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Pay Order to William Clayton for Mary Little, 15 October 1843

Source Note

, on behalf of JS, Pay Order, to , for Mary Little, , Hancock Co., IL, 15 Oct. [1843]; handwriting of ; one page; JS Collection, CHL. Includes endorsement and notation.
Single leaf measuring 3 × 7–7⅜ inches (8 × 18–19 cm). The top and right edges of the leaf have the square cut of manufactured paper; the bottom edge was hand cut and the left edge torn. The text was inscribed on the recto. The pay order was folded in half twice for transmission. An endorsement and a notation were later added to the verso. The document has a small, circular hole in the center, likely a puncture from an office spindle.
The pay order was endorsed by , who served as city treasurer from 1842 to 1845. It was presumably kept among Nauvoo city records. In 1845, the city of was disincorporated. Many if not most of the city records were likely included in the various collections of city records listed in an inventory produced by the Church Historian’s Office (later Family and Church History Department) in 1846, when they were packed up along with church records and taken to the Salt Lake Valley. The city records are also listed in inventories of church records created in 1855, 1878, and circa 1904. By 1973 the document had been included in the JS Collection at the Church Historical Department (now CHL). The document’s likely inclusion with the city records listed in early church inventories and its later inclusion in the JS Collection indicate continuous institutional custody since 1845.

Footnotes

  1. [1]

    Nauvoo City Council Minute Book, 9 Sept. 1842, 101; 8 Feb. 1845, 235.

  2. [2]

    “An Act to Repeal the Nauvoo Charter,” 14th General Assembly, 1844–1845, Senate Bill no. 35 (House Bill no. 42), Illinois General Assembly, Enrolled Acts of the General Assembly, 1818–2012, Illinois State Archives, Springfield.

    Illinois General Assembly. Enrolled Acts of the General Assembly, 1818–2012. Illinois State Archives, Springfield.

  3. [3]

    “Schedule of Church Records. Nauvoo 1846,” [1], Historian’s Office, Catalogs and Inventories, 1846–1904, CHL.

    Historian’s Office. Catalogs and Inventories, 1846–1904. CHL. CR 100 130.

  4. [4]

    “Inventory. Historian’s Office. 4th April 1855,” [1]–[2]; “Index of Records and Journals in the Historian’s Office 1878,” [11]; “Index to Papers in the Historians Office,” ca. 1904, 7, Historian’s Office, Catalogs and Inventories, 1846–1904, CHL.

    Historian’s Office. Catalogs and Inventories, 1846–1904. CHL. CR 100 130.

  5. [5]

    See the full bibliographic entry for JS Collection, 1827–1844, in the CHL catalog.

Historical Introduction

On 15 October 1843, in , Illinois, , acting on behalf of her husband, JS, wrote a pay order requesting that the Nauvoo city treasurer, , pay member Mary Little for services she provided during a smallpox outbreak. Smallpox, a highly contagious and often fatal disease historically referred to as the “speckled monster” because of its characteristic pustular lesions, was carried to the Americas by European explorers in the early sixteenth century to devastating effect. Outbreaks in succeeding centuries ravaged indigenous peoples and colonists from to Mexico City to British Columbia. During a deadly smallpox outbreak in Boston in 1721, Puritan minister Cotton Mather and physician Zabdiel Boylston vigorously promoted the practice of variolation, which entailed deliberately infecting a healthy individual with a mild form of a disease in order to stimulate immunity. Smallpox outbreaks continued to plague the continent; the disease ran rampant during the American Revolutionary War, leading the Continental Army’s commander in chief, George Washington, to order his generals to inoculate new recruits in 1777. In the late eighteenth century, English doctor Edward Jenner published information about his experiments with “vaccination,” a bold, new practice that involved giving subjects vaccinia (cowpox) to stimulate the body’s immune system to develop a resistance to smallpox. In time, Americans embraced the revolutionary method.
While early vaccination efforts diminished the number of smallpox outbreaks in the during the first half of the nineteenth century, the disease persisted, including along the western frontier. In 1838, the Alton Telegraph published a notice of outbreaks in ’s St. Clair, Morgan, , and Cook counties. Outbreaks of the disease in 1843 affected many unvaccinated residents in Illinois’s Putnam and LaSalle counties. A few citizens contracted smallpox in late summer and early fall 1843, which was generally a time of poor health in the city. In early September, a pay order submitted to the Nauvoo city treasurer on behalf of indicated that he assisted in moving a “Mr Dayly,” who had contracted smallpox. Several weeks later, the city treasurer received another pay order, submitted on behalf of and his team for “mooving Wm Pain[e] in case of the Small pox.” Claims submitted to JS by the city marshal, , suggest that Sherwood and others assisted multiple smallpox victims, including Dayly and Paine, during fall 1843. The featured pay order indicates that Little provided services for unidentified smallpox patients during late summer or early fall 1843. Little’s identity cannot be definitively verified. She may have been the same Mary Little who was listed as a member of the Camp Creek , located about fifteen miles east of Nauvoo, in early 1842.
signed her name and her husband’s name on the 15 October 1843 pay order. It is possible that Emma Smith acted as JS’s scribe when she wrote the pay order or that she wrote it in connection with her role as president of the , a church organization that frequently aided the sick. The pay order was produced in , where JS and Emma Smith lived, and presumably hand delivered to Little. Little took it to , who executed the order and endorsed the document, noting that Little was paid. Notations in the Nauvoo city treasury ledger book indicate that Little received five dollars in specie on 11 December 1843.

