Faith and Betrayal (15 page)

Jean Rio’s daughter-in-law, Nicolena Bertelsen Baker, as a ten-year-old girl walked the entire way from what is now Council Bluffs, Iowa,
to Salt Lake City. The second wife in a polygamous marriage to Jean
Rio’s son William George Baker, she raised her family of ten children
in near-abject poverty in the frontier settlement of Richfield, Utah.

William, though married and already the father of five, was instantly smitten by Nicolena’s “unusual fresh beauty,” as he put it. A believer in “the Principle,” he appealed to Young for permission to take her as his second wife.

Like most women in her situation in post-“Reformation” Utah, Jean Rio was extremely cautious in expressing strong opposition to Mormon practices, including that of polygamy. She would almost certainly have known Fanny Stenhouse, an educated English convert like herself, who was beginning to voice the opinion that polygamy was the “worst oppression and degradation of woman ever known in a civilized country.” Stenhouse—whose husband, journalist T.B.H. Stenhouse, had publicly and sensationally abandoned polygamy—came to the attention of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the novel
Uncle
Tom’s Cabin,
about the progress from slavery to freedom. Stowe was encouraging both Stenhouses to write about their Mormon experience, and while it would be a few more years before each of them published a book, the couple became the core of a dissident group of Utah intellectuals. In the run-up to the Civil War, as the Republican Party likened polygamy to slavery, a national eye was turned toward Utah, and Jean Rio observed the situation with a keen curiosity.

For the sake of family harmony, Jean Rio put her disapproval aside and embraced her new daughter-in-law with compassion and empathy. While she might have tried to dissuade her son from practicing polygamy, she knew that the young Nicolena had little, if any, say in the matter.

Indeed, the young Danish woman found herself suddenly “sealed” to William. Despite her objection, her marriage to the beloved Christensen was “set aside” by Brigham Young, and thus her only avenue “through the veil” and to eternal salvation now rested with William Baker. “Even though Lena may not have been in love with him at the time,” according to one account, “she realized it was the natural and dutiful thing for a girl to marry a good man and do her part toward the common good.” She confided her true feelings to her sister Ottomina, and stoically determined not to complain. If anything, her faith in God and devotion to her church became stronger, as she chose to see her misfortunes as evidence of God’s love. She vowed that she would cultivate love for this older husband, a tall man with curly black hair and striking blue eyes who made every effort at tenderness with her. “She was the type of girl who hungered and thirsted for knowledge, culture, and beauty,” according to a Mormon historian. “William filled that need. He was ever kind, considerate, and gallant despite the difficulties of celestial marriage.”

Her “bride’s nest,” according to one account, was “a primitive adobe dugout” in close proximity and stark contrast to Hannah’s relatively comfortable log home. Nine months after marrying William, Nicolena gave birth to a baby girl, whom she christened Ottomina after her favorite sister. Over the next decades she would often be pregnant and almost always destitute, eventually bearing ten children who were not legitimate by civil standards. She would spend her life in a crude shanty in the shadow of the more honored “first family,” her own babies pitted for survival against William’s thirteen children by Hannah. Still, Nicolena brought beauty to the harshest environment. She “made her little home so clean and cozily beautiful that it became a saying in the village that ‘Lena’s house,’ whether it was a dugout or a two-story dwelling, always looked like a palace,” according to one account. “She was the very soul of orderliness, system, and neatness in her person and in her housekeeping.” As her sons grew, they hauled the winter’s wood for her, cut and baled alfalfa for her livestock, while also supporting her with the income they earned driving the stagecoach that brought the mail to the mining camps of Nevada. The younger children helped with the cows and chickens, the garden, and the fruit orchard.

“The little happinesses, the large griefs, the moves from town to town, the uncertainties of life as a second wife, the sorrows and ecstasies of mothering and rearing ten children, poverty, sickness, and death,” as one history described Nicolena’s years of marriage, were typical for a woman of her time and place. What carried her through, by all accounts, was a keen and infectious streak of humor.

