“Do you think that I am an old man? I could prove to this congregation that I am young; for I could find more girls who would choose me for a husband than can any of the young men.”
—Brigham Young
“If I were placed on a cannibal island,” Brigham Young once remarked, “and given a task of civilizing its people, I should straightway build a theatre for the purpose.”
In 1862, before the coming of the railroads, Salt Lake City was as isolated from the refinements of civilization as almost any cannibal island. Fourteen grim years of hardship and toil had been devoted to building up the community. There had been little time for levity, amusement, relaxation. Of course, the men had polygamy, which, if sometimes a trial, was more often a form of enjoyment. As Edith Young Booth, a granddaughter of Brigham Young, informed this writer: “Men had a wonderful time under polygamy.” But Brigham was sensible enough to realize that something more was wanted, not only by the men, but by the women and by families, something to relieve the daily drudgery of frontier living. And so Brigham elected to give the population—which had bread but wanted circuses—a form of circus, an extraordinary theater, the largest showcase west of Chicago, a theater the equal in dimension and opulence of those in New York and London and Paris.
On July 1, 1861, construction was begun on what would be formally called the Salt Lake City Theater but was informally referred to as Brigham’s Theater. Actually, for all but two years of his life, this theater was the Prophet’s personal property. Once, after a dozen years as proprietor, he sold land and building to a corporation of six (that included two of his sons) for $100,000, then, twenty-four months later, bought it back for $116,000. At his death the property was worth $125,000.
Yet, because of a series of fortunate circumstances, the original cost of construction and decoration was low. Since the structure was the Prophet’s own, labor was acquired cheaply. A party of sixteen diggers, eight stonecutters, fifteen carpenters, and three millwrights worked under the direction of William H. Folsom, the architect. A year later Folsom would also contribute his daughter to Brigham as the Prophet’s twenty-fifth and favorite wife. The building supplies, in charge of Brigham’s son Joseph A. Young, were obtained for next to nothing. Except for a quarter of a million adobe bricks, hauled by wagon, most of the materials came from Camp Floyd. After President Lincoln had recalled Johnston’s army to the East, to fight in the Civil War, he sanctioned the sale of abandoned government supplies to the highest bidder. Promptly Brigham spent $40,000 in gold to buy $175 army wagons for ten dollars each, twenty-eight-dollar sacks of flour for fifty-two cents each, and, above all, the discarded building materials for his theatrical project.
In nine months the Salt Lake City Theater was completed. At the suggestion of a visiting London architect, the interior, capable of seating 2,500 persons, was made to resemble the Drury Lane Theater. The proscenium arch was sixty feet deep. The parquet circle or orchestra was furnished with imported chairs with cane backs and seats, including a single rocking chair for the Prophet. The elaborate boxes and galleries were equally comfortable.
When Fitz Hugh Ludlow, the New York critic, short-story writer, drug addict, and promoter of Mark Twain, visited Salt Lake City, he was Brigham’s guest at the theater shortly after it opened. Ludlow was astonished by what he saw: “My greatest surprise was excited by the really exquisite artistic beauty of the gilt and painted decorations of the great arch over the stage, the cornices, and the moulding above the proscenium-boxes. President Young, with a proper pride, assured me that every particle of the ornamental work was by indigenous and saintly hands.”
Brigham directed Ludlow’s attention to the central chandelier—”a richly carved circle,” noted Ludlow, “twines with gilt vines, leaves, and tendrils, blossoming all over with flaming wax- lights, and suspended by a massive chain of golden lustre.”
“Where do you think we got that central chandelier,” asked Brigham, “and what d’ye suppose we paid for it?”
“I suppose you paid a thousand dollars for it in New York.”
“Capital! I made it myself!” exclaimed the Prophet. “That circle is a cartwheel which I washed and gilded. It hangs by a pair of gilt ox chains, and the ornaments of the candlesticks were all cut after my patterns out of sheet tin!”
This magnificent homemade showcase was officially opened to the public on the evening of March 6, 1862. The premiere audience attended by invitation only. The first night had more the air of a religious revival meeting than a theatrical opening. To start proceedings, Brigham called the audience to order. A choir then sang, “Lo, on the Mountain Tops Appearing.” Then Daniel H. Wells read a prayer of dedication. “O Lord,” he beseeched at one point, “preserve forever this house pure and holy for the habitation of Thy people. Suffer no evil or wicked influences to predominate or prevail within these walls; neither disorder, drunkenness, debauchery, or licentiousness of any sort or kind; but rather than this, sooner than it should pass into the hands or control of the wicked or ungodly, let it utterly perish and crumble to atoms.”
After the prayer came “The Star-Spangled Banner” and then the principal speech by Brigham Young. He had, he said, been piously raised to regard the theater as a pit of Satan. There were still Christians who considered all amusement as evil. Yet nothing created by God could be evil—only the frailties of men could make it so. This theater, then, could be a resort of pleasure if it were kept pure as a tabernacle.
During his address Brigham briefly turned drama critic and stated his prejudices. He preferred comedy to tragedy, he made it clear. “If I had my way,” he said, “I would never have a tragedy played on these boards. There is enough tragedy in everyday life and we ought to have amusement when we come here.” Later in his speech, to make certain that he was fully understood, Brigham belabored the point further. “Tragedy is favored by the outside world; I am not in favor of it. I do not wish murder and all its horrors and the villainy leading to it portrayed before our women and children: I want no child to carry home with it the fear of the fagot, the sword, the pistol, or the dagger, and suffer in the night from frightful dreams. I want such plays performed as will make the spectators feel well…” According to Ann Eliza Webb, Brigham also told the audience, “I will not have a Gentile on this stage… I’ll have a Saints’ theatre, for the Saints, and we’ll see what we can do ourselves.” Before the end of the year, however, both Gentiles and tragedies would cross the stage.
After several more orators, a short play The Pride of the Market by J. R. Planche was performed. Then the stage was cleared for dancing to the accompaniment of an orchestra of twenty led by a professor from England. On this note of gaiety the dedication ceremony ended.
Two days later, under the management of Brigham’s favorite son-in-law, Hiram B. Clawson, the Salt Lake City Theater was thrown open to the public. The orchestra seats were seventy-five cents each; the seats in the third circle or upper gallery were fifty cents each. The curtain went up at seven o’clock. Between March 8 and April 19, two plays were performed each night, for fifteen nights, to packed houses. This brought the first season to a successful closing, and the theater was darkened through the summer and autumn, to open for its second season early on the evening of Christmas Day. For this second season there were some new faces among the Deseret Dramatic Association’s stock company, and among these one of the most attractive was that of eighteen-year-old Ann Eliza Webb.
Somewhat bewildered and decidedly nervous, Ann Eliza made her stage debut on the night of December 25, 1862, in what was advertised as a “mirth-provoking Irish farce.” The play was entitled Paddy Miles’ Boy; or, Irish Mischief. The cast of characters numbered seven, and the seventh, according to the program, was listed as “Jane Fidget… Miss Webb.” Two nights after her Christmas debut, Ann Eliza performed again, this time enacting the role of Caroline Leslie in The Two Polts. Four days after that she was seen once more, playing the juvenile character of Blanche Howard in Old Phil’s Birthday.
What bewildered Ann Eliza the most was Brigham’s motive in ordering her on the stage. Possibly, she may have reasoned, the Prophet wanted to adorn his stage with beauty—at eighteen the brown-haired Ann Eliza was classically lovely and slender—or possibly he was sufficiently attracted to her to want her near his person. Certainly, she knew, no evidence of her ability as a Thespian had prompted his summons. “I had no particular talent or taste for the stage,” Ann Eliza admitted, “and I knew absolutely nothing about the art of acting. I never had the slightest training or preparation for it, but plunged into it, entirely ignorant of what I was undertaking. I did ‘juvenile business’ with an occasional ‘soubrette’ part as a variation, but in the latter line I was not nearly so successful.”
As an adjunct to her acting there had been another change in Ann Eliza’s life. Because she was required at the theater for rehearsals in afternoons and performances in evenings, and because her home was a considerable distance from the theater, Brigham had decided that this daily traveling back and forth would be “extremely inconvenient.” Therefore he asked the first Mrs. Webb if it would not be wiser to have Ann Eliza stay with his daughters and wives at the Lion House, his main residence near the theater, during the season. Ann Eliza’s mother was flattered and agreed that her daughter should spend four nights a week at the Lion House and Sundays and two other days at home.
Reluctantly acceding to the arrangement, Ann Eliza moved into the three-story harem of twenty gables that Brigham had built seven years before. Here, in separate suites, twelve of his numerous wives lived. As often as possible, Ann Eliza avoided the wives and gave her attention to Brigham’s daughters, many of whom were her own age. Ann Eliza had much in common with at least ten of the daughters, a buxom, lovely lot who had also been enrolled as members of the theatrical stock company and were starring en masse (their ankles shockingly exposed beneath blue tarlatan skirts) in The Mountain Sylph. One of these daughters, Alice Young, who married Hiram B. Clawson, and who became notorious for her love affairs, had sufficient talent to be given leading roles. Despite this honor, she performed, like Ann Eliza, as a duty. “I am not myself very fond of playing,” she confessed to a visiting Englishman, “but my father desires that my sister and myself should act sometimes, as he does not think it right to ask any poor man’s child to do anything his own children would object to do.”
Except for the company of these robust girls Ann Eliza disliked the Lion House. She hated the excessive austerity, frugality, plurality in evidence. She was not seduced by its size and splendor. When the bell for breakfast rang out, Brigham’s daughters, as was their rebellious custom, chanted, “Bread and butter and peach sauce!” Ann Eliza always joined them in the derisive chant, for bread, butter, and peach sauce were monotonously on the table every morning of every day and had been for years. Impatiently Ann Eliza looked forward to the three days at her own home, where she might enjoy her mother’s familiar and generous meals and avoid the piercing eyes of the Prophet.
Gradually, during the busy months that followed, Ann Eliza was less and less concerned with the Lion House, as she became more and more absorbed in the art of acting. Appearances on the huge stage were no longer nerve-racking now that she was acquiring experience and skill and had received applause and favorable notices.
However, Ann Eliza never took her minor talent seriously. She would never make “a brilliant success in it,” she decided. “Though,” she was quick to add, “I was something of a favorite, and had very pleasant things said of me, not only in the Salt Lake, but even in the California papers, by some persons who had seen me act. Whatever it was that kept me from being an absolute failure, I never knew. It certainly was not because I had prepared for my profession, for I had not; and I only went through the parts assigned to me as I fancied they should be given, and I never attempted any stage tricks or mannerisms. If I had, my doom would have been sealed. I fancy that my adherence to nature, and a constant refraining from striving for effect, had a great deal to do with my popularity; for I was liked, even though I was no artist, and it is not egotism for me to say it… My public was like a party of friends, and I was always on the best of terms with them, and grateful to them for giving me so much encouragement.” In short, Ann Eliza did not overact, or hardly acted at all, but underplayed her roles, projecting them with simplicity and realism, and achieved success with the general public rather than among more demanding playgoers and critics.
Through the rest of the holiday season, and then during January, February, and March of 1863, the stock company staged a potpourri of mediocre plays such as Secret Agent, That Blessed Baby, Damon and Pythias, and The Good-for-Nothing. Ann Eliza appeared in several of these as a secondary bit player or ingenue but had stronger roles as Mrs. Fitzalian in Simpson and Company and as Emily Wilton in The Artful Dodge.
