19 Common People: Church Activity during the Brigham Young Era

“The people constitute the power and reality of the Kingdom of God.” That fundamental truth, voiced by LDS pioneer bishop Leonard W. Hardy in 1861, is often ignored in Mormon history, which tends to concentrate on Church leaders and programs.1 Of 150,000 Latter-day Saints over whom Brigham Young presided during his three decades in Utah, barely 1,000 served as leaders from bishopric level up to General Authorities—a ratio of 149 to 1.2 How did the 149,000 Saints who were not leaders practice their religion?

In 1860 a Salt Lake City bishop reported that most in his ward were “just as faithful as they knew how to be, others as much the reverse, neglecting almost every duty.”3 What did being “faithful” mean back then? What did the bishop have in mind when he said every duty? Or, applying today’s terminology, what did it mean in Brigham Young’s day to be “active in the Church”?

To be “active in the Church” today is to attend Sunday meetings somewhat regularly, to fulfill a calling, and, if fully committed, to hold and use a temple recommend. By contrast, during Utah’s first two decades, the Saints did not go regularly to any church meetings, and ward buildings were too small to allow most members to attend sacrament meeting. For most of that early period, men, women, and children had no Sunday School, Relief Society, Mutual, Primary, or ward priesthood meetings to attend nor auxiliary callings to fill. Saints had no temples needing their attendance or proxy ordinance work. Therefore, what constituted “being a good Mormon” back then? What follows is an attempt to answer this question.

Size of Stakes and Wards

Stake and ward sizes varied dramatically. Brigham Young had no more than 13 stakes to oversee at one time until he expanded the total to 20 stakes just before he died in 1877. Those 20 stakes averaged 12 wards apiece, but 8 stakes had more than 14 wards, and the dominant Salt Lake Stake, where one-fourth of the Church membership lived, had 35 wards.

When Brigham Young died, gathered Zion included 104,000 Saints living in 240 wards. Wards averaged 81 families and 432 members per unit. But Salt Lake Stake’s wards were larger than most, averaging 566 members. And wards in the Utah (Utah County) Stake were even larger, averaging 808 members each.4

Church Attendance

Believers who gathered to Zion lived in villages and towns for educational, social, cultural, and religious purposes. There, they belonged to specific wards and stakes and could attend church meetings. The types of meetings, their frequency, and their procedures varied according to local circumstances and habit. “Going to meeting” was more optional then than it is in the early twentieth-first century.

Sunday Meetings

From the first pioneers’ first week in Great Salt Lake Valley, leaders provided each Sunday a general (not ward) church meeting or two. When settlements formed outside the valley, the same pattern continued. The norm by the mid-1850s was two public meetings on Sunday conducted for the entire settlement, not just for a ward. Both meetings, usually at 10 am and 2 pm, were held so that speakers could address the Saints. The afternoon meeting became the people’s sacrament meeting.

In Salt Lake Stake, the main Sunday meeting took place on Temple Square. On Sunday afternoons, some of the valley’s Saints gathered for the stakewide sacrament meeting and to hear the General Authorities preach. At first the attendees met only during good weather, under a brush-covered bowery. Then the Church built the “Old” Tabernacle, seating capacity 2,500 (less than half of the city’s population). It was replaced in 1867 by the “New” Tabernacle, seating capacity of 8,000 (still not quite half of the city’s population), which still stands on Temple Square.5 Other multiward settlements that did not have tabernacles continued the tradition of settlement-wide outdoor Sunday meetings.

During winter months, however, outdoor meetings could not be held, so the Salt Lake Valley and outlying wards conducted their own services in homes or in ward meetinghouses, after such were erected. Even the Old Tabernacle, when it was in use, proved to be too cold during the winter to host the Sunday general meetings. It appears that cold weather caused settlement-wide sacrament meetings to become ward meetings, a major development in the worship history of the Saints. In 1867, because wards by then were conducting Sunday Schools on Sunday mornings, leaders ceased holding the downtown Tabernacle Sunday morning general meeting.6

For the Saints who attended, the Sunday services provided varying calibers of speakers, a chance to partake of the sacrament, and sometimes impressive inspiration. An eighteen-year-old diarist in Smithfield, Cache County, commented about her Sunday activities on April 21, 1867: “I have been to two meetings to day. Have listened to the pleasing word of God spoken by His servants and have been much instructed and comforted thereby. Oh! That the honest in heart everywhere might listen to such teaching! Could they do otherwise than to understand and believe.”7

Martha Spence Heywood, who had no children to care for during most of these years, attended religious services regularly in Salt Lake and then in Nephi when she moved there as an early settler. She noted on Thursday, May 4, 1854, the monthly fast day, that she “attended forenoon and afternoon meetings and felt much benefited thereby.” She added that “there was quite a good attendance of females,” which implies that such was unusual and worth noting.8 Among reactions to meetings she recorded in her diary are these: “Today we had a good meeting,” “Had a good meeting this forenoon,” “Had some good speaking,” and “Had a good meeting.”9 Of two Sunday meetings in Salt Lake’s bowery, years apart, she noted, “Enjoyed the remarks of Joseph Young in reference to keeping the Sabbath holy,” and “Truly comforted and instructed by the preaching” that provided “a variety of good instruction.”10

Sunday meetings in most settlements were well attended—but only if judged by how full the meeting facility was. If measured by the percentages who “went to church,” those meetings were poorly attended. One Salt Lake City ward reported that of its 181 families, only 31 were regularly represented at Sunday meetings, and 97 of the families, or 50 percent, were “perfectly indifferent.”11 Historian Ronald W. Walker points out that “‘going to meeting’ clearly was not a popular nineteenth-century pastime.”12

Several factors account for the early Utah Saints’ light attendance at Sunday services. The primary cause was inadequate meeting halls. In most areas, the first meetinghouses were too small for everyone in the ward to be seated for Sunday meetings. The Toquerville chapel, for example, was a 20′ × 16′ adobe house, the size of some family rooms in today’s suburban homes, too small to serve the settlement’s nineteen families.13 Although small buildings might be full on a Sunday, the majority of ward members were not in attendance. In 1856, Elder Wilford Woodruff mentioned “wards where they are so crowded.” Many meetings, he said, are “as full as people can be” so that “many of the ward have to go home.”14

In 1861, Brigham Young recommended the building of “substantial Halls in the different wards.”15 In the following sixteen years, many wards built new meetinghouses, but often the new structures were still too small. In 1877, for example, Salt Lake City’s Twenty-first Ward designed a new meetinghouse that was about 28′ × 43′16—enough space to seat only about 180 people. Some communities did build large churches, such as the 85′ × 40′ edifice Kaysville Ward built by the early 1860s, which could seat 900 Saints. Curtains divided its basement into four classrooms.17 Ogden built a tabernacle, in use by the late 1850s, that could seat 1,200.18 Nevertheless, as late as 1877, the Juvenile Instructor reported that many children had never partaken of the sacrament because “in many places the meeting houses are too small for them to meet with the grown people, and therefore they have to stop at home while their parents attend meeting.”19 

Often, the first meeting places were either members’ homes or simple one-room, log assembly halls.20 Not only were they small, but often they were crudely finished and uncomfortable. Gunnison Ward’s first meetinghouse was 20′ × 40′, built of logs, with a roof of willows, straw, and earth. The walls were chinked and plastered with mud and whitewashed on the inside. Floorboards did not fit very closely together. Benches were “formidable slabs” with four legs attached. A crude pine table stood in one corner.21

Orderville, c. late nineteenth century. A large assembly hall sits in the background. Courtesy Church Archives. In Tooele “the first public house was built in 1854,” John Alexander Bevan recalled. He also described its lack of amenities:

It was 28 ft. long by 18 feet wide, a log-house with a dirt roof. A fireplace in each end stood lengthwise, north and south, facing the east. There was one small door, and two small windows in front. The chimneys were built of adobe. The fireplaces were large, so that the wood could be stood up in them endways, and make a big fire to give both heat and light. The head of each family made a bench for his family to sit on. These benches were usually made of slabs, with four legs put in on the round side of the slab. . . . Besides the fire for light, they had tallow candles, home-made, and each family was supposed to furnish a candle. The house was used for all purposes, both religious and otherwise. It was the schoolhouse, the meeting house, and the amusement hall. It had a pulpit on the west side near the center. This pulpit, or stand, was about large enough to hold three men.22

