Brigham Young - Leader of the Mormon Church

Brigham Young - Leading the Mormons

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In 1872, Young was indicted for being an accessory in the murder of Robert Yates, a killing that occurred in 1857 at the mouth of Echo Canyon. Though a man named Bill Hickman would eventually confess to killing Yates, Young and other military commanders were held liable for the military operation which resulted in the death of Yates. The other leaders arrested were jailed at Fort Douglas, but Young was held under "house arrest." However, a year later the charges were dismissed.

Later, when the government began to collect information to to hold someone liable for the Mountain Meadows Massacre more than a decade earlier, prosecutors did their best to prove Young's complicity, but were unable to.

Fort Douglas, 1866.

Only John D. Lee was arrested in 1874, who would initially testify that President Brigham Young had no knowledge of the event until after it happened. Later; however, he would say: "I have always believed, since that day, that General George A. Smith was then visiting southern Utah to prepare the people for the work of exterminating Captain Fancher's train of emigrants, and I now believe that he was sent for that purpose by the direct command of Brigham Young." Lee was found guilty and executed in 1877 and the question of Young's role was never definitively determined.

Brigham Young died shortly after Lee's trial, on August 29, 1877, and was buried in the Pioneer Mormon Cemetery in Salt Lake City. After his death, federal authorities continued their assault against Mormon theocracy and polygamy practices with a vengeance. In 1882 Congress passed the Edmunds Act, which restated that polygamy was a felony punishable by five years of imprisonment and a $500 fine. However, the church ignored the law, until it the government actively began to prosecute church members. Initially, polygamists became ineligible to hold political office, were disqualified from jury service, and known polygamists were dismissed from public offices. Over the next few years, amendments were made to the law which required plural wives to testify against their husbands, dissolved the Perpetual Emigration Fund (a loan institution that helped members of the church come to Utah from Europe), abolished the Nauvoo Legion, provided a mechanism for acquiring the property of the church, annulled territorial laws which allowed illegitimate children to inherit, and replaced local judges with federally appointed judges. With little choice, the Mormon church finally relinquished the practice of polygamy on October 6, 1890. In 1896 the territory of Utah was admitted into the union as the 45th state. Various former Mormons, who have continued the practice of polygamy to the present day, have been excommunicated by the Mormon church.

Other notable activities during his Brigham Young's lifetime were the establishment of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the founding of the University of Deseret, now the University of Utah, and the founding of the Brigham Young Academy, which later became Brigham Young University.

In addition, his activities as a pioneer businessman were legendary, including transportation enterprises involving a wagon express company, a ferryboat company, and a railroad. In manufacturing, he established lumber and wool mills, an iron operation, and even a distillery. His greatest success as a businessman; however was in real estate. Before his death he was living a lavish lifestyle and was the richest man in Utah, having an estimated personal fortune of about $600,000.

Mormon Temple Grounds, 1912

Brigham Young coordinated the efforts to build these impressive buildings on the Mormon

Temple Grounds, photo by L. Hollard, 1912.

This image available for photographic prints and downloads HERE!

In addition to the Mountain Meadows controversy, Young was also criticized for his beliefs about African-Americans. In 1847 he implemented church policy that denied Mormon priesthood to blacks, a practice that remained in effect until it was finally repealed more than a century later, in 1978. And, unfortunately, the man could not hold his views to himself regarding his prejudice, several statements of which were published in the Morman Journal of Discourses including:

"You see some classes of the human family that are black, uncouth, uncomely, disagreeable and low in their habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind....Cain slew his brother. Can might have been killed, and that would have put a termination to that line of human beings. This was not to be, and the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose and black skin."

"In our first settlement in Missouri, it was said by our enemies that we intended to tamper with the slaves, not that we had any idea of the kind, for such a thing never entered our minds. We knew that the children of Ham were to be the "servant of servants," and no power under heaven could hinder it, so long as the Lord would permit them to welter under the curse and those were known to be our religious views concerning them."

"Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so."

His greatest criticism; however was the practice of polygamy. Though, it was not he who "created" the practice, he was obviously one of its most ardent supporters, marrying 56 wives during his lifetime and fathering 57 children. At the time of his death, 19 of his wives had predeceased him, he was divorced from 10, survived by 23, and the status of the other four was unknown.

Brigham Young was an ardent supporter of polygamy,

marrying 56 wives during his lifetime and fathering 57 children. This photo shows less than half of his wives.

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