“It has transpired, since her departure from the family, that her present course is the result of loose principles.”
—John W. Young
The stairs in the new Salt Lake City house were built from the parlor.
This architectural abomination was the first interior sight that confronted Ann Eliza as she entered her latest residence in August of 1872. In a way, perhaps, the stairs represented the turning point in Ann Eliza’s marriage.
First seen from the exterior, “Ann Eliza’s house,” as sight-seers would soon call it, standing on the corner of South Temple Street and Second East Street, looked agreeable enough. The two-story adobe dwelling, with its steep green gables, red brick chimneys, stained-glass windows, and small porch, seemed vaguely Gothic. “An exceedingly pretty cottage,” Ann Eliza decided, “with an air of cosiness about it.” Brigham had designed it in collaboration with Truman O. Angell, architect of the Mormon Temple. Ann Eliza estimated that the house cost her husband $5,000. John W. Young thought it cost $12,000.
Once Ann Eliza had entered her residence, it was the curved staircase from the parlor to the second floor, disconcerting her completely, that forced her to revise her good opinion. After the “bitter disappointment” of the stairs in the parlor nothing seemed attractive. She almost ignored the well-lighted sitting room with its fireplace, the diamond window with its hand-stained golden beehive, and the spacious master bedroom upstairs in her search for faults. The floor plan, she said, was “very inconvenient, and badly arranged.” There were many rooms, but they were, for the most, too small, especially the ten-by-six-foot kitchen, which was more suitable for “a doll’s house.” Also, Ann Eliza learned, no provision had been made for a water supply. From the first day she had to use the wells of her neighbors, and apparently the neighbors were not gracious about her trespassing.
Shortly after settling into the new house with her two sons and her mother, Ann Eliza appealed to Brigham to make certain structural changes in their residence. She accomplished nothing. “Speaking to him concerning these matters was worse than useless,” she wrote, “for I never could influence him in the slightest, while every suggestion which I ventured to make irritated him extremely; so I held my peace, after one or two attempts to change things a little, so that the house should be more convenient.”
Later, when Ann Eliza made her feelings about the house and her husband’s parsimony a public matter, John W. Young strongly defended his father’s generosity. “Ann Eliza moved into the city,” he told the press, “because she was not contented on the farm—not on account of any neglect or inattention from my father. I know that she was always furnished money whenever she applied for it. On one occasion my father gave her mother money to make a trip to the East to visit her friends. Upon her stating a desire to come to the city, a cottage was erected for her especial accommodation at an expense of fully $12,000. There is not a more comfortable home in the city.” This was corroborated by Mary Cairns, daughter of Brigham’s housekeeper, who always remembered that Ann Eliza’s cottage was decorated with imported French wallpaper and some furnishings of imported marble.
Nevertheless, the deterioration of Ann Eliza’s marriage, which had begun at The Farmhouse, was now accelerated. She was living, she told a friend, in “the same stingy way.” She complained that for months her table was without fresh meat and that during almost a year in the city she received only two calico dresses from Brigham.
It was her mother, Ann Eliza said, who comforted her and made her lot endurable. But soon continuance of this relationship was challenged by Brigham. Late in 1872 he called on Ann Eliza and told her that he could no longer afford to support the first Mrs. Webb. He suggested that she be sent back to South Cottonwood. Ann Eliza was shaken by the injustice of it—this, after her mother “had worked herself ill in his service”—and she wept “bitterly” at the thought of going on without her mother. After Brigham left, Ann Eliza found herself unable to carry out his order. “In addition to the dread and dislike which had grown up in my heart toward my husband,” she wrote, “I was beginning to lose faith in the religion which he represented.”
Without husband or religious conviction to lean upon, her mother became a necessity for her day-to-day existence. She decided to keep the matter from her mother and plead with Brigham on his next visit.
When Brigham came calling again, he remained adamant. If Ann Eliza would not get rid of her mother, then he would do it for her. She begged him to stay out of it and asked for a little more time. Her request was granted. Knowing, as she did, that her older brother Gilbert was indebted to her for saving him from excommunication, she hurried to see him. She spilled out Brigham’s ultimatum. Promptly Gilbert offered to contribute five dollars a week to his mother’s support. Ann Eliza immediately passed the offer on to her husband. He was satisfied. The first Mrs. Webb remained in the Gothic house beside her daughter.
Ann Eliza never forgave Brigham for the anguish he had caused her. Long after, she remarked, “From the day he told me to tell my mother to go home, I hated him.” Yet that was not all of it. While Brigham treated Amelia to luxuries, and gave her love, and cared to some degree for most of his other wives, Ann Eliza continued to be deprived of material necessities and affection. “I saw I was neglected, insulted, humiliated,” she said. “I was alone tied to an old man. Others were cared for, and it was more than a woman’s nature could stand, to see them thus petted.”
Eight months of privation passed, and by March of 1873, Ann Eliza’s husband had ceased calling on her altogether. Even worse, she had reached a financial crisis. She wracked her brain for a means of raising money to supplement what little support Brigham gave her, and at last she found a means. She went to the Bee Hive House with her proposal. She informed Brigham that she required more money for the ordinary necessities of life. Furthermore, she wanted one luxury, an organ, for her son Edward, who was “passionately fond of music.” Since there were empty rooms in the house, she had been struck by the notion that she could procure money through use of these rooms. Would Brigham object if she took in some boarders? He thought it was a capital idea, and, said Ann Eliza, he agreed to it with “amazing readiness.” Did he mind if she took in Gentile lodgers as well as Mormons? He had no objection whatsoever, so long as one and all paid her at least three dollars a week rental.
At once Ann Eliza went to work converting her private dwelling into a public rooming house. By late March of 1873, the spare rooms were filled. “As it chanced,” noted Ann Eliza, “all my boarders were Gentiles.” One of these was the Civil War veteran, thirty-five-year-old Major James Burton Pond, a reporter for the Tribune. Soon Judge Albert Hagan, the ex-Confederate colonel and mining attorney, and his wife would move in. It was a new and alien world for Ann Eliza. With the Prophet’s consent she had taken the enemy to her hearth; shortly she would take them to her bosom.
The coming of the boarders did not lighten Ann Eliza’s burden. True, she had more money for her guests’ food, and a fund set aside for young Edward’s organ, but she worked from dawn to nightfall for her tenants. By now she was carrying the load alone. Somehow her mother had finally learned of Brigham’s earlier effort to evict her. Hurt, the first Mrs. Webb took tearful leave of her daughter—but not her religion—and departed for South Cottonwood to live again with Chauncey and the other Mrs. Webbs.
Ann Eliza’s added income was not sufficient to feed her sons and herself adequately. Late in May she called on Brigham and asked his assistance. “He seemed angry,” she said, “and complained that he had so many expenses and that he wanted me to keep myself—to take the money that I had saved to buy an organ for my own son and keep myself and family with it… This interview made me sick and I was in bed for a week.” Out of bed briefly, she was stricken by pleurisy. Despite the illness, she suffered her way once more to Brigham’s office and demanded fresh meat for her table. She received, she said, “two bits’ worth.”
Because she was ill in bed so frequently, she found time to read. Until this period she had always dutifully limited her readings to approved Mormon works. Now, for the first time, she was drawn to read an anti-Mormon book by an old acquaintance who had suffered in polygamy and escaped it. Ann Eliza saw no sin in the act. Brigham often read anti-Mormon literature. She recalled one occasion in particular: “I remember once going into his office, and finding him examining the advertising circular of a book on Mormonism, written by a lady who had for a time been a resident of Utah. He commenced reading it aloud to me in a whining voice, imitating the tone of a crying woman. Yet, notwithstanding this attempt to make a jest of it, I knew that the publication of this book annoyed him excessively, and that he was both curious and anxious concerning the contents, and the effect they would produce.”
The volume that Ann Eliza secretly read, perhaps borrowed from a Gentile boarder, was Expose of Polygamy in Utah by Mrs. T. B. H. Stenhouse. It was a slender, black-covered book, brought out by the American News Company of New York City the year before. The first page began: “I was once a Mormon woman, and for over twenty years I have lived among Mormons. Their faith was once mine as truly as any words can express; their thoughts were the same as mine; their hopes were my hopes; their religious opinions were in sympathy with my own. But that was in the time past.”
Avidly Ann Eliza read on. Mrs. Stenhouse’s passage, on page seventy-five, seemed as if it were written to her. “When this little book falls into the hands of some of the women of Utah, they will, I know, acknowledge in their hearts, if not in words, how true my statements are. A man may have a dozen wives; but from the whole of them combined he will not receive as much real love and devotion as he might from one alone, if he had made her feel that she had his undivided affection and confidence. How terribly these men deceive themselves! When peace, or rather quiet, reigns in their homes, they think that the spirit of God is there. But it is not so! It is a calm, not like the gentle silence of sleep, but as the horrible stillness of death—the death of the heart’s best affections, and all that is worth calling love.”
On page 192 Ann Eliza found her own name listed as the fifteenth wife of Brigham Young. In minutes she had reached the last paragraph of the book: “I have now completed my task, and am about to lay down my pen. I shall, I know, be condemned by those hymn-singing, devotional women, who, childless and husbandless here, dream of the glories of the world to come, while they never knew the duties, the obligations, the sweet and hallowed sympathies of the world in which they live. In their eyes, I have doubtless committed the ‘unpardonable sin.’ I have written for the suffering and sorrowing women in Polygamy. They will understand me, and to them I appeal. Before the Great Tribunal I will cheerfully meet their verdict.”
Not unexpectedly, Ann Eliza was deeply moved. She understood Mrs. Stenhouse’s touching confession of a life in polygamy. This book, she told audiences later, “showed me things in a clearer light than I had seen them before. I knew every word was true from my own sad experience, and it encouraged me to leave the hateful polygamic life.”
At about the same time as her reading of Mrs. Stenhouse’s book, Ann Eliza met the Reverend C. C. Stratton at a social gathering, and in him she found a friend who would listen to her troubles. A few weeks later, at her own request, Ann Eliza met privately with the Reverend and his wife and poured out to them the entire saga of her life with Brigham. After that, she met with the Reverend frequently to discuss with him the possibilities of achieving her freedom.
The last week in June, she fell desperately ill again, with only her sympathetic boarders to care for her. Brigham, she said, ignored her appeals for help. With a single exception, no member of his family called on her. This exception, curiously, was one of Ann Eliza’s stepsons, Brigham Young, Jr., the second of the Prophet’s legal sons. Ann Eliza knew him well enough to call him “Briggy.” He was a stout young man, dull but kind, and possessed of three wives. Ann Eliza had special affection for him because he had once bested his father in an affair of the heart. The rivalry had been inspired by the appearance, in Salt Lake City, of Lizzie Fenton, a tall, vivacious Philadelphia girl. “Both old Brigham and young Brigham were smitten with her at once,” said Ann Eliza, “and commenced paying her the most marked attentions, and for a long time a fierce rivalry existed between the father and son.” It had delighted Ann Eliza that the son had won and that Lizzie had become his third and favorite wife.
