Conference record · 1849 April General Conference · 1849-04-06
Full transcription pass (2026-07-24, claude-opus-5). **This file previously stated that no minutes of this conference had been located. That was wrong.** Bullock's contemporaneous minutes survive in the CHL folder 'Salt Lake City, 1849 April 6-12' (Historian's Office general Church minutes, 1839-1877, CR 100 318, restrictionLevel 'open to research'), and all of the conference proper is now transcribed below from the leaf images, fetched via the catalog's own delivery API (accessLevelCode 'unconditional' confirmed before download). Method - four overlapping 2x-scale contrast-enhanced bands per leaf plus targeted zooms. The reason no minutes were found earlier is likely that the folder is titled by date range rather than by conference, and the record is short and unglamorous - the April 6 session opened in snow and mud with about thirty people present, Brigham Young sick and absent, and adjourned within the hour for want of attendance. Business was transacted on April 7 and 8. The conference occupies leaves 1 through the top of leaf 5; the remainder of the folder (the balance of leaf 5, leaf 6, and the leaf 7 wrapper) is non-conference material described in the collation notes and deliberately not folded into this record. Graded fragmentary because Bullock's minute-hand carries word-level uncertainty throughout; uncertain readings are bracketed in place, cancellations recorded as [struck: ...], interlineations as ^[...], and expanded abbreviations in square brackets.
Bullock's contemporaneous minutes, and the source of the transcription below. Docketed by Bullock on the wrapper (leaf 7) 'April 6, 7, 8 1849 / Conference Minutes at G.S.L. City / ^[Rich & Lyman] Sending a company to California and a mail eastward.' - the docket's two subjects correspond exactly to the conference sessions and to the appended non-conference business. Folder restrictionLevel 'open to research'; item accessLevelCode 'unconditional'.
OCR'd from MStar_Vol_11_djvu.txt (lines ~19506-19945). Not a record of proceedings but the First Presidency's own report of them, composed within days of the conference. Retained in full below because it is the form in which this conference reached the Saints abroad, and because its account of the conference's business is now checkable against the minutes.
A short independent eyewitness item ('CONFERENCE.') describing the weather and crowding, printed 12 days after the conference closed. Its weather report is corroborated by Bullock's minutes. Open to research.
The same First General Epistle, printed six weeks earlier than the Millennial Star's reprint, but with far more degraded OCR (broken column interleaving); not used as a transcription base.
Proofread against the source text.
Light review (original pass), against the Millennial Star printing of the First General Epistle that then constituted this file. NOT a review of the manuscript transcription added on 2026-07-24; that text is
Collated word-by-word against the original scan.
Legacy field (heavyweight review retired 2026-07). That pass located the April 18, 1849 Frontier Guardian eyewitness note and correctly concluded that the epistle was not a minutes record, but it also concluded that no minutes existed. The 2026-07-24 pass found Bullock's minutes in CHL and superseded that conclusion. The Frontier Guardian's report of snow and crowding is independently corroborated by Bullock's own weather notes ('Snow on ground, melting - ground wet'; 'Cold Breeze'; a hail storm on April 8).
This is a living critical edition. If you find a transcription, metadata, or sourcing error in this talk, report it to the editors →Reports are collated against the page scan and land as corrections in the vault.