On January 3, 1843, Charlotte Haven sat down in a small cottage overlooking the Mississippi and wrote to her parents in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. She had arrived in Nauvoo only days earlier to spend the winter with her brother Henderson and his wife, Elizabeth. Haven was not a Latter-day Saint. Her skepticism appears in the opening lines: [1] As I write Nauvoo, I look at the word with perfect amazement, and almost doubt my own senses when I find myself an inhabitant of this city of fanatics, for never did I expect to see the place, far less to indite letters to my dear parents from it. [1] Haven's letters appeared nearly forty-eight years later in the Overland Monthly under the title "A Girl's Letters from Nauvoo." They are openly critical and should be read as one outsider's testimony, not as a neutral transcript. Still, she recorded small details that official histories often leave out: the bitter cold, muddy streets, unfinished homes, crowded worship services,...