The 19th Wife (6 page)

Now might be a good time to point out a singular truth of all Prophets, from Jesus through Muhammid to Joseph Smith. They do not come in unappealing form. A Prophet usually possesses beauty, in his heart, of course, but in his physical being as well. His refined features and powerful stature are among his most potent natural gifts. To deny this is to deny the truth of the Human and how We, both man and woman, function. I intend not to belittle the Prophet’s achievements nor the import of his message. Yet ask yourself, Dear Reader—Would you stand in a hot field for hours with flies buzzing about your head to listen to a man with a disagreeable presence? Although this fact hints at Man’s animal nature, it is the truth and therefore worth recording. There, I have said enough on this particular subject.

“When I go forth,” Joseph continued before the crowd beneath the buttonwood tree, “and spread the news of this new Gospel, often I am asked, Brother Joseph, what is your message? Indeed, what is my message? What is the message of our new Church? What have the other men forgotten, and what am I here to restore? Friends, my message is clear, for it came to me from our God. We are here, all of us, we are here on Earth for but one reason, and that is to love. What was Christ’s message? To love. The Truth is simple, as it always is. I am here to restore that message to all of Man while we live through these last days.

“Now if you do not believe my story, nor have any interest in reading this Book, then peace to you, my Friend, for I wish you no ill. But take one thing from our meeting today. Take my love and share it with all that you meet for the rest of your time.”

Joseph jumped down to greet the assembled, and there was much fuss made over him, people reaching to touch his coat. Enraptured, Elizabeth asked one of his companions for a copy of the miraculous book. She spent Captain Zucker’s money on it. When at last Joseph made his way to her he said, “Tell me, Sister, where are you going?”

“Up the river and down.”

“No final destination?”

“I live on a paddle-wheel.”

“Then why not come with us? We’ve been to Independence defending our brothers. Now it’s time to go home to Kirtland. It’s a long walk to Ohio, but I promise you’ll find a kind people there.”

“And my son?”

“If you join us, I promise you both will be loved.”

At the time, of course, Elizabeth could not know she had met Joseph and his Zion’s Camp in retreat from their failed attempt to establish a new Zion in Missouri. Joseph, Brigham, Heber Kimball, and the other Apostles had been recently tested by a growing enemy. They lost fourteen men along the way to cholera, but their faith had strengthened in their long march home. On that damp day in July Elizabeth had followed a path through the summer grass and come upon a moment in History. Dear Reader, consider it! A stranger beneath a buttonwood tree promising love! Imagine the power this has over the lonely heart!

Elizabeth never returned to the
Lucy.
Joseph introduced her to Brigham Young, my future husband, who at the time was a humble carpenter from Vermont and only thirty-three. “This woman is joining us,” Joseph said. “Look after her and her child.” Brother Brigham followed these orders, never letting Elizabeth and Gilbert out of sight for the six-hundred-mile walk to Kirtland. We know Brigham now as Joseph’s successor, a man of wealth and power, but then he was a woodworker, a glazier, a furniture maker. One could see his trade in his scuffed hands.

Brigham carried Gilbert for much of the journey and revealed himself to be a friend to my mother. The next day they stopped at a creek. He set Gilbert upon a bed of leaves, then guided Elizabeth into the water, across the mossy stones, until the current reached her breast. He gently pushed her head beneath the surface and blessed her. When she emerged she was a Latter-day Saint, and would always be.

After many weeks of walking they passed through a dark wood that opened onto a hilly clearing beside a river. Here the Saints’ new city of Kirtland, Ohio, gleamed. Brigham gave Elizabeth a room in the small house he shared with his new bride, Mary Ann Angell, a recent convert from New York. “Gather yourself and rest,” he said. “You are tired and your boy needs sleep. My wife will give you land where you can grow some cabbage. She’ll invite you into her kitchen to bake bread. Her barn is your barn, and you may feed our pig, and when the time comes part of that pig will be yours. These are your duties now. Only when you are settled should you turn your mind to spiritual devotion. Now you must simply live.”

On her first morning in Kirtland, Elizabeth set out to see the busy milling town. With Gilbert in her arms she went down to the bank of the Chagrin. While watching the river’s quick current, and pondering the movement of her life, and seeing an imprint of her fate in the rippled water, a far-away voice cawed in her ear: “Must be the whore.”

“I heard they picked her up in a Missouri brothel,” a second voice hissed.

“Makes you wonder what they were doing there.”

“And to think she brought her bastard here.”

Elizabeth looked upriver. Far off two young women stood upon a fishing dock. Their voices had traveled down with the current, farther than they would have ever thought possible. Elizabeth pulled the bonnet over Gilbert’s head and returned to Brigham’s house. She never said a thing.

