Brigham Young

Brigham Young led the Latter-day Saints to Utah and governed the territory they built for thirty years. Born in Vermont in 1801 into a poor farming family, he had eleven days of formal schooling and worked as a carpenter, painter and glazier. He read the Book of Mormon in 1830 and was baptised in 1832. He joined Joseph Smith at Kirtland, became one of the Twelve Apostles in 1835, and led an extraordinarily successful mission to England from 1839 to 1841, which brought thousands of British converts and much of the movement's later membership. When Smith was murdered by a mob in Illinois in 1844, Young won the succession dispute as president of the Twelve, and the majority of the church followed him. Driven from Nauvoo by mob violence in 1846, he organised an evacuation of some sixteen thousand people across Iowa in winter, and led the first company into the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847. Over the following decades he directed the settlement of several hundred towns across Utah and neighbouring territories, laying out grids, allocating water rights communally, and dispatching families by assignment rather than choice — a colonisation effort of remarkable administrative discipline. He was appointed territorial governor in 1851 and was removed in 1857 when President Buchanan sent an army, provoking the Utah War. During it, a local militia massacred about 120 emigrants at Mountain Meadows; Young's precise responsibility is still disputed, and only one man was ever executed for it. He publicly announced plural marriage in 1852 and had over fifty wives. He founded the university that became Brigham Young University, and died in 1877.

• Lived: 1801 CE – 1877 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: religious_leader, colonizer