Sounding Brass* Part 1

"In My Mind's Eye, Horatio . . . "

Personalized History

"The story which I propose to tell in these pages is a plain, unexaggerated record of facts which have come immediately under my own notice, or which I have myself personally experienced. Much that to the reader may seem altogether incredible, would to a Mormon mind appear simply a matter of ordinary every-day occurrence."¹

Thus Mrs. Stenhouse begins a book whose title, Tell It All: The Story of a Life's Experience in Mormonism, promises everything. But the student who searches through it in hopes of discovering a single episode of her personal experience which could be called "altogether incredible" or even improbable is doomed to disappointment. Whatever is strange and marvelous in the Stenhouse story is always taken from the stories of other people. How can she claim it all for her own? Very easily, on the principle that whatever I am aware of comes "immediately under my own notice"—who else's? and how else but "immediately?" Now let us notice how Ann Eliza Young paraphrases Stenhouse: "All the events which I shall relate will be some of my own personal experiences, or the experience of those so closely connected with me that they have fallen directly [immediately] under my observation [notice], and for whose truth I can vouch without hesitation."² Plainly the reader is in for a feast of gossip. If both ladies are prepared to chalk up as personal experience whatever is brought to their personal attention, to what limits may they not go? Both devote considerable space to atrocity stories that took place long before their time, and Ann Eliza can give verbatim reports of highly secret conversations between Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and "vouch without hesitation for their truth" because forsooth it is all part of her own simple story—it is "closely connected" with her because she actually was a Mormon.

"I spoke truths of which I was a living witness—truths which had been burned into my soul through suffering that words can never tell." Thus Ann Eliza begins her second (1908) book as "a living witness": but to what? Not to events but to "truths," not necessarily to things seen and heard but "suffered," or, better still, "burned into my soul through suffering"³—her experience consists in what she has suffered: "I am not imagining situations. . . . There is not a pang, not a throb of anguish which I have depicted that I have not felt myself."⁴

Here the lady defines a "situation" as anything she has felt, and since only she is the judge of her feelings, she feels free to tell other women's stories as her own—for all their pangs and throbs of anguish are hers: "The voices of twenty thousand women speak in mine."⁵ "I knew every pang which she was suffering, for I have passed through it all myself."⁶ Nothing could be more convenient to the author of a book of atrocity stories than to have his own feelings pass as evidence in the case, allowing him to substitute other people's exciting experiences for his own very drab ones as long as he feels morally certain that both he and they have suffered the same "pangs."

Excuse It, Please

Writers of anti-Mormon studies have a pretty way of excusing themselves first for the awful things they are about to tell, then for the awful things they cannot tell. Mrs. Stenhouse assures us that "much that to the reader may seem altogether incredible" is simply routine "to a Mormon mind,"⁷ and Mr. Wallace opens his book by disclaiming responsibility for whatever absurdities he may perpetrate in words that apply to Richard Burton but certainly not to him: "I am conscious that my narrative savours of incredibility: the fault is in the subject, not in the narrator."⁸ But Burton was reporting his own experience. Wallace is simply parroting Mrs. Ann Eliza Webb Dee Young Denning. Now Mrs. Young in her first book promised "A COMPLETE Exposé of Mormonism." When it was shown her that it was her duty to expose the Mormon Monster, she "adopted it without hesitation" and pulled out all the stops.⁹ Yet she insists that what she has told is nothing compared with what she could tell: "I am compelled to silence on points that would make what I have already said seem tame in comparison."¹⁰ "Another volume, as large as this, would not contain all I could write on this subject."¹¹ The stuff sold well, but the sensation-hungry public must have novelty, and when "it became a matter of life and death that this commodity be kept marketable and attractive,"¹² one might expect Ann Eliza to dip into her vast reserve of untold stories. Yet though in her second book (the 1908 edition)—written after thirty-three years of thinking it over—she promises to "exhibit still more fully the whole career of Brigham Young," the best she can come up with is "a handful of anecdotes"—the same anecdotes she told in her first book, only fewer—"far too little of life with the Prophet and too few facts of her own physical existence," says the exasperated Mr. Wallace.¹³

What is wrong? What makes the lady so strangely reticent? Out of thousands of personal experiences whose "horror" is beyond belief,¹⁴ isn't it odd that she has not a single one to add to her first story, especially since the avowed purpose of the 1908 opus is "to expose that accursed system with its polygamic, murderous and other criminal practices, . . . arouse the . . . people of America,"¹⁵ "above all, to awaken still deeper interest . . . that shall at length swell into indignation"?¹⁶ The way to do that is not to hold back on unpleasant details, as none knew better than Eliza Young. "For almost half a century," Mr. Wallace assures us, " . . . she paraded publicly, over and over again, every intimate detail of the old existence."¹⁷ The "unremitting hysteria" of her language is more savage than ever in her last book, and she is perfectly willing to tell more horror-stories—but they are all the stories of other women; she has nothing to add to her own. Why not? If we examine the actual events of her life as she describes them, they all turn out to be quite humdrum and ordinary; ah, but the pangs, the anguish—that is another thing! Here again we meet a peculiar situation, for every time Ann Eliza suffers Promethean pangs, she is careful to conceal her sufferings from all the world—even "her [dear] mother to whom," as Mrs. Woodward observes, "she was almost morbidly attached,"¹⁸ is never allowed for a moment to suspect what is going on in little Ann Eliza's seething interior. The fact that nobody at the time is ever aware of the sufferings of this "imaginative, excitable child," as she calls herself,¹⁹ is a pretty good indication that those sufferings were invented in retrospect. There is not a scrap of external evidence for any of the horror that surrounds our informant; the outrage never lies in what actually happens, but only in Ann Eliza's very private and very secret reaction to it.

Such is the stuff of her—and Mr. Wallace's—dramatic history. With Stenhouse it is the same. Take one moving instance: "What a shock this was to me; for that sum . . . was gone at one sweep! 'Can it be possible,' I said, 'that he [Brigham Young] can be so mean as that? Where can his conscience be? or has he any; to deprive me of my hard earnings in this way. He shall not do it—I will make him pay me.' "²⁰ Here, plainly, the lady is reporting a harrowing experience—firsthand. Brigham Young, it is clear to all, has done something monstrous, something particularly cruel and evil and greedy. What is the event that triggers this agonized reaction? Simply this; that Mrs. Stenhouse's husband (Mr. Stenhouse) had suggested that the family make a try at paying tithing, receiving tithing credit in return for work done for the Church, like other Mormon families—this is the full extent of the atrocity Mrs. S. so vividly describes. No tithing was paid, but the emotional damage was done and the world has another atrocity to chalk up against Brother Brigham. But it is Ann Eliza we are going to tell about. Here is her story.

