Mormon Publications: 19th Century

Deseret News. Salt Lake City : June 15, 1850-December 10, 1898.
57 v. 28, 54, 40, 30 cm.

View Document

For Brigham Young, as with his predecessor, the importance of the press lay in communicating with the Saints. "This people cannot live without intelligence," he wrote in 1847, "for it is through obedience to that principle they are to receive their exaltation; and if the intelligence cannot be had justice has no claim on obedience, and their exaltation must be decreased." ("Journal History," 1 April 1847.) On June 15, 1850, the Church leaders began what for many years would be the principle means of providing "intelligence," that remarkable pioneer newspaper, the Deseret News -maintaining the pattern established by The Evening and the Morning Star and Upper Missouri Advertiser in Missouri, the Messenger and Advocate and Northern Times in Ohio, the Elders' Journal in Ohio and Missouri, and the Times and Seasons, The Wasp, and the Nauvoo Neighbor in Illinois. Willard Richards, second counselor in the First Presidency, was the founding editor, Thomas Bullock, the editorial assistant and business manager.

The early issues of the News were printed in the Mint on South Temple just east of what is now the Joseph Smith Memorial Building , until August 1850, when the print shop was moved to the Council House, located across the street on the southwest corner of South Temple and Main streets. About fourteen months later the shop was moved again, to the second and third floors of the Deseret Store, on the northeast corner of South Temple and Main -undoubtedly because it had just taken delivery of a second press, a larger "Imperial." It was relocated a third time in June 1854, to the north rooms of the Tithing Office on the east side of Main Street just north of the Deseret Store, and then transferred again eighteen months later back to the Council House. Still more moves were in store for these peripatetic presses, and when Brigham Young sent the Saints south in the spring of 1858 because of the Utah Expedition, he sent the presses too, one to Parowan, the other to Fillmore, where it was set up in the basement of the statehouse and used to print eighteen numbers of the News. That September they were returned to the Council House. Finally in May 1862 the print shop was relocated in the second and third floors of the Deseret Store, where it would rest for the remainder of the century.

A prospectus for the paper is printed in each of the first seven numbers. Unsigned and undated, it proposes "a small weekly sheet" designed to "record the passing events of our State" and "refer to the arts and sciences, embracing general education, medicine, law, divinity, domestic and political economy, and every thing that may fall under our observation, which may tend to promote the best interest, welfare, pleasure and amusement of our fellow citizens."

Thomas Bullock records in the "Historian's Office Journal" that "the printers" set the type for the first number on Wednesday and Thursday, June 12 and 13, and on the 14th, at 5:20 p.m., the first sheet for the first side came off the press. The "printers" began setting the second number on Thursday, June 20, he reports, and the next day he corrected the proofs. On Sunday, June 23, he came to the office at 8 a.m. and began distributing the second number before Sunday service, distributed more of them during the intermission, and continued to deliver papers that afternoon and the following day. He read the proof for the third number of Friday, June 28, and on Saturday, directed "Newspapers to Subscribers all morning." The "Historian's Office Journal" indicates that Bullock continued to read the proof for the paper into the fall and then apparently passed these duties to someone else, probably Joseph Cain.

The first seventeen numbers (June 15-October 5, 1850) were issued weekly on Saturday without a lapse. The News for October 5, 1850 , explained that lack of paper would delay the next number until October 19, and the issue for that date announced that until further notice, the paper would appear every other Saturday-which indeed was the case for nos. 18-29 (October 19, 1850-March 22, 1851). Vol. 4 is the first volume to contain fifty-two numbers-and the first to include some issues on homemade paper.

On October 8, 1865 , the paper launched a semi-weekly edition-also named The Deseret News -which came out on Tuesday and Saturday and ran until 1922. It began a daily, the Deseret Evening News, on November 21, 1867 , which is still being published. The weekly continued to be published in 8-page issues until February 10, 1869 (Vol. 18, no. 1), then in 12-page issues until March 27, 1872 (Vol. 21, no. 8), when it went to a 16-page issue. It maintained 16-page issues until it was superceded by The Deseret Weekly on Saturday, December 29, 1888 . The Deseret Weekly, with a reduced page-size of about 30 x 20 cm., was published in semi-annual volumes until December 10, 1898 , when it was brought to a close.

Like its predecessors, the Deseret News printed local and national news, poetry and fiction, agricultural advice, actions of the provisional and territorial legislatures and the city councils, messages of the governors and reports from the territorial auditors, lists of letters at the post office, immigration news, legal notices, local advertisements, editorials on various issues, doctrinal articles, conference reports, and letters from missionaries. Much of its space was taken up with reports of the discourses of the Church leaders, and beginning with the first issue of Vol. 2, the News resumed the serial publication of the "History of Joseph Smith," which it picked up from the last installment in the Times and Seasons and ran until January 20, 1858 . The seventh and eighth volumes reported on the Utah Expedition, with, expectedly, much heated editorializing by Albert Carrington.

Excerpted and edited from Peter Crawley, A Descriptive Bibliography of the Mormon Church. Volume Two, 1848-1852. ( Provo, Utah : Brigham Young University, Religious Studies Center, 2005). Item 494. Forthcoming.

Used by permission of the authors.