Captain Dan Jones

A miner’s son who went to sea

Dan Jones was born on 4 August 1810 in the parish of Halkyn, Flintshire, the sixth of the eight children of Thomas Jones and Ruth Roberts. When he was sixteen he became a sailor, which is why he was known for the rest of his life as Captain Dan. On 3 January 1837 he married Jane Melling, a childhood friend from Halkyn, and in 1840 the two of them emigrated to the United States.

The Mississippi, and a new religion

In America Jones became captain of the Ripple, a steamship carrying passengers between New Orleans and St Louis. After she struck a rock and sank he took command of the Maid of Iowa, a boat that could carry some three hundred passengers.

It was on the river that he heard of the Church, which had lately moved its headquarters to Nauvoo, Illinois. He sought the Latter-day Saints out, believed what the missionaries told him, and was baptised in January 1843. That April he used the Maid of Iowa to carry approximately three hundred British converts up to Nauvoo, and afterwards hauled freight for the building of the Nauvoo Temple. Joseph Smith preached from her deck more than once, and in May 1843 bought a half interest in the boat, becoming Jones’s business partner.

Carthage Jail, June 1844

When Joseph and Hyrum Smith were arrested and imprisoned at Carthage, Jones was one of those chosen to accompany them, with Willard Richards and John Taylor. On the night before the two men were killed, Smith asked Jones whether he was afraid to die. Jones answered that engaged in such a cause, he did not think death would have many terrors. Smith replied with what is generally identified as his last recorded prophecy: “You will yet see Wales and fulfill the mission appointed you before you die.”

Baptising a country, 1845–1849

In late 1844 Brigham Young asked Jones to return to Wales. He travelled to England with Wilford Woodruff and others called to the British Isles, and after about a year of little progress was asked to preside over the work in Wales. There were then just over two hundred Latter-day Saints in the country.

Between 1845 and 1848 the missionaries in Wales under his leadership baptised approximately 3,600 people — in terms of population, one in every 278 people in Wales at that time. When Jones left there were seventy-two branches and 4,645 members. He was succeeded as president of the Welsh Mission by William Samuel Phillips.

The Welsh press

In 1846 Jones began to publish a Welsh-language periodical for the Church, Prophwyd y Jubili (Prophet of the Jubilee) — the first periodical the Church published in any language other than English. In 1847 came the best known of his many Welsh tracts and pamphlets, Hanes Saint y Dyddiau Diweddaf (History of the Latter-day Saints). On his second mission he oversaw John S. Davis’s translation of the Book of Mormon into Welsh in 1852, only the third language other than English in which the book had appeared, after Danish and French, and he briefly edited Udgorn Seion, the periodical that succeeded his own.

Leading them out, 1849

On 26 February 1849 Jones departed Wales with over three hundred Welsh converts, sailing from Liverpool to New Orleans on the Buena Vista and continuing by riverboat to Council Bluffs, Iowa. The Hartley followed a week later under William Hulme with a second Welsh company. At Council Bluffs the Church organised the first Welsh-speaking branch in the United States, with Jones as its president. On 13 July 1849 he and many of his converts left with other pioneers in the George A. Smith company, and Jones reached the Salt Lake Valley on 26 October.

Manti, a second mission, and the lake

Jones settled at Manti and was elected mayor in 1851. In 1852 Brigham Young asked him back to Wales; that second mission lasted until 1856 and brought approximately two thousand more baptisms, most of those converts eventually emigrating to Utah. He returned to Utah in 1856, and as his health failed took the Timely Gull on the Great Salt Lake, a vessel of Brigham Young’s carrying salt, cedar wood and flagstone.

He practised plural marriage, marrying Elizabeth Lewis on 8 November 1849 and Mary Matilda LaTrielle on 18 February 1857. Jane died on 24 February 1861. Less than a year later, on the twenty-fourth anniversary of his marriage to her, Dan Jones died of tuberculosis at the age of fifty-one, survived by six children. President Gordon B. Hinckley wrote in 1993 that in terms of the number of converts, Jones “must certainly be included in the half dozen or so most productive missionaries in the history of the Church.”