Polygamy and a Temple on the Pedernales

The intrinsic cultural patterns of Zodiac included polygamy, temple ritual, and socio-economic communitarianism, and, as such, they reflected antebellum Mormonism. RLDS president Joseph Smith III, in a letter to Joseph Davis of the Utah church in 1899, wrote, “nearly all the factions into which the Church broke had plural marriage in some form” in the post-1844 era before the Civil War. His father had been gathering concurrent wives as early as the Kirtland years. Joseph Smith Jr. further refined the practice at Nauvoo, moving it from private to doctrinal grounds. By 1860, plural marriage was an integral part of Mormonism