During Ann Eliza’s entire acting career, and even for years after, the person of Brigham Young dominated the Salt Lake City Theater, backstage and from the orchestra. It was he who decided that Ann Eliza and the other Mormon players must furnish their own wardrobes and perform without salary. Later, in order to attract prominent outside actors and vaudevillians and lecturers, Brigham learned to pay handsomely. Eventually he paid his homegrown company too. He would allow no liquor, cigarettes, firearms, or infant children in the theater. It was one of the oddities of the showcase that Brigham permitted “merchandise, grain, and home manufactures” instead of money for tickets. Because silver, gold coins, and greenbacks were not widely circulated in Utah, Brigham allowed patrons to deliver goods and livestock at the box office. The popular comedian, Artemus Ward, recollected, perhaps facetiously, that for a single night’s appearance in the theater he received at the box office the following in lieu of cash: “20 bushels of wheat. 5 bushels of corn. 4 bushels of potatoes… 2 hams. 1 live pig. 1 wolf-skin. 5 pounds honey in the comb. 16 strings of sausages… 1 set children’s under-garments, embroidered.” One avid theatergoer, it is said, paid for his ticket with a turkey and received his orchestra seat and two spring chickens in change.
Brigham’s firm hand also guided the plays that were shown and the actors who appeared in them. Of course, he was not without histrionic background himself: in the old days, in Nauvoo, he had enacted the High Priest in a play called Pizarro; in the Endowment House he played the lead in the drama of Creation; and from the pulpit, almost weekly, he demonstrated his wide range of dramatic abilities.
Brigham continued to be critical of tragedy and melodrama. Even Charles Dickens was not exempt. In 1869 Oliver Twist was presented, starring James A. Herne as Bill Sikes, co-leader of Fagin’s gang, and Lucille Western as Nancy, a young street girl. In a climactic scene, played off-stage, Sikes, learning Nancy had exposed him, savagely beat her. Then, battered and bleeding, Nancy staggered on-stage and died before the footlights. On opening night, to make the scene more realistic, Lucille Western, as Nancy, pasted a slice of raw beef to one cheek, to simulate her face ripped to the bone, smeared her forehead with make-believe blood, and messed up her hair. When she staggered on-stage in this fashion, the sensation was immediate. She “was so revolting,” reported John S. Lindsay, who saw the scene, “that several women in the audience fainted.” Brigham was outraged. He demanded that Oliver Twist be withdrawn at once, and it was.
Sentimental romances concerned with monogamy were also frowned upon, not only by Brigham, but by other polygamists as well. According to Artemus Ward: “It will be remembered that when C. Melnotte, in the Lady of Lyons, comes home from the wars, he folds Pauline to his heaving heart and makes several remarks of an impassioned and slobbering character. One night when the Lady of Lyons was produced here, an aged Mormon arose and went out with his twenty-four wives, angrily stating that he wouldn’t sit and see a play where a man made such a cussed fuss over one woman.”
Public nudity in musicals or dances—and this meant exposure of any area between ankles and knees—was severely censored by Brigham Young. Once, when a real ballet came to the Salt Lake City Theater, the dancers prepared to attire themselves in their regular French-style, below-knee-length bell-shaped skirts, or tutus. Worried, manager Clawson consulted Brigham, who, as expected, refused to let the ballet go on unless the dancers wore flowing skirts down to their ankles. Clawson’s aesthetic sensibilities were offended by this Puritanism, and he made out a traditional case for the revealing skirts but was sternly vetoed. The grumbling ballet opened as scheduled, the female dancers hampered by skirts almost to the floor. Brigham, who was on hand, clucked approval. Having seen the ballet once, he did not come again. Immediately Clawson began his private little war against censorship. Before the corps went on the second night, he took a shears and snipped six inches from each skirt. Every night of the week thereafter, before the curtain was raised, Clawson sliced six more inches from each skirt. On the sixth and final night the corps appeared wiggling and pirouetting airily, thighs and buttocks properly revealed and slender legs unencumbered, and the great audience was as enchanted as if it were in Paris. Not until the ballet was safely on its way East did Brigham learn of the deceit, and it was long before Clawson, consigned to hell’s fires, could show his face again.
Brigham’s interest in the morals of his players was no less devoted than his interest in the morals of their plays. He was in constant conflict with George Pauncefort, a brilliant English leading man who had made a hit as Armand Duval in Camille on Broadway and had excited Salt Lake City with his renditions of Hamlet and Macbeth. When a character actor named David McKenzie played Uncle Tom in Uncle Tom’s Cabin without a Negro accent, because Pauncefort had ordered him to do so, Brigham immediately rescinded the order and restored the accent. The Prophet tolerated Pauncefort because of his talent, until he learned, as one Mormon historian put it, something of the Englishman’s “alleged mode of living.” It appeared that Pauncefort and his pretty leading lady Mrs. Florence Bell, whom he had brought from Denver, maintained a behind-the-scenes relationship that was anything but platonic. Since Pauncefort had a contract, Brigham could not dismiss him. At the same time, he refused to condone a pair living in sin. While the Englishman appeared on his boards, Brigham refused to visit the theater or allow his wives, children, or associates to visit it. As soon as he could, Brigham dismissed Pauncefort.
However, long years after, Pauncefort gave other reasons for Brigham’s disapproval. In 1897 Frank J. Cannon, son of George Q. Cannon, was traveling in Japan when one day he was startled to observe an English teahouse atop a hill. The teahouse bore a sign reading: “Shakespeare Tavern. George Pauncefort.” Inside, Cannon found seventy-year-old Pauncefort with a Japanese wife and a copy of The Deseret News. At once the old actor recalled his falling out with Brigham and gave his version of it. “I was coming on magnificently in my art in Salt Lake, but I made two inevitable mistakes. I danced once too often at a party with the lovely Amelia Folsom, who was Brigham’s favourite wife; and I fell in love, also, with his charming daughter… Not even my art, to which Brigham was devoted, was sanctified enough to entitle me to a marriage union with a member of his family.”
Over his Mormon players Brigham wielded more direct power. One day when an attractive, diminutive young Mormon convert, Sara Alexander, read lines for a friend who was absent, and was overheard by Brigham, she was commanded to undertake a stage career. As talent scout, Brigham was unerring, for Sara Alexander became the best of the Mormon actresses. Her fame would range from California to New York, and before her death in 1926, at an advanced age, she would appear in motion pictures with Norma Talmadge and William Farnum. But as a young girl, and for a while Brigham’s protégée and ward, her romantic life was guided by his whims. When a non-Mormon actor visiting Salt Lake City fell deeply in love with Sara Alexander and proposed, she suggested that he make his intentions known to Brigham. The actor called on Brigham and stated his suit. But the Prophet had already made up his mind. “Young man,” he said, “I have seen you attempt Richard III and Julius Caesar with fair success, but I advise you not to aspire to Alexander.”
Sometimes, it was said, Brigham’s interest in young actresses—as in the case of Ann Eliza Webb—was less fatherly. Once, according to Dr. Wilhelm Wyle, the German researcher, Heber C. Kimball gathered his family about him to pray for Brigham, when suddenly he halted and cried out, “I can’t pray for him, but he needs it badly enough, for the greater the strumpet, the more brother Brigham is after her.” The story, from an anti-Mormon source, is likely apocryphal, yet, as a matter of recorded fact, Brigham Young did have one protracted and public love affair with an actress. She was the justly celebrated and breath-takingly beautiful Julia Dean Elayne. “Brigham,” said Ann Eliza Webb, “was madly in love with her.”
Julia Dean was born in Pleasant Valley, New York, during 1830. She was a child prodigy and was put on the stage. At sixteen, appearing on the boards of the Old Bowery Theater in Manhattan, she found fame as Esmeralda in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Her shy charm attracted Joseph Jefferson, the rising young actor only a year her senior and not yet renowned for his Rip Van Winkle. She became his mistress for a short period. Then, in 1855, when she was twenty-five, she met Dr. Arthur Hayne in Charleston, South Carolina, and married him. But matrimony was not for Julia Dean Hayne. Restlessly she went on the road, and by 1864, having taken a sailing vessel to Panama, ridden across the isthmus, and resumed her trip by boat, she was in San Francisco. After divorcing Dr. Hayne, she ran into a friend she had known in the East, John S. Potter, a sixty-year-old theater manager who was assembling a troupe to tour the western territories. Julia Dean Hayne joined Potter’s company as leading lady and performed through California, then in Idaho, Oregon, and Montana. Wherever the company appeared, its members heard glowing tales of the fabulous and modern Salt Lake City Theater. Determined to try their luck, the players left Montana in a crowded stagecoach for Utah. On July 26, 1865, the thirty-five-year-old Julia Dean Hayne set eyes on the capital of the Mormons.
An engagement of one week was immediately secured by Potter. On August 11, 1865, before a filled house, Julia Dean Hayne opened as Camille Gautier in Alexandre Dumas’ Camille. So sensational was her performance that Brigham Young himself led the thunderous ovation that followed. The one-week engagement stretched to many weeks, and it would be eleven months before the Mormons would finally let her go. Along the way Brigham dropped Potter and his players and convinced Julia Dean Hayne to remain alone and act with his Mormon stock company, which was standing by under salary. When Brigham offered the actress $300 a week, an enormous sum in those days, Julia Dean Hayne had no choice but to accede.
Angry at being shunted aside, Potter made up his mind that he would teach the Prophet and his former leading lady a lesson. At a cost of $7,000, all borrowed money, Potter had built in thirty days a competing theater, the Academy of Music. So cheap was the construction that the thin walls were filled with sawdust. His first offering was Damon and Pythias—played to a half-empty auditorium. Everything was against Potter: a play that had already been seen too often, a Prophet who disapproved, and a rival female star who was the toast of the territory. At last creditors closed in, and Potter was bankrupt. Brigham bought up the cheap building, tore it down, and used the lumber for farm fences. Broken, Potter fled.
Julia Dean Hayne remained, a bigger attraction than ever. After Camille Gautier she did Peg Woffington, Lucretia Borgia, and Medea. She even had the authority to produce two plays on her own, one of them Aladdin, or The Wonderful Lamp. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to write for her. The editor of the Salt Lake City Herald, Edward L. Sloan, did an Indian play for her, Osceola, in which she enacted a chief’s daughter. The Mormon historian Edward W. Tullidge penned Eleanor DeVere for her, in which she enacted a lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth. Later she commissioned Tullidge to create Elizabeth of England. Apparently it was an excellent play, for Julia Dean Hayne planned to perform it in New York City and Tullidge pinned all his hopes on the venture. By unhappy circumstance the actress arrived in New York City with the play just as the Italian leading lady Ristori opened in Elizabeth by Giacometti. Ristori made a hit; Julia Dean Hayne shelved her drama, and Tullidge, it is said, went out of his mind with disappointment and had to he confined.
Just as Julia Dean Hayne won the applause of all Mormon theatergoers, she won the heart of Brigham Young. “Speculation was rife,” recalled John S. Lindsay in 1905, “and much surprise and wonder was excited in certain quarters that President Young should go out of his way to show more marked attention to an actress than he had ever shown to any of his wives.”
