“Would you think that they could abduct me from here?”
—Ann Eliza Young
It is a curious fact of history that 1873—the year during which Ulysses S. Grant began his second term as President of the United States, financial panic bankrupted 5,000 businesses, yellow fever decimated the South, William “Boss” Tweed was convicted of fraud, and the cable car was introduced to San Francisco—was also the year in which a majority of Americans were fascinated, agitated, or otherwise preoccupied with the subject of life in a harem. For this strange absorption, two young ladies were largely responsible—one being a woman born in Wales who had spent five years in a Siamese harem, and the other being a woman born in Illinois who had spent four years in a United States harem.
The English authority on seraglio living was Mrs. Anna H. Leonowens. In 1873 her unusual book, The Romance of the Harem, was published by James R. Osgood and Company in Boston. Only three years earlier, Mrs. Leonowens had made a small but solid reputation with her first book The English Governess at the Siamese Court, the story of which would become better known in the next century as Anna and the King of Siam and The King and I. After her husband had died in India, the twenty-seven-year-old Mrs. Leonowens had accepted the job of tutor to the sixty-seven children of King Mongut of Muang Thai, or Siam. In her first book Mrs. Leonowens had narrated her adventures of five years in the barbaric court of a benevolent tyrant. Now, encouraged by her friends, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Harriet Beecher Stowe, she undertook in her second book to reveal the details of the Siamese king’s harem of 9,000 wives and concubines and to discuss the thirty wives and mistresses who were the mothers of his vast brood of children.
“Polygamy—-or, properly speaking, concubinage—and slavery are the curses of the country,” Mrs. Leonowens wrote in 1873. And then she added: “The number of concubines is limited only by the means of the man. As the king is the source of all wealth and influence, dependent kings, princes, and nobles, and all who would seek the royal favor, vie with each other in bringing their most beautiful and accomplished daughters to the royal harem… Woman is the slave of man.”
This Victorian exposure of Siamese polygamy, although less widely read than Jules Verne’s then current Around the World in Eighty Days, created heated discussions among its American readers. For these readers knew, as almost all Americans knew, that under their very noses, a short train ride away in the mountain fastness of the Territory of Utah, more than 10 percent of a large and growing colony of fellow American citizens were openly practicing a similar polygamy and that the Vermont-born leader of this colony had twenty-seven wives and fifty-six children. “Modern Mohammedanism,” Frances E. Willard, the temperance crusader, would write in Chicago, “has its Mecca at Salt Lake.”
Twenty-one years earlier Brigham Young, President of the Church of Latter-day Saints, had publicly proclaimed, as a divine revelation, the celestial tenet of plural marriage, or polygamy. In the two decades after, the practice of American polygamy had become the subject of intense and angry national—and even international—controversy. As early as 1856 the first Republican nominee for President, John Charles Frémont, had advocated a platform that inveighed against “those twin relics of barbarism—polygamy and slavery.” By 1873 slavery had been extirpated in an intramural bath of blood, but the other relic of barbarism remained and flourished.
The 100,000 Mormon Saints of Utah Territory, veterans of savage persecution, defended their God-given polygamy with passion. They had been directed to practice it by the Lord, they said. “The controversy is with God, not us,” remarked Eliza Roxey Snow, who had been a wife of Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism, and who was now platonically wedded to Brigham Young. The Mormons were only following in the footsteps of Abraham, they insisted, and performing a form of marriage that had been sanctioned by Luther, St. Augustine, and John Milton. Furthermore, they added, they were practicing plural marriage without lust and only for the purposes of procreation. “God never introduced the patriarchal order of marriage with a view to please man in his carnal desires,” said Brigham Young, “but He introduced it for the express purpose of raising up to His name royal priesthood, a peculiar people.” Heber C. Kimball, Brigham Young’s alter ego, who had forty-five wives and sixty-five children and was thought by a young visiting author to resemble an “Italian mountebank-physician of the seventeenth century,” put the matter more succinctly. “ ‘To be plain about it, Mr. Kimball, what did you get these wives for?’ “ Mr. Kimball once asked himself before a large assembly. And then he replied, “The Lord told me to get them. ‘What for?’ To raise up young ‘Mormons’—not to have women to commit whoredoms with, to gratify the lusts of the flesh, but to raise up children.” As a result of this passionless polygamy, the Mormons pointed out, they had done away with the evils of spinsterhood, prostitution, adultery, and other small cancers of the outer monogamous world.
