Heber C. Kimball was a central figure in early Latter-day Saint history, serving as Brigham Young’s first counselor and helping shape the church’s westward migration. He led a complex family life with 43 wives and 64 children, balancing loyalty, faith, and leadership amid the challenges of polygamy and frontier life. His daughter, Helen Mar Kimball, navigated personal tragedy while leaving a rich record of her experiences, and her son, Orson F. Whitney, carried forward the Kimball legacy through poetry, preaching, and church leadership. In this interview, biographer Andrew Kimball explores the lives, struggles, and enduring influence of the multi-generational Heber C. Kimball family.
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Book Context: “The Blood in Their Veins” — Heber C. Kimball Family History
What inspired The Blood in Their Veins?
When I was in graduate school, historian Richard Bushman was my stake president. We live now not far from each other in Manhattan.
In 2012, he invited me to lunch and mentioned the church was preparing a new multi-volume history. He thought perhaps the project could use me to draft parts about Heber C. Kimball and his family. Heber had been first counselor to Brigham Young.
A few weeks later, he got back to me and said it had not worked out, but of course, I was free to write about the Kimballs on my own. I decided I would.
There are already two biographies of Heber C. Kimball, one published in 1888, another in 1981. But Heber’s family interested me; the 43 wives and the 64 children by 17 of those wives.
The resulting book was “The Blood in Their Veins,” a phrase Brigham Young used in commenting about the Kimballs.
Heber C. Kimball: Life, Family, and Leadership
Overview
Who was Heber C. Kimball?
Heber C. Kimball was born in Vermont in 1801. His family moved to New York State, where, as a young man, he knew Brigham Young. They investigated the new religion together and were both baptized in 1832.
By that time, Heber and his wife Vilate had four children, two of them deceased. Both Heber and Brigham were ordained as apostles in 1835.
As Brigham came to assume leadership of the main body of the church after Joseph Smith’s murder, he increasingly relied on Heber C. Kimball’s assistance and support.
Heber C. Kimball and Polygamy
How was Heber C. Kimball introduced to polygamy?
In 1866, Heber told a congregation of saints that “I can recollect well when Joseph Smith the prophet received” a revelation for me “in the presence of President Brigham Young and Willard Richards. They had not been home from a mission in England “over six days before Joseph called us together and laid these things before us, the first time we knew of them.”
Joseph gave his revelation as “Thus saith the Lord for my servant Willard and Brigham and Heber to take more wives for this is pleasing in my God’s sight.”
Heber described his astonishment:
I wept days, but I would not weep before the people. I would go and wash my face and anoint my head. . . . I was sorrowful. I had a good wife. I was satisfied.
Heber C. Kimball had been married to Vilate for nineteen years, and it took considerable cajoling by Joseph Smith and the acquiescence of Vilate before he would obey. He finally did, with typical whole-heartedness.
When was his wrestle with polygamy first published?
Not until the 1880s was the story written down in detail by his daughter, Helen Mar Kimball. It is a remarkable account of Heber and Vilate’s inner struggle to accept a practice violently at odds with what they had been taught to believe.
The lack of contemporaneous accounts is always an issue with historians. Unfortunately, it was an inevitable consequence of the secrecy in which the saints felt obliged to practice polygamy until the public announcement in 1852.
Although a retrospective recounting, Helen Mar Kimball’s description of her father’s wavering in the face of the command and her mother’s miraculous conversion to the new doctrine makes an amazing narrative.
Why were some early Latter-day Saints sealed to Heber C. Kimball by adoption?
Beyond wives and children, notions of family relationships in eternity evolved radically under Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, coming to include concepts of priesthood adoption.
During the hurried ordinance work in the new temple during the last days in Nauvoo, several hundred adults were “adopted” to a handful of Latter-day Saint leaders, who in turn were linked to prior priesthood holders, either living or dead, in what was meant to form an unbroken lineage back to Adam and hence Deity.
Heber and Vilate Kimball adopted at least 40 individuals.
Heber and Vilate Kimball adopted at least 40 individuals, predominantly married couples, and, as word of adoption spread among the saints, came to informal understandings with an unknown number more.
