III: THE FIVE MRS. WEBBS

“Good God! I have wives enough to whip out the United States.”

—Heber C. Kimball

On August 29, 1852, four years after the founding of Salt Lake City, Brigham Young announced to his followers, to the nation, to the world, that henceforth the doctrine of plural marriage was an official tenet of the Mormon Church.

The occasion for this explosive bulletin was a routine two-day conference of 106 Mormon missionaries gathered together in Salt Lake City, to be briefed on their work before leaving for such distant parts as France, India, Russia, and South Africa.

On the morning of the second day of the meeting, almost before the missionaries had settled in their places, forty-one-year-old Orson Pratt, seventeen years an Apostle, the Church’s leading intellectual light, and the husband of ten living wives, rose to his feet and suddenly began to discuss the secret revelation on polygamy given to the late Joseph Smith in Nauvoo during 1843.

“It is well known… to the congregation before me,” said Pratt, “that the Latter-day Saints have embraced the doctrine of a plurality of wives as part of their religious faith… But, says the objector, we cannot see how this doctrine can be embraced as a matter of religion and faith… In reply we will show that it is incorporated as part of our religion and necessary for our exaltation to the fullness of the Lord’s glory in the eternal world.”

Pratt then discoursed at length on the celestial aspects of polygamy and its Biblical background.

“Here, then, we perceive, just from this one principle, reasoning from the blessings of Abraham alone, the necessity—if we would partake of the blessings of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—of doing their work, and he that will not do the works of Abraham and walk in his footsteps will be deprived of his blessings.

“Now let us inquire what will become of those individuals who have this law taught unto them in plainness if they reject it? I will tell you. ‘They will be damned,’ saith the Lord God Almighty in the revelation he has given.”

Attempting to anticipate every doubt, Pratt assured his startled listeners that Mormon polygamy would not be practiced to “gratify the carnal lusts and feelings of man,” but would be practiced to fulfill a holy demand of the Lord. Later Pratt would explain that in this doctrine the Saints were obeying the word of God and not the precedent set by Old Testament patriarchs. “The Latter-day Saints in this territory practice polygamy, not because the law of Moses commands it; not because it was extensively practiced by the best of men we know of mentioned in the Bible, the old patriarchs, Abraham, Jacob, and others… We have no right to practice it because they did, but because it is enjoined upon us by divine command.”

Would divine command contradict temporal law? Pratt was positive that it would not. There was nothing in the Constitution of the United States about the number of wives an American citizen might legally possess. “I believe that they will not, under our present form of government (I mean the government of the United States), try us for treason for believing and practicing our religious notions and ideas. I think, if I am not mistaken, that the Constitution gives the privilege to all of the inhabitants of this country, of the free exercise of their religious notions… Then, if it can be proved to a demonstration that the Latter-day Saints have actually embraced, as a part and portion of their religion, the doctrine of a plurality of wives, it is constitutional. And should there ever be laws enacted by this government to restrict them from the free exercise of their religion, such laws must be unconstitutional.”

Still Pratt realized that the revolutionary marital doctrine might make the timid quake. For these Pratt sounded a final warning: “There will be many who will not hearken, there will be the foolish among the wise, who will not receive the new and everlasting covenant in fullness, and they never will attain to their exaltation, they never will be counted worthy to hold the scepter of power over a numerous progeny, that shall multiply themselves without end, like the sand upon the seashore.”

If the 106 Mormon missionaries assembled were left dazed by this remarkable turn of events, and if they found their lunches hardly digestible, they had much sterner oratory awaiting them in the afternoon conference. For now Brigham Young, second Prophet and newly appointed first Governor of the Territory of Utah, had much to add. Standing before the missionaries and his own aides, Brigham placed his exalted blessings on the daring doctrine.

“You heard Brother Pratt state, this morning, that a Revelation would be read this afternoon, which was given previous to Joseph’s death,” Brigham said. “It contains a doctrine a small portion of the world is opposed to; but I can deliver a prophecy upon it. Though that doctrine has not been preached by the Elders, this people have believed in it for years.

“The original copy of this Revelation was burnt up. William Clayton was the man who wrote it from the mouth of the Prophet. In the meantime it was in Bishop Whitney’s possession. He wished the privilege to copy it, which brother Joseph granted. Sister Emma burnt the original. The reason I mention this is because that the people who did know of the Revelation supposed it was not now in existence.

“The Revelation will be read to you. The principle spoken upon by Brother Pratt this morning we believe in. And I tell you—for I know it—it will sail over and ride triumphantly above all the prejudice and priestcraft of the day; it will be fostered and believed in by the more intelligent portions of the world as one of the best doctrines ever proclaimed to any people.

“The world has known long ago, even in Joseph’s days, that he had more wives than one. One of the Senators in Congress knew it very well. Did he oppose it? No! But he has been our friend all the day long, especially upon that subject. He said pointedly to his friends: If the United States do not adopt that very method [plural marriage], let them continue as they now are; pursue the precise course they are now pursuing, and it will come to this, that their generations will not live until they are 30 years old; they are going to destruction; disease is spreading so fast among the inhabitants of the United States, that they are born rotten with it, and in a few years they are gone.’ Said he, ‘Joseph has introduced the best plan for restoring and establishing strength and long life among men of any man on earth, and the Mormons are a very good and virtuous people.’

“Many others are of the same mind; they are not ignorant of what we are doing in our social capacity. They have cried out, ‘Proclaim it’; but it would not do a few years ago; everything must come in its time, as there is time to all things. I am now ready to proclaim it.

“This Revelation has been in my possession for many years, and who has known it? None but those who should know it. I keep a patent lock on my desk, and there does not anything leak out that should not.”

But Brigham Young had deliberately opened the patent lock on his desk, and now the word was out. Sixteen days later, on the day following Ann Eliza Webb’s eighth birthday celebration, The Deseret News, established two years earlier as the mouthpiece of the Church, issued a fifteen-cent extra edition to confirm the announcement in print before the entire incredulous nation. And seven months later, in Liverpool, England, the Millennial Star trumpeted the doctrine to the wide world.

Now, at last, the mysterious and private practice was in the open. And all the world gaped. For the Mormons of the United States were the first Western peoples in modern times to advocate and encourage harem living. Perhaps it was the boldness of the announcement that shocked the most. By fleeing to sparsely populated Utah, the Mormons had sought to avoid persecution and opposition. Yet, knowing full well that the flaunting of polygamy in public would bring down on their heads the righteous wrath of the entire monogamous nation, the Church hierarchy had sanctioned the doctrine. What on earth had impelled Brigham Young to make the sensational announcement?

There were several reasons for publicizing what had been, until 1852, a private matter. Since Nauvoo, the Saints had lived their doctrine in secret, but the secret was not well kept. As Ann Eliza Webb would explain years later: “The command had gone forth to take more wives, and it did not matter at all whether there was a place to put them in; they must be taken into polygamy. It was kept quiet from the outside world, and the elders who were sent out on missions were commanded to keep utter silence on the subject. Rumors did get out after a while, especially after the California miners began to pass through Utah. There were no hotels at Salt Lake City at that time, and the emigrants who stopped there to rest before finishing their journey were compelled to become temporary inmates of Mormon homes, where they found polygamous wives and children as a matter of course. Naturally they would grow curious after a time concerning these extra women and children, and as the inquiries were sometimes quite embarrassing, every subterfuge had to be resorted to so as to keep the guests in ignorance of the system.

“But, try the best they might, they could not prevent suspicions of the truth.”

It was the forty-niners, headed for the gold fields of northern California, who spread the scandal westward. But they were not alone. A year later, in 1850, Utah had been made a territory of the United States by Congress. After appointing Brigham the first governor of this territory with a population of 11,000, President Millard Fillmore also nominated nine men as Federal officeholders. Of these nine, four were Mormons and five were anti-Mormons. The most pugnacious of the anti-Mormons was Perry E. Brocchus, of Alabama, who had been selected to serve as associate justice of Utah Territory.

On September 8, 1850, an ailing Judge Brocchus requested permission to address the Saints at a meeting in the Bowery, a makeshift outdoor tabernacle that seated 2,500. Brigham granted the request and sat by as Judge Brocchus launched into what appeared to be a mild and non-controversial speech. The Mormons had offered to send a block of marble as their contribution to the Washington Monument, and now Judge Brocchus was remarking that such marble should only be presented by a people who were loyal to the government. Against a stony silence, the judge frankly questioned Brigham’s loyalty. The judge could not forget that upon the occasion of President Zachary Taylor’s death, Brigham, who resented the late President for having rejected Utah’s appeal for statehood, had exclaimed, “Zachary Taylor is dead and gone to hell, and I am glad of it!… I prophesy, in the name of Jesus Christ, by the power of the priesthood that is upon me, that any other President of the United States, who shall lift his finger against this people, will die an untimely death and go to hell.”

Now the judge undiplomatically alluded to Brigham’s remark. As he afterward reported his speech thus to President Fillmore: “I endeavored to show the injustice of their feelings towards the Government, and alluded boldly and feelingly to the sacrilegious remarks of Governor Young towards the memory of the lamented Taylor. I defended, as well as my feeble powers would allow, the name and character of the departed hero from the unjust aspersions cast upon them, and remarked that, in the latter part of the assailant’s bitter exclamation that he ‘was glad that General Taylor was in hell,’ he did not exhibit a Christian spirit, and that if the author did not early repent of the cruel declaration, he would perform that task with keen remorse upon his dying pillow.” If this were not enough, the tactless and fearless judge turned his attention to the Mormon women. “Oh, ladies, sweet ladies,” he implored, speaking of Brigham Young, “why do you ‘go in’ for such a man? Your smiles should be turned on the contemplation of men who can handle the sword—George Washington and Zachary Taylor, the second Washington. Oh, Governor Young can’t handle a sword.” The judge was fully aware of secret polygamy. How could these fallen women present a block of marble to their government? “In order to make this presentation acceptable,” said Judge Brocchus, “you must become virtuous and teach your daughters to become virtuous, or your offering had better remain in the bosom of your native mountains.”

At once a wave of Mormon men were on their feet, bellowing for the floor. Brigham, shaken with rage, was on his feet before them. “His manner,” the judge admitted to the President, “was boisterous, passionate, infuriated in the extreme; and if he had not been afraid of final vengeance, he would have pointed his finger at me, and I should in an instant have been a dead man.”

Brigham did point his finger at the judge, but it was to shame him. “I ask you all,” he shouted to his excited audience, “have we ever before listened to such trash and nonsense from this stand?” He wheeled upon Brocchus. “Are you a judge, and can’t even talk like a lawyer, or a politician, and haven’t read an American school history? Be ashamed, you illiterate ranter, not to know your Washington better than to praise him for being a mere brutal warrior. Washington was called first in war; but he was first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen. He had a big head and a great heart. Of course, he could fight. But, Lord! What man can’t? What man here will dare to say, with women standing by, that he is a bit more a coward than Washington was? Handle a sword! I can handle a sword as well as George Washington. I’d be ashamed to say I couldn’t. But you, standing there, white and shaking now, at the hornets’ nest you have stirred up yourself—you are a coward, and that is why you have cause to praise men that are not.”

As to the judge’s insinuations about female immorality and lascivious harem life among the Mormons, Brigham held such rumors in utter contempt. “What you have been afraid to intimate about our morals, I will not stoop to notice,” Brigham said to the judge, “except to make my particular personal request to every brother and husband present not to give you back what such impudence deserves. You talk of things ‘you have on hearsay’ since your coming among us. I’ll talk of hearsay, then—the hearsay that you are discontented and will go home because we cannot make it worth your while to stay. What it would satisfy you to get out of us I think it would be hard to tell; but I am sure that it is more than you’ll get. If you or anyone else is such a baby-calf, we must sugar your soap to coax you to wash yourself on Saturday nights. Go home to your mammy straight away, and the sooner the better.”

