Family Background

1801. June 1: Born in Whitingham, Vermont, Brigham Young was cousin to Apostles Franklin D. Richards and Willard Richards. He was son-in-law of Albert Rockwood (First Council of Seventy), and brother-in-law to Lorenzo Snow, Amasa Lyman, Heber C. Kimball, and Church architect Truman Angell. He was Heber C. Kimball's uncle by marriage.

Early Years

Soon after Brigham's birth, his family moved to Sherburne, New York. "When I was young," Brigham recalled, "I was kept within very strict bounds and was not allowed to walk more than half-an-hour on Sunday for exercise. … I had not a chance to dance when I was young, and never heard the enchanting tones of the violin until I was eleven years of age; and then I thought I was on the highway to hell, if I suffered myself to linger and listen to it."

At age sixteen, Brigham learned carpentry, joining, painting, and glazing. The family was poor. His sisters made him "Jo Johnson" caps to ease the New York winter. He had to work year round, ill clad, with "insufficient food until my stomach would ache."

Throughout his life Brigham Young was conscious of the fact that he had little formal education—only eleven days. "When I meet ladies and gentlemen of high rank, they must not expect from me the same formal ceremony and etiquette that are observed among the great in the courts of kings. In my youthful days, instead of going to school, I had to chop logs, to sow and plant, to plow in the midst of roots barefooted, and if I had on a pair of pants that would cover me I did pretty well."

Despite his lack of formal education, he was the leading spirit in endowing three institutions of higher learning in Utah—Brigham Young College (Logan, Utah), the University of Deseret (now University of Utah in Salt Lake City), and Brigham Young Academy (now Brigham Young University in Provo). His educational philosophy was summed up in a prize-winning definition submitted posthumously for him to the San Francisco World's Fair: "Education is the power to think clearly, to act well in the world's work, and to appreciate life."

Marriages

He married Miriam Works in 1824. She died in 1832, and he married Mary Ann Angel in 1834.

Brigham Young described himself as a "great lover of women. In what particular? I love to see them happy, to see them well fed and well clothed, and I love to see them cheerful. I love to see their faces and talk with them, when they talk in righteousness; but as for anything more, I do not care. There are probably but few men in the world who care about the private society of women less than I do."

He married at least fifty-five plural wives, including Zina D. Huntington, Eliza R. Snow, Amelia Folsom, Ann Eliza Webb, and seven widows of Joseph Smith. Several wives left him and six obtained formal divorces.

He fathered thirty-one daughters and twenty-five sons, including sons who married daughters of apostles Jedediah M. Grant, Parley P. Pratt, Erastus Snow, and Lorenzo Snow. Susa Young Gates was perhaps his most prominent daughter.

President Young ordained three of his sons apostles when the youngest was only eleven years old. Appointing them his counselors, he became the only president of the Church to have sons serving with him in the First Presidency. Brigham Jr. was the only son to become a member of the Quorum of the Twelve. John W. was publicly sustained as a member of the First Presidency in 1876, but Joseph A. remained apostle without portfolio.

Convert

1830. A Methodist since 1822, Brigham Young read the Book of Mormon left in Mendon, New York, by Joseph Smith's brother Samuel. Two years later, on April 14, 1832, he was baptized, confirmed, and ordained an elder by Eleazer Miller.

1832. Served a mission to Canada with his brother Joseph.

1834. Marched in Zion's Camp.

Apostle

1835. February 14: Called to the original Quorum of the Twelve by the Three Witnesses.

1838. October: When David Patten was killed, Young became the senior member of the Quorum and led the Saints from Missouri to Illinois while Joseph Smith was in Liberty Jail.

1839. September 14: Brigham Young left Nauvoo on a mission to England "without purse or scrip." His wife was ill, with no means of support, caring for a day-old baby. In England he founded the Millennial Star and established the European Emigration Bureau, which sent the first company of forty European Saints to Nauvoo.

1841. Called to be president of the Quorum of the Twelve (D&C 124:127), Young returned to Nauvoo in July.

"President of the Whole Church"

1844. July: Young was on a Council of Fifty assignment promoting Joseph Smith's U.S. presidential candidacy when he learned of the martyrdom. Despite attempts by Sidney Rigdon to assume control of the Church after Joseph's death, the Church membership sustained the Quorum of the Twelve with Young as its president. As early as December 5, Brigham Young was signing Church documents as "President of the Church."

1845. April 7: Sustained as "President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles to this Church and nation, and all nations, and also as President of the whole Church of Latter-day Saints."

1847. December 5: Sustained as President of the Church by the Quorum of the Twelve "with authority to nominate his two counselors," Heber C. Kimball and Willard Richards. December 24: The First Presidency was formally sustained by a general conference in Kanesville, Iowa.

Colonizer

1847. President Brigham Young led the pioneer vanguard to the Salt Lake Valley and directed colonizing efforts in more than two hundred settlements. He was appointed governor of the Provisional State of Deseret (1849) by the provisional legislature, organized the "Perpetual Emigration Fund" (1849), established the Deseret News, with Willard Richards as editor (1850), and was appointed governor of Utah Territory by President Millard Fillmore (1850).

A charter member of the Council of Fifty, Brigham Young noted in a meeting of the Salt Lake School of the Prophets that "some of the brethren think that the Priesthood should not govern us in political affairs but the Priesthood is supreme; even in financial affairs. … Some would say as with the Democrats [in the] east, each party wanting their man but we must quit that: I hope we may never hear of an opposition in this city or country again. … We will learn that the Priesthood must dictate."

