YOUNG, ARTHUR, an English politi cal economist; born in Suffolk, England, Sept. 11, 1741. He became a farmer, and made a series of agricultural tours in England, Ireland, and France, pub lishing accounts of them, which were very favorably received, and in 1793 he was appointed secretary to the newly constituted Board of Agriculture. Of his many writings his "Travels in France," over the plains and table-lands to the splendid valley in the heart of the Rocky Mountains, where, between the Wasat ches and the Great Salt Lake, he founded (July, 1847) the present Salt Lake City. His immediate followers forming a nucleus, others poured into "the Prom ised Land," and in 1849 an attempt was made to organize a State, to be called the State of Deseret, that being the offi cial name given by the Mormons to the district. The United States Government refused to sanction the new State, but Utah was organized as a territory, and Young appointed governor. The appoint
ment of a "Gentile" governor in 1854 led to serious troubles, as Young and the other Mormons refused to recognize his authority, and it was not till a force of 2,500 troops was sent out in 1857 that the United States Government could en force its laws on the turbulent sec taries.
Young was the founder of polygamy as an institution, and was among the first to practice it. In 1852 he promul gated the "celestial law of marriage," which he declared to have been revealed published in 1792, is the most interest ing, from its sketches of the social as well as the agricultural conditions of the French provinces just before and just after the revolution of 1789. He died in London, April 20, 1820.