Bio DeCasseres (1875 - 1964)

Ho-Chunk and Pottawatomie poet, cousin of Joseph Smith

One of the most interesting people I have encountered recently in my research is Bio DeCasseres, Joseph Smith’s first cousin, twice removed.

Bio was the granddaughter of Stephen Mack, Jr. Like his cousins Joseph and Hyrum, he was born in Vermont. His father had several business ventures in Michigan and paid for his son to attend Moors Charity School. Stephen eventually joined his father in Michigan, where the young man worked as a fur trader and married an Ho-Chunk and Pottawatomie woman named Hononegah in 1829.

Their daughter Mary moved to the Blue Earth Reservation in Minnesota, where she gave birth in 1875 to Adela or Bio.

As a young woman, Bio published several poems. Although she was one of the earliest Native women to publish poetry in a mainstream newspaper, she never represented herself as an Indigenous woman.

To a Bluebird in the Desert

What a fickle tide has brought thee here,

‘Mid barren rocks and hill-tops sere?

No balsam branch to hide among

While flut'st the silence with thy song.

Where wilt thou rest that down head

When fierce noon rages overhead;

Where find an answer to thy call

When Nature drapes with heavy pall?

I watch thy flight far o’er the sands.

Thou brightest dream of distant lands;

Of dew-wet grass, of blossoming trees,

Of lulling tones from Mem’ry’s seas.

O bit of blue ‘mid waste of gray,

Thou flame where scattered ashes lay!

A timbrel heard through hush of night

Is like thy breast in desert flight.

Bio abandoned her first husband Harry C. Jones, after a sixteen year correspondence with her lover Benjamin DeCasseres. The couple exchanged letters for years after their initial meeting. “I hold you in a love-crush of unborn sobs,” DeCasseres told Bio in one letter, “and wind your image ‘round about my soul like a rainbow woven by a drunken god.” Jones eventually agreed to a divorce, and Bio and DeCasseres married. The two published their love letters, leading one newspaper to suggest that the “pair” were “egotists” who enjoyed “flagellating in public.”

During his life, DeCasseres was compared to H.L. Mencken and considered Jack London and William Randolph Heart his close friends. Bio continued to write poetry and published a single novel, a psychobiography of Jesus in which the young man learns before his death that Pontius Pilate is his father. In his introduction to the book, DeCasseres praised his wife’s work, for refusing to denigrate “sex-love” by embracing the idea that Mary was sinless and Jesus was a “Man-Virgin” (The Boy of Bethlehem, 13) DeCasseres became an acolyte of Nietzsche and spent his life as a cultural critic, reviewing books and American culture as a whole.

DeCasseres died in 1945 at the age 82. Bio then moved to Tucson, where she lived until her own death in 1964.

As a historian of Mormonism, I find Bio interesting for several reasons:

1. Her cousin Joseph Smith wrote or translated (depending on your religious beliefs) a scripture that tried to explain the origins of Native Americans. Historians have tried to create an origin story for his interest in Native American history — pointing variously to Moors Charity School, the burial mounds that dotted the American landscape, and the presence of Indigenous communities in upstate New York. Although these ideas are interesting, people often frame their inquiry as though Joseph Smith’s interest in Native American history and culture was unique.

It wasn’t.

In settler societies, the communities people are displacing often fascinate them. White Americans collected Native American grave objects as curios in the nineteenth century and placed them in museums in the twentieth. Joseph Smith’s interest in Native American communities was reflective of a larger American culture that romanticized Indigenous people, even as it created a society that pushed them aside.

I can understand why people find Joseph Smith’s tenure at the Moors Charity School interesting. What I find more difficult to understand is why Bio and her ancestors haven’t been a larger part of Mormon history. Historians have spent an inordinate amount of time arguing whether Joseph Smith sacrificed a dog as part of a ritual patterned on local Indigenous practices, but have largely left his very real Indigenous relatives out of the story.

The lack of research means it is difficult to say how much Joseph Smith knew about his cousin Stephen, his wife, or their children, or to what extent they influenced him.

2. Like her Mormon relatives, Bio was religiously and sexually creative. Her biography of Jesus is not a great work of American literature, but it explores the idea that sex is integral to the human experience. She rejects the idea that Mary conceived Jesus while remaining a Virgin and examines the effect that being labeled a “bastard” would have on a child.

People often portray Joseph Smith as uneducated, and thus, unable to write the Book of Mormon. His family, however, was filled with writers and creatives. His niece Ina was the first poet laureate of California. After she divorced at the age of twenty, she refused to remarry and argued later in life that women should receive enough pay to support themselves without the aid of a husband. Ina considered her poetic gifts part of her heritage as a Smith, and offered her cousin Joseph’s son David Hyrum support in his own poetic endeavors.

Of course, the presence of other writers in the Smith family does not mean Joseph was the author of the Book of Mormon, but it does suggest that his family was more talented and literary than we have given them credit for.