Scholar DEBUNKS the Biggest Lies About Brigham Young

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Brigham Young has a notorious reputation for being a womanizing polygamist, for being a government tyrant, for being cruel and mean, and in some of the more sinister cases, maybe even being a murderer. So we are going to be debunking the top misconceptions Latter Day Saints and others have about Brigham Young. So to do that, we've brought on guest Daniel C. Peterson. Thank you for being on the show today. [00:00:20] Speaker B: Oh, thank you for having me. [00:00:21] Speaker A: So, Dan, can you give a little bit of a background for who you are, what you do, and what you're working on right now? [00:00:25] Speaker B: Yeah, I come out of a little different background than, you know, 19th century Utah history. That's not my. Not my field, but I've always had a strong interest in Latter Day Saint history. And so my training actually is in classics, classical philosophy and Islamic philosophy. I'm a Middle Eastern specialist, so an Islamicist, if you will. But I've always seen myself as really not just an Islamicist. Some people have been shocked by this, but a historian of religions. And so that allows me to do the Mormon thing as well as the Muslim thing. [00:00:57] Speaker C: I mean, we have so much in common, like polygamy. Right. [00:01:00] Speaker B: It was a cottage industry in the 19th century to comp Mormonism to the Islam of America. Brigham Young and his heroine, not just [00:01:08] Speaker D: in the 19th century. Even today, some of our religious, [00:01:13] Speaker B: our [00:01:13] Speaker D: Christian critics today will still make that claim. [00:01:17] Speaker B: And not only there. I mean, it's kind of died out in serious writing. But Har Gibb, one of the greatest Islamicists of the 20th century, wrote a book called Mohammedanism, which is really funny. I think it was published after his death, because part of the book is arguing that you should never call them Mohammedans, you shouldn't call it Mohammedanism. But at one point he says, you know, Muhammad has been represented in a lot of different ways, including as a crypto Mormon. And. Wow, that's really funny. Yeah. So, you know, to me, it's kind of natural segue, if you will, from, you know, doing history of Islam to doing the history of another revealed religious movement, which is actually quite interesting. And, you know, there were serious Orientalists in the early part of the 20th century who saw the, you know, the connections between them. Edvard Meyer, for example, the great German historian of religion, came and wrote an entire book, not a very good one. I don't think about Mormonism, but it's because he saw a resemblance. He said, this is a chance to study the birth of a new revealed religion. He believed in no revelation at all. But a new revealed religion in a time when we have the sources and the nearness to be able to really evaluate it and see how other such religions must have evolved. But the proximate reason why I'm involved in this is that we've been working for about a year, a little more than a year, on a series of miniature documentaries, about 12 to 15 minutes in length each, probably going to be about 75 of them. We started off with the idea of 52. And then we keep getting new things done well, new interviews that are so good. And I think we can't just do one with that. We've got to split it. And then we're working really well with the church historical department and they've been pushing historians toward us. Interview them. Interview them. What about this topic? And so we've decided, okay, let's just bite the bullet and go ahead and do more. But they're going up online at no charge. We have no way, no intention of trying to monetize this. They go up on a channel, YouTube channel, becoming brigham.com and we've got three up so far. And it's going to go into the middle of next year, I would think. No, that's. [00:03:29] Speaker D: So this is going to be 75 episodes on Brigham Young. [00:03:33] Speaker B: Yes. Now, we started off, and some people have misunderstood this, we started off with one on who killed Joseph Smith, because there's a, to me, nutcake theory out there, you know, to give it the technical term that, that says it was Brigham Young using as his instruments John Taylor and Willard Richards. The thing is nuts. I mean, and, and so some people say alert. [00:03:56] Speaker C: We'll talk about that later. [00:03:57] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So you're wondering how I feel about it. [00:03:59] Speaker C: Yes, exactly. [00:04:00] Speaker B: So, but, but we're not going to spend the whole thing on that. That's just a way of getting things going. This is one of the more extreme theories out there. [00:04:08] Speaker C: Right, yeah. Well, I will just mention too, in addition to becoming Brigham, the RSC is now beginning to publish Brigham Young's journals. They've already released volume one. It's not going to be as comprehensive as the Joseph Smith papers. I think Matt Groh and others who have worked on this, Garrett Dirkmaat have told me, like, Brigham Young's papers would be 60, 70 plus volumes. [00:04:26] Speaker B: Right. [00:04:26] Speaker C: Like, it would be insane. But there will be a good representative sample of his, of his journals and papers and things like that. So now we're like in a