On September 25, 1910, forty-eight-year-old William H. Smart took pen in hand and, as he so often did during a ministry unique in Mormondom, wrote a prayer:

My Heavenly Father: Please awaken me to a full realization of the blessing Thou hast bestowed upon me in bringing me along thus far on the Journey of life. . . . Thou didst snatch me from the burnings, Thou didst in me choose a weak thing of the earth to confound the wise. . . . O Father May these my humble but fervent petitions find favor in thy sight even at...

On April 14, 1860, thirteen Mormon families, led by Thomas Sharratt Smart from Provo, Utah, pulled their wagons into a circle on the Muddy (later the Cub) River in the north end of Cache Valley in what they thought was Utah. The settlement they would build there would become Franklin, the first permanent white settlement in Idaho.¹ It would also become the birthplace of William H. Smart, the man known as the father of Mormon settlement in Utah’s Uinta Basin and the author of the most voluminous and comprehensive journals documenting that settlement.

The Mormons had long eyed the lush,...

The early years of adulthood, with decisions to be made about career, marriage, and lifestyle, can be stressful. For young William H. Smart, they were more than that; they were often full of torment. Like many young men, he agonized over the choice of a wife, but he went further; he fasted and prayed over whether to take a second wife in the polygamy commonly practiced among Mormons at the time. For a man who accomplished so much, who was so focused, goal-oriented, decisive, and self-assured in later life, he was, during this period, surprisingly ambivalent, irresolute, self-indicting, and unable...

From its beginning, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has relied for its growth on missionary efforts. In 1830, the very year of its organization, missionaries were laboring in Canada and among Indians on the western frontier. Formal missions were established by Joseph Smith in England in 1839 and, shortly before his 1844 murder, in Tahiti. After Brigham Young had relocated the struggling church to the Great Basin, he launched a missionary movement that was astonishing in the audacity of its world outreach. Overseas missions were established in Scandinavia, France, Italy, Switzerland, and Hawaii in 1850; Australia and...

The next eight years saw profound changes in William H. Smart’s life. His family grew from one infant daughter to four children. Despite his continued smoking, he resumed teaching at the church-owned Brigham Young College and filled various church callings, none of them positions of leadership. One crucial change was in his financial condition, and in the way he improved it. He returned virtually penniless from the failed Turkish mission. After three more years of struggling financially as a schoolteacher, he finally gave it up and became a full-time player in the then-burgeoning sheep industry. Within three years after that...

The Eastern States Mission to which William H. Smart reported on April 11, 1898, had a long, although sporadic, history. First opened in 1839, it was the second organized Mormon mission, two years behind the British Mission. It was closed in 1850, reopened four years later, but closed again in 1858, after elders throughout the church were called home because of the approach of a federal army in what became known as the Utah War. It remained closed during the Civil War, reopened in 1865, closed four years later, and finally reopened for good in 1893.¹

When Smart arrived, it...

In addition to his business acumen and spiritual dedication, William H. Smart had a knack of fortuitous timing. He established himself solidly in the sheep business during the boom years, before grazing restrictions to save the watershed drove less provident sheepmen out of business. He sold his stock in the LaPlata silver mine just before the ore pinched out, the stock became worthless, and the area became a ghost town. Now, on February 9, 1901, he arrived in Heber Valley to become the new stake president, the highest Mormon authority there, just sixteen months after the arrival of the railroad...

The Uinta Basin, where William H. Smart would soon plunge into his most difficult and far-reaching labors, and where he would wear out the major portion of his adult life and dissipate his fortune, was Utah’s last major land area permanently settled by whites. Ringed by the Wasatch Mountains on the west, the Uinta Mountains on the north, the Tavaputs Plateau and Book Cliffs on the south, and the Rocky Mountains on the east, it was remote, isolated, and difficult to access.

With rainfall averaging less than nine inches a year, limited and often alkaline soil, and a climate that...

Uintah Stake, William H. Smart’s new responsibility, was hardly a bastion of Mormondom. It consisted of a single ward—the Ashley Ward in Vernal—and outlying units in the tiny Mormon clusters at Glines, Jensen, Maeser, and Naples. The “Uintah Stake Manuscript History” refers to those units as “wards,” but explains that “in reality they were only districts of the Ashley Ward.”

That seems like small progress in the nineteen years since the stake was organized, but Ashley Valley was definitely not Mormon country. Because of its isolation and the negative reports by explorers, Brigham Young had declined to issue...

For William H. Smart’s patiently compliant Anna, leaving her beautiful two-story brick home only three years after its completion was but one of many trials she suffered as the wife of a man whose single-minded dedication to his church leadership calling left her so often alone. For William, the trial was different—and far more pivotal. His problem was not that of leaving, but of deciding where he should leave to. Where in his new ministry—named by the First Presidency the Duchesne Stake of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints¹—would he establish his home?

His decision...

Smart’s presidency of the new Roosevelt Stake proved to be short, in large part because non-ecclesiastical affairs demanded so much of his time and energy. Times were tough in the early 1920s. Farmers, overextended during the World War I boom, now faced high mortgage payments and collapsed prices for their products and their lands. Foreclosures were common, and banks, unable to collect on their loans, were in trouble. Smart’s struggles to save the two Mormon banks he had fostered were especially draining. His election to and service in the state legislature was another distraction, and the alarming decline of his...

What’s a man to do when he’s released from twenty-four years of virtually full-time church service? Apostle Richards’s invitation to Smart to rest from his long labors suggests the story of the just-retired man who sat in his rocking chair and, after several weeks, began to rock. William H. Smart wasn’t such a man. A couple of months earlier, on his sixtieth birthday, April 6, he had written that he was “fairly well and full of desire to continue active spiritually and temporally. . . . I have no spirit or thought of retiring.”

So he didn’t. Shortly after his...

If life had been hard for settlers trying to scratch out a living in the Uintah Basin’s inhospitable soil—and for William H. Smart himself—it was about to get harder. Six weeks after he left Leota for good, the collapse of the stock market on Black Friday, October 29, 1929, started the Great Depression. In the subsequent bank runs, $140 billion of depositor money disappeared, 10,000 banks closed their doors, and shrinking credit brought widespread foreclosures. Utah was hit as hard as any place, and the basin, where farmers and ranchers were barely holding on anyway, harder still.

Smart’s...

Throughout his long Uintah Basin ministry, William H. Smart gave countless priesthood blessings for healing and/or comfort. His retirement to Salt Lake City did not end that. On the very day he and Anna settled into their one-room apartment, word came of the killing of FBI agent Samuel P. Cowley in a gun battle that also killed the notorious gangster Lester (“Baby Face” Nelson) Gillis. Smart hurried to the home of the victim’s mother, his niece Luella Cowley, wife of former apostle Matthias F. Cowley. At her request, he gave her a blessing of comfort. After a funeral attended by...

As he understood it, William H. Smart’s commission from the LDS First Presidency was to see that Utah’s last colonizing, made possible by opening of the Ute Indian Reservation in 1905, would be done primarily by Mormons. A century later, the results can be measured.

When Smart arrived in the rough frontier town of Vernal in 1905 to become president of the church’s Uintah Stake, it consisted of one small ward in Vernal and five tiny outlying branches, all outside the reservation boundary. By 1930, when his Basin ministry was about over, growth of the Uintah Stake had been slow....