ISAAC C. HAIGHT
(Isaac Chauncey Haight)
Mormons had been attacked, murdered and run out of community after community. The Mormon prophet, Joseph Smith, had been shot and killed. They finally came to the very inhospitable land of Utah, and built a thriving community.
Isaac Chauncey Haight, an early convert to the Latter Day Saint Movement, was a colonist of the American West remembered as a participant in the Mountain Meadows massacre. He was raised on a farm in New York, and became a Baptist at age 18, hoping to become a missionary in Burma. He educated himself, and found work as a schoolteacher. He converted to Mormonism and set out to convert others in his neighborhood, building up a branch with forty members. To escape religious persecution, his family (wife and infant daughter, parents, one brother and two sisters, all of whom had joined the church) arrived in Nauvoo, Illinois in July, 1842.
