“Would you like to read our Book?” said Gilbert. It was after midnight, and the street outside Mrs. Cox’s window had fallen silent long ago. Virginie lay asleep in my lap.
She accepted it, holding it close to her breast. “Now then, I’ve got a lot of questions, but it’s getting late so maybe I’ll ask just the one that’s been at me for some time.”
I urged Mrs. Cox to ask whatever she needed to know.
“There’s some who go round saying a Mormon man takes a dozen wives, maybe more. When I ’ear this, I say it can’t be true. I got two Mormons living right ’ere in me ’ouse and I’d know, wouldn’t I, if they kept a ’arem back ’ome.”
Before our departure for England, Brigham had instructed us to evade the truth of plural marriage. “Far away, across the oceans,” he said, “you will find the stranger cannot imagine the reds of Zion, nor the snowy heights of our peaks, nor the vastness of our great basin. Just as these ignorant men and women cannot see the beauty of our land, they cannot understand the uniqueness of our families. Speak not of the plural wife until our foreign brothers and sisters have arrived in Deseret and can see for themselves how red our sand blows.”
For most men, myself included, the lie comes quickly and more naturally than we hope to admit. Thus I denied the truth of polygamy to Mrs. Cox, and forever after regretted doing so. I blame no one but myself for this misdeed.
“That’s what I wanted to ’ear,” she said. “Right, now I’ve kept you up late, ’aven’t I?” She lifted her daughter while expressing such genuine gratitude and love that I knew for certain then and there we had converted our first soul.
Joseph Young, Brigham’s son, was stationed in London on his own Mission. I wrote to him about our first convert, and he journeyed the eight hours to baptize Mrs. Cox. We met in a field dotted with sheep, beside a fast-running stream. He led Mrs. Cox into the water and submerged her. With that, we had brought forth our first Saint.
When Mrs. Cox emerged from the stream, her wet robe permitted the rosy color of her flesh to come through. To ignore her beauty would be to ignore God’s mastery. To look at it would be to commit a sin. Yet I must confess I could not help but stare. Mrs. Cox stood in a sunbeam that gave her the look of a statue carved by the hand of an artist from classical Greece—a sheer marble gown draped over her form in such a manner that every curve was apparent to the day.
Later that night, after a celebration in the parlor, Gilbert and I lay upon our bed studying the Book. I sensed an agitation in my son—his foot was kicking the bedpost irritably. When I asked him to stop, for it was disturbing my concentration, he did so sullenly. I asked if there was a matter he wished to discuss, but he said he had nothing to share.
I have seen the gloomy air visit Gilbert many times. Aware of the stifled energies of the unmarried young man, I never pressed him on the matter. I decided the next day I would speak to him about marriage. There was a great possibility of meeting a young woman in Liverpool—a pretty soul eager for conversion and deliverance to Zion. My boy needed something to look forward to, I concluded, and having solved, or so I believed, my son’s anxiety, I raked the coals for a final time, turned down the lamp, and settled beneath the bedclothes with a fine sense of accomplishment. It was still early, and the streets threw up the lamentable noise of urban sin—the singing drunk, the wench twirling on the sailor’s arm, the gang of orphans scurrying across the cobblestones in broken shoes. It took some time for my mind to clear of the wretchedness below our warm, cloistered room and permit me to enter a peaceful sleep.
Late that night, after the clamor from the street had died out, a foreign noise woke me. I turned on my side and discovered Gilbert missing from the bed. The moon shed a silver glow upon the room, illuminating the pink nosegays in the paper on the wall. I opened the door with such precision that its hinge brought no attention to my movements—a stealth which enabled me to witness, at the opposite end of the corridor, my son positioned near Mrs. Cox at her chamber’s door. Their persons stood so close together a Bible would not pass between them. The window beside them was cracked and a night breeze wound its way into the hall, billowing their sleeping gowns in a way that unified them like a double cumulus cloud.
I cleared my throat. “Gilbert.”
