Canada

Even before the first published copies of the Book of Mormon were completed, Solomon Chamberlin, an itinerant preacher, visited the Smith family near Palmyra, New York, after he heard rumors about the Book of Mormon. Hyrum Smith took Chamberlin to the office where the book was being printed, and Chamberlin soon departed for Upper Canada (present-day Ontario) with 64 printed pages of the Book of Mormon and preached “all that [he] knew concerning Mormonism.”¹ Chamberlin’s preaching in Canada is the earliest known example of preaching from the Book of Mormon. Over the next decade, many Latter-day Saints—including Joseph Smith; his mother, Lucy; Oliver Cowdery; and six of the original Twelve Apostles—traveled to Canada to preach and attend to Church business.²

Preaching near Toronto in 1836, Parley P. Pratt found a small group of Christians seeking a church with the “primitive simplicity” found in scripture.³ Many members of that group, including John and Leonora Taylor and Joseph, Mary, and Mercy Fielding, were soon baptized, and Pratt organized several small branches in the area.⁴ A year later, when Apostles Heber C. Kimball and Orson Hyde began preaching in England, they were joined by Joseph Fielding, John Goodson, Isaac Russell, and John Snyder—all converts from Pratt’s mission to Canada.⁵

Beginning in 1847, many of the over 2,000 Canadians who had joined the Church migrated to the western United States along with the main body of the Saints.⁶ In 1887, Charles Ora Card, a stake president in Cache Valley, Utah, led a small group of Saints to Lee Creek (later Cardston), Alberta, where they settled.⁷ Many of the early settlers of Southern Alberta, including Card and his wife Zina Young Card, were members of polygamist families. After the U.S. Congress passed the Edmunds Act in 1882, these Latter-day Saints risked fines and imprisonment for continuing to live in polygamist relationships. As a result, some of them chose immigration to Mexico and Canada. Alberta offered both economic opportunities and a safe haven from the antipolygamy laws of the United States, though polygamist men were supposed to bring only one of their wives with them to Canada.⁸

Photograph taken August 26, 1923, at the dedication of the Cardston Alberta Temple.

Over the next three decades, Latter-day Saints migrated to Southern Alberta in large numbers. In 1895, the first stake organized outside of the United States was the Cardston Alberta Stake, and in 1923, the first temple outside the United States was built in Cardston. By then, more than 9,500 Latter-day Saints lived in the approximately 20  communities in Alberta.⁹ By the end of the 1970s, stakes and missions had been established in every territory and province of Canada.¹⁰ Several Canadian citizens have served as General Authorities and General Officers of the Church, including First Presidency members Hugh B. Brown and N. Eldon Tanner and Relief Society General President Elaine L. Jack. By 2018, more than 195,000 members of the Church resided in the country, with additional temples built in or planned for Toronto, Halifax, Regina, Edmonton, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, and Winnipeg.¹¹

Church Resources

“On the Canadian Frontier: Stories of Life in the Charles and Zina Card Home,” May 18, 2012, history.lds.org.

“History of the Cardston Temple” (video), June 18, 2012, history.lds.org.

“Southern Alberta,” history.lds.org.

Bibliography

The following publications provide further information about this topic. By referring or linking you to these resources, we do not endorse or guarantee the content or the views of the authors.

Brigham Y. Card, Herbert C. Northcott, John E. Foster, Howard Palmer, and George K. Jarvis, eds., The Mormon Presence in Canada (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1990).

Solomon Chamberlin autobiography, Church History Library, Salt Lake City.

Larry C. Porter, “Solomon Chamberlain—Early Missionary,” BYU Studies, vol. 12, no. 3 (Spring 1972), 314–18.

Roy A. Prete and Carma T. Prete, eds., Canadian Mormons: History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Canada (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2017).

Notes

1. Solomon Chamberlin autobiography, 10, Church History Library, Salt Lake City; see also Larry C. Porter, “Solomon Chamberlain—Early Missionary,” BYU Studies, vol. 12, no. 3 (1972), 314–18.

2. See Historical Introduction to “Revelation, circa Early 1830,” josephsmithpapers.org; Stephen K. Ehat, “‘Securing’ the Prophet’s Copyright in the Book of Mormon: Historical and Legal Context for the So-called Canadian Copyright Revelations,” BYU Studies, vol. 50, no. 2 (2011), 4–70; Eric Smith, “A Mission to Canada: D&C 100,” in Matthew McBride and James Goldberg, eds., Revelations in Context: The Stories behind the Sections of the Doctrine and Covenants (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2016), 202–7; see also Topic: Printing and Publishing the Book of Mormon. For more detail on early preaching in Canada, see Carma T. Prete, “Eastern Canada: An Early Fruitful Field, 1829–77,” in Roy A. Prete and Carma T. Prete, eds., Canadian Mormons: History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Canada (Provo, Utah: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2017), 23–38.

3. John Taylor, “History of John Taylor by Himself,” 7, Historian’s Office Histories of the Twelve, 1856–1861, Church History Library, Salt Lake City.

4. John Taylor, “History of John Taylor by Himself,” 10, 12.

5. John Taylor, “History of John Taylor by Himself,” 11; Orson F. Whitney, Life of Heber C. Kimball, an Apostle; the Father and Founder of the British Mission (Salt Lake City: Kimball Family, 1888), 123.

6. See Roy A. Prete, “Rise and Progress of the Church in Canada,” in Prete and Prete, Canadian Mormons, 1–22.

7. Card led exploratory parties to Southern Alberta in 1886 and 1887. After surveying the region around the St. Mary River, they voted unanimously to “plant [their] colony” on a tributary of the river called Lee Creek. Donald G. Godfrey and Brigham Y. Card, eds., The Diaries of Charles Ora Card (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1993), 52, 54–55; see also Rebecca J. Doig and W. Jack Stone, “The Alberta Settlement,” in Prete and Prete, Canadian Mormons, 60–63.

8. See “The Manifesto and the End of Plural Marriage,” Gospel Topics, topics.lds.org.

9. There is some debate about the number of settlements founded in whole or in part by Latter-day Saints in Southern Alberta. See Lynn A. Rosenvall, “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Alberta: A Historical and Geographical Perspective,” in Dennis A. Wright, Robert C. Freeman, Andrew H. Hedges, and Matthew O. Richardson, eds., Regional Studies in LDS Church History: Western Canada (Provo, Utah: Department of Church History and Doctrine, Brigham Young University, 2000), 1–12; Brigham Y. Card, “Charles Ora Card and the Founding of the Mormon Settlements in Southwestern Alberta, North-West Territories,” in Brigham Y. Card, Herbert C. Northcott, John E. Foster, Howard Palmer, and George K. Jarvis, eds., The Mormon Presence in Canada (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1990), 77–107; Doig and Stone, “The Alberta Settlement,” 55–99.

10. Daniel H. Olsen, Brandon S. Plewe, and Jonathan A. Jarvis, “Historical Geography: Growth, Distribution, and Ethnicity,” in Prete and Prete, Canadian Mormons, 108–13.

11. “Facts and Statistics: Canada,” Mormon Newsroom, mormonnewsroom.org.