Back in 1830 in frontier America, my gggg-grandfather Jay was 20 years old when Jay’s family met the Mormon missionaries. Jay’s father had a vision about the truthfulness of the missionaries’ message and he, his wife, and their eight children all joined the Church. Jay’s father was immediately set apart as a missionary and sent out to proselytize. When he returned home, they left their farm to join the Saints in Jackson County, Missouri.
Jay married Mary in 1833 in Independence Missouri, shortly before all hell broke loose. Mary was Jay’s childhood sweetheart, whose family joined the Church about the same time that Jay’s family joined the Church. Six months after the wedding, Mary huddled in the December cold on the river banks while the mob set fire to their homes. She and Jay spent the next five or six years scratching out a living in Missouri, trying to get enough money to travel to rejoin the Saints.
By the time Jay and Mary reunited with the Saints in Nauvoo in 1839, Mary had given birth to three children, two of whom were still living. Her oldest child was five years old when they settled in Nauvoo. Several years later, fourteen-year-old Ellie joined the family as a mother’s helper. Other than the names of her parents, we don’t know anything about Ellie’s childhood. Some stories suggest that Jay basically rescued Ellie from a bad situation and she was grateful to move into his household, where she had enough to eat and wasn’t beaten. However, their life histories were written by grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and there’s no way to verify the circumstances in which Ellie came to live with Jay and Mary.
In 1846, the Saints were being driven out of Nauvoo. Jay and Mary were sealed in the Nauvoo temple in January 1846 and left for Winter Quarters a week later. At Winter Quarters, Jay and Mary both fell seriously ill. Jay survived, Mary didn’t. Jay would spend three years convalescing in Winter Quarters before he could head west with the Saints.
The family history doesn’t say anything about Ellie’s health in Winter Quarters, which I take to mean that she was healthy enough that her suffering wasn’t enough to mention. Undoubtedly, she helped bury Mary, nursed Jay back to health, and cared for Jay and Mary’s children, who ranged in ages from 11 down to 3. Two of them died at Winter Quarters as well.
The dates get dodgy here. Recordkeeping in the traumatic setting of Winter Quarters wasn’t very good. Either three months before Mary died, or nine months after, Jay married Ellie, who was either 16 or 17 years old at the time. Jay would have been either 35 or 36. Ellie bore her first child more than a year later, by either date.
Either one year or two years after Jay married Ellie, Jay married 18-year-old Prue while still at Winter Quarters. Ellie and Prue were born the same year. We don’t know anything about Prue’s childhood. In her later years, people who knew her described her as a tall, lean, noble woman who had suffered much. We know she would go on to become both a poet and a midwife. I wish someone had saved her poetry. Was she alone in Winter Quarters? Did she have parents or siblings there? Her mother died during the final persecutions in Nauvoo. Her father disappears from the records after his wife died. Prue didn’t write a life history. Her great-granddaughter cobbled together the few paragraphs of her life sketch.
This isn’t part of the written history anywhere, but I like to believe that Ellie introduced Jay and Prue, and wanted them to marry. Ellie, cast-off child from a family that didn’t want her, may have been friends with Prue, who also apparently had no family. And now Ellie was married to a man twice her age, caring for Mary’s children who were only a few years younger than she was. Perhaps she wanted a friend in the family, someone close to her age for support. Perhaps she wanted to help Prue, and the best way to put an unmarried 18-year-old girl into a respectable and stable situation was a marriage. Perhaps she told Prue that Jay was kind and considerate, and he would never beat them. I imagine these things are why Prue and Jay were married a year or two after Ellie married Jay.
Prue and Ellie came across the plains in separate years. Jay was still weak and sick, but he managed to gather enough money and supplies to send Ellie out to Utah, where Jay’s siblings and parents took her in, along with Mary’s four surviving children and Ellie’s baby, until Jay and Prue could make the crossing. Prue’s first child was born just over a year after they arrived in Utah.