Now Brigham Young, Jr., visited Ann Eliza and was shocked by her appearance and by her story of the neglect she was suffering at his father’s hands. In a fit of anger, the young man rushed to the Bee Hive House and burst in on Brigham while he was having a meal with Amelia Folsom and Lucy Decker.
“Father, I think it is shameful, the way you are treating Ann Eliza,” the young man shouted. “She is fearfully sick, and if you don’t have something done for her, she’ll die on your hands. I’ve been down to see her, and I know.”
Brigham was too taken aback to make a reply. But later in the day, Ann Eliza received medical supplies and food from the Bee Hive House.
However, from Ann Eliza’s point of view, no medical supplies on earth could repair the emotional damage done to her. She did not try to hide her distress from her boarders. Mrs. Hagan saw it, heard Ann Eliza’s story, and summoned her barrister husband, Judge Hagan. The attorney recommended a divorce action and then went off on a trip to California, hoping Ann Eliza would have her mind made up by his return.
Now Ann Eliza suffered doubts and added nervous ailments. She allowed herself to be rebaptized and further disillusioned in the Endowment House. She consulted again with the Reverend Stratton. She saw Brigham once more, for the last time, it would turn out, and his rejection of her request for a new stove finally hardened her growing resolve. When Judge Hagan returned from California, Ann Eliza told him that she was ready to divorce Brigham Young.
On July 15, 1873, after the boarders had moved out, her furniture had been turned over to an auctioneer, and her elder son, Edward Wesley, had gone to her parents, Ann Eliza deserted Brigham’s house, and, taking her younger son Leonard by the hand, she walked with him to the waiting Strattons. That fearful and lonely night, she resided in the uncertain sanctuary of the Walker House, the renowned Gentile hotel, and fantasied strangulation at the hands of one of Brigham’s fanatical Danites. But the first daybreak of freedom found her intact, and though “relieved and hopeful,” she wondered what would happen to her. By the time she was dressed she had to wonder no longer.
The morning of July 16, 1873, exploded about Brigham Young’s twenty-seventh wife, his apostate wife, like a blast of artillery.
How the news leaked out was never known. Perhaps Judge Hagan and Major Pond had done their publicity work well in the night. Perhaps rumors had spread from the lobby of Walker House and fanned throughout the sprawling city. Perhaps Gentile and Mormon spies were on the run. But with the dawn, the attractive, withdrawn, frightened Ann Eliza Young was on her way to becoming an international celebrity, issue, scandal.
Incredulously she awoke to find herself famous and recorded the sensation of it, as Lord Byron had not.
“The news of my flight from home had gone abroad, and the morning papers were full of it—the Mormon journals abusing, the Gentile journals praising and congratulating me. This part of the experience had never suggested itself to me. It had never occurred to me that it would be made a public matter, and I shrank from the very thought. I felt myself a marked object. Reporters called on me, seeking interviews for the California, Chicago, and New York papers, and questioned me until I was fairly bewildered. I had gone to bed a poor, defenceless, outraged woman, trying to find my way out of a false life into something truer and better, I arose to find that my name had gone the length and breadth of the country, and that I was everywhere known as Brigham Young’s rebellious wife. People who were curious to see one of the wives of the prophet swarmed into the hotel. I could not leave my room, nor did I dare do so, nor to allow my child out of my sight for nearly two months. The Mormon papers commenced to assail me in every way, while the Gentile papers came unanimously to my defence.”
The first newspaper that Ann Eliza saw that morning was her champion, the Salt Lake City Tribune, and in it the writer, probably Major Pond, was discreet. The lead editorial was headlined: “A Sign of the Times”. The editorial read:
“The Tribune has, from time to time, persistently affirmed that Mormon polygamy would die out with the present race of old Nauvoo Mormons, and that the social anomaly formerly known and introduced as ‘spiritual wifeism,’ or ‘celestial marriage,’ would speedily adjust itself to the will of the nation if the influences of contact were permitted to do the work, instead of seeking to uproot at one sweep what has been the growth of thirty or forty years…
“An illustration, and probably one of the best that can be afforded of the truth of our position, is the fact that the youngest wife of Brigham Young has so overcome her religious training, her Mormon experience and the fear of the anathemas of the priesthood, as to leave her polygamic associations, and is now said to be the inmate of one of our leading hotels.
“We forbear giving the lady’s name or any of the details of the occurrence, or in any way treating the matter in a trifling or carping spirit, as we would encourage the disintegration of polygamy rather than retard its work by assailing the honest but unfortunate women, who are really but the victims of a false conception of religious duties.”
On the opposite page, in a column of facetious comments on local news called “Jottings,” Pond or one of his colleagues treated the Mormon reaction humorously: “Brother Brigham is forlorn, his last rib has deserted his bed and board.” The following morning “Jottings” would add: “Brother Young is as well as could be expected in his bereavement.”
Another Salt Lake City newspaper of Gentile persuasion, the Journal, did not forbear to give the lady’s name, and throughout Utah that first morning the Gentile press rejoiced. Typical in gaiety was the Corinne Daily Reporter:
“The Salt Lake papers announce that the favorite wife of Brigham Young has deserted him for a life among the ungodly. Mrs. Young that was has taken up her abode in one of the hotels, where she no doubt will be the sensation until a score or more of the remaining hundred throw off their allegiance. In the days of homespun and rustic crockery the old man had a good thing of it, but now, alas! The fashions and follies of heathendom break down the bolts and bars of our peculiar institution. Tithing went first, and now polygamy goes of its own accord.”
The rest of the nation’s press was less casual and restrained. From coast to coast the “bewildered” apostate wife was page-one news. Everywhere she was incorrectly referred to, or subsequently quoted, as being Brigham Young’s seventeenth or nineteenth wife, an understandable mathematical lapse, since the press and Ann Eliza were probably only counting the number of Brigham’s wives alive at the time. Actually Ann Eliza was Brigham Young’s twenty-seventh wife, give or take a few.
In San Francisco the Evening Bulletin headlined its front-page story: “Brigham’s Wrongs.” The lead paragraph read:
“Salt Lake City, July 16th—There was a great sensation here today, upon the announcement by the Journal that Ann Eliza Webb Young, the seventeenth wife of Brigham Young, had left him forever, carrying off furniture and other personal effects. Brigham will endeavor to replevin the goods. Mrs. Young is at the Walker House, and three leading lawyers are about to institute suit for divorce and alimony in a large sum. Great revelations are expected concerning the inner domestic life of the prophet. Mrs. Young is enjoying the sympathy of Gentile ladies, and the polygamous Mormons are a good deal disturbed.”
On the more populous and sophisticated opposite coast, the New York Times devoted an entire column of its austere editorial page to the news. The editorial was headed simply: “Number Seventeen.” The editorial began:
“Polygamy has received a heavy blow, and another cause celebre is to be added to the already ample list of the year. The seventeenth wife of Brigham, the Prophet, has thrown off her allegiance, and the knell of Utah’s ‘peculiar institution’ is, perhaps, sounded with the tidings. For, if Ann Eliza Webb Young succeeds in her suit, it is almost certain that some, at least, of her sixteen predecessors, to say nothing of those who came after, will follow her example; and we cannot expect the children and disciples of the Prophet to cleave, under such circumstances, to a practice which, in his person, will have received so signal a blow. The precedent to be established is one of real interest, and will, probably, be of consequence to the social future of the Territory. A suit like that of the Tichborne ‘claimant’ [wherein the 280-pound Arthur Orton, of Wagga Wagga, Australia, claimed to be the missing Sir Roger Tichborne, heir to a wealthy family estate in England, and wound up in jail for fourteen years for his masquerade] affects only himself and the acknowledged members of the Tichborne family; but a suit like that of Brigham Young’s seventeenth wife is of vital moment, not only to her regiment of co-wives, but to all polygamously-wedded females in the whole Mormon community.”
But even as the New York Times announced the sensation to the East, it sharply rapped Ann Eliza’s knuckles, a reprimand that gave her much grief. “The question arises, What kind of social position can be maintained by a lady… who has practically assented to the doctrines of polygamy, and then asks that help from the laws which they are only invented in monogamic cases to bestow?” inquired the editorial. “She cannot say she went into the matter blindfold… What seems remarkable, when we think of all this, is that she should, as witness the telegraph, ‘enjoy the sympathy of the Gentile ladies’ at Salt Lake, just as though she were an especially ill-used woman whose sufferings she had in no sense brought upon herself. If there is any disgrace in living in a state of concubinage in a Christian country, credit may truly attach to escaping from it; but the odium of having voluntarily entered upon such a state is surely not thus to be entirely overlooked or blotted out.”
If Ann Eliza was unnerved by this eastern criticism, she was almost completely shattered by a scurrilous headline and dispatch appearing in the San Francisco Chronicle on Thursday, July 17. The headline read: “One of Brigham Young’s Wives Strays From the Path of Virtue.” A portion of the story read:
“There has been considerable scandal in regard to her familiarity with parties outside, and it is generally supposed that one or more of these instigated the present move. It is expected that a suit for divorce will be commenced at once… The Journal considers the affair an event that will send a thrill of surprise and terror through many polygamist households, while Mormons generally consider it the natural career of loose principles.”
Immediately Ann Eliza and her backers attempted to locate the source of the scandalous story. According to Ann Eliza, a newcomer to Salt Lake City and a non-Mormon, W. H. Harrington, a copy-reader on the pro-Mormon Salt Lake City Herald and a telegraph operator, had filed the story to San Francisco. “Through Brigham Young,” said Ann Eliza, “who, it is alleged, virtually controls the Associated Press and the Western Telegraph Office in Utah, he had access to wires and sent all the scandalous messages which his employer dictated.”
In a lead editorial, the Tribune warned Harrington: “It is customary for gentlemen to be very careful with the personal reputation of ladies in this western country—where the code of honor has a very wide and ready application… To go and deliberately publish the lady’s name in full, relating in detail incidents of a former marriage, and making insinuations of liaisons with Gentile lovers, evinces a dangerous temerity.” The Tribune concluded: “We would suggest to Mr. H. to ‘repent quickly,’ sue at the feet of that lady for forgiveness, publish the sentiments of deep anguish that distract his heart, make his peace with her family, and forever afterwards eschew the bad counselors who furnish him the items to blacken the name of a woman who dared to free herself from a relationship that was irksome and unnatural, even if not degrading to her sense of womanhood.”