The Two or Three Lives of Ann Eliza Webb Dee Young Denning

First, behold Ann Eliza the infant, "consecrated to sorrow by the baptism of my mother's tears upon my baby brow."²¹ "Many a time she has knelt with me clasped fast in her arms, the tears falling on my wondering face, and prayed frantically that we both might die."²² Of course she was too young to remember any of this, but what a production she makes of it! Actually it comes right out of Stenhouse: "My only comfort was in my children; no revelation, I felt, could change their relationship to me. But over my little daughter Clara [Ann Eliza's friend] I mourned, for I thought . . . she would some day be called upon to suffer as I did."²³ Both ladies put full blame for this infant damnation on Brigham Young. From the age of two Ann Eliza has a "distinct remembrance" of a very happy time at Winter Quarters.²⁴ At the age of three as the "little dancin' missy" she was "petted by everybody" and thoroughly enjoyed herself.²⁵ Then came the great trek, with Ann Eliza, "a little blue-eyed girl, dancing merrily under the trees," or "running along by the side of a covered emigrant-wagon."²⁶ "I . . . was petted almost as much by my fellow-travellers as I had been . . . in Missouri. It is a wonder that I was not completely spoiled; I daresay I should have been, had it not been for my mother's sensible and judicious training. I was her idol, the one object for which she cared the most in the world."²⁷ To idolize Ann Eliza is the one "sensible and judicious" course for anyone to take; anything less than that she considers persecution.

At last an element of real horror: at the usual age of eight she is baptized—a pleasant and edifying experience to which most Mormon children eagerly look forward. But not Ann Eliza! "So great was the nervous shock that I could not think of it without a shudder for years after."²⁸ Little did the witnesses of this perfectly ordinary, familiar, and interesting ordinance realize that they were actually beholding a grisly episode right out of Edgar Allan Poe. To show that there is no mistake, let us here interrupt our chronological sequence to mention Ann Eliza's third baptism, in her thirtieth year. By her own free will and choice she had elected to have herself baptized again—by now she should have known what she was up against; but again she was thoroughly brutalized: "I was led into the water by a great strapping fellow," and emerged "gasping for breath," some "words were spoken over me, and the farce ended."²⁹

Of growing up in a polygamous household, she reports, "In our own family it was very smooth sailing,"³⁰ and so she must resort to seeking her harrowing tales in other people's houses. But then comes the indescribable horror of the "Reformation," during which people had to answer "a list of singular questions, many of which I distinctly remember."³¹ This is out of Stenhouse, who says that all trace of such a catechism had completely disappeared.³² Fortunately Ann Eliza remembers it, but discreetly clams up: "I dare only mention a few [she mentions none]. . . . Many were grossly indelicate, others laughably absurd."³³ How does it happen that this sheltered child comprehended and remembered both the obscenity and the absurdity of these forbidden questions, none of which she cares to repeat as an adult? She remembers how one man confessed to stealing a sheep, and sure enough, right there in the meeting little Ann Eliza saw some sheep's wool clinging to the lapel of his Sunday suit, in which no doubt he did his sheep-stealing.³⁴ Well no, she won't go that far, but she is absolutely sure of one thing: "I know I wondered if that was from the sheep he had stolen."³⁵ And that is good enough for evidence. But no, she promises more: "I tell the incidents from actual knowledge, and not from mere hearsay."³⁶ So what follows? A long letter written by the wife of "a merchant of Salt Lake City," telling of events that had nothing to do with Ann Eliza's little world; none of the characters in the story is named, "at the special request of the writer of the letter."³⁷ Even so it wasn't a very good atrocity, "somewhat remarkable, because it was unattended by bloodshed";³⁸ then why does our author bother with a mild atrocity which does not concern her? Because, she explains, it is "the best description" of many "similar scenes" she might report.³⁹ She retells the same story, incidentally, in 1908, not in the form of a letter but as a personal experience.⁴⁰

"I Wants to Make Their Flesh Creep"

But now comes a genuine atrocity, eagerly exploited by Mr. Wallace as Ann Eliza's firsthand experience of Mormon brutality at its worst.⁴¹ It seems that when Ann Eliza was a small child, the daughter of her uncle married a Gentile named Hatten, who shortly after was killed by Indians on the way to California. It is significant that in Mr. Wallace's book nobody is ever killed by Indians, even in the wild 1850s—but always by "Indians"—alias you-know-who. Only little Ann Eliza knew who the real murderers were—namely, Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball, who wanted to marry Hatten's bride. Since she can give us the very words that passed between the two in planning the murder and the very words in which Brigham Young ordered it, Ann Eliza should have told the bride what she knew, for though Mrs. Hatten dearly loved her late husband, she "became a Mrs. Kimball without a protest";⁴² she should at least have told her own parents years later, for then they would not have insisted on her marrying the murderer, Brigham Young. It was only "after many years," she says, that Mrs. Kimball "learned the bitter truth"—the bride herself never suspected anything.⁴³ In that case, how could it have been such a harrowing experience for her little cousin? What she actually experienced was hearing that a man she hardly knew, a distant relative by marriage, had been killed by Indians: and this she and Mr. Wallace parlay into her one personal experience of a "victim of Blood-Atonement," though what the death of a Gentile can have to do with Blood Atonement remains a mystery.

Next comes Ann Eliza's prize exhibit, "the murder of a woman named Jones, and her son," because "they were suspected of falling away in the faith."⁴⁴ It was in Payson where she was living, at the age of ten, with her mother: "I did not see the bodies, nor did my mother, although they were driven past our door; we both shunned the fearful sight."⁴⁵ But the rest of the town was whooping it up, including "plenty of women . . . who gloried in their death as a deed of service to the Lord."⁴⁶ The bodies, "shockingly mutilated, were placed in a wagon, and exposed to the crowd by being driven through the streets, attended by a jeering, taunting mob, who could not cease their insults though their victims were still in death."⁴⁷

The impressive engraving of the vast crowd lining the streets as the wagon moves through the town is enough to justify Mr. Wallace's enthusiastic retelling of the tale. Only he overlooks one significant detail: "Concerning the murders," says Mrs. Young, "the majority of the people knew nothing, and supposed that the Indians were the assassins, as they were always told."⁴⁸ The huge ticker-tape parade, the taunting, howling mob, the bodies on public display in the small village of Payson not only failed to make an object-lesson of the widow Jones and her son, but never even came to the attention of "the majority of the people." Where could they all have been before, during, and after the monster celebration to have heard nothing of it? This is simply another example of the two worlds of Ann Eliza—a well-known public event, a typical Indian atrocity, is veiled by a shadow world of easily imagined horror.

