When Utah Territory began yielding the riches of its vast mineral resources, it was mostly the pockets of non-Mormon mining magnates that were lined with gold and silver.
Jesse Knight was an exception, a Latter-day Saint who became a multimillionaire from mining and other business concerns that he said he developed in response to divine promptings.When money in huge amounts began to pour into the Knight family coffers, he passed much of it along to other people based on the conviction that his success was heaven-sent and that it obligated him to a lifetime of service to others.
"Uncle Jesse" became a benefactor to thousands of individuals, including employees for whom he sometimes created jobs at the expense of the businesses themselves. His financial legacy continues to benefit Brigham Young University years after his death, and the LDS Church gratefully acknowledges that Knight's fortune was a saving factor in an early era when the church was foundering financially.
Knight's ties to the LDS Church began almost at its inception. His father, Newell Knight, was among the earliest converts to the new faith. Young Jesse was born in 1845 during the troubled Nauvoo era. His father directed the first 50 wagons across the Mississippi River as the migration westward began, but died soon afterward, leaving his wife, Lydia, to struggle to Salt Lake Valley with seven children.
Newell's fervent testimony, however, was greatly diluted in his youngest son. For years, Jesse resisted - in fact argued against - the church. Not until he was married and facing the loss of a child to a disease caused by the poisoning of the family's water supply by a dead rat did his latent testimony blossom. The miraculous cure of his little Jennie after a blessing by elders of the church changed his life. He dedicated the remainder of his days to service to the church and to rearing his children as believers, according to his son, Jesse William, who wrote a biography after his father's death. One daughter, Minnie, died as a result of the poisoned water.
For more than half his life, Jesse Knight hovered on the bare edges of poverty. As a youth, he drove wagons with provisions to mining camps in Nevada and Montana. On one occasion, he was paid for his goods in gold dust, which he hid in the hub of an old wagon wheel in the back of his wagon for fear of robbers. The occasional sight of a body dangling from a tree along the route he traveled was enough testimony of the lawlessness of those early days to validate his fear.
When he was 17, he was in a party under the direction of Horton D. Haight that was sent back along the emigrant trail to assist a wagon train to Salt Lake Valley. He had traveled the same route as a child of 4 when his mother brought her brood west. Thirty of the 650 members of the emigrant company died during the trek and were buried on the plains.
At 22, young Knight participated in the Black Hawk Indian war, spending a summer guarding infant Sanpete communities threatened by natives.
When his eye fell on a young woman from Provo, he determined to enhance his chances by building a wooden one-seat sleigh. When he went to pick up the girl, she insisted on bringing along her overweight aunt. About a mile from home, the homemade sleigh hit a rough spot and disintegrated, leaving the trio to slog home in deep snow, a mortified Jesse with the remains of his sleigh to carry and a team of horses to lead.
He ultimately married Amanda McEwan, who encouraged him to sell their home in Provo and take up ranching west of Payson in Utah County. The family existed by growing silage during the summer, fattening cattle during the winter and selling them in the spring. Knight was a hard worker and passed the ethic along to his sons, Jessie William recounted.
Once when his two boys whined that they'd rather take a licking than plant corn, he obliged them. Then he made them feel so guilty that they helped with the planting after all.
Miners from the booming nearby Tintic District were frequent visitors at the Knight home, and Jesse dabbled in prospecting. The pivotal experience of his life occurred one day as he sat alone under a pine tree on the east side of Godiva Mountain. He recounted later that he heard a voice distinctly say that "This country is here for the Mormons." The message was burned into his memory, and he believed that his subsequent rise to fortune was the direct result of this divine intervention. Before fortune had actually found him, Knight told one of his sons that he would be responsible for helping the church out of a financial crisis. That prediction came true later when church leaders found themselves unable to pay debts, threatening the credit of the institution.
Although he first resisted, Knight eventually prayed about the situation and came forward with $10,000 that saved the immediate situation and bought time for the church to regain its financial stability. Then-President Wilford Woodruff wrote a letter to Knight saying that the donation "was an answer to my prayers to the Lord to open some door of relief whereby we may be enabled to meet pressing demands upon us." He proffered a note for $10,000 at 8 percent interest, which was subsequently paid in full.
After receiving his personal revelation, Knight located a piece of land that seemed to hold promise of underground minerals. He immediately solicited Jared Roundy, an expert miner, to "locate" the property for him. He also offered Roundy a chance to be his partner. The miner responded he didn't want to be any part of "a damned old humbug like this." The sentiment stuck, and the first of Knight's many productive mines became the Humbug.
He mortgaged his Payson home for $1,500 to finance the initial development. In July 1896, after about two months of work, the first samples of rich silver-lead-zinc ore came out of the Humbug. Knight took a wheelbarrow of the ore, dumped it on a small platform and said, "I have done the last day's work that I ever expect to do where I take another man's job from him. I expect to give employment and make labor from now on for other people."
The second shipment of ore from the mine brought a return of $11,189.05, a sizeable sum for the time. Knight began buying up properties in the same vicinity. Over time, Godiva Mountain became the site of six Knight mines, eventually producing more than $10 million in minerals.
In 1897, the town of Knightsville sprang up to serve Knight's miners. It was an entirely atypical mining town - no saloons and none of the riotous living associated with such communities. On Sundays, Knight miners went to church. He paid them 25 cents more per day than miners were earning from other companies so they could spend the Sabbath in worship without losing money. The operators' organization dropped him from membership because of this radical arrangement.
He fired miners who drank as being irresponsible toward their families and dangerous to their fellow workers.
At one time, Knight was probably the largest owner of patented mining properties in the Intermountain region. Income from his mines allowed him to branch out into other businesses, many of them related, such as smelting and building railroads to transport ores. Among his business ventures were ranching and sugar production in Canada (a town was named for his son, Raymond); woolen mills, ranching in Nevada, coal mining, irrigation and land development in Colombia, South America. Some of his businesses thrived, some flamed and died, but Knight cared less for success or failure than for the benefits the companies could generate for others, his son wrote.
From 1901 to his death in 1921, Knight served on the BYU board of directors. Several outright gifts to the university and an ongoing endowment interest in a Uintah Valley irrigation company were significant to the university's growth. In 1960, a new business building was named in his honor.
In 1907, he deeded 500 acres of land on the Provo Bench to the school, and a few years later, 40 additional acres were added.
On his death on March 14, 1921, Uncle Jesse Knight was eulogized by the Salt Lake Tribune as "beloved pioneer, mining magnate, builder and philanthropist . . . ." David A. Smith, a funeral speaker, charcterized him as a man who had built a testimony in the LDS faith into "a spirit and a life . . . associated with vision and effort (that) transmitted kindly desires into helpful deed and turned dreams into accomplished facts."