A Preliminary Response On Brigham Young’s Financial Dealings

“Brigham Young” and “Heber C. Kimball” take refuge from the rain on the Tennessee set of the Interpreter Foundation’s “Six Days in August” film project. Photograph by Russell D. Richins

One or two folks have shown up on my blog attacking Brigham Young as greedy and corrupt. Brigham enriched himself, they say, by giving himself interest-free loans from Church funds in order to establish businesses. The lesson, supposedly, is that, if you want to become rich, you should become the head of a church.

The commenters provide a list, from the late D. Michael Quinn, of businesses that Brigham owned and which he is said to have set up with loans from the Church:

Aivenpah Valley Herd Ground
Anti-Friction Journal Box and Divided Car Axle
B.K. Tannery
Bank of Deseret
Bear River Ferry and Toll Bridge
Benson, Far and West
Big Cottonwood Canal
Big Cottonwood Lumber
Brigham Young Bank
Brigham Young Barbershop
Brigham Young Blacksmith Shop
Brigham Young Carding Mill
Brigham Young Carpentry Shop
Brigham Young Cotton Factory
Brigham Young Cotton Farm
Brigham Young Doby Show Shop
Brigham Young Eating House
Brigham Young Express
Brigham Young Farm
Brigham Young Gristmill
Brigham Young Herd
Brigham Young Herd Ground
Brigham Young Lime Kiln
Brigham Young Lumber Yard
Brigham Young Map Store
Brigham Young Molasses Factory
Brigham Young Nail Factory
Brigham Young Paint Shop
Brigham Young Paper Mill
Brigham Young Plastering Shop
Brigham Young Pottery Shop
Brigham Young Print Shop
Brigham Young Real Estate
Brigham Young School
Brigham Young Shoe Shop
Brigham Young Silk Cocoonery
Brigham Young Stable
Brigham Young Tannery
Brigham Young Tavern
Brigham Young Woolen Factory
Burton, Sons, and Young
Call’s Landing and Church Warehouse
Chase Mill
Chruch Slaughterhouse
Church Stone-cutting Yard
City Creek Foundry and Machine Shop
City Creek Wood
Constitution Building
Co-operative Stock Herd Association
Davis County Canal
Deseret Bee-keepers
Deseret Currency
Deseret Dramatic Association
Deseret Mint
Deseret National Bank
Deseret Paper Mills
Deseret Store
Deseret Training and Manufacturing
Deseret Telegraph
Deseret Theological Institute
Deseret Woolen Mills
Eagle Gate Toll Road
Eldredge and Clawson
Empire Gristmill
Excelsior Mill
Forest Farm
Fort Bridger
Gardo House
Globe Bakery
Globe Saloon
Grass Creek Coal
Great Salt Lake City Waterworks
HC Kimball Flourmills
Heberville Cotton Factory
Hooper, Eldredge and Company
Howard Distillery
Jordan Irrigation
Juab, Sanpete, and Sevier Railroad
Kansas Prairie Ranch
Laie Plantation
Latter-day Saints Bakery
Lorenzo Snow Flourmill
Maid of Iowa (steamboat)
Malad River Ferry
Maple Creek Sawmill
Mount Trumball Lumber
Mutual Life and Savings
Parowan Cotton
Perpetual Emigrating Fund
Pipe Springs Ranch
Price Convention
Prove Bench Canal and Irrigation
Provo Canyon Road Company
Public Machine Shop
Rush Valley Herd Company
Salt Lake and Tooele Valley Railroad
Salt Lake City Railroad
Salt Lake House
Salt Lake Theatre
San Pete Coal
Seventies’ Hall Association
Seventies’ Hall of Science
Social Hall
Thomas Howard Paper Mill
Timely Gull (Lake Boat)
Timpanogos Manufacturing
Tooele Gristmill of Brigham Young
Tooele Toll Road
Union Academy
Union Pacific Railroad
Utah Central Railroad
Utah Southern Railroad
Utah Western Railway
Warm Springs Bath House
Wasatch Woolen Mills
Weber River Toll Bridge
Winsor Castle Stock Growing Company
Young and Benson
Young and Little
Young and Morley
Young and Winder
Young, Little and Winder
Zion’s Co-operative Fish Association
ZCMI
Zion’s Co-operative Rio Virgin Manufacturing
Zion’s Bank

The list is implicitly intended to damn the Church’s second president, but I wonder how many of these businesses Brigham Young really considered his own, and how many of them were set up by him as projects to further the settlement of the Great Basin and to benefit the Saints and their local economy. My vague understanding is that corporate law was not yet as well-established as it is today, certainly not in Utah Territory, and that the first several presidents of the Church “owned” Church property on behalf of the Church. Personal finances were not kept absolutely distinct from Church finances as they are today and under contemporary law and accounting practices.

My wife and I are in Cedar City for the Utah Shakespeare Festival, and I don’t have access to my copy of Mike Quinn’s book on Church finances or to the various biographies of Brigham Young that I own or to my copy of Leonard Arrington’s classic Great Basin Kingdom. Moreover, I’m no specialist on this topic and have never been especially interested in it. So I wrote to my long-time friend Tom Alexander, perhaps the foremost historian of Utah and himself a biographer of Brigham Young.

In his reply to my inquiry, Professor Alexander acknowledged that the citations to Brigham Young in the index of Quinn’s book are so extensive that he did not have time to reread all of them in formulating his response, let alone the time to reread the entire volume. But here is the salient part of what he wrote to me:

The corporation of the president was not established until the 1920s. In the 19^thcentury, it was extremely difficult to separate Joseph Smith’s, Brigham Young’s, and the other three 19^th-century presidents’ holdings from the church’s. I don’t know how you could show that he borrowed church money to invest, the two estates were so intermingled. Moreover, Young and the other general authorities received salaries from the church.

After Young’s death some family members sued to try to get more of the property and money. They argued that it was his, not the church’s. The settlement of the suit gave them more of the assets than the executors believed were Young’s, as Quinn says.

Unlike today, in general conference the church gave a verbal accounting of the church’s income and expenditures.

Quinn’s book lists Brigham Young’s properties. I believe that what he has written makes it clear that it would have been impossible to determine that Young borrowed from the church because the two estates were so intermingled.

Leonard Arrington wrote an article on the settlement of the Brigham Young estate that can give you more information.

I should say that this intermingling in the case of Joseph Smith was a large part of the dispute between Emma Smith and Brigham Young.

As I believe I’ve mentioned here, I recently interviewed Dr. LaJean Carruth, who has specialized for decades now in retrieving text from nineteenth-century Pitman shorthand records. She has particularly been focused on Brigham Young, and has come not only to respect him but to love him. She believes that his personality has been falsified — for the worse — in some of our treatments of him. (What is the greatest misrepresentation of Brigham Young? someone asked her at the recent FAIR conference. “The Journal of Discourses,” she answered.) “Others know a lot about Brigham Young,” she told me. “But I know Brigham Young.”

I also recall an interesting comment from the late Irving Stone, in a book about the American West entitled Men to Match My Mountains: Some, he said, have faulted Brigham Young because he grew wealthy. But, wrote Stone, Brigham was so phenomenally talented as an organizer and entrepreneur and, as we would say today, as a “venture capitalist,” that he could scarcely have failed to prosper. In fact, Stone added, he could easily have become far wealthier still, had that been his primary aim, given his central role in the development of much of the intermountain West. He was literally that good.

Posted from Cedar City, Utah