Brigham Young renaissance where there's kind of converging interests in. [00:04:37] Speaker B: Yeah, well, so for Example, one of the things we're adding on, something we had not thought of doing. There are apparently a pair of historians up at the history department in Salt Lake. I don't even know who they are. I haven't met them yet. Maybe I have. I just don't know. But they're doing, I think, a two volume collection of Brigham's letters to ordinary saints. And they thought we should do this. They said, would you be interested? It'll show a pastoral side to Brigham Young that a lot of people will be quite surprised by. And I said, that's exactly the kind of thing I want to do, because we're used to the thundering authoritarian in the pulpit, you know, but what about the guy who's writing to ordinary saints who are having issues, trying to help them and giving them counsel and so on? So to me, that's just really valuable stuff. And this part of the goal of the project is to give the real Brigham Young. We're not trying to whitewash him or present him as perfect in every way. He would have rejected that himself. But we are trying to present a whole picture of him where even some of the sources we've been using heretofore Le Jean Carruth has said. You know, I asked her once, what is the worst misrepresentation of Brigham Young? And she said, the Journal of Discourses. I laughed. But she's serious, you know, that. That it subtly presents him as more authoritarian, meaner, more egocentric, more arrogant, less sympathetic than he really was. [00:05:56] Speaker A: So misconceptions about Brigham Young, I think the most common one that I hear is like, well, Joseph Smith. Sure, he had multiple wives. Brigham Young had dozens and dozens. He had this harem living in the beehive house, the lion house. Some of them were quite young. So what is the truth about Brigham Young and his practice of polygamy? [00:06:14] Speaker B: Well, you know, the fact is, Brigham Young does not come across as much of a romantic, really. And in many cases, I mean, you have to put yourself into the 19th century where women did not really have legal status. Not only could they not vote, but they couldn't really manage property very well unless they had a man to do it for them. And so a lot of the women that Brigham married, he married. I won't say a lot, but several of them I can point to cases, maybe a lot. It was to sort of give them status. He would. Well, the famous case is Ann Eliza Webb. [00:06:46] Speaker C: D. I was just going to say [00:06:47] Speaker B: Ann Eliza, the 17th wife or the 27th wife or whatever she claims to Be in any given week. And, you know, she'd been married before. And then the parents came to Brigham and said, could you give our daughter some status? He said, okay, I'll marry her. And then he marries her and he gives her a way far away and basically never visits her. And she talks about him as boy he lusted after. He was constantly eyeing her and all this sort of thing. Well, his behavior after he marries her doesn't seem to suggest that at all. Then she complains that he neglects her. He never visits, you know, gives her a farm. She's got to manage it herself. Well, it's clear to me that he's giving her economic security and legal status. [00:07:27] Speaker A: So she was married before. Was she married? [00:07:30] Speaker B: When she married Brigham Young, she had been divorced. [00:07:32] Speaker A: Okay, got it. [00:07:32] Speaker B: So I got to remember the name Ann Eliza Webb. [00:07:34] Speaker C: That's her name, Denny Dee. [00:07:36] Speaker B: And then that marriage ended. Then young. Then she leaves Brigham Young, marries again and abandons that. [00:07:41] Speaker C: Yes. Yeah. Hugh Nibley has a fantastic book he wrote back in the 60s, sounding brass. It's sort of vintage Nibbly, where he pokes funny. It is very funny. He pokes holes in her story, these sort of contradictions and over the top depictions that she gives. [00:07:56] Speaker B: And he says, the last we see of her as she's riding off into the sunset, having just taken everything from her son's home and stripped it bare, and she disappears. She's a grifter. [00:08:08] Speaker D: Well, I was about to say she might give Brigham a run for his money as far as number of husbands go. [00:08:15] Speaker B: Right. So, you know, and there are other cases like this of women that he married that were quite elderly by the standards of the frontier and so on, where to me it's often a case, not always. I won't say that. I won't say there weren't domestic. There wasn't domestic happiness and romance or whatever there was. There isn't much romance in the 19th century by our standards. Sure. You know, people refer to, read Jane Austen, Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Bennet and this sort of thing, it's quite formal, but there are a lot of cases where it's pretty clear that he's trying to help out. And in an age where women didn't really have much legal status, that's one of the ways of doing it. They weren't just on their own on the frontier without a way of making a living. [00:08:59] Speaker A: Right. [00:08:59] Speaker C: Yeah. The depiction of Brigham Young I see in historical anti Mormon literature from the 19th century, you usually get one of two, I think, sort of equally Absurd depictions of how plural marriage works in Utah and with Brigham Young. On