“The business of ruining a woman’s reputation is, of all others, the meanest and most despicable.”
—Denver Mirror, 1874
Perhaps every woman is finally a servant of her past, yet there are some few, like Ann Eliza Young, who make their pasts serve them.
When Ann Eliza succeeded in escaping Utah Territory in 1873, she took with her, not merely as her heritage, but as a commodity tangible as the luggage she carried, twenty-nine years of a life already lived. Any other young woman might have preferred to free herself entirely of so strange and painful a past, to blot out every memory of it, to start anew in fresh faith and marriage. But this Ann Eliza could not, or would not, do. For almost a half century, driven by the demons of duty and money, she paraded publicly, over and over again, every intimate detail of the old existence. For Ann Eliza the past was always as alive as the present and would ever be synonymous with the future.
Since Ann Eliza’s precious past was what she had to live on and for—and not merely live with—it became a matter of life and death that this commodity be kept marketable and attractive. There were millions of persons, Ann Eliza soon discovered, whose curiosity was crossed with criticism. Wherever she traveled she evoked doubt as well as sympathy. After initial sensationalism and compassion had run their course, there remained the single original question in most minds. This question was cleverly made the lead blurb in all publicity and advertising literature circulated by Ann Eliza’s lecture managers. The blurb read as follows:
“The first question asked by everybody is this: If Mrs. Young is so cultivated and able a woman as to write and deliver lectures that rank with the best, why did she become a Mormon, and marry Brigham Young?
“Answer—She was born and educated in the Mormon Church, and consequently had no choice in the matter. She never knew any other religion until after her marriage with the Mormon Prophet.”
Thus the heinous thing—polygamist, harem wife, plural wife, concubine—was explained and absolved. In short, the lurid past was not of this frail woman’s making; rather, she was its helpless victim—she had “had no choice in the matter.”
But had she or had she not? Forever after, millions of persons would wonder. And, this day on the train leaving Utah and for the rest of her days after, Ann Eliza would wonder too…
The ungainly, high-stacked, wood-burning locomotive carried Ann Eliza and Mrs. Cooke northeast at speeds varying between sixteen and twenty-two miles an hour. To Ann Eliza the pace seemed death-defying, since her last continental crossing, as a child, had been in a wagon that moved two miles an hour. Time zones were a decade away, and Ann Eliza had to remember that every nine miles eastward her watch lost one minute.
The monotony of the grinding journey across the mountains and the plains was often relieved by a reservation Indian hitching a ride on the rods and by male passengers trying to shoot down buffalo and wild game from the engine tender or the rear platform. There were occasional stops at rude wooden depots, and Ann Eliza and Mrs. Cooke descended, with the other passengers, to stretch and walk, surrounded always by old Indians begging for money and enterprising squaws offering to show their papooses for a quarter of a dollar a peek.
The new routine and marvel of the first day in flight soon absorbed Ann Eliza completely. The glittering hotel train offered a buffet in the passenger cars, but luncheon was served in the new diner, where expensive mirrors reflected inlaid wooden walls and the Turkish carpets sank beneath the foot. The menus were lengthy and included many expensive dishes, but it is likely that Ann Eliza did not indulge herself beyond the cheaper one-dollar lunch.
In the afternoon Ann Eliza was emotionally affected by a small incident. Across the aisle was a young mother, a little boy on her lap, and a beautiful eight-year-old girl beside her. At one brief stop, a male passenger boarded the train. As he entered the car, the eight-year-old girl leaped to her feet and cried, “Oh, my dear papa has come!” In a moment the man was kissing and hugging his daughter and wife and fondling his tiny son. Watching the warm scene, said Ann Eliza, “the tears sprang to my eyes, and I had fairly to hide my face, for my cheeks were moist, and my mouth would quiver, as I thought of the father’s love, of which my children were robbed—of which all children in Utah are robbed—by a fiendish system…”
At nightfall, beneath the swaying kerosene lamps, the white-jacketed colored porters busily spread crisp sheets on the sleeping berths, as somewhere someone softly played a small organ. Since both sexes slept in the same Pullman car—a topic of scandal in the East—women were expected to retire fully clothed. That first night Ann Eliza primly reclined in her berth armed with muslin blouse, balmoral skirt—and hatpin.
She did not record the thoughts that flickered through her brain that long, restless night. Possibly her two sons were on her mind. Would they be safe with her mother in South Cottonwood? Possibly she worried about her mother and that heart-rending letter she had sent. Did her mother really mean, “Your death would have been far preferable to the course you are taking”? And her father and brothers—would they be punished by the Prophet for her sensational revolt? And her belongings, in the trunk, sent ahead to Laramie—would the shipment ever reach her? And the dependable Major Pond—would he reach Laramie in a short time? And the first crucial appearance in Denver, and the one later in Washington, D.C., and the many in between—would she really be able to make them? Would she be regarded as an immoral concubine? Or as a persecuted victim of polygamy and a brave champion of monogamy? And Brigham—was she out of his reach?
Laramie proved to be a small, disorganized frontier town, over seven thousand feet above sea level, surrounded on three sides by soaring peaks. In its chilly, frozen, dirt streets there seemed as many cattle, sheep, and hogs as cowpunchers and merchants. For two days Ann Eliza and Mrs. Cooke remained secluded in their heated hotel suite. Their single joy was that Ann Eliza’s trunk had arrived safely.
At last Major Pond arrived safely, too, much to Ann Eliza’s relief. With him he brought the issue of the Salt Lake City Tribune that had appeared the day after Ann Eliza’s flight. It carried one news story of interest to her, headlined: “Gone On a Mission.” Ann Eliza read on: “Mrs. Ann Eliza Young left town yesterday to start on her lecturing tour in the East… The lady departed without announcement, as her friends had reason to believe that efforts would be made to prevent her carrying out her design. She has some important secrets to tell out of school, and her husband, the Prophet, with his favorite institution, Polygamy, will suffer rather severely at her hands. Her revelations at this particular time will be of immense service to the cause of progress, as her former position in Mormon society will give weight to her utterances… We predict abundant success for this lady in her new field of labor, and do not hesitate to express our belief that she is deserving of all the kindnesses that may be bestowed upon her.”
Now that the success of her escape was public, Ann Eliza realized that she had crossed the last boundary of compromise. Her survival depended on her sincerity and talent. Her arrival in Laramie was not long secret. Before she could proceed to Denver, she and Major Pond were besieged by requests for a lecture. Because money and rehearsal were both needed, Major Pond prevailed upon Ann Eliza to try one of her lectures in Laramie. She consented to appear. At once Major Pond rented a classroom of the Wymong Institute, printed and distributed tickets at $1.50 each, and soon the advance sales mounted to $600.
The evening of December 3, 1873, was freezing, and the snow fell steadily. The largest room of the Institute was filled with 400 people, a cheerful and noisy crowd, who waited with eager anticipation as Ann Eliza walked purposefully toward the lectern.
A reporter from the Laramie Independent observed her closely and listened carefully.
“Mrs. Young was modestly attired, and her bearing as she approached the stand, was dignified, but unconcerned. Her face is attractive rather than handsome, and betokens both culture and earnestness. In commencing her story—for it seemed as such—she remarked that a nineteenth wife in the nineteenth century was an anomaly peculiar to American institutions. From the first word that she uttered until the last, the interest of the audience seemed riveted by her earnest, pleading narrative of the wrongs that had been inflicted upon her by Mormonism. There was a frankness in her manner and utterance that won the entire sympathy and assent of her hearers, while her revelation seemed like the opening up of a strange world.”
The spell that Ann Eliza wove over her Laramie audience was broken only by the gales of laughter that swept the room when she related incidents of Brigham’s parsimony and anecdotes concerned with Amelia’s dominance over him.
Like the audience, the Laramie Independent reporter was entirely won over by Ann Eliza. In concluding his review of the lecture the reporter wrote: “We say God speed, noble woman! And may the fruits of your labor be made manifest by the downfall of the remaining ‘relic of barbarism.’“
In Salt Lake City the following morning, both Brigham and Amelia, as well as the Reverend Stratton, General Maxwell, Judge Hagan, Judge McKean, and the assorted Webbs, read in the Tribune of Ann Eliza’s success. A dispatch from Laramie informed them that she had been received by “a large and appreciative audience” and predicted that her lecture “is destined to produce an immense sensation throughout the country.”
The reception gave Ann Eliza support when she needed it the most. “I felt fresh courage,” she admitted after the lecture in Laramie.
Meanwhile every hamlet between Laramie and Denver was telegraphing Major Pond for an engagement with his client. After a conference with Ann Eliza, the amateur manager informed Cheyenne and Fort Russell that she would stop over in both places for one-night stands. The train trip to Cheyenne was only forty miles. Like Laramie, the town of Cheyenne had developed as a byproduct of the Union Pacific and had been in existence only six years. Ann Eliza delivered her Thursday night lecture before “a large circle” gathered in Cheyenne’s Presbyterian Church, and the Daily Leader found the content of her talk “racy” and her delivery “a woman’s flowing elocution, sustained with becoming direction.” Cheyenne was followed by a short stay in Fort Russell, and on December 6 Ann Eliza, Mrs. Cooke, Pond, and his daughter arrived in Denver, Colorado, and checked into the Inter-Ocean Hotel.
Denver, perched a mile above sea level in the Rocky Mountains and within sight of snow-capped Pikes Peak, was the capital city of Colorado Territory. Founded by a trapper and his Sioux wife sixteen years before, it had grown into a metropolis through persistent rumors of gold strikes. In 1870 the population of the city was 4,759, and 1,500 buildings had been erected. Now, three years later, the city was bursting at the seams, and in this blustery preholiday season, the gambling casinos and saloons busied themselves with commerce and crime, and the dudes and squatters and miners in the streets were raucous and alcoholic. The Daily Register of rival Central City took its usual dim view of Denver and of Ann Eliza’s chances for a success in that rum hole: “We doubt whether her story will excite any public interest, since it appears that she has but little talent, but depends upon the novelty of her theme for success. The Denver papers boast that she preferred to make her debut in that city. In that she makes a serious blunder, for there is no place in the country where the people are so indifferent to lectures and the legitimate drama as in Denver.”
If Ann Eliza quaked at the snide warning, Major Pond remained unperturbed and efficient. His advance telegrams had alerted the community and the newspapers, and they clamored to meet Brigham’s fugitive wife. Major Pond invited Denver editors and reporters, as well as those of nearby towns, to a press conference in Ann Eliza’s suite. The conference was staged the afternoon of her arrival.
Ann Eliza had clad herself in the plainest of dresses, without frills or accessories. Over the dress she wore a simple, lightweight, long, dark purple coat. Although obviously tense, she replied to questions coolly and sincerely. At all times her manner remained restrained and ladylike.
The press conference had begun with a display of Ann Eliza’s credentials, letters of a high moral tone praising her personality and motives. The recommendations were signed by the Reverend C. C. Stratton, Judge James B. McKean, C. P. Lyford, pastor of the Methodist Church in Provo, J. H. Wickizer, the Federal officer in Utah who had successfully shipped Ann Eliza’s trunk to Laramie, and D. J. Pierce, pastor of the Baptist Church in Laramie. The business of credentials was undoubtedly an early stratagem suggested by Major Pond, who wished to overcome any conservative’s suspicion that his client was a lady of easy virtue.
Anxious not to give away the best of her lectures, Ann Eliza was brief in her replies to questions. She spoke fleetingly of her early years in Mormonism, her adventures in the Endowment House, her marriage to Brigham, and her postponed divorce case. She touched on her escape from Salt Lake City and mentioned that she had personally selected Denver for her first major effort, despite the fact that some friends tried to “dissuade” her. She promised two lectures for Denver. She was still in the process of writing a third one on “the political condition of Mormondom.” She hoped to deliver her first lecture by early the following week. Major Pond, she said, was still hunting for an available hall. After that and one more lecture, she expected to travel to engagements in Kansas, Missouri, and New York, with her ultimate goal Washington, D.C., where she intended to “tell the people there some things about Mormonism that were never before dreamed of by them.”