In less than a year, after suffering the most chilling ostracism, Judge Brocchus and his fellow anti-Mormon officials had fled to Washington, D.C., Just as the forty-niners had taken the news of secret polygamy to the west coast, these defeated Federal officials took lurid details of harem living to the east coast. Brigham Young hated the distorted pictures of celestial marriage resulting from these rumors as he detested secrecy in general. The plural-wife doctrine was, after all, a revelation of the Lord, and Brigham was proud of it. Furthermore, in the few years since the founding of Salt Lake City he had seen his people flourish—a half million dollars’ worth of livestock was in the area, 16,000 acres were under cultivation, and 250 miles of settlements, each known as a stake of Zion, spread across Utah—and Brigham felt strong and secure in the isolated Rocky Mountain valley. Finally, because he was an intensely practical seer, Brigham realized the necessity to propagate the race on this distant frontier. Single wives united to single husbands would produce children, but not enough children and not fast enough. On the other hand, many wives serviced by a single fertile husband might produce children in vast numbers, and the soaring population would ensure the future prosperity and power of the Church. And so, for all of these reasons, Brigham Young determined to put an end to evasions and to make the startling doctrine of plural wifehood a matter of normal and open practice and public record.

The national uproar that greeted this radical matrimonial innovation was instantaneous, persistent, and did not cease for the remainder of the entire nineteenth century. Celebrated authors and journalists came across the plains and through the mountains, by stagecoach, to visit Salt Lake City as they would visit a zoo and to report their observations and feelings on the strange mating institution.

The paramount exhibit, of course, the central attraction, was Brigham Young’s own household. It exasperated him that visitors were interested in little aside from his polygamous family. “When strangers come to see me,” he said, “their first reflection is, ‘I would like to ask him a question if I dare.’ What is it? It is all about wives. My conscience! What a generation of gentlemen and ladies we have!”

In the full eloquence of his later years Brigham once told his congregation: “Ladies who come into my office very frequently say, ‘I wonder if it would hurt his feelings if I were to ask him how many wives he has?’ Let me say to all creation that I would as like they should ask me that question as any other, but I would rather see them anxious to learn about the Gospel. Having wives is a secondary consideration; it is within the pale of duty, and, consequently, it is all right. But to preach the Gospel, save the children of men, build up the kingdom of God, produce righteousness in the midst of the people, govern and control ourselves and our families and all we have influence over, make us of one heart and one mind… is our business, no matter how many wives a man has got; that makes no difference here or there. I want to say, and I wish to publish it, that I would as soon be asked how many wives I have got as any other question, just as soon, but I would rather see something else in their minds. Instead of all the time thinking, ‘How many wives have you?’ or ‘I wonder whom he slept with last night.’ I can tell those who are curious on this point. I slept with all that slept, and we slept on one universal bed—the bosom of our mother earth, and we slept together. ‘Did you have anybody in bed with you?’ ‘Yes.’ *Who was it?’ It was my wife. It was not your wife nor your daughter nor sister, unless she was my wife and that too legally. I can say that to all creation, and every honest man can say the same; but it is not all who are professed Christians who can say it.”

Brigham Young was ill-cast for the role of model polygamist. His earliest background was dominated by puritanism, poverty, and monogamy. Born of a Vermont farming family in 1801, he was the ninth of eleven children. Motherless from the age of fourteen, Brigham was beaten by his father for the slightest infraction of family rules. Religious morality was strict, and he was never permitted to walk more than a half hour on Sundays. At the age of twenty-two he became a Methodist. A year later he became a married man. His first wife was eighteen-year-old Miriam Works, of Cayuga County, New York. Brigham hired himself out as house painter, carpenter, farm hand, to support Miriam and the two girls she bore him. In April and May 1832, Brigham and Miriam were baptized into the Mormon Church by Joseph Smith. Four months later, at Mendon, New York, Miriam “clapped her hands and praised the Lord” and died of consumption, leaving Brigham a widower at thirty-one.

Two years passed before Brigham married again. His second wife was Mary Ann Angell, of Puritan stock, Baptist persuasion, born in New York and raised in Rhode Island. As an adolescent she filled her head with the Scriptures and determined that she would not wed until she would “meet a man of God.” Converted to Mormonism in 1830, she traveled to Kirtland, Ohio, alone, met her man of God, and as an old maid of almost thirty-one married Brigham Young on February 18, 1834. In the forty-five years that she was married to the Prophet she gave him six children, three boys and three girls. She disliked polygamy, yet, as first wife, gave consent to each new plural marriage (a technicality required by Mormon law). In 1852, when polygamy was made public, Mary Ann Angell was forty-nine. Although an intelligent woman, she was of a retiring nature, yet she dominated the other wives by the accident of seniority. In those early days in Salt Lake City, Brigham’s wives lived side by side in an L-shaped series of log and mud-plaster cabins. Mary Ann Angell alone had a private cabin separated from the rest. The other wives looked up to her and called her “Mother Young.” Her superiority, she knew, rested in a single point of law: if polygamy were ever declared illegal, she alone would remain Brigham’s legal wife and major heir to his estate.

Even though Joseph Smith did not dictate the plural-marriage revelation until July 12, 1843, Brigham began to practice what his Prophet secretly preached a full thirteen months before. On June 15, 1842, the forty-one-year-old Brigham married his first plural wife, twenty-year-old Lucy Ann Decker, who gave him seven children (and always permitted them to sleep through the mornings, remembering how she hated her own New England childhood when she had to awaken every dawn at five).

Having entered into polygamy with reluctance, or so he always said, Brigham now devoted himself to multiple matrimony with surprising (or understandable) zest. He celebrated the year of the revelation, 1843, with two more marriages performed on a single day in early November. The first of these brides was the second cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a tall, educated nineteen-year-old girl from New York, Harriet Elizabeth Cook Campbell, who gave Brigham a son three years later; the second bride was, by contrast, the somewhat elderly Augusta Adams, a dignified Massachusetts woman of forty-one, who would remain childless.

Between May and September of 1844, Brigham added another three wives. In the spring, when he was forty-three years old, he married a child bride, sixteen-year-old Clara Decker, the tiny, younger sister of his first polygamous wife. It was Clara who, three years later, accompanied him on the difficult first journey into the Rocky Mountains. In the autumn Brigham married a beautiful brunette from New York, Clarissa Ross, who was thirty years old and gave her husband four children. Shortly after, Brigham took for a wife the first of the six widows of Joseph Smith whom he would marry. This was the dark, slender, thirty-year-old Emily Dow Partridge, who had been born in Ohio and raised in Mormonism since she was seven. In her youth she had overheard her father describe her to a friend as the “odd one” in the family. Apparently this experience had been traumatic, for long after she would write her children: “Let me tell you here that if any of you ever have a child that is in any way peculiar, don’t let that child know it by anything you may say or do. For many times some of the most noble qualities have been crushed or destroyed while in their undeveloped state because they were not understood.”

At the age of nineteen, along with an older sister, Emily Dow had been sealed to Joseph Smith as his twenty-third wife, in the reluctant presence of Smith’s first wife, Emma Hale. “From that very hour, however, Emma was our bitter enemy,” Emily Dow Partridge once revealed. “We remained in the family several months after this, but things went from bad to worse until we were obliged to leave the house and find another home.” Emily Dow, in the year she was married to him, gave Smith no children; however, she gave Brigham Young two sons and five daughters.

In 1845, as successor to the Prophet, Brigham was too occupied with his new post to take more than one wife. This wife, his ninth, was Olive Grey Frost, a frail tailoress from Maine who had done missionary work in England and had married Joseph Smith just before his assassination. Upon seeing Smith’s coffin—a wooden box covered by a horse blanket and grass—Olive Grey Frost, it was said, “went entirely mad.” At twenty-nine, still mourning and ill, she married Brigham Young. They were man and wife only eight months when she died in Nauvoo of pneumonia.

On February 15, 1846, under the threat of mob violence, Brigham Young was forced to flee Nauvoo forever. In the twenty-three days preceding the exodus, either excited by a revival of religious fervor or eager to protect his place in heaven by good works on earth, Brigham married eleven women ranging in age from seventeen to forty-two. In the seven days between January 14 and 21 of 1846, Brigham took seven brides. Then, in the four days between February 2 and 6 of 1846, he took four more brides.

This matrimonial spree began on January 14, 1846, a month before his departure from Nauvoo. In that one day Brigham married Louisa Beaman, Emmeline Free, and Margaret Maria Alley. Thirty-one-year-old Louisa Beaman, of New York, full-busted and lovely, was another of Joseph’s widows. Eventually she gave Brigham two sets of twins, all boys, and sentimentally she named the first set Joseph and Hyrum, after her former husband and brother-in-law. This wedding of Brigham’s was immediately followed by one to the beautiful and adoring Emmeline Free, made over her parents’ objections. The youthful Emmeline pampered and petted her husband, and by 1852 she was his most beloved spouse. Of Emmeline, John Hyde would write in 1857: “Brigham has a favorite. She is a very good-looking person, of about thirty years of age. She is tall; her eyes are a very soft blue, large and full; her hair light brown; complexion very fair, and general expression very intelligent and prepossessing… In her case, Brigham violated his own law. For a little while, he indulged his vanity so far as to wear his hair curled; much laughter and remark was occasioned by persons often noticing his head fixed up in papers and hair-pins, of an evening. This lady was the industrious hairdresser.” Apparently Brigham was more consistently attentive to Emmeline than to any of his previous wives. Between 1847 and 1864, a period of seventeen years during which at least seventeen wives competed for his bed, Emmeline produced ten children by Brigham, four of them sons. The third wife married by Brigham that single day was Margaret Maria Alley, a twenty-one-year-old girl from Massachusetts. She would die in Salt Lake City six years later, just after the public proclamation on polygamy, and her children would be raised by Clara Decker.

A week later in Nauvoo, on January 21, 1846, Brigham took himself four more wives between daybreak and dusk. One was thirty-one-year-old Susan Snively, an energetic and aggressive Virginian of German extraction, another was seventeen-year-old Ellen Rockwood of Massachusetts, the third was twenty-four-year- old Martha Bowker, of New Jersey, and the fourth was a young widow of Joseph Smith, twenty-three-year-old Maria Lawrence, of Canada. While that wondrous day delivered four faithful wives, it would provide Brigham with no added progeny. The following day, January 22, 1846, almost as an afterthought, Brigham took his seventeenth wife, Margaret Pierce, a charming Pennsylvania girl of twenty-two. Margaret did not give her husband a child for nine years, but at last, in 1854, she produced the son who would be Brigham’s fiftieth offspring.

After eleven days spent recuperating from his marathon of celestial marriages, Brigham vigorously returned to the altar on February 2, 1846, when he became the third husband of Zina Diantha Huntington, of Watertown, New York. The descendant of a Pilgrim father, Zina had been converted to Mormonism at fifteen and had married Henry Bailey Jacobs in Nauvoo during March of 1841. Seven months after this marriage, while Jacobs was on a mission to England, Zina had become Joseph Smith’s eighth wife—even though seven months pregnant with Jacobs’ first son. Since Jacobs adored his wife, he agreed to share her. Zina had been Joseph’s plural wife for three years when she was half widowed. At twenty-five she became the plural wife of Brigham Young, with Jacobs on hand to witness the ceremony.

