Escaping Pedogamy
Some girls in territorial Utah were so horrified by the prospect of being coerced into pedogamous relationships with men older than their own fathers that they went to extremes to avoid it, escaping Utah alone, forcibly removing themselves from their husbands or potential suitors, or even committing suicide rather than submit.
Non-Mormon, Joseph Troskolawski, was in Utah in 1855 and 1856 as an assistant surveyor under the employ of US Surveyor, General David H. Burr. In a letter to the New York Herald on May 24, 1857, Troskolawski wrote of the disgust he felt when confronted with, not only blatant pedophilia, but incest among LDS leaders as well. He wrote, "One of their bishops [Aaron Johnson of Springville] married four of his own nieces, and I was told that as soon as another still younger should attain sufficient maturity, she also would be sacrificed to his vile passions. I myself met this bishop in company with one of his wives, who could not have been more than thirteen years old. In that house...a gray haired man, upwards of sixty years of age, retires with a young girl not over thirteen!"
Bishop Aaron Johnson, indeed, married several of his nieces, but Trokolawski was off by one year in the wives' ages, being at least 14 when they married their uncle. Aaron Johnson's first plural wife was a woman named Sarah Mariah Johnson, whom he married in Nauvoo in 1844, when she was 20 and he was 38. Despite having the same surname, nothing is known about her parents, although family members have speculated she was his niece. In May 1846, Aaron Johnson married his niece, Mary Ann Johnson, daughter of his brother, William Johnson. Aaron was just shy of 40 while Mary Ann was only 14. Brigham Young officiated at their marriage. Another niece, Harriet Fidelia Johnson, was 15 when she married her uncle, Aaron, in 1852, and he was 46. She was the daughter of his brother, Lorenzo, and again Brigham Young officiated. Another of Lorenzo's daughters, Eunice Lucinda Johnson, married Aaron in 1853, when she was 17 and he was a week away from 47. This time, apostle George A. Smith performed their sealing. Lastly, in March 1857, Second Counselor in the First Presidency, Daniel H. Wells, married another daughter of Lorenzo Johnson, Julia Maria, to her uncle, Aaron. He was now 50 and Julia was just 14.
Troskolawski then continued in his letter to recount the story of young Emily "Emma" Wheat, a recent arrival from Ohio:
I became acquainted in Salt Lake City with a little girl about twelve years old, named Emma Wheat, and her brother [Charles]. They were in a distressed condition, and…I visited their mother, who is old and infirm, for the purpose of aiding them, if in my power. The children begged of me to assist them in getting to the States...During a temporary absence from the city an old man asked the young child in marriage. She told her mother she would rather die than assent to the old man’s proposal. She persisted in her resolution, and at length the old man, finding his suit hopeless, married the mother for the purpose of forcing her daughter to his house. The girl, however, fled, and made known her distress to a friend of mine, while I was still absent, and he supported the girl and her brother until my return. Upon my arrival I immediately fulfilled the promise I had made them. I procured a passage for them in the United States mail stage, and sent them on to Ohio. This was done on the 1st of August [1856]. On the 2d, by the order of Brigham Young, the gang of Dannites [sic] attempted to kill me.
Emma was born in 1843 in Connecticut and her brother, Charles Orson Wheat, was born there in 1846 to James Wheat and Harriet Hunt. Their father, James, died in Sandusky, Ohio in 1854 and they were in Utah by the winter of 1855-56. Their widowed mother, Harriet, married James Rawlins in Salt Lake City in May 1856. Rawlins was 62 years old when they married, so Emma was just 12 when he reportedly began pursuing her hand in marriage as well. Although many details that Troskolawski gave are not verifiable, we do know that the US mail left Salt Lake City on August 2, 1856 at 10:00am, so he was off by one day as to when the stage coach left. Emma and Charles Wheat had aunts and uncles living in Sandusky, Ohio, and she likely went there. She then married Charles N. Hunt in Connecticut in 1861 (and died in the Bronx, New York in 1929), so she definitely had left Utah, Mormonism, and her mother behind. Mormon lawyer, Hosea Stout, confirms in his diary that, on August 4, 1856, Emery Meecham and John Flack "gave [Troskolowski] a most unmerciful Horse whipping, bruising & marring him very much. Troskieloskie is an employe[e] of Mr. Burr, the surveyor general, for the United States." A letter from David Burr, written August 30, 1856, to the Secretary of the Interior reported that he thought "the attack was made upon Mr. Troskolawski, in order to produce a salutary effect upon us 'Gentiles,' and make us afraid to express our opinions," an act of terrorism.
Another letter to the New York Herald, this one written on August 31 but published on October 19, 1856, was anonymously written by their Salt Lake correspondent and extensively reported on the attack on Troskowlaski. According to this account, the two young men, plus Mormon thug Bill Hickman, had attacked him in downtown Salt Lake right at dusk. The victim "was found to be very seriously hurt having received a severe internal injury by being dreadfully cut up and bruised. He had received heavy blows behind each ear and on his forehead." It was also reported that he was in such bad condition his friends and colleagues thought he was going to die, but he pulled through. However, the author did not know the cause of this vicious attack and broadly surmised, "Mr. T. had used too great freedom of speech in expressing his views of Mormon religion."