the one hand, you have the depiction of Brigham Young as, like, the Turkish sultan with his sensual harem, his seraglio of these beautiful wives. Like, you get that kind of depiction, which is, by the way, super popular and, let's be frank, very racist. Super racist. And how plural marriage is depicted in the 19th century, others compare it with, like, African polygamy and things like that. So you got that one extreme, but then you also have the extreme you get from the accounts. And there's some truth to this, but I think it's overblown of polygamy is nothing but just cold and sterile and indifferent and abusive. And there was never any romance, never any warmth, never any love. It was purely economical and transactional. Right. You know, where does Brigham, as far as we can tell, his experience with plural marriage? [00:09:57] Speaker B: Somewhere in between those. I mean, I'll give you a couple of 19th century examples of those extremes. I mean, you look again at Jane Austen. Talk about transactional. You know, well, how much does he make per year? Yeah, well, he gets £100 a year. Well, that's not good enough. I need £500 a year. And, you know, women have to marry because if they're alone, then they've got nothing. Property can't be. That's the whole problem in Pride and Prejudice, right, Is the property can't go to the daughters. Mr. Bennet has only daughters, and so he has to find a man, and hopefully one of them will marry one of his daughters. It doesn't happen. Mr. Collins, my favorite character in the BBC version, is just not up to that. But it was very economic, very financially driven in the 19th century because of the lack of legal status of women. It's hard for us to understand that where women can hold any position, they can be attorneys, let alone be represented in the courts. But on the other hand, here's a visitor who actually knew Middle Eastern, plural or polygamy. Richard Britain, who wrote Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Mecca in Al Medina, Right. Who'd been there masquerading as a Muslim, [00:11:11] Speaker C: dresses up and the whole guard puts [00:11:13] Speaker D: on the whole show was also racist, by the way. [00:11:16] Speaker B: Yes. And he also. He had an actual fascination with erotica. I mean, his wife burned a lot of his papers before he died. She was a devout Christian. He was not. And so a lot of what he wrote is gone, but some of his translations of really questionable stuff survive. So he comes to visit Utah. He makes a pilgrimage to the Great Basin to visit the Great Seraglio of Brigham Young. He was disappointed it wasn't nearly as sensuous and so on as he'd hoped to. It was downright Victorian. So it just wasn't what he was hoping for. And I think that needs to be taken into account. Here's somebody who actually knew Middle Eastern polygamy and knew the Latter day Saints at firsthand. He visited and spent time. He was a very acute observer, very bright, and he didn't see any resemblance at all between Latter Day Saint practice of polygamy and the kind that he'd seen in harems in Arabia. [00:12:15] Speaker A: So one other misconception people have is that Brigham Young is this iron fisted, strict, stern, grumpy prophet and government tyrant or autocrat who just has complete control over this little theocracy in Utah. [00:12:31] Speaker C: He's the furor of the great baseline. I see this depiction. Oh yeah, I call him cowboy Hitler. Image of Brigham Young. [00:12:37] Speaker D: Right? [00:12:38] Speaker C: Like, yeah, it gets amped up here. So what can you say about that? [00:12:41] Speaker B: Well, first of all, I don't think he's as grim and humorless as many people think him to be. I love. I wish James Arrington were still doing his, what is it? Here's brother Brigham, one man show. There's some great scenes in it. And he really gets the sense of humor that Brigham had. And it helped that James's father was Leonard Arrington, who, you know, wrote the biography of Brigham Young. But yeah, there's one scene that I just love where a woman comes to Brigham and says, you know, my husband, she doesn't use the term because it's one we use now. But my husband is being verbally abusive to me. He's, well, like what? She says, well, the other day he told me to go to hell. What should I do? Brigham pauses and says, well, don't go. And then there's this. And I just read an account of this the other day. I told the story. And then later that evening, I found an account from Mark Twain where he's visiting Salt Lake City with his brothers, going out to be the secretary to the governor of Nevada territory. And they have a meeting with Brigham Young, Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens. Very young at that point, but he's Samuel Clemens. So he's trying to needle Brigham and [00:13:43] Speaker C: very witty, very incisive. [00:13:46] Speaker B: And Brigham ignores him the whole time. And. And then at the end when they're standing up and they're taking their leave, Brigham walks over and he pats Mark Twain on the head, says, cute child you have. Oh, my God. Boy or a girl? And Twain says the Mormon prophet had bested me. So. But, you know, I think sometimes that's so savage. What we miss is, is that, well, we get it in black and white. I'd like to see the twinkle in the eye. [00:14:15] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:14:16] Speaker B: I'd like