The press conference proved a huge success. The Denver newspaper build-up of Ann Eliza began. Major Pond succeeded in renting the largest hall in the city, that of the New Baptist Church, for appearances on December 9 and 10. For Ann Eliza the weekend was a difficult one. She tried not to think of the ordeal ahead. She polished her two set lectures, “My Life in Bondage” and “Polygamy As It Is,” continued creating the new one, “The Mormon Religion,” and wrote letters to her family. Constantly the fear of a fiasco hung over her head. She had been advised not to open her tour in Denver. For the first time, her lectures would be covered nationally. A half-filled hall, an unruly audience, a poorly delivered talk, would be broadcast far and wide and might bring an end to her tour before it had fairly begun.
Soon enough it was December 9. All through the gloomy day, the snow came down and the temperature dropped. By nightfall the ground was frozen and the city swept by a terrifying white blizzard. From the window of her hotel bedroom, Ann Eliza observed the unkind elements and fell into deep depression. “I was discouraged and despondent,” she wrote, “for I had come to consider this first evening as prophetic of my future career, and I saw failure before me. I did not know whether I should be able to reach the church, the storm was so furious; but as a faithful few had promised to be in attendance, let what might happen, I determined to make the trial.”
With heavy heart she sat in her whalebone corset and petticoat while Mrs. Cooke worked her brown hair into a magnificent coronet braid. Then, before the mirror, and with her companion’s help, she got into a new black silk dress. Except for a point-lace barbe at the neck she wore no further ornamentation. She pulled a white kid glove on each hand, found her coat, her manuscript, and she was ready.
The lecture had been advertised for eight in the evening. An hour earlier Major Pond, resplendent in black broadcloth frock coat, vest, and trousers, wearing a gold, key-winder watch at his vest, arrived at her door to escort her. Perhaps until that moment he had regarded her as an unfashionable drab, but now he was held speechless by her beauty. Even a quarter of a century later, in his memoirs, he would not forget the moment. “I remember the night she was to appear in Denver,” he wrote. “I went to the Inter-Ocean Hotel where she boarded, to escort her to the church, and did not know her. She was dressed up, and—well, she looked very pretty.”
In the carriage to the New Baptist Church, as the snowstorm swirled about them, Ann Eliza gave voice to her deepest fear. No one would come to see and hear her. What if no one came? Suddenly they were at the church. “My forebodings had been utterly useless,” Ann Eliza wrote. “Long before the church doors were opened a large crowd was in waiting, and before the hour for beginning the lecture arrived, the house was full, and hundreds had gone away unable to gain admission.”
Ann Eliza had misjudged the power of her appeal. In an aseptic age, when curiosity about matters sexual was forbidden, Ann Eliza offered an irresistible bait. She could discuss human passion with piety, because the subjects of her lectures were polygamy and religion. For cloistered and genteel women and their churchgoing husbands, in this rough city, Ann Eliza’s daring entertainment was permissible and an event. And even for some of the more uncouth citizenry, sated though they were by gambling halls and hell-raising, the inside story of harem life in America was an attraction not to be missed.
While the standing-room-only attendance thrilled Ann Eliza, it opened Major Pond’s eyes. For the first time, he fully realized that he had an attraction that might appeal to both sexes equally and to people of every walk of life and degree of wealth and education. Once inside the church and planted in the wings, Ann Eliza peeked out at the large hall. Immediately she suffered an attack of stage fright. Her original fear had been that no one would come; now she feared that too many had come. “As I looked into the crowded house, before I came on the platform, my courage almost left me,” she wrote. “But while hesitating, the thought of the poor women whose cause I was to plead, came vividly into my mind, and with firm step, and beating heart, I walked onto the platform, and stood facing my first audience, who greeted me with tumultuous applause.”
Ann Eliza had been accompanied onto the platform by the Reverend Winfield Scott, Denver’s foremost Methodist minister and by a second clergyman who was also one of her sponsors. Ann Eliza and the second clergyman took chairs in the rear while the Reverend Scott moved to the speaker’s desk. His introduction was brief. In a moment Ann Eliza advanced and supplanted him. The overcrowded hall—even the aisles were now filled with customers in folding chairs—welcomed her with a roar. She bowed, and when she looked up the noise subsided. Her lips trembled nervously. And then—strangely—at once she was composed.
“The nineteenth wife of a man living in the nineteenth century, in a heathen country, would perhaps be considered a curiosity,” she began in a rich, clear voice that reached distinctly to the farthest corner of the hall. “But in civilized Christian America, where the abomination of polygamy is permitted by the government, she is, of course, no curiosity. In presenting myself as a lecturer for the ear of the public, I feel that an explanation, if not an apology, is demanded. So, at the outset, let me say I cannot lay any claim to the grace of rhetoric or the art of elocution. Nevertheless, I have something to say, and I hope to say it so as to be understood.
“I was born and have been trained in the Mormon Church, therefore I ask your attention to the substance of my communication, rather than to the manner in which that shall be communicated. I cannot expect to gain your applause. I may not move your feelings; but I do desire to secure your attention, and, if possible, to aid in determining your convictions. My life is but a duplicate of many others, the index to hundreds equally or more dreary.”
After defining Mormon words that would be unfamiliar to the Denver audience, words such as Gentile and apostate, Ann Eliza plunged into autobiography. She spoke of her parents, their early conversion to the Church, their acceptance of polygamy, her own birth and migration to Salt Lake City, her adventures in the Endowment House at sixteen, her career as an actress, and her unhappy marriage to James L. Dee.
Then she went on to tell how Brigham Young and George O. Cannon assisted her in divorcing Dee. “She is specific on this point,” the Rocky Mountain News reported, “because the Mormons say she was never divorced from her first husband.”
At last she had reached the point of Brigham’s courtship. Collectively, it seemed, the audience leaned forward. “Some time after coming away from church, I met Brigham Young, who said he thought he had better go home with me, and I replied I would be pleased to have him do so. He went with me, and while on the way, asked me if I had received any offers of marriage since I left my husband, and I told him I had, but that I had not accepted. He then asked leave to give me a little good advice, and told me never to marry again for love, but to marry some good brother whom I could look up to for counsel. By the way, the only good counsel I ever received from him was to practice the strictest economy.”
The last was delivered by Ann Eliza with exaggerated disgust, and her listeners responded with a wave of appreciative laughter. Ann Eliza continued the tale of Brigham’s suit, of her refusal to go into polygamy, of her eldest brother’s telegraph-pole troubles, and of her final decision to save her brother by marrying Brigham. In great detail she described the wedding ceremony in the Endowment House, her life at the Lion House, her miseries at The Farmhouse, her adventures in the boardinghouse, and her escape to the Walker House.
Ann Eliza was nearing the end of her lecture. Haltingly she told of her mother’s last effort to restrain her from leaving Brigham and Utah. “The most affecting incident connected with her escape from the great Apostle of Mormonism,” stated the Denver Tribune, “was a letter from her mother, who seems to have shared her hardships and privations resignedly for the sake of her Mormon religion. This letter besought her, as only a mother can, to come back to those who should be dearer to her than all on earth. In closing, the mother said she had rather her daughter were dead and in her grave than an apostate.
“Mrs. Young read this part of her lecture with suppressed feeling, it being only with great effort that she subdued her emotions.”
With difficulty, Ann Eliza said, she had ignored the letter. She had cast her lot with her courageous Gentile friends—the Reverend Stratton, Judge McKean, Major Pond, and others—who protected her in the Walker House and helped to spirit her out of angry Utah.
“A few years ago,” she said, “the Gentiles would not have dared to aid me. At last the door of legal redress opened. Once I should have shuddered at the thought of entering; but at length my mind was made up. I would endure everything rather than live on in my life of humiliation. I ventured, and have won, at last, liberty; and I trust, through the guidance of that fatherly hand, which has not since failed me, to be led into paths of future usefulness and peace.
“In this picture of my bondage and hopes, and fears, you have a faithful delineation of the condition of many of the women of Utah. By nature they are just as pure and true as any woman in the world. They endure more self-denial for their religion than any other can. Let the charge of insincerity be the last one brought against them. It is the misfortune and fate of tyrants of every grade to inflict wrongs, which work their own remedy. You have seen it in my personal history. The things which I suffered opened my eyes to the hollowness of Brigham Young’s pretensions to sanctity of character, and unveiled the system of which he was the head and I one of the many victims.
“Under these accumulated sources of distrust and dissatisfaction, I literally forsook father and mother and home and friends. To be sure, I have found them again, and others true and tried have been to me all that I could have hoped and won. Do you wonder, then, at my gratitude for a discipline however harsh that has resulted in my freedom? If so, it is because you have never tasted the bitter dregs of polygamy and the contrasted sweets of liberty.”
She stood very still, her story concluded, awaiting the verdict. She was confident. “I have never spoken more effectively in my life than I did that night,” she said later. “It seemed to myself almost as though I was inspired. I forgot myself in my subject.” As she waited, the vast audience, so long absorbed in the bizarre tale, remained momentarily hushed.
Suddenly the applause broke out, caught up, swelled. Scores of men and women rushed to the stage to congratulate Ann Eliza, take her hand, touch her. Hundreds more, observed the representative of the Rocky Mountain News, “reluctantly turned away, as though they felt the story had been half told.”
Ann Eliza’s success was total. Unanimously the press praised her. Even the critical Central City Daily Register, which had predicted disaster, printed a choleric congratulation. “We confess our surprise at hearing of the popular ovation tendered her—it came to us in the nature of a revelation. But we fear it was the bits of domestic scandal with which her lecture was seasoned that excited the craving of the Denverites. At any rate, we are glad to note any improvement that may happen to metropolitan society.” Only the Virginia City Chronicle, from afar, disapproved. Perhaps Ann Eliza would draw “in the Eastern Cities” as she had in Denver, but she was still no less a concubine. “Would any other woman who had been a resident of any other bagnio of the country have the effrontery to tell the world of her own degradation and crime? There is a great waste of sympathy for her by those who should know better; but they forget, in the woman, her crimes.”
News of Ann Eliza’s success spread throughout the land. Requests for engagements poured in to Major Pond. Even that giant of the lecture field, James Redpath, was heard from once more. He wanted Ann Eliza for his Star Lecture Course, a series that already included such celebrated names as Frederick Douglass, Edward Everett Hale, Susan B. Anthony, Josh Billings, and Theodore Tilton. Redpath’s preliminary bait was a possible $10,000 for fifty appearances. Major Pond replied that he would consider it.
Meanwhile, all fears dissipated, Ann Eliza prepared to deliver her second lecture, this one less autobiographical and instead devoted to the general practice of polygamy. The publicity accorded the first lecture had made the second one another sellout.
This lecture, while less personal than the first, was considerably more lurid. Ann Eliza traced the growth of the plural-wife doctrine from Joseph Smith’s revelation in Nauvoo during 1843 to Brigham’s public announcement of it in Salt Lake City during 1852.
“The Mormons hesitatingly acknowledged that the thing called love among the Gentiles cannot exist under their system,” said Ann Eliza, “but claim that they have instead a purer feeling of respect, support and friendship. The question is often asked, what do the women say about it? Generally they say nothing except that it is a hard faith for women. They feel that their first duty is submission, and their second silence. The Mormons say the most of the opposition or trouble comes from the American or Irish wives, though there are very few of the latter. Their social system is organized selfishness. At the present time, polygamy is principally fed by the foreign element. As soon as an emigrant train arrives, the wife-hunters swarm around it like so many vultures. The new arrivals may be unable to understand a word of English, but love can speak through the eyes, it is said, and these wife-seekers very soon make themselves understood. The inducements of a comfortable house and home to a new arrival, without a friend or acquaintance in the country, is irresistible, and the poor dupe from a foreign shore becomes wife three, seven or ten in haste, to repent at leisure.”
As she progressed, Ann Eliza’s exposé became more heated. She told of polygamists stealing Gentile wives and justifying their expanding harems by pointing to the Bible. “It was claimed that all the patriarchs were polygamists, and that Adam, in a previous existence, had many wives, of whom Eve was one. More than this, it was held that the pure and exalted love of Jesus for Martha and Mary, her sister, as well as Mary Magdalene, showed that they were his plural wives, and that the marriage at Cana of Galilee was one of his bridal feasts.”
