No Man Knows My History (Arkosh History)

by Fawn M. Brodie

A man’s memory is bound to be a distortion of his past in accordance with his present interests, and the most faithful autobiography is likely to mirror less what a man was than what he has become. Joseph Smith always dictated his journal with an intense consciousness of his audience, and in the 1840’s, when he began in earnest to write the official history of his church for the edification of posterity, he reconstructed his past as only a celebrated prophet of the nineteenth century would have lived it. It was all of one color, a succession of miracles and revelations, and in no sense an evolution. It became, in fact, an almost impenetrable hiding-place, where he concealed himself behind a perpetual flow of words.