“There is one advantage in a plurality of wives; they fight each other instead of their husbands.”
—Josh Billings
Although he admired the way in which the Prophet managed his many wives, Apostle Heber C. Kimball once saw fit to play seer for Brigham: “Some day there’ll be one new wife who’ll give you trouble.” Brigham was more amused than concerned by his aide’s prediction. Not until his marital adventure with Ann Eliza Webb had ended in disaster was Brigham finally able to admit to Kimball, “Yes, I suppose your prophecy had to come true.”
But, at the time Ann Eliza accepted Brigham’s proposal, there seemed every possibility that this marriage would remain as untroubled as the majority of his previous ones. As the nuptial date approached, there was on Ann Eliza’s part finally a certain passivity and eventually an undercurrent of excitement at the prospect of becoming a fractional wife of one of the nation’s foremost figures. As for Brigham, all arrogance and threats were put aside. He was attentive and winning. On the eve of the wedding he called on the bride-to-be and presented her with three fashionable dresses—one silk, the other two merino—and with a new purse that contained a fifty-dollar bill.
For the moment the wedding was to be kept secret. This was at Brigham’s request. He claimed that he wanted to avoid headlines at a time when the Federal government was again agitating against polygamy. Ann Eliza, however, suspected another motive. The true reason for temporary secrecy, she felt, was that Brigham did not wish to incur the wrath of his twenty-fifth wife, Amelia Folsom.
On April 7, 1869, the sixty-eight-year-old Brigham Young and the twenty-four-year-old Ann Eliza Webb became man and wife. The simple marriage ceremony, in the Endowment House, was presided over by the skeptical Heber C. Kimball and attended by the bride’s mother and father and several family friends. It is not recorded whether Ann Eliza’s bankrupt brother Gilbert, whose telegraph-pole difficulties had inspired the union, was a witness to his salvation.
After the ceremony Ann Eliza accompanied her second husband to a Mormon conference, presumably as protégé rather than wife. In the evening, because he was not yet ready to face Amelia’s outrage and the harem’s disapproval, Brigham returned his twenty-seventh wife to her father’s home outside the city and then retired alone to his bedroom in the Lion House.
There are two versions of what happened in the month that followed, and they are both Ann Eliza’s. In her memoirs Ann Eliza wrote that she did not see her husband for three weeks after the wedding, and when at last he did appear, it was only for “a few minutes.” But writing to a friend, Ann Eliza admitted that in the first weeks “I had considerable of his attention; his visits were frequent.”
On his second visit that first month Brigham Young invited his bride out for a carriage ride. He seemed anxious not to set tongues wagging by being seen in her company, and to this end he avoided the main thoroughfares. Ann Eliza took delight in his nervousness. She realized that he had not yet told his harem of his latest acquisition. Apparently he was preparing to do so shortly, for now he requested Ann Eliza to live under one roof with a number of the other wives. “He had wanted me to go to the Lion House to live,” said Ann Eliza, “but on that point I was decided. I would stay at my father’s house, but I would not go there…” At last Brigham agreed that if Ann Eliza would do him the courtesy of visiting the Lion House from time to time, he would provide her with a separate residence in Salt Lake City.
Brigham was once heard to remark that, if he had it to do all over again, he would give each and every wife her own bungalow. While such a plan would be costly, and entail considerable leg work on the part of the husband, it would render plural marriage less inhibiting and almost frictionless. Such an arrangement of a private dwelling for a plural wife of Brigham Young was not without precedent. Because of his wealth and energy, Brigham had, from his earliest days in the territory, been able to scatter a number of his wives about in different houses.
However, in 1869 one home held the greatest number of Brigham’s wives, the widely publicized Lion House, located in a central block of Salt Lake City. According to the Mormons, no more than twelve of Brigham’s wives ever slept in the three-story Lion House at any one time. According to Ann Eliza, by the last year of her marriage, the population of the Lion House had been reduced to six plural wives.
Where, then, were the other wives? Adjacent to the Lion House, connected by Brigham’s main office and a corridor, was the residence second in importance. This handsome colonial adobe, coated with yellowish plaster, was known as the Bee Hive House. Built seventeen years before Ann Eliza entered the harem, the Bee Hive House was named after the beehive (denoting Mormon industry) carved above its observatory. This residence was Brigham’s executive mansion in the three years that he was Federal governor of Utah Territory. Distinguished visitors, and they were many, crossed a wide porch, rapped on the imposing oak door, and entered the main-floor hallway. Usually they treated with Brigham in the green parlor downstairs or in his business office. Rarely were they shown Brigham’s small, austere bedroom—sixteen feet square—furnished with bed and bedstand, desk, chairs, and washstand, or any of the many bedroom suites provided for the multiple wives.
Before the ascendancy of the Lion House, the Bee Hive House served most of the harem. Studying its barred windows, Captain Richard Burton had reported: “There is a Moslem air of retirement about the Bee House; the face of woman is rarely seen at the window, and her voice is never heard from without.” Until 1860 Mary Ann Angell, Brigham’s second and only legal wife, his Khadija, dominated the $65,000 residence. But management of the other wives under its roof, of the eighteen male laborers who tended the orchard, gardens, and flour mill to the rear, of the cleaning women (“helpers,” Brigham called them), proved too much for Mary Ann Angell. Retiring from the hustle, she turned the reins over to Brigham’s third wife and first plural wife, Lucy Ann Decker. Finally the harem was transferred to the Lion House and elsewhere, and Lucy Ann had the Bee Hive House to herself.
Meanwhile the legal Mary Ann Angell became the first of Brigham’s spouses to set up a private and monogamous-styled household. After leaving the Bee Hive House, Mary Ann moved to a relatively small, aristocratic, two-story home known as The White House. This residence, located on a hill overlooking the city, had been Brigham’s first important house and the first in all the territory with a shingled roof. Its only shortcoming was a lack of sufficient windows, for it had been constructed at a time when glass was expensive. Here Mary Ann dwelt in lofty isolation until Brigham sold the building to an Englishman for $25,500. After that, the legal wife lived in humbler quarters behind the Lion House.
Numerous others of Brigham’s wives followed in Mary Ann’s footsteps. Emmeline Free, when deposed as favorite, considerately retired to the late Jedediah M. Grant’s house on upper Main Street. This house was sufficiently spacious to hold most of Emmeline’s ten children by Brigham Young. Zina D. Huntington, the eighteenth wife, settled her person and belongings in a cottage on Third South Street. Emily Dow Partridge and some of her seven children by the Prophet were content to live in a modest two-story house on Third East Street. Clara Decker, who had married Brigham at sixteen and had five children by him, was satisfied to reside in a place of her own near the Social Hall on State Street. Two wives, Harriet Barney, the twenty-fourth, and Mary Van Cott, the twenty-sixth, were neighbors in their own separate homes opposite South Temple Gate.
None of these city wives were very long out of touch with harem headquarters in the Lion House. All were expected to join Brigham and their sister or rival wives frequently in dining and prayers. However, several wives were too far removed from the Lion House ever to attend community festivities. These, in a sense, were the expatriates. Four miles beyond the Salt Lake City limits stood The Farmhouse, a two-story residence, situated on a vast rural property, belonging to Brigham. Here, for some years, dwelled Susan Snively, Brigham’s Virginia wife, until she was replaced by a series of other wives who served on the farm a year or more at a time. The last of these was Ann Eliza herself. In St. George, Utah, Brigham had his elaborate winter mansion—he found time to spend seven winters there in all—managed by Lucy Bigelow, who was transferred there from the Lion House late in 1870. In Provo, Utah, Brigham possessed a stately old colonial house—with the city’s telegraph office established in one room— where his English wife, Eliza Burgess, was the mistress.
Just before his death in 1877, the Prophet began construction of the domicile that he desired the most, one that was to supersede all others. This was the $100,000 Gardo House, a towering pile of brick and sandstone, designed somewhat in the manner of Phineas T. Barnum’s gaudy Iranistan in Connecticut. Gardo House, with windows of rare plate and wall mirrors imported from Paris, was intended to become Brigham’s final official residence and the home of Amelia Folsom, the queen bee of the harem. Since it was planned that Gardo House would know no other hostess than Amelia, the mansion was referred to as Amelia’s Palace. Eventually the construction of Gardo House was completed by Brigham’s successor, President John Taylor, who made it his official residence.
But in 1869 there was no Gardo House, and the wives who had won their privacy were happy to accept less elaborate lodgings. Since Ann Eliza was aware that most of Brigham’s wives were not confined in the Lion House, she was able to assert herself. A month after her marriage, Ann Eliza, accompanied by her mother (who was to live with her as companion), was escorted by Brigham to the new house he had purchased for her in Salt Lake City.
Ann Eliza was stunned by the first sight of her bridal cottage. The quarters were uncomfortably Lilliputian and unattractive. In the living room the furniture was of the cheapest pine wood. The carpet, worn thin in the middle, was a discard from the Lion House parlor. The chinaware in the dining room and pots and pans in the kitchen were the used, battered leftovers from a bakery Brigham had owned and recently sold. Windows, unadorned by curtains or blinds, stared nakedly into the street, until Ann Eliza hastily covered them with her spare bed sheets.
Since she had been so ardently wooed by the great man, Ann Eliza undoubtedly expected to be rewarded with the luxuries of regal living. Her disenchantment was immediate and enduring. Once a month her food rations and supplies were delivered: sparse cuts of pork (rarely beef), five pounds of sugar, one pound of candles, one box of matches, one bar of soap. Several times a month there were deliveries of bread. Once every six months she received “a few yards of calico, and a few yards of both bleached and unbleached muslin.” According to Ann Eliza, the promised allowance of $1,000 a year had been verbally raised to $3,000 a year before her marriage—a sum three times what the other wives had been promised—but at no time did she see a penny of this money.
Meanwhile, the news of Ann Eliza’s marriage to the Prophet had been made public. In the Lion House, and in Brigham’s other residences, the announcement was greeted coldly. To Brigham’s other wives, the newest and twenty-seventh wife represented a domestic threat. The main reason for apprehension was Ann Eliza’s age. She was almost eight months younger than Mary Van Cott, the twenty-sixth wife, and six years younger than Amelia Folsom, the reigning favorite, and forty-one years younger than Mary Ann Angell, the legal wife. Most of the wives remembered Ann Eliza as the actress friend of their daughters, and they felt that her youth and beauty would make her a serious competitor for their busy husband’s affection. Moreover, with the appearance of Ann Eliza, the economic comfort and security of the other wives would be encroached upon even further. Each additional female partner meant one more sharing of the monthly furnishings, clothes, and food.
Ann Eliza was not unaware of the antagonism felt by many of her sister wives. She dreaded meeting them. But, though she had won the battle against living in the Lion House, she knew that sooner or later she must face her rivals. At last came Brigham’s command, couched as an invitation. Ann Eliza recorded her acceptance of the inevitable in a deceptively unemotional statement: “When my marriage to him was known by the other wives, as it was on my removal to the city, he took me to the Lion House, to visit the family there.”
Ann Eliza was no stranger to the Lion House. Every nook and cranny of the huge residence was imprinted on her memory. Quite possibly, as she awaited Brigham’s carriage and the tense confrontation with the other wives, she recalled the place where once she had been a carefree part-time boarder.
To non-Mormons, and especially to those outside of Utah who had been propagandized by scandal sheets and yellow journalism, the Lion House was synonymous with oriental harem. They imagined the Lion House to be an American khalif’s palace with vast and glittering halls, broad staircases, veiled and spangled boudoirs, cushions, peacock tongues on plates of gold, incense, lutes, eunuchs, and an air of voluptuous license and depravity. Ann Eliza knew better. She knew that she was about to attend not a Near Eastern palace but something more accurately described as resembling a strictly regulated female dormitory transplanted from flinty Vermont. The atmosphere of the Lion House was excessively female, of course, but also austere and controlled. By the nature of its organization, sexuality was only faintly implied. Religious duty pervaded every parlor, hall, and bedroom, and somehow this made sex seem a procreative bodily function rather than a pleasurable secret sin. In short, the house exuded an atmosphere of bountiful motherhood rather than unrestrained concubinage. And a large part of this atmosphere, as Ann Eliza well knew, was generated by the very architecture and layout of the building itself.
The construction of the Lion House had begun in 1855, and the residence was ready for occupancy in the following year. As a matter of fact, Brigham began moving wives into it while the carpenters were still at work. The construction cost Brigham about $35,000 out of pocket. The cost was this low only because many workmen had volunteered or been commanded to offer their services free. The completed house was probably worth closer to $65,000.
The residence was named after the reclining stone lion erected over the entrance. An Englishman and believer, William Ward, had fashioned the lion, as he had the stone beehive next door. (There was later much distress when he defected from the Church.) The shaggy beast above the front door provided anti-Mormons with a subject for much malicious comment. Typical among these was J. H. Beadle’s in 1870: “Over the pillared portico in front is a stone lion, a sad misapplication of the emblem, by the way, as that royal brute is ever content with one mate. The bull would have been more appropriate…” Actually the lion had been inspired by an emotion no more dramatic than nostalgia. As a young man in New England, learning the trade of carpentry, Brigham Young had been awed by a stone lion decorating a mansion on which he had worked. When at last he could afford it, he appropriated the majestic emblem for his own.