As the audience sat aghast, Ann Eliza pressed her advantage with more sensational disclosures. She described the unhappiness in Brigham’s households, the unseemly behavior of his sons in polygamy, the fate of Brigham’s first wife and the inevitability of an Amelia, the crudity of Heber C. Kimball in calling his wives “cows,” the degradation of a polygamist who had married six of his nieces, the widespread loneliness of children in Utah. To the subject of children, Ann Eliza added an anecdote. She had heard of a sweet girl child, in a plural home, who one night asked her mother, “Mama, I do wish God had made men enough so that every little girl could have a father to love her.”
And Eliza apologized for being forced to omit certain spicy details of harem life. “I have but imperfectly told the story of polygamy; much that might be said, under some circumstances, cannot be told in a promiscuous assembly.” No outsider, she assured her audience, neither reporters nor congressmen, would ever know plural marriage as it was really practiced. Ann Eliza had reached the final moments of her address. Vigorously she struck at the complacent ones.
“Legislators, in doubt or in dread, give polygamy the benefit of their doubts or their fears, and again the question is laid over for a season. Meanwhile anxious eyes are longing, and burdened hearts are breaking, and children are swarming forth with the blight upon their birth, and a brand upon their brow, and all the country blesses itself, saying, ‘We have done no wrong. Let no one object, the women are free to accept this relation or reject it—to live in it or leave it.’ They are not free. Their souls are fettered.”
She paused, allowing her words to strike home, and then concluded:
“I had encouragement to break away from my faith and its connections, which few others can have. Nevertheless the step required great fortitude, and was attended with many misgivings. How would I be received into society? Would ladies, especially, recognize one who had been a polygamous wife? How far would the authorities of the Church dare to pursue me? That they would try to blacken my character I well knew. Would they go farther and attempt personal violence? How would my old friends and all my blood relations regard my step and me?
“These and many similar questions tortured and perplexed me, before my resolution was made. Imagine, then, the hopelessness of one less favorably situated. I cannot close without expressing my gratitude to the public for the considerate courtesy and kindness with which I have been met since taking this step. And I should not fully express my feelings did I fail to acknowledge the constancy of the Heavenly Father’s care in guarding my untried steps. Let me assure one and all that, whatever fortune the future may have in store for me, I shall never regret the step which brought me freedom of action and conscience.”
As on the first night, the address was met with a vast embrace of applause, and once again men and women of every class crowded about Ann Eliza to murmur their appreciation and to grip her hand.
Two days later, on Saturday, December 13, 1873, Ann Eliza, the conquest of Denver behind her, once more climbed aboard a Union Pacific train and headed toward the waiting Midwest. Major Pond had booked her heavily in Kansas, and the immediate destination was Topeka.
Major Pond had rented Costa’s Opera House in Topeka and scheduled Ann Eliza’s first lecture for Monday, December 15, and her second for the night after. Reserved seats were seventy-five cents each and general admission fifty cents. The Topeka press had publicized her success in Denver, and the Commonwealth had hailed her arrival with the headline: “Brigham Young’s Recalcitrant Ex-rib.” Despite Pond’s preparations, Ann Eliza, hair still braided and dress still black silk, faced her first half-filled house. As the State Record of Topeka reported it: “The insufficient announcement, or the bad condition of the weather, or both, or something or other, prevented the assembling of a large crowd at the opera house Monday night to hear Mrs. Young… Her lecture, however, was listened to with marked attention and interest, and produced a decided sensation.”
The following night, for her general lecture on polygamy, the attendance was greater. After this talk she was mobbed, and the best ladies of Topeka literally and “effusively” took her to their bosoms.
After a three-day rest, Ann Eliza proceeded to Lawrence, Kansas. Here the build-up had been more effective. The citizens of Lawrence responded en masse. Liberty Hall was jammed to the rafters the night of the first lecture. A town elder introduced Ann Eliza, and her performance was at its peak. The Kansas Tribune was dazzled by her. “She holds her audience spell-bound,” the newspaper said. “There has seldom been a greater treat than was enjoyed by the audience.”
Ann Eliza’s next stop in Kansas was the city of Leavenworth. The community had been anticipating her arrival for days. Not only were the city’s two major newspapers filled with her, but billboards and posters bearing lithographed portraits of her and legends reading “The Rebel of the Harem” were everywhere. Ann Eliza, Mrs. Cooke, and Major Pond arrived in Leavenworth from Lawrence on December 19. As Ann Eliza left the late-afternoon train, she showed fatigue and strain. She told dignitaries and reporters that she was suffering a nervous headache and postponed all meetings.
Ann Eliza rested in her suite at the Planters House. Later, refreshed, she held a business conference with Major Pond. Dozens of offers from New York publishing firms had come in, and Ann Eliza agreed that she would write a book of her experiences when she felt stronger. Also, she discussed with her manager an invasion of Europe, where interest in the Mormons was high, sometime during 1874, and both agreed to take the idea up at a later date.
After the succession of jolting train berths, the Planters House bed was a luxury. In the morning Ann Eliza awakened fully rested. She informed Pond that her headache was gone, and he notified the press.
A reporter representing the Leavenworth Daily Times came hastily to Ann Eliza’s hotel reception room. He found her “comely and graceful.” Her beauty was not Nordic blonde or Latin brunette, “but of that type which is developed in the atmosphere of mountains.” He thought her anything but meek. “We should say from a studied glance of Mrs. Young’s countenance, that she is not of the mould that bows gracefully to the yoke of submission.
“Mrs. Young is an agreeable companion in conversation,” wrote the reporter, “and quick to note the weakness of any proposition advanced in favor of polygamy. She can readily understand why a man like Mr. Sloan, editor of the Salt Lake Herald, who went to Utah with a deep-seated aversion to polygamy, became a convert to the plurality doctrine. Mrs. Young can explain his conversion in two minutes. It takes Mr. Sloan himself two hours. She has lived to some purpose in Utah, and she knows what polygamy is beneath the surface.”
During the interview Major Pond appeared. He told the reporter of Ann Eliza’s many publishing offers. He discussed the remainder of the lecture tour. “Mrs. Young will probably appear in Washington during the present session of Congress,” Pond concluded, “and proceed to give the congressmen some unheard-of information on the vexed question of Mormonism.”
Ann Eliza’s first lecture was scheduled for the evening of December 22. Major Pond had secured Laing’s Hall, which seated 1,000 persons. Leavenworth buzzed with excitement as the time of Ann Eliza’s appearance drew near. When, at last, Ann Eliza appeared on the stage, to be introduced by the town’s mayor, the largest crowd in Leavenworth history was seated and standing in Laing’s Hall.
The lecture was well received. Almost everyone agreed that she possessed enough “spirit” to have been Amelia Folsom’s match. During this appearance Ann Eliza seems to have corrected one impression of Brigham that had existed in Kansas. According to the Leavenworth Commercial, in a piece reprinted in the Mormon capital: “From the fact that he [Brigham] had so many wives, and he was so fond of having many wives, we supposed he must be a lecherous, licentious old brute. But this does not seem to be the case. He does not marry wives because he loves them, according to Ann Eliza, but because he is conceited, vain, and fond of showing his power and increasing his importance in this way.”
After Ann Eliza’s second lecture in Leavenworth, it was predicted by those who heard her that her beauty, shapely figure, sincere elocution, and strange narrative would make her the nation’s foremost lecturer and the leading influence in forming public opinion against polygamy. Thus encouraged, Ann Eliza went into St. Louis, Missouri, for two major appearances.
St. Louis was an old city, with a population somewhere between four and five hundred thousand people. The busiest section was located along three miles of the Mississippi River. Not only was it a water and rail terminal, but St. Louis was an important outpost of culture. Those of its natives who attended lectures, and they were many, preferred intellectuals to freaks. Ann Eliza had been made well aware of this, and she was apprehensive.
When she walked out on the stage of the St. Louis Mercantile Library, on Monday night of December 29, her earlier misgivings seemed justified. The auditorium was only one-third filled. But, as she would later be told, her listeners were “some of the most respectable people of the city,” and this satisfied her. The reviews that she saw the following morning made her even more cheerful. The critics praised her performance without dissent, and one credited her persuasiveness to “her training for the Salt Lake stage, under the commands of Brigham.”
The fine reception in St. Louis was marred only by an altercation between Major Pond and a local booking agent named G. A. Wallace. Because Wallace had earlier represented himself to be an agent of experience and integrity, Pond had contracted with him to set the two dates in St. Louis as well as several others in Missouri. However, after the appearance at Mercantile Hall, Pond learned that Wallace had not paid his proper share of expenses toward the advertising, the auditorium, and Ann Eliza’s hotel. Enraged, Pond decided that Wallace was a “fraud,” tore up their contract, refused to honor Wallace’s bookings in Missouri, and arranged to take Ann Eliza into Iowa and Illinois instead.
Wallace did not take this treatment lying down. In an open letter to the Chicago Evening Journal, Wallace wrote: “I must give a most unqualified denial to the statement that I did not pay all the bills connected with Mrs. Young’s lectures in St. Louis, amounting to close on $300, although she failed to draw half the rent of the hall in which she gave her old and hackneyed Mormon story to the public. I left St. Louis under the agreement with Pond to raise money, which the temporary absence of a friend from town has prevented me from doing for the present. In a day or two the party referred to will return with ample funds, and although I have been grossly misled by Pond as to the success which has attended these lectures hitherto, I will discharge the last cent for which I became responsible… Mrs. Ann Eliza’s success in the lecture field may be inferred from the fact that in St. Louis, a city of 450,000 inhabitants, one hundred and sixty-five persons manifested sufficient interest to attend her two lectures… at the ‘small charge’ of fifty cents each! ‘Tis true! ! notwithstanding the lectures were advertised at a cost of $200! !”
Informed of the disagreement between Wallace and Pond, the Salt Lake City Tribune, as ever, rushed to Ann Eliza’s defense: “Mr. Wallace now avenges himself by publishing lying statements in the newspapers about Mrs. Young. He says she does not draw good audiences. This we know to be false…”
Despite the vengeful Wallace, Ann Eliza had much to be grateful for and to celebrate on New Year’s Eve, 1873. Behind her lay the most harrowing and exciting year of her life to date, yet she had survived it and gained celebrity and temporary independence. Still, as she toasted the advent of 1874 with Mrs. Cooke, Major Pond, and some newly made friends, she would not allow herself to relax. For she knew that the year ahead, with all its tensions and promise, would present her with her greatest challenge. Her task was twofold: to prove herself before sophisticated eastern audiences and the highly demanding James Redpath, and to convince legislators in Washington that what she had to tell them was the whole truth and that the practices she was telling the truth about deserved strong legal condemnation. She knew also that her immediate future was not fully in her own hands. She was uneasy about the sudden and surprising silence in Salt Lake City, so much like the eerie stillness before a battle. The deserted enemy in the Bee Hive House and the Lion House was not one to take the blows of a disloyal wife and apostate without retaliation. Fear of Brigham’s vengeance, through Mormons scattered about the Midwest and East, was constantly on her mind. Nevertheless, she was confident of her growing reputation and strength.
With the New Year, Mrs. Cooke, who had been ailing, said her farewells and bravely returned to Salt Lake City. She had been replaced as chaperone by Major Pond’s young daughter. Ann Eliza’s crucial eastern test, before Redpath and Boston’s Brahmins, would not take place until mid-February. She had still seven weeks to improve herself as a lecturer and build herself as an attraction. For these weeks, to replace G. A. Wallace’s canceled itinerary, Major Pond had booked her on a busy but relatively easy swing through Iowa, Illinois, and Wisconsin. At once this last tryout tour got under way.
In Burlington, Iowa, Ann Eliza learned that, for the first time, she would have competition from another lady lecturer who had just arrived. The other lecturer was the notorious Victoria Claflin Woodhull. At thirty-six, the handsome and much emancipated Mrs. Woodhull had behind her an electric and eccentric career. By mesmerizing Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, the richest man in the United States, she had been able to open Wall Street’s first female brokerage house in 1870. She had published a sixteen-page scandal sheet known as Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly. In Washington, D.C., she had appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to plead for women’s rights. She had brazenly made public the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher’s seduction of Elizabeth Richards, wife of Beecher’s best friend, Theodore Tilton. She had run for President of the United States, although she had no vote, but Ulysses S. Grant had been reelected, nevertheless. She had been arrested, at the instigation of Anthony Comstock, for writing obscene material on Beecher and had served time in New York City’s Ludlow Street Jail. Now, with her hussy of a younger sister, Tennessee Celeste Claflin, working as her advance booking agent and publicist, Victoria was lecturing through the Midwest on free love.