In a trail meeting while crossing to Utah, Heber praised his family, whether by birth or adoption, for doing their best. He wished all to be filled with “the spirit & power of God,” to prophesy and “have dreams & visions.”
Kimball himself had found that God was most present “when he gave all up & could say, Lord here I am with all I have.”
Although each individual soul was central in seeking salvation, the path was a shared one, and success depended on “oneness.” Eternal life was imagined as a family affair.
Heber C. Kimball’s Wives and Children
How many wives did Heber C. Kimball have?
I believe Heber C. Kimball had 43 wives, although there are varying counts.
How many wives did he have children with?
Heber had children with 17 of his 43 wives. Others were past child-bearing age, with whom there was probably no physical intimacy.
Some of the 43 wives never lived with Heber or the Kimball family, and some never went west with the saints; most of these probably understood their sealing as only applicable in the afterlife. After Heber’s death, additional women were sealed to him, presumably with an expectation of advantage in the afterlife by being sealed to a righteous man.
How many children did Heber C. Kimball have?
Most of Heber’s children were born and grew up in nineteenth-century Nauvoo and Salt Lake City. There were 64 of them by my count. Several were stillborn. Nineteen died before the age of 10.
The 42 children who reached the age of 20 provide a cross-section of much Utah Latter-day Saint experience. For example, none of the boys had professions. A few hauled freight before the railroads. Others farmed, ranched, or drummed goods for Salt Lake merchants. One was a jailor.
Although there were three bishops, four stake or mission presidents, and a daughter on a general church board, only one son achieved a high church office. A few left their father’s church, with several becoming Christian Scientists.
What were Heber C. Kimball’s children like?
The family harbored some fractious souls. A number of the boys struggled with alcoholism; some succumbed. One was jailed for assault. Several accused another of jumping their mining claim. One was convicted of selling fraudulent shares in a banana plantation, but the conviction was overturned on appeal.
There were squabbles over the family cemetery, a charge of chicanery with the family books, occasional uncertainty and jealousy over who would head the family.
The family harbored some fractious souls.
There were instances of depression, venereal disease, and suicide. Fourteen sons served proselyting missions, toughing it out despite malaria and loneliness. One refused in court to disavow his plural wife, although dying of tuberculosis, and was sentenced to the Utah Territorial Penitentiary.
The boys found work and lost it. There were good marriages, bad marriages. They fell in and out of love, grew cold, grew hot. There were dreams taken as portents and numerous instances of inspiration and testimony.
Heber C. Kimball’s Character and Personality
What was his personality like?
Heber C. Kimball was over six feet tall, balding, and symmetrical in figure, with a blacksmith’s solid build. He was noted for direct talk and quirks of humor. There was not a hypocritical bone in his body.
Emmeline Wells recalled of Heber that “his moods and peculiarities—call some of them eccentricities if you will,” made “a lasting and indelible impression upon people.”
She recalled him as “intensely original” and indeed “not like any other man that we have ever known.”
Why was he made fun of?
Heber C. Kimball’s lack of artfulness and finish made him easy to pillory. Brigham Young’s estranged wife, Ann Eliza, claimed that Heber “seemed always to supply the buffoonery” in any gathering. The New York Tribune mocked him as part “circus-clown.”
Brigham Young put it more positively, remarking that “Brother Kimball is noted in the States for calling things by their right names.”
An opposition newspaper backhandedly complimented him in 1865 for having “just enough of burly Yankee Doodle honesty, to blurt out his ‘thinking’ at times.”
As his son Elias would later remark, “Poor father, how he used to get it in the neck all the time. Such is life in the far west.”
How did that compare to the way people would view his son, J. Golden Kimball?
Thirty-five years later, Heber’s son, J. Golden Kimball would be ridiculed as a member of the First Council of Seventy in much the same vein by the Salt Lake Tribune.
In 1908, the newspaper dubbed him the “jester” in the court of “polygamous king” Joseph F. Smith and belittled him as a “jocose high priest” somewhat too “inclined to jest with things sacred.”
Like his father, J. Golden yielded not an inch to enemies of Mormonism, a trait the Tribune dubbed “fanaticism,” though conceding that he did it boldly and was a “big, strong, straightforward man.”
