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According to many accounts of LDS theology, polygamy, also called celestial marriage, is a necessary mandate for the highest degree of celestial glory. Doctrine and Covenants sections 131 and 132 tell us that celestial marriage and the continuation of the human family will enable us to become gods because we will have endless, everlasting increase (D&C 132:20). The Doctrine and Covenants gives a direct warning that if we do not abide by the law of polygamy, we cannot attain this glory (D&C 132:21). Likewise, prophets have stated that theosis and plural marriage are intimately intertwined. Brigham Young, the most notable advocate for mandated polygamy, stated, “The only men who become Gods, even the sons of God, are those who enter into polygamy.”[1] However, he also wrote, “if you desire with all your hearts to obtain the blessings which Abraham obtained you will be polygamists at least in your faith.”[2] It is interesting that he uses the words “at least in your faith.” Was this to suggest that if a man cannot practice polygamy on earth, he will in heaven? Or is this to suggest a man may never enter into a polygamous marriage, but may live the spirit of polygamy in his heart? Later, Wilford Woodruff recorded in his journal that “President Young said there would be men saved in the Celestial Kingdom of God with one wife with Many wives & with No wife at all.”[3] Woodruff also wrote, “Then President Young spoke 58 Minutes. He said a Man may Embrace the Law of Celestial Marriage in his heart & not take the Second wife & be justified before the Lord.”[4] What is to be made of these statements? How can one embrace the spirit of polygamy, the law of celestial marriage, but remain monogamous with one wife or even no wives?

This paper will refer to the sex-focused, androcentric, patriarchal, heteronormative model of polygyny as the Standard Model. At a glance, the Standard Model is highly problematic. Though the Standard Model tends to dominate discourse, a more creative interpretation of what the spirit of polygamy includes may offer new insight into what celestial relationships might look like. I’m suggesting a way to reconcile diverse desires for celestial marriage under a new model I call Queer Polygamy, which encompasses the spirit of polygamy without mandating specific marital relations. I will begin with an expository of the Standard Model of polygamy followed by an expository of the Queer Polygamy Model and demonstrate how plural marriage may be redeemed to accommodate diverse relationships and desires, as Brigham Young suggests. I will then point out five common concerns with the Standard Model of polygamy and how the Queer Polygamy Model address them.

The Standard Model of polygamy is often and reductively described as one man having multiple wives. The man will continue to increase in power and dominion according to the number of wives and children he accumulates. This means he is eternally sealed to all his wives and children as a god, like Heavenly Father, who also must have entered into plural marriage. To attain the highest degree of celestial glory and have eternal increase, a man must enter into polygamy. The Standard Model focuses exclusively on the man or patriarch with little regard to what others, especially women and children, desire.

This aesthetic of God and godhood is problematic for many reasons. This view paints a rather androcentric and domineering perspective of what polygamy might look like. Additionally, this makes God a patriarchal monarch whose power and glory aren’t shared with his family and community but used at the expense of his family and community. If God evolved into godhood as a lone patriarch, his power is not holy but tyrannical. This patriarchal model of God, polygamy, sealings, celestial glory, and heaven are not a vision of glory most of us would aspire to as Saints in Zion. The Standard Model also neglects doctrines concerning the law of consecration, theosis for all, and other communal practices of Zion. The people of Zion live together as one in equality (D&C 38:24–27; 4 Ne. 1:3), having one heart and one mind (Moses 7:8). The Saints of Zion together enjoy the highest degree of glory and happiness that can be received in this life and, if they are faithful, in the world to come. Zion can be thought of as a template for how gods become gods. Yet the Standard Model of polygamy doesn’t resemble anything Latter-day Saints might want to strive for. The God of the Standard Model sounds more like a venture capitalist accruing wives and children for self-glorification rather than the leader of a collective group of Saints living in pure love with one another. Community, diversity, nuance, and even sometimes consent[5] are lost in this simplistic narrative.

I believe queer theology is ripe with possibilities to reconcile our diverse aspirations toward Zion in a model I call Queer Polygamy, a model that can accommodate a potentially infinite number of marital, sexual, romantic, platonic, and celestial relationships. The phrase Queer Polygamy almost seems redundant. Polygamy is inherently queer according to contemporary monogamous marital expectations.[6] It is, by Western standards, a deviation from the norm. The word queer may also seem to imply that a person must necessarily be a member of the LGBTQ+ community for these ideas to apply, but this is not the case. Rest assured, heterosexual monogamous couples are an important subset under the umbrella of Queer Polygamy, just as Brigham Young suggested. A person with many, one, or no spouses may be included in this model. The use of the word queer in Queer Polygamy is to signify a more thoughtful and thorough interpretation of polygamy that would be inclusive of such diversity, and many of its manifestations would be rightly considered queer. You may initially find this model strangely foreign, but I believe it is in harmony with LDS theology, both logically and practically, as both scripture and past prophets have taught. The word polygamy is used to convey the plurality of relationships we engage in and to suggest that celestial marriage and eternal sealings include far more practices than heterosexual monogamy or androcentric polygyny. Eternal sealings among the Saints are inherently plural. Queer Polygamy is not in opposition to LDS theology but rather the fulfillment of the all-inclusive breadth that LDS theology has to offer.

The Standard Model of polygamy is problematic for multiple reasons, as many LDS feminists and queer theologians, like myself, have pointed out.[7] I will review five of the most common problems with the Standard Model, then demonstrate how they might be reconciled by adopting the Queer Polygamy Model. The five common concerns are that the Stand Model does not leave room for the following: (1) monogamous couples;(2) women, and other genders, who desire plural marriage; (3) asexuals, aromantics, and singles; (4) homosexual relationships; and (5) plural parental sealings.

First, an unnuanced reading of Doctrine and Covenants section 132 appeals to a patriarchal and androcentric model of polygyny built upon a hierarchy of men who will be given women, also called virgins, as if they were property (D&C 132:61–63). This exclusively polygynous model is a major concern for women who do not wish to engage in plural marriage without their consent, such as the case with “the law of Sarah” (D&C 132:64–65). By extension, the Standard Model does not leave room for couples who wish to remain romantically and/or sexually monogamous. However, there is room for monogamy in the Queer Polygamy Model. To demonstrate this, I’d like to refer to queer sexual orientations not as universal orientations or socio-political identity labels but as specific practices in specific relationships. For example, I identify as pansexual; however, in my relationship with my sister I am asexual and aromantic. Though I am pansexual by orientation, I engage in a specific asexual, aromantic, platonic relationship with her. This is not intended to mean that our relationship is void of depth, intimacy, love, commitment, and loyalty—quite the contrary. I feel all those things for my sister and more, but we have no desire for a sexual or romantic connection. This does not mean my sister is any less important to me than my husband, with whom I do desire a sexual and romantic relationship; it simply means the relationship dynamics are different between my sister and me and my husband and me. In the Queer Polygamy Model, I could be sealed to my sister in a platonic sealing for all eternity while also being sealed to my husband in a relationship that does include sex. I would be sealed to two people plurally, but I would still be practicing sexual monogamy. Thus, for couples who desire to practice heterosexual monogamy with one partner for all eternity, they may still be sealed to other persons they love plurally and engage in those other relationships asexually and aromantically. It is in this way that we can be sealed to our children. I am not only sealed to my husband, but I’m also platonically sealed to our three children. Not all sealings include sex, nor should they. Plural marriages, unions, and sealings among adults could also include plural, platonic sealings among several persons while the core couple still practices exclusive heterosexual monogamy.

Second, the account given in Doctrine and Covenants 132 does not explicitly address women who also wish to engage in plural marriages alongside their husbands. The exclusively polygynous model of polygamy can create a disturbing and problematic power imbalance among the sexes—especially for women in heterosexual relationships. Under the Queer Polygamy Model, plural sealings would be available to all consenting adults, not just men. As stated above, women are sealed to multiple people, such as children and parents, but I suggest that the policy allow women to be sealed to multiple adults whom they are not related to, just as men are afforded that privilege. Though the scriptures do not state that women may have more than one husband, that does not mean they can’t have more than one husband. In fact, more than one of Joseph Smith’s wives was also married to other men.[8] This shows there is room in our religion for women who desire to be married to multiple men, including heteroromantic, sexual, or asexual relationships. It would be up to the participants to decide the relationship dynamics of their sealing or marriage, just as Joseph Smith engaged in sexual relationships with some, but not all, of his plural wives. There are various reasons for plural marriage and/or sealings that do or don’t involve sex. Granted, legitimizing sexual relationships through sealings and/or ritual is important to avoid promiscuity in sexual relationships. Honesty and open communication are key to respecting the autonomy and volition of all participants—though not all past participants of polygamy practiced it in such a manner, namely Joseph Smith.

Third, a traditional interpretation of the doctrine of celestial marriage does not leave room for persons who do not desire marriage or are asexual and/or aromantic. However, there is room for asexual and aromantic sealings under the Queer Polygamy Model. Sealings of kinship, friendship, and love may be offered between persons who wish not to have a sexual or romantic relationship with others. Plural marriage for asexual persons could take the form of an asexual woman married to a heterosexual couple, or three asexual persons who wish to be sealed together in a plural marriage that doesn’t include sex. Again, sealing and/or marriage is not tantamount to sex. Asexual persons, or persons who wish to remain single, could be sealed to parents, siblings, friends, and other partners without committing to sexualized or romanticized notions of marriage and sealings.

Fourth, the Standard Model is aesthetically heteronormative—leaving out the experiences and desires for homosexual, bisexual, pansexual, and other queer persons. This may be one of the more difficult huddles to overcome, because the common perception of Mormon theology implies there is no such room for homosexual unions in celestial cosmology. I do not see why this must necessarily be the case. I have written several pieces about how we could reenvision our reductive views of creation to include homosexual relationships, creation, reproduction, procreation, and families.[9] In my view, homo-interactive creation, which includes homosexuality, is a required aspect of godly creation. If there is anything evolutionary biology has taught us, it’s that the creation of life and flourishing of the human species is far greater than heterosexual monogamy. I have no reason to think that God wouldn’t use natural means of creation to enable all life, goodness, relationships, parenting, and flourishing. If this is the case, it is possible for plural homosexual relationships to exist under the model of Queer Polygamy.

The Queer Polygamy Model leaves room for same-gender and same-sex sealings, whether they are platonic, such as with my sister and me, or homosexual, such as with two wives. Under the Queer Polygamy Model, plural marriage may include multi-gendered partnerships, such as sealings among sister wives that may or may not allow sexual relations between them. If a man is married to two women and the women are bisexual, they may choose to be sealed to each other and have a romantic and sexual relationship with each other as well as with their common husband. Likewise, a transgender woman might be married to a cisgender man and cisgender woman. If all identify as pansexual, it could be the case that they are all in a romantic and sexual relationship with one another. The takeaway is that gender is irrelevant to whether or not there is sexual activity in plural sealings—assuming there is no abuse, neglect, or harm being done to the participants. The purpose of the sealing isn’t to legitimize sexual behavior; the purpose of sealing is to legitimize the eternal and everlasting bonds that people share with one another, be they homosexual or otherwise.

Fifth, the Standard Model doesn’t leave room for children to have autonomy to be sealed or unsealed to diverse parents. In the Standard Model, children are property of their fathers and have little say about whether or not they may be sealed or unsealed to other parents. For example, a child born into a heterosexual marriage may be sealed to the parents, but if the father is gay, divorces his wife, and both marry other men, the child of the first marriage would have four parents—one biological father, one biological mother, and two stepfathers—but would only be sealed to the biological father and mother. Under the Queer Polygamy Model, the children could be granted plural sealings to both the biological parents and their husbands. The child would be sealed to three fathers and one mother, though the dynamics of the relationships are diverse and fluid among the parents. Essentially a child should be able to be sealed to all the parents they love. This is not the case under the Standard Model, which focuses on who the child belongs to in the eternities instead of whom the child desires to be sealed to. A child should not be forced to choose between fathers by mandates of heterosexual monogamy or patriarchal polygyny. Children with plural parents should be granted plural sealings for those who desire them. No child should have to divorce a parent eternally just to be sealed to another, just as no wife should necessarily have to divorce a husband to be sealed to a second. It is to the detriment of the child to assume they are inherently “owned” by their biological father alone when the child has the capacity to love more than one father and mother. Likewise, a child born to a family with three mothers and one father should have the opportunity to be sealed to all her mothers. Heaven isn’t heaven without all the people we love, and I trust God feels the same. If not, heaven becomes hell.

Now that we have a broader understanding of what diverse families and sealings could look like under the Queer Polygamy Model, the words of LDS prophets about families begin to taste sweet again. The family really is central to God’s plan—it is ordained of God. We are all part of one big family—God’s family. The family is far more than just one mom and dad. It is siblings, cousins, spouses, aunts, uncles, friends, grandparents, and the generations of persons who came here before you or me. The family is about creating bonds that extend into eternity as we connect with one another to become something greater than ourselves. Family is everything, yet too often people perceive family to mean something so narrowly defined. It is really a grand and beautiful quilt that envelops us all. Sealings under this broad quilt might include, but are not limited to, spouse-to-spouse sealings, parent-to-child sealings, law of adoption sealings, friendship sealings, and many more. Under the family quilt of Queer Polygamy, we are all interconnected in an infinite number of complex and beautiful relationships.

The spirit of polygamy is love of community. This is the law we must embrace as Saints in Zion if we are to become gods. The spirit of polygamy encompasses the diverse unions of the gods in all their complexity and intricacies. The spirit of polygamy includes, but also reaches beyond, the legitimization of sexual relationships. The spirit of polygamy means I might be sealed to my best friend regardless of whether or not we also share a sexual relationship. It means children may be sealed to all their fathers and mothers, be they biological or adoptive. It means it takes a village to raise our children. It means I may be sealed to a sister wife, not through my husband but with my husband. It means my husband may be sealed to his best friend while they enjoy a platonic, asexual, aromantic relationship. It means an asexual woman may choose to be sealed with a gay couple, independent of sexual activity, but still have a relationship full of meaning, emotional intimacy, and purpose. The spirit of polygamy means heaven isn’t heaven without all the people we love. It means infinite possibilities fulfilled by our infinite love—just like the gods, filled with a multiplicity of heavenly mothers, fathers, and parents that we have yet to imagine. I cannot imagine any God more beautifully Mormon than a God of both plurality and unity who welcomes all families into Zion as we strive to join the gods above.

---

[1] Brigham Young, Aug. 19, 1866, Journal of Discourses, 11:269.

[2] Ibid.

[3] “I attended the school of the prophets. Brother John Holeman made a long speech upon the subject of Poligamy [sic]. He Contended that no person Could have a Celestial glory unless He had a plurality of wives. Speeches were made By L. E. Harrington O Pratt Erastus Snow, D Evans J. F. Smith Lorenzo Young. President Young said there would be men saved in the Celestial Kingdom of God with one wife with Many wives & with No wife at all” (Wilford Woodruff, Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, edited by Scott G. Kenny, 9 vols. [Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1985], 6:527 [journal entry dated Feb. 12, 1870]).

[4] Woodruff, Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, 7:31 (journal entry dated Sept. 24, 1871).

[5] “The revelation on marriage required that a wife give her consent before her husband could enter into plural marriage. Nevertheless, toward the end of the revelation, the Lord said that if the first wife ‘receive not this law’—the command to practice plural marriage—the husband would be ‘exempt from the law of Sarah,’ presumably the requirement that the husband gain the consent of the first wife before marrying additional women” (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Plural Marriage in Kirkland and Nauvoo,” Oct. 2014).

[6] In this paper I will use the word queer according to its broad definition as anything strange, peculiar, odd, or deviating from conventional norms or societal expectations. If I am using the word queer as a referent to the LGBTQ+ community, I will use queer persons or queer community.

[7] Blaire Ostler, “A Feminist’s Defense of Polygamy,” personal blog, Oct. 27, 2017; Blaire Ostler, “The Problem is Patriarchy, Not Polygamy,” personal blog, Feb. 5, 2018.

[8] “Several later documents suggest that several women who were already married to other men were, like Marinda Hyde, married or sealed to Joseph Smith. Available evidence indicates that some of these apparent polygynous/polyandrous marriages took place during the years covered by this journal. At least three of the women reportedly involved in these marriages—Patty Bartlett Sessions, Ruth Vose Sayers, and Sylvia Porter Lyon—are mentioned in the journal, though in contexts very much removed from plural marriage. Even fewer sources are extant for these complex relationships than are available for Smith’s marriages to unmarried women, and Smith’s revelations are silent on them. Having surveyed the available sources, historian Richard L. Bushman concludes that these polyandrous marriages—and perhaps other plural marriages of Joseph Smith—were primarily a means of binding other families to his for the spiritual benefit and mutual salvation of all involved” (“Nauvoo Journals, December 1841–April 1843,” introduction to Journals: Volume 2, The Joseph Smith Papers). “Another theory is that Joseph married polyandrously when the marriage was unhappy. If this were true, it would have been easy for the woman to divorce her husband, then marry Smith. But none of these women did so; some of them stayed with their ‘first husbands’ until death. In the case of Zina Huntington Jacobs and Henry Jacobs—often used as an example of Smith Marrying a woman whose marriage was unhappy—the Mormon leader married her just seven months after she married Jacobs and then she stayed for years after Smith’s death. Then the separation was forced when Brigham Young (who had married Zina polyandrously in the Nauvoo temple) sent Jacobs on a mission to England and began living with Zina himself” (Todd Compton, In Sacred Loneliness [Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1997], 15–16).

[9] Blaire Ostler, “Sexuality and Procreation,” personal blog, Feb. 22, 2016; Blaire Ostler, “Queer Mormon and Transhuman: Part I,” personal blog, Dec. 8, 2016; Blaire Ostler, “Queer Mormon and Transhuman: Part I,” personal blog, Jan. 26, 2017; Blaire Ostler, “Queer Mormon and Transhuman: Part I,” personal blog, Aug. 24, 2017.

[post_title] => Queer Polygamy [post_excerpt] => Dialogue 52.1 (Spring 2019): 33–43
Ostler addresses the problems with what she terms the “Standard Model of Polygamy.” She discusses how these problems might be resolved if it is put into a new type of model that she terms “Queer Polygamy.” [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => queer-polygamy [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-01-28 19:51:55 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-01-28 19:51:55 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.dialoguejournal.com/?post_type=dj_articles&p=23346 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => dj_articles [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) 1

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 18937 [post_author] => 1699 [post_date] => 2018-10-25 19:14:03 [post_date_gmt] => 2018-10-25 19:14:03 [post_content] =>

Probably the most destabilizing piece of historical information most Mormons come across is Joseph Smith’s polygamy. Though his practice is vaguely known by many, there seems to come a time when the details really come into focus: when we understand how young some of the girls Joseph took to wife were, how many of the women were already married to his friends, how coercive he could be in gaining a woman’s hand, how he kept Emma in the dark for such a long time, how much pain and heartbreak the practice caused. And it is very difficult to reconcile these details with our desire to revere Joseph Smith as a prophet and as a good man.

This reaction is understandable since so many of us come from cultures that don’t have a history of polygamy. It goes against our tradition of the “one and only,” of the nuclear family, of our hope for equality between the sexes, of our desire to protect children, of our belief in agency. Seriously, would we countenance any of Joseph Smith’s polygamous behavior today? Anyone who would pursue fourteen-year-old girls, or woo already-married women would be lucky to stay out of jail. And certainly that person would be excommunicated.

However, Joseph Smith is not going away. He founded our church, and the Church is committed to defending him, as was shown in the polygamy essay on lds.org that absolved him of his behavior by saying that he was forced into it by an angel with a flaming sword.

The story of Joseph’s polygamy is a disturbing one, but my thesis is that it is also one of the most essential stories Mormonism has—a modern-day version of the story of Abraham and Isaac: a story uniquely capable of shocking Latter-day Saints—not out of the Church, but into a deeper relationship with the divine.

***

The story of Abraham and Isaac is one of the Bible’s most frequently told stories. God commands Abraham to sacrifice his only son on a mountaintop. So Abraham takes Isaac on a long journey and binds him to a boulder. He raises his knife but is stopped by an angel who offers a ram in Isaac’s stead. We have all heard interpretations of this story in church. In fact, it seems to me that we spend much more time on the interpretations than we do on the story itself, probably because, deep down, we feel how horrifying and repugnant the story is to our most basic values. Think about it. A man brought his child to a mountain in order to kill him. Period.

As the Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard observed, if you taught the story of Abraham and Isaac in church on Sunday and then on Monday came upon a member of your congregation taking his son to a mountain in order to sacrifice him, what would you do? You would stop him, of course.[1] Using any force necessary. Why? Because killing children is wrong. Period. Further, if you had encountered Abraham on the road with Isaac and understood what Abraham intended to do, what would your reaction be? You would stop him, of course. Using any force necessary. Who cares if an angel was planning to abort the sacrifice at the last second? Who cares if Isaac’s sacrifice is a prefiguration of Jesus’ crucifixion? One does not attempt to kill children. Period.

Given the fact that one should not kill children (period), how can we encounter the story of Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac? First, we need to go past the story’s events and peer into its inner workings. We need to recognize what the story is doing rather than getting hung up on what it is telling. This is very difficult: it goes against all our training on how to encounter a story.

In some ways, stories are tools. We use them to give order to our experiences. They can be templates that guide our own lives and actions. For example, perhaps we might hear the story of the Good Samaritan and decide to follow the example of the Samaritan by being more compassionate. Perhaps in our youth we are inspired by a testimony given in sacrament meeting, and then, years later, find ourselves testifying of the same thing. When we find a story that resonates with us, we often use it like a cookie cutter, pressing it onto our lives, watching how it molds the once amorphous lump of our experience into a recognizable shape. This reveals a far more profound way that stories affect us. We think that we tell stories, but more often stories tell us. This is a strange thing to contemplate; after all, don’t stories come out of our mouths, through our pens, or through our keyboards?

The science fiction/fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett once described stories as rivers, flowing through space-time.

Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a mountainside. And every time fresh actors tread the path of the story, the groove runs deeper.

[. . .]

So a thousand heroes have stolen fire from the gods. A thousand wolves have eaten grandmother, a thousand princesses have been kissed. A million unknowing actors have moved, unknowing, through the pathways of story.

[. . .]

Stories don’t care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats.[2]

I’m a good case in point. I grew up hearing stories about some of my progenitors who had made their careers as writers, editors, and poets. I decided that I wanted to be a writer as well. So I focused my energies: I joined the student newspaper. I became a full-time news reporter. I got an MFA. I wrote articles, essays, and books, and eventually became a magazine editor. The writer story “told” me, just as it had told my great uncle Paul and great aunt May. Certainly their individual stories had different details than mine because of the time and place they lived in, but we have a very similar overall story. And we deliberately let that story tell us—even invited it. Letting a story “tell” you isn’t necessarily a bad thing: people with knowledge of their family history tend to be more resilient because they have stories close at hand that they can hitch rides on. “Uncle so-and-so was an engineer; I might have an aptitude for that, too. Grandma was a great organizer; I might do well in business.” So, though the first (and usually only) thing we see about stories are the events they narrate, their true power lies in what they do—which can often be invisible. Let’s take a look at the story of Abraham and Isaac again, but instead of focusing on its content, let’s focus on what it’s doing.

***

According to Kierkegaard, the story of Abraham and Isaac is deliberately structured to horrify us. It is trying to break us out of our perceptions of what it means to have a relationship with God. Most of us consider God to be a fatherly figure that blesses us when we are righteous and allows punishment to come upon us when we sin. Mormonism sticks very close to the father metaphor, making God the father of our spirits, a father who presented a plan of salvation for his “children,” who watches over us on Earth as a father might, who wants us to return to live with him. It’s an easily understood and comforting metaphor.

However, Kierkegaard argues that this approach eventually blocks us from being able to enter into a deeper, more direct relationship with God, simply because (as both Christian and Mormon scripture argue) God is beyond our comprehension. As God self-describes in the Book of Moses, “Endless is my name; for I am without beginning of days or end of years” (Moses 1:3). When Moses encounters God, his physical being has to be transfigured in order for him to even survive: “. . . no man can behold all my glory, and afterwards remain the flesh on the earth,” God explains (Moses 1:5). Indeed, when the glory of God leaves Moses, his physical body collapses for hours, and Moses muses that “man is nothing, which thing I had never supposed” (Moses 1:10). When Satan comes to tempt him, Moses sees through him easily simply because Satan is comprehensible to his mortal mind, “where is thy glory that I should worship thee?” Moses asks. “I can look upon thee in the natural man” (Moses 1:13–14).

If Moses, one of the greatest prophets, had never supposed humanity’s utter nothingness compared to God, what makes us think we have even a whisper of understanding concerning the divine? Our mortal minds and weak language can’t even begin to conceive of or attempt to describe God. God is too vast, too powerful, too ineffable, too complex, too simple, too everything. When we approach God, we are stepping into unexplored territory, the one-millionth part of which we’ll never be able to traverse, much less comprehend, much less communicate. What makes us think that a deep relationship with God is epitomized by warm feelings, answered prayers, and a happy life? We are like people living on a sandbar, never even imagining that a continent lies just yards away.

The story of Abraham and Isaac attempts to break us out of our tiny perception by saying something utterly horrifying. “A man of God tried to sacrifice his son.” That sentence should not exist. How can a man of God contemplate the murder of his child? If we are being honest—if we are not letting our awe of scripture and tradition make us lazy—this is where our perceptions explode. This is where we can start to understand that the story is trying to do something normal stories don’t usually do: push us out of itself and into the realm of metaphor. This story is not valuable as a description of a literal occurrence; it’s valuable as a story that brings us into an alternate reality teeming with symbols—like saying, “Once upon a time, a woodcutter brought his son and daughter out into the forest and abandoned them there.” The story of Abraham and Isaac is trying to show us what happens when a person becomes deeply connected with God: when a person has stepped off the sandbar and made for the continent; when a person has gone beyond the father/child metaphor; when a person enters what Kierkegaard called a “subjective” relationship with God.

In order to enter a subjective relationship with God, we need to become a subject ourselves: someone fully aware, fully in control, fully oneself, tapped into the deepest roots of our own unique spark. And then we need to bring that wholeness into a relationship with God, holding nothing back. We are a subject, and God is a subject. There is no subject and object. One does not act while the other is acted upon. We become like Nephi, to whom God granted any desire, not because Nephi had become an excellent sock puppet, but because Nephi knew Nephi, Nephi knew God, and God knew Nephi. They had become one.

When one has entered such a state, conventional morality, which had before taken up so much of our bandwidth, falls away. Not because we should no longer live by it, but because it has become miniscule: irrelevant to our relationship with this amazing being. It was helpful as we groped toward God, but now it’s like sounding out the letters of a word when we know how to speed-read. As the Waterboys once sang, “That was the river. This is the sea.”

When you enter into a subjective relationship with God, the relationship is between you and God only. No one looking at that relationship from the outside has any basis for judging it. The possibilities that this relationship has opened up are so far beyond human understanding that an outside viewer would have no way of perceiving what was happening anyway. That person would have to enter his or her own subjective relationship with God to get even an inkling, and then he or she would be too caught up in his or her own divine relationship to care anymore.

This is what Abraham’s story is pointing us toward: how, when we enter into an intimate relationship with God, we are catapulted beyond good and evil, how human law and rationality suddenly look like pitiful candles in the noonday sun. How we make a quantum leap into a relationship that no eye hath seen nor ear heard nor mind conceived.

At this point, you would be fully justified in saying, with no attempt to hide your incredulity, “You mean that the story of Abraham uses attempted infanticide to symbolize what happens to a person when he or she enters a relationship with God? That’s messed up.” On one level, I completely agree with you. Using a violent, repulsive act to signify a subjective relationship with God seems very strange, especially if, as many faith traditions maintain, God is love.

But I’m hard pressed to think of an approach that would work better simply because of how stories work. As the narrative theorist Robert McKee has pointed out, conflict is the only thing that can drive a story. If things just get better and better for a character, the character has no reason to strive, no reason to struggle; he or she becomes complacent. If the character is nice to the world and the world is nice back, nothing changes. However, the higher the obstacles mount against a character, the more a character struggles, the more he or she suffers, the more intrigued we get, the more invested we become. Conflict arouses our faculties. Niceness lulls us into complacency.

A good example of this principle is Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Everyone and their dog are fascinated with its first book, The Inferno. (Some have even read it.) We hang on every word of Dante’s journey through the nine circles of hell and the torments he observes in each. But less than one percent of those who have encountered The Inferno know a single thing about Purgatorio and Paradiso. Why? Because those two books are full of angels, clouds, and songs. Things just get nicer and nicer—the antithesis of a compelling narrative. So even though our first hope is that a story that could break us out of our complacent relationship with God would be a nice one, it probably can’t be so. Only conflict can awaken us. There must needs be opposition in all things.

To recap. The story of Abraham and Isaac is a horrifying one. None of us here endorse Abraham’s actions in any way. We would all do our level best to stop him from going up that mountain and would probably vote for locking him away. However, this story is not about its content. It is structured to break us out of conventional thought, much as a koan is meant to (e.g., If you meet the Buddha, kill him). It is meant to help us see that a subjective relationship with God is so far outside mortal ken that it cannot be perceived—and especially not judged—from the outside.

***

It seems to me that the tale of Joseph Smith’s polygamy functions as a modern-day Abraham and Isaac story. So many of its events are horrifying; and a man of God commits them. If we caught Joseph Smith on the road to convince a fourteen-year-old girl to marry him, we would do everything in our power to stop him. We would probably even vote to lock him away. Just as with Abraham’s story, the shockingness of the tale wants to eject us from the narrative all together, which is why so few Mormons can stay for long in Joseph’s story without jumping to one conclusion or another: Joseph was forced into polygamy by an angel and is therefore blameless (Abraham was commanded by God to kill his son and is therefore blameless), or Joseph was an oversexed, manipulative, power-drunk man (Abraham suffered from a psychosis; he believed God was speaking to him when it was really his mental illness). If we resist using either of these very understandable escape hatches, I think we can find something of the power of this story.

As with Abraham’s, Joseph’s story is of a man who has entered into a subjective relationship with God and therefore finds himself beyond conventional morality. Abraham was given license to kill. Joseph was given license to marry. But we can’t get caught in the content; in a story like this, it’s all about the symbolism. When one is in a subjective relationship with God, conventional morality is like sounding out letters when one can speed-read. You’ve entered a context where the mortal mind and all its structures are far transcended. God is much too big to be confined to neurons and language. That was the river; this is the sea. The story of Joseph Smith’s polygamy is another version of the story of Abraham and Isaac. They are similarly structured, and they teach the same principle.

Now is the perfect time to say, “But, Stephen, isn’t it obvious that Abraham’s story is a myth while Joseph Smith’s is historical? Actual people were involved in Joseph’s actions. We have records of his doings. How can it be profitable to read his story symbolically when it is painfully literal?” In many ways, I think you’re right. Joseph’s story is thousands of years closer to us than Abraham’s and it takes place in a cultural context similar to our own. Some of it may have happened to our own ancestors. Some of us may feel the reverberations of Joseph’s actions in our own families.

However, I think the story’s proximity is also its strength. As I’ve said, the story of Abraham and Isaac has been repeated so many times that it has lost much of its shock value. (We tell it to children, for Pete’s sake.) And with the loss of that shock comes a diluting of the story’s potency. However, Joseph Smith’s story still hits the gut. We see our own fathers, sisters, wives, husbands, mothers, and brothers in the story. We especially see ourselves. Here is the man we revere as the greatest of all prophets. What would have happened had he approached us? And how do we reconcile our reaction to our respect for prophethood? How do we reconcile our reaction with our own selfhood? Our own subjectivity? We are put in a position of deep conflict, which is where struggle and purification occur. Where a subject begins to get built.

I also think that Joseph’s tale has a somewhat more constructive arc than Abraham’s does. While Abraham’s trajectory leads toward death, Joseph’s leads toward life. Joseph wasn’t commanded to kill; he was commanded to unite—and, implicitly, to multiply and replenish. His unlawful actions tended toward the creation of life, though they also led toward the destruction of many family relationships. His tale’s tendency toward life seems almost like we’re getting our wish that the story of a subjective relationship with God be a less violent one. Joseph breaks foundational social rules, many hearts, and many relationships, but it is because he is uniting while Abraham was destroying. We aren’t headed toward a sacrificial altar; we’re headed toward (let’s not mince words or metaphors) a marriage bed.

Joseph’s story is also more compelling because he actually does the deed. Abraham is stopped before he commits the sacrifice. But Joseph is not. An angel does not step out at the last moment to halt the nuptials. In fact, he seems to be standing behind the couple, wielding a flaming sword (the closest thing an angel has to a shotgun). Abraham gets to go home with a living son, and Joseph gets to go home with a new wife, but also with the hordes of problems that would plague him (and his people) for the rest of his short life.

Joseph’s story seems more honest to me. The person who comes into the most intimate relationship with God isn’t necessarily the person who is happy and prosperous. We need only consider the story of Jesus to understand that. That’s where Joseph’s story finally transcends Abraham’s. Joseph made the “sacrifice.” And the consequences followed. What is it to be in a subjective relationship with God? You find yourself beyond good and evil. You find yourself in a relationship with a being so great, so incomprehensible that no one outside the relationship can understand or judge it. That is its beauty. It is only you and God: an ultimate connection with everything that was, is, and will be. Including everything and everyone. You are not separate. You are one. You are not gone from existence, life, or relationship: you have become sealed to it all. But that is also its danger. The only thing you’re guaranteed from your intimate relationship with God is an intimate relationship with God. Prophets die, sometimes horribly. But if you have that relationship, that’s all you need.

At this point, it is tremendously hard not to go back to the content of Joseph Smith’s polygamy story. It’s hard not to say, “Hold on, you’re saying that Joseph Smith’s subjective relationship with God nullifies all the pain and destruction he caused? All you have to do is say, ‘God told me to do it,’ and you’re off the hook? Are you saying that Joseph Smith had an intimate relationship with God while he was ruining the intimate relationships of so many other people?”

These are totally legitimate questions if the content of the story matters. But in this context, the content matters only insofar as it serves to eject us from the story. Once it has done its job, the content drops off like the booster rocket from a space shuttle. Joseph’s actions propelled us out of the narrative, and now we must leave them in order to explore our own possibilities in the divine.

Yes. If we met Joseph on the road to take a fourteen-year-old wife, we would do all in our power to stop him. The pain resulting from the way he practiced polygamy is real. It will never stop being real. I’m not trying to justify him in any way. I am not arguing that he was allowed to do what he did because he was in a subjective relationship with God. I am talking only about how these two stories work. How they symbolize aspects of an intimate relationship with God. The stories are confusing when their content takes the spotlight, when we don’t see them as pointing to concepts that are galactically foreign to our experience and assumptions. “Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9).

Probably the most compelling thing about Joseph’s theology is his insistence on our radical agency. The agency of a human soul is so complete, so utter, that one-third of God’s children could choose Satan over Jehovah while in the presence of God (Abraham 3:28). We are the irrevocable creators of our souls. We forge ourselves choice by choice. There is no limit to the heights we can reach or the abysses we can plumb. We can become gods: beings that have penetrated every secret, connected with every soul, experienced every atom. But we are almost always trapped inside nice stories that preach nice morals and bring us to nice endings. But these stories stop significantly short of revealing our potential. We are like people who have never seen the Milky Way because the city lights tower above us. These lights make us think we know the way. They show us paths to known destinations. But that is not what Joseph’s theology was about. That is not what Jesus was trying to teach. Sell everything you have, they said. Leave your family. Let the dead bury their dead. Pluck out your eye. (Each a horrifying metaphor.) Stop at nothing to reach that god-spark inside of you.

***

Both of the stories I’ve talked about have been about men. But there are similarly structured stories involving women. For example, Laura Brown’s character in Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours (or its luminous film adaptation). And just to let you know: spoiler alert. Laura Brown is a 1950s housewife with a doting husband, a new suburban home in southern California, a beautiful (though intense) little son, and a daughter on the way. But it is evident from the very beginning that Laura is burdened by some malaise, one that becomes so onerous she comes very close to killing herself. But at the end of the movie, we find out that a few months after giving birth, Laura had boarded a bus and gone to Canada, never seeing her family again.

Laura Brown’s abandonment of her family is unthinkable to me. “Monstrous,” as one character put it. Her actions are so far removed from my experience and thoughts that I cannot imagine what would motivate her to do such a thing. And the story never gives me any help. I’ve watched the movie at least half a dozen times and have found only one hint as to what might have motivated Laura Brown. At the end of the movie, a much older Laura tells another character, “I had a choice between life and death. I chose life.” No particulars, no details, no back-story. We just have to take her word for it. For a long time, I felt that this was a weakness in the story, but now I see it as a strength.

Abraham’s story is the same: he has a doting wife, a tent in the sunny desert, and a beautiful son. But he is weighed down by a burden so onerous that he comes very close to killing his son. Why does he try to perform such a monstrous act? The story gives us only one hint: because God commanded it (without giving a reason why). Abraham had to choose between obeying and disobeying the life force of the universe. And he chose to obey it. But he gives us no particulars, no details, no backstory. We just have to take Abraham’s word for it. Joseph had to take more wives. Why? Because he was commanded to by an angel with a flaming sword. These stories all have the same structure. My reaction to Abraham’s story is the same as my reaction to Laura Brown’s and Joseph Smith’s. It’s unthinkable. But as we have seen, there are many unthinkables strewn throughout the scriptures.

Is it worth sacrificing money to become one with life? Is it worth sacrificing a job, a boat, a car, social status? These stories careen past those banal questions without even a glance. They take us right to the edge of the cliff and push us off. How great is the worth of one soul? So great that Laura Brown left her young family to bring hers into the light. So great that Abraham made his only son into a sacrifice. So great that Joseph Smith broke hundreds of hearts.

Those who have ears, let them hear past these monstrous metaphors and into their structures.

Jesus did not teach the parable of the person who put off becoming one with God until the next life. He did not praise the rich or the successful or the powerful. He didn’t even teach kindness or tithing or humility or the Word of Wisdom or modest dress codes: he taught atonement. Becoming one with God: something beyond the grasp of every human mind. Something no one has ever been able to capture in any art. Something we can only ever point toward.

In many ways, what “happens” in a story is secondary. Its content is beside the point. What the story does is the most powerful thing about it. Most stories want to tell us. But there are a few that are structured in such a way that they try to violently eject us from themselves and let us see a symbol of a connection with the indescribable Divine. To let us feel for a moment an inkling of what it’s like to be connected with God. The same God who—so long ago, so recently, still—wades deep into matter unorganized and brings forth a brand new story.

---

[1] Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, translated by Alistair Hannay (New York: Penguin, 1985), 59.

[2] Terry Pratchet, Witches Abroad: A Novel of Discworld (New York: Harper, 1991), 3.

[post_title] => Scared Sacred: How the Horrifying Story of Joseph Smith’s Polygamy Can Help Save Us [post_excerpt] => Dialogue 49.3 (Fall 2016): 75–88
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“Anyone who says Father Cutler ever sanctioned, upheld, or practiced polygamy are ignorant, unlearned, dishonest, or deceived, for they took false reports for facts, not knowing the truth.”[1][2]

The Mormon polygamous passage was not traversed solely by those who sided with Brigham Young. Plural marriage was part of the legacy handed down from the Nauvoo experience and as Joseph Smith III once stated, “nearly all of the factions into which the church broke had plural marriage in some form.”[3] There were certainly exceptions to this rule—Sidney Rigdon and Charles B. Thompson, for example, never practiced plural marriage. However, polygamy and questions about its origins and extent could not easily be ignored by any of the sects. 

In fact, polygamy served and continues to serve as a means by which one variant of Mormonism positions itself against another. Although some of those who would become members of the Church of Jesus Christ (Cutlerite) were involved in the plural marriage experience in Illinois and Iowa, by the time of its official inception in 1853, the church had rejected the practice. This article traces the evolving memory of and public reaction to plural marriage among the Cutlerites in an effort to understand how a religious movement conceptualizes and re-conceptualizes its past in order to solidify its identity in the present. 

Studies of memory—that is, how a community remembers and represents its own past—have already proved useful to scholars seeking to understand Mormon culture. Both Kathleen Flake and Stephen C. Taysom have demonstrated how the LDS Church has “forgotten” its polygamous passage via emphasizing other distinctive historical moments (e.g., Flake’s argument concerning the first vision)[4] or whitewashing these events in Mormon popular histories (e.g. Taysom’s discussion of Gerald N. Lund’s The Work and the Glory series).[5] A similar approach also informed David Howlett’s compelling study of how the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now known as the Community of Christ) came to remember the practice of polygamy, as their cousins came to forget it.[6]

As these scholars have already emphasized, memory is a crucial component of how institutions define themselves and police their borders. The particular lens through which a group chooses to see its past shapes its members’ understanding of who they are in the present. As David Lowenthal has stated, “the past as we know it is partly a product of the present; we continually reshape memory, rewrite history, refashion relics.”[7] “History” as we are using it here refers to the crafting of the past via available source materials. Neither the process of constructing memory nor the writing of history is unbiased, but the latter is “based on empirical sources which we can decide to reject for other versions of the past,” whereas the former is shaped more by the present requirements of the community’s self-definition.[8]

This article is divided into two major parts. The first section is devoted to a history of the proto-Cutlerite—that is, the movement as it existed as a colony before organization as a church—involvement with polygamy. Here we will count wives and husbands and measure the extent of overall knowledge of polygamy during the period. The second section is devoted to a history of the Cutlerite—that is, the movement after the official founding date of the Church of Jesus Christ—memory or representation of polygamy. 

The history of Cutlerite understandings of polygamy—their memory of Mormonism’s polygamous past—can be divided into three major periods. The first period, between 1853 and 1864, was characterized by a collective and institutionally enforced silence, which attempted to mute those voices who knew of polygamy’s past. During this period, the Cutlerites were haunted by the memory of polygamy, even when (or perhaps, particularly because) it was unacknowledged in public. As we will see, there were unavoidable reminders of a polygamous past in their midst. 

A second period was initiated at Alpheus Cutler’s death and brought on by the growing intensity of RLDS missionary work that closely equated the community with their apparently unfortunate past. Gone was the policy of silence on polygamy altogether. A new strategy emerged in its place, one in which the church openly denied and distanced itself from any involvement in past polygamy. As we will see, such public denials hid residual private anxieties in the second generation. Regardless, it was during this period that the community’s collective aversion to polygamy led the Cutlerites to form their own identity—by pushing against the Brighamites, with their corrupt marital practices, while simultaneously seeking to respond to the insinuations made by RLDS missionaries, former Cutlerites, and neighboring non-Mormon communities. 

A third period began with the twentieth-century arrival of Cutlerites to Independence, Missouri. In their new environment, where they were surrounded by a variety of Mormon sects, identity formation became all the more important. Likewise, the twentieth century presented new contradictions to the Cutlerites’ narrative of plural marriage from another source: professional historians. Scholars published en masse concerning Joseph Smith’s many plural marriages; later in the century, they even turned their attention to Alpheus Cutler. The Cutlerites responded in the form of official church histories and even found allies in other movements’ apologetic histories. In effect they moved from doing memory, presenting the past from their personal knowledge, to the claim that they could construct the past from historical documents. Likewise during this period, the effort to construct identity by pushing against the Brighamites was intensified and as a result, Brigham Young and other historical Mormon figures began to appear as stock villains. The history of the Church of Jesus Christ offers us a view of how one denomination has tried both to preserve and to construct a heritage rooted in the past—a heritage which has shifted and been re-imagined over the course of its history. 

A Twenty-First Century Encounter 

On June 4, 2002, I held my first and only interview with Stan ley Whiting, president of the Melchizedek Priesthood of the Church of Jesus Christ. Like many students of Mormonism, I stumbled across the church in the writings of Danny Jorgensen and D. Michael Quinn and wanted to know something about this small group of believers who claimed to have maintained the Mormons of Nauvoo intact into the twenty-first century. As I sat in the Whitings’ living room in Blue Springs, Missouri, I found something very tender in the elderly gentleman, who would periodically remark that I looked just like his grandson. We spoke for several hours as he bore testimony of the Restoration in general and the history of the Cutlerites in particular. He had recently traveled to visit the rebuilt Nauvoo Temple, before it was dedicated, and kindly expressed the similarities of our faiths, especially the fact that both communities maintained what he referred to as “the upper room work” or simply “the priesthood.” 

We had only spoken a few minutes, when he looked at me, smiled, and said, “Now I’m picking on you now and I don’t want you to take this personal, but you belong to the Utah [Church] . . . to us, one of the grossest sins in the world is polygamy.” He went on to express his irritation with scholars who had persistently tried to “destroy our integrity” in reference to whether Alpheus Cutler and the early Cutlerites were polygamists or not. He continued, “And we have got proof in our records that we don’t show to people what happened clear back through Alpheus Cutler. Alpheus Cutler was claimed by the church—your church—as having twenty-seven wives, eighteen wives.” He raised his hands, exasperated. “I don’t pay any attention to that. He only had one wife and that’s Lois.”[9]

Six years later, when I finally presented some of my research on the Cutlerites at a conference of the John Whitmer Historical Association, I remembered Whiting’s concerns and for that reason decided to avoid any mention of polygamy at all. Instead, I was excited to probe the singular ecclesiology of the faith. However, by the end of the session, I was reminded of the interest and controversy in questions concerning the Cutlerite involvement in plural marriage. After finishing the public Q&A, I was approached by several scholars who wanted to discuss the topic. One senior scholar, who had inadvertently offended a Cutlerite a year previously, simply asked if I felt it was accurate to say that Cutler practiced polygamy. Another asked in hushed tones whether the records mentioned anything about their plural marriages. When I answered in the negative, he commented that the records were probably doctored or the important portions left unavailable; otherwise, he speculated, we would find the information “we all” suspected was there. 

Despite the guaranteed interest in such a project, I had decided I would leave the subject of plural marriage for someone else to unravel. I wanted to avoid the controversy. Yet, as I continued my research, I came to think that the Cutlerites’ experience and reaction to polygamy was and remains a crucial part of their story. Specifically, I began to look for a way that would allow me to tell the story of Cutlerite polygamy in a historically accurate way—drawing on all of the available source material, while being responsible as a scholar to both my subject and my audience, and even sympathetic to the Cutlerite plight. 

Ultimately scholars still do not have access either to those hypothetical documents that Stan Whiting claimed would exonerate Cutler from the allegations leveled against him or to those that the above-mentioned historian suggested would add even further exciting details of polygamy’s heyday. Yet the records we do have paint a more complicated and compelling portrait of the movement than we could gain from being able to add to or subtract wives from the story. Instead, the history of Cutlerism’s reaction to polygamy is one of coping with a memory silenced, repressed, and deliberately forgotten, but ultimately important to the Cutlerite construction of identity. 

The History of the Cutlerites and the Cutlerlites in Mormon History 

Alpheus Cutler, a Latter-day Saint since 1833, grew to prominence in Nauvoo as a member of the city’s High Council, one of the temple committee, and the temple’s “master builder.” As a confidant of Joseph Smith, Cutler was entrusted with Nauvoo’s emerging esoteric theology. On October 12, 1843, he was initiated as a member of the Holy Order (also known as the Anointed Quorum), through what would come to be known as the temple endowment. On November 15, 1843, he was sealed to his wife, Lois, and subsequently the couple received the ceremony referred to as the “fullness of the Melchizedek Priesthood.” Although he was not one of the original members of the Holy Order endowed in 1842, he was only the sixth man to receive this capstone anointing, one week before the first of the twelve apostles, Brigham Young, received the rite. 

On March 11, 1844, Alpheus Cutler was chosen as one of the charter members of the Kingdom of God, frequently referred to as the Council of Fifty, a religiopolitical society designed to promote the Saints’ political interests, including interactions with governments, Joseph Smith’s candidacy for the presidency of the United States, and colonization efforts. The Kingdom was tied to Mormon millenarian expectations and was intended to function as a worldwide government during the millennial reign of Christ. One responsibility associated with the Council of Fifty was the effort to bring the Mormon gospel to the Native Americans. During this period, Cutler received an assignment to conduct such a mission in Kansas.[10]

As a member of the High Council, Cutler played a key role in supporting the leadership of the twelve apostles following Smith’s death. This support included participating in the excommunication of supporters of rival movements.[11] He also served in the temple, administering the ceremonies of the Holy Order to the rest of the Latter-day Saints. Once the westward migration began, Cutler served as the president of the Municipal High Council in the settlement of Winter Quarters. By the end of 1847, he was eager to fulfill the assignment he had previously received as a member of the Council of Fifty. With Brigham Young’s support, he established a mission to the Native Americans, and in the following months relocated to Silver Creek, Iowa, where he served as the branch president.[12]

The period from the undertaking of this mission to the official founding of the Cutlerite church in 1853 could be termed the Proto-Cutlerite period, in which those who accompanied Cutler on his mission began to see themselves as distinct from the rest of Mormonism. In time, the separation between those who accompanied Cutler, with their focus placed on converting the Native Americans, and other Mormons, who were focused on the trek west, led to increasing tensions between the two communities. By the time Young had re-established the first presidency and planned for the colonization of the Great Basin, the proto Cutlerites had begun to see messianic possibilities for their movement in general and for their leader, Alpheus Cutler, in particular. They saw themselves as responsible for building relationships with the Native Americans—relationships that would result in the re-establishment of the Saints in Missouri. Though the rift had its origins in what Richard Bennett has referred to as “difference over place and priorities,” in time it blossomed to encompass competing mental worlds of Mormonism’s future.[13]

Lamanism, as Mormons in the surrounding area termed the proto-Cutlerites’ message, was seen as a heretical threat to the Church. Following a series of investigative trials with the regional High Council directed by the apostle Orson Hyde, the official sanction for the Native American mission was withdrawn. Many of those who were active in the mission were excommunicated; eventually, on April 20, 1851, Alpheus Cutler was excommunicated as well.[14] Not long thereafter, the proto-Cutlerites abandoned their missionary efforts due to a lack of conversions and overwhelming hardship.[15]

In 1852, the colony relocated to southwest Iowa, where they founded the town of Manti. On September 19, 1853, Alpheus Cutler announced that he had had a revelation to re-organize the Church of Jesus Christ.[16] Beginning on that date, his followers were re-baptized and a new church leadership body was selected. The community prospered, numbering a few hundred at its height. In the late 1850s, the Cutlerites attracted the attention of another movement founded only a few months before their own: the “new organization,” later known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The evangelistic group quickly depleted a large chunk of the Cutlerites’ membership.[17] With pressures from the encroachment of RLDS ministers and the death of Alpheus Cutler in 1864, the Cutlerites decided once again to relocate, this time to Minnesota, where they founded the town of Clitherall. 

The Cutlerites struggled at the end of the nineteenth century, especially following their renewed encounter with Josephite missionaries, to the point that the church rarely held meetings. With the death of Chauncy Whiting in 1902, there was an eight-year hiatus of any meetings of the organization until Isaac Whiting, his successor, accepted his position. For these reasons, there is a fourteen-year gap in the organization’s minutes before they begin again with a notice that the church “started anew in 1910.”[18] Few of the first generation of Cutlerites remained to assist in this renewal. 

In 1930, a group of Cutlerites relocated to Independence, Missouri, an action which inadvertently resulted in schism. Although the Cutlerites were divided between two rival churches for some time, one in Minnesota and one in Missouri, the only surviving community by the 1950s was in Independence, where the church currently resides. For the past hundred years, the community has never been more than a handful of believers, often on the verge of extinction. 

The Cutlerites attract a unique degree of interest from scholars and armchair historians compared to the other churches of the Restoration. Among the most compelling components of the Church of Jesus Christ is its connection with Nauvoo esotericism. After all, Cutler’s claim stemmed from secret commissions received as part of the Council of Fifty and the Anointed Quorum, his reception of the Second Anointing, and most importantly, the perpetuation of the Nauvoo-era endowment into the present. Mormons of various factions have fantasized that the Cutlerites exist in a timeless state, unchanged since Nauvoo. Some wonder what the ceremonies performed on the second floor of their meeting house encompass, and if knowledge of them would demonstrate what the twelve apostles of the LDS Church must have changed since Nauvoo. For example, one writer has noted that the Cutlerites’ ceremony was evidence that Masonic elements were additions made by the Brighamites—regardless of the fact that he had no access to details of the Cutlerite ceremony.[19] Although the trope of Cutlerites as the keepers of Nauvoo esotericism is what undoubtedly piques our communal curiosities into the smallest remaining nineteenth-century sect, there is no reason to question whether the Church of Jesus Christ has somehow escaped the impact of time and space.[20] The history of all known institutions includes change over time. 

Our historical curiosity also has something to do with our tendency to position the Church of Jesus Christ on a constructed spectrum of the Restoration. We are used to thinking of the LDS Church as the proponents of Nauvoo Mormonism with its emphasis on temple rites and, historically, plural marriage, on one side of the spectrum, and the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, who vehemently opposed polygamy, on the other. We have come to popularly think and speak of the Cutlerites as existing in a space somewhere between these two poles, part LDS since they maintain Nauvoo esotericism, and part RLDS in that they reject plural marriage. There are two problems with this comparative methodology employed to understand the Cutlerites: first, this spectrum is much too simplistic; second, it tries to come to terms with the Cutlerites through analogy rather than by examining the tradition on its own merits. Of course, my comments are not designed to discourage our interests in the Church of Jesus Christ, only to encourage us to suspend what we think we know about the community in order to gain a perspective fully positioned in the sources at our disposal. 

Polygamy in Nauvoo and Silver Creek (1845–approx. 1851) 

Before we can use the Cutlerites as a case study in memory construction, we should look at the historical moment to which the new institution was reacting. The first subject we need to probe is to what extent the available records suggest Cutlerites were involved in plural marriages. Should scholars speak of the proto-Cutlerite period as a polygamous phase in the sect’s history? What knowledge did individual Cutlerites have about plural marriage, in their own sect or among the followers of Brigham Young, prior to Orson Pratt’s 1852 announcement? When exactly Alpheus Cutler was introduced to plural marriage as sponsored by Joseph Smith or other ecclesiastical leaders is uncertain. However, his membership in the Holy Order and Nauvoo’s High Council would have positioned him with plenty of opportunities to learn of the practice. For example, Cutler may have been in attendance when Hyrum Smith read the July 12, 1843, revelation before the Nauvoo High Council on August 12, 1843. Unfortunately, there was no attendance taken during the historic meeting and Cutler was absent the following week.[21] Because the Holy Order was populated with many of those who were involved in early plural marriage, Cutler would have also been able to discover the practice through these associations. That he remained unaware of polygamy until after Joseph Smith’s death seems highly unlikely. 

It is certain that by 1845 Cutler had become fully immersed in the world of post-martyrdom plural marriage. His twenty-year-old daughter, Clarissa Cressy Cutler, married the apostle Heber C. Kimball on February 29, 1845. (Cutler’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Emily, also married Kimball, but not until December 1845.) On August 9, 1845, Kimball, in turn, performed the ceremony that sealed Cutler to his first plural wife, the recently divorced ex-wife of Orrin Porter Rockwell, Luana Hart Beebe.[22] On January 14, 1846, following a general policy for those couples that had previously been sealed outside of the temple, Alpheus had his sealing to Luana, as well as his earlier sealing to Lois, performed again within the edifice. The same procedure was followed with the re-performance of Cutler’s higher anointings, although this time with both Lois and Luana accompanying him in the rite.[23] On February 3, 1846, Cutler was sealed to five additional women: Margaret Carr, Abigail Carr, Sally Cox, Disey Caroline McCall, and Henrietta Clarinda Miller.[24] Cutler’s new wives received their anointings on the same day. 

Of these seven women, we only have a record of three accompanying him during the Native American mission. Alpheus Cutler had children with only one of his plural wives, Luana. Danny Jorgensen’s research has uncovered three children born to the union between 1846 and 1850 or 1851. In order to conceal their paternity, the two children to survive childhood did not use the last name Cutler. Jacob Lorenzo, a son born in 1846, was given Cutler’s mother’s maiden name, Boyd, and Olive Luana, a daughter born in 1850, used the surnames of Luana’s two later husbands al ternately.[25]

Alpheus Cutler, his wives, and his daughters appear to have been the only actual participants in plural marriage from the group of individuals in Silver Creek who eventually became Cutlerites. However, during the proto-Cutlerite period, there was one other polygamist family connected to the community: F. Walter Cox, one of Cutler’s counselors, and his three wives. Luman H. Calkins, Cutler’s other counselor and the bishop of the Silver Creek Branch, though not technically a polygamist, was also sealed to multiple women in the Nauvoo temple, as he was sealed to both his current and his deceased wife.[26]

Yet as Jorgensen’s research has demonstrated, this was far from the extent of the colony’s polygamous ties. Many of those who would become Cutlerites participated in the Nauvoo Temple experience and began the trek westward to Winter Quarters, where polygamy was becoming an increasingly public affair.[27] Al though Jorgensen may have overstated the situation when he wrote that early Cutlerites possessed an “intimate, detailed directly experiential knowledge” of plural marriage, their associations make it unlikely that many of Cutler’s followers needed Cutler to introduce them to plural marriage, as they would have already learned of the practice either by rumor or by personal experience with the rest of the Brighamites.[28]

Further, there were several Cutlerites with relatives who practiced plural marriage either in Nauvoo or later in Utah. In most cases these were female relations polygamously married to men who continued to accept the leadership of the twelve apostles. There were also at least two additional male polygamists related to the community. Chauncy Whiting, Alpheus Cutler’s eventual successor, was never a polygamist, but his brother Edwin Whiting was sealed to three women in the Nauvoo Temple.[29] One of Edwin’s wives also had ties to the community. Mary Elizabeth Cox Whiting’s brother, Amos Cox, would also become a Cutlerite. In fact, three of Amos’s siblings were polygamists and his own father-in-law had been sealed to eight women in the Nauvoo Temple.[30] Finally, Calvin Beebe, who would act as the branch president of the Farm Creek Branch of Cutlerites, performed plural marriages in the Nauvoo temple. 

The proto-Cutlerites were also aware of Alpheus Cutler’s and F. Walter Cox’s practice of plural marriage. As will be shown, Cox made very little effort to conceal his polygamous status. Of course, asserting that all Cutlerites knew about Cutler’s polygamy would be a dangerous assumption. It is possible that knowledge of Cutler’s relationships were only shared with the community’s elites, a practice that would have had a strong precedent in 1840s Nauvoo. 

However, it is evident that there were those who knew detailed information about Cutler’s marriages. Iva Gould, a Cutlerite descendant who belonged to the RLDS faith, recorded her experience of probing her parents and grandparents for information concerning polygamy. In an undated (twentieth-century) letter, she wrote: 

I asked my folks some of the questions about the Cutlerites that you asked yesterday. They said it was common belief in the early days that Alpheus Cutler had been a polygamist, though the present generation of Cutlerites deny it. My father said that at one time on a short journey he stopped at the home of Mrs. [Luana Beebe] Boyd who told him she was one of the wives of Alpheus Cutler, that she had been a poor girl without relatives to care for her and Cutler told her if she would be sealed to him he would support her. 

On reaching home my father asked my grandfather, Francis Lewis Whiting, a brother of Chauncey Whiting, if it was true that Father Cutler had more than one wife. He answered reluctantly, “I suppose it is true that he had three wives.” And when I asked if Mrs. Boyd was one of them, he said, “Yes, I suppose she was.” He was a staunch Cutlerite and did not like to admit it but was too honest to deny it. My grandmother then said that Father Cutler got rid of his wives before he started the church, that he took one of them on a mission to the Indians and she died there. Another he gave away to a man who wanted to marry her.[31]

This is a crucial source mainly because it is the only record–although secondhand–from a first-generation Cutlerite affirming Cutler’s polygamous status. For such a late document, it is surprisingly accurate. The three wives spoken of would have included the three who remained with Cutler in Iowa: Lois Cutler, Cutler’s public spouse; Luana Hart Beebe, who remarried with Cutler’s apparent consent; and Henrietta Clarinda Miller, who died around 1851, during the Cutlerites’ Native American mission.[32]

“Alpheus Cutler Decided to Put Away His Plural Wives”

By 1851, the man who had once had seven women sealed to him in the Nauvoo Temple had completely abandoned the practice. When a pair of Brighamite missionaries returned to Utah from Clitherall, Minnesota, in the 1880s, they noted their surprise that the Cutlerite community denied that “Joseph Smith ever taught or practiced plural marriage.” A report of their experience, published in the Deseret News, stated that “Cutler himself had three wives before he left the Church, two of whom he abandoned on leaving.”[33] These missionaries had left Clitherall with the understanding that Cutler had left his wives when he left the Church. So far as I have been able to ascertain, this is the only time a reason—Cutler’s excommunication—was assigned, if only by implication, to the ending of Cutler’s polygamous lifestyle. 

The first historical study to address how Alpheus Cutler became a monogamist was Clare B. Christensen’s self-published history, Before and After Mt. Pisgah. Christensen notes that in 1851, Mills County, Iowa, instituted a new piece of anti-polygamy legislation, which resulted in F. Walter Cox’s arrest. In reaction to the threat of incarceration, he reached a compromise with the courts that he and his wives would move from Iowa. Although Christensen does not cite his sources, he explains that Cutler also faced charges from the county. In Christensen’s words: 

Alpheus Cutler was 67 years old. Life was not easy for him. He was a stone mason in a land where there was little stone to build with. Confronted with problems from the law, Alpheus decided to put away his plural wives. Not knowing what else to do, at least two of his wives although disowned, continued to live as part of the community.[34]

Subsequent historians followed Christensen’s explanation— often citing his statement that Cutler “put away his plural wives.” Unfortunately, the current narrative as promoted in Biloine Young’s Obscure Believers goes so far as to suggest that the dissolution of Cutler’s marriages occurred abruptly and cruelly in 1851. Young writes: 

Like Abraham sending Hagar into the wilderness, Cutler, with a single pronouncement, cast off the five women he had pledged to support and protect. There is no mention of where the five found the basic necessities of food and shelter, who befriended them or how they managed to survive. Four of Cutler’s five plural wives simply disappear from Cutlerite history as if they had never existed.[35]

Young’s narrative is based solely on her reading of Christensen, particularly her interpretation of the twentieth-century historian’s words “put away.” 

We will arrive at a better understanding of the events that led up to the end of these six marriages over the course of five years, if we place them in their proper historical context. First, it should be remembered that only three wives accompanied Cutler to the Indian mission and, thus, we should be very open to the fact that four women may have already ceased to see themselves as Cutler’s wives. The fate of the two remaining plural wives is discussed in Iva Gould’s account above. If any wives were “put away,” it was likely only Luana, whom Cutler arranged to be remarried to one of his followers. While the annulment of Cutler’s marriage to Luana may have signaled the end of polygamy for the community, it is also helpful to examine the fate of his four other sealings. 

Cutler’s Nauvoo temple sealings were performed in two parts: first, the (re-)sealings of his first wife and Luana Hart Beebe occurred on January 14, 1846, followed in February by his sealings to Margaret Carr, Abigail Carr, Sally Cox, Disey Caroline McCall, and Henrietta Clarinda Miller. Because these five women were not present for the ceremony to be performed in January, it seems likely that they made the decision to be sealed to Cutler sometime during those three weeks. 

What we know about polygamy in this period suggests that such speedy courtships were far from an anomaly. The zeal to perform temple ceremonies during the three months in which the Nauvoo temple was available meant that many relationships were arranged with very short notice. Even monogamous arrangements were brought together on short notice in order to assure one’s access to the rituals. Mosiah Hancock, who was only eleven at the time, was sealed to a twelve-year-old girl and later remembered that the couple was instructed “not to live together as man and wife until we were 16 years of age.” He explained, “The reason that some were sealed so young was because we knew that we would have to go West and wait many a long time for another temple.”[36]

What was the motivation for such speedy courtships? With less emphasis on romantic love and more emphasis on the salvific basis of such unions, historian Lawrence Foster notes that women sought “status and relationships in the afterlife,” as well as economic support for the impending excursion westward.[37] This perspective helps explain why four of Cutler’s marriages did not endure. According to the Iva Gould statement, Luana Hart Beebe cited her own poverty as her motivation, and Cutler’s promise that “if she would be sealed to him he would support her” was a prime factor for the union.[38] Yet if temporal welfare was the draw for the thirty-one-year-old Luana, who was recently divorced with five children, others may have been attracted by the salvific component of a ritualistic relationship. Luana’s marriage was, of course, unique. She had been Cutler’s wife for several months by the time she was sealed in the Nauvoo temple. The ceremony re-performed there certainly came with the assumption that a literal familial relationship would continue. 

Although it has been debated, age does seem to have played a role in whether relationships arranged and ritually sealed in Nauvoo would lead to a typical marital relationship thereafter. This largely had to do with another motivation for plural marriage, sexual reproduction. The five women who were sealed to Alpheus Cutler on February 3, 1846, ranged in age widely: 74, 65, 51, 43, and 23 respectively. It was only the youngest, Henrietta, who remained with Cutler until her death in 1851. At the age of twenty-three, it would have likely been expected that the union would produce children. 

The difficulty of maintaining these Nauvoo temple marriages was felt by those who traveled to Utah as well. Cutler’s son-in-law, Heber C. Kimball, was a prime example. According to Fanny Stenhouse’s popular exposé, Kimball had once stated (for effect, no doubt) that besides the wives he had in Salt Lake City, he also had “about fifty more scattered over the earth somewhere. I have never seen them since they were sealed to me in Nauvoo, and I hope I shall never see them again.”[39] Although Kimball, in actuality, did not have fifty estranged ex-wives, he did have ten of these Nauvoo temple marriages annulled with an additional “six [wives who] are unaccounted for after the move West.” His biographer has attributed this lacuna to “the unusual [i.e. salvific] and pragmatic [i.e. economic] nature of these marriages.”[40]

In any case, rather than “a single pronouncement” made in 1851, we should see Cutler’s polygamous relationships, like many others begun in Nauvoo and certainly those established during the winter of 1845–1846, as tenuous from the start. By 1848, he seems to have already gone from seven wives to three. These relationships were entered into with a spirit of zeal that, with the exception of Luana and Henrietta, ended perhaps as quickly as it had begun. 

The new legislation that outlawed polygamy should not be seen as the single cause behind Cutler giving up polygamy. After all, Cutler could have followed F. Walter Cox’s example, relocated, and preserved his wives. Rather, Cutler’s decision to end his relationship with Luana Hart Beebe may have been justified by a new piece of legislation, but likely reflects his own personal aversion to plural marriage. 

Cutler’s lived experience likely played a role in his growing distaste for plural marriage. A great deal had occurred since he had knelt at the Nauvoo Temple’s altar. There were the broken marriages of his two daughters and their husband, Heber C. Kimball, who had left to participate in the trek west.[41] Both women had remarried in 1849. Although we don’t know the details of Cutler’s life as a polygamist, simply by numerical calculations, he may have felt like a failure in the new system. Four of his wives had not accompanied him to Silver Creek. And if the impossibility of a successful polygamous lifestyle wasn’t enough, the cholera epidemic had robbed him of Emily, Clarissa, and his youngest wife. 

It was a combination of both internal and external pressures that mounted to cause Alpheus Cutler to “put away” plural marriage. By 1851, Alpheus Cutler was a monogamist and two years later formed a monogamous church. One first-generation Cutlerite, Sylvester J. Whiting, a half of a century removed, claimed that “After Father Cutler reorganized the church in 1853 he, by the authority of the holy priesthood, vetoed polygamy till the coming of Christ. . . . Anyone who says Father Cutler ever sanctioned, up held, or practiced polygamy,” he continued, “are ignorant, un learned, dishonest, or deceived, for they took false reports for facts, not knowing the truth.”[42] Although Whiting was himself mistaken, or perhaps even lied about Cutler’s marital status, there is no evidence to suggest that polygamy continued into the Church of Jesus Christ once the new organization was formed. In fact, it should be noted that there is no evidence that any plural marriages were formed amongst those who became Cutlerites following the Nauvoo Temple period. There is also no con temporary record to suggest that Alpheus Cutler ever taught plural marriage. For this reason, the brief interaction with plural marriage could and would be quite easily seen by first-generation Cutlerites as an unfortunate aftermath of the Nauvoo temple experience. 

Enforced Silence in Manti, Iowa, 1853–1864 

In September of 1853, in the newly organized town of Manti, Iowa, Alpheus Cutler looked into the sky to see two half-moons with their backs to one another. His followers later believed that Cutler had been awaiting this sign since 1844, when Joseph Smith had told him that the manifestation would one day appear. It was at this time that Cutler should re-organize the church. On September 19, 1853, the Church of Jesus Christ officially came into existence. 

Of course, it is not as if a new people was entirely created on that day. There was a direct continuation between the Cutlerites’ theology previous to 1853 and the theology that emerged afterward. However, the moment was sacralized for the growing body of rebaptized Cutlerites. If before they had coalesced around their (now-abandoned) mission to the Native Americans, they could now coalesce around the effort to build the church organization and see themselves as completely independent from their Brighamite critics. 

Because of this event, it became possible for Cutlerites to conceptualize their community as beginning in 1853 and thus unmolested by the disturbing memories of the past decade. Their collective memory could theoretically start afresh on the date that also featured the membership’s rebaptism. The earlier period was no longer relevant, as made clear by the symbols of renewal. The suspicion that references to the polygamous past of the community have been “scrubbed” from the church minutes and other records during this period may hold some truth. What is unmistakable is that the records unintentionally reveal how the Cutlerites themselves developed a taboo forbidding any discussion of this most controversial element of their history. A controversy that occurred in May and June of 1863 poignantly demonstrates this process. 

On May 17, 1863, Joseph Fletcher spoke during the morning session of a church conference. The minutes state simply, “A few words by Father Fletcher,” not recording what the subject of Fletcher’s sermon was. According to the record of the afternoon session, Fletcher spoke again and “occupied the time upon the subject spoke of in the forepart of the day and closed.” F. Lewis Whiting spoke next and suggested that instead of preaching, they should hold a prayer meeting. The minutes conclude that “it was thought advisable so to do.”[43]

The following month, on June 28, 1863, Fletcher took the stand again during a service. He complained that the church had taken away his privilege to preach. According to the minutes, “he was told that it was not so, it was only that particular subject relative plurality.” Fletcher persisted that he “had a right to preach on what subject he pleased, and if he could not have the privilege here he would go into the world where he could have the privilege, and still persisted in preaching that or nothing.” The congregation’s president, Almon W. Sherman, who was also the son-in law of Alpheus Cutler, argued that he “did not consider in that thing, that [Fletcher] was actuated by the spirit of the Lord.” However, he suggested that the only way to move forward was for the two to “lay the matter before Father Cutler, and let him decide.” The congregation voted unanimously for this resolution and the meeting immediately closed. The minutes conclude with an emended postscript: “The matter above mentioned was settled. Father Cutler decided that it was not wisdom to meddle with that subject, so the matter was dropped.”[44]

We do not know from what vantage point Joseph Fletcher approached his preaching on plural marriage; however, it was apparent that the church members agreed that it should not be discussed. And, more importantly, it was apparent that Alpheus Cutler forbade it himself. 

Memory was carefully and institutionally regulated. The effort to mute the past seems to have functioned as a means of avoidance. Cutler and his followers experienced real trauma in their encounter with plural marriage. By discouraging public discussion, they ensured that the practice, along with its accompanying pain and angst, was not confronted and relived by the community. 

Yet the decision to suspend the practice and place the conversation on hold may have only been conceived of as a temporary solution to their difficulties. Sylvester Whiting’s statement that Alpheus Cutler “by the authority of the holy priesthood, vetoed polygamy till the coming of Christ” suggests that the Cutlerites saw the decision to suspend the practice (and their conversation of it) in light of their millenarian expectations. In other words, because Alpheus Cutler was God’s representative on Earth he held the authority necessary to lay aside the issue of plural marriage until Christ would appear to deal with it for them—both in reference to the laws of the state and the burden of the practice itself. Similarly, in the Brighamite experience, historian Dan Erikson has suggested that the belief that the second coming was imminent may have played a role in the widespread support for the LDS Church’s issuing of the 1890 Manifesto.[45]

Efforts to control social memory—to force forgetting, as in the case of the 1850s Cutlerites—frequently prove a much more difficult task than institutions would hope to be the case. Avery F. Gordon’s Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination looks at these attempts to cover the past and their frequent futility. She describes her project in the following words: 

I used the term haunting to describe those singular yet repetitive instances when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind spot comes into view. Haunting raises specters, and it alters the experience of being in time, the way we separate the past, the present, and the future. These specters or ghosts appear when the trouble they represent and symptomize is no longer being contained or repressed or blocked from view.[46]

As much as the silence benefitted the church, one thing is certain: an absence of discussion did not mean that the community had forgotten about plural marriage. There were plenty of remaining specters who were all too visible. There was Joseph Fletcher, but also the Brighamites and Josephites who refused to obey the community’s rule. Unfortunately for the Cutlerites, there were also two not-so-subtle reminders of their own polygamous roots remaining in the community: the progeny of Heber C. Kimball and his two wives, Emily and Clarissa Cutler. The community coped by insulting the youths, referring to them by well known polygamist names such as Brigham or Heber. In the words of Abram Alonzo Kimball, the son of Heber and Emily: 

My brother and I were repeatedly ill-treated by Uncle’s family and were continually persecuted and called names for being polygamy children in order to tantalize us. The men of the family would call us “Bastard”, “Brigham”, “Heber”, etc. and on the slightest provocation they would threaten to send us to Utah, telling us that the Mormons would soon settle us.[47]

Further evidence that the topic was off-limits was that although Abram knew he was the son of a Utah polygamist, he was not sure which of the well-known church leaders had once been married to his mother.[48] Thus, the Kimball children were raised in a similar fashion to Cutler’s own polygamous children, who were also unaware of their parentage. 

In later years, as Cutlerites began to speak about polygamy, they still maintained their hesitance to discuss Cutler’s wives. As Iva Gould’s father intuited that the “staunch Cutlerite,” Francis Lewis Whiting, “did not like to admit it,” the anxiety felt over offering this disturbing and privileged information was high. The silence resulted in the second generation and those not in the know holding onto a “common belief” that Cutler was once a polygamist. These rumors were discouraged and did not continue for long. Because collective memory must be preserved and memorialized in order to endure, in time, the enforced silence resulted in a legitimate forgetting. As sociologist Paul Connerton noted, when dealing with “collusive silence brought on by a particular kind of collective shame there is detectable both a desire to forget and sometimes the actual effect of forgetting.”[49] The taboo did not serve as it may have been intended—as a temporary solution to cognitive dissonance—but as an implicit, enduring rejection of plural marriage. This is not to say that specters of polygamy would rest for long. 

The Clitherall, Minnesota, Period, 1864–1902 

With the death of Alpheus Cutler, the Church entered a tenuous period in which the sect’s leadership worried over their ability to maintain the organization. In their effort to regain their equilibrium, the Cutlerites decided that the first step was to abandon Manti, Iowa. Their relocation was designed to place geographic distance from the RLDS ministry and the ex-Cutlerites who had joined their ranks. But equally important was for the Cutlerites to forge and strengthen their communal identity through pushing against their competitors. On one hand, this meant defining themselves against the Josephites—namely, the Josephites’ rejection of Joseph Smith’s Nauvoo ritual system. On the other hand, this meant defining themselves against the Brighamites by breaking their silence on plural marriage. 

In addition to their own internal anxieties over plural marriage, which were intensified by their interactions with RLDS and LDS ministers, during this period the Cutlerites were also affected by and reacting to two overlapping discourses. First, they were a captive audience and later minor actors in the conflict between Josephites and Brighamites over whether it was Joseph Smith or Brigham Young who first instituted plural marriage. Second, during a period of intense national attention on the Utah territory, they felt the burden of being seen as closet Brighamites. Both of these discussions encouraged the Cutlerites to break the previous taboo against speaking about polygamy; the latter even encouraged them to bring their voices into the public square. 

Concerning the first discourse, the early Cutlerites quickly embraced the idea that Brigham Young, rather than Joseph Smith, had instituted plural marriage—an idea principally although not exclusively promoted by the Reorganization. The tentativeness of this approach was revealed as Brighamites undertook an effort to collect various affidavits from those involved in Nauvoo polygamy, including Smith’s numerous widows. It was after becoming familiar with a heated exchange between Lyman O. Littlefield, a popular Mormon author, and Joseph Smith III that Sylvester Whiting sought his sister’s opinions on the matter. 

Several Cutlerites had maintained correspondence with their relatives. Letters from Chauncey and Sylvester Whiting to their Brighamite relatives included frequent references to religious matters—often with an effort to justify their decision to follow Alpheus Cutler. They did not, however, turn to these apostate kin for help in understanding spiritual matters. It was a last resort when, in 1886, Sylvester Whiting drafted a letter to his sister, Emmeline Cox, the plural wife of F. Walter Cox. Just as he had never sought her advice before, he had also never discussed with her the intricacies of polygamy. He penned: 

I should like to ask your opinion in regard to when and who started polygamy as there is such a dispute between the Josephites and the Utah Mormons on that question. I see in L. O. Littlefield’s statements that some 8 or 10 women testify that they were sealed to Joseph or Hyrum as his wives and I have heard Cordelia Morley was sealed to Joseph before she was to Walter. I wish you would ask her and then tell me if it [is] so and what your opinion is in such an order of things. Confidentially I am not prepared to say that there is not such an order of some kind or other. Of course I can’t see how there could be and not conflict with the law.[50]

The rumors were true. Cordelia Morley, Emmeline’s sister wife, had in fact been sealed to Joseph Smith for eternity, with her future husband, F. Walter Cox, standing as Smith’s proxy. Afterwards, Cox and Morley were married for mortality. Cordelia’s story is an interesting one. She had rebuffed a proposal from Joseph Smith in the spring of 1844, but had reconsidered at the insistence of her intended husband.[51] Whether Emmeline responded to her brother’s plea is unknown. Appealing to the views of a backsliding sister suggests the urgency of Whiting’s desperation, but his request for confidentiality about his own questions is perhaps the most revealing. It demonstrates the anxiety experienced by someone who was publically opposed to polygamy while at the same time harboring doubts as to the correctness of his position. It was clearly not an acceptable position to entertain the possibility of the existence of “such an order of some kind or other.” 

Whiting’s comments also reveal the extent of Cutlerite knowledge. It is unlikely that Whiting did not know about Cutler’s marriages, despite later denials. But his questioning was not directed as to whether Cutler was once a polygamist—he knew better—but whether Joseph Smith or Brigham Young had introduced the practice. Because Cutler did not marry his second wife, Luana Hart Beebe, until after Smith’s death, it may have been thought (perhaps accurately) that Cutler was influenced by the apostles—likely Heber C. Kimball, who not only married two of Cutler’s daughters but who also performed the ceremony between Cutler and Beebe. 

Whiting’s letter presents a rare moment of honesty expressing his own uncertainty about the subject of plural marriage. He was not expressing the party line. Like Joseph Fletcher’s attempt to break the rule of silence in the 1853–1864 period, this letter reflects a typical rupture in institutionally directed forgetting—another specter come to the surface and a symptom of a broader anxiety likely not captured in the historical record. A community experiences genuine cognitive dissonance when new narratives are introduced that seemingly contradict known events. Memories of polygamy preserved through rumors or gossip about who was involved haunted the Cutlerites. The ghostly hand of the Josephite missionaries inflated these concerns, but the RLDS church also offered new ways to conceptualize the past that the Cutlerites found appealing. 

The Josephite campaign against plural marriage seems to have aided the Cutlerites in their effort to find an acceptable history. The aversion to discussing plural marriage was initially founded upon the awareness that Cutler (as well as other close friends and relatives) had been polygamists, and furthered by the community’s uncertainty over who had begun the practice in the first place. However, with the decision made that the blame should rightfully be ascribed to Brigham Young, a response to polygamy could be offered. Perhaps there were other Cutlerites who, like Whiting, confidentially continued to question their absolute disavowal of polygamy, but the public face of the movement was one of absolute certainty. As historian David Lowenthal stated, “the most vividly remembered scenes and events are often those which were for a time forgotten.”[52]

During the intense period of national interest in the “Mormon Question,” the Cutlerites worked to publically distinguish themselves from the Brighamites, who naturally, based on their size, dominated the nation’s impression of Mormonism. Chancey Whiting, serving as the church’s president and public spokesperson, responded. In an 1885 article he wrote in response to questions from the local Fergus Falls Journal, he inserted the entire length of Doctrine and Covenants section 111, setting forth the pre-Nauvoo monogamous policies of the Church. At this time, Whiting also attributed the break with the Brighamites to the issue of polygamy. “And now, under these considerations, and being assured that we had no need to break the laws of the land to keep the laws of God, we could not fellowship with or follow a people who encouraged or practiced such things.” He assured the readers of the newspaper that “some of the Salt Lake elders say that our little society is among the hardest opposers to the polygamy question of any people that they had conversed with.”[53]

In 1889, Chauncey Whiting inferred from an article published in the Minneapolis Tribune concerning the Mormon Question that “by all appearance a large portion of the censure, was intended to reflect heavily upon the society commonly known as the Old Clitherall Mormons, or Cutlerites.” He noted that 

the polygamy question [was] so carefully noticed as to lead the people [to believe] that the Clitherall Mormons are believers in, and practicing the doctrine on the sly seems almost too simple for any thinking mind to brook, and more especially as we are living in the heart of civilization, and surrounded with respectable and intelligent inhabitance, who have eyes to see, and ears to hear, and hearts to understand, and where law and justice can be administered to the guilty according to the criminality of the offense.[54]

He further explained his continued exasperation that despite numerous responses to regional newspapers, confusion still existed over their stance on polygamy. 

Nevertheless, I will again affirm that this people are not guilty of the crime, neither are they believers in the doctrine. Hence with all boldness and clear conscience we denounce polygamy, with all its kindred evils, not only to the outside world (as accused) but to the inside church (if I may speak) in the most strenuous emphatic terms.[55]

Journalists painted the Cutlerites with a Brighamite brush. Whiting’s response strategy was to distance the small sect from any and all Brighamite associations. His ongoing assurances that Mormonism should not be equated with polygamy took on many forms. Most importantly, it included the construction of an origin story in which a rejection of plural marriage was the cause behind the Church of Jesus Christ’s founding. Cutlerites were “among the hardest opposers to the polygamy question”—just ask the Brighamites. He also used the language of morality commonly employed against Mormon polygamy, referring to “polygamy, with all its kindred evils”—evils that Whiting expected his audience to already know. Furthermore, he employed the language of law. Polygamy was a crime and Cutlerites would not fellowship with criminals. 

The general refusal to acknowledge the Cutlerite story was particularly aggravating for Whiting. He appealed to common sense: how could they conceal their plural marriages while “living in the heart of civilization”? His rhetorical strategy of disavowing polygamy to both “the outside world” and the “inside church” assured them that he was not involved in a strategy of doublespeak. Yet the Cutlerites continued to feel that their own versions of events were ignored. It was likely this grievance that caused Chauncy Whiting to proclaim in an 1889 church meeting that he “did not know of any one [in Clitherall] that advocated polygamy.”[56]

The portrayal of the Cutlerites as part and parcel of a monolithic, polygamous Mormonism frustrated the sect’s efforts to define itself. As a result, the Cutlerites felt pressure to clarify their identity, a process that occurred not only in the public forum but also through everyday encounters with outsiders. Despite their attempt to geographically distance themselves from other forms of Mormonism, Cutlerites continued to have periodic visitors from both the LDS and RLDS faiths—visitors who were both a threat and a blessing to the community’s future. 

The most obvious example of this can be seen in the direct criticism of the Brighamites. Humor such as that employed in reference to Abram and his brother, Isaac, was also used to deflect the efforts of LDS missionaries to the community. On April 12, 1885, a meeting was held in which the Cutlerites discussed their treatment of other Restoration churches: specifically, the council discussed “our often speaking in a joking way of having more than one wife and of calling their preachers nicknames, etc.” The Council concluded “that all these things were wrong and must be stopped as they were apt to hurt feelings and lead the wrong way, etc.”[57]

Of course, we should not read this effort to encourage politically correct language as a sign of a new ecumenical approach. This was designed to prevent direct conflict between the communities—conflict which was closer to the surface at some times than at others. In private meetings, the Cutlerites did not mix words in reference to the Brighamites. In a meeting held on July 10, 1886, the Cutlerite council discussed its decision to deny a Utah elder’s request to preach in the church’s meeting house. According to F. L. Whiting, this decision was made “as they viewed the Utah church to be the highest class of adulterers and whoremongers of any religious church on the face of the earth.” He was followed by Warren Whiting, who commented that “there was not one word in the bible to prove polygamy.” Finally, Chancey Whiting, Cutler’s successor in the church presidency, stated that “he did not fellowship either the Josephite, or the Utah Church, and did not know of any one here that advocated polygamy.”[58]

Despite their opposition to the licentious practices of the Brighamites, Cutlerites had a much more volatile relationship with members of the RLDS organization. Like journalists who portrayed the Cutlerites as crypto-polygamists, Cutlerites saw the RLDS as working diligently to contradict their community’s telling of its own history. RLDS refusal to accept the Cutlerite denial of involvement in plural marriage was only one example of this tendency. During the lifetime of Alpheus Cutler, RLDS missionaries questioned Cutler’s claim to be a member of a group of seven men invested with sacerdotal authority, arguing that it was only a committee to discuss political affairs. Perhaps most threatening was the claim by former Cutlerites that Alpheus Cutler had initially prophesied that Joseph Smith III would succeed his father. Based on this telling of the Cutlerite past, RLDS apostle T. W. Smith argued that the church in Clitherall should be referred to as the “Whiting faction, for they are not Cutlerites any more than Josephites, i.e., do not keep Cutler’s teachings any more than they do Joseph Smith’s.”[59]

Although there are few overt references to Cutlerite polygamy from RLDS sources during this period, there is evidence to suggest that there was a sense that the organization had been tainted by its polygamous past or perhaps its polygamous present. Former Cutlerites, such as Iva Gould, came with stories passed down from the early days in Nauvoo and Silver Creek. One Cutlerite noted that the Josephites frequently claimed that “the quorum” involved with the sect’s upper room work taught “immorality.”[60]

The ongoing suspicion erupted into a controversy following the conversion of Wheeler Baldwin, a former Cutlerite, to the RLDS Church. The church had instituted a policy that recognized baptisms performed previous to the death of Joseph Smith, if and only if the individual did not lend his support to the practice of polygamy. Wheeler Baldwin had been baptized in 1831 and thus would have qualified; however, members of the Reorganization, including apostle Charles Derry, objected post-facto based on their suspicions that Baldwin had become embroiled in polygamy while a member of the Church of Jesus Christ. 

On August 14, 1863, Joseph Smith III penned a letter to Derry in response to the situation: 

I am sorry that you meet with so much confusion and contention, but much of it, almost all is so very uncalled for, and growing out of a mistaken notion that every man is in duty bound to rectify the evils he sees in his brother, regardless of his own, so he sets about it and loses his time and throws both into the grasp of the evil one, and no good is done to either. They who caul at Bro. W. Baldwin’s authority and standing, if busied about the making of their own election sure, would have little time to find fault, and indeed would find less cause to do it. Bro. B. is an old member of the church, has never been legally dispossed [sic] of his membership, and when with the Cutlerites supposed they were the only ones striving for the Kingdom, and if in his manner he strayed into acknowledging polygamy, his connections with us is a renouncement of that eror, if he was guilty which I do not believe, and behind that recaption no man can legally go, for in it we burry [sic] the past and do misdeed.[61]

Joseph III’s willingness to give the Cutlerites the benefit of the doubt over polygamy influenced references to the community that found their way into print. This did not, however, mean that the associations were entirely repressed; they would appear periodically in Josephite literature. 

Cutlerites necessarily defined themselves against both Josephites and Brighamites in the nineteenth century, as they do in the present. The strategy employed differed depending on the front. Pushing against the Brighamites took shape in public and private opposition, sometimes including intolerant rhetoric. Yet, for all the repugnance Cutlerites felt against the Latter-day Saints, it was the Josephites whom they saw as their own persecutors. As Terryl Givens has pointed out, a sense of “persecution more often serves to strengthen resolve than to stifle it.”[62] We should think of these processes of identity formation, of course, as a movement attempting to preserve its vulnerable membership rolls, but also as a means to alleviate the cognitive dissonance of multiple histories of the past. 

Theological Consequences for the Late Nineteenth Century 

On March 10, 1844, Joseph Smith publically taught the idea of familial sealings, using Alpheus Cutler as a hypothetical example. 

Let us suppose a case; suppose the great God who dwells in heaven should reveal himself to Father Cutler here by the opening heavens and tell him I offer up a decree that whatsoever you seal on earth with your decree I will seal it in heaven, you have power then, can it be taken off No, Then what you seal on earth by the Keys of Elijah is sealed in heaven, & this is the power of Elijah.[63]

A decade later, early Cutlerites accepted—if they did not embrace—the concept that there were rites that when performed by priesthood authority would enable the family unit to endure beyond death. Jorgensen has pointed to the sect’s patriarchal blessings for relics of this belief. For example, one blessing states that the recipient and her husband will be “sealed together that no power of earth or hell can separate you in time or in eternity.”[64] We can also find oblique references to the concept in the minutes of Cutlerite meetings. For example, one Cutlerite assured his estranged spouse that she would belong to him in the hereafter. 

Within thirty years of Alpheus Cutler’s death, however, marital or other familial sealings were no longer a component of Cutlerite teachings. Although refutations of such sealings would not appear until the mid-twentieth century, the second Cutlerite prophet, Chancey Whiting, did not place much stock in the idea. At the death of his wife, he wrote to Brighamite relatives that “Perhaps the Lord called h[e]r home to dwell with h[e]r dear children who had gone before h[e]r. Of these matters however I will not decide but leave it for Him whose right it is to judge.”[65] The following year, he drafted another letter: 

I suppose that there is a great many who comfort themselves with a view that after death they will meet, and enjoy the society of their friends and loved ones in a bright, beautiful and glorious mansion on high, and that too in the presence of the Lord of life and glory. . . . Could I know that with my relation and friends I would be more at peace and rest.[66]

The demise of the ideas of eternal marriage occurred in parcel with and perhaps as a result of the church’s rejection of plural marriage. Although these concepts were not always presented in tandem by Joseph Smith and were eventually parsed out in twentieth-century LDS theology, their nineteeth-century predecessors came to believe that the endurance of monogamous marriages was based on the condition of contracting a second marriage. This connection may have engendered a sense that suspending one idea—plural marriage—meant suspending the other, eternal marriage. 

In addition, the performance of sealing ceremonies held an inevitable potential for at least the existence of theological or ritual plurality. For when a widower was sealed to his second spouse, he was in effect becoming a polygamist—if only in the religious imagination. 

Finally, we should note that it is likely not a coincidence that Chauncy Whiting’s verbalized doubts about eternal marriage occurred during a time period in which plural marriage was being openly criticized and rebuffed. In other words, it seems likely that the era of silence set aside the discussion of eternal marriage as well as polygamy. When the matter was first discussed in the 1880s, three things had changed. First, the Cutlerites had come to accept the Josephite narrative for the origins of polygamy; second, Alpheus Cutler had died; and third, they had lost a collective memory preserving Smith’s teachings on the matter. This is not to say that first-generation Cutlerites had forgotten that sealings took place. They hadn’t, but the importance for their own story had been discarded. As a result, the practice could perhaps be questioned as an appendage to the overall criticisms of plural marriage, and in the next generation was entirely rejected. In 2002, Stanley Whiting pointed me to the twenty-second chapter of the Gospel of Saint Matthew, in which it stated that “in the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven” (Matthew 22:30). Like plural marriage, sealing had become a matter set apart for contest.

Changes in how one aspect of the past is remembered can have large effects on other related matters. The historian David Lowenthal commented, “To exorcise bygone corruptions even one’s own treasured relics may have to be destroyed.”[67] Such was the case with the doctrine of eternal marriage. 

Writing History in the Twentieth Century 

In the twentieth century, Cutlerites have continued to define themselves against the Brighamite practice of polygamy, even after the Brighamites themselves rescinded the practice. With the Cutlerite renewal of 1910, there were a number of statements offered to explain that even the founding of the institution was fundamentally anti-polygamous. It was at this time that Sylvester Whiting first issued the idea that “by that authority [of the Kingdom] Father Cutler vetoed the doctrine of plural wives or polygamy until the coming of Christ.”[68] The new narrative colored the story of the Cutlerites, as related in a local history published in 1916. According to the non-Cutlerite author, following the martyrdom, “those who rejected the polygamous doctrine of Young separated from him and chose as their leader one Cutler.”[69] Finally, during this era, the Cutlerites were able to insert their voice effectively into the public forum, if only on a regional level. 

The new meetings continued with various statements against polygamy. For example, on October 2, 1910, Isaac Whiting “said polygamy is of the devil for it is contrary to the law of God.”[70] Such statements would have been at home in an earlier era, but the renewal brought in additional ideas, often drawing on the Brighamite hierarchy as stock villains who had among other things sought to kill Alpheus Cutler via poisoning.[71] The renewal of the church occurring alongside a renewal and intensification of anti-Brighamite discourses appears as a tool to aid in the ever-dwindling community’s retrenchment. 

In the succeeding decades, as the body of the Cutlerites came to be predominately located in the Independence area, they found themselves as part of a multi-denominational landscape built around the Temple Lot. As a result, it became increasingly important to explain who they were in the face of so many peoples sharing competing stories. During this period, the Cutlerites began to publish their own writings and to communicate with other sects. 

The trope of the intentionally dishonest and scheming Brighamites continued as an essential part of the Cutlerite story during this period, as evidenced by the first full-length public church history, Alpheus Cutler and the Church of Jesus Christ, written by Rupert J. Fletcher, then president of the church, and his wife, Daisey Fletcher. Of most importance, the Fletchers wrote: 

Shortly after assuming the new roles of leadership some of these men began collecting as many as possible of the historical records of the church, journals of the elders, minutes of the conferences, and council meetings, etc. Soon they were busily engaged in correcting, revising, and editing all that came into their hands. In many cases the records were deliberately altered to conform to new doctrines and practices not taught in the church before. Others were suppressed or destroyed, so the true story of all that happened in Nauvoo may never be known.[72]

Commenting on the apparent success of the apostles, they noted that “beneath the surface there lurked evils that were bound to erupt into conflict sooner or later. The moral structure of the church was being undermined.”[73]

This telling of the story explains why there were nineteenth century documents that suggested both Joseph Smith and Alpheus Cutler were polygamists. Viewed in one light, the accusation made little sense—not because early Brighamites wouldn’t have altered records when preparing publications, for example—but from the Brighamite point of view the idea that Cutler was a polygamist was a compliment. Cutler’s marriages were not portrayed as illicit in the sources, but as legitimately sealed in the temple by Heber C. Kimball and Parley P. Pratt, both highly respected apostles in the church’s hierarchy. In another light, the portrait is of Brigham Young deliberately introducing corruption, knowing full well the sinister nature of his plan and finding it necessary to trump up evidence against those that might try to question or expose him. The image is a vibrant one. The charge against the early Brighamite hierarchy is designed to vindicate Smith and Cutler, but it also implicitly continues a more subtle argument—that the Cutlerite reading of the past is correct and untainted. This conversation has naturally continued into the present.

This revisionist perspective also influenced how Cutlerites came to relate to Mormon scholarship in the latter part of the twentieth century. Indeed, Mormon historians are a part of Mormon history, a fact that is clearly evidenced in the past twenty-five years of the Cutlerite experience. If for a time the Cutlerites were almost ignored by the scholarly community, with the rise of new Mormon history the Church of Jesus Christ became a frequent example in the work of such LDS historians as D. Michael Quinn and Richard Bennett, as well as the focus of at least nominally-RLDS historians Danny Jorgensen and Biloine Whiting Young. These historians were eager to plot the Cutlerites into the Mormon succession crisis that followed Joseph Smith’s death by focusing on the usual areas of conflict: priesthood keys, temple ceremonies, secret councils, and, of course, plural marriage.

Specifically, as of 2002, the most important published works that aimed to understand the Cutlerites were written by Jorgensen and Young, two scholars who like many earlier critics had family roots in the Cutlerite community and presumably an agenda in the present.[74] The Cutlerite response to this more recent scholarship has been an intensified angst against the telling of the Cutler-as-polygamist narrative and what some have interpreted as a mistrust of scholars. 

From the Cutlerite perspective, this new assault, which drew on the same stories used a generation before to discredit the faith, had simply continued in a new form—now armed with academic language and citations. Yet the Cutlerites were far from defenseless. As they had in the past, they developed strategies to deal with competing histories. The new genre of new Mormon history was a threat to more than just the Cutlerites. Conservative members of the Reorganization also struggled against the growing tendency of RLDS historians to accept the idea that Joseph Smith—not Brigham Young—was the originator of plural marriage. This meant that the Cutlerites now had intellectual allies in securing their understanding of the past. The resources of the Restoration branches, specifically Richard Price’s Joseph Smith Fought Polygamy, a well-documented (though many would argue historically inaccurate) study, strengthened the church’s sense of the past. The two volumes, the church’s history and Price’s volume, were both marketed on the church’s website in the first part of this decade and represent a dual effort to respond to the less-than-desirable alternative histories of the faith. 

Yet more important than scholarly texts that defend the Cutlerite position was the claim to possess irrefutable oral histories and primary source material that vindicated the movement’s collective memory. The earliest statement I have discovered to promote this strategy was a letter written by Amy L. Whiting in the 1960s. Addressing the claim that Joseph Smith was a polygamist, she wrote: “Some of our close ancestors were in the church in Joseph’s day, and were working with him and knew him personally and positively knew that he never did advocate that doctrine of polygamy . . . even some of our school books teach that Joseph Smith was the founder of that doctrine of polygamy but it is absolutely false.”[75] As cited above, Stanley Whiting offered the same solution in 2002, access to special sources of historical knowledge. This new strategy took seriously the contest as it was occurring, from the Cutlerite perspective, in the historical enterprise of Mormon studies, but it also re-verified that the only voice that truly mattered for understanding the Cutlerite past was the Cutlerite voice. 

As a twenty-year-old Latter-day Saint sitting in Stanley Whiting's living room, it felt strange to be confronted with Mormonism's polygamous past. After all, Brighamites have long since given up the practice of plural marriage as part of their identity. Yet for Cutlerites, the issue of plural marriage is a matter of the present just as much as it is one of the past. 

The title for this article, “The Highest Class of Whoremon gers and Adulterers,” was taken not from a quote describing the Cutlerites, but from one Cutlerite’s reference to the practice as propagated by their competitors, the Brighamites. As a result, this brief quote captures the core of the Cutlerite experience with polygamy. As Rupert J. Fletcher and Daisy Whiting Fletcher accurately stated, an essential mission of the early Cutlerite church was to “eradicate any taint of plural marriage” that, from their perspective, had infected so much of Mormonism. Whether it was the reason for the church’s founding or whether it emerged in quick succession thereafter is unimportant; this was the community's defining mission. The continual push against polygamy and those specters that continued to appear defined them as much as any other trait. For Cutlerites, the polygamous passage was a means for the community to find identity. 

What is at stake in the midst of this emotionally-charged subject is the ability to claim access to and legitimacy from a sacred past. The Cutlerite sense of chosen-ness could only be preserved on claims to an accurate understanding of the past. As a people who see themselves as responsible for bringing forward the teachings of Nauvoo, particularly surrounding the upper room work, into the present, any chink in the armor of the community’s past is a real danger on the mission of the present. 

As scholars we should, of course, understand the Cutlerites’ sensitivity to those that challenge the official story on the relationship of their community with polygamy. For one thing, it is not entirely accurate—once the church was founded, it was always a monogamous organization—but more importantly, the crypto polygamist has been a major trope used against the Cutlerites from both non-Mormons and Mormons of various denominations for over one hundred fifty years. The fierce response is a sigh of exasperation. The ongoing denials are a means of defense against a world that seems to assume the Cutlerite voice cannot be an accurate one. 

---

[1] The author would like to express his appreciation to Christine Elyse Blythe, Danny Jorgensen, and Benjamin Park who read early drafts of this paper and offered their critiques. 

[2] Quoted in Biloine Whiting Young, Obscure Believers: The Mormon Schism of Alpheus Cutler (Pogo Press, 2002), 195. 

[3] Joseph Smith III, letter to Joseph Davis, October 13, 1899, quoted in Joseph F. Smith Jr. and Richard C. Evans, Blood Atonement and the Origin of Plural Marriage: A Discussion (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1905), 49. 

[4] Kathleen Flake, “Re-placing Memory: Latter-day Saint Use of Historical Monuments and Narrative in the Early Twentieth Century,” Religion and American Culture (Winter, 2003); also The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 

[5] Stephen C. Taysom, “A Uniform and Common Recollection: Joseph Smith’s Legacy, Polygamy, and the Creation of Mormon Public Memory, 1852– 2002,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 35, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 113–144. 

[6] David J. Howlett, “Remembering Polygamy: The RLDS Church and American Spiritual Transformations in the Late Twentieth Century,” John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 24 (2004): 149–172. 

[7] David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge University Press, 1985), 26. 

[8] Ibid., 212–213. 

[9] Interview with Stanley Whiting, June 4, 2002. 

[10] For a discussion of the Cutlerites as an outgrowth of the Council of Fifty, see D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1994), 192–212. 

[11] Fred Collier, The Nauvoo High Council Minute Books (Hanna, Utah: Collier’s Publishing, 2005), 156–57. 

[12] For a discussion of this period, see Danny Jorgensen, “Conflict in the Camps of Israel: The 1853 Cutlerite Schism,” Journal of Mormon History 21 (Spring 1995): 25–64; and “Building the Kingdom of God: Alpheus Cutler and the Second Mormon Mission to the Indians, 1846–1853,” Kansas History 15 (1992): 192–209. 

[13] Richard E. Bennett, “Lamanism, Lymanism, and Cornfields,” Journal of Mormon History 13 (1986–87): 49–50. 

[14] Quinn, Mormon Hierarchy, 208. 

[15] Jorgensen, “Building the Kingdom of God,” 206–207.

[16] For a discussion of the organization of the Cutlerite church, see Christopher James Blythe, “The Church in the Days of Alpheus Cutler: New Insights into Nineteenth-Century Cutlerite Ecclesiology,” John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 29 (2009): 73–93.

[17] See Barbara Bernauer, “Gathering the Remnants: Establishing the RLDS Church in Southwestern Iowa,” John Whitmer Historical Association 20 (2000): 4–33; Danny Jorgensen, “The Scattered Saints of Southwestern Iowa: Cutlerite-Josephite Conflict and Rivalry, 1855–1865,” John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 13 (1993): 80–97.

[18] Mss 2394, Church of Jesus Christ (Cutlerite) Collection (1853–ca. 1970), L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah (hereafter cited as Cutlerite Collection), Box 2, Folder 5, 14. 

[19] Christopher Warren, “Eugene O. Walton and the Restored Church of Jesus Christ: A Brief Historical and Theological Evaluation,” Restoration: The Journal of Latter Day Saint History 7:4 (October, 1988): 6.

[20] It should be noted that the principal scholars of the Cutlerites, including Danny Jorgensen, Biloine Whiting Young, and Mike Riggs, have often been able to avoid this problem. 

[21] Nauvoo High Council Minutes, August 12 and 17, 1843, LDS Church Archives. In affidavits offered by those in attendance, Cutler is only sometimes listed. See Gary James Bergera, “‘Illicit Intercourse,’ Plural Marriage and the Nauvoo Stake High Council, 1840–1844,” John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 23 (2003): 59–90. 

[22] Journal of Heber C. Kimball, August 9, 1845, in Stanley B. Kimball (ed.), On the Potter’s Wheel: The Diaries of Heber C. Kimball (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1987), 133. 

[23] Book of Anointings. See Devery S. Anderson and Gary James Bergera (eds.), The Nauvoo Endowment Companies, 1845–1846: A Documentary History (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2005), 415.

[24] Ibid., 459. 

[25] Danny L. Jorgensen, “The Old Fox: Alpheus Cutler, Priestly Keys to the Kingdom, and the Early Church of Jesus Christ” in Differing Visions: Dissenters in Mormon History, edited by Roger D. Launius and Linda Thatcher (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 162. 

[26] Anderson and Bergera, The Nauvoo Endowment Companies, 463– 464. 

[27] Richard E. Bennett, Mormons at the Missouri, 1846–1852 (Nor man, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 195.

[28] Jorgensen, “The Old Fox,” 170. 

[29] George D. Smith, 630. 

[30] Ibid., 609. 

[31] Iva Gould, undated letter quoted in Biloine Whiting Young, Obscure Believers: The Mormon Schism of Alpheus Cutler (Lakeville, Minn.: Pogo Press, 2002), 197–198. 

[32] Danny Jorgensen suggests that Henrietta’s death may have been caused “from cholera of childbirth.” Danny Jorgensen, “Building the Kingdom of God: Alpheus Cutler and the Second Mormon Mission to the Indians, 1846-1853,” Kansas History 15 (1992): 206. 

[33] “In Minnesota and Wisconsin, Among the Cutlerites, Rigdonites, and Mobberites,” Deseret News XXXIII (October 15, 1884), 3. 

[34] Clare B. Christensen, Before and After Mt. Pisgah (Salt Lake City: privately published, 1979), 183. 

[35] Young, Obscure Believers, 57. 

[36] Mosiah Hancock Journal, LDS Church Archives. 

[37] Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality: The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 198. Historian Kathryn M. Daynes has noted of the period that “no evidence points to marriages entered into solely because of romantic love, companionship, or sexual attraction, although these may have developed as a result of the marriage.” Daynes, More Wives Than One: Transformation of the Mormon Marriage System, 1840–1910. (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2001), 38. 

[38] Iva Gould, undated letter quoted in Biloine Whiting Young, Obscure Believers: The Mormon Schism of Alpheus Cutler, 197–198.

[39] Mrs. T. B. H. [Fanny] Stenhouse, An Englishwoman in Utah: The Story of a Life’s Experience in Mormonism (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1880), 211. 

[40] Stanley B. Kimball, Heber C. Kimball: Mormon Patriarch and Pioneer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 123 

[41] Richard E. Bennett, “Lamanism, Lymanism, and Cornfields,” Journal of Mormon History 13 (1986/87), 50. 

[42] Quoted. in Biloine Whiting Young, Obscure Believers: The Mormon Schism of Alpheus Cutler, (Pogo Press, 2002), 195. 

[43] Minutes of conference, May 17, 1863, box 2, folder 5, 48, Cutlerite Collection. 

[44] Minutes of church service, June 28, 1863, box 2, folder 5, 51, Cutlerite Collection. 

[45] Dan Erickson, “As a Thief in the Night”: The Mormon Quest for Millennial Deliverance (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1998), 204.

[46] Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, new edition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008; first published 1997), xvi. 

[47] Abraham A. Kimball Reminiscences and Journal, 1877–1889, LDS Church Archives, 6. 

[48] Ibid., 18–19. 

[49] Paul Connerton, “Seven Types of Forgetting,” Memory Studies 1 (2008), 67.

[50] Cited in Christensen, Before and After Mt. Pisgah, 433–434. [Editor’s Note: In the PDF, this is footnote 49.]

[51] Cordelia Morley Cox Autobiography, Typescript, L. Tom Perry Special Collections. 

In the spring of 1844, plural marriage was introduced to me by my parents from Joseph Smith, asking their consent and a request to me to be his wife. Imagine, if you can, my feeling, to be a plural wife. Something I never thought I could ever be. I knew nothing of such religion and could not accept it, neither did I then. I told Joseph I had a sweetheart; his name was Whiting, and I expected to marry him. He, however, was left by the wayside. He could not endure the persecutions and hardships. I told the Prophet I thought him a wonderful man and leader, but I wanted to marry my sweet heart. After Joseph Smith’s death, I was visited by some of his most intimate friends who knew of his request and explained to me this religion, counseling me to accept his wishes, for he now was gone and could do no more for himself. I accepted Joseph Smith’s desire, and 27 January 1846, I was married to your father in the Nauvoo Temple. While still kneeling at the alter, my hand clasped in his and ready to become his third plural wife, Heber C. Kimball tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Cordelia, are you going to deprive the Prophet of his desire that you be his wife?” At that, Walter Cox said, “You may be sealed to the Prophet for eternity and I’ll marry you for time.” Walter was proxy for Joseph Smith, and I was sealed to him for eternity and to Walter for time. 

[Editor’s Note: In the PDF, this is footnote 50.]

[52] Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country, 205. 

[53] The Saints Herald, 51, no. 47 (Nov. 23, 1904),1096. 

[54] Box 2, Folder 9, 63–64, Cutlerite Collection. 

[55] C. Whiting, letter to editor of Battle Lake Review, Box 2, Folder 9, 64–65, Cutlerite Collection. 

[56] Minutes of Council, July 10, 1886, Bpx 2, Folder 3, p. 32, Cutlerite Collection. 

[57] Minutes of Council, April 12, 1885, Box 2, Folder 3, p. 6, Cutlerite Collection. 

[58] Minutes of Council, July 10, 1886, Box 2, Folder 3, p. 32, Cutlerite Collection. 

[59] T. W. Smith, letter to “Dear Bro. Oliver,” July 19, 1875, Herald (August 15, 1875): 501. 

[60] Minutes of church service, May 14, 1911, Box 2, Folder 6, p. 37, Cutlerite Collection. 

[61] Joseph Smith III, letter to Charles Derry, August 14, 1863, Joseph Smith III Papers, P15, f2, Community of Christ Library-Archives.

[62] Terryl Givens, Viper on the Hearth: Mormons, Myths, and the Construction of Heresy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 60.

[63] Wilford Woodruff Journal, March 10, 1844, LDS Church Archives. 

[64] Pliney Fisher Patriarchal Blessing Book, 58, quoted in Danny Jorgensen, “Fiery Darts of the Adversary: An Interpretation of Early Cutlerism.” John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 10 (1990): 69. 

[65] C. Whiting, letter to “Ever respected relations and friends,” May 5, 1893, LDS Church Archives. 

[66] C. Whiting, letter to sister Emeline, July 24, 1894, LDS Church Archives. 

[67] Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country, 67. 

[68] Minutes of church service, June 21, 1910, Box 2, Folder 6, 15, Cutlerite Collection. 

[69] Eben E. Corliss, Reminiscences of the Early History of Otter Tail County (1916), 15. 

[70] Minutes of Council, October 2, 1910, Box 2, Folder 6, 20, Cutlerite Collection. 

[71] “History of the Church of Jesus Christ Cutlerites, Book 319,” Box 2, Folder 8, 46, Cutlerite Collection. 

[72] Fletcher and Fletcher, 37–38. 

[73] Ibid., 38. 

[74] For an autobiographical discussion of Young’s Cutlerite roots, see Biloine W. Young, “Minnesota Mormons: The Cutlerites,” Restoration 2:3 (July 1983): 1, 5–12. 

[75] Amy Whiting, “A Brief History of the Church of Jesus Christ,” Box 2, Folder 8, p. 61, Cutlerite Collection. 

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When I was a young Latter-day Saint, polygamy entered my consciousness about the time I became a teenager. References to it were not uncommon by family members and in Sunday School classes. It seems to me there was less sensitivity surrounding discussion of polygamy in church meetings then than now. Men reflected on the practice, often humorously. Women, nettled by such remarks, often expressed displeasure with the prospect of plurality under any circumstance. The comment most often heard was that, though once permitted, Mormon polygamy had been discontinued by the Church’s president. Guided by inspiration, he had directed that such marriages no longer be performed. It was also occasionally said that the reason for its discontinuance was that too many had fallen short of living the principle in righteousness. Plural marriage in this life was thus brought to an end by the Manifesto of 1890. It may recommence in the millennium, we were told, but there, as in heaven where it is sure to be the domestic order of the gods, our minds will be so enlightened that all misgivings, and especially female discomfort with the arrangement, will fade away. This was the general course that I and others followed in discussions on the subject, both in church and, after I married, at home with Kamillia. 

A more extensive encounter with the topic occurred in the process of preparing my doctoral dissertation on the Mormon colonies in Mexico. Examination of materials relating to the relocation of large numbers of Mormons south of the border beginning in the mid-1880s revealed that, rather than a search for new lands—the reason publicly given for the migration—it was escape from prosecution for unlawful cohabitation that actually prompted most to go there. I became aware that the thousands of Latter-day Saints living in northern Mexico constituted the greatest concentration of pluralists anywhere in Mormon society at the time. More than this, it became obvious from my research that plural marriages continued to be performed in Mexico after the Manifesto of 1890. Records left by Anthony W. Ivins, stake president in the colonies and later an apostle and member of the First Presidency, showed that he performed many of these post-Manifesto marriages with the quiet approval of and instructions from high Church leaders in Salt Lake City. 

This discovery did not, at the time, startle my conscience or threaten my religious convictions. For reasons I cannot fully explain, I ignored the dissonance brought by contradictions between what was publicly stated and what secretly took place. I accepted statements by Mor mon authorities that plural marriages after the Manifesto had not been approved and were the work of rebels out of harmony with Church leaders. Consequently, Church-approved post-Manifesto polygamy received virtually no attention in my finished dissertation. The contradiction lingered, however, and would later be joined to other questions concerning the reliability of Mormonism’s official historical claims. 

After receiving an appointment to teach the history and philosophy of education at Brigham Young University, I completed the dissertation and devoted myself to responsibilities associated with work and raising a young family. Kamillia and I had always been conservative in our views, both of us were active in the Church, and we both wanted to acquire a deeper confirmation of Mormonism’s divinity. I imagine the questions we addressed in our private conversations were much the same as those raised by other thoughtful Latter-day Saint couples when discussing religion. Our searching was accompanied by prayer, fasting, scripture reading, and full activity in the Church—all that was prescribed as the pathway to a “testimony.” As time passed, however, and when nothing of a convincing nature occurred to allay our doubts, confidence that Mormonism offered us a sure road to either heaven or absolute truth wavered. 

During these same years, as commonly happens with scholars after completing their doctoral programs, I continued my research on the colonies in Mexico with a view to eventually publishing my findings. This research involved regular visits to the Church Archives in Salt Lake City, where I learned, first, that there were numerous documents I could not see and second, that whatever notes I took on documents I was permitted to view must be examined by A. William Lund, then assistant Church historian. It was always a harrowing half hour or so at the end of each research day when Lund read the 3x5 cards on which I wrote my notes—especially when, finding some of which he disapproved, he would crumple them and throw them into the waste can in his office. 

Another occurrence of the early 1960s involved making the acquaintance of Nelle Spilsbury Hatch. She was a prominent resident in the colonies, had written a history of Colonia Juarez, and was visiting a relative in Provo, Utah, when we were introduced. She kindly consented to answer questions about the colonies, permitting Kamillia and me to spend an afternoon with her during which we discussed everything from polygamy to economics in Mormon-Mexican colonial life. I particularly remember the sense of abandonment that she said the colonists felt when President Wilford Woodruff issued his 1890 Manifesto. Our discussion was pleasant and led to a collaborative project some years later. Near the same time, Kamillia and I also interviewed Heber Farr, an older Provo resident who, having married a plural spouse in 1904, was at the time, perhaps, the only polygamist yet living in the United States whose post-Manifesto marriage had been approved by Church authorities. The memories and comments of these two individuals gave human faces to numbers of people whose names I knew only from diaries and other documents. 

Another approach I undertook to my subject was to send questionnaires to Mormons living in the colonies. Some residing there had survived the exodus imposed on them by the Mexican Revolution, had returned to Mexico and, I hoped, could tell me things that would otherwise die with them. Some of the questions I asked related to polygamous practices before the exodus but were respectfully phrased and constituted only a portion of the information I sought. It was with surprise that I was one day summoned to a meeting with one of the university’s administrative officers, Anthony Bentley. Born in the colonies but living in Provo, Utah, he had somehow learned of my questionnaires and insisted that I explain the reason for them. 

Angrily, he interrogated me both about my purpose in sending such inquiries and my intentions regarding the use of any information obtained from them. With a raised voice, he repeatedly demanded to know where I would publish my findings. Taken aback by his hostile manner, I could only say what was true: that questionnaires were commonly employed by scholars in many fields; that my intent was an innocent search for historical information; and that, while I did not yet know where I would publish any writing I might do on the subject, I had assumed that I would eventually submit it to some historical journal. Bentley was especially provoked because I could not be specific about where the information I sought would appear in print. He seemed suspicious of my intentions generally and found none of my answers satisfactory. He told me that, before resuming work on the colonies I should clear future research with him. 

About the same time, Antone K. Romney, dean of the College of Education, also asked me to explain what my research was about. This was a more amicable experience than the interview with Bentley. The dean displayed greater understanding about how research is conducted and published, seemed sympathetic with what I was trying to do, and said he would discuss my work and need for more historical information with his brother, Marion G. Romney, who was a member of the Quorum of the Twelve. Their family also had roots in the Mexican colonies, both Antone and Marion having been born in Colonia Juarez. 

It was perhaps three months or so before a response came. Again Dean Romney invited me to his office and read to me a memorandum sent to him not from his brother but from Hugh B. Brown, a member of the First Presidency. It indicated that I should not pursue my research, at least so far as it involved Mormon polygamy. When I asked Dean Romney for a copy of the memo, he said he could not give me one. I vividly remember some of the language, however. There was no rancor in it, but it instructed Romney to tell me that it was best not to examine subjects that had brought “trouble” to the Church in its past. I was disturbed by the message, not only because of the curb it placed on my work but by the view that things possibly embarrassing to the Church were not appropriate for scholarly investigation. It seemed entirely at odds with what I thought a university should be about. I was also affected by the fact that it came from one in the First Presidency whom I and many others believed possessed a broad and intellectually friendly outlook. 

These events occurred at the same time Kamillia and I were privately equivocating over the truth claims of Mormonism. It is important that I acknowledge Kamillia’s interested participation in all that occupied me in those years. While discussions on the subject occurred nearly daily, we shared our inner turmoil with no one, not even our children. I was fortunate to have a companion whose misgivings were identical to my own and who confronted the implications of our questions so bravely and honestly. I must also add that our decision to leave Brigham Young University—and subsequently the Church itself—did not hinge singly on issues associated with my research. These were but part of a complex of considerations that brought us to that momentous life step. 

While there were several ingredients in the decision, the primary concern remained a want of spiritual certainty that the Church was true, an increasing awareness of instances where the historical record contradicted what we had been taught, and a growing realization that the world was filled with admirable, heroic people entirely outside the Mormon frame. Discouragement with the university’s approach to scholarship, particularly as it related to my own work, was but one of several matters qualifying my religious faith. Taken altogether, it seemed dishonest on my part, as I told the president of the university when explaining my resignation in the spring of 1966, to continue as an employee paid from the tithing receipts of believing members. 

Something more needs to be said regarding my break with Mormonism. After formally submitting my resignation from BYU, owing probably to brief discussions with colleagues and administrators about my reasons in the matter, several faculty and friends paid visits, hoping to dissuade me. I particularly remember Hugh Nibley, a former teacher from whom I had taken many courses, and one whom I had long held in high regard. He did not “bear his testimony” or engage me on philosophical or historical grounds. His chief plea was simply that I should not be “inveigled by the ways of the world.” What affected me most was his interest and concern. I was even more touched when Dean Romney asked whether Kamillia and I would visit with one of the General Authorities concerning our doubts if he could arrange it. Of course, we consented. 

An appointment was made for us to meet with Apostle Howard W. Hunter in the Church Administration Building in Salt Lake City. After we were ushered in by a secretary, Apostle Hunter graciously greeted us. The first few minutes were confused because, for some reason, he assumed we were grieving for a dead child and seeking spiritual solace for the loss. After explaining the correct reasons for our presence, our growing doubts and misgivings regarding the Church, he expressed understanding and responded with kindness. He remarked on the many advantages offered by the Church, especially for those with families. He told us that he could not imagine how life would be for him without “the gospel.” When I asked if he had direct, personal confirmation that the Church was true, such as a communication from heaven, he said, “No.” But, he went on, he knew others who told him they had had such a witness, and he relied on their claims, believing that they would not deceive him. While Kamillia and I left the interview no more convinced than before, we have always remembered the thoughtful manner and compassion the apostle displayed toward us. 

I should also add that Kamillia and I, neither at that time nor since, harbored any bitterness toward Mormonism. It was responsible for much that we considered best in our lives. We yet have enormous regard for the toil, sacrifice, and achievements of our pioneer ancestors. Even after becoming nonmembers, we stood by our children when all chose to be baptized in the Church. And we were happy to support our son when he was called to fill a mission abroad. We occasionally attended church, especially when our children were participating in some way. It was only that we could not personally subscribe to contentions that Mormonism alone possesses all religious truth, that its theology is divinely dictated from heaven, and that, if there is a life beyond the grave, as between individuals of equal ethical merit, those who are Mormon will be given a greater reward than those who are not. In the years following my resignation from Brigham Young University and our decision formally to leave the Church, we have consistently sought to respect the religious choices made by our children. And in none of my historical writing about the Church have I ever intended to criticize or embarrass it. 

After accepting an appointment at California State University, Fullerton, I sought for a time to redirect my research into areas apart from Mormon history, fields in which I had studied and that had long held interest for me. While this resulted in publications on non-Mormon topics, I found I could not entirely abandon historical interest in my Latter-day Saint ancestors. Moreover, with the appointment of Leonard Arrington as Church historian a spirit of openness and honesty regarding investigation of the Mormon past largely replaced the paranoia I encountered in the 1960s. I was given a grant to work at the Church’s Historical Department Archives for several weeks in the mid-1970s. Access to materials I had never seen before was permitted, and I was able to add considerable information to what I already possessed on the polygamous, Mormon colonies in Mexico. Near this same time, I met and became acquainted with Victor W. Jorgensen, an engineer from Utah, who was intensely interested in post-Manifesto polygamy. He had already gathered data on the post-Manifesto marriages of certain Mormon apostles. It would be unfair of me not to acknowledge the large contribution he subsequently made to publications resulting from our work together. 

Another important event occurred when, in the early 1970s, I and my colleague, Professor Gary Shumway, along with a few students spent several days in the Mexican colonies. Gary gathered numerous interviews on tape, all of which are a part of the impressive collection he developed as founder and director of the California State University Center for Oral and Public History. These and other records gathered by Gary have proven of great assistance to me over the years. During our visit to the colonies, I renewed my acquaintance with Nelle Hatch. Though aged and severely impaired in both sight and hearing, she remained mentally alert and implored me to bring to completion a project she had long ago commenced and since passed on to another Mormon colonist from Mexico, Hal Bentley, then employed at the University of Utah. The project involved writing biographical sketches of important personalities dating from the founding years of the colonies’ history. She had gathered several notebooks of memoirs, letters, and other materials to be used in the volume. Bentley, struggling with an illness, was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task and was unable to do anything with it. 

Fearing that her long-envisioned tribute to old friends, the pioneer founders of the Mexican settlements, would be forgotten, Nelle pleaded that I do what I could to obtain the materials and finish the volume by 1985, the centennial date for the founding of the colonies. I promised her I would do so. I succeeded in acquiring possession of all Nelle’s materials bearing on the project, incorporated findings of my own, and with the assistance of Gary Shumway and Nelle’s daughters—Ernestine Hatch and Madelyn Hatch Knudsen, the book was privately published by Gary Shumway and made available for sale during the centennial celebration of the colonies in 1985. Titled Stalwarts South of the Border, it is a rich compilation of biographical and autobiographical reminiscences relating to the Mormon pioneers of Mexico, many of whom were polygamous.[1] Nelle Hatch remains for me an especially dear personality, forever connected in my mind with those sturdy figures who, with so little, built a thriving Mormon commonwealth in the deserts of northern Mexico. 

It was also during the early 1980s that I met Guy C. Wilson Jr., the son of polygamous parentage in the Mexican colonies who was then living in Pasadena, California. After reading an article of mine, Guy contacted me, wishing to share some of his memories. I soon realized that, though in his eighties, he had unusually strong powers of recollection. I arranged to interview him, making tape-recordings of his reminiscences. Goodly portions of his youth were spent both in the colonies and in Utah. His father, Guy Carlton Wilson Sr., was a prominent citizen in the colonies and presided over the Juarez Stake Academy, one of the premier elementary and secondary schools in all northern Mexico. He was also a polygamist. In addition to Melissa Stevens, a plural wife and Guy Jr.’s mother, Guy Sr. married Anna Lowrie Ivins, a daughter of Anthony W. Ivins, president of Juarez Stake. Young Guy thus grew up within the colonies’ most elite circle and was extensively acquainted with polygamy as it was practiced and approved by Mormons in the early twentieth century. 

Guy was primarily interested in memorializing his father. But in the process of telling about him, Guy brought other individuals and events into his narrative. He remembered the names of many who took plural wives after the Manifesto, some in Mexico and others in the United States. So many women who married in polygamy after 1890 were sent to Mexico to bear their children and thereby be less conspicuous north of the border, he said, that Mexican colonists referred to their settlements as “lambing grounds.” He told how George Q. Cannon, counselor in the First Presidency, strongly urged entry into “the Principle” and helped implement its continuation. He related touching accounts of the hardships imposed on families who, relocating to the United States after the Mexican Revolution, were asked to geographically disperse their plural families so as to spare Mormonism (by then officially monogamous) any embarrassment owing to its former attachment to the Principle. These and many other memories were published by the California State University Oral History Program in 1988 as, Memories of a Venerable Father and Other Reminiscences. 

Guy took great pride in his Mormon heritage but was relaxed in his personal attitudes toward Latter-day Saint teachings. Following our recording sessions in the mornings, he generally took me to the Valley Hunt Club in Pasadena for lunch. After ordering cocktails, Guy always raised his glass and said: “Come Carmon, let’s drink to the Church!” Then followed two hours of further recollections, some adding to stories recorded in the morning, others new, but most told in language so salty that he wanted it confined to our luncheon table. 

I should now return to the work that Victor W. Jorgensen and I first undertook in the late 1970s and early ’80s. The first printed investigation into approved, late plural marriages on which we collaborated was an article in an issue of the Utah Historical Quarterly for 1980 dealing with the cases of Apostles Matthias F. Cowley and John W. Taylor.[2] That article not only showed the extent to which these two authorities engaged in plurality after 1890 but, more importantly, demonstrated that their expulsion from the Quorum of Twelve in 1905 was an event orchestrated for the purpose of appeasing national criticism of the Church. We explained how the two agreed to resign owing to pressures brought by Senator-Apostle Reed Smoot whose seat in the United States Senate was challenged on the grounds that the Church still engaged in new plural marriages. The article also revealed that there were other apostles, apart from Cowley and Taylor, who entered plural marriages after 1890. The publication was well received and was awarded the Dale Morgan Prize as the best article to ap pear in the Quarterly that year. 

The success of this project encouraged us to commence work on a book-length treatment of the matter. Then Michael Quinn, who had an interest in the same subject, published a long article on it in Dialogue in 1985.[3] His findings reinforced ours and provided additions to our growing list of post-1890 plural unions. His account also contained helpful insights into how such marriages were approved. Pressing ahead with our work, Vic, who lived in Utah, regularly sent me extensive transcripts identifying and discussing approved plural marriages after the Manifesto. I then added my own findings and other observations, slowly working all into a book-length manuscript. The result was Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage, published by the University of Illinois Press in 1992, more than a decade after our first foray into the topic in the Utah Historical Quarterly. Despite his extensive work in searching out those who married after the Manifesto, for personal reasons Vic decided that he did not wish to be formally identified with the book. Thus, the volume bears my name alone. Like our article, this work received overwhelmingly favorable reviews and was given the best book award for that year by the Mormon Historical Association. 

It is always interesting how one’s views change as work in a subject area progresses. At the outset, the extensive number of new, Church-approved, post-Manifesto plural marriages was what most surprised me. And it is still astonishing to realize that, between 1890 and 1910, at least two hundred and perhaps as many as three hundred such marriages took place. Church statements, when rumor and question arose, that such marriages were few, that Church authorities did not approve them, and that those that did occur were the “sporadic” work of “mavericks,” fell hollow before the sheer quantity of plural unions that research now shows were approved and contracted. But gradually, something else emerged, something more significant even than the magnitude of their numbers. This was the identity of many of those who undertook such marriages. The majority were individuals who could be counted among the most faithful of Church members: former missionaries, bishops, members of bishoprics, stake presidents, members of stake presidencies, and other individuals similarly distinguished and favored in the Mormon community. At least seven apostles took plural wives after the Manifesto.[4] 

Again, it was not just that numerous apostles entered the Principle after 1890, but that members of the First Presidency approved and assisted them in such unions as well. George Q. Cannon in the mid-1880s was remembered to declare that his attachment to the revelation on plurality was so strong that he felt “like taking every son of mine & placing his hand on my thigh causing him to swear he will obey it.”[5] After the Manifesto, Cannon remained more active perhaps than anyone else in assisting with its continuance. He not only encouraged individuals, including members of his own family, to take plural wives but sent recommends to Anthony W. Ivins in Mexico indicating that the bearers of such messages were approved and that Ivins might proceed to solemnize their plural un ions.[6] President Joseph F. Smith was also a strong believer in polygamy and gave permission to numerous individuals after the Manifesto to enter the practice—both in and outside of the United States.[7] While documentation for such marriages is in most instances compelling, it is less so for President Wilford Woodruff, who issued the Manifesto. While I am persuaded that Woodruff entered a marital arrangement of some kind on his own with Madame Lydia Mountford in 1897, the available evidence for this is inferential only.[8] And other capable historians have disagreed with me.[9] 

This realization, that it was the Church’s elite who were mostly involved in post-Manifesto polygamy, highlighted another issue, one that nagged the investigation from its beginning. This was the problem of the Church’s use of mistruth when publicly discussing polygamy, both early and late. Even a superficial examination of Mormon plurality, from the period of its practice in the 1840s to the throes of its cessation in the first two decades of the twentieth century, confronts one with numerous instances of false denial by Church leaders. This led to my writing a rather lengthy essay, titled “Lying for the Lord,” that was added as an appendix to Solemn Covenant. Since the publication of the book, that phrase has sometimes been repeated as a criticism of the Church for instances of dissembling on a variety of questions. My intent in that essay was not, however, to indict the Church in any general way but simply to explore its use of prevarication when attempting to keep the approved practice of polygamy secret. 

