Alexander Badlam (1809-1894)

Biography
Alexander Badlam, Sr. (November 28, 1809 – November 30 or December 1, 1894) was an early leader in the Latter Day Saint movement and a Mormon pioneer.

Badlam was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts. He was a coachmaker by trade. The couple became members of Joseph Smith's Church of Christ and moved to the Kirtland, Ohio region.

Zions Camp 1834
In 1834, Badlam was a member of the Zion's Camp (1834) expedition that traveled from Lake County, Ohio to Jackson County, Missouri. On February 28, 1835, Badlam became one of the inaugural members of the First Quorum of the Seventy. In 1835, he settled in Missouri and became a member of the church's Missouri high council.

The following year, in 1835, perhaps in recognition of the faith and valor displayed on Zions Camp Alexander was ordained a Seventy and called to take his place on the newly created First Quorum of the Seventy, according to revelation, one of the three presiding quorums of the Church.

He then seems to have settled into a productive life not unlike that of his peers. He is called into numerous positions of leadership and service, most often as a clerk for various conferences, and branches. The researcher will find numerous reports signed by Elder Badlam, usually as a clerk but occasionally as the presiding officer. He seems to have been quite close to Lyman Wight for whom he often served a clerk. He lived for some time in Kirtland Ohio, then, on some occasion he removed to Missouri. There he suffered the depredations and persecutions of the mob. Sometime after being driven from Missouri to Illinois, he penned a redress petition seeking compensation for his losses at the hands of the mob and the Missouri Militia. Like others, he never received any compensation.

In Nauvoo, he was commissioned a Lieutenant in the Nauvoo Legion at the organizing court martial. It is not clear whether he had a military background prior to his commission.

In 1839, after the "extermination order" was issued, Badlam fled Missouri with the other Latter Day Saints was issued and settled in Nauvoo, Illinois. Badlam was admitted as a member of the Council of Fifty on March 11, 1844, but was dropped from the council on February 4, 1845.

East Coast Saints
In 1847 and 1848, Badlam presided over the branch of the church in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1849, he traveled from Boston by ship to Sacramento, California to participate in the California Gold Rush. In 1850, he returned to Boston and he and his family traveled by ship to Utah Territory via California as Mormon pioneers. After arriving in Utah, Badlam was readmitted to the Council of Fifty.

By 1855, Badlam had abandoned The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and by 1860 he had moved back to Sacramento. By 1880, he was living in San Francisco, where he died.

He seems to have migrated west with the saints after the expulsion from Nauvoo, and there, destitute from the years of losses and persecutions, he sought relief at the hands of his wife's uncle, Samuel Brannan. Samuel Brannan had been an early member of the Church and had also determined to go west with the saints. Brannan, however was appointed to lead a company who would travel from the Eastern States by sea around Cape Horn to California and thence to Utah. They arrived in San Francisco, California shortly after gold was discovered and a number of them, Brannan included, stayed in California to make their fortune. Many failed. Brannan did not and became a leading citizen of the Golden State.

Thus it was to a rather worldly relative that Elder Badlam appealed for help. Brannan gave him very little cash but rather gave him some valuable commercial property and offered to help establish him in business. As near as we determine, Elder Badlam never rejoined the body of Saints in Utah. The only other two references we find are an occurrence in 1889 when President Wilford Woodruff called upon Elder Badlam and others to use their influence on a Senator from California to contact U.S. President Benjamin Harris concerning the persecutions which the saints were suffering at the time. The Senator expressed a willingness to contact Harris but doubted that his intervention would be efficacious. It wasn't.

A final note might refer to Elder Badlam or perhaps to his son Alexander Badlam, Jr. Badlam (whichever one it was) apparently had become a naturalist of some note. He authored a book, Wonders of Alaska. In the book, he took on a recurring legend of Alaska concerning a mirage of what appeared to be a city floating on the waters. He printed a photo taken by his daughter which purported to show the city. Badlam's views were not universally accepted and it was late in the twentieth century before science solved the mystery, finally determining that the "city" was actually an inverted image of a glacial range.

Marriage and Family
In 1833, Badlam married Mary Ann Brannan in York County, Maine.

Badlam was the brother-in-law to Samuel Brannan, California's first millionaire.