Review
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Title: A Barn Full of Angels: The Spiritual World and Pioneer Journey of Zerah Pulsipher
Authors: Chad L. Nielson
Publisher: Greg Kofford Books
Genre: Religious Non-fiction, Biography
Year Published: 2026
Number of Pages: 243
Format: paperback
ISBN: 978-1589588332
Price: 29.95
Reviewed by Melvin Clarno Johnson for the Association of Mormon Letters
A Barn Full of Angels: The Spiritual World and Pioneer Journey of Zerah Pulsipher, the work of Chad L. Nielsen, stands as a significant contribution to the life studies of 19th-century biographical literature of early Mormonism. The writer controls the narrative rigorously, delivering both a sympathetic interpretation of a self-portrait and analytical detachment. Nielsen’s subject—Zerah Pulsipher, president of the Seventy, missionary, colonizer, and an important, substantial official of the nineteenth‑century church from Ohio in 1832 to his death in Hebron (now Enterprise in southern Utah) almost fifty years later, has long occupied the margins of early Latter‑day Saint history.
Pulsipher was called in 1835 as one of the first selection of Presidents of the Seventy in his 46th year. His strength as a leader was supporting the decisions and directions of the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve. He is noted for baptizing Wilford Woodruff, but his activities in organizing and strengthening the Kirtland Camp migration are more characteristic of his labor. His leadership was original as it was solid. By early 1838, the Latter-Day Saints in Kirtland, Ohio, were in deep turmoil. Hundreds of members, particularly among the poorer in Kirtland, were in hard straits. The Kirtland Safety Society had failed. The city became unsafe because of internal schism, lawsuits, and ensuing violence. And Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon, the President and his First Counselor, had fled to Missouri in January of 1838. Those without wagons or money or land in Kirtland and northeastern Ohio were powerless to follow them west.
Charged with the organization and direction of getting church members to Missouri, the Presidents of the Seventy, including Pulsipher, established order, developed a system of rules of conduct, along with an arrangement for discipline and resource-sharing. The Seventy began for the first time to act as an administrative body. They drafted a formal constitution, established rules of conduct, and created a system of discipline and resource-sharing. This was the first time the Presidents of the Seventy functioned as a major administrative body. The “Constitution of the Camp of the Seventies” (also known as the “Kirtland Camp Constitution”) survives in full. Drafted in April 1838 by the Presidents of the Seventy, the document was a blueprint governing the migration of needy members from Kirtland, Ohio, to Far West, Missouri.[1] It also stood as a study for the more impressive immigration across the Mississippi soon to follow to Nauvoo, Illinois.
Nielsen argues that Pulsipher appears as a character aiding and assisting the more visible Latter-day leaders. He balances that image with examples of Pulsipher’s life of lived religion, contextualizing the religion’s growth through its institutional development with the ongoing and spiritual experience of the religion’s membership. The reader may start with how Nielsen uses the terminologies of ‘Mormon writing’ to capture the tone of the period and era. Consider Pulsipher’s barn vision (p. 6) in his own restoration language, “Another brighter light presented from above with such masterly rays of glory… and I beheld as I thought the Angels of God with the Book of Mormon in their hands.” Or Nielsen’s inclosing of the biography (Preface, p. x) that makes the chronicle flow easily for the modern reader: “To dismiss these experiences as mere delusion would be to misunderstand him entirely; to accept them without question would be to abandon the historian’s craft.”
A central strength of the biography is its clarity in that Nielsen neither discourses in an uncritical and over-approving manner to reduce or dismiss his subject’s understanding of his world. Nielsen imagines his subject’s world as historically operative—neither verified nor dismissed- but it operated in a workable context in which individuals deciphered actions and events, tried to control community life, and maneuvered within institutional demands. The reader can follow Nielsen’s narrative ease through domestic events, the community’s history, and the church’s organizational progression. A portrait of men/women and the movement emerges, negotiating shifting boundaries of charismatic organizational authority as a bureaucratic parameter develops the nature of governance that would eventually define the Church.
I think Michael Dennis Quinn would have perked his ears up at Pulsipher’s enchanted worldview of his visionary culture. Nielson describes Pulsipher’s charmed worldview populated by very real-bodied angels, spirits, and kin who have passed over and then returned to visit and pass on instructions and warnings. One week of Pulsipher seeking conviction and conversion finished with a barn‑filling vision of angels holding the Book of Mormon. The author incorporates this passage with an intensity characteristic of a Second Great Awakening tale, without, however, romanticization or pathos. Instead, he places the experience within broader American visionary traditions (Quaker, Swedenborgian, and revivalist) in demonstrating how the new religious Mormon restoration distinctively defined such encounters.
Pulsipher’s lived religion, as strong in “enchantment” as it was, demonstrates the uneven nature of spiritual gifts in the early history of Mormonism. The Autobiography of Zerah Pulsipher (as preserved on John Pratt’s site)[2] is rich in spiritual reflection, impressions, providential experiences, charismatic atmosphere, yet it does not contain any mention of glossolalia or speaking in tongues. Instead, the narrative discusses his family background; his spiritual impressions from an early age, conversion and missionary work; and leadership roles. There are no mentions of glossolalia or the gift and use of tongues.
This institutionalization is key. Pulsipher was not merely a recipient of visions; he became an administrator of the supernatural. Nielsen documents his involvement in dispossessions, healings, and priesthood rituals aimed at rebuking “foul spirits” and the “Destroyer” believed to afflict the Kirtland Camp. These episodes reveal how early Mormon leaders translated charismatic experience into routinized practice. Pulsipher’s authority rested not only on ecclesiastical office but on his perceived capacity to mediate between living and spiritual realms.