1857. Reports that the Mormon "theodemocracy" was getting out of hand provoked President James Buchanan to send federal troops to install a new governor and other officials. Governor Young, who had not been contacted by the president, declared martial law and forbade the army to enter the Salt Lake Valley. In the spring of 1858, as the Utah Expeditionary Force approached, Young evacuated northern Utah. Thomas L. Kane worked out a settlement whereby the army passed through the deserted Salt Lake City to Cedar Valley, thirty miles southwest, and the new territorial officials were accepted without further incident.

1861. October 18: At the outbreak of the Civil War Brigham Young wired the first telegraph message east on the new Overland Telegraph line: "Utah has not seceded, but is firm for the Constitution and laws of our once happy country."

"Lion of the Lord"

The "Lion of the Lord"—so named by toastmaster W. W. Phelps in 1845—was imposing in every dimension. He stood 5'10" tall, weighed 188-200 pounds, and boasted a 44-inch chest.

He also wore false teeth. "One morning he was cleaning his artificial dentures at the family wash bench just outside a back door [of the Erastus Snow home in Saint George, Utah] when little Flora caught sight of him at this very private chore. Quickly he plopped his teeth into his mouth when he beheld her staring at him in open-mouthed, wide-eyed fascination. She bounced up and down with excitement, shrilly crying 'Oh, Brother Brigham, show me your teeth; show me your teeth, Brother Brigham!' The Lion of the Lord, touched by childhood's whims, kindly obliged."

He was not always the confident preacher moderns tend to envision. Even in his later years, he approached the public forum with uneasiness. "Although I have been a public speaker for thirty-seven years," he once said, "it is seldom that I rise before a congregation without feeling a child-like timidity; if I live to the age of Methusaleh I do not know that I shall outgrow it."

Visitors to Salt Lake City often commented on his language: "He says 'leetie', 'beyene' and 'disremember.' An irrepressible conflict between his nominatives and verbs now and then crops out in expressions like 'they '" was.

"When he speaks," reported one contemporary, "the words seem to be calmly weighed by the brain, clipped by the teeth, and finally squeezed through the left half of the almost locked up lips."

His sermons were usually practical—filled with hints on stock raising, fence building, tales of sufferings of Saints, advice to the lovelorn. He admonished the breathing of fresh mountain air, the use of homemade cloth, the eating of thick-crusted bread.

Man of Contradictions

Brigham Young was not averse to contradicting himself. He condemned novel reading as profitless, but allowed the practice in his own home. He consistently denounced the purchase of manufactured "states goods" as a breach of self-sufficiency, but admitted buying more of them than any man in the territory. He demanded strict obedience from members of the Church, yet counseled:

"I am more afraid that this people have so much confidence in their leaders that they will not inquire for themselves of God whether they are led by Him. I am fearful they settle down in a state of blind self-security, trusting their eternal destiny in the hands of their leaders with a reckless confidence that in itself would thwart the purposes of God in their salvation, and weaken that influence they could give to their leaders, did they know for themselves, by the revelations of Jesus, that they are led in the right way. Let every man and woman know, by the whispering of the Spirit of God to themselves, whether their leaders are walking in the path the Lord dictates, or not."

A journalist described Brigham Young as "a self-reliant and strong-willed man … one born to be master of himself and many others." But his children remember him as an "easy touch." He himself declared, "I do not rule my family with an iron hand, as many do, but in kindness and with pleasant words; and if soft words would teach them, they would know as much as any family on this earth."

Temple Builder

Brigham Young worked as a carpenter on the Kirtland and Nauvoo temples. He laid tile cornerstone for the Salt Lake Temple (1853) and dedicated sites for the Logan and Manti temples (1877). At the Manti dedication he told Warren Snow: "Here is the spot where the Prophet Moroni stood and dedicated this piece of land for a temple site, and that is the reason why the location is made here, and we can't move it from this spot."

Businessman

Heber J. Grant recalled Brigham Young's saying, "Daniel Wells is my statesman, Heber Kimball is my prophet, and I am a business man looking after the best interests of the people."

"Before I had been one year in this place [Salt Lake City]," Brigham Young said, "the wealthiest man who came from the mines, Father Rhodes, with seventeen thousand dollars could not buy the possessions I had made in one year." During the years 1862-1872 President Young's annual personal income averaged $32,000.

His wealth came from a "dairy in Hampton, Utah, which produced over 150 tons of cheese per year, a 10,000-acre ranch between Mendon and Logan on which grazed 600 head of cattle and hundreds of sheep, a carding factory and grist mill on City Creek, a large wagon and repair shop in Salt Lake City, a cotton and woolen factory at the mouth of Parley's Canyon, a leather tannery in St. George, a saddle-manufacturing shop, and a shoe factory which employed a dozen men."

His farming and ranching operations were blue-ribbon quality. He won many prizes at the annual Deseret fairs—"second best apples," "second best pecks of silver and red onions," "best drumhead cabbage," "best bunches of grapes," "best pigs," "best brood mare," "best yearling colt," "best Devon Bull."

At his death, he was the wealthiest man in Utah, with an estate of approximately $2.5 million, which was embroiled in legal battles between his family and the Church for years afterwards.

Death

1877. August 29: Died of complications related to appendicitis.

Brigham Young was typically practical in arranging his own burial details, requesting a coffin "made of plump 1-1/4 inch (redwood) boards, not scrimped in length… my body dressed in my temple clothing… the coffin to have the appearance that if I wanted to turn a little to the right or the left, I should have plenty of room to do so." Buried in the family burial plot one block east of the Lion House in Salt Lake City.

During World War II a United States Navy liberty ship was named in his honor, and in 1950 a twelve-foot marble statue of Brigham Young, created by his grandson Mahonri M. Young, was placed in the Capitol Building in Washington, D. C.

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