Mrs. Smith Goes to Washington:

Eliza R. Snow Smith’s Visit to Southern Utah, 1880-81

Jill Mulvay Derr

In 1885, when Eliza R. Snow penned her life sketch for historian Hubert Howe Bancroft, she recalled with pride the extensive travels that for seventeen years had defined, in part, her work with the women’s Relief Society of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. “I have traveled from one end of Utah Ter. to the other – into NevadaIdaho, in the interests of these organizations – have organized hundreds of the Young Ladies’ and Primary Associations since their introduction,” she wrote.[1] Known among Latter-day Saints during the 1830s and 1840s as a poet and writer of hymn texts, Eliza Snow, in the 1850s and 1860s, officiated in women’s sacred ordinances in the Endowment House in Salt Lake City and became known as “priestess.” Through the 1870s and 1880s, she stepped outside the Holy House to labor in local wards with women, young women and children and serve not only as Relief Society president, but “President of the Latter-day Saint Women’s Organizations,” and “the recognized leader of the women of the Latter-day Saints.”[2] She was a shepherd who knew her flock of women and children and they knew her. For nearly twenty years, like an itinerant preacher, she visited them unceasingly. Her five-month sojourn in Southern Utah during the winter of 1880-81 is an illuminating example of her movable ministry and pastoral outreach.

“I spent the Autumn & Winter of 1880-81 in St. George, officiating in the Temple for the dead, and visiting and organizing Associations in that interesting City, and adjacent country – having traveled one thousand m[ile]s by team over jolting rocks and through bedded sand, occasionally camping out at night on long drives,” Eliza wrote in her life sketch.[3] Except for her nine-month trip to Europe and the Holy Land in 1872-73, the southern tour comprised the longest time and distance she traveled away from Salt Lake City, and she never forgot it. Nor did those whom she visited forget. “One of the most unforgettable things of my life was when Eliza R. Snow came to CedarCity in 1880 to organize a Primary Association,” Violet Lunt Urie recalled.[4] The southern tour, executed at the height of Eliza’s ministry among Latter-day Saint women and children, provides significant insights into both the minister and her ministry. No Eliza Snow diary for this period has yet come to light, nor do we have more than three or four of the many letters she wrote from St. George. Nevertheless, newspaper articles, rich local minutes, and personal diaries and reminiscences of Dixie Saints furnish a fascinating picture of Eliza at the apex of her formal and informal power.

Eliza first visited the southern settlements in 1864 in company with Brigham Young and a large group of family members and church leaders.[5] Though Brigham Young went to southern Utah at least a dozen more times before his death in 1877, Eliza did not accompany him. After 1868, when Brigham Young called her to help bishops organize Relief Societies and then to preach to women, she traveled extensively, accompanied by other leading women, first moving northward as far as the Cache and Malad valleys and, by 1878, venturing as far south as Manti. But the settlements south of Nephi, along the route that is now Interstate 15, did not see her until she spent five months there during 1880-81. After that, she never again crossed the southern rim of the Great Basin.

Eliza did not make the 1880-81 trip south alone, but in the company of her dear friend Zina Diantha Huntington Young (1821-1901) who, like Eliza, was a plural wife first of Joseph Smith and, after his death, of Brigham Young.[6] During their southern tour, three years after Brigham’s death in 1877, Eliza and Zina celebrated their connection to Joseph. Repeatedly, they were honored as “wives of the Prophet Joseph Smith.” Added to this significant family connection was new organizational stature. Five months before the two women began their journey, in June 1880, Eliza was called and sustained as general president of the Relief Society and Zina as her first counselor.[7] And the St. George Temple, as Eliza noted, played a central role in the women’s southern labors. Between November 1880 and March 1881, Eliza and Zina circled through a string of thirty-two settlements and visited Relief Societies, Young Ladies organizations, and Primary Associations. Week after week, their circuit brought them back to the temple where they forged sacred connections to their families and to Joseph Smith.

Eliza was seventy-six years old in June 1880 when she was appointed general president of the Relief Society and, as Maureen Ursenbach Beecher has shown, she traveled with particular intensity during the next twelve months.[8] Just how long or extensively she planned for the trip south is unclear. A3 November 1880 article in the Deseret News notes “Sister Eliza R. Snow and Zina D. Young are contemplating a trip to St. George, before winter sets in. They will start within the next fortnight probably, and return in about a month afterward.”[9] In fact, they left five days later and were absent five months. What seems to have been originally planned as a visit to St. George, the temple, and members of the Young family and numerous friends, expanded to include visits to nearly every settlement in five Utah counties: Millard, Beaver, Iron, Washington, and Kane. There were Relief Society sisters to comfort and counsel, young ladies in Mutual Improvement Associations to instruct, and Primary Associations to organize. Eliza and Zina moved from ward to ward to complete this organizational work; their endless meetings and public speeches formed a prominent part of their trip south. Their quieter days spent in and around St. George, at the temple and with friends, were an equally memorable aspect of the trip. Both the institutional and personal dimensions of their extended visit in and around WashingtonCounty will be better understood if prefaced by a review of why it was not “Miss Snow” but “Mrs. Smith” who went to Washington.