The day following his marriage to Zina, and apparently still in the mood to rescue another of Joseph Smith’s widows, Brigham married forty-two-year-old Eliza Roxey Snow, who was the sister of Lorenzo Snow, an Apostle, and who had secretly been sealed to Joseph Smith in June of 1842. Eliza Roxey Snow had lived under the same roof with Joseph and his first wife, Emma Hale. In the spring of 1844, both Emma and Eliza Roxey were pregnant by Joseph. When Emma, who did not suspect this, emerged into the hall outside her bedroom one morning to find Eliza Roxey, clad only in a nightgown, and her husband locked in each other’s arms, she lost her temper. Grabbing a broom, she swung at Eliza Roxey, who retreated, slipped, and fell down a flight of stairs. Wildly Emma drove her rival into the street. As a result of this harrowing experience Eliza Roxey Snow suffered a miscarriage. Eventually she hid her past behind the curtains of conservatism and respectability. A teacher and prolific poet, Eliza Roxey became the foremost female apologist for polygamy and perhaps the most influential woman in the Church. She provided no children for Brigham; in fact, it is doubtful if their marriage was more than platonic.

Three days after his union with Eliza Roxey Snow, on February 6, 1846, Brigham married his twentieth wife, a small Massachusetts widow of twenty-five who always signed her name as Naamah Kendel Jenkins Carter Twiss. Almost nine months before, Brigham had personally officiated at the marriage of Naamah to one John S. Twiss. In three months Twiss was dead, and Naamah was a widow until salvaged by Brigham.

Thereafter, for thirteen months in Winter Quarters, Brigham devoted his time to less romantic Church business. But then, twenty-four days before heading westward, he contracted marriage to two sisters in a single day. On March 20, 1847, the forty-six-year-old Brigham took for plural wives twenty-year-old Mary Jane Bigelow, an Illinois girl, and her seventeen-year-old sister, Lucy Bigelow. Upon arrival in Salt Lake City, the older sister, Mary Jane, who had not yet cohabited with Brigham, asked him for an annulment or legal separation, and it was granted. However, Mary Jane’s younger sister, Lucy, remained a staunch polygamist and faithful partner for life, giving Brigham three daughters between 1852 and 1863.

Once established in Salt Lake City, Brigham refrained from further marital acquisitions and temporarily concentrated his energies on organizing a secure and civilized community. No new wives were added to his crowded household until after his public announcement of celestial or heaven-directed plural marriage.

And so, at the very moment when Brigham Young officially recognized polygamy, he stood before his people and the entire world as the prime practitioner of the holy doctrine. He had been married twenty-two times by August of 1852 and, with two wives dead and one separated from him, he was living with a household of nineteen women.

The entire United States, it seemed, wanted to know more about polygamy in general and Brigham’s harem in particular. The anti-Mormons were fanatical in their disapproval; the Mormons were equally fanatical in their defense. Objectivity was almost impossible to come by in the decade after 1852. But during the turmoil of those years, when journalists and authors were pouring into Salt Lake City, there arrived two professional Gentile observers who, if not entirely objective in their opinion, were inclined toward moderation in their published reports of what they witnessed. One of these was Horace Greeley, who disapproved; the other was Captain Richard Burton, who approved.

When the forty-eight-year-old Horace Greeley arrived, by stagecoach from the East, in Salt Lake City during July of 1859, he was already as nationally famous as Brigham Young, his senior by ten years, was infamous. Publisher of the celebrated New York Tribune, he was often America’s conscience and one of its foremost opinion makers. In his crackling pages he opposed woman suffrage, the theater, easy divorce, business monopoly, and slavery. Persistently he advocated high tariffs, Irish independence, prohibition, strong unions, and the draft laws. He opened his pages to an odd variety of geniuses: Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx. With considerable foresight he advised the nation’s young men to go west. At last, because he was curious about Mormonism, Brigham Young, and plural marriage, he went west himself.

At two o’clock in the afternoon of July 13, 1859, Horace Greeley sat down across from Brigham Young, who was backed by two of his grown sons, Heber C. Kimball, and a number of other Church functionaries. Horace Greeley began to pose his questions, and Brigham replied with pleasing frankness. “He spoke readily,” Greeley told his readers, “not always with grammatical accuracy, but with no appearance of hesitation or reserve, and with no apparent desire to conceal anything, nor did he repel any of my questions as impertinent. He was very plainly dressed in thin summer clothing and with no air of sanctimony or fanaticism. In appearance, he is a portly, frank, good-natured, rather thick-set man of fifty-five, seeming to enjoy life, and to be in no particular hurry to get to heaven.”

After a brief exchange on general topics, Greeley, the crusading abolitionist, wanted Brigham’s views on the burning subject of slavery, which his Prophet predecessor had once denounced.

“What is the position of your church with respect to slavery?” Greeley wanted to know.

“We consider it of divine institution,” said Brigham serenely, “and not to be abolished until the curse pronounced on Ham shall have been removed from his descendants.”

“Are any slaves now held in this territory?”

“There are,” admitted Brigham.

“Do your territorial laws uphold slavery?”

“Those laws are printed—you can read for yourself. If slaves are brought here by those who owned them in the States, we do not favor their escape from the service of those owners.”

Apparently Greeley was somewhat nettled. “Am I to infer that Utah, if admitted as a member of the Federal Union, will be a slave state?”

Brigham, who wanted desperately to be admitted to the Union, knew which way the wind was blowing and played it diplomatically. “No, she will be a free state,” he declared flatly. “Slavery here would prove useless and unprofitable. I regard it generally as a curse to the master. I myself hire many laborers and pay them fair wages; I could not afford to ovm them. I can do better than subject myself to an obligation to feed and clothe their families, to provide and care for them in sickness and health. Utah is not adaptable to slave labor.”

Somewhat calmed, Greeley inquired about other aspects of the Church structure and finally arrived at the subject that, next to slavery, interested him (and his readers) the most. But first a preparatory question.

“Can you give any rational explanation,” Greeley asked, “of the aversion and hatred with which your people are generally regarded by those among whom they have lived and with whom they have been brought directly into contact?”

Brigham did not so much as blink. “No other explanation,” he said, “than is afforded by the crucifixion of Christ and the kindred treatment of God’s ministers, prophets, and saints in all ages.”

The preliminaries were completed. Greeley plunged ahead. “How general is polygamy among you?”

“I could not say. Some of those present have each but one wife; others have more; each determines what is his individual duty.”

“What is the largest number of wives belonging to any one man?” Greeley wanted to know.

“I have fifteen,” said Brigham. “I know no one who has more, but some of those sealed to me are old ladies whom I regard rather as mothers than wives, but whom I have taken home to cherish and support.”

“Does not Christ say that he who puts away his wife, or marries one whom another has put away, commits adultery?”

“Yes, and I hold that no man should ever put away a wife except for adultery—not always even for that. Such is my individual view of the matter. I do not say that wives have never been put away in our church, but that I do not approve of that practice.”

The interview had lasted two hours, and, for his part, Greeley felt that it had been fair give and take on both sides. Yet, during the eight days he continued to report to New York City from Salt Lake City, the subject of plural marriage continued to weigh heavily on his mind. He tried to divert himself with other observations: Mormons and Gentiles did not mix socially; sermons in the new Tabernacle were too verbose and too rambling; the mass of Mormons were “honest and sincere” in their faith, although possibly “this so-called religion (with all others)” might be “a contrivance for the enslavement and fleecing of the many, and the aggrandizement of the few”; Brigham Young was a dictator, and as a result all Federal officials were rendered impotent, should be withdrawn, and the territory itself (after being reduced in size) should be left to the Mormons as a private and autonomous reservation; “more than a thousand barrels of whisky have been sold in this city within the last year” despite the fact that the Latter-day Saints prohibited the drinking of hard liquor; the laborer’s lot in Utah was more difficult than his lot in Kansas.

But what continued to fascinate Horace Greeley above all else were the numerous plural wives. This “degradation… of woman to the single office of child-bearing” troubled him deeply. The wives of polygamy seemed lifeless, inert, inactive. Eight years later, an English visitor, William Hepworth Dixon, would experience the same sensation: “I have never seen this sort of shyness among grown women, except in a Syrian tent.” According to Greeley: “No Mormon has ever cited to me his wife’s or any woman’s opinion on any subject; no Mormon woman has been introduced or has spoken to me; though I have been asked to visit Mormons in their houses, no one has spoken of his wife (or wives) desiring to see me, or his desiring me to make her (or their) acquaintance, or voluntarily indicated the existence of such a being or beings.” Before leaving Salt Lake City, Horace Greeley reported his final judgment on the subject: “I do not believe the plural-wife system can long endure, yet almost every man with whom I converse on the subject seems intensely, fanatically devoted to it, deeming this the choicest of his earthly blessings. With the women, I am confident it is otherwise; and I watched their faces as Elder Taylor, at a social gathering on Saturday night, was expatiating humorously on this feature of the Mormon system, to the great delight of the men; but not one responsive smile did I see on the face of a woman. On the contrary, I thought they seemed generally to wish the subject passed over in silence.”

On August 25, 1860, little more than a year after Greeley left Utah, Captain Richard Burton, the fabulous English explorer, Orientalist, author (not yet knighted), rode into Salt Lake City on a covered wagon, after a nineteen-day journey from St. Joseph, Missouri. At thirty-nine, Burton had lived nine lives. Sent down from Oxford, he had become a captain in the Bombay Native Infantry. When the British Intelligence requested a report on conditions in Karachi, Burton presented them with an essay on sexual perversions among the Indians. At home in Goa as well as Somaliland, he had discovered Lake Tanganyika and Victoria Nyanza. He had mastered a dozen languages, including Jataki, an Afghan dialect. Seven years earlier, determined to become one of the few white men to visit forbidden Mecca, he dyed his skin brown, memorized the intricate Mohammedan ritual, and had himself circumcised in a painful operation. Then, disguised as a Pathan haji, he successfully entered Mecca. The practice of polygamy in Eastern countries intrigued him, and now that the Mormons were practicing it, he was eager to see how it worked in the West. He believed in polygamy, perhaps because it was bizarre and exotic, and defended it, much to the distress of his future wife, Isabel. Defensively she always reminded visitors that, after all, Richard was satisfied with having one wife and that “he is a domestic man at home, and a homesick man away!”

Attired in wide-brimmed hat, English shooting jacket, flannel shirt, and buckskins, Burton came to Utah armed with Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanism, two pistols, and a long knife. A savagely handsome, mustached giant, he wore his hair cropped close to the skull to prevent scalping by Indians (and would later lecture the London Anthropological Society on the art of scalping). For his first meeting with Brigham Young—arranged by the recently appointed governor of the territory, 240-pound Alfred Cumming, of Georgia—Burton respectfully changed his rough attire to fashionable stovepipe hat and dark frock coat.

At noon of August 31, 1860, Captain Burton was led by Governor Cumming into Brigham Young’s office, where the Prophet and several aides were waiting. After introductions and handshaking Burton sat on a sofa and observed the man he had crossed an ocean and a continent to see.

“I had expected to see a venerable-looking old man,” wrote Burton in The City of the Saints the following year. “Scarcely a grey thread appears in his hair, which is parted on the side, light colored, rather thick, and reaches below the ears with a half curl… The forehead is somewhat narrow, the eyebrows are thin, the eyes between grey and blue, with a calm, composed, and somewhat reserved expression… The nose, which is fine and somewhat sharp pointed, is bent a little to the left. The lips are close like the New Englander’s, and the teeth, especially those of the upper jaw, are imperfect. The cheeks are rather fleshy, and the line between the alae of the nose and the mouth is broken, the chin somewhat peaked, and the face clean shaven, except under the jaws, where the beard is allowed to grow. The hands are well made, and not disfigured by rings. The figure is somewhat large, broad-shouldered, and stooping a little when standing.

