“Whenever I see a pretty woman I have to pray for grace.”
—Joseph Smith
She was born Ann Eliza Webb in the embattled community of Nauvoo, Illinois, on September 13, 1844.
It was the year of “Fifty-four forty or fight” and “What hath God wrought?” It was the year of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and Poe’s balloon hoax. It was the year thirty-nine-year-old Joseph Smith, the first Mormon, while running for President of the United States against James K. Polk and Henry Clay, was brutally murdered by a lynch mob. It was also the year that a forty-two-year-old carpenter and Mormon missionary, Brigham Young, replaced the martyred Smith as head of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
There had been four children in the Webb family before Ann Eliza’s birth, three older brothers, Chauncey Gilbert, known as Gilbert, Edward Milo, and Lorenzo Dow, and one sister, Helen Maria. Ann Eliza was the only girl in the family to survive to maturity alongside of her brothers. She was also the last offspring of the union of her parents. Her father, Chauncey G. Webb, a carriage maker, was thirty-two at her birth, and her mother, Eliza Churchill Webb, a schoolteacher, was twenty-seven.
The organized Mormon Church had been in existence only fourteen years when Anna Eliza was born, and her parents had been among the earliest and most devout converts to the new faith. Both had joined the Church within three years of its founding, and it was this membership, as much as any genetic chromosomes, that shaped Ann Eliza’s entire destiny.
For fuller understanding of most lives one “must begine at ye very roote” of the family tree, the early Puritan William Bradford once remarked. But in the peculiar case of Ann Eliza Webb, the most powerful character influences grew not out of her ancestral roots but out of the foundations of her church.
The Mormonism that dominated and shaped Ann Eliza’s parents and herself took hold in a time of religious revival and ferment. Hallelujah was the common word on all lips. Although the young nation was strongly Presbyterian and Methodist, sectarian utopias flourished. Joseph Smith’s Mormonism was the natural heir to Conrad Beisel’s Ephrata Society, Lucy Wright’s Shaker cult, Robert Owen’s New Harmony, and John Humphrey Noyes’ Oneida Colony.
Ann Eliza’s parents, of course, subscribed to the Mormon version of the Church’s beginnings. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had its birth on a summer’s day in a lovely grove of trees outside Palmyra, New York, in the northeastern part of that state. Joseph Smith, Junior, the fifteen-year-old son of a Presbyterian farmer, became confused by the Babel of religious exhortations. Seeking the true way, he consulted his Bible, and in the Epistle of James he read: “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God…” Wandering out into the grove adjoining his family’s farm, he finally knelt and asked of God. Perhaps he was not surprised when a brilliant light appeared before him. The interior area of light, he saw at once, was inhabited. “I saw two personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air,” he later recorded. The pair introduced themselves as God and Son. With remarkable aplomb, young Smith asked which religious sect he might best join. He was advised, firmly and at length, to join none, since none were worthy of him.
Subsequently Smith described his vision to a local Methodist clergyman. The preacher treated the story with “contempt” and reminded Smith “that all such things had ceased with the apostles.” But Smith, understandably, felt that the time of miracles and visions was not past, and he began to recount his adventure to one and all. For three years he buttonholed cynics and was scorned. Meanwhile, as relief from occasional labors, he indulged himself in the pleasures of the flesh. “I frequently fell into many foolish errors,” he tactfully admitted later, “and displayed the weakness of youth and the foibles of human nature.”
But, as one who had seen a vision, his sins weighed heavily upon him. One night, in September of 1823, when he was eighteen, Smith prayed for forgiveness in the privacy of his bedroom. At once the brilliant light returned, and again it was occupied. “A personage appeared at my bedside, standing in the air, for his feet did not touch the floor,” said Smith. “He had on a loose robe of most exquisite whiteness.” The unfamiliar visitor announced himself as the angel Moroni, a messenger from the Maker. The angel, Smith recalled, said “that God had a work for me to do; and that my name should be had for good and evil among all nations, kindreds, and tongues… He said there was a book deposited, written upon gold plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent, and the source from whence they sprang. He also said that the fulness of the everlasting Gospel was contained in it, as delivered by the Savior to the ancient inhabitants; also, that there were two stones in silver bows—and these stones, fastened to a breastplate, constituted what is called the Urim and Thummim —deposited with the plates; and the possession and use of these stones were what constituted seers in ancient or former times; and that God had prepared them for the purpose of translating the book.”
Although Moroni temporarily departed, it remained a social and sleepless night for Joseph Smith, Junior, for Moroni came and went four times in all that night. The following day Smith tramped to the west side of the largest hill outside Manchester, New York, and under a rock he found a stone box containing the gold plates. Since he had been advised not to remove the plates for yet another four years, Smith returned empty-handed.
Touched though he was by the divine hand, Smith did not neglect earthly matters in the next four years. In Harmony, Pennsylvania, he hired himself out to an elderly gentleman who wanted him to dig for an old Spanish silver mine. While so employed, Smith boarded in the house of one Isaac Hale. In the house also was the landlord’s comely young daughter, dark-complexioned, hazel-eyed Emma, and Smith began to court her. Emma’s father was something less than enthusiastic about Smith as a prospective son-in-law. “His appearance at this time,” said Isaac Hale, “was that of a careless young man, not very well educated, and very saucy and insolent to his father.” Despite the prospect of gold plates as a dowry, or perhaps because of it, the landlord continued to show resistance. Nevertheless, in 1827, when Smith was twenty-two, he married Emma Hale, who was twenty-three.
That same year Smith removed the gold plates, with their Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the translating spectacles known as Urim and Thummim, from beneath the hillside rock. When news of the gold plates swept the New York countryside, and avaricious mobs came searching, Smith was forced to hide his precious package in a variety of places, among them a hollow log and a barrel of beans. At last, with his plates and his bride, he returned to Harmony, Pennsylvania, purchased a small farm, and undertook the delicate work of rendering the hieroglyphics into English.
Employing the services of Martin Harris, a middle-aged farmer and businessman who was impressed by the younger man’s visions, Smith began the marathon task of dictating a translation. In April 1828 Smith and Harris sat facing each other, but with a thick blanket hanging between them. On his side Smith would peer through the Urim and Thummim at the gold plate before him and see the words magically transformed into English and dictate them, a sentence at a time. Harris, on the other side, transcribed the dictation on foolscap, then read the sentences back and made any necessary corrections.
In eight weeks Harris had 116 pages of what was to be The Book of Mormon. The story was a history of the movement of three ancient peoples, the Jaradites, Lamanites, and Nephites, from Babylon and Jerusalem to America before the birth of Christ. Eventually these people destroyed each other through continual wars. The last of the Nephites recorded the tale on gold plates in 421 A.D. and left them for a future and more enlightened age. All that remained of these peoples were the American Indians, descendants of the Lamanites, and the gold plates, willed by the Lord to Joseph Smith, Junior.
Because Martin Harris had neglected wife and family to collaborate in the Lord’s work, his domestic troubles increased. His wife nagged him. And he, said his wife, became “more cross, turbulent and abusive to me.” Once, enraged because his wife had heckled him about The Book of Mormon, Harris struck her with the butt end of a whip. At last, tiring of domestic conflict, Harris begged Smith for permission to show his wife the 116 pages, in order to convince her of the importance of their work. Reluctantly Smith consented. However, Smith’s mother, Lucy Mack Smith, had misgivings. As she wrote in her memoirs: “Mr. Harris’ wife was a very peculiar woman, one that was naturally of a very jealous disposition; besides this, she was rather dull of hearing and when anything was said that she did not hear distinctly she suspected that it was some secret which was designedly kept from her.” Furthermore, Smith’s mother would not forgive Harris’ wife for once having called her Joseph “a grand impostor.” At any rate, Mrs. Harris was shown the 116 pages and seemed to be mollified.
Harris kept the manuscript in a drawer of his wife’s best bureau. One day, in a moment of overenthusiasm, eager to display the work to friends, Harris tried to find his wife’s key to the bureau drawer. Unable to locate it, he clumsily picked the lock, damaging the bureau. Later, when Smith appeared for the pages, the drawer was found to be empty. Harris ransacked the house, but the 116 pages remained missing, and never again were they seen. History has had no explanation except the one given by Lucy Mack Smith. She theorized that Mrs. Harris, angered by her husband’s vandalism as well as the influence of Smith upon him, had removed the precious pages and hidden them. “There is no doubt but Mrs. Harris took it from the drawer, with the view of retaining it until another translation should be given, then to alter the original translation, for the purpose of showing a discrepancy between them, and thus make the whole appear to be a deception.”
Thereafter Martin Harris was amanuensis no longer. A year later a twenty-three-year-old schoolteacher, Oliver Cowdery, volunteered for the assignment. Starting from scratch, hidden again behind a blanket, Smith dictated the entire 275,000-word book to Cowdery. Harris was restored to Smith’s good graces when he offered to finance the printing of the holy volume—$3,000 for 5,000 copies run off in Palmyra, New York, in the spring of 1830. With publication a reality, an angel lofted the gold plates back to heaven, but not before displaying his presence and the plates to three witnesses— Cowdery, Harris, and a farmer named David Whitmer—and then again to eight more persons. Interestingly, although Cowdery, Harris, and Whitmer all eventually broke with Joseph Smith, not one of them ever retracted his account of having seen the angel and the gold plates.
On April 6, 1830, Joseph Smith and his friends organized the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They had their holy book, and soon they had their hierarchy of fifteen—Joseph Smith, the first President and Prophet, aided by two counselors and twelve Apostles. Within a week the difficult work of proselytizing and conversion began.
