In the nineteenth century, Utah territory was principally populated by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (often nicknamed “Mormons”), and the Church maintained considerable influence over social and political affairs. Consequently, the small population of non-Mormons struggled with limited opportunities for political representation and social engagement; there were few easy ways to meet non-Mormon women when so much of Utah society fell within Latter-day Saint community life. Controversy over the practice of religious polygamy, then endorsed by the Church (though now prohibited by the Church) further contributed to the barrier between practicing Mormons and objecting non-Mormons. Irish immigrant Jennie Froiseth was among this group of anti-polygamists, and she struggled with isolation and loneliness after following her husband, an army surveyor assigned to Utah territory, to Salt Lake City in 1871. Craving socialization and a sense of culture outside the Church most of her neighbors attended, Jennie established an exclusively non-Mormon organization in 1875. Her home, Rose Cottage, became the site of Utah’s first women’s literary club. Jennie named it Blue Tea in honor of a long social and cultural tradition of tea drinking as well as in commemoration of the Blue Stocking Society, an educational movement for women in mid-eighteenth-century England. On September 21 of the same year, members formalized the club with the purpose to “organize exclusively for women… to promote mental culture.” Like Jennie, members were also looking for a social outlet and an opportunity for self-education, as few had direct access to formal education. Members met every Thursday afternoon in Rose Cottage to share and discuss research ideas. The first topics focused on London and its history, including the English Parliament, British banking, the architecture of London Tower and Westminster Abbey, the royal family, and London museums, churches, and royal gardens. Through their time together, members of Blue Tea formed bonds of sisterhood, and they celebrated birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays together each year. Sorority, greater confidence, and stronger literary and writing skills led to more participation in political activity. Blue Tea also provided what historian Lola van Wagenen called an “organizational basis for the anti-polygamy movement” in Utah. By November 12, 1878, several Blue Tea members, including Jennie Froiseth, helped found the Anti-Polygamy Society, an association of Utah residents that petitioned for “special legislation from… Congress to compel a cessation of plural marriages” in the territory. The women of the Anti-Polygamy Society, led by Blue Tea members including Jennie, helped produce The Anti-Polygamy Standard newspaper and a book reprinting some of the Standard’s articles entitled The Women of Mormonism, Or the Stories of Polygamy. Nevertheless, Blue Tea was primarily a cultural and social club. They focused on the pursuit of mental culture outlined in their mission. Rose Cottage provided a space for non-Mormon women in Salt Lake City to join in self-improvement. Members taught each other about American history, politics, government, and economics as well as European culture, art, literature, and music. They gained self-confidence, created networks, empowered each other, and formed lasting friendships. Blue Tea functioned for eight years, from 1875 to 1883. The last recorded meeting in the Blue Tea minute book was held on May 2, 1883, and the club disbanded sometime thereafter. Several years later, in 1915, Jennie reflected that on recognizing “the larger scope of the [Ladies] Literary Club, [Blue Tea] discontinued [its] organization.” About twenty percent of former Blue Tea members joined the new Ladies Literary Club, although Jennie did not.

For more (including 3 images) view the original article

In 1911, David Udall returned with his family to St. Johns, Arizona with the intent to stay. They had first lived in St. Johns in 1880, but David’s plural marriages to both Ella Stewart and Ida Hunt led to his prosecution and imprisonment. His second wife, Ida, spent two years in hiding with her in-laws, and even when David was released from prison, the family lived in impoverished conditions on the frontier’s margins, outcasts for practicing plural marriage. By the turn of the twentieth century, though, two separate Latter-day Saint prophet-presidents had publicly renounced plural marriage, and while members and leaders applied the first renouncement inconsistently, the second was firm. While the Udalls remained married and continued variously living together, with the Church no longer solemnizing new marriages, the most overt persecution finally waned. From the 1880s onward, the Udalls had, whether together or separately, lived throughout northeastern Arizona, in St. Johns, Snowflake, Round Valley, Eagar, and Hunt. In 1911, however, with many of the children now adults and David committed to living in the area as president of the Church’s St. Johns Stake, the family worked together to build a “dream home” in the city. They hired contractors from Thatcher, Arizona, and the Udall sons—both Ella’s and Ida’s—labored with them, helping to haul material, craft cement bricks, and do carpentry work. Ella’s daughter Pearl also participated, cooking meals for the builders. During this time, most of the family lived in a house that Ida owned in St. Johns, a three-story edifice so drafty they nicknamed it the “Air Castle.” In the spring of 1912, the Udalls finished building their new home and moved in. David estimated it had cost $8,000, including both building materials and furnishings, and he called it a “monument” to “years of effort in building up St. Johns, and what I deem more important… the solidarity of our family circle.” The family nicknamed their dream home the Elm Hotel, naming it for an elm tree that David had previously planted on the lot years before, in 1887. The family’s unmarried sons lived in the Udall home until they married and went on to establish their own homes in St. Johns. Ida had a first-floor room and spent most of the next three years there—the last of her life. Later, when the Church called David to serve as a temple president in Mesa, he rented out rooms in the Elm Hotel while he was gone, finally fulfilling the nickname’s second half. The building stayed in the family for generations. After David passed, his and Ida’s son Grover and his wife Dora bought the Elm Hotel. Dora’s niece Elma recalled that “she turned it into a hotel. She even got AAA approval,” added bathrooms, and started a restaurant. The hotel-motel operation outlasted the restaurant, serving customers as late as the 1980s. When Grover and Dora passed away, the Elm Hotel passed into the possession of David’s grandson Keith and his wife Gwen, among whose family is the author Brady Udall, their grandson. David’s elm tree on the lot grew to a tremendous size, and locals dubbed it the “centennial tree” for its old age. Elma Udall recalled that “it [took] five of us like this,” with arms outstretched, “to go around the trunk.” Unfortunately, after so long, the tree grew too big for the property. When it was more than a hundred years old, it began rotting, and out of concern it might fall on the house, the tree was cut down. Eventually, another St. Johns local bought the house from the Udall family and lived there for a time, but they moved out after the attic caught fire. Today, one block to the east of the Elm stands a chapel of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and two blocks to the west is the Apache County Historical Society Museum. Though the house is in some disrepair, the Elm Hotel still stands.

