Questions for Research on the Morrisites

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Questions for research

Questions the guide has not been able to settle, for students, local historians, and other researchers. Questions of record can be advanced with records that are digitized or held in Utah, Idaho, Montana, or California. Questions of interpretation ask what the movement means for the history of religion; they suit theses and articles.

If you take one up, or can answer one, write to contact@morrisite.org. Answers will be credited here. The edition of Forscutt’s “Sketch of Joseph Morris” is in progress by the editor.

Questions of record

Where is Joseph Morris buried?

Open

Known: The Salt Lake City Cemetery sexton’s record lists Morris under June 15, 1862, as no. 1469. He lies in the pauper ground, in an unmarked grave. A tradition holds that he was buried beneath a street so that he would be trodden underfoot; no published source for it has been found.
Where to look: Salt Lake City Cemetery office (plat maps of the pauper sections); sexton’s records on FamilySearch; Salt Lake newspapers for June 1862 in Utah Digital Newspapers; where the tradition first appears in print or family accounts.

Did Brigham Young ever answer Morris?

Open

Known: About a dozen of Morris’s letters survive in Young’s office files (CR 1234 1). Anderson found no reply, and reports a penciled note on the first letter, “He’s weak minded.” The letters have not been listed by date.
Where to look: Young’s letterpress copybooks and office journals, 1857–1861, in the same collection; the Journal of Wilford Woodruff for February 1861. A dated list of the letters, with catalog links, would be useful in itself.

What did Joseph F. Smith write to Niels Anderson?

Open

Known: In 1903 Niels Anderson asked the church to help his wife, Mary Christoffersen Anderson, whose jaw was shot away in 1862. His letters survive (CR 1 191, digitized), and they answer a letter from Smith dated February 25, 1903, which is not in the file. Whether any help followed is unknown.
Where to look: Joseph F. Smith and First Presidency letterpress copybooks for 1903; Bannock Stake and Soda Springs ward records.

Who were the Morrisites?

Open

Known: The roll of membership printed in 1886 lists about 430 people baptized at South Weber in 1861–62, but the lives of ordinary members have never been traced. Most Morrisite names appear in no readily available source.
Where to look: The roll; Slaterville and other ward records; the 1860 and 1870 censuses; Soda Springs, Carson Valley, and Deer Lodge records. Findings would be cited here, not published as a list, and living people are excluded.

Who died at Kington Fort?

Open

Known: Accounts differ on the number of dead and on some of their names and dates. No list checked against all the sources exists.
Where to look: Contemporary newspapers; Woodruff’s journal; the Journal History; Forscutt’s account; the Anderson gravestone; Salt Lake and Weber County burial records; testimony from the 1879 trial of Robert T. Burton.

What became of the California congregation?

Open

Known: George and James Dove led the church in San Francisco after 1882 and published its books into the 1890s. How and when the congregation ended is not known.
Where to look: San Francisco directories and newspapers in the California Digital Newspaper Collection; probate and cemetery records for the Dove family; the imprints of later Morrisite publications.

What do the Danish revelations say?

Open

Known: The USU collection holds a bound volume of Morris’s revelations in Danish that does not seem to exist anywhere else. It has not been translated or compared with The Spirit Prevails.
Where to look: USU Special Collections, Caine MSS 10. A reader of nineteenth-century Danish handwriting is needed.

Where are the records of the 1863 trials?

Open

Known: Seven Morrisites were convicted of second-degree murder and others fined in March 1863, before Governor Harding pardoned them. Accounts come mainly from newspapers and later histories.
Where to look: Utah territorial court case files at the Utah State Archives; federal records for the territory; Harding’s papers and pardon records.

When was the photograph of Morris taken, and who is with him?

Open

Known: Anderson (Revisited, 118) dates the only known photograph of Morris to about 1841, in England, and identifies the man beside him as his older brother William, who came to America only after 1862. Commercial photography reached England only in 1841, and the second man looks much older than Morris, while family trees make William about two years his senior. Others date the picture about 1860.
Where to look: The original image and its owner; Anderson’s research files at USU (Caine MSS 10); Morris family descendants in England and Utah; the photographic process and studio, if a mount or case survives.

Who led the Montana church after George Williams?

Answered

Answer: From the church’s minutes, as Anderson gives them (Revisited): William James, the local president under Williams, sustained in May 1882 with Andrew Hendrikson and John R. Eardley as counselors; George Thompson of London, elected president of the church on May 10, 1886, probably the last general president; Andrew Hendrikson, president of the Montana Morrisites from 1886 until his death on July 3, 1921; and George Johnson, who presided until shortly before his death on April 29, 1954. The church disbanded in 1969. Eardley, often named as the Montana leader, was a counselor and stake president who left Montana about 1900. The Chronology and the lineage chart now follow this account.
Still open: How far Thompson’s authority reached beyond Montana, who presided from 1954 to 1969, and the dates of Eardley’s offices. Court and Council minutes and the Hendrikson papers in the Morrisite collection at USU (Caine MSS 10) are the place to check.

Questions of interpretation

Where did the Morrisite teaching of reincarnation come from?

