Faith and Betrayal (16 page)
William Baker was rewarded yet again for his many years of faithful devotion, receiving the high-salaried position of bookkeeper and secretary for one of Utah’s most powerful men, Chauncey Walker West, who, with Ezra Taft Benson and Lorin Farr, had received the coveted construction contract with the Central Pacific Railroad. The race to reach Ogden took on epic proportions, as both sides were pushing with all possible speed, employing ruthless tactics. Union Pacific induced the workers of Central Pacific with higher wages, forcing Central Pacific to match the raises as well as to bring in beefy Irishmen to bolster the Chinese crews. In the final push to complete the track, Union Pacific laid seven miles of track in one day, prompting Central Pacific to claim it could lay ten miles in a day. Having made a $10,000 bet with a Union Pacific executive who believed it couldn’t be done, Governor Stanford journeyed to Utah to observe the historic event firsthand. Benson, Farr & West “received more than the contract price,” according to one account, “for so anxious had been the company to lengthen its line that Stanford had agreed with West, on condition that the work be pushed forward with all possible speed, to pay him whatever it might cost.”
“A great feat has been accomplished today,” the
San Francisco Evening Bulletin
announced. “Ten miles and fifty-eight feet of railroad . . . has been laid between daylight and sun-down. The most powerful track-laying force ever mobilized of 848 men completed the task. Two million pounds of iron were handled during the day.” When Stanford pounded a Nevada silver sledge into the golden spike at Promontory Summit in Utah, on May 10, 1869, joining the Central Pacific and Union Pacific tracks, Jean Rio’s future opened before her.
“As luck would have it,” writes one historian, “a wagon train hove into view of the Promontory crowd as the final tie was eased into place; the juxtaposition of old and new struck the celebrants as fittingly dramatic.” The nation erupted in celebration, as if to symbolize the independence Jean Rio must have felt. The Liberty Bell in Philadelphia rang. San Francisco fired 220 cannons. Fireworks lit the skies in New York and Washington, and Chicago staged its largest parade of the century. Zion was no longer an isolated enclave, beholden only to the totalitarian rule of Brigham Young. It had once refused to join with America; now America had subsumed it. An easily accessible world now stretched 690 miles west across the Sierras to Sacramento and 1,086 miles east and across the Rockies to the Missouri, making freedom a sudden possibility for thousands of Saints who had long since resigned themselves to virtual captivity. Jean Rio would be among those who seized their freedom.
Ironically, the devout Mormon-bishop-turned-railroad-magnate Chauncey West would be her deliverer. West, who was among Utah’s earliest pioneers, most prominent businessmen, wealthiest citizens, and avid polygamists, presided over an ostentatious estate in Ogden that covered an entire city block. Homes for each of his nine wives were graced with gardens and orchards more reminiscent to Jean Rio of her English upbringing than her Utah destitution. West was a longtime intimate of Brigham Young, serving as a general in the six-thousand-member Nauvoo Legion, or Utah Territorial Militia, during Zion’s most controversial time, the year between the Mountain Meadows Massacre and the Utah War.
Though a decade younger than Jean Rio, West had become one of her closest friends. His brother Lewis was married to Jean Rio’s daughter Elizabeth, and Jean Rio had adopted a maternal mien toward both West “boys.” She became particularly worried about Chauncey during the summer of 1869, as he seemed ravaged by stress in the wake of the massive railroad construction project he had supervised. The tracks had been completed months before, and yet the California industrialists who owned the Central Pacific had not sent the payroll for the thousands of Mormon laborers, nor honored their commitment to pay the hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees promised to West’s own three-man partnership (in which Brigham Young had a one-quarter interest). West was absorbing the pressure from increasingly hostile workers—many of whom had been recruited by William Baker—and as his anxiety increased, his health declined.
In November Chauncey West decided to travel by rail to San Francisco to meet with Stanford, who had made a personal commitment to West to fulfill the obligations, and to secure a final settlement with Central Pacific. In his weakened state he turned to Jean Rio for the nursing that had become her specialty. The proficiency she showed in caring for the injured and infirm during her wagon-train crossing had evolved over time into a nearly professional skill. She saw this as a calling to serve humankind, which to her was the Christian obligation. As her faith in Mormonism faltered, her devotion to healing the afflictions of others strengthened.
