Faith and Betrayal (11 page)
The travelers rested for three days so Eliza could recover from the delivery and nurture her newborn. Jean Rio lost another ox to poison but was so enraptured with the birth of the baby and the proximity of Salt Lake City that she considered it but a minor inconvenience. She wrote that the country had been “beyond description for wilderness and beauty. We are indeed among the everlasting hills.” Still, there were challenges ahead. Weaving its way through a ninety-mile chain of cliffs that cut into the Wasatch Range of the Rockies, the party reached the summit of the Bear Divide, at 7,245 feet, on September 27. There Jean Rio got her first glimpse of the Great Salt Lake Valley. Greeting the group at the top were several Mormon men with fresh teams to assist in the sheer and precarious descent.
Jean Rio took her new grandson into her arms and carried him four miles rather than risk having him ride in a wagon that might overturn. She would remember the joy of that moment for the rest of her life, triumphantly carrying the newborn Henry William Rio Baker all the way to the magnificent valley of the Great Salt Lake. Eliza and another woman who had just given birth—“the two ladies ‘in the straw’ ”— were the only members of the party to remain in the wagons. As Jean Rio reached the bottom, she panicked when she looked up to see the wagons rushing down even though the wheels had been locked. Miraculously they all arrived intact. “We are now at the entrance of a narrow defile between rocks measuring 800 feet perpendicular height, with a serpentine stream running through it which we shall have to cross nineteen times.”
An hour after starting out the following day, they came to an abysmal ravine “over which was thrown an apology for a bridge.” It was the most rugged terrain since leaving Council Bluffs, and Eliza “suffered much from the roughness of the road.” Captain Brown informed them that the next day would be even worse, as indeed it was.
“Of all the splendid scenery and awful roads that have ever been seen since Creation, I think this day’s journey has beaten them all,” Jean Rio noted on September 28. They had camped the night before at the foot of a mountain, which they then ascended. “This was hard enough on our poor worn-out animals, but the road after was completely covered with stones as large as bushel boxes, stumps of trees with here and there mud holes in which our poor oxen sunk to the knees. Added to this was the Canyon Creek—a stream of water running at the bottom of the ravine, interlacing our road in such a zigzag fashion that we had to ford it sixteen times at a descent of 15 to 20 feet, and of course an equal ascent that in some places was nearly perpendicular.” By now she had lost more than a dozen oxen during the trek.
Enveloped by mountains of solid rock, she marveled at the huge evergreen trees growing in the crevices, and the building-size boulders that had tumbled down in landslides, sometimes completely blocking the trail. “In one spot the rocks had the appearance of a ruinous gateway through which we had to pass,” she wrote. “The opening was very narrow, only one wagon could go along at a time, and that along the bed of the Canyon Creek, which seems to have forced its way through the opening I have described.”
The trail then turned and passed under massive overhanging rocks. “The grandeur of the scenery to my mind takes away all fear, and while standing in admiration of the view Milton’s expressions in
Paradise Lost
came forcibly to my recollection: ‘These are thy glorious works, Parent of good in wisdom hath thou made them all.’ ” In that moment she forgot all the hardship of her pilgrimage. “Suddenly, I heard a sound as of rushing water on my left hand, and looking in that direction I observed that the mountain stream buried itself among some bushes, and sure enough there was the prettiest waterfall I had seen yet. The cataract in itself was comprised of fifteen separate falls over as many pieces of rock.” Struck with “both awe and delight,” she stayed behind until the teamsters yelled at her that she was dangerously delinquent.
On entering the long-sought valley of Zion, Mormon “Saints” like Jean
Rio were greeted with the majestic sight of the Great Salt Lake. Always
impressed by the physical grandeur of the American West, she was in
awe of the setting of her new home.
They came upon a row of seven wagons, each with a broken wheel or axle. Continuing on, they reached yet another party of ten wagons in similar disrepair. “We picked our way as well we could, and at about sunset we emerged from the canyon and caught a faint view of our destined home.” The party camped in a hollow at the entrance to the Great Salt Lake Valley. Exhausted, Jean Rio joined Eliza in a wagon. The young woman was in extreme distress from the jolting of the day’s travel. Jean Rio encouraged her with the knowledge that the following day would be the last of their journey. “Thank God . . . it is over now,” she wrote in her diary that final evening. “They tell us that five miles tomorrow will bring us to the said Salt Lake City, and after crossing a hill, at whose base we are now resting, we shall have a road as smooth as a bowling green.”