Local meetinghouses, no matter the size, discouraged attendance by being too hot, too cold, or too smoky. Boweries and other buildings became unbearably hot during summer months. In St. George the first bowery proved to be “too small” for general gatherings. “On every side the assemblies were exposed to the rude blasts of the hot summer, and the deep chilling atmosphere of the winter season.”23 But the new bowery, 85′ × 45′, while large and neat, suffered from frequent windstorms that blew dust through the willows into the faces of the assembled faithful. Charles L. Walker attended a conference on May 4, 1866, at which “I heard little of what they said, for the wind roared through the willows that covered the bowery, with such violence that it was almost an impossibility to hear the speaker.” Two days later, men nailed “wagon covers round the bowery to protect [attendees] from the gale.” St. George had a meeting hall, but “it would seat only about a hundred people.” Finally, in 1869, a spacious tabernacle opened for Sunday meetings, although it was unfinished. Meetings were held in the basement, for the building exterior was not finished until 1871, the interior, not until 1875.24

In 1869, Provo’s tabernacle had a new stove that smoked up the room. “I do the best I can when the Stove is red hot,” the custodian said. “I put the Coal in quick, but cannot prevent the smoke and flame coming out when the door is opened.”25 Two years later, during a cold December, “several members of the Choir were complaining because of the coldness of the Meeting House.” “Unless the room is warmed,” a bishop warned, “the people will stay at home.”26

Other life realities hindered men, women, and children from going to meetings. In that premicrophone era, attendees at the outdoor meetings and in the Old Tabernacle and other larger meetinghouses had trouble hearing and understanding the speakers. On some Sundays, travel to meetings over dirt roads in uncovered wagons was unpleasant and even impossible because of mud, ice, rain, wind, dust, snow, or scorching sun. Sickness and small children kept many Saints home from meetings, especially the mothers. Martha Spence Heywood’s excuse for missing her Salt Lake City ward’s sacrament meeting one Sunday in January was because of “the bad walking,” meaning mud or snow or water, and “the close atmosphere of the house.”27 Farm chores and irrigation turns had to be done, even on the Sabbath. Saints in farming regions developed a pattern of not attending meetings during busy summer months, a practice that lingered into the twentieth century. Also, foreign-speaking immigrants sometimes stayed home from English-speaking sacrament meetings.

Poor quality meetings, too, contributed to nonattendance patterns. Smaller communities lacked enough speakers to give variety to the meetings year after year. Women, it appears, rarely spoke in sacrament meetings. Available speakers often were not good speakers. Therefore, within a few years, a ward’s meetings became repetitious and often boring. Illustrating the “dull meeting” problem is Provoan Sidney Alexander Pace’s recollection that

we were in the habit of going into meeting on Sunday and if the speaker was not lively enough, fifteen or twenty of us young boys would get up and walk out of meeting and go down by Bishop Loveless’s home. . . . They used to have large straw stacks and here we went to have our fun. . . .

The Bishop . . . gave me a good fatherly talk and gave me a mission to work with the young boys of the ward and get them into meeting and keep them there. He said he didn’t care how I did it but he wanted me to do that for him. . . . By the end of a month’s time all the boys would stay in meeting until it was out.28

To improve sacrament meetings, the Church called men to be home missionaries to travel in assigned regions and speak in ward meetings and at special conferences.29

A lack of fervor among work-distracted Saints likewise lowered the attendance. Lackluster attendance at Provo Tabernacle afternoon meetings in 1872 caused stake president Abraham O. Smoot to ask block teachers “to report why the people do not come to meeting, the turn-out is unwarrantable. . . . Provo ought to fill this house to overflowing but they do not[,] only when the President [Brigham Young] comes; then they turn out for curiosity. I feel that the people do not enjoy the spirit of their religion.” Smoot continued, “There has not been too much preaching, or to[o] lengthy meetings,” he said, adding that “a healthy man who complains of two meetings, is weak in the faith.” Three years later, the problem persisted, so President Smoot decided to “call the regular meetings wether the people attended or not and thus free himself from all blame.”30

At the end of 1860, bishops for Great Salt Lake City’s twenty wards gave verbal reports at the biweekly bishops meeting, telling of the wards’ number of families, attitudes, and participation. The comments dealing with meeting attendance are summarized here (what is notable is that the bishops’ perspective seems to have been not what percentage of members attended but how full the meetinghouse was):

Meetings well attended on Sunday, some few “on the background.”

Meeting well attended.

Weekly meeting pretty well attended, fast meeting but few attend.

Sunday meeting well attended, fast meetings not so.

Sunday night meetings and on fast day well attended.

Fast meeting well attended.

Monthly fast meeting well attended, at which they bless their children.

Good spirit toward attending meetings.

Good spirit prevails, meeting well attended.

Meeting tolerably well attended; “some who have lived in the ward six years have never been seen at a meeting, and yet call themselves saints.”

People generally very slack in going to meeting.

No place for holding meetings.31

In some LDS meeting halls, men sat on one side and women on the other, a strange practice not yet well researched. The Old Tabernacle, for a period of time, had a partition running through the center, separating the sexes—women on the north, men on the south. The practice continued in the New Tabernacle, according to an 1867 visitor there—women sat in the middle seats, men in the side seats along the walls. The Parowan Ward meetinghouse was similarly segregated, women on the east side, men on the west.32 How extensive this practice was is not known.

LDS religious life was centered in the ward and its religious meetings. To outsiders ward sacrament meetings often seemed irreverent, informal, and lacking in good speeches and admirable music. But for many Saints, these ward meetings provided inspiration and appreciated instruction.33

Ward Sunday Evening and Midweek Prayer Meetings

In many wards, small numbers of Saints gathered in someone’s home for a Sunday-night and a midweek-night prayer meeting. These meetings, which continued throughout Brigham Young’s era, primarily featured testimony sharing, singing, and praying rather than preaching.34 Women as well as men spoke. In Nephi’s early days, Martha Spence Heywood sometimes attended the ward’s prayer meetings. On Sunday evening, October 12, 1851, she noted that “we met together for worship and had a good meeting” at which two men spoke and then “Sister Gifford spoke a few words and I followed her.”35

“It stormed so fast Wednesday evening that we had no prayer meeting,” she recorded on February 16, 1851, in Salt Lake. “Our prayer meeting last Sunday evening to Brother Leonard’s was full and very good.” Regarding a Sunday evening prayer meeting in Nephi, Martha Spence Heywood noted, “Our prayer meeting did not amount to much.” But on another occasion, she wrote “we had a very good prayer meeting.”36

Ward Fast Meetings

Continuing a practice started in Nauvoo, wards held fast meetings on the first Thursday of every month. Workers had to leave their jobs for two hours or more to attend. To facilitate their attendance, Church leaders at times sternly reminded Mormon employers to close their doors during fast meeting. In 1874 a gathering of bishops discussed the “very imperfect way” members treated fast meetings. Presiding Bishop Edward Hunter regretted that “so many failed to appreciate the blessings of our fast meetings.” One local bishop responded that “our man servants and maid servants should be allowed to go, and our stores and workshops closed, to give all a chance.”37 Two years later, Bishop Hunter reported that for the first time the Salt Lake Stake’s public works closed on fast-day morning and would continue to do so in the future so public workers could attend fast meetings. One of Bishop Hunter’s counselors, Leonard W. Hardy, added that he believed those who failed to attend fast meetings should pay a double fast offering. “All the Merchants in the Church ought to close their stores on that day and give the clerks a chance to go to meeting,” he urged.38 One month later, the bishops agreed that a petition be drawn up that requested city merchants to close for three hours on fast days. What resulted from this plan is not known.39

Priesthood-Related Meetings

In early Utah, high priests groups and elders quorums were few and served little more purpose than for the men to come together for testimony bearing or talks about the gospel. Most ordained men held the office of seventy and belonged to one of the general quorums of seventy. Because nearly all the men sent out as missionaries were ordained as seventies prior to leaving, they needed to join a seventies quorum when they returned. Seventies quorums were numbered quorums so if a man belonged to the Sixteenth Quorum, for example, when he moved, he still belonged officially to that quorum. By the 1860s, Utah had more than sixty such quorums. These were not stake entities, nor were they necessarily linked to a locality. Gradually, seventies belonging to various quorums who lived in the same locality started to meet together in a “mass” quorum for testimony bearing or instruction but not for assignments to do local Church work. During this period, seventies quorum meetings generally saw low attendance.

Where they existed at all, priesthood quorums were stake entities. Stake-level priesthood gatherings included separate monthly meetings for high priests and seventies. Priesthood holders met with their stake quorum officers, who gave instruction and gospel explanation, but the meetings consisted primarily of the men in attendance bearing testimonies. As recorded in the quorum minute books for several of the stakes and settlements, quorum leaders’ admonitions indicate that attendance at these meetings generally was less than leaders wanted.40

The functions of deacons, teachers, and priests were performed primarily by Melchizedek Priesthood holders. Revelation affirms that “those holding the Melchizedek Priesthood can act in all the offices of the Aaronic Priesthood” if called upon and set apart for that office,41 so the bishops and stake Aaronic Priesthood quorum presidencies “called and set apart” such men to be acting priests, acting teachers—the home teachers of that day—and acting deacons.42 Hence, these men were termed the “acting priesthood”—meaning those called into active service. The rest were reserves.43

Wards held acting teachers meetings once or twice a month, at which the teachers reported to the bishop about their visits to ward members. These meetings were that generation’s equivalent to our modern ward priesthood meetings. Sometimes the group was referred to as a teachers quorum.