While it is true that Church leaders used purposeful falsehood to cloak Mormon polygamous practice at almost every stage of its history, my essay on the subject argued that we must be careful with our conclusions concerning it. Honesty and dishonesty are not easily reduced to the bi nary, ethical judgments we commonly make. Most importantly—and what I fear is too often missed despite my repeated attention to the issue in the book—is that plural marriage was so important as a tenet that resorts such as lying, though regretted, were thought necessary as a way to preserve it. In all of life, and with all people, lesser truths must sometimes yield to more important ones. While policies of deceit seldom escape detection and, once indulged, are susceptible to being employed elsewhere, their use here speaks most emphatically to the high regard in which plural marriage was held during those years. 

And this, the crucial significance given the practice by the nineteenth-century Church, was justified by other contentions, some of which have been quite forgotten. One of these was the support polygamy gave to patriarchal government in the home. The importance of patriarchal authority, and its linkage with plural marriage, was affirmed in the first public defense of the practice printed on Joseph Smith’s press in Nauvoo, Illinois: Udney Hay Jacob’s The Peacemaker (1842). During the decades of its approval, plurality was often referred to as “patriarchal marriage.” The significance of restoring the polygamous, Abrahamic household, with a strong male figure at its center, was repeatedly emphasized in nineteenth-century Mormon sermons and writings. Attention to patriarchal government in the home was so pervasive that I sometimes wondered if polygamy was but an auxiliary device, a brace recruited to assure the more important function of male rule. This thinking led to my article on the subject in the Journal of Mormon History.[10] Unfortunately, when printed, the typesetting program ran footnotes into the text, making it difficult for readers to follow the development of the article’s themes. I was not given an opportunity to correct mistakes made by the printer before it appeared in the completed issue of the journal. Because the patriarchal-polygamous alliance was so important in nineteenth-century Mormon thinking about home life, I have sometimes thought I should revise the article, add further reflections, and publish it again. 

Biological advantages were also said to follow plurality when practiced as taught by Mormon leaders. If sexual relations were employed only for reproductive purposes, men and women were told they would enjoy greater health, greater strength, and greater longevity, goals that were allegedly more easily accomplished in polygamy than in monogamy. Some saw the practice as a way by which the longevity of the ancients would be restored. As I combed through Mormon diaries, sermons, and public prints during the years of my research, I encountered this argument so frequently that I wondered why it had not received greater mention by historians. Dan Erickson, a friend and graduate student, joined me in summarizing these arguments in an article in the Journal of the History of Sexuality in 2001.[11] Along with its eugenic promises, superior social gifts were ascribed to polygamy, along with the claim of providing greater happiness than could be found in the monogamous home. Another assertion was that women might escape the curse of Eve by submitting to the requirements of plural family life. Such contentions make it easier to understand why the Saints went to such lengths, including the use of mistruth, to keep the Principle alive after the Manifesto. 

All these aspects of plural marriage, and more, were brought together in Doing the Works of Abraham: Mormon Polygamy, Its Origin, Practice, and Demise (Norman, Okla.: Arthur H. Clark Company, 2007). I had always been interested in writing a book that would be published by the Arthur H. Clark Company. When I was a graduate student at Brigham Young University in the late 1950s, Dr. LeRoy Hafen, one of my professors and a much-published authority, praised the Clark Company for the quality of materials used in its books and the historical service provided through its splendid volumes on western Americana. The Arthur H. Clark Company, as every historian of the American West knows, continues to enjoy a reputation as one of the premier publishing houses in the field. When I learned that Clark was planning a new series, KINGDOM IN THE WEST: THE MORMONS AND THE AMERICAN FRONTIER, I contacted Robert A. Clark and expressed interest in doing a book for him on Mormon polygamy. Bob put me in touch with Will Bagley, the series general editor. After I sent him a prospectus, Will invited me to be a contributor to the KINGDOM IN THE WEST project. Over the lengthy period of time necessary to complete the book, I suspect Will often wondered whether he had erred in that decision. Not only were ten years required to finish the volume, but my early drafts, submitted to reassure Will and Bob that progress was occurring, were so filled with footnotes and documents that they must have despaired at the behemoth in preparation. 

Books in the series, as Will envisioned them, were to consist primarily of original sources illustrating development of Mormonism’s nineteenth-century “Kingdom in the West.” Inasmuch as I had been collecting notes and documents on Mormon polygamy for more than thirty years, I first needed to organize the book into conceptual categories, that is chapters and subchapters. This was followed by much sifting and winnowing, then grafting the selected materials into their appropriate sections. Because polygamy is so rich a subject, with so many interconnecting implications, I considered it necessary to use several early writings to illustrate each theme. When my own commentaries on these documents were added, along with lengthy footnotes, the book ballooned beyond what either Will or Bob found acceptable. Then followed a series of drafts, each thriftier than its predecessor. As part of the slenderizing process, including many excellent recommendations by Will and Bob, the work greatly benefited from the helpful critiques of Ben Bennion, Todd Compton, and Michael Homer. In addition to stylistic and factual corrections, all identified places where surgery on the volume could be done. 

The book was finally published in the spring of 2007. It contains most of what I have found and thought concerning polygamy in the course of several decades of research: original inspirations for the practice; arguments for plurality presented both to Church members and to the world at large; commentary by those living “the Principle” on their experience with it; the long, cruel, anti-polygamy crusade by the federal government; Mormonism’s final surrender of the practice; and its return to monogamy as the preferred form of domestic life. Looking back now that I have completed the volume, perhaps the most significant feature to emerge in my mind is the enormous importance given the doctrine by nineteenth-century Mormon advocates. But equally dramatic, after equivocation for twenty or so years following the Manifesto, is the emphatic manner displayed by the Church in moving away from the Principle. All who acquaint themselves with sermons and writings of nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints repeatedly encounter the centrality given plural marriage as an ideal both for this life and the one hereafter. And no less conspicuous is the subsequent abandonment, made obvious by a glaring absence in official histories and sermons, of the Church’s attention to it today. 

But Mormon polygamy, I now realize, has implications beyond a narrow concern with nineteenth-century Mormon domestic life. Anthropologists indicate that the marriage of one man to several women yet remains the most preferred (if not actually entered into) form of marriage in world societies—a claim made by nineteenth-century Mormons when justifying the practice. This is why, in Doing the Works of Abraham, I made occasional comparisons between the Latter-day Saint practice of plurality and that of others such as Muslims and certain African societies. Mormonism’s own involvement with polygamy may have been one of the larger, if not the largest, formal departure from traditional monogamous marriage in Euro-American family structure in centuries. 

Latter-day Saint efforts to secure the legality of their plural marriage system also led to many encounters with the government in court. The most famous of these, Reynolds v. U.S. (1879), laid down principles of American constitutional law yet followed and cited in cases involving the First Amendment’s freedom of religion clause. To examine such contests, one in which the advocates of polygamy almost always lost, necessarily leads to a consideration of legal and constitutional issues, an area no historian of Mormon polygamous experience can ignore. Apart from legal defenses, I am also struck with the sheer quantity of formal apologetics produced in behalf of the Principle. Mormon writings and sermons defending plurality are encountered at every turn during the years when the Church approved the practice. While I have done no counting nor made a serious survey, I suspect formal Mormon justifications supporting plurality may constitute one of the larger bodies of such argument in world literature.[12] These are but a few of the ancillary lines of inquiry that flow from the study of Mormon plural marriage. 

In concluding, it is important to repeat that my work on polygamy should not be seen as connected in any large way with my decision to leave Mormonism. Except that I was frustrated by university policies regarding my early research, it was not the major reason leading Kamillia and me to ask that our names be removed from the Church’s membership rolls. Moreover, it needs to be said that those administering the Church’s historical archives in recent years have been most generous in making their collections available to me. Neither have I as a historian ever condemned Mormonism or judged it negatively because of plurality. Rather, exposure to Mormon polygamy, with all that it demanded from practitioners, has only deepened my respect for the men and women who lived it. They were, as Nelle Hatch put it to me decades ago, “big people.” 

I have often thought about the fact that there are many historians, numbers of whom are better scholars than am I, who yet believe in the divinity of the Church. Though looking at the same historical phenomena, they seem simply to appropriate them differently than do I. I have wondered at times if it comes down to personality or psychological proclivity on the part of the observer. I can only say in all honesty that there is nothing in the evidence with which I am acquainted that grants Mormonism, either in the past or at present, a greater radiance than one finds in many institutions and individuals. It is always painful when, as occasionally occurs, someone accuses me of writing “against the Church” or, as when a caller from Utah told how his stake president warned him to trust nothing Carmon Hardy writes inasmuch as he is “an apostate.” Such comments have been few, however, and almost without exception I am treated kindly by Mormon historians and Latter-day Saints—especially those who actually read what I write.[13] In every instance, when treating Mormon subjects, I do my best to describe them as accurately and fairly as possible, placing all under the same lamp I would if recounting a military exploit of the American Civil War or the policies of a medieval Catholic pope. 

This said, it is also true that my interest in the study of Mormon polygamy is partly owing to the fact that it is my heritage—what Eugene Campbell, a former chair of BYU’s History Department, in a conversation with me about the difficulties of religious belief, called “the folkway of our fathers.” Not only was I raised in the Church, a descendant of George A. Smith and his polygamous wife Hannah Maria Libby, but I am proud that my Mormon forebears walked across the continent, broke their plows subduing the salt-crusted plain, fought the crickets, and raised up cities in the dry valleys of the Rocky Mountains. If I now disagree with some of their precepts, I yet hope to emulate their courage in setting a different course, in honoring my own deepest convictions. 

More than anything, however, as one infatuated with the limitless range of our species’ possibilities, I see Mormonism as constituting an extraordinarily brave and rich religious instance. If, for me, it remains a mortal invention, it still partakes of the evanescence I find to surround the human adventure generally. Though no longer a formal Latter-day Saint, I expect the drama and allurement of its historical journey, including its complicated dance with polygamy, to long bind my fascination. 

---

Note: This article is part of a series, Avenues to Faith, guest-edited by Todd Compton. The series looks at how historians, creative writers, administrators, educators, and scriptural scholars have dealt with some of the classic problems in Mormon history. The series assumes that a careful examination of these issues is necessary to develop a holistic, inclusive faith. 

[1] Nelle Spilsbury Hatch and B. Carmon Hardy, comps. and eds., Stalwarts South of the Border (Anaheim, Calif.: privately printed, 1985). 2.

[2] Victor Jorgensen and B. Carmon Hardy, “The Taylor-Cowley Affair and the Watershed of Mormon History,” Utah Historical Quarterly 48, no. 1 (Winter 1980): 4-36. 

[3] D. Michael Quinn, “LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890-1904,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18, no. 1 (Spring 1985): 9-105. 

[4] All of Chapter 6 in Solemn Covenant is devoted to providing evidence for and identifying plural marriages by Mormon apostles in those years. The ratio of distinguished Latter-day Saints to those less prominent who took plural wives after the Manifesto is given at the end of Appendix 2 in Solemn Covenant. 

[5] Thomas Memmott, Quotation Book, 101-3; Archives, Family and Church History Department, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City. 

[6] Hardy, Solemn Covenant, 171. 

[7] Ibid., 310-35. 

[8] Ibid., 227-32. 

[9] See, for example, Thomas G. Alexander, Things in Heaven and Earth: The Life and Times of Wilford Woodruff, a Mormon Prophet (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1991), 326-29. 

[10] B. Carmon Hardy, “Lords of Creation: Polygamy, the Abrahamic Household, and Mormon Patriarchy,” Journal of Mormon History 20, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 119-52. 

[11] B. Carmon Hardy and Dan Erickson, “‘Regeneration Now and Evermore’: Mormon Polygamy and the Physical Rehabilitation of Humankind,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 10, no 1 (January 2001): 40-61. 

[12] I am, of course, not talking about memoirs or reminiscences, imagined and factual, that describe men and women’s experiences in plural, sexual relationships. Rather I refer to purposeful defenses of formal, religiously approved polygamous marriage, adducing its advantages and urging its adoption. 

[13] And, I must add, though my dominant historical interest remains with those many-wived, patriarchal stalwarts of the old Church, I have found today=s polygamist dissenters not only welcoming but as gentle and sincere a people on the whole as their nineteenth-century predecessors. 

[post_title] => Polygamy, Mormonism, and Me [post_excerpt] => Dialogue 41.2 (Summer 2009): 85–101
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The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints or FLDS Church and its controversial Church president or prophet, Warren Jeffs, have attracted significant attention during the last several years. The community has dramatically and radically changed from within while it attempts to withstand intense pressure from media and government for its unique religious practices, as well as allegations of fraud and abuse.[1] On May 6, 2006, the Federal Bureau of Investigation placed Warren Jeffs on its "Ten Most Wanted" list for unlawful flight to avoid prosecution of state charges for arranging and performing plural marriages to underage women. His arrest on August 26, 2006, has thrust Jeffs, the FLDS Church, its communities, and Mormon polygamy in general even further into the national and international spotlight.[2]

Understandably, the unique FLDS form of arranged marriages, called placement marriage, which sometimes involves underage brides in polygamous marriages, has been a focal point of interest, investigation, and concern. The scrutiny on all these subjects is likely to continue unabated, probably often as late-breaking news, as the dust begins to settle from the internal social and religious turmoil and from the legal processes now unfolding.[3] In July 2005, eight FLDS men were charged with sexual misconduct in Arizona for relationships with underage plural wives, presumably married to them by Jeffs. 

A persistent question is why a large majority of the FLDS community has remained loyal to Jeffs despite his recent purges of hundreds of lifetime members and other radical moves during the last few years.[4] Especially mysterious is why a large number of women and children appear willing to unquestioningly accept the excommunications of their husbands or fathers and their own subsequent "reassignments" to new families. The purpose of this paper is to present some background relevant to the development of arranged or appointed marriages, called "placement marriages" in the FLDS community.[5] This context is vital for understanding the events now unfolding. 

Although placement marriage is deeply entrenched in the belief structure of the FLDS community, it did not always exist. Rather, it has evolved over the past fifty years or so. In fact, 1 have found no evidence, either from oral histories or in contemporary documentation, to support the concept of arranged marriages among fundamentalist Mormons prior to the 1940s. Rather, in my reading of diaries, documents, and histories of both nineteenth-century Mormons and twentieth-century fundamentalist Mormons, the model among fundamentalists prior to the late 1940s mirrored, more or less, nineteenth-century LDS patterns of choosing marriage companions. That is, individuals chose marriage partners based on varied combinations of personal attraction and principles of faith (which usually included testimony or personal revelation) along with direct or in direct influence of family and ecclesiastical leaders. For most fundamentalist Mormons, this same pattern continues to this day. It is a differ ent story, however, among those who have become known in the last twenty years as the Jeffs group or more recently as the FLDS. 

It is my belief that FLDS placement marriage derived from the belief that obedience to priesthood leaders is a requirement for salvation. The requirement for such obedience became more pronounced after quorum leadership ceased to exist under Rulon Jeffs in the 1980s. The loss of quorum leadership opened the door for absolute rule by only one man and ultimately led to the tyrannical leadership manifested since 2002 by Rulon's son Warren.[6] The most visible evidence of the community's deep commitment to this requirement for obedience in exchange for salvation can be seen in the acceptance by so many of the dramatic rearrangement of families. In this way, participation in placement marriage is perhaps, for the FLDS, the greatest outward expression and symbol of devotion to God and their religion. An understanding of how placement marriage developed and its significance is important because of these reasons and because no one can be certain how this community may emerge from its present turmoil.

Placement Marriage 

Historians D. Michael Quinn and Martha Sonntag Bradley gathered information about arranged marriages in what was then the Johnson or Colorado City group from interviews they conducted in the 1980s and 

1990s. 1 first learned about placement marriage as a child from family members who knew friends and relatives in that group who participated in arranged marriages. Later, as 1 became acquainted with several relatives from that community, I learned more about this practice in personal discussions. Despite my disagreement, 1 came to respect my FLDS relatives, many of whom stated that they were not coerced but freely chose to participate in placement marriages and felt that their submission to the priest hood in this way was the best way to please God. Many, even most, appeared to have stable marriages and loving relationships with their spouses. 

This situation, however, has changed in the past ten years. It is significant that, in my discussions with them until the early 1990s, they referred to "the Priesthood" and "they" in reference to the Priesthood Council, which provided religious governance. By the early 1990s, these terms were intermixed with and finally replaced by "the prophet" and "he." I failed to fully comprehend the importance of this evolution until recently, when Warren Jeffs began dismantling many of the families with whom 1 had been acquainted. 

In the FLDS community, there is no dating or courtship before marriage. Young people can get to know each other through association at school, church and community dances, and of course through family connections. But they are not encouraged to fall in love. Romantic love is supposed to develop after the priesthood selects the spouse, not before.[7] In 1998, based on interviews Quinn had conducted in 1990, he wrote that "the youth of [this] group anticipate with faith and solemnity the decisions of the Priesthood Council regarding the most important event of their young lives: the selection of a marriage companion."[8] A young man, James, told him, "We are raised believing that the Priesthood would choose our mate and we were not to allow ourselves to fall in love with any body."[9] When a young single man feels he is ready to marry, usually at about age twenty or twenty-one, "you go to them [the Priesthood]. They don't come to you. . . . They basically decide who you're going to marry. You can have a little bit of your say, it's not just totally that they tell you.... They set it up."[10]

In first marriages, the husband and wife are usually close in age.[11] In plural marriages, however, the age differences between husband and wife can vary widely, and the process is also somewhat different. Generally married men do not volunteer to the priesthood their interest in entering plural marriage but instead wait for an inquiry about their interest. According to James, when called in, a man can indicate that he is not interested at that time; however, a "faithful male may delay polygamous marriage, but cannot be considered faithful if he refuses the decision of the Priesthood for him to marry polygamously."[12] Whenever a married man of whatever age marries a plural wife, "he defers to choices made by the Priesthood" about whom, when, and where he will marry.[13]

Young girls learn household skills and child care from an early age to prepare them for marriage. They are usually between ages sixteen to twenty-five when they decide to marry.[14] When a woman feels ready, she discusses her feelings with her father (sometimes with both parents) and then "turns herself in," which means that her father mediates by taking her to meet with the prophet to inform him she is ready for marriage. The prophet may agree that she is ready or he may decide she should wait awhile, even a few years. The prophet decides, based on his inspiration or revelation (and his knowledge of the available males), whom the girl should marry. The husband-to-be, whether single or already married, is then informed, and the ceremony takes place any time from a few minutes or hours to a week later. 

A young woman can decide not to marry the man who is chosen for her, but that doesn't happen very often.[15] She can express a preference of whom she would like to marry, but this is usually not welcomed.[16] It reflects badly on the father because it is perceived as evidence that he was not diligent in raising his daughter or in keeping her away from boys. There was "quite a bit of disgrace if you actually fell in love with somebody you really did want to get married to," commented one of Quinn's interviewees.[17] In 1990, Sam Barlow told Quinn that young people who "make commitments" may have them "respected sometimes."[18] My sense is that such a scenario is quite uncommon and usually means that, if two young people develop a relationship (which may or may not involve premarital sexual relations), they are sometimes allowed to marry but usually carry a social and religious stigma. 

The prevalent view has been that there is a lot of romance in not knowing who you are going to marry until the last moment and that, when a marriage is ordained of God (by revelation to the prophet), the couple will come to love one another, if they don't at first. Several men and women said that they did not seek personal revelation because they considered the only sure revelation to be from the prophet and didn't want the possibility of making a mistake about such an important decision; they were glad to have a prophet to tell them whom to marry.[19] Of course, this entire scenario represents the ideal, and participants readily admitted that some couples struggled to make their marriages work and some marriages failed altogether.[20]

Placement marriage also worked, though somewhat differently, for married men and women when things went awry. If a man were deemed to be apostate for any reason, his wives could be contacted by the priest hood leader or his representative, if they did not come on their own, and encouraged to leave or divorce him.[21] If they were compliant, they would then be reassigned in much the same way as single women.[22] This process was similar for widowed women.[23] Placement marriages meant that there were very few women in the community without a husband and that a majority of men, though not all, lived plural marriage. 

This description of placement marriage applies to practices under Rulon Jeffs during the late 1980s and early 1990s; but in at least a few cases—possibly more—Warren Jeffs may have eliminated the volunteer aspect of placement marriage, in which young women went with their fathers to the prophet to indicate their readiness for marriage. Some evidence suggests Warren Jeffs may have started assigning marriages for some young women who had nor first volunteered themselves.[24]

Louis Barlow's Secret 1948 Marriage 

Louis Barlow's secret 1948 marriage took place before placement marriage existed. The following account is told here mostly through the perspective of my grandfather, Joseph Lyman Jessop, a twentieth-century polygamist, since most of it is drawn from his journals.[25] In this paper, the names of most persons still living have been changed, with the exception of well-known public figures such as Warren Jeffs. 

Theaccount is important because it was recorded in some detail and it was not an isolated case. Most significantly, it shows that a crucial trend was developing in the late 1940s among some fundamentalist Mormons regarding attitudes and procedures for selecting marriage companions. That transition was a move away from individuals choosing companions for marriage through mutual attraction with guidance and the permission or blessing of parents and priesthood leaders and toward marriage partners being selected, wholly decided, and arranged or appointed by a priesthood leader or leaders. 

On the first weekend in September 1948, Joseph Lyman Jessop traveled from his third wife's home in the Salt Lake Valley to Black Canyon, about ten miles south of Antimony in central Utah. The homes of his first two wives were located in this canyon across the road from the Osiris Mill that Lyman had helped construct over the previous two years.[26] On Sunday, before he had to return to Salt Lake for work, his fifteen-year-old daughter Christine, daughter of his first wife, Winnie, asked to speak to him privately. She confided that the previous weekend, while attending a dance in Short Creek, she had been secretly married as a plural wife.[27] The groom was twenty-four-year-old Louis Jessop Barlow, already a polygamist with two wives and three or four children.[28] He was the oldest son of the presiding fundamentalist leader John Y Barlow and a nephew of Joseph Lyman Jessop, therefore Christine's first cousin.[29] Afterward, she returned home where she had been ever since and had kept her secret even from her mother.[30] Lyman was shocked, to say the least, and deeply troubled.[31] Before he left that day, he likely shared die unsettling news with Christine's mother.

While Lyman was en route to Salt Lake that same afternoon, the reported bridegroom, Louis Barlow, flagged him down on the highway, Standing on the roadside, the two men had a lengthy discussion. Lyman recorded: "We conversed over the marriage for more than an hour. 1 was displeased with him .. . and told him he had high-pressured the girl. He told me he was commanded to take this step, and I asked, 'Who commanded you, Louis?' and he would not say who but told me it was a divine command and he argued that he had done exactly right." Lyman told Louis, "No person on earth has a right to tell you to take my daughter without my knowledge or consent, and this you have done."[32]

Their conversation ended without agreement. Lyman suspected the "divine command" Louis said he had received had probably come from his father, John Y. Barlow. John was the only person, according to Lyman's knowledge of patriarchal order and of priesthood authority, who was really in a position with Louis to have done such a thing—although it was possible that John hadn't given his son any "divine command" and Louis had either misunderstood or had taken something his father said out of context. Nevertheless, Lyman also knew from past experiences, that John sometimes pressed his ideas forcefully on others.[33] If John had given Louis such a command, Lyman did not think it was right, as it violated the agency of others involved, namely that of his daughter, his own, and her mother's. 

A few days later, Louis Barlow came to Lyman's home in Salt Lake where he again pled his case. He argued that Lyman had given or implied his consent for the marriage when he had earlier given him permission "to see her" or get to know her.[34] Lyman emphatically denied that he had given any such consent to Louis or to any of the other young men who had asked for the privilege of seeing Christine. Louis finally resorted to threats, saying that both Christine's and Lyman's salvation was at stake if Lyman said or did anything against Louis and this marriage. 

"Pretty cocky, I call it," Lyman wrote in his diary. "To this stand 1 am opposed, because this marriage was done without my knowledge or consent. We don't agree on . . . procedure."[35]

This was just the beginning of a two-year ordeal that tested the resolve of Joseph Lyman Jessop to exert his fatherly rights and obligations to guide and protect his family. He believed in following priesthood leadership intelligently, not blindly, and he was determined to know and understand for himself the principles and correct order of priesthood law which he understood to be patriarchal in nature.[36] He considered this secret marriage as one of several violations of patriarchal law and personal agency on the part of his associates during recent years. 

Joseph Lyman Jessop, a Twentieth-Century Polygamist

Joseph Lyman Jessop was raised a member of the LDS Church, serving a mission, marrying in the temple, and remaining active until he was thirty-one.[37] After he married his first plural wife in 1923, he was excommunicated.[38] After that event, Lyman's primary circle of associates consisted of a few hundred people who were dedicated to preserving and perpetuating plural marriage, most of whom were already or soon would be excommunicated. They believed that John Taylor, third LDS Church President, had bestowed priesthood authority to continue plural marriage on five other men in 1886 after he received a revelation regarding the matter.[39]

Jessop learned directly from John W. Woolley and his son, Lorin C. Woolley (with whom he became intimately acquainted in the 1920s), that in September 1886, President Taylor was in hiding from federal marshals in John W. Woolley's home in Centerville, Utah.[40] They told him that, on a Sunday afternoon, a delegation of Church officials visited him and urged that the Church renounce plural marriage. That night Taylor took the matter to the Lord and, according to Woolley, received a lengthy visitation from Jesus Christ and Joseph Smith instructing him not to yield to either federal or internal pressure. The next day, Taylor told the Woolleys and about eleven others of his experience, wrote down the revelation, and had his secretary, L John Nuttal, make five copies.[41] At Taylor's urging, all present entered into a "solemn covenant and promise that they would see to it that not a year should pass without plural marriages being performed and children born under the covenant."[42] Afterward President Taylor set apart five individuals—John W. Woolley, Lorin C. Woolley, George Q. Cannon, Samuel Bateman, and Charles H. Wilcken.[43] Except for George Q. Cannon who was already an apostle, he ordained them as apostles. He charged these five men to perpetuate plural marriage no matter what the Church might officially do.[44]

According to fundamentalist Mormons, President Taylor, George Q. Cannon, and the four newly ordained men, and later Joseph F. Smith, comprised a special quorum of seven apostles.[45] Taylor was said to have given these men both the authority and the appointment to perpetuate the quorum by calling others as needed "under the direction of the worthy senior . . . so that there should be no cessation in the work."[46]

By 1918, John and Lorin Woolley were the only men of this quorum still living. Shortly before John Woolley died in 1928, he and Lorin received a revelation directing them to call others.[47] After his father's death, Lorin C. Woolley acted in accordance with those instructions to ensure that the authority and calling they received from President John Taylor would be perpetuated. 

Between March 1929 and June 1933, Lorin C. Woolley ordained six men as apostles to fill vacancies in the quorum. These men, in order of their calling, were Joseph Leslie Broadbent, John Yeates Barlow, Joseph White Musser, Charles Frederick Zitting, LeGrand Woolley, and Louis Alma Kelsch.[48] Lorin Woolley appointed J. Leslie Broadbent as his Second Elder, "as the one holding the keys of revelation jointly with himself, in the same manner as they had first been held jointly by Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery, the first and second elders."[49] This quorum was sometimes called the Quorum or Council of Friends, or more commonly, "the Priesthood Council."[50]

After Lorin C. Woolley's death in 1934, the Priesthood Council continued to function, presided over by Joseph Leslie Broadbent. Then, after Broadbent's death the very next year, John Y. Barlow assumed leadership based on his seniority in the quorum.[51] During the 1940s, Barlow called seven men to this quorum: Leroy Sunderland Johnson, Jonathan Marion Hammon, Guy Hill Musser, Rulon Timpson Jeffs, Richard Seth Jessop, Carl Otto Nathaniel Holm, and Alma Adelbert Timpson.[52]

During the 1930s and early 1940s, Joseph Lyman Jessop worked closely with the brethren of the Priesthood Council and others who had coalesced around them in the establishment of Short Creek as a refuge in 1935 and in other endeavors.[53] Moreover, Jessop was prosecuted for unlawful cohabitation and served time with fourteen others, including Priesthood Council members, in the Utah State Penitentiary in 1945.[54] From these experiences, he knew these men well and those connected with them, and he was keenly aware of problems among the group who was by then being called fundamentalists or fundamentalist Mormons.[55] He recognized that some of these problems were a direct result of being separated from the Church. They lacked many of the checks and balances that existed within the Church structure. For example, they couldn't turn to bishops or stake presidents for advice about young men who might come courting their daughters. The weight of every aspect of a man's family rested on his and his wife's or wives' shoulders. Under these circumstances, correct application of the patriarchal order was their only legitimate option. Lyman, with his fellow fundamentalists, felt that their situation (of being separated from the Church) was part of the out-of-order condition they must bear until "the setting in order" of the Church and kingdom when they hoped for a miraculous reunification with the Church.[56] Some of Jessop's greatest concerns about problems among fundamentalists were the violations of agency that seemed to crop up repeatedly. He felt that such violations not only thwarted patriarchal law but were not consistent with the mission to keep plural marriage alive. His views may have derived from the 1886 revelation to John Taylor which specifically addressed the issue of personal agency, particularly this part: 

Have I not given my word in great plainness on this subject [the new and everlasting covenant of marriage, meaning plural marriage]? Yet have not great numbers of my people been negligent in the observance of my laws and the keeping of my commandment and yet have I borne with them these many years and this because of their weakness, because of the perilous times. 

And furthermore, it is more pleasing to me that men should use their free agency in regards to these matters. Nevertheless, I the Lord do not change and my word and my covenants and my law do not.[57]

Joseph Lyman Jessop believed that exercising free agency was essential in choosing one's marriage companion (or companions) as well as in making the choice to live plural marriage. In his view, there simply was no room for coercion by anyone, especially in the name of priesthood authority, when God himself didn't compel or force mortals ro keep his commandments. Thus, the secret marriage between Christine Jessop and Louis Barlow was prima facie evidence of the tendency of some to exercise unrighteous dominion and violate personal agency. This was no small matter to Jessop. How could fundamentalists, whose very purpose was to preserve the laws of God, feel justified in committing such violations? In some cases, he thought such actions leaned too close toward priestcraft. 

Standing Firm 

Lyman soon learned that his own brother, Richard Jessop, recently called by John Y. Barlow as a new member of the Priesthood Council, was the man who had performed the secret marriage ceremony.[58] Seeking advice, Lyman made an appointment to see Joseph W. Mussev, a Priesthood Council member who was next in seniority after John Y. Barlow. Lyman told Musser about the secret marriage, about his own action to restrain Louis from taking Christine to Short Creek, and that he had told Louis, "No mortal man has the right to take my daughter without my knowledge or consent.”[59]

The elderly Musser agreed and told Lyman his stand was right. He said, "1 am surprised at Rich (Jessop), who performed the ceremony . . . That ceremony don't ammount [sic] to a thing under those circumstances [of coercion and without parental consent]." He assured Lyman no action was needed "to an[n]ul it . . . even tho the one who did it was acting in good faith." Musser advised, "Just go on as tho nothing has happened, and let God bring about the adjustments and lead the girl to [marry] where she belongs." Further, Musser told Lyman, "The Priesthood [Council] is definitely out of order. This case is almost the last straw. What will they do next[?]"[60]

It was impossible, however, for Lyman and his family to go on with life as if the marriage hadn't happened because Louis persisted in his claim that Christine was his wife. Louis even came to Lyman's bedside early one morning where he "argued his view of his sole right to the girl because of her being his wife."[61] Lyman remained unconvinced. 

The following week Louis took matters into his own hands. While Lyman was away, Louis came to his home and took Christine to Widtsoe, about twelve miles away, to the ranch of a polygamist friend, Newell Steed.[62] Before they left, Winnie demanded to know why he felt he had the right to do this. Louis answered that Lyman had given him that right, a statement that persuaded Christine to go with him. Whether she went willingly or reluctantly is unknown. Winnie was greatly upset, especially at the thought that Lyman may have given Louis permission without discussing it with her. When Lyman returned home at the end of the week, he reassured Winnie that he had given no such permission.[63]

Early die next morning, to Lyman and Winnie's surprise, Louis brought Christine home. Louis's brother Joe and Lyman's brother Richard, who had performed the secret ceremony, came with them. Louis announced his intention to take Christine, as his wife, to his residence in Short Creek. Rather than argue with Louis, Lyman appealed to Christine directly and said he'd rather she didn't go. This appeal apparently gave Christine the courage she needed to say no to Louis, realizing she had a choice and that her father had not given his consent as Louis had claimed. Still Louis was determined to have his way, telling Lyman, "She's my wife and as much under the direction of her husband as any [married] daughter you've got." Lyman remained unmoved, telling Louis, "Well, this case is a little different. 1 haven't given my consent, and that makes it differ ent." For more than three hours, Louis pressed his case with encouragement from both Joe and Richard; but in the end, the three men left without Christine.[64]

Still, Louis didn't give up. "It seems," Lyrnan wrote several weeks later, "that some of our . . . friends are doing all in their power to get her [Christine] away from us and to Louis." He added, "1 feel our group of people need the 'setting in order' as bad as any people on earth. The out-of-order condition of some of those who call themselves The Priest hood' is strongly appearant [sic]. If there is any family or person in full or der before God, 1 do not know of it."[65]

A "Diabolical, High-Pressure Marriage" 

As the tense situation dragged on, Winnie Jessop fretted almost to the point of a nervous breakdown. Lyman counseled her to quit worrying that the matter was not being resolved as quickly as she thought it should. He then revealed the intensity of his feelings when he told her, "We can not force them (they who have part in promoting this diabolical, high-pressure marriage in secret conspiracy against us) to show repentance nor apology." Although he felt deeply betrayed, Lyman was not vindictive. He added to Winnie, "We must leave it now in the hands of God to direct our further course. We must watch and pray humbly for his guidance, and we must not let their acts get us down on any truth or gospel principle, lest we too go wrong because we have been wronged by others."[66]

Lyman was comforted when his own father, Joseph Smith Jessop, said he did not approve of what had been done. However, the elder Jessop defended his other son, Richard, who had performed the marriage, saying, he "would not harm anyone if he knew of it."[67] Lyman's father arranged a family meeting in late January to try to resolve the situation.[68] Those who attended were Joseph Smith Jessop, Lyman and Christine, Louis Barlow and his father, John Y. Barlow, and two of Lyman's brothers, Richard and Fred Jessop. Significantly, reflecting a respect for patriarchal order, Joseph Smith Jessop presided, rather than John Barlow, even though John was the senior member of the Priesthood Council. In this family setting Barlow was present first as Joseph Smith Jessop's son-in-law and only second as his superior in the priesthood.[69]

Lyman told the assemblage that he considered the marriage invalid because Louis had pressured Christine into the marriage and because it was done without Lyman's knowledge or consent. He was especially adamant because Christine "says she don't want Louis at all and felt all the time that He was nor the one for her, tho she yielded to his stubborn will and persuasions." Louis, John Y. Barlow, and Richard Jessop argued that the marriage was valid. John claimed that "Lorin Woolley told him that wherever and whenever an authorized man used that ceremony, it is binding, no matter what the conditions were."[70] Lyman thought he had known Woolley as well as or better than any of these other men. He didn't argue the point, but he didn't accept John's argument. He felt John had taken Woolley's statement completely out of context.[71]

John Barlow finally proposed releasing Christine from the marriage if the family members present really wanted it that way. Fred Jessop cautioned against it, saying, "The girl don't know what she wants." Richard Jessop agreed and stated that the marriage "will stand tho it takes a thousand years to see it." Of the six men present, four were in favor of seeing the marriage as valid, Joseph Smith Jessop remained neutral, but Lyman adamantly disagreed, even though he felt very much the odd man out. He told those present, "I don't want to be bitter in my feelings . .. but 1 don't want to be afraid of the opinions of men [either]; and .. . in my understanding, the Patriarchal Law has been ignored to a great extent in this and in other cases."[72]

The meeting lasted for nearly two and a half hours. At the end, everyone shook hands. However, as Lyman observed, "The case was essentially the same as it was before the meeting."[73] He was amazed that John Y. Barlow and his own brothers were so insistent on the marriage when neither he nor Christine wanted it. Had their prior convictions about the patriarchal law altogether disappeared? What had changed? 

The status of the marriage remained in limbo for another year because Lyman would not yield to the continuing pressure from Louis, his own brothers, or John Y. Barlow and would not persuade Christine to accept Louis. Rather, Lyman, his wives, and Christine frequently fasted and prayed over the matter.[74] It was the death of John Y. Barlow on December 29, 1949, that opened the door for a change. 

Resolution through Joseph W. Musser 

After Lyman attended John Y. Barlow's funeral, he alluded in his journal to his incomplete confidence in Barlow's leadership. "There has never been a doubt in my mind as to his being called by direct revelation from the Lord to keep alive the principle of Plural Marriage," he wrote. "As to some other things, 1 need more inspiration and revelation from. Heaven to me to judge fully the merits [there]of."[75]

A few weeks later while he was in Antimony, Lyman again talked to Christine, who had recently celebrated her seventeenth birthday. As she had done "several times" since the family meeting the year before, Chris tine "again expressed . . . that she feels she does not belong in Louis' family."[76] Lyman decided to visit Joseph W. Musser, who was now the senior and presiding member of the Priesthood Council. When he did, Musser requested that he bring Christine for a personal interview.[77] Christine told Musser that she had not changed her mind, still felt that she didn't belong with Louis, and would like to be freed from that association. Musser promised to do so but stated it would be best to have the Priesthood Council's support. 

On February 25, 1950, Lyman, Christine, and Louis Barlow met with the Priesthood Council in a meeting specially convened to hear their case, now pending resolution for nineteen months. Six members of the Priesthood Council were present: Joseph W. Musser, who was presiding, Guy H. Musser, A. A. Timpson, Leroy S. Johnson, Richard S. Jessop, and J. Marion Hammon. Louis, Christine, and Lyman were each questioned. Lyman repeated once again that he considered the marriage ceremony illegal as far as priesthood law was concerned because "I didn't know anything about the marriage until it was all done. .. . 1 am not trying to say that the girl has no blame in this, but the hurry and rush was urged by Louis; and tho [Christine] said 'I do' to the marriage covenant, there was undue pressure put upon her and it was not done of her own freewill and choice." Lyman said that he would yet give his consent and support to the marriage if Christine wanted Louis for her husband. "But," he stated with firmness, ". . . she does not."[78]

Lyman told of being present when Lorin C. Woolley gave instructions regarding "the [priesthood] order of getting consent and approval of the parents of girls [who were] entering this law [plural marriage] and that The Priesthood of God just can't do these things (i.e., marry girls without the consent of their parents, especially when those parents are trying to live the law of plural marriage themselves)." Woolley's statement contradicts John Y. Barlow's assertion at the family meeting the year before that the secret marriage was valid simply because it had been performed by someone with authority. Lyman said Woolley had emphasized his expression "by a pound of his fist upon the table."[79]

When Lyman finished speaking, Louis defended his actions by saying that his father, John Y. Barlow, had backed him up in the whole proceeding and that, if he had to do it over again, he would do everything the same way. J.Marion Hammon warned Louis, "You'd better not." Louis re treated, saying, "I know you brethren of the council are the highest council on earth and your decision will be the will of the Lord." Nevertheless, Louis made one last plea. He claimed that, since he hadn't had a chance to live with Christine, he thought he should be given that chance. Al though no one seemed to take Louis's request seriously, Lyman vocalized his objection, "If it means that [Christine] was to go to his home and live with him as a wife, I'm not in favor of that proposition."[80]

Joseph Musser said Christine "didn't have a chance" and likened this case to one "in which Pres. John Taylor took action because the girl herself hadn't had a chance to express her own desires and had been railroaded into marrying an apostle." A. A. Timpson told of a similar case in which John Y. Barlow's counsel was to release the girl who had been high-pressured into marriage. Leroy Johnson told of like counsel also given by Barlow for yet another situation of the same nature. All the council members seemed in agreement to annul the marriage.[81] However, a final decision was postponed for another thirty days, probably because Musser became ill and had to leave the meeting early. 

Lyman failed to record in his journal the exact date when Christine was formally released from her secret marriage to Louis Barlow; but it was certainly sometime in the next six months, before she married another man in October 1950.[82] This time the man she married was clearly of her own choosing. Lyman regarded this son-in-law as "one of the great characters" of their day.[83]

Fractures of the Fundamentalist Mormon Community

Less than a year after Christine married the man of her choice, the fundamentalist Mormon community fractured. Differences over doctrine and practices, including protocols for courtship and marriage, were among the core issues of division.[84] Several began teaching it was the right of priesthood leaders to make marriage assignments, sometimes involving girls as young as thirteen or fourteen. An attitude was growing among die fundamentalists that, when "the Priesthood speaks," the people must follow. A few, like Lyman Jessop and Joseph Musser, were opposed to this mentality, as they had demonstrated in the case of Christine's secret marriage. Unfortunately, they were increasingly in the minority.

Another main point of contention was over Musser's calling of Rulon C. Allred, a naturopathic physician who became involved with the fundamentalists in 1935 and was a son-in-law of John Y. Barlow.[85] In 1950, stating that he was acting according to a revelation, Musser privately ordained Allred an apostle and patriarch, called him as a member of the Priesthood Council, and appointed him as his Second Elder.[86] When Musser told the other council members about his action, they initially sustained; but later at the same meeting, some began having second thoughts, saying that Allred was only Musser's counselor, not a member of the council. They felt that Musser was trying to place Allred ahead of them in seniority. This was not Musser's intent, but he did not argue about these differences of opinion. However, after Musser announced Allred's calling in a meeting of fundamentalists on October 29, 1950, council members became more defiant. One charged Allred of having "impugned this Priesthood [Council] by going to Bro. Musser and asking for a blessing." Musser emphatically replied, "Any man that claims Allred asked for that blessing is a damned liar!"[87] Later in private, he stated, "The Council will not sustain me, and 1 refuse to be over-ridden in the matter. . . . I did what the Lord told me to do, and if these brethren will not uphold me, they will be broken to smithereens."[88]

The council members began citing other reasons for their resistance, even accusing Musser, who was somewhat incapacitated by a stroke in June 1949, of being a demented old man who didn't know what he was doing.[89] This friction between Musser and the other council members culminated on Sunday, May 6, 1951, when the Priesthood Council openly refused to sustain Musser in calling Allred to the council. Between May 1951 and the summer of 1952, the Priesthood Council, consisting of Charles F. Zittingand the seven men called by Barlow, entirely rejected Joseph W. Musser, whom they had considered their presiding leader in the priesthood for more than a year.[90] Most fundamentalists, whether in Salt Lake or in Short Creek, sided with them. A much smaller number stayed with Musser. Some fundamentalists remained aloof from either side and later became known as independents.[91]

In 1952, after it became clear that the members of the Council would not sustain him, Joseph W. Musser filled his vacated quorum with new members whose names he said were received by revelation.[92] Joseph Lyman Jessop was among those called. Musser's new Priesthood Council emphasized free choice in marriage matters, although they still held ID protocols in which parents and priesthood leaders were consulted before courtship and marriage. 

The other council members who, in Musser's view, had been "disappropriated" by the Lord, continued to function together.[93] Charles F. Zitting, who lived in the Salt Lake area, was recognized by some as presiding until he died in 1954.[94] Sixty-six-year-old Leroy S. Johnson, who lived in Short Creek, then assumed leadership. Those who sustained his leadership were known for many years as the "Johnson group." Although there was precedent for either LeGrand Woolley or Louis A. Kelsch to assume leadership at the time of Zitting's death because of their seniority in the original Priesthood Council, neither Woolley nor Kelsch allied himself with either of the contending groups. In his autobiography, Kelsch reports that, when Leroy Johnson asked him whether Kelsch was going to lead the people, the following exchange occurred: "Louis asked, 'Roy, have you had a revelation that you should lead the people?' Roy said, 'Well, no.' Louis said, 'I haven't either.' Roy said, 'What shall 1 do?' Louis said, 'Roy, do what you want to do.' Roy Johnson [then] went and told the people [in Short Creek] that Louis told him to take the leadership and that Louis had stepped down." [95]

During the period of the fundamentalist split in the early 1950s, some young men and women were advised that, "because the father is out of harmony with them . . . that he has lost his rights to the family, therefore the children of that father should listen to and obey they who call themselves the Priesthood." Council members urged daughters "to leave their father's [sic] homes and marry according to their direction."[96]

Two of these young women were in Joseph Lyman Jessop's immediate and extended family. In August 1952 Lyman's thirteen-year-old daughter was taken from Salt Lake to Short Creek after he refused to grant permission for her to marry. When the note she left was discovered, he immediately went after her and brought her back before a ceremony could be performed.[97] The following month, one of Lyman's nieces was spirited away to Short Creek to become a plural wife. After her panicked mother asked for Lyman's help, he wrote, "It seems certain that somebody's teaching and practicing some damnable doctrines of just taking away at will some of our daughters against the consent of parents until the attitude and practice is disgusting, to say the least, and we (some of us) feel it must not be tolerated when it involves members of our own families. How far will this priestcraft go?"[98]

Lyman was equally disgusted when he learned in early 1953 of "brethren [in Short Creek] assuming the right to go into another man's house and advise the wives there to leave their husband because the husband was not in harmony with the brethren who claimed leadership."[99] The ideas with which Louis Barlow had defended his 1948 secret marriage were now openly taught. Parents did not have to be consulted regarding the marriages of their children, parents or husbands could be arbitrarily considered unworthy by priesthood leaders, and loss of salvation was the price of failing to be in harmony with the leading brethren. Lyman knew for certain that he was considered unworthy by the Priesthood Council in Short Creek when relatives told him they had heard Leroy Johnson, Richard Jessop, and Carl Holm teach in meetings that "Lyman has lost his priesthood."[100]

Arranged marriages directed by Priesthood Council members or by Leroy Johnson himself became the norm in Short Creek during John son's leadership from the 1950s to the 1980s. It is not certain when the term "placement marriage" came into use—whether it was during John son's administration or later under Rulon T. Jeffs's direction. The people wholly embraced the practice, believing that this was a higher or more divine pattern than when individuals, even with parental and priesthood guidance, chose their own mates. 

The 1953 Short Creek Raid 

The same day that Lyman's niece was taken to Short Creek, he learned of "recent actions of the LDS Church leaders and attorneys . . . meeting with special Stare officials and FBI officials . . . and others and [of] agreements among them ... to stamp out forever the practice of plural marriage."[101] Less than a year later on July 22, 1953, Lyman learned of the impending Short Creek raid planned by Arizona Governor H. Howard Pyle for that very purpose.[102] It was scheduled to take place four days later, on July 26. Lyman and two other men made an emergency drive to Short Creek to warn the community. Leroy Johnson listened quietly and then commented, "We have heard like stories before and nothing has come of it. We're not going to run; it wouldn't do any good."[103]

Lyman urged, "Now, Bro. Roy, this is not just another fantastic story. They are coming, and they said they would bring 500 cars if necessary. Now of course we are not here to tell you what to do but only to warn you of this event. We have done our best to tell you because of our interest in your welfare." Lyman said Johnson thanked them but seemed to take the warning very lightly.[104]

The infamous 1953 Short Creek raid and its aftermath were among the most trying events ever experienced by the fundamentalist Mormons in that town.[105] Just days after the raid, Louis J. Barlow "gave a radio ad dress that included a denial of hostile assumptions about arranged marriages at Short Creek." He stated, "There have been no forced marriages. Everyone is free to leave or stay as he [or she] chooses."[106] Lyman was "sad indeed" when the newspaper headlines announced the raid two days later because he felt it was so unjust. Many of his immediate and extended family members were among those who were prosecuted and separated from their families. His own father, eighty-four-year-old Joseph Smith Jessop, was among those arrested.[107] He died a month later as a direct result of the physical and emotional distress he suffered from the raid.[108] The raid failed, however, to destroy the Short Creek community or their devotion to their religion, including plural marriage. Eventually, the fathers were released on probation, mothers and children were allowed to go home, and families were finally reunited.[109] While the community picked up the pieces and went on with life, the deep scars from the Raid and the community's mistrust of government remained vivid—not forgotten to this day. One apparent result of the Raid was the renaming of Short Creek, a community which had straddled the Arizona/Utah border. The part in Arizona became Colorado City and the part in Utah became Hildale. 

Discord in the Priesthood Council 

Priesthood Council member Carl O. N. Holm died April 27, 1972, leaving six surviving members of the council. By the early 1970s, there was evidence of discord among Johnson's Priesthood Council members over whether the Priesthood Council members all held authority and should govern collectively or whether only one man actually held the keys of priesthood.[110] In 1978 these disagreements led to a permanent division. Three council members, J. Marion Hammon, A. A. Timpson and Guy H. Musser, sustained Johnson as "President of the Priesthood [Council]" while Rulon T Jeffs and Richard S. Jessop sustained him more inclusively as the "keyholder and that one man." Richard S. Jessop died on October 23, 1978,and Guy H. Musser died on July 11, 1983, leaving only four men on the Priesthood Council, evenly split in opposing views. During the last years of his life, Johnson was most of the time, suffering from shingles. He rallied in 1984 and permanently dismissed council members Hammon and Timpson over the issue.[111] By this act, Johnson established his view that the Priesthood Council government was not needed and that only one man really held the authority to govern. Johnson's death on November 25, 1986, left Rulon T. Jeffs as Johnson's sole remaining council member and only successor, the "keyholder and that one man." 

The Short Creek community fractured as a result of Johnson's dismissal of Hammon and Timpson. They and those who sustained them established a new community, Centennial Park, three miles away.[112] Rulon Jeffs, with the help of others, broke up several families who had ties to Hammon and Timpson's community. As Priesthood Council members had done in the early 1950s when they separated from. Joseph Musser, Jeffs persuaded some wives and children to leave their husbands, fathers, or parents because they were considered unworthy, out of harmony, or apostate. He then reassigned them to "more worthy" men. 

In 1991, partially in response to a lawsuit by members of the Centennial Group over property rights, Rulon Jeffs legally organized his group as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.[113] He justified his right to rule alone without a quorum and expounded a doctrine which he named "One Man Rule." In his version of priesthood succession, he used this term to describe how authority had passed from Joseph Smith through others to himself.[114] Jeffs cited Doctrine & Covenants 132:7, which refers in part to the authority to seal marriages, as his premise for the "one man rule" doctrine:". . . and there is never but one on the earth at a time on whom this power [the sealing power] and the keys of this priesthood are conferred. . . . " Jeffs considered himself that one man and taught that "the Holy Spirit of God . . . is given down through that channel, His Mouthpiece here on the earth." He further taught, "You cannot oppose that channel or say that you can get around him and go directly to Jesus Christ. He is the channel, the fountainhead, the mouthpiece of God, because he is the keyholder of the holy Priesthood, which is God."[115]

Thus, Rulon Jeffs taught that to oppose the "one man," himself, was to oppose God. This doctrine made obedience to him, even before Jesus Christ, essential for salvation. If there was any doubt what Rulon Jeffs's message meant, it was explicitly clarified by his son Warren Jeffs. In a December 17, 1994, priesthood meeting in Salt Lake City, Warren expounded the "one man" doctrine. He closed the meeting, testifying about his father, Rulon: "I know that he is God over me, which means I owe him my all. I belong to him, for he is God with us, he being the key holder and God's representative to us. You will only see the face of your Heavenly Father through coming to a perfect obedience to this man, President Jeffs.”[116]

With placement marriage already well established and no council members to share decision making, his authority over the community and over marriages was absolute. Those who sustained Jeffs felt that his assignments to marry were done in the best interests of the couples. Louis Barlow's brother Sam, interviewed by Michael Quinn in January 1990, explained, "The Priesthood . . . arranges marriages to give greater assurance of their stability and permanence, and also to be sure that the couples are not related in such a closely knit community." He did not view arranged marriages as coerced: "The first consideration, as I've known it, is to make sure the individuals feel free and at liberty to make their own choices."[117] Although lip service was given to the idea of free agency to accept or reject an appointed mate, the pressure to conform, both from leaders and the community, was enormous. Individual preferences and parental influence, at best, were merely window dressing if they were genuinely considered at all. Individuals knew that serious long-term religious and community sanctions would result from rejecting a placement-marriage partner. 

Epilogue 

Louis Barlow continued to live in Colorado City where he raised a large family and was a teacher, beloved and respected by many. Louis and his brothers, along with several of Joseph Lyman Jessop's brothers, became some of the foremost leaders in their community.[118] They all whole heartedly sustained the arranged-marriage system. After the death of Leroy Johnson, they advocated complete obedience to Rulon Jeffs, considering him to be the prophet, the Keyholder, and the mouthpiece of God. (Other terms sometimes used to encourage complete obedience were "keeping sweet" or "staying in harmony.") 

I became acquainted with Louis J. Barlow in the 1970s through a mutual friend. Despite our religious differences and limited contact, 1 came to respect and admire him as a gentleman, an educator, and as a loving husband and father. In 2002, after three of his grown sons were killed in an airplane crash, I attended the funeral in Colorado City.[119] I was impressed by the large display in the meeting house hallway of Louis's family photos. They showed ample evidence of a proud, happy, and close-knit family. 

My last meeting with Louis, arranged by a mutual friend, was in the lobby of a Salt Lake City hotel. During our visit, we briefly discussed Utah's intention to pass a law making it a felony for men no marry under age girls in plural marriage.[120] When I voiced the idea that it wasn't necessary to marry underage girls to live plural marriage, Louis expressed adamant disagreement. It was apparent that he emphatically supported placement marriage, which he thought included the right of the "one man" to arrange marriages for underage young women. For him, the issues were inseparable. 

Ultimately, the requirement of absolute obedience to the "one man" created a cycle of reasoning from which there was to be no escape, even for many of the most faithful and loyal, including Louis Barlow Things began to unravel in the 1990s as the aging Rulon Jeffs physically declined and as his less charismatic son, Warren, increased in power and influence.[121]

By making himself indispensable to his father, Warren carefully and deliberately maneuvered himself into a position to take his father's place and assume control of the FLDS communities and its assets. It is possible that for over a decade he had secretly taped private conversations of members when they sought his father's counsel so that he knew intimate details of most members' lives.[122] By 1998, the Jeffs family had relocated from the Salt Lake Valley to Colorado City. That same year, Rulon Jeffs suffered a debilitating stroke, and Warren took charge of his father, cutting off access to all but a selected few.[123] Warren then persuaded all of the trustees of the community's communal United Effort Trust Plan (UEP) to redefine powers so that all trustees worked at the "whim and will" of the Trustee in Trust, Rulon Jeffs. Since Warren essentially controlled his father, it effectively empowered him with complete financial control.[124] Like Rulon, Warren was also preaching the end of the world and persuading scores of families to relocate to Colorado City or Hildale.[125]

Warren Jeffs began speaking publicly for his father. On July 16, 2000, Warren preached a lengthy sermon which he announced as "the message [of] our Prophet, against association with apostates."[126] The aged Rulon endorsed Warren's words: "That is exactly what 1 wanted presented here to this people. . . . So take this counsel that I have asked Brother Warren to deliver to this people today." 

Warren began by announcing: "Today our Prophet is drawing another line of guidance for this people, which he does not want us to cross anymore.... He is now calling upon his people to let the apostates alone, and let there be a separation of this Priesthood people from associations, business, and doings with apostates." He warned them to stop "harboring enemies" by patronizing the businesses of or having professional associations with "apostates," to quit jobs and break off partnerships. He clarified that he was not talking about "accidental meetings," such as in "businesses open to the public," where "our Prophet knows it is hard to tell the difference." 

He also distinguished between gentiles "who have never known this Priesthood or been a part of it" and an apostate "who has turned traitor." He denounced apostates as "the most dark person on earth. They are a liar from the beginning. They have made covenants to abide the laws of God and have turned traitor to the Priesthood and their own existence and they are led about by their master, Lucifer. . .. Apostates are literally tools of the devil. They can't help themselves, even if they were once nice, once energetic in this work, once industrious." In addition to the implication that "apostates" included any other fundamentalist groups and even some FLDS members, he specifically named Alma Timpson. (J. Marion Hammon had died in 1988.) 

Three times, he announced that the prophet or the Lord (using the terms almost interchangeably) wanted apostates to "leave the Priesthood land," forbade the congregation to "[bring] apostates on our land," and stated that "the Lord has asked [that] they be removed .. . upon our land in Short Creek." Such statements referred to the lawsuits over property that had been dragging on since 1987.[127]

Warren identified apostate "relatives" as the greatest challenge. He admonished: "We need to stop calling them up as some supposed 'friends,' because they are our relatives and telling] them what is happening among this people." He singled out women with a special rebuke for polluting their homes: "If a mother has apostate children, her emotions won't let her give them up and she invites them into the home, thus desecrating that dedicated home. We want to see them and socialize with them and every time we do, we weaken our faith and our ability to stand with the prophet." He advised: "Your only real family are the members of this Priesthood who are faithful to our Prophet." 

Warren sternly warned that if "you choose to go socialize and par take of their spirit, you will become like them,... you are choosing to get on the devil's ground.... Our prophet will lose confidence in any person who continues to harbor apostates . . . and he means business! . . . so the Lord will know His people and who is with our Prophet and who is not." 

Warren Jeffs identified "doubt against the prophet and those who support him" as signs of apostasy and quoted a 1959 sermon given by his father that "a complaining spirit, a murmuring spirit" will lead to "undue criticism . . . especially of those who preside over us."[128] Ironically, Warren Jeffs described his railing denunciations as "a call of peace" and quoted Leroy Johnson as saying "it is a sin to even criticize the apostates. Be kind to everyone, but leave apostates alone." Jeffs urged his listeners to focus their efforts to "build up the Priesthood businesses, build up the storehouse!;] above all in our physical doing, build up the United Effort Plan." 

This policy required "faithful" members to prove their orthodoxy by shunning relatives and friends outside the community, even at the cost of quitting jobs, and selling or abandoning businesses. Jeffs's new policy also impacted me and my family. Soon after his June 2000 sermon, some of my FLDS relatives contacted members of my non-FLDS extended family and informed them: "We love you, but we will not be contacting you again, and please don't contact us." In August 2002, when some relatives and I attended the funeral of Louis Barlow's three sons in Colorado City, our relatives there did not invite us to come to their homes as they had always done on previous occasions. 

As another consequence, many parents had to expel their "wayward" sons or be expelled themselves.[129] Expulsion was no small matter. It meant losing family, property, the right to live in the community, and hope of salvation. Then, two months later in August 2000, Warren Jeffs cracked down in another anti-apostate effort by influencing a mass withdrawal of FLDS children out of public education and into dozens of home schools. Enrollment dropped from more than 1,200 students in Colorado City's school district to about 250. This action caused the loss of jobs for many and the closure of some public schools in the Colorado City/Hildalearea.[130]

In short, on Warren Jeffs's watch, a growing intolerance developed for any kind of dissent or transgression, whether perceived or real. If Warren heard of the slightest expression of dissatisfaction or criticism of himself or his father or knew of any moral infraction or anything that could be construed as being "lack of harmony," a man, woman, or teenager could be ousted from the community. The wives, children, and properties of men who were effectively excommunicated were reassigned to other "more faithful" men. If a man's wife or wives did not want to be reassigned, they too were compelled to leave. Significantly, Warren "assisted" his father by overseeing arranged marriages.[131] Even before his father's death on August 8, 2002, Warren saw to it that members who questioned his own authority were excommunicated.[132]

Despite speculations about delay and disarray in succession, Warren Jeffs was announced as the new FLDS president only two months after Rulon Jeffs's death.[133] Two months after Rulon Jeffs's death, Warren Jeffs was announced as the new FLDS president. Under his presidency, the FLDS community entered an ongoing state of tension and metamorphosis. Within the year, Warren declared that God was done with die twin towns of Colorado City/Hildale and quietly began sending small numbers of the "faithful" to newly purchased properties, including a site in Texas where they began construction on a temple.[134] He himself went underground to avoid being served a subpoena. Meanwhile, he continued winnowing the flock. Family break-ups and the reassignments of wives and their children to new husbands became commonplace. Some women and their children were reassigned more than once. As families were rearranged, so were their living arrangements, so that almost no family was untouched in the shuffle. Despite statements to the media by "the faithful" or by FLDS attorneys that nothing extraordinary was happening, Warren Jeffs's self-styled autocracy cast a shadow of fear, uncertainty, and instability over the FLDS community. 

Soon, even Louis Barlow's lifelong devotion and support mattered little. On January 10, 2004, Louis was deemed unworthy, at age eighty, to stay in his own community. On that day, Warren Jeffs, who had gone on the underground some months earlier, made a surprise appearance in a Colorado City meeting where he excommunicated Louis and more than twenty other men, saying, "God has the right to judge his people." Reading from what he said was a revelation from God, Warren stripped them of their priesthood, instructed them to turn over their property, wives, and children to him, and ordered them to leave the community.[135] Following the pattern Louis established for himself as a young man, he did exactly as he was told, apparently believing that Warren Jeffs was now "the highest authority on earth" and that whatever he decided "was the will of the Lord."[136]

Warren Jeffs was methodically eliminating any who might possibly compete with him for power. Some predicted that Louis, his brothers, and other community leaders would not submit to Warren Jeffs's usurpation of authority and a battle for power would ensue.[137] But except for Winston Blackmore in Canada, no resistance developed.[138] An anonymous letter sent to households in Hildale and Colorado City tried to persuade Louis to take action. The anonymous author said he "was told in a dream by God that a false prophet is leading the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints" and that Louis Barlow (as the oldest son of John Y. Barlow) should be leading the church, rather than Jeffs.[139] Louis would have none of it.[140] He died May 24, 2004, in St. George, Utah, apparently still believing that he had done the right thing by yielding his priesthood, family, homes, and possessions.[141]

Conclusion 

The story of Louis J. Barlow's secret marriage in 1948 and the history of twentieth-century fundamentalism before and since that time provide evidence for several important concepts. Most of these are directly or indirectly related to Warren Jeffs's rise to power and the FLDS communities present state of change and agitation. They are also important for understanding FLDS placement marriage in this larger context. 

First, the story alludes to the prevailing protocol among fundamentalist Mormons in the 1940s for choosing marriage companions. This protocol involved free choice, mutual attraction, and principles of faith along with direct or indirect influence from parents and priesthood leaders. In this process, the father's or parents' permission or blessing was considered essential and honorable. 

Second, the story demonstrates that this protocol was being challenged by at least a few fundamentalists who asserted that primary decision-making about marriages belonged to leaders rather than individuals and families. This shift was particularly evidenced by Louis Barlow's claim of a divine command, probably from his father John Y. Barlow, to marry Christine secretly and his warning that the salvation of Lyman and Chris tine Jessop was at stake if they did not cooperate. Jessop's journals indicated that this case, though unusual, was one of several during that period. Further support comes from the agreement of John Y. Barlow and Lyman's brothers, Richard and Fred, that the marriage was valid, even though it was done in secrecy without parental consent. 

Third, this story suggests that the rationale for placement marriage originated with John Y. Barlow and was perpetuated and expanded by the seven men he called to the Priesthood Council. 

Fourth, such changes in protocol laid the foundation for placement marriage for first-time marriages and for reassigning wives and children of husbands or fathers who were considered unworthy, out of harmony, or apostate.

Fifth, placement marriage was linked to the personal salvation of the couple involved and their parents. Individual agency to choose differently was essentially muted, and resistance was equivalent to censure at least and to damnation at worst. Warren Jeffs may have recently eliminated the volunteer aspect of placement marriage by arranging marriages for young women who had not first indicated their readiness for placement. Such a scenario would mean that placement marriage has lost even the surface appearance of permitting free agency and that the only real choice permitted is one between salvation (i.e., willingly submitting herself to the prophet's instructions) or damnation. 

Sixth, many fundamentalists rejected and never participated in arranged marriages. For fundamentalist Mormons like Joseph W. Musser and Joseph Lyman Jessop, appointed or arranged marriages violated the concept of free agency and thus undermined a prime directive of the 1886 revelation to President John Taylor, the basis of twentieth-century Mormon fundamentalism by rejecting Warren Jeffs. 

Seventh, the community that became known as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is, to my knowledge, the only large group of fundamentalist Mormons who believes in and practices placement marriages, although it is possible that a few practice some form of arranged marriage. An example is Winston Blackmore's group, which separated from the FLDS. 

Eighth, the failure of Leroy S.Johnson and Rulon T.Jeffs to perpetuate a quorum leadership or a priesthood council government opened the door for Rulon Jeffs's "one man rule" doctrine. 

Ninth, the long-time acceptance of priesthood authority over individuals and families in exchange for the promise of salvation made it easy for Rulon Jeffs's followers to fully embrace his "one man rule" doctrine. Motivated by a desire for salvation, members participate in placement marriage as the greatest possible outward manifestation of faith, perhaps comparable to serving missions as an outward manifestation of faith for today's LDS members. 

Last, Warren Jeffs's expulsion of scores of dedicated, loyal, life-long FLDS members (especially many like Louis J. Barlow who were among the stalwarts of the community), and the radical rearrangement of so many families and their living arrangements in such a short period of time have created an atmosphere of tension, fear, and serious internal instability that appears to be intensifying. The community seems to be on the brink of implosion from these radical changes as well as from the loss of legal control over their communal and community assets and the threatened loss of their leader, Warren Jeffs, through prosecution and possible long-term imprisonment.[142] Despite all this, it is likely that many, like Louis Barlow, will cling tenaciously to their religion, as they have known it, no matter what happens. 

In conclusion, this story shows that marriage placement in the FLDS community as it exists today did not exist among fundamentalist Mormons before the 1940s. Rather, over the past fifty years in that community, it evolved from the belief that obedience to the prophet is the only sure way to please God and ensure salvation. As such, placement marriage is the most visible outward symbol of members' devotion. Without this foundation, it is unlikely Warren Jeffs could wield, through fear alone, so much power with so many. Thus, participation in placement marriage, whether for newlyweds or for reassigned families, is at the very heart of the FLDS members' seemingly incomprehensible loyalty to Warren Jeffs. 

In the past, threats from the outside have only strengthened the resolve of the FLDS members to maintain their beliefs and practices. Jeffs's penchant to control through fear and division and the resulting familial and communal turmoil may be evidence of a growing crisis of faith from within. One thing is certain: the FLDS community is in the midst of a watershed period that is changing its course permanently. Because of the people's deeply held beliefs about obedience and their keen desire for salvation, it is still unpredictable how the community will emerge. It may shatter into pieces, with its members, possessions, and faith going in many different directions.[143] Hit survives, with or without Warren Jeffs, it is likely to continue on a course that is radically different from both its nineteenth-century Mormon roots and from its twentieth-century Mormon fundamentalist foundation. 

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[1] Beginning in the early 1990s with the gradual decline and eventual death (2002) of FLDS Church president and prophet Rulon Jeffs, his son Warren Jeffs rose to power. Simultaneously, the FLDS, along with other Mormon polygamous fundamentalist communities have, become the focus of government investigations for allegations of fraud and various kinds of abuse. For an overview of fundamentalist history, see Ken Driggs, "A Guide to Old Fashioned (Fundamentalist) Mormonism," paper presented at the Western History Association, October 14, 2005, Scottsdale, Arizona, photocopy in my possession. For current and recent online articles on Warren Jeffs and the FLDS community published in the Salt Lake Tribune and the Deseret News respectively, see http://www.sltrib.com/polygamy and "Coverage of Warren Jeffs, Fundamentalist LDS," http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249, 635211550,00.html; see also Wikipedia, "Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental ist_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter_Day_Saints

[2] Nate Carlisle, "Polygamist Makes FBI Top-10 List," Salt Lake Tribune, May 7, 2006, A-l; Ben Winslow, "Jeffs on FBI's Top Ten Most Wanted," Deseret Morning News, May 6, 2006, http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/ 0,1249,635205554,00.html (accessed May 7, 2006). On July 13, 2005, the Utah and Arizona attorney generals announced a $10,000 reward for information leading to Warren Jeffs's arrest. Utah Attorney General, Press Release, July 13, 2005. CNN, "Fugitive Polygamist Sect Leader Caught near Las Vegas," posted 1:20 p.m., EDT, August 30, 2006, http:// wwwlcnn.com/ 2OO6/LAW/O8/29jeffs.arrest (accessed September 21, 2006); Associated Press, "Fugitive Polygamist Sect Leader Arrested in Las Vegas," FoxNews, August 29, 2006, transcript http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,210959, OO.html (accessed September 21, 2006). 

[3] Jeffs and others in his community are facing a number of both civil and criminal lawsuits. Jeffs is named in three civil lawsuits, three lawsuits that involved FLDS property in Utah and Arizona, and in criminal lawsuits in two states for arranging plural marriages of underage girls to older men. Civil charges include a lawsuit that Warren's nephew Brent Jeffs filed in July 2004 alleging that Warren sodomized him in the late 1980s. In August 2004, a half-dozen "lost boys" sued the FLDS Church and its leaders, including Warren Jeffs, for alleged economic and psychological injury resulting from being driven out of the community. In December 2005, "M. J." sued Warren, saying he had forced her into a spiritual marriage with a man many years her senior. Brooke Adams, "Warren Jeffs: A Wanted Man," Salt Lake Tribune, May 10, 2006, A-l, A4. 

Bruce Wisan, court-appointed accountant in charge of the FLDS trust fund, filed criminal charges against Jeffs on May 27, 2006, Wisan claimed that Jeffs and four others had been "fleecing trust assets." Associated Press, "Lawsuit Filed against Warren Jeffs," KUTV (Salt Lake City), May 27, 2006, transcript, http://kutv.com/topstories/local_story_147211137.html (accessed September 25, 2006). 

On April 5, 2006, Utah issued an arrest warrant for Jeffs on felony charges for rape as an accomplice (arranging and performing plural marriages) in Washington County, Utah, "State of Utah v. Warren Steed Jeffs," photocopy of legal complaint, http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/polygamy/utjeffs40506crinf.html (accessed September 25, 2006). Jeffs was indicted in June 2005 on charges of acting as an accomplice in sexual misconduct (arranging and performing plural marriages) in Colorado. Each Utah count carries a penalty of five years to life in prison. "Polygamist Leader Charged with Child Sex Abuse," ABC 4 News, June 12, 2005, http://www.childbrides.org/control_ABC4_Warren_charged _with _child_sex_abuse.html (accessed September 20, 2006); see also Associated Press, "Key Witness Told Judge Why She Won't Testify," Salt Lake Tribune, Septem ber 25, 2006, B-6. 

Pamela Manson, 'Eight Hit with Teen Bride Sex Charges," Safe Lake Tribune, July 12, 2005, C-5. The first trial resulted in a guilty conviction of Kelly Fischer. Brooke Adams, "First of Eight Polygamist Trials Begins against Arizona Men," Sod Lake Tribune, July 5, 2006, A-l, A-10; Brooke Adams, "Verdict Is Called a Message," Salt Lake Tribune, July 8, 2006, A-l, A-8. A second trial against Donald Barlow resulted in an acquittal. Associated Press, "FLDS Member Found Not Guilty of Sexual Conduct with a Minor," September 8, 2006, B-2. As of this writing, the remaining cases have not yet been tried. 

[4] In striking contrast to his predecessors, Warren Jeffs has excommunicated hundreds (mostly men and young boys), rearranged scores of families and their living arrangements, and called "the faithful" among his flock to build new communities in Colorado, Nevada, South Dakota, and Quintana Roo, Mexico. The most visible new community is near Eldorado, Texas, where the FLDS colony has constructed a temple. Brooke Adams, "FLDS Completes Temple at Its Texas Site," Salt Lake Tribune, February 4, 2006, B-2; Ben Winslow, "FLDS Temple Appears Complete," Deseret Morning News, January 31, 2006; http//deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,635180342,00. html (accessed September 21, 2006). Jeffs refused to respond to lawsuits against him and went into hiding. These actions eventually threatened the loss of the FLDS's communal land and properties, held by the United Effort Plan Trust and worth about $ 110 million, and led to his loss of legal control over the trust which is now in the hands of a court-appointed receiver. John Hollenhorst, "Polygamy Leader Apparendy Sitting Out of Court Fight," KSL-News Channel 5, aired February 28, 2005, transcript, http://www. rickross.com/reference/polygamy/polygamy311.html (accessed September 20, 2006); "Utah A.G. Asks to Freeze FLDS Assets," KSL-TV Channel 5, May 27, 2005, transcript, http://www.childbrides.org/control.html (accessed September 20, 2006); "Court Seizes $ 100 Mil in Polygamist Sect's Funds," Arizona Republic, May 28, 2005, http://www.aicentral.com/ arizonarepublic/news/articles/05 28coloradotheft28.html (accessed September 20, 2006); Austin Smith, "Meet the New Neighbors," Attain Chronicle, July 29, 2005, http;//www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid= oid%3A281915 (accessed September 20, 2006); Brooke Adams and Pamela Manson, "The Modern Raid on Polygamy," Salt Lake Tribune, August 21, 2005, A-6; Linda Thomsen, "Ruling Guides Operation of FLDS Trust; Religious Influence over UEP Assets Is Eliminated," Deseret Morning News, December 15, 2005, http://www.nndarticles.com/p/articles/mi__qn4188/is_ 2OO51215/ai_nl5947551 (accessed September 20, 2006). 

[5] "Placement marriage" is the term coined by those who became known as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS) for their system of arranged or appointed marriages. 

[6] The existence of priesthood leadership quorums among some fundamentalist Mormon groups may serve as check and balance systems to the authority of any one man. See also Driggs, "A Guide to Old Fashioned (Fundamentalist) Mormonism." 

[7] D. Michael Quinn, "Plural Marriage and Mormon Fundamentalism," Dialogue; A Journal of Mormon Thought 31, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 34.

[8] Ibid. Quinn's statement reflected the pre-1986 era when a Priest hood Council existed in the group. 

[9] James, quoted in ibid., 34. James also explained that some youths "try to get ‘sneaky dates.'... .They'd sneak and go places and talk," If caught, the offenders were "led to the Priesthood. They were told they were not allowed to see each other again." 

[10] James, qtd. in ibid., 35. 

[11] Martha Sonntag Bradley, "The Women of Fundamentalism: Short Creek, 1953," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 23 (Summer 1990): 15.

[12] James, qtd. in Quinn, "Plural Marriage and Mormon Fundamentalism," 34. 

[13] Bradley, "The Women of Fundamentalism," 15. 

[14] A. S., interviewed by Marianne Watson, May 20, 2006. She was born and raised in Colorado City/Hildale and grew to adulthood there in the early 1990s. Although she "turned herself in" at age eighteen during the time when Rulon Jeffs was the prophet, she was not called in for placement and did not marry until age twenty-two, after she had graduated from college. She was a first wife. She believed this long delay was because her family was in less favor with the prophet at the time, indicating that family and community politics played a role in the involvement of Rulon Jeffs in marriage decisions. She reported that the usual age for marriage was eighteen to twenty-five and did not know of any girls during her adolescence who married as young as age fifteen, although she was aware of girls chat age marrying in Canada. She also indicated that family and community politics played a role in how responsive the prophet was to certain families. She also said she wished, because she had reproductive problems that increased with age, that she could have married at age fifteen so that she could have had more children. However, "the Prophet does not take into consideration those kinds of things, "she told me. This repore was consistent with chat of a woman who lived in Colorado Cicy in the 1970s who said, "It was uncommon to be married at fourteen" in that community. Caroline Dewegeli Daley, interviewed by Quinn, "Plural Marriage and Mormon Fundamentalism," 36. The 1953 Short Creek raid and investigation showed that "the average age at first marriage for fundamentalist women in Short Creek was sixteen, though fourteen and fifteen were not uncommon." Bradley, "The Women of Fundamentalism," 14.

[15] Ibid. 

[16] Caroline Dewegeli Daley, paraphrased in Quinn, "Plural Marriage and Mormon Fundamentalism," 36, reported that, when she was young in Colorado City, "only a couple of her friends expressed the desire to marry prior to the Priesthood's choice, in which case the marriage occurred after much contrary counseling and a long waiting period," 

[17] Daley, quoted in ibid., 36. 

[18] Sam S. Barlow, interviewed by Michael Quinn, January 30, 1990, qtd. in ibid., 35, 

[19] Some of my FLDS relatives claimed that a precedent for arranged marriages had been set by early LDS prophets, in particular Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. When I asked for references, they did not provide specific cases or records. 

[20] Quinn, "Plural Marriage and Mormon Fundamentalism," 35; see also A. S., interviewed by Watson. A. S. felt the man to whom she was as signed was not right for her, and she wished there had been greater leeway both socially and religiously to say, "Hey, wait a minute here. Let me think about this." She described the first two years of her marriage as "hell." Eventually, she and her husband put more effort into making their marriage work. By the time she began to have children, she felt she was really in love with her husband. 

[21] The condition of being apostate was construed from a number of actions such as abuse, infidelity or adultery, cheating or stealing, overt rebellion against priesthood leadership, leaving the religion, or joining another fundamentalist group. During the last part of Rulon Jeffs's administration and during the entirety of Warren Jeffs's, these definitions were broadened to include any disloyalty, perceived or real, determined entirely by Jeffs, either with or without (most often without) a hearing or an interview with the accused. Women, whether first or plural wives, married to men who are judged apostate are given priesthood "releases," a form of divorce. A legally married first wife usually obtains a legal divorce as well, although this is not a prerequisite, before she is reassigned to another husband. 

[22] When a wife is reassigned (presumably after a "priesthood release"), she is sealed for time and eternity to the new husband. Any children she had in the past, including adult children, are regarded as sealed to the new husband. The many reassignments in the last few years have created a community where nearly everyone's last name is changing. One newspaper article captured the essence of this resulting "wild surname web." Brooke Adams, "Ousted FLDS Dads Stuck with Aching Stigma," Salt Lake Tribune, June 15, 2006, A-l.A-10, comments that "William Barlow became William Rickert after his father, Louis Barlow [the subject of my article], was kicked out."

[23] The ceremonies for most marriages of widows were usually for time only, rather than for time and eternity. This form may have changed under Warren Jeffs's leadership. 

[24] Two of the criminal lawsuits and one civil lawsuit against Warren Jeffs involve two women who claim that Jeffs arranged marriages when they were minors, without their expectation and over their personal objections. These marriages were alleged to have occurred in 2001 and in 2002, both before Rulon Jeffs died. "Testimony of Candi Shapley," grand jury transcript, September 1, 2006, http://www.courttv.com/news/hildale/grandjury_testi mony.html (accessed September 30, 2006); Ben Winslow, "Victim in Jeffs Case Is Also Suing him," Deseret Morning News, October 10, 2006, http://www.deseretnews.eom/dn/view/0,1249,650197718,00,html (accessed October 10, 2006); Jennifer Dobner, Associated Press, "Jeffs' Accuser in Criminal Case Also Has Civil Case Pending," Las Vegas Sun, October 10, 2006, http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/nevada/2006/oct/10/ 101010O55.html (accessed Ocober 10, 2006); Brooke Adams, "Rape Case Witness Suing Jeffs," Sail Lake Tribune, October 10, 2006; http://www.sltr. 

[25] Joseph Lyman Jessop, Diary, 3 vols. (Midvale, Utah: Privately published, ca. 1993-98); hereafter cited by volume and date. 

[26] In December 1945, Joseph Lyman Jessop was released on parole from the Utah State Penitentiary after serving a sentence for unlawful cohabitation (polygamy). In March 1946 Newell Steed and Lyman's brother, Richard, proposed constructing a grain elevator in Black Canyon, about ten miles south of Antimony, Utah, and twelve miles north of Widtsoe, Utah. They took their proposal to the Priesthood Council to be considered as a priesthood project. On March 6, Guy H. Musser, a council member, offered Lyman Jessop the opportunity to help build the mill and move part of his family there if the parole board would permit it. On April 26, 1946, Lyman's parole officer approved his move to Antimony with his legal wife, Winnie, and her children. In July 1946, he moved his second wife, Maleta, to Antimony as well but left his third wife, Beth, in Salt Lake City. Two years earlier he had been forced to separate his families, who previously shared the same home in the Salt Lake Valley, to comply with the terms of his parole. Conditions of parole included ceasing to live with any but his legal wife and providing adequately for all his children and wives. Until he separated his families, he was not allowed to stay overnight in his home nor could he visit his family except by the permission of and arrangement with his parole officer. He was told he could not father any more children with his plural wives and that they were free to marry someone else in monogamy. So although the separation of his families was difficult, at least in this remote canyon, he was able to live with his families. Jessop, Diary, 3:October 3 and November 16, 1945; March 6, 23, 29, April 12, 16-18, 22, and July 27, 1946. 

[27] Antimony is about 150 miles from Short Creek, which in 1948 was a three- to four-hour drive, depending on the condition of the roads and the vehicle. 

[28] Louis Jessop Barlow's first two wives were Lucy Johnson and Isabell Johnson. 

[29] Louis Jessop Barlow, son of John Yeates Barlow and Martha ("Mattie") Jessop Barlow Joseph Lyman Jessop's sister), was born August 9, 1924- Lyman Jessop's diary does not record his views on marriages between first cousins or close relatives. None of his thirty-five children married first cousins; three married second cousins. 

[30] Jessop's journal gives no indication whether this marriage was consummated after the ceremony was performed but before Christine returned home. It is my opinion that it was probably not consummated since it would have been difficult for Christine, who had traveled to Short Creek with family members, to keep it secret, if that were the case. 

[31] Jessop, Diary, 3;September 5, 1948. 

[32] Ibid. 

[33] Joseph Lyman Jessop and John Y. Barlow had been brothers-in-law since 1924 and had known each other for more than twenty-five years. Lyman loved John and respected him in many ways. However, Lyman's journal contains several references to issues and events involving Barlow in which Lyman felt that John's actions leaned heavily toward autocracy. In many instances, Lyman clearly disagreed with Barlow's reasoning and his decisions. For example, in 1935 Lyman disagreed with John's proposals for a united order, which he felt infringed far too much on individual agency. Marianne T. Watson, "Short Creek: 'A Refuge for the Saints,"1 Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 36, no. 1 (Spring 2OO3); 71-87. 

[34] Jessop, Diary, 3:March 21, 1948. Jessop earlier noted in his diary the interest of at least one other man in Christine prior to this occasion. The term "permission to see" a girl basically meant a boy or a man had asked the father for his blessing to allow him to get to know die girl by association in dances or in other group social settings. In some cases, it meant permission to court, including one-on-one dates. It did not mean permission to marry her. It was expected that a man would ask the father for permission or his blessing before asking his daughter to marry. 

[35] Ibid., 3:September 20-25, 1948. 

[36] Jessop believed that "the patriarchal law" was another term for the Abrahamic Order which was "the only family order in the Heavens." He believed the patriarchal or Abrahamic law had a two-fold nature. First it meant the right and obligation of a father to provide for, bless, and direct both the temporal and spiritual affairs of his family. Inherent within it was an obligation to honor parents and priesthood leaders including his wives' fathers or the fathers of any women he might want to marry. It also meant that no man had a right to marry another man's daughter without his permission or blessing (especially if that man was striving to live the patriarchal law himself). 

Second, the Abrahamic law meant living the law of plural marriage in a way that fostered the co-existence of patriarchy and matriarchy. In other words, there could be no true patriarchy without matriarchy. The Abrahamic law of plural marriage was impossible without the law of Sarah, in which a wife or wives freely chose to participate in plural marriage. This meant wives were to be or become co-equal with their husband in priesthood and ordinance although he presided for the sake of order. Jessop believed that a particular object of living plural marriage for both men and women was to obtain a fulness of priesthood, through the ordinance of the second anointing as promised in the temple endowment. One event that demonstrated this belief as it related to a woman's role in the fulness of priesthood was when he gave a blessing to Joseph W. Musser, assisted by Musser's wife, Lucy, who laid on hands with him. This was outward evidence that all three involved had received the "fulness of priesthood" ordinances. Jessop, Diary, 2: December 21, 1939; February 7-8, 1940; 3:January 12, February 2, 3, 12, 14, and December 3, 1952; February 10, 1953; January 1, 1954- Joseph Musser received his second, or higher, anointing in the Salt Lake Temple in November 1899. Joseph W. Musser, Journal of Joseph White Musser ([Salt Lake City?]; Privately published, [1945?], photocopy in my possession. 

[37] Joseph Lyman Jessop was born February 10, 1892, in Millville, Utah. He served a Southern States mission from 1910 to 1913. Jessop, Diary, l:November 12, 1910 to January 17, 1913. Jessop married his first wife, Winnie Porter, on July 25, 1917, in the Logan Temple. Jessop, Diary, 1 July 25,1917. 

[38] Joseph Lyman Jessop married his second wife, Maleta Porter, on January 20, 1924, and was excommunicated from the LDS Church (Salt Lake East Mill Creek Ward) on September 16, 1924. Jessop, Diary, l: November30, 1924; 3:January 20, 1950 (a retrospective record). He married his third wife, Beth Allred, on January 6, 1934; Jessop, Diary, 3;January 6, 1934- See Violet Jessop Jenson, Beth: A Life History of Beth Allred Jessop (Eagle Mountain, Utah: Gems Books, 2004), 128. Much later, about 1959 or 1960, he married Bern's divorced sister, Olive Allred Kunz Neilson, as a fourth wife. Jenson, Beth, 329-30. Olive Allred Kunz Neilson, "Biography of Olive Allred Kunz Neilson," n.d., typescript autobiography, photocopy in my possession, contains no mention of this marriage. Joseph Lyman Jessop died February 11, 1963, in Murray, Utah. 

[39] "A Revelation of President John Taylor, Given at the Home of John W. Woolley, Centerville, Utah, September 26-27, 1886," Truth 7, no. 8 (February 1942): 206; Fred Collier, Unpublished Revelations of the Prophets and Presidents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Colliers Publishing, 1981), 145-46. A copy can also be found in John Taylor Papers, Box 1, bk. 2, 548-49, Special Collections, Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City. See Martha Sonntag Bradley, Kidnapped from That Land: The Government Raids on the Short Creek Polygamists (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1993), 17-19; [Auditor wishes to remain anonymous pending publication], "1886 on Trial; A Compilation of Accounts and Preliminary Response to Criticisms of Fundamentalist Claims Surrounding the 1886 Revelation," unpublished manuscript, 2003, photocopy in my possession. This study systematically organizes and analyzes the various first-hand, hear say, and circumstantial accounts of the 1886 events and evaluates published critiques. Copies of this manuscript may be requested at [email protected]. Joseph W. Musser stated that George Q. Cannon, a counselor in the First Presidency, told him: "President John Taylor had, during his lifetime, under the direction of the Lord, perfected arrangements for the perpetuation of plural marriage, even after the Church should reject its practice." Joseph Musser, "Abraham H. Cannon" (editorial), Truth 7, no. 12 (May 1942); 277.

[40] Jessop, Diary, l:March 28, April 8, and July 1, 1923. 

[41] Lorin C. Woolley, "Statement, September 22, 1929," Truth 20, no. 1 June 1954): 28-33; see also Joseph W. Musser, ed., The New and Everlasting Covenant of Marriage: An Interpretation of Celestial Marriage, Plural Marriage (Salt Lake City: Truth Publishing, 1934), 47. According to Musser, "Daniel R. Bateman," Truth 8, no. 1 (June 1942): 14, Daniel R. Bateman "frequently... exhibited his Journal bearing a copy of the 1886 Revelation which he claimed to have copied from the original in Prest. Taylor's own handwriting." An other source, which I have not verified but which is cited in "1886 on Trial" is a quotation from Dr. Reed C. Durham, past president of the Mormon History Association and L.D.S. Coordinator of Seminaries and Institutes in Salt Lake City, recorded in the minutes of the high priests' quorum meeting, Salt Lake Foothill Stake, February 24, 1974- It states: "There was a revelation that John Taylor received and we have it in his handwriting. We've analyzed the handwriting. It is John Taylor's handwriting and the revelation is reproduced by the fundamentalists. That's supposed to prove the whole story because there was indeed a revelation. The revelation is dated September 27; that fits the account of a meeting, 1886." 

[42] Ibid., March28, 1923. 

[43] Charles Henry Wilcken (born Carl Heinrich Wilcken on October 5, 1830, in Germany) was recently identified as a polygamous ancestor of current Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. Thomas Burr, "Could Ancestors Haunt Romney?" Salt Lake Tribune, August 21, 2006, http://www. sltrib.com/ci_4212788 (accessed September 20, 2006). 

[44] Lorin C. Woolley said that President Taylor prophesied: "The day will come when a document similar to that (Manifesto) dien under consideration would be adopted by the Church." Woolley, "Statement, September 22, 1929," 28. 

[45] Fundamentalists frequently cite Doctrine and Covenants 84, which they claim refers to a priesthood council or hierarchy of seven men. designated as "high priest apostles." In April 1873, Brigham Young announced a quorum of seven in that month's LDS general conference: "The Mormon people will most likely be astonished upon reflection to find that Brigham Young has created a new quorum of priesthood, and that, too, one higher than the Twelve Apostles. The Mormon President stated at Conference that the order of the priesthood gave him the right of sewn counselors, and die seven were duly given him by the 'congregation of Israel,' including the vote of the 'apostles themselves.'" "A New Quorum of Priesthood," Salt Lake Daily Trilwne, April 10, 1873, 2, http://udn.lib.utah.edu/cgi-bin/docviewer.exe? CISO ROOT=/sltl&CISOSHOW=16742&CISOSHOW2=16770 (accessed September 25, 2006). Citing scriptures and various LDS sources, Joseph W. Musser explained his views that a quorum of seven had existed anciently as well as in the early days of the LDS Church. Musser, Supplement to the New and Everlasting Covenant (Salt Lake City: Privately published, 1934), 102-3, 105-6, 110-12, 123- These views are disputed by Brian C. Hales, "Is FUNDAMENTALISM Fundamental?" (1993) http://www.mormonfundamentalism.com/FilesForDownload/IsFundamentalismFundamental.txt (accessed September 20, 2006), See also Brian C. Hales and J. Max Anderson, The Doctrines of Modern Polygamy: An LDS Perspective (Salt Lake City: Northwest Publishing, 1978) chap. 11; Hales and Anderson, Priesthood of Modern Polygamy; An LDS Perspective (Salt Lake City: Northwest Publishing, 1992) chaps. 6,10. 

[46] John Taylor quoted in Woolley, "Statement, September 22, 1929," 28. Woolley's statement reads in part: "We were given authority to ordain others if necessary to carry this work on, they in turn to be given authority to ordain others when necessary, under the direction of the worthy senior (by ordination), so that there should be no cessation in the work John Taylor set the five mentioned apart and gave them authority to perform marriage ceremonies, and also to set others apart to do the same thing as long as they remained on the earth; and while doing so, the Prophet Joseph Smith stood by directing the proceedings. Two of us had not met the Prophet Joseph Smith in his mortal lifetime, and we, Charles H. Wilkins and myself were introduced to him and shook hands with him." See also Marianne T Watson, "John W. and Lorin C. Woolley: Archangels between Nineteenth-Century Mormon Polygamy and Twentieth-Century Mormon Fundamentalism," Pa per presented at the Mormon History Association annual meeting, May 22, 2004, Provo, Utah. 

[47] Jessop, Diary, 2:January 13, 1934- "Journal of Joseph White Musser," March 31, 1930, typescript, 55, photocopy in my possession.

[48] Lorin C. Woolley ordained bod Joseph Leslie Broadbent (1891-1934) and John Y, Barlow (1874-1949) on March 6, 1929, and Joseph W, Musser (1872-1954) on May 14, 1929, Under Woolley's direction, Broadbent ordained both Charles F. Zitting (1894-1954) and LeGrand Woolley (1887-1965) on July 22, 1932. and Louis Alma Kelsch on June 26, 1933. 

[49] Louis A. Kelsch, "Brief History of Meetings Pertaining to the School of the Prophets, and to the Special Calling of the Patriarchal Order of the Priesthood," typescript, 1934, photocopy in my possession; Laura Tree Zitting, The Life of Charles F. Zitting: One of God's Noble Men ([Salt Lake City?]: Privately published, 1988), 54. 

[50] The term "Friends" was apparently derived from Doctrine and Covenants S4;63, 77: "You are mine apostles, even God's high priests; ye are they whom my Father hath given me; ye are my friends. . . . And again I say unto you, my friends, for from henceforth, I shall call you friends, it is expedient that 1 give unto you this commandment, that ye become even as my friends in days when I was with diem, traveling to preach the gospel in my power" (D&C 84:63, 77).

[51] John Y. Barlow clearly presided by order of seniority. However, Rula Broadbent and Joseph W. Musser testified to various individuals that J. Leslie Broadbent, just before he died, designated Musser to succeed him as the "worthy senior." Jessop, Diary, 3:November 14, 1952; Owen A. Allred, "Fire side Meeting on the History of the Work" (June 8. 2003), in History of the Priesthood Split and Additional Historical Items (Salt Lake City: Privately published, 2003), 47-48. After Broadbent's death, Barlow immediately assumed leadership. Musser sustained John Y. Barlow after Broadbent's death because Barlow did not know of Broadbent's appointment of Musser and because it had not been witnessed by other members of the Priesthood Council nor was it established before the people. Joseph Lyman Jessop recognized Barlow as the presiding elder, although he believed as early as 1937 that Musser was nearer to God than any man he knew and considered him to be the mouthpiece of God. jessop, Diary, 2:February23, June 13, 1937, July 2, and December 8, 1937. In my opinion, further research should be done about the differences between Musser and Barlow as the possible beginnings of what eventually became the 1950s split, resulting in two distinct fundamentalist Mormon groups. 

[52] Leroy S. Johnson (1888-1986) and J. Marion Hammon (1905-88) were both ordained apostles on December 14, 1941. Guy H. Musser (1910-83) and Richard S. Jessop (1894-1978) were ordained about April 1945 before Rulon T. Jeffs (1909-2002) who was ordained April 20, 1945. Carl O. N. Holm (1917-72) was ordained about 1948. Alma A. Timpson (1905-97) was ordained by John Y. Barlow on December 27, 1949, two days before Barlow's death. The quorum consisted of more than seven members at times during the 1940s although two members, LeGrand Woolley and Louis A. Kelsch, withdrew from active participation. At the dme of Louis Barlow's 1948 secret marriage, the Priesthood Council effectively consisted of nine: John Y. Barlow, Joseph W. Musser, and Charles F. Zitdng and the first six men called by Barlow. 

[53] Watson, "Short Creek: 'A Refuge for the Saints.'" 

[54] Jessop, Diary, 2:March 7 and May 24, 1944; 3:May 15-December 15, 1945. See also Bradley, Kidnapped from That Land, 6; Ken Driggs, "Imprisonment, Defiance, and Division: A History of Mormon Fundamentalism in the 1940s and 1950s," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 38, no. 1 (Spring 2005)- 65-95; D. Michael Quinn, ]. Rsub&n Clark The Church Years (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1983), 183-86; Marianne T. Watson, "The Fred E. Curtis Papers: LDS Church Surveillance of Fundamentalist Mormons, 1937 to 1954," paper presented at the Sunstone Symposium, August 10, 2001, Salt Lake City. 

[55] The term fundamentalists, when describing twentieth-century excommunicated Mormons who continue to practice polygamy without LDS Church sanction, came into use in the early 1940s probably after Joseph Musser used that term in a letter to the Daughters of Utah Pioneers in which he stated: "We are asked by the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers to present a brief statement for and the aims of the so-called faction in the Mormon religion frequently but erroneously referred to as the 'Woolley Group,' the 'Barlow.' 'Musser,' or 'Polygamy, etc., Group.' Actually this group may be called the 'Priesthood Group' or the 'Fundamentalists' .. . because of their refusal to accede to certain changes in the fundamentals of the Gospel." Joseph Musser, quoted in (no author), Religious Seen, and Cults That Sprang from M.or monism (pamphlet) (Salt Lake City: Daughters of Utah Pioneers Central Company, 1942); Joseph W. Musser, "Factions" (editorial), Trwth 9, no. 24 (September 1943): 94-96. Newspaper articles announcing the 1944 polygamy raids used "fundamentalists" in the text or in photo captions but not in the headlines. "Polygamy Probe Names 46," Salt Lake Tribune, March 7, 1944, and "Forty Arrested on Indictment in Polygamy Probe," Deseret News, March 7, 1944- Unless otherwise noted, the newspaper quotations are from the photocopy of a scrapbook containing these articles, most of them without page numbers designated. Joseph Lyman Jessop's diary did not include the word "fundamentalist" until 1945 when he was in the Utah State Penitentiary. Jessop, Diary, 3:August 27 and 31, October 8, and December 2, 1945. Apparently Jessop did not know of Musser's letter to the DUP and objected to the term. For example, in a letter to Joseph W Musser, he protested against the wording of the Declaration of Policy, a document compiled by prison officials describing die polygamists as "Fundamentalists." Jessop wrote, "It [the Declaration of Policy] tries to force an acknowledgment from us that there is [an] organisation known as Fundamentalists, and that we are officers in the same. Such an organization does not exist, so far as I know." Jessop, Diary, 3:August 31, 1945. In the aftermath of the 1944 raid, Apostle Mark E. Petersen respond formally to curiosity about the Church's involvement in the raid in a statement that was published by United Press International and printed in at least two Salt Lake City newspapers. This statement, in part, acknowledged that the Church had been "actively assisting federal and state authorities in obtaining evidence against the cultists, and helping to prosecute them under the law." It also said the Church regarded the name "fundamentalists" as a misnomer because it "gave the impression (which is what the cultists sought) that they are old line Mormons, which they are not." Quoted in Bradley, Kidnapped from That Land, 86-87; for other references to the letter, see Salt Lake Telegram, November 10, 1944, and Sak Lake Tribune, November 11, 1944-Letter partially reprinted in Joseph Musser, ed., "The Conspiracy Cases," Truth 12, no. 9 (February 1947): 246. 

[56] Jessop, Diary, liDecember 14, 1924 and January 17, 1926, 3:June 21, 1945. The term "setting in order" among fundamentalists usually referred to Doctrine and Covenants 85:7: "And it shall come to pass that I, the Lord God, will send one mighty and strong, holding the scepter of power in his hand, clothed with light for a covering, whose mouth shall utter words, eternal words; while his bowels shall be a fountain of truth, to set in order the house of God." Jessop understood the one mighty and strong to be the resurrected Prophet Joseph Smith. Joseph W. Musser recorded that Lorin C. Woolley told him that "he was told by the voice of his [deceased] Father under the direction of Joseph Smith that his mission was not to set the Church in order, but to do what he was set apart to do." Joseph W. Musser, Diary, March 31, 1930. 

[57] "A Revelation of President John Taylor, . . . 1886," 206; emphasis mine. 

[58] Jessop, Diary, 3:September 26, 1948. 

[59] Ibid, 3: January l5, 1949. 

[60] Ibid. In this entry, Jessop quotes Musser as saying that "he had urged the brethren to not take [marry] girls under age." 

[61] Ibid.; 3:September 20-25, 1948. This entry also states: "Louis said he had been to see Bro. Joseph Musser who advised him to come tell Lyman that he had lived [sexually] with Christine as a wife. I was surprised to learn that their relationship had gone that far." However, as it turned out, this statement was completely opposite to Louis's testimony a year later that he had never "had a chance to live with [Christine]" as a wife. Jessop, Diary, 3 February 25, 1950. Thus, it remains uncertain whether Louis and Christine ever consummated this marriage. Louis's claim that he lived with her may have been a tactic to obtain Lyman's consent to the marriage. 

[62] Jessop, Diary, 3:September 20-25, 1948. 

[63] Ibid. 

[64] Ibid., 3:September 26, 1948. 

[65] Ibid., 3:November 1-6, 1948. 

[66] Ibid.

[67] Ibid, 3:December 9, 1948. 

[68] Ibid., 3: January 26, 1949. 

[69] Ibid., ^September 10, 1923. John Y. Barlow married Martha ("Mattie") Jessop, daughter of Joseph Smith jessop and Martha Moore Yeates Jessop, on September 10, 1923. Louis J. Barlow, born August 9, 1924, was John and Martie's first child. 

[70] Ibid., 3 January 26, 1949. 

[71] Ibid. Although Joseph Lyman Jessop was not explicit about his disagreement over John's claim of what Lorin Woolley said, it is clear from his journal he did not agree with Barlow's interpretation. He was sure Woolley did not mean that anyone could impose his will on others in die name of priesthood. It is probable that if Woolley made such a statement, it was relative to the idea that "it is the authority of the Priesthood, not the place, that validates and sanctifies the ordinance." J. W Musser, The New and Everlasting Covenant of Marriage (Salt Lake City: Truth Publishing, 1933), 82.

[72] Ibid. 

[73] Ibid. 

[74] Ibid.,3: February 5, 1950. 

[75] Ibid., 3; January 4, 1950. 

[76] Ibid.,3; January 29, 1950. 

[77] Ibid., 3; January 29 and February 8, 1950. On January 29, Musser told Lyman, "[Christine] should be released, and I shall take up the matter with my brethren and we'll act upon it." Lyman asked if Musser must consult with others of the Priesthood Council about the case before he could act by himself. Musser said he could act by himself, but he would like to see Chris tine personally first and get her expressions firsthand; he then intended to discuss the matter in the council. 

[78] Ibid., 3; February 25, 1950. 

[79] Ibid. Also 3January 29, 1950. Jessop said this statement was made in the presence of "Dan Bateman also in the presence of his uncle Moroni Jessop and in our home (at 3574 South 9th East) about the time of the birth of our son Paul [January 21, 1929]. I told him I have asked Uncle Rone [Moroni Jessop] if he remembered this event and saying of Uncle Lorin Woolley |and] he said he remembered it (my conversation with Uncle Rone was at the home of I. W. Barlow on evening of Jan. 25, 1950) B[rother] Musser agreed." 

[80] Jessop, Diary, 3;January 20, 29, 1950. 

[81] Ibid., 3:February 25, 1950; see also January 29, 1950. 

[82] Family records in my possession! see also Jessop, Diary, 3:December 2, 1950.

[83] Jessop, Diary, 3:June 23, 1950. 

[84] Driggs, "Imprisonment, Defiance, and Division"; Driggs, "A Guide to Old Fashioned (Fundamentalist) Mormonism." 

[85] AJlred became involved with fundamentalists in 1935 while trying to "save" his father, B. Harvey Allred, who had published A Leaf in Review (Caldwell, Ida.: Caxton Printers, 1933). This book castigated LDS leaders for apostasy and included an account of John Taylor's 1886 revelation and the events leading to it. Rulon married Ruth Barlow, John Y. Barlow's daughter, as a plural wife on November 14, 1935. 

[86] This ordination occurred September 18, 1850. Musser apparently felt he was following the precedent set by his predecessor, Lorin C. Woo Hey, who appointed J. Leslie Broadbent as his Second Elder. Musser stated, "I wanted to appoint my son, Guy, as my Second Elder, but the Lord would not give his approval." As part of the ordination, he told Allred: "Henceforth, you will stand at my side as Leslie did to Lorin and as Hyrum did to Joseph ... and you shall stand in this office as long as I live." Rulon Allred understood that his calling included serving on the council and as Musser's Second Elder but that, in seniority, he would take his place according to order of ordination after Musser died. Rulon C. Allred, Minutes of [Fundamentalist] Meeting held in Poulson, Montana, May 17, 1959, transcription, published in History of the Priesthood Split and Additional Historical Items, 67-72. Allred explained: "In the Priesthood a man as President of the Priesthood [president Council Member] has a Second Elder, In the Church a man has presidency and two counselors. And the appointment is exactly the same. Joseph Smith had Oliver Cowdery as his Second Elder. Hyrum, his brother, was chosen to fillthat office when Oliver fell." Seventies Meeting Minutes, home of Richard Kunz, Murray, Utah, May 12, 1974, transcription, published in ibid., 85. 

[87] Seventies Meeting Minutes, May 12, 1974, 80. 

[88] Ibid. 

[89] Members of the council claimed that Allred used his influence as Musser's physician during Musser's physical incapacity to persuade Musser to put hands on his head and give him a blessing so he could claim ordination to the apostleship. Another reason cited was whether Musser could act authoritatively without getting the entire council's approval, even though three of them had been called privately by John Y. Barlow before it was made known to the others. In a priesthood meeting on December 3, 1950, the council members told Allred that "they were empowered to accept or reject Joseph [Musser]'s actions, and that they had decided Rulon [Allred] was not a member of the Council, nor an Apostle as Joseph had told him. The Council informed him that he held only a commissioned authority and was an assistant to Joseph ... during the life of Joseph. They said that Joseph was mistaken in the diings that he had told Rulon about his holding keys and being one in the Council." Ibid., 83. For an FLDS version of Allred's "supposed ordination," see Rulon T. Jeffs, History of Priesthood Succession in the Dispensation of the Fullness of Times and Some Challenges to the One Man Rule (Hildale, Utah: Twin City Courier Press, 1997), 252-53. Leroy Johnson told Joseph Musser and Lyman Jessop, "If the Lord wants to use an incapacitated leader (referring to Joseph Musser) to lead some people astray, that is the Lord's business." Jessop, Diary, 3:July 2, 1952. Vera Cook Allred recorded on May 2, 1952, that those opposing Musser were saying, "He is old and incapacitated and doesn't know what he's doing." Vera AUred, "A Personal Witness," in History of the Priesthood Split and Additional Historical Items, 103. See also Rulon C, Allred, Minutes of [Fundamentalist] Meeting Held in Poulson, Montana," 71- Robert Eaby recorded, "There are those going about telling that Joseph has lost his mind because of his infirmaries [sic]. . .. I told him that I believed he was not demented as some say." Robert Eaby, Diary, June 16, 1951, typescript copy of entry, photocopy in my possession. 

[90] Jessop, Diary, 3:March 19, May 27, December 6,9, 1951; January 12 and February 3, 1952. The other Priesthood Council members were Charles F. Zitting (originally called by Lorin C. Woolley), and seven men called by John Y. Barlow between June 1941 and December 29, 1949: Leroy S. Johnson, J. Marion Hammon, Guy H. Musser, Rulon Jeffs, Richard S. Jessop, Carl N. Holm, and Alma Adelbert Timpson. Louis A. Kelsch and LeGrand Woolley were still living but did not participate in any council matters. Kelsch continued to perform plural marriages when requested, but he never asserted himself in the leadership of the fundamentalists after about 1945. 

[91] The families of Louis A. Kelsch, Arnold Boss, Morris Kunz, Ianthus Barlow, Albert Barlow, and others were in this category. 

[92] Jessop, Diary, 3:March 19, May 6 and 27, and December 6 and 9, 1951; January 12 and February 3, 1952. On January 12, 1952, Joseph W. Musser called Rulon Clark Allred, Margarito Bautista, John Butchereit, Eslie Devoe Jenson, Owen Arthur Allred, Marvin L. Jessop, Joseph Blaine Thompson, and Joseph Lyman Jessop. Ibid., 3:January 12, 1952. 

[93] Quoted in "Witness and Testimony by Marvin L. Allred," published in History of the Priesthood Split, 139. Meeting November 15, 1952, with his new council, "Joseph forcefully told us that if these brethren [of the council who had rejected Musser] continued further in the council of the Lord, they must come in after any who are present at his speaking. Musser then stated, "They have been rejected because they would not accept the word of the Lord." Jessop, Diary, 3:November 15, 1952,

[94] Charles F. Zitting died July 14, 1954. In 1978 I saw in the homes of Short Creek (Colorado City) relatives priesthood succession charts, with photos, that included J. Leslie Broadbent and Charles F. Zitting. When I visited there in 1991, I saw new charts in which Broadbent and Zitting did not appear. These latter charts were consistent with Rulon T. Jeffs's published history of priesthood succession. Jeffs, History of Priesthood Succession, 277.

[95] Barbara Owen Kelsch, Louis Alma Kehch, 1905-1947 ([Salt Lake City?]: Privately published, ca. 1975), 86. 

[96] Jessop, Diary, 3; February 2, 1953. 

[97] Ibid., 3; August 23-24, 1952. 

[98] Ibid.; also 3:September 10, 1952. 

[99] Ibid.,3; February 2, 1953. 

[100] Ibid., 3; December 8-13, 1953. 

[101] Ibid. 

[102] Bradley, Kidnapped from That Land, 111-47. 

[103] Jessop, Diary, 3 July 22-23, 1953. Leroy Johnson's decision not to run may have been similar to a decision Joseph W. Musser had made a year earlier relating to the threatened prosecution of the polygamists in the Salt Lake area. Joseph W. Musser said, "'I'll get the word of the Lord on the matter' and two days later said, 'I have received the word of the Lord, viz: we are not to run away. We will stay put and let them do their damndest. They will not be able to do what they think they can. . . . We can hold our meetings. They can't do any more to us." Jessop, Diary, 3:August 28 and 31, September 6 and 7,1952. The negative media coverage and political backlash against Arizona's Governor Howard Pyle resulting from the Short Creek raids may have prevented further prosecution of polygamists at that time. 

[104] Ibid. 

[105] Bradley, Kidnapped from That Land, ix-x, 111-213. 

[106] Louis J. Barlow, interviewed on KSUB shortly after July 26, 1953, quoted in Quinn,' Plural Marriage and Mormon. Fundamentalism,' 33-34.

[107] Ibid., 132-33 (photos); Jessop, Diary, 3:September 1-2, 1953.

[108] At the funeral, Lyman learned that, before his father's death, he "spent hours weeping among the cedar trees for his own kin and friends who are the victims of the unhallowed raids upon this peaceful village (of Short Creek)." Lyman considered that his father "was greatly weakened by this raid and imprisonment and died a martyr to the cause of truth and freedom," Jessop, Diary, 3:September 1-2, 1953. Joseph Smith Jessop died of kidney failure exacerbated by the lengthy journey by bus without bathroom stops to Kingman, Arizona, after he was arrested. Because of his age and infirmity, he was soon released, only to die soon afterward.

[109] Bradley, Kidnapped from That land, 148-59. 

[110] Division over one-man rule versus a council government began as early as 1935. Watson, "Short Creek:'A Refuge for the Saints.'" In November 1936, Joseph Musser spoke to John Y. Barlow about the "present [united effort] set-up" in Short Creek and that "there seemed a disposition toward one man rule." Musser advised that Barlow resign from the management of UEP affairs and "confine his labors more particularly to the spiritual field; that our [priesthood] work was especially along the line of keeping faith in patriarchal marriage alive, and not in the directing of colonizing." The next morning at a priesthood meeting, the majority of those present expressed the belief that Barlow "held the keys to Priesthood and was the mouthpiece of God on earth" while some expressed that he held "authority to seal [marriages] and was the senior member of the Priesthood group, and as such presided." Musser, Journal, November 8-13, 1936. 

The issue in the 1970s and 1980s centered on interpretations of Doctrine and Covenants 132:7: "There is never but one on the earth at a time on whom the keys of the sealing powers and keys of the holy Priesthood are conferred." J. Marion Hammon and Guy H. Musser were teaching that the parenthetical matter in that verse, "(and I have appointed unto my servant Joseph to hold this power in the last days, and there is never but one on the earth at a time on whom this power and the keys on this priesthood are conferred)," was not in the original revelation. They therefore argued that the concept of "never but one on the earth at a time" was false. In contrast, Leroy Johnson and Rulon T. Jeffs taught that only one man at a time holds the keys of the sealing power, and those who act during his administration are only acting under a delegated authority." Johnson and Jeffs also declared invalid the 1880 revelation given to Wilford Woodruff which states, in part: "And while my servant John Taylor is your President. .. [and] although you have one to preside over your Quorum, which is the order of God in all generations, do you not, all of you, hold the apostleship, which is the highest authority ever given to men on earth? You do. Therefore you hold in common the Keys of the Kingdom of God in all the world." The 1880 revelation was published by fundamentalist Mormons in The Four Hidden Revelations (Salt Lake City: Privately published, 1948). The LDS Church Archives are identified as his source for this revelation in Max Anderson, Polygamy: Fact or Fiction (Salt Lake City: Publisher's Press, 1979), 119. 

[111] On February 19, 1984, Leroy Johnson refused to allow J. Marion Hammon and Alma Adelbert Timpson to sit on the stand as members of the council. He told them: "The Lord gave you men five and a half years to change your thinking on this principle of having one man holding the sealing powers in the earth at a time, and you have made a miserable mess of it by coming here and preaching over this pulpit that I was about to die because of my attitude towards this principle." Shordy afterward, Johnson permanently dismissed Hammon and Timpson as council members. Rulon Jeffs made it clear that these two men and their followers were the worst of apostates. Leroy S.Johnson, Leroy S. Johnson Sermons, 7 vols. (Hildale, Utah: Twin City Courier Press, 1984), 7:51; Jeffs, History of Priesthood Succession, 329-54.

[112] Hammon and Timpson held their first separate priesthood meeting on May 13, 1984. They dedicated their own meetinghouse on September 27, 1986, a hundred years after John Taylor's 1886 revelation, an event that gave their town its name. This community believes rliat Rulon T Jeffs wrongfully influenced Johnson in the last years of his life, taking advantage of him in sickness, which culminated in the wrongful dismissal of the two council members. After the death of Hammon and shortly before his own death, Timpson called his son, John, and bestowed upon him the same appointment and calling he himself had received from John Y. Barlow. After the elder Timpson's death, John Timpson called others and reestablished a priesthood council, which maintains that it is the true heir of John Taylor's legacy to perpetuate plural marriage. 

[113] The name of the corporation was "The Corporation of the President of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints," February 6, 1991, #495,512, cited in Quinn, "Plural Marriage and Mormon Fundamentalism," 14; Ken Driggs, ""This Will Someday Be the Head and Not the Tail of the Church': A History of the Mormon Fundamentalists at Short Creek," Journal of Church and State 43, no. 1 January 2001): 201; and his "A Guide to Old Fashioned (Fundamentalist) Mormonism."

[114] Jeffs, History of Priesthood Succession. Jeffs also identified the "one man" as the "Keyholder." His list of keyholders in order of their presidencies were: Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, John Taylor, John W. Woolley, Lorin C. Woolley, JohnY. Barlow, Leroy S.Johnson, and Rulon T. Jeffs.

[115] Ibid., 1-3; emphasis mine. 

[116] Quoted in Benjamin G. Bistline, The Polygamists: A History of Colorado City, Arizona (Scottsdale, Ariz.: Agreka Books, 2004), 343.

[117] Sam Barlow, quoted in Quinn, "Plural Marriage and Mormon Fundamentalism," 14, 33. 

[118] Louis Barlow's brothers included Dan Barlow (former mayor of Colorado City), Sam Barlow (former sheriff), and Joe, Alma, Truman, Alvin and Nephi. Joseph Lyman Jessop's brothers who lived in Colorado City were Richard, Virgil, Fred, and later Dowayne Jessop. 

[119] "Plane Crash Victims Mourned," Spectrum, August 16, 2002, http://www.polygamyinfo.com/plygmedia%2002%2095spectrum.htm (accessed September 24, 2006). Killed were Gregory Holm, 38, and three of Louis J. Barlow's sons: John O., 39; Ronald O., 49; and Michael D., 44- 

[120] This law (H.B. 307, passed in 2003) specifically targeted polygamists marrying minors. It became Utah Code Annotated, Child Bigamy 76-7-101.5. This statute states that any person "IS years of age or older is guilty of child bigamy when, knowing he or she has a wife or husband, or knowing that a person under 18 years of age has a wife or husband, the actor carries out the following with the person who is under 18 years of age: (a) purports to marry the person who is under 18 years of age; or (b) cohabits with the person who is under 18 years of age. This is a second degree felony which is punishable by one to fifteen years." In November or December 2001, Utah's attorney general and later FLDS Church attorneys had advised that a showdown with Utah and Arizona authorities could be avoided by ending marriages between adult men and minor girls. Influenced by Warren Jeffs, Rulon refused to agree, making the practice a test of faith for the FLDS. Winston Black- more, interviewed by Marianne Watson, Anne Wilde, and Linda Kelsch, April 2004, stated that Rulon Jeffs initially agreed that it was not necessary to continue marriages of adult men to underage women but that he (Blackmore) saw Warren Jeffs lean over and whisper to his father, so that the elder Jeffs changed his words to say the opposite. Sam Barlow, in a sermon delivered in Colorado City in April 2002, alluded to the laws regarding sexual conduct with minors. See "The Polygamy Files," the Salt Lake Tribune's polygamy blog: "The FLDS Battle for Plural Marriage," April 4, 2006, http://blogs.sltrib.com/plurallife/archives/2006_04_01_archive.htm (accessed April 4, 2006), and "The FLDS Battle for Plural Marriage, Part Two," April 5, 2006 (same blog site).

[121] Adams, "Warren Jeffs: A Wanted Man," A-l, A-4. Warren, the son of Rulon Titnpson Jeffs and Marilyn Steed, was born December 3, 1955, in San Francisco. 

[122] According to Richard Holm, a former FLDS member and son of Carl Holm, Warren Jeffs, with his father's knowledge, secretly recorded thousands of members' personal conversations with Rulon Jeffe, These tapes detailed community members' transgressions, confessions, and other personal matters. Holm felt that Warren had used these tapes on assuming control of the FLDS Church in 2002 to identify those he deemed undesirable. Richard Holm, interviewed by Marianne Watson, January 2004. See also John Dougherty, "The Man behind the Curtain," Phoenix New Times, January 29, 2004, http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/issues/2004-01-29/sidebar. html (accessed January 29, 2004).

[123] Winston Blackmore, interviewed, "Bustup in Bountiful," aired January 25, 2006, at 9:00 p.m. on CBC_TV, transcript, http://cbc.ca/ fifth/bustupinbountiful/interviews_winston.html (accessed July 15, 2006).

[124] Ibid. 

[125] To prepare for the end, Warren Jeffs preached increasing isolation from the secular world. He urged his flock to avoid newspapers, television, the internet, and other exposure to "gentiles" (outsiders). The town radio station shunned popular songs with lyrics, broadcasting mostly upbeat, patriotic instruments Is. Jeffs also prophesied a mass lifting-up during which only the most devout would rise to heaven. The ascension was supposed to take place from the community garden in the center of town. Jeffs reportedly named several dates that came and went with no apparent heavenly rapture. Susan Greene, "Polygamy Prevails in Remote Arizona Town," Denver Post, March 4, 2001, http://www.rickross.com/reference/polygamy/polygamy54.html (accessed July 24, 2006). 

[126] Warren Jeffs, "Our Prophet's Call: 'Leave Apostates Alone. Severely,' Lesson, general meeting, July 16, 2000, at the Leroy S. Johnson Meeting House, Colorado City, Arizona, photocopy of minutes in my possession. See also "Warren Jeffs FLDS Sermon," Salt lake Tribune, July 27, 2006, http://www.childbrides.o rg/news _control_sltrib_Warrens_sermon.html (accessed September 24, 2006); Brooke Adams, "Jeffs' Sermon Railed against Outside Thinking," Salt Lake Tribune, July 27, 2006, B-2. 

[127] These statements reflected frustration because legal action had not succeeded in removing Centennial Park members from properties in Hildale and Colorado City owned by the United Effort Plan. The UEP held title to the homes and lots on which people from both the Johnson and Jeffs groups lived and for which they had contributed money and labor. At the 1984 fracture, RulonJeffshadacquiredcontroloftheUEPand, in 1986, declared that those living on UEP land were tenants at will, giving him the power to legally evict those with whom he disagreed. No such understanding had existed before Jeffs's declaration. In 1987, several of the Hammon-Timpson families filed an action in federal court to determine their property rights. The UEP countered with actions in state courts in 1989 and 1993 against some of the Hammon-Timpson claimants. The state court stayed these cases, pending a resolution of the federal action. In 1993, the federal district court dismissed the federal claims for lack of subject matter jurisdiction and dismissed the pending state claims without prejudice. The Hammon-Timpson claimants then filed an action in Utah's district court in Washington County. The state court consolidated its action with the UEP's previously filed suits. On September 1,1998, the Utah Supreme Court upheld the district court's ruling allowing the Hammon-Timpson claimants to remain on the land for their life times or requiring the UEP to compensate the claimants if it sought to remove them. However, it found errors in the previous decision and could not determine whether any or all of the claimants had life estates. It therefore remanded that issue back to the trial court. Jeffs et al. v. Stubbs et al, Utah Supreme Court, Case No. 960454, 970 P.2d 1234 (Utah 1998), http//www. caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=ut&vol=supopincsinvol=jeffs (accessed September 27, 2006). 

[128] Rulon T. Jeffs, April 19, 1959, Words of President Jeffs (Salt Lake City: n.pub., 67, quoted in Jeffs, "Our Prophet's Call 'Leave Apostates Alone, Severely,'" [4]. 

[129] Rachel Olsen, "Polygamy's 'Lost Boys' Struggle to Fit in," (St. George) Spectrum, August 5, 2004, http://www.childbrides.org/boys_ HFTCB_spec_helping_lost_boys.html (accessed September 27, 2006); Da vid Kelly, "Polygamy's 'Lost Boys' Expelled from the Only Life They Knew," Los Angeles Times, June 19, 2005, http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2005/06/19/polygamys_lost__boys_expelled_from_only_life_they_ knew/?page=2. In August 2004, six "lost boys" sued the FLDS Church and its leaders, including Warren Jeffs, for the economic and psychological injury they said resulted after being driven out of the community. Nancy Perkins, "FLDS Church, Leaders Sued by 6 'Lost Boys,'" Deseret Morning News, August 28, 2004, http://www.childbrides.org/boys_des_sued_by_6_lost boys.html(accessed September 27, 2006). 

[130] Howard Fischer, "State Officials Prepare to Seize Control of Colorado City School District," Arizona Daily Star, August 11, 2005, http://www. azstarnet.com/sn/hourlyupdate/88285.php (accessed September 25, 2006). 

[131] LuAnn Fischer, an FLDS member who was excommunicated in September 2001, said Warren Jeffs began assigning dozens of young wives to his father about ten years previously as a way of preventing them from marrying other men. She believed that the younger Jeffs did this so he could then marry them off in exchange for leverage, money, or favors after his father's death. Fischer did not believe that the elderly Jeffs consummated these marriages, Valerie Richardson, "Flaunting Polygamy as the Law Gets Tough," Washington [D.C.] Times, March 27, 2001, http://www.polygamyinfo.com/plygmedia%2001%2040watimes.htm (accessed July 24, 2006).

[132] LuAnn Fischer said she and her husband were excommunicated after they questioned Warren Jeffs's, not Rulon's, authority. Susan Greene, "Polygamy Prevails in Remote Arizona Town," Denver Post, March 4, 2001, http://www.rickross.com/reference/polygamy/polygamy54.html (accessed July24, 2006); Associated Press, "Polygamist Leader Rulon T. Jeffs Dies," posted 9:22 AM EDT (1322 GMT) September 9, 2002, http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/09/09/obit.rulonjeffs.ap/index.html (accessed September 98, 2002); Tom Zoellner, "Polygamist's Death Creates Tension in Enclave," Salt Lake Tribune, September 10, 2002, http://www.childbrides.org/control_SLTrib_rulon_death_creates_tension.html (accessed July 23, 2006).

[133] Mark Havnes, "Thousands Flock to Funeral of FLDS Leader," Suit Lake Tribune, September 13, 2002, http://www.polygamyinfo.com/plygmedia%2Q02%2Q118trib.htm (accessed September 26, 2006); Angie Parkinson, "Jeffs's Funeral Draws 5,080: FLDS Prophet Laid to Rest in Service Thursday," (St. George) Spectrum, September 13, 2002, http://www. polygamyinfo.com/plygmedia%2002%20118spectrum.htm (accessed July 26, 2006); Michael Janofsky, "Years May Pass before Fundamentalist LDS Name Successor to Jeffs," New York Times, September 15, 2002, http://www.polygamyinfo.com/plygmedia%2002%20121nyt.htm (accessed September 24, 2006); Associated Press, "FLDS Names Warren Jeffs New President," Suit Lake Tribune, November 23, 2002, and Associated Press, "Warren Jeffs New Head of Fundamentalist Church," November 28, 2002, both at http://www.religionnewsblog.com/1276/flds-names-warren-jeffs-new-presi-dent 

[134] Adams, "Warren Jeffs: A Wanted Man." This article identifies sites in Eldorado, Texas; Mancos, Colorado; and Pringle, South Dakota, and speculates that others, as yet unknown, also exist. "Eldorado, pop, 1,838, Stands out. The FLDS have poured millions into a 1,691-acre property, creating a small city with a dairy, cheese factory, orchard, barracks, homes, meeting hall and a massive limestone temple. The estimated population ranges from 150 to 600."

[135] Jane Zhang, "Mayor, Others Ousted from FLDS Church," (St. George) Spectrum, January 11, 2004, http://www.religionnewsblog.com/ 5630/mayor-others-ousted-from-fIds-church (accessed September 24, 2006); Pam Manson and Mark Havnes, "FLDS Prophet Thins Flock,' Salt Lake. Tri bune, January 12, 2004, http://www.religionnewsblog.com/5625/flds prophet-thins-flock (accessed September 24, 2006); Nancy Perkins, "Colo rado City Mayor Quits after FLDS Action: Polygamist Church Strips Him, Others of Their Priesthood," Deseret Morning News, January 12, 2004, http:// www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/is_20040112/ai_nll438362 (accessed September 24, 2004); "Colorado City Called Tense,'" Lake Havasu News-Herald, January 13, 2004, http://www.rickross.com/reference/polyg amy/polygamyl51.html (accessed September 24, 2006); Jane Zhang, "Mayor Resigns in Colorado City after Ouster of about 20 Men from Polygamous Church, City Power Changes," (St. George) Spectrum, January 13, 2004, http://www.polygamyinfo.com/plygmedia%2004%2013spectrum.htm (accessed September 24, 2006); Associated Press, "Men Ordered to Leave Polygamist Community without Families," KUTV Channel 2 News, January 13, 2004, http://www.childbrides.org/contxol_KUTV_men_ordered_to_leave. html (accessed September 24, 2006). 

[136] The quoted words were Louis's expressions to the Priesthood Council in 1950 when they heard about his secret marriage to Christine. Jessop, Diary, 3: February 25, 1950. Louis's first wife, Lucy Johnson Barlow, was reportedly reassigned to Warren's cousin, Richard Allred, who was young enough to have been her son. Lucy died a year later on October 20, 2005. "Lucy Johnson Allred" (obituary), (St. George) Spectrum, October 22, 2005, http//www.thespectrum.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=20051022/OBITUARIES/510220 (accessed October 27, 2005); "Anonymous," blog entry posted October 22, 2005, 11:34 PM, http://texaspolygamy.blogspot. com/2005/10/obituaries.html#cll3004208015010416. 

[137] Zoellner, "Polygamist's Death Creates Tension in Enclave"; Brandon Griggs, "FLDS Leadership Battle Is Predicted," Salt Lake Tribune, September 12, 2002, http://www.religionnewsblog.com/814/flds-leader' ship-battle-is-predicted (accessed September 24, 2006); Manson and Havnes, "FLDS Prophet Thins Flock"; Brian Haynes, Dave Berns, and Dave Hawkins, "Power Struggle: Trouble Brewing in Towns," Las Vegas Review Journal, January 15, 2004, http://www.childbrides.org/control_AP_states_brace_for_ trouble.html (accessed September 24, 2006); Associated Press, "States Brace for Trouble in Polygamist Communities," Arizona Daily Sun, January 19, 2004, http://www.mazeministry.com/mormonism/smart/brides/shaken, html (accessed September 24, 2006). 

[138] Winston Blackmore, interviewed by Watson, Wilde, and Kelsch, April 2004, reported that, after Rulon Jeffs's debilitating 1998 stroke, Warren Jeffs gready restricted access to his father. For awhile, Blackmore was one of the privileged few, but ultimately, Warren also excluded Blackmore. Ac cording to Blackmore, it was obvious that Warren, not Rulon, was making all the decisions. See also Blackmore, "Bustup in Bountiful"; Fabian Dawson, "Polygamists inThree-Way Struggle for Control of Sect," Province (British Columbia), September 10, 2002, http://www.canada.com, also posted at http://www.religionnewsblog.com/781/polygamists-m~three-way-stmggle for-control-of-sect, posted September 11, 2002 (accessed September 24, 2006). 

