Brigham Young

Brigham Young was an American religious leader, politician, and colonizer whose 30-year leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints across 1844–1877 launched the Mormon settlement of the American West — particularly his 1847 founding of Salt Lake City and the State of Deseret in present-day Utah. He was born Brigham Young on June 1, 1801, in Whitingham, Vermont. His father John Young was an American Revolutionary War veteran and Vermont and New York farmer, and his mother Abigail Howe was a homemaker.

His early adulthood across 1815–1832 — comprising his New York frontier farm-laborer, glass-painter, and carpenter work — shaped his subsequent practical-administrator approach to Mormon-pioneer western settlement. His 1832 conversion to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints under founder Joseph Smith — at age 31, two years after the 1830 publication of the Book of Mormon — launched his lifelong Mormon religious career. His 1835 ordination as one of the original Twelve Apostles of the early Mormon Church established his early Mormon-leadership role.

The June 27, 1844 assassination of Joseph Smith at the Carthage, Illinois jail — and the subsequent August 8, 1844 Mormon succession crisis at Nauvoo, Illinois — produced his 1844 election as the second President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His 1846–1847 Mormon Trail westward migration — leading approximately 16,000 Mormon pioneers from Nauvoo, Illinois, across 1,300 miles to the Salt Lake Valley — produced his July 24, 1847 founding of Salt Lake City. The July 24, 1847 statement "This is the right place" upon his first sight of the Salt Lake Valley became the founding-narrative line of Utah Mormon history.

His subsequent 30-year Salt Lake City leadership across 1847–1877 produced over 350 Mormon-pioneer settlements across present-day Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Wyoming, Nevada, and Southern California. His 1851–1858 service as the first Governor of the Utah Territory was complicated by his 1857–1858 Utah War — the federal-army Mormon-territory standoff under President James Buchanan. His personal life across 51 wives and 56 children shaped 19th-century Mormon polygamy practice (which the LDS Church officially renounced in the 1890 Manifesto). He died on August 29, 1877, at age 76, in Salt Lake City, of peritonitis. The 1875 founding of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah recognized his lifetime educational advocacy.

His name Brigham derives from the Old English place-name meaning "settlement by the bridge." Brigham has been a rare but enduring American boys' name across the 20th century, primarily within Mormon-tradition families.