The 19th Wife Read online

  Even so, Lydia complained to Chauncey that he was spending too much time with the first Mrs. Webb. Gilbert recalls the young bride sighing, “And what am I supposed to do while you’re with her?”

  As monstrous as these recollections make Lydia out to be, we should remember that she was still a teenager, naive, and devout. She was cast into a situation that even the savviest courtesan might not know how to maneuver. She feared that the secretive nature of her marriage meant it could be quickly abandoned, annulled, or even denied. During the first month of marriage, Lydia wrote her mother: “You were right, Mother. The meaning of marriage can be unknowable. I try to keep him happy, but sometimes I do not know what will please him, and what will cause a wrinkled look of displeasure. I do not cry in front of him, or before the children, and certainly not Mrs. Webb. When I feel the need, I go outside with the animals. My faith comforts me more than ever, for I know that God and His Son will now welcome me, when the time comes, for I have fulfilled my duty. I am now Wife.” We must bear this in mind before we condemn Lydia: Her spiritual leaders had told her this was her path to Salvation.

  Elizabeth put up with Lydia’s selfish behavior for only so long. One evening she spoke with her husband. “I have drawn up a chart,” she said. “On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, you will spend the evening with her.”

  Chauncey relented immediately. “You’re right. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays will be yours. I’ll spend Sunday night alone, here in the keeping room. That’ll even it out.”

  “On Sundays,” Elizabeth said firmly, “you’ll be with me.”

  6.

  Such disharmony in the Webb household took place while the Saints were preparing for their greatest test yet. The Exodus was scheduled to begin with the spring weather, but new threats of massacre compelled Brigham to declare Nauvoo no longer safe. On February 4, 1846, in the dark heart of winter, the first Saints crossed the Mississippi to Sugar Creek, Iowa. Brigham did not make the treacherous crossing for another eleven days, staying behind in Nauvoo to perform several Endowment Ceremonies to Saints anxious to be blessed before abandoning their beloved Temple. By March 1, some two thousand Saints huddled in wagons and tents in Sugar Creek. Their journey had begun, yet their destination was still unknown. From here Brigham led the Saints roughly 350 miles, at a rate of approximately six miles per day, to what would become a yearlong way station on the Nebraska side of the Missouri River, Winter Quarters, an exposed encampment roughly six miles upriver from the site of present-day Omaha.

  Chauncey and his family remained in Nauvoo until early April 1846. He was too busy building wagons to join the early emigrants. Eventually they too packed up, leaving behind nearly all their possessions and wealth. The Webbs—Chauncey, his two rival wives, and three children—joined the Exodus, crossing the Mississippi in two bonneted wagons pulled by three yoke of oxen. They carried a year’s supply of provisions, their clothing, and their faith. The Webbs reached Winter Quarters by midsummer. By September, some twenty thousand Saints had gathered there, each having placed his or her life into the hands of Brigham Young. Once a city rivaling Chicago, Nauvoo was now a ghost town. The wondrous Temple—the pride and handiwork of thousands of Saints—was abandoned. In a few years it would be in ruins, resembling a pile of ancient rubble in Rome or Greece, with animals sleeping among its stones.15 The Nauvoo Temple would not rise again until 2002.

  For Elizabeth Churchill Webb, this event would prove momentous. This is the moment she buried her Testimony in the time capsule, leaving for us an eloquent, if incomplete, record of her faith.

  7.

  As every LDS member knows, the Saints would end up staying in Winter Quarters for almost a year. Under Brigham’s direction, they laid out blocks of flimsy tents, open-sided dugouts, and simple log sheds, building a temporary city to survive the winter of 1846–1847. Brigham called it the Camp of Israel. The settlement included community facilities such as a gristmill, a school, and several workshops to produce basic goods. Among these was Chauncey’s wainwright shop. Here, with help from his stepson, Gilbert, he built and repaired the wagons that would carry the Saints on their upcoming journey.