[139] In his dream, the anonymous author "beheld John Y. Barlow command unto his son [Louis Barlow] to step up to his calling and to forsake his birthright no more, that his time of remaining quiet has passed, that he was chosen before the world was created to do an important work and that the time for his calling had come." Quoted in Jane Zhang, "Letter: Barlow Has Right to Lead," (St. George) Spectrum, January 14, 2004, http://www.childbrides.org/contro_spect_letter_barlow_lead.html and Nancy Perkins, "Anonymous Letter Decries FLDS Leader," Deseret Morning News, January 15, 2004, http://rickross.com/reference/polygamy/polygamyl53.html. 

[140] He may have been hoping for reinstatement After his excommunication, one anonymous source was quoted as saying, "They know what they have to do. They could have their jobs back tomorrow, if they wanted to." Perkins, "Anonymous Letter Decries FLDS Leader." Richard Holm said riiat Warren Jeffs led him to believe that his excommunication was temporary, a test, and that he would be reinstated if he complied and repented. Despite Holm's conformity, he was not reinstated. Holm, interviewed by Watson, January 2004. 

[141] Pamela Manson and Brooke Adams, "Ousted FLDS Leader Louis Barlow Dies," Salt Lake Tribune, May 25, 2004, http://www. religionnewsblog.com/7414/ousted'flds'leader-louis-barlow-dies May 26, 2004 (accessed September 24, 2006); Associated Press, "Excommunicated Member of Prominent Polygamist Family Dies," May 25, 2004, http://www.rickross.com/reference/polygamy/polygamy210.html (accessed Sep tember 24. 2006). Louis had experienced heart problems before his excom munication. My Salt Lake Valley relatives who attended Louis Barlow's fu neral reported his continued loyalty to Jeffs. Doug Cooke, an ousted FLDS member whose wife of twenty-one years had been reassigned, was quoted as saying: "When a man loses his family, he loses the chance to buiid a 'celestial family,' and 'your whole life was wasted up to that point.' '1 wanted to die,' Cooke recalled when his wife was 'remarried' to Fred Jessop, the FLDS church's longtime bishop who recently disappeared. '1 wanted God to take me home.' Cooke said he met Barlow a week ago [before his death] at the Village Inn restaurant. Barlow refused to shake his hand, Cooke said, saying, 'We have nothing in common." Barlow apparently considered Cooke, but not himself, an apostate even though both had been excommunicated. Jane Zhang, "Louis Barlow Dies in St. George Home," St. George Spectrum, May 25, 2004, http://www.ch ildbrides.org/con trol_spec_Louis_Barlow_dies.html (accessed September 24, 2006). A mutual friend (name withheld) told me that he contacted Louis after learning of Louis's excommunication. Louis re fused to discuss the situation in any detail and did not make any negative re marks about Warren Jeffs or others. 

[142] The FLDS in particular have been targeted because of their stated determination to continue directing underage brides, ages sixteen and seventeen, into plural marriages, although they are willing to stop arranging marriages for brides younger than sixteen. This announcement was made by a delegation of FLDS brethren, including Sam Barlow, in a December 2001 meeting with staff members of the Utah Attorney General's office. Statement reported by Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, meeting with Mary Batchelor, Anne Wilde, Linda Kelsch, and Marianne Watson, January 2002. Because of Warren Jeffs's refusal to respond to lawsuits and because of other irregularities, the community lost legal control of the Colorado City school district and the United Effort Plan Trust in 2005. Most damaging was the loss of control over the trust, valued at more than $110 million, which holds title to most of the FLDS property and assets in Colorado City, Arizona; Hildale, Utah; and other places. Brooke Adams and Pamela Manson, "The Modern Raid on Polygamy," Salt Lake Tribune, August 21, 2005, A-l. 

[143] Religious influence over UEP assets was legally eliminated in 2005. "Ruling Guides Operation of FLDS Trust," Deseret Morning News, December 15, 2005, http://www.childbride,org/control_des_ruling_ guides _operation_of_UEP.html (accessed September 24, 2006). Further, it appears that FLDS communal property will be privatized. According to court-appointed receiver Bruce Wisan, "It's [the UEP Trust] broken, and 1 don't think it'll ever be the same." Quoted in Ben Winslow, "FLDS Trust in Judge's Hands," Deseret Morning News, July 14, 2006, http://deseretnews. com/dn/view/0,1249,640194645,00. html (accessed July 14, 2006).

[post_title] => The 1948 Secret Marriage of Louis J. Barlow: Origins of FLDS Placement Marriage [post_excerpt] => Dialogue 40.1 (Spring 2007): 83–136
Watson explains how the secret marriage of Louis J. Barlow to a 15-year-old girl caused a major rift among fundamentalists. Today’s fundamentalist members are still experiencing the effects of that marriage. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => the-1948-secret-marriage-of-louis-j-barlow-origins-of-flds-placement-marriage [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-03-14 18:06:55 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-03-14 18:06:55 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.dialoguejournal.com/?post_type=dj_articles&p=10217 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => dj_articles [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) 1

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 10415 [post_author] => 1858 [post_date] => 2018-03-22 17:18:01 [post_date_gmt] => 2018-03-22 17:18:01 [post_content] =>

We hardly dared speak of it [i.e., plural marriage during Joseph Smith's lifetime!. The very walls had ears. We spoke of it only in whispers.

Zina Diantha Huntington Jacobs Smith Young, 1898 

Of course there was things manifestly that the church was not to know—that they were not to reveal to the church, or were not to be revealed to the church.

Wilford Woodruff, 1892 

From Joseph Smith's first documented plural marriage in 1841 until his death more than three years later, some twenty-eight men and 106 women (as civil and plural wives) entered the prophet's order of celestial matrimony.[1] Given the secrecy surrounding Smith's controversial (and illegal) practice, the exact number of these earliest polygamists may never be known. However, enough information in the form of diaries, letters, auto biographies, reminiscences, affidavits, statements, and family histories has accumulated since the early 1840s—coupled with reasonable inferences and educated guesses—to enable a compelling, albeit tentative, identification.[2]

Based on the most convincing data presently available,[3] the following men either definitely or probably married additional wives with Joseph Smith's permission prior to his death on June 27, 1844: James Adams, Ezra T. Benson, Reynolds Cahoon, William Clayton, Joseph W. Coolidge, Howard Egan, William Felshaw, William D. Huntington, Orson Hyde, Joseph A. Kelting, Heber C. Kimball, Vinson Knight, Isaac Morley, Joseph Bates Noble, John E. Page, Parley P. Pratt, Willard Richards, Hyrum Smith, John Smith, Joseph Smith, William Smith, Erastus Snow, John Taylor, Theodore Turley, Lyman Wight, Edwin D. Woolley, Brigham Young, and Lorenzo Dow Young. While the evidence in a few cases (i.e., Coolidge, Felshaw, Kelting, Page, and Wight) for an early plural marriage is circumstantial and conjectural, these twenty-eight men and their wives comprise the most likely candidates for membership in Joseph Smith's inner circle of plural marriage participants.[4] (Biographical details not covered in the body of this essay may be found in the appendix.) 

For Joseph Smith, a marriage that survived death had to be performed by an officiator authorized to employ the sealing power of God's restored priesthood authority. Marriages sanctioned, or "sealed," in this manner were termed eternal marriages. The highest state, or order, of eternal marriage was celestial, or plural, marriage. Only after the abandonment of plural marriage did the terms "celestial" and "eternal" marriage become interchangeable in LDS parlance. Plural marriages could be for time only, in which case the husband acted as his wife's terrestrial caretaker; for eternity only, in which the wife became her husband's "eternal possession" after death only; or for time and eternity, in which case the wife or wives were joined—or sealed—to their husband, both in this life and the next. The majority—though not all—of Mormon plural marriages were for time and eternity.[5]

Mormon plural marriage featured a strong patriarchal orientation.[6] Viewed as a portion of the faithful husband's "privileges" and "possessions," plural wives comprised an integral element in Joseph Smith's celestial marital economy. Smith "often referred to the feelings that should exist between husband and wives," remembered one of his plural wives, saying 

that they, his wives, should be his bosom companions, the nearest and dearest objects on earth in every sense of the word. He said men must be ware how they treat their wives. They were given them for a holy purpose that the myriads of spirits waiting for tabernacles might have pure and healthy bodies. He also said many would awake in the morning of the resurrection sadly disappointed; for they, by transgression, would have neither wives nor children, for they surely would be taken from them, and given to those who should prove themselves worthy. Again he said, a woman would have her choice; this was a privilege that could not be denied her.[7]

Many—but not all—of the men and especially women entering into Joseph Smith's order of plural marriage did so primarily as a show of loyalty, obedience, and sacrifice to Smith, coupled with Smith's assurance that blessings unimaginable awaited them. For Smith, plural marriage represented the pinnacle of his theology of exaltation: the husband as king and priest, surrounded by queens and priestesses eternally procreating spirit children. As these spirit offspring enter mortality, they, by their obedience, accrue both to themselves, through their own children, and to their eternal parents additional glory, power, and exaltation—the entire process of exaltation cycling forever worlds without end. 

Evidence 

This section compiles the evidence for each pre-martyrdom plural marriage in alphabetical order by the husband's surname. 

That James Adams married Roxena Higby Repsher (also Repshire) as a plural wife was attested to by Repsher on October 13, 1869. According to Repsher: "On the eleventh day of July A.D. 1843 at the City of Nauvoo, County of Hancock, State of Illinois, She was married to James Adams for time and all eternity, (James Adams already having one wife ^living^) by President Joseph Smith."[8] Roxena had previously married Daniel Mayhope Repsher (born 1804) on February 22, 1821; however, she had apparently separated from Repsher by the time of her marriage to Adams. The exact state of Roxena's separation is unclear, and evidently not everyone agreed, at least initially, with her decision. Nearly a year earlier on August 31, 1842, Joseph Smith had told members of Nauvoo's all-fe male Relief Society: "sis[ter]. Repshar had long since been advised to return to her husband—has been ascertain'd by good evidence that she left her husband without cause—that he is a moral man and a gentleman—she has got into a way of having revelations, but not the rev[elations]. of God—if she will go home we will pray for her, but if not our prayers will do no good."[9] Roxena and Daniel did not reconcile, and Daniel married Hannah Walton (born 1826) in the Nauvoo Temple on January 24, 1846. There is no evidence that either of James Adams's marriages was repeated in the Nauvoo Temple. 

Ezra T. Benson's early plural marriage to his civil wife's younger sister is attested to in two 1869 affidavits. In the first, dated September 6, 1869, his civil wife, Pamelia Andrus, testified: "On the nineteenth day of November A.D. 1843 She was married or sealed to Ezra T Benson for time and all eternity by Hyrum Smith in the presence of Adeline B. Andrus her sister, which was done in the City of Nauvoo County of Hancock, State of Illinois, and further, on the twenty seventh day of April A.D. 1844 at the same place She was present and witnessed the marrying or sealing of her sister Adeline to her Husband E]zra]. T. Benson by President Hyrum Smith."[10] In the second, dated September 5, 1869, his first plural wife, Adeline Andrus, stipulated: "On the Twenty-seventh day of April, A.D. 1844 in the City of Nauvoo, county of Hancock State of Illinois, She was married or Sealed to Ezra T. Benson, for time and all eternity, (he already having one wife,) by President Hyrum Smith; in the Presence of Pamelia A. Benson, and also that her sister, Pamelia, was Sealed to E[zra]. T. Benson Nov[ember]. 1843."[11]

Evidence for Reynolds Cahoon's early plural marriage apparently exists only in Cahoon family history. Stella Cahoon Shurtleff and Brent Farrington Cahoon, comps. and eds., Reynolds Cahoon and His Stalwart Sons (n.p., 1960), 78, and Mary L. S. Putnam and Lila Cahoon, eds. and comps., Reynolds Cahoon: His Roots and Branches (Bountiful, Utah: Family History Publishers, 1993), v, 65, 78, both report Cahoon's plural marriage to Lucina Roberts Johnson, a widow, sometime in late 1841 or early 1842. Lucina had married Peter Henry Johnson (born 1801) on November 24, 1824. She had six children before Peter died in 1838. Lucina evidently bore Cahoon a daughter, named Lucina Johnson Cahoon, about 1843, who died shortly after birth. 

William Clayton's early plural marriages are among the best documented. Clayton's 1874 affidavit[12] and James B. Allen's biography, Trials of Discipleship: The Story of William Clayton, a Mormon (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 188-220 (republished as ~No Toil Nor Labor Fear: The Story of William Clayton [Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 2002], 185-218), detail both the challenges of life in Nauvoo polyg amy as well as Clayton's marriages, first to Ruth Moon in 1836 and then to her younger sister, Margaret Moon, as a plural wife in 1843. Prior to Joseph Smith's death, Clayton also unsuccessfully courted Mary Aspin (born 1815) and Sarah Ann Booth (born 1826) as plural wives. Clayton's daily first-person account of early Mormon plural marriage is found in George D. Smith, ed., An Intimate Chronicle: The Journals of William Clayton (Salt Lake City: Signature Books in association with Smith Research Associates, 1991, 1995), 93-197. 

Though secondhand, the evidence for Joseph W. Coolidge's early plural marriage seems persuasive. According to a conversation between Coolidge and Joseph F. Smith recorded in Smith's diary on August 28, 1870: "Joseph Smith had sealed more than one wife to Jos[eph]. W. Coo lidge, and he [i.e., Coolidge] 'knew' as he said, what he spoke. I record this as the testimony of a man who has not been with the Church for more than 20 years."[13] Coolidge had married Elizabeth Buchanan civilly in 1834. If Joseph F. Smith's report is correct (i.e., that Joseph Smith sealed more than one wife to Coolidge), Coolidge's first plural marriage was probably to Elizabeth's younger sister, Mary Ann Buchanan, sometime before Joseph Smith's death on June 27, 1844. Coolidge and his families did not join the main body of the Saints for their move west in 1846-47. 

Howard Egan's early plural marriage is better documented. Sometime early in 1844, Hyrum Smith, Joseph Smith's older brother, reportedly told John D. Lee that Egan had been "sealed to Mrs. [Catherine Reese] Clawson, and that their marriage was a most holy one; that it was in accordance with a revelation that the Prophet had recently received direct from God. He then explained to me fully the doctrines of polygamy, and wherein it was permitted, and why it was right."[14] Reese had married Zephaniah Clawson (born 1798) on January 8, 1824. They had six children before Clawson died about 1839. 

In 1869, Mary Ellen Kimball, a plural wife of Heber C. Kimball, added that "She was present, and a witness to the marriage or Sealing of Catherine Clawson to Howard Egan, (who already had one wife) by Hyrum Smith, Patriarch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints."[15] Mormon apostle George A. Smith, writing to Joseph Smith IIIin 1869, corroborated this early plural marriage.[16] Tamson Parshley, Egan's civil wife, remained with him throughout his life; Catherine Reese divorced him in 1852. 

The evidence for William Felshaw's early plural marriage is compelling but circumstantial. The only known sources for his plural marriage to Charlotte Writers (born 1824) on July 28, 1843, are his family genealogical records (ac www.familysearch.org) and Susan Black's Membership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, s.v. "Felshaw, William." In apparent corroboration of his and Walters's marriage, however, Charlotte gave birth to their first daughter, Katherine, on January 25, 1845, suggesting that conception occurred in May 1844; and when Charlotte was endowed in the Nauvoo Temple on February 3, 1846, she was identified explicitly as "Charlotte Felshaw"—both of which imply an early marriage to Felshaw. 

William D. Huntington's early plural marriage is also best attested to in his and his family's genealogical records (at www.familysearch.org) and in Black, Membership, s.v. "Huntington, William Dresser." Huntington married Caroline Clark civilly in 1839 and three and a half years later was sealed to her younger sister, Harriet Clark. William was the brother of two of Joseph Smith's plural wives, Zina Diantha Huntington Jacobs and Presendia Lathrop Huntington Buell. Another brother, Dimick Huntington, introduced his sisters to Smith's teachings on polygamy and per formed their plural marriage ceremonies. It is interesting that William, the younger of the two brothers, not Dimick, entered Smith's order of plural marriage during Smith's lifetime. 

The primary evidence for Orson Hyde's two early plural marriages is found in an 1869 affidavit and in the autobiography of one of his wives.[17] On September 15, 1869, Hyde testified: 

I, Orson Hyde, do hereby certify and declare according to my best recollection, that on the 4th day of September] I was married to Miss Marinda N. Johnson, In Kirtland Ohio, in the Year of our Lord 1834. And in the Month of February] or March, I was married to Miss Martha R. Browitt, by Joseph Smith the Martyred Prophet and by him She was Sealed to me for time, and for all Eternity, in Nauvoo Illinois]. And in the month of April of the same year 1843, I was married by the same person to Mss. Mary Ann Price, and by him she was Sealed to me for time and for all Eternity, in Nauvoo Ill[inois] while the woman to whom I was first married was yet living and gave her cordial consent to both transactions and was personally present to witness the ceremony's.[18]

Mary Ann Price Hyde recorded in her memoirs, apparently in the 1880s: 

On the return of Orson Hyde from his mission to Palestine [on December 7, 1842] he carried letters of introduction to me and invited me to visit his wife. I was there met by Joseph Smith, the Prophet, who, after an interesting conversation introduced the subject of plural marriage and endeavoured to teach me that principle. I resisted it with every argument I could command for, with my traditions, it was most repulsive to my feelings and rendered me very unhappy as I could not reconcile it with the purity of the gospel of Christ. Mr. Hyde took me home in a carriage and asked me what I thought of it and if I would consent to enter his family? I replied that I could not think of it for a moment. 

Thus it rested for awhile and Mr. Hyde married another young lady [i.e., Martha R. Browettl.[19] In the meantime I was trying to learn the character of the leading men, for I sincerely hoped they were men of God. But, in my mind, plurality of wives was a serious question. 

I soon learned to my satisfaction, that Mr. Orson Hyde was a conscientious, upright[,] and noble man and became his third wife. Mrs. [Marinda Nancy] Hyde had two sweet little girls and I soon learned to love them and their dear mother who in the Spring of 1842 [sic, 1843] received me into her house as her husband's wife. Sealed to him by Joseph the Prophet in her presence.[20]

Orson Hyde and Marinda Nancy Johnson's marriage is one of at least two cases in which Joseph Smith evidently married as a plural wife the civil wife of one of his apostles. (The other may be Parley P. Pratt's wife, Mary Ann Frost Stearns.) Johnson and Smith's marriage is treated in Todd Compton, In Sacred Loneliness: The Plural Wives of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1997), 228-44. Though two separate sealing dates have been proposed for Joseph and Marinda's plural marriage—April 1842 and May 1843—the earlier date is probably the more correct. It is the date found in Smith's personal diary, though recorded later, and is in keeping with Smith's practice of marrying married or widowed women during this period of time. Marinda's May 1, 1869, affidavit reporting a May 1843 sealing to Smith probably refers to a resealing.[21]

Marinda was never sealed to Hyde during Smith's lifetime, and Hyde received his second anointing on January 25, 1844, alone. During Smith's lifetime, only two other men, Orson Pratt and Parley P. Pratt, received their second anointings without their wives. The second anointing was the highest ordinance in Smith's temple-related theology during which wives were anointed as queens and priestesses to their husbands, and husbands as kings and priests to God; the second anointing thus functioned as a de facto "marriage" sealing. Although after Smith's death, Marinda was evidently sealed to Hyde, an occurrence Todd Compton terms "extremely anomalous,"[22] it is not entirely clear if she was also anointed to him, although given their sealing, she probably was. In 1870, Marinda and Orson divorced, Marinda counting herself as Smith's—not Hyde's—eternal companion. 

Like Coolidge's, the evidence for Joseph A. Kelting's early plural marriage is inferential—perhaps because like Coolidge, Kelting did not remain with the LDS Church for long after Joseph Smith's death.[23] Kelting married Elizabeth Ann Martin in 1832. Then, according to an affidavit he signed on March 1, 1894: 

Calling at the home of the prophet one day, early in the spring of 1844, on some business or other not now remembered, the prophet invited me into a room upstairs in his house, called the mansion. After we entered the room he locked the door and then asked me if I had heard the rumors connecting him with polygamy. I told him I had. He then began a defense of the doctrine by referring to the Old Testament. I told him I did not want to hear that, as I could read it for myself. He claimed to be a prophet—I believed him to be a prophet—and I wanted to know what he had to say about it. He expressed some doubts as to how I might receive it, and wanted to know what stand I would take if I should not believe what he had to say about it. I then pledged him my word that whether I believed his revelation or not, I would not betray him. He then informed me that he had received a revelation from God, which taught the correctness of the doctrine of a plurality of wives, and commanding him to obey it. He acknowledged to having married several wives. I told him that was alright. He said he would like a further pledge from me that I would not betray him. I asked him if he wanted me to accept the principle by marrying a plural wife. He answered yes. A short time after this I married two wives in that order of marriage.[24]

In a second affidavit, dated September 11, 1903, Kelting reported: 

I first knew Joseph Smith, the Prophet, in Ohio. I once called upon him afterwards at his residence in Nauvoo, Illinois, and told him I wanted a private interview. We walked up stairs together. His wife, Emma, was down stairs, and he did not wish her to hear what we were going to talk about. 

We went into the front room, and he locked the door. I told him it was mooted about that he was teaching plural marriage, and asked him the question, "Are you mooting plural marriage?" 

His answer was, "cannot answer you, as you are both a lawyer and sheriff of Hancock County, and it might militate against you as an officer as well as against us." 

I said, "Joseph, whatever you tell me as your friend is safe; I came here to find this out, and I assure you upon the square (and we were both Ma sons) it shall never injure you in any shape." 

"I did moot plural marriage," said the Prophet. 

"Did you have a revelation to teach this?" I asked. 

"I did," he answered. 

"Have you more than one wife sealed to you by this authority," I asked. 

"I have," said he. 

After giving me this information, he referred me to Brigham Young if I wanted any more on this subject, Brigham seeming to be the man he trusted most with this matter, and was putting him to the front. 

The Prophet assured me that the revelation was as authoritative and binding as any revelation given through him up to that time; and, in fact, that it was paramount to all the rest.[25]

Kelting's use of "a short time" in the first affidavit suggests that he married polygamously prior to Smith's death. As Kelting received both his wife, Elizabeth, and Minerva O. Woods through the veil in the Nauvoo Temple when all three received their endowments on December 24, 1845, and all were sealed less than a month later on January 20, 1846, I speculate that Kelting may have married Woods sometime before the end of June 1844. 

Like William Clayton's, Joseph Smith's, and Brigham Young's, Heber C. Kimball's plural marriages have received the most scholarly attention. Stanley B. Kimball's biography, Heber C. Kimball: Mormon Patriarch and Pioneer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981), 307-16, treats the topic in detail. In addition, Heber Kimball's first plural wife, Sarah Peak Noon, testified on September 7, 1869: "President Joseph Smith personally taught her the doctrine of a plurality of wives, and that on the [blank] day of [blank] A.D. 1842 at the City of Nauvoo, County of Hancock, State of Illinois She was married or Sealed for time and all eternity to Heber C. Kimball by President Joseph Smith in the presence of President Brigham Young."[26] Sometime in October or November 1842, Peak gave birth to her and Kimball's son, Adelmon (sometimes Adelbert).[27]

Heber's experience with plural marriage reveals much of Joseph Smith's approach and method of instruction. "Brother Heber," Smith announced probably sometime before the close of 1841, "I want you to give Vilate [Murray Kimball, Kimball's civil wife] to me to be my wife." "Dumb-founded," Kimball fell into a dark funk for several days. Finally, after pouring out his soul in prayer to God, he asked Vilate to accompany him to Smith's residence. After being ushered into a private room, Kimball turned to Smith and, pointing to Vilate, said, "Brother Joseph, here is Vilate." Smith, according to Kimball, "wept like a child" and immediately sealed the faithful couple "for time and all eternity," saying, "Brother Heber, take her, and the Lord will give you a hundredfold."[28]

Throughout this episode, Vilate was evidently unaware of her husband's situation, for Smith also instructed Kimball at or around this same time to marry plurally without telling Vilate, a caution that would have been unnecessary if Vilate knew of Smith's doctrine.[29] Heber agreed but grew conflicted about the subterfuge. Vilate eventually asked what was troubling him; and when Kimball explained his predicament, they settled on two elderly sisters who, they felt, "would cause [Vilate] little, if any, unhappiness."[30] According to Lorenzo Snow, another early apostle and later LDS Church president, when Joseph Smith learned of Kimball's intention, he vetoed the plan, declaring that the "arrangement is of the devil you go and get you a young wife one you can take to your bosom and love and raise children by."[31]

Smith then "commanded" Kimball to marry thirty-one-year-old Sarah Noon, whose husband had apparently deserted her. In fact, Kimball's grandson noted, "Heber was told by Joseph that if he did not do this he would lose his Apostleship and be damned."[32] "I can say," Heber confided to Vilate, "I never suffered more in all the day[s] of my life than since these things c[a]me to pass."[33] "You have my first and best and Eternal love fore time and Eternity," he added on September 3, 1843. "And I pray God the Eternal Father to let you live while I live, fore thare is no Soul that can fill your place in my heart."[34]

Sometime prior to his death in mid-1842, Vinson Knight married Philinda C. Eldredge Myrick.[35] Philinda had wed Levi N. Myrick on November 18, 1827, but he had been killed in the Haun's Mill Massacre in late 1838. According to Knight family history, 

It is said that Martha [McBride Knight, Vinson Knight's first wife] was the first woman to give her consent for her husband to enter Plural Marriage. She knew something was worr[y]ing her husband and he couldn't seem to tell her about it. One evening as she was sitting in the grape arbor behind the house Vinson returned home carrying a basket. He explained to her that he had taken some fruit and vegetables to the widow, Mrs. Levi Merrick, whose husband had been killed at Haun's Mill, M[iss]o[uri]. He also explained to her that he had been told to enter Plural Marriage. That if he had to, this Sister Merrick would be the one he could help best. He must have been greatly relieved when Martha replied, "Is that all."[36]

Knight may have attempted to effect a second plural marriage before his death. On June 23, 1843, William Clayton recorded in his diary: "This A.M. President Joseph [Smith] took me and conversed considerable concerning some delicate matters. . . . Also Brother [Vinson] Knight he [i.e., Joseph Smith] gave him [i.e., Knight] one [i.e., a plural wife] but he went to loose conduct and he could not save him."[37] Following Knight's death, Eldredge married Daniel H. Keeler civilly on February 1, 1843. There is no evidence that Knight's marriages were repeated in the Nauvoo Temple. 

The evidence for Isaac Morley's two early plural marriages is both inferential and based on family tradition. Historian Maureen Ursenbach Beecher was the first to note that Eliza R. Snow recorded the name of her older sister Abigail Leonora Snow Leavitt as "A L Morley." Abigail had been scribe for Eliza's copy of her patriarchal blessing, which Isaac Morley had pronounced on December 19, 1843. Beecher notes that Eliza's identification of her sister by Morley's name "confirms her knowledge that her sister's sealing to Isaac Morley . .. had in fact already taken place."[38] Abigail's name appears simply as "A. Leonora Leavitt" in Morley's own book of his patriarchal blessings in LDS Church Archives. 

In fact, Eliza Snow clearly implies a plural marriage between Isaac and Abigail at least as early as September 1843 in her Biography and Family Record of Lorenzo Snow . . . (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Company, 1884), 70, 73, and 75. Abigail had married Enoch V. Leavitt (1799-1866) in 1821, but by 1830 had left him. She and two daughters joined the LDS Church in 1831. According to Morley family history, Isaac subsequently took as his second plural wife Hannah B. Finch Merriam on January 14, 1844.[39] Finch had married Edwin P. Merriam (born 1803) on November 5, 1831. After three children had been born, Merriam died on September 14, 1842. 

Shortly after his marriage to Finch, Morley and his civil wife, Lucy Gunn, broached the subject of plural marriage with their daughter Cordelia (born 1823). "In the spring of forty-four [1844]," Cordelia remembered in her autobiography, "plural marriage was introduced to me by my parents from Joseph Smith, asking their consent and a request to me to be his wife. Imagine if you can my feelings, to be a plural wife, something I never thought I ever could. I knew nothing of such religion and could not accept it. Neither did I."[40] Cordelia was sealed to Smith by proxy after his death. 

According to his sworn testimony dated June 26, 1869, Joseph Bates Noble reported that 

in the fall of the year A.D. 1840 Joseph Smith, taught him the principle of Celestial marriage or a "plurality of wives", and that the said Joseph Smith declaired that he had received a Revelation from God on the subject, and that the Angel of the Lord had commanded him, (Joseph Smith) to move forward in the said order of marriage, and further, that the said Joseph Smith, requested him, (Jos. Bates Noble) to step forward and assist him in carrying out the Said principle, saying "in revealing this to you I have placed my life in your hands, therefore do not in an evil hour betray me to my enemies.'"[41]

In a second statement given that same day, Noble added "that, on the fifth day of April A.D. 1841, At the City of Nauvoo, County of Hancock, State of Illinois, he married or sealed Louisa Beaman, to Joseph Smith, President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints, according to the order of Celestial Marriage revealed to the Said Joseph Smith."[42] Louisa Beaman was the sister of Noble's civil wife, Mary A. Beaman. 

About performing the sealing of Louisa Beaman to Joseph Smith, Noble later testified: 

626 Q:—... Did you not marry Joseph Smith and Louisa Beeman over at Montrose in Iowa in your house where you lived at that time before you moved over to Nauvoo? A:— No sir it was not performed there. It was per formed on this side of the river. 

627 Q:—Do you mean that it was performed in Nauvoo? A:— Yes sir.

628 Q:— At whose house? A:— At mine. 

629 Q:—Who was present? A:— My family. . . . 

680 Q:— You performed the ceremony and returned across the river that same night did you not? Is that not what you said? A:— Yes sir.

681 Q:— What made you say the other day that Joseph Smith and that women you sealed to him slept together that night? A:— Because they did sleep together. 

682 Q:— If you were not there that night how do you know they slept together? A:— Well they slept together I know. If it was not that night it was two or three nights after that. 

683 Q:— Where did they sleep together? A:— Right straight across the river at my house they slept together. . . . 

686 Q:— . . . Did he [i.e., Joseph Smith] sleep with her [i.e., Louisa Beaman] the first night after the ceremony was performed? A:— He did.

687 Q:— Now you say that he did sleep with her? A:— I do.

688 Q:— How do you know he did? A:— Well I was there.

689 Q:— And you saw them go to bed together? A:— I gave him counsel. 

690 Q:— What counsel did you give him? A:— I said "blow out the lights and get into bed, and you will be safer there", and he took my advice or counsel. (Witness laughs heartily) 

691 Q:— Let the record show that the witness is applauding himself upon the smartness of his answer. . . . 

700 Q:— Well did you stay there until the lights were blown out? A:— No sir I did not stay until they blowed out the lights then.

701 Q:— Well you did not see him get into bed with her that time? A:— No sir. 

702 Q:— And so you don't know whether he followed your advice from your own knowledge? A:— No sir I did not see him, but he told me [he] did. 

703 Q:— Well do you know from your knowledge that he did? A:— Well I am confident he did. 

704 Q:— But you don't know it of your own knowledge from seeing him do it? A:— No sir, for I was not there. 

705 Q:— Was Emma Smith there? A:— No sir. 

706 Q:— Did she know anything about it? A:— No sir, I think not.

707 Q:— Were they married at his house? A:— No sir. 

708 Q:—Where were they married—were they married at your house? A:— Well it was a house that I had rented, —or a house that I owned by the bye, for I owned a whole block there that I had bought.[43]

Two years later to the day after Louisa's sealing to Smith, Noble, according to his "Individual Record" (at www.familysearch.org) and Black (Membership, s.v. "Noble, Joseph Bates"), married Sarah B. Alley as his first plural wife. Their child, George, was born ten months later. "I have a secret to tell you but I am almost afrade," Vilate Kimball wrote to her husband, Heber C , on June 29, 1843, of Alley's pregnancy. "It was commited to Sarah [Noon, whom Heber had married in 18421 and she was requested not to tell me, but she said she concidered me a part of herself and she would tell me, and I might tell you for it was just what you had prophesyed would come to pass. Now if you know what you have said about sarah Abby [i.e., Sarah B. Alleyl then you have got the secret, for it is even so and she is tickled about it and they all appear in better spirits than they did before. How they will carry it out, is more than I know. I hope they have got more faith than I have."[44]

Apparently, Noble had hoped to marry sooner. According to Wil liam Clayton's diary for May 17, 1843: "pres[idenlt. Jloseph Smith] said to bro[ther]. [Benjamin R] Johnson & I that Jloseph]. B[ates]. Nobles when he was first taught this doctrine [i.e., plural marriage] set his heart on one [potential plural wife] & pressed Jloseph]. to seal the contract but he never could get opportunity. It seemed that the Lord was unwilling. Finally another [potential plural wife] came along & he then engaged that one and is a happy man. I learned from this anecdote never to press the prophet but wait with patience & God will bring all things right."[45] Noble took his second plural wife, Mary Ann Washburn, nearly four months after this conversation took place.[46]

John E. Page's early plural marriages are documented in an interview conducted by Joseph Fielding Smith with Page's third civil wife, Mary Judd. Page's first two wives, Betsey Thompson and Lorain Stevens, had died before he married Mary in 1833 and 1838 respectively. In August 1904, Joseph Fielding Smith, future LDS Church Historian, apostle, and president, visited Judd, who reported that "she gave her husband, John E. Page, other wives."[47] In a fuller statement, Smith reported that Page evidently married polygamously during Joseph Smith's lifetime: 

In 1904 I went to the World's Fair in St. Louis. James G. Duffin was presiding over the Central States Mission at that time, and I went with him to see Mary Page Eaton, wife of John E. Page. She was an aged woman, and I was introduced to her. The two of us sat there and talked and I questioned her about plural marriage. I asked her, "Did John E. Page have wives other than you?" She replied, "Yes." I said, "How did he get them?" She said, "I gave them to him." I said, "How come you did that?" She said, "Well, he wanted them and 1 gave them to him." I said, "Well, that was in the days of the Prophet Joseph Smith." She said, "Yes, it was."[48]

According to D. Michael Quinn, Page may have married Nancy Bliss as a plural wife in 1844, but they separated in 1845.[49]

Both of Parley P. Pratt's early wives left statements of their marriages to him. Though she divorced him in the spring of 1853, Pratt's civil wife, Mary Ann Frost Stearns, reported on September 3, 1869: "On the twenty-fourth day of July A.D. 1843, at the City of Nauvoo County of Hancock, State of Illinois She was married or Sealed to Parley P. Pratt for time and eternity, by President Hyrum Smith, in the presence of Mary Ann Young and Elizabeth Brotherton."[50] Frost previously had married Nathan Stearns (born 1809) on April 1, 1832. They had one child before Stearns died in mid-1833. 

Mary Ann also attested that same day in a second affidavit: "On the twenty-fourth day of July A.D. 1843, at the City of Nauvoo, County of Hancock, State of Illinois, She was present and witnessed the marrying or Sealing of Elizabeth Brotherton to Parley P. Pratt for time and eternity, by Hyrum Smith Patriarch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in the presence of Mary Ann Young."[51]

On August 2, 1869, Elizabeth Brotherton, Pratt's first plural wife, stated: "On the twenty fourth day of July A.D. 1843, in the City of Nauvoo County of Hancock, State of Illinois, She was married or sealed to Parley P. Pratt for time and all eternity, by Patriarch Hyrum Smith, in the presence of Mary Ann Young, and Mary Ann Pratt, Mary Ann Pratt being Sealed at the same time."[52] "[B]e buisy [sic] in doing good," Parley wrote to Elizabeth less than three months after their marriage, "and God will bless you, and I will bless you, and you shall want for no good thing, and soon you shall have a house and home, and enjoy more and more of the society of those you love, perhaps I may not see you tonight because of other matters. If not I will see you tomorrow night at the same place at six O Clock or between that and nine."[53]

Parley and Mary Ann's sealing was evidently more complicated than Mary Ann's affidavit indicates. Pratt family tradition holds that Pratt and Sterns, as well as Pratt and Brotherton, were initially sealed by Hyrum Smith on June 23, 1843, but that, when Joseph Smith learned of the ceremony performed in his absence and without his permission, he rescinded them. Although the reasons are not clear, Joseph Smith had apparently wanted Pratt's first plural wife to be Olive Gray Frost.[54] However, Parley evidently prevailed, and one month later, on July 24, 1843, Joseph asked Hyrum[55] to seal Pratt and his first civilly married wife, Thankful Halsey Pratt (married 1827, died 1837), for eternity, with Frost acting as proxy for Halsey; then seal Pratt and Sterns; and finally seal Brotherton to Pratt as his first plural wife. Smith subsequently wed Olive Frost, probably at around this same time.[56]

Mary Ann's support of plural marriage vacillated. Vilate Kimball, writing to Heber C. on June 29, 1843, describes Mary Ann's reaction to the doctrine: 

I have had a viset from brother Parley [P. Pratt] and his wife [Mary Ann]. They are truly converted [to plural marriage]. It appears that J[ose]p[h] has taught him some principles and told him his privilege and even appointed one [i.e., Elizabeth Brotherton] for him. I Dare not tell you what it is [as] you would be astonished and I guess some tried. She has be[e]n to me for counsel. I told her I did not wish to advise in such matters. Sister Pratt has be[e]n rageing against these things. She told me herself that the devel had ben in her until within a few days past. She said the Lord has shown her it was all right. She wants Parley to go ahead, says she will do all in her power to help him. They are so ingagued I fear they will run to[o] fast. They asked me many questions on principle. I told them I did not know much and I rather they would go to those that had authority to teach. Parley said he and I were interrupted before he got what instruction he wanted and says he did not know when he should have an opportunity. He seamed willing to wate. I told him these were sacred things and he better not make a move until he got more instruction.[57]

Reportedly, Parley was eager to take additional wives, which Mary Ann initially sanctioned. As William Clayton, writing in his diary on August 20, 1843, noted: "I also had talk with M[ary]. Aspen who is in trouble. P[arley]. P. P[ratt] has through his wife [Mary Ann Pratt] made proposals to her but she is dissatisfied[.] Sister P[ratt]. is obstinate. When P[arley]. went away sister P[ratt]. cautioned A. [Aspin] against me &. said the Twelve would have more glory than me &x. I tried to comfort her &L told her what her privilege was."[58] However, Mary Ann's views changed, perhaps as the challenges of life as a plural wife became apparent. As Parley later wrote of her: "Afterwards Alienated from her husband and Saught by all manner of falsehoods to distroy his Influence and Caracter. But repenting of these things and Confessing them before President B[righam]. Young in the temple at Nauvoo and Solemnly conveneting to take back her words of falsehood, Wherever they had been Spoken she was frankly forgiven by her husband [himself]."[59]

Although Parley and Mary Ann may have been sealed in July 1843, Joseph Smith subsequently indicated that they had not been sealed for eternity and Mary Ann was not later anointed to Parley as a part of his second anointing.[60] Instead, she was sealed and anointed to Joseph Smith by proxy in the Nauvoo Temple in early 1846.[61] Thus, Joseph Smith may have wanted to take Mary Ann as a plural wife, as he had Orson Hyde's wife, Marinda. When he discovered that Hyrum had sealed the Pratts, he cancelled the sealing, then arranged to have Parley and Thankful sealed for eternity, Parley and Mary Ann sealed for time, Parley and Elizabeth Brotherton sealed for both time and eternity, and finally had himself sealed to Mary Ann and to her sister, Olive, for eternity.[62]

Willard Richards's first plural marriages—to teenage sisters Sarah and Nanny Longstroth in January 1843—are attested to only in Richards's family history. Prior to his first plural marriage, Richards had married Jennetta Richards civilly in 1838. According to Sarah Longstroth's descendants: 

When Joseph Smith told Grandpa [i.e., Willard Richards] to take another wife, he had no one in mind; so the Prophet said, "Willard, what about some of the women you knew in England?" And immediately Grandfather thought of the Longstroth family and how they had taken good care of him when he was so ill. The Longstroths had come to America and were living in St. Louis, and Willard went down there and asked the parents for Sarah and Nanny. Sarah was sixteen, and Nanny was fourteen. The parents thought Nanny was too young, so Willard said, "Let me marry her, and she can come back home and stay with you and when you feel that she is ready you can send her to me." With the consent of the girls this was agreed upon. A few weeks later, Grandpa Longstroth brought the girls to Nauvoo. They married Dr. Willard Richards in January 1843. Joseph Smith performed the ceremony. 

Nanny returned to St. Louis with her father, and Sarah may have stayed in Nauvoo for awhile, but later was with her family in Rockport, Mo. where they were living in 1843 and early 1844. The Longstroths moved to Nauvoo in Mar 1844 and it is known that Sarah was living with her family when Willard's wife Jennetta died (July 1845). Sarah and Nanny were sealed to Willard Richards in the Nauvoo Temple Jan[uary] 22 and 25,1846 and it was after this time that the marriages were consumated.[63]

Richards's third Nauvoo plural marriage—to Susannah (Lee) Liptrot—as well as the plural marriage of his own sister Rhoda to Joseph Smith five months later are documented in his diary, though in shorthand. As deciphered, Richards's diary entry for June 12, 1843, reads: "Marr[ie]d Susana L[ee] Liptrot a[nd] Rhoda [Richards] to Joghf [Joseph Smith]."[64] Susannah was the widow of John Liptrot (born 1804), married in England before 1829. All four early wives were subsequently resealed (Jennetta, by proxy) to Richards in the Nauvoo Temple.[65]

The two early plural marriages of Joseph Smith's older brother, Hyrum Smith, are documented in the testimonies of Hyrum's wives. His first civil wife, Jerusha Barden, died in 1837. Later that same year, he married British convert Mary Fielding. On August 11, 1843, he took as his first plural wife Mary's sister, Mercy R. Fielding Thompson, the widow of Robert B. Thompson, who had died on August 27, 1841. Before the end of the month, Hyrum married a second plural wife, Catherine Phillips. "On the eleventh day of August A.D. 1843 at the City of Nauvoo, County of Hancock State of Illinois,"Mercy stipulated on June 19, 1869, "She was married or Sealed for time to Hyrum Smith, Presiding Patriarch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, by Joseph Smith, President of the Same, according to the laws of said Church regulating marriage. In the presence of her sister Mary Smith."[66] In an untitled autobiographical sketch, dated December 20, 1880, Mercy added: 

On the 11 of August 1843 I was called by direct revelation from Heaven through Brother Joseph the Prophet to enter into a state of Plural Marriage with Hyrum Smith the Patriarch. This subject when first communicated to me tried me to the very core of my former traditions and every natural feeling of my Heart rose in opposition to this Principle but I was convinced that it was appointed by him who is too wise to err and too good to be unkind. Soon after Marriage I became an inmate with my sister in the House of Hyrum Smith where I remained until his Death sharing with my sister the care of his numerous family I had from the time I moved to his House acted as scribe Recording Patriarchal Blessings.[67]

Hyrum and Mercy had participated six weeks earlier, on May 29, 1843, in a proxy ceremony uniting Hyrum and Jerusha with Mercy acting as proxy for Jerusha, then the union of Mercy and Robert with Hyrum acting as proxy for Robert. Thus, Hyrum and Mercy's celestial marriage was for time only. In 1883, Mercy explained to Joseph Smith III, who was reluctant to believe that his father had practiced plural marriage: 

My beloved husband, R[obert]. B. Thompson, your father's private secretary to the end of his mortal life, died August 27th, 1841, (I presume you will remember him.) Nearly two years after his death your father told me that my husband had appeared to him several times, telling him that he did not wish me to live such a lonely life, and wished him to request your uncle Hyrum to have me sealed to him for time. Hyrum communicated this to his wife (my sister) who, by request, opened the subject to me, when everything within me rose in opposition to such a step, but when your father called and explained the subject to me, I dared not refuse to obey the counsel, lest peradventure I should be found fighting against God; and especially when he told me the last time he came with such power that it made him tremble. He then enquired of the Lord what he should do; the answer was, "Go and do as thy servant hath required. He then took an opportunity of communicating this to your uncle Hyrum who told me that the Holy Spirit rested upon him from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. The time was appointed, with the consent of all parties, and your father sealed me to your uncle Hyrum for time, in my sister's room, with a covenant to deliver me up in the morning of the resurrection to Robert Blas[h]el Thompson, with whatever offspring should be the result of that union, at the same time conseling your uncle to build a room for me and move me over as soon as convenient, which he did, and I remained there as a wife the same as my sister to the day of his death. All this I am ready to testify to in the presence of God, angels and men.[68]

A decade later, giving testimony in the Temple Lot Case, she commented: 

If there was communication between the eternal world and this I should never have been sealed to any body—if I had not obeyed the command of the Lord, when the Lord sent it through an angel to his prophet Joseph Smith—and sent my own husband or a message from him in the eternal world to me through the prophet, and to his brother Hyrum that he should take me, and my little child—that is the word that my dead husband sent from the eternal world to brother Hyrum that he should take charge of me and my little child and keep us in this world, and on the day of resurrection to deliver us up safely to my husband. Now that was the message from my husband to the prophet, or to brother Hyrum through the prophet, commanding Hyrum to take me to live with my sister with my little child, and he did not act on it quick enough, and so he came the second time—or he went and enquired of the Lord—and the Lord spoke to him through the angel, and when he inquired of the Lord the voice told him to go and do as his servant required him to do and that was the time that he went to Hyrum and told him what he had been ordered to do, and he then sent my sister over to me to break the word to me.[69]

Of her own experience as Hyrum Smith's plural wife, Catherine Phillips testified in 1903: 

I was married to Hyrum Smith, brother of the Prophet Joseph Smith, as his plural wife, and lived with him as his wife. 

The sealing was performed by the Prophet Joseph Smith himself in Nauvoo, State of Illinois, in August, 1843, in the brick office belonging to my husband, and occupied at the time as a dwelling by Brother and Sister Rob[er]t. and Julia Stone, and was witnessed by my mother, Sister Stone and her daughter Hettie. 

In consequence of the strong feeling manifested at the time against plural marriage and those suspected of having entered into it, I, with my mother, moved to St. Louis near the close of the year, where I was living when the Prophet Joseph and my husband were martyred.[70]

Hyrum Smith's conversion to plural marriage was difficult. As Brigham Young recalled in 1866: 

Right north of the Masonic Hall in Nauvoo the ground was not fenced, this was in the year 1842 [sic, 1843]. There were some rails laid along to fence up some lots. Hyrum [Smith] saw me and said, "brother Brigham, I want to talk to you." We went together and sat upon those rails that were piled up. He commenced by saying, "I have a question to ask you. In the first place I say unto you, that I do know that you and the twelve know some things that I do not know. I can understand this by the motions, and talk, and doings of Joseph, and I know there is something or other, which I do not understand, that is revealed to the Twelve. Is this so"? I replied "I do not know anything about what you know, but I know what I know.["] Then he said, "I have mistrusted for along time that Joseph has received a revelation that a man should have more than one wife, and he has hinted as much to me, but I would not bear it." . . . 

I will now go back to where I met Hyrum. He said to me, "I am convinced that there is something that has not been told me. I said to him, "brother Hyrum, Joseph would tell you everything the Lord reveals to him, if he could." I must confess I felt a little sarcastic towards Hyrum, although he was just as honest as an Angel, and as full of integrety as the Gods' but he had not that ability which Joseph possessed to see and understand men as they were. I took advantage of this, and I said to him, "Brother Hyrum, I will tell you about this thing which you say you do not know about if you will sware with an uplifted hand, before God, that you will never say another word against Joseph and his doings, and the doctrines he is preaching to the people." He replied, "I will do it with all my heart; I want to be saved" and he stood upon his feet, saying, "I want to be knowmg the truth and to be saved." And he made a covenant there, never again to bring forward one argument or use any influence against Joseph's doings. Joseph had a g[ood] many wives sealed to him. I told Hyrum the whole story, and he bowed to it and wept like a child, and said God be praised. He went to Joseph and told him what he had learned, and renewed his covenant with Joseph, and they went heart and hand together while they lived, and they were together when they died, and they are together now defending Is rael.[71]

Hyrum subsequently became a staunch proponent of his younger brother's doctrine. He presented his brother's revelation on plural marriage (LDS D&C 132) to members of the Nauvoo Stake high council in August 1843 and performed many plural marriage sealings from June 1843 until his and his brother's deaths a year later. 

John Smith, Joseph Smith's uncle, married Clarissa Lyman on September 11, 1815. According to Jesse Nathaniel Smith, John then married Mary Aikens as his first plural wife on August 13, 1843.[72] Aikens had first married Silas Smith (born 1779) in 1828. They had three children before Silas died in 1839. About the same time as his plural marriage to Aikens, John Smith was also sealed, according to Benjamin F. Johnson, to Julia Ellis Hills Johnson: 

My mother having finally separated from my father, by the suggestion or counsel of the Prophet [Joseph Smith! she accepted of and was sealed by him to father John Smith. In this I felt not a little sorrow, for I loved my father and knew him to be naturally a kind and loving parent, a just and noble spirited man. But he had not obeyed the Gospel, had fought it with his words; and as I knew a stream must have a fountain and does not rise above it, so I consoled myself, assured by the Prophet's words that a better day would come to my father.[73]

Julia Ellis had married Ezekiel Johnson (born 1773) in 1801. They had sixteen children. Johnson, who never joined the LDS Church, died in early 1848 in Nauvoo. Prior to Julia Johnson's marriage to John Smith, his nephew Joseph Smith had married as plural wives two of Johnson's daughters: Delcena Johnson Sherman in July 1842, and Almera W. Johnson in May-June 1843. Following Joseph Smith's death, Mary Aikens was sealed to her deceased husband (with John Smith as proxy) in the Nauvoo Temple. Julia Johnson was both resealed and anointed to John Smith. 

The abundant evidence for Joseph Smith's Nauvoo plural wives was first published in Andrew Jenson, "Plural Marriage," Historical Record 6 (May 1887): 233-34. Jenson was followed by Fawn Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet, 2d ed., rev. and enl. (1945; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 457-88; Thomas Milton Tinney, The Royal Family of the Prophet Joseph Smith, Junior (Salt Lake City: Tinney-Green[e] Family Organization Publishing Company, 1973); Danel W. Bachman, "A Study of the Mormon Practice of Plural Marriage before the Death of Joseph Smith" (1975); George D. Smith, "Nauvoo Roots of Mormon Polygamy" (1994); D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power (1994), 587-88; and most recently Todd Compton, In Sacred Loneliness. Although some readers may disagree in a handful of instances with Compton's identifications of Smith's Nauvoo wives,[74] I believe he is accurate. In fact, I am persuaded that the evidence allows for an additional four (if not more) plural wives—Mary Houston, Sarah Scott Mulholland, Mary Ann Frost Stearns Pratt, and Phebe Watrous Woodworth—bringing the total of Joseph Smith's known Nauvoo plural wives to at least thirty-six.[75]

Houston, Woodworth, and Pratt were all sealed and anointed to Joseph Smith by proxy in the Nauvoo Temple, a privilege suggesting a plural marriage during Smith's lifetime. In fact, Woodworth's daughter, Flora Ann, had married Smith during May or June 1843, probably at around the same time as her mother's own possible plural marriage to Smith. Sarah Scott, who had married James Mulholland (1810-39) in early 1839, wed Alexander Mullinder/Mullander (born ca. 1810) civilly on October 25, 1843, with Apostle John Taylor performing the ceremony. Mulholland was probably a "front" husband to conceal Sarah's plural marriage to Smith—much the same arrangement by which Smith had authorized Joseph Kingsbury and Sarah Whitney's "prete[n]ded marriage" on April 29, 1843. Scott was sealed to Mulholland for eternity and to Heber Kimball, not Mullinder, for time on February 3, 1846, in the Nauvoo Temple. The record of that ceremony identifies her explicitly as "Sarah Smith," imply ing an earlier sealing to Joseph Smith. Finally, Orson F. Whitney, son of Helen Mar Kimball Smith Whitney, Joseph Smith's youngest plural wife, wrote in his biography of his grandfather, Heber C. Kimball, that Mary Houston and Sarah Scott were known plural wives of Joseph Smith during Smith's lifetime.[76]

A few other clarifications seem appropriate. First, although Zina Huntington's family history reports that Joseph Smith initially approached her as a prospective plural wife in the winter of 1839-40,[77] Zina herself insisted that Smith never directly broached plural marriage with her until the day of their marriage in October 1841. Rather, "my brother Dimick told me what Joseph had told him [regarding plural marriage]," she recounted. "Joseph did not come until afterwards... . [T]he Lord had revealed to Joseph Smith that he was to marry me. I received it from Joseph through my brother Dimick."[78]

Joseph Smith may have initially raised the topic indirectly with Dimick, possibly at the same time in late 1840 when he was preaching plural marriage to Joseph Bates Noble and one or two others. Smith evidently opposed Zina's civil marriage to Henry Jacobs in March 1841.[79] Only after that marriage did the prophet's overtures become explicit. "He [Joseph Smith] sent word to me by my brother [Dimick]," Zina remembered, "saying, 'Tell Zina I put it off and put it off till an angel with a drawn sword stood by me and told me if I did not establish that principle upon the earth, I would lose my position and my life.'”[80] Impressed by Joseph's urgency, Dimick finally agreed to raise the subject with Zina. Zina did not learn for certain of Smith's intention until October 27, 1841, when he proposed to her, she agreed, and Dimick performed the ceremony. 

Second, H. Michael Marquardt has shown that despite their affidavits attesting to their resealing to Joseph Smith on May 11, 1843, for the benefit of Smith's civil wife, Emma Hale Smith,[81] sisters Emily Dow and Eliza Partridge were in fact probably resealed to Smith twelve days later on May 23, 1843.[82]

Third, both Almera Johnson and Ruth Vose Sayers recalled Hyrum Smith performing their plural marriages to Joseph Smith: Almera in the spring of 1843, and Ruth in February 1843.[83] However, Hyrum evidently did not accept his brother's doctrine until May 26, 1843. Thus, if the two women are remembering correctly that Hyrum was the officiator, the two ceremonies presumably would have occurred between May 26, 1843, and Joseph's and Hyrum's deaths on June 27, 1844. If the dates are correct, then someone else may have officiated. In Ruth's case, it is possible that she was reporting a resealing performed by Hyrum. 

A possible, if garbled, account of Ruth and Joseph's plural relationship is found in Wilhelm Ritter von Wymetal's sensational Mormon Portraits[;] or the Truth about the Mormon Leaders from 1830 to 1886[.] Volume First[.] Joseph Smith the Prophet His Family and His Friends (Salt Lake City: Tribune Printing and Publishing Co., 1886), 64-66. Wymetal's story is third-hand at best but seems to report the accidental discovery by Richard Rushton Jr. (1814-84) of Ruth Sayers in Joseph Smith's Mansion House during the last week of April 1843 while Emma Smith was in St. Louis. Wymetal identifies her as "the beautiful and attractive wife of Elder Edward Blossom, a high councilor of Zion, (afterwards exalted to the apostle ship by Brigham Young)." Ruth, age thirty-five at the time, was married to Edward Sayers, a florist, and the recalled identification of Sayers as "Edward Blossom" may be understandable. However, Sayers was not Mormon and hence was not a Nauvoo Stake high councilor or later apostle. Wymetal, or his sources, may have confused Ruth Sayers with Lucinda Harris,[84] whose husband, George, was a high councilor in Nauvoo, but was never an apostle. For an interesting account of Edward Sayers in Utah in 1853, see Mrs. B[enjamin]. G. Ferris (Cornelia Woodcock Ferris), The Mormons at Home . . . (New York: Dix & Edwards, 1856), 185-86. Ferris also describes Vienna Jacques Shearer (124-26, 154-56, 186-87), reputedly one of Joseph Smith's plural wives. If Ferris's information is correct, Shearer was probably not sealed to Joseph Smith during his life (although she was sealed to Smith by proxy in 1858). 

William Smith, Joseph Smith's mercurial younger brother, married Caroline Grant civilly in 1833. Ten years later, following a poorly executed foray into John C. Bennett's unauthorized system of plural marriage in early 1842, William evidently married first Mary Ann Covington Sheffield, then perhaps Mary Jones prior to Joseph Smith's death. In both instances, according to Covington, Brigham Young performed the ceremony. Mary Ann Covington had previously married James Sheffield (born 1814) in England in early 1836 but reportedly left him when he mistreated her. She arrived in Nauvoo in early 1843. In 1892, Covington, then in Salt Lake City, affirmed her and Jones's plural marriages to William Smith:[85]

13 ... A:— Well I went to live at Orson Hyde's and soon after that time Joseph Smith wished to have an interview with me at Orson Hyde's. He had the interview with me [in April 1843], and then asked me if I had ever heard of a mans having more wives than one, and I said I had not. He then told me that he had received a revelation from God that a man could have more wives than one, and that men were now being married in plural marriage. He told me soon after that his brother William wished to marry me as a wife in plural marriage if I felt willing to consent to it.... 

14 Q:— State to the reporter whether or not you consented?. . .

15 . . . A:-Yes sir. 

16 Q:— You consented? A:— Yes sir I did. 

17 Q:— State to the reporter whether or not you were ever married to William Smith? A:— I was married to him. 

18 Q:— Who performed the ceremony? A:— Brigham Young.

19 Q:— Can you state who was present at the performance of the ceremony besides Brigham Young? A:— Not anybody but William Smith and myself. 

20 Q:— State to the reporter whether or not—whether or not you ever witnessed any other ceremonies, where anyone was married in plural marriage? . . . 

21 Q:— How many did you witness? A:— I witnessed one. 

22 Q:— What was that? A:— I witnessed one other plural marriage to William Smith. 

23 Q:— State to the reporter who that was? . . . A:— It was Mary Jones—her name was Mary Jones.[86]

24 Q:— Who performed the ceremony? A:— It was Brigham Young

27 Q:— Was that last ceremony you have mentioned where he was married to Mary Jones performed after or before the ceremony where you were married to him? A:— After.. .. 

30 Q:— Was this after or before the death of Joseph Smith?... A:— It was before the death of Joseph Smith. 

145 Q:— In whose house were you married to William B. Smith?. . .

146 .. . A:— Well it was in her house—in Agnes Smith's house. . . .

183 Q:— And you swear positively that you roomed with William B. Smith as his wife one night, but you can't say whether it was five nights or ten nights? A:— Yes sir, I know I did one night—and I can't say how many more. . . . 

197 Q:— Is it not a fact that you were just sealed to him for eternity, and that that is how Brigham Young sealed you to him,—just for eternity? A:— I was sealed to him for time and eternity. I was sealed to him as everybody else was.[87]

While Covington reports that her marriage to William Smith took place in the fall of 1843, the ceremony may have actually occurred sometime during April-May 1844 (or perhaps in late spring 1843), as William was living in the eastern United States from the summer of 1843 to April 1844. 

On October 19, 1845, William was excommunicated from the LDS Church for various infractions, including unauthorized plural marriages, undertaken after Joseph Smith's death. In late 1846, Covington married Joseph A. Stratton (born 1821). Stratton died in 1850 in Salt Lake City. In 1864 Covington wed Chauncey Walker West, who had married Mary Ann's sister Sarah in 1855 and who would add a third Covington sister, Susan, as his plural wife in 1867.[88] Later, Covington was sealed to Stratton, with West acting as proxy. 

Like most early Mormon diarists, Erastus Snow did not record his first plural marriage. However, unlike most early diarists, he did record—in code—his early eternal sealing to his civil wife, Artimesia Beaman (married 

1838). She was a sister of Joseph Smith's first Nauvoo plural wife, Louisa Beaman. As translated, Snow's diary entry for February 15, 1844, reads: "Record of Marriage On the 15th day of February 18441 Erastus Snow according to the laws provisions of the Holy Priesthood, was married and sealed for Times Eternity to Artimesia Beman by Hyrum Smith Patriarch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints."[89] According to a later statement by Snow, he was sealed to Minerva White, his first plural wife, in March 1844. Hyrum Smith, "officiating under the Prophet's direction," performed the ceremony.[90] Both wives were later resealed and anointed to Snow in the Nauvoo Temple. 

Five years before he died, Snow publicly described his introduction to early Mormon plural marriage: 

The Prophet Joseph Smith in the year 1841 [sic, 1843] made known the principle of the Celestial Order of Marriage to htm- me. He invited me out for a walk with him and told me that when He was translating the Scriptures that part of it w[h]ere one of the Old Prophets was deviding His property to His ofspring. AThen it was that the Lord revealed unto himA That the time had come now when the principle should be practiced. Joseph told me the Names of some of the wives or wom[e]n which had been sealed to him by Joseph B. Noble. That Emma His 1st wife was acquainted with Athese wom[elnA and had administered to him but she had turned against him now. That in the conversation the Prophet was pure and Noble. He [i.e., Erastus Snow] testified that He was perfectly acquainted with the Wives of the Prophet Joseph. The 1st ones Name was Luisa Demon [i.e., Louisa Beaman] who was a pure and virtuous woman all her life. 

Emma believed that there could not be a Holy Alliance between the man and the woman unless the woman consented to it with all her heart. Emma used her womanly nature to teas and annoy Joseph and went so far as to threaten Joseph that she would leave Him and cohabit with another man and the Lord forbade her in the Revelation. . . . 

I [i.e., Erastus Snow] know and do bare record that He [i.e., Joseph Smith] did [practice plural marriage] and counciled me to obey and enter into this order and about a year after my conversation with him upon the subject He sent His brother [i.e., Hyrum Smith] who sealed [on April 2, 1844] a second wife [i.e., Minerva White] to me and she is living now. 

The Law was that the 1st wife place the right hand of the 2d into the hand of her husband and expressed her willingness and consent. He [i.e., Erastus Snow] entered into that order of Marriage with more Secredness then when He married His 1st wife.[91]

Like Erastus Snow's early plural marriage, the evidence for John Taylor's two plural marriages is found only in his family's genealogical records. As summarized in Taylor's official biography, The Life of John Taylor, by B. H. Roberts (1892; reprinted, Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1963), 465-66, 471-83, Taylor married Leonora Cannon civilly in 1833, followed by plural wives, Elizabeth Kaighan on December 12, 1843, and Jane Ballantyne two months later on February 25, 1844.[92] Though not stated, Hyrum Smith probably performed both ceremonies. In 1845-46, all three wives were resealed and anointed to Taylor (as were an additional five plural wives) in the Nauvoo Temple. 

"When this principle was first made known to us by Joseph Smith," remembered Taylor, an apostle since 1838, 

it was in Nauvoo. . . . We were assembled in the little office over the brick store. There being present Bro[ther]s B[righam] Yo[u]ng Heber C. Kimball. Orson Hyde & myself.[93] Bro[ther] Willard Richards may have been present too, but I am not positive. Upon that occasion, Joseph Smith laid before us the whole principle pertain[in]g to that doctrine, and we believed it. Having done this Joseph felt, as he said, that he had got a big burden rolled off his shoulders. He felt the responsibility of that matter resting heavily upon him. Notwithstanding, however, that we receiv[e]d the princple <St believed it, yet we were in no great hurry to enter into it. Sometime after this, I was riding out of Nauvoo when I met Joseph coming in. We met in the old graveyard ... and I moved to Bro[ther] Joseph and he moved to me, I think we were both on horseback, but of that I am not sure, Said he "Bro[ther] Taylor stop" and I stopped. He looked me right in the eye, and spoke with all the solemnity that I ever heard him speak, said he: "Brother Taylor, that principle has got to be complied with forthwith; and if not, the Key will not be turned." He had told us before that if this principle was not entered into, the Kingdom could not go one step further.[94]

"Did I feel to stand in the way of this great, eternal principle," Taylor added, "and treat lightly the things of God? No. I replied: 'Brother Joseph, I will try and carry these things out,' and I afterwards did, and I have done it more times than once."[95]

According to The Theodore Turley Family Book, compiled by Nancy Romans Turley and Lawrence Edward Turley (n.p., 1978], 56) as well as his "Individual Record" (www.familysearch.org), Theodore Turley married Mary Clift as his first plural wife "prior to 1842." He previously had married Frances Kimberly civilly in 1821. On October 20, 1842, Mary gave birth to a son, Jason. However, as closer scrutiny makes clear, Jason was fathered not by Turley, but by Gustavus Hills, who had formed a liaison with Clift as part of John C. Bennett's unauthorized system of polygamy.[96] Jason died at age one on October 26, 1843. In March-April 1844, Turley married Mary's sisters, Eliza and Sarah Clift, as his plural wives, at which time he presumably also married Mary. The family antedated Theodore and Mary's plural marriage, no doubt reflecting the family's desire to provide Jason with legitimate parentage, at least in the eyes of the LDS Church. All three wives were resealed and anointed to Turley in the Nauvoo Temple. 

As with other poorly documented plural marriages, the evidence for Lyman Wight's early marriages is circumstantial. According to Wight family history: 

At this time, September of 1844, many things were probably going through Lyman Wight's mind. He was now in Prairie, La Crosse County, Wisconsin with his family and four wives. Three of them recently acquired. There was Jane Margaret Ballantyne, 25 year old daughter of John and Janet Ballantyne, Scottish emigrants with the company. Jane was pregnant and expecting a child in late winter. Then there was Mary Hawley, 22 year old daughter of Pierce and Sarah Hawley, Vermonters with the company. The next was Mary Ann Hobart, 17 year old daughter of Otis and Sophoronia [sic] Hobart.... There, of course, was the ever faithful Harriet [Benton], now age 44 and at the end of her childbearing years. Harriet was old enough to be the other wives' mother. Harriet appears to stoically accept the new and everlasting covenant of plural marriage or perhaps she welcomed the company. We have no record of her opinion.[97]

If Wight, an LDS apostle since 1841, had married polygamously by September 1844 and if one of his wives were due to give birth by March 1845 at the latest, the plural marriages would have most probably been performed before Joseph Smith died on June 27, 1844. 

Lyman left Nauvoo for the Wisconsin pineries ca. July 21-22, 1843. Among the 150 or so people accompanying him and his family were his three wives: Jane Ballantyne, Mary Hawley, and Mary Ann Hobart, as well as their parents and siblings.[98] According to Joseph Smith's diary, Lyman returned to Nauvoo by May 1, 1844. Wight subsequently left for Washing ton, D.C., on May 22, 1844, and returned to Nauvoo on August 6, 1844. He and other members of the Pine Company then left Nauvoo for Wisconsin on August 28, 1844. Assuming that Lyman married plurally before Joseph Smith died, he probably did so before the third week of July 1843. 

In Wisconsin, Wight actively preached plural marriage. Gideon Carter (born 1831) recalled as much during an interview with B. H. Roberts in 1894: 

I remember that while he [i.e., Wight! and his company were stopping at Prairie La Crosse in the fall and winter of 1844-45, Lyman Wight's son, Orange L. Wight, who was the husband of my sister Matilda, married a plural wife, a young lady to whom he had been engaged before marrying my sister, but with whom he had broken though some misunderstanding. I understood that Lyman Wight performed the ceremony. En route from Texas one 

Joel Miles married a plural wife; and Lyman Wight himself, before we arrived in Texas, also married a plural wife; and I remember distinctly that while living in Texas he had three wives, and I think he had four. 

Question by B. H. Roberts: Mr. Carter, did Lyman Wight say that Joseph Smith taught plural marriage, and did he practice it by virtue of the prophet Joseph Smith having introduced it? 

Answer: He did. He said that he saw and heard read the revelation establishing plural marriage before Joseph Smith's death. I have heard Lyman Wight relate many times how Joseph Smith announced the revelation to his brother Hyrum. Hyrum did not at first receive it with favor. His whole nature revolted against it. He said to Joseph that if he attempted to introduce the practice of that doctrine as a tenet of The Church it would break up The Church and cost him his life. "Well," Joseph replied, "it is a commandment from God, brother Hyrum, and if you don't believe it, if you will ask the Lord He will make it known to you." The matter caused Hyrum much distress and anguish of heart, he well-nigh sweat blood over it, so repugnant was it to his feelings, and such his dread of seeing it introduced into The Church; but he inquired of God, according to Wight's statement, and he received from the Lord the same revelation that Joseph had—that it was a true doctrine, and a commandment from God. . . . 

Lyman Wight also said that Joseph Smith had given him authority to perform these plural marriage ceremonies in connection with other ceremonies in the Church.[99]

Orange Wight recounted some of the challenges facing young men in Nauvoo during the early years of plural marriage: 

At first the Doctrine was taught in private.... I noticed when in company with the you[n]g folks the Girls were calling one another Spirituals. ... Now altholughj only in my 20th year would not be 20 untill 29 November [18143, I concluded to lo[olk about and try to pick up one or more of the young Ladies, before they were all gone, so I commenced keeping company with Flora Woodworth, Daughter of Lucian Woodworth, called the Pagan Prophet. I was walking along the street with Flora near the Prophets residence when he Joseph [Smith] drove up in his carrage stoped and spoke to I and Flora and asked us to get in the carrage and ride with him he opened the doore for us and when we were seated oposite to him he told the driver to drive on we went to the Temple lot and many other places during the Afternoon and then he drove to the Woodworth house and we got out and wen[t] in. 

After we got in the house sister Woodworth took me in another room and told me that Flora was one of Josephs wives, I was awar[el or believed that Eliza R. Snow and the two patrage [Partridgel Girls were his wives but was not informed about Flora. But now sister Woodworth gave me all the information nessary, so I knew Joseph Believed and practiced Poligamy.[100]

Lyman Wight was excommunicated from the LDS Church on December 3, 1848, for insubordination. Though his wives remained with him, they were never resealed or anointed to him in the Nauvoo Temple.

Edwin D. Woolley's early plural marriages are documented and summarized in Leonard J. Arrington's biography, From Quaker to Latter-day Saint: Bishop Edwin D. Woolley (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1976), 111-14, 489. Woolley married Mary Wickersham civilly in 1831. Before the end of 1843, he also married two plural wives: Louisa Gordon Rising and Ellen Wilding. Gordon was separated from David L. Rising (born ca. 1816, married mid-1838). The second of their two children was born ca. 1841-42, but David did not die until September 1845. As Woolley and Louisa's first child, Edwin Gordon, later wrote: "Edwin D. Woolley was among the first who adopted the principle of plural marriage as taught by the Prophet Joseph, and he received at the hands of the Prophet for his first plural wife Louisa Chapin Gordon, the mother of the subject of this sketch, and afterwards received a second plural wife by the same authority, so that before leaving Nauvoo at the time of the exodus in 1846 he had three living wives."[101] Though all three women were resealed to Woolley in the Nauvoo Temple, only Wickersham was anointed to him.

The most thorough treatment of Brigham Young's plural marriages is Jeffery Ogden Johnson's "Determining and Defining 'Wife': The Brigham Young Households," in Brigham Youngs Homes, edited by Colleen Whitley (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2002), 1-12, 219-30. Second only to Joseph Smith, Brigham Young was the most married of early Mormon polygamist husbands. Following the death of his first civil wife, Miriam Works, in 1832, he married Mary Ann Angell in early 1834, then took as his first plural wives Lucy Ann Decker Seeley in mid-1842, Augusta Adams Cobb and Harriet Cook in November 1843, and Clarissa Decker (Lucy's sister) in May 1844.[102] In about 1835, Lucy had married William Seeley (born 1816). After three children, they reportedly separated by 1842. Seeley died on May 20, 1851. Augusta Adams married Henry Cobb (born 1798) in late 1822. They had seven children, who remained in Boston after Adams joined the LDS Church. Adams and Cobb evidently separated by 1843. Cobb died in mid-1872.[103]

All four of Young's plural wives left affidavits of their sealings to him. In the first, Lucy Decker stated: "On the fourteenth day of June A.D. 1842, in the City of Nauvoo, County of Hancock, State of Illinois, She was married or Sealed for time and all eternity to President Brigham Young, by the Prophet Joseph Smith, in the presence of Elder Willard Richards one of the Twelve."[104] In two affidavits, both made on the same date, Augusta Adams attested: "On the Second day of November A.D. 1843, She was married or sealed, for time and all eternity to Pres[iden]t. Brigham Young, by the Prophet Joseph Smith, in the City of Nauvoo, County of Hancock State of Illinois, in the presence of Mary Ann Young, Fanny Murray, and Harriet Cook." The second one reads: "On the Second day of November A.D. 1843, in the City of Nauvoo, County of Han cock State of Illinois, She witnessed the marrying or Sealing of Fanny Murray to President Joseph Smith, by President Brigham Young; Mary Ann Young and Harriet Cook, being present."[105]

Harriet Cook also made two affidavits, also both on the same date: "On the Second day of November, A.D. 1843, in the City of Nauvoo, Hancock Co[unty]. State of Illinois, She was married to President Brigham Young by the Prophet Joseph Smith, for time and eternity, in the presence of Mary Ann Young, Fanny Murray Smith, and Augusta Adams Young." The second one reads: "On the Second day of November A.D. 1843, in the City of Nauvoo, Hancock Co[unty]. State of Illinois, She was present and witnessed the marrying or Sealing of Fanny Murray to President Joseph Smith, for time and eternity, by President Brigham Young; Mary Ann Young, and Augusta Adams Young being present."[106]

The fourth wife, Clara Decker stated: "On the eighth day of May A.D. 1844, in the City of Nauvoo, Hancock Co[unty]. State of Illinois, She was married or Sealed for time and eternity to President Brigham Young, by Elder Willard Richards, one of the Twelve, by Sanction of Pres[iden]t. Joseph Smith, and in the presence of Elder Lorenzo D. Young, Harriet P. Young & Lucy Ann Young."[107]

Brigham Young's affection for his wives is evident in a letter he wrote from Philadelphia on August 17, 1843, to his first wife, Mary Ann Angell: "Give my love to .. . Br[otherl Deckers famely [Young had married Lucy Decker two months earlier] and finely all that you have an opertunity .. . take the first Share of my Love to yourself and then to the rest . . . Give my love to Sister Haritt [i.e., Harriet Cook, whom Young would marry on November 2, 1843, ten days after his return to Nauvoo] if she is there.... She is a fine wooman."[108] Mary Ann, Lucy, Augusta, Harriet, and Clarissa were all later sealed to Young in the Nauvoo Temple. Mary Ann, Lucy, and Harriet (and presumably Clarissa) were also anointed to him. Augusta was anointed to Joseph Smith. 

The last of the early Mormon polygamist husbands, Lorenzo Dow Young, married Persis Goodall civilly in 1826, then wed Harriet P. Wheeler Decker plurally in early 1843. Lorenzo's older brother, Brigham, probably performed the ceremony. Harriet previously had married Isaac P. Decker (1799-1873) in 1820. They had six children, including Lucy and Clarissa, who married Brigham Young as plural wives. Harriet and Isaac apparently separated by 1843. According to Decker family history: 

Isaac [Decker] did not believe in polygamy, and after having lost his fortune as a banker for the Church in Nauvoo, he could not afford more than one wife, but being a stubborn "Dutchman" he did not tell the church authorities his reason for not entertaining polygamy. He [i.e., Wayne Decker] says that Brigham Young, becoming regusted [sic] with Isaac, worked on Har riet to marry Lorenzo, telling her that Isaac was not a faithful member of the Church because he did not live up to its Scriptures. That is the reason Harriet did marry Lorenzo [Dow Young] then, and a few years later when Isaac did come out west, he got even with Harriet by marrying three or four other wives just to spite her.[109]

Persis and Lorenzo had separated by January 27, 1846, when she was sealed and anointed to Levi Richards (1799-1876) as a second wife in the Nauvoo Temple.[110] Harriet remained with Lorenzo, to whom she was re-sealed and anointed in the Nauvoo Temple. 

Analysis 

Not surprisingly, given both the secretive nature of early Mormon plural marriage as well as later trends in territorial Utah, more than half of these early polygamist husbands had no more than two wives prior to Joseph Smith's death. Close to an additional third had a maximum of three wives. (See Table 1.) 

Table 1: Total Number of Wives Per Husband, 1841–44, Includes Civil and Plural Wives

Total Number of Wives	Number of Husbands	Percentage of Husbands
Two	14	50.0
Three	9	32.0
Four(a)	3	11.0
Five(b)	1	3.5
Thirty-seven(c)	1	3.5

1. Willard Richards, Theodore Turley, and Lyman Wight
2. Brigham Young
3. Joseph Smith

On average, husbands were older than their wives at all marriages, both civil and plural. (See Table 2.) The youngest man to marry civilly was Lorenzo Dow Young (to Persis Goodall) at age eighteen, the oldest John Smith (to Clarissa Lyman) at thirty-four. The youngest man to marry plurally was William D. Huntington (to Caroline Clark) at twenty-four, the oldest John Smith (to Mary Aikens Smith) at sixty-two. The youngest woman to marry civilly was Tamson Parshley (to Howard Egan) at age thirteen, the oldest Leonora Cannon (to John Taylor) at thirty-six. The youngest woman to marry plurally was Helen Mar Kimball (to Joseph Smith) at fourteen, the oldest Julia Ellis Hills Johnson (to John Smith) at sixty. 

While at first glance, it may appear that a high percentage of plural wives were married to other men at the time of their plural marriage (18 percent), Joseph Smith's plural marriages accounted for all of these as well as for more than a third of his own plural marriages. In fact, the majority of plural wives had never previously been married at the time of their plural marriage.[111] Still it is not always possible to differentiate convincingly between married and separated wives. (See Table 3.) 

Table 2: Age at Civil and Plural Marriages, 1841–44

Number and Type of Marriage	Husbands: Average Age	Husbands: Range	Wives: Average Age	Wives: Range
First civil(a)	24	18–34	21	13–36
First plural	39	24–62	28	16–46
Second plural	42	32–62	28	14–60
Third plural	42	36–48	22	15–31
Fourth plural	40	38–42	27	15–40
Fifth+ plural(b)	38	38	30	14–58

1. Does not include the second and/or third civil marriages of John E. Page, Parley P. Pratt, Hyrum Smith, and Brigham Young 
2. Applies only to Joseph Smith

Table 3: Marital Status of Plural Wives, at Time of Plural Marriage, 1841–44

Marital Status	Including Joseph’s Wives – Number	Including Joseph’s Wives – Percentage	Excluding Joseph Smith’s Wives – Number	Excluding Joseph Smith’s Wives – Percentage	Joseph Smith’s Wives Only – Number	Joseph Smith’s Wives Only – Percentage
Single	46	58	28	63	18	50
Widowed	11	14	6	14	5	14
Separated	10	13	10	23	0	0
Married	13	16	0	0	13(a)	36
Total	80		44		36

1. Presendia L. Huntington Buell, Sarah Kingsley Howe Cleveland, Elizabeth Davis Gold smith Brackenbury Durfee, Lucinda Pendleton Morgan Harris, Elvira A. Cowles Holmes, Marinda N. Johnson Hyde, Zina D. Huntington Jacobs, Mary E. Rollins Lightner, Sylvia P. Sessions Lyon, Mary Ann Frost Stearns Pratt, Ruth D. Vose Sayers, Patty Bartlett Sessions, and Phebe Watrous Woodworth

Table 4: Pre-Martyrdom (June 27, 1844) Plural Husbands' Positions

Membership/Positions	Number	Percentage
Anointed Quorum	16	57
Second Anointing	11	39
Council of Fifty	14	50
One of the above	17	61
All of the above	10	36
None of the above	11	39
Seventy	3	11
High Priest	14	50
Apostle	11	39

Also of interest is the fact that twenty-one women (26 percent of Nauvoo plural wives) were biological sisters. Six of Joseph Smith's wives (16 percent of his plural wives and 7.5 percent of all plural wives) are included in this category (the asterisk indicates Joseph Smith's sister-wives): Pamelia and Adeline Andrus Benson, Ruth and Margaret Moon Clayton, Elizabeth and Mary Ann Buchanan Coolidge, Caroline and Harriet Clark Huntington, Sarah and Nanny Longstroth Richards, Mary and Mercy Fielding Smith, *Zina and Presendia Huntington Smith, *Emily and Eliza Partridge Smith, *Maria and Sarah Lawrence Smith, and Eliza, Mary, and Sarah Clift Turley. 

The majority of plural husbands were members of an elite class of LDS priesthood holders. All of them had been ordained to the Melchizedek Priesthood and all held the office of Seventy or higher. Just being practicing polygamists prior to Joseph Smith's death put them in a select category. But all of them were also members of either Smith's Quorum of the Anointed (early temple endowment initiates) or of the Council of Fifty (political kingdom of God), or had received their second anointings. One-third of plural husbands received all of these privileges prior to Smith's death; but more than a third of plural husbands received none of these blessings before Smith died. (See Tables 4 and 5.) 

[Editor’s Note: For Table 5, please see PDF below]

Given the retrospective significance of Nauvoo's Female Relief Society, it is interesting that only forty-seven (3.5 percent) of the 1,331 identified members were involved in early polygamy as either civil or plural wives. More precisely, 16 percent of women married to Nauvoo's early plural husbands were members of this women's organization: 61 percent of the civilly married wives (n = 17) and 38 percent of the plural wives (n = 30). Significantly, however, 50 percent of Joseph Smith's plural wives were Relief Society members (n = 18).[112]

On average, civil wives gave birth to their first child thirteen months after their marriage.[113] For plural wives (excluding Joseph Smith's plural wives and a handful of cases in which the first child followed marriage by sixty or more months[114]) the period between marriage and first birth was nearly twice as long (twenty-four months). In fact, evidently only four children—excluding those attributed to Joseph Smith[115]—were born to plural wives prior to Smith's death: Lucina Cahoon (daughter of Reynolds Cahoon and Lucina Roberts Johnson Cahoon), Daniel Clayton (son of William Clayton and Margaret Moon Clayton), Adelmon Kimball (son of Heber C. Kimball and Sarah Peak Noon Kimball), and George Noble (son of Joseph B. Noble and Sarah B. Alley Noble).[116] In contrast, fourteen children were born to civil wives during the same thirty-month period. The ratio of births by status of wife is: .5 per civil wife, .05 per plural wife. Thus, early plural wives were ten times less likely to give birth before Joseph Smith died than were civil wives. 

Drawing upon the above findings, the "average," or representative, early Mormon polygamist husband was twenty-four years old when he married civilly and thirty-nine years old when he first married plurally. He had been ordained to the office of high priest in the Melchizedek Priesthood and, prior to Joseph Smith's death, was either a member of the Quorum of the Anointed or Council of Fifty, or had received his second anointing. The "average" wife was twenty-one years old at the time of her civil marriage or twenty-eight years old at the time of her plural marriage. If a plural wife, she had never previously married and was not a member of Nauvoo's Relief Society (unless she was married plurally to Joseph Smith). A civilly married couple's first child was born thirteen months after their marriage, while a plurally married couple's first child was born two years after their marriage, which would put this birth after the death of Joseph Smith. 

Perhaps the identification of the earliest Mormon polygamist husbands and wives will always remain preliminary at best. In many instances, we are asked to rely on sources and surmises that may not hold up under closer examination. The biographical and genealogical records from which we tease conclusions are only as reliable as the materials used by the compilers, writers, and submitters themselves. Ideally, first-person eyewitness accounts are the most desirable; unfortunately, they are also the scarcest. Despite these limitations, I believe this tentative list helps to bring us nearer to identifying the men and women who fully embraced, during Joseph Smith's lifetime, his celestial doctrine of eternal plural marriage. 

[Editor’s Note: For the Appendix, see PDF below]

---

[1] This number counts Marinda N. Johnson Hyde and Mary Ann Frost Stearns Pratt once each. It does not include the deceased civil wives of John E. Page, Parley P. Pratt, Hyrum Smith, and Brigham Young, nor the husbands of women also married plurally to Joseph Smith, nor the men and women involved in John C. Bennett's unauthorized system of polygamy. 

[2] In early 1994, George D. Smith published the results of his investigations into early plural marriage: "Nauvoo Roots of Mormon Polygamy, 1841 — 1846: A Preliminary Demographic Report," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 37 (Spring 1994): 1-72. Smith's analysis included a comprehensive appendix entitled "Nauvoo Polygamous Families" which listed every known—as of 1994—early plural husband and wife sealed with Joseph Smith's (and later Brigham Young's) approval, together with dates of birth, marriage, sealing, age at sealing, and total family size prior to mid-1844, from mid-1844 to 1846, and from 1846 on. My essay revisits Smith's ground-breaking identifications. 

[3] In addition to the biographical and historical sources cited throughout this essay, the following two references were particularly invaluable: the individual and group genealogical records searchable atwww.familysearch.org and the information assembled in Susan Easton Black's multi-volume Membership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1830-1848 (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University, Religious Studies Center, 1984-88). Despite their occasional errors, both works are essential sources. Unless otherwise indicated, all genealogical information for the men and women here treated comes from these two compilations.

[4] Although I have elsewhere speculated that George J. Adams (1811-80) and William Henry Harrison Sagers (1815-86) also married polygamously during Smith's lifetime, I now believe they should be excluded. In 1843, Adams was summoned to LDS headquarters to answer charges of adultery. He admitted to a sexual encounter and was forgiven. Rumors surfaced soon afterward that he had taken a plural wife, but this cannot be corroborated. Still, it is likely that Adams was at least introduced to Smith's teachings on the subject. Following Smith's death, Adams joined William Smith (Joseph's younger brother) and Samuel Brannan in advocating and practicing polygamy without the approval of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles. As a result, he was excommunicated in 1845. Sagers was linked sexually to his sister-in-law, Phebe Madison, in late 1843, but she married civilly shortly before he was tried for adultery and forgiven. While Joseph Smith subsequently explained plural marriage to Sagers and others, there is no evidence that Sagers contracted an officially sanctioned plural marriage prior to Smith's death. 

[5] For helpful introductions to Mormon plural marriage, see Richard S. Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy: A History, 2d ed. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1989); Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality: The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); and Louis J. Kern, An Ordered Love: Sex Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Utopias-The Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Community (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). 

[6] B. Carmon Hardy, "Lords of Creation, Polygamy, the Abrahamic Household, and Mormon Patriarchy," Journal of Mormon History 20 (Spring 1994): 119-52. 

[7] Lucy Walker Smith Kimball, quoted in Lyman Omer Littlefield, Reminiscences of Latter-day Saints (Logan: Utah Journal Co., Printers, 1888), 45-46.

[8] Repsher's statement is found among the many affidavits on "Celestial Marriage" that Joseph F. Smith collected in 1869-70 in two record books (hereafter Joseph F. Smith Affidavit Books) housed in Archives, Family and Church History Department, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City (hereafter LDS Church Archives). The affidavits in these two books are not arranged in any particular order. They also occasionally contain duplicates. Some of these documents, along with later statements, were published in Joseph Fielding Smith, Blood Atonement and the Origin of Plural Marriage (1905; reprint., Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1970), 67ff. Carets (^^) indicate text added interlinearly in the original document. 

[9] Nauvoo Relief Society, Minutes, August 31, 1842, in Selected Collections from the Archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2 vols. (Salt Lake City: Brigham Young University Press, [December 2002]): 1:19.

[10] Joseph F. Smith Affidavit Books. 

[11] Ibid. See also John Henry Evans and Minnie Egan Anderson, Ezra T. Benson: Pioneer, Statesman, Saint (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1947), 63, 65, 355-56; and Donald Benson Alder and Elsie L Alder, comps., The Benson Family (Salt Lake City: Ezra T. Benson Genealogical Society, Inc., 1979), 38, 54. 

[12] William Clayton, "Affidavit," February 16, 1874, holograph, LDS Church Archives.

[13] Joseph F. Smith, Diary, August 28, 1878, in Selected Collections from the Archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2 vols. (Salt Lake City: Brigham Young University Press, [December 2002]): 1:26. 

[14] John D. Lee, Mormonism Unveiled, or the Life and Confessions of John D. Lee (St. Louis: Bryan, Brand & Co., 1877), 288.

[15] Mary Ellen Kimball, Affidavit, August 6, 1869, Joseph F. Smith Affidavit Books. 

[16] George A. Smith, Letter to Joseph Smith III, October 9, 1869, Journal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (chronology of typed entries and newspaper clippings, 1830-present), October 9, 1869, LDS Church Archives. 

[17] See also the genealogical information in Myrtle Stevens Hyde, Orson Hyde: The Olive Branch of Israel (Salt Lake City: Agreka Books, 2000), 496-99.

[18] Joseph F. Smith Affidavit Books. Myrtle Stevens Hyde, Orson Hyde, 498, dates Hyde's marriage to Price as July 20, 1843. 

[19] Browett and Hyde divorced ca. 1850. 

[20] Mary Ann Price Hyde, "Autobiography," holograph, n.d., not paginated, LDS Church Archives.

[21] Joseph F. Smith Affidavit Books. 

[22] Compton, In Sacred Loneliness, 243. 

[23] Unlike Coolidge, Kelting was excommunicated from the LDS Church January 6, 1849. See the entry for this date in Pottawattamie High Council Minutes, typed excerpts in my possession, original in LDS Church Archives.

[24] Joseph A. Kelting, quoted in B. H. Roberts, Succession in the Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 2d ed. (Salt Lake City: George Q. Cannon & Sons Publishing Co., 1900), 119-20; original affidavit in LDS Church Archives.

[25] Joseph Kelting, Affidavit, September 11, 1903, LDS Church Archives.

[26] Joseph F. Smith Affidavit Books. 

[27] Adelmon died five or six months later during the week of April 18-24, 1843. See The Wasp, April 26, 1843, 3; information courtesy H. Michael Marquardt.

[28] James Lawson (Kimball's son-in-law), Statement, in Orson F. Whitney, Life of Heber C. Kimball, 2d ed. (1880; reprinted, Salt Lake City: Stevens and Wallace, 1945), 440. Heber told Lawson this story when Lawson was courting Kimball's adopted daughter, Elizabeth Ann Noon Kimball, whom Lawson married in 1856. Elizabeth was the daughter of Sarah Peak Noon by her first husband, William Spencer Noon. Author Orson F. Whitney was Kimball's grandson, the son of his and Vilate's daughter, Helen Mar Kimball Smith Whitney, also one of Joseph Smith's plural wives. 

[29] Kimball, Heber C. Kimball, 9-96. 

[30] Whitney, Life of Heber C. Kimball, 336. 

[31] Quoted in Stan Larson, ed., Prisoner for Polygamy: The Memoirs and Letters of Rudger Clawson at the Utah Territorial Penitentiary, 1884-87 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 12. 

[32] Whitney, Life of Heber C. Kimball, 336 note. Though the sources disagree as to whether Vilate helped to choose the two elderly sisters, I believe she did. The two sisters, Laura and Abigail Pitkin, were subsequently sealed to Kimball in the Nauvoo Temple on February 3, 1846.

[33] Letter quoted in Danel W. Bachman, "A Study of the Mormon Practice of Plural Marriage before the Death of Joseph Smith" (M.A. thesis, Purdue University, 1975), 185. 

[34] Heber C. Kimball, Letter to Vilate Kimball, September 3, 1843, holo graph, LDS Church Archives. 

[35] See Compton, In Sacred Loneliness, 369; and D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Origins of Power (Salt Lake City: Signature Books in association with Smith Research Associates, 1994), 559. See also Franklin D. Richards, Diary, December 9, 1887, LDS Church Archives: "This evening Sister Gilbert Belnap daughter of Vinson Knight's once Presiding Bishop until his death in Nauvoo. Her mother [i.e., Martha McBride Knight] was sealed to the Prophet Joseph [Smith]. Her father received another wife—widow Merrick whose husband was martyred at Haun's Mill." 

[36] Delia Belnap, "Martha McBridge Knight," typescript, not paginated, LDS Church Archives; courtesy Todd Compton.

[37] Smith, An Intimate Chronicle, 108. An Intimate Chronicle misidentifies "[Vinson] Knight" as "[Newel] Knight." 

[38] Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, ed., The Personal writings of Eliza Roxcy Snow (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2000), 273 note 41. Earlier, Beecher had used the verb "suggests" instead of "confirms." Maureen Ursenbach, "Eliza R. Snow's Nauvoo Journal," BYU Studies 15 (Summer 1975): 414 note 43. 

[39] Vera Morley Ipson, "History and Travels of the Life of Isaac Morley Sr.," 1958, 2, LDS Church Archives.

[40] "Autobiography of Cordelia Morley Cox," 1, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah (hereafter Perry Special Collections). 

[41] Joseph F. Smith Affidavit Books. 

[42] Ibid. See also Franklin D. Richards, Diary, January 22,1869: "Br[other] Joseph B. Noble . . . related that he performed the first sealing ceremony in this Dispensation in which he united Sister Louisa Beman to the Prop[h]et Joseph in May—I think the 5th day—in 1841 during the evening under an Elm tree in Nauvoo. The Bride disguised in a coat and hat." Noble was not consistent in remembering where exactly he performed this marriage ceremony. See his testimony quoted below.

[43] Joseph Bates Noble, Testimony, in "Respondent's Testimony, Temple Lot Case," 424, 426-27, Library-Archives, Community of Christ, Independence, Missouri. 

[44] Vilate Murray Kimball, Letter to Heber C. Kimball, June 29, 1843, holograph, LDS Church Archives. 

[45] Smith, Intimate Chronicle, 103. 

[46] See Hazel Noble Boyack, A Nobleman in Israel: A Biographical Sketch of Joseph Bates Noble, Pioneer to Utah in 1847 (Cheyenne, Wyo.: Pioneer Printing, 1962), 32; courtesy H. Michael Marquardt.

[47] Smith, Blood Atonement and the Origin of Plural Marriage, 49-50; emphasis Smith's. 

[48] Quoted in Minutes of the Meeting of the Council of the Twelve, the Patriarch to the Church, the Assistants to the Twelve, the First Council of the Seventy, and the Presiding Bishopric, May 5, 1954, photocopy of typescript in my possession. It should be noted that, in 1842, Judd had denied knowing about plural marriage: 

"244 Q:— When did you, if at all, know of the practice of plurality of wives,—or the preaching of the doctrine of plurality of wives? A:— I never heard it preached while Joseph [Smith] lived. 

"245 Q:— You never did? A:— No sir, not while he lived." Mary [Judd Page] Eaton, Testimony, "Complainant's Testimony, Temple Lot Case," 642.

[49] Quinn, Origins of Power, 567. See also the entry in Christian Christiansen's journal which reports a visit ca. 1856 to "Brother Page" near Quincy, Illinois, "who had two wives given him by Joseph Smith in Nauvoo who lived with him without anyone's speaking to him about it." Quoted in Davis Bitton, Guide to Mormon Diaries and Autobiographies (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1977), 66; courtesy H. Michael Marquardt. Todd Compton believes that the second of Page's Nauvoo wives was probably Mary's sister, Rachel Judd. Compton, quoted in Levi Peterson, email to Gary Bergera, November 4, 2004.

[50] Joseph F. Smith Affidavit Books. 

[51] Ibid. 

[52] Ibid. See also the genealogical data in Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt, edited by Parley P. Pratt Jr. (1873; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1985 printing), 429-31; and Autobiography of Parley P. Pratt: Revised and Enhanced Edition, edited by Scot Facer Proctor and Maurine Jensen Proctor (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2000), 586-92. 

[53] Parley P. Pratt, Letter to Elizabeth Brotherton Pratt, October 7, [1844], Parley P. Pratt Papers, LDS Church Archives.

[54] According to Pratt family records, as quoted in Proctor and Proctor, Parley P. Pratt, Revised and Enhanced, 407 note 9: "Elizabeth Brotherton, daughter of Thomas and Sarah Brotherton, born March 27, 1816 in Manchester, England, sealed to Parley P. Pratt as his wife for time and all eternity, June July 24, 1843. Done at the house of Brigham Young in Nauvoo, by the hand of Patriarch Hyrum Smith." Some family members read the correction of month as evidence of a June 1843 sealing between both Pratt and Brotherton and Pratt and Sterns. For more on the dating of Parley's and Mary Ann's sealing, see Andrew F. Ehat, "Joseph Smith's Introduction of Temple Ordinances and the 1844 Mormon Succession Question" (M.A. thesis, Brigham Young University, 1982), 66-71, summarizing Pratt family historian Stephen L Pratt. "The sealing power was not in Hyrum [Smith] legitimately," Brigham Young later reported, presumably in reference to the Pratts' June 1843 sealing, "neither did he act on the sealing principle only as he was dictated by Joseph [Smith]. This was proven, for Hyrum did undertake to seal without counsel, & Joseph told him if he did not stop it he would go to hell and all those he sealed with him." Brigham Young, Letter to William Smith, August 10, 1845, Brigham Young Papers, LDS Church Archives. 

[55] Mary Ann Frost Pratt, Affidavit, September 3, 1869, Joseph F. Smith Affidavit Books. Mary Ann makes it clear that Hyrum, not Joseph, officiated.

[56] Compton, In Sacred Loneliness, 6, 586-92.

[57] Vilate Kimball, Letter to Heber C. Kimball, June 29, 1843, holograph, LDS Church Archives. 

[58] Smith, Intimate Chronicle, 118. Pratt also successfully courted Belinda Marden. She wrote a poem in April 1844 that begins: "For nought to me is all be side / If of his presence I'm denied / The happy hours with him I've spent / To me a holy charm have lent." She concludes, speaking as though in Parley's voice: "My dear, your prayers for future life /Are granted—You shall be my wife." Parley P. Pratt Notebook, Perry Special Collections. Pratt and Marden were sealed on November 20, 1844. 

[59] Parley P. Pratt, quoted in "Family Record of Parley Parker Pratt," March 11, 1850, Parley P. Pratt Papers. 

[60] Wilford Woodruff, Wilford Woodruff's Journal, 1833-1898, typescript, edited by Scott G. Kenney, 9 vols. (Midvale, Utah: Signature Books, 1983-85): 2:340, recorded about Pratt's second anointing on January 21, 1844: "Joseph [Smith] said Concerning Parley P Pratt that He had no wife sealed to him for Eternity and asked if their was any harm for him to have another wife for time & Eternity as He would want a wife in the Resurrection or els his glory would be Cliped. Many arguments He used upon this subject which were rational & consistant. Brother] Joseph said now what will we do with Elder P[arley] P Pratt? He has no wife sealed to him for Eternity. I Ie has one living wife but she had a former Husband and did not wish to be sealed to Parly for Eternity. Now is it not right for Parsley to have another wife that can [blank]?" Yet according to his own diary, Joseph Smith was not present for Pratt's second anointing (Brigham Young performed the rite), and presumably Smith made these comments in another setting. That Woodruff's statements regarding Mary Ann's having a "former husband" and not wanting "to be sealed to Parly for Eternity" were crossed out suggests that this information may not have been correct or perhaps that Woodruff later learned that Pratt had been sealed to Elizabeth Brotherton six months earlier. 

[61] According to Pratt family tradition, Brigham Young believed that "if Joseph [Smith] had lived he would have had Mary Ann [Pratt] sealed to him [in the Nauvoo Temple]." Consequently, following Smith's death, Young advised Parley to "Take Sister Mary Ann and her children; take good care of them and take them to Joseph [Smith] and it will do more for your exaltation than anything you can do in the matter." LDS Church President John Taylor later explained to one of Parley and Mary Ann's children: "Your mother was sealed [in the Nauvoo Temple] to the Prophet Joseph [Smith], your father acting as proxy." John Taylor, Letter to Moroni L. Pratt, October 29,1886, First Presidency Letterpress Copybooks, LDS Church Archives. 

[62] Even so, the Pratts' marriage was not happy. "A few days after the foregoing Ordinance [i.e., Mary Ann's sealing to Joseph Smith]," Parley commented: "She forsook her husband [i.e., Parley] who had moved Out from Nauvoo, on his way to the Mountains Choosing to return (Like Lots Wife) and remain In Nauvoo till Spring. She accordingly returned and took two of the Children with her viz—Moroni and Olivia Pratt.... After this she came to the Council Bluffs, where her husband had an interview with her and still kindly Invited her to go with him; but she still refused and wished to return to the State of Maine." Quoted in "Family Record of Parley Parker Pratt." 

[63] Ann Richards Martin, "Sarah Longstroth (1826-1858)," in Richards Family History, edited by Joseph Grant Stevenson, (Provo, Utah: Stevenson's Genealogical Center, 1991), 3:279; see also p. 285.

[64] Willard Richards, Diary, June 12, 1843, LDS Church Archives, transcription courtesy D. Michael Quinn. See also the notation after July 1, 1866, in Wilford Woodruff, Historian's Private Journal, LDS Church Archives: "Willard Richards & Susannah Liptrot were sealed June 12, 1843, by Joseph Smith in Josephs Store Nauvoo." My appreciation to D. Michael Quinn and George D. Smith for pointing out these sources. 

[65] Also of interest is Richards's account of his fourth plural marriage, this one performed after Joseph Smith's death. Richards and his new wife, twenty-one-year-old Alice Longstroth (born January 28, 1824, died November 21, 1909)—sister to Sarah and Nanny—mutually covenanted a plural union between themselves without the aid of an outside officiator: "At 10. P.M. took Alice L h by the [hand] of our own free will and avow mutually acknowledge each other husband & wife, in a covenant not to be broken in time or Eternity for time & for all Eternity, to all intents & purposes as though the seal of the covenant had been placed upon us. for time & all Eternity & called upon God. & all the Holy angels—& Sarah Long—th to witness the same." Richards, Diary, December 23, 1845. Willard and Alice were not resealed in the Nauvoo Temple, and Alice subsequently wed Moses Whittaker (1820-52) and later George D. Watt (1824-1909). 

[66] Joseph F. Smith Affidavit Books.

[67] Mercy Fielding Thompson Smith, untitled autobiographical sketch, December 20, 1880, LDS Church Archives. 

[68] Mercy Fielding Thompson, Letter to Joseph Smith III, September 5, 1883, reproduced in "Testimony as to Her Marriage to Hyrum Smith," Deseret Evening News, February 6, 1886. 

[69] Mercy Rachel Thompson, Testimony, "Respondent's Testimony, Temple Lot Case," 263. 

[70] Catherine Phillips Smith, Affidavit, January 28, 1903, in "Affidavit of Widow Smith," Deseret Evening News, September 27, 1905. Neither Mercy nor Catherine was subsequently sealed and/or anointed to Hyrum (by proxy) in the Nauvoo Temple. Only Mary Fielding was resealed (January 15, 1846) and reanointed (January 30, 1846) to her deceased husband. However, on January 27, 1846, Louisa Sanger and, on January 30, Lydia Dibble Granger, widow of Oliver Granger, and Polly Miller were all sealed by proxy to Hyrum for eternity. In addition, Louisa was sealed to Reuben Miller (Hyrum's proxy) for time, Lydia to John Taylor (Hyrum's proxy) for time, and Polly to Samuel Bent (Hyrum's proxy) for time. Lydia was also anointed to Hyrum (with Taylor again acting as proxy), and Polly, though this is not clear, may have also been anointed to Hyrum (with Bent acting as proxy). There is no evidence that Louisa was anointed to Hyrum. On the basis of these sealings, some have speculated that these three latter women had been sealed to Hyrum while still alive as his plural wives.

[71] Brigham Young, Sermon, October 8, 1866, LDS Church Archives.

[72] Journal of Jesse Nathaniel Smith: The Life Story of a Mormon Pioneer, 1834-1906 (Salt Lake City: Jesse N. Smith Family Association, 1953), 7.

[73] Benjamin F. Johnson, My Life's Review: Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin Johnson (Provo, Utah: Grandin Book Co., 1997), 88-89.

[74] See Richard Lloyd Anderson and Scott H. Faulring, Review of In Sacred Loneliness, in FARMS Review of Books 10 (1998): 2. But see Compton's response, "Truth, Honesty and Moderation in Mormon History: A Response to Anderson, Faulring and Bachman's Reviews of In Sacred Loneliness" (July 2001), privately circulated. Compton identifies thirty-three plural wives, Anderson and Faulring twenty-nine. In his response, Compton presents his reasons for keeping thirty-three and even notes that the actual number may be higher. 

[75] I do not believe that Fanny Alger, whom Compton counts as Smith's first plural wife, satisfies the criteria to be considered a "wife." Briefly, the sources for such a "marriage" are all retrospective and presented from a point of view favoring plural marriage, rather than, say, an extramarital liaison, which seems clearly to be Oliver Cowdery's interpretation of the relationship. In addition, Smith's doctrine of eternal marriage was not formulated until after 1839-40. For Compton's counter-argument, see his In Sacred Loneliness, 25-42. I also believe the circumstances of Lucinda Pendleton Morgan Harris's plural marriage to Smith better fits the context of Smith's pattern of contracting plural marriages ca. 1841 -42 with married or widowed women than it does to the late 1830s, the period some have assigned to Harris's and Smith's plural marriage. Most recently, Lyndon W. Cook, comp., Nauvoo Marriages Proxy Sealings, 1843-1846 (Provo, Utah: Grandin Book, 2004), 12-13, has suggested that three more women be added to the list of Smith's plural wives: Lydia Kenyon Carter (married ca. 1841-43), Sarah Bapson (probably Sarah [Rapson] Poulterer, married ca. 1841-43), and Hannah Ann Dubois Smith Dibble (married ca. 1842-43). 

[76] Whitney, Life of Heber C. Kimball (1888), 431; (1945), 419.

[77] See Compton, In Sacred Loneliness, 80; and Martha Sonntag Bradley and Mary Brown Firmage Woodward, Four Zinas: A Story of Mothers and Daughters on the Mormon Frontier (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2000), 111-12.

[78] See Zina D. H. Young, Interviewed by John W. Wight (an elder of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), October 1, 1898, in Zina Card Brown Family Collection, LDS Church Archives; published as "Evidence from Zina D. Huntington-Young," Saints' Herald 52, no. 2 (January 11, 1905): 28-30. 

[79] See Benjamin F. Johnson's reminiscence: "Of the Prophets Partiality or Love for Sister Zina I will only say she was always in his favor. &. that after a two & half years mission to Canada & the middle States I returned to learn she had but recently married [Henry Jacobs], which perhaps did not AquiteA please the Prophet for in answer to this great love for her she soon became his own wife, was among the first to accept the plural order order of marriage." "'Aunt Zina' as I Have Known Her from Youth—By 'Uncle Ben,'" n.d., in Zina Card Brown Family Collection. 

[80] Zina D. H. Smith, in "Joseph, the Prophet. His Life and Mission as Viewed by Intimate Acquaintances," Salt Lake Herald Church and Farm Supplement, January 12, 1895, 212. 

[81] Affidavits dated May 1, and July 1, 1869, Joseph F. Smith Affidavit Books; see also Emily Dow Partridge Young, "Incidents in the Life of a Mormon Girl," holograph, 185-86, LDS Church Archives. 

[82] H. Michael Marquardt, "Emily Dow Partridge Smith Young on the Witness Stand: Recollections of a Plural Wife" (2001), privately circulated; see also H. Michael Marquardt, "A Preliminary List of Women Married or Sealed to Joseph Smith (1841-44)," privately circulated.

[83] Almera Johnson Smith, Affidavit, August 1, 1883, LDS Church Archives; Ruth Vose Sayers Smith, Affidavit, May 1, 1869, Joseph F. Smith Affidavit Books. 

[84] Thanks to rare book dealer Rick Grunder, we know that Lucinda Pendleton Morgan married George Harris on November 23, 1830, and not November 30, 1830. See www.rickgrunder.com/Newspapers%20for%20Sale/ lucindaharris.htm. See also Spirit of the Times & People's Press (Batavia, New York) 1 (November 30, 1830): 3; courtesy H. Michael Marquardt.

[85] In response to hostile questioning, Covington apparently expressed some uncertainty on the exact date of her marriage to William Smith. However, her memory of other past events is impressive, and I can find no persuasive reason to doubt her account of her marriage.

[86] Covington may have meant Mary Jane Rollins (born December 25, 1829, died July 22, 1880), whom William married on June 22, 1845, one month after the death of his civil wife. Nauvoo Neighbor, July 2, 1845, 3. The exact status of William Smith's marriage to Rollins is unclear. Their marriage does not appear in "A Record of Marriages, in the City of Nauvoo, Illinois, kept and made agreeable to a City ordinance bearing date the 17th day of February 1842, entitled 'An Ordinance concerning Marriages,'" LDS Church Archives. However, this book is probably incomplete: no marriages were recorded between March 18 and October 9, 1845, and only four additional marriages were recorded thereafter, the last occurring on December 31, 1845. That William married so soon after Caroline's death may suggest a prior relationship with Rollins. Non-Mormon journalist Thomas Sharp hinted as much when he wrote in the Warsaw Signal, July 2, 1845: "Patriarch Bill Smith, brother of the Prophet, whose wife died about four weeks since, was again married on last Sunday week—having been a widower about 18 days. His bride is about 16 and he is 35. Bill will do very well for a father to the church but his wife won't do for mother. Wonder if Bill was not engaged before his former wife died." The marriage was short-lived. Rollins left Smith by the end of the summer; the two formally divorced in early 1847; and Rollins subsequently married Frank Williamson on March 13, 1849. 

[87] Mary Ann Covington Sheffield Smith Stratton West, Testimony, in "Respondent's Testimony, Temple Lot Case," 495-96, 500, 501. On the other hand, William Smith, "Complainant's Testimony, Temple Lot Case," 168, asserted that polygamy was not introduced into the LDS Church until after his brother's death. "Your father never sealed or married any plural wives to me," he also wrote to Joseph Smith III on July 20, 1892, "nor did he ever tell me that he believed in Polygamy—nor did he ever read any revelation in my presance [sic] in the Council of the twelve—nor did I hear of any talk of revelation on Poligamy not untill after the Brigham Mormons left Nauvoo—in the Spring 1846. . . . how much your father may have had to do with this doctrine—Previous to his death I know nothing about it. if any Person got Polygamy teachings from William Smith—no other one is responsable for it but himself." Holograph in Community of Christ Library/Archives. 

[88] See Franklin L. West, Chauncey W. West: Pioneer-Churchman (Salt Lake City: Author, 1965), 24, 32. Mary Ann bore two children, one of whom survived to adulthood, before Chauncey died on January 9, 1870. 

[89] Erastus Snow, Diary, June 1841-February 1847, text opposite p. 50, LDS Church Archives.

[90] "Apostle Erastus Snow's Testimony," in Jenson, "Plural Marriage," 232, courtesy H. Michael Marquardt. In contrast, Snow family genealogical records report that this first plural marriage occurred on February 2, 1844. Moroni Snow, "The Descendants of Erastus Snow," Utah Genealogical and Historical Magazine 3 (April 1912): 64. According to Andrew Karl Larson, Erastus Snow: The Life of a Missionary and Pioneer for the Early Mormon Church (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1971), 87, Joseph Smith performed Snow's plural marriage. However, Snow's personal report that Hyrum Smith officiated seems more likely. By 1844, Joseph Smith had ceded most such responsibilities to Hyrum.

[91] "A Sinopsas of Remarks made by Apostle E[rastusl Snow July 22 [18831 at Nephi [Utah] Sunday evening," reported by Thomas Crawley, clerk of the Juab Utah Stake Conference, LDS Church Archives. 

[92] See also Nellie T. Taylor, "John Taylor, His Ancestors and Descendants," Utah Genealogical and Historical Magazine 21 (July 1930): 105-6.

[93] If Taylor's memory is correct, Hyde's presence dates this meeting to sometime after his return to Nauvoo on December 7, 1842.

[94] Taylor, quoted in Minutes of Meeting, October 14, 1882, L. John Nuttall Papers, Perry Special Collections. 

[95] John Taylor, n.d., Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (Liverpool, Eng.: Latter-day Saints' Book Depot, 1855-86), 24:231. 

[96] See my discussion of this incident in "'Illicit Intercourse,' Plural Marriage, and the Nauvoo Stake High Council, 1840-1844," John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 23 (2003): 75-77.

[97] Jermy Benton Wight, The Wild Ram of the Mountain: The Story of Lyman Wight (Afton, Wyo.: Afton Thrifty Print/Star Valley Llama, 1996), 236.

[98] Ibid., 216.

[99] Quoted in Roberts, Succession in the Presidency, 122-25; original in LDS Church Archives. 

[100] Orange Lysander Wight, Untitled reminiscence, 1903, LDS Church Archives. There is some speculation that Orange may have been an early polygamist as well; his untitled reminiscence is unclear. According to Wight family history, however, Orange married Matilda Carter on February 6, 1844, and Sarah Hadfield plurally on February 7, 1845. Wight, Wild Ram of the Mountain, 239, 445, 501. Joseph I. Earl, Letter to Francis M. Lyman, September 14, 1905, LDS Church Archives, further clarifies: "Orange L Wight says he and Sarah Hadfield his second wife were mar[r]ied by his Father at La Crosse Wisconsin, between the firist [sic] and fifteenth of Jan 1845." 

[101] Edwin Gordon Woolley, autobiographical sketch, n.d., 2-3, LDS Church Archives.

[102] Before marrying Lucy Decker, Young had courted Martha Brotherton (born 1824) as his first plural wife. She, however, rejected his proposal and subsequently published her description of the episode in American Bulletin (St. Louis), July 16, 1842, then in Warsaw Signal, July 23, 1842. Reprints followed in the Louisville Journal, July 25, 1842; New York Herald, July 25, 1842; Alton Telegram, July 30, 1842; and Quincy Whig, August 6, 1842. Following Brotherton's death, Young had her sealed to him by proxy on August 1, 1870. Stanley Ivins, research into LDS sealing records, Ivins Papers, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City. Brotherton's sister, Elizabeth, became Parley P. Pratt's first plural wife in mid-1843. 

[103] The marital status of Lucy Decker and Augusta Adams at the time of their marriages to Brigham Young is not entirely clear. While they may have separated from the husbands prior to Young's proposals, it is also possible that Young's offers of marriage facilitated their decision to leave their husbands. My thanks to Todd Compton for pointing out this possibility. 

[104] Lucy Decker Young, Affidavit, July 10,1869, Joseph F. Smith Affidavit Books.

[105] August Adams Cobb, Affidavit, July 12,1869, Joseph F. Smith Affidavit Books. 

[106] Harriet Cook Young, Affidavit, March 4, 1870, Joseph F. Smith Affidavit Books. 

[107] Clara Decker Young, Affidavit, March 4,1870, Joseph F. Smith Affidavit Books. 

[108] Brigham Young, Letter to Mary Ann Angell Young, August 17,1843, Special Collections, Beinecke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

[109] Marguerite L Sinclair, Letter to Frank M. Young, June 21, 1947, Lorenzo Dow Young Papers, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City. After arriving in Salt Lake City, Decker married at least five wives. 

[110] Some Richards family members, evidently basing their conclusions on an incorrect marriage date between Persis and Levi of January 27, 1848, believed that Persis "always resented that she was left behind in Winter Quarters and never became a part of Lorenzo [Dow Young]'s family in Utah." Pioneer Women of Faith and Fortitude, 4 vols. (Salt Lake City: International Society Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1998), 3:2562.

[111] For an apologetic explanation of Smith's marriages to already-married women, see Samuel Katich, "A Tale of Two Marriage Systems: Perspectives on Polyandry and Joseph Smith" (Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research, 2003), available at www.fairlds.org/pubs/polyandry.pdf.

[112] Calculated from Maurine Carr Ward, "'This Institution Is a Good One': The Female Relief Society of Nauvoo, March 17,1842 to 16, March 1844," Mormon Historical Studies 3 (Fall 2002): 87-203. 

[113] I exclude Caroline Huntington from the total of civil wives because her first child was evidently born more than seven years after her marriage to William Huntington. 

[114] These plural wives were Martha Hyde (84 months), Elizabeth Pratt (96 months), Nanny Richards (74 months), all of Joseph Smith's plural wives, Mary Ann Wight (72 months), and Clarissa Young (65 months). 

[115] The following four children may or may not have been fathered by Joseph Smith with his plural wives: Orson W. Hyde (mother Marinda Nancy Johnson Hyde), Josephine R. Lyon (mother Sylvia Sessions Lyon), Florentine M. Lightner (mother Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner), and Moroni Pratt (mother Mary Ann Frost Stern Pratt). Todd Compton, "Fawn Brodie on Joseph Smith's Plural Wives and Polygamy: A Critical View," in Reconsidering No Man Knows My History: Fawn M. Brodie and Joseph Smith in Retrospect, edited by Newell G. Bringhurst (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1996), 164-73.

[116] George Reynolds, a secretary to the First Presidency, Letter to H. Neidig, June 7, 1892, First Presidency Letterpress Copybooks, hypothesized about the low birth rate: "The facts that you refer to are almost as great a mystery to us as they are to you; but the reason generally assigned by the [plural] wives themselves is, that owing to the peculiar circumstances by which they were surrounded, they were so nervous and in such constant fear that they did not conceive."

[post_title] => Identifying the Earliest Mormon Polygamists, 1841-1844 [post_excerpt] => Dialogue 38.3 (Spring 2004): 1–74
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[1]Wallace Stegner once observed, "a faith crushed by law or force will merely go underground. . . when outward resistance is impossible, the inward resistance remains."[2] This description might well apply to this story of how Fundamentalist Mormons, before they were ever called by that name, chose a small, northern Arizona village, Short Creek, as a place of refuge to avoid legal prosecution over polygamy. Instead of disappearing from the political and legal landscape as they hoped, the refugees soon became the focus of national attention. The topic of polygamy drew the media to Short Creek just it had drawn the media to Utah in the previous century. News writers, photographers, and even one film maker flocked to the remote town in the autumn of 1935. They came "from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts and north and south from Canada to the Mexican border" to report on the court trials of three men and three women for polygamy-related charges.[3] Wallace Stegner described Short Creek during this extraordinary moment as "the capital of the world."[4]

This story is largely drawn from the contemporary accounts of Joseph Lyman Jessop, a polygamist from Salt Lake City. Jessop was among a handful of men sent by priesthood leaders to Short Creek in May 1935 with the express purpose of building "a branch of the Kingdom of God."[5] Through the medium of personal accounts, Jessop's diary provides a more intimate perspective on why he and his maverick Mormon brethren chose Short Creek as a place of refuge and why their activities quickly drew such dramatic attention. 

Background of Joseph Lyman Jessop 

Joseph Lyman Jessop was a third-generation Mormon, born 10 February 1892 in Millville, Cache Valley, Utah. Both his grandfathers were early Utah pioneers who became polygamists.[6] Jessop's parents, however, were monogamists. They had been married only one year when Wilford Woodruff is sued the 1890 Manifesto calling for an official end to plural marriage within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.[7] After the Manifesto, the church moved ever more away from polygamy as well as from other distinctive Mormon practices and beliefs of the nineteenth century, such as the United Order, a belief in the imminent Millennial return of Christ, and a duty to build the Kingdom of God on earth. While this new Mormon worldview was readily embraced by most LDS church members, the Jessops were among a small minority who resisted adaptation[8] and who continued to believe these abandoned practices were requirements for the goal of Mormon exaltation.[9]

Joseph Lyman Jessop married his first wife Winnie Porter in July 1917 in the Logan Temple. They had been married for five years when Jessop took a step which led to a life-altering decision. He left Millville and followed his father to Salt Lake City to work at the Baldwin Radio Plant. The factory's owner, Nathaniel Baldwin, was a prominent Utah inventor and industrialist.[10] More importantly, Baldwin was a believer in continued plural marriage and felt it was his religious duty to help others who were also committed to "Old Fashioned Mormonism."[11] His patronage drew polygamists and would-be polygamists from all across Mormon territory to work at his factory.[12] As a result, as many as ten to twenty percent of Baldwin's employees were from families of post-manifesto plural marriages or had inclinations toward continued plural marriage.[13]

For the Jessops and others like them, employment at the Baldwin factory facilitated their introduction to Lorin C. Woolley and his elderly father John W. Woolley. The elder Woolley was a former stake patriarch and temple worker. Earlier, he had been excommunicated for performing post-Manifesto plural marriages.[14] The son, Lorin C. Woolley, was a former bodyguard of the third church president, John Taylor. Lorin now served on the Baldwin factory's board of directors. The Woolleys testified of President John Taylor's 1886 experiences and of apostolic authority given to them by Taylor to ensure the perpetuation of plural marriage.[15] For the Jessops, legitimate priesthood authority to perform plural marriage was essential, and the Woolleys' testimony was reassurance to them that the Lord intended for and had prepared the way for plural marriage to continue, despite the Church's 1890 Manifesto declaring that polygamy could no longer be sanctioned. 

While working at the Baldwin Radio Plant, Jessop and his family participated in study meetings and firesides with other believers in continued plural marriage.[16] This association, while casual in its nature, served as a catalyst which permanently welded the heretofore loosely connected believers in "the fulness of the gospel."[17] Gradually, these individuals and their families would coalesce into what would later be called the Fundamentalist Mormon movement. 

In 1924, Joseph Lyman Jessop's convictions regarding plural marriage were cemented when he married Maleta Porter, a cousin to his wife Winnie, as his first plural wife. They were sealed in a ceremony performed by John W. Wool ley in Centerville. Within the year, Jessop, his two wives, and several others believing in continued plural marriage—and also connected with the Baldwin Radio factory—were excommunicated from the Church.[18] At about the same time, the Baldwin Radio factory was threatened with insolvency and was placed into receivership.[19] Jessop and others of similar conviction were among the first to lose their jobs. While some stayed in the Salt Lake Valley, others returned home. Jessop decided to stay. He found part-time work at the Woolley farm in Centerville. During this period he became more intimately acquainted with John and Lorin Woolley. 

After John Woolley passed away in December 1928,[20] Joseph Lyman Jessop was among those who were aware of Lorin Woolley's "calling" six men to assist him in perpetuating his apostolic mission from John Taylor.[21] Woolley organized the men as a Priesthood Council. The men were Joseph Leslie Broad bent, John Yeates Barlow, Joseph White Musser, Louis Alma Kelsch, Charles Zitting, and Dr. LeGrande Woolley.[22] The special mission of the Priesthood Council was to keep plural marriage alive.[23] This was to be done alongside the church and not in competition with it. Historian Martha Sonntag Bradley described the path Fundamentalist Mormons aspired to travel as a "road often running parallel to the visible Mormon Church" in order to "maintain the pure and unadulterated church, the 'invisible church,' the church of the original teachings of Joseph Smith."[24]

LDS Church Instigates Surveillance of Polygamists 

In 1930, the Church had been struggling for some forty years to convince a doubting nation it was sincere in ending polygamy.[25] Seventh Church President Heber J. Grant especially resented reports of new polygamy springing up among church folds. He made concerted efforts to excommunicate known polygamists and any who might enter into or perform new plural marriages. With increasing determination, President Grant directed church leaders to shun any polygamy which could be in any way connected with the church.[26] In the April 1931 General Conference of the church, President Grant promised that the church would "give such legal assistance as we legitimately can in the criminal prosecution of such [plural marriage] cases."[27] Two years later, Grant presented an official 16- page statement, sometimes called the "Final Manifesto," that went far beyond previous church statements to deny the legitimacy of plural marriages after 1890.[28]

The 1933 "Final Manifesto" marked a change in the way church leaders dealt with polygamists. Under Grant, the church-initiated cooperation with government for the surveillance and prosecution of polygamists.[29] A compulsory loyalty oath was introduced for any church members whose actions or loyalties might be suspect.[30] Anti-polygamy legislation was introduced in the mostly "Mormon" Utah State Legislature which significantly increased the penalties for unlawful cohabitation when compared to what they had been during Utah's raid period in the 1880s.[31] In 1935, all these measures created a political and social climate unfavorable for Fundamentalists. More than ever, they felt a need for a place of refuge. 

Short Creek, a Place of Refuge to Become a Millennial City 

In July 1926, Lorin C. Woolley prophesied to some of "perilous times to come in which. . .those who would live the law [of plural marriage] would be at the point of annihilation because the persecution would be so great."[32] With such apocalyptic prospects in mind, Woolley sent Joseph Lyman Jessop and two of his brothers, Richard and Vergel, on a two-week trip to southern Utah and to the Arizona strip area.[33] Their main destination was Lee's Ferry, Arizona, where polygamists Carling Spencer, Jerry Johnson, and Elmer Johnson lived. Their purpose was "to look over the place as a [possible] gathering place for the saints."[34] Then they visited Isaac Carling in Short Creek for the same purpose. They had known Carling since 1924 when they had all worked at the Baldwin Radio Factory.[35] After the men returned and reported their findings, no decision was made to take any action. 

Eight years later, the two sites were again considered as possible places of refuge. In March 1934, not long after Joseph Lyman Jessop married his third wife, Beth Allred, he and four other men went to Lee's Ferry and Short Creek.[36] After their return, Jessop made a report of the six-day mission to members of the Priesthood Council.[37] Though Jessop didn't record in his diary his assessment of either place, he apparently did not think "the conditions" at Short Creek were conducive for a place of refuge since he privately discouraged his brother-in-law Axel Fors from moving there.[38]

The idea of a place of safe retreat became even more important when it was rumored that, "The officers of the law are looking seriously into the family life of several of us, and it looks like persecution is nearing."[39] Jessop expressed anxiety after he heard several sermons preached against polygamy at the April 1934 LDS General Conference priesthood meeting. The last speaker was President Heber J. Grant. Jessop wrote that Grant "assailed vigorously and devilishly Israel Barlow, John W. Woolley and Lorin C. Woolley and all who have said and urged the practice of plural marriage. . .and called these polygamists 'the slickest bunch of liars in existence.'" During the talks, ". . .a packed house of men laughed at all these jests of ridicule and slander against the Lord's own."[40] Jessop said he "sat and prayed in soberness, 'O God, let Thy will be done. Send fourth [sic] thy judgments in thine own due time and way, and I pray help me to be ready by keeping all the laws and commandments and put and keep my own house in order.'"[41]

Only a few days later, Jessop recorded his awareness of the Church's involvement in legal prosecution: 

We have news from reliable sources that Officers of the Federal Government of the U.S. are here from Washington at the solicitation of Heber J. Grant and his helpers to persecute [sic] and imprison and penalize those who are trying to obey the fulness of the gospel. Heber J. Grant says to them, "Give them the limit and the Church will furnish the money to fight the case.[42]

A few days later one man and wife were arrested and briefly jailed on charges relating to polygamy.[43] Quickly, some polygamists went into hiding.[44] Jessop's diaries reveal that the Priesthood group—those associated with the Priesthood Council—responded to threats of legal prosecution in the spring and summer of 1934 in five specific ways: (1) holding prayer circles; (2) conducting personal and communal fasts; (3) publishing a small religious book in defense of their beliefs; (4) writing an open letter of warning addressed to Heber J. Grant and "all those who are persecuting the saints,"[45] and (5) searching for a place of refuge. 

Three events exacerbated the growing crisis. Lorin C. Woolley died on 20 September 1934. Just six months later, on 16 March 1935, Woolley's successor as the senior member of the Priesthood Council, J. Leslie Broadbent, also died. Broadbent's death at age 43 was a shock to the Fundamentalists.[46] The same week, the Utah State Legislature passed House Bill No. 124, which elevated the punishment for unlawful cohabitation from a misdemeanor, punishable by up to six months incarceration, to a felony, punishable up to five years. The new law was scheduled to go into effect two months later, on 15 May 1935. This legislation set in motion the events which produced the drama in Short Creek later that summer and fall. 

When the brethren of the Priesthood Council learned about the "new anti-polygamy law," they studied it with an attorney and determined it was intended "to make trouble."[47] The next day, the "largest assembly ever" gathered for a fast meeting.[48] To reaffirm their resolve, several brethren met with the Priesthood Council and "covenanted to keep all the commandments of the Lord."[49]

In early May, with just two weeks before the new unlawful cohabitation statute was to take effect, Jessop told his family ". . .something is going to be done on account of persecution. I may be sent away from you. I don't know where."[50] On 10 May, with only five days left of the countdown, Jessop and others met with brethren of the Priesthood Council to read and discuss a letter from Price Johnson of Short Creek in which he once again recommended the town as a place of refuge.[51] Johnson's plan was accepted as a last-minute measure. 