But the outer monogamous world of Gentiles, as the Mormons liked to call all nonbelievers, remained outraged and horrified and continued to react with indignation for more than two decades. Gentiles persisted in believing that Mormons were satisfying not God but their lower carnal instincts. The Gentile attitude was personified in an anecdote told about the polygamous shereef of Morocco. Dr. Edward Westermarck, a scholar on marital evolution, had accompanied a group of English ladies on a visit to the Moorish shereef. One English lady asked the ruler why his Moors did not satisfy themselves with one wife as did Europeans. The shereef seemed amazed. “Why, one cannot always eat fish,” he said.
Between Gentiles and Mormons there was no meeting of minds on polygamy. Captain Richard F. Burton, fresh from an excursion to Mecca, had visited Salt Lake City and clearly defined the conflict: “The anti-Mormons declare that it [polygamy] is at once fornication and adultery—a sin which absorbs all others. The Mormons point triumphantly to the … absence of that uncleanness and licentiousness which distinguish the cities of the civilized world.”
The enemies of Mormon polygamy, while all moral indignation and righteousness and prattling persistently of hearth and family, often had their own private reasons, conscious or unconscious, for opposing plural marriage. Clergymen saw the appeal of the practice as a threat to the older, established religions. Businessmen, worried about the Mormons’ cooperative economic structure, and politicians, worried about the Mormons’ united voting power, saw polygamy as a useful red herring for achieving their deeper purposes. Male reformers, perhaps jealous of the “sexual variationism afforded by having a number of wives with whom to go to bed,” and female reformers, recognizing the system as a threat to their own security and yet piqued by evidences of male Mormon virility, converted their guilts into moral protest. Gentiles inside Utah, as well as many who had once lived there or passed through, often masked personal interest and self-profit in shocked virtue.
For twenty-one years the campaign against so-called Yankee harem life continued unabated. Horace Greeley, after a firsthand investigation, wrote: “Fanaticism, and a belief that we are God’s especial, exclusive favorites, will carry most of us a great way; but the natural instinct in every woman’s breast must teach her that to be some man’s third or fourth wife is to be no wife at all.” Harriet Beecher Stowe pleaded for her countrymen to “loose the bonds of a cruel slavery whose chains have cut into the very hearts of thousands of our sisters—a slavery which debases and degrades womanhood and the family.” J. H. Beadle, newspaper publisher and ghost writer, stated: “The white inhabitants of Utah are the only branch of the Caucasian race that have adopted polygamy within many hundred years… It has shown a marked and rapid tendency towards evil, and in many of its features probably worse than in any Mohammedan country.” Fanny Stenhouse, whose husband had succumbed to the allurements of plural marriage but later repented, wrote: “Visitors will come from Utah and will tell you that the Mormon women are happy in Polygamy, for it is a part of their religion. Never; until new hearts and new natures are given to the women of Utah, and all that is womanly, and pure, and sacred, is crushed out from their souls, can one single woman be truly happy in Polygamy!” As to the puritanical restraint to be found in polygamy, a daughter-in-law of Brigham Young had the last word. “If Salt Lake City were roofed over,” she said in the New York Times, “it would he the biggest whorehouse in the world.”
Whether or not Mormon polygamy made of Salt Lake City a temple of godliness or a whorehouse was still the dominant issue on the American scene in 1873. The appearance of Mrs. Anna H. Leonowens’ factual book The Romance of the Harem stirred the fire of debate anew, but what made the fire a raging blaze was the dramatic action of an attractive and ailing young lady in Utah.
Her name was Ann Eliza Webb Young, a Mormon by birth, an actress, a divorcée and, most important, the twenty-seventh and last wife of Brigham Young. In the summer of 1873 Ann Eliza Young deserted her husband, Brigham Young, Prophet and colonizer, and sued him for a divorce. Eventually she succeeded in putting him in jail, and the repercussions rocked his Church to its very foundations.
By her defection and daring—at risk of losing reputation and life, she insisted—and by subsequently raising her voice more loudly against the American harem than any voice had ever been raised before, Ann Eliza Young struck polygamy in the United States its greatest blow, a blow from which it never recovered. Overnight, it seemed, she became a wonder, to last not nine days or nine months but nine years. Because of Ann Eliza Young, twenty-seventh wife, the intimate secrets of the American harem would become public property, the extremely vigorous relic of barbarism would be relegated to historical curiosity and sexual oddity, and the emerging field of professional lecturing would have its first sensational box-office star, at last.
At daybreak of Tuesday, July 15, 1873, three horse-drawn furniture vans stood before a new two-story adobe dwelling. This dwelling, of Gothic design, with steep gables and stained windows, was located on the southwest corner of South Temple and Second East streets in Salt Lake City, Territory of Utah. Hastily, almost furtively, before the city could come awake, the movers toiled to empty the house of its furnishings.
