August 29, 1877, he gave Mr. and Mrs. Frank Leslie and their entourage from the staff of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Weekly a valued interview. "And if you put me in a book," said Brigham Young to the Leslies, "promise at least that you will print me as you have found me, and not as others have described me." Before the Leslies could record their impressions in print, the Mormon leader died. Mrs. Leslie's positive, even generous, account of their experience concluded by expressing regret that Brigham Young would never learn "how kindly and respectfully we remember him." She hoped the world would "deal as tenderly with his memory as we do, above his tomb let us inscribe: 'Judgment is Mine saith the Lord.'
On the whole, however, the press was unwilling either to deal tenderly with Brigham Young's memory or to leave judgment to Deity. His death was seized upon by newspapers and illustrated weeklies as an occasion not for grief, not for the listing of accomplishments common in obituaries, not for measured evaluation, but for written and artistic satire. Humor and ridicule were the dominant tones in the public media's coverage of Young's death, which for a surprisingly long period of time remained a popular subject of journalists and their illustrator allies. The themes and variations played on this event tell something about public taste in the nineteenth century, the use of a celebrated individual in the process of stereotyping, and the power of the press. "The demise of Brigham Young has long been looked for," noted the Tuscarora, Nevada, Times. Wishful thinking had appeared in the Utah anti-Mormon press as early as 1874, three years before the event, when a cartoon in Enoch's Advocate, a short-lived underground newspaper, foresaw the death of Brigham Young as "A Solution of Many Problems. "Enoch" in the title of the newspaper and in the cartoon referred to the cooperative economic program then advocated by Brigham Young. The wooden shoes served as a mocking symbol of Mormon aspirations toward self-sufficiency. "Little Briggy" (Brigham Young, Jr.), "G. A. S." (George A. Smith), "Daniel" (D. H. Wells), "G. Q. Smoothbore" (George Q. Cannon), and "Horse and Hide" (Orson Hyde), prominent leaders of the Mormons, were pictured vying for the vacated leadership role.