Hardly less intimate is Ann Eliza's experience of the Mountain Meadows massacre. "I was but a child at the time, but I recollect, perfectly, hearing that an emigrant-train had been attacked by the Indians, and all members . . . with the exception of a few of the smaller children killed; and I remember, also, seeing these children, who . . . were to be cared for by the Mormon people."⁴⁹ She puts seeing in italics to establish herself as a witness. But to what? The report of another Indian massacre in the worst year of Indian depredations, that was all. But that will never do: "Young as I was, I felt the mystery . . . and I knew instinctively . . . that something was being hidden from the mass of the people, by their leaders."⁵⁰ Is that the way the child Eliza had been taught to think about "the leaders"? "The very mystery which veiled it made it more awful to me, an imaginative, excitable child; and though I followed the example of my elders, and never spoke of the subject, even to my mother, it haunted me perpetually, and I grew absolutely terrified at the constantly recurring fancies which I drew of it."⁵¹ This is a revealing illustration of how Wallace's informant operates: the outward experience was hearing of another Indian massacre and seeing the survivors, but that is merely incidental to her story, which is that she experienced the real thing inwardly, secretly, "instinctively," so that even her mother never suspected that she knew a thing, which is not surprising, since nobody else suspected anything either. Yet at that time the child Eliza not only suspected but knew exactly what had happened and who was behind the whole thing—John D. Lee! "I had never even seen the man; but knowing the record of his crimes, and always hearing of him in connection with some deed of bloody brutality, my horror and fear of him never diminished, and he remained, what he had always been, the ogre of my childish fancies."⁵² Now this is interesting. How well known was Lee before the Mountain Meadows tragedy? Who but Ann Eliza knew "the record of his crimes"? Scouting and settling distant places had been his calling, and we shall examine his career later on. What bothers us now is how a sheltered child in "the strictest of Mormon households" could have heard all about the unnamed crimes of an obscure minor official three hundred miles away, and not only that but immediately surmise that he had been the author of the Mountain Meadows atrocity. Here we have an excellent indication of the reliability of Mrs. Ann Eliza Young as a historian. Yet it is her version of Mountain Meadows that Mr. Wallace follows meticulously.

Even more than baptism, the rite of the "Endowment," as they call it, is, as Ann Eliza points out, the most cherished experience of all good Mormons. But for her it was just more cruel abuse, and we find her suffocated, strangled, nauseated, on the point of collapse and hysterics before it is over, and along with that "quite dissatisfied" and "as hopeless and apathetic as I had before been eager and buoyant."⁵³ She had been expecting a show, and when it failed to come up to expectations, her vaunted religious fervor collapsed at a touch: "It was so different from what I expected that I was saddened and disappointed by it all."⁵⁴ But whose fault is that?

Private and Confidential

A chapter entitled "Troubles in Our Own Family" promises at long last something specific involving Ann Eliza, but alas, that chapter begins: "I know a first wife who was driven to such utter desperation."⁵⁵ And so on and on until the lady catches herself: "I could cite hundreds of such cases . . . but I will, instead, tell a little what the 'Reformation,' and the subsequent 'Celestial Ordinance' fever, did for our own family."⁵⁶ Why only a little when she knows so much? What follows is little enough, to be sure—the amusing story of how one of the "Hand-Cart Girls" snagged her father.⁵⁷ Here Ann Eliza, the doughty champion of suppressed Morman womanhood, actually describes one of these victims of tyranny as a shameless hussy on the make. How can that be? Well, in this case the husband happens to be her own father—all other Mormon men are brutes below the level of beasts; he alone is the victim of a wily female.

But all the time Ann Eliza is not suffering at all; she is a gay carefree girl, laughing and joking with her friends about polygamy, as they sympathize with her and resent Brigham Young's jealous interference with her boyfriends, "and a more rebellious set of mortals was never seen."⁵⁸ Unaware that even the slightest hint of criticism of the priesthood can mean only quick and certain death, and that Brigham Young "holds them so completely, body and soul, that they shrink before his displeasure in absolute terror,"⁵⁹ the foolish girls go right on with their suicidal talk: "We indulged in the most incendiary talk, and turned the torrent of our wrath especially against polygamy."⁶⁰ Next, undamaged, she is sponsored by Brigham Young in her stage career, working in highly edifying surroundings: "It was almost like a family; and I do not believe there was ever a theatre where there was less of envyings, and jealousies, and strifes, than there was among us."⁶¹ But where Ann Eliza herself has no inner anguish to report, Mr. Wallace comes to the rescue: Brigham Young cracks the whip and commands her to become an actress, for he secretly lusts after her.⁶²

This is apparent from the episode of the buggy, in which Woodward and Wallace take understandable delight, it being the only indication that Brigham Young thought of marrying Ann Eliza as early as she thought of marrying him. Her girlfriends, she says, suggested that President Young might be after her, and sure enough, a few days later he picked her up in his buggy and gave her a lecture on marriage. In spite of her girlfriends' insistence and Young's bluntness and clumsiness, our heroine completely missed his drift, and insisted forever after that he was not in love with her but just wanted to cut her down to size. Yet in telling her story she does her best to help the willing reader to the opposite conclusion. Why this wild ambivalence? Because it must be her story that Brigham Young desires her, though she insists that such a thing never occurred to her during any of her talks with Young.

Against the united protests of parents and friends, Ann Eliza married the dashing and handsome Dee, whom all the girls were after. He did his best to come up to her romantic expectations—"There is such a sweet humility about a woman's love!"⁶³ is her comment on this—but within a month she was completely disillusioned and suffering beyond all imagination. He even knocked her out once "in his fury at what he termed my stubbornness," but "I very quickly forgave him: it was so sweet to feel the old tenderness again."⁶⁴ Nevertheless this typical family spat with the very monogamous Dee (why does she omit the episode from her expanded autobiography of 1908?) serves as the text for one of Mrs. Young's most impassioned discourses on the evils of polygamy. They had two children, and Dee with rough good humor⁶⁵ used to play with them. But what a reaction! "He used to either take no notice of them at all, which I infinitely preferred, or he would handle them so roughly that the little things would shriek with pain and terror, and I would be almost frantic with fear lest he should kill them in his mad frolics."⁶⁶ Such is the Mormon father, either contemptuously indifferent or madly sadistic, threatening the lives of his babes as he gloats over their pain and terror. Is it any wonder that he finally attacked Ann Eliza herself? He "seized me by the throat, and threw me back into the chair. The screams of the terrified child brought my mother into the room at once. She snatched the baby from my arms, . . . called my father, and he came and rescued me from the infuriated man who held me."⁶⁷ Again it was the reaction that made the drama: "I was dizzy with pain, and almost suffocated from the grip; but my maternal instinct was stronger than the pain, and I never relaxed my hold on my child."⁶⁸ Ann Eliza's stock demonstration of nobility and anguish was brief, however, since mama and papa came "at once" from the next room. Dee never got a chance to tell his side and didn't even appear in court when Ann Eliza got her divorce with the greatest of ease. Two days later, she said, she celebrated the merriest Christmas she had known in years; she was, as she put it, "supremely, selfishly happy"⁶⁹—which may suggest to some that the whole thing was staged. Indeed, in the 1908 version she omits the whole dramatic episode and confines herself to stating, "At last my parents were eyewitnesses of my husband's brutal violence towards myself. . . . Until that time they had known nothing of the treatment which I received from my husband."⁷⁰ They had all been living in the same house for two years, with papa and mama watching Dee like a hawk, yet with all this "brutal violence" going on under their noses the doting parents detected no marks or bruises, no suspicious noises, no betraying tears—"they had known nothing" of Ann Eliza's sufferings. Again, only she is the witness to what she had gone through—Dee always denied it and nobody else ever noticed a thing.

