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.

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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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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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