Brigham Young was born in Vermont in 1801, raised in poverty in upstate New York, and worked as a carpenter, glazier and painter with almost no formal schooling. He read the Book of Mormon in 1830, joined the movement in 1832, and was ordained to the original Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1835. His reputation was made on the British mission of 1839 to 1841, which he led and which brought several thousand converts into the church.
When Joseph Smith was killed at Carthage in June 1844 the movement had no settled rule of succession, and Young's achievement was to persuade the assembled Saints at Nauvoo that the Quorum of the Twelve, not Sidney Rigdon and not any individual claimant, held the authority. He then organised the evacuation of a city of some twelve thousand people under threat of violence, the winter encampment at Winter Quarters on the Missouri, and the crossing to the Great Basin, arriving in the Salt Lake Valley with the first company on 24 July 1847. He was ordained president of the church in December 1847.
Over the following thirty years he directed the founding of several hundred settlements from Idaho to southern California, established irrigation agriculture in a desert where nobody had farmed, planned and began the Salt Lake Temple, founded the university that became the University of Utah, and governed as territorial governor of Utah from 1851. He died in 1877.