The 19th Wife (17 page)

THE
19
TH WIFE

CHAPTER FIVE

My Youth in Deseret

Now, with your permission, I will tell the stories of my youth in the Utah Territory and how those years, the 1850s, led me to my fate as Brigham’s wife. In the autumn of 1848, when I was four years old, we settled in Great Salt Lake City, a new settlement overlooking a silver saline sea. When my family arrived in this forsaken land, we were a wretched lot in possession of little more than our wagons and oxen, a milking cow, and the clothes encrusted to our backs. No doubt you have seen many daguerreotypes of the Westward-ho family: the bearded father in suspenders, the mother in an apron (she always thinner than her brood), the children with dark half-moons of exhaustion beneath their eyes. This is who we were, any American family waging everything on the West. Except, to this historic image, you must add Sister Lydia and her child, Diantha. To the untrained eye she would look like a widowed aunt, but by now my Dear Reader knows the secrets of the Mormon clan.

In our first year in Deseret, we were so busy digging, clearing, building, and sowing there was little time for misery. In order to represent the fullest form of honesty, I must confess that those early years in Zion were among the happiest my family has known. We, each newly arrived Saint, were set upon a purpose: to build a home while establishing a colony where we could be free in our beliefs. This is a noble cause, one that can inspire even the tiniest of hearts, such as mine was at the time, and return doubting minds to course. My father, ever industrious, set up a new wagonry and very soon his forges blazed. My mother, who never spent a day in school, was asked by the Prophet himself to teach one day a week in the Zion school house. (I won’t expend ink by digressing into Brother Brigham’s curious effort to establish the Deseret Alphabet, made up of thirty-eight mostly new characters which gave the Saints a secretive method of writing English. This alphabet was briefly forced upon the children of Zion, myself included. For a short time my mother, in obeying her spiritual leaders, had to teach it at the blackboard, all the while knowing it was useless backslang.)

Anyone who has embarked on a great adventure, started a new phase of his life, or begun life freshly in an unfamiliar land will understand the general excitement and sense of possibility of those early years in Utah. We were concerned less by what we lacked and more by what we one day might possess. This is a healthy vision of life, and for this we all owe Brigham Young. From his pulpit in the Tabernacle he set the tone of each day in the Territory. He demanded the laying out of orderly streets and set to building Temple Square on a scale so large he said it was not for any of us alive but for the Saints of the next century, and the century thereafter. He commanded the digging of artesian wells, which delivered fresh water along a pebbly flume to our door. He organized the city into wards and set up a bishop in each to lead the local population through times of duress and spiritual weakness. He tapped his most industrious men to open a tannery, a curriery, a crockery, warehouses for paint and whip, stores for shoes, cloth, soap, and candles, and quite nearly everything else. In no time there was a city where previously there had been a moonscape of sand, sagebrush, aloe, and the dusty cottonwood. All this sprang out of nothing—as the giddy wildflowers appear in the desert after the April downpour, each a tiny colored miracle aloft on the stalk; all evidence of God’s might. Although Brigham Young would one day become my enemy, I must acknowledge all that which he created for his Saints. The “go-a-headitiveness” for which the Mormons have become known comes from, I believe, the leadership of Brigham at this time. In less than ten years he transformed a basin so arid and inhospitable that even the most intrepid and resourceful Indian nations had avoided it for thousands of years, into the City of the Saints, a metropolis of some twenty thousand souls and a thriving theocracy for him to rule with, he assured us, Divine legitimacy.

This, then, is what I called home.

In the late fall of 1854, not long after my tenth birthday, our idyll was interrupted by Brigham’s selection of my father, Chauncey, and my half-brother, Gilbert, to journey to England to serve on a Mission. One might suspect that we would receive this news as an honor—an opportunity to carry forth the new Gospel to our distant cousins. Yet in those early days of the Territory, nothing was as it seemed.

Brigham Young, as President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Lord’s Prophet, Governor of the Utah Territory, and general owner of the largest businesses and industries in the land, had become a ruler of absolute authority. He controlled the Church, the civic government, the police, the press, the major economic institutions, including the busiest stores, mills, and warehouses, and owned much of the Territory’s land, and other things, too. His holdings were so vast some claimed even he could not know all that he possessed.

By 1854 my father had become a wealthy man again in his own right. His wagonry was the most productive in the Territory. Because the railroad would not arrive for another fifteen years, Utah’s isolation, and the great distances between its stakes, made wagon manufacturing one of the most valuable industries. With my father abroad, Brother Brigham would run the manufactory on his behalf. My father understood the arrangement immediately. “You’ll have to cut back,” he told his two wives. “The next two years will be long. Look out for each other.” Saying good-bye to his family, my father kissed each wife, then his children. He told Aaron he was now the man of the house. The boy, all pimple and whisker, declared himself ready for the task. My father lifted Diantha in the air, twirling her around. She was of that age (six) and made of that peculiar demeanor that compels an otherwise modest girl to lift her hems upward anytime given the chance (I imagine the showgirl is made of the same fiber). When my father approached me, I bit down hard on a trembling lip. “How do I know you’ll come back?” I said. He promised he would, but already I had my doubts.

The concept of a Mission is not easy for a ten-year-old to grasp. My father had always been a quietly religious man. I had a difficult time envisioning him—and tongue-tied Gilbert even less so!—standing before strangers and speaking of the Lord. The journey was long, the seas rough, and the climate in England, my mother said, damp and disagreeable. Floating through the schoolyards of Zion were stories of Missionaries who never returned: “A bloody Catholic put a ball through his head!” Speaking on behalf of Christ is a dangerous task, especially when the faith you carry forth is tainted by rumors of angels, miracles, and the harem.