Once in Utah, Jay, along with his brothers and parents, founded a pioneer town. Ellie and Prue established their households, about which we know nothing. The grandchildren tell us that there was no distinction between full and half siblings, and that everyone worked together. Perhaps they lived near each other; they would have to live close, or even in the same house, for the distinction between full and half siblings to fade. I imagine Prue attended Ellie’s births as a midwife. Ellie had twelve children, eight of whom lived to adulthood. Prue had eight children, six of whom lived to grow up.
Jay was called as bishop of their small community, a position he would hold for the next twenty years, until his death. An unexpected illness took him while he was traveling back from Salt Lake City. Ellie and Prue were 39 years old when their husband died. Ellie was pregnant when he died; her son lived long enough to be blessed by his uncle, and named “Sorrow” before he died too. I imagine that naming your dying newborn “Sorrow” meant that Ellie was deeply saddened by Jay’s death, and then hit hard again by her baby’s death.
Ellie and Prue’s older children were old enough to work the farm; they didn’t have to remarry for economic reasons. They didn’t have to remarry for posterity either. The histories don’t say if anyone offered to marry either one of them and Ellie and Prue turned them down, or if no one ever offered. What the histories do say is that Ellie and Prue spent the rest of their lives together.
About ten years after Jay died, Prue’s son decided to settle 150 miles away and he invited his sister-mothers to come with him. No one tells us what Ellie and Prue thought about that invitation, and why they decided to leave the dozens of cousins, nieces, nephews, and in-laws of Jay’s family. They’d lived in that community for more than two decades as one of the most respected families.
The histories make a note of telling us that Ellie and Prue shared a wagon when they left their homes. The histories don’t tell us how they set up housekeeping in their new town. Probably they lived with an adult child and were surrounded by grandchildren. Ellie lived another eight years and died at age 52. Prue lived another thirteen years, and died at her son’s home after a brief illness. They were buried in the same cemetery.
—
When I first read my family history, I was mostly focused on Jay. The men mattered the most. Jay’s granddaughter put together his life history, with input from many others. We know a little bit about Mary because her family and Jay’s family were friends before they all joined the Church together. Ellie only gets a few paragraphs. There’s more in the oral history about Ellie, because up until I was in my 20s, we went to the little pioneer cemetery every Memorial Day, where Jay is buried. We cleared weeds off the graves and listened to old relatives tell stories. I don’t know how true the stories were, but that’s where I learned that Jay rescued Ellie. Did it really happen that way? I don’t know.
The detail that Ellie and Prue shared a wagon to move to a new town after their husband died stayed with me. I’d heard that sister wives were usually bitter rivals; I’d heard that sister wives were usually the best of friends. It seems to me that Ellie and Prue were best friends.
Once I got married, I started wondering if Ellie and Prue were more to each other than sister-wives. I married out of obedience too. I tried to love my husband. But eventually, I wished I was in a polygamous marriage so at least I would have a sister-wife for companionship. That’s when I started wondering if Ellie had asked Prue to be her sister-wife before Prue and Jay ever met. It seemed like something I would have done.
Jay was 36 when he married two teenagers. By all accounts, Mary was the wife of his heart. He’d known her since they were children and courted her for years before they married. He was a hard-working, faithful man, and the histories written about him by those who remember say he treated all his wives with respect. Mary was Jay’s same age. In Winter Quarters, Jay had his heart broken by Mary’s death, and by the death of two more of his children who died in Winter Quarters. Jay was sick, for three years he was too sick to leave Winter Quarters. I can’t believe that Jay was a lecherous predator on the prowl for teenage girls. The situation in Winter Quarters would have compelled him to marry Ellie. We don’t know why he married Prue, we really don’t, I made up the entire story about Ellie and Prue being friends and Ellie not wanting to be alone in a marriage with a man twice her age, and Jay just wanting to do the right thing.
None of these four people left us an account of how they felt. We have some information about where they lived, what they did, and when they gave birth and died, but that’s all. Was Ellie in love with Jay? Was Prue? Did Jay love them the same way he loved Mary, or was he mainly motivated by life’s necessities and what he believed to be God’s will? Were Ellie and Prue in love with each other? Did Mary tell Jay to marry Ellie as her dying wish because she knew Ellie already loved Mary’s children and would be a kind stepmother?