There seems every evidence that Brigham, at sixty-four, had a deeply romantic involvement with Julia Dean Hayne. For winter sport Brigham ordered a huge green sleigh built and, in bold lettering on its side, he named it “The Julia Dean.” The sleigh, decorated with two large swan heads and drawn by six horses, was capable of carrying two to three dozen adults. On two known occasions, Brigham threw glittering parties for the actress at his country residence The Farm House, four miles outside the city, and drove Julia Dean Hayne to the celebrations in the sleigh.
It is said that Brigham tried to convert the actress to the Mormon faith and even proposed marriage. But Julia Dean Hayne would have her patron neither as Prophet nor as polygamist. Besides, she had fallen in love with a non-Mormon. He was James G. Cooper, a tall, strikingly handsome southern gentleman, who had been appointed Secretary of Utah Territory. Cooper, an inveterate theatergoer, had worshipped the actress from the audience during most of the eighty-five evening performances that she gave at the Salt Lake City Theater. Learning that her quarters were next door to his offices, he arranged to make her acquaintance. Their love proved mutual. After a brief affair they married in 1866 and agreed to move east.
On the evening of July 4, 1866, after performing in The Pope of Rome before Brigham and a packed house, Julia Dean Hayne stepped in front of the curtain and spoke a moving valedictory:
“Ladies and Gentlemen. It is but seldom I lose the artist in the woman or permit a personal feeling to mingle with my public duties; yet, perhaps, in now taking leave, I may be pardoned if I essay to speak of obligations which are lasting. If, during my lengthened stay within your midst, some trials have beset my path, many kindnesses have cheered the way, the shafts of malice have fallen powerless, and the evil words of falser hearts have wasted as the air. And perhaps in teaching me how sweet the gratitude I owe these friends, I should almost thank the malignancy which called their kindness forth. For such, believe me, memory holds a sacred chamber where no meaner emotion can intrude.
“To President Young, for very many courtesies to a stranger, alone and unprotected, I return these thanks which are hallowed by their earnestness; and I trust he will permit me, in the name of my art, to speak my high appreciation of the order and beauty that reigns throughout this house.
“I would the same purity prevailed in every temple for the drama’s teachings. Then, indeed, the grand object would be achieved and it would become a school
“‘To wake the soul by tender strokes of art,
To raise the genius and to mend the heart’
“But I speak too long and pause—perhaps, before the last farewell,
“’A word that has been and must be,
A sound which makes us linger,
Yet, Farewell’”
Julia Dean Hayne’s life in the East with her second husband was tragically brief. She returned to the New York City stage, appeared in Lucretia Borgia and The Woman in White, and was seen for the last time, while pregnant at thirty-seven, during October of 1867. On May 19, 1868, she died giving birth to a stillborn infant girl. She was buried in Port Jervis, New York.
In faraway Utah Territory, Brigham Young grieved her loss. “His regard for her never ceased,” wrote Ann Eliza Webb, “and I have heard, on what seemed very good authority—although I cannot vouch for its truth—that after he heard of her death he had one of his wives baptized for her, and then sealed to him for her; so he is sure, he thinks, of possessing her in the next world, although he could not induce her to look kindly upon him here.”
The rumor Ann Eliza had heard was, indeed, correct. Since the doctrine of celestial marriage permitted a polygamist to take a woman already dead for a bride, to join his plural household in heaven for all eternity, Brigham decided that he would at last possess Julia Dean Hayne in this manner. Long-forgotten Church records show that, shortly after the actress died, Brigham led his twenty-fifth wife, Amelia Folsom, to the Endowment House and had her stand in for his beloved leading lady. Employing his twenty-fifth wife as proxy, Brigham had Julia Dean Hayne baptized into the Mormon Church and then sealed to him in marriage for all eternity. James G. Cooper may have won the battle, but somehow Brigham must have felt that he had won the war.
But six years earlier, it was a less experienced actress, eighteen-year-old Ann Eliza Webb, who was the center of Brigham’s attentions. While the Prophet made no proposal to his protégée, either in the theater or in the Lion House, he continued to be, through the winter of 1862 and early 1863, her most attentive fan. Often Brigham had Ann Eliza and the other actresses driven to the theater in his personal carriages. Ann Eliza was permitted to enter the theater through the private door used exclusively by Brigham’s wives and children.
When the curtain was rung up on a new play, Brigham was, more often than not, in attendance. “Brigham Young usually sits in the middle of the parquette, in a rocking-chair, and with his hat on,” Artemus Ward observed. “He does not escort his wives to the theatre. They go alone. When the play drags he either falls into a tranquil sleep or walks out.” Artemus Ward was only partially accurate. Brigham often allowed wives to accompany him to the theater; rarely did he fall asleep or walk out. According to one of his daughters, Clarissa Young Spencer, the family had a free reserved section in the orchestra. The daughters sat in one row, the sons in another, and most of the wives in the west front section. “Father had the upper box on the east side,” said Mrs. Spencer, “and very often I would go with him and enjoy the performance by his side. Between acts he would take me by the hand and go out on a little balcony that led from the hall back of the box and stand there unobserved, but observing.” Usually several wives and children sat with Brigham in his box, and the atmosphere was that of an indoor picnic. On more than one occasion Brigham’s favorite was seen peeling and eating apples throughout a performance.
Ann Eliza retired from the stage in April of 1864. For the duration of her stay in Salt Lake City, nine more years in all, she would attend the theater time and again, but only as a member of the audience. During those years, humorous lecturers—Artemus Ward, Mark Twain, Josh Billings, Petroleum V. Nasby—were as much in demand as imported plays. Of the lecturers, the greatest drawing card was the dour, ungainly, consumptive Artemus Ward.
When Artemus Ward arrived in Salt Lake City, from a tour of California, late in 1864, he was already stamped with celebrity. Foremost among his followers was the man in the White House. To Abraham Lincoln, Ward could do no wrong. In 1862 Lincoln had opened a solemn cabinet meeting on the Emancipation Proclamation by reading aloud a funny chapter from Artemus Ward’s latest book. Everyone roared with delight, except Secretary of State Seward, who was not amused. On another occasion, after the blood bath at Fredericksburg, Congressman Isaac N. Arnold called on Lincoln to discuss the battle but was treated instead to a reading by the President from another Artemus Ward book. The congressman was shocked. “Mr. President, is it possible that with the whole land bowed in sorrow and covered with a pall in the presence of yesterday’s fearful reverse, you can indulge in such levity?” Lincoln lowered the Ward book and exclaimed, “Mr. Arnold, if I could not get momentary respite from the crushing burden I am constantly carrying, my heart would break!”
Artemus Ward was thirty years old when he came to Utah. He had been born Charles Farrar Browne, near Waterford, Maine. His schooling ceased with his father’s death in 1846, when he was twelve, and he went to work as a New England printer. Presently he was setting type in Tiffin, Ohio, for four dollars a week and beginning to write and publish amusing squibs on the side. His work came to the notice of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and he was hired, at twelve dollars a week, as reporter and feature writer. Adopting the name of Artemus Ward, he began to turn out a column of humorous commentaries. Often his wit was barbed. When a rival columnist, of repulsive countenance, mailed him a knife to use on himself, Ward replied by describing his rival in print: “He is the homeliest man in America… He has been offered a good salary to stand up in a corn-field as a scarecrow. He is compelled to get up three times every night to rest his face.”
Artemus Ward’s real fame came when he employed misspelled words, a pseudo dialect, and broad puns in his writings. Although he had not yet met Brigham Young, he had read about him and about plural marriage and written the following: “In a privit conversashun with Brigham I learnt the follerin fax: It takes him six weeks to kiss his wives. He don’t do it only onct a yere & sex it is wuss nor cleanin house. He don’t pretend to know his children, thare is so many of um, tho they all know him. He sez about every child he meats call him Par, & he takes it for grantid it is so. His wives air very expensiv. Thay allers want suthin & ef he don’t buy it for um they set the house in a uproar. He sez he don’t have a minit’s peace. His wives fite amung theirselves so much that he has bilt a fitin room for thare speshul benefit.”
As Ward’s reputation grew, he accepted a job on the staff of Vanity Fair in New York, published the first of five books (it sold 40,000 copies immediately), and finally, in 1861, turned comedian-lecturer. Melville D. Landon described him in that period: “In stature he was tall and slender. His nose was prominent… complexion florid; mustache large, and his voice soft and clear… In his lectures he never smiled—not even while he was giving utterance to the most delicious absurdities; but all the while the jokes fell from his lips as if he was unconscious of their meaning. While writing his lectures, he would laugh and chuckle to himself continually.”
Before delivering his lecture in the Salt Lake City Theater, Ward was invited to meet Brigham Young. Escorted by Clawson, the humorist went to the meeting with some trepidation. Would the Prophet remember the published open letter of his pretended “privit conversashun with Brigham”? But the interview went smoothly, and Ward was able to record later: “When I left the Prophet he shook me cordially by the hand, and invited me to call again. This was flattering, because if he dislikes a man at the first interview he never sees him again. He made no allusion to the ‘letter’ I had written about his community. Outside guards were pacing up and down before the gateway, but they smiled upon me sweetly. The veranda was crowded with Gentile miners, who seemed to be surprised that I didn’t return in a wooden overcoat, with my throat neatly laid open from ear to ear.”
To advertise his lecture, and have fun with polygamy, Artemus Ward prepared special tickets. On each one the legend read: “Admit the bearer and One Wife. Yours Truly, A. Ward.” The night of the lecture the theater was filled with Mormons. The orchestra played an overture; the curtain lifted on a drawing-room set, and Ward stood, as he said, “before a Salt Lake of upturned faces.” His lecture was entitled “Babes in the Woods.” Apparently Ward was satisfied with its reception. “I was never listened to more attentively and kindly in my life,” he wrote. Four years later, when J. H. Beadle came to Salt Lake City to publish a small newspaper, the lecture was still being discussed. Beadle had the impression that it had not been so successful as Ward liked to think. “Old residents tell me that Artemus Ward’s lecture in Salt Lake was, professionally speaking, a perfect failure,” wrote Beadle, “simply because it was ‘cut too fine’ for the latitude. A few laughed at his broadest jokes, then for a solid hour, while he was doing his funniest, the audience sat ‘like a bump on a log,’ not giving a smile. It’s a wonder it did not kill the sensitive author.”
As a matter of fact, Artemus Ward profited enormously from his Utah visit. “The Mormon religion is singular, and his wives are plural,” he liked to say. Mormon polygamy, especially, had fascinated him. “I have somewhere stated that Brigham Young is said to have eighty wives,” Ward wrote. “I hardly think he has so many. Mr. Hyde, the backslider, says in his book that ‘Brigham always sleeps by himself, in a little chamber behind his office’; and if he has eighty wives I don’t blame him. He must be bewildered. I know very well that if I had eighty wives of my bosom I should be confused, and shouldn’t sleep anywhere. I undertook to count the long stockings, on the clothes-line, in his back yard one day, and I used up the multiplication table in less than half an hour.” At last, based on his Salt Lake City adventure, Ward created his most popular and lucrative lecture “A Visit to the Mormons.” The Mormon lecture, facetious and broad fun, was delivered against a background of changing slides and called “Artemus Ward’s Panorama.”