Caroline Hicks married 30-year-old Albert King Thurber, first counselor of the Spanish Fork ward bishopric, on March 21, 1857 at the Endowment House in Salt Lake City. Having just turned 13, three weeks earlier, Caroline realized she was too young for a sexual relationship. So after the marriage, she locked Thurber out of her bedroom. Her older brother, George Armstrong Hicks, and a friend named John Moore, rescued her through the bedroom window. George and John also helped her to obtain a cancelation of her sealing with Thurber. Three years later, at the age of 16, she married her rescuer, 22-year-old John Moore, and bore eight children. As dramatic as this scenario was, Caroline remained faithful to Mormonism. Thurber himself was a serial pedogamist, first marrying 14-year-old Thirza M. Berry in 1851 when he was 24, and then marrying third wife Agnes Brockbank in 1867 when she was 16 and he was 41.
In the autobiography of Caroline's brother, George Armstrong Hicks (edited by Polly Aird in 2011), he provided a fascinating window into the machinations of pedogamy in the Spanish Fork ward. He recounted that as part of the zeal of the Reformation:
The young girls of Spanish Fork were fairly besieged by men old enough to be their fathers. The young women from 13 to 16 years of age were many of them sealed to men three times their own age. The girls were told that if any faithful man made them an offer of marriage, it was their imperative duty to except [sic] the offer. An old and tried man in the gospel [was] more capable of giving a high degree of glory than a young and untried man.
However, he also noted that there was active dissent among just a few of the girls in the area. "There were but three girls who stood out against the 'old men,'" he wrote. They were Lucilla Beck, Jane Buchanan, and Polly Ann Dorrity. "They deserve a name in history for their moral courage and good sense," he continued. Dorrity was his wife's cousin and he knew well "what she had to endure to remain single." No fewer than five older, married men "at the same time [were] offering her salvation," including John W. Berry, also a counselor in the Spanish Fork bishopric. Dorrity's father favored her marrying Berry because of his church position, but Polly Ann informed her father, Dennis, that she would commit suicide rather than go through with such a marriage. Denied his desires, Berry took back the gifts that he had given Polly Ann to woo her. Johnathan McKee, 19 years her senior and married with five children, even told Polly Ann "that an Angel of the Lord had visited him and told him it was his duty to take Polly Ann and it was her duty if she wished to be saved to mar[r]y him." Polly Ann's mother, Diana, believed McKee and urged her daughter to marry him, but father, Dennis Dorrity, was not taken in by the ploy, telling them that he thought "the Angel should have visited him or his daughter" Polly Ann as well. To take herself out of this frenzied market, in February 1856 she married her peer, Albert Gay, just seven years older than herself at 15.
Although Hicks gave no stories about Beck or Buchanan, we do know that Lucilla Beck was 18 when she married John W. Snell (aged 22) in 1857, and Jane Buchanan was 20 when she married 23-year-old James G. Higginson the same year, so they successfully escaped pedogamy... but, not polygamy. Both men later married one other wife each.
In my last article, I wrote about Martin Handcart survivor, Sarah Ann Briggs, and her pedogamous marriage, which eventually led to her leaving Mormonism. Another 1856 handcart survivor committed suicide by cutting her throat on Christmas night 1856, rather than marry an old man. The New York Times quoted a report dated March 5, 1857 from Salt Lake City that an unnamed girl had “traveled thousands of miles on foot, suffering great privations and fatigue,” had but "recently arrived by the hand cart train." When she rejected the “besotted head” of the family where she was recuperating, she was turned out into the street. "Being naturally modest and endowed with the self respect and delicacy becoming her sex, she was unable to overcome the prejudices of her early education - and so positively declined the insulting overtures. She was informed then that she could remain in his house on no other condition; she chose to abandon it, but soon found every other door closed against her." Now “homeless and friendless, beyond the possibility of escape from her pursuers,” her only options were “pollution or death, and she chose the latter.”
Hosea Stout recorded her suicide in his diary and added that her surname was Williams: "This evening a young woman by the name of Williams committed suicide by cutting her throat." Now there were members of a Williams family who had just arrived in the Martin Handcart Company. Caroline Garstone Williams Blakey survived the handcart disaster and she had a daughter by her first husband, named Caroline Williams, who was born in England in 1841. This younger Caroline would have been 15 the winter of 1856, but Williams family genealogists have claimed she remained in England and married John Greenwell there in 1856. However, according to the marriage record I found in Herefordshire records, the Caroline Williams who married Greenwell was the daughter of James and Susanna Williams, not George and Caroline Williams. We also know that young Caroline Williams appeared with her family on the passenger list of the Horizon which brought many Mormons from England who would later be in the Martin Handcart Company. 15-year-old Caroline Williams was almost certainly the girl who slit her own throat on Christmas, rather than be coerced to marry a much older man who already had a wife and children.
This is the fourth piece in a series of articles that discusses child brides in historic and modern times in Utah. Read the other pieces here, here, here, here, and here, and here. Read the other pieces here, here, and here.