When West implored Jean Rio to accompany him to California she leaped at the opportunity. She had not seen her sons John and Charles in more than a decade, and correspondence with them had been sporadic at best, especially in the highly charged atmosphere during the years leading up to and following the Utah War. Her midwife’s notebooks filled with jottings from this period—distinctly different from the long prose passages of her past—reflect a complacency and resignation notably different from the spirit of her earlier years, when she looked forward hopefully, never dwelling on the agony of the past or the fear of the unknown, but rather focusing on an excited and optimistic vision of the future. That was a time when frontier America appealed to her intellect and senses—before the promises were betrayed, the hopes deferred. Now, on November 22, 1869, she is fully in the moment, open to change while devoid of expectation. “I shall see my two boys again and hope to enjoy the time,” she writes in the first entry she has made in her emigration diary in seventeen years. “How long I shall remain is uncertain, but I have learned to lean on my heavenly father for direction so I do not feel much concerned for the future.”
CHAPTER NINE
One Household of Faith
THE TRAIN LUMBERED over the snowdrifts of the Sierras, a breathtaking view of Lake Tahoe in the distance. A new adventure had begun. California symbolized a rebirth for Jean Rio no less than England had meant a new life for her mother nearly a century earlier. How candid she was with Chauncey West about her decision to leave the church is unclear, though she brought all of her belongings with her. What is clear is that she shed her eighteen-year Mormon interlude as freely and completely as the surname Baker she had carried for thirty-two years, now calling herself Jean Rio Pearce.
Arriving in San Francisco with West on November 24, 1869, she waited at the railroad station for her son John, whom she had telegraphed to meet them. When he failed to appear she took her invalid companion to the sophisticated Cosmopolitan Hotel. Whatever she thought of this new and bustling city, when she saw her sons Charles, now thirty, and John, twenty-six, she knew it had to provide more opportunity and allure than the Deseret of their youth.
“My dear boy came to the hotel this morning,” she wrote of John. “What a change from the boy of seventeen when he took leave of me in Ogden ten years ago.” A newlywed, John eagerly introduced his mother to Katie, “a whole-souled young woman,” as Jean Rio described her, who was expecting their first child. Charles lived in an ornate Victorian home in the high style of the times—“he is very comfortably fixed”— which, after the poverty they had endured in Utah, was all the more impressive.
Jean Rio leased a “suite of rooms on Powell Street” for the rapidly declining Chauncey West, whose San Francisco doctor pronounced his infirmity “too deeply seated” to respond to treatment. On January 3, 1870, Jean Rio wrote that West was “unable to rise this morning.” A week later he was dead. “The end has come,” she wrote. “There has been a gradual sinking of the physical powers . . . at six this morning he expired. One of his hands was clasped in John’s, the other in mine.” Considering West’s intimacy with Brigham Young and his own long-standing position in the Mormon hierarchy, that he wanted only Jean Rio, a disaffected Saint, and her apostate son John at his side at his time of death seems ironical at the least.
She accompanied West’s body to Oakland, where family members retrieved it for the journey back to Utah for burial, and then she collapsed with fatigue. “I am weak in body, for my task has been a harassing one,” she wrote. “For the last week I have never undressed, and the only rest I have taken has been lying down occasionally on the sofa.” She continued on for a time at the Cosmopolitan before settling in with John and his wife in San Francisco while awaiting the birth of their child. Four months later she and the couple relocated to Sherman Island, a booming settlement in the delta at the confluence of the Sacramento and the San Joaquin rivers, approximately fifty miles northwest of San Francisco.
Entrepreneurs and farmers, recognizing the value of the fertile swamplands, had poured into the area following the discovery of gold nearby in 1848. Reclamation and settlement of the delta was peaking as the completion of the transcontinental railroad freed more than twelve thousand Chinese migrant workers, most of whom moved into the delta to work on the levees that were under construction, on vast farms that produced asparagus and rice, and in canneries and nearby coal mines. The huge, once-useless marshland was being transformed into what would become a historic labyrinth of interconnected waterways and rich reclaimed islands. When the 1868 California legislature removed acreage ownership limitations, John Baker seized the opportunity and claimed for himself a large tract of land. By April 1870, six months after her arrival in California, Jean Rio had moved into a comfortable home that John had built on Sherman Island for his wife, baby son, and mother. “It is like being in a new world,” she writes in a brief entry at the end of her emigration diary.
