Interestingly enough many of my pioneer ancestors were around when Joseph Smith founded the Mormon church.
They were in the Nauvoo temple before the mobs forced them out and
destroyed there temple. I am proud to be a descendant of Mormon Pioneers John & Poly
Shaw, Diana & Harriet Shaw and William Adams Hickman.
As a young boy, a member of the 42nd word church in Ogden, I never knew this.
In church we were
taught about Joseph smith, how he was murdered and about his Temple in
Nauvoo, Illinois. It was not until I was in my 50's that I learned that
my great great grandfather John Shaw and his family were among the
first followers of the teachings of Joseph Smith along with William Adams
Hickman, my other great great grandfather, who was Joseph Smith's body
guard and later Brigham Young's.
A "Mormon mountain man" is in many ways a contradiction in terms. Free-spirited
explorers like Jim Bridger, William. Ashley, Jedediah Smith, and others were
often unchurched, single, buckskin clad pioneers. Although William Adams Hickman
was a trusted member of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
(Mormon), husband to ten plural wives, including an Indian squaw, father to
thirty-five children, and one of Utah territory's earliest lawmen, he was also an
independent, rough, undisciplined mountain man and outlaw. As much at home in
his trading post near Fort Bridger as in his more comfortable house in the Salt
Lake Valley, and responsible for more deaths than lives saved, Hickman led an
enigmatic eventful life. There was never a time during Bill Hickman's western
experience that stories often exaggerated of his usually �notorious� exploits
were not related in homes throughout the Salt Lake valley and elsewhere. His
sixty-eight years took him from Mormonism's beginnings to its periods of
isolation and adjustment during the 1850,s and 1870's. He died in 1883 a
non-Mormon because of an excommunication he considered unwarranted. Hickman's
loyalty to the Mormon church and its leaders continued until 1863, thirteen
years after his arrival in the Great Salt Lake Valley, when he accepted
employment with the United States government. Earlier, he had served his church
as one of the most valuable, effective Mormon guerrillas harassing federal
troops during the 1856-58 Utah War. But after he took a position as a federal
Indian guide, Mormon church leaders viewed him as a renegade church �spy,� no
longer worthy of their support and friendship. Excerpts from Wild Bill Hickman
and the Mormon Frontier by H.A. Hilton
w_b_hickman.pdf