For more (including 10 images) view the original article

In 1857, Latter-day Saints in Britain could buy the fourth volume of the Journal of Discourses and find a stirring declaration attributed to Brigham Young. The prophet-president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (sometimes nicknamed “Mormons” at the time) decried the United States Congress’ agitations against polygamy, saying, “True we have more wives than one, and what of that?” Young questioned if Congress could even enforce the law. He hyperbolically supposed a prison large enough to contain every polygamist lawbreaker in Utah would eventually have to encompass the entire Great Basin, “roofed… over from the summit of the Rocky Mountains to the summit of the Sierra Nevada.” When federal prosecution of polygamy cases escalated in the 1870s and 1880s, officials instead relied on western prisons like the Utah Territorial Penitentiary—sometimes nicknamed “the Pen.” Completed in 1854, the Territorial Penitentiary was southeast of Salt Lake City in Sugar House, Utah. Just two years previous, the territorial Legislative Assembly had requested federal money for building a prison in order “to prevent crime, but also to reform the offenders.” Decades later, federal officials were now trying to use the penitentiary to prevent polygamy and reform the Mormons. This included Mormons such as George Q. Cannon, who lived in hiding “underground” from 1885 to 1888. Cannon was the First Counselor in the First Presidency of the Church—a high office held only by apostles—and with five wives and thirty-two children, he was an easy target for federal marshals. Despite the dangers, though, hiding grated on Cannon. In his journal, he wrote he was “not anxious to become a martyr,” yet also “always felt to urge our people to stand up courageously to their principles” and wanted to live up to the same standard. When a prosecutor and marshal tried to extort the Church—money in exchange for not prosecuting Cannon—Cannon resolved to turn himself in, deciding, “I had much rather go to the penitentiary and serve the full term” than have the Church pay blackmail money to do him a special favor other Latter-day Saint polygamists could not afford. Cannon entered the Territorial Penitentiary in Sugar House in September 1888, and he found himself in good company. Fifty other Mormon polygamists were also in the Pen “for living with their wives,” as Cannon wrote, and they even took a few photographs together when they had visitors. Perhaps with some irony, Cannon observed in his journal that he and “the brethren”—as he liked to call his fellow Latter-day Saint incarcerees—resided in the same prison as twenty-two men either accused or convicted of murder.  Conditions in the Pen were scant. Winters were cold, but fires were prohibited for fear of arson. One inmate remembered waking up on winter mornings with his beard frozen solid. The prison provided spoons but no other utensils, so “the brethren have improvised knives out of spoon handles and other scraps of metal they have got hold of and made wooden forks,” Cannon wrote. Meals themselves were mostly coffee, bread, meat, gravy, and “mush.” Cannon did not drink coffee, and he often forewent meat. He substituted milk and butter when he could. Unlike some other prisons in the Western territories, the Pen did not make labor part of the sentence, leaving inmates with copious free time. Cannon filled the extra time by researching and writing a history he called The Life of Joseph Smith the Prophet, a project he and his sons had been writing for the last six years. On Sundays, Cannon and the other imprisoned Latter-day Saints held Sunday School together, reading the Bible and singing hymns. In October 1888, they even procured an organ from the Church’s Sunday School Union for musical accompaniment. Other ministers came to the Pen to give sermons in the afternoon, and Cannon sometimes assessed them. One Episcopal preacher’s “discourse was a very weak effort,” Cannon thought, but a few months later a Methodist “preached the best Methodist sermon” Cannon had ever heard. Cannon’s prison sentence was short—only five months—and he left the Pen in February, 1889. In his journal, he was optimistic. He wrote, “The Lord manifested to me in a very plain manner, before I came in, that I ought to go, and that if I did, it would be easier for the brethren who should follow.” Now, five months later, Cannon noticed polygamists receiving shorter sentences, prison officials granting more privileges to inmates, and even the quality of the food improving. “Our lot was far from being a hard one,” Cannon thought. The Latter-day Saints would continue to endure, he was certain.

