William H. Clayton (July 17, 1814 – December 4, 1879[2]) was a clerk, scribe, and friend to the religious leader Joseph Smith.

He joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in 1837 and served as the second counselor to the British mission president Joseph Fielding while proselyting in Manchester.

He led a group of British converts in emigrating to the United States in 1840 and eventually settled in Nauvoo, Illinois, where he befriended Joseph Smith and became his clerk and scribe.

He was a member of the first company to make the overland trek to the Salt Lake Valley, where he collaborated to devise a roadometer to measure distances for his The Latter-Day Saints' Emigrants' Guide.

Jerald and Sandra Tanner published portions of the Clayton journals that appeared in the notes of a Brigham Young University student in 1982.

The LDS Church History Library announced in October 2017 that they would publish William Clayton's complete diaries.

[4] In September 1840, Clayton led a group of British converts who emigrated to the United States on the ship North America.

He and his family first tried to farm in Iowa Territory, then settled in the predominantly Latter Day Saint community of Nauvoo, Illinois.

[4] He was a recorder and clerk of the Nauvoo City Council, an officer in the Nauvoo Music Association, a member of the church's influential Council of Fifty, and a member of Joseph Smith's private prayer circle where the Latter Day Saint temple ceremonies were first introduced.

[11] After Joseph Smith's death, Clayton recorded the endowments made by members in the Nauvoo temple before starting their exodus.

Seeing Margaret's emotional distress when Farr returned, Clayton asked Joseph Smith if they could annul the marriage, but he said no.

Diantha continued to live with her parents and was in late pregnancy when Clayton left Nauvoo with his other family members in February 1846.

The following year, he was a member of the vanguard company that crossed the plains to select a western site for Mormon colonization.

[29] In April 1846, while camped near Locust Creek on the plains of Iowa, Clayton wrote the words to the popular Mormon hymn, now known as "Come, Come, Ye Saints", which is sung to the music of a traditional English song, "All is Well".

One of his plural wives, Diantha, had given birth to a healthy baby boy, William Adriel Benoni Clayton.

I feel to thank my heavenly father for my boy and pray that he will spare and preserve his life and that of his mother and so order it so that we may soon meet again."

This hymn signified the difficulties and faith involved in the Mormon migration to the west and was popular among pioneer Latter-day Saints.

[32] The hymn appears in the Protestant New Church Hymnal with the third verse changed to refer to a heavenly resting place rather than one in the far west.

[31] Clayton's hymn "When First the Glorious Light of Truth" also appeared in LDS hymnals,[33] He also wrote words for "A Deluded Mormon" and "The pioneers at length are come.

"[34] Clayton, along with Orson Pratt and Appleton Milo Harmon, created a novel design for a wooden odometer for use on wagons, also called a roadometer.

[36] The wagon-mounted odometer helped Clayton measure accurate distances between landmarks, starting from Council Bluffs[37] and going to the Great Salt Lake.

He was briefly president of the Sheffield and Lincolnshire Conferences before being released in April 1853 and returning home to Utah in October of the same year.

[4] Once settled in Utah, Clayton continued to maintain church records and also participated in public and private business activities.

Clayton also worked as treasurer of the Deseret Telegraph Company and as secretary of Zion's Co-operative Mercantile Institution (ZCMI), a church based cooperative business enterprise.

Private ventures included collecting debts, filing land claims, acting as a legal advocate, lending money, merchandising, farming, and mining speculation.

He stopped keeping a personal journal on February 19, 1842, when he started to help with bookkeeping for the Nauvoo temple's construction.

Three of Clayton's notebooks from when he lived in Nauvoo have long been part of the closed archive of the Church History Department.

[51] In his review of An Intimate Chronicle, Allen stated that Smith's inclusion of the Nauvoo diaries relied almost entirely on the Jerald and Sandra Tanner version of Ehat's notes.

[54] In 2002, new text from the journals became available when Allen published a reprinting of his Clayton biography entitled No Toil Nor Labor Fear.

[56][57] Excerpts of the Clayton Nauvoo diaries in D. Michael Quinn's research papers showed "thirty percent more text"[56] than the widely circulated Ehat notes.