“Joseph Smith… came from nowhere. Reared in a poor Yankee…
“Joseph Smith… came from nowhere. Reared in a poor Yankee farm family, he had less than two years of formal schooling and began life without social standing or institutional backing. His family rarely attended church. Yet in the fourteen years he headed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Smith created a religious culture that survived his death, flourished in the most desolate regions of the United States, and continues to grow worldwide. . . . In 1830 at the age of twenty-four, he published the Book of Mormon….He built cities and temples and gathered thousands of fo llowers before he was killed at age thirty-eight.” — Richard Lyman Bushman, historian, Joseph Smith Rough Stone Rolling: A Cultural Biography of Mormonism’s Founder, 2005 Based on the excerpt, the westward migration by the Mormons in the 1830s and 1840s was most likely motivated by the