At the time of Ann Eliza’s appearance in Iowa, Victoria Woodhull was creating her usual sensation. Recently, in Chicago, she had said, “I never had sexual intercourse with any man of whom I am ashamed to stand side by side before the world with the act.” Now, in Iowa, she was saying, “Nothing is so destructive as that intercourse carried on habitually without regard to perfect and reciprocal consummation. I need not explain to any woman the effects of unconsummated intercourse. But every man needs to have it thundered in his ears… that the other party demands a return for all that he receives, demands that he shall not be enriched at her expense, demands that he shall not, either from ignorance or selfish desire, carry her impulse forward only to cast it backward…” Iowa was shocked, and the Herald of Dubuque agreed with its readers that Victoria “has created more stir, more sensation in our city than any man who ever trod the dust of its streets.”
In Burlington, Iowa, Victoria Woodhull crossed paths with Ann Eliza for the first time. Victoria went to Ann Eliza’s hotel, in an effort to meet the twenty-seventh wife and enlist her in the free-love movement. Ann Eliza, who knew of Victoria’s scandalous reputation, was appalled. She did not wish to be tainted by Victoria’s brand of emancipation. Ann Eliza refused to admit the visitor to her rooms, and Victoria left the hotel in a rage. That evening, still somewhat unnerved, Ann Eliza gave her talk. The Burlington Hawkeye approved: “She has a pleasant face, clear complexion, and at times an embarrassed manner, which does not at all detract from the personal attractions of the lecturer… She tells a plain story of her life in Brigham’s household. It has no pretensions to literary excellence; but the language is clear, well chosen, and forcible.”
The next day Ann Eliza was glad to put distance between herself and Victoria Woodhull. Illinois proved a delight. She was pleased that Peoria said she “is in no sense of the word an adventuress.” The audience in Springfield proved “flattering.” In Quincy she “completely dissipated all prejudice that may have existed against her.” The day after her performance in Clinton, the Methodist pastor wrote: “Our people today are talking of the lecture.”
Perhaps Bloomington, Illinois, was the most gratifying of all. Generally Major Pond arranged his bookings through Methodist clergymen and shared the proceeds with them. In Bloomington, however, Pond had made his contract with B. P. Marsh, lecture- committee chairman, and W. W. Wallace, corresponding secretary, both representing the local Young Men’s Christian Association. In return for its sponsorship, the Y.M.C.A. took two thirds of Ann Eliza’s receipts.
One of the largest crowds in many years gathered to hear her in Bloomington’s Burley Hall. The Daily Pantagraph extolled her “modest dignity and graceful bearing,” and the Daily Leader adored this “earnest woman” who “modestly yet truthfully” revealed the inside story of harem life with Brigham.
After the first lecture, Ann Eliza, Major Pond, and Pond’s daughter rested the night in Bloomington’s Hotel Ashley, and the following day they were entertained by Marsh and Wallace of the Y.M.C.A. Following the second lecture, that evening, Ann Eliza and the Ponds boarded a train and went directly to their respective sleeping berths in order to be completely refreshed for their next engagement in Jacksonville, Illinois. Quickly enough Bloomington became merely one more geographic blur in Ann Eliza’s memory —but soon she would have reason to remember every face in the town and to relive every moment of her stay there and of her departure.
Leaving Jacksonville on January 16, 1874—”She deserves encouragement from every Christian minister,” the local pastor wrote his colleagues—the trio worked their weary way northward to teeming, chilly Chicago. In the Windy City, with Ann Eliza on his arm, Major Pond paid a call to the branch office of Redpath’s Lyceum Bureau. The man in charge of this office was a conservative Australian named George H. Hathaway, one of James Redpath’s most successful booking agents. Apparently Pond and Hathaway appreciated each other’s gifts at once, for later they would become partners and the foremost powers in the lecture field.
Hathaway, impressed by the amateur Pond’s recent grosses and Ann Eliza’s obvious box-office appeal, advised his visitors to join in with Redpath. Pond then explained that Redpath had already agreed to handle Ann Eliza’s appearances in Boston. Pond added that if Redpath could deliver $10,000 worth of further engagements to them they would certainly ally themselves with him. Undoubtedly Hathaway pointed out to them that until his employer, Redpath, had organized American lecturing six years before, performers had been poorly treated and badly paid. Foreign visitors like Charles Dickens—who was estimated to have made $228,000 on his second American tour—were the only exceptions. Ralph Waldo Emerson, on his own, had often received as little as five dollars for an appearance; under Redpath’s guidance he was soon receiving $500 an appearance. Furthermore, it was Redpath who had been able to guarantee Henry Ward Beecher $1,000 for a single night’s talk. Major Pond and Ann Eliza needed no more persuading. Once the terms were agreed upon, they said, they would entrust their futures to Redpath’s bureau.
In Evanston, Illinois, Major Pond had another bit of personal business to transact. Not wishing to keep his daughter on the road like a gypsy, he enrolled her in an Evanston private school. But now he needed another chaperon and companion for Ann Eliza. In Evanston he found her. She was a thirty-four-year-old spinster, Ruth Storey, who had been the closest friend of his wife Ann Frances, whom he had lost three years earlier. For a nominal fee, Miss Storey agreed to accompany Ann Eliza and Pond on the tour, to share Ann Eliza’s bed and to keep her company.
Ann Eliza’s critical engagement to appear in Boston’s famed Tremont Temple was for the evening of February 19, 1874, still more than three weeks off. Before that time she had a series of small bookings to fulfill in Wisconsin and again in Illinois. Promptly, from Chicago, Ann Eliza invaded Wisconsin. In Madison strong legislators wept unashamedly. In Janesville the audience punctuated the lecture with cheers. In Oshkosh a full house “went to scoff but remained to pray.” In Milwaukee there was standing room only.
In Appleton, Wisconsin, although pleased that the city enjoyed her “unstudied eloquence and frankness,” Ann Eliza had her mind on other things. Ever since she had left Illinois, there seemed something—some mystery—vaguely forbidding in the air. In Appleton, on February 4, 1874, at the desk of her suite in the Waverly House, she wrote a hasty note to an influential publisher friend named Culver. It read in part:
“Dear Sir: While stopping in Madison I was often questioned as to how I became acquainted with Mr. Pond and how he came to be managing my business and after I left there I received an anonymous letter speaking of these things. While in Milwaukee the same was repeated. You will greatly oblige me if you will put the enclosed article in your paper, which answers these questions…
“I would be glad to have a copy of your paper containing this article. Receive my sincere thanks for all your kindness to me. I am most respectfully yours, Ann Eliza Young.”
Having finished the troubled letter, Ann Eliza added a postscript in the margin of the letterhead: “You will oblige me by making any corrections needed in this as I am unaccustomed to writing for publication.”
The exact questions asked of Ann Eliza in Wisconsin about her connection with Major Pond she chose not to reveal. Their general nature may be suspected. The article sent to Mr. Culver probably explained that Major Pond, after fighting Confederate guerrillas in Kansas and Missouri during the Civil War, had resumed his profession of journalism in Wisconsin, moved to Salt Lake City to take a job on the Tribune, boarded with Ann Eliza after his wife’s death, joined the group that urged her to divorce Brigham Young, and undertaken to manage her first lecture tour and display her before congressmen in Washington, D.C. Undoubtedly, Ann Eliza felt, this kind of explanation would underline the fact that her relationship with Pond was purely professional.
Satisfied, Ann Eliza, accompanied by Pond and Miss Storey, returned to her last Midwest engagements in Illinois. Night after night, before masses of intent faces, she read her one-hour-and-a-half autobiographical lecture and her lecture exposing polygamy. With each appearance, as the all-important Boston date drew closer, her confidence was shaken by mounting anxiety.
The final Midwest performance she gave was in Freeport, Illinois. Once again she had a resounding success. The Freeport Journal said that “all were delighted with her lecture” and added, “Mrs. Young goes from here to Boston, where we bespeak for her a cordial reception; and may her efforts result to create a strong public sentiment against a giant evil in our land, which is winked at by the powers that be, and misunderstood by all not immediately cognizant of its terrible effects!”
At last Ann Eliza was on a train to the East. Each major lecture behind her—Denver and St. Louis especially—had been a test, but Boston held the future’s key. If she failed there in any way, she would be swiftly relegated to mere oddity, nine-day wonder, to be heard no more. But if she succeeded, she might become one of Redpath’s influential and high-paid standards, like Julia Ward Howe and Anna H. Leonowens, and then her voice would become an authoritative one in the nation, and her financial security would no longer be dependent on Brigham’s still contested alimony.
Boston, and its more than a quarter of a million inhabitants, in that winter of 1874, was still recovering from the catastrophic fire of thirteen months before. The blaze had cost the city 767 buildings, most of them commercial, and an over-all loss of seventy- five million dollars. But there was still money enough and interest enough in Boston to maintain the bay city’s position as America’s leading cultural center. The day of Ann Eliza’s arrival in the city, Wednesday, February 18, 1874, A. E. Sothern was starring in Dundreary at the Boston Theatre, little Minnie Madden was the hit of Ten Nights in a Bar-Room at the Howard Athenaeum, and a concert was being promised for the benefit of Signor G. Operti at the Boston Music Hall. The stage of Tremont Temple was occupied by fifty-five-year-old Charles Kingsley, the English novelist who was advertised as “Canon of Westminster, and Chaplain to the Queen of England.” Under Redpath’s management, Kingsley, author of Westward Ho!, was giving readings (without his usual stammer) before moderate-sized audiences who paid fifty cents a seat. With the arrival of Ann Eliza, he would be removed to Horticultural Hall to lecture on “The First Discoverers of America.” Among the coming attractions being advertised were six lectures on “Nervous Force,” to be offered by Professor C. E. Brown-Sequard, M.D., at the Lowell Institute, and readings of an original story by Wilkie Collins, author of The Moonstone, at the Parker Memorial. But the most prominent front-page advertisement, under “Entertainments,” that had been displayed all week, read as follows:
REDPATH’S LYCEUM
MRS. ANN ELIZA YOUNG,
OF SALT LAKE CITY,
WILL TELL
“A WOMAN’S STORY OF POLYGAMY,”
IN TREMONT TEMPLE,
THURSDAY EVENING, FEB. I9TH.
MRS. YOUNG was educated in the Mormon faith, and at the age of 24 was married to
BRIGHAM YOUNG
as his 19th wife. Her experience of the horrors of the system soon led her to seek a divorce and to begin a crusade for the abolition of the iniquity. She comes East with the most cordial endorsement of all the leading Christian clergy and prominent Gentiles of Utah. Her success in the West as a lecturer has been equalled only by the temperance movement. The churches everywhere support her with enthusiasm.
Tickets 50¢ with reserved seats. For sale on Tuesday at Russell’s Music Store, 126 Tremont Street.
Ann Eliza and Major Pond, with Miss Storey trailing along, checked into Boston’s Parker House shortly after the Wednesday noon hour. Having unpacked and eaten, Ann Eliza and Pond went to visit James Redpath at his Lyceum Bureau, located at 36 Bromfield Street.
