The story of the pocket watch that stopped a bullet and saved John Taylor’s life is one of Mormonism’s most enduring “miracles” — but was it really?
A new study presented at the recent Mormon History Association meetings in Rochester, N.Y., offers some answers.
Taylor was an early leader in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who would live to become its third president.
He was a beloved adviser and friend to church founder Joseph Smith, even being with Smith in Illinois’ Carthage Jail on that fateful day of June 27, 1844, when a mob stormed into their room to gun down the Latter-day Saint prophet and his associates.
Smith was killed in a hail of bullets as he fell out of the two-story window. Taylor, too, rushed to the window, when he felt the impact from five balls — four from the door and one from below that pushed him back into the room. The future church president slumped against the windowsill and then crawled under a bed.
After the attackers retreated, Taylor was amazed to find himself alive.
( Library of Congress) This lithograph by artist C.G. Crehen depicts the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith at Carthage Jail.
Later, in examining the watch, he remarked: “I never could account for it until then; but here the thing was fully elucidated, and was rendered plain to my mind. I was indeed falling out, when some villain aimed at my heart. The ball struck my watch, and forced me back; if I had fallen out, I should assuredly have been killed, if not by the fall, by those around, and this ball, intended to dispatch me, was turned by an overruling Providence into a messenger of mercy, and saved my life.”
He told the story again and again to eager believers and outside audiences. It was repeated in newspaper accounts and official histories. It continued to be used as a faith-promoting yarn even after his descendants donated the watch to the church’s museum in Salt Lake City in 1934.
Given that the watch did not suffer much damage, some began to wonder if the timepiece actually stopped a bullet.
Enter forensic experts.
Questions emerge
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) John Taylor, third president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was with Joseph Smith when the church founder was slain at the Carthage Jail.
In 1998, Jennifer Lund was working at the Church History Museum, which displayed the watch and featured the lifesaving account.
One day, the independent researcher and consultant got a question from one of the museum’s docents, challenging the prevailing belief about Taylor’s protection and arguing that the watch was more likely damaged when he hit the windowsill.
So Lund enlisted Latter-day Saints Neil Ord, a nuclear physicist who taught at Brigham Young University-Hawaii and Weber State University, and his wife, Gayle Ord, along with Charles Pitt, a professor of metallurgical engineering at the University of Utah, to examine it and consider the various possibilities.
They concluded that the watch’s dent was “likely caused” by the fall, not by a bullet. And that became the dominant description.
It was used in Richard Bushman’s landmark Smith biography, “Rough Stone Rolling,” in Glen Leonard’s “Nauvoo: A Place of Peace, A People of Promise,” in the church’s official multivolume “Saints” history, and in museum exhibits.
But that meant there was wide divergence between the older watch story and more recent windowsill account.
“The church wanted to have a unified voice,” Matthew Godfrey, a leader of the Joseph Smith Papers Project, says in an interview. “Could we see what really happened and present a unified theory?”
Brian Warburton, a collection care specialist at the Church History Library, led the watch investigation, which was divided into three teams — one focusing on history and two looking at forensic evidence. In the latter category was a group led by Paul Rimmasch and Mitchell Pilkington, criminologists at Weber State.
While the historians looked at past statements and contexts, the scientists disassembled the watch and put it through a series of tests, as well as getting engineers to re-create it virtually and do simulations. They compared it to other watches — notably the one belonging to Smith’s brother Hyrum, who also perished at Carthage — hit by bullets.
Not definitive
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) The watch John Taylor wore during the murders of Joseph and Hyrum Smith in Carthage, Ill., on June 27, 1844.
Two of the three teams concluded that “some research supports a fragmented or ricocheted bullet,” Warburton says, “not a direct hit.”
That included the team led by Rimmasch and Pilkington.
“The face did, indeed, lack substantial damage,” they write in the paper they presented in New York. “Furthermore, when the so-called ‘bullet mark’ was examined with oblique light, it was noted that this defect had been caused by the outward bulging of the underlying base metal and not by a projectile hitting the surface.”
But the back of the watch showed an “irregular-shaped, albeit shallow deformation,” the authors note, that could indicate “an impact to the back of the watch from something other than a direct shot.”
That would make sense if the watch were in Taylor’s pocket with the face toward his chest.
When the damage to four areas of special interest “were visually compared to comparable area damage to the crushed watches as a group and the shot watches as a group,” Rimmasch and Pilkington argue, Taylor’s watch “shared more similarities with the shot watches.”
The damage was “more consistent with being shot,” Pilkington says in an interview “than being crushed.”
Warburton says the third team concluded that the damage on Taylor’s watch was closest to that which came “from widespread blunt force when a test watch was smashed between two hardwood boards.”
So what kind of unified message will now be included in church exhibits, histories and manuals?
The wording is still being crafted, Warburton says, “but will likely state that the watch was damaged in the attack, although the precise nature of how it was damaged will likely never be known. We will also then likely state that recent thorough research indicates that a projectile, or fragment of one, may have hit the watch at a reduced speed and acute angle.”
What role, if any, the watch played in Taylor’s survival remains unclear, Godfrey acknowledges. What is clear, though, is that while Taylor suffered nonlethal injuries from the attack, none of the five bullets “hit one of Taylor’s major organs.”
That, the historian says, is still miraculous.
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