Footnotes
Hyde, “Orson Hyde’s Life,” 23.
Hyde, Joseph S. “Orson Hyde’s Life,” no date. Weston Nephi Nordgren, Orson Hyde Research Files, ca. 1945–1979. CHL.
An 1837 travel handbook warned travelers that “without the signature of an Austrian ambassador or minister on his passport, no traveller is allowed to enter the Austrian dominions.” If a signature was not procured before reaching the border, travelers would be “turned back to seek the signature . . . of an Austrian minister, in the nearest capital.” (Handbook for Travellers in Southern Germany, 107, italics in original.)
Handbook for Travellers in Southern Germany; Being a Guide to Bavaria, Austria, Tyrol, Salzburg, Styria, &c., the Austrian and Bavarian Alps . . . . London: John Murray and Son, 1837.
Postal transmission times were irregular. Letters from England to Nauvoo generally took between thirty and ninety days to arrive. Hyde’s letter was written on 17 July and received before 2 October in Nauvoo, when JS read it aloud at a church conference, suggesting JS received it sometime in September. (JS History, vol. C-1, 1228.)
By the 1830s the burgeoning industrial revolution and developments in bureaucratic practice led to a modern German confederation of states that increasingly relied on clerical practices for administration rather than on the earlier monarchical models. However, the application of these practices could vary greatly from state to state; for example, “the Bavarian bureaucracy in the mid-nineteenth century . . . was plainly less hierarchical and authoritarian than the Prussian version.” (Osterhammel, Transformation of the World, 606.)
Osterhammel, Jürgen. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Patrick Camiller. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014.
Hyde’s mission was uniquely public. Not only were his letters home intended for publication, but his assignment as an “agent and representative in foreign lands” was to obtain as much information as possible from Jewish rabbis and community leaders regarding the “present views and movements of the Jewish people” and to “communicate the same to some principal paper for publication.” (Recommendation for Orson Hyde, 6 Apr. 1840.)
At the time of this letter, Hyde’s wife, Marinda Nancy Johnson Hyde, lived in Nauvoo with their two daughters, Laura, age four, and Emily, age one. (Hyde, Orson Hyde, 496.)
Hyde, Myrtle Stevens. Orson Hyde: The Olive Branch of Israel. Salt Lake City: Agreka Books, 2000.