In 1866 Ward took his illustrated lecture to London, appeared at Egyptian Hall, and created a sensation with his mixture of fact and fancy. When a reproduction of the Lion House was thrown on the screen, Ward described it further and then added:
“Brigham Young has two hundred wives. Just think of that! Oblige me by thinking of that. That is—he has eighty actual wives, and he is spiritually married to one hundred and twenty more. These spiritual marriages—as the Mormons call them—are contracted with aged widows, who think it a great honor to be sealed—the Mormons call it being sealed—to the Prophet.
“So we may say he has two hundred wives. He loves not wisely, but two hundred well. He is dreadfully married. He’s the most married man I ever saw in my life.
“I saw his mother-in-law while I was there. I can’t exactly tell you how many there is of her—but it’s a good deal. It strikes me that one mother-in-law is about enough to have in a family—unless you’re very fond of excitement.
“A few days before my arrival in Utah—Brigham was married again—to a young and really pretty girl [probably the then twenty-one-year-old Mary Van Cott, wife number twenty-six]— but he says he shall stop now. He told me confidentially that he shouldn’t get married any more. He says that all he wants now is to live in peace for the remainder of his days—and have his dying pillow soothed by the loving hands of his family. Well—that’s all right—that’s all right—I suppose—but if all his family soothe his dying pillow—he’ll have to go outdoors to die.
“By the way—Shakespeare indorses polygamy. He speaks of the Merry Wives of Windsor. How many wives did Mr. Windsor have? But we will let this pass.”
During his seventh week in Egyptian Hall, Artemus Ward, weakened by tuberculosis, fell gravely ill. On March 6, 1867, at the age of thirty-two, he was dead.
While greater names followed Ward’s footsteps into the Salt Lake City Theater in the years after, none was ever greeted with the same affection and bewilderment which had met the gangling humorist. To Brigham’s theater came Ole B. Bull, the Norwegian violinist and student of Paganini, to give a concert for $500; Thomas Nast, the Harper’s Weekly cartoonist who had smashed William Marcy “Boss” Tweed, to enliven his lecture with crayon drawings; Sir Henry M. Stanley, the newspaper man who found Livingston in darkest Africa, to talk about pygmy tribes; George Francis Train, the eccentric millionaire whose trip around the world inspired Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg, to laud the Mormons and their leader (who, listening to the address, saw three oil lamps in the footlights burst into flames and calmly stepped on the stage and fanned them out); Phineas T. Barnum, who had made four million dollars promoting such attractions as Jenny Lind and the original Siamese twins, to speak of the road to riches (and to note with pleasure, “A dozen or so of Brigham Young’s wives, and scores of his children, were among the audience”); and General Tom Thumb, the twenty-five-inch midget who had won the heart of Queen Victoria, to perform his imitation of Napoleon (and to later tell the Prophet, “I can understand everything but your polygamy—I can’t understand that,” to which Brigham would reply, patting Tom’s head, “Yes, yes, I know, but you will understand it when you get as big as I am.”).
Through the years the celebrities continued to parade across the stage of Brigham’s theater—Maude Adams making her debut, Buffalo Bill presenting The Knight of the Plains, Edwin Booth appearing in Hamlet, Susan B. Anthony haranguing for the female vote (which Mormon women already had), Henry Ward Beecher preaching a sermon, and John L. Sullivan staggering through an acting performance in Honest Hearts and Willing Hands. Almost every leading entertainer of the nineteenth century appeared in the Salt Lake City Theater—Joseph Jefferson, Tony Pastor, Oscar Wilde, Madame Modjeska, Sarah Bernhardt, James O’Neill, Lillian Russell—to be followed in the twentieth century by John Barrymore, George Arliss, Eddie Foy, Harry Lauder, Al Jolson, Jane Cowl. Finally, after sixty-six years, Brigham’s theater was torn down in 1928 to make way for a gasoline station.
Competing against so dazzling a galaxy of colorful stars, Ann Eliza Webb’s brief career in the Salt Lake City Theater left little impression on entertainment history. Yet her retirement from acting in April of 1864 was not for lack of public success but rather for want of time for a private life—since by then she was deeply in love and a bride.
One evening, when the theater was dark, Ann Eliza attended a party at the home of a friend. There she first set eyes on twenty-two-year-old James Leech Dee, a Mormon bachelor who had emigrated from Hanley, Stafford, England. A plasterer by vocation, an amateur actor by avocation, James Dee was ruggedly attractive and tall, possessed of an easy charm with women and a remarkable knowledge of Shakespeare. For Ann Eliza, at eighteen, it was love at first sight. And because, said Ann Eliza, he was “a very great favorite with all the girls,” Dee’s devotion to her alone was doubly flattering.
“The chance meeting soon ripened into a friendship,” said Ann Eliza, “and that into a nearer relation. My whole life was brightened by the new, sweet glory that had swept in in such a torrent upon me. It took on a new look, and even the most common things were invested with a strange, novel interest. Nothing seemed natural. Everything in my life had deepened and broadened in the light of my new experience. Commonplace people grew interesting, commonplace events stirring. The whole world was tinted with the rose-color of my romance. I was very happy.”
However, there were young ladies in Ann Eliza’s dose circle who were less happy about the match. They knew Dee better, and they disapproved. “They saw that he was in no way my equal,” said Ann Eliza, “but I was so blinded that I would not see what they pointed out to me. There was disparity in disposition and in temperament, all of which promised, to those who could see and understand the matter, unhappiness if we came into a closer relationship.”
When Ann Eliza announced her engagement to Dee, her parents, Eliza Churchill and Chauncey Webb, were as disappointed as her girl friends. The more they objected, the more Ann Eliza stubbornly clung to her beloved. Both family and friends saw Dee as “selfish, overbearing, and domineering,” Ann Eliza admitted, but then she added that “he showed none of that domineering spirit in the days of our early acquaintance; he deferred to me in the slightest matter; he professed to love me very tenderly, and I believe he did love me as well as he was capable of loving anything, or anybody, outside of himself.” When marriage was proposed, Ann Eliza’s parents gave “a reluctant consent.” Not even Brigham Young intervened, for at this time his attentions had been diverted by another. He had, two months before Ann Eliza’s wedding, taken his twenty-fifth wife, Amelia Folsom, who would thenceforth dominate his life and his harem.
On April 4, 1863, Ann Eliza and James Leech Dee stood solemnly before their Prophet in a room of the Endowment House. Her bridal gown consisted of a sacklike white robe and green apron; her undergarment had cabalistic designs over her breasts, navel, and right knee. Attending Ann Eliza, as witnesses, were her mother and several family friends.
Brigham faced the groom. “Do you, Brother James Dee, take Sister Ann Eliza Webb by the right hand, to receive her unto yourself, to be your lawful and wedded wife, and you to be her lawful and wedded husband, for time and for all eternity, with a covenant and promise on your part that you will fulfill all the laws, rites, and ordinances pertaining to this holy matrimony, in the new and everlasting covenant, doing this in the presence of God, angels, and these witnesses of your own free will and accord?”
“Yes,” said James Dee.
Brigham turned to his protégée, Ann Eliza, and smiled down at her. “Do you, Sister Ann Eliza Webb, take Brother James Dee by the right hand, and give yourself to him to be his lawful and wedded wife, for time and for all eternity…?”
“Yes,” said Ann Eliza.
Brigham studied them both and then prepared to seal them. “In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and by the authority of the holy priesthood, I pronounce you legally and lawfully husband and wife, for time and for all eternity. And I seal upon you the blessings of the holy resurrection, with power to come forth in the morning of the first resurrection, clothed with glory, immortality, and everlasting lives; and I seal upon you the blessings of thrones, and dominions, and principalities, and powers, and exaltations, together with the blessings of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And I say unto you, Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth, that you may have joy and rejoicing in your prosperity in the day of the Lord Jesus. All these blessings, together with all other blessings pertaining to the new and everlasting covenant, I seal upon your heads, through your faithfulness unto the end, by the authority of the holy priesthood, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
The Endowment House scribe, John Lyon, placed the data of the marriage in the record, along with signatures of the witnesses, and Ann Eliza was officially and glowingly Mrs. James L. Dee.
But the bride also was still an actress, and her wedding evening was spent on the boards of the Salt Lake City Theater, with her husband watching proudly from the audience. All through her courtship Ann Eliza had continued to perform as stock company ingenue. She felt, in fact, that her lover had inspired her. “I grew ambitious,” she said, “and I acted better all the time. I think, perhaps, if I had remained on the stage, and had not lost my ideal, I should have accomplished something in my profession. Love does make a woman ambitious. If she never had before, in all her life, a desire to be, to do, to excel, she has it now. She wants to do something to make herself the better worth his taking.” And so that night, before consummating her marriage, Ann Eliza acted for Dee—and a few thousand more.
On the night of April 4, 1863, the Salt Lake City Theater was presenting three short plays—Porter’s Knot, The Artful Dodger, and Bombastes Furioso. Ann Eliza performed in The Artful Dodger. The word of her marriage had spread and, although she had a lesser role, her appearance dominated the stage. Ann Eliza would never forget that evening. “I was greeted, when I made my appearance, with the most tumultuous applause,” she said. “Cheer after cheer arose, and it was some minutes before I could speak my lines. Every time I appeared, there was a repetition of this scene, and I was fairly embarrassed, so persistent was the applause. There was the more excitement, probably, because I had kept my approaching marriage a secret, and but very few, even of my personal friends, knew anything about it… For once I was the central figure on the stage, and all my superiors gave way to me with a graceful good nature.”
Seven nights later Brigham’s stock company closed the season with The Merchant of Venice, and with Shakespeare the first phase of Ann Eliza’s career as entertainer was ended. Although she continued to visit the theater to rehearse for the next season, when the stock company resumed in October, Ann Eliza was too occupied with histrionics at home to pay heed.
Dee owned a cottage, but it was rented on a long-term lease. His bachelor quarters were too small for the newlyweds. Ann Eliza prevailed upon him to move into a suite of empty rooms in her father’s large city home. Dee agreed, and here, despite the watchful gaze of Ann Eliza’s mother and the comings and goings of Chauncey’s various wives and children, there was a degree of privacy.
For one month after the marriage, Ann Eliza enjoyed Dee’s affection and consideration, as well as the security of his pledge that theirs would remain a monogamous union. But soon enough she began to see the side of him that had been previously hidden from her but known to her friends. Marriage vows, Dee felt, should not interfere with his bachelor’s privileges, and, complained Ann Eliza, “he soon became quite a noted gallant among the young girls, bestowing on them the attentions that he had given me in our unmarried days…” Ann Eliza would not accept Dee’s indifference toward her or his veiled intimidations of another marriage without protest. Terrible arguments followed. According to Ann Eliza, Dee would “indulge in furious fits of anger, which fairly frightened me,” and he would “talk shamefully to me, and threaten me with all kinds of ill treatment.”
The worst torture to which she was subjected, Ann Eliza later confessed, was Dee’s threat to bring home a plural wife. He enjoyed telling her about the comely young ladies he was considering marrying, naming them by name, including several who were Ann Eliza’s close friends. “I had one friend,” said Ann Eliza, “of whom I was very fond. He became jealous of my affection for her, and in order to win me from her, and to break up our friendship, he pretended very great interest in her. He would leave me to go home by myself from the theatre, and would go off with her and remain a long time; then, on his return, would tell me what he said was the conversation between them, in which he would represent her as making the most ardent love to him, until, at last, I fairly came to hate her. I would not see her if I possibly could help it, and I was anything but cordial to her when we did meet.” Later Ann Eliza realized that Dee had lied to her, yet she could never again resume with the girl on the old friendly basis.