“The Prophet’s dress was neat and plain as a Quaker’s, all grey homespun, except the cravat and waistcoat. His coat was of antique cut, and, like the pantaloons, baggy, and the buttons were black. A necktie of dark silk, with a large bow, was loosely passed round a starchless collar, which turned down of its own accord. The waistcoat was of black satin…

“Altogether the Prophet’s appearance was that of a gentleman farmer in New England—in fact, such as he is… He is a well-preserved man, a fact which some attribute to his habit of sleeping… in solitude. His manner is at once affable and impressive, simple and courteous: his want of pretension contrasts favorably with certain pseudo-prophets that I have seen… He shows no signs of dogmatism, bigotry, or fanaticism, and never once entered—with me at least—upon the subject of religion. He impresses a stranger with a certain sense of power: his followers are, of course, wholly fascinated by his superior strength of brain… Of his education I cannot speak: ‘men not books, deeds not words’ has ever been his motto: he probably has, as Mr. Randolph said of Mr. Johnston, ‘a mind uncorrupted by books’… He assumes no airs of extra sanctimoniousness, and has the plain, simple manners of honesty. His followers deem him an angel of light, his foes, a goblin damned: he is, I presume, neither one nor the other… He has been called hypocrite, swindler, forger, murderer. No one looks it less.”

The ensuing conversation took one horn. In the early sparring Burton was curious about an unusual pistol and a rifle which hung from the wall. Brigham explained that one of them was “a newly invented twelve-shooter” to replace the obsolete six-shooter. The Prophet was interested in the motive behind Burton’s visit. Burton told him that “having read and heard much about Utah as it is said to be, I was anxious to see Utah as it is.” Happily Brigham tried to describe Utah “as it is”—dwelling largely on the subjects of agriculture and livestock. There was a lively exchange on the territorial violence and massacres reported to the rest of the nation. Brigham referred to these as strictly “Indian wars” and complained that the wounding or death of two or three was always exaggerated to twenty by the time the news reached the outside world.

At last Burton determined to speak aloud what had been on his mind throughout the interview. He told Brigham that he was fascinated by Mormonism and its customs and that he would like to be taken into the Church and baptized inside the mysterious Endowment House. Brigham, who had been briefed on Burton’s proclivity for collecting odd cults, was prepared. “No, Captain,” he said gently, “I think you have done that sort of thing before.” (Curiosity in Mormon rites did not diminish through the years. In more modern times, according to John Gunther, author Sinclair Lewis asked one of Brigham’s successors, David O. McKay, if he might explore the Mormon Temple, which had replaced the Endowment House. “Yes,” said McKay. “All you have to do is adhere to the faith, give up alcohol and tobacco, and donate to the Church one tenth of your income in perpetuity.”

Refused admittance to the Church, Burton defended his sincerity. He had, he said, traveled from the Old World to the New simply to become part of a people “sensible enough to permit polygamy.” Persuasive though his visitor’s argument was, Brigham would not relent. Instead he firmly changed the subject. Had his visitor, in his African explorations, covered the same ground as Dr. David Livingston, the Scottish missionary? Burton replied that he had traveled ten degrees north of Zambezi and the Victoria Falls. One of the Apostles present, Albert Carrington, rose to locate Burton’s route on a wall map but moved his finger too near the equator. Brigham called to Carrington, “A little lower down.” Carrington obeyed, dropping his finger lower on the map. This was accurate and Burton was impressed. “There are many educated men in England,” he wrote, “who could not have corrected the mistake as well.” With this the interview was terminated, and Burton left without the license to practice polygamy, which he had hoped to acquire.

Burton remained almost a month in Salt Lake City and continued to study polygamy as an outsider. He had arrived favorably disposed toward the doctrine. What he saw at firsthand did not disappoint him. “To the unprejudiced traveller,” he wrote, “it appears that polygamy is the rule where population is required, and where the great social evil has not had time to develop itself. In Paris or London the institution would, like slavery, die a natural death; in Arabia and in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains, it maintains a strong hold upon the affections of mankind… The other motive for polygamy in Utah is economy. Servants are rare and costly; it is cheaper and more comfortable to marry them.”

Of course, admitted Burton, the Mormons had, with plural marriage, reduced romance and love “into a calm and unimpassioned domestic attachment.” The monogamous company of two encouraged tenderness; the polygamous company of three made it rather a crowd. Still, perhaps this was not too bad. “Womanhood is not petted and spoiled as in the Eastern States; the inevitable cyclical revolution, indeed, has rather placed her below par, where, however, I believe her to be happier than when set upon an uncomfortable and unnatural eminence.”

Before leaving Utah for California, Panama, and England, Burton came to this conclusion: “The Mormon household has been described by its enemies as a hell of envy, hatred, and malice—a den of murder and suicide. The same has been said of the Moslem harem. Both, I believe, suffer from the assertions of prejudice or ignorance. The temper of the new is so far superior to that of the old country, that, incredible as the statement may appear, rival wives do dwell together in amity; and do quote the proverb ‘the more the merrier.’… They know that nine tenths of the miseries of the poor in large cities arise from early and imprudent marriages, and they would rather be the fiftieth ‘sealing’ of Dives than the toilsome single wife of Lazarus.”

The immediate publicity given the plural-marriage proclamation by the press, and later by reporters of such stature as Captain Richard Burton and Horace Greeley, created the false impression that all Mormon males in Utah practiced polygamy. This was not the case. At that time the Church stated that no more than ten out of every hundred Mormon males practiced the doctrine. In recent years Mormon historians have revised the figure downward to three out of every hundred. However, in The Western Humanities Review for 1956, Stanley S. Ivins, after a study of polygamy, came to this conclusion: “From information obtainable from all available sources, it appears that there may have been a time when fifteen, or possibly twenty, per cent of the Mormon families of Utah were polygamous. This leaves the great majority of the Saints delinquent in their obligation to the principle of plurality of wives.”

The great majority of practicing polygamists were among the wealthy and prominent Mormons of the territory. Plural marriage was an economic indulgence. Only the rich could enjoy it without hardship. And usually only the important members of the Church were in constant contact with the hierarchy and were thereby, even if they had objections, forced to conform. Among those upon whom polygamy was thrust, because they were wealthy and prominent, was Chauncey Webb. He was industrious. He was favored by fortune. As in Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, he had prospered again. The result was that his single surviving daughter, Ann Eliza Webb, was to be raised, at least in the eyes of the Church, by five mothers.

The Webbs, it will be remembered, arrived in Salt Lake City on September 20, 1848. In their covered wagon there were two Mrs. Webbs: Ann Eliza’s mother, Chauncey’s first and legal wife, Eliza Churchill, and his younger first polygamous spouse, Elizabeth Taft, who was pregnant throughout the trek westward. The parents of Elizabeth Taft, having arrived in Salt Lake City earlier, were on hand to welcome the incoming caravan. The Tafts lived in a cabin in the large fort and for a short time gave shelter to the Webbs. But Chauncey, independent as ever, soon erected a tent and housed his two wives, three sons, and Ann Eliza in this and in the adjacent covered wagon. At once he began to build a large adobe home. Within three months it was completed—”the first residence of any pretension in Salt Lake City,” Ann Eliza said proudly, and the second eastern-style home in the community.

Chauncey’s new home was needed by his family. For a month before, in February of 1849, Elizabeth Taft had given birth to a son, Seth Taft Webb. “This was a time and an occurrence to try my mother’s spirit,” wrote Ann Eliza of her stepbrother’s birth, “but she bore it bravely, and showed herself a true Christian and a brave and sympathetic woman. She took all the care of the mother and child, and was as devoted to the former as though she had been a daughter. If there was any bitterness in her heart towards her, she certainly did not show it at this crisis of her life. It was a trying position for her to be placed in… a woman caring for another during the birth of a child whose father is her own husband.”

Elizabeth Taft’s recovery from childbirth was a slow process. In 1876, recalling this event that had occurred in 1849, Ann Eliza wrote: “In the absence of physicians, almost the entire responsibility and care of Elizabeth and the boy, my half brother, fell upon my mother. She has often said that in the care she gave her at that time, she tried to make amends for some of the bitterness of feeling she had shown before. She never expected to be reconciled to the family arrangement; but as it was inevitable, she was determined to do everything in her power to help everyone concerned in it, and to make the new home in Zion as peaceful and harmonious as possible. It was a difficult task, but then polygamy is made up of difficult tasks and trying situations… My mother grew very much attached to the child, and he clung to her with loving affection. He is twenty-six years old now, but he has always kept his love for ‘Auntie’ as he calls my mother, and she has an unflagging interest in him. Indeed, all Elizabeth’s children are fond of my mother, and our two families have been more united than polygamous families usually are. This has been due to the common sense of the two mothers, who … knew each that the other was not to blame for the mutual suffering. For twelve years they lived together under one roof, eating at the same table, with not an unkind word passing between them.”

The first Mrs. Webb’s tolerance of the second Mrs. Webb was all the more commendable for the fact that, in the twelve years that they all lived together, the second Mrs. Webb gave Chauncey at least six children, four boys and two girls. Before her death in 1909, Elizabeth Taft produced eleven children in all. Despite this continuing evidence of her husband’s enthusiasm for his second mate, the first Mrs. Webb usually kept her jealousy to herself.

Yet married life was not altogether so serene in the Webb household. Time and again, watching her husband retire for the night with Elizabeth Taft, the first Mrs. Webb contemplated suicide. The responsibility that kept her from the ultimate act, she always said, was her duty to the four-year-old Ann Eliza. What she could endure the least—since the second Mrs. Webb was a soft, affectionate, outgoing girl of twenty-one at the time—was being witness to the endearments and attentions that Elizabeth Taft gave to Chauncey.

Once, when the two wives were alone, Eliza Churchill Webb turned on her younger rival and, uncontrolled, begged her not to show her love for Chauncey in her presence.

In a rare outburst of anger Elizabeth replied, “Do you think I have no trials?”

“God forgive me and help us both,” Eliza said with quick sympathy. “I know you have.”

Thereafter the first Mrs. Webb kept her feeling to herself and her peace with the other wife. But she could not hide her feelings from Chauncey, who had too easily become reconciled to this harem aspect of his domestic life.

On one occasion, seeing his first wife moody, and knowing for what reason, Chauncey shook his head and said to her, “I don’t understand it. You were willing at first. What is the difficulty now? Don’t you think Elizabeth a good, true girl?”

“Yes, indeed,” agreed Eliza Churchill.

“Don’t you believe in polygamy, then?”

“Yes, I suppose so. I wish to live my religion.”

“Well, what is to be done about it?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Eliza Churchill miserably, “but I can’t endure this life.”

“And yet you entered it voluntarily,” said Chauncey relentlessly. “I don’t understand you. You are strangely inconsistent.”

Eliza Churchill herself did not understand—torn between a faith she loved and a doctrine of the faith she abhorred—and retreated, as ever, into defeated silence.

Soon, however, Chauncey was absorbed with the basic problem of survival. He had brought a store of food from Nebraska, but in no time at all the cupboard was bare. “It was a year of deprivation and self-denial,” Ann Eliza recalled. All through that trying year the Webbs subsisted on the monotonous fare of rough bread made of unground wheat, dried buffalo meat, occasional pieces of dried fruit, and rationed cups of tea. While his wives attended to the four children and knitted clothing—for there were no ready-made garments to purchase—Chauncey commuted to the nearby canyons, from which he hauled timber to construct a carriage factory.

By the time Ann Eliza was five her father was again making money. Foodstuffs were being imported from neighboring states, and Chauncey could pay a dollar and fifty cents a pound for sugar and five dollars a pound for tea. Gradually sheep’s wool replaced buffalo’s wool for clothes, and soon ready-made calico dresses and men’s suits were arriving by the wagon load.