The indignant W. H. Harrington, telegrapher, did not take this lying down. In the Salt Lake City Herald, he led off by denouncing the Tribune as “an abortion in the field of newspaper literature.” Ungallantly he referred to Ann Eliza and her backers as “hybrids” and implied that they could be taught decent behavior only through application of “revolvers and cowhides.” He had filed the San Francisco story, of course, but insisted that it “did not spring from a Mormon source.”
Long years after, Ann Eliza was pleased to write the final word on Harrington: “As a reward for his labor, he was promised a daughter of Mayor Wells as his wife. The young lady would not acquiesce in the arrangement, and the shabby rascal was henceforth despised alike by Mormons and Gentiles.”
Except for his possible employment of the battered telegrapher, Brigham Young did not deign to recognize officially his last wife’s apostasy or make any statement to controvert her story. Nor, yet, did he make any move to woo her back to his bed or Church. Although in his seventy-second year, mellowed and socially amiable, the Lion of the Lord, as his colleagues called him, could roar when stung. Apparently he at first regarded Ann Eliza’s removal as a temporary aberration, due to a high-strung character, illness, and unfortunate companionship, and he felt that shortly she would see the folly of her ways and return contritely to the fold. But when, four days after her mental lapse, on July 19, 1873, she permitted her three blackguard attorneys to file formally, and in the strongest terms, for civil divorce, Brigham Young was at once dismayed and angered.
“Surprised, as everyone was, by this action, I think no one was more astonished than the Prophet himself,” said Ann Eliza with undisguised glee. “He would have looked for rebellion from almost any other wife sooner than from me. I had been so quiet and acquiescent during all my married life with him. He was annoyed by the publicity of the affair; for, although he likes notoriety, and courts it, he did not care to appear as defendant in a suit for divorce, on the grounds of neglect and non-support. It would not sound well in the Gentile world.”
Just before the divorce suit was filed, Ann Eliza had been engaged in a brief altercation with her lawyers. Judge Hagan and his associates wanted a 50 per cent share of any sum won from Brigham Young. Upon hearing this demand, Ann Eliza’s weakness of the flesh, timidity, and helplessness were momentarily shed. Since a judgment against her husband was her only future security, she was determined not to promise half of it away. She stood solidly on a flat $20,000 legal fee for the action. Judge Hagan could not budge her, and at last he and his associates bent to her will.
With the plaintiff and her defenders once again united, the holy and financial attack was launched on July 19, on behalf of “Ann Eliza Young, by her next friend, George R. Maxwell, plaintiff, vs. Brigham Young, defendant.” The bill of divorce was filed with the Honorable James B. McKean, Judge of the Third Judicial Court, and the complaint papers were also served on Brigham Young, President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
After stating that Ann Eliza had been born in Nauvoo, Illinois, been a resident of Salt Lake County since 1848, married Brigham Young on April 7, 1869, possessed two children by a former marriage, the complaint agreed “that for a period of about one year after her marriage, the defendant lived and cohabited with and acted toward the complainant with some degree of kindness and attention, and during that time contributed to her maintenance and the support of her two children, not, however, in a manner proportionate to his mean nor to her station in life.”
Ann Eliza had, she stated, “during all the period mentioned, and ever since then… discharged with fidelity all the duties and obligations incumbent on her as a married woman, and uniformly treated the defendant with the utmost tenderness, ever mindful of her responsibilities as a wife.”
Nevertheless, “about a year after his said marriage, for some cause or motive unknown to the complainant, the defendant, regardless of all his marital obligations, commenced toward her a systematic course of neglect, unkindness, cruel and inhuman treatment, ending in an absolute desertion of her, and forcing upon her the conviction that the defendant no longer entertained for her the slightest feeling of affection or respect, and had altogether withdrawn from her his support and protection.”
That was the crux of it. Now followed the detail. A year after her marriage, Ann Eliza contended, she was exiled to a large suburban domicile owned by her husband and known as The Farm. There, for three and a half years, she did manual labor, as did her mother, whose health broke down. Brigham Young “rarely visited the place, and on such occasions his visits were of brief duration, lasting from a few minutes to a half hour; that on all such occasions the defendant treated your oratrix with studied neglect and contempt, and gave her to understand that his visits were not for her, but for the purpose of supervising the work on the farm.”
Since the autumn of 1872, she had been living in the Gothic house in Salt Lake City, and her marital life had not improved. Brigham Young, she went on, “has wholly absented himself from the complainant, and refused to visit her at her domicile or elsewhere.” She had called upon him for money and food. “In answer to her repeated solicitations the defendant had used toward her opprobrious and most offensive language, and only at distant intervals of time since the Fall of 1872 furnished her with a few articles, but not sufficient in quantity or quality for her subsistence and that of her dependent children.”
Despite his parsimony, Brigham Young “was, at time of said marriage, ever since then has been, and is yet, the owner, in his own right, of vast wealth, amounting to several millions of dollars, and is in the monthly receipt of an income therefrom of not less than $40,000.” Brigham Young had always denied his wealth. Little more than three months before, in an autobiographical telegram to the New York Herald, he had explained that if he possessed these phantom millions he “would most assuredly use the means to gather our poor Church members from the old countries and bring them here, where their condition might be improved.” But Ann Eliza argued that her husband’s fortune was real. In a clarifying affidavit she stated that it amounted to eight million dollars. Of this sum, alas, she had no share. Her own current assets totaled $380. Therefore, she “prayed for a separation,” asked $1,000 a month until the divorce could be granted, and then requested $200,000 additionally for her children and herself, and $20,000 for her attorneys’ fees.
The public disclosures made in Ann Eliza’s complaint thrilled the entire world. The reaction began in Salt Lake City, spread through the territory, continued west and east, and crossed even the Atlantic Ocean. In Salt Lake City the pro-Mormon Herald contended that Ann Eliza “knowingly and deliberately became the plural wife of a man who had already more than one wife. That marriage, purely an ecclesiastical affair, independent of civil ceremony or legal enforcement, entitled her to just such care, protection and attention and the faith both parties professed demanded… The laws of the United States recognize no such marriage: the United States Courts cannot recognize such a marriage without recognizing the legality of polygamy.” The Tribune replied: “When men do not render such aid to their wives as is commensurate with their standing in society, and refuse to supply them with the common necessities of life, then the law comes in aid of the weaker vessel, and compels the man to do his duty. Is this ‘affair’ above and beyond the very common and plain rules of law and common sense?” Elsewhere in the territory, the Corinne Daily Reporter subscribed to the Mormon line. “Under our laws she is no more the wife of President Young than she is of the Persian Shah; and not having the legal status in marriage, surely all talk about divorce must be sheer nonsense.”
The San Francisco Daily Alta carried the headline on page one: “Summary of Ann Eliza Young’s Divorce Bill.” The Philadelphia Public Ledger gave a concise but complete account of Ann Eliza’s alimony demands. The New York Times, under the headline, “Brigham Young’s Divorce Suit,” and the smaller boldface head, “Full Text of His Seventeenth Wife’s Complaint and Application,” devoted three full columns to the bill of divorce. The Times of London, reprinting the news from the Pall Mall Gazette, predicted that Ann Eliza’s divorce would lead “to a conflict of jurisdiction in America… between the territorial or Mormon and the United States’ or Gentile courts.”
At last Brigham Young realized the seriousness of the charges and recognized that he had a determined and formidable adversary on the fourth floor of Walker House. Promptly he acted to make his troublesome mate withdraw her complaint. Although an experienced if brusque diplomat, he now performed with all the subtlety of an aroused frontiersman. His first appeal was to Ann Eliza’s religious susceptibility.
One afternoon two Mormon Teachers paid a call on Ann Eliza. After being properly screened, no doubt, and it being ascertained that they were not Danites, they were admitted to Ann Eliza’s presence.
As on another occasion, one Teacher inquired, “Do you experience the comforts of your religion?”
“I do not,” said Ann Eliza firmly.
“Ah, return,” the Teacher pleaded, “and perhaps the Master will send an angel to whisper in Brigham’s ear, and you may become his favorite wife.”
“Well, I don’t want the angel to do any such thing!” Ann Eliza shouted.
There was little to add. The Teachers crept away in defeat.
Ann Eliza had complained bitterly that, although she was ill, not a single one of her Mormon friends visited her at Walker House. Brigham Young was aware of this. Perhaps he was responsible for Ann Eliza’s first Mormon caller. Or perhaps it happened quite spontaneously. But Ann Eliza thought not.
The Mormon caller was Clara Stenhouse Young. She was the daughter of the celebrated Fanny Stenhouse, author and lecturer, and T.B.H. Stenhouse, publisher and polygamist. When Clara Stenhouse was fifteen, Brigham Young’s eldest legal son, Joseph A. Young, who already had three wives, fell in love with her. At first Clara’s monogamy-minded mother fought the marriage. “Personally I had no objection to Clara’s lover,” she wrote. “I had known him for several years. He was an intelligent, generous-hearted, and handsome man, of very good standing among the Saints, and wealthy. As a friend, I valued and esteemed him; but that he, a polygamist, should wish to marry my darling daughter was very repugnant to my feelings.” Nevertheless, Clara Stenhouse became Joseph A. Young’s fourth wife. “He was a professed polygamist,” said Ann Eliza, who knew him well, “yet in a certain sense he was a monogamist; for although he had three wives, he lived with only one.” The one whom he lived with, his favorite, was Clara Stenhouse. Although he was abusive to her when drunk, which was frequently, and once chased after her with a pistol (whereupon she left him, until he wooed her back), he gratified her with a splendid house, fully furnished, a carriage, jewels, and elegant clothes. Even after her parents renounced Mormonism, fled to the East, and wrote books against it, their daughter remained married to Brigham’s son. Clara and Ann Eliza had been fast friends. “She knew all about my treatment,” said Ann Eliza, “for she boarded with me several months.”
Now Clara Stenhouse Young came to see Ann Eliza at Walker House.
After the amenities Clara frankly remarked that she was surprised at what Ann Eliza had done.
“You know that you would have done the same thing,” replied Ann Eliza, “if you had been treated as I have been.”
“Well, I don’t know but what I would,” Clara finally agreed.
The meeting had been friendly, as in old times, and Ann Eliza hoped that her friend would call again. Clara promised that she would. A short time later, she paid her second visit. But this time there was too little natural warmth, too much curiosity, and considerable strain. Ann Eliza did not invite her back a third time. “The last time she called,” Ann Eliza explained to a Gentile friend, “I felt sure that she had come to spy.”