The forty-one-year-old Redpath, short and weighing 150 pounds, energetic, amusing, colorful, his face adorned with mustache and side whiskers, had made a legend of John Brown, had introduced the interview technique to American journalism, and had made of lecturing a big-time business. Fearless (he had once ignored a Senate subpoena), constantly in motion (he had never taken a holiday), perpetually defending the underdog (he had championed old John Brown, the cause of Haiti, and was now interested in the victims of polygamy and the freedom of Ireland), Redpath held almost a monopoly on celebrated platform artists. While he handled many successful men for his 10 per cent fee—Henry Thoreau, John B. Gough, Henry Ward Beecher, Mark Twain among them—he prided himself on his ability to sell women to the public. One of his female lecturers, Anna E. Dickinson, the vigorous young suffragette, made $40,000 a year. Even Brigham Young regretted that he had been unable to hear Miss Dickinson when she had visited Salt Lake City during the first year of Ann Eliza’s marriage. “I wanted to hear Anna Dickinson lecture here, very much,” Brigham remarked to a visitor. “I would gladly have given a dollar to hear her scold. I understand she excels in that…”
While Ann Eliza did not have Miss Dickinson’s frank and fiery personality, Redpath sensed in her something else quite as valuable. Ann Eliza looked like a lady and acted like a lady, and this retiring and withdrawn personality contrasted nicely with the basic sexual interest her story held. From a suffering, genteel, and chaste young woman, any talk about promiscuity under polygamy would be acceptable. For her part, Ann Eliza was enchanted by Redpath. “He had never heard me speak,” she wrote, “but he was so bitter an enemy to this horrible system, as indeed he is to every wrong, that he was willing to take me for my work’s sake.” Major Pond, of course, knew Redpath well. As a youngster of eighteen, he had been with Redpath in Kansas and had regarded him “almost as a god.” He still held the older man as a deity. Whatever Redpath had in mind for Ann Eliza was agreeable to Pond.
Redpath felt that the entire East would be watching the results of Ann Eliza’s Boston lecture. If he was to undertake her career and put her over solidly, he must have a capacity house at Tremont Temple on the evening of February 19. To insure her success, Redpath’s billboards displayed not only Ann Eliza’s lovely face but also the faces of her rival wives in the Lion House. Redpath had arranged for an immediate series of feature interviews to be given the leading Boston newspapers. And finally, he had decided to present Ann Eliza personally to her audience on Thursday evening.
Exhilarated after the talk with Redpath, Ann Eliza returned to her suite in the Parker House to dress and collect her thoughts. In the afternoon she was joined by Miss Storey and Major Pond. Then the members of the press were admitted one by one.
The first interview of the afternoon was given to a reporter from the Boston Daily Globe. The reporter seemed surprised to find himself in the presence of three persons instead of one. He soon sorted them out and later described them: “The central figure, of course, was Mrs. Young, and naturally she ought to be considered first. If all the persons who will read this article are acquainted with the appearance of Miss Agnes Ethel, the actress, who played at the Globe Theatre about a year ago, a description of Mrs. Young’s physique would be unnecessary. The resemblance is really almost wonderful. There is the same slight, upright, well-made figure, narrow but comely face and almost sorrowful expression. The voice, too, distinct, but somewhat tremulous, is wonderfully like Miss Ethel’s. Mr. Pond is a large, well-developed man, and apparently a thorough Westerner, accent and all. Miss Storey is of medium size, rather pretty, and is decidedly ladylike in her appearance.”
The Daily Globe reporter took the chair offered him and began to question Ann Eliza. But, for some reason, she did not feel talkative. “Mr. Pond, my business agent, no doubt can tell you all that you wish to know.” The reporter brooded that “to converse with Mr. Pond was not the object of the visit,” but, nevertheless, he questioned Pond about the tour. Soon enough Ann Eliza began to interrupt her manager and amend his statements.
Pleased, the reporter turned back to Ann Eliza and questioned her directly about the contents of her three lectures.
“Do these lectures form a regular course, or are they independent of each other?”
“They are entirely independent,” said Ann Eliza. “Each one has its own ground to cover.”
“How have your lectures been received?”
“Oh, the feeling in places I have visited has been very good—very good indeed,” said Ann Eliza quickly and emphatically. “I have been treated with the greatest consideration by newspapermen, ministers, and all.” She pointed to the table in the room, heaped high with correspondence. “There is a pile of letters from some of the best people in the West, as strong as they can write. We have had the very finest audiences everywhere, and I have letters of commendation from influential men in all quarters.”
“Mrs. Young, do you travel alone?”
“No, I travel with Mr. Pond, my business agent, and Miss Storey of Chicago. When I started on my tour, I was accompanied by an elderly person, Mrs. Cooke of Utah, but her health compelled her to give up travelling.”
“Have you seen any Boston people yet?”
“No, no one in particular; we only arrived this noon—”
Major Pond swiftly took over. “Mrs. Young has been resting a little since then,” he told the interviewer.
“How long do you propose to remain in Boston?” the reporter asked Pond.
“Well, I don’t know. We have made no definite arrangements but, probably, Mr. Redpath will lay out a route for us in this vicinity. We left a good paying business in the West to come here. Mrs. Young had more engagements than she could attend to, at $100 a night. At every one of the twenty-two lectures the people made money, with one exception, and then it was a frightfully stormy night. Mrs. Young drew audiences in the West where not a lecturer in the country could, except John B. Gough, and you know he’s different from all others. You find him so here in Boston, I suppose. I hope, sir, you’ll hear Mrs. Young, tomorrow, for you’d be very much interested. We considered this matter thoroughly before leaving the West, but Boston seems to be the centre for a lecturer to start from. We were drawing large audiences in the West, but we thought, and Mr. Redpath wrote us, that we’d better come to Boston, so as to get before the people as much as possible. Mrs. Young wants to go to Washington backed by the people.”
“Go to Washington?” the reporter echoed with surprise.
“Yes, sir,” said Pond. “Mrs. Young hasn’t started out on this tour to make money. Her object is to help the poor suffering women of Utah, and therefore she is going to Washington to see what can be done.”
“Yes,” added Ann Eliza, revived again, “one of the congressmen in Utah, General Shanks, told me that by telling my story in Washington, in my own way, I would do more good than all the statesmen in Utah.”
“But have you any law framed in your mind,” inquired the reporter, “or are you just waiting to see what course events will take, so as to be guided by them?”
“Well,” said Ann Eliza, taking over completely, “of course I have my own ideas and beliefs upon the subject, but it would not be right for me to pretend to dictate to those great men what laws they shall make. I shall simply tell my story and let them apply such remedies in the way of law as they see fit.”
There was more of the same, and then the Daily Globe man was off to write his story. Through the long winter afternoon, the parade of interviewers continued, and Ann Eliza obliged one and all. It was early evening by the time the last journalist, representing the Boston Post, made his appearance.
The exchange began crisply with the visitor asking Ann Eliza her present opinion of Mormonism. “I think it is one of the greatest humbugs of the age,” snapped Ann Eliza, borrowing one of P. T. Barnum’s favorite words.
After inquiring about Ann Eliza’s beginnings, the reporter wanted to know if most of the Saints were sincere in their religious beliefs. “I know that some of them are sincere as people can be in any belief,” said Ann Eliza. “I know that my own parents entertained honest convictions concerning it, and I also know that Mrs. Stenhouse, who is a very intelligent lady, believed it fully till she was satisfied, as I myself have been, that it was utterly false. We all believed it as truth from heaven till, by the most terrible and bitter suffering, we found out our mistake.”
“Is the dissatisfaction getting to be quite general?” the reporter wanted to know.
“I think I may say that there are now more than a hundred women in Salt Lake City who are dissatisfied just as I was for four years before I left.”
Ann Eliza discussed her escape in detail, telling how she caught the Union Pacific train “two minutes” before its departure. The reporter interrupted to inquire why Brigham had permitted her to keep Gentile boarders. “He will do anything for money,” said Ann Eliza, “or to have his wives get it for him.”
The reporter was curious about Brigham’s money. How could he afford to keep a harem? What was he worth? “He has $7,000,000 in the Bank of England,” said Ann Eliza, “and his possessions in Utah embrace perhaps one third of all the property there. His monthly income is estimated at not less than $40,000 per month, and is probably much more. He owns the most beautiful farms, all kinds of factories, mills and manufacturing buildings, and those who operate them are obliged to pay him one tenth of all they produce… In addition to this, he, or his sons, own all the railroads there with the exception of the Union Pacific. The Southern, Central and Northern steam railroads, and the street railway in the city are all owned by them, and it is impossible to pass over any of them with the idea of escape without being detected.”
The Post man asked the number of Brigham’s wives. “He has only nineteen for time,” said Ann Eliza, “but a great number of women are sealed to him for eternity.”
Would it not be difficult, the reporter wondered, to keep track of so many wives with whom he had no relationship other than spiritual? “It would seem so to you, perhaps,” replied Ann Eliza, “but he supposes that the Lord will keep track of them and that they will all be reserved to await his coming into his kingdom.”
After both parties had agreed that The Book of Mormon made fairly dull reading, the reporter returned to the question of the harem. How could Brigham dole out love to so many women and yet keep them all happy? “There are not a dozen exceptions in all Utah to the rule that every Mormon husband has his favorite wife,” said Ann Eliza, “and you may perhaps imagine what unhappy feelings such a state of affairs may create.”
The reporter inquired about Amelia Folsom. Ann Eliza described her as tall, shapely, perhaps too pale.
What about cosmetics? “Does she use arsenic?”
“I never heard that she did. I know nothing about it myself.”
“And her nose?” asked the reporter.
“Turns up slightly. Her mouth is small, and her compressed lips seem to suggest the strong will which she possesses, and which Brigham Young seems inclined to fear. She is not to be thwarted, and Mr. Young knows it.”
“In what style does she dress?”
“She has not good taste in dress. She has everything to gratify her wishes in that respect, but lacks the skill to adopt those styles and colors which would make her more beautiful in appearance.”
The following day, the Thursday of the first lecture, all of the interviews burst into print, all prominently displayed on front pages, and none of them less than a full column in length. If publicity were enough, Ann Eliza’s success seemed assured.
But the Thursday excitement was lost on Ann Eliza. She was, by then, hovering between shock and hysteria. For, late the evening before, her composure and confidence, and perhaps all her good prospects, were shattered by a “shameful article”—as she called it —published first in Chicago and then telegraphed throughout the country.
She had worried about the silence of her enemies while in Missouri and had had a premonition of trouble while in Wisconsin, and now, at last, the blow had fallen. The article consisted of a scandalous expose of Ann Eliza’s love life. Published in the Chicago Times, date-lined “Bloomington, III., Feb. 17,” it was written by a “Special Correspondent.”
The “shameful article” began harmlessly, with a resumé of Ann Eliza’s platform conquests, a description of her “superb loveliness” and her “well-developed and voluptuous form,” and a review of her lecture in Bloomington.
“But this, kind reader, is a digression,” the article went on. “Let us come to the most absorbing interest of our story. Like other lady lecturers, No. 19 travels in company with an agent, who looks after her engagements and sees that no Young Men’s Christian Association beats her out of her hard earnings. She had the misfortune to have a gay and dashing fellow for her business manager. His name is Pond. He came from Wisconsin, and they call him Major. A handsome man he is, arrayed in the height of fashion and conversing with a fluent and oily tongue. It was noticed soon after their arrival at the Ashley House, by the different guests and house servants, that there existed the greatest familiarity between the fair lecturess and her handsome agent. In the evening, after the lecture, the audience dispersed to their homes and the lecture party to their hotel—one party imagining it an awful thing to be a Mormon, and the other thinking over the receipts of the evening and engagements ahead. In this manner the good hotel Ashley was reached, and soon the city was hushed in the quietness of the hour. As time passed on, the gentlemanly night clerk wondered why the major did not come to the office for the key of his room, as it was locked and the key hanging upon the rack in the office. In the morning the chambermaid and other parties connected with the hotel discovered that the gallant major had remained with the lovely ex-Mormon during the night, no doubt dreaming sweet dreams of the financial success that the tale of Mormon life would surely bring to those engaged in the good cause of exposing the shams and wickedness of the entire system.
“This frail relic of Mormonism and her amorous agent remained in the city until the next evening, when they boarded the Jacksonville train, where she had an engagement to tell her little story.
“And now comes the gist of the narrative. The conductor of the train, M.L., an old and reliable servant of the company, saw the parties (the fair Mormon and her Don Juan) enter the sleeping car together, but did not know that they had secured a sleeping berth together, which they had done, other parties seeing them retire together; and behind the curtains their licentious conduct was clearly proved, from the conversation that was carried on in a loud whisper, being in substance a kind of curtain lecture. The remarks of Ann Eliza ran thus: ‘Major, you must be more cautious; you are getting too prudent [sic], and if you continue to do so we will soon be exposed and our bright but short career be gone forever. Therefore, darling, you must be more on your guard, or our doom is sealed.’
