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

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.