“Aunt Eliza” or “Sister Eliza” or “Miss Eliza R. Snow” retained her maiden name until 1880, when in May, six months before she headed south with Zina, she took Joseph Smith’s name and became known as Eliza R. Snow Smith. Eliza’s new name and her declared relationship to Joseph Smith had significant repercussions throughout her southern tour.

By 1880, questions about the Prophet’s introduction of the doctrine and practice of plural marriage (polygyny or polygamy) had been argued for nearly four decades. In Nauvoo, Illinois, Eliza, like other plural wives, kept confidential her marriage to the Prophet and later admitted that she “had no anticipation of ever being acknowledged as a lawful wife.”[10] Exposure of covert polygamy in Nauvoo sparked the explosive events that culminated in the murder of Joseph and Hyrum Smith at nearby Carthage in 1844. Then Church membership, sharply divided over plural marriage and other doctrinal innovations, fractured. The half that traveled to the Rocky Mountains with Brigham Young exacerbated the controversy over plural marriage by perpetuating the practice and publicly acknowledging it in 1852. Plurality of wives, Latter-day Saints affirmed, originated in revelation given to Joseph Smith.[11] A sizable cluster of Nauvoo Mormons who had remained in the Midwest gathered during 1852-53 in the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which “categorically rejected and condemned the practice of plural marriage.”[12] When Joseph Smith III, the oldest son of Joseph and his first wife Emma Smith, agreed to assume leadership of this group in April 1860, he too denounced plural marriage and declared that his father the Prophet Joseph Smith “never could have promulgated such doctrines.”[13] Emma Smith, who had opposed plural marriage in Nauvoo, supported her son’s anti-polygamy stance, which he expanded into strategic missionary and political campaigns.[14]

While Eliza must have known that Joseph III sent RLDS missionaries to Utah to disclaim the Prophet Joseph’s involvement in plural marriage and persuade Utah Mormons of the error of their “Utah doctrines,” no direct response from her regarding their visit or preaching is extant, even though the missionaries were Joseph and Emma’s own sons, whom Eliza had known as children. Alexander came in 1866, and returned with David in 1869, who came on his own in 1872, followed in 1876 by Joseph III himself.[15] In October 1879, however, three year’s after Joseph III’s visit, Eliza fiercely answered the Reorganization’s insistence that Joseph Smith had no plural wives. She wrote indignantly to the Deseret News of having recently read to her “great astonishment” the “Last Testimony of Sister Emma,” just published in the RLDS Saints’ Advocate. According to Eliza, the published transcript of the interview Emma had granted her sons Joseph and Alexander in February 1879, two months before her death on April 30, represented Emma as “positively affirming that Joseph the Prophet had no other wife or wives than her; that he neither taught the principle of plurality of wives, publicly or privately.” Eliza questioned Joseph III’s motive and method, labeling him a “misguided son [who], through a sinister policy, branded [his mother’s] name with gross wickedness – charging her with the denial of a sacred principle which she had heretofore not only acknowledged but acted upon.” Eliza recognized Emma as a “once highly honored woman” and observed:

Even if her son ignored his mother’s reputation for veracity, he better had waited until his father’s wives were silent in death, for now they are here living witnesses of the divinity of plural marriage, as revealed by the Almighty, through Joseph Smith, who was commanded to introduce it by taking other wives.[16]

The “Last Testimony of Sister Emma” provoked Eliza’s angry October 1879 letter to Deseret News editors, which she signed “Eliza R. Snow, A wife of Joseph Smith the Prophet.” She had vented her wrath toward the United States government nine months earlier in January 1879, after the United States Supreme Court issued its decision in the case of Reynolds vs. the United States, confirming the constitutionality of the 1862 Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act and opening the way for prosecution of polygamists.[17] With biting sarcasm, Eliza pummeled the court’s decision, its travesties of justice. “Let us cause thousands of loving, honorable wives to be stigmatized as prostitutes, and their offspring as bastards,” she wrote in one of fourteen verses.[18] When the “Last Testimony of Sister Emma” appeared nine months later, it hit a raw nerve. Eliza concluded her October 1879 letter to the Deseret News with a reference to the Reynolds decision: “It may be asked, Why defend plurality of wives, since the United States government forbids its practice? The action of the executors of this government can neither change or annihilate a fundamental truth. . . . The controversy is with God – not us.”[19]

