The 19th Wife (13 page)

My Ma is the most generous woman I know. She never thinks of herself if there is someone else to think of. That’s why she didn’t speak. When she heard the news she took a step backward. One step followed by another, and again another. It was like a moment in a fairy tale because she seemed to disappear. I know it doesn’t make any sense and it isn’t possible and all the rest, but that’s what happened before my eyes—my mother was swallowed up by Lydia’s news. If the Lord can send an angel to Joseph Smith, then a woman learning the news of her husband’s baby with his other wife can disappear. And that’s what happened. She was gone. For a moment we didn’t know where she was. I had to go out into the cold night to bring her in. She was shivering. Several times she said—not loud but soft in a whisper—“Please. No.” I led her to her bedroll beside the hearth and removed her shoes, and by now my mother stopped talking altogether. I set her under the blankets. “Lay quiet,” I said. It’s a hard feeling for a boy to put his mother to bed like she were the child.

8.

Thankfully, Elizabeth’s impulse to document her life did not end with the Testimony of Faith. In
The 19th Wife,
Ann Eliza describes her mother writing a travel diary during the Exodus. Many Saints, especially the women, kept detailed records of their journeys. These documents, many now archived by the Church, have been central to our understanding of the arduous trek from Nauvoo to Winter Quarters and ultimately to Zion. I have relied on Elizabeth’s Pioneer diary, written between May 1848 and September 1848, to narrate her story during this transformative period.

The Webbs left for Zion on May 4, 1848, in a company of 1,229 Saints. The column of 397 wagons driving westward carried every imaginable provision: stoves, bureaus, rockers, farm tools, a piano. The livestock roped to the rear of the wagons included dairy cattle, horses, mules, and spotted pigs. Elizabeth notes in her diary the sounds of the other animals: “dogs barking, cats mewing, thousands of bees buzzing in their hives, and a brown squirrel flitting about its cage.”

The Webbs and their fellow travelers were following in the footsteps of the Saints who had traveled a year earlier along the old Oregon Trail. Brigham had established an ingenious system of roadside mailboxes at ten-mile markers—typically the sun-bleached skull of a pronghorn antelope or an American bison—to leave information about the trail, crossings, conditions, and so forth. In 1847, the journey for Brigham and his Saints had been treacherous and uncertain. By 1848, the trip, while arduous, was no longer a mystery. Ann Eliza was almost four years old at the time. Some of her earliest memories, she tells us in
The 19th Wife,
come from this trip. For her, the journey was a period of great adventure and joy. As the wagons rolled through the prairie grass, she would skip along, picking flowers—probably milkweed, phlox, and meadow rose—and singing hymns. The sound of more than a thousand Saints singing “The Spirit of God Like a Fire Is Burning!” must have fortified them through their long days.

The itinerary was almost always the same: Every day for four and a half months the Saints rose at five, ate a hot breakfast in the dawn, and pushed forward until dusk. They rested only on the Sabbath. In her Exodus diary, Elizabeth writes of ending a day and “circling the wagons, lighting the supper fire, and watering the animals. By the time the chores were done and the children fed, the blue night sky had turned black and was lit by stars. Often I stay awake to watch the moonlight shine upon the hides of the sleeping oxen, on their moist noses, and on the white brow of Ann Eliza, who always sleeps like an angel, whether sun or storm.”

The hopeful quality of their journey changed dramatically when in early June Lydia gave birth. The baby—to be named Diantha—was born with complications. Already on the journey Elizabeth had witnessed in her company three newborns die, two followed by their mothers to their prairie graves. What exactly happened to Lydia and her baby we will never know. That the situation was serious is, however, entirely clear.
¹⁷

Elizabeth immediately recognized that the lives of both mother and child were in danger. “Lydia lay upon the tickings in the wagon-bed unable to open her eyes,” Elizabeth writes. “When I called her name she did not respond. The child Diantha was even more lifeless, tiny and still at her mother’s side. I did not know what to do.”

At this time it was common for Saints facing illness to resort to prayer and the healing powers of priests. Elizabeth describes an Elder (I cannot determine who) sitting with Lydia in the wagon-bed. “He came at night when we had stopped beside a creek. He was an old man, so worn by the journey I doubted whether he would ever see the Zion we sung about. I worried over what he was capable of.”

