A Civil War Concern

 

When the Civil War broke out, Church leaders first took a “you-deserve-what-you-earned” attitude. However, as the war continued to rage, Brigham Young sympathized with what group of people?

A)     The South

B)     The North

C)     The residents of Jackson County, Missouri

D)     The residents of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

Yesterday’s answers

1.      (A)   Joseph Smith

In the fall of 1834 Mormon missionaries first came to Harrison County, western Virginia, where the family of Jacob Bigler, Henry’s father, lived in the small community of Shinnston. Jacob’s spouse, Sarah Cunningham Bigler, was converted to the new religion. At that time, however, her stepson Henry could not believe Joseph Smith, Jr., to be a man of God. “I disliked the name of their Prophet,” Bigler recalled, “because there was a man living in our neighborhood whose given name was Jo, who was forever picking quarrels and wanting to fight somebody.”

Bigler Autobiography/Journal, 13, Mormon File, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

2.      (A)   Write about the gold discovery in California

Henry Bigler’s activities of the next two years (1846-48) eventually brought recognition. Following the Saints’ exodus from Nauvoo, he joined with some five hundred other Latter-day Saint men to form the Mormon Battalion marching from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to the Pacific shores. This trek and the succeeding months when Bigler worked in northern California for Johann Augustus Sutter earned him a place in recorded history. Of the several laborers employed at Johann Sutter’s sawmill at the moment James W. Marshall found gold, only Henry Bigler made a contemporary written record of the find. “This day some kind of mettle was found in the tail race that looks like goald,” he wrote. Years later Bigler’s diary entry would be used to accurately date the gold discovery.

M. Guy Bishop, “A Great Little Saint: A Brief Look at the Life of Henry William Bigler,” BYU Studies, 30:4, 31.

3.      (D)   Henry met Brigham Young on the street when Brigham extended the call

 

But just as Henry Bigler began to enjoy the roles of husband and father, his church called once again. On 28 February 1857 as he traveled from Farmington toward Salt Lake City, Bigler chanced upon Brigham Young along the road. The church President halted his carriage next to Bigler and told him to prepare for another mission to the Sandwich Islands. Young also requested that Bigler stop by his office in Salt Lake City and leave the names of all others whom Bigler knew spoke Hawaiian. This informal call not only demonstrated President Young’s confidence in Henry Bigler, but also may offer a view of how casually at least some mission calls were issued in the mid-nineteenth century.

M. Guy Bishop, “A Great Little Saint: A Brief Look at the Life of Henry William Bigler,” BYU Studies, 30:4, 33.

4.      (D)   By serving a call as a St. George Temple worker

Henry Bigler maintained correspondence with Cannon throughout these years, and there is no reason to assume that others of his former mission colleagues did not do the same. Since being a temple worker provide a small monthly stipend, assignment to St. George may well have been a Latter-day Saint version of old-age compensation for those who had given up much in the service of the Church when they were younger. At least such a hypothesis could clearly be applied to Henry Bigler.

M. Guy Bishop, “A Great Little Saint: A Brief Look at the Life of Henry William Bigler,” BYU Studies, 30:4, 36.