Brigham Young · 1869 April General Conference · 1869-04-06
Delivered April 6, 1869, shortly after the founding of Zions Cooperative Mercantile Institution (ZCMI) and the cooperative store movement in Utah Territory. Published in Journal of Discourses, Volume 12, pp. 372-376 (confirmed against indexes/jod-page-index.json; this April 1869 discourse was printed in Volume 12 while the rest of the conference appears in Volume 13, a JD publication-lag quirk). Text below is taken from the Historical General Conferences transcript, which notes the discourse was 'reported in full' for publication. 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 372. 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: previous source_url was a bare BYU collection landing page with no proven JD volume/page citation. Located the precise citation — JD 12:372-376 — confirmed against indexes/jod-page-index.json; note this April 1869 discourse prints in Volume 12 while the rest of the conference is in Volume 13, a JD publication-lag quirk, not an error. Upgraded source_url/witnesses to the page-anchored IA pointer (page/n381) and BYU id/9624. Body collated word-for-word against the Weebly raw-HTML transcript (fetched directly, not summarized); no OCR errors, clean boundaries. Session corrected to "Tuesday Afternoon Session," confirmed against the Weebly page's own day-by-day agenda for the Fortieth Annual Conference.
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.