From the very day Smith made known his remarkable revelation, he and his followers
found themselves in conflict with their neighbors and with mainstream America. Their
insistence that only the gospel they preached would open the road to salvation, their
tendency to establish political and economic control wherever they settled, their attempts
to establish a theocratic state, and, later, their practice of polygamy so aroused the
hostility of their countrymen that they drove the Latter-Day Saints from New York to
Ohio to Missouri and, finally, to Illinois, where in 1844 Joseph Smith paid a martyr’s
price for his visions of the kingdom of God restored. Two years later, Smith’s successor,
Brigham Young, led the Mormons to a hoped-for place of peace and refuge in the
mountains and deserts of territorial Utah. There they struggled to overcome an unfriendly
natural environment, colonized the Great Basin, sent out missionaries to gather in the
elect, and set themselves single-mindedly to the task of “building up” a new Zion in
preparation for the second coming of the Savior.
Out of this cauldron of struggle and conflict were forged many of the stories Mormons
still tell, stories that inculcate in both tellers and listeners a great sense of appreciation for
the sacrifices of their forebears and a determination to face present difficulties with
courage equal to that of their ancestors.
One such story, typical of many others, tells of a pioneer wagon train caught in a
winter storm in Wyoming while try-ing to reach Utah. With the temperature dropping
below zero, one woman huddled next to a little girl as they slept, only to discover in the
morning that the girl had frozen to death during the night. The woman’s hair had frozen
to the girl’s stiff body and had to be cut free before the woman could get up. The
woman’s family kept the scissors used to cut the hair and passed them down from one
generation to the next—just as they have passed down the story of the event—to remind
family members of sacrifices once made on their behalf and to persuade them to honor
their valiant heritage. Similar stories have been circulated in numerous other families.
They tell of persecutions, of hardships endured on the trek west, of encounters with
Indians, and, in the face of droughts and grasshopper plagues, of attempts to make their
new desert home “blossom like the rose.”
The stories tell also of the practice of polygamy, which once again put Mormons on a
collision course with established society. Initiated by the early 1840s but not exercised
openly until the 1850s, the practice of polygamy, or “plural marriage,” as the Mormons
called it, brought the wrath of Victorian America upon the entire Mormon community
and resulted in a series of federal antipolygamy laws. A spate of mainly humorous stories
details acts of trickery engaged in by Mormons as they outwitted the callous federal
marshals attempting to incarcerate them for “unlawful cohabitation.” For example, one
good patriarch, summoned to appear before a local magistrate to explain his polygamous
activities, asked his wives to wait for him at the cemetery on the outskirts of town. Asked
by the judge where his wives were, the man answered truthfully, “In the cemetery, every
one.” Assuming that the wives were deceased, the judge let the man go. He then stopped
by the cemetery, picked up his wives, and returned safely home.
Other stories focus on the heartbreak experienced by plural wives, who had to share
their husbands with other women. One poignant and typical account tells of a man about
to take a second wife. He, his first wife, and his wife-to-be traveled to town by horse and
wagon to have the marriage ceremony performed:
On the way there the man slept with his first wife in the wagon, and his
little fiance slept on the ground under the wagon. But on the way back, the wives reversed positions. The second wife slept with the husband in the
wagon, and the first wife slept under them.
The practice of polygamy was officially discontinued by the church in 1890, but stories
like this one linger on, engendering among some contemporary Mormon women feelings
of sympathy for the pain suffered by their sisters of yesteryear.