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Date Posted: 10:24:30 08/25/12 Sat
Author: SWC
Subject: The Mormons Part 4


How They Lived

“Upon arriving in the Salt Lake Valley, the Mormons literally had to make a place to live. They created irrigation systems, laid out farms, built houses, churches and schools. Access to water was crucially important. Almost immediately, Brigham Young sent out scouting parties to identify and claim additional community sites. While it was difficult to find large areas in the Great Basin where water sources were dependable and growing seasons long enough to raise vitally important subsistence crops, satellite communities began to be formed in all directions. Church members eventually headed south into present day Arizona and Mexico, west into California, north into Idaho and Canada, and east into Wyoming, settling many familiar communities in those areas.” (One of them would have been the fictional town of ’Beehive’ in “The Pursued”.)

“The experiences of returning members of the Mormon Battalion were also important in establishing new communities. On their journey west, the Mormon soldiers had identified dependable rivers and fertile river valleys in Colorado, Arizona and southern California. In addition, as the discharged men traveled to rejoin their families in the Salt Lake Valley, they moved through southern Nevada and southern Utah.”

It was really the beginning of a new era. 53% of the new colony was under age 19 and 25% under age 8. The territory wasn’t even technically party of the United States yet as the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ending the Mexican War had not been signed yet. (That came in 1848.) Young organized the territory into a new state called “Deseret” and petitioned for it to be entered into the Union. Instead the area became designated “Utah Territory”. The fact that Deseret included all of present-day Utah and Nevada and much of Colorado, New Mexico and California may have had something to do with Congress’s decision not to grant so much territory and power to Young. Still, Young was appointed both Territorial Governor and Head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs for Utah Territory. His dealings with the local tribes were so successful that the Indians used the words “Mormons” and “Americans” separately, considering them to be different peoples.

“Like so many of the opportunists who came to the west for their destiny, the Saints saw the hand of the Almighty in their settlement, especially the next year when first frost and then massive clouds of locusts threatened to devour their ripening wheat. With seeming providential timing, the seagulls that dwelled around the giant saltwater lake swarmed over the horde of insects and devoured them….More than gulls, however, the Mormons owed their salvation to Brigham Young, who kept them together with a mixture of threats, cajolery, inspiration and a host of other appeals to their spiritual and mental needs. He even prevented all but a few from answering the siren call of gold in 1849. “

Four days after arriving in the Salt Lake Valley, Brigham Young designated the site for the Salt Lake Temple, intended to be the third temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to replace the abandoned Kirtland Temple in Ohio and Nauvoo Temple in Illinois“. It took 40 years to build the great temple and tabernacle. Smaller temples in St. George, Logan and Manti, Utah were actually completed first, but the one in what became Salt Lake City became the symbol of the region and the religion.

Young attempted to model the new society based on Joseph Smith’s “United Order” concept: “Participants would deed (consecrate) all their property to the United Order, which would in turn deed back an "inheritance" (or "stewardship") which allowed members to control the property; private property was not eradicated but was rather a fundamental principle of this system. At the end of each year, any excess that the family produced from their stewardship was voluntarily given back to the Order. If a participant left the church, they forfeited their stewardship and the property reverted back to the church. The Order in each community was operated by the local Bishop….Under Young's leadership, producers would generally deed their property to the Order, and all members of the order would share the cooperative's net income, often divided into shares based on the amount of property originally contributed. Sometimes, the members of the Order would receive wages for their work on the communal property…Under the United Order, private property was never abolished. The sharing of goods, often cited as communalism, was completely voluntarily. Members of the Church who chose to participate in the United Order voluntarily deeded their properties to the Church, which would then, deed all or a portion of it back to the original property owner. The "residue", or property which was over and above what the owner and his family required for themselves, was used by the Church to provide to the less fortunate, who would be required to pay it back either monetarily or by labor. The private property owner was never forced to participate in the Order nor was his property forcefully confiscated. Private property owners were free to join or leave the orders and were in total control of their deeded properties.”

The experiments with the United Order concept tended to fail because property was mostly land and livestock and the value of both varied greatly. This not only created gaps in the income level and lifestyle of various members of the community but caused members to migrate from place to place and thus from community to community. There were also conflicts over the leadership of each community. Eventually, Utah reverted to a more traditional capitalistic economic model. With the rise of communism in the 20th century, church leaders took pains to point out the difference between the United Order and communism: "Communism and all other similar isms bear no relationship whatever to the United Order. They are merely the clumsy counterfeits which Satan always devises of the Gospel plan .... The United Order leaves every man free to choose his own religion as his conscience directs. Communism destroys man's God-given free agency; the United Order glorifies it. Latter-day Saints cannot be true to their faith and lend aid, encouragement, or sympathy to any of these false philosophies ...."

