Paul Dayton Bailey was a publisher, editor, and author. He was a prolific chronicler of the Mormon Church and the American West. He was born in American Fork, Utah on 12 July 1906. He left home at age 13 to travel the rails until 1922, when he returned to Salt Lake City and enrolled at the University of Utah. He began his career as a journalist working as a reporter for the Salt Lake Telegram. In 1943 he purchased the Eagle Rock Advertiser and also started Westernlore Press to publish his and other authors books, in Los Angeles, California.
Baily wrote and published over forty books on western history, as well as articles, book reviews, and tributes. His works include Polygamy Was Better Than Monotony (1972), Holy Smoke, a dissertation on the Utah War (1978), For This My Glory: a Story of a Mormon Life (1940), An Unnatural History of Death Valley: With Reflections on the Valley's Varmints (1978), Virgins, Vandals, and Visionaries (1978), and several biographies.
Paul Bailey died in Claremont, California on October 26, 1987 and is buried in Fillmore, Utah.
This is written more as a novel format with a lot of information from Jacob Hamblin's journals. It is an older out of print book that was written back in the 1940's so the style is a little different than what most would be used to. I was interested to learn about all the places that he lived and traveled to in Northern Arizona. It spares no details about the difficulty that many women had in polygamous marriages and in what happened in the Mountain Meadows massacre. Hamblin felt that some Mormons, acting individually were to blame for the incident and that the church leaders weren't necessarily doing their part to bring those individuals to justice.