Brigham Young Shows a Young Mark Twain His Valley Tan Whisky Distillery

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Painted scene inside a brick distillery building. In the foreground center, Brigham Young — an older man in a black tailcoat, dark flat-brimmed hat, and white beard — gestures with one hand while walking beside a younger curly-haired man in a brown suit holding a small notebook. Two large copper stills with curving pipes rise behind them. Around the room, workers in shirtsleeves and aprons tend wooden mash tubs on a raised platform, while others load wooden crates stenciled "VALLEY TAN WHISKY — SALT LAKE CITY" onto a wagon. A sunlit street and brick storefronts are visible through an open doorway at the right.

A dramatization of Brigham Young — president of the LDS Church and governor of Utah Territory — escorting a young Samuel Clemens through a Salt Lake City distillery producing "Valley Tan" whisky for sale through ZCMI, the church's cooperative mercantile. Twain visited Salt Lake City in August 1861 and recorded his impressions of Valley Tan in Roughing It, calling it "a kind of whisky, or first cousin to it... made of imported fire and brimstone." The Word of Wisdom (D&C 89, 1833) had counseled Mormons against "strong drinks" for nearly thirty years by then, but Brigham Young freely operated and profited from church-affiliated distilleries throughout his presidency.

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