For more (including 5 images) view the original article

In early 1888, Annie Clark Tanner was expecting her first child with Joseph Marion Tanner (see “Annie Clark Tanner’s ‘Wedding Supper’ and Early Marriage” for background). Motherhood made her feel “secure,” “thankful,” and “happy,” but contemporary circumstances cast a shadow over the pregnancy. Annie was Marion’s second wife, and for the last four years she had been masquerading as a single woman. Now pregnant, Annie could no longer pass as unmarried, and as a pregnant woman without an obvious husband, federal marshals would suspect she was a plural wife and might target her as a potential witness against her husband. To avoid subpoenas, Annie had to go underground. Annie was familiar with plural wives going underground, as her father sometimes provided a safehouse to underground women. She remembered, “When a young woman with a little baby came to my father’s, the only question asked by any of the family was, ‘Is she on the “underground railway”?’ No one wanted to know more for fear of being questioned by some Deputy Marshal who may be looking for her.” Latter-day Saints employed various underground strategies, including living far away or hiding on the outskirts of town. Annie’s strategy was to assume a false name—Mrs. Wilson—and live on the move, staying with family, friends, or willing strangers in any given town for as long as two months or as short as a day. Annie began her underground journey on April 11, 1888. Three-months pregnant, Annie felt “happy at the prospect of being a mother,” but “sad to have to leave” Farmington. Within five months, Annie moved seven times, moving back and forth to Logan, then Ogden, then Farmington with her family, then to Salt Lake City, then back to Farmington, then to Bountiful, and then finally to Centerville. Although living with her family was risky, Annie found her stays in Farmington welcome respites. Her hosts and neighbors in other towns were friendly, but she felt lonely because she could not meaningfully converse without risking revealing her true identity. “I could not say, ‘I am Ezra Clark’s daughter,’ and I hated the name of Wilson,” she recalled. Living in Farmington was precarious, though. During one stay, a neighbor saw Annie in the backyard, and “she did not conceal her surprise at seeing me big in the family way.” In Centerville, Annie stayed in the home of John Woolley and his wife. There on September 30, 1888, at around 2:00 AM, she gave birth to her daughter Jennie. Five days later, Marion made it to Centerville to visit. When Jennie was three weeks old, Annie returned again to Farmington for a few weeks, but this time her stay was “somewhat unpleasant.” Keeping baby Jennie a secret was stressful, and Annie constantly worried someone might discover them. Like her pregnancy, Annie’s daughter made her a target for federal marshals. In November, Annie moved to Ogden for a few days and then to Mendon. While she was in Mendon, both Marion and his first wife Jane “Jennie” Tanner visited. It was the first time Jennie saw Annie’s daughter, and Annie noticed Jennie start to cry, perhaps because she had no children of her own. Even so, Annie thought Jennie “loved the baby and manifested respect for me.” Even with her baby, Annie stayed itinerant. Over the next year, she lived in Logan and Richmond, Utah and then in Franklin, Georgetown, Montpelier, Paris, and Thomas’ Fork, Idaho. Marion visited Idaho in August, and on August 11 he and Annie joined a dinner in Paris, Idaho with Church apostles George Q. Cannon and Francis Lyman and Church president Wilford Woodruff also attended. While Annie “enjoyed the meetings splendidly,” one interaction became awkward. After dinner, they moved to the front room, where Jennie played on the floor while the adults talked. During the conversation, Woodruff asked Annie if she was the child’s mother. Annie said yes. Woodruff then inquired, with Marion still in the room, “And who is the happy father?” Annie wrote in her diary,

I hesitated a little and Brother Cannon, who had married us, came to my rescue by saying, “That is hardly a fair question, is it, Brother Woodruff?”

Later, one of my brothers who was there said, “You wouldn’t even tell the President of the Church who your husband was, would you?” Those of us who knew who the father was, could see how proud Brother Tanner would be to acknowledge claim on that lovely little girl. But nothing further was said. Annie’s whirlwind life continued. She left Paris the next day, and by August 16 she lived with her brother in Auburn, Wyoming. In December, she and Marion spent Christmas together in Auburn before moving to Liberty, Idaho for a week. By January 1890, Annie moved again to Montpelier for a night, then to Georgetown for a few days, and then to Franklin, arriving by January 20. For her February 8, 1890 diary entry, Annie wrote, “Mr. Tanner came to see us. We talked that evening of a home for me and baby which made our visit very memorable to me.” “Six years I had wandered,” Annie reminisced, including two years on the underground in which she moved more than twenty times and raised their daughter Jennie. Now, when she was a month pregnant with a second child, Marion finally provided Annie with a long-term home of her own in Franklin, Idaho. Franklin was comfortable, and Annie was in good company as a plural wife. She noticed “dozens of polygamist women, under assumed names, had temporary homes there while their husbands had employment elsewhere. No one asked questions.” Annie only lived in Franklin for a year before moving again, but she treasured her home while she had it. Decades later, after her relationship with Marion all but dissolved, Annie went on to build another home for herself in Farmington, Utah. The house was her “pride and security,” and she never sold it, living in Farmington for the rest of her life.