Since neither the old faith nor old friends could lure Ann Eliza back to the fold, Brigham Young realized that he must at least persuade her to drop the public divorce suit. Knowing full well that she was destitute, dependent entirely on the charity of supporters, he reasoned that money would prove an irresistible bait.
Brigham Young selected Hiram B. Clawson, a prominent son-in-law, as his representative in a compromise settlement. Many considered Clawson the perfect diplomat with women. He had gained a reputation as manager of the successful Salt Lake City Theater, and, in fact, Ann Eliza had been an actress in his troupe. His fortune was made when he succeeded in winning Brigham Young’s eldest legal daughter, Alice Young, for his third wife, over the Prophet’s objections. As third wife, Alice Young Clawson was not tractable. She had a long record of promiscuity. Once she had been engaged to marry a visitor to Salt Lake City named Tobin. When Tobin left town to continue his business, promising to return and marry her, Alice restlessly took up with other young blades. One lover was actually packed off to the Hawaiian Islands by father Brigham, to serve in exile as a missionary. When Tobin returned and learned of Alice’s inconstancy, he broke the engagement and left the Mormon capital. It may have been a coincidence that his party was ambushed at the Santa Clara River, 370 miles south of Salt Lake, and barely succeeded in eluding their unidentifiable attackers.
On the rebound from Tobin, Alice married Hiram B. Clawson. “The Prophet opposed the union,” said Ann Eliza, “but Alice would have Clawson in spite of her father. Some years after, he married one of her half-sisters. Like other Mormon women, Alice accepted the doctrine of polygamy; practically she hated it, and her married life was very unhappy. She had several children, but was not a good mother.”
As the third Mrs. Clawson, Alice continued to flirt and wear gay, provocative dresses. One day in the street, Brigham Young came upon her and was annoyed by her attire. “Good heavens, Alice!” he fumed. “What are you rigged out in that style for? You look like a prostitute.”
Alice glared at her father. “Well, what else am I? And whose teachings have made me so?”
Shortly after, Alice committed suicide with poison. Clawson mourned her briefly, then turned to his other wives for consolation.
Now, fully restored to the good graces of his powerful father-in-law, Clawson confidently prepared to bribe Ann Eliza into silence. Toward this end he sought out Ann Eliza’s father, Chauncey Webb, and her mentor, the Reverend Stratton, conferred with them, and then together the three men met with the recalcitrant wife. Clawson treated Ann Eliza frankly, intelligently, and without arrogance. The divorce was dangerous to the Church, he admitted. “If she gained her suit,” he said, “it would do incalculable harm, as hundreds of Mormon women would immediately follow her example.” Consequently, if she were willing to drop the suit, she would have Brigham’s guarantee of $15,000 and safe passage out of Utah Territory for her children and herself.
This offer of security and safety almost dissolved all of Ann Eliza’s good intentions. “I will confess that the offer tempted me,” she wrote later. “I could take my children and go away quietly with them, and avoid the notoriety which I so hated. If it had been my own individual case alone, I should have eagerly accepted the offer and made the compromise. But when I thought how much was involved, how many other lives would be affected by the decision which would be given in my case, I put all thought of settlement aside.”
Later Ann Eliza liked to say that it was she who went to Judge Hagan and General Maxwell, when they wavered, and advised them to reject the cash bribe and go on. But there is evidence to the contrary, indicating that Ann Eliza almost succumbed to Clawson’s $15,000 but was held to the original divorce by her Gentile backers. At any rate, the compromise was rejected, the affable Clawson returned empty-handed to his master, and the bill of divorce remained alive on the court calendar.
Now, at once, efforts were made to intimidate Ann Eliza through her best friends and family. There is no actual evidence that Brigham Young was directly responsible, but Ann Eliza always chose to think that the campaign was directed by him. Since the Reverend C. C. Stratton had been Ann Eliza’s adviser and was cherished by her, it was he who came under the most vicious attack. On August 9, 1873—Ann Eliza was now in her fourth week in Walker House—the San Francisco Chronicle, which had been the first to attack Ann Eliza’s virtue, undertook to attack the Reverend Stratton’s piety. The headline read: “The Mormon Scandal,” and the smaller subhead read: “A Clergyman’s Part in Brigham Young’s Divorce Suit.” The story that followed, signed by “an Occasional Correspondent,” possibly a euphemism for telegrapher Harrington, read in part:
“The reverend appears to have been the first to move in the lady’s interest. He it was who spoke to the lawyers and arranged the interviews and preliminaries, and properly he should have appeared in the documents as ‘her first friend,’ but it is said that he once resided in Oregon, and his name was associated with some human affair there that occupied public attention, and which gave him ever afterwards a distaste for unnecessary publicity. He, therefore, very modestly declined the mention of his name as sister Eliza Ann’s [sic] first friend, and on that account the name of that brave soldier, General George R. Maxwell, was given to the public in that capacity.”
Two paragraphs later the Chronicle ominously threatened that “if the reverend continues to meddle, he may expect a ventilation of a fraction of Oregon history.” The Chronicle’s hints of a “human affair” in Oregon, regarded by some readers as meaning adultery and by others as indicating financial malfeasance, was never further elaborated. Nevertheless, the Reverend Stratton felt it necessary to defend his own involvement in the case of the twenty-seventh wife.
Apparently at the Reverend Stratton’s request, a reporter for the sympathetic Salt Lake City Tribune appeared for an interview, which was published August 21, 1873. The reporter found the hitherto busy reverend now becalmed in his study. After being “courteously invited to a seat,” the reporter wondered if the Reverend Stratton knew to what extent he was being publicly involved in the Ann Eliza scandal. The reverend knew exactly to what extent he was being involved. Had he instigated Mrs. Young’s separation from Mr. Young? He had not. But he knew Mrs. Young? Yes, before the separation she had called upon him “repeatedly.” And he did not encourage her to leave her husband? “My recommendation to her has been to remain as she was, until Congress should legislate for her relief or Providence should intervene.” Well, who encouraged her to file for divorce? Her lawyers. Was she not also motivated by a morbid desire to gain notoriety? “By no means. She is a person of womanly instincts, and I believe her present position is exceedingly distasteful to her.” Did he ever advise her to leave the Mormon Church? “Never. She has admitted here that she had not been a Mormon in heart for a number of years, although she had been born and reared in that Church. But since the Gentiles had come in she had greatly cooled in her faith.” Did the reverend play any role in the Clawson compromise? Yes, indeed. “At the request of her father, and by arrangement with Mr. Clawson, I visited the latter in company with her father, and agreed upon terms of the compromise.” But when Ann Eliza, at the behest of her lawyers, rejected it, the reverend “mingled no further in the business.”
In fact, so anxious was the Reverend Stratton to protect his tiny Methodist isle in Deseret that he took out a paid advertisement avowing his nonbelligerence. Two days after his interview appeared, the Philadelphia Public Ledger added a footnote: “Rev. C. C. Stratton has published a card denying that he influenced Ann Eliza to enter the divorce suit, and charging the lawyers with attempting to fleece their client.”
Not only were Ann Eliza’s Gentile friends under fire, but her family was placed in an untenable position. At last there came to Walker House the word that Ann Eliza dreaded most, the first reaction of her beloved mother, Eliza Churchill Webb, in the form of a personal letter. No prodding from Brigham Young was required to produce this communique. Eliza Churchill Webb’s belief in Mormonism had withstood the shock of polygamy, and her awe of the Prophet had survived eyewitness incidents of her daughter’s marriage. Desperately now, while there was still time, she tried to save her erring offspring.
“My Dear Child: You can never know how dear you are to your grief-stricken mother. Your death would have been far preferable to the course you are taking. How gladly would I have laid you in your grave, had I known what was in your heart. I now pray that you be spared for repentance and atonement; for, as sure as you are living, a day of repentance will come; a day of reckoning and of sorrow, such as you have never imagined. Now, let me entreat of you to pause, and retrace your steps before it is too late. The Lord, my Father, grant that you may listen to your mother’s last appeal, and flee from your present dictators, as you would from the fiends of the darkness.
“You will never know the effort I am making to write this. When I first received the blow, it struck me down like a flash of lightning, and the first I remember, I was praying for your death before you sinned past redemption. My much-loved child, come to your mother, and try to smooth her pathway to the grave. I should pray to be laid there at once, if I did not hope to save you yet. The path you are pursuing leads to the lowest depths of woe, and I pray, every moment of my life, that you may speedily be arrested. Oh, how could you turn against us? How could you break our hearts? Your father’s house, and your brother Gilbert’s house, are both filled with weeping friends, who are deploring your fate; and I implore you, in the name of all that is sacred, to come back to us. You seem to be encircled in a cloud of almost impenetrable darkness, but the Lord our God is able to remove the veil, and enlighten you in his own way. I can only pray for you.
“My heart is broken, my dear and much-loved child. I loathe the sight of food, and sleep has forsaken my eyelids. The idol is rudely broken that I have worshipped so long. My fault has been in loving you too well, and having too great anxiety for your welfare.
“I pray you to forgive me for all the wrongs you imagine I have done you in bringing you up as I have done. I have ever been laboring, teaching, and instructing with the best of motives, with an eye to your interests. I shed the bitterest tears I ever did in my life. God grant you may never have cause to shed such tears. If I can ever be the least comfort to you, do not fear to let me know. I close by repeating, come to the arms of your heart-broken but still anxious… Mother.”
Holding the disturbing pages, Ann Eliza suffered her last critical moment of doubt. Her mother’s wavering pen had stabbed her heart. “I longed to fly to her,” she confessed, “but even to make her happy I could not violate my conscience and go back into the old bondage of darkness again.” Agonized though she was, the doubt was pushed aside. The suit for divorce would continue.
Now the war of words between Walker House and Lion House pitched to a crescendo. The divorce announcement, with its guarded, legal exposure of harem life, brought nationwide demands for more information on the rebellious plural wife. Since human interest had to be satisfied, America’s foremost reporters beat a path to Walker House. On the fourth floor of the hotel, in drawing room number 110, the pale and wan Ann Eliza reclined exhaustedly on her chaise longue like a Utah Camille, receiving a succession of wide-eyed journalists.
Within three days, the first week in August, two different reporters representing the San Francisco Chronicle came to interview her. The first Chronicle man, introduced to Ann Eliza by a mutual lady friend, was immediately impressed by the variety of magazines scattered about her room and by her knowledge of current events. He heard the story of her life with sympathetic interest. “It was deeply interesting to me,” he said, “and left the vivid impression on my mind that it is great folly for the Latter-Day apostles and prophets to be guilty of the absurd notion that they can transplant Asiatic manners and habits on this American soil. I have listened to many women here, and heard them denounce polygamy as the grossest outrage to which a free American woman can be subjected to, but I never saw eyes, that were a moment before dull and heavy with weakness and pain, dart out such indignation as those I looked at while some answers were given to the questions I propounded to Mrs. Young. There was nothing of the scold about her, but her language was the inspiration of remembered wrongs.”