To prepare the ward meetinghouse for meetings and, under the direction of the bishop, aid the poor, wards had a few acting deacons. Deacons meetings in larger population areas were monthly stake meetings. In more isolated settlements, deacons, if they met at all, generally attended the acting teachers meetings.

General Conferences and Stake Conferences

Saints’ meeting schedules included “going to conference.” Thousands flocked to Great Salt Lake City twice a year to attend general conference. (Again, the percentage of total LDS members in Utah who attended general conference was very low.) Traveling in wagons, buggies, and carts, on horseback, on foot, and later by train, many used the trip for spiritual renewal as well as for shopping and renewing friendships. That general conferences sometimes were crowded is shown by Martha Spence Heywood’s comments on April 6, 1856. She went to conference at the bowery but found there a “dense crowd,” so she went back home.44

Quarterly conferences, which were not then termed stake conferences, were held in several different settlements, including American Fork, Bountiful, Farmington, Kaysville, Provo, Tooele City, Fillmore, and Spanish Fork. But they were held between November and January and from June to August, Church leaders apparently letting general conference serve as the other two conferences per year. By the mid-1860s, St. George held stake conferences each May and November. Many special conferences were held whenever General Authorities passed through a settlement.45

Dixie’s premier diarist, Charles L. Walker, regularly attended local church meetings. He particularly enjoyed a stake conference held in St. George on May 4, 1872. Resident Apostle Erastus Snow, who was serving as the stake president, “spoke in a powerful and very interesting manner on the Power and Authority of the Holy Priesthood. It was rich and very edifying. I could have listened to him all day; it was meat and drink to my soul, and I felt as tho I had a rich feast of spiritual food.”46

Saints had opportunities in most stakes to attend stake conferences. By the mid-1850s, the Davis Stake was holding twice-yearly conferences, no two in a row in the same community. On March 14 and 15, for example, the conference took place at Kaysville. Nine men spoke during the two days.47 In some other stakes, the conferences were held less regularly.48

Slow Increase in Ward Meetings and Callings

During the first two decades of the pioneer period, LDS men, women, and children had no church meetings to attend other than the Sunday general worship meetings, prayer and fast meetings, stake conferences, or acting teachers meetings. For most wards during this period, the only ward priesthood officers were the bishopric, the acting teachers quorum, and a few acting deacons. Well into the 1860s, the vast majority of “active” Latter-day Saint adults never held a ward job. Without Relief Societies, Sunday Schools, Mutuals, and Primaries, wards had few positions available for anyone to fill. As a result, most ward members held no ward jobs. The turning point was the third decade, when ward meetings and activities increased as the four auxiliary organizations were introduced, one by one. Thus, only gradually, with the advent of Church auxiliaries, did service in ward positions become a regular part of the committed Mormon’s life.

The following beginning dates for Lehi’s ward organizations reveal the lack of opportunity for ward jobs that existed for two-thirds of the Brigham Young era:49

Males with Priesthood Offices, No Duties

In 1852, 2,200 of Utah’s 12,000 total number of residents (men, women, and children) held a priesthood office—or one-fifth of all the people. By 1877, a quarter of a century later, the ratio stood about the same, 22,000 out of 104,000 total. Assuming that about half the total population was above age fifteen and that half of these were males, then the 22,000 who held priesthood offices comprised almost all the males over age fifteen.

However, even though most male adults held a priesthood office, most did not have specific duties to perform. The men were expected only to be ready to accept calls to be acting teachers or to fill proselyting missions if and when such calls came.

In 1852 some 40 percent of priesthood bearers were seventies, and 20 percent were elders. (Seventies then were Melchizedek Priesthood officers, seventy to a quorum, in dozens of quorums that functioned like stake quorums; they were not comparable to today’s First and Second Quorums of Seventy, whose members are General Authorities.50) By 1877, however, the elder-to-seventy ratio had reversed, and 41 percent of priesthood bearers were elders and 20 percent seventies. The percentages of high priests (14 percent) and Aaronic Priesthood (24 percent) remained unchanged throughout the period.51 On average, a ward in 1877 had 13 high priests, 19 seventies, and 38 elders, or 70 Melchizedek Priesthood bearers out of 432 members. It had 6 priests, 6 teachers, and 10 deacons, for 22 Aaronic Priesthood bearers total.52

Most lesser priesthood bearers were adults, not boys.53 Church leaders had no expectation that a boy should advance through the ranks—deacon to teacher to priest—or that a boy needed to hold a priesthood office at all. Most young males were ordained first to the Melchizedek Priesthood in their late teens or early twenties to be an elder or seventy.54

Acting Teachers

The first ward callings were the bishoprics, including clerks, and then the acting teachers, but only a select dozen or score of men served as acting teachers in a ward. Bishoprics and this corps of teachers “shouldered the ward’s leadership and performed its labor.”55

During Brigham Young’s presidency, Melchizedek Priesthood men handled almost all Aaronic Priesthood work in Utah, doing “double duty” by acting in both priesthoods.56 One older man who was a seventy served as an acting priest in one ward and an acting teacher in two wards and was in the stake’s deacons quorum presidency.57 Another man, an elder, was also both an acting deacon and an acting teacher.58 Bishop Hunter often exhorted priesthood men to “magnify both priesthoods.”59 The statement “I was an Elder before I was a deacon” was easily understood during the pioneer period.60

A man called to be a teacher was expected to visit a big set of families living in the ward. As ward populations grew, he was assigned a companion so that teachers could visit in pairs. Some teams were assigned to visit all the families in a given block, giving rise to the “block teacher” designation. They visited monthly in many wards but only quarterly or randomly elsewhere. A survey in 1870 shows that LDS wards had between eighteen and twenty-four block teachers each, and each team visited between eight and twenty families. Bishops met monthly, or sometimes biweekly, with their acting teachers to receive reports and give assignments.61

Then, as now, end-of-the-month visits were common. In 1864, Bishop Leonard Hardy complained about teachers who “put off their visits through the wards to the very last evening before they have to give in their report, this hurrying way of visiting, failed to accomplish the design of a Teachers duty.”62

By assignment from the bishops, teachers did more than pay visits to members’ homes. They settled some disputes, helped the needy, collected fast offerings, obtained needed resources, and administered the sacrament.63

Relief Societies

After being shelved in Nauvoo, Relief Societies were organized for a brief period in the 1850s by women in some wards primarily to assist needy Native Americans in their neighborhoods. But no more than three or four societies survived the “Move South,” the northern Saints’ 1858 evacuation to more southerly settlements, a response to the threat of Johnston’s army.64 For most Mormon women, the Relief Society program was not reorganized until 1867, fully twenty years after the first Saints entered Utah. Therefore, for a full generation, women, most of whom did not attend sacrament meetings regularly, at best attended weeknight prayer meetings. For them, religion was concentrated on interactions at home and with neighbors rather than centered around formal, weekly church attendance.65

By the late 1860s, Relief Societies were started in most wards, giving women “church work.” Provo’s Third Ward Relief Society commenced on December 2, 1868, by voting in twenty-two members. Mary Jane Tanner, the bishop’s wife, was the first president. Each week the sisters met in a different house. They debated whether to have two separate society meetings, one a prayer meeting and the other a quilting meeting. At first they tried one meeting at which they had prayer and a hymn and then quilted and sewed. But the atmosphere became too relaxed and gossipy, the minutes note, so they began holding both types of meetings weekly. For a long time, attendance was good at quilting meetings but “very low” at prayer meetings.66

Relief Societies copied the priesthood organization in several respects. They called women to be teachers, like the block teachers, to visit the sisters in the ward. They called a few sisters to be deaconesses, doing the work ward deacons did—making the meeting place ready and comfortable for each week’s meeting.67 Because of the existence of ward Relief Societies, a dozen or more women in each ward received “church callings” to serve in positions in the wards.

