On June 20, 2015, Richard Dutcher posted this bit to Facebook:
On this day in Salt Lake City in 1848, Porter Rockwell rode a handmade unicycle around the temple lot six times wearing nothing but his cowboy boots, a leather holster and and a cowboy hat. He fired two shots into the air, one from each pistol, every time he passed a giggling Eliza R. Snow. Brigham Young watched from the center of the lot, remarking to Wilford Woodruff, “What a [non-Keepa-esque language] idiot.” (Brigham Young Diaries. Volume 7, page 83. LDS Church Archives).
That 2015 bit popped up again yesterday, the one-year anniversary of its original posting, and it’s been making the rounds beyond Dutcher’s circle. It has 2.4K likes and hearts and laughs, and has been shared 1,400 times.
Since then, readers have written to ask me about the legitimacy of this report. Is it true? Does the diary really say that?
Is it true? Not one word. Richard Dutcher is pulling your leg, having some fun, making his friend (and mine) Tom Kimball laugh.
For one thing, “on this day [that is, 20 June] in 1848,” Brigham Young was many hundreds of miles east of Salt Lake City. Brigham had reached the Valley in July 1847, then returned to Winter Quarters that fall. In the summer of 1848 he led another wagon company – one that brought my own ancestors West. On 20 June 1848, Brigham Young’s company camped at Wood River, only 75 miles or so (if I’m counting up the daily mileages correctly) from Winter Quarters.
So, you know, even if you can conceive of a naked Rockwell riding a homemade unicycle around the future site of Temple Square, firing his guns for the amusement of a giggling Eliza, Brigham was nowhere near enough to be aware of it.
A pity, innit?
“The Rockwell Hypothesis,” anyone?
Ba-dum-DUM on that comment. 🙂
Another thing that just popped into my head–there probably were no unicycles in 1848. (And, frankly, there weren’t really bicycles as we know them in 1848.)
The first patent for a unicycle was issued in the U.S. in 1869–for a “single-wheeled velocipede.” But maybe Porter Rockwell had retrieved one with his time machine, and Brother Brigham had used his space-time warping powers to drop into Great Salt Lake City for the day.
One other thing: the development of velocipedes and bicycles and unicycles must necessarily have paralleled the development of roads on which the things could actually be ridden. I’d guess that even if Porter Rockwell brought a unicycle back to 1848 with his time machine, he’d have had a rough ride on the rutted streets of GSLC.
A giggling Eliza R. Snow? Also, I believe city creek would have run through the temple lot in 1848, good luck riding a unicycle through that.
Disappointed…
To bad the facts get in the way of a good story.
A temple lot in 1848? At the most it was a plowed field with a crude bowery. If memory serves, work didn’t commence on the Old Tabernacle for several years and the cornerstone for the temple was laid just before the U.S. Army marched on our lovely Deseret in 1857.
But Eliza R. Snow giggling at naked Porter Rockwell fried my circuits. Ardis should be more careful springing such images on her ninnies.
This makes me chuckle. I can’t imagin Eliza snow laughing. She seems so serious. But i imagine she did laugh right? Thanks for lightening my day.
Sorry I have missed the last few posts! For some reason as of about two weeks ago (maybe more) posts have stopped showing up on my reader. Have you recently changed anything on the website?
No, Amanda, I haven’t made any changes recently. With spam being under control at the moment, I haven’t even bothered to block the senders of the few pieces of spam that make it through Keepa’s defenses. I don’t know what to suggest about your reader.