“Resolved… it is both right and the duty of Congress to prohibit in the Territories those twin relics of barbarism—Polygamy and Slavery.”
—Republican Party Platform, 1856
Late on the evening of May 21, 1883, Ann Eliza Denning arrived in Manistee by train. Although she had sprung from a pioneer environment and spent most of her ten years as lecturer in and out of the cruder small communities of expanding America, she was yet unprepared for the atmosphere that awaited her in her newest home.
The rough and booming town of Manistee was located in northern Michigan, between Lake Michigan to the west and Manistee Lake to the east, with heavily trafficked Big Manistee River winding through the city like a life-giving artery. This location, so remote from civilized urban centers, gave Manistee the appearance, and often the license, of an uninhibited frontier settlement. The Chippewa Indians had called the region “Manistee,” which meant “spirit of the woods” in their language. The white inhabitants retained the appellation but as often referred to their town by the nickname “Sawdust City.” Visitors were reminded by either name that they were in lumber country.
More than twenty thousand people populated the town in 1883, and the majority of these were hard-working, hard-drinking, roistering, and prospering Polish lumbermen. Besides the Poles there were large groups of Swedes, Norwegians, Germans and French. Some of these emigrants toiled in the community’s thriving salt industry; others were employed in the local tannery, electric-light plant, harness factory, bedspring company, or in one of several breweries, but the greatest number of these by far worked in the forests beyond Manistee. Inside the abundant pine woods, hearty men with enormous thirsts steadily felled the big trees, sawed them into logs, then floated these down the Big Manistee River into the landlocked harbors of Manistee Lake. In more than a dozen sawmills, the timber was again cut by sash saws and circular saws and run through the planing mills. After that the new lumber was transported down river, through the town, to Lake Michigan, where it was loaded on Great Lakes transports.
The mentality of Manistee’s foreign-born lumbermen, mainly the laborers, was Klondike. As a class they lived riotously, from day to day, sating animal appetites. The imports most in demand were whiskey and women. If Moses R. Denning’s Manistee National Bank and the city council building nearby gave the main thoroughfare of River Street an island of respectability, and if elsewhere the leading hotel, known as Dunham House, and the $18,000 Civic Opera House and the fourteen churches tried to give the town a facade of distinction, these were not enough to disguise the fifteen hotel bars and forty-two saloons. Often many of the latter set their open kegs of whiskey in the streets.
Still, Manistee had its so-called “400.” In the mammoth Victorian frame houses, on the hill overlooking the sawmills, harbors, and beaches, and in equally expansive residences along the fashionable section bordering on Manistee Lake, dwelt the rich men of the community, and Moses R. Denning was one of these. The two-story frame house that he had erected thirteen years before, and had now prepared for his second wife, was simpler, more graceful and classical than the ornate Victorian houses of his neighbors. The Denning house was Grecian in design and spacious in size.
When Ann Eliza Denning took possession of her latest dwelling on the night of May 21, 1883, she was impressed. From the outer porch, she walked into an entry hall, then moved into a parlor. A sliding door opened into a second parlor, and this led to the formal dining room, expensively wainscoted in walnut. Of the thirteen rooms in the house, seven were downstairs and six, including the main bedrooms, upstairs. The Denning house, called “palatial” by newspapers, had many advanced conveniences, among these a constant flow of hot water, especially appreciated by Ann Eliza when she would use the wood-enclosed copper bathtub.
The spring morning after her arrival Ann Eliza explored the grounds of the property. The house was guarded in front by four trees and numerous rosebushes. To the rear stood an impressive coach house and a small grape arbor. A block away, at the edge of Manistee Lake, she found her husband’s wharf surrounded by forty-foot canoes of whole cork pine logs, which his crews used to drive logs down the river.
At first, Ann Eliza felt that she would be welcomed in Manistee by its social leaders. Certainly the Manistee Standard, as ever, was courteous. Having noted the arrival of “the happy couple,” the weekly newspaper went on: “Mrs. Young, after traveling the world over, did Manistee the honor of selecting one of its citizens for a life partner, and Manistee for a permanent home… It is said that her health has been failing from overwork, and her marriage will of course afford a much needed rest.”
However, any feeling of well-being that Ann Eliza may have possessed, engendered by the Standard and the town’s five other newspapers, was soon dispelled by the haughty members of its wealthy society class. Living descendants of Manistee’s old settlers recall that “Ann Eliza was cold-shouldered by the city’s society women, who regarded her as someone notorious and something of a freak.”
During this brief ostracism, Ann Eliza did not permit herself the indulgence of self-pity. Within six weeks she had her sons and mother with her in the new house. The younger boy, Leonard Dee, now eighteen, had preceded his mother to Manistee and was working as a clerk in the local post office. The older boy, Edward Wesley Dee, nineteen, had a traveling job but came up from Chicago to Manistee to join his mother for a short time. The first Mrs. Webb, who had been invalided in a Battle Creek sanitorium, was soon put aboard the Great Lakes steamer Ludington and sent to the care of her daughter.
The reunion of mother and daughter was of short duration. During the fourteen months that followed, the first Mrs. Webb’s health steadily declined. On August 16, 1884, at the age of sixty-seven, she died “of paralysis” in her daughter’s house. She was buried two days later in an expensive casket trimmed in black velvet. Long after, Ann Eliza, apparently unable to remember the exact location of her mother’s grave, placed it “in Western New York, near her birthplace.” Actually the first Mrs. Webb’s forgotten grave still exists in Manistee’s Oak Grove Cemetery.
With the loss of her mother, Ann Eliza depended more than ever on her husband of a little over a year for companionship. There is evidence, however, that Moses R. Denning, or “Old Mose,” as the townfolks called him, was anything but a homebody. Born in the lumbering district of Maine during 1828, he was raised on a farm. After some elementary schooling, he moved to Pennsylvania and became a lumberman on the Susquehanna River. In 1856, when he was twenty-eight, he met and married Annie Ralston. At the outbreak of the Civil War he tried to enlist on the Union side, but, according to the Manistee Democrat, he was rejected “on account of a crippled hand.” Nevertheless, he participated as a noncombatant. He organized the “Bucktail Regiment” and led it to Camp Curtin. He then organized the 84th and 110th Pennsylvania Regiments and delivered them to the front lines. On several occasions he risked fire “to care for the sick and wounded.”
After the war Denning engaged in driving logs on various rivers. Gradually he invested in business, buying and selling timberland, farm acreage, and coal mines, in Florida, Arkansas, and finally in Michigan. In 1866 Denning, then thirty-eight, settled in Manistee with his first wife. His logging business was immediately successful, as were his various other investments, and he founded the Manistee National Bank. He was civic minded, serving on the school board and as city alderman, and he opposed the evil of saloons.