After the divorce Ann Eliza moved to Cottonwood, where "I was royally happy,—happier than I ever was in my life before,"⁷¹ with mama babying her darling as ever and waiting on her hand and foot. "Here, I think, I was happier than I had ever before been in my life. My health was much improved."⁷² It is hard to believe after that, that her life had been ruined forever, yet "for the rest of her days Ann Eliza would always refer to James Dee as the man who 'blighted' her life."⁷³ She describes herself as a real beauty and "very fond of gay society,"⁷⁴ though of course "I had suffered too much" ever to be as she was "in the old frolicsome days."⁷⁵ Yet she frolicked merrily with her children, until one summer evening as she sat cradled in her mother's arms thinking (so she says) how little the goings and comings of one Brigham Young concerned her, the man himself set out for Cottonwood to get her! The very next day he proposed marriage to Ann Eliza through her parents. The courtship we have treated under a separate head, as its supreme significance deserves; let us skip now to the married life with Brigham.

It is precisely here, where she promises so much, that Ann Eliza Young, to Mr. Wallace's annoyance, serves history so poorly with her measly "handful of anecdotes." The first is how Clara Decker, "sadly in want of some furs,"⁷⁶ gave Brigham Young a lecture on his own viciousness and the depravity of the Mormon religion—and promptly got the furs. Next Ann Eliza "preferred a similar request, and was met by a similar torrent of abuse,"⁷⁷ whereupon she "burst into tears, . . . puzzled and astonished at this new revelation of my Prophet-husband's meanness and coarseness. The next time he came to see me he brought me my furs."⁷⁸ If this is indeed one of her few authentic revelations of domestic life with Brigham, why does Ann Eliza omit it in her expanded life story of 1908? Why does Woodward completely distort it by reporting that the lady did not get the furs? Is it because it makes Brigham Young look rather good and her not so good?⁷⁹

Next she asks for some silk to reline the muff—and gets it. This is worked into an epic battle of wills: "When he had finished he cut off a quarter of a yard of narrow silk from an entire piece, . . . and gave it to me with as many airs and as much flourish as though he were presenting me with a whole dress pattern. It is needless to say that my muff was not lined with that piece of silk."⁸⁰ Needless to say, that is, if you know our Ann Eliza. Next she reports that Brigham once denounced the foolish and unhygienic fashion of long trains on ladies' dresses by announcing, "The very next time that I see one of my wives with a dress on sweeping the ground, I will take the scissors and cut it off."⁸¹

"The very next day," Ann Eliza reports, "I was passing through a door in front of him, when he accidentally stepped upon my train, which was a very long one. . . . To my great surprise, he not only refrained from the threatened application of the scissors, but from any comment, even so much as an apology for his awkwardness."

This little act, staged by Ann Eliza herself, failed to get a rise out of her husband: he neither assailed her with scissors nor with the usual "torrent of abuse." Deliberately challenged, he displayed perfect self-control—or indifference. Her reaction? Disgust with the brute who didn't offer "even so much as an apology for his awkwardness."⁸² Ann Eliza is again the victim. Then she had to endure the humiliation of being driven to the polls and instructed "how to vote" (not for whom, but how) by of all things her husband's coachman! (The italics and the howl are hers.)⁸³ The "outrageous absurdity"⁸⁴ of receiving instructions from a mere coachman was more than she could stand, and never again did she soil her lovely hands with a Utah ballot.⁸⁵

Next we read how Amelia Folsom banged a garden gate in Ann Eliza's girlish face and shouted at her: "There, madam! I'd like to see you get in now."⁸⁶ Since all Ann Eliza had to do was open the gate and walk in, one would fail to see the point of this story, did not Ann Eliza entitle it "Amelia Tries to Shut Me Out."⁸⁷ The second encounter with Amelia was even more intimate and harrowing: "During the dessert she reached the cake-basket to me, and with as freezing a tone and manner as she could assume, asked,—'Will you have some cake?' I declined, and that ended our conversation—the last and indeed the only one I ever had with her."⁸⁸ The passage is worth the italics we have given it, for Ann Eliza claims to be the intimate, personal, firsthand authority on the most personal details of the life of Amelia Folsom Young. This may all be interesting, but is it really a tale of horror such as no words can describe?⁸⁹ That comes next in the episode on the farm.

The Work Farm

Ann Eliza "dreaded the ceaseless hours of manual labor that awaited her"⁹⁰ at the farm, says Wallace, and yet to all appearances she had no objections. How do you explain that? Since the lady has overlooked the slip, Mr. Wallace shows that he knows the formula by coming to the rescue with his own insight into the secret mind of his subject: "Her first instinct was to protest," but she didn't because "she wanted no fight."⁹¹ That is not the way she tells it: "As it was my husband's will, I went, without a word of protest."⁹² She could wail like a banshee for a muff and fight like a tigress for the silk to line it with—but not one word of protest about going to the farm. Why not? Because the farmhouse was a very grand place, "had a lovely appearance" and was "one of the pleasantest looking places that one would care to see,"⁹³ and "I knew I should be obliged to perform as mistress of the farm-house."⁹⁴ There was a lot of work to be done: "There were butter and cheese to make from forty cows, all the other dairy work to attend to, besides cooking for twenty-five or thirty men."⁹⁵ Besides "I . . . took care of the house, did the washing and ironing, and was allowed the extreme pleasure of carrying the farm supplies to the other wives every week."⁹⁶

