An article about the final volumes of the Joseph Smith Papers includes an image of Joseph Smith preaching the King Follet sermon in April 1944.
(click to enlarge) |
https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/joseph-smith-papers-lecture
On the stand with Joseph are members of the Sac and Fox Nation. Theses tribes were originally from the Lake Huron and Lake Michigan area before a series of wars (and the US government) forced them to relocate to Oklahoma, Iowa, and Missouri. See the note from JSP below.*
A month later, members of the tribe visited Joseph in Nauvoo. He explained that the Book of Mormon told him about their fathers.
https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/history-draft-1-january-21-june-1844/65
This identification of the Sac and Fox as descendants of the Book of Mormon people is consistent with what Joseph Smith wrote in the Wentworth letter, as well as with the "Mission to the Lamanites" as described in D&C 28, 30 and 32.
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*The Sauk (or Sac) and Fox tribes, who were living in present-day Michigan and Ohio by the early seventeenth century, established political ties with each other in the eighteenth century after a protracted war with the French nearly decimated the Fox tribe. Continued conflict with the French forced the confederation to move south into present-day Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri—the western portions of which belonged to Spain at the time—where they began warring with tribes such as the Kaskaskia and Osage, who were already living in the area. American expansion into these lands after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 led to further conflict, including an Indian raid in which three white settlers were killed. Hoping to avoid full-scale war with the United States, a delegation of Sauk and Fox leaders made an agreement with Indiana territorial governor William Henry Harrison to cede part of their land in exchange for the return of an Indian prisoner. Harrison evidently did not reveal the full extent of the cession, however, which included most of western Illinois (including the land on which Nauvoo was located), southwestern Wisconsin, and parts of eastern Missouri. Indian resentment over the treaty appears to have been a key factor behind the 1832 Black Hawk War, which resulted in the Indians being forced to cede to the United States one and one-quarter of a million acres of land in present-day Iowa. The remainder of their land was sold to the government in 1842. The Indians were permitted to continue living on the western portion of this land until 1845, when they were relocated to lands in present-day Kansas. (Jung, Black Hawk War of 1832, 11–32, 190–209; White, Middle Ground, 469–517; Eby, ‘That Disgraceful Affair,’ 37–63, 263–295.)