In a desperate effort to hold the marriage together, Ann Eliza decided that she must have a family. Two sons were born to her during the two-and-a-half-year marriage to Dee—the first, James Edward Dee, later known as Edward Wesley Dee, was born in 1864, and the second, Leonard Lorenzo Dee, was born in 1865. Ann Eliza adored the infant Edward, but her hopes that the child would draw Dee closer to her were soon rudely shattered. All through her pregnancy, Ann Eliza heard, from malicious gossips or well-meaning friends, that Dee had been seen at the theater or promenading on the street with some attractive woman. “He used to discuss my callers, and especially the pretty girls,” said Ann Eliza, “as most Mormon men discuss women, with reference to their ‘points,’ as jockeys would talk of horses, or importers of fine stock.”
Gradually Ann Eliza’s health began to give way under the strain. It grieved her even more that her husband was not sympathetic. Until then their disagreements had always been verbal.
But in the eighth month of her first pregnancy Ann Eliza suffered physical hurt from Dee. “He made some request of me,” she said, “which I was totally unable to grant, and in his fury at what he termed my stubbornness and rebellion, he struck me violently, and I fell insensible before him.” Immediately, shocked by what he had done and fearing that he had seriously hurt his mate, Dee carried her to their bed and ministered to her. After that he was all contrition and apology. Briefly, until the birth of Edward, an armistice was maintained between the couple. Once the baby had been safely delivered, Dee resumed his old habits. Since the infant child was ailing, Ann Eliza was too concerned to be worried about her husband’s neglect.
After Edward’s recovery Ann Eliza’s life again followed the familiar and unhappy pattern. Left alone with her son, she brooded in the bedroom of her father’s house, trying to hide her sorrow from her mother and the various other Mrs. Webbs, while her husband continued to amuse himself about town. Soon, perhaps by accident, perhaps because she persisted in believing a large family would bring her husband closer to the hearth, Ann Eliza was pregnant again. Two weeks before her second confinement her relationship with Dee was brought to a climax.
It was an autumn afternoon. Ann Eliza, swollen with child, sat in a rocker with Edward on her lap, staring across the bedroom at Dee, who was reading. Chauncey’s fifth child by his second wife, Elizabeth Taft, three-year-old Louis Webb, entered the bedroom. Dee glanced up and asked Louis to fetch him an object that stood on a high shelf beside a heavy jar. Ann Eliza interrupted, saying the object was too high for Louis to reach and he might bring the jar down upon his head. Instead, still holding Edward, she rose, offering to fetch the object for Dee herself. Instantly angered at being contradicted, Dee commanded Ann Eliza not to leave her chair.
“Louis will bring me what I desire,” he said firmly.
“But he must not,” cried Ann Eliza.
“I tell you he shall.” Dee turned to the frightened boy. “Louis, fetch it to me instantly.”
Ann Eliza stepped forward. “Louis, you shall not.”
Enraged, Dee leaped at Ann Eliza. She would never forget what happened next.
“My husband, maddened with fury that I should dare to contradict him, seized me by the throat, and threw me back into the chair. The screams of the terrified child brought my mother into the room at once. She snatched the baby from my arms, which I still held clasped convulsively, while my husband’s fingers were tightening about my throat. I was dizzy with pain, and almost suffocated from the grip; but my maternal instinct was stronger than the pain, and I never relaxed my hold on my child.
“My mother called my father, and he came and rescued me from the infuriated man who held me and carried me into my mother’s room.”
Now, for the first time, Ann Eliza sobbed out the entire story of her ill-treatment at the hands of Dee. At once Chauncey, hacked by Ann Eliza’s brothers, Gilbert and Edward Milo, decided that Dee must never see his daughter again. Ann Eliza was kept locked in her mother’s room, while Chauncey told Dee to get out of the house at once. Still blind with rage, Dee threatened all manner of vengeance on his wife, but at last he was forced to leave the premises.
Eliza Churchill and Chauncey Webb consulted with Brigham Young and George Q. Cannon, the Mormon delegate to Congress and a friend of the Webbs, about an immediate divorce. Brigham agreed that he could rid Ann Eliza of Dee, but this kind of divorce would only be recognized inside the Church. To protect custody of her children, he suggested that she file for divorce in the Probate Court of Salt Lake County.
On the morning of December 23, 1865, Ann Eliza appeared, with her father and a friend, before Judge E. Smith of the Probate Court. James Dee was not on hand. Testimony of the plaintiff’s complaint was taken, and in short order Ann Eliza had her divorce and the custody of her sons. Two days later, she said, she celebrated the merriest Christmas she had known in years. For the rest of her days Ann Eliza would always refer to James Dee as the man who “blighted” her life. Even thirty years later, speaking to a Michigan compiler of biographies, she would remember Dee as “one of the kind who believe that woman was made to be a slave of her lord… exacting and cruel.”
But all of this was strictly Ann Eliza’s version of her first marriage. James Dee may have had quite another. There is little doubt that Ann Eliza, nervous of temperament and strong-willed, was not the easiest of wives to manage. Moreover, there is some evidence that Dee may have been subjected to mother-in-law trouble. Ann Eliza did not deny her mother’s part in opposing the marriage, yet, unreasonably, she defended it. “My husband knew of her opposition to our marriage, and he did not like what he termed her interference; though why a mother cannot look after her daughter’s interest without being accused of interfering is even now a mystery to me.”
Ann Eliza had been the first Mrs. Dee, but there was to be a second, and she fared far better. Nine months after Ann Eliza divorced him, James Dee married again, and this time the marriage lasted. On October 2, 1866, Dee took seventeen-year-old Esther Ellen Brown for a wife. The new Mrs. Dee came of a devout and prominent Mormon family. Her father, Captain James Brown, was from North Carolina and was a veteran of the Mexican War. He had helped found the city of Ogden. Her mother was of similar sturdy stock, having been delivered of Esther after a pregnancy that included the long march from Nauvoo to Salt Lake City.
While Ann Eliza went on to fame and notoriety in the distant Gentile world, James Dee was satisfied to remain obscure but prosperous in Utah. He continued to work as a plasterer of log cabins. Then he moved to Ogden and there opened a restaurant and a saloon. Eventually, as his family expanded, he purchased a considerable amount of property—his real-estate holdings were worth $30,000 at his death—and he built a ten-room white stucco house, with an artificial pond and a pasture filled with livestock. He rode about Ogden in an expensive English carriage. And at no time did he display the rakish traits earlier attributed to him by Ann Eliza.
James Dee was the father of two sons by Ann Eliza. Now, by his second wife, Esther Ellen, he had seven more children, four sons and three daughters. Shortly after the birth of the seventh offspring, a boy named Ernest Leon, Esther Ellen died at forty-five. This last child is the only child of James Dee to survive to the present day. He was raised to maturity by a sister, Elizabeth, who died in 1958 at the age of ninety-one.
Ernest Leon Dee, an electrical engineer now retired at seventy-five and a pillar of the Mormon Church, resides in Salt Lake City. To him old memories are very much alive. He believes that Ann Eliza maligned his father, and he cannot forgive her. “Ann Eliza claimed that my father used to beat her,” Ernest Leon told this writer. “That’s unbelievable. Not once did he ever thrash one of his children or lift a finger against us. He never swore, smoked, or drank, and he was never a polygamist. I was twelve when he died, and I remember him well. He was a man of vast learning, an amateur Shakespearean actor. In the old days we had a huge dining room in Ogden, and Father, a tall, big-bayed, big-footed man, would strut up and down the room, carrying me on his foot, and waving a sword as he declaimed from King Lear.
“When Father died, there was no will. But it was his wish that his sons by Ann Eliza share his estate equally with all of us. They got $2,000 out of the estate. Eventually my $2,000 got to be worth $32,000—so you can’t say my father was a ne’er-do-well. I’m told the real reason Ann Eliza and my father were divorced was not as she stated, but because of her mother, who was aggressive and wanted her daughter in society. Ann Eliza’s mother said to her, ‘You get a divorce from Dee and I’ll get you married to Brigham Young.’ And that’s what happened.”
Ann Eliza’s first husband died on June 6, 1897. His second wife, Esther, had preceded him to the grave by four years. Actually, at Dee’s death, only six of his seven children by his second wife and one of his sons by his first wife survived to profit from his legacy. Ann Eliza’s elder son, Edward Wesley Dee, occupied with mining work, was struggling along in Denver with wife and family when informed that he was one of the seven heirs of James Leech Dee. After signing an assent to sell his father’s property, so that these holdings could be converted into cash to pay both debts and heirs, Edward Wesley received his $2,000 share.
By then Ann Eliza, still alive, had experienced two more marriages, yet she never forgot Dee or ceased to attack him. Perhaps, as she always insisted, he had marked her for life by being unfaithful and by beating her, and only in his next marriage did he reform. Or perhaps, as his last son claims, Ann Eliza had fabricated her ill-treatment to gain sympathy and to camouflage her heartless use of him to realize the ambitions of her mother.
However, in 1865 Ann Eliza’s freedom from matrimony, for whatever motives, was precious to her. After the Christmas holiday celebration in Salt Lake City, Ann Eliza took her two sons and accompanied her father, mother, and sundry stepmothers to the Webb country farmhouse—a great whitewashed, barnlike structure perched on a hill—in South Cottonwood, Utah, ten miles south of the capital.
The months that followed were placid and happy ones for Ann Eliza. She played with her boys. She shared the household chores. She ate and slept and regained her strength. “I dreamed of nothing beyond this peaceful life,” she wrote. “I wished for nothing else. Such a sweet restfulness had taken possession of me, and I pictured myself growing old in this quiet spot, with my strong, brave boys near me… The improvement of my health was a source of great joy to me. I never was so well in my life. The color had come back to my cheek, the sparkle to my eyes, the smile to my lips, the elasticity to my step, and something of the old life to my spirits, although I had suffered too much to have them quite as light as they were in the old frolicsome day when I had gone merry-making with my old companions, had won friends in the theatre, and had wailed ‘with the girls’ over the monotonous fare of the Prophetic table.”
At twenty-one Ann Eliza was more attractive and feminine than ever. There were suitors, of course, and several proposals of marriage. Ann Eliza rejected them all and explained her refusal to one ardent swain, “I have my children; I shall live for them alone; they are my only loves.” When the suitors appealed to Chauncey and the first Mrs. Webb to intervene, they were told that Ann Eliza was of age and knew her own heart and mind.
And so, through the year of 1866 and then the spring of 1867, Ann Eliza remained the retired divorcée. Little happened in South Cottonwood, and for this routine and placid existence Ann Eliza was grateful. But suddenly, early one summer’s day, there was excitement in the air. News had come that the Prophet himself, Brigham Young, was making an annual tour of his dominion and was even now en route to South Cottonwood to hold a revival meeting and preach two Sunday sermons.
As he approached South Cottonwood with his Apostles and his retinue, Brigham Young was a vigorous sixty-six and at the height of his powers. Under his directions the Mormon Church was a national force, and recently great advances had been made. One day, cutting the end off an egg and standing it upright on toothpicks, Brigham conceived of a Tabernacle of similar shape, with a giant unsupported roof resting on forty-four sandstone pillars. Now the Tabernacle was nearing completion, after three years in construction. Too, a web of telegraph lines was being built throughout the territory, and in the capital city the University of Deseret was being planned.
