Brigham Young

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Brigham Young died in Salt Lake City on the 29th of August 1877, and his last words were a name repeated three times. "Joseph! Joseph! Joseph!" The man he called for was Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, who had been killed decades earlier. On the 2nd of September, an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 people crowded into the Tabernacle for Young's funeral. He had led the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for 29 years, longer than anyone to hold that office. He had also served as the first governor of Utah Territory. His admirers called him the American Moses. His critics blamed him for some of the worst violence and some of the most painful policies of his age. How did a painter and carpenter with little formal schooling come to hold such power? What did he build with it? And who paid for it?

  59636595100

• 2. A Seeker From Vermont

  ›

  Young was born on the 1st of June 1801 in Whitingham, Vermont, the ninth child of John Young and Abigail "Nabby" Howe. His family soon moved to upstate New York, and his schooling was slight. His mother taught him to read and write. She died of tuberculosis in June 1815, and his father soon remarried and sent him off to learn a trade.

  In Auburn, New York, Young apprenticed under John C. Jeffries and worked as a carpenter, glazier, and painter. One house he helped paint belonged to Elijah Miller and later to William Seward. It is now a local museum. The Panic of 1819 ended the apprenticeship when Jeffries let him go.

  Young described a strict Puritan-style upbringing. He used tobacco but did not drink alcohol, yet he refused to sign a temperance pledge. His reasoning was that a pledge would bind him, and he wanted to do right freely. In his words, "I want my liberty."

  In October 1824 he married Miriam Angeline Works, whom he had met in Port Byron. That same year he joined the Reformed Methodist Church after studying the Bible. He insisted on baptism by immersion rather than sprinkling. Their daughter Elizabeth was born on the 26th of September 1825.

  By the time Young settled in Mendon, New York, in 1828, he had drifted from the Methodists. He thought of himself as a seeker who had not yet found a church with true authority. In Mendon he first met Heber C. Kimball. Around 1830 his brother Phineas Howe brought him a copy of the Book of Mormon, obtained from Samuel H. Smith. Young did not accept its divine claims right away.

  In 1831 five missionaries arrived from Columbia, Pennsylvania. Young was struck by their spiritual gifts, such as speaking in tongues and prophecy. He travelled to Columbia with his wife and Kimball to see their branch for himself. He was baptized by Eleazer Miller on the 9th of April 1832, after meeting Joseph Smith. That spring, he spoke in tongues himself.

  Grief came quickly. Miriam died of consumption, and Vilate Kimball looked after Young's children while he travelled to Kirtland, Ohio, to visit Smith. There Young spoke in a tongue that Smith identified as the "Adamic language." He married Mary Ann Angell, a convert from Rhode Island, in February 1834. That May he joined Zion's Camp on its march to Missouri.

  On the 14th of February 1835, Young was ordained to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Missions followed to the east coast, New York, New England, and the eastern states. In December 1837, dissenters angry over the failure of the Kirtland Safety Society forced him to flee Kirtland. He stopped briefly in Dublin, Indiana, with his brother Lorenzo, then moved to Far West, Missouri, in 1838.

  Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs signed what became known as the Mormon Extermination Order that year. Under Young's direction, the quorum organized the exodus of Latter Day Saints from Missouri to Illinois. Soon afterward he spent a year on a mission to the United Kingdom, where members began publishing the Millennial Star, a hymnal, and a new edition of the Book of Mormon. By the time he came home to Nauvoo, the apostles were running the church's missionary work and the immigration of converts.

  56714

• 3. Succession and Exodus

  ›

  In June 1844, Young was far from Nauvoo, travelling east to gather votes for Joseph Smith's run for president. An armed mob stormed the jail where Smith awaited trial on a charge of treason and killed him. Young did not learn of it until early July.

  Several men claimed the leadership. On the 8th of August 1844, church members gathered to choose between Young and Sidney Rigdon, the senior surviving member of the First Presidency. Rigdon argued that no one could succeed Smith and offered himself as a "spokesman" and guardian. Young answered that the church needed more than a spokesman. He said the twelve apostles held the fullness of the priesthood needed to lead. A majority voted for the Quorum of the Twelve.