By 1864, Jean Rio found herself in increasing conflict with her polygamist son William, their relationship strained by his extreme religious beliefs and his attempts to control her financial affairs. As in civil war, such family divisions were heart-breaking—a toll of the parting of the once faithful. She had begun to lose faith not long after her arrival in Salt Lake City and had now suffered a series of serious blows—the reality of polygamy; the fact that women were denied a role in the church’s hierarchy; the authoritarian, dictatorial patriarchy of Brigham Young; the horrendous Mountain Meadows Massacre; the church’s turning a blind eye to her poverty; even the expropriation of the piano she had brought across an ocean and a continent. Jean Rio of all people knew that rejecting the church openly was not a choice if she was to remain in Utah. In that theocratic society there was hatred and shunning, cleaving mothers from sons, wives from husbands, brothers from sisters, with the apostates branded as if they were the lepers of biblical times. She had received her “endowments” a year after her arrival in Utah—a ceremony that required a strong commitment—but by 1857, if not earlier, Jean Rio had left the fold and was considering her own life’s options, with her eye on California.

Like her new daughter-in-law, Nicolena, she had had her share of brief but blissful romance. In 1864, to the dismay of William, she had married a “Gentile” named Edward Pearce— one of the relatively few non-Mormons living among the Saints. “I had been a widow fifteen years, my children all married, and I felt I had the right to decide for myself in a matter that only concerned myself,” she wrote. At the age of fifty-four, she had found a happiness that had eluded her since her arrival in Zion. “I hoped that my old age would have been cheered by his companionship—that I should no longer be alone,” she wrote near the end of her life, adding it to her original diary. “But it was not to be. He only lived six months. That time was of unbroken peace and comfort, and his sudden death was a severe blow to me. Perhaps I was not worthy of being the wife of so good a man, for he certainly was one in whom there was no guile.”

That year too, the devout William was “disfellowshipped” by the church for purchasing a pair of boots from a “Gentile” merchant, though he was later reinstated. Jean Rio’s son Walter, along with his wife, Eliza, and their many children, was planning to join his brothers John and Charles in California, where they were prospering as merchants and politicians. Her two remaining children in Utah were busy raising their own families: Elizabeth had married a successful Ogden businessman, and William had little time for his mother now that he had two wives and numerous offspring. While Jean Rio had lacked the courage to join her sons in a dangerous nighttime flight by horseback years earlier, unwilling to risk pursuit by Young’s “Avenging Angels,” it had become easier to leave the territory in the 1860s.

The dangerous period of apostate killings had waned, as the U.S. presence in the territory made itself felt. The watchful eye of federal officials mitigated much of the frontier violence and U.S. Army escorts oversaw a burgeoning traffic of disaffected Mormons fleeing Zion. California newspapers reported that thousands of fugitive Saints were making their way west, “refugees from the Mormon kingdom who had sought the army’s protection because they feared their former coreligionists,” as one account described them. The flow of Mormon defectors had become the largest emigration to that point, far surpassing even the California gold rush. The U.S. Army posted advertisements directed at dissidents throughout Salt Lake City. “Having through His Excellency Governor Cumming,” read one, “asked of Gen. Johnston a military escort to conduct us beyond the lines of danger, on our road to California, and the same being readily granted, we respectfully solicit all who wish to avail themselves of this security, and can be ready for an early start, to convene at the California House.”

Still, at this point in her life Jean Rio, middle-aged and twice widowed, was reluctant to journey by horse and wagon to San Francisco, escort or no escort. As it happened, her “escape” from Zion came with the much-anticipated, and bitterly fought, transcontinental railroad.

“Next to winning the Civil War and abolishing slavery, building the first transcontinental railroad, from Omaha, Nebraska, to Sacramento, California, was the greatest achievement of the American people in the nineteenth century,” writes Stephen E. Ambrose. The government had pitted two of the country’s largest corporations—the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific—against each other in a race to link the continent, “thus ensuring an empire of liberty running from sea to shining sea.” Brigham Young battled the railroad every step of the way, viewing it as a threat to his tottering realm, despite government assurances that the opening of a central route to the Pacific would benefit the sect’s gathering to Zion. Young “never had taken the trouble to conceal his inflexible opposition to any attempt to build a railroad through his empire,” according to historian R. Kent Fielding. Not only would the railroad bring an influx of the depraved and despised “Gentiles” to Utah Territory, Young believed, but it would also give dissatisfied Saints a ready means of retreat.