Sunday Schools for Children

In the early 1850s, Sunday Schools began sporadically in wards here and there, founded by concerned local individuals rather than Church leaders. Richard Ballantyne started the first one in 1849 when fifty youth, ages eight to fourteen, met in a special room added to his home. Other individuals copied him, so independent Sunday Schools sprang up in most wards. Provo started a Sunday School in 1852, which operated off and on. In 1860, the school started meeting in the Third Ward meetinghouse—one Sunday School for four Provo wards. Finally, in 1876 each ward organized its own Sunday School.68 A Sunday School started in Lehi in 1851 but “was not permanently organized until 1866.”69 In fall 1856, Bishop John Rowberry in Tooele decided his ward needed a Sunday School “for the benefit of the Rising Generation.” He appointed Eli Lee to run it, so “Bro. Lee immediately commenced operations by collecting a few of the children together on Sunday mornings, and instructing them, assisted by his wife. For some time, but little progress was made.” By 1857 the school had eight classes—five taught by men and three by women.70

In 1866, Elder George Q. Cannon launched the Juvenile Instructor to help the Sunday Schools, and in 1872 he became the Church’s first general superintendent of all the Sunday Schools. By the 1870s, two hundred Sunday Schools involved nearly fifteen thousand youth and adults. Sunday Schools created ward positions that Saints could be called to fill. For the first time, women and children participated directly in a Sabbath meeting as teachers and students, and many men became officers and teachers. Songs, prayers, scripture lessons, catechisms, and recitations were all part of the school. So, too, were examination days, like one Salt Lake bishop Frederick Kesler attended when he found “the house was well fild, the pieces ware well spoken & a Large No. of presants ware given out as Reward of merit which consisted in some verry choice Books.”71

A revealing picture of Sunday School activity appears in the first statistical report the Deseret Sunday School Union compiled.72 Their data are for the quarter ending September 15, 1872. In twenty Utah counties and one Idaho stake, the Church had 190 Sunday Schools, of which 149 had reported. These 149 enrolled 13,373 pupils—5,964 boys and 7,409 girls—and had 1,408 teachers—687 men and 721 women. The following table shows the courses of study and the number of classes taught in each:

Adults were not the only ones to stay home from Sunday School; so did older youths and young adults. William Dunbar of the Salt Lake City Twentieth Ward became concerned for the ward’s young people ages sixteen through twenty-two because

as a general thing the class I am referring to do not attend Sunday school. They consider that they are too old, that they know too much, or that it is rather humiliating to associate with children; and, with a few exceptions, those I mean are not of the kind who have read the Bible. . . . They must not expect to study “Mormonism” by reading novels, but they must read the Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Millennial Star, Orson Pratt’s Works, the Voice of Warning and many others. These are the works our children must study if they ever find out for themselves the truth of the principles of “Mormonism.”73

Efforts to Help the “Unchurched” Youth

For two decades, most LDS parents in Utah raised their children without the help of Church programs. This generation of parents believed their children would grow up to be righteous by virtue of living in Zion and away from Babylon. “No thought was bestowed upon their spiritual culture,” Eliza R. Snow confessed, with the result that “we had Infidels among them; children of good parents.”74 Children born in the faith, another leader said, “did not seem to value it like those who had left everything for its sake.”75

Records show that adult Saints complained about a variety of misbehaviors by adolescent boys: rowdyism, vile language, reckless horseback riding, throwing rocks through windows, vandalism, fighting, intoxication, smoking, spitting tobacco juice on church floors, gang behavior, and Sabbath breaking.76 Adults complained about girls “retailing scandal,” drinking tea, being lazy, desiring inappropriate fashions, dancing improperly, dating Gentiles, and relishing novels.77

Most teens did not attend Sunday School, believing it was for little children. But in the 1870s, recruitment pushes increased teenage Sunday School enrollments. One teacher said twenty young men in his class “were exceeding rough” at first “but now they attended regularly and their minds were awakened.” Another remarked that his class grew from 2 to 110 in two years and that “rowdyism was being dispensed with.” Another report said “the Sabbath School had a great effect to restrain boys from whiskey, tobacco and bad habits” and the boys “were more polite and amenable to good advice.”78

Some of the teenage girls began to receive indirect training and to be further involved in the Church when they started receiving calls to teach the children in Primary following its creation two years after Brigham Young’s death.

Leaders, being parents themselves, created additional programs to prevent the young folks from growing up unindoctrinated, untrained, and unappreciative of their religion.79 Valuing their young people, they launched mutual improvement programs for young women in 1869 and for young men in 1875. The weekly meetings of the YWMIAs and YMMIAs featured “intellectual exercises,” “suitable amusements,” and programs intended to build testimonies, improve manners, and overcome deficiencies in members’ educations.80

Illustrating the start-up of youth movements is the Salt Lake City Seventeenth Ward. Its Young Ladies Cooperative Retrenchment Society began in 1870 with nineteen young women as members and a married woman as president. This group resolved to reform in many specific areas: to read Church books, to obey the Word of Wisdom, to remove right-hand gloves when partaking of the sacrament, and to not “retail scandal.” Leaders stressed proper dress standards for the girls, some of whom had received their endowment: dressing neatly and plainly, avoiding tight lacing, eschewing long trains or “dresses so short that the tops of our high shoes could be seen,” not mutilating temple garments by cutting off the sleeves and collars, not turning garments down “from their shoulders” to go to parties, and not wearing shawls gentile style or bonnets made after gentile patterns.81

The ward’s retrenchment attendance sagged. One reason was that some girls said “they do not have any thing to retrench in they do not wear ruffles and frills,” so why come? The organization folded, then resurrected in 1873. But by 1875 the girls had wearied of meetings where the woman president called on them to stand up and say something. “It seems that we can not say any thing where we are in our meetings,” one honest girl said, “but we can talk freely when out of doors.” “I think I could speak better if there was no older Sisters present,” confessed another. Miss Addie Clayton put the problem in a nutshell: she “hated to refuse to speak yet hated to speak.” One effort to boost attendance seemed guaranteed to create guilt in the girls: “If we do not come to meeting,” an officer said, “our guardian angel[s] cannot come, and they love to come and converse together.”82

President Brigham Young’s 1875 ban on round dancing stirred up the girls. Some approved a resolution to quit round dancing, some abstained from voting, and some voted in favor of the resolution but with reluctance. Clarissa Smith “presumed there was no girl that like[d] round-dancing as well as she did yet she had said she would quit so she would. The temptation was great.” Another pledged “to try by the help of the Lord to quit round dancing, although it was hard.” Addie Clayton did not vote because she feared she might break the promise. There was no harm in round dancing, she reasoned, “if harm was not made of it.” Jennie Russell pledged, “by the help of the Lord,” to quit round dancing and also tea and coffee. Lizzi Smith “liked tea & coffee but was going to stop that & round dancing.” One girl liked the dancing ban because she never could get the step right and appreciated an excuse to quit trying.83

The Seventeenth Ward’s YMMIA held its first meeting on November 2, 1875. Their purpose for organizing was “to learn all they could in regard to the principles of our religion” and to practice public speaking and explaining “our views and ideas.” Members participated in discussions, talks, lectures, readings, declamations, and the sharing of personal essays. Discussion topics included the “first principles,” Word of Wisdom, and signs of the times. For new participants, it was “the first time that most of them had ever stood before a congregation.”84

By 1877 a main feature of the YMMIA meetings was questions and answers. An assigned person brought in a question on any religious, scientific, or historical subject. The executive committee assigned a member, someone other than the question raiser, to be the answerer. If no one could answer a particular question, the committee, which included the bishop, would consult with Church authorities “except on Scientific or Historical subjects.” Among questions raised were “How high was the tower of Babel?” “Was Moroni a spirit or resurrected being?” “What is the difference between a Republican and a Democrat?” and “When was the first locomotive made?”85 About twenty young men normally attended the ward’s YMMIA meetings.86 Late in 1877, the Seventeenth Ward’s YMMIA and YLMIA agreed to hold joint meetings once a month, an innovation that enlivened both organizations.

Priesthood for Young Men

As part of the multipronged effort to strengthen the youth, priesthood leaders labored on a modest scale to place boys into priesthood harness during the mid-1870s. Salt Lake Stake President Angus M. Cannon wanted bishops “to draw the young men into positions in the Priesthood and thus an excellent experience, and, at the same time, preserve them from evil associations.” He personally had noticed a “marked improvement” in his own sons after they were ordained.87 Priesthood service, proponents argued, like involvement in the auxiliaries, would help keep boys from evil practices while inculcating skills to qualify them for adult church service. To care for meetinghouses, deacons were specifically advised to clean the building; keep dust off the seats; polish the stove; carry in coal; light the fires; have the sacrament trays, table, and clothes clean and neat; usher people to their seats; help keep order during church services; and even clean the “back-houses”—apparently the outhouses.

Cottonwood Ward deacons, 1936. Young men were regularly being ordained to positions in the priesthood by this era. Courtesy Church Archives.

More Meetings, More Ward Jobs

In his handwritten history of Gunnison Ward, Bishop Christian Madsen explained the evolution in meetings, which provided the opportunity for more people to hold positions in their wards: “In regard to the Ecclesiastical arrangements, there was of course separate meetings both forenoon and afternoon, untill Sunday Schools were introduced, which afterwards occupied the Sunday forenoon. All the year round. In winter time there was Sunday and Thursday night meetings, besides the meetings of Acting Priesthood and Quorums.” By November 1877, Gunnison Ward had the following schedule of meetings:88

Saints and Ordinances

The Sacrament

The day after the arrival of Brigham Young in Salt Lake Valley, a Sunday, the advance company partook of the sacrament; in the next few years, the sacrament was sometimes administered only once a month.89 By the mid-1850s, however, the Saints had the opportunity to partake of the sacrament weekly in the areawide sacrament meetings.

