menu_book Chapter 27

CHAPTER XXVII. Social Life in Salt Lake City. Ballrooms, Wallflowers, and Divorce. Spring opened bright and beautiful, and I began to feel more at home in Zion, and more contented with my position.

I do not, however, mean that I was satisfied with polygamy, or that I contemplated calmly the prospect of my husband taking a plurality of wives, but that I had begun to adapt myself to the manners and customs of the saints, and had already formed many of those pleasant intimacies which lend such a charm to life. My talkative friend was a constant visitor at our house, and her strange views of life

and of that all-absorbing subject, the management of man under the plural wife system, together with her lively conversation and unceasing flow of spirits, made her visits acceptable, and she often banished from my mind thoughts which, if unchecked, would have made my life unbearable. Her husband, too, poor creature, sometimes followed in her train, and on one occasion

she actually brought Alice with her, that I might see what sort of a girl she was. I found her quite good-looking, intelligent, and as pleasant a little body as one could wish to know, but at the same time I detected in the expression of her features, lively and self-reliant as she was, too many traces of that look of subdued sadness which casts a cloud over the countenance of every woman living in polygamy.

Other friends besides I had, too numerous to mention, friends whom I had known in England and whom I had wept over the horrors of polygamy when it was first announced, and dear Swiss friends, not a few, who had come to Zion before us and were now quite settled and at home. Two faces I longed to see, but of their owners I could at first get no tidings. Our dear Madame Bélève, my old Swiss friend, who in past days had shown me so many kindnesses

and whom I had so tenderly loved, where was she? Somewhere I knew in Zion, but not in Salt Lake City, and to the chapter of accidents I felt that I must leave it, whether I ever saw her again or not. And thereto was Mary Burton, with all her sweet winning ways, she whom I had known as a child, whose early womanhood had been darkened by apprehensions of that accursed abomination

polygamy, who had suffered that terrible martyrdom upon the plains, who for aught I knew might at that very time need most my sympathy and sisterly love. Oh, where was she? Poor Mary, might it not be that worn out with the fearful sufferings which she had endured, she had gone to that peaceful rest which she had so vainly sought on earth?

I had asked everyone who came across my path who was likely to know whether they could give me any information as to where she was, but I could learn nothing more than that not long after their arrival she and her husband had left the city and had gone to one of the settlements in southern Utah. I had therefore to wait in uncertainty for any chance which might accidentally bring

us again together. I was very glad that the winter was over, for we had had rather a rough time during our first months in Salt Lake City, and the various associations of our life had tended rather to strengthen than to relieve my apprehensions respecting the future. The ball season which, of course, I cannot pass by in silence, had been a source of annoyance

and I may say disgust to me. I had seen so much that was unpleasant at those balls, and although what I witnessed did not then affect me personally, yet it was painful to see others suffer and to hear poor women whose hearts were crushed and broken tell each other in whispers the sorrow which had blighted their existence.

The morning was always very popular among the saints, and the leading men among them have wisely fostered a taste for it. When the people first went out to Utah, as may be supposed, life was hard and amusements were few. The Mormons as a body are examples of industry and diligence.

To them, labor is one of the cardinal virtues, and like all other pioneers, they found plenty of energies. Houses had to be built, land prepared for cultivation, the commonest necessaries of life to be manufactured or raised, and busy hands were perpetually engaged in a thousand useful industries, and the dust of toil was washed from the careful brow.

It was but natural that the need of a little recreation should be felt. So in very early days Brigham built a theater, and a very fair amount of histrionic talent was developed among the saints. The social hall, in which were held balls, public entertainments, and other amusements, was used for histrionic performances before the theater was built.

Brigham owned the theater. Money was to be made out of it, and the chance of making money Brother Brigham never permitted to slip through his fingers. Brigham's eyes were sharp enough to see that a theater would be to him a source of profit. But he did not look far enough.

That theater, under the immediate direction of the prophet, with his own daughters acting in it, with the plays which were performed under his own censorship, has been one of the many causes which have perceptibly, although perhaps indirectly, shaken the hold which Mormonism had upon many a woman's mind. A man would probably witness the performance of a play with no other thought than the remembrance

of an hour's amusement, but not so a woman. To her the play suggested something more, and her daughters would share her thoughts. Daily and hourly, it might be, the effects of polygamy would be brought under their notice as a matter affecting themselves personally. They might be firm in the faith, but the observant instincts of their sex could never be wholly

crushed. They would notice the neglect which wives endured even from good husbands. They would see a man leaving the wife of his youth, the mother of his children, and, careless of the cruel wrong he did her, leave her in lonely sorrow while he was spending his time in love-making with some young girl who might have been his daughter.