Joseph Lyman Jessop, his brother-in-law Ianthus W. Barlow (John Y. Bar low's brother), and another young polygamist, Carl E. Jentzch, were chosen as a vanguard to join the brethren at Short Creek and assist them in their land and sawmill affairs. Jessop and Jentzch were ordained high priests and set apart to "prepare a refuge for the saints who will come to this country."[52] Joseph Musser promised them water would "break forth as it was needed."[53] Musser wrote of the occasion: 

We met with these brethren and set them apart for their labors. . . .They were instructed to proceed to Short Creek, accept the leadership of Bro. Price. W. John son, and not to drive a nail or saw a board, or engage in any occupation except under the influence of the Spirit of the Lord. Not to have their minds on money, but upon the glory of God. The brethren felt splendid and covenanted to carry out instructions.[54]

Musser felt inspired that this action was the beginning of the re-establishing of the United Order. He predicted, "Though it has a very small beginning, it will grow to fill the whole earth."[55]

Jessop felt his course was fixed. He penned in his diary, ". . .1 pray, O my Father in Heaven, Help me to fill this great mission acceptably unto thee. . . ." That evening he called his wives together and "prayed in tears. . .feeling keenly the thots [sic] of being separated for perhaps many months."[56] Jessop decided it was best not to tell his younger children about the plan. The next morning, Jessop arose at 4:15 a.m. He gave his wives and three oldest children blessings and kissed them all goodbye. Then he with Carl Jentzch began a 350-mile journey toward Short Creek. They arrived the following evening, believing they were relatively safe from the reach of Utah law enforcement.[57]

Building the Kingdom of God in Short Creek 

Jessop, Jentzch and Ianthus W. Barlow, who had arrived earlier, began their mission in earnest. They met with seven men from the Short Creek area in a priesthood meeting to discuss "means and plans of action." Each man "consecrated all to the building of the Kingdom of God." A week later, the presidency for "this branch of the Kingdom of God" was organized. Ianthus W. Barlow was set apart as President, Isaac Carling as First Counselor, and Elmer Johnson as Second Counselor.[58] They and their brethren were instructed to prepare Short Creek "for the coming of the saints. . .to build a city of Zion and feed eventually millions of people."[59]

A little over a week later, Elders Price W. Johnson and Carl Jentzch returned to Salt Lake. They reported to the Priesthood Council that all the brethren involved were willing to put their land and assets into a common fund for the benefit of "our brethren" under the jurisdiction of the Priesthood Council. Like Joseph Musser, they felt that this was the beginning of living in a United Order. 

A whirlwind of activity characterized the polygamists' presence in Short Creek. Hardly a day passed without arrivals or departures of those connected in some way with the movement. Family members of the men from Salt Lake began arriving. Jessop's third wife, Beth, came with their first child, four month-old Winnie Faye.[60] Before the end of the summer, the small flock comprised perhaps a hundred souls.[61]

Building "the Kingdom" in the remote desert village of Short Creek during the summer of the 1935, in the midst of the Great Depression, was not an easy undertaking.[62] A great deal of energy, time and attention was spent to obtain the basic needs of water, food and shelter. Daily or weekly chores included gardening, hauling wood for cooking and baking, grinding wheat for bread, and maintaining the few automobiles available. Almost immediately, the group of men began digging a well (though they never found water), drew up plans for a windmill, and began ploughing land and planting crops—beans, melons, corn, rye and other grains. They laid out streets for the city-to-be and began gathering machine parts to construct a power plant. Assignments were given to log trees and to work at the sawmill, and arrangements were made to obtain a planing machine for lumber. Time was taken to write letters to loved ones left behind in Salt Lake City. 

As a skilled carpenter, Joseph Lyman Jessop kept especially busy although he often complained about the lack of materials and the difficulty of working with poor or green lumber. He helped to build a privy, enlarge a cabin, and construct a small shop to house power machinery. He built a few screen doors to keep out flies, a great necessity in the hot climate. In exchange for a six-dollar store credit, he built a door frame and drawers for a cabinet. When it was Jessop's turn to work at the sawmill in the canyon, he not only cut logs like everyone else, but made a table and a chair for the loggers' cabin. He was particularly in demand when a new home was started for Ianthus Barlow. 

Millennial Fervor Sparked 

The movement in Short Creek quickly inspired a millennial zeal among Fundamentalists. To many, involvement in Short Creek, either directly or indirectly, symbolized their commitment to the fulness of the gospel. Some, however, were more reluctant. When Morris Kunz voiced his reticence in a Sunday meeting, Joseph Musser recommended that Bro. Kunz be excused, that his services could be used to good advantage in Salt Lake, rather than in Short Creek, and that he should not go "until he can feel satisfied it is the will of the Lord."[63]

On 20 June 1935, the Priesthood Council met in Salt Lake City and decided that any brethren sent down to Short Creek who became dissatisfied might be released and return home. More importantly, they decided Bro. John Y. Barlow was to move to Short Creek and take full charge of operations there, "using his judgment and taking action as occasion requires."[64] Bro. Musser, with the help of the other brethren of the Council, was to have similar jurisdiction in Utah in Barlow's absence. 

Musser's teachings to Fundamentalist audiences in the summer of 1935 bore four main themes. First, he stressed individual responsibility, preaching that "it is up to all the brethren to know for themselves," and that every person "should place himself in a position to know for himself whether or not the Priesthood is right and then act accordingly."[65] However, he qualified individual responsibility by saying that brethren who were "expressing the hope that [they] may soon get the 'word of the Lord,' should understand that they are getting this word every time the Priesthood [Council] takes official action. . . that is as much of the 'word of the Lord' they may ever expect to get until they accept it as such, when the Lord would give them further direction."[66] He said those who were looking for angels to answer them would not get their anticipations satisfied, for "We are required to live by faith."[67]

Second, Musser emphasized the importance of working communally and preparing to live the United Order. He told the saints that from this time greater responsibility would rest upon them and that "no one present, working selfishly for himself, would succeed. Only community effort would be successful."[68] He promised "they would never become rich in worldly things, except the Lord had something special for them to do, and that from now on none of them would 'make money' to any appreciable degree outside of the spirit of the United Order."[69] He said none were prepared for United Order. "We must overcome selfishness, prejudice, envy and learn to love our neighbor as ourselves" and "quit gossiping and bearing false witness."[70] "When this is achieved," he told them, "we will be able to live in accordance with God's plan and find it so much easier. . .we will wonder why we didn't adopt it before."[71]

Third, he expounded upon the order of priesthood leadership and explained that Bro. John Y. Barlow, by virtue of his seniority, was at the head of the Priesthood Council no matter where he was. Under Barlow's direction, men might be appointed to take charge of certain works, as had been done, and they would be respected in their positions, yet should always be subject to the head. 

Fourth, Musser emphasized the importance of individual agency, saying, "individual responsibility must be recognized. Men cannot be saved if deprived of their agency."[72] While Musser preached to the saints in Salt Lake, his admonitions may have been more relevant in Short Creek where unity was crumbling. 

Contention Among the Brethren 

During the thirteen weeks that Joseph Lyman Jessop spent in Short Creek, one of his greater concerns was contention among his brethren. Manifested at first as discouragement, feelings gradually increased until they emerged as out right strife. Finally, the authority of those in charge was questioned. The source of the deepest division, however, was John Y. Barlow's plan to form a trust or holding company as the beginning of a United Order. 

About two weeks after arriving, Jessop wrote of despondency among several: "All present feel glum and under a heavy load until they could hardly smile. I tried to cheer them up."[73] A few days later, several had complained that "the spirit of union is not as great as it should be among the men here."[74] Disunity became even more evident when an "instructive" letter arrived from Joseph W. Musser, and some of the brethren responded with the spirit of fault finding.[75]

On the first of July, Jessop made a trip to Salt Lake City, his only chance that summer to visit the two wives and the children he had left behind. His main purpose for the trip, however, was to consult with the brethren of the Priesthood Council. He met with John Y. Barlow, Joseph W. Musser, and Louis Kelsch. They warned him to be "very, very careful while in Salt Lake because 'the law authorities have a very clear case against you. . .and the officers are watching for you.'"[76] These brethren then asked Jessop for a detailed report of affairs in Short Creek. He told them, ". . .it was a case of walking by faith and not by sight, for there is no sight in it—I mean no sight of sufficient crops, no water, no building material in sight at present, so we are walking by faith." When asked if he wanted to go back, Jessop replied, "For me there is nothing else to do because I have been called and set apart for this work, and I feel just like going back and doing all I can for the cause."[77] When Jessop mentioned Bro. Musser's yet unfulfilled prophecy that water would come forth in Short Creek, Musser sat in silence a moment, then looked up and said, "It will come when you are united and not until then."[78]

Two days later, Jessop helped load vehicles with the household goods of John Y. Barlow's family for their move south. As previously decided by the Priesthood Council, Barlow was going to Short Creek to take charge of the whole project, temporally and spiritually. 

At his departure, Jessop was clearly distressed by his two wives' "love and loneliness inexpressible" and the tears of his children, whom he had to leave once again. "I felt a vacancy that words cannot express. All I can do is Pray. I left them in the hands of the Lord."[79]

In Short Creek, the brethren made efforts to unite. After having prepared by fasting, they met in a special priesthood meeting on 7 July. Bro. John Y. Barlow presented the articles and laws of the United Trust that had been prepared by the Priesthood Council. All present voted to give their property. 

Despite such an outward display of unity, controversy over the United Trust was hardly resolved. Jessop learned of the extreme dissatisfaction of Carl Jentzch, who was "much affected by and opposed to some clauses in the document of the United Trust."[80] Jentzch said he could see "oceans of tears shed by this people because of it." He began preparations to "go back to the City and quit. . .on account of the clauses," which he said guaranteed nothing.[81] Jessop agreed that the United Trust clauses in question appeared "harsh and unfair" and felt that they "were not meet for men."[82] His journal records several prayers on the matter.[83] He even personally approached Bro. Barlow, who told him, "I got this [the idea for the United Trust] in answer to my prayers and I know I am right."[84]

At a priesthood meeting held in Short Creek on 11 August, Jessop "tried to unite the spirit of those present." Despite his effort, the meeting erupted into a verbal tug-of-war over the matter of authority of the presiding brethren. Jessop felt he "could not agree in full with either side" and did not say anything during the debate. He confided to his journal, "I'm having plenty of fight with myself of late to try to feel good as I should." 

On 15 August, in Salt Lake City, Joseph Musser received word of the "seri ous inharmony" at Short Creek.[85] It was reported that two of the brethren, Harold Allred and Ianthus W. Barlow, objected to the Priesthood Council entering into temporal matters, claiming their calling to be exclusively to exercise the sealing powers. Musser observed, "They will trust their eternal salvation with us but fear our judgment in temporal matters."[86]

A few days later, at a Thursday evening priesthood meeting, John Y. Barlow called upon each one present to express himself. Each man "ask[ed] forgiveness of the others and all felt better."[87] The sacrament was administered, and then all joined in prayer. That was Joseph Lyman Jessop's last meeting as a resident of Short Creek. The very next week, on 20 August, he received a letter from Joseph Musser urging his immediate return to Salt Lake City. 

Challenging the LDS Church 

The Fundamentalist movement in Short Creek had been created in the midst of a small but very mainstream L.D.S. community. In fact, LDS church authorities had been well aware that polygamists were living in Short Creek before the decision was ever made by Fundamentalist Mormons to make it a place of refuge. The previous year, on 30 August 1934, four Short Creek Church members had been excommunicated for preaching or practicing polygamy.[88] So, in 1935, the growing numbers of polygamists in Short Creek and the discussions they generated in the Short Creek Ward drew more than casual attention. 

At first, Jessop had refrained from attending the Short Creek Branch, feeling that it was "best not to crowd in upon them because they would think we are trying to run them out."[89] But, after receiving a personal invitation, Jessop was glad to attend regularly. In spite of the fact that he had been excommunicated from the Church a decade earlier, he still considered himself in every way a Latter-day Saint.[90] Almost immediately, he noted tensions over doctrine during class discussions between the regular church members and the Fundamentalists, some of whom were still members of the church in good standing. One Sunday meeting became especially tense when Jessop and others, "Took issue in favor of the laws of the Lord in preference to those of the land."[91]

The following Sunday, leaders from the Zions Park Stake came to set matters straight. Jessop's account of the meeting described the church leaders' remarks as demeaning to the Fundamentalists. He wrote: 

Bro. Jeppson began defending the law of the land against polygamy, quoted scripture and spent much time belittling anyone who should oppose the Manifesto, calling them silly people. He shuddered at the thot [sic] of going against the Govt. of the U.S. [Then,] Bro. David Hershi endorsed Jeppson's remarks. . . . Another Councilman, a Bro. Sandberg, spoke along the same lines.[92]

As soon as the meeting was over, Jessop and Carl Jentzch challenged the church leaders to allow open debate on the subjects they had discussed. Heated debates and discussions erupted both inside and outside the meeting house among men and women on both sides of the issue. Listening crowds looked on for the better part of an hour. Jessop described the commotion: 

I with Carl Jentzch walked to the front to Bro. Edwin Black who had charge of the meeting and We protested them, charging they had been teaching false doctrine and [asked him to] ask the house, that the people may hear the other side. I challenged Sandberg. . .to meet the issue point by point before the people. The other speakers left the building. Harold Alfred and wives came up and introduced themselves to him [Sandberg], as also [my wife] Beth, showing up our baby, saying, "And here is one of those whom you said had no right to be born." Orlin Colvin and wife came up defending the side against plural marriage. I challenged him to meet me in open debate before the people. Then John T. Spencer came also on their side, and I said, "I challenge you too, John Spencer." He flew angry and bristled up like a banty rooster. We had a large crowd around us, and some cornered Jeppson outside, so we went after them strong for about 45 minutes, and they refused to listen further and left us. Many of those present argued for the truth and others against it.”[93]

That confrontation was the match that set Short Creek aflame in a blaze that all the world would see. It soon became clear that law enforcement and media had been contacted by high-level church leaders.[94] Within the week a report came that complaints had been made to prosecute several men on polygamy charges.[95] Eleven days later, the first photographer, a man from the International News Service, showed up in Short Creek. He wanted to see "the 400 people and 40 new homes under construction and. . .to get a photograph of at least one polygamous family where 3 babies were born to one man by three wives in one month." Jessop flatly stated, "He took a picture of I. W. Barlow's house (the only one under construction), also a picture or two of the village."[96]

By that time, articles about the polygamists in Short Creek had already been published in the Salt Lake Tribune. What bothered Jessop most was the report that leaders of the church were "urging the officers of Mohave County, Arizona, to arrest and embarass [sic]" them.[97] Two days later on 9 August, the Mohave County Sheriff and the County Attorney came to Short Creek, looking to find someone to sign complaints, so they could make arrests.[98] After finding a local homesteader to do the deed, six of Short Creek's "most solid citizens," including Bro. John Y. Barlow, were arrested.[99] Barlow was charged with "Open and notorious cohabitation" with a woman other than his legal wife.[100] It is no small irony that the very first prosecutions of polygamists following the passage of Utah's 1935 unlawful cohabitation law were not in Utah but in Short Creek, Arizona. 

Jessop left Short Creek the morning of 21 August. When he asked John Y. Barlow whether or not to return, Barlow answered that he "thot it best [for Jessop] not [to] go."[101] So Jessop was not an eyewitness of Short Creek's extraordinary moment as the capital of the world that brought reporters, photographers, and film-makers "from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts and north and south from Canada to the Mexican border."[102] He did not see the trial, described as "a comedy of errors," when the "schoolhouse filled to overflowing with visitors from all across the state" and reporters from a half dozen newspapers "noted every moment" with flashbulbs "exploding across the makeshift courtroom."[103] Nor did he see "Paramount News set up a movie camera in the schoolhouse and [film] the entire proceedings."[104] Neither was he a witness the very next day when the LDS church authorities presented its newly instituted loyalty oath to the members of the Short Creek Branch, requiring them, under threat of excommunication, to declare their support of the First Presidency of the church "without any mental reservation" and to "denounce the practice and advocacy of plural marriage."[105]

Jessop had been plucked out of the crisis in Short Creek only days before its culmination, a crisis he had helped foment. He could only track from afar the trials and the subsequent conviction of three Short Creek saints—two polygamists and one plural wife.[106] Those who were imprisoned for polygamy were released within a year and returned to Short Creek.[107] The LDS Church eventually withdrew its branch from the town, leaving it to those who had made it a polygamist community. 

Conclusion 

When legal efforts were made in the 1935 to stop polygamy, Fundamentalist Mormons designated Short Creek, Arizona, as a place of refuge. It was a last minute decision, born of desperation, to go underground and avoid legal prosecution over plural marriage. In their zeal to build Zion, to do more than just an escape, the Fundamentalists inadvertently created a movement which drew inordinate and immediate attention, church excommunications, legal battles, and media scrutiny. Despite Short Creek's 1935 moment in the sun, the Fundamentalist Mormon movement at Short Creek did not wither away, and the opposition did not end polygamy as anticipated by some church and government officials. Large-scale government raids in 1944 and 1953 only strengthened individual and community resolve. Although residents eventually changed its name to Colorado City to avoid stigma from the raids, the town will soon celebrate seventy years since it was designated as a place of safety in 1935.[108] Short Creek's legacy as a "refuge for the saints" survives in a growing, thriving community for a segment of Fundamentalist Mormon polygamists and their families.[109]

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[1] This paper was prepared in fulfillment of a 2001-2002 Floyd O'Neil Scholarship from the American West Center at the University of Utah. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Mormon History Association's Thirty-Seventh Annual Conference, Tucson, Arizona 16-19 May 2002 and at the Sunstone Symposium, Salt Lake City, Utah, 7-10 August 2002. 

[2] Wallace Stegner, Mormon Country, (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1942), 225. 

[3] Mohave County Miner, 6 Sep 1935. Martha Sonntag Bradley, Kidnapped from That Land: The Government Raids on Short Creek Polygamists (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1993), 56-63, 224-225. Bradley cites from more than three dozen magazine and newspaper articles reporting Short Creek's polygamy in 1935. 

[4] Stegner, 223.

[5] Diary of Joseph Lyman Jessop, vols. 1-3 (Privately Published, 2000). Joseph Lyman Jessop was born 10 February 1892 in Millville, Utah. He died 11 February 1936 in Murray, Utah. During the time he was in Short Creek in 1935, Jessop had three wives, Winnie Porter, Maleta Porter, and Beth Allred, and he had 17 children. He eventually became the father of 35 children. Prior to his death, he married Beth's divorced sister, Olive Allred, as a fourth wife. See also Lorraine A. Bronson, Winnie. (Privately published typescript book, 1989), a biography of Winnie Porter Jessop. 

[6] Joseph Lyman Jessop's father, Joseph Smith Jessop, was the son of Richard Jessop and Mary Ellen Shaffer. Richard Jessop was jailed in 1889 for unlawful cohabitation. Jessop's mother, Martha Moore Yeates, was the daughter of Frederick Yeates and Sarah Webb. Frederick Yeates served two six-month sentences for unlawful cohabitation, one conviction, presumably, for each of his two plural wives. 

[7] Bradley, 6. Driggs, "This Will Someday Be the Head And Not the Tail of the Church': A History of the Mormon Fundamentalists at Short Creek," Journal of Church and State 43 (Winter 2001): 201. Edward Leo Lyman, Political Deliverance (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986). Lyman argues that while Mormon leaders made concessions about polygamy in order to gain Utah statehood, it was probably not their original intent to end plural marriages permanently.

[8] Driggs, 201-203. 

[9] Diary of Joseph Lyman Jessop, vol. 1 (22 Jan 1916), 105. In 1916, Joseph Lyman Jessop was shown a revelation to John Taylor on plural marriage that "few people [had] ever seen" by his uncles John and Fred Yeates. Jessop was likely referring to the 1886 revelation of John Taylor. Jessop defended the Mormon practice of polygamy on a few occasions during his 1910-1912 L.D.S. mission in the Southern States. His 1910 patriarchal blessing from a Logan temple worker promised him wives and children.

[10] Ibid., 206-207. Marianne T. Watson, "Joseph Lyman Jessop, The Baldwin Radio factory, and 'Old Fashioned Mormonism,"' unpublished manuscript dated 3 August 1992. (Hereafter: Wat son, "Joseph Lyman Jessop.") 

[11] Merrill Singer, "Nathaniel Baldwin, Utah Inventor and Patron of the Fundamentalist Movement," Utah Historical Quarterly 47 (Winter 1979): 42-53, at 51. 

[12] Ibid., Also Nathaniel Baldwin Diaries, 1897-1961, Marriott Library Special Collections, University of Utah. Baldwin was excommunicated from the LDS Church in 1922 for "insubordination" related to his beliefs in plural marriage. His diaries reflect his close friendships with others who held similar beliefs and attending religious meetings with them as early as 1921. He also provided rooms in his "Omega" office building in East Mill Creek for study meetings. 

[13] Ibid., Also Nathaniel Baldwin Diaries, 1918-1925. Also Diary of Joseph Lyman Jessop, vols. 1-2 (1923 to 1924). At its peak, in the early 1920's, the Baldwin factory employed some 300 workers, the majority of whom were mainstream Mormons who were not interested nor involved in continued plural marriage. Since complete employee records have not been found, the figure of ten to twenty percent is based upon names of people found associated with Baldwin's factory who were later connected directly with the Fundamentalist movement, which total about 30. Baldwin also hired post-manifesto polygamists and members of their families, even some of the children and wid ows of John W. Taylor, who were not later connected with the Fundamentalist movement. 

[14] Driggs, 208. John Wichersham Woolley (1831-1928) was excommunicated 30 March 1914 for performing plural marriages. "Excommunication," Deseret News, 31 March 1914, at 1."Excommunication of John W. Woolley," Salt Lake Tribune, April 3, 1914, at 4. "Excommunication of John W. Woolley," Salt Lake Telegram, 3 Apr 1914, at 3. 

[15] Bradley, 19.

[16] The term "continued plural marriage" refers specifically to the continued practice of plural marriage as an ongoing institution rather than the belief in plural marriage as a doctrine of Mormonism which had been suspended with the 1890 Manifesto. 

[17] Plural marriage societies often refer to their beliefs as "the fulness," which is a shorthand term for "the fulness of the gospel as restored by Joseph Smith." 

[18] Diary of Joseph Lyman Jessop, vol. 1 (12 Feb 1924, 1 Apr 1924, 5 Jul 1924, 29 Oct 1924, 30 Nov 1924, 1 Feb 1925), 173-183. 

[19] Ibid. "Receiver for Baldwin Firm," Salt Lake Tribune, October 9, 1924; "Receiver Appointed for Baldwin Radio Works," Deseret News, October 9, 1924; "Baldwin Gives Version of Suit," Salt Lake Tribune, October 10, 1924; "Baldwin Factory Work to Continue Says Receiver," Deseret News, October 10, 1924. 

[20] John Wichersham Woolley was born 30 Dec. 183 and died 13 Dec. 1928.

[21] Diary of Joseph Lyman Jessop, vol. 2 (13 January 1934), 4-5. Jessop's diary on this date states, "now the Lord has again spoken from the heavens after a silence of many years. ... The Lord had chosen men to act with these Prophets and hold the Priesthood like unto them before the death of John W. Woolley, but they were not notified of this choosing while he lived. In March 1929, these two men were notified and received their ordination according to direction of Almighty God. Joseph Leslie Broadbent and John Y. Barlow then began to function accordingly. A little later Joseph W. Musser was likewise called and appointed, then Charles F. Zitting, then LeGrand Woolley, then Louis Kelsch, until now this body of seven men form a nucleus of the Sanhedrin of God. Mortal men did not select them nor even suggest a name to the Lord, but they were called direct from heaven."

[22] Driggs, 208. Diary of Joseph Lyman Jessop, vol. 2 (13 January 1934), 4-5.

[23] Joseph W. Musser Diary, 13 November 1936. 

[24] Bradley, 39. 

[25] This forty-year period is the subject of Thomas G. Alexander, Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890-1930, (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986). 

[26] Bradley, 13-14. 

[27] Driggs; Heber J. Grant, General Conference Reports, April 1931; Messages, V: 292-303. Joseph W. Musser diaries, April 4, 1931. D. Michael Quinn, J. Reuben Clark: The Church Year (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1983), 183-186. President Heber J. Grant called J. Reuben Clark as second counselor in the First Presidency. Clark could not, according to biographer Michael Quinn, "look upon polygamy after the 1890 Manifesto with the least degree of allowance" and felt it was almost impossible for a Church member to be loyal after becoming involved in what he called the "web of renegade polygamy," which he regarded as tantamount to adultery. So, when Church President Grant "gave J. Reuben Clark a mandate to suppress the. . .practice of polygamy, President Clark went at it with a vengeance." 

[28] Quinn, 183-186. 

[29] Marianne T. Watson, "The Fred E. Curtis Papers: L.D.S. Church Surveillance of Fundamentalist Mormons," 1937 to 1954, unpublished manuscript dated 10 August 2001.

[30] Ibid., Bradley, 56-57.

[31] Ibid., 16-17. 

[32] Diary of Joseph Lyman Jessop, vol. 1 (28 Jan. 1928), 8. 

[33] Ibid., 7-8. The Arizona Strip area refers to the northern part of the state which is cut off from the main area by the Grand Canyon. 

[34] Ibid. 

[35] Driggs, 207; Bradley, 46. 

[36] Joseph Lyman Jessop and Beth Allred were married 7 January 1934. Beth was the daughter of post-manifesto polygamist B. Harvey Allred and his second wife Mary Evelyn Clark who were sealed 15 July 1903 in Mexico by Apostle Anthony W. Ivins. 

[37] Since Lorin C. Woolley was ill, J. Leslie Broadbent and John Y. Barlow, as the next senior members of the Priesthood Council, directed the mission. 

[38] Diary of Joseph Lyman Jessop, vol. 1 (3 May 1934), 58. 

[39] Ibid., 27 March 1934-2 Apr 1934, 18. The four men who accompanied Joseph Lyman Jessop were Richard Jessop, John Y. Barlow, Morris Kunz, and Arnold Boss.

[40] Diary of Joseph Lyman Jessop, vol. 2 (7 Apr 1934), 19. 

[41] Ibid. 

[42] Ibid., 24 May 1934, 22. A few days, later Jessop wrote of hearing a similar report, "One proposition is to send us to Mexico." 

[43] Ibid., 21 Apr. 1934, 19. Polygamist Abe Teerlink and his wife Rosa were charged in relation to polygamy. 

[44] Ibid., 15 May 1934,21. 

[45] Ibid., 24 June 1934,25. 

[46] Ibid., 16 Mar. 1935, 53.

[47] Diary of Joseph Lyman Jessop, vol. 2 (23 Mar. 1934), 53. 

[48] Ibid., 25 Mar. 1935, 54. 

[49] Ibid., 4 Apr. 1935, 55. 

[50] Ibid., 30 Apr. 1935, 57. 

[51] Ibid., 10 May 1935,58. 

[52] Ibid. 

[53] Ibid. 

[54] Joseph W. Musser Diary, 10 May 1935. 

[55] Ibid.

[56] Ibid. 

[57] Diary of Joseph Lyman Jessop, Vol. 2 (13-14 May 135), 59. 

[58] Ibid., 23 May 1935, 60. 

[59] Ibid., 17 May 1935,59. 

[60] Ibid., 22 May 1935, 60. 

[61] Ibid., 17 May 1935, 59. The size of this "flood" on Short Creek, in terms of new population, is estimated to have been some 50 to 60 people. Combined with the families of those already from the area, the entire movement was probably around 100. Of the 16 men identified by name in Jessop's journal who were bound by priesthood covenant to the movement, seven came from the Salt Lake area: Ianthus W. Barlow, Joseph L. Jessop, Carl Jenztch, John Y. Barlow, Harold Allred, and Joseph L. Jessop's two brothers, Richard and Fred. Ten were all from the Short Creek area or from Southern Utah. They were Price Johnson, Elmer Johnson, Isaac W. Carling, Leonard Black, Isaac Carling Spencer, Jerry Johnson, Henry Covington, LeRoy Johnson, Vergel Jessop, and Warren Black. Over the next three months, Jessop identified a total of 60 persons who were somehow connected with the effort in Short Creek. Of these, 54 individuals were members of the 16 families listed above, a number of whom were older unmarried sons whose labor contributed greatly to the movement. Six others were visiting relatives. Of the 60, 29 or about half, came from Salt Lake, and one of these was a baby born after their arrival—the son of I.W. and Violet Barlow. However, missing from this list are names of some wives and most younger children. 

[62] Driggs, 210. 

[63] Joseph W. Musser Diary, 13 June 1935.

[64] Ibid., 20 June 1935. 

[65] Ibid., 13 June 1935. 

[66] Ibid. 

[67] Ibid.

[68] Joseph W. Musser Diary, 10 May 1935, 27 May 1935. 

[69] Ibid., 3 June 1935. 

[70] Ibid., 23 June 1935. 

[71] Ibid.

[72] Joseph W. Musser Diary, 13 June 1935.

[73] Ibid., 30 May 1935,60-61. 

[74] Ibid., 3 June 1935, 61. 

[75] Ibid., 23 June 1935, 62. Letter, Joseph W. Musser to "Our Brethren in the Covenant of Christ," 18 Jun 1935. 

[76] Ibid., 2 July 1935, 63-64. 

[77] Ibid. 

[78] Ibid.

[79] Ibid., 4 July 1935, 64. 

[80] Ibid., 16 July 1935, 65. 

[81] Ibid., 17 July 1935, 65. 

[82] Ibid., 17 July 1935, 22 June 1935, Vol. 2, 65-66. 

[83] Ibid., 28 July 1935, 16 July 1935, 17 July 1935, Vol. 2, 63, 66. 

[84] Ibid. 

[85] Joseph W. Musser Diary, 15 August 1935. 

[86] Ibid. 

[87] Diary of Joseph Lyman Jessop, Vol. 2 (11 Aug 1935 and 15 Aug 1935), 68-69.

[88] Driggs, 210; Bradley, 52. Isaac Carling was excommunicated for preaching polygamy. The other three, all found to have entered polygamous marriages, were Warren E. lohnson, Viola Spencer Johnson, and a plural wife of Price Johnson, Hellen Lucy Hull. 

[89] Diary of Joseph Lyman Jessop, vol. 2 (26 May 1935), 60. 

[90] Ibid, 181. Jessop was excommunicated in December 1924 from the East Mill Creek Ward in Salt Lake City "for practicing and teaching principles contrary to the rulings of the church." 

[91] Ibid., 7 July 1935, 64. 

[92] Ibid.

[93] Diary of Joseph Lyman Jessop, vol. 2 (21 Jull935), 66. 

[94] Bradley, 6. Bradley states: "The Kansas City Times quoted Apostle Melvin J. Ballard as admitting to the partial responsibility for the prosecution of Spencer, Allred and Johnson when it shared information with the government that had been gathered for Church trials." Driggs, 213-214. Truth, January 1936. 

[95] Ibid., 26 July 1935, Vol, 2, 66. 

[96] Ibid., 6 Aug. 1935, Vol. 2, 67. 

[97] Ibid., 7 Aug. 1935, 67; Driggs, 213-214; Truth, January 1936. 

[98] Ibid., 9 Aug 1935, 68. Also Bradley, 54. Bradley states, that on "16 August 1935, [County Attorney] Bollinger succeeded in surprising the fundamentalists with warrants. . . ."It is not likely the arrests were a total surprise, given the fact that the polygamists had been warned of the probability arrests some three weeks before, on 21 July 1935. Jessop's diary clearly identifies the day of the initial arrests as 9 August not 16 August; he states it was Jack Childers who finally signed the complaints. Wallace Stegner's account (Stegner, 220), as told to him by Short Creek resident [non-polygamist] Jon Reed Lauritzsen, agrees in substance with Jessop's account, stating that Sheriff Graham and County Attorney Bollinger "had trouble getting complaints," but finally got "Jack Chil dress," a homesteader, to sign. 

[99] Ibid., Driggs, 213. Bradley, 55. Those arrested were Isaac Carling Spencer, Sylvia Allred Spencer, Price Johnson, Hellen Hull, John Y. Barlow, and Mary "Roe" Barlow. Charges against all were dismissed in September 1935 by Short Creek Justice of the Peace J. M. Lauritzen based on "information and belief" amounting to rumor. Soon new complaints were drawn and warrants issued. 

[100] Joseph W. Musser Diary, 20 August 1935. 

[101] Ibid., 3 Sep 1935,70. 

[102] Mohave County Miner, 6 Sep 1935. Bradley, 56-63, 224-225. Bradley cites from more than three dozen magazine and newspaper articles. 

[103] Ibid., 56. 

[104] Ibid. 

[105] Driggs, 211. 

[106] "Short Creek Embroglio," Truth, vol. 1 (October 1935), 51. Bradley, 54-55,62. Driggs, 213-214. The two men, Price W. Johnson and Isaac Carling Spencer, spent not quite a year in prison and were let out early for good behavior. Sylvia Allred, plural wife of Isaac Carling Spencer, who was pregnant at the time of her arrest and trial, received a suspended sentence after the birth of her baby. 

[107] Ibid.

[108] Short Creek's name was officially changed to Colorado City in 1962. 

[109] Driggs, 51. Driggs states: "Short Creek has today disappeared from maps but thrives as Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona. . . .It is important to appreciate that Mormon Fundamentalism is not a monolithic group any more than the larger Christian or Islamic communities are homogenous. The Short Creek Community is but one part of a much larger and very diverse group. There are some sympathies but no formal ties between Short Creek and any of the other Fundamentalist communities."

[post_title] => Short Creek: A Refuge for the Saints [post_excerpt] => Dialogue 36.3 (Spring 2003): 71–87
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Introduction 

In one sense it is curious that there is such a thing as Mormon fundamentalism—only 168 years have passed since the religiously "burned-over district" of New York state gave birth to the Book of Mormon in 1830. Despite its youthfulness, Mormonism is to mainline Christianity what early Christianity was to Judaism—a separatist Judeo-Christian movement of extraordinary growth.[1] The principal organization of Mormonism is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints which has worldwide membership of more than 10 million people who look to Salt Lake City, Utah, with the reverence usually given to Rome, Jerusalem, and Mecca. 

Because LDS membership has doubled every fifteen years or less since 1945, a non-LDS sociologist projects Mormonism will be a world religion of 265 million members within 90 years.[2] For more than a century the LDS church has dominated the Mountain West of America so completely that the area is known to geographers as "the Mormon cultural region." Mormonism is the first or second largest church in nine western states, the fifth largest religious organization in America, and presently fields 57,000 full-time proselytizing missionaries throughout the world.[3] This Mormon-dominated West is the home of Mormon fundamentalism, a twentieth-century response to changes in the LDS church that began with public abandonment of the practice of "plural marriage" (polygamy) by an 1890 "Manifesto" from the church president. 

Which leads to the problem of offensive terms. Mormon fundamentalists have embraced the term "Fundamentalist,"[4] but generally dislike the word "polygamy." First, many regard it as the disbeliever's way of mocking their faith that God sanctions and commands that righteous men of a divine latter-day Covenant marry more than one wife. Second, some object that "polygamy" could also refer to multiple husbands, and therefore "polygyny" (more than one wife) is the only outsider's term that is accurate. Mormon fundamentalists refer to their practice of multiple marriage as the "the Principle," or "Celestial Marriage," or "the New and Everlasting Covenant," or "the Priesthood Work," or (most commonly) "plural marriage." Some even resent an outsider saying "the practice of plural marriage," because this sacred principle is not something they practice at! Outside anthropology, even most academics are unfamiliar with the term "polygyny," and this essay therefore uses the general term "polygamy" because it is universally understood to refer to the marriage of a man to more than one living wife at a time. I hope this study demonstrates there is no disrespect in my use of "polygamy" and "polygamist." 

Stereotypes 

Like other fundamentalist movements, Mormon fundamentalism suffers from stereotypes fostered by the mainstream religious tradition and by the secular media. The most prevalent stereotype is that all adult Mormon fundamentalists are practicing polygamists, with the obligatory illustration of a bearded man surrounded by a bevy of young wives.[5] An other common image in the popular mind and media is of Mormon fundamentalist females currently wearing hair in long braids, dresses to the ankle, and long sleeved blouses buttoned to the neck.[6] Non-Mormons and mainstream Mormons often accept the view of the 1981 television drama Child Bride of Short Creek that a polygamist's teenage son may have to make a desperate escape to save his girlfriend from the matrimonial clutches of the young man's own father.[7] Like all stereotypes, these distort our understanding of a diverse and complex people. 

The 1988 Charles Bronson movie Messenger of Death used those polygamy stereotypes in a kinder way, but then portrayed the more recent image of wild-eyed Mormon fundamentalists engaging in murder and gun battles over rival claims to authority. This perception of Mormon fundamentalists as sectarian murderers is only twenty years old, and is based on the acts of a handful of deranged individuals.[8] Even though the largest Mormon fundamentalist group at Colorado City, Arizona, prohibits possession of firearms "as a matter of religious faith," the equation of violence and fundamentalism is powerful enough to crop up in a 1987 scholarly examination of Mormon polygamous families.[9]

Numbers 

Then there is the problem of counting Mormon fundamentalists. The LDS church, the news media, and fundamentalists themselves have not always been helpful in giving accurate estimates. 

Part of the LDS church's campaign for acceptance by non-Mormons has been to grossly underestimate the number of Mormon polygamists, both before and after the 1890 "Manifesto" declared an end to polygamous marriages. Church leaders and members usually claim that nineteenth-century polygamous practice was no more than 2 or 3 percent of the Mormon population in Utah, when it was ten times that rate.[10] During a transitional period of fourteen years after the 1890 Manifesto, LDS leaders secretly authorized and performed about 250 new polygamous marriages, yet only acknowledged the occurrence of "a few," despite disclosures of the larger numbers by a muckraking press and a three-year investigation by the U.S. Senate.[11] After 1906 the LDS church's consistent battle against the performance of new polygamous marriages was characterized by similar distortion. LDS leaders publicly dismissed renegade plural marriages as few in numbers, whereas privately they exhibited a paranoia that new polygamous marriages were spreading like wildfire.[12] 

On the other hand, the news media and some fundamentalists have joined in grossly inflating the numbers of twentieth-century Mormon polygamists. To embarrass the LDS church, as well as sell newspapers, early in this century the Salt Lake Tribune made the sensational claim that there were "thousands" of new polygamous marriages after the 1890 Manifesto.[13] In like manner the fundamentalist publication Truth later claimed that about 2,200 men entered polygamy after the 1890 prohibition "through the blessings of the Authorities of the Church [i.e., to 1904]."[14] This was ten times higher than the actual numbers.[15]

In recent years promotional exaggeration has merged with the perceptions of outsiders. In 1974 one fundamentalist wrote that "no less than 50,000 individuals are personally involved in the living of this law today."[16] That figure is still easy to dismiss as inflated, yet law enforcement officials were soon stunned at the extent of polygamous practice in Utah. Solving the murder of fundamentalist leader Rulon C. Allred in 1977 required close cooperation with fundamentalists of various persuasions who gladly distanced themselves from the aberrant fundamentalists who committed the murder. The Utah attorney general said he was "astonished at the scope of the practice of polygamy" which involved tens of thousands. The Salt Lake County Attorney said: "I think that the immensity of the numbers of people right there in Salt Lake County that were practicing polygamy really did shock me. I didn't think that there were that many people that were committed to the Fundamentalist ideas and actually actively practicing the Fundamentalist theories."[17]

By the late 1980s, it was customary to claim a minimum of 30,000 people living in polygamy. For example, a 1986 study of three suburban polygamist families began by claiming "30,000 people living in polygamous families in Utah today," and the Salt Lake Tribune in 1988 reported the estimate of a geographer at Utah State University that "30,000 to 40,000 people could be practicing polygamy in the West from southern Canada to northern Mexico. He estimated that 20,000 to 30,000 of those live in Utah alone." During that same year the Los Angeles Times cited an estimate of 60,000 polygamists.[18] In 1989 The Encyclopedia of American Religions article on polygamous Mormon groups estimated "approximately 30,000 polygamists," and the New York Times claimed 50,000 people living in polygamous households as of 1991.[19] Fundamentalist publisher Ogden Kraut publicly stated in 1989 that "there are probably at least 30,000 people who consider themselves as Fundamentalist Mormons, espousing at least the belief in the doctrine of plural marriage."[20] Although he kept the 30,000 figure of earlier claims, this was actually a major reduction in the estimated number of polygamists because Kraut included people who merely believe in plural marriage. 

That figure is still a third too high. Even after accepting higher-end estimates on a group-by-group basis, this study finds about 21,000 men, women, and children are Mormon fundamentalists from northern Mexico through the far western United States into southern Canada. These numbers do not include members of the LDS church who accept fundamentalist doctrines without giving allegiance to the movement. In one interview Ogden Kraut observed that there are "professors of religion that I'm acquainted with who believe all the doctrines of Fundamentalism, and yet they're teaching at BYU, seminaries, and institutes" of the LDS church. He added in another interview that these fundamentalist sympathizers include "high councilmen, bishops, and in some cases stake [diocese] presidents."[21] That may be so, but this study restricts the scope of Mormon fundamentalism to those who demonstrate actual commitment.[22] Contrary to common wisdom, many of these committed fundamentalists are living in monogamous relationships, and about three-fourths of Mormon fundamentalists today have never been members of the LDS church. 

The Mormon Mainstream and Plural Marriage 

If living polygamy is not necessary to be a Mormon fundamentalist, how are they different from the currently non-polygamist Mormon mainstream? That definition requires some discussion of Mormon theology, practice, and history. 

Even basic theology evolved during the fourteen-year leadership of Mormon founder Joseph Smith, Jr. (1805-44), but the single most important characteristic of Mormonism has been its claim to the Old Testament tradition of prophetic leadership within an apostolic church of Christ. The LDS church claimed to have living apostles like those of the New Testament, but more important was the church president's claim to be a prophet like Moses—able (if called upon by God) to challenge the authority of any secular pharaoh, to reveal new commandments, to announce new words of God as revelation and scripture, to hold priesthood that bridged the authority of Old and New Testaments, and to lead God's people as a self-sustaining, theocratic community. In fact, it was this reinvoking of Old Testament norms within a Christian context that almost immediately alienated Mormonism from traditional Christianity and Protestant-dominated American society.[23] 

In the mid-nineteenth century Mormonism became "Uncle Sam's abscess," as one book title put it. Using biblical references to a pre-millennial "restoration of all things," Joseph Smith restored in practice (sometimes secretly) Old Testament forms, and Brigham Young institutionalized them after the founding prophet's murder by a mob in 1844. Polygamy was the most sensational, but equally disturbing to outsiders were Mormon migration to a central place, political hegemony, theocratic ideals and practices, economic cooperation and communalism, anti-pluralism, and speculative theology that included doctrines that Adam was God, that Christ was married, and that both God and Christ were polygamists.[24] These were flashpoints in the conflict between Mormonism and American society, and from 1862 to 1890 the federal government waged a campaign to attack Mormonism through anti-polygamy legislation (which was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1879 and 1890). Polygamy was the easiest weapon for nineteenth-century anti-Mormons to use in attacking everything else they abhorred about Mormonism.[25] 

As the government increased its anti-polygamy crusade, Mormon leaders defensively countered that the abandonment of plural marriage was theologically impossible. Jan Shipps, the pre-eminent non-Mormon interpreter of the Mormon experience, has observed that because polygamy alienated Mormons from mainstream America for decades, "the practice of plural marriage gave the Latter-day Saints time to gain an ethnocultural identity that did not entirely rest on corporate [church membership] peculiarity."[26] Mormon leaders gave many rationales for practicing polygamy (including its role in producing a larger number of righteous children), but always subordinated those explanations to the affirmation that revelations of God required the Latter-day Saints to live this "Holy Principle." A frequent advocate of that theme was Apostle Wilford Woodruff who sermonized on one occasion that if Mormons gave up polygamy, "then we must do away with prophets and Apostles." He told the Mormons a decade later, "Were we to compromise this principle by saying, we will renounce it, we would then have to renounce our belief in revelation from God."[27] Nevertheless, because of the LDS church's official defiance of federal anti-polygamy laws since 1862, its very existence hung in the balance by the summer of 1890. To survive, the church either abandoned or redefined all of these radicalisms, beginning with polygamy. Wilford Woodruff himself, as recently sustained LDS church president, announced the "Manifesto" in September 1890 to end the practice of plural marriage.[28] 

Fundamentalist Origins and Definitions 

During a forty-year transition after 1890, many LDS church members looked wistfully back at Mormonism's old time religion. The reasons were larger than polygamy, for as a Brigham Young University historian observed: "The political, social, religious, and economic world [of Mormonism] that emerged after the Manifesto of September 1890 was vastly different from the one that had existed before."[29] Nevertheless, only a few Mormons concluded that the church had corrupted itself in the process of accommodating to American society. Those who regarded these beliefs and practices as non-negotiable merely had to read the pre-1890 published statements of the church leader who issued the 1890 Manifesto. These Latter-day Saints regarded pre-1890 Mormonism as pristine, and defined the post-Manifesto church as compromised in theology and authority. By the 1930s Mormonism's fundamentalist movement resulted from those perceptions.[30]

Being a Mormon fundamentalist involves three essentials. First, a conviction that the LDS church is "out of order"—in other words, has strayed off its divinely instituted path by abandoning or changing various practices and beliefs. Second, a conviction that plural marriage is a divine revelation and commandment that should be practiced today by those who are willing and worthy. Third, an acceptance of priesthood authority and officiators not sanctioned by the LDS church. These are the three pillars of Mormon fundamentalism.[31]

But nearly all fundamentalists retained the essential Mormon views of prophetic leadership and authority, and could not simply advocate as a matter of conscience the return to practices and beliefs abandoned by the LDS church. Thus they needed a claim of authority that could counter the fact LDS president Heber J. Grant (as acknowledged prophet, seer, and revelator in the 1920s) was leading a full-scale retreat from the radical past. 

Plural marriage was the central issue of the LDS church's accommodation, and by necessity was also the foundation of the fundamentalist claim to authority beyond that of the changing church. According to ex communicant Lorin C. Woolley, the main fundamentalist exponent in the 1920s, the president of the church who was living in 1886 (John Taylor) conferred special priesthood authority upon Woolley and others to continue performing plural marriages even if the church abandoned "the Principle." As the last survivor of those men, Lorin Woolley in 1929 conferred that apostleship upon others, a "Council of Friends" or "Priesthood Council" (most of whom had already been excommunicated from the LDS church). Among Woolley's council were John Y. Barlow, Joseph W. Musser, and Louis A. Kelsch, Jr., who will be discussed later. More than 90 percent of fundamentalists center their authority on Lorin Woolley's Council of Friends.[32] The fundamentalists who do not trace their authority through Lorin Woolley either claim the charismatic authority of a vision or trace their "patriarchal priesthood" in some way to Joseph Smith. 

The easiest division among Mormon fundamentalists to understand is the split between "groups" and "independents." About 90 percent of fundamentalists belong to organized groups. This study identified their numbers after inquiries on a group-by-group basis. Each has a history and character which also need at least some discussion. Even though American society and the LDS church gave Mormon fundamentalists every reason to distrust outsiders, the contours of Mormon fundamentalism are gradually coming into focus for the outside world because fundamentalists are more willing to talk with the media and academics.[33]

The Groups: Fundamentalist Church (Colorado City) 

The small town of Short Creek (now Colorado City), Arizona, is the centerpiece of the largest fundamentalist group. The town was also the focus of an unprecedented effort by American law enforcement to destroy a peaceful community, eradicate family relationships, and scatter a people to the winds. Its only American parallel is the federal actions against Native Americans in the nineteenth century.[34]

For thirty years after Leroy S. Johnson and other polygamists settled at Short Creek in the late 1920s, the community was the target of outside repression. First, the LDS church conducted wholesale excommunications of Short Creek residents in 1935, the same year the church's behind-the-scenes encouragement resulted in a Utah law defining unlawful cohabitation as a felony. This law exceeded the repressiveness of the Victorian federal government which defined polygamous cohabitation as a misdemeanor. Later that same year Arizona convicted two "Short Creekers" of polygamy, one of them Johnson's brother. After more attempted prosecutions of town residents in 1939, law enforcement bided its time until 1944, when federal and local officers conducted early morning arrests of fifty people from Arizona and Utah. This resulted in the imprisonment of more than twenty men, including Short Creek's leader John Y. Barlow. An original member of Woolley's Priesthood Council, he was now senior president. Barlow lived only a few years after his release, and was spared the sight of Arizona police and the national guard making a pre-dawn raid on Short Creek in 1953 to arrest its entire population.[35]

It is difficult to overstate the trauma of the 1953 Short Creek raid on family life of its 400 residents. Arizona's governor "said that they intended to put the men in prison, put the women in detention homes, take our children and adopt them out and destroy the records so that no stigma would ever be on our children, and take our lands and use them to pay for the costs of the raid.”[36] Arresting officers segregated the older teenage boys, told them to scatter wherever they chose (even though legal minors), and then left the unattended youths in a town of empty houses that had been ransacked without search warrants for evidence. Leroy Johnson eventually sought out and relocated nearly all of these dispossessed youths back to the community.[37]

Polygamous mothers and their young children were a special target of Arizona and Utah officials in the 1953 raid and its aftermath. Arizona made the children wards of the state and placed them in foster homes.[38] Utah authorities sought to complete the pincer assault on Short Creek and Mormon fundamentalists by defining polygamist children as neglected and abused children, and sending police cars to take them from polygamous parents. The LDS church's newspaper applauded that action, and encouraged government seizure of every polygamist child who could be found. It was two years before 161 young children were allowed to return to their mothers and fathers at Short Creek, and polygamists elsewhere hid their children and lived in dread of having them "taken" on any pretext.[39]

Although the shocks of 1953 reverberated among polygamists of every persuasion, the raid encouraged understandable clannishness in the people of Short Creek (now incorporated as Colorado City, Arizona, and its cross-border "twin city" of Hildale, Utah). In 1977 its Priesthood Council president Leroy Johnson cataloged the collective memory and heritage that bind his group together: "I have been through the '34 raid, raid of '41, when they had Uncle Rich and Uncle Fred arrested, the raid of '44, and the raid of '53. We are still fighting for our liberty." Colorado City's mayor comments, "When people are under persecution from the outside, they always stick tight. They always hold way better together."[40] Often called Short Creekers no matter where they live, this group's economic co-operative was incorporated as the United Effort Plan in 1942. Incorporated by Johnson's successor Rulon Jeffs, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is also called the Johnson-Jeffs group.[41]

The Colorado City group has grown in numbers and geographic distribution since the attempted destruction of its small community in 1953. Born as a polygamous child in 1958 and raised in the group's Salt Lake Valley community, one woman observes, "The Johnson group is very low profile," and therefore difficult to count.[42] Recent court documents list 4,600 beneficiaries of the United Effort Plan in Colorado City-Hildale, which corresponds to the population reported for the school board. The Colorado City group has its only foreign settlement in the farming community of Lister, Canada (near Creston, British Columbia). One Colorado City leader says that 500-600 persons in Lister are fundamentalists, and some also live in Creston. Inside sources agree on an estimate of 2,000 Johnson group members in the Salt Lake Valley. There are also multiple family dwellings of group members in Cedar City and Manti, Utah, and scattered families and individuals elsewhere, which probably add no more than 400 men, women, and children. This adds to a total of about 7,600 people in the Johnson-Jeffs group.[43]

These numbers include a recent split (amounting to 20 percent of the total) originally led by Marion Hammon and Alma Timpson from the Priesthood Council at Colorado City. This split has divided families in the tightly-knit community, but is permanent because both groups have filled vacancies in their respective priesthood councils. The Hammon Timpson group (also called "The Second Ward") often lives in co-residence with the main body of Short Creekers, and is difficult to segregate in such statistics as beneficiaries of the United Effort Plan and in Colorado City's school board records of community population. The split has resulted in on-going lawsuits between the two groups.[44]

The Groups: Apostolic United Brethren 

Of comparable size is the Allred group ("Apostolic United Brethren"). After a stroke, Joseph W. Musser (a member of Lorin Woolley's Priesthood Council and at this time its president) put his physician Rulon C. Allred into the council in 1951, which its other members resisted. In January 1952 the Short Creek members of the council repudiated Allred's position, which split the movement into two groups, each with a rival Council of Friends. This schism has always been peaceful, but it divided families. For example, Rulon Allred had brothers-in-law among the Bar lows in Short Creek. Allred's group tended to be urban-oriented and more easy-going than the Johnson group with its population primarily centered in an isolated commune. Allred and other Salt Lake men had spent seven months in jail in 1945, and he and his families frequently moved out of state in the 1950s to avoid arrest. Still, the Allred group did not directly experience Short Creek's sense of trauma until 1977. In that year Rulon Allred was murdered and became a martyr for his people, as Short Creekers of 1953 are for the Johnson group. His funeral attendance was the largest ever in Utah up to that time.[45]

The Allred group (Apostolic United Brethren) has about 7,200 total members. In 1989 its current presiding elder Owen Allred reported 700 adults in the Salt Lake Valley, 200 adults in Cedar City, Utah, 500 adults in its commune at Pinesdale, Montana, as well as 300 Mexican fundamentalists in Ozumba, D.F., Mexico, and scattered families in England, Germany, and the Netherlands.[46] The figures were not provided for the total number of children in the Allred group, but it is safe to assume that three-fourths of these 1,700 adults are married, and of that number more than half are women with children. Interviews and other sources indicate that it is reasonable to expect these women to have an average of seven children. This yields an estimated 5,500 children, or a total of approximately 7,200 members in the Allred group. 

The Groups: Church of the Firstborn 

Next in size, but by less than one-fourth, is the combined total of various LeBaron churches. These organized Mormon fundamentalists bypass Lorin C. Woolley's Council of Friends. Instead, the LeBaron churches claim authority through a patriarchal priesthood conferred from Joseph Smith to his polygamous brother-in-law Benjamin F. Johnson to his grandson Alma Dayer LeBaron and through one of Dayer's sons. Still, from the 1920s to 1955, Dayer, most of his children, and some other LeBaron relatives had been entering into plural marriages performed by Joseph W. Musser and Rulon C. Allred whose authority derived from Lorin C. Woolley. Until 1955 most of the LeBaron family did not discuss the significance of the family's blessings, and instead divided their loyalties among the LDS church, the Allred group, and two LeBaron brothers who had unsuccessfully claimed for twenty years to be the prophetic "One Mighty and Strong" of Mormonism. 

When Joel F. LeBaron suddenly incorporated the Church of the First born of the Fullness of Times in 1955, his brother Verlan (before converting) was "convinced that we had another false prophet loose in the family." However, most of Joel's immediate family converted after the formal organization of the Church of the Firstborn on 3 April 1956. Joel was "First Grand Head," even though he was a monogamist at the time, in temporary violation of the traditional Mormon fundamentalist requirement of polygamy for leadership. He turned his family's ranch in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, into Colonia LeBaron, a fundamentalist haven with communal laundry, kitchen, and dining area.[47]

Subsequent activities of LeBaron churches seized the attention of other fundamentalists, the LDS church, and eventually the nation itself. First, unlike other Mormon fundamentalist groups, the LeBarons sent missionaries to proselytize. They churned out pamphlets which they shoved under dormitory doors at Brigham Young University and passed out at the gates of Temple Square in Salt Lake City. They made inroads on other fundamentalist groups which responded with published arguments. After the conversion of a dozen LDS missionaries in 1958, followed by defections of local LDS leaders throughout the West, the LDS church began its first publishing crusade against any fundamentalists.[48] Then a schism—the Church of the Lamb of God led by Joel's brother Er vil LeBaron—murdered Joel in 1972, fire-bombed the LeBaron colony at Los Molinos, killed about twenty other family members and dissident followers, threatened the U.S. and LDS presidents, and then assassinated Rulon C. Allred at his Salt Lake office in 1977. In the decade after Ervil LeBaron's death in the Utah penitentiary, some of his family and followers committed another twelve sectarian murders within the LeBaron groups. These incredible events reversed the momentum of the Church of the Firstborn, and disenchanted all but the most devout.[49]

This murderous violence has poisoned outside perceptions about Mormon fundamentalists generally, and also stigmatized the overwhelmingly non-violent fundamentalists who still traced their authority through Alma Dayer LeBaron. One of the principal law enforcement investigators of the LeBaron murderers affirms that there are fewer than fifty persons responsible for this sectarian violence.[50] In 1990 a tele-journalist from New York City spent two weeks in the polygamous commune of Colonia LeBaron and reported that its population of about 1,000 is divided among the Church of the Firstborn and other LeBaron churches, with an added 300 LeBaron followers in an unnamed location (probably the LeBaron colony of Los Molinos in Baja California).[51] Followers of LeBaron's patriarchal authority are also scattered from San Diego, throughout the West, and in Central America, and now add probably another 400 hundred men, women, and children outside the two LeBaron communes in Mexico.[52] Therefore, the LeBaron churches now have about 1,700 people as the third largest organized form of Mormon fundamentalism. 

The Groups: Davis County Co-Operative 

Then there is the financially diversified Kingston group, incorporated as the "Davis County Co-operative." One fundamentalist described it as "the most outstanding example in all Mormondom of patriarchal family effort to establish [an economic] united order."[53] Outsiders know a general outline of the Kingston group. Charles W. Kingston was initially aligned with Lorin C. Woolley's fundamentalist authority, but in 1935 his son Eldon Kingston received an angelic commission to begin strict economic communalism with the Kingston family and their followers in Davis County, Utah, immediately north of Salt Lake City. In the early years these ascetic people wore a uniform: blue bib-overalls for males and blue dresses for females, with no pockets and tied at the waist with string. 

Fifty years later outsiders knew the Kingstons had given up uniforms, still lived austerely as individuals, and were led by Eldon's much married brother John Ortell Kingston. The group had financial holdings in Utah that attracted front page attention of the Wall Street Journal: a 300-acre dairy farm in Davis County, a cattle ranch and coal mine in Emery County, the Bobco Discount Store, the United Bank, a restaurant equipment business, a clothing factory, wholesale distributors, shoe-repair stores, as well as a 1,000-acre farm in Idaho.[54] Beyond that, the Kingston group is so secretive that even other Mormon fundamentalists regard it as virtually impenetrable.[55]

More details about the Kingstons have come from a plural wife within its inner circle and a man involved in the economic operation of the Davis County Co-operative.[56] Among the faithful, it was first known as the "New Order," and each of its male heads of household was identified by number, with "Number One" for the descendant of Jesus Christ who leads the group: initially Eldon Kingston and later Ortell Kingston. Only the inner circle used these numbers, but "Ortell Kingston [as "Number One"] was absolutely the dictatorial [leader], in other words, what Ortell Kingston said, went. He was a very wise economic manager. But there wasn't any council—although there was a [priesthood] council—but there wasn't any council that he needed to meet with. He made decisions. Whatever decision he made, it happened." After Ortell's death, his sister provided functional direction for the Co-operative, in concert with Merlin Kingston as religious leader. 

The group has abandoned some of its early practices, but not essential ones. In addition to the long-discarded blue uniforms, in its early years the Kingstons were also the only fundamentalists to control the diet of the faithful: only one designated food (such as squash) each day in unlimited amounts. Although non-fundamentalists and even the Allred group's presiding elder have assumed that the Kingstons have also abandoned plural marriage along with the distinctive dress and dietary rules,[57] polygamy is still alive within the inner circle. It is restricted primarily to the Kingstons and their kin. "However, there are a lot of interests that draw away from the interest toward plural marriage, especially the emphasis on economic success." 

In fact, the Davis County Co-operative is far more extensive than previously understood. In addition to the already identified holdings, the Kingston group owned Murray First Thrift until it was absorbed by another bank. Through a variety of wholly-owned subsidiaries and a maze of company names, the Davis County Co-operative has published telephone directories, screen prints T-shirts and sports shirts, owns a trucking company, hardware stores, pawn shops, and clothing stores in Utah, and distributes a variety of products (including video games) to local chain stores and other businesses. In addition, this Mormon fundamentalist organization began doing business with Communist China before it was fashionable in America to do so, and became the exclusive distributor to stores throughout the United States of work gloves and clothing manufactured in the People's Republic of China. 

Without stating the full extent of the Kingston group's revenues, the source for this economic information indicated that the Co-operative's income is far more than a million dollars a month. Until recently computerized, the accounting for these businesses and their thousands of employees was done by hand in a warehouse-size office staffed by women, primarily plural wives: "Now, all of these women that did all of this accounting, they brought all of their kids. In the next area, there was a yard and fence and things. And they brought all their kids, and they took turns babysitting each other's kids. Or their older children came [after school] and babysat the children." 

The far-flung economic empire of the Davis County Co-operative also creates problems for numbering membership in the Kingston group because there are various levels of participation. Those at the lowest level of trust—numbering in the thousands—are employees who may not even realize that they are employed by a Mormon fundamentalist organization. In the second level, employees agree with the Co-operative to reduce their paychecks to the amount necessary to pay for such things as rent, mortgage, utilities, government taxes, etc. At this level the Co-operative withholds the balance of salary, and each month gives the employee a special card redeemable for all goods and services in Co-operative enterprises, with discounts from 10 percent to 50 percent or more. The discounts are calculated monthly according to the Co-operative's profit margin for each item or service, and applied to the next month's card. 

The Kingston inner circle refuses to discuss religion with those at this second level, even if the special cardholders are polygamists from other fundamentalist groups. At the third level of trust in the Davis County Co-operative, the participant receives an even smaller paycheck, but now receives an apartment or house from among the Co-operative's widely dispersed real estate holdings. Some participants at this third level become assistant managers or managers of Kingston enterprises, and because of this trust, religion may enter the relationship, at last. But not necessarily, because "the only people they trusted to really know what was going on were those that were in the family." The Kingston group's children move through the second and third levels with inside knowledge and equal unwillingness to discuss religion with outsiders in those levels of the Co-operative. 

Once the Davis County Co-operative became successful, it stopped seeking converts, and now even a trusted outsider may take years (if ever) to finally gain membership at the Kingston group's center. For some, this may come only through polygamous marriage into one of the families at the core. 'Those that go to church together are the Kingstons and their families, and a few people of the Fundamentalist point of view." Even here, economic and business matters dominate Sunday meetings for a people who continue to live in austerity despite the co-operative wealth of their organization. This inner circle is really the only level of the Kingston group where participants can be considered Mormon fundamentalists, because "the Davis County Co-operative isn't really a religious organization." Dominated by descendants of the original core of Kingstons, kin, and early converts, the Kingston group's inner circle is made up of about 1,000 persons who can be considered fundamentalist members.[58] This is the last fundamentalist group of significant size. 

The Groups: Miscellaneous 

Ogden Kraut observes that there is a wide assortment of tiny groups—"splinters of splinters"—some with half a dozen followers.[59] A generous estimate is that no more than 1,000 men, women, and children belong to this collection of small organizations of Mormon fundamentalists. 

The larger groups duplicate many functions of the LDS church. They have sacrament (Communion) meetings, Sunday school classes, and separate meetings for children, youth, women, and ordained men. In addition, fundamentalist groups accept tithing, have incorporated, and obtained tax-exempt status. Nevertheless, in such groups as Allred's Apostolic United Brethren, the priesthood leadership receives no salary, stipend, or living allowance.[60] 

Outside the Groups: The Independents 

This duplication of church functions alienates independent fundamentalists who believe that Lorin C. Woolley's commission of authority was limited to keeping plural marriage alive, and nothing more. They affirm that before his death in 1934, Woolley said fundamentalists should not collect tithing, congregate, colonize, or proselytize. Louis A. Kelsch, Jr., was the youngest member of Woolley's Council of Friends, and is regarded as "the first independent," because he dissented from these developments as early as 1941. Independents share a pessimism that Mormon fundamentalism has also gone "out of order." 

The only meetings conducted by independents are private discussions in a family's home, where the sacrament is administered by those with priesthood. If unrelated families gather on Sundays, meeting places rotate, so that a different head of household conducts each week to avoid the appearance of leadership. 

Independent fundamentalists estimate their own diverse numbers as two or three thousand. This is supported by the fact that fundamentalists in the Kelsch family alone currently amount to three hundred people.[61] Therefore, it is safe to estimate the total number of independent fundamentalists as approximately 2,500 men, women, and children who live in urban centers like Salt Lake City, Boise, Las Vegas, Denver, Phoenix, and Los Angeles, as well as rural areas throughout the Far West.[62]

Although they might not define themselves this way, independent fundamentalists are anti-institutional, frequently anti-authoritarian, and very pluralistic. Their lack of orthodoxy and hierarchy accommodates such diverse independents as Ernest Strack and Alex Joseph. Strack was a 1970s hippie communalist who continued his Sufi Islamic philosophy as a Mormon fundamentalist. When this gentle individualist and polygamist died of cancer at age thirty-seven during the centennial year of the Manifesto, the funeral motorcade in Utah was almost a mile long.[63]

On the other hand, Big Water, Utah's, polygamist mayor Alex Joseph says: "I'm not an LDS Fundamentalist, but I personally subscribe to too many Mormon doctrines to deny I'm a Mormon Fundamentalist." His polygamist wives include two Catholics, a Methodist, and a Presbyterian, and neither he nor his wives observe the LDS Word of Wisdom's prohibition of alcohol and tobacco. This is contrary to the practice of other Mormon fundamentalists. 

At the vernal equinox in 1977, Alex Joseph helped found the Confederate Nations of Israel. The Encyclopedia of American Religions classifies it as one of the "Polygamy-Practicing Groups" of Mormonism. Actually, by fundamentalist definitions, this is a non-group confederation of independent "patriarchs" (including Ogden Kraut, at first). A fourth of its 400 members are living in polygamous families throughout the United States, yet few of them have ever been part of any Mormon tradition. Catholics, Protestants, Eastern religionists, atheists, and sexually-active homosexuals join independent Mormon fundamentalists as patriarchs in the Confederate Nations of Israel.[64] Independent Mormon fundamentalists include political liberals and conservatives, religious conservatives and ecumenicals, as well as social conservatives and liberals. 

Growth by Birth and Conversion 

How then have approximately 21,000 men, women, and children become part of Mormon fundamentalism? First, primarily through birth into fundamentalist families. Second, since fundamentalists do not actively proselytize, the relatively few converts actually seek out fundamentalism. 

As much as three-fourths of current membership in the organized groups were born into fundamentalism. Many fundamentalists today are members of families that have an unbroken pattern of polygamy which extends well before the 1890 Manifesto. For example, Louis J. Barlow of Colorado City was the fourth generation to be born in plural marriage, and Morris Jessop in the Allred group was the third generation of his family to be born in the Principle. Both these men were born to fundamentalist parents, and now have grandchildren themselves. This pattern of three or four generations of affiliation with fundamentalism is true of the Colorado City, Allred, LeBaron, and Kingston groups, and is even true of independents like the Louis A. Kelsch, Jr., family. Since the groups account for 90 percent of the movement, few current Mormon fundamentalists have ever been baptized members of the LDS church.[65]

What of the converts to Mormon fundamentalism? In the early years of the movement, virtually everyone was a convert directly from the LDS church, for which the church excommunicated most of them sooner or later. A plural wife, who has known many converts to independent fundamentalism in the last decade, notes that most of the converts from the church are in their thirties and forties.[66] My own fieldwork indicates that recent converts to Mormon fundamentalism come from two directions: previous converts to the LDS church from other faiths, and LDS church members with polygamous ancestry. There seem to be few conversions by those with strictly monogamous Mormon ancestry. 

No fundamentalist group now actively proselytizes, and so potential converts seek out fundamentalist writers, leaders, or friends. Owen All red says he is aware of only fifteen or twenty couples annually who convert from the LDS church to fundamentalism.[67] Ogden Kraut's fundamentalist publications cause many investigators to seek him out, and he observes that fundamentalist conversions rise sharply after every change the modern church makes in LDS doctrine and policy. Those changes in the LDS church occur frequently enough that fundamentalism does not suffer by refusing to send out missionaries. Kraut also says, "Actually there's a lot of people who are not Mormons who become interested in Fundamentalism."[68] Therefore, growth in the groups is primarily through the birthrate, but conversions add significantly to the smaller numbers of independents. 

The Appeal of Mormon Fundamentalism 

Contrary to popular assumptions, polygamy is not what attracts most converts to Mormon fundamentalism. For example, as a convert to the LDS church, Roy Potter sought out fundamentalists in 1979 after being censured by church authorities for inquiring about Brigham Young's Adam-God teachings. He regarded current ecclesiastical denial of the church's past as evidence that the LDS church "is out of order." Plural marriage was a later consideration.[69] A few years ago, about six English families began reading nineteenth-century teachings of the LDS church, sent a representative to Utah, and eventually joined the Allred group. Again, for these men and women in England, polygamy became significant afterwards.[70]

Interviews with fundamentalist youth indicate that a major appeal of fundamentalism is the intensity of its doctrinal emphasis, compared with the primarily social emphasis of the LDS church. A fifteen-year-old girl in a plural family does not like the LDS services she has attended because "it was like they would announce all the sports things, announce all the picnics they were going to, and maybe they had a short verse and a song." Then after a general meeting with too little doctrine, she found she was the only one in her LDS Sunday school class who could answer questions, "just simple stuff that you'd think all the kids in the class would know, but nobody knew it.”[71] A nineteen-year-old fundamentalist has joined the LDS church just to go on a full-time mission, and reported back to his friend in the Allred group that "there wasn't really any doctrine presented to the people in their [LDS] meetings." To the LDS rebuttal that its church meetings emphasize faith, repentance, and baptism, fundamentalist teenagers reply, "But not deep doctrine."[72] For these fundamentalist teenagers, the LDS church is too shallow in doctrinal emphasis compared with the sermons and class discussions they are accustomed to. 

A young man who converted to fundamentalism at eighteen comments on this from a different perspective. He had been a strict Mormon since childhood, was the leader of his teenage priesthood quorums, and kept doing more than was required, but felt something was missing. "In the Mormon church when I would sit through a meeting I would feel depressed and bored as though I had learned nothing." In LDS classes and release-time seminary, he was always asking questions: "How come this? and How come that?—and they were telling me 'Don't worry about it/ and I told them, 'Well, I've gotta worry about it, because it's buggin' me.'" Two years after his conversion to fundamentalism, this young man no longer pesters teachers or speakers with questions, but instead generally sits quietly in fundamentalist meetings, listening to presentations of "deep doctrine" which he ponders long after the meetings.[73]

The observations of these teenage fundamentalists are consistent with statements by adults who leave the LDS church for fundamentalism. Converts to Mormon fundamentalism do not hunger for polyg amy—they thirst for a greater doctrinal and spiritual emphasis than they have known in the LDS church. In particular, interest in Brigham Young's Adam-God doctrine leads many church members to feel that there is a chasm between the free-wheeling Mormon doctrines of the nineteenth century and the orderly, sanitized theology of the twentieth-century LDS church. 

In fact, polygamy can sometimes be the most difficult part of a Mormon's conversion to fundamentalism. The teenage convert's first interest in fundamentalism was the Adam-God doctrine. His second question was whether people should follow "a prophet or was it to be Jesus who we were supposed to follow." This young convert finally got around to polygamy, saying "that was tough for me to accept at first because I'd always been taught that it was wrong and wicked, and things like that." With the church's exponential conversions in recent decades, relatively few Latter-day Saints have a polygamous heritage, and so polygamy is a social and religious obstacle for most church members. "Except for descendants of pioneer polygamists with a sense of history," notes a feminist expert on Mormon fundamentalism, "polygamy is as foreign to the contemporary Mormon as it might be to someone outside the Church. For some it is barely part of their mythic past."[74]

This teenage convert to Mormon fundamentalism explains his slow acceptance of polygamy. "When I heard that people were taking two or three, I felt that wasn't being very faithful to the first wife, and it took a while to accept it. I had to do a lot of praying, a lot of fasting over it. ... Gradually I just started accepting it."[75]

However, there are exceptions to this reluctant acceptance of plural marriage. One plural wife says that in her conversion in Colorado from the United Church of Christ to the LDS church, she read Doctrine and Covenants, Section 132, and became converted to the necessity of plural marriage as part of her conversion to the LDS church. Shortly after her LDS baptism, she was stunned to learn that the church now prohibits plural marriage. A year later, as a transfer student at Brigham Young University, she became a fundamentalist and plural wife at age twenty-one.[76]

Fundamentalist Relations with the LDS Church 

Many mainline Mormons do not understand the fundamentalist attitude toward the LDS church, which has certainly not tried to endear itself to Mormon fundamentalists. From the 1930s until recently, LDS church leaders established surveillance teams for fundamentalist meeting places and homes, denied baptism to children of fundamentalists, prohibited fundamentalist children from attending Primary classes, and excommunicated adults on the basis of guilt by association, for beliefs rather than acts, and for refusing to deny rumors or sign loyalty oaths. LDS surveillance teams copied down license plate numbers in order to identify those visiting the homes of fundamentalists, and a Brigham Young University professor was once discovered using a telephoto lens to photograph license plates of cars at meetings of the Allred group. There were even some fake conversions, so that LDS spies could operate within fundamentalist groups. Beyond ecclesiastical harassment and punishment, LDS church leaders have encouraged punitive legislation, turned over surveillance information to law enforcement, pressured public libraries to remove fundamentalist publications, urged the postal service to deny mailing privileges to fundamentalists, and supported the forced adoption of all polygamous children into monogamous homes.[77]

From the earliest years of the fundamentalist movement to the present, LDS leaders have also encouraged an informer-syndrome that sometimes poisons family relationships. One plural wife was excommunicated in 1970 after her sister reported her to church authorities. "This was not at all vindictive," the plural wife says, "just the involvement of circumstances which we anticipated—to be excommunicated—but even when you expect it, it's still a real heartache." Then she adds, "The whole life you love is the church."[78] That love drove one LDS mother to initiate criminal proceedings against her own son for polygamy, and his polyga mous daughter comments of her grandmother: "I think she did that mostly because she was really angry that my dad had gone ahead and entered into polygamy, and she wanted him to stay in the Mormon church. So my Mom was in hiding, and I was raised in hiding until I was five."[79] Church leaders were mistaken if they expected fundamentalists to repudiate the LDS church in the face of these assaults. 

Whether excommunicated or never LDS, nearly all fundamentalists (outside the LeBaron churches) regard the LDS church as the only true church—divinely instituted, with God's full authority to receive revelations, perform saving ordinances, proselytize, and teach. Until recently, the leaders of Colorado City's Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints insisted that this title did not refer to a separate church, but only distinguished their Priesthood Work from the "monogamous church," and that they revered the LDS church as God's only true church. The Fundamentalist church legally incorporated in 1991 due to an on-going lawsuit by its separatist Hammond-Timpson group.[80]

Like many who were hounded by church repression, Rulon C. Allred felt resentment and pain, but taught his children that the LDS church "was our church—the One True on the face of the earth, he said, although it was currently out of order." Meetings of the Apostolic United Brethren are canceled during the semi-annual general conferences in Salt Lake City so that the Allred fundamentalists can listen to talks by LDS general authorities. In the Allred academies of Salt Lake and Montana, each morning students pray facing the direction of the Salt Lake temple, to which Mormon fundamentalists are denied admission by the LDS church.[81] 

Owen Allred, excommunicated in 1942, says, "Yes, I love the church—I still do to this day. I believe it is God's church," even if it "has drifted" in order to be accepted by the world.[82] One excommunicated plural wife (an independent) admits: "I still like it. They have a skeleton of what was given them. It's true that the services are pretty boring, and you jump for joy if you hear anyone give a speech on Christ."[83] Most Mormon fundamentalists so thoroughly indoctrinate their children to revere the LDS church that teenagers even express their love for a church whose meetings they have never attended.[84]

In fact, before the groups developed their own church-like functions, fundamentalists participated in the activities of the LDS church until church authorities discovered this duality and excommunicated them. LeGrand Woolley remained active in the LDS church even after he became a member of Lorin Woolley's Priesthood Council in 1929.[85] In a fundamentalist ordinance in 1941, B. Harvey Allred, Jr., conferred the Melchizedek priesthood on his son, after which unknowing LDS church authorities ordained Owen Allred to the office of elder. Owen remained both a fundamentalist and church member until excommunicated twelve years later.[86] Ogden Kraut served a mission for the LDS church in 1948 after being ordained to the office of seventy for that mission by Joseph W. Musser, fundamentalist leader and publisher of Truth. Kraut continued as an active elder in the LDS church and as a fundamentalist seventy and publisher until his excommunication for apostasy in 1972.[87]

Living a dual church-fundamentalist life remains an individual choice today, even for teenagers. A fifteen-year-old fundamentalist girl (an independent) says: "I've kind of dropped out from being active in the church, because I think it's kind of compromising for me because my mom was a member of the church and they excommunicated her."[88] On the other hand, some teenage boys among the independents today receive ordinations within the LDS church if possible, while those in groups rarely do.[89] A teenage boy in the Allred group says, "They do urge us to go on missions [for the LDS church] but it's not a real common practice,"[90] and the youths I interviewed from the Allred and Colorado City groups have no interest in serving a mission for the LDS church. However, one of these boys has a fundamentalist friend who joined the church for no other reason than to preach the basic principles of the LDS gospel to non-Mormons. This nineteen-year-old is serving a two-year mission (during which he supports himself with savings or family assistance). LDS church leaders do not realize this missionary is a believing fundamentalist.[91]

This study's teenage convert to fundamentalism is not as fortunate. He admitted to local LDS leaders that he believed Mormonism's old-time religion, and they refused to allow him to serve a mission. They rejected his solemn promise to preach only the Book of Mormon and other basic principles expected of LDS missionaries today. Now at age twenty, he can hardly contain his sorrow at this disappointment. He had planned and saved since early childhood to serve a full-time mission for the church he still regards as God's own.[92]

Monogamy and Polygamy Among Mormon Fundamentalists 

Even less understood is the relationship between the actual living of polygamy and the affirmation of each Mormon fundamentalist that plural marriage must be allowed today. For example, Albert E. Barlow delayed marrying a plural wife for more than twelve years after his conversion to fundamentalism in 1922. He had the distinction later of serving two prison terms for unlawful cohabitation with his wives.[93] Ogden Kraut was a fundamentalist for twenty-one years as an adult before he married a plural wife in 1969, and says he knows many independent fundamentalists who are bachelors "of all ages, for one reason or another."[94]

Some independent fundamentalists are so disillusioned that they discourage their families from entering polygamy. Roy Potter was dismissed from the police department of Murray, Utah, because of his polygamy. Eventually he took his case all the way to the Supreme Court.[95] Due to the strain on his wives of his legal battle to regain a policeman's badge, Roy Potter is now a monogamist. He is not planning to marry again, and has turned down proposals from several women. He also reports that in dependents who entered polygamy decades ago are now encouraging their children and grandchildren "not to enter into polygamy" because Mormon fundamentalism is "so out of order that you can't possibly do it properly."[96] Nevertheless, such disillusioned independents do not reject Mormon fundamentalist essentials or suggest acceptance of the current LDS church position on those essentials. 

Owen Allred reports that only a small minority of his group's adults have married polygamously. Only 10-15 percent of the adults are living polygamously in the Allred group in Salt Lake Valley, Cedar City, Utah, and Pinesdale, Montana. Only 5 percent of the Mexican fundamentalists at Ozumba are polygamous. The Allred fundamentalists in Germany and the Netherlands are monogamous, but several English fundamentalists are polygamous. As presiding elder of the Apostolic United Brethren, Allred says, "Actually I discourage it ... if you're not ready for Celestial Marriage, if you're not qualified to live it, if you do not have a testimony that it is a law of God and not something to satisfy your own personal whims ..." When a man or woman comes to him seeking permission to court polygamously, Owen Allred usually responds, "Now wait a minute, dear brother or sister, let's be careful."[97]

On the other hand, leaders of the Johnson-Jeffs group actively promote plural marriage among their followers in Colorado City, Arizona, and Hildale, Utah, the Salt Lake Valley, and elsewhere. The bachelorhood among independents is virtually unknown after the mid-twenties in the Colorado City group, since unmarried young men can expect intense, personal persuasion from family and the Priesthood of the Johnson-Jeffs group. On-site fieldwork indicates that a majority of the adults in Colorado City and Hildale have entered polygamous marriages, and that nearly everyone in these communities is either living in polygamous households and/or was born to polygamous fathers.[98] Nevertheless, married men of great devotion (and real interest in plural marriage) may not be allowed to marry a plural wife in the Colorado City group.[99] The extensive plural marriage in the Johnson-Jeffs group contrasts with near reticence among independents and the Allred group. 

Dating and Courtship 

Which leads to how Mormon fundamentalists enter into marriage, both monogamous and polygamous. This is approached differently by fundamentalists, and the most marked contrast is between the Allred group and independents on one hand, and the Colorado City group on the other. 

For the independents and the Allred group, youth activities and dating come before a marriage proposal. A sixteen-year-old boy in the All red group says, "They have dances for the youth, kind of ballroom dances, but like Virginia reel and stuff like that."[100] A young woman adds that the Allred group's Youth of Zion organizes firesides with speakers, snow tubing parties at Park City, kite-flying parties, treasure hunts, volleyball, basketball and baseball games, and rents rinks for ice skating and roller-skating parties.[101] Teenagers in independent fundamentalist families do not usually join these organized activities of the Apostolic United Brethren, even if they have friends in the group. 

Independent youth and the Allred youth also have activities on their own for group dates or couple dates. Contrary to outsider assumptions about the barrenness of fundamentalist social life, these teenage fundamentalists play Nintendo at home, play tennis, go water skiing and bowling, and see popular movies, including a few R-rated movies. In the Salt Lake Valley, teenagers from independent families and from the Allred group also go to the Lagoon amusement park in Davis County, to the 49th Street Galleria (now Utah Fun Dome), to the Raging Waters water park, and to dance clubs in Salt Lake City such as The Bay and Palladium where they can dance to the rock and modern music unavailable at All red group dances.[102] A sixteen-year-old boy in the Allred group says, "My dad was never very strict so I really could go and do anything I wanted, really, unlike most of the kids in the group." He has played the electric guitar in a rock band, but adds, "I'm trying to get off it, because I shouldn't be."[103]

Dating in the Allred group is a serious matter, though. A twenty-two year-old young woman says that in monogamous dating, young men can ask the girl directly, but usually ask her father first. Her own polygamist father tells the shy young men, "Well, don't ask me; you're not taking me out!" She and a teenage boy from the group both express disapproval of kissing before marital courtship. He also observes that there is no rule for a young man to follow if he learns (as this seventeen-year-old did) that a married man wants to court the teenager's girlfriend: "There's not really any certain way to go about it other than to follow your priesthood head, and by that I don't mean blindly do whatever he says. . . . You need to find out by yourself by prayer and fasting what the proper channel is to take." He continued dating his girlfriend in spite of the older man's polygamous overtures, but "we kind of drifted apart mostly because I found out for myself that it was just too early for me and we needed to be friends." Monogamous courtship can last a year or more for young fundamentalists among the Apostolic United Brethren and the independents.[104]

In the Allred group and among independents, polygamous courtship can begin early but is usually of short duration. A fifteen-year-old girl in an independent family comments: "In the fundamentalist environment— this isn't true all the time—but a lot of men just think that when a girl turns fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, that she's going to get married." She adds that a married man thinks a girl will marry him if she goes out with him more than once.[105] A young woman in the Allred group points out that, unlike monogamist dating, a married man is expected to ask the father's permission to court his daughter who has the right to turn down the request without ever talking to the prospective suitor. "If the girl feels like she wants to go out with them, she can. If she doesn't want to, she doesn't have to," and this twenty-two-year-old young woman adds that she has told her father to turn down "quite a few married men" who asked him.[106] When one girl joined the Allred group at age seventeen, she had seven polygamous proposals in two weeks, and the first "date" was always a discussion of what the man and his wife (wives) hoped for in a new wife.[107] Some fundamentalist men have their other wife (wives) join the first "date" with a prospective new wife.[108] Neither independents nor Allred group members seem to notice the irony that their patterns of courtship give enhanced status to monogamy through prolonged courtship as compared to brief, business-like polygamous courtship. 

Arranged Marriage 

The Colorado City group eliminates that disparity between long monogamous courtship and brief polygamous courtship. As tersely put by one of its young men: "In our group we don't date."[109] Aside from attendance at classes and youth firesides, the Johnson group authorizes only one kind of close interaction between unmarried boys and girls: ballroom dances. These occur, for example, several times a month in Colorado City, where the waltz is a favorite among the youth.[110] A plural wife raised in the Johnson group's Salt Lake Valley community observes that dating is absolutely prohibited because "we were raised believing that the Priest hood [Council] would choose our mate and that we were not to allow ourselves to fall in love with anybody." Predictably, some youths at Colorado City try to "get what they called 'sneaky dates.' I mean they'd sneak off and go places and talk." When a seventeen-year-old friend of hers got caught on a "sneaky date" with an eighteen-year-old boy, "they were called into the Priesthood. They were told they were not allowed to see each other again."[111]

Therefore, in the Johnson group, boys alone or girls alone participate in a variety of unsponsored activities. In Colorado City those are primarily outdoor activities like hiking, camping, horseback riding, but can also include trips across the border to movie theaters in St. George, Utah. If they live in the Salt Lake Valley, the group's same-sex youth go out together and enjoy fast-food restaurants, bowling, miniature golf, Lagoon amusement park, movies such as Indiana Jones and Batman, and "whatever's fun."[112]

Although they enjoy the recreational fun of most teenagers, youth in the Johnson-Jeffs group anticipate with faith and solemnity the decision of the Priesthood Council regarding the most important event of their young lives: the selection of a marriage companion. Arranged marriage in the Colorado City group has three main perspectives: that of the Priesthood leaders, of the prospective husbands, and of the prospective wives. 

Whether in Colorado City, Salt Lake Valley, Canada, or elsewhere, the president of the Priesthood (or a fellow member of his Council) in the Johnson group seeks divine inspiration to know God's will as the Priest hood selects worthy spouses.[113] Just days after the 1953 raid, Louis J. Bar low (now director of the teenage release-time seminary program in Colorado City) gave a radio address that included a denial of hostile assumptions about arranged marriages at Short Creek: "There have been no forced marriages. Everyone is free to leave or stay as he chooses."[114] His brother further explains that the Priesthood of the Colorado City group arranges marriages to give greater assurance of their stability and permanence, and also to be sure that the couples are not closely related in the tightly knit community. He affirms: "The first consideration, as I've known it, is to make sure the individuals feel free and at liberty to make their own choices."[115] 

A young man in the Colorado City group indicates that males also defer to the marital decisions of the Priesthood. At age nineteen, he has never dated a girl, and when asked how he expects to know a girl, he replies, "Basically through the Priesthood. . . . They basically decide who you're gonna marry. You can have a little a bit of your say. It's not just to tally that they tell you. You have your say. . . . You go to them. They won't come to you." This nineteen-year-old adds that it is most common for men to be twenty to twenty-one years old when "[you tell the Priest hood] you want to get married. Basically, they'll set it up." These are the marital expectations of young men in the Colorado City group.[116] In first marriages the husband and wife are usually close in age.[117]

There are some differences in arranged plural marriages of the Colorado City group. The young man says that, unlike the decision for a first marriage, a man does not announce his interest in marrying polygamously: "The Priesthood decides. Basically, they ask you if you would like to do it. You say yes or no." And the man is free to indicate he is not interested in plural marriage "at the time." Then the nineteen-year-old repeats: "At the time." A faithful male may delay polygamous marriage, but cannot be considered faithful if he refuses the decision of the Priest hood for him to marry polygamously.[118] However, married adults in Colorado City and a young woman who was there in the 1970s agree that men who wish to enter plural marriage can also state that interest to the Priesthood which then advises the men who to marry as a plural wife. In this case, even middle-aged men defer to the choices made by the Priesthood.[119]

Females in the Colorado City group are no more deferential to the Priesthood Council's choice of a mate than males are, except that the female's deference is mediated by her father. "Like if I was sixteen and I wanted to get married," a woman observes, "I would go to the Priesthood and I would say, with my father [there], that I'm ready to get married. Please tell me who I should get married to." In this case, however, her authoritarian father went to the Priesthood without her and obtained the name of a man for her to marry. After he admitted to her that the husband was an "old man," his teenage daughter said she was not even interested in knowing what the Priesthood told him. She eventually left the Johnson group, and became a plural wife in the Allred group. There she married a man of her own choosing, but eventually left him. Her five sisters continue in stable plural marriages that were arranged by the decision of Colorado City's Priesthood Council.[120]

Members of the Colorado City group have assured outsiders that "romantic love [is] a frequent element in the courtship,"[121] but that is supposed to happen after the Priesthood selects the partners, not before. This is the whole purpose of prohibiting dating. The discomfort with romantic attachments before the Priesthood's decision is indicated in a comment by one leader of the Colorado City community that if young people "make commitments to each other, then those are respected some times."[122] The young woman who lived there in the early 1970s agrees that females could indicate their choice for a husband, but the Priesthood did not welcome such preference: "And then after that, they would call you and ask you if there was anybody you had in your mind. ... And your father would be sitting there, so you were automatically disgraced if you had someone in your mind. And the father would get very angry, because he felt like somebody who hadn't done his job—he hadn't kept his daughter away from other boys properly. So there was quite a bit of disgrace if you actually did fall in love with somebody who you really did want to get married to." Only a couple of her friends expressed the desire to marry young men prior to the Priesthood's choice, in which case the marriage occurred only after much contrary counseling and a long waiting period.[123]

Ages of Wives and Husbands 

This plural wife's family history raises the question of the age difference between husbands and plural wives in fundamentalist marriages. Her mother became a plural wife at fourteen, when her father was about thirty-seven. This plural wife herself married in the Allred group at seventeen to a man who was twenty years her senior, and shortly afterward introduced her seventeen-year-old friend as a new plural wife to her husband. This woman's sister married at nineteen to one of Colorado City's middle-aged priesthood leaders, Marion Hammon, who led the dissident "Second Ward." The 1953 raid and investigation showed that "the average age at first marriage for fundamentalist women in Short Creek was sixteen, though fourteen and fifteen were not uncommon."[124] Based on her observations twenty years later, this woman (who left the Johnson group and has now abandoned polygamy) says that for the females there "it's personal preference," with most choosing to accept an arranged marriage between the ages of sixteen and nineteen: "By the time you're twenty-one, you're an old maid." Despite her own mother's marriage at fourteen in the Salt Lake community of the Colorado City group, this woman disagrees with the 1953 court findings at Short Creek, and says it is "uncommon to be married at fourteen" in that group.[125]

This is not always the case, but plural wives are often teenagers and sometimes twenty years younger than their polygamous husbands. On the other hand, when a fundamentalist male marries his first wife, she is usually close to his own age. This pattern holds true in all the groups, as well as among independent fundamentalists. Rulon C. Allred himself was middle-aged when he married two fifteen-year-old brides.[126] An in dependent plural wife in this study is twenty-seven years younger than her husband who is twenty-five to twenty-two years older than his other plural wives.[127] Independents like Ogden Kraut express discomfort at such age differences, and some fundamentalist men marry only wives their age or older.[128] On the other hand, the plural wives I interviewed for this study do not regret their youthful decisions after fifteen to twenty years of marriage. 

There are LDS church and Utah state perspectives on fundamentalist teen brides. Joseph Smith himself in his mid-thirties married a seventeen year-old and a fifteen-year-old as plural wives, and their marriages were not platonic.[129] In Utah 23.5 percent of females who married monogamously in 1986 were teenagers, compared with 13.1 percent of females nationally who married that year.[130] "Well, in Utah the age of consent for marriage is fourteen, if the parents agree," observes the director of the Utah Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. "But if they do it for religious reason, then people get upset."[131]

One such upset person is the director of Utah Children. This child advocacy group has filed amicus curiae briefs in the Fischer adoption case against the right of polygamist families to adopt any children, including orphaned polygamous children: "We also note that young women are frequently given very early in marriage. And we do not think to give girls in marriage is in their best interest." Such opponents regard teenage monogamous marriage as regrettable, but see teenage polygamous marriage as evil. Although Utah Children and others deny that religion is the issue, they actually regard polygamous religious conviction as inherently coercive for teenage girls.[132]

Marriage Dynamics 

Fundamentalists also disagree on the question of whether it is necessary to have a minimum number of wives. One author implies that a righteous family "quorum" has a minimum of two plural wives.[133] Ogden Kraut observes that the organized groups regard an increase in the number of wives as requirement or reward for each level of presiding office. Even though Kraut himself now has five wives, he waited two decades to marry polygamously, and says, "Personally, I don't just don't think that they ought to be running around looking for a bunch of wives. Some of the groups kind of have the idea that the more wives you have the more power, authority, whatever."[134] Rulon Allred's daughter says that is often true among the Apostolic United Brethren.[135] In the groups and among independents, some regard the number of wives as a status symbol for men, whereas other husbands are appalled at such a concept. 

Polygamist husband-wife dynamics in fundamentalist families vary as much as in monogamist families outside Mormonism, but polygamy obviously adds to the complexity. Psychologist Marvin Rytting notes, "What you have in polygamy is basically an intensification of what you see in all sorts of families."[136] Fundamentalist men say they fall in love with each wife in sequence, and argue that this is no more difficult to understand than a father in any family loving each new child as much as he loves his older children.[137] Unless the marriage is arranged (as at Colorado City), a female can propose polygamous marriage, but usually the man does so. Technically, he requires the permission of his first wife to enter polygamy, but that is not necessary if she is opposed.[138] A plural wife in the Allred group observes that a prospective plural wife meets with the first wife and polygamous wives, if any, to "relate with them and take whatever time is necessary. Everybody is very free about their feelings and expressions."[139] Although optional, the first wife's cooperation is essential for a congenial polygamist family, which the first wife traditionally begins by placing the hand of the new plural wife in her husband's hand at the marriage ceremony.[140]

A teenage boy in the Allred group describes the social customs following the marriage ceremony of fundamentalist couples within the group. "You don't see the marriage performed, but they have a reception with cake and ice cream, entertainment, and all this kind of stuff," including religious testimonials. He adds that "the first wife usually has quite a big reception in proportion to the other wives," as a precaution against attendance at a polygamous reception by someone unfriendly to the Principle.[141] Even though social/legal necessity may require a rule of small (or no) receptions for polygamous brides, this inevitably gives greater status to the monogamous marriages of Mormon fundamentalists. Likewise their tradition of longer monogamous courtship. Preeminence of the first wife is deeply ingrained even within families that have been fundamentalist for generations.[142]

Jealousy 

Even the first wife's approval does not eliminate problems with jealousy, which is clearest from the plural wife's point of view. A plural wife in the Allred group says that with her husband's other wives she had a congenial relationship which "was a very easy, wonderful amalgamation" but quickly adds, "That's not necessarily standard."[143] Some plural wives, like one of Rulon Allred's widows, do not acknowledge jealousy: "it was no different for me, really, sharing my sister-wives with my husband than it had been sharing my sisters with my father." One of his daughters says, "The mothers would sooner die than admit to jealousy or any form of rivalry."[144] On the other hand, plural wives I interviewed volunteered comments on jealousy. 

The youngest and last plural wife in an independent household says that "everyone was all threatened" when their husband married her, and it took a year for the other wives "to calm down" as they grew to love her. After sixteen years "we're all still real possessive of [him] and his feelings," she says. "[He] is one of those creative people who write you love letters and poems, you know, and I always look at us as having an individual relationship with him, you know, like a love affair with our husband. We just had to handle sometimes if we were a little jealous, but we'd rather be passionate than, you know, put all your feelings in a closet so you don't ever feel jealous. I'd rather just be honest, you know, and if we're jealous, deal with it at the time."[145] Louis Kelsch's widow acknowledges that among his six plural wives, "I have to admit that there are feelings like that, but since we believe that this is a higher principle that we are supposed to live, we believe that we are to control those feelings. And we find out that if we do learn to control those feelings, we become closer than sisters, and we have peace in the family."[146] Girls raised in a fundamentalist family anticipate this necessity, as a fifteen-year-old ac knowledges: "I'll probably feel jealousy. I'll have to overcome that." She adds, "It doesn't really matter if you're the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, whatever."[147]

Still, jealousy can be corrosive even for the most devoted fundamentalist families. Raised as a polygamous child in the Colorado City group, one plural wife praises her father's first wife who had a daughter the same age as the new plural wife. "[She was] very non-jealous, a very giving person. And very many times she would sacrifice her own needs for the needs of my mother or the needs of my father." Yet when this polygamous child became a plural wife in the Allred group, she found the first wife to be very jealous: "If you have a lot of jealousy between you, some how you can't get along. And that jealousy factor really does have to be minimalized." After five years this plural wife decided to "eliminate the middle man in our relationship, and [the first wife] was the middleman." She stopped communicating with the first wife and persuaded the other plural wife to do the same. Since all the wives lived in the same large house, the entire family life disintegrated. After years of unrelieved tension that she is sure caused her husband's heart attack, this plural wife took her children and left. After she established a life alone with her children, her former husband told her the other plural wife also had left him, and that the first wife obtained a civil divorce. This plural wife is now legally married to the husband in the LDS church. The first wife and other plural wife have both become plural wives of other men.[148]

Divorce 

Although divorce is a painful topic, fundamentalists do not avoid discussing it. "You have to have a society, if you're going to be civilized, that accommodates for the human error that may occur, and allows for a remedy that is progressive and civilized, and allows for productive things," says Sam S. Barlow of Colorado City. Of the arranged marriages there, he adds, "I don't think anybody's expected to be married to some body they don't want to be married to."[149] A woman raised in the Colorado City group observes that often there is no formal divorce: "If you were a problem wife you had your own home somewhere else—across the town, preferably. And your husband did not come to see you unless it was a necessity. I mean she was basically just to raise her own family almost like a divorced person, but not quite."[150] Morris Jessop of the Allred group's Priesthood Council says that many polygamists "have lost their families—divorces, breakups, heartaches, you name it—because they fooled themselves to think they could live this way of life and not put an effort to it," but Owen Allred estimates that within his group there is only one divorce for every thirty-seven plural marriages.[151] Ogden Kraut estimates a slightly higher divorce rate for plural marriages among independents: one in thirty.[152]

The estimates by Allred and Kraut translate to 2.7 percent to 3.3 per cent of polygamist marriages ending in divorce, which fundamentalists define simply as the permanent dissolution of a plural marriage, since there is no civil divorce for polygamy. Standardized divorce rates (crude and refined) based on per thousand of population are not a workable basis of comparison for the small numbers of Mormon fundamentalists. However, fundamentalist estimates show that current polygamist marriages are far less likely to end in divorce than civil marriages within the LDS church, Utah, and the United States. In 1981 a representative of the LDS bureaucracy and a sociologist conducted a random survey of 7,446 members of the LDS church and found that 5.4 percent of men and 6.5 percent of women divorced after LDS temple marriage. For total marriages (non-temple and temple), 14 percent of married men and 19 percent of married women in the LDS church divorced. In Utah there is one new divorce annually for every 2.2 new marriages performed, and the percent of divorce for ever-married men is 21.1 percent, and for women is 22.0 percent. Nationally, the percent of divorce reported for ever-married men is 22.3 percent, and for women is 23.3 percent.[153] Fundamentalists have almost a tenth that rate in polygamist divorce. 

However, Mormon fundamentalists contribute to the civil divorce rates through the break-up of their first marriages, particularly for couples who convert to fundamentalism. First wives obtained civil divorces from some of fundamentalism's earliest leaders: Joseph W. Musser, Louis A. Kelsch, Jr., Charles F. Zitting, Rulon C. Allred, and Rulon Jeffs. In some cases the divorce came after the mere suggestion of polygamy; in other cases after the first wife had tried for years to share her husband with sister-wives and with the fundamentalists over whom he presided.[154] A girl in an independent family reports that the divorce of a first wife is "kind of common" among independents.[155] This is true because first wives in the groups are now likely to be socialized to polygamy through growing up in fundamentalist homes,[156] whereas independents have a higher proportion of converts confronting polygamy for the first time in their lives. Nevertheless, a first wife's divorce does not always mean she has rejected polygamy—in two of the families of this study the first wives were converts from the LDS church who obtained civil divorces from polygamists, and then became plural wives to other men.[157]

Unhappiness and divorce are part of fundamentalist polygamy, just as dysfunctional families are widespread among LDS and non-LDS monogamists. Of greater interest are the dynamics of polygamous living among Mormon fundamentalists. Polygamous families today manifest several adaptations in the relations of husband and wife, wife with wife, children with parents, children with children, and children with outsiders. Mormon fundamentalist adaptations are sometimes as individual as the persons involved, but the fundamentalist group can also shape family life in prescribed ways. These dynamics can only be sketched briefly here.[158]

Status of Females 

The question of subservience of females to a polygamous patriarchy is one reason the Utah Children advocacy group has legally battled the right of Mormon fundamentalists to adopt children. This organization's director says that fundamentalist teachings that "women were considered property, that women were expected to be submissive . . . are outside of the norms of general society, and we do not believe are in the interest of healthy children growing up to be healthy and normal adults." Thus one argument against the right of polygamists to adopt is that they teach their sons to be patriarchal and their daughters to be subservient.[159] "But," counters the feminist director of the ACLU's Utah Chapter, "the truth of the matter is that not very many religions in this country support the full equality of women. So if we were going to outlaw every religion that didn't promote equality for women, I think that there would be a lot fewer religions in this country."[160]

Among fundamentalists that debate may be more relevant to the Colorado City group. One plural wife raised in the group believes that the husband typically "controls the family, controls the wives, controls the in come, controls the discipline," and that wives in the Colorado City group are "expected to submit themselves to their husband in all things." However, she admits that her father was stricter than others.[161] On the other hand, the third of five wives in one Colorado City family argues for their domestic power: "Anyone who thinks a plural wife is weak and submissive can't imagine the strength it takes to manage a large home filled with children."[162] But even that seems to be praise for the endurance of wives, not an argument for female autonomy at Colorado City. This group practice closed communion for priesthood holders only, thereby administering the sacrament only to males above the age of twelve. Females do not receive the sacrament in meetings of the Johnson-Jeffs group in Colorado City, the Salt Lake Valley, or elsewhere, whereas females and males have equal access to the sacrament in the Allred group and among independents.[163]

Deference, not subservience, seems to be the rule for women elsewhere in Mormon fundamentalism. "Pregnant and chained to the kitchen sink is pretty much the image, but that isn't so at all," explains a plural wife in the Allred group. "Our counsel is sought for in the decisions, but we are encouraged to be ourselves. It is not restrictive." "However," she adds, "when you have a head of a family who has four wives, there has to be some system or you have chaotic daily activities constantly. So we do believe in order." Her view of family order is that the husband makes final decisions after consultation with the wives.[164] This is echoed by a plural wife among the independents: "I feel like the husband and the father of the family is definitely the patriarch in that family and should be honored as such."[165] An Allred Council member's plural wife describes her relationship to him as non-subservient: "And he will say, 'Maybe this would be the better way to do it, but that's up to you, you know.' He usually leaves the final choice up to me."[166]

In fact, plural wives often have a practical autonomy that counters stereotypes of fundamentalist patriarchy. This is especially true when the wives have separate residences and the husband is absent for days or weeks at a time. One plural wife of more than fifty years comments, "Well, when you are in different homes, like we were—we had three different establishments—he is only there a third of the time. So you have two-thirds of the time when you do have to run your own affairs and you are independent in a small way. ... We would always consult him about things, but still we had to handle the problems that would come up with the children and with our cars and so on." She admits that her autonomy has sometimes bruised her husband's ego, and so plural wives "have to play dependence one time and independence another."[167] Some fundamentalist wives do not play dependence very well. One plural wife in the Alfred group vetoed every choice for a new house her husband proposed, which exasperated her sixteen-year-old son who helped his father pick out one house after another.[168]

In fact, the residential pattern for fundamentalist families tends to be decided by wives among the independents and Alfred group and by husbands or the leadership in the Johnson group and Kingston group.[169] Co residence is common for financial reasons, and sometimes is preferred by the wives. One independent plural wife says, "We were all close. Susan and I lived together for twelve years. Karen, Susan, and I lived together maybe six years," although they now choose to live in separate residences with their large families.[170] Co-residence can involve each wife having a separate section of the building for herself and children, or it can involve the more complex arrangement apparently standard in the Colorado City group: "All the bedrooms for the children would be on the top floor, and then all the wives' areas, their bedrooms would be on the middle floor. And then maybe on the main floor just one or two wives that basically didn't have children, and the husband's office and bedroom would be on the main floor.”[171] Wives can also be in different states, or separate cities, or across town, or a few blocks from each other, or in a specially constructed polygamous "compound" of adjacent build.[172]

Even though co-residence of wives in a large house eliminates the de facto independence of wives in separate residences, a fundamentalist husband may actually encourage autonomy for his plural wives living under one roof. When the wives in one household expected their husband to make decisions, he usually replied, "You can handle this, dear, I know you can." One of his plural wives comments: "So he was always encouraging us to be our best selves, to always push forward. And I appreciated that in him." He also handled finances for all the wives, until they decided to control their own income and budgets.[173] At the far end from female subservience is one of Alex Joseph's wives who explains: "Polygamy is a feminist lifestyle. I can go off 400 miles to law school, and the family keeps running," to which this plural wife adds: "I am a monogamist. My husband is a polygamist."[174]

This discussion risks creating another fundamentalist stereotype— plural wives as feminists. Nevertheless, husband-wife dynamics can be as diverse in Mormon fundamentalist marriages as in the monogamous marriages of outsiders. In current polygamist marriages, husbands vary from patriarchal controllers to partners in decision-making, and wives from subservient to feminist. No marriage exists in a social vacuum, and all the plural wives in this study volunteered comments about feminism, women's liberation, and society's expectations of the male role in marriage. "But I'm not a feminist or women's libber" was almost a cliche among these plural wives as they described their occupational independence and family autonomy. In fact, American society intensifies the female autonomy that is latent in modern polygamy. Many polygamous couples feel a desire to disprove the stereotype of polygamist wife subservience, and they unconsciously turn to feminist-influenced models of partnership-marriage rather than to biblical models of patriarchal marriage. That process is common among the independents and in the Allred group, less so in the Colorado City group, but is always influenced by the personal preferences of polygamous husbands and wives. 

Those differences affect the division of housework in a polygamous household. Louis Kelsch's widow says that for the first few years the wives lived together and decided among themselves what they would do. Later Kelsch himself "would divide up the household duties, and then we would take turns, so that no one had the unpleasant jobs forever."[175] In some families a dominant wife (usually the first) takes charge and assigns everything (including weeks free from housework).[176] In other families the wives permanently specialize in particular household duties.[177] In many families this is a multiple version of "women's work," but some polygamist husbands are very domestic. "When I was a [university] student," observes one plural wife, "he always made breakfast and did dishes at night."[178] Another plural wife adds, "I'm not one that likes to spend five hours in a kitchen all day long, and have a hot meal ready for my loving husband when he gets home. He likes to cook and I'm more than glad to let him."[179]

Whether in co-residence or in separate residences, a man's plural wives usually take care of each other's children. Louis Kelsch's widow says, "If some of us left, the others babysat voluntarily. We would say, Tm going. Would you watch the children?'"[180] One employed plural wife explains that babysitting by a sister wife "gives the woman much more freedom to go out and work if she chooses, to stay home if she chooses, to do both."[181]

Female Employment and Financial Stress 

Whether by necessity or personal preference, most polygamous wives are employed outside the home. Traditionally, plural wives in the Kingston group work outside the home, often as accountants for the extensive financial transactions of the Davis County Co-operative.[182] The majority of Colorado City's plural wives work in its public schools, its community college, or its Danco clothing factory which manufactures uniforms for medical facilities and for such national chains as Thrifty Drugs and Sizzler restaurants.[183] Many plural wives work in teaching, in clerical positions, or in Utah's service-industry economy. "In the early years it was necessity," one woman says. "We cried when we left our babies, and the sister wife would hold the baby up at the window and wave good-bye as we left." As a marked advantage over secular society, this sister-wife babysitting leaves children with a trusted adult family member, while allowing their mother to pursue educational or occupational goals. Now this plural wife is preparing for a career as a physician.[184] Although Owen Allred prefers that the wives in his group remain with their families, most wives work outside the home, including two of his daughters who are registered nurses.[185] Alex Joseph's wives include a newspaper editor, attorney, fire fighter, and real estate agent.[186]

Separate incomes can give plural wives economic autonomy if they manage their own occupational income. However, very often (especially in co-residence households) each wife's income becomes part of a family budget administered by the husband, and each wife manages only her allotted portion. On the other hand, wives in separate residences (particularly if long distances from each other) tend to manage their own occupational income, in addition to what their husband provides them from his income. 

In fact, outside work for plural wives is common because polygamist families in an urban-suburban setting almost always struggle financially. Polygamous husbands frequently have more than one job, and children grow up with a constant awareness of the family's limited resources.[187] Louis Kelsch's widow comments about the general inability of most polygamous families to buy their children a lot of fashionable clothes and to pay for college education. Most of the children in her extended family begin working full time as teenagers.[188] One of the boys in this study quit school at fifteen to work full time, and a girl began working at the same age so she could pay for her orthodontia. One of the high school boys is in college preparation courses and works part time, but did not go out for track because he could not afford the cost of track shoes, uniform, etc. The high school coach frequently identified polygamist children in classes, and loudly tried to hand him money in front of the other boys. This young man walked away in angry humiliation. So polygamist families are working families for young and old, male and female. 

Child Interaction with Sister-Wives, Father, and Siblings 

Sister-wife babysitting also increases the interaction of plural children with the women they call "aunts" and "the other mothers." Teenagers in this study come from large polygamous families representing Colorado City, the Allred group, and the independents. For example, one has twenty-one siblings (ten by one mother), another is from a family of five wives and twenty-six children, and another from a family of three wives and thirty-seven children. Two plural wives point out difficulties in disciplining the other children—resentment between wives if a wife is too severe with a sister-wife's child, and confusion for the children who confront different rules when they enter another wife's "area" in the large house.[189] By an interesting contrast, all the teenagers in this study reported that the other wives disciplined them the same as their own mothers. Their experiences are typical of this boy's: "My other mothers have always just shown all the love that they could give to me, and I'm always welcome at any of their houses at any time. You don't have to knock to go into their houses, because it's pretty much your house, too. And I'm always sleeping over there ... and I can eat there or whatever." A teenage girl adds, "Sometimes we even call the other moms our Mom."[190]

In practical terms, it is difficult for polygamous children to have the kind of closeness with the father that they have with his other wives. This is a result of his heavy work schedule, numerous children, and (for separately housed families) his visitation to his other families. A wife in Colorado City notes, "A father may only spend a few minutes each week with each child."[191] One plural wife in the Allred group admits "he was too busy helping his wives and not doing the fatherly things—not hugging them, and not helping them, and not going to the PTA meetings, and the kids got to where they didn't like their Dad. They just didn't because he was too busy. He wasn't a dad to them." Likewise Rulon C. Allred's daughter published a family memoir that expresses her adoration for him as well as her resentment against his emotional distance.[192] One teenage boy suggests that polygamy simply intensifies a difficulty some fathers would have in parenting even a few children. "My father's father was quite abusive ... and because he didn't receive that kind of love and attention as a child from his own father, it was very hard for him to learn how to be a good father to us. And I'm not saying he wasn't a good father. No way. I'm saying that he's had to learn because he wasn't taught. He's had to learn on his children how to be a family man. . . . I've never had any bad experiences with him at all. I've never seen him argue with any of my mothers or with any of the kids for that matter. . . . He doesn't get too much involved with the personal affairs of the children because he's not there as much." Then this teenager looks up with glistening eyes, "But he's the best father in the world, and I can say that about him, and I wouldn't choose anybody else." 

Despite the logistical problems of parenting a polygamous family, some fundamentalist men are Super-Dads to their children. A teenage daughter reports: "I have a really good relationship with my dad, as far as relationships go. ... It's incredible having so many children, but he can get around and make us all feel special, and he's helped so much in our upbringing. I think it's really neat that he's been able to make us each feel important. . . . I mean, he's busy. He has a lot of things to do, but he always has time to sit down and talk with us separately, and then if we have any questions for him, he's always there for us . . . just boppin' from house to house."[193] Some polygamous children have unavailable fathers, but others have fathers as emotionally connected as the best monogamist is to his children. 

Another side of polygamous family dynamics is the relationship among children of different wives. All the polygamous teenagers in this study report that they regard their siblings as full brothers and sisters, just with different mothers, and the children generally have been in close association all their lives. Similar-aged children by different mothers of ten report being "best friends," sometimes their only close friends. One plural wife comments that in large polygamous families "they don't have the need for a lot of outside friends because they've got somebody their own age. They've probably got three or four their own age."[194] However, the eldest children of the first wife are less likely to feel this same closeness, since they are often ten to twenty years older than the oldest children of the first plural wife. Estrangement among half-siblings is common when the first wife obtains a divorce, but there are always exceptions. A plural wife reports that after polygamy caused her husband's first marriage to end in divorce, the first wife's children drew names each year to send Christmas gifts to their growing number of polygamous brothers and sisters.[195] The "best friend" relationship of polygamous siblings raises the question of their interaction with outsiders. 

Education 

Public school is traditionally the primary agent in the socialization of outsiders, but that is only partly true for the children of Mormon fundamentalists. There is no consistent pattern for the education of these children (even within the same families). They can be found in public schools, private academies, and home schools. Also, distinctions blur between public education and fundamentalist schools. 

The educational mode of lowest socialization is the home schooling favored by some fundamentalists. Out of dozens of independent fundamentalists participating home schooling, the John Singer family alone refused school board supervision of the instruction and engaged in an increasingly bitter conflict with authorities in Utah. This resulted in an armed stand-off and John Singer's death in 1979.[196] Neither Utah state authorities, local school boards, nor fundamentalist families have repeated the errors of that unfortunate confrontation over fundamentalist education. 

Still, some independent fundamentalists are critical of the quality of education that can result from home schools. Ogden Kraut says home schools are fine where wives have good training, but in some fundamentalist home schools "the poor kids never get any training. It had been better for them to go to public schools, than to stay home and to do nothing."[197] A fifteen-year-old girl in a home school agrees that "most Fundamentalists do an awful job educating their children. I mean a lot of their children can't even write their names," but in her case her mother and the sister-wives were college graduates with teaching certificates. To get course work beyond the abilities of their home schools, students take correspondence courses or enroll in selected courses at the high schools. This teenage girl is planning on a pre-med program when she enters college.[198]

After decades of operation, the private academy at Colorado City (formerly Short Creek Academy) closed in the 1980s. It had offered instruction through the twelfth grade. A transfer student found the curricula more difficult than those of public schools she had attended in Salt Lake Valley up to her move to Colorado City in her mid-teens.[199]

Today all the children in the Colorado City-Hildale polygamist commune attend tax-supported public schools. But these "public schools" (two elementary schools larger than many in Salt Lake City, a middle school, and a high school) are operated and staffed completely by fundamentalists for the fundamentalist children of the community. These schools also are rigorously secular and, aside from a moment of meditative silence each morning, have no religious content. Daytime religious instruction comes through the release-time seminary program of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Colorado City. It is almost indistinguishable from the instruction in LDS church release time seminaries in Utah on the Mormon "standard works" of scripture: Bible, Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price.[200] Likewise at Colonia LeBaron and Los Molinos, Mexico, fundamentalist children first attended private schools and then government supported schools within their own communities.[201]

About 85 percent of the Johnson group's young men and women attend college. Most graduate from Mohave County Community College (also staffed by fundamentalists) right in Colorado City. Many go on to the nearby University of Northern Arizona at Flagstaff or Southern Utah University at Cedar City, Utah. Some attend the University of Utah at Salt Lake City, and a few even go to the LDS church's Brigham Young University in Provo. In consultation with the Priesthood, the Colorado City's graduates go into occupations that reflect traditional gender roles.[202]

The Allred group and the Kelsch family of independents currently have private academies. The Apostolic United Brethren operates its certified Mountain Valley School in Bluffdale, Salt Lake Valley, but the school board restricts enrollment to about 200 students because of the facility's size. Most children in the Allred group attend regular public schools, and only a fourth of the presiding elder's own grandchildren attend his group's school. The Allred commune of Pinesdale, Montana, also has an academy. Aside from opening prayer, the general instruction is secular in the Allred academies which are also attended by non-fundamentalist and non-LDS children. The academies use the Montessori method, and students graduate on a mastery-level at about seventeen or eighteen years of age.[203] The Kelsch family of independent fundamentalists owns and operates the Silver Creek Academy for the benefit of the children who live in a compound of Kelsch brothers and a brother-in-law near Park City, Utah. It also is licensed, but its graduates rarely attend college.[204]

Independent fundamentalists, the Kingston group, many Allred families, and Johnson group families in Salt Lake Valley send their children to public schools. Statistics of higher education are not available for these fundamentalists, but high proportions of males and females attend college in the Allred group and among some independents. Although the independent Kelsch children near Park City have their own academy, most of the children of Kelsch fundamentalists attend public schools, but end their schooling at or before high school graduation in order to work. In fact, if they do not attend a university, fundamentalist boys usually work in the building trades, which Mormon fundamentalists dominate in Salt Lake Valley and elsewhere in Utah. Likewise, the Kelsch family's cabinet factory is one of the largest in the Mountain West. The Kingston group's children also attend public schools, and the Davis County Co-operative may encourage some of its children to attend college and even professional schools in order to provide expert service to the Kingston group as trusted insider-professionals.[205] Despite reservations about the social environment, the majority of urban fundamentalists send their children to public schools, where they interact with outsiders, usually with some discomfort. 

Harassment by Outsiders 

Many polygamous children have been taunted as "polygies" by neighborhood children or in elementary school.[206] For some, the situation gets uglier during adolescence. When one of Ogden Kraut's families moved to a new neighborhood recently, someone smashed their windows and threw severed duck heads on the porch.[207] One teenager reports that a few years ago students threw darts at his older sister in the halls of her high school, and a young woman tells of nineteen-year-old neighbors yelling, "We know you, blankety-blank polygamists!" and then "would flip me off and things like that." 

All the teenagers in this study are very reluctant to talk about the religion of those who engage in such harassment of polygamists. They finally acknowledge that this harassment comes from LDS church members, but then quickly add that such behavior is not true of all LDS people. Fundamentalist youth find that most non-LDS children and adults shrug when they learn of polygamists in their midst. However, one teenage fundamentalist explains that even in the heavily LDS high schools there has been almost no harassment in recent years "because there are so many weird people in the school, a polygamist is just another weird group of person." 

Converts and their children suffer the most because they have suddenly entered a category feared by their LDS friends and neighbors. The teenage convert to fundamentalism found his LDS friends suddenly stopped talking to him. Their parents were "my second parents," but after his conversion, "they didn't want their kids to have anything to do with me." He had been a youth leader in his LDS ward but finally stopped attending church meetings because, "I'll go and [offer to] shake someone's hand, and they won't even shake my hand, and they'll just walk away." Aside from a fundamentalist girl he has dated for a year, this teenage convert has not developed any fundamentalist friends his own age. Now at age twenty his friendships are with the middle-aged men and women of the independent meetings he attends.[208]

"Passing" as Monogamists 

Outside the communes, teenagers from polygamous families lead dual social lives. They have many LDS acquaintances who are unaware of their status, but for most their only close friends are other fundamentalist children. Polygamists' children (particularly independents and those in the Allred group) are proud of blending in. One polygamous boy says of his high school friends: "None of them even know that I am. They just think I'm just another kid." All the teenagers in this study say they would not deny their status if LDS friends asked, but the dual life goes deeper. To avoid questions concerning their families' polygamous status, most fundamentalist teenagers avoid associating at school with each other.[209] This is not a pattern they will grow out of, either, because their parents are rarely known as fundamentalists to outsiders. Aside from their religious meetings, most urban and suburban fundamentalists do their best to be unrecognizable to outsiders.[210]

Which brings up the matter of dress. In its early decades, the Colorado City group "wore fundamentalist Mormonism like a badge: severe buns, long skirts, black suits, faces scrubbed and plain, persisting in old fashioned dress even for the children."[211] In Colorado City this posed no problem, but elsewhere the Johnson group attracted stares. Such pioneer type dress invited taunts for their children in school: "I resented the fact that I had to be punished for what my parents did," says one woman born and raised as a polygamist child in the Johnson group's Salt Lake Valley community.[212] This has relaxed a bit in Colorado City, but the door of the community's only restaurant (the Early Bird Cafe) displays a sign: "Cover your elbows, knees, shoulders, and toes, or out this door you goes."[213] In Salt Lake City some fundamentalist children of all ages still wear such distinctive dress, including obviously home-made shirts and trousers for the boys. However, that is a rarity which embarrasses children and teenagers in the Allred group and among independents, and is even uncomfortable for those youths in the Johnson group who wear modern clothes. 

These young people have their own dress code. A leader in the All red's Youth of Zion prefers Reebok high tops, gray acid-wash Levis, and designer-label shirts. A young woman in the Allred group wears high tops, 900-series Levis, and a sweatshirt. A teenage girl from a family of independent fundamentalists sports black pants, black blouse, high black soft-leather boots, and a white patent-leather jacket. These fundamentalist girls also use make-up consistent with their secular peers. Owen All red's grandchildren at his family compound wear the blouses, shirts, shorts, jeans, and surfer jams typical of any teenagers. "I am opposed to it," their grandfather says, "but it's awful hard because of peer pressure from everywhere."[214] It is not so much peer pressure as it is a determination on the part of most urban fundamentalist youth to be inconspicuous: "We act like normal kids and everything," one boy grins. "We don't dress like polygies, or anything." 

Hair is another matter. Raised in the Johnson group, a woman says, "I was always trained that it [the hair] was my crowning glory, that according to the Bible, that one of these days I would get to wash the Savior's feet with it, at least if I lived righteous enough. So to cut it to me was a huge disgrace." Rulon Allred would not allow his wives to cut their hair.[215] Most females in both groups still have long hair, but in the Allred group (and to some extent the Colorado City group) those with long hair now style it in contemporary fashion, and avoid the long braid and hair bun. By contrast, women in independent families often have stylishly-cut short hair. Most fundamentalist men now avoid beards, and the Colorado City group expects army-style haircuts for all males. The young man interviewed from this group apologized because his hair was just over his ears.[216] On the other hand, teenage boys in the Allred group tend to have collar-length hair, but if short hair is the style for outsider friends of an Allred group or independent boy, then his hair will be short. 

Disaffection of Youth 

This desire for outsider approval by youth within the relatively easy going Allred group and among independents often leads to disaffection. One father observes: "There is no middle ground for Fundamentalist youth. Either they're very dedicated or they choose to be completely out of the movement. We respect their choice in the Allred group. We don't try to force them one way or the other. On the other hand, the LDS church provides a middle ground for youth because the church is primarily social."[217] Owen Allred volunteers that alcohol, drugs, delinquency, and sexual experimentation are problems among the Allred group's youths, and that twice as many young men leave the group as females.[218] One teenage boy says, "I've had a lot of influences in the world, and sometimes I wonder why I'm even still here [in the Allred Group]." Many of Rulon Allred's children, and sons of his group's current leader ship, have abandoned fundamentalism for the LDS church or no religion.[219]

Defection of independent children from fundamentalism is especially understandable since independents feel estranged from the groups, the church, and the secular society. Ogden Kraut observes that "the percentage is not very high" for keeping their children in the movement that many independent parents also regard as "out of order." He adds, "I know of some men who have large families and almost none of them get back into Fundamentalism."[220] A twenty-three-year-old son in an independent family says, "I don't think that you should believe in just one thing, in one way like Christian or Mormonism or anything."[221]

At the other end of the fundamentalist scale, the strict demands of the Colorado City group and the Kingstons are too much for many of their youths, again primarily young men. In 1953 the present head of Colorado City's youth seminary program claimed that there was no juvenile delinquency or profanity there,[222] and this is a result of rigid social control according to Colorado City's mayor: "If somebody's kids get out of order, you know a man gets some hot breath down his back. It isn't necessarily the police hammering on them. But they get some pressure from the other families and from the people [i.e., the Priesthood] to do something and to take care of them."[223] Many young men leave this control behind as soon as they can. 

Raised in the Johnson group until she left it in the mid-1970s, one plural wife says: "There was a very high turnover of young men who left the group." This perception is also supported by recent fieldwork.[224] The disaffection is usually total. One man raised in the commune and now in his twenties recently told me, "I've done my best to put it all behind me and live a different life." Of such boys, one Colorado City leader observes, "Percentage wise there's not a whole lot of them who come back and affiliate religiously. There's quite a high percentage that don't."[225] A plural wife in the Davis County Co-operative says that 50 percent of its young people (especially males) abandon the ascetic Order.[226]

The Guarantee of New Plural Marriages 

Since fundamentalists report that twice as many young men abandon fundamentalism as young women, this is the reason that polygamy can continue among fundamentalists with few conversions from the outside. In other words, the rigorous conformity required in the Colorado City group, for example, winnows away the majority of the group's young men. This radically alters the gender ratio of faithful fundamentalists, and leaves a disproportionate number of young women free to become plural wives. This pattern of higher religious persistence for fundamentalist females also allows demographic opportunity for polygamy among independents and the Allred group which promote it less. 

Even though polygamy is less common among the Allred group and the independents, there is no evidence that it is dying among those who remain faithful. In Owen Allred's family, all of his daughters and more than half of his sons have entered polygamy. One independent, Albert E. Barlow, reports that all but two of his first plural wife's eight children married polygamously, as did all but one of the twelve children by his second plural wife. A third of Louis Kelsch's family is living in the Principle.[227]

Among the believing fundamentalist teenagers in this study, attitudes vary from cautious to enthusiastic about entering plural marriage in the future. One boy remarks, "I believe it's a true principle, but I don't know if it's for me to live, either. I just have to wait and see." This is echoed by another teenager who says he does not expect to look for a plural wife because "I don't want to have all that responsibility," even though he believes in it. On the other hand, all the married sisters of another teenage boy have married polygamously, and he says, "I definitely do want to live plural marriage because I have a testimony of it." One young woman responds, "It's a big part of my plans. I mean, I don't know, I can't imagine life without it” and the other teenage girls in this study agree. Even in this small group of faithful teenage Mormon fundamentalists, the commitment to marry polygamously is four times higher for females than for males. Such a gender-skewed trend guarantees that Mormon fundamentalism will continue to thrive as a polygamous subculture in America. 

Living with Altered Social and Legal Realities 

These young fundamentalists will enter plural marriage in a more hospitable world than when their parents married polygamously. The 1953 Short Creek raid was a climax of government prosecutions of polygamists, and it backfired in a storm of public criticism for its perpetrators and in enormous financial costs to the government.[228] Prosecutorial interest has sharply declined since then. There was a conviction in 1974 for polygamy, but it was due to a formal complaint by the father of one of the man's plural wives.[229] A polygamist husband expresses the view of Mormon fundamentalists today: "We're taking the position that plural marriage is not prosecutable because of so many deviant practices that the Supreme Court has said are justifiable. . . . Because we take that position and because we've had far less persecution over the years, we've become more open." Then he adds, "Some say we'll pay some day. We shouldn't be so open."[230]

Several law enforcement officials explain the lack of prosecutions under anti-polygamy statutes. The assistant chief investigator of the Salt Lake County attorney's office says, "I really doubt that we'll ever see prosecution of those people for the multiple marriage." He explains that because Mormon fundamentalists marry only one wife civilly, the big amy statutes do not apply. Prosecutors are reluctant to charge fundamentalists with adultery or unlawful cohabitation because of society's acceptance of sexual cohabitation by unmarried persons.[231] Utah's attorney general agrees, and adds that there is not enough prison space to hold all polygamists, so there is "an uneasy truce" between law enforcement and polygamists.[232] The Salt Lake County attorney says the polygamy laws should be taken off the statute books because Mormon fundamentalists in all other respects "are not violating the law." His assistant chief investigator adds, "The vast majority of those people are peace-loving. They want no problems with outsiders. They want to be left alone to practice their religion as they best see fit, and we respect that."[233] An FBI agent adds: "At least 99 percent of all polygamists are peaceful, law-abiding people."[234]

These remarkable expressions by senior law enforcement officers are symptomatic of dramatic changes that occurred in less than fifteen years. The murder of Rulon C. Allred in 1977 brought law officers in close contact and cooperation with his successor Owen Allred, as well as with representatives of most other fundamentalist groups anxious to distance themselves from the small band of murderous schismatics connected with Ervil LeBaron. The urgency and intensity of this communication and cooperation broke down walls of suspicion that had previously seemed unbreachable. Owen Allred says, "But as far as the state and the officials of the state—the police departments, head people—they just treat us wonderfully. I am so thankful for that. Right from the governor's office down, they have been very respectful to us."[235]

A renewal of armed stand-offs and bloodshed involving the Singer family and their polygamous son-in-law Addam Swapp in 1988 again placed the local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies in the position of seeking cooperation with fundamentalists, this time with the independents.[236] After the Singer-Swapp family bombed an LDS chapel and barricaded themselves at their family compound, Ogden Kraut's efforts at defusing the situation endeared him to the law enforcement agencies. When the resulting publicity of Kraut's polygamous status endangered his position as a civilian employee of the U.S. Army, the local FBI chief and the Utah attorney general intervened with the post commander to protect Kraut's position.[237] It is a long way from the Short Creek raid. 

Nevertheless, such developments infuriate powerful elements of Utah and western American society. The Salt Lake Tribune printed an editorial in 1988: "Utah officials presumably have tolerated polygamy to keep the peace and to avoid making the dependents of polygamists wards of the state. However, when the state makes special allowances for polygamy, it tacitly approves the practice and scorns its own constitution. Such double-dealing cannot continue indefinitely without generating greater contempt for Utah laws and standards."[238] Although LDS church leaders may wish Utah to be as repressive de facto as it is de jure toward Mormon fundamentalists, the society is in transition and not dictated by church headquarters or its allies. 

