Paul Debarthe is a Community of Christ archaeologist in Nauvoo and Hawn’s Mill. 185 years ago, a Missouri mob killed 17 Mormon men and boys at Hawn’s Mill. What evidence can be found now? Paul Debarthe is an archeologist and member of the Community of Christ. He’ll discuss his latest book, “Hawn’s Mills Hamlet” and discuss the latest archaological findings from that terrible event. We’ll also discuss some of his findings from digs at Nauvoo. Check out our conversation…
Excavating Nauvoo
Interview
GT 00:44 Welcome to Gospel Tangents. I’m excited to have a longtime friend of mine, but you probably haven’t met him before. Could you go ahead and tell us who you are and where we are?
Paul 00:59 Good evening, I am Paul DeBarthe. What is this place called?
GT 01:07 The Hangar Hotel.
Paul 01:09 It’s in the airport at Fredericksburg, Texas. And [we are] in the hotel room, and Rick Bennett is conducting an interview.
GT 01:17 And why are you in Texas?
Paul 01:19 The John Whitmer Historical Association has set its conference here for this weekend. And I have had the privilege of being invited to give a presentation.
GT 01:29 Yes. So, the good thing about–it’s kind of a good and bad thing about this. So, Paul and I are actually going to be speaking against each other. So I can’t watch his presentation, and he can’t watch mine. And so, I’m taking this opportunity, because actually, we’re going to talk more than–you’re probably going to just have to talk for 20 or 30 minutes in your presentation. We’re going to get the full inside scoop.
Paul 01:52 I brought an hour, so we’ll see what we get.
GT 01:56 Oh, you have the whole hour. Okay, wow, that’s awesome.
Paul 01:58 I don’t know if I get the whole hour or not, but I’m prepared.
GT 02:01 You’re prepared either way.
Paul 02:02 Yeah. {both chuckling}
GT 02:05 Well, you’ve just written a brand new book. Why don’t you show it to the camera. And we’ll see, we’ll let people know what it is. What’s it called?
Paul 02:17 Hawn’s Mill’s Hamlet: a Phase Three Archaeological Investigation. Michael S. Riggs and myself are the authors. And it’s published by John Whitmer Books.
GT 02:32 Oh, that’s so fantastic.
Paul 02:33 It is the second in a series of archaeology history. And we anticipate that series will build indefinitely, because there’s an awful lot of need for history to be counterbalanced by archaeological facts. I’ll probably get in trouble with this. But archaeologists with artifacts that tell the truth, often contradict what the historians have to say.
GT 02:58 Uh, oh. {both laughing}
Paul 03:01 If we could help the historians correct a few things, then we clearly can benefit from each other. Because clearly, as an archaeologist, if I can get the benefit of historical guidelines and know where to dig, digging is such a painstaking operation and so deliberate. And it’s good to know where to dig and the historians can sometimes help with that.
GT 03:22 Yeah. Well, that’s fantastic. So, let’s talk a little bit about your background, before we dive into the book. So, you have an archaeology background, tell us where you went to school and how you got that.
Paul 03:36 As a lad, I liked to read the National Geographic. And I liked to read the Book of Mormon. And I recognized that there were just an awful lot of archaeological sites that I wanted to explore in my life, Mexico in particular. And I had the privilege in 1971 of getting on the Robert T. Bray Archaeological Field School from the University of Missouri at Columbia. And that project was at Nauvoo, Illinois.
GT 04:05 So you’re a Missouri Tiger. Is that right?
Paul 04:07 No. Well, I have credits from there, but my undergraduate degree [was] at Graceland College and then I went to KU in Lawrence for my bachelor’s in anthropology with a specialty in archaeology.
GT 04:22 A Jayhawk.
Paul 04:24 Yes, I’m afraid so. However, I would acknowledge that when I go to homecoming, it’s at Graceland.
GT 04:31 Ok. This weekend, Kansas is playing BYU. At this point of this recording, we don’t know who won that game.[1] But who are you rooting for?
Paul 04:38 Kansas, of course. Yeah, I live in Kansas. And it’s a little tough to be proud of Kansas. I mean, it’s the only state with its biggest city across the state line. It’s the only state that has a fictional person as its most famous citizen, two of them, actually, and one of them isn’t even human.
GT 05:00 Who’s that?
Paul 05:00 Dorothy and Toto.
GT 05:01 Oh, that’s right.
Paul 05:03 And it’s a little tough. I’ve been having to teach kids in Kansas for a long time, trying to help them be proud of being from a place everybody else is trying to get away from. They get over to Colorado and get on the mountains. That’s a lot a lot more appealing. And so, Kansas has some difficulties that way to be able to accommodate its history and move that toward a respectable future. I mean, after all, Kansas has a terrorist statute and a state capital.