They would see a wife crushing out from her heart the holiest impulses which God had implanted there, striving to destroy all affection for him whose dearest treasure that affection should have been, because indeed polygamy could not exist with love, and themselves personally feel the degradation and misery of the celestial order of marriage. And that to them would be the practical picture of life.

But in the theater, shortsighted Brigham, to allow it to be so, another picture would be presented for their consideration. A picture, it might be, ideal in its details and surroundings, but true to the letter in the lesson which it conveyed and the thoughts which it suggested. The disgusting, the brutalizing cruelties of polygamy were never represented on the

stage. Thoughts so coarse, so sensual, could never inspire the true poet's pen. Know the tale of love, as the poet tells it, is all that is refined and chaste and delicate and pure. The co-mingling of two souls, the unison of two loving hearts, the hopes, the aspirations,

the tender joyful sorrows of two fond natures, of two alone. Such is the picture presented as the ideal of the beautiful and of the good. The delicate attentions of the devoted lover, his happiness even in the shadow of a smile from her, the lofty pedestal upon which to his imagination she stands, a queen and peerless, or the confiding love of the heroine of the story, blushingly confessing to herself that

there is one heart on earth which is all her own and in which none but herself can ever rule or reign. The Mormon women are not devoid of common sense, nor are they destitute of those quick perceptions which under all circumstances distinguish their sex. They see on the stage representations of the happiness attendant upon love and marriage,

such as God ordained, and such as finds a response in every heart. And they compare such pleasant pictures with what they know and have witnessed of polygamy. And they draw painful inferences therefrom. Their faith may be proof against apostasy, but the impression left upon their minds produces its effect notwithstanding.

Another institution was the dance. Brigham and the leaders knew that it would never do to leave people without amusements of some kind, and thus the balls and social gatherings were originated. The idea of prophets, apostles, high priests, and patriarchs attending a ball and joining in a dance must appear grotesquely incongruous to the Gentile mind, but out among the Mormons

it is quite the thing, and to the men those balls and parties were very pleasant. I do not think that many of the Mormon women enjoyed the ball season, and I know to some of them it was the most painful part of their lives. It is a cruel thing for a woman anywhere to know that her husband's affections are divided, that she is not his only love, and that his heart is no longer all her own.

But far worse is the lot of the wife in Utah. She has to see and be present when the lovemaking is going on, when her husband is flirting and saying soft nonsense, or looking unutterable things at silly girls who are young enough to be her daughters, nay, her own daughters and her husbands may actually be older than the damsel he is courting for his second wife.

Such an outrage upon the holiest feelings of womanhood would not for a moment be tolerated in any civilized community, but among the saints women are taught that this is but one part of that cross which we all have got to bear. Cross-bearing is all very well, and I do not doubt that sorrow and trial have a sanctifying influence upon the soul, but by all means let us have a fair division of the burden.

It is not just that the heaviest end of the beam should be placed on poor, weak women's shoulders, and that her lord should even find pleasure in that cross which weighs her to the dust and crushes out from her weary soul the last sparks of love and happiness and hope. How sweetly did the men preach patience and submission to the will of heaven!

I wonder where their own patience and submission would have been had matters been reversed and their wives had been taught that it was their privilege and a religious duty to court and flirt with and marry men younger and handsomer than their husbands. The Brethren never forget what Brother Brigham once said about the Mormon men being all boys under a hundred years of age, and they do not neglect their privileges.

Here in the ballroom you may see men of three score years and even older joining in the dance with girls of sixteen and even younger, making love to them, flirting with them, marrying them. Age or plain looks are nothing with such men. The girls are taught that they can exalt them to greater honor and happiness in heaven than

young and untried men could, and that they ought to feel honored by receiving tender attentions from the chosen servants of the Lord. One wife, or even half a dozen, if they chance to have so many, of course will not stand in the way. The husband is the Lord and Master, and a woman's wishes count for naught.

In the ballroom the company of the first wives, and in fact of many of the plural wives, once worshiped but who had had their day, was not so much sought as that of young and interesting maidens. And after having stood up with their husbands in the first dance, as a matter of form, many of those forlorn wives might be seen sitting along the sides of the hall, keeping each

other company and talking over their sorrows. We used to call these poor ladies the wall flowers, sitting there watching, noting all that their husbands did or said. Those poor women were in themselves a touching protest against the cruelty of the system, such as none but a Mormon heart could have resisted.