Neither the crippled hand, which he self-consciously kept tucked into a coat pocket, nor his new wife inhibited his restless activity. He traveled constantly—to Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to visit his children by his first wife, to lumber camps in northern Michigan to supervise his workmen, to Arkansas to check on his “large and valuable coal interests,” to Washington, D.C., to confer with Democratic Party leaders.
In 1890 these Democratic Party leaders persuaded Denning to compete for a seat in the State legislature. After a brief campaign, Denning won his seat by 245 votes, and in January of 1891 he went to Lansing to represent Manistee County in the Michigan House of Representatives. Denning served one term in the House, occupying himself with several committees, but was not sufficiently stimulated by the experience to compete again for public office.
During these same seven years, Ann Eliza was equally active. Besides occasional trips with her husband to Ohio and the South, she accompanied him to Manistee’s social events—an open-air concert, a visiting opera company, a performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a masquerade ball, a new roller rink, an excursion-boat party, a clergyman’s lecture at Union Hall on “The Mormon Question.”
Rarely did she communicate with the press in these years. However, on August 20, 1887, when she was forty-three, she broke her unnatural silence to write a letter to the editors of the Evening Journal. The newspaper had informed Manistee residents that Ann Eliza had undertaken a fast to improve her health, and she wished to correct some portions of the story.
“I have been a great sufferer for more than eight years with nervous dyspepsia, brought on by years of sorrow and strain of 10 years of lecturing,” she wrote. “I have never known of so severe and, apparently, hopeless a case as mine. For six years I have been unable to digest even a crumb of food without taking full as much pepsin, or other digestive medicines, as I did of food. I heard of this fasting cure and nutrient and what cures were being done by it, and I determined to try it. I wrote to some of the doctor’s prominent patients and ascertained that it was a genuine thing, and then I communicated with the doctor.”
The doctor was a Washington, D.C., physician who had discovered a liquid called Nutrient, which curbed its users’ appetites. Ann Eliza took three teaspoons of the medicine a day, for fifteen days, and limited her food intake to watermelon, muskmelon, graham bread, and baked potatoes. Ann Eliza’s weight dropped from 120 pounds to 100 pounds, but although considerably weakened, she was never “dangerously ill,” as the newspaper had erroneously reported.
“I should not lose faith in this treatment for most persons, even though it did not cure me,” Ann Eliza concluded. “I desire to thank you for the very kind words you spoke of me and my work against Mormonism and polygamy. It is pleasant to know that my long struggle and efforts have been remembered so long.”
The press was happy to report that the fast had been, “successfully accomplished,” and that once more Ann Eliza was “able to enjoy carriage drives around the city.”
During the years between 1883 and 1890, Ann Eliza was as busy with her sons by her first husband as was her lumberman husband with his children by his first wife. Ann Eliza’s elder son, Edward Wesley, had married a redheaded southern belle named Mabel Rose in Savannah, Georgia, over the objections of her parents, who did not want a northerner or former Mormon in the family. Edward Wesley and Mabel Rose took up residence in Tallahassee, Florida. In 1885 Edward Wesley brought his younger brother, Leonard, down from Manistee, and they went into the cigar-manufacturing business together. By this time Mabel Rose was pregnant, and she traveled to Manistee to have her child, a boy named Rollins Lewis Dee, and Ann Eliza was now a grandmother. Five years later, in 1890, Edward Wesley and Mabel Rose were living in New York City, where he continued in the cigar business. There they had their second son, Edward Clifton, and Ann Eliza hurried from Manistee to New York to see her newborn grandson.
In all these years of intensive domesticity Ann Eliza never lost her interest in polygamy and Mormonism. For one thing, she still had one parent alive, near Salt Lake City. Her father Chauncey G. Webb had been excommunicated by the Mormon Church in 1875, but now it seemed that he had repented and was back in the good graces of the Church after being rebaptized a Mormon. He was deeply devoted to his second wife, Elizabeth Taft, and had had eleven children by her—all Ann Eliza’s half-brothers and half-sisters—and among these were triplets who had died at birth. Besides the link with her father, Ann Eliza’s interest in Utah was kept alive by the continuing existence of polygamy, which had survived the Edmunds Bill of 1882.
But now the end of plural marriage was in sight. From afar Ann Eliza watched its death throes. In January of 1885, a Gentile grand jury voted to prosecute the current Prophet John Taylor. Before he could be arrested, Taylor preached a last sermon in the Tabernacle and then fled to a farmhouse hideout several miles northwest of Salt Lake City, near the community of Kaysville. The hideout, referred to in code as the D.O., was elaborately guarded by sentries, who warned Taylor to disappear whenever inquisitive Federal deputy marshals were sighted.
Other Mormon polygamists emulated their leader by going underground in remote villages of Utah and neighboring states. The homes where polygamists secreted themselves often had trap doors in the living room floors that led into dirt cellars stocked with provisions. Many of the plural wives were scattered about, the majority going to live near Franklin, Idaho, and others going to Canada and England. Some polygamists went on extended foreign missions—Joseph F. Smith spent almost six years abroad at this time—and some removed themselves and their possessions to Mexico.
Now that polygamists were on the run, the government decided to crush them completely. In March of 1887, at the instigation of J. Randolph Tucker of Virginia, Congress passed a revised version of the Edmunds Bill to be known as the Edmunds-Tucker Bill. The measure was the last Federal legislation aimed at celestial marriage. It provided that, in all plural-marriage cases, witnesses be compelled to appear in court, that polygamous wives be permitted to testify against their husbands, that voters and office-holders be forced to sign an oath promising to obey anti-polygamy laws, that convicted polygamists be disfranchised and their children declared illegitimate, that records of new Church marriages be publicly filed in court, that female suffrage and local territorial militia be abolished, that the Mormon Church, as well as its emigration fund, be disincorporated, and, severest measure of all, that all Church property in the excess of $50,000 (including the Lion House and Amelia’s Palace, but not buildings used “for the purpose of the worship of God”) be forfeited to the Federal government.
“All this happened in the United States in the year 1887, not in Spain or Holland in the dark ages or the days of the Inquisition,” wrote Mormon historian Joseph Fielding Smith.
As more and more Federal agents swarmed into Utah to enforce the Edmunds-Tucker Bill, and the Church buckled in defeat, John Taylor, attended by two of his wives and his two counselors, died in his hideout on July 25, 1887. According to the Church, he had been “killed by the cruelty of officials who have, in this territory, misrepresented the government of the United States.”
Even though its leader was dead, polygamy itself remained alive. So certain had Congress been that plural wives, once given the opportunity, would abandon their harems that the lawmakers had authorized the construction of a $112,000 Woman’s Industrial Home in Salt Lake City to give shelter and work to “homeless and destitute polygamous wives and their children.” At no time were there more than ten polygamous wives in this Federal home—and they, for the most, wives of apostates—and after a decade the government abandoned the white elephant at auction for $22,500.