Everywhere the missionaries of Mormonism met strong resistance and skepticism. The miraculous story of the gold plates was held suspect. Peter Ingersoll, a neighbor of Joseph Smith, revealed that Smith had told him that he had concocted the fable as a practical joke and that Smith had disclosed to friends that his package contained not gold plates but common bricks.
A version of the origin of The Book of Mormon more widely accepted by anti-Mormons was that of the Spaulding plagiarism. In 1812, inspired by an archaeological excavation in Ohio, the Reverend Solomon Spaulding, Dartmouth graduate and Presbyterian minister, had written a romantic historical novel entitled Manuscript Found. The novel was a fictional account of ancient plates, dug up in Ohio, that told of the lost tribes of Israel in pre-Columbian America. Before dying of consumption, the Reverend Spaulding left manuscript copies of his novel with his wife and with a Pittsburgh bookseller. When the widow Spaulding read The Book of Mormon, she shouted plagiarism. She remembered that in 1825 her copy of her husband’s novel had disappeared; by coincidence, she added, Joseph Smith had been working for her next-door neighbor as a well digger. Most anti-Mormons accepted this version of die truth in Joseph Smith’s time, and many have continued to accept it to this day. However, Dr. M. Wilford Poulson, of Brigham Young University, perhaps the foremost living expert on Joseph Smith and the origins of Mormonism, studied all related documents and told this writer that the Spaulding theory was “nonsense.”
Another point constantly made by anti-Mormons was that Joseph Smith was completely miscast in the role of Prophet. The argument was that the Lord would not have selected a human being with so many earthy frailties to carry out so spiritual a mission. The towering Joseph Smith was, indeed, a man of this world in every way. Combining the delicate and handsome features of a matinee idol with the physique of an athlete, he wrestled, gambled, swore (“like a pirate,” the governor of Illinois would observe), drank, and whored.
A convincing picture of Joseph Smith was drawn by Josiah Quincy, the mayor of Boston. Quincy, accompanied by his cousin, Charles Francis Adams, son of President John Quincy Adams, called on Smith in Illinois during 1844. Quincy found the Prophet “a man of commanding appearance, clad in the costume of a journeyman carpenter… He was a hearty, athletic fellow, with blue eyes standing prominently out upon his light complexion, a long nose, and a retreating forehead. He wore striped pantaloons, a linen jacket, which had not lately seen the washtub, and a beard of some three days’ growth.” Quincy reported that he and Adams were formally introduced to Smith. “‘God bless you, to begin with!’ said Joseph Smith, raising his hands in the air and letting them descend upon the shoulders of Mr. Adams. The benediction, though evidently sincere, had an odd savor of what may be called official familiarity, such as a crowned head might adopt on receiving the heir presumptive of a friendly court. The greeting to me was cordial—with that sort of cordiality with which the president of a college might welcome a deserving janitor.”
During their conversations, Quincy frankly told Smith that he possessed too much power. Smith was not abashed. He replied, “In your hands or that of any other person so much power would, no doubt, be dangerous. I am the only man in the world whom it would be safe to trust with it. Remember, I am a prophet!” To which Quincy added for his readers: “The last five words were spoken in a rich, comical aside, as if in hearty recognition of the ridiculous sound they might have in the ears of a Gentile.”‘
Mormon colleagues did not deny Smith’s prophetless habits and manners. In fact, Brigham Young was once said to have remarked, “That the Prophet was of mean birth, that he was wild, intemperate, even dishonest and tricky in his youth, is nothing against his mission. God can, and does, make use of the vilest instruments. If he acts like a devil, Joseph has brought forth a doctrine that will save us, if we abide by it. He may get drunk every day of his life, sleep with his neighbor’s wife every night, run horses and gamble… but the doctrine he has produced will save you and me and the whole world.”
To anti-Mormons the translation of the gold plates was considered as difficult to accept as the translator. Typical of the adverse criticism was that made by Mark Twain. He regarded The Book of Mormon as an “insipid” and “tedious plagiarism of the New Testament.” He added: “It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle—keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate.” Even Captain Richard Burton, a better and fairer friend of Mormonism, was appalled. “Surely there never was a book so thoroughly dull and heavy,” he said; “it is monotonous as a sage-prairie.”
Nevertheless, the philosophy of this book and its new ideal began to make converts in great number, and among these were Ann Eliza Young’s parents. Ann Eliza’s father, Chauncey G. Webb, had been born and raised in Hanover, New York. He lived under the same roof with his elderly mother and father, labored with his hands as a wheelwright, and enjoyed pleasures where he found them. He was a simple, solid young citizen, conservative, matter-of-fact, and often skeptical. He had little patience with spiritual matters and ignored the revivalist sentiment that so stirred his contemporaries. However, his parents were at that advanced point in years where they wanted the hope and promise of immortality. When the vigorous Mormonism, with its greener heavens, beckoned, they joined it fervently. And when their new Church pulled up stakes to buy land and found a utopia in distant Kirtland, Ohio—in accordance with a revelation visited upon Joseph Smith—they prepared to follow.
Chauncey G. Webb was asked by his parents to accompany them—he was then twenty-three—and, briefly, he hesitated. He was possessed of no deep interest in this new religion or in any religion. But finally, rather than antagonize the parents he revered, and rather than be left behind by his kin, he accepted baptism in the Mormon Church and rode off with his elders to frontier Ohio. And there, in 1834, he met and fell in love with Eliza Churchill.
At seventeen, Eliza Churchill’s life had been one of those minor hells that Charles Dickens was proving so adept at dramatizing. Born in Union Springs, New York, Eliza Churchill had lost her mother when she was four. Since her father was incapable of raising her and two other children, he was forced to farm them out, each to a different family, until that future day when he would have money enough to bring them back together in their own lodging. This family dream he never saw fulfilled.
Eliza Churchill was placed in charge of a stern family named Brown, every day waiting to be rescued, and never being rescued. For twelve helpless years, alien as an orphan, she existed under the domination of unloving foster parents. Denied the education that she desired, she was reduced (as in the old, old fairy tales) to despised household drudge. Her will to learn did not diminish. All self-improvement had to be accomplished secretly, but it was accomplished, and, voraciously, her underground reading ranged from the Fanner’s Almanac to John Wesley.
At fifteen Eliza Churchill was intelligent and well-read, yet ingrown and lost in fantasy. She daydreamed, had visions, believed in miracles, and thus was able to survive her unhappy lot. When Mormon missionaries, among them a young zealot named Brigham Young, materialized in the vicinity where she lived, and were denounced by her guardians as blasphemers, Eliza Churchill was intrigued. She slipped out to hear them speak. What they offered was what she desperately needed—some fresh hope that was privately all her own. She accepted the divinity of the new religion at once. In two days she was baptized by Brigham Young.
Her will, reinforced by her recent conversion, her sense of revolt heightened, she disclosed the affiliation to her guardians. The Browns were infuriated and commanded her to renounce the idiocy at once. Eliza refused. She was imprisoned in the farm cellar “for several days” on a bread-and-water diet. This only strengthened her resolve. She would not relent. At last, realizing her fanaticism could not be overcome, the Browns unlocked the cellar door and ordered her to leave the only home she had ever known. She left gleefully, certain that her Mormon friends would care for her, and she was not wrong. Brigham Young escorted her back to Kirtland, Ohio, where she taught in exchange for her keep, until Chauncey G. Webb arrived and found her.
“It must have been the attraction of opposite natures that brought together in so close a relationship the practical, shrewd, somewhat skeptical man, and the devoted, enthusiastic, religious girl,” Ann Eliza Young later wrote of her parents. “It was probably the very contrast that made the young man feel such tenderness and care for the homeless orphan girl, and made her cling to him, trusting her helplessness to his strength.”
In 1835 they were married—or “sealed,” as the Mormons called it. Unlike Gentiles, who were married until death did them part, Mormons such as Chauncey Webb and Eliza Churchill were united “through time and eternity.” Sometimes Mormons were married for time only, since eternity had been promised a previous mate. But for Chauncey and Eliza Churchill the wedding was optimistically for all time on earth and all eons of the hereafter. Immediately following his marriage, Chauncey opened a small factory of his own, for the manufacture of wagons, and he prospered. Soon he built a home for Eliza Churchill and himself in Kirtland. “It was at this time,” wrote Ann Eliza, “that the friendship began between my mother and Brigham Young, which lasted so many years—a faithful friendship on her part, met, as a matter of course, by unkindness and treachery on his side.” Meanwhile, the newly affluent Chauncey was being cultivated by Joseph Smith. It had been revealed to the Prophet, in one of a continuing series of adumbrations, that he go into the banking business. Forthwith he organized the Kirtland Safety Society Bank. For capital, Smith convinced Chauncey and several other Mormons to invest all their cash savings. Because Smith proceeded to issue notes without silver or gold to support them, the government looked askance upon his project. To evade regulations, Smith reorganized his firm as the Kirtland Anti-Banking Company. Notes signed by him flooded the community.
“But the sham notes, passing from hand to hand, soon went far beyond the Mormon settlement,” wrote Ann Eliza. “Some even reached Pittsburgh, and a banker there who had received many from his customers sent an agent to Kirtland to investigate its affairs. He found the people busy and apparently prosperous. He visited Smith and was assured that the notes of the Anti-Banking Company were as good as specie. But when the agent produced his bundle of notes and asked for the cash equivalent, Smith’s tone changed. He told the agent that the notes were intended to be circulated, but not to be paid. That would spoil the game. After some warm talk the agent departed and reported the new method of banking to his employers. They promptly called in the aid of the United States Court. The bubble burst. My father and several other Mormons lost all they had invested.”