She rose the morning of September 29 “with a thankful heart that our travels were nearly finished.” After breakfast she attended to her “two patients,” Eliza and the baby, who were both getting along better than could have been expected. Impatient to see her new home, Jean Rio clambered to the top of the hill the wagons would soon climb. There before her she saw the city “which was laid out in squares, or blocks as they call them here, each containing ten acres and divided into eight lots, each lot having one house.” She stood speechless and stared. “I can hardly analyze my feelings, but I think my prevailing ones were joy and gratitude for the protecting care God had over me and mine during our long and perilous journey.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
A Life of Toil
JEAN RIO’S ENTOURAGE was an eye-catching sight in primitive, poverty-ridden Salt Lake City. The special wagon carrying the piano, the inventory of household furnishings and clothing, and the obvious refinement of the Baker family members caught the attention of many in the settlement now inhabited by some five thousand souls. This was a woman of unmistakable means, a woman whose background and cultivation set her apart from most of the Saints who had migrated since 1847.
Jean Rio carried with her a letter of introduction to a Mrs. Wallace, whose husband she had met in London, where he was serving as a missionary. Mrs. Wallace received the family hospitably, offering to enclose their wagons and livestock within her property. Several curious neighbors came to welcome them, and Jean Rio set out to find a home for herself and her family as quickly as possible. “We have been living in our wagons 24 weeks this day,” she wrote, “and I shall be glad to get in a habitation where I can sit down and think over all that has passed on this lengthened journey.”
The very day Brigham Young’s party had descended into the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847, they had unhitched their wagons and plowed the soil. Sowing potatoes, corn, beans, and peas, they had set out to tame the desert, irrigating the prehistoric lake bed by digging ditches to direct the summer mountain runoff into the new fields. Lake Bonneville had once covered twenty thousand square miles with fresh water, but it was now reduced to a vast expanse of salt flats.
Young had addressed his small contingent the following day, setting out the laws of his empire in this land of Canaan. The covenants—some tacit then, articulated later—would include the most controversial of church doctrines: “celestial marriage,” or polygamy, and “blood atonement,” a ritualized form of murder in which the killer provides his victim with eternal salvation by slitting his throat. There would be no tolerance of those weak in the faith, he had warned his followers. From that day forward Young would preside over an autocratic theocracy, a socialist utopia increasingly militaristic and secessionist in the years to come. From here he would usher in the “Dispensation of the Fullness of Times” that was to signal Christ’s return, gathering the remnants of Israel to the “only true church” as prophesied by Joseph Smith.
Guided by the hand of God, he said, he used a sacred “divining rod” to select a forty-acre lot as the site for a massive temple and designed the city at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains. Beginning at the temple, 132-foot-wide streets were laid out following the cardinal points of the compass. Young divided the two-square-mile city into lots of one and a quarter acres, eight lots in a block for homes with individual yards, designed so that no house directly faced another. A nearby six-square -mile enclosure—the “Big Field”—was platted into parcels ranging from five to eighty acres for farming. As noted earlier, there would be no private ownership of property in what one of Young’s clerks described as this “place where the land is acknowledged to belong to the Lord,” and each man would be assigned two plots, one for a home and one for a farm. But the plan for a rich widow such as Jean Rio was less clear, so rare were her circumstances in the new Zion. There was no place in this society for unmarried women.
The agrarian method projected by Young was based upon the industriousness and perfection of the bee. The beehive was the symbol of the Saints. “The communal food gatherers, or farmer bees,” writes David Bigler in his book
Forgotten Kingdom,
“were to live in the city, or hive, and harvest food from assigned plots in nearby fields for central storage from which all would share, according to their needs.” Under the “Law of Consecration,” Saints were soon expected to give over all of their property to the church, for the building of the Kingdom, which would then oversee their livelihood. The men could keep parcels of land conveyed to them as long as they remained faithful, tithing members of the church. The strict method of tithing included 10 percent of all income and 10 percent of all produce raised, which went into the personal coffers of Brigham Young as trustee for the church, and were used in part for the support of his mansion and plural wives. “He renders no account of the funds that come into his hands,” wrote a nineteenth-century Mormon journalist, “but tells the faithful that they are at perfect liberty to examine the books at any moment.”
