Page:The Rocky Mountain Saints.djvu/47

 CHAPTER II.

is not the design of the Author to present in this place an extended biography of Joseph Smith, but a brief sketch of his career may be appropriately commenced at that period of his life when he claims to have become an object of interest to the heavenly world. Of his ancestry, little is known beyond the fact that this branch of the Smith family is of Scotch extraction, and reached the New World in the beginning of the eighteenth century. Joseph himself was born December 23d, 1805, in Sharon, Windsor County, Vermont, and was one of a family of six sons and three daughters. "When he was ten years of age, the family removed to Palmyra, Ontario County (now Wayne), New York, and thence, four years later, to Manchester, in the same county, and at this place, eighteen months afterwards, the Mahomet of the West, as he has appropriately been called, began his career as the originator of the new religion.

Of young Smith's personal appearance and life preceding this time, there is little to be said. In manhood he was very handsomely formed, tall, and athletic. In his fifteenth year the commencement of his religious experience he was doubtless much like any other farm youth of very limited education, and remarkable for nothing, either good or bad. In his family he was considered a "good boy," and throughout his chequered career no one ever charged him with lacking that native frankness of soul which generally characterizes the country youth. The charges afterwards made against him, of being