Twice during Brigham Young’s years, the sacrament was withheld for short periods. Once was for several months during the Mormon Reformation when the Saints were given time to repent and make restitution prior to renewing their covenants. The other interval came during the Utah War period, 1857–58, when the sacrament was withdrawn while the federal army established itself in Utah. Some of the leaders’ concerns about holding Sunday meetings are indicated by instructions given October 1858; bishops were told that “if there are any meetings, let them be prayer meetings” and not preaching services where speakers might say something offensive to the occupation army. “Be careful to controul all that may be said,” Presiding Bishop Edward Hunter cautioned, “for an enthusiastic Mormon is more dangerous than an Apostate.” Finally, early in August 1859, Brigham Young recommended that local leaders start holding public Sunday meetings again “in all the wards once a week at least.” That November, Presiding Bishop Hunter expressed gratitude “for the privilege of again having the sacrament administered in the Tabernacle.”90

During sacrament meetings, the sacramental water was passed down the rows in a “common cup.” These containers were goblets or glasses—tiny individual cups were not introduced until 1911. In 1852 the General Authorities wanted to obtain a special set of sacrament glasses and plates for use in the Sunday afternoon downtown services. They asked members to contribute silver from which to make sacrament vessels. Very quickly they collected silver coin worth $149 and several pounds of silver watch cases, spoons, rings, and other “ornaments.” The silver was melted down and then cast by silversmith Israel Barlow to form twelve silver cups. Then in 1855, leaders obtained “six new silver bread baskets.” In 1873, Salt Lake City’s Ninth Ward dedicated its “silver service for the communion table,” purchased with members’ donations. Provo wards spent more than four years trying to raise enough through donations to buy a nice sacrament serving set for use in the Provo Tabernacle.91

For many years, the methods for blessing and passing the sacrament varied from ward to ward. Often, bishops personally administered the sacrament, both in their own wards and in the settlement-wide sacrament meetings. One bishop noted in 1874 that “at 2 PM I administered the sacrament in the New Tabernacle assisted by my 2 council[ors] and [Acting] Teachers.” Some wards blessed bread and water first, then passed both at the same time. In other wards, bishops decided “to bless the bread and water at the Sacrament according to the universal custom” instead of “blessing both before distributing either.” While bread and water passed through the congregation, speakers continued their talks. In a valleywide 1854 sacrament meeting in Salt Lake City, for example, after the opening song and prayer, the bread was blessed, and while it passed around, Brigham Young preached a sermon. Then he stopped in midsermon, “blest the contents of the cup,” and resumed his talk while the water goblets passed around.92 An opinion on whether the congregation should kneel was issued in 1868, when Presiding Bishop Hunter told bishops he preferred the “kneeling posture,” which “was much more seemly to his mind, than standing as at present.”93

A few small cases of “misconduct” during the sacrament needed correcting. “Instead of the saints taking a sip of water, at the sacrament and then passing it,” one leader complained, “they indulged in the habit of drinking too freely, with the view of quenching their thirst.”94 Some men and women kept their hats on in church, especially in cool weather, and women wore gloves. Bishops were told in 1867 that because “the gentlemen were required to uncover their heads while partaking of it [the sacrament]” as a sign of respect “the ladies should be required to take off their gloves.”95

Local leaders wondered if children should receive the sacrament during Sunday School time. “In settlements where there are Meeting Houses sufficiently spacious to admit of children attending the public meetings on Sunday afternoon, we suggest that they be encouraged to go there,” the First Presidency advised local leaders. But where meetinghouses were too small, bishoprics should serve the sacrament weekly to the Sunday School children.96 As children usually did not attend the afternoon sacrament meetings, leaders introduced the sacrament into Sunday School. Bishop Kesler’s diary noted the innovation: “I visited our Ward Sunday School & spoke a few minets while the Sacrement was passing around, it being the 2nd time that it had been administered unto our children in the Sunday Schools.”97

Baptisms

Almost all baptisms in early Utah took place outdoors in streams or lakes. Records identify but few baptismal fonts anywhere in Utah. In October 1856, the First Presidency dedicated a baptismal font located near the Endowment House in Salt Lake City. A year later, two Apostles helped dedicate a baptismal font in the city’s fourteenth ward.98 In 1861, Brigham Young had a large wagon boarded up to make a font a few rods east of his schoolhouse. About 10′ × 12′, it had two dressing rooms attached. The President dedicated it on September 4, 1861, then told the ward bishops “they were quite welcome to use it for Baptizing, instead of the creek.”99

In 1875 the Presiding Bishop asked Frederick Kesler, a millwright, to build a new baptismal font for a group baptism of Native Americans then visiting Salt Lake City. With boards and pipes, he built the font to run east to west so the officiator would stand facing south, letting the candidate rise facing east, as in the Resurrection.100 Kesler installed his font to have running, not standing, water, for he believed that baptisms should be, like Jesus’ was, in running water.101

In 1877 leaders urged parents to baptize children when they turned eight, even in winter, rather than waiting several months. Although children might be “afraid of the cold water,” the ordinance should not be postponed.

Rebaptisms

Newcomers to Zion learned upon arrival that they should be rebaptized as an initiatory rite wherein they covenanted and committed to the new religious setting and society they were joining. It was “a kind of standing ordinance for all Latter-day Saints who emigrate here,”102 following the example set by Brigham Young’s 1847 pioneer company.103 In October 1854, a bishop with thirty-two Danish families in his ward reported that on a prior Sunday, 107 Danes, some of whom were from other wards, were rebaptized.104 “When Brethren first come in here,” Presiding Bishop Hunter instructed in 1856, “they should be rebaptized and set to work.”105

During Brigham Young’s presidency, leaders provided Utah Saints with three opportunities to be rebaptized: during the consecration movement in 1854, the Mormon Reformation in 1856–57, and the united order movement in the mid-1870s. On these occasions, Saints were asked to search their souls and repent sufficiently to be worthy of being baptized once again. During the reformation, almost all adult Saints were rebaptized. For example, some five hundred Saints in the Kaysville Ward—nearly every member of the ward—accepted rebaptism.106 During the united order campaign, leaders judged that the members seemed to be in a “stupor” and needed to be awakened through renewing their covenants. The Twelve set the example by being rebaptized and preached the necessity of the “elders renewing their covenants with the Almighty by rebaptism”; women were to do the same.107

Rebaptisms also took place for other reasons. Ill people were rebaptized to renew their health. People found guilty of serious sin were not cut off from Church membership if they were contrite but were instead instructed to be rebaptized.108

Temple Endowments and Marriages

Prior to 1877, Church activity did not involve participation in temple ordinances other than receiving one’s own endowments, being married, witnessing marriages, and doing some baptisms for the dead. Endowments were given in the upper floor of the Council House in Salt Lake City from 1851 to 1855, at the Endowment House in Salt Lake City from 1855 until 1877 and even later (until 1889), and in the St. George Temple starting in 1877. Men and women rarely went to these sacred places after receiving their own endowments and being married.109

Most of the adult Saints in Brigham Young’s time obtained their temple endowments. A total of about seventy thousand adults lived during the three decades studied here. From 1851 to 1876, 43,952 Saints received their endowments—about 70 percent of the total number of adults.110 Another sizable percentage of adults had been endowed in Nauvoo.

In May 1855, when the Endowment House first opened, the First Presidency strongly encouraged Saints to keep the house busy.111 Wards received quotas to fill on assigned days, so bishops sent unendowed men and women there to receive the ordinances. Even youths were sent. “We would like to see many of the young and sprightly young persons, who are strict to obey their parents,” said Endowment House director and First Presidency Counselor Heber C. Kimball.112 Records of the Kaysville elders quorum for 1865 show that thirty-six of its first members became elders while in their teens, most being ordained at the Endowment House prior to receiving the endowment.113

A bishop asked Brigham Young in 1877 at what age girls might receive endowments, and the prophet replied that “if naturally ripe and early development of mind and body” a girl at twelve could, but “as a general rule 15 is old enough.”114 One age study involves the Endowment House records for 1870, 1872, 1877, and 1878 and the St. George Temple endowment records for 1877 and 1878.115 These records show that teenagers, particularly girls, commonly received their endowments at young ages. For all recipients under age 30, the average age for receiving endowments was 22 for men and 19.5 for women. However, the most popular age for receiving endowments was 17 for women, followed by 18, 16, and 19. For men, the most popular age for receiving endowments was 23, followed by 24, 20, and 22. Of 1,085 endowments checked in the samples, one in three, or 373, were teenage recipients. A few youths received endowments at 9, 12, and 13, but the youngest age when significant numbers of endowments were given was 14 for both boys and girls.

