Gerald N. Lund - Thy Gold to Refine

Text illustrations by Robert T. Barrett

1993 Gerald N. Lund and Kenneth Ingalls Moe

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Deseret Book Company, P. O. Box 30178, Salt Lake City, Utah 84130. This work is not an official publication of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of the Church or of Deseret Book Company.

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First printing in hardbound 1993 First printing in paperbound 2001 First printing in trade paperbound 2006

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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-73463

ISBN 0-88494-893-5 (hardbound)

ISBN 1-57345-873-2 (paperbound) ISBN-13

978-1-59038-652-1 (trade paperbound)

Printed in the United States of America

Banta, Menasha, WI

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

For behold, this is my work and my gloryto bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.

Moses 1:39

Preface

In the prefaces to the previous three volumes, I have concluded by expressing my appreciation for all of those who have made important contributions to this series. It is not necessary to repeat all of those expressions again, so I say only this: Without Kim and Jane Moe and their vision, without the competent and efficient staff at Bookcraft, without the researchers and secretaries and trusted manuscript readers and artists, The Work and the Glory would not be a reality today. And my wife, Lynnthe only one besides myself who knows what writing this series has required because she has paid much of the pricenot only puts up with my long hours at the computer but also completely and totally believes in this project. How can one ever give adequate thanks for that?

In prefacing this volume, I should like to add only two additional expressions of thanks. To the numerous readers who have been following the saga of the Benjamin Steed family and who have come to think of the Steeds as I doas real and living people whom we care about a great dealthank you for your unflagging support. It has been a most gratifying project for me to work on, but it is especially gratifying to know that others are enjoying it as well.

Second, I express a deep and reverential gratitude to those early Saints who provided the raw material from which this novel gets its life. Not only have they inspired me, but they have kindled in me a renewed determination to put away the petty and temporal things that so often clutter our lives and to willingly submit myself to whatever the Lord sees is necessary in the refining and forging of the gold I hope he has in mind for me someday.

One other comment of a more practical nature: As I wrote volume 4, I decided to do the endnotes as I completed each chapter, rather than wait and do them all at once as I had done in previous volumes. For convenience, on the manuscript I added them to the end of each chapter. To my surprise, those who read the manuscript found this to be a welcome change. They said they really liked knowing immediately which portions of the chapters were based on historical events. So in this volume the chapter notes are found at the end of each chapter.

With the coming forth of Thy Gold to Refine, volume 4 in the series The Work and the Glory, the saga of the Steed family and their intimate involvement with the events of the Restoration continues.

Volume 1 (1827 to 1830) introduced the Steeds, who had moved into upstate New York in 1826. There, in the spring of 1827, they met Joseph Smith, the young man the Lord had called to open the work of the last dispensation. Through Benjamins doubting eyes and Nathans and Mary Anns believing eyes, we witnessed the opening scenes of Gods great work of the latter days.

In volume 2 (1830 to 1836), the development of the infant Church began, and we saw how that development profoundly impacted the Steed family members as the Church swelled rapidly in numbers and moved from New York to Ohio and Missouri.

Volume 3 (1836 to 1838) saw the first major internal challenge to the Church as many of the recent convertsincluding several important leadersbecame disillusioned and disaffected with the exacting standards the Lord requires of his people, and left the Church. Not only did they apostatize, but in many cases they became bitter enemies and fought with untiring ferocity against Joseph Smith and their former associates. Driven from Kirtland, the Church and the Steeds ended up in northern Missouri. Old wounds that had left rifts in the Steed family fabric began to heal, and through marriage and childbirth the Steed clan more than doubled in numbers.

Surprisingly, volume 4 covers the smallest period of time of any of the volumes so farfrom July 1838 to March 1839, a period of less than nine months. I say surprisingly because as I began work on Thy Gold to Refine, I was determined to pass over swiftly the first few months that the novel would cover. Why? Because this period of Church history is one of the grimmest in the whole story of the Restoration. It is a time of continuous adversity, grinding opposition, intense tribulation, and frightening violence. Gallatin, Crooked River, Far West, Adam-ondi-Ahman, DeWitt, Hauns Millthe very geography reeks with blood and horror and sorrow. I feared that the story was so depressing and so dark that readers would find it a burden to wade through it in any detail. So my original plan was to treat those few months swiftly. We would get the Steeds out of Missouri and into Nauvoo as quickly as possible and go on to more pleasant times.

But stories have lives of their own sometimes, and to my own surpriseand wonder!this turned out to be the case with volume 4. The story is too rich, the events are too momentous, the tragedies too moving, the pathos and the poignancy too wonderful and too terrible and too inspiring to simply brush over lightly. These Saints were real people, and their story is one of incredible loyalty and faith in the face of staggering adversity.

Why was the price so high for these early Church members? Why was the call to conversion so fraught with challenges? If the Saints were Gods people, as they believed they were, why did he allow their enemies to run amok among them? Why didnt God intervene in their behalf? These are questions of pressing relevance for our generation as well. Sometimes we, as modern Latter-day Saints, wonder why adversity and trials and setbacks and tragedies become our lot. Why is this happening to me? we cry. What am I doing wrong? Why isnt the Lord answering my cries for help?