With all that to do on a five-day week—and she definitely implies, and Wallace apparently believes, that she did do it—one is surprised to learn what her real grievances were at the farm. One was that in order to reach her bedroom she had "to pass through a dining-room thirty feet, and a parlor forty feet in length"—which gives you an idea of the layout; but even worse was that "hired men, family, and visitors were all compelled to use the same staircase."⁹⁷ What humiliation—the same staircase as the hired help! Most of all she suffered from boredom "long, uneventful years,—and how I hated my life! . . . Even the love I bore my children was changed."⁹⁸ The picture of the fastidious lady pining away the uneventful years hardly suits with the moving engraving in the book that shows Ann Eliza toiling heroically over enormous washtubs. Where must the correction be made? In the washtubs. When one starts to figure out the minimum staff required to perform the tasks enumerated above, it quickly becomes apparent that Ann Eliza did not do it all herself. (1) She actually mentions hired help—a lot of it, e.g., cooking for twenty-five or thirty men; only (2) she didn't do the cooking: "My mother . . . took charge of the cooking. I assisted in the latter."⁹⁹ (3) And what does she mean by "take charge?" Not doing the actual work, certainly. She was "mistress of the farmhouse," with absolutely nobody over her to make her do anything. John W. Young was right when he said: "She did not have to raise her hand" at the farm,¹⁰⁰ for Brigham Young rarely visited the farm and never went into the house. In view of her quick and efficient reaction to whatever she considered abuse, the fact that she stuck it out three and a half years and left it in high spirits¹⁰¹ shows how little she suffered; when shortly after, she tried to run a small boarding-house, the project collapsed almost immediately—which shows plainly enough that she had neither the strength nor the skill to carry on as she says she did at the farm.

Here is how Mrs. Young itemized her sufferings at the farm in a neat deposition for the Court: "During the year 1869 he sent me, (1) against my wishes, to a farm . . . where . . . I (2) was compelled to (3) labor until I was (4) completely broken down in health; . . . (5) my only companion was my mother; . . . (6) except the limited fare which the defendant allowed me, he (7) appropriated all the proceeds of the farm; . . . (8) on the few occasions when he visited the farm he (9) treated me with studied contempt, (10) objecting even to my aged mother remaining with me, (11) after her health was destroyed by overwork on his farm."¹⁰²

Questions on the above points:

(1) Didn't you say you went "without a word of protest?"¹⁰³ How was anyone to know it was against your wishes?

(2) Who compelled you to labor? You were "mistress of the farm-house,"¹⁰⁴ and Brigham Young, you say, never bothered you there. Oh, but he was "addicted to fault-finding, and so easily displeased, that we took no pleasure in his visits. . . . I dreaded them, and grew ill with nervousness and apprehension every time he came to us."¹⁰⁵

(3) From that it is clear that you managed things badly. It is also clear that you had recourse to your usual "out" of becoming, as you put it, "ill with nervousness . . . every time he came." Now how could one so delicate be forced, as Mr. Wallace so movingly puts it, to "ceaseless hours of manual labor?"¹⁰⁶ You had only to dislike a thing to "grow ill with nervousness" and take to your bed and your novels.

(4) Mr. Wallace notes that you were happy and gay, your "satisfaction was complete" as you returned from the farm to your new home in Salt Lake.¹⁰⁷ Granted some of your pleasure sprang from feelings of relief, how could any "completely broken down" person be as blithe as you were?

(5) The farm was, as you say "within pleasant driving distance"¹⁰⁸ of the city, where you were free to go anytime; it was in the midst of a thriving rural community where you had many near neighbors, while the farm itself was a bustling hive of activity; then there were all sorts of church and family activities; you had your doting mother and your children with you, and you often insisted that your whole life was completely wrapped up in them: how then can you or Mr. Wallace say that you were starved for companionship? Whose fault was it? You would not associate with hired help—even to use the same stairs was an indignity; there was old Mrs. Lewis the housekeeper, a pitiful victim of Brigham Young's rapacity as you report it; and yet you say there was not room enough for you and her even in that enormous house.¹⁰⁹ Wallace insists that you yearned for Brigham Young's stimulating companionship, and you complain that (8) he visited you rarely and (9) then treated you "with studied contempt." But you also say that you "took no pleasure in his visits and dreaded them." Under those circumstances how can you complain of his leaving you alone?

(6) Now as to that "limited fare," your own mother, you say, "took charge of the cooking," and in one stirring episode you tell how she forced Brigham Young to allow her to set the kind of ample table she felt the farmhands should have;¹¹⁰ you also say you "assisted" in the cooking, and yet you want us to believe that you were "allowed" only "limited fare"—that your mother let her daughter starve while she fed the field hands sumptuously?

(7) Since the farm was Brigham Young's, who else should "appropriate all the proceeds" of it?

(10-11) "After her health was destroyed by overwork on his farm," Brigham Young tried to get your mother to return to her own home at Cottonwood. Wasn't that the humane thing to do when he saw she was working herself to death? Brigham hardly ever visited the farm; it was you who saw your mother slaving away day after day; it was you who insisted on her coming to the farm and staying there for years—carried on hysterically and said you couldn't live without her. Who made her work so? Who was in charge? Who kept her from returning to her own home and family at happy Cottonwood, wildly protesting against her retirement from the farm even after her health was ruined? Who but Ann Eliza?

But the clue to the whole story of the farm is Ann Eliza's summary of her life there: "I lived here for three years and a half,—long, uneventful years,—and how I hated my life! It was dull, joyless, oppressed, and I looked longingly back to the dear old days at Cottonwood, the restful days that never could come again. Even the love I bore my children was changed."¹¹¹

Three and a half years is more than half of her life with Brigham Young! And of all that time she remembers only two brief anecdotes—not about herself, but about how her mother rebuked Brigham Young for his meanness towards the farmhands. Of her six-hundred-page book devoted to a "COMPLETE Exposé" of life in Mormonism, this woman of the flawless memory who never overlooks a chance to get in a dig at Brigham Young, devotes less than two pages¹¹² to her three and one-half years of heroic suffering and Herculean labors at the farm! Ann Eliza is not the one to overlook any affront to her rank, or minimize any privation. The fact that she has nothing to say about life at the farm aside from the above generalities is conclusive evidence that her life there was indeed dull and uneventful—because she had nothing to do.

The Exodus

During her last days at the farm we find Ann Eliza merry again, for soon she would be back in town "performing once more as a genteel lady. She was happy."¹¹³ Brigham Young was building her a house strictly to her specifications. Again the shock: as she stepped through the front door of her "exceedingly pretty cottage,"¹¹⁴ her world collapsed: "nothing seemed attractive";¹¹⁵ she was stunned, shocked, hurt; ignoring all the good features of the house, which were substantial and expensive, she could only see that it was "very inconvenient, and badly arranged."¹¹⁶ She soon converted it into a boarding house to make some extra money, which she expected Brigham Young to supply: "My family had increased,"¹¹⁷ as she puts it, and it was her husband's duty to support her "family." She depicts herself not as taking in boarders but "obliged to rely upon the charity of friends."¹¹⁸ Wallace paraphrases this grimly to read, "She survived only through the good offices of her boarders and neighbors,"¹¹⁹ which is true of most people who run hotels for a living.

