Church Plans to Publish Nauvoo Journal of William Clayton

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By Trent Toone, Church News

The Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is collaborating with Yale University Press to publish the Nauvoo, Illinois, journal of William Clayton, reported a September 25 news release on ChurchHistoriansPress.org.

“We are so pleased to work with Yale to make this important text available to the public. They have earned their reputation as one of the best scholarly presses in our field. We are eager for scholars and members to read this long-awaited volume,” Matthew McBride, director of publications in the Church History Department, said in the news release.

Who Was William Clayton?

Clayton joined the Church in England. He was baptized by Heber C. Kimball in the River Ribble on Oct. 21, 1837, according to his biography on JosephSmithPapers.org.

Clayton moved to Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1840. Between 1842 and 1846, he was a clerk, treasurer, temple recorder and confidant of Joseph Smith and his wife, Emma Smith.

Clayton was the clerk of the first company of pioneers to enter the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. He penned the words to the pioneer hymn, “Come, Come, Ye Saints,” in April 1846. Clayton also invented an early version of the odometer, an instrument used for measuring distance.

He served a mission to England from 1852-1853. He died in Utah on Dec. 4, 1879, at the age of 65.

“It would be hard to overstate the importance of William Clayton’s journal for understanding the Nauvoo era of Church history,” said Alex Smith, a volume editor on the project and a co-editor for six volumes of the Joseph Smith Papers.

“Many insights in the journal — about Joseph Smith’s daily activities and religious teachings, Nauvoo’s civic and ecclesiastical administration, the city’s social life and the lived experience of plural marriage are found nowhere else,” Alex Smith said in the news release.

Publishing Clayton’s Nauvoo Journal

The Church History Department first announced its plans to publish Clayton’s three-volume Nauvoo journal in 2017. The Church has owned the journal since 1854, when William Clayton donated it to the Church Historian’s Office.

For the last eight years, a team of professional historians, archivists and editors have transcribed, verified and annotated the three volumes in the style of the Joseph Smith Papers.

The completed manuscript has been submitted to Yale and will go through the press’s peer review and editorial processes in the coming months.

“This informative, provocative and inspiring journal ultimately recounts one man’s life-defining faith, and I hope any who read its often very personal entries will find a connection to Clayton and the other early Latter-day Saints who frequent these pages,” Smith said.

Other Published Journals

The Church has published the journals of other early Latter-day Saints in recent years, including:

• The Diaries of Emmeline B. Wells.
• The 1883 Prison Journal of Belle Harris.
• The Journals of Early Sister Missionaries.
• The Journal of George F. Richards.
• The Journal of George Q. Cannon.

Learn more about these and other publications at ChurchHistoriansPress.org.