Product Description

John Doyle Lee (1812-1877) was one of the most controversial figures of early Mormon history. A fervent convert, he was adopted by Brigham Young and rose to become a leading member of the church's hierarchy. Lee left behind a number of colorful diaries that reveal in fascinating clarity and detail the everyday life of Utah's pioneer settlers. In them, he describes his close relationship with Brigham Young, his experiences in converting Native Americans to Mormonism, his trials with farming and livestock, his encounters with his 19 wives, and his eventual exile to the barren wastelands of Lee's Ferry.
In the 1950s, five of Lee's diaries in the Huntington collections were meticulously edited and annotated by historians Robert Glass Cleland and Juanita Brooks and published in two volumes by the Huntington Library in 1955 to great acclaim as A Mormon Chronicle, The Diaries of John D. Lee, 1848-1876. The University of Utah Press kept the book in print until the 1990s; it has now been reprinted as a Huntington Library Classic with a new foreword by Andrew Rolle, a Huntington research fellow and retired Cleland Professor of History from Occidental College. In his foreword, Rolle discusses the collaboration between Cleland, a leading historian of the Southwest, and Brooks, a notable scholar of Mormon history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #771795 in Books
• Published on: 2003-06-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 868 pages

Time Magazine, 1955
No American can read these "Diaries" without thrilling to the roughhewn courage and tenacity written in every page of them.

The United States Quarterly Book Review, 1956
An important information source concerning frontier life, the settlement of Utah, and the tenets and customs of the Mormon Church.

The New York Times Book Review, December 1955
Speaks vividly and picturesquely of the melodrama, the monotony, the mysticism of the life of Western pioneers.

Customer Reviews

A Morman Chronicle
John D. Lee's diaries were of great interest to me, he was my great great grandfather. The family had collected parts of the diaries and other information through the years. This was a great addition to the family history collection.