(Brigham Young) He also wore false teeth. "One morning he was cleaning his artificial dentures at the family wash bench just outside a back door [of the Erastus Snow home in Saint George, Utah] when little Flora caught sight of him at this very private chore. Quickly he plopped his teeth into his mouth when he beheld her staring at him in open-mouthed, wide-eyed fascination. She bounced up and down with excitement, shrilly crying 'Oh, Brother Brigham, show me your teeth; show me your teeth, Brother Brigham!' The Lion of the Lord, touched by childhood's whims, kindly obliged."
He was not always the confident preacher moderns tend to envision. Even in his later years, he approached the public forum with uneasiness. "Although I have been a public speaker for thirty-seven years," he once said, "it is seldom that I rise before a congregation without feeling a child-like timidity; if I live to the age of Methusaleh I do not know that I shall outgrow it."
Visitors to Salt Lake City
often commented on his language: "He says 'leetie', 'beyene' and 'disremember.' An irrepressible conflict between his nominatives and verbs now and then crops out in expressions like 'they '" was.
"When he speaks," reported one contemporary, "the words seem to be calmly weighed by the brain, clipped by the teeth, and finally squeezed through the left half of the almost locked up lips."
His sermons were usually practicalâ€"filled with hints on stock raising, fence building, tales of sufferings of Saints, advice to the lovelorn. He admonished the breathing of fresh mountain air, the use of homemade cloth, the eating of thick-crusted bread.
[source: Van Wagoner, Richard and Walker, Steven C., A Book of Mormons, http://amzn.to/newmormonstudies]
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