Charles Dutton Miller, July 1839

While saints were being driven out of Missouri in 1839, missionaries were busy preaching the gospel in England.  It was during this time that Charles Dutton Miller Joined the church.

Charles Dutton Miller was born in Manchester England in August, 1816. He was the youngest of seven children, and his father died when he was two years old. His widowed mother was very poor, but managed their scant money with frugality. His mother was good at herbal remedies, and once treated princess Victoria of England. After that she received patronage as a healer from many grand families of England. 

Charles only attended a few years of school, and then became an errand boy for a hat maker.  Later he became apprenticed to a clog maker, and later went into business for himself. He also became a methodist minister.  He married Jane Marshall and together they had four children. 

In 1837 missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints came to England.  Because of persecution of church members, John didn’t join the church until 1939. He was baptized by Joseph Fielding and William Clayton in July just before he turned 23.  After he joined the church, business at his shop dropped off so much and he was forced to close.  He became an itinerant missionary for the church, traveling and preaching without purse or scrip. He was ordained a high priest by Brigham Young in 1840 and was made president of the Manchester Conference with 1200 members.  He later became the president of the Bradford Conference, which was even larger.  They often hosted missionaries in their home. 

In 1848 he was feeling desires to unite with the saints in America, but at the time they had just been driven out of Nauvoo. He was told to stay in England and strengthen the church there. Finally in 1849 he and his growing family boarded a ship for America. Eight weeks later they arrived in New Orleans. They moved on to St Louis, where they stopped so that he could work and earn enough money for the trek west.  In 1851 the saints in that area received a letter from the First Presidency urging them to gather to Utah. Some sources say that his wife, Jane refused to go to Salt Lake, but others say she died in St. Louis, along with one of their children.  Either way, Charles and one of his sons started off for Utah alone. They joined a wagon train in 1852, and arrived in Utah that fall.

Once in Utah,  Charles met and married Alice Ashton, a widow with three children. They moved  to Lehi, and then settled in Provo. He lived there until his death from pneumonia in 1878. 

The Missouri War

 This week in Come Follow Me we are reading sections that were given in summer of 1838. The sections don't really relate the history that was happening that summer and fall, but it was a tumultuous time in the early church. There is a good summary of what happened in the Saints Volume 1 Chapters 27-30.  When I was young, and heard about this time period I was made to understand that the mobs were evil, and the saints were innocent victims in the conflict.  Now the Saints history shows a more balanced and honest depiction of the times. Sydney Rigdon talked about "a war of extermination" way before Governer Boggs issued the "Extermination Order."  The band of church members who were called the Danites looted and burned down "gentile" towns, just as the mobs had looted and burned down saints towns. It all culminated with Governor Boggs sending troups to Far West and arresting Joseph Smith and other church leaders. 

I can see why the more balanced view of the stories were not taught in primary, but as an adult, I am glad to hear both sides.  I had always wondered why Go dwould let Joseph Smith languish in Liberty Jail for months. Now I believe that the church had started down a very dark path, one the Lord knew would lead to both their spiritual and temporal destruction. It was a battle they could not win, and Joseph seemed to be going along with it. So God, like many a good father, put Joseph in time out. It worked. After Liberty Jail, Joseph Smith no longer strove to avenge the wrongs of the saints through bloodshed. Instead he sought peaceful means to redress the wrongs against the saints. He even ran for president, when neither local, state, or federal officials would offer help. 

I think God's dealings with Joseph at this time are conforting.  Yes, Joseph made bad mistakes, and yes, the Lord let him suffer the consequences, but Joseph learned from the consequences, and he gained great wisdom and received important direction from the Lord while in Liberty Jail. Dispite the saint's expulsion from "Zion," God was still able to lead the church and eventually guide them to the Salt Lake Valley and Intermountain West where they finally were able to grow and prosper. These stories teach us to remember that God is playing the long game. If we stay humble and patient, he will ultimately lead us through our trials--even the trials of our own making--to a better place.

Oliver and Lorenzo Snow 1836

 Lorenzo Snow and his father, Oliver Snow, were not the first on this line of genealogy to join the church. As I have recorded, Lorenzo Snow's mother joined the church after hearing Joseph Smith preach in 1831, and his sister, Eliza, joined in 1935. I am focusing on Lorenzo Snow here for two reasons.  The most obvious is that he later became the president of the church in 1898. The second is that he joined the church because of the preaching of a man mentioned in this week's reading for Come Follow Me, David W. Patten (Section 114). The rest of this article is a summary of the life sketch about Lorenzo Snow found here in The Life and Ministry of Lorenzo Snow.

In 1835 Lorenzo was riding his horse in his home town of Mantua, Ohio, when he happened upon David W. Patten who was a newly ordained apostle and was on his way to Kirkland after serving a mission.  The two men rode together for about 30 miles.  Lorenzo later wrote, “Our conversation fell upon religion and philosophy, and being young and having enjoyed some scholastic advantages, I was at first disposed to treat his opinions lightly, especially so as they were not always clothed in grammatical language; but as he proceeded in his earnest and humble way to open up before my mind the plan of salvation, I seemed unable to resist the knowledge that he was a man of God and that his testimony was true.”

Lorenzo had been studying religion at Oberlin College, but after meeting Patten, and hearing his sister Eliza's experiences in Kirtland, he decided to leave Oberlin and join his family in Kirtland.  There he studied Hebrew along with some of the church leaders, and eventually was baptized in June 1836.  Soon after his baptism he received a strong witness of the truth of the Gospel and prepared to serve a mission. He served two missions back to back that spanned 1837-1840. By then the saints and his family had moved to Nauvoo, Illinois. He joined his family there  but soon after was called to serve a mission in England. During his mission he delivered copies of the Book of Mormon to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. 

There are a lot of other good stories about Lorenzo Snow.  He helped on Joseph Smith's campaign to become President. In 1845 Joseph Smith taught him the principle of plural marriage, and in response he married two women Charlotte Squires and Mary Goddard. He crossed the plains when the saints moved to Utah and in 1849 became a member of the Quorum of the Twelve. That same year he left for his mission in Italy. The work there went slowly until he came across the Waldenses in the Piedmont region of Italy, some of whom are our ancestors. He lead a group of Italian converts to Utah.

in 1853 Brigham Young called Lorenzo snow to lead a group of families to settle the northern Utah county of Box Elder. There he helped establish Brigham City.  He lived there when not on assignment from the prophet, until Wilford Woodruff's death in 1898.  On hearing of the prophet's passing, he took a train to Salt Lake City and went to the temple to pray. While there, the Lord appeared to him and told him to reorganize the 1st presidency immediately. He was sustained as prophet on October 10, 1898.  He was already elderly when he was sustained, and he only served for three years, but during that time he received important revelations, including one about using the principle of tithing to help the church get out of debt. Lorenzo Snow died in 1901 of pneumonia and was barried in Brigham City.