Despite this surface show of resistance, the Mormons were ready for truce terms. In 1887, applying for statehood, the Mormons finally proposed a constitution that outlawed plural marriage. This constitution was ratified by a vote of 12,195 to 504. Two years later, in April of 1889, the Apostles selected eighty-two-year-old Wilford Woodruff, the mild Connecticut man who had first shown Brigham Young the site of Salt Lake City, as their Prophet. Woodruff knew the sentiments of his people. He also knew that the present state of affairs could not long continue. Almost all Church leaders were still underground, their families demoralized, and over three quarters of a million dollars of Church funds lay in the hands of the Federal government.
In 1890 Woodruff sent emissaries to Washington, D.C.—among them the son of George Q. Cannon, the youthful Frank J. Cannon, who would later be excommunicated for announcing that the Mormon hierarchy secretly advocated polygamy—to treat with 260-pound President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat elected despite the fact that he had fathered an illegitimate child. President Cleveland listened and then offered his deal: amnesty for old polygamists, return of escheated property, legitimatizing of all children born of plural marriages, and statehood for Utah—in return for complete abolishment of polygamy.
Woodruff made his decision, razed the old Endowment House as a show of goodwill, then summoned members of the hierarchy out of hiding and informed them that “in broken and contrite spirit” he had asked judgment of the Lord, and the Lord had advised him to relinquish the practice of celestial marriage. Someone in the room asked if that meant the end of all plural unions. Woodruff said that it did. Someone else wondered if it meant separation from wives long wedded. Woodruff said that it did. One by one the Apostles protested, and then, one by one, they submitted.
“Not a petty word was uttered,” wrote Frank J. Cannon, who was present at the crucial meeting. “Their thought was not for themselves. Their grief was not selfish. Their protests had a dignity in pathos that shook me in spite of myself.” The last to speak was Joseph F. Smith, tears on his cheeks. “I have never disobeyed a revelation from God. I cannot—I dare not—now.”
On September 25, 1890, Woodruff issued a manifesto or proclamation to the world press. It read, in part:
“Inasmuch as laws have been enacted by Congress, forbidding plural marriages, which laws have been pronounced constitutional by the court of the Last Resort, I hereby declare my intention to submit to those laws, and to use my influence with the members of the Church over which I preside to have them do likewise… And I now publicly declare that my advice to the Latter-Day Saints is to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land.”
Officially, polygamy in the United States was dead, and six years later, on its seventh attempt, Utah was admitted to the Union.
Under the pressure of public opinion created by Ann Eliza and others, polygamy was forced to capitulate to conformity, but this public opinion was opposed, in the years following Woodruff’s manifesto, by a sizable number of non-Mormons who regretted the abolishment of plural marriage. Elbert Hubbard, the sage of East Aurora, New York, wrote: “Polygamy, under certain conditions, the biologists recognize, is eminently right and proper, because it is natural. Plural wives are happy wives. Brigham Young did not depress his women.” In 1903 George Bernard Shaw wrote: “Polygamy when tried under modern democratic conditions, as by the Mormons, is wrecked by the revolt of the mass of inferior men who are condemned to celibacy by it; for the maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first rate man to the exclusive possession of a third rate.”
In 1936 Dr. Joseph Tenenbaum, authority on the sexual history of women, wrote: “Physiologically, polygamy is, next to agamy, the best adapted mode of mating, from the viewpoint of variability of choice.” In 1947 John Gunther wrote that polygamy “contributed greatly to the sternly moral standards and high level of citizenship that prevail in Utah today,” largely because it eliminated adultery and juvenile delinquency. Gunther claimed that “the position of women was often bettered by plural marriage rather than the opposite,” since polygamy gave every female a chance to marry, gave every female a wide choice of husbands, gave every female more economic protection, “since only the more courageous and capable men, with considerable earning power, could afford more than one wife.”
Even polygamy’s modern enemies have conceded that it was not quite so monstrous an institution as Ann Eliza and her emotional crusaders made out. According to a statistical study prepared by Stanley S. Ivins in 1956, most male polygamists had not possessed twenty-seven wives but merely two, most were not bearded patriarchs marrying child brides (the average male ceased marrying at forty), most did not marry large numbers of women at once, most (90 per cent) did not marry pairs of sisters, most did not produce more children with each wife than monogamists (polygamists had six children per woman, and monogamists had eight).
“The composite polygamist,” wrote Ivins in 1956, “was first married at the age of twenty-three to a girl of twenty. Thirteen years later he took a plural wife, choosing a twenty-two-year-old girl. The chances were two to one that, having demonstrated his acceptance of the principle of plurality, he was finished with marrying. If, however, he took a third wife, he waited four years, then selected another girl of twenty-two. The odds were now three to one against his taking a fourth wife, but if he did so, he waited another four years, and once more chose a twenty-two-year-old girl, although he had now reached the ripe age of forty-four. In case he decided to add a fifth wife, he waited only two years, and this time the lady of his choice was twenty-one years old. This was the end of his marrying, unless he belonged to a three per cent minority.”
Such were the historical afterthoughts. However, in 1890 the majority of the non-Mormon population rejoiced at the beheading of the plural dragon. In Manistee, especially, there was joy, as Ann Eliza, at the age of forty-six, celebrated the victory of national monogamy toward which she had contributed so great a part. But her pleasure was to last no longer than seventeen months, when marital difficulties, superimposed upon a personal tragedy, gave her reason to hate monogamy as much as she had once hated polygamy.
In September of 1889, because her younger son, Leonard, was suffering from tuberculosis, Ann Eliza took him to the more healthful climate of Pima, Arizona, to live with her older brother Gilbert, who in turn lived under a cloud. Six years earlier Gilbert and his surviving polygamous wife Kate had conducted a general store in Pima, and Gilbert had been sufficiently respected to be elected the town’s mayor. During that heady period Gilbert had succumbed to one Gentile vice—in a second house he had kept a second family, consisting of a woman who was not his wife and their illegitimate child. At that time his respectability had remained intact. But in May of 1889, just four months before Ann Eliza’s arrival with ailing Leonard, Gilbert had been accused of enacting a role in the notorious Wham robbery, considered by many the West’s greatest road crime.
Major Joseph W. Wham, a paymaster in the United States Army, and his escort of eighteen soldiers had been riding through the mountains of Graham County, carrying a military payroll of $28,000 to Fort Thomas. En route they had been ambushed by twenty bandits and had lost the entire payroll. Shortly afterward eight men were indicted for the crime, and among these were Gilbert Webb and one of his sons, Wilford T. Webb. Their trial lasted thirty-three days, and 165 witnesses gave testimony. However, the jury was predominately Mormon, and Gilbert and his son were acquitted. There were those who said that Gilbert participated in the robbery to obtain funds for Ann Eliza and Leonard. According to Joe T. Place, of Duncan, Arizona, who had known Gilbert well: “He worshipped the ground his sister walked on.” The Mormon Church took a dimmer view of such charitable acts and excommunicated Gilbert.
