Deseret News,--Extra. Great Salt Lake City, U.T., September 14, 1852. Minutes of conference. A special conference of the elders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, assembled in the Tabernacle, Great Salt Lake City, August 28th, 1852, 10 o’clock, a.m., pursuant to public notice. [Great Salt Lake City, 1852].
48p. 22.3 cm.

By the summer of 1852, the polygamous practices of the Mormons were no longer a secret. The reports of the territorial officers were now published around the country, and the Mormons were being forced to respond to them. Parley P. Pratt made such a response in July, for example, in his broadside Mormonism! Plurality of Wives! which implicitly admitted that Brigham Young was a polygamist. On August 28, 1852, a special conference was convened in Salt Lake City to call a new set of missionaries and to publicly acknowledge the practice of plural marriage. Ironically, Orson Pratt, who ten years before had become disaffected from the LDS Church for a time over the issue of polygamy, delivered the principal discourse defending the practice. Thomas Bullock read the revelation to Joseph Smith of July 12, 1843, which deals with the eternal nature of marriage and sanctions, under certain circumstances, a plurality of wives (Doctrine & Covenants 132). The minutes of this conference—including the text of the revelation of July 12, 1843—were hastened into print as a Deseret News Extra, but in pamphlet form for more convenient distribution. Later in the year, Horace S. Eldridge reprinted the extra in St. Louis; and the minutes of the conference were reprinted as a supplement to volume 15 of the Millennial Star.

Excerpted and edited from Peter Crawley and Chad J. Flake, A Mormon Fifty: an exhibition in the Harold B. Lee Library in conjunction with the annual conference of the Mormon History Association (Provo, Utah, Friends of the Brigham Young University Library, 1984) Item 39, p. [29-30].

Used by permission of the authors.