As is traditional when one explores a life, it is not out of order to make a brief stop to examine Gilda’s roots. I would like to look at one ancestor in particular to better situate and frame her unusual vivacity. Her maternal great-grandfather I believe captures Gilda’s spirit more than any other of her progenitors. It is not that others are unimportant—certainly not—but rather this one stands out in a way that portends Trillim’s adventures. The others are largely of that hardy pioneer stock that many of the Mormon faithful will recognize and appreciate: hard working; determined, undaunted by hardship and discouragement. Legends every one of them, but heroes and heroines of a recognizable type and manner and as such need little introduction or elaboration. Her maternal great-grandfather is different.1
Interestingly, her great-grandfather’s name was first introduced to me in a page from my grandmother’s journal long before the name Gilda Trillim meant anything to me at all. On the page, she makes a passing comment, “Oh that I were as lucky as Skáldskapur.”
Arnfinnur Skáldskapur was an Icelandic sea captain who joined the Mormon Church while his ship was being refitted in Liverpool, England. He had a reputation for being something of an explorer-philosopher, yet he tended toward the fantastic. For example, he kept a journal of encounters with what he believed were mermaids. They were always sighted at some distance, so it is easy to disregard the accounts from our modern perspective, which has no place for such creatures. However, Arn (as he was called) would not be dissuaded. One of his grandsons wrote in a letter to his sister from fin de siècle Paris, “Gramps Arny showed us his journal of sea people sightings when I was just a little tyke. I tried to tell him there weren’t any such beasts as sea people but he would have non [sic.] of it. So I’m not surprised you cannot get him to take his medicine if he thinks it’s been tampered with. Once something is in his head there is no talking him out of it.”
After joining the Mormon Church in March 1866, he immediately resigned his captain’s commission and left on the ship Arkwright with 450 other Saints under the direction of Justin Wixom. However, upon landing in the US in early July, he felt inspired to stay in New York and learn the art of daguerreotype photography and during the next five years became a well-known photographer of stage actors and actresses. In 1871, he took the Overland Route train to Salt Lake City, where he set up a photography business adjacent to a bank on the corner of Beech and Laurel streets. Soon after his arrival to Utah, he joined a gentlemen’s club known as the Redbearded Horseshoers who met regularly to study the life and writings of Joseph Smith. He soon became the leader of the group. One of the few remaining pamphlets written by Arn contained the following paragraph:
“The Prophet Joseph Smith was a prophet and seer, but more than that he could wrestle the past into the future and vice-versa. I have it from John Taylor himself that when Brother Joseph found a treasure in the ground, the spirits that guarded it would try to pull it back deeper into the earth. But Joseph was more powerful than they all and he would lay hold upon it and with a yank heave it from the hands of those spirits. President Taylor said, “Now when he went to lay hold upon the gold plates those forces that make all things slippery tried to pull it down, but Joseph grabbed it by the rings and pulled, but he not only pulled up the plates he pulled the whole history of the Nephites into the world lock, stock and barrel. He made it real. Where once there was ordinary history he pulled into the universe sacred history.”“
Arn began to teach that history was flexible and could be manipulated from the present moment just as much as it could influence the future. And through his photography Arn began to try to rewrite the past. He thought that through subtle manipulations he could do as he thought Joseph Smith had done to pull up new things into the past by a combination of faith and power.
He started his history manipulation experiments with small attempts at changing the past. He would photograph women in variously colored dresses. He would then hand-color the dress in the black and white photo a variant shade other than the one of which he had taken a picture. He would then save the hand-colored photo and approach the woman years later and show her the photo. When they disagreed on the original color, he would have her pull out the dress and examine it. His journal records years of failure, but as time passed, a series of successes began to appear. The blue dresses he was coloring red would be found in the possession of the woman, often after long storage in a cedar chest, actually turned to red. It seemed that the more recent past was harder to change (but not impossible). He reports that as his successes mounted he decided to try bolder manipulations of the past and would color the yellow dresses with, say, red and blue stripes. The discovery of the first red and blue striped dress stored by a widow named Rathbone sent shock waves through the Redbearded Horseshoers.2 There was talk of deception. However, the final proof came when a pale blue dress he had colored with white and red gingham turned up for which he clearly had no access. The dress had been taken by a woman and her husband down to the Mexican territories right after being photographed. Several of the more skeptical Horseshoers wrote to the woman, named Tantamount Lee, and asked her the state of her dress. She replied with the following:
“‘Tis a strange thing. I had not seen that dress but a couple of times in the five years we’ve lived here, for after bearing (due to the good Lord’s grace) three children in the same, I had not worn it for many years as the children had done much to rearrange my figure. I remember as clear as day that it was light blue in color. It had been in my daughter’s hope chest for those five hard years and upon receipt of your letter, I dug through the chest until I found it near the bottom. Now, you will think me soft minded, but my memory of a blue dress must be set aside in light of what I found, for it was a red and white gingham dress. So I dug out the picture taken those many years ago and to my surprise it has always been a gingham dress (though the colors are hidden in the colorless original) for the pattern is as clear as day.”
It was shortly after that that Arnfinnur Skáldskapur sold his photography business and became the man you are no doubt familiar with if you know any Salt Lake History at all. He became quite adept at things like finding Spanish treasure, or in having bank accounts he had never mentioned suddenly becoming available and holding thousands of dollars. Even things like people in places as far away as Chicago and New York leaving him vast sums of money in their wills. The Salt Lake Tribune called him “The Luckiest Man Alive.”
Of course, as you know, that luck was not to hold. After being named as one of the Apostles, he was gunned down just after the century turned new. The man arrested was 77 years old and claimed Skáldskapur had stolen his wife, 45 years ago. Arnfinnur’s wife had been engaged to this man apparently, yet they had never actually been married, so the shooter was thought to be mad.
His ideas on the present influencing the past are interesting. Science demands that I dismiss them, of course, but as Jorge Luis Borges says, “Reality is not always probable, or likely.”3