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I came here freely, with neither garlic nor wolf’s bane!

I came here freely, with neither garlic nor wolf’s bane!

Last updated on: October 19, 2026 at 1:23 pm by Dan Peterson

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I came here freely, with neither garlic nor wolf’s bane! 2026-10-19T13:23:55-06:00 Dan Peterson

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C.C.A. Christensen, “Crossing the Mississippi on the Ice” (created ca. 1878), depicting the commencement of the Mormon exodus from Nauvoo, Illinois, abandoning their temple and their city, toward the Great Basin West (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

A new installment of our short video-documentary series Becoming Brigham was posted this morning: “Mud! Down Payment on an Exodus?— Becoming Brigham Episode 39”

For what it’s worth, I’ve also already been through the episode that will go up next week. It’s an unusually emotional one, and not merely in my opinion. Some critics will, no doubt, pronounce the emotion faked and manipulative—I hope not, but I have nearly a quarter of a century of experience now with the Peterson Obsession Board alone and, for that reason, my expectations are realistically low. But I was there, and I can testify that the emotions onsite were entirely genuine and unrehearsed. We were moved by the stories and the sights at Mount Pisgah and at Winter Quarters. Unlike me, my two co-hosts and our historian-interviewee for the episode are actual human beings, psychologically normal, and their responses were spontaneous and unscripted.

A 1940 theatrical poster (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I’ve been devoting a lot of attention to Brigham Young over the past year or two, for the obvious reason that I’ve been deeply involved with Becoming Brigham during that period. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the enormous focus, in Utah and well beyond Utah, on the important football game between the University of Notre Dame and Brigham Young University has had me thinking about the image conveyed by his name and about the additional fame that BYU’s increasing prominence is bringing to it. (If I had to guess, I would say that Brigham Young’s name is at least as familiar to non-Latter-day Saint Americans than is that of Joseph Smith, and very likely more so.)

For instance, to cite only examples from sports: BYU very recently defeated Nebraska in an exhibition basketball game; the BYU men’s swim team just swept the University of California at Santa Barbara; the women’s soccer team just beat No. 8 Texas Tech (their first loss of the season) and is tied for first in the Big XII; the women’s cross country team, ranked No. 2 nationally, just defeated No. 1 North Carolina State for the team title at the Indiana Pre-Nationals; and the Associated Press currently has the BYU football team ranked second in the nation (and, on Fox, Joel Klatt has it at number one.

The name of Brigham Young is in the news.

To the extent that he is misperceived (and misrepresented) as fanatical, murderous, violent, misogynistic, racist, and tyrannical, that obviously colors the perception of the state that he founded and governed and that is still powerfully associated with him, the universities that bear his name (in Utah, Idaho, and Hawaii), and the church that he led. I object to falsehoods about Brigham Young, and I don’t want the reputations of my adopted home state, my alma mater and former employer, and my church to be damaged.

I have no illusions that Becoming Brigham will find a significant audience beyond the membership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Non-Latter-day Saint views of Brother Brigham are far more likely to have been formed by American Primeval, just as the image of the Church itself is being created by Under the Banner of Heaven and Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, and we have an uphill battle before us to undo the harm that such ventures have done and will likely continue to do.

But I would like as many members of the Church as possible to see Becoming Brigham, because the Saints need to understand that portrayals of Brigham Young as a murderous, violent, tyrannical, misogynistic, and racist fanatic are, to say the least of them, overblown and misleading. I hope that those who have been watching it—as I write, we’re closing in on a cumulative total viewership of 500,000—will at least be sufficiently equipped, when they encounter baseless calumnies against Brother Brigham, to disbelieve them or even to contradict them, if not outright to refute them. It’s not healthy for the Saints to buy into hostile distortions of the Church’s second president, the principal person through whom the keys of the priesthood were transferred down to the present day. Happily, they don’t need to buy into such distortions.

I encourage you, if you haven’t already done so, to watch Becoming Brigham. And not just the most recent installments. There are currently thirty-eight prior episodes to the one that went up this morning. I also encourage you to subscribe to it, and to call it to the attention of others who might enjoy it or benefit from it. We’ll make no profit from Becoming Brigham — we can’t — but we’ve put a lot of effort into it and we made it to be watched. Thank you for your attention to this matter. And thank you for your help.

Bran Castle, in a cellphone photo taken earlier today by my wife. As you can readily see, they’re getting into Halloween mode here.

We drove from Bucharest this morning through a quite pretty area of ski resorts in the Carpathian Mountains into — cue drum roll — Transylvania.

The high point of the day, in a manner of speaking, was a visit to Bran Castle — which is otherwise widely known as “Dracula’s Castle.” It’s the second most popular tourist destination in Romania, according to our guides. Which is a remarkable tribute to the power of marketing, since

The fictional Count Dracula never lived in it, not even fictionally.
There is no evidence that Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula, was aware of it in any way.
It bears virtually no resemblance to the crumbling, ruined castle described as Dracula’s home in the novel.
It has, at the very most, only a slight connection with the historical Vlad Dracul–and probably not even that.

In fact, although he was born in Sighișoara, in the region of Kingdom of Hungary known as Transylvania (which is now part of Romania), the mid-fifteeenth-century Vlad Dracul (aka Vlad III and Vlad Țepeș [that is, “Vlad the Impaler”]) was never the ruler of Transylvania; rather, he was the Voivode or prince of Wallachia, a neighboring principality to the south through which we drove yesterday when traveling from the Danube to Bucharest.

By the way, the interior of the castle was basically set up as a haunted house or a “house of horrors.” Pretty tacky. (The company that recently bought majority interest in it also owns Graceland.) And the area at its base is a tourist trap.

Posted from Brașov, Transylvania, Romania

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