GT 05:33 A terrorist statue?
Paul 05:34 John Brown.
GT 05:36 Oh, that’s right, John Brown’s Rebellion.
Paul 05:40 So yeah, it’s a little bit funny. I mean, in Kansas, the ball of twine is one of our most famous tourist destinations. Big Bertha is another one.
GT 05:51 Well, now, you live right outside Kansas City, right?
Paul 05:55 I live in Overland Park, Kansas.
GT 05:56 Overland Park, Kansas, which is fairly close to Independence.
Paul 06:00 It’s about a 40 minute drive for me to go see relatives who live in Independence.
GT 06:04 So, all my Community of Christ friends joke that that’s the Land of Zion. So, you’re practically in Zion, right? Because you wouldn’t call Kansas Zion?
Paul 06:15 Better than that. I had the privilege of marrying an angel. And so, I bet I’ve lived most of my life pretty close to heaven.
GT 06:29 That’s great. We’re going to talk about her. Tell us her name really quick.
Paul 06:31 Tepurotu Rina Fauura DeBarthe.
GT 06:35 Most people know her as Rina.
Paul 06:37 Rina, right. She and I have had, for me, a glorious 52 and a half years together, married and another year and a half dating. She has moved to the other side as of February 28. And I miss her dreadfully.
GT 06:53 I miss her, too. I’m happy that I at least got to meet her. Last year, we went. Steve Pynakker and I came to see you in Nauvoo. And we went to lunch with Rina and got to see her and I’m so sad she’s not here.
Paul 07:09 So am I. On the other hand, she is, because she left Tahiti, but brought a lot of it with her. She has left us with taking a lot of us with her. And the impact that she left in our world is so amazingly profound for a little lady that fundamentally wanted to love her own family and not bother anybody. But instead, she helped change the world.
GT 07:09 Yeah, she’s a fantastic lady. So, one of the things that I think is really interesting, and I want to talk a little bit about Nauvoo before we move on to Hawn’s Mill. So, last summer, Steve and I came out to Nauvoo, and you were doing an archeological dig. And can you tell us a little bit more about what we were doing last summer?
Paul 08:01 Last summer, we were working, and this summer, as well, on the Times and Seasons, the second Times and Seasons site. It’s a fascinating study, because in Mormon history, there are several different LDS printing sites. So, first in Independence with…
GT 08:21 W.W. Phelps.[2]
Paul 08:26 W. W. Phelps. I kept thinking of Parley P. Pratt and it wasn’t right. W. W. Phelps had the printing office in Independence, and it got destroyed in 1833. They, about that time, started a printing office in Kirtland. And that one got burned and so that one also needs to be explored. Then Oliver Cowdery took a printing press to Far West. That one got buried under a haystack at the end of the Mormon War and Hyrum Clark went back in the spring of 1839, to dig it out of the ground and bring it back to Nauvoo. And that’s the one that was used, then, in the Times and Seasons. We have Don Carlos Smith and Ebenezer Robinson setting up the Times and Seasons in a warehouse that had water coursing across it and apparently was close to the river, and apparently on the north side of Nauvoo. And they both got sick there and I think developed a real dread for basements.
Paul 09:30 But then in 1839, they moved to the second site, which is the one that we’re excavating. It had a basement that was deteriorated and so they did some rehabilitation work on the basement, and then they built a structure on top of it and were able to use part of that for housing. But the main floor was fundamentally for printing the Times and Seasons and the Book of Mormon. And, therefore, it becomes quite significant in the LDS history. The third one was moved across the street. And the fourth one is the one that’s been restored on Main Street that was after Joseph Smith passed.
GT 10:06 Yeah, I think a lot of people don’t know that there were actually four Times and Seasons buildings, not just one.
Paul 10:10 And so to be able to retrace, the whole of LDS printing would be my desire. I’d like to encourage people to look to the days when we can actually have the investigations, of these other chapters. We’ve been working on this fourth chapter, on the second Times the Seasons building. And it’s just fascinating, because there are two foundations there. And when Bob Gray and I worked there in 1975, we thought that we had the original first Times the Seasons, because we had printer’s type. I think we came up with 572 pieces of printer’s type that were associated with both foundations. So therefore, both buildings are Times and Seasons, right? Well, but I’ve gone back to work on it, to try to clean it up and make it so that we could restore the building. And I’m convinced now that the first Times and Seasons, according to Ebenezer Robinson’s record, in the return, is north of Nauvoo, and has now been covered by the river, when it rose 20 feet.
GT 11:06 Oh.
