Capt. Dan Jones – missionary to Wales
On the shipping list for the Buena Vista, the sailing vessel that brought 249 Welsh Mormon immigrants to America in 1849, their leader Dan Jones gave as his occupation “Saints.” For the previous four years Jones’s entire focus had indeed been on leading the Saints, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and vigorously extending an invitation for all his Welsh compatriots to accept the message of Mormonism and become Saints.
Born in the village of Halkyn, Flintshire, North Wales on 4 August 1810, Capt. Dan Jones was the product of a devout Methodist family. He went to sea at age seventeen and had immigrated to America with his wife Jane Melling Jones at least as early as 1840. He operated a small steamboat named the Ripple on the Upper Mississippi until mid-November 1841 when it struck a rock and sank about sixty miles upriver from Nauvoo. By summer of the following year, however, Dan Jones in partnership with Levi Moffit was busy building another steamboat, the Maid of Iowa.
It was while on the Maid of Iowa that Jones read in the Warsaw Signal and other publications many scurrilous stories about the Mormons. Skeptical that any people could be as bad as the Mormons were depicted to be Jones sought and found conversation with one of Mormonism’s adepts. After failing to find sufficient counterarguments to reject this new doctrine he embraced it by submitting to baptism in January 1843 in the Mississippi River.
Just under three months later Jones had occasion to meet the Prophet Joseph Smith in person when he transported in his steamboat about two hundred British converts to Mormonism from St. Louis to Nauvoo. He imagined that a prophet “would have either sheep or goat skin for clothing, a long beard, and long white hair, that his face would be long and wrinkled, and that he would have a haughty and dissenting air.”
Jones had no trouble accepting Joseph Smith as a prophet despite his unfulfilled expectations. And he was a fiercely loyal friend to Joseph over the next fourteen months until the Martyrdom. They even became business partners when Joseph Smith bought out Levi Moffit, Dan’s first partner and half owner of the Maid of Iowa.
One month after their first meeting Joseph Smith called Dan Jones to serve a mission to Wales. Jones’s departure, however, was delayed for over a year because of other assignments he received in connection with the Maid of Iowa. The plan was for Joseph to purchase Dan’s half of the steamboat. About ten days before the Martyrdom Joseph said to Dan, “I have a check in the house for $1200; as soon as I can get it cashed you shall have $1100 of it, and the start for Wales, not with your fingers in your mouth but prepared to buy a Press; and do business aright.”
Dan Jones was with Joseph Smith and the others in Carthage the night before the Martyrdom. After hearing gunshot Joseph left his bed by the window and lay down beside Jones on the floor and asked him if he was afraid to die. “Has that time come think you? Engaged in such a cause I do not think that death would have many terrors,” Jones replied. Then the Prophet uttered his last recorded prophecy in mortality: “You will see Wales and fulfill the mission appointed you ere you die.” During the next thirty-six hours Jones’s life would be spared by divine intervention, thus fulfilling the first part of the prophecy.
The second part of the prophecy was fulfilled a few weeks later when Dan Jones and his wife traveled with Wilford Woodruff and several others to Britain where they were to serve missions. As for the money he was to receive for his half of the Maid of Iowa, Jones later wrote that he did not ever receive “the first dollar” as payment. He added philosophically: “Thrilled with the prospects of my Mission I left all, rejoicing in the exchange of a Steam Boat for an Eldership on the deck of the never sinking ship of life.”
Dan Jones lived for seventeen years following the Martyrdom. He spent just over half these remaining years as a missionary in Wales. He was in North Wales for the first year of his first mission and had only limited success with just three convert baptisms. The following three years he presided over the missionary work in all of Wales with headquarters in Merthyr Tydfil. The combined efforts of the growing number of members, a handful of fulltime missionaries, and the many sermons and publications of Elder Jones resulted in nearly three thousand converts to Mormonism in Wales.
Having not received any money for his steamboat in order to purchase a press Jones had to rely on the press of his brother John for his publications. John Jones lived in the little village of Rhydybont near Llanybydder, Carmarthenshire, where he operated a press to subsidize his meager income as a Congregationalist minister. He printed Mormon materials during the week and preached against their doctrine in his Sunday sermons, receiving money for both. His press became known as the “prostitute press” for aiding the cause of Mormonism. On this press were printed almost all of Dan Jones's publications during his first mission: 13 pamphlets of various sizes, a small hymnal, a 288-page scriptural commentary in defense of Mormonism, and twenty-eight issues of Prophwyd y Jubili (Prophet of the Jubilee), the first non-English Mormon periodical.
In February 1849 the first group of Welsh Mormon emigrants sailed from Liverpool on the Buena Vista under the leadership of Capt. Dan Jones. Many of these died of cholera on the Missouri River. Approximately 80 of the survivors continued on to the Salt Lake Valley that same year, the first foreign-language speakers to settle there.
During the April 1852 General Conference a call was extended to Dan Jones to return to Wales to serve a second mission. About sixteen months after his arrival he was called to preside over the missionary work in Wales replacing William S. Phillips who had replaced Dan Jones five years earlier. Also Jones became editor of Udgorn Seion (Zion's Trumpet), the sequel to Prophwyd y Jubili, replacing John Davis who had replaced Dan Jones five years earlier.
During the next two years Capt. Jones would publish twenty-four more pamphlets and seventy-two issues of the periodical. And during this second mission another three thousand Welsh converted to Mormonism. In April 1856 Dan Jones led a group of over five hundred Welsh converts to America on board the S. Curling.
Jones lived for just over five years after his return to Utah. He died at the age of 51 on 3 January 1862 in Provo, Utah, probably as a consequence of a lung ailment contracted in the lead mines of North Wales as a youth. President Gordon B. Hinckley has declared that Dan Jones "must certainly be included in the half dozen or so most productive missionaries in the history of the Church."