Dream Mine

The Dream Mine is a mining project on the mountainside east of Salem, Utah, whose importance in the book rests less on gold brought to the surface than on the promise that it would be found when the Last Days arrived. John Hyrum Koyle’s prophetic vision turned an unproductive shaft into a lasting religious investment: supporters imagined the buried wealth sustaining the faithful through catastrophe. Decades later, the same expectation drew Onias and the Lafferty brothers into a scheme to build a refuge beside the mine, connecting its legend to their escalating conflict and to the murders of Brenda and Erica Lafferty.

Setting and the founding vision

Salem lies twelve miles south of Provo, where orchards and potato fields meet the steep mountains of the Wasatch Front. A conspicuous white structure clings to the hillside above the farming community. The mine’s scale and position gave it a physical presence in the landscape, but its significance came from what believers said lay underground. Koyle, a Mormon who regarded himself as specially gifted in prophecy, began the project after a dream he dated to August 27, 1894.

In the dream, the angel Moroni led Koyle into a mountain and showed him nine vast caverns filled with gold. The treasure, according to the account, had belonged to the Nephites described in The Book of Mormon. God had hidden it beneath the mountain after their wealth made them prideful and covetous, along with ancient records of the Mormons’ forebears. The mine was thus imagined not simply as a source of riches, but as a repository of sacred history and a provision held back until the moment it would be needed most.

Moroni’s promise also supplied an explanation for delay. The gold would remain concealed until the Second Coming was imminent, after powerful civilizations had fallen and terrible strife had overtaken humanity. Koyle was shown where to begin digging and assured that the treasure would eventually be uncovered. The promise made the absence of immediate results compatible with continued belief: failure to find gold did not disprove the prophecy if the appointed time had not yet come.

Mining, investment, and religious opposition

Koyle filed a claim on the hillside and began digging on September 17, 1894. The western mining boom made it possible to attract financial backing, much of it from devout Mormons who treated investment in the mine as both a spiritual commitment and a prospect of future wealth. Eventually, about 700,000 shares were sold. By the mid-1940s, a shaft had been excavated 3,400 feet into the mountain, but no gold had been found. For Koyle and his investors, that result did not defeat the undertaking: the promised discovery belonged to the Last Days, not to the ordinary schedule of mining.

The leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints opposed Koyle’s claim to revelation. In the church’s structure, major revelations were expected to come through its president, prophet, seer, and revelator, rather than through an independent visionary. Church authorities repeatedly called Koyle a false prophet and warned members against investing. Many Saints nevertheless continued to believe in his account. In 1948, the church excommunicated Koyle; he died the following year, aged eighty-four. The dispute over the mine therefore concerned not only whether its promised gold existed, but who could claim authority to speak for God. Its adherents’ faith outlasted Koyle, and Onias became one of those who carried the prophecy forward.

Onias and the City of Refuge

Onias heard about the mine shortly after converting to Mormonism. He bought 300 shares at three dollars apiece and later persuaded his mother to purchase another 300. In the late 1970s, he began receiving revelations that directed him to establish a City of Refuge at the mine’s base, where the righteous could shelter during the Last Days. He moved to Utah County and made a $1,500 down payment on five acres below the mine entrance. The refuge gave the old prophecy a practical and communal ambition: the mine’s future wealth would support not merely individual investors, but a protected settlement.

Onias’s plans brought him into contact with local Dream Mine supporters Bernard Brady and Kenyon Blackmore, who owned expensive homes in a community beside the mine. Blackmore introduced Brady to Onias, whom he had known years earlier in Bountiful. Onias was organizing the School of the Prophets, and Brady recruited five Lafferty brothers—Tim, Watson, Mark, Dan, and Ron—to join. Near the end of 1983, Brady brought Onias and the brothers together. They formed an immediate alliance around the sense of a divinely assigned mission.

Onias’s revelations called for warnings to be sent to leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whom he accused of abandoning sacred doctrines. The Lafferty brothers helped prepare and mail more than 15,000 pamphlets in two weeks, work that would otherwise have taken Onias months. The School of the Prophets began meeting weekly in Provo, usually in the home of the Laffertys’ mother, Claudine. Onias subsequently appointed Ron bishop of the school’s Provo chapter. The mine’s promised wealth and the proposed refuge were now bound to a growing religious organization and to the brothers’ own authority within it.

Disputes over control and provision

The alliance did not last undisturbed. Ron began challenging Onias’s authority, and he and his supporters resisted the expectation that members find ordinary work to fund the City of Refuge. Ron argued that God would supply the necessary wealth miraculously. One revelation directed Mark to bet on a Nevada horse race, with divine guidance supposed to identify the winning horse; the wager lost. Onias’s subsequent rebuke further damaged his relationship with Ron and the other brothers.

The mine’s directors also refused to place the project under the brothers’ control. On an earlier visit, Dan offered the labor of all six brothers to help extract the gold and finance the refuge. The managers declined. After the brothers’ break with the School of the Prophets, Dan and Ron returned and demanded that the directors hand the mine’s management over to them, warning that refusal would bring divine consequences. The directors rejected this demand as well. The mine’s symbolic promise had become a concrete contest over who could direct its operations and claim the resources expected to emerge from it.

The mine’s place in the final plan

Despite rejection by the directors and expulsion from the school, Ron and Dan continued to pursue the City of Refuge. During a road trip in 1984, they sought support from prominent polygamists in the West, including John W. Bryant, whose Oregon commune Ron had visited earlier. The brothers described the refuge as preparation for the Last Days. Their project retained its original logic—shelter for the righteous before catastrophe—but their efforts to secure backing increasingly took place outside Onias’s leadership and the mine directors’ authority.

The mine also became part of the plan attached to Ron’s removal revelation. On July 24, 1984, after Brenda and Erica had been killed, Ron drove Dan, Chip Carnes, and Ricky Knapp to Chloe Low’s home. The group intended to carry out further killings, including the killing of Richard Stowe, before beginning work on the City of Refuge beside the Dream Mine. Low was away, and the group instead entered her house in search of valuables. In this sequence, the mine’s supposed future provision stands beside immediate criminal acts: an imagined refuge was made contingent on violence that the brothers believed would clear the way for it.

The Dream Mine therefore operates in the narrative as both a physical site and a promise whose deferred fulfillment organizes belief and action. Its shaft, shares, and neighboring land are tangible; the gold, records, and protection promised for the Last Days remain prospective. That gap allows setbacks to renew rather than end the pursuit, while disputes over revelation and control turn an old mining prophecy into a source of new alliances and conflict. The mine’s importance lies in that transformation: a buried treasure becomes the imagined foundation of a refuge, and the refuge becomes part of a plan whose consequences extend far beyond the hillside above Salem.