But for that horrible system these balls and parties would of course have been extremely pleasant. With the feeling of fraternity which exists among the saints, such gatherings ought only to be a source of pleasure. But polygamy blighted everything, and it is with the feeling almost of hatred that I recall

some of those occasions. How many an aching heart has there felt weary, felt so weary as to long for death? No change of feature might betray the mental struggle, but the bitterness of the soul was all the same. And I have seen wives there whose husbands paid them market attentions so that the girls

to whom they were making love might notice their devotion and draw favorable auguries for the future, in case they married them. And the wife has known all this, and has valued her husband's attentions accordingly. And yet the poor deluded women persuade themselves that this system is right, and in accordance with the revealed will of God.

And they think that the evil, poor creatures, is in their own hearts, and that they deserve to suffer. The Mormon men sometimes would be rather surprised, I think, if they could hear what their wives say of them at those balls. I have seen very obedient wives, so goaded to anger by the conduct of their husbands,

that they have said very bitter things indeed. And what was not spoken was felt, I know, by every wife in whose nature the last traces of womanly feeling had not been altogether crushed out. At one of those balls the apostle Heber C. Kimball came up to me, and said in his jesting way, that he would introduce me to his wife.

He brought up five or six ladies of various ages, one after the other, and said, There now, I think I'll quit now, for I'm afraid you are not too strong in the faith. Are these all you have got, I asked? Oh dear, no, he said. I have a few more at home, and about fifty scattered over the earth somewhere, but I've

never seen them since they were sealed to me in Nauvoo, and I hope I never shall again. Heber was called the model saint. But the ball season passed, and the spring came on, and our prospects began to brighten. My husband not only found remunerative employment for his pen in Salt Lake City, but was also engaged as special correspondent to the New York Herald, and several of the California

papers. One morning a countryman, roughly dressed and looking the picture of care, called at our house and asked to see Mr. Stenhouse. I gazed at him for a moment, for I thought there was something familiar in the sound of his voice.

He looked at me, and I at once recognized him. It was Mr. Bélif himself, in whose house we had lived in Switzerland. But oh how changed he was! Once a refined, handsome, gentlemanly man, now a mere wreck of his former self. Careworn, roughly looking, poorly clad, he and his family had been in Utah six years,

and had suffered all the ills that poverty can induce. The change which was wrought in him was so great, that for some moments I was so overcome by my feelings that I could not utter a word. In the few short years which had elapsed, since I saw him, in his own bright and happy home, he had become quite an old man.

I hardly dared to ask about his wife, for I feared what his answer might be. But after a little while he told me that she had sent her love, and would like to see me whenever I could find an opportunity to call upon her. They lived some miles from the city, but I told him that I would not fail to visit them whenever it was possible for me to do so.

I talked a long while with Mr. Bélif, and was much interested in what he told me. He made no complaints, he had still firm faith in Mormonism, and said that if the brethren had not dealt fairly by him, they would be answerable to God for what they had done. Besides, he added, I do not blame them so much, for they are Americans, and would not be happy if they did not get the advantage in some way.

I was anxious to ask him if he had been induced to take another wife, as he had been in Utah during the Reformation, and I did not see how it was possible for him to have escaped. But while I was thinking how I might put the question delicately, he saved me the trouble by himself telling me that he had married the young servant girl whom his wife had taken from Switzerland with her.

This information was quite a shock to me, for I well knew the proud spirit of his wife, and I could realize what anguish this second marriage must have caused her. I did not, however, like to question him on the subject, so I turned the conversation into another channel, and when he went away I sent kind messages to Madame Bélif, saying that I would seize the very first opportunity of hearing from her own lips the story of

all they had gone through. Here again I found the trail of that monster, Polygamy. This time in the home of my dearest friend. From the moment when she and I had mingled our tears together in Switzerland over that abomination, life had been to me one long, weary, sickening battle with my own heart,

one futile attempt to fully convince myself that Polygamy was right and that I was wrong. I certainly did believe, or thought that I believed, the doctrine was true, but at times nature prevailed in the struggle, and womanly indignation and anger rose in arms against faith. These feelings were, however, at once and unhesitatingly subdued.