Young had had a state constitution written up but had it sent to Iowa for printing because there was no printing press in the new state. Young continued to dream of a state based on Mormonism but that became impossible with the gold and silver rushes in California, Nevada and Colorado and the coming of the transcontinental railroad, which brought many non-Mormon settlers to Utah, which eventually, (in 1896), became a secular state. But in the early years, Brigham Young and the Quorum of the 12 Apostles were in complete charge. “During his time as governor, Young directed the establishment of settlements throughout Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Nevada, and parts of southern Colorado and northern Mexico. Under his direction the pioneers built roads and bridges, forts, irrigation projects, and established public welfare, organized a militia, and pacified the Native Americans.”

The Mormons were part of the Pony Express experiment, with adventurous young lads trying out their horse-riding skills in Salt Lake City for William Russell, whose Leavenworth & Pike’s Peak Express Company was organizing the run. The candidates had to be young, (around 20) and light, (about 125 pounds). Eighty riders were hired at the beginning. Forty more hired on later. 200 sturdy mustangs, “warranted sound, not to exceed 15 hands high, well broke to the saddle” were advertised for. Most of them were obtained from the Army. 190 relay stations were built. The enterprise only lasted a couple of years before going out of business because of the completion of the first intercontinental telegraph line in 1861. But four of the riders went on to become Mormon bishops.

The flag of Utah has a beehive on it. The bee was symbolic to Mormons of a trait they treasured: industriousness, a willingness to work and work together to build things. Visitors, even those who were critical of the Mormons in other areas, all credited them for this. British explorer Richard Burton, taking note of all the working class Englishmen he found in Salt Lake City, called Mormonism “the faith of the poor” but accused it’s ambitious adherents of “a materialism so leveling that even the materialist must reject it”. But “he was forced to acknowledge that Mormon diligence had made Utah an outstanding success” and “in point of mere morality, the Mormon community is perhaps purer than any other of equal numbers.”

Novelist Helen Hunt Jackson “observed that Salt Lake City was clean, orderly, beautifully planed and planted and prosperous…(it was) the strongest testimony to the uprightness, honesty, industry and purity of Mormon lives and their charity, also“ .

Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield, (Massachusetts), Republican, writing after his tour of the west, credited the Mormons for being “outstanding in material matters….They had built a city that he found surpassingly lovely and for which he did not hesitate to predict a future as ‘the great central city of the west’ and, with unflagging diligence and skill, they had irrigated the desert and caused it to bloom into productive farmland. “ Bowles summed up “All our experience and observation in Utah tended to increase our appreciation of the value of it’s material progress and development to the nation; to justify congratulations to the Mormons and to the country for the wealth they have created and the order, frugality, morality and industry that have been organized in this remote spot on our continent.”

Things might have progressed without further problems but for several issues involving Mormon beliefs that the rest of the country found increasingly intolerable.

While Joseph Smith may have evolved a doctrine of polygamy to justify his actions, Brigham Young devoutly believed in it. “Though most historians think that polygamy among Latter Day Saints was taught and practiced by Joseph Smith, Young's predecessor, many adherents to other Latter Day Saint denominations such as the Community of Christ believe that polygamy in the Mormon church originated under Brigham Young. The church's first official statement on the subject was given by Brigham Young in 1853 after the church had arrived in Utah. Young's words came nine years after the purported original revelation by Joseph Smith

Young was perhaps the most famous polygamist of the early American church, marrying a total of 55 wives, 54 of them after becoming a Latter Day Saint. Young had 56 children by 16 of his wives; 46 of his children reached adulthood. Sources have varied on the number of Young's wives due to differences in what observers have considered to be a "wife".There were 55 women that Young was sealed to during his lifetime. While the majority of the sealings were "for eternity", some were "for time only". However, it is suspected that not all of the 55 marriages were conjugal and Young did not live with a number of his wives or publicly hold them out as wives, which has led to confusion on numbering. This is in part due to the complexity of how wives were identified at the time. If a woman was married and her husband died, she was often remarried to someone else in proxy of her former husband so that all of the children she should have became her former husband's children. Furthermore, for a time women were having themselves sealed to men without a man even knowing about it. Of his 55 wives, 21 had never been married before; 16 were widows; six were divorced; six had living husbands; and the marital status of six others are unknown.”.