Open

Why it matters: Morris, Williams, Davies, the Doves, and later Brighouse all taught that spirits return to the earth in new bodies, a doctrine the Latter-day Saint church did not teach. Where it came from bears on how early Mormon ideas were carried and reshaped by dissenters.
Where to start: The Spirit Prevails; Kirk Watson’s edition, including Davies’s 1882 interview and the Doves’ Treatise on Re-Incarnation (1892); the Scriptural Mormonism episode of November 14, 2026; reports of Nauvoo-era teachings; Spiritualism in Britain and America in the 1850s and 1860s.

How did believers survive failed prophecy?

Open

Why it matters: Morris set days for the Second Coming that passed; he was killed in the siege; Williams named the Deer Lodge Valley as the place of Christ’s return; Davies proclaimed his infant son the Messiah. Yet the movement lasted more than ninety years. Who stayed, who left, and how they explained what happened are open questions.
Where to start: The revelations and testimonies of 1862 in Kirk Watson’s edition; Williams’s letters at USU; the Davies material; the literature that began with Festinger, When Prophecy Fails; changes in membership over time (cited, not published as lists).

How did a prophet’s movement become a church run by vote?

Open

Why it matters: Authority passed from Morris’s revelations to Williams’s letters from afar, then to presidents elected at court meetings (1882, 1886) and to Danish lay leaders who had never been Latter-day Saints. Few movements of the period document that change so closely.
Where to start: Court and Council minutes and the Cainan letters in the Morrisite collection at USU (Caine MSS 10); Anderson’s chapters on the Montana church; the sociology of schism and of the routinization of charisma.

Why were so many Morrisites Scandinavian?

Open

Why it matters: Danish speakers were prominent from the start: Morris’s revelations circulated in Danish, the Omaha and Council Bluffs congregations kept Danish-language records in 1869, and the last Montana leaders were Danish immigrants. Disappointment after emigration, language, poverty, and patterns of recruitment are all possible explanations.
Where to start: The 1886 roll of membership compared with Scandinavian Mission emigration records; the Danish-language material at USU; emigrant letters and Danish-language newspapers.

What became of the spiritual gifts?

Open

Why it matters: Speaking in tongues, interpreted tongues, and messages from angels were central at Kington Fort, as in the “3rd Captain of the Lord’s Host” testimony of June 1862. One Morrisite revelation charges Church leaders with deciding to put down the gifts. How Morrisite practice compares with the Latter-day Saint church in the 1850s has not been studied closely.
Where to start: Kirk Watson’s edition; The Spirit Prevails; studies of spiritual gifts and the Reformation of 1856–57 in Utah.

Where did the rituals come from?

Open

Why it matters: The scepters, Morris’s robe and crown, the ceremony at Kington Fort in May 1862 that Anderson calls the Foreshadowing Ceremony, the holding of goods in common there, and later communal experiments at Walla Walla and in the Order of Enoch. Their relation to Latter-day Saint temple ritual and to the church’s own communal programs is unexplored.
Where to start: The scepters and their inscriptions (see Repositories); Anderson, Revisited, 116–17; The Spirit Prevails; Davies’s 1881 deposition in Kirk Watson’s edition.

What did Morris teach about marriage, and what did women do in the movement?

Open

Why it matters: Later writers often describe Morris as an opponent of plural marriage; Kirk Watson’s introduction argues that he accepted it as a celestial principle. Women’s part in the gifts, in testimony, and in the community has hardly been studied.
Where to start: The Spirit Prevails; Kirk Watson’s introduction and sources; Emma Thompson Just’s letters in Agnes Just Reid, Letters of Long Ago; the Anderson plaque and other family accounts.

How has the Morrisite War been remembered?

Open

Why it matters: The descendants’ bronze plaque at Soda Springs, the 2006 monument at South Weber, folk traditions such as the street burial, and the church’s 1903 reply to the Andersons, which blamed the Morrisites, each tell a different story of the same three days.
Where to start: The plaque transcription (Series 5); the monument text; the 1903 file (CR 1 191); newspaper retellings; oral histories at USU and Weber State University.

Why did some Morrisites join the RLDS Church?

Open

Why it matters: Mark H. Forscutt joined the Reorganization in Salt Lake City in 1865, and John L. Bear also joined it, while other Morrisites returned to the Latter-day Saint church. Others joined later: Robert E. Farley in Nebraska in 1870, and, after years in the Morrisite groups, Erick and Caroline Eliason at Soda Springs in 1870, Margaretta Cook in Nevada in 1873 and Lena Hanson at Deer Lodge in 1895. The Eliasons’ joint baptism at Soda Springs, a Morrisite settlement, suggests the RLDS mission reached the community there directly. Several people on the roll were baptized at Malad, Idaho, in 1865. What the Reorganization offered them, and whether its missionaries sought them out, is not well understood.
Where to start: Forscutt’s journals; Bear’s autobiography in the Journal of History; records of the RLDS mission to Utah in the 1860s; Black, Early Members of the Reorganized Church (1993), which cites RLDS branch records and Saints’ Herald obituaries; the later-path dots on the roll; Rogers, “Mark Hill Forscutt” (2001).