to hear the tone of voice. I wish we could. We don't get it very often, but it's pretty clear that he had a sense of humor. And there were some people who didn't like him. I'm not going to minimize that. But there were a lot of people who loved him. They called him Brother Brigham. And he was approachable and he was kindly and he was blunt spoken. And he himself would tell you that his tongue was the most unruly member, you know, and he says, if you see me standing off by myself, it's me trying to get control of myself. But. But the idea that he was an autocrat that. Well, Le Jean Carruth, for us, you know, has. Has said she spent decades working on his writing and things that people have never seen before that were only in 19th century. Pitman. [00:14:56] Speaker C: These are these shorthand statements that were just because no one read the shorthand. So now Le Jean is going through and cataloging and transcribing them and. [00:15:03] Speaker B: Yeah, and she says, you see a kinder man, a gentler man. She says, I've come to love him. You know, other people know a lot about Brigham Young. I know Brigham Young because I've spent years with his words. And there's a kindly personality there and a twinkle quite often. But the idea, too, that everything in Utah happened with his, you know, direct supervision. Direct supervision. Come on. The communications in Utah weren't that good. [00:15:28] Speaker D: It was a big territory. It was a big territory for horseback being your fastest means of travel. [00:15:35] Speaker B: The classic case is when he sends orders down to Cedar City to leave the Fancher train alone. Don't. Don't do anything to them. And it gets there too late, even though the man on horseback goes as fast as he possibly can. Can't get there in time. But I'll give you a couple of examples of where Brigham's iron will, you know, the tyrant of the territory, was not enforced. And these are stories that come down to me through family legend in St. George and so on. My mother grew up there, and I have relatives there. And there is the story, for example, of the. The tower on the St. George Temple. If you've seen pictures of the original St. George Temple, the tower is very squat. And Brigham hated it. He thought it didn't look right. It Was out of proportion. It was wrong. It should be changed. Well, he didn't get his wish. And then he died shortly after the dedication of the St. George Temple. And that tower was hit by lightning. And when they put the tower up now it was taller. It was the way Brigham wanted. And so the joke in St. George was always, well, he's arrived. But the other thing is, and I can't quite remember who was on what side, but Myles Romney and Brigham Young disagreed about the interior of the St. George Tabernacle. Brigham wanted the pulpit lower. Myles Romney wanted the stairs going up higher. They couldn't agree. And so finally you go up and I've spoken in the St. George tabernacle. You go up the stairs, then you have to come down to the pulpit. It was a compromise, but Brigham Young, the tyrant, the autocrat, did not get his wish there. And this is on a church owned building. [00:17:04] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:17:05] Speaker C: I would point out too, on kind of more serious matters like territorial legislature and things like that, there's great new research on the early years of the territorial legislature and the debates. And at no point does Brigham Young just unilaterally step in as the dictator of Utah and say, this is how we're gonna do it. They go through the democratic process as an elected legislature to enact laws of the territory. They have arguments, of course, Brigham gives his opinion, and it carries a lot of weight, certainly. [00:17:32] Speaker B: Right. [00:17:32] Speaker C: But it's not this sense of the Fuhrer steps up to the Reichstag and just declares, what's going to happen here? [00:17:38] Speaker B: The best study we have now is this abominable slavery. [00:17:42] Speaker C: Exactly the one I. Paul Reeve. [00:17:44] Speaker B: Paul Reeve and Christopher Riche Carruth. And they've gone through documents from the territorial legislative debates, and it's pretty clear there were serious debates. Orson Pratt opposed the bill that eventually passed. Other people wanted stronger rules legislating slavery. Brigham opposed that. And he kind of got the middling, the middle ground that he wanted. But it wasn't by simply issuing a fiat. [00:18:08] Speaker D: It wasn't sheer force of will. [00:18:10] Speaker B: Yeah, no. So this idea that I've heard people say, well, the Mountain Meadows massacre must have been ordered by Brigham Young because nothing in the territory would have happened without his decree. Oh, it did. And the massacre did too. He was horrified by it. And you know, I've often said when people think Brigham Young ordered it. Look, let's assume for a moment that Brigham Young really is evil. Nobody's ever accused Brigham Young of being stupid. And the Mountain Met his massacre was stupid. It came at the worst possible Time. It was a disaster and has been ever since. Brigham would not have authorized that. [00:18:45] Speaker A: Interesting. So, speaking of murder, another accusation people have made about Brigham Young is that he is a murderer, that he's first of all ordered the Mountain Meadows Massacre, which you've addressed. But the other