Volume 2 of the Histories series features four Church histories written by assignment from Joseph Smith. The

fourth historian, John Corrill, deserves to be better known.

In Ohio in 1830, someone gives Corrill a copy of this new publication called the Book of Mormon.

He looks at a few pages and decides it's a fraud.

But to his astonishment, he learned Sidney Rigdon and most of his congregation have joined the Church. Well, Corrill decides that maybe he should investigate more closely.

And he's baptized in 1831.

He's called as a counselor in the bishopric in Jackson County.

And the Saints elect him as their first representative to the Missouri Legislature.

In 1838, he received the assignment to write a Church history. He did go ahead and write the history, but it didn't turn out to be the institutional record that Joseph Smith had anticipated.

As the struggles in Missouri became more and more severe,

Corrill felt that Joseph Smith’s leadership had become really authoritarian, and his concluding words are heartbreaking.

He’s discouraged; he’s disappointed.

He’s given so much of himself to the Church. But now he says that as far as he can see,

plan after plan has been overthrown,

and our prophet has seemed not to know the event until too late.

Corrill’s document is a hybrid.

In part, it is a Church history with wonderful eyewitness accounts. And in part,

it’s Corrill’s personal story of how he came to join the Church

and then why he left the Church. He was excommunicated in 1839.

So if we're looking for an inspiring story of a pioneer who valiantly triumphed over every challenge,

we wouldn't choose this one.

But if we want to understand how complex and how destructive

the Missouri struggles really were, what Joseph Smith was going through,

just trying to keep the Church together and what the members were called upon to endure,

then Corril″s work is really valuable to us.

His history is John Corrill’s story,

and it's also part of Joseph Smith story.