Studying the Lion House shortly after it was built, Captain Richard Burton wrote: “The house resembles a two-storied East Indian tenement.” To minds less exotic and cosmopolitan it resembled nothing more than a hundred New England dwellings of colonial design. The material of construction was native sun-baked adobe. The house was not two-storied, as Burton had guessed, but three-storied. The mistake was understandable, since the entry from the street led through a glass vestibule—to keep the cold wind out—into the second story, which was the main floor. The first story was below, out of sight, and the third high above, inaccessible to most outsiders.
This haven for communal living was prepared with meticulous foresight. Descending to the first or basement floor, the visitor was confronted by a warren of varied rooms, all buzzing with activity. The largest room below was the dining room, forty feet long and furnished with three tables that often held fifty women and children at one meal. Recalling her year as an actress, Ann Eliza remembered this room the best—sitting to breakfast with Brigham’s daughters and chanting the daily protest against “bread and butter and peach-sauce.”
Other rooms in the first-floor basement were a buttery, a weaving room, a pantry, the coachman’s quarters, and a temporary schoolroom. There was also a flagstone storage cellar filled with vegetables and other provisions, as well as a laundry room containing wooden tubs and a pounding barrel.
Anti-Mormon writers liked to say that there was a secret door somewhere on this bottom floor leading to underground cells and passages. Mrs. C. V. Waite had given credence to the lurid rumor in 1866: “There are said to be underground passages from Brigham’s houses… Also apartments under the Lion House, where he secretes his wealth and punishes his refractory wives.” Clarissa Young Spencer, one of Brigham’s daughters by Lucy Ann Decker, was denying the rumor as late as 1940: “I feel reasonably sure that the rumor came from the fact that at one time a large canal ran under a portion of Father’s property.”
On the second or main floor of the Lion House was the long central parlor, used for counseling, prayers, and entertaining, and across the hall the series of bedroom suites occupied for the most by the wives with children. The central parlor was a showcase: a Brussels carpet with floral design, two mahogany tables in the middle of the room, a rosewood piano, a melodeon, a crimson velvet sofa, a large heating stove, and an assortment of gilt chairs custom designed to the varied shapes of the different wives. Here the favorite or senior wives received their friends. The lesser wives saw female callers in their individual sitting rooms.
Beyond the parlor was the only bedroom privately accessible to Brigham from his office. This had been Emmeline Free’s room before Amelia Folsom replaced her as the queen bee. Now Amelia used the room only occasionally. It was richly furnished. A four-poster canopied bed, on the red carpet, dominated the room. Oak chairs, beautiful tables, a sofa, a wardrobe, a wall mirror, and a fireplace completed the furnishings.
Other bedrooms on the second floor reflected not only the personalities of their occupants but their position in the harem as well. Emily Dow Partridge, the eighth wife, from Ohio, had a poorly furnished bedroom for herself but was allowed additional rooms for those of her seven children who lived with her. Before moving to the Bee Hive House, Lucy Decker, the third wife, had a sitting room in addition to extra bedrooms because she, too, had given Brigham seven children. Her sister, Clara Decker, the sixth wife, had the most ornate bedroom of all—a magnificently carved bed canopied with heavy damask curtains, a settee, Venetian blinds on the windows, and an oil portrait of her Brigham on one wall.
The third or top floor of the Lion House was the one evoking the greatest curiosity in sight-seers. From the exterior could be seen twenty gabled rooms, and tourists liked to count the smoking chimneys to try to determine how many wives were in attendance. This top floor did, indeed, have twenty small bedrooms, largely occupied by Brigham’s childless wives and the more mature members of his progeny. Also on the top floor stood a large parlor with partitions to divide it into five smaller parlors.
The upstairs bedrooms were comparatively small, each exactly twelve by sixteen feet in size. Those bedrooms nearest the street were the coldest, and they were provided with fireplaces. The other bedrooms were warmed by heating stoves. Although the Gothic windows beneath the steep roof were narrow, they supplied adequate daylight. Typical of the upstairs bedrooms was the one in which resided Naamah Kendel Jenkins Carter, known to Brigham as Twiss, after her first husband who had died. Twiss, the twentieth wife, was satisfied with an ordinary bed, three oak chairs, a toilet stand, and a small wall mirror. Harriet Elizabeth Cook, the difficult fourth wife, possessed a similar room. Down the hall, Eliza R. Snow’s bedroom and sitting room were more grandly furnished to fit her high station. As the venerable former wife of Joseph Smith and as the poet laureate of Mormondom, Eliza R. Snow was permitted fashionable furniture, artificial flowers, and a center table heaped high with imported books. The bedrooms for Brigham’s growing children were assigned according to their sex and age: the boys of similar years shared quarters together, as did the girls.
This, then, was the familiar Lion House that Ann Eliza approached in 1869, and approached not as the friend of Brigham’s daughters but as their newest stepmother and the Prophet’s latest wife. Inside the Lion House, the rival wives waited while Brigham tethered his horses to the post outside the Eagle Gate, then led Ann Eliza past the manned guardhouse, up the outer staircase, through the glass vestibule, and into the hallway and central parlor.
Neither Ann Eliza nor anyone else left a record of all the wives she met that day. Later she mentioned four by name but implied that there were more. Speaking of the wives who greeted her, Ann Eliza wrote: “I was very kindly received by most of them, Emmeline Free and Zina Fluntington being especially my friends. Two of them, however,—Eliza Burgess and Harriet Cook,—would not speak to me.”
The two wives who were most cordial to Ann Eliza that trying first day, Emmeline Free and Zina D. Huntington, had both fallen from their husband’s favor long before. Emmeline Free, the eleventh wife, had monopolized Brigham for almost two decades after their marriage. She was, said Fanny Stenhouse, “the handsomest of Brigham’s wives—tall and graceful, with curling hair, beautiful eyes, and fair complexion.” She was also the most prolific child-bearer of the harem, giving Brigham six daughters and four sons. She cohabited with the Prophet at least seventeen years, since her earliest pregnancy was in 1847 and her last in 1864. Significantly her successor, Amelia Folsom, married Brigham in 1863 and had dominance of the Lion House the following year, and after that Emmeline was never impregnated again. Once shunted aside because of Amelia, Emmeline had a nervous breakdown and suffered a long period of illness. Few of the wives sympathized with her, remembering the grief she had caused them.
Ann Eliza’s other close friend in the Lion House, Zina D. Huntington, was the eighteenth wife. She had been simultaneously married to Henry Bailey Jacobs and Joseph Smith in Illinois. After the murder of Smith she had taken Brigham for her third husband, just before the trek to the West. A strong woman of sad countenance, extremely religious, and in awe of her third husband, Zina D. Huntington was given much responsibility and little love by Brigham. Using the silkworms that her husband had imported from France, she unsuccessfully managed a large cocoonery outside the city. Also, as official midwife, she delivered the majority of children born in the Lion House.
Apparently for a long time Brigham had wanted Zina D. Huntington out of the way. When her only child by the Prophet, also named Zina, fell in love with an Englishman, Thomas Williams, who already had a wife, Brigham told the groom that he could have one Zina if he would also take the other. The eighteenth wife did not have to be told twice. She moved out of the Lion House and joined her daughter and son-in-law. Later she acquired a private residence from Brigham. Not until after her husband’s death did she agree to travel, and then she spent two years on a mission to the Sandwich Islands. But in 1869, at the age of forty-eight, Zina D. Huntington still clung to the Lion House and any ally in bewilderment that she could make, and at once she sensed that the twenty-seventh wife could be a friend.
Besides these two wives, whom Ann Eliza singled out for special mention because of their immediate warmth, there were others she spoke of later as being kindly and affectionate. Undoubtedly, Lucy Decker, custodian of the adjacent Bee Hive House, came over to pay respects to Ann Eliza, and her younger blood sister, Clara Decker, no doubt proved equally friendly.
The Decker sisters were both short, stout, and amiable. Lucy, Brigham’s third spouse and first in plurality, was forty-seven when Ann Eliza faced her as wife to wife. Lucy had left her first husband, Dr. Isaac Seeley, to marry Brigham. The first of her seven children by the Prophet, a boy christened Brigham Heber, had been born in 1845 and was the Prophet’s first polygamous offspring. When Ann Eliza joined the harem, this boy was a cadet at West Point. Lucy had been happy at being given the sole stewardship of Bee Hive House. This position she enjoyed until the arrival of Amelia Folsom, who, on moving her boudoir from the Lion House to the Bee Hive House, forced Lucy to serve her.
Clara was the younger of the Decker sisters and also the brighter of the pair. At forty-one, she had been Brigham’s wife for a quarter of a century. Ann Eliza adored her at once. “She expresses her opinion rarely,” said Ann Eliza, “but when she does, they are given decisively, and her husband is not at a loss to understand their meaning… No one can know Clara Decker without loving her.”
There were probably six or seven other wives in the Lion House who were well disposed toward Ann Eliza upon her first appearance as wife. Ann Eliza thought that the sandy-haired, freckled, pudgy, forty-eight-year-old Mrs. Twiss, twentieth wife and housekeeper of the harem, was most “amiable.” Ann Eliza found forty-seven-year-old Martha Bowker, the short-tempered, ailing, neatly dressed fifteenth wife, “by no means intellectually brilliant.” Of Martha Bowker, Fanny Stenhouse would write: “Brother Brigham acts towards her as if he had quite forgotten that he has ever married her, and she lives in all the loneliness of married spinsterhood.” Ann Eliza considered Harriet Barney, the twenty-fourth wife who had been married to Brigham for thirteen years, a woman of superior endowments. Harriet Barney was tall and full-figured, yet exceedingly graceful. She loved Brigham deeply, and although Ann Eliza was the third wife to follow her, she accepted each challenge with equanimity.
Among the other more or less friendly wives Ann Eliza may have met on this, her first visit to the Lion House as Brigham’s mate, were forty-six-year-old Margaret Pierce, the seventeenth wife, whose only child, Morris, was Brigham’s fiftieth; thirty-nine-year- old Lucy Bigelow, the twenty-second wife, whose fifteen-year tenancy of the Lion House would come to an end the following year with her move to St. George; forty-five-year-old Emily Dow Partridge, the eighth wife, who had been briefly married to Joseph Smith and been twenty-five years married to Brigham; and sixty- five-year-old Eliza R. Snow, the nineteenth wife, who had become a literary celebrity at twenty-two, a Mormon at thirty-one, a plural wife of Joseph Smith at thirty-eight, a plural wife of Brigham Young at forty-five, and whose role in the Lion House was often—according to Susa Young Gates—to arbitrate “domestic tension” between “unhappy wives.” Ann Eliza regarded the formidable poet Snow as “the most intellectual of all the wives.”
By Ann Eliza’s own admission, two wives displayed antagonism and snubbed her. These were Eliza Burgess, Brigham’s only foreign-born mate, and Harriet Cook, Brigham’s outspoken New York spouse. Eliza Burgess, an English immigrant who had worked as a servant for Brigham and Mary Ann Angell in Illinois, became her master’s twenty-third wife in 1850 and presented him with a son three years later. In the Lion House, Eliza Burgess was a servant once more, acting as assistant housekeeper to Mrs. Twiss. She looked upon Brigham as God. “It is almost painful to see the dumb worship which she accords to her master,” said Ann Eliza, “and the cavalier manner in which it is received.”
The twenty-seventh wife always claimed that she understood the resentment of the twenty-third wife. “Eliza Burgess, though not the first, and never a favorite wife, used to be terribly exercised whenever Brigham added another to the family,” Ann Eliza wrote. “She would go about, crying bitterly, for days, and would sometimes shut herself up in her room, refusing to see anyone. Her sorrow was the joke of the family, since no member of it could see what reason she had for indulging in it. She had but just got over mourning his alliance with Mary Van Cott, when she was called upon to grieve over his union with me.
“She knew me perfectly well, as she had been an inmate of the Lion House for some years, and used to see me constantly the winter I was at the theatre, and spent so much of my time there; but on the occasion of my first visit after my marriage, she utterly ignored my presence, and would neither look at me or speak to me.”
After Ann Eliza’s visit had been concluded, and she had departed, Zina D. Huntington, of the pro-Ann Eliza group, took Eliza Burgess aside. “Why did you not speak to Ann Eliza?” she inquired.
“Oh, I will by and by, when I feel like it,” replied Eliza Burgess.
It was not until the newest wife had been in and out of the Lion House “several times” that the resentful English wife, tired of sulking and weeping, suddenly confronted her. “Good morning,” she said curtly to Ann Eliza, and then she was gone. It was, Ann Eliza concluded, a stamp of official recognition at last.