“Alas! fair, but frail Ann Eliza, you, too, should have been more cautious, more prudent, and, above all, more virtuous. Remember you are yet the lawful wife of the great main-spring of Mormonism. No legal tribunal has ever yet dissolved the bonds that unite you together as man and wife. You should consider, as you have renounced the Mormon faith and practices, that the brightest jewel in Gentile life is virtue, and those who practice it shall verily have their reward.’
“The Young Men’s Christian Association of this city acted in good faith, supposing her pure, chaste, and a bright star from Mormondom. They took her in, giving her one-third of the gross receipts, and a good Christian endorsement, which was all right for the active young men of the association had not the means or the time to find out the contrary. The startling announcement that the fair Ann Eliza was a creature of frailty was not made known until her departure from the city, and coming as it does from persons whose veracity and truth cannot be questioned, and who have no other motive than to present to the public the plain and unvarnished truth of this woman’s relations with her handsome and amorous agent, Maj. Pond, these facts are written with a view of informing the public of the true character of the woman, and to afford protection to all Christian communities from imposition by the wonderful stories and immoral conduct of the frail but beautiful Ann Eliza No. 19.”
After reading the scurrilous piece, Ann Eliza sat stunned. Her first words, when she could find words, to Major Pond were “Brigham Young’s money is at the bottom of this.”
Both Ann Eliza and Pond knew that the article could destroy them. “I was overwhelmed by it,” Ann Eliza wrote, “for I feared it would put an end to the career of usefulness which I had marked out for myself.” The audiences of 1874, as Ann Eliza had learned, would accept and applaud a woman who spoke of sex in the guise of a religious problem. But their puritanical heritage was too recent to allow them to accept and applaud a woman who, married to one man, made carnal love to another in hotel rooms and sleeping berths. True—as Story, editor of the Chicago Times, persisted— or untrue and libelous—as Ann Eliza and Major Pond loudly proclaimed—the exposé could not go unanswered. It had to be put down and branded false, or Ann Eliza was finished as a big-time lecturer.
All during that terrible night and the following day, Ann Eliza, Pond, and Redpath conferred. There was no time, they realized, to investigate the sources of the story and to discredit the persons involved and refute their allegations. In fact, not until two days later would Pond be sufficiently organized to counterattack. For the moment the question was Boston. How widely had the story been circulated in the city? Apparently it was known, but not by all. Redpath was willing to gamble. Instead of postponing the test while they defended Ann Eliza’s virtue, he decided that the lecture must go on at Tremont Temple. Redpath would still stand beside Ann Eliza as her sponsor. If Boston could be won over this night, it would give Ann Eliza a label of respectability, as well as sympathy and support, to aid her fight in the weeks that would follow. Miserable though she was, Ann Eliza agreed it was best to appear.
As the afternoon waned, there was more news from the Midwest, and again it was bad. Another Chicago Times story, date-lined Milwaukee, reported that Victoria Woodhull, during a speech on free love, had remarked that she “knew of the truth of the scandal.” Afterward Mrs. Woodhull told the press that she had been in Bloomington at the same time Ann Eliza was lecturing there and had been aware of the affair between Ann Eliza and Pond. She had no desire to criticize her fellow lecturer for “preaching one thing and practicing another.” As a matter of fact, she heartily approved of the affair. Women should be encouraged to make love with whom they pleased, when they pleased, and where they pleased. Ann Eliza had done no wrong. After all, it was free love, was it not?
Victoria Woodhull’s confirmation of the scandal damaged Ann Eliza doubly. But what infuriated her the most was that Mrs. Woodhull had lied about being in Bloomington at the time Ann Eliza and Pond were there.
The chances for a Boston success seemed bleaker than ever. Writing about the crisis two years later, Ann Eliza could still shudder. “The scandal was published on the eve of my first appearance in Boston, and I was greatly distressed lest it should injure my prospects in that city. I wanted my visit there to be a success, as I felt that if I made a favorable impression, I should hold the key to all New England. And it was to the staunch and loyal New Englanders that I looked for assistance in my labors. My new and good friends had taught me to consider Reform and New England synonymous terms… But after the attack by the Chicago paper, I regarded failure as certain.”
As the sun set, Ann Eliza, in a state of near collapse, awaited her hour of judgment. At last she pulled herself together, groomed and dressed herself with Miss Storey’s help, and rode with Pond and Redpath to Tremont Temple. Her outlook was worse than it had been in Denver. She approached the auditorium with the optimism of an aristocrat en route in the tumbrel. And, as in Denver, a surprise awaited her.
Tremont Temple was filled to the rafters with an audience of persons. The best families had turned out. No face, in the vast sea of faces, betrayed antagonism. These Boston faces were sympathetic or neutral as they all waited for the star of the evening.
At a few minutes after seven-thirty the hawkers suddenly ceased peddling their pamphlets up and down the aisles. James Redpath led Ann Eliza on stage, seated her, then himself moved to the footlights. He welcomed the huge throng and explained, “I have stepped out of my usual course to introduce Mrs. Young, as I want to be a good Christian as well as a good lyceum manager.” He went on to extoll Ann Eliza’s virtue, courage, and ability. He hit at the Federal government for delaying action against polygamy. He demanded that Congress pass legislation to this effect. “The Republican Party had, years ago, pledged itself to this work, as well as to the abolition of slavery, the twin relics of barbarism,” he said. “I appeal to the ladies of Boston to urge them on and not cease until your petitions are granted.”
Now, at last, he introduced Ann Eliza Young.
She rose demurely and walked to the speaker’s desk. The applause was protracted, and she bowed in silent humility. A woman who was in the audience wrote to the first Mrs. Webb in Utah: “When Mrs. Young rose and came forward on the platform—the desk had hidden her from my sight while sitting—the moment I saw her face and heard her voice, my heart went out to her in earnest sympathy, not on account of her peculiar domestic relations, but because of the sincerity and purity, the artlessness and womanly dignity that shone in all her demeanor.”
Apparently this member of the audience was not alone. All the persons present, it seemed, hung on each of Ann Eliza’s words. For the twenty-third time she was telling her story in public. But this night it was not stale to her, for her career and entire future depended on the effect of her narrative.
She was recounting her married life with Brigham. “Subsequently my mother became sick and he wanted to send her away,” said Ann Eliza, “to which I would not consent, nor let my mother know of his feelings, for she would not have remained if she had known them. I was neglected, insulted and humiliated in every way imaginable, and I saw that it was impossible for me to ever interest my husband. You may ask why should he take wives in this way to neglect them. I can only say that his vanity was the incentive to the act. He wished to show that though he was so old he could marry young women. During two years I did not go out half a dozen times. The Utah Relief Society gave a ball one evening, and with it came Brigham, with another wife, to invite me to go. I was mortified that he could not take me once without another, but I said not a word. My purpose was always to make people believe I didn’t care. I went to two of these delectable entertainments, one the repetition of the other. During this treatment I began to see the falsehood, misrepresentation and meanness of which he was guilty, and my mind was full of doubt and fear as to the truth of the faith, and I began to lose my ordinary good health.”
When Ann Eliza brought her tale to the point of her defection, telling the audience that she had decided “that if I must support myself, I would at last be free,” the 2,000 persons in Tremont Temple broke into thrilled applause.
After one hour and twenty minutes, Ann Eliza’s ordeal was ended. She stood poised for the verdict.
The applause was thunder. People surged toward the stage. In the wings Pond was ecstatic. “She made a great success,” he crowed in a letter to a friend. “Hundreds came forward to congratulate her.” The lady in the audience who had reported the event to the first Mrs. Webb in Utah also wrote: “After the lecture I thought to go upon the platform and speak with Mrs. Young, but the crowd prevented, and she presently left.”
Ann Eliza left, walking on air. “After the lecture was over, I felt that my hopes were realized, and that New England was open to me.” If true, she owed it all to James Redpath, she admitted. His introduction—”so kind, so reassuring, so generous, and above all, so just”—had “fairly inspired” her to speak well.
The next day the five leading Boston newspapers made the verdict official. As one, they enjoyed her, commiserated with her, and praised her moving sincerity. Redpath agreed with Pond that their performer had made “a great success.” Yet, to exploit that success properly, her name would have to be cleared. For, as Redpath had guessed, the scandal had not been fully circulated before her opening night. Now it would be, and, while the triumph in Boston would give her a residue of sympathy and support, she must answer charges against her before she could go further.
In the week after the first Boston lecture, the Chicago Times calumny was reprinted in many large cities in the East. It was also given widespread space in the West, especially in Salt Lake City, where it was published on February 24, five days after the Boston lecture. The pro-Mormon Herald reprinted it in its entirety under a bank of lurid headlines. The first headline read: “Amorous Ann Eliza.” The second: “The Nineteenth Vulgar Fraction of Brigham Young’s Wife.” The third: “Shockingly Improper Incidents of Her Later Career.” The fourth: “Flying From Polygamous Utah, She Revels in a “Pond” of Illicit Love.”
The anti-Mormon Tribune, still true to Ann Eliza, ran a slightly edited version. However, the first headline admitted: “First Class Sensation.” The second: “Ann Eliza and the Major Come to Grief.” The third: “Highly Colored Report of Naughty Doings.” The fourth: “What Is the World Coming To?” In its comments the Tribune played it safe. Perhaps the story was not true. “We caution the reader to receive it with several grains of allowance. It has been known that the pair have been dogged on their tracks ever since they started on their lecture tour. The object of this was to start up some scandal, and thus bring their labors to an end. Here is evidence of how the work has been done.” Yet it might all be true. And so the Tribune added: “In a day or two we shall hear further of this matter. If any guilty connection has been indulged in by this pair, we hope some time to come across the amorous major, and take a hand in ornamenting his slick sides with a coat of tar and feathers. The lady we more pity than condemn. She is the victim of a false system, brought up in a school of lust and libertinage, and such a finale seems a fitting corollary to such teaching.”
From Salt Lake City the Reverend C. C. Stratton wrote Ann Eliza and Pond that he and other Gentile friends were doing their best to keep public opinion favorable, but much depended on what information would be supplied by Bloomington. “Do not imagine that any of us are unduly excited or that we intend yielding to this new phase of the opposition,” wrote the reverend. “The Mormon papers are maddened by the efforts made to secure congressional action, and will scruple to nothing that promises to slur Judge McKean, myself, or any other whom they recognize as antagonists.”
In Boston both Ann Eliza and Pond had already pitted themselves against the Chicago Times. They knew, of course, that the Times thrived on yellow journalism. During the Beecher-Tilton adultery case, the Times devoted a column to depicting Beecher as “a monster of debauchery and lust.” As to Tilton, the Chicago newspaper had asked Victoria Woodhull about the cuckolded editor. “I ought to know Mr. Tilton,” Mrs. Woodhull was quoted as saying. “He was my devoted lover for more than half a year… so enamored and infatuated with each other were we that for three months we were hardly out of each other’s sight day or night. He slept every night for three months in my arms.” Mrs. Woodhull and Mr. Tilton, it might be added, had been married but not to each other.
Both Ann Eliza and Major Pond began a barrage of letters to offset the damage done by the Times. On the one hand, they tried to ferret out the facts about the scandal’s origins. On the other, they tried to enlist friendly newspapers to defend their reputations.
On February 21, 1874, Major Pond dashed off a one-page note to his publishing friend Culver. “Dear Sir: You have probably seen that cruel dirty attack on Mrs. Young & myself in the Chicago Times of the 19th. I cannot imagine its object unless its source comes through Mormon influence. We have no money to work with or I would prosecute the paper for libel at once. Will you use your paper to defend the character of as pure a woman as the Lord ever made. I have long been looking for a stab in the back from Brigham, but had no idea as to its source. All the evidence you wish as to Mrs. Young’s character & mine you can have. I am in haste. Yours, J. B. Pond.”
