The man in the photograph is Brigham Young, the second president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But the face of the woman seated next to him has been scratched out.
“If you really look at his face... it’s the closest thing to a smile that you’ll ever see on Brigham,” said Brent Herridge, a Utah photographer who appraised the daguerreotype decades ago that sparked his quest to know more about the mystery woman in it.
Herridge is moving ahead with his efforts to try to prove a hypothesis he has about the image: that the woman is a previously unknown wife of the revered church leader. He is now actively looking for the Native American woman’s gravesite to prove it.
The image is known as “Brigham Young and unknown wife.”
“What we found was that nobody — and we looked at all the wives — nobody quite fit what we were looking for,” Herridge said. “So we looked outside of the circle and we’re lucky enough because of some of the details in the photograph, such as bracelets, and a chain around her neck and the hand... and there was a hand that was damaged.”
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