Joseph Smith went on Mormon door-knocking trip through Ontario in 1833

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It happened in Canada: This series on the revolutionaries, luminaries and criminals who have visited the Great White North, was originally published in 2014

The harvest complete, the people of Mount Pleasant, Upper Canada, were enduring the first snowstorms of the season when a charismatic American with a slight limp arrived in town to announce himself as a prophet from God.

Roaming preachers were common in 1833 Canada, but this was different. Where other evangelists had merely shopped around fresh interpretations of the Holy Bible, this one brought an entirely new bible.

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Discovered buried in the New York wilderness, this new bible claimed Jesus Christ had once walked in America and that the continent’s Aboriginal people were descended from an ocean-going tribe of ancient Israelites.

“Miserable imposters,” declared one Canadian Methodist priest. In another Canadian village, the prophet and his circle were barred access to a meetinghouse after the proprietor found they hailed from the “Sect of the Mormonites.” At another meeting, they were shouted down by locals.

But the prophet, a 27-year-old farmer’s son named Joseph Smith Jr., seemed unfazed, claiming that these Canadians were merely “superstitious” and blind to “the truth.”

“Oh God, esta[b]lish thy word among this people,” Smith jotted in a worn journal now considered one of the most priceless treasures of the Church History Library in Salt Lake City.

“We hope that great good may yet be done in Canada.”

It had only been 10 years since Smith said he had been first visited by Moroni, an angel who led him to a set of buried golden plates outside Manchester, New York.

As per Mormon theology, Smith used a “seer stone” to decode the Egyptian text on the plates, creating the Book of Mormon, which was first printed in 1830.

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Within three years, Smith had already gathered a significant following and had begun work on a major temple in Kirtland, Ohio, when Freeman Nickerson, a convert from western New York, invited the prophet into the snowy reaches of British North America to preach to his Canadian kin.

In 1833, only about 300,000 people lived in the scattered, remote settlements of Upper Canada, the predecessor to modern Ontario. Slavery had just been officially abolished in the British Colony and only 20 years before it had fended off a full-scale invasion from the United States.

Although this was Smith’s first trip over the border, the British colony had played a curious role in one of his first divine revelations. Via the seer stone, Smith had declared in 1830 that if his followers went to Kingston, Ont. — the terminus of the still-under-construction Rideau Canal — they would secure funding to distribute the Book of Mormon.

When the trip did not pan out, one follower, David Whitmer, questioned whether the revelations were truly coming from God.

Crossing the border in October, likely with only a small carriage, Smith dubbed Canada “very fine country” and “well cultivated.” But, he also said he “had many peculiar feelings in relation to both the country and people.”

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The feeling was apparently mutual.

Unlike the Americans, Canadians never assaulted, killed or tarred-and-feathered any visiting Mormons, but many did react negatively to Yankee strangers telling them they had gotten Christianity all wrong.

“It was seen as sectarian and fanatical and there’s improbable claims, right?” said William Goddard, a local historian in Hamilton, Ont. “’Angels and golden bibles, so how can we put any faith in this?’”

One by one, Mormons were also clearing out the pews of existing Protestant congregations. “You’ve got your local preacher obviously defending his religion,” said Mr. Goddard, saying there were accounts of local religious figures rushing to areas visited by the Mormons in order to clear the “delusions” out of locals’ heads.

But Smith’s 1833 visit secured between 12 and 16 Canadian converts. Many more would come by way of roaming missionaries and Smith’s 1837 trip to Toronto, where he reportedly received hospitable treatment from William Lyon Mackenzie, a newspaper publisher and future mayor of Toronto who, later that year, would be leading an unsuccessful violent uprising against British rule.

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Of the Toronto converts, who were baptized near the city’s Black Creek, one would even go on to become president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Nevertheless, few traces endure of Joseph Smith’s forays into Canada, and according to Toronto-based historian Ev Pallin, many of the country’s 200,000 Mormons — more than half of whom live in Alberta and British Columbia — are largely unaware of the prophet’s early connection to British North America.

Despite having been visited by the most influential religious figure in U.S. history, Mount Pleasant, Ont., does not even mention Joseph Smith in a county-sponsored official walking tour and the event only gets a few pages of mention in The Work of Our Hands, an official 2004 book about the history of Mount Pleasant.

“The visit of the Mormons obviously caused considerable disruption in the village and district homes,” wrote the book, saying that Smith’s visit had briefly upset the “tenuous balance” locals had struck between competing Protestant denominations.

But these early converts rarely stuck around. Then, as now, “gathering” was a major tenet of the Mormon church, and Canadians had only to be baptized before they were packing their bags for Mormon settlements in Missouri, and later, Utah.

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“The neighbours thought they were crazy, of course, but they didn’t feel that way,” said Mr. Pallin.

Although Canadians were among the first followers of the Book of Mormon, the Mormon population of modern Canada pales in comparison to other countries such as the Philippines (700,000 Mormons), Brazil (1.3 million) and of course the United States (6.4 million).

Nevertheless, Canada still stands as the only non-U.S. country to have hosted the Mormon prophet, and it remains the first foreign nation to encounter one of the most well-known symbols of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints: The globe-trotting, door-knocking Mormon missionary.

From a few prosthelytizers roaming the shores of Lake Erie, there are now more than 80,000 Mormon missionaries around the world at any one time.

“Canada was first in hearing the message from the states, and then it was taken to Europe from here,” said Mr. Pallin.

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