Mormon History
Memories of Brigham Young - 1857
Daily Quincy Whig – July 22, 1857
(From the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser.)
The Mormon
Leaders.
Both Brigham Young and Heber
C. Kimball are New Yorkers. Brigham lived near the line dividing Ontario and
Monroe counties, in the town of Victor, at the time he became a Mormon. He had
always manifested a proclivity to religious fanaticism, or rather he was a lazy
rapscallion, good for nothing except to howl at a camp meeting. He lived in a
log shanty, with a dilapidated, patient, suffering wife, surrounded by a host of
tow headed children. Occasionally he made up a lot of axe-helves and traded them
off for sugar and tea; in other fits of industry he would do a day's work in the
hay-field for a neighbor, hoe the potatoes in his own little patch, or pound
clothes for his wife on a washing day. But his special mission was to go
camp-meetings and revivals, where he managed to get his daily bread out of the
more wealthy brethren, in consideration of the unction with which he shouted "ga-lo-rah!"
On such occasions Brigham took no thought of the morrow, but cheerfully putting
on his old wool hat, would leave his family without flour in the barrel or wood
at the door, and telling his wife that the "Lord would provide," he would put
off for a week's absence. Poor Mrs. Brigham managed by borrowing from her
neighbors with the small hope of paying, chopped the wood herself, with an old
sun-bonnet -- Navarino style -- went to the spring for water, thoroughly
convinced that her lot was not of the easiest, and that her husband was, to use
a western expression, an "ornary cuss;" in which sentiment all who knew him
joined. People were getting very tired of Brigham when Mormonism turned up. He
was just the man for the religion and the religion seemed expressly adapted to
him. He became an exhorter, held neighborhood meetings, ranted and howled his
doctrines into the minds of others as weak as himself, and finally went West,
with the rest of them, where he has developed his powers until the poor,
miserable rustic loafer is Governor of a Territory and the chief prophet of a
great religious sect. He has just the mixture of shrewdness and folly which is
required for success in fanaticism or quackery. A wiser man could not hold his
place. A man must be half fool and half knave to be a successful quack.
Heber C. Kimball was a man of more respectability. He was a born fanatic, and if
he was not a Mormon would be something else just like it. In his church -- he
was a Baptist originally -- he was one of those pestilent fellows who want
resolutions passed at church meetings withholding fellowship from somebody else,
and insist on having a political codicil added to the Bible. We believe he had
some property. He has much more talent than Brigham Young, but is inferior to
him in the elements of quackery. He has very respectable relatives now living in
the part of Monroe county from which he started.
Note: For a contemporary account of Brigham Young's baptism into Mormonism, see
the
Apr. 14, 1832 issue of the Rochester Liberal Advocate.