Wilford Woodruff's Journal

Wilford Woodruff's Journal

Sixty-five years of daily entries by a man who was present for nearly everything and never wrote for publication — the most complete contemporaneous record of the church's first century.

What it is

Wilford Woodruff kept a journal almost every day from December 1833, when he was a twenty-six-year-old convert, until August 1898, when he was ninety-one and president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He did it obsessively and he did it for himself.

That last part is what makes it exceptional. Almost every other substantial nineteenth-century Latter-day Saint record was produced for an audience — sermons taken down for publication, histories written to be read, letters composed with a recipient in mind. Woodruff was writing a private record of what happened, with no reader to persuade.

What he was present for

Nearly all of it. Zion's Camp. Kirtland and the temple there. The apostles' mission to Britain, where he baptised hundreds in Herefordshire. Nauvoo, the introduction of the temple ordinances, and the succession crisis after Joseph Smith's death. The exodus, and the entry into the Salt Lake Valley. Four decades of church administration under Brigham Young, John Taylor and his own presidency. And in 1890, the Manifesto — which he issued, and wrote about.

Where the official histories and the private journal disagree about a date, a meeting or who said what, this is the record that was written the same week.

What we hold

726 indexed sources covering December 1833 to August 1898, from the Scott G. Kenney typescript.

Agriculture at 137 entries is not noise either. He farmed, he recorded weather and crops, and the journal is a working record of subsistence in the Great Basin as much as it is a record of the church.

How to read it

• It is a typescript, not the manuscript. The Kenney edition is the standard transcription and this library indexes it, but it is a reading of Woodruff's hand, and anything turning on an exact word is worth checking against the original.
• A private record can be wrong. Woodruff wrote what he understood at the time, sometimes secondhand, sometimes days late. Contemporaneous is not the same as correct.
• Read around the entry. Woodruff's significant days often look unremarkable on the page. The context is in the week, not the sentence.