Despite all of this outside activity, Brigham had also found time to increase the number of his plural wives. It will be remembered that in 1852, when he announced polygamy to the world, Brigham had been married twenty-two times and was living with nineteen wives. In the fourteen years between 1852 and his journey to South Cottonwood in 1866, Brigham had acquired four more wives.
On October 3, 1852, less than six weeks after revealing celestial marriage to the world, Brigham had married twenty-four-year-old Eliza Burgess, an impoverished emigrant from England who had voluntarily been a servant in his home for seven years. After that the Prophet had waited more than three and a half years before taking his twenty-fourth wife. On March 14, 1856, he had been wedded to twenty-five-year-old Harriet Barney, a divorcée. Harriet, dark-haired, pale, tall, had been married young and briefly and given her first husband two sons and two daughters. She had born her first husband the last of her daughters and divorced him the year before joining Brigham’s harem. Seven years after marrying the Prophet, she gave him a son.
On January 24, 1863, Brigham had finally, after a long and difficult courtship of three years’ duration, won the hand of his most electric and demanding wife, Amelia Folsom, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of his favorite architect. Then on January 8, 1865, Brigham had married another divorcée, lovely, affectionate, twenty-one-year-old Mary Van Cott. She had been the child bride, several years earlier, of a man named James Cobb and bore him a daughter, Louella, after their divorce. Years later this daughter of Mary’s by her first husband married one of her second husband’s sons, an arrangement not quite incestuous but certainly dizzying. Brigham had taken Mary for a wife not half a year before his visit to South Cottonwood. She had been his twenty-sixth wife, and now, entering the village where he was to speak, Brigham had arrived at the place that would provide him his twenty-seventh and last and most difficult wife.
As Brigham and his long entourage of one hundred carriages and wagons, and fifty horsemen, wended their way into South Cottonwood, the entire population, it seemed, poured into the streets to demonstrate and greet their leader. A brass band played. People hoisted high beribboned lances, banners, and signs reading “Hail to the Prophet” and “The Lion of the Lord.” Men waved their hats, and women fluttered their handkerchiefs, and among the latter, holding a sign that read “The Daughters of Zion- Virtue,” were Ann Eliza and her mother and the plural Mrs. Webbs. “As a matter of course, I helped ‘welcome the President’ to Cottonwood,” said Ann Eliza; “so did all the family; and, as we were all old friends, we were glad to see him personally, as well as spiritually, my mother especially being overjoyed, for there was always the warmest friendship between them.” The first Mrs. Webb was doubly grateful because Brigham had helped liberate her favorite child from the clutches of James Dee.
Since there was no tabernacle in South Cottonwood, Sunday services were always held in an open-air Bowery roofed by tree branches. For Brigham’s appearance the Bowery was crammed to overflowing with eager Saints, among them Ann Eliza in her best finery and many of her family. From the pulpit Brigham spoke, as usual, without notes or any rehearsed sermon. His words, all fire and brimstone, denounced extravagant female attire in South Cottonwood as well as the alcoholism of the men. On women’s fashion Brigham could be particularly scathing. Four years before he had begun his campaign for sensible, homespun, Mormon cottons instead of Gentile frills. On that occasion he had remarked, in almost unprintable language, “The women say, let us wear hoops, because the whores wear them. I believe if they were to come with a cob stuck in their behind, you would want to do the same. I despise their damnable fashions, their lying and whoring… There is not a day I go out but I see the women’s legs, and if the wind blows you see them up to their bodies… Who cares about these infernal Gentiles? If they were to wear a s—t pot on their head, must I do so? I know I ought to be ashamed, but when you show your tother end I have a right to talk about tother end. If you keep them hid, I’ll be modest and not talk about them.”
In a similar vein, this Sunday Brigham addressed the women of South Cottonwood, but his greater wrath was reserved for the men. They were drunkards, he said, and devils, and they were not following Joseph Smith’s rules of health laid down in his Word of Wisdom. And the worst of them was a man named Howard, who operated the South Cottonwood distillery. He had been given permission to manufacture alcohol for Gentiles, yet he was corrupting the Saints.
“This Howard,” said Brigham, “he does not have a cent in the world which I did not give him. I even gave the poor, mean scapegrace the very land he lives on.”
The discredited Howard, a Mormon, was seated near the Webbs. He leaped to his feet in righteous indignation. “It isn’t so, and you know it isn’t,” he shouted at Brigham. “I bought the land of you and gave you twelve hundred dollars for it.”
“You lie!” retorted Brigham. “I gave it to you!”
“Yes, for twelve hundred dollars,” persisted Howard.
“I never got a cent for it,” roared Brigham.
“You’re the liar, and you know it!”
Enraged, Brigham faced the congregation and thundered, “Is there no one who will remove that man from this place?”
Instantly a dozen of the faithful surrounded Howard and forcibly removed him a distance from the Bowery.
Pacified, Brigham resumed his morning sermon. Having chastized the congregation, he now went on in a mellower mood. As he spoke his gaze fell on Ann Eliza, whom he had not seen in more than two years. He was fascinated. The Biblical phrases rolled forth automatically from his tongue, but his real attention was devoted to the twenty-two-year-old divorcée.
Ann Eliza was not unmindful of the Prophet’s interest in her. At first she assumed that he was drawn to her face because it was a familiar one. Then it occurred to her that there were other faces in the audience equally familiar to him. Still he sought her eyes, and she became self-conscious.
“I began to be a little uneasy under his scrutiny,” Ann Eliza wrote. “I thought that possibly there was something about my appearance that displeased him. Possibly he did not approve of my dress… That he was not looking at me indifferently or carelessly I knew very well, from the bent brows and keen gaze that I felt was making the most complete scrutiny, and I wished he would look somewhere else. I fidgeted about in my seat, I looked at my little boy who was sitting beside me, and pretended to arrange some articles of his clothing. I did everything but to jump up and run away, and I even wanted to do that, to get out of the reach of those sharp eyes and that steady, unflinching gaze. I am sure he saw my discomfort; but he was pitiless, and all the while the speaking was going on he scarcely turned his eyes from me a moment. I tried to be unconscious, to look in every direction except his, but the steady eyes would always bring mine back again in spite of myself. I felt his power then as I never had felt it before, and I began to understand a little how it was that he compelled so many people to do his will, against their own inclinations.”
At last the morning services were concluded and Ann Eliza was freed from the hypnotic stare. Herding her son along before her, she moved with the crowd into the open sunlight. Then it was, emerging from the roof of boughs, that she realized that the Prophet had followed her. As he confronted her, she feigned surprise but was undoubtedly proud that she had been singled out by him and that all eyes were upon her.
According to Ann Eliza’s version of what happened next, Brigham Young looked down at her and inquired, “Are you well?”
“As you see,” she answered cheerfully.
“May I walk home with you?”
“If you wish. I should be much pleased.”
Brigham’s retinue and the local church dignitaries hung hack, casting knowing glances at one another, as the crowd parted to make way for the sixty-six-year-old Prophet and the twenty-two-year-old divorcée and her son.
Brigham took the boy by the hand. “A pretty child. What are you going to do with him?”
“Make a good man of him, if possible.”
“A better one than his father proved to be, I trust,” said Brigham.
“God grant it, else he would not be much of a comfort to me,” Ann Eliza said with a show of emotion.
They walked on in silence. Ann Eliza found Brigham looking at her. At last he spoke again. “You are very much improved since you left Mr. Dee. Do you know it? You are a very pretty woman.”
Ann Eliza laughed nervously. “Thank you. If you can only tell me I am a good woman, I should like that too.”
“Yes, you are that, I believe, and a good mother,” said Brigham. “And you were a good wife, only that foolish fellow didn’t have the sense to half appreciate you.”
“Thank you again. I don’t know that I can take all you tell me, since I am not sure that I deserve such high praise.”
“You are your mother’s girl. There can be but one conclusion to draw from that. But tell me about yourself—are you happy?”
“Very,” said Ann Eliza quickly. “I never was happier in my life.”
“What makes you specially happy just now?”
“Oh, my children, my mother, my quiet life, after all the trial and weary struggling to make the best out of the very worst.”
Brigham observed her keenly. “Then you don’t regret your divorce?”
“Indeed I do not,” said Ann Eliza firmly. “And now, Brother Young, let me thank you for your kindness in helping me to regain my freedom and above all to keep my children. You must be content with gratitude, for I can repay you in no other way.”
Ann Eliza would always remember that he glanced at her curiously that moment, smiled enigmatically as if trying to make up his mind to say something, then changed his mind. They continued toward the Webb farmhouse in silence.
Abruptly Brigham broke the stillness. “I suppose you have had offers of marriage since your separation from Mr. Dee?”
“Yes, many.”
“Do you feel inclined to accept any of them?”
“No, not in the slightest degree. None of them move me in the least.”
“And you haven’t a preference for any of the suitors?”
“I assure you, no.”
“Never had the slightest inclination to say ‘yes’ to any offer that has been made?” Brigham persisted.
“Not a bit of inclination,” said Ann Eliza. It would seem, at this point, that Brigham’s tenacious inquiries into her love life may have made Ann Eliza suspicious of his motives. But she would always insist that she regarded his questioning as no more than fatherly concern. Now, having reassured him that she had turned away all suitors, she added, “All my lovers have had a rival affection to contend with.”
“For whom?” asked Brigham sharply.
Ann Eliza patted her remarkably tranquil son. “For him,” she said, “and for the other dear child that God gave me. I can have no room for other love while I have them to care for. They fill my heart exclusively, and I am so glad and happy because of it, that I should be jealous if I saw the least hint of regard for anyone creeping in. I couldn’t love anybody else. I wouldn’t.”
Brigham regarded his attractive young companion with a certain air of disbelief. “Then you think you will never be induced to marry?”
Perhaps Ann Eliza sensed his essential cynicism. “Never in my life,” she said strongly.
The Prophet was amused. “I have heard a very great many girls talk that way before,” he said.
“Yes, but I am not a girl. I am a woman; a woman, too, with hard, bitter experiences; a woman who has lost faith in mankind and hasn’t much faith in matrimony; a mother, too, who will not give her children a rival.”
“No, but you might give them a protector,” Brigham said shrewdly.
“They don’t need it. My love is sufficient protection. Besides, they are boys and will be my protectors in a few years. So, you see, I do not need to marry for protection for myself or them.”
Brigham would not be turned aside. For a moment he assumed the garb of Prophet. “But supposing it were shown to be a duty?”
“It can’t be,” she replied instantly. She had seen her mother burdened by years of duty, and she would not assume such a burden for herself. “I should not recognize a duty of that kind. I consider myself old enough, and sufficiently experienced, to judge of my duties without any assistance.”
Somewhat taken aback by her outburst, Brigham stared at her a moment, and when he spoke his voice was gentle and paternal. “Child, child, I fear you are very headstrong. Don’t let your will run away with you.”
“No danger. It is not crossed often enough to make it very assertive.”
Brigham continued to stare at her. “A spoiled child, eh?”
“Possibly. My will seems to be everybody’s way at home.”
“Well, my child,” said Brigham benevolently, “I want to give you a little advice. I have known you all your life and have had an interest in you from your birth. Indeed, you seem like one of my own family, you were always in and out so much with my children, and I am going to speak to you as I would to one of my girls. You will probably marry again, some time, though you say now you won’t.”
