Typewritten condensation of the original journal of Shurtliff, a businessman, politial and religious leader, Mormon missionary and patriarch, which tells of his early life in Ohio, religious revivals, conversion to Mormonism, marriages, missionary work, mobs in Far West, Missouri, expulsion from Nauvoo, Illinois, immigration to Utah, life in Weber County, Utah, and military preparations against Johnston's Army.

Collection includes daily accounts of his family, his church mission to England (vol. 2), the Utah War, persecutions concerning his practice of polygamy, his subsequent prison sentence, and his life in Colonia Dublán, Chihuahua, Mexico. Typescripts of the journals are also included in the collection.

Contains twelve handwritten, signed letters which concern Greenwood's conversion to Mormonism in England, his immigration to the United States, activities in Nauvoo, Illinois, and the 1847 trek to Salt Lake City and American Fork, Utah. Also includes a bound autobiography (plus typescript) written between 1869 and 1884.