Mormon sources blamed the bank failure on the national financial panic of 1837. Ann Eliza was forever more critical. “If such an affair had happened in the Gentile world,” she insisted, “it would have been called swindling.”
Embittered, Chauncey Webb was prepared to quit the Church. Only the pleadings of his steadfast wife, and the responsibility of supporting his first-born son, Gilbert, who arrived in December of 1837, kept him from apostatizing. Possessed now of less faith and less cash, Chauncey industriously resumed his production of wagons. But other members of the community, ex-Mormons and non-Mormons, were not so charitable toward the Prophet. They rose up against Smith, and one night a mob of hoodlums broke into his house, dragged him out, strangled him until he fell unconscious, then tried but failed to pour a vial of acid into his mouth. Finally the mob stripped Smith naked, poured tar and feathers on him, and left him to the mercy of his flock.
Shortly after, learning from his missionaries that the city of Far West in Missouri might be more receptive to utopia, Smith had a revelation that his church must move its headquarters across Indiana and Illinois to the safer Zion. The Prophet departed for Missouri by horseback in January 1838. Chauncey and Eliza Churchill Webb, taking their infant son Gilbert and what possessions they could carry, forsook business and home to follow by wagon.
The year in Missouri proved even less peaceful than the sojourn in Ohio. The two major Mormon settlements in Missouri were in, first, the city of Far West, and, second, thirty miles northward across Daviess County, in the pioneer Mormon city of Adam-ondi-Ahman (so named by Joseph Smith to mean “the place where Adam shall come to visit his people”), popularly called Spring Hill. Chauncey constructed a log cabin and workshop in Adam-ondi-Ahman, and his wife produced their second son, Edward Milo. As before, the industrious Chauncey persevered and prospered. Again security was brief.
The short-tempered Missourians already had a savage record of antagonism toward the Mormons. As slaveholders, the original settlers regarded the incoming Saints as threatening Northerners. Too, the Missourians resented the Mormons’ unorthodox religion, their economic competition, and their regard of enemy Indians as “a part of God’s chosen people.”
Unorganized but persistent hostilities against the Mormons resumed. Scattered Saints fought back. In Adam-ondi-Ahman, Joseph Smith encouraged self-defense. Calling his flock together, among them the troubled Webbs, Smith cried out, “Do all you can to harass the enemy. I never felt more of the spirit of God at any time than since we commenced this stealing and house-burning.” One of Smith’s foremost aides, a recently converted Campbellite preacher named Sidney Rigdon, delivered an even more inflammatory speech. “The mob that comes to disturb us,” he warned, “we will follow until the last drop of their blood is spilled, or else they will have to exterminate us. We will carry the war into their own homes and families…”
Unfortunately the Missouri mobs grew larger and bolder. To meet them, the Mormons formed their hands of avenging Danites. Now the battle was fully joined. When a Missouri mob leader was a candidate for the state senate, the Mormons agreed to vote en masse against him. Twelve Mormons tried to reach the polls in Gallatin, but they were clubbed into retreat. In retaliation, Mormon riders gutted the town of Gallatin. In October 1838, twelve miles east of Far West at the settlement of Haun’s Mills, Missouri state troopers under Colonel William O. Jennings attacked a poorly armed group of Mormon men, women, and children. Seventeen Mormon men and children died. One militiaman murdered a ten-year-old boy, explaining, “Nits will make lice, and if he had lived he would have been a Mormon.” All reason was forgotten as the undeclared war pitched to a fury. Armed bands, on both sides, looted, burned, raped, and murdered.
At the height of the violence, Chauncey and Eliza Churchill Webb and their offspring were once again forced to give up home and workshop and flee to the comparative safety of the city of Far West. But soon their position was precarious. Governor Lillburn W. Boggs, who would later almost lose his life to an unknown assassin (thought to be the Danite, Orrin Porter Rockwell), issued the following infamous order: “The Mormons must be treated as enemies and must be exterminated or driven from the state, if necessary, for the public good.”
Faced by an approaching militia of 6,000, Joseph Smith sued for peace and surrendered to his persecutors. A hasty court-martial sentenced him to death by firing squad in the public square of Far West for the crime of treason. Chained to four of his aides in a single cell, Smith awaited his fate. In the end, perhaps, it was liquor more than prayer that saved his life. One night, after six months of imprisonment, Smith’s jail guards began drinking heavily. Smith and his disciples offered them $400 for freedom and two horses. After four of the guards had fallen into drunken slumber, the fifth released them. In ten days, riding and walking, Smith and his aides reached the receptive asylum of Quincy, Illinois.
But even before Smith’s miraculous escape, Chauncey and Eliza Churchill Webb had left Missouri for the more promising land of Illinois. Since vandals had already stolen their horses, Chauncey hitched oxen to an open wagon and set out across the hard, wintry prairies. “My mother,” wrote Ann Eliza, “held her two infants close in her arms during all the long, tedious journey, to keep them from perishing. She had but one dress to wear, as she had to leave Daviess County in great haste, taking only her children with her.”
In April 1839 the Webbs, exhausted and destitute, crossed the Mississippi River and rode into Quincy, short days before Joseph Smith and his aides were to arrive in triumph. Eliza Churchill Webb’s bitterness at the Missourians—she would never forget that they had punished “innocent women and children”—was soon alleviated by the friendliness of the people of Quincy. The Webbs were given food and clothing, and jobs were found for them. After two months in Quincy, Chauncey Webb moved his family south to the town of Payson, Illinois, where once more he built a house and a carriage-manufacturing shop. In all, the Webbs remained in Payson for three years, and they profited financially. But during the entire period Eliza Churchill Webb, although pleased to be delivered of two more children, Lorenzo Dow and Helen Maria, who died in her fourth month, continued to agitate restlessly against her isolation from her fellow Saints. She wanted to follow Joseph Smith, and Joseph Smith had gone elsewhere.
Three years earlier, ever searching for utopia, Smith had reconnoitered the midwestern area. Fifty miles north of Quincy, where the low marshland and high bluffs bent into the Mississippi on the eastern side of the river, stood the hamlet of Commerce, Illinois. Despite an old settlement of one stone house, two blockhouses, and seven log cabins, the surrounding countryside remained primitive and wildly beautiful. Across the way, on the western slope of the river, sprawled the abandoned military barracks of a ghost village called Montrose, Iowa. Joseph Smith was impressed. For $160,000, borrowed at exorbitant interest rates, he purchased vast tracts of property in and about both settlements. Next he subdivided the land into large lots, which he sold to Mormon families for $500 each. To those of his followers who had been impoverished by the Missouri mobs, he awarded homesteads free.
Smith constructed his first Illinois home, a log cabin, on the soft bank of the river one mile south of Commerce; one of his favorite Apostles, Brigham Young, took up residence for a short time in a drafty barracks building, just opposite in Montrose. From the first, the appellation Commerce had distressed the Mormon leader. It made the community sound like a way station for drummers, not a Mecca for Prophets. After brief deliberation Smith renamed his capital city Nauvoo, Illinois—Nauvoo being Hebrew, he said, for “beautiful place”—though no Hebraic scholar ever corroborated existence of the word.
The first occupation of Nauvoo was in June 1839. Within eighteen months the hamlet was a flourishing city of 2,000 log cabins and frame shanties, and soon these would give way to splendid red brick houses with gardens. Within five years Nauvoo was the largest city in Illinois, with a population of 20,000, making it almost twice the size of Chicago.
Very early, after an epidemic of malaria, Smith had the low swamplands drained, and then he set up quarters in the heart of the city. He had been commanded by the Lord, he said, to sell shares of stock to the brethren in order to build a boardinghouse for himself and his family. Almost at once the boardinghouse became a reality and was known as the Nauvoo House. One room was devoted to a museum, containing a variety of Egyptian mummies and an alleged autograph of Moses on parchment, with Smith’s mother, Lucy Mack Smith, as curator of the collection. Often Smith would show distinguished guests through his museum, and at the end of the tour he would announce, “Gentlemen, those who see these curiosities generally pay my mother a quarter of a dollar.” Even Prophets, apparently, had overhead. Later, Smith owned a hotel and a grocery store in which he kept his private office.
From the outset Smith realized that he could become a political power in Illinois. He had a solid bloc of votes to deliver, and he controlled this bloc. In effect, he put the Mormon votes up to the highest bidder. The rival political parties in Illinois, the Democrats and Whigs, wanted these votes. Smith, in turn, wanted a civic charter for Nauvoo that would make it an autonomous and powerful community, perhaps the most powerful in America. The Whigs were agreeable to anything, and so Smith made his deal with them.
To represent him in preparing the Nauvoo charter, Smith sent to the new state capital in Springfield a recently acquired right-hand man. This was Dr. John C. Bennett, a physician-of-fortune, an abortionist, a scamp, a practicing turncoat, and a highly qualified candidate for any list of top rogues. At thirty-seven, Bennett had been a medical graduate and a professor of midwifery in Ohio, as well as Adjutant-General of Illinois. Professing sympathy for the Mormons and hiding his opportunism, he had joined the Church. Now, in Springfield as the Prophet’s representative, he drove a hard bargain with the Whig legislatures. The Nauvoo charter was to give the city the right to make and enforce its own laws, to hold its own courts, to have its private militia, and to build a university. Mormon historians agree that the twenty-eight sections of the charter were the “most liberal in American history.” The bill authorizing this charter was passed by the Illinois legislature in December of 1840, and among those voting for it was a young politician named Abraham Lincoln.
