Brigham Young · 1868 October General Conference · 1868-10-08
Delivered October 8, 1868, on the eve of the transcontinental railroad's arrival in Utah. Published in Journal of Discourses, Volume 12, pp. 281-289 (confirmed against indexes/jod-page-index.json and the Weebly page's own bibliography). Text below is taken from the Historical General Conferences transcript, which notes the discourse was 'reported in full for publication' since 'a synopsis... would convey a very inadequate idea of it.' Reported by David W. Evans; speaker did not review this text before publication. Full text reproduced; not abridged.
Pitman shorthand by David W. Evans; speaker did not review. BYU ContentDM's item-detail page currently fails to render in modern browsers (loads, then a client-side script redirects to the generic lib.byu.edu collections page; reproduced 2026-07-01, site-wide BYU bug, not link-format specific). Re-promote to preferred/source_url once BYU fixes this.
Page-anchored scan witness for Journal of Discourses volume 12, page 281. Currently the only reliably clickable link for this talk; BYU ContentDM is the institutionally preferred citation but its item pages are currently broken client-side (see the BYU witness note).
Digital transcript used to source the text below.
Proofread against the source text.
Proofread against the official/CHL/JSP source plus scan/OCR witness; body confirmed word-for-word complete, no changes needed.
Collated word-by-word against the original scan.
Heavyweight pass: merged a duplicate file (1868-10-young-salvation-temporal-and-spiritualself-sustainingcivilization.md, same talk under a different id/slug, with several encoding-mangled curly quotes) into this canonical file, keeping this file's session/talk_order field and adopting the duplicate's precise JD 12:281-289 citation (confirmed against indexes/jod-page-index.json and the Weebly page's own bibliography); duplicate deleted with git rm. Body collated word-for-word against the Weebly raw-HTML transcript; no OCR errors, clean boundaries. Corrected talk_order to 2, since [[1868-10-smith-historical-address]] (Part 2, "History of Church—Emigration to Utah") preceded this discourse in the same Thursday Morning Session per the Weebly page's own day-by-day agenda.
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.