into an ordeal.

The teamster, whom Joseph remembered as Caleb Howard, quickly proved to be what Lucy called “an unprincipled, unfeeling wretch.” He spent the money they had paid him on drinking and gambling. The Smiths fell in with another family, the Gateses, who were also traveling west, and Howard wanted two of the Gates daughters to ride with him. Picture the sleighs creaking over frozen ruts, the younger children bundled in quilts, and a lame boy of eleven trudging beside them through the drifts.† So, Joseph remembered, “Howard drove me from the waggon & made me travel in my weak state through the snow 40 miles per day for several days.” Joseph was about eleven and still lame. When his older brothers protested, Howard “would knock them down with the butt of his whip.”²⁶

About twenty miles west of Utica, Alvin came to his mother one morning with bad news. Howard had thrown the family’s goods out of the wagon and was about to drive off with the team. Lucy called him into the barroom of the inn, where a number of travelers had gathered. Then she turned to the room:

Gentlemen and ladies, please give your attention for a moment: now, as sure as there is a God in heaven, that team, as well as the goods, belong to my husband; and this man intends to take them from me, or at least the team, leaving me with eight children, without the means of proceeding on my journey.²⁷

Then she turned to Howard. “Sir, I now forbid your touching the team, or driving it one step farther—you can go about your own business, for I have no use for you—I shall take charge of the team myself.”²⁸

And she did. It is not hard to see where her son learned to stand his ground.

The rest of the way was no easier. Joseph remembered riding on the last sleigh of the company, and being “knocked down by the driver, one of Gate’s Sons, & left to wollow in my blood until a stranger came along, picked me up, & carried me to the Town of Palmyra.” With Howard’s money gone, Lucy paid the innkeepers along the road with cloth and clothing, “the last payment being made with the drops taken from Sister Sophronia’s ears.”²⁹

She had brought eight children three hundred miles through a New York winter on courage and cloth. When they finally reached Palmyra, Lucy wrote, they had “a small portion of our effects, and barely two cents in money.” But her husband was there. “I was quite happy,” she said, “in once more having the society of my husband, and in throwing myself and children upon the care and affection of a tender companion and father.”³⁰

A Log House in the Woods

The family sat down together and made a plan. They would “unite our energies,” Lucy wrote, and get a piece of land.³¹

Lucy set up a business painting oilcloth table coverings, and it “did extremely well.” She earned enough to feed the family and buy furniture. Joseph Sr. and the older boys hired out for day labor. They dug wells, harvested, made barrels and boiled maple sap into sugar. After about two years in Palmyra village, they contracted for a hundred acres of forest just south of town, in the township of Manchester.³² They built a log house and began the slow work of clearing the land, cutting and burning trees one acre at a time. When a payment came due, Alvin went away to earn it and came back with the money.

Lucy remembered those years with gratitude. “We had a snug log house, neatly furnished, and the means of living comfortably.” And “the hand of friendship was extended on every side; and we blessed God with our whole heart, for his mercy which endureth forever.”³³

Joseph Sr. was still dreaming. In one dream, he was so lame he could hardly walk, until his guide led him to a garden where twelve images rose and bowed to him one by one, and he was healed. In another, he came to the door of a great building on the day of judgment and was told he was too late. He prayed until “my flesh was withered upon my bones.” At last he called on God “in the name of his son Jesus,” asking forgiveness, and the porter told him “it was necessary to plead the merits of Jesus, for he was the Advocate with the Father.” Then he was made whole, and the door opened.³⁴

In 1819 Joseph Sr. dreamed that a peddler came to the door with a pack on his back. The man said he had called seven times and had always found Joseph “strictly honest in all your dealings: your measures are always heaped, and your weights overbalance.” This would be his last visit, he said, and “there is but one thing which you lack in order to secure your salvation.” Joseph begged him to write it down. He ran to get paper, and in his excitement he woke up.³⁵

Lucy recorded the dream without explaining it. But it captures the family’s situation in 1819 with painful exactness. They were honest and hardworking and they believed in God. And they were still sure that something was missing, something no one around them could name.