As with his father, his preaching was criticized at times as crude, to which Golden retorted on one occasion that
I was not feeling very badly as a great modern prophet [Heber] was called crude, and he had said things that would be remembered even behind the vail, while silver tongued orrators sentiments were forgotten.
J. Golden Kimball
When someone advised that J. Golden’s “trouble” came from imitating his father’s blunt manners and quirks of humor, he shrugged, “Well, thank God I can try to be like him a little.”
How was Heber C. Kimball regarded in his lifetime?
Much noted in his time among the Latter-day Saints, Heber has had little place in history.
The Gentile (non-Mormon) press despised him. He was no dissimulator. His tone could be strident, uncouth, with a turn of humor that grated on some ears. There were loquacious men of more education among the saints, some of whom fell to the wayside like hard seed flung on rocky ground.
Heber had the virtues of single-minded loyalty and resolute faith and exhibited the great power that emanates from constancy. He was the sort of follower and first lieutenant on whom new religions are built.
What did Brigham Young say about Heber C. Kimball at his funeral?
Speaking at Heber’s funeral in 1868, Brigham remarked that he had known Kimball for 43 years, the last 24 with Heber as his counselor. Brigham said that Kimball had been worthy, and therefore “the day of this man’s death was far better to him than the day of his birth.”
Brigham Young considered Heber C. Kimball “a man of as much integrity I presume as any man who ever lived on the earth.”
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The influence of Heber C. Kimball on his posterity
How did Heber’s character define the Kimball family for decades?
Heber C. Kimball was at the center of the family, always. His impact threads the lives of his wives and children, both before and after his death. His was a formidable, persistent presence.
For decades, Heber’s strong character defined the Kimballs. Family members experienced night dreams of their father and daytime intimations of his presence. At death, they felt his imminence. Always, there was the impossible comparison with their progenitors’ outsized life and accomplishments.
Measuring up to father was inevitably a trial for the sons. Elias Kimball observed to a brother that father had been “a magnificent looking man” and thought that “none of us are so fine looking as he was.”
His son, J. Golden Kimball, glumly reflected that “we are not as courageous and made of as good metal as our parents.”
Vilate Kimball: Wife of Heber C. Kimball and Friend to the Poor
Who was Vilate Kimball?
Vilate was 16 when she married Heber C. Kimball. At the age of 25, she was baptized a Latter-day Saint. She was 36 when her husband came under pressure from Joseph Smith to take another wife, and only consented to polygamy after prayerful struggling.
She was 39 when the family took flight in wagons in the dead of winter, abandoning home and city. At 40, she set up house in a rough shelter in Winter Quarters. It was there, in hard circumstances, that she mothered her children and (increasingly) the sister wives who lived nearby, their children, and dozens of adults adopted by sealing into the family.
How was Vilate Kimball perceived by her sister wives?
Vilate was “dearly beloved” by Heber’s other wives and their children, according to sister-wife Lucy Walker Kimball, who thought Vilate “one of the noble women of the earth.”
When sister wife Mary Ellen went home to her mother after the wrenching loss of her only child, it was “Sister Vilate” who came to invite her home.
When Presendia Huntington Kimball was moved south during the evacuation of Salt Lake as the U.S. army advanced in 1858, and then seemed to get overlooked in Heber’s arrangements for return, it was
Sister Vilate (that blessed woman, a mother to us all, when I think of her my heart swells with gratitude) [who] would give Bro. Kimball no peace until he sent for me to return to the family.
“She had been a mother to the whole family,” wrote sister-wife Adelia after Vilate’s death, “and a true friend to the poor.”
Helen Mar Kimball: Life, Marriage, and Writings
Who was Helen Mar Kimball?
She was Heber and Vilate’s third child and only surviving daughter. At 14, she was married to Joseph Smith, but remained with her parents through the time of his death a year later. She then married Horace Whitney and emigrated west with the family. They had 11 children, 6 of whom pre-deceased her.
Though intelligent and strongly opinionated, Helen was a private woman, preoccupied with household and children and susceptible to anxiety and sometimes depression. She was familiar with the leading women in the church and gained some attention in later years with her writing for the Woman’s Exponent.
