Just as the Kirtland Camp served as a training and testing ground for the first-generation leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, so the move across Iowa became a preparation and proving experience for a second group. Among that second wave was young Lorenzo Snow, the man who in 1849 would be called into the Quorum of the Twelve and in 1898 would become President of the Church. A small journal, preserved in photocopy in the LDS Church Archives, provides a sketch of the young man learning his roles and of the Iowa experience which helped teach him.
Not exactly a diary, the four-by-six inch notebook is more a series of catch-up accounts, the last of them finished by spring 1847, but none of them written on the day they happened. The location of the notebook itself, identified by the catalogue of the Church Archives as being “in private hands,” is now unknown; the photocopy is at least eleven years old. Of a total of ninety-three pages, thirty-seven comprise the Iowa account. The rest of the notebook is a miscellany of entries from Snow’s British missions, accounts, lists of members under his charge, and scattered genealogical data. The book concludes with a copy of a letter which Lorenzo Snow composed for Charles Dana and Robert Campbell to deliver to his unconverted relatives in his native Ohio.
