Once more: Brigham Young, villain

Last updated on: June 24, 2015 at 10:00 am by Dan Peterson

Once more: Brigham Young, villain 2015-06-24T10:00:55-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Cyrus Dallin’s 1897 monument to Brigham Young, in Salt Lake City, Utah
(Click to enlarge.)

In response to my recent defenses of Brigham Young (for which, see here and here and here), two more people (beyond Greg Smith) have kindly brought additional stories to my notice.

The first is a reader who calls himself “ideeho.”

I don’t have easy access at the moment to my copy of Arrington’s Brigham Young: American Moses, but “ideeho” tells me that the story comes from chapter 10 and that, in his copy (and presumably in mine), it appears on pages 157-158. I give it here essentially in “ideeho’s” words:

Leonard Arrington’s biography of Brigham Young recounts a story of a time when the Saints are scattered pretty much all across Iowa. One family meets with great travail, their wagon rolling over and breaking the wife’s leg. They can’t go on, and they see that they must be left behind. Brigham, hearing of this, won’t have it. He travels back to where the family is, spends the entire night fashioning a sort of hammock swing to sit within the wagon and cushion the jolts the wagon will make, so that the wife and the family can continue on and not be left behind. The story says so much about the man. Burdened down by trying to lead, save, and minister to thousands of Saints in their great needs, here is a man who could’ve delegated the problem to another but showed us what it really means to be a leader and what prophets are really like. He spent his entire night to save one woman and one family from being abandoned and left behind.

A monster!

(Remember: Brigham Young is supposed to have been a cruel and heartless misogynist. I wonder, though, how many of his comfortable critics on this score would have acted in a similar manner.)

And my friend Michael De Groote, reacting to Greg Smith’s post, wrote to call my attention to something by Jana Riess, a prominent Mormon blogger for Religion News Service (who, for what it’s worth, often sees things rather differently than I do):

The young wife Coombs left behind (or, rather, who refused to follow her husband), was Sarah Turk Coombs — who later married George Riess — Jana Riess’s great great grandfather.

Jana, who, as you probably know, is an adult convert to the Church, talks about it here:

http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/flunkingsainthood/2011/11/the-mormon-skeleton-in-my-familys-closet.html

And Jana also mentions another family story that talks about how Brigham Young was a great and good man.

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