Scoundrels Tale: The Samuel Brannnan Papers (Kingdom in the West) [Hardcover]

Sam Brannan (Author), Will Bagley (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 2005 | Series: Kingdom in the West (Book 3)

Through letters and other documents by Samuel Brannan and his contemporaries, Will Bagley offers the first honest and accurate portrait of one of the most colorful and important figures in California and Mormon history. An early convert to Mormonism, a protege of Joseph Smith, and an early leader of the Mormon Church in New York, Brannan led eastern church members to Yerba Buena (San Francisco) aboard the ship Brooklyn in 1846. They were the first group of American emigrants to reach California by sea. Brannan's dreams of empire, nurtured in contacts with national Democratic leaders, were undercut by the United States conquest of California and Mormon settlement in Utah, but the discovery of gold in 1848, which he played a key role in publicizing, soon made hime rich supplying the miners. For a while he was reputedly the richest man, and certainly one of the most powerful, in California. Having broken with Brigham Young and the Mormans, Brannan pursued other inter! ests, from mines and railroads to vineyards and a recreational spa, from San Francisco's Vigilance Committee to filibustering in Hawaii and Mexico. Drink, womanizing, divorce, and bad investments brought him down. He died having spent his last impoverished years pursuing another dream of empire, involving mining and colonization in Sonora.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Will Bagley is a historian and a writer who lives in Salt Lake City. He is the editor of _A Road from El Dorado: The 1848 Trail Journal of Ephraim Green and Frontiersman: Abner Blackburn's Narrative._ In 1994 with Harold Schindler, he revised and updated Dale L. Morgan's classic _West from Fort Bridger_. For the centennial of Utah's statehood, he published _This is the Place: A Crossroads of Utah's Past_, a childrens book, with his brother cartoonist, Pat Bagley. His book _The Pioneer Camp of the Saints: The 1846-1847 Mormon Trail Journals of Thomas Bullock_ was the first volume in the Arthur H. Clark Company series _Kingdom in the West: The Mormons and the American Frontier_, of which _Scoundrel's Tale_, hardcover, vas volume 3. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Arthur H. Clark Company; First Edition edition (December 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0870622870
• ISBN-13: 978-0870622878
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.3 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,934,031 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the real story of Sam Brannan, March 20, 2001

By 

steve the artguy (Napa, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Scoundrels Tale: The Samuel Brannnan Papers (Kingdom in the West) (Hardcover)

Sam Brannan is a mythic character. He was on the scene and usually a major player in most of early California history, from the founding of San Francisco and Sacramento to the publicity of and fortunes made from the Gold Rush. Like most larger than life figures, facts about him are hidden within the obscuring mists of legend.

William Bagley has done the heroic task of sifting through literally all available letters to, from, and about Brannan by first person sources. With access to documents previously hidden in the depths of the Salt Lake City archives, Bagley is able to weave a crazy quilt story of an apprentice printer living with Joseph Smith's family who became a brilliant young evangelist who stumped throughout the US in the mid 1800s, and as President of the Saints in the West spearheaded a voyage of saints hoping to establish a Mormon principality on the west coast of America. The fact that in his later years, having made and lost fortunes larger than most will ever see, he claimed never to have been a Mormon at all makes the story even more intriguing.

Bagley's meticulous attention to details, footnotes, and absolutely complete index makes this both a fascinating read and an invaluable reference book. If you want or need to know anything about Sam Brannan, I can think of no better place to start.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Notorious Tale of Sam Brannan, April 20, 2008

By 

Poseur (CA, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Scoundrels Tale: The Samuel Brannnan Papers (Kingdom in the West) (Hardcover)

Bagley is an interesting modern historian. He makes his bias toward Brannan clear in the first few pages and throughout the book (chiefly based on Brannan's part in San Francisco's vigilante movement (My hat is off to Brannan for that episode.)), but it's a bias that the reader can mostly cringe at a little and move on mainly because Bagley has put forth a great effort in piecing together a wide array of primary sources that the reader can interpret without (pre)judgement. Bagley also states that this book is "not for the faint-hearted." I'm unclear on what that means since I found nothing excessively shocking about the man. I was expecting that Brannan was a "womanizer" of dozens of women, but that failed to emerge. Based on his time period Brannan had his faults, but he clearly is the material of a classic American hero like him or not. The only thing I did find disturbing was the fact that the LDS church seems to prohibit, limit, shelf indefinitely or (likely) destroy historical materials it deems threatening in any way to its image; possibly that is what Bagley meant. Maybe it was the fact that Brannan was a clear threat to Brigham Young, and Young knew it. Bagley also does a fine job of separating the real from the mythical Brannan. I felt that I got to know the man a little better when it was revealed that Brannan was charitable, but was blunt toward poor people, and would question them closely, but gave them a generous gift. That made him more human to me even though it was a secondary source. He also survived seven gun shot wounds; he was one tough and lucky man. We should all be so lucky to have a life such as Brannan's. Overall, a readable book.