Always an avid observer of nature, she was overwhelmed by the lushness of the land, which was filled with migratory waterfowl, hundreds of species of fish, much other wildlife, and wild herbs and other plants. Jean Rio never failed to recognize beauty, whether in the storm of the sea, the heat of the plains, or the poverty of her farm. But after the desolation and adversity of Deseret, the copiousness of the delta must have seemed an especially blessed reward. She sent word to her son Walter that opportunity was abundant, and within months he, along with his wife, Eliza, and their eight children, arrived from Utah as well. Jean Rio’s sister-in-law and her husband, Mary Ann and Jeremiah Bateman, who had accompanied her twenty years earlier from England to Utah, soon followed. The last to arrive was her daughter, Elizabeth, whose husband, Lewis West, died of smallpox during the summer of 1870, leaving her a widow with five small children. Polygamist son William would be the only Baker to stay behind in Utah, the only member of the family to remain a practicing Mormon.
Jean Rio brought with her on the train to California all that remained of the possessions she had taken across the Atlantic Ocean and Great Plains, a collection of belongings much reduced from her sojourn in Zion. Her posterity, her legacy, her passion, and her accomplishment were inextricably tied to her square grand piano, but that was now in Brigham Young’s possession. The only vestige she brought of it to her new home was the black, tar-coated crate that had kept it safe through all its crossings, a container that she valued enough to save. (The crate is said to be in a California museum.) She had always loved beautiful clothing. She had needed an extensive wardrobe of fine dresses for her singing performances, and had taken those and more to be worn in Zion. Those dresses that were left were threadbare, the others had long since been cut up and remade into clothing more suitable for frontier life. She had her sapphire ring and her gold band, a writing desk and printed music, a black shawl she had brought from England, and the only piece of bone china left from the set of dishes that had been her mother’s. Every Christmas since her arrival in America she had served plum pudding on this “blue willow ware platter,” surrounding the dessert with holly and topping it with brandy, which was set aflame.
In 1871 the “big flood,” as it was referred to locally, wiped out the Sherman Island settlement, and the Baker clan moved to the small town of Antioch nearby. Founded in 1849 by a man named Joseph Smith, which the Baker family found ironic, the community was a boomtown reaping the economic benefits of the delta reclamation. Keeping a hand in farming, the Baker men branched out into politics and other community enterprises, becoming merchants as well. The name Rio became ubiquitous in the area—all eight of Walter’s offspring had it as a middle name—and was now pronounced with the soft
i
as if derived from the Spanish word for “river,” the name being mistakenly associated with early Mexican influence in the territory.
Son Charles remained in San Francisco, where he and his wife had ten children; he apparently practiced law and made a fortune that surpassed any of his brothers’. John continued rice farming while pursuing local politics; eventually he became a Republican state legislator. He became known for introducing antipolygamy legislation, but since he kept his Mormon past private, his constituents would not have been aware of the rich origins of that legislation. He built a mansion at Emmaton on Sherman Island for his family, which ultimately would include four children. Increasingly, he spent much of his time in Sacramento, the state capital, forty miles away, traveling upriver by paddleboat.
Walter built a home in Antioch, and Jean Rio divided her time between the two nearby sons’ residences, traveling between the locations by ferry. Her growing Baker grandsons were volunteers for the local fire department, members of the Masonic lodge (this was widely considered a public rejection and disavowal of Mormonism), and owners of a hardware store and a pharmacy. Josiah Elliott Rio Baker, believed by other descendants to have been Jean Rio’s favorite grandson as the namesake of the beloved child she had buried at sea, became postmaster and Contra Costa County treasurer. Wearing a cutaway coat and stylish straw hat, Josiah was a well-known figure in town, his hardware store offering utilitarian supplies as well as the latest fashions. “In addition to the merchandise you’d expect, such as nails, farm implements, tools, etc.,” an Antioch newspaper noted, “the store also sold furniture, carpets, wallpaper, stove oil . . . [and] a sign over the main entrance advertised Eureka Stoves and Ranges, which were among the first mass-produced kitchen appliances.”
