He sounded like a man giving God’s orders through a megaphone made of granite. Brigham Young — carpenter, colonizer, prophet — had a voice built for outdoor preaching in the open air of the Salt Lake Valley, where there were no walls to help and no one dared disagree. He managed fifty-five wives, organized the migration of tens of thousands across a continent, and transformed a desert into a functioning civilization. The voice that accomplished all this was Vermont-born, frontier-hardened, and delivered with the absolute authority of a man who believed he answered to the Almighty and nobody else.
The Voice: Vermont Granite, Frontier Command
Young was born in Whitingham, Vermont, in 1801, the ninth of eleven children. The accent he carried was rural New England: rhotic, unpretentious, the flat vowels of northern Vermont roughened by decades on the American frontier. He was trained as a carpenter and glazier before his conversion to Mormonism in 1832, and the voice retained the practical directness of the trades — no ornament, no rhetoric, every word a nail driven to purpose.
After the murder of Joseph Smith in 1844, Young assumed leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and led the migration west. The journey from Nauvoo, Illinois, to the Salt Lake Valley took months, and Young addressed his followers regularly along the way — sometimes from wagons, sometimes from hillsides, always without amplification. The voice had to carry. It did. Contemporaries described a powerful, commanding baritone capable of reaching thousands in the open air.
His cadence was sermon-like and declarative. He mixed frontier practicality with theological pronouncement in the same breath: irrigation ditches and salvation, planting schedules and divine law, civic engineering and the Kingdom of Zion. He saw no distinction between the temporal and the spiritual, and the voice reflected that unity. “This is the right place. Drive on,” he reportedly said upon reaching the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847. Seven words. The founding of a civilization.
How We Know
Young died in 1877, before the phonograph was commercially available, so no recordings exist. But his sermons were transcribed extensively and published in the Journal of Discourses, a twenty-six-volume collection that remains the primary source for his speaking style. The transcriptions reveal a voice that was blunt, repetitive, occasionally crude, and utterly certain. He preached as if disagreement were not merely wrong but metaphysically impossible.
Contemporary accounts from both followers and critics describe the same qualities: physical power, absolute conviction, and a frontiersman’s contempt for ambiguity. British traveler Richard Burton, who visited Salt Lake City in 1860, described Young as “a ruler born” whose voice “carried the ring of authority” even in casual conversation.
In Their Own Words
“This is the right place. Drive on.” — Apocryphal but foundational. The founding sentence of Salt Lake City.
“He who takes counsel from the Lord need never fear the opinions of men.” — The theological basis for ignoring all criticism.
“I have never yet preached a sermon and sent it out to the children of men that I could not improve upon.” — The only hint of humility in the archive. Even this sounds like authority.
Sources
- Journal of Discourses, 26 volumes, 1854-1886.
- Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet, John G. Turner, Harvard University Press, 2012.
- Richard Burton, The City of the Saints, 1861.
- The Lion of the Lord: A Biography of Brigham Young, Stanley P. Hirshson, Knopf, 1969.
- Church History Library, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.