(Young, technically was a polygynist. Polygyny is the practice of a man having more than one wife. Polyandry is the practice of a wife having more than one husband. Polygamy is the practice of having more than one spouse at a time and thus includes both polygyny and polyandry. The Mormons practiced only polygyny.)

Young built two houses for his wives, the Lion House and the Beehive House. A contemporary of Young wrote: "It was amusing to walk by Brigham Young's big house, a long rambling building with innumerable doors. Each wife has an establishment of her own, consisting of parlor, bedroom, and a front door, the key of which she keeps in her pocket". The Beehive house actually had a beehive atop it. It symbolized the Mormon believe in industriousness. In fact “Deseret” was the Mormon word for honeybee.

Apostle Orson Pratt announced in 1852 “"It is well known, however, to the congregation before me, that the Latter-day Saints have embraced the doctrine of a plurality of wives, as part of their religious faith. … I think, if I am not mistaken, that the Constitution gives the privilege to all inhabitants of this country, of the free exercise of their religious notions, and the freedom of their faith, and the practice of it. Then if it can be proven … that the Latter-day Saints have actually embraced, as a part and portion of their religion,
the doctrine of a plurality of wives, it is constitutional.”

Young then took the podium and said “I prophesy to you that the principle of polygamy will make its way, and will triumph over the prejudices and all the priestcraft of the day; it will be embraced by the most intelligent parts of the world as one of the best doctrines ever proclaimed to any people. You have no reason whatever to be uneasy; there is no occasion for your fearing that a vile mob will come hither to trample underfoot the sacred liberty which, by the Constitution of our country, is guaranteed to us. It has been a long time publicly known, and in fact was known during his life, that Joseph had more than one wife. A Senator, a member of Congress, was well aware of it, and was not the less our friend for all that; so much so, as to say that were this principle not adopted by the United States, we would live to see human life reduced to a maximum of thirty years. He said openly that Joseph had hit upon the best plan for re-invigorating men, and assuring a long life to them; and, also, that the Mormons are very good and very virtuous. We could not have proclaimed this principle a few years ago; everything must abide its time, but I am now ready to proclaim it. This revelation has been in my possession for many years, and who knew it? No one, except those whose business it was to know it. I have a patent lock to my writing-desk, and nothing gets out of it that ought not to get out of it. Without the doctrine which this revelation makes known to us, no one could raise himself high enough to become a god.”

Pratt’s first wife Sarah took a dim view of polygamy: “[polygamy] completely demoralizes good men and makes bad men correspondingly worse. As for the women—well, God help them! First wives it renders desperate, or else heart-broken, mean-spirited creatures…Here was my husband, gray headed, taking to his bed young girls in mockery of marriage. Of course there could be no joy for him in such an intercourse except for the indulgence of his fanaticism and of something else, perhaps, which I hesitate to mention.”

The same Samuel Bowles who had congratulated the Mormons on creating a “surpassingly lovely” city in the desert, felt he was kept away from the Mormon women so he could not find out what their real attitude was toward polygamy. He did manage to hear one woman, “with bated breath and almost hissing fury, say “Polygamy is tolerable enough for the men but it is hell for the women.” Bowles predicted the “end of polygamy, a form of slavery, and the Mormon social system, which he regarded as barbaric, monarchical and antagonistic to everything that was American“. An ironic statement since Mormonism had become popular in part because it was an American religion.

Leigh Freeman, editor of the Ogden Freeman, campaigned against polygamy, calling plural wives “concubines” and saying that Salt Lake City was a “fit place for the Sultan of Turkey.”