For more (including 4 images) view the original article

When authorities arrested Latter-day Saint bishop David King Udall on perjury charge in May 1884, his second wife Ida Hunt Udall called it a “trumped-up charge, simply got through malice on the part of the ‘ring.’” Though Ida dismissed the case as spiteful and unfounded, within the year David was in court both this perjury charge and two more trials, including a polygamy charge and second perjury case. Ida saw the “St. Johns Ring” operating behind each charge—an anti-polygamy group in St. Johns, Arizona who thoroughly controlled the town. Solomon Barth, a German Jew who founded St. Johns with Mexican farmers, led the Ring. As the town’s founder, Barth became its de facto leader, and his marriage to Refugio Landavazo y Sanchez, a prominent Spanish-American, extended his influence to the local Hispanic community. Barth regularly served as a grand jury foreman, and his employees often filled grand jury seats. With his intersecting business and political influence, Barth could influence his employees’ votes as grand jurors. Others in positions of civic authority joined Barth in the St. Johns Ring. Ebenezer S. Stover, Tomas Perez, and John Lorenzo Hubbell all served as sheriff; Charles L. Gutterson was the local United States District Attorney, Alfred Ruiz was district clerk, and George A. McCarter was the local United States Court Commissioner. McCarter’s position was particularly powerful. He determined the priority for pressing charges and often chose cases prosecuting Latter-day Saints.McCarter was also editor of the Apache Chief (renamed St. Johns Herald in 1884), a newspaper regarded as heavily anti-polygamy and anti-Mormon. In an 1884 journal entry, Ida reported the newspaper wrote about her “frequently,” describing her in “glowing colors” as a “prostitute, mistress, etc.” Even after McCarter sold the paper in 1885, it still declared itself “the only exclusively anti-Mormon paper in Arizona.” Although the St. Johns Ring justified their actions as the duties of elected public office, St. Johns’ Mormons accused Ring members of holding their offices through voter fraud. For example, David reported being barred from voting in November 1882. The election official simply told him, “We have decided that no polygamist should vote today.” David recalled, “There was no redress; I turned and walked away.” With the sheriffs in the Ring, investigations into the voter suppression did not materialize. By 1882, Mormons faced frequent “nuisance suits,” including larceny, unlawful assembly, and perjury. With Barth serving as grand jury foreman, indictments were frequent. Under these difficult circumstances, David testified before a grand jury for the perjury complaint filed against him. In David’s June 1884 grand jury, however, an independent St. Johns local named David Campbell served as jury foreman, not Barth. After hearing David’s testimony about the supposed perjury—an error caused by a misunderstanding on district clerk Ruiz’s part—Campbell convinced the grand jury to dismiss the case. The dismissal was only a temporary respite. By August, David was charged and arrested for unlawful cohabitation, despite his second wife Ida going into hiding two months earlier. All but one of the witnesses signing the indictment were members of the St. Johns Ring, whom Ida in her journal insisted, “knew nothing whatever of our family affairs, except from hearsay.” In November, David stood trial in Prescott, Arizona. However, the prosecution failed to subpoena Ida and compel her testimony, and without further evidence the court found David not guilty. David was fortunate; three Latter-day Saint neighbors were convicted in the same timespan. By January 1885, Church prophet-president John Taylor was advising members to flee Arizona and migrate to Mexico, beyond the reach of the U.S. government. David stayed in St. Johns, but some forty other families packed up and left town. David, perhaps, should have also left. In the summer of 1885, a grand jury convened to attempt a second indictment for the previously dismissed perjury charge, and this time the court did not inform David. Without his testimony, the grand jury indicted David for perjury. At the trial itself, Judge Howard Sumner presided. Sumner was a respected jurist and frequent speaker on the evils of polygamy. In David’s trial, Sumner sustained the prosecution’s objections to defense testimony and evidence, effectively excluding all possible proof that might have exonerated David. The jury returned a guilty verdict after 30 minutes. In response, David wrote this prayer: “Oh God, please deliver me… If I am to suffer imprisonment, let it be for my religion and not for the heinous crime that will be a disgrace to me and my family throughout life.” By September 1885, David was serving his prison sentence in Detroit, Michigan. This was the St. Johns Ring’s last anti-Mormon victory. Some unknown disagreement between Barth and the others caused him to split from the Ring. Meanwhile, former sheriff Hubbell had begun forming business relationships with Mormons, and district clerk Ruiz had actually tried to testify on David’s behalf before Sumner ruled against the defense. The two of them left the Ring, and they even signed on to a letter to President Grover Cleveland asking him to pardon David. Cleveland did, freeing David in December 1885. By 1887, the Ring fell apart. McCarter was dismissed as court commissioner due to alcoholism, and Barth went to prison for two years as the territorial court turned against him and found him guilty of destroying county records. Meanwhile, by 1888 David moved to Round Valley, Arizona, where he lived for several years before eventually moving back to St. Johns with his family and going on to build a home there and become a stake president for the Church. After his prison sentence, Barth also returned to St. Johns. Having apparently mellowed out toward Mormons by the time he died in 1928, Barth requested his funeral be held in a Latter-day Saint chapel. Levi Udall, David’s son, conducted the service.

