Messenger and Advocate

Latter Day Saints' Messenger and Advocate

Three years of the church's paper at Kirtland — and the first published account, by the man who was there, of how the Book of Mormon and the priesthood came to be.

What it is

The Latter Day Saints' Messenger and Advocate was published monthly at Kirtland, Ohio, from October 1834 to September 1837, succeeding The Evening and the Morning Star. Its three years cover the most concentrated period of institution-building in the church's history: the organisation of the Quorum of the Twelve and the Seventy, the School of the Elders, the compilation of the Doctrine and Covenants, the building and dedication of the Kirtland Temple, and — in its final numbers — the collapse of the Kirtland Safety Society and the crisis that emptied the city.

Cowdery's eight letters

The reason this periodical matters out of proportion to its size is a series of eight letters written by Oliver Cowdery to W. W. Phelps and published across its run.

Cowdery was Joseph Smith's scribe for most of the Book of Mormon translation and was present at the restoration of the priesthood. His letters are the earliest published narrative of those events by a participant — earlier than the accounts in Joseph Smith's own histories, and different from them in details that historians have argued over ever since.

Anyone working on how the founding narrative took shape reads these letters, because they are one of the few fixed points from before the story had settled into its familiar form.

What we hold

Three volumes covering 1834 to 1836 — 36 indexed items.