In unison they peered down the hallway in my direction. “Father—”
“Evening, Mr. Webb. Need some milk, do you? I’ll fetch the pail.”
“Father, I was on my way outside when I ran into Mrs. Cox. She asked me a question about the Afterlife.”
“That’s right. I was lying in me bed awake as the rooster, thinking about what will ’appen when it’s time to go on. What I want to know is, will I meet Mr. Cox in ’eaven? It’s what I was thinking when I ’eard ’is footsteps out ’ere, so I opened the door and asked. ’E was explaining ’ow things work when you came along.”
“Mrs. Cox would like us to baptize by proxy her husband,” Gilbert explained. “I’m willing to stand in his place.”
I felt a great shame for my accusations and retreated to our room. Yet my ear remained pricked, taking in the click of Mrs. Cox’s door and the fall of my boy’s step as he made his way down the crickety stairs and outside. The privy door squealed with its recognizable glee. I was still awake when he entered the room. He climbed over me and turned to face the wall. In the moonlight I watched him pick at the seam in the paper until at last sleep transported me, for a few hours, to my two loving wives at home.
In March of 1856, almost a year before I had anticipated a departure from Liverpool, Brigham sent word that he needed me at home. He had selected me, above all men, to organize a new plan to increase the rate of immigration. Up until then it cost on average $55 in gold for one Saint to journey from Europe to Great Salt Lake, via New York and Iowa City, or Saint Louis—a reasonable sum for a voyage consisting of many thousands of miles on ship, train, and wagon. Yet Brigham had come to believe, for what reason I cannot be sure, that the Church needed a more economical method of importing its Saints. His advisors, to whom he sometimes overly deferred, had convinced him of a plan they called Divine. In The 19th Wife Ann Eliza regrettably but correctly labels it a scheme.
The largest expense of the voyage was the teams of oxen that pulled the wagons from Iowa City into Utah, more than one thousand miles, and therefore Brigham’s advisors had concluded the oxen should be removed from the trip. The immigrant Saints, all of them, would pull their belongings across the plains and the mountains in hand-carts.
I complained to Brigham’s son, Joseph, about the feasability of the plan but he dismissed my concerns. “The Prophet has chosen you. It’s the will of the Lord. Now prepare to leave England.”
A few days before departing, I came to a decision about my future. I wanted to take Mrs. Cox as my wife. If I were another man, with a different set of values, I suspect I might have had the opportunity to embrace her in her boardinghouse; and I suspect she might have accepted my kiss. But I am not such a man. I have made a vow to my wives never to stray, and I have not and never will.
“Will you and Virginie return to Zion with us?” I proposed one evening shortly before our farewell. I told her she could live in my household in Great Salt Lake and become a part of it.
For a long while Mrs. Cox did not speak. My meaning was not to deceive this woman by importing her to Utah and then, once she was an ocean and continent away from home, demand she become my wife. I have known Saints to do so to foreign women and even young girls of fourteen and fifteen. It is an abhorrence I was always sorry Brigham never spoke out against. This was not my intention with Mrs. Cox, but I could not outright discuss marriage with her until I had first discussed it with my beloved Elizabeth.
“ ’Ere’s what I’ll do. I’ll give it a think tonight and tell you in the morning.”
It is unsettling, even for me, to look back at myself and recount here the impetuous feelings early love can inspire in a full-grown man. Yet because I promised this to be a full and true account, I wi
ll commit to paper how my heart pounded in my chest! I wanted to run through the front door and shout in the street! I knew then she would come to Utah, and I knew she would marry me once Mrs. Webb had agreed, and I will admit my mind raced months ahead to our wedding night, when at last I could touch this lovely creature and she would be mine.
Our farewell was an awkward moment. A carriage came for our trunks. The horses idled in the mud while we managed to part Mrs. Cox’s company. Gilbert, Mrs. Cox, and myself stood at her gate, each with a crooked smile that bore extended meaning. When Gilbert and I were in the carriage, Mrs. Cox pressed her face through the door. “ ’Tisn’t good-bye. We’ll be right behind you in another month.”