  Many followers later recalled something miraculous about that day. They said that when Young spoke, he looked or sounded exactly like Smith. The earliest such account dates to 1850 and the latest to 1920. Rigdon went on to head a separate church based in Pittsburgh, and other claimants founded further branches of the movement.

  The city Young meant to leave was growing more dangerous. Nauvoo's charter was repealed in January 1845, which stripped residents of their courts, police, and militia. Young still pressed on with the temple. Its exterior was finished on the 10th of December 1845. Members then received their endowments day and night, and an estimated 5,000 were endowed by February 1846.

  Legal trouble closed in as well. Some Mormons had counterfeited American and Mexican money, and a grand jury indicted Young and other leaders in 1845. When officers came to the temple to arrest him, Young sent out William Miller wearing Young's hat and cloak. Miller was arrested and released once officers realized their mistake. Young condemned the counterfeiting. Biographer John Turner wrote that it "remains unclear whether Young … had sanctioned the bogus-making operation."

  Young also negotiated with Stephen A. Douglas, promising to lead the church out of Nauvoo in spring in exchange for peace. The indictments, along with rumors that troops would block the departure, pushed him to begin the exodus in February 1846. The first stop was Winter Quarters, in what is now Nebraska.

  The Salt Lake Valley was then part of Mexico. By the time Young reached it on the 24th of July 1847, war had put it under American control, although U.S. sovereignty was not confirmed until 1848. Utah now celebrates that arrival as Pioneer Day. Two days later, Young and the Twelve climbed the peak just north of the future city and raised the American flag. They called it the "Ensign of Liberty."

  He named the settlement "The City of the Great Salt Lake" and laid it out in blocks of ten acres, each divided into eight equal lots. On the 7th of August, he suggested the whole camp be rebaptized as a sign of rededication. Mountain fever kept him in the valley for just over a month before he headed back to Winter Quarters on the 31st of August.

  His expedition was among the largest and best organized of the westward treks. He made repeated trips between the valley and Winter Quarters to help other companies. On the 5th of December 1847, the Twelve unanimously agreed to form a new First Presidency with Young at its head. At Winter Quarters, on the 27th of December, a conference sustained him, with Heber C. Kimball as first counselor and Willard Richards as second. A conference in Salt Lake City in September 1850 sustained them again, and the question of who would lead them was settled.

  1011957100

• 4. Building Utah

  ›

  On the 3rd of February 1851, President Millard Fillmore appointed Young the first governor of Utah Territory, which Congress had created through the Compromise of 1850. Young had hoped for a State of Deseret instead. The post paid $1,500 a year, with another $1,000 for serving as superintendent of Indian affairs.

  The numbers behind his colonizing are large. Historian Rodman W. Paul credited Young with directing the founding of 350 towns across the Southwest between 1847 and 1877. Settlements he directed spread across present-day Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Nevada, California, and parts of southern Colorado and northern Mexico. His followers built roads, bridges, forts, and irrigation projects. They also organized a militia and set up public welfare.

  That expansion also meant conflict with the people already living there. Under Young's direction, the settlers issued a "selective extermination" order against male Timpanogos. After a series of wars, the Mormons eventually made peace with the Native Americans.

  Young organized the first territorial legislature and made Fillmore the first capital. In 1849 he arranged for a printing press to come to the valley, and it later printed the Deseret News. That same year he set up a gold mint, striking coins from the gold dust travelers had left behind during the Gold Rush. Alfred Cumming, Young's successor as governor, closed the mint in 1861.

  Transport mattered as much as money. In 1856 Young organized the Brigham Young Express and Carrying Company, which carried mail and passengers between Missouri and California. He was one of the first to buy Union Pacific stock for the first transcontinental railroad. He also authorized the Utah Central line, which linked Salt Lake City to the Union Pacific.

