“When I found what I had said I was surprised”

(by Dan Peterson sic et non blog)

The other night, I read Elder Bruce C. Hafen’s review, in BYU Studies 54/3 of Blaine M. Yorgason, Richard A. Schmutz, and Douglas D. Alder, All That Was Promised: The St. George Temple and the Unfolding of the Restoration (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2013).

At one point, Elder Hafen mentions the early “Dixie” (St. George) settler Charles Pulsipher, who was assigned by the leader of the St. George settlement, Elder Erastus Snow of the Council of the Twelve, to travel throughout the towns of southern and central Utah in order to recruit laborers and to secure provisions for temple construction workers.  One day, Pulsipher was in Ephraim, a town right in the center of Utah, in modern Sanpete County, urging the local Saints to provide a dozen stone masons who could help to construct the temple’s sandstone walls.  He particularly stressed the urgen need, as he saw it, to finish the temple while the great but aging leader Brigham Young was still alive.

As Charles Pulsipher recorded in his journal:

Before I was aware of what I was saying I said, “Come on down and help us build that Temple and we will come up here and help you build one in San Pete,” and when I found what I had said I was surprised for I had never heard of any intention of building [a temple] in San Pete but it was said and I knew it would be done for it wasn’t my premeditated sayings so I went right on and never let on that I had said anything out of the common.

 

At the close of the meeting they gathered around me and said, “So we are going to have a Temple up here in San Pete, are we?”

 

“Yes sir.”

 

“Well, when did President Young tell you about it?”

 

“He never told me.”

 

“And when did you first hear of it?”

“You heard it as soon as I did.”

 

“And do you think it will be so?”

 

“Yes, I not only think but I know it will be fulfilled.”

 

In about four years I sent up two hands to work on the Manti Temple, thus I filled my promise.

After dedicating the St. George Temple in April 1877, Brigham Young stopped off on his way home to dedicate the site for a temple in Manti.  A short time thereafter, President Young dedicated the site for the future Logan Temple.  He passed away in August 1877.

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson/2020/01/when-i-found-what-i-had-said-i-was-surprised.html?fbclid=IwAR1LhlssTfHJsn1j1QcIwVHt1ESTnVwnIPIpBownl8KMZKIzobLvowh5mjY