Because Chauncey had risen in the community, Brigham Young considered him a valuable Mormon. As such, Chauncey was ordered to serve a tour of duty as a missionary in Sheffield, England. Tied closer to the Church than ever by polygamy—for if he left the Church, where would he be accepted with the two wives he loved so dearly?—Chauncey was forced to comply. The mission abroad carried with it no expense money or salary. His wives and children had to live off his small savings. This was not enough, and during the husbandless period Eliza Churchill Webb shut down the large house and moved in with Elizabeth Taft’s parents. Eliza Churchill Webb also resumed teaching in Salt Lake City and in the not too distant town of Payson, Utah. The five-year-old Ann Eliza accompanied her mother to schools in both cities and was herself enrolled in classes.

When Chauncey returned, at last, from his English interlude, he immediately reopened his carriage factory. Again the big house was occupied, the entire family united under one roof, and the diminished savings account replenished. Increasing prosperity brought with it, as before, polygamous commands from Brigham Young. Once again Chauncey was advised to pay deference to the new doctrine by taking more wives. Any objections he may have originally had to plural marriage had all but vanished. Apparently, like many of the 3,000 Mormon missionaries roaming England, and especially Wales, he had acquired a taste for the fair-complexioned English country girls. Now, in 1856, these pretty, robust young ladies poured into Salt Lake City by the hundreds, many of them dragging their possessions behind them in handcarts. Since Chauncey was obliged to further populate his bed and board, he decided (without too much pain, it may be assumed) that these English immigrants might be more decorative than the home-grown product. And so, as Ann Eliza remembered vividly, when she was twelve years old her forty-four-year-old father took three more wives, all at once, and all less than half his age, and suddenly there were five Mrs. Webbs.

To Eliza Churchill Webb and Elizabeth Taft Webb were now added Lizzie Webb, a second Eliza Webb, and Louisa Webb. The new third and fourth wives were hand-picked by Chauncey, but the fifth wife boldly picked him. Louisa, said Ann Eliza’s mother sarcastically, “selected ‘our’ husband.” The avalanche of new femininity hardly dismayed the first and legal wife at all. “My mother had already had her burden given her,” wrote Ann Eliza, “and after she had been obliged to see another woman taking the love and care that by right belonged to her, and her alone, she grew indifferent on the subject, and declared that a few wives, more or less, would make little difference to her now, and she would be as well satisfied with one fourth of a husband as with one half.” However, the second Mrs. Webb, Elizabeth Taft, did not accept the situation with the same resignation. It was the first time she had been superseded. Although she did not complain, she suffered a nervous breakdown and was put to bed, until she was able to gather her wits and adjust to the harem.

Desperately Chauncey tried to establish a working democracy in his household. At all costs, he realized, jealousy and rivalry must not be permitted. When he bought one wife a new hat, he bought all the wives new hats. But perfect equality was not always easy to maintain. One Christmas, when the wives were living in separate homes, Chauncey was given the gift of a turkey by a friend. Knowing that one turkey was not enough for five tables, and knowing also that his funds were at that moment too low to allow for the purchase of five turkeys, he decided to hide it and avoid conflict. Unfortunately his first wife, Ann Eliza’s mother, discovered the bird.

“What are you going to do with it?” asked Eliza Churchill. Trapped, Chauncey replied, “Why, you may have it if you wish. I’m sure I don’t know what else to do with it.”

With malicious glee at her husband’s discomfort, and because she resented the younger English wives, the first Mrs. Webb determined to strike a blow for seniority. “Oh, I really do not care about it,” she said. “I have chickens, you know, and I like them equally well. In fact, I think I prefer them. But I would like to decide which of the other wives shall have the turkey, if you will allow me—”

“All right. I have given it to you, you know. You shall make what disposition you please of it.”

“Thank you,” said the first Mrs. Webb. “I should like Elizabeth to have it. She deserves it, and needs it, too, and would be grateful for it. And then, too, you see, she, being next to me, would claim it by right of seniority.”

Chauncey conceded. The first wife gave the precious turkey to the second wife, in order to put the third, fourth, and fifth wives in their places. And the unhappy Chauncey, to prevent rebellion, had to dip into his savings to placate the English wives at Christmas.

Chauncey’s problem with multiple wives was not his alone. Susa Young Gates, one of Brigham’s daughters, wrote: “Any man who fancied that the women of his household would have the heavy end of the trouble-balance while he soared into easy indulgence was due for a rude awakening. Mormon women were persons, not a sex-group. The man soon found that his particular life-job was that of domestic moderator.” Once, in 1856, Brigham lost patience with the complaints of plural wives. During a Sunday sermon he offered to set all of the “whiners” free of their marriages in two weeks. “It is said that women are tied down and abused,” he told his congregation; “that they are misused and have not the liberty they ought to have; that many of them are wading through a perfect flood of tears… Prepare yourselves for two weeks from tomorrow; and I will tell you now, that if you will tarry with your husbands, after I have set you free, you must bow down to it, and submit yourselves to the celestial law. You may go where you please, after two weeks from tomorrow; but, remember, that I will not hear any more of this whining.”

In a study of 175 old polygamous families, one of Brigham’s grandsons Kimball Young, the noted sociologist, found that only 23 per cent of the marriages suffered “considerable” to “severe” conflict, whereas 77 per cent were “moderately” to “highly” happy. In troubled plural households most of the wives’ miseries came from insecurity. But often an insensitive husband could compound the conflict. Heber C. Kimball caused himself no end of trouble when he remarked to his friends, “I think no more of taking another wife than I do of buying a cow.”

Chauncey Webb did not regard his mates as cows. As a consequence, the five Mrs. Webbs got along exceptionally well. They did not like polygamy, but they liked Chauncey, his home, his income. They were careful not to quarrel with one another, and they were careful to keep their resentments from their mutual husband. The rare grumblings that occurred most often took place when Chauncey showed partiality and excessive affection for Lizzie, his third wife.

The only major insurrection ever staged in the family was provoked by Louisa, the fifth wife. Because Louisa had aggressively proposed to Chauncey, the other wives privately nicknamed her “The Free-will Offering.” Of all the wives, Louisa alone refused to share the drudgery of household labor. She had once been an actress, she said loftily, and menial work was beneath her. Needless to say, the other wives were irritated—”disgusted with her selfishness and indolence,” was the way Ann Eliza put it.

During this period Chauncey moved all his wives and children to a farmhouse seventy miles west of Salt Lake City. Shortly after, he traveled east to perform a mission for the Mormon Church. During his absence Louisa cast her gaze on some of the handsome young hands toiling on the farm. Whether or not she committed adultery with these men, or merely flirted with them, is not known. But when Chauncey returned from his brief mission, his first wife reported Louisa’s “familiarity with the men employed on the farm” and “her undignified behavior.” Chauncey promptly had a showdown with his errant fifth wife. He made his displeasure clear and told her that she would be sent away unless she learned to “behave in a more becoming and dignified manner.”

Chastized, Louisa was all regret and apology. When Chauncey left the farm to drive some cattle to Salt Lake City, Louisa took to her bed. During the day little Ann Eliza looked in on her, and Louisa groaned that she was dying and gave Ann Eliza a premature inheritance of watch and chain. Frightened, Ann Eliza summoned her mother, who came running.

“Oh, I am dying,” cried Louisa. “I shall never cause any more trouble in your family… My husband does not love me, and I cannot live. All I desire is death.”

“It is not always so easy to die when we desire,” said the first Mrs. Webb crisply.

“But I have made sure,” replied Louisa. “I have taken poison.”

Uncertain if Louisa had attempted suicide or was merely reverting to her acting career, the first Mrs. Webb finally summoned son Edward Milo from the field and sent him scurrying up the Salt Lake City road after Chauncey. It was evening when Chauncey returned. He was told that if Louisa was dying, it was the longest deathbed scene in history. Grimly he entered her bedroom, demanded to know what she had done, and then ordered an antidote of cayenne pepper and tea. Louisa fought the concoction but was forced to swallow it and then, for the first time, almost expired.

By the following day Louisa had fully recovered. Chauncey faced her frankly and informed her that he had suffered enough from her indolent ways and melodramatic scenes. She was, he said, disrupting his household, and she must leave. Tearfully Louisa confessed the poison hoax, insisting that she had only wanted to win his sympathy, and begged to remain. Chauncey would not have it. He took Louisa to Salt Lake City, divorced her, and was thereafter satisfied with his four other less theatrical wives. As for Louisa: she married a second husband in Salt Lake City, divorced him after three weeks, then married a third husband in southern Utah, and on a trip to St. Louis absconded with all of his money to England.

Meanwhile, this curious domestic life, with its topsy-turvy values, was leaving a permanent brand on young Ann Eliza Webb. Growing to maturity, first with one mother, then with two, then with five, then with four, gave Ann Eliza insecurities she would never overcome. Under polygamy she acquired an enduring—although for a long time an unconscious—hostility toward all men. The figures of Chauncey and the five Mrs. Webbs would cast long shadows across Ann Eliza’s future and gravely affect her matrimonial attempts.

Perhaps the announcement of polygamy in 1852, when she was eight years old, was the most profound single early influence in Ann Eliza’s life. Yet there was another influence that same year of almost equal importance. As an infant of eight days, Ann Eliza had been blessed by her parents’ Church. Not until she was eight years old did she formally become a member of that Church. On her eighth birthday Ann Eliza was baptized by Bishop Taft, the second Mrs. Webb’s father.

“I was exceedingly terrified,” Ann Eliza recalled. “I was taken to a pond, and the bishop carried me in his arms, and plunged me into the water; and so great was the nervous shock that I could not think of it without a shudder for years after.

“My mother was glad when it was over, for I was made a child of the Church, and by this rite she consecrated me to God and the Mormon faith.”

From the date of her baptism, until attaining maturity and independence a decade later at eighteen, Ann Eliza Webb’s growth coincided with the strengthening of the Church and the occurrence of many of the most dramatic events under Brigham Young’s reign.

Three years after Ann Eliza’s baptism, in the week preceding her eleventh birthday in 1857, there took place the worst tragedy to befall the Church since the public announcement of polygamy. This was the cold-blooded crime committed in southwest Utah that came to be known as the Mountain Meadows massacre.

Undoubtedly the killings at Mountain Meadows were the direct result of a series of tensions the Mormons had been under in the twenty-four previous months. Perhaps it all began with the ill-fated handcart migration scheme, a fiasco with which the Webb family was closely involved.

Because the winter of 1855 had been a particularly severe one in Utah—acres of crops had succumbed to sleet and snow, and livestock had frozen to death or starved—the Mormon Perpetual Emigrating Fund was low. The steady stream of converts from Europe was usually supplied with relatively expensive covered wagons for the journey west. Now there was no money for these wagons. But rather than halt emigration, Brigham Young proposed one of his favorite ideas that had not as yet been tried. “We cannot afford to purchase wagons and teams as in times past,” he announced in September 1855. “I am consequently thrown back upon my old plan—to make handcarts and let the emigration foot it… A company of this kind should make the trip in sixty or seventy days. I do know that they can beat any ox train crossing the plains. Let all the Saints who can… come while the way is open before them… let them come on foot, with handcarts, or wheelbarrows.”

In England, and on the Continent, Brigham informed potential converts that it required only forty-five dollars a person to travel from Liverpool to Salt Lake City. That and strong legs. All the rest would be furnished free. At once, in England alone, 1,300 newly baptized Saints signed on for the unique trip. Within a year 3,000 would have attempted, and only a portion completed, the handcart journey.

Meanwhile Brigham chose Iowa City as the jumping-off point. Lumber was purchased in St. Louis, and the most expert carpenters and blacksmiths in Utah were hurried to Iowa City. Franklin D. Richards, an Apostle of seven years and the possessor of ten wives, was put in charge of the operation. Because Richards was determined to see the scheme work, he decided to draft the most experienced supervisor available. From Liverpool, Richards wired Chauncey Webb, then in his fourth year as a missionary in Sheffield, England, and ordered him to speed to the port at once. After a rough passage of fifteen days Chauncey arrived in Boston. Ten days later he was in Iowa City, overseeing the construction of the two-wheeled carts, which resembled rickshaws.

