Though he is often regarded as a great organizer and tactical leader, Brigham Young was first and foremost a spiritual leader, Ronald K. Esplin testified at the Sons of Utah Pioneers symposium Nov. 11.

"He caught the spirit of Joseph Smith's teaching, and then he had the Spirit enough to learn from the Lord the rest," said Brother Esplin, director of the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Church History at BYU.The Saints' exodus to the West was foretold long before the Prophet Joseph Smith's martyrdom in 1844, he said.

"A number of times - in 1889, 1895, 1898 just before his death - Wilford Woodruff retold the story about his first meeting ever with Joseph Smith in 1834," he said. That occasion was a gathering in Kirtland, Ohio, of some of the brethren who were going to accompany Joseph Smith to Zion's Camp.

"They talked about the glorious future of the Restoration, and they gave their testimonies," he recounted. "And then Joseph Smith stood up and said, `Brethren, I've been edified by this, but you do not know the half of it. You don't even have a glimpse yet of what is going to come to pass. The destiny of this people is far away in the West. We are going to be a mighty people in the Rocky Mountains.' "

A number of evidences suggest that the Saints did have intimations or prophecies about their destiny in the West, Brother Esplin said. For example, Church missionaries to the Lamanites in Missouri in 1830-31 were expelled by a government agent who then reported to his superiors in Washington D. C. that the Mormons were unruly. He wrote that they said there was some great prophecy that they would be among the Indians in the Rocky Mountains.

Thus, by the Nauvoo period, the prophecy of the Saints going west was understood by Brigham Young and many other Church leaders, although the average Latter-day Saint had no idea, Brother Esplin said.

Brigham Young understood the reason was that the Saints could not become the people the Lord intended them to become if they stayed among their enemies, Brother Esplin explained.

"He had to learn everything because he was unlearned, unsophisticated, and needed Joseph Smith as a model of how to be a righteous person without being pious like his Puritan ancestors," he said. But specifically Brigham learned from Joseph to view the world as God-centered, he added. "Brigham had to understand that, and when he did he gloried in it: the expansiveness of the gospel, the idea that everything we do is a gift to the Lord."

Brother Esplin quoted Brigham Young as saying the extent of his duty was to get up every morning and find out what the Lord would have him do that day and then go out and do it, even if he felt unprepared, or it looked impossible or he felt foolish in the attempt.

"He believed that if we did all in our power . . . the Lord would see to the rest," Brother Esplin explained. "And he lived his life that way."

Such an attitude of unconditional obedience to the Lord meant finishing the Nauvoo Temple, even though he knew the Saints would abandon it and go west soon after the temple was completed, Brother Esplin noted.