Charles Carleton Coffin, a Boston Journalist, claimed to have had gotten access to Brigham Young’s ‘harem‘. “A passage leads to to the private office of Brigham --back of which is his private bedroom, where his concubines wait upon him- Amelia today, Emeline tomorrow- Lucy the day after. Brigham’s lawfully wedded wife was Mary Ann Angell. She married the prophet while he was a young man, before he was a prophet. She lives in a large stone building in the rear of the harem. Brigham does not often visit her now. Lucy Decker was the lawful wife of Isaac Seeley and mother of two children but Brigham Young could make her a queen in heaven and so, bidding good-bye to Isaac, she became first concubine and had added eight children to the prophet’s household. Harriet Cook indulged in tantrums and did not hesitate to consign Brigham to the real of evil spirits. Lucy Bigelow was affable and lady-like. Miss Twiss had borne no children and therefore ranked low in the prophet’s esteem. She looks after his clothes, sews his buttons on his shirts and acts the part of a housewife. Like Lucy Decker, Harriet Barney had deserted her husband to become a concubine so that she might be exhalted in heaven but, having failed to add any children to the household, was not even honored in the harem. Mary Bigelow had been am member of the harem for several years but Brigham had tired of her and sent her away. Emeline Free was the apple of the Prophet’s eye. The favor shown her brought on a row. The other concubines carried this jealousy to such a pitch that the Prophet had a private passage constructed from his bedroom to Emeline’s room, so that his visits to her could be made without observation. She had produced eight children. Amelia Folsom, another favorite but apparently a less tractable one has things pretty much her own way- a private box at the theater, a carriage of her own, silks, satins, a piano, a parlor elegantly furnished. If the prophet slights her, she pays him in his own coin.”

Sir Richard Burton, the English explorer, (no relation to the actor of the next century, who should have played him in a movie), had made a name for himself by entering the sanctum of Islam at Mecca. He now set his sights on Salt Lake City. He disapproved of a number of things. His hotel was short on servants and boot polish. More importantly, the state was dry. “Bottles and decanters were not forthcoming.” He found polygamy not as interesting as advertised: “I looked in vain for the outhouse harems in which certain romancers had informed me that wives are kept, like any other stock“. Was Coffin making his story up?

Novelist Helen Hunt Jackson found polygamy “oppressive” but wrote “ You look earnestly into the faces of all the women you see. They are standing on doorsills, with laughing babies in their arms: they are talking gayly with each other. They are walking by the side of men; they are carrying burdens or seeking pleasure, just as other women do- apparently”

Some of the Mormon women did rebel against the system. Eilley Orroum was born in Scotland, converted to Mormonism at age 15 and moved to Nauvoo, Illinois where, at age 16, she married a 50 year old church elder, Edward Hunter. She became unhappy when Hunter married several other young ladies and divorced him, (women did have the power to do that: everything was voluntary). She married another Mormon. They moved to the Carson Valley, where she divorced him as well. She made a living cooking and washing clothes for Comstock Lode miners, one of whom paid her with a “10 foot claim”, which was located next to the claim of Sandy Bowers, who became her third husband. Their claims proved rich and she soon had a $300,000 mansion where she ruled as “Queen of the Washoe”. She decided to go to England visit another Queen, Victoria, who refused to see her because she was divorced. She came back with a cutting of ivy from Westminister Abbey, which she announced to everyone in Washoe was a gift from Victoria and planted it next to her house. The local miners assumed that since Victoria didn’t own any part of the Comstock, the ivy was the only gift she could afford. Eilley’s claim played out and after Sandy died, she became a fortune teller in San Francisco, dying in the poorhouse, far from her birthplace in Scotland and far from being a good Mormon wife.

Ann Eliza Webb Young, one of Brigham’s wives, went beyond a personal rebellion to political action. She had grown up a Mormon. Her father eventually married five women. She noticed how her mother, the first, grew increasingly resentful with each new marriage. The other wives had similar emotions. “ They did not like a polygamus life and only endured it because they thought they must.” Ann was a “beautiful young woman” and Brigham Young was a friend of the family but Ann announced she had no intention of becoming a plural wife. Instead she married a “sometime actor” named James Dee and bore him two sons. That marriage floundered and Brigham Young expedited a civil divorce. “He then set about romancing her with every resource at his disposal- including, she later claimed, a threat to bankrupt her brother if she did not capitulate“. She married him in 1869 when the Prophet was 67 and she was 24 but she refused to move into the Lion House. Young built her a house of her own, which gave her a measure of independence. But he rarely ventured there. Her dishes “were old bits of crockery from a defunct bakery and the carpet a hand-me-down from the Lion House.” She had to take in boarders to support herself. When Young refused to replace a defective cook stove, she moved out of the house and, shockingly, into a non-Mormon hotel. Even more shocking, she sued Brigham Young for divorce, demanding a $200,000 settlement plus $20,000 in legal fees.