For more (including 8 images) view the original article

In July 1884, the David, Ella, and Ida Udall family of St. Johns, Arizona was optimistic about the future. The Udalls were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (then often nicknamed Mormons), and they were also polygamists, plural marriage being a central religious practice of the Church at the time. David’s marriage to both Ella and Ida violated the Edmunds Anti-Polygamy Act of 1882, but like most other Mormon polygamists, the Udalls followed the counsel of their prophet-president John Taylor to engage in civil disobedience. When faced with the choice to “obey God or Congress,” the Udalls chose God. Despite the 1882 Edmunds Anti-polygamy Act, David had thus far avoided being arrested for polygamy, and their nontraditional family was growing. On July 5, David’s first wife Ella gave birth to their second daughter, to be named Erma. Meanwhile, their first daughter Pearl was four-years old. Despite anti-polygamy sentiments in St. Johns, the Church hoped eastern Arizona could be a haven for polygamist members. A neighbor, Catharine Cottam Romney, second wife to Miles Romney, had even returned to St. Johns after hiding in New Mexico. Ida thought her family might soon be “able to go out and do something as other people did.” However, July 10 dashed that hope. Just as the Udalls finished dinner, Mormon neighbors Ammon Tenney and Joe Crosby arrived with urgent news. Federal marshals had arrested Tenney for violating the Edmunds Act (though they had not yet taken him into custody) and issued a subpoena to his second wife Eliza Udall Tenney, Ida’s sister, who promptly fled. Tenney and Crosby warned the marshals might next arrest David and subpoena Ida to testify against him. Ida was hesitant to leave Ella, still recovering from the birth, and Pearl and Erma, who Ida regarded as if her own daughters. Still, she soon agreed to go “underground,” a term Latter-day Saints in the late-nineteenth century used to describelong-term hiding to evade arrests or subpoenas related to polygamy. Ida stayed the rest of the evening at a neighbors’ home, but before she could sleep David arrived and took Ida along with Eliza, Catharine, and Annie (Miles Romney’s third wife) three miles out of town, arriving at the home of Joel White around 2:00 AM. The house did not have room for all four women, so the group arranged beds for them outside. In her journal, Ida described sleeping “on the shady side of the house, under the blue canopy of heaven… Thus passed our first night as exiles from home.” All day July 11, Eliza kept watch with binoculars. Whenever she saw someone draw near the homestead, the four women hid behind curtains or underneath the beds. The four remained in hiding at the White home until July 16, when “it was decided,” as Ida wrote, that they would “be shipped” to Snowflake, Arizona. Unlike St. Johns, where the Mormons were newcomers, Latter-day Saints had founded Snowflake, and Ida and Eliza had family there. The women would still need to hide, but everyone hoped they would be safer in Snowflake than in St. Johns. After sunset that day and before leaving St. Johns, Ida visited Ella, Pearl, and Erma one last time, and she kissed each of them. The women departed for Snowflake thereafter and traveled through the night. Ida rode with Catharine and Annie in a wagon driven by their husband Miles Romney, but as an extra precaution Eliza (“the only criminal of the lot,” Ida wrote) took a different route. Accompanied by her husband Ammon Tenney and a neighbor, Eliza rode to Snowflake on horseback, disguised in men's clothes.  Catharine gave birth in Snowflake two weeks later, having gone into, out of, and back into the underground in the span of two months, all during her final trimester.  Over time, as federal marshals continued combing northeastern Arizona with subpoenas, the families decided even Snowflake wasn’t far enough. In September, David and Ida agreed to have her travel to Nephi, Utah, where she could live with David’s parents. There in Nephi, in March 1885, Ida, like Catharine, gave birth on the underground to her daughter Pauline. Ida did not reunite with the rest of the family again until the late 1880s, in Round Valley, Arizona. Catharine moved from Snowflake to St. George, Utah, where she lived with her family for a few years. After Miles resolved to flee prosecution by moving to Mexico, he, Catharine, Hannah, Anna, and their children reunited in Juarez by 1886, continuing their underground exile beyond the reach of the United States. By 1885, mounting persecution prompted President Taylor to advise the Latter-day Saints of eastern Arizona to flee the country and go to Mexico as the Romneys would in 1886. Around fifty families left St. Johns and the surrounding region, and while David did not leave initially, he eventually quit St. Johns and moved to Round Valley, Arizona in 1888, where the whole family lived together by 1892.  Some families eventually returned to St. Johns, like the Udalls who went on to build a home there (see “The Elm Hotel and the Udall Family”). Other families, like the Romneys who eventually repatriated, never lived in St. Johns again.