The Elder gathered the family around Lydia in the wagon. He set his hands upon her head and prayed for her recovery. He did the same with the baby. “If the Lord so pleases, then He will save them. Now you must pray,” he told the Webbs.

“What if they don’t improve?”

“Then the Lord must have a reason to leave your prayers unanswered.”

This struck Elizabeth in the heart. Since the wedding more than two years before, many times she had wished Lydia out of her house. She admits to having prayed for the Lord to take her away. “Many times, when I am alone at night, I must listen to my husband visiting my rival in the manner he no longer visits me. How many times have I begged the Lord to end this humiliation?” she admits in her diary. “Yet again and again I find myself alone.”

Before the Elder departed he said to Elizabeth, “Look after this girl and her child. Do not let them suffer. Do what you can.”

Did Elizabeth hesitate? Did she think: This is my chance to be free of my competition and return my husband to me? We do not know. If she did, the selfish impulse soon passed. For two weeks Elizabeth devoted herself to Lydia’s and Diantha’s recovery, refusing to leave their side. During the daily trek across the summer plains, Elizabeth applied compresses and spoon-fed water and gruel. “Above all,” she writes, “I prayed.”

The following passage from her diary is a remarkable articulation of her faith. It provides important insight into how many early LDS women came to terms, both practical and spiritual, with plural marriage:

I came to see the test the Lord had set before me. Previously I had allowed myself to hate my Sister Wife. I resented each breath she pulled from the air. I resented each morsel she plucked from the plate. I resented the dent in the cushion she left when she stood from the chair. I resented the tendril of hair left on the brush. I resented her voice rising to greet me. I resented her lips on the brows of my children. I resented the very qualities that made her a fellow creature of God. My dark hatred, too, had spilled over to her unborn child. Verily I came to see that the Lord Jesus Christ had set before me a test. Do I love? He asked. Or do I hate? He had heard the cries from my wicked heart and He took pity on me. Had He answered my prayers, and removed Lydia from our family, and destroyed her child, He would not have truly loved me. No! He loved me by testing me. When I first met Brother Joseph all those years before he said to me and others, “Let us pour forth love—show forth our kindness unto all mankind, for love begets love.” I await my Day of Judgment with a heart bursting open with love. Yet I had forgotten all that I believed. Kneeling beside Lydia in the wagon-bed, my faith returned. The love the Saints had shown me returned. When it did, Lydia rose and the baby howled and their health was restored. Their recovery coincided with the restoration of my faith. I can never forget this! Its meaning is clear and shall always be.

By September 1848, the Webbs and their party had reached the cool red mudstone canyon of the Weber River, only a few days out from the Salt Lake Valley. At some point, Brigham had driven from Salt Lake to meet them. At night, around the campfire, he described the Mormon Canaan they would soon find over the mountains. After only a year in the Valley, the Saints had already built up a small city of one-room log homes, neat roads on a grid, an imposing fort to defend against Native American attack, several gristmills and granaries, dozens of shops for tools and goods, and some five thousand acres of thriving crops irrigated by a sophisticated system of shallow channels, locks, and dams. “Brigham told us,” Elizabeth writes in her final diary entry, “of our Promised Land. God had revealed it to Brigham, and now Brigham was revealing it to us. I held my sister wife’s hand as we listened to Brigham describe the world that awaited over the pass.”

On September 13, 1844, Ann Eliza celebrated her fourth birthday. “Brigham held me and touched me,” she writes in
The 19th Wife,
“and smiled such that I knew I was his favorite child. On my birthday he kissed me and declared, ‘This beautiful child is the future of the Saints of Deseret!’” We will never know whether or not Ann Eliza, at the age of four, could remember this scene with such clarity. Even so, when she writes of it years later in her memoir, she notes, “I was happy because I saw my mother and father happy, and my Prophet happy too. I remember his fingers on my arm and the wool of his beard on my cheek. In no way could I have known many years later this man would marry me and then try to destroy me. There were no clouds on the horizon that September in Utah. The vista was clear.”

