True Sisters (37 page)

Ella, who had once made her husband write down his promise never to take another wife, gripped baby Nancy while she let out her breath. She continued to look at her husband for a long time before she turned to her sister and said, “Nay, Nannie, ye will marry Andrew. We hae always been sisters. Now we will be sister-wives.”

Nannie shook her head back and forth. “I widna share the bed with Andrew. I canna ask you to make the sacrifice.” Tears streamed down Nannie’s face.

The two sisters gripped each other’s hands, but it was Andrew who spoke. “I would take ye for a wife and would love ye as I do your sister,” he said. “But we will wait until ye want it. Ye are welcome to bide with us as long as ye like as our sister. And if ye decide ye do not want to marry me or another, why then, we’d be pleased to hae ye as the first old maid in Utah.”

The three turned as one and glared at Levi, who at last took a step backward, then two, before he turned and rushed off. Andrew picked up Nannie and carried her to a wagon. But just before Andrew set her down, Nannie reached into the waistband of her dress and removed the red shoes. Then she dropped them into the mud.

Epilogue

Anne Sully never was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, although she lived with the Mormons for the rest of her life and eventually began to think of herself as Sister Anne. The Sullys went south, where John worked as a laborer, while Anne took in washing. They lived in a one-room adobe house with a dirt floor. John planted a garden each year, but it was difficult to coax crops from the hard red earth, and John was not much of a farmer. The family often went hungry.

After four years, the Sullys moved to Great Salt Lake City, where John once again set up a tailor shop. It lacked the refinements of the London establishment, but he was patronized by the new Mormon gentry, including the prophet, and he prospered. He remained a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, although he was never again the fervent convert he had been in England. Anne bore two more children, who, like Joe and Lucy, lived to old age. Some twenty-five years after arriving in the valley, John and Anne returned to London for a visit, a trip that they cut short because both of them were homesick for the valley.

*   *   *

Ephraim Cooper did indeed secure a job at the tithing office. He worked there for five years before he left to join the staff of the
Deseret News,
where he became an editor. Late in life, he used the diary he had kept during the first part of the journey as the basis of a book detailing the Martin Handcart Company’s ordeal, a book that became a Mormon classic. Although he was devout, he never rose in the church, in part because he refused to enter into celestial marriage. He and Emeline had five children.

*   *   *

To no one’s surprise except Jessie’s, Thomas Savage, with the encouragement of his wife Rebecca, asked Jessie to become his third wife. She refused. Instead, she became the first and only wife of a farmer who had been one of the rescuers of the Martin Company. Jessie bore him four children, all delivered by her friend Maud, who moved into the household after the death of her second husband, Old Absalom. Like Jessie and Maud, Jessie and Rebecca were lifelong friends.

*   *   *

Andrew Buck tried his hand at carpentering, but he did not care for it, and when a textile mill opened in the valley, he was hired. The pay was low, but Ella was frugal, and Nannie did fine sewing for John Sully’s shop, and the three made a comfortable living. The women divided the housework and the care of Ella’s six children, who were bemused when outsiders asked which of their father’s
wives
was their mother. Nannie never married, although it was assumed by many in Great Salt Lake City that she was Andrew’s second wife. Andrew attached wheels to the bottom of a chair so that Nannie could move herself about as she worked with her flowers. Her garden was known throughout the valley for its beauty.

The three died within two years of one another and were buried in a little Mormon cemetery in Salt Lake City, Ella in the center, Andrew and Nannie on either side of her.

*   *   *

Just a year after Louisa Tanner arrived in the valley, her sister-wife, Tabitha, died in childbirth. Louisa raised Tabitha’s child, along with seven of her own. Once back in the valley, Thales Tanner’s doubts about his worthiness faded, and he regained his zealousness. He rose to become one of the leaders of the church, and he was called upon frequently to recount stories of crossing the plains. He was silent about the handcart debacle, leaving the story to dissidents and apostates, for fear of bringing condemnation on the church and Brigham Young. But he told of other crossings in which he had participated, both before and after the handcart journey. And as with his story of Joseph Smith, Thales’s telling of his part in the Overland Trail treks changed over the years. It was a dense listener who heard the mighty voice of Thales Tanner and did not conclude that he was a hero of the Mormon Trail.