Despite his recent travail, Gilbert played the gracious host to Ann Eliza and Leonard for six months. In March of 1890, satisfied that her brother’s care and the climate would repair Leonard’s lungs, Ann Eliza left Pima to return to Manistee. Four weeks later she received word that her twenty-five-year-old son had died of tuberculosis. Her grief was terrible, but even as she mourned Leonard’s premature passing and arranged for his burial next to her mother in Manistee, she was becoming aware of serious domestic problems under her roof.
Behind the serene facade of the Denning mansion in 1891, there raged a bitter conflict between Ann Eliza and Moses R. Denning. The conflict had its roots in the same problem that had marred Ann Eliza’s marriage to Brigham Young—sexual incompatability. Denning “was a man of unreasonable passion and lust, apparently making no effort at self-control,” Ann Eliza would later charge, “so that by living with him, the health of your oratrix became weak and impaired and broken.”
When Ann Eliza began to deny him her bed, Denning sought solace elsewhere. There were several young and attractive servant girls in the house, and Denning decided to enjoy their presence fully. Ann Eliza observed that he “was in the habit of caressing, handling and lewdly conversing with such hired help.” On one occasion she came upon her husband and a serving girl, Mamie Larsen, engaged in carnal activity in the maid’s bedroom. Ann Eliza berated her mate, but Denning was not cowed. Counterattacking, he called his wife “bitch” and “whore” and accused her of wanton behavior with half the male population of Manistee.
Despite her anguish, Ann Eliza did not leave Denning. A permanent marriage in monogamy had too long been her goal, and she was not ready now to separate herself from its advantages. Instead, she tried to forget her marital troubles, as well as her recent bereavement, by plunging wholeheartedly into a relatively new religion.
A quarter of a century before, Mary Baker Eddy, daughter of a Congregational deacon, had begun to practice mental healing after curing herself of an injury from a bad fall on an icy street. In 1879 she had established the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, and now, in 1891, the seventy-year-old, three-times-married Mrs. Eddy had practitioners gaining converts everywhere in the Midwest. In March of 1891, Ann Eliza invited a Chicago practitioner, Miss S. B. Bauer, to be her house guest in Manistee for two weeks. During Miss Bauer’s stay and Ann Eliza’s conversion from Methodism to Christian Science, Moses R. Denning kept his distance, attending a mining lawsuit in Arkansas and a Democratic Convention in Lansing, Michigan.
Ann Eliza sponsored the three free Christian Science lectures that Miss Bauer gave in the basement of Manistee’s Union Hall. Then Ann Eliza invited friends to her parlor to attend a course of Science lessons, given on twelve successive evenings. Before her marital problems came to a climax, Ann Eliza tried to keep busy with Christian Science work and woman’s suffrage meetings. In 1891 she visited Ludington, Michigan, on Science work and later attended a Women’s Congress in Grand Rapids. However, mental healing was not enough to overcome the mental suffering Ann Eliza was undergoing because of Moses R., and the following year their conflict came to a head.
In 1892 Moses R. Denning was sixty-four and Ann Eliza forty-eight, and they had lived together as man and wife for almost nine years. Early in that year, their domestic differences became unendurable. Although Denning still had intimate relations with his wife, these moments were too infrequent to satisfy him. As a result, his infidelities became more numerous. He blamed his peccadillos on Ann Eliza’s frigidity. She blamed his sins on his inhuman sexual needs. Whatever the motive, Denning’s philandering continued both under his roof and in the city. One afternoon Ann Eliza discovered him petting a complaining German maid named Minnie in a corner of the downstairs hallway. Soon enough Ann Eliza learned that outside the house he was associating “with lewd, immoral and unchaste women and was frequently guilty of improper and criminal conduct with such women.”
Humiliated, Ann Eliza fled to New York to seek refuge with her son Edward Wesley and to sulk, and when she returned to Manistee in February of 1892, she refused to resume marital relations with her husband. The first night home she locked her bedroom door against him, and in a rage of frustration Denning pounded at the door, then tried, but failed, to break it down. After threatening Ann Eliza with mayhem, discoursing on her alleged adulteries, and cursing her in the foulest language, he left to find his pleasures among more hospitable women. The bedroom door remained locked that night and every night thereafter.
For two more months the Dennings were at odds, and at last Denning decided that he had suffered enough. In a fit of cold anger he sold four lots he owned in Manistee to a friend, George M. Burr, a cashier in the Manistee National Bank. On Friday morning, April 22, 1892, Denning walked out on Ann Eliza, informing the press that he was going to Pennsylvania to care for his ailing mother.
Gossip was everywhere, and so were reporters. On April 28 the Manistee Advocate, under the headline, “Somewhat Sensational,” made public the separation:
“From outward appearances there seems to be considerable discord in the Denning household, and as a consequence many merchants are somewhat anxious in regard to the immediate settlement of sundry bills that Mrs. Denning contracted last week.
“Mrs. Denning was formerly Ann Eliza Young, nineteenth wife of Brigham Young, the Mormon leader and prophet, and was well known throughout the country by her lectures and writings on the underside of Mormon life. She was married to Mr. Denning several years ago, and to outward appearances lived happily. Last week Mr. Denning went around to the several trades people the family had been in the habit of dealing with and paid up all bills, in some places gave checks for a little more than was due, and when his attention was drawn to the fact, said it was all right, ‘credit it up.’ At Mr. Russell’s [Edwin Russell, the grocer], he said that as he was going out of town, and possibly would not be back soon, they might have to wait a little longer than usual for the payment of the next month’s bill.
“Mr. Denning went away Thursday. Next day Mrs. Denning consulted her attorney, and acting on his advice started on an extensive shopping tour with the evident purpose of piling up as big a stack of bills as possible to greet Mr. Denning on his return. As he was well known to be a man of large wealth and paid bills promptly, merchants were willing to sell her all she wanted, and in consequence she bought about a thousand dollars worth of groceries and provisions, dry goods, shoes, slippers, furniture and hardware in a couple of days.”
When Denning learned of this shopping spree, he hastily mailed an advertisement from Pennsylvania to the Manistee Daily Democrat. Without making any charges against Ann Eliza, his published notice warned “the public not to trust her on his account as he would pay no bills of her contracting.”
The Manistee Times-Sentinel, eager to hear Ann Eliza’s side of the disagreement, sent a reporter to call on her at her residence some six days after Denning had departed. The reporter found Ann Eliza “calm and collected.” When he questioned her, she gave him a statement for publication.
