Brigham Young

Brigham Young was born on June 1, 1801, in Whitingham, Vermont, the ninth of eleven children of John Young and Abigail Howe Young ^[1]. The family farmed poor land and moved repeatedly through New England and upstate New York in search of better prospects. Formal schooling was scarce in the household; Young later said he had received only a handful of days of classroom instruction in his entire childhood ^[2].

His mother died of tuberculosis when he was fourteen, and the family scattered soon afterward. Young left home to earn his keep and apprenticed as a carpenter, painter, and glazier, trades he practiced in the towns along the Erie Canal corridor of western New York ^[1]. Surviving examples of his craftsmanship, including furniture and finished woodwork, suggest a careful and methodical worker. In 1824 he married Miriam Angeline Works, and the couple settled near Mendon, New York, where he ran a small workshop ^[2].

The region where Young lived was swept by waves of religious revivalism in the 1820s, an area historians often call the burned-over district. Young joined a Methodist congregation in 1824 but remained restless in his beliefs, unsatisfied by the competing denominations around him ^[3].

In 1830 a copy of the Book of Mormon reached the Young family through Samuel Smith, a brother of the movement's founder Joseph Smith. Brigham Young studied the book for roughly two years before committing himself, a deliberateness that marked much of his later leadership. He was baptized into the young church in April 1832 ^[1]. His wife Miriam, gravely ill with tuberculosis, was baptized shortly before her death that September, leaving Young a widower with two daughters ^[2].

Young threw himself into missionary work, preaching in New York, Canada, and later England. He met Joseph Smith in Kirtland, Ohio, in 1832 and became one of his most loyal supporters. When the church organized the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1835, Young was ordained a member, and by 1840 he presided over the quorum ^[3]. His mission to Britain between 1839 and 1841, undertaken while he was sick and nearly penniless, proved remarkably productive: the apostles baptized thousands of converts and organized an emigration system that would channel British Latter-day Saints to America for decades ^[4].

During the church's crisis years in Missouri and Illinois, Young managed the evacuation of church members driven from Missouri in 1838 and 1839 while Smith sat in jail. The episode displayed the administrative skill that became his signature. When Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were killed by a mob in Carthage, Illinois, on June 27, 1844, the church faced a succession crisis. Young argued that authority rested with the Twelve Apostles, and in August 1844 the majority of church members in Nauvoo accepted that claim, effectively making him the movement's leader ^[1]. He was formally sustained as the church's second president in 1847 ^[3].

Hostility toward the Latter-day Saints in Illinois made departure unavoidable. Young organized the evacuation of Nauvoo beginning in February 1846, moving thousands of people, wagons, and livestock across Iowa in punishing weather. The refugees wintered on the Missouri River at a camp called Winter Quarters, in present-day Nebraska, where hundreds died of disease and exposure ^[4].

In April 1847 Young led an advance company of 143 men, 3 women, and 2 children toward the Rocky Mountains. He had studied the reports of explorers such as John C. Fremont and settled on the valley of the Great Salt Lake, territory then still claimed by Mexico, as a refuge remote enough to spare his people further persecution. The company entered the valley in July 1847, with Young, weakened by illness, arriving on July 24 ^[1]. That date is still celebrated in Utah as Pioneer Day.

What followed was a sustained migration rather than a single journey. Under Young's direction, and financed in part by a revolving Perpetual Emigrating Fund established in 1849, roughly 70,000 Latter-day Saint emigrants crossed the plains to Utah before the transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869 ^[4]. Most traveled by ox-drawn wagon; between 1856 and 1860 about 3,000 came in handcart companies, pulling their belongings by hand. Two of those companies, the Willie and Martin companies of 1856, were trapped by early snows in Wyoming, and more than 200 people died before rescue parties sent from Salt Lake City reached them ^[4].

When the United States acquired the Great Basin from Mexico in 1848, Young petitioned for a vast state to be called Deseret. Congress instead created Utah Territory in 1850, and President Millard Fillmore appointed Young its first governor ^[5]. He held the office until 1858, combining civil and religious authority in a way that unsettled federal observers from the start.

Young directed colonization with unusual system. Church leaders called families, often by name from the pulpit, to settle specific valleys, and settlements were laid out on a grid plan with wide streets, communal irrigation works, and land distributed in modest lots. During his lifetime Latter-day Saints founded several hundred communities stretching from present-day Idaho to southern California and Arizona ^[3]. Irrigation agriculture in an arid land, cooperative economics, and home industry were constant themes of his preaching.