As a reward for his bargaining, Dr. Bennett was made the first mayor of Nauvoo. Smith reserved for himself a higher office. Under the charter, he created the Nauvoo Legion, which consisted of 6,000 Mormon men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five wearing comic-opera uniforms and carrying real muskets. Smith made himself the lieutenant general of this legion, a military rank held previously in American history only by Lieutenant General George Washington.
As Nauvoo grew, Joseph Smith looked for foreign conquests. He ordered the ailing Brigham Young off a sickbed and sent him, with other missionaries, to England to spread the word. With only eighteen dollars in his pocket, Brigham made his way to Liverpool. His accomplishments were a wonder. In a single year he raised money to get 5,000 copies of The Book of Mormon printed and presented Queen Victoria with one. He started a Mormon newspaper called The Millennial Star. He moved among the poor, overworked factory laborers and painted for them a word picture of a Mormon heaven as brilliant as the Mohammedan heaven, and 8,000 were converted to the church. Of these, in 1841 Brigham sent 769, mostly women, back to thriving Nauvoo, Illinois.
A year after the influx of English converts began, another group of new arrivals appeared in Nauvoo. Eliza Churchill Webb had finally convinced Chauncey that she could never be happy so far removed from her beloved Joseph and Brigham. Relenting at last, Chauncey traveled north alone to Nauvoo to scout landsites. He found five level acres, cleared the deed, made a down payment, and returned to Payson to gather his wife, his children, and his possessions. The move to Nauvoo was effected. But, upon arrival, Chauncey learned that his ownership of the five acres was being challenged. A wealthy Mormon convert named Dr. Robert D. Foster argued that he had a prior claim on the property made by verbal agreement two years earlier. The matter was brought before the Church for arbitration. Since Dr. Foster was a close friend of Joseph Smith, he carried the day and the disputed acreage. Later he would repay the Prophet by defecting from the Church and becoming Smith’s Judas.
Disappointed though he was, Chauncey Webb wasted no time in recrimination. Instead he found several lots he liked as well as the first land, bought them for cash, and built on one a commodious house and another carriage factory. Settled in Nauvoo, Eliza Churchill Webb was happy. Soon she would have grave reasons for regretting the change.
Paradise must have its serpent, and in Nauvoo the serpent was Dr. John C. Bennett, Mayor. Overnight, it seemed, Bennett was deposed as head of the Nauvoo municipal government, accused of licentious conduct, and excommunicated from the Church. Smith took over the mayor’s office for himself, and the boiling Bennett trotted off eastward to have his revenge. What happened immediately thereafter would have far-reaching consequences for Chauncey and Eliza Churchill Webb and all their Mormon neighbors.
On July 8, 1842, Bennett announced to one and all that in a series of articles to be published in the Sangamo Journal and in a forthcoming book, he would tell the truth, the whole, shocking truth, heretofore secret, about Joseph Smith. He had become a Mormon merely for the purpose of unmasking their perfidy—”It at length occurred to me that the surest and speediest way to overthrow the Impostor, and expose his iniquity to the world, would be to profess myself a convert to his doctrines, and join him at the seat of his dominion”—and now he was ready to tell the world all he knew of “Holy Joe and his Danite band of murderers.”
Bennett published his articles and then his 341-page book in 1842. The book, printed by Leland and Whiting of Boston, was The History of the Saints: or, An Exposé of Joe Smith and Mormonism. The scandal that the book made public was that Joseph Smith and the Mormon hierarchy were secretly practicing polygamy in Illinois.
Indeed, this was true, but so successful were the Mormons in discrediting Bennett’s character and career that his fantastic charges were not immediately fully accepted by the nation at large. However, they were accepted throughout non-Mormon Illinois, and this was the first of a series of exposures that contributed to the downfall of idyllic Nauvoo.
Bennett’s conflict with Smith came mainly over an attractive young lady. She was Nancy Rigdon, daughter of the august Sidney Rigdon. According to Bennett, the Prophet had asked him to play John Alden. “If you will assist me in procuring Nancy as one of my spiritual wives,” said Smith, “I will give you five hundred dollars or the best lot on Main Street.” Bennett claimed that he refused to cooperate on the grounds of protecting female virtue. He would not admit that he also wanted Nancy. Smith then, on his own, invited Nancy to his printing office. Angered, Bennett forewarned Nancy of the Prophet’s designs. Nevertheless, Nancy went to see her leader. According to Bennett, “Joe was there, took her into a private room (his favorite assignation room), and LOCKED THE DOOR… Joe then swore her to secrecy and told her that she had long been the idol of his affections, and that he had asked the Lord for her, and that it was his holy will that he should have her… He then attempted to kiss her and desired her to kiss him… She told him she would alarm the neighbors if he did not open the door and let her out immediately. He did so…” He also dictated a letter to her. “Happiness is the object and design of our existence,” he wrote, and pressed his suit. Nancy showed the letter to her father, who confronted Smith with it. After first denying seduction, the Prophet finally admitted that he had attempted it—”to test Nancy’s virtue,” he said.
According to Bennett’s exposé, the Church Apostles were almost all libertines, most of them as lecherous as their leader. One of Bennett’s more sensational stories recounted the attempted seduction of Martha H. Brotherton, a handsome and cultivated young English import, by the already married Brigham Young, with the assistance of Joseph Smith. Bennett claimed that he had an affidavit, made out and sworn to on July 13, 1842, by Martha Brotherton, disclosing how she had faced a fate worse than death. One afternoon, after she had been in Nauvoo three weeks, Brigham asked to see her in an upstairs room of Joseph Smith’s grocery store. She was surprised to find a sign on the door: “Positively No Admittance.” Presently she was inside with Brigham and Joseph Smith. After meeting the Prophet, she found herself alone with Brigham, “who arose, locked the door, closed the window, and drew the curtain.” Brigham then swore her to secrecy and asked her to become his plural wife.
The proposal stunned Martha Brotherton. Would she consent? “If it was lawful and right, perhaps I might,” she said, “but you know, sir, it is not.”
“Well,” said Brigham, “Brother Joseph has had a revelation from God that it is lawful and right for a man to have two wives….”
Martha tried to stall. She must seek permission of her parents. Brigham had no patience for this. He wanted a kiss. Martha did not comply. To help the seduction along, he locked her in the room alone for ten minutes and went to find the Prophet. At last he reappeared with Joseph Smith.
Brigham turned to Smith. “Well, Sister Martha would be willing if she knew it was lawful and right before God.”
“Well, Martha,” said Smith, “it is lawful and right before God—I know it is. Look here, sis, don’t you believe in me? … Well, Martha, just go ahead and do as Brigham wants you to—he is the best man in the world, except me.”
Martha continued to beg for time to think. Smith became impatient. “He said it was the best opportunity they might have for months,” Martha reported, “for the room was often engaged.” No amount of persuasion could weaken her. She remained adamant in her chastity and departed at last with virtue intact. Shortly afterward she fled to St. Louis, where she made out her affidavit and then turned it over to Bennett. The story created a sharp scandal, blunted somewhat when Martha’s sister, Elizabeth Brotherton, a devout Mormon who was soon to become the plural wife of high-ranking Parley P. Pratt, countered with an affidavit of her own, attesting to the fact that her sister was “not only a liar but also immoral.”
Nevertheless, Bennett’s scurrilous account of how “the Lord of the Harem glutted his brutal lusts to the maximum of his sensual desires,” and sanctioned it all under the guise of divine commandment, stirred Mormon and Gentile alike in Illinois. Ordinary Saints speculated to what extent all this oriental harem living had been going on under their noses. What they learned, and what many non-Mormons guessed, created a wave of apostasy inside the Church and deep resentment among righteous and puritanical Methodists and Presbyterians on the outside. Nauvoo would never recover from the blow.
According to Brigham Young’s later account, Joseph Smith had been considering the possibilities of celestial or plural marriage as early as 1829, at the time he was squinting through the Urim and Thummim and dictating the translation of the gold plates to pedagogue Oliver Cowdery.
“Brother Joseph,” Cowdery had asked on one occasion, “why don’t we go into the order of polygamy and practice it as the ancients did? We know it is true, then why delay?”
“I know that we know that it is true and from God,” said Smith calmly, “but the time has not yet come.”
Apparently, during the Kirtland, Ohio, period, Joseph Smith had decided that the time had almost come. While translating his version of the Old Testament, the Prophet had been intrigued by the polygamic practices of Abraham, Jacob, Solomon, and David. There is little doubt that he sincerely believed that the plural-wife system of the ancients was the God-favored system of marriage. Beyond this there may have been decisive personal factors that influenced him. Quite possibly his juiceless and forbidding wife, Emma, was not the most entertaining of bed partners. Evidently Smith had a roving eye and a need for sexual variety. Yet his stern puritanical upbringing did not give him the easy conscience of a rake. He could not allow himself mistresses. And so, possibly, to have his cake and eat it, too, he allowed himself a plurality of wives. However, since polygamy had not been practiced extensively in the Western World since the Middle Ages, except among Turks and Arabs and tribes in Africa, Smith realized that he could only make it acceptable for himself if he made it acceptable to his wide following. This he might accomplish by making the practice an order from on high. Or perhaps, as the Mormons insist, none of this elaborate intrigue was necessary, for Smith did receive an order from on high.
At any rate, with whatever limited divine sanction he had, Smith began to devote himself to premature polygamy. In Kirtland, Emma had agreed to give room and board to a poor but attractive seventeen-year-old orphan girl named Fanny Alger. Secretly Smith married her, enjoyed the marital prerogative, and soon Miss Fanny, in fact, Mrs., was pregnant. The gossips were busy. A neighbor, Fannie Brewer, later swore in an affidavit: “There was much excitement against the prophet, on another account, likewise—an unlawful intercourse between himself and a young orphan girl residing in his family, and under his protection!!! Mr. Martin Harris told me that the prophet was most notorious for lying and licentiousness!!” The forest of exclamation marks did not hide the trees. The veil dropped from Emma’s eyes, and, in a rage, she drove the plural Fanny into the street.
