The language of contemporary Gentiles, in the main, is bitterly hostile. It is also true that much Gentile testimony has been heavily biased-and of course that the Mormons were abominably treated by adjacent mobs in Illinois and Missouri. Arrington and Bushman are correct in claiming that Latter-Day Saints have in fact added more than the non-Mormon historians to the body of relevant knowledge. Still, there are problems in writing Mormon history for a Gentile culture, no matter how scrupulously the task is undertaken. It all sounds fair, square, and aboveboard. He is quite explicit about such touchy subjects as the paramilitary Danite bands, and the Mountain Meadows massacre of 1857. He provides appendixes listing Young’s 25 wives (27 by another count) and 57 children. Arrington describes the criticisms of Young within the church by dissidents such as Sidney Rigdon, “King” James Strang, and Joseph Smith’s son Joseph III. He shows no embarrassment, for example, in discussing the treasure hunting or “money-digging” craze among the Smiths and their neighbors in the “Burned-Over District” of western New York. Bushman’s Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism, which is dedicated to Arrington, has fully absorbed the sociocultural investigations of non-Mormon historians. Bushman, who neither proselytize nor fudge. On the face of it, nothing would appear more commendably mainstream than the recent work of Mormon historians such as Arrington, as well as Jan Shipps and Richard L. Another observer called him a Tartuffe, sanctimoniously sly.īrigham Young, then, is a person of exceptional interest, well worth a biography that manages to avoid the extremes of hero-worship and debunking. Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune, who interviewed Young in 1859, found him impressively astute and approachable, if ungrammatical. He was by turns artful and loutish, peremptory and considerate. Yet his oratory, unrehearsed, jocose, and loose in form, enthralled audiences. He liked to thrust with a bowie knife in order to emphasize a point.

On the platform Young could be brutally direct in rebuking subordinates. To judge from early documents (before there were secretaries to correct spelling and style), his sense of language was rudimentary. Yet he could be cannily calculating his revelations appealed to “natural principles” of a distinctly pragmatic cast. Young was prepared to abandon the thriving settlements of Utah, in defiance of federal authority, as he had almost blithely turned his back on the Mormon metropolis at Nauvoo, Illinois. He is also, as Arrington notes, a bundle of apparent contradictions. Brigham Young is a figure on the giant scale, Napoleonic in versatility and organizing skill. The result is fascinating, both for what it says and for what it does not say.

Brigham Young by Leonard J. Arrington