Relations with Washington deteriorated through the 1850s amid reports from federal appointees that Young ruled the territory as a theocracy. In 1857 President James Buchanan dispatched an army expedition to install a new governor, Alfred Cumming, touching off the confrontation known as the Utah War. Young declared martial law and ordered a strategy of harassment and scorched earth rather than pitched battle; the dispute ended in 1858 with a negotiated settlement, a presidential pardon, and Young's replacement as governor ^[5]. The gravest event of that tense year was the Mountain Meadows Massacre of September 1857, in which local Mormon militiamen and some Paiute auxiliaries murdered about 120 members of an emigrant wagon train in southern Utah. Historians continue to debate the chain of responsibility; the fullest modern studies conclude that Young did not order the attack but that wartime rhetoric contributed to the climate in which it occurred, and that he later obstructed prosecution ^[6].

After Miriam's death, Young married Mary Ann Angell in 1834, and she bore six of his children. Following Joseph Smith's private teaching of plural marriage in Nauvoo, Young became one of its principal practitioners and, after 1852, its public defender. Careful modern counts credit him with 55 wives, though the nature of the marriages varied widely; some were caretaking arrangements or sealings without cohabitation. He fathered 57 children by 16 of his wives ^[1].

His household in Salt Lake City centered on two adjoining residences, the Beehive House and the Lion House, which functioned as home, office, and reception hall. Visitors ranging from journalists to European travelers recorded impressions of a disciplined, industrious domestic operation. Young rose early, worked through a heavy schedule of correspondence and meetings, and preached extemporaneously; hundreds of his sermons were transcribed and published in the Journal of Discourses ^[2].

Young never lost the habits of a tradesman. He took a close interest in building projects, personally reviewing plans for the Salt Lake Temple, the Tabernacle with its distinctive elliptical roof, and theaters, schools, and factories. Contemporaries described him as blunt, practical, and sparing with sentiment, a manager more than a mystic ^[2].

The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 ended Utah's isolation and brought new economic and political pressure. Young responded by organizing cooperative enterprises, including the Zion's Cooperative Mercantile Institution, and by contracting with the railroads for grading work that brought cash into the territory ^[3]. He also promoted a north-south rail line, the Utah Central, driving its ceremonial last spike himself in 1870.

Federal prosecution of polygamy intensified in his final decade. Young was arrested in 1871 on charges connected to plural marriage, and in 1875 a court briefly jailed him for contempt in a divorce suit brought by his wife Ann Eliza Webb, whose lawsuit and subsequent lecture tour made national headlines ^[5]. Through it all he continued to direct church affairs, reorganizing local leadership across the settlements in 1877 in a sweeping administrative reform completed only weeks before his death.

Education occupied him late in life. He deeded property to establish Brigham Young Academy in Provo in 1875, the school that grew into Brigham Young University, and supported a similar academy in Logan ^[7]. He also dedicated the St. George Temple in April 1877, the first temple completed in Utah. Young died at his home in Salt Lake City on August 29, 1877, at the age of 76, probably of a ruptured appendix and resulting peritonitis. An estimated crowd in the tens of thousands filed past his casket in the Tabernacle ^[1].

Any Brigham Young biography has to reckon with scale. He presided over the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for three decades, longer than any president since, and left it with roughly 115,000 members, a functioning gathering system, and an institutional footprint across the Intermountain West ^[3]. The settlement program he directed shaped the map of Utah and neighboring states; dozens of towns trace their founding to companies he dispatched. Historians of the American West, whatever their view of his theology, rank him among the most effective colonizers in the nation's history, and his contemporaries sometimes called him the American Moses, a phrase the historian Leonard Arrington chose for the title of his standard scholarly biography ^[1].

The record is contested as well as consequential. Young's defense of plural marriage placed his church in conflict with the federal government for a generation after his death. His teachings on race, including the policy that barred men of Black African descent from the church's priesthood, remained in force until 1978 and have been repudiated by the modern church ^[3]. His dealings with Native peoples mixed a stated policy that it was cheaper to feed Indians than to fight them with settlement pressure and episodes of violence, including the Black Hawk War of the 1860s ^[6].

For readers asking who was Brigham Young, the answer resists a single label: carpenter, missionary, theologian, emigration agent, governor, and builder. Among Brigham Young achievements, the safe transfer of a persecuted religious community across half a continent and its transformation into a durable society is the one his admirers and critics alike concede. Brigham Young University, Pioneer Day, and the streets of Salt Lake City laid out under his eye keep his name in daily circulation nearly 150 years after his death ^[7].