As to Brigham Young and the Lion House—that “plastered, painted and carpeted prison,” as Ann Eliza described it—she was forever done with both. “She could have no further affiliation with the Prophet,” the Chronicle man was made to understand; “she would sooner die; she would gladly have died any time during the past four years to have ended her misery. She thoroughly detests the Prophet and asserts that he is the most vindictive, cruel man she ever knew of… He is a simple, easy-talking, courteous gentleman before strangers, but the moment that the stranger leaves, if the slightest thing ruffles him, he is harsh and uncouth with those who are dependent upon him, and is utterly reckless with his cutting words.”
Apparently this was not enough for titillated San Franciscans. Three days later a second Chronicle interviewer met with the reclining Ann Eliza. This journalist, ungallantly, judged her to be “about thirty-five years old.” In the same period a New York Sun reporter would guess that she was “about twenty-five years old,” and a representative of the New York Herald would reckon that “the lady is about twenty-eight years of age.” She was, in fact, twenty-eight, but only a month from her twenty-ninth birthday.
“Was your first husband a Mormon?” the second Chronicle reporter inquired.
Ann Eliza rubbed her forehead and appeared pained by the memory of the humble husband who had preceded the Prophet. “Yes, yes,” she replied.
“Did he have more than one wife?”
“No, I was his only wife. He blighted my life and made me ready to make any sacrifice.”
“How did you come to marry Brigham Young? Did you do it of your own free will, or were you forced to it?”
“Well, it is a long story, but if you wish to hear it I will tell you. I was free to do as I wished, and still I wasn’t. You see, in the first place, these men who are leaders in the Church have an almost unlimited power over us. They can do as they please. You have no idea how great their power is. If a man wants to marry a woman, the woman must marry him. They dare not refuse. The story of my marriage to the President will illustrate how these men get their influence and how they exercise it. My first husband rendered me miserable and blighted my life. I felt that I had nothing to live for but my friends, and for them I was ready to make any sacrifice.” One of her best friends, Ann Eliza went on, was one of her brothers. This brother became involved in a business deal with Brigham Young, and when it failed, Brigham threatened to drive the brother out of the Church. To save her brother, Ann Eliza gave in to Brigham Young’s persistent wooing and became his plural wife.
“How many wives did Brigham have when he first offered marriage to you?” the San Francisco reporter wanted to know.
“Fifteen, I think. Let me see; I know all the names. Let me count them up.” For a moment she was absorbed in rapidly counting aloud. “Yes,” she said at last, “fifteen at that time. Mary Van Cott was the sixteenth and I am the seventeenth.”
“Which is Brigham’s favorite wife?”
“Amelia is his favorite and does with him as she pleases,” said Ann Eliza. “She has been married to him twelve years.”
The visiting journalist was curious to know more about Amelia’s power. “What is the particular trait in Amelia’s character which renders her the favorite?”
“I don’t know,” said Ann Eliza, “unless it is her great willpower. She is a perfect virago and carries everything by storm. She has the best of everything, and sometimes she gets mad and smashes things right and left. Then the President buys her more. I understand that Mr. Young says I could have gone to the Co-operative stores and got what I wanted. The statement is untrue. Amelia is the only one of the President’s wives who can go into a store and run up a bill.”
“If Amelia was a favorite of twelve years’ standing, why did Brigham want to marry you?”
“Well, we think it is vanity. They like to show that if they are old men, they can marry young women. It is a false idea that the last wife is always the favorite.”
Suddenly, as if feeling that she had said too much, Ann Eliza glanced nervously at the windows and door. When she turned back to the Chronicle reporter, her voice was lower and agitated. “Would you think that they could abduct me from here?” she whispered.
The reporter appeared surprised. “Why, you certainly have no fears of that kind? Mr. Young’s natural policy will prevent any such action as that.”
“Ah, you don’t know them,” Ann Eliza said quickly. “I have taken this room as high up as possible to protect myself. I dare not let my little boy leave the room, and I eat all my meals here.” Then she added angrily, “Well, if they do put me out of the way, my father will attend to them.”
Only the day before, Ann Eliza had expressed the same fears to a correspondent of the New York Sun. When she had then mentioned possible abduction, and the startled visitor had wondered if she really worried about it, she had burst out, “You don’t know how powerful they are. I have taken this room up here hoping to be safe, but I don’t know how soon they may attempt to put me out of the way… It is only within two or three days that I have been out on the street, and then I walked to the Reverend Mr. Stratton’s house. When I first came here, I went down to the table once or twice, but I was advised that it was not safe, and since then have had my meals served in my room.” Whether Ann Eliza was, in these moods of fright, play-acting and dramatizing herself, or whether she was hoping to protect herself by passing her plight on to the nation at large because she was genuinely apprehensive for her life, will never be known. But, in those weeks and months in Walker House, she treated her rooms as a fortress and spoke constantly of being kidnapped or murdered.
When Ann Eliza had at last settled down again, the San Francisco journalist resumed his interview. “Has Brigham ever used profane language to you?” he wanted to know.
“I can’t say that he has,” Ann Eliza admitted, “but he has used shockingly insulting and grossly vulgar language to me. Oh, sir, he is a vile old creature. I have heard him swear in the pulpit when talking of the Gentiles.”
“I have heard that he intends to allege adultery against you as his defense.”
Ann Eliza seemed momentarily stunned. “Is it possible! Is it possible!”
“Could they manufacture any evidence of that kind, do you suppose?”
“They could find two thousand Mormons to swear to anything that the President told them,” replied Ann Eliza indignantly. “For that matter, they could find plenty of Gentiles, too. They said that a man brought me to this hotel and was paying my expenses here. It is false. I am the only one responsible for my actions.”
Representatives of the eastern press were equally inquisitive about Ann Eliza’s past, present, and future. It was the Reverend Stratton who brought over the correspondent for the New York Sun, and his wife and introduced them. The New York reporter covered much the same ground as his San Francisco colleague, but once or twice he was tempted to question Ann Eliza sharply.
When Ann Eliza explained how she had been forced to marry Brigham Young, the Sun interviewer did not seem entirely satisfied with her explanation. “I suppose,” he said, “you thought it would be better to marry the highest man in the Church and be well cared for, than to marry some one in an inferior station?”
Ann Eliza shook her head vigorously. “No, I had no such thoughts. I felt that my life had been blighted anyhow, and I might as well make a further sacrifice if I could save my brother, so… I married him. And just six months before we were married, he took Mary Van Cott.”
“Who is Mary Van Cott?”
“She is a woman just about my age, and he treated her just about as bad as he has me. Amelia is his favorite.”
Once again Amelia was belabored by her sister wife. The visitor wondered if Amelia had given Brigham any children. Ann Eliza said that she had not.
“Has Mary Van Cott any children?”
“Yes, she had one born about two years ago. It is the youngest in his family.”
The visitor was impressed by the last, and when later he sent his story of the interview to the New York Sun, he added a parenthetical note after the quotation. It read: “It may interest the reader to know that Brigham Young is 73 years old.”
On the heels of the Sun correspondent there appeared, at the invitation of Judge Hagan, a writer from the younger James Gordon Bennett’s influential New York Herald. He thought that Ann Eliza had “a remarkably sweet face” and saw that she was in ill health and was solicitous. “Mrs. Young was in health indisposed,” he told his readers, “and I begged her not to deprive herself of the comfort and aid of the pillow, which I saw she had just used on the couch.” Sensing that her caller was impressed by her, Ann Eliza proved extremely cooperative. The conversation that followed went easily and well.
“Have you been long in Utah?” the New York Herald writer inquired.
“I came here when I was four years old.”
“Your parents still live, I am told?”
“Yes, my father and mother live about ten miles south of this city, and I have two brothers older than myself in the territory.”
“Are your father and brothers polygamists?”
“Father has three wives and had two more who are dead; my eldest brother has two wives, but the youngest has only one.”
“You have, therefore, been reared in polygamy?”
“Yes. I have seen it all my life.”
The writer asked if she had preferred polygamy to monogamy. Ann Eliza made it clear that she had always been against plural marriages.
“Why, madam?”
“It looked unnatural, and I viewed it with abhorrence.”
“Are the women in polygamic families unhappy?”
“Mostly. I think all are unhappy, but some of them struggle to conceal it.”
“Did you ever know any women say that they were happy in that relationship?”
“Oh yes, I have heard women say so, but I never believe them.” Soon enough Ann Eliza was pouring out the details of her own adventure in polygamy and her escape from its bondage.
The Herald writer noted all of this and then remarked, “Brigham Young laughs at your course, and asserts that he will allow you no alimony.”
Ann Eliza remained unruffled. “I told my lawyers that whether I was defeated or not I would do what I was doing to save other women from falling into the same snare.”
“How does he get along with his other wives?”
“He keeps them so under his thumb that they dare not say anything. To their particular friends they complain. They are very much tried with his course.”
“What do they complain of chiefly?”
“They are mortified by his partiality to Amelia and his prodigal expenditure of money to give her everything she wants, while they live in a very plain way and are forced to earn a good deal of their support.”
“How has she obtained such an influence over him? It certainly cannot be her good looks, for she is not a beauty.”
“It puzzles everyone,” Ann Eliza admitted. “The other wives think that he is afraid of her because she is such a virago. She has threatened to leave him hundreds of times, I suppose.”
“Why should he submit to her to such an extent while he humbles and neglects the others?”
“He thinks, doubtless, it would be a great scandal if she left him. Besides, she is acquainted with a great many things that he would never want brought before the public.”
“Do any of the other wives threaten to leave him?”
Ann Eliza thought that if her own divorce suit was successful, and she was awarded alimony, it might encourage twenty-nine-year-old Mary Van Cott Young to leave him. The writer wanted to know why this wife might follow in Ann Eliza’s footsteps.
“When this lady had a daughter to him,” Ann Eliza explained, “Amelia was so enraged, as she had been childless herself, that she forbade Brigham ever to be a husband to that young wife again.” Incredulous, the Herald wondered if it was Brigham’s religion that made him take so many problem wives. Ann Eliza thought this might have once been so, but no longer. Now it was simply a matter of male vanity rather than religion. “I do not think that he believes in his own religion,” she concluded spitefully.