Mormonism has passed the century mark of its public abandonment of polygamy. The Manifesto saved the church from destruction in 1890, and allowed Utah to become a state in 1896. Now government agencies have entered into a de facto gentlemen's agreement with Mormon fundamentalists about their continued living of polygamy. Some law enforcement officials are even looking forward to a de jure resolution: a test case before the U.S. Supreme Court that will reverse the 1879 Reynolds v. the United States decision allowing criminal prosecution of religiously-based polygamy.[239]

In this instance, disenchanted law officials are joined by legal historians who regard the Reynolds decision as an anachronism that could not be upheld if the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to rule on a challenge to the century-old precedent.[240] In 1988 an Arizona superior court judge fired the first shot of what may be a siege to overturn Reynolds: "The court holds, in essence, that the [Arizona] constitutional proscription of polygamy may be applied except where it would interfere with genuine religious practices ..."[241] Those words sounded like the beginning of a judicial battle to fulfill Justice William Douglas's dissent against the 1972 Wisconsin v. Yoder: "in time Reynolds will be overturned." Still, the Supreme Court may nullify that effort since its neo-conservative majority used the Reynolds decision in 1990 to deny the use of peyote in Native American religion.[242] The Supreme Court will never relinquish the essential constitutional principle of Reynolds v. the United States that there are limits to protected religious practice. 

However, the Reynolds decision is ripe for circumvention. It atavistically defines a non-normative family relationship as deprived of legal protections, even though this family relationship is at least as stable as normative monogamy. If religiously motivated polygamists ever have success with the U.S. Supreme Court, they will do so in an appeal that does not use the First Amendment to challenge Reynolds, but instead uses the "equal protection" provision of the Fourteenth Amendment to challenge laws and policies that discriminate against non-monogamous family life. 

That is the constitutional potential of the Fischer adoption case. In an unappealed decision in 1991, the Utah Supreme Court ruled: "The fact that our [Utah] constitution requires the state to prohibit polygamy does not necessarily mean that the state must deny any or all civil rights and privileges to polygamists." The Utah Supreme Court then ruled that a polygamist family has the legal right to adopt children.[243] This 1991 decision established a precedent for future petitions to obtain judicial recognition of all family rights for polygamous marriages. 

Triangular Impact: Fundamentalists, the LDS Church, and the Third World 

For its part, the LDS church strenuously resists reversing any policy, and enforcement of the 1890 Manifesto is a big one. In fact, the LDS church applies the Manifesto to countries and cultures where polygamy is legal. For example, Nigerian law allows polygamy, but the LDS church refuses to baptize polygamous husbands or wives in Nigeria unless the husband divorces the plural wives by taking them back to their villages. When the LDS church first sent a representative there, "A Nigerian priest, to become a member of the Church, was told that he could not be baptized unless he sent away one of his wives. He slept on it over night and came the next morning and told Brother Williams that he had decided to let one of his wives go back to her father." Of this, LDS church president David O. McKay lamented: "That is a cruel thing to do." Yet thirty years later that is still the church's policy toward legal polygamists. Nor will the church baptize children of polygamists in Africa, until the children are old enough to convincingly renounce polygamy.[244]

African polygamy (the normative practice in 78 percent of sub-Sahara tribes) is a challenge for Catholic and Protestant churches as well. Although they lack the LDS church's polygamous scripture and heritage, several Christian churches baptize polygamists. A survey shows that polygamists in Nigeria's capital account for 17.3 percent of Catholics and 23.3 percent of Protestants.[245] Moreover, since polygamy is legal in Nigeria (where there are tens of thousands of Mormons), its polygamists are in compliance with the 1890 Manifesto's wording to "refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land."[246] What African polygamists are not in compliance with is U.S. and Utah laws. Thus people who marry legally within African culture are now defined as sinful by a church that once advocated polygamy in defiance of U.S. laws. This contradicts the LDS church's Twelfth Article of Faith as it applies to sub Saharan Africa: "We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates and in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law." Moreover, a church that defines family life as eternal has a policy that requires the break-up of Third World families as a pre-condition for Mormon conversion. 

These ironies will become demographically unbearable once Africa's black LDS population increases significantly beyond its current 100,000. Black African Mormons are in Angola, Cameroon, Botswana, Cameroon, Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Lesotho, Mozambique, Nambia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Somalia, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zaire, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. In the 1990s black LDS population increased 50-250 percent in various countries.[247]

As early as 1962, church president David O. McKay was inclined to allow wholesale baptisms of Nigerian polygamists on humanitarian grounds, and LDS temple marriages for those loyal polygamists. He was supported by his lawyer-counselor Henry D. Moyle, who argued that the Manifesto was inapplicable to Third World polygamy. They were dissuaded by Counselor Hugh B. Brown's concern that this would confuse the church's policy toward illegal polygamy in the United States. Brown, also a lawyer and a lifelong opponent of the fundamentalists, had drafted the 1935 law that made unlawful cohabitation a felony in Utah.[248]

Again, about 1979, Apostle LeGrand Richards reported that a meeting of the First Presidency and Twelve had just debated whether to sanction legal polygamy in Nigeria and elsewhere. However, this temple meeting tabled the discussion, thereby continuing by default the policy of requiring legal polygamists to become monogamists. Apostle Richards explained, "The problem is that if we allow it in other places [such as Africa], the people could argue that it should be allowed here [in Utah], too."[249]

African polygamists who seek admittance into the LDS church are not fundamentalists, but are tarred with the same brush by current application of the 1890 Manifesto. For the past three decades, members of the First Presidency and Quorum of Twelve Apostles have considered changing the scope of the Manifesto without discarding the document itself, which is now regarded as virtual revelation by LDS church members. Although this will be a wrenching administrative change, the LDS church will eventually open the doors of Mormonism to millions of legal polygamists in Africa, the Near East, and Asia by defining the Manifesto to prohibit only marriages that are illegal in the country of their origin. 

The change in LDS church policy toward Third World polygamists will also transform the situation of Christianity in Africa. There, Catholic polygamists realize they live in violation of the church's canon law and theology. African polygamists are also second-class Christians even in the few Protestant churches which baptize polygamists, because these churches have simply made a grudging exception to their marital theology in order to accommodate African realities. When the LDS church re defines the scope of the Manifesto, African polygamists for the first time will be able to experience a Christian fellowship whose theology, scripture, and heritage glorify honorable polygamous marriage. The LDS church is the only Christian fellowship that can offer African polygamists more than second-class status as Christians, and the Mormon population in Africa will experience explosive growth if the LDS church combines vigorous proselytizing with a redefined Manifesto.[250]

Mormon fundamentalism is the only obstacle preventing the LDS church from making that humanitarianly necessary, theologically consistent, and administratively logical acknowledgement of the sanctity and legitimacy of Third World polygamous family life. The LDS hierarchy is understandably reluctant to do anything that would strengthen the position of its polygamous schismatics, who would demand to receive the same dispensation as African, Near Eastern, and Asian polygamists. But the North American situation is completely different because polygamy is illegal (even if the laws are unenforced) in Canada, Mexico, and most of the United States. The LDS church will never repeal the 1890 Manifesto and accept illegal polygamy, just to allow about 21,000 Mormon fundamentalists to become Latter-day Saints. 

Nevertheless, because the 1890 Manifesto's prohibitions were defined in terms of the "law of the land" in the United States, changes in U.S. jurisprudence are undermining the document's relevance to American fundamentalists, just as Third World polygamous realities demand the Manifesto's redefinition. The Manifesto's "law of the land" prohibition ceased to apply to federal law as soon as Utah became a state in 1896, because federal anti-polygamy laws are legally void within all states of the Union. That is why Congress required Utah's state constitution to prohibit polygamy. On the other hand, even if the U.S. Supreme Court continues to uphold Reynolds, that 1879 decision's application to polygamists is ironically null in every state that has "consenting adult" statutes which have decriminalized polygamous cohabitation by default. Therefore, the 1890 Manifesto is based upon criminal laws that no longer apply in "consenting adult" states where fundamentalist polygamy exists in ironic compliance with the legalistic definitions of the Manifesto. 

In addition, even in Utah and other western states with anti-polyg amy statutes and polygamous families, there is judicial change. The grim hostility of law enforcement officials against continued polygamy has now all but vanished into a live-and-let-live attitude. The numbers of polygamists already make enforcement of these anti-polygamy statutes virtually impossible. Mormon fundamentalists have achieved a remarkably successful modus vivendi with the United States, its curiosity, and its laws. If the U.S. Supreme Court eventually rules that non-monogamous families have legal rights, then the legalistic basis for the Manifesto will crumble like a house of cards. If there had been judicial recognition of polygamous family rights in 1890, there would have been no Manifesto. 

The Mormon fundamentalist population of about 21,000 is a deceptively small percentage of the total population of the LDS church and of the United States. Relatively few people who read the Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants will live polygamy, but the number of Mormon fundamentalists is growing exponentially. Short Creek's polygamous population was 400 at the time of the 1953 raid, but less than forty years later it was 4,600. Those now living in Mormon-oriented polygamous families rival the numbers living in plural marriages sanctioned by the LDS church at the time of the 1890 Manifesto. There are ten times more polygamists in the United States now than in 1862, the year of the first federal law against polygamy, or in 1953, the year of the last federal raid against polygamists. Western America is already crowded with Mormons, and will be increasingly so in coming decades, but polygamous family life will also be a growing factor in the West's social fabric. In other words, polygamy will be an ever larger demographic reality for Americans, no matter what the LDS church does regarding its definitions of the Manifesto. 

But there is an equal irony in the position of Mormon fundamentalists. "There are many things we would love to see that would give us opportunity for involvement in the Church," says an excommunicated plural wife, "but I also believe that the Church needs us. So I'm not languishing ...”[251] These fundamentalists have always defined their service to Mormonism as caretakers of the Principle abandoned by the LDS church. The LDS church will challenge Mormon fundamentalism's very reason for existence when church leaders publicly authorize plural marriage, even on a limited basis in Third World countries. 

For example, when the LDS church allows the practice of plural marriage wherever it is legal, and ratifies such legal polygamous ceremonies by priesthood ordinance, on what basis can Mormon fundamentalists continue to pursue a separate course? Current fundamentalist leaders do not perform plural marriages for every adherent who may be interested, so can they justify overriding decisions of LDS church leaders who may allow polygamy to some within the church's world wide flock but deny the Principle to others? Likewise, can fundamentalists embrace the LDS church when it allows polygamous living but continues its doctrinal and procedural policies also rejected by fundamentalists? In other words, can Mormon fundamentalists dictate the terms of their reconciliation to the LDS church once it begins authorizing even limited plural marriage? 

When the situation in the Third World requires (as it should) the LDS church to sanction current polygamous living, Mormon fundamentalism will face a challenge it will not survive by using its present definitions. Mormon fundamentalists have a separate line of priesthood, and they will find it difficult to join a newly polygamous LDS church and be deferential to LDS general authorities, rather than to fundamentalist Priest hood councils. Colorado City's United Effort Plan, the Allred's Apostolic United Brethren, and the Kingston's Davis County Co-operative will be reluctant to turn over their extensive economic assets upon conversion to a polygamous LDS church's Corporation of the President. However, that will be necessary if these groups continue to define the continuation of plural marriage as the fundamental reason for their estrangement from what they define as God's true church. 

At a personal level, it will be hard to give up the sense of community within Mormon fundamentalism for a somewhat alien LDS community. Despite all the professed (and sincere) reverence for the LDS church, the Mormon fundamentalist has a religious tradition different from that of the LDS church member, and it will not be easy to walk away from that identity. In other words, one day each Mormon fundamentalist will decide whether his or her fundamentalist identity is more important than joining a newly polygamous LDS church. 

In fact, LDS church acceptance of Third World polygamists will underscore the fact that (unlike LDS Mormons) fundamentalist Mormons have retained the nineteenth-century sense of being a gathered people. The dual processes of accommodation to American society since 1890 and massive conversion rates since 1960 have undermined the traditional Mormon sense of ethnicity ("peopleness") within the LDS church. "Mormon ethnicity" is dying in the LDS church (and in some respects has died already through a "Correlation Program" too involved to discuss here).[252] By contrast, Mormon ethnicity lives on actively in Mormon fundamentalism. 

Not simply caretakers of plural marriage, Mormon fundamentalists have lost their church but retained and even re-created the crucial sense of Mormons as a people, a Volk, an ethnicity. The current LDS church is so alien to its nineteenth-century counterpart that even accepting Third World polygamists in full fellowship will not return the current LDS church to its nineteenth-century character. Fundamentalism may therefore have increasing appeal to LDS church members who feel the loss of that identity as their church hurtles toward its projected population of 265 million before the second-century anniversary of the Manifesto. That is one reason why there will continue to be fundamentalist Mormons after the LDS church becomes polygamous again. 

The other reason is that many (perhaps a majority of) Mormon fundamentalists may realize that their fundamentalist identity is more important to them than even a polygamous LDS church. These remaining Mormon fundamentalists will redefine themselves as God's only order (church), and will redefine the LDS church as irredeemably fallen even as it restores polygamous practice. Undoubtedly most members of Colorado City's Fundamentalist Church, the Davis County Co-operative, and the LeBaron churches will remain fundamentalists even if the LDS church sanctions plural marriage again. On the other hand, significant numbers of Mormon fundamentalists (probably not a majority) may join the LDS church if it accepts polygamous living. Because of the traditional fundamentalist reverence for the LDS church, some members of the above three groups and at least a large minority of independents and the Allred's Apostolic United Brethren may seek out the LDS church once it sanctions even limited polygamous living. Sanctioning Third World polygamy may be a difficult administrative decision for the LDS church, but it will split and redefine the Mormon fundamentalist movement as nothing else has. 

Despite their clannishness and inwardness, Mormon fundamentalists are participating in a transformation of the world around and beyond themselves. Over the objections of the American West's governing elites, Mormon fundamentalists have given the region an enduring polygamous character. The Kelsch family's cabinet business, the Kingstons' Davis County Co-operative, Colorado City's United Effort Plan, and the fundamentalist domination of Utah's building trades have a multi-mil lion dollar combined economic impact that is both regional and national. Mormon fundamentalists feel no affinity with practitioners of other non normative family relationships in the United States. Nevertheless, Mormon fundamentalists are participating with all other non-monogamous households in a domino effect that has altered judicial and social realities of the nation as a whole. Internationally, Mormon fundamentalism is both the deterrent and the key toward a transformation of the Christian status quo in polygamous cultures such as sub-Sahara Africa. Mormon fundamentalism has significant impact far beyond its small numbers which are growing rapidly.[253]

---

Note: This essay was first published in 1993, is copyrighted by the University of Chicago Press, appears here in slightly revised form with their permission, but does not update source notes or data on fundamentalists.

[1] Whitney R. Cross coined the phrase in his The Burned-over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800-1850 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1950). For a penetrating analysis of Mormonism as a new world religion, see Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of a New Religious Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). For general understanding of Mormon history and beliefs, see also Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience (New York: Knopf, 1979). 

[2] Rodney Stark, "The Rise of a New World Faith," Review of Religious Research 26 (Sept. 1984): 22. Five years later he found LDS membership growth actually ahead of his projection. Remarks of Stark at annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Salt Lake City, Utah, 27 Oct. 1989.

[3] D. W. Meinig, "The Mormon Cultural Region: Strategies and Patterns in the Geography of the American West, 1847-1964," American Geographers Association Annals 55 (1965): 191- 200; Deseret News 1991-1992 Church Almanac (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1990), 6; LDS church statistical report for 31 Dec. 1991; D. Michael Quinn, "Religion in the West," in Under An Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past, ed. William J. Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin (New York: Norton, 1992); also D. Michael Quinn, "From Sacred Grove to Sacral Power Structure," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 17 (Summer 1984): 9-34; "LDS 1997 Statistical Report," Deseret News, 5 Apr. 1998, A-13, for missionaries and members. 

[4] Mormon fundamentalists usually capitalize fundamentalism and fundamentalist when referring to themselves, but this essay will give this capitalization only in their quotes. "They are rightly called Mormon Fundamentalists, for they have not turned with [LDS] Church policy as the main body has, but have reverenced and upheld the founders." Louis J. Barlow's remarks on KSUB Radio, shortly after the Short Creek raid of 26 July 1953, copy in my possession; also Leroy S. Johnson's statement in 1977, "I was grateful when I heard that [LDS apostle] Mark E. Petersen branded us as 'FUNDAMENTALISTS.'" See Ken Driggs, "Fundamentalist Attitudes toward the Church: The Sermons of Leroy S. Johnson," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 23 (Summer 1990): 51, and The L. S. Johnson Sermons, 6 vols. (Hildale, UT: Twin Cities Courier Press, 1983-84), 4:1491.

[5] Pierre LaForet, "Ce Mormon. Heureux. 'Regne' Sur Ses Quatre Femmes," Le Figaro, 16 Apr. 1988; Bella Stumbo, "No Tidy Stereotype. Polygamists: Tale of Two Families," Los Angeles Times, 13 May 1988, Part 1,1; Reason: Free Minds and Free Markets 18 flan. 1987), photographs on the front page and table of contents page, as well as four illustrations in the same issue for Gerald M. King's article, "The Mormon Underground Fights Back," 23, 24, 26, 28, 29.

[6] Example in Salt Lake Tribune, 19 Mar. 1986, Sec. NV, p. 1. 

[7] Sunstone Review 2 (Jan.-Feb. 1982): 9. This was also a theme about nineteenth-century polygamy in Maurine Whipple's novel Giant Joshua, where a son failed to persuade his girlfriend against becoming his own father's plural wife. I watched Child Bride of Short Creek on late night television in mid-1991 in New Orleans, a decade after its original screening. 

[8] For the isolated, sensational murders that created this stereotype, see Ben Bradlee, Jr., and Dale Van Atta, Prophet of Blood: The Untold Story of Ervil Le Baron and the Lambs of God (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1981), and Richard S. Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy: A History (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1986), 215-19. The film Messenger of Death was also televised more than once in 1990-91. Video store rentals will guarantee the continued circulation of its polygamy stereotypes, as well as those of Child Bride of Short Creek. 

[9] Ken Driggs, "After the Manifesto: Modern Polygamy and Fundamentalist Mormons," Journal of Church and State 32 (Spring 1990): 386; Jessie L. Embry, Mormon Polygamous Families: Life in the Principle (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987), xiii-xiv. Although there was also some non-fatal violence during 1990 involving the polygamist mayor of Big Water, Utah, the conflict involved a political and financial dispute within the community, not a dispute about polygamy or about fundamentalist claims. See Jerry Spangler, "Tidal wave of fury in tiny Big Water," Deseret News, 5 Sept. 1990.

[10] Stanley S. Ivins, "Notes on Mormon Polygamy," Western Humanities Review 10 (Summer 1956): 229-39, reprinted in Utah Historical Quarterly 35 (Fall 1967); James E. Smith and Phillip R. Kunz, "Polygyny and Fertility in Nineteenth-Century America," Population Studies 30 (Sept. 1976): 465-80; Phillip R. Kunz, "One Wife or Several? A Comparative Study of Late Nineteenth Century Marriage in Utah," in Thomas G. Alexander, ed., The Mormon People: Their Character and Traditions (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1980), 53- 73; Dean May, "A Demographic Portrait of the Mormons, 1830-1980," in D. Michael Quinn, ed., The New Mormon History: Revisionist Essays on the Mormon Past (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992); Larry Logue, "A Time of Marriage: Monogamy and Polygamy in a Utah Town," Journal of Mormon History 11 (1984): 3-26; Lowell "Ben" Bennion, "The Incidence of Mormon Polygamy in 1880: 'Dixie' versus Davis Stake," Journal of Mormon History 11 (1984): 27-42; Logue, Sermon in the Desert: Belief and Behavior in Early St. George, Utah (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 44-71. 

[11] Congress, U.S. Senate, Proceedings Before the Committee on Privileges and Elections of the United States Senate in the Matter of the Protests Against the Right of Hon. Reed Smoot, a Senator from the State of Utah, to Hold His Seat, 4 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1904-1907); H. Grant Ivins, Polygamy in Mexico as Practiced by the Mormon Church, 1895-1905 (1970; Salt Lake City: Collier's Press, 1981); Kenneth L. Cannon II, "Beyond the Manifesto: Polygamous Cohabitation Among LDS General Authorities After 189Q," Utah Historical Quar terly 46 (Winter 1978): 24-36; Victor W Jorgensen and B. Carmon Hardy, "The Taylor-Cowley Affair and the Watershed of Mormon History," Utah Historical Quarterly 48 (Winter 1980): 4- 36; Kenneth L. Cannon II, "After the Manifesto: Mormon Polygamy, 1890-1906," Sunstone 8 (Jan.-Apr. 1983): 27-35; D. Michael Quinn, "LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890-1904," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18 (Spring 1985): 9-105; Jessie L. Embry, "Exiles for the Principle: LDS Polygamy in Canada," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18 (Fall 1985): 108-116; Fred C. Collier and Knut Knutson, eds., The Trials of Apostle John W. Taylor and Matthias F. Cowley (Salt Lake City: Collier's Publishing Co., 1987); Jessie L. Embry, "Two Legal Wives: Mormon Polygamy in Canada, the United States and Mexico," and B. Carmon Hardy, "Mormon Polygamy in Mexico and Canada: A Legal and Historiographical Review," in Brigham Y. Card et al., eds., The Mormon Presence in Canada (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1990).

[12] Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy, 195-98; D. Michael Quinn, Reuben Clark: The Church Years (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1983), 183-85.

[13] For example, Salt Lake Tribune, 24 Aug. 1909,4. 

[14] Truth 15 (Oct. 1949): 133-134. Mormon fundamentalists, like LDS members, capitalize "Church" when referring to the LDS church. In another example of this exaggeration, the fundamentalist periodical claimed that Anthony W. Ivins performed more than 400 polygamous marriages in Mexico from 1895 to 1904, when in fact he performed 43 verified plural marriages. Truth 5 (Apr. 1940): 246; compare Quinn, "LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890-1904," 80n281. 

[15] See n11. 

[16] Dennis R. Short, Questions on Plural Marriage (Salt Lake City: By the Author, 1974), 94. Newsweek, 19 May 1975, also estimated a total of 35,000 people living in polygamy, which this study regards as too high an estimate even now, and certainly an inflated figure then. 

[17] Paul Van Dam, Utah State Attorney General, interview by Ken Verdoia on 6 Dec. 1989; David Yocum, Salt Lake County Attorney, who prosecuted Ervil LeBaron in 1980, interview by Ken Verdoia on 7 Dec. 1989. Copies in my possession.

[18] Carolyn Campbell, "The Private Place of Plural Marriage," Utah Holiday, May 1986, 36; Salt Lake Tribune, 10 Apr. 1988, B-2. See also King, "The Mormon Underground Fights Back," 22; Los Angeles Times, 13 May 1988, Part I, 24. 

[19] J. Gordon Melton, The Encyclopedia of American Religions, 3rd ed. (Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1989), 579; Dirk Johnson, "Polygamists Emerge From Secrecy, Seeking Not Just Peace but Respect," New York Times, 9 Apr. 1991, A-22. 

[20] Ogden Kraut, "The Fundamentalist Mormon: A History and Doctrinal Review," paper presented to the Sunstone Theological Symposium, Salt Lake City, Utah, Aug. 1989, published by Kraut as The Fundamentalist Mormon, 23. In 1986 Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy, iii-iv, also estimated "30,000 Fundamentalists." 

[21] My interview with Kraut on 26 July 1989; Kraut interview by Ken Verdoia on 17 Dec. 1989, copy in my possession. After I arrived at this 21,000 figure, I read the estimate of "twenty thousand or more adherents," in Driggs, "After the Manifesto," 388.

[22] For that reason, this definition does not include a Mormon schism called the Order of Aaron, the Aaronic Order, or Levites. Its founder, Maurice Glendenning, officially condemned plural marriage shortly after the group's organization in 1942, even though (or perhaps because) about 20 percent of his early followers believed in continued polygamy. This group defines itself as separate from Mormon fundamentalism. Hans A. Baer, Recreating Utopia in the Desert: A Sectarian Challenge to Modern Mormonism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), x, 61-63. 

[23] For a discussion of these issues from different perspectives, see Mario S. DePillis, "The Quest for Religious Authority and the Rise of Mormonism," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 1 (Spring 1966): 68-88; Shipps, Mormonism; and Klaus J. Hansen, Mormonism and the American Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).

[24] Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy, 3-69; Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality: Three American Communal Experiments of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Klaus J. Hansen, "The Political Kingdom of God as a Cause for Mormon-Gentile Conflict," BYU Studies 2 (Spring-Summer 1960): 241-260; D. Michael Quinn, "The Council of Fifty and Its Members, 1844 to 1945," BYU Studies 20 (Winter 1980): 163-197; Leonard J. Arrington, Feramorz Y. Fox, and Dean L. May, Building the City of God: Community and Cooperation Among the Mormons (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1976); Marvin S. Hill, Quest for Refuge: The Mormon Flight from American Pluralism (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1988); Kenneth H. Winn, Exiles in a Land of Liberty: Mormons in America, 1830-1846 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 4-5, 53-54, 64-73, 218-26; David John Buerger, "The Adam-God Doctrine," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 15 (Spring 1982): 14-58; Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (Liverpool, Eng.: Latter-day Saints' Book Depot, 1854-86), 1:345-46, 2:82, 210, 3:365, 4:259,11: 328. An excellent one-volume compendium of Mormon fundamentalist doctrine is Robert R. Openshaw, The Notes (Pinesdale, MT: Bitterroot Publishing Co., 1980). 

[25] Orma Linford, "The Mormons and the Law: The Polygamy Cases," Utah Law Review 9 (Winter 1964/Summer 1965): 308-70, 543-91; Gustive O. Larson, The "Americanization" of Utah for Statehood (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1970); Joseph H. Groberg, "The Mormon Disfranchisements of 1882 to 1892," BYU Studies 16 (Spring 1976): 399-408; Richard L. Jensen and Jo Ann W. Bair, "Prosecution of the Mormons in Arizona Territory in the 1880s," Arizona and the West 19 (Spring 1977): 25-46; Kimberly Jensen James, '"Between Two Fires': Women on the 'Underground' of Mormon Polygamy," Journal of Mormon History 8 (1981): 49- 61; Martha Sonntag Bradley, "Hide and Seek: Children on the Underground," Utah Historical Quarterly 51 (Spring 1983): 133-53; Hansen, Mormonism and the American Experience, 145; Ed ward Leo Lyman, Political Deliverance: The Mormon Quest for Utah Statehood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 2, 23; Ken Driggs, "The Mormon Church-State Confrontation in Nineteenth Century America," Journal of Church and State 30 (Spring 1988): 273-89; Ken Driggs, "The Prosecutions Begin: Defining Cohabitation in 1885," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 21 (Spring 1988): 109-121; Edwin Brown Firmage and Richard Collin Mangrum, Zion in the Courts: A Legal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988); Carol Cornwall Madsen, "At Their Peril: Utah Law and the Case of Plural Wives, 1850-1900," Western Historical Quarterly 21 (Nov. 1990): 425-43. 

[26] Jan Shipps, "The Principle Revoked: A Closer Look at the Demise of Plural Marriage," Journal of Mormon History 11 (1984): 67.

[27] Journal of Discourses, 13:166, 22:147-48. A massive collection of doctrinal statements and historical events concerning Mormon polygamy appears in Gilbert A. Fulton, Jr. [pseud.], The Most Holy Principle, 4 vols. (Murray, UT: Gems Publishing Co., 1970-75). 

[28] Lyman, Political Deliverance; Thomas G. Alexander, Mormonism in Transition: A History of the Latter-day Saints, 1890-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), esp. 60-73; Quinn, "LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890-1904," 9-50; Kenneth W. Godfrey, "The Coming of the Manifesto," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 5 (Autumn 1975): 11-25; Thomas G. Alexander, "The Odyssey of a Latter-day Prophet: Wilford Woodruff and the Manifesto of 1890," Journal of Mormon History 17 (1991): 169-206. 

[29] Thomas G. Alexander, "The Manifesto: Mormonism's Watershed," This People 11 (Fall 1990): 23. Jan Shipps had earlier referred to the Manifesto as "a disconfirming event that profoundly altered the character of Mormonism," in her "In the Presence of the Past: Continuity and Change in Twentieth-Century Mormonism," in Alexander and Embry, After 150 Years, 24.

[30] This transition is briefly discussed in Alexander's Mormonism in Transition and in Van Wagoner's Mormon Polygamy, but deserves more detailed study of how Mormon fundamentalism really developed and why it was shunned by most who secretly entered new plural marriages from 1890 to 1907 with church authority. See also Ken Driggs, "After the Manifesto: Modern Polygamy and Fundamentalist Mormons," Journal of Church and State 32 (Spring 1990): 367-89; Driggs, "Twentieth-Century Polygamy and Fundamentalist Mormons in Southern Utah," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 24 (Winter 1991): 44-58; Martha Sonntag Bradley, "Joseph W. Musser: Dissenter or Fearless Crusader of Truth?" in Roger D. Launius and Linda Thatcher, eds., Differing Visions: Biographical Essays on Mormon Dissenters (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). 

[31] Kraut's Fundamentalist Mormon, 9-20, discusses the following "Doctrinal Differences": 1. Plural marriage, 2. Missionary work, 3. Office and Calling of the Seventy, 4. Priesthood Confirmation and Ordinations, 5. Gathering of Israel, 6. United Order, 7. Adam/God, 8. Persecution and world friendship, 9. One Mighty and Strong, 10. Zion, 11. Blacks and the Priest hood, 12. Kingdom of God. In his original talk, Number 11 was Gifts of the Spirit.

[32] Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy, 190-98; Joseph W. Musser autobiography, "Patriarchal," 4, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City; Musser diary, 22 Apr., 14 June, 7 Aug. 1922, 14 May 1929, archives, Historical Department, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter LDS archives); Truth 1 (Jan. 1937): 117-20; Jerold A. Hilton, "Polygamy in Utah and Surrounding Area Since the Manifesto of 1890," M.A. thesis, Brigham Young University, 1965, 31; Lynn L. Bishop and Steven L. Bishop, The Keys of the Priesthood Illustrated (Draper, UT: Review and Preview Publishers, 1971); Kraut, Fundamentalist Mormon, 1-4. Dean C. Jessee, "A Comparative Study and Evaluation of the Latter-day Saint and 'Fundamentalist' Views Pertaining to the Practice of Plural Marriage," M.A. thesis, Brigham Young University, 1959, was restricted by BYU for several years due to Jessee's relatively even-handed presentation. Paul E. Reimann, Plural Marriage, Limited (Salt Lake City: Utah Printing Co., 1974), seeks to refute Lorin Woolley's claims in a legalistic analysis that is flawed by Reimann's historically inaccurate understanding of post-Manifesto polygamy. J. Max Anderson's relentlessly historical analysis of Lorin Woolley's claims is Polygamy Story: Fiction and Fact (Salt Lake City: Publisher's Press, 1979), which was reviewed by Fred C. Collier, "Tannering Fundamentalism," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 13 (Summer 1980): 130-32, and expanded in his Re-Examining the Lorin Woolley Story (Salt Lake City: Collier's Publishing Co., 1981). 

[33] As an outsider, I find some fundamentalists express suspicion and unwillingness to talk, but many have been patient with my ignorance and curiosity, and have been candid about their experiences. The mayor of the polygamist commune of Colorado City, Arizona, has provided interviews to more than a hundred reporters. In addition, fundamentalists of various factions have recently invited to their polygamous households such diverse outsiders as a Jewish psychologist and anthropologist, a feminist historian, an LDS legal historian, newspaper reporters from the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Le Figaro, Ladies' Home Journal, and television crews from local news stations, the University of Utah's public station, the nationally syndicated Current Affair, and Italian television. Mormon polygamists have also appeared on nationally televised talk shows of Phil Donahue, Oprah Winfrey, and Sally Jessy Raphael. For example, Le Figaro, 16 Apr. 1988; Los Angeles Times, 13 May 1988,24-25; Dan Njegomir, "Border Towns Embrace Polygamy," Las Vegas Review-Journal, 11 Dec. 1988,1; Kathryn Casey, "An American Harem," Ladies' Home Journal, Feb. 1990,117ff; Dirk Johnson, "Polygamists Emerge From Secrecy, Seeking Not Just Peace but Respect," New York Times, 9 Apr. 1991, A-22. Ken Verdoia (senior producer of KUED-TV in Salt Lake City) to D. Michael Quinn, 16 Oct. 1989; my interview with Martha Sonntag Bradley on 27 Oct. 1989 about her fieldwork in Colorado City, Arizona; Dan Barlow (mayor of Colorado City) interview by Ken Verdoia on 27 Nov. 1989, copy in my possession; Irwin Airman (of the University of Utah's psychology department) to D. Michael Quinn, 1 Mar. 1990, concerning his Mormon fundamentalist field work with Israeli anthropologist Joseph Ginat; Ken Driggs (of University of Wisconsin's Law School) to D. Michael Quinn, 14 Mar. 1990; my telephone interview with Leslie Fagen, report er for television's Current Affair, on 29 Mar. 1990.

[34] Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), 241, 247, 248; Jack Norton, When Our Worlds Cried: Genocide in Northwestern California (San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1979); Arrell Morgan Gibson, The American Indian: Prehistory to the Present (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath & Co., 1980), 229. 

[35] Elizabeth M. Lauritzen, comp., Hidden Flowers: The Life, Letters and Poetry of Jacob Marinus Lauritzen and His Wife Annie Pratt Lauritzen (Brigham City, UT: Bradbury Print, 1982), 101-105; Ken Driggs, "After the Manifesto," 367-69, 378-84; Driggs, "Twentieth-Century Polygamy and Fundamentalist Mormons in Southern Utah," 44-58; Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy, 195-205, and my interview with Sam S. Barlow on 30 Jan. 1990. For the church's quiet encouragement of legal prosecution of fundamentalists, see Quinn, /. Reuben Clark, 184-86.

[36] Dan Barlow, mayor of Colorado City, interview by Ken Verdoia.

[37] My interview with Sam S. Barlow. 

[38] An "outsider" historian of the Short Creek raid describes a young plural wife who delivered while in detention, and, at the moment of birth, Arizona authorities "took the baby away from her and wouldn't let her see it for a week." Martha Sonntag Bradley interview by Ken Verdoia on 5 Dec. 1989, copy in my possession. Also, Bradley's "The Women of Fundamentalism: Short Creek, 1953," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 23 (Summer 1990): 23-31, her "'We Remembered Zion': The 1953 Raid on the Polygamous Community of Short Creek," paper at Western History Association on 20 Oct. 1990, and her Kidnapped From That Land: The Government Raids on the Polygamists of Short Creek (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1993). 

[39] Previous note; Driggs, "After the Manifesto," 384-85; my interview with Sam S. Bar low; Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy, 201-205. Utah's test case was Vera Black and her children. See their interview by Ken Verdoia on 28 Nov. 1989, copy in my possession; Maureen Barlow interview by Ken Verdoia on 5 Dec. 1989, copy in my possession; Mabel Allred interview by Katherine Lundell on 6 Jan. 1990, copy in my possession; my interview with Barbara Owen Kelsch on 20 Jan. 1990; Dorothy Allred Solomon, In My Father's House (New York: Franklin Watts, 1984), 82,125-26; Ken Driggs, "Who Shall Raise the Children?: Vera Black and the Rights of Polygamous Utah Parents," Utah Historical Quarterly 60 (Winter 1992): 27-46. 

[40] Leroy S. Johnson sermon at Colorado City on 6 Mar. 1977, L. S. Johnson Sermons, 4:1352; Dan Barlow interview by Ken Verdoia.

[41] In common Utah pronunciation, it is Short "Crick" and Short "Crickers." Ken Driggs, "Fundamentalist Attitudes toward the Church," 51, quotes a sermon by Leroy Johnson that their group was "the Fundamentalist group of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." However, after President Johnson's death in 1986, the leaders of the group adopted the unincorporated title of "Fundamentalist Church," as indicated in my interview with Sam S. Barlow, and in Louis J. Barlow, Director of Colorado City Seminary Program of the Fundamentalist Church, interview by Ken Verdoia, 27 Nov. 1989, copy in my possession. The Colorado City group legally incorporated on 6 February 1991 as a religious corporate sole, "The Corporation of the President of The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" in Utah (#149,512). 

[42] My interview with Caroline Dewegeli Daley on 28 Jan. 1990. 

[43] "United Effort Plan's Supplemented Response [as of 27 Nov. 1989] to Order of Court dated July 28,1989," in Case 87-C-1022J, Roger E. Williams et al. vs. United Effort Plan et al, United States Court for the District of Utah; my telephone interview with Jeff Swinton on 14 Apr. 1990; telephone interview with Martha Sonntag Bradley on 27 Oct. 1989; Caroline Dewegeli Daley interview; Sam S. Barlow interview; Lister's population was 586 in the 1986 Canadian census, according to my telephone interview on 17 April 1990 with Mr. McRae, manager of Population and Social Statistics, Ministry of Finance and Corporate Relations, Province of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. In my telephone interview on 18 April 1990 with a former member of the group in Lister, Aloha Boehmer says a couple of the Colorado City group's families live nearer Creston and a couple of families are in Cardston. She estimates a lower population for Lister and for the group there than reported by sources in the Canadian government and in Colorado City, whose higher estimates are used here. After arriving at the 7,600 total, I learned in a telephone interview with Ken Verdoia on 26 April 1990 that Colorado City's seminary program director Alvin Barlow estimates the group has "close to eight thousand total members."

[44] In my telephone interview on 28 Jan. 1990 with the attorney for the Hammon-Timpson group, Jeff Swinton said that about 20 percent of former Johnson group members from Arizona to Canada have joined the so-called "Second Ward" which has 150-200 male heads of household. Although most members of the Hammon-Timpson group live at Colorado City-Hildale, in 1986 the "Second Ward" also founded a small residential division of Centennial Park, less than a mile from Colorado City, during the centennial of the 1886 revelation. 

[45] Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy, 196-98, 207, 210, 215-16; Lyle O. Wright, "Origins and Development of the Church of the Firstborn of the Fullness of Times," M.S., Brigham Young University, 1963,61-62; Lynn L. Bishop and Steven L. Bishop, The Truth About John W. Woolley, Lorin C. Woolley and The Council of Friends (Draper, UT: By the Authors, 1972), 33-37; Solomon, In My Father's House, 12,27-29,47-48, 70-100,310. 

[46] My interview with Owen Allred on 29 July 1989; my interview with Roy Potter on 26 July 1989.

[47] The above perspective on the LeBarons comes from Verlan M. LeBaron, The Lebaron Story (Lubbock, TX: Keels & Co., 1981), esp. 122,134,170, and 179; also 4-5,20,29, 42, 60-61, 64, 71, 99, 105, 112, 115, 117-35. His book states the preference for calling the church over which Joel (and later Verlan) presided by the shortened title Church of the Firstborn. This essay follows that preference, even though there is possible confusion with an alternative Church of the Firstborn organized by their brother Ross Wesley LeBaron. Also see discussion of the claims of various sons of Alma Dayer LeBaron in these outsider studies: Wright, "Origins and Development of the Church of the Firstborn of the Fullness of Times," esp. 89-98, 254-56; Reimann, Plural Marriage, Limited, esp. 232-34; Bradlee and Van Atta, Prophet of Blood, 45-48,52,56,63-123; Melton, Encyclopedia of American Religions, 575; and Fred C. Collier, Independent Fundamentalists and Their Claims to the Fulness of the Priesthood: An Open Letter to All Independent Fundamentalists (Salt Lake City: Collier's Publishing Co., 1990), 4.

[48] Previous note, and Los Angeles Times, 18 June 1967, A-ll; Kahile Mehr, "The Trial of the French Mission," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 21 (Autumn 1988): 27-45; Bruce R. McConkie [an LDS general authority], How to Start a Cult or Cultism As Practiced By The So Called Church of the Firstborn of the Fullness of Times Analyzed, Explained, And Interpreted... (Salt Lake City: By the Author, ca. 1961); Hector J. Spencer, Why I Returned to The LDS Church (Colonia Dublan, Mex.: By the Author, ca. 1963); Henry W. Richards [member of the LDS church's "Special Affairs Committee," then chaired by Apostle Mark E. Petersen], A Reply to the "Church of the Firstborn of the Fullness of Times" (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1965). For arguments against the LeBarons by mainstream fundamentalists, see Harold Allred, The Scepter, The Church of the Firstborn, John The Baptist: A Defense of Truth, Peter's Authority (Fruitland, ID: By the Author, 1958); Francis M. Darter, Francis M. Darter versus Joel F. LeBaron (Salem, UT: By the Author, 1964). 

[49] LeBaron, LeBaron Story, 137-307; Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy, 214-17; Bradlee and Van Atta, Prophet of Blood, 135-350; my interview with Richard W. Forbes, Assistant Chief Investigator of the Salt Lake County Attorney's office, on 26 July 1989; Richard W. Forbes interview by Ken Verdoia on 7 Dec. 1989, copy in my possession; Solomon, In My Father's House, 88, 92-93, 150, 250; Rena Chynoweth [acquitted of Rulon Allred's murder, but now publicly admits it], Blood Covenant (Austin, TX: Eakin Press, 1990). 

[50] My interview with Richard W. Forbes; Forbes interview by Ken Verdoia.

[51] My telephone interview with Leslie Fagen; LeBaron, LeBaron Story, 228,250-54,293- 94,297,299. Also my telephone interview with Fred Collier on 7 Apr. 1990; Los Angeles Times, 13 May 1988, Pt. 1, pp. 1, 24. 

[52] LeBaron, LeBaron Story, v, 228,294,299, referred to families living in San Diego and Central America in the early 1980s. In a telephone interview on 7 April 1990, Fred Collier in Utah says he is presiding patriarch of a Church of the Firstborn that has less than one hundred total members in Utah, California, Oregon, and Washington. Although Collier's ordination came through Ross Wesley LeBaron, Ross has had a different organization in Utah which is described along with a Colorado splinter from Ervil LeBaron's church, in Los Angeles Times, 13 May 1988, Part 1,1, 24. 

[53] Harold Woolley Blackmore, Patriarchal Order of Family Government (Hurricane, UT: By the Author, 1974), 94. Owen Allred, presiding elder of the Apostolic United Brethren, expressed similar praise in my interview with him on 29 July 1989.

[54] Above information on the Kingstons comes from Blackmore, Patriarchal Order, 94- 95; Hilton, "Polygamy in Utah," 38-41; Wright, "Origins and Development of the Church of the Firstborn," 58-59; Bradlee and Van Atta, Prophet of Blood, 167; Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy, 212; Wall Street Journal, 12 Feb. 1985,1; interview with Richard W. Forbes. In the years since this publicity, the Kingstons have disposed of some of these businesses and acquired others. 

[55] My interviews with Ogden Kraut, Owen Allred, and Ann (this last one on 28 July 1989). 

[56] The following comes from "Jane Doe Kingston," information submitted in writing on 25 Apr. 1989, and my interview with "George Mason" on 26 Jan. 1990.

[57] Hilton, "Plural Marriage," 38; interview with Owen Allred.

[58] As indicated earlier, all the above data on the Kingston group comes from "Jane Doe Kingston” information submitted in writing on 25 Apr. 1989, and my interview with "George Mason." 

[59] My interview with Kraut. For brief discussion of fundamentalist groups of even small size, see Steven L. Shields, Divergent Paths of the Restoration, 4th ed. (Los Angeles: Restoration Research, 1990), and Melton, Encyclopedia of American Religions, 573-79. 

[60] My interview with Owen Allred; Owen Allred interview by Ken Verdoia on 18 Dec. 1989, copy in my possession; interview with Sam S. Barlow; LeBaron, The LeBaron Story, 123- 28,137-82,297-300. By contrast, in the LDS church there is an ample monthly living allowance provided to its lifetime general authorities and also to church officers in full-time service temporarily. This amounts to fewer than 500 salaried ecclesiastical officers at one time in a church of 10 million, compared with literally hundreds of thousands of unsalaried LDS church officers.

[61] Above information on independents comes from Bishop and Bishop, The Truth about John W. Woolley, Lorin C. Woolley and The Council of Friends, 11, 85; my interviews with Kraut, Potter, Albert E. Barlow (on 27 July 1989), Ann , and Barbara Owen Kelsch. 

[62] Los Angeles Times, 13 May 1988, Part I, 24, estimated that in the Los Angeles area alone there are 1,200 polygamists. This is a wildly inflated estimate, even though my interviews indicate that Southern California is home to some independent fundamentalists and some members of various groups. 

[63] Ernest Strack to D. Michael Quinn, 17 June 1989; Mary Hak Strack to D. Michael Quinn, 7 Apr. 1990.

[64] My interview with Alex Joseph on 29 Mar. 1990; Deseret News, 5 Sept. 1990. Melton, Encyclopedia of American Religions, 576, gives the organization date as 1978, but this essay follows the 1977 date given in Joseph's interview. For his earlier view of himself and his activities, see Alex Joseph, A Nickel's Worth: Channel 4 Television Interview with Polygamist Alex Joseph, aired May 22,1977 (Salt Lake City: Dennis R. Short, 1977). See also Solomon, In My Father's House, 236, where she discusses Alex Joseph under the name of Ronald Ellison. 

[65] Morris Jessop interview by Ken Verdoia on 20 Jan. 1990 (copy in my possession), and Louis J. Barlow, interview by Verdoia; my interview with Barbara Owen Kelsch; also my interview with Ann, and my interview with "Jane Doe Allred" (on 29 July 1989).

[66] My telephone interview with Ann on 27 Mar. 1990. 

[67] My interview with Owen Allred. 

[68] My interview with Kraut. 

[69] My interview with Roy Potter. 

[70] My interviews with Ann and Owen Allred.

[71] My interview with Sarah , age fifteen, on 16 Jan. 1990. 

[72] My interview with Jeremy Thompson, age seventeen, on 17 Jan. 1990.

[73] My interview with Damon Cook, age twenty, on 26 Jan. 1990.

[74] Martha Sonntag Bradley, "Changed Faces: The Official LDS Position on Polygamy, 1890-1990," Sunstone 14 (Feb. 1990): 32. See also "Monogamous Triumph," in Hardy, Solemn Covenant, 336-62. 

[75] My interview with Damon Cook. 

[76] My interview with Carla Foster on 16 Jan. 1990.

[77] Quinn, J. Reuben Clark, 183-85; Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy, 195-98; Driggs, "After the Manifesto," 381; my interviews with Albert E. Barlow, Kraut, Barbara Owen Kelsch, and Larry McCurdy (on 21 Jan. 1990); Solomon, In My Father's House, 12,97,244; Rhea Allred Kunz, Voices of Women Approbating Celestial or Plural Marriage, Vol. 2 (Draper, UT: Review and Preview Publishers, 1985), 482-87; Bradley, "Changed Faces: The Official LDS Position on Polygamy, 1890-1990," 29,30, 31. 

[78] My interview with "Jane Doe Allred." 

[79] My interview with Caroline Dewegeli Daley.

[80] My interview with Sam S. Barlow; my telephone interview with Ken Verdoia on 28 Mar. 1990; also Louis J. Barlow, Director of Colorado City Seminary program of the Fundamentalist Church, interview by Ken Verdoia; Driggs, "Fundamentalist Attitudes Toward the Church," 51-52. Information on the incorporation of the Fundamentalist church was obtained in my telephone interview with Ken Driggs, 16 July 1991. See n41. 

[81] Solomon, In My Father's House, 95; Dorothy Allred Solomon interview by Ken Verdoia on 6 Jan. 1990, copy in my possession; Mabel Allred, plural widow of Rulon C. Allred, interview by Katherine Lundell; my telephone interview with Ken Verdoia on 28 Mar. 1990. Rulon Allred's ambivalence of reverence and resentment is clear in the contrasting obituaries he wrote for LDS church president Heber J. Grant in Truth 11 (June 1945): 17, and (July 1945): 41. 

[82] My interview with Owen Allred. 

[83] My interview with Carla Foster. 

[84] For example, my interview with Jeremy Thompson. 

[85] Jesse B. Stone, "Jewish Influence on Mormon Church" (Salt Lake City, ca. 1940), by a former Mormon fundamentalist turned pro-Nazi.

[86] My interview with Owen Allred. 

[87] My interview with Kraut. 

[88] My interview with Ruth Foster on 16 Jan. 1990. 

[89] My interviews with Ann , Owen Allred, Jonathan D. Robinson (age sixteen, on 26 Jan. 1990), and James (age nineteen, on 30 Jan. 1990).

[90] My interview with Jeremy Thompson. 

[91] My interviews with Jeremy Thompson, Jonathan D. Robinson, and James.

[92] My interview with Damon Cook.

[93] My interview with Albert E. Barlow. 

[94] My interview with Kraut. 

[95] King, "The Mormon Underground Fights Back," 24-25; Van Wagoner, Mormon Po lygamy, 219-22; Royston Potter, An Offender for a Word: The Polygamy Case ofRoyston Potter vs. Murray City, et al. (Salt Lake City: Pioneer Press, 1986). 

[96] My interview with Roy Potter. 

[97] My interview with Owen Allred; also his interview in Los Angeles Times, 13 May 1988, Part 1,25.

[98] My telephone interview with Martha Sonntag Bradley on 17 Oct. 1989, concerning her fieldwork in Colorado City; also estimate that "70 percent of the adults in Colorado City and Hildale engage in the practice of plural marriage/' according to dissident Carl Fischer's deposition, 90, on 23 Aug. 1988, Fifth Judicial District Court for Washington County, Utah, in re Probate No. 3023, copy in my possession. 

[99] My interview with Caroline Dewegeli Daley. Contrary to his own desires, her father has been a monogamist in the Colorado City group since his plural wife left him nineteen years before our interview. As discussed below, the Priesthood Council arranges marriage.

[100] My interview with Jonathan D. Robinson. 

[101] My interview with Heather _______, age twenty-two, on 17 Jan. 1990.

[102] My interviews with Ruth Foster and Heather _______. 

[103] My interview with Jonathan D. Robinson. 

[104] My interviews with Heather ______, Jeremy Thompson, and Sarah ______.

[105] My interview with Sarah ___________.

[106] My interview with Heather __________. 

[107] My interview with Caroline Dewegeli Daley. 

[108] Campbell, "The Private Place of Plural Marriage," 57. 

[109] My interview with James __________. 

[110] My interviews with James _________ and Sam S. Barlow. 

[111] My interview with Caroline Dewegeli Daley. She left the Johnson group at age seventeen, to become a plural wife in the Allred group.

[112] My interview with James ________.

[113] My telephone interview with Martha Sonntag Bradley on 17 Oct. 1989, concerning her fieldwork in Colorado City, Arizona; also Bradley, "Women of Fundamentalism," 14-15.

[114] His KSUB talk shortly after 26 July 1953; for the negative assessments, see Bradley, "Women of Fundamentalism," 12-13; U.S. Senate, Committee of Judiciary to Study Juvenile Delinquency, Plural Marriage, 28 Apr.-2 May 1955, 84th Congress, 2d Session.

[115] My interview with Sam S. Barlow. 

[116] My interview with James ___________. 

[117] Bradley, "Women of Fundamentalism," 15.

[118] My interview with James _______.

[119] Bradley, "Women of Fundamentalism," 14; my interview with Caroline Dewegeli Daley. 

[120] My interview with Caroline Dewegeli Daley. About a year after she formally separated from him, he and his first wife were divorced, and he asked Caroline to remarry him as his legal wife. She did. 

[121] Bradley, "Women of Fundamentalism," 15. 

[122] My interview with Sam S. Barlow.

[123] My interview with Caroline Dewegeli Daley. 

[124] Ibid.; Bradley, "Women of Fundamentalism,” 14. 

[125] My interview with Caroline Dewegeli Daley. Campbell, "The Private Place of Plural Marriage," 56, also comments, without source citation, that "In Colorado City many girls marry at fourteen," and that unmarried females there are "old maids" at age twenty.

[126] Solomon, In My Father's House, 47, 79. Of the three polygamist families featured in Campbell "The Private Place of Plural Marriage," only one man had married teenage brides.

[127] My interview with Carla Foster. 

[128] My interview with Kraut. Campbell, "The Private Place of Plural Marriage," 38,39, gives examples of this alternate pattern of same-or-older-aged plural wives.

[129] Donna Hill, Joseph Smith: The First Mormon (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1977), 313, 355; Linda King Newell and Valeen Tippets Avery, Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984), 146-47. 

[130] Marriage and Divorce: 1987 (Salt Lake City: Bureau of Vital Records and Health Statistics, 1987), 10. 

[131] Michelle Parrish-Pixler interview by Ken Verdoia on 6 Dec. 1989, copy in my possession. 

[132] Rosalind McGee interview by Katherine Lundell and Ken Verdoia on 15 Jan. 1990, copy in my possession; also "Utah Children Files Amicus Brief Opposing Adoption of Six Children By Polygamist Couple" (Salt Lake City: Press Release by Utah Children, 31 May 1989). The specific instance is the Fischer family adoption case, In the Matter of Wayne Allen Thornton et at, Number 890053, Priority Number 7 (Utah Supreme Court). This family is featured in New York Times, 12 June 1989,10, and in Ladies' Home Journal, Feb. 1990,116ff.

[133] Short, Questions On Plural Marriage, 77. Compare with D. Gene Pace, "Wives of Nineteenth Century Mormon Bishops: A Quantitative Analysis/' Journal of the West 21 (Apr. 1982): 49-57. 

[134] My interview with Kraut. 

[135] Solomon, In My Father's House, 249. 

[136] Quoted in Campbell, "The Private Place of Plural Marriage," 58, but mistakenly identified there as a psychiatrist. Rytting presented his intensive study of the polygamous husband, wives, and children in a single household in his unpublished "Between Three Cultures: A Polygamous Marriage," paper at the meeting of the Mormon History Association at Omaha, Nebraska, May 1983, and in his unpublished "Persecuting and Prosecuting Polygamists: Perplexing Public Policies," paper at the meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex at Madison, Wisconsin, June 1986. 

[137] For example, my interview with Owen Allred, and Owen Allred interview by Ken Verdoia. 

[138] Short, Questions On Plural Marriage, 10,39.

[139] My interview with "Jane Doe Allred"; also Bradley, "Women of Fundamentalism," 22. 

[140] My interview with Potter and "Jane Doe Allred." Although traditional, the presence of the first wife has often been eliminated at the ceremony, especially when fear of arrests has made it necessary to reduce witnesses to polygamy. In the law polygamy is the ceremony, not the living arrangement. 

[141] My interview with Jeremy Thompson. 

[142] Solomon, In My Father's House, 45. 

[143] My interview with "Jane Doe Allred." 

[144] Mabel Allred interview by Katherine Lundell; Solomon, In My Father's House, 185.

[145] My interview with Carla Foster. 

[146] My interview with Barbara Owen Kelsch. One plural wife tells another researcher how she controls jealousy: "But when I felt most hateful I went into my room and closed the door." See Bradley, "Women of Fundamentalism," 20. 

[147] My interview with Ruth Foster. 

[148] My interview with Caroline Dewegeli Daley.

[149] My interview with Sam S. Barlow. For the nineteenth century, see Eugene E. Campbell and Bruce L. Campbell, "Divorce Among Mormon Polygamists: Extent and Explanations," Utah Historical Quarterly 46 (Winter 1978): 14-23. 

[150] My interview with Caroline Dewegeli Daley. 

[151] Morris Jessop interview by Ken Verdoia; Owen Allred interview by Ken Verdoia.

[152] Ogden Kraut interview by Ken Verdoia; my interview with Kraut.

[153] "LDS Rank High in Marriage, Low in Divorce, Study Says," Ensign 14 (July 1984): 79; Bureau of Economic and Business Research, Graduate School of Business, Statistical Abstract of Utah: 1990 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1990), 46; Thomas K. Martin, Tim B. Heaton, Stephen J. Bahr, eds., Utah In Demographic Perspective: Regional and National Contrasts (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1986), 126. 

[154] Joseph W. Musser and Hugh B. Brown family group sheets in Family History Library of the LDS church, Salt Lake City; Hugh B. Brown interview, 12-13 Nov. 1969, transcription, 24-25, in Edwin B. Firmage papers, Manuscripts Division, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah; Laura Tree Zitting, The Life of Charles Frederick Zitting: One of God's Noble Men (N.p., By the Author, 1988), 27; my interview with Barbara Owen Kelsch; Solomon, In My Father's House, 39. A published autobiography of a first wife's gradual disillusionment with fundamentalist polygamy and return to the LDS church is Melissa Merrill [pseud.], Polygamist Wife (Salt Lake City: Olympus Press, 1975), which was published by this devotional press as a warning to its LDS clientele. The narrative is true, however, and her husband was a prominent publisher in the Allred group. 

[155] My interview with Ruth Foster. 

[156] Bradley, "Women of Fundamentalism," 22-23, comments on this socialization of daughters in fundamentalist families. 

[157] My interviews with Jonathan D. Robinson and Caroline Dewegeli Daley.

[158] Compare the following discussion to Vicky Burgess-Olson, "Family Structure and Dynamics in Early Utah Mormon Families, 1847-1885," Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1975; Lawrence Foster, "Polygamy and the Frontier: Mormon Women in Early Utah," Utah Historical Quarterly 50 (Summer 1982): 268-89; Kahile Mehr, "Women's Response to Plural Marriage," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18 (Fall 1985): 84-98; Embry, Mormon Polygamous Families; and Douglas R. White, "Rethinking Polygyny: Co-Wives, Codes, and Cultural Systems," Current Anthropology 29 (Aug.-Oct. 1988): 529-72. 

[159] Rosalind McGee interview by Katherine Lundell and Ken Verdoia; also -"Utah Children Files Amicus Brief Opposing Adoption of Six Children By Polygamist Couple" (Salt Lake City: Press Release by Utah Children, 31 May 1989). 

[160] Michelle Parrish-Pixler interview by Ken Verdoia. 

[161] My interview with Caroline Dewegeli Daley. Bradley, "Women of Fundamentalism," 15, does not specifically address this question of actual living dynamics, but does show that subservience was the normative value presented in Mormon fundamentalist literature such as Truth 14 (Oct. 1948): 134. 

[162] Anonymous wife, quoted in Ken Verdoia, "A Matter of Principle," Utah Holiday 19 (May 1990): 21.

[163] My telephone interview with Caroline Dewegeli Daley on 9 Oct. 1990; my interviews with Ann _____, Heather _____, James ______, and Jonathan D. Robinson; my observations of a sacrament meeting of the Apostolic United Brethren on 21 Jan. 1990. 

[164] My interview with "Jane Doe Allred." This is echoed in Campbell, "The Private Place of Plural Marriage,” 58. 

[165] My interview with Ann ______. 

[166] June Jessop interview by Ken Verdoia on 20 Jan. 1990, copy in my possession.

[167] Maureen Barlow interview by Ken Verdoia.

[168] My interview with Jonathan D. Robinson. 

[169] My interviews with Ann ______, Caroline Dewegeli Daley, and "George Mason." 

[170] My interview with Carla Foster. 

[171] My interview with Caroline Dewegeli Daley. This seems to be a more detailed explanation of the "master bedroom wife" system practiced by one polygamist and rejected by another in Campbell, "The Private Place of Plural Marriage," 36, 38. 

[172] My interviews with Ann , Carla Foster, Heather , Jonathan D. Robinson, Jeremy Thompson, Owen Allred, and Barbara Owen Kelsch; Solomon, In My Father's House, 67. 

[173] My interview with Caroline Dewegeli Daley.

[174] King, "The Mormon Underground," 30; also her similar statements in New York Times, 9 Apr. 1991, A-22. 

[175] My interview with Barbara Owen Kelsch. 

[176] Solomon, In My Father's House, 46. 

[177] Bradley, "Women of Fundamentalism," 21. 

[178] My interview with Carla Foster. 

[179] My interview with Ann _______.

[180] My interview with Barbara Owen Kelsch. 

[181] My interview with Ann _______. 

[182] My interview with "George Mason." 

[183] My telephone interview with Martha Sonntag Bradley on 17 Oct. 1989; my telephone interview with Ken Verdoia on 28 Mar. 1990. 

[184] My interview with Carla Foster. 

[185] My interview with Owen Allred. 

[186] King, "The Mormon Underground Fights Back," 26. For the diversity of employment by nineteenth-century Mormon wives, see Michael Vinson, "From Housework to Office Clerk: Utah's Working Women, 1870-1900," Utah Historical Quarterly 53 (Fall 1985): 326-35.

[187] My interview with Caroline Dewegeli Daley; Solomon, In My Father's House, 109, 135,155; Verdoia, "A Matter of Principle," 21. 

[188] My interview with Barbara Owen Kelsch. 

[189] My interviews with Barbara Owen Kelsch and Caroline Dewegeli Daley.

[190] My interviews with Jeremy Thompson, Ruth Foster, also Sarah ________, Heather ________, Jonathan D. Robinson; and James _______. Compare with Solomon, In My Father's House. 

[191] Anonymous plural wife, quoted in Verdoia, "A Matter of Principle," 21. This did not appear in the television documentary of same title, broadcast nationally by PBS on 29 Nov. 1990. 

[192] My interview with Caroline Dewegeli Daley; Solomon, In My Father's House, 62,98, 190,237,252.

[193] My interview with Ruth Foster. 

[194] My interview with Ann ______.

[195] My interview with Carla Foster. 

[196] David Fleischer and David M. Freedman, Death of an American: The Killing of John Singer (New York: Continuum, 1983).

[197] My interview with Kraut. 

[198] My interview with Ruth Foster, also with Sarah _______.

[199] My interviews with Caroline Dewegeli Daley and Sam S. Barlow.

[200] My telephone interviews with Martha Sonntag Bradley on 17 Oct. 1989, and Ken Verdoia on 28 Mar. 1990; my interview with Sam S. Barlow. 

[201] LeBaron, LeBaron Story, 169-70, 254.

[202] My telephone interviews with Martha Sonntag Bradley on 17 Oct. 1989, and Ken Verdoia on 28 Mar. 1990; my interview with Sam S. Barlow. 

[203] Salt Lake Tribune, 19 Mar. 1986, Sect. NV, 1; Campbell, "Private Place of Plural Marriage," 44; my interview with Owen Allred on 29 July 1989; Owen Allred interview by Ken Verdoia; my interview with Heather _________. 

[204] My interview with Barbara Owen Kelsch.

[205] My interviews with Roy Potter, Albert E. Barlow, Ann _________, Owen Allred, Barbara Owen Kelsch; "Jane Doe Kingston," information submitted in writing on 25 Apr. 1989.

[206] My interview with Jeremy Thompson; Utah children used a doggerel taunt that was both racially and religiously insulting in Solomon, In My Father's House, 15. Although I did not ask them how they spelled the nickname, all the teenagers in this study seemed to pronounce it as given here, rather than the "plyggie" pronunciation in Solomon's book and in the film Child Bride of Short Creek. 

[207] My interview with Kraut.

[208] My interview with Damon Cook. 

[209] Even where teenagers wanted to be known by their real names in these interviews, I have not identified them here and in other sections of this essay where I felt their disclosures were too personal. 

[210] Verdoia, "A Matter of Principle," 22; also specific examples in Campbell, "The Private Place of Plural Marriage," 38-39. 

[211] Solomon, In My Father's House, 27. 

[212] My interview with Caroline Dewegeli Daley. 

[213] My telephone interview with Ken Verdoia on 28 Mar. 1990.

[214] My interview with Allred. 

[215] My interview with Caroline Dewegeli Daley; Solomon, In My Father's House, 32.

[216] My interviews with Caroline Dewegeli Daley and James ________.

[217] My interview with Larry McCurdy. 

[218] My interview with Owen Allred; also Solomon, In My Father's House, 236.

[219] Solomon, In My Father's House; my interview with "Jane Doe Allred"; Owen Allred interview by Ken Verdoia; Morris Jessop interview by Ken Verdoia. 

[220] My interview with Kraut. 

[221] My interview with Brad on 30 Jan. 1990. 

[222] Louis J. Barlow talk on KSUB Radio within a few days of the Short Creek raid on 26 July 1953. 

[223] Dan Barlow interview by Ken Verdoia; also similar observation in my interview with Sam S. Barlow. 

[224] My interview with Caroline Dewegeli Daley; my telephone interview with Martha Sonntag Bradley on 17 Oct. 1989.

[225] My telephone interview with "John Doe Johnson" on 28 Jan. 1990; my interview with Sam S. Barlow. Also dissident Carl Fischer's deposition, 59-60,105, on 23 Aug. 1988 in the Fifth Judicial District Court for Washington County, Utah, in re Probate No. 3023. 

[226] "Jane Doe Kingston," information submitted in writing on 25 Apr. 1989.

[227] My interviews with Owen Allred, Albert E. Barlow, and Barbara Owen Kelsch.

[228] Bradley, Kidnapped From That Land. 

[229] Kraut, Fundamentalist Mormon, 22; Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy, 201-207.

[230] My interview with "George Mason." Fundamentalists, however, have an exaggerated perception of the judicial acceptance of "deviant practices," which have been decriminalized by several states but not by the U.S. Supreme Court. 

[231] My interview with Richard W. Forbes. 

[232] Paul Van Dam interview by Ken Verdoia, and quoted in Verdoia, "A Matter of Principle," 23; also quoted in New York Times, 9 Apr. 1991, A-22.

[233] David Yocum interview by Ken Verdoia; my interview with Forbes.

[234] Los Angeles Times, 13 May 1988, Part 1,24. 

[235] My interview with Owen Allred; also Robert G. Dyer, "The Evolution of Social and Judicial Attitudes Toward Polygamy," Utah State Bar Journal 5 (Spring 1977): 35-45.

[236] "The Return of the Patriarch," Time, 1 Feb. 1988, 21; Jean Bucher, "Inside Addam Swapp," Utah Holiday 18 (Oct. 1988): 31-40,47; Ogden Kraut, "The Singer/Swapp Siege: Revelation or Retaliation?" Sunstone 12 (Nov. 1988): 10-17; an account of the Singer-Swapp stand off will appear in the forthcoming second edition of Fleischer and Freedman's Death of an American. 

[237] My interview with Kraut.

[238] Salt Lake Tribune, 9 Dec. 1988, A-22. See also Salt Lake Tribune, 11 June 1989, A-26.

[239] My interview with Richard W. Forbes; James L. Clayton, "The Supreme Court, Polygamy, and the Enforcement of Morals in Nineteenth Century America: An Analysis of Reynolds v. United States," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 12 (Winter 1979): 46-61.

[240] Laurence H. Tribe, American Constitutional Law (Mineola, NY: Foundation Press, 1978), 853-54; G. Keith Nedrow, "Polygamy and the Right to Marry: New Life for an Old Lifestyle," Memphis State University Law Review 2 (Spring 1981): 203-49; Penelope W. Salzman, "Potter v. Murray City: Another Interpretation of Polygamy and the First Amendment," Utah Law Review (1986): 345-71; Ken Driggs, "Lorenzo Snow's Appellate Court Victory," Utah Historical Quarterly 58 (Winter 1990): 93. 

[241] Decision of Judge J. D. Howe in Samuel S. Barlow v. John A. Blackburn et al., on 6 June 1988, Superior Court of Arizona, Maricopa County; copy in my possession.

[242] Wisconsin v. Yoder, 406 U.S. 205,92 S. Ct. 1526,32 L. Ed. 2d 15 (1972); Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy, 221-22; Bradlee and Van Atta, Prophet of Blood, 34; New York Times, 18 Apr. 1990, A-10.

[243] In the Matter of the Adoption of W.A.T., V.E.T., J.T.T., J.S.T., J.L.T., and B.D.T., Minors, 808 P.2d 1083 (Utah 1991): 1085; also New York Times, 29 Mar. 1991; Ken Driggs, "Utah Supreme Court Decides Polygamist Adoption Case," Sunstone 15 (Sept. 1991): 67-68; T. R. Reid, "The Adoption Case That Shook Utah," Washington Post (15 Mar. 1989): B-l; Chris Jorgensen, "Could Adoption Case Affect Polygamy's Future?" Salt Lake Tribune, 16 Apr. 1989, B-l; "Custody Battle in Utah's Top Court Shines Rare Spotlight on Polygamy," New York Times, 12 June 1989,10; "Polygamy Battle: Man Fights Utah over 3rd Wife's Children," Milwaukee Journal, 12 June 1989, A-5; Ladies' Home Journal, Feb 1990,116ff.

[244] Discussion by members of LDS First Presidency on 19 Sept. 1962, LDS archives, transcript in my possession; my telephone interview on 4 Apr. 1990 with Mark and Elma Bradshaw, a married couple who were LDS missionaries in Nigeria in 1980-81 and again from 1988 to April 1989. Mrs. Bradshaw knew of two Nigerian polygamists who received LDS baptism from another missionary shortly after they divorced their wives in this traditional manner, but her husband Mark said he would never baptize a man in such circumstances unless the divorce had occurred long before the baptism request. He could not countenance a man divorcing wives for the purpose of becoming a Mormon, but that ethical scruple is not shared by all LDS leaders or their representatives in Africa. On the other hand, in the mid-1970s a Christian missionary in Africa wrote that "very few people today advocate a break up of a polygamous household and even conservative pastors in Africa prefer to postpone baptism rather than do such a thing." See Aylward Shorter, "Review," Journal of Religion in Africa 8 (1976): 150. 

[245] Eugene Hillman, Polygamy Reconsidered: African Plural Marriage and the Christian Churches (Mary Knoll, NY: Orbis, 1975), 34,94, 96; also G. E. Currens, "A Policy of Baptizing Polygamists Evaluated," Africa Theological Journal 2 (Feb. 1969): 71-83; Alan Tippett, "Polyg amy as a Missionary Problem: The Anthropological Issues," Church Growth Bulletin 5 (Mar. 1969): 60-63; Edward G. Neuing, "The Baptism of Polygamous Families: Theory and Practice in an East African Church," Journal of Religion in Africa 2 (1970): 130-41; E. Dale LeBaron, "Af rica: The Church In," in Daniel H. Ludlow, ed., Encyclopedia of Mormonism: The History, Scripture, Doctrine, and Procedure of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1992), 1:23. 

[246] Deseret News 1991-1992 Church Almanac, 153. In the Doctrine and Covenants the Manifesto is included at the back of the volume. It is Document 1 in recent editions.

[247] Deseret News 1991-1992 Church Almanac, 119,145,328-29. Compare to LDS population for Ghana, Nigeria, and Zaire in Deseret News 1989-1990 Church Almanac (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1988), 86. Le Baron, "Africa," 23. Excluding South Africa, where the vast majority of Mormons is white, there were 31,900 black Mormons in Sub-Saharan Africa as of January 1991. In 19931 estimated converts. As a recent update, the total LDS church population in sub-Sahara Africa was 108,000, as of "Missionaries in Africa Grow As They Seek New Converts," Salt Lake Tribune, 4 Apr. 1998, C-2. 

[248] Transcript of First Presidency meeting, 19 Sept. 1962; Joseph W. Musser diary, 28 Mar. 1935; Truth 10 (Nov. 1944): 144. 

[249] Richards described the meeting and made that statement to Paul and Margaret Toscano, according to their letter to me, 16 Sept. 1990.

[250] This requires a comment about the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, headquartered in Independence, Missouri, with a world population of 250,000. Since 1860 the RLDS church officially denied that the founding prophet Joseph Smith had anything to do with polygamy, and the RLDS church defined polygamy as a disgusting aberration from Christian values. However, because of proselytizing among polygamist Afri cans, in 1972 the RLDS Book of Doctrine and Covenants, Sec. 150:10, stated "Monogamy is the basic principle on which Christian married life is built. Yet, as I have said before, there are also those who are not of this fold to whom the saving grace of the gospel must go. When this is done, the church must be willing to bear the burden of their sin, nurturing them in the faith, accepting that degree of repentance which it is possible for them to achieve..." (emphasis added). Non-RLDS readers, including me, understood the emphasized words to mean that this revelation allowed the RLDS church to baptize African polygamists without requiring an end to their existing plural marriages. However, the RLDS church historian writes that monogamy was ultimately required of these polygamist converts: "The RLDS church baptized polygamists in India and Africa during the 1960s, and then took measures to help these families to make the necessary social and economic adjustments to extricate themselves from polygamous arrangements. This was achieved during the 1970s, and the RLDS church has not baptized polygamists since that time" (Richard P. Howard to D. Michael Quinn, 19 Dec. 1990).

[251] My interview with "Jane Doe Allred."

[252] James B. Allen and Glen M. Leonard, The Story of the Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1976), 595-622; Robert Gottlieb and Peter Wiley, America's Saints: The Rise of Mormon Power (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1984), 15, 59-62, 81-82; Jan Shipps, "Making Saints in the Early Days and the Latter Days," paper given in a plenary session of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Salt Lake City, 27 Oct. 1989, in Marie Cornwall, Tim B. Heaton, and Lawrence A. Young, eds., Contemporary Mormonism: Social Science Perspectives (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 77-80.

[253] Since the initial publication of this essay, a major study appeared in Irwin Altaian and Joseph Ginat, Polygamous Families in Contemporary Society (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

[post_title] => Plural Marriage and Mormon Fundamentalism [post_excerpt] => Dialogue 31.2 (Summer 1998): 1–68
Quinn shares what Mormon Fundamentalists believe. some stereotypes about them, and identfies the different groups. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => plural-marriage-and-mormon-fundamentalism [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-03-16 21:56:24 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-03-16 21:56:24 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.dialoguejournal.com/?post_type=dj_articles&p=11165 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => dj_articles [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) 1

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 11702 [post_author] => 2532 [post_date] => 2018-04-10 15:09:35 [post_date_gmt] => 2018-04-10 15:09:35 [post_content] =>

Polygamy, marriage to more than one spouse at a time, cannot be seen in the fossil record of our primitive ancestor, Homo erectus, and no one knows if Lucy of the African Rift, reputed to be the mother of us all, was a plural mate. A recent study of the evolution of human sexuality concludes, however, that while modern man is often culturally obliged to be monogamous, he may be biologically predisposed to polygamy.[1] Therefore it should not surprise us that polygamy has been practiced in many parts of the world. Plural marriage has been found in India, Nepal, China, the Middle East, Africa, Indonesia, Australia, in early Germanic tribes, among certain native Indian societies of the Americas and Eskimos of the Arctic, and, notably, the Mormons of North America.[2]

There were multiple wives and concubines in ancient Mesopotamia and among Old Testament leaders of the early Hebrew peoples. Abraham, David, and Solomon had many wives, but Jewish law required monogamy by the eleventh century C.E. Polygamy was also found in pre-Islamic Arabic cultures of the Middle East, Asia, and North Africa. Later, the Koran limited Moslem husbands to a maximum of four wives. Ancient Roman law, which recognized marriage by solemn ceremony, by purchase, and by mutual consent or extended cohabitation, eventually excluded polygamy. The marriage law of most western nations is the product of Roman Catholic canon law, which recognizes marriage as a lifelong monogamous union between a woman and a man by consent and consummation.[3] Polygamy was prohibited by the Justinian Code in the sixth century C.E., is generally forbidden in Europe and the Americas, and was strictly against Illinois law when the Mormons secretly introduced the practice in 1841.[4]

Polygamy Before Joseph Smith 

Mormons were not the first in America to think of plural marriage. In fact, for three centuries before Joseph Smith introduced Mormon "celestial marriage," polygamy was a popular subject of public debate in Europe and America. In 1531 Martin Luther advised England's Henry VIII to "take another queen in accordance with the examples of the patriarchs of old who had two wives at the same time"; eight years later Luther, arguing that polygamy was sanctioned by Mosaic Law and was not banned by the New Testament, gave Prince Philip of Hesse a dispensation to take a second wife.[5] Since the Protestant Reformation had replaced the authority of the Pope with a "literally inspired" Bible, Old Testament polygamy became a persuasive argument for marital innovation in the sixteenth century. 

In 1534 John Bockelson of Leyden, Holland, led the Anabaptists in Münster, Germany, in eleven months of polygamy as they awaited the end of the world. This town of 15,000 had been "purified" of all infidels— Catholics and Lutherans—and was expected to become the New Jerusalem. Revered as prophet of the Lord, Bockelson issued twelve articles revealed to him by God, including sanction for a man to take as many women to wife as he wanted. Bockelson was proclaimed king and took sixteen wives who were considered "queens." Domestic arrangements were decided by a stick placed at the dinner table in front of the queen who had been chosen to spend the night with the king. All unmarried females who had reached the marriage age of twelve were pressured to take a husband of at least fourteen years of age, but most women strongly supported the prophet[6]: 

Some of the women and girls stayed on after he had preached, danced about and cried in a loud voice, Father, Father, Father, give! give! give! then they leapt up, raised their hands to the sky and clapped. Their hair undone, hung round their neck or down their back. They stared at [the] sun and imagined that God the Father was sitting up there in his glory. Then they danced like maenads in pairs through the streets and gazed at the sun till they were exhausted, white and deadly pale. 

Anabaptist wives found other wives for their husbands, as Sarah had done for Abraham, and men often married their wives' sisters. The man with the most wives was considered the best Christian. 

Theologians justified polygamy by appealing to its practice among Hebrew patriarchs, such as Abraham, Isaac, and David, noting that it was not forbidden in the New Testament nor by church fathers Augustine and Jerome. Social rationale linked the desirability of children to provide a worshipful population and a large labor force, the needs of men, expected displacement of prostitution, and fulfillment of man's natural patriarchal domination of women. Münster theologians also asserted that semen was precious and should not be wasted, as it would be if it did not provide offspring, for example, if a woman was menstruating, pregnant, or infertile. Assuming that "men cannot contain themselves," in order to avoid wasting semen, "hence they can marry several women."[7]

Anabaptist polygamy met with difficulty. Forced cohabitation gave rise to "constant dissension," and there was "fierce resentment" where two or three women shared a husband. Church authorities put "refractory wives" in prison and executed some who protested their husbands' taking other wives. One woman was summoned to a tribunal and sentenced to death after she completed her pregnancy. Another was pardoned when she begged her husband's forgiveness. In 1535 the town was attacked and John of Leyden was interrogated and killed; Münster has remained Catholic ever since.[8]

Writers such as Milton, Boswell, Newton, Rousseau, Spinoza, Napoleon, and the Lutheran scholar John Leyser all advocated polygamy. Schopenhauer, who considered woman to be "Nature's knockout blow," endorsed Mormon plural marriage since Nature's aim was to increase the species.[9]

In 1780 in England, Rev. Martin Madan, the disciple of John Wesley who co-wrote "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," advocated the restoration of biblical polygamy, which would "return discipline to the sexual informality of the age, correct a declining population, eliminate abortion, save innumerable women from ruin, and restore men to their rightful, patriarchal role."[10] During the years following 1817 American Utopian Jacob Cochran taught a "spiritual matrimony" to communities in Maine and New Hampshire; it was "sanctioned by a ceremony of his own, within which any man or woman, already married or unmarried, might enter into choosing at pleasure a spiritual wife or spiritual husband." Cochran reportedly had a "regular harem, consisting of several unmarried females."[11] Starting in the 1830s, John Humphrey Noyes and his Perfectionists practiced another form of group marriage. Settling in Oneida, New York, in 1847, more than 500 men and women shared land, clothes, sex partners, and children. The communal spirit waned when Noyes ruled that he had first claim on the women, and in 1879 the men revolted, accusing Noyes of taking young women against their will. By 1881 the Oneida community was disbanded. 

In 1837, when Mormon headquarters was located in Kirtland, Ohio, a Cleveland newspaper fifteen miles away printed a letter which argued for polygamy as a remedy for the "distress" of "so many old maids." If a man first obtained "the consent of his wife, or wives," the writer asked, "what evil would arise" from allowing him "as many more wives as he may judge proper?" It would be "more desirable to be the second or even third wife of a generous man, than to remain an old maid, neglected and laughed at . . . and it would eminently lessen prostitution in one sex and ranging in the other." Furthermore, it would "not be more expensive for a man to have two wives, than to have one wife, and hire a seamstress."[12]

That year the Mormon church responded to the idea of plural marriage with a resolution denying fellowship to any member guilty of polygamy, and it even disciplined one Solomon Freeman for "living with another woman."[13] Latter-day Saints publicly denied rumors of polygamy until 1852, a decade after the first plural marriages were officially recorded in Nauvoo, Illinois. 

Importance of Nauvoo Polygamy 

Utah polygamy has received considerable attention, but any definitive study of Mormon plural marriage must begin with its Nauvoo roots. This essay explores the extent and character of Nauvoo polygamy, from the first documented plural marriage on April 5,1841, to the ceremonies concluded in 1846, the year of westward migration.[14]

Although Joseph Smith met his death at the hands of outsiders, it was internal dissent, precipitated by polygamy, which brought him to the Carthage jail in June 1844. Rumors about Smith's extramarital relationships with women had circulated for a decade before his 1841 plural marriage and the revelation sanctioning polygamy, recorded in 1843. The story repeated most often involved Fanny Alger, a young woman whom Smith employed in Kirtland, Ohio, in 1835 to help his wife Emma with house work. Several Mormon leaders claim that Fanny Alger was Smith's first plural wife.[15] Some suggest that Smith advocated polygamy as early as 1831, when he presented a revelation directing several married elders to take native American women as wives "that their posterity may become white, delightsome and just."[16] Nevertheless, evidence from Smith and his secretary, William Clayton, suggests that the prophet claimed to receive a separate injunction to practice polygamy in 1843.[17] Although Mormon plural marriage was intended to remain a closely guarded secret, word that Joseph Smith and possibly other Mormons were practicing polygamy began to spread across towns and villages of western Illinois in the early 1840s. 

The secret became a scandal in May 1844 when William Law, a counselor to Joseph Smith who equated polygamy in the restored church with concubinage, filed suit against Smith in the circuit court of Hancock County, Illinois. Law charged that Smith was living "in an open state of adultery" with Maria Lawrence, a teenaged orphan who was living in the Smith household. In fact, Smith had secretly married both Maria and her sister Sarah by the fall of 1843 and was serving as executor of their $8,000 estate. Law apparently hoped that disclosing Smith's relationship with the young girls might lead him to abandon polygamy, but Smith immediately excommunicated Law, had himself appointed the girls' legal guardian, and rejected the charge in front of a church congregation, denying that he had more than one wife: 

Another indictment has been got up against me.. . I had not been married scarcely five minutes, and made one proclamation of the Gospel, before it was reported that I had seven wives . . . This new holy prophet [William Law] has gone to Carthage [county courthouse] and swore that I had told him that I was guilty of adultery... What a thing it is for a man to be accused of committing adultery, and having seven wives, when I can only find one.[18]

The following month Law and other Mormon dissidents published the inaugural issue of the Nauvoo Expositor to reveal Smith's "mormon seraglio, or Nauvoo harem; and his unparalled and unheard of attempts at seduction."[19] Declaring the Expositor a public nuisance, the Nauvoo City Council, led by Mayor Joseph Smith, ordered all copies of the paper to be burned and its printing press destroyed. These actions created an uproar through out the state, where Smith's growing political power—as well as his alleged immorality—were both feared and resented. When Governor Thomas Ford ordered Smith arrested, Joseph and his brother Hyrum were jailed at Carthage. On June 27, a large mob overpowered the guards and shot the brothers to death. 

Inception of Plural Marriage 

How did the Mormon community in Nauvoo arrive at this state of affairs? On July 12,1843, Joseph Smith dictated a ten-page revelation to his private clerk, William Clayton, which indicated that he meant to "restore" the ceremonies and cultural patterns of ancient Israel. The revelation on plural marriage, or "celestial marriage" as it was called, claimed to restore the practice of "Moses, Abraham, David and Solomon having many wives and concubines ... a new and everlasting covenant" in which "if any man espouse a virgin... [or] ten virgins ... he cannot commit adultery, for they belong to him" (D&C 132:4, 61, 62). 

A few months earlier, Clayton recalled, Smith "also informed me that he had other wives living besides his first wife Emma, and in particular gave me to understand that Eliza R. Snow, Louisa Be[a]man, Desdemona W. Fullmer and others were his lawful wives in the sight of heaven."[20] In fact, by the time of the 1843 revelation Smith had married at least twelve women besides his legal wife Emma, and a dozen of his most trusted followers had also taken plural wives. 

About forty years later, assistant church historian Andrew Jenson collected statements from Smith's former wives, who willingly confirmed that they had "consented to become the Prophet's wife" and that he "associated with them as wives within the meaning of all that word implies."[21] On behalf of Jenson, and working with plural wife Eliza R. Snow, journalist Emmeline B. Wells wrote in 1886 to ask Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner, 

to prepare a careful sketch of your life for publication in the Historical Record along with others of the wives of Joseph Smith, the prophet. Begin with your name and birthplace also date, the names of your parents and their origin whether American born etc. and from the North or the South then your conversion to the true Gospel etc. But positively your marriage ceremony to Joseph on what day and by whom performed, and who were the witnesses if any. This is the principal point such other matter in brief as may seem to you suitable. Perhaps you had better direct it to me, though it will all be submitted to someone in authority before being published. 

Aunt Eliza asked me to write you and ask you to prepare this and sent her love to you. Helen who sends love, she has the same to do, also Lucy Walker Kimball. Do you know the particulars about Sister Marinda Hyde's being sealed to Joseph & on what day or in what year, or who officiated in the ceremony?[22]

Jenson published these statements in 1887, primarily in an attempt to convince Smith's family, who remained in the Midwest after his death, that their progenitor had in fact practiced polygamy.[23]

Just when Mormon polygamy began is conjectural, but it had clearly commenced by April 5, 1841, with Smith's first officially acknowledged plural marriage. In a ceremony beside the Mississippi River, he married twenty-six-year-old Louisa Beaman disguised in a man's hat and coat. The ceremony was performed by her brother-in-law, using words dictated by the prophet.[24] At that time Smith was thirty-five and had been married fourteen years to thirty-six-year-old Emma Hale Smith. They had five living children. 

During the two-and-one-half years from his first official plural marriage in April 1841 to his last known marriage in November 1843, Smith took as many as forty-two wives, one or two at a time.[25] On average, this pace produced 1.5 new wives each month. By the end of 1843, Emma Smith's biographers observed, most close friends of Smith's legal wife had either married her husband or had given their daughters to him.[26] Reportedly, some of the younger women were discreetly instructed in polygamy by older women who had been inducted previously into the secret order.[27]

Smith courted these plural wives with an offer of eternal marriage too wonderful to refuse. According to the doctrine of celestial marriage, a woman who was "sealed" (married) to a man in a special religious ceremony was united to him and their children, not only for "time"—until death—but for eternity where they eventually could become gods. Implicit in the revelation was the requirement that a man and woman must accept the "principle" of taking plural wives—known as the law of Abraham—in order to gain the highest afterlife, the celestial kingdom. Just as Abraham, David, Solomon and other Old Testament patriarchs took "many wives and concubines," the patriarchs and elders of the restored church could attain "crowns of eternal lives in the eternal worlds" and have descendants as "innumerable as the stars." A woman's salvation thus depended on entering into a polygamous relationship with a man of high status in the church, because such men were thought to have made the greatest progress towards godhood on earth. 

A charismatic, handsome man, Joseph Smith apparently had little trouble persuading young women that he was their way to eternal realms of glory. Sixteen-year-old Lucy Walker, for example, had been adopted by the Smiths and worked as a maid in the Smith home. The prophet told Walker that God had commanded him to take her as a wife. She was angry and insulted, but she feared Smith's warning that if she rejected the "principle" of plural marriage, "the gate will be closed forever against you." On May 1,1843, while Emma was shopping for supplies in St. Louis, Lucy married Joseph Smith.[28]

For young women living in the Smith home, the prophet's advances were hard to resist. After the death of their father, Emily and Eliza Partridge came to live with Joseph and Emma Smith to care for their son, Don Carlos. Each of the sisters married the prophet, at first without Emma's knowledge, and later in another ceremony to which Emma consented. Emily wrote in her diary, "From that very hour Emma was our bitter enemy."[29]

Marriage to Spouses of Living Husbands 

Beginning in 1841, Joseph Smith took as plural wives several married women, as if exercising a variant of the feudal droit du seigneur: a king's right to the brides in his domain. This option was presented to the married woman as a favor to her. A woman who wanted higher status in the celestial kingdom could choose to leave a husband with lower status in the church, even if she had been sealed to him, and become sealed to a man higher in authority. 

On October 27,1841, Smith was married for eternity to Zina D. Huntington, Henry B. Jacobs's wife; Jacobs, a devout church member, consented to this "celestial marriage" even though Zina was six months pregnant with Jacobs's child. On December 11, 1841, the prophet married Zina's sister, Prescindia Huntington, who had been married to Norman Buell for fourteen years and remained married to Buell until 1846.[30] Prescindia then left Buell and married Heber C. Kimball "for time," that is, until the end of her life. In the afterlife, "for eternity," she would revert to Joseph Smith. 

Smith married Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner in February 1842, when she was already married and eight months pregnant. "As for Sister [Elizabeth] Whitney," she wrote, "it was at her house that the Prophet Joseph first told me about his great vision concerning me." Mary was "sealed to Joseph Smith the Prophet by Brigham Young in a room over the old red brick store in Nauvoo."[31] Apparently, Smith had planned to marry her long before her marriage to Adam Lightner; Mary was just thirteen years old when she first met the prophet in 1831 in Kirtland, Ohio. As she recalled, "the Savior appeared and commanded him to seal me up to everlasting life, gave me to Joseph to be with him in his kingdom ... Joseph said I was his before I came here and he said all the Devils in Hell should never get me from him."[32] After her celestial marriage to Joseph, Mary lived with Adam Lightner until his death in Utah and had eight children by him. In April 1842, two months after the Lightner ceremony, Nancy Marinda Johnson married Joseph Smith while her husband, Orson Hyde, was on a mission to Jerusalem. After Hyde returned, his wife went back to live with him.[33]

The question of how many children came from Smith's plural marriages has never been answered decisively. Josephine L. Fisher wrote that her mother, Sylvia Sessions, told her "that [Josephine] was the daughter of the Prophet Joseph Smith."[34] Prescindia Huntington Buell once said that "she did not know whether Mr. Buel or the Prophet was the father of her son [Oliver]."[35] Researchers have tentatively identified eight children that Joseph Smith may have had by his plural wives.[36] Emily Partridge observed: "Spiritual wives, as we were then termed, were not very numerous in those days and a spiritual baby was a rarity indeed."[37]

An Invitation from the Prophet To Marry Plural Wives 

Although he insisted that the practice of polygamy remain secret, Joseph Smith introduced his teaching about plural wives to thirty families of his close followers among the 15,000 Mormons living in and around Nauvoo.[38] When he denied from the pulpit having plural wives, at least 100 other polygamous adults sitting in the congregation knew about the secret doctrine. 

How did Smith convert his followers to the practice of plural marriage? One of the clearest records of how Smith persuaded married men to take additional wives comes from the pen of William Clayton. An ardent believer in Smith and in the heavenly mandate for polygamy, Clayton had been baptized in Victorian England in 1837 during the first foreign Mormon mission; he himself served on a mission to Manchester and migrated to Nauvoo in 1840. He seems to have been unaware of the earliest secret marriages—those dating from 1841 escaped mention in the meticulous diary he began in 1840. 

By the time Clayton first mentions plural marriage in early 1843, he had been married to his legal wife Ruth for six years and had three children. Smith called at his home and invited Clayton for a walk, during which he said he had learned of a sister back in England to whom Clayton was "very much attached." Clayton acknowledged the friendship, but "nothing further than an attachment such as a brother and sister in the Church might rightfully entertain for each other." The prophet then suggested, "Why don't you send for her?" Clayton replied, "In the first place, I have no authority to send for her, and if I had, I have not the means to pay expenses." Smith answered, "I give you authority to send for her, and I will furnish you with means," which, according to Clayton, he did. Noting that this day in early 1843 was the first time the prophet had talked with him "on the subject of plural marriage," Clayton recalled the prophet's further sanction: "It is your privilege to have all the wives you want."[39]

Following Smith's admonition, Clayton fully embraced plural marriage. Later in Utah he wrote: "I support a family of near forty persons on a salary of $3,600 per annum and we live well, are well clothed and very comfortably situated . . . I have six wives whom I support in comfort and happiness and am not afraid of another one. I have three children born to me during the year, and I don't fear a dozen more."[40] Clayton eventually married a total of ten women who bore him forty-seven children. 

There were other polygamous husbands in Nauvoo besides the prophet and his private clerk. Smith urged that plural marriage was essential for the church, warning that "the church could not go on until that principal [sic] was established."[41] Between April 5,1841, and January 17, 1842, he took his first four officially recorded plural wives: Louisa Beaman, Zina D. Huntington, Prescindia L. Huntington, and Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner. Theodore Turley, Brigham Young, Jonathan Holmes, Reynolds Cahoon, and Heber C. Kimball each took one plural wife in 1842. Smith married fourteen more women that year, making a total of twenty-three plural wives he and his associates married by the end of 1842. On January 18,1843, Willard Richards took the twenty-fourth plural wife. Other new polygamous husbands in 1843 included Thomas Bullock, William D. Huntington, Lorenzo Dow Young, Orson Pratt, Joseph Bates Noble, William Clayton, Orson Hyde, James Bird, Parley P. Pratt, James Adams, William Felshaw, Amasa Lyman, Hyrum Smith, Benjamin Mitchell, John Bair, Henry Lyman Cook, Ebenezer Richardson, John Taylor, and Edwin D. Woolley. In addition, Joseph Smith contributed fifteen more women to the total of forty-two new plural wives in 1843. In 1844, up to June 27 when the prophet was killed, Erastus Snow, John D. Lee, Ezra T. Benson, and Dominicus Carter became polygamists, and nineteen more plural wives in that half-year made a grand total of eighty-four plural marriages in the Nauvoo community while Smith was still alive. 

Sequence of Nauvoo Plural Marriages, April 5, 1841–June 2, 1844

Husband	Wife	Date of Marriage
1. Joseph Smith	Louisa Beaman	Apr 5, 1841
2. Joseph Smith	Zina Diantha Huntington (Jacobs)	Oct 27, 1841
3. Joseph Smith	Prescendia L. Huntington (Buell)	Dec 11, 1841
4. Joseph Smith	Mary Elizabeth Rollins (Lightner)	Jan 17, 1842
5. Theodore Turley	Mary Clift	Jan 1842
6. Joseph Smith	Patty Bartlett (Sessions)	Mar 9, 1842
7. Joseph Smith	Nancy Marinda Johnson (Hyde)	Apr 1842
8. Joseph Smith	Delcena Johnson (Sherman)	Early 1842
9. Brigham Young	Lucy Ann Decker	Jun 14, 1842
10. Joseph Smith	Eliza Roxcy Snow	Jun 29, 1842
11. Joseph Smith	Sarah Ann Whitney	Jul 27, 1842
12. Joseph Smith	Martha McBride (Knight)	Aug [3] 1842
13. Joseph Smith	Sarah Bapson	1842
14. Joseph Smith	Agnes M. Coolbrith (Smith)	1842
15. Joseph Smith	Elizabeth Davis (Brackenbury Durfee)	1842
16. Joseph Smith	Sally A. Fuller	1842
17. Joseph Smith	Desdemona W. Fullmer	1842
18. Joseph Smith	Sarah M. Kingsley (Howe Cleveland)	1842
19. Joseph Smith	Lucinda P. (Morgan Harris)	1842
20. Joseph Smith	Elvira Annie Cowles (Holmes)	Dec 1, 1842
21. Jonathan Holmes	Elvira Annie Cowles	Dec 1, 1842
22. Reynolds Cahoon	Lucina Roberts	1842
23. Heber C. Kimball	Sarah Peak (Noon)	1842
24. Willard Richards	Sarah Longstroth	Jan 18, 1843
25. Thomas Bullock	Lucy C. Clayton	Jan 23, 1843
26. Wm D. Huntington	Harriet Clark	Feb 5, 1843
27. Joseph Smith	Ruth D. Vose (Sayers)	Feb 1843
28. Joseph Smith	Eliza Maria Partridge	Mar 8, 1843
29. Lorenzo Dow Young	Harriet Page Wheeler	Mar 9, 1843
30. Orson Pratt	Charlotte Bishop	Mar 10, 1843
31. Joseph Smith	Almera Woodard Johnson	Apr [3] 1843
32. Joseph Bates Noble	Sarah B. Alley	Apr 5, 1843
33. William Clayton	Margaret Moon	Apr 27, 1843
34. Orson Hyde	Mary Ann Price	April 1843
35. Joseph Smith	Lucy Walker	May 1, 1843
36. James Bird	Sophia A. Fuller	May 5, 1843
37. Joseph Smith	Emily Dow Partirdge	May 11, 1843
38. Joseph Smith	Sarah Lawrence	May 11, 1843
39. Joseph Smith	Maria Lawrence	Spring 1843
40. Joseph Smith	Helen Mar Kimball	May 1843
41. Joseph Smith	Rhoda Richards	Jun 12, 1843
42. Parley P. Pratt	Elizabeth Brotherton	Jun 24, 1843
43. Joseph Bates Noble	Mary Ann Washburn	Jun 28, 1843
44. Joseph Smith	Flora Ann Woodworth	Spring 1843
45. James Adams	Roxena Repshire	Jul 11, 1843
46. Orson Hyde	Martha Rebecca Browett	Jul 20, 1843
47. William Felshaw	Charlotte Walters	Jul 28, 1843
48. Amasa M. Lyman	Diontha Walker	July 1843
49. Hyrum Smith	Mercy R. Fielding (Thompson)	Aug 11, 1843
50. Joseph Smith	Melissa Lott	Sep 20, 1843
51. Joseph Smith	Olive Grey Frost	Summer 1843
52. Joseph Smith	Hannah Ells	Summer 1843
53. Joseph Smith	Mary Ann Frost (Pratt)	Summer 1843
54. Benjamin Mitchell	Lovina Buckwater	Oct 10, 1843
55. John Bair	Lucinda T. Owen	Oct 19, 1843
56. Brigham Young	Augusta Adams	Nov 2, 1843
57. Brigham Young	Harriet Cook	Nov 2, 1843
58. Joseph Smith	Fanny Young (Murray)	Nov 2, 1843
59. Henry L. Cook	Lovina Thaves	Nov 5, 1843
60. Ebenezer Richardson	Polly Ann Child	Nov 1843
61. John Taylor	Elizabeth Kaighan	Dec 12, 1843
62. Edwin D. Woolley	Louisa Gordon	1843
63. Edwin D. Woolley	Ellen Wilding	Dec 28, 1843
64. Hyrum Smith	Catherine Phillips	1843
65. Hyrum Smith	Lydia D. Granger	1843
66. John Taylor	Jane Ballantyne	Feb 25, 1844
67. Theodore Turley	Eliza Clift	Mar 6, 1844
68. Erastus Snow	Minerva White	Apr 2, 1844
69. John D. Lee	Rachel A. Woolsey	Apr 19, 1844
70. John D. Lee	Louisa Free	Apr 19, 1844
71. John D. Lee	Abigail Schaeffer (Woolsey)	Apr 19, 1844
72. Theodore Turley	Sarah Ellen Clift	Apr 26, 1844
73. Ezra T. Benson	Adeline B. Andrus	Apr 27, 1844
74. Brigham Young	Clarissa Decker	May 8, 1844
75. Dominicus Carter	Mary Durfee	Jun 2, 1844
76. Joseph Smith	Sylvia Porter Sessions (Lyon)	by 1844
77. Joseph Smith	Mary Houston	by 1844
78. Joseph Smith	Nancy Maria Winchester	by 1844
79. Joseph Smith	Sarah Scott	by 1844
80. Joseph Smith	Olive Andrews	by 1844
81. Joseph Smith	Jane Tippets	by 1844
82. Jospeh Smith	Sophia Sanburn	by 1844
83. Joseph Smith	Phoebe Watrous (Woodworth)	by 1844
84. Joseph Smith	Vienna Jacques	by 1844

The thirty polygamous husbands from 1841 up to Joseph Smith's death on June 27,1844, had married a total of 114 legal and plural wives, who had borne 131 children. These men averaged thirty-six years of age (range: 24-60) and had been married an average of ten years (1-32 years) before marrying a second wife of a mean twenty-five years of age (14-39 years). At that time, their legal wives averaged thirty-two years of age (22-56 years), four years younger than their husbands and seven years older than the first plural wife at the time of her marriage. At the time of these first polygamous marriages, the nuclear family included an average of four pre-polygamous children (0-9). During the Nauvoo years these families would grow to include an average of eight wives (2-43) and six children (1-17). In the post-Nauvoo years these original thirty families would eventually accumulate an average of twelve wives (2-55) and twenty-seven children each (0-65). Without Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and Heber C. Kimball—the three most-married men—these families averaged four wives and six children during the Nauvoo years, and ultimately eight wives and twenty-five children each. 

The thirty early Nauvoo polygamists are listed below as of the dates they first took plural wives. 

Nauvoo Polygamists, 1841-44 (6/27) 

	Entered Polygamy	Prior Years Married	Pre-Polygamy Children	Eventual Children	Eventual Wives
1. Joseph Smith	Apr 5, 1841	14	5	5	est. 43
2. Theodore Turley	Jan 1842	20	9	22	5
3. Brigham Young	Jun 14, 1842	8	4	50	55
4. Jonathan Holmes	Dec 1, 1842	5	2	7	3
5. Reynolds Cahoon	1842	32	7	10	3
6. Heber C. Kimball	1842	20	6	65	45
7. Willard Richards	Jan 18, 1843	4	1	26	14
8. Thomas Bullock	Jan 23, 1843	4	3	23	3
9. William D. Huntington	Feb 5, 1843	3	0	7	3
10. Lorenzo Dow Young	Mar 9, 1843	16	7	26	8
11. Orson Pratt	Mar 10, 1843	6	3	45	10
12. Joseph Bates Noble	Apr 5, 1843	8	5	31	11
13. William Clayton	Apr 27, 1843	6	3	47	10
14. Orson Hyde	April 1843	8	3	26	7
15. James Bird	May 5, 1843	11	5	7	3
16. Parley P. Pratt	Jun 24, 1843	6	3	32	11
17. James Adams	Jul 11, 1843	NA	0	0	2
18. William Felshaw	Jul 28, 1843	16	9	17	3
19. Amasa M. Lyman	Jul 1843	8	2	37	9
20. Hyrum Smith	Aug 11, 1843	5	2	2	4
21. Benjamin Mitchell	Oct 10, 1843	NA	0	17	6
22. John Bair	Oct 19, 1843	14	7	32	6
23. Henry L. Cook	Nov 5, 1843	1	0	4	3
24. Ebenezer Richardson	Nov 1843	10	4	35	4
25. John Taylor	Dec 12, 1843	10	4	35	16
26. Edwin D. Woolley	1843	12	5	26	6
27. Erastus Snow	Apr 2, 1844	5	3	37	16
28. John D. Lee	Apr 19, 1844	10	6	52	19
29. Ezra T. Benson	Apr 27, 1844	12	5	34	8
30. Dominicus Carter	Jun 2, 1844	5	1	40	8
Average		10	4	27	12

This brotherhood of Mormon polygamists was expanding at a rate that alarmed William Law, who had once been dedicated to Smith's ideals and remained a believer in Mormonism. Law had always been a sympathetic listener to Emma Smith's complaints about the practice. When he learned that secret plural marriages were being performed among Joseph Smith's inner circle of followers, Law tried to persuade Smith to stop. In a desperate attempt to convince the prophet, he reportedly threw his arms about Smith's neck and begged him to abandon his polygamous relationships.[42] Smith responded by telling Law that God had commanded him to teach the doctrine of celestial marriage. God, he said, would condemn him if he did not obey. 

We know what happened next. On June 7, 1844, the reformers published 1,000 copies of the Nauvoo Expositor, which claimed to be "rich with facts, such expositions, as make the guilty tremble and rage."[43] The newspaper asserted that Smith had "introduced false and damnable doctrines into the church" such as "the plurality of wives," which "are taught secretly, and denied openly" and amount to "abominations and whoredoms." It detailed how "many females in foreign climes" were attracted by promised "blessings" from Smith regarding "the will of the Lord concerning them," only to "meet brother Joseph, or some of the Twelve, at some insulated point... on the bank of the Mississippi" where they were requested to "never indulge what is [then] revealed to them, with a penalty of death attached . . . that she should be his (Joseph's) Spiritual wife."[44]

The Expositor was intended to be a weekly reformist newspaper, but the first issue was its last. Following Smith's lead, according to William Clayton's journal, June 10, 1844, "The City Council passed a resolution declaring the Printing press on the hill 'a nuisance' and ordered it destroyed if not moved in 3 hours notice. About sundown the police gathered at the Temple and after organizing proceded to the office and demolished the press and scattered the Type." So were events set into motion which resulted in charges of riot and treason, Smith's arrest by the governor of Illinois, and the prophet's death two weeks later. 

In a letter to Smith's brother-in-law, William Law described Smith's death as an event in which "the wicked slay the wicked," and "the hand of a blasphemed God . . . has taken sudden judgment."[45] Law recorded in his diary that the deaths of Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum represented "the judgment of an offended god" [that Joseph Smith] "set the laws of god and men at defiance. He was naturally base, brutal and corrupt and cruel. He was one of the false prophets spoken of by Christ who would come in sheep's clothing but inwardly be a reveling wolf . . . but god stopped him in his career and gave him to his destroyers."[46]

With such opposition to polygamy in the church itself, how could the Nauvoo community fail to connect the death of their leader with his secret marriages? Half of the 1,000 printed copies of the Expositor, expressing the complaints reformist Mormons shared about polygamy, had been mailed prior to the press's destruction. Yet church members believed the denials from their leaders, that charges of polygamy were untrue. All Mormons loyal to Smith then—and many devout Mormons today—believe that Smith died a martyr, murdered because of hostility from godless outsiders, the "mob." Brigham Young avoided mention of polygamy when he concluded, "They killed Joseph, and what for? For the Gospels' sake. It was for no evil for I was well acquainted with him. He testified to the truth and sealed his fate with his blood."[47]

The account of Smith's assassination in the official History of the Church mentions his indictment on charges of polygamy but says nothing of Smith's having plural wives. Thomas Ford, Illinois governor in 1844, did list Smith's marital practices as one of the issues causing internal dissent but did not mention other Nauvoo polygamists.[48] Although some scholarly writing has linked polygamy in Nauvoo to Smith's death, studies of polygamy typically overlook Nauvoo and begin counting plural husbands and wives in 1852 when the practice was announced in Utah.[49] The recently published semi-official Encyclopedia of Mormonism tells different parts of the story in different sections but does not in any one place draw together Smith, his wives, the spread of the practice to other men during his lifetime, and the internal dissent over the practice which led to his death.[50]

Personal Accounts of Nauvoo Polygamy 

The Nauvoo temple was the centerpiece of the physical and social arrangements of Nauvoo polygamy. Sarah Rich wrote of the temple work she and her husband, Charles, did during the wave of marriages in January and February 1846: "We were to be there at seven in the morning and remain until the work was done at ten or twelve o'clock at night if necessary. So we got a good girl Mary Philips a wife of my husband to stay and take care of the children and we helped in the house of the Lord.”[51]

The "pecking order" among plural wives often determined how much control they had over family life. As in a complex mating dance, first wives not only directed households but also frequently chose subsequent wives. George A. Smith's first wife Bathesheba Bigler recalled: "I had since the Prophet's martyrdom, like Sarah of old, given to my husband five wives."[52] Jane Snyder Richards told western historian Matilda Bancroft of placing a young woman as a housekeeper in a home: "In the course of a few months she married the master of the house; and the two wives had two daughters with but twelve days difference in their ages."[53] In a slightly different way Adelia Kimball assumed control of her marital choice: after obtaining Vilate's consent to marry Heber C. Kimball, she "concluded to become his wife."[54]

Although later journals and memoirs kept by members of leading polgamous families in Utah include references to Brigham Young's Bee hive House; Heber Kimball's "Big House" with its "Girls' Parlor" and separate rooms for each wife; William Clayton's "Big House"; and the Richardses' spacious two-story dwelling, these more comfortable living arrangements differed from conditions in Nauvoo, where families lived in secrecy and, as they faced intensifying persecution, anticipated leaving town. Emily Partridge Smith wrote: "Times were not then as they are now in 1877." She recalled that at the time of Smith's death she was living at the Coolidge home, and later, though remarried to Amasa Lyman, she lived with her mother before moving in with Lyman and his first wife.[55] Plural wives sometimes worked as servants in the home of the first wife, often hiding the special relationship they had with the man of the house. They had to disguise their pregnancies from citizens who had not been let in on the secret doctrine and accept their contempt for "loose women" when babies were born apparently out of wedlock. Plural wives were frowned on by some legal wives who knew about the doctrine and feared that Smith might ask their husbands to practice it. 

Convinced by Faith, Authority, and Perceived Advantages 

Plural wives entered polygamy with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Prescindia Huntington, third recorded plural wife of Joseph Smith, wrote late in life that 

in 18411 entered into the New Everlasting Covenant - was sealed to Joseph Smith the Prophet and Seer, and to the best of my ability I have honored plural marriage, never speaking one word against the principle. I have been the mother of nine children - seven sons and two daughters, two by my last husband - Heber Chase Kimball. Never in my life, in this kingdom, which is 44 years, have I doubted the truth of this great work.[56]

However, some women had to struggle to accommodate their sensibilities to the radical new teaching they believed they must obey. Caroline Rogers Daniels, Nauvoo divorcee, married polygamist Abraham Owen Smoot because: "It was necessary for my salvation and exaltation."[57] Adelia Almira Wilcox Hatton Woods chose church leader Heber C. Kimball because she desired to marry a man who could not only "save himself, but also me."[58] Bathsheba Smith was convinced by "a revelation from God and having a fixed determination to attain to Celestial Glory, I felt to embrace every principle, and that it was for my husband's exaltation that he should obey the revelation on plural marriage in order to attain to kingdoms, thrones, principalities and powers, firmly believing that I should participate with him in all his blessings, glory and honor."[59]

Plural wife Sarah Studevant Leavitt of Nauvoo recalled that when "It was whispered in my ear by a friend that the authorities were getting more wives than one," [I] reasoned that "the Anointed of the Lord would not get more wives unless they were commanded to do so ... I have seen so much wrong connected with this ordinance that had I not had it revealed to me from Him that cannot lie I should sometimes have doubted the truth of it."[60] Mercy Rachel Fielding Thompson, widow of Joseph Smith's secretary, wrote that "On the 11 of August 18431 was called by direct revelation from Heaven through Brother Joseph Smith the Patriarch" to join her sister and become the plural wife of his brother Hyrum. Persuaded by the authority and character of Joseph Smith, she explained that she was "convinced that it was appointed by him who is too wise to err and too good to be unkind."[61]

Eliza Maria Partridge Smith Lyman, who with her sister Emily "went to live in the family of the prophet Joseph Smith . . . about three years," wrote that "this was truly a great trial for me but I had the most implicit confidence in him as a Prophet of the Lord and [could] not but believe his word and as a matter of course accept of the privilege of being sealed to him as a wife."[62] Sarah Dearmon Pea Rich said, 

when my husband and myself had this doctrine explained and taught to us in its true light by those that had a right to teach it we both saw the propriety of the same and believed it to be true and [essential] to our future glory and exaltation hereafter we accepted the same and like old Sarah of old Joseph had in that temple given to my husband four other wives which were sealed to him in that temple by the holy order of god by one having authority to do the same.[63]

Some plural wives told of advantages they found for themselves in polygamy. Jane Snyder Richards wrote of how faithfully Elizabeth McFate, her husband's new wife, took care of her while she was recovering from a miscarriage.[64] Though she expressed difficulties when her husband took another wife, Mary Home found that she could "work out her individual character separate from her husband." She felt "freer" and able to "do herself individually things she could never have attempted before."[65] Lucy Walker, who was on intimate terms with Smith's other wives, the Partridge and Lawrence sisters, experienced "less room for jealousy when wives live under the same roof." She said, "Instead of a feeling of jealousy [plural marriage] was a source of comfort to us."[66]

Difficulties for Plural Wives 

At times women wrote frankly about their difficulties with polygamy. For Mary Home "Celestial marriage" was "one of the ordinances of the house of God," but she felt that "no one can ever feel the fullweight of the curse till she enters into polygamy." She accepted this "great trial" because "her religion demanded it."[67] Lucy Walker Kimball regarded polygamy as "a grand school" to "learn self control, self denial."[68] Mary Ellen Kimball recorded Heber C. Kimball's analogy that plural marriage should be like a dish of water into which he puts a quart and his wives each put in a pint. She grasped the essence: "so you see our will swallowed up in his will."[69]

The dilution of a woman's will, an image which would offend twentieth-century feminist sensibilities, extended to the subjugation of wives by polygamous husbands. Eventually husband to forty-five wives, Heber C. Kimball wrote that wives should be "in subjection to their husbands." He preached, "I am subject to my God, my wife is in subjection to me and will reverence me in my place and I will make her happy."[70] Kimball justified this dominance of women with the view that man was primary in a creation which only secondarily came up with a woman for man: 

The man was created, and God gave him dominions over the whole earth, but he saw that he never could multiply, and replenish the earth, without a woman. And he made one and gave her to him. He did not make the man for the woman; but the woman for the man, and it is just as unlawful for you to rise up and rebel against your husband, as it would be for man to rebel against God.[71]

Other polygamous Nauvoo husbands also affirmed their authority over women. Amasa Lyman, who eventually married nine wives, lectured to the priesthood holders in the Nauvoo temple: "A man becomes responsible for his own conduct, and that of his wife . . . we want the man to remember that he has covenanted to keep the law of God, and the Woman to obey her husband."[72] George A. Smith, then husband to six wives, agreed that "the woman ought to be in subjection to the man, be careful to guard against loud laughter, against whispering, levity, talebearing."[73] And Brigham Young, who married fifty-five women, wrote that "woman will never get back, unless she follows the man back... the man must love his God and the woman must love her husband."[74]

Martha Spence Heywood expressed the stoic attitude that some Mormon women took toward the difficult role of plural wife: "I tried to recognize the hand of the Lord in all of this for the perfecting of my character."[75]

People of both genders expressed anguish over polygamy. Nauvoo polygmist Joseph Fielding wrote in the 1840s and 1850s of dissent in the Mormon community: "This is my greatest trial, and I think there is more trouble on the Subject of Plurality of Wives than anything else . . . [it] appears in general to have given great Offence to the Wife . . . some of the best of our Sisters are tiranised [sic] over by some of the meanest." He bemoaned that "My Wives have not spoken to each other for many Months."[76] Patty Sessions, plural wife to Joseph Smith as well as the first wife of "Mr. Sessions," spoke of her husband's preference for another wife: "I feel very bad .. . he took [Harriet] to the farm with him [and] leaves me here alone."[77] Victoria Hancock Jackson, a grand-daughter of Levi W. Hancock, resented that "Some men neglected present wives with children and were captivated by a younger face."[78] Emeline B. Wells spoke of being "tortured" by her husband's inattention: "O if my husband could only love me even a little and not seem to be perfectly indifferent."[79] Adelia Almera Wilcox Hatton Wood Kimball left her first plural marriage because her husband's first wife considered a plural wife to be "nothing more than a concubine," and Adelia felt that she and her children were "looked upon as intruders."[80] Jane Richards spoke of feeling "like wringing the neck of any other child than hers that should call her husband papa."[81]

Rejection 

There were women who could not easily be persuaded to endorse the doctrine of plural marriage. Emily M. Austin, whose sister married polygamist Newell Knight, escaped to Ohio to avoid this "horrible" practice.[82] Rachel Ridgway Ivins Grant, mother of future LDS president Heber J. Grant, refused even to meet with Joseph Smith, saying that she would "sooner go to hell as a virtuous woman than to heaven as a whore."[83]

The prophet faced rejection more than once. In the spring of 1842 Smith told Sarah Pratt, wife of Apostle Orson Pratt, that the Lord wanted him to take her as his "spiritual wife." Sarah refused Smith's offer and eventually exposed him to her husband. When he confronted Smith, Orson Pratt was excommunicated, but he was reinstated five months later. After Smith's death Pratt himself took plural wives, and he became the primary apologist for plural marriage when it was officially announced in Utah in 1852. Sarah ultimately left both Orson and the church; she labeled polygamy the "direst curse" which "completely demoralizes good men, and makes bad men correspondingly worse. As for the women," she wrote, "well, God help them."[84]

When Smith proposed in April 1842 to Nancy Rigdon, daughter of his close friend and counselor, Sidney Rigdon, he reportedly took her into a room, "locked the door, and then stated to her that he had had an affection for her for several years, and wished that she should be his." Nancy refused him, saying she would only marry a single man. The following day Smith explained in a letter to her: "That which is wrong under one circumstance, may be, and often is, right under another." He added, "Whatever God requires is right, no matter what it is, although we may not see the reason thereof." She remained unconvinced.[85]

Any discussion of resistance to polygamy is incomplete if it does not mention Emma Smith's reluctance to accept co-wives. Joseph's plural marriage revelation went so far as to threaten her with destruction if she did not comply. She responded by reportedly throwing the written revelation into the fire. After Joseph Smith died, she consistently denied that her husband had ever practiced polygamy. According to Lucy Meserve Smith, Emma "bore testimony to me that Mormonism was true as it came forth from the servant of the Lord Joseph Smith but said she the Twelve had made bogus of it. She said they were living with their [plural] wives and raising children and Joseph never taught any such doctrine."[86] Eventually Emma Smith allowed the majority of Mormons under the leadership of Brigham Young to migrate west without her. She later became a member of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, headed by her son, Joseph Smith III. 

Secrecy 

Considering the explosive nature of what was taking place, Nauvoo polygamy was surprisingly well-concealed. The words of the early polygamists convey Joseph Smith's need for secrecy. Lucy Walker said that Joseph "lived in constant fear of being betrayed.”[87] Jane Richards explained that when Joseph Smith had taken some more wives a few months previous to his death, he received a "revelation in regard to polygamy," which required that he "should do it without publicity this time" because "mob spirit was already quite excited."[88] Thus polygamy was made known only to "a few trusted ones," according to Mary Home's account: "At first the brethren and sisters were so averse to it that it could scarcely be mentioned."[89] Joseph Lee Robinson tells the story of Smith saying in Nauvoo that if "I should reveal the things that God has revealed to me, there are some on this stand that would cut my throat or take my hearts blood."[90] Nancy Tracy recalled that Smith taught the "Celestial Order of Marriage" only to "a few that could bear it."[91]

Evidently one such person was Ebenezer Robinson, who recalled that the "doctrine of spiritual wives" was "talked privately in the church in Nauvoo, in 1841" but that he was invited to participate in 1843. Hyrum Smith "instructed me in Nov or Dec 1843 to make a selection of some young woman and he would seal her to me, and I should take her home," he recalled, "and if she should have an offspring give out word that she had a husband, an Elder, who had gone on a foreign mission." Possibly referring to a secluded birthplace, or conceivably to abortion, Robinson spoke of "a place appointed in Iowa, 12 or 18 miles from Nauvoo to send female vic[t]ims to his polygamous births."[92]

The motif of caution recurs in the stories of early polygamy. When the pregnancy of William Clayton's first plural wife threatened to expose them, the prophet advised Clayton to "just keep her at home and brook it and if they raise trouble about it and bring you before me I will give you an awful scourging and probably cut you off from the church and then I will baptize you and set you ahead as good as ever.”[93]

According to church historian Andrew Jenson, Sarah Ann Whitney became the seventh plural wife of Joseph Smith, and the story of his marriage to her illustrates another strategy. She disguised her relationship to the prophet by pretending to marry Joseph Corodon Kingsbury on April 29, 1843. In his autobiography Kingsbury wrote: "I according to Pres. Joseph Smith & Council & others agreed to stand by Sarah Ann Whitney as though I was supposed to be her husband and [participated in] a pretended marriage for the purpose of... Bringing about the purposes of God in these last days..." Three weeks later, while in hiding, Joseph Smith wrote a revealing letter which he addressed to her parents, Newel and Elizabeth Whitney, inviting them to bring their daughter to visit him "just back of Brother Hyrums farm." He advised Brother Whitney to "come a little a head and nock [sic] at the south East corner of the house at the window." He assured them, especially Sarah Ann, that "it is the will of God that you should comfort me now." He stressed the need for care "to find out when Emma comes," but "when she is not here, there is the most perfect safty [sic]." The prophet warned them to "burn this letter as soon as you read it" and "keep all locked up in your breasts." In closing he admonished, "I think Emma won't come to night if she dont[,] dont fail to come to night."[94] In 1845-46, after now-widowed Sarah Ann went to live with Heber C. Kimball, "her husband for time," Kingsbury, married his own plural wives.[95]

Most of Smith's plural wives boarded with other families, whom he visited periodically. His secretary, William Clayton, recorded one such visit to young Almera Johnson on May 16,1843: "Prest. Joseph and I went to B[enjamin]. F. Johnsons to sleep." Johnson himself later noted that on this visit Smith stayed with Almera "as man and wife" and "occupied the same room and bed with my sister, that the previous month he had occupied with the daughter of the late Bishop Partridge as his wife." Almera Johnson also confirmed her secret marriage to Joseph Smith: "I lived with the prophet Joseph as his wife and he visited me at the home of my brother Benjamin F."[96]

After the destruction of the Expositor and the death of their leader, most rank-and-file Mormons did not find out about the doctrine of polygamy until the winter of 1845-46. John D. Lee wrote that "in the Winter of 1845 meetings were held all over the city of Nauvoo" to teach "celestial marriage." He tells a fascinating tale of who married whom, of partner exchanges and trades, and stresses that "plural marriages were not made public. They had to be kept still. A young man did not know when he was talking to a single woman."[97] Making the same point from a woman's perspective, Eliza Maria Partridge Smith Lyman wrote that "a woman living in polygamy dared not let it be known."[98] Jane Richards speaks of the winter of 1845-46 as the time when polygamy was first presented to the Mormon community at large: "During the winter and previous to the company start ing [February 1846], Mr. Richards took his second wife, Elizabeth McFate [January 31,1846]. Polygamy was now made known to us for the first time, and while the majority of the church were made acquainted with the doc trine, it was only practically entered into by a few."[99]

The memories of Jane Richards reveal a personal culture of privacy among women. Leonora Cannon Taylor, hearing that Jane Richards's life in polygamy was going "not very well," advised her, "you have too much pride and grit to let any of your domestic trials be known to the world." Mrs. Richards passed on this "code of silence" to a younger woman, telling her that "as long as she had lived in polygamy she had never spoken to any one of her troubles or allowed that she had any trials."[100]

Nauvoo Polygamy After Joseph Smith's Death 

While journals and personal writings tell a complex human story, numbers give depth to the picture. After Joseph Smith's death, the number of plural marriages in Nauvoo began to increase rapidly. In the fall of 1844, Brigham Young took ten wives, Heber C. Kimball, nine; Parley P. Pratt, three; William Clayton, Isaac Morley, and George A. Smith each took a pair of wives. Of the fifty-eight plural marriages in 1844, thirty-nine (two-thirds) took place after Joseph Smith died, seven to former wives of the prophet. Many of Smith's wives were married "for time" to other men, such as Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball, twenty-four during 1844-46 in Nauvoo. (They continued to be sealed "for eternity" to the dead prophet.) 

Plural marriages accelerated in winter 1845-46, after the temple opened on December 10 and it became clear that westward migration would actu ally take place. Brigham Young urged priesthood-holders to take plural wives during their brief use of the newly-opened temple. Heber C. Kimball, Brigham Young, John Taylor, Samuel Bent, Willard Richards, John Smith, John Bernhisel, Alpheus Cutler, Newel K. Whitney, Amasa Lyman, Joseph Coolidge, Winslow Farr, Peter Hawes, Cornelius Lott, and George A. Smith led the way with a total of 118 wives. By this time Smith's "inner circle" of thirty polygamous husbands had broadened to include over 150 men. 

Forty of the 153 Nauvoo polygamous husbands married sisters, six before Joseph Smith's death, twenty after his death in Nauvoo, and the rest after the migration to Utah. Ultimately about one-third of Nauvoo's po lygamous families included sister-wives. It was probably easier for a woman to share a husband with a sister than with a stranger. Mormons may also have seen a precedent in the Levirate marriages mandated in the Torah, where a brother had special rights and obligations to father a first-born son for his deceased brother's widow.[101]

In most sister marriages there were two sibling wives. William Clay ton's first plural wife (April 27,1843), like those of many polygamists, was his legal wife's sister, Margaret Moon. When he asked Joseph Smith in 1843 for permission to marry a third Moon sister, Lydia, Smith replied that he had just received a revelation that forbade a man from taking more than two sisters of a family. Smith then asked Clayton to petition Lydia in his favor to become one of his own plural wives.[102] The marriage data indicates, however, that this proscription against more than two sister-wives was not always heeded. 

For whatever reason—to provide for women during the difficult journey, to ensure a growing population in the west, or to fulfill Joseph Smith's new marital doctrine—there were fifty-six Nauvoo polygamous marriages in 1845, and 255 in 1846, primarily in January and February, up to the time when the pioneer camp began to cross the Mississippi River. During this winter of celestial marriages Heber C. Kimball took twenty-four wives; Brigham Young, twenty-one; John Taylor and Samuel Bent, eight; Willard Richards and John Smith, seven; John Bernhisel, Alpheus Cutler, and Newel K. Whitney, six; Amasa Lyman, five; Joseph Coolidge, Winslow Farr, Peter Hawes, Cornelius Lott, and George A. Smith, four; Benjamin Covey, Eli Kelsey, John D. Lee, William Miller, John Pack, William Sagers, William Smith, Guy Wilson, Clark Whitney, and Joseph Young, three each (Sager's and Whitney's marriages each included a legal first wife); John Bair, Rufus Beech, William Blackhurst, Benjamin Brown, John Butler, Simeon Carter, Benjamin Clapp, Frederick Cox, Charles Dana, George Dykes, David Fullmer, Alfred Hadden, Edward Hunter, Joel Johnson, Asahel Lathrop, Joseph Markham, Reuben Miller, Isaac Morley, John Parker, W. W. Phelps, Orson Pratt, Parley Pratt, Charles C. Rich, A. P. Rockwood, Samuel Russell, David Sessions, Abraham Smoot, Erastus Snow, Lorenzo Snow, Allen Weeks, and Thomas Woolsey each took two; and some sixty-seven other husbands added one more wife to their families. By the end of the Nauvoo period in 1846, the 153 polygamous husbands had married 587 women and produced 734 children. About 80 percent of Nauvoo plural marriages occurred after Smith's death. 