A sampling of Endowment House marriage records for the year 1870 shows that endowment age corresponded with marriage age for girls. That year, the most common age for girls to marry was 17, and the average was 18. A few girls as young as 12 received temple marriage sealings. For women under age 24, the average marriage age was 18, but the average age of the men they married was 25, a difference of seven years. This age gap is smaller than that found by Dean May for Kanab during the 1870s, where women married at the average age of 19 and men at 29. The gap is larger by three years than the age difference Larry Logue found for marriages in St. George, where women and men married at age 19 and 23 respectively.116

Scholars continue to refine our estimates of the incidence of plural marriage. Findings vary in terms of total percent of families involved, depending upon time period and what communities were studied. Larry Logue’s research shows that in St. George nearly 30 percent of households were involved in polygamy in 1870, and 33 percent were in 1880. All recent evidence conclusively shows that most LDS adult men and women in Utah between 1847 and 1877 were monogamists, not polygamists.117

Patriarchal Blessings

It was common practice for Saints to obtain patriarchal blessings. Patriarchs often traveled in circuits so people could receive their blessings. Recipients paid a small fee to reimburse the patriarch for his traveling expenses. Sometimes Saints received two or more patriarchal blessings in their lifetimes. Within three weeks of arriving in the Salt Lake Valley in 1850, for example, Martha Spence Heywood sought for and received her blessing from Patriarch John Smith. Three years later, she received a second blessing from a Brother Cazier. Many, like Sarah Dugard Crowther, received a patriarchal blessing in Nauvoo and a second one in Utah.118

Proselyting Missions

Church missionary records show that during the entire 1847–77 period, only 2,657 men entered the mission field—less than one thousand per decade. In 1877, by comparison, Utah had perhaps twenty thousand adult males (a few thousand who lived in the time under discussion had died by 1877). Thus, in terms of missionary service, at best only one man in ten—but probably no more than one in twenty—filled a proselyting mission. Salt Lake City’s Sixteenth Ward had 113 families in 1857, or at least one hundred adult males. But during the 1860 to 1877 period, only twelve men left from that ward on proselyting missions—suggesting a rate lower than 10 percent.119 This small percentage counters an image we have popularized that says because the men were so often called away on missions, significant numbers of women ran farms and families, developing their independence and abilities in new ways.120

Personal Religion and Worthiness Standards

Saints knew what constituted being a “good Mormon,” even if they lived below their own expectations. They understood they should practice the basics of Christian behavior: be honest; do not kill, steal, lie, or commit adultery; read scriptures; pray; have family prayer; help the poor; attend church meetings; and teach the gospel in the home. To “teach the principles of the Gospel of Christ to their children at least 10 minutes every day” was one covenant parents in Gunnison made in recommitting to live the united order.121

Building up Zion

All who “crossed the plains,” “gathered to Zion,” and then built up Zion were considered good Latter-day Saints until they proved otherwise. “Abide among his saints,” the First Presidency urged.122 The faithful were those who stayed in Zion and obeyed admonitions against going to California or backtracking on the Mormon Trail. They built up Zion by erecting homes, developing farms, caring for their cattle, digging irrigation systems, maintaining village roads, constructing meetinghouses, and helping neighbors. Those willing to physically strengthen the Mormon settlements were considered such stalwarts that problems they might have with smoking, drinking, profaning, Sabbath breaking, and even immoral living did not normally cost them their standing in the community and the Church.123 Citing Brigham Young, Daniel H. Wells taught,

“Go to with your mights and build up the kingdom of God, by quarrying the rock, by bringing the timber from the kanyons and making it into lumber, by making adobies, mixing the mortar, burning the lime, and drawing from the elements around us the material necessary to beautify, and build up, and to exalt in every way those principles that essay to establish righteousness over the whole earth.” If the word is to build forts, build them; if to raise grain, raise grain.

He added that in his opinion a “woman that makes a yard of cloth accomplishes a good work towards building up the independence of the kingdom of God, and by her works her faith is made manifest.”124

Catechisms

Members had no annual temple worthiness interviews through which Church leaders could monitor, encourage, and even enforce behavior. So what leverage did the Church have to help members behave righteously? Two Church programs seem to have filled that function: the general rebaptism campaigns noted previously and catechisms,125 which ward teachers or local leaders used to interrogate the members in a manner somewhat like that of the modern temple recommend interview.

John Jaques published a catechism for children in 1854 that became widely used throughout the Church up through the 1890s, even in Europe, Hawaii, and Samoa. It was primarily doctrinal but included two chapters on commandments—the Ten Commandments and the Word of Wisdom.126

During the Mormon Reformation, members were asked a series of questions about their righteousness. The questions dealt with both negative and positive behaviors, the negative ones being murder, adultery, betraying fellow Saints, bearing false witness against a neighbor, becoming drunk, stealing, lying, incurring debts with no intention to pay, underpaying hired help, coveting, profaning, and speaking against Church leaders and teachings. On the positive side, members were asked if they labored faithfully for their wages, paid tithes, kept the Sabbath, and attended ward meetings. Men were expected to preside in their families.127

In addition, various reformation leaders spoke out against specific activities they believed offended the Spirit. Novel reading was one. Another was having more enthusiasm for socials than for worship meetings: David Ivins of Utah County, speaking to a meeting of bishops in Salt Lake City, said that “one class of the people fill the Ball Room and, and another class attend prayer meeting.”128

Worthiness Requirements

The Church had general requirements or expectations regarding worthiness for individuals seeking to obtain their endowments. One year after the Endowment House opened, its director, President Heber C. Kimball, advised the bishops regarding who they should recommend by letter to come for endowments. His requirements for both men and women follow:129

Pay tithing from year to year.

Pray in your families.

Do not speak against the authorities of the Church and kingdom of God.

Do not steal.

Do not lie.

Do not swear.

Do not interfere with the neighbors’ things or spouses.

Respect presiding officers and bishops.

When the St. George Temple opened early in 1877, Saints wishing to go there needed to obtain a recommend from their bishops, who had received blank recommend forms for that purpose. The printed recommend form read, “I hereby recommend ______ as a faithful member of the Church, having paid full Tithings and donations, and as being worthy of receiving (here state the ordinances desired in the Temple), if endorsed by Prest. B. Young.”130

Another set of worthiness requirements was framed during the united order enlistments in the mid-1870s. One set of united order rules said the member should refrain from swearing, “adultery, whoredom, and lust,” vulgar and obscene language and conduct, being contentious or quarrelsome, speaking evil of others, being selfish, wearing a “foolish and extravagant fashion,” and buying items from abroad that were being made in Utah. On the positive side, they should pray with their families morning and evening, pray privately, keep the Word of Wisdom “according to the Spirit and meaning thereof,” treat family members with kindness and affection, seek the salvation of all mankind and good for all, observe personal cleanliness, keep the Sabbath day holy, return what is borrowed, patronize members of the order, foster and encourage the production and manufacturing of all consumer goods, be simple in dress and manners, labor for mutual benefit, perform labor honestly and diligently, and sustain with faith, works, and prayers those in charge of the united orders.131

Tithing

Leaders firmly believed the best way of judging people was by the spirit they showed in the settling of their tithing. As leaders taught regularly in sermons and publications, tithing involved three parts: (1) an initiatory tithe of all one possessed when he or she started paying tithing, usually at the time of conversion; (2) a tithe of increase and income; and (3) a labor tithe.132 Labor tithing originated in Nauvoo. For every ten days a man and his team did not work for income, such as days spent in riding and leisure, he was expected to work one day for the Church as labor tithing. Or, he could use labor tithing to substitute for paying tithing in kind.133

Leaders constantly counseled members to be punctual and strict in paying tithing and offerings to the poor.134 By the mid-1850s, the Saints paid tithes to their bishops and settled with the bishop at year’s end. Late in 1860, when Salt Lake City’s bishops gave verbal reports about their wards, most of them commented about the spirit of tithe paying.135 They made summary statements like these:

Good desire to settle tithing in season.

Good spirit toward tithing.

Most of ward felt well especially toward tithing.

Hard to get donations.

Good spirit to pay tithing.

Good feeling regarding tithing.