“It is unnecessary for me to enter into the details of Mr. Denning’s life,” said Ann Eliza. “I will leave his own acts to speak for themselves. Any reference that I may make to them is made without the slightest bitterness or ill-feeling. Nothing shall be set down in malice. I speak of our affairs only, because it seems better to do so than to allow unfounded and untrue surmisings of people to be published as facts. I have borne a burden for nine years which came near crushing me, and but for the goodness of God, would have done so. I have become perfectly fearless and am strong to meet the irresistible, for I have the utmost faith in the ultimate triumph of right and justice. The course of conduct pursued by Mr. Denning has been one that I could not countenance, and when I returned from New York, last February, I refused to sustain the relation of wife to him any longer, while he indulged in that he was doing. He offered to give me all he had if I would leave Manistee, which I refused to do. Of course this made him very angry, and when he become convinced that I could not be moved from my position, he began to make preparations to leave. I was perfectly aware of what he was doing, but made no move to prevent him. The messages he has sent me are entirely unbecoming a man—such as, ‘Now she can starve, and see how she likes that’; and similar remarks. He left early Friday morning, April 22nd, and I have not seen him since. I am greatly relieved by his absence, and sincerely glad that he has gone, so long as it seems to be impossible for him to live a normal and respectable life. My worst wish for him is, that he will awaken to the truth, that there is a better and happier way to live, and that his last days may indeed be his best days.”
After this remarkable outburst, Ann Eliza lapsed into nine months of silence, and then, in January of 1893, she filed suit for divorce, making public her third husband’s alleged extracurricular sexual excursions. On August 14, 1893, the divorce was granted on the grounds of extreme cruelty. Ann Eliza was awarded $400 for her attorneys and $5,000 to cover all alimony and interests she might have in Denning’s properties.
Denning did not attend the dissolution of his marriage. After leaving Ann Eliza, he had gone to Curwensville, Pennsylvania, to visit his mother. Then, with two of his sons by his first wife, he had continued to Ronceverte, West Virginia, the noisy lumber town on the Greenbrier River, and established residence there.
After the divorce from Denning, Ann Eliza lived on alone for four trying years in Manistee. To sustain her senses she gave herself more fervidly than ever to Christian Science. In 1895 she was honored by the appearance of a four-page biography in a book otherwise devoted exclusively to males. The Portrait and Biographical Record of Northern Michigan, published in Chicago, contained “sketches of prominent and representative citizens, together with biographies and portraits of all the Presidents of the United States.” The biography of Ann Eliza recounted her flight from Utah, her lecture career, and her three marriages. “Of late years,” it said, “she has led a quiet and secluded life, honored and respected by all who know her.” There was mention of her older brother Gilbert living in New Mexico. There was also a reference to her two sons: “Edward W., whose home is now in New Mexico; and Leonard L., who died in young manhood.”
Ann Eliza’s surviving son, Edward Wesley, had moved to New Mexico from New York City for two reasons: first, for causes unknown, he had separated from his wife, Mabel Rose and probably wanted to put distance between them; second, he had learned that, like his late brother, he was suffering from tuberculosis and required a different climate. In 1897, while Ann Eliza was traveling in the East, Edward Wesley again made a change of locale, transporting himself from New Mexico to Denver, where he moved into a house that Ann Eliza had owned there since 1895.
No sooner had Edward Wesley settled in Denver than Ann Eliza decided to join him. Returning to Manistee from Philadelphia, she sold her heavily mortgaged mansion, then proceeded to Denver and there rented a bungalow near her son. In 1899, perhaps from lack of money, she sold her Denver property and was forced to dispossess her son.
After that, for more than a decade, Ann Eliza lived in obscurity, leaving only a few clues as to her movements.
In 1900 she saw the new century in—a year in which many of America’s seventy-nine million people were talking about William Jennings Bryan, Upton Sinclair, Eugene V. Debs, Theodore Roosevelt, Jack London, Carrie Nation, Casey Jones. It was also a year in which Mormonism, if not Ann Eliza, was in the news. The new Prophet was eighty-seven-year-old Lorenzo Snow, brother of Ann Eliza’s sister harem wife, Eliza R. Snow. The congressional delegate to Washington from Utah was Brigham H. Roberts, but because he had three wives, the House of Representatives voted 268 to 50 not to seat him.
The following year there was a fleeting glimpse of Ann Eliza. On Monday, April 22, 1901, Ann Eliza’s niece, Effie Webb—who was a daughter of Ann Eliza’s brother Gilbert and was housekeeper for Ann Eliza’s father in Salt Lake City—made a notation in the diary that she kept. It read: “Ann Eliza and Eddie have not yet arrived.” According to Effie Webb, “Eddie” was Ann Eliza’s older son, Edward Wesley, alive but ill in 1901. A short time before, because he was still suffering from tuberculosis, Ann Eliza had convinced her son to leave Denver with her and visit Texas for his health. After a vacation in El Paso, the pair, mother and son, were expected in Salt Lake City, where an inheritance of $2,000 left by James L. Dee four years before was to be collected by Edward Wesley. Recently a granddaughter of Chauncey Webb’s second marriage remarked of Ann Eliza’s return to Salt Lake City in 1901: “I understood she had come back to Utah very repentant.”
Following that one visit to Utah—her son Edward Wesley died shortly after—Ann Eliza disappeared again for over a year, to reappear in 1902 in El Paso. Presumably she went there to be near her elder brother, Gilbert, who was working on railroad construction in the State of Chihuahua in Mexico. Ann Eliza lived a secluded life in this hot, rough city on the Mexican border. Few Texans knew anything of her earlier fame and notoriety. However, Mormon polygamists living in exile in the Mexican towns of Chuichupa, Colonia Juarez, and Pearson (founded by the millionaire Englishman, Weetman Pearson, later Lord Cowdray, who had built the port of Veracruz, the dam across the Blue Nile in Egypt, and the tunnels under the East River in New York) excitedly gossipped over the rumor that Brigham Young’s twenty-seventh wife was somewhere in El Paso.
Ann Eliza occupied four different residences in five years, all located near El Paso’s downtown business district. During 1902 and 1903 she rented a small new adobe bungalow on Magoffin Street, a highly respectable address in a district otherwise inhabited by bankers, professional men, and engineers. The following years, because her purse was becoming depleted, Ann Eliza was forced to live in three duplexes. During these years Ann Eliza’s neighbors knew her only as “Mrs. Anna E. Denning, widow of Moses R.,” although Moses R., very much alive in West Virginia, would have resented his premature decease.
During 1907 Ann Eliza was less “repentant” than she had been a half dozen years before in Utah. She had decided that the seventeen-year-old Woodruff manifesto, abolishing polygamy, had not been entirely observed by the Saints. “Their President, Wilford Woodruff, in 1890 issued a hypocritical proclamation suspending polygamy, and then went on and practiced it as before,” said Ann Eliza. “So did his faithful lieutenants, Apostles and Bishops and Elders, and what not. So did their deluded followers.” And now a hard core of Saints, said Ann Eliza, in Utah, Arizona, Idaho, and Canada were still practicing polygamy, because they claimed that John Taylor, while in hiding during 1886, had received a secret revelation from the Lord to continue celestial marriage.