The next day at Sunday Services, following Joseph’s sermon, Brigham rose to bear testimony. He paused, his throat darkening. “Before word of the Restoration came to Brother Joseph,” he began, “and we knew of its Glory, we were destitute and depraved. Now, through His love and wisdom, we know we live in these latter days, these days leading up to Judgment and Redemption. We await them with our hearts full.” Brigham looked to the collected souls cramped in a neighbor’s parlor, some on the floor, many along the wall, others standing outside leaning through the open windows. “But if anyone here, or anywhere, believes himself, or herself, to be no less destitute or depraved than we were before our knowledge, if anyone here, or anywhere, believes he has already achieved Salvation, I ask him, or I ask her, to come forth now, and show yourself. If any of you think yourself purer, fairer, or closer to the foot of God than the rest of us, show yourself now, for I should like to know you. If any of you, because you come from a proud family, or your husband earns a fine income, or you possess a fine complexion and a multitude of bonnets, believes you are of a better kind than any of the rest of us, then step forward now and show yourself, for we all should like to know you. But beware, for although you may think yourself as such, He shall be the judge of all things and will not withhold His judgment. Who here thinks himself better than the rest?…Anyone?…No one at all?…I did not think so. Now go forth and prove to Him you are His Latter-day Saints.”

After the services, the women of Kirtland overwhelmed my mother with gifts, clothing, cooking pans, jars of preserves. A widow named Graeve offered a permanent room. A drive was called for cotton, toys, seeds, and a vegetable plot. New friends invited Elizabeth for supper, others for singing. Sisters brought their babies to see Gilbert and everyone kissed his head when they met him on the street. Never again did someone speak cruelly of her past. The Saints knew of it, and understood it. They never pitied her, never shamed her, never again questioned her place.

So it was, through love and kindness, Brigham joined Joseph Smith in welcoming Elizabeth Churchill as his newest Saint; and so she was when soon thereafter she met another fresh convert, a blacksmith from New York, the man who would become my father, Chauncey Webb.

LDS CHURCH ARCHIVES

SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

Pioneer Biographies & Autobiographies

Salt Lake City

Access to the Special Collections is restricted to Latter-day Saints in possession of a current temple recommend. Those unable to visit the Collections themselves may send a relative or friend on their behalf, provided he or she has a temple recommend. You may also engage an ancestral researcher or scholar, provided that he or she also has a temple recommend.

Updated by Deb Savidhoffer, Church Archivist, 9
/
3
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2004

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CHAUNCEY G. WEBB

PART I

Since the publication of
The 19th Wife
last year, I have been left with many questions about the nature of my life. In my daughter’s book, she recounts a version of our family history in which I do not—in fact cannot—recognize myself. According to Ann Eliza, I have become a ghost of a man, my corporeal presence consumed by my many wives. In those pages, now read by hundreds of thousands across this land, she calls me “a man who wanders about the desert without soul”—a charge I find painful to read even now. With her words cold upon my heart, I have come to believe it would serve some purpose—whether personal or historical I cannot say—if I were to set down in my own words the story of how I came to be a Saint and marry five wives. In her Preface Ann Eliza writes, “I leave judgment to the hearts of my good Readers everywhere.” Yet in truth, only two can judge a man: himself and God.

My mother first heard Brigham preach in 1833, while he proselytized in our village of Hanover, N.Y. She attended a meeting on a September afternoon and returned home agitated by religious fervor. “I’ll be departing with Brother Brigham in the morning,” she announced. “I have but a few years left on this Earth. I want to spend them with one who loves me.” Underestimating the power of the new Gospel, at first I scoffed at her sudden conversion, yet the next day she left with Brigham to join Joseph in Kirtland, O.H. I was twenty-one and for the first time in my life I found myself alone.

I was an apprentice in a blacksmith’s shop then, with a bright future as a wheelwright, and I spent those lonely days, and often my nights, toiling before my forge. Often I think back on this time—more than forty years ago—and I ponder my future wife, Elizabeth, and her ordeals. About the same time my mother left me, Elizabeth was making her way through the streets of St. Louis, expecting a child. Of course I could not know this at the time; I could not even imagine such a woman. Yet in my musings about the past, I like to think each of us had set down on a path to find one another. Now I shall describe the road I chose.

Although I was still an apprentice to Mr. Fletcher, men came to me by name to repair their carriage wheels, for the reputation of my work had traveled as far as Buffalo. Although I had very little money, it was clear to me, especially now with my mother departed, that with hard work and good fortune, and the blessing of that mysterious being known as God, I might one day become a wealthy man.