On August 8, 1873, the New York Herald printed the results of this interview in four and a half columns under sixteen Barnum-style headlines. The largest headline read: ”Brigham’s Lost Affinity.” The next, beneath it, read: “The Story of Mrs. Eliza Webb Graphically Told by Herself.” And below that: “The Prophet Of Utah As a Lover.”
Ann Eliza’s uninhibited revelations created a national sensation. So tremendous was the outcry of sympathy on her behalf, and so unanimous the uproar against her husband, that Brigham Young decided that he could remain silent no longer. Until then he had tried not to dignify Ann Eliza’s activities with official comment from himself or his family. But now it was becoming a serious matter. The twenty-seventh wife must be shown to the public for what she truly was, from his point of view—a blackmailer, a liar, a hussy, and a courtesan. New York and San Francisco must be answered at once.
En route to New York at that very time was Brigham’s youngest and most sophisticated “legal” son, John W. Young, twenty-nine years old. John W. was legal son insofar as the United States Government might regard his mother, Mary Ann Angell Young, the first of Brigham’s living wives, as sole legal spouse. Although most of John W.’s energies were given to representing his father in eastern business deals, he would three years later be sustained as first counselor in the First Presidency. His ambition was to succeed his father as Prophet, and when that dream would fail he would retire from active Church affairs. He was much devoted to polygamy. He eventually possessed four wives, one of them the child daughter by a previous marriage of Mary Van Cott, his father’s twenty-sixth wife and his own stepmother. Most of his affection was concentrated on his third wife, Libbie, whom he had stolen from a husband of just one week in Philadelphia.
When John W. Young reached his fourth-floor suite in the St. Nicholas Hotel in New York City, there was evidently word from his father to refute Ann Eliza’s damaging testimony in the New York Herald of August 8. Since all the press clamored for some word from the Prophet’s son, he had little difficulty in finding a suitable platform. John W. Young chose to engage Ann Eliza in the same columns where she had slandered her husband and his father. His interview appeared at great length, in two parts, in the New York Herald of August 13 and 14.
The Herald reporter found John W. Young “a pleasant-looking, well-built gentleman of about 30 years of age, reclining in a large armchair. Mr. Young wore a black velvet jacket, faced with light blue silk, and appeared thoroughly comfortable. He welcomed the Herald man cheerily and expressed his willingness to answer any questions which might be asked for the sake of gaining information regarding the Mormon faith, mode of life or the present suit now pending. He deprecated very strongly any desire on the part of the newspapers to make a sensational interview out of his conversations and was gratified, he said, to be informed that the Herald desired to give his language just as he should utter it. Mr. Young is a man of medium height, rather stoutly built, with a florid complexion, light hazel eyes and dark brown hair. A heavy moustache covers his mouth.”
After brief preliminary conversation about “commerce and trade” between Utah and the rest of the country, which interested neither of the two men, the business at hand at last came under discussion.
“Do you find the condition of women in polygamy an unhappy one?” the reporter asked of the multi-wived son of the Prophet.
“On the contrary, I have always observed that they were peculiarly contented,” replied John W. Young suavely. Later Ann Eliza would disclose that John W.’s first wife Lucy had so resented the presence of his third wife Libbie that he had been forced to lock her in a “dark closet” until she became more docile. Eventually this same Lucy departed from John W.’s crowded household and divorced him. Perhaps some memory of Lucy made John W. Young say to the reporter what he would say next. “Of course, all women are naturally more or less jealous. If they were not governed by pure religious motives there is little doubt but that their condition would be one of constant vexation. As it is, they have feelings regarding the question of polygamy which appeal to the highest sentiments of human nature and which do not call forth base sentiments of jealousy. Our men and women are as chaste and virtuous as any other class or sect of religious people. More than this, we do not claim… The women conscientiously sanction this doctrine of the Mormon faith because they believe that polygamy is right, and I will venture to assert that one hundred Mormon families taken at random will be found to contain fewer seeds of discord than the same number of families selected from out of any eastern city’s population. Family trouble exists more or less everywhere.”
The reporter was eager to get to the twenty-seventh wife. “Mrs. Ann Eliza Webb Young stated to a representative of the Herald in Salt Lake City that her brother had some business relations with President Young, and that she was rather forced into marriage by these circumstances. Is this the actual state of the case?”
“To begin with, her brothers are both gentlemen of the highest integrity,” said John W. Young tolerantly. “They would not, if they could, coerce her into any marriage relation. Regarding the statement that one of her brothers had business relations with my father, I do not hesitate to stamp the whole story as false.”
After some further discussion about this brother’s lack of business acumen, the conversation was brought back to the subject of Ann Eliza. The reporter inquired, “You knew Eliza Webb before her marriage with your father, did you not?”
“Yes, from childhood. She is about twenty-nine years old, near my own age. She was born in 1844. We went to school a short time together.”
“She was educated in the faith?”
“Certainly. She had a thorough knowledge of the polygamic usages, and when she contracted the marriage, she did so with her eyes wide open.”
The Herald man wanted a peek into the harem. He became bolder. “How do the other members of the family feel about the suit?”
John W. Young was ready for this. “So far as I can learn, all regard her present unenviable position as a result of her own doings. Her past conduct can be characterized in a mild form as very injudicious. It has transpired, since her departure from the family, that her present course is the result of loose principles, demonstrated by her actions in her own home. There is, in Salt Lake, a very obnoxious class of men who have ‘squatted’ upon us, and whose sole attention is devoted to insinuating themselves into our families. Their object in life is to ruin women and to break up all household ties. Such men exist here in New York, doubtless; exist more or less everywhere.” The speaker was, of course, aware that publisher Theodore Tilton’s outrage against clergyman Henry Ward Beecher, for having slept for a year and a half with Tilton’s wife, Elizabeth, was competing on all front pages with Ann Eliza’s defection. Now he added, “The influence of some man is unquestionably at the bottom of Eliza’s actions.”
“Will the suit be compromised?”
John W. Young ignored Clawson’s recent offer of $15,000 to Ann Eliza for a settlement out of court. He answered, “There certainly will not be a settlement in the form of a compromise. My father has no intention of remunerating hungry lawyers, especially such shameless scoundrels as ask $20,000 for their services in a simple divorce case. He is willing to give Eliza anything that is reasonable in the shape of alimony, but he will not be blackmailed.”
“Do the wives of the Prophet have to work, as she asserts?”
“There is not a word of truth about her toil,” John W. Young replied heatedly. He then proceeded to refute Ann Eliza’s story of privations and inattention. She lived in luxury, he insisted, and “the story of her poverty is a fabrication.”
Continuing, John W. Young added that Amelia Folsom was not the troublemaker that Ann Eliza had made her out to be. “On the other hand, Eliza’s troubles have arisen from the interference of fanatics, whose business seems to be to make dissensions in the Mormon Church… If Ann Eliza had only asked for a divorce, if she had gone to President Young and told him what she wanted, he would have divorced her, and it would not have cost her anything.”
“Is this case regarded as an evidence of the falling off of the believers?”
“Not at all,” said John W. Young firmly. “It in no way impairs the faith in or efficacy of the system of polygamy. It is merely an evidence of the foolish course of one woman, and it is not the first instance either in the history of the world. There will not be any further trouble in the family, whether she is successful or not. We do not fear an explosion of that sort. Ann Eliza can never come back into the family relations. I am sure, however, that my father will provide for her. Good afternoon.”
Meanwhile, in Salt Lake City, the Lion of the Lord had decided that he must speak for himself at last. All the nation’s press had been fighting to see him, without success, but now, one of their number, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, was awarded the singular honor.
The meeting took place in the Lion House. “I met the seer in his office, a large and elegantly furnished room,” the nervous reporter noted. “He was talking with a secretary as I entered. A mutual friend introduced us. He arose, shook my hand warmly, and in a half-social, half-dignified manner waved us to a seat.”
The reporter later admitted his tongue-tied terror in the presence of one of America’s foremost figures. Brigham Young was not unaware of his role as churchman supreme, trailblazer, colonist, statesman. Once, one of his daughters Maria had asked him if he had read a certain book of history. “No, daughter,” he had replied, “I am too busy making history to find any time to read history.”
At seventy-two he was still impressive and vigorous. Less than three years before, Bayard Taylor, the poet and diplomat, had met him and decided that he resembled “a successful bank or railroad president… He is both short and broad, but his thickness gives the impression of strength, rather than corpulence… The general expression of his face is at once reticent and watchful.” More recently James B. Thayer, accompanied by Ralph Waldo Emerson, had also met him and described him meticulously: “He was a man of not over medium height, full-blooded, and with the look of some stout stage-driver who had prospered and been used to authority. His face was smooth, except for whiskers of a reddish cast touched with gray. His hair, rather thick and of a like color, seemed wet, and was parted behind and brushed or rather rolled up on the top, in a cheap way that one might see on a teamster at a ball… His mouth was close, his nose somewhat aquiline, his eyes quiet but cunning, his manner good, and steady.”
Actually Brigham Young was five feet ten inches in height and still erect and imposing except when he was suffering from neuralgia. His eyes were steel gray and unwavering, and his lips thin and usually compressed, and it was these features that chilled many visitors. Yet he was possessed also of a blustering outdoor kind of vigor and cheeriness, and he had a keen sense of humor and irony. Most of his daughters worshipped him and despised Ann Eliza for speaking against him. The most vocal and longest lived of Brigham’s daughters, Susa Young Gates, told Major Pond long years after the scandal, “Ann Eliza was untruthful. She was a jealous and unscrupulous woman! God forgive her and let Him deal with her. I have no bitterness in my heart for her. I love my religion too well to hold enmity to anyone, however willful and wicked they may be. My dear father was one of the purest and most unselfish of men as well as one of the greatest.”
Apparently there was no moderation in discussing Brigham Young: to Mark Twain he was the “ignorant savage,” and to George Bernard Shaw he was the “American Moses.”
Now, seated across from this fearsome yet awesome Matterhorn of a man, the San Francisco reporter was at a loss for words. He stuttered something to the effect that it was “very warm.” Brigham Young agreed that it was, indeed, warm but that he had seen it warmer. After a few minutes of socializing, the reporter confessed, “His easy manner reassured me.” At last both parties came to grips with the subject to be discussed.
At once Brigham Young launched into a tirade against his enemies. “We have been abused and reviled by lying press agents almost beyond endurance. There is a conspiracy under way to take from us our lands and our money. They will not allow us to live in peace. They have driven us from place to place, and the thieves and robbers have followed us here to our beautiful valley. They want to take from us all we possess. But they had better stop! They will find that we will stand by our own. Not one penny of tribute shall they wrest from us. We have redeemed this land from the grasp of the desert. It was given to us by God and has been consecrated to our holy Church, and we mean to keep it.”