In Winter Quarters in the late 1840s, in a desperate situation, Ellie and Prue became sister wives and spent the rest of their lives together. How can you fall in love in such circumstances? If marriage is necessary to survive, you do what you have to do. Did Ellie and Prue have to end the hopes of young men closer to their own age? Was Jay their best option?
In my mind, the only way polygamy could ever really “work” is if no one is in love with anyone else. Respect, sure. Affection, if at all possible. But romantic love? I don’t see how that could work in a polygamous marriage.
I’ve mentioned before, but when my marriage got really bad, I wished I was in a polygamous marriage. I think I could have lasted longer if I only had to be around my ex-husband for a few weeks at a time. I also look at my mother and think she would have been much better off if my father hadn’t been around very often. If a husband is a burden, then sharing that burden with sister-wives would be a blessing.
Rather a bad situation for the husband too, wouldn’t you say? None of his wives really wanting him around. All that power, but nobody actually likes him.
Polygamy would be tolerable only if marriage is a duty and the relationship is a burden to be shared. I believe Jay was a decent man. I believe Ellie and Prue got along as well as sister-wives could. But I also believe that Jay was happy to return to Mary, and that Ellie and Prue got the option of marrying someone else, or staying together just the two of them.
—
Questions:
- If you have a story you want to share, please tell about your own ancestors and polygamy.
- What are your thoughts about marriage as a duty and economic necessity?
- What are your thoughts about marriage as a fulfilling relationship?
- Should I write a novel about lesbian sister-wives and their straight, clueless husband? (just kidding)
Wheat & Tares 
Thank for for this. You have provided perspectives (deliberately plural) on the subject that unfortunately get virtually no air time.
As for your novel, if you keep the perspectives you maintained in this post (i.e., not labelling them lesbians but still hinting at it) it could actually work. But don’t assume the husband is clueless. Perhaps he understands his limitations and is willing to look the other way as long as the wives aren’t giving birth to someone else’s children. As you state, the absence of stereotypical romance is critical to making such a story work. But I (not having a romantic bone in my body) find value in that. Historically, romance in marriage has been far more prominent in literature than in reality. Stories about people making it all work without romance are needed, even if it involves extra wives and implied lesbian relationships.
Well, I know of modern lesbians who after marrying a man, brought in another woman to the relationship. They all share an household and the three of them all had sex, not together as a threesome necessarily. Looks like polygamy on the outside, as the women get pregnant and have babies, but the love is really between the two women and the man is there as sperm donor and helps with finances. As long as they all stay friends and the man is a good father it can really work.
And in my family’s history back in the early church, there is one man who married a second wife because he needed help caring for a child. The man joined the church and his wife had a newborn and didn’t want to go off to God knew where with a newborn, so planned to join her husband later. The man took the older child with him. Crossing the plains or whenever, he was writing to the wife and said that Sara was “helping him with the child.” Before the wife could save up to make the trip to Utah with her second child, she found out that he had married Sara, not just that she was helping him with her first son. Anyway, the family history I know doesn’t give her feelings because it is all from the Mormon side who were in Utah. Anyway, he went on to marry a couple more women and I am descended from the daughter of the youngest son of the youngest son of however many youngest sons you can count. The family of the son left back East HATE the family in Utah, so it isn’t too hard to figure out how that first wife felt about him marrying the woman who was “helping him take care of” the oldest son.
I do think that back then men really needed a woman to care for a child as “day care” had not really been invented and he either hired a nanny or married a nanny and it was cheaper to marry her than to pay.
I always felt like it was a hell of a religion that would encourage a man to desert his wife and go off and marry again without even telling the first wife and that the first wife was quite justified in hating Mormons. But the family history meetings at reunions always portrayed her as the evil wife who refused to be baptized and hated Mormons.
Reading this story with all of its gaps and unknowns, it has reinforced my decision this past year to really get serious about writing my personal history.
My father’s grandmother was a second wife and she wrote a short autobiography which I have treasured. It is very short, however. My step-father wrote a longer biography of my (biological) father’s grandfather. I very much enjoyed reading both of those stories. When I look at the rest of my great- and grand-parents, I know nothing about them. It struck me that I would not be remembered if I didn’t get writing.