From the first, Chauncey experienced difficulties. As a conscientious veteran carriage maker, he demanded the best of material and craftsmanship. Each cart had to be sturdy enough to survive a journey of 1,300 miles. But his Mormon superiors felt that cheaper carts would perform as well as expensive ones. Firmly Chauncey was told “to make the wagons on as economical a plan as possible.” Every new day Chauncey faced a fresh harassment. According to Ann Eliza: “They did not wish to furnish iron for the tires, as it was too expensive; raw hide, they were sure, would do just as well. My father argued this point with them until at last the agents decided to give up raw hides, and they furnished him with hoop iron. He was annoyed and angry, all the while he was making the carts, at the extreme parsimony displayed.”

Handcarts were waiting when the first large company of emigrants arrived. Two groups of 446 foreign Saints, using ninety-six handcarts and five commissary wagons, set out from Iowa City in early June 1856. The men pulled the carts, loaded with personal effects, while their women and children walked beside them. Thus they dragged and marched their way across Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, and Utah, suffering no more than callouses and a few Cheyenne scares, for almost four months. Upon their arrival in Salt Lake City in late September, Brigham pronounced his scheme a success and encouraged the remainder to follow in the same way.

Meanwhile hundreds of foreign Saints were crowding into Iowa City, where Chauncey’s production of carts lagged far behind demand. To meet the demand, the hierarchy overruled Chauncey’s meticulous requirements, and carts were thrown together, made out of the greenest, unseasoned timber. When two large groups of converts, delayed by a wait for carts, planned to depart for the West behind schedule in late summer, Chauncey vigorously protested. He explained that an early winter on the plains and in the Rocky Mountains would destroy them. Again he was overruled by the hierarchy. The two groups were allowed to go ahead.

On July 15, 1856, the first group, led by Captain James G. Willie, left Iowa City. In this company there were 404 men, women, and children from England, Scotland, Germany, and Scandinavia. They were accompanied by a food wagon and eighteen cows. Two weeks later they were followed by Edwin Martin’s group of 576 new Saints.

Still confident that they would beat the winter, for they had been covering twenty miles a day, both groups started west from Nebraska in the latter half of August. Willie’s group ate well: a portion of buffalo meat, a pound of flour, and some rice, sugar, and tea or fresh milk for each of the 404 persons daily. But by the time the group trudged into Fort Laramie, their rations were depleted, and the fresh supplies of food they expected to find in Laramie were not there. Worse, the winter had begun. With determination Willie pressed onward. It was foolhardy. Obstacles came fast and furious now. Indians raided them. Cows were lost to a buffalo stampede. Food seemed to evaporate, and daily rations were cut to a meager ten ounces per person.

The winter was at its worst. Snowdrifts impeded progress. Raging sleet storms and below-zero weather struck the group, whose members possessed only summer clothing and had no means for contriving shelter. As Chauncey had warned, the cheap handcarts dissolved in the terrible weather—axles snapped, and green lumber contracted and hoops popped off the wheels. Death came daily. On the Sweetwater the survivors of a night found fifteen had frozen to death in their sleep.

Long before, Chauncey, riding on a swift mule train, had passed these companies, and, back in Salt Lake City, he realized what their fate might be. He reported the emergency to Brigham. Then, after his four-year separation from his family, he spent two days with his wives and children but thereafter worked day and night preparing a relief train.

Brigham rushed one of his sons and a friend, on a light wagon, to meet the Willie and Martin groups and tell them that help was coming. Ann Eliza watched the relief wagons, carrying her father and her brother Edward Milo, as they rolled out of Salt Lake City. On November 9, 1856, the relief wagons, carrying warm clothes and bedding, potatoes and flour, found the Willie group snowbound in the hills. Of the 404 who had followed Willie, seventy-seven were dead. Shortly after, the Martin group was found, with sixty-seven dead.

“I remember distinctly when these companies came in,” wrote Ann Eliza. “Their wretched condition impressed me at the time, and I have seen many of them since, poor crippled creatures, stumping about the city.”

Brigham blamed everyone, and everyone blamed Brigham. So furious was Chauncey with his superiors that he spoke of leaving the Church. But once again, as long before, Ann Eliza’s mother dissuaded him. Shortly after, the handcart scheme was quietly abandoned. All that Chauncey ever got out of it were his third, fourth, and fifth wives.

The very famine and depression that had created the handcart fiasco also created another crisis in the Church. Many Mormons, tired of Utah’s unyielding soil and hard weather, apostatized and moved to sunnier California. Other Mormons ignored the Sabbath, misused polygamy, committed adultery, quarreled with friends and neighbors. Clearly something had to be done. And so that fanatical period, known in the Church as the Reformation, came into being.

Ann Eliza saw its beginnings when she was still eleven and residing in Payson, seventy miles south of Salt Lake City, where her mother taught school while her father was abroad. A Utah Savonarola named Joseph Hovey came to Payson to preach. As Ann Eliza recalled it: “He commenced by accusing the people of all sorts of misdeeds and crimes, and he denounced them in the most scathing and the rudest fashion, and they trembled under his fierce denunciations, and cowered before him as before the face of an accusing angel. He accused them of theft, of licentiousness, of blackguardism, of lying, of swindling and cheating, of hypocrisy and lukewarmness in their religion, and of every other sin… ‘Repent, confess, and be re-baptized’ was his urgent call, ‘and all your sins shall be forgiven you; yea, verily, for so hath the Lord promised.’“

A religious revival fanned out now, uncontrolled, encouraged by Brigham and a new young Apostle named Jedediah M. Grant. Missionaries moved from door to door, questioning sinners, demanding to know if they had committed adultery, shed “innocent blood,” taken to drink, and paid their tithing of 10 per cent to the Church. Anger against religious “lethargy,” as Brigham termed it, and against backsliders and anti-Mormons rose to a fever pitch. There were, or there were said to be, numerous killings. According to Ann Eliza, one of her female cousins had stopped over in Utah en route to California. She was married to a Gentile named Hatten. Ann Eliza’s relatives were distressed that one of their number had married out of the faith. These relatives consulted the authors of the Reformation and were advised: “Put Hatten out of the way. It is a sin and a shame to have so good a woman dragged around the world by a Gentile.” In a few days it was announced that Hatten had been murdered by “Indians.”

Two Federal officials in Utah reported this state of affairs to Washington, D.C. Judge George P. Stiles claimed that the records of the Supreme Court of Utah had been stolen and burned. They had, indeed, been removed but not destroyed. Judge William W. Drummond—who infuriated the Mormons by permitting his mistress (for whom he had abandoned wife and family in Illinois) to sit beside him on the bench in Salt Lake City—accused the Reformation of three crimes of murder. In Washington, President James Buchanan was deeply disturbed by this intelligence. He thought that he sniffed rebellion in the air. Without further investigation he decided to act. Addressing Congress, Buchanan stated, “This is the first rebellion which has existed in our Territories; and humanity itself requires that we should put it down in such a manner that it shall be the last.”

On May 28, 1857, Secretary of War John B. Floyd—to prevent Utah Territory from seceding from the Union—ordered 2,500 crack troops assembled in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, with instructions to march on Salt Lake City. Although preparations were made in secrecy, two Mormons in Kansas learned what was happening. They passed the news on to Abraham O. Smoot, a Church elder, who rode west with the sensation.

On July 24, 1857, Brigham and several thousand Saints were celebrating the leading Mormon holiday at a camping ground called Silver Lake. Festivities were at their height when Smoot, after twenty days on the road, and three others galloped in with the alarming news that the United States was about to attack Utah.

Brigham and his aides were furious and defiant. From the pulpit Brigham challenged the approaching army. “Come on with your thousands of illegally-ordered troops,” he shouted, “and I will promise you, in the name of Israel’s God, that you shall melt away as the snow before a July sun.” To this Heber C. Kimball added contemptuously, “Good God! I have wives enough to whip out the United States…” Brigham, and not he alone, believed that the invasion had an economic motive. Secretary of War Floyd, Brigham said, was out peddling army contracts that would profit him five million dollars. Later events proved this accusation partially true. The invasion of Utah would cost the United States fifteen million dollars. In 1860 Buchanan would force Secretary of War Floyd to resign over army contract scandals.

The Mormons prepared to make a fight of it. After a decade in the valley, they were powerful and self-assured. Declaring martial law, Brigham reactivated the old Nauvoo Legion. Two thousand men were called to arms, with 3,000 more standing by. A small, fleet ranger force, under Major Lot Smith, was sent forth to harass the United States Army. Major Smith hit at army supply trains, in one instance putting the torch to seventy-four wagons. He and his men stampeded army cattle herds and introduced a scorched-earth policy by burning the prairie grass. Another force reduced Fort Bridger and Fort Supply to charred ash heaps. And the main part of the Nauvoo Legion, 1,250 men, was deployed above the narrow entrance to Echo Canyon. Meanwhile, anticipating a breakthrough, Brigham had Salt Lake City vacated, except for a few demolition teams trained to burn down the capital if necessary. Everything from grain to the presses of The Deseret News was moved out of Salt Lake City, and 30,000 Saints, the Webbs among them, were evacuated to the south.

The United States Army of 2,500 men was led by Colonel Albert Sidney Johnston, a Kentuckian who, it was said, had once knocked down a fellow West Point cadet named Jefferson Davis to win a tavern keeper’s daughter and who now was spoiling for another fight. But there was no fight. Cooler heads were at work. Governor Cumming had arrived to treat with Brigham, as had Colonel Thomas L. Kane, a Philadelphian who was the Mormons’ best friend in the East and whose life had once been saved by them in Nebraska when he had fallen ill. While Johnston and the army fumed in Camp Scott, the arbitration talks went on through the bitter winter. On June 26, 1858, Johnston was permitted to walk his restless troops through emptied Salt Lake City and to take up a more permanent position at Camp Floyd, forty-five miles away.

At last the Webbs and other Mormon families returned to Salt Lake City. And Johnston remained, hovering nearby. Irritation and discomfort continued. One group of army hotheads planned to kidnap Brigham, but Governor Cumming put a stop to this threat. Camp followers and discharged soldiers introduced debauchery and thievery into the city.

At last peace was achieved. Buchanan pardoned the Mormons. Johnston sailed from California for home. In 1861 the 2,500 troopers abandoned Camp Floyd and returned east to fight in the Civil War. A year after, Johnston engaged Ulysses S. Grant at Shiloh and was killed in the action. Governor Cumming suffered out the conflict in a northern prison. Secretary of War Floyd became a Confederate officer. Buchanan gave way to President Lincoln, and Lincoln told the Mormon publisher Stenhouse, “When I was a boy on the farm in Illinois there was a great deal of timber on the farms which we had to clear away. Occasionally we would come to a log, which had fallen down. It was too hard to split, too wet to burn and too heavy to move, so we plowed around it. That’s what I intend to do with the Mormons. You go back and tell Brigham Young that if he will let me alone, I will let him alone.”

Peace was wonderful, but it came too late to give the Mormons any serviceable good will in the hostile East. For, at the very time Buchanan was preparing for the so-called Utah War, a leading Mormon was involved in a scandal that confirmed the prevailing notion that all male Latter-day Saints were licentious and lustful.

