On July 9, 1844, a letter from a dead man arrived at the post office in Burlington, Wisconsin, forty miles southwest of Milwaukee. Addressed to “Mr. James J. Strang,” it had been postmarked three weeks earlier in the Mormon city of Nauvoo, Illinois. The dead man was Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He had written the letter nine days before his murder, but already he could see what fate would soon befall him. “The wolves are upon the scent, and I am waiting to be offered up,” he confided to Strang, whom he addressed as “My Dear Son.”
Indeed, it was the prophet’s premonition regarding his imminent demise that had prompted him to write. “In the midst of darkness and boding danger the spirit of Elijah came upon me,” he explained, “and I went away to inquire of God how the church should be saved.” According to Smith, God’s voice came in reply: “My servant James J. Strang.”
This mysterious epistle would go down as “one of the most important—and controversial—documents in the history of the Mormon religion,” in the words of one modern observer. If the letter was to be believed, 31-year-old James Strang—who had disappeared from western New York less than a year earlier, with creditors close on his heels—was now the rightful heir to a church of more than 25,000 members worldwide.
How had this seemingly impossible turn of events come to pass?
One thing seems certain: Strang had not gone west with the goal of becoming a prophet of God. His original intention, he later told an interviewer, was to make a fortune in what had been one of the era’s fastest-growing industries, the construction of canals. The success of the Erie Canal, completed in 1825, had set off a canal boom in the United States, with more than 3,000 miles of these inland waterways constructed by 1840. Strang hoped to use a family connection to get work as a contractor on the Illinois and Michigan Canal, an ambitious effort to link the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River.
That family connection was his father-in-law, the redoubtable William L. Perce, a longtime canal contractor with a remarkable record of graft and profiteering at public expense. Because canal projects were so massive, they were usually funded by individual states and run by political appointees, making the system ripe for corruption. As a superintendent of repairs on the Erie Canal in the late 1820s, for example, Perce was able to hand out contracts to his cronies and to himself. Even by the standards of a business notorious for its fraud and graft, he binged at the trough with impressive gluttony.