I’ve read his mother’s writings, and his wife’s, and his son’s, but I couldn’t remember if I had read anything of Joseph’s until I looked in the John Tanner book (John Tanner and His Family, by George S. Tanner, 1974) and saw that Joseph wrote the rather distinctive biography of his father Myron which is included in the Appendix.

There is a short biography of Joseph in the back of his mother’s book A Fragment: The Autobiography of Mary Jane Mount Tanner. It is available through the University of Utah Marriott Library. See pages 210-214.

Joseph was an intelligent, energetic man, and must have had quite an influence on education in Utah. He was an associate of Karl Maeser, and when Maeser died in 1901, Joseph became the Commissioner of Church Education. He served in that position until, as his biography in his mother’s autobiography so delicately puts it, he “fell into disfavor with church officials” after two post-Manifesto marriages. At that point, he moved to Canada and spent the next 15 years farming and writing extensively for the Improvement Era and Sunday School. He also wrote a biography of John Riggs Murdock who led five “Down and Back” companies.

Joseph died in 1927 at the age of 68.

His son, O.C. Tanner, or Obert Tanner, as he was known in academic circles, arranged the editing and publication of his mother’s and grandmother’s writings. Those two books are an important contribution to the social history of Utah and to an understanding of some of the practical aspects of the institution of polygamy.

I would love to read more about Joseph’s mission. I don’t know if he left an account of his three and a half years in Europe, Turkey and Palestine in the 1880s, but it must have been an amazing experience.

And I will be very interested to see what he had to say about the topics listed in the original post.

And Chris H., you may sneer all you want, but you’d better “sneer at” those on the thread. Start dropping prepositions and no telling where it’ll lead. Some illiterate will start saying he “graduated high school.”

That’s right, Chris H., no opinionated mocking allowed. You’ll have to work on trying to achieve the status of having an empty head, instead![grin]

I have a sneaking suspicion that Researcher knows more about Brother Tanner than the rest of us put together and has probably read more than a little bit of his writing — I should have asked you to write something to accompany this post, R.

Once we have a sample or two of his opinions, we’ll all be in a better position to evaluate them and our reaction to them. I’ll put up one tomorrow for starters (along with something lighter for those who will find this series a little too heavy).

I think that creating O.C. Tanner might make up for a lot.