In 1857 the clean-shaven, handsome, stocky Parley Parker Pratt, fifty years old, was one of the leading lights of the Church. A member of the twelve Apostles, a poet, and a polygamist with six wives, Pratt was one of Brigham’s foremost missionaries. As Ann Eliza heard the story, and as the anti-Mormon press featured it, Pratt was on a mission in San Francisco when he converted to the Church one Eleanor McLean, the attractive wife of a California merchant named Hector H. McLean and the mother of three young children. Not only did Pratt win Mrs. McLean for the Church, but he won her for himself. He seduced her, lived with her in sin, and convinced her to become his seventh wife when they returned to Utah. According to the Mormon version of the affair, Mrs. McLean was already a Mormon and separated from her husband when Pratt came along. Among other things, said the Mormons, Hector McLean was a wife beater and drunkard. Pratt had no interest in her, said the Mormons, beyond helping her recover her three children from her cruel ex-mate.

By both accounts, Hector McLean sent the three children down to his father-in-law’s house in Louisiana. Swiftly Mrs. McLean followed her children and, by promising to renounce Mormonism, regained control of one of them. In a letter, she had arranged a rendezvous with Pratt on an Indian reservation in Arkansas. Learning of this, Hector McLean charged Pratt with alienating his wife’s affections and abducting his child. Pratt was arrested and placed on trial in Van Buren, Arkansas.

Pratt suffered much anguish during the trial. Certain letters that he had penned to Mrs. McLean concerned themselves more with temporal affairs than Church business. Stung by this lechery, Hector McLean once pulled his pistol in court but was physically prevented from using it. An unruly Arkansas mob, all on McLean’s side, packed the court and growled ominously. However, when Mrs. McLean absolved Pratt of all initiative in wooing her and abducting the child, the judge could do no more than acquit him.

The following morning, Pratt, on horseback, rode out of Van Buren, intent on joining an emigrant train to Utah and expecting to be joined there by Eleanor McLean. The outraged husband, however, had other ideas. Hector McLean, determined to take the law in his own hands, mounted up and rode into the countryside in pursuit of Pratt. There was a lively chase, with McLean firing after Pratt, on the gallop, and missing. Slowly McLean gained on the Apostle, and then, when they were side by side, McLean whipped out a bowie knife and lunged at Pratt, driving the knife home to the hilt. Pratt pitched from his saddle, mortally wounded, while McLean halted and put a bullet into him for good measure. Returning to the city, McLean was hailed as a hero by all Arkansas. He was neither arrested nor tried but recovered his third child and traveled freely to Louisiana. In Utah the mourning populace held the late Parley Parker Pratt up as a martyr—and saw all natives of Arkansas as butchers.

The handcart fiasco, the famine, the Reformation had all contributed to building tension toward a climactic explosion. But it was the assassination of Pratt, as well as the approach of Buchanan’s army, that finally triggered this explosion. In the early autumn of 1857 a Captain Fancher led a train of thirty wagons and 137 emigrants through Salt Lake City and then southwest toward California. Most of the members of this train were from four counties of Arkansas, and they were well-behaved family folk; however, the remainder were self-styled “Wildcats” from Missouri, and they were rowdies. The stage was set for the infamous Mountain Meadows massacre.

As the Fancher train members marched through the southern settlements of Utah, according to the Mormon version, they antagonized and provoked their hosts at every stop. The Mormons alleged that these emigrants boasted of having been part of the mobs that drove the Church from Missouri and of having participated in the murder of Joseph Smith. Because they were denied supplies, they tore down farmers’ fences, called Mormon women whores, threatened to raze the town of Fillmore, and promised to return soon from California and help the Federal army in crushing the Saints. Also, it is said, they used arsenic to poison the springs at Corn Creek, thereby causing the death of many Indian cattle.

After passing through Cedar City, Utah, where they bought fifty bushels of wheat, the Fancher party proceeded to a point thirty-five miles southwest known as Mountain Meadows. This was a green valley, eight miles long and one mile wide, where the party hoped to rest a few days and feed its 600 head of cattle. Back in Cedar City, a group of Mormons under Colonel Isaac C. Haight, head of the local militia, was meeting in a church to debate the conduct of the Fancher party. Half of the group was for attacking and avenging Joseph Smith and Parley Pratt; the other half was for letting the emigrants leave in peace. On Monday, September 7, 1857, Haight sent a messenger by horseback to Salt Lake City to obtain Brigham Young’s advice. The messenger reached the Prophet three days later, and the Prophet told him, “Go with all speed, spare no horse flesh. The emigrants must not be meddled with, if it takes all Iron County to prevent it. They must go free and unmolested.”

But from the moment the messenger had galloped out of Cedar City, the Fancher party camped on Mountain Meadows was embattled. At daybreak of September 7, a large band of Indians attacked the emigrants. The first Indian volley killed seven whites and wounded sixteen others. Hastily the emigrants drew their wagons into a circle and then retaliated. Several Indians fell, two dead chiefs among them. At once the Indians sent word for other tribes to reinforce them and summoned John Doyle Lee, a prosperous Mormon farmer at Harmony, who was the government Indian agent for the area, to lead them.

The emigrants threw up dirt breastworks and settled down for a siege. After two days, realizing their supplies and water were low, they voted to send to Cedar City for help. Three emigrants on horseback tried to break out of the ambush. Two headed west and were promptly cut down by the redskins. The third, William Aiden by name, catapulted his mount out of the circle and dashed toward Cedar City. But Mormons were on the scene with the Indians, and one Mormon rose and shot Aiden, killing him instantly. This last action was witnessed by the beleaguered emigrants, and now they knew that a portion of their enemy were Mormons. The knowledge sealed their doom.

At this point there were fifty-four white men, including Colonel Haight, John D. Lee, and a Major John M. Higbee, and perhaps 300 Indians attacking the Fancher train. A council of war was held. Most of the Mormons felt that the emigrants must be massacred, so that there would be no adult witnesses against the Church. The few who feebly protested against a blood bath were silenced by the angry Indians, who threatened them. Through the long, charged night, whites and redskins debated the plan, and by dawn it was agreed upon.

With the first sun of Friday, September 11, two Mormons, Lee and William Bateman, carrying a white flag of truce, rode a wagon slowly to the circle of emigrant wagons, where a white flag was also mounted. Lee told the Fancher party that he was a Saint, there to rescue them, and that he knew what terms would appease the Indians. He advised the emigrants to throw all their rifles, pistols, knives in his wagon, march out unarmed, and leave all their wagons and cattle to the Indians. Lee promised that in this way the Mormons could escort them safely, on foot, back to Cedar City. The emigrants had no choice but to agree and comply.

Members of the Fancher party filed out into the open. Seventeen of their children under the age of seven were placed in one wagon, while a woman and three wounded men were placed in another wagon. The other women of the party and the older children were marched across the Meadows under Mormon guard. A quarter of a mile behind them the column of male emigrants marched, each with an armed Mormon beside him. Suddenly, in a shallow heavily surrounded by scrub oak, Haight shouted, “Halt! Do your duty to God!”

Each Mormon guard wheeled and shot dead the emigrant beside him. Other Mormons fired into the women and children, and those who tried to escape were mowed down by the surrounding Indians. The woman and three wounded men in the wagon were also slaughtered. Only the seventeen youngsters under seven, who would be poor witnesses, were permitted to survive. In minutes the cold-blooded mass murder was over. The corpses of 120 men, women, and children littered Mountain Meadows, and the stench would arouse a nation.

Leaving the Meadows, the Mormons enjoyed a hearty breakfast then returned to the scene of the crime. The Indians had stripped and mutilated the bodies before leaving with their loot. The Mormons buried the dead in such a shallow grave that wolves soon uncovered it and scattered flesh and bone across the entire Meadows. Two days later the Mormons received the message from Brigham Young—”They must go free and unmolested”—and only then did the full import of the deed strike Haight. “Too late,” he groaned, “too late!” Then and there the killers pledged to keep their participation a group secret.

Eighteen days later John D. Lee arrived in Salt Lake City and reported the “Indian massacre” to Brigham Young. At the terrible news Brigham wept and wrung his hands miserably as he paced the floor. “This is the most unfortunate affair that ever befell the Church,” he cried. “I am afraid of treachery among the brethren that were there. If anyone tells this thing so that it will become public, it will work us great injury.”

But soon the news was out and everywhere. Even Ann Eliza Webb, then thirteen, heard about it. “I was but a child at the time,” she wrote later, “but I recollect, perfectly, hearing that an emigrant-train had been attacked by the Indians, and all members of the band, with the exception of a few of the smaller children, killed. I remember also seeing these children…

“Young as I was, I felt the mystery that shrouded the whole transaction, and I knew instinctively, as did many others, that something was hidden from the mass of the people by their leaders, which it was not deemed prudent to reveal; but the terrible truth was not then suspected by the faithful Saints.”

In two months the news had spread throughout the country, and the Mormons were considered suspect. Investigation was in the air. Brigham decided to beat the government to it. He sent George A. Smith to the scene to look into the affair. Smith reported that Mormons had been in the vicinity but that the actual massacre had been committed by 200 Indians. Satisfied, Brigham so informed Washington, D.C. The government was less than satisfied. Judge John Cradlebaugh and a military escort were ordered to Iron County to locate every Mormon who had been in the massacre area and to serve thirty-six writs of arrest. The Mormon participants, forewarned, disappeared. From a cave above his farm, Lee watched the investigators through field glasses. Not one of the thirty-six writs was served.

Through the years public indignation and pressure did not abate. Although Haight and John D. Lee, especially Lee, were the Prophet’s close friends, Brigham thought it wise to excommunicate them from the Church. Later Haight was quietly brought back into the Church. Lee, to keep himself out of sight, left his ten surviving wives—there had once been nineteen of them and sixty-four children—to care for his homes in Harmony and Washington, Utah, and himself moved to an isolated cottage near the Colorado River. Still the massacre was dinned in Brigham’s ears. Before Congress, Judge Cradlebaugh blamed it squarely on the Mormons and called it “one of the most cruel, cowardly, and bloody murders known in our history.” At last, to put an end to the accusations of seventeen years, Brigham agreed that Lee be placed on trial.

On November 7, 1874, Lee was visiting several of his wives in Panguitch, Utah. The United States deputy marshal came calling. Lee hid in the hog pen. He was found and arrested. He went on trial in the summer of 1875. Although cut off from the Church, Lee knew that he had its support, for it was on trial too. The jury contained nine Mormons and three Gentiles. Witnesses were properly vague. No one in Utah was surprised that it was a hung jury and that Lee was freed. But throughout the country the public press shouted sham and hoax, and Brigham saw that a sacrificial lamb was needed to still the angry voices.

Once again, this time in the autumn of 1876, Lee was placed on trial. It is possible that Brigham made a deal with the government: convict Lee, if you will, and we will help you, but drop all charges against the rest of the participants. So it was Lee, alone, against the world. This time the jury was not rigged. This time silent witnesses became talkative. This time memories were improved. The indictment was that Lee, alone, had led the Indians. The verdict was guilty of murder in the first degree. The sentence was death by a firing squad at the scene of the crime.

Awaiting execution, Lee wrote a book, which his attorney smuggled to the world, exposing Mormonism, branding Brigham a “tyrant,” accusing Haight of planning and directing the massacre. At last, on the now arid soil of Mountain Meadows, Lee sat watching his pine coffin being hammered together. A photographer requested his picture. He agreed to pose if three copies were sent to the three wives who had remained loyal to him. Now, to the press, he made a speech. He spoke favorably of Joseph Smith. He lashed out at Brigham Young. “See what I have come to this day,” he said. “I have been sacrificed in a cowardly, dastardly manner! It is my last word—It is so.” He sat on the edge of his coffin, calmly listened to a Methodist minister’s prayer, then stared at the five-man firing squad. “Center my heart, boys,” he called out. “Don’t mangle my body!” The volley rang out. Lee fell backward into his coffin. Mountain Meadows was avenged at last.

