DEATH
THE DEATH OF DESERET
By the mid-1870s, the alphabet still floated throughout the Utah Territory, but by that time, even Brigham Young acknowledged that the Deseret Alphabet experiment had failed. Printing books in the new script proved costly, and few, if any, were willing to purchase and study them, despite years of promotion.
GENERAL ELECTION PEOPLE'S TICKET
Utah Territory, 1875
On August 2, 1875, voters in the Utah Territory elected representatives to the twenty-second territorial legislature, which convened in 1876. This ticket, printed for Salt Lake, Summit, and Tooele counties, was deposited at the polls. Notably, it still includes the Deseret Alphabet.
On October 2, 1875, The Juvenile Instructor publicly signaled the project’s end. While noting that the Book of Mormon had been printed in Deseret, the magazine agreed that the characters were visually fatiguing and unfamiliar, making them difficult to read. Some suggested instead modifying the existing Roman alphabet rather than replacing it entirely. Later that month, the University of Deseret’s Board of Regents voted unanimously to adopt Pitman’s phonetic system in place of the Deseret Alphabet.
Wilford Woodruff was an early leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and later its fourth president. A dedicated missionary and convert under Joseph Smith, he helped expand the church in the United States and Great Britain. Woodruff kept detailed journals that now serve as one of the most important firsthand records of early Latter-day Saint history. As church president, he issued the 1890 Manifesto, which officially ended the practice of plural marriage in the church.
LATTER-DAY SAINTS' MILLENNIAL STAR
Liverpool: Orson Pratt, 1840-1970
BX8601 M55 vol. 35
The Millennial Star, the church’s longest-running periodical, was aimed primarily at British Latter-day Saints. This volume includes an 1873 lecture in which Orson Pratt urged The Teachers Association to adopt Pitman’s phonotype and abandon the Deseret Alphabet.
While the Board of Regents' vote marked the Deseret Alphabet’s official demise, interest in spelling reform lingered briefly. In July 1877, Orson Pratt was sent to Liverpool to arrange for the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants to be printed in the Pitman orthography. But the following month, after the phonotype had arrived, Brigham Young died, and the Church abandoned further efforts at spelling reform.
JOURNAL OF DISCOURSES
Orson Pratt, 1840-1970
BX8639.A1 A5 1967 vol. 19
This volume of the Journal of Discourses includes a lecture given by Orson Pratt in the Fall of 1877 on the topic of Brigham Young's death. He acknowledges mourning throughout the Latter-day Saint community.
SELLING SHORTHAND
Although the LDS Church ultimately concluded that neither the Deseret Alphabet nor the Pitman phonetic system was suitable for scripture publication, shorthand gained increasing importance in the late nineteenth century as a practical skill for business and secretarial work. In Utah, one notable practitioner was John Mills Whitaker.
Born in 1863, Whitaker studied at the University of Deseret in the 1880s before serving as secretary to John W. Young and later to the Salt Lake and Eastern Railway Company. He also played a key role in the early development of the LDS Seminary System. Throughout the 1890s, Whitaker taught at the University of Deseret, where he offered courses in phonography and typewriting.
LETTERS TO PITMAN
John Mills Whitaker Papers, 1863–1960
MS 0002
The John Mills Whitaker papers consist of daily journals, correspondence, and business and professional papers, among other materials, relating to John Mills Whitaker. Whitaker was an educator, horticulturalist, politician, and LDS Church leader.
To support his classes, Whitaker maintained regular correspondence with the firm of Isaac Pitman & Sons and with Pitman’s Phonographic Institute in Ohio, obtaining instructional materials and textbooks. Through educators like Whitaker, phonography continued to be an important part of Utah’s educational and professional life, even as earlier efforts at spelling reform gradually faded into the past.
PITMAN MANUALS
John Mills Whitaker Papers, 1863–1960
MS 0002
By the time that Pitman’s phonographic system was taught at the University of Utah, A wide range of manuals, textbooks, instructional charts, and correspondence courses helped standardize and popularize the Pitman method. Thus, by the late nineteenth century, Pitman shorthand was the most widely used system in the English-speaking world.
UNIVERSITY OF DESERET REGISTRATION CARDS
John Mills Whitaker Papers, 1863–1960
MS 0002