by Sally Denton
Evoking a biblical justification for “the Principle,” Young avowed that God himself was a mortal being residing on a planet orbiting a star called Kolob, where he was sexually active with his first wife, the Heavenly Mother, and his other wives; that Adam was a polygamist, and Eve but one of his many wives; and that Jesus had slept with Mary Magdelene and had multiple wives as well. “They [the Mormons] are Jews in their theocracy,” wrote the celebrated but controversial nineteenth-century British author Sir Richard Francis Burton in The City of the Saints, expressing the dismay of many English and European intellectuals at a Mormonism that seemed to them a caricature of Old Testament religions. “They are Christians inasmuch as they base their faith upon the Bible, and hold to the divinity of Christ, the fall of man, the atonement and regeneration. They are Moslems in their views of the inferior status of womankind, in their polygamy, and in their resurrection of the material body.”
According to Mormon doctrine there were to be three types of marriage: the first, secular marriage being for “time,” the second for “time and eternity,” and the third for “eternity.” Thus the doctrine proclaimed that for a man to reach the pinnacle of eternal bliss he must marry three times, each wife representing a jewel in his kingly crown. Some faithful Saints eagerly adopted this matrimonial system as the requisite avenue to godhood in the hereafter. Meanwhile, to serve their temporal interests here on earth, they were careful and calculating in their selection of wives, seeking mates who would advance their business or household interests. “Each wife would be chosen to serve in a different capacity,” according to one account of the arrangement. “There were cooks, laundresses, hostesses, and mothers, all profitable to the husband. It was less expensive to marry a woman than to hire her for wages.” Viewed as the property of their husbands, often referred to as “cows,” the women engaged in a quid pro quo slavery that served as their only vehicle to the everlasting kingdom.
Jean Rio Baker would have been considered a prime candidate for “spiritual wifery.” As an older woman—just over forty—and a wealthy woman in her own right, she would have attracted the attention of any number of practicing polygamists, including Brigham Young himself. Young alone had the power to grant a man the privilege of taking another wife, so any consideration of such an arrangement would have rested with the prophet. “Out of this matter,” a firsthand observer of the policy wrote in 1852, “grows an immense power based upon his knowledge of all the domestic relations in the colony; such delicate confidence begets a reverence and fear.”
How Jean Rio retained her staunch independence in this climate is an enduring mystery, but perhaps it may be explained in part by the manhood of her oldest son, Walter, who might have been expected to oversee her interests. According to doctrine, her deceased husband, Henry, would “resurrect” her upon her death, claiming her as his own in the afterlife, so she would not have felt the necessity to cleave unto another man for her personal exaltation—if indeed she ever believed in that—nor would a male Saint be compelled to marry her to provide her with eternal salvation.
Now Brigham Young, who routinely gave orders relating to the domestic situations of his Saints, directed Jean Rio to immediately relocate from the relatively urban and sophisticated Salt Lake City to a remote and uncivilized outlying area. Perhaps she was being punished as a recalcitrant or outspoken Saint. Her independent streak and intelligence could not have been repressed indefinitely.
“I have just returned from a little journey of 40 miles to a place called Ogden where I have purchased 20 acres of land,” Jean Rio wrote in her diary on November 4, 1851. Directed by Young to go forth and settle far-flung communities, the Saints encroached into remote locales to expand the Kingdom of God. “I am to have a small house built during the winter, and in the spring the younger boys and myself will go there and commence farming. Walter’s family, with Uncle and Aunt [Jeremiah and Mary Ann Bateman], will remain in my home in Salt Lake City.” (Walter; his English wife, Eliza; and their infant son would eventually join Jean Rio in Ogden.) With her usual enthusiasm and optimism, she embraced the potential. “I was shown several specimens of the produce of the country, and took home with me a pumpkin weighing 53 pounds, but I saw some weighing 90 pounds, also potatoes of three pounds.”