“What if I don’t recognize you after two years,” I worried as my father climbed into his wagon.

“In two years,” my father laughed, “I might not recognize you.”

Thus my father and Gilbert departed, their hearts dense with faith and fear. Of course I did not accompany them on their Mission, and therefore will leave his years abroad to my Dear Reader’s imagination, which I trust is fertile and capable of filling in.

In his absence, the household of harmony and happiness crumbled. Very soon the payments from the manufactory upon which my mother and Lydia survived ceased. Distressed by her circumstances, my mother visited the wagonry to inquire after its affairs. Brother Brigham had appointed Mr. Morley to serve as general manager and foreman. He kept my mother and me waiting nearly three-quarters of an hour, despite this being our property. When at last he agreed to see my mother (he made no acknowledgment of me), the man said, “I have but a minute, Madame.”

“My husband’s been gone three weeks,” my mother began, “and it’s taken three weeks for our income to dry up. If you were me, wouldn’t you come down here to ask? I have a household, Mr. Morley, and little ones. I need to know what I can expect for the next two years.”

Mr. Morley was a thickly set pale man with a beard that grew in so darkly against his pallid skin, it appeared blue. “My first obligation is to the Prophet,” he said.

“So is mine.”

“Your husband and many others are over there in Europe converting Saints. Well, when these foreign Saints reach our shores they’ll need wagons to cross the plains. Brother Brigham’s placed an order for two hundred wagons. I need to cover the cost of the materials and pay the men and heat up the forge. That leaves very little at the end of the day. I can’t go raising the prices on the Church, can I?”

“Of course not, but what about that little extra? When can I expect to see it?”

“Mrs. Webb, I’m very sorry if your husband didn’t explain matters fully to you. This wagonry doesn’t throw off much. Your husband hardly paid himself. The little bit of profit is now going to me. I can assure you it’s hardly a fair fee. I’m sacrificing, too.”

None of this sounded accurate to my mother, but she had no recourse, and she hesitated before articulating any doubt regarding Brigham and the Church.

“May I make a suggestion,” said Mr. Morley. “You and the second Mrs. Webb might want to turn some of your house work into items you can sell. Are you any good with the butter churn? Making cakes of soap? I bet you make a fine hat. But really, Mrs. Webb, this isn’t my realm. I know the women’s organizations are good about helping women such as yourself.”

Later that night, after we children had gone to bed, I overheard my mother and Lydia discuss the situation. Lydia, ever resourceful and bright, said, “I could bake batches of bishop squares and sell them to the hotel dining room.”

“That’s not enough.”

“I’ll knit socks and you can raise laying hens.”

“Socks and eggs won’t be enough.”

“We could always rent out a room.”

My mother reminded Lydia there wasn’t a spare room to let out.

“I could move into your room,” Lydia suggested, “or you could move into mine and we could fix up the empty one for a widow who needs a roof and if she’s got little ones we can bring them in, too.”

I imagine that the thought of another woman under her roof convinced my mother to find another path to financial stability. In the morning she applied to the Prophet’s office for an appointment as teacher in one of the distant stakes. At this time Brigham was busy colonizing the vast Utah Territory, mapping it into a system of wards and stakes. (A stake is similar to a county, and each stake is made up of several wards; these are biblical terms.) Some wards were so remote and forsaken that few Saints wanted to move there. Teachers especially were in demand, for how could the Prophet encourage multiple wives and the voluminous offspring they produced if he did not provide schools for all those beautiful little heads? Within a week of her request, Brother Brigham dispatched my mother, Aaron, and me to Payson, sixty miles south of Great Salt Lake.

By January 1855 we had settled, as best we could, in a one-room adobe hut with a dirt floor and two beds flanking the hearth. Known for its high sun and desert climes, Deseret, I should remind the Reader, is equally familiar with winter’s bitterness. The wind whips, the snow blows, the temperature plummets, the ice collects. So it did this January in Payson, where wood was scarce, forcing us to fuel our fire by buffalo dung. Aaron, who at seventeen was of ample frame, took more than his share of the bedclothes. Each night was a difficult but eventually victorious battle of retaking the woolly territory my shivering body had lost to him, so that by dawn, after an exhaustive but committed effort, I finally had gained enough warmth to sleep an hour. I do not know which is worse: the rancid nighttime odors produced by a boy caught in the throes of early manhood or the stench of burning buffalo dirt. Needless to say, I had yet to become accustomed to our new lot.

Not long after our arrival, our new neighbor, Mrs. Myton, appeared in a flutter at our door. “Have you heard?” she gasped. “There’s an Elder coming to speak in the Meeting House!” She was excited in a fluffed-up way, her arms flapping about. A Mormon Elder speaking to his people is a common event in every ward and so my mother inquired for further detail. Mrs. Myton handed over a broadside that appeared ripped from its post. “He’s coming to Payson to discuss our sins!”

So it had been arranged that a Saint by the name of Elder Joseph Hovey would preach in the evening to the sinners of Payson. How or why Elder Hovey selected Payson I will never know, for I doubt it was any more, or less, sinful than the other communities of Zion.

Before his arrival, the town stirred with anticipation. Sister wives donned their finest scarves and swatted at their husbands until they had washed properly. Children scraped mud from their boots. Everyone wanted to appear clean at the meeting. My mother and I were no less susceptible. She hurried about our little hut in search of something to wear, while I rinsed out my stockings. Aaron, however, had recently acquired the dour, resentful air of his age. He had begun putting up a fuss on Sunday mornings, turning out for Church in an untidy manner that was all too deliberate and designed to provoke the sharpest of irritation in my mother.