Thales took four more wives and built homes for them, although the families gathered each Sunday at the main house, the one in which Louisa lived. As first wife following Tabitha’s death, Louisa managed the families, assigning duties, settling complaints, quietly scolding Thales when he paid too much attention to one wife or ignored another. She was fair and evenhanded and much loved by her sister-wives. The Tanner household was considered one of the most harmonious in Zion, and skeptical Gentiles who questioned the principle were often invited to visit with the Tanners to see for themselves how successful plural marriage could be.

When the Mormon Church ended celestial marriage in 1890, polygamous men were ordered to rid themselves of all but one wife. Thales chose Louisa. “I’ve given it much thought and have decided I will be yours. You have been a good and faithful wife, and you deserve me,” he told the woman who had accompanied him from England so many years before.

Louisa turned him down.

Acknowledgments

When I was a high school student in Salt Lake City in the 1950s, I was intrigued by the bronze statue of a man pulling a handcart that was displayed in the temple grounds of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The high-walled temple grounds in the center of the city are sacred to Mormons because they contain not only the LDS temple, which is closed to outsiders, but the turtle-back tabernacle, home of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. But it was the heroic-size handcart statue, executed by Torleif Knaphus in 1947, that appealed to me most. The statue is of a resolute man pulling a two-wheeled cart, his wife beside him, attending to their daughter, who sits on top. A small boy pushes the vehicle.

Back then, I knew that these people, LDS converts, had piled their meager belongings into the cart and walked thirteen hundred miles across the prairie and mountains to Salt Lake City, but I did not know about their terrible journey, that hundreds had suffered and died on the way to the Mormon Zion.

The handcart scheme was the idea of the prophet Brigham Young, who became head of the LDS Church in 1844, following the murder of founder Joseph Smith. By the mid-1850s, zealous missionaries had converted tens of thousands of Europeans, mostly in Scandinavia and the British Isles. The converts were encouraged to emigrate to Utah, but many were poor and couldn’t afford the three-hundred-dollar cost of outfitting themselves with a covered wagon. Let them push handcarts, Young said. Handcarts would lower the emigration cost to no more than twenty dollars, and the church would loan the converts the money. Carts would be waiting for the Saints when they arrived in Iowa City, where the train tracks ended, and way stations along the route would provide the people with supplies.

The idea was an intriguing one. Walking was no ordeal, since most pioneers walked beside their wagons instead of riding in them anyway. And there would be wagons for the sick and the infirm.

Execution of the handcart scheme proved wanting, however. Carts were not waiting, nor was there seasoned wood to build them. The converts themselves were forced to construct their handcarts, and out of green wood. The rickety vehicles, which constantly broke down, were the scourge of the trek. But that was not all. The church failed to establish way stations, and the result was starvation.

Five handcart companies crossed the plains and mountains from Iowa City, Iowa, to Utah in 1856. The first three reached Zion with relatively few casualties. In
Handcarts to Zion: The Story of a Unique Western Migration, 1856–1860,
LeRoy R. and Ann W. Hafen put the total deaths in those three companies at about twenty-five. The fourth company, the Willie Company, was not so fortunate. It left Iowa City on July 15 and encountered snow, and as a result sixty-seven died, according to the Hafens.

The Martin Company, the last of the five handcart companies that year, departed nearly two weeks after the Willie Company and incurred the greatest hardships. Some 625 converts left Iowa City with Captain Edward Martin. Defections on the first part of the journey reduced the number to 575. Of that group, between 135 and 170 perished from cold, hunger, exhaustion, or a combination of the three. (Some put the figure even higher.) In contrast, forty-two members of the famed Donner Party died. That makes the Martin Company saga the single greatest tragedy in the history of America’s westward expansion.