The reporter felt that he had his cue. “Do you think,” he asked, “that this divorce suit of Ann Eliza Young is part of the general conspiracy against you?”
Brigham Young smiled—”contemptuously,” the reporter noted—and nodded. “Well, yes. It is a small part of a great whole. It don’t amount to anything except to show how low they will stoop to accomplish their ends. They are beginning to find that they can’t retort by the wholesale, and so they are trying to make it up in small parcels. It is simply a case of blackmail, in which they have secured the alliance of my wife. It is not long ago that they formed a bogus indictment against me for living with this same woman in lascivious cohabitation. That conspiracy fell to the ground, and now they find it convenient to recognize her as my wife. They will fail in that as they have in everything else. We shall see, we shall see!”
Since the Prophet had characterized Ann Eliza’s divorce action as part of a grand conspiracy, the reporter stated that he would like “to get at the bottom of it.” Had President Young seen the papers of complaint? He had, indeed.
“Mrs. Young says that you treated her brutally and cruelly.” Brigham Young’s face flushed with rage. “That is a lie. I treated her as a wife should be treated. Of course, if she sues for a divorce she must trump up some charge to sustain it. The animus of this thing is shown by the course they have taken. The territorial law makes these cases triable in the Probate Court. Why do they summon me to the United States Court? They want another of McKean’s packed grand juries to indict me. They have tried that once and failed, as they will fail again.”
“Mrs. Young says that you did not allow her the ordinary necessaries of life.”
“I gave her carte blanche to get whatever she wanted at the stores of the Zion Co-operative Mercantile Institute,” said Brigham Young. “That is what I do with all my wives.” Sixty-seven years later, Clarissa Young Spencer, Brigham’s fifty-first child, confirmed her father’s contention. She wrote that a private family store, for use of the wives, was maintained behind the Bee Hive House, next door to the Lion House. “Each wife had her charge account here, as well as one at the Zion’s Co-operative Mercantile Institution, the leading dry-goods store of the city… As far as I know, the wives were not limited in either account, although I suppose they knew enough to keep their purchases within reasonable bounds.”
Now, briefly, Brigham Young regaled his journalistic visitor, and members of his office force, with the story of a Pennsylvania politician who two years before had promised to keep him out of jail on polygamy charges for a fee of $100,000 in gold. When the reporter wanted to know what Brigham had told this politician, the Prophet replied with a roar of laughter, “Well, I just asked him if $100,000 in greenbacks wouldn’t do as well!”
After the laughter in the room subsided, the reporter pursued the case of Ann Eliza again. “Mr. Young, supposing the United States Court entertains this suit for divorce, what will be the next step?”
The reporter and clerks in the office waited in silence. Dusk had invaded the room, and Brigham sat very still, staring out at the wall, twelve feet high, surrounding the harem house. At last he turned back to the reporter. His broad face was solemn, and when he spoke, his voice was low. “Adultery,” he said. “We have the evidence to prove the facts, and we shall prove them to the satisfaction of all honest men. I dislike to take this course, but the honor and dignity of the Church must be maintained.”
When the interview appeared, it appeared on page one of the Sunday Chronicle. Four black headlines beckoned the reader. The first read: “The Prophet Speaks.” The second read: “An Interesting Conversation with Brigham Young.” The next: “He Denies That He Treated His Wife Brutally.” The last: “Simply a Case of Blackmail.” And now all San Francisco, and finally all the West and all the East, knew that Ann Eliza Webb had been officially branded an adultress by her husband. No graver charge could have been made by the Prophet, who regarded adultery as a cardinal sin, and who had once remarked in the heat of a sermon, “Suppose you found your brother in bed with your wife and put a javelin through both of them, you would be justified… I have no wife I love so well that I would not put a javelin through her heart, and I would do it with clean hands.” Now he had hurled the javelin at Ann Eliza.
For Ann Eliza, agitated and sickly in her two cells atop the Walker House, her series of interviews and the rebuttals by Brigham Young and his son brought immediate offers of cash reward. Her name was on the lips of millions—to some a virtuous heroine, to others a scarlet woman. But no matter how she was regarded by her fellow citizens, there was unanimity on one point—everyone, without exception, it seemed, wanted to see and hear her. In four weeks she had become a commodity of value. Show business courted her.
The greatest promoter of entertainment in the world, the sixty-three-year-old Phineas T. Barnum, who had just gone into the circus business with W. C. Coup, bombarded Ann Eliza with cablegrams from Europe. Barnum had made himself a millionaire by converting a half-monkey, half-fish named the Feejee Mermaid into a successful hoax, a twenty-five-inch carpenter’s son named Charles Stratton into Tom Thumb, and a colorless, illegitimate Swedish soprano named Jenny Lind into the box-office success of the century. Only three years before, Barnum had offered Brigham Young $100,000 a year if he would allow himself to be exhibited in the East. Now a similar offer was being extended to Brigham’s wife.
Equally enticing to Ann Eliza, whose savings had evaporated and whose purse was empty, were the many tempting offers from lecture managers. Of these, the most attractive came from James Redpath of the Boston Lyceum Bureau. Until the advent of Redpath, who had been a friend of John Brown, a consul for Haiti in Philadelphia, a journalist with Union troops, lecturing was a hit-or-miss proposition, and the Midwest was a cultural void. There was a handful of lecturers, of course—Emerson had received five dollars and three quarts of oats to deliver a speech; Horace Greeley had received $193 for a talk; Horace Mann was worth ninety-five dollars—but this form of enlightenment and entertainment proceeded without central organization or plan. One night, after listening to Charles Dickens, Redpath determined to change all that. He decided lecturing could be profitable if properly planned and promoted. He created his Lyceum Bureau, took on Emerson, Mary A. Livermore, and Henry Ward Beecher. Still, his business was not yet big time. With Ann Eliza Young, he hoped to make the platform topical, exciting, controversial. But, although dazzled by Redpath’s name, Ann Eliza was not so easily swayed.
Among her supporters, however, there was one who was even more impressed by Redpath’s name. This was the young journalist on the Salt Lake City Tribune, Major James Burton Pond, who had known Redpath in the John Brown abolitionist days. While Pond agreed that Barnum was out of the question, he felt that Redpath was quite another possibility. He suggested to Ann Eliza that perhaps she should consider taking “the lecture platform against Mormonism.” But for one so long alone and so sensitive, despite her youthful stage career, the idea of a carnival of public appearances was abhorrent. “I shrank from the very mention of it,” said Ann Eliza, “and replied to the friends who proposed it that I could not, and would not, do it.” As to her future money for her sons and herself, she was still confident that the divorce action would immediately acquire for her the necessary alimony.
But the divorce was mired down in obtuse legalities. The first major issue was one of jurisdiction. Should a territorial or a Federal court hear the case? This issue was important, since, if a territorial court handled the matter, it was felt that the Mormons might have more control over the verdict, while if a Federal court judged it, the non-Mormons or Gentiles would decide it. The wrangle began immediately over service of the divorce papers on Brigham Young. Judge James B. McKean decided that a Federal marshal should act as process server. Brigham’s legal counsel, Charles H. Hempstead, a Gentile who had formerly been an anti-Mormon editor and United States district attorney, promptly challenged the procedure. When Hempstead brought the matter before the Third District Court, Judge McKean was ill, and in his place sat Judge P. H. Emerson, who had less judicial bias for Ann Eliza. At once Judge Emerson reversed McKean’s decision and agreed that the territorial marshal and not the Federal marshal must do the process serving. It was a setback for Ann Eliza but not yet a major one.
On August 10, 1873, Judge McKean still indisposed, Judge Emerson again sat on the bench to hear a new motion filed by Brigham’s attorney. Speaking for the Prophet, Hempstead argued that Ann Eliza’s request for temporary alimony and for divorce was a question to be decided by the local Probate Court and not by the United States District Court. Even the Tribune conceded that Hempstead’s demurrer was presented with “much ability and clearness.” Then, on behalf of Ann Eliza, Judge Tilford rose to reply with “graceful rhetoric.” The debate lasted two days. A week and a half later, Judge Emerson gave his decision. He explained that the law was on the side of Brigham Young. In 1852 the Territorial Legislature of Utah had passed a divorce bill “giving to the Probate Court in place where the complainant may reside, jurisdiction.” Therefore, said the Tribune, “from the research His Honor had devoted to the case, he was led to the conclusion that this [Federal] Court had no original jurisdiction.” Brigham had won the second round also. Ann Eliza would have to be heard, not by her friend Judge McKean, but by a local court that might be pro-Mormon. With this point settled, the divorce hearing itself was finally put off until May 1874.
The paradox of her situation made Ann Eliza’s head swim. She was almost impoverished, yet almost rich. The alimony she had depended on now would not even be considered by her peers for eight more months. She had no resources, except the charity of her new friends, yet beyond the mountains waited a mine of wealth. She was still imprisoned, afraid to leave her room, fearful even of dining in public, terrified that she would be assassinated in her sleep and her son kidnapped. Neither her purse nor her nervous system could possibly withstand another eight months among her sworn enemies. She must do something. But what?
It was at this crucial moment, apparently, that Major Pond reopened the question of a lecturing career and presented a new proposition. He was tired of Salt Lake City, too, and restless, and he wanted money for his daughter and himself. Instead of considering the offers of Redpath and Barnum, why should not Ann Eliza allow him to represent her? He would leave journalism and become her full-time lecture manager. They would both acquire fame and fortune in a freer and friendlier world.
Ann Eliza listened to the proposition carefully. Why not, indeed? Major Pond was an ally and a friend and entirely trustworthy. He would help her gain liberty and independence until her divorce and alimony demands were judged. It was the answer to all her problems. Yet she was gripped by uncertainty. She had a story to tell, and obviously the entire nation waited to hear it, yet was she capable of telling it properly? Could she stand more notoriety? Could she be so unladylike? “To parade myself and my troubles before the world seemed such an indelicate thing to do!” she protested to Pond. But then the others of her Gentile backers reminded her of how Brigham had treated her, was even now blackening her name, and how the public platform would give her a place from which to retaliate and to hit out at the hateful system of polygamy. It was this argument, Ann Eliza liked to say afterward, that changed her thinking and made up her mind. “When it was shown me that I might make of myself a power against Mormonism which should be felt,” she wrote, “and which should open people’s eyes to the enormity of the religious system which was tolerated by the government, I hesitated no longer.”
