Handsome Lake and the Great Revival in the West

Bibliographic Data

ID2730704
AuthorsAnthony F C Wallace (corresponding author)
Year1952
Volume4
Issue2
Pages149
Publication date1952-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-0678 • E-ISSN: 1080-6490
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/3031386
OpenAlexW2322076005
LanguageEN
Citations received11

THE western marches of the state of New York in the early years of the nineteenth century produced two great religious prophets whose followers are now joined in evangelical combat.' It was in the little back-country town of Palmyra, near Rochester, that Joseph Smith in 1819 first saw angels in a dream, and later revealed that he had found the golden plates which became the Book of Mormon. And it was in western New York too, a decade earlier, that an Iroquois Indian who had seen angels in a dream preached the Gaiwiio or Good Word of a new religion to his followers. These two cults, among the several which sprang up in that remote and forested part of the state, have separately grown great and spread. The Mormons removed to Utah in the middle part of the last century, while the adherents of Gaiwiio remained on their reservations. But today the two religions have once more met, though not in amity. Mormon missionaries in the last few years have been returning from Utah to the New York State reservations, and are bending every effort to convert the people of the longhouse to Mormon Christianity. The adherents of Gaiwiio strive to extend their faith to nominally Christian Indians. Within this generation we shall see whether Mormonism can replace Gaiw'iio on the reservations, or whether the Indian religion will successfully resist its competitor, and so preserve its status as the indigenous faith of western New York

Archaeology · Geography · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Archaeology and Natural History · Geology · History · Mormonism, Religion, and History

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