Ann Eliza’s other enemy in the harem, forty-five-year-old Harriet Cook, was less forgiving. Harriet Cook had the seniority of being Brigham’s fourth wife, but from all accounts she disliked her husband and he equally despised her. According to Ann Eliza, Harriet was a tall woman, with regular features except for a sharp nose and waspish mouth. During the twenty-six years that she had been married to Brigham, she had acquired a cynical attitude toward her husband’s religion. “Mormonism, polygamy, and the whole of it, is humbug, and may go to the devil for all I care,” she liked to say to her startled friends.
Whenever possible, Brigham avoided Harriet, and when he had to converse with her, he never discussed theology. “Brigham, finding her so ungovernable, and being quite unable to exact submission or obedience from her, refused to live with her,” said Ann Eliza, “and, although she still lives at the ‘Lion House’ with the other wives, avoids her as studiously as possible, and will not even notice her, unless positively compelled to do so.” Ann Eliza cannot be regarded as prejudiced in this judgment of Harriet Cook, since other witnesses confirm her report. In 1866 Mrs. C. V. Waite wrote: “Brigham cares nothing for this woman, and avoids her as much as possible.” Eight years later Fanny Stenhouse wrote that Harriet “is an intelligent but not at all a refined woman.”
Somehow, in 1846, Harriet and Brigham produced a son named Oscar. According to Mrs. Stenhouse, the Prophet punished his fourth wife by not allowing her any more children. Perhaps it was just as well. The one issue of their union, Oscar, was described by anti-Mormon writers as an untractable child of ungovernable temper. He called Brigham “the old man,” and Brigham called him “reprobate.”
When Ann Eliza arrived to meet the rest of the harem in 1869, Harriet Cook was working off her aggressions by tutoring the children in the basement and by sewing shirts, coats, and trousers for the numerous boys in the Lion House. She made no effort to conceal her hatred of Ann Eliza. The roots of this hatred were probably in the past. According to Ann Eliza, Harriet “had been a servant in my mothers family in Nauvoo, and Brigham had, indeed, married her from our house. She used to take care of me when I was a baby, and she was so angry when she heard that Brigham had married me, that she wished with all her heart that she had choked me when she had a good chance.”
Four of Brigham’s more important wives were not present in the Lion House on the day Ann Eliza came calling. Mary Ann Angell, the sixty-six-year-old legal wife, was nowhere in evidence. “Quite a number of persons in Utah,” said Fanny Stenhouse, “believe that she is dead, so very little is seen and known of her.” However, she was far from dead in 1869 but would remain alive another thirteen years. Most probably her absence had nothing to do with the appearance of a new wife forty-two years her junior. Mrs. C. V. Waite implied that Mary Ann stayed away from the Lion House because she was “very unpopular” with the other wives. Apparently she was not unaware of her legal position and not given to hiding her feelings toward polygamous wives, and these were the attitudes that antagonized.
Actually Mary Ann Angell, widely respected in Utah, had become a recluse in The White House on the hill. Ann Eliza met her formally on later occasions and thought that “her mind is somewhat clouded.” The oldest wife and the youngest wife seemed to get along well. “She was always kind to me,” said Ann Eliza, “and I have had for her a real regard and sympathy, which increased after I became a member of her husband’s family. She is a very reticent woman, neither invited nor gives confidence, had few intimate friends, and visits but little.”
Also absent from the Lion House was fifty-four-year-old Susan Snively, the thirteenth wife. Susan, a kindly and modest southern woman of German extraction, was living in The Farmhouse, Brigham’s rural estate outside the city. After eight years of isolation in The Farmhouse, personally supervising the production of butter and cheese for the entire Young family, Susan’s health gave way. She was brought back to the Lion House an invalid, and even after her partial recovery, she was treated as an ailing patient. It was during this later period that Ann Eliza finally met her and became her confidante. One day, protesting her involuntary confinement to Ann Eliza, the thirteenth wife exclaimed, “How I should like to drive! And how much good it would do me! We have plenty of carriages, to be sure, yet I am never allowed to ride.”
The most important of Brigham’s wives, thirty-one-year-old Amelia Folsom, as well as his most recent bride before Ann Eliza, twenty-five-year-old Mary Van Cott, both failed to welcome Ann Eliza to the family. Mary Van Cott lived in her own cottage and was barred entry to the Lion House at Amelia’s insistence. Amelia herself, furious at Brigham’s latest marital indulgence, either remained aloof and distant in the Bee Hive House or removed herself to another part of the city for the day. Momentarily, and for this Ann Eliza was grateful, the meeting between the favorite wife and the most recently favored wife was deferred, and fireworks were averted.
Ann Eliza’s introduction to the harem in the late spring of 1869 was tense but relatively painless. If Ann Eliza thought that this was to be her first and last visit to the Lion House, she was mistaken. Brigham believed in communal living, and for the entire year that followed her marriage, until April of 1870, Ann Eliza was expected to attend meals, prayers, and social functions regularly in the Lion House. Because she was lonely, and because the harem offered companionship and excitements of its own, Ann Eliza did not object. Besides, the Lion House, for all its severity of design, provided more comforts than Ann Eliza was able to enjoy in the tiny, ancient house, which Brigham had turned over to her.
As an official member of the harem, Ann Eliza saw the daily routine of the wives in the Lion House to be one of well-regulated and constant activity. Brigham instinctively understood what most military leaders learn from experience—that when you have charge of a large number of persons you are required to keep them busy and disciplined.
The day in the American harem usually began shortly after dawn, around seven o’clock in the morning. The wives awakened, dressed their younger children, clothed themselves in bodices and skirts of calico, and made up their beds. At five minutes to eight in spring, summer, and autumn, and at twenty-five minutes after eight in winter, a hand bell shaken by Mrs. Twiss or Eliza Burgess resounded through the second and third stories of the Lion House. Within five minutes the three tables in the basement dining room were filled. The breakfast, prepared by Mrs. Twiss and two outside cooks, most often consisted of eggs, potatoes, baked squash, toasted bread, fruits, and the much detested peach sauce.
As breakfast was being served in the Lion House, Brigham Young was awakening and dressing in the Bee Hive House next door. He preferred to take his breakfast alone, although sometimes Amelia joined him, and in either event he was served by Lucy Decker. Brigham ate hastily and lightly, usually a boiled egg, a bowl of milk and cream taken with bread, and some fruit. When he felt festive, he would order Lucy to bring him a stack of buckwheat cakes and soak it in syrup made in Vermont.
By nine o’clock Brigham was in his office adjacent to the Lion House. Pinching his tiny, black-rimmed spectacles to the bridge of his nose, he would read The Deseret News, his personal mouthpiece, and then the Salt Lake Tribune, the leading anti-Mormon newspaper. “He loses his temper every morning over the Salt Lake Tribune,” Ann Eliza observed. After covering the local press, Brigham attended to his mail, reading all letters directed to him and dictating replies to the most important. At ten o’clock a barber arrived to shave him and clip his beard. The remainder of the morning was devoted to receiving visitors.
Brigham prided himself on his democratic attitude toward callers. The lowliest member of his flock was as welcome as the most renowned Eastern traveler. Even John Hyde, who could find few virtues in the Prophet, conceded his hospitality: “An old lady once went to seriously inquire ‘the word of the Lord’ as to whether red or yellow flannel was best to wear next to the person, and he has gravely advised her to ‘wear yellow by all means.’“ After the old lady had gone, the next visitor might have been Dom Pedro II, last emperor of Brazil, or Baron Rothschild, or General William Tecumseh Sherman, all of whom were received by Brigham at one time or another. In fact, during the period of his marriage to Ann Eliza, Brigham entertained the aging Ralph Waldo Emerson, en route to California to deliver a lecture entitled Immortality. Although Brigham had one brief exchange with Emerson concerning the most accurate books about Utah, the Mormon leader did not seem aware, or perhaps refused to recognize the fame, of the literary lion from Concord. Most of the conversation took place between Brigham and members of Emerson’s party, until Brigham’s thin and well-read young secretary could contain himself no longer and blurted, “Is this the justly celebrated Ralph Waldo Emerson? I have read a great many of your books.” After that, Brigham requested Emerson’s autograph in his guest register and bade him good journey.
Having dispensed with morning visitors, Brigham undertook official business. His eight-hour work day had no break in it, for he always skipped lunch. Through the afternoon he officiated at a few marriages, granted divorces, attended funerals, held conferences (with the Apostles and Bishops on Church policy and immediate problems), and inspected public works.
Meanwhile, in the Lion House, the majority of Brigham’s wives were occupied. Rarely would they see their husband in the daylight hours, yet his presence was everywhere, and they toiled as if always under his gaze. The wives began by cleaning their quarters. Hired help did the dishwashing, but the women themselves took turns in shifts of two and three doing the house’s entire household and personal washing and ironing. Quilting frames and spinning wheels were in steady use, producing quilts and yarn for children’s attire.
The army of children gave their mothers little time for rest. For a portion of each day they were kept busy in Harriet Cook’s schoolroom. Then, as their mothers watched, they were treated to a succession of private tutors. They were instructed by music and dancing masters, French and English teachers, and the girls learned the new shorthand from a professional stenographer. After that, mothers taught the girls to sew, while handy men allowed the boys to assist them in branding and herding livestock. If the day was warm, Brigham’s wives led his brood into the back-yard swimming pool, which was supplied with fresh water from a mountain stream. Bathing suits were taboo. The mothers and daughters wore linsey-woolsey dresses over pantalets, and the boys clad themselves in light overalls.
Whenever there was a spare moment in the afternoon, Brigham’s wives concentrated on the several sewing machines that had been imported from St. Louis. Although the black silk dresses worn on Sundays and to parties were ready-made and often highly fashionable, most of the wives’ attire, especially their headgear, muslin pantalets, and cotton skirts, were homespun. Since Brigham was extremely clothes conscious, the wives who loved him vied for his attention by spending much of their time on creating an attractive wardrobe. Even the wives who were indifferent to their husband devoted themselves to their appearance, for no other reason than that they were women.
Making feminine clothes to parade in before Brigham was usually an exasperating project. His taste in clothes was dogmatic and limited. A decade before he married Ann Eliza he tried to foist his own idea of fashion on his wives. He designed an aberration, which he christened The Deseret Costume. It consisted of a military hat eight inches high, a baggy short skirt that fell to the calves and partially covered trousers invented by that emancipated editor, Amelia Bloomer, and a long, loose jacket of antelope skin. Eliza R. Snow took up The Deseret Costume at once, even going so far as to cut up one of her treasured silk dresses and convert it into the unattractive three-piece garment. Briefly, and unhappily, the other wives followed suit. But then, one by one, they abandoned it.
According to Susa Young Gates, “Mormon women were too truly women to carry such a movement long. They had a love of beautiful colours and pretty clothes, so that a few years saw the matter dwindle into neglect, with only a memory of self-discipline left to strengthen the character of those who participated.” Ann Eliza, however, was less indulgent toward the design of “the Mormon Worth.” Said she: “It was a very unbecoming dress, both to face and figure; there was nothing graceful or beautiful about it, and probably the female Mormons have never, in all their lives, come so nearly being actually indignant with their Prophet as they were when he endeavored to induce them to disfigure themselves by wearing this hideous costume.”
Defeated by female vanity, Brigham retreated into silence only briefly and was soon heard again on the subject of women’s fashion. He deplored fancy hats and praised plain, homemade dresses. When one of his wives would wear a hoop or bustle, or stylish accessories, he would caustically inquire if she was doing so to scare off flies and bedbugs.
Even this less radical campaign of Brigham’s had its opponents. One weary husband, bedeviled by his spouses, protested to the Prophet. “Brother Brigham,” he said, “we have seen ladies go to parties in plain, homemade cloth dresses, but every man was after the girls who had on a hundred dollars’ worth of foll-the-roll, and they would dance with every woman and girl except the one in a plain dress, and they would let her stay by the wall the whole evening.”
Brigham replied to the protesting husband in a sermon the following day: “It adds no beauty to a lady, in my opinion, to adorn her with fine feathers. When I look at a woman, I look at her face, which is composed of her forehead, cheeks, nose, mouth and chin, and I like to see it clean, her hair combed neat and nice, and her eyes bright and sparkling; and if they are so, what do I care what she has on her head, or how or of what material her dress is made?”
Most of the wives dutifully paid heed to their master’s wishes and bent to their sewing machines, stitching conservative bodices and skirts. But Amelia Folsom, backed by Lucy Decker and Ann Eliza and many of Brigham’s older daughters, formed the bloc that held out for fancy feminine wear.
Occasionally, however, for no reason whatsoever, Brigham would reverse his stand. At an evening prayer meeting that Ann Eliza attended, Brigham’s twenty-year-old daughter, Fanny, one of his children by Lucy Decker, entered the parlor sporting a black dress gayly trimmed in bright red braid. The conservative Eliza R. Snow, who had been the first to wear the outlandish high-hat-and-bloomer outfit and the last to discard it, and who tried to anticipate her spiritual husband in all temporal matters, sniffed at Fanny’s scarlet braid and exclaimed, “Is it possible that I see one of Brigham Young’s daughters in a dress trimmed with red? I am more surprised than I can tell.”