Footnotes

  1. [1]

    See Riedel, “Edward Jenner and the History of Smallpox and Vaccination,” 21; Fenn, Pox Americana, 6–11, 44–103; and Calloway, One Vast Winter Count, 415–425.

    Riedel, Stefan. “Edward Jenner and the History of Smallpox and Vaccination.” Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings 18, no. 1 (Jan. 2005): 21–25.

    Fenn, Elizabeth A. Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.

    Calloway, Colin G. One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.

  2. [2]

    Fenn, Pox Americana, 32–36. Forms of variolation were reportedly practiced by individuals in the Ottoman Empire, China, and India as far back as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (Boylston, “Origins of Inoculation,” 309–313.)

    Fenn, Elizabeth A. Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.

    Boylston, Arthur. “The Origins of Inoculation.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 105, no. 7 (July 2012): 309–313.

  3. [3]

    Fenn, Pox Americana, 45–47, 94–95.

    Fenn, Elizabeth A. Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.

  4. [4]

    Bazin, Eradication of Smallpox, 35–40; Riedel, “Edward Jenner and the History of Smallpox and Vaccination,” 23–24.

    Bazin, Hervé. The Eradication of Smallpox: Edward Jenner and the First and Only Eradication of a Human Infectious Disease. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2000.

    Riedel, Stefan. “Edward Jenner and the History of Smallpox and Vaccination.” Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings 18, no. 1 (Jan. 2005): 21–25.

  5. [5]

    Kaufman, “American Anti-Vaccinationists and Their Arguments,” 463. In 1809, Massachusetts became the first state to provide free vaccinations. In 1813, the federal government began to encourage vaccination by allowing free shipment of the smallpox vaccine through the United States postal service. (Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 Butler 12–13 [1905]; An Act to Encourage Vaccination [27 Feb. 1813], Public Statutes at Large, 12th Cong., 2nd Sess., vol. 2, chap. 37, p. 806, sec. 2.)

    Kaufman, Martin. “The American Anti-Vaccinationists and Their Arguments.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 41, no. 5 (Sept.–Oct. 1967): 463–478.

    The Public Statutes at Large of the United States of America, from the Organization of the Government in 1789, to March 3, 1845. . . . Edited by Richard Peters. 8 vols. Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1846–1867.

  6. [6]

    “Small Pox,” Alton (IL) Telegraph, 31 Jan. 1838, [3]; “Small Pox,” Illinois Free Trader and LaSalle County Commercial Advertiser (Ottawa), 21 July 1843, [2]; “The Small Pox,” Illinois Free Trader and LaSalle County Commercial Advertiser, 28 July 1843, [2].

    Alton Telegraph and Democratic Review. Alton, IL. 1841–1850.

    Illinois Free Trader and LaSalle County Commercial Advertiser. Ottawa. 1840–1843.

  7. [7]

    In late June 1843, the Nauvoo City Council passed an ordinance requiring all new migrants to disclose “whether they have recently had, or have been exposed to any contagious disease or diseases.” In early September, John Smith wrote to his son George A. Smith, “there has been & is now considerable sickness in the upper part of the citty.” (Nauvoo City Council Minute Book, 29 June 1843, 183; John Smith to George A. Smith, 3 Sept. 1843, in Bathsheba Bigler Smith, Nauvoo, IL, to George A. Smith, Boston, MA, 2 Sept. 1843, George Albert Smith, Papers, CHL.)

    Smith, George Albert. Papers, 1834–1877. CHL. MS 1322.

  8. [8]

    JS to Nauvoo City Treasurer [William Clayton], for Stephen Markham, Pay Order and Receipt, 3 Sept. 1843, JS Collection, CHL.

  9. [9]

    Henry G. Sherwood to [Nauvoo City Treasurer], for Truman R. Barlow, Pay Order and Receipt, 27 Sept. 1843, Nauvoo, IL, Records, CHL.

  10. [10]

    Henry G. Sherwood, Claim, Nauvoo, IL, between 9 Sept. and 10 Nov. 1843; Henry G. Sherwood, Claim, Nauvoo, IL, 8 Dec. 1843, Nauvoo, IL, Records, CHL; Henry G. Sherwood for John Snider, Claim, Nauvoo, IL, 3 Feb. 1844, private possession, copy in editors’ possession.

  11. [11]

    Camp Creek, IL, Branch, Record, [2]. Aside from her membership in the Camp Creek branch, little is known about this Mary Little. It is possible that she is the same Mary Little, born in 1813, who received ordinances in the Nauvoo temple on 2 January 1846. (Kimball, Journal, 2 Jan. 1846.)

    Camp Creek, IL, Branch. Record, 1842–1847. CHL.

    Kimball, Heber C. Journal, Nov. 1845–Jan. 1846. CHL.

  12. [12]

    Although the pay order does not include a year, the payment notation in the Nauvoo city treasury ledger book indicates that Little was paid in December 1843, which strongly suggests that the order was also produced in 1843. (Nauvoo City Treasury Ledger, 8, 101.)

  13. [13]

    Nauvoo City Treasury Ledger, 8, 101.

Page [1]

Let the bearer Mary Little have about five dollars out of the City Treasury to remunerate her for her Services among the small Pox
Joseph Smith
By
. Oct 15— [1843] [p. [1]]
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Source Note

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Document Information

Related Case Documents
Editorial Title
Pay Order to William Clayton for Mary Little, 15 October 1843
ID #
2049
Total Pages
2
Print Volume Location
JSP, D13:191–194
Handwriting on This Page
  • Emma Smith

Footnotes

  1. [1]

    See Nauvoo City Treasury Ledger, 8, 101.

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