Levi Jackman: ‘Like Moses on Pisgah’s Top’ — Pioneer Diarist Who Worked on Two Temples and Saw the Valley for the First Time (July 19, 1847)

Levi Jackman (1797–1876) was born in Vermont, lost his father before birth and his mother to cancer when he was twenty-two. He settled in Ohio and was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1831. He was a man who arrived at the gospel through loss and found in it a new family.

In 1832 he moved with the Saints to Independence, Missouri — and was driven out by mob violence in 1833. He went to Kirtland, Ohio, where he labored on the Kirtland Temple. Then to Nauvoo, where he labored on the Nauvoo Temple. He had given his hands to two houses of the Lord before a single one was completed.

On July 19, 1847, Jackman was in the vanguard pioneer company when they crested the ridge above the Salt Lake Valley. He wrote in his diary:

'Like Moses on Pisgah's top we could see a part of the Salt Lake Valley, our long anticipated home. We did truly rejoice at the sight.'

The Moses reference was not literary decoration. It was theological testimony. Moses, after forty years of leading Israel through the wilderness, stood on the mountain and saw Canaan — but did not enter it. Jackman was saying: we have wandered. We have suffered. And now we see it. And unlike Moses, we are going in.

Jackman also encountered Sam Brannan on the trail near the Valley, described Pawnee Indians and prairie dog towns along the way, and noted passing through a herd of buffalo — the last great one he would see. He settled in Salt Lake City, served as first counselor to a bishop, and died in Salem, Utah in 1876 at age 79.

His diary is preserved in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and on microfilm. It is one of the few first-hand accounts of the moment the first pioneer company saw the Valley.