I must admit—for my hope in recounting my long journey into polygamy is to reveal the truth, if only to myself—that I was not altogether sad when my mother left for Kirtland. Since the tragic and early death of my father, her great effort in life had been to preserve the dignity and grandeur of her widowhood. She wore her voluminous mourning gown the day she met Brigham; for Kirtland, she packed a small trunk containing blackcloth and somber lace. Tending to her had become a burden of minor proportions, for I was a young man in pursuit of those items which young men are known to pursue. There were many evenings I would have preferred to stay at the forge, with my apron heavy around my neck and the fire warm in my face, than return home for a silent supper of winter stew, followed by the long hours providing her wordless company while she worked her sewing hoop.

This, therefore, is why no one found greater surprise than I in the depths of my loneliness after my mother’s departure—or the heights of my elation when her first letter arrived two months later. “My good son—I have settled in Kirtland,” she wrote. “The Prophet Joseph Smith baptized me in our river, the Chagrin. Do not scorn your mother. I am an old woman. I was afraid of death until I met the Latter-day Saints. They have promised me Glory in the Afterlife. I still hope to meet you there.”

I responded to her letter, declaring the emptiness of my evenings and my general longing to see her again. She replied that if I were to accept Joseph Smith as a Prophet, I should come to Kirtland and be near her.

I was not yet prepared to do so. I knew very little about this new Church except what my mother had relayed and the gossip already surrounding it. Even then there were rumors of unusual marriage customs. I wrote my mother, asking her to explain why I should devote myself to a man who was no more than any other man. “You do not know him,” she replied. “Although he is a man, he is the man on Earth chosen by God.” With each letter my mother’s fanaticism expanded until she wrote freely describing angels and divine revelations and the miraculous golden plates. The letters confirmed that I could not abandon my future in Hanover for a small city in the Ohio swampland run by a man who promised that which only the Lord Himself can deliver.

Then my mother wrote with a different sort of news: “Kirtland is growing by the day. Newly converted Saints from New York and Pennsylvania and even Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, add to our census weekly. With each passing month, the City expands into the forest. Any man with an axe can make a fine living clearing the woods. Here, in this growing Metropolis, one must think of Rome at her birth to imagine it properly. There is an urgent need for a second blacksmith and wheelwright. I told the Prophet my son is the best in Chautauqua County. He has invited you, my dear son Chauncey. The Prophet has invited you.”

Not long after this, Mr. Fletcher came to see me at my station. He explained that his business was suffering—which I knew it was not—and told me he would have to cut my take on each wheel I repaired. I complained, knowing my work brought him his most profits, but he dismissed my outrage. “Your wheels are no better than the rest,” he said.

With that, I hung my apron on its peg and left Mr. Fletcher’s service for good. He expected me back in the morning, I am sure, but by then I was on my way to Kirtland, tying my fortune forever to the Latter-day Saints. The coincidence between the arrival of my mother’s letter and Mr. Fletcher’s duplicity has consumed many of my pondering hours over the years. Was it the hand of my beloved mother? Or the hand of God? Or is it possible one event can ensnare itself upon another, as a trip wire entraps the ankle, without reason, plan, or meaning? I cannot say.

The journey from New York to Ohio was relatively easy even back then. Wagons and carriages filled the road with travelers and journeymen—settlers and trappers and wandering preachers—yet none of these gave me as lasting an impression as the girl I met twenty miles beyond Erie while resting at a roadside inn. I supped in a small room lit by the hearth and, as I completed my meal, the innkeeper, a durable woman with full-blown gray-blue cheeks, asked if I needed anything more. “A bit of sweet? A hot-tot before bed? No? Then how about a nice girl?”

At once I understood the meaning of her offer. Rather than claim I resisted and voiced my offense, I must describe my reaction in honest terms. I was twenty-one years of age. I was eager to know a woman in such a manner. For most of my life I had assumed this would be my wife, but recently I came to realize that I might not have to wait until matrimony. In Hanover fear for my reputation kept me from visiting the brothel I knew existed above the printing shop. But on the road, in this dark forested limbo between my old home and my new, where nearly everyone I met seemed to be testing the pliability of Christian morals, I felt suddenly free of past and future restraint. “Mrs. Mack,” I said, “who do you know?”

“I know a handful of right pretty ladies. How do you like ’em? Fat or thin? Dark or fair? The older ones know the best tricks, but the younger ones ain’t got much in the way of fur. What will it be, Mr. Webb?”

I asked Mrs. Mack if she knew of a woman who was old enough to know her way through the activities she was proposing and yet not too old. “Right, you ain’t looking for your mother, are you? Wait right here. Have yourself another whiskey. If you take the girl, the cup’s on me.” She scurried out the front door; her movement was low on the ground and slow but with enough agility that she reminded me, as the door closed behind her wide, hobbling rear-side, of a gopher disappearing down its hole.