“The Saints will greet you when you arrive,” I promised.
“I’ll make sure of it,” said Gilbert.
The carriage pulled away. We, father and son, turned to admire Mrs. Cox standing beside the ivy climbing her gate. In the wind the early red-green leaves trembled, brushing her throat and cheek.
When she was out of sight Gilbert declared, “Father, I’m going to marry her.”
I was so startled by my son’s announcement that I had to struggle to suppress my jealousy. “Marry Mrs. Cox? My boy, what are you talking about?”
“When she lands in Utah, I’ll marry her.”
“Have you discussed this with Mrs. Cox?”
“No, but I know she’ll have me.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’ve never been so sure of anything.”
The leonine pride which resides in the cage of my heart had been stirred. I wanted to lash out and defend the woman who, in only a matter of time, would be mine. But I would not challenge my son in such a manner. I loved him too much. I had no doubt Mrs. Cox would become Mrs. Webb, my Mrs. Webb, that is, but to state the fact so baldly would leave him, I feared, irreparably harmed and, perhaps, weakened in the eyes of other women. The boy would need to marry soon, and I would help him, but he would not marry the woman I had already settled upon. Somewhere in The 19th Wife Ann Eliza asks, “Did my father not think himself selfish, claiming one woman when he already had two?”
Her question devastates me, even today.
Upon our arrival in Iowa City, we found, to great dismay, no materials for the construction of the hand-carts, no process of assembly, no leader with the temperament or skill to enact the Prophet’s plan. Even worse, only a few days behind us was the first arrival of Saints—anxious souls from London, Glasgow, Copenhagen, and Stockholm about to spill from the train with their belongings strapped to their backs. They would need nothing more than shelter and food, and yet Brigham’s agents had not prepared any. They had failed to establish a camp of any sort or stores of nourishment and water. The European souls—by early summer several thousand had gathered—were left to unroll their tickings in a field. When it rained, they propped coats and tarpaulins upon sticks. The kind people of Iowa City opened their larders to the emigrants, passing out bread, potatoes, and waxy wheels of cheese. There was no meat unless a pig was donated, or stolen. Water came from a single, questionable well.
Such conditions led to immediate squalor—the stench of the refugee camp is one that no man shall ever forget. Often I walked among these weary souls, looking for Mrs. Cox, grateful to never find her encamped in such suffering.
Always I saw the same question burning in the emigrants’ dispossessed eyes: Why? Why had the Church that promised them Salvation and taken their money for the journey abandoned them in a prairie, a thousand miles from Zion? The Apostles sent from Salt Lake—men whose names I shall refrain from presenting here—told the hungry and disenchanted migrants that any impatience would be interpreted as distrust of God. “You have been given a Divine challenge. Only the faithful will pass.” I cannot know whether the immigrants believed these men or were too broken to defy them.
By June, after much labor, the first carts were ready. They were a crude vehicle of poor craftsmanship and material in which I could take little pride. One cart could haul a family’s personal belongings, no more than seventeen pounds of garments and bedclothes per person. The Divine plan conceived of a man pulling the cart, while his wife and children walked alongside. In reality, there were a large number of young girls traveling alone and widows with babes, or the elderly. These fair creatures were never meant to drag their earthly possessions across the plains and over the Rocky Mountains and yet that is what we asked them to do.
