by Sally Denton
John Taylor, an upper-class English intellectual, converted to Mormonism in 1836. He emigrated soon afterward to Missouri, where the founding prophet, Joseph Smith, appointed him an apostle. He returned to England to proselytize, converting Jean Rio and her family in 1848.
The Mormon missionaries were “preaching the glory of America along with the glory of the new religion,” writes Fawn Brodie, and Brigham Young was advocating emigration as a solution for Europe’s social and economic problems. Taylor wrote a “memorial” to Queen Victoria, offering to remove England’s poor to America through a sophisticated plan for emigration. The creation of Zion in the American New Jerusalem was “the working-class Mormon response to a class society that offered only limited opportunities for self-improvement,” writes Richard L. Jensen and Malcolm R. Thorp. Most Britons who converted were attracted to the promise of relief from the economic servitude that shackled them. Guaranteed acres upon acres of soil as rich as Eden, the poor and working class clamored to leave.
For Jean Rio and those converts who were better off than the working class, the reasons were different. Her decision to join a new faith was emotional, spiritual, and intellectual. She was seduced by promises of a return to a pure, honest, original Christianity. Perhaps even more alluring to her was the Mormon message of individual salvation. Such a notion would have been liberating to a woman who had spent her life thus far subject to what she had increasingly come to see as the oppressive, intercessory role of an indifferent ecclesiastical authority.
Early missionaries pointedly neglected to reveal the doctrine of polygamy that the independent, and very monogamous, Jean Rio would later find so abhorrent. What attracted her now was the promise that women could be members of the priesthood—not, as she later learned, that a woman’s only path to the hereafter was as an appendage to a man. While there had been nineteen “high priestesses” in 1843, the church had returned to a staunch patriarchy after Joseph Smith’s death in 1844, but that was not disclosed to her.
She was drawn to Smith’s concept that Christianity would be restored to the individual, which, after all, was the revolutionary idea that Jesus preached—that the power once held in the temple could be found within each person, that God was accessible to every human being directly rather than through the dominant male church hierarchy. “It was deeply subversive of the existing order of things,” according to one religious scholar, “since it made no distinction between rich or poor, sinful or innocent, man or woman; everyone could be part of the temple on equal terms.” Mormonism was a radical departure from the staid Anglican religion in which Jean Rio had been reared. Now, the missionaries assured her, she could embark on a rich and evolving personal relationship with God without a censoring male intermediary, and like all mortals, she could be guided by ongoing revelations.
Tales of Joseph Smith’s martyrdom and the persecution of the Saints in Missouri strengthened her ardor. No small attraction, as well, especially for this woman whose adventuresome spirit was barely contained in London society, was the excitement of participating in the settlement of the newly explored North American continent. But such a naked desire and ambition for entering the man’s world of adventure would be considered “womanly” only if cloaked in a spiritual calling. “One must be called by God or Christ to service in spiritual causes higher than one’s own poor self might envision, and authorized by that spiritual call to an achievement and accomplishment in no other way excusable in a female self,” writes American scholar Carolyn G. Heilbrun of this era in which it was not acceptable for women openly to seek control over their lives.
Still, a religious conversion of such magnitude was highly controversial in Jean Rio’s social stratum, and was made even more so by the requisite immersion baptism gaining notoriety in the community. Based on instructions left by Joseph Smith—who said he had received a visitation from John the Baptist describing the method of complete immersion—the Mormon baptism was meant to be a literal rebirth, “according to the orders and example of our Savior, Jesus Christ,” as one convert wrote. The terrifying immersions, attended as they were by rumors of fatal drownings, not surprisingly brought moments of spiritual metamorphosis to many new disciples. The clandestine baptisms were often performed at night to avoid anti-Mormon mobs, and the icy rivers and ponds held a special trepidation for the proselytes. John Taylor baptized Jean Rio Baker and her husband, Henry Baker, in London on June 18, 1849. A fellow missionary, Wilford Woodruff, baptized the Baker children around the same time. Many decades later, Taylor and Woodruff, in turn, would succeed Brigham Young as presidents and prophets of the church.