Annoyed, Brigham turned in his chair and snapped at Eliza R. Snow, “That dress is well enough. Let the girl alone. She shall wear whatever she chooses. I’ve seen you in more ridiculous finery than that.”
At the same time Brigham punished those of his wives who demanded ready-made garments and fancy clothes by refusing to supply them with either money or materials. Amelia, alone, obtained what she wanted. When Clara Decker, rotund wife number six, requested some strips of fur for trimmings, Brigham soundly berated her for her bad taste and intended extravagance. Clara, who had been refused before, would not have it on this occasion. She lost control completely. “If you think, Brigham Young, that I care anything for you, except for your money and what little I can get from you, you are mistaken. I might have cared more once; but that was a long time ago.” In a fury she wheeled and walked out on him. By nightfall she had her apologetic furs.
Six months after her marriage, Ann Eliza confronted Brigham with a similar request for furs. She had not heard of Clara’s difficulty, and she expected to have the furs at once. Instead, Brigham abused her for her flightiness and expensive demands. Shocked by his outburst, Ann Eliza began to weep, sobbing, “Oh, don’t, Brother Young!” Softened by her tears, Brigham held his tongue. The following day he delivered the furs.
Later, emboldened by her success with the furs, Ann Eliza went to her husband and requested silk to reline a worn hand muff. Again Brigham exploded. She had her furs, he said. Now it was silk. What would it be next? Would she never be satisfied, always be frivolous and demanding? This time Ann Eliza would not give him the satisfaction of tears. She stood firm and listened to his tirade. “I knew that he had several trunks full of silks, velvets, and laces, that he was keeping for some purpose or other,” she said, “and consequently the material for relining my muff would cost him nothing; so I did not feel I merited the lecture I was receiving. I said nothing, however, beyond making my request, and when he had finished he cut off a quarter of a yard of narrow silk from an entire piece which he had in one of the trunks, and gave it to me with as many airs and as much flourish as though he were presenting me with a whole dress pattern. It is needless to say that my muff was not lined with that piece of silk.”
Ann Eliza’s mood of defiance about what she wore continued. One evening Brigham told his assembled wives, “The very next time I see one of my wives with a dress on sweeping the ground, I will take the scissors and cut it off.” The following evening Ann Eliza appeared in a long dress that swept the Lion House floor. Passing through a doorway, she met her husband. As he moved aside, his foot accidentally stepped on the train of her dress. He looked down, looked up, hesitated, and then walked off without a word. When she saw him next, he did not have a pair of scissors. In the battle of fashion, at least, the twenty-seventh wife knew that she had won.
For nine hours of the day the Lion House was a world of women. At four o’clock in the afternoon this was changed. Brigham arrived for his daily visit with his wives. At five o’clock the dinner bell was sounded. Brigham led his file of wives and children down into the dining room. Tardiness was not permitted; those who were late did not eat.
The wives and children filled the two long tables. Brigham sat stoutly at the center of the short head table, facing his family. In earlier years Emmeline Free had occupied the chair to his right and Eliza R. Snow the one to his left. Now it was Amelia Folsom who sat to his right and Mrs. Twiss, to give her handy access to the kitchen, to his left. Sometimes Mrs. Twiss gave way to Eliza R. Snow or Clara Decker or one of Brigham’s male friends like Joseph F. Smith, nephew of the martyred Joseph, or to a prominent Gentile visitor. Amelia gave way to no one. Usually Lucy Decker, over from Bee Hive House, and Eliza R. Snow headed the long tables. Ann Eliza, when she came to dinner, sat with the childless wives.
After Brigham said grace, Mrs. Twiss bobbed up and down, serving most of the platters. The regular meal consisted largely of corn-meal mush, midget cuts of mutton or beef, baked potatoes, vegetables, bread, milk, and cheese. The desserts varied from baked apples to custard pie. Only at Sunday dinner was chicken served, occasionally being replaced by bear steak or venison. Turkey was saved for Thanksgiving or Christmas.
Ann Eliza noticed that there were really two meals served—the ordinary one for the wives at the long tables, and a more lavish one, with numerous “delicacies” added, at Brigham’s table. This disparity was resented by several of the lesser wives. On one occasion an ordinarily meek spouse coveted a dish served to Brigham and Amelia but not to herself. Suddenly, getting up the nerve, she leaped to her feet, strode to her husband’s table, helped herself to the luxury plate, and returned to her seat—”amidst looks of consternation from the other wives,” observed Ann Eliza, “and of indignant amazement from her husband.” Brigham said nothing while at the table. Apparently he had much to say afterward. The act of open rebellion was never repeated.
According to Susa Young Gates, the atmosphere at the dinner table was relaxed but restrained. There was some “good and jovial conversation,” she recalled, “yet there was never anything approaching boisterous laughter or unseemly mirth.”
After Brigham and his wives had concluded their meal, there was an hour of rest. At seven o’clock, as night fell, Brigham lit the candle in his bedroom, emerged into the hall, opened a glass cupboard, removed a large prayer bell, and rang it sharply three times. Then he proceeded briskly to the second-story central parlor. Brigham sat on a chair in the middle of the room, his face illuminated by the astral lamp on the small table beside him. He watched his wives and children enter and take their regular places about the spacious room. Eliza R. Snow was always allowed to sit to his right.
In the first months of her marriage, Ann Eliza attended these prayer meetings regularly, since all the wives living off the premises were expected to be on hand. Soon Ann Eliza saw that the appearance of the outside wives was “irregular.” This gave her courage to absent herself more and more. “I used to go whenever I felt inclined, which was very seldom,” she said, “and the longer I was a member of the family, the more infrequent became my attendance.”
The evening prayer meeting began with the group singing several hymns. After that, the multitude of wives and children kneeled as Brigham rose with open Bible in hand and read a variety of prayers. Most of the wives enjoyed these prayers; Ann Eliza did not. “He prays with great unction,” said Ann Eliza, “and, I suppose, unconsciously to himself, some of his patronizing manner slips into his appeals to the throne of Divine Grace, until his petitions always seemed to me to be very much like advice to the Deity rather than entreaties for the Divine blessing.”
When, at last, the amen was spoken and echoed, Brigham closed his Bible and sank into his chair, while his wives stiffly lifted themselves erect and gathered about him or mingled with each other. This was the period for domestic informality and togetherness in the Lion House.
At ease after his eight-hour work day, Brigham would chat with the wives surrounding him. He never discussed Church or personal business with his mates. As he had explained to Horace Greeley, “If I did not consider myself competent to transact a certain business without taking my wife’s or any woman’s counsel with regard to it, I think I ought to let that business alone.” However, he liked to discuss the day’s news—the driving of the golden spike at Promontory Point, a gala and drunken affair which Amelia had attended and Brigham had not; the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment (which still did not open the Mormon Church to Negroes); the recent vote given to women in Utah, the first in America; the irritation of enduring the anti-Mormon Ulysses S. Grant in the White House for a second year; the deaths of Robert E. Lee and Charles Dickens; or the defeat of Napoleon III at Sedan.
Sometimes Brigham’s conversations with his wives were devoted to domestic problems. If two of the women had been quarreling, Brigham would encourage them to speak their minds and then serve as judge and peacemaker. If any individual wife had a personal difficulty, Brigham would lead her aside and listen and then offer helpful suggestions. If conversation occasionally bored him, music almost never did. Often, after prayer, Brigham would call out to his older daughters, “Come, girls, let’s have some music.” Then, as the wives listened approvingly and knitted, one of the girls would sit at the piano and play “Silver Threads Among the Gold,” while another daughter sang the lyrics.
During many of these evenings in the Lion House parlor, Brigham devoted his time to his sons and daughters. As father, the Prophet was a strict disciplinarian. When the older of his fifty-six children went out to social affairs, Brigham insisted on inspecting their attire and admonishing them to be home before ten in the evening. He was equally strict about late-hour courting. One Sunday night the older girls had received their boy friends in the central parlor. At Brigham’s order the lamp on the table in the middle of the room remained illuminated. The bright light proved inhibiting to the various couples. At last one of Brigham’s girls, more fearless than the rest, disengaged herself, turned down the lamp, and surrounded it with a wall of books. The room was thrown into semidarkness, and in the shadowed comers the couples embraced. All at once the parlor door was thrown open, and framed in it, like an embodied conscience, stood the Prophet, a revealing candle in his hand. The couples stiffened in their places, then fell apart, as Brigham silently walked to the table, removed the books, one by one, and turned up the lamp. “The girls will go upstairs to their rooms,” he announced, “and I will say good night to the young men.” Shamefaced, the girls trooped out. Brigham followed them into the hall, to reappear in the parlor a moment later with a mountain of men’s hats in his arms. The evening was ended.
Even the youngest of Brigham’s offspring could know his wrath. Once, while preaching an outdoor sermon, he became annoyed by two of his little sons, who were noisily racing up and down a nearby slope. Halting in mid-sermon, Brigham left the congregation, strode swiftly to the slope, collared his sons, spanked each one into whimpering silence, and then calmly returned to his pulpit and resumed the words of the Lord.
Soon after her marriage, Ann Eliza acquired strong feelings about Brigham and his children. Although she remained one of her husband’s eleven childless wives, Ann Eliza still had her two sons by her first marriage. She had high hopes that Brigham would perform as a valuable and much-needed stepfather. In the courting period Brigham had displayed a fondness for both young Edward Wesley and Leonard Dee. He promised Ann Eliza he would do much to improve their lot. After the marriage, according to Ann Eliza, he treated her sons as “interlopers.” He gave each boy a new hat and pair of shoes annually. He would not give them suits but ordered Ann Eliza to make the suits herself. Once, said Ann Eliza, when she asked for new shoes earlier than usual, Brigham replied, “They don’t need shoes; children ought always to go barefoot; they are healthier for it.” Ann Eliza was all the more to note that Brigham’s own sons never went barefooted.
Ann Eliza believed, however, that Brigham’s own brood was treated in other ways as badly as were her own sons. She liked to believe the apocryphal story then current among Gentiles. Brigham was in a store talking to a friend when an attractive young boy entered with a shopping list for the clerk. Brigham was charmed by the boy, asked him several questions, and then turned back to his friend. “That’s a nice boy,” the Prophet said. “Whose child is it?” The friend blinked. “Why, he’s one of Mrs. Brigham Young’s children, President,” the friend replied. Brigham smiled foolishly and changed the subject.
Ann Eliza chose to believe that her husband could not know all of his twenty-five sons and thirty-one daughters, as well as all of his adopted children. “Some of his children are almost strangers to him,” said Ann Eliza. “They know nothing of fatherly affection, and while they feel that they have, socially, a sort of prestige, by being so closely related to him, they feel, personally, only a dread and fear of him. He never invites their confidences, nor shows himself interested in their affairs.”
However, several of Brigham’s daughters, flatly contradicting Ann Eliza, have stated in writing that Brigham was a loving and devoted parent. Certainly numerous letters from Brigham to his grown children away at school exist to attest to his paternal concern. Living relatives remember that he often looked after his children personally, once shepherding six daughters at the same time to the dentist and then bringing them back to his office where six new sleds awaited them.
Frequently, in public sermons, the Prophet showed his interest in the welfare of his youngest subjects. The same year that he was wooing Ann Eliza he advised his flock in a sermon: “When your children arise in the morning, instead of sending them out of doors to wash in cold, hard water, with a little soft soap, and wiping them as though you would tear the skin off them, creating roughness and darkness of skin, take a piece of soft flannel, and wipe the faces of your children smooth and nice, dry them with a soft cloth… Train up your children to be beautiful and fair, instead of neglecting them until they are sunburned and become like the natives of our mountains.”
Brigham did not always confine his wives and himself to the parlor pleasures of the Lion House. Sometimes he would take a party of his wives to the theater. More frequently he would take several of his wives to a social ball. Because dancing was sanctioned by the Bible, and because it was the only physical activity for which he had time, Brigham approved of it for himself, his wives, his Saints. “I want it distinctly understood,” he explained in a sermon, “that fiddling and dancing are no part of our worship. The question may be asked, ‘What are they for, then?’ I answer, that my body may keep pace with my mind. My mind labors like a man logging, all the time; and this is the reason why I am fond of these pastimes—they give me a privilege to throw everything off, and shake myself, that my body may exercise, and my mind rest.”
Balls were almost always held at the Salt Lake City Social Hall. The dancing took place in a room forty by eighty feet in size, dominated at one end by an orchestra seated on a raised platform beneath a plaster bust of Shakespeare, and decorated at the opposite end by a legend of woven evergreens spelling “Our Mountain Home.” Adjoining the ballroom was a large dining room, where late supper was served to the foot-weary guests, often as many as 250 in number.
The festivities began promptly at four o’clock in the afternoon. Brigham arrived, majestic in a broadcloth suit, followed by his wives, who were rarely less than two in number and usually more. At the entrance he paid five dollars for himself, five dollars for one wife, and two dollars for each additional wife. Inside the hall, after offering up a prayer, Brigham would wait for the orchestra to strike up and then lead the first cotillion, an elaborate, formal square dance that required the exchange of partners.
