Sunday,
June 10th. At St. George Tabernacle meeting, by request
of Apostle Wilford Woodruff, Brother Bleak read President Brigham Young’s
Discourse, delivered in Logan, Cache Co. on Friday, May 25th,
1877 at the Priesthood Meeting; held for the purpose of organizing a Stake of
Zion. Brother Woodruff made some pertinent remarks on the Discourse, remaking
in substance: the difference between President Young and himself was, that President
Young remembered the sayings of the Prophet Jospeh in a most wonderful manner,
while he, Brother Woodruff, had written the sings of the Prophet; he said he
had never heard the Prophet Joseph deliver a sermon, a prophecy, or give a revelation,
without writing it; as could be seen by referring to his Journals. The sermon
delivered by Brother Joseph at the funeral of King Follett, he had written on
the crown of his hat, standing in the congregation. He had a gift from God, it
was this, that when he did not have pencil or paper with him, he could, after
hearing the Prophet Joseph preach a sermon, go home and write it word for word
and sentence after sentence, but after completing the writing—the sermon would
pass from his mind, as though he had never heard it. At the time of doing these
things in early days he did not understand that this habit of recording the
words of the Prophet Joseph, was the calling to which God had called him, but
the subsequent experience of the Church was, that those who had been Historians
in the Church had apostatized, and had taken the Records, which they had in
charge, with them. To meet this loss, he said, his Journals had proved very
serviceable. (James Godson Bleak, The Annals of the Southern Mission, June 10,
1877, in The Annals of the Southern Mission: A Record of the History of the
Settlement of Southern Utah, ed. Aaron McArthur and Reid L. Neilson [Salt Lake City:
Greg Kofford Books, 2019], 478-79)