  In January 1847, in a Revelation, God instructed Brigham to lead the Saints to the Rocky Mountains. The Heavenly Father assured His Prophet he would know the exact place to build their new Zion when he saw it. Word spread through Winter Quarters that a long journey would begin soon; everyone busied themselves with final preparations. For the Webbs, however, this meant their own departure would have to be delayed. Once again Chauncey’s wainwright shop was needed to support the departing Saints, the majority of whom left Winter Quarters in the spring and summer of 1847. By the time Chauncey’s work was done, it was too late for the Webbs to depart for Zion; the autumn snows would catch them. The Webbs would have to wait through the winter of 1847–1848 before they could join the new settlement in Utah.

  According to Ann Eliza, during this time Chauncey was under the misperception that his plural marriage remained a secret. “Sometimes a husband is wrong about very much,” Ann Eliza observes. In every society—from the forums of ancient Rome to the dorms of BYU—the romantic life of others has always been subject to gossip. The early Saints were no exception. Everyone knew that Lydia was now the second Mrs. Webb. As Ann Eliza puts it, “The girl made sure of that.”

  Elizabeth’s pain from sharing her husband with Lydia was renewed when, in November 1847, Lydia announced she would have a child. Gilbert’s record of how Lydia told Elizabeth she was pregnant is worth quoting at length.

  My mother set out a stew and didn’t say much, minding her own business in the way that she had since Lydia became her rival. The wind was fierce, blowing through the chinks in the logs. My mother never sat to join us, she ran from the table to the hearth and back with the biscuits and the drippings and everything else. Anyone would see the difference now, what with my mother in her apron with the gravy stain above her heart while Lydia sat at the head of the table in a Summertime dress too thin for November. Her complexion was as white as the frost on the water in the well. “Children, your father and I have something important to tell you,” Lydia said. “Soon you’ll have a baby brother or sister.” She took my father’s fist and held it up like she had won a relay race.

  My Ma is the most generous woman I know. She never thinks of herself if there is someone else to think of. That’s why she didn’t speak. When she heard the news she took a step backward. One step followed by another, and again another. It was like a moment in a fairy tale because she seemed to disappear. I know it doesn’t make any sense and it isn’t possible and all the rest, but that’s what happened before my eyes—my mother was swallowed up by Lydia’s news. If the Lord can send an angel to Joseph Smith, then a woman learning the news of her husband’s baby with his other wife can disappear. And that’s what happened. She was gone. For a moment we didn’t know where she was. I had to go out into the cold night to bring her in. She was shivering. Several times she said—not loud but soft in a whisper—“Please. No.” I led her to her bedroll beside the hearth and removed her shoes, and by now my mother stopped talking altogether. I set her under the blankets. “Lay quiet,” I said. It’s a hard feeling for a boy to put his mother to bed like she were the child.

  8.

  Thankfully, Elizabeth’s impulse to document her life did not end with the Testimony of Faith. In The 19th Wife, Ann Eliza describes her mother writing a travel diary during the Exodus. Many Saints, especially the women, kept detailed records of their journeys. These documents, many now archived by the Church, have been central to our understanding of the arduous trek from Nauvoo to Winter Quarters and ultimately to Zion. I have relied on Elizabeth’s Pioneer diary, written between May 1848 and September 1848, to narrate her story during this transformative period.

  The Webbs left for Zion on May 4, 1848, in a company of 1,229 Saints. The column of 397 wagons driving westward carried every imaginable provision: stoves, bureaus, rockers, farm tools, a pia
no. The livestock roped to the rear of the wagons included dairy cattle, horses, mules, and spotted pigs. Elizabeth notes in her diary the sounds of the other animals: “dogs barking, cats mewing, thousands of bees buzzing in their hives, and a brown squirrel flitting about its cage.”

