Will Bagley

Published volumes describe the Mexican–American War, the conquest of California and the gold rush, the Brigham Young pioneer party of 1847, European visitors to "Zion," Mormon polygamy, the Utah War, and the Mountain Meadows Massacre.

Fifteen volumes have appeared, most recently Richard L. Saunders' Dale Morgan on the Mormons: Collected Works Part 2, 1949-1971 and William P. MacKinnon's At Sword's Point, Part 2: A Documentary History of the Utah War, 1858-1859.

Other significant volumes include Michael W. Homer's On the Way to Somewhere Else: European Sojourners in the Mormon West; B. Carmon Hardy's Doing the Works of Abraham: Mormon Polygamy, Its Origin, Practice, and Demise; Bagley and David L. Bigler's Innocent Blood: Essential Narratives of the Mountain Meadows Massacre; and Playing with Shadows: Voices of Dissent in the Mormon West, which Bagley edited with Polly Aird and Jeff Nichols.

As a member of "Speakers Bureaus", Will Bagley personally spoke many times in public.

He gave academic papers at the annual conventions of the Western History Association, the Mormon History Association, Sunstone Magazine, the Oregon-California Trails Association, the Communal Studies Association, and the Center for Studies on New Religions.

William Grant Bagley (May 27, 1950 – September 28, 2021) was a historian specializing in the history of the Western United States and the American Old West.

Bagley wrote about the fur trade, overland emigration, American Indians, military history, frontier violence, railroads, mining, and Utah and the Mormons.

William Grant Bagley was born to Lawrence Miles Bagley and Margene Bailey Bagley on May 27, 1950, in Salt Lake City, Utah.

His ancestors came from England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Sweden and Germany.

He was a descendant of the fifth Governor of the Colony of Connecticut, John Webster.

His paternal great grandfather was a Mormon pioneer from New Brunswick, Canada.

Bagley attended Brigham Young University in 1967–68, and then he transferred to University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), where he obtained his B.A. in History in 1971.

At Santa Cruz Bagley studied writing with Page Stegner and history with John Dizikes.

He graduated from UCSC between Richard White and Patricia Limerick, two of the leading lights of the "New Western History."

While at UCSC he received the California State Scholar and President's Scholar awards.

He considered an integral part of his education a trip he took in 1969, on a homemade raft built of framing lumber and barrels, down the Mississippi River from Rock Island, Illinois to New Orleans.

After graduation he spent three years in North Carolina studying the local Bluegrass music and culture, and playing in bands.

After college, Bagley worked as a laborer, carpenter, cabinet maker, and country musician for more than a decade.

In 1979 he founded Groundhog Records to release his long-playing record, "The Legend of Jesse James."

From the age of nine he was raised in Oceanside, California, where his father was a long-serving mayor in the 1980s.

His younger brother Pat Bagley became the notable Salt Lake Tribune editorial cartoonist and they are the uncles of professional surfer Dusty Payne.

In 1982 he abandoned music and hard labor to take a writing position at Evans & Sutherland, a pioneering computer graphics firm.

He worked in various high-tech ventures until 1995, when he started his career as a professional historian.

He wrote more than twenty books.

Continuing its hundred-year tradition of letting the people of the West recount their own history, in 1997 the Arthur H. Clark Company launched a new historical series, Kingdom in the West: The Mormons and the American Frontier.

Bagley was editor of this projected 16-volume series.

The series presents essential source-documents that look at the West through Mormon eyes and the Mormons through Western eyes.

His column, "History Matters", appeared every Sunday for four years (2000–2004) in The Salt Lake Tribune.

He served as editor of News from the Plains, the newsletter of the Oregon-California Trails Association, for two years.

Bagley was a research associate at Yale University's Beinecke Library in 2000 and was the library's Archibald Hanna Jr. Fellow in American history in 2009.

In 2008 historian David Roberts dubbed him the "sharpest of all thorns in the side of the Mormon historical establishment."

Although he was raised as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS Church), Bagley discontinued membership as an adult.

He publicly stated that he "never believed the theology since [he] was old enough to think about it."

However, he was friends with believers and considered himself a "heritage Mormon," valuing his pioneer lineage.

In September 2014, the Utah State Historical Society granted Bagley its most prestigious honor as a Fellow, joining "the ranks of such luminaries as Dale Morgan, Wallace Stegner, Juanita Brooks, and Leonard Arrington."

Western Writers of America gave Bagley its 2019 Owen Wister Award for Lifetime Contributions to Western Literature in 2019.

He said it was "an expression of affection from my WWA friends that is appreciated and humbling, for it calls to mind the words 'I am not worthy!'"

Bagley lived and worked in Salt Lake City, Utah, until his death in 2021.

Bagley published extensively over the years and was still active at the time of his death.

He was the author and editor of twenty books and of many articles and reviews in professional journals, such as the Western Historical Quarterly, Utah Historical Quarterly, Overland Journal, The Journal of Mormon History, and Montana The Magazine of Western History.