For more (including 3 images) view the original article

Although Congress passed the Morrill Anti-bigamy Act in 1862, twelve years later in 1874 no court had yet found a single member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (sometimes nicknamed “Mormons” in that time) guilty of having multiple wives. While the rest of America condemned Mormon polygamy as a barbaric heresy and theocratic threat to democracy, Church leaders insisted the First Amendment to the Constitution protected their plural marriages under the free exercise of religion. Meanwhile, most Latter-day Saint polygamists lived in remote western U.S. territories. Latter-day Saints held electoral majorities for years, effectively guaranteeing territorial law enforcement, judges, and juries were friendly to Latter-day Saints. However, in June 1874 Congress passed the Poland Act, granting United States district courts exclusive criminal jurisdiction in the territories, thereby putting judges, juries, and polygamy cases in the hands of the federal government instead of territorial voters. Within a year, federal prosecutors finally had a trial for an anti-polygamy case against George Reynolds, a clerk in the office of the Church’s First Presidency who had married a second wife earlier that year. Reynolds originally agreed to be indicted as a “test case” negotiated between the Church and federal prosecutors to settle the Church’s First Amendment claims, but the agreement fell apart after his October 1874 indictment. By the time of Reynolds’s trial in March 1875, Reynolds was fighting for a not guilty verdict. Court convened on March 31, 1875 for United States v. Reynolds. Although Latter-day Saints were among the jury, they agreed to respect the trial court’s ruling on the Morrill Act’s constitutionality for the sake of deciding the verdict. But Carey, the prosecutor, soon found himself at an impasse anyway. He declared his intent to prove Reynolds lawfully married Mary Ann Tuddenham in 1865 and unlawfully married Amelia Jane Schofield in 1874, but the fourteen witnesses he subpoenaed—including friends and family of Reynolds—had planned ahead of time to give testimonies that would obscure as much as possible Reynolds’s relationship to Schofield. Historian Bruce van Orden observed, “their testimonies bordered not merely on evasion but on lying.” Daniel H. Wells, who had officiated the marriage, testified he could not clearly remember the ceremony. Reynolds’s sister Julia, who shared his home, admitted that a woman besides Reynolds’s first wife did live in the house but insisted she did not know if the second woman and Reynolds were married. In later polygamy cases, other families made similar efforts to dance on the edge of “truth” to avoid implicating husbands and wives. Before the end of the trial’s first day, the prosecution team privately agreed they were failing to prove the case—but they were not ready to give up. There was one potential witness they had not subpoenaed already: Amelia Jane Schofield, Reynolds’s second wife. Since the government did not recognize their marriage as lawful, they could justify subpoenaing Amelia to testify against her husband. The prosecution quietly obtained a subpoena, and while they waited for a deputy marshal to escort Amelia to the courthouse, Carey asked for and received a brief recess. Not long after, Amelia arrived. Benjamin R. Cowen (sometimes spelled Cowan), Assistant Secretary of the Interior, was in the courtroom audience and believed “the ghost of Joe Smith would scarcely have produced a more profound sensation.” Now several months into her pregnancy, Amelia was obviously carrying someone’s child, and “she must either have sworn herself the lawful wife of George Reynolds or tacitly confessed to being his concubine,” Cowan thought. In the end, her cross-examination was even simpler. Because the prosecution had not previously subpoenaed Amelia, she had not been part of the other witnesses’ preparation. Carey asked Amelia who she was married to, and she calmly testified that Reynolds was her husband. Court reconvened on April 1, 1875, and Carey rested his case. J.G. Sutherland, Reynolds’s defense attorney, pivoted his strategy and admitted Reynolds and Amelia indeed were married, but he asserted the First Amendment protected their marriage as a religious practice. The prosecution objected to the statement as irrelevant, and the judge upheld the objection—establishing grounds for Reynolds to eventually bring his case to the Supreme Court. The jury—Mormons and all—returned a guilty verdict after deliberating for thirty minutes. Several legal snafus followed the trial, including an appellate court decision to overturn the trial’s verdict for irregularities in the original indictment. But after a second trial in which Reynolds’s defense again insisted the First Amendment protected his practice and a second judge again declared this defense invalid, a second jury again declared Reynolds guilty. On December 21, 1875, Judge Alexander White sentenced Reynolds to serve two years in prison. Reynolds and the Church immediately appealed the decision, and the government postponed his sentence in the meantime. But when the Supreme Court upheld the Morrill Act as constitutional in 1879, Reynolds’s two-year prison sentence caught up to him. On June 16, 1879, Reynolds handed himself over to federal marshals. Latter-day Saints called him a “living martyr,” “imprisoned for conscience’ sake.”

For more (including 6 images) view the original article

In 1882, Ella Stewart Udall and her husband David King Udall had a happy life as a frontier couple. David ran a store in St. Johns, Arizona and led their local congregation, and they had a two-year-old daughter, Pearl. But on May 25, the family participated in a ceremony deemed illegal by the Edmunds Act of 1882: David married a second wife, Ida Hunt Udall. They were all members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (in that time often nicknamed Mormons), which taught plural marriage to its members as a central religious practice. Yet Church membership alone did not persuade Euro-Americans with Protestant roots to accept polygamy, a practice the broader United States abhorred. All three came to accept plural marriage in different ways, often based on lifetime pondering and experiences. David Udall began considering polygamy while serving as bishop of the St. Johns ward. During that time, Church prophet-president John Taylor encouraged all Church leaders to practice polygamy. For David, this was difficult. His father’s plural marriage was unhappy, so David grew up skeptical of polygamy. In his memoir, David reported he assented to polygamy because of “only the deepest religious conviction,” and many Latter-day Saints of the era couched their acceptance of polygamy in similarly spiritual terms. Some family histories even describe “conversions” to polygamy, much as one might describe conversion to a faith. David’s attitude softened after he married Ella Stewart. Ella also grew up in a plural family, but both wives, Margery and Macy Wilkerson, were sisters and got along well. Ella’s mother Margery died when Ella was only fifteen, and Macy raised her thereafter, leading Ella to develop a positive attitude toward polygamy But while Ella was open-minded in the abstract, she may have been hesitant about participating in polygamy herself. David occasionally broached the subject of marrying a second wife, but in every case before Ida, Ella disapproved of his suggested spouse, and David dropped the matter each time. Ida entered the Udalls’ lives in 1881, when David hired her as a clerk for his Co-op store in St. Johns. At the time, she had a boyfriend named Johnny Murdock in Beaver, Utah. Unlike Ella, Ida’s parents were not polygamists during her childhood, so she had not grown up with plural marriage in her immediate family. Instead, Ida converted to polygamy in 1880 when she met Jesse N. Smith, president of the Eastern Arizona Stake, and his wives Emma Seraphine West and Mary Aikens. Ida saw a “distinct spiritual quality” in the family and an “unselfish devotion between” Emma and Mary. Ida was so impressed that she resolved to also have a plural marriage. When Johnny Murdock, her boyfriend from Beaver, wrote to her with a marriage proposal, Ida promptly broke off the relationship because Murdock did not want to practice polygamy, and Ida did. By 1881, when Ida moved to St. Johns and began working at David’s Co-op, she, Ella, and David each accepted plural marriage, though each for different reasons and to different extents. After Ida broke up with Murdock, David courted her, and he proposed in January 1882. Before accepting, Ida left St. Johns for Snowflake, and she asked Ella by letter for her consent to the proposal: 