Of all dances, Brigham approved only of the cotillion and the quadrille. He opposed any dance that might create sexual stimulation or be used as a means of courting and seduction. He considered the polka and the waltz (which Lord Byron had said could “wake to wantonness the willing limbs”) as indecent, and both were banned from Social Hall. “Those who cannot serve God with a pure heart in the dance,” Brigham liked to say, “should not dance.”
During the first cotillion, at least, Brigham always displayed a surprising amount of vigor. “The Prophet is more industrious than graceful as a dancer,” Artemus Ward observed. “He exhibits, however, a spryness of legs quite remarkable in a man at his time of life.”
After the opening cotillion, Brigham would rest on a splendid sofa, flanked by Amelia Folsom, dressed in silk, feathers, and jewelry, and Mary Ann Angell, dressed in severe plain silk. Other of his wives who had been invited more often than not wore calico; their daughters wore puffed tarlatan.
As the evening progressed, Brigham usually danced first with his favorite wife rather than his senior wife, which was contrary to custom. Then he danced at least once with each of his other wives present and finally devoted the rest of the evening to Amelia.
On one occasion that Ann Eliza could remember, Brigham was forced, because of the dignitaries present, to follow the custom of dancing his first dance with the senior wife at hand. On this occasion Brigham had been undiplomatic enough to escort, as his partners, his old favorite, Emmeline Free, and his new favorite, Amelia Folsom. When the first cotillion began, Brigham tried to evade the issue by remaining immobile on the sofa between his wives. But when the manager of the dance committee confronted him and encouraged him to participate, Brigham knew that he must make a decision. Rising, he faced Emmeline and Amelia. They sat, tight-lipped. All eyes were on Brigham. At last he moved toward Emmeline, knowing the eleventh wife must have precedence over the twenty-fifth. “Come along and dance,” he said gruffly to Emmeline, and then, without offering his arm, he hastened to the floor and waited for her to follow. Throughout the dance he spoke not a word to Emmeline. Instead, his attention was concentrated on Amelia, who was vivaciously dancing with another member of the hierarchy. When the number ended, Brigham, still wordless, hastened Emmeline back to the sofa and then went off to seek his favorite. But Amelia, surrounded by admirers, would have none of the Prophet’s apologies. At last the music resumed. Despite her husband’s soft words Amelia showed no inclination to forgive him. At this critical moment the dance manager appeared once more. He wondered if Brigham would honor the gathering by participating in the new cotillion. “With pleasure,” said Brigham. “Now I will dance with my wife.” He offered Amelia his arm, and this time, somewhat mollified, she accepted it. During the entire number Brigham conversed animatedly with his partner. From the sofa Emmeline Free looked on bitterly.
Although a plurality of partners put a damper on many social evenings, Brigham preferred these irritations to the rebellion that might be provoked by the act of taking only one wife. Once, in the first year of her marriage, Ann Eliza thought that she might succeed in having her husband alone at a ball. The Female Relief Society, a powerful Mormon educational and cultural organization, had announced a reception at the Social Hall and suggested, for a novelty, that ladies select their own escorts.
Ann Eliza decided that she wished to attend. “I ventured to ask Brother Young,” she said. “He was my husband, and whom else should I invite? He accepted my invitation, apparently with much pleasure, and arranged to call for me on the appointed evening to take me to the hall. He was punctual to his appointment, but when he arrived he was accompanied by another wife. I suppose he knew the fact of his being at the ball would be reported to Amelia, and that she would be very angry if he went with me alone. I was very much annoyed at the circumstance, and really a little hurt that he could not take me somewhere just once without someone else along. I said nothing, however, and was as cordial to the other wife as I should have been had she accompanied him at my express invitation.”
While lack of monogamous companionship turned Ann Eliza against these dances, something else irritated her friend, Fanny Stenhouse, even more. The plural wife, wrote Mrs. Stenhouse “has to see and be present when the love-making is going on, when her husband is flirting and saying soft nonsense, or looking unutterable things at silly girls who are young enough to be her daughters… Here in the ballroom you may see men of threescore years and even older joining in the dance with girls of sixteen or even younger—making love to them, flirting with them, marrying them.”
Nevertheless, many wives welcomed the fun of these evenings away from the communal roof. The dancing in Social Hall usually proceeded for four hours, until eight o’clock, when the orchestra blared forth a march and a procession was formed and the men and their wives paraded into the dining room for supper. Later there was more dancing, relieved by vaudeville entertainers and singers. Despite the fact that Brigham’s normal bedtime was midnight, he often liked to stay at these dances until five o’clock in the morning.
For most of Brigham’s wives there were few pleasures at the Social Hall or in the Lion House that could compensate for the dominating presence of Amelia Folsom. Just as she monopolized Brigham at almost every dance, she controlled him in their twin residences. Ann Eliza knew, from the first moment she had set foot in the Lion House as plural wife, where her main competition lay. She learned that Emmeline Free, the deposed favorite, and Harriet Barney, the wife who had preceded Amelia, had both resisted the new favorite’s influence over their husband, and yet each, in turn, had lost out.
For a time the anti-Amelia clique in the harem had hoped that the newest two wives, Mary Van Cott and Ann Eliza, because of their beauty and youth, might overcome Amelia. It was soon apparent that this hope was to remain wishful thinking. Mary Van Cott was too ladylike, too restrained, and she had no stomach for a fight. And Ann Eliza, lacking in confidence and sophistication, did not have enough knowledge of the romantic art—nor did she have the desire—to turn Brigham from Amelia to herself. But even if Ann Eliza had possessed the desire to supplant Amelia, it is unlikely that she could have accomplished the feat. The enemy was practiced and formidable. Amelia was positive, aggressive, ambitious, and somewhat of a hellion. She made it clear to Mary Van Cott and Ann Eliza at once that if either intended to try to unseat her, the challenger would have to battle to the death. Amelia Folsom had been the practical head of the harem for six years, and she intended to remain in that position to her last breath.
Ann Eliza’s principal rival had been born Harriet Amelia Folsom in Buffalo, New York, on August 23, 1838. She had dropped the given name Harriet in 1863, when she was twenty-five, shortly after coming into the Lion House, because she found Harriet Cook and Harriet Barney there before her. She determined not to be the third Harriet but the first and only Amelia, and in this she succeeded.
Her background and natural endowments gave her every advantage. Amelia’s father, William Folsom, was the brilliant English architect who had helped build the Salt Lake City Theater and the Mormon Tabernacle. He had become a Mormon in 1841, when Amelia was three, and had dutifully transported his family to Nauvoo. After the murder of Smith, when Amelia was eight, he had fled to Keokuk, Iowa.
Not until 1860 did the Folsoms finally move to Salt Lake City. Brigham, accompanied by Heber C. Kimball, drove out in a carriage to greet the distinguished family personally, and on that occasion, for the first time, he saw Amelia as a mature young lady. She was twenty-two years old, tall, stately, poised, and provocatively arrogant in her beauty. A surviving niece who knew her believes that “regal” and “haughty” are the words that might best describe her. Amelia’s hair was brown, her eyes translucent blue-gray, her nose tilted, her mouth regular though thin-lipped. Her complexion, the color of cream, was flawless. Her hody was young and graceful, yet full and firm. Women thought that she had “the most beautiful hands in the world.” She left nothing to be desired—and so she was desired by all who saw her. In a short time, more than a dozen ardent swains were at her feet, and soon Brigham Young was one of them.
The Prophet was fifty-nine years old, with twenty-four marriages behind him, when he fell deeply in love with Amelia and tried to make her his wife. Once a reporter asked Amelia, “When did your courtship begin?” She replied, “Immediately after my arrival in Salt Lake.” The reporter inquired, “Did President Young employ peculiar methods of courtship?” Amelia answered, “I think not. I was aware that he was the husband of a number of wives— I did not care to know how many—but that did not affect our courtship in the least. President Young was naturally dignified but was always at ease with company.”
Not until meeting Ann Eliza, eight years later, would Brigham find a second female so difficult to conquer. Daily, it seemed, week in and week out, his carriage was outside Amelia’s father’s door. Church business was neglected as Brigham, in his best broadcloth, sat inside her parlor, enchanted, adoring her, constantly proposing. She was so unlike his other wives. Several of them had once had beauty and still had refinement, but none of them had Amelia’s elegant femininity. She used foreign colognes. She wore lace shawls and jewelry. She owned delicate fans. She played the piano. She sang. Above all, she had spirit. Her instincts were perfect. She treated Brigham not as Prophet but as merely one more suitor, wealthier than the others, more powerful than the others, but a questing male, nevertheless. According to those of her relatives still alive today, what troubled Brigham even more was the knowledge that Amelia was “very madly in love with another young man at the time.”
It is said that Brigham, as well as Amelia’s parents, had to remind her that he was not a mere mortal. He was her temporal and spiritual guardian. It is also said that, when all other approaches had failed, Brigham confronted her with a divine revelation that he had received. “Amelia,” he said, “you must be my wife; God has revealed it to me. You cannot be saved by anyone else. If you will marry me, I will save you, and exalt you to be a queen in the celestial world, but if you refuse, you will be destroyed, both soul and body.” Years later, when Ann Eliza heard of this approach, she remarked bitterly, “This is the same argument he used to win me, and the one he has always in reserve, as the last resort.”
Amelia apparently was impressed by the revelation, but not enough to lose her head. She had her conditions. She would marry him if she would be his “first” wife, not his twenty-fifth, if she would have a private carriage, a box at the theater, a place beside him on all special trips, a wardrobe of expensive imported clothes, an allowance or pin money, and, some day when she wished it, a private mansion of her own. Brigham capitulated on every count. And on January 24, 1863, despite recent Federal legislation against polygamy, Amelia Folsom became Brigham Young’s twenty-fifth wife.
“I remained at home three weeks,” Amelia later recalled, “when I took up residence at the Lion House, President Young’s home. His wives and children all lived there and each wife, including myself, had her separate room. At that time there were seventy-five of us in the family, including the hired help. We all dined at the same table, over which President Young presided.”
When Amelia entered the Lion House, she was Brigham’s first new wife in seven years. From the start she performed as if no other wife existed. At dinner she sat at Brigham’s right hand. At the ball opening the new Salt Lake City Theater she had the first dance. When attending plays, she most often sat beside Brigham in the box, while other wives had to be satisfied with the orchestra seats. At Brigham’s homes, on the road, in St. George and Provo, she was ever beside him, forcing the out-of-town wives, Lucy Bigelow and Eliza Burgess, to serve her.
When she learned that President Ulysses S. Grant was coming to Utah, she requested that she be his hostess and was granted the honor. For the occasion she demanded a formal dress imported from Paris and acquired a $700 item of blue taffeta. Anticipating her future $100,000 mansion, she commissioned a huge, ornately carved bed and other mahogany furniture, and Brigham paid the bill. She reminded her husband of her allowance, and by the time Ann Eliza appeared, Amelia alone, of all the wives, was able to save $10,000 out of her pin money.
Her word was a command. She would brook no compromise. If Brigham dared to dally or equivocate, she would curse him and smash furniture. Once, when she asked for a sewing machine of her own, Brigham bought her one of obscure manufacture. Infuriated, she dragged the machine out of her room and kicked it down the stairs. When Brigham appeared, all consternation, she shouted at him, “What did you get this old thing for? You knew I wanted a Singer.” The Singer materialized overnight.
Rarely did Amelia bend to the Prophet’s wishes. Beside him in their theater box, and against his entreaties, she loudly chewed apples, threw the peels about, and then focused her binoculars on the audience instead of the actors on the stage. Mrs. C. V. Waite recounted in 1866, the third year of Amelia’s marriage, a singular domestic scene in the Lion House. Amelia invited a young lady friend to join Brigham and herself for tea in the parlor of the Lion House. After the tea Amelia ate some candy and then began to crack peanuts, tossing the shells out of a nearby open window. This irritated Brigham. “Amelia, don’t do that; put your shells by your plate.” Amelia showed defiance. “I shan’t do it. I’ll throw them where I please.” Brigham brooded silently, and Amelia resumed with the peanuts. At last the Prophet spoke again. “Amelia, I wish you wouldn’t do that any more.” The favorite turned on her husband. “I don’t care. I’ll throw the shells where I please, and I’ll do as I please, and you may help yourself.” She tugged at her friend’s dress and stood up. “Come, let’s go upstairs, and let him grunt it out.”
Most of the wives detested her. Emmeline Free blamed a nervous breakdown on Amelia. Only Mary Ann Angell and Eliza R. Snow accepted the inevitability of her presence and became her friends. Eventually, though, through the years, the other wives came around, largely because they saw that only through her influence might they obtain favors from Brigham.
Despite Amelia’s power over him, Brigham twice resisted it and succumbed to love and physical attraction. Two years after his marriage to Amelia, he took the pretty twenty-one-year-old widow, Mary Van Cott, for his twenty-sixth wife. And six years after Amelia, he took twenty-four-year-old Ann Eliza for his twenty-seventh wife.