Mrs here slips in a particularly effective touch: "It was her Gentile boarders who nursed her."¹²⁰ Ann Eliza says nothing about being nursed. What W. and W. generously fail to mention is that the boarders who "nursed" her so touchingly—for almost three weeks!—were at that very time planning to collect a vast sum of money ($100,000!) from her; she was their gold mine.¹²¹

Next Brigham Young cruelly withholds medical supplies from Ann Eliza—until he learns that she needs them, whereupon they are promptly supplied. Again it is the reaction that counts: "No medical supplies on earth," sobs Mr. Wallace, "could repair the emotional damage done to her."¹²² Then we come to the climax of the story, Ann Eliza's point of no return—the episode of the stove: "Damn him! Damn him!" shrieks Mrs. Woodward; he would learn "how much that stove he wouldn't buy for Ann Eliza was going to cost him."¹²³ Wallace eagerly takes up the cry: this refusal to get his wife a larger stove was his crowning act of selfishness and cruelty.¹²⁴ After such heroics it is an anticlimax to learn from a letter she wrote to Fanny Stenhouse just two weeks after the event that Ann Eliza did get "a stove out of him" without any fuss.¹²⁵ Badly needing some real act of villainy to make their stories plausible, our biographers have not hesitated to ignore Ann Eliza's own original version.

In Salt Lake City, she met the Rev. Stratton and his wife, who became friends and listened to her woes. At the same time she read the pamphlet written by Mrs. Stenhouse. Though even the Rev. Stratton protests that her husband has provided a comfortable home for her which she would be foolish to give up (where would he get that idea if the woman was actually starving?), Ann Eliza hearkens to the voices of her Gentile boarders and resolves to leave Brigham Young and sue him for $200,000. The three blackguard lawyers insisted on fifty percent of the take, but the lady stuck by her guns, and the seasoned and unscrupulous conspirators "bent to her will."¹²⁶ This was after she had retired to the Walker House, "a poor, defen[s]eless, outraged woman," the victim of Brigham Young's brutality.¹²⁷ But first, acting with such great speed "that no one had time even to suspect my intention," she whisked all her furniture to a public auction, where her enthusiastic friends converted it to cash "at large prices."¹²⁸ The reason for such speed was not, as implied, to elude Brigham's spies—the auction was a public one, and even they might wonder why the furniture vans?—but to pull a fast one, as the neglected Stenhouse letter makes clear: "I . . . instructed an auctioneer two weeks ago to take away the furniture and sell it, as a part of it was my own, and I thought I was entitled to the rest."¹²⁹ She had to work fast because the stuff she was selling wasn't hers. She pulled the same sort of trick on her next husband.¹³⁰

Fleeing to the Walker House, she is "fairly bewildered . . . to find that my name had gone the length and breadth of the country."¹³¹ "It had never occurred to me that it would be made a public matter, and I shrank from the very thought."¹³² How was she going to help all those other women by her example (that, she insists, was her sole aim in asking for $200,000 instead of taking the $15,000 that was offered) if the thing was never to be made public?¹³³ At the hotel, "ladies and gentlemen called on me with offers of sympathy. All the persons connected with the hotel were kindness itself."¹³⁴ Her father came and stayed with her constantly. Brigham Young's daughter and the ward teachers visited her. Surrounded by eager reporters, she told her stories. And what is the reaction? "She treated her rooms as a fortress and spoke constantly of being kidnapped or murdered."¹³⁵ When reporters asked embarrassing questions, she quickly changed the subject, "glanced nervously at the windows and door," and whispered, "Would you think that they could abduct me from here? . . . Ah, you don't know them. . . . I dare not let my little boy leave the room, and I eat all my meals here."¹³⁶

She was putting on an act. To stay with friends, she says, would be to "endanger their lives and their home."¹³⁷ Yet on the night of her "perilous escape" from Salt Lake she went to the house of those friends, and they all came out of the house together, "and started, ostensibly to walk home,"¹³⁸ showing that she was perfectly free not only to visit her friends "ostensibly," but to leave her hotel. Another check: "I could not leave my room, nor did I dare to do so, nor to allow my children out of my sight for nearly two months."¹³⁹ Well, she did leave her room during that time, to give an anti-Mormon lecture in the lobby.¹⁴⁰ But more important is her report that just before going to the hotel, "I had sent the elder of my boys to his grandmother" in Cottonwood.¹⁴¹ It is simply not true that she dared not allow her children out of her sight: the one was living in Cottonwood in perfect safety, where the other soon joined him—but it is a necessary fiction if her story of imminent danger is to hold up. So far was the lady from hiding out from the Mormons that she "complained bitterly" that her Mormon friends did not visit her, as indeed some of them did—including the ward teachers!¹⁴²

After the great siege episode comes the great escape. Leaving the Walker House by the back door (a way undiscovered by the Danites), Ann Eliza openly parades on the street, visits her friends the Strattons, with whom she is seen "ostensibly" going back to her hotel.¹⁴³ Suddenly she mounts a carriage and dashes off to catch a train at a distant and unspecified place in the mountains—it would never do to let the reader know that the place was really Ogden; what could be tamer? The excitement of her "providential escape" lies entirely in what she imagines during the ride; there is not the slightest indication of any attempt to stop or overtake her, which would have been the easiest thing in the world if anybody had wanted to do it. She got to the station with only two minutes to spare: if that is not a hairbreadth escape from Mormonism, what is? This remained forever after the melodramatic climax of her life story. "Ahead lay Wyoming and freedom," writes Mr. Wallace, unable to resist such a perfect Hollywood cliché.¹⁴⁴ Freedom had been hers any time she wanted it: she had been publicly offered $15,000 cash and safe conduct out of the territory.¹⁴⁵

Out in the World

After her "providential escape" Mrs. Young traveled around the country giving "racy" lectures on life with Brigham, accompanied by her manager, a dashing, handsome fellow who knew his way around. Now it happens that sex sells newspapers as well as lecture tickets, and the ever-cynical gentlemen of the press were not slow in making inevitable comments about Mrs. Young and her interesting partner.¹⁴⁶ Again the reaction is everything. "After reading the scurrilous piece," writes the sympathetic Mr. Wallace, "Ann Eliza sat stunned. Her first words, when she could find words, to Major Pond were 'Brigham Young's money is at the bottom of this.' "¹⁴⁷ Of course it was; Mr. Young is at the bottom of all her sufferings. What gives it away is the reaction of the gallant Major; though a man of the world and professional purveyor of scandal, he too is shocked and wounded. His chaste mind simply can't conceive of such a thing: "I cannot imagine its object," he wrote, lost and bemused, "unless its source comes through Mormon influence."¹⁴⁸ That, of course, is the answer: "I have long been looking for a stab in the back from Brigham."¹⁴⁹ What treachery—a stab in the back, after all he had done for Brigham! For Mr. Wallace this was Brigham Young's fiendish way of attacking Ann Eliza "through her best friends," though throughout the history any specific friends strangely fail to materialize.¹⁵⁰

Finally "Ann Eliza had attained every goal,"¹⁵¹ celebrating "the victory of national monogamy toward which she had contributed so great a part."¹⁵² Again the reaction: she had no "peace of mind." While "her public face, except for the past suffering she exploited professionally, . . . was the face of success and contentment, her secret second face, the one behind the lyceum mask, remained disturbed and distraught."¹⁵³ Free from the horrors of Mormon bondage, she still suffers, and as always the suffering is of her own making.

