Madeline McQuown, Dale Morgan, and the Great Unfinished Brigham Young Biography
Shortly after completing The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton in 1967, Fawn M. Brodie wrote to her friend Dale Morgan confessing that she had “been periodically haunted by the desire to do…
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Making the Mormon Trek Come Alive | Richard E. Bennett, We’ll Find the Place: The Mormon Exodus, 1846-1848
Author Richard E. Bennet describes his book as:
. .. not so much a study of the train or of the trek, but of a religious exodus of one of the 19th century’s most persecuted and despised groups of religionists—the Latter day Saints—who were bound neither for Oregon nor for California but either for survival or extinction. This was not just another march westward “across the wide Missouri” in fulfillment of America’s Manifest Destiny; rather, it was a destiny in motion yet to be mani fest, for it was not at all certain that this enterprise of Joseph Smith, Jr.—The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—would ever survive to live a new day. The story of the Mormon exodus is that of a religion in torment, desperately seeking to save itself from persecution, to rid itself of its own detractors and obstructionists, and to find it self in some unknown valley, “far away in the west.” It was Mor monism in the raw and on the move—forging a new identity while seeking a safe refuge in the tops of “the everlasting hills” (xiv).
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