Faith returned triumphant, and I was again convinced that the revelation must have been the will of the Lord, and that my duty was to submit, but not to question. In moments of comparative self-control I had even tried, as a missionary's wife, to justify it to others, but only to witness an outburst of sorrow and anger and to feel still more the weakness of my position.

That had been my own experience, but how had the time passed with my dear old friend? She must, no doubt, have been as greatly disappointed as I was when she came to Zion and saw things as they really were, and not as they had been represented to us. My own eyes had certainly been opened not a little since my arrival. Instead of finding the people enjoying the comforts and blessings of life which we had

been taught were strewn about them in profuse abundance, we found among all but the leading families the greatest poverty and privation. The majority of the people were living in little log or adobe houses of one or at the utmost two rooms of the most primitive construction, and without the slightest convenience of any description.

Their food was bread and molasses, and it might be an occasional morsel of meat, but many of them scarcely even indulged in the latter or in any article of grocery for months at a time. Their floors and walls were bare and their clothing poor and scanty, and yet, destitute as they were of all the comforts and conveniences of life, they were conscientiously endeavoring,

like good saints, to practice polygamy because, as they believed, the Lord had commanded it. In respect to education, they were in even a worse position. Books, pictures, and periodicals of any kind there were none, with the exception of that dreary organ of the church, the deseret news, the suppurific influence of which some wicked apostate has likened to a dose of Winslow's soothing syrup.

Brigham Young himself an illiterate man, and the leading elders frowned upon every attempt to raise the intellectual status of the people, and so little encouragement was given that no one could afford to keep school. The consequence was that the boys and girls grew up with little more education than their own sense of necessity taught them to acquire for themselves, and it was not until very

recently that any suitable efforts were made to supply trained teachers and to open schools in which a thorough education could be afforded. I have already mentioned the sermons in the tabernacle and observed how little calculated they were to elevate the character or cultivate the minds of the people. I have before me as I write a choice morsel extracted from one of the sermons of Heber

C. Kimball, which I think I must give for the reader's benefit. Fancy, an apostle, thus addressing a large and mixed congregation of men, women, and children. Here are some educated men just under my nose. They come here and they think they know more than I do, and then they get the big head,

and it swells and swells until it gets like the old woman's squash. You go to touch it and it goes cur-smash, and when you look for the man why he ain't Thar. They're just like so many pots in a furnace. You know I've been a potter in my time, almighty thin and almighty big, and when they're sought

up the heat makes them smoke a little, and then they collapse and tumble in, and they ain't no whar. This was Heber's style in general. Next to making modest people blush, nothing pleased him better than to annoy or ridicule anyone who had the smallest pretensions to education.

And yet, naturally, Heber was a kind-hearted man. Brigham's style is very little better, and the substance of his discourses quite as bad. I will give a very favorable specimen, taken from a sermon on polygamy, delivered some years ago, touched up and corrected, and published in the official organ, the Deseret News. Man will say, My wife, though a most excellent woman, has not seen a happy day since I took

my second wife. No, not a happy day for a year, says one, and another has not seen a happy day for five years. I am going to set every woman at liberty and say to them, Now go your way, my women with the rest, go your way.

And my wives have got to do one of two things, either round up their shoulders to endure the afflictions of this world and live their religion, or they must leave, for I will not have them about me. I will go into heaven alone rather than have them scratching and fighting around me. I will set all at liberty.

What, first wife, too? Yes, I liberate you all. I know there is no secession to the everlasting whinings of many of the women in this territory. I am satisfied that this is the case. And if the women will turn from the commandments of God and continue to despise the order

of heaven, I will pray that the curse of the Almighty may be close to their heels and that it may be following them all the day long. And those that enter into it the celestial order and are faithful, I will promise them that they shall be queens in heaven and rulers to all eternity. Now if any of you will deny the plurality of wives and continue to do so, I promise

that you will be damned. This was sweet language for a prophet and a saint to utter, and yet it is not half so coarse or improper as some whole sermons that I have listened to from the lips of Brother Brigham and the other leaders of the Church. The apostle Orson Pratt is the only one who has dared, in the presence of Brigham, to

say that education was a proper thing and that there were many books which would be of good service to the saints if they obtained and studied them. Brigham arose in ire and said, from books. But the prophet has changed with the times, and there are now in Utah very good schools,

both Mormon and Gentile. But none of them are free schools. Bishop Taylor once said in a public lecture that they were destructive to the best interests of the community. And the bishop's lord in the Lion House is exactly of the same opinion, for he has repeatedly

