Utah was Brigham Young’s community. He was absolute master of its every detail. He knew every Mormon in Salt Lake City, his name and family, his assets and problems. When he visited St. George, the Mormon settlement near the southern Nevada border, he entered every home, embraced every Saint. When he ordered a thing to be done, it was done: Tabernacle, temple towns, schools, roads, library…
Plays appearing in the theater had to have his approval. Marriages required his consent, and courtships as well. If a man wanted to enter a business or trade, Brigham Young had to approve. … When he told a man to enter into plural marriage, that man took another wife. Whatever he said was the religion of the Mormons; when he said that a man or group was apostate that man or group was excommunicated. Heber Kimball, Young’s first in command, told the congregation: “If Brother Brigham tells me to do a thing, it is the same as though the Lord told me to do it.”
If it seemed that the Mormon was not overburdened with personal decisions, Sir Richard Burton, who visited them as a friend in Salt Lake in 1860, said that Brigham Young’s policy was based upon: “The fact that liberty is to mankind in mass, a burden far heavier than slavery.”