Inside the house, in the high-ceilinged parlor, Ann Eliza Young nervously directed the movers through the many cramped rooms, downstairs and upstairs. Explaining her tension of that morning, Ann Eliza wrote: “My plans were quickly laid, and with the assistance of friends whom I had found in this hour of trouble, were carried into instant execution, before they could be discovered by Mormon spies.”
During much of the six months before, Ann Eliza Young had been bedridden and too ill to revolt against her lonely, loveless, and impoverished life as twenty-seventh wife of Brigham Young. Throughout that period she had been regularly attended by Dr. J. N. Williamson, who charged her no fee. “She is suffering from diseases peculiar to females,” the good physician later announced, “which causes her much pain, and has pain in her back, as also a bearing-down pain, causing her to become very nervous.” What Ann Eliza required, said the physician, were “nursing and sympathy.” Since she received neither from her famous and notorious husband, Ann Eliza looked to her friends, among them a clergyman, an attorney, a retired general, a newspaperman, and several boarders, to give her the advice and encouragement that she needed in this emotional crisis. At last, aided by these friends, and summoning up the last of her physical stamina, she had made her decision: to cross swiftly from the cloistered world of the Latter-day Saints to the spacious world of the non-Mormons, to escape the most widely publicized harem on earth for the freer air of the monogamous household, to do what no other wife of Brigham Young had yet done—walk out on him without his consent or knowledge.
Standing now in her parlor, watching the movers carry off her frayed, shabby furniture, Ann Eliza Young, despite her recent travail, was still a strikingly handsome young woman. At twenty-nine years of age, tall and lithe, she wore her dark-brown hair youthfully loose around her shoulders. Her deep-blue eyes, broad fine nose, rich red lips and white teeth contrasted sharply with her pale complexion. Her face was at once sweet and sad, yet, disconcertingly, a flashing trick of the eyes and a firm chin gave evidences of hidden inner strength. On this early morning she favored a long flowing dress of plain black, as if mourning the four years of her second marriage, yet there were tiny celebrations in the white linen collar and cuffs, the green necktie, the jet earrings and breastpin. In a few days a reporter from the New York Herald, meeting her, would shake his head incredulously in print: “The first drought was that the Prophet was intensely stupid to have driven that beauty from the harem.”
In forty minutes the three moving vans were filled. Now they rumbled off to deposit their cargoes with an auctioneer. In another day the furniture of Ann Eliza and Brigham Young would be sold for $380. And Ann Eliza would not be displeased. “The furniture was worth almost nothing, being old and worn, and of common quality at its best,” she said, “but my friends bought it at large prices, ‘to help the young apostate’….”
With the three moving vans gone, Ann Eliza sought the younger of the two sons she had had by her first marriage. This was eight-year-old Leonard Lorenzo Dee. His brother, Edward Wesley Dee, older by a year, had earlier been sent to the plural household of Ann Eliza’s mother, ten miles south of Salt Lake City, ostensibly for no other purpose than a change of scene and a vacation. Now, taking young Leonard in hand, Ann Eliza hastily left the desolate dwelling that Brigham Young had built for her and made her way to the home near the Methodist Episcopal Church in Third South Street where waited her protectors, the Reverend and Mrs. C. C. Stratton.
Until she had begun to take in boarders to help support herself, with Brigham Young’s enthusiastic permission, Ann Eliza had regarded all non-Mormons or Gentiles as the progeny of Satan. Then, at a social gathering in the house of a lady friend, she met an infidel named Howard Sawyer, and she was pleasantly surprised to find that he did not have horns. Shortly after, at another social in the home of a Mormon, she met Howard Sawyer again, and he in turn introduced her to the Reverend C. C. Stratton, who was fortuitously present.
For almost two decades after the founding of Salt Lake City, the Mormon religion had an exclusive hold on the community. In 1865 a fiery, anti-polygamist army chaplain, the Reverend Norman McLeod, preached for the Congregational Church in that city. On a fundraising trip east, the Reverend McLeod testified against plural marriage before a Congressional committee and was warned by Mormons not to return. He heeded their warning and did not reappear in Salt Lake City until 1872. A Catholic priest Father E. Kelly came to Salt Lake City in 1866 but failed in his efforts at proselytizing. The Catholics did not come to stay until 1871, when Brigham Young contributed a piece of land and $500 toward the building of their church. Two Protestant preachers, the Reverend George W. Foote and the Reverend Thomas W. Haskins, came in 1867. Brigham Young had little objection; the missionaries proved ineffectual, acquiring only 101 converts in three years. By 1870 the first Methodist preacher, the Reverend G. M. Peirce, appeared and delivered his sermons in a hayloft over a livery stable. Apparently his work made some inroads. In a year the Methodists had built a $50,000 church, the first non-Mormon place of worship in Salt Lake City or in Utah. In 1872 the Reverend Stratton took over this church, and though the Methodists would have no more than 189 converts by 1882, Stratton himself was soon regarded as one of the foremost non-Mormons in the territory.