I cannot allow another day to pass by without writing you to ascertain if possible your true feelings upon… the possibility or probability of my becoming at some future day a member of your family… I cannot allow the matter to go farther, without first having received some assurance of your willingness to such a step being taken, at least that you have no more serious objections to me than you would to any other under like circumstances. Two months later, Ella wrote back:

The subject in question has caused me a great amount of pain and sorrow, more perhaps than you could imagine, yet I feel as I have from the beginning, that if it is the Lord’s will I am perfectly willing to try to endure it and trust it will be overruled for the best good of all. My feelings are such that I can write but briefly on this subject.

With kind regards to all, I remain your friend. Ella's blessing on the union was unenthusiastic, but she, Ida, and David reached an agreement. In May, David and Ida married in the St. George, Utah Temple, and in her journal entry for that day, Ida observed she had two new relationships:

When he [David] bade me goodnight, the sacred name of wife was whispered for the first time in my ear, causing my heart to flutter with a strange new happiness. During the night, Ella, being unable to sleep, came into my room, and mentioned for the first time our relationship to each other, and we talked long and earnestly of our hopes and desires for the future, both feeling much happier for the same. In the coming years, anti-polygamy laws, Ida going into hiding for two years, David’s arrest and imprisonment, tensions over how to balance the marriage, and financial hardship would all combine to complicate these “hopes and desires.” But at least for that May night in St. George, they were a happy family.

For more (including 3 images) view the original article

While herding cattle during the summer of 1855, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who had been called to settle southern Utah discovered the location of beautiful Pine Valley in southwestern Utah. The following year, St. George residents went to Pine Valley to harvest timber and establish several sawmills. As more people settled in Pine Valley, they constructed a chapel. They called upon Ebenezer Bryce, a shipbuilder from Scotland and the namesake for Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah, to design and build the structure. There is some discrepancy regarding the methods used to design the chapel. Some sources claim that because he was a shipbuilder, the roof of the building is constructed to model an upside-down ship, while other sources state that Bryce used materials appropriately common for buildings, not ships. While the roof may look similar to a ship, the description provided by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gives doubt to that claim: the building is made of pine wood, from “the finest trees in the valley, the same stand as those from which the pipe organ in the Salt Lake Tabernacle was constructed.” The foundation is made of local stone, mainly granite and red limestone. The building has three floors: a basement in which auxiliary meetings were held, a ground floor used for community purposes and as a schoolhouse, and an upper floor which contains the building’s chapel, used as the main space of worship. Following the chapel’s original completion, Latter-day Saints in Pine Valley have since added an attic containing pictures of the original settlers and other historical artifacts. Another small building, the Tithing Office, was constructed in the corner of the lot. In 1971, the two buildings, the chapel and Tithing Office, were added to the National Register of Historic Places. Both are still in use today by Pine Valley locals as a church building and community gathering place, making it the longest-operating chapel in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

For more (including 3 images) view the original article

In the spring of 1865, Mormon settlers met with Utes of Sanpete Valley, hoping to find a resolution to years of sporadic disagreements and occasional violence between the groups. Instead of alleviating tensions, however, even greater violence erupted with the onset of the Black Hawk War. Brigham Young previously encouraged the Saints to treat Indians well, saying, “We are settled upon their lands, which materially interrupts their success in hunting, fishing, etc… For these reasons, it behooves us to exercise toward them all possible kindness, liberty, patience, and forbearance.” While his policy of kindness toward Native Nations continued, Young simultaneously recognized Mormon settlers were vulnerable to attack after dispossessing tribes of some of their settlement sites and using up the region’s finite resources.

The area around Cove Creek was a particularly dangerous resting place for travelers as 30 miles of uninhabited desert lay in both directions. On April 12, 1867, Circleville resident Ira Hinckley received a letter from Brigham Young extending a calling for him to construct a fort near Cove Creek. Its purpose was to “afford protection from the Indians to the Telegraph & Mail Stations and to travelers who are almost constantly on the road. Also to furnish feed and protection from and weather to this latter class.” Hinckley immediately told the messenger to tell Brigham Young he would accept the calling.

A few days later, Hinckley traveled to Cove Creek with his brother Arza and forty other men, and within seven months they finished building Cove Fort. While most pioneer-era forts were wooden, Cove Fort was instead constructed out of volcanic rock, contributing to its structural longevity.

Although relatively small, measuring 100 feet by 100 feet, Hinckley and his men built an impressive fortress. The walls were 18 feet high, 4 feet thick at the base, and 2 feet at the top. Gun ports lined the walls. The fort had rooms for the Hinckley family, visitors, a kitchen and dining area, and a room for a telegraph station, which was installed in February 1867. There was also a ranch on site to provide food and a blacksmith shop to service the horses and wagons of travelers.