  His ventures ran from a ferryboat company and a wagon express to lumber, wool, sugar beets, iron, and liquor. He did best in real estate. He also helped organize the Salt Lake Gas Works, the Salt Lake Water Works, an insurance company, a bank, and the ZCMI store in downtown Salt Lake City. He tried to build self-sufficiency through collectivist communities called the United Order of Enoch.

  In 1873 Young announced he would leave the presidencies of the Deseret National Bank and ZCMI, and his role as trustee-in-trust for the church. He said he wanted relief from the burden of "secular affairs." When he died, he was the wealthiest man in Utah, with a personal fortune estimated at $600,000.

  Young's teaching about schools was practical and religious at once. He urged bishops to start grade schools, supported by volunteer labor and tithing. He saw education as learning how to make the Kingdom of God real on earth. A board of regents he organized created the University of Deseret on the 28th of February 1850, and it later became the University of Utah.

  On the 16th of October 1875, he deeded buildings and land in Provo to a board of trustees for a new school. He hoped for an academy where Latter-day Saint children could be educated free of what he called the "pernicious atheistic influences" of other schools. It became Brigham Young Academy in 1876 under Karl G. Maeser, the forerunner of Brigham Young University.

  He reorganized the Relief Society for women in 1867. He created an organization for young women in 1869 and one for young men in 1875. The young women's group was first called the Retrenchment Association and aimed to turn girls from costly and extravagant worldly ways. Young also organized a committee to refine the Deseret alphabet, a phonetic script developed between 1847 and 1854. It appeared in two Deseret News articles, two elementary readers, and a translation of the Book of Mormon, and had nearly vanished by 1870.

  Temples were his steadiest priority. Only four days after reaching the valley, he marked the site of the Salt Lake Temple, and he presided over its groundbreaking on the 6th of April 1853. He oversaw the Salt Lake Tabernacle. He announced temples at St. George in 1871, Manti in 1875, and Logan in 1877. In 1855 he opened the Endowment House as a "temporary temple" so members could receive temple ordinances while the large temple rose.

  1415161224

• 5. A Household of Many

  ›

  Young once said that when Joseph Smith taught him plural marriage, "It was the first time in my life that I desired the grave." Yet he became the man most associated with the practice. Some Latter Day Saint denominations, such as the Community of Christ, call him the "Father of Mormon Polygamy."

  In early 1842 in Nauvoo, Young performed the sealings for two of Smith's plural wives. That year he also proposed to Martha Brotherton, a seventeen-year-old recent immigrant from Manchester, England. She signed an affidavit saying that Young and then Smith had pressured her. John C. Bennett, who had been excommunicated, requested the affidavit and mixed false claims with true ones. Young and William Smith attacked Brotherton's character, and she never rejoined the church. Young knew of Smith's secret practice even as he campaigned against Bennett's charge of "spiritual wifery."

  In June 1842 Young married Lucy Ann Decker, his first plural wife. She was still married to William Seeley at the time. Young supported her and her two children in their own Nauvoo home, and they had seven children together. He married more women in Nauvoo than any other polygamist there, and eight of those marriages were to Joseph Smith's widows.

  In 1853 Young made the church's first official public statement on the subject since reaching Utah. He admitted the doctrine was hard on women, but he said its purpose was large families. He told a first wife who had raised children for twenty or thirty years that it was time to give her husband up to other women who would bear children. He also taught that God gave sexual desire to sustain humankind, and that sex belonged within marriage.

  The count of his wives depends on what a "wife" means. Young was sealed to 56 women. Most sealings were for eternity, while some were "for time only," with Young standing as proxy for a dead husband. Thirty-one of the wives were not conjugal and had exchanged eternity-only vows. Many did not live with him or appear publicly as his wives.

  Of the 56, twenty-one had never married, seventeen were widows, six were divorced, and six had living husbands. The status of six more is unknown. By his death he had 57 children by sixteen wives, and 46 of them reached adulthood. Two of his wives, Zina Huntington and Eliza R. Snow, held administrative positions in the church.

