Things in Heaven and Earth: The Life and Times of Wilford Woodruff, a Mormon Prophet
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When Wilford Woodruff converted to the LDS church in 1833, he joined a millenarian group of a few thousand persecuted believers clustered around Kirtland, Ohio. When he died sixty-five years later in 1898, he was the leader of more than a quarter-million followers worldwide.Before attaining the status of senior apostle at the death of John Taylor in 1887, Woodruff had been one of the fiercest opponents of United States hegemony. He spent years evading territorial marshals on the Mormon underground in rural Utah and Arizona, unable even to attend his first wife's funeral. As church president, faced with disfranchisement and federal confiscation of LDS temples, Woodruff reached a decision in 1890 to accept U.S. law.But through all this, Woodruff himself changed. Alexander examines the secular and religious development of the president's world view from apocalyptic mystic to pragmatic conciliator. He reveals the gentle, solitary farmer; the fisherman and horticulturalist; the family man with seven wives; the charismatic preacher of the Mormon Reformation; the astute businessman; the savvy politician who courted the favor of prominent Republicans in California and Oregon (Leland Stanford and others); and the romantic who in old age pursued the affections of Lydia Mountford.