Polygamous Marriages by Nauvoo Husbands 

Husbands	Total Nauvoo Wives*	1841	1842	1843	To June 27, 1844	After June 27, 1844	1845	1846
Smith, Joseph	43	3	15	15	9est.
Young, Brigham	40	0	1	2	1	10	4	21
Kimball, Heber C.	37	0	1	0	0	9	5	21
Taylor, John	11	0	0	1	1	0	0	8
Bent, Samuel	10	0	0	0	0	0	0	9
Lee, John D.	10	0	0	0	3	1	2	3
Richards, Willard	9	0	0	1	0	0	2	5
Lyman, Amasa	8	0	0	1	0	1	0	5
Smith, George A.	8	0	0	0	0	2	3	2
Smith, John	8	0	0	0	0	0	0	7
Whitney, Newell K.	8	0	0	0	0	1	0	6
Bernhisel, John	7	0	0	0	0	0	0	7
Cutler, Alpheus	7	0	0	0	0	0	0	6
Pratt, Parley P.	7	0	0	1	0	3	2	0
Snow, Lorenzo	6	0	0	0	0	0	3	2
Clayton, William	5	0	0	1	0	2	1	0
Coolidge, Joseph	5	0	0	0	0	0	0	4
Farr, Winslow	5	0	0	0	0	0	0	4
Hawes, Peter	5	0	0	0	0	0	0	4
Lott, Cornelius	5	0	0	0	0	0	0	4
Morley, Isaac	5	0	0	0	0	2	0	2
Pratt, Orson	5	0	0	1	0	0	1	2
Rich, Charles C.	5	0	0	0	0	0	2	2
Smith, William	5	0	0	0	0	0	4	0
Turley, Theodore	5	0	1	0	2	1	0	0
Bair, John	4	0	0	1	0	0	0	2
Butler, John	4	0	0	0	1	0	0	2
Covey, Benjamin	4	0	0	0	0	0	0	3
Kelsey, Eli	4	0	0	0	0	0	0	3
Miller, William	4	0	0	0	0	0	1	2
Pack, John	4	0	0	0	0	0	0	3
Smith, Hyrum	4	0	0	3	0	0	0	0
Snow, Erastus	4	0	0	0	1	0	0	2
Wilson, Guy C.	4	0	0	0	3	0	0	0
Young, Joseph	4	0	0	0	0	0	0	3
Beach, Rufus	3	0	0	0	0	0	0	2
Benson, Ezra T.	3	0	0	0	1	0	0	1
Blackhurst, William	3	0	0	0	0	0	0	2
Brown, Benjamin	3	0	0	0	0	0	1	1
Cahoon, Reynolds	3	0	1	0	0	0	0	1
Carter, Dominicus	3	0	0	0	1	0	0	1
Carter, Simeon	3	0	0	0	0	0	0	2
Clapp, Benjamin	3	0	0	0	0	0	0	2
Cox, Frederick	3	0	0	0	0	0	0	2
Dana, Charles	3	0	0	0	0	0	0	2
Dykes, George P.	3	0	0	0	0	0	0	2
Felshaw, William	3	0	0	1	0	0	0	1
Fullmer, David	3	0	0	0	0	0	1	1
Grover, Thomas	3	0	0	0	0	1	0	1
Hadden, Alfred S.	3	0	0	0	0	0	0	2
Hunter, Edward	3	0	0	0	0	0	1	1
Huntington, Wm. D.	3	0	0	1	0	0	0	1
Hyde, Orson	3	0	0	2	0	0	0	0
Johnson, Aaron	3	0	0	0	0	1	1	0
Johnson, Benj. F.	3	0	0	0	0	1	0	1
Johnson, Joel	3	0	0	0	0	0	2	0
Kingsbury, Jos. C.	3	0	0	0	0	0	1	1
Lathrop, Asahel	3	0	0	0	0	0	2	0
Markham, Stephen	3	0	0	0	0	0	0	2
Miller, Reuben	3	0	0	0	0	0	1	1
Nickerson, Freeman	3	0	0	0	0	0	1	1
Noble, Joseph B.	3	0	0	2	0	0	0	0
Parker, John D.	3	0	0	0	0	0	0	3
Phelps, William W.	3	0	0	0	0	0	0	2
Rockwood, A. P.	3	0	0	0	0	0	1	1
Russell, Samuel	3	0	0	0	0	0	0	3
Sagers, William H.	3	0	0	0	0	0	0	3
Scott, John	3	0	0	0	0	0	1	1
Sessions, David	3	0	0	0	0	0	0	2
Smoot, Abrhama	3	0	0	0	0	0	0	2
Stout, Hosea	3	0	0	0	0	0	2	0
Weeks, Allen	3	0	1	0	0	0	0	2
Whiting, Edwin	3	0	0	0	0	0	1	1
Whitney, Clark	3	0	0	0	0	0	0	3
Woolley, Edwin	3	0	0	2	0	0	0	0
Woolsey, Thomas	3	0	0	0	0	0	0	2
Young, Lorenzo	3	0	0	1	0	0	0	1
[76 with 2]	152
Total Wives	587

*(incl. legal marriages)

Over the six years when polygamy was practiced in Nauvoo, 1841 to 1846, Smith, Kimball, and Young were the most-married men in Nauvoo; they accounted, in fact, for 117 of the 434 Nauvoo polygamous marriages, over one-fourth of the marriages by the community of 153 polygamous husbands. After Nauvoo, Young married fifteen more wives and Kimball married eight. At the funeral of his wife, Vilate, Kimball, pointing to the coffin, said: "There lies a woman who has given me forty-four wives."[103]

Incidence ff Nauvoo Plural Marriage  Showing the Impact of the Most-Married Men 

	1841	1842	1843	1844 (to 6/27)	1844 (after 6/27)	1845	1846	Cumulative
Total Nauvoo	3	20	42	19	39	56	255	434
Smith	3	15	15	9	0	0	0	42
Kimball	0	1	0	0	9	5	21	36
Young	0	1	2	1	11	4	20	39
	3 (100%)	17 (85%)	17 (40%)	10 (53%)	20 (50%)	9 (16%)	41 (16%)	117 (27%)
Total polygamous marriages, less Smith, Kimball, Young	0	3	25	9	19	47	214	317

Joseph Smith's marriage arrangements had been distinctive. He married approximately forty-three women, but his plural wives usually lived apart in separate households or, in the case of working girls in the Smith home, were soon forced by Emma to leave. Emma's opposition to Joseph's plural wives, and perhaps his regard for them as one-time participants in a brief relationship (albeit followed by eternal marriage), may account for this unusual pattern. His followers, on the other hand, tended to marry fewer wives and formed more coherent families. Twenty-one of the thirty polygamous families during Joseph Smith's time contained just two wives, four men had three, John D. Lee, Hyrum Smith, and Theodore Turley had four, and Brigham Young had five wives. As the number of polygamous families increased from thirty to 153 in the later Nauvoo period following Smith's death, so did the number of wives per typical family, from an average of 2.5 (3.8 if Joseph Smith's forty-three wives are included) in the early period when Smith was alive, to 3.1 for the whole Nauvoo period (3.8 including Smith's forty-three, Brigham Young's forty, and Heber C. Kim ball's thirty-seven). Ultimately, there were seventy-six Nauvoo families with two wives, forty-two families had three wives; ten families each had four and five wives; twelve families had six-to-eleven wives; and one family each, the cumulative households of Kimball, Young, and Smith, had thirty-seven, forty, and forty-three wives.[104]

Frequency of Polygamous Households by Number of Marriages 

A. During Joseph Smith's Lifetime 

	Number of Wives	Polygamous Families	Marriages	Average Wives Per Family
	43	1	43
	5	1	5
	4	3	12
	3	4	12
	2	21	42
Total		30	114	3.8
Excluding Joseph Smith		29	71	2.5

B. During Entire Nauvoo Period Per Poly 

	Number of Wives	Per Polygamous Families	Marriages	Average Wives Per Family
	43 (Smith)	1	43
	40 (Young)	1	40
	37 (Kimball)	1	37
	11	1	11
	10	2	20
	9	1	9
	8	4	32
	7	3	21
	6	1	6
	5	10	50
	4	10	40
	3	42	126
	2	76	152
Total		153	587	3.8
Excluding Smith, Young, Kimball		150	467	3.1

During the years after the westward migration, considering post Nauvoo children of Nauvoo wives and later wives of these Nauvoo families and their children, the 153 families that began practicing plural marriage in Nauvoo eventually accounted for a total of 971 wives and 2,790 children, a mean incidence of 6.3 wives and 18.2 children per each family. Excluding the large families of Smith, Young, and Kimball, the ultimate size of these Nauvoo families averaged 5.7 wives and 17.8 children per household. After the Nauvoo polygamists reached the Great Salt Lake, the proportion of Nauvoo families that had two wives declined from seventy six to sixteen; thirty-three families each had three wives; 91 families had from four to ten wives; and one to four families each had eleven to nineteen wives.

Nauvoo Polygamous Families 

	During Joseph Smith’s Life	Total Nauvoo Period	Eventual Nauvoo Families in West
Husbands	30	153	153
Wives	114	587	971
Children	131	734	2,790
Total Persons	275	1,474	3,914

Legacy of Nauvoo Plural Marriage 

These preliminary demographic observations indicate that the practice of plural marriage, which Joseph Smith initiated among thirty families, more than quintupled in total number of participants—husbands, wives, and children—about 10 percent of the Mormon community by the end of the Nauvoo period in 1846. Afterward, these polygamous Nauvoo families nearly tripled in size from the end of the Nauvoo period to the later Salt Lake period. It is clear from these data that Nauvoo provided the model and impetus for the later practice of polygamy in the west. These Nauvoo roots of Mormon polygamy eventually encompassed thousands of people, and the practice expanded in Utah territory to include tens of thousands of men, women, and children, involving over half of the population of some Mormon communities.[105] 

The discovery and rejection of this relatively unknown doctrine by a vocal minority seems to have been one of the primary factors leading to Joseph Smith's death. One historian concludes: "Joseph Smith's belief in, preaching about and practice of plural marriage must be considered as one of the factors precipitating the martyrdom."[106]

Rejection of plural marriage was also one of the elements dividing the church after Smith's death. Until recently the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS) never wholly accepted the idea that Smith practiced polygamy. Early RLDS leaders believed that Smith, in the last weeks before his death, told several people that his plural marriage revelation had been a mistake: "We are a ruined people. This doctrine of polygamy, or spiritual wife system, that has been taught and practiced among us, will prove our destruction and overthrow. I have been deceived . . . it is wrong; it is a curse to mankind, and we shall have to leave the United States soon, unless it can be put down."[107] After Smith was killed, Brigham Young pushed completion of the Nauvoo temple and accelerated plural marriages, and, indeed, the Mormons were soon compelled to leave the United States for Mexico, which then included the Great Salt Lake Valley. Later, when polygamy was outlawed as a condition for statehood, Mormons who wanted to maintain their polygamous families again had to flee to Mexico (now below the Rio Grande), where remnants of these expatriate colonies still exist. Many polygamists who persisted in their belief in the divine sanction of their practice remained in the United States. Reported to number in the tens of thousands, these "Fundamentalist" Mormons have endured years of government prosecution—and official LDS censure. 

What do LDS people today think about polygamy in the early Nauvoo church? Since that period was enshrouded with secrecy and denials, and the practice was not announced until 1852 from a new home in the Great Salt Lake Valley, Nauvoo polygamy has remained a mystery. The prophet's mother concluded that Joseph Smith taught plural marriage but that we have no knowledge that anyone practiced it until the later Salt Lake period under Brigham Young.[108] Not even the relationship between Nau voo polygamy and the internal Mormon dissent which led to the prophet's arrest and assassination is clearly recognized. Latter-day Saints tend to identify reports of Nauvoo polygamy with anti-Mormon propaganda, which is considered to be based on unfounded rumors of Joseph Smith's illicit marriages. The community of 153 polygamous husbands, 587 plural wives, and 734 children has remained beneath the horizon of perception. 

Yet these 153 families, which would themselves grow to include nearly 4,000 people after the westward migration, provided the model for the approximately 50,000 who would eventually be associated with Mormon polygamous families in Utah. Many Latter-day Saints—especially those that have polygamous ancestors—take pride in the faithful men and women who practiced plural marriage long ago. Even though LDS men take just one legal wife today, many devout Mormons still believe in the "principle" and may be sealed to more than one woman for eternity. The Mormon church's present doctrine of celestial marriage—which includes the promise of plural marriage in the afterlife, and the current practice of plural marriage among Fundamentalist Mormons, are the legacies of Joseph Smith's revelation sanctioning Nauvoo polygamy as a "new and everlasting covenant." 

[Editor's Note: For further tables, see PDF below.]

---

[1] Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Mystery Dance: On the Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Summit Books, 1991). An informative study of primate evolution is Kathy D. Schick and Nicholas Toth, Making Silent Stones Speak: Human Evolution and the Dawn of Technology (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993). 

[2] Polygamy has been practiced to some extent in about 80 percent of the 853 cultures on record (Delta Willis, The Hominid Gang [New York: Viking, 1989], 259; G. P. Murdock and D. R. White, Ethnology 8 [1969]: 329-69).

[3] See James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 52, 128, 225, 256, 299, 304, 478-79, 577, 615; Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage, Sexual Practices and the Medieval Church (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1982), 118-28. 

[4] Through the Nauvoo period polygamy was a criminal act under the Illinois 1833 antibigamy laws, which remained unchanged during statute revision in 1845. Polygamy, thus defined, was punishable by fines of $1,000 and two years imprisonment (previously married persons) or $500 and one-year imprisonment (previously single persons) (Revised Laws of Illinois 1833 and Revised Statutes of the State of Illinois 1845, sees. 121, 122, University of Chicago Law Library). 

[5] John Cairncross, After Polygamy was Made a Sin: The Social History of Christian Polygamy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 36-51.

[6] K. Loffler, Die Wiedertaufer zu Munster, 1534-35 (Jena, 1923), 75, in Cairncross, 10.

[7] Loffler, 107, in Cairncross, 7-8. 

[8] Cairncross, 2-30.

[9] Cairncross, 84-93,112-40,153. 

[10] Martin Madan, Thelyphthora; or, a Treatise on Female Ruin . . ., 3 vols. (London: J. Dodsley, 1780-81), cited in B. Carmon Hardy, Solemn Covenant: the Mormon Polygamous Passage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 2, and Cairncross, 157-64. 

[11] "The Cochran Fantasy in York County [Maine]," Anonymous, Aug. 3, 1867, in Maine Historical Quarterly 20 (Summer 1980): 30. 

[12] Letter signed "Enquirer" to the Cleveland Liberalist 1 (Feb. 4,1837): 164, Oberlin College Library.

[13] Resolution in LDS Messenger and Advocate, May 1837,511; action against Freeman in "Elders Quorum Record," Nov. 23, 1837, archives, The Auditorium, Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS), Independence, Missouri, in Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith, 2d. ed., (New York: Knopf, 1971), 185. 

[14] The data on plural marriages cited throughout this essay were derived from various sources: official sealing (marriage) and temple endowment lists (the first men to receive their temple endowments were more likely to have plural families); the list of Mormon pioneers leaving Nauvoo; William Clayton's so-called "temple journals"; census data; family history group sheets; and a variety of letters, diaries, early newspapers, and oral histories. Research was conducted in the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, the Marriott Library at the University of Utah, the Utah State Historical Society, Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Library, and archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Specifically, among the scholarly research that facilitated this study were Susan Ward Easton Black, Membership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1830-1848, vols. 1-50, (Provo, UT: Research Study Center, Brigham Young University, 1984-88); Davis Bitton, Guide to Mormon Diaries and Autobiographies (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1977); Dale Morgan, The Bancroft Research Guide; Brodie, Appendix C; Andrew Jenson, "Plural Marriage," The Historical Record 6 (May 1887): 219-40, hereafter, HR; and especially D. Michael Quinn, personal correspondence, Dec. 6,1991. Further research will undoubtedly generate more accurate data for a few families, but these small differences will not change the following overall demographic portrait of the number and scope of plural marriages in Nauvoo. 

[15] According to Mormon apostle William McLellin, Emma witnessed her husband and Fanny in a "transaction" identified as the "first well authenticated case of polygamy" McLellin to Joseph Smith III, July 8,1872, RLDS archives; Salt Lake Tribune, Oct. 6,1875; Richard S. Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy: A History [Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1986], 5-12). The prophet's scribe, Warren Parrish, said that "he himself and Oliver Cowdery did know that Joseph had Fannie Alger as wife, for they were spied upon together." After Book of Mormon scribe Oliver Cowdery wrote a letter characterizing Joseph's relations with Fanny as a "dirty, nasty, filthy affair," he was excommunicated on charges that included "seeking to destroy the character of President Joseph Smith jr by falsly insinuating that he was guilty of adultry &c." Donald Q. Cannon and Lyndon W. Cook, eds., Far West Record: Minutes of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1830-1844 (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1983), 162-63 (Apr. 12,1844); Joseph Smith et al., History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, ed., B. H. Roberts, 2d ed., rev., 7 vols. (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1963), 3:16, hereafter HC. In 1899 Alger was married by proxy to the deceased prophet, and assistant church historian Andrew Jenson described her as "one of the first plural wives sealed to the Prophet" (HR, 223; Thomas M. Tinney, The Royal Family of the Prophet Joseph Smith, Jr. [Salt Lake City: Green Family Organization, 1973], 41); Heber C. Kimball also referred to Fanny Alger as Smith's first plural wife (recounted by church patriarch Benjamin F. Johnson in a letter to George F. Gibbs, 1903, 10, LDS archives). 

[16] The Book of Mormon prophesies, "the scales of darkness shall begin to fall from their eyes; and many generations shall not pass away among them, save they shall be a white [pure] and delightsome people" (2 Ne. 30:6). A July 17, 1831, revelation (uncanonized) on plural marriage was asserted in W. W. Phelps's August 12,1861, letter to Brigham Young. LDS church president Joseph F. Smith also concluded that the principle of plural marriage must have been revealed to Joseph Smith in 1831 (Deseret News, May 20,1886). In the December 8,1831, Ohio Star, Ezra Booth wrote of a Mormon revelation to form a "matrimonial alliance with the natives" (Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality [New York: Oxford University Press, 1981], 299n28). 

[17] Joseph Smith's own journal contains a contemporary account of a July 12, 1843, plural marriage revelation: "Received a Revelation in the office in presence of Hyrum and W[illia]m Clayton" (Scott H. Faulring, ed. An American Prophet's Record: The Diaries and Journals of Joseph Smith [Salt Lake City: Signature Books in association with Smith Research Associates, 1987], 396). The entry for that date in the official church history confirms 1843 in the first person: "I received the following revelation in the presence of my brother Hyrum and Elder William Clayton," and entitles the text, "Revelation on the Eternity of the Marriage Covenant, including the Plurality of Wives; Given through Joseph, the Seer, in Nauvoo, Hancock County, Illinois, July 12th, 1843" (HC 5:500-501). Clayton also confirms that the revelation occurred in 1843: "I testify again that the revelation on polygamy was given through the prophet Joseph Smith on the 12th of July 1843" (Clayton to Madison M. Scott, Nov. 11,1871, LDS archives).

[18] HC 6:403, 405, 410-11; Van Wagoner, 64; Lyndon Cook, "William Law, Nauvoo Dissenter," Brigham Young University Studies (Winter 1982): 47-72. 

[19] Frances Higbee to Mr. Gregg, May 1844, Nauvoo, Chicago Historical Society.

[20] "William Clayton's Testimony," Feb. 16, 1874, Jenson, 224-26. 

[21] Lucy Walker affidavit in HR, 230. 

[22] Emmeline B. Wells to Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner, Salt Lake City, Mar. 12, 1889, LDS archives. 

[23] Jenson listed Fannie Alger, Louisa Beaman, Lucinda Harris, Zina Huntington, Prescindia Huntington, Eliza Roxcy Snow, Sarah Ann Whitney, Desdemona Fullmer, Helen Mar Whitney, Eliza Partridge, Emily Partridge, and Lucy Walker as Smith's plural marriages prior to the 1843 revelation (HR, 233-34). 

[24] Joseph B. Noble performed the marriage. See Linda K. Newell and Valeen T. Avery, Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith (New York: Doubleday, 1984), 95-96. Noble married his first plural wife exactly two years later, on April 5,1843. 

[25] Andrew Jenson identified twenty-seven of Smith's wives (HR, 233-34), Fawn Brodie identified forty-nine (Brodie, 335-36, 457-88). 

[26] Newell and Avery, 147. 

[27] Elizabeth Durfee had the "duty to instruct the younger women in the mysteries of polygamy" (Joseph H. Jackson, A Narrative of the Adventures and Experiences of Joseph H. Jackson [Warsaw, IL, 1844], 14, in Brodie, 305).

[28] George D. Smith, ed., An Intimate Chronicle: The Journals of William Clayton (Salt Lake City: Signature Books in association with Smith Research Associates, 1991), 100; Newell and Avery, 139. 

[29] Autobiography of Emily Partridge, cited in HR 6:240; Newell and Avery, 138-39.

[30] Van Wagoner, 41-43.

[31] Mary E. Rollins Lightner to Emmeline B. Wells, summer 1905, LDS archives.

[32] Autobiography of Mary Elizabeth Rollins Lightner, quoted in Brodie, 443-444; statement in LDS archives. 

[33] Brodie, 119; Faulring, 396. 

[34] Josephine L. Fisher to Andrew Jenson, Feb. 24,1915. On October 12,1905, Angus M. Cannon confirmed this account to Joseph Smith III, the prophet's son: "It was said by the girl's grandmother that your father has a daughter born of a plural wife. The girl's grandmother was Mother Sessions, who lived in Nauvoo." He added that Aunt Patty Sessions "asserts that the girl was born within the time after your father was said to have taken the mother." Cited in Van Wagoner, 48n3. 

[35] Mary Ettie V. Smith, Fifteen Years Among the Mormons, 2d. ed. (New York, 1859), 34; see Brodie, 301-302, 437-39, and photograph of Oliver Buell showing his likeness to Joseph Smith, 306ff. 

[36] Besides Josephine Fisher (b. Feb. 8, 1844) and Oliver Buell, named as possible children of Joseph Smith by his plural wives are John R. Hancock (b. Apr. 19, 1841), George A. Lightner (b. Mar. 12,1842), Orson W. Hyde (b. Nov. 9,1843), Frank H. Hyde (b. Jan 23, 1845), Moroni Pratt (b. Dec. 7, 1844), and Zebulon Jacobs (b. Jan 2, 1842). See Brodie, 345; Van Wagoner, 44, 48-49n3. 

[37] Emily D. P. Young, "Autobiographical Sketch," quoted in Van Wagoner, 230. After Smith died, Emily became the wife of Brigham Young and by him bore a son whom she later carried across the Mississippi on her way to Winter Quarters. She later wrote: "While in Nauvoo I had kept my child secreted and but few knew I had one. But after I started on my journey it became publicly known and some have told me, years after that he was the handsomest child they ever saw. One woman told me she thought he was the smartest spiritual child she had ever seen. I said dont you think they are as smart as other children. She said no she did not think they were. There was a good deal of that spirit at that time and sometimes it was very oppressive" ("Incidents of the Early Life of Emily Dow Partridge," typescript, Western Americana, Marriott Library). 

[38] HR, 6:219-40; Van Wagoner, 61, 77, 79, 85; Foster, 139-80. George A. Smith estimated that prior to Joseph Smith's July 12, 1843, revelation on plural marriage only "one or two hundred persons" in Nauvoo knew that LDS leaders privately taught and practiced polygamy (Journal of Discourses, 26 vols., [London: Latter-day Saint's Book Depot, 1854-86], 14:213), hereafter, JD. 

[39] "William Clayton's Testimony," HR, 224-26.

[40] Clayton letterbooks, Nov. 7,1869, Marriott Library. 

[41] Joseph Smith to John Taylor in Nauvoo, between Mar. 1842 and Feb. 1846, Mary Isabella Hales Home, Autobiography, 10-11, Utah State Historical Society, hereafter USHS.

[42] "William Law," 66. Law was aware of the "doctrine .. . of Plurality and Community of wives" at least by January 1, 1844 (William Law Diary, 1844, copy in private possession). 

[43] William Law Diary, June 7, 1844. 

[44] The Nauvoo Expositor is available at some libraries, such as the New York Public Library, and at LDS archives. Similar penalty oaths were sworn to participants in Mormon temple ceremonies (see Jerald and Sandra Tanner, Evolution of the Mormon Temple Ceremony: 1842-1990 [Salt Lake City: Utah Lighthouse Ministry, 1990], 16-22).

[45] William Law to Isaac Hale, Nauvoo, Illinois, July 20, 1844, LDS archives.

[46] William Law Diary, June 27, 1844. The memory of Law's estrangement to Smith is preserved today in the restoration of historic Nauvoo where the foundations of Law's unrestored house remain visible in the grass across the street from Smith's "Red Brick Store," in which some of the plural marriage ceremonies took place.

[47] JD (May 6, 1877), 18:361. 

[48] Thomas Ford, History of Illinois, 2 vols. (Chicago: S. C. Griggs, 1854), 2:166-76. Ford listed the following causes of antagonism toward the Mormons: Mormon violations of freedom of the press, their religious views, polygamy, their military strength, rumors of their intent to destroy the Warsaw Sentinel, Mormon alliance with Indians, Joseph Smith being crowned "king," revival of Danite vigilante bands, Mormon assertions that God had consecrated all their neighbors' property to the Saints, and their bloc voting (Mormon approval required for election). 

[49] Several studies rely on Danel Bachman's "Not Lawful to Utter—An Examination of Historical Evidence for the Mormon Practice of Polygamy Before June 27,1844," Aug. 1971, privately circulated. Bachman refers to Fawn Brodie's landmark research of diaries, letters, and affidavits which demonstrate the extent of Smith's plural marriages in Appendix C of No Man Knows My History. Each of these studies in turn rely on Jenson's "Plural Marriage." 

Lawrence Foster's Religion and Sexuality is rich in anecdotal description of Smith's polygamy but only mentions that "most Mormon leaders had taken at most two to three additional wives," citing D. Michael Quinn's Yale University Ph.D. dissertation, "The Mormon Hierarchy, 1832-1932: An American Elite," 1976. James B. Allen and Glen M. Leonard, The Story of the Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1976), mention polygamy in the 1830s, Smith's first recorded plural marriage in 1841, his teachings to close associates, and their being "sealed" to additional wives. However, they do not say anyone actually practiced polygamy: It is "not clear whether Joseph Smith lived as husband with any of his plural wives" (171). 

Donna Hill, Joseph Smith: The First Mormon (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977), only goes so far as to say that Smith had taken several plural wives by 1842 and that he taught his most loyal friends. The Mormon dissent, which got Smith charged with adultery and polygamy, is described in detail. Leonard Arrington and Davis Bitton, The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints (New York: Knopf, 1979), mention polygamy in the 1830s and that Smith "had formed several plural relationships before the 1843 revelation," and recognized that he "may have sired in polygamy several children whose identities were obscured by their being raised under other surnames" (197). Polygamy is described as a "clandestine arrangement, limited to the prophet and two to three dozen of the leading men and the wives," but few are actually mentioned (199). The reformists are seen as a "small group of Mormon dissidents" who published "inflammatory allegations about the sex lives of Mormon leaders" (77-78). 

Jessie L. Embry, Mormon Polygamous Families: Life in the Principle (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987), does connect Smith's destruction of the Nauvoo Expositor, a dissident, anti-polygamous press, with his arrest and martyrdom. Although "many of the other church leaders eventually married additional wives," (6) no Nauvoo marriages are included in her calculations, which begin in 1852. 

Richard S. Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy, relates evidence that many of Joseph Smith's secret plural wives ignited internal opposition to polygamy, which led to the prophet's arrest and death. But the story then moves quickly to the public announcement of polygamy in 1852 and its practice in Utah. Although the author is aware that "church leaders were secretly practicing polygamy long before it was publicly admitted," he does not address the scope of over 150 polygamous husbands and 585 plural wives who were involved in the secret practice in Nauvoo that would later include about 970 wives and nearly 2,800 children as part of these original Nauvoo polygamous families. 

[50] Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 4 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1991). The "History of the Church" (#612) and "Social and Cultural History" (#1378) entries omit mention of actual practice of polygamy; "Plural Marriage" (#1091) and "Joseph Smith" (#1337) entries make limited mention of polygamy but refrain from discussing the extent of the practice, especially in Nauvoo.

[51] Rich, Autobiography, 66-67, LDS archives. 

[52] Bathsheba Smith, Autobiography, 13, Special Collections, Marriott Library.

[53] Jane Snyder Richards, "The Inner Facts of Social Life in Utah," 1880,15, Bancroft Library. 

[54] Adelia Kimball, Memoirs, 17, USHS. 

[55] Emily Dow Partridge Young, "Incidents."

[56] Prescindia Lathrop Huntington Smith Kimball, Autobiographical Sketch, Apr. 1, 1881, LDS archives. 

[57] Caroline Rogers Daniels, "Autobiography," in Bitton, 328. 

[58] Adelia Kimball, 17, USHS. 

[59] Bathsheba Smith, 13. 

[60] Sarah S. Leavitt, Autobiography, 22-23, Special Collections, Marriott Library.

[61] Mercy Rachel Fielding Thompson Smith, Autobiography, n.d., LDS archives.

[62] Eliza Maria Partridge Lyman, "Life and Journal of Eliza Maria Partridge Lyman," 1877, 13, Marriott Library. 

[63] Rich, 68. 

[64] Jane Snyder Richards, "Reminiscences," 1880,19, Bancroft Library.

[65] Home, 22. 

[66] Lucy Walker Smith Kimball, Autobiographical Statement, 6-7, Bancroft Library.

[67] Home, 22. 

[68] Lucy Walker Smith Kimball, 8. 

[69] Mary Ellen Kimball, Journal, n.d., LDS archives. 

[70] "Nauvoo Temple Record," Dec. 21, 1845, in George D. Smith, An Intimate Chronicle, 222. 

[71] William Clayton diary, Dec. 21,1845, in Smith, 227. 

[72] Ibid., Dec. 21,1845, 225-26. 

[73] Ibid., 225. 

[74] Ibid., Dec. 28,1845, 239.

[75] Martha Spence Heywood diary, 74, USHS. 

[76] Joseph Fielding journal (1832-59), 178, LDS archives; see also Bitton, 106-107.

[77] Patty Sessions, Journal, 61, 63, USHS. 

[78] Victoria Hancock Jackson journal, in Bitton, 172. 

[79] Judith R. Dushku and Patricia R. Gadsby, "'I Have Risen Triumphant': A Personal View of Emmeline B. Wells," ca. 1977,12, USHS. 

[80] Adelia Kimball, 15,17. 

[81] Jane Snyder Richards, "Inner Facts," 2. 

[82] Emily M. Austin, Autobiography, in Bitton, 15. 

[83] Ronald W. Walker, "The Continuing Legacy of the Feminine Ideal," Dialogue: A journal of Mormon Thought 15 (Autumn 1982): 109. A decade later in Salt Lake City at age thirty-two, Rachel married the deceased prophet Joseph Smith by proxy and became the seventh wife of Jedediah M. Grant "for time only" (Walker, 111).

[84] Van Wagoner, 29-36, 98-100. 

[85] Ebenezer Robinson, "Items of Personal History of the Editor," The Return (Davis City, IA, 1889-90); Sangamo Journal, Aug. 19, 1842; "The Letter of the Prophet, Joseph Smith to Miss Nancy Rigdon," Joseph Smith Collection, LDS archives; HC 5:134-36. 

[86] After hearing of this denial of plural marriage, Lucy's husband, Apostle George A. Smith, said "Emma knows better." He told of visiting the prophet as he had finished helping Emma deliver the child of one of his plural wives. Finding Joseph "out on the porch with a basin of water washing his hands," George A. "said to him what is up, said Joseph one of my wives has just been confined and Emma was midwife and I have been assisting her. He said she had granied [delivered] a number of women for him. This is word as I had it from brother G. A. Smith." Lucy Meserve Smith statement, n.d., LDS archives. 

[87] Diary of Lucy Walker Kimball, 7. 

[88] Jane Snyder Richards, "Reminiscences," 18. 

[89] Home, 10. 

[90] Joseph Lee Robinson Autobiography and Journal, 24, LDS archives.

[91] "A Sketch of the Life of Nancy Naomi Tracy," n.d., 20, USHS. 

[92] Ebenezer Robinson to Jason W. Briggs, Jan. 28,1880, LDS archives. On December 29,1873, Ebenezer and Angeline Robinson signed an affidavit saying that Hyrum Smith had come to their house in the fall of 1843 to teach them the doctrine of polygamy and that he had been wrong to oppose it.

[93] William Clayton journal, Oct. 19,1843. 

[94] Joseph Smith to Newel K. Whitney family, Aug. 18, 1842, photocopy, George Albert Smith papers, Special Collections, Marriott Library. Joseph had recently married Sarah Ann Whitney on July 27,1842. 

[95] "History of Joseph Kingsbury, Written by His Own Hand, 1846, 1849, 1850," Stanley Snow Ivins Collection, 15:74-76, USHS.

[96] HR, 222; letter, Johnson to Gibbs; Joseph F. Smith, Jr., Blood Atonement and the Origin of Plural Marriage (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1905), 70-71.

[97] As an example of dispersing plural wives to pretend monogamy, Lee noted that "as far as Brigham Young was concerned, he had no wives at his house, except his first wife, or the one that he said was his first wife. Many a night have I gone with him, arm in arm, and guarded him while he spent an hour or two with his young brides, then guarded him home" (John D. Lee, Mormonism Unveiled, or, The Life and Confessions of the Late Mormon Bishop, John D. Lee, ed. W. W. Bishop [St. Louis: Byron, Brand, 1877], chap. 14). 

[98] Eliza Maria Partridge Lyman, 13. 

[99] Jane Snyder Richards, "Reminiscences," 19. 

[100] Jane Snyder Richards, "Inner Facts," 17-18.

[101] James R. Baker, Women's Rights in Old Testament Times (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992), 51,142-43,147,151-53. 

[102] William Clayton journal, Sept. 15,1843.

[103] Orson F. Whitney, The Life of Heber C. Kimball, an Apostle: the Father and Founder of the British Mission (Salt Lake City: Kimball Family, 1888), 436n. Whitney affirms that Kimball was the husband of forty-five wives and father of sixty-five children.

[104] An interesting narrative of William Hickman's ten marriages in Nauvoo is contained in Hope A. Hilton, "Wild Bill" Hickman and the Mormon Frontier (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1988).

[105] By 1880, at the end of Brigham Young's era and before federal raids on polyg amous households, about 33 percent of Mormons in the St. George stake and 67 percent in Orderville, Utah, lived in polygamous families (Lowell "Ben" Bennion, "The Incidence of Mormon Polygamy in 1880: 'Dixie' Versus Davis Stake," Journal of Mormon History 11 [1984]: 27-42). Stanley S. Ivins found that a sample of 1,651 families in Utah produced an average of fifteen children per family. He also found that of 1,784 polygamists, 66 percent married one extra wife, 21 percent married three wives, nearly 7 percent four wives, and 6 percent five or more wives. Applying these ratios to an 1890 census of 2,451 plural families, we arrive at an estimate of 45,416 persons involved in polygamy. 

2,451 families	x 66%	x 2	= 3,235 wives	2,451 Husbands
	x 21%	x 3	= 1,544	6,200 Wives
	x 7%	x 4	= 686	36,765 children
	x 6%	x 5	= 735	45,416 Total
	100%		6,200 wives

See Ivins's "Notes on Mormon Polygamy," Utah Historical Quarterly 35 (Fall 1967): 311,313-14, 318. Current research into this subject may produce more definitive statistics which are' beyond the scope of this essay. 

[106] Bachman, "Not Lawful to Utter," 45.

[107] Recalled by William Marks in a letter to Zion's Harbinger and Beneemy's Organ, July 1853. Though the Council of the Twelve rejected it, Marks's account did fit the outcome of plural marriage in Nauvoo. 

[108] Lucy Mack Smith, preliminary manuscript of biography of Joseph Smith, 1845.

[post_title] => Nauvoo Roots of Mormon Polygamy, 1841-46: A Preliminary Demographic Report [post_excerpt] => Dialogue 27.1(Spring 1994): 1–72
Smith discusses the importance of plural marriage in Nauvoo to church history. He shows that after Joseph Smith passed away, Nauvoo polygamy numbers rose. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => nauvoo-roots-of-mormon-polygamy-1841-46-a-preliminary-demographic-report-2 [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-03-16 14:36:30 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-03-16 14:36:30 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.dialoguejournal.com/?post_type=dj_articles&p=11702 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => dj_articles [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) 1

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 11823 [post_author] => 2297 [post_date] => 2018-04-11 03:10:12 [post_date_gmt] => 2018-04-11 03:10:12 [post_content] =>

This essay examines how common the practice of polygamy was in the Salt Lake Valley in 1860. We use census data, Ancestral File information, and data from family histories and biographies to estimate the number of women who were plural wives and the typical living arrangements for these women. We also ask if any differences existed based on ward characteristics. Three LDS wards are examined, the Thirteenth Ward (a well-to-do ward whose members formed the elite of Mormonism), the Twentieth Ward (a moderate income ward whose members were almost all immigrants), and the Mill Creek Ward[1] (which covered the rural area of the valley and where members lived in farming households). 

Estimates of the number of women and men who actually practiced polygamy in nineteenth-century Utah are plentiful.[2] But most available research is based on non-random samples or data from the 1880s, a period of great turmoil for Latter-day Saints and at least three decades after polygamy was openly practiced in the west.[3]

Our interest in estimating the number of women in plural marriages in 1860 is primarily sociological. Contemporary scholars have wondered why women participated in a practice so apparently contrary to their own best interests. Certainly religious doctrine and devotion to "building the Kingdom" encouraged devout Mormon women to enter into "the principle." But we suspect that one reason a woman could decide to become a plural wife was simply that it was a common practice. The principle had been introduced and practiced among the elite leaders of the church, and as the practice became more open, participation provided a measure of status and prestige within the religious community. 

Religious groups exert pressure on individuals to conform to normative expectations in many ways. For example, negative sanctions discourage deviance. But individuals are also encouraged to adhere to the normative expectations of the group in positive ways. For example, devout members provide a model of appropriate behaviors for true believers. Thus the degree of conformity to religious expectations by elite group members encourages both newcomers and those striving to be "good" followers to meet the same expectations. 

Social pressures to carry out religious expectations can be powerful despite a low level of observance in the general population. The contemporary LDS church setting provides some useful examples. The church encourages all young men to serve as missionaries, but in reality many do not. Typically only one in three young men actually serves as a missionary.[4] In addition, couples are strongly encouraged to marry in the temple. But the number of temple-married households in the U.S. is relatively small—less than one in three of all households, and only 45 percent of married-couple households.[5] Despite low levels of observance, these normative expectations define not only the boundaries of the religious group (e.g., membership) but also distinguish the core adherents from those on the periphery (e.g., active versus inactive). Furthermore, adherence to religious principles not only assures salvation but offers an individual a certain degree of status and prestige within the religious group. 

Both Vicky Burgess-Olson[6] and Jessie Embry have examined the reasons why women entered plural marriage. Burgess-Olson noted that (1) dedication to the principle, (2) pressure from a third party, and (3) economic forces were prevalent reasons. She also reported that status was a significant motivation to marry, particularly for young women who became the third or fourth wife of a prominent local leader. Embry examined common folk justifications for the practice of plural marriage and reported a common perception that there was an insufficient number of men. Some informants said the men had been killed in the Black Hawk War or the Spanish-American War. This is historically inaccurate since there were few Mormons killed in either war. Others said there simply were not enough "good" men for all the "good" women. An imbalance in the male-female ratio has not been substantiated by census data. On the contrary, some have argued that there was a shortage of women. 

To anyone living in a society where monogamy is the acceptable form of marriage, the choice to enter into a plural marriage seems particularly strange. However, making such a choice becomes more understandable when one considers how common the practice may have been—as common as missionary service or temple marriage in the contemporary LDS church. 

Polygamy and Religious Practice 

In August 1852, Apostle Orson Pratt spoke boldly to all members of the church at general conference about the importance of living under the new marriage covenant that many leaders of the church had been practicing for ten or more years. Pratt warned the congregation that those who did not take hold of the practice would face dire consequences: "Now, let us enquire, what will become of those who have this law taught unto them in plainness, if they reject it? [A voice in the stand, "they will be damned."] I will tell you: they will be damned, saith the Lord God Almighty, in the revelation He has given."[7]

The development of Mormon covenant making through the Nauvoo, Illinois, period is described fully by anthropologist Rex Cooper.[8] The patriarchal order established by the end of the Nauvoo period emphasized the importance of creating family kingdoms presided over by male priesthood holders. The form of these family kingdoms changed over time, but by 1860 plural marriage was a principle which committed Mormons were expected to live.[9] Two significant events occurred in the mid-1850s that encouraged the spread of polygamy among those who had gathered in the Salt Lake Valley. First, the Endowment House was completed in 1855. The ceremonies in which polygamous marriages were created and other religious rituals were performed in the Endowment House, a temporary substitute until a temple could be built. While such marriage ceremonies took place even before the Endowment House was built, the existence of a building specifically for such purposes helped to institutionalize, legitimize, and encourage the practice.[10] 

Second, a vigorous reformation occurred within the church during 1856-57. Members were encouraged to purify and to rededicate themselves to living all the principles of the gospel, including polygamy. Stanley Ivins documents that there were "sixty-five percent more [polygamous] marriages during 1856 and 1857 than in any other two years . . ."[11] This dramatic increase was likely a function of the increased emphasis on plural marriage. 

Despite available scholarship, folk traditions live on in contemporary society which dictate specific images of polygamy. One view (encouraged by the non-Mormon media at the turn of the century) emphasized that Mormon men married many wives who were treated only a little better than cattle, lived in constant strife with the other wives, were subject to their husband's every whim, and were generally impoverished.[12] The other view (held by many Mormons and influenced by official church reports and statements) claimed that each man had only a few wives, that only the well educated and elite Mormon leadership participated in polygamy, and that Mormon women and men were highly virtuous. 

Various estimates of participation in plural marriage exist. An 1885 statement from John Taylor and George Q. Cannon reported, "As to the male members of our Church who practice plural marriage are estimated as not exceeding; but little, if any, two per cent, of the entire membership of the Church..."[13] Another report stated that "It has been estimated that out of a community of about 200,000 people, more or less, from 10,000 to 12,000 are identified with polygamy."[14]

William E. Berrett concluded that "plural marriage was never at any time a general law for the entire church, and was never at any time practiced by over two percent of the adult male population."[15] Ivins quoted an official statement by the Mormon church that "The practice of plural marriage has never been general in the Church and at no time have more than three percent of families in the Church been polygamous." But his own estimate is higher. Using the biographies of prominent Utahns and the history of Sanpete and Emery counties, he estimated between 15 and 20 percent of families were polygamous and approximately 13 percent of men.[16] Leonard Arrington and Davis Bitton also estimated female involvement: 

Based on the best information now available, we estimate that no more than 5 percent of married Mormon men had more than one wife; and since the great majority of these had only two wives, it is reasonable to suppose that about 12 percent of Mormon married women were involved in the principle. . . . These are generally figures for the period from about 1850 to 1890.[17]

We find two problems with these estimates. First, the impact of polygamy on nineteenth-century Mormonism has been generally trivialized. For example, James Allen and Glen Leonard claimed that plural marriage "played a relatively small role in the total life of most Mormon communities. Most Saints accepted the principle but did not practice it. It was not only a complicated social problem, but also a heavy economic burden, especially in times of persecution. . . . 'the principle/ as it was called, was something many avoided."[18] They also underestimated the prevalence of polygamy: "Exactly how many people married into plural marriages is impossible to determine, but probably between 10 and 15 percent of the families in pioneer Utah were involved."[19] 

Second, the various attempts to estimate the numbers involved in polygamy use a different statistical base. John Taylor's "2 percent" is based on the entire membership of the church, which includes not only women and children, but church members not living in the Utah territories. Berrett uses the 2 percent but interprets it as 2 percent of adult males. Ivins quotes 3 percent, but it is 3 percent of families, rather than 3 percent of the membership. Other estimates use the entire membership of the church as the base but include anyone "identified" with polygamy—adult men and women as well as children in polygamous households. 

This same ambiguity exists in the more recent research on polygamy rates. Lowell Bennion estimated the polygamy rate for different Utah communities and concludes that "at least one-fifth of all Mormons lived in plural homes in 1880."[20] Larry Logue offered a more precise measurement of polygamous status as a percent of "eligible person years," estimating that 31 percent of husband person years, 62 percent of wife person years, and 57 percent of the children person years in St. George between 1861-80 were po lygamous.[21] Another estimate is provided by Bean et. al. who recently examined the fertility patterns of nineteenth-century Utah women and estimates the rate of polygamy as well. Using data amassed as part of the LDS church's family-group sheet program, Bean et. al. created a marriage classification for all women who were born between 1800 and 1899 and lived in Utah. Records for about 86,000 women reveal an overall rate of only 9 percent married to a polygamous husband. However, the data indicate that between 27 and 31 percent of women born 1830 through 1844 were married to a polygamous husband during their lifetime. These women would have been of marriageable age between 1848 and 1862, the time period when women in the 1860 census would have been entering into plural marriage.[22]

Our own examination of polygamy presents a different statistical approach. First, along with Bean et. al., we focus on women and their experience with polygamy. Examining the percent of men who enter into plural marriage provides useful information but underestimates the impact of the practice on the total population—especially for women and children. Furthermore, having identified the numbers of women in plural marriage we can then examine how many lived by themselves as head of house, lived with another wife, or with many wives. Second, we take a snapshot in time. We look at how many women were married at the time of the 1860 census and how many of those were in plural marriages at that time. We also estimate how many eventually became plural wives. 

By 1860 polygamy had been openly practiced and encouraged for almost a decade. Laws prohibiting plural marriage in U.S. territories had not yet been passed. By selecting the 1860 census, we not only capture polygamy at an early date but also at its highest peak (as suggested by the Bean et. al. data). We also are able to limit the amount of record matching required since the population of Salt Lake City in 1860 is relatively small. There were 8,191 people living in 1,496 households in Salt Lake City. Perhaps one reason the 1860 census has never been used to estimate the number living in polygamy is that marital status is not specified. Therefore, in order to estimate the numbers living in polygamy, we must pay careful attention to which individuals exist in the household and then match that information with marriage records from other sources. 

By 1860 church members had been divided into twenty geographically defined wards. These wards represented different ethnic and economic configurations of the population. By selecting different geographic areas of the city for record selection and matching, we are able to identify (1) whether the practice of plural marriage was higher in wards containing the "elite" families of Mormondom, (2) whether the practice was lower in wards with a high percentage of immigrants, (3) whether the practice was higher in rural areas of the valley, and (4) whether economic factors seemed to have an influence on the extent of plural marriage in a ward. 

Methodology 

We selected three wards from the Salt Lake Valley—two within the city and one just outside the city. Ward selection was based on three criteria: urban versus rural, immigrant versus American-born, and the socioeconomic status of the members. Selection was based in part on data provided in Larry Draper's demographic analysis of the twenty Salt Lake wards existing between 1850 and 1870.[23]

The Thirteenth Ward was a well established ward bounded on the east by Third East and on the west by State Street, and on the north and south by South Temple and by Third South. Some of the most prominent families of the LDS church resided in the Thirteenth Ward, including the Erastus Snow, Phinias Young, George Goddard, and Daniel H. Wells households.[24] According to Draper, the Thirteenth Ward was the second largest in 1860, comprising 142 households and accounting for 9.5 percent of the total population of Salt Lake City. Draper also notes that there were only 35.2 percent foreign-born members in this ward. He ranked it second in terms of wealth, with the average head of household owning $1,672 of real wealth. 

By comparison, the Twentieth Ward was a relatively new, medium sized ward. It comprised 58 households and represented 3.9 percent of the 1860 population. It was not organized until 1857 and was located on Plat D, which is now "the Avenues" of Salt Lake City. Referred to as "the dry bench" because it lacked water, residents were of average income (the ward ranked eleventh out of twenty in terms of wealth); the average head of house owned $958 of real wealth. This ward had the highest number of foreign-born (94.8 percent). By 1870, the Twentieth Ward was not only the wealthiest in the valley, but also the largest ward.[25]

We also selected the Mill Creek Ward—the only ward organized outside of Salt Lake City in 1849.[26] The original ward boundaries stretched from 2100 South to Cottonwood Creek and what is now 4800 South. On the west and east, its boundaries were the Jordan River and the Wasatch mountains. Two-thirds of Mill Creek Ward residents were foreign born. We have no comparable wealth figures for this ward.

Data were first obtained from the census records. In order to be as comprehensive as possible, all adults ages eighteen and above living within the ward boundaries were identified, whether or not they appeared on the official rolls of the church. Initially, we also noted the names of young women under the age of eighteen in case they might have already married. However, we found none of these women to be wives and therefore have restricted the sample to eighteen and above. 

Having collected the data from the 1860 census, we supplemented the material primarily with Ancestral File information. We also accessed biographies and family histories which provided additional information where needed. In order to tabulate polygamy rates, we created the following three marital status categories: 

1. Women in polygamous marriages. All women who were clearly in a polygamous marriage in 1860 were included in this group. For the majority of these women, we have concrete data from the LDS Ancestral File showing the birth, death, and marriage dates. For a small number of women, we found data suggesting their husbands had more than one wife, but because of inadequate marriage and/ or death dates we were unable to verify if there had been an overlap in the marriages. If we could find no evidence indicating the marriages had been sequential rather than concurrent, we classified the woman as a plural wife. We also include women in this category if the census reported more than one woman in the same household with the same surname and available information on the husband's family indicated that the women were not related in some other way (e.g., sister or sister-in-law). Given our experience in matching records, we believe these women were most likely plural wives. 

2. Women in monogamous marriages. All women whose Ancestral File information indicated they were the only wife of their husband in 1860 were included in this category. Also included were all women who appeared monogamous according to the census—there was only one man and one woman in the household. We assumed this was the only marriage at the time since we could find no evidence of other wives. However, it is likely that for some of these women there were other plural wives living in other households in other wards. 

3. Apparently unmarried or widowed women. Women who were either never married or widowed, or women for whom we could find no information, were included in this category. These women were listed as either head of house or were living in a household with others but did not share the surname of the male head of house. When the woman shared the same surname of the male head of house but was at least twenty years his senior, we categorized the woman as a widow. 

We believe this classification system produces a conservative estimate of the number of women living as plural wives. 

Findings 

Using data from the census, we find significant differences among the wards on a variety of variables (see Table 1). Men in the Twentieth Ward were predominantly craftsmen or skilled laborers. Men in the Mill Creek Ward were predominantly farmers or farm laborers, while men in the Thirteenth Ward were primarily businessmen, merchants, and skilled laborers. 

Table 1: Ward Comparisons, 1860

	13th	20th	Mill Creek
Occupation	7%	7%	0%
Professional	26	11	0
Business/merchant	28	54	12
Craftsman/skilled laborer	20	28	34
Unskilled laborer	19	0	55
Farmer	(N=188)	(N=54)	(N=191)
Foreign-born	44%	94%	67%
Male	39	94	64
Female	49	91	70
Male-to-female ratio	(N=473)	(N=132)	(N=410)
Males	49% (231)	41% (54)	49% (197)
Females	51% (242)	59% (78)	51% (213)
Average age (in years)	(N=473)	(N=132)	(N=410)
Male	35	38	36
Female	34	32	35

The male/ female ratio among adults was fairly even in the Thirteenth and Mill Creek wards; however, in the Twentieth Ward only 41 percent of the adult population were men. We also found that the ages of men and women were more balanced in the Thirteenth and Mill Creek wards (about 35 years of age), while men were somewhat older than women (38 years old compared to 32 years old) in the Twentieth Ward. 

Table 2: Marital Status for Women in 1860 Census by Ward

	13th		20th		Mill Creek		Total
	N	%	N	%	N	%	N	%
Polygamous Marriage	103	43	28	35	106	50	237	44
Monogamous Marriage	81	33	35	44	75	35	191	36
Not married	57	24	16	20	33	15	106	20
Total	241	100	79	100	214	100	534	100

Table 2 presents data on marital status for women living in the three wards. Overall, we found the greatest number of women were in a polygamous marriage, more than four in ten. A little more than one-third of women were in a monogamous marriage, and 20 percent of women were not currently married. Women living in the Mill Creek Ward were most likely to be in polygamous marriages (50 percent) and least likely to be unmarried (only 15 percent). As shown in Table 3, the majority of unmarried women in Mill Creek were over 50 years of age (55 percent). By comparison, women in the Twentieth Ward were least likely to be in a polygamous marriage (35 percent), and if unmarried (20 percent) they were mostly under thirty years of age (56 percent). More than one in four women in the Thirteenth Ward were in a polygamous marriage. There were slightly more unmarried women (about one in four) in this ward, and unmarried women were also comparatively younger (42 percent under the age of 30). These women may have been temporary guests or perhaps unidentified domestics. We found no information suggesting they were married at the time or eventually married the head of house.

Table 3: Age Distribution of Unmarried Women in 1860 Census by Ward

	13th		20th		Mill Creek		Total
	N	%	N	%	N	%	N	%
< 30	24	42	9	56	10	30	43	41
30-49	19	33	3	20	5	15	27	25
50+	14	25	4	25	18	55	36	34
Total	57	100	16	100	33	15	106	100

The above data suggest that unattached women in the rural area of the valley were most likely older (probably widows), while the unmarried women in the urban areas were younger. Urban centers may have been more inviting for the young unmarried woman even in 1860. 

Table 4: Marital Status of Married Women in 1860 Census by Ward

	13th		20th		Mill Creek		Total
	N	%	N	%	N	%	N	%
Polygamous	103	56	28	44	106	59	237	56
Monogamous	76	41	25	40	67	37	168	39
Eventually	5	3	10	16	8	4	23	5
Total	184	100	63	100	181	100	428	100

As seen in Table 4, the highest rate of polygamy among married women is in the farming community of Mill Creek where we found 59 percent of women in a polygamous marriage. The lowest rate of plural marriage for married women in our sample is in the Twentieth Ward (44 percent), the urban ward with the most foreign born and a lower average wealth. However, note also that married women in the Twentieth Ward were more likely to become a plural wife than women in the other wards. Their immigrant status and relatively young age may account for the lower rate of polygamy. In sum, at least three out of five of the married women in these three wards eventually became plural wives. This suggests a much higher rate of plural marriage than estimated in other studies. 

We also examined the living arrangements of women in plural marriages. Folk images picture men married to dozens of women, and plural wives living and maintaining their own households. Ivins's early study estimated "Of 1,784 polygamists, 66.3 percent married only one extra wife. Another 21.2 per cent were three-wife men, and 6.7 percent went as far as to take four wives. This left a small group of less than six per cent who married five or more women." More recently Arrington and Bitton estimate "that no more than 5 percent of married Mormon men had more than one wife; and .. . the great majority of these had only two wives ... "[27]

Table 5: Living Arrangements for Women in Polygamous Marriages, 1860

	13th		20th		Mill Creek		Total
	N	%	N	%	N	%	N	%
Woman head of house (husband not present)	4	4	0	0	12	11	16	7
Only wife in household	22	21	6	21	36	34	64	27
2 wives present	46	45	18	65	33	31	97	41
3 wives present	18	17	0	0	17	16	35	15
4+ wives present	13	13	4	14	8	8	25	10
Total	103		28		106		237

As reported in Table 5, the most common arrangement for plural wives was to live with their husband and one other wife (about four in ten). This arrangement was, however, most common in the Twentieth Ward where more than three out of five women lived with their husband and one other wife. We found that three in ten plural married women in the Thirteenth Ward and one in four of plural married women in the Mill Creek Ward lived in households with two or more other wives. 

We found few plural wives who were heads of house—only 4 percent in the Thirteenth Ward and none in the Twentieth. However, 11 percent of polygamous wives in the Mill Creek Ward were the head of their own household. One reason for this higher number was the many households of Archibald Gardner, a wealthy landowner and mill operator. Gardner had eleven wives, of whom seven lived in the Mill Creek Ward boundaries. One of his wives, Jane Park, age twenty-six, was head of her own household and reported a single twenty-two-year-old male farm laborer living in her home. Two other wives, living in separate dwellings, were mother and daughter. But this arrangement was rare in 1860. We found little support for the image of plural wives living in separate households, visited regularly (or irregularly) by the husband—the living arrangement of Emmeline B. Wells, for example. At most 7 percent of plural married women were living singly in I860, and it was most likely to occur in the farming community of Mill Creek, and only then in wealthy farm households. 

Table 6: Mean Number of Additional Plural Wives for Women in Polygamous Marriages, 1860

	13th		20th		Mill Creek		Total
	N	Mean	N	Mean	N	Mean	N	Mean
Total number of additional wives in same household	99	1.27	28	1.21	102	.81	229	1.06
Total number of additional wives at census	68	2.62	19	1.11	75	2.44	162	2.36
Total number of additional wives in husband’s lifetime	91	3.91	23	2.74	98	3.03	212	3.38

Data in Table 6 demonstrate additional significant differences by ward. We calculated the total number of additional plural wives for each woman married to a polygamous husband. Since missing data are a problem, these numbers may not be as accurate as the rest of our estimates. We feel more confident about the accuracy of identifying which women were married to polygamous husbands than the accuracy of counting how many other wives. However, we did find that women in the Twentieth Ward had the fewest wives in the same household in 1860 (1.21 compared to 1.81 for the Mill Creek Ward and 1.27 for the Thirteenth Ward). However, women in both the Thirteenth and Mill Creek wards were more likely to have other plural wives in other households (2.62 and 2.44 respectively). Over time ward differences decreased. The total number of other plural wives during the husband's lifetime was 3.91 for the women in the Thirteenth Ward, compared to 3.03 for Mill Creek and 2.74 for the Twentieth Ward. Clearly women in the Thirteenth Ward had the most other women married to their husbands. 

These statistics are based on data about all people living in ward boundaries in 1860. No attempt has been made to make comparisons with actual church membership records. The Thirteenth Ward covered a commercial and highly urban area of the city, and there were likely many non-Mormons living within the boundaries. There were at least two hotels within the boundary limits. Given the likelihood of non-Mormon residents, the polygamy rate among Mormons in the Thirteenth Ward is probably actually higher than we have estimated. Taken together, it appears that the polygamy rate is highest in agricultural/farming areas, almost or equally high in well-to-do urban areas, and lower in less well-to-do urban areas populated with recent immigrants. However, we do find that the number of plural wives in the Twentieth Ward increased after 1860, probably as the economic stability of the households increased and the new immigrants had time to settle into Mormon society. 

We found few unmarried women under thirty in the three wards: only 8 percent of the population overall, and only 5 percent in Mill Creek. We also found little evidence that men married widows as plural wives. Rather, these women were more likely to be living with adult sons and daughters. 

We found a number of young men who either were not married or were not living with a spouse. These young men were most prevalent in the Thirteenth Ward where they lived in boarding houses, and in the Mill Creek Ward where they were farm laborers. Remember, the male/female ratio in these two wards was almost equal, and yet there was a high rate of polygamy. In some cases, we found an apparently unmarried man living and working as part of a polygamous household alongside a young polygamous wife of similar age. For example, in the household of Caroline C. Green, age twenty-one, there was a twenty-three year old farm laborer named Richard Ingraham. But Caroline was a plural wife of Cornelius Green, age forty. Young men such as Richard owned no property, had few skills (their occupation was typically listed as unskilled laborer), and were perhaps not able to support a family. 

Conclusion 

These data suggest that the practice of polygamy played a significant role in shaping social relationships and culture in early Utah. Two out of five women and three out of five married women living in these three wards were in polygamous marriages. Data on the number of contemporary LDS women who are temple married is not available, but it is likely that the statistics are similar. The sheer numbers of women who were willing to enter into marriage with a polygamous husband probably encouraged other women to follow in their footsteps. The fact that plural marriage was initially introduced among the leadership of the church helped create an atmosphere of greater acceptability. Perhaps such unions provided a certain amount of status for both husband and wife which served to mitigate the stresses and strains of actually living under "the principle." 

Economic factors also played a significant role. Housing more than one wife, whether in separate residences or in the same residence, must have required a certain level of economic well-being. The fact that we find more plural wives in the same household in the elite wealthy urban ward or the wealthy landed household of Mill Creek than in less well-to-do areas like the Twentieth Ward suggests an economic factor. Women likely examined the costs and benefits of a polygamous marriage. On the other hand, we must not ignore the economic advantage additional wives provided polygamous households, both in urban and rural areas. Each additional person contributed to household production and therefore to the economic stability of the household. Even so, there must have been obvious benefits to considering marriage to a well-established, financially stable, prominent man rather than to a young man with little to offer economically. 

The almost equal sex ratio in the two wards with high polygamy rates suggests that there must have been a number of marriageable young men who had difficulty competing in the marriage market. We found a great disparity between the real estate and personal property values of the male heads of house and the unskilled laborers living in the boarding houses of the Thirteenth Ward or the farm laborers living in households in Mill Creek. 

We can draw only tentative conclusions from these data. More analysis must follow. However, the data seem to suggest that the practice of plural marriage was higher in wards containing the "elite" and wealthy families of Mormondom. The practice of plural marriage was initially lower in the Twentieth Ward where incomes were more moderate and where almost all members were immigrants. However, the total number of women who either were a plural wife or eventually became a plural wife was about equal for all three wards. We found a high rate of plural marriage in the rural area of the valley as well, but the rate was not much greater than in the more wealthy Thirteenth Ward. 

In short, we find a high rate of plural marriage and conclude that such a common practice would encourage more women to enter into plural marriage during the next two decades. We also find, however, that about four in ten married women in these three wards never became a plural wife. We suggest that more attention be given to the differences between women who entered plural marriage and those who did not and what conflicts may have arisen among the women as they made different choices about their role in "the Kingdom." What factors encouraged women to enter plural marriage has been addressed previously. A survey of factors which discouraged women from entering into plural marriage might be even more enlightening.

---

[1] Mill Creek Ward was the appropriate name and spelling for many years. However, by the time the history of the ward was published in pamphlet form, the spelling had changed to Millcreek Ward. 

[2] See Stanley S. Ivins, "Notes on Mormon Polygamy," Western Humanities Review 10 (1956): 229-39; Jessie L. Embry, Mormon Polygamous Families: Life in the Principle (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1987); and Lowell Bennion, "The Incident of Mormon Polygamy in 1880: 'Dixie' versus Davis Stake," Journal of Mormon History 11 (1984).

[3] See Embry.

[4] Darwin L. Thomas, "Letter to the Editor—'Afterwords,'" Brigham Young University Studies 24 (1986): 99-103. 

[5] Kristen L. Goodman and Tim B. Heaton, "LDS Church Members in the U.S. and Canada: A Demographic Profile," AMCAP Journal 12 (1986): 88-107.

[6] Vicky Burgess-Olson, "Family Structure and Dynamics in Early Utah Mormon Families—1847-1885," Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1975.

[7] Orson Pratt, "Celestial Marriage," in Journal of Discourses (Liverpool: F. D. and S. W. Richards, 1854), 1:54, 56. 

[8] Rex E. Cooper, Promises Made to the Fathers: Mormon Covenant Organization (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1990). 

[9] See Embry, 7-9.

[10] Danel Bachman and Ronald K. Esplin, "Plural Marriage/' in Encyclopedia of Mormonism (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1992), 3:1094. 

[11] Ivins, 231. 

[12] Davis Bitton and Gary L. Bunker, "Double Jeopardy: Visual Images of Mormon Women to 1914," Utah Historical Quarterly 46 (1978): 184-202. 

[13] James R. Clark, ed., Messages of the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1833-1964 (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1966), 3:11. 

[14] Ibid., 31. 

[15] William Edwin Berrett, The Restored Church: A Brief History of the Growth and Doctrines for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Desert Book Co., 1953), 250-51.

[16] Ivins, 230. 

[17] Leonard J. Arrington and Davis Bitton, Die Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints (Boston: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1979), 199. 

[18] James B. Allen and Glen M. Leonard, The Story of the Latter-day Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Co., 1976), 278, 279. 

[19] Ibid., 278. 

[20] Bennion, 38.

[21] Larry M. Logue, A Sermon in the Desert: Belief and Behavior in Early St. George, Utah (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988). 

[22] Lee L. Bean, Geraldine P. Mineau, and Douglas L. Anderson, Fertility Change on the American Frontier: Adaptation and Innovation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

[23] Larry Wayne Draper, "A Demographic Examination of Household Heads in Salt Lake City, Utah, 1850-1870," M.A. thesis, Brigham Young University, 1988. 24.

[24] Ronald W. Walker, '"Going to Meeting' in Salt Lake City's Thirteenth Ward, 1849-1881: A Microanalysis," in New Views of Mormon History: A Collection of Essays in Honor of Leonard Arrington, eds. Davis Bitton and Maureen Ursenbach Beecher (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press), 138-61.

[25] Twentieth Ward History, 1856-1979, comp. Ruth J. Martin, archives, Historical Department, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City. 26.

[26] Earl E. Wright, Millcreek Ward, 1849-1956 (Salt Lake City: Millcreek First Ward, 1956).

[27] Arrington and Bitton, 199.

[post_title] => How Common the Principle? Women as Plural Wives in 1860 [post_excerpt] => Dialogue 26.2 (Summer 1993): 139–153
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Despite official denial, the Manifesto of 1890 did not bring an end to LDS church-approved plural marriages. It did, however, inaugurate an era of confusion, ambiguity, and equivocation in the Mormon community. After two generations of bitter struggle and the creation of thousands of plural families, one could hardly expect polygamy to simply disappear. 

The years 1890-1911 were a period of ambiguity. When the federal government granted Utah statehood in 1896, federal laws regulating families gave way to state laws, and such legislation as the Morrill Act (1862), the Poland Act (1874), the Edmunds Act (1882), and the Edmunds-Tucker Act (1887) no longer applied. Although plural marriage was prohibited by both state constitutional and statutory law as a condition for statehood,[1] official enforcement was relaxed. As a result, Mormons once again entered into new officially sanctioned plural marriages, and existing plural families continued to live together. This was especially true during the early presidency of Joseph F. Smith, 1901-18. Plural marriages continued to be solemnized both in Zion and in the Mexican colonies. Moreover, many members of the Quorum of the Twelve during this period were reluctant to grant unqualified support to the 1890 Manifesto, including Apostle Abraham O. Woodruff, a son of the Manifesto's author. This official reluctance lent tacit approval to the hundreds of plural marriages — some two thousand according to the Salt Lake Tribune— solemnized between 1890 and 1904. (I suspect their estimate was far too high, but the Tribune vigorously promoted it.) Historian Tom Alexander noted that "perhaps as high as 15 percent" of stake and ward leaders had entered plural marriages after 1890, "often at the urging of a Church leader" (1986, 62). D. Michael Quinn has estimated that fifty thousand living descendants remain of these marriages (1985, 104; see also Cannon 1978a, 1978b). 

The selection in 1903 of Apostle Reed Smoot as a senator from Utah and the four years of Senate hearings concerning his seating forced Church leaders to again address the polygamy question, a confrontation which resulted in the Second Manifesto of April 1904 (Proceedings 1906; Shipps 1977; Jenson 1971, 178-81). President Joseph F. Smith said, in part, "I hereby announce that all such marriages are prohibited, and if any officer or member of the Church shall assume to solemnize or enter into any such marriage he will be deemed in transgression against the Church and will be liable to be dealt with, according to the rules and regulations thereof, and excommunicated therefrom" (in Clark 1970, 4:84-86). This time the Church meant business. 

In 1911 Apostle John W. Taylor was excommunicated and Apostle Matthias Cowley was disfellowshipped (Jorgensen and Hardy 1980; Collier and Knutson 1987). However, it was during the administration of Heber J. Grant, beginning in 1918, that Church officials made concerted efforts to purge the Church of the most zealous advocates of plural marriage. Among those excommunicated were John W. Woolley, his son Lorin C. Woolley, Israel Barlow, Jr., his son John Yates Barlow, Joseph W. Musser, and others who would later play significant roles in the fundamentalist movement. 

Early Fundamentalist Leaders 

It would be a mistake to dismiss early fundamentalist leaders and sympathizers as a group of crackpots. Certainly LDS apostles John W. Taylor and Matthias Cowley were educated, well-spoken, and thoughtful men. Taylor and Cowley are much respected and embraced by fundamentalists, but both refused to openly join the movement. They remained in the mainline Mormon community, and both were eventually restored to full membership, Taylor some years after his death (see Taylor 1974, 273-79). Other plural marriage holdouts served as stake presidents, bishops, and frequently patriarchs. Often they were from prominent Church families such as the Taylors, Barlows, Mus sers, Johnsons, Woolleys, and others. 

The family of Leroy S. Johnson, who presided in more modern times over a large community of fundamentalists based in Colorado City, Arizona, was fairly typical. He was a son of one of the plural wives of Warren Johnson, called on a mission by Brigham Young to replace John D. Lee as ferrymaster at Lee's Ferry in 1874 (Driggs 1990; Measeles 1981). His brother Price Johnson was convicted of polygamy in Arizona in 1935, one of the first fundamentalists prosecuted in the twentieth century ("Prison" 1935). Within Latter-day Saint society, these men were powerful, respected, relatively well educated (especially in religious matters) and could often claim extensive pedigrees dating back to the time of Joseph Smith. 

Heber J. Grant's Response 

In 1918 President Joseph F. Smith died, and Heber J. Grant became seventh president of the Church, serving longer than any other president except Brigham Young. During his administration, Church membership nearly doubled. At the same time, Church leaders sought to mollify public hostility and garner good will by actively and publicly distancing the Church from polygamy holdouts. Although Grant had been convicted of a polygamy-related offense in 1899 ("Heber" 1899), he was determined to eradicate plural marriage within the Church community. He delivered stern messages denouncing the practice in 1925, 1926, and 1931 (in Clark 1970, 5:242, 249, 292-303). In 1933 his counselor J. Reuben Clark, a relative of the Woolleys, prepared a detailed, legalistic, sixteen-page "Final Manifesto" (Quinn 1983, 179-81; Clark 1970, 5:315-30). The statement, which was read aloud in every congregation in the Church, responded to and denounced fundamentalists, who continued to distribute literature at Temple Square during general conference. 

Shortly thereafter Clark advocated a kind of ecclesiastical "loyalty oath" that suspected fundamentalist sympathizers were required to sign. Those who refused faced excommunication. Individuals had to pledge that they were not themselves practicing or advocating polygamy, or spreading rumors that General Authorities secretly condoned plural marriage in their private circles. Musser published a version of the oath in the March 1936 issue of Truth, a monthly magazine published by fundamentalists beginning in 1935: 

I, the undersigned member of the Millville Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, solemnly declare and affirm that I, without any mental reservation whatever, support the Presidency and Apostles of the church; that I repudiate any intimation that any one of the Presidency or Apostles of the Church is living a double life; that I repudiate those who are falsely accusing them; that I denounce the practice and advocacy of plural marriage as being out of harmony with the declared principles of the Church at the present time; and that I myself am not living in such alleged marriage relationship. 

In 1935 the majority of the small dependent ward at Short Creek in southern Utah was excommunicated for refusing to sign the oath. Leroy Johnson and other future fundamentalist leaders were among them.[2] The loyalty oath apparently backfired. Instead of eradicating fundamentalism, the excommunications only created a core membership around which its leaders could build a more permanent organization. President Clark himself would come to reconsider this approach later in life (Quinn 1983, 184-86). 

Fundamentalists Organize 

In the 1920s many fundamentalists associated themselves with Utah inventor Nathanial Baldwin. Among those working in his Salt Lake City radio factory or serving as officers in his business was defrocked apostle Cowley. Until the business foundered, Baldwin was funda mentalism's most important financial patron (Singer 1979; Bronson 1989). Throughout the 1920s, fundamentalists existed as a loose association of friends and sympathizers from both within and without the official Church. At first they recognized John W. Woolley, an excommunicated Salt Lake Stake patriarch and temple worker, as their spiritual leader. With his death in 1928, his son, Lorin C. Woolley, assumed leadership and in 1929 organized the first priesthood council. He was succeeded in 1934 by J. Leslie Broadbent and in 1935 by John Y. Barlow. Each lived in Salt Lake City but ministered to a following all over the old Mormon Zion. 

Following mass excommunications at Short Creek in 1934 and 1935, Barlow and Joseph W. Musser visited the community. A few years earlier, members of Leroy Johnson's family had moved there from Lee's Ferry, where their polygamous practices had attracted the attention of local authorities (Stegner 1970, 209-26). Gradually Short Creek became both a center of fundamentalism and an experiment in United Order communalism, although other centers continued in Salt Lake City and at other outposts in Canada, Mexico, and throughout the Great Basin. 

In spite of this growth, fundamentalism still lacked the structured hierarchy familiar to most Latter-day Saints. While many fundamentalists looked to the priesthood council for leadership, other "independents" opposed any structure. Truth, edited by Joseph W. Musser (and later his son Guy Musser), served as a unifying force among fundamentalists until it expired in 1956. 

In 1949 John Y. Barlow, the man most fundamentalists recognized as the leader of the priesthood council, died. Joseph W. Musser became the leader of the council even though he had suffered a series of debilitating strokes and was now under the medical care of Rulon Allred, a naturopath and practicing fundamentalist. Musser's advocacy of Allred as his successor and other religious and policy disputes created a rift in the council (Bronson 1989, 202-43; Solomon 1984, 15-30) before Musser died in 1954. Allred emerged as the leader of a Salt Lake City group, which still exists under the leadership of Rulon's brother Owen Allred. Leroy Johnson assumed the leadership of the more traditional United Effort Trust group in Short Creek, now known as Colorado City, on the Utah-Arizona border. When Johnson died in 1986, Rulon Jeffs, a Sandy accountant, succeeded him. 

Criminal Prosecutions 

In 1935 the Utah legislature made unlawful cohabitation, a polygamy-related crime, a felony for the first time. Even in the darkest days of the 1880s, Congress had left the offense a misdemeanor (Driggs 1988a, 1988b, 1990; Firmage and Mangrum 1988; Linford 1965). That same year, Arizona prosecuted a half dozen Short Creek residents, aided by the LDS Church, which had earlier excommunicated them. In a 4 April 1931 conference address, President Heber J. Grant had stated the Church's position concerning prosecution: 

We have been and we are willing to give such legal assistance as we legitimately can in the criminal prosecution of such cases [new polygamy]. We are willing to go to such limits not only because we regard it as our duty as citizens of the country to assist in the enforcement of the law and the suppression of pretended 'plural marriages,' but also because we wish to make our attitude toward this matter so clear, definite, and unequivocal as to leave no possible doubt of it in the mind of any person, (in Clark 1970, 5:292-93) 

Fundamentalists were convinced the 1935 Short Creek trials were engineered by local LDS leaders after the excommunications ("Heber" 1936). In the first twentieth-century convictions of fundamentalist Mormons, two men were sentenced to eighteen to twenty-four months in the Arizona state prison. 

Washington County, Utah, attempted more prosecutions in the late 1930s (State v. Jessop 1940). The 8 March 1944 Salt Lake Tribune reported a major multi-state and federal government raid that led to the arrests of almost fifty people, the eventual imprisonment of twenty two of them, and publicity in such national publications as Time, Look, Newsweek, and most major newspapers. Again, the Church publicly applauded the raid. The following official statement appeared in the 8 March Salt Lake Tribune: 

Since the manifesto by President Wilford Woodruff was adopted by the church (on October 6, 1890), the first presidency and other general authorities have repeatedly issued warnings against an apostate group that persisted in the practice of polygamous marriage, illegal both as to the church and the state. Members of the church who have let this warning go unheeded and have violated the rule and doctrines of the church by entering into these illicit relationships have been formally dealt with and excommunicated as rapidly as they could be found out. This is the extreme punishment which the church can inflict. 

Notwithstanding excommunication, some of these persons have persisted in propagating their false ideas regarding the doctrine of plural marriage. Their attitude is one of rebellion against the church. Their activities are unauthorized, illegal and void. 

We commend and uphold the federal government in the efforts through the office of the United States district attorney and assisting agencies to bring before the bar of justice those who have violated the law. 

Church members also assisted in the prosecutions. The 2 October Ogden Standard Examiner reported that Bishop Kasper Fetzer testified at one of the trials that Church officials "sent me on a special mission to try and save young people's souls from the clutches of the cult." Three appeals from these prosecuted cases reached the United States Supreme Court — Chatwin v. United States (1946), Cleveland v. United States (1946), and Musser et al v. Utah (1948) —the first time religiously based polygamy had been considered there in this century. 

Finally, in the big Arizona raid of 26 July 1953, almost three hundred people were taken into custody, and national publicity was extensive. Page one articles appeared in the Atlanta Constitution, the Dallas Morning News, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others. Reports in the Arizona Republic and Deseret News noted that as a result of the raid, twenty-seven Arizona men were placed on a short probation and over 160 children and their mothers remained in Arizona foster homes for almost two years ("147 Receive" 1955; "Short Creek" 1955; Bradley 1990). A United States Senate subcommittee came to Arizona in 1955 for largely unproductive investigative hearings, and the Utah Supreme Court decided the legally notorious In Re Black (1955) denying parental rights to fundamentalists who practice or advocate polygamy. 

The last organized polygamy hunt came in 1955 when five men, all of them "independents," were arrested ("Two Utah" 1955). 

A Traditional Community 

Today fundamentalist Mormons can be found all over the old Mormon Zion, with substantial congregations outside Mexico City and in western Canada. There is even a small western European following. They are not a monolithic group. There are several organized priesthood groups and perhaps an equal number of unaffiliated independents. A few remain active members of the LDS Church, keeping a low profile about their fundamentalist sympathies. The two largest organized groups are that based in Colorado City, which has a meeting house with seating for five thousand and which is presided over by Rulon Jeffs, successor to Leroy Johnson. The other, presided over by the grandfatherly Owen Allred, has its administrative base in Bluff dale, Utah, but has a congregation numbering in the hundreds outside Mexico City and a united order community at Pinesdale, Montana. 

The fundamentalist Mormon community in Southern Utah today is primarily the United Effort Trust group at old Short Creek, now known as Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona. A smaller community near Cedar City affiliates with the Allred group. In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that as an outside observer who has visited several fundamentalist communities and been a guest in both worship services and a number of homes, I am sympathetic to these people, though I have reservations about some aspects of their community life. Let me offer a few personal observations. 

Most Latter-day Saints have a difficult time being clear-headed when it comes to fundamentalism. Years of hard feelings and emotional biases based on internal doctrinal differences and, to be honest, embarrassment over polygamy, make objectivity difficult. A small minority who call themselves fundamentalists have been violent, resulting in distorted stereotypes in the news of all fundamentalists. Mainstream fundamentalism has no tradition of violence and no tolerance for it. Perhaps we should put polygamy entirely aside for a moment and consider the similarities of the fundamentalist Mormon community with other very traditional, socially conservative, and sincere religious communities. I find striking parallels with Old and New Order Amish, Mennonites, Hutterites, and others in the Anabaptist tradition (Hostetler 1974). 

Fundamentalist Mormons are very traditional. Families and children are extremely important, indeed are the primary focus of community life. Divorce or, in the case of plural families, a "cancellation of sealings," is frowned upon, though it does occur. Community sex ual mores are very restrictive, beginning with extreme modesty in dress and appearance. 

For instance, accepted dress for women in Colorado City requires plain dresses to the wrists, ankles, and neck to cover garments. Make up and jewelry are frowned upon. Hair is worn long and in old fashioned styles. Men wear shirts to the wrists and buttoned to the neck, no matter what the season. I once attended Sunday worship services in Colorado City and counted only four men and boys out of about two thousand in attendance not wearing plain white shirts. Men wear their hair short and are always clean shaven. I'm told this style is not doctrinal, but is social custom advocated by the late Leroy Johnson. 

Even the discussion of sexual topics is considered inappropriate. Men's and women's roles are very traditional and gender based, though many women work competently outside of the home. Hard, honest work, especially physical labor, is expected of everyone. Children are taught to respect their parents and adopt the community's shared values. As with any socially conservative community, fundamentalists have their portion of teenaged rebellion, and I expect they always will have. 

With some reservations about subjects and their application, education is admired and encouraged. A college education in what are thought to be appropriate areas, usually practical fields such as business, education, or nursing, is thought to be a good thing. Many parents have proudly told me of their childrens' college study. Fundamentalist men and women seem to be no more or less educated than the residents of other rural, modest-sized communities in the Great Basin. 

Fundamentalists are aware of the "world" around them and carry on a running debate about the problem of being in the world but not of it. Crime, divorce, a perceived erosion of respect for authority and patriotism, deviant sexuality, and declining honesty in our society are the great threats they see for the nation as well as for their community. They want no part of these evils and make conscious efforts to isolate themselves from what they believe to be moral cancers.

Two examples may illustrate. Television has only recently found its way into some homes in Colorado City. The few households with TVs tend to draw neighbors who also want to watch. Many are less than thrilled about this encroachment from the outside world. I suspect they fear less the electronic portrayal of monogamous households than the sex, violence, disrespect, and rampant materialism that they see there. 

As a second example, the community has recently been involved in considerable litigation over parental rights and other issues connected with their practice of religiously based polygamy.[3] They have retained very able lawyers outside the community to represent them, most of them LDS bishops or stake officers. (I work with these lawyers as a consultant and expert witness. I am sixth generation LDS with a history of polygamy in my family.) Some of the leading cases that will support arguments on behalf of the fundamentalists involve the rights of homosexuals, lesbians, and other individuals whose conduct fundamentalists object to very strongly. While lawyers see no reason not to utilize these cases, the fundamentalists are most reluctant because they so totally reject the conduct involved. 

If all this sounds like what you might encounter in an outlying, extremely conservative LDS stake, it should come as no surprise. We are all part of the same religious tradition with the same root values. We have much more in common than we have differences. 

So how do fundamentalists differ from "regular" Latter-day Saints? "They're the ones who practice polygamy, and they're not really Mormons anyway" is far too simple a response. 

A 1963 master's thesis by John Day characterizes fundamentalist Mormonism as a protest against adaptation. I think that's pretty much on the mark. The LDS Church we know today is so different from nineteenth-century Mormonism that Brigham Young and John Taylor would be hard-pressed to recognize it. The stress of legal and social pressure from the rest of the nation, coupled with economic and demographic pressures that resulted from great missionary success, made it virtually impossible for the nineteenth-century Church to survive unchanged. Adaptations to these new realities were unavoidable, and Wilford Woodruffs 1890 Manifesto was only one of those adaptations. It was neither the first nor the last, and it was not even the greatest (Alexander 1986; Shipps 1984). 

While many Church members had pushed for these changes, a significant minority found them very unsettling. The vast majority of men and women on both sides of the debate were principled and sincere. Fundamentalism as we know it today has its roots among the conservatives who resisted both these changes in the Mormon community and changes in the nation at large as it became more urban and industrialized. 

Doctrinal Differences 

Change and division brought with it new theological constructs (see Musser 1980; Kraut 1989; Richardson 1988). Fundamentalists consider themselves part of the LDS Church, living within special priesthood organizations set apart to continue and preserve sacred ordinances. In 1991 the Colorado City community incorporated itself in Utah as the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, for the first time announcing its break with the Church through a legal creation. Outside of these priesthood groups, independent polygamists, not surprisingly, are much less concerned with direct lines of priesthood authority. 

The priesthood councils believe that the temporal Church—the popularly accepted Church—is not the head of the priesthood. To them the leadership of the priesthood and the leadership of the Church are not one in the same but were divided sometime after the death of President John Taylor. According to this model, Ezra Taft Benson is the head of the corporate body, but Rulon Jeffs or Owen Allred, depending on the fundamentalist affiliation, is the head of the priesthood. The head of the priesthood is usually the senior member of the seven member Priesthood Council and as such enjoys the direct counsel and guidance of God for his people. 

As a consequence of this perception, fundamentalists do not always view changes that come through the Church as proper and binding. They do not recognize either the first or second manifesto or the suspension of plural marriage. They also feel the Church is "out of order," to use their phrase, in other significant ways. They do not accept changes made since the administration of President Joseph F. Smith in the temple ceremony or in the garment design. They refer to "priesthood garments" rather than "temple garments," as most Mormons call them. This is more a concern of the Allred group. (Many have stressed that they do not need to "sneak" into LDS temples to perform their ordinances: they are concerned about proper priesthood authority, rather than ordinances performed in a specific place.) 

Fundamentalists disagree with the Church's turn-of-the-century suspension of a literal, physical gathering of Zion and with temple building outside of the old Zion. (The first temple opened outside the Great Basin was the Hawaiian Temple, dedicated in 1919 by President Heber J. Grant.) They also reject the discontinuation of religious communalism, such as the United Order efforts. All of the priesthood groups attempt to continue some form of communalism, including the United Effort Plan in Colorado City. In addition they reject the ordinations of blacks to the priesthood, what they refer to as the "Canaanite Revelation." 

Other disagreements include the present more worldly role of apostles in the Church; the discontinuation of the Adam/God theory; the decision to stop sending missionaries out without purse or script; the infallibility of the prophet, especially when he appears to modify doc trines introduced by Joseph Smith; and the Word of Wisdom as a law rather than advisory counsel, a somewhat less tolerant position than they embrace.

Seemingly small points can be especially telling. In both of the large priesthood groups, prayers in worship services are often delivered by men with the right arm raised to the square. In the Allred group worship services, only priests and Melchizedek priesthood holders bless and administer the sacrament. Water is passed in large glasses or goblets, as in the last century. A Melchizedek priesthood holder hands the bread or water to the member, who partakes and hands it back to the priesthood holder, who in turn hands it to the next member. This is in contrast to the usual administration of the sacrament in LDS sacrament meetings by the Aaronic priesthood, and the passing of sacrament trays down aisles from member to member. I have never seen a woman speak in a worship service of the Colorado City group. 

Even with these and other differences, fundamentalist meetings have a distinctly Mormon flavor. The congregation sings Mormon hymns from LDS hymnals. Pictures of Joseph Smith and Jesus Christ are in evidence. Speakers quote from the four standard works but use just as frequently the Journal of Discourses and the Millennial Star. Ezra Taft Benson might be quoted approvingly on some point, and the Ensign might be used in a meeting hall or home. Everywhere there is the comfortable sort of atmosphere we find when a lay clergy presides over meetings and delivers sermons. The language used will be peculiarly Mormon. 

Plural Marriage 

Then there is the issue of polygamy, or plural marriage as the fundamentalists prefer to call it. For them polygamy is a pejorative term that implies no priesthood authority. Though probably what fundamentalists are best known for, plural marriage certainly is not practiced by all fundamentalists and probably not even by a majority. 

While romantic love is not necessarily the model for selection of spouses in Colorado City, I am told the feelings of the parties involved are taken into account. Marriages are most often arranged by parents and the community's religious leaders, who believe they are guided by divine inspiration. Sometimes this amounts to being sure that every one in need of care is the responsibility of some priesthood holder. Not all such marriages work, and when they don't, a cancellation of sealings, a kind of divorce, is granted. Sometimes, with their parents' permission, young people marry before they reach majority. Large age gaps between husbands and wives are not uncommon. The Allred group, in contrast, uses romance as a model, but always with the prior approval of priesthood authorities.

Children and large families are the norm, as they are considered the primary reasons for marriage. It is my understanding that sexual relationships between spouses are not considered proper unless children are possible (Bradley 1990). 

Stereotypes about fundamentalist lifestyles are sometimes accurate but frequently downright untrue. My experience with friends in Colorado City suggests that women are often reserved when they first encounter strangers, going through a stage of sizing the newcomer up. I have women friends there who are outspoken and obviously strong willed. Among them is Vera Black, the subject of In Re Black (1955), who is personable, yet a strong presence. Even young women under twenty, once they accept a newcomer in the community as a friend, are not shy. The stereotype of the meek and submissive Colorado City plural wife is simply off the mark in my experience. Most of their young people today seem to understand that there are other lives to be lived if they wish. 

Polygamy in Colorado City may also serve as a distinct group identification practice, just as it did for nineteenth-century Mormons. It clearly identifies individuals as members of a distinct religious community; leaving the group and blending into the world become psychologically and socially difficult. Some religious historians believe this was on Joseph Smith's mind when he introduced the doctrine (Moore 1982, 1986). When a group practice also draws persecution from the world, group solidarity increases. 

Conclusion 

We can all benefit from religious tolerance. Because of our own experiences of a century ago, Latter-day Saints should be prepared to set the standard for tolerating the sincere religious views and practices of others, even when we strongly disagree with them. We need not accept practices without question, particularly those that may actually injure unwilling participants. But we should never be eager to condemn practices that are a valid reflection of religious faith. 

---

[1] Article 3 of the Utah Constitution provides "First: —Perfect toleration of religious sentiment is guaranteed. No inhabitant of this state shall ever be molested in person or property on account of his or her mode of worship; but polygamous or plural marriages are forever prohibited." Article 1, section 4 provides that "the rights of conscience shall never be infringed" and ensures a complete separation of church and state, but has been held not to protect religiously based plural marriage (In Re Black, 283 P.2d 887 [1955]). 

Utah Enabling Act, ch. 138, 28 stat. 107 (1894), sec. 3, provides, in part, "First. That perfect toleration of religious sentiment shall be secured, and that no inhabitant of said state shall ever be molested in person or property on account of his or her mode of religious worship: Provided, that polygamous or plural marriages are forever prohibited."

[2] Those excommunicated in 1935 for refusing to sign the oath included Henry E. Covington, Viva Jones Covington, Leroy S. Johnson, Josephine Ford Johnson, Leonard Black, Vera Colvin Black, J. Warren Black, Ruth Walker Black, Millard W. Black, Eda Johnson Black, Charles C. Cox, Retta Stocks Cox, Karl J. Olds, Charlotte Colvin, Elva E. Walker Carling, Elizabeth Johnson Colvin, Melvin E. Johnson, and Lola Johnson. (See microfilm records of Rockville Ward, Zion Park Stake, Transcript Ward Record, 1935, also called Form E. Originals in LDS Archives.)

[3] Those cases are: In the Matter of W.A. T. et al, 808 P.2d 1083 (Utah 1991) concerning the Fischer adoption; Williams et al v. United Effort Plan (No. 87-C-1022J, D. Utah, United States District Court) concerning the partitian of the UEP trust; and Barlow et al v. ALEOAC (No. CIV 91-838 PHX RCB, D. Arizona, United States District Court) concerning the decertification of a polygamous law enforcement officer.

[post_title] => Twentieth-Century Polygamy and Fundamentalist Mormons in Southern Utah [post_excerpt] => Dialogue 24.4 (Winter 1991): 44–58
Driggs shares the story of how in between the First and Second Manifestos, polygamy was still happening in secret. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => twentieth-century-polygamy-and-fundamentalist-mormons-in-southern-utah [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-03-14 23:37:51 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-03-14 23:37:51 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.dialoguejournal.com/?post_type=dj_articles&p=12038 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => dj_articles [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) 1

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 12073 [post_author] => 2317 [post_date] => 2018-04-13 03:11:16 [post_date_gmt] => 2018-04-13 03:11:16 [post_content] =>

As The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints moves past the centennial of Wilford Woodruffs announcement on plural marriage, there is still considerable misunderstanding as to what the "Manifesto" was and how it came about. Most people who know anything about the Church and its long struggle with the United States government over the practice of polygamy know that the Woodruff announcement was pivotal in relieving mounting pressures and that it was in some way instrumental in attaining Utah statehood. However, many details in the political background of these events remain obscure. This essay seeks to place the Woodruff Manifesto within the context of these developments. 

From the beginning of Mormon settlement in the Great Basin, Church leaders and their political friends recognized the desirability of self-government, possible only through statehood. Only as a state could voters elect local officials instead of having them imposed from outside through an appointive, "carpetbag" process. However, the Church's 1852 public acknowledgment of plural marriage essentially doomed for years to come any real possibility of attaining their desired political independence. Soon thereafter, the infant Republican party's first platform declared against polygamy, and the party continued an undiminished opposition through the ensuing three decades during which party members were largely ascendant on the national political scene. Just after the Civil War, the two most powerful members of the House of Representatives, so far as statehood was concerned, Speaker Schuyler Colfax and territorial committee chairman William H. Ashley, visited Utah and specifically informed Church authorities that their fervent goal could never be attained so long as the practice of plural marriage continued (Whitney 1893, 2:121-39). While Mormons determined to maintain what they considered a divine principle, their political activists stubbornly continued to seek statehood for Utah. But government officials were equally determined to root out the objectionable practice, and anti-polygamy "raids" became increasingly bitter during the 1880s (Larson 1971, 91-206). 

Early in 1887, the Edmunds-Tucker Bill, aimed at weakening the Church by confiscating most of its property, passed its final obstacles in the House of Representatives. When the best efforts of Mormon lobbyists failed to thwart it, some friendly to the Church devised the so-called "Scott Amendment," which proposed to delay the effect of the new law for six months. In the interim, the resolution suggested, Utah citizens might hold a new constitutional convention to frame and ratify a fundamental law with specific prohibitions against polygamy (Wolfinger 1971, 336-46). The sponsors of the Edmunds-Tucker Act refused to consider the proposal, but Church agents decided to pursue that course even though the restrictive law was already being implemented (Lyman 1986, 42-50). 

Those representing Church interests in the nation's capital, particularly General Authority John W. Young, had developed a cordial relationship with Democratic President Grover Cleveland and several of his chief advisors, including Solicitor General George A. Jenks. In fact Jenks actually drafted the anti-polygamy clause for the proposed Utah constitution and even journeyed to Utah during the summer convention to quietly help incorporate the provisions into the document (J. Young 1887a). 

Even more crucial was the reaction of the highest leaders of the Church to the proposed Scott Amendment. Initially President John Taylor opposed it, believing approval of a constitutional statement against plural marriage might convey the impression that Church leaders or their followers intended to surrender on the principle of plural marriage. Continuing communications from the nation's capital, particularly from Charles W. Penrose, a Salt Lake City Church leader and newspaper editor then temporarily assigned to the lobby in Washington, D.C., argued that accepting such a constitution was purely a political matter in which non-polygamous Mormons, the only ones then able to vote, were simply acting in their capacity as citizens. Penrose noted that polygamists were not committing themselves on the matter at all, although they might benefit from the fact that, should Utah be admitted as a state, law enforcement would be carried out by locally elected officials instead of by less sympathetic outside appointees (J. Young 1887a; Penrose and Richards 1887; Taylor and Can non 1887; Jack 1887). 

President Taylor finally approved the Scott Amendment approach after learning that President Cleveland was anxious for such a response. But the Church leader reiterated that his approval did not in any way hint at changes in Church doctrine. The venerable Taylor, in his last six months of life, demonstrated understanding of Penrose's arguments when he replied, "If a constitution should be adopted according to its [Scott Amendment] provisions it would, at worst, only be punishing ourselves for what our enemies are now punishing us." Mormon leaders and Cleveland officials effectively orchestrated the necessary constitutional convention and implemented the requisite provisions against plural marriage. Utah voters ratified the constitution in late summer. 

However, many of the Democratic majority in Congress were not so easily convinced that a simple constitutional clause was proof of changed Mormon practices. In September 1887, after President John Taylor's death, the Quorum of the Twelve read and discussed a document presumably drafted by a Democratic leader in the national legislature. The document stated that unless Mormons who were summoned before the Utah courts to answer charges of polygamy or unlawful cohabitation "shall promise to obey the laws against that offense," it would be impossible to "bring the Congress of the United States to believe" that Church leaders were being "honest in adopting a constitution prohibiting polygamy." Church attorneys prepared a statement for use in court, but after extensive deliberation, the apostles concluded that "no Latter-day Saint could make such a promise and still be true to the covenants he had made with God and his brethren" at the time of marriage. "If such a promise was necessary as a condition to our securing statehood," the apostles concluded, "we at once give the administration at Washington to understand that we could not accept it" (Grant, 29 Sept. 1887). Thus the most extensive Utah statehood effort collapsed because congressional leaders demanded greater concessions than Church authorities felt they could make. 

Yet some Democratic leaders, cognizant of the political advantages not only of continued Mormon allegiance to the party but of Utah statehood, did not let the matter drop completely. Early in 1888, territorial committee chairman William Springer proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution allowing Congress to intervene in any state that failed to enforce its polygamy laws. Convinced that such assurance would markedly enhance prospects for Utah's admission, most of Springer's committee associates approved the proposal, as did some of the strongest supporters of Utah statehood. But again Latter day Saint leaders firmly rejected the proposals as too restrictive, even when the provisions were "modified" to make them "as harmless" as possible. This firm resistance to another substantive concession again handcuffed Democratic efforts to gain Utah statehood (Lyman 1986, 58-59). 

Similarly, at the end of 1888, "friends in the East" for a third time attempted to persuade Church authorities to make some real compromise on plural marriage. Church leaders discussed a lengthy document that essentially asked Latter-day Saints to promise to strictly conform to the laws of the land. Not all Mormon officials rejected the proposals outright, although after deliberations, none thought the benefits promised — presumably related to statehood — were sufficient to warrant that course. Others present firmly stated they could only accept such a change if it came as "the Word of the Lord through the servant of God whose right it is to speak" (Grant, 20 Dec. 1888). There had been no acting president of the Church since the death of John Taylor in July 1887, but all General Authorities understood that the president of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, Wilford Woodruff, was the man entitled to such divine direction, even before he was sustained as president in April 1889. 

This rejection ended for some time attempts at Utah statehood by Democrats since the reins of national government were about to pass to a Republican president, Benjamin Harrison, who had a friendly majority in Congress. The new chief executive and many of his fellow Republicans were still determined to make the Mormons conform to the law. To do this, they intended to deny all members of the Church the right to vote. But although some Republicans supported such stringent tactics, others began to seek Mormon political allegiance. This was possible only because many Latter-day Saints had become disillusioned with the Democrats' failure to deliver statehood — a failure that was not entirely their fault, considering the persistent refusal of Church leaders to make any concessions. Ironically, the party that most effectively wielded the heavy hand with the Saints ended up benefiting most from their political support. 

Pivotal to this political transition was Mormon disappointment with the role of members of the formerly friendly Democratic party in instituting what was first known as the Idaho Test Oath. Formulated by Democrat H. W. "Kentucky" Smith, a long-time anti-Mormon activist, and implemented by other Democrats, this law denied the vote to all believers in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, even those who did not practice plural marriage. Although the initial legal tests of the law were upheld in the Idaho Territorial Supreme Court in March 1888, the Mormons there determined to continue their fight against disfranchisement. Their strategy was a test case where, in the words of the leading spokesman for the Church in Idaho, William Budge, they would "have the opportunity to bring in the presidents of stakes, bishops and other leading men of the Church in Idaho to show whether or not that doctrine is now preached, practiced, etc." (Budge to Woodruff 1888). Certain their opponents could find no recent evidence against them, the Mormons would thereby establish judicially that they had conformed to the law (Lyman 1977, 8-10). 

As Budge and his associates began implementing this approach, a new judge was appointed to the Idaho Supreme Court, Democrat Charles H. Berry, former attorney general of Minnesota. It soon became evident that he would have jurisdiction over the district from which the test case arose. Besides using Utah Congressional delegate John T. Caine to generate suitable pressures on the judge through political friends back home, Budge boldly traveled to the Blackfoot judicial headquarters to confer with Berry before he rendered his decision. The judge, who recorded the conversation as accurately as he could recall, claimed the Church leader first quoted U.S. Solicitor General Jenks as saying that if the test oath law was taken before the United States Supreme Court, "it would not stand for a moment." Budge also stressed the crucial nature of the pending decision on the continued allegiance of the Idaho Mormons to the Democratic party (Berry 1888). 

Berry's reply demonstrated considerable admiration for Mormon industry and economic accomplishments but firmly stated his intent to "administer the laws as they were." He made it clear he could not allow political considerations to affect his decision and expressed regret that the Mormons could not bring their marriage relations into "regulation step" with the rest of American society (Berry 1888). The published decision {Idaho Daily Statesman, 17, 20 Oct. 1888; Wood River Times, 16, 17, 24 Oct. 1888) not only upheld the test oath but ruled the Mormon arguments that they no longer taught or practiced plural marriage were merely a temporary posture of no importance so long as the general Church had made no changes on the question. The kind of concession necessary to relieve the disfranchisement onslaught, Judge Berry stressed, was a formal renunciation of the doctrine at a Church general conference, not unlike what actually occurred several years later. 

Even more ominous than events in Idaho, early in 1890 the test oath was upheld by the highest court in the land. With this Supreme Court decision, Davis v. Beason, the way was cleared for anti-polygamy advocates to enact similar legislation nationwide. Bills to that effect were introduced in the House of Representatives by Isaac N. Struble of Iowa, and in the Senate by Shelby M. Cullom of Illinois. These showed every evidence of breezing through to passage until Mormon agents, led by former Utah congressional delegate and first counselor in the First Presidency of the Church, George Q. Cannon, who had begun the process of switching his personal political allegiance to the Republican party, discovered possible powerful assistance from within that party. 

Republican party official James S. Clarkson later recalled that at the crucial time Cannon was giving up on securing any effective assistance from the Democrats, he and the party's foremost leader and strategist, James G. Blaine, "were studying the elements of voters in the United States to try to secure a majority for the political principles in which [they] believed." The party was just then making its last ditch bid to enfranchise black voters in the South through the so-called "force bill," and prospects were not at all good for breaking the Democratic grasp on the vote from that section. The West certainly appeared to hold more promise. Republican leaders accepted the inflated figures lobbyists Isaac Trumbo and Morris M. Estee generated from census and Church membership records and were impressed with "the magnitude of the Mormon people, the greatness of their development in many states besides Utah, and the large part that they were sure to bear, for good or evil, in the destiny of this republic" (Clarkson 1894). 

The most decisive event arising out of this new alliance, later reported to Church leaders in an over-laudatory manner by Clarkson, was Blaine's appearance at a congressional committee hearing on the Cullom or Struble bills, "protesting against such an outrage upon any portion of a free people, asserting that no republic of free men could tolerate such a wrong and live." Clarkson concluded, "Of course your people know something of the courage and loyalty of Mr. Blaine towards you in oppression." But, he continued, "the summit and sublimity of it all was reached when he stood in the small committee room and smote down with the giant strength of his indignant wrath the further attempt — in a free government to degrade still further a people already wronged too much" (Clarkson 1894). There is no reason to doubt that such an event occurred. In fact, contemporary Mormon historian Orson F. Whitney, who had good access to Church authorities, similarly credited Blaine with blocking the Cullom-Struble bill (Whitney 1893, 3:743). 

At about this time, as passage of the disfranchisement legislation seemed certain, Utah delegate Caine called in desperation upon one of the few Utah Church members already affiliated with the Republican party, Ogden newspaper editor and former assistant to Caine, Frank J. Cannon. Cannon's lengthy testimony before the Senate Committee on Territories was an effective exposition of the grossly unfair aspects of the proposed law. He stated, referring to the earlier Edmunds-Tucker law, which barred polygamists from any participation as American citizens, "Our parents were punished for an act, but the [Cullom Struble] bill proposed to punish us for a thought." He explained that the intended law sought to restrict a class of people who had obeyed the law and expressed every intention of continuing to do so. Then following the lead of friendly committeemen, Cannon testified that the monogamist Mormons he represented disavowed their personal acceptance of plural marriage each time they took the oath required by the Edmunds-Tucker Act in order to vote. He also assured the committee that the monogamous Saints would amend the Church practice if they had the power, but that such alterations in Church doctrine came only through the head of the Church —who did not bow to popular opinion (U.S. Senate 1890, 12-14). 

Delegate Caine did not realize young Cannon was in the East at the behest of his father, George Q. Cannon, who was personally directing the Church fight against the disfranchisement bills. Under his guidance, Frank conferred with Blaine, an old congressional friend from the senior Cannon's earlier service as Utah delegate. Now secretary of state to President Harrison, Blaine instructed young Cannon to make private personal pleas to individual committee members considering the Cullom and Struble bills, and offered to help him should any prove hesitant. However, Blaine warned that such influence would only temporarily alleviate the problem; a permanent solution was only possible if the Saints would "get into line" so far as marriage practices were concerned (Cannon 1911, 85-91). 

Upon reporting Blaine's comments to his father, Frank Cannon claimed President Cannon divulged, "President Woodruff has been praying. . . . He thinks he sees some light. . . . You are authorized to say that something will be done." With this, young Cannon approached the committee members, confidentially relaying his father's message. He conferred with an influential Republican member of the Senate Committee on Territories, Orville Platt, along with others, and "told them that the Mormon church was about to make a concession concerning

 the doctrine of polygamy." He later claimed that these assurances at least temporarily halted progress on these bills (Cannon 1911, 85-91).[1]

Cannon's account is essentially corroborated by the author of the bills, Utah anti-Mormon lobbyist Robert N. Baskin, who later wrote that the Senate committee had decided to report his bill favorably. Then he learned that the Church agents "had requested that further action on the bill be temporarily delayed." Senator Cullom apprised him that "he had been assured by a delegation of prominent Mormons, that if further action on the bill was delayed for a reasonable time, the practice of polygamy would be prohibited by the Mormon church." Explaining that Struble had received similar assurances, Baskin recalled the delay was granted, but with the clear understanding that if polygamy was not prohibited within a reasonable time, vigorous action on the pending bills would be resumed. Though his disfranchisement measure never became law, Baskin credited the threat of it with being "the last straw" that forced the issuance of the Woodruff Manifesto (Baskin 1914, 183-86). 

A coded letter written during this time by George Q. Cannon to his fellow First Presidency members, Wilford Woodruff and Joseph F. Smith, offers further insight. He reported from Washington, D.C., that "we shall have time to get in some work," adding that he favored "the proposition which Tobias [a code name for Church lobbyist Isaac Trumbo, who was then one of Woodruffs closest confidants] submitted to you, and which you referred to me, if the party will now accept the business on those terms." Although it is impossible to prove conclusively, it is likely that the lobbyists' proposition was for a retrocession on plural marriage if the Republicans would halt further progress on the Cullom-Struble bills. Cannon promised to do all he could at the nation's capital and affirmed belief that he was being divinely assisted. He reported that Trumbo had conferred with Basil [Blaine] and stated that he felt good about the situation, which Cannon judged to be "encouraging" (G. Cannon 1890). 

It is clear that political considerations also persuaded Republican sponsors to postpone passage of the disfranchisement legislation. Upon his return to Salt Lake City, President Cannon reported to fellow Church leaders that the outlook for Utah was brighter than it had been for many years. Alluding to the Clarkson-Blaine strategy of increasing the number of Mormon Republicans in the West, he stated, "We would doubtless have been disfranchised by the Struble bill if the Republican leaders in Washington had not been given to understand that there were Republicans in Utah and that a wise course on the part of the Republicans would doubtless make more" (in R. Young 1892). Cannon was also quoted as saying that "the Republican party are [sic] becoming more favorably impressed with regard to the importance of securing Mormon votes and influence" (A. Cannon, 10 July 1890). 

Several weeks after the disfranchisement crisis was averted, Frank Cannon's half-brother, Apostle Abraham H. Cannon, was in New York City for medical treatment. He recorded in a 12 June 1890 journal entry that while visiting his father there, he was shown a paper drafted by Blaine, who expressed hope that Church authorities would accept the document. Young Cannon described what he saw as a "virtual renunciation of plural marriage," which caused the dedicated young polygamist to "revolt at the prospect of signing such a promise." It is possible that the proposal was in some way revised, but on 10 July, the apostle noted in his journal a private reading of an important First Presidency resolution made 30 June in regard to plural marriage. The resolution, he noted, was to the effect that no such marriages would be permitted to occur "even in Mexico unless the contracting parties, or at least the female, was resolved to remain in the Mormon colonies" recently established there, largely for that purpose. This quiet dictum is a most significant development on the subject of plural marriage, a concession like what had been promised to Republican leaders. Though the Woodruff Manifesto issued almost three months later has usually been emphasized as the most important step, it was in a real sense merely the public announcement of a policy previously implemented. 

A letter soon thereafter from President Joseph F. Smith to his good friend and later counselor in the First Presidency, Charles W. Nibley, illustrates further details of the new Church stance. Nibley had inquired about the possibility of a mutual friend (probably himself) then taking another plural wife. Smith replied that he personally approved of the idea in principle but confessed that "times have changed, the conditions are not propitious and the decrees of the powers that be" were against the move. He explained that he was referring to powers within the Church, though prudence dictated they also defer to governmental authority. Smith further stated, "The decree now is that there shall be no p m s [plural marriages] in the United States, and that there should be none anywhere else —unless one or both of the parties remove beyond the jurisdiction of the government to make their home." He added that he did not know how long that condition would prevail, but that the almost "absolute prohibition" was for the present the law of the Church. He assumed the family of the woman in question would hesitate to allow her to live in Mexico, alone much of the time, and attempted to convince the applicant that he was already sufficiently involved in plural marriage to satisfy any of God's requirements on the subject. But, President Smith assured, "should the clouds roll by and the gloom pass away . . . it would be altogether a different matter" (Smith 1890a). 

At about the same time, Joseph F. Smith also implied another motive for the momentous change in stance on plural marriage. He confided to another close associate, L. John Nuttall, that "we are making a strong effort to do something in defense of the rights of our 'monog' brethren," adding a hope that Church leaders could "do as much in their behalf as they have done in ours" — presumably referring to the loyalty of nonpolygamous Church members to the controversial doctrine amidst the onslaught of the Edmunds-Tucker and Cullom-Struble imperatives (Smith 1890b). Besides this, Mormon leaders may well have recognized that a Church announcement ending sanctions of new plural marriages might remove the polygamy issue as an obstacle in the Utah statehood fight. With the formal Church organization absolved of responsibility for the continuance of plural marriages, those later charged with such offenses would have to stand on their own. Under such circumstances, monogamist Mormons could not justifiably be disfranchised or even the territory denied statehood simply because some Church members continued the offensive practice on their own. 

While word of the new Church position quietly circulated among the faithful, Gentile territorial officials were not so apprised and continued to seek further legislative measures to pressure the Saints into submission. The most active agency in these efforts was the Utah Com mission, formed by Congress at least partially for that purpose. At a 7 August 1890 meeting of that body, R. S. Robertson was asked to gather the material for an annual report to the secretary of interior. The commissioners agreed that the report should present a full and accurate statement of the "existing status of the polygamous question — including facts and statistics as may show, or tend to show the increase or decrease of the practice." Robertson's subsequent draft was considered, to an extent edited, and finally adopted and forwarded to Washington, D.C. (U.S. Utah Commission Minutebook D, 7 Aug. 1890). Made public soon thereafter, it charged that forty-one male Mormons had entered polygamous relations in Utah territory since the previous annual report (U.S. House 1890, 13:414-20). Although this may well have been the case, the evidence presented hardly substantiated the allegation, and several Church leaders soon referred to the reported new plural marriages as a blatant falsehood (Caine 1890a; Smith 1890b). Some, including Apostle Moses Thatcher, expected the report to be a source of considerable trouble unless the Church could "offset" it in some way. President Woodruff also worried that the Utah Commission report might well lead to further legislation inimical to Church members (Grant, 30 Sept. 1890). 

That late summer was a busy time for the First Presidency. As soon as they returned from a short train trip to New Mexico, they embarked for San Francisco. There they met with former Republican National Convention Chairman Morris M. Estee of Napa, who urged them to make an announcement "condemning polygamy and laying it aside," by then standard Republican advice. The Californian had already been passed over twice for a place in Harrison's cabinet and had no influence with the administration. Estee may have reinforced the First Presidency's resolve, but they had already set their course toward the momentous announcement. There was another reason for their journey to the coast. Abraham H. Cannon confided in his journal that the First Presidency wished to avoid being subpoenaed as witnesses before the court in matters related to the Church property suits then about to begin (Quinn 1985, 42-3; A. Cannon, 3 Sept. 1890). 

In their absence, hearings commenced before Colonel M. N. Stone, a special commissioner appointed by the Utah Supreme Court to review the accounts and actions of Frank H. Dyer, former receiver of Church property escheated under provisions of the Edmunds-Tucker Act. A primary purpose of the proceedings was to determine if an earlier territorial supreme court decree prevented further government efforts to secure Church property not already in the hands of the new receiver, Henry W. Lawrence. The U.S. attorney for Utah, Charles S. Varian, indicated a special interest in the Utah temples in St. George, Logan, Manti, and Salt Lake City. Dyer was criticized for allowing a compromise between the Church and government that enabled the temples to remain in Mormon hands. The government attorney appeared to be probing for an opportunity to reopen the Church suits sufficiently to allow the government to confiscate that sacred property. Varian expressly desired to keep the hearings open long enough to compel President Woodruff to testify, but the summons servers could not locate their man. The presidency outwaited their would-be inquisitors. However, as soon as the First Presidency returned, Church attorneys undoubtedly warned them of the danger to Church property, particularly the temples (Deseret Weekly News, 13, 20, 27 Sept. 1890). 

Within a week of his return, President Woodruff confided in his diary the oft-quoted observation, "I have arrived at a point in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when I am under the necessity of acting for the temporal salvation of the Church" (25 Sept. 1890). Though he referred to government attempts to suppress polygamy as the main reason for making his subsequent declaration, the threat of temple confiscation was undoubtedly on his mind as well. Certainly "the temporal salvation of the Church" would include protecting these sacred edifices from presumed enemy hands. Apostle Marriner W. Merrill, then acting as president of the Logan Temple, discussed the impending announcement with Woodruff as it was about to be released. He commented in his diary on 24 September 1890 that the Manifesto "seems the only way to retain the possession of our temples and continue the ordinance work for the living and dead which was considered of more importance than continuing the practice of plural marriage for the present." This clear statement of purpose was of the same tenor as Woodruffs own subsequent statements justifying his actions in announcing the Manifesto.[2]

These worries pressed upon the prophet. But the Church had withstood pressures at least as serious in the past. Even figuratively backed to the wall and faced with practical considerations that demanded concessions, Woodruff cannot necessarily be denied the possibility of divine inspiration that he and his associates claimed motivated his decision. George Q. Cannon later told of the numerous earlier suggestions for such action from within and outside the Church. Cannon explained the time chosen in terms fellow believers could easily understand: "At no time has the Spirit seemed to indicate that this should be done. We have waited for the Lord to move in the matter." Finally, he said, on 24 September 1890, Woodruff felt what he deemed to be spiritual direction, and the Manifesto was the result (Deseret Weekly News, 18 Oct. 1890). 

On the afternoons of 24 and 25 September, the First Presidency and several apostles met and considered the text of the momentous announcement Woodruff had drafted, undoubtedly with assistance from other writers. After careful examination and discussion, they agreed with its contents as worded. With such approval, what became known as the Woodruff Manifesto was released to the Associated Press and forwarded to congressional delegate John T. Caine for initial dissemination from the nation's capital (W. B. Dougall 1890). Caine's accompanying letter, published with the first announcement in the Washington Evening Star on 25 September 1890, denounced the Utah Commission report for attempting to stimulate negative legislation such as disfranchisement. The delegate expressed hope that the Church announcement would prevent any such action. The opening paragraph of the Manifesto indicated the same intent, with the one following answering charges that a particular plural marriage had taken place under Church supervision during the past year. After referring to the court decisions upholding the laws prohibiting plural marriage, Woodruff affirmed his intention to submit to those laws and use his influence with Church members to do likewise. He pointed out that nothing in his recent teachings could be construed as encouragement or even mention of polygamy, concluding, "I now publicly declare that my advice to the Latter-day Saints is to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land" (D&C — Declaration 1). 

Although word of the Manifesto spread quickly throughout the Mormon communities, most General Authorities withheld comment until regular quorum meetings began on 30 September. There the Brethren freely expressed their impressions, recorded in considerable detail in the journals of Heber J. Grant and Abraham H. Cannon. The apostles understood that only such an announcement could alter the increasingly negative public opinion regarding the Church. Several agreed with Grant who, referring to the ban within the United States, stated that "President Woodruff had simply told the world what we had been doing and if there were any advantages to secure by the Manifesto I feel that we should have them." Most strikingly, the apostles' comments indicate that they saw little, if any, personal application of the declaration. It merely banned new marriages within the United States. Several of the Brethren expressed their intention to continue their present marital arrangements. John Henry Smith pledged that only incarceration in prison would restrain him from living with his wives. His close associate, Francis M. Lyman, endorsed that same sentiment saying, "I design to live with and have children by my wives, using the wisdom which God gives me to avoid being captured by the officers of the law" (in A. Cannon, 30 Sept. 1890; Grant, 30 Sept. 1890). 

At the time the Manifesto was released, President Joseph F. Smith wrote to his plural wife Sarah, then residing in Nephi, that she would soon likely hear of a "pronunciamento by Prest. Woodruff in relation to our political and domestic status" that would "no doubt startle some folks." He assured her that "it will not startle you, neither will you be worried about it for you and the rest of us are all right." He explained that it was only "those who could and would not, and now can't, who will be affected by it. They may growl and find fault and censure, but not those who have done their whole duty." Here it is abundantly clear that those who had already been obedient to the divine injunction to enter plural marriage were considered beyond the sweep of the declaration. It was more an announcement that other Latter-day Saints had procrastinated too long and would not now be able to enter into practicing the presumed higher law (Smith 1890c). 

In further discussions, the General Authorities wondered about additional action regarding the Manifesto. During general conference the first week of October 1890, this question was resolved by a telegram from Caine, who reported that the secretary of interior had informed him the official declaration would not be recognized until it was formally accepted in general conference (Caine 1890b). The next day one of the Church's most popular orators, Orson F. Whitney, addressed a huge throng at the Tabernacle. He prefaced his remarks by reading Joseph Smith's Articles of Faith. He probably gave special attention to the twelfth article, which states: "We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honor ing, and sustaining the law." After Whitney had read the text of the Manifesto, senior apostle Lorenzo Snow moved that it be accepted by the congregation. Though there was no recorded dissent, there was apparently little enthusiasm, and many showed disapproval by abstaining (Quinn 1985, 47-48). 

Following the vote, President Woodruff and George Q. Cannon offered justifications for the declaration. Cannon recounted an instance when a Missouri mob had prevented the Saints from carrying out what they considered a divine injunction to build a temple at Jackson County. He then read what was accepted as a revelation to Joseph Smith relieving them of their charge and condemning those who prevented completion of the task. It was on the same basis, Cannon stated, that Woodruff felt justified in issuing the Manifesto. President Woodruff followed, reminding all that, given his age, he was not long for this world and soon expected to meet his predecessors and his God. Claiming the Manifesto had not been issued without earnest prayer, he testified that "for me to have taken a stand in anything which is not pleasing in the sight of God, or before the heavens, I would rather have gone out and been shot." Woodruff explained that it was not his purpose to "undertake to please the world," but with laws enforced and upheld by a nation of sixty-five million people, reality must prevail. "The Lord has given us commandments concerning many things and we have carried them out as far as we could, but when we cannot do it, we are justified. The Lord does not require at our hands things that we cannot do" {Deseret Weekly News, 18 Oct. 1890). 

Throughout this time, the Church's leading opponents criticized the Manifesto. Utah Governor Arthur L. Thomas, in a 27 September 1890 interview in the San Francisco Chronicle, pointed out that the declaration "in no way asserts that polygamy is wrong or the law right." The 18 October Deseret Weekly News replied, "There is nothing in President Woodruffs declaration in regard to faith, or doctrine, or tenets, but it contains a volume in a few words as to practice." It was only with practices, not beliefs, that laws and governments were empowered to impose conformity. The News editor commented in disgust that the demands limiting beliefs carried concessions further than Church leaders had thought they would need to go. 

That was the problem. Possibly some national government officials had indicated that something like the Manifesto would suffice, but it was now certain that territorial officials and their newspaper allies would not let the Saints off so easily. The hierarchy of the Church obviously did not intend to disrupt present polygamous marriages or renounce beliefs in plural marriage. But if they had possessed assurances that they had done all that was necessary, further requests for the government to clarify their present status would not have been so promptly forthcoming.[3] 

Woodruff sent such an appeal to E. C. Foster of the U.S. Department of Justice less than a month after the Manifesto. After acknowledging Foster's previous letter, which had expressed concern for the humane treatment of those still imprisoned for unlawful cohabitation, Woodruff stated that his people would gladly avail themselves of any clemency the government saw fit to grant. He particularly hoped that a "better understanding would be reached as to the treatment that can be lawfully extended to the women who have entered into plural marriage and their offspring." He explained that some of his brethren's continued hesitation to make court promises to obey the law was because judges had construed unlawful cohabitation laws in such a manner that many felt promises to obey such laws would be "dishonorable in them, and would amount to an entire repudiation of past obligations" (Woodruff 1890). He gave an example of a man who had visited the home of a plural wife to see his sick child and had been sent to prison on unlawful cohabitation charges. Making his plea specific, Woodruff said that "having acceded to the requirements of the law, it has seemed to us that a more lenient interpretation of what constituted unlawful cohabitation might now be rendered and enforced." After voicing confidence that action would be taken satisfactory to all concerned, he concluded, "The practice being now stopped, those who have innocently entered into this relation should not be made to suffer more than absolutely necessary." 

This request for a more acceptable legal definition of unlawful cohabitation and clarification of the rights of plural wives and their children was not fulfilled. At the next general conference in early April 1891, George Q. Cannon described the continuing dilemma of women bound to their husbands with ties as sacred as if they were the only wife. He asked what should be done with them and expressed a continuing hope that the government would resolve the question. The Church leader then stated he thought this would occur when the proper officials became "convinced of our sincerity in issuing this Manifesto declaring that plural marriages should cease." He implied that those officials were not yet convinced, undoubtedly because of negative reports sent to the East by the press and territorial officials. He therefore admonished the Latter-day Saints to move one step closer to abandoning plural marriage. President Cannon recalled that he had testified to a president of the United States of his belief in plural marriage, a belief he asserted was embedded into his very being. Yet, he added, he had consented to obey the law. He appealed to each Latter-day Saint involved to seek spiritual guidance to reconcile this seeming contradiction with formerly held dogmas, encouraging all to "trust in our God for the results." Cannon then proclaimed, "I say now publicly that it is the intention of the Latter-day Saints to obey the law and leave the results with the God of Heaven" (Deseret Weekly, 11 April 1891). 

The respected Church leader was close to asking husbands to avoid even the appearance of cohabitation with plural wives when he stressed that each must "accommodate himself to affairs so that we shall not create a feeling that will be a continuation of the antipathy manifested through the doctrine." Further enjoining the Saints to live so that the world could recognize their sincerity in the matter, Cannon candidly defined what the presidency now felt constrained to adopt as the Church's difficult compromise position regarding existing polygamous relationships. He explained, "We have made covenants it is true, but each man must arrange his affairs so that he would not violate those covenants, thereby bringing down the displeasure of God"; at the same time, he added pointedly, each man must also honor the law of the land (Deseret Weekly News, 11 April 1891). 

Later in the year Woodruff appeared to go even further toward discouraging any form of cohabitation. By that time Church leaders had been given some hope of recovering confiscated Church property if they could convince certain officials that it would never be used to help promulgate polygamy doctrines. The First Presidency therefore consented to appear in court before Master-in-Chancery Charles F. Loofbourow. In conferences with their attorneys prior to the court appearance, the General Authorities stipulated "that polygamy had ceased in good faith, and as to the course we will take if it is ever revealed anew, we cannot say, though there is no human probability of its restoration" (A. Cannon, 12 Oct. 1891). Although at that time non-Mormon counsel W. H. Dickson stated that law officers had no intention of preventing a man from providing for his family, his former law partner, U.S. attorney C. S. Varian, sought to elicit testimony to the contrary. 

Placing Woodruff on the stand, Varian asked, "Do you understand that the Manifesto applies to the cohabitation of men and women in plural marriage where it already exists?" The witness replied he could not say for sure but thought that "the effect of it is so." Continuing, Woodruff stated that he did "not see how it can be otherwise," adding the prohibition of polygamy was intended to be universal, in foreign countries as well as the United States (Deseret Weekly News 24, 31 Oct. 1891). It was obvious from subsequent private discussions among the General Authorities that Woodruff was not satisfied with the impression he had conveyed; however, he could see no alternative to the testimony he had given. He said that if a man deserted or neglected his plural families he would likely be disfellowshipped from the Church. Clearly Church leaders continued to advocate the policy enunciated earlier in the year by George Q. Cannon (A. Cannon, 12 Nov. 1981). 

Although change was not apparent for some time, the Manifesto did help elicit some alteration in federal government policy. In November 1890, United States Attorney General W. H. H. Miller informed James S. Clarkson that he had advised law enforcement officers in both Utah and Idaho to be "exceedingly careful not to do anything that may look like persecution" of the Mormons. This was not only a precautionary measure aimed at preventing misunderstandings while high government officials assessed the Mormon leaders' position, but since Miller also sent a copy of the letter to those same Church authorities, it was obviously an attempt to assure at least a measure of good faith or reciprocation. This was not an easy task for Miller, who had to beware of getting too far ahead of his much more hesitant friend, President Harrison. Late the following year, some Mormon polygamists, including Joseph F. Smith, began appealing to the president for amnesty for past offenses. However, Harrison's lack of enthusiasm for that cause dragged the process on until just before the end of his term early in 1893. By that time polygamous relationships were being kept extremely circumspect, and prosecutions were markedly curtailed. An enabling act for Utah statehood would be passed midway through the following year. 

Thus the tremendous pressures generated by heightened government activity aimed at eliminating Mormon plural marriages did in fact force at least statements of outward conformity to the law. The changes enunciated in the Woodruff Manifesto clearly aimed at relieving these tensions, and over a period of several years this goal was essentially accomplished. President Joseph F. Smith, who would continue to play the primary role in guiding the future Church position on plural marriage for the next several decades, summed up the intended purpose of the strategic announcement and the policy following immediately thereafter, when he stated late in 1891, "What the Lord requires is that we shall not bring upon ourselves the destruction intended by our enemies, by persisting in a course in opposition to the law" (Smith 1891). That was the fundamental purpose of the Woodruff Manifesto. 

[Editor’s Note: For Bibliography, see PDF]

---

[1] Frank J. Cannon's book, Under the Prophet in Utah, first published as a muckraker expose of abuses of the Mormon hierarchy by a former insider-turned apostate, has long perplexed students of Church history. Author Lyman once presumptuously chided his former professor, the late Gustive O. Larson, for relying perhaps too fully on Cannon's over-laudatory accounts of his own role in several crucial events in the era. However, his brother Abraham's scrupulously honest journal and other source materials cited herein consistently corroborate Frank's version of the events of the crucial summer of 1890.

[2] In the most detailed of these statements, delivered at Cache Stake Conference in Logan 1 November 1891 and reported in the Deseret Weekly News 14 Nov. 1891, Wilford Woodruff stated: "The Lord has told me to ask the Latter-day Saints a question. . . . Which is the wisest course for the Latter-day Saints to pursue — to continue to attempt to practice plural marriage, with the laws of the nation against it .. . at the cost of the confiscation and loss of all the Temples . . . ? The Lord showed me by vision and revelation exactly what would take place if we did not stop this practice. . . . [A]ll ordinances would be stopped throughout the land of Zion." Since 1981, editions of the Doctrine and Covenants designate the Manifesto Official Declaration 1 and include an additional page entitled "Excerpts from Three Addresses by President Wilford Woodruff Regarding the Manifesto." (See Lyman 1979.) All three quotes, including a larger version of the above, were part of a paper the author presented at the Mormon History Association meeting at San Francisco in April 1979, entitled "The Woodruff Manifesto in the Context of Its Times." A commentator's copy of the paper was subsequently loaned by an employee of the Church Historical Department to someone in the First Presidency's office.

[3] Gordon Thomason argued twenty years ago in a DIALOGUE article entitled "The Manifesto Was a Victory!" that Church leaders had gained assurance of security and sanctity for existing plural marriages before they made their own concessions. In light of material present herein — particularly Woodruffs letter to E. C. Foster, this thesis is untenable.

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This essay is an attempt to explain the responses of some Latter-day Saints to the Manifesto of 1890. It takes its inspiration from a work by Kenneth Stampp on the American Civil War, in which he proposes that uncertainties relating to the Southern states' cause profoundly affected the Southern mind both during and after the war. Both Stampp's study (1980) and a commentary on his thesis by Peter Loewenberg (1982) suggest to me that something similar may have occurred with the Mormons. As I will indicate, there was a fundamental difference between the Mormon polygamous circumstance and that described by Stampp in his examination of the South and its defense of slavery. While I believe that Stampp's approach has relevance in explaining the origin of the Manifesto, that is not the issue with which I am dealing in this paper. Neither am I seeking to diminish the significance of ingredients like political and economic distress in accounting for why the Manifesto was written.[1] I wish only to draw attention to certain psychological dimensions of the question, especially as they emerged after 1890. Specifically, I will look at expressions of guilt and self-doubt as they were fitted to the Mormon need to explain what had happened. 

The two decades previous to the Woodruff Manifesto are crucial in understanding Mormon appropriation of the document. Pressures created by the federal government's opposition to polygamy gave the time an intensity reminiscent, in some ways, of the reformation of the 1850s. On 9 January 1870, Wilford Woodruff reminded a Tabernacle audience that plurality was a commandment from heaven and that they must obey it or be damned. "Now, which shall we obey," Woodruff asked, "God or Congress? For it is God and Congress for it." The assembly, with a loud voice, answered, "We will obey God" (Kenney 1983, 6:518-19). In the spring of 1880, Church congregations throughout the territory received a special message from the General Authorities and were asked to pledge themselves to stand by the laws of God, whatever persecution and consequences may follow. During the 1880s members were told that it would amount to apostasy to renounce the principle and that to do so would result in their rejection by God. The persecution raging against them was interpreted as part of the trial and sifting associated with being among the elect.[2]

Mormons were reminded that they were like the Israelites in Egypt or the Christians in their early difficulties with Rome. They needed only to keep the commandments, and God would fight their battles for them.[3] In late 1889, after Church authorities discussed whether or not to suspend the practice of polygamy because of the severity of government efforts to end it, President Wilford Woodruff prayed for guidance. In the words of Apostle Abraham H. Cannon, God's "answer came quick and strong" (19 Dec. 1889). President Woodruff was told that the Saints should remain allegiant to the revelations already given to them. The Lord would protect them; the wicked would not prevail. Church members needed only to keep the commandments, watch, and be faithful (Kenney 1983, 9:67ff; Nuttall, 27 Nov. 1889). 

Mormons had looked for the Second Coming of Christ since the 1830s, and opposition to polygamy was counted as further evidence that the time was near. Responding to the United States Supreme Court's decision in the Reynolds case, L. John Nuttall wrote in his diary 7 January 1879 that the cup of iniquity was full and that surely the Lord would "shortly come out of his hiding place and vex the nation." Apostle Erastus Snow said in 1884 that the day was at hand when Joseph and Hyrum Smith would be resurrected and Christ would appear among his followers —all, he indicated, before the apocalyptic events associated with destruction of the wicked ("Discourse" 1884). When the House of Representatives approved the Edmunds-Tucker Act in 1887, Wilford Woodruff warned that Congress had "turned the last key that seals their condemnation and lays the foundation for the overthrow & final destruction of the United States Government" (in Kenney 1983, 8:420-21). 

