Brigham Young
The carpenter’s apprentice who became the Moses of his people — leading a covenant community across a wilderness and planting a civilization in the desert.
The Craftsman Who Converted
Brigham Young was born in 1801 in Whitingham, Vermont, the ninth of eleven children in a poor and frequently moving family. He had little formal education — he would later estimate he had about eleven days of schooling in his life. He learned by doing: farming, carpentry, painting, glazing. He was a practical man with skilled hands and an organizing mind.
When a copy of the Book of Mormon reached his hands in 1830, he did not rush to embrace it. He studied it for two years, examined the claims carefully, and in April 1832 was baptized in a small stream in Mendon, New York. His conversion was measured and deliberate — a pattern that characterized everything he would do. He did not leap; he evaluated, decided, and then committed absolutely.
His first meeting with Joseph Smith in 1832 in Kirtland, Ohio, was unadorned: he spoke in tongues before Joseph, who confirmed it as a gift of the Spirit. Joseph’s response reportedly was warm and direct. Brigham later said that seeing Joseph was like seeing a natural man — and finding in him the prophet of God. He was not disappointed by the ordinariness; he saw through it.
Apostle and Servant
In 1835 Brigham Young was called to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. He became one of Joseph Smith’s most loyal and capable lieutenants. When the Saints were driven from Missouri in 1838–1839 during one of the most violent periods of early Church history, it was Brigham Young — then serving as President of the Twelve — who organized the exodus of some eight to twelve thousand refugees across the frozen Mississippi River into Illinois. Joseph was in jail. Brigham moved the people.
He led multiple missions to England and was responsible for some of the most successful missionary work in early Church history. Thousands of British converts poured into Nauvoo through the late 1830s and early 1840s, swelling the city into one of the largest in Illinois. Brigham Young built the pipeline that brought them.
He was in Boston when Joseph and Hyrum Smith were murdered in Carthage Jail on June 27, 1844. He rushed back to Nauvoo. The question of succession fell on the whole Church. In an August meeting, Sidney Rigdon spoke first, arguing his claim to lead. Then Brigham rose to speak — and many present later testified that his voice and appearance in that moment resembled Joseph Smith’s so closely that they were startled. The Twelve were sustained to lead the Church.
This Is the Right Place
Nauvoo was not sustainable. Anti-Mormon violence intensified through 1845 and 1846. Brigham Young negotiated the Saints’ departure and oversaw the abandonment of the city they had built on the Mississippi. The temple was completed and endowments administered to thousands before they left. Then they crossed the river in February 1846 — in winter, with wagons, animals, children, and whatever could be carried.
The trek across Iowa and then the Great Plains was one of the most demanding peacetime migrations in American history. Brigham organized it with extraordinary precision: advance companies, supply caches, planted fields for those who would come the following year, a system of wagon companies with captains of tens, fifties, and hundreds. He was managing a nation on the move.
On July 24, 1847, the pioneer company entered the Salt Lake Valley. Brigham Young, sick with mountain fever and riding in a carriage, looked out over the valley for the first time. According to those present, he raised himself up and said: “This is the right place. Drive on.”
Brigham Young, July 24, 1847
“This is the right place. Drive on.”
The valley was dry, alkaline, and surrounded by desert. Most wagon companies would have looked at it and turned back. Brigham Young looked at it and began to plant. Within days the company was digging irrigation ditches and planting potatoes. Within weeks they had mapped a city. The entire structure of Salt Lake City — the wide streets, the block layout centered on the temple site, the irrigation network — was planned and executed under Brigham’s direction in the first summer.
Building in the Desert
Over the next thirty years, Brigham Young directed the colonization of much of the American West. More than 350 settlements were established under his leadership: in Utah, Nevada, Idaho, California, Wyoming, and Arizona. He organized immigration companies to bring thousands of converts from Europe across the ocean and across the plains, eventually establishing the Perpetual Emigration Fund to help those who could not afford the journey.
He was known for a practical theology that made little distinction between sacred and secular. He once said he did not know any difference between his religion and his everyday life. He preached in the tabernacle and then went to supervise the construction crew. He organized the Church hierarchy and then organized the territorial government. He was governor of Utah Territory from 1850 to 1857 and president of the Church from 1844 until his death in 1877 — thirty-three years leading the Saints.
He broke ground for the Salt Lake Temple in 1853. He would not live to see it completed — the temple was dedicated in 1893, sixteen years after his death. But he chose the site, directed the construction materials, and ensured the work began. He understood that what he started others would finish, and he started it anyway.
The Man and His Complexity
Brigham Young is not a figure without shadow. He practiced and publicly defended plural marriage. He made statements about race that the Church has since repudiated. The Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, in which a group of Arkansas emigrants was killed by Utah militiamen and Paiute allies in southern Utah, occurred during his governorship, and the degree of his knowledge and responsibility remains disputed and painful.
He was also, by any measure, one of the most consequential leaders in nineteenth-century American history — a man who took a shattered, persecuted, and exiled community and built from it a durable civilization. The historian Wallace Stegner, no admirer of the faith itself, wrote: “Whatever he was, he was not small.” Brigham Young is best understood not as a saint without fault, but as a large and driven man who gave everything he had to a cause he believed was God’s.
Key Sources
Key Sources
- Doctrine & Covenants 136 — Revelation given through Brigham Young at Winter Quarters, January 1847, organizing the pioneer exodus
- Journal of Discourses — 26 volumes of Brigham Young’s sermons and addresses (1854–1886)
- Manuscript History of Brigham Young — Primary source account of the pioneer period kept by his clerks
- The Mormon Exodus (1847) — One of the largest voluntary migrations in North American history, spanning 1,032 miles from Winter Quarters to Salt Lake Valley