After the death of Joseph Smith resulted in a succession crisis, Wight led his own break-off group of Latter Day Saints to Texas, where they created a settlement.

Sometime around 1826, Wight moved to Warrensville Township, Ohio, and was baptized into the Reformed Baptist (later Disciples of Christ or Campbellite) faith by Sidney Rigdon in May 1829.

In February 1830, Wight united with Isaac Morley and others in forming a common stock utopian society in Kirtland, Ohio.

He was ordained to the high priesthood in June 1831 by Joseph Smith Jr. and was tasked with traveling from Kirtland to Missouri with John Corrill, preaching along the way.

On July 23, 1833, Wight signed an agreement with the vigilantes which specified that the Latter Day Saints would leave Jackson County by 1834.

When the elders refused, Wight stepped forward to make the journey, despite his wife being ill with a three-day-old child and only three days of food.

Smith and Wight recruited about twenty individuals, including Hosea Stout, who was not a church member at the time but was impressed with their preaching.

They met with the main company on June 8 at the Salt River in Missouri, bringing the total to 207 men, 11 women, 11 children, and 25 wagons.

At the end of Zion's Camp, Wight wrote up the discharge orders, and remained in Missouri according to Smith's request.

In response, Wight armed over 150 men at this time to defend the Latter Day Saints in Daviess County.

Wight was accused, along with Joseph Smith, of organizing an army and threatening and harassing various old settlers of the county.

The old settlers and their families fled and Wight and his men looted their property and burned their homes to the ground.

When Far West fell under siege after the Missouri Executive Order 44, Wight organized members in Adam-ondi-Ahman to assist them.

Wight was ordained an apostle of the church by Smith on April 8, 1841, to replace Patten, who had died in the Battle of Crooked River in 1838.

Wight and George Miller became co-responsible for a common-stock, religious cooperative company/church mill and logging town in the wilderness of Wisconsin.

[4] Wight was eventually excommunicated by Young on December 3, 1848;[9] his most prominent follower, Bishop George Miller, was also disfellowshipped.

The only remaining material infrastructure of the colony is the Mormon Mill cemetery near Hamilton Creek, about fifty miles east by north of Fredericksburg.

After 1849, Wight wrote and stated that he believed the prophetic mantle of church leadership should fall on the shoulders of Joseph Smith's sons.

In 1851, after the Pedernales River overflowed its banks and destroyed Zodiac, the Wightite colonists moved to Burnet County, establishing Mormon Mill.

His group had been traveling to Jackson County, Missouri, where he wished to rejoin the remainder of the mid-western Latter Day Saints.

After Wight's death, most of his followers became members of the RLDS Church (renamed the Community of Christ in 2001), led by Joseph Smith III.