Jacob Hamblin

Jacob Hamblin’s own story, in the first person. Born in Ohio in 1819, he hears a “Mormon” Elder preach in Wisconsin in 1842, is baptized against his family’s opposition, meets the Prophet Joseph Smith at Nauvoo, and reaches the Salt Lake Valley in 1850. In Tooele Valley he resolves to carry peace to the Indians rather than shed their blood; from 1854 he labors in the Southern Indian Mission at Harmony and on the Santa Clara, and in 1857 Brigham Young appoints him its president. He leads repeated journeys across the Colorado River to the Hopi towns (the book’s “Moquis”), loses young George A. Smith, Jr., to a Navajo attack in 1860, guides Major John Wesley Powell, and helps make peace with the Navajo nation at Fort Defiance in 1871. The book closes with a Navajo council that threatened his life in the winter of 1874–75, a letter about it from one of the two Smith brothers who were with him, and his last journeys for President Young.

The title page reads “Jacob Hamblin, A Narrative of His Personal Experience, as a Frontiersman, Missionary to the Indians and Explorer, Disclosing Interpositions of Providence, Severe Privations, Perilous Situations and Remarkable Escapes. Fifth Book of the Faith-Promoting Series, by James A. Little. Designed for the Instruction and Encouragement of Young Latter-day Saints. Juvenile Instructor Office, Salt Lake City, Utah. 1881.” The unsigned preface, the publisher’s, says Hamblin was “induced to narrate, for Brother James A. Little’s pen to record,” the incidents in it, and Hamblin ends the book saying he has “furnished the facts for the pen of Brother Little.” Chapter XVI quotes Major John Wesley Powell’s account of a council with the Shivwits, and Chapter XXI is mostly a letter to the Pioche Record, signed J. E. S., by one of the two Smith brothers who were with Hamblin at the Navajo council.

The book has no chapter titles; short titles were written for the page, and each chapter’s summary from the printed contents is read at its start. The preface is read by a second voice. The list of the series’ books after the title page is not read. Fifteen clear printer’s slips are corrected (for example “without purse of scrip” to “purse or scrip”), and the contents’ “Port Defiance” is read as Fort Defiance. Otherwise the book is read exactly as printed, in the language of 1881, including its period terms for Native Americans.

Text produced for Project Gutenberg by the Mormon Texts Project, with thanks to Tom Williams for proofreading (released February 16, 2015). Project Gutenberg lists Jacob Hamblin as author and James A. Little as editor.