He dedicated Jerusalem for the return of the Jews, renamed Nevada’s oldest town, nearly became president of the LDS Church, and may have helped create one of Mormonism’s most enduring succession myths. This week, Lindsay Hansen Park and Bryan Buchanan trace the astonishing and contradictory life of Apostle Orson Hyde, from orphaned boy who walked 600 miles to Ohio, to missionary who crossed more than 20,000 miles to the Holy Land, to Brigham Young’s colonizing agent across the American West. Along the way, they explore Hyde’s role in Genoa and Carson Valley, the British and German missions, plural marriage, western irrigation and conservation, the Utah War, and the succession crisis after Joseph Smith’s death, while confronting the darker parts of his legacy, including his treatment of a formerly enslaved man, marriages to teenage girls, role in Joseph Smith’s imprisonment, and impossible testimony about Brigham Young’s famous “transfiguration.” Orson Hyde was missionary, judge, journalist, apostle, colonizer, and empire builder, a man whose life captures both the astonishing ambition and profound moral contradictions of nineteenth-century Mormonism.

Show Notes

• Orson Hyde: A Life of Lessons Learned — BYU Religious Studies Center
• Orson Hyde: Nauvoo to Jerusalem and Back Again — BYU Religious Studies Center
• Orson Hyde and the Carson Valley Mission, 1855–1857 — BYU ScholarsArchive
• Hyde, Orson — Utah History Encyclopedia
• Orson Hyde — Joseph Smith Papers
• Justice Comes to Nevada — True West Magazine
• Orson Hyde’s 1865 Speech on Rangeland Grazing — Western Watersheds Project
• Orson Hyde — Joseph Smith Papers Biography
• President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles — Wikipedia
• Books mentioned:
• Orson Hyde: Missionary, Apostle, Colonizer by Howard H. Barron
• Orson Hyde: The Olive Branch of Israel by Myrtle Stevens Hyde