Daniel C. Peterson discusses the Gadianton Robbers in life of guerrilla warriors and warfare.
Daniel C. Peterson, “The Gadianton Robbers as Guerrilla Warriors,” in Warfare in the Book of Mormon, ed. Stephen D. Ricks and William J. Hamblin (Provo, UT: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1990), 146-73
D. Michael Quinn, who rejects the equation of the Gadianton robbers with the masons of the nineteenth-century New York, offers an alternative explanation of them in his flawed but brilliant book *Early Mormonism and the Magic world View*. As befits his general thesis, he argues that the Book of Mormon views the Gadianton robbers as a confederacy of murderous black magicians and sorcerers whose oaths and secret works were less Masonic than occultic. His arguments are intriguing, although at certain crucial ponts they seem to me to rest upon a highly arbitrary reinterpretation of the text of the Book of Mormon. Still, there may be some truth in his discussion of the robbers and considerable value in the parallels he has adduced in my “Notes on ‘Gadianton Masonry,’” the prevalent interpretation of the Gadianton robbers (among Latter-day Saints) as merely secular criminals is anachronistic and incorrect.
An examination of the Gadianton robbers as representing an alternative religious option within Nephite society is overdue. However, for the purposes of this paper, it is yet another facet of the Gadianton phenomenon that demands our attention. Ray C. Hillam, a Mormon political scientists who has studied modern insurgency and counterinsurgency methods in China and Vietnam, found them “strikingly similar to those in the Gadianton era.” As one read the accounts of insurgency and counterinsurgency in the Book of Mormon,” he says, “one is impressed with its relevancy for modern times.”
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I certainly do not claim to reduce the Gadianton phenomena to a mere scriptural analogue of familiar contemporary irregular military organizations. To do so would be only slightly less misleading than the Masonic theory itself. “For the purposes of analysis, we must, of course, call forth one thread, one theme, one idea at a time, but we must also bear in mind the existence of this larger world [portrayed by the Book of Mormon] and relate individual passages to greater structures if we are to find their broadest meaning.” In an article currently underway, I hope to place the Gadiantons within a larger context of not only military but also religious history. Nevertheless, a totally believable and coherent complex of military behaviors and responses forms an undeniable facet of Gadiantonism in the Book of Mormon, which oversimplified references to the anti-Masonic controversies of New York in the late 1820s cannot explain away. To me, the most likely and safest explanation lies in Joseph Smith’s own account of the origin of the Book of Mormon, and in the understanding that it is, indeed, a record of authentic historical events.