A quarter of an hour later she returned with a young woman. “This here’s Jenetta. Pretty, isn’t she? Originally from New York, ain’t that right, dear? Came up this way to be near her gramps.”

I bowed and the young woman said, with surprising boldness, “Which way’s your room? I’ll go up first to fix myself up.”

This comment was so exotic—the notion of a woman working on herself, whatever that might mean, for me—that I could not speak and merely pointed to the stairs. Mrs. Mack said, “Second room at the top. Be fast, deary. God made you beautiful enough.”

I sat for a bit, stunned, I believe, not only by Jenetta’s beauty but by Mrs. Mack’s frankness; I had never seen femininity in such full and assertive relief. Other than my mother, I realized, I knew few women except to nod hello on the streets of Hanover. Up until this point I believed that women came in but few varieties: the delicate virgin, the industrious wife, the declining widow, and of course the black-hearted whore. Certainly I had met others who fit into none of these categories, but the world presented them to me, or perhaps more accurately, I saw them, in rather simple terms. In short, I was fast becoming overwhelmed by woman’s great complexity.

When I entered my room, Jenetta stood at the mirror regarding herself. She wore a sort of sleeping gown that looked neither comfortable nor practical to sleep in. I asked if she wasn’t cold. She wrapped her long, lovely arms around my neck and said, “I won’t be.” What ensued was of the usual sort for this kind of encounter, but I must note for these efforts that Jenetta led the way, initiating me to more pleasure than I had ever imagined possible on Earth. She stayed with me for the night, a cost that left my limited traveling funds worrisomely depleted, but I had decided everything in my earthly possession was worth making these joys last until the dawn. By sunrise I could not face saying good-bye, and proposed that she join me on my journey.

“To Ohio?” she laughed. “Oh critters, no. I got my husband right here with me.”

“But Mrs. Mack said you lived with your gramps?”

“That’s what I call my husband, he’s so old. He’ll be wanting his breakfast about now.” She sprang from the bed, dressed, and departed as efficiently as she had arrived; and I buried my face into the pillow to inhale her sweet odor; and, I am afraid, to weep.

“Mrs. Mack,” I wailed, “the most horrible and wonderful thing has happened. I have fallen in love. I must see Jenetta again.”

“That’s real nice, but I’ve heard it a thousand times before. Afraid you’ll never find it again, but you will, I promise, you will. Now shouldn’t you be on your way, Mr. Webb? Didn’t you say your mother’s waiting in Ohio? Thank you very much, dear, but get on, there you go, right now, good-bye!”

She swept me over her threshold into her garden and shut the door. I stood in the sunlight, desperate and confused.

Because I am an engineer and possess a mostly logical mind, and I like to believe I solve problems mostly through analysis and rigor, eventually I talked myself into passing through Mrs. Mack’s garden gate without once looking over my shoulder. Yet the head does not need to turn and the eyes need not gaze back for the heart to remain behind.

It was with such longing that I arrived in Kirtland. On that first night my mother served a feast of ham hocks followed by angel pie. “In the morning, I’ll take you down to meet the Prophet and he’ll get you work in one of the manufactories. Why didn’t you eat all your pie? Go on, finish up. I baked it for you.”

There is comfort in knowing that people remain the same.

As it turns out, my mother had overstated the case. Indeed there was opportunity for a wheelwright, but Joseph had invited dozens of men to meet the demand. I took a job in one of his wagon manufactories as a junior apprentice, earning less than I had in Hanover. “At least you’re near me,” my mother sighed in a great show of maternal care.

On Sundays, with little else to do, I accompanied her to services led by the Prophet, although I was still not a member of the Latter-day Saints. I remained skeptical, but Joseph had a presence unlike most men, with eyes wide and blue, and the stature of a man who knows his place in history. I did not have to attend more than one Sunday meeting to know the command he possessed over his followers. If he were not a Christian, he might very well have been a sorcerer—so capable of casting a spell he was.

“Look around!” he said one Sunday. “Look around and tell me what you see. Do you see gambling, drinking, swindling, the whoring that goes on throughout our country? Do you see the sin that walks down the street dressed as proud gentleman in top hat and dear sweet lady in her flimsy dress? Do you? Because that is not what I see. No, I see on those dirty streets those things that are missing—compassion, caring, love. When I look around I see neighbor ignoring neighbor, man snubbing wife, child abandoning parent. This is the Great Apostasy. For Christ taught us to love and so it has come to pass that He has returned in Revelation to restore love to our Earth. Such is the truth as I know it, as He has revealed it to me.”