Joseph Smith moments: Stranger in Nauvoo
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There were eight of them. And although they had been born free, everywhere they went in frontier America, they were accused and harassed as if they were fugitive slaves.
Jane, 20, had joined the Church a year earlier. It was her idea that they leave their home in Buffalo, N.Y., and begin the long journey west toward the one place they knew they would be safe.
Nauvoo, the Beautiful. For in that city in Illinois lived the Prophet Joseph Smith. And Jane had seen him in a vision and wanted to go to him.
So they came on foot, not daring to use well-traveled roads. First, they wore out their shoes, then their socks. Ultimately, they walked on bare feet.
"We lay in bushes, and in barns and outdoors," Jane later wrote. "And traveled until there was a frost just like a snow, and we had to walk on that frost."
After a hard journey of more than 800 miles, at long last they arrived in Nauvoo. Emma Smith, Joseph's wife, begged them to enter her home. Joseph came down to the sitting room and spoke with them. "Now," he said to them, "I want to hear of some of your hard trials."
They told him, and Joseph slapped his hands and said to a friend, "What do you think of that?"
"I think if I had had it to do, I should not have come," says the other, "I would not have had faith enough."
The Prophet told the weary travelers that they would stay with him until they had each found a place to stay. A week later, they all had found new lodgings. All except Jane.
One morning, the Prophet found her crying.
"Where are all the folks?" Joseph asked.
"They have all got themselves places," Jane replied, "but I 'haint got any place."
"We won't have tears here," Joseph said.
"But I have got no home."
Then the Prophet turned to his wife Emma and said, "Here's a girl who says she's got no home. Don't you think she has a home here?"
Emma smiled. And from that moment on, Jane lived as a member of the family in the home of the Prophet of God.
After Joseph and Hyrum were martyred, Jane Manning James crossed the plains with other members of the Church. She arrived in Salt Lake and lived out her days there. Years later, she said that sometimes she would still "wake up in the middle of the night, and just think about Brother Joseph and Sister Emma and how good they was to me. Joseph Smith was the finest man I ever saw on Earth."— Neil K. Newell, Welfare Services