Paul 11:07 And so this is the second one. And they rehabilitated this generation old basement that had been put together by a fur trader. I think it had been used as a storage site for furs. And then they built a building on top of it and used that for the Times the Seasons. And through the knotholes, you see clusters of type gathered underneath. In the cracks out the doorways, there were pieces of type. And so, I’m confident that what we found in the basement, and associated with both foundations, simply fell through from the second structure. So, the basement definitely is pre-Mormon. But the structure that they built on top of it was the second Times and Seasons. We have ample evidence for that, now.
GT 11:52 Well, that’s awesome. So, the big question for me, I believe it was in 1832 when W.W. Phelps printed “Free People of Color,” basically welcoming blacks to the state. Missouri being a slave state, they weren’t fans of that article. And so they “pied the type,” as they say, which I guess, [means] basically, they threw out all the type to destroy the printing press. So my question is in which of the four buildings did that happen?
Paul 12:29 Okay, well, but you’re talking about the Phelps printing office in Independence, which…
GT 12:36 Oh, I’m getting mixed up with Nauvoo.
Paul 12:36 …which, yeah, they destroyed the press, destroyed the type. That press went to St. Joe, and ultimately to Colorado. But the press that was brought by Oliver Cowdery to Far West, is the one that was dug up by Hiram Clark, taking to Nauvoo, to become the press for the Times and Seasons. So, it was only used for the two editions of the Elder’s Journal at Far West, that’s all I’m aware of, anyway.
GT 13:05 Okay. I’m getting mixed up my stories aren’t I?
Paul 13:06 So, it wouldn’t be a whole lot of type from there. But yeah, that’s why I would like very much for us to be able write the whole volume of the LDS printing, but really all we have right now is the archaeology for one chapter.
GT 13:18 Okay. Well, cool. One of the other things that I think’s amazing and really cool that you do is you allow students to dig there, and then you help them with their archeological finds. And I know you’ve taught—tell us where you’ve taught, because I know you’ve taught both college and high school.
Paul 13:36 I spent most of my career teaching in Shawnee Mission School District in Kansas, that’s a high school. And I initiated an archaeology program in high school. Actually, I did my student teaching there in anthropology and in sociology. It’s a forward-looking district or was at the time. And it was really quite an honor to do my student teaching there. They, unfortunately, fired the gentleman I did my student teaching under and hired me in his place. And I stayed there for 37 years. I started the archaeology program. And having archaeology for high school kids was a bit of innovation. But I found that kids do so much better in learning, if they get their hands into it.
GT 14:20 Right. They literally get their hands dirty, right?
Paul 14:23 Yeah, the hands on hands on history is the best way. For example, I learned that if I could get my students to play the role of some person in history, they would learn everything they could learn about that person in history. And then we’d have a conference with all the dialogue of dignitaries, and they’d have a chance to ask questions at each other, yell at each other. And you get Henry the Eighth and three of his wives in the same room, and you can have some fascinating discussions. And so I would do press conferences, too. I’d usually begin as Socrates and spend an hour ringing them with questions about Sophia, Filo Sophia, of course. And it was just so much fun for me to be able to encourage people to dig into the real issues, dig into the questions and put on the clothes, wear the costume, try to get a sense of what that person’s life was like, and then see how they interacted with the others. And when the students did that–and so often they found it a challenge. But when they did that, it gave them a benchmark of learning that when I encounter them now, 20 and 30 years later, they still remember having done the press conferences. It would have been somewhat out of the Renaissance, probably, or later. I had students do the same process with 19th century history. And so, I tried to keep the girls with the ladies, and that was more difficult, because our history has done some such an unfair job treating women. But it’s just amazing how girls would dress up in the costumes and come representing Elizabeth, Katherine the Great, Mary Queen of Scots, all these various and sundry women and costuming and getting into character became a lot of fun.
Paul 16:27 So then, when I got the archaeology started, to be able to get the kids to go to the archeological site and dig and find artifacts, that really begin to open their eyes and was great for me too, because you see a kid find a piece of ceramic, “Mr. DeBarthe! look what I found. What kind is that? Is that hand painted? Or is that transfer printed? Or how do they get that decoration on there?” And you start them asking those questions and try to find out, well, look, you’ve got two different colors on there. How’d that happen? Oh, that’s hand painted. Oh, wow. And see the brushstrokes. And to be able to appreciate that is somebody’s individual effort to make those brushstrokes, to paint that flower. What does that date to? That’s a Mormon period. It goes back to 1840’s. Wow. And so the student gets excited about history because they found it. And I kept track of the grades on a bunch of my sophomores through three years of high school. And the ones that found artifacts, and that was almost everybody who went to the dig. The ones that found artifacts did one grade point better in the rest of their social studies, than those that didn’t go.
GT 17:38 Oh, wow. So Paul, I have to tell you, back in April, following World Conference in Independence, we had a celebration of Rina’s life. And I ran into one of your students.