Through the years, out of the mass of lies and contradictions, several facts are now generally agreed upon by cooler heads. Brigham Young was probably not responsible for the massacre. His responsibility, if any, was more subtle. His aggressive sermons against Gentiles and aliens had infected his underlings with fighting fever and made possible Mountain Meadows. Yet even these sermons can be justified in the light of the constant persecution the Church had suffered. Most likely the responsibility for the massacre rests equally on the shoulders of the large number of whites and Indians at the scene. John D. Lee was no more guilty than fifty other Mormons, and with his unfair execution he became another of history’s little victims, those scapegoats seemingly so necessary to the continuance and balance of society.

Against this agitating background of controversy and violence, Ann Eliza Webb grew to maturity. She left youth behind her at an early age. When she was twelve she had several proposals of marriage from “church dignitaries.” In Utah it was not uncommon for the older polygamists to set their caps for nymphets. “One enthusiastic elder,” said Ann Eliza, “secured for a wife a girl of eleven years, and brides of thirteen and fourteen were often seen…” But Chauncey Webb would not have his only daughter a bride at twelve, and all offers were rejected.

In school Ann Eliza’s education was narrowly Mormon. She was constantly taught to accept polygamy. “I gave very little heed to the advice,” she said, “and set about making my own romance, just as girls everywhere do, in my imagination.” At twelve Ann Eliza did not find life under one roof with the five Mrs. Webbs disagreeable. But her mother did. The first Mrs. Webb entreated Ann Eliza’s father to give her a separate residence. This he refused to do. In desperation the first Mrs. Webb asked permission to take Ann Eliza on an extended vacation to Skull Valley, seventy miles out of Salt Lake City, where Ann Eliza’s brothers had a log cabin and tended grazing land. To this Chauncey readily consented. When the other wives heard of it, one of them begged to go along. The first Mrs. Webb tried to resist. As she told Ann Eliza, “Why can’t she see and understand that I want to make my escape from this confusion and trouble and go away alone?” Nevertheless, she took the other wife with them to Skull Valley.

A short time afterward Brigham Young was inspired to form an express company featuring a unique carriage of his own design. The carriages were to be manufactured in Chicago, and Brigham ordered Chauncey to Illinois to supervise the work. Though there had been no payment for either the long mission to England or the handcart work in Iowa, this time Brigham promised a salary. Nevertheless, until he had the money, Chauncey was forced to practice economy. Toward this end he asked his sons to enlarge the log cabin in Skull Valley, and then be sent his remaining three wives there. The first Mrs. Webb was furious. She told Ann Eliza “that she never, in her whole life, felt so rebellious as she did then.” She even vowed not to pray for Chauncey’s safe return from Chicago. And if the wives were not trial enough, the first Mrs. Webb was soon burdened by another worry. Her older son, Gilbert, was suddenly ordered to the Sandwich Islands, as Hawaii was then called, for a five-year mission. The first Mrs. Webb’s health deteriorated, and Ann Eliza was filled with anguish and afraid that her mother might die.

Chauncey’s assignment in Chicago was a failure in every way. Brigham had determined to establish a company called “B. Young’s Express” and carry passengers, freight, and mail between Independence, Missouri, and Salt Lake City. Dissatisfied with existing means of transportation, he had meticulously designed a new kind of team-drawn wagon. Five times the size of an ordinary covered wagon, it was rectangular in shape, with twelve windows and mammoth wheels. Carriage makers in Chicago ridiculed the proposed monstrosity, until one, eager for the Mormon trade, agreed to undertake the construction with Chauncey’s assistance. Brigham had wanted fourteen carriages built; instead, Chauncey had two made. Each one filled an entire freight car. No passenger was ever known to travel in either one. Disappointed, Brigham used them for freight until they fell apart, and then he abandoned the entire business.

When Chauncey billed the Prophet for his services in Chicago, Brigham hedged. He preferred to regard Chauncey’s labors as “a gratuity to the church.” By then Chauncey was too sick to protest. He had fallen ill in Chicago, and now, in Salt Lake City, he requested the first Mrs. Webb to nurse him. She refused and sent the second Mrs. Webb, Elizabeth Taft, in her place. But Chauncey still wanted his first wife beside him. Again he sent for her, and again she refused. She felt triumphant in being so necessary to him, but she felt the old bitterness too.

Finally Chauncey’s pleadings, conveyed by messenger, made her feel ashamed. With Ann Eliza she hurried back to the house in Salt Lake City. Briefly she was happy taking care of her husband.

But when the four other wives gathered to assist her, the familiar anger welled. “All the heart had gone out of my work,” she told her daughter. “Feeling seemed entirely dead. I hadn’t the slightest emotion for the man who lay before me there, and I was indifferent to his fate as though he had been an entire stranger… I did not wish that he might die; I was simply indifferent.”

Eventually Chauncey’s fever broke. The moment that he was on the road to recovery, the first Mrs. Webb took Ann Eliza and fled south to visit relatives. After that the first Mrs. Webb resumed teaching in Payson, spending almost an entire year apart from her husband.

In September of 1860, the first Mrs. Webb reluctantly returned to the family she detested in Salt Lake City. The home-coming was marked by Ann Eliza’s sixteenth birthday, and almost immediately after Ann Eliza fell ill of a lung ailment. Physicians being held in low regard in those days, Ann Eliza was treated only by the Mormon clergy, mainly Bishop Taft. His medication consisted of prayer. No recovery appeared evident, and it was feared that Ann Eliza might succumb to consumption. At this point Heber C. Kimball decided that Ann Eliza could only be saved by being given her Endowments or confirmation in advance, a singular honor, since this ceremony was rarely bestowed on adolescents. As a preliminary step, Ann Eliza was rebaptized by immersion in the water font of the Twelfth Ward meetinghouse. Almost immediately, as if by some miracle, her health began to improve. The final step, that of confirmation, was scheduled to take place in the mysterious Endowment House, on the northwest corner of Temple Square.

The Endowment House was a two-story adobe structure—”with a pent roof and four windows, one blocked up,” Burton observed—used for plural marriages, confirmations, and other holy ceremonies. Like the sacred Kaaba of Mecca, the building was off limits to non-believers. Because its rituals were performed behind closed doors, wild rumors of the activities within were spread by anti-Mormons. The Endowment House became notorious in the eastern part of America and abroad as a den of medieval black magic and sexual orgies. P. T. Van Zile, Federal District Attorney in Utah, called it that “sink-hole of iniquity.” John Hyde, who claimed to have been initiated into the wonders of the House, wrote: “It is impossible to state all the licentiousness, under the name of religion, that these sealing ordinances have occasioned.” According to Burton: “The Endowment House is the place of great medicine, and all appertaining to it is carefully concealed from Gentile eyes and ears: the result is that human sacrifices are said to be performed within its walls.” Actually the sacred rites enacted in the House, derived from the Bible, Milton, and Masonry, were tame and harmless.

For confirmation on her sixteenth birthday, Ann Eliza arrived at the Endowment House carrying her lunch and special religious robes that her mother had made for her. After removing her shoes and giving her name and personal data to a clerk, Ann Eliza went inside and joined several other Mormons who were to be confirmed. She was led to a spacious bathroom—a curtain hanging in the center divided male from female—then stripped naked and placed in a tub of water. Now Eliza R. Snow, the poet who was one of Brigham’s plural wives, washed Ann Eliza from head to toe, all the while murmuring prayers. After that Ann Eliza’s body was thickly covered with olive oil, while Sister Snow blessed the limbs of her body, mentioning “loins” and “breasts” so that “you may bring forth a numerous race.” The oil nauseated Ann Eliza, and she could hardly proceed with the ceremony.

Presently she was dressed in a plain white muslin shift, subsequently covered with nightgown and skirt, then the flowing linen ceremonial robe her mother had prepared. After being given the secret holy name of Sarah, Ann Eliza, joined by her fellow Mormons, witnessed and participated in a playlet representing “the Creation, the Fall, and the final Restoration of Man to his first glory.” The main actors, although costumed, could be identified by Ann Eliza. Brigham performed the role of Plead God; Heber C. Kimball had the role of Jehovah; Daniel H. Wells was Jesus, and Eliza R. Snow was Eve.

When the playlet was done, a Masonic orientation was offered. “We were given certain signs, pass-words, and grips, arranged in a circle, and told to kneel,” said Ann Eliza. “The women were also required to cover their faces with their veils; then we were bidden to raise our right hands heavenward, and take the oath of implicit obedience and inviolable secrecy.”

By the day’s end, Ann Eliza’s illness had fled, but so had her sense of enchantment. “I was perfectly exhausted by what I had passed through,” she said, “and quite dissatisfied. It was so different from what I expected that I was saddened and disappointed by it all. My feelings of the morning had undergone a most radical change. I was no longer buoyed up by the enthusiasm of religious fervor; that had died away, and I was as hopeless and apathetic as I had before been eager and buoyant.

“Soon after I took my Endowments, Brigham Young showed his consciousness of my existence. He had always seen me frequently, but had regarded me and treated me as a child. He seemed suddenly to realize that I had grown to be a young lady, and the first intimation he gave of it was by interfering with my beaux.”

In 1861, at seventeen, after mourning the untimely death of Lorenzo Dow, her youngest brother, Ann Eliza Webb had begun to attend social affairs with members of the opposite sex. Her favorite boy friend was Finley Free, a younger brother of Emmeline Free, Brigham’s favorite plural wife at the time. Finley Free was a gay extrovert, with many interests in common with Ann Eliza, and she adored him. The Frees had their own residence, and often Ann Eliza visited there. She continued seeing Finley during 1862, her eighteenth year, and enjoyed accompanying him to plays at the recently opened Salt Lake City Theater.

Apparently Brigham twice saw Ann Eliza on Finley’s arm at the theater. Out of some inexplicable impulse Brigham called on Ann Eliza’s mother and stated that Ann Eliza must stop hanging out with “those Frees” for they were “a low set.” He demanded that the first Mrs. Webb intervene and not permit Ann Eliza to see Finley again. The first Mrs. Webb obeyed, and Ann Eliza obeyed. But Ann Eliza was vocal in her resentment at Brigham Young’s interference.

One evening Ann Eliza was gossiping with a group of her girl friends, all of whom knew of Brigham’s interference in Ann Eliza’s romantic affair. One girl thought that the older polygamists always interfered because they wanted the younger women for themselves.

She turned to Ann Eliza. “Perhaps Brother Brigham means to marry you himself.”

The very thought was outrageous to Ann Eliza. “But he won’t,” she snapped. “I wouldn’t have him if he asked me a thousand times—hateful old thing.”

Inevitably a report of Ann Eliza’s declaration got back to the Prophet. Perhaps he was annoyed; more likely he was intrigued. After that, he watched for Ann Eliza, and one afternoon, riding in his carriage, he saw her walking home. He drew up next to the sidewalk.

“You are some distance from home,” he said to Ann Eliza. “Get in and ride with me. I will carry you there.”

Ann Eliza had no choice but to oblige. They rode in silence a few moments.

Suddenly Brigham turned to his attractive companion and spoke. “I heard you said you wouldn’t marry me if I wanted you to ever so much.”

Taken aback, Ann Eliza stammered out an evasive denial.

“I think,” wrote Ann Eliza later, “Brigham’s mind was made up from that time that I should one day be his wife.”

If so, Brigham must have known that it would not be simple to bridge the gap of years between them. This was 1862, when Brigham was sixty-one and Ann Eliza was still seventeen. But in the fall of that year, on Ann Eliza’s eighteenth birthday, Brigham Young made a move designed to bring her closer to his watchful eye and to make her a glamorous member of the community.

“He sent for me to come to the theatre as a member of the company,” said Ann Eliza, “for he wished to make an actress of me.”

Ann Eliza Webb’s public career was about to begin.