The completion of Utah's first four temples between 1877 and 1893 (particularly the Salt Lake Temple) corresponded with hardships associated with the anti-polygamy crusade and contributed to Mormon expectations that special events were soon to occur (Stuy 1990). Sensing the dedication of Church members, Apostle John Henry Smith told a priesthood gathering in 1888 that, if the Church's leaders would show the way, the people would certainly follow. During a meeting of the apostles only four months before the Manifesto, Quorum President Lorenzo Snow told his brethren they would live to see the Savior and would participate in the great work of the world's closing scenes. And Apostle John Henry Smith, less than ten days before the Manifesto, told a Church conference in St. George that "no principle or Revelation that God ever gave to his people was to be laid on the shelf as a thing of the past" (Morgan, 6 Oct. 1888; Young, Jr., 29 May 1890; Larson and Larson 1980, 2:718). 

We must recall, in understanding the Mormon mind of that time, what the modern church has purposely, and quite successfully, for gotten: the extraordinary significance attached by nineteenth-century Mormons to the principle of plural marriage. It was, said some, the most important truth given the world by the Restored Church. It revealed the domestic economy of the gods. It alone promised to eliminate prostitution and other forms of sexual corruption; it brought hygienic and biological benefits of a startling nature. It was said to have the capacity for restoring the longevity of the ancient patriarchs. It assured correct government in the home and, therewith, greater peace and stability in society at large. Some called it the "chief cornerstone" of the work; others saw its implementation as a prerequisite for Christ's return and the commencement of the Millennium.[4]

And mere belief in the doctrine was not enough — men were told they must actually engage in the practice. George Q. Cannon informed an audience in St. George that he was reluctant to lift his hand to sustain any presiding officer who had not entered the principle. Church elders were told that having a dead woman sealed to them, or living "consecutive polygamy" by taking a new wife after a former one passed away, was not enough. One must live with more than one wife at the same time.[5] Polygamy was a requirement for membership in the revived School of the Prophets during the 1880s. Members hesitated, for example, to admit John Smith, Patriarch of the Church, because he smoked and, though husband to two wives, spent all his time with only one (Graffam 1981, 37, 48, 57). 

Considering the importance of the tenet and the firm assurances that God would protect and deliver his people, why, then, was there a Manifesto? Justifications given at the time it was submitted in general conference — that Church members had suffered enough and that President Woodruff was guiding the Saints by prayer and inspiration — only beg the question. Recognizing untoward circumstances confronting the Church does not reconcile the event with promises and statements of previous years. The argument that the Woodruff document was a "victory" because it was issued only at the Mormon president's pleasure, or because it salvaged other features of Mormon practice, overlooks the fact that such compensation was purchased at the expense of what many considered their most precious tenet (Thomason 1971). 

Neither does it help to remember that the Manifesto, when first issued, probably was not intended by Church leaders to be the great dividing line it later became. It is true the document was initially contrived as little more than a tactic and that approved plural marriages continued to be performed for years after its announcement (Quinn 1985). It is also true that nearly two decades passed before the statement was included in the 1908 edition of the Doctrine and Covenants and that it went through several stages of interpretation before acquiring the regard it has today. This said, it was still an event of traumatic consequence for many. When presented, the Manifesto took numbers by surprise, provoking sadness and disappointment. It was said that gloom filled the Tabernacle after the announcement of its approval. Some sobbed with regret. There were General Authorities who were unhappy with the change. And, contrary to subsequent Church accounts describing the vote on the document as unanimous, we know it was not and that many refused to vote at all. President Woodruff himself later admitted that many Saints were sorely tried by what he had done.[6]

Puzzlement lingered as late as 1930, when Brigham H. Roberts published his Comprehensive History of the Church. Discussing the response to the Manifesto, Roberts pointed out that with all the Latter-day Saints had suffered, "they were prepared to suffer more. The thought of surrendering it [plural marriage] had never occurred to the great body of the church, and they were slow to be reconciled to the action." In almost every paragraph he wrote about it, Roberts betrayed question, if not doubt, as to the necessity of the Manifesto. The most he seemed able to say, by way of justification, was that God's purposes were His own (CHC 6:223). Years later, an unidentified correspondent told Kimball Young what a blow the Manifesto had been to him, saying that while eventually reconciled to the document, his first question had been, "Could it be that the Lord had made a mistake?" (K. Young 1954, 411). 

The sense that a great cause had been inexplicably denied them afflicted some for years. Paraphrasing the sentiments of a plural family that he interviewed in the 1930s, Kimball Young described the period following the Manifesto as the "hardest times." Until then those engaged in the principle "had the consolation that they were doing right and living their religion. The persecution did not matter." But with renunciation of the principle, he said, all that had given them a sense of cause was taken away (Larsen 1935, 2). 

There was, however, an answer that could explain what had happened. The principle had not failed. Neither had the Saints' oracles led them astray. Plurality remained a truth, and God had not broken his promises. Rather, the Saints themselves were responsible for the cessation of plural marriage. The practice of God's holy law was only postponed for a more deserving generation. Comments to this effect appeared within a year of the Manifesto, in a sermon by First Presidency counselor George Q. Cannon (Deseret News, 14 Nov. 1891). On that occasion, he explicitly stated that the document was given because the Saints had failed in their religious responsibilities. In an April 1893 lecture given in the Salt Lake Temple, Joseph F. Smith said much the same thing (Whitaker, 9 April 1893). And Apostle Matthias F. Cowley repeated in a 1901 address that it was the Church's own failures that accounted for the Manifesto (in Smoot Proceedings 1906, 1:8). 

This is, of course, close to the interpretation of Mormon fundamentalists who describe the event as simply an appeasement and surrender to the ways of the world. As one fundamentalist writer explains, just as the ancient Israelites were given a king instead of a prophet, modern Israel was given monogamy instead of the principle (Fulton and Allred 1970, 4:66; see also Newson 1956; Kraut 1977, 140-59). 

When the Manifesto was first presented to the Saints in conference, perseverance shown by Church members was memorialized, and they were told the Lord was relieving them from further trial ("Re marks" 1890). In his comments, Cannon referred to an 1841 revelation excusing the Saints from further efforts in an assignment frustrated by their enemies. That revelation exempted the Church from building a temple in Missouri because they had done all they could; continued striving in the face of great opposition was unnecessary (D&C 124:49). This was a change, however, from what Church members were told only five years before. A 5 June 1885 Deseret News editorial said that any seeking to use the 1841 revelation as precedent for discontinuing polygamy were moral weaklings — and needed "a ram rod fastened parallel with their spinal column." The editorial further argued that circumstances giving rise to the 1841 revelation were entirely different from those confronting the Saints in the 1880s. The former had to do with the erection of a physical structure. The Saints either could or could not perform the task. Now, said the News, they were dealing with a "law," an eternal principle. In other words, there seems to have been a return after the Manifesto to attitudes previous to the statement, shifting responsibility more directly to Church members themselves. 

The charge of Mormon error was not confined to remarks by Church leaders. In comments by lay members we encounter the most telling references to where the Saints had failed. Recounting a conversation with an older Mormon woman in the early 1890s, Florence Merriam remembered that the woman had said the Manifesto came about because so many were not living plurality correctly. It had, she said, become "almost a curse to us" (Merriam 1894, 132-33). Journalist Richard Barry reported another Mormon to say the Saints had fallen into such unrighteousness in practicing polygamy that God had to bring it to a halt (1910, 451). Another, Victoria Jackson, recorded in her journal that the Lord ceased fighting their battles because "the law [of plural marriage] was dragged into the gutter. Old men swapped daughters, sex weakness predominated in many cases. Some men neglected present wives . . . and were captivated by a younger face (pp. 4-5). Joseph Lee Robinson later wrote of his concern that, during the 1880s and 1890s, much wickedness had emerged in connection with the principle (p. 66). And Sarah Hendricks, the daughter of a Mormon pluralist, remarked that polygamy "was taken away" because so much abuse had crept into it (1980, 8; see also K. Young 1954, 411; Draper 1980; and Walser 1976). 

Whether or not Mormon polygamy had morally degenerated to such a degree, these statements tell of suspicion by the faithful that not all was right in the households of those living the celestial law. Uneasiness about Mormon polygamous behavior is what invites the comparison with Southern misgiving as described by Kenneth Stampp. Citing examples such as the relative rapidity with which Southern states joined in opposing slavery after the Civil War, Stampp argues that the Southern will was eroded by moral equivocation, a process that was often only partly conscious (1980, 255-56). 

The parallel is not exact and the issue more complicated because Mormons believed plural marriage to be divine law. Mormons challenging plurality in any fundamental way risked more than cultural treason —they courted heresy and damnation. Unlike those Southern ers who Stampp said secretly fretted over their cause, few Saints are likely to have questioned the abstract rightfulness of plural marriage. The Mormon struggle arose within because of what were perceived as personal shortcomings in practicing a commandment of God. 

We know, for example, that romantic and exclusive inclinations haunted many polygamous relationships. The persistence of such assumptions has been noted by students of the Mormon polygamous family for decades.[7] Yet, opposed to such feelings were urgings by Church leaders that plurality was the better way and that all Saints should strive to be worthy to live it. Monogamous sentiments undoubtedly acted as an incubus on the consciences of many, pluralists and non-pluralists, men and women alike. 

More crucial, and what particularly recommends the theme of guilt as part of the Mormon response to the Manifesto, is the nervousness felt by many Saints about their sexual behavior. Most of this, I believe, revolved around the question of whether and to what degree sexual activity was to be enjoyed apart from its use for reproduction. General approval of erotic pleasure in marriage previous to the Mormon removal West seems to have given way to a more rigoristic ethic in the latter half of the nineteenth century.[8] This was partly due, undoubtedly, to uncertainties ».'t by Americans in general about sexual purpose. Anxiety was sharpened by the fact that, despite growing acceptance of the importance of romance, medical advice manuals of the time warned of the dangers sexual indulgence could bring, and Victorians sometimes anguished acutely over what to do with the pleadings of their glands.[9]

Mormon apologetics in behalf of polygamy also contributed to increased sensitivity about the propriety of sexual pleasure. Except for expressions of outrage over Gentile hypocrisy, no subject connected with sexuality occupied Mormon spokespersons more often than denials that gratification of the flesh had anything to do with plural marriage.[10] One might argue, of course, that the frequent and emphatic nature of such denials betrayed Mormon anxiety on the subject. Whatever its reason, reproduction was set forth with impassioned emphasis as the near-exclusive function of sexual relations. The Saints were sermonized and warned repeatedly to beware of non-reproductive indulgence.[11] Indeed, this was identified by Mormon leaders as one of the gifts of plurality — that multiple partners permitted men to more easily fulfil their needs while confining themselves to reproductively purposed sexual activity. Polygamy, they said, minimized the profligacy they believed inherent in monogamy.[12]

Criticism of the Saints for their failure to abide by the divinely ordained purposes of sexual relations — especially in polygamy — had flowed across Mormon pulpits for years. Brigham Young declared in 1862 that abuse of the principle was sending thousands to hell, and Heber C. Kimball said in 1868 that "hundreds and thousands" in the Church were not living celestial marriage as it was intended (JD 11:269; 12:190). In a sermon in Springville, Utah, Apostle Orson Hyde upbraided the Saints for what he called their "secret sins." He specifically warned married couples to avoid sexual congress except for reproduction, and admitted that, especially in its early years, polygamy had led many into sexual excess (Gallup, 11 Feb. 1857). And during the 1880s, Apostle Erastus Snow told Mormon colonists in Mexico that too many men were yet rushing into plurality for the wrong reasons.[13]

A common, often dominant, refrain in attacks made upon the Saints was that religion and philosophy were no more than scaffolding, a front to cover their true motivation: common, animal lust. Sexual criticisms by abolitionists of the Old South were adapted and used against the Mormons.[14] And the Saints, despite public denials, must sometimes have internalized such remarks, if only as private self interrogation — a tendency reinforced by the insistence of their leaders that principle, not passion, must govern them in their marital relations (JD 5:290-91; 9:269; 11:210-11; 18:375; 23:64-65). The intense emphasis on righteous perseverance in the face of attacks from Church enemies, typical of sermons in the 1880s, sensitized Church members to personal failure. The struggle many had with monogamous impulses must have acted as an accusing witness of their selfishness and doubt. But the emphasis on a strictly reproductive employment of sex would have been especially keen as a testament to weakness of the flesh. Mormon preachment created an ideal that was difficult to attain. And, as Freud reminded us, the territory between what we desire and what others tell us we ought to desire is a region fertile with guilt (Freud 1922, 106). 

In his essay, Kenneth Stampp suggests that what he found in the South could be duplicated often in history. Individuals and societies engaged in great moral conflicts often internalize the issues in ways that, even if unconscious, profoundly affect the outcome of events—so much so that they sometimes actually invite defeat (Stampp 1980, 255). I am not saying that Mormon anxiety acted so powerfully as to contribute to surrender on the practice of polygamy. But I have tried to show that such feelings were recruited after the Manifesto, at least by some, as a way of explaining why the document was necessary. This agrees with the research of Leon Festinger and his associates who found some years ago that, surprisingly, when prophecies or theological certitudes fail, most followers in religious movements rebound with even greater faith than before, rather than lose belief. The process seems to involve the invention of a rationale consistent with former teachings that explains the disappointment or failure. The rationale is then adduced as further evidence that what they had believed in, but lost, was indeed true (Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter 1956). 

The Saints had been told that plural marriage was a dangerously powerful thing, equally capable of bringing great blessings or great sorrow and evil. The crisis of belief precipitated by the 1890 declaration naturally provoked members to explain and to blame. Consistent with warnings concerning their sexual behavior, some appropriated events of their recent past as proof that the teachings were true. However, distress and faultfinding took different forms. Apostle Matthias F. Cowley, for example, more than a decade after the Manifesto, said that Mormon society had inherited a generation of immoral women because their mothers had displayed insufficient regard for the principle when it was permitted {Deseret News, 9 Aug. 1902). William Henry Smart, joined to an additional wife by a high Church authority in 1903 but yet uncertain about the meaning of the Manifesto, reportedly blamed the birth of a retarded child on relations he had had with his plural wife (Smart 1980). One is reminded of Anne Firor Scott's description of Southern attitudes after the Civil War when she paraphrased a Southern lady to say that "the four years of bloody War was a fit penance for so many [sexual] sins" (Scott 1970, 53).15 

By recalling their doubts, their hesitations associated with plurality, and the sting of guilt for what Apostle Orson Hyde called their "secret sins," Mormons were able to save a recent passage of their history from what must otherwise have been an inexplicable defeat. By resorting to self-blame, regard for their leaders and the principle remained intact. God had not abandoned them. They had failed Him. The Manifesto, they could reason, was a consequence of their own misdeeds. 

---

[1] These considerations have been extensively explored in a number of works. See, for example, CHC 5:203-9; 6:210-19; Arrington 1958, 353-79; Godfrey 1970; G. Larson 1971; Wells 1978; and E. Lyman 1986.

[2] An account of the pledge as taken by Saints in St. George is found in Larson and Larson (1980, 2:491-92); see also Orson Pratt's 1880 discourse in Journal of Discourses (20:327). For a small sample of typical sermons, see "Effect of Persecution," Contributor 4 (Oct. 1882): 34; JD 25:191 (Brigham Young speaking in 1884); editorial, Deseret News, 23 April 1885; and "No Relinquishment," Deseret News, 5 June 1885. 

[3] Comparisons with the ancient Jews, persecuted Christians, and even the repressed and injured American Indian were made with considerable frequency. See Kenney 1983, 7:51; JD 22:178-79; 23:271-72; 26:42-43, 159-60; Larson and Larson 1980, 2:555; Joseph F. Smith's comments in Jenson 1887, 195; Eyring, "Reminiscences"; Condie, "Reminiscences and Diary," 3 March 1889. Urgings that the Saints need only trust in God include JD 20:296, 315, 355; 24:111, 173; Larson and Larson 1980, 2:642.

[4] Illustrative sources are JD 4:254-55; 11:210, 354; 14:339; 17:218-19; 20:352- 53; 25:21, 114-15; Penrose 1868; "Be Not Led Astray by Deceivers," Deseret News, 13 Dec. 1879; "Expressions from the People," Deseret News, 14 April 1885. 

[5] For Cannon's St. George statement, see Larson and Larson 1980, 2:629. There are countless references by Church leaders preaching the necessity of polygamy for those wishing the highest reward in the hereafter. See, for example, Charles S. Smith Diary, 26 April 1884, p. 259; Kimball 1981, 237; Kenney 1983, 8:126-27, 235; John Morgan Diaries, 6 Oct. 1888; JD 20:99; 24:284-85; Roberts 1884, 52, 107; and Tanner 1973, 62.

[6] "Box Elder Stake Conference," Deseret Weekly, 7 Nov. 1891. See also William Gibson statement in "Polygamous Issues," Deseret News, 28 March 1896; Brigham H. Roberts as quoted in Walker 1982, 365; William Henry Gibbs, Sr., Diary, 6 Oct. 1890; Abbie Hyde Cowley Diaries, 6 Oct. 1890; Gibson Condie Diary, pp. 108-9; Joseph Henry Dean Diary, 6 Oct. 1890; John Mills Whitaker Diaries, 6 Oct. 1890; and Lucy W. Kimball testimony in Reorganized 1893, 375.

[7] Hulett 1940, 1943; Young 1954, 291-93; Olson 1975, 61-62. Despite a modest increase in the number of polygamous contractions through the mid-1880s, Presidents Cannon and Smith later indicated that Mormon reluctance to embrace the institution had brought the Manifesto upon them. See "Remarks Made by President George O. Cannon," Deseret News, 14 Nov. 1891; and Joseph F. Smith's comments recorded in Rudger Clawson Diary, 6 Nov. 1899. The relative increase in plural contractions was noted in "Report of the Utah Commission," (Report 1885, 2:886); see also Ivins 1956, 231-32. 

[8] Oliver Cowdery, for example, told his wife in a 4 May 1834 letter that not even maternal responsibilities should interfere with a married couple's personal relationship. And Parley P. Pratt recalled that the Prophet Joseph Smith spoke to him approvingly of affection and intimacy in marriage (1985, 259-60). 

[9] For extended discussion of attitudes toward sexuality in nineteenth-century American society, especially relating to its dangers, see Fellman and Fellman 1981, 22-23; Haller and Haller 1974; Barker-Benfield 1976; relevant sections of Degler 1980; D'Emilio and Freedman 1988, 55-84; and Lystra 1989. The impact and appropriation of such views among the Mormons is explored in Hardy 1986. The issue is also treated in Kern 1981, 9, 32-33 passim; Bush 1976; and Campbell and Campbell 1976, 394-96. For suggestion that equivocal feelings about sexuality in contemporary Mormon society is at least partly an inheritance from the past, see Raynes 1987, 238-42. 

[10] As a small sample, see JD 2:76; 3:266; 4:278; 8:118; 9:36; 11:210; 20:26; 22:97; 23:228; 25:227; "The Sin of Adultery," Millennial Star 30 (5 Dec. 1868):776-79; " 'Mormonism' Not Sensual," Millennial Star 30 (5 Dec. 1877):789-90; Kenney 1983, 5:563; Cannon, 8 Sept. 1890.

[11] While this is more extensively explored in Hardy (1986), the following references are illustrative: Orson Hyde's sermon, reported in Gallup (11 Feb. 1857); a Mormon Elder's comments recorded in Sinclair (1982, 194); JD 4:278; 13:207-208; B. Young (1861); Ballantyne (1854, 5); and Erastus Snow as reported in Larson and Larson (1980, 2:620). 

[12] See, for example, JD 11:206; 24:144-45; G. Cannon 1882, 3068; "Baptism and Plurality of Wives," Millennial Star 17 (30 Oct. 1855):645; "The New York Sun on the 'Mormons,' " Millennial Star 26 (4 Nov. 1865):693-96; "Epistle of the First Presidency," 4 April 1885, in Clark 1965, 3:11. This subject is explored at much greater length in the author's forthcoming book, Solemn Covenant: The Mormon Polygamous Passage, to be published by the University of Illinois Press. 

[13] Erastus Snow's comments are found in Jenson, "Diaz Ward," (1 Aug. 1885). See also "Discourse by Prest. George Q. Cannon," Deseret News, 1 Nov. 1884; Joseph F. Smith's comment to Heber J. Grant concerning Albert Carrington, in Heber J. Grant Diaries, 24 Dec. 1885; and the paraphrase of the thoughts of Apostle Francis M. Lyman, in A. Lyman 1958, 102.

[14] Abolitionist concern with sexual sin in the ante-bellum South, and revival of reform efforts in this area after the war is treated in Walters (1973). Resurrection of Abolitionist rhetoric, and its focus on sexual immorality after the Civil War, is a primary theme in Pivar (1973). For examples of such criticism directed against the Mormons, see Ferris 1856, 146-47, 200; Utanus 1858; Froiseth 1882, 212; Dixon 1868, 183-84; Tiedeman 1886, 539; "Report of the Governor of Utah," 1885, 2:1020. See also Bunker and Bitton 1983, 128.

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At 1:00 A.M. on 26 July 1953, Arizona state officials and police officers moved through the inky darkness of an eclipsed moon to begin an armed invasion of the tiny village of Short Creek in the isolated area north of the Grand Canyon. The crime of these American citizens? They were practicing polygamists, nearly all of them of Mormon antecedents but repudiated and excommunicated by their Church. 

At 9 A.M. that same morning, Arizona's Governor Howard Pyle intoned solemnly over KTAR radio: 

Before dawn today the State of Arizona began and now has substantially concluded a momentous police action against insurrection within its own borders.

Arizona has mobilized and used its total police power to protect the lives and future of 263 children. They are the product and the victims of the foulest conspiracy you could possibly imagine. 

More than 100 peace officers moved into Short Creek. .. . They arrested almost the entire population of a community dedicated to the production of white slaves who are without hope of escaping this degrading slavery from the moment of their birth. (Arizona Republic, 27 July 1953) 

This 1953 raid was the third of three, launched not simply against offending individuals in a community but against the entire community. The first had come in 1935, and the second in 1944- What was it about the men and women of fundamentalist Mormonism that threatened the "moral fiber" of America? Why did the state of Arizona find it necessary to launch a crusade to "protect" the women and children of an entire community? Why was their communal seen as un-American? 

The Women of Fundamentalism 

A girl growing up in the shadow of Short Creek's red butte knew the boundaries of her world. She and the other women of Short Creek were geographically and socially isolated, living in the rigid gender-marked world of patriarchy. The powerful male world of fundamentalist Mormonism does not exist without the supportive and obedient female world. Bearing children to a righteous husband as one of his several wives was, in these women's views, not only the husband's will but also God's will. One of the government's motives in the 1953 raid was to "free" these women from a form of sexual slavery and to "protect" the young women of Short Creek from an untenable situation in which their sexuality during early adolescence became the property of a husband who was usually much older in a situation of limited choice. 

How did these women function as individuals? How much did they have to say about the way they lived their lives? 

Perhaps the most crucial question was that of arranged marriages, after plural marriage itself undoubtedly the single custom that ran most deeply counter to American culture. Two years after the third raid, the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency heard testimony in 1955 about social conditions in Short Creek. One senator asked whether young girls had been free to choose their own husbands, and Robert S. Tuller, Superior Court judge in Pima County, emotionally testified that they had been denied that right, then added: 

To force a young girl not yet competent to think or speak for herself into a plural marriage with a man not of her choosing, is to force her into bondage. To say that a fifteen year old girl who marries a thirty, forty, or fifty year old man, selected for her by a committee of other men, does so voluntarily without force or duress is merely to quibble with words. Our law wisely decrees a child of such age is incompetent to make any voluntary decision in that. (Committee 1955, 28) 

Mrs. Alfonzo Nyborg, a monogamous resident of Short Creek raised in a polygamous home and wife of the town's deputy sheriff, testified before the same committee that teenage girls and boys were allowed very little autonomy by comparison with the larger society: "The children, they don't have a mind of their own. They [the male leaders] just live their lives for them. The same way with the young boys. They go out and work and do what they tell them to do, and they hand the money over, and they [the male leaders] give them back what they want." Mrs. Nyborg expressed pessimism about young fundamentalists' ability to break out of the system. "It seems that once they get them it is awfully hard to get loose." She also reported once commenting to a girl, the wife and daughter of polygamists: "They must hold something over you so that you do like that." The girl answered, "They do, but I can't explain it" (Committee 1955, 32). 

Although the doctrine of individual free agency, one of the classic foundational beliefs of Mormonism, occurs repeatedly in fundamentalist literature, the context and examples usually assume that the reader, like the speaker, is male, and the issue of choice was most frequently invoked in the context of being free from the constraints of society to live a polygamous lifestyle. Women in Short Creek had few choices to make as adults. Here the culture of fundamentalism collaborated with the limited opportunities offered in this isolated, rural frontier community. Shiryl Jessop Blackmore (1985), the daughter of Edson and Alyne Jessop, grew up in Short Creek and married into polygamy but later moved to LaVerkin. She described her adolescent awakening to the realities of her limitations in a recent oral history interview: "When I was sixteen I first realized that I would probably never see the world. That Short Creek and the few miles of fields around it that I could walk through might be all I knew of life." Then a woman in her forties, she shuddered in remembrance, then summarized what she had seen as her choices: "1. Finish high school and then get married. 2. Get married as a teenager. 3. Leave the town altogether, which would bring disgrace to my family and shame on my head." 

But leaving was not a real alternative because she was ill equipped to fend for herself: "I was not trained for a job, I knew no one outside of town, the thought of a world full of strangers terrified me. Leaving was simply not an option." She also understood clearly that discussing her concerns with either her father or her mother was not an option either. They would have considered such questioning nothing short of treason, a sin to be repented of. She and others like her had to wrestle with their problems privately. 

Short Creek itself reinforced the authoritarian nature of fundamentalism in allowing its young people little room for independence. In 1953 Short Creek was still essentially a frontier community. Homes had no electricity or central heating, often no plumbing. The sheer physical labor required of women to care for their children and houses under these conditions should not be underestimated. Furthermore, fundamentalism's raison d'etre—large families-meant that pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing intensified the physical demands on a woman every two or three years from the time she was married until the end of her childbearing, typically in her mid-forties. Girls were pulled into their mothers' lives to supply necessary domestic help from childhood until their own marriages. 

In 1953 there was no local public high school nor avenues to trade or higher education. The Short Creek Academy offered only limited classwork. Partially as a consequence, the marriage pattern differed markedly from general U.S. norms. The average age at first marriage for fundamentalist women in Short Creek was sixteen, though fourteen and fifteen were not uncommon. Eight of the sixty-four women arrested in the 1953 raid were minors (Superior Court 1953). Four teenage wives testified, agreeing with Mrs. Nyborg, that women in Short Creek typically married in their teens and had frequent pregnancies. This information about age at first marriage admittedly was extrapolated from a small sample group (approximately one-third of the total female population); but at the time of the raid, at least a dozen girls between fourteen and seventeen were either pregnant or the mothers of up to three children (Committee 1955, 14). Those at the academy would leave class to nurse their babies (Pyle 1984). All girls between the ages of eleven and eighteen, perhaps fifty in number, were a particular concern of the juvenile justice system for they were potential plural wives and mothers (Committee 1955, 20). The raid seemingly did nothing to dissuade these young girls from marrying polygamous husbands. 

Evidence indicates that this situation was due, in part, to limited opportunities. As the public school system improved over the next two decades, the average age at first marriage increased dramatically until, by 1988, it had leveled off at nineteen, much closer to the approximated state average of twenty-one (Bureau Vital Records 1985). 

Marriage decisions were considered religious decisions—not private ones—and hence fell within the domain of the presiding patriarchs. Sect leaders John Barlow and LeRoy Johnson exerted tremendous influence on the distribution of wives. When approached, they advised men when and who to marry and how to live in plural households. Even when Dan Barlow (1986) married his fifth and final wife at age forty, he deferred to the judgment of his patriarchal leader and foster father, LeRoy Johnson. Because Dan believed LeRoy Johnson was the mouthpiece of the Lord, he was predisposed to accept his advice. 

Such a system is not necessarily coercive or exploitive. When fewer than five hundred individuals lived in Short Creek, the patriarch knew everyone and probably had reasonably accurate ideas about how well two people might be suited to each other. In other cases, parents arranged marriages. Also, young men usually married girls near their own age for a first wife, although later marriages tended to see increasing gaps in the ages of bride and groom—a pattern that had also held true for nineteenth-century Mormons practicing plural marriage. In these young marriages and even in later plural marriages, romantic involvement was a frequent element in the courtship. Love in marriage, no matter what the age, was an esteemed value (V. Barlow 1988). 

The primary aim of marriage, however, was not love but a celestial social order. Plural marriage was part of a deferential and hierarchical society that was strictly ordered along patriarchal lines. The child was subordinate to the mother. The mother bowed to her husband's authority. He, in turn, looked to the prophet for direction, while the prophet was answerable to and spoke for Jesus Christ. As God was at the head of the world, the husband was the earthly head of the family. The appropriate behaviors directed toward one's superior were deference and obedience. The appropriate behaviors directed toward one's subordinates were instructional, benevolent, and either rewarding or punitive. 

The official fundamentalist requirements for women are summarized in Joseph Musser's editorial in Truth, the Salt Lake-based fundamentalist periodical, in 1948: "Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. In placing man at the head, he bearing the Priesthood, a law, an eternal law, was announced." The roles of both were rigidly prescribed, "Man, with divine endowments, was born to lead, and woman to follow, though often times the female is endowed with rare talents of leadership. But women by right, look to the male members for leadership and protection." Women were taught to "respect and revere themselves, as holy vessels, destined to sustain and magnify the eternal and sacred relationship of wife and mother." She was the "ornament and glory of man; to share with him a never fading crown, and an eternally increasing dominion" (1948, 134). Musser also spelled out these male-female roles in more secular matters: The man "shall fight the physical battles in protection of his loved ones, and bring into the home the necessaries of life." The wife "adorns the home, conserves the larder and renders the habitation an earthly heaven where love, peace, affection, gratitude, and oneness shall abound, she the queen and he the king" (1948, 134). 

Men were encouraged to look for women with a "kind and amiable disposition; love, unaffected modesty, for industrious habits, [and] for sterling virtues." The ideal wife had "cleanliness in person, in apparel, in cooking, and every kind of domestic labor." She was cheerful and had "genuine religion to control and govern every thought and deed" (Truth 10:113).

If a wife were found wanting in any of these areas, it was the husband's responsibility to instruct her and remedy her deficiencies: "Let him realize the weighty responsibility now placed upon him as the head of the family and also let him study diligently the disposition of his wives, that he may know how to instruct them in wisdom for their good." Because men were superior to women, the "weaker vessels," it was the husband's responsibility "to nourish, cherish, and protect; to be their head, their patriarch, and their saviour" (Truth 10:114). 

Traditional gender assignments were reinforced by a dress code which was spelled out for the women though not for the men. Pants, scanty attire, and make-up were all discouraged: "The female cannot wear men's attire and display to the world those finer and more sensitive qualities that crown her with beauty and grace known only to herself," editorialized Musser in 1947. "When a corpulent woman forsakes her protective skirts for overalls she displays a figure that is anything but attractive. Her feminine charms have forsaken her" (1947, 19). Polygamist Edson Jessop of Short Creek explained in a national news story, "We believe in covering our bodies and we frown upon make-up; silence itself is reproof enough if one's wives come out with short sleeves or painted faces" (1953, 30). 

Interestingly enough, these prescriptions—right down to the prohibition against pants—could have appeared in any nineteenth-century Mormon publication without sounding even faintly strange; what is more, they could have appeared in any twentieth-century Mormon publication up to approximately the mid-1970s and still have sounded completely familiar to orthodox Mormon women and men. Even today, it is the intensity of the decree, rather than the concept itself, which would sound extreme to orthodox Mormon women. 

Perhaps the only substantive difference in how Mormon and fundamentalist women viewed their position in society was the literalness with which the latter took this advice and the pervasiveness in fundamentalist society of the belief that women were in a separate class from men. They willingly took their place in this rigid society and—conditioned by tradition, history, and spiritual experiences which reinforced such roles—considered it to be God's will for them and a source of great personal happiness. One young plural wife in a Salt Lake City fundamentalist family said in a recent interview that she and her sister wives gladly looked to their husband's leadership as a priesthood holder. "We are lucky to have one of the elect of God in our home," she emphasized. Her sister wife added, "When you only get a small part of your man, you glory in what you have" (Mrs. S. W. and C. W 1986).

Clear roles have the useful social function of providing cultural stability. Against the turmoil, materialism, and "juvenile delinquency" which characterized post-war America, the psychological security and emotional reassurance of a profoundly religious, home-centered life must have been deeply consoling for many fundamentalist women. As the "outside world" came to be characterized as a threatening place of persecution, legal action, and imprisonment, the ideal of home as a haven acquired peculiar power. 

The polygamist also married to follow God's injunction to Adam and Eve: "Multiply and replenish the earth." Accordingly, sex was for procreation only and governed by strict guidelines based on theological considerations. The fundamentalist patriarch spoke of sexual activity in puritanical terms, again an echo of nineteenth-century Mormonism, and saw in polygamy the cure-all for the world's problems of prostitution, homosexuality, infidelity, and sexual debauchery. Monogamy, claimed Musser in another Truth editorial, was a lesser sexual law which had put "many women . . . in their graves [as] the victims of the sexual over-indulgence of their husbands." Polygamy "will at least modify this trouble and subdue the natural animal in man" (1948, 182). 

Sexual activity within marriage was, in the polygamous system, for procreation. Rulon Allred describes first approaching patriarch Charles Zitting in the early 1940s with the idea of marrying a plural wife. Zitting, one of the original practitioners who claimed John Taylor's ordination to plural marriage, put Allred through a grueling interview on his private life, sexual experience, past history and attitude toward religion, and attitudes about women. Zitting seemed to look straight into Allred's heart with his piercing dark eyes (Taylor 1953, 76). "If you are ready to enter the Principle," he said, "this is the law." Zitting then declared the purpose of plural marriage to be producing children, forbade sexual intercourse between conception and the child's weaning, and warned, "A man who looks upon his wife with lust is damned. A man who can live this law is worthy of his exaltation, but don't enter the Principle unless you can meet the requirements" (in Taylor 1953, 76). 

Zitting's explanation of "the law" of abstinence during a woman's pregnancy and lactation seems to have been a generally accepted rule. Polygamist husbands were counseled to exercise self-control and moderation; then, "the sexual relation, properly employed, rather than reflecting mortal weaknesses and being immodest, lewd, coarse, vulgar or indelicate, and something to blush over," would be elevated to a higher plane and become "a divine principle dedicated by the Gods for the perpetuation of life and birth of earths" (Musser 1944, 102).

The rhetoric of fundamentalism does not celebrate sexuality but treats it with respectful caution as a necessary evil—at best a force which men must learn to control and from which pregnant women must be protected. Still, sexual consummation sealed the marriage with a powerful bond. Musser went so far as to say "a real man could not live sexually with a woman without loving her" (1948, 182). 

Although the polygamists were fundamentally opposed to contraception, sharing a husband with five other women could work against quick conception. Nor is there any reason to believe that all husbands expected to provide or were capable of providing sexual intercourse every night, since "tempering the lust of the husband" was also one of the residual effects of righteous living (Musser 1948, 184). Perhaps the most effective contraceptive device was the commandment to observe gestational abstinence, thus insuring that children would be spaced at least eighteen to twenty-four months apart, "thereby conserving [the mother's] health and enabling her to bring forth healthy and beautiful children" (Musser 1948, 185). It was bearing these children that, for the polygamous woman, was the ultimate blessing and her unique role in the plan of salvation. Barrenness was seen as a reproach—God's curse on the woman and her husband (Truth 14:135). 

Musser and other fundamentalist leaders derived their philosophy of gestational abstinence or the "sexual law" from extensive readings about the relative virtues of abstinence during pregnancy and picked from those readings a combination of ideas that made sense in their minds. It is virtually impossible to document how extensively this doctrine was practiced, but the ideal was in place by the 1940s. For the fundamentalist, gestational abstinence emphasized the theologically sacred nature of birth. During gestation and lactation, the woman was separated from earthly passion and joined with God in the act of creation (Musser 1942, 187). 

Practical arguments in fundamentalist literature concentrated on the benefits of gestational abstinence for both mother and unborn child. According to one unidentified mother, writing in 1941, it "results in superior brain development, while the reverse leads to idiocy. Intercourse during pregnancy drains the nerve-vitality of the mother and child . . . when the nervous system of the mother is so sensitive and may be so easily upset" (Truth 7:185). 

One polygamous woman expressed this same concept in highly colored language: "The embryo and fetus destroying practice [intercourse during pregnancy] is hideous. It is little short of involuntary baby slaughter. An ugly unholy picture it makes." She continued with a poignant observation that told much of the complicated nature of these marriage relationships. "Yet the loving, faithful wife submits, usually without protest, because she wants to please her man and keep him loving her alone" (in Musser 1942, 130). Fundamentalist women were often reluctant to speak about sex outside of the context of reproduction. This woman, at least, acknowledged its role in the husband-wife relationship. 

Short Creek was the "lambing ground" where the women of plurality from all over the region—Utah, Arizona, and Idaho—came to give birth in a home setting with the assistance of an experienced midwife. For example, in the east wing of her lovely plantation-style home in Short Creek, nurse-midwife Lydia Jessop, first wife of Fred Jessop, delivered hundreds of babies. She brought to her work a sense of professionalism and careful standards that soon were acknowledged as appropriate by county health officials (Jessop 1988). 

During the three Short Creek raids, the women of Short Creek were dealt with as mothers. Several women were indicted on charges similar to those applied to their husbands, but none were imprisoned. Rather, they were allowed to stay with their children and put under the protective custody of the state. Furthermore, it was as mothers that these women exerted power and influence. Although the state "protected" them, it also attempted to limit their capacity for teaching the doctrine, for they were recognized as crucial in perpetuating both the doctrine and practice of plural marriage. 

In fact, the role of fundamentalist women represents a distinct shift in the evolution of the defense of polygamy. Nineteenth-century Mormon polygamy defended its Constitutional right as a religious practice; twentieth-century fundamentalism defended a woman's "inalienable right to motherhood" (Musser 1945, 275). In the 1950s, fundamentalist Mormon polygamy was essentially a cult of motherhood. Musser called polygamy a "woman's rights program." What mattered most was not marriage, he said, but "quality" motherhood, "and to try and withhold the right thereof from any fit woman of our breed and nation is an infamy as well as national insanity" (Truth 10:275). 

Idealized motherhood thus counterpoised patriarchal power in fundamentalist society, and it was as a mother that a woman in Short Creek exercised what influence she had. "Motherhood was the grand capstone of the life of the woman. Greatness, glory, usefulness await her otherwise but here alone all her powers, all her being can find full play," lauded Musser in 1949 (Truth 14:184). 

"We who believe in polygamy are joyed at the role the Lord has given us," said Rhea Kunz in 1987. "Unlike so many mothers today, we don't fear childbirth." Another mother added, "We don't worry because of the extra expense that another mouth will bring. We know that the Lord will provide and care for us" ("Polygamous Wife" 1944, 26). According to Musser, polygamy offered to all women the lure of marrying a man of her choice and becoming a mother. From his perspective, "every normal woman yearns for wifehood and motherhood. She yearns to wear the crown of glory. The most precious and yearned for jewels are children to call her mother" (Truth 14:134). Polygamy also served the practical sociological function of integrating the "thousands of American women who are [otherwise] a permanent surplus on our marriage market and doomed to spinsterhood and childlessness" (1944, 102). 

How did this practice work? Behind the theory and the theology of fundamentalist "celestial marriage," how did families live out their united lives? 

First, fundamentalists viewed their unions as both sacred and eternal, thus increasing the significance of all relationships in the home. Much official counsel warned against anger and criticism and encouraged harmony: 

Speak not the faults of your wives and others; for in so doing you speak against yourself. 

Never seek to prejudice the mind of your husband against any of his other wives, for the purpose of exalting yourself in his estimation, lest the evil which you unjustly try to bring upon them, fall with double weight upon your own head. 

Let each mother teach her children to honor and love their father, and to respect his teachings and counsels. 

Suffer not children of different mothers to be haughty and abusive to each other; for they are brothers and sisters the same as the children of the patriarch Jacob. . . . Always speak well of each of your husband's wives in the presence of your children. .. . If you consider that some of the mothers are too lenient with their children and too negligent in correcting them, do not be offended, but strive, by the wise and prudent management of your own, to set [a] worthy example before them. (Musser 1944c, 113-15) 

In Short Creek, a polygamous woman typically spent much of her married life in the same household as her sister wives and their children. Typically, she was also expected to generously love each of them. Making a plural marriage work thus required enormous sacrifice, self control, and commitment to the principle. 

One polygamous wife in an anonymous interview acknowledged the difficult times. "Sure we became angry and jealous. We are after all human beings. But when I felt most hateful I went into my room and closed the door." There she inhaled slowly and "prayed for the strength to endure—or at least to be pleasant" (Janice T. 1986).

Husbands minimized jealousy in various ways. Rulon Allred was careful to express his affection only privately to his wives. To flaunt his romantic involvement with six separate women would have, Allred believed, resulted in discord. It was something they all knew existed, but it was easier not to witness it. 

A second patriarch, Edson Jessop, attempted to encourage thinking first of the group and considering the plural family "above all a unit. My wives trust me. A man of our faith never walks the chalk line as does the man with only one wife." Jessop tried to "spend my time where I'm most needed, perhaps where there is sickness or trouble," and claimed that his wives "trust me to do whatever is best for the family as a whole" (Jessop and Whipple 1953, 29). 

Jessop saw his role as "diplomat" and explained, "Even when my families lived separately, I rotated my evenings; once a week we met together at one Home Evening." In this setting it was possible to "pray and sing together, air your problems and your grudges, play games and visit and afterward sample Marie's special angel-food cake or Alice's cream puffs. You not only have fun—you forge bonds that will endure a century" (Jessop and Whipple 1953, 27). 

In one family, the five wives felt most content by alternating weeks in the kitchen, garden, and laundry (Janice T. 1986). Another family "specialized," with one woman caring for all of the children while her more proficient elder sister wife sewed, laundered, and ironed while the third baked bread and prepared meals. 

Edson Jessop's six wives were nearly all the same age and good friends. "They cooperate efficiently, one handling the sewing for the family, another the cooking and so forth," he commented. "What counts is not the number of wives, but the number of united wives. In fact, there are times when I wish mine would at least get mad at me separately instead of all together" (Jessop and Whipple 1953, 30). 

In answer to the oft-voiced question about the nonexclusive nature of plural marriage, polygamists simply turned away from metaphors of romantic love. Instead, they explained with analogies to a mother's love for her several unique and individual children (Johnson 1988). Edson Jessop also used the metaphor of friendship. "Naturally a man values his wives for different qualities, just as he values his friends. Perhaps one wife has pretty hair, and another is wonderful with the children, perhaps one is witty and keeps him cheerful, and another brings him closer to God" (Jessop and Whipple 1953,29). 

After childbirth or during illness, sister wives assumed the incapacitated woman's roles. "It is a joy to have a companion with whom to share sorrow and happiness, sickness and health," commented one woman, "[to have] in times of distress someone to lean upon and turn to for assistance; [when sick], to know that your children are receiving a mother's loving care" (Truth 10:26). 

This type of close companionship seems more analogous to the friendship between a husband and wife in a close monogamous marriage than to the more usual women's friendships of today. Perhaps in the absence of husbands, these women learned to meet most of their social and emotional needs with each other. In one family, when two plural wives were offered the option of living in separate homes, they chose instead to share a home as "best friends" (Mrs. S. W. and C. W. 1986). A first wife, preparing to meet a potential third wife, remarked candidly to her husband: "After all, it's more important that she get along with us than with you. A plural wife doesn't see much of her husband, but she is entering into the family of her sister wives" (Taylor 1953, 78). 

The shared persecution of the three raids, in which the women saw themselves and their children as martyrs for a holy cause, also increased their shared commitment. Furthermore, the raids were simply dramatic climaxes in an ongoing saga that encouraged the women to see themselves as part of a larger family, the community of believers. Polygamy served as a boundary separating those inside the community from all outsiders, including blood kin who did not accept the principle of plural marriage. It functioned as a powerful adhesive that enhanced the resolve and unity of the group. 

Unlike Mormon polygamy of the nineteenth century, which had its roots in the marital traditions of monogamy, this highly enmeshed society looked for guidelines in its own hundred-year Mormon history of the practice. In the 1950s mothers of the new generation of young polygamous women taught their daughters what it was to be a plural wife, what it was to be female in fundamentalist society. Through their behavior, through example and tradition, and through belief these women taught their daughters to continue on the path they believed was the one sure way to salvation. 

Young polygamous women like Colleen Jessop Darger learned from their mothers' examples. Vera Black attested to this fact in her testimony before the court, In Re State in Interest of Black (283 P. 2d 887). In answer to the question "Now that principle (plural marriage) was taught in the home, in your home, while you were a young lady?" Vera said, "Well I don't know what you mean exactly, if anyone lives the situation, why they naturally get it in their lives." 

Vera's testimony continued along this same vein.

Q: It had the sanction of your parents, didn't it, your father and mother?
A: I presume it did. 
Q: And were you opposed when you proposed to become a plural wife of Mr. Black, were you opposed by them? 
A: I guess I had my free choice. 
Q: You sought their counsel I am sure didn't you? 
A: Well they never stopped me. 
Q: They rather encouraged it did they not? 
A: They didn't have too much to say about it, they gave their children their free agency. 
Q: It was discussed in the home? 
A: Well that is what I mean, I was along enough in years that I had knowledge enough to think for myself, I had my own head. 
Q: Do you feel like you would be willing to continue to violate the laws of the State of Utah by living as man to wife with Mr. Black in the future? 
A: It would be a pretty hard thing to do to give anybody up after you have lived with him as I have. I couldn't live without him. 

Thus, paradoxically, fundamentalist women triumphed by accepting limitations. The patriarchal order stressed a woman's need for male guidance and support. The exaltation of her fertility locked her into the single role of mother. These very limitations led the courts to deal with fundamentalist women as dependents, like children, unable to take care of themselves and in need of protection and intervention. But in safe guarding their motherhood, the courts also gave them the cradle in which they would continue to nurture fundamentalism. 

The 1953 Raid

Outsiders watched the growth of polygamy in the quiet shadow of the red butte that surrounded Short Creek and were alarmed at its increasing strength. The Mormons carefully guarded their temples, wards, and mission systems as they watched the polygamists in the Colorado Plateau area and quickly gathered information about those involved in any way with the group for excommunication proceedings. Increasingly, however, Arizona's government and the Mormon Church focused on the town's women and children. It was the "plight" of these "victims," more than any other factor, that led to the third and most socially devastating raid on the fundamentalists of Short Creek on 26 July 1953. 

This concern underlay the rhetoric of Governor Howard Pyle's radio message which referred once to "insurrection within its own borders" but continued in the language of protectionism: "to protect the lives and future of 263 children . . . the product and the victims of the foulest conspiracy. . . a community dedicated to the production of white slaves . . . degrading slavery." He continued: 

Here is a community—many of the women, sadly right along with the men—unalterably dedicated to the wicked theory that every maturing girl child should be forced into the bondage of multiple wifehood with men of all ages for the sole purpose of producing more children to be reared to become mere chattels of this totally lawless enterprise. 

As the highest authority in Arizona, on whom is laid the constitutional injunction to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed," I have taken the ultimate responsibility for setting into motion the actions that will end this insurrection. (Pyle 1953) 

The day chosen for the raid, Sunday, July 26, was the same weekend as Mormon Pioneer Day, a state holiday in Utah. The Twenty-fourth of July held profound significance for the Mormon people and their unwelcome closet cousins, the fundamentalists. It marked the day of the Mormon pioneers' official entry in the Salt Lake Valley. 

Friday, July 24 was hot and dry. Even farm animals lingered in the shade beneath the few trees that lined fields and streets in Short Creek. The weekend's festivities began with an evening social held in the schoolhouse, the only building in town large enough to seat a group of people. Still, the room was crowded with enthusiastic citizens singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" and the Mormon favorite "Come, Come Ye Saints." After the school orchestra performed, the town patriarch, eight-four-year-old Charles Zitting, rose to entertain his audience with stories of his youth in Utah. He also warned them of rumors of an impending raid. His listeners chuckled and exchanged disdainful glances. The threat of another raid seemed insignificant compared to the two years many had already spent in prison as a result of earlier raids in 1935 and 1944. 

Saturday night the fundamentalists gathered beneath the stars for a dance that, like all socials, opened and closed with prayer. Again, the main topic of conversation that night was the raid. Mothers, sobered by even the remote possibility of arrest, returned home and told their children, "If we are separated we will be rejoined." 

"You must be brave," whispered Viola Broadbent, cupping the trembling chin of a child about to burst into tears, "The Lord will be with us" (Broadbent 1986). 

Earlier that same Saturday while Short Creek had been preparing for its evening dance, the forces of the raid had gathered at Williams, Arizona, 125 miles to the south, in the handsome red sandstone high school. Its auditorium on the second floor had boasted fifteen rows of permanent seats. Quickly the room filled with perhaps sixty or seventy Arizona highway patrolmen, deputy sheriffs, national guardsmen, and liquor control agents. Many were returned vets eager to reenlist in the work of making a better America. The remainder of the room filled with civilians, attorneys, and social service workers. 

The team was briefed and divided into two groups who would converge on the town from two directions, one from the Arizona side and another from the Utah side, thereby giving the illusion of support from the Utah government. As dusk fell, the lights of the first group could be seen fifty miles away like a trail of fireflies winding through the undergrowth. After descending from the Kaibab Forest, they turned out their lights, moving ahead cautiously by waning moonlight. An eclipse would occur at 4:30 A.M., making the darkness absolute except for starlight. 

As the children of Short Creek slept, their supposed "saviors" were traveling along the more than four hundred miles of dusty roads in less secrecy than they had supposed. Fred Porter, the local sheriff and a monogamist, had alerted the polygamists about the impending raid. They were expecting something. Long before the cars doused their lights, lookouts on the red butte above Short Creek spotted the caravan coming from the Kaibab Forest like a streak of fire moving along a spill of gasoline. 

"Holy cow!" muttered one lookout incredulously. "I counted one hundred cars in that line-up. Half the cops in Arizona to round us up" (D. Barlow 1987). Then Lydia Jessop, Fred's wife, sent up a young man to say that a phone call from "one of the boys" warned that "a hundred cars" were "coming from the Utah side." 

One of the men scratched a match. It flared in the inky darkness, lighting the calm, clean-shaven faces with an eerie glow. A second man then lit a stick of dynamite, lobbing it up and out. It cracked in the sky like lightning in a summer storm, warning the families waiting below that the government had arrived. 

After the tension, there was a certain amount of relief. In fact, the Johnsons, the Barlows, the Jessops, and the Broadbents welcomed martyrdom. Persecution for their religious beliefs had always hallowed their suffering. 

When the caravan of "good Samaritans" swirled into Short Creek at 1:45 A.M. with lights flashing and sirens blaring their arrival to the world, they found the people of Short Creek—men, women, and children—standing behind the picket fence that circled the schoolhouse. They had assembled during the preceding hour, dressed and hair brushed, to sing while they waited. Unlike their singing two nights before, the music was intermittently broken by nervous gasps, tears, and whispers moving through the crowd like a wave upon water.

When Sheriff Fred Porter climbed out of the lead car, LeRoy Johnson, wearing a clean white shirt, necktie, dark pants, and dark blue suspenders, stepped forward to meet him. "We've run for the last time," he told Porter. "We're going to stand right here and shed our blood" (Group 1988). His white hair framed his craggy, intelligent face. Porter did not respond to either the desperation or the near invitation to violence. "We don't want violence," he said, raising his voice slightly so that it carried over the waiting congregation, "but we're here to do a job and we're going to get it done." 

There was no violence. The warning stick of dynamite was the closest thing to force on either side. By 4:30 A.M. the town of Short Creek had been "secured" by the combined forces of the state of Arizona. Deputy sheriffs fanned out through the crowd to serve warrants on thirty-six men and eighty-six women. Within eight minutes, they had served warrants on all the adult fundamentalists on the Arizona side of town. The charges included statutory rape, polygamous living, cohabitation, bigamy, adultery, and misappropriation of school funds (Superior Court 1953). The highway patrol quickly strung makeshift barbed-wire fences around the school yard and put all the adults behind them. Some had their children with them; others had left children at home in bed asleep. None could leave to attend to their children or the animals that roamed hungry in the fields or stood patiently in the barns until late afternoon. Patrolmen also set up tents for the command center and a kitchen and promptly served heaping piles of bacon and eggs to the prisoners and their jailers. A third tent housed two Mohave County Superior Court judges, Lorna Lockwood and Jesse Faulkner, who took jurisdiction over every child, including the alleged juvenile wives, and made them wards of the court. 

Late that afternoon the thirty-six men who had been arrested were driven to Kingman along with eight women who were either childless or whose children were grown. Kingman County Jail, where the fundamentalists arrived at 11 P.M., thoroughly disgusted them. "It was just horrible," shuddered Millie Johnson, then fifteen years old. "Unbelievable conditions for human beings. The walls were crawling with bugs. It was filthy, just filthy." The eight women immediately demanded clean sheets, hot water, and soap. Before they went to sleep that night, they had thoroughly scrubbed the walls and floors. But "we just couldn't seem to wash away the filth of what had happened to us" (M. Johnson 1988). Transferred to another section of the prison the next day, they began to scrub again. They also prayed and began to fast. By the end of the week, LeRoy Johnson had raised $43,000 to release all thirty-six men and eight women. In most cases their families were no longer in Short Creek to welcome them home. 

Separation: The Women's Experience 

Twenty-four-year-old Viola Broadbent, the first wife of David Broadbent, had sat all that first day with the other women on folding chairs in the center of the school yard. Fanning their faces with their aprons and shading their babies with their hands, the women waited, chewing the state's sandwiches and drinking sodas. By 4 P.M., most of the mothers and their children had been sent home where they waited for the next three days. On the second and third days, a court photographer and a deputy sheriff photographed each home and each wife with her children. They also photographed outbuildings and junked rusting cars that the children played in, incorrectly labeling such cars as "dwellings" for some plural families. Later, the fundamentalists would mention, among their resentments, the added indignity of being linked with this image of slovenly indigence. 

On Thursday night, 31 July 1953, 125 women and children attempted a mass escape through the hills north of Short Creek on the Utah side, but were caught and returned to their homes by the police officers (G. Johnson 1988). 

At 9 A.M. on Tuesday, 29 July, the third morning, an officer appeared at Gwen Johnson's front door and told her to pack for a journey, not specifying for how long or how far. A strong woman, she and her husband, LeRoy Johnson, had six children. Furthermore, they had taken in the six orphans, ranging in age from ten to eighteen, of John Y. Barlow who died in 1949 and his first wife, Mattie, who died in 1944. Gwen was intelligent, serene, and dignified, inspiring love and respect not only in her home circle but among the other women of the community. Seven months pregnant with her sixth child, she was especially worried about three of her foster children, sixteen-year-old Sam, fourteen-year-old Truman and eighteen-year-old Alwin who would surely be left at home without anyone to care for them. She scrambled to pack for her five children and three youngest foster children. 

Less than an hour later, Mrs. Johnson and her children gathered up their suitcases and joined other women and children who were walking up the street to the school yard where five big yellow school buses waited. Behind them, many left canning projects—bottles still sitting in pressure cookers on burners that had been hastily switched off, counters heaped with ripe fruit that was rotting within twenty-four hours, loaves of baking bread left to char or sour in the cooling ovens (G. Johnson 1988).

When one police matron summarily told a mother to be packed for a three-day trip in ten minutes, she protested, "I can't be ready in ten minutes. I've got all the squash cooking. How many clothes do I need for three days?" The matron immediately threatened, "If you don't hurry, I'll go and get someone that will make sure that you do" (Group 1988). 

At the school, state welfare representatives explained to the 56 women that the government was taking custody of Short Creek's 164 children but that they could, if they wished, accompany their children into foster homes (G. Johnson 1988). 

Because of the confusion of dealing with so many uncooperative women and children, it was almost 5 P.M. before they were all finally aboard the buses to begin the arduous seventeen-hour drive down the canyon to Phoenix. The state provided sandwiches, soda, formula, evaporated milk, and boiled water, but the ride was horrendous. The children cried and fidgeted in their seats. The bus drivers had been instructed to refuse to stop for any reason. The buses had no built-in toilet facilities, and the only provision was a single child's potty in the aisle of each bus. In addition to the children's needs, many of the women were pregnant. One mother, frustrated beyond endurance, snapped at the driver angrily: "When Governor Pyle can control my kids' kidneys, I'll leave plurality!" The bus drove on. One pregnant woman, close to her delivery date, went into labor as the bus twisted and jolted; she refused to tell the officials on board or ask them to stop. Marjorie Holmes's six-year-old daughter, Susie, already sick when they boarded the bus, was feverish and dehydrated by the time they reached Phoenix seventeen hours later. Holmes implored the matron on board to let her take the child to the hospital, but the matron, suspecting a trick, refused. The girl eventually died from complications of this illness (D. Barlow 1988). 

Behind them, Short Creek's unnatural quiet lengthened into evening. Truman, Alwin, and Sam Barlow, and their half-brother Joseph Barlow, divided up the responsibility for the homes left vacant in Short Creek and worked hard into the night, rounding up and tending the dogs, chickens, and cows left roaming through yards, emptying ovens, washing dishes, and closing windows and doors (A. Barlow 1988). The thirty plural wives on the Utah side of the creek redoubled their sisterly efforts, canning the fruit, tending the animals, and helping the men in the fields (Black 1988). 

At 7 A.M., the buses reached Mesa and Phoenix. Some went to the National Guard Armory, others to the YMCA. The Y's parking lot was crowded with women in bright summer dresses, LDS Relief Society sisters designated by the state as foster mothers for the fundamentalists' children. Many were not assigned foster homes but were housed in the Y itself, jamming its gymnasium and hallways. Ester Spencer, ironically the only wife for the moment of Floyd Otto Spencer, was pregnant with her eighth child. For three and a half months, she shared a hallway, three cots, and a single toilet with five other mothers and twenty-nine children (in Truth 21:5). After a few days, most of the women and children left the armory and the YMCA and were distributed to foster homes throughout the Mesa area. 

The children, as wards of the court, received state welfare aid. By 1955, the cost of supporting the children and their mothers in their foster homes for twenty-two months was $110,000, the annual budget of Mohave County (Committee 1955, 8). Foster arrangements varied considerably. Alyne Bistline Jessop and her three children were ushered into a room with clean towels and a rocking chair (Blackmore 1985). Another woman led a mother and four children to a tool shed behind her Mesa home. It contained only four single beds, no chairs, dressers, or toilet facility. When the mother burst into tears, the foster mother commented, "If you break the law you have to accept the punishment," then turned and walked back to her own home. The family stayed there seven months (Group 1988). 

When Margaret Hunter Jessop's bus reached the armory, her first priority was getting her children to the restroom, but instead they were all shepherded into a large gymnasium. "I noticed that there was a lady standing there watching me wherever I went. She came up to me and said, 'I've decided that you're the family I would like to take.'" Bewildered, Margaret and her children followed her out of the building. As they were driving down the street, the woman said kindly, '"Now this is going to be quite an experience for both of us, and I hope you will be comfortable.'" The home was newly built on a quiet dead-end street where the foster mother's husband was waiting to meet them. 

Margaret felt that she and her children were treated well but was appalled to learn that the woman had chosen her family because "she wanted to adopt another child." Margaret refused adamantly to even consider the idea; but still, "a number of different people came to that home and looked my children over. I remember so much how those people . . . followed them around, they were so hungry for a child." 

The woman, Margaret recalled, "had been told that our lifestyle was sort of prehistoric. She was surprised that we weren't the backwoods type of people that she had supposed." In fact, when told to transmit an ultimatum from the authorities that Margaret would, the next day, have to choose either to renounce her faith or give up her children, the woman "broke down and cried." Fortunately, this forced choice never materialized, and the foster mother eventually helped the family find a comfortable apartment that a retired couple had cared for well. She also gave Margaret a washing machine, her mother's sewing machine, and paintings by her mother, enlisting her sisters to help collect furniture and decorations (Timpson 1988). 

Even the fundamentalist women who were treated well and lived comfortably were haunted by fears of losing their children to arbitrary government action. Many of them spent hours walking through their neighborhoods, gradually finding each other at parks, in shopping centers, or on the streets. The policy toward the polygamists was still in constant flux. There were those in control who still advocated the idea of permanent separation of the women from their children. Even after the women were in their own apartments, they had limited mobility. The government agents with whom they had regular contact, Arizona state social workers, attempted to keep them separated from other members of the group, refused to provide any information about their husbands, refused to tell them where their sister wives were, and gave them no information about how long they had to stay in Mesa. 

Viola Broadbent found that a number of Short Creek women were living in apartments near her own. Soon they would meet each afternoon in the park. One day she noticed a man standing at the fence of the park watching her children. After a while he approached her, squatted down before one-year-old Lydia, and said, "I have been watching you. My wife and I would like to adopt your daughters and give them a good life in a Mormon home." Recoiling in horror, Viola quickly swept Lydia up in her arms and, dragging her five-year-old, ran all the way back to her apartment. She never returned to the park and "never felt safe, even for a moment," until she returned to Short Creek (Broadbent 1986). 

Marie Darger was shy even before the raid. For her, at age five, Mesa was an ordeal in fear. "I was afraid every time I went to school that they would take my mother away while I was gone." Even after their return to Short Creek, "I was always afraid of strangers, even strangers among us." Ruefully she confessed, "I always felt like the raid was my fault. When I was a little girl they were always telling us that if we were good, if we were righteous, that the Lord would protect us. Well, I knew that I had been a bad girl from time to time and I reasoned in my own little mind that this was the reason why they raided us, God was punishing all of us for my sins. I was afraid and ashamed and I couldn't ever shake it" (Darger 1988).

One of the more bizarre moments of the raid came a few days after the women and children had arrived in Mesa. Arizona highway troopers, struggling to reconcile their images of odious lawbreakers with the human tragedy of disrupted families, staged a picnic in Candle Park. Their wives baked cakes and prepared salads; the troopers paid the pavilion rental themselves. They didn't want the children to always remember them with fear and resentment and worked hard to melt their terror, playing with them, teasing and joking with them, tossing the little ones into the air. Marie Darger remembered "a big mountain of a man" breaking down and weeping at the grievous irony that his "protection" had inflicted such pain on them (Group 1988). 

After six months in Mesa, social service workers moved Viola Broadbent, her four daughters, another plural wife, and her children to a small town outside of Flagstaff. This was part of a state policy to redistribute the mothers and children to small towns throughout Arizona, again attempting to destroy the unity of the group. After twenty-two more months, Viola's husband, David Broadbent, then out on probation, came for her in an old jalopy of a truck that many of the men shared to retrieve their families (Broadbent 1986). The ordeal of separation from their community was over. The series of hearings and trials of the past two years had led to legal victory for the Short Creek fundamentalists. 

Only a handful of women did not return to Short Creek when they had the chance. They had not been broken. The principle of plural marriage had not, in their way of thinking, been tainted by the accusations, the arrests, and the legal action. 

[post_title] => The Women of Fundamentalism: Short Creek, 1953 [post_excerpt] => Dialogue 23.2 (Summer 1990): 15–38
Bradley describes how even after the Short Creek Raids happened, the women there still believed in plural marriage. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => the-women-of-fundamentalism-short-creek-1953 [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-03-14 22:36:22 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-03-14 22:36:22 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.dialoguejournal.com/?post_type=dj_articles&p=12241 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => dj_articles [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) 1

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At the age of ninety-eight, Leroy Sunderland Johnson died in Hildale, Utah, on 25 November 1986. Johnson presided over one of the oldest and largest fundamentalist Mormon groups, organizers of the United Effort Trust in Colorado City, Arizona, formerly known as Short Creek. Accepted as a prophet by his group of fundamentalist Mormons, Johnson's thirty-two years as senior member of the Council of the Priesthood was a time of stability, growth, financial success, and greater public acceptance. An obituary in the January 1987 Sunstone magazine called him "a dominant figure in post-manifesto polygamy for over half a century." 

A number of fundamentalist groups have broken with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints over plural marriage and related issues. While the various groups most often sympathize with each other, their philosophies and leaders differ distinctly. Johnson's group has never adopted a name, identifying themselves as the fundamentalist arm of the Church. They emphatically reject the violence that has some times brought other groups into the public eye and shaped impressions of Mormon fundamentalism. Like most fundamentalists, Johnson's group tends to be reclusive, adopting styles and customs distinctly out of fashion. They model their religious organization after the nineteenth century united order. Those followers I have encountered have always stressed their general goodwill toward the Church. They have many more agreements than disagreements with President Ezra Taft Benson and his predecessors. 

Johnson's followers are not part of Allred's group of the Apostolic Brethren based in the Salt Lake Valley, the Davis County Kingstonites, the Singer-Swapp family, any of the Mexican-based LeBaron groups which have been involved in notorious killings, or Alex Joseph's Church of Christ in Solemn Assembly. Royston Potter, the former Murray, Utah, police officer who went to court to challenge anti polygamy laws in the late 1970s was also not a member of Johnson's flock. 

The Johnson group traces its priesthood authority from an 1886 vision they claim President John Taylor received while on the underground at the home of John W. Woolley in Centerville, Utah. During the intense prosecutions of polygamy in the 1880s, President Taylor and most other Church leaders went into hiding, moving from one refuge to another protected by bodyguards. In fact, John Taylor died on the underground in 1887, pursued by authorities until the end. 

The Woolley home was a favorite stop for Taylor. He often met there with other Church leaders to conduct Church business. Fundamentalists believe Taylor had been considering a proposed statement suspending plural marriage. Jesus Christ and Joseph Smith are said to have appeared to him and instructed him not to give in. The following day, he told some of his party about the vision and set five of them apart to continue plural marriage no matter what the Church might do. The five were Woolley and his son Lorin C. Woolley, George Q. Cannon, Charles H. Wilkins, and Samuel Bateman (Van Wagoner 1986, 183-94).[1] The vision was never presented to the general Church membership for a sustaining vote and indeed, the Church denies its existence (Reimann 1974, 185-224; Anderson 1979; cf. Collier 1979, 145-46; "Four Hidden" (1948): 148-52). 

In 1904 President Joseph F. Smith issued the second manifesto in response to the Reed Smoot hearings, apparently closing the door on plural marriage for good (Clark 1971, 4:84-86). In 1912 and again in 1929 the Woolleys came forward, first privately, then publicly, with the "accounts" of the vision. After his excommunication from the Church in 1924, Lorin C. Woolley organized a seven-member priesthood council to continue to advance plural marriage under proper priesthood authority (Van Wagoner 1986, 190-93). After a 1933 "final manifesto" (Clark 1971, 5:315-30), the Church began excommunicating those who continued to support plural marriage. A more organized fundamentalist movement went public. Although families and small groups were spread over Mormon areas of the Rocky Mountain West, the movement increasingly centered on the little desert hamlet of Short Creek on the Utah-Arizona border. Today the Utah side of the community, where Johnson died, is called Hildale, and the Arizona side is Colorado City. 

In the mid-1930s a group led by Eldon and Charles Kingston broke away from the Short Creek group. In the early 1950s, the main group divided to create the Allred and Johnson groups. Other splinter groups continue to break off today. The old Short Creek community remains one of the largest and most influential of the organized groups. Many students of Mormon polygamy believe the majority of modern polygamists are not affiliated with any group; some even retain membership in the Church while holding plural wives in secret (Baer 1988, 31-42; Flesher and Freedman 1983; Van Wagoner 1986, 190-222; Anderson 1979; Reimann 1974; Stumbo 1988). 

Johnson first came to national public attention in 1953. A secret two-year investigation of his community by the state of Arizona came to a climax with a pre-dawn raid Sunday, 26 July 1953 by 102 law enforcement officers led by Attorney General Ross Jones, another one hundred invited newsmen, and an assortment of judges, social workers, nurses, and a National Guard field kitchen. Arizona governor Howard Pyle had declared the little fundamentalist community to be "an insurrection against the state." Arizona law officers brought 122 arrest warrants and seized 263 children whom the state deemed to be endangered by the fundamentalist environment. The state of Utah joined in by seizing more children and attempting to terminate the parental rights of fundamentalists in court. Eventually a plea bargain resulted in twenty-seven no contest pleas followed by probation, but family and community life in Short Creek was disrupted for years, and the community had to shoulder great financial burdens. To the Short Creek community, it was a traumatic and heart-rending experience.

Much of the national news media played the raid as a comic incident, but the raid was not always applauded. In two critical editorials, the Arizona Republic, Arizona's most influential newspaper, likened the raid both to "the hated police-state roundups of the old world" and a Keystone Cops farce (28 July, 1 August 1953). The Phoenix newspaper also commented on 1 August that "[the authorities] must also remember that the state has countenanced polygamy in Short Creek by taking no effective action against it for years." 

The raid made headlines in nearly every major newspaper in the country. Johnson, then sixty-five, was identified as one of three leaders of the community. The others were Richard S. Jessop, fifty, and Carl Holm, thirty-six. It was Johnson who acted as the spokesman, calling the raid the "most cowardly act ever perpetrated in the United States," and the police "Storm Troopers masquerading in highway patrol uniforms" (Deseret News 27 July 1953, 1). 

Johnson organized the community's defense during the raid, arranged bail for the defendants, found legal counsel, and raised funds to pay for it. The raid solidified his authority in Short Creek, leaving little doubt that he was leader after 1953. 

From 1953 to 1986 Johnson led the Short Creek group and was a frequent speaker at fundamentalist religious gatherings in the western United States and Canada. His sermons were recorded by tape or shorthand with increasing regularity. Then in the mid-1980s the transcribed Johnson sermons were published as a seven-volume set along with a few sermons attributed to John Y. Barlow by the Twin Cities Courier Press of Hildale, Utah. The full set of the L. S. Johnson Sermons contains over three thousand pages of typed, double-spaced text, a sort of fundamentalist Journal of Discourses. As might be expected, much of the content deals with fundamentalism and the Church. The books are a rich source of fundamentalist history and beliefs as taught by Johnson and should not be overlooked by scholars. 

The Warren Johnson Family 

Johnson's sermons frequently refer to his family, English immigrants who first settled in the East. Johnson recalled that his non-Mormon grandfather, Jeremiah Johnson, "was a polygamist. He had two wives and raised two families [twenty children] in the same home at the same time; but not under the direction of the Holy Priesthood, because he knew nothing about the Priesthood" (1983-84, 1:315). Johnson's father was named Warren. He graduated at twenty-five from "one of the eastern colleges," but because of poor health his doctors gave him only a few months to live and suggested that he might live longer in the more hospitable climate of California (1:315). So he left his home in Marston, Massachusetts, for the West. He got as far as Dubois, Idaho, "in a nice buggy" before ill health overtook him. He struggled on to Farmington, Utah, where a kind Mormon family named Smith took him in, nursed him back to health, and interested him in the LDS Church. After reading the Book of Mormon, he met Brigham Young in Salt Lake City, "and that was the first time he was absolutely convinced that Mormons did not have horns." He was converted "and entered into the law of plural marriage" (4:1226). 

President Young, knowing this new convert was an educated man, "called him to go down into Nevada on the Muddy River and teach school for a colony of the Mormons down there" (4:1226). This settlement, the first of several missions for the older Johnson, was near the former St. Joseph and the present-day Overton, Nevada. Warren was later called by President Young as a missionary to the Navajo Indians in northern Arizona at Lee's Ferry. Johnson recalled that his father served there for twenty-two years until he was released by President Wilford Woodruff (3:864). 

John D. Lee, the proprietor of Lee's Ferry, established the ferry in 1871 at Lonely Dell on the Colorado River and operated it until his arrest in 1874 on charges arising from the Mountain Meadows massacre. One of his wives, Emma Lee, operated the ferry until 1879 with the assistance of Warren Johnson. The two were recognized as capable and careful operators. In 1879 Emma Lee left with her family to settle across the river in Arizona. The Church later bought the ferry from her for one hundred cows contributed by the people of southern Utah and northern Arizona. The ferry continued operation until the Marble Canyon bridge was completed in 1929, much of the time under the management of the Warren Johnson family (Peterson 1973, 75-77; Brooks 1957, 292-95; McClintock 1985, 91-97). 

After the Manifesto of 1890, Warren Johnson, concerned about his responsibility to his two wives and seventeen children, wrote Apostle and later President Joseph F. Smith. In a 15 December 1891 letter, Smith told him that God did not require men to put away their existing plural families. "What the Lord requires is that we shall not bring upon ourselves the destruction intended by our enemies, by persisting in a course in opposition to the law" (in Lyman 1986, 142). "My father was a man that had lived the law, but he refused to give up his plural families after the Manifesto" (5:254). 

Johnson also recalled that his father broke his back and journeyed from Kanab to Salt Lake City "to be blessed under the hands of President Wilford Woodruff. When he came back, he had a wheelchair—given to him by President Wilford Woodruff. He taught us children to honor and obey the leaders of the Priesthood. That was his great charge to his children, especially his sons—to honor and obey those who presided over them in Priesthood" (1:327). 

In 1900 Johnson's parents moved with Church colonists from southern Utah to Big Horn County, Wyoming. Warren Johnson was still in his wheelchair and made the difficult journey in the back of a wagon. Apparently, the family wanted to find more available land for its twenty children, especially the sons. Johnson's mother was the only midwife in an area without a doctor. A year after the move, Warren Johnson died and was buried in the small town of Byron (2:557, 597-98; 3:798). 

Leroy Johnson's Childhood 

Johnson was born 12 June 1887, probably at Lee's Ferry, and was baptized at the usual age of eight, a few years after the 1890 Manifesto suspending plural marriage. Although he believed the Manifesto damaged the authority of the priesthood in the Church, he believed "my baptism took" (2:693). Like many pioneers of his generation, Johnson's formal education was limited by the demanding life of the West. By age eleven, in 1898, he had gone as far as the sixth grade in Kanab, Utah. He was twenty-two before he could return to school and eventually completed the eighth grade. He was one of fourteen adults in the school; only two of them graduated from the eighth grade (6:108- 9). He remembered his family had had four children die within one two-week period at Lee's Ferry (4:1485). When his father died in 1901, Leroy was only fourteen (4:1227). At age seventeen he received a patriarchal blessing which he believed directed him toward his fundamentalist beliefs (2:632). 

Johnson's childhood memories in Big Horn County, Wyoming, include Apostle Abraham Owen Woodruff bearing his testimony "that except the people woke up and accepted the fulness of the gospel and lived it and applied it to their lives, they would not be able to obtain the blessings that the Lord had in store for them in the country" (5:254). Johnson said about Woodruff: 

I was only a boy about thirteen years old when Abram O. Woodruff passed away. I heard him talking to my father. He [Woodruff] said "I hope the Lord will take me home before I do anything that will deprive me of my salvation." This was in Wyoming. He went back to Salt Lake, was asked to go down and preside over the Mexican mission. He went down and established himself there. His wife took smallpox and died. A week later, he died with smallpox. So, the Lord takes us at our word. (3:881)

Woodruff had been ordained an apostle at age twenty-four in 1897 by his father, then Church President. He died in 1904 in El Paso, Texas, a week after his wife. An advocate of continued plural marriage, his death probably saved him from the Church discipline that came to Apostles John W. Taylor and Matthias Cowley after the second manifesto. Taylor was excommunicated, and Cowley was disfellowshipped in 1911 (Alexander 1986, 66; Jorgensen and Hardy 1980). 

Leroy Johnson lived most of his life within the sphere of the devout Mormon community of St. George, about forty-five miles from present-day Colorado City. According to a recent study, more than two men in five in St. George in the 1870s and 1880s participated in plural marriages, the majority of married women were plural wives, and the majority of children grew up in plural families. Johnson's childhood experiences in a devout plural family in the 1890s were the norm, not the exception. Young people married early even by pioneer Mormon standards, usually by their late teens. For both men and women, status within the community and the Church was closely tied to participation in a plural marriage (Logue 1988, 44-71). It is not surprising that Johnson absorbed most of St. George's religious and cultural attitudes. 

Johnson as a Church Member 

Leroy Johnson believed in continued plural marriage before he was even aware of the fundamentalist movement. "I tried for some years before I became acquainted with President Barlow or President John W. Woolley to get into the principle of plural marriage, because I had it in my heart" (3:1159). Woolley was the first acknowledged leader of the modern fundamentalist movement, having been excommunicated by the Church in March 1914 for "insubordination to the discipline of the government of the Church" for continuing to perform plural marriages as Salt Lake Stake Patriarch ("Excommunication" 1914). Johnson heard of the Woolleys and fundamentalism as early as 1924 (4:1433) or 1926 (5:241) and first met John W Woolley in 1928, the year Woolley died. "I shook hands with him and heard his story on the 1886 revelation, and I believed it" (4:1504). Johnson recalled that he was very outspoken in his belief in "the Celestial Law" but "had not taken any action about it any further than to express my feelings." Johnson's stake president repeatedly scheduled interviews with him "regarding my worthiness of being maintained in the Church," but he recalled that the stake president kept missing them out of a fear of the confrontation (4:1268). This was probably in the mid-1930s.

In fundamentalism's early years stories were rife of continued plural marriage by the General Authorities of the Church (Quinn 1983, 183- 85). In 1976 Johnson recalled a Kanab sermon preached by President Heber J. Grant in which he found subtle support for his fundamentalist leanings. 

I had just listened to a conference report and heard President Grant speak from the stand, and I thought he condemned the law of plural marriage, the Celestial Law, pretty severely.[2] I had been laboring for some time to get the Spirit of the Gospel, and President Grant had scheduled a stopover in Kanab and was going to speak to the people. I went to the Lord and told him I was going to that meeting and for Him to cause that Brother Grant would give me the key as to whether plural marriage could be lived in this day or not. (4:1243) 

He felt Grant did give him such a key. While Grant did not speak directly on the subject, Johnson came away satisfied. "Every once in a while he dropped a word to let me know that the true principles of the gospel were always discarded by the majority of the people" (4:1244). 

Before his excommunication Johnson, his older brother Price, Isaac Carling, and their wives had driven to Salt Lake City to attend general conference. The women attended the meetings in the Tabernacle; but at Price Johnson's urging, the men met with another group in Cottonwood. At this meeting, Johnson first met Joseph Musser, John Y. Barlow, and other fundamentalist leaders. At first Johnson resisted the fundamentalists' ideas, but over the next few weeks as he discussed them with his brother, he became convinced they were true. Shortly there after Musser and Barlow visited Short Creek with their families, which further solidified Johnson's testimony. "It doesn't make any difference what men say, I know that President Barlow holds the key of the Priesthood," he told a friend (6:346). 

The Short Creek Excommunications 

About the time of Musser and Barlow's visit, President Grant gave his new counselor J. Reuben Clark, appointed in 1933, a mandate to end secret plural marriage in the Church. Clark, a relative of the Woolleys,[3] went at it with great energy. He employed a sort of ecclesiastical loyalty oath which required suspected fundamentalists to repudiate fundamentalist teachings and the suggestion that plural marriage continue in any form (Quinn 1983, 184-85). 

Perhaps Musser and Barlow's Short Creek visit forced Johnson's Church leaders to act. He recalled his eventual excommunication as coming in 1935. "The high council came out to Short Creek in 1935 and called us on the carpet and told us our die was cast and that we were only to accept or reject their edict, there would be no argument." The presiding officer was President Claud Hirschi (6:342). At the time Short Creek was in the Zion Park Stake (now the Hurricane Utah Stake). 

According to Johnson, the high council delivered its message, and a ward clerk then circulated "a little paper to sign," probably the loyalty oath. The fundamentalist periodical published the text of a sample oath in its March 1936 issue: 

I, the undersigned member of the Millville Ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, solemnly declare and affirm that I, without any mental reservation whatsoever, support the Presidency and Apostles of the Church; that I repudiate any intimation that any one of the Presidency or Apostles of the Church is living a double life; that I repudiate those who are falsely accusing them, that I denounce the practice and advocacy of plural marriage as being out of harmony with the declared principles of the Church at the present time; and that I myself am not living in such alleged marriage relationship. 

Johnson and his wife Josephine discussed it and decided not to sign. Only four or five members of the Short Creek congregation were willing to sign it. Most members of the ward, including the Johnsons, were notified of their excommunication a few days later.[4] Johnson found his excommunication to be "a great load . . . lifted off my shoulders," but his wife "felt like the earth had fallen out from under her." For a while the couple met with and were courted by other Mormon dissenters, but eventually they chose the Woolley group (6:343). 

Johnson referred to his excommunication as being "handled by the Church," meaning that "I have no records in the Church today" (5:151). In 1970 he rejected the importance of his excommunication, saying, "They may have gone through the motions of excommunicating me, but how can they excommunicate a man for believing what Joseph Smith taught?" (1:233). 

Sometime after the Short Creek excommunications, the Church sent an emissary, an Elder Crawford of Rockville, Utah, a returned missionary, 

to come out to Short Creek and preach repentance to us. He was an ambitious young man, full of faith, as far as the Church was concerned. He was very definite in his explanation of what he was sent out to Short Creek for.... He went on at great lengths to let us know that we had committed one of the greatest sins a people could commit in breaking away from the Church and claiming plural marriage to be a great saving principle. (1:342) 

Apparently Barlow became Short Creek's spiritual leader, and Musser returned to Salt Lake City where he edited the fundamentalist periodical Truth. Barlow, as senior member of the Priesthood Council, soon ordained Johnson as a member of the Council of the Priesthood and as his successor in the leadership of Short Creek (Baer 1988, 38). Barlow, who kept homes in Short Creek and Salt Lake City, died in 1949 at age seventy-four in Salt Lake City. 

Johnson on the Significance of Short Creek 

Over the years, Short Creek (or Colorado City, as it was later known) became more than just a small town hidden in the "Arizona Strip" north of the Grand Canyon. Johnson's sermons reflect its special religious significance for fundamentalists. 

He taught that through inspiration three or four landowners offered the site "as a starting place for the gathering of the saints." The site "was choice above all other spots of ground in the surrounding country. In fact, the statement was made that the time would come when one acre of this ground would produce more than ten acres of the best soil in Salt Lake Valley" (3:844). However, Joseph Musser had said that this richness would only be realized "when you are united" (4:1465).

Brigham Young had considered successful colonization of the St. George area and nearby Muddy River, Nevada, a high priority. Over a thousand families were called on missions in the 1860s and 1870s to settle in southwestern Utah, Johnson's parents among them. In 1864 Young built a home in St. George and began spending his winters there. The Church committed substantial resources to keeping the colonists afloat (Arrington 1958, 217-23; 1985, 295, 30840; Logue 1988, 842). 

According to Johnson, Brigham Young had visited the Short Creek area along with George Q. Cannon, his counselor in the First Presidency. Johnson claimed that in 1926 Young's buggy driver, an old man in Rockville named Gifford, related the following story to him. Young and Cannon were traveling by buggy from St. George to Kanab. The prophet ordered his driver to stop while he surveyed the land. "This will someday be the head and not the tail of the Church. This will be the granaries of the saints. This land will produce an abundance sufficient wheat [sic] to feed the people" (3:854-55). 

Johnson on the Manifesto of 1890 

President Wilford Woodruff pledged through the Manifesto of 1890 to discontinue plural marriage and urged Church members to abide by federal laws which prohibited the practice. The Manifesto was widely opposed in the Church, and it was a generation before it was truly enforced (Quinn 1985, 9-105; 1983, 179-86; Alexander 1986, 60-73). Johnson and other fundamentalists see the Manifesto of 1890 as the event that divided the Church. 

We all know that Wilford Woodruff signed a manifesto in order to make the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints a part of the world, or in other words, in order to save our dignity with the world, he made a covenant with them that we could do away with the Celestial Law. (1:317) 

In 1890 the Manifesto was signed by the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; and not only did they sign away their privileges to the New and Everlasting Covenant, or the law of Plural Marriage, but they broke every other commandment that God has given. Why? Because God says: Break one of these commandments and you are guilty of the whole. (1:211-12) 

As a result, Johnson taught, "This [Short Creek] is the only place, my brothers and sisters, upon the earth that you can hear the fullness of the everlasting gospel preached" (1:212). He described the Manifesto as a work of evil: "The evil powers tried to destroy that which God had set up, but before He allowed this condition to transpire, He provided an escape for this revelation to be continued" (2:533). He saw the Manifesto as "one of the greatest stumbling blocks of all times," allowed by the Lord as "the great test" of the righteous (4:1357). The Church "tried to make peace with the enemy by signing away their rights to Holy Priesthood" (4:1339), and "the Lord caused a division to come upon the Latter-day Saints" (4:1535). 

Johnson preached in a 1976 sermon: 

"But," says the enemy of righteousness, "we live in a different age. What was good for the people in the days of the Prophet Joseph is not necessary in the lives of the people in the day in which we live." This is not so, my brothers and sisters, for God says: "My word is one eternal round, and what I say to one I say to all. My purposes never fail. And all who will not listen and put into their lives the Gospel of Jesus Christ will fall by the wayside." (4:1307) 

Johnson also taught that the Manifesto did not prohibit continued plural marriage but left the choice up to individuals. "After Wilford Woodruff signed the manifesto, the Lord told him that it was now pleasing in His sight that men should use their own judgement regarding these principles. He also says in this book, the Doctrine and Covenants, that except a man obeys the laws that pertain to the blessings of Celestial Glory, he cannot obtain it. So, we are only trying to keep alive the principles of life and salvation" (1:234). 

Johnson on the Relationship Between Husbands and Wives 

Johnson said of his community's uncommon family structure, "I do not believe in polygamy, and I do not like the word. The Lord does not use it." His term and, he believed, the Lord's term, was "plural marriage" (3:1021). 

In a 1974 sermon concerning peace in the home and among wives, Johnson taught that in the celestial kingdom "there are three heavens or degrees." He quoted J. Golden Kimball to the effect that it took more than plural wives to ensure an exalted station in the heavenly kingdom. Then he asked the men in his Colorado City congregation, "Are you training those wives so they will be in harmony with you and take you into the highest degree of the Celestial Glory and give eternal increase?" (3:807-9). 

At another point while preaching on a similar theme, he quoted Brigham Young: "The Prophet Brigham Young said that the law of plurality would damn more than it would save. And this is true. Why? Because we treat lightly that ordinance. We do not know how to train ourselves when we get them. We labor under a great delusion. Many of us think that when we have wives sealed to us that we have our calling and election made sure, and we need not go further, but this is not so" (2:422). If a properly sealed plural family lived obediently, on the morning of resurrection only the husbands could "bring . . . forth" their wives (2:747). 

Johnson on the Fundamentalists and the Church

Johnson and his group never pretended to form a new church. Johnson always identified the Colorado City community as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (1:14-18; 3:950; 4:1479) or "the Fundamentalist group of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" (2:693). 

Johnson and other fundamentalists distinguish between the priest hood and the "monogamist," "popular," or "corporate church." The Church, according to their view, is a legal creation to satisfy gentile expectations and is subordinate to the priesthood quorums. It is "a vehicle of the Priesthood, instead of the Priesthood being a vehicle of the Church" (1:173). 

Describing his beliefs, Johnson said, "It is not in modern doctrines of the Church, but it is the original doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the fundamental principles. I was grateful when I heard that Mark E. Peterson [sic] branded us as 'FUNDAMENTALISTS'" (4:1491). He once called his group "the fundamentalists of the Fundamentalist division of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints" (4:1635). 

Some people think because we speak of the everlasting Gospel and the law of Plural Marriage, that we have pulled away and left the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and that we have hung on to one principle of the Gospel, namely, plural marriage, and discard everything else. This is not true. For we believe that no man can receive the Celestial Law without first coming in at the door of Baptism for the remission of sins and keeping himself clean and pure from the sins of the generation in which we live. (1:210) 

Yet he had observed in 1952, "We have separated ourselves from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as it now stands" (5:28).

As if to underscore this connection with the Church, in 1952 Johnson delivered a sermon on the Articles of Faith. After presenting all thirteen Articles of Faith, he said, 

There is only one thing in which we differ from those who profess to be Latter-day Saints today, and that is in living of the higher principles of the Gospel as they were revealed to the Prophet Joseph and given to him. Because they conflict with the laws of the land seemingly, they have been abandoned and laid on the shelf. And because we contend that they are as true today as they were the day they were given to Joseph Smith, we are condemned; and they say we are trying to establish something new and advance new ideas in the earth. (1:15-16) 

In this context, Johnson somewhat indignantly charged that his followers were "a people who had been branded as apostates from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when they have only done that which the Lord has commanded" (1:212). 

Johnson on the Standard Works 

Johnson and his fundamentalist group embrace the scriptural standard works of the Mormon Church unreservedly as the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price (4:1503). "I hold in my hand the standard works of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints," said Johnson in a 1977 sermon in Salt Lake City. "So every man, woman and child that believes in this book is under condemnation unless they live according to the teachings in it. There is nothing else for us to do, my brothers and sisters, in this day now, a hundred and fifty years since the Prophet Joseph brought this work into the world, but preach repentance to a generation of people who are unbelievers" (4:1420). Sermons delivered from the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants were the norm for Johnson, coupled with praise of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, John Taylor, and others. "We have been greatly blessed because we have this Doctrine and Covenants, the Book of Mormon, and the Pearl of Great Price to refer to as the word of God to the generation in which we live" (4:1704). 

Johnson on The Journal of Discourses 

Johnson and his followers believe with considerable pride that because of them the Journal of Discourses, a lengthy compilation of the sermons of nineteenth-century Church leaders, is available to twentieth-century Latter-day Saints. 

He often told his followers that the orthodox Church "sent agents out around the country gathering up the Journals of Discourses [sic] and the Millenial Star" (1:136; 4:1690). He claimed these agents had visited those who owned copies and also bought them from retail and used book stores. Presumably this was to suppress previous teachings promoting plural marriage. He charged that the Church had "removed from the homes of the Latter-day Saints the testimonies of the early leaders of this Church. . . . They gathered up their literature and burned it, so they could not get it" (5:345). Apparently at some point there was an effort by the Church to take the Journal of Discourses out of circulation (Taylor 1978, 233). Johnson recalled this happening "in about 1924- 25" (4:1525). 

Johnson recalled that in 1954 fundamentalists republished the set at a cost of $55,000, and sold them through Deseret Book after an initial press run of five hundred were "scattered among the people and libraries" (1:61; 4:1490, 1525). Johnson claimed that "this incited the envy of the leaders of the Church. Why? Because the Journals of Discourses [sic] were being distributed among the people of the Church, and it wasn't by the consent of the Church" (1:228). He believed the Lord had inspired his servants to have the fundamentalists republish the set (3:1191) and considered it the greatest missionary accomplishment of the previous thirty years (1:298). 

Johnson also reacted indignantly to what he saw as an attempt in 1930 by the Church to replace the Doctrine and Covenants with a volume by Apostle James E. Talmage called Revelations of a More Enduring Value. The replacement took out of the original collection "some two hundred sections and parts of sections." The effort was a failure, according to Johnson (1:317-18; 3:1209-10; 4:1660, 1681).[5]

Johnson on Temples 

Johnson looked forward to the day when he and his followers would again enjoy the blessings of the temples although they did not believe that temples are essential for the exercise of priesthood authority in performing sealing ordinances. They believe their leadership had that authority in a direct line from John Taylor and that unions performed under proper priesthood authority are for time and eternity. Speaking of his people, Johnson said that "there is nothing in the world 1 would like to see more than to see them prepare themselves for the holy temple, that they might go there and receive their endowments" (2:675). He presumed all fundamentalists felt the same way. "There isn't anyone here but what would like to have access to the temples of our God and have their work done" (1:175). He seems never to have lost the respect for Mormon temple rites and his own temple marriage (6:360-61). 

But Johnson disapproved of substantial changes he noted in LDS temple ceremonies early in the twentieth century—changes in both content and manner of presentation of temple ordinances, evident when Johnson said he last visited a temple (see Buerger 1983, 10-44; 1987,33-76). 

When I see the great trend of the people today, the great cry of the Latter-day Saints is to go to the temples and be married for time and all eternity; but the ordinances of the temples have been changed in my days. They do not receive the same instructions today that were given to us when I went through the temple. 1 went through the temple first in 1914. The last time I was permitted to go through the temple was in 1928. In that short period of time, great changes had taken place. So, I know that the changes that have been made over the years are mockery in the sight of our Father; for He is not pleased with the Latter-day Saints, including a great number of the fundamentalist arm of the Latter-day Saints. (3:1091-92) 

Referring to the Latter-day Saint community in general, Johnson said in 1973, that "since we have desecrated our covenants that were made in the holy temple, and we have changed the ordinances and broken the everlasting covenant, we have got to repent of these things" (2:675). 

Johnson on the Fullness of the Gospel 

Johnson was convinced that most members of the Church did not enjoy a fullness of the gospel. "The majority of those who bear the name of the Latter-day Saints have rejected the fullness of the everlasting gospel. Why have they rejected it? Because they have thought more of their own judgment than they did of the Prophets of God" (5:190). He applauded the missionary efforts of the orthodox Church, but he qualified that praise. "Even those who are being converted today to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints do not believe in the fundamental principles of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as they were given to the Prophet Joseph Smith" (4:1704). 

Johnson on the Line of Priesthood Authority 

According to Johnson, at some point after the death of John W. Woolley in 1928, Woolley appeared in a vision to his son, Lorin C. Woolley, who was then head of the fundamentalists. The father instructed the son to call and set apart 

to carry this work along . . . Joseph Leslie Broadbent, John Y. Barlow, Joseph Musser, Charles F. Zitting, LeGrand Woolley, and Louis Kelsch. . . . And before John Y. Barlow passed away, he called Leroy S. Johnson and J. Marion Hammon and had them set apart as Apostles of the Lord, Jesus Christ. He later called President Guy H. Musser and Rulon Jeffs[6] and had them set apart. Later on he called Richard Jessop and Carl Holm, and Brother Alma Timpson. (4:1606-7) 

Johnson would sometimes trace the fundamentalist line of priesthood authority for his followers. "The Gospel is true. Joseph Smith was a Prophet of God. Brigham Young was his successor in the line of Priesthood. John Taylor and Wilford Woodruff, John W. Woolley, Lorin Woolley, Leslie Broadbent, John Y. Barlow, Joseph White Musser, Charles F. Zitting and the Council you see before you are also successors in the line of Priesthood" (3:1153). 

Johnson on the Raids on Short Creek 

Johnson's sermons contain repeated references to various "raids," especially the Arizona raid on Short Creek on 26 July 1953. He recalled "that great day when the army came in and took over the city of Short Creek. . . . They took the men out and put them in jail. They ravaged their homes, took their wives and children, loaded them on buses and took them away" (3:1081). He also remembered it as the day "we were carried away by the unbelievers" (2:693). 

Johnson believed that the Lord: 

had to know again how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints felt toward the Celestial Law, so, this is what happened: soon after these people landed in Phoenix, Arizona, there was a quarterly conference held in Mesa, Arizona. President David O. McKay was in that conference and he made this statement, "I want the people to know that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is in full harmony with the actions of the state of Arizona in the Short Creek episode." What did it mean? Wait and see. It isn't over yet, and I doubt very much if the persecution of this people is over. (3:1082) 

Arizona authorities concede they had kept the leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints informed of their plans for the raid (Maloney 1953; Quinn 1983, 186), and the Church-owned Deseret News applauded the action on 27 July 1953 saying, "We hope the unfortunate activities at Short Creek will be cleaned up once and for all." 

Johnson taught that the orthodox Church supported the 1953 raid financially. "They answered to the tune of $50,000 to assist the state in carrying away the women and children of this people" (4:1391). At other times he said they provided $100,000 in support and that the legal costs of the fundamentalists were $50,000 (1:227). The Short Creek raid continued a policy of supporting prosecutions for plural marriage that dated back to President Heber J. Grant (Quinn 1986, 184-87; Clark 1971, 5:292-303). 

Johnson also was convinced the Church was behind the 1944 raids:

Sometime along the line, President Grant made remarks that he would like to live to see all these polygamists behind bars. And he did. When the 1944 raid came along, they arrested Brother Musser and Brother Barlow and put them in jail along with Brother Zitting and others, Brother Kelsch. And do you know what happened? After the prison gates closed behind these men, President Grant passed away. So, he lived long enough to see them behind the bars. (4:1386) 

Johnson felt his own children and others had been abused and taunted because of their modesty and beliefs while in Arizona state foster care (5:382-83), but he once suggested that supplies sent in by the state of Arizona to provide for families "while we laid in prison" might have been an indication of God's support and protection. He was proud that the fundamentalists came out of the ordeal with little or no long term debt (3:1000.) He believed the Lord would always deliver his chosen people from the enemies; for him the outcome of the 1953 raid was proof of that. "We learned in the raid of 1953 that the Lord was willing to deliver us out of the hands of our enemies, simply because we were willing to do things that he asked us to do" (3:1026). 

Johnson saw the raid and President McKay's statement as a turning point. "The key is turned and from now on we will win the battles of the saints," he recalled telling his wife (4:1391). 

A Christmas day 1954 letter from Johnson to his religious community reflects the still fresh trauma of the 1953 raid: 

Today we find ourselves threatened with the experience of being separated from our children and we feel like the Lord surely will not allow this to happen. . . . Let us as parents gather our families around us as much as circumstances will permit and . . . seek to get the spirit of God and keep it so that God will be pleased to grant unto us deliverance at this time. (1:132) 

Johnson on David O. McKay 

Johnson often commented on President David O. McKay. In 1960 he compared their respective priesthood authority: "President McKay has the same opportunity that I have, but he has rejected the saving principles of the gospel. . . . President McKay had the gospel given to him in a pure line from the Prophet Joseph Smith, and so did I" (5:151). 

But when President McKay died in 1970, Johnson praised the man who had supported earlier prosecutions. 

Today, nearly three million people are mourning the loss of a great leader. He took his place in the leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and he filled it with honor before the people. 1 don't know of a man who has been loved by a greater number of people than has David O. McKay. It will be a great day of mourning and admiration given to his name, and I want this people to understand that the priesthood join in with the rest of the world in mourning the passing of David O. McKay. (1:147) 

Johnson also paid attention to the public comments of other Church leaders and sometimes announced his approval. For instance, in 1976 he applauded a Brigham Young University commencement address on improving morality within the Mormon community (3:1218). 

In 1963 Johnson expressed some satisfaction that "offshoots" of fundamentalism had drawn attention away from his group. 

We are glad for all these things because the fire is taken away from us. The Church now is about to fight some of these offshoots because they have carried the fight to the Church, and we have kept our mouths shut as far as the Church is concerned. . . . We might say a few things here that sound like we are fighting the Church teeth and toenails, but we have kept the commandments of the Lord in this. .. . If we have to stand and face the enemy, we will do it. But if the Lord has another offshoot from the Church to take the fire away from us while we do our work, that is all right, because we want to get our work done. (5:305-6). 

Johnson on Contemporary Life 

Johnson was skeptical of much modern thought. He rejected evolutionary theory: "In my growing-up years, I ran across a book called the Darwin Theory. I only read a small part of it, but I read enough to tell me that if I read anymore I wouldn't be Mormon" (3:949). He was suspicious of space exploration and saw it as an effort to discredit God (1:118-19). In a 1962 sermon, he worried aloud about the Cuban missile crisis and a son he had serving in the Marines at that time (5:277). He disapproved of the low morality of the Nixon administration (3:907). He frequently preached against long hair on men but said "the woman's hair is her glory. . . and there are certain ordinances of the Priesthood that she will need beautiful hair in order to perform" (3:1189). 

He thought little of modern fashion and was distressed that "the daughters of Zion would walk the streets of our great and glorious city of Salt Lake as harlots; and you will not be able to tell the face of a Saint from a Gentile" (5:14). He instructed parents never to allow their small children to run naked, but to clothe them, teach them modesty "and the sacredness of their bodies" (6:231). In 1974 he urged members who had television in their homes to "get rid of it" because of the harmful influences on their families (3:890). He disliked television crews who came to film exposes on the community (4:1616). He urged his followers to clean up dirty or unsightly homes and guard against accidents. "The spirit of God cannot come to a home that is ill-kept, while He blesses the occupants of it with health and strength" (5:311). 

Johnson on the Mission of Fundamentalism 

Johnson explained the religious mission of his community in a 1970 sermon in Salt Lake City. 

The reason for us gathering people together and teaching them like we have been teaching them today is to try and bring up a people that Joseph Smith can use when he comes to set in order the House of God; for we believe that Joseph Smith is the One Mighty and Strong, who will come here clothed with power and the mantle of righteousness to set in order the House of God. He has to have men prepared for that great work. He has to have men who have not fought against the laws of the Celestial Kingdom; because God has said that Zion cannot be redeemed only upon principles of the Celestial Kingdom. (1:233) 

In 1974 Johnson stated this purpose more simply, "These principles have got to be kept alive" (3:886). 

Leroy Johnson, prophet of fundamentalists, and his followers may seem like a footnote in the total Mormon experience. They have not attracted much attention from scholars. However, a study of the Mormon fundamentalist movement provides remarkably illuminating insights on the experience of the Church and its accommodations to a modern society. The Johnson sermons contain a wealth of history for both nineteenth and twentieth-century Mormon historians. 

Fundamentalism is essentially a protest movement against the religious and cultural accommodations the Church made as it searched for a way to survive under the often savage pressures of the gentile world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Those accommodations began with the 1890 manifesto and gained speed during the long administration of President Grant. Fundamentalism strives to remain close to the Mormonism of the 1880s, which is seen as the golden age of the faith. By studying fundamentalist beliefs, we better understand those changes. Although plural marriage is the most obvious topic, shifts and changes can also be seen in temple ceremonies, religious communalism, the Word of Wisdom, and the stronghold of religious leaders over the last century's Mormons, a hold that is considerably diminished today. 

With the organized criminal prosecutions of the fundamentalists ending in the late 1950s, the community now seems much more secure in its relationship with the outside world and more ready to tell its story to outsiders. The time is certainly ripe for scholars to listen.

---

[1] Most fundamentalist Mormon groups trace their priesthood authority to this visitation to Church President John Taylor. The Woolleys did not come forward with their accounts of these events until well into the twentieth century, after the deaths of Cannon and Bateman who, along with Wilkins, left no known account of the experience. The Woolleys maintained steadfastly that these events did happen and were the driving force behind early fundamentalism.

[2] Grant made formal public statements over a number of years denouncing continued plural marriage. He threatened excommunication and the full cooperation of the Church in criminal prosecutions of offenders. These statements came at the April 1921 general conference, a widely circulated letter of September 1925, the October 1926 and April 1931 general conferences, and the sixteen-page June 1933 "Final Manifesto" that was read aloud in every congregation of the Church (Clark 1971; Quinn 1983, 182-85; Alexander 1986, 60-73).

[3] Clark was himself the child of a plural family. His mother, Mary Woolley Clark, was a daughter of Edwin D. Woolley and plural wife Mary Wickersham. John W. Woolley was a brother of Mary Woolley Clark, making him J. Reuben Clark's uncle. Lorin C. Woolley was therefore Clark's cousin. Another of Clark's cousins, Janet Maria Woolley, would become a post-manifesto plural wife of excommunicated apostle John W Taylor (Taylor 1974, 1-52; Quinn 1983, 181-83; Parkinson 1967,196-99, 313-14, 334-35). 

[4] The Short Creek congregation was attached to the Rockville Ward of the Zion Park Stake. The Transcript of Ward Record for 1934 and 1935 shows twenty-two excommunications for polygamy-related matters. Johnson, who was a high priest at the time, was excommunicated along with his wife and fifteen others on 7 September 1935 for refusing to sign the loyalty oath. The excommunications of the twenty-two were for refusing to sign the oath, for preaching plural marriage, or for practicing it. Johnson's brother Price and a plural wife, Helen Hull, were among those excommunicated on 30 August 1934.

[5] The author has attempted to verify the publication of such a volume but as of this writing has been unable to do so.

[6] Rulon Jeffs succeeded Johnson in 1986 (Bitton 1987).

[post_title] => Fundamentalist Attitudes Toward the Church: The Sermons of Leroy S. Johnson [post_excerpt] => Dialogue 23.2 (Summer 1990): 39–60
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In the spring of 1887, Charles Ora Card, president of the Cache Valley Stake of Zion, led a small group of polygamous Mormon families into Alberta, Canada. On the banks of Lee's Creek, a few miles north of the international boundary, they established the village of Cardston as the first Mormon settlement on Canadian soil. 

Like settlements established earlier in Mexico, Cardston was a haven for polygamous Mormons fleeing prosecution in the United States. In the years before the 1890 Manifesto, vigorous enforcement of anti-polygamy laws drove many Mormon polygamists from their domains in the United States. Although this has been widely acknowledged as the genesis of Mormon settlement of Alberta, attempts to suppress polygamy did not make settlement in Canada inevitable (Dawson 1936, 196-98; Wilcox 1950; Lee 1968, 14). Indeed, the origins and destination of this northward migration can only be understood in the light of the personal circumstances of two men: Charles Ora Card and President John Taylor. The deciding factors were Card's dedication to the principle of plural marriage and his understanding of Mormon theology and prophecy and John Taylor's patrimony and Anglophile sympathies. 

Polygamy began early in the Church. Joseph Smith secretly taught the doctrine as early as 1841 (Van Wagoner 1985, 75-77). What was later known as Section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants was first secretly recorded 12 July 1843, stating that the Lord commanded Joseph Smith to restore the patriarchal order of Abraham, Jacob, and David, and that only those who participated could hope for the highest exaltation in the resurrection (O'Dea 1957, 62—63). From the beginning of settlement in Utah, polygamy was practiced openly. It was first announced to the general membership of the Church at a conference held in Salt Lake City on 28 August 1852 and broadcast in a special edition of the Deseret News some three weeks later (O'Dea 1957, 104).

With the exception of a fifteen-year period during the presidency of Brigham Young, polygamy was illegal whenever and wherever Mormons practiced it (Quinn 1985, 15-16). Certainly it set the Mormons apart from Gentile society, polarized the Mormon community, and aroused the hostility of Gentiles already fearful of the social cohesion, political influence, and evangelical energy of this dynamic new church. 

For much of the Church's history, Gentile attacks have focused on plural marriage, depicting polygamous Mormons as lustful and immoral. For example, Harriet Beecher Stowe crusaded against polygamy, describing it as "a cruel slavery whose chains have cut into the very hearts of thousands .. . a slavery which debases and degrades womanhood, motherhood and the family" (in Stenhouse 1875, vi). 

In Congress the Morrill Act of 1862 attacked plural marriage by outlawing bigamy in all U.S. territories; the Edmunds Act of 1882 targeted Mormon practices by disfranchising polygamists and making plural marriage a crime. In 1887 the Edmunds-Tucker Act attacked Mormon society and the Church itself by abolishing women's suffrage, dissolving the corporation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and demanding a more inclusive voter's registration oath, all in an attempt to stamp out the practice of polygamy (O'Dea 1957, 110; Quinn 1985, 16). The Church was shaken to its foundations. 

Not all Mormons were polygamous. No matter how theologically desirable, plural marriage was not always economically possible. Indeed, members of the Church who embraced the law of Abraham and entered into plural marriage faced no easy lot. Not only did polygamy run counter to the social values of most, if not all, converts to Mormonism, but its practice required radical personal and familial adjustments (Mehr 1985, 84-85; Embry and Bradley 1985, 99—107). Those who accepted polygamy required a reconciliation of secular law and spiritual law as taught by Joseph Smith. Since it was a test of faith, polygamy was adopted by the more orthodox, or devout, members of the Church, who were usually the better established community leaders. Probably at no time were more than one in five Mormon families polygamous (Ivins 1956, 229-39). In the 1880s, to avoid the federal government's vigorous campaign of enforcement, polygamists lived with their plural wives secretly or went on the Mormon "underground," assuming false identities and affecting disguises. Others sought to circumvent federal law by contracting plural marriages on the high seas or beyond the borders of the country. 

John Taylor, Brigham Young's successor as senior apostle and later third president of the Church from 1877 to 1887, ardently defended the principle of plural marriage (Quinn 1985, 27). In 1885 he openly defied the United States government by proclaiming that God's law transcended the law of the government; therefore, government could not abrogate the principle of plural marriage. To avoid arrest, he promptly went into hiding and lived on the Mormon underground until his death two years later (CHC 6:122-23; Jen son 1:19).

Because he knew the difficulties of life on the run, Taylor encouraged polygamists to establish a Mormon colony in Mexico. For even though polyg amy was illegal there and certainly alien to Roman Catholic culture, Mexican authorities appeared to be willing to turn a blind eye so long as it remained clandestine (Hardy 1987). 

Refuge in Mexico appealed to many fugitive Mormons including Charles Ora Card, president of the Cache Valley Stake (See Hudson 1963; Bates 1960; Godfrey 1987). Card, like Taylor, was pursued by U.S. marshals. His life was complicated by his first wife, who not only had apostatized but was attempting to obtain a divorce. At every opportunity she had revealed Card's whereabouts to the authorities. After being arrested and escaping from custody, Card was convinced that to remain in Utah was to court disaster (Wilcox 1950; 23-24; Hudson 1963, 82-83; Godfrey 1987). He resolved then to move to Mexico. Early in 1886 he met with President Taylor to seek his permission to leave Cache Valley. To his surprise, Taylor advised him to go instead to Canada and to find a place to establish a Mormon colony. British-born John Taylor had lived in Canada for several years before converting to Mormonism in 1836, and he believed that British justice would allow Latter-day Saints a fair hearing (Jenson 1:19). 

Many believe that President Taylor "called" Card to serve a mission in Canada and establish a bridgehead for Mormon settlement. Although this interpretation has achieved wide currency among Latter-day Saints in Alberta, it is not supported by documentary evidence (Stutz 1987). But what is certain is that Card heeded his prophet's advice and turned his sights toward Canada, specifically toward the southern area of British Columbia and Alberta (then the Northwest Territories) immediately north of the international boundary. 

Unlike President Taylor, Card had no affinity for the British. He was of Yankee stock, from the "Burned-Over District" of New York State, and his family had lived in New England for several generations. Card had no real experience of Canada, the British, or Canadians. When John Taylor advised him to look to Canada, Card was forty-seven, a respected community and church leader who had played an important role in developing Utah's Cache Valley. He was an experienced pioneer, a veteran of a handcart trek from Iowa to the Salt Lake Valley, and a sawyer by trade. He had been called to be president of the Cache Valley Stake in 1884 (Godfrey 1981, vii-xi). And as a high-profile Church leader with three wives and an ex-wife bent on his downfall, Card was a prime target for prosecution under the Edmunds Act. 

Card did not undertake his journey of exploration alone. President Taylor assigned two other Mormon fugitives to accompany him: James W. Hendricks and Isaac E. D. Zundel (Card, 14 Sept. 1886). Like Card, both were wanted for "unlawful cohabitation" and stood to benefit if a refuge from prosecution could be established in Canada. 

Card and his companions went by wagon and train from Utah, through Oregon, to Spokane, where they purchased horses and equipped themselves to explore Canadian territory. On Wednesday, 29 September 1886, the party crossed into Canada. Card recorded in his diary that day: "[I] crossed the British line and for the first time in my life, placed my foot on the sod of British Columbia and in fact, it is the first time on British soil for any length of time. Only crossed Canada in the night from Buffalo to Detroit in the spring of 1872." As he passed the boundary marker, Card recorded that he took off his hat, swung it around, and shouted, "In [British] Columbia we are free!" 

Unable to find a tract of land in British Columbia large enough to accommodate a Mormon settlement, Card's party went by train to Calgary and explored the southern part of Alberta before returning to Utah. Card was impressed with this country. In his journal he commented favorably upon the soil, vegetation, and climate. On 22 September he particularly noted the Indian population: 

North of us and east of us are tribes that all speak Blackfoot language. Here would be a good place to establish a mission among the Lamanites, who in these parts seem to be of rather lighter complexion than we usually find them and seem intelligent for an uncivilized race, although they are much degraded by many lowlived White men that allure them to whoring. 

Upon his arrival in the United States Card submitted a report to President Taylor and received permission to return to his home in Logan. There he busied himself preparing to lead a colonizing expedition to Canada, studying the geography of Alberta, and learning what he could about conditions in Canada (Card, 23 Nov. 1886). Despite his industry, it appears that Card had no great enthusiasm for settling in Canada, apart from respite from harassment and prosecution. Although in his journal entries of 16 and 24 December Card referred to Canada as "a land of refuge" or "our refuge in the north," subsequent bitter comments reflected his resentment at being forced to settle in a foreign land for loyally observing "the mandates of Heaven." As deputy marshals stepped up their harassment and Card's situation in Utah became daily more intolerable, he increasingly resented the prospect of exile: "I have been arrested for the observance of the laws of God, been in the hands of the law, have been exiled, have been on British soil to seek refuge for the oppressed and downtrodden of God's peoples" (31 Dec. 1886). 

Nor was the irony of a republican Yankee seeking refuge in British territory lost on Card, who wrote: "It seems strange that my grandsires fought to establish religious liberty, and in that great struggle that stained our fair land with a deluge of blood to free from the rule of a tyrant King, that now it seems their grandchildren should be obliged to gather into the domains of a government that is ruled by a queen" (1 Jan. 1887). 

Nowhere in Card's diary is there any direct indication that he was formally "called" by President Taylor to establish a Canadian settlement as a mission for the Church.[1] Had this been so, Card would scarcely have lamented the injustice of this lot to the same extent, if, in fact, he would have complained at all. 

Early in 1887 Card's attitude toward the Canadian settlement project changed dramatically. When Samuel Smith of Brigham City visited Card on 21 January 1887, Card discussed his northern venture, arguing that "the land of refuge is the north." To his surprise, Smith related that he had been present at an 1843 priesthood meeting in the basement of the Nauvoo Temple when Joseph Smith prophesied that: 

England or the nation of Great Britain, would be the last nation to go to pieces. She would be instrumental in aiding to crush other nations, even this nation of the United States, and she would only be overthrown by the ten Tribes from the north. She would never persecute the Saints as a nation. She would gather up great treasures of gold and yet we should seek refuge in her dominion (Card, 21 Jan. 1887). 

This testimony clearly impressed Card. Thereafter entries in his daily journal changed dramatically from resentment to optimism. The "Canadian refuge" was cast in a new light. Since it had been prophesied that the Saints would seek refuge in British dominions, Card saw himself no longer as an exile from Zion, but as a pioneer whose destiny would be to fulfil Joseph Smith's prophecy. 

It is debatable whether this prophecy was widely known among Mormon leadership, if, indeed, Joseph Smith did make such a statement. Card certainly appeared startled to learn of it. But two years later, after the Canadian settlement at Cardston was firmly established, Apostle John W. Taylor addressed a Cardston fast meeting and spoke of Cardston's destiny. Card was impressed and recorded in his journal on 4 July 1889: 

Elder J. W. Taylor rose and spoke and bore a powerful testimony, stating he had beheld the Savior. He predicted that this would become a fruitful land and yet in time of need, it would be a haven of rest for those people who desired to serve God. Those who were seeking fame [to defame?] of our people, who flaunt so much about liberty in Utah, would be put to the fruit of the battle when the Negroes rise up against their masters, which soon would be the case. The Red Man would stalk through the land as the battle axe of the Lord, and after they had done their work, they would be changed to a skin of whiteness in a day. 

Card incorporated Smith's proprecy in his formal address of welcome to Lord Stanley, Queen Victoria's representative in Canada, when Stanley visited Fort MacLeod, Alberta, in the fall of 1889: 

Our Prophet Joseph hath discerned that [of] all the Kingdoms of this world, the British Principalities, by reason of their high integrity and their judicial purity, will be the last to fall, and it is for this reason, as well as from an affectionate admiration of her own womanly virtues, that we invoke the blessings of heaven upon the Sovereign of these vast realms (Card, 14 Oct. 1889). 

Although Card eventually came to see his work as a colonizer from the perspective of millenialist theology, his journal entry on 25 February 1887 before his departure for Canada that spring, indicates that he still viewed the establishment of a Mormon colony in Canada as a short-term venture, noting that "I expect to make a short stay [in Canada] with other of my exiled brethren."

Even though Joseph Smith's prophecy had changed his outlook, Card was dismayed when he found it difficult to assemble a strong contingent of settlers to accompany him to Alberta. While forty-one men initially had promised to go with their families to Canada, only a few followed through. Some thought that it would be only a matter of time until the polygamy issue was resolved and the pursuit of polygamists terminated; they decided to stay "and run their chances." Others simply concluded they did not have the means to settle in Canada. Although Card was depressed, he remained committed. He recorded in his journal 4 March 1887, "I resolve to go it — I go alone." 

When Card received word of the passage of the Edmunds-Tucker Act, he resolved to press ahead, decided which wife would accompany him, and purchased equipment for the move north. He received informal neighborly assistance from the Mormon community, and President John Taylor sent word that he "desired we make the northern mission a success and desired the brethren all to throw their influence in that direction" (Card, 17 March 1887). Nevertheless, Card's preparations for departure were hindered by "spotters" who kept a watch on known polygamists and their sympathizers and by U.S. deputy marshals who then raided their residences. To Card, his choices were limited: 

. . . as our enemies are so bitter and there are so many traitors among the false brethren that it is with much precaution we can keep out of their clutches. But thus far, the Lord had prospered me and mine in that direction. 

It gives me a variety of thought to either leave the city and valley I have helped to settle and made my home for 27 years and either exile myself or go to prison and have my substance wasted in fines by minions of the lowest type (20 March 1887). 

Card also hoped that if polygamous Mormons moved to Canada, U.S. deputy marshals would decrease their harassment of the Church and Mormon community. Thus Card was motivated by several beliefs: that the Canadian refuge had been prophesied by Joseph Smith; that he would eventually be captured and imprisoned if he did not move north; that it was the duty of all fugitive Mormons to leave the Mormon heartland to reduce the pressure on their families and the Church; that there were opportunities for proselytizing among the Indians in Alberta; and that he had the blessing of President John Taylor. 

After Card and his group of eight families established a new Mormon colony on Lee's Creek, Alberta, a steady trickle of fugitive Mormons immigrated, until the 1890 Manifesto suspended the practice of polygamy and removed the main reason for polygamist emigration to Canada. But by then other forces were in operation. A land shortage in Utah and Idaho made it increasingly difficult for young farmers there to acquire land. The new frontier in Canada offered opportunity to homestead under the terms of the Dominion Lands Act. A quarter-section of land could be acquired by paying a ten dollar entry fee and by completing cultivation and residency requirements. 

Demand for land also led the Church to conclude cooperative agreements with Canadian enterpreneurs to develop irrigation lands in southern Alberta. Church members would then have opportunities to enter farming. Utah businessman, Jesse Knight, entered into the sugar beet industry in Alberta with similar motives. He developed irrigation and also established the town of Raymond. The Church last attempted to provide agricultural land for purchase by Mormon settlers when it purchased the Cochrane Ranch in Alberta in 1910. The villages of Hillspring and Glenwood were established on this property. This marked the end of organized agricultural expansion by the Mormon community in Alberta, although independent migration by Mormon settlers continued to extend the bounds of Alberta's Mormon country until it came to embrace a huge tract of country lying south and west of Taber (Lehr 1974,20-29). 

Long before this, economic needs superseded theological concerns in the extension of Mormon domains. After 1890 polygamy was not a significant element in expanding the Mormon settlement in Alberta. And there is reason to doubt that it was of real importance after 1887. 

In November 1888 Card and Apostles John W. Taylor and Francis M. Lyman traveled to Ottawa to appeal to the government for the right to prac tice polygamy in Canada. They met with a polite but firm refusal from Justice Minister Sir John Thompson and Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald (Card, 9-16 Nov. 1888; Champion 1987, 10-17). Some Mormons, contrary to law, secretly engaged in plural marriages in Canada, even after the Manifesto, but this was rare. After 1890 polygamy did not play a role in attracting Mormon settlers to Canada (Embry 1985, 108-16).2 

Although polygamy was a major reason that Mormons initially migrated beyond the borders of the United States, the direction of that migration to Canada can only be explained by Charles Ora Card's circumstances and John Taylor's favorable disposition towards British justice. It was these two Mormon leaders, instrumental in channeling the migration of polygamists to Alberta, whose philosophies combined to shape part of the geography of Mormon settlement in North America. Card and Taylor, though of very different backgrounds, shared their faith and an unshakable determination to maintain the principle of polygamy. 

---

[1] On two occasions Card wrote of his intended settlement in Alberta as "the northern mission," but in both instances the context is ambiguous (Card, 19 Feb. and 17 March 1887). The term appears to be used in the conventional non-Mormon meaning of the word, rather than in the sense of a "mission" to which he received a "call" from the Church.

[post_title] => Polygamy, Patrimony, and Prophecy: The Mormon Colonization of Cardston [post_excerpt] => Dialogue 21.4 (Winter 1990): 114–121
Lehr discussed the journey undertaken by Charles O. Card to move to Canada and preserve polygamy, before the First Manifesto during a time that members were being hunted down for for their religious beliefs. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => polygamy-patrimony-and-prophecy-the-mormon-colonization-of-cardston [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-03-14 21:18:22 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-03-14 21:18:22 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.dialoguejournal.com/?post_type=dj_articles&p=12415 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => dj_articles [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) 1

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 15775 [post_author] => 2493 [post_date] => 2018-04-17 16:50:25 [post_date_gmt] => 2018-04-17 16:50:25 [post_content] =>

When Joseph Smith III preached his first sermon as leader of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints at Amboy, Illinois, on 6 April 1860, he expressed his unqualified aversion to the Mormon doctrine of plural marriage: "There is but one principle by the leaders of any faction of this people that I hold in utter abhorrence; that is a principle taught by Brigham Young and those believing in him." The doctrine was, of course, polygamy. But Smith also declared that his father, Joseph Smith, Jr., had never been involved in the practice. "I have been told that my father taught such doctrines. I have never believed it and never can believe it." He added, "If such things were done, then I believe they never were done by divine authority. I believe my father was a good man, and a good man never could have promulgated such doctrines" ("Mormon" 1860, 103). 

No issue infuriated or drew his attention as did plural marriage — and especially charges of his father's role in its origination. Indeed, opposition to the practice became something of a cause celebre for Smith and, by extension, for the Reorganized Church during the nineteenth century (Blair 1973, 215- 30). Recent historical investigation has demonstrated that, by the last decade of the century, the Reorganized Church as an institution had rejected the previously well-accepted idea that Joseph Smith, Jr., had begun the practice (Blair 1985, 20-22). During the 1970s and 1980s, however, numerous historians, among them Reorganized Church historian Richard P. Howard, probed deeper into the origins of plural marriage, demonstrating beyond reasonable doubt the Mormon prophet's central role in developing the doctrine during the Nauvoo experience and offering frameworks for understanding it (Howard 1983; Blair 1985; Bitton 1977; Foster 1981; Bachman 1975; Hill 1977; Van Wagoner 1985; Newell and Avery 1984). 

These compelling historical arguments raise a central question: How could Joseph Smith III flatly deny his father's role in beginning Mormon polygamy while confronted with substantial evidence to the contrary? Additionally, what role did Smith play in the antipolygamy crusade of the latter nineteenth century? These questions inform the analysis presented in this essay. 

Essentially, Joseph Smith III approached his father's involvement in plural marriage from an already fixed viewpoint. His admission that he could never believe his father might have been involved in polygamy seems to have guaranteed his perspective in spite of countervailing evidence. Smith subscribed to a postulate as immovable as a geometric theorem: (1) Joseph Smith, Jr., had been a good man. (2) Good men do not practice polygamy. (3) Therefore, Joseph Smith, Jr., could not have been involved in Mormon plural marriage. All his actions and thought processes concerning the practice rested upon this central postulate. 

Throughout the remainder of Smith's career, his position on plural marriage never wavered. For instance, in 1866 Smith wrote in the True Latter Day Saints' Herald, "Joseph Smith was not a POLYGAMIST in 1843 and 1844, as I have every reason to believe, from every proof I have been able to gather" ("Reply" 1866, 63). He also wrote to Caleb Parker in Lanark, Idaho, 14 August 1895: "Father had no wife but my mother, Emma Hale, to the knowledge of either my mother or myself, and I was twelve years old nearly when he was killed. Not a child was born to father, except by my mother, not one" (Letterbook 6). Finally, in more reasoned tones, Smith wrote in his memoirs: "To admit that my father was the author of such false theories as were being taught, or that he practiced them in any form, was not only repulsive in itself to my feelings and strongly condemned by my judgment, but was contrary to my knowledge of, and belief in him."[1]

With a belief system that required his father's innocence, Joseph Smith III could not sit by quietly while others charged his father with responsibility for beginning the practice.[2] Feeling it his duty as a son, he desperately sought to clear Joseph Smith, Jr.'s, name. "Is it manly or unmanly for a son to defend his father's good name according to his convictions of honor and truth?" Smith asked only somewhat rhetorically on 6 May 1896 in a letter to the Deseret News (Letterbook 6). He frankly admitted to E. L. Kelley, a member of the Reorganized Church's Presiding Bishopric during much of the latter nineteenth century, "I have been ambitious of but one thing, so far as human ambition is concerned, and that was to prove by the logic of conduct that my father was not a bad man" (10 July 1883, Kelley). Maintaining family honor was a common concern of the period (Kern 1975; Greenacre 1963). Joseph Smith III believed that the Smith family legacy was most important in the overall development of the Reorganized Church ("Card" 1860, 170; J. Smith to Charles Strang, 22 July 1882, Letterbook 3A). He may also have been concerned that he would have to answer to his father at some future time. As he told E. D. Smith on 22 July 1896: 

Your father is like mine, ever on the other shore; both of us are rapidly going thitherward; the work of our fathers was clear to them; both earnestly engaged in it as the way of life; we shall meet them, and I am going to try to so live that when I may meet them, it will be safe for them to say, "Joseph, you fought bravely, and though at times the battle seemed to go against you, you rallied well, and we are glad to meet you" (Letterbook 7). 

Joseph Smith III was also greatly concerned about the welfare and viability of the Reorganized Church. This concern motivated his every decision. And he believed that proving his father's innocence of polygamy would enhance the church's uniqueness and reason for being. "To me the gospel plan as taught by Joseph Smith," he wrote to Zenos H. Gurley, Jr., 24 July 1879, "is not so defensible from the ground that he did preach, teach, and practice polygamy, as upon the basis that he was not its author" (Letterbook 2). 

Giving all credit to Joseph Smith Ill's essential honesty, I believe that his concerns with proving his father's innocence and his commitment to divorcing the Reorganized Church from plural marriage rendered him unable to honestly investigate Mormon polygamy's origins. Without question, he was convinced he had three tasks: (1) To clear his father of any involvement in the practice of plural marriage, and thereby redeem the family honor; (2) To build a place for the Reorganization somewhere between the radical Mormonism of the Great Basin — where plural marriage most recognizably separated those Mormons from the rest of American religion — and the mainstream of American Protestantism (Vlahos 1980, 176-77); and (3) To end the practice of plural marriage among the Mormons, on the grounds that it was immoral and a blot upon the religion his father had instituted. 

With these goals in mind, as well as his desire to maintain harmony within his own organization, Joseph Smith III was very cautious about insisting as an article of faith that his father had not been the author of the plural marriage doctrine, especially in his early years as president. Because many church members had weathered the movement's splintering following his father's death and had some knowledge of doctrinal practices in Nauvoo, Smith allowed for other opinions. For instance, he always explained that the Reorganization opposed polygamy without referring to his father's involvement. He responded to an inquiry from Texan J. L. Traughber on 13 February 1877, "So far as polygamy or spiritual wifery is concerned, the Reorganization denies its correctness without reference to whether he [Joseph Smith, Jr.] did or did not practice it" (Letterbook 1A). On 5 March 1886, he wrote to Zenos H. Gurley, Jr., an apostle who was a gadfly to Smith on the question of polygamy's origins as well as other issues, "You know that while I believe father was not the author of Utah polygamy I have not and am not now making the battle against the Utah church on that ground but upon the ground that plural marriage is not of God no matter whoever the revelation, so called, came through or who taught or practiced it" (Letterbook 4). Smith also suggested that his father had not been perfect and that if it turned out he had been responsible for polygamy's establishment, he would be punished. He told a J. J. Barbour of Dart Town, Georgia, on 15 May 1878, "While I fully believe that Joseph did not receive the revelation referred to, yet, if he did, it is so directly opposed to the laws already received, that I must [admit] it to have been either of man or of the Devil" (Letterbook 1). 

Joseph Smith III also took, at least at first, a moderate position within the official quorums of his own church. For example, a joint meeting of the First Presidency and the Quorum of Twelve on 2 May 1865 discussed the origins of Mormon polygamy. The minutes of that meeting noted: 

The question arose as to whether Joseph the Martyr taught the doctrine of polygamy. President [William] Marks said Brother Hyrum [Smith] came to his place once and told him he did not believe in it and he was going to see Joseph about it and if he had a revelation on the subject he would believe it. And after that Hyrum read a revelation on it in the High Council and he Marks felt that it was not true but he saw the High Council received it. 

