My mom has been reading Saints, volume 2. And as we are wont, she called me with a fun fact. She had read that Wilford Woodruff was the first person to wear white clothing to officiate in at the temple [n1]. I responded that indeed, not only that but it was a suit made of deer skin. My mom was somewhat incredulous.

So I cracked open the Woodruff journals (or the digital transcript that I have access to), and mulled around until I found the excerpt that I read at some point, somewhere. For February 1, 1877 he recorded that “I dressed in pure white Doe skin from head to foot to officiate in the Priest Office, white pants vest” and that this was “the first Example in any Temple of the Lord in this last dispensation.” He also noted that “Sister Lucy B Young also dressed in white in officiating as Eve” [n2].

My mom’s first response was, well, how did they get it white? That is a good question, and it was the one I had failed to ask. So after some digging, it was clear that not only was doe skin the literal skin from a female deer and soft leathers more generally, but it is also the name for a heavy and smooth wool fabric with a soft finish.

Then digging some more I found a letter published in Mark Curtis’ 1964(!) masters thesis on the history of the St. George Temple. This letter is from a now restricted volume that covered correspondence in the first year of the temple, and I haven’t seen it cited anywhere else. The Temple had apparently ordered carpet and fabric from the Provo Woolen Mills, and Brigham Young wrote a letter to them on March 10, 1877, to express his discontent with the delivered products. After discussing the carpets he noted that while the cloth quality was fine, it was “inferior in color” to what they expected. He asked about their production capacities, hoping that they could “make white doeskin” in a manner that met their standards. He also noted that the “Washington factory,” presumably the cotton factory, produced “white doeskin cloth” of superior color [n3].

So there you go. This was more than a month after Woodruff and Young’s introduction of white clothing to the officiators’ offices, but it seems pretty clear to me that the doe skin they made their clothes out of was not leather, but woven fabric. And why it took my mom to ask me a fairly obvious question to figure that out is a demonstration of how easy it is to not think critically about the jumbles of information we all hold in our minds. Thanks mom.

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1. Saints: No Unhallowed Hand, vol. 2 (Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), 427.
2. Kenney, Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, 7:325.
3. St. George Temple Letter Book, 1877-1878, pp. 85-86 as reproduced in Kirk M. Curtis, “History of the St. George Temple” (M.A. thesis, Brigham Young University, 1964), 56-57.