The autumn of 1846

In the cellar of the great house on the bluff above the Ohio River,

an old man with a long white beard was burning the books.

Not religious books, bank ledgers, account sheets,

the paper record of where the society's money had come

from and where it had gone. Father Rap was 89 years old, half blind and half deaf, and still every

inch the tyrant. He fed the pages into the fire one at a time. Beneath the floorboards above him,

hidden in the cellar of the big brick house he had

built with other men's labor, lay more than half a million dollars in gold and silver coin. Not one of

his followers knew the sum. Not one of his two trustees knew where he had hidden it. He intended to take

that secret with him into the land of Canaan, and he very nearly did.

Johann Georg Rap came into the world on November 1st, 1757, in the village of Iptingen,

in the duchy of Wirtemberg. He was a weaver by trade and a troublemaker by temperament.

He read his Bible the way a magistrate reads an indictment, and by the time he was in

his 30s he had decided the Lutheran pulpit had it wrong, the state had it wrong, and the only man

in Verdembourg who had it right was Johann Geyorg Rap. In 1791 he said so out loud to a civil affairs

official. I am a prophet, he announced, and I am called to be one.

A prophet in that part of Germany, in that century, was not a welcome thing. The authorities

find him, imprisoned him, and watched him. In 1803, he sailed for America with a scouting party of

Wurtenberg separatists. By 1804, he sailed for America with a scouting party of Wurtenberg separatists.

By 1804, he had 300 of them behind a palisade in Butler County, Pennsylvania,

calling him father, signing away their property and waiting for the end of the world.

...