Determined not to be a burden to her family, Jean Rio had immediately thrown herself into a newfound social, political, and professional life. “I mean to work at my trade,” she writes in 1870 in a passage entered in her emigration diary. But while her “trade” had been dressmaking in Ogden, it would be midwifery in California. She became active with the local temperance chapter, part of a wide-ranging and long-misunderstood social reform movement advocating not only the prohibition of alcohol because of its destructive impact on families and society but also woman suffrage, equal pay, birth control, child labor reform, and the eight-hour day. She was responsible for Antioch’s first high school, and she was an unrelenting advocate for such community services and facilities as a library, a fire truck, and a public park. She joined Eastern Star, the women’s equivalent of the Masonic lodge, and became a faithful and devoted member of the First Congregational Church of Antioch. The first church of any kind in the community, it had been formed a few years earlier and was known for its socially conscious and politically liberal attitudes. It proudly accepted an African-American member—it was the first church in California to do so—and served as a school for children of the local Chinese laborers; such demonstrations of tolerance were otherwise unheard of at the time. Jean Rio never spoke of her years in Utah, and apparently neither she nor her sons ever told the California offspring of their Mormon experience. Whether fearful of reprisals or simply desirous of putting that past firmly behind them, once in California the Baker family truly began anew.
Jean Rio’s life was a steady stream of delivering babies, sewing dresses for her young granddaughters, making hats for her two daughters-in-law, attending temperance meetings and church services, and nursing those in the community who were sick. She kept an extensive midwife’s notebook, itemizing the daily events that occupied her time, the childbirth dramas and rousing sermons, the Bible readings and deathbed vigils. She made “pettycoats and underclothes” for “Aunt Bateman,” and calico and gingham costumes for her granddaughters’ dolls.
It’s unclear what became of the substantial “lifetime annuity” she had inherited from her aristocratic great-uncle William Rio MacDonald, but she lived as a woman of means during her Antioch years, on a scale that obviously exceeded her earnings as a midwife. It was a dramatic contrast to the utter poverty she had suffered in Utah after turning over all of her property and money to the church. Perhaps her deceased husband Edward Pearce had left her an estate, or perhaps once out of Utah she was able to reestablish contact with English relatives or lawyers who might have facilitated a release of her inheritance, bypassing its arrogation by Brigham Young. In the event, at a time when the annual median income in Antioch was approximately $500, she had the wherewithal to lend the Masons $1,000—the equivalent of more than $17,000 in 2004 currency—for which she received as collateral a mortgage on the Masonic temple. She also purchased an expensive, prestigious handcrafted Mason & Hamlin reed organ—her first musical instrument since relinquishing her Collard & Collard piano to Young—and had it shipped by rail from Boston to Antioch.
“My life bids fair to be a very quiet one,” she wrote. “I have every temporal comfort my heart can desire, my children vie with each other in contributing to my happiness.” Still, by 1875 a restless desire to see her son William and his children (some of whom she had never met) overtook her, and she began making plans for an extended visit back to Utah Territory. Meanwhile, her widowed daughter Elizabeth had remarried and was living again in Ogden—now practicing Mormonism after a period of lapsed faith—and Jean Rio was eager to see her and meet her recently born grandchildren as well.
“In August 1875,” she wrote later, “I returned to Utah to visit my remaining children, and many friends whom I love and esteem, as the members of one household of Faith, irrespective of creed.”
That summer of 1875, Utah Territory was agitated with the upcoming trial of John Doyle Lee, the man now called “the butcher in chief” by the Salt Lake Daily Tribune, accused for his role in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. National newspapers were covering the sensational story of the mass murder that had occurred eighteen years earlier. In the intervening years, the massacre had been the focus of passionate debate, both within Utah Territory and in the nation at large. At issue were the alleged acquiescence, culpability, and cover-up by Brigham Young. In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, the church began placing the blame on Lee, an adopted son of Young, portraying him as a fanatical zealot who had acted without authority from Young or the church hierarchy. Now, maneuvering for statehood and facing mounting pressure from the U.S. government, along with a national outcry for justice in the matter, Young’s theocracy was forced to hold someone accountable for the crimes.
Though at the time of the massacre Jean Rio had been living in Ogden—three hundred miles north of the site—her sons who had been required to serve in the church’s militia would have been privy to reports and rumors of the event that swirled through Utah, especially among men in the military ranks. As noted earlier, two of her sons, Charles and John, had abandoned both Utah and the Mormon Church in 1858—the year following the massacre—in direct response to the terrible incident, according to their descendants. Now, on her return to Utah, Jean Rio found herself situated less than sixty miles from where the “trial of the century”—what a Salt Lake City newspaper was calling “the most important criminal case ever tried in the United States”—had begun two weeks earlier. In a different time and place Jean Rio might have been an alert chronicler of such events, though at this point her diary is enigmatically silent on the subject, suggesting that the long arm of retribution was still intimidating to apostates.