No Man Knows My History (Arkosh History)

by Fawn M. Brodie

Parley Pratt was lying next to the prophet late one night when these stories became so foul that he could not close his ears to them. Suddenly, he said, Joseph rose and spoke in a voice of thunder: “Silence, ye fiends of the infernal pit! In the name of Jesus Christ I rebuke you, and command you to be still; I will not live another minute and hear such language. Cease such talk, or you or I die this instant!” The guards turned away abashed and half-scared. Pratt was overwhelmed. “I have seen ministers of justice,” he wrote later in his autobiography, “clothed in magisterial robes, and criminals arraigned before them while life was suspended on a breath . . . but dignity and majesty have I seen but once, as it stood in chains at midnight in a dungeon in an obscure village in Missouri.”