A
Harper’s Weekly
illustration of Salt Lake City circa 1858 showing
the meticulously designed city much as Jean Rio first saw it when she
arrived in the Mormon capital in 1851
.
There is no indication from Jean Rio’s writings that she anticipated such a scenario. How much money she brought with her is unknown, but of course in London she had inherited a small fortune. “Different methods were used on different people to relieve them of their wealth,” says Bigler.
Whatever the state of her finances, Jean Rio had arrived in Utah Territory during what Mormon historians would later call the “Stone of Daniel” period. The Saints believed they were fulfilling the prophecy of the biblical Daniel as he intrepreted Nebuchadnezzar’s dream: “And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a Kingdom, which shall never be destroyed; and the kingdom shall not be left to other people; it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever.” This theocratic state was clearly on a collision course with the government of the United States.
“I have purchased a small house with an acre of garden attached to it,” Jean Rio wrote on October 6. “There are only four rooms, but we can manage for the winter.” How different this home was from her London town house, and from the opulent residence of her childhood. What a stark contrast was this arid landscape from the rainy, verdant city of her girlhood. But she had long since reconciled herself to a new life of simplicity and struggle and had not yet encountered the series of disappointments and betrayals that would later make her yearn for an idealized England. “The garden is in good cultivation,” she went on, “and has growing a patch of Indian corn, also potatoes, cabbage, carrots, parsnips, beets, and tomatoes watered by a little stream. The house is 40 feet from the road and fronts the public square.” She also bought a “heifer, which supplies us with milk.” All members of her party were in good health except for Eliza, who remained weak. Even the “small and delicate” newborn was beginning to flourish.
Having acquired a taste for wild scenery and having a natural penchant for adventure, she was settled in Salt Lake City less than a week when she ventured out into the wilderness. “I had a wish to visit a sulphur lake four miles distant,” she wrote. She asked her two oldest sons to yoke some oxen to one of her wagons for the day trip. Winding along a stream that followed the Wasatch foothills, she could smell the mineral water miles before they reached it. “We managed with some difficulty to get close to the opening and there, sure enough, was the water boiling furiously and of a bright green color.” From that vantage point she could see the Great Salt Lake in the distance, its surface covered with “tens of thousands” of wild ducks. But the outing would prove singular, as her days in Utah Territory would soon be ruled by drudgery, leaving little opportunity for the recreational explorations and wilderness treks she had brightly anticipated.
Now she was faced with building a future. While she knew nothing about farming, other life skills had been honed on the overland journey. Like most pioneer women she had learned how to address myriad exigencies as well as everyday concerns. She could poultice wounds, sew up lacerations, treat dysentery and colic, and lay out a corpse. She learned how to create teas and salves from the native herbs and roots. She had by default become an experienced midwife, having delivered babies during the overland trek. She came to see these newfound abilities as a calling; her confidence and her competence in delicate and demanding tasks that she had never performed before gave her a sense that she was doing this by divine guidance and inspiration. Her sons would learn to farm and hunt the deer, elk, and antelope that roamed the nearby mountains, while she mastered the domestic skills needed for the selfsufficiency of her family. Having witnessed the killing, skinning, and butchering of game animals on the trail, she and her sons would put their knowledge to use with the cattle, chickens, hogs, and sheep they raised. She would learn how to preserve, can, dry, and store the fruits and vegetables they harvested, and how to turn fresh milk into butter and cheese. The mundane chore of laundering took on massive dimensions as she tried to furnish clean clothing and linen for her family—a never-ending battle in the dusty environs of the high desert. Drawing countless buckets of water from a stream, heating them over open fires, scrubbing the increasingly threadbare clothing with the soap she had made, and then employing what a granddaughter would call those “instruments of torture designed by men for women to use,” she would iron them stiff. She learned to sew, turning buffalo skins into luxuriant robes and blankets, deer and cow hides into rugs for her dwelling.