So it was that she pledged to take up farming, relying solely on sixteen-year-old William and twelve-year-old Charles Edward to help her. The younger three—Elizabeth, John, and Charles West—were age ten and under, and could not have been expected to contribute much in the way of labor, committed as Jean Rio was to home-schooling them as well. What she thought and felt of this destiny in Zion is markedly absent from her contemporaneous diary—did she avoid committing her true feelings to paper for fear her diary would be discovered by others?—though made abundantly clear decades later.
As her new home was under construction in Ogden she spent her first Christmas in Salt Lake City. “A delightful day ushered in not by the ringing of bells, as our city does not possess any, but by the firing of cannons,” she wrote. For two hours at daybreak Captain Pitt’s Brass Band, an ensemble of English converts, serenaded the city. At ten a.m. she attended the formal festivities. “The Governor with several members of the Legislature were present with their Ladies.”
This would be the last joyous celebration she would record in Utah.
MARCH 22, 1852. Removed to Ogden, accompanied by my son William and the younger children. Now I suppose I have finished my ramblings for my whole life.
If the surviving diary is an accurate indication, Jean Rio Baker now laid down her pen. Her next entry—at least in this diary—would be seventeen years later. Her life in Utah would be one of failed promise, perpetual disappointment, and ultimate poverty as the church to which she had been so thoroughly devoted appropriated her fortune. It was “a life so unremittingly tough, demanding, frustrating, burdensome,” as Robert Coles writes of the frontier existence. Women like Jean Rio left England for Utah in search of an exalted life. But what she, like thousands of others, found was a reality Coles describes as “hunger, sickness, the loss of loved ones, and day in, day out, a seemingly endless expanse of backbreaking toil, with no sign that even a modest good fortune was forthcoming.”
Her new village, formally laid out by Young, sprawled between the forks of the Ogden and the Weber rivers. There she did her best to remain faithful—or at least to appear so— joining in community and church affairs, acting in early stage productions, and tending to her family and the daily dramas of child rearing under the most primitive frontier America conditions. She was the first to lead the congregational singing in the Ogden church, with her son William playing violin. Though the first years on her farm were fruitful, by 1853 external influences were causing fear and paranoia in Zion.
Several “Gentile” federal officials appointed by President Fillmore to preside in Utah Territory had arrived during the summer of 1851, just weeks before Jean Rio got there. They were greeted with derision and threats. These federal agents had quickly returned to Washington, D.C., with tales of the Mormons’ anti-American sentiments and strange practices that alarmed the president and Congress. Reporting that polygamy was practiced widely, that a well-trained and well-armed Mormon militia routinely murdered dissidents, and that the entire territory was riddled with sedition, these “runaway officials,” as the Mormons called them, presented an unsettling portrait.
Coinciding with this testimony, Lt. John Williams Gunnison, a brilliant U.S. Army officer, wrote a best-selling book about the Mormon experiment in the Rocky Mountains. Assigned to survey the land between the thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth parallels for a transcontinental railroad—a prospect Brigham Young regarded with enmity—Gunnison had wintered in Salt Lake City. During that time he undertook to write a study of the people and their religion. The Mormons, or Latter-Day Saints, in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake: A History of Their Rise and Progress, Peculiar Doctrines, Present Condition, and Prospects, Derived from Personal Observation, During a
Residence Among Them was published in 1852 to a shocked national audience, and it prompted a congressional debate on the rebellious territory.