  The Webbs and their fellow travelers were following in the footsteps of the Saints who had traveled a year earlier along the old Oregon Trail. Brigham had established an ingenious system of roadside mailboxes at ten-mile markers—typically the sun-bleached skull of a pronghorn antelope or an American bison—to leave information about the trail, crossings, conditions, and so forth. In 1847, the journey for Brigham and his Saints had been treacherous and uncertain. By 1848, the trip, while arduous, was no longer a mystery. Ann Eliza was almost four years old at the time. Some of her earliest memories, she tells us in The 19th Wife, come from this trip. For her, the journey was a period of great adventure and joy. As the wagons rolled through the prairie grass, she would skip along, picking flowers—probably milkweed, phlox, and meadow rose—and singing hymns. The sound of more than a thousand Saints singing “The Spirit of God Like a Fire Is Burning!” must have fortified them through their long days.

  The itinerary was almost always the same: Every day for four and a half months the Saints rose at five, ate a hot breakfast in the dawn, and pushed forward until dusk. They rested only on the Sabbath. In her Exodus diary, Elizabeth writes of ending a day and “circling the wagons, lighting the supper fire, and watering the animals. By the time the chores were done and the children fed, the blue night sky had turned black and was lit by stars. Often I stay awake to watch the moonlight shine upon the hides of the sleeping oxen, on their moist noses, and on the white brow of Ann Eliza, who always sleeps like an angel, whether sun or storm.”

  The hopeful quality of their journey changed dramatically when in early June Lydia gave birth. The baby—to be named Diantha—was born with complications. Already on the journey Elizabeth had witnessed in her company three newborns die, two followed by their mothers to their prairie graves. What exactly happened to Lydia and her baby we will never know. That the situation was serious is, however, entirely clear.16

  Elizabeth immediately recognized that the lives of both mother and child were in danger. “Lydia lay upon the tickings in the wagon-bed unable to open her eyes,” Elizabeth writes. “When I called her name she did not respond. The child Diantha was even more lifeless, tiny and still at her mother’s side. I did not know what to do.”

  At this time it was common for Saints facing illness to resort to prayer and the healing powers of priests. Elizabeth describes an Elder (I cannot determine who) sitting with Lydia in the wagon-bed. “He came at night when we had stopped beside a creek. He was an old man, so worn by the journey I doubted whether he would ever see the Zion we sung about. I worried over what he was capable of.”

  The Elder gathered the family around Lydia in the wagon. He set his hands upon her head and prayed for her recovery. He did the same with the baby. “If the Lord so pleases, then He will save them. Now you must pray,” he told the Webbs.

  “What if they don’t improve?”

  “Then the Lord must have a reason to leave your prayers unanswered.”

  This struck Elizabeth in the heart. Since the wedding more than two years before, many times she had wished Lydia out of her house. She admits to having prayed for the Lord to take her away. “Many times, when I am alone at night, I must listen to my husband visiting my rival in the manner he no longer visits me. How many times have I begged the Lord to end this humiliation?” she admits in her diary. “Yet again and again I find myself alone.”

  Before the Elder departed he said to Elizabeth, “Look after this girl and her child. Do not let them suffer. Do what you can.”

  Did Elizabeth hesitate? Did she think: This is my chance to be free of my competition and return my husband to me? We do not know. If she did, the selfish impulse soon passed. For two weeks Elizabeth devoted herself to Lydia’s and Diantha’s recovery, refusing to leave their side. During the daily trek across the summer plains, Elizabeth applied compresses and spoon-fed water and gruel. “Above all,” she writes, “I prayed.”

  The following passage from her diary is a remarkable articulation of her faith. It provides important insight into how many early LDS women came to terms, both practical and spiritual, with plural marriage:

  I came to see the test the Lord had set before me. Previously I had allowed myself to hate my Sister Wife. I resented each breath she pulled from the air. I resented each morsel she plucked from the plate. I resented the dent in the cushion she left when she stood from the chair. I resented the tendril of hair left on the brush. I resented her voice rising to greet me. I resented her lips on the brows of my children. I resented the very qualities that made her a fellow creature of God. My dark hatred, too, had spilled over to her unborn child. Verily I came to see that the Lord Jesus Christ had set before me a test. Do I love? He asked. Or do I hate? He had heard the cries from my wicked heart and He took pity on me. Had He answered my prayers, and removed Lydia from our family, and destroyed her child, He would not have truly loved me. No! He loved me by testing me. When I first met Brother Joseph all those years before he said to me and others, “Let us pour forth love—show forth our kindness unto all mankind, for love begets love.” I await my Day of Judgment with a heart bursting open with love. Yet I had forgotten all that I believed. Kneeling beside Lydia in the wagon-bed, my faith returned. The love the Saints had shown me returned. When it did, Lydia rose and the baby howled and their health was restored. Their recovery coincided with the restoration of my faith. I can never forget this! Its meaning is clear and shall always be.

