Collective Consolidation Culminates

Abstract

Many contingent choices determined whether and how Mormons would remember Smith’s vision. This chapter shows how as late as the late 1870s, after the death of Brigham Young, Latter-day Saints had still not consolidated collective memory of Joseph Smith’s first vision. However, the 1880 canonization of a version of the 1838/39 account symbolized an institutional collective consolidation of the first vision. Orson Pratt, a long-time selector and relater of the vision, witnessed its consolidation before his death in 1881. Pratt was the saints’ foremost relater and repeater of Smith’s first vision, making their shared memory usable, a past for the present.