Isaac Bullock Diary

Isaac Bullock (1825–1891) was a Latter-day Saint missionary whose service brought him to Fort Supply, then part of Utah Territory. Born in Grafton, New Hampshire, he later led an emigrant company west in 1852. The Church History Biographical Database records his Shoshone Mission service from April 1855 to September 1857.

Bullock’s notebook combines Roman writing with characters from the newly introduced Deseret Alphabet to represent Shoshoni words. The vocabulary, dated approximately 1854–1855, shows the script being applied beyond English during the earliest years of its development.

The manuscript offers unusually early evidence of a purpose-built phonetic alphabet being used to document an Indigenous language of North America. Its Deseret letters distinguish vowel sounds explicitly, giving the record a particular importance among Shoshoni materials predating John Wesley Powell’s collecting work and the later Bureau of American Ethnology holdings.

For Deseret scholarship, the list reveals how one writer adapted the alphabet to a language he was learning. For specialists in Numic languages, it offers an early point of comparison with later records of Shoshoni. Interpreting its spellings requires attention both to the language being recorded and to Bullock’s understanding of the new script.