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Left, business owner Brian Christiansen stands with a light in an underground vault while historian Joseph Johnstun climbs down a ladder. Some think the space could be a tomb commissioned by early Latter-day Saint leader Joseph Smith before he was martyred.
TC Christensen
Brian Christiansen has spoken with so many reporters in recent days that he is starting to lose his voice.
The businessman from St. George has fielded several interview requests because news outlets want to know more about the discovery of an old brick vault located under the sidewalk in front of his Nauvoo, Illinois, business.
The original cover and title page of A Trip to the North Pole; or, Discovery of the Ten Tribes (1903)
On the first Sunday of December in 1903, a headline in the Salt Lake Tribune announced the startling news, NORTH POLE DISCOVERED six years before explorer Robert Peary’s famous, if disputed, expedition. According to the article, a Mr. O.J.S. Lindelof had, on a recent trip to Europe, been given a waterlogged manuscript that he brought back with him to Salt Lake City. When he finally got around to reading it, the manuscript turned out to be a record of the discovery of the North Pole by a San Francisco-based expedition some years earlier. Unlike Peary, who discovered an uninhabitable frozen wasteland, the explorers in Lindelof’s manuscript describe a verdant, densely populated region that has been hidden from the rest of the world for thousands of years.