Bishop Alonzo Raleigh, and no doubt other leaders, “believed it would come in the course of events that Tithing would be a matter of fellowship, just as much as stealing or drunkenness is now.”136 However, in 1852, President Young explained that nontithe payers were not to be subjected to Church discipline. “There is no compulsory or arbitrary power to be exercised over the brethren, in order to coerce the payment of tithing,” he instructed.137 But he sometimes wished nontithe payers could be disciplined. In 1868 he told bishops that he “really wished they would cut off from the church those members who did not pay their tithing.” In September 1876, he stressed how strongly he believed every “good Mormon” must be a tithe payer: “What is a fact, we have become so dull and indifferent, that men are permitted to remain in the church who gave way to habits of intoxication and never pay a cent of tithing, although Jehovah told Joseph that Tithing was a standing law for ever.”138

We do not know how many Saints did or did not tithe. But the percentage of tithe payers exceeded at least 40 percent of the adults.139 Tithing records for Spring City show that between 82 and 94 percent paid some tithing during the 1860–68 period.140

Fasting and Fast Offerings

Because of the Lord’s stern admonition that the Church take care of the poor and needy, fast offerings became almost as basic an obligation for practicing Mormons as their tithes. On occasion, members were warned that “those who failed to pay their offerings were not entitled to the sacrament.”141

At first, LDS members brought their fast offerings to the meetinghouse. Offerings were food items rather than cash, and bishops distributed the donated food to the needy in the ward, sometimes assisted by the acting priesthood. Later, the bishops assigned deacons or teachers to pick up food donations from the members’ homes. In 1871 a Salt Lake City bishop told of “his method to send the teachers round on a fast day morning from house to house, and by these means he obtains sufficient to sustain the poor.”142 In 1876 the Aaronic Priesthood young men in Payson, Utah, collected “about 150 lbs of flour, 2 sacks of potatoes, 2 quarts of Dried fruit 15 or 20 lbs of Meat and 5¢ in money.” The Payson Aaronic Priesthood members gave considerable help in the 1870s to one needy lady in the ward, Sister B. Some boys were sent to purchase a cow for her, others to gather wood for her stove. They regularly brought her flour. They gathered fast offerings for her benefit. They plowed land for her and planted some lucerne for her cow.143

At times, members participated in special fasts. “Today all the inhabitants of Cache Valley are required to hold a solemn Fast,” a young Cache Valley woman wrote in 1868, “and pray to Him who heareth righteous prayers, that the grasshoppers may not destroy the crops.”144

Word of Wisdom

John Jaques’s catechism posited that good members were expected to obey the Word of Wisdom. However, the Word of Wisdom never became a binding law on Brigham’s Saints.145 For example, moderate drinking was allowed, although drunkenness was not tolerated.

In October 1851, Salt Lake Valley bishops discussed the Word of Wisdom. One bishop noted tithing was a test of fellowship (although not a matter for Church discipline), but the Word of Wisdom was not. Bishop Edward Hunter’s counsel on the Word of Wisdom was “as much as possible observe it” and teach the upcoming generation to do it.146 His counsel to bishops eight years later regarding liquor was that men should “either take it moderately or let it alone entirely.”147 Regarding tobacco, President Young said it was injurious, “but since it is so extensively used, and many seem to place upon it as high a value as bread, why not raise it here, and stop its immense importations.”148

At the April 1867 conference, President Young instructed bishops that “every Elder in Israel must know that whiskey, tobacko, tea and coffee are not good for them to take” and that “he sometimes felt like making the observance of the Word of Wisdom a matter of fellowship, but it would be thought severe.”149 So, he assigned the bishops to ask members to obey the Word of Wisdom. They did, with good results, at least temporarily. Two weeks later, Salt Lake Valley bishops reported that the majority of Saints had been obeying the Word of Wisdom since conference. “Others were gradually leaving off their use,” they said, except “some whose advanced years and long usage, deemed it unwise to abstain.”150 Less than a year later, Bishop Hunter “rejoyced at the general observance of the word of wisdom,” at least in Great Salt Lake Valley.151 The late-1860s campaign brought a slight improvement that was short-lived. (Obedience to the Word of Wisdom did not become a binding worthiness behavior until the twentieth century.)

Morality

Married adults guilty of adultery were dealt with harshly, usually by excommunication. Personal and Church records for Brigham Young’s era do not mention youthful sexual immorality, so its extent cannot be known or guessed. At the dawn of the 1870s, one leader boasted that “our young live virtuously until they marry,” a standard youths knew they should not violate.152 Occasionally, teenage girls were victimized by older men, such as stepfathers or masters in the houses where the girls lived as servants. Youths guilty of having consensual sex before marriage received reprimands and loss of religious reputations rather than excommunications. However, they were expected to marry to “make things right.” When premarital sex sins were confessed only after the couple had married, forgiveness often came with confession and rebaptism and without excommunication. One young man, for example, “committed himself previous to his endowments” and then married the young woman. The authority hearing the case noted that the Church had been “lenient” with such cases in the past, so the apology of the man was accepted and he was forgiven by being rebaptized.153

Miscellaneous Church Assignments and Expectations

To be a member was to deal with appeals to help with a number of Church projects. Perhaps the assignment families accepted that had the most far-reaching impact was to fill calls from Church leaders to uproot and move out to colonies the Church was establishing.

But Church members also frequently filled short-term assignments. Well known is the late 1856 appeal that drew heroic responses from volunteers who rescued the handcart people trapped by Wyoming snows. When a gathering of Spanish Fork Saints heard the call for help, thirteen “young and able bodied men” volunteered and rushed five wagons and teams toward Wyoming.154 Between 1861 and 1868, hundreds of men and youths from all over Utah went east as volunteers, manning scores of “down and back” wagon trains that brought thousands of immigrants to Zion. Kaysville Ward members, for example, drove nine teams in 1868. A year earlier, that same ward provided thirteen teamsters and teams that hauled thirty-nine loads of cut rock to the Salt Lake Temple site. When Church leaders asked for men to help fill labor contracts for transcontinental railroad construction jobs, men from dozens of wards responded.155 Appropriately, life sketches by or about men who filled such assignments describe the pride the men felt for giving such assistance to the Church and its members.

Members heard many requests and instructions. Devout members obeyed, and the less faithful disregarded them. Saints were asked in the mid-1850s to consecrate their properties to the Church and, in the 1870s, to pool their properties into united orders. Members offered much resistance to the latter effort, causing President Young to admit a year before his death that “he had been inspired by the Gift and power of God to call upon the saints to enter into the united order, or order of Enoch, and that now was the time, but he could not get the people to enter into it. He had cleared his skirts if he never said another word about it.”156

In the late 1850s, Saints were told not to exchange their products with the United States Army stationed at Camp Floyd. Early in 1861, President Young “asked the Question, whether there was any harm in taking Wheat, Butter, Eggs, &c to Camp Floyd to sell to our enemies. He answered Yes, for such persons would weep and lament as long as Eternity lasts, if ever they are saved in the Kingdom of God, and the blight inflicted on their Character in the sight of Heaven and all Holy Beings, will never be obliterated.”157

At times, profanity became a problem. Perhaps the worst outbreak was in 1868–69 among Mormon men in railroad construction crews. Their language bothered President Young so much that he asked bishops “to cut off from the Church any man, who has been working on the railroad, and indulged in cursing, swearing or drunkeness.” He was determined “that no man shall have the fellowship of the saints who takes the name of God in vain, and indulges in wickedness.”158

When Church leaders developed, published, and taught the Deseret Alphabet, members felt obligated to try to learn how to read it. By late 1869, “most of the wards” in Salt Lake City “were using [Deseret Alphabet] books either in their day or Sunday schools.”159 Another expectation outside the usual was for Saints to accept diverse nationalities. In 1864, for instance, Brigham Young remarked

on the oneness, and unity that should exist among the saints of God, to cast under our feet every feeling of national prejudice, that inasmuch as the saints have been gathered from different nations, baptized into one faith, and received of the same spirit, we should learn to cherish towards them the kindest of feelings, as saints of God, regardless of the nation that gave them birth.160

Leadership and Followership

Any claim that the early LDS priesthood leaders were dictators who cracked whips, making the Saints jump, is doubly mythical—about the nature of both the leaders and the followers. Utah’s early Mormon settlers were not docile sheep easily led anywhere. Southerners, New England Yankees, Scots, Welsh, British, and Scandinavians had inbred streaks of independence that let them balance personal and family needs with Church needs, the scale tipping one way some times and the other way at other times.