In both cases Amelia had tantrums. When she learned that her husband had married Mary Van Cott, Amelia accosted the bride and groom, it is said, tore at Mary’s hair, and pounded her fists against Brigham. She promised that she would murder them both.
Worried about the favorite, Brigham decided not to bring Mary into the Lion House. Instead, he presented her with a separate bungalow, then called for her in his closed carriage and took her to a furniture store. After Mary and Brigham had ordered what they needed, they left the store and started toward their waiting carriage. That moment, Amelia, eyes glaring but hands fortunately weaponless, sailed into view. Before Mary could reach the vehicle, Amelia darted between her and the carriage and stepped inside. She ordered the coachman to drive her to the Lion House. The perplexed coachman glanced at Brigham, who stood helpless and speechless. Amelia stared triumphantly at Mary, who, said Ann Eliza, “was furious at the insult but showed it only by her flashing eyes and deepening color.” Still Brigham was silent. Amelia poked the coachman. “Home, I say,” she commanded.
The coachman rode off with the victorious Amelia. Mary and Brigham started back to her bungalow on foot. All the way Mary castigated him for his weakness. But a worse scene was waiting for Brigham when he returned to the Lion House. Amelia was on him like the furies, heaping insults on him and attacking that “shameless creature” known as Mary Van Cott.
It was Mary, however, who had the final victory, and she accomplished it with her femininity and in her bed. On January 14, 1870, five years after she had married her husband, she gave birth to Brigham Young’s fifty-sixth and last child, a daughter named Fanny. When the happy news was announced, Amelia was never more enraged. She had a tempestuous scene with Brigham and forbade him ever to make love to Mary again or even see her. For several months Brigham sheepishly obeyed. But just as he was about to leave on a trip through southern Utah, the attraction of Mary and his eagerness to see his latest offspring proved too much. Apparently Mary told Ann Eliza what happened, and Ann Eliza repeated it. “She refused to shake hands with him,” said Ann Eliza, “and told him that if he could afford to stay away so long from her while he was living in the same city with her, she could afford to not shake hands.”
Brigham’s twenty-seventh marriage tried Amelia’s temper almost as much as his twenty-sixth. Amelia, said Ann Eliza, “had not got over her anger at her lord for taking Mary Van Cott—of whom, by the way, she was terribly jealous—when fuel was added to the fire of her fury by my introduction to the world as another Mrs. Young. She was terribly bitter toward us both, though I think she hated Mary with a more deadly hatred than she felt for me. I think she considered Mary her most dangerous rival, but for all that she was not drawn towards me at all. It was not that she disliked me less, but Mary more.”
Amelia was nowhere to be seen the first time Brigham brought Ann Eliza to the Lion House as wife. Several weeks later the rival wives had an accidental encounter, their first. Ann Eliza was taking a young lady friend, on foot, to see the lush gardens behind the Lion House. She and her friend were exchanging “girlish reminiscences” when they realized that another female pedestrian, directly ahead of them, was listening to their chatter. As the woman ahead arrived at the gate to the Lion House garden, Ann Eliza realized that she was none other than Amelia Folsom. The favorite opened the gate and went through just as Ann Eliza caught up. Instead of holding the gate ajar, Amelia slammed it shut and secured it from the inside. “There, madam!” she exclaimed to Ann Eliza, “I’d like to see you get in now.”
Startled, Ann Eliza watched Amelia depart up the garden path. Recovering, she reached inside the wire, unfastened the latch, and led her friend inside. Neither referred to Amelia’s rudeness. Instead, they had resumed their reminiscences, when they came upon Amelia examining a plant and dressing down Leggett, the gardener. Ann Eliza and her friend passed Amelia without comment, strolled through the entire garden, then started back to the street. Amelia was no longer in sight, but Leggett, the gardener, stood among his flowers and bushes with an unhappy expression on his face.
Ann Eliza halted. “What is the matter, Mr. Leggett?”
The gardener sighed. “Oh, it is Mrs. Amelia. Did you hear her scolding me just now? Wasn’t she just awful? She’s that mad because you came in, that she had to let out on somebody, and I suppose I came the handiest. But ain’t she a master hand to scold, though? Why, you ought to hear her give it to me sometimes. I’m pretty well used to it, and don’t mind very much. It’s some consolation to think that Brother Brigham gets it worse than I do, and when he’s round, I’m safe.”
Ann Eliza’s second brush with Amelia was equally brief and one-sided. On June 1, 1870, all the surviving wives gathered in the dining room of the Lion House to help Brigham celebrate his sixty-ninth birthday. Since it was probably Mary Ann Angell who had taken Amelia’s place at the head table for this one festivity, Amelia and Ann Eliza were, through some insensitive mismanagement, seated opposite one another at one of the longer tables. The dinner was strained. No word passed between the two until the dessert. Suddenly, said Ann Eliza, Amelia shoved the cake basket at her “and with as freezing a tone and manner as she could assume, asked, ‘Will you have some cake?’ I declined, and that ended our conversation.”
Even though in the next few years Ann Eliza continued to regard Amelia as an antagonist, she often confessed admiration for the manner in which the favorite treated their husband. “I was once present,” said Ann Eliza, “when she wanted her husband to do something for her; he objected, and she repeated her demand, threatening to ‘thrash him,’ if he did not comply. It is, perhaps, unnecessary to say that she was not obliged to ask him again.”
In later years, however, Ann Eliza never had a good word for Amelia. She told audiences throughout the United States that Amelia was neat rather than beautiful, that she had “a terrible temper… hates Brigham… uses the vilest language in her common conversation,” and that Brigham was afraid to put her out because of the subsequent scandal and the risk that she might expose his personal business.
Mormon sources were kindlier to Brigham’s twenty-fifth wife. In New York, Brigham’s son, John W. Young, was asked by a reporter, “Was Amelia the cause of any trouble in the household?” Young replied, “She has always been a worthy member of the family. She has never been the cause of any disturbance, and Ann Eliza’s allegations regarding Amelia are entirely without foundation in fact.” A pamphlet on Brigham’s wives, published by the Daughters of Utah Pioneers, called Amelia “queenly” and said of the $100,000 Gardo House: “The family understood that Amelia would live there and was happy that President Young had chosen her to assume the responsibilities of all social affairs.” Recently one of Amelia’s nieces remarked that Amelia had married the Prophet merely to nurse his gout and that if she seemed domineering it was only because she had to watch over his health strictly.
Perhaps the most objective picture of Amelia, in the period when she was fending off Mary Van Cott and Ann Eliza, was presented by an anonymous Gentile lady visitor to Salt Lake City, who came by train, blanched at plural marriage, and sped back to Philadelphia to publish “A Week Among the Mormons” in Lippincott’s Magazine for July 1870. The authoress, who signed herself “A.M.,” and her party were taken on a guided tour of the city by Joseph W. Young, Brigham’s son. One of the wondrous sights was to be a view of Amelia Folsom. At the time, anticipating the construction of her palace, Amelia had moved out of Bee Hive House and was living in an attractive, one-and-a-half story, adobe residence across the street. She was waiting beside her Steinway piano when her eastern guests arrived. Apparently her appearance was imposing, for the authoress from Philadelphia reported: “Mrs. Amelia became the surroundings: tall and graceful, with a commanding figure and a head worthy of better things, it was hard to realize her position.” The authoress was amazed at Amelia’s “suavity and courtesy.”
During the meeting one of Joseph W. Young’s wives asked her father-in-law’s twenty-fifth wife, “Amelia, are you going to the President’s?” Amelia replied briskly, “That will not be necessary.
I have sent for the President!” Shortly after, Brigham’s carriage arrived without him. But a message to Amelia stated that he would be by later.
To pass the time Amelia took her visitors on a ride through the city. “We were amused,” wrote the Philadelphia authoress, “at the commotion created by Mrs. Amelia’s appearance in the stores on the street. Evidently she was recognized as a power. We watched her closely, curiously. Aware of her history, of the months of suing that Brigham had undergone ere he could bring her to consent to be Mrs. Young No. 40 or 50, or thereabouts, we looked and marveled.”
After the tour Amelia asked the Gentile lady, “What do you think of polygamy now? Is it what people have represented it to be?”
“Not exactly,” said the authoress, “but much worse.”
Instantly Amelia was her old fiery self. “Ah, well! I suppose your minds are not educated up to this point, but the day will come when you will see that we are in the right. I am not the only wife of my husband, but I consider myself the equal, if not the superior, of ANY woman in the United States. A kinder, more indulgent, more affectionate husband than mine cannot be seen.”
Later, when Brigham arrived—”a short, rotund figure, grayish hair and whiskers, a pleasant face and a mellifluous voice, with a falling cadence in it,” the authoress noted—he returned Amelia’s compliment. “With all my wives and daughters,” he told his eastern visitors, “I have not heard a woman scold these fifteen years. What do you think of that?”
Party manners were observed. “We think it speaks very forcibly,” the Philadelphia authoress replied, and then went east to write one of the few Gentile impressions extant of Amelia Folsom.
If the favorite was invincible against all inroads tried by other wives, as Ann Eliza finally decided, there still remained one area in which Amelia could not control Brigham completely. This was the area of Brigham’s physical love life. Historians of early Mormon phenomena have studiously neglected Mormon sexuality, perhaps less for reasons of prudishness than for the fact that few records were left of bedroom behavior in Salt Lake City.
Yet, during the reign of Brigham Young, the entire non-Mormon population of the United States, it seemed, as well as that of England and European countries, was certain that Mormon men were obsessed with sex. Captain Mayne Reid called Salt Lake City the “modern Gomorrah.” Mrs. Benjamin G. Ferris, wife of the Federal Secretary for Utah Territory, called Mormon males a “gang of licentious villains.” The apostate, John Hyde, called Brigham’s wives “the companions of his passions, and not of his life; panderers to his lusts, instead of being the partners of his affections…” Everywhere, in the outside world, this was the note.
The Mormons, on the other hand, continued to defend polygamy as a revelation of the Lord. Sexual gratification was incidental, they explained. Procreation was the divine purpose. “I never entered into the order of plurality of wives to gratify passion,” said Brigham Young.
What were the known facts about Mormon sexual behavior in general and Brigham’s love life specifically? Most observers and students of polygamy seemed to think that while the system, by its very nature, invited sexual license, indulgence in sensuality, it was actually practiced with puritanic restraint. Still, there were those who felt that no “divine principle” could curb natural carnal urges.
Theodore Schroeder, the psychologist and liberal who defended the Mormons and then fought them, was concerned—in the words of Sidney Ditzion—with “the ultimate consequences of their preoccupation with sex… This continual thinking, talking, acting and worshipping of sex and procreation in revival excitements was certain to result in a population of hypersexed individuals—the males especially.”
On the other hand, defending the majority opinion, Dr. M. Wilford Poulson, of Brigham Young University, told this author that he had observed many polygamous households in his long life, and not once had he ever seen any evidence of hypersexuality. A colleague of Dr. Poulson’s, however, supported Schroeder, explaining, “When a people prattle so much of their virtue, they are bound to be suspect.”
Most likely Mormon sex life was, indeed, more puritanic than licentious. Conversely it was not entirely devoid of sex, practiced as a form of pleasure. In those pre-artificial insemination days children were conceived solely through sexual intercourse. Often this act of procreation, much as subsequent history averts its head, produced the by-product of physical gratification.
If most love-making in Brigham’s Salt Lake City, especially for the women, was less enjoyable than in modern days, the fact must be blamed not on puritanic polygamy but on the temper of the times. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, in America, one attitude toward corporeal love prevailed. The men had orgasms; the women had children. That was the sum and balance of it. Yet, as everywhere, there were women and women, and some managed to have children and simultaneously enjoy the act leading to conception. There is evidence that this kind of female gratification occurred in nineteenth-century America and in Salt Lake City and in the Lion House.
Some critical aesthetes thought Mormon women so unattractive that Mormon males had to have the “variability of choice” provided by polygamy to stimulate them. Ungallantly Mark Twain considered Mormon women as “poor, ungainly and pathetically ‘homely’ creatures.” J. H. Beadle concurred. “Female beauty is scarce in Utah,” he said.
Yet Captain Richard Burton, who had known women of every nation, was enchanted by “the lofty, thoughtful brow, the clear transparent complexion, the long silky hair, and, greatest charm of all, the soft smile” of the Mormon female. And Phil Robinson, like Burton an English writer, observed that Mormon wives and daughters “have figures that would make Paris envious, and they carry themselves with almost Oriental dignity.”