declared, There shall be no free schools within his saintly kingdom on earth. Nevertheless, Brother Brigham and his infallible priesthood are at last beginning to discover that although the night of ignorance and superstition may hate the clear daylight of truth and knowledge, when the great ruler of all commands the light to come forth, it is not in the power of man,

with all his boasting, to forbid the sun to shine upon the dark places of the earth. Balls, parties, and the theater provided amusement for the people in Salt Lake City itself, but in the settlements there was little else in the shape of recreation than idle gossip or the harangues of the tabernacle. In the city, of course, this has all been changed of late years, but in the settlements

of Utah there is the same lack of civilization as there was fifteen or twenty years ago. At the time when we went to Utah, Mormon society was slowly recovering from that terrible marrying mania which has set in during the Reformation, and a season of divorce was the result. The authorities at that time, as I have already observed, had urged every person without distinction into polygamy.

Men and women had been forced to marry one another without any respect to affection or fitness, and the result was that hundreds of marriages were entered into, which made those who contracted them miserable for life, but the consequences of which they could not avoid. At the same time, not a few were divorced almost immediately after they were married,

and these things were a matter of daily occurrence. Brigham Young, with his eye perpetually on the dollar, finding that his marrying scheme, like many other of his divine plans, was a failure, saw at once that quite a nice little sum might be realized by charging a fee for divorces. Nothing was charged for marrying, but if the people insisted on having divorces, why the

best and certainly the most profitable thing was to make them pay for it. When we first went to Utah, the prophet was doing quite a flourishing business in that line. Anyone could get a divorce for ten dollars, and Brigham publicly, in the tabernacle, jested about it, and said that the money thus obtained came in very conveniently as pin money for

Though I doubt if they ever received a dollar of it. He added that so far as eternity was concerned, these divorces were not worth the paper they were written on. The people had married for eternity, and in eternity they would have to live together, whether they liked it or not.

He says the same today, but still he sells his divorces, and gathers in the ten dollars. All this is an anomaly, although the people do not appear to see it. While, more than any other community, they profess to regard marriage as a sacred institution, they marry and are divorced in a more careless fashion than the people of any civilized country. I could mention instances which would be really ludicrous were they not so shocking.

I know a young woman in Salt Lake City who is not over twenty-one years of age. She is a very pretty girl, and has engaged quite extensively in the divorce business, for she now lives with her fourth husband. She was in my employment after she left her third, and I had an opportunity of studying her character.

I noticed that she was frequently visited by a certain young man who seemed to make himself very agreeable to her, and feeling a great deal of interest in her, for she had left her father and mother in England when a mere child in order to gather to Zion under the paternal care of one of the elders. I asked her why the young man came to see her so often.

He is my intended husband, she replied. Why, I said quite astonished. You have only just been separated from your last husband, and after so much ill treatment I should have thought you would have been afraid of trying another, at any rate so soon as this.

You're wrong there, she replied in quite a serious, earnest way. I am determined to marry until I get the right one, even if I have to do so a dozen times. Don't you think I am right? This really seemed so shocking that I did not know what to say. The most absurd point in all this was that of her three former husbands one was a Gentile,

and two were Mormons. The Gentile, of course, would have no chance in the world to come, but to each of the two Mormons she was sealed for eternity. Now if Brigham's divorces are of no force in the next world, and if his marriages are binding, what will this young woman do between her two Mormon husbands, to say nothing of

the two other Gentile ones who do not count? For the Mormons, though they are so generous to themselves in the matter of wives, will not allow a woman to have a couple of husbands, either here or in eternity. What nonsense is all this? What blasphemy to ascribe to it the Lord!

How different I found the Mormon Lord from that great and glorious Being, source of all goodness, holiness, and truth, to whom in the days of my childhood I had looked up and adored. The Lord of whom they so flippantly spoke was not the same Him to whom things in heaven He never blighted the heart of woman or cursed her with a perpetual curse.

But to Him, since I escaped from the cruel thraldom which once blighted my existence day by day, my soul goes out in love and gratitude. Would that I could infuse into the worn and weary hearts of the women of Utah the knowledge that God has given freely to all His creatures, to woman as well as man, no cruel law to torture their souls, no wretched revelation to embitter their lives, but a gospel of peace and gentleness

and love, which makes perfect those who walk therein. End of chapter 27