While Ann Eliza left most of her defense to Major Pond, she took pen in hand on March 3 to plead her chastity to Mrs. Culver, the publisher’s wife:
“Dear Mrs. Culver: Of course you have seen that dreadful article in the ‘Chicago Times.’ I have been sick in bed ever since I saw it. It was a terrible shock to me because so undeserved and so unexpected. Mr. Pond has written and sent articles to your husband, but has heard nothing from him in return. I feel so anxious about it. Oh! Mrs. Culver do not believe me guilty of this terrible thing, be charitable and in a short time my innocence will be proven. We have the most positive proof of its falsity. I am so tired of surmounting difficulties. I am discouraged trying to do so any longer. It seems the whole world are my enemies, ready and glad to believe me capable of any ingratitude, hypocrisy or crime. You are a woman and have a woman’s feelings and must understand how I suffer under this dreadful accusation.
“Letters are coming from Bloomington by every mail, almost, telling us the Young Men’s Christian Association are investigating it thoroughly and can find no truth in it. They have found the man who wrote the article who says he will retract and get it into the ‘Times’ if possible. Marsh says he will publish our vindication far and wide. We have taken steps toward a suit for libel against the ‘Times.’ I see Vic Woodhull has come out against me in Milwaukee with the most barefaced falsehood ever spoken. She says she was in Bloomington when I was there and knew all about the affair, but did not like to throw the first stone and denounced me for a hypocrite for preaching one thing and practicing another. She said she believed in those things herself. I think I told you of her attempt to have an interview with me in Burlington, Iowa, and my refusing her request. She takes her revenge in this way. She was in Nebraska when I was in Bloomington. I have always had a lady companion who has not been away from me for five minutes since I left Salt Lake and has always occupied the same bed. At Evanston III. near Chicago I got a lady to travel with me she is indeed a perfect lady and everybody likes her very much. She is about 34 years of age is what is called an old maid. She is very good as a nurse and assists me in every way, her name is Miss Ruth Storey and old and intimate friend of Mrs. Pond’s when alive. Mr. Pond’s daughter remained at Evanston to go to school. I have had splendid success in Boston, and found many very warm friends, nobody here believes that story. I send you a little paper published by Mr. Redpath in my behalf, containing extracts from the Boston papers. Please let me hear from you if it is only a half dozen lines. Trusting your confidence in me remains unshaken I am most sincerely Your Friend. Mrs. Ann Eliza Young.”
In the almost two weeks between Major Pond’s letter to Mr. Culver and Ann Eliza’s letter to Mrs. Culver a thorough investigation of the scandal had taken place. The investigation, at Pond’s suggestion, was conducted by Dr. B. P. Marsh, chairman of the lecture committee of the Bloomington Y.M.C.A., and W. W. Wallace, corresponding secretary of the same Y.M.C.A. While these two played Dupin in Bloomington, Ann Eliza hired one Leonard Swett, probably an attorney, to look into the matter in Chicago. In Kansas, C. N. Shaw, editor of the Leavenworth Commercial, and in Utah the staff of the Salt Lake City Tribune determined, on their own, to ferret out what facts they could find.
Before proceeding with their investigation, all parties demanded a plain and candid statement from Ann Eliza and Major Pond as to their actual activities in Bloomington and on the train to Jacksonville. In a series of open letters to the press, Pond, as spokesman for Ann Eliza and himself, gave their version of the two nights in question.
According to Pond, he had attended the first Bloomington lecture with an old Salt Lake City friend, Colonel J. H. Wickizer, who had assisted Ann Eliza in her escape the year before and who was now on a vacation in Illinois. After the lecture, around ten- thirty in the evening, the two men deposited Ann Eliza and Pond’s daughter in the lady lecturer’s suite of the Ashley House. After that, the two men retired to the privacy of Pond’s separate quarters next door—it was “cold” in the room that night, Pond remembered—to converse until midnight. Then Pond and the colonel parted and went to their respective beds. The statement in the Chicago Times that he had not used his bedroom key that night, said Pond, was a fabrication.
The following evening in Bloomington, after the lecture, when the traveling trio boarded the Jacksonville train, Ann Eliza was “very sick,” and Pond “had to assist her almost constantly” until their destination was reached. This last, presumably, was an explanation for any visits that Pond may have made to his client’s berth during the night. In short, he had performed as Florence Nightingale and not as Casanova. Furthermore, said Pond, he had seen no train conductor and no train conductor had seen him until their arrival in Jacksonville at eight o’clock in the morning. The conductor had been sound asleep in his stateroom the entire journey, and the only employee of the train that Pond met was the colored porter who made up his berth.
The Salt Lake City Tribune obtained confirmation of Pond’s story fiom Colonel Wickizer and was satisfied. The Leavenworth Commercial received similar confirmation from an anonymous friend in Bloomington, who had done some sleuthing for the editor and had found the charges of misconduct against Ann Eliza “unwarranted and unfounded.” The Bloomington friend added: “There is a small organization of Mormons in the neighborhood and it is the belief of this entire community that the correspondence of the Times was instigated by the resident saints.”
Meanwhile Dr. Marsh and Wallace, of the Bloomington Y.M.C.A., had moved with brisk efficiency. The foul libel had its origins, they learned, in a Bloomington barbershop several days after Ann Eliza and Pond had left the city. A customer remarked, in admiration of Ann Eliza’s beauty, “that Pond had a good thing of it.” The Jacksonville train conductor, who was present in the shop, nodded agreement and said, “The porter says Pond slept with her on the train, and I believe it.” The choice rumor spread, reached the ears of a reporter on the Bloomington Pantagraph—”a local Democratic journal”—who wrote it as a news feature and sent it to Editor Story of the Chicago Times. Story was delighted to have the feature, being an admirer of Brigham Young and having earlier praised the Prophet as “a man of iron inflexibility, much forecast, extraordinary ability and a vast fund of good humor.”
With this knowledge of the scandal’s origins, Dr. Marsh confronted the traitorous Bloomington reporter. “He denied it,” Dr. Marsh wrote Pond, “but I crowded and scared him and made him own up and give me all the information he had to base his statements upon. The article was written on mere bar-room talk, as I understand it, but the basis of it all comes from the train conductor.” When tracked down, the train conductor and the Ashley House clerk both vigorously denied responsibility for starting the odious rumor.
In Chicago, Ann Eliza’s researcher, Leonard Swett, supplied her with his findings. She wrote: “George C. Bates, a Mormon lawyer, of low repute, and twenty thousand dollars, induced the Paper to publish the article which originated in the foul imagination of Bates.”
While the guilty parties, if such existed, were never prosecuted, the investigation had served its purpose. Dr. Marsh and Wallace prepared, for Redpath, an ecstatic recommendation of Ann Eliza’s talents and virtues and then added a vindicating statement:
“As reports tending to injure the character of Mrs. Young have been extensively circulated by designing parties, and as said reports purport to be based upon Mrs. Young’s conduct while in this city, we have investigated said reports and find them to be false, and our association has no reason to detract in any wise from the above recommendation.”
Most of the nation’s press was satisfied. The Leavenworth Commercial announced that the scandalous statements “in regard to Major Pond and Mrs. Ann Eliza Young are sensational and false in every particular.” The Denver Mirror wrote: “The recent ‘exposé,’ so-called, in the Chicago Times, of alleged disreputable conduct on the part of ‘Ann Eliza,’ the escaped Mormon (who recently lectured in this place), was a most reprehensible, cruel act, and a burning disgrace to any journal pretending to respectability. Its eagerness to pander to a depraved public taste prompted the Times to devote its circulation to the crushing of a defenceless woman. Now it appears that there was no foundation for the story…” The Salt Lake City Tribune, convinced that the scandal had been proved “lying and libelous,” attacked the editor who had printed it: “Storey [sic] of the Times has been publicly whipped upon the streets as a woman defamer. He is naturally a cynical, atrabilarious, cold-blooded creature; shunned by his race, and repaying this aversion with intense hate.”
Major Pond had promised to sue both the Chicago Times and the Salt Lake City Herald for libel unless they retracted. There is no evidence that either sheet retracted, and there is no evidence that Major Pond ever sued them.
In Salt Lake City the fact that the Herald had not apologized seemed to trouble no one except Chauncey Webb, Ann Eliza’s father. On March 16, 1874, he addressed a letter to the proprietors of the Herald:
“Gentlemen: You have published several libellous and false statements concerning my daughter, Mrs. Ann Eliza Young, very damaging to her character, and extremely painful to the feelings of her friends. The falsity of the statements made in your columns has been since abundantly proved, but you have not had the fairness and the manliness to retract. I write to require at your hands a full and fair retraction of the false allegations made, that the denial may be as widely disseminated as the scandal, and that my daughter’s name may be vindicated from the vile aspersions cast upon it.
“I ask the favor of an early reply to this. I am, gentlemen, Very obediently yours, C. G. Webb.”
Chauncey Webb waited four weeks without receiving a reply, and then angrily he sent a copy of this letter to the more friendly Tribune. “Feeling that I am in duty and honor bound to protect my child,” he wrote, “and vindicate her character from the vile expressions of unprincipled caluminators and low-bred serfs who have bartered away their manhood for less than a mess of pottage, I ask the insertion of this letter in the Tribune, together with my request of the Herald, which I herewith furnish so that your readers may at once comprehend the feelings of a father when his child is attacked by worse than assassins. Shame on the cowardly villain who stabs a lady in the back!”
Whether Chauncey’s correspondence had been inspired by a surge of paternal affection for his distant daughter or whether it had been encouraged by a plea from the daughter herself was a fact never established. Suffice it that the paternal outburst moved Ann Eliza deeply and moved the Herald and Chicago Times not at all.
Despite the unqualified endorsement of Ann Eliza given by the Bloomington Y.M.C.A., and the acceptance of it by the press, James Redpath refused to be complacent. When making subsequent bookings, he learned that lecture committees in various towns had received anonymous copies of the Salt Lake City Herald with “the original scandal article, heavily marked.” The inference seemed plain to Redpath. He publicly accused Brigham Young of this guerrilla warfare. Because some timid committees were affected by resurrection of this old literature, Redpath saw fit to publish a broadside entitled The Mormon Slander. It consisted largely of letters written by Dr. Marsh and Wallace and their gradual clearance of Ann Eliza’s name.
However, for the most, the flurry of scandal had little effect on Ann Eliza’s subsequent career. After the success of her first lecture in Boston, Redpath and Pond called on every newspaper, frankly displaying the Chicago Times article to those editors who had not seen it. The editors, said Ann Eliza, were chivalrous. “They say such a report emanating from such a source,” wrote Pond, “is only a compliment to Mrs. Young in New England.”
With growing confidence, Redpath arranged for Ann Eliza to deliver her second and third lectures respectively in Tremont Temple and in Horticultural Hall. The second lecture, on polygamy in general, was offered on February 24 to “an audience of respectable size.” Though ill, and advised to cancel out, Ann Eliza went on. At the lecture’s end she was heartily applauded.
On March 1, 1874, Ann Eliza introduced the new, third lecture that she had so long been writing. Entitled “The Mormon Religion,” it presented a detailed account of Mormon history, customs, behavior, and much inside information on the leaders of the Church. An absorbed audience listened to Ann Eliza’s ringing finale:
“It may seem strange to you that I, once a member of the Mormon Church, can characterize its leaders and usages so severely. But who could have better right or cause than one whose entire early life was dwarfed and warped by its teachings; whose later life was imbittered and blighted by its practices, and who yet experiences the horror of the nightmare which rests upon the soul?… I had known no other faith and had been taught that this was heaven’s last, best gift. I had no other standard of comparison. I dared not question. The system must be right, and my doubts, when doubts arose, must be wrong. With the spread of Gentile influences came other standards of religion. That was the time of doubt and vacillation, of struggle and agony, and finally of triumph. And now, should I love the religion, which tortured and enslaved me? As well expect the prisoner to love his cell and the captive to hug his chain. At last I am free! My bondage is of the past, and I rejoice in my deliverance. I see the false system as it is, and loathe it in all its enormities, and expect to loathe it more and more while I live. I see others in its thraldom and the public looking on in its indifference, and consecrate myself to the work of exposing the cheat, and scattering the apathy, and delivering, as far as my example and voice may, those who still linger in the embrace of death.”
Ann Eliza’s style had been emboldened and impassioned by her recent persecutions. The improvement did not pass unnoticed. The Boston Journal congratulated her in a lead editorial, which was headed: “A Thrilling Narrative.”