one being that he orchestrated the murder of Joseph Smith. [00:18:59] Speaker B: Yeah. Now, that one I have a very hard time taking. [00:19:02] Speaker C: You called it what a nutcake theory earlier. I believe that's a technical term, technical term of art. [00:19:08] Speaker B: But when I heard it at first, I thought, you can't be serious. And they have some evidence, they claim, but a lot of it is ballistic evidence and so on. I'm thinking for a murder that happened in 1844, how much ballistic evidence you have, really. But one of the things that's come out of this Becoming Brigham series that we're working on is, and I knew it before, but it's been illustrated to me multiple times how absolutely loyal and deferential Brigham Young was to Joseph Smith. And you see it time and time again in our movie Six Days in August, for example, There's a scene where Brigham and some of the apostles go to the Far West Temple site and take their leave for their mission to England from that temple site and lay a cornerstone of the temple. And they do it at the peril of their lives. And there's an extermination order in Missouri out for them. So why did they do it? Well, because a year before, a little over a year before, Joseph had said they were going to start their journey to England from that spot on such and such a date. But surely at this point, when the saints have been thrown out of Missouri, the extermination order has been issued, I think people would pardon them and say, you don't have to do that. [00:20:13] Speaker D: You can just start from wherever you are. [00:20:16] Speaker B: But this is Brigan, and he says, you know, if Joseph Smith said, we're going to take our leave from the Far West Temple site, we will do that. And so you see him do that. And that, I think, is vintage Brigham Young. And in fact, it's kind of funny that apparently before they left, they went by the house of an apostate early in the morning, knocked on the door, just to let him know they were there. [00:20:38] Speaker C: They were still there. [00:20:38] Speaker B: They just laid the cornerstone. Now they're going to England. But, I mean, Missouri is the opposite direction from England. They go out of their way to go to Missouri before heading back to Illinois to go to England. And that's Brigham Young. There's a wonderful Story of Joseph rebuking Brigham once publicly. Well, Brigham had a strong personality. Later was called the lion of the Lord and with reason. And so I think a lot of people were probably on pins and needles wondering, how is he going to react to this? He's kind of been dressed down in front of everybody else. I don't know that he would have responded to anybody else the way he responded to Joseph. But he says, joseph, what would you have me do? Very meekly, because for him, Joseph was the prophet of the 19th century, and he was going to do everything he could. Ron Esplin, in one of the interviews we've done for this series, makes an interesting point to me. He says, you know, if you look at the various claimants for the leadership of the church in 1844 and the years immediately following, every one of them, every group, every individual wanted to jettison some part or all of Joseph's Nauvoo program. Building the temple, especially, and going west. I mean, those kind of mutually contradictory. In a way, let's put a lot of effort into building this building and then abandon it and go west. But that was what Joseph Smith wanted to do. And so brigham and the 12 do that. He says, if you wanted to go with the group that was going to carry out Joseph's teachings, they were the only game in town. Sidney Rigdon wasn't that interested in the temple. Certainly didn't believe in the gathering. A lot of people said, well, the gathering always gets us into trouble. Let's just abandon it. And Brigham said, no, we gather to build temples, to issue ordinances. I think the idea that Brigham Young would ever raise his hand against Joseph Smith is just inconceivable. The more you get to know the man, and it's instructive, I think, that his dying words are Joseph, Joseph, Joseph. According to some accounts, I wouldn't be surprised if Joseph came to get him. Interestingly enough, by the way, Emma Smith's [00:22:34] Speaker C: dying words were, yeah, same thing. [00:22:35] Speaker B: Yeah, Joseph. [00:22:36] Speaker C: So in other words, it sounds like Brigham Young, based on your description here. And I think it's all true. He doesn't fit the profile of somebody who is secretly scheming behind Joseph's back to undermine him. The phrase I think the Brigham uses all the time is Joseph's measures that he wants to fulfill. Specifically in this context, the temple and plural marriage. Right. Like, these are the things that he is emphatic that the quorum of the 12 need to perpetuate these two things that Joseph is introducing. Inauvoo. So he doesn't seem to fit the profile of someone who's scheming in the shadows. Right. Because the conspiracy goes, he, as president of the quorum of the 12, is just sort of itching to take control of the church so he can introduce these evil, nefarious things like polygamy and blood oaths in the temple and things like that. Right. And so he has to get Joseph out of the way. You're saying here that he absolutely does not fit that profile from what we know about. [00:23:24] Speaker B: Not at all. Not at all. Now, I don't want to