Undiscouraged, Joseph Smith continued to sow the seeds of the new principle. Official Church records allow him twenty-seven plural wives. Fawn M. Brodie, his best biographer, discovered documentation for forty-nine plural wives. It is said that between 1835 and 1843, when the Lord gave him full license, Smith married between eleven and twenty-six young women, most of them not yet twenty years old. All of these marriages were surreptitiously made, since Emma was so unreasonable. It is said that, at the Prophet’s insistence, Emma made a home in Nauvoo for girls without family and funds. There were twelve of these girls in all, and all were their host’s plural wives without Emma’s knowledge. When Emma finally did learn the truth, she threw out ten of the girls, permitting her husband to marry two of them, Eliza and Emily Partridge, sisters aged eighteen and nineteen, unaware that Joseph had already married them.
By 1843 word of Joseph Smith’s marital activity had spread in and about Nauvoo. To put an end to the dangerous gossip, Smith wrote in the public press that the idea of “a community of wives” was “an abomination in the sight of the Lord.” When a missionary, Hyrum Brown, did not take him seriously, Smith had Brown “cut off from the church” for “preaching polygamy and other false and corrupt doctrines” in Michigan. Meanwhile Smith had completed a prolonged and successful session in marriage counseling with the Lord, and now he was ready, at last, to pass his great secret on to the more enlightened members of his hierarchy.
In February 1843, Smith invited his secretary, William Clayton, to take a walk with him. Casually Smith steered the conversation to the subject on his mind. He said he knew that Clayton, though married, had deep affection for another woman, a convert in England. Clayton did not deny it. Smith suggested to his secretary that he send for her, marry her, and keep two wives. If Clayton registered shock, Smith did not recognize it. “It is your privilege to have all the wives you want,” he said coolly. Then he went on to discuss his revelation. According to Clayton: “This was the first time he talked with me on the subject of plural marriage. He informed me that the doctrine and principle was right in the sight of our Heavenly Father, and that it was a doctrine which pertained to celestial order and glory.”
Two months later, Lorenzo Snow, just returned from a missionary assignment in Europe, was also taken for a walk by the Prophet. “We walked a little distance,” said Snow, “and sat down on a large log that lay near the bank of the river. He there and then explained to me the doctrine of plurality of wives; he said that the Lord had revealed it unto him and commanded him to have women sealed to him as wives; that he foresaw the trouble that would follow and sought to turn away from the commandment; that an angel from heaven then appeared before him with a drawn sword, threatening him with destruction unless he went forward and obeyed the commandment. He further said that my sister, Eliza R. Snow, had been sealed to him as his wife for time and eternity…”
On Wednesday, July 12, 1843, Joseph Smith, who had been carrying the revelation about in his head, confessed to his brother Hyrum and his secretary Clayton that he hated to go further with it because of the storm it would raise with number one wife Emma.
Hyrum thought that Emma could be handled. “If you will write the revelation on celestial marriage,” he told his brother, “I will take it and read it to Emma, and I believe I can convince her of its truth, and you will hereafter have peace.”
Smith smiled wanly. “You do not know Emma as well as I do.”
But Hyrum would brook no more delay. “The doctrine is so plain, I can convince any reasonable man or woman of its truth, purity, and heavenly origin.”
“Well,” said Smith, “I will write the revelation and we will see.” Clayton hastily found paper, while Smith and Hyrum sat down. Smith explained that in The Book of Mormon the Saints had been limited to one wife and no concubines. On the other hand, in the Old Testament, Abraham and the other ancients had “many wives and concubines.” So, quite logically, Smith had inquired of the Lord if old Abraham had sinned in polygamy. Now Smith dictated to Clayton the Lord’s reply and the revelation. “Verily, this saith the Lord unto you, my servant Joseph, that inasmuch as you have inquired of my hand, to know and understand wherein I, the Lord, justified my servants Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; as also Moses, David and Solomon, my servants as touching the principle and doctrine of their having many wives and concubines: Behold! and lo, I am the Lord thy God, and will answer thee…” Whereupon, after considerable verbiage, the Lord reassured the Prophet that Abraham had partaken of polygamy by divine commandment. “Go, therefore, and do the works of Abraham; enter ye into my law, and ye shall be saved.”
As he dictated the revelation, Smith clarified the granting of plural marriage by repeating the Lord’s words, “If any man espouse a virgin and desires to espouse another, and the first give her consent; and if he espouse the second, and they are virgins, and have vowed to no other man, then he is justified; he cannot commit adultery for they are given unto him… and if he have ten virgins given unto him by this law, he cannot commit adultery for they belong to him and are given unto him; therefore he is justified.”
There was, of course, still the nagging problem of Emma. The Prophet decided to incorporate his wife into the revelation by anticipating her wrath. He had asked the Lord if—as he knew she might—Emma could practice polyandry or plurality of husbands while he practiced plurality of wives. The Lord had put his mind at ease and served warning to Emma. “Verily, I say unto you, a commandment I give unto mine handmaid, Emma Smith, your wife, whom I have given unto you, that she stay herself, and partake not of that which I commanded you to offer unto her; for I did it, saith the Lord, to prove you all, as I did Abraham…” Yet what if Emma denounced and resisted polygamy? The Lord would not have it. Smith dictated the Lord’s reply. “And let mine handmaid, Emma Smith, receive all those that have been given unto my servant Joseph, and who are virtuous and pure before me…”
Finally the revelation was on paper. “After the whole was written,” recalled Clayton, “Joseph asked me to read it through slowly and carefully, which I did, and he pronounced it correct.”
With considerable confidence, brother Hyrum took the written revelation and hastened off to read it to Emma. She heard it out, all of it, and was not amused. After berating Hyrum soundly, she threw him and the revelation out of the house. Hyrum returned to the Prophet, crestfallen. “In all my life,” he said with wonder, “I have never been so abused by a woman.”
Now that the revelation was on paper, Smith began to read it to his intimates. Sidney Rigdon, Brigham Young, William Law, a Canadian convert, were all appalled by it. Hearing it for the first time, remembered Brigham, he “desired the grave, and I could hardly get over it for a long time.” Smith continued his readings. Bishop Newell K. Whitney was impressed and asked if he might make a copy. Smith consented.
What happened next Brigham Young described years later: “After Joseph had been to Bishop Whitney’s he went home, and Emma began teasing for the revelation. Said she, ‘Joseph, you promised me that revelation, and if you are a man of your word, you will give it to me.’ Joseph took it from his pocket and said, ‘Take it.’ She went to the fireplace and put it in, and put the candle under it and burnt it, and she thought that was the end of it, and she will be damned as sure as she is a living woman. Joseph used to say that he would have her hereafter, if he had to go to hell for her, and he will have to go to hell for her as sure as he ever gets her.”
But, of course, there was another copy of the revelation, and then several copies, and the doctrine continued to be circulated among the elite of the church. News of it spread throughout the prospering community. A New Hampshire girl, visiting Nauvoo, pretty Charlotte Haven, wrote her family in the East: “A month ago or more one of the Apostles, Adams by name, returned from a two years’ mission in England, bringing with him a wife and child, although he had left a wife and family here when he went away, and I am told that his first wife is reconciled to this certainly unwelcome guest to her home, for her husband and some others have reasoned with her that plurality of wives is taught in the Bible… I cannot believe that Joseph will ever sanction such a doctrine, and should the Mormons in any way engraft such an article on their religion, the sect would surely fall to pieces, for what community or state could harbor such outrageous immorality?”
At last even Chauncey and Eliza Webb were approached by Joseph Smith and informed of the new doctrine. Since Chauncey was doing well with his latest carriage factory, and regarded as an influential personage in Nauvoo, Smith wanted his support. He ordered Chauncey to “live up to his privileges” and take more wives. Eliza Churchill Webb, despite her awed devotion to the Prophet, was horrified by the introduction of celestial marriage. She wanted to conform, to obey the leader she worshipped, to have secure her marvelous place in the Mormon heaven, but she did not wish to share Chauncey with another woman. Night after night the Webbs discussed the course they must follow. They could reach no decision. So absorbed were they in their personal problem that they were hardly aware of dramatic events building to a climax in the streets of Nauvoo and neighboring non-Mormon towns.
In the months before the secret polygamy revelation, resentment had been growing slowly against the Mormons and particularly against Joseph Smith. Now the citizens of Illinois knew Mormonism firsthand, and they did not like it. “The cheap story of the golden plates and the colonization of the American continent by emigrants from Jerusalem,” wrote Bernard DeVoto, “the mumbo-jumbo of illiterate, semi-Biblical, degraded Masonic rituals, the apocalyptic nonsense of the Mormon metaphysics—such things were in themselves enough to cause trouble on a frontier enthusiastically Methodist and Presbyterian.”
Mormon prosperity and political opportunism also created antagonism. To make matters worse, Joseph Smith had decided to run for President of the United States against James K. Polk of the Democrats and Henry Clay of the Whigs. Earlier, dangling his bloc of votes, Smith had asked the two candidates how they would treat the Mormons if elected. Both replies had been unsatisfactory. Smith then saw clearly that the votes must go to himself. A political convention was arranged in Nauvoo, and it nominated Smith for President and Sidney Rigdon for Vice President. Candidate Smith then drew up his platform and sent 250 Mormon missionaries to every corner of the United States to stump for it. He advocated that Congress be reduced to one third of its size, that congressmen take salary cuts down to two dollars a day, that the money saved by these cuts be used to buy off slaves and that slavery be abolished within six years, that state prisoners be pardoned, that federal troops be used to suppress mobs, that a national bank be established, and that Mexico and Canada be invited to join the United States.