At Helen Mar Kimball’s death in 1896, one Latter-day Saint leader called her “one of the best known and most estimable women of the Church.” But history and circumstance landed on Helen about as hard as it does on most of us mortals.
Why did Helen Mar Kimball marry Joseph Smith when she was 14?
In June 1843, when Helen was 14, her father asked “if I would believe him if he told me that it was right for married men to take other wives” and went on to explain polygamy and how it had been taught in the scriptures.
Helen reacted with disbelief and repugnance. Joseph Smith stopped in the next day and taught the principle himself in company with her father and mother.
I willingly gave myself to purchase so glorious a reward.
As Helen later recalled it, Joseph assured her that “if you will take this step, it will ensure your eternal salvation and exaltation & that of your father’s household & all of your kindred,” a promise so great, recalled Helen, “that I willingly gave myself to purchase so glorious a reward.”
She later saw this acquiescence as a “generous sacrifice” by a girl who “dids’t not weigh the cost nor know the bitter price.”
How did she later feel about her marriage to Joseph Smith?
For years, Helen Mar Kimball would struggle with the fact that she had been led into polygamy at such an early age, writing evocatively 13 years after Heber C. Kimball’s death that “my father had but one Ewe Lamb, but willingly laid her upon the altar.”
He had acted in the rush of leaving on a mission and inadvertently wounded the feelings of both daughter and wife.
Although there is no reason to think there was a sexual component to the marriage, it was clearly a difficult episode for Helen, maybe traumatic. Joseph died a year later, in 1844.
Did Helen remarry after Joseph Smith’s death?
Yes. Helen Mar Kimball married her sweetheart, Horace Whitney. That marriage was also soon complicated by polygamy. Horace would take two more wives, with Helen’s consent, though unintentionally upsetting her when she happened upon his love letter to one of them.
Could you talk about her struggles with depression?
Helen experienced a succession of hard shocks. She lost her first three children in infancy. Another died at four. Another at 16. Another at 21.
The second baby died as they crossed the plains by wagon in 1848. Helen was so distraught it seemed to unhinge her. She became convinced the child was still alive and insisted her husband open its grave to confirm the infant was dead.
As they continued west, Helen lost her reason altogether. She became convinced that she was in the power of Satanic beings. The family had to forcibly feed her. It took months to recover.
Helen was probably depressive by temperament or biochemistry. Beset with melancholy and various physical ills, she wrote at one point that “none but god or His angels knew the extent of my trials.”
What were Helen’s relationships like with her children?
Helen Mar Kimball was anxious and worried about her children, for reasons that seemed important to her. She was exasperated with and worried for a daughter who insisted on amusing herself on Sundays rather than keeping the sabbath day holy.
- Another daughter took up with an outsider. He was a decent and honorable man, but not a Latter-day Saint. Her daughter persisted and married him. That was a body blow to Helen. Over the succeeding years, she seems to have contributed to undermining the marriage, which eventually failed.
- A third daughter married polygamously, even as federal persecution of the practice was heightening. The husband felt unable to publicly acknowledge the marriage, and after their son was born, he failed to provide support. He showed no interest in her or their child and did not even turn up for the child’s funeral. Helen supported this daughter through a morbidly unhappy life of tears and depression.
- Helen’s son Charlie was a self-conscious boy, considered himself unattractive to girls, felt guilt over smoking and drinking, and struggled with feelings of shame and inferiority. When at 21 he shot himself in his mother’s house in Salt Lake, the newspapers sensationalized the tragedy.
Through it all, she maintained what younger half-sister Alice called “a beautiful character.”
After Helen’s four-year-old Phebe caught scarlet fever and died in a day, Alice
went up to her but could not control my feeling and I burst into tears. She put her arm around me and said, ‘Alice, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.’
I looked at her in wonder and surprise. I could not understand.
How did Helen Mar Kimball’s suffering shape her faith?
More than once, Helen Mar Kimball descended into her own hell. The blows of life registered on her physical self, leaving her perennially ailing, though still her sense of fight burned on.