  So many people needed housing. In downtown Salt Lake City, he built the Lion House, the Beehive House, the Gardo House, and the White House. The Beehive House and the Lion House are still prominent landmarks. A family store at the north end of the Beehive House let wives and children run accounts. Karl Maeser privately tutored Young's children from 1865 until 1867, when he was called on a mission to Germany.

  When Young died, nineteen of his wives had died before him, ten were divorced from him, and twenty-three survived him. His will shared his estate with the sixteen living wives who had lived with him. It did not mention the six surviving non-conjugal wives. In 1902, The New York Times established that his direct descendants numbered more than 1,000. A 2016 estimate put them at around 30,000.

  7980783781

• 6. Doctrine, Race and Slavery

  ›

  Nineteen volumes of transcribed and edited sermons, the Journal of Discourses, preserve most of what Young taught. Only one section of his is canonized as scripture in the Doctrine and Covenants. It was added in 1876.

  On the 21st of September 1856, Young declared: "We need a reformation in the midst of this people; we need a thorough reform." So began the Mormon Reformation of 1856 and 1857, a call to spiritual renewal across Utah. His counselor Jedediah M. Grant toured settlements urging people to reject sin. Almost all active members were rebaptized as a sign of commitment. Young stressed plural marriage, rebaptism, and passionate preaching. By early 1858 the Reformation had ended.

  Two teachings from the era have since been repudiated. The Adam-God doctrine held that Adam was once a mortal who became exalted, and that he brought Eve from another planet. Young said he learned from Smith that Adam is "our Father and our God." The other, blood atonement, held that some sins could not be covered by Christ's atonement. Those who committed them could partly atone by shedding their own blood. The church formally repudiated blood atonement as early as 1889. Occasional preaching of it during the Reformation never led to its practice by members.

  On race, Young's record is the hardest to read. Under Smith, men of black African descent had generally been treated equally in the priesthood. After the move to Utah in 1848, Young announced a ban on conferring the priesthood on black men. It also barred black Latter-day Saints from temple rites such as the endowment and sealings. He often taught that the cause was the "seed of Cain," and in 1863 he spoke of a death penalty for white people who mixed their blood with it.

  He insisted the Lord, not he, had set the ban. He taught that black men would one day hold the priesthood, but only after all of Adam's other children had been redeemed. He also opposed theories that humans came from separate creations, insisting on one. In 1978 church president Spencer W. Kimball rescinded the policy, and the church disavowed past theories explaining it.

  Young believed in the racial superiority of white men. In a speech published in the Deseret News from his manuscript history of the 5th of January 1852, he said that people he called "the seed of Canaan" could not hold civil or church office. He used the Curse of Ham, a racist reading of Genesis 9 that slaveholders had used to justify slavery. He also predicted that Chinese and Japanese immigrants would arrive, and said they would need to be governed by white men.

  His position on slavery shifted. In the 1840s he avoided taking sides in the national debate. In January 1852 he said that "no property can or should be recognized as existing in slaves," and two weeks later called himself a "firm believer in slavery." Historian John G. Turner described the result as a "bundle of contradictions."

  The same year he led the push for the 1852 Act in Relation to Service, which legalized and regulated slavery in Utah. In a speech he said that anyone who believes the Bible must believe in slavery, and that the "colored race" had brought curses on itself. In an 1859 interview with the New York Tribune, he called slavery a "divine institution" that was "not to be abolished."

  4652384877

• 7. War and Massacre

  ›

  The Runaway Officials of 1851 were Broughton Harris and other federal appointees who quit Utah within months after failing to work with Young. Two years passed before their posts were filled. Their reports reached Washington. In early 1857, after hearing of systematic obstruction of federal officials, especially judges, President James Buchanan decided to install a non-Mormon governor.

