Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/747

 676 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. s., i, 1899

which future generations of men should know as the birthplace of the Book of Mormofi, whose "author and proprietor" should be the founder of a great and wide-extending u religion " domi- nating the lives and actions of hundreds of thousands of men and women in the heart of a nation of many millions. And yet so it was. Palmyra was the place of publication of the Mormons' El Koran, the prophet Joe Smith's " Book of Mormon" a brief examination of which, its origin and its place in the literature of the world, it is proposed to give.

Bring to your mind's eye the place and the people. Less than thirty years of such settlement on the frontiers of civiliza- tion, at that time, had gone by. The wilderness had given way in places to farms hewn out of the primeval forests, and villages had sprung up with schools, churches, and post-offices, — not, however, as they exist in this day of rapid transit and swift news transmission ; for in 1806 it took a month and cost a dollar to carry a letter by mail from Boston to Cincinnati. The people were not endowed with the goods of this world : they had, indeed, like all settlers in a new territory, gone to the new land to accumulate for themselves and their posterity what they had failed to win in their old homes in the east. And there were no foreigners to influence their civilization. The Irish were still in Ireland ; the Germans had not arrived ; the French in the New World were all in Canada and Louisiana.

And so it came to pass that the few hundred settlers who had established their homes in the new land in Ontario county, 1 New York, were a homogeneous people, mostly from the nearer New England states. The characteristics of the domestic and religious life of New England were all strongly developed in the new colony. The leading families were there, — the lawyer,

��1 Ontario county originally extended to the lake of the same name. In 1823, however, the State Legislature erected the northern portion into a new county and gave it the name of Wayne, in commemoration of the distinguished Revolutionary soldier. Palmyra is its county seat.

�� �