Thomas Kane not only helped Mormons, but wrote history

PROVO — Many of the enduring popular images of Nauvoo-era and pioneer-era Mormons flowed from of the gifted pen and oratory of Thomas L. Kane, a former Brigham Young University professor said Wednesday."My sense when I first read 'The Mormons' was yes, I know that, that's exactly how it was," Edward A. Geary said of reading Kane's 1850 book. "It really was Thomas Kane who was formulating the permanent images we have of Nauvoo and the migrating Mormons."Kane may be famous for coming to the dramatic aid of the Latter-day Saints in 1846, when they had been driven from Nauvoo, Ill., and again in 1857, when the U.S. Army marched on Salt Lake City, but Geary said Kane's constant aid over three decades is overlooked."Almost continuously over a period of almost 30 years, Kane was doing the work of a consultant, the work of a lobbyist, the work of a public relations manager or image molder to a very, very large extent," he said. "He did what people now would get large fees for, but one of his principles was never to take payment from the Mormons."Kane was effective because he was a master of strategic rhetoric, Geary said. He wielded a skillful pen at a time when America was a nation of newspapers and newspaper readers and the papers were hungry for content. Geary's lecture was the penultimate in this school year's Thomas L. Kane Exhibition Lecture Series at BYU. Geary is a retired BYU English professor and former editor of "BYU Studies." Kane set out to change the national perception of the Mormons, Geary said. "His first literary contribution for the Mormons was planted in letters he wrote trying to change opinions. They culminated in 1850 with a lecture at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania," which became 'The Mormons.' "The work begins with Kane as a tourist who knew nothing of the Mormons making his way up the Mississippi, which he described as dreary and full of sordid, vagabond and idle settlers in an unimproved country."Then around a bend he sees a beautiful river on a hill," Geary said. Kane described the city as cultivated and clean but in the possession of a drunken rabble. He then crossed the river and found the last band of Mormons, and later he provides descriptions of the Mormon camps on the Missouri River as the Latter-day Saints prepared to undertake the pioneer journey to Utah."The message clearly is the Mormons are very much like the author's audience — decent, civilized, refined people, unlike the border inhabitants of western Missouri and Iowa," Geary said. "If the Mormons have had trouble with their neighbors, it's because the mormons simply have a higher lever of civilization and culture then the frontiersmen.""The Mormons" was distributed to all members of Congress and other influential people. Kane never joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, though it was rumored he had. In fact, Kane became irreligious, which pained his devout Christian wife, Elizabeth. "The image they used," Geary said, "was of a pane of glass between their lips, and she was on the inside of the church and he was on the outside." Kane and Brigham Young were great friends, but Elizabeth Kane would struggle throughout her life with President Young, though she said he treated her gallantly and her portrait of him in her own book, "Twelve Mormon Homes," is very perceptive, Geary said. She later told the story of the Kanes' visit to St. George with President Young in 1872, when Thomas Kane fell ill. She said she returned from a walk to find her husband sleeping in his bed and President Young kneeling by his bed in prayer."She writes that she finds herself feeling kindly toward this man, too," Geary said.The Kane lecture series will conclude March 12, when Matthew J. Grow, author of a new Kane biography just released by Yale University Press will deliver "Thomas L. Kane and Nineteenth-Century America." BYU Studies plans to publish all the papers in the lecture series as a book.