Though highly controversial, the dream of a transcontinental railroad had finally materialized on March 2, 1853, when the Thirty-second Congress appropriated $150,000 authorizing Secretary of War Jefferson Davis to establish a Bureau of Explorations and Surveys. Davis dispatched the U.S. Army Topographical Corps to map possible routes between the thirty-second and forty-ninth parallels. Among the explorers Davis selected was Captain John Williams Gunnison, published critic of the Mormons, who would survey between the thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth parallels from the Arkansas headwaters to the Great Basin, by way of the Santa Clara River in southwestern Utah. Gunnison recommended a line “crossing the North Platte into the South Pass, over the Coal Basin, skirting the Bear River Mountains at the northern base, near Bridger’s fort; and through the Bear and Weber Kanyons . . . to the banks of the Valley of Lake Utah”—or into the heart of Zion. But in October of that year, Mormons along with mercenary renegade Indians massacred Gunnison and his party on the Sevier River in central Utah. Federal investigators concluded that Mormon leaders had ordered the murders in retaliation for Gunnison’s exposé, as well as in an effort to stop the railroad expansion. The Gunnison tragedy, along with other depredations by the theocracy, would eventually move President James Buchanan to send troops in the so-called Utah War of 1857.

After all the surveys were completed, Jefferson Davis recommended a southern route from New Orleans to Los Angeles that would have greatly enhanced the power and wealth of the southern states. But northern, free-state politicians blocked the scheme.

The Central Pacific Railroad, owned by a bevy of wealthy and powerful California business tycoons, was formally incorporated in June 1861. The intent was to build a railroad from California across the Sierra Nevada. The following year saw the creation of the Union Pacific Railroad by New York and Chicago industrialists. That line was intended to run west from Omaha, Nebraska. The two lines were to meet at a yet-to-be-determined location near Salt Lake City. The Pacific Railway Act of 1862 had chartered the Central Pacific to build east until it joined tracks with the Union Pacific at the Nevada-Utah border. “But the wording was vague,” according to historian Glenn Chesney Quiett, and the powerful Central Pacific lobbyists in Washington convinced Congress to amend the act to allow both railroads to continue construction until they met. “Just where this was to be was not stated, and since every mile of track meant thousands of dollars in subsidies, each road was anxious to build as long a line as possible,” wrote Quiett. With the amended act of 1866, the race was on.

Brigham Young’s position toward the railroad softened when he saw its inevitability and grasped the significance of a route that might skirt his territory. By 1863 he had become so eager for the railroad to come to Zion that he conducted his own surveys and purchased five shares of stock in Union Pacific. He began bartering for construction contracts and extracting other concessions, including a guarantee that the line would be built through Salt Lake City. Explaining his change of attitude to the Saints, he claimed he had had a vision in which “the Lord had revealed to him that the Union Pacific would build directly to Salt Lake City.” California governor Leland Stanford, one of the backers of the Central Pacific, traveled to Salt Lake City five times to lobby Young on his company’s behalf, but reportedly found the prophet “cold and close.”

When a Union Pacific engineer, Grenville Dodge, declared that the road should instead be built north of Salt Lake City to Ogden, Young felt double-crossed. Furious, he “called the faithful together and preached a scorching sermon against this impious engineer and his railroad,” according to one account. Coincident to Dodge’s life being threatened in Utah was Union Pacific officials’ telling Young he could “name his price and set other conditions” for a construction contract.

Young readily agreed, after meeting with his twelve apostles. He then called together his followers to reveal the new and contradictory “divine” plan. “The Lord, in another vision, had commanded the Mormons to help the Union Pacific,” he was said to have announced. With that, he signed a $2 million contract “to do the Union’s grading, tunneling, and bridge-building from Ogden east into the Wasatch Mountains,” according to one account. Young then placed notices in the Salt Lake City newspapers “calling on all the men who wanted work to report to three of his sons, who were ready to hire.” Characteristically, Young hedged his bets, and by the project’s completion Mormon graders were working feverishly at either end, with Young not only heavily invested in Union Pacific but maintaining a quarter-interest in the firm of Benson, Farr & West, a subcontracting company for Central Pacific run by three Mormon bishops.