Nielsen’s analysis succeeds because he weaves around the false binary of secular skepticism and devotional literalism. Instead, he demonstrates how visionary experiences functioned socially: reading cohesion, validating leadership, and offering interpretive frameworks for suffering, migration, and conflict. Pulsipher’s barn vision of angels with copies of the Book of Mormon in their hands thus becomes more than a conversion narrative; it becomes a template for understanding how this early convert established himself within sacred history.
Nielsen explores a second major theme concerning the role of mid‑level Church personalities in governance, influencing early Church development. He argues convincingly that the institutional durability of nineteenth‑century Mormonism depended not only on prophetic charisma but on the administrative labor of leaders like Pulsipher. Other examples in Southwestern Utah territory would be militia colonel and Stake President Daniel Duncan MacArthur, Bishop Zadok Judd of Santa Clara, Elder John Pierce Hawley of Pine Valley, and High Councilman Samuel McKnight of St. George Stake. Nielsen offers a more granular account of institutional life in Ohio by reframing familiar episodes—Kirtland’s financial collapse, the Missouri expulsions, and the succession crisis—through the perspective of someone tasked with implementing rather than formulating decisions.
The Kirtland Camp migration of 1838 is the biography’s central case study. Nielsen’s reconstruction of the immigration camp’s constitution, planning, internal disputes, and daily hardships reveals the shocking burden imposed on Seventy. Pulsipher emerges as a disciplined and often strict leader who enforced order, managed increasingly scarce resources, and met dissent with a mixture of spiritual authority and practical necessity. This, what Nielsen calls “history from the middle,” transforms the Kirtland crisis from an abstract institutional failure into a lived experience ~ a story of facing growing hunger, a lack of livestock and wagons, a struggle over authority, and spiritual warfare.
Nielsen’s treatment of Pulsipher’s 1862 disciplinary hearing for performing unauthorized plural marriages serves as a sharp monograph of the Church’s shift from Kirtland‑era flexibility to Brigham Young’s consolidation of religious governance. Formed in an earlier world of nuanced and negotiated authority, Pulsipher insisted he believed he was acting within delegated priesthood rights. Young, seeing such autonomy as disrupting, moved to enforce a top‑down order. Nielsen deconstructs the episode with appreciated steadiness, revealing both the functional logic behind this executive turn and the personal cost it imposed on men like Pulsipher. The analysis captures how movements change—and how individuals would be carried along in those changes.
The third major theme centers on the family as the site where radical doctrine lived, contested, and negotiated. Nielsen’s biography is rich in family voices: Mary Brown Pulsipher’s reminiscences, John Pulsipher’s detailed journals, Charles’s missionary writings, and Mariah’s reflections on plural marriage. These sources allow Nielsen to reconstruct not only Zerah’s public leadership but the intimate world of a household navigating conversion, migration, loss, and new religious ideas.
Mary’s narrative is particularly striking in her account of baptismal healing, her ambivalence toward Methodist revivalism, and her reflections on leaving “all my friends but my own family.” It reveals the emotional and social costs of conversion. Nielsen treats her as a historical actor in her own right. Her skepticism toward enthusiastic Methodist worship, her insistence on baptism by immersion, and her personal conviction after reading the Book of Mormon illustrate the interaction of personal spirituality with communal belonging.
Plural marriage introduces still more complexity, as it reshaped relationships inside the Pulsipher household while challenging the limits of belief and loyalty. For instance, Nielsen does not avoid Pulsipher’s sermons, dismissing a wife’s “hellish fear,” minimizing women’s emotional pain in plural marriage. Yet he brings forth the voices of women in the family, particularly Mariah, whose recollections expose the emotional strain polygamy imposed. By juxtaposing these perspectives, Nielsen demonstrates that the mediation of radical marriage doctrine occurred not only in councils and sermons but in kitchens, family councils, and bedrooms. The result is a lived account of one family bumpily attempting to resolve faith, maintain affection, and be obedient.
A Barn Full of Angels is a success. As a biography, it endows an agency and complexity to a person often relegated to the margins. As social history opens at a ground‑level perspective of ordinary Saints constructing, sustaining, and at times resisting the edges of a new religious movement. As a study of lived religious charisma, it illustrates the permeable barrier between the natural and supernatural of early Mormon thought.
Nielsen’s prose moves, often, with grace. He writes with empathy but without over-romanticizing, within a space of critical distance but without cynicism. The preservation of the original spelling and grammar in primary quotations confers an immediacy without lessening clarity. The book’s most enduring contribution, however, is its insistence that the history of Mormonism cannot be comprehended (grokked) solely through its prophets and apostles. The story is told in the lives of those who threshed grain in frozen barns, captained wagon trains into hostile terrain, fought with angels and demons, and attempted—successfully or not—to build Zion in their homes and souls.
A brief sketch of his personality and commitment to his religion is revealed in a comment by Florence Hall. When asked how long he would be gone on a missionary call, Pulsipher replied, “I don’t know. Just long enough to do the work the Lord has for me to do.”[3]
[1] The full text is published and annotated in Joseph Smith Papers, Documents, Volume 6: February 1838–August 1839, ed. Mark Ashurst‑McGee et al. Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2017. It appears as the “Constitution of the Camp of the Seventies, circa 13 April 1838.” CHL Call Number: Seventies Quorum Records, 1837–1845, and includes the Constitution copied into the Seventies’ record book.
[2] johnpratt.com/gen/8/z_pulsipher.html <accessed: May 14, 2026>
[3]Florence A. Hall, “Sketch of Zera Pulsipher”, pp. 3-4.