Samuel Smith's First Mission: Two Books of Mormon Placed with Preachers Who Were Secretly Siblings

In the summer of 1830, Samuel H. Smith—the Prophet Joseph's younger brother and the Church's first officially called missionary—set out alone with a knapsack full of copies of the newly printed Book of Mormon. He had no companion, no training, and no missionary lessons. On his first day he walked 25 miles, visited four homes, and was rejected by all of them. That night he slept under an apple tree.

In the days that followed, Samuel placed two copies of the Book of Mormon—and what makes this so remarkable is what he could not have known: the two people he gave them to were brother and sister, though they lived apart and Samuel placed the books on separate visits.

The first copy went to John P. Greene, a Methodist minister, whose wife Rhoda was Brigham Young's sister. Samuel left the book with Rhoda Greene after she told him she had read it and was 'much pleased with it.' She wept with gratitude. Samuel taught her to pray about what she read and ask God for a witness. Eventually both she and her husband John P. Greene were baptized.

The second copy went to Phineas (Phinehas) Young—Rhoda's brother and Brigham Young's brother—also a Methodist preacher. Samuel encountered him at a farmhouse while Phineas was on his own preaching circuit. Phineas took the Book of Mormon intending to find its errors and expose them. Instead, he read it twice in two weeks, became convinced it was true, and publicly defended it to his congregation.

Samuel did not know that Phineas Young and Rhoda Young Greene were siblings—or that the two books he placed on his brief, seemingly fruitless mission would both land in the same family. That summer, the extended Young family and their close friends the Kimballs all read the Book of Mormon. Among those converted were Brigham Young, who would go on to lead the Church from 1844 to 1877, and Heber C. Kimball, who served as an Apostle from 1835 to 1868.

Samuel's mission formally baptized no one. Yet the seeds he planted with those two Books of Mormon—placed providentially with two preachers who were brother and sister—bore fruit that shaped the entire future of the Church. The conversion of established preachers like Phineas Young and John P. Greene also proved immensely valuable: their experience, their congregations, and their credibility helped catalyze many more early conversions.

It is one of the most remarkable statistical improbabilities in Church history: the only two books Samuel was able to place on his entire mission went to two people who were secretly related—and both became pivotal instruments in the Restoration.