Life and Times of John Pierce Hawley: A Mormon Ulysses of the American West

Life and Times of John Pierce Hawley: A Mormon Ulysses of the American Westnarrates the wide-ranging life and times of John P. Hawley's search for and service to an authentic Mormon faith. Melvin C. Johnson has been researching Hawley's adventurous life along the American borderlands and frontier for three decades. Hawley was an active member of several Latter Day Restoration denominations in Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Wisconsin, Texas, the Indian Nations of Oklahoma, and Utah Territory from 1838 to 1909.

A Mormon Ulysses follows Hawley's adventures in the West growing up as a logger, woodworker, settler, church official and missionary. He helped build the first Mormon temple west of the Mississippi, battled the Comanches, was entangled in the horrors of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, and pioneered the Pine Valley community in southern Utah. Hawley's western odyssey is timely, worthy, and deserves to belong in the canon of American history and biography.

Melvin C. Johnson is an independent historian and retired college professor, writer, and speaker who pursues subjects dealing with the East Texas mill town culture, the Texas Hill country before and in the Civil War, and the intersection of Western America and Mormonism. His work won the Smith-Pettit Best Book Award (2007) for Polygamy on the Pedernales: Lyman Wight's Mormon Village in Antebellum Texas and the Greg Kofford Best Theological Article (2017) for "John Hawley: Mormon Ulysses His LDS Mission to Iowa and Eventual RLDS Conversion," John Whitmer Historical Association Journal. He and Halli, his wife, live in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Tyler, Texas.