Gunnison’s revelations confirmed the federal officials’ claims that polygamy was indeed pervasive, inciting Young to proclaim publicly for the first time that “the Principle” was divinely inspired. The doctrine emerged into national awareness just as “the transformation of the home into an affective, sentimental nest was elevating monogamy to a near religion,” writes a scholar of the movement. “The presumed superiority of Western culture was closely related, it was believed, to its sexual ethic.” Flouting the sacred institution of marriage, Young had handed his enemies a sword. Northern congress-men drew an analogy to slavery, moving the subject of Utah Territory into the limelight. The inchoate Republican Party now referred to polygamy and slavery in its platform, vowing to eradicate these twin relics of barbarism. Young thought both institutions divine, once telling New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley that slavery should not be abolished until “the curse pronounced on Ham” was removed. Young found scriptural support for both, and he believed that the men in his utopian society were entitled to as many slaves as Abraham and as many wives as Solomon. Young saw polygamy as a cornerstone of an advanced civilization, believing that society’s ills found their root in the subjugation of the male’s sexual needs. Fostered by the notion that men possessed a greater sexual drive than women—along with the entrenched opinion that women were inferior—the doctrine faulted monogamy for wasting sperm. In a religion in which populating the afterlife was paramount, such “waste” was a sin.
Brigham Young with some of his wives and children in his Salt Lake City mansion a few years after Jean Rio first met him.
As federal legislators sought a solution to the problem, Jean Rio struggled to raise a crop in harsh soil. The daily challenge of feeding her family became paramount. While political tensions escalated, crop failures and drought added to her burden. In 1853 she buried her youngest son, Charles West, who had been kicked by a horse in one of those gruesome if commonplace frontier accidents—more evidence to her of the frailty and uncertainty of American life. The remaining children became more useful as they grew, but the land was unforgiving. “This little family of Londoners,” one account described them, “knowing nothing of agriculture, trying to make a living on a little patch of worthless land.”
Still, the hardship could not erode Jean Rio’s essential goodness. Every starving Indian, tramp, or displaced “Gentile” seemed to find his way to her kitchen, where generosity prevailed. Her home, though increasingly barren, remained a place where friends, relatives, and neighbors all gathered; her high-spirited and curious mind was seductive and comforting in hard times. Meager as the meals became, she always took afternoon tea and set a formal table for dinner with what fine china survived. Music was a mainstay in all of the Baker homes—hers as well as those of her grown children—with most of her offspring renowned for their singing, instrument playing, or theatrical performing, or all three. All her grown sons had reputations for showing tenderness in a harsh environment. “The Baker men were known particularly for never whipping a child,” wrote an early pioneer; such a reputation was unusual for the period and place, where “a lot of men unmercifully beat their children and horses.” A love of children and dogs, of laughter and dramatics set the family apart from the more dour and pious neighbors.
Jean Rio rose to the challenge in these times of trial, just as she had done while leading her family across the ocean and plains. She was called upon to deliver babies, to prepare bodies for quick burial, and to attend the sick, and along the way she cultivated her aptitude as a medicine woman of sorts. Her collection of roots and herbs expanded, her quick mind naturally grasping the healing powers of plants. By necessity, the bejeweled pianist and singer had evolved into a botanist, a midwife, an undertaker, and a nurse.
With the theocracy now starved for cash, faced as it was with the burgeoning financial demands of building up a military for what seemed like an inevitable clash with the U.S. Army, Brigham Young instituted new rules of stewardship. In 1854 Jean Rio was required to convey all of her property, including cash and goods as well as her beloved piano, to Young as “Trustee in Trust” of the church. She could remain in her home and cultivate her land only so long as she was deemed a faithful servant. (Some accounts indicate she had traded the piano to Young earlier for wheat to feed her hungry family.) The piano wound up in Amelia Palace, the home of Young’s favorite wife, a beautiful Englishwoman named Ann Eliza Webb Dee Young Denning, who would ultimately scandalize him and the church by filing for divorce and giving lectures nationwide critical of Mormonism.
A fresh wave of fanaticism permeated Zion in 1856. Disaffection and widespread apostasy—brought on by a combination of unrelenting poverty, unhappiness with the daily reality of polygamy, and whisperings of blood-atonement murders— threatened the stability of the church and Young’s despotic sway. That year a swarm of locusts—what would become known as the “Mormon cricket”—decimated the fields of Deseret, leading to a famine of devastating proportions. Collective morale plummeted, and Saints began to abandon their barren farms, setting their sights on newly settled California.
