Conference record · 1850 April General Conference · 1850-04-06
Transcribed from the Millennial Star, Vol. XII, No. 17 (Sept. 1, 1850), pp. 257-262 and No. 18 (Sept. 15, 1850), pp. 273-277, which together reprinted the minutes of the April 6-8, 1850 Great Salt Lake City General Conference. Follow-up (2026-07-16, first pass): confirmed via Utah Digital Newspapers that the Deseret News's first issue is dated June 15, 1850 -- more than two months after this conference -- so no contemporary Deseret News printing of these minutes can exist; the previously listed 'Deseret News, April 1850' witness was based on a mistaken assumption and has been removed. Follow-up (2026-07-16, second pass): located a second contemporary witness, the Frontier Guardian (Kanesville, Iowa), whose full-text OCR on Internet Archive contains the same conference minutes -- likely faster to reach print than the England-based Millennial Star's September reprint. Its scan is column-scrambled (OCR interleaves adjacent newspaper columns line by line), but legible fragments across the scrambled lines resolve the previously illegible Twelve Apostles sustaining-vote gap: the fragment sequence (Patriarch vote, then 'Quo[rum]...ried; also [P.P. Pratt]...Woodruff...Amasa Lym[a]n...[C.C.] Rich, Loren[zo Snow]...Franklin D. [Richards]...same; carr[ied]') matches, name for name and in the same order, the verbatim-confirmed September 1850 sustaining vote for the same Quorum of the Twelve already transcribed in the companion 1850-09 conference_record ('Orson Hyde was sustained as President, and P. P. Pratt, O. Pratt, W. Woodruff, J. Taylor, G. A. Smith, A. Lyman, E. T. Benson, C. C. Rich, L. Snow, E. Snow, and F. D. Richards, as members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles'). The body below now gives that reconstructed vote using the September vote's confirmed wording, clearly flagged as a reconstruction rather than a clean read of either witness -- not every name is independently legible in the April scan's fragments, but none contradicts the September pattern and several (Woodruff, Amasa Lyman, Rich, Lorenzo Snow, Franklin D. Richards) are directly confirmed in the fragments. The Frontier Guardian's report does not appear to include the Sunday morning discourse at the length the Millennial Star gives it, so the second flagged gap (the unattributed George A. Smith-to-Brigham-Young speaker shift) remains unresolved -- searched for the transition phrase and did not find it in this witness. Graded fragmentary per schema.md's rule that conference_record entries are never verbatim.
OCR'd from MStar_Vol_12_djvu.txt (lines ~21871-23464). Cleaned of mechanical OCR character errors and rejoined line-breaks without paraphrasing or modernizing wording. Two passages are OCR-damaged beyond a confident mechanical fix and are marked in place: (1) the sustaining vote for the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, which collapses into unreadable fragments ('Mov / carried / A / Si') between the Patriarch's sustaining vote and Willard Richards's -- see the Frontier Guardian witness below, which resolves this; (2) a stretch of the Sunday, April 7 morning session where the first-person voice shifts from what reads as George A. Smith's opening remarks to language ('your humble servant at their head' of the Twelve; 'as your leader, or president') that can only be President Brigham Young's, with no attribution line surviving the OCR between them -- still unresolved.
OCR'd from Frontier_Guardian_1849-1852_djvu.txt (conference minutes located near line ~124800 of that file, roughly OBJECT/page index 88 of 317 in the companion djvu.xml). The scan's OCR is column-scrambled -- the text interleaves lines from adjacent newspaper columns rather than reading in a clean single stream -- which makes most of the passage unusable for clean quotation, but resolves the Twelve Apostles sustaining-vote gap (see fidelity_notes) via legible fragments matching the September 1850 vote's confirmed wording. No IA full-text search index exists for this item ('No hOCR or Abbyy file present'), so locating the passage required downloading the full djvu.txt and grepping it rather than IA's search-inside API. Not checked for the Sunday morning speaker-shift gap: searched but did not find the relevant transition phrase in this witness, suggesting the Frontier Guardian's report may abridge that discourse more than the Millennial Star does. Exact issue date and page number not yet pinned down -- would need the page image (blocked this pass; see below) or a cleaner section of the djvu.xml to determine precisely.
Located 2026-07-24. Catalog description is simply 'General Conference,' dated 1850 April 7, restrictionLevel 'open to research', accessLevelCode 'unconditional'. It covers the SECOND DAY ONLY of this three-day conference and is not the full minutes -- the fuller record is the sibling folder '1850 April 6-8', which CHL marks 'closed to research' and which is therefore deliberately not cited or transcribed here. Not yet transcribed; cited so the facsimile pane can show the leaves. Leaf 1 is not a set of minutes but a pronouncement, in Bullock's hand: 'I say unto you Samuel Russell in the name of the God of Israel - that the heavy hand of ^the almighty shall be upon you and you shall know that this is a God of Revelation'.
Proofread against the source text.
Light review: in-context proofread against the cited Millennial Star OCR lines; confirmed no double-spacing or synopsis/session-bleed artifacts remain, and that the two already-flagged gaps (the illegible Twelve Apostles sustaining-vote fragment and the unattributed mid-discourse speaker shift) are honestly noted rather than silently resolved. NOT a full page-by-page scan collation.
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.