The household had grown again. A daughter, Katharine, had been born in Lebanon in 1812, and a son, Don Carlos, in Norwich in 1816, just before the move. A last child, named Lucy for her mother, would be born in 1821.³⁶

Of her son Joseph’s boyhood in these years, Lucy says almost nothing on purpose. She knew readers wanted remarkable stories, but “nothing occurred during his early life, excepting those trivial circumstances which are common to that state of human existence.” She describes him as “a remarkably quiet, well disposed child.”³⁷ Joseph himself later wrote that the family’s poverty meant hard work for every child old enough to help. His schooling, he said, amounted to “reading writing and the ground rules of Arithmatic.”³⁸

He was a quiet farm boy with a limp. He also thought deeply about God, and the noise of religion around him was about to grow louder.

“Who of All These Parties Are Right?”

Western New York in those years was alive with religion. Methodist circuit riders, Baptist preachers and Presbyterian ministers competed for converts. In June 1818 Methodists held a camp meeting in Palmyra, and the next summer another gathered about fifteen miles from the Smith farm.³⁹ People would later call the region “the burned-over district,” because revival fires had swept through it so many times.

Joseph remembered the excitement vividly. “There was in the place where we lived an unusual excitement on the subject of religion,” he wrote in his 1838 history. “Some were contending for the Methodist faith, some for the Presbyterian, and some for the Baptist.” It began with good feeling, but when converts began to choose churches, “a scene of great confusion and bad feeling ensued—priest contending against priest, and convert against convert.”⁴⁰

The arguments came home. “My father’s family was proselyted to the Presbyterian faith,” Joseph wrote, “and four of them joined that church, namely, my mother, Lucy; my brothers Hyrum and Samuel Harrison; and my sister Sophronia.” Joseph Sr. stayed away, as he always had. Joseph himself went to meetings “as often as occasion would permit” and leaned toward the Methodists. But he could not decide.⁴¹

He later remembered that at the revival meetings he wanted to “feel & shout like the Rest,” but “could feel nothing.”⁴² At about twelve, he said, “my mind become seriously imprest with regard to the all importent concerns for the wellfare of my immortal Soul.” He began to search the scriptures, and he noticed that many professing Christians “did not adorn their profession by a holy walk and Godly conversation.” He also felt his own sins keenly.⁴³

And he looked at the world around him. The boy who spent his days clearing fields and his nights under the open sky wrote of it years later in halting, heartfelt language:

I looked upon the sun the glorious luminary of the earth and also the moon rolling in their magesty through the heavens and also the stars shining in their courses and the earth also upon which I stood and the beast of the field and the fowls of heaven and the fish of the waters and also man walking forth upon the face of the earth in magesty and in the strength of beauty.⁴⁴

“My heart exclaimed,” he wrote, “all all these bear testimony and bespeak an omnipotant and omnipreasant power.”⁴⁵ He did not doubt that God existed. He doubted only that anyone around him could tell him how to find Him.

“In the midst of this war of words and tumult of opinions,” he remembered, “I often said to myself: What is to be done? Who of all these parties are right; or, are they all wrong together? If any one of them be right, which is it, and how shall I know it?”⁴⁶

It was his mother’s question from her own girlhood, and his father’s from the field of dead timber. It was his grandfather Asael’s question too, when he urged his children to search the scriptures and look to Christ. Now it belonged to a fourteen-year-old boy. And one day, reading his Bible, he came across a verse in the Epistle of James that seemed written for him alone.

Key: † marks imagined connective detail. Full citations and verification status are in 04-sources.md. Lucy Mack Smith is quoted from her 1845 history (JSP fair copy); Joseph Smith’s own recollection of his illness and the journey is from “Note A” in the addenda to his manuscript history (JSP, History, 1838–1856, vol. A-1), written in Nauvoo in the 1840s.