Thereafter, Ann Eliza was Boston’s darling. Three more times, during March and April, she appeared in Horticultural Hall and Wesleyan Hall to sizable and enthusiastic crowds. These successes, as well as the growing sympathy for a frail woman so gravely maligned by the Mormon hierarchy, inundated James Redpath with booking requests from Pennsylvania, New York, and the New England states. Reassured at last, Redpath offered her $2,000 for four weeks of lectures outside Boston. He offered Major Pond a full-time job in the Boston office of his Lyceum Bureau. Both Ann Eliza and Pond were happy to accept his offers.
Ann Eliza was on the circuit again. Engagements in South Boston and Springfield in Massachusetts, Titusville and Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, and Williamsburg in Virginia were unanimously favorable. Then, a succession of triumphs in New England was climaxed on March 20, 1874, by a meeting—after one of her lectures—with the Vice President of the United States, sixty-two-year-old Henry Wilson, a former shoe manufacturer and senator. Wilson heartily congratulated Ann Eliza and told her that she “would certainly do much good.”
Less than two weeks later, on April 2, 1874, Ann Eliza arrived in New York City for the first time. America’s largest community had over a million inhabitants. This was the playground of William Marcy Tweed, Henry Ward Beecher, Phineas T. Barnum, Jim Fisk, and Horace Greeley. It was also the showcase for every great entertainer or theatrical presentation in the country. Riding through New York, Ann Eliza saw that Niblo’s Garden featured Frank Mayo in Davy Crockett, The Colosseum offered a Cyclorama of Paris by Moonlight, the Academy of Music was presenting an Italian opera, Booth’s Theatre was starring Adelaide Neilson in Romeo and Juliet, and Association Hall advertised the Caroline Singers, a company of slaves singing favorite southern melodies. If Ann Eliza had any misgivings about matching this competition, or about her own exploitability, they were dissipated the moment of her arrival in the Astor House. For the press was waiting.
That evening Ann Eliza agreed to receive a reporter representing the New York Herald. She welcomed him, wearing her black silk dress with white ruffles at the neckline.
“I believe, Madam,” said the reporter, “that you are known as Mrs. Brigham Young No. 19, and that you have a divorce suit pending against Brigham Young, the Mormon Prophet?”
“Yes, I have applied for a divorce in the United States District Court of Utah and for alimony; but there is a dispute between the territorial and Federal courts over this case. My name is Anne Eliza Webb, and I was born in Nauvoo, III. I lived five years with Brigham Young as his wife, but I had no children by him. I was married before and had two children.”
After explaining why she had married Brigham and how she had escaped him, she went on to other matters:
“I have been lecturing in different parts of the country—Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas and other states. The Mormons have received 5,000 converts this year of both sexes, and they have 600 missionaries in Europe who are continually making proselytes. I do not think that Mormonism will fall at any early day, or at least not until Congress shall have legislated it out of existence and legalized the marriages and offspring of the poor women who wish to be liberated. Then the women will become respected and Mormonism will go down. The Gentiles do not go into country places much, only to Salt Lake City. Two or three people have been murdered who were witnesses against Brigham Young, and this gives rise to suspicion of a motive for their deaths. The reason of Mormonism being kept alive is principally in the fact that the missionaries of the sect in Europe visit the most ignorant classes and inform them that the streets are paved with gold and the land flowing with milk and honey. Brigham’s son-in-law, Hiram B. Clawson, offered me $15,000 to compromise the suit, but I refused to do it. They thought that if I should succeed in my suit many other women would follow my example. I shall lecture in Baltimore and Washington, but shall lecture in New York City before I go to Washington.”
Ann Eliza’s debut in Manhattan’s Association Hall, the eve of April 9, was a box-office failure and a critical success. According to the New York Times, she attracted a “scant” audience, but her discourse was found “intelligent and intelligible.” Major Pond worked hard, and succeeding lectures drew larger crowds and greater praise. The New York Tribune compared her platform prowess favorably to that of Henry Ward Beecher. The Sun thought her as effective as any lady speaker in the land and added: “Mrs. Young has none of the practiced archness or coquettish wriggles of the women of Eastern society. Her manner is subdued, ladylike, and very seldom not entirely self-possessed.” In later lectures, the World noticed, “many of the audience pressed forward to the platform to congratulate Mrs. Young.”
The conquest complete, Ann Eliza moved on. The cities of Rochester, Buffalo, Toronto, and Baltimore fell before her. And at last, after five months, she was on her way to the showdown in Washington, D.C.
In the nation’s capital, Ann Eliza had a formidable enemy. This was forty-seven-year-old George Q. Cannon, who had been born in Liverpool, England, had migrated to the United States, and had been the youngest of Mormon Apostles on the day Brigham took over the leadership of the Saints in Illinois. He had also, some years before, helped Ann Eliza divorce her first husband. Earlier in the year 1874, Cannon had been elected territorial delegate to Congress from Utah, after his Mormon’s People’s Party had overwhelmed the Gentile’s Liberal Party at the polls. In spite of possessing four wives and not being a naturalized citizen, he had been seated in the House of Representatives over heavy protest.
It was Cannon’s task at this critical moment to see that Ann Eliza’s mission was thwarted. The moment was critical because the strongest anti-polygamy bill yet placed before Congress, introduced at President Grant’s suggestion, was still being bitterly debated. The bill had been presented on January 5, 1874, by Representative Luke Potter Poland, of Vermont, Brigham’s home state. Poland, farmer, attorney, Republican, enemy of the Ku Klux Klan, ten years married to his dead wife’s sister, was a Republican of integrity and prestige. His bill superseded the weak anti-bigamy measure of a dozen years earlier. The Poland Law, as it was popularly called, took from Mormon probate courts all “civil, chancery, and criminal jurisdictions” and turned these cases over to the Federal government. Worse, from Brigham’s viewpoint, the Poland Law stated that in cases where polygamists were to be prosecuted, the jurors would be disqualified if they practiced or adhered to a belief in plural marriage.
When Redpath arranged to book Ann Eliza into Washington, D.C., Cannon heard of it at once, and either he or his aides submitted the Chicago Times scandal to the religious societies planning to sponsor her. Shocked, the societies tried to cancel their dates. Redpath would have none of it. As he replied to one organization in the capital city:
“You have every indorsement from religious leaders and bodies, and to cancel the engagement is simply to give aid and comfort to those vicious Mormons they above all desire.
“As to her not coming to Washington, that is out of the question. It is her objective point, and there she will go and speak if every paper and reporter are bought up by Brigham in advance. It would be moral suicide to do otherwise.
“If I believed that there was a foundation for the story, I would drop her quicker than lightning, for it would damage me all over the country. But to do so now would be cowardice.
“I have no intention of being sowed by Brigham Young, and on reflection I trust you will not yield to his emissaries either.”
After reading this, the wavering organization sent a telegram to Redpath. It read: “Send Mrs. Young; dates agreed upon.”
Ann Eliza, accompanied by Major Pond and Miss Storey, and carrying letters of introduction to President Grant and James G. Blaine, Speaker of the House of Representatives, reached Washington, D.C., on the spring day of April 13, 1874. She was met by General Maxwell, her old Salt Lake City friend, who was in Washington to contest the congressional seat that he had lost to George Q. Cannon.
At once General Maxwell escorted Ann Eliza to the Ladies Reception Room of the House of Representatives. The members were in heated session at the time, and James G. Blaine, a wispy, white-bearded former publisher who had been one of the founders of the Republican Party and would be that party’s losing presidential candidate two years thence, was in the Speaker’s chair, gavel in hand. Ann Eliza sent her calling card and letter of introduction to him. Blaine studied her card, and then he rose. Major Pond would never forget what happened next. “He came out and shook hands with her and was half tempted to be a little bit funny and jocose, but he discovered at once that she was a lady, a woman with a cause, and an earnest one, and in a moment his attention was riveted. He did not go back to his chair but sent word to somebody else to take his place, and in a few minutes somebody else came into the speaker’s room, and in not over twenty minutes that room was packed with members of Congress.”
Representatives continued to pour out of the chamber, milling about Ann Eliza, fighting to hear her and to be introduced. One of the representatives, returning to the chamber, ran into George Q. Cannon.
“I have just seen Mrs. Young,” the representative said.
Cannon stiffened. “Did she speak of me?”
“Yes, she did.”
“Only to lie about me, I suppose,” said Cannon.
“No, she did not lie about you.”
Cannon turned on his heel and stalked out of the chamber.
By now Ann Eliza was passing out photographs of polygamous wives to the congressmen, to show graphic evidence of how the system had left its imprint on their once attractive faces. Someone suggested that she be invited inside the chamber. Graciously Blaine led her inside. “There was a stampede on the floor,” wrote Pond, “and she held an ovation for two hours. Everybody wanted to see and hear her.”
The following day, on the evening of April 14, 1874, Ann Eliza spoke on “My Life in Mormon Bondage” before a hall filled predominately with congressmen and other government officials and their wives.
Her opening words departed from her usual text. Instead, she began:
“I know that you come to hear me from curiosity. I do not know why there should be anything curious in my being the nineteenth wife of Brigham Young. Polygamy is sanctioned by you in the national councils. While George Q. Cannon, of Utah, a polygamist with four wives, sits there, the peer of delegates from the other territories, Congress is responsible for the system which makes a plurality of wives possible in the Mormon country.”
With that she had her audience in her hand. An hour and a half later, she was the toast of Washington. With the exception of the Chronicle, which Cannon had talked into publishing “a burlesque report,” the press was unanimous in shouting her praises.
The word of mouth spread. It reached the White House. When Ann Eliza, in her black silk gown, came before another huge gathering for her second lecture on “Polgamy As It Is,” she saw in the foremost box the grave countenances of stubby President Ulysses S. Grant and his cross-eyed wife, Julia, flanked by their party and by the Secret Service.
If ever she needed inspiration, this was the night. As applause subsided, she began:
“Polygamy among the savages or Turks does not especially shock us. It harmonizes with their religion and condition. But polygamy in the United States is, to the American mind, a revolting fact. Considered geographically, it is an unwelcome intruder. Considered historically, it is a startling anachronism. Considered in the light of our Christian civilization and ideas, it is an ugly excrescence. Polygamy in the United States! Polygamy among Anglo-Saxons! Who was original enough to conceive the idea? Who was bold enough to inaugurate the practice? And, above all, how could this be done under the guise of religion? Has it, in truth, an existence among us, or have stories which have floated to us from Utah described monsters of the imagination rather than realities of the experience? Polygamy in the United States is no figment of the fancies. It is not the creation of sensational storytellers nor irresponsible Bohemians; it is a prevailing social custom among 100,000 of your citizens. It has been preached among them as an essential article of faith for more than twenty years. It originated with a man of Puritan ancestry and born in the State of Vermont. Its greatest exemplar and strongest exponent is another native of Vermont. Many of its leading advocates are native-born citizens of the United States. I propose devoting this lecture to the origin, spread, extent and fruit of this system. I have been a witness of much that I shall relate; of some things I have been a victim.”
Midway through the lecture, relating details of the harem life prevailing in Utah, Ann Eliza struck back at George Q. Cannon.
“The Congressional Delegate from Utah has four wives, the third being my cousin. Contrary to the usual custom, his first wife rules him as with a rod of iron. She snares his society and is the companion of drives and social hours, has every luxury for her table, while the others are almost entirely neglected. It is now commonly reported in Utah that he has put away all but one to gain his seat in Congress, but the report is without any foundation whatever. He denied through the newspapers that he was living in violation of the law, and explained it to his wives by saying the law was unconstitutional and the lawmakers were the transgressors, not him.” The sensation in the audience was tremendous. Even the President’s face reflected his outrage.
Soon the lecture was done. Applause dinned in Ann Eliza’s ears. In minutes she was surrounded. Suddenly her admirers parted to give way to President Grant. He took Ann Eliza’s hand and congratulated her. “It will be an everlasting disgrace to the country,” he said, “if Cannon is allowed to take his seat in Congress.”
Cannon was allowed to take his seat in Congress. But perhaps it was not a coincidence that not many weeks after Ann Eliza’s appearance, the long-delayed Poland Law against polygamy was passed by congressmen in the Senate and House who had heard Ann Eliza and was signed into being by the President who had congratulated her.
The twenty-seventh wife had successfully accomplished her first mission at last.