“No, I shall not marry. I mean what I say when I tell you so.”
“Yes,” said Brigham with the easy assurance of one who had been the victor in twenty-six proposals, “I know it. But you will. Now mark my words, and see if you don’t.”
“Well, don’t feel so sure that you send somebody after me,” said Ann Eliza warily.
“You needn’t be afraid of my sending anybody. I promise you I won’t do that.”
“Good. Then I shall not be obliged to say ‘no’ to them and so, perhaps, hurt your feelings as well as mortify them.”
They had reached the farmhouse entrance, but the exchange was not yet ended. Brigham would have the last word.
“Still,” he was saying, “I believe that you will marry again some time. It is in the nature of things that you should. Women of your age and your looks don’t stay single all their lives; not a bit of it. Now, my advice is this: when you do marry, select some man older than yourself. It doesn’t make so much difference whether you’re in love with him, if you can respect him and look up to him for counsel. Respect is better than romance, any day. You’ve tried the one, now give the other a chance. You didn’t succeed so well with the other experiment that you care to try that over again, I know. You had your own way, too, if I remember rightly. It wasn’t such a smooth one as you thought it was going to be. I knew you was [sic] doing the wrong thing when I saw the man. I could have told you so, but you didn’t ask my advice. Now I’m giving it to you without asking, for I don’t want you to make another mistake. So, when you choose again, remember what I say, and get a husband whom you can look to for good advice.”
Solemnly Ann Eliza thanked him for his interest in her. “I promise to heed your advice if I ever find it necessary, but I am sure I shall not find it necessary. I am determined not to marry again.”
Apparently, during the last, Chauncey and Ann Eliza’s mother—who were inside the house, having absented themselves from the morning services with the intention of attending the afternoon sermon—had become aware that their daughter’s escort was none other than the Prophet. Impressed by this singular honor, the first Mrs. Webb invited Brigham to join the family at noon dinner. Although he had made a previous appointment to dine with a Mormon named Bowman, he accepted the Webbs’ invitation at once. Word was dispatched to the Bowery also inviting Brigham’s brother, Joseph Young, and Congressman George Q. Cannon, to the meal, and both promptly appeared.
As the table was set, Ann Eliza wondered at Brigham’s friendliness. “Brigham was uncommonly jovial that day,” she observed, “and made himself particularly agreeable. He was unusually gracious to my father, revived old memories, and joked with my mother; petted and praised the children, and was very paternal in his manner to me. He showed himself, altogether, in his very best light, and made his visit very pleasant.” When the meal commenced, Brigham, his brother, and Cannon all remarked on Ann Eliza’s blooming health and youthful appearance. Brigham, especially, was lavish in his praise of her. “As I had much improved in every way,” Ann Eliza recalled later, “I did not regard his observations as any intended compliment or any indication of what afterwards I learned to be passing in his mind.”
After the meal it was time to return to the Bowery for the afternoon services. The entire Webb family, Ann Eliza included, accompanied Brigham into town. Once again the open-air meeting place was crowded. The Webbs were favored with seats down front. Brigham took his stance at the pulpit, and, extemporaneously, he preached on austerity and faith. Perhaps his mind was not on his work, for his afternoon listeners were not criticized for dressing like whores or drinking like Gentiles. The prevailing mood was one of sweetness and light. Several times during his discourse he frankly caught Ann Eliza’s eye—smiling, as if to remind her of their long walk and secret conversation—and Ann Eliza returned his gaze without fear.
When the sermon was done and the assembly dispersed, the members of Brigham’s retinue hurried to the line of carriages. The party was scheduled to set out immediately for Willow Creek. But instead of going to his vehicle, Brigham remained behind to talk to Chauncey Webb. He told Chauncey that he had some “important business” to discuss with him. Since the business was private, Brigham thought it best to return with Chauncey to the farmhouse. The carriages and members of the retinue would be kept waiting until nightfall.
At the farmhouse Brigham and Chauncey retired to the library. Elsewhere in the house, Ann Eliza wondered what the Prophet and her father were conversing about. She guessed it might he the matter of the Howard distillery.
The afternoon waned. Still the men remained behind closed doors. Two hours had passed, and Ann Eliza’s curiosity mounted. “At the end of the two hours,” she observed, “my mother was called into the room, and the discussion was resumed. After a short time, all came out. Brigham went away, bidding us all goodbye with much cordiality, and with an added impressiveness in his manner towards me.
“When he had gone, my father told me the subject of their long conversation.
“Brigham Young had proposed to him for me as a wife.”
For the remainder of her life Ann Eliza would not forget the shock that she felt at the incredible news. As she later told the New York Herald: “I cannot describe my feelings; I was frightened. The thought of it was a perfect horror. I thought Father had gone crazy, and I would not believe his statement for hours. When I realized that it was a fact I could do nothing but cry. The idea of an old man, sixty-seven years of age, the husband of about twenty wives living, asking me, at twenty-two, to be added to the number filled me with the utmost abhorrence.”
As she wept, her mother took her hand and tried to soothe her. “Why, my dear, what is the matter? Are you crying because the Head of our Church—the most powerful and influential man among us—has made you an offer of marriage? Why, it is nothing to cry about, surely.”
Nevertheless, Ann Eliza shed her tears. Meanwhile Chauncey attempted, as best he could, to recount the details of his two-hour conversation with Brigham. With incredulity Ann Eliza listened and later reported what she heard to the New York Herald. Brigham had told her father, at once, that he wanted to marry Ann Eliza. “He had watched me from my infancy, saw me grow up to womanhood, had always loved me and intended to marry me, but having taken Amelia just after the law was passed in Congress prohibiting polygamy, he feared to take another wife soon after, lest it should make trouble, or he would have taken me then. My marriage with a young man was unlooked-for to him, and when he was made acquainted with it he did not just like to stop it, he said, and so he let it go on, but always hoped that the time would come when he would have me.
“He wanted Father and Mother to use all their influence with me, as it would be the best thing I could do. He asked Father if a good house, well furnished, and $1,000 a year pocket money would be enough for me, and added that if it was not enough, I should have more.”
Ann Eliza heard the details of the proposal in stunned silence. When her father was through, Ann Eliza suddenly asked, “What answer did you make him?”
Actually Chauncey had told Brigham that the house and money “would be sufficient.” But now he replied to his daughter, “I told him that I would lay the proposition before you and tell him what your decision was. He said that he had talked with you on the subject of marriage, and that you told him no one had proposed for you whom you fancied; that he was glad you were not easily pleased and suited with every newcomer, for he intended to place you in a position where you would be vastly the social superior of all your present lovers.”
Ann Eliza’s grief turned to indignation. “Didn’t he tell you that I said I never should marry again? That my life was to be devoted to my children?”
Chauncey nodded. “Yes, he said you mentioned something of that sort, but that he didn’t take any stock in it; all girls talked so; it was their way of playing the coquette; he understood it, and he liked you better for your coyness.”
“I told him decidedly that I was a girl no longer, but a woman, who knew her own mind, who had arrived at the ability to make her own decisions through terrible suffering; that the thought of marriage was distasteful to me.” Ann Eliza’s anger was complete, at Brigham for ignoring her feelings, at her parents for daring even to entertain the idea of such a marriage. “I wonder if he needs to he told more plainly? If so, you may go to him, since you told him you should leave the decision to me, and tell him that I say to him, No, as I have said it to all my other suitors, and that I do not even thank him for the position he intended to confer upon me, for he knew I did not want it. Does he think I have escaped one misery to wish to enter another? ‘Position!’ I wonder what he thinks there is particularly fine about being a plural wife even to Brigham Young? I have not seen so much happiness in the system, even among his wives, that I care to enter it. And I never, never can.”
Her hysteria had grown again, and her father tried to reason with her. “You are excited now, my daughter. Be calm, and think the matter over reasonably. Don’t decide in this hasty manner.”
Ann Eliza would not be put off. “I might think it over, reasonably, as you call it, for the rest of my life, and the conclusion I should arrive at would be the same. I never will, of my free will and accord, marry Brigham Young, and you might as well tell him so at once and have the matter settled.”
Now Ann Eliza’s mother, who desperately wanted the marriage for the standing it would give her daughter and the entire family, intervened. “But, my dear child, suppose it was your duty?”
Ann Eliza looked at her mother wildly as if betrayed. “Oh, Mother, Mother! Have you turned against me too? Am I to fight you all, singlehanded, alone? Won’t you, at least, stand by me?”
“I would gladly, my only, my darling daughter, if I was sure that it would be right.”
“Do you doubt the right of it? Can you doubt it?” cried Ann Eliza. “Or do you think it would not be wrong to stifle all natural feelings, all aversion to another union, above all, to him? Would it be right, do you think, to give myself to a man older than my father, from whom I shrink with aversion when I think of him as my husband, who is already the husband of many wives, the father of children older, by many years, than myself?”
“But he is your spiritual leader,” the first Mrs. Webb said lamely.
“That is no reason why he should be my earthly husband,” Ann Eliza snapped. “I cannot see what claim that gives him to my affection.”
“The doctrines of our Church teach you to marry.”
Determined not to become mired down in a religious discussion, Ann Eliza avoided her mother’s line of argument. Her temper was near the bursting point. She glared at her mother, and then, thrusting her words at her mother like a spear, she demanded, “Do you want to get rid of me?”
The first Mrs. Webb fell into her daughter’s arms and began to sob. “You know I do not. How can you say that? I was only saying what I did because I thought it was for your good here and hereafter. Did I consult my own feelings, no one should have to except myself, but I think of your welfare before my selfish desires.”
“Oh, Mother, I can’t, I can’t…”
While the two women clung to each other, Chauncey stepped forward and touched Ann Eliza’s shoulder. “Don’t fret so, child. I will tell Brother Brigham how you feel, and perhaps he will give up the idea. But he seemed to have set his heart on it, and I don’t know how he’ll take it.”
Ann Eliza appealed to her father’s weakening resolve. “Why, I belong to you, Father. Tell him so, and that you can’t give me away to anybody.”
Chauncey permitted himself the ghost of a smile, then frowned at the gravity of his assignment, and at last he departed. And thus ended a scene of nineteenth-century domestic bathos, as recorded by Ann Eliza in her autobiography of 1876, and thus began a series of events that would lead to Ann Eliza’s capitulation and to her international celebrity.
However, it is important to remember that this account of Brigham’s courtship and proposal is Ann Eliza’s version of the affair. Mormon sources take quite the opposite point of view. In 1930 Susa Young Gates, the most prominent of Brigham’s daughters, wrote her father’s version of the proposal for her authoritative biography, The Life Story of Brigham Young. At the last moment, before publication, she was advised to delete all references to Ann Eliza in order to prevent libel suits, and so the book appeared with no mention of Ann Eliza except a baffling inclusion in the index. However, the original manuscript of Mrs. Gates’ biography, unexpurgated, is still in the possession of her descendants, and in it may be found Brigham’s version of his courtship with his twenty- seventh wife.
“Of course we all knew, in that inscrutable way girls have of knowing unspoken things, that Father did not want to marry Ann Eliza,” wrote Brigham’s daughter in the unpublished section of her manuscript. “But Ann Eliza persisted. She was a divorced woman with two sons, and she teased Father through her mother for several years to marry her, suggesting nominal union, ‘just to be called by his name, that was all!’ He protested that he was an old man and wanted no more wives. She was both determined and persistent. She won.
