All hail Jesse Strang, crowned this day in 1850 King of Beaver Island! How did he get this title? By being told he deserved it by an angel, of course.
James — when he was young and relatively normal — wrote a paper on the natural history of Beaver Island which was published in the Smithsonian Institution’s Annual Report, and considered definitive for years.
He was also a lawyer and newspaper editor in his 20s, but in 1844 (at 31) he went a bit funny and got himself baptised into Joseph Smith’s definitely real and not made up ‘Church’ of Latter-day Saints.
Mind you, James had kept a diary as a teenager in which he mourned the fact that he hadn’t been made a general. He did, after all, feel that he had a calling to be a world leader…
Anyway, when Joseph Smith was murdered by a mob, Strang claimed he was the natural successor. Unfortunately, so did rather a lot of other senior men in the ‘church’. Who also excommunicated Strang.
At this point, he mysteriously discovered a letter from Joseph Smith proclaiming him the rightful heir — a document of such historical immensity, it has its own Wikipedia page.
He also took a leaf out of Joseph Smith’s book by discovering some metal plates with markings on after a helpful angel appeared to him and told him where to look. He was also able — Good Lord! — to translate them.
The Brighamites (Brigham Young being a rival leader) said Strang’s plates had been made from an old brass kettle, but James pointed out that he had to be king because The Book of The Law of the Lord said so.
This was — of course — the book he’d ‘translated’ from the brass plates. James also made the mistake of letting daylight in on magic by actually showing people the plates. Joseph Smith never did (and his were gold, so: clearly better. Or something.)
Anyway, about 12,000 Mormons believed Strang, and went off with him to Beaver Island, where the Prime Minister he’d appointed stuck a tin crown on his head. Strang differentiated himself from other Mormons by preaching monogamy.
Well, at first. He changed his mind, took five wives and had 14 children. This about-face lost him a lot of followers, who had thought he was the normal one, compared to Brigham Young, but Strang had other problems.
One follower, who’d been beaten for adultery (because obviously, you can ‘take’ as many wives as you like, as long as you don’t take another man’s ‘property’), began to conspire against him, and acquired a gun.
With a friend, also armed, Thomas Bedford ambushed and shot Strang in the sixth year of his reign, and he carked it three weeks later. In the meantime, locals drove the remaining Strangites off Beaver Island.
They still exist, though. One of so many factions of latter day saints, there’s a Wikipedia page dedicated just to listing them, including the Church of the Potter Christ, the Order of Enoch, the Church of the Firstborn and the Church of the Firstborn of the Fulness of Times, the Church of Jesus Christ Restored, the True Church of Jesus Christ Restored, and the Church of Jesus Christ Restored 1830 — or (my favourite) the Church of Christ With the Elijah Message, The Assured Way of the Lord, Inc.
Mind you, on the subject of credulous people and piffle, it’s also the 76th anniversary of a headline people think was accurate and didn’t just misrepresent a weather balloon.
