Memoirs of John R. Young, Utah Pioneer, 1847 — Context and Discussion

(4 User reviews) 1081

In Category - Memoirs

Authors: Young, John R., 1837- Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2014 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Young, John R., 1837-; Latter Day Saint pioneers -- Utah -- Biography Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

Edition facts

Words 86,894

Reading time 378 min

Text sections 10

This digital edition of Memoirs of John R. Young, Utah Pioneer, 1847 — Context and Discussion is described by source-level measurements including 86,894 words, 6 hr 18 min estimated reading time, and 10 detected text sections.

The text analysis averages about 18.5 words per sentence, while the detected sections provide another way to judge how the source is divided.

Project Gutenberg metadata also associates the work with “Young, John R., 1837-,” connecting these edition facts with the source record’s subject description.

Source: Project Gutenberg record #46391

John R. Young's 1920 memoir recounts his 1847 pioneer trek to Utah, missionary service in Hawaii and England, and close association with Brigham Young, using plainspoken diction, verse interludes, and vivid sensory details.

Editorial Edition Score 4.8/5

★★★★★ ★★★★★

Calculated from edition completeness, EPUB availability, text structure and catalogue metadata. Not a user rating.

How this score is calculated

Description quality20 pts
Title & short description10 pts
Source metadata20 pts
Text length15 pts
Chapters / structure15 pts
EPUB file integrity20 pts

Total of 100 points, scaled to a 2.5-5.0 range. Editions with an empty description or a missing EPUB file are not scored.

Edition quality

File: pg46391

Read the Text

Birth.--Childhood Recollections.

Camp on Sugar Creek.--Brigham's Charge to the Exiles.--Death of a Noble Woman.--Free from Mobs

Petition Governors.--William C. Staines.--Captain James Allen

Thomas L. Kane's Description of the City of Nauvoo, and the Exiled Mormons

Daniel H. Wells.--Baptism for the Dead.--Lorenzo D. Young's Mission.--Wilford Woodruff.--Saved by Prayer

Brigham's Wise Counsels.--Joseph Toronto.--Joseph Smith, Seer and Organizer.--Prophecy of August 6, 1842

A Religious Commonwealth.--General Clark's Degree.--Brigham's Indian Policy.--Its Peaceable Fruits.--The Glory of the Immigrant's First View of the Valley

Mormon Stalwarts.--A War on the Plains.--Death of Celestia Kimball.--Two Indian Girls Tortured.--Sally's Death.--Ira Eldredge's Dog and the Wolf.--Delicious Rawhide Soup.--Eat Thistles.--The Devastating Crickets.--Delivered Wrought by the Sea Gulls

My First Mission.--Uncle Brigham's Counsel.--Parley P. Pratt, Teacher and Orator.--My First View of the Ocean.--San Francisco.--Tracting the City.--Scrap With a Hotel Keeper.--Labor as a Cook in the Home of Mr. McLean.--The Man who Murdered Parley P. Pratt

Sail for the Islands.--At Honolulu T Labor in Tin Shop.--My First Kanaka Meal.--A Home with Kiama.--Attend Native Funeral.--Meet Mr. Emerson.--Three Days Without Food.--Saved by a Donkey.--Lose my Eyesight.--Receive a Glorious Vision

On Oahu Again.--John Hyde's Apostasy.--I Meet Him in the Presbyterian Church.--At Waiahia

Hear of Parley P. Pratt's Death.--Buchanan Sends Harney to Utah.--Letter From Brigham Young

Praise for the Elders.--Efforts to Bring Two Natives to Utah.--Sail for Home.--Description of Steerage.--An Earnest Prayer.--Timidity of the Saints.--Baptize a New Convert at Midnight

Visit My Cousin.--His Tempting Offer.--Meet the Agents of Mr. Walker, the noted Filibusterer.--Baptize Mrs. Bradford

Start for a Thirteen-Hundred-Mile Walk.--Become Indian Scout.--Meet Jacob Hamblin, the Indian Peacemaker.--Surrounded by Indians.--Shooting a Dove, Saves our Scalps