  Buchanan chose Alfred Cumming and sent him with 2,500 soldiers. Young learned in July that troops were heading for Utah with his replacement. He declared martial law and called out the Nauvoo Legion, the territorial militia, to delay the approaching force. Mormon forces stole cattle from the U.S. Army and burned its supply wagons. This was the Utah War.

  The Mountain Meadows Massacre took place in Washington County in 1857, during that tension. The Utah Territorial Militia carried out attacks that killed at least 120 members of the Baker-Fancher wagon train, men, women, and children. Only children under seven survived, and local Mormon families cared for them. The dead were left unburied. Scholars do not dispute that individual Mormons from nearby communities took part.

  How far Young was involved is disputed. Historian Leonard J. Arrington reports that a rider reached Young's office on the day of the massacre. Learning that church members in Parowan and Cedar City planned an attack, Young sent back a letter ordering that the Fancher party be allowed to pass unharmed. The letter reportedly arrived on the 13th of September 1857, two days after the killings. Young had promised the federal government to protect migrants crossing the territory. In the following month, the Aiken massacre was carried out on his orders.

  The remains of about 40 people were later found and buried. U.S. Army officer James Henry Carleton raised a cairn of rocks and a large cross made from local trees. Its crossbeam read, "Vengeance Is Mine, Saith The Lord: I Will Repay." A granite slab said that 120 men, women and children were massacred in cold blood early in September 1857, and that they were from Arkansas. According to Wilford Woodruff, Young arrived at the site in 1861 with an entourage and suggested the inscription instead say, "Vengeance is mine and I have taken a little."

  The Utah War ended in 1858 with a negotiated settlement. A peace commission helped broker it. Young agreed to resign as governor and let federal troops enter the territory. In exchange, Buchanan pardoned the Mormon settlers. Mark Twain later alleged, using a dubious source, that Young had ordered the massacre. Young handed the governorship to Cumming.

  565758395

• 8. Moses and Villain

  ›

  Young collected nicknames, and the best known was "American Moses," also "Modern Moses" or "Mormon Moses." Followers saw in him a leader who took his people across a desert to a promised land. Statues now honor him in several places. A bronze one stands in front of the Abraham O. Smoot Administration Building at Brigham Young University. A marble one has stood in the National Statuary Hall Collection at the United States Capitol since Utah donated it in 1950. Another rises atop the This is the Place Monument in Salt Lake City.

  Writers of his own century were less reverent. In 1857, Fitz-James O'Brien's short story "My Wife's Tempter" cast him as an "apostle of hell." Florence Claxton's 1872 comic satire The Adventures of a Woman in Search of Her Rights ends with a woman marrying Young in a dream. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. joked in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table that he had as many tree-wives as Young had human ones.

  Mark Twain gave Young a chapter and much of two appendices in Roughing It. He described Young as a theocratic "absolute monarch" defying the U.S. government. The Scottish poet John Lyon, an intimate friend, wrote Brigham the Bold in tribute after his death.

  Arthur Conan Doyle gave Young a small but pivotal role in A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes story, published in 1887. The scene is set in 1860, and the book portrays Mormons unsympathetically. Doyle admitted he had "provoked the animosity of the Mormon faithful." He said the Danite Band and the murders were historical, though a novel told them more luridly. His daughter said her father would be the first to admit the book was full of errors about the Mormons.

  The screen has taken him up repeatedly. Dean Jagger played him in the 1940 film Brigham Young, and Charlton Heston in The Avenging Angel in 1995. Terence Stamp took the role in September Dawn in 2007. Gregg Henry played him in Hell on Wheels, Scott Michael Campbell in Under the Banner of Heaven in 2022, and Kim Coates in American Primeval in 2025. The 2011 musical The Book of Mormon makes him a tyrannical regional warlord. He also appears at the end of Le Fil qui chante, the last Lucky Luke book by René Goscinny.

  Young is buried on the grounds of the Mormon Pioneer Memorial Monument in the heart of Salt Lake City. On the 10th of June 1938, members of the Young Men and Young Women organizations he founded placed a bronze marker at his grave.

  7293879291