When Chauncey Webb, his two wives, and now four children arrived in Salt Lake on September 20, 1848, they were, by all accounts, a happy family. Plural marriage, once so loathsome to Elizabeth in concept, had become a part of her daily existence. Elizabeth recorded this thought in her diary: “Brigham used to say: We make room for what the Lord gives us. How true, how true.” She had accommodated Lydia into her household; and the second Mrs. Webb had come to appreciate Elizabeth’s companionship. Each woman felt for the other’s children the way an aunt might feel for a niece or nephew. In the next few years, as the Webbs worked to establish themselves in Salt Lake, Elizabeth came to accept the second wife. “Lydia is of our family, no more or less. So says God,” she often told Ann Eliza.

As Elizabeth set up a new household and participated in the settling of the Utah Territory and grew into middle age, she would have little time to linger over the insults of polygamy again until 1855—when in one feverish, indulgent month Chauncey, who must have been suffering from what we would now call a midlife crisis, married three women, each under the age of seventeen. But that, as they say, is another story.

9.

I wrote this paper for three reasons. One, to show the effects of plural marriage on one woman’s life. Her story is neither representative nor unusual. It is simply that: one woman’s story. There are many other narratives, written or waiting to be told, that shed further light on the practice of polygamy in early Church history. Anyone familiar with even a few of these will know that many women despised the institution, while others rejoiced in it for practical and/or spiritual reasons. Among the practical reasons were the sharing of housework, child care, and the relief from sexual obligations to one’s husband. The spiritual reasons were of the highest order: The happiest plural wives believed their entrance into Heaven was secure.

The secondary purpose of this paper has been to raise up the subject of polygamy as a legitimate and unfinished topic of inquiry for LDS scholars and writers. The Church, of course, banned the practice in 1890. Since then our leaders have spoken out forcefully and consistently against it. Any honest observer would have to concede that there has been no official connection between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and polygamy for more than one hundred years.

Even so, there is no denying plural marriage was an important part of early Church culture. As scholars we must look at it rigorously, understand it honestly, and place it correctly in our heritage. Some present-day Church leaders have dismissed polygamy as a “noncentral” issue, a peripheral “sideshow” to the larger issues of accepting the Restoration of the Gospel, understanding the Revelations, knowing the Lord Christ, and preparing for Salvation. Yet for some nineteenth-century Saints, such as Elizabeth Churchill Webb, plural marriage was so very much a part of their daily lives, of their terrestrial existence, that to label it as “minor” or “noncentral” is to, in effect, cast aside their very earthly experiences as “minor” and “noncentral.” The fact of the matter is many of the men who laid the foundations of today’s Church, including our beloved Prophets Joseph and Brigham, participated in polygamy with astonishing vigor. They sanctioned it, promoted it, spread it, and exalted it. They also lied about it. This is not a criticism, but a fact. Its sting can be lessened by facing it for what it is.

Just as a long and sustained critical inquiry into slavery has helped to fortify the national psyche and shore up our nation’s moral standing, so too would an examination of our founders’ role in this deplorable practice help clear, at last, the misperception that Mormonism and polygamy remain somehow entwined.

Make no mistake, our detractors continue to use the issue against us today. Best-selling books, influential newspapers and magazines, and popular television programs investigate present-day polygamy and inevitably connect it back to the LDS Church. We rightly protest such misrepresentation; we reasonably decry the unfairness of the coverage; over and over we try to correct the errors. Yet I believe that our strident denial of any connection has in fact hurt our image in the larger public rather than helped it. The LDS Church has been so intent on distancing itself from polygamy, on letting the world know that we stand adamantly and unequivocally opposed to the institution, that we have ignored its actual role in our own history. By repeating the message “That has nothing to do with us!” we inadvertently minimize the effects it played on our early members, especially its women. This strategy of putting a distance between the Church today and the polygamous acts of our forefathers—while understandable—has been misconstrued by some as whitewashing or even denial. Hence the suspicion and the constant repetition of old stories and rumors. Hence the continuous and harmful misperception that polygamous sects such as the Firsts in Mesadale and the LDS Church are one and the same.