In the quiet Michigan town of Manistee, the Moses E. Dennings, hailed as the town's model couple, had just celebrated twenty-three years of happily married life. Woodward says it was their golden wedding anniversary, and that Denning "had children older than Ann Eliza."¹⁵⁴ According to Wallace he was at most fifty-three years old.¹⁵⁵ Ann Eliza (who a year later was to lecture in Ohio on "Utah's Curse and the Nation's Shame") was staying at the home of the wealthy and hospitable Dennings. Time passes, but not very much. We return within two years to find the model marriage broken up and the elderly Mr. Denning married to the charming houseguest. What is Ann Eliza's reaction to that? Total silence. In her complete autobiography of 1908 she makes no mention of Denning. But what a production she could have made of it if she had been in the first Mrs. Denning's shoes! Even Mrs. Woodward raises an eyebrow, for Ann Eliza can hardly have been madly in love with the "rich old logger with one arm."¹⁵⁶ In no time at all Ann Eliza was playing her accustomed role of the abused and neglected wife. Like Dee and Young, Denning was a brute, "so that by living with him, the health of your oratrix became weak and impaired and broken."¹⁵⁷ But though she "refused to sustain the relation of wife to him any longer,"¹⁵⁸ she stubbornly refused to divorce him—which Wallace finds most noble of her. Denning begged her to leave him, "offered to give me all he had if I would leave Manistee, which I refused to do."¹⁵⁹ Why? Because, Wallace explains, "she was not ready now to separate herself" from the advantages of "a permanent marriage in monogamy."¹⁶⁰ But what are the advantages of living with a monogamous husband who "called his wife 'bitch' and 'whore' and accused her of wanton behavior with half the male population of Manistee"?¹⁶¹ What could she see in the loathsome Denning, who hated the sight of her? The answer to that question (as if you didn't already know the answer) is simple—Denning was loaded. Now it is worthy of note that from the moment Ann Eliza became the rich Mrs. Denning she ceased entirely from her great Mormon crusade. "Does any one think," she had cried, "that, for the sake of emolument, I could thus open my heart? . . . Never. My womanhood revolts at the idea. As a means of support, I would never have undertaken it."¹⁶² Yet when she finally had the means and the time to carry on her great crusade in style she suddenly lost all interest in it: the lecture she gave the week she married Denning was the last one she ever gave,¹⁶³ which is strange indeed if she never lectured for money. "Driven by the demons of duty and money,"¹⁶⁴ she strangely forgot about the duty as soon as she got the money.

As soon as Denning left her for the last time, Ann Eliza went on a great spending spree, buying up the town and charging everything to Denning on the advice of her attorney. "She bought about a thousand dollars worth of groceries and provisions, dry goods, shoes, slippers, furniture and hardware in a couple of days."¹⁶⁵ The reader may recall how on the advice of her lawyers, moving with great speed "so as to escape detection," she auctioned off Brigham Young's furniture just before leaving him,¹⁶⁶ converting everything to cash at a handsome rate. Again, however, she is the frail martyr, noble to the end: "Nothing shall be set down in malice,"¹⁶⁷ she tells the reporters as she sets about to portray the monster Denning, who in the end tried to starve her—just like Brigham!

Wallace has gone to no end of trouble to search out the last days of this "remarkable woman." We find her happy at last with her son Edward, whose marriage with a Southern Socialite had broken up, leaving him free to devote his full time to mama as they settled down in a bungalow in Denver. But then "perhaps from lack of money," Wallace explains, "she sold her Denver property and was forced to dispossess her son."¹⁶⁸ Still disdaining money, she next turns up in Utah to claim a $2,000 legacy left her by the generous and forgiving Dee. It was pretty decent of him, since she never had one generous thing to say about Dee,¹⁶⁹ whom for fifty years she had been describing as the blight of her life. Then she moved in on her brother Gilbert in El Paso, where she "occupied four different residences in five years."¹⁷⁰ "During these years," says Wallace, "Ann Eliza's neighbors knew her only as 'Mrs. Anna E. Denning, widow of Moses R.,' " though Moses R. was still "very much alive."¹⁷¹ Here is the same old Ann Eliza, passing herself off in her last days as something fine and noble, a sweet retiring widow, instead of the much-divorced wife of a man who had done everything he could to get rid of her.

In 1908, painting a heroic picture of herself as a lone warrior against the powerful hierarchy, who "have found huge enjoyment in their own guile and cunning in evading punishment for their crimes,"¹⁷² she can speak with the same intimate inside knowledge of Utah and the Mormon leaders that she had displayed in 1876, though she has been away from Utah for thirty-five years. She shows us here what she has been doing all along, i.e., converting old atrocity stories into firsthand experience by merely tagging her name to them.

The last we hear of the living Ann Eliza is a statement attributed to her older grandson in 1930: "I hope to hell I never see her again."¹⁷³

Such briefly but without major omissions is the heart-rending story of Ann Eliza Young, the story which she has parlayed into a six-hundred-page book of suffering and horror such as no words can describe. But we should not pass by in silence one particularly harrowing experience that occurred to Ann Eliza in the East some time after she had escaped from Mormon Bondage:

When once, in a car, I saw a manly little fellow, about twelve or thirteen years of age, rise with a rare grace, and give his seat to an old lady, the tears sprang to my eyes, such an unaccustomed sight was it. I contrasted that boy with the youth of Utah, and I felt with a new indignation flashing through all my veins, and a new sorrow tugging at my heart, the curse that polygamy was to the young men, as well as to the young girls, who are growing up under the teachings of that baneful system. It is horrible! It fouls and poisons the stream at its very source (and it adds mud and filth as it crawls along its slimy way), sending up its noxious vapors, etc., etc.¹⁷⁴

Even if all this comes by way of comment on her marriage with the exceedingly monogamous James Dee, it just gives you an idea of how the woman suffered.

Notes to Part 1

* Sounding Brass was originally published in Salt Lake City by Bookcraft in 1963. It carried the subtitle, "Informal Studies in the Lucrative Art of Telling Stories about Brigham Young and the Mormons."

