President Hinckley Honors Brigham Young, Celebrates Freedom

At a dinner honoring Brigham Young, President Gordon B. Hinckley commented that the enterprises started by the Church’s second president “were so numerous and so boldly conceived as to merit him the honor of possibly being America’s greatest entrepreneur.”

The dinner was held in the bowery of Old Deseret Village at This Is the Place State Park in Salt Lake City by the Newcomen Society, an organization that honors entrepreneurship. President Hinckley was accompanied by his wife, Marjorie. Also in attendance were President Thomas S. Monson and his wife, Frances; President James E. Faust and his wife, Ruth; several other General Authorities and their wives; and more than 50 descendants of Brigham Young, including Marian Young Morgan, age 98, who accepted an award honoring her grandfather.

“I stand in awe of his boldness in leading his people to this valley,” President Hinckley said. After enumerating Brigham Young’s accomplishments in colonizing, agriculture, industry, construction, finance, commerce, and publishing, President Hinckley said: “Over all of these institutions, past and present, rests the lengthened shadow of Utah’s greatest pioneer, greatest colonizer, and greatest entrepreneur, Brigham Young.”

Freedom Festival

“Without acknowledgment of Deity, without recognition of the Almighty as the ruling power of the universe, the all-important element of personal and national accountability shrinks and dies,” said President Hinckley at the annual Freedom Festival in Provo, Utah, attended by more than 24,000 people on 29 June 1997 in Brigham Young University’s Marriott Center.

President Hinckley was joined by U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, Utah’s U.S. Senators Orrin Hatch and Robert Bennett, and U.S. Representative Chris Cannon, also from Utah. Prior to President Hinckley’s address, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang selections from a sesquicentennial program the choir has been performing during 1997 throughout the state of Utah.

The patriotic service was broadcast via satellite to Church meetinghouses throughout the United States and Puerto Rico.

Simpson’s Hollow, Wyoming

“I’m grateful for our people who did what they did in the desperate circumstances in which they found themselves and finally worked out a compromise, a reconciliation which brought peace,” said President Hinckley on 5 July at the dedication of a roadside exhibit at Simpson’s Hollow, Wyoming, where in 1857 a group of 40 Latter-day Saints captured and burned an army supply train in perhaps the most dramatic confrontation of the “Utah War.”

“To me it’s a miracle that in all of this campaign, that really began in 1857 and continued into the summer of 1858, not a single shot was fired by the Utah militia,” said President Hinckley. “This, in my judgment, represents one of the great and dramatic events in the history of the West.”

After hearing false rumors that Church members were rebelling against the government, President James Buchanan sent some 2,500 soldiers to the Utah territory 140 years ago. The destruction of U.S. military supplies succeeded in delaying troops for the winter. Although U.S. soldiers did later occupy locations in Utah for a time, negotiations eventually led to a peaceful resolution of the conflict.

“They loved the Constitution of the United States,” said President Hinckley about the early Latter-day Saints. “They wanted to be loyal citizens of the United States. But they did not wish to be punished by reason of the false tales by officials who had been sent to Utah to govern them.”