Anti-Mormon sentiments were common among the general US population in the mid-nineteenth century, so it’s not surprising that the covered wagon women would share them. It’s often difficult to tell, though, whether or not those prejudices were based on fact or on sensationalist tales that were popular at the time.
While reading the following passage, I was reminded of an episode of History Detectives I recently watched. It involved the authentication of an anonymously published book called Female Life Among the Mormons. The book purports to have been written by a Mormon wife in 1856—just a few years after Lucena Parsons’ diary entry. And while the book was at best highly fictionalized and at worst a complete fabrication, there’s no reason to believe that Lucena Parsons’ account—while inevitably colored by prejudice—isn’t generally truthful on the basic facts.
After all, I don’t think there’s much to debate about polygyny among the early Mormons. It happened then, as it happens now among fundamentalist Mormon sects. And if American women in the 1850s had little power comparative to men, it surely can’t have been any better for them in a patriarchal stronghold like the Mormon church.
Lucena Parsons had a few things to say about that, after her party wintered over at the Mormon settlement in Salt Lake City.
January, 1851
I know many men who have mothers & their daughters for these so called spiritual wives let the number be what it may. Oald Brigham Young for one. Archibald Gardner for another & Capt Brown for another & many more I could mention but it is too mean to write. These demons marry some girls at 10 years of age. For instance a man will take a mother & her daughters & marry them all at one time & perhaps he has persuaded her to leave a husband with whome she has always lived happy, or be damned. She believes it for perhaps he is one of the heads of the church & in this way many respectable families have been ruined. This I know to be true.
What will become of these men the Lord only knows. I have had the opportunity of knowing many of the women that are called spiritual wives & among them all I never saw one that seemed the least bit happy, but on the other hand they are a poor heart broken & deluded lot & are made slaves to the will of these hellish beings who call themselves men. All the preaching & teaching that is heard in this valley is obedience to rulers, & womens rights are trampled under foot. They have not as much liberty as common slaves in the south.
Brigham Young has some 70 women it is said [1]. Heber C Kimball has 50 [2], Doctor Richards 13, Parley Pratt 30 or 40 [3], John Taylor 8 [4], Capt Brown 8 [5], & in fact all the men who have but one are looking out for more. If when they have got them they would use them well it would be better but far from it. They fight & quarrel & the women leave one man & go to another. When a woman wishes to leave she goes to Brigham & gets a divorce & marries another & this is the way things are going all the time.
Lucena Pfuffer, 1821-1905, Diary of Lucena Parsons, January, 1851, in Covered Wagon Women: Diaries & Letters from the Western Trails, vol. 2: 1850. Holmes, Kenneth L., ed. & comp.. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.
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Her numbers are a little off. According to Wikipedia,
1. Brigham Young had 55 wives.
2. Heber C. Kimball had 43 wives.
3. Parley Pratt had 12 wives.
4. John Taylor had at least seven wives.
5. Capt. James Brown had 13 wives.
red paper boat 