Silent as the metal from which it was formed, Salt Lake's familiar landmark statue of Brigham Young stared down Main Street last week to watch over the downtown celebration of 100 years of statehood.
Although he didn't live to see Utah officially welcomed into the union of states, no one could have had more interest in its evolution than Brigham Young. No one left a greater imprint on the course of Beehive State history or had as much influence on its founding institutions and philosophy.The infant town of Great Salt Lake City was still groping for a toehold in the desert in the late 1840s when Samuel Brannan tried to convince President Young that California was a better alternative as a home for Latter-day Saints. Having seen the coast state and its gold, Brannan thought it came closer to his idea of a Zion than the barren reaches of the Great Salt Lake Valley.
"No sir," the feisty pioneer leader responded. "I am going to stop right here. I am going to build a city here. I am going to build a temple here, and I am going to build a country here." And for three decades, President Young devoted his life to the creation of a society unique in the country.
His success as a colonizer was unparalleled in American history. Recognized by many as a "modern-day Moses," he guided the systematic settling of more than a hundred Great Basin communities. Many survive today and are part of Utah's 100-year story. Others served an immediate purpose or failed in that purpose and left only a temporary mark on Utah history.
Non-LDS historian Herbert E. Bolton described President Young as "a devout believer, but more especially, he was a lion-hearted man of iron will, an organizer and the founder of a commonwealth." His single-minded service to the LDS cause, in fact, won Brigham the sobriquet "Lion of the Lord."
President Young's early life seems to have fitted him for the challenge of resettling tens of thousands of faithful Mormon pioneers in a wilderness far from the then-existing United States.
He was born June 1, 1801, in Whittingham, Windham County, Vt., to an austere and God-fearing family. As a young man he moved to New York.
His interest in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was stirred when he read a newspaper article about church founder Joseph Smith and "his Indian Bible." His brother, Phineas, had received one of the first copies of the Book of Mormon from early LDS missionaries and shared it with Brig-ham.
Compulsiveness was not part of Brigham's nature. "I weighed the matter for a year and a half. I looked at it on all sides. I reasoned on it month after month until I came to a certain knowledge of its truth," he later said.
Once fully converted to the church, President Young took on its causes with characteristic fervor. In September 1832, five months after his baptism, he met Joseph Smith in Kirtland, Ohio. He came upon the church founder and several of his brothers chopping and hauling wood.
"Here my joy was full at the privilege of shaking the hand of the Prophet of God," he said of the experience. The attraction was mutual as Joseph, later to be martyred for his beliefs, predicted that Brigham Young would eventually preside over the fledgling church.
President Young's mettle was tested through years of missionary work, including several years in England. He once set out ailing himself and leaving a sick wife with a 3-week-old infant as well as other children. The family had been impoverished by the depredations of anti-church mobs that drove church members from state to state in the Midwest.
President Young was ordained to the Quorum of the Twelve on Feb. 14, 1835, and set apart as president of the church Dec. 27, 1847, after serving as de facto president for several years following Joseph Smith's death.
The martyrdom of Joseph and his brother, Hyrum, in June 1844 threw the struggling young church into confusion, and it was largely President Young's unwavering testimony and unswerving leadership that preserved the organization.
Before Joseph's death, church leaders had discussed the advisability of moving the Saints to some Western location. It fell upon Brigham to fulfill the mandate.
After a miserable year vacating Nauvoo and slogging across Iowa Territory, a vanguard party of pioneers set out for the Rocky Mountains in April 1847. As their leader, President Young could only say of their precise destination that he would "know it when I see it."
In the original party were 143 men, three women, including one of Brigham's plural wives, Clara, and two children. Brigham spent his 46th birthday, June 1, 1847, at Fort Laramie in Wyoming Territory, having come 5341/4 miles from Winter Quarters, Neb., according to William Clayton's precise measurements. The party arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in late July 1847, prepared to settle in after Brigham's July 24 declaration that "This is the right place. Drive on."
Despite his undisputed leadership of the LDS migration, he gave the credit to another source. "I do not wish men to understand that I had anything to do with our being moved here; that was the providence of the Almighty. It was the power of God that wrought out salvation for this people. I never could have devised such a plan."
According to Wilford Woodruff, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve and a member of the original party, Brigham Young was inspired to come to Salt Lake Valley and "inspired to work after he got here."
No armchair quarterback, Brigham rolled up his sleeves and joined in the backbreaking physical labor of founding a refuge for Saints scattered across the prairie and arriving in large numbers from European countries. Over the next 30 years, he:
- Brought hundreds and then thousands of Latter-day Saint emigrants to Utah Territory, directed settlement of more than 100 towns, helped design vital irrigation systems and the necessary infrastructure to support them and fought for statehood even while trying to retain a theocratic self-rule.
- Promoted many business endeavors, including banking, manufacturing and commerce to make the pioneers as self-sufficient as possible. Along the way, he and other pioneer leaders became wealthy.
- Encouraged arts, literature, education and theater in pioneer settlements. He was an avid supporter of the Salt Lake Theater and founded both the University of Deseret (later the University of Utah) and Brigham Young University.
- Served eight years as territorial governor and provided leadership through a "war" with the United States, stating emphatically, "with us it is the kingdom of God or nothing, and we will maintain it or die in the trying - though we shall not die in the trying. . . . but we shall live in the trying."
- Promoted the construction of the transcontinental railroad and telegraph, even though their coming to Utah further diluted his chances of maintaining Mormon exclusivity in the territory.
President Young's leadership was personal and firmly founded on his religious beliefs. To those who sometimes resented what they felt to be heavy-handed meddling in their private lives, his response was, "Take the people and I am proud of them; but there is a feeling with them that they must not be counseled in their temporal matters. I call this a sectarian notion, for we will find yet that God is a dictator in everything."
Hundreds of anecdotes, however, attest to his love and charity toward those who followed him. Heber J. Grant, later a president of the church, recalled hitching a "slide" behind President Young's sleigh on one occasion when he was a small boy. The vehicle got going so fast he was afraid to let go, and he clung to the sleigh clear to "the Cottonwood."
When he discovered the young hitchhiker, President Young told his driver, Isaac Wilson, "The little boy is nearly frozen. Put him under the buffalo robe and get him warm." The meeting led to a lifelong friendship between the boy, who had lost his father early in life, and the church leader.
The tragedy of Saints who came to Utah in the mid-1850s with handcart companies touched President Young deeply. When he learned some companies were nearing Salt Lake Valley after horrendous trials, he told a conference congregation that they were to open their homes to the new arrivals. "I do not want to see them put into homes by themselves. I want to have them distributed in the city among families that have good comfortable homes. . . . To speak upon these things is a part of my religion, for it pertains to taking care of the Saints." He told those already established that in this instance, the need for pudding, milk, baked potatoes and salt was greater than for prayers.
His practical approach was helpful in addressing the disappointments of some converts who had struggled toward an ideal "Zion" only to find the reality of a frontier Zion in every respect.
In the late 1850s, noted newsman Horace Greeley described Brigham Young: "He was very plainly dressed in thin summer clothing and with no air of sanctimony or fanaticism. In appearance he is a portly, frank, good natured, rather thick-set man of 55 (Brigham was really 58 at the time) seeming to enjoy life and to be in no particular hurry to get to heaven."
A New York reporter sent to Utah to look at the Mormons attended a July 24 picnic party at Brighton hosted by the pioneer leader. At the end of a busy day, he wrote, he saw a lone man wandering through the campground cleaning up the debris of the celebration and seeing that all the fires were out. The man was Brigham Young.
In August 1877, he became ill and over a period of several days declined until his death on the 29th.