I have completed my history up to age 15 and it has been a terrific journey. I encourage everyone to write about their life and share it with the family. Future generations will know you and respect your endeavors.
My great great grandfather was a polygamist who married two literal sisters. Unfortunately they did not know they married the same man because he didn’t bother to tell them and apparently the sisters didn’t discuss their husband. (Wow, my husband’s name is Charles, too, and he works on a railroad too!) Each sister lived on one end of the railroad he worked in Arizona.
At some point they found out, after which chaos and anger understandably ensued. It’s been 100+ years since then and the two family clans don’t associate with each other. In full disclosure this particular progenitor was a scoundrel anyways, being both a horse thief and a vigilante, in addition to a closeted bigamist, so he probably had others on the side, but the doctrine granted him some legitimacy.
My view of marriage is decidedly more nuanced than when I got married as a ABM. And turning marriage into a duty is a good way of making it miserable for both (all??) parties, or at least a great way to remove all romance.
Thanks for sharing your family story, Janey. I know I have a number of polygamous predecessors. I’ve heard–without details–that some of my own family’s polygamy stories aren’t very happy ones. As a result, I’ve avoided reading/researching them. Perhaps your sharing of your story will be the inspiration I need to read/research my own family’s stories. As they say, sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Such complicated situations! I read an autobiography of a polygamous wife, Annie Clark Tanner. She wrote about her strong testimony of The Principle. The man she married heard her and that’s when he started courting her. She married him when polygamy was illegal and had to immediately go into hiding. Her husband stood her up shortly after they were married. She writes about waiting at the window for hours past the time he promised to come. Six weeks after her wedding, husband married another wife without telling Annie. It broke her heart. She was disillusioned about polygamy early on, but she did her duty. Her husband didn’t sound like a good guy – more of a selfish flake.
The first generation in polygamy would have had a very different experience than the 2nd and 3rd generations. In Nauvoo, when polygamy started to spread, it was established couples wrestling with the idea. Adults who had been raised in a monogamous society were making the decisions. But once the community was in Utah, polygamy was the norm. Girls were married off younger and younger, with less and less ability and opportunity to say no.
How convenient for men to have a religion to justify their cad behavior.
Based on the actions of some men I knew, I promised myself as a teenager that if I ever became a young widower, I’d wait a year before I even thought about dating again.
I plan on holding myself to that promise, but with each passing year, I grow more sympathetic towards those who remarry fairly quickly. I’ve grow so dependent on my wife in so many ways it’s truly hard to imagine life without her. Obviously no one is the same as her, but finding someone else to share a life with would be a huge step in filling a gaping hole in the heart. I think my wife would probably have a much easier time moving on from me.
It would seem economic marriages were much more common back then, but I would ideally hope for love on both sides in a marriage. For those who do remarry quickly, even now, I do believe there is some genuine love there—at least in those I know—because I think they’ve gotten much more adept at producing it with time. I realize that’s not always the case, and when it isn’t, there are some glaring results.
I also have polygamy in multiple lines. I haven’t researched it in depth, but from what I’ve seen, most of it was neither positive nor negative. It simply was.
Thanks for sharing.
Not certain that the author would disagree with me here, but ethical polyamory can work but it’s admittedly a different subject than polygamy- the latter which is rarely egalitarian.
People can and often DO love multiple people at once and remain committed to them- but this takes work, openness, and boundaries. In the end it isn’t something that everyone wants nor need want. Same thing with romance and sex in general.
Anyone read “The Ethical Slut” by Dossie Easton and Janet Hardie? 3rd Ed.?
Here’s a strong vote for 4 and no hinting around. It’s not 1954. Finally, a book of Mormon historical fiction I can relate to.
I get economic necessity, but eff duty. All this talk of customs and duty makes me think of tariffs. What sort of prohibited goods are we talking about. There must be a reason smugglers are so popular in historical romance fiction.
If it’s not fulfilling, why be in the relationship. I don’t get it. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I’d like to think (and as someone who is not romantic–barf) that you’re better together than apart. Insert cliche. Play the song.