Home Activities.--Counseled not to Study Law.--Called to Uintah and Dixie

Miss Carmichael's Parting Words.--San Francisco.--Orson Pratt's Prophecy.--Sail for Hawaii.--Delivered from the Hands of a Wicked Man.--Visit Walter M. Gibson.--View Kawaimanu

Conference at Wailuku.--Return to Honolulu.--Sail for Home.--Man Overboard

United Order.--Indian Troubles.--Mission to England

Transferred to the Bristol Conference.--A Remarkable Woman.--My Views of Celestial Marriage

A Visit to Wales.--Mrs. Simon's Good Work.--A Tribute to Joseph Fielding Smith.--A Letter from my Wife, Albina

Death of Jehiel McConnell.--A Letter to my Daughter.--Five Thousand Dollar Reward.--Letter from Apostle Joseph F. Smith

A Letter to my Son.--An Enquirer Answered.--The Sinking of the Euridice, Four Hundred Men Perish.--Letters from Home.--Two Splendid Dreams

Death of a Lady Apostle Woodruff Baptized in 1840, At Midnight.--Baptize an Aged Backslider.--A Letter from Apostle Wilford Woodruff.--Transferred to the London Conference

Visit London, the Grandest City in the World.--Meet the Claridge Family, and Leave My Testimony With Them.--Visit Portsmouth and the Home of Nellie Grant Sardys.--Labor With Elder Connelly.--Rake Hay and Receive a Gift from an English Lord

Conditions at Orderville.--Letter to E. M. Webb, on Politics.--Visit Winchester Cathedral.--Pass Through the Town of London.--Letter from President William Budge.--Mobbed at Albourne

Goodbye to England.--A Poem.--The Master's Question

In memory of My Wife, Albina.--"By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them"

In Memory of My Wife, Lydia

In Memory of My Wife, Tamar, and Sacred to My Wife Catherine

APPENDIX--STORIES AND RHYMES.

Twenty-fourth of July Musings Sent to President Joseph F. Smith.--Twenty-fourth of July Toast.--Utah.--Thrilling Eruption of Kilauea

A Thrilling Experience on the Plains.--The Stampede

Crusade Against Plural Marriage

Salt Lake Valley in 1847.--Utah Pioneers.--A Peaceful Home

From the Cradle to the Grave.--Lines to Sister M. L.

The Young Men's Pledge.--Brigham Young's One Hundredth Birthday.--Mary's Birthday.--Some Things that I Remember

Memoirs of John R. Young.

Birth.--Childhood Recollections.

Continue Reading →

John R. Young opens his 1920 memoir not with his birth but with a poem on the power of words, calling them “the soul’s ambassadors.” This choice signals a narrator who values direct expression and moral reflection. The memoir, written when Young was in his eighties, covers his 1847 pioneer journey to Utah as a child, his missions to Hawaii and England, and his decades of church service. Young’s prose is plain and unadorned, but he frequently breaks into verse—often to praise fellow church leaders like Joseph F. Smith—and includes letters, journal entries, and financial reports. The result is a hybrid text that blends personal recollection with documentary evidence, offering a firsthand view of Mormon institutional life in the nineteenth century.

Diction and the Plain Style

Young’s sentences are short and declarative, with little ornament. He writes, “I had bread and herrings for breakfast, dinner, and supper” to describe a day of fasting. When he records a letter from a sister in the gospel, he lets her words stand without commentary: “I can truly say that from the time you were here, a great weight of sorrow has been lifted off my heart.” This restraint gives the memoir a documentary feel. Young rarely editorializes; instead, he presents events and lets the reader infer. His vocabulary is concrete—rawhide soup, thistles, crickets, sea gulls—and he favors action verbs: “walked,” “preached,” “visited.” The plain style suits a man who describes himself as more comfortable with labor than with rhetoric.

