In 1871, leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints announced that a temple would be built in St. George in 1871. While this was exciting for members in southern Utah, it was also exciting to the members scattered throughout Arizona who wanted to be married for eternity in a ceremony that could only take place in a temple. After the temple in St. George was completed in 1877, couples in Arizona traveled to St. George to participate in the marriage ceremony. Depending on their starting point in northern or southern Arizona, some couples traveled over 400 miles to be married. The Honeymoon Trail was difficult to traverse under the best conditions and was sometimes made worse by the weather. Couples had no choice but to cross deep muddy washes and traverse canyons and hills. They could choose between a shorter route across mountains or avoid them by extending their journey by many miles. Although the trail did have a hazardous river crossing, most of the trail lacked adequate drinking water. It was common for oxen to die from dehydration. Some couples made the most of this loss by trading dying or dead oxen to people along the trail for other needed goods. Some couples endured snowstorms while others endured sandstorms. For instance, Joseph Fish, who undertook the trail to marry Julia Reidheid, suffered vision loss due to the sandstorms encountered on the journey. Despite their father’s challenging experience, some of Fish’s children still chose to traverse the same trail to reach the temple, fully aware of the risks they would face. The physical trail was not the only danger faced by couples. Tensions stemming from the Black Hawk War, a violent confrontation between Latter-Day Saint settlers and the Ute, Paiute, and Navajo nations from 1865 until 1872, led to ongoing confrontations. Some travelers lost horses to Indigenous raiders. However, many of the interactions between travelers and the Natives were friendly. Still, stories of past violence exaggerated the expectations of hostile interactions and caused the travelers to fear. Not only were Natives a concern, but running into strangers and outlaws also brought fear to the lawless wilderness. Danger surrounded the couples and groups who journeyed to the temple in St. George.  The efforts and dedication of the Saints of Arizona were observed by Church leaders. In 1918 they announced that a temple would be built in Mesa Arizona. At the time there were only six operating temples, marking a tremendous victory for the members scattered throughout Arizona. The completion of the Mesa Temple in 1927 brought to an end the colorful history of the Honeymoon Trail.

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Glen Hyde and Bessie Haley met on a ship steaming from San Francisco to Los Angles in the early summer of 1927, and it was clear to their friends and family that the two were immediately attracted to one another. Glen and Bessie were both intelligent, cultured, and outgoing, and they had the makings of the ultimate power couple. After divorcing her first husband in early April 1928, Bessie immediately married Glen. The newly wedded couple then settled into life at Glen's home near the town of Murtaugh in Twin Falls County, Idaho. Acquired by the Hydes in the early 1910s, “the Murtaugh Place” was a small parcel of land located fifteen miles east of the family's farm, “the Home Place,” in Kimberly, Idaho. Glen's father, Rollin Hyde, had bought it to expand his farming enterprises. After dropping out of college for the final time in 1923, Glen came to live in the small shack he and Rollin built on the property, dividing his workdays between the Murtaugh Place and the Home Place. In the spring and summer, Glen and Rollin grew crops on both properties to sell in Kimberly, while in the winter, they raised sheep and sold their wool when spring came. When he wasn't working, Glen enjoyed activities like playing tennis on the court he had built at the Home Place, or swimming in the local irrigation canals or in the nearby Snake River. Yet, Glen was never satisfied with his life at the Murtaugh Place. The young man craved adventure. Glen's new wife shared his ambition. Bessie was accustomed to the bustling and exciting nature of life in the city, having spent much of her early adulthood studying art in San Francisco. Life at the Murtaugh Place was comparatively dull and uneventful, as daily life was largely based on the regular routines of farm work. Though she learned to ride a horse, got a dog, and reportedly worked as hard as her husband, it was clear to friends and family that Bessie, along with Glen, desired a lifestyle that their existence at the Murtaugh Place could not provide. A “normal” life on the farm wasn't for them. For Glen and Bessie, the means to escape the monotony of the Murtaugh Place came in the form of their upcoming honeymoon, a trip down the Colorado River. By choosing such an undertaking, the couple sought to emulate the fantastical stories of exploration and daring feats reported on the front pages of popular tabloids. If successful, Bessie would have been the first woman to travel the entire length of the nearly 600-mile-long river, a feat that the couple could use to gain further fame for themselves. In essence, their honeymoon was a ticket out of their boring lives at the Murtaugh Place. After Glen and Bessie disappeared, the Hyde family continued to operate the Murtaugh Place for several more years. At present, it seems as though nothing remains of the shack Glen and Bessie lived in.   

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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Many divorcee’s inaugural steps as single souls graced the Washoe Courthouse steps. One such divorcee was the famous playwright Arthur Miller. Miller had resided at the Pyramid Lake Guest Ranch in the spring of 1956. After his six weeks residency and subsequent divorce, he returned to film a movie he had written that was founded upon his own six-week stay as a divorcee.

Miller’s residency was fulfilled on May 31, 1956. Arthur Miller received his divorce from Mary Slattery Miller on June 12, 1956. He held mental cruelty as grounds for divorcing Mary, whom he’d met in college. The Washoe Courthouse divorce hearing lasted only five minutes. This speedy hearing would strike a strong comparison to another upcoming hearing for Miller. He had been subpoenaed to testify before the House un-American Activities Committee Washington D.C. the following week.

Amidst the height of the Red Scare, Miller had been accused of Communist leanings. His hearing before the House had been delayed to allow for Miller to stay in the state for the duration of his residency. After enduring both his marital and political hearings, Miller would marry star Marilyn Monroe.

Miller had two eras in Reno. The first occurred in 1956 when Miller obtained a divorce from his first wife. In Miller’s second act in Reno, he arrived with his new bride Marilyn. The two arrived to film Misfits in 1960. Misfits’ premise was inspired by his own residency on Pyramid Lake. The film combined Miller’s experience on a divorce ranch with a plot that featured his movie-star wife. The divorce ranch served as a token of Reno that was romanticized by many but brought to the big screen by Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. Monroe operated as the leading lady and starred alongside Clark Gable. Gable was already a familiar face in Reno, beyond his national fame. He had stayed at the Flying M E Ranch and later fished with Sinatra on Nevadan lakes. The stars offered a film that brought the stories of Nevada’s many divorcees to light.

However, the pensive Miller who had created stories along the shores of Pyramid Lake would later discover a painful irony in his Misfits film. Miller and Monroe’s marriage would fall apart on the Misfits set. The film was released in 1961 and Marilyn’s role as a divorcee in Miller’s film would be realized that same year.

Within Miller’s own experience and his wife’s portrayal of Reno divorces, the infamous Washoe County Courthouse maintained a central symbolic presence. Miller’s first steps as an ex-husband were captured by local reporters. Then, a few years later, his new wife Monroe would stand on the very steps Washoe County Courthouse steps portraying the divorcee she would soon become.

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