In February of 1907, Mormon polygamy became a national issue in Congress for almost the last time, and Ann Eliza watched the proceedings closely. Four years earlier, after Joseph F. Smith (whose uncle had been the founder of Mormonism) had succeeded Snow to the Presidency of the Church, the Utah legislature elected Reed Smoot as United States senator. Immediately the Protestant ministers of Salt Lake City filed a protest in Washington. Even though Reed Smoot was a conservative Republican with only one wife, his enemies pointed out that he was an Apostle of the Church and a believer in polygamy.
Under pressure, the Committee on Privileges and Elections in the Senate undertook to examine the thorny case. Thousands of petitions against Smoot—arguing that he was a tool of the Mormon hierarchy, and that he and other Apostles encouraged underground polygamy—bombarded the committee. For his part Smoot denied everything. At last the Senate sent subpoenas to the Prophet Joseph F. Smith and to other members of the hierarchy. Smith created a sensation by confessing that his five wives had given him eleven children since the outlawing of polygamy by the Woodruff manifesto. He tried to explain to the committee that new plural marriages were not permitted in the Church—anyone found making such a marriage was excommunicated—but that it was impossible for old polygamists to abandon the wives they had once married. “I was placed in this position,” he told the senators. “I had a plural family, if you please; that is, my first wife was married to me over thirty-eight years ago, my last wife was married to me over twenty years ago, and with these wives I had children, and I simply took my chances, preferring to meet the consequences of the law rather than to abandon my children and their mothers; and I have cohabited with my wives—not openly, that is, not in a manner that I thought would be offensive to my neighbors—but I have acknowledged them; I have visited them. They have borne me children since 1890, and I have done it, knowing the responsibility and knowing that I was amenable to the law.”
In 1906 the committee reported to the Senate that the majority of its members were against the seating of Reed Smoot. On December 13, 1906, the whole matter went before the Senate for debate and vote. Smoot came under heavy attack but was defended by Senator Albert J. Hopkins, of Illinois, who said that Smoot had opposed polygamy “even from his infancy.” Several senators also attacked President Theodore Roosevelt for supporting Smoot, suggesting it was simply because the Mormons had backed him in the presidential election. The day before the Senate vote Smoot spoke out for himself. He declared that new plural marriages were rare in Utah and made without Church sanction. Every such marriage, since 1890, “has the express condemnation of the church.” As to himself, he was flatly against polygamy.
On February 20, 1907, the Senate voted. It required a two-thirds yea vote to expel Smoot. After the roll call the vote stood twenty-eight yeas, forty-two nays, and twenty not voting. Smoot retained his Senate seat—and would retain it for five successive terms, until 1932, when he would be buried under the Franklin D. Roosevelt Democratic landslide.
Following the Smoot case from a distance, Ann Eliza’s worst fears were confirmed. She decided that plural marriage, no matter how sporadic, was still being practiced in Utah. Either because she wanted to fight the old enemy once more, or because she was tired of obscurity and longed again for the limelight, she set to work revising her forgotten book, Wife No. 19, that had been published thirty-one years before.
Diligently she worked. She wrote a new preface: “Many years have passed since, as a fugitive from Mormon slavery, I first related the story of my bondage and escape to the wondering Gentile world… I gave ten years of my young womanhood to lecturing and writing of the facts with which I was only too familiar, until failing health compelled me to retire to private life… I cannot help thinking that these years of labor did accomplish some good. Bills making polygamy a crime against the United States were passed in Congress and signed by the President. These, I was assured, were a direct result of my work.”
But now, she realized, her work was not finished—polygamists still thrived. “Against this yet unsubdued host of evil-doers,” she wrote, “I venture again to raise my voice and wield my pen, which may be blessed by God as a humble instrument, for the pulling-down of the stronghold of error. To the new generation which has arisen I appeal as I did to their fathers and mothers, to arouse and exert themselves against the portentous evil still threatening our peace, our homes, our lives.”
The book that followed was 512 printed pages in length. Until page 452 the text of Wife No. 19 was followed fairly closely. But the last sixty pages consisted of new material. In refurbishing her old book, Ann Eliza made changes not only in sentence structure but in facts and added considerable information on what had happened to her cast of characters and herself between 1876 and 1907. Now she was able to tell the whole story of the Mountain Meadows massacre and of Lee’s eventual execution. Now she could bring up to date the lives of Brigham’s children and several wives, as well as those of Mormon congressional delegates like George O. Cannon.
In the revised book, Ann Eliza discussed only two of her three husbands. The story of her unhappy first marriage to James L. Dee was repeated but was severely cut and modified. In the old book a page and a half had been given to the episode where Dee had attempted to choke Ann Eliza. In the new version this attack was condensed to a single sentence: “At last my parents were eyewitnesses of my husband’s brutal violence toward myself.” Perhaps by 1907 Ann Eliza had mellowed with age, or perhaps she wished to repay Dee for having left $2,000 to her son Edward Wesley. The polygamous marriage to Brigham Young was repeated with all its original details, but now Ann Eliza was able to add the story of his death and reprint a copy of his will. Too, she was able to report the whole story of her long divorce case. As for her third marriage to Moses R. Denning, this was omitted entirely from the new book.
At the end of the old material that she had revised Ann Eliza wrote: “I have told my story as simply as I could. I have added nothing, but I have left much untold. Another volume, as large as this, would not contain all I could write on this subject. My life is but the life of one, while thousands are suffering, as I suffered, and are powerless even to plead for themselves; so I plead for them. The voices of twenty thousand women speak in mine, begging for freedom both from social and religious tyranny.”
The new material in the book began with an account of Brigham’s death, then contained short biographies of his successors, Taylor, Woodruff, Snow, and Smith. Ann Eliza discussed the Edmunds Bill, happily, and the seating of Reed Smoot, unhappily. Throughout, her style was gaudy as ever. On page 500 she wrote: “I was one of many thousands of victims of that accursed system; and fortunately have not only escaped from its thraldom, but have been enabled by voice and pen to expose its terrible dangers to the American people. The despotic ruler from whom I suffered directly and chiefly has passed away to a higher tribunal to receive righteous judgment. But the dreadful system which he moulded and controlled so long still exists and in spite of all the measures by which an aroused people have sought to restrain and suppress it, still flourishes and spreads its baneful influences over many parts of our beloved country and even on foreign nations.”
At last Ann Eliza had reached the end of her final appeal to the public that had forgotten her. “I have been absent from Utah for many years,” she wrote, “but I am none the less deeply interested in its welfare, for it was my early home, endeared by fond recollections. I love its people and wish to see them freed from the intolerable bondage of a false and malignant religion. Every report that I get from that State verifies the statement that polygamy is rampant… The American people must therefore continue their holy crusade against this anti-Christian system. They must grapple with it in its strongholds. They must sustain those heroic souls who are engaged in this divine warfare. They must educate their sons and daughters to constant vigilance and unrelenting hostility against its insidious approaches. They must be ever on their guard lest by some trick or stratagem the cunning dangerous enemy enter and desecrate their hearths and homes.”