When she wrote after one of many disappointments that “my soul is bowed ‘under the Rod’,” her choice of phrase spoke to a submission grounded not in defeat but strong acceptance. If polygamy seemed at times a terrible sacrifice, yet from its incorporation she took a lasting faith and indomitable resolve, clinging tenaciously to her sense of right despite setbacks and despondency.
Helen sometimes puzzled over where things were leading, but finally closed ranks in fierce loyalty to the cause with which she had aligned. In surrender to that faith, she found sustaining freedom.
What were some of Helen Mar Kimball’s most notable writings?
Polygamy pamphlets
Polygamy was, at times, a great trial for Helen. Nevertheless, she embraced the practice and wrote two long pamphlets defending it.
Reminiscences in the Woman’s Exponent
Helen Mar Kimball’s extensive reminiscences of growing up in Kirtland and Nauvoo, including a remarkable account of her parents’ introduction to polygamy, were published in the Woman’s Exponent over six years in the 1880s.
According to the editor, Emmeline Wells, the series was the paper’s most eagerly read feature, and together with Helen’s pamphlets in defense of polygamy lent her a kind of local celebrity.
Diary of Helen Mar Kimball Whitney
After her husband died in 1884, Helen maintained a remarkable diary during her final 12 years, which has been brilliantly edited by Todd Compton and published as A Widow’s Tale: the 1884-1896 diary of Helen Mar Kimball Whitney.
How was Helen Mar Kimball remembered by those who knew her?
Upon Helen’s death in 1896, she would be compared to her father, with Emmeline Wells calling her Heber C. Kimball’s “best living representative.”
Wells thought that “the Gospel was her all, she cared for little else and being of a particularly spiritual nature she loved to bear testimony.” Helen had shared with “her illustrious father” a gift for prophecy, often in the form of premonitory dreams.
“I’m quite a dreamer,” Helen wrote once to a son, “& so was my father & mother before me.”
Speaking at Helen’s funeral, the apostle Joseph F. Smith declared that “man cannot say anything good [that] is not true of her.”
Orson F. Whitney: Apostle, Poet, and Ideas
Who was Orson F. Whitney?
Helen Marr Kimball’s fifth child, Orson F. Whitney, was one of the most celebrated public speakers in the church and was eventually called to the Quorum of the Twelve in 1906. As a boy, he had known his grandfather, Heber Kimball, and recounts several colorful anecdotes in a later autobiography.
Orson grew up in a polygamous household, later writing of his father’s other wife that
Aunt Mary was almost a real mother to me. At first, she lived in the same house with my mother, but when her own children began to come, Father provided her with a separate domicile. The houses were in the same lot, and he stayed about a week with each family, fairly dividing his time, attentions, and limited means with both. His children loved one another almost as much as if the same mother had borne them.
How did Orson exemplify both the Kimball and Whitney families?
Heber Kimball’s daughter and Newel Whitney’s daughter were both sealed to Joseph Smith in Nauvoo as plural wives. After Joseph’s murder in 1844, Heber married Newel’s daughter, and Newel’s son Horace married Heber’s daughter.
In life, Kimballs and Whitneys intermarried; in death, they shared a private cemetery on Heber’s city block in Salt Lake.
The grafting of stocks flowered in Orson, born in 1855 to Helen and Horace, blending the practical bent of the Kimballs and the more expressive nature of the Whitneys.
Most Kimballs seemed constituted along the lines of Heber’s son Elias, who, as president of the Southern States Mission, scolded elders “inclined to talk on misteries.” In contrast, Orson Whitney, highly-regarded bishop of Salt Lake’s eighteenth ward, felt increasingly drawn to the hidden things of the kingdom as his testimony of Mormonism matured.
How did a vision received during his mission change the course of Orson F. Whitney’s life?
Great things were expected of Orson. He had inherited the Whitney taste for the arts, publishing a stream of poems and essays in various Utah papers. To his mother’s considerable relief, his ambition for a career on stage was thwarted by lack of funds and then a mission call to Ohio, where his continuing literary efforts for a time proved a distraction.
Then one night, as he later reported, he dreamed that he gazed through a gate into the garden of Gethsemane and saw Jesus bowed down “in the agony of His soul” as three of his waiting apostles dozed.
It seemed that he was kneeling before the Savior who gazed at him with “indescribable tenderness.”
