Despite the labor required on the farm, the Snow family valued learning and saw that each child had educational opportunities.

Snow received his final year of education at Oberlin College, which was founded by two Presbyterian ministers.

In 1831, Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, took up residence in Hiram, Ohio, 4 miles (6.4 km) from the Snow farm.

Snow recorded that he heard the Book of Mormon being read aloud in his home in Mantua and met Smith at Hiram in 1831.

Eliza invited Snow to visit her and attend a school of Hebrew newly established by the church.

While living in Kirtland in 1837, Snow was called to serve a short mission in Ohio, traveling "without purse or scrip."

Snow and the members of his extended family chose to move to Missouri in the summer of 1838 and join the Latter Day Saints settling near Far West.

After an unpleasant sea voyage from New York City, Snow met with some members of the Quorum of the Twelve who had opened the British Mission in 1839, including Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, and Parley P. Pratt.

Snow worked briefly in the Manchester area, and had success in Birmingham, where he baptized people in Greet's Green and organized a branch in Wolverhampton.

In late spring 1844, he returned to Ohio, preaching and baptizing new converts and distributing recent church publications to members.

Snow and his family, with wagons and livestock, joined a group of emigrants and moved across the Mississippi River into Iowa in February 1846.

Snow began his mission in Italy among the Waldensians, an ancient sect of Christians who inhabited the Piedmont Valleys in the Alps.

Snow and his companions, Joseph Toronto, Thomas Stenhouse, and Jabez Woodard, initially had very little success in converting the Waldensians to Mormonism.

[6][7][8][9] In 1850, Snow wrote a pamphlet entitled "The Voice of Joseph" to advance missionary work in the Italian mission.

Snow and his successors were unsuccessful, winning fewer than 200 converts, all of whom had either emigrated or were excommunicated by the time the mission closed in 1867, in no small part because of Italian laws that circumscribed publication of non-Catholic religious materials.

[13] Snow tacitly helped engineer the 1901 election of his friend, Thomas Kearns, a wealthy Utah Catholic, to the United States Senate.

(Ezra T. Benson had replaced Farr in 1861; he was a resident of Cache County and remained the other representative after the district was split.)

The local leaders followed Snow's instructions and the institution they formed eventually evolved into Brigham Young University–Idaho,[21] formerly known as Ricks College.

[22] Snow was the subject of a United States Supreme Court case regarding polygamy prosecutions under the Edmunds Act.

As he began his tenure as church president, Snow had to deal with the aftermath of legal battles with the United States over the practice of plural marriage.

The LDS Church was also in severe financial difficulties, some of which were related to the legal problems over plural marriage.

Snow approached this problem first by issuing short term bonds with a total value of one million dollars.

It was during Snow's presidency that the LDS Church adopted the principle of tithing—being interpreted as the payment of 10 percent of one's income—as a hallmark of membership.

In 1899, Snow gave an address at the tabernacle in St. George, imploring the Latter-day Saints to pay tithes of corn, money, or whatever they had.

[27] Snow died of pneumonia in Salt Lake City at age 87, and was succeeded as church president by Joseph F. Smith.

"[28][29] Snow's teachings as an apostle were the 2013 course of study in the LDS Church's Relief Society and Melchizedek priesthood classes.