Fanny relates the experiences of a 19th century missionary as she and her young husband proselytize throughout Europe in search of converts to the new Mormon faith. Her religious zeal is sorely tested upon receipt of news from America revealing that their religion has adopted the practice of polygamy as the means to exaltation. The couple is summoned to Utah only to find themselves firmly ensconced in Brigham Young's inner circle and called upon to practice plural marriage or risk a fall from family, friends, and faith.
By : Fanny Stenhouse (1829 - 1904)
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In the fall of the year 1869, a few earnest, thinking men, members of the Mormon Church, and living in Salt Lake City, inaugurated what was regarded at the time as a grand schism. Those who had watched with anxiety the progress of Mormonism, hailed the “New Movement” as the harbinger of the work of disintegration so long anticipated by the thoughtful-minded Saints, and believed that the opposition to Theocracy, then begun, would continue until the extraordinary assumptions of the Mormon priesthood were exploded, and Mormonism itself should lose its political status and find its place only among the singular sects of the day.
It was freely predicted that Woman, in her turn, would accept her part in the work of reformation, take up the marriage question among the Saints, and make an end of Polygamy.
Little did I imagine, at that period, that any such mission as that which I have since realized as mine, was in the Providence of Time awaiting me, or that I should ever have the boldness, either with tongue or pen, to plead the cause of the Women of Utah. But, impelled by those unseen influences which shape our destinies, I took my stand with the “heretics;” and, as it happened, my own was the first woman’s name enrolled in their cause.
The circumstances which wrought a change in my own life produced a corresponding revolution in the life of my husband.
In withdrawing from the Mormon Church, we laid ourselves, our associations, and the labours of over twenty years, upon the altar, and took up the burden of life anew. We had sacrificed everything in obedience to the “counsel” of Brigham Young; and my husband, to give a new direction to his mind, and also to form some plan for our future life, thought it advisable that he should visit New York. He did so; and shortly after employed himself in writing a history of the “Rocky Mountain Saints,” which has since been published.
In course of time, the burden of providing for a large family, and the anxiety and care of conducting successfully a business among a people who make it a religious duty to sternly set their faces against those who dissent from their faith, exhausted my physical and mental strength. Considering, therefore, that change might be beneficial to me, and my own personal affairs urgently calling me to New York City, I followed my husband thither.
On my way East I met a highly-valued friend of my family, who, in the course of our journey together over the Pacific Railroad, enthusiastically urged me to tell the story of my past life, and to give to the world what I knew about Polygamy. I had been repeatedly advised to do so by friends at home, but up to that time no plan had been arranged for carrying out the suggestion.
I had hardly arrived in New York before the electric messenger announced that a severe snow-storm was raging on the vast plains between the Rocky Mountains and the Missouri River, and for several weeks all traffic over the Union Pacific Railroad was interrupted, and I could not return to my home in the distant West.
That unlooked-for snow-blockade became seriously annoying; for not only was I most anxious to return to my children, but also, never having known an idle hour, I could not live without something to do. At that moment of unsettled feeling, a lady-friend, with whom I was visiting, suggested again “the book;” and she would not permit me to leave her house until she had exacted from me a promise that it should be written.
Next morning I began my task in earnest. I faithfully kept my room and laboured unremittingly; and in three weeks the manuscript of my little work on “Polygamy in Utah” was completed. It was very kindly welcomed by the press—both secular and religious—and for this I was sincerely grateful. I had not, up to that time, thought of much else than its effect upon the people of Utah; but the voluminous notices which that little book received showed the deep interest which the people of the United States had taken in “the Mormon question,” and how ardently they desired to see the extinction of the polygamic institution among the Saints.
In Salt Lake City I was so situated that I was daily—I might almost say hourly—brought in contact with visitors to the Modern Zion; for, during the summer, thousands of travellers pass over the Pacific Railroad. Not a few of these called to see me; and I received from ladies and gentlemen—whose kind interest in my welfare I felt very deeply—many personal attentions, many words of sympathy and encouragement, and many intelligent and useful suggestions in respect to my future life. Indeed, I saw myself quite unexpectedly, and, I may truthfully say, without my own desire, become an object of interest.
By the earnest suggestions of friends and strangers, and by the widely published opinions of the press, I was made to feel that I had only begun my work—that I had but partly drawn aside the veil that covered the worst oppression and degradation of woman ever known in a civilized country. Nearly all who spoke to me expressed their surprise that intelligent men and women should be found in communion with the Mormon Church, in which it was so clearly evident that the teachings of Christianity had been supplanted by an attempt to imitate the barbarism of Oriental nations in a long past age, and the sweet influences of the religion of Jesus were superseded by the most objectionable practices of the ancient Jews. How persons of education and refinement could ever have embraced a faith that prostrated them at the feet of the Mormon Prophet, and his successor Brigham Young, was to the inquiring mind a perfect mystery.
The numerous questions which I had to answer, and the explanations which I had to give, showed me that my little book had only whetted the appetite of the intelligent investigator, and that there was a general call for a woman’s book on Mormonism—a book that should reveal the inner life of the Saints,—exhibit the influences which had contributed to draw Christian people away from Christian Churches to the standard of the American Prophet, Joseph Smith, and subject them to the power of that organization which has, since his death, subjugated the mass of the Mormon people in Utah to the will and wickedness of the Priesthood under the leadership of Brigham Young.
A few months after the publication of my first book, I was invited to lecture upon “Polygamy in Utah;” and wherever I spoke I observed the same spirit of inquiry, and met with a renewed demand for more of circumstance and narrative—which I had, from a sense of personal delicacy, withheld in my former work.
I saw no way of satisfying myself and others than by accepting the rather spiteful invitation of a certain Mormon paper to “Tell it all;” and this, in a narrative of my own personal experience, which I now present to the reader, I have endeavoured to do. Not being in any sense a literary woman, or making any pretensions as a writer, I hope to escape severe criticism from the public and the press. I had a simple story to tell—the story of my life and of the wrongs of women in Utah. Startling and terrible facts have fallen under my observation. These also I have related; but my constant effort has been to tell my story in the plainest, simplest way, and, while avoiding exaggeration, never to shrink from a straightforward statement of facts. I have disguised nothing, and palliated nothing; and I feel assured that those who from their actual and intimate acquaintance with Mormonism in Utah as it really is, are capable of passing a just and impartial judgment upon my story, will declare without hesitation that I have told “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”
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