Brigham Young was the ninth of 11 children of John and Abigail (Howe) Young. When Brigham Young was three years old, his indigent family moved to a region of upstate New York called the “burnt-over district” for its excesses of religious enthusiasm. Brigham grew up, practically without formal education, to become a journeyman painter and glazier. In 1832, after pondering the Book of Mormon for two years, he left the Methodists, whom he had joined at the age of 22, to follow several members of his family into the Mormon Church, in whose ranks he steadily rose in importance.
Brigham Young carried out missionary work in the Eastern states and from 1839 to 1841 in England as head of the most fruitful of the Mormon missions. In 1834 he had accompanied Zion’s Camp to Missouri to aid the beleaguered Saints, and
in 1838-1839, when the Mormons were driven from that state, he organized their exodus. After the murder of Joseph Smith by mob violence in 1844, Young stepped into the leadership of the stricken and harassed people about to be driven for the fourth time from their place of settlement. Despite disorganization, fierce opposition, and great physical hardship, he brought them across Iowa to Winter Quarters, Nebraska (near what is now Omaha), in 1846 and prepared them for the westward trek to Utah, having meanwhile (1844) defeated Sidney Rigdon for the post of church leader.
Young sought aid from the United States government, which equipped the Mormon Battalion for a march to California as part of its operations in the Mexican War; and, to determine a place of settlement, he studied literature from government and other sources and interviewed travelers. In 1847 he led a party of 148 to the valley of the Great Salt Lake, arriving himself on July 24. On his return to Winter Quarters, he was formally elected church president.
In Utah, Young planned settlements, “calling” the settlers to a religious duty and choosing them according to needed skills. He organized emigration from the East and brought some 70,000 persons from Europe, a success marred only by the disaster at Sweetwater River, Wyo., in October 1856, when a group of settlers traveling on foot and pushing heavy handcarts died in a snowstorm. He encouraged farming and indigenous industry, strengthening the Mormon community, but giving non-Mormons control of Utah’s mineral wealth. He established cooperative irrigation and retail store enterprises, and later revived the cooperative United Order communities, also developing church-owned business interests. He sponsored educational institutions, including the University of Deseret (1850), now the University of Utah. He withstood federal opposition and remained the effective authority in Utah regardless of who held the gubernatorial office. He took advantage of the coming of the railroad in 1869, a development intended to bring his downfall. Dealing sternly with dissent, he maintained his leadership over the theocratic community that he had built, with the assistance of such able lieutenants as Heber C. Kimball, Wilford Woodruff, and George Q. Cannon.
Young preached and practiced plural marriage and had 27 wives and 56 children. On his death, Utah’s Mormon population had reached 140,000, comprising a widespread and distinctive community, which had survived the rigors of settlement and of opposition that had broken out into violence in the Utah Mormon War of 1857.