Brigham Young doesn't come off as a fool. He no doubt had heard about the Rigdon theory of the BOM, bit it didn't seem to phase him. Was he just another person duped by Joseph Smith, or eas he a conman who knowingly took advantage of Joseph's fraud?

Brigham was a working man before he joined with Smith & co. The con was better than labor, I imagine. He jumped right in and rose to Dictator before he was done.

I would go with conman. I don't think Brigham was any dummy.

His brother Phineas had a dream where the lord came riding up in a beautiful carriage and magnificent white horses and said he wanted Brigy. It took him 2 full years of intense investigation before he took the plunge, and he was only 22 and his wife just died. So I think it was in sincerity.

But as the saying goes great power corrupts greatly. What happened later in Utah got rather out of hand...

He was initially against polygamy. He did change his mind. It seems he changed his mind on a lot of things.

Maybe power turns the very poor a bit more than others.

So my guess is that he was a true believer to begin with. But I would imagine he figured the game out pretty quickly and used his wits to outsmart Rigdon. It is pretty obvious Rigdon was running the show until they got to Nauvoo. Then Joseph took over and BY used the death of Joseph and Hyrum to grab power. I suspect plural marriage would have been done away with if Emma and Joseph III had managed to prevail with Rigdon as caretaker. If that had happened Brigham would have just been another Bennett.

It’s hard to fault Brigham for grabbing power from what he knew was a bunch of buffoons. It was a contest of ruthlessness, and he won.

He conned the conner, but ended up being taken out, too. Steve Benson has a long post on how BY met his demise.

Where is this post, how evidence based is it.

No offence to Steve Benson but i find his posts hard to follow, long, rambling, which surprises me since i heard he works with journalists.

They're usually long *because* they're packed full of evidence -- quotes, references, cross-checked facts.

You want evidence? Steve provides it. You want brevity? Probably going to have to look elsewhere.

Definite conman. One, for the same reason the current profit is a conman. They know they do not see visions, angels, Christ, etc. Prior to becoming special witless' of Jesus Christ, they could easily pass off not seeing angels, visions, etc., and be satisfied w/ there own delusions of "feelings" from the spirit, promptings, etc. However, once called into the apostleship, and never receiving any such manifestation - they begin to realize that there is nothing "beyond the veil" of Mormonism - and they realize they have been duped and are part of the con.

Brigham Young literally ate crow growing up as a poor farm boy - he and his brother. The con provided a much better income, women, wealth, power, and praise. He was an evil man just like his predecessor.

He was an evil con man/dictator who ruled with an iron fist. He was a wily, ravenous wolf (no insult meant to wolves) who made sure that his followers were settled in an isolated, desolate area with no hope of escape.

Joseph was a conman. Young was no dupe. He had a talent for seizing power and the ability to recognize the opportunity for it. Power was his drug. He was way past being a simple con man. He was a virtuoso dictator because he had no conscience as an Achilles heel.

The religion was just the vehicle for the power. He had the distilleries, the women, and the henchmen and goons. He took what he wanted with no need to con anyone out of it. He flew higher than that. Does that sound like a dupe?

Very good analysis.

but a thieving, murderous tyrant! He deliberately isolated his inherited followership for purposes of aggrandizing and enriching himself, happily subjecting them to extreme hardship and even death. Those who tired of doing his bidding and tried to leave were "killed by Indians."

You don't build what Brigham Young did without being smart. Also he managed to stay in power as prophet and avoid being jailed by the Federal Government even when he was removed as territorial governor. Ol Brigham was a strategic thinker. He knew it was only a matter of time before they would get ran out of Utah if he didn't grow the numbers of the church. He did everything he could to bring people out to Utah including a massive missionary effort in Europe. By the time the government decided it had enough of the Mormons there were too many of them. If they were smaller in numbers I don't know if the church would have lasted. Brigham kept the fear of God in people but kept things in check enough to avoid a full out war. He was devious but brilliant.

He gained power through political machinations, not because he was chosen by God; but the vast majority of followers did not know this--they believed he was the next best thing to God.

And if they didn't? Bad mojo.

In my imagination (thought it may bear some resemblance to reality), there was a turning point...

Brigham was a high-ranker in the church, but not the highest.
One day Smith pulls him into a private meeting.
Tells him he's been caught having sex with a young girl they took in as a "helper" by Emma. Says he's got a way out, and it's a sweet deal: he's going to proclaim a "revelation" re-instituting the multiple wives and concubines of the ancient Kings of Israel. That'll get Emma to lay off him, he says, and give him an excuse to have sex with any woman he wants. Tells Brigham that he needs somebody to back him up -- and that if he does it, Brigham gets "promoted," gets in the secret multiple-wives club, and gets to start picking out his own sweet young things to "marry."

That's the turning point. By now, Brigham knows Smith's a con artist -- but he's impressed by how he's managed to keep his "church" together despite tons of criticism, legal problems, starting wars, fake banks, and all the rest. So he has a choice to make: he can take his (one) wife, ditch the con-man, and go try to make an honest life somewhere else. Or he can go all-in with the con-man, get power and women and money, and continue/increase the con-man's scam.

He could have walked away.

He chose to go all-in.

Everything after that, disturbing and disgusting and ego-centric as his actions were, is irrelevant.

That's where he chose the kind of man he'd be -- lying and cheating and conning other people for power, money, and sex.

That's all you need to know about the man.

Google Brigham Young and Cochranites.

I think he was a true believer. I remember reading somewhere in one of Michael Quinns volumes and in No Man Knows My History, that he was always concerned that he could not receive revelation like Joseph could. That being said I believe that he believed that he was the Lion of the Lord and had the right to rule Zion with an Iron Fist.

I think that he bought Joseph's Bullshit hook,line and sinker and became a rigid fanatic. It is part of because of him that it survived. He dragged everybody westward and kept them in isolation allowing them to "harden" into what we have now.

He definitely used the church to build his personal fortune and probably felt that was his reward for his hard work.

He was definitely a true believer.

Big Brother Brigham flogged Orwellian Newspeak for twenty years.

This Freemasonical god-man in his isolated Kingdom employed the time-worn tactic of messing with the language of converts. The old bugger called it the Deseret Alphabet.

As described in Bigler’s Forgotten Kingdom:

"Aimed to reform the representation of the English language, not the language itself, the new phonetic system offered a number of advantages.

First, it demonstrated cultural exclusivism, an important consideration. It also kept secrets from curious non-Mormons, controlled what children would be allowed to read, and in a largely unlettered society that included non-English speaking converts, eliminated the awkward problem of phonetic spelling. For such reasons, for nearly two decades Brigham Young pushed the new alphabet on reluctant followers.

It also kept secrets from curious non-Mormons, controlled what children would be allowed to read, and in a largely unlettered society that included non-English speaking converts, eliminated the awkward problem of phonetic spelling.

For such reasons, for nearly two decades Brigham Young pushed the new alphabet on reluctant followers."

Thus the Desert Master decreed His controlling inoculations.