She didn’t get the money but she became a national celebrity, besieged by reporters and book and lecture tour offers. She used these opportunities to denounce Brigham Young and polygamy. He had the nerve to call her an adultress. She managed to sneak out of Utah to Denver, where she began her lecture tour. She made it to Washington where she was received by both Congress and President Grant. Her efforts eventually produced a bill to ban polygamy in the territories, (easier than in the states because there was no issue of “territory rights”). Then she faded into obscurity, so much so that the date and place of her death is unknown.

Wyoming became the first state to allow women to vote in 1869, a half-century before the rest of the country followed suit. It gave Congress an idea as to how to end polygamy in Utah: they proposed to give women the vote there, assuming that the “slaves” would vote out their masters. Mormon women outnumbered men 3-2. But Brigham Young and the other church leaders had confidence in their women and their system. The Utah territorial legislature voted to give the vote to women before Congress could. In the following election, Mormon candidates got far more votes than they had in the previous one, increasing the church’s power in the territory. Their enemies then claimed that “When Mormon women vote it is simply duplicating the male vote over and over again. They all vote the same ticket- the one given them.” Congress eventually passed a law denying women the right to vote in Utah.

After Congress repealed the right for women to vote in Utah, a movement was born to regain it. It was led by Emmeline Wells, an enthusiastic “plural wife”. She had married at age 15 and had one child. Her husband left Nauvoo and never returned so she married a second man, 50 year old Newell Whitney, a bishop of the church. She was the second of his three wives. She had a second child by him. When he died, she asked Daniel Wells, another prominent church member and friend of her husband, (age 52) to marry her. She became his 7th wife. She kept a diary of her experiences and went beyond that to publish a newspaper, the Woman’s Exponent, which expounded on women’s issues for 40 years. She became an advocate of both plural marriage and women‘s suffrage, seeing no contradiction in those positions. “Through editorials and articles, public appearances before national feminist conventions and vigorous lobbying in Washington, she campaigned in forthright style for the return of the lost franchise and she went along way toward dispelling the suspicion of Mormonism and polygamy that Brigham Young’s rebellious wife had helped to foster.”

My own view of the practice after reading several articles is that it was a natural outgrowth of the communal nature of the Mormon religion and also a reflection of the economic times. Women had few choices of profession: their primary purpose was to create a home and family for a man. If they were not attached to a man, a life of poverty, (or real prostitution), was their likely fate. What better way to combat this than to allow more than one women to attach themselves to a man? Ideally, (as seen in “The Pursued”), the relationships between the wives of a Mormon man seem to have been basically those of sisters who shared chores and became a community of their own. Meanwhile the re-worked tenants of the religion held that polygamy was viewed favorably by God and would be rewarded at the end of your spiritual journey.

Obviously it mattered how the personalities meshed and there could be rivalries and jealousies. Clearly the wealth of the man was a huge factor. Plural wives were a rich man’s privilege. (Heber Clawson in “The Pursused” is a highly successful rancher: one wonders how it would have gone with his wives if they were struggling to feed three mouths.) Then again, having plural wives would encourage the industriousness the Mormons prized, so those mouths could be fed. Whether a plural marriage produced a “harem” or a pious, loving extended family probably, again, depended on the individuals involved. It seems evident that humility was not a prominent trait in Brigham Young and that being his wife might have been a more difficult path than being the wife of Heber Clawson.

Other branches of the Mormon faith rejected polygamy, (and it became an issue in the question of which branch was the legitimate one), and even in Utah only about 20-25% of the population lived in polygamist households. But the issue continued to produce emotional reactions in the East, as did other tenants of Young’s version of Mormonism, such as the idea that Adam and God were the same being, that we could all become like God and his practice of baptizing the dead. It was said that the church’s rituals were heavily borrowed from the freemasons and it‘s writings from many sources.

Whereas Joseph Smith had a tolerant view toward blacks, Brigham Young restricted them from any leadership position, would not allow them to participate in temple ceremonies and, when asked what the church’s position on miscegenation was, he said that the proper response was the death penalty. "Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so"

Then there was the seemingly unquenchable desire to obtain money, as exemplified by Young’s demanding tithes from Sam Brannan even after he’d been excommunicated, and the veil of secrecy over their financial dealings. The industriousness and prosperity of the Mormons created jealousy and suspicion, much as it has over the centuries with the Jews and produced similar prejudices.

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