Text
A full, verbatim account of the speech does not exist, but notes exist, taken contemporaneously, by Thomas Bullock (using a type of personal shorthand), William Clayton (writing in longhand), and Willard Richards (taking "minute"-style notes of major elements of the speech). Wilford Woodruff also took extensive contemporaneous notes and transferred the notes to his journal with editorializations, but his original notes were not preserved. One author (Searle) estimates that the surviving notes of the sermon contain roughly 30% of the words of the actual address, but that together, they are likely nearly topically complete.
A version reconstructed (by Bullock) from the Bullock and Clayton records was published in the church paper Times and Seasons of August 15, 1844. A later version resulted from amalgamation of the Richards, Woodruff, Bullock and Clayton texts. This amalgamation was done by church employee Jonathan Grimshaw roughly ten years after Smith's death and is generally regarded as the "official" LDS Church version because it was carefully reviewed, edited, and approved by LDS authorities including Brigham Young. It contains some text not found in any of the primary sources and contains redundancies resulting from the naïve reconstruction. These redundancies, and the parts added by Grimshaw without support in the contemporaneous notes, were removed in a modern amalgamation by Stan Larson in 1978.
Read more about this topic: King Follett Discourse
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