Ann Eliza, speaking with the superiority of one who regarded herself as an exception, conceded that grown Mormon women were unattractive but defended them by blaming their unhappy features on their married state. “When flippant correspondents,” wrote Ann Eliza, “after a visit to the valley of the Saints, go away and write in terms of ridicule of the Mormon women, calling them fearfully ugly in looks, they little know what bitter, hard, cruel experiences have carved the deep lines round the eyes and mouths, and made the faces grow repulsive and grim… It is no wonder that the women of Utah are not beautiful; there is nothing in all their lives to glorify or beautify their faces…”
Ann Eliza, however, was a woman and herself prejudiced. Mormon men considered their women extremely attractive, and they were not alone. An abundance of case histories exists to show that Gentile men were constantly trying to seduce or marry the ladies of Salt Lake City. One such case history concerns Lieutenant Sylvester Mowry, a young army officer serving under Colonel Edward J. Steptoe in 1854. Mowry and several hundred other soldiers, en route to California, spent that winter in Salt Lake City. Writing to a friend in Rhode Island, he made it clear that he was out to have some fun with the Mormon girls but that the vigilance of Mormon fathers and fiances made it a dangerous game. Nevertheless, Lieutenant Mowry succeeded in meeting one of Brigham’s daughters-in-law—he refers to her only as Mary, quite possibly the first wife of Brigham’s first son, Joseph A. Young—and had almost seduced her when Brigham learned of the heated affair and broke it up.
Lieutenant Mowry was only briefly inactive. In a short time he was able to write his Rhode Island friend: “With the greatest difficulty I persuaded a pretty girl and a great favorite with us to let me take her home from Judge Kinney’s party and when I had got her into the carriage she laid down in my arms let me feel her bust etc etc—Showing that the difficulty is not with the women but with their keepers… Mary is accessible if I can get the opportunity but ‘theres the rub.’ The other little piece that I took home from the party can be got down I believe, but alas, there appears to be no chance.”
Brigham Young never underestimated the sex appeal, or the availability, of certain female members of his flock. After the devastating Mowry and his fellow Casanovas had left for California, Brigham addressed himself from the pulpit to women of easy virtue, “If any wish to go to California to whore it, we will send a company of them off; that is my mind, and perhaps some few ought to go for they are indeed bad enough.”
Brigham’s exasperation with his female subjects gave the New York Herald the idea that the non-Mormon Mowrys were the solution to polygamy. The newspaper suggested that if the government would send “a fresh detachment of young, good-looking soldiers” to Salt Lake City four times a year, the ranks of polygamists would be decimated “by female desertions,” until the Mormon males would be lucky to retain one wife apiece. Somewhat later the Nation suggested a sounder plan to halt polygamy: “Go to work at once to cut off the supply of women from the Mormon community” through special immigration laws.
However, women continued to move to Utah. If the sex life these women engaged in under polygamy was puritanic and restrained, it still did not wither from neglect. According to a journal of the period kept by one Jonathan Baker, as quoted by Kimball Young, a Mormon conference was stirred when “President McAllister spoke of some men bringing on premature decay and an early death by the too frequent use of sexual intercourse.”
Polygamy gave little room for privacy, but Kimball Young’s research shows that the condition was not entirely inhibiting. In one instance a Mormon husband was forced to live in the same sleeping quarters with three wives. He slept with his first wife in an upper bunk and allowed his second and third wives to sleep in the lower bunk. When he desired either the second or third wife, he would so inform his first wife. She gave automatic permission with the sole stipulation that he return to their bed when he was through. The husband then climbed down to the lower bunk, copulated with one of the wives below, and then climbed up to sleep out the night beside his first wife. The practice was considered quite natural by all parties, and it is unlikely that there was ever any recrimination. In another instance Kimball Young heard of a “first wife who was all right about the second marriage until she could hear her husband’s boots drop on the floor in the second wife’s room.”
Considerable attention was always given by non-Mormons to Brigham Young’s love life. The wildest speculations were made in all corners of the world. Actually very little is known about Brigham’s romantic relations with his wives. Since he believed that the purpose of intercourse was procreation, he advised husbands to abstain from sexual union with their wives from the moment pregnancy was known until the infant child had been weaned from the breast. This abstinence was not practiced to the letter by Brigham himself. He had many other peculiar notions about sex. He told Horace Greeley that he believed “that outside of the Mormon church, married men usually keep mistresses.” He believed that incest was not a crime, though personally he had a prejudice against it. He believed that the consumption of eggs stimulated virility and helped “beget more children.”
Apostate Mormons reported that Brigham usually did not invite a wife to his bedroom but preferred to call on her. According to John Hyde: “… Brigham sleeps alone. He not only practices but publicly advocates this habit, and that, too, without any delicacy of thought or modesty of expression. The reasons he urges are very singular and ridiculous. ‘Audit solum ad vocem libidonis.’“ This might be rendered: “One only has to be present to have libidinous desires”—in short, that a man could best control his desires by removal of his person from temptations.
It was said that when Brigham had decided on his bed partner for the night he made a chalk mark on her door. Later, with a certain delicacy of feeling for his other wives, he would softly go down the row of doors, find the one with the chalk mark, and slip inside. Sometimes, it was said, a jealous rival wife, hungering for the Prophet’s love, would rub out the chalk mark on the favored wife’s door and put it on her own. It is difficult to imagine that Brigham was ever deceived, for he always knew what he wanted—and whom.
His virility, as advertised by the production of fifty-six children, was widely discussed and secretly envied. Brigham had his first child, a daughter, when he was twenty-four and his last, also a daughter, when he was sixty-nine. In a single month of his sixty-second year, three of his wives gave him three children, two sons and a daughter.
There is evidence that Brigham had long sexual relationships with a number of his wives. Lucy Decker, the third wife, had her first child by Brigham in 1845 and her seventh child by him fifteen years later. Clara Decker, the sixth wife, had her first child by him in 1849 and her fifth child by him twelve years later. Emily Dow Partridge, the eighth wife, had her first child by him in 1845 and her seventh child by him seventeen years later. Emmeline Free, the eleventh wife, had her first child by him in 1847 and her ninth and tenth children by him sixteen and seventeen years later. Lucy Bigelow, the twenty-second wife, had her first child by him in 1852 and her third child by him eleven years later.
All of the wives who collaborated with Brigham in bearing his sons and daughters were not necessarily enthusiastic about the process. Most of them welcomed his love, it is true, and all believed that cohabitation was a divine duty, but some were uncooperative, as his great number of childless wives attest. In several cases, notably that of Harriet Cook, the acid fourth wife, a sustained relationship was not attempted, by mutual agreement. When Brigham was forty-five, and Harriet twenty-one, they had a son. After that he refused to favor her with any intimacy, for which she was eventually grateful. According to one of Harriet Cook’s relatives in Salt Lake City, Harriet was “a wealthy and frigid Easterner.” She liked polygamy only because “she did not believe in sex,” and plural marriage made her lot easier because she knew that Brigham could always be satisfactorily occupied elsewhere and would not bother her, as he might have under monogamy.
Since Brigham loved Amelia Folsom deeply and never ignored or discarded her, it is most likely that their physical relationship was happy and long-lived. Amelia, much to her distress, was said to be barren, and she never gave the Prophet the child they both desired. Amelia’s distress was heightened by the fact that, after she married her husband, she had to stand helplessly by while he had five children by four other wives.
Ann Eliza was also childless by Brigham, but since she was fertile, the decision was probably her own. (On the other hand, one of Brigham’s granddaughters claims that Ann Eliza was “consumed to have a child with the Young name, but Brigham Young wasn’t interested.”) In later life, when Ann Eliza tried to disassociate herself from Mormonism, she would sometimes astound listeners by proclaiming that she had never had sexual intercourse with Brigham. On one occasion she informed Jennie Anderson Froiseth, editor of the Anti-Polygamy Standard, of Salt Lake City, that her marriage to the Prophet had never been consummated and that by denying him sexual love she had angered him constantly. It was for this reason, she said, that Brigham had begun to treat her badly.
In The Portrait and Biographical Record of Northern Michigan, published in 1895, there appeared a four-page account of Ann Eliza’s life. Again her second marriage was spoken of as platonic: “… a so-called ‘spiritual’ ceremony was performed, uniting our subject with the late Brigham Young for the world to come, but without the relations of husband and wife. The wife still remained an inmate of the parental home, and lived in this way for five years.” Undoubtedly this information was supplied by Ann Eliza herself. Undoubtedly it was false.
After her marriage to Brigham, Ann Eliza did not live with her father for sixty months but for little more than one month. The rest of the time, except for forays to the Lion House, Ann Eliza dwelt in three different homes provided by Brigham, and she was available to him whenever he called. Neither his potency nor his fecundity was impaired by his great age at the time of their wedding. Brigham took Ann Eliza for wife on April 7, 1869. Yet in that very week, or possibly one of several weeks that followed, Brigham had sexual union with Mary Van Cott, for, nine months later, Mary gave birth to Brigham’s fifty-sixth child, the daughter named Fanny. Furthermore, the will Brigham dictated when he was seventy-two clearly indicated his potency—for it acknowledged as his legitimate heirs all children born nine months after his death.
Ann Eliza was in her twenty-fifth year when she became Brigham’s twenty-seventh wife. Earlier, after divorcing Dee, she had been physically ill, but she had rested and recovered and was in the best of health when she became the Prophet’s bride. Ann Eliza was the youngest member of the harem and one of the prettiest and most shapely and not a virgin. It seems improbable that Brigham would have wooed her so ardently merely to enjoy her spiritual presence in an afterlife. It also seems improbable that a young lady like Ann Eliza, basically security conscious, would wish, let alone dare, to resist Brigham’s advances, especially if she desired ascendancy over Amelia and the other wives. As a matter of fact, several of Brigham’s descendants have stated that Ann Eliza was sexually “aggressive” in her relationship with her husband.
In her divorce complaint against Brigham, Ann Eliza admitted: “… for a period of about one year after her marriage, the defendant lived and cohabited with and acted toward the complainant with some degree of kindness and attention.” Since cohabit means “to live together as husband and wife,” implying not only social intercourse but sexual as well, Ann Eliza’s legal document would seem an open confession that she and Brigham had physically consummated their marriage.
But consummation of love, like procreation resulting of love, may not be proof of emotional happiness. There was vast curiosity among non-Mormons, at the time the Lion House was most populated, as to whether Brigham’s harem wives were happy or unhappy with their one husband and their communal domesticity.
The more vocal of Brigham’s wives and daughters, and their friends, made it clear to the world that life in the Lion House was the ideal. When Ann Eliza had been ten months married to Brigham, Eliza R. Snow enlisted several of the older of her fellow wives, and other Mormon female leaders, to prepare and forward a resolution to Congress, where, as ever, new anti-polygamy bills were being debated. In this public resolution, the Mormon wives defended polygamy and other Mormon institutions “as the only reliable safeguard of female virtue and innocence… the only sure protection against the fearful sin of prostitution and its attendant evils, now prevalent abroad, and, as such, we are and shall be united with our brethren in sustaining them against each and every encroachment.”
Individual wives also took to the ramparts. Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, daughter of Heber C. Kimball and herself the wife of an Apostle, told the women of monogamy that plural wives had it in their power to declare polygamy “illegal” whenever they wished, but that they had no wish to do so. “The means gathered to assist in reforming the ‘Mormons,’“ she went on, “in freeing the ‘poor down-trodden women from their polygamous yoke’ is a most ridiculous farce. It will compare with the collecting of money for the poor heathen, who would have been better off a thousandfold had they never seen a ‘Christian.’”
Susa Young Gates felt that her father and his wives had the perfect relationship. “I was born and reared in the Lion House,” she wrote. “In all my life in that beloved home, I never heard my father speak an unkind or irritable word to one of his wives… Much less did I ever hear or see anything but the utmost courtesy and kindliness between my father and his wives.”
Ann Eliza was the only member of Brigham’s family to dissent publicly. “I must say that… scenes of violence do not often occur in Brigham’s family, as most of his wives feel the dignity of their position too much to allow the world to see any disagreement between them, even when it exists. There are some very fine women among the Prophet’s wives—women that, outside of Mormonism, would grace any social circle. Educated, cultivated women, who by some strange circumstance have been drawn, first into the Church, then into the Prophet’s harem. I think nothing better shows the peculiar power which Brigham Young possesses, than a look at the women who are and who have been his wives… He had the shrewdness to select such women, and the power to win them, but he has not the ability to appreciate them; and I have no hesitation in saying, from my own experience with and knowledge of them, that more unhappy and wretched women do not exist in the world, than the more cultured and delicate wives of Brigham Young.”
Perhaps a more sober judgment, one between the two extremes, was passed by Phil Robinson in 1883, after his tour through Utah. “In polygamy the highest happiness of woman is contentment. But on the other hand her greatest unhappiness is only discontent. She has not the opportunity on the one hand of rising to the rapture of perfect love. On the other, she is spared the bitter, killing anguish of ‘jealousy’ and of infidelity. But contentment is not happiness.”
For Ann Eliza, in that first year as harem wife, contentment was, indeed, not happiness. Her life became a placid routine, divided between the tiny house where she lived with her sons and mother and the Lion House. Brigham visited her erratically and treated her “with some degree of kindness and attention.” Sometimes he would come into the house to relax and share peppermint tea with her. More often he would take her for a ride in his carriage. These were the occasions when they were alone. When he took her to the theater or a ball, they were always chaperoned by one or more of the other wives. Infrequently he invited her to join him on a short trip outside the city. On one such trip Ann Eliza and Emmeline Free accompanied him to a Church conference in Brigham City. It was festive for one day. After that Amelia came storming into Brigham City and Ann Eliza and Emmeline were left to their own devices.
