In 1859 Brigham Young sent two Mormon missionaries to live among the Hopi, reduce their dialect to a written language, and then teach it to the Hopi so that they would be able to read the Book of Mormon in their own tongue. Young instructed the men to teach the Hopi to write in the Deseret Alphabet, a phonemic system that he was promoting in place of the traditional Latin alphabet. While the Deseret Alphabet faded out of use in just over twenty years, the manuscript penned in Deseret by one of the missionaries has remained in existence. For decades it sat unidentified in the Archives of the...