For more than 150 years, there has been a debate about who was responsible for the poor execution of the handcart experiment and the failure to send rescuers until it was almost too late. Some historians, such as David Roberts in his excellent book
Devil’s Gate,
the most comprehensive history yet of the handcart experiment, blame Brigham Young. The question is an intriguing one, but since my book is a novel about the members of the Martin Company and not a factual account of the handcart experiment as a whole, I have chosen to steer clear of the controversy. My characters care more about survival than they do about assigning blame.

*   *   *

Within days of the Martin Company’s arrival in Salt Lake, the handcart experience was being turned into legend. On December 10, the
Deseret News
wrote, “This season’s operations have demonstrated that the Saints, being filled with faith and the Holy Ghost, can walk across the plains, drawing their provisions and clothing on hand carts.”

But it was more than faith and the Holy Ghost that allowed those exhausted Mormon converts to drag their handcarts through rivers, snow, and freezing cold. The men who pulled the carts had courage and strength and a readiness to sacrifice. So did the women. Often pregnant, carrying little ones in their arms, the women did not give up, and, in fact, there were more deaths among the men than among the women. “Their women were incredible,” wrote Wallace Stegner in his introduction to
The Gathering of Zion.
As I read Mormon history, I found it was the women whose lives haunted me.

Although I am not LDS, I found that these early Mormon women spoke to me. It is their stories I wanted to tell. I hoped to portray them not as martyrs, but as real flesh-and-blood people who found joy in their religion but cursed it, too, who starved and froze but who blessed the Lord for leading them to Zion.

*   *   *

In the past, church archives were generally closed to outsiders, but that has changed in recent years, and the LDS Church History Library and Archives provides access to a wealth of handcart journals, accounts, stories, and articles to researchers of all faiths, both at its location in Salt Lake City and online. I’m grateful for that trove of information and also to the librarians there who answered specific questions. I drew on many of these first-person accounts in crafting
True Sisters,
but my characters are entirely fictional.

A note on style: Once they reached America, the converts, technically, were
immigrants
. I’ve chosen to call them
emigrants,
as they were known in the nineteenth century.
Emigrant
is preferred by virtually all Utah historians.

I am indebted to Fred E. Woods, professor of religious understanding at Brigham Young University and an expert on the Mormon migration, who critiqued an early draft of this book, correcting misunderstandings and suggesting changes, and to Will Bagley, Utah’s finest, if most controversial, historian and author of the superb
Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows.
Will not only questioned some of my research but spotted errors that would have affected the novel’s credibility. Lyndia Carter, whose knowledge of the handcart expeditions is almost legendary, generously shared her scholarship. My thanks to Glen Rollins for encouragement.

My books are always a collaborative effort with my agents, Danielle Egan-Miller and Joanna MacKenzie, at Browne and Miller Literary Associates. They helped me focus the stories and decided that bittersweet endings are okay. My supportive editor, Jennifer Enderlin, tied up loose ends. And the three of them solved the thorny problem of a title for a work that had been known only as “the handcart book.”

Thanks to Bob, to Lloyd and Forrest, and to Dana and Kendal, who are the reason I can write about strong women.

Also by Sandra Dallas

The Bride’s House

Whiter Than Snow

Prayers for Sale

Tallgrass

New Mercies

The Chili Queen

Alice’s Tulips

The Diary of Mattie Spenser

The Persian Pickle Club

Buster Midnight’s Café

About the Author

SANDRA DALLAS
is the author of eleven novels, including
The Bride’s House, Whiter Than Snow, Prayers for Sale, Tallgrass,
and
New Mercies.
She is a former Denver bureau chief for
BusinessWeek
magazine and lives in Denver, Colorado. Visit her at
www.sandradallas.com
.