Ann Eliza found her publisher in Philadelphia, where she may also have taken up residence between 1908 and 1911. The publisher was William S. Jackson, who conducted a vanity house called the Aldine Press in the Witherspoon Building, and who also had an office in Boston. Actually Jackson divided his time between printing books and selling real estate. It is likely that Ann Eliza paid him most or all of the costs of publication of her second book.
The 512-page, red-covered volume appeared in 1908. The title page read: Life in Mormon Bondage… A Complete Expose of its False Prophets/Murderous Danites/Despotic Rulers and/Hypnotized Deluded/Subjects… by Ann Eliza Young… 19th Wife of Brigham Young… Limited Edition.
While 1908 was a year of many popular best sellers, Ann Eliza’s Life in Mormon Bondage was not one of them. People were reading Mary Roberts Rinehart’s The Circular Staircase and John Fox, Jr.’s The Trail of the Lonesome Pine and Lucy M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Few people could any longer become aroused over the relic of barbarism. It seemed as if the last public interest in polygamy had been expended on the Reed Smoot case over a year before. It was a dead issue. Only 1,000 copies of Ann Eliza’s new book were published. It is doubtful if half of them were sold. However, there is some evidence that the handful that did sell made an impression on this limited number of readers. Margaret Hatch Haycock, of Salt Lake City, remembers that, when she and her husband were on a Mormon mission to Los Angeles in 1908, there was a considerable number of persons who resisted conversion by quoting anti-Mormon sentiments from Ann Eliza’s Life in Mormon Bondage. It is Mrs. Haycock’s recollection that Ann Eliza was “living in Southern California at that time, and I think she wrote short stories about the church and polygamy, or maybe it was just the book, but it made it awfully hard for us.” Unhappily for Ann Eliza, there is no evidence that her California sales were duplicated elsewhere.
But if the apathetic public would not be aroused, at least Ann Eliza could have the satisfaction of letting her family and old friends know that she was still alive and vigorous at sixty-four. Yet who was there left of her kin and old associates to read and enjoy Life in Mormon Bondage?
In 1908 her mother Eliza Churchill Webb had been dead almost a quarter of a century. Ann Eliza’s father, Chauncey G. Webb, after indulging himself in six marriages, had been dead five years. He had passed away on the morning of April 7, 1903, but not before advising his doctor from his deathbed, “No matter what the Church authorities tell you to do—do it. If it’s right, it’s right. If it’s wrong, they’ll be accountable, not you.” His funeral service, before a large host of relatives and friends, had taken place at the Ninth Ward meetinghouse in Salt Lake City, with a Bishop presiding, a close friend, Angus M. Cannon, who had once excommunicated him, delivering the eulogy, and a Church choir singing. The Deseret News published his epitaph, He “built the wagon… used by President Young in which he entered the valley.” His plot in the Salt Lake City cemetery would be shared, in 1909, by his second wife, Elizabeth Taft Webb.
In 1908 only one of Ann Eliza’s three husbands was still alive. Moses R. Denning lived on in Ronceverte, West Virginia, where he would die at the age of eighty-two in 1910.
In 1908 both of Ann Eliza’s sons were gone, but her two grandsons, Rollins and Edward Clifton, were very much alive. Rollins, working as a secretary, had been married two years in 1908, and he and his wife, Aline Yard, were living in California, with his mother, Mabel Rose. Rollins lived until 1941. The younger of Ann Eliza’s grandsons, Edward Clifton, was a bachelor and a clerk in a wool company in Oakland during 1908. Later he served in World War I, then was a successful real-estate broker until his death in 1948.
In 1908, two of Ann Eliza’s three brothers were still alive. Seventy-one-year-old Gilbert, for whom she had once married Brigham Young and who had been at her younger son’s deathbed, was busily at work as general contractor for the 595-mile Mexican stretch of the Kansas City, Mexico and Orient Railroad, then being laid through the State of Chihuahua. Among his foremen, at the head of 200 peons, was Pancho Villa, who supervised grading operations. Four years later, old and penniless, Gilbert would join 1,500 fellow Mormons in fleeing his former employee, Pancho Villa, to find a refuge in El Paso. At last, Gilbert would return to Mexico and become manager of the foreign sawmills in Pearson. In 1922 he would be restored to the Mormon Church. A year later, at the age of eighty-six, Gilbert would die in Pearson—today known as Mata Ortiz—and be buried, in the full glory of his Temple clothes, on a bench of earth in the hills above Colonia Juarez.
Ann Eliza’s other brother, seventy-year-old Edward Milo, was a contractor and cattleman in New Mexico during 1908. He had left the Mormon Church almost four decades before because of a violent quarrel with Brigham Young. Learning that his sister was being ill-treated by the Prophet, Edward Milo had gone to Brigham’s office to protest. Infuriated by the protest, Brigham—”a big man,” Edward Milo would ruefully record in his diary—lifted Ann Eliza’s brother off his feet and bodily threw him out of the office. Edward Milo would die in May of 1927, at the age of eighty-nine, and be buried near his father in Salt Lake City.
In 1908, besides Ann Eliza, only three of Brigham Young’s twenty-seven wives were still alive. The seventeenth wife, Margaret Pierce, had died the year before, but Amelia Folsom would live two more years, Harriet Barney three more years, and Eliza Burgess seven more years. The institution of plural marriage, which they had shared in common, would not die at all, at least not officially. A hard-core minority of Mormons, known as Fundamentalists, despite Woodruff’s manifesto and the threats of excommunication if exposed, continued to practice plural marriage in secret. Defiantly they practiced it in 1908, and defiantly, still, they practice it today. They flourish in Short Creek, Arizona, in Juab County, Utah, in Los Angeles, and, above all, in Salt Lake City itself. In 1959 a high official of the Mormon Church admitted to this writer that there were 2,000 polygamists in Salt Lake City; an attorney connected with the city administration placed the figure at closer to 5,000 polygamists. Their leading apologist was alleged to be an attorney named Joseph W. Musser, whose pamphlet Celestial or Plural Marriage defended the celestial system.
Of the male friends who had assisted Ann Eliza in shedding polygamy in 1873, and who had helped her escape to celebrity, only one was alive in 1908. The Reverend C. C. Stratton, a decade after assisting Ann Eliza, had left his Methodist flock in Salt Lake City to become president of the University of the Pacific and later president of Portland University, and he was still active in 1908. He would die in 1910.