Aside from Brigham Young’s elaborate mansion, the Lion House—so named because the corpulent, stentorian Young was called “the Lion of the Lord”—and the residences of his affluent apostles, Jean Rio’s home, with its English furniture, Persian rugs, bone china, and sterling flatware, was among the best appointed in the city. The elaborately carved and exquisitely inlaid Collard & Collard piano was the centerpiece of her parlor. What little leisure time she had revolved around music, reading, and writing. She sang in the church choir, played the piano for her family and new friends, read from her leather-bound volumes of Shakespeare and other classics, wrote letters back to England, and continued her diary. She also took on the responsibility of educating her young children, who stood out among their peers for their manners and impeccable dress.
She noted the great disparity between the city’s inhabitants. A few, like her, lived in relatively large and comfortable adobe and brick structures. Most of the others occupied crude hovels, many of which were dugouts carved into the hillside, their roofs covered with willow branches, dirt, and canvas. There were no windows or doors, and a hanging cloth was meant to keep out the cold. Infested by rattlesnakes and insects, the willow shanties often provided shelter for large families in a two-hundred-square-foot space. One pioneer called her home the “Castle of Spiders.”
Particularly disturbing to Jean Rio was the status of women, who were unable to vote, to hold office, or even to express opinions without facing public opprobrium. For a woman of her breeding, education, and professional experience, it was a rude awakening. Most of the women in Salt Lake City lived in squalor reminiscent of the worst of London. “This is a hideous place,” wrote one of her contemporaries. “Some days ago, I killed a rattlesnake with my rolling pin, as he came crawling down the steps. I was just cooking supper and the baby was on the floor or rather the ground, for we have no other floor. I was badly frightened. A few days ago, while keeping the flies off the baby’s face as he slept on an improvised bed on the floor, I discovered, to my horror, a large tarantula crawling toward the child.”
Some settlers managed to build primitive log cabins, which brought their own form of misery. The timber was a haven for bugs, which attracted hundreds of mice. “Sometimes as many as 60 would be caught before going to bed,” wrote one settler. The rain from summer thundershowers and melting winter snows routinely trickled through the willow roofs, turning the cabins’ dirt floors into a muddy mess.
It soon became alarmingly apparent to Jean Rio that the rumors of polygamy, long denied by the church, were indeed true. “Celestial marriage” and “eternal progression” were fundamental tenets of early church doctrine, and high officials had been covertly practicing them since the mid-1830s, though “the Principle,” as it was euphemistically called, was not formally sanctioned. Long after Joseph Smith had taken polygamously several of what would eventually number forty-eight wives, the church publicly disavowed the doctrine’s existence. The revelation of the “Law of Jacob”—named for the Old Testament polygamist—had not been presented officially as a commandment from God until 1842, and even then was practiced in secrecy. Afraid he would incur the wrath of the “Gentiles,” Smith had privately revealed the “blessing” to his intimates one by one. Among the chosen few was the apostle Brigham Young, who, upon learning of the revelation, polygamously took a second wife within weeks.
In August 1843 the controversial revelation had been committed to writing and presented to the church’s high council. Most men were shocked and conflicted—to say nothing of the wives, who were now expected to share their husbands. But untold numbers acquiesced with a growing commitment to God’s divine plan. “Spiritual wifery,” as it was called, was a crucial and urgent component of the faith’s concept of “eternal progression.” This core doctrine, upon which the family values, patriarchal traditions, and early rituals of the religion were based, had at its root the journey to the “Celestial Kingdom”—“the pinnacle of post-mortal existence,” as one scholar describes it, where the “faithful will evolve into gods in their own right and come to rule universes of their own.” According to the doctrine, Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and all the other Mormon male luminaries would progress until they were equal in power and stature with God. That all male believers were on the road to godhood, that a heaven existed where all men could be saved and then go on to create their own worlds, was a compelling notion to the faithful. To Jean Rio it was an abomination, and its concealment was one of many lies she now realized she had been told by the missionaries.