How Joseph Smith would have fared at the ballot box he would never know, for tragedy was about to overtake him. His intense political activity, combined with gossip about the polygamy revelation—and, in fact, the growing practice of polygamy among the Church hierarchy—twisted resentment into hot hatred. There was needed only one more provocation to turn Illinois into the bloody battleground that the Saints had known and suffered in Ohio and Missouri.
This provocation came soon enough. William Law, the Canadian who was Smith’s second counselor, got into a disagreement with the Prophet over whether building materials that he possessed should be used for private enterprise or for the Mormon Temple then being erected. The disagreement became a divorce when Law, who had threatened to kill any man who preached polygamy in his house, learned that Smith had made overtures to his attractive wife. It is not clear if Law, along with his brother Wilson Law and Dr. Foster, quit the church or were excommunicated. But suddenly they were anti-Mormon and in support of the exposés being published by Dr. Bennett.
Law determined to air his grievances. Using a printing press located in a grocery store, he wrote and published a newspaper named the Nauvoo Expositor. Only one issue appeared. It was enough. On June 7, 1844, Law’s newspaper was distributed through Nauvoo and neighboring towns. The purpose of the paper, Law said, was to “censure and decry moral imperfections” evident in the “self-constituted Monarch.” Proclaimed the leading article: “We are earnestly seeking to explode the vicious principles of Joseph Smith, and those who practice the same abominations and whoredoms…” According to the Expositor, deluded females were being imported wholesale from abroad to sate the lust of the Prophet. Each new arrival was brought to Smith’s private quarters and ordered to sleep with him. “She is thunderstruck, faints, recovers, and refuses. The Prophet damns her if she rejects. She thinks of the great sacrifice, and of the many thousands of miles she has traveled over sea and land, that she might save her soul from pending ruin, and replies, God’s will be done, and not mine.”
This sort of thing was lèse-majesé, and Smith knew that it must be stopped at once. Declaring the Expositor a public nuisance, Smith, wearing the cap of mayor, gave the city marshal the following instruction: “You are hereby commanded to destroy the printing press from whence issues the ‘Nauvoo Expositor’ and pit the type of said printing establishment in the street…” Smith accompanied the marshal and other aides to Law’s grocery headquarters. A burly bodyguard stood before the door. When the Mormons tried forcibly to enter, the bodyguard knocked three of them down. Only then, it is said, did Smith enter the fray. He flattened his adversary with a punch. Hastily the press was broken, the type scattered, and copies of the newspaper destroyed.
The surrounding countryside rose in fury against these strong-arm tactics. Smith was charged with inciting a riot, and a warrant was issued for his arrest by Governor Thomas Ford of Illinois. Realizing that he had overreached, Smith, accompanied by his brother Hyrum, fled by skiff across the swollen Mississippi to Montrose, Iowa. It was his intention to continue westward to Oregon or California, there to reestablish Nauvoo. But while in hiding, he received word from Emma that any such abandonment of his people, at this critical moment, would be regarded as cowardice. Shaken, for essentially he was fearless and loyal, Smith hesitated. At last, having been promised adequate protection of his life by Governor Ford, he reluctantly returned to Nauvoo. Surrendering to the authorities, he murmured, “I am going like a lamb to the slaughter, but I am as calm as a summer’s morning.”
Joseph Smith and Hyrum were now charged with the crime of treason against the state and confined to a spacious cell room of the Carthage jailhouse, twenty miles southeast of Nauvoo. A segment of the militia guarded the premises. Smith and his brother spent an uneasy night in their cell. The following day, the muggy summer’s Thursday of June 27, 1844, after having sent for the Nauvoo Legion to rescue them, the Smith brothers prayed, conversed, and relaxed with two visiting friends, John Taylor and Willard Richards. At five o’clock in the afternoon, from their second-story cell, the four men heard the muffled sounds of gunfire.
In the yard below an anonymous mob was closing in on the jail entrance. A hundred assassins, their faces blackened, carrying guns and knives, had scaled the small fence, had survived token resistance from the guards who fired over their heads, and were now breaking into the building. Upstairs, in the cell, Joseph Smith, in shirt sleeves, dropped the wine he had been sipping, jumped to his feet, and snatched a six-barrel pistol (smuggled to him earlier by a follower) from his coat. His brother Hyrum grabbed for a single-barrel pistol. The attackers forced the cell door, and as it burst open, a fusillade of shots rang out. Smith wounded three of the mob. But their volley caught Hyrum in the head, chest, and leg and killed him instantly. Taylor was hit four times and gravely wounded. With the odds insurmountable, Smith threw down his pistol and leaped for the open window. As he ascended the ledge, bullets exploding through the smoking cell door and from the court below struck him. “Oh Lord, My God,” he groaned, then doubled over and pitched forward, falling two stories to the path alongside the jail. Some accounts say that he was dead when he hit the ground; others say that he was still alive and hastily propped up to a sitting position, to be dispatched by a firing squad of four. A Mormon legend has it that one attacker moved in to decapitate him with a bowie knife—there was still a price on his head in Missouri—but that a timely bolt of lightning forestalled this desecration.
The Illinois mob had thought that the death of the Prophet would mean the death of Mormonism, but the mob miscalculated completely. The Church survived for two reasons: first, the murder of Smith gave the Church its Golgotha and its martyred Christ; and, second, it paved the way for the election of the very man needed at this moment, Brigham Young, one of the greatest organizers in American history.
News of the Prophet’s death reached Brigham Young in Boston two weeks after the event. Immediately he hastened back to Illinois. He arrived in Nauvoo the night of August 6, 1844, to learn that Sidney Rigdon had preceded him from Pittsburgh by three days. Already Rigdon was working to be made “guardian to the church.” On August 8 a crucial outdoor meeting was called. The twelve Apostles and a mass of Saints gathered in a meadow to listen to Rigdon and Brigham Young.
Standing atop a wagon, Rigdon spoke first. His hour-and-a-half speech was halting, uninspired, and he made little impression on the gathering. In the afternoon Brigham spoke. “You cannot fill the office of a Prophet, Seer and Revelator: God must do this,” said Brigham. “You are like children without a father and sheep without a shepherd. You must not appoint any man at our head: if you should, the Twelve must ordain him.” Instead, Brigham proposed that the Apostles take over Joseph Smith’s high seat. He did not have to add that he was the leader of the Apostles. He was proposing rule by wise men; Rigdon was proposing himself alone. But it was not merely this difference that moved the audience. It was Brigham’s instinctive theatrical ability that carried the day.
Long after, Orson Hyde, a Church elder, would remember: “He spoke, and his words went through me like electricity. ‘Am I mistaken,’ said I, ‘or is it really the voice of Joseph Smith?’ This is my testimony; it was not only the voice of Joseph, but there were the features, the gestures and even the stature of Joseph before us in the person of Brigham. And though it may be said that President Young is a complete mimic, and can mimic anybody, I would like to see the man who can mimic another in stature, who was about four or five inches higher than himself.”
By nightfall the forty-three-year-old Brigham Young, journeyman house painter and carpenter from Whitingham, Vermont, was virtually the new Prophet of the Church. And among those who sustained him, in that meadow that day, were Chauncey and Eliza Churchill Webb, she eight months pregnant with the child who was to he her last and who was to become Brigham’s twenty-seventh wife. Four months later, in Nebraska, Brigham Young would officially be elected second President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Thirty-four days after Brigham had taken control of the Mormons, days during which Sidney Rigdon was excommunicated, the nine murderers of Joseph Smith were acquitted by a jury, the Nauvoo charter was in the process of being repealed, and mobs began agitating for complete expulsion of the Saints, Eliza Churchill Webb gave birth to her fifth child, an infant girl whom she baptized Ann Eliza Webb.
“I was born on the 13th of September, 1844,” Ann Eliza Webb wrote later, “at the most tempestuous and most critical period in Mormon history.”
Only briefly were Chauncey and Eliza Churchill Webb permitted to be happy with their newborn child. As the child would write in the purple prose of maturity: “I was consecrated to sorrow by the baptism of my mother’s tears upon my baby brow… My baby hands wiped away tears, my baby fingers stroked a cheek furrowed by them, and my baby eyes never saw beyond the mist in hers. I came to her when the greatest misery of her life was about to fall on her.”
This “greatest misery” was not the mob violence outside the Webb household but rather the inevitable problem of polygamy. Once Joseph Smith had advised Chauncey to “live up to his privileges.” Smith’s sudden death had seemed to solve the problem. Now the Prophet’s successor, occupied though he was with the future of the Church, sought to carry out the wishes of the martyred founder. When Ann Eliza was one year old, Brigham Young called on her parents. Sternly he ordered Chauncey to accept the revelation of plural marriage and to practice it. Chauncey left the decision to his wife: to leave Mormonism or to share her household and husband with another woman. Eliza Churchill Webb suffered a hundred hells. She agonized over the problem, and prayed and prayed. Polygamy, her daughter later wrote, “was the most hateful thing in the world to her, and she dreaded and abhorred it, but she was afraid to oppose it, lest she be found ‘fighting against the Lord.’“
When Brigham pressed for a decision, Eliza Churchill Webb surrendered. Immediately, the harassed couple were faced with a second problem. Who would be the other wife? Chauncey and Eliza Churchill made their choices independently and compared them. Both had selected the same girl. She was nineteen years old and attractive and already lived under their roof. Her name was Elizabeth Lydia Taft. Shortly after Ann Eliza’s birth, she and a younger sister had come to live with the Webbs as boarders. “She was a very pleasant, cheery, affectionate person,” Ann Eliza wrote, “and all the family became very much attached to her… She was thoughtful of my mother, and tender to us little ones, petting us and indulging us in our childish whims, and we, in return, loved her very dearly.”