^1. Mrs. T. B. H. (Fanny) Stenhouse, Tell It All: The Story of a Life's Experience in Mormonism (Hartford, CT: Worthington, 1874), 31.

^2. Ann Eliza Webb Young, Wife No. 19; Or, The Story of a Life of Bondage, Being a Complete Exposé of Mormonism, and Revealing the Sorrows, Sacrifices and Sufferings of Women in Polygamy (Hartford, CT: Dustin, Gilman, 1875), 32-33.

^3. Ann Eliza Young, Life in Mormon Bondage (Philadelphia: Aldine, 1908), 1.

^4. Young, Wife No. 19, 401.

^5. Ibid., 601.

^6. Ibid., 576 (emphasis added).

^7. Stenhouse, Tell It All, 31.

^8. Irving Wallace, The Twenty-Seventh Wife (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1961), 9.

^9. Young, Wife No. 19, 568.

^10. Ibid., 591.

^11. Ibid., 601.

^12. Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 278.

^13. Ibid., 431.

^14. Young, Wife No. 19, 279.

^15. Young, Life in Mormon Bondage, 1.

^16. Ibid., 26.

^17. Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 278.

^18. Helen B. Woodward, The Bold Women (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953), 330.

^19. Young, Wife No. 19, 230.

^20. Stenhouse, Tell It All, 351.

^21. Young, Wife No. 19, 99.

^22. Ibid., 106.

^23. Stenhouse, Tell It All, 143.

^24. Young, Wife No. 19, 111.

^25. Ibid., 112-13.

^26. Ibid., 118.

^27. Ibid., 114.

^28. Ibid., 180.

^29. Ibid., 545.

^30. Ibid., 142.

^31. Ibid., 186.

^32. Stenhouse, Tell It All, 314-15.

^33. Young, Wife No. 19, 186.

^34. Ibid., 183.

^35. Ibid. (emphasis added).

^36. Ibid., 190.

^37. Ibid.

^38. Ibid., 194-95.

^39. Ibid., 190.

^40. Young, Life in Mormon Bondage, 149-50.

^41. Ibid., 197.

^42. Ibid., 195.

^43. Ibid.

^44. Ibid., 197.

^45. Ibid., 198.

^46. Ibid.

^47. Ibid.

^48. Ibid.

^49. Ibid., 229.

^50. Ibid. (emphasis added).

^51. Ibid., 230.

^52. Ibid., 231-32.

^53. Ibid., 370.

^54. Ibid.

^55. Ibid., 292-93.

^56. Ibid., 296.

^57. Ibid., 296-97.

^58. Ibid., 375.

^59. Ibid., 374.

^60. Ibid., 375.

^61. Ibid., 382.

^62. Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 128.

^63. Young, Wife No. 19, 385.

^64. Ibid., 402.

^65. Ibid., 405.

^66. Ibid.

^67. Ibid., 407-8.

^68. Ibid., 408.

^69. Ibid., 411.

^70. Young, Life in Mormon Bondage, 305; cf. Young, Wife No., 19, 408.

^71. Ibid., 411.

^72. Ibid., 412.

^73. Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 150.

^74. Young, Wife No. 19, 373.

^75. Ibid., 423.

^76. Ibid., 132.

^77. Ibid.

^78. Ibid., 132-33.

^79. Woodward, Bold Women, 322.

^80. Ibid., 134.

^81. Ibid., 134-35.

^82. Ibid., 135.

^83. Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 388.

^84. Ibid.

^85. Ibid.; Young, Wife No. 19, 94-95.

^86. Young, Wife No. 19, 461.

^87. Ibid., 455.

^88. Ibid., 462.

^89. Ibid., 591.

^90. Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 224.

^91. Ibid.

^92. Young, Wife No. 19, 533.

^93. Ibid.

^94. Ibid., 532-33.

^95. Ibid., 534 (emphasis added).

^96. Ibid.

^97. Ibid., 533-34.

^98. Ibid., 536.

^99. Ibid., 534.

^100. Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 229.

^101. Young, Wife No. 19, 536; Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 229.

^102. Young, Wife No. 19, 554.

^103. Ibid., 533.

^104. Ibid.

^105. Ibid., 534.

^106. Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 224.

^107. Ibid., 230.

^108. Young, Wife No. 19, 532.

^109. Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 228.

^110. Young, Wife No. 19, 534-35.

^111. Ibid., 536.

^112. Ibid., 534-36.

^113. Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 229.

^114. Young, Wife No. 19, 537.

^115. Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 232.

^116. Young, Wife No. 19, 537.

^117. Ibid., 542.

^118. Ibid., 537, 555.

^119. Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 19.

^120. Woodward, Bold Women, 325.

^121. Young, Wife No. 19, 555; she sued Brigham for $20,000 for legal fees, plus $1,000 per month, plus $200,000 for the care of herself and children. Cf. Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 244-46; the lawyers were expecting to get 50 percent of the suit, but she insisted on a flat rate of $20,000.

^122. Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 237.

^123. Woodward, Bold Women, 325-26.

^124. Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 22, 238.

^125. Stenhouse, Tell It All, 288.

^126. Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 244.

^127. Young, Wife No. 19, 549.

^128. Ibid., 546.

^129. Stenhouse, Tell It All, 288 (emphasis added).

^130. Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 412-13.

^131. Young, Wife No. 19, 549.

^132. Ibid., 548.

^133. Ibid., 551-52.

^134. Ibid., 551.

^135. Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 257.

^136. Ibid., 256.

^137. Young, Wife No. 19, 548.

^138. Ibid., 569.

^139. Ibid., 549.

^140. Ibid., 567.

^141. Ibid., 547.

^142. Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 247.

^143. Young, Wife No. 19, 569.

^144. Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 277.

^145. Young, Wife No. 19, 551.

^146. Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 310-11.

^147. Ibid., 311.

^148. Ibid., 317.

^149. Ibid.

^150. Ibid., 250.

^151. Ibid., 333.

^152. Ibid., 409.

^153. Ibid., 333.

^154. Woodward, Bold Women, 330.

^155. Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 396.

^156. Woodward, Bold Women, 330.

^157. Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 410.

^158. Ibid., 414.

^159. Ibid.

^160. Ibid., 411.

^161. Ibid.

^162. Young, Wife No. 19, 568.

^163. Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 396.

^164. Ibid., 278.

^165. Ibid., 413.

^166. Young, Wife No. 19, 546.

^167. Ibid.

^168. Ibid., 415.

^169. Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 420.

^170. Ibid., 416.

^171. Ibid., 417.

^172. Young, Life in Mormon Bondage, 4.

^173. Wallace, Twenty-Seventh Wife, 427.

^174. Young, Wife No. 19, 400-401.