say he's blindly obedient. It's interesting that at one point in his journal, he says he inquired of the Lord, should we finish the temple? Things have changed. Should we finish the temple? And the answer was, yes, we should finish the temple. That's all he writes. But some people say, well, he never claimed revelation. Oh, he does. He's just very modest about the way he got some sort of communication that told him, yeah, yep, we finished the temple. But he's not a man who opposed Joseph. He always favored what Joseph wanted. And you see that time and time and time again in his life. And he talks about Joseph in reverential terms. He describes himself as an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, but he's also an apostle of Joseph Smith. And I feel like shouting hallelujah all the time. When I thought I got to know the prophet of the 19th century. He said, when he was young, I thought I would have crawled on my hands and knees to meet a man who actually spoke with God and could speak for God. And then he says, in Joseph Smith, he did. And so it takes him a while to join the church. It takes a couple of years, but once he. Once he commits, he's all in. Yeah. So. [00:24:32] Speaker C: Well, there's other reasons why the conspiracy theory is dumb. Not the least being that the people that did murder him were, like, publicly claiming it afterwards. Thomas C. Sharpe. And these guys were not hiding their involvement at all. They were proud of it. But, yeah, that's. We don't need to get into that. But that's a little monkey wrench in that theory as well. Right? [00:24:49] Speaker B: You know, I've always thought, okay, so how do you envision this happening? The mob comes to kill Joseph and [00:24:54] Speaker C: Hiram, he's already there. [00:24:55] Speaker B: And there are, you know, Willard and John Taylor with smoking guns, smirks on their faces, and you don't bring that up in your trial. Yeah, they were already. [00:25:03] Speaker C: When you're on trial for murder, you don't bring up the fact that these guys already did it, they already showed up. [00:25:08] Speaker B: No, it's a crazy theory. [00:25:11] Speaker A: It's a great point. [00:25:12] Speaker C: Well, it's good to debunk these myths about Brigham Young. I feel like even the more absurd or outlandish ones, just because if you don't, then they kind of take a life of their own. [00:25:19] Speaker B: They do. [00:25:19] Speaker C: And it turns into a meme. Like Brigham Young, the mean, grouchy prophet, has turned into kind of a meme, even among Latter Day Saints, you know, again, oh, sure, Brigham, you know, he was the mean, nasty Brigham. But okay, we'll tolerate it. But no, like anybody else, he was a multidimensional person. Certainly he had sternness. You can't blame the guy for what he's thrown into, what he has to do. But there's more to him. He's a more well rounded person. [00:25:42] Speaker D: You mentioned him having a strong personality, and I think that is something that stands out to a lot of people. But I also think the circumstances in which he was given the reins of the church and what he had to do. Those two projects you talked about, finishing the temple and moving west, like, well, [00:26:01] Speaker B: people are shooting at you. Literally. Yeah. [00:26:03] Speaker C: Trying to arrest you. He has to dress up Bogus Briga. [00:26:05] Speaker A: And then. [00:26:06] Speaker D: And then coming out here, which, you know, I, as a. As someone who grew up in Utah, after it's already built up. [00:26:14] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:26:14] Speaker D: I don't know that we always appreciate what they actually walked out to, like, go. You used to be able to just go out to like five Mile Pass and be able to see what it really was. But now even that's all getting built up. Go out past Eagle Mountain. Right. You gotta understand, that was the whole valley. [00:26:30] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:26:30] Speaker D: That was everything out here. And so building a people out here, like, it took a strong personality. [00:26:36] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:26:36] Speaker C: Right. [00:26:37] Speaker B: And, you know, I'm sure there were a lot of people who came and said, this is it. Yeah, really serious. [00:26:41] Speaker C: Let's go to California, guys. Let's go to San Diego. [00:26:44] Speaker D: This is the place. But this is the place. [00:26:46] Speaker C: Right. [00:26:47] Speaker B: And you've got people who are coming from England. Oh, yeah. Green, beautiful England arrive out here. This is the promised land. St. George. [00:26:56] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:26:58] Speaker C: It is interesting to see in some of Brigham Young's critics both during his lifetime and immediately afterwards. Obviously, you have the guys who just think he's this despicable scoundrel. But you do get a number of his critics who have this begrudging respect for him for what he was able to do to transform the territory into a sort of a thriving oasis in the desert. Right. I think that speaks a lot to Brigham Young's character, that even those who are critical of him could recognize his strengths and what he was able to do. [00:27:24] Speaker B: And I've wondered, I don't know, I don't know if Joseph could have done it. One of the few criticisms you get from Brigham of Joseph is