Now, at the Mormon social, the Reverend Stratton began to converse with Brigham Young’s twenty-seventh wife. The clergyman was fascinated, since Sawyer had told him that he might question Ann Eliza freely and that he would receive “frank and honest” answers. Ann Eliza, too, was fascinated. “Mr. Stratton was the first representative of a religion outside the Mormon belief whom I had ever met,” she said, “and I listened anxiously to every word he said, hoping to find some ray of light and cheer.” The clergyman was persuasive, and Ann Eliza left the party feeling, she admitted, “very strongly drawn toward the world which he and Mr. Sawyer represented.”
Some weeks afterward, suffering the vapors and an increasing disenchantment with her religion, her husband, her lot as a harem wife, Ann Eliza “remembered Mr. Stratton’s kindly words.” She summoned a sympathetic boarder and railroad man, Malcolm Graham, and begged him to take a message to the Reverend Stratton. The boarder Graham was glad to oblige. He felt that Ann Eliza was being mistreated. Although she was ill and without food, medicines, or servants, Graham would vouch that he “never saw said Brigham Young at the house of Mrs. Young and never heard of his visiting her.” Ann Eliza was “in danger of actual starvation,” Graham would testify, and she survived only through the good offices of her boarders and neighbors. Graham needed no urging to play good Samaritan. He hastened forthwith to the Reverend Stratton with Ann Eliza’s request for an interview.
That same afternoon the Reverend and Mrs. Stratton met with the distraught Ann Eliza. “They received me so cordially,” recorded Ann Eliza, “that my heart went out in love toward them at once. I talked to them unreservedly, and opened my soul to them. I told them of my childhood, my religious training, my unhappy domestic experience, and all the occurrences of my marriage to Brigham Young. They listened with earnest sympathy, and when I finished my story, were overflowing with words of pity and consolation. I shall never forget them in my life. They were the sweetest words which had ever been spoken to me, for they helped me to see the way out of bondage.”
Returning to her boardinghouse, Ann Eliza seemed instilled with a new courage. There was, she said, “a resolution forming in my mind, which was speedily to overturn my whole life, and bring me into a new and strange existence.” Ann Eliza began to see the Reverend Stratton more and more frequently. She told him, the clergyman would remember, “that her soul was not in the Mormon Church, and that she was merely a nominal wife to President Young, living in a separate house and receiving no share of his attentions, and that she wished to be set free by United States law.” This, then, was her resolve: to leave Brigham Young’s harem and divorce him.
Although Ann Eliza was emotional about her need to be free, the Reverend Stratton viewed her predicament and future more objectively. He reminded her, conservative shepherd that he was, that she possessed “a comfortable home” and some small support from Brigham Young. If she left him, she would lose both home and support. Furthermore, she might find herself faced with even worse hardship. The United States law might not recognize her polygamous marriage, and, if it failed to do so, she would be no more than an escaped concubine and utterly destitute. He wondered if it might not be the better part of wisdom to continue as harem wife until Congress could legislate on her behalf or until God saw fit to help her. But by now Ann Eliza was out of patience with both Congress and God. She wanted her freedom at once. In that case, said the Reverend Stratton, she must find “a competent attorney.” For himself, he had tried to give her the grimmest picture of reality, of the difficulties that lay ahead, but once she understood them and yet determined to go ahead, then he would be staunchly beside her all the way.
The “competent attorney” appeared as if by divine intervention. Ann Eliza had rooms to let in her house at three dollars a week, and among her newest boarders appeared the Missouri-born, thirty-year-old Judge Albert Hagan, a member of the bar, and his wife. Hagan, Ann Eliza would learn, had been a colonel in the Confederacy until his capture in Kentucky, where he had met and married his wife nine years earlier. After the war he had moved to Santa Cruz, California, to practice mining law, and now he had decided to seek his fortune in Salt Lake City.
Shortly after the arrival of the Hagans, Ann Eliza had occasion to visit with her husband, Brigham Young, and during that visit she found him extremely disagreeable. Wounded, she returned to the boardinghouse and made no effort to hide her bitterness.
“Mrs. Hagan’s kindly eyes discovered my distress,” said Ann Eliza, “and she instantly begged my confidence. I gave it unreservedly and fully. She asked leave to tell her husband, and he, indignant at the treatment I was receiving, consulted with other lawyers, and all agreed in advising me to bring a suit against Brigham for divorce and alimony.