Verse as Personal Tribute

Young inserts original poems at key moments, often to honor church leaders. His lines on Joseph F. Smith—“I knew Joseph F. Smith, in life’s rosy morn. / When herding cows, and plowing corn”—are metrically rough but affectionate. The poems function as eulogies, not literary exercises. They reveal Young’s emotional register: he admires physical endurance, humility, and loyalty. The verse on Smith’s Hawaiian mission—“Poi, paakai, poverty and shame, / Were all endured, for the blessed Savior’s name”—uses Hawaiian words (poi, paakai) to ground the tribute in specific experience. These poems are the memoir’s most personal feature, offering a counterpoint to the otherwise factual prose.

Dialogue and Reported Speech

Young rarely reproduces extended dialogue, but he includes letters and quoted statements that serve as indirect speech. A letter from Jane Roach, for instance, is given in full: “I can truly say that from the time you were here, a great weight of sorrow has been lifted off my heart.” Young’s response—“It is always a comfort to me to know that I have been a comfort to others”—is the closest he comes to self-reflection. He also reports public exchanges, such as an open-air discussion with a city postmaster and a Methodist revival where he was invited to pray. At the revival, he “thanked the Lord for having raised up the Prophet Joseph Smith,” which he notes “advertised my coming meeting better than my hand bills had done.” These episodes show Young’s strategic use of speech to advance his missionary work.

Sensory Details of Place and Hardship

Young’s descriptions are spare but vivid. In Plymouth, he lodges in a garret “four stories high” with a window overlooking “the Plymouth Starch Works’ back yard, a filthy, stinking hole; and the room literally swarmed with rats and mice.” He admits, “like any woman, I am in mortal terror” of rodents—a rare personal disclosure. In contrast, he notes the beauty of a park with “a large herd of fallow deer” and writes, “How beautiful they looked!” His eye for detail extends to weather: “Out-door wall flowers are in bloom, while fruit buds are swelling, as if spring were at hand.” These sensory observations ground the narrative in physical reality, whether the squalor of a Plymouth garret or the mild January of Bristol.

Young’s memoir rewards readers who attend to small details: a line of verse, a quoted letter, a mention of rawhide soup. The author’s voice emerges not through grand statements but through the accumulation of precise, unadorned observations. Readers should approach the text as a mosaic of primary sources—journal entries, poems, correspondence—rather than a continuous narrative. The gaps between episodes are as telling as the episodes themselves, revealing what Young chose to record and what he left unsaid.

That rainy afternoon, John Young’s plainspoken voice followed me into the dusk, his Hawaii missionary days lingering like wet earth. Later, idly, I picked up The Gallery of Portraits: with Memoirs. Volume 5 (of 7) — Edition Insights and found the same quiet gravity—faces and lives, each a small, sensed presence. One book simply handed me to the other, no hurry at all.

Avery Scott

4 weeks ago

James Ramirez

1 month ago

Emma Flores

2 weeks ago

Theodore Baker

1 month ago

4 out of 5 (4 User reviews )

Add a Review

Your Rating *

Name*

Your Review*

Timothy Ferguson - 1 month ago

While this memoir is historically significant, it is a challenging read due to its rambling structure and heavy reliance on religious doctrine. Young's storytelling is straightforward but often lacks descriptive detail, leaving the reader with a flat account of a dramatic journey. The book would benefit from editorial footnotes to clarify references. Only for researchers specializing in Mormon history.

Ryan Arias - 1 month ago

Young's memoir is a sincere and informative recollection of the pioneer experience, providing honest details about the difficulties of the trail. However, the narrative can be somewhat repetitive, and the prose lacks polish, reflecting its oral history roots. Still, it is a valuable companion to more scholarly works on the Mormon migration, offering a personal, grounded voice.

Paula Morrison - 1 month ago

John R. Young's memoir is an invaluable firsthand account of the Mormon pioneer trek to Utah. His narrative is both inspiring and humbling, detailing the hardships of the journey and the faith that sustained the pioneers. Young's personal stories—of encounters with Native Americans, struggles for survival, and the building of a community—offer a unique, intimate perspective on a pivotal moment in American history. Essential reading for anyone interested in the American West or religious history.