Joseph Smith III did not accept this testimony, but in the interest of church unity and welfare, he did not press his position. Instead, he was satisfied that the body adjourned without issuing a binding policy to the church upon the origins of polygamy (Council, 11). 

Two years later another joint meeting of the Apostles and the First Presidency reconsidered the subject. After considerable discussion, Smith supported tabling a resolution stating that Joseph Smith, Jr., had not been the originator of plural marriage "because of the almost universal opinion among the Saints that Joseph was in some way connected with it." He commented, "Passage of the resolution would do more injury than good" (Council, 9 April 1867, 34). 

Even when Joseph III sought to discover the truth about his father's involvement, he was hamstrung by a certain benevolent prejudice that prompted him to buttress what he already believed rather than alter it in any substantial way. He dismissed plural marriage evidence that contradicted his preconceived notions using several sophisticated rationales. 

There is no doubt that the Reorganization leader was deeply troubled by the plural marriage issue. He often said that he had no knowledge of his father's guilt in implementing the doctrine, but was that true? Whatever incidents he may have witnessed in 1843 and 1844 as a young boy he may have repressed. Certainly some of his early writings suggest submerged pain (Smith, Jan., Feb. 1845). His papers contain copies of correspondence defending his father and his church, but we have no way of knowing if he failed to include letters that he did not or could not refute concerning the plural marriage issue. Admittedly, much of this is supposition, but it should be raised as a possible explanation. 

Smith also seemed to have employed clinical denial — refusing to believe or allow awareness of an unpleasant or threatening aspect of reality. His flat denials of his father's role in plural marriage have some substantiation, to be sure, but they were in large measure faith statements that ignore overwhelming information to the contrary. His 1860 comment, "I have never believed in and never can believe it," is an example of such an a priori decision to reject all but what he wished to believe.[3]

Without question, Smith also rationalized away evidence which incriminated his father. Although Smith responded differently to shifting situations and divergent sets of evidence, complicating an explanation of his behavior, it appears that his approach toward polygamy was to accept what supported his position and reject countervailing evidence. It is easier to substantiate how Smith's preconceptions and mental processes shaped his explanations of polyg amy's origins. Smith "read law" during his pre-presidency years between 1854 and 1856 under two different western Illinois attorneys. Although he was never admitted to the bar, he learned how to ask questions that gave the answers he sought (Smith to James Whitehead, 8 Sept., 1884, Letterbook 1A; Launius 1982, 124-27). When interviewing those with firsthand knowledge of plural marriage in Nauvoo, Smith typically framed his questions to reflect his preconceived notions. "Was my father married to more than one woman and did they live together as husband and wife?" Perhaps a witness could answer yes to the first part of the question, but a truthful witness would be forced to answer no to the second part, as plural marriage practices in Nauvoo were clandestine. 

Early in his career Smith rejected all but what he considered eyewitness commentary and urged his associates to do the same. He told J. F. Minton, for instance, "Don't make statements of which you have not the proof at hand, or know first what it is."[4] Hearsay evidence is often unreliable, but a significant amount of the information Smith rejected was not, apparently, second or thirdhand but was provided by people who learned about plural marriage from some of Nauvoo's high Church officials — the Twelve, the Bishopric, and High Council—that Joseph Smith, Jr., had instituted the practice of plural marriage. These people were close to the source of the teaching in both time and space. Nonetheless, Smith rejected their testimony if it was not eyewitness information.

An 1885 interview in Utah with Solon Foster makes this clear. Foster had lived in Nauvoo in 1844 and 1845, part of that time in the Nauvoo Mansion where he was the Prophet's coachman and where he and young Joseph III had become friends. He had learned of plural marriage while in Nauvoo; and if he had not been taught the practice by Joseph Smith, Jr., he was intimately acquainted with those who expanded the practice near the time of the Proph et's death. Joseph Smith interviewed Foster about his father's involvement and recorded the following exchange in his memoirs: 

"Brother Solon, were you ever present at a marriage ceremony of any kind which occurred between my father and any other woman other than my mother, Emma Hale?" 

"No; I was not even present at their marriage." 

"When you were an inmate of my father's house at occasional stated periods, as you have said, did you ever see any woman there whom you knew to be a wife to my father, other than my mother?" 

"No, sir." 

"Did you ever meet, in social gatherings anywhere in the city of Nauvoo at any time in company with my father, introduced by him or others as his wife, other than my mother Emma?" 

"No, sir." 

The interview continued for some time after this exchange, Smith pressing harder with each question, but using very specific questions rather than inviting Foster to tell him what he knew. Smith finally exploded: "I discover that, like others, you know nothing at all, personally, that would convict and condemn him, for you say he never taught you the doctrine; you say you never saw him married to any woman other than my mother" (Memoirs 83 [24 March 1936]: 369). Foster's recollection of this conversation is much different. As related by John R. Young in 1931, Foster told Joseph that his father had been intimately involved in polygamy, citing as one example the famous confrontation between Emma Smith and Eliza Snow. Foster presumably re marked, "The night your Mother turned Eliza R. Snow outdoors in her night clothes and you, and all the children stood out in the street crying, I led you back into the house and took you to bed with me, and you said 'I wish Mother wouldn't be so cruel to Aunt Eliza.' " Admittedly, this was Young's recollection of a speech by Foster given years earlier, but it points up the problems inherent in trying to pin down evidence (Young 1931). 

Smith considered all of his interviews as strong evidence acquitting his father of all charges, but seemed willing to stretch or misconstrue evidence to support his position when, in fact, the evidence was not particularly impressive to those without his unique mindset. A conversation with Melissa Lott Willis, who had lived in Nauvoo during the 1840s, is a case in point. Smith visited her while on a missionary trip to Utah in 1885 and recorded this exchange in his memoirs: 

"Now, Melissa, I have been told that there were women, other than my mother, who were married to my father and lived with him as his wife, and that my mother knew it. How about it?"

She answered rather tremulously, "If there was anything of that kind going on you may be sure that your mother knew about it" (83 [28 April 1936]: 530). 

This could not be construed as a particularly firm denial of Joseph Smith, Jr.'s, involvement in plural marriage. At best it was a "non-denial denial," to use a phrase made famous by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward during their Watergate investigations with the Washington Post. But Joseph Smith used this testimony and others like it to buttress his belief in his father's innocence. 

There were those both within and without the Reorganized Church who regularly told Joseph Smith III that his father had taught plural marriage. George A. Smith and other Utah relatives regularly tried to explain to him Joseph Smith, Jr.'s, role in the development of plural marriage. Joseph F. Smith began to collect affidavits and other evidence in the 1870s to prove that Joseph Smith, Jr., had originated the practice. Older Reorganized Church members who had been in a position to learn about the practice in the 1840s also described for Joseph III plural marriage developments. 

Smith reacted to these efforts in several different ways. Most often, as with Solon Foster, he discounted statements because they were not eyewitness accounts. At other times he would try to impeach the testimonies of his witnesses. It was virtually a foregone conclusion that Utah church leaders, whose testimonies he believed were biased by their immoral character in perpetuating polygamy, would be discredited in this way (G. A. Smith 1869; Smith 1934— 37,82 [8 Jan. 1935]: 47-49, 82 [1 Oct. 1935]: 1264-66). 

A more difficult problem arose in dealing with members of the Reorganized Church. For example, prickly apostle Zenos H. Gurley, Jr., frequently told Smith that his father had been a polygamist (Vlahos 1971; Gurley 1873, 1874, 1879). At first, Smith may have claimed that Gurley had no firsthand knowledge of the situation in Nauvoo, which was true. But in 1888 when Gurley wrote an autobiography in a history of Decatur County, Iowa, he inserted an affidavit by his father-in-law, Ebenezer Robinson, who had joined the Mormon church in 1835, which said that Joseph Smith had taught him the doctrine in Nauvoo (Gurley 1887, 543-44; Turner 1985, 378-84). Attempting to throw a shadow over the affidavit, Smith wrote in his memoirs that he and a local Methodist minister were discussing the new county history not long after its publication and the question of the affidavit came up. "Yes, I have seen it, Brother Smith, that article can do you no harm," the Methodist minister said. "The writers are too well known, and the effect will be quite contrary to what they anticipate" (1934-37, 83 [11 Feb. 1936]: 176). This conclusion does not seem to be warranted, however, as Zenos Gurley was a popular politician in Decatur County throughout much of the 1890s (Blair 1970). 

If one of the other approaches to discredit evidence did not seem appropriate, Smith was likely to ignore the issue entirely. He reacted this way to testimonies of some of his Utah relatives and fellow Reorganized Church members all too often. He was silent in the face of challenges from Isaac Sheen, William Marks, James Whitehead, George A. Smith, and others (Marks 1865; McLellin 1872). W. W. Blair, an apostle and later counselor in the First Presidency of the Reorganized Church, met with James Whitehead in April 1874 to ask him about plural marriage in Nauvoo. Blair's diary is revealing: "J[oseph] did te[ach] p[olygamy] and pr[actice] too. That E[mma] knos it too that she put [the] hand — of wives [in] Jos. hand. W[hitehead] says Alex H. Smith asked him .. . if J[oseph] did P[ractice] and tea[ch] P[olygamy] and he, W[hitehead] told him he did." Blair apparently confronted both Joseph and Alexander Smith with this information, but they seem to have made no response at any time to it (W. W. Blair, 13, 17 June 1874). 

Many called Smith stubborn for refusing to admit that his father had initiated plural marriage. Zenos Gurley chastised him: "You absolutely refuse to believe the evidence that would convict [your father]" (Gurley, 6 Apr. 1879). When challenged in this way he typically responded, as he did to J. J. Barbour on 15 May 1878: "I am not positive nor sure that he was innocent" (Letterbook 1). When pressed further, Smith was known to have reacted more forcefully on occasion. For instance, Gurley questioned Smith's integrity and Joseph Smith III responded, "I tell you, brother, I have been cut to the quick, when brethren have affirmed that I did know that my father was guilty of practicing polygamy; and denied it because I was obstinate, and sinned against light and knowledge in so denying" (24 July 1879, Letter book 2). This placed Gurley on the defensive and prompted him to seek a reconciliation (Gurley 1879). Gurley's reconciliation was only temporary, however; eventually he was dropped from his position as an apostle and, in 1886, withdrew from the movement, in part over the issue of plural marriage (Vlahos 1971). 

Joseph Smith III admitted insufficient information concerning the origins of polygamy both less frequently and less candidly as his years in the presidency passed. Alma R. Blair (1985) suggests that as his opponents became fewer he could afford to be more persistent. By the mid-1880s, virtually no other opinion could be expressed in the Reorganized Church. Apostles Jason Briggs and Zenos Gurley, who tried, were harshly dealt with by the church (Vlahos 1971; Blair 1980). 

While Smith was generally tolerant of other positions throughout his career, on this issue he would accept no compromises. He was even willing to violate his basic integrity by sanctioning outright, fully understood untruths on at least one occasion. A letter on 11 March 1882 from Joseph Smith III to his uncle, William B. Smith, then writing a book about his career in Mormonism (1883), warns: 

I have long been engaged in removing from Father's memory and from the early church, the stigma and blame thrown upon him because of Polygamy; and have at last lived to see the cloud rapidly lifting. And I would not consent to see further blame attached, by a blunder now. Therefore, Uncle, bear in mind our standing today before the world as defenders of Mormonism from Polygamy, and go ahead with your personal recollections. .. . If you are the wise man I think you to be, you will fail to remember anything [but] referring lofty standard of character at which we esteem these good men. You can do the cause great good; you can injure it by vicious sayings (Letterbook 3; See also J. Smith to William Smith, 12 July 1879, Letter book 2).

William Smith acceded to his nephew's wishes both in his public statements and private letters, clearing his brother of any involvement with plural marriage even though William had once been involved himself (Smith, 26 Oct. 1893; Bates 1983, 16-18; Edwards 1985; Lyon 1973, 203; Hutchins 1977, 76-77). 

This is an understandable though rather astonishing document. In the early years of his denials, Joseph Smith III was seeking to defend his family name and create a viable new church. By 1882 after more than twenty years of public proclamations, Smith's personal honor was at stake in proving his father's noninvolvement in plural marriage. If William Smith, a member of the ruling family in a position to know beyond all doubt what Joseph Smith, Jr., had taught in Nauvoo, had publicly countered Joseph Ill's position, the result could have been critical both to the Smith family and the Reorganization. At the least it would have severely damaged Joseph Smith Ill's credibility. Fortunately for him, William Smith was old, ill, financially dependent and therefore accepting of his nephew's direction (Howard 1978, 24-28). 

Joseph Smith Ill's perceptions about the origins of plural marriage greatly affected the Reorganized Church's perspective in the national antipolygamy crusade of the latter nineteenth century. While Joseph Smith, Jr.'s, role in the introduction of plural marriage in Nauvoo remained officially unresolved throughout the 1860s, the issue became increasingly important after the Reorganized Church opened its mission to Utah in 1863 and became critical when the Smith sons began work there in 1866 and were exposed to first hand Mormon polygamy (Shipley 1969). Rivalry between the Reorganized Church and the Utah Mormons intensified during the 1870s. 

Joseph Smith III made four missionary trips to Utah before 1890. Each time, he denounced polygamy and tried to improve his father's reputation. Defending Joseph Smith, Jr., became the style and aim of the Reorganization's antipolygamy stance. Smith won favor and support from those outside of Mormondom who opposed polygamy and the Utah Church and gained respect for the Reorganization. The fact that the Reorganized Church rejected polygamy while the Utah Latter-day Saints embraced it created an easy-to-remember dichotomy for outside observers. Joseph Smith III used this dichotomy to carry out a two-phased policy toward the Utah Saints. First, he executed a vigorous missionary program to "rescue" Latter-day Saints enmeshed in the "evil practice" of plural marriage. Smith's missionaries to Utah preached essentially a threefold message: (1) The true successor to Joseph Smith, Jr., his eldest son, had taken his rightful place in the presidency of the church; (2) Brigham Young was a usurper of authority and a dictator; (3) Plural marriage was a false doctrine whereby Young held his followers in a bondage as evil as Southern slavery (Blair 1973; Howard 1983, 17-19). 

The second phase of Smith's policy involved working closely with political leaders and non-Mormon reformers to destroy the political power of the Mormon church and to end plural marriage. Smith thus involved the church with many individuals with differing goals but all intent on destroying polygamy among the Great Basin Mormons. Smith provided information on the "Mormon Question" to political leaders at least as early as 1863 and as late as 1890. His circle of political contacts during this period included Congressmen Wil liam H. Ashley of Ohio and William F. Hepburn of Michigan; Presidents Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, and James A. Garfield; Senator George F. Edmunds of Vermont, Governor Eli H. Murray of Utah Territory, and several politicians of lesser note. In demand as an antipolygamy speaker and writer, Smith helped mobilize popular support for eliminating plural marriage. In all instances, he argued that his father had never been involved in plural marriage (Launius 1982, 304-19). 

Joseph Smith III’s first real involvement in the political antipolygamy crusade came in May 1866 when, as Joseph Smith, Jr.'s son and because of his church's other activities, Congressman James M. Ashley asked him to come to the Capitol to confer about the "Utah Question" with members of the House Committee on Territories. The committee was most concerned about the Mormon Church's apparent disregard of federal authority and was framing legislation to bring the territory more in line with other western jurisdictions. Ashley hoped, in addition, to persuade Congress to pass legislation that would put teeth in the almost unenforceable Morrill Antibigamy Act of 1862 (Ashley 1866; Poll 1958, 113). Smith had long wanted to talk about the Morrill Act. Consequently, he and Elijah Banta, a huge amiable church official, left for Washington on 30 May 1866 (J. Smith and Smith 3:349; activities reported in J. Smith 1934-37, 82 [16 July 1935]: 912-13). 

On 6 June 1866 Smith met with Ashley in his boarding house to discuss plural marriage in detail before the committee's formal hearings. After discussing the issue for some time, Ashley pointedly asked the young Reorganization leader what he would recommend doing to deal with the situation in Utah. Smith offered several suggestions immediately, impressing Ashley with his grasp of the problems in the territory. Consequently, the Congressman asked Smith to write a report to aid the committee in its planning. After several informal meetings with Ashley and other members of the Committee on Territories, Smith gave Ashley his report. In it he summarized the history of the Mormon church from 1830 to 1846 and affirmed that it had obeyed the laws of the land until his father's death. 

Smith also asserted that since the split in the church, the Utah-based faction had constantly sidestepped the law and had not been forced back into line, "and that such failure and neglect of duty on the part of the executive officers of the various States and the Nation have given rise to a conviction upon the part of some of the [Utah] church members that there was no disposition to so enforce the laws of the land." Smith argued that the Mormons had been allowed to rule themselves for so long that they honestly believed they should hold this power forever, even if their practices ran counter to the laws of the United States. He added that it was time for government officials to assert their legitimate authority over Utah Territory. Smith concluded though that no further laws establishing federal jurisdiction were needed: "The Constitution was very plain about where final secular power rested, and no legislation need extend their basic right."

Ashley had specifically asked Smith to comment on the polygamy issue, knowing his strong opposition to the practice. He asked if Smith thought Congress should pass further antipolygamy legislation, and if so what forms these bills should take. Ashley cautioned Smith, however, to remember that the Constitution expressly forbade the proscription of religious freedom, and wanted to determine the legality of the practice in Mormon theology and tradition. Was polygamy a religious tenet, he asked, and thereby inviolate under the law? Smith's written response was cautious and tactful. While acknowledging the right of every citizen to worship as conscience dictated, Smith asserted that plural marriage was neither substantiated in scriptures nor in Christian history and indeed contradicted everything for which Jesus Christ had stood. The original Mormon faith, Smith insisted, as a part of Christianity could never have adopted such a tenet, and he produced carefully selected evidence to suggest that it had been virtually unknown during his father's lifetime. He urged the proper enforcement of legislation designed to end the practice of plural marriage. 

Smith left Washington on 11 June 1866 satisfied that he had presented his viewpoint on the polygamy issue rationally and had convinced Ashley and his committee that his approach to political control of the Mormons was the most logical and likely to succeed. He was, however, skeptical of success because of the slow and circuitous nature of government. When asked to comment on his accomplishments in Washington, Smith described the many meetings with committee members and restated his views but added that little would probably result from the episode ("Pleasant Chat," 1866, 177-78; J. Smith to Charles Derry, 29 June 1866, Papers). This appraisal proved correct. For months Congress debated the necessity of new antipolygamy legislation but passed nothing. Eventually they decided, almost by default, to enforce the laws already on the books until a sufficiently strong coalition arose to pass additional antipolygamy laws (Poll 1958, 113-18). 

In part because of this stalemate in Congress, a pressing concern of governmental mental policymakers of the 1870s became the appointment of territorial officers to Utah who could carry out already existing laws. Utah Mormons had experienced virtually endless trouble with federal authorities since the Utah Territory was created in 1850, and at the center of the government's difficulties was invariably the territorial governor. A move arose in the 1870s to appoint Joseph Smith III to that position partly because of his reputation among non Mormons, partly because of the Reorganization's solid support of the civil government in all matters affecting the question of church and state, and partly because of its opposition to plural marriage. When J. Wilson Shaffer died in October 1870, several of Smith's supporters petitioned President Ulysses S. Grant to appoint Smith as his successor (D. Smith 1870). An Illinois news paper summed up the matter: "If the government would make Joseph Smith governor of that territory, it would wipe out at once polygamy and fair Utah would take her place among the states, with no blot upon her face" (Weekly Argus, 21 June 1879). 

Although President Grant appointed a career Republican politician instead of Smith, the prophet's friends continued their efforts for the next several years. On 19 October 1879, for instance, Edward W. Tullidge, the iconoclastic Mormon historian who had joined with the Reorganized Church a few months earlier, wrote to President Rutherford B. Hayes urging Joseph Smith's appointment to the Utah governorship. He claimed that Smith would be able to destroy the "polygamic theocracy" in the Great Basin and predicted that with Smith as governor and with some 200 projected Reorganized Church missionaries working in the territory, 20,000 to 50,000 Utah Mormons would soon join the crusade to abolish plural marriage (Tullidge 1879). 

As late as 10 September 1881 the editor of the Weekly Argus, published in Sandwich, Illinois, not far from the church headquarters at Piano, issued a lengthy statement supporting Joseph Smith Ill's governorship of Utah: 

The Argus had frequently pointed out a remedy [to the Mormon question], which is on the frontiersman's principle of a backfire. Opposed to these [objectionable] religious practices, while holding the general principles of the Mormon faith, is the "Reorganized Church" with Elder Joseph Smith at its head; a body of eminent, able men, already making inroads on the Brighamites, and to aid them in promulgating the new faith in Utah should be the aim of the general government. 

In the end it would be wise to appoint Elder Joseph Smith — who had the character and the ability for the position — as governor of that territory, an appointment which would receive the approval of his own branch fully, and largely of the other, and would divide the power of the Brighamites as to enable this branch successfully to combat the crime at its central point. Mr. Smith is a true, loyal citizen, a practical Christian, a temperance man, an able leader, and bitterly opposed to the "peculiar institution." 

There is no evidence that these proposals were seriously considered either by Washington officials or Joseph Smith III. That his name arose as a possible candidate, however, indicates his and the Reorganized Church's stature among the opponents of polygamy. 

Smith did, however, maintain an active connection with various politicians interested in the antipolygamy question. In June 1880 Smith wrote to Republican presidential candidate James A. Garfield about his movement's hatred of polygamy and asked his assistance in ending the practice. In his 1881 inaugural address Garfield demanded that Congress eliminate polygamy within the United States (J. Smith to James A. Garfield, 18 June 1880, Letterbook 3). At about the same time Smith corresponded with Vermont Senator George F. Edmunds about legislation that eventually passed in 1882 as the Edmunds Act, which provided for the easier arrest and prosecution of those engaging in "unlawful cohabitation" (J. Smith to Robert Warnock, 20 March 1882, Letterbook 2). Still later Smith met and discussed the enforcement of this legislation with Governor Eli H. Murray of Utah Territory who promised a tough but fair enforcement policy which, with a few exceptions, he delivered (Smith 1934-37, 83 [3 March 1936]: 274; J. Smith to Bro. George, 20 June 1883; Miscellaneous Letters and Papers). 

Smith also recognized that not all Mormons were polygamists or disloyal to the United States and should not be persecuted. When Edmunds proposed a bill in 1886 stiffening antipolygamy laws and destroying the political identity of the Mormon Church, Smith asked that Congress temper the bill so that no person's freedom of worship was violated. "Unwise legislation in the present crisis can not fail to be productive of evil," he warned Representative William F. Hepburn of Michigan in a letter on 9 February 1886. "Solid work for the benefit of the people governed and the maintaining of the supremacy of the institutions and laws of the Country ought to [be] sought after." Smith also pointed out to Hepburn that a proposed oath which would require all Mormons to disavow any connection with their temple beliefs and forsake other religious commitments as a prerequisite for suffrage, stood very close to a violation of freedom of religion. He pleaded with Hepburn to make Congress understand that it must "be wisely discriminant between acts of disloyalty and that which is belief preparatory to the life beyond." The polygamy question aside for the moment, Smith discussed the legality of the bill forcing Mormons to denounce their religion: "I acknowledge the right of the government to define largely what the rights may be to control my civil actions [as it does regarding plural marriage]; but certainly deny the right to impose oaths upon me that ask me to renounce my allegiance to God in any sense; as this oath by Senator Edmunds may be construed to do" (Letterbook 4; see also J. Smith to William H. Kelley, 14 Jan. 1886). 

On 4 March 1886 Smith wrote Edmunds that he favored moderation in dealing with non-polygamist Mormons, allowing them all the rights and privileges of full United States citizenship. He remained as steadfastly opposed to plural marriage as ever but did not want to persecute innocent people for their fellow church members' actions. Regarding polygamists, however, Smith told Edmunds, "The hand of Government has too long been clothed in silk; those who had attempted legislation have feared to hurt; this made the leaders of the polygamists bold and aggressive, and they presume upon the old time plea of 'persecution, oppression, religious intolerance, the rights of conscience,' &c." If Edmunds restricted his activity to antipolygamy legislation, Smith counseled, there would be little trouble with non-polygamist opposition to the bill. If he persisted in attacking the Mormon Church as a whole, however, Congress could find itself with a Mormon war on its hands that would be expensive, certainly, in property, dollars, and, quite probably, human life. Ill feelings would persist for generations (Letterbook 4). 

Joseph Smith III looked upon the passage of the Edmunds-Tucker Act in February 1887 with mixed emotions. The law, as Smith had hoped, was directed at polygamists. It provided for stricter enforcement and stiffer prison sentences, loosened the confines of legality under which Federal marshals worked, and permitted certain types of circumstantial evidence to be admitted in court cases dealing with plural marriage. These results pleased Smith. But he seriously questioned some of its other sections. The act disincorporated the Mormon church and provided for the seizure of all Church property in excess of $25,000. It called for a test oath of allegiance to the United States government before any Utahn could serve in public office or vote. Smith had already protested the oath's inclusion to Senator Edmunds, and he accepted some of the remaining provisions of the act only with reservation. Once it was enacted, however, Smith supported its enforcement, concluding that while it was not the best tool to resolve the Mormon issue, it was the only one available and therefore had the potential of ending the half-century long practice of polygamy. 

From this perspective, then, it should not be surprising that Joseph Smith III was overjoyed when Wilford Woodruff announced, in 1890 after a complex set of compromises, that he was advising Latter-day Saints to contract no marriages forbidden by law. For Smith, plural marriage's elimination vindicated his position that his father had not been its author. It signified, furthermore, that his efforts were indeed reforming the Mormon Church; and although the Reorganization actually had little to do with the Utah Mormon decision to end plural marriage, Smith believed that he could take a fair measure of credit for the action. He summarized this belief in a letter to Utah Congressman Moses Thatcher on 18 December 1896 when the state entered the Union. "I have watched the course of the events as it has appeared to the public," he wrote, "and have been anxious to see the right vindicated" (Letter book 7; Newell and Avery 1984, 302-9). 

With the passing of plural marriage, Smith was convinced justice had triumphed, truth had prevailed, and one branch of his father's church had been cleansed of its most prevalent blemish. 

---

[1] J. Smith 1934-37, 82 (2 April 1935) : 432. Additional examples of this viewpoint are in Joseph Smith Ill's (1) published articles: 1870, 1880, 1882, and 1889; and (2) letters: to Cousin John, 28 Dec. 1876, Letterbook 4; to E. C. Brand, 26 Jan. 1884, Letterbook 4; to L. O. Littlefield, 14 Aug. 1883, Letterbook 4; to John Henry Smith, 6 Jan. 1886, Letter- book 4; to Deseret News Col, 21 March 1896, Letterbook 6; to Hon. J. C. Barrows, 3 Jan. 1880, Letterbook 2; to Hon. G. F. Edmunds, 4 March 1886, Letterbook 4; and to Zenos H. Gurley, 5 March 1886, Letterbook 4. See also Samuel H. B. Smith to George A. Smith, 10 July 1860, Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah; "A Lusty War Cry," 1882. 

[2] Even the prophet's brother, David H. Smith, expressed his misgivings about their father's innocence in an 1872 letter: 

I know my mother believes just as we do in faith repentance, baptism, and all the saving doctrines, in the books of the church and all, but I do not wish to ask her in regard to polygamy, for dear brother God forgive me if I am wrong. .. . I believe there was some- thing wrong. I don't know it, but I believe it, the testimony is too great for me to deny (D. Smith 1879). 

See also Robinson, April, June, Sept., Oct. 1890, April 1891; McLellin 1872; Smith, 2 Apr. 1879.

[3] Emma Smith apparently exhibited this denial defense mechanism concerning her memories of polygamy as well. See Newell and Avery 1984, 95-105, 297-304; Newell 1984, 12-13; Beecher, Newell, and Avery 1980, 51-62. 

[4] J. Smith to J. F. Minton, 13 March 1891, Papers; J. Smith to Zenos H. Gurley, 24 July and 20 Aug. 1879, Letterbook 1. Smith's mother had also taken this approach. Emma wrote to Thomas Gregg in 1846, "Everything that has not come within my immediate observation remains doubtful in my mind until some circumstance occurs to prove reports either true or false" (quoted in Newell and Avery 1984, 366).

[post_title] => Methods and Motives: Joseph Smith III's Opposition to Polygamy, 1860-90 [post_excerpt] => Dialogue 20.4 (Winter 1987): 77–85
When Joseph Smith III preached his first sermon as a leader of the Reoganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints at Amboy, Illinois, on 6 April 1860, he expressed his unqualifed aversion to the Mormon doctrine of plural marriage.  [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => methods-and-motives-joseph-smith-iiis-opposition-to-polygamy-1860-90 [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-03-14 20:15:51 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-03-14 20:15:51 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.dialoguejournal.com/?post_type=dj_articles&p=15775 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => dj_articles [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) 1

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This is an essay in speculative theology. In it I explore an idea—the general Mormon expectation of future polygamy—that has important religious and moral implications but about which there is little definite scriptural direction and no clear official doctrine. I attempt here, in the spirit of a venerable tradition in Mormon thought from Joseph Smith's King Follett Discourse and Orson Pratt's The Seer to the sermons and writings of Hugh B. Brown and Lowell Bennion, to make a reconsideration, unauthoritative but serious. I suggest some new, possibly beneficial ways we might think and feel about celestial marriage—both as it is and as it might be. My essay is not a critique of official Mormon practice or doctrine but an invitation to reexamine some unofficial ideas and expectations which persist among most Mormons because of a past practice—a practice I believe was divinely inspired but also divinely, and permanently, rescinded. 

Shakespeare's Julius Caesar contains a crucial scene after Brutus has decided to join the conspiracy and kill Caesar. Brutus is reflecting on that decision in his orchard in the early morning, when his wife Portia joins him. Awakened when he left her side and further alarmed by the voices and cloaked figures of the departing conspirators, she worries that all this may be related to his "musing and sighing" at dinner the evening before and the "ungentle looks" and "impatience" with which he waved her aside. Even now Brutus claims he is merely "not well in health" and tells her to "go to bed." But Portia will not be dismissed and speaks straight to the heart of his real illness: 

You have some sick offense within your mind,
Which, by the right and virtue of my place, 
I ought to know of 
I [ask] you, by my once commended beauty, 
By all your vows of love, and that great vow 
Which did incorporate and make us one, 
That you unfold to me, yourself, your half, 
Why you are heavy. . . . 
Within the bond of marriage, tell me, Brutus, 
Is it [there stated] I should know no secrets 
That appertain to you? Am I yourself 
But, as it were, in sort or limitation, 
[That is, am I one with you in only a limited way?] 
To keep with you at meals, comfort your bed, 
And talk to you sometimes? Dwell I but in the suburbs 
Of your good pleasure? If it be no more, 
Portia is Brutus' harlot, not his wife. (2.1.268-75; 280-87) 

Portia then reminds Brutus of the qualities of lineage and character that first drew him to her and, as further proof of her firmness and courage to bear his painful and intimate secrets, reveals that she had wounded herself in the thigh but had suffered patiently all night without troubling him. Brutus exclaims, "O ye gods. Render me worthy of this noble wife!" But then he does nothing to achieve that worthiness. A knock at the door signals an additional conspirator to be won over, and Brutus readily allows this crucial opportunity with his wife to be interrupted. Although he promises Portia that "by and by thy bosom shall partake/The secrets of my heart," he never keeps that promise. Had he shared his deepest self with his other half, his wife, and been, advised by her better perspective, this man, whom Marc Anthony later calls "the noblest Roman of them all," might have been deterred from bringing greater evil on Rome than the evil he sought to cure. Instead, he also destroys the life of the intrepid Portia, who kills herself by swallowing hot coals after she learns what he has done and sees his fate. And Brutus finally takes his own life after Octavius and Anthony defeat his armies at Philippi. 

Shakespeare thus shows how well he understood the importance of fidelity, the complete faithfulness, loyalty, and sharing that is possible only when a man and a woman join their full lives — physical, mental, and spiritual — in what he called "the marriage of true minds" (Sonnet 116). He saw fidelity as central to married love, which he portrayed as the supreme form of human happiness and wholeness at the end of each of his comedies and the violation or interruption of which lies at the heart of most of the tragedies and late romances. 

I believe Shakespeare is right. Marital fidelity is central to mortal joy and eternal life, even godhood, and great catastrophes are already resulting from our current neglect of it, in society generally and in too many Mormon marriages. It is the key to our concepts of sexual morality before and after marriage. And there is, I believe, a serious danger to the ideal of fidelity — and thus both to our sexual morality and to our concepts of ourselves as eternal men and women — in the expectation, shared I fear by many Mormons, that the highest form of marriage in the celestial realm is what is technically called polygyny, plural wives for a single husband. 

I believe official Mormon polygyny, as it was practiced in the nineteenth century, was inspired by God through his prophets. I am the descendant of polygynists. I honor those literal ancestors and my many spiritual ancestors who lived that law — faithfully, morally, and at enormous costs to themselves and the Church. Those costs included alienation from American culture and from their own moral training, martyrdom for a few, and very nearly the total destruction of their Church and culture by the United States government, which was willing to use brutal and unconstitutional means to force Mormon conformity. I believe that the good achieved by polygyny outweighed those costs and made possible the establishment and success of the restored kingdom of God on earth during its beginning period. And when that practice had achieved its purposes, limited to a specific historical period and place, God took it away. 

I believe God removed polygyny by direct inspiration to his prophets and did it because polygyny was no longer worth the costs it exacted. He did not remove it because our ancestors lacked the courage or ability to continue to pay those costs or merely wanted to accommodate themselves to mainstream American values. I believe that any persons who thoroughly and honestly examine the evidence will conclude that there were terrible difficulties and mistakes, embarrassing vacillations and equivocations, even transgressions and deceptions (by both leaders and lay members of the Church), that accompanied both the beginning and the end of polygyny. But if such persons also tender some faith in the restored gospel and its prophetic leadership and exercise some human empathy and compassion, they will find that the terrible problems that came with plural marriage did not come, as some have alleged or implied, because Joseph Smith was uninspired or merely lustful or because Brigham Young and John Taylor persisted in a mistake against God's will. As I read their letters, journals, and sermons and the accounts and testimony of those who knew them best, I find ample evidence, despite the serious mistakes and problems, that Joseph Smith had great self-control and that all three prophets were deeply inspired leaders, who would not persist in a form of marriage — the supreme sacrament of Mormon theology — that was contrary to God's will. 

The anguish, mistakes, and problems that instituting polygyny brought to the Mormons came precisely because most of the people involved were trying heroically both to be moral (that is, true to God's laws given in the past) and also to respond to what they believed was undeniable new revelation — revelation that directly countered their own moral inclinations and Christian training. And I believe that in that clash of the old moral code with new revelation lies the best answer to the question of why. Why would God require such a strange practice, one counter to standard Christian morality and inherited rationality, one that even contradicted sensible and God-given moral laws — and thus could be practiced only at enormous cost? 

I believe the answer is similar to the answers to some similarly difficult questions, such as: Why would God command his faithful prophet Abraham to kill his son Isaac, when God himself condemned human sacrifice as immoral? or, Why would God allow his prophets to deny priesthood blessings to blacks, counter to his own teachings about universal equality? Polygyny was indeed (as the Lord himself tells us in Doctrine and Covenants 132 by explicitly comparing Abraham's taking of a second wife to his offering of Isaac) what can be called an "Abrahamic" test, that is, a command by God to violate an earlier commandment: 

God commanded Abraham, and Sarah gave Hagar to Abraham to wife. . . . Was Abraham, therefore, under condemnation? . . . Nay; for I, the Lord, commanded it. Abraham was commanded to offer his son Isaac; nevertheless, it was written: Thou shalt not kill. Abraham, however, did not refuse, and it was accounted unto him for righteousness (v. 35; see vv. 34-37). 

God apparently uses such a unique and uniquely troubling test because it is the only way to teach us something paradoxical but true and very important about the universe — that trust in our personal experiences with divinity must sometimes outweigh our rational morality. Obedience to the divine commands that come directly to us must sometimes supersede our understanding of earlier commands if we are ever to transcend the human limitations of even our best inherited culture and religion. We must learn, sometimes very painfully, to be open to continuous revelation. We must learn such a lesson partly because truth and history are too complex to be reduced to simple, irrevocable commandments — even from past prophets — like "Thou shalt not kill" or "Thou shalt always have only one spouse." Truth is ultimately "rational," but it is not always or immediately clear to our present reason. 

Our ancestors' painful obedience, then, to the new and "contradictory" revelation of polygyny both tested and confirmed them as saints, worthy to build God's kingdom. They learned, as Shakespeare also knew, that "Sweet are the uses of adversity" (As You Like It 2.1.12). And they learned that lesson from the most wrenching human adversity — when opposites are posed by God himself. But precisely because it was an Abrahamic test, and thus a means to reveal and develop qualities necessary in one particular and unusual historical setting, polygyny is not a practice to project into the eternities as the basis for a celestial order. Heaven is, by definition, a place where the cultural limitations and historical peculiarities of earth-life no longer prevail. Abrahamic tests and other special historical requirements, such as "lower" laws like the Levitical priesthood and tithing, teach us much about God's flexible dealing with human limitations and historical conditions but little or nothing about a supernatural celestial order, beyond such temporary mortal conditions.[1]

What, then, is such an order like? What should be our model of celestial marriage? Though we are given very little direct description of that highest heaven, the scriptures clearly stress fidelity and union of opposed equals: 

Neither is the man without the woman nor the woman without the man, in the Lord (1 Cor. 11:11). 

And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. . . . Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh (Gen. 2:23-24). 

For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things (2 Ne. 2:11). Black and white, bond and free, male and female .. . all are alike unto God (2 Ne. 26:33). 

Ye have broken the hearts of your tender wives, and lost the confidence of your children, because of your bad examples before them; and the sobbings of their hearts ascend up to God against you. And because of the strictness of the word of God, which cometh down against you, many hearts died, pierced with deep wounds (Jacob 2:35). 

These and other scriptures, together with the teachings of modern prophets and the temple marriage sealing ordinance, support a theology of absolute and equal fidelity between a man and a woman as the basis for sexual morality, marital happiness, eternal increase, and, in its fullest implications, for godhood itself, the creative power that makes all existence possible. This theology of marriage is unique to Mormonism and is to me the most attractive and impressive part of the gospel — after the atonement of Christ. And just as the atonement is the key to our salvation from sin and death in this life, so celestial marriage is the key to exaltation, our eternal progression in the life to come. 

The Mormon theology of marriage has two main characteristics. First, it implies that complementary oppositions lie at the very heart of physical, moral, and social existence. The most fundamental of these is the male-female polarity. That fundamental opposition, when it is tamed and matured into physical and spiritual unity, makes possible the creation and proper nurture both of mortal children and of spirit children to populate new universes. Female-male unity (which God has powerfully imaged in the concept of becoming "one flesh") ideally involves complete sharing — with a separate, co-eternal individual and without loss of our own individuality — of all our singularity, vulnerability, trust, hopes, and potentialities. 

Since celestial marriage is the crucial requirement for exaltation to godhood, Mormon theology suggests that the maturity essential to discovery and exaltation of the self is ultimately possible only in a fully equal, bi-polar but thus complementary, individual-to-individual synthesis. The supreme figure for this ideal, powerfully reinforced each time faithful Mormons attend temple endowment or sealing ceremonies, is that of the earth's first lovers and parents: We are each invited to become, figuratively, an Adam or an Eve. We are thus imaginatively united in that perfect one-to-one unity established in the beginning by God, because "it is not good that the man should be alone" (Gen. 2:18). Hebrew "alone" means incomplete, unfulfilled, rather than lonely (Whittaker 1980, 36). We are united that we might "know" each other, meaning in Hebrew to fully comprehend and share our being (Whittaker 1980, 36). The highest model for marriage, then, established in the garden and reinforced in the most sacred LDS ceremonies, is monogamous and centered in full one-to-one fidelity. 

The image of becoming one flesh is realized most literally, of course, in conception, when our bodies actually unite to make new life. The sexual relationship perfectly represents spiritual union within polarity, that one-to-one sharing that ultimately makes possible the creativity of godhood. We can violate that creative union of two opposites, in various ways — by immature haste or promiscuity, by self-gratification or lust (either outside marriage or within it, if sex is used selfishly), by lying to each other, by not sharing fully and often our deepest feelings and hopes, by refusing to be vulnerable and thus walling off parts of ourselves, by not working constantly to justify and build complete trust. 

The second main idea about marriage in Mormon theology is that since the highest form of love in the universe is the fully sexual and exclusive love of a man and a woman eternally committed to each other, it is the key to our highest joys and exaltations — and our greatest pains and failures. It is the love that ultimately, whatever the accidents of mortal life which may prevent children now, is able to continue the work and glory of Godhood through eternal increase and creation. Therefore heterosexual married love is the ideal held out for all and made available to all. 

Mortal probation continues for a long time after death to provide equal opportunities to all, and our theology promises that any genetic, developmental, or cultural problems or physical accidents that prevent marriage or children in this life will be resolved and that opportunities for such marriages and children will be provided in the next life. 

But Mormon theology also promises dire results if we willfully oppose or neglect that ideal, even the piercing of our hearts with deep wounds. There are absolute prohibitions against homosexual activity and extramarital inter course and very strong discouragements of lust — of promiscuous, selfish, or obsessive eroticism — even within marriage. The only rational explanation, it seems to me, for such warnings and prohibitions is that by their very nature certain practices tend to center on self rather than relationship and to deny the creative integrity of sexual intercourse — that is, its unique capability, at least in potential, to produce new life — or to violate the perfect trust and fidelity that the vulnerability and creative power of male-female union both nurture and need. 

What, then, about polygyny? It, of course, does not fit the model of one to-one fidelity I have described. First, we must consider the possibility that polygyny really does not violate fidelity, that if people are good enough they can have trust and sexual wholeness with more than one person. This could well have been true of our polygynous ancestors. Might it be even more likely in the celestial realms where the conditions and our capabilities will be much better than what we know now? I have found that this is the hope and assumption of many, perhaps most, Latter-day Saints who have seriously considered the possibility they might eventually be required to live in plural marriage.

I find two serious problems with such a hope. First, it is based on a dangerous notion: that simply getting more of a good thing is always better — that a great love for one person is even better if extended into great love for many persons. Consider, however, the differences between the elements that make up truly complete love. They include charity or unconditional, Christ-like love — but also friendship and erotic love, love that makes choices, love that is based on differential desires. The unconditional, redemptive love God has for all his children and commands us all to learn is certainly capable of being multiplied. But such unconditional love is only a part of married love. And the other elements of a complete, married love, including restrictive obligations, covenants of complete and exclusive sharing, and the creative sexual love that makes new children and universes possible, are not improved by multiplication. In fact, they are usually destroyed or at least weakened by it. Romantic, married love is, I believe, strengthened by being exclusive, even for the gods. 

Eternal marriage uniquely includes all the elements of love: the exclusive as well as the inclusive and unconditional. Although it can expand to include sacrificial love for populous worlds of spirit children, it will nevertheless be injured by forces that weaken by division the powerful bonds of filial obligation and sexual fidelity. In other words, celestial married love differs from mortal love not because it includes a larger group of individuals but because it includes more kinds of love than any other relationship—sexual love and quite idiosyncratic "liking" as well as charity or Christ-like love. But those unique and exclusive extra qualities, which give married love the greatest potential of any relationship, require the fully mutual fidelity only possible between one whole woman and one whole man. 

Such fidelity, I believe, moves us beyond polygyny or polyandry, beyond patriarchy or matriarchy, even beyond priesthood in its usual functions and meaning. It seems to me that those are all lower laws, serving their inspired purposes—but only during certain mortal times with their cultural limitations. The ideal celestial order of marriage—of power, of creation, and of administration—will be the one the temple marriage sealing ceremony invites us to look forward to if we are faithful: a full and equal complementarity of a queen and a king, a priestess and a priest. It will be what President Ezra Taft Benson has called, after giving the term his own unusual definition, the "patriarchal order." In "What I Hope You Will Teach Your Children About the Temple," President Benson lists three priesthood orders, the Aaronic, Melchizedek, and "patriarchal," pointing out that the third is "described in modern revelation as an order of family government where a man and woman enter into a covenant with God — just as did Adam and Eve — to be sealed for eternity, to have posterity, and to do the will and work of God throughout their mortality" (1985, 8).[2]

Just as the lower Aaronic (or Levitical) priesthood is superseded by the Melchizedek when historical conditions or individual maturity warrant, so I believe the Melchizedek priesthood is a preparatory order to some extent superseded by the fully equal order that men and women receive when sealed in the temple. And though we are apparently not yet mature enough for God to inspire us to implement that order fully and administratively on earth, we should, it seems to me, try to imagine it for the future, at least in the celestial kingdom, and prepare ourselves for it by living it as fully as possible now. 

And that brings me to a second problem with the dubious argument that celestial marriage will be polygynous because we will be morally superior there, more able to love inclusively. Such an expectation can tempt us to love inclusively and superficially — even promiscuously — in this life. Mormons sometimes joke about looking forward to polygamy — because it will be more sexually diversified for men or less sexually demanding or psychologically intense for women (or simply allow a division of labor in a household to the advantage of women). The serious edge under these jokes sometimes emerges in open longing for something "better" than we have known in monogamy, perhaps a wider circle of easy friendships, unfettered by the full demands and resultant exclusions of being one flesh. 

The trouble with these jokes and serious hopes is their projected flight from the full responsibilities of married love, which include loving unconditionally — but also include being a special, intimate friend, having children, sharing one's deepest self, and being fully vulnerable. In Michael Novak's words, "Seeing myself through the unblinking eyes of an intimate, intelligent other, an honest spouse, is humiliating beyond anticipation" (1976, 41). And we are tempted to avoid that humiliation, however redemptive it is. Having comparatively shallow, friendly, intellectual, artistic relations with a group of people, even having merely sexual adventures with a variety, is not as difficult as developing a full relationship of fidelity with one person. And I fear that many Mormon men and women let the expectation of polygyny as the ideal future order justify their inclination to be vaguely promiscuous or superficial in sexual relationships, to flirt or share their identity with a number of people, or simply to withdraw from the struggle into blessed singularity — and there, too often, to be satisfied with some version of love of self. In short, some Mormons, assuming future polygyny, practice for it now by diverting their affections and loyal ties away from the arduous task of achieving full spiritual and physical unity with the one person they would otherwise inescapably have to face, an imperfect spouse. 

The nineteenth-century Mormon experience shows that such temptations are related to the very nature of polygyny. Those who lived it best, most devotedly and successfully, apparently found they could do so only by making the relationships more superficial — that is, less romantic, less emotionally intense and focused. Zina Diantha Huntington Jacobs Smith Young, wife of three men, including Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and one of the strongest public advocates of polygamy, was quoted in the New York World, 19 November 1869, as saying, "A successful polygamous wife must regard her husband with indifference, and with no other feeling than that of reverence, for love we regard as a false sentiment: a feeling which should have no existence in polygamy" (in Van Wagoner 1986, 102). Vilate Kimball, first wife of Heber C, counselled an unhappy plural wife that "her comfort must be wholly in her children; that she must lay aside wholly all interest or thought in what her husband was doing while he was away from her" (Van Wagoner 1986, 102—3). 

Diaries, letters, and reminiscences of polygynous wives and children reveal that regular down-playing of the romantic dimension of married love was indeed one of the costs of polygyny, whatever its compensating values. Even the best relationships appear to be bittersweet. But I fear that such a flight from the complete love that includes romance may actually appeal both to overly idealistic unmarried Mormons and to Mormons who are not completely happy in their marriages now. If so, it is an unfortunate compromise, one without genuine compensating values and one to be repented of rather than rationalized by the hope that eternal marriage will be polygynous. One of the horrifying results of this idea, conveyed by some teachers of LDS youth, that polygyny is a "purer" love since it is a more inclusive and less selfish love and thus the celestial form of marriage, is that they thus help prepare some young Mormon women to be seduced by the argument of fundamentalists that they can engage in that "higher" order right now! Such thinking also tends to encourage promiscuity in the young married, who may therefore share their deepest feelings, even sexual interests, too broadly; it encourages passivity in the middle-aged, who may thus neglect the constant struggle for full fidelity, which includes romance and friendship as well as charity; and it encourages irresponsibility in the old, who may finally retreat from their life-long task of building a deep and full celestial love into bored tolerance or silent alienation. 

Now let me turn to a consideration of why, in addition to the serious danger to fidelity, I believe polygyny, though it was once an inspired practice, is not an eternal principle. I have five main reasons.

1. A requirement so central and important to our eternal salvation should be firmly grounded in the scriptures, but it is not. In fact, the clearest scriptures state that polygyny is only an occasional requirement, otherwise extremely dangerous. In the Book of Mormon, the prophet Jacob reports the Lord's insistence that David's and Solomon's polygyny was "abominable," apparently, as the Lord suggests to Joseph Smith in Doctrine and Covenants 132:37-38, because they went beyond what he commanded them. The Lord tells the Nephite men categorically to have one wife only and no concubines — no divided fidelity of any kind (Jacob 2:27). In this general exhortation to chastity and monogamy, God offers only one exception: "For if I will . . . raise up seed unto me, I will command my people" (Jacob 2:30). The only such exception that we know about since that time is documented in Doctrine and Covenants 132, where the Lord commands his young Church to practice polygyny, and we must assume that commandment was given for the fundamental purpose stated in the Book of Mormon — to raise up seed unto him. 

I think the operative words in the Lord's statement of his one exception are "unto me." Polygyny, historical evidence indicates, did not produce a larger number of children; it was more likely instituted because of the Abrahamic test which it provided parents and because it concentrated children in well organized and elite families. My sense is that it produced a more devout and religiously well-trained progeny, seed unto God. That is certainly what some leaders, such as Brigham Young (JD 3: 264) and Erastus Snow (JD 24: 165), believed was a central purpose and effect of polygyny. My chief evidence that they were right is the subjective one that well into the 1950s and 60s, when the surge in converts began, I was present at a number of meetings where standing count indicated that a huge majority of active Mormons, especially leaders, were descendants of polygynists, a much larger percentage than the percentage of Mormons who actually practiced polygyny. 

At any rate, Doctrine and Covenants 132 does not say or imply that polygyny is anything more than an exception, commanded for a specific purpose relevant to a specific historical circumstance and, by implication, to be rescinded when those circumstances changed or when the costs began to outweigh the benefits. 

All of the passages in section 132 about eternal conditions and promises relate to "the new and everlasting covenant," to what will happen "if a man marry a wife .. . and it is sealed unto them by the Holy Spirit of promise" (v. 19), that is, to eternal marriage, not to plural marriage. The language concerning plural marriage, it seems to me, simply grants permission to engage in this unusual practice then required of some Mormons, with precise conditions designed to make certain that such an extremely difficult and dangerous requirement be controlled within the moral and religious bounds of the priest hood and the temple: "If any man espouse a virgin, and desire to espouse another [by the law of the priesthood], and the first give her consent, and if he espouse the second . . . then is he justified" (v. 61). 

Only two verses of Section 132 could be read as support for eternal polygyny. Verse 39 declares that David will not inherit his wives "out of this world" because of his sin against Uriah and Bathsheba, possibly implying that had he not sinned he would inherit those wives in the next life. And verse 63 states that plural wives are given to a man "to multiply and replenish the earth . . . and to fulfill the promise which was given by my Father before the foundation of the world, and for their exaltation in the eternal worlds, that they may bear the souls of men; for herein is the work of my Father continued, that he may be glorified." This latter verse is ambiguous. It could mean simply that obedience to God's command of polygyny on earth, by those so commanded, makes possible their exaltation and thus the continued bearing of spirit children in their eternal marriages, of one woman and one man, in the celestial kingdom. Or it could mean that some polygyny is eternal: that for those who are sealed into it in this life, polygyny in heaven is necessary for their exaltation, since it makes it possible for the wives involved to "bear the souls of men" in the celestial kingdom. 

If verse 39 means that David could have inherited his plural wives and the second interpretation of verse 63 is correct, at most these verses suggest that polygyny will continue for those sealed into it here on earth, not that it will be required of others. Yet that second interpretation of verse 63 seems to me completely unacceptable because it requires that we see the purpose of plural wives as simply, or mainly, to bear more spirit children. Such a notion strikes directly at the heart of our concept of men and women as coeternal and equal partners in the celestial realms. It is based on one of the popular rationales for eternal polygyny but the one which is perhaps most repugnant to an increasing number of faithful Mormons — that since women take nine months to bear mortal children and presumably will take that long to bear spirit children as well, each man must have many wives, keeping them all pregnant most of the time, to produce those billions of spirit children for "the eternal worlds" referred to in Doctrine and Covenants 132:63. That argument seems to me so obviously wrong I am tempted to simply dismiss it, but I have found that enough influential Mormons and teachers of religion espouse such an argument that I must respond. 

Suppose it would take a woman, bearing a child each nine months, 60 billion years to produce the spirit children for an earth like ours (the 80 billion or so people demographers compute will have lived on earth by 2000 A.D.) . It does not seem reasonable to me that God would require polygyny, with all its attendant problems, simply to reduce that time to twenty or even ten billion years by giving each man four or six wives. If humans can already produce test-tube babies and clones, God has certainly found more efficient ways to produce spirit children than by turning celestial partners into mere birth machines. To anticipate such a limited, unequal role for women in eternity insults and devalues them. 

My basic point is that the scriptures are at most ambiguous about the place of polygyny in celestial marriage. I find no scriptural evidence that polygyny is required either for all of us or for those who are to be the most exalted. The silence of the scriptures concerning something so important and fundamental cannot be an oversight: "Surely, the Lord God will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets" (Amos 3:7). Yet a number of nineteenth-century Mormon apostles and prophets, in their defense of polygyny, claimed it was the celestial order of marriage, including Brigham Young (JD 11:269, 271; 16:166) and Joseph F. Smith (JD 20:28). However, in the same sermons where they declared polygyny to be the celestial order, these leaders also asserted or implied, with the same conviction, one or more of the following: that the wives of those who do not practice polygamy will be, in the next life, given to those who do (JD 16:166) ; that the more wives and children one has, the greater one's future glory (JD 1:61; 20:29-31); that if Utah did not receive statehood before polygamy was abolished, it never would (JD 11:269); and that the practice of polygyny by the Church would never be taken away (especially John Taylor, see Van Wagoner 1986, 128). Since we no longer believe—or accept as inspired—those other claims, the associated claim, that celestial marriage is polygynous, is at least called into question. 

I can understand that it might have been necessary for nineteenth-century Mormons and their leaders, who invested so much in the practice of polygamy and paid such terrible individual and group costs for it, to justify their commitment in part by the belief that it was more than an inspired but temporary practice. However, that does not make their belief true — or at least does not universalize eternal polygyny. The situation is similar to that of denial of priesthood to blacks. Some apostles and prophets until fairly recent times have stated that the denial was more than an inspired Church practice—that it was rooted in pre-existent choices and the eternal nature of blacks or their ancestors (JD 11:272; First Presidency Statement 1949; McConkie 1958, 102). But in the same sermons or writings they also recorded their equally firm beliefs that interracial mixing with blacks should bring death (JD 10:110) or that the Civil War would not free the slaves (JD 10:250) or that blacks would never receive the priesthood in this life until all whites had (JD 11:272; 7:291; First Presidency, 1949; McConkie 1958, 476). All of those claims have been proven false, one by direct revelation from God, and that fact, I believe, at the very least leaves us free to question the associated claim that dark skin or black ancestry is a sign of a mistake in the pre-existence. 

Because God spoke in the 1978 revelation to end the practice of priesthood denial to blacks we should seriously question the rationale that well-meaning Church members developed to explain that practice: the racist and unscriptural doctrine still persisted in by some that blacks were not "valiant" in the premortal world. And because God spoke in 1890 to end the practice of polygyny, we should also question the rationale that well-meaning Church members had developed to justify it: the sexist and unscriptural doctrine of post-mortal plural marriage. 

We should all aspire to the courage of Elder Bruce R. McConkie, who after the 1978 revelation had flatly contradicted his earlier teachings that blacks would never receive the priesthood on earth, apparently recognized he must also discard some associated teachings: "Forget everything that I have said, or what President Brigham Young or President George Q. Cannon or whomsoever has said in days past that is contrary to the present revelation. We spoke with a limited understanding and without the light and knowledge that now has come into the world [about how 'all are alike unto God . . . black and white' (2 Ne. 26:33)]" (1983,153). 

We now have additional light and knowledge, because of the 1890 revelation and subsequent Church teachings and practices, on what that same Book of Mormon passage means in claiming "all are alike unto God . . . male and female." Certainly analogies do not provide proof by themselves, but this one should encourage us to reassess past teachings which were linked to teachings we now know to be false and that are contrary to our post-Manifesto understanding of marriage. 

I realize this is a troubling, perhaps dangerous, position: If we start questioning some statements of Church leaders, why not all? If they were wrong about some of their rationales for polygyny and priesthood denial, why are they not wrong about God's involvement in first instituting those practices—or anything else in the Restoration? Though I sympathize with—even share—this anxiety, the assertion that revelation is either totally true or totally untrue is still a false dichotomy: We simply do not believe, as Mormons, that we must accept all scripture and prophetic teaching as equally inspired, and we have no doctrine of prophetic infallibility. The scriptures and our modern Church leaders themselves have made this point again and again and have given us some guidelines for distinguishing binding truth and direction from good advice and both of these from "the mistakes of men" ("Preface" to the Book of Mormon; see also D&C 1:24-27). 

In the particular case of polygyny a reasonable guideline can be formulated: If a Church practice which served valuable historical purposes is rescinded, thus proving false some statements which were made in the process of defending it as permanent because it is based in some eternal doctrine, then all such statements are called in question and can be thoughtfully and prayer fully assessed in relation to other fundamental scriptures and doctrines (as I am trying to do here) without opening the Pandora's box of complete skepticism. I can (and do) believe that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were divinely called prophets who received direct revelation across a remarkable range of important practices and doctrines. I am not thereby constrained to believe (and do not) that they never made a mistake or never suffered from human limitations of understanding that plague us all. Modern prophets themselves have explicitly renounced specific practices and teachings of both those earlier prophets (the Adam-God theory, for instance), sometimes even supplying rational arguments to help us understand how such mistakes or changes could occur, without thereby calling into question those prophets' general inspiration or prophetic authority. 

2. My second reason for questioning eternal polygyny, in addition to the lack of scriptural support for such a doctrine, is that if polygyny were the highest order of marriage, surely the Lord would want us to practice it whenever and wherever we could on earth. But he does not. I feel certain, and those I have consulted who are trained in the law agree, that a serious effort by the Church to strike down the anti-polygamy laws as unconstitutional would succeed. But the Church not only does not make such an effort; I understand it takes action against those who seriously advocate doing so. We do not even allow our members to continue practicing polygyny in countries where it is legal. Thus, one of the strangest paradoxes of Mormon history is that the Reorganized Church, which claims the Lord never revealed polygyny, allows members to practice it in India and Africa, while the Utah-based LDS Church, which claims the Lord did reveal it, does not allow anyone to practice it. 

3. There is a general Mormon assumption that the plural wives who were sealed to polygynists (or are sealed to widowers) are bound in eternal sealings that cannot be broken and so at least those marriages must be plural in eternity. But this assumption has been essentially refuted by the modern Church practice, initiated by President David O. McKay, of sometimes sealing a woman to more than one man. Of course, this form of plural marriage (polyandry) usually occurs only in temple work done for a dead woman who was married to more than one man during life. She is now sealed to all her husbands without our presuming to make a choice for her — and, of course, her choice in the spirit world of one eternal companion must then invalidate the other seal ings and leave those men free to find eternal companions. Sealings thus seem to guarantee bonds only when they are subsequently agreed upon but do not forcibly bind anyone. But if this is so in such polyandrous sealings, then it might just as well be the case in polygynous ones. The man involved could have the opportunity to work out a one-to-one relationship as the basis for celestial marriage from among the women to whom he was sealed, and the other sealings must then be invalidated by mutual consent, thus freeing those women to form one-to-one celestial marriages with others. 

Who would those others be? Possibly the "extra" husbands of widows similarly released by their choice of one eternal companion, or, of course, the many single men who have lived on earth, but also, it has been half-seriously suggested, the surplus of male babies who die and inherit celestial glory. Being required to make such a choice may sound like harsh doctrine for those women who in good faith look forward to being with the one man they have known and loved, even if he has other wives. But that doctrine is no harsher than the same doctrine for the man married to one woman whom he loves deeply, even though she has been married to others, perhaps sealed to one of them and now, under President McKay's change, sealed to all. All but one of these men must find new companions. Obviously we must trust in the great and almost unique Mormon principle of continued life and development after death but before judgment, when opportunity will abound for single men and women, as well as unmatched spouses, to find their eternal companions. 

4. That semi-serious aside about surplus male babies leads to my fourth argument: Another popular rationale for polygyny is that there are and will be more righteous women than men. This rather patronizing and certainly unprovable sentiment cloaks a sexist assumption, demeaning to both men and women. And a fine satire on the question, "In the Heavens Are Parents Single? Report No. 1," by the "Committee on Celestial Demographics," published in the Spring 1984 DIALOGUE, makes a plausible case that there will actually be many more men than women in the highest degree of the celestial kingdom. We know that 104 males are born for every 100 females and 47 percent of males born into the world have died before age eight, as opposed to only 44 percent of females. If we accept the usual interpretation of Doctrine and Covenants 137—that all children who die under eight are exalted—then already, from the over 70 billion who have come to earth, nearly 17 billion males and 15 billion females are destined for the highest degree of the celestial kingdom on the basis of premature death alone, a surplus of nearly 2 billion males (1984, 85-86). Even if women were naturally more righteous, it would take a huge disproportion in that righteousness to merely equalize those numbers, to say nothing of creating a situation that required plural wives. 

Of course, that "Report" is extremely speculative and fundamentally wrong-headed, as good satire always is. I believe it is more likely and certainly more consistent with free agency that children who die and are thus, in the words of Doctrine and Covenants 137:7, "heirs of the celestial kingdom," are not thus guaranteed exaltation but only guaranteed an opportunity for exaltation — and that the number of males and females in the celestial kingdom is essentially equal. 

Actually, I believe those numbers are exactly equal. Since celestial marriage itself is a prior requirement for the highest decree of the celestial kingdom, then it would seem that we arrive there, not as different numbers of men or women who then must pair off — or pluralize off — into marriages, but only after having achieved, as part of our righteousness, a celestial marriage. We arrive partnered. In other words, arguments about relative numbers of righteous men and women are irrelevant; the highest degree of the celestial kingdom will be, by definition, a place made up entirely of eternal male-female couples. 

5. My fifth reason for believing celestial marriage is not polygynous — and my main reason for thinking that we must not simply say, "We can't possibly imagine what it will be like in heaven and so shouldn't worry about it" — is that it seems to me, from reflection and from talking with Mormon women, that the devaluation of women inherent in the expectation of polygyny is destructive of their sense of identity and worth now. For instance, the argument considered above, that there must be polygyny because there are more celestial women than men, sounds on the face of it complimentary to women. But if we reflect a bit, it is simply a way of saying that one good man is in some sense the equivalent of more women than one, however "righteous" those women are compared to the average man. Can one man emotionally and sexually satisfy more than one woman? Or is he capable of being "equally yoked" to more than one woman—spiritually or intellectually or managerially or whatever? In either case, the implications seem to diminish women, reducing them, in some essential way, to less than full equivalence with men. 

If we believed that the celestial order would be truly polygamous, allowing either polygyny or polyandry because somehow we would all—men and women—be capable of a "higher," more inclusive love than could accommodate various groupings, the case would at least be rational and nonsexist. However, both the historical order Mormons once practiced and the celestial order many Mormons anticipate are purely polygynous. They accept in the eternal marriage unit only plural wives, not plural husbands. Since there is no good reason to believe that polygyny will be needed to accommodate an excess of women in the celestial kingdom, then the expectation that there will be plural wives but not plural husbands cannot help but imply fundamental inequalities between men and women that have to do with their most central qualities and feelings, those involving sexual and spiritual identity and relationships (such as the insulting concept discussed above, that women are needed chiefly as birth machines for spirit children). 

I believe we can remove that vague implication of inferiority without becoming alienated either from nineteenth-century Mormonism or from our present faith in the gospel and the Church. It is possible and spiritually healing, I believe, to affirm our polygynous ancestors for their obedient sacrifices and courageous achievements, which made the foundations of the restored church secure — and yet to reject the expectation of future polygyny. For too many of us, that expectation undermines the foundations of our present identities as women and men and diverts us from the difficult struggle for complete fidelity in our marriages that the gospel standard of morality and the expectation of celestial marriage as the basis of godhood require. 

I do not presume to speak for others. My intent is simply to help free us, as Mormon men and women, to think about our marriages and the future with more openness, less bound to the expectation of future polygyny. Let us not be limited to our past understanding. In the speech I referred to earlier, Elder McConkie observed, "Since the Lord gave this revelation on the priesthood, our understanding of many [scriptures] has expanded. Many of us never imagined or supposed that they had the extensive and broad meaning that they do have" (1982, 152). And though he then discussed only how our understanding of how black and white are "alike unto God" had expanded, I suggest that we also need to consider that our understanding of how men and women are alike and equal unto God may still be narrow, in need of further expansion. Men who have suffered from an unhealthy sense of superiority and women who have felt degraded by the assumption of future polygyny should feel free to seek the inspiration that may help unburden them. 

Certainly none of us can presume an exact knowledge of the celestial order and what we will be capable of there, but our whole religion is built on the assumption that this life is, in its essentials, very much like that future life and a direct preparation for it. We have been clearly commanded to try to develop perfect one-to-one fidelity in our marriages here, and in the temple marriage sealing ceremony we have been given, I believe, a clear vision of what the highest future order of marriage will be: It will be a full and equal, one-to-one partnership of a king and a queen, a priestess and a priest, a perfectly balanced and yet dynamic bi-polar union that makes possible "a fulness and a continuation of the seeds forever and ever" (D&C 132:19).

Difficult as complete married fidelity and unity is to achieve, there is nothing sweeter on earth than our approximations of it. And we have been given no clear evidence that it will not continue to be the sweetest thing in heaven, the foundation of godhood and a blessing available to all who, freed from this world's limitations, really want it. 

---

[1] Joseph F. Smith, in a discourse in the Salt Lake Tabernacle, 7 July 1878, suggested both the danger of polygyny, a powerful principle "that savors of life unto life, or of death unto death," if it were misunderstood or misused and that he understood it was applicable "when commanded and not otherwise" and was "particularly adapted to the conditions and necessities . . . the circumstances, responsibilities, and personal, as well as vicarious duties of the people of God in this age of the world" (JD 20:26).

[2] Joseph Smith preached on 27 August 1843 regarding three priesthoods: The Melchizedek Priesthood holds the right from the eternal God, and not by descent from father and mother; and that priesthood is as eternal as God Himself, having neither beginning of days nor end of life.

The 2nd Priesthood is Patriarchal authority. Go to and finish the temple, and God will fill it with power, and you will then receive more knowledge concerning this priesthood.

The 3rd is what is called the Levitical Priesthood, consisting of priests to administer in outward ordinances, made without an oath; but the Priesthood of Melchizedek is by an oath and covenant.

This version, which appears in Joseph Fielding Smith, ed., Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 14th printing (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1964), p. 323, is, in turn, quoted from Joseph Smith, Jr., History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, B. H. Roberts, ed., 7 vols., 2nd ed. rev. (1949; rpt. ed., Salt Lake City: Deseret Book Company, 1951), 5:555. This sermon was reconstructed from Joseph Smith's diary for that date, kept by Willard Richards. The original text reads: 

[The Melchizedek priesthood is] a priesthood which holds the priesthood by right from the Eternal Gods. — and not b[y] descent from father and mother

2d Priesthood, patriarchal authority finish that temple and god will fill it with power.

3rd Priesthood. Levitical.

Priests made without an oath, but the Priesthood of Melchisedek is by oath and covenant (Andrew F. Ehat and Lyndon W. Cook, comps. and eds. The Words of Joseph Smith [Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Religious Studies Center, 1980], pp. 244-45).

[post_title] => On Fidelity, Polygamy, and Celestial Marriage [post_excerpt] => Dialogue 20.4 (Winter 1987): 138–154
England shares his reasons for why Joseph Smith introduced polygamy and then removed it as one of the commandments. England argues that polygamy was a faith testing experience which lead them to in his words “worthy to build God’s kingdom.” [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => on-fidelity-polygamy-and-celestial-marriage [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-03-14 20:52:03 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-03-14 20:52:03 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.dialoguejournal.com/?post_type=dj_articles&p=15779 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => dj_articles [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) 1

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While a number of studies dealing with polygamy have examined the experiences of wives and children, very few have looked at men's views. Two exceptions are articles by J. E. Hulett (1943) and Kimball Young (1942), both more than forty years old. Young contends that while plural marriage gave men "certain insecurities" because polygamy was contrary to their monogamous traditions, it also "offered men . . . ego security" because of the possibility of having additional sexual partners, and "higher status" because of the prestige in Mormon society of having more than one wife (1942, 307). 

However, after studying interviews conducted by Hulett and Young in the 1930s, and the Redd Center's conducted in the 1970s and 1980s with husbands, wives, and children of Mormon polygamous households, then comparing them with Mormon monogamous families, I have found evidence to suggest other male views of polygamy (Embry 1987). Rather than seeing polygamy as a "burden or pleasure" or a system full of "ego security" with some "insecurities," I found that most men practiced polygamy because of their religious beliefs; their marital experiences were similar to the experiences of both their LDS and non-LDS American monogamous counterparts. Mormons, both monogamous and polygamous, seem simply to have adapted the Victorian ideology evident throughout nineteenth-century America to their new lifestyles. 

Of course, since polygamy was practiced for such a short time, these adaptations varied from family to family, making it impossible to describe the typical Mormon polygamous family. There was no "typical" family. As I see it, understanding the diverse experience of individual families will help us avoid oversimplified conclusions and stereotypes. 

Hulett and Young's interviews were conducted with thirteen husbands, fifty wives, five husbands and wives interviewed jointly, and eighty-three children of polygamous families. Hulett, a research assistant for Young, used the interviews in writing his dissertation, and Young used them in his book, Isn't One Wife Enough? (1954). Young's book has been the only major study on life in polygamous families. The title suggests a negative view of the Mormon practice of polygamy, but Young identified most of the families that he studied as "successful." Based on five categories, he found half of 110 family cases were "highly successful, marked by unusual harmony" or "reasonably successful"; a quarter were "moderately successful with some conflict but on the whole fair adjustment"; the rest had "considerable conflict and marital difficulty or severe conflict, including, in some instances, separation and/or divorce" (Young 1954, 56). Without the advantages of recording devices, Hulett and Young had to depend on their note-taking ability to remember what their informants told them. Because of this, it is sometimes difficult to determine whether we are reading the opinion of the interviewee or the interviewer. Moreover, to protect identities, Young used pseudonyms throughout his book and has no footnotes, so scholars have been unable to determine his sources. Perhaps the most serious flaw, though, is that the examples Young cites in his study are not representative of even his own sources. After reading his book and the sources, it appears he took the most interesting and most dramatic cases and then drew generalizations from them as "typical" examples. 

Between 1976 and 1982, the Charles Redd Center at Brigham Young University sponsored a major interview study of polygamous families. Ten trained oral historians, including me, interviewed 250 children of Church sanctioned polygamous marriages in which the parents were married before 1904. Because of the sensitive nature of the topic and the Church's policy not to encourage the current practice of polygamy, almost half of those contacted first refused to be interviewed. However, as the project progressed, that number dropped to fewer than 25 percent. Those interviewed suggested brothers and sisters — both full and half — and others they knew who had been raised in polygamous families. The interview questions were developed from the topics discussed in Kimball Young's book, not by design, but because Young's study was all that was available for preliminary research at the time. 

In 1982, the project was expanded to interview 150 children from monogamous families who grew up during the same time period as a comparison group to the children of polygamy studied earlier. Again, we selected those whose parents had been married before 1904. The parents' marriage date was used, rather than the age of either parents or children, because many of the polygamous children were born as late as the 1920s. A press release inviting interviewees for the project was issued by BYU Public Communications and was published in many newspapers in Utah as well as in newspapers published for LDS audiences in Arizona and California. A large number of people responded, so interviewees were chosen according to location and availability. Some effort was made to interview people who grew up in towns where there were polygamists. Again, interviews were developed from topics discussed in Kimball Young's book. 

The Redd Center interviews, like Hulett's and Young's, also have limitations. All of the interviews record adults' memories of their childhoods, and memories tend to be more favorable than actual experiences. In addition, children have only a limited knowledge of their parents' activities. Especially in the nineteenth century, children were not told about their parents' sexual activities, and they were probably not aware of all the economic and religious activities of their families. In the case of plural marriage, they would probably not have been told all the reasons why their parents chose to marry in polygamy. Despite these limitations, however, the interviews are a valuable source — in some cases the only source — of information about how plural families were set up. The children could at least report on their relationships with their own parents and with their fathers' other wives, as well as the ways their particular families operated. 

The Redd Center oral history interviews and the Kimball Young Collection at the BYU Library provided the bulk of information for my study. I also used diaries, autobiographies, and other interviews available in the LDS Church Archives and the BYU Manuscript Collections. In total, I scrutinized lives of approximately 200 plural husbands, 400 plural wives (mostly living in polygamy during its later period), and 150 monogamous husbands and wives. 

If the study had been done a generation earlier, I could have captured the memories of those who lived in polygamy between 1852 and 1880 before opposition became formal and intense. As it is, the reminiscences of the following generation reflect the problems encountered by those who lived "the principle" during its last sanctioned days. 

When asked, nearly all the Mormon participants said that they practiced polygamy for religious reasons. For example, William B. Ashworth wrote, "I loved my wife and felt that I had in her all I desired as a companion, but with the faith I had in the authorities, I felt it was my imperative duty to obey their counsel." He added that he had heard church leaders say, "If the brethren do not embrace the doctrine, and their wives are willing that they should, they (the men), are in danger of their wives being given to husbands who would exalt them in the highest glory" (n.d., 15-16). Andrew Jonus Hansen wrote in his autobiography, "Celestial and Plural Marriage is a law of Heaven and at that time in force among God's people on earth, sanctioned and approved by Him" (n.d., 141). 

While most Mormon men, according to this study, would not have considered polygamy if they had not believed it to be a commandment, a minority of the children of polygamous homes said that having the option of polygamy might have changed the way men viewed other women and their own wives. Because other wives were a possibility, men might have allowed their eyes to roam more, viewing other women as possible mates. Also, with the chance of marrying more wives, a man might not divorce a wife he grew tired of, instead essentially ignoring her while offering affection to another wife who seemed more desirable at the time. For example, E. W. Wright, the eighth son of Amos Russell Wright's first wife, Catharine Roberts, said that his father believed strongly in the principle of plural marriage and undoubtedly married for religious purposes. Yet knowing he could marry younger women made his first wife less attractive to him and he did not treat her as well (1937, 5). J. W. Wilson, a monogamist on the Juarez Stake high council in Mexico, wrote, "Polygamy is a true principle . . . but men did not live as they should have done. .. . I talked to a man who had been married to a number of wives. . . . He said . . . that all of his marriages were due to inspiration. . . . I asked him that now as he grew older and his desires were dying if he had inspirations to marry and he said no, that he had no more inspirations. That was the reason polygamy could not be lived, men believed it because of their lustful desires" (1935, 2-3). While this might have been true in some cases, there are few, if any, records indicating that sexual motives played a major role in the men's decisions to marry more than one wife. 

The modern perception of men and women marrying for love was rarely mentioned in nineteenth-century marriage manuals. Historian John Gordon quotes one manual, "True love is founded on esteem, and esteem is the result of intimate acquaintance and confidential intercourse," and then adds, "A married couple should feel love for each other, but the love should grow out of the relationship rather than being the cause of it" (1980, 153). Instead of romantic love, men and women were encouraged to look for religious devotion, good character, which included avoiding "idleness, use of intoxicating drinks, smoking, chewing, snuffing tobacco, the taking of opium, licentiousness in every form, gambling, swearing, and the keeping of late hours at night," and "beauty, health, and intellect" in a marriage partner to ensure the best children (Gordon 1980, 150-52). 

Plural husbands reflected this Victorian attitude about love. In general, they believed that learning to work together for common goals (including the ultimate reward, eternal life) was more important than physical attraction. After telling of his love for each of his three wives as long as they were faithful to him, Joel Hill Johnson concluded: 

Should each prove True 
Their work to do 
Like true and faithful wives 
Then all shall share 
My love and care 
With crown of endless lives (n.d., 52-53). 

Another Victorian ideal perpetuated by polygamous as well as monogamous households in nineteenth-century America was the concept of differentiated male and female roles within marriage. While "nineteenth-century society gave . . . most of the substance of power to the male, within the family the relationship was, in the end, between two people [and] who predominated [in a marriage] depended as much on what each was as on the public definition of the institution" (Degler 1980, 43). Nineteenth-century men and women generally had separate spheres of responsibilities which kept them apart most of the time. Barbara Welter, a historian of nineteenth-century women's culture, wrote, "The nineteenth-century American man was a busy builder of bridges and railroads, at work long hours in a materialistic society" (1978, 313). Thus, a husband was expected to provide for his family, and home was where the wife provided a refuge from the world of work. Because of this division of labor, "American society was characterized in large part by rigid gender role differentiation within the family and within society as a whole, leading to the emotional segregation of women and men" (Smith-Rosenberg 1978, 339). 

This pattern was true in both LDS monogamous and polygamous families; evidently the number of wives was not the deciding factor in determining division of labor. According to my study of 185 polygamous husbands and 118 monogamous husbands, 58 percent of the polygamists and 62 percent of the monogamists were involved in farming or ranching, manufacturing, merchandising, and freighting. Over half of that group—57 percent of the plural husbands and 59 percent of the monogamous—were farmers or ranchers. Even when farming was not the major source of income, most families raised nearly all of their food and produced nearly everything they used, the men and women each having specific assignments. The men usually worked in the fields or in businesses outside of the home while women worked inside the home, in the garden, and with domestic animals. 

Of course, there were some unique problems with polygamy since a plural husband had to provide not only physical but emotional support for more than one wife. However, my study showed that many husbands saw all of their wives regularly. Of 156 families, 47 percent had a regular daily or weekly visiting schedule, 8 percent had no routine, and 20 percent stayed mainly with one wife. The remaining 24 percent visited either once every three days, rotated once a month, or visited at General Conference or harvest time, depending on family circumstances. With regular visits, husbands were most likely aware of their wives' needs. Since 60 percent of the wives in my study lived in the same community as their husbands and co-wives, if there were special problems such as illness, most husbands could usually be reached quickly and could help the family in need. 

Apparently most husbands tried to divide not only their time, but also their resources and affections equally between all of their wives. Mary E. Croshaw Farrell, the fourth wife of George Farrell, said that financial matters caused most domestic disagreements in polygamous families (1937, 9). To avoid financial problems, in 65 percent of forty-nine families who mentioned the subject, the husband divided the supplies between the families. In about 60 percent of the thirty-two examples, each wife received equal provisions. Other husbands provided an allowance for each wife. Whatever way the financial resources were divided, the husband "would have to be really considerate of both wives," as one son put it. "I'm sure under the circumstances eyes would be open if one wife had more than the other. Jealousy crept in. I think that applied to polygamy in general with the exception of a few of the families. A husband living in polygamy should have the same for one wife that he does for another" (Jackson 1978, 25).

Most polygamous husbands also tried to prevent jealousy over affection. Thomas E. Taylor, in a letter to his plural wife Brighaminia (Minnie), explained, "When a man has a number of families he has to be very circumspect and careful in both actions and words." He went on to explain, "I may do things . . . for you that others would feel bad about. On other times, something for others might give you pain but I am going to try and do my best in my imperfect way" (Taylor, 17 July 1893). Edith Smith Bushman said, "Father was very wise. He never carried the stories from one family to another and he never made a comparison" (1979, 5). 

There were times, however, when one wife was clearly the favorite, a situation which, of course, led to bad feelings. Lawrence Leavitt reported, "I think he [my father] cared a lot for my mother" but then implied that she was not the favorite wife (1980, 9). Catherine Scott Brown began, "My father was rather partial," but then stopped and concluded, "I will just say this. My mother wasn't the favored wife. I won't say anything more about it" (1976, 12). But of course favoritism is a highly subjective perception; even children of the same mother occasionally viewed their favoritism differently. Jesse, the son of the second wife, Sarah Eliza Fenn Barney, said that he felt his father favored the first wife, his mother's sister Annie, "because she was the first wife, the first love" (1982, 33). His full brother Orin, however, said, "We couldn't see that Dad treated anyone any different than anyone else" (1982, 7). 

Men in polygamy, according to the interviews, usually hoped that their wives would also love each other and avoid arguments. Thomas E. Taylor wrote to Minnie about his first wife, "I would like Emma to be frank with you and you with her and each learn the lesson of humility. I am your husband as well as hers." In one instance when his wives were apparently not communicating, Thomas sent a letter to Minnie and asked her to mail it or take it from Gunnison to Emma in Salt Lake City. He added, "I hope you can see your way to do this in the spirit of meekness and love, not only for your husband's sake but for your own and all your family." Charles E. Rich wrote to his wives from a mission in 1861, "I am glad and thankful so far as I know that there is a kind and friendly feeling amongst you. I hope and pray that this spirit and feeling may increase among you till you will be one, as the church of God is one." 

As in monogamous marriages, though, individual personalities dictated how well the husbands and wives got along. As Ida Walser Jackson explained, "Not all the [plural] families got along. It was the people though and not the institution. It was the way the man handled it a lot and not the way the women themselves accepted it. .. . There was jealousy among some, but many of them just got along beautifully" (1976, 18). David Candland did not always get along with one of his wives, Hannah, but had a system for dealing with disagreement: "I absent myself sometimes for weeks then she craves forgiveness" (n.d., 51). Christopher Layton recalled his love for his third wife, "Death came to the relief of my wife Sarah M. on October 25, 1864. This was a great blow to us all, for in her we lost our best advisor and peacemaker, a true wife and loving mother" (n.d., 35-36). Monogamous marriages seemed no different, however. Elbert Hans Anderson, for example, said of his monogamous parents, "I think at times that Mother felt that Father didn't take enough time to spend with her" (1983, 9). 

Nineteenth-century American families displayed the Victorian influence not only in their attitudes toward love and the marital roles they followed, but also in their methods of child-rearing. Because husbands and fathers in American and Mormon families were often gone, wives cared for the home as well as the children. As one scholar explained, "From every available source, it is clearly evident that girls and boys were raised by mothers who were faithful to the standards of motherhood. . . . Men lived a masculine existence 'out there' which from decade to decade seemed more isolated from the feminized home life of 'in here' " (Dubbert 1979, 21). 

Like other nineteenth-century American children, most monogamous and polygamous children felt a special closeness to their mothers. Ada S. Howlett, a child of a monogamous family, explained, "My mother was my mainstay I guess. Father was quite busy, and he had a big family" (1982, 7). But many felt little closeness, especially with their fathers. Elsie Jane Hubbard spoke of her monogamous parents, "In those pioneer days they had to work pretty much all the time. We worked with our parents. We helped along. But as far as spending any time in my life much, no" (1983, 11). Marjorie Cannon Pingree said, "I was not neglected, but it seemed to me that I grew up with very little regulating because my father had another family that he lived with a part of the time. He supervised us as best he could, but I couldn't remember that I was ever forced to study or guided in my assignments" (1983, 2). 

One might suppose from such evidence that children of monogamous families were closer to their fathers than those of polygamous families. Of sixty three polygamous families whose children talked about their relationships with their fathers, 13 percent reported receiving no attention from their fathers, 52 percent had little interaction with their fathers, and 33 percent were close to their fathers. In contrast, 84 percent of the children from forty-one monogamous families reported that they were close to their fathers. At first, these figures seem overwhelmingly to support the theory that not only did most polygamous children feel a special closeness to their mothers, but they also lacked a closeness with their fathers. However, such a conclusion may be based more on what was not reported than on what was. Of the more than 200 polygamous and 150 monogamous families that I studied, only 63 and 41 children, respectively, mentioned specifically their relationship with their fathers, although the interviewees were asked to describe their fathers as well as their mothers. However, rather than talking about specific relationships, the children usually talked about their fathers' occupations and their Church positions, just as they did when discussing their mothers. It would be fairer to conclude that, given the Victorian ideal, children in polygamous families, much like children in monogamous families, expected to be closer to their mothers than to their fathers since their fathers were earning the living and did not spend as much time in the home.

But although they were not always present, the polygamous fathers in my study generally expressed love for their families. Teaching religious values was considered to be especially important, as the children recall, and polygamous families as well as monogamous LDS families nearly always had a family prayer. Of seventy-nine polygamous families (a husband and his wives counted as one family) and seventy-six monogamous LDS families, 90 percent of the polygamous and 85 percent of the monogamous had daily family prayers. These family prayers apparently continued in both monogamous and polygamous families whether the father was there or not. Some men, like Martin B. Bushman, "made it a practice to live with each family the same that I might help them with their children and have prayers with them. I tried to set a good example before my children by having prayer night and morning" (n.d., n.p.). 

Polygamy, then, did not completely change the nineteenth-century Victorian ideal of family relationships for the families who practiced it. Husbands and fathers were often gone in plural families just as they were in monogamous ones; polygamy only meant that men had to divide up their family time even more. But for the most part, plural husbands and fathers maintained good relationships with all of their families. Charles Rich's letter to his plural wives written on 11 January 1863 while he was on a mission summarizes the hopes of many plural husbands: 

Now my dear wives how is it with you? How do you enjoy yourselves? Do you enjoy the Holy Spirit? Do you pray? Do you teach our children to pray and do you see that no unholy principle that will destroy them is suffered to grow in their minds? Do you attend meetings faithfully? Do you cultivate love for each other? Do you love and remember an absent husband? I trust that you remember all these things and many more. 

[post_title] => Burden or Pleasure? A Profile of LDS Polygamous Husbands [post_excerpt] => Dialogue 20.4 (Winter 1987): 158–166
Despite what researchers have said over the years regarding for why men married plural wives, Embry argues that a significant portion of husbands married plural wives because of their religious beliefs. [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => burden-or-pleasure-a-profile-of-lds-polygamous-husbands [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-03-14 21:07:32 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-03-14 21:07:32 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.dialoguejournal.com/?post_type=dj_articles&p=15781 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => dj_articles [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) 1

WP_Post Object ( [ID] => 16031 [post_author] => 2140 [post_date] => 2018-04-18 16:57:15 [post_date_gmt] => 2018-04-18 16:57:15 [post_content] =>

Joseph Smith emerged from the ferment of Jacksonian America during a time when religion was regaining its hold over American life, when abolitionist groups, temperance movements, and benevolent societies were thriving. Utopian experiments testified to the exuberance of a nation advancing from infancy to childhood. Innocent vitality, limitless resources, a booming economy, and westward expansion nurtured a profound belief in America as the land of destiny, a light to the world. 

God could not have chosen a better place, a better time, or a better people than the people of early nineteenth-century America for the "restitution of all things." After a decade of religious revivalism, the booming economy of the 1830s had ripened millennial expectations. Word of angelic visitations was greeted with enthusiasm. The heavens were being rolled back. Old men were dreaming dreams, young men saw visions. Women spoke in tongues, and children conversed with angels. New faiths mushroomed. 

Western New York, where the Prophet grew up, was so frequently swept by the fires of religious enthusiasm that it came to be known as the "burned over district." It was in this milieu, on 6 April 1830, that Joseph Smith organized the Church of Christ, later renamed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Like other dynamic movements of the day, the fledgling church was influenced not only by restoration Protestant sectarianism but by flourishing contemporary social experiments. Joseph Smith's unique ability to blend current ideas with his own visionary experiences is evident in the growth of his communal vision. The Prophet's earliest exposure to Utopian thought and practices may have stemmed from a religious sect called the United Society of True Believers in Christ's Second Appearing. Popularly known as the Shakers, the group established a community a few miles from Smith's birthplace in Vermont (Arrington, Fox, and May 1976, 20). Mother Ann Lee's celibate society was the first communitarian organization of its kind in the United States. 

Joseph was probably also familiar with the Harmonists, who claimed that George Rapp, a Lutheran minister and social reformer in Germany, was responding to a vision from Gabriel when he brought his followers from Germany in 1814 to Harmony, Pennsylvania, where Joseph Smith intermittently lived from 1825 to 1827. The Harmonists, who migrated to Indiana to found New Harmony in 1824, experimented like the Shakers with shared property and celibacy. 

Robert Owen, wealthy Scottish reformer and industrialist, may also have directly shaped Joseph Smith's Utopian ideas through one of his most influential American followers. Arriving in the United States in the mid-1820s, Owen promised a "new Eden in the far west" and began establishing communities based on communal ownership and equality of work and profit. After purchasing the New Harmony community from the Harmonists in 1825, he established two other communitarian societies in Ohio, at Kendal and Yellow Springs.[1] Sidney Rigdon, a prominent Protestant minister in the Western Reserve area of Ohio and a follower of Alexander Campbell's Disciples of Christ, attended a debate between Owen and Campbell in 1829. Taken with Owen's system of "family commonwealths," he tried to implement such a communal order within the Disciples of Christ (Erickson 1922, 17). Campbell's objections caused Rigdon to split from the group, along with other dissenters who went on to set up "common-stock" societies at Mentor and Kirtland, Ohio. By the fall of 1830, Rigdon and more than 100 members of "the family," as they were known, had converted to Mormonism, products of the missionary zeal that brought within a few months nearly 1000 new members into the Mormon fold. 

After arriving in Ohio from New York in early February 1831, Joseph Smith convinced Rigdon's communal group to abandon the common-stock principle in favor of the "more perfect law of the Lord." A week later, on 9 February 1831, Smith announced God's revealed "Law of Consecration and Stewardship." Members were advised that "all things belong to the Lord" and were directed to deed all personal property to the bishop of the Church. The bishop then returned a "stewardship" to each head of a household, who was expected to turn over any accrued surplus to the Church. Known as the "Order of Enoch," "The Lord's Law," and the "United Order," the Mormon Order of Stewardship was intended as a pattern of social and economic re-organization for all mankind. The dream was to unify "a people fragmented by their individualistic search for economic well-being." The Saints as a group, divested of personal selfishness and greed, were to be prepared by this communal discipline to usher in the millennial reign of Christ (Arrington, Fox, and May 1976, 2-3). 

Despite the relatively peaceful but brief period in Kirtland, Smith's futuristic plans never fully materialized. As the Church began to expand in Ohio and Jackson County, Missouri, converts imported a diversity of lifestyles to the Mormon strongholds. Not only had a majority of Rigdon's communal "family" become Mormons, but individuals from a variety of Utopian communities had also been converted. Ugly accusations that the Mormons were practicing free love, polygamy, and "spiritual wifery" soon rose against the Utopian practices of the young society. 

Many outsiders were suspicious of their close-knit adhesion, so foreign to mainstream America. Nor is it difficult to see how Mormon communitarianism with its shared property could have been suspected of a "community of wives" as well. One prominent observer of Robert Owen's "family commonwealths" expressed the popular assumption: "Family life is eternally at war with social life. When you have a private household, you must have personal property to feed it; hence a community of goods — the first idea of a social state — has been found in every case to imply a community of children and to promote a community of wives" (Dixon 2 :209). 

Mormons may have easily become confused in the public mind with Owen like contemporary movements. In the early 1830s, another group of "saints" also emerged from the New York social chaos. Disciples of revivalist preachers Erasmus Stone, Hiram Sheldon, and Jarvis Rider claimed they were perfect and could no longer sin. They became known as "Perfectionists." As part of their doctrine, they advocated "spiritual wifery," a concept nearly identical to Mormon eternal marriage. John B. Ellis's 1870 description of perfectionist theology assured that "all arrangements for a life in heaven may be made on earth; that spiritual friendships may be formed, and spiritual bonds contracted, valid for eternity." Mormon missionary Orson Hyde, a former member of Rigdon's "family," visited a similar group he referred to as "Cochranites" in 1832 and worried about their "wonderful lustful spirit, because they believe in a 'plurality of wives' which they call spiritual wives, knowing them not after the flesh but after the spirit, but by the appearance they know one another after the flesh" (Hyde, 11 Oct. 1832; emphasis in original). 

The frontier teemed with other practitioners of that "wonderful lustful spirit," such as the notorious Robert Matthews, alias "Matthias the Prophet." This self-styled "Prophet of the God of the Jews" announced that "all marriages not made by himself, and according to his doctrine, were of the devil, and that he had come to establish a community of property, and of wives" ("Memoirs" in Ivins 7:15). Matthews practiced what he preached, contracting an unusual marriage with the wife of one of his followers in 1833. Convincing the couple that, as sinners, they were not properly united in wedlock, he claimed power to dissolve the marriage and prophesied that the woman was to "become the mother of a spiritual generation" while he Matthews, would father her first spiritual child. Charges of swindling and murder were brought against him in 1835 by a group of his followers. Though legally acquitted of murder, he served a brief sentence on a minor charge. Three months after his release from prison, he turned up on Joseph Smith's doorstep in Kirtland using the alias "Joshua the Jewish Minister." After two days of mutually discussing their religious beliefs, they disagreed on the "transmigration of souls/' and Joseph told him his "doctrine was of the Devil . . . and I could not keep him any longer, and he must depart" (Jessee 1984, 74-79). 

Linked as the Prophet was with such contemporary religionists as Matthias, Shaking Quakers, Harmonists, Perfectionists, Rapphites, and Cochranites, it is little wonder that many outsiders viewed him with a jaded perspective. Ironically, however, the real problems for Smith in Kirtland were caused by insiders. He had given a revelation 9 February 1831 which reaffirmed New Testament monogamy. "Thou shalt love thy wife with all thy heart, and shall cleave unto her and none else," he said (D&C 42:22). In March 1831 he added, "It is lawful that [a man] should have one wife, and they twain shall be one flesh" (D&C 49:16). Within the Prophet's own congregation, rumors floated that he was violating these directives. 

Benjamin Winchester, once a close friend of Smith's and leader of Philadelphia Mormons in the early 1840s, recalled in 1889 the situation in Kirtland during the mid-1830s: "There was a good deal of scandal prevalent among a number of the Saints concerning Joseph's licentious conduct, this more especially among the women. Joseph's name was connected with scandalous relations with two or three families" (Salt Lake Tribune, 22 Sept. 1889). Benjamin F. Johnson, another of Smith's confidants, added late in life that this was "one of the Causes of Apostacy & disruption at Kirtland altho at the time there was little Said publickly upon the subject" (Zimmerman 1976, 39). 

These and other rumors circulating in Kirtland during the summer of 1835 may have been the catalyst for the canonization of the Church's position on marriage. At a 17 August 1835 general assembly, Church members voted to accept the first edition of the Doctrine and Covenants as "our belief, and . . . the faith and principle of this society as a body" (D&C, 1835 ed.). Addressing the charges of fornication and polygamy leveled at the Church, a "Chapter of Rules for Marriage among the Saints," as the Kirtland High Council Minutes called it, was read to the group by W. W. Phelps, the Prophet's scribe. This declaration said in part: "Inasmuch as this church of Christ has been reproached with the crime of fornication, and polygamy; we declare that we believe, that one man should have one wife; and one woman, but one husband, except in the case of death, when either is at liberty to marry again." The assembled Saints voted to canonize the section by appending it to the Doctrine and Covenants. 

Historically, Mormons have not given that marriage statement the attention deserved by its pivotal significance. The neglect is understandable: the section is no longer in Church scriptures. When the Church officially announced in 1852 that it had been practicing plural marriage for nearly a decade, the 1835 statement in the Doctrine and Covenants seemed obsolete. It was removed in 1876 and replaced with Section 132, a revelation on "celestial marriage" received 12 July 1843 and introduced to the Saints in August 1852. 

An additional reason the 1835 marriage statement gets little notice despite its status as the present law of the Church is that Joseph Smith was not present during the 17 August general assembly which voted on the measure. Years later, the rumor circulated that Oliver Cowdery had authored the marriage statement against the Prophet's wishes. If Cowdery, as an Assistant President of the Church, did write the statement, most likely it was to protect the Prophet from the rumors that were spreading against him. For whatever reason, Smith planned a brief missionary venture to Michigan to coincide with the 17 August meeting.[2] Statements he and other Church leaders later made, however, as well as the fact that he performed marriages using the ceremony canonized in that 1835 declaration, argue that he approved of the marriage declaration.[3] Furthermore, Smith could have made changes prior to the 1835 printing. A "Notes to the Reader" addendum, page xxv in the 1835 edition, details a change in the article of marriage after it had been canonized. 

The 1835 marriage statement was important in several respects. Not only did it deny the practice of Church-sanctioned polygamy, but it also outlined a marriage ceremony which ended by pronouncing the couple " 'husband and wife' in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and by virtue of the laws of the country and authority vested in him [the person performing the ceremony]: 'may God add his blessings and keep you to fulfill your convenants from hence forth and forever!' " 

This statement, the first referring to eternal marriage, together with the Prophet's two 1831 revelatory statements, suggests that Church leaders no longer viewed marriage as a strictly civil contract. But the Church did not officially accept responsibility for solemnizing the marriages of its members until after the 1835 "rules for marriage" had been canonized. 

Civil authorities in Ohio did not recognize the license of Church leaders. Sidney Rigdon was arrested in 1835 for marrying a couple, then released when he produced his Campbellite license. This refusal to recognize Mormon priesthood authority was a source of irritation to Joseph Smith; and in a bold display of civil disobedience on 24 November 1835, he performed his first marriage. It was initially intended that Seymour Brunson, who held a valid minister's license, would marry Newel Knight and Lydia Goldthwait Bailey. But as Hyrum Smith began the introductory comments, Joseph stepped forth and declared his intent to officiate. The bride, later noting that "the prevailing law of Ohio did not recognize the Mormon Elders as ministers," added that Smith said at the time of the wedding : 

Our elders have been wronged and prosecuted for marrying without a license. The Lord God of Israel has given me authority to unite the people in the holy bonds of matrimony. And from this time forth I shall use that privilege and marry whomsoever I see fit. And the enemies of the Church shall never have power to use the law against me.[4]

Another interesting aspect of the 1835 marriage statement was a clause which held that "all legal contracts of marriage made before a person is baptized into this church, should be held sacred and fulfilled." Despite that explicit directive, Lydia Goldthwait Bailey, though abandoned by her legal husband, was not divorced when the Prophet married her to Newel Knight, a fact well known to all involved. 

The polyandrous Knight marriage was one of Joseph Smith's earliest efforts to apply heavenly guidelines on earth despite legal technicalities. Emphasizing the sacramental nature of marriage, he commented at the conclusion of the Knight ceremony "that marriage was an institution of heaven, instituted in the garden; that it was necessary it should be solemnized by the authority of the everlasting Priesthood" (HC 2:320). Viewing temporal and spiritual standards as inextricably intertwined, Joseph Smith began in the fall of 1835 to teach the eternal marriage alluded to in the canonized marriage statement. W. W. Phelps, Smith's scribe in Kirtland, has provided a commentary on the Prophet's marriage teachings of that period. Writing to his wife in Missouri 9 September 1835, Phelps explained: "I have it in my heart to give you a little instruction, so that you may know your place, and stand in it, believed, admired, and re warded, in time and in eternity." Two weeks later he again wrote: 

Br. Joseph has preached some of the greatest sermons on the duty of wives to their husbands and the role of all Women, I ever heard. I would not have you ignorant, Sally, of the mystery of Men and Women, but I cannot write all you must wait till you see me. This much, however, I will say, that you closed your 4th letter to me in a singular manner: really it was done after the manner of the Gentiles: says Sally "/ remain yours till death." But since you have seen my blessing I think you will conclude, "if your life and years are as precious in the sight of God as Mine" thus you will be mine, in this world and in the world to come; And so long as you can ''remain on earth as you desire." I think you may as well use the word "forever," as "till death". . . . This is the reason why I have called you at the commencement of this letter, My Only One, because I have no right to any other woman in this world nor in the world to come according to the law of the celestial Kingdom, (emphasis in original) 

Phelps's understanding of eternal marriage in the "celestial Kingdom" obviously came from Smith, who preached numerous sermons on marriage during the fall of 1835 while Phelps was living in his home and working with him daily. Despite the implication of eternal marriage in both the 1835 canonized ceremony and Phelps's statements, the first Mormon eternal marriage did not take place until 6 April 1841, when Smith was sealed to plural wife Louisa Beaman by Joseph B. Noble.[5] The Prophet had apparently come to view all marriages prior to this time, including his own to Emma Hale, as valid for "time" only. As late as 1840 he was occasionally signing his letters to Emma with the benediction "your husband till death" (Jessee 1984, 454).[6] It was not until a 28 May 1843 meeting of the Endowment Council[7] in Nauvoo that Joseph and Emma were sealed for time and eternity through the "new and everlasting covenant of marriage" (Ehat 1982, 2). 

The idea of eternal marriage was not unique to Joseph Smith. Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772), an eminent Swedish scientist who turned to theology in middle age, wrote a number of books setting forth "heavenly doctrines" which he claimed were based on biblical teachings interpreted to him through direct communication with the spiritual world. "Two souls which grew up together before life are bound to find each other again on earth," he wrote, and "in heaven as on earth there are males and females. Man was made for woman and woman for man. Love must unite them eternally, and there are marriages in heaven" (in Cairncross 1974, 174-75). 

William Hep worth Dixon discussed the "Americanization of spiritual wifery" as developed by Joseph Smith's New York contemporaries, the Perfectionists: 

The theory is, that a man who may be either unmarried before the law or wedded to a woman whom he cannot love as a wife should be loved, shall have the right, in virtue of a higher morality, and a more sacred duty than the churches teach him, to go out among the crowd of his female friends, and seek a partner in whom he shall find some special fitness for a union with himself; and when he has found such a bride of the soul, that he shall have the further right of courting her, even though she may have taken the vows as another man's wife, and of entering into closer and sweeter relations with her than those which belong to the common earth; all vows on his part and on her part being to this end thrust aside as so much worldly waste. (Dixon 1:88-89) 

New England proponents of spiritual wifery in the 1830s were asking such questions as "Does a true marriage on earth imply a true marriage in heaven? Can there be a true marriage of the body without a binding covenant for the soul? Is not the real marriage always that of the soul? Are not all unions which are of the body only, false unions?" Dixon notes that leaders of this movement answered boldly that "all true marriages are good for time and for eternity . . . all other combinations of the two sexes, even though they have been sanctioned by the law and blessed by the Church, are null and void" (Dixon 1:94). 

Swedenborgian and Perfectionist thinking have striking similarities in Joseph Smith's early Nauvoo teachings. But Smith went a step further by advocating what he termed "celestial marriage," a blending of eternal marriage and polygamy to which polyandry became an integral though short-lived appendage. 

With the introduction of polygamy to Nauvoo, the standards of "gentile law" were simply viewed as invalid, despite the clause to the contrary in the 1835 Doctrine and Covenants. As God's earthly agent, the Prophet claimed powers transcending civil law. Responsibility for binding and unbinding marriages on earth and in heaven was solely his or his designates'.

Augusta Adams Cobb is a case in point. Baptized in 1832, she was a stalwart Church member in the Boston area. Her husband, however, was not converted. Returning to Boston in the fall of 1844 after an extended visit to Nauvoo, Mrs. Cobb told her husband that she loved Brigham Young and "live or die, she was going to live with him at all hazards" (Boston Post, 22 Dec. 1847, cited in Ivins). She returned to Nauvoo and her husband successfully sued for divorce; but Church leaders had obviously not recognized her civil marriage to Mr. Cobb in the first place: she and Brigham Young had been married secretly 2 November 1843. 

"Gentile law," with its civil marriage, was publicly denounced as early as 1847 by Orson Pratt in a sermon recorded by Wilford Woodruff: 

as all the ordinances of the gospel administered by the world since the Aposticy of the church was illegal, in like manner was the marriage Cerimony illegal and all the world who had been begotton through the illegal marriage were Bastards not Sons & Hence they had to enter into the law of adoption & be adopted into the Priesthood in order to become sons & legal heirs to salvation. (Kenney 3:260) 

Eleanor McLean, the twelfth wife of Apostle Parley P. Pratt, amplified this theology in an 1869 newspaper interview. In an 1857 Arkansas dispute, Mrs. McLean's legal husband, Hector, had murdered her extralegal husband, Parley. Trying to clear up the confusion of the polyandrous relationship for a reporter in 1869, she dismissed her legal marriage: "The sectarian priests have no power from God to marry: and a so-called marriage ceremony performed by them is no marriage at all" (Pratt 1975, 233). 

Mrs. McLean was on safe Mormon ground theologically. Her source could have been the published writings on the subject by her brother-in-law, Orson Pratt. In his Church-sponsored The Seer, Pratt had explained in 1853: "Marriages, then among all nations, though legal according to the laws of men, have been illegal according to the laws, authority, and institutions of Heaven. All the children born during that long period, though legitimate according to the customs and laws of nations, are illegitimate according to the order and authority of Heaven."[8]

Even Mormon marriages prior to the fall of 1835, when priesthood authority began to be evoked in marriage ceremonies, were adjudged invalid, with Joseph Smith's own marriage to Emma Hale 18 January 1827 by Squire Tarbill being considered "illegal according to the laws .. . of heaven." John D. Lee, a member of the secret Council of Fifty and an adopted son of Brigham Young, explained: 

About the same time the doctrine of '"sealing" for an eternal state was introduced . . . the Saints were given to understand that their marriage relations with each other were not valid. That those who had solemnized the rites of matrimony had no authority of God to do so. That the true priesthood was taken from the earth with the death of the apostles and inspired men of God. That they were married to each other only by their own covenants, and that if their marriage relations had not been productive of blessings and peace, and they felt it oppressive to remain together, they were at liberty to make their own choice, as much as if they had not been married. (Lee 1891, 146-47) 

This developing position of Church leaders in Nauvoo on what constituted a wife makes much of the confusion surrounding Joseph Smith's personal behavior easier to understand. When he was sealed to Louisa Beaman 5 April 1841, few people were aware of the incident. Emma Smith did not know, neither did Hyrum. Most of the Twelve were on missions in England. But shortly after the first boatload of apostle-missionaries docked at the Nauvoo wharf, Joseph took them aside and began to teach them about polygamy-— "spiritual marriage," as it would be known to a select few Nauvoo Saints.[9]

Perhaps one of the first married Nauvoo women to be introduced to Joseph Smith's polyandrous teachings was the wife of Apostle Orson Pratt. If one believes the report of Smith's turncoat counselor John C. Bennett, Joseph approached Sarah Pratt sometime in early 1841 while Orson was still on his mission in Europe. "Sister Pratt, the Lord has given you to me as one of my spiritual wives," Bennett later quoted Smith. "I have the blessings of Jacob granted me, as he granted holy men of old, and I have long looked upon you with favor, and hope you will not deny me." "I care not for the blessings of Jacob," the feisty Sarah reportedly replied. "I have one good husband, and that is enough for me" (Bennett 1842, 229). The incident caused sufficient difficulty between Smith and Pratt that both Orson and Sarah left the Church for a short time.[10] 

Some have assumed that, when Joseph Smith approached married women with polyandrous proposals, he was merely testing their faith, loyalty, or virtue. In Sarah Pratt's case, for example, the 14 September 1877 New York Herald reported: "It is said that the Prophet admitted to [Pratt] the attempt he made on his wife's virtue, but that it was only done to see whether she was true to her absent husband." In at least two other cases the Prophet "tested" an apostle by asking him for the hand of his wife. Church President Wilford Woodruff recounted the "test" of Apostle John Taylor: "The Prophet went to the home of President Taylor, and said to him, 'Brother John, I WANT LEONORA.' " Taylor was stunned, but after walking the floor all night, the obedient elder said to Smith, "If GOD wants Leonora He can have her." Woodruff concluded: "That was all the prophet was after, to see where President Taylor stood in the matter, and said to him, Brother Taylor, I dont want your wife, I just wanted to know just where you stood" (Whitaker 1 Nov. 1890; emphasis in original). 

A similar test was required of Apostle Heber C. Kimball: "Joseph demanded for himself what to Heber was the unthinkable, his Vilate. Totally crushed spiritually and emotionally, Heber touched neither food nor water for three days and three nights and continually sought confirmation and comfort from God." Finally, after "some kind of assurance," Heber took Vilate to the upper room of Joseph's store on Water Street. The Prophet wept at this act of faith, devotion, and obedience. Joseph had never intended to take Vilate. It was all a test" (Kimball 1981, 93). 

Jedediah M. Grant, second counselor to Brigham Young and father of President Heber J. Grant, commented on such tests in a Utah sermon delivered on 19 February 1854. "When the family organization was revealed from heaven — the patriarchal order of God, and Joseph began, on the right and on the left, to add to his family, what a quaking there was in Israel." But asked Grant, "Did the Prophet Joseph want every man's wife he asked for? He did not, but in that thing was the grand thread of the Priesthood developed. The grand object in view was to try the people of God, to see what was in them" (JD 2:13-14). 

In some instances, however, the Prophet's intent went beyond "trying the people." He sought to marry wives of several living men, refusing to recognize the legality of their civil marriages. Mary Elizabeth Rollins, married to non Mormon Adam Lightner since 11 August 1835, was one of the first women to accept the polyandrous teachings of the Prophet. "He was commanded to take me for a wife," she wrote in a 21 November 1880 letter to Emmeline B. Wells. "I was his, before I came here," she added in an 8 February 1902 statement. Brigham Young secretly sealed the two in February 1842 when Mary was eight months pregnant with her son George Algernon Lightner. She lived with Adam Lightner until his death in Utah many years later. In her 1880 letter to Emmeline B. Wells, Mary explained: "I could tell you why I stayed with Mr. Lightner. Things the leaders of the Church does not know anything about. I did just as Joseph told me to do, as he knew what troubles I would have to contend with." She added on 23 January 1892 in a letter to John R. Young: "I could explain some things in regard to my living with Mr. L. after becoming the Wife of Another, which would throw light, on what now seems mysterious — and you would be perfectly satisfied with me. I write this; because I have heard that it had been commented on to my injury" (George A. Smith papers).[11]

Sarah M. Kimball, a prominent Nauvoo and Salt Lake City Relief Society leader was also approached by the Prophet in early 1842 despite her solid 1840 marriage to non-Mormon Hiram Kimball. Sarah later recalled that 

Joseph Smith taught me the principle of marriage for eternity, and the doctrine of plural marriage. He said that in teaching this he realized that he jeopardized his life; but God had revealed it to him many years before as a privilege with blessings, now God had revealed it again and instructed him to teach with commandment, as the Church could travel [progress] no further without the introduction of this principle. (Jenson 1887, 6:232) 

Sarah Kimball, like Sarah Pratt, was committed to her husband, and refused the Prophet's invitation, asking that he "teach it to someone else." Although she kept the matter quiet, her husband and Smith evidently had difficulties over the incident. On 19 May 1842, at a Nauvoo City Council meeting, Smith jotted down and then "threw across the room" a revelation to Kimball which declared that "Hiram Kimball has been insinuating evil, and formulating evil opinions" against the Prophet, which if he does not desist from, he "shall be accursed" (HC 5:12-13). Sarah remained a lifetime member of the Church and a lifelong wife to Hiram Kimball, who eventually joined the Church but was killed in a steamship explosion while enroute to a mission in Hawaii. 

Marinda Nancy Johnson, sister of Apostles Luke and Lyman Johnson, married Orson Hyde in 1834. A year before Hyde returned from Jerusalem in 1843, Marinda was sealed to Joseph Smith, though she lived with Orson until their divorce in 1870 (Quinn 1978, 98). Josephine Lyon Fisher, born to Windsor P. Lyon and Sylvia P. Sessions on 8 February 1844, less than five months before the Prophet's martyrdom, related in a 24 February 1915 statement that prior to her mother's death in 1882 "she called me to her bedside and told me that her days on earth were about numbered and before she passed away from mortality she desired to tell me something which she had kept as an entire secret from me and all others but which she now desired to communicate to me." Josephine's mother told her she was "the daughter of the Prophet Joseph Smith, she having been sealed to the Prophet at the time that her husband Mr. Lyon was out of fellowship with the Church."[12]

Two sisters, Zina D. and Prescindia Huntington, both respected Nauvoo women, were also polyandrous wives of Joseph Smith. Prescindia had married Norman Buell in 1827 and had two sons by him before joining Mormonism in 1836. She was sealed to Joseph Smith by her brother Dimick on 11 December 1841, though she continued to live with Buell until 1846, when she left him to marry Heber C. Kimball. In a "letter to my eldest grand-daughter living in 1880," she explained that Norman Buell had left the Church in 1839, but that "the Lord gave me strength to Stand alone & keep the faith amid heavy persecution." 

Prescindia's twenty-year-old sister Zina was living in the Joseph Smith home when Henry B. Jacobs married her in March 1841. According to family records, when the Jacobs asked the Prophet why he had not honored them by performing their marriage, he replied that "the Lord had made it known to him that [Zina] was to be his Celestial wife" (Emma R. Jacobs in O. Cannon, 5). Believing that "whatever the Prophet did was right, without making the wisdom of God's authorities bend to the reasoning of any man," the devout Jacobs consented for six-months-pregnant Zina to be sealed to Joseph Smith 27 October 1841 (O. Cannon, 5). Some have suggested that the Jacobs's marriage was "unhappy" and that the couple had separated before her sealing to Joseph Smith.[13] But, though sealed to the Prophet for eternity, Zina continued her connubial relationship with Jacobs. On 2 February 1846, pregnant with Henry's second son, Zina was resealed by proxy to the murdered Joseph Smith and in that same session was "sealed for time" to Brigham Young. Faithful Henry B. Jacobs stood by as an official witness to both ceremonies (O. Cannon, 7). 

This polyandrous triangle became even more complex. Zina and Henry lived together as husband and wife until the westward-bound Saints reached Mt. Pisgah, Iowa. At this temporary stop on the pioneer trail, Brigham Young announced that "it was time for men who were walking in other men's shoes to step out of them. Brother Jacobs, the woman you claim for a wife does not belong to you. She is the spiritual wife of brother Joseph, sealed up to him. I am his proxy, and she, in this behalf, with her children, are my property. You can go where you please, and get another, but be sure to get one of your own kindred spirit"'(Hall 1853, 43-44). 

President Young then called Jacobs on a mission to England. Witnesses to his departure commented that he was so ill they had to "put him on a blanket and carry him to the boat to get him on his way" ("Short Sketch" in O. Cannon Collection).[14] Though his health returned, his spirits remained low. On 27 August 1847, his missionary companion and brother-in-law, Oliver Huntington, received a letter from his wife informing the two missionaries that "Zina had gone to Salt Lake City to live with President Young's family" (Firmage). Oliver dashed off a letter to Zina, complaining that "Henry is here and herd the letter. He says all is right, he don't care. He stands alone as yet. I have had almost as much trial about you as he has. I have had to hear, feel and suffer everything he has — If you only knew my troubles you'd pitty me" (Firmage in O. Cannon Collection). 

Henry returned from his mission and settled in California. But he was still in love with Zina, now a plural wife of Brigham Young. His letters to her were heartrending. On 2 September 1852 he wrote: "O how happy I should be if I only could see you and the little children, bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh." "I am unhappy," Henry lamented, "there is no peace for poor me, my pleasure is you, my comfort has vanished. . . . O Zina, can I ever, will I ever get you again, answer the question please" (O. Cannon Collection). In an undated Valentine he added: 

Zina my mind never will change from Worlds without Ends, no never, the same affection is there and never can be moved I do not murmur nor complain of the handlings of God no verily, no but I feel alone and no one to speak to, to call my own. I feel like a lamb without a mother, I do not blame any person or persons, no — May the Lord our Father bless Brother Brigham and all purtains unto him forever. Tell him for me I have no feelings against him nor never had, all is right according to the Law of the Celestial Kingdom of our god Joseph (O. Cannon Collection). 

One might understandably wonder why a man so obviously in love with his wife would give her up to another. Oliver Huntington, writing of this incident in his autobiography, explained: "Zina's husband took to himself another woman before he had returned from England to the bluffs . . . and [Zina] chose a guardian, who could supply her with whatever she wanted, which she could not get, this supply came from the Church. She became the wife of Brigham Young."[15] Another descendant clarified the incident further: "President Young told Zina D. if she would marry him she would be in a higher glory" (Briant S. Jacobs quoted in Firmage, 15, in O. Cannon Collection). Brigham Young himself provided the clearest insight into this situation in an 8 October 1861 General Conference statement on divorce: "There was another way — in which a woman could leave a man — if the woman preferred — another man higher in authority & he is willing to take her. & her husband gives her up —- there is no bill of divorce required in the case it is right in the sight of God."[16]

The "patriarchal order of marriage," as polygamy was often termed in the nineteenth century, was specific in pointing out that salvation for women depended on their being sealed to a "Lord," or worthy man. Orson Pratt, who eventually became recognized as the "Apostle of Polygamy" for his spirited defenses of the principle, published the first theological discussion on the necessity of a woman's being sealed to a worthy man in order order to receive heavenly exaltation: 

You will clearly perceive from the revelation which God has given that you can never obtain a fulness of glory without being married to a righteous man for time and for all eternity. If you marry a man who receives not the gospel, you lay a foundation for sorrow in this world, besides losing the privilege of enjoying the society of a husband in eternity. You forfeit your right to an endless increase of immortal lives. And even the children which you may be favored with in this life will not be entrusted to your charge in eternity; but you will be left in that world without a husband, without a family, without a kingdom — without any means of enlarging yourselves, being subject to the principalities and powers who are counted worthy of families, and kingdoms, and thrones, and the increase of dominions forever. To them you will be servants and angels ... . [Regardless of the] morality of such persons . . . how kind they may be to you, they are not numbered with the people of god; they are not in the way of salvation; they cannot save themselves nor their families; and after what God has revealed upon this subject you cannot be justified, for one moment, in keeping their company. It would be infinitely better for you to suffer poverty and tribulation with the people of God, than to place yourselves under the power of those who will not embrace the great truths of Heaven (Pratt 1853, 140). 

Steeped in such philosophy, married women such as Mary Elizabeth Lightner, Sylvia Sessions, Prescendia Buell, Zina D. H. Jacobs, Augusta Cobb, and Eleanor McLean were persuaded that their non-Mormon or Mormon layman husbands could not take them to the highest degree of the coveted celestial kingdom. A Mormon male of hierarchical rank, with feet firmly planted in the priesthood, seemed a sure ticket to heaven. 

In the labyrinth of early LDS matrimonial theology, the definitions of "wife" and "husband" are complex indeed. Polygyny — the practice of having two or more wives at the same time — correctly describes the Mormon practice of plural marriage. But so, in Nauvoo, does polyandry — the practice of having two or more husbands at the same time. There is considerable evidence, during the early years of plural marriage, that more than a few Mormon women had two husbands simultaneously. These bigamous or polyandrous relationships were complicated by the fact that the legal husband did not usually know about the extralegal husband. In addition, the Church recognize the nonlegal husband as the valid mate, whereas the law recognized the legal mate. Polygamy — the state of having two or more wives or husbands at the same time — is often said to be used incorrectly in describing Mormon plural marriage. But the history of Mormon marriage systems makes it correct to call many early Mormon marriages not only polygynous, but also polygamous. 

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[1] The Harmonists returned to Pennsylvania, founding the village of Economy some twenty miles from Harmony.

[2] Smith was in Kirtland as late as 10 August and had returned by 23 August (HC 2:242-43, 253). Cowdery remained in Kirtland not only to conduct the conference, but to be with his wife Elizabeth, who gave birth to their daughter Maria on 21 August. 

[3] Joseph Smith quoted the 1835 marriage statement in its entirety and then declared it the only "rule of marriage . . . practiced in this Church" {Times and Seasons 3 [1 Oct. 1842]: 939). President Wilford Woodruff added in court testimony in 1893 that before the revelation on plural marriage was given in 1843, "there could not have been any rule of marriage or any order of marriage in existence at that time except that prescribed by the Book of Doctrine and Covenants." President Woodruff further testified that this was "all the law on the question" of marriage that was given "to the body of the people." Lorenzo Snow, president of the Quorum of the Twelve, added that the section on marriage was the "doc- trine and law of the church upon marriage at that time [early Nauvoo]" (Temple Lot 1:304, 309,312). 

Joseph Smith used the ceremony outlined in the marriage statement in performing marriages— even plural marriages. Mercy Fielding testified in 1893 that on 4 June 1837 Joseph Smith married her to Robert Blashel Thompson using the "ceremony prescribed by the Church and set forth in the Book of Doctrine and Covenants." She added that the same ceremony was used when she became the plural wife of Hyrum Smith in 1843 (Temple Lot 1:344-45).

[4] Homespun 1893, 31. Newel Knight, the bridegroom, added that the Prophet said at the conclusion of the wedding: "I have done it by the authority of the holy Priesthood and the gentile law has no power to make a law that would abridge the rights of my religion. I have done as I was commanded, and I know the Kingdom of God will prevail, and that the Saints will triumph over all their adversaries" (Sketch, 6).

[5] Louisa Beaman (also spelled Beman or Beeman), daughter of Alva and Betsy Beaman, was born in Livonia, New York, 7 February 1815. She was sealed to Joseph Smith for eternity and Brigham Young for time on 14 January 1846, and died in Salt Lake City 15 May 1850. 

[6] See also Joseph to Emma Smith, 9 Nov. 1839, in Smith 2:376-77. Jessee (1984, 448- 49) cites it, explaining that the closing benediction and Smith's signature have been cut away. Interestingly, in a 16 August 1842 letter to Emma, Smith signs the letter "your affectionate husband until death through all eternity for evermore" (Jessee 1984, 527). This letter precedes by more than nine months the Smiths's eternal sealing on 28 May 1843. 

[7] This secret organization was also called the Endowment Quorum, the Quorum of the Anointed, Joseph Smith's Prayer Circle, or simply the Quorum.

[8] Pratt 1853, 47. Orson further added on 11 August 1871: "I said their [non-Mormon] baptisms are illegal. Now let me go a little further, and say that the ordinance of marriage is illegal among all people, nations and tongues, unless administered by a man appointed by new revelation from God to join the male and female as husband and wife" (JD 16:175).

[9] The terms "spiritual marriage," "spiritual wifery," and polygamy have become confused in Mormon history. Though "spiritual wifery" in Mormon usage later became equated with John C. Bennett's advocacy of promiscuous intercourse or "free love," this was not the con- temporary Nauvoo meaning. Polygamy, spiritual wifery, and/or spiritual marriage were used in Mormon and non-Mormon contexts as though interchangeable. Emily Dow Partridge, a plural wife to Joseph Smith and later Brigham Young, for example, uses "spiritual wife" as a reference to herself and others: "Spiritual wives, as we were then termed, were not very numerous in those days and a spiritual baby was a rerity indeed" (1877, 72). Helen Mar Kimball Whitney, another of Joseph's plural wives, added that in Nauvoo, "spiritual wife was the title by which every woman who entered into this order [plural marriage] was called" (Whitney 1882, 15). Bathsheba Smith, wife of Apostle George A. Smith, testified in court that during the John C. Bennett fracas in Nauvoo, the church "preached against him from the stand, and against plural marriage, the secret wife system, secret marriages. The spiritual wife system was the system by which a man had two wives at the same time" (Temple Lot 1:362). And Ebenezer Robinson, who was introduced to plural marriage by Hyrum Smith in November or December 1843, when asked in an interview, "Did you understand from Hyrum Smith in 1843 that polygamy & spiritual wifery was identical?" responded "I did" (Robinson to Jason W. Briggs, 28 Jan. 1880). Justin Morse, a Nauvoo resident in the early 1840s, testified 23 March 1887 that in 1842, "Elder Amasa Lyman, taught me the doctrine of sealing, or marrying for eternity, called spiritual wifery, and that within one year from that date my own wife and another woman were sealed to me for eternity. . . . This woman was the wife of another man, but was to be mine in eternity" (in Shook 1914, 169-70). Furthermore, the 1 January 1845 Nauvoo Neighbor, responding to Illinois Governor Thomas Ford's charges of polygamy, editorialized: 

To relieve the governor's mind, on this subject, we will just say that the meaning of spiritual wives is to be married for eternity, instead of natural lifetime; and should a man die after they have been married, they have a legal right to get married again; and should they do it for eternity, especially a man, he must have spiritual wives.

[10] For a discussion of the difficulties between the Pratts and Joseph Smith, see my forth coming essay on Sarah M. Pratt.

[11] After her sealing to Smith, Mary Lightner had seven more children by Adam Lightner. It was the rule rather than the exception for Smith to encourage a polyandrous wife to remain with her legal husband. Joseph Kingsbury even wrote that he served as a surrogate husband for the Prophet: "I according to Pres. Joseph Smith & council & others, I agreed to stand by Sarah Ann Whitney [sealed to Smith 27 July 1843] as though I was supposed to be her husband and a pretended marriage for the purpose of shielding them from the enemy and for the purpose of bringing out the purposes of God" (Kingsbury, 5).

[12] On 12 October 1905, Angus M. Cannon discussed this incident with Joseph Smith, III, and his son Frederick. In response to the elder Smith's inquiry, "Where is the issue in evidence of my father's having married plural wives," Cannon replied: 

I will now refer you to one case where it was said by the girl's grandmother that your father has a daughter born of a plural wife. The girl's grandmother was Mother Sessions, who lived in Nauvoo and died here in the valley. She was the grand-daughter of Mother Sessions. . . . Aunt Patty Sessions, asserts that the girl was born within the time after your father was said to have taken the mother. And I want you to understand that I know your father lived and died a Prophet of the Living god, and I will be the last one to seek evidence of anything that the world might be pleased to criticize in his life, knowing that he alone was accountable to God for his conduct. (A. Cannon, 1905) 

[13] Jenson, 1:697, and Arrington 1985, 171. Henry Jacobs's letters indicate a blissful relationship from his point of view with no hint of discord. Interestingly, he still viewed Zina as his wife though she had been "sealed for time" to Brigham Young. Six months after that sealing had taken place, Jacobs wrote "Mrs. Zina Jacobs" from Brooklyn, New York, on 19 August 1846, enroute to his mission in Liverpool to tell her, "I have not forgotten you my Love is as ever the same and much more abundantly And hope that it will contue to grow stronger an stronger to all Eternity worlds without End when familys are joined together" (In O. Cannon Collection). 

[14] Henry in his 19 August 1846 letter to Zina mentioned that "My health is measurably good at present excepting my Lung Bleede at times which causes much debilation of body; when I Met you before in nauvoo I was very feeble indeed and continued So untill I came to Cambey NY then ray helth began to improve."

[15] Cannon Collection. After receiving word of Zina's relationship with Brigham Young, Jacobs married Sarah Taylor. He was excommunicated on 6 December 1847 for his part in sealing W. W. Phelps to three women. See Van Wagoner and Walker 1982, 207-8. After reinstatement Jacobs was again excommunicated on 26 January 1851 for reasons that even he did not know, according to his 1 Sept. 1852 letter to Zina. 

[16] President Young's theology may have come directly from Joseph Smith. Wilford Woodruff wrote in his journal, 2 June 1857: 

Brigham Young Said Joseph taught that when a womans affections was entirely weaned from her husband that was Adultery in spirit. Her Affections were Adultrated from his. He also said that there was no law in Heaven or on Earth that would Compel a woman to stay with a man either in time or Eternity. This I think is true (but I do not know), that if a man that is a High priest takes a woman & she leaves him & goes to one of a lesser office say the Lesser priesthood or member I think in the resurrection that the High Priest Can Claim her. Joseph [Young]: What if she should not want to go with him? I should not want a woman under those Circumstances.

Brigham. I will tell you what you will find that all those evil traditions & affections or passions that Haunt the mind in this life will all be done away in the resurrection. You will find then that any man who gets a glory & exaltation will be so beautiful that any woman will be willing to have him if it was right & wharever it is right for the woman to go there she will be willing to go for all those evils will vanish to which we are subject in this life. (Kenney 5:55-56)

[post_title] => Mormon Polyandry in Nauvoo [post_excerpt] => Dialogue 18.3 (Fall 1985): 67–83
Van Wagoner defines polyandry as having two or more husbands at the same time. He identifies women who ended up marrying members of the Twelve or Joseph Smith while they were were already married to their own husband [post_status] => publish [comment_status] => closed [ping_status] => closed [post_password] => [post_name] => mormon-polyandry-in-nauvoo [to_ping] => [pinged] => [post_modified] => 2024-03-14 18:26:10 [post_modified_gmt] => 2024-03-14 18:26:10 [post_content_filtered] => [post_parent] => 0 [guid] => https://www.dialoguejournal.com/?post_type=dj_articles&p=16031 [menu_order] => 0 [post_type] => dj_articles [post_mime_type] => [comment_count] => 0 [filter] => raw ) 1