“Mr. Hagan assured me that if I did not gain the suit, I should have found a way of getting out of my life in Mormonism; that it would be a test case, showing how the polygamous wives of Mormons stood in the law, and that I would find ready sympathy from the outside world.”
Faced with the moment of final decision, Ann Eliza hesitated. Her upbringing in the Mormon faith, the unshakable devotion of her beloved mother to the faith, the terrifying idea of daring to strike at the powerful Prophet briefly undermined her resolve. Judge Hagan told her that he must make a short business trip to California. He hoped that she would seriously consider his advice and added that he would expect a final decision upon his return.
After Judge Hagan had left, two Ward Teachers of the Mormon Church, during their routine visits, paid a courtesy call on Ann Eliza. One of the Teachers inquired, as if by rote, “Sister Young, do you enjoy the spirit of our religion?” Angrily Ann Eliza exclaimed, “No, sir, I do not.”
Stunned, the Ward Teachers proceeded to lecture Ann Eliza. Finally they pleaded with her to be rebaptized, assuring her this magnificent experience would restore her faith. Wearied by evangelism, Ann Eliza consented to go through the ceremony once more. But, on appearing at the Endowment House, she was obstructed for two hours by red tape. At last, because she was the Prophet’s wife, she was admitted before a contingent of Danish emigrants.
The rebaptizing of Ann Eliza began. “The men officiating were talking and laughing as if engaged in an every-day affair,” she remembered, “while I was trying to feel solemn and to exercise faith—a signal failure, I assure you. I was led into the water by a great strapping fellow, who mumbled a few words over me and plunged me in. I was taken from the water gasping for breath, and placed in a chair. Some more words were spoken over me, and the farce ended. Everything was done in such a business-like manner, with an utter absence of anything of a devotional nature, that I was thoroughly disgusted, and made no further effort to believe in Mormonism or its ordinances.”
To survive the trauma of having abandoned, within herself, her lifelong faith, and to avoid facing the decision she must make upon Judge Hagan’s return, Ann Eliza devoted herself more busily than ever to her boardinghouse. As if this might solve everything, she desperately tried to make the venture a success. Her guest rooms were filled, and to serve her added roomers she realized that she needed a larger stove. Since it was a practical necessity, she found the courage to visit her husband, Brigham Young, in his office.
He looked up from his desk to listen as she pleaded for the larger stove.
When she was through, his heavy face showed surprise. “I believe you are keeping boarders,” he said.
“Yes, I am, and that is why I want the stove. I cannot do the necessary cooking on the one I have.”
Brigham was annoyed. “If you want a cooking stove, you’ll get it yourself. I’ve put you into a good house, and you must see to the rest. I cannot afford to have so many people calling on me for every little thing they happen to think they want.”
Heartsick over his refusal and his coldness, Ann Eliza determined never to call on him again. She made her way back to the boardinghouse, and on the way back she brushed aside the last web of indecision.
When Judge Hagan returned from California, Ann Eliza was waiting for him. They conferred, and once Hagan felt satisfied that the twenty-seventh wife would stand firm, he brought his new partners, two prominent local attorneys, Judge F. M. Smith and Judge Frank Tilford, into the case. Since the case was, as the Reverend Stratton had warned, unprecedented and possibly weak (for it was questionable if a Federal court would recognize all plural wives of a single husband as legal wives by civil law), Judge Hagan sought to plug every loophole.
There is reason to believe that, before allowing Ann Eliza to make her move, Judge Hagan proceeded to enlist in her cause first all her friends and his own and then influential Mormon haters who might prove useful. Among these Gentile supporters were the Federal judge who might try the case, a politician of military reputation to serve as Ann Eliza’s legal “next friend” in court, and a newspaperman employed by the anti-Mormon mouthpiece, the Salt Lake City Tribune.
Of this triumvirate of aides—all became Ann Eliza’s close friends, and one was later thought to have become her lover—the most important and valuable was Judge James B. McKean, the High Justice of Utah. Like his arch enemy, Brigham Young, Judge McKean was born in Vermont. In his varied career he had been both Methodist preacher and a member of the bar in New York. He was handsome, scholarly, and genial in all matters except the subject of polygamy. According to Mormon sources, when President Ulysses S. Grant appointed McKean to the Federal bench in Utah during 1869, McKean remarked to the President’s brother-in-law that whenever he found local laws interfering with him he would “by God’s blessing… trample them under my feet.” Non-Mormons doubted if McKean had ever been so indiscreet, but when the forty-nine-year-old judge arrived in Utah the year after his appointment, he promptly established a record for unrelenting belligerence against the Latter-day Saints.