Jean Rio’s piano was dismantled and crated, its crate dipped in tar to weatherproof it for ocean and river crossings. The inlaid Collard & Collard square grand was the first piano brought by wagon train into the intermountain West—a rare treasure. The Mormon prophet Brigham Young acquired her beloved instrument after the once-wealthy Jean Rio had been reduced to poverty. It is now on display in the Museum of Church History in Salt Lake City.
A move to California became synonymous with apostasy to those who remained loyal to Young, and those who fled did so in darkness and secrecy and with justified fear of swift and cruel retribution.
Meanwhile, Young’s plan to transport thousands of poor Scandinavian converts across the plains was producing tragic results. In the early years of emigration, the church’s Perpetual Emigrating Fund had advanced money to European converts to make the journey to Salt Lake City—money that Jean Rio never had to use. The emigrants were obligated to repay the money at 10 percent interest once they arrived in Zion or in goods if they had no cash. But now Young announced that the church could no longer “afford to purchase wagons and teams as in times past.” He was, he said, “thrown back upon my old plan—to make handcarts, and let the emigration foot it.” That idea led to the greatest disaster in the history of western migration, exceeding by seven times the lives lost in the Donnerparty tragedy a decade earlier.
In what he said was a divinely inspired invention, Young conceived of a contraption, called a handcart, fashioned after those used by porters in New York City railroad stations. The lightweight handcarts were hastily constructed from unseasoned wood, measured the same width as a wagon, and had a handle like that of a wheelbarrow by which to be pulled or pushed. Five people were assigned to each cart, which was laden with their belongings; each emigrant was allowed to bring seventeen pounds of baggage that included clothing and bedding. For the sake of economy the wheels had no tires—a factor that would lead to many breakdowns. Insufficiently rationed, many emigrants starved as they endured frostbite during early snows on the plains. “With a morsel of bread or biscuit in their hands, nearing it to their mouths, could be seen men, hale-looking and apparently strong, stiff in death,” wrote a witness. The ill-conceived plan led to the deaths of sixty-seven in one blizzard alone. Many of those who died had been handicapped; they had been lured to Zion by missionaries promising safe passage and free land. Most Mormons at Salt Lake held Young personally responsible.
Fearing that his flock had become less zealous, Young ushered in the “Mormon Reformation”—a terrifying period church historians later referred to as the “Reign of Terror”— during which loyalist enforcers interrogated the settlers. Encouraging Saints to inform on their neighbors, family, and friends who were weak in the faith, Young’s “Avenging A
ngels,” or Danites—originally named the Sons of Dan by Joseph Smith for the man described in the Bible’s Book of Judges— were the enforcement arm of the prophet. A secret police that brought swift retribution to apostates and to antagonistic “Gentiles,” they were the elite unit of Young’s “Army of Israel.” “Backsliders were to be hewn down,” according to writer Josiah Gibbs. Young declared so in increasingly fiery sermons, verbally attacking the apathy or outright defection that undermined the urgent task of building his “Biblical City of Zion.” During the winter of 1856‒1857 church elders swept through the Mormons’ homes, demanding that everyone be rebaptized and forcing church members to answer fourteen questions:
Have you shed innocent blood or assented thereto?
Have you committed adultery?
Have you betrayed your brother?
Have you borne false witness against your neighbor?
Do you get drunk?
Have you stolen?
Have you lied?
Have you contracted debts without prospect of paying?
Have you labored faithfully for your wage?
Have you coveted that which belongs to another?
Have you taken the name of the Lord in vain?
Do you preside in your family as a servant of God?
Have you paid your tithing in all things?
Do you wash your bodies once a week?
If Saints admitted to laxity, or if their neighbors testified against them, they were required to renew their commitment to the faith, endure various forms of penance, and vow allegiance to the prophet. Untold numbers tried to leave the territory, mostly in vain, as the religious extremists gained dominance.