“I was constrained to weep in unison with him,” Orson recalled.
The dream then shifted, and it seemed that he was kneeling before the crucified Savior who gazed at him with “indescribable tenderness, affection, and compassion.”
Upon waking, Orson felt the urge to relinquish the things of the world, including earthly ambitions.
What did Orson F. Whitney believe about reincarnation?
Orson accepted his gospel teachings on a variety of subjects, notably including the belief in reincarnation. He filled a second proselyting mission in 1881 in England. While in the country, he met Charles Stayner, a religiously inclined, charismatic, and persuasive intellectual who helped edit the church newspaper there and spoke about reincarnation.
At the time, there was some divergence of opinion on reincarnation among those few church members who cared about such matters. However, over the next decade, the authorities would close ranks against the notion.
How did Orson F. Whitney’s belief in reincarnation impact his call as an Apostle?
For some years and even after Stayner’s excommunication from the church, Orson resisted and resented pressure to relinquish his deeply held belief in reincarnation.
Eventually, as other prophecies of Stayner failed, culminating in his death in 1899, Orson formally abjured his attachment to reincarnation, removing the only obstacle to his advancement in the church.
He was added to the Quorum of the Twelve in 1906.
What was Orson F. Whitney’s epic poem about Elias?
After a lifetime of occasional poems, articles, and sermons, Orson took up the project of a lengthy epic in 1900, Elias – An Epic of the Ages, which he expected to “be the crowning effort of my life.”
Whitney’s poem recounts the grand sweep of time, from pre-mortal existence to the restoration of priesthood authority in nineteenth-century America under Joseph Smith and Brigham Young’s exodus to the western desert.
He dedicated the 90-page poem to Joseph F. Smith, sixth president of the church. For a time, it was taught in Utah schools.
A friend who heard Orson read the work in its entirety in 1910 thought it stood well beside Milton’s Paradise Lost and contained “some very advanced ideas on religious subjects.”
What were some of his deepest values?
Orson F. Whitney never stopped believing in spiritual knowledge as a saving principle. He longed to know the very interior of eternity.
A friend would recall Orson’s visit to a stake conference in Provo in 1928 as a member of the Quorum of the Twelve. The two men had strolled the streets sharing “views on great religious truths,” both of them so entranced by the subjects under discussion that they arrived late for services.
Although Orson suffered at times from low spirits like his mother and grandfather before him, he dreamed once that while preaching a sermon, he discovered in his right pocket a little bird chilled to death or frozen.
As Orson warmed to his topic at the pulpit, the bird came to life, upon which he held it up to the congregation, declaring: “Thus does the Spirit of the Lord revive and lift up the drooping soul.”
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About the Scholar
Andrew Kimball is a historian and writer specializing in Latter-day Saint history, as well as nineteenth- and twentieth-century church leadership. He has co-authored a biography of Spencer W. Kimball with his father, Ed Kimball, and his research often explores church leadership, family dynamics, and the lived experience of early Latter-day Saints, including polygamy and migration. He is also the author of The Blood in Their Veins, a detailed study of Heber C. Kimball and his family.
Further Reading
Explore more From the Desk articles about the Kimball Family:
- What Did Spencer W. Kimball Write About in His Journal?
- What Did Heber C. Kimball Tell the Presidents of the Seventies?
- Why Did Helen Mar Kimball Fascinate Laura Harris Hales?
- How Did Orson F. Whitney Influence Joseph F. Smith?
- What Did Orson F. Whitney Say About the Sacred Grove?
Heber C. Kimball Family
Read what other scholars and publishers say about the Kimball family in Latter-day Saint history:
- The Blood in Their Veins: The Kimballs, Polygamy, and the Shaping of Mormonism (Signature Books)
- Book Review: The Blood in Their Veins: The Kimballs, Polygamy, and the Shaping of Mormonism, by Andrew Kimball (Times and Seasons)
- Heber C. Kimball—Man of Faith and Integrity (Religious Educator)
- A Widow’s Tale: 1884-1896 Diary of Helen Mar Kimball Whitney (Utah State University Press [PDF])
- Elder Orson F. Whitney’s Special Witness of Jesus Christ (Truth Will Prevail)