Later that summer, a cholera epidemic struck London, and Jean Rio’s husband and infant daughter became gravely ill. Henry died on September 3, and the baby girl, her namesake, Jean Rio, died ten days later. The heartbroken widow turned her full attention to emigrating to America with her remaining seven children. If she agonized over this momentous decision, she did not reveal any uncertainty to the many friends and family members who attempted to dissuade her. It would have been only natural to feel misgivings about an unknown future, but her determination never failed her. If she harbored doubts, if she vacillated at all, she kept it to herself. The loss of her husband and child seemed to embolden her in her newfound purpose rather than to undermine her resolve. Only years later would she reflect on the magnitude of her decision, on all that she had left behind, ultimately judging herself harshly.
In accordance with English law, she inherited her husband’s property, which added to her already sizable coffers. She set out to liquidate her holdings, converting her real property and many personal belongings to cash, and began preparations for the journey.
Millennialist predictions gave urgency to the foreign mission, as the Second Coming was said to be imminent. Jean Rio saw it all as divine intervention that would transform a corrupt and venal society into an idealistic golden age free of disease, poverty, crime, and oppression. These were what the church called the “latter days,” referring to the Bible’s Book of Revelation, in which it was prophesied that final wars would rage on a field called Armageddon, and floods and fires would destroy the earth. The church’s mouthpiece, the Millennial Star, a Liverpool newspaper edited by John Taylor, carried a regular column, entitled “Signs of the Times,” that interpreted the wars, volcanoes, earthquakes, plagues, fires, and floods erupting throughout the world as unmistakable portents that the end was near. Jean Rio didn’t need to look far beyond the tragedy within her own family and the depravity of her community for convincing evidence.
The concept of the Mormons’ gathering to Zion of the seed of Israel was the distinctive expression of the British Saints’ millennialism. The renewal and evangelical impulse of Mormonism that was sweeping across England inspired untold numbers to leave behind everything familiar for the calling of a new land. With the same discipline and drive that had made her a successful musician, Jean Rio threw herself into this most passionate dedication to a richer life for herself and her children. The message of the “Restoration” was deeply felt, and the apocalypticism that infected her fellow seekers was contagious. She saw herself as fortunate to be called to participate in what she thought was one of history’s most spiritual and challenging times. To join the exodus to a faraway, mysterious land as part of this calling seemed to her natural as well as epic.
While the church chartered vessels and supplied funds for the poorest converts, Jean Rio was among the few who had the means to pay their own way. This financial independence also provided her with the ability to take far more belongings than most emigrants could manage. Her square grand piano was carefully dismantled and crated, and the crate that would hold it was dipped in tar to weatherproof it for the dozens of water crossings—across the ocean, then up the Mississippi River, and finally traversing the plains, with their many streams and tributaries, en route to Utah. She packed enough stately dresses cut exclusively for her by seamstresses on London’s fashionable Regent Street to wear t
o Sunday church services, and booked passage on a sailing ship from England to New Orleans for herself, her seven children, and nine others—friends and members of her extended family.
The British government had begun implementing regulations in response to rampant reports of overcrowded, unsanitary, criminal, and life-threatening circumstances upon the seas. By the time Jean Rio made arrangements for transportation on the newly built, 152-foot George W. Bourne, the law limited the payload to three passengers for every five tons, and required six feet between decks and ten square feet per passenger in lower berths. Captains were ordered to carry three quarts of fresh water per day per passenger, as well as seven pounds of bread, biscuits, flour, oatmeal, or rice per passenger per week. Ships had to be inspected for seaworthiness and had to carry a sufficient number of lifeboats.
