Reid L. Neilson - The Saints Abroad: Missionaries Who Answered Brigham Youngs 1852 Call to the Nations of the World

Come brethren let us sing a song of praise unto the Lord,

Who hath chosen us and sent us forth to preach his holy word,

Mong distant nations far away, where sin and sorrows reign

Where dire commotion fills the land with wretchedness and pain.

ChorusThen brethren let us not forget to work, and watch, and pray;

Our God will never us forsake, but guard us night and day.

We go to teach eternal truth, to saints and sinners too,

To tell the world the glorious things the saints have got in view;

No doubt temptations deep and strong, will often us assail,

And satan will his cunning use to cause our faith to fail.

ChorusThen brethren let us not forget, &c.

We go to tell the saints abroad, how they may all secure

Succession of eternal lives, to those who will be pure;

How thrones and principalities, dominions and powers,

They may obtain eternally, with other friends of ours.

ChorusThen brethren let us not forget, &c.

We leave behind us, those we hold most sacred, fond and dear;

We know theyre in the hands of God, and what have we to fear:

The joys of home we now forgo our mission to fulfil,

And go to do what God requireswe have no other will

ChorusThen brethren let us not forget, &c.

And when our work abroad is done, and we are called home,

O may our hearts be pure as gold, fit for the world to come;

May thousands saints accompany us, when west our steps we bend,

Whose praises to the God we love, forever will ascend.

ChorusThen brethren let us not forget, &c.

William Clayton, Song for the Missionaries of 1852.

.William Clayton, Song for the Missionaries of 1852, Deseret News , November 27, 1852. Clayton composed these lyrics at Blacks Fork of the Green River on the Mormon Trail on September 23, 1852, in honor of his fellow missionaries called at the special August conference. It was sung to the tune of My Heart and Lute.

1. Portrait of Brigham Young
2. Dalsgaard, Mormons Visit a Country Carpenter
3. Portrait of Dan Jones
4. Title page of Udgorn Seion (Zions Trumpet)
5. Portrait of Orson Spencer
6. Title page of Millennial Star
7. Portrait of Jacob Houtz
8. Portrait of Edward Stevenson
9. Portrait of Nathan Porter
10. The Rock of Gibraltar
11. Portrait of Jesse Haven
12. Modern-day Cape Town
13. Portrait of Benjamin Johnson
14. Haleakala Crater
15. Portrait of James Lewis
16. Portrait of Hosea Stout
17. Portrait of Chauncey West
18. Portrait of Hugh Findlay
19. Captain Bells ship, the Cressy
20. Portrait of Augustus Farnham
21. Bountiful Tabernacle
22. First edition of Zions Watchman

There are three major types of notes or aids that documentary editors can provide their readers: provenance, textual, and contextual notes. To make this rich assemblage of missionary letters and reminiscences more comprehensible, we have employed all three categories of annotation to illuminate the people, places, and things the eight representative Latter-day Saint elders referenced in their letters. We have generally followed the same style used in Reid L. Neilson and Nathan N. Waite, eds., Settling the Valley, Proclaiming the Gospel: The General Epistles of the Mormon First Presidency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), a companion volume to the present book.

Provenance Notes

Our goal is to make these letters more accessible to our twenty-first-century audience. We want our readers to be aware of where they can find the original documents, better understand their genre, and come away with a greater appreciation of their publication history. To this aim we offer the following notes on the documents provenance or history.

Repository information . Original printings of all the missionaries letters contained herein can be found in the archival collections of the Church History Library, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, as detailed in the source notes at the beginning of each chapter.

Publication history . Nineteenth-century missionaries often wrote letters to church leaders, and their accounts were published in various Latter-day Saint periodicals. We have included letters from a variety of sources. Dan Jones and Jesse Haven wrote to Presidents Franklin D.

Textual Notes

Transcription method . Scholars engaged in documentary editing employ a variety of transcription methods. Editors make choices on the kinds of editorial apparatus they will use based on the types of documents they are featuring and their anticipated readership. Most of the letters in this book were written to church leaders and then published in periodicals.

We have used a conservative expanded transcription method of displaying the printed text. This editorial approach encompasses a wide spectrum of editing styles, all of which standardize accidentals, datelines, and signatures; mark paragraphs with indentations; and do not attempt to reproduce the excessive spacing and physical layout of the text of documents. We have occasionally bracketed clarifications to the text and made any other corrections according to the seventeenth edition of The Chicago Manual of Style and the eleventh edition of Merriam-Websters Collegiate Dictionary .

Indecipherable characters or words . Occasionally a pioneer press error or the age of the printed page renders a letter or word indecipherable. When the missing text could be deduced from its context, we have filled the letter in without brackets.

Names of people . We chose to clarify the names of people, since some of our readers may be family historians searching for their ancestors. Aside from standard abbreviations such as Wm., we have used brackets to expand abbreviated or partial names in the text and correct misspellings; thus, elder Barnes becomes elder [Lorenzo] Barnes, and so forth. We have included a biographical register of all the missionaries called in 1852. Other people have been identified in footnotes when possible; many, however, were impossible to find.

Spelling variants and misspelled words . Many of the original words in the missionaries correspondence do not conform to modern spelling conventions. Some of these words are nineteenth-century spelling variations (such as proceedure instead of procedure), and we have retained them because they convey the historical nuances of the letters. We have, however, silently corrected words that were simply misspelled (such as precisly) or that were typographical errors (such as psesiding or deprepation). At times, it has been difficult to discern whether a given spelling was a nineteenth-century variation or a simple misspelling, so we have had to use our best judgment. The Oxford English Dictionary has been an invaluable resource in historic spellings, as have the linguistic corpora of Mark Davies of Brigham Young University.