Taking the Restored Gospel to Canada
In 1829, before any finished copies of the Book of Mormon had been published, Solomon Chamberlin, an itinerant preacher, visited the Smith family near Palmyra, New York. Solomon was eager to spread word of the restored gospel, even though this process of Restoration was still unfolding before his eyes. “I went with Hyrum and some others to [the] Palmyra printing office, where they began to print the Book of Mormon,” he recalled, “and as soon as they had printed 64 pages, I took them with their leave, and pursued my journey to Canada, and I preached all that I knew concerning Mormonism, to all both high and low, rich and poor.” Over the next decade, many Latter-day Saints—including Joseph Smith; his mother, Lucy; Oliver Cowdery; and six of the original Twelve Apostles—traveled to Canada to preach and attend to Church business.
Preaching near Toronto in 1836, Parley P. Pratt found a small group of Christians seeking a church with the “primitive simplicity” found in scripture. Many members of that group, including Leonora and John Taylor and Mary, Joseph, and Mercy Fielding, were soon baptized, and Pratt organized several small branches in the area.
Beginning in 1847, many of the over 2,000 Canadians who had joined the Church migrated to the western United States, along with the main body of the Saints. In 1887, Charles Ora Card, a stake president in Cache Valley, Utah, led a small group of Saints to Lee’s Creek (later Cardston), Alberta, where they settled. Many of the early settlers of southern Alberta, including Card and his wife, Zina Young Card, were members of polygamist families. Alberta offered both economic opportunities and a safe haven from the antipolygamy laws of the United States, though polygamist men were supposed to bring only one of their wives with them to Canada.
After nearly 700 miles of travel, as Card and his party were nearing their destination, they found the St. Mary River was flooding, making it impossible to ford. Two local Mounties told Card that the mountain snows had begun to melt and, over the next several weeks, the river’s waters would only continue to rise. It would be weeks, they said, before the company could continue. Knowing they did not have the supplies to wait, Card called the travelers together. “We knelt in solemn appeal,” Mary Ibey, one of the travelers, recorded. “President Card asked our Father in Heaven to subdue the elements and make it possible to reach our destination.” After the prayer, the men of the camp went to work, building a raft through the night. The next morning, however, the water’s flow had slowed. “We crossed safely and did not use the raft,” Ibey said. “As soon as we were safely on the other side, the river started to rise, and it was weeks before anyone could cross.”
Members gathered for the dedication of the Cardston Alberta Temple, 1923.
Over the next three decades, Latter-day Saints migrated to southern Alberta in large numbers. The first stake organized outside of the United States was the Cardston Alberta Stake in 1895, and in 1923, the first temple outside the United States was built in Cardston. By then, more than 9,500 Latter-day Saints lived in approximately 20 communities in Alberta.