With some embarrassment, no doubt, thirty-three-year-old Chauncey proposed to his youthful boarder. Elizabeth Taft was stunned by the proposal and emotionally torn. On the one hand, she did not wish to hurt Eliza Churchill Webb; on the other, she wanted to please Chauncey Webb. In the end, because she was rigid in her Mormon faith, she decided to please Chauncey. She accepted the proposal. Her only condition was that the wedding await the expected arrival of her parents, from Michigan, in March of 1846. Brigham was consulted. He would allow no delay. On a day in January of 1846, in the new Nauvoo Temple, Chauncey Webb took his second wife, with his first in attendance, and now Ann Eliza had two mothers.
“In the spring of 1846,” Ann Eliza recorded, “our family left Nauvoo, with the large body of the Saints, to find a new home in the West.” In the nearly two years since Joseph Smith’s assassination and Brigham Young’s ascendancy, anti-Mormon feeling in Illinois had not abated. Governor Ford, anxious to prevent more violence, had used every stratagem to get rid of the Mormons. After suggesting to Brigham that he and his followers “get off by yourselves where you can enjoy peace,” he reversed his tactics. He hinted to Brigham that if the Mormons did not leave at once the federal government might prevent them from moving at all, for fear that they would join forces in the Rocky Mountains with the British in an attempted grab of the West. This was deceit, and Brigham undoubtedly knew it, but pressure by the governor, the militia, and the unruly mobs, was at a bursting point. The leader of the Apostles realized that the time for the last exodus had arrived.
During the Wednesday morning of February 4, 1846, in blustery winter weather, the first contingent of Saints crossed the solidly frozen Mississippi River to the Iowa side, with no destination but safety. On a late morning eleven days later, Brigham Young, with his wives and children in wagons, abandoned his brick home and considerable property and, accompanied by Willard Richards (who had escaped the Carthage jail assassination unscathed), moved across the ice to join the vanguard of Saints at the temporary camp of Sugar Creek, nine miles inside Iowa.
In two weeks 2,000 Mormon men, women, and children and 400 wagons had piled up at Sugar Creek. Conditions were primitive. The very first night, nine children had been born. No day was without its birth, said Eliza R. Snow, “some in tents, others in wagons—in rainstorms and in snowstorms. I heard of one birth which occurred under the rude shelter of a hut, the sides of which were formed of blankets fastened to poles stuck in the ground, with a bark roof through which the rain was dripping. Kind sisters stood holding dishes to catch the water as it fell, thus protecting the newcomer and its mother from a showerbath.”
Still fearing massacre, Brigham determined to put as much land as possible between his fugitives and the Illinois mobs. On March 1, 1846, Sugar Creek was abandoned, as Nauvoo had been, and the 400 wagons sloshed and groaned across the mud of Iowa, plodding westward. Most often only six miles a day were covered. Animals fed on tree bark where there was no grass; humans died of exposure to the cold. It took three and a half months, until mid-June, to reach the Missouri River. By homemade ferry the Saints crossed the water to the Nebraska side, and six miles north of present-day Omaha, their leader established a settlement. This was to be known as Winter Quarters, halfway house on the route to the Rockies.
Meanwhile an even larger body of Saints, all but the old, the ailing, the weak in faith, had belatedly fled Nauvoo in April, following the rutted trails of Brigham Young’s party. Among these were the Webbs, delayed because Chauncey had been occupied day and night building Conestoga-type wagons for what the historian Hubert H. Bancroft called a migration without “parallel in the world’s history.” Soon even the old and ailing followed. Robbed and beaten, besieged for two days in Nauvoo until they surrendered, they traded their possessions for their lives and escaped overnight. Nauvoo was left virtually a ghost town.
One of the few prominent Mormons to remain behind was the late Prophet’s wife, Emma Smith, who had been pregnant by Joseph at the time of his assassination and bore her eighth child by him late in 1844. Refusing to recognize Brigham as her new leader, Emma stayed on in Nauvoo with her large family. Two years after the exodus she married a bearded and baby-faced young tavern keeper named Major Lewis C. Bidamon and devoted her latter years to tending bar with him. In old age she denied Joseph’s visions and the fact that he had practiced polygamy. Before her death in 1879, when she was seventy-five, she told her third son, “No such thing as polygamy, or spiritual wifery, was taught, publicly or privately, before my husband’s death… He had no other wife but me; nor did he to my knowledge ever have.” Her eldest son, Joseph, formed the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Independence, Missouri, during 1859, proclaiming that this was the pure, monogamous Mormon Church and that Brigham Young had corrupted the old Church by himself introducing polygamy.
But in 1846 almost all Mormons followed the old Church out of Nauvoo. For seven months a continuous stream of humanity—believers in all—and their livestock, converged on Winter Quarters. In these harried months, said Bernard DeVoto, “the Iowa prairies witnessed such a pageant as no one had seen since the Goths moved on Rome.” In Nebraska, Brigham tried to create the semblance of a city, but haste and poverty made the task impossible. Winter Quarters rose on the Missouri River bluffs like a haphazard boom town, with mules, horses, oxen, chickens, cattle, goats, and sheep covering the forty-one blocks that were dotted with log cabins, dugouts, caves, and dirt-roofed shacks.
Amid chaos Brigham maintained iron discipline and organization. In a hurriedly built meeting hall the hierarchy plotted the future. Missionaries to England came and went. A gristmill was constructed, and crops were planted. Scurvy was repelled by importing potatoes from Missouri, bought with the proceeds of women’s homemade willow baskets. Monotony and misery were alleviated by singing and dancing almost every night to the inspiring music of Captain William Pitt’s brass band, which had been converted in England and brought over as a unit. No mood of anarchy or slackness was permitted. When three young men named Clothier, Brown, and Barnum played it fast and loose with the young ladies, they were charged with “adultery or having carnal communication” for fifteen nights, found guilty, and flogged.
Although Ann Eliza Webb was little more than two years old at the time, she always insisted that her “first distinct remembrance was of Winter-Quarters.” Her sister, Helen Maria, had died in 1843, and now, in a sturdy log cabin prepared by Chauncey, Ann Eliza dwelt with her three surviving brothers, two mothers, and father. Soon this home, too, was broken up. Chauncey, realizing that the hierarchy was planning a westward trek, was impatient to make as much money as possible for supplies. There was no prospect of income in Winter Quarters, and so Chauncey proposed to move to a Mormon settlement in Missouri and see what he could earn. Leaving his second wife, Elizabeth Taft, and his sons, Gilbert and Edward Milo, in the cabin in Winter Quarters, he transported his first wife, his youngest boy, Lorenzo Dow, and Ann Eliza to Missouri.
“That winter, in Missouri,” Ann Eliza remembered, “is one of the bright spots in my childhood, to which I am especially fond of looking back. It is, indeed, the only really happy time I can recollect. My father was busy most of the time, and we lived very pleasantly and comfortably, for that section of the country at that early day; my mother was more cheerful than I had ever known her to be, and the atmosphere of our home was peaceful. The second wife had been left [at Winter Quarters in Nebraska] and my mother had her husband’s sole care and attention, as she had had it in the old days before the curse of polygamy was thrust upon her.” In the evenings a Negro band entertained, and two-year-old Ann Eliza had her first dancing lessons and was soon adept at performing several numbers popular among the slaves.
Late in January of 1847, the happy interlude came to an abrupt halt. Word reached the Webbs that Brigham Young had been favored with his first revelation from the Lord. He had never been so favored before, and, unlike his predecessor Joseph Smith, he would not be so favored often. The moment was impressive. Apparently Brigham had been told to find a permanent settlement for the Saints somewhere in the Rocky Mountains—he would know the place when he saw it—and the revelation also gave him “instructions for the guidance of the camps of Israel on their journeyings to the west.” The Webbs were summoned to return to Winter Quarters.
Back on the bluffs of the Missouri River, Chauncey expected that he and his family would accompany Brigham and the first pioneer party, but this was not to be. Brigham commanded Chauncey to remain in Winter Quarters another year and concentrate on constructing wagons for the main body to follow him. At the time a 3,500-pound wagon, twenty-six feet long, required the labor of four men and the time of two months to build, and no one was more expert at directing this vital work than Chauncey. Furthermore, Brigham wanted Chauncey to help lead the larger second party that would follow in his footsteps. And so Chauncey bent to his augers and linchpins, and little Ann Eliza resumed her dancing lessons, and Brigham prepared for his most challenging journey.
In his own mind, Brigham had settled upon a desolate section of the West known as the Salt Lake Basin for his destination. Four years earlier Senator George H. McDuffie, of South Carolina, had told the Senate that he would not “give a pinch of snuff for the whole territory. I wish to God we did not own it.” Even the writings of John Charles Frémont and other explorers, whom Brigham studied, described an unpromising land that was populated only by sage and salt grass, cottonwood and willow trees, a few streams and lakes. In spite of this—or perhaps because of it, since he wanted a haven isolated from persecuting non-Mormons and out of the path of expanding Empire—Brigham made this Salt Lake desert his goal. As he told a reporter from the New York Times: “From Frémont’s reports, we determined to get our wagons together, form a grand caravan and travel through the country to the Salt Lake, miles from any civilized settlement.”