Still, emigration took great courage. Even under the best of circumstances the perils of smallpox, measles, typhoid, lice, spoiled food, diarrhea, and common seasickness took their toll. Shipwrecks, hurricanes, collisions, leaks, and lack of wind to propel the ship at a pace in keeping with the food supply all added to the risk. The voyage ordinarily took between four and nine weeks, depending on the weather and the infamous headwinds on the Atlantic—what one historian calls “a formidable gauntlet of wind and wave.” After the arrival in New Orleans, a thousand-mile riverboat excursion up the Mississippi River to St. Louis offered its own dangers. Snags, sand-bars, collisions, explosions, fires, and floods threatened the steamboats. Between 1810 and 1850, more than four thousand people had died in steamboat calamities. In the American interior, disease posed a unique threat to British emigrants, who had little immunity to afflictions such as Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Families rarely arrived in Zion intact.
Crossing twelve hundred miles of plains carried hazards as well, including wagon accidents, buffalo stampedes, lightning strikes, poisonous snakes and insects, Indian depredations, sunstroke, exhaustion, theft, and noxious water. Missionaries downplayed the dangers; church leaders believed the voyage would strengthen the converts for the hardship of life in Zion. Hints of the aridity of the Salt Lake Valley made their way to England, as the Mormon elders requested certain supplies. But most emigrants would be shocked to find Zion a barren desert rather than the sylvan Eden they had been promised. Jean Rio certainly had no intention of farming, nor had she yet been told that eventually she would be expected to “consecrate” all of her money and possessions to the prophet Brigham Young. Having spent her life in the lush verdure of England, she would be unprepared for the harsh aridity and drought-ridden land of her future home.
At forty years old, she believed she had sufficient resources for the rest of her life. Her gold, diamond, and sapphire jewelry, musical instruments, personal library, printed music, bone china, sterling tableware, damask linens, and Queen Anne furniture, as well as an elegant wardrobe, suggest that she anticipated a life if not of leisure then at least of a certain comfort.
The church provided Jean Rio with detailed publications about the requisite supplies for the journey as well as for life in Zion. Since there were few stores in Utah, she was told to bring a substantial amount of clothing, linen, thread, needles and pins, and tools including a claw hammer and nails, as well as to procure some firearms, especially rifles, and ammunition. Writing paper and cooking utensils were also in short supply in Utah and had to be brought.
Leaving her husband of seventeen years and her two deceased children interred at the St. Lawrence Jewry, Jean Rio turned her attention away from her homeland and toward a new frontier. With the anguish of parting from friends and relatives, she bought passage for her seventeen-member entourage, which included her seventeen-year-old son, Henry Walter (called simply “Walter”), and his young bride, Eliza; fifteen-year-old William; eleven-year-old Charles Edward; nine-year-old Elizabeth; seven-year-old John; six-year-old Charles West, and a sickly four-year-old, Josiah. She would also pay for her brother-in-law Benjamin Baker; her husband’s only sister, Mary Ann Bateman, and Mary Ann’s husband, Jeremiah, who had recently lost their twin daughters to tuberculosis; and five additional converts for whom she took responsibility.
Just as her mother, Susanna Burgess, had escaped persecution in France for the promise of life in England, Jean Rio now abandoned the severity and constraints of that England for a country halfway around the world. The great Romantic notion of true freedom from all kinds of oppression was symbolized by the young nation of unlimited possibility.
Her social standing and personal wealth had been no protection against the spiritual vacuum that she felt at home. Women, regardless of their station, were not empowered by Victorian society, and the promise of the missionaries, the community of the Saints—whatever the reality would turn out to be—was the promise of more autonomy and respect than a future in England held for her. She possessed a welldefined social conscience that gave her a lifelong commitment to improving the lives of those less fortunate. Her writing and her life make clear that she was seeking a more primitive Christianity that would enhance her identification with the poor and oppressed. The attraction of Mormonism was a communal ideal that had implicit within it more of a rigorous social conscience than any other American religion of the time, and far more than the Anglican religion of early-nineteenth-century England. If she harbored any doubts, they were suppressed by her overwhelming belief that there existed a better place and a more fulfilling life for herself and her children.