Once, charging a jury in Salt Lake City, Judge McKean thundered forth, “I venture the prediction that the day is not far in the future when the disloyal high priesthood of the so-called Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints shall bow to and obey the laws that are elsewhere respected, or else those laws will grind them to powder.” Writing to the United States Attorney General in Washington, D. C., Judge McKean stated: “If, in any age, there was ever a part of Christian land so utterly abandoned to the leadership of impostors, criminals, and traitors, as in this territory, I have never heard of it.”
History has passed no objective verdict on Judge McKean. The non-Mormon, R. N. Baskin, United States District Attorney in Utah, praised him: “As a citizen he was without blemish. Free, literally free from every vice, punctual in his engagements, fair in his dealings, truthful in his statements, honest in his convictions, sincere in his professions, ardent in his friendships, and earnest in his devotions.” The Mormon historian Brigham H. Roberts thought that was not the point at all and damned Judge McKean. “History is concerned with Judge McKean in his career as a public officer, and what boots his private virtues of temperance and general uprightness in private life, if by guidance of a half-insane prejudice and an overpowering bigotry, and intense hatred of a system of religion which does not meet with his approval, he is led by his fanaticism into usurpations of authority and the wresting of the law to gratify his personal malice.”
Ann Eliza Young could have no better collaborator in court. Nor could her attorney, Judge Hagan. Ann Eliza would always remember that Judge McKean “took special interest” in her “and helped her to arrive at her conclusion to sacrifice herself and her own inclinations for the good of others.”
Next to stand beside Ann Eliza in her fight was General George R. Maxwell, a wounded veteran of the Civil War, who was serving as Federal Registrar of the Land Office in the Territory of Utah. “He was disposed to conviviality on rather a large scale,” reported S. A. Kenner, a journalist friend, “and generally kept a long way from the methods of deportment which are supposed to characterize the typical Sunday School teacher; but much was overlooked in him because of having fought as a Union soldier through the Civil War and been literally shot to pieces.” Three years before meeting Ann Eliza, Maxwell had run for territorial delegate to Congress against Captain William H. Hooper, Brigham Young’s candidate. Maxwell’s chances were about those of Custer obtaining a majority vote from the Sioux. Of the 20,000 votes cast, General Maxwell received 1,500. Later he protested Captain Hooper’s election on the grounds of Hooper’s disloyalty to the United States government, but to no avail. Now, stimulated by Ann Eliza’s determination to contest the Prophet, General Maxwell prepared to support her in court.
The last of Ann Eliza’s backers was the thirty-five-year-old James Burton Pond, a newspaperman on the Salt Lake City Tribune. Pond, a handsome widower of two years, lived with his young daughter as one of Ann Eliza’s boarders. His background was colorful. His father had been a blacksmith in Allegany County, New York, where he had been born. Raised in Kenosha, Wisconsin, he became a printer in Fond du Lac at fifteen and was carrying a Sharps’ rifle for John Brown in Kansas at eighteen. After scaling Pikes Peak, he enlisted in a Union guerrilla unit during the Civil War and was cited for gallantry in action against Quantrill’s raiders and commissioned a major. After the war he became a restless wanderer and journalist, settling at last in Salt Lake City, where he divided his time between covering news for the Tribune and managing a furniture store. Of all Ann Eliza’s friends, it was Major Pond who, at the crucial moment, would be the most useful to her. One day, too, he would be accused of scandalous conduct with his protégé.
On July 10, 1873, Ann Eliza, encouraged by her supporters, visited the Reverend Stratton one last time before her moment of decision. She reported the activities of Judge Hagan and his two associates on her behalf. She said that Judge Hagan was ready to proceed. The reverend could only give her his blessings. Nowhere would she find counselors of higher integrity, he said, and if they had the means to win her suit, she should bind herself to them to the bitter end.
And so, on the morning of July 15, 1873, Ann Eliza moved out Brigham’s furniture and sold it off and hastily put herself under the protection of the Reverend and Mrs. Stratton. She spent a fearful afternoon with her mentors, waiting for nightfall. “In the evening,” she said, “Mr. and Mrs. Stratton took us to the Walker House, the Gentile hotel, which became my Salt Lake City home.” The line between two worlds had been crossed, the deed was done, and now, for Ann Eliza Young, there was no turning back.
The one-year-old Walker House, perhaps the foremost hotel in the Rocky Mountains, was an imposing four-story structure, with six colonnades and a balcony guarding the entrance. Its advertisements to weary travelers, published throughout the territory, read: “This House is the largest and best appointed House in Utah Territory, and has accommodations for three hundred and fifty guests. Streetcars and carriages connect with the White Sulphur Baths. Reading rooms, containing papers from all points. Baths, Bar, Telegraph, news and cigar stand attached to the House.” This was the stronghold of Brigham Young’s opposition, a fortress for transients that pitted itself against the Prophet’s enormous Tabernacle, his private harem in the Lion House, and the executive offices in the Bee Hive House. Here Judge McKean, Judge Hagan, General Maxwell, and reporter Pond were familiar faces, and here lodged most prominent and inquisitive visitors from the Midwest and East, like President Ulysses S. Grant, Phineas T. Barnum, Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, General William T. Sherman, George Francis Train, Vice-President Schuyler Colfax, Mr. and Mrs. Tom Thumb, and Dom Pedro II, Emperor of Brazil.