At some point during the next six months, Eliza decided to take the name of her husband Joseph Smith. Thus, she would broadly and unmistakably proclaim that she was a plural wife and proudly committed to plural marriage. She had publicly defended plural marriage and claimed her relationship to Joseph on many previous occasions, but changing her name was like hoisting a banner in a time of crisis. It was a way of defying both the Reynolds decision and the “Last Testimony of Sister Emma.” In the 15 May 1880 issue of the Woman’s Exponent, editor Emmeline B. Wells began referring to Eliza as “Eliza R. Snow Smith.”[20] Eight weeks later, 16 July 1880, Eliza told women assembled inBountiful for the Davis Stake Relief Society quarterly conference that “some of her friends were desirous that she should take upon herself the name of her first husband which was Smith.”[21] At least two other wives of Joseph Smith – Zina D. H. Young and Emily Dow Partridge Young – experimented with taking the name Smith at this time.[22] Ultimately, Eliza was the only one for whom the change of name endured.[23]

Thus it was Eliza R. Snow Smith who joined her sister-wife and friend Zina D. H. Young for a five-month visit to southern Utah that served both institutional and personal purposes. The women’s extensive organizational work – visiting different settlements to organize and assist local branches of the Relief Society, Young Ladies Mutual Improvement Association and Primary Association – will be the focus of the first part of this discussion. The second part will feature Eliza and Zina’s visits with friends and their work at the St. George Temple. The two parts cannot be neatly divided, however, since the women’s institutional and personal circles inevitably and frequently overlapped.

Mapping Eliza and Zina’s travels reveals what an ambitious program they undertook during the twenty-weeks they toured “Utah’s harshlands.” On November 8, 1880, the two women stepped onto the 7:00 a.m. train in Salt Lake City and rode in the cars of the Utah Southern Railroad to the depot at Juab, JuabCounty, a stop but not the terminus. By June 1880 the railway had been extended south to Milford, near Beaver, but the two women chose to disembark further north so they could visit the string of settlements between Scipio and CedarCity. At Juab, they climbed into the first of the many carriages and wagons in which they would ride for the next five months and “Brother Olsen” transported them twenty–four miles to Scipio, where they arrived about 6:00 p.m. The next day, November 9, they met with the Relief Society at Scipio and organized a Primary Association. On November 10 they held meetings at Holden, and the following day at Fillmore. They stopped to visit Fillmore stake president Thomas Callister, who then lay terminally ill. Eliza spoke in tongues to comfort him. “A sweet spirit filled the house,” Zina recorded, and “it seemed angels were ther[e].”[24] On November 12 they spent the day in Meadow and held an evening meeting at Kanosh. Eliza said “she was pleased to meet the sisters of Kanosh,” and observed that “sixteen years had elapsed since she had passed through the settlement before.”[25] They missed the sisters’ quarterly conference they had anticipated attending in Parowan on Saturday, November 13, but held a meeting with the sisters the following Monday evening. At CedarCity on Tuesday, November 16, they organized a Primary Association and a silk association and held a general meeting that “was considered by all present to be a feast of good things.”[26]

On Friday, November 19, they organized a Primary Association at Washington, then pushed on to St. George, arriving before the end of the day. Church headquarters for the southern settlements, St. George was to be their headquarters for the next four and a half months. They settled in with stake Relief Society president Minerva Snow and spent the next two weeks laboring in the temple and visiting ward Relief Societies, Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Associations and Primary Associations in St. George, Washington, and Santa Clara.

The first of their forays began on Friday, December 3, when they left for a five-day tour of settlements north and west of St. George: PineValley, Pinto, Hebron, Hamblin, and Gunlock. Eliza described part of the trip in a letter to the Woman’s Exponent: “The morning was delightful, and the beautifully variegated mountain scenery, like a panorama constantly changing, was sublimely amusing as we passed on over rugged rocks and through canon and dell, with ever and anon a healthy jolt, all of which were accredited for my special benefit.”[27]

Following their return, they spent the rest of December, the next twenty-three days, in and around St. George. Then beginning on New Year’s Day, 1881, Eliza, Zina and Minerva began a “missionary trip up the Rio Virgin” to settlements north and east of St. George.[28] They spent a week visiting Harrisburg, Leeds, Toquerville, VirginCity, Duncan’s Retreat, Grafton, Rockville, and Shonesburg, and they held a total of fifteen meetings. “We are all Sisters & and each of us have our parts to perform,” Eliza told women at Rockville as she organized a Relief Society there. “Be alive,” she counseled.[29]

They returned, resettled themselves in St. George, and concentrated their labors in the temple. Then, at the end of January, they made a short trip south and west to Bunkerville. On January 26, 1881, Myron Abbott recorded:

I commenced to thrash and Brother Samuel Knight came with sisters Eliza Snow and sister Zina D. Young and sister Erastus Snow [Minerva]. A relief society meeting was called and we had a good time together and some very good instruction and a primary association was organized and some useful knowledge was imparted. Tonight a young ladies improvement [association] will be organized. I attended meeting. The Spirit of the Lord was poured out in rich abundance. Sister Snow talked in tongues and Sister Young gave the interpretation and we all rejoiced in the principles of the Gospel.[30]