Paul 17:52 Oh, really?
GT 17:53 And I was like, so how do you know Paul DeBarthe? And he said, “Oh, he was my teacher.” And I’m trying to remember, but if I recall correctly, I think when he got married, he asked you to perform the ceremony.
Paul 18:11 That’d be Nate. Nate Johnson.
GT 18:12 Okay, that’s who it was.
Paul 18:16 A rascal.
GT 18:17 Oh, really?
Paul 18:21 A rascal. He had a synthetic glob of snot that he threw up and it stuck on the on the side of my classroom. It was there for years.
GT 18:30 He didn’t tell me this. All I remember is that he said [that] you were one of his favorite teachers. And that’s why he was there.
Paul 18:41 I was honored that he would come ask me for assistance in tying the wedding knot. Furthermore, he and his wife, after 10 years, finally had a baby girl. They invited us, although they’re not religiously affiliated at all, to my knowledge. But they invited us to come bless that baby. And my daughter and I had that privilege. They live in St. Joe. I’m pleased you got to meet one of my former students that had something good to say. {both laughing}
GT 19:13 It was nothing but good. It was fantastic. It was funny, because I was like, “So are you here with World Conference,” and he didn’t know anything about. He said, “I just know, Paul.”
Paul 19:24 He came to celebrate Rina. Yeah, we had that third celebration of her life. She had died on February 28. We’d had a week of hospice. So, the kids had a chance to put together three celebrations of her life. And the first one was on Zoom, and because she had grown up speaking Tahitian and got punished for speaking Tahitian when she went to the French school. Then she came the United States to go to college at Graceland. She majored in Spanish.
GT 19:54 Oh really?
Paul 19:55 And afterwards she picked up Chinese, Arabic and Russian and other languages as she had opportunity. As an English as a Second Language person, she just loved being able to communicate with people on a face-to-face level. Her father had told her when she left Tahiti when she was 16 and a half, “Daughter, love the people of Zion.” She took that literally. And she would explain that you don’t know who the people of Zion are, but God does. So that means you need to try to learn something from everyone you meet, because they’re all probably people of Zion. And in the process, she met me, and I received the greatest blessing of life. On that first Zoom celebration, we had people from Europe, from Africa, from all across Polynesia, from all across the Americas wanting to express their appreciation, because she had touched their lives. And I’ll be happy to get into that. But you want me to talk about archaeology?
GT 21:01 All right. Anyway, I just wanted to give people your background in archaeology and you’re such a wonderful teacher. And I think that’s great.
Paul 22:10 That’s my background in archaeology. I had a little work in Mexico. A little bit in Polynesia, but my career has fundamentally been in Nauvoo, Illinois where I worked with Bob Gray initially from 1975 to 1984. Working on the University of Missouri contract for the RLDS Church. And then in 2012 I went back with Lach MacKay and Bob Smith we organized, I Dig Nauvoo. We got interrupted by covid, but it was a fascinating experience because we had people who were Community of Christ, LDS, Restorationist’s, local people, regional people. Everybody interested in the history of where were working. Some of them simply had archaeology on their bucket list. But everyone wanted to come there, and work and we would eat together and work together. We had to be careful talking about religion and politics. But when we got to the Battle of Nauvoo site, I had people working together whose ancestors had been opponents in that battle.
GT 22:21 Oh, wow.
Paul 22:22 And we got along fine. Nobody shot each other. I mean, it was beautiful. And for me, the experience of digging at Nauvoo with these marvelous volunteers from across the spectrum, was a taste of Zion. And when COVID hit, then I couldn’t dig. So we set up the Book of Mormon Perspectives Forum, and we’ve been having that project for the last three years.
GT 22:51 Yeah we’ve talked about that one.
Paul 22:52 But, now we’re back to digging.
GT 22:53 Yeah. And I still get requests from people that are like, what is that Monday night meeting? In fact, I just gave a name to Robert today.
Paul 23:02 Thank you. Right now, we’re scheduled up into November, and I just find it fascinating. Rina thought that it would die within the first year. But there’s so many people that have so much to say. We’ve had six different presentations on where the land of Nephi is. Isn’t that fun?
GT 23:21 Yeah, it’s fun.
Paul 23:21 And all of them are so confident in their presentation. And the participants get to take that in and sort it out, ask questions to each other with respect. And it’s just a delightful educational process.
GT 23:34 Yeah, it’s super fun.
Paul 23:35 And you’ve been there.
GT 23:36 I have been there, and I’ve presented a few times. I just volunteered for another.
{End of Part 1}
[1] Kansas won 38-27.
[2] Bruce Van Orden wrote a biography of W.W. Phelps. See our interview at https://gospeltangents.com/people/bruce-van-orden/