In the first year, Ann Eliza lived in relative harmony with her husband’s other wives. She found herself drawn closer and closer to Emmeline. Her only active enemies in the harem remained Amelia and Harriet Cook; Eliza Burgess would soon be removed to Provo. The main irritant for Ann Eliza was her wealthy mate’s growing parsimony. Outwardly he gave the appearance of one who had mellowed and prospered—the look of “a well-preserved Englishman, of the yeoman class,” Ann Eliza thought. He blustered less and took more care with his attire. At the same time, she felt, he was becoming more tightfisted. Her demands for pin money were ignored; her requests for extra food and clothes, for herself and her sons, if not flatly rejected, were granted grudgingly. When Ann Eliza complained to her mother, the first Mrs. Webb could only beg her daughter to have patience. By the end of the first year, Ann Eliza had become bored with austerity as well as the proximity of the other wives in the Lion House, and she made her feelings known to Brigham. He promised her a change.
In May of 1870, Brigham announced the change that he had in mind for Ann Eliza. She was immediately apprehensive. He was sending her to his largest out-of-town establishment, The Farmhouse, located four miles south of Salt Lake City. Ann Eliza knew that six of Brigham’s wives had taken turns managing Brigham’s farm and all had been the worse for it. Susan Snively, the thirteenth wife, had lived at The Farmhouse the longest period, eight years; Lucy Bigelow, the twenty-second wife, had lived there the shortest period, one year. While Ann Eliza was attracted to rural beauty and isolation, she dreaded the ceaseless hours of manual labor that awaited her. Her first instinct was to protest to Brigham that she was too frail for the assignment. But Brigham’s mind seemed made up, and she wanted no fight. She accepted the indefinite tour of duty without protest.
In that burgeoning spring of 1870, with her sons and mother beside her, and her personal belongings accompanying her, Ann Eliza traveled the lovely four miles to the two-story house that fronted Brigham’s one-hundred-acre farm. She had seen it before, and the exterior always impressed her, with its low windows and vine-draped verandas below and the half dozen gables above. Originally there had been an adobe on the site, but eleven years before Brigham had replaced it with this modern $25,000 house of his own design.
Familiar as it was—New Year’s Day was always celebrated by Brigham and his family here—Ann Eliza, now that she was its mistress, inspected The Farmhouse from cellar to top floor with new eyes. The entry led into a large central living room, low ceil- inged to conserve heat in winter, and marred, Ann Eliza thought, by having in one corner the single narrow staircase to be found in the entire house. Off to the right were a sitting alcove with rush-bottomed rockers and a long dining room that could seat seventy guests at a time. Beyond the staircase to the rear, was the forty-foot kitchen with an adjacent pantry. From the kitchen Ann Eliza observed the rural property, the stately pine trees, the forest of black locust trees and mulberry bushes, the cultivated fields of corn and wheat being worked by the laborers who would be in her charge.
Returning from the kitchen into the hallway, Ann Eliza briefly studied the square gas lamps, brass lined and decorated with jeweled prisms, and then she climbed the steep stairs to the second floor. The family suite consisted of two small bedrooms for the boys and her mother, a tiny study for Brigham’s use, and a huge bedroom, with an attractive fireplace, to be shared by Brigham and herself. Other bedrooms were for guests and certain of the hired help.
Making her way to the living room again, Ann Eliza at last descended into the cellar. She observed the well that pumped water up to the kitchen, the loaded log bins, the meat hooks dangling provisions. The cellar walls were of whitewashed rock, and Ann Eliza would remember that here was the only escape from the intense summer heat.
The Farmhouse was impressive, Ann Eliza conceded, but “by no means a desirable place of residence.” Certain features of the house irked her from first day to last. Although Brigham had made the walls with adobe, to keep the rooms cool, Ann Eliza complained that the walls were still too thin and consequently the sun was roasting in summer and the snow and winds chilling in winter. Once the first Mrs. Webb protested to Brigham, “The house is hot when we wish it to be cool, and vice versa.” Brigham replied, “You have been so long away from civilization that you are not a proper judge of what a house ought to be!” Also, Ann Eliza never stopped complaining of the staircase in the living room. Not only was it an eyesore, but a single staircase was inadequate. If one of the boys or a hired hand was ill upstairs, the constant trudging with medicine and food from kitchen to stairs, and up and down, was exhausting.
Soon enough Ann Eliza and her mother had established their routine. Since The Farmhouse was the source for all milk, butter, cheese, and vegetables consumed in the Lion House and the Bee Hive House, both women were occupied from morning until night overseeing taking milk from the forty cows and churning butter and making cheese. The first Mrs. Webb also did the main cooking for the thirty men on the farm. Ann Eliza assisted with the meals, kept the house tidy and clean, did all the washing and ironing, and tutored her sons.
Once a week, said Ann Eliza, she “was allowed the extreme pleasure of carrying the farm supplies to the other wives.” The regular sight of them, in the Lion House, was galling, and Ann Eliza began to dread the eight-mile round trip. Every fourth week, on her visit to the Lion House, Ann Eliza picked up five pounds of sugar, a quarter of a pound of tea, one bar of soap, and one pound of candles for The Farmhouse.
In the first year at The Farmhouse, and the second of her marriage, Ann Eliza looked forward to seeing Brigham as often as possible. She desperately wanted companionship and stimulation, but she soon found that he gave her neither. Somehow, in this second year, her marriage began to lose whatever little warmth it had once had.
“We had occasional visits from Brigham,” said Ann Eliza. “He was very fond of coming unexpectedly, and at all sorts of irregular hours, hoping, evidently, that some time he might catch us napping. He was so addicted to fault-finding, and so easily displeased, that we took no pleasure in his visits, and I grew to be positively unhappy every time his approach was heralded.”
One day at noon, Brigham marched into The Farmhouse just as the first Mrs. Webb was serving lunch in the dining room to her daughter, grandsons, and the thirty laborers. Brigham stood in the dining-room door, acknowledged greetings, and walked slowly around the long table, surveying the food. At last he signaled the first Mrs. Webb to follow him into the living room.
When they were alone, Brigham said, “You cook too good food for those men. It is too rich for their stomachs.”
The first Mrs. Webb tried to explain. “I wish to give them something which they can eat, and I try to do so. They work hard, and I surely can do no less than give them palatable food; yet if you do not approve of my manner of providing for them, I will make any change you may suggest, if I can satisfy the men with the fare.”
“It don’t make any difference whether they are satisfied or not,” said Brigham. “I say it is healthier for them to have bread and milk, and you must give it to them.”
The first Mrs. Webb was appalled. “Shall I give them this, and nothing else, three times a day?”
“Well, once in a while you may set on a little butter too.”
“But are they to have no meat?”
“Perhaps I will allow them a little occasionally,” agreed Brigham, “but they are much better off without it.”
As if this were not enough, Brigham appeared suddenly late one summer’s afternoon and surprised the hired hands at dinner. Once again he took Ann Eliza’s mother aside. He told her that she was feeding the men their dinner too early. He said they ought to still be in the field, working at least three hours more before dinner. Patiently the first Mrs. Webb reminded him that the day’s work was not done, that after dinner the men would be busy milking and feeding the forty cows and tending other livestock. Brigham replied that the men could work the three hours extra in the field, then have dinner, and still tend to the livestock after dark. He paced angrily. Hard work, he said, hurt no one. All the world, it appeared, was out to take advantage of him—”and my wives are as bad as the rest,” he added darkly. The first Mrs. Webb promised to see what she could do. With Ann Eliza she later approached the overseer. She reported Brigham’s demand for three more hours a day in the fields. The overseer bristled. He would not work his men beyond five or six o’clock; they were overworked already. Ann Eliza repeated the overseer’s refusal to Brigham. Anxious to avoid a revolt, Brigham backed off and dropped the matter.
For two years Ann Eliza and her mother were the only women in The Farmhouse. In the third year, reacting with a surprise almost as great as Crusoe’s at the footprints in the sand, Ann Eliza greeted an elderly woman, bag and baggage in hand, at the front door. She introduced herself as Mrs. Lewis, a spiritual wife of Brigham Young. “Mrs. Lewis is never mentioned among his wives,” said Ann Eliza, “yet he was sealed to her about two years after his marriage to me.”
Mrs. Lewis was moved into an upstairs bedroom, and some months later, after her disillusionment was complete, she told Ann Eliza her story. She had been a wealthy widow in Provo, living in a beautiful house that she had built. All of her children but one were married. That one was her twenty-year-old son, Thomas, a shy, retiring young man who was the comfort of her old age. One evening Thomas attended a party, fell in love with a girl of his own years, not realizing that she was coveted for plural wife by the local Bishop Snow. When Thomas continued to court the girl, he was waylaid one night by a gang of ruffians and castrated. After that he retired into melancholia and one day disappeared entirely. Mrs. Lewis grieved and was only slightly interested in the factory Brigham was building next to her property. When Brigham’s representatives needed her property for a watercourse, Mrs. Lewis sent them packing. One day Brigham himself appeared. He wished to “comfort” her over her son. She was appreciative. Eventually Brigham proposed marriage. Impressed and lonely, Mrs. Lewis accepted. Brigham told her that he could not see her often, so he suggested that she move to The Farmhouse, where she might he more accessible to him and have Ann Eliza’s companionship. Over the protests of her children, Mrs. Lewis dutifully moved to The Farmhouse. When she learned that Brigham had confiscated her home in Provo and built a watercourse through the property, she tried to see him at the Bee Hive House, but he was always too busy to receive her. Now she was bitter.
Ann Eliza was bitter, too. While she found Mrs. Lewis “a very kind, patient woman,” she also found her an added burden. The Farmhouse itself remained “at once the warmest and coldest house I ever saw.” Her mother had fallen ill of overwork, as had Ann Eliza herself, and her responsibilities were greater than ever.
Worst of all, Ann Eliza’s relationship with Brigham had deteriorated entirely. His visits were shorter, and so was his temper—largely because she was not sexually compliant and had frigidly rejected his advances. Ann Eliza pretended not to understand his irritation. “He had said I was the best wife he had,” she told a friend, “for I had never given him a cross word or look. But for that good temper I take no credit, for my silence was all through fear. I never loved him and never said to him that I loved him. I looked upon him as a heartless despot.”
Occasionally Ann Eliza tried to let him know how she felt. There is the story, possibly apocryphal, that once Brigham gave her money to buy thirteen chickens. She returned with twelve roosters and one hen. When Brigham was puzzled at the preponderance of roosters, Ann Eliza explained curtly, “I didn’t want the hen to suffer the way your wives do!”
It was the summer of 1872. Ann Eliza was nervous and worn thin. She had been critical of The Farmhouse in the beginning, but now she despised it. “I lived here for three years and a half—long, uneventful years—and how I hated my life!” she later wrote. “It was dull, joyless, oppressed, and I looked longingly back to the dear old days at Cottonwood, the restful days that never could come again.”
When she found herself apathetic toward her beloved sons, Edward Wesley and Leonard, now growing boys of grammar-school age, she knew that she could not endure another month of this exile. Yet, much as she wanted to pour her heart out to Brigham, she was afraid.
The fact was, and Ann Eliza knew it, that Brigham and his family sincerely felt that she was living well and had no right to complain. A year later, after Ann Eliza had told the world of her hatred for The Farmhouse, a New York Herald reporter asked John W. Young, “Was she compelled to be a common drudge?” Brigham’s son replied for himself and his father, “There is not a word of truth about her toil. I will tell you how she lived. The farm on which she resided was the best in the whole territory and had one of the finest farmhouses anywhere to be found. A horse and carriage was at her service and five servants ministered to her wants. She did not have to raise her hand.”
True or not, this was Brigham’s attitude, and Ann Eliza feared that she could not overcome it. Yet she knew that she must. Before she was able to decide what to do, her decision was made for her.
In that summer of 1872, Brigham came calling. He had news for her. He was building a luxurious house in the city, which was to be all her own. She and her mother would be able to move into it within a short time. In her excitement Ann Eliza hardly allowed herself to think of his motive. She suspected that what inspired the change was less his love for her than his desire to get one of his more vigorous wives into The Farmhouse. She did not care. All she knew was that she would be in civilization again, living in a real home, and performing once more as a genteel lady. She was happy. Suddenly she sobered. There was just one thing…
“What is it?” Brigham asked.
“Are there to be chambers in my new house?”
“Yes, certainly.”
“Then will you please not build the stairs from the parlor? Let them go out of another room in the house but do not disfigure that one. Besides being ugly, it is inconvenient and excessively annoying to be obliged to pass through the best room at all times and on every occasion.”
“You can have stairs out of every room in the house, if you want them,” said Brigham cheerfully.
Ann Eliza’s satisfaction was complete.