that Joseph couldn't run a store, he couldn't run a bank. Yeah, he couldn't run a bank. He just wasn't a good businessman and it wasn't his calling. But Brigham could. Brigham knew how to do it. And so I'm thinking, yeah. Was he the man that the Lord needed at this time? I think he was, but some people say, yeah, he was because he was mean and nasty and autocratic. No, that's not it. People could always leave if they didn't want to be with him. And some people did, but a lot of people revered him as Brother Brigham. [00:27:58] Speaker C: That's the other fun trope of anti Mormon literature from the 19th century is that if life in Utah, if you're living in Utah, you were just constantly in a state of, like, mortal danger for your life, that at any minute, if you utter a single word of defiance to Brigham Young, the Danites will come and slit your throats. Right. This trope, and there's examples people have pointed to in anti Mormon literature, so. And so was blood atoned by Brigham Young and you later find him ten years later in California. [00:28:22] Speaker B: Right. [00:28:23] Speaker C: Or something like that. Right. Like, come on. Yeah. This image of stern, autocratic Brigham Young just. [00:28:27] Speaker B: There's a funny passage from Ann Eliza Webb D. Young Denning, you know, we've already mentioned where. And Nibley has a lot of fun with this, where she escapes from the tyranny of Brigham Young and she flees across the border into Wyoming. And when she gets across the border, she said, I could almost in my mind hear the hooves of the Danites horses coming after him. But she crosses the border and gets down out of her carriage and kisses the ground that she's made it safely and Nibal, you think the Danites cared about the Wyoming border? She's out in the middle of nowhere, you know, she's three feet across the Wyoming border. They say, dang, our extra legal killings can't be done. You know, another territory. And so they just are forced to stand there and go, dang. It's ludicrous. And it's instructive that she only hears the Danites hoofbeats in her mind. [00:29:17] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:29:18] Speaker B: They never actually hears any Danites coming [00:29:20] Speaker C: After another plug for interpreter is Craig Foster's article on violence in Utah. Right. This one comes up up Mountain Meadows. We'll do a whole episode sometime on Mountain Meadows. But there's other examples of both judicial and extrajudicial killings in Utah. Frontier violence. Right. Again, the misunderstanding or the myth that people have is that, like, Utah is like Tombstone, Arizona. It's like the Wild west and pistols at dawn type of thing. Yes. Frontier life is rough, and there is extrajudicial killing that makes us squeamish in this frontier life. But I think Craig Foster's study shows that under Brigham Young, it's no more violent than anywhere else in New Mexico, in California and these other places. [00:29:57] Speaker D: I think I actually, when I took a Utah history class, I actually, I was amazed to see how Wild west it really was. Like, I was like, whoa, the Wild west, it's real. It really happened. Obviously, there is some exaggeration, but to your point is it wasn't a uniquely Utah thing. Right. Like, this is just life on the frontier was hard and rough, and there was. And enforcing justice and law was difficult because communication lines weren't that strong. You had, like, one sheriff in town who often was like, his appointment wasn't. Like, there was no criteria. Right. That they went through to establish who a sheriff was. He was usually just barely better than the outlaws in the first place. Right. He was a little morally gray often. It just was hard. Right. And. And. And Utah had its share, but it wasn't Brigham Young's fault. [00:30:56] Speaker B: You don't just dial 911 and police there for five minutes. Yeah. [00:31:01] Speaker A: Through your years of study and getting to know Brigham better through producing films about him. Now, why should Latter Day Saints have faith in Brigham Young as a prophet? [00:31:09] Speaker B: Well, because I think clearly he was essential for the church's survival. He made sure. I talked with somebody at a. A faithful gathering of Latter Day Saints several years ago, a young man who said, gee, I like the apologetics that you guys do. But he says, I have one real difficulty. That is, I think that Sidney Rigdon was the Lord's choice and the Brigham Young usurped the role. But, yeah, the Lord can work through people like that. So that kind of idea. But I wanted to say to him, look, do you realize, had Sidney Rigdon come to power in the church, first of all, he apparently did not have the priesthood keys. He wasn't really committed to temple ordinances. He wasn't committed to the idea of the gathering. What kind of a church would you have if Sidney Rigdon had taken over. It would be a form of kind of odd Protestantism with an extra book. And I don't know that we'd have ceilings or temples or eternal families or anything like that. And so we should be grateful to Brigham young because the 12 preserved Joseph Smith's teachings and tried as best they could to put them into effect in a new territory under extremely adverse conditions. But also he was. Well, I just got a note from a friend of mine who's. I'm going to try to persuade him to write this up. I don't know if