Nanny as next wife a long history past the Sound of Music. There’s probably an undiscovered cuneiform recording the story of Ninshubur coming to work as a nanny for Inanna and dutiful clueless Dumuzid who ends up in the Underworld. And Ninshubur and Inanna lived eternally happy afterwords, mutually fulfilled. (And all the straight teenage girls cried over handsome tragic Dumuzid) Hey, I like this story. Maybe Maria should have got together with the Baroness.
As for family stories, in my Book of Remembrance (are they still a thing?) are a bunch of short bio’s of faithful pioneers originally for DUP. My favorite is the one with a postscript negating all the glowing things written. Apparently none of his wives had anything good to say.
So two polygamy stories in my ancestry have made their way to me. I will start with the negative one. This story was told to me by my mother. She heard it from my great grandma Veda who died at the age of 94 when I was in my early twenties.
Veda’s mother was one of four wives. Veda only saw her father once a month when he would come to Sunday dinner. Back then children were seen but not heard at the dinner table and so she had no interaction with him. One afternoon she was walking through town and passed him on the sidewalk. She stopped him and told him that she had holes in her shoes and asked if he would buy her another pair. He told her he didn’t have any money to do that for her. This was the only time she ever spoke with him.
Story number two is better. My father’s aunt Bertha, who made all my night gowns in my childhood, wrote this story. In England, John Douglas, a widower with one son married, Mary Dyson, a widow with two daughters. They joined the church and emigrated in 1856 on the ship named Horizon with other British mission saints paid for by the Perpetual Immigration fund. Mary, 36, took her daughter Eliza, 18 and John, 39 brought his son William, 14. After 36 days they landed in Boston then arrived On July 8th in Iowa City.
They were in the 5th and last handcart company headed by Edward Martin. Eliza died and was buried in Rockville Illinois. With the green wood in their handcarts they were part of the party rescued on November 19th (I was raised in the area of Sweetwater County Wyoming where they were rescued. It is sooo cold there in November.) William died the same day they were rescued.
They arrived in SLC on November 30th in poor health with no resources. They still had to pay back the Perpetual Immigration Fund.
Mary, 38 at this point, and in poor health was too old to have more children. Her sister Matilda in England became a widow with three children in 1958. Mary wrote to her and invited her to immigrate to Utah and become John’s second wife. In November 1962 John married Matilda.
We have a picture of them with John in the middle and his wives on either side, each with a baby in their arms. They lived in different houses. Mary raised one of Matilda’s daughters, Mary Jane. The ward clerk believed Mary Jane was Mary’s daughter. Mary Jane was the mother of my great grandmother, Katherine, who I knew well, who also died at the age of 94 when I was in my early twenties.
Canadian Dude – I think ethical polyamory is a fascinating family structure. I’ve read some joking-but-not-really joking dialogues online about how polyamory will go mainstream because that’s the only way to afford a house anymore. As you pointed out, a huge difference between polygamy and polyamory is the equality. Women are under priesthood authority and men make all the decisions in polygamy. Whereas, the goal in polyamory is for each individual to be equal to the others. No one is taking direction from anyone else. I don’t know any polyamorous groups in real life. I imagine those emotional dynamics are very complex and the participants would need to have good communication skills and personal boundaries.
Two of great great grandparents married in England in 1859. They were both teenagers, and their first child was born a month before the wedding! (They had both been Mormon for a while by then, by the way.) You can learn fun things from paying attention to those details. They crossed the ocean and settled in Paris, Idaho in the 1860s. In 1869, the husband married an 18-year-old second wife, 11 years younger than himself. The marriage lasted only 3-4 years, and when she left, she left behind a child that the husband and first wife raised as their own. By her mid 20s, the second wife married a guy her own age, with whom she had 3 more children. None of the 4 individuals in this story ever entered into a plural marriage again, as far as I can tell. To me those data points suggest a polygamous marriage entered into out of a sense of duty, and perhaps financial necessity as you suggest. It also suggests people didn’t particularly like the arrangement, and possibly everyone was more satisfied with how things settled eventually. It makes me wonder what they believed about polygamy, and whether they thought it was earning them a place in heaven, or any of the other things being preached about it at the time.