While the fort was initially designed for protection, it was never attacked, and the inhabitants maintained good relations with the local tribes. It did, however, serve as a refuge for all those that visited. Families, telegraph operators, mail carriers, trail workers, and even occasional Utes called upon the Fort for a place to sit or stay the night. Hinckley’s son Ira Parnell Hinckley said, “Within its then impregnable walls were safely sheltered thousands, both good and bad, the venturesome and the timid, the desperado and the saint, as they moved westward in quest of gold, or eastward in disappointment, or back and forth in their routine duty. Without it, what might have been, no one knows.”

The fort was used as a waystation from 1867 to 1882, but as the railroad became increasingly popular, fewer travelers visited the fort. The Hinckley family occupied Cove Fort until 1890, and then in 1919 the Church signed it over to William Henry Kesler. In 1989, descendants of Ira and Arza Hinckley purchased the land back from the Kesler family and subsequently donated it to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Church restored Cove Fort to its original condition and Gordon B. Hinckley, then a member of the Church’s First Presidency and a descendant of Ira Hinckley, dedicated it as a historic monument on May 21, 1994.

For more (including 4 images) view the original article

Fort Utah was first established a mile and a half east of Utah Lake by a company of one hundred and fifty Latter-day Saints. Led by John Higbee, the Saints arrived on April 1, 1849. They chose the location with the intention to farm on the fertile river soil, but when President Brigham Young visited the fort, he suggested they move to higher ground. The secondary location became the nucleus for the city of Provo. The Saints settled next to the indigenous village of the Timpanogos Utes. Initially, the Utes treated their new neighbors with kindness and generosity, and they fished and gambled together. That winter, however, misunderstandings broke out between the Utes and Saints. It began in August with a dispute between Richard Ivie and a native known to the Latter-day Saints as Old Bishop, whom Ivie accused of stealing his shirt. When Bishop refused to give the shirt up, Ivie and his friends killed him and threw his body into the Provo River. Furious, the Timpanogos demanded the settlers hand over the murderers. When their requests were denied, they insisted the Saints provide compensation for Bishop’s death, which the Saints also refused. Considering how generous the tribe had been in sharing their prized fishing and hunting resources during the summer, the Utes felt justified in collecting rent through involuntary cattle and corn payments from their neighbors during the fall and winter. As the amicable relations began to sour, Higbee asked Brigham Young permission to declare war against the Timpanogos, whom he misrepresented to Young as hostile. Young granted the request. Parley P. Pratt and Willard Richards agreed with him, not wanting to find themselves cut off from their southern colonies. They sent the Nauvoo Legion to assist the local Latter-day Saints in attacking the Timpanogos. After just one day, the soldiers cornered their enemies into an abandoned cabin. The next day they placed shields on sledges and attacked. Desperate, the natives fled during the second night only to be hunted down. When the fighting ended, there were more than one hundred Timpanogos casualties and one dead Latter-day Saint. This dark episode serves as a reminder that while Latter-day Saints generally had positive interactions with the Native Americans, there were certainly episodes of unwarranted and reprehensible violence.

For more (including 3 images) view the original article

The scorching temperatures, sparse vegetation, and endless red rock of Saint George, Utah were all that greeted early settlers in the Cotton Mission. Charles Walker, born 1832 in Leek, England, was one of the individuals called by Brigham Young to settle the area and produce cotton to supplement the income for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Upon arriving in 1862, Walker remarked, “St. George is a barren looking place. The soil is red and sandy. On the North ranges a long high red rocky bluff. On the East is a long black ridge of volcanic production. On the west the same. On the south runs the Virgin river, a shallow, rapid stream from which a great portion of the land is irrigated. To look on the country it [is a] dry, parched, barren waste with here and there a green spot on the margins of the streams.” While his observation seemed bleak, Walker exuded optimism with the work that he believed God had called him to do. He wrote in his personal journal, “Well it’s all right; we shall know how to appreciate a good country when we get to it, when the Lord has prepared the way for his people to return and build up… Zion.” Walker’s time in St. George reflected the stalwart nature of those called to settle far Western settlements, and his life in the area would have a significant impact on those around him. The initial hope that settlers could grow cotton as a cash crop was dashed by poor soil quality. In an attempt to keep the community thriving, Brigham Young ordered the construction of a large public works project to bolster the economy: a new temple. Walker transitioned to stonemasonry and worked on the temple constantly. When the temple was completed, Walker participated in the, and a song he wrote for the occasion was sung at the event. When Walker was not busy with blacksmithing or working on the temple, he spent time with his family and saw to his various church callings. One labor that endeared him to the hearts of his neighbors was his gifted ear for writing hymns, the most famous of which is “Dearest Children, God is Near You.” Walker later adopted polygamy as practiced by Latter-day Saints in the nineteenth century, marrying his second wife, Sarah Smith. His first wife, Abigail Middlemass, helped him select Sarah, and the trio lived together for the rest of Walker’s life. Each wife gave birth to eight children, sixteen total, with twelve of them reaching adulthood. Walker noted that his peculiar family situation allowed him to labor on the temple and work in his shop more because the burden of running the household was shared between his spouses. Walker also kept himself busy as an assistant marshal for the city and a leader in the local militia. He passed away in 1904, leaving behind a legacy of faithfulness and work ethic on the Utah Frontier.

For more (including 3 images) view the original article