Horse

Horse appears in sharply different registers: as an alleged anachronism in an ancient scripture and as an ordinary animal woven into work, courtship, violence, and religious schemes. These references do not give the animal a perspective of its own; instead, they show how human characters make Horse carry evidence, opportunity, and belief.

The Horse as a Historical Test

The book’s criticism of The Book of Mormon points to its references to horses as one of several anachronisms that trouble its historical account. The text places horses in the pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere, although the passage states that they did not exist there in that era. The horse is named alongside wheeled carts, steel, and the seven-day week: material details that, in the book’s argument, expose a gap between the scripture’s ancient setting and the history claimed for it.

This objection is presented as part of a larger dispute, not as a final answer to religious belief. The same passage argues that faith is generally resistant to academic criticism, and that The Book of Mormon’s enormous readership and continued appeal cannot be dismissed simply because critics identify historical problems. Horse therefore has a double role in the discussion: its presence invites a concrete historical challenge, while the book’s reflection on faith stresses that such challenges do not by themselves explain the scripture’s hold on believers.

The Horseman and the Boggs Shooting

A horse appears again not as a disputed ancient presence but through the reputation and work of Orrin Porter Rockwell, an accomplished horseman from Nauvoo. During the investigation into the shooting of former Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs, a storekeeper recalled that the man who had worked with the stallion had come to inspect a pistol shortly before it went missing. The account identifies that hired man as Rockwell, who had arrived in Independence a couple of months before the shooting and slipped away immediately afterward.

The horse is not described as participating in the crime, and the book does not present the storekeeper’s recollection as direct proof. Rather, Rockwell’s association with the stallion supplies a distinctive identifying detail within the account of the stolen handgun and his sudden departure. The narrative calls him almost certainly the would-be assassin and places the episode within his growing reputation for violence on behalf of the church. In this passage, equestrian skill belongs to the profile of a man whose later legend would include the names Destroying Angel and Mormon Samson; it is the human rider, not the animal, who becomes the focus of suspicion and notoriety.

A Borrowed Horse and a Marriage

Horse also stands at the beginning of Dan Lafferty’s relationship with Ann Randak. They met when Dan borrowed a horse from her to ride in a local parade. Ann, a Romanian immigrant who cared for Robert Redford’s horses on a ranch up Spanish Fork Canyon, east of the Dream Mine, subsequently became Dan’s plural wife.

The borrowed horse gives the episode a specific, practical point of contact: their meeting begins through an exchange involving an animal, not through a religious gathering or a prior courtship described in the passage. Dan had first resolved, after reading The Peace Maker, to marry his stepdaughter, Matilda’s oldest daughter, but abandoned that plan at the last minute and married Ann instead. The narrative records Ann’s own willingness to enter the marriage through Dan’s account of her openness to new experiences. Horse is not assigned a motive or symbolic meaning by the characters; its importance lies in the mundane circumstance that brought them together, before Dan’s plural-marriage convictions shaped the relationship.

The Racehorse and Prophetic Funding

In another episode, a horse becomes the proposed instrument of divine provision. Ron Lafferty’s revelation instructed him to send his brother Mark Lafferty to Nevada to wager on a horse race. According to the revelation, the Lord would tell Mark which mount to back, and the bet was meant to raise money for the City of Refuge beneath the Dream Mine. Ron’s plan treated the race not as a gamble in the ordinary sense but as a source of funds secured by divine guidance.

The wager failed. After the brothers lost, Onias could not resist telling them that he had predicted the failure; the episode further damaged relations between Ron and the prophet. The unnamed horse selected for the bet thus enters the narrative as part of a chain connecting revelation, money, and authority. Its result matters less as a sporting event than as a test of Ron’s claim that miraculous means would finance the school’s work. The loss made that claim vulnerable to ridicule and gave Onias another point of conflict with the Lafferty brothers.

A Recurring Instrument

Across these episodes, Horse shifts from a historical marker to a working animal, a clue in an investigation, and an object of speculative wagering. The contexts differ, but each places the animal within a human system of interpretation: critics use its presence to challenge an ancient chronology; the Boggs account uses a horseman’s occupation to help identify a suspect; Dan’s borrowed mount links him to Ann; and Ron’s horse-race revelation turns a wager into a claimed act of providence.

That pattern also sets limits on the animal’s narrative presence. No passage follows a horse’s experience independently of the people who ride, care for, identify, or bet on it. Yet the references are not interchangeable: the ancient horse is a problem of historical credibility, Ann’s horse belongs to work and a chance encounter, and the racehorse carries the consequences of a failed prophecy. Together, they make Horse a small but recurring point where material life meets the book’s larger concerns with evidence, religious authority, and the claims people make about divine intervention.