Henry Green Boyle was born in Tazewell County, Virginia, on March 7, 1824. He became interested in several religious groups, joining the Methodists and Cambellites before being baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by Jedediah Grant in 1843. Following his conversion to Mormonism Boyle was disowned by his family and worked in the Rich Valley to make enough money to travel to Nauvoo, Illinois. He served on a mission in Virginia before finally arriving in Nauvoo in 1845. After the death of Joseph Smith he followed the Mormons to Council Bluffs, where he joined Company C of the Mormon Battalion in July 1846. He marched to California with the Battalion, arriving in 1847 and re-enlisting the following year. In 1848 he helped lead an expedition party that blazed one of the first trails from Los Angeles to Salt Lake City. Boyle later returned to California with Charles C. Rich and the San Bernardino mission in 1857, and was made president of the Southern States Mission in 1867, spending much of the 1870s and 1880s serving in Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. Following the death of his first wife, Keziah Holladay, Boyle married three plural wives, Elizabeth Ballard (1859), Arabella McKinley (1865), and Martha Taylor (1869). In 1887 he and Arabella were arrested on polygamy charges in Utah for which Boyle was imprisoned. Following his release, he moved his family to Pima, Arizona, where he died on September 2, 1902.
From the description of Diaries of Henry Green Boyle, 1846-1888. (Huntington Library, Art Collections & Botanical Gardens). WorldCat record id: 658044879