CHAPTER FOUR
Committed to the Deep
I THIS DAY TOOK LEAVE of every acquaintance I could collect together, in all probability never to see them again on earth. I am now, with my children, about to leave forever my Native Land, in order to gather with the Saints of the Church of Christ, in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake in North America.” This first diary entry by Jean Rio was made on January 4, 1851.
The next day, she and her party rode the train from London to the thriving English port of Liverpool. The harbor was filled with hundreds of masts bearing flags from dozens of nations on “schooners, barks, barkentines, brigs, snows, sloops, steamers, tugs, and fishing boats,” as Conway B. Sonne describes the more than twenty thousand vessels that used the docks that year. There the voyagers would get the first glimpse of the ship that would carry them across the Atlantic, a 663-ton square-rigger built in Kennebunk, Maine, two years earlier. Commanded by her co-owner, Captain William Williams, the vessel was “a typical product of Yankee shipwrights, built with two decks but no galleries, three masts, square stern, and a billethead,” as a maritime encyclopedia describes the ship. The Kennebec River region was known for the finest ships built in America, and the George W. Bourne—the namesake of her builder—was an impressive specimen of seasoned spruce and pine fashioned into a sleek and elegant craft.
A Mormon shipping agency had chartered the vessel, paid the way for most of the 181 emigrating Saints under the direction of three elders, and provided the necessary food for the trip, though Jean Rio paid amply to transport her own family. The other converts borrowed money from the church-founded Perpetual Emigrating Fund—financed with voluntary contributions in Utah—money they were expected to repay in labor, livestock, or goods upon their arrival in Salt Lake City. “The funds are appropriated in the form of a loan, rather than a gift,” Brigham Young wrote, “and this will make the honest in heart rejoice, for they love to labor, and be independent by their labor, and not live on the charity of their friends, while the lazy idlers, if any such there be, will find fault, and want every luxury furnished them for their journey, and in the end pay nothing. The Perpetual Fund will help no such idlers; we have no use for them in the Valley.” The revolving cooperative fund enabled Mormons already living in Utah to make deposits in Salt Lake City to pay for transportation of their family and friends who were still in the British Isles, and in Scandinavia, where missionaries were working feverishly.
At the time, the average cost from Liverpool to what is now Council Bluffs, Iowa, where the wagon-train e
xcursion to Zion would begin, was ten English pounds per person— approximately three times a factory worker’s annual salary. In Council Bluffs, the church would outfit the teams, though, again, Jean Rio would buy her own wagons and oxen and hire teamsters, professional men who would drive her teams across the plains. She prepared herself by reading the recently published travel guides and poring over maps created by explorers and provided by the church.
On January 7 she and her children passed their required medical examinations before boarding the ship, even though four-year-old Josiah was grievously ill from consumption, from which he had been suffering throughout the previous months. Having recently lost her husband and another child to disease, she well knew the severity of his condition. Still, she hoped that the sea air would revitalize him and she knew that in any case he would never have survived the London winter.
She wore a woolen cape to keep out the damp Liverpool chill. There was no one to bid her farewell, but she felt blessed to have a sunny day for departure. She was not without her fears and worries, but her overwhelming mood was one of excitement and even levity. She found great humor in her group’s allocated provision of seventy pounds of oatmeal for the first week.
The initial days were occupied with organizational tasks controlled by the church leaders. Elder William Gibson quickly established order and appointed a committee composed of himself and two other church officials. The three then divided the ship into wards, each ward to be presided over by one of them, and appointed men to act as security for the group and to keep order. Next came the reading of a strict code of conduct to be observed while at sea. The passengers received explicit instructions on hygiene and sanitation, and were warned about lascivious drunken sailors and backsliding converts.