"I Know the Dream Mine is True": Mormons, Mining, and the Making of "Bad Religion" in Early Twentieth-Century Utah

Author

Christine V. Shell, University of New Mexico - Main CampusFollow

Publication Date

Fall 12-16-2023

Abstract

In 1894, folksy Mormon farmer-turned-prophet John H. Koyle, Jr, dreamed that an angel from the Book of Mormon showed him where and how to mine for golden ore and Book of Mormon treasures. Shortly afterwards, Koyle and a handful of friends established the “Dream Mine” at the revealed location, and as word spread additional workers joined the cause—for this was a mine destined to save the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its members from financial and spiritual ruin during the long-foretold apocalyptic “Last Days.”

Koyle’s followers took delight and solace from their participation in the Dream Mine’s distinctive community of faith, which involved physical labor, promoting stock, making individual stock purchases, and attending shareholder meetings that echoed Mormon worship services. The Church, on the other hand, fought Koyle for decades, seeing his movement as a distinctive threat to the Church’s established, divinely revealed authoritarian structure.

The battle over the Dream Mine exposes an important, overlooked dimension of Mormonism’s historical development: its transition from a dangerous and “bad” religion of the nineteenth-century to a respected and “good” All-American faith of the twentieth through markers beyond polygamy. This dissertation explores three interrelated markers which shaped this new identity—charismatic authority, mining and resource extraction, and wealth acquisition—and argues that they oriented both the Church’s emerging understanding of itself as a respectable faith community as well as its efforts to delegitimize and malign competing religious movements whose adherents practiced religion on their own terms.

Keywords

Mormonism, Mining, Religious Studies, Settler Colonialism, Utah History

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

American Studies

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

American Studies

First Committee Member (Chair)

Kathleen Holscher

Second Committee Member

Alyosha Goldstein

Third Committee Member

Max Perry Mueller

Fourth Committee Member

Samuel Truett

Recommended Citation

Shell, Christine V.. ""I Know the Dream Mine is True": Mormons, Mining, and the Making of "Bad Religion" in Early Twentieth-Century Utah." (2023). https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/amst_etds/126