“Years after, George Q. Cannon, who was Father’s first counsellor for years, told me that Ann Eliza and her mother would come up to Father’s office and beg him to marry the grass widow. Once Father told George O. to go marry that young woman and give her a home for herself and the two boys. But he replied that the lady did not want him, she wanted Father.
“‘I am an old man, Sister Webb, and I have all the wives and children I want. I am too old to be marrying again,’ argued Father.
“ ‘But,’ persisted the widow’s mother, ‘just give her your name; Jet her have the joy of being called by your name.’
“ ‘She will not be satisfied with that, sister.’
“ ‘Oh yes, she will,’ persisted the mother, while the daughter sat weeping into her carefully arranged pocket handkerchief.
“Well, the upshot of it was that Father finally married her. He was forced to it upon his own theory that women should have the right of choice in matrimony, for they usually could choose but once while a man might have many choices. And so he needs must abide by his own teachings.”
Most of Brigham’s descendants have not modified this version. Edith Young Booth, one of Brigham’s granddaughters, informed this writer that she had heard Ann Eliza was “wild.” As a result, “her parents begged Brigham, against his will or hers, to marry her, so she wouldn’t get in trouble and would be respectable.” Kimball Young, one of Brigham’s grandsons, wrote this author: “My mother occasionally remarked that the mother of Ann Eliza ‘engineered’ the match with Brigham—for the sake of prestige and money.” Ernest Leon Dee, who resented Ann Eliza for speaking and writing against his father, also said that the proposal of marriage came not from Brigham but from Ann Eliza’s mother. After getting her daughter to leave Dee, Ann Eliza’s mother “went to Brigham Young and said, ‘Look at my poor daughter—she has no means of support—can’t you help her out?’“
Generally Ann Eliza’s version of the affair has prevailed. But occasionally the Mormon version has found its way into print. In 1882 the Police Gazette published a booklet by “An Apostle’s Wife.” Of Ann Eliza the anonymous author had this to say: “She was a thorough Mormon, ambitious and intriguing for power. She wanted the glory of being one of Brigham’s wives, and divorced a husband in order to reign supreme over his vast estates and many wives.”
Whose version can one believe? Probably the truth lies somewhere in between. Most likely Ann Eliza’s mother, socially ambitious for her daughter and fanatically devoted to the Church, did intrigue to bring Ann Eliza and Brigham together. And perhaps Ann Eliza resisted less than she later wanted the world to believe. On the other hand, even if the first Mrs. Webb did make the arrangements, there is no reason to doubt Ann Eliza’s account of the Prophet’s love and pursuit of her. In 1867 Ann Eliza was young, pretty, and available—and Brigham, in that year, was actively devoted to his two latest wives, Amelia Folsom and Mary Van Cott, and only the year before he had vigorously attended the actress Julia Dean Hayne. It is likely he would have found Ann Eliza irresistible.
At any rate, according to Ann Eliza, she had no intention of becoming one more addition to Brigham’s harem. Her father had been assigned to transmit her refusal to Brigham in Salt Lake City, and this he did a short time later. “He told Brigham,” said Ann Eliza, “how averse I was; and he only laughed, and said I should get over it, if I only had time. He would not give me up, but he would not hasten matters; he would leave me in my parents’ hands, and he hoped they would induce me to listen favorably to his proposals. The last remark was made with a peculiar emphasis and a sinister smile… He sent a message to me, which, though seemingly kind, contained a covert threat; and I began to feel the chains tightening around me already.”
For almost two years, through messengers and in occasional personal visits, Brigham wooed Ann Eliza, and for two years she resisted him. Once, personally entreating her to succumb, he reiterated that her first marriage to Dee had been “a great shock” to him but he added that now that she was free he must tell her he “loved” her and press his suit. Ann Eliza remained unmoved, though quite alone in her defiance. Her mother and father were openly on Brigham’s side—her mother for reasons of salvation, her father for reasons of survival. But finally it was Brigham’s pressure on her brothers, Gilbert and Edward Milo, especially on the former, who was the elder, that forced Ann Eliza to reconsider her stand.
Late in 1866 Ann Eliza’s brother, twenty-nine-year-old Gilbert Webb, had been adequately supporting his plural household of two wives, Almira and Kate, by a freight business that consisted of ten wagons and sixty mules. The other brother, Edward Milo, was a farmer and satisfied with one wife, Lizzie Horne. That year Brigham Young summoned Gilbert Webb to his office and offered him an opportunity to increase his income substantially. Gilbert accepted with alacrity.
The opportunity that Brigham gave to Gilbert involved the cutting and shaping of timber for telegraph poles. The year before, Brigham had established a Church program of telegraph-line construction in Utah, to facilitate rapid communication between Mormon settlements. Now he had further agreed to assist in the building of a new transcontinental line by contracting to set up telegraph poles between Salt Lake City and Denver. Brigham had agreed to do the job for a payment of eight dollars for each pole delivered. Instead of supervising the undertaking himself, Brigham sublet the job to his oldest son Joseph A. Young and a friend Bishop John Sharp, promising them three dollars a pole. They, in turn, at Brigham’s suggestion, were ready to sublet the job to Gilbert Webb, offering him two dollars and fifty cents a pole.
Since Gilbert needed more freight wagons, mules, and provisions for the thirty men he hired, he borrowed $11,000, at 5 per cent interest a month, part from a Gentile banker named Kerr, and part from William H. Hooper, the Mormon territorial representative in Congress. As security to obtain these loans, Gilbert persuaded his father Chauncey to co-sign the note, placing his property as collateral.
Once he got his crew on the road, Gilbert moved the project speedily and efficiently. Every passing week saw twenty-five miles of telegraph poles delivered. When he had almost reached Denver, Gilbert received a message from Brigham to return to Salt Lake City. Returning, he met with the Prophet and learned that others could easily finish the Denver job. Meanwhile there was an emergency involving the line being constructed from southern Utah to Montana. Brigham desired Gilbert to take over the new job and push it to completion. He offered Gilbert three dollars for every telegraph pole delivered and one dollar for every pole set in the ground. Delighted at the prospect of being even more enriched, Gilbert did not trouble to ask for a formal contract. He shook hands on it and started north with his men, after drafting his younger brother Edward Milo from the plow to hire another crew to set the poles.
The Webbs did their work but became increasingly apprehensive as time went by and money was not forthcoming from Brigham for general expenses, provisions, crew, or their own fees. First, Edward Milo returned to Salt Lake City and tried to obtain the cash from Brigham, his son, or Bishop Sharp and failed, and then Gilbert hurried into town for an explanation. Except for one draft on a New York bank, which Gilbert had to sell at a discount, he could not get another penny due him. Brigham alleged that Gilbert’s poles were rotten, most of them had been condemned, and, anyway, there was no need to honor a contract that did not exist in writing.
According to the Webb family, Brigham had reneged on a business deal and dishonorably connived to get the job done for nothing. According to another of Brigham’s legal sons, John W. Young, in an interview with the New York Herald in 1873, the fault had been Gilbert’s own: “The true fact is that Brigham Young was not interested at all in the financial embarrassment which overtook one of the brothers. It was merely a question of dollars and cents between her [Ann Eliza’s] brother and another man. This man, if I remember rightly, was Mr. Hooper, now our representative in Congress. The former had obtained a contract for furnishing telegraph poles, and bought more by several thousands than he could pay for.”
In any case, by the spring of 1868, Gilbert Webb was forced into bankruptcy. Liquidating his freight business and real-estate holdings, he paid off his loyal crews and the Gentile banker named Kerr in order to protect his father. Only a small amount was left for Brigham’s Mormon friend William H. Hooper. Brigham was annoyed. He accused Gilbert of favoring the Gentiles at the expense of a Mormon. Gilbert countered that Brigham had plotted his ruin to enrich Hooper and himself. Meanwhile, from South Cottonwood, Ann Eliza was viewing the impending catastrophe with alarm.
Now, according to Ann Eliza, Brigham did the expected thing. He traveled to South Cottonwood and delivered a terrible threat to the first Mrs. Webb. Unless she balanced the harm Gilbert had done to him by “counselling” her daughter to become his wife, he would excommunicate or “cut off” Gilbert from the Church.
For once the first Mrs. Webb refused to cower before the Prophet. “If you do that, Brother Young, I shall find it very hard to forgive you,” she told Brigham; “although Gilbert may have erred in judgment, he designed to do right. Would you, President Young, like to have his father ruined in the crash? The notes held by Mr. Kerr were signed by him.”
“If his father signed the notes, he ought to pay them,” retorted Brigham.
“Well, if Gilbert had been paid for his work, he would have been able to have paid all his debts.”
Angrily Brigham said, “What do you know about this business, I’d like to know?”
The first Mrs. Webb would not back down. “I know enough to know when my children are ill-used and cheated, Brigham Young. I wonder how you would like to have one of your sons cut off from the Church and treated in the manner in which you have treated Gilbert?”
“I should think it perfectly right if one of my boys had done wrong and needed punishment.” He started for the door. “We shall see if Gilbert will be allowed to pay his Gentile debts in preference to paying the brethren.”
With his departure the black threat hung over the household. Gilbert would be excommunicated, destroyed, unless Ann Eliza capitulated. Ann Eliza saw her brother’s deep depression and was touched. “There was nothing but ruin in store for us if I persisted in my refusal,” she saw. “The loss of property was by no means so dreadful a thing to my brother—brought up to believe that there was no salvation outside of Mormonism—as being cut off from the Church and receiving the Prophet’s curse, and he was heartbroken at the prospect.” Also, another terrible problem faced Gilbert: inside the Church he was a conforming polygamist; outside he would be a criminal bigamist.
In despair Ann Eliza decided to go to Salt Lake City with a girl friend and make a last appeal to the Prophet. She would try to convince her suitor to be merciful to Gilbert, without demanding the price of her person in marriage. She would humble herself before him, and her eloquence would move him. These were her imaginings as she traveled to the capital.
Once in Salt Lake City, she screwed up her courage and went to call on him at the Lion House. At the very entrance her resolution wavered, and she fled. Twice more she made her way to his doorway, and twice again she turned away. Shortly after, while promenading in the street, she saw Brigham coming toward her. This was the moment, and she determined to speak her heart. They were face to face, and suddenly, under his cold gaze, she weakened and was tongue-tied. Except for “a common-place greeting,” she could find nothing to say.
Ann Eliza returned to South Cottonwood in defeat. Chauncey and her mother were anxiously waiting, and the haunted Gilbert too. Ann Eliza could hardly meet their eyes.
“My religion, my parents—everything was urging me on to my unhappy fate,” wrote Ann Eliza, “and I had grown so tired with struggling that I felt it was easier to succumb at once than to fight any longer. I began, too, to be superstitious about it; I did not know but what I was fighting the will of the Lord as well as the will of the Prophet, and that nothing but disaster would come as long as I was so rebellious. The thought struck me, in a sudden terror, ‘What if God should take my children, to punish my rebellious spirit?’ It was agony. ‘Not my will, but thine,’ was my heart-broken cry,—more desperate than resigned, however,—and I went to my mother and told her that I had decided. I would become the wife of Brigham Young!”