William H. Clayton (July 17, 1814 – December 4, 1879 ordained a priest in December; and a high priest on April 1, 1838. Clayton's parents, 10 surviving siblings, and some of his wife's family also joined the church. In 1838, he served as second counselor to the British mission president Joseph Fielding, with Willard Richards as first counselor. Clayton became a missionary in England, where he grew a branch of the church in Manchester to about 240 members. Clayton was good friends with Smith and they sometimes referred to each other as David and Jonathan. In an 1840 letter, Clayton wrote to church members in Manchester about interacting with Smith, assuring them that Smith was "a man of sound judgment, and possessed of abundance of intelligence." He described listening to him as a spiritual experience "which expands your mind and causes your heart to rejoice."

Migration to the west

Late in February 1846, Clayton left Nauvoo after a flurry of work making and packing records in the office and new Nauvoo temple. He spent the winter of 1846–47 at Winter Quarters, Nebraska. The following year, he was a member of the vanguard company that crossed the plains to select a western site for Mormon colonization. He was a recording scribe for Brigham Young, President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, during the journey. Several months later, Clayton returned to the mid-West to prepare his family for the overland trek. Travelling in the Heber C. Kimball Company, they arrived in Salt Lake City in September 1848. In a 1951 article for the Improvement Era, Heber J. Grant wrote that he specifically requested that congregations sing the fourth verse about accepting death and not end with the third verse. The hymn appears in the Protestant New Church Hymnal with the third verse changed to refer to a heavenly resting place rather than one in the far west. He also wrote words for "A Deluded Mormon" and "The pioneers at length are come."

The Roadometer and The Latter-day Saints' Emigrants' Guide

Clayton, along with Orson Pratt and Appleton Milo Harmon, created a novel design for a wooden odometer for use on wagons, also called a roadometer. Clayton was assigned to record the number of miles the company traveled each day. One day, Clayton personally counted the revolutions of a wagon wheel and computed the day's distance by multiplying the count by the wheel's circumference. Clayton asked Pratt to develop a design for a wagon odometer. It consisted of a set of wooden cog wheels attached to the hub of a wagon wheel, with the mechanism "counting" or recording by position the revolutions of the wheel. The apparatus was built by the company's carpenter Appleton Milo Harmon.

The wagon-mounted odometer helped Clayton measure accurate distances between landmarks, starting from Council Bluffs

Life after immigrating to Utah

Clayton served a second mission in England starting in September 1852. He was briefly president of the Sheffield and Lincolnshire Conferences before being released in April 1853 and returning home to Utah in October of the same year.

Clayton is listed as one of the original pioneers on Cyrus Dallin's Brigham Young Monument in Temple Square.

Journal and personal records

Clayton recorded his daily activities in a series of personal journals. His first journal starts on January 1, 1840 and recounts his experiences as a missionary in Manchester and his migration to America. George Smith, a compiler of Clayton's journals, called it Clayton's "England and Emigration" journal. It is possible that Clayton was inspired by Heber C. Kimball's daily record-keeping. He stopped keeping a personal journal on February 19, 1842, when he started to help with bookkeeping for the Nauvoo temple's construction. Clayton's Nauvoo journals start on November 27, 1842. As Joseph Smith's personal secretary and friend, he attended most meetings, where he often took minutes. Clayton's Nauvoo journals describe how Joseph Smith and others practiced plural marriage before 1843. On July 12, 1843, Joseph Smith dictated his revelation on plural marriage to William Clayton. The journals also describe how Nauvoo functioned independently from the state of Illinois. Clayton recorded activities related to the temple in Heber C. Kimball's journal beginning on December 10, 1845. While Clayton adopted the voice of Kimball in the journal, Smith argued that it should be considered one of Clayton's journals, as it contains his "distinctive style." James B. Allen, Clayton's biographer, argued that this journal should not be considered one of Clayton's journals, on the basis that scribes were frequently employed to keep the journals of church leaders.

Clayton's handwriting is not identified in Joseph Smith's History of the Church. A summary of Joseph Smith's "translation" of the Kinderhook plates are also in Clayton's journals.

There has been some controversy over the publication of William Clayton's diaries. Three of Clayton's notebooks from when he lived in Nauvoo have long been part of the closed archive of the Church History Department. In 1982, Jerald and Sandra Tanner published typed excerpts from Clayton's Nauvoo diaries between January 22, 1843, and January 28, 1846. Their excerpts came from a copy from Andrew Ehat's notes. Ehat charged the Tanners with copyright violation, but a judge ruled that his transcript was a copy of preexisting material and not copyrightable. In a discussion of how he selected the text for his abridgement of William Clayton's journals in An Intimate Chronicle (1995), George D. Smith explained that he used "a variety of official and unofficial sources" in compiling text of the Nauvoo journals. In his review of An Intimate Chronicle, Allen stated that Smith's inclusion of the Nauvoo diaries relied almost entirely on the Jerald and Sandra Tanner version of Ehat's notes.

In 2002, new text from the journals became available when Allen published a reprinting of his Clayton biography entitled No Toil Nor Labor Fear. The new printing included two appendices: a side-by-side comparison of William Clayton's diary entries (from 1842–44) with the text of the Joseph Smith's History of the Church, as well as Clayton's "History of the Nauvoo Temple." A post on the By Common Consent blog from 2017 states that the first appendix was the only source for the original source material for the Doctrine and Covenants sections that come from Clayton's diary until the second volume of the Joseph Smith Papers was published in 2011.<!--clicking on the vol. 2 image from the Benchmark Books website will lead to a page that calls it "J2" like the BCC post does--> Excerpts of the Clayton Nauvoo diaries in D. Michael Quinn's research papers showed "thirty percent more text"

See also

  • Nauvoo Brass Band

References

Works cited

  • <!--This is a later edition of Trials of Discipleship: The Story of William Clayton-->
  • Cracroft, Richard H. "Oh, What Songs of the Heart": Zion's Hymns as Sung by the Pioneers," included in Walker, Ronald W. and Dant, Doris R., "Nearly Everything Imaginable: The Everyday life of Utah's Mormon Pioneers," 1999, Brigham Young University Press, Provo, Utah. .
  • <!--a limited edition was published in 1991-->
  • Hymns The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, copyright 1948, printed 1978
  • William Clayton's diary at Brigham Young University library
  • Other collections related to William Clayton in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University