Given the disorganization of the mission, and the slowness of the building supplies, I advised Brigham’s agents that the last party could leave no later than the end of June. The others would need to remain in Iowa City until the following spring. But these men, who were religious zealots, not organizational leaders, refused to adhere to my counsel. Against my orders, the last party of hand-carts left in the middle of August, walking toward their own death, I was quite sure. These foreign immigrants knew nothing of our climate or the mountains awaiting them. To make matters more precarious, the men who had promised to look over the immigrants like angels had sent them on their journey with criminally small rations—ten ounces of weak buckwheat flour and a little rice for each man and woman per day, an amount I understood to be approximately one-third of the average man’s caloric needs; and five ounces of buckwheat flour, and no rice, for the child Saints. Many of the immigrants were from Northern Europe and the cold harbors of Sweden and Norway and thus spoke little English, certainly not enough to complain about these insufficient supplies. Along the trail, at infrequent posts, the weary Saints would find supplements of brown sugar, cured pork, and weak coffee dispersed by the fat, careless Elders assigned to the task. It takes little forethought to know this is not enough food to walk a thousand miles while pulling one’s belongings. I advised the agents present that not only would the Saints freeze, they would also starve. One Apostle replied, “This is the will of Brigham himself. Take your complaints to him.” Were he there and not one thousand miles away, I would have appealed directly to the Prophet. Instead, I was forced to argue in the ears of his men, who proved themselves wholly ordinary. There are many to blame for the tragedy that ensued. I include myself in that wretched lot.
With the last party departed, we prepared for the journey ourselves. We formed a party of two dozen men, mostly Missionaries on return voyage from their work in European lands. The party included Joseph Young, who I must admit had grown from boy to man during his years abroad. He too had seen the risk facing the emigrants and had complained about it. But not even the Prophet’s son could affect the men who worked under the standard of Brigham Young. We left Iowa City well-prepared, with teams of oxen and mules, our own wagons stocked with flour and rice, coffee and sugar, dried beef and pork, chickens, a pig for every five men, and a milking cow. This is how it should be done, and great pangs of regret overcame me, and Gilbert, too, as we overtook that last party of hand-carts on the trail. They saw us comfortable on the wagon seat, or nudging along the cow with a reed, and heard the chickens cluck from the cage, and certainly they must have wondered why they themselves were not so well-equipped.
On the Platte River’s North Fork we joined an encampment of emigrants for one night. They were flung around several pits of fire, men and women and children alike, collapsed upon bundles of clothing and sacks of flour, too tired to set up camp properly. Many wore shoes held together by rawhide string. “What will they do when winter comes?” Gilbert asked, yet I could not answer him for the truth was too difficult to speak.
Gilbert and I, and the other men in our party, offered as much food as we could spare and handed over a pair of asses for the sick who were too enfeebled to walk. We promised we would send help once we reached the Salt Lake Valley. In the morning, with no more than a strip of sunlight in the east, we continued on our journey. Each man was determined to reach Zion as soon as possible. It was our only chance of saving these souls.
Upon reaching Great Salt Lake, our hearts broke open with relief. The city had grown in our absence, a
nd had we not been arriving with urgent news, we would have stopped to marvel at Zion’s progress. But there was no time for reflection and joy. At once Gilbert and I traveled home while Joseph Young went directly to speak to his father.
On the matter of the hand-cart expedition, this is where my account differs from that of my daughter in her published memories. When Brigham heard of the danger awaiting these innocent emigrants, he shook with anger. He scolded the men, his apparent agents, who had misinterpreted his words. Certainly the Prophet wanted the expedition performed economically, but he had never meant to risk a life. Ann Eliza doubts the Prophet’s sincerity, claiming Brigham had known all along the dangers and misery facing the emigrants. This is not true, for I witnessed the Prophet preach in the Tabernacle the next Sunday that every Saint in Zion must contribute to the rescue effort. He denounced the men who had made such reckless decisions in his name. He denied that the perils facing the emigrants were a test of God but said they were, rather, a sign of man’s incompetence and indifference. As he orated, blood filled his throat. His voice reached across, or so it seemed, the entire Salt Lake Valley. It is impossible to deny the sincerity of his rage.
I should stop my account of the hand-cart emigrants to describe my return home. There were, of course, two homes to return to. Lydia lived in Great Salt Lake with Diantha; Elizabeth lived in Payson with Ann Eliza and Aaron, who had since wed the neighboring girl. Because I arrived in Great Salt Lake first, I stayed with my second wife on my first night back in Zion. Lydia welcomed me with caresses and boiled beef, a clean house, and a warm bed. Any man who has sustained himself through long intervals separated from his wife knows how welcome her initial touch is upon return.
The 19th Wife Page 20