Brigham Young

The most important single convert ever made to Joseph Smith's religion was a rawboned, somewhat stocky young man named Brigham Young. In 1830 Brigham worked as a carpenter and painter in the frontier community of Mendon, Monroe County, New York. He was twenty-nine and he had not yet heard of the Mormons. In appearance he was less prepossessing than Joseph Smith. His hands bore the calluses of the common workman. His shoulders were broad and muscled, but his legs were short and his body long. His auburn hair, which he wore in the Western style, was parted loosely on the right and hung over his ears. His pale blue, almost gray eyes were his most impressive feature.

Seven years earlier Brigham Young had married Miriam Works, a frail girl who had since become an invalid. She had borne him two children, named Elizabeth and Vilate. Brigham, in 1830, was a Methodist and a Mason. He had lived in Mendon only a year, having come there to join his father and members of his family, who had moved several years earlier from Aurelia in Cayuga County. In the year Brigham Young had been at Mendon he had earned the reputation for being a conscientious worker and a good fellow. His dry, somewhat sly humor had won him friends, but he had not made them easily; and-except for one, Heber C. Kimball, a neighbor-he felt nearer to his father, his stepmother, and his brothers and sisters than he did to most of the townspeople.

His father's life had not been a settled one. John Young, like the father of Joseph Smith, had begun life as a farmer and had moved from one farm to another in an attempt to make a living for his family. He had begun in Hopkinton, Massachusetts. Failing as a farmer there, he moved to Vermont, where his ninth child, Brigham, was born at Whitingham, June 1, 1801. Two years later he moved again, this time to Sherburne, New York, about a hundred miles west of Albany. In 1815 Nabby Young, Brigham's mother, died, and again the family moved westward, first into Cayuga County (where Brigham married), then on to Mendon, near Rochester.

Brigham's wife, Miriam, had tuberculosis, and her illness made life difficult for him. By the time they arrived in Mendon, she could not move from bed by herself. Each morning Brigham Young would dress and feed the two little girls, then carry his wife to a rocking chair before the fire. After serving her breakfast, he would leave for work, promising to look in during the day. Miriam, it must have seemed to him, was too young to die, yet she was too frail to keep pace with his restless energy. Solemnly, but without hope, he prayed for her recovery.

Brigham's father was among those most affected by the revivalism of the frontier and reared his children with strictness and piety. All the Young family joined the Methodists, and three of Brigham's brothers became lay preachers. Brigham Young himself, although he joined the church at his family's urging, seems to have remained always somewhat critical of it. He did not join until he was twenty-one, and even after the arrival of his two daughters he remained unconvinced of the need for so extreme a piety as he had been forced to show.

At that time Brigham Young concluded that "the mantle of tradition" was over him to such an extent that he could scarcely contemplate the problem of religion at all. His friend Heber Kimball, a likable and witty young man, was a Baptist. Brigham's elder brother Joseph, whom he greatly admired, was a reformed Methodist. Each had, as Brigham Young put it, "got a mantle for himself," but which was the right mantle? The two sects differed in many respects, both in their forms and in their beliefs, and he asked himself, if the one was true, could the other be also? He also asked himself, "What is Christianity?" Was it the forms and observations of which the rival preachers made so much? Was it the teaching of Scripture? If so, which Scripture? The sects offered conflicting interpretations of identical texts.