Ann Eliza’s entrance into the gaslit lobby of the hotel, her registration, and her climb to the uppermost floor with her eight-year-old son and the Strattons occasioned only the slightest curiosity, for news of the abdication from her position as one of the queens of the harem was not yet public. On the fourth floor a suite of two small, neat rooms, in which her personal effects had already been deposited, stood ready. The narrow drawing room, or parlor, was furnished with a chaise longue, marble-topped bureau, small table and solid black walnut chairs, sewing machine, and Ann Eliza’s trunk. The adjoining room was the bedroom, dominated by its large double bed.
After Ann Eliza had put her son, Leonard, to sleep, she rejoined the Strattons. The hotel was alien, and she was unaccountably afraid. The Strattons had previously invited her to lodge with them, and now, for a moment, she regretted not having accepted their offer. Probably they renewed their invitation. But Ann Eliza sensed that from this night forward she must bear the main brunt of her decision alone. If she sought refuge with the Strattons, she reasoned, “I should expose them to Mormon fury and endanger their lives and their home.” With determination—and “untold fear and dread”—she decided to remain in Walker House.
After the Strattons had departed, Ann Eliza opened her trunk. She found the precious framed photographs of her mother, father, two brothers, and other relatives, and hung them about the drawing room. For a moment this was comforting. At last she undressed. After removing the long black dress and high button kid shoes, she stood, smaller than before, in her chemise and drawers. There were two windows facing out on Temple Street. She turned down the gas lamps and moved to a window. Below, the street lights were lit, illuminating the horse carriages that passed in either direction. Peering off, she could see the boxlike Endowment House where her time of trouble had begun, and the six-year-old elliptical Tabernacle. In the darkness beyond, she knew, soared the majestic Wasatch Mountains and, behind their sentry summits, a haven of liberty which she was yet unsure that she would ever attain.
Shivering and exhausted, she went to bed. However, this night was not meant for sleep, but instead for a nightmare of wide-awake dreams.
Even three years later, when recalling the hours of that long night and the thoughts of that long night in her autobiography, every fear of it remained vivid in memory, like the horror of a black room in childhood:
“Imagine, if you can, my feelings, on being alone with my little child, in a strange place, under such peculiar circumstances. I had abandoned my religion, left father, mother, home, and friends—deliberately turned away from them all, knowing that the step I was taking could never be retraced. My heart cried out for my mother, who I knew would be more sorely stricken with my action than any one else in the world. I would have spared her if I could, but I was powerless to act in any other manner.
“It was the first time in my life that I had been in a hotel; and, as I was among people who I had been taught were my bitterest enemies, I was overwhelmed by a sense of desolate helplessness. I did not know what my fate would be. Every footstep in the halls startled me; for I expected that each would bring some one to summon me to a dreadful death. I fully believed that was to be my last night on earth, so I prepared for death; but the agony of suspense was awful. I had been taught that no deed was too bad, no outrage too dastardly, for the Gentiles to commit upon the Mormons; and here I had allowed myself to be placed so fully in their power that they might do with me as they pleased, and my fate would never be known.”
Suddenly she wondered why she did not leave this foreign place and return to the world so safely if unhappily known and find refuge with a Mormon friend. And then she realized that no Mormon would dare to protect her. “I was in open rebellion against their leader,” she remembered, “and had I remained one day among them, my doom would have been irrevocably fixed.” Gradually, through the dark morning hours, the conviction grew that the Gentiles—the Reverend Stratton, Judge McKean, General Maxwell, Major Pond, Judge Hagan—were her true allies and that her real enemies were those whom she had fled—Brigham Young, the Apostles of the Church, the avenging Danites.
Her image of death being imminent had not changed. But the specter figure of the one who would deliver that death changed, shifted from faceless Gentile to familiar Mormon. No Danite, she decided in terror, would allow her to remain alive in this hostile hotel or to escape Utah Territory.
Ann Eliza knew by heart many of the public threats Brigham Young had thundered forth from the Tabernacle pulpit against apostates, those who had forsaken the faith. One of Brigham’s threats she particularly recollected: “The time is coming when justice will be laid to the line and righteousness to the plummet: when we shall take the old broadsword, and ask, ‘Are you for God?’ and if you are not heartily on the Lord’s side, you will he hewn down.”
