Behold, There Shall Be a Record Kept: Horace K. Whitney, the Diarist of the Whole Exodus (1846–1847)

Horace Kimball Whitney was born July 25, 1823, in Kirtland, Ohio, at the very center of the Restoration — the son of Newel K. Whitney, the Church's second Presiding Bishop, and Elizabeth Ann Whitney, who had been driven with the Saints from Ohio to Missouri to Illinois. On February 3, 1846, in the Nauvoo Temple, Horace married Helen Mar Kimball, daughter of Heber C. Kimball and Vilate — one day before the first wagons rolled out of Nauvoo into the Iowa winter. Both were children of the Restoration who had, as their biographer observed, "seen it all": Kirtland's apostasy, Missouri's expulsions, Nauvoo's rise and the Prophet's murder.

What sets Horace apart in the history of the exodus is a commandment. On the day the Church was organized, the Lord had instructed: "Behold, there shall be a record kept among you" (D&C 21:1). Horace obeyed it as few did. A gifted writer, musician, and mathematician, he kept a missionary journal in 1843 and then six detailed handwritten diaries spanning the entire Mormon exodus — and unlike the journals of Clayton, Woodruff, Bullock, Pratt, and Egan, each of which covers a portion of the flight, Horace's cover all five of its phases: the February 1846 departure from Nauvoo and the crossing of Iowa; the starving winter at Winter Quarters; the vanguard company journey from the Missouri to the Great Salt Lake, April–July 1847, which Horace traveled as a member of the Tenth Ten; the summer settlement of the valley; and the October 1847 return trip over the mountains to Winter Quarters. Together with Helen Mar's reminiscences published decades later in the Woman's Exponent, their joint record stands as perhaps the most complete husband-and-wife account of the exodus extant.

Horace entered the Valley with the first company, helped build the first fort, and spent his life in the new city: a major in the Nauvoo Legion, a founder of the Deseret Dramatic Association at the Salt Lake Theater, and a printer for the Deseret News who set the type for its first edition in 1853. Helen bore him eleven children, among them Orson F. Whitney, who would serve in the Quorum of the Twelve from 1906 to 1931.

Horace died November 21, 1884, in Salt Lake City. His never-before-published diaries slept in the Church History Library for a century and a half before scholars recognized what the young printer had carried across the plains besides his wife and his team: the commandment that a record be kept — and the obedience to keep it through every mile of the exodus, so that the Latter-day Saints would never have to depend on their enemies' account of how they crossed the wilderness.