  By September 1848, the Webbs and their party had reached the cool red mudstone canyon of the Weber River, only a few days out from the Salt Lake Valley. At some point, Brigham had driven from Salt Lake to meet them. At night, around the campfire, he described the Mormon Canaan they would soon find over the mountains. After only a year in the Valley, the Saints had already built up a small city of one-room log homes, neat roads on a grid, an imposing fort to defend against Native American attack, several gristmills and granaries, dozens of shops for tools and goods, and some five thousand acres of thriving crops irrigated by a sophisticated system of shallow channels, locks, and dams. “Brigham told us,” Elizabeth writes in her final diary entry, “of our Promised Land. God had revealed it to Brigham, and now Brigham was revealing it to us. I held my sister wife’s hand as we listened to Brigham describe the world that awaited over the pass.”

  On September 13, 1844, Ann Eliza celebrated her fourth birthday. “Brigham held me and touched me,” she writes in The 19th Wife, “and smiled such that I knew I was his favorite child. On my birthday he kissed me and declared, ‘This beautiful child is the future of the Saints of Deseret!’ ” We will never know whether or not Ann Eliza, at the age of four, could remember this scene with such clarity. Even so, when she writes of it years later in her memoir, she notes, “I was happy because I saw my mother and father happy, and my Prophet happy too. I remember his fingers on my arm and the wool of his beard on my cheek. In no way could I have known many years later this man would marry me and then try to destroy me. There were no clouds on the horizon that September in Utah. The vista was clear.”

  When Chauncey Webb, his two wives, and now four children arrived in Salt Lake on September 20, 1848, they were, by all accounts, a happy family. Plural marriage, once so loathsome to Elizabeth in concept, had become a part of her daily existence. Elizabeth recorded this thought in her diary: “Brigham used to say: We make room for what the Lord gives us. How true, how true.” She had accommodated Lydia into her household; and the second Mrs. Webb had come to appreciate Elizabeth’s companionship. Each woman felt for the other’s children the way an aunt might feel for a niece or nephew. In the next few years, as the Webbs worked to establish themselves in Salt Lake, Elizabeth came to accept the second wife. “Lydia is of our family, no m
ore or less. So says God,” she often told Ann Eliza.

  As Elizabeth set up a new household and participated in the settling of the Utah Territory and grew into middle age, she would have little time to linger over the insults of polygamy again until 1855—when in one feverish, indulgent month Chauncey, who must have been suffering from what we would now call a midlife crisis, married three women, each under the age of seventeen. But that, as they say, is another story.

  9.

  I wrote this paper for three reasons. One, to show the effects of plural marriage on one woman’s life. Her story is neither representative nor unusual. It is simply that: one woman’s story. There are many other narratives, written or waiting to be told, that shed further light on the practice of polygamy in early Church history. Anyone familiar with even a few of these will know that many women despised the institution, while others rejoiced in it for practical and/or spiritual reasons. Among the practical reasons were the sharing of housework, child care, and the relief from sexual obligations to one’s husband. The spiritual reasons were of the highest order: The happiest plural wives believed their entrance into Heaven was secure.

  The secondary purpose of this paper has been to raise up the subject of polygamy as a legitimate and unfinished topic of inquiry for LDS scholars and writers. The Church, of course, banned the practice in 1890. Since then our leaders have spoken out forcefully and consistently against it. Any honest observer would have to concede that there has been no official connection between the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and polygamy for more than one hundred years.