Newly Published Eliza R. Snow Discourses Show Her Extensive Travels to Build Church and Promote Unity
SALT LAKE CITY—The Church Historian’s Press today announced the online publication of more than 150 additional discourses by Latter-day Saint leader and poet Eliza R. Snow, dating from January 1879 to September 1880. Transcripts of discourses from 1868 to 1880 are available for free to the public at churchhistorianspress.org/eliza-r-snow.
In 1868 church president Brigham Young assigned Snow to assist bishops in organizing Relief Societies and to instruct Latter-day Saint women. Within ten years, Snow had also helped found the Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Association and the Primary Association. In developing and overseeing these three organizations, Snow traveled all over Utah Territory, as well as into Idaho Territory, Wyoming Territory, and Nevada. One of her most extensive speaking tours occurred between 1879 and fall 1880, when she met with people in remote settlements from the Bear Lake area in the north to Utah’s Sanpete County in the south. At one point in late summer 1880, Snow told the Relief Society of the Salt Lake City Eighteenth Ward (her home ward) that she had attended thirty meetings in two weeks.
Snow relished gathering with Latter-day Saints and creating new relationships, helping to connect men, women, and children from various locations and backgrounds with one another and into the body of the church. On February 6, 1879, she told women in Ogden, Utah, that she “felt as if she belonged to [them].” She told the Relief Society women in Payson, Utah, later that year that “her desire was to bless them in every settlement.” The following year she encouraged the women in Brigham City, Utah, to “live so closely together that the adversary cannot have any power over us; union is strength.” In visits to Primary organizations in Utah in 1880, she told the children of Davis County how pleased she was “to see so many pleasant faces before me” and the children of Levan that “she loved her little brothers and sisters and loved to come to meetings.”
About the Church Historian’s Press
The Church Historian’s Press was announced in 2008 by the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Joseph Smith Papers was the first publication to bear the imprint. The press publishes works of Latter-day Saint history that meet high standards of scholarship. For more information, visit the Church Historian’s Press website.