Illustrative is Provo’s situation between 1868 and 1872, as revealed in minutes of the bishops’ meetings in that city.161 With a charge to “build up Provo” and “make Provo one of the centres of attraction,” Brigham Young sent Abraham O. Smoot to Provo in 1868 to be a mayor and what we would now call a stake president. But Smoot found he could not budge the bishops much and that they, likewise, had trouble making the Saints respond to their requests.162 Smoot met twice monthly with the bishops of the five Provo wards to consult, monitor, and admonish. He instructed that the minutes of those meetings “record all that we do and who does” and “whether we respond to the calls made upon us or not”; the record shows plodding progress at best.163

After one year in office, Bishop Smoot felt frustrated by Provoans’ unresponsiveness. “When has there been a job completed in this place[?]” he charged. “What is the reason we are not united enough and confidence is lacking[?]” Month by month, year by year, apathy smothered many of his calls for progress, causing him to complain in 1872, “Turn any way you will and ask what you will and you get nothing in any of our public calls.”164 Among public calls not well responded to were those to construct the Provo Canyon road, build a new tithing house, erect adequate meetinghouses and schools, finish off the tabernacle grounds with a well and outhouses, build and operate the woolen mill in Provo, erect adequate schools, and carry out cooperation-type projects. Even a rather simple community effort like obtaining sacrament vessels for the Provo-wide sacrament meetings floundered for over four years.165

When Brigham Young and the School of the Prophets pushed cooperative merchandising, Smoot tried to gain Provo’s support for the idea. “As we have a head that must dictate,” Smoot said of Brigham Young, and “as Bishops and Teachers, we must instruct the people on these things, give the Co-operative System your influence and support.” But after laboring for a year to convert the people, one bishop reported, “There is quite an opposition to Co-operation and the [woolen] Factory.”166 Smoot added, “We have not more than 10% of the people who are in favor of or believe and act in Cooperation.”167 As if testifying to disprove charges of priesthood dictatorship, Smoot lamented:

I would not of myself keep calling on the people to cooperate, build factory, &c. only that the burden is laid upon me by the Priesthood and I want to carry it out. There is a few of clear brain that can see the good of this, but the masses do not see the point, and I think they are getting tired of hearing me talk about it. I would not say another word only as I am required. If the Bishops of Provo and the County do not help me I am left alone. I do not know that there is anything said in the meetings of the people in favor of Cooperation, Factory, &c. I can occasionally hear of it being preached down. I want the Bishops to help me.168

The bishops’ meeting minutes reveal four causes for Provo’s slowness to make projects happen. First, Provo had a good share of “hard people” who possessed traditional English independence. A favorite Mormon motto was “mind your own business,” and common people applied that to strangers, neighbors, and Church leaders alike.169 Second, bishops lacked respect among the Saints. Smoot arrived at a time when leaders’ influence had waned for some reason. “Heads here have not the proper influence,” Smoot noticed. “I think I can see a feeling of distrust in the people to any measure proposed by authority, and while this lasts with the people we are dead ducks.” Provo had good people “disposed to be good Mormons, but they are filled and troubled with doubts and fears.” Although bishops “are rising in the esteem of true men in the kingdom,” he said, still they lacked “the necessary persuasive powers” to motivate their people.170 Third, and perhaps more important than the other factors, Provoans had limited resources. Leaders constantly assessed and taxed the people and called for donations for Church projects, apparently beyond the people’s ability to pay. “We are poor” was a complaint bishops heard when soliciting funds or goods.171 The fourth hindrance was leadership style. Bishops rarely minded Smoot’s “snubbing our ears and stirring us up to our duties.” But rather than dictate, Smoot functioned democratically, feeling that “the bishops as a body are really legislators for Zion.” He encouraged, but did not demand, results from bishops holding lifetime tenure. Bishops, in turn, lacked bargaining power with members, unlike today’s leaders who can deny temple recommends to unsupportive Saints.172

Ebbs and Flows of Commitment

Historian Richard Bushman observed that often published Mormon histories describe well the conflict between the Church and the world but pay little attention to the tensions between God and the Church.173 In past dispensations, the faith of God’s chosen people ebbed and flowed, and the Saints’ commitments during Brigham Young’s years traced similar ups and downs.

One decade, the 1870s, provides a case study. It was a decade when the Church experienced much “progress”—gaining railroad connections, opening a temple, founding united orders, creating new auxiliary programs, welcoming a continuous stream of immigrants, and restructuring stakes, wards, and quorums. But of spiritual health and progress during that decade, leaders became unusually critical as indicated by their sermons and comments during meetings.

Early in 1871, Presiding Bishop Hunter warned that the people’s indifference toward their duties “almost deprived them of their fellowship.” He observed that “many were getting sleepy and falling away from the faith.”174 Bishop William Thorne of Salt Lake was “satisfied with his brethren that the people were asleep and did not feel that interist in the work that they should.”175 Minute books are sprinkled with such judgmental phrases as “there needs to be a wakening up and a shaking of the dry bones,” time to wake up from “our lethargy,” “Mormonism is at low ebb,” “the great necessity of a reformation,” “things have been at loose ends,” “people were all drifting,” and “the darkest time since the Church was organized.”176 In May 1874, one officer reported that “Bro. Brigham told us if we drifted further we should be over the precipice.”177

To counter slackness and to bring greater faith and dedication, Church leaders introduced new programs and projects. But apathy blunted these reform efforts. Regarding the united orders, one Salt Lake bishop confided in his diary, “I am sorry to see so mutch opposition manifested towards the united order as thare is in this city it betokens no good & in consequence of which we maybe made to se[e] mutch sorrow and affliction.”178 Reacting to poor support for temple projects, Brigham Young bluntly chastised the Saints; he “spoke sharply of the tardiness of the people in living our religion and he said we were nigh ready to be spewed out of the mouth of the Lord.”179

Another reform tool in mid-decade was rebaptism. Members were requested to repent and reorder their lives preparatory to renewing their commitments to the Church by being rebaptized. Presiding Bishop Hunter had high hopes for the plan: “We have been in a lukewarm state for a long time, and he did not know of anything more suited to our present condition than rebaptism.”180 A high priests quorum officer put it plainly: he “compared the Church to day like unto a ship after a long voyage, in a Dry Dock for repairs and needing it.”181 A year after the rebaptism push, however, the general feeling was that it had not done much to improve the people.182

Not all leaders felt so judgmental. Bishop Alonzo Raleigh, for example, said in 1875 that “he did not think a greater proportion were apostatizing, and giving way to Drunkenness and Debauchery, than they did do at Nauvoo, or since the first organization of the church.”183

Records for the 1870s identify many who did right when too many around them were careless. One is John Picknell, an older man. Noting the critical spirit some members manifested toward Brigham Young, he counseled, “Don’t find fault, especially with the president, he may do wrong, as well as we, it matters not what those over us may do, its none of our business. If they give us the priesthood, & they apostatize the next day it dont matter to us, we are right if we do right!”184

When some priesthood bearers complained they were too busy to attend quorum meetings, Brother Picknell chided them: “You say you have not much time to come to meeting, how much time do you suppose I’ve to do? I’ve Seventies’, Priests’ Teachers’ & Deacons’ meetings to attend. Teacher in two wards, a Priest in one, [prayer] circle meetings to attend &c I’m out almost every night in the month. I’m after the pay! I can’t afford to lose it.”185

Reacting to unfaithfulness around him, he warned that “one half [of the Church] will turn away, let it not be you nor me” and then added the folksy but straightforward truth: “Every tub must stand on its own bottom.”186

Stalwarts also are seen in Salt Lake City’s Seventeenth Ward Relief Society minute book, which records the sisters’ responses to a terrible epidemic in the 1870s that took the lives of many of their children. Determined to unite their faith by praying privately in their homes, they proposed that “at ten o’clock of each day, we retire to a quiet place and pray, that our faith may be concentrated, that we may have wisdom and faith sufficient by our united prayers to stay the diptheria which is now raging among our children, and that on Thursday we abstain from food until after prayers.”187

Salt Lake City’s Eighth Ward assigned Samuel D. Chambers, a former Mississippi slave, to serve as an assistant to the deacons, who took care of the ward meetinghouse and did ushering. A regular guest at the stake deacons meetings, more than once he was the only person there other than the stake officers. His testimonies, which quorum clerk Thomas C. Jones recorded, impressed his fellow deacons, most of whom were adults. Samuel joined the Church at age thirteen while a slave in Mississippi. Although lacking contact with the Church for a quarter century, he maintained his testimony. Becoming a free man in 1865, he earned enough money to gather to Zion in 1870 at age forty. His fervor is felt in his recorded testimonies given between 1873 and 1877: “I’m glad that I ever took upon me the name of Christ.” “The knowledge I received is from my God. It is a high and holy calling, without the testimony of God we are nothing.” He enjoyed serving the Church because he “did not come here [to Utah] to sit down and be still.” His desire was to “be active in doing what he can for the building up of the kingdom of God.” He attended meetings, ushered at the tabernacle, tithed fully, and endured as a stalwart until his death in 1929 at age ninety-eight.188

Just before President Brigham Young died in August 1877, he expressed his wish that the Saints gathered in Zion lived their religion better. “It is a marvel that the Lord did not scatter this people to the four winds,” he observed. “It would have been done but for the prayers and faith and works of the humble saints”—the John Picknells, the Seventeenth Ward sisters, and the Samuel Chamberses of the Church.

This article was originally published in Nearly Everthing Imaginable: The Everyday Life of Utah’s Mormon Pioneers, ed. Ronald W. Walker and Doris R. Dant (Provo, UT: BYU Press, 1999), 244–95.