For all her fantasies about Brigham Young’s murderous intent, it was unlikely that Brigham Young would have dared, or even desired, to send an assassin into a bedroom of Walker House to garrote or knife his twenty-seventh wife. Yet nothing was utterly impossible on that still rough and paranoiac frontier. Moreover, there was every evidence that the Mormons had maintained, in their earlier days in Missouri and Illinois, and perhaps still in Utah in the summer of 1873, a special secret-service force to frighten off or even dispose of dangerous enemies of the Church.
Certainly, in 1838, when there was more need of such an organization, the Mormons had formed a “death society,” as Elder John Hyde labeled it. At first this society was called Daughters of Zion or Daughters of Gideon, after a Biblical quotation, but this was regarded as too effeminate an appellation for a band of strong and bearded young men. Next the society was called the Destroying Angels, but that was considered as overly theatrical and the name briefly became the Big Fan, which symbolized the blades of a threshing machine. Finally, from a verse in Genesis—”Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse’s heels, so that his rider shall fall backward”—the Sons of Dan, soon shortened to Danites, was permanently adopted.
The Mormons always justified having these armed bands by citing their need for defensive units against persecutors, and this was probably a sincere explanation, as far as it went. Ann Eliza persistently argued that the Danites were organized only “for the purpose of plundering and harassing the people of the surrounding country. I have been told this by a person who heard the oaths administered at a meeting of the band in Daviess County.”
Under two paid assassins, one named Orrin Porter Rockwell, a long-haired man who was said to have shot the governor of Missouri, and the other William Hickman, who published his confessions of mayhem in a paperback book in 1870, the Danite idea seemed to survive the exodus west. “Some of the leading spirits of that band are still in Salt Lake City,” wrote Elder Hyde in 1857. “Although they do not maintain their organization, being generally merged into Brigham’s Life Guards, yet without the same name, they have performed the same deeds.”
In i860 Horace Greeley gave some credence to the continuing rumors of threat and violence. United States soldiers encamped near Salt Lake City had told him “that not less than seventy-five distinct instances of murder by Mormons because of apostacy… are known to the authorities here.” Greeley had heard of the poor Parrish family. “The family had been Mormons, but had apostatized—and undertook to return to the states; they were warned that they would be killed if they persisted in that resolution; they did persist, and were killed.” Coolly weighing the highly colored stories of Mormon homicide, Greeley concluded: “Some of these may have been fabricated by Gentile malice—others are doubtless exaggerated—but there is some basis of truth for the current Gentile conviction that the Mormons have robbed, maimed, and even killed persons in this territory … I deeply regret the necessity of believing this; but the facts are incontestable.”
A year later Captain Richard Burton also conversed with the soldiers outside Salt Lake City. “These anti-Mormons declare that ten murders per annum during the last twelve years have been committed without punishment in New Zion… They attribute the phenomenon to the impossibility of obtaining testimony, and the undue white-washing action of juries…”
During the first year of Ann Eliza’s marriage to Brigham Young, the anti-Mormon J. H. Beadle reported somewhat luridly to his public: “This lawless banditti went after the contumacious stranger with bowie-knives and Colt’s revolvers.” If the stranger refused to depart the territory, his fate was sealed. “He would never again be heard from; the mission of the ‘destroying angel’ was sudden, sure, and complete.” And a mere two years before Ann Eliza’s defection, Mark Twain had repeated stories heard from Gentiles of how Rockwell and Hickman led “assassinations of intractable Gentiles.” At no time did Ann Eliza believe that Brigham Young himself had ever committed a murder. But she was sure that he directed the Danites. “In this way,” she said, “Brigham Young had managed a great many murders, of which he would probably avow himself entirely guiltless, since his hands did not perform the deed… He looks clean enough outwardly, but within he is filled with moral rottenness to the very core.” But, of course, by this time Ann Eliza was an angry wife.
Rigid in her strange bed, awaiting either death or daylight, Ann Eliza Young slept not a wink that night.
“I laid awake all night wishing for the day to dawn, yet fearing that I should never see it; and when the first ray of light came through my windows I was relieved and hopeful.”
But relieved as she may have been to have survived the long night, and hopeful as she may have been to welcome the brightening new day, she could not begin to foresee the mingled victories and defeats, joys and miseries, peace and scandals, that would crowd the weeks, months, and decades that lay ahead. Perhaps it was better not to know, to be unable to imagine the future. Perhaps thus, finally, as she stirred on the alien bed, her apprehensive mind turned slowly backward to all that had been so incredible, improbable, bizarre, to all in the past that had brought her to this moment of secret flight and refuge….