In 1908 Ann Eliza was more alone than she had ever been. No one was interested in the windmill at which she tilted. Her second book failed in every way because polygamy had become a curiosity instead of a cause. And, in a year when people were talking about Elinor Glyn and the forty-seven-story Singer Building in New York, and Mischa Elman and Orville Wright and Jack Johnson and Henry Ford’s Model T, the twenty-seventh wife of Brigham Young was an anachronism.
It is rare in history that a celebrated person disappears completely, totally, from the public view. It has happened, of course, but infrequently. Yet, from the time Benjamin Bathurst, English diplomat in Vienna, disappeared on November 25, 1809, at Perleberg, Germany (he walked around his carriage horses toward an inn and evaporated from sight forever), until the time Ambrose Bierce, celebrated American author, entered Mexico in 1914 and was never seen or heard of again, there have been instances of well-known people who have dropped from sight with almost no clues as to their ultimate fate. Ann Eliza Young was one of these.
In 1908, when she was sixty-four, she published her book, and from that year on history knew her no more. She had vanished into thin air, or so it seemed.
No major research source in the United States or England, Mormon or Gentile, carries the story of Ann Eliza’s last years or the date of her death or the place of her grave. The Mormon Church Historian’s office, in Salt Lake City, has meticulous obituary records of Mormons and apostate Mormons, but its files (which have been examined) do not reveal Ann Eliza under Webb or Dee or Young or Denning. The huge Genealogical Library, in Salt Lake City, has extensive accounts on James L. Dee’s wives and children, and on Brigham Young’s wives and children, and Ann Eliza is noted in these, but her death date is missing.
No pro-Mormon or anti-Mormon book, past or present, furnishes the date of Ann Eliza’s demise. Even Kate B. Carter’s authoritative Brigham Young—His Wives and Family, published by the Daughters of Utah Pioneers, concludes its brief sketch of Ann Eliza by saying: “The date and place of her death are unknown.”
The great libraries of the world—the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the New York Public Library, the British Museum—do not know the year of Ann Eliza’s passing. The specialized or local libraries in those places where Ann Eliza lived—the Library of the Utah Historical Society and the Manistee Public Library—are also without information. The many histories of lecturing and lecturers, the extensive files of the Redpath Lyceum Bureau in Chicago, the encyclopedias of the world, do not have the date. Dozens of advertisements have brought replies from old-timers, both Mormon and Gentile, but not the final date; hundreds of letters to newspapers and cemeteries, everywhere, have furnished information but not the final date.
All that is known of Ann Eliza’s end are scattered rumors, but none can be confirmed. The unpublished portion of Susa Young Gates’ biography of her father, Brigham Young, concluded its section on Ann Eliza as follows: “What became of her? She married a business man in the East and lived until recent years, in comparative obscurity.” Since this was probably written in 1925, the phrase stating that Ann Eliza “lived until recent years” might imply that she died in the early 1920s.
Mrs. John A. Widtsoe, of Salt Lake City, granddaughter of Brigham Young and Lucy Bigelow, and daughter of Susa Young Gates, had once heard that Ann Eliza “died in poverty, in California, unloved and unknown.”
Helen Spencer Williams, of Salt Lake City, granddaughter of Brigham Young and Lucy Decker, had another locale for Ann Eliza’s interment. “I’ve always understood that she died in Arizona and the Mormon bishop there buried her.”
Gaylen Snow Young, of Salt Lake City, grandson of Brigham Young and Margaret Pierce, supported the more popular recollection that Ann Eliza had ended her years in the East. “The family gossip,” he said, “was that Ann Eliza had died in New York and been buried in a pauper’s grave, but I don’t know under what name.”
Margaret Hornung Perron, of San Jose, California, possessed an unpublished leather-bound diary of 400 typescript pages dictated by her father in 1935. Her father was John Hornung, who had been married to a niece of Ann Eliza. In his diary Hornung, who had met Ann Eliza in Manistee and considered her the most intelligent woman he had ever known, concluded several pages about her with a single line devoted to her death. “She died some years ago in Rochester [New York],” Hornung stated.
Dr. J. Edgar Lyon, of Salt Lake City, whose grandmother had been a housekeeper at the Lion House and the Gardo House, and whose mother had been acquainted with Ann Eliza, remembered an incident that shed some light on Ann Eliza’s last days. “Several years ago I was giving a lecture. There was some person present recently come from the East. That person commented that at the end Ann Eliza was so poor, unwell, and with no one to take care of her, that she finished her days in a rest or mental home.”
In the early 1930s, a woman researcher, working for the Work Projects Administration in Utah, was assigned to learn what had finally become of Ann Eliza. She interviewed Mabel Young Sanborn, Brigham Young’s daughter, “who related that Ann had died in poverty, and that the Church had put up some money for her burial, so she would not be buried in potter’s field.” The researcher then interviewed a member of the Mormon Church Historian’s Office, “who confirmed the story.” It was thought that Ann Eliza had died in Brooklyn.
Finally, in the summer of 1959, while doing research in Salt Lake City, this writer heard the strangest story of all. In a meeting with Ernest Dee, the surviving Dee born of James L. Dee’s second marriage, this writer inquired when Ann Eliza had died. Ernest Dee did not know, but he did know when she was last seen alive. Sometime between 1928 and 1930, Dee had gone to New York City on business for General Electric. Entering the Equitable Life Insurance Building, Dee found himself face to face with Rollins, Ann Eliza’s older grandson. Both men were surprised. “My goodness, Rollins, what are you doing here?” Dee asked. Rollins said that he was just about to leave for New Jersey on business. Dee inquired after several members of Rollins’ family and then wondered what had become of his grandmother, Ann Eliza. “Why,” said Rollins, “I just ran into her here a few minutes ago. She’s gone up the street toward 42nd and Broadway. Let’s go catch her.” Dee said that they then hurried through the crowds for several blocks, trying to locate Ann Eliza, but she was nowhere to be found. At last they gave up. Rollins was not disappointed to have missed her. “I hope to hell I never see her again,” he told Ernest Dee.
If Dee’s story is accurate, Ann Eliza would have been eighty-six when he almost saw her in New York City. However, Rollins’ daughter, who lives in Burlingame, California, doubts the time in which Dee placed the story. “My father would not have been in New York thirty years ago,” she says; “it would have been closer to thirty-five years ago—for he was not in New York after 1925— and he had made several business trips to New York from 1921-1925.
Based on such dim memories, it seems that Ann Eliza may have died at any time between 1909 and 1930 and anywhere from California to New York.
Perhaps it no longer matters where and when she died—for she was most alive when there was a fight to be fought, and after it was won, and the American harem was dead, then, figuratively, her life was ended too.
The gravestone is missing, but Ann Eliza Young’s monument still stands. Susan B. Anthony gave women the vote. Mary Walker and Victoria Woodhull gave women a career. But Ann Eliza Young, twenty-seventh wife, gave women the best gift of all— monogamy triumphant—one wife for one man, one wife and no more, to exclusively love, honor, and obey her mate to her heart’s content…