Time and again, later, Ann Eliza insisted that she had not undertaken to exhibit herself for money. When the suffragette Woman’s Journal of Boston accused her of “trying to make capital” out of being Brigham’s plural wife, Ann Eliza replied, “Does any one think that, for the sake of emolument, I could thus open my heart to the rude gaze of a curious public, bear all the slurs, slights, jeers, and aspersions that are cast at me by malicious Mormon and thoughtless Gentile papers, be made a by-word of, have my name on every vulgar lip? Never. My womanhood revolts at the idea. As a means of support, I would never have undertaken it. When I saw it was a duty, I adopted it without hesitation…”
Possessed by her crusade, Ann Eliza bent to the table of her locked parlor, steel-point pen constantly dipping in the nearby vial of ink, as she wrote and rewrote three lectures. The content of these lectures, according to the faithful Tribune, were as follows: “The first containing a personal record, in which the circumstances of her marriage with the Prophet are detailed, and many racy incidents of the royal household given… The second lecture grapples with polygamy, and presents to the hearer a woman’s view of ‘the divine ordinance’… The third lecture… deals in a very able manner with the political condition of Mormondom…”
While Ann Eliza wrote, Major Pond’s pen was also busy. His original intention, after conferences with her other Gentile supporters, was to start her off in Washington, D.C. “Our people decided that if Ann Eliza could tell that story in Washington,” wrote Pond, “we would get some attention and legislation. Up to that time we had been able to get little attention and no legislation.” But when Pond wrote to cities en route to Washington, he learned that his new client was everywhere in demand. And so he arranged her first big booking in Denver, with Kansas City and Chicago and many smaller cities among the scheduled stops.
All through September and October, Ann Eliza and Major Pond worked at their respective tasks. On November 5, the Tribune could not resist leaking word of the impending lecture tour. “We understand that Mrs. Ann Eliza starts out next week on her lecturing tour… The Prophet’s heart now yearns towards his lost loved one, and he wishes her to stay in the fold and not tell stories out of school.” Possibly because of this leak—she was being “kept under surveillance” by the Danites, she thought—or because she was not yet ready, the escape from Utah was postponed.
Now Major Pond, still privately unsure of his client’s forensic talents, decided on a public preview of her autobiographical lecture. He told Ann Eliza that other residents of Walker House were eager to hear details of her story from her own lips. Believing the demand was spontaneous rather than arranged by Major Pond, Ann Eliza consented to appear. An evening performance was scheduled, and the word went out.
On the appointed night, Ann Eliza, clutching her manuscript, entered the brightly illuminated large parlor of Walker House. She expected a handful of Gentile friends on hand to hear her. Instead, the room was filled to capacity. All eyes were upon her. “I stood for a moment gazing in sudden bewilderment,” she said; “the blood rushed to my face, and my first impulse was to run away and hide myself in my room. But the applause which greeted me, the smiling, reassuring faces which were turned towards me, and the sympathy which I read in them all, gave me courage.”
Nervously Ann Eliza stood at a lectern before the assembly and read aloud the colorful tale of her life with Brigham Young and his wives. As she recounted her sufferings, she peered across her pages to see the effect. Strong men and their ladies wept silently. It was enough for Ann Eliza. She continued to the end with growing resolution.
Her success was immediate and reflected on all faces. “I was surrounded by my newly made friends, all enthusiastic in their demonstrations of sympathy,” she wrote. The Tribune was encouraging but critical the following morning. Ann Eliza’s lecture was “full of interest and instruction, and… delivered with a woman’s flowing elocution sustained with becoming action.” However: “Reading from manuscript is a bad fault; we wish her to commit her lectures to memory, and address her audiences, looking them square in the eyes, and not concealing one-half of her form behind a reading desk.” But Major Pond had no reservations; he was ecstatic. “The most interesting and thrilling story that anybody ever heard,” he crowed. “That speech was telegraphed to the Associated Press, and the next day came telegrams from theatrical managers, showmen, and speculators from all parts of the country.” But Pond had her to himself, and now, at last, only one obstacle was left. How to get Ann Eliza out of Utah alive?
Ann Eliza had transmitted her fears to Major Pond, and with so much at stake he half believed them. As ever, Ann Eliza considered her peril real, as possibly it may have been. “I discovered, after my arrangements were made, that my intention [to leave and lecture] had become known to the Mormons, who were threatening me with all sorts of vengeance if I insisted on carrying out my plans.”
Only one railroad went eastward out of Utah, and that was the Union Pacific line that had been welded by golden spike with the Central Pacific four years earlier. This railroad was laid well north of Salt Lake City, and the main embarkation point was the city of Ogden. To reach Ogden and her freedom train, Ann Eliza would have to travel from Salt Lake City to Ogden on the local railroad that was owned by Brigham Young. This she would not do.
Secret conferences were held in Ann Eliza’s rooms. At last it was decided to mislead Ann Eliza’s enemies, and possible pursuers, by purchasing Union Pacific tickets at Ogden for the train departing there November 28. This, it was felt, would divert the Mormons toward Ogden—while Ann Eliza, in a private carriage, would race in the night toward the town of Uintah, in northeast Utah at the mouth of Weber Canyon, a brief Union Pacific stop below and beyond Ogden.
Once the decision had been made, Ann Eliza confided it to her father in person. Her father wished her Godspeed, but her mother, learning of her plan, wept for what could be no better than a journey into Hell. Having the last of the lecture arrangements to complete, Major Pond could not accompany his charge, so he found a companion to travel with her. This was Mrs. Sarah A. Cooke, a large, intelligent, older woman, who had spent twenty years tutoring Brigham Young’s many children and acting in his Salt Lake City Theater, without once receiving salary. After her husband, a policeman, had been killed in the line of duty, Mrs. Cooke lost $2,000 of a city pension to Brigham Young. She promptly left the Church, sued the Prophet, and became President of the Women’s National Anti-Polygamy Society. When the trip had been broached to her, she accepted with alacrity. In the past she and Ann Eliza had had the theater and the Lion House in common. Now she and Ann Eliza shared a single desire: to avenge the wrongs committed against them by Brigham Young and aid in the destruction of polygamy.
Plans for the final flight continued to develop in utmost secrecy. Ann Eliza left her sons with her family in South Cottonwood. They could be sent to her later. Her railroad tickets were purchased, as planned, in Ogden. No effort was made to remove her trunk from Walker House. Instead, a friend, Colonel J. H. Wickizer, a Federal officer in Utah, acquired a new trunk and kept it in his quarters. Then gradually, piece by piece, and always concealed, Ann Eliza’s personal possessions were carried out of the hotel and conveyed to the new trunk. When the trunk was filled, Colonel Wickizer shipped it to Laramie, Wyoming, “as the baggage of another person.” But no amount of caution could ease Ann Eliza’s apprehension of danger. “Death, incarceration in a madhouse, and many other terrible things had been threatened,” she said.
At last the moment of escape arrived.
“On the evening of the 27th of November, I went with my father, and one or two friends, to the house of Mr. and Mrs. Stratton,” Ann Eliza wrote. “We left the hotel by the back door, for the front entrance was closely watched, although it was not expected that I would attempt to leave the city until the next morning. About eleven o’clock we left the Strattons’, and started, ostensibly to walk home. A carriage was in waiting at the corner. We got in, called for Mrs. Cooke, who was to be my travelling companion, and were driven rapidly out of the city…
“The night was intensely dark; we could not see our hands before our faces, and, as we plunged on through the night and the darkness, we were a gloomy and apprehensive party. We were not sure how closely we had been watched, or whether we had succeeded in eluding Mormon vigilance. Even then, the Danites, those terrible ministers of Mormon vengeance, might be upon our track, and I could not cast off the feeling that every moment brought us nearer and nearer to some dreadful death.”
The Calvary between Salt Lake City and Uintah was forty miles. The rutted dirt road, past shadowed orchards, opened into the Great Salt Lake Valley, with its fen lands, alkali patches, and broad meadows cooling in the winter night, and its cattle and wild fowl hidden behind the curtain of black.
“Twice during the night we were lost,” said Ann Eliza. “The last time, we missed our way and went several miles up a canon, and I felt sure that we were betrayed and that our driver was carrying us to certain destruction. I spoke to him without letting him know my suspicions and told him we were going wrong. He turned about and drove rapidly back, and we reached the mouth of the canon just as the day dawned. Confusion vanished with the darkness, our driver found the right road…”
And suddenly, in the November gray of daybreak the ghost town of Uintah loomed before their eyes. Four years before, with the coming of the Union Pacific, Uintah had burst into boom. Because it was a rail point from which freight was transferred to Salt Lake City, and because it was a molasses-manufacturing center, a hundred businesses—hotels, saloons, dry-goods stores—crowded the main streets. But a year later, with the building of Brigham Young’s Utah Central to Ogden, Uintah lost its importance as a terminus and, with that, its prosperity. Now only a handful of dying shops remained to serve the heartier settlers, and beyond these and the railroad depot there was nothing.
But to Ann Eliza, Mrs. Cooke, and Chauncey Webb, weak and exhausted in their dust-caked, bumping carriage, Uintah appeared the fairest paradise. Even as they clattered through town, the Union Pacific’s extra-fare hotel train from Ogden, headed for Laramie, Denver, and Omaha, could be heard chugging and puffing into the depot.
As Westinghouse’s new air brakes brought the cumbersome iron horse to a halt, Ann Eliza’s carriage swung into the rough wooden depot. The stopover was only for a minute, it seemed. Already the bewhiskered conductor, in slouch hat and frock coat, was waving to the engine driver and stoker.
Hastily pecking a kiss at her father, Ann Eliza was out of the carriage. One hand in Mrs. Cooke’s hand and the other grasping her handbag, she was hurrying to the train. A white-jacketed Negro porter helped first Ann Eliza and then Mrs. Cooke into the George M. Pullman sleeping car, and in a moment the train began to move.
Ann Eliza and Mrs. Cooke had one of the deluxe sleeping car’s ten sections. Everything was a wonder: the velvet upholstered seats, the thick floral carpets, the berths, the washroom, the heating stove, the passing train butcher with his wares. And above all, for Ann Eliza in that early morning, the sight of Uintah receding in the distance.
Ahead lay Wyoming and freedom. Ann Eliza was overwhelmed by a sense of excitement. But as the train picked up speed, jarring and swaying at twenty-two miles an hour, Ann Eliza’s high feeling of exultation shook off, and what remained was “utter loneliness.”
She turned to Mrs. Cooke, and when she spoke her voice was weak and helpless. “What shall I do?” she asked.
Mrs. Cooke touched her hand. “Keep up a brave heart, and think of the work before you.”
Ann Eliza Young, twenty-seventh wife, lay back on the upholstered seat, closed her eyes, and tried to think of the work before her—and at once she thought of the one who would try to stop that work. And now, suddenly, loneliness was compounded by another emotion—fear.