On April 9, 1847, the final trek began. There were 143 members to this advance party, including Brigham and the sixth of his plural wives, Clara Decker Young, a quiet, well-read, nineteen-year-old New York girl who had married the new Prophet three years earlier. Also in this party were two other women, two non-Mormon whites, and three Negro slaves.
Traveling in sixty-four wagons and carriages (actually light wagons), the men trudging alongside their teams with rifles alert under their arms, the caravan covered the 541 miles to Fort Laramie in seven weeks, arriving there on Brigham’s forty-sixth birthday. Following the line of the old Oregon Trail, but often beating their way off the trail to avoid anti-Mormons and Indians, they improved on Frémont’s maps through use of two sextants and other instruments, set up prairie mailboxes every ten miles (sometimes in buffalo skulls) to leave letters for those who would follow, fought off raids of Pawnee Indians, and built rafts to cross the Platte River.
The routine became a nightmare of monotony. Awakening with the first rays of sun at five, usually announced by the blast of a bugle, the small party cooked breakfast and fed the teams for two hours. At seven they resumed the seemingly endless march across rugged flatlands, those stretching prairies that Captain Richard Burton would characterize as “an ocean in which one loses sight of land.” By eight-thirty of the evening they would grind to a weary halt, create a wagon circle for defense against redskins, then eat, pray, and indulge in dancing, card games, and practical jokes.
Too often, in reaction against the hardships of the trek, the Saints would cavort long beyond their nine-o’clock nightly curfew. Once, said Brigham, “I called the camp together and remonstrated with those brethren who were giving away to trifling, dancing, and card playing…” On this occasion Brigham told those he had summoned about his wagon, “If any man had sense enough to play a game at cards, or dance a little without wanting to keep it up all the time, but exercise a little and then quit it and think no more of it, it would do well enough, but you want to keep it up till midnight and every night, and all the time. You don’t know how to control your sense… Suppose the angels were witnessing the hoe down the other evening, and listening to the haw haws the other evening, would not they be ashamed of it? I am ashamed of it.”
Chastized, they plodded on more religiously, more silently. In Wyoming, a welcome figure, that of Jim Bridger, king of mountain men for a quarter of a century, appeared. He tried to divert Brigham from the Salt Lake Basin. “Mr. Young,” said Bridger, “I would give a thousand dollars if I knew that an ear of corn could be ripened in these mountains. I have been here twenty years, and have tried it in vain, over and over again.” Brigham, fortified by vision, replied that “if he would wait a year or two we would show him what could be done.”
It was boiling summer now, and they were in the mountains, hacking trees, cutting brush, prying loose boulders to make trails. And they were strangely ill. Passing back information on their trek to the Saints in Winter Quarters, Brigham tried to explain the odd malady: “The cold frosty nights of the mountain pass, followed by warm days and the great dust of the succeeding plains, tend to produce sickness, such as fever, head and backache… let every soul be very careful for clothing and keeping warm over the mountain pass, and particularly as night approaches, keeping out of the evening air, as much as possible, and out of the dust.”
On July 23, 1847, they had reached an enormous valley of the Salt Lake Basin. Brigham was too ill with mountain fever to enter it. Instead he sent an elder, Orson Pratt, with forty-two men, to explore the valley. That night Pratt camped on the site of what would soon become Salt Lake City. At daybreak Pratt ordered the earth plowed. But the sun-baked ground was hard as flint, and plow points broke on it. Hastily Pratt had a stream dammed, allowed the diverted water to soak the earth, and then planted the first Mormon crop over several acres.
The following day an Apostle, Wilford Woodruff, drove his light wagon, with Brigham reclining in the rear, to the valley entrance. “I drove my carriage, with President Young lying on a bed in it, into the open valley, the rest of the company following,” wrote Woodruff. “When we came out of the canyon, into full view of the valley, I turned the side of my carriage around, open to the west, and President Young arose from his bed and took a survey of the country. While gazing on the scene before us, he was enwrapped in vision for several minutes. He had seen the valley before in vision, and upon the occasion he saw the future glory of Zion and Israel, as they would be, planted in the valleys of the mountains. When the vision had passed, he said, ‘It is enough. This is the right place. Drive on.’ So I drove to the encampment already formed.”
Four days later Brigham was on his feet. This would be Salt Lake City in the Mormon’s own State of Deseret, which meant honeybee. At once the city was planned: a perfect square of ten-acre blocks, each block subdivided into lots one and one-fourth acres in size. Forty acres were set aside for a mammoth temple. And, because unfriendly Ute Indians were in evidence, a large fort of logs and adobe bricks was given first building priority. Soon the fort began to rise from the valley bottom, spread across ten acres, with its walls nine feet high and twenty-seven inches thick. Now crops were planted, and flour mills, tanneries, business shops planned, and Brigham knew that it was time to fetch the rest of his impatient Saints from the East.
On August 26, 1847, he started the tedious crossing back to the Missouri River. Halfway there he came face to face with a company of 2,000 Mormons on the march. He instructed them of the perils ahead, inspired them, and sent them off. Then he resumed his own journey to Winter Quarters. In nine weeks he reached the Nebraska colony where waited the remaining Saints, among them the Webbs.
All through that autumn and winter, Brigham carefully organized the second and last party he would lead to the Salt Lake Basin. And all the while Chauncey Webb industriously hammered out new wagons, exchanging the income from sale of these vehicles for provisions. With the advent of spring the last party was ready. There were 1,229 Mormons, including the seven members of the Webb family, in 397 wagons, including two superb ones Chauncey had made for his own clan. Besides carrying passengers, the wagons were top-heavy with every comfort of civilization, from stoves and bureaus to farm equipment and pianos. The livestock that accompanied this train made it appear like a Noah’s ark on foot: 1,275 oxen, 699 cattle, seventy-four horses, eighty-two dogs, thirty-seven cats, five beehives, and one squirrel.
On May 4, 1848, when the earth bloomed and Ann Eliza Webb was a bursting three years and eight months of age, the grand caravan got under way for the Rocky Mountains. The Webbs were among the more prosperous families on the train. Chauncey had stuffed his two wagons with provisions for an entire year, and there were three yoke of strong oxen for the vehicles. The prevalent mood among the Webbs, was one of good cheer and anticipation, despite the expected exhaustion on the trek.
Ann Eliza reflected her family’s mood. For her, the wagon train was a traveling circus and every morning a new miracle. Long after, she would not forget: “I ran along, during a portion of the day, by the side of the wagons, picking the flowers by the way, and talking to the different members of the train, for I knew everybody, and was petted almost as much by my fellow-travellers as I had been by my negro friends in Missouri. It is a wonder that I was not completely spoiled; I daresay I should have been, had it not been for my mother’s sensible and judicious training. I was her idol, the one object for which she cared the most in the world; but for all that, she ruled me wonderfully, and I yielded her the most implicit obedience, while giving her the most passionate childish love and devotion.
“I remember her so distinctly on this journey! She occupied herself a great deal with writing, keeping a literal transcript of all that befell us on our journey, mingled with the deepest religious meditation and poetic fancies. She always wrote in a large book, which she afterwards destroyed.
“We rested every Sabbath, and always held services. Sometimes we stayed a week in camp, resting our tired oxen, and recruiting our own strength. It was a pleasant season of the year, and we could afford to travel leisurely, as we had left Winter-Quarters so early that we had ample time to reach Salt Lake Valley before the weather became disagreeable.”
Ann Eliza had no memory of the hardships of the 1,031-mile crossing. Only the happy adventure of it remained forever in her mind. Above all else she remembered the stirring hymns and songs—one penned by her mother—sung in chorus by one and all during Sunday encampments. “I shut my eyes now,” she wrote as a grown woman, “and see a large company gathered together, in a fast-falling twilight, on a wide plain, that seems as endless as the ocean; the blue of the star-studded sky is the only covering for the heads of this company. In the dusk the white-covered wagons look weird and ghostly. Campfires are burning; men, women, and children are clustered together, and the talk goes back to the old days and the trials and persecutions which these people have borne, and forward to an independent and happy future, blessed of God and unmolested by man. In the glow of anticipation, some one strikes up this fervid hymn… and the wide plains echo back the stirring strains. I nestle by my mother’s side, awed and subdued, but content to feel the clasp of her hand and meet the loving light of her eyes. The song is over, and ‘hosannas’ and ‘amens’ resound on every side, and out of the blue sky the stars smile down on the wanderers with a calm, hopeful light.”
At the Weber River, a few days from its destination, the company halted and pitched camp for a week. Women fished, and men repaired bolsters and axles, and Brigham Young repeated details of his revelation. When Ann Eliza celebrated her fourth birthday, Brigham attended. At this time, Ann Eliza recalled, she was one of Brigham’s favorite youngsters. ‘I little thought then,” she added ruefully later, “what relation I should one day hold to this man, who was older than my father. My future was not foreshadowed in that summer journey in search of a home.”
Finally the camp on Weber River was broken. The last days of marching, on callused feet, were faced with vigor and haste. And at once, it seemed, though more than four weary months of travel lay behind them, the Salt Lake Valley opened beneath their eyes. A kind of civilization was waiting. From her mother’s side Ann Eliza could see a city of 450 log and adobe homes, a massive fort, three sawmills, and 5,000 planted and irrigated acres of crop (that had survived, through a miraculous visitation of sea gulls, a black invasion of crickets). On September 20, 1848, Ann Eliza Webb and her elders descended into the valley.
Peace, at last, was the joyous refrain in every mind. None could know that peace would be short-lived.