Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.