you can find the paper. Years ago, he did a paper for John Sorensen. He said when he was a research assistant, he went on and got a PhD in Political Philosophy at Harvard. So this guy's got capacities. And he said, I was supposed to do it on the thinking of Brigham Young in the Journal of Discourses. He said, I came away thinking, this guy is incredibly bright. And he said, I need to find that paper. I see that it's relevant now. Well, I think that a lot of what we've been given from Brigham Young is some of his best legacy. I mean, some of the things he had to say, there's some weird doctrines and people cherry pick those, you know, weird passages or passages that offend us. But a lot of what he was teaching was mainstream Latter Day Saint doctrine. And in really memorable ways expressing it, he kept the church on course. Where would it have gone if it fell into the. Into the clutches of James Jesse Strang? Or for that matter, we've had more scripture. [00:33:19] Speaker C: We've had the book of the law [00:33:20] Speaker B: of the Lord, right, Dan? That's right. And those. Well, I won't even go for that. But people get mad at me because we never did intend to show James Strang in any of our movies. The movies don't go that far into the future. But I was thinking at one point that if we did, I want to cast Pee Wee Herman as James Sprang, because I'm not a big fan. But then Pee Wee Herman passed away, so. Yeah, but it would have been a very different thing. We owe him gratitude. And the other thing is, when I see people who want to be sort of cutting Brigham Young off, I think, do you realize that you're cutting off the branch on which you sit? I mean, the priesthood line of almost everybody today goes through almost every apostle, every leader of the church goes through Brigham Young. Young. If you think that's not legitimate, if you think he usurped the role, he was an evil man, you're Casting doubt [00:34:12] Speaker D: on the legitimacy of your own priesthood or your. Or your family's priesthood. If you're. [00:34:18] Speaker B: I remember at one point saying to somebody, look, you don't get to have Russell M. Nelson without Brigham Young. [00:34:25] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:34:26] Speaker C: So there's a domino effect. In other words, if you're going to throw out Brigham, I mean, it's the scriptures we have in use today. They come through Brigham Young and Orson Pratt and those guys. Right. Many of our teachings, our Paul. I mean, some of our procedural things we do in the church. Right. Is Brigham kind of sets these things up. Of course, there's been refinements over time to that, but, yeah, it kind of comes back to him as establishing a lot of these things. [00:34:46] Speaker B: Right. First temple in the west was dedicated by Brigham Young, and. [00:34:49] Speaker C: And he standardized the temple endowment and things like that. [00:34:52] Speaker B: There's a wonderful painting in the temple down there of Brigham and Wilford Woodruff sitting together as they go through the. What they are trying to do to standardize the endowment ceremony. Brigham Young is very much behind that. And so there's a lot that we take for granted in the church that comes from Brigham Young. And the presidents of church have recognized that. I know that President Hinckley had a big painting of Brigham Young on the wall of his office. And he said sometimes when he was facing a difficult decision, he would turn around and he'd look at that and he'd think, brigham, what would you do? [00:35:24] Speaker C: Help me. What would Brigham do? [00:35:25] Speaker B: Yeah. Because Brigham had had to face a lot of those questions in a way. Joseph had other questions. But the church was morphing. And there are other things going on with Brigham. The church settles into a pattern. And Brigham is the man who establishes much of that. And so his successors know that. They understand that. And I think our debt to him is enormous. And I just bristle when I run across people who want to kick him under the bus. It's just wrong. He doesn't deserve it. It's not just. I'm not just saying that we need him because he's essential to the modern church. We need him because the criticisms of him to a large extent are unjust. They're not fair. He doesn't deserve this. But people who want to preserve aspects of the church that they like and prune off the ones they don't like. They'll say racism, polygamy, that kind of thing. Well, it's Brigham's fault. He did it. And so we don't care about what happens to him. We want to preserve Joseph pristine. You can't do that. The history is much more intertwined than that. And Brigham really was, to the best of his ability, trying to carry out what Joseph wanted. [00:36:31] Speaker A: Well, it strikes me that we shouldn't be squeamish or scared of studying the life of Brigham Young, but rather the opposite. We should be excited to dive in and learn about this prophet of God. And for those who want to dive into learning more about Brigham Young, look up becoming Brigham on YouTube, where this is going to be an expansive series with interviewing top scholars. And it's very, very exciting. So thank you so much, Dan, for joining us today. [00:36:54] Speaker B: Thank you for having me. [00:36:55] Speaker A: Remember, you can study deeply and believe boldly. We'll see you next time. [00:36:58] Speaker D: Time.