Post-Manifesto Polygamy: The 1899-1904 Correspondence of Helen, Owen, and Avery Woodruff (Vol. 11 in the Life Writings of Frontier Women series)

By Phillip A. Snyder, Lu Ann Faylor Snyder

Reviewed by Laura Compton
On 11/30/2009

Utah State University Press, 2009 Cloth binding:
196 pages (Biographical List; Endnotes; Bibliography; Index
ISBN-10: 0-87421-739-3
ISBN-13: 978-0-87421-739-1 Price: $34.95

How did they do it? How did 19th- and early 20th-Century Mormons grapple with the demands of polygamous relationships? At a time when Federal agents could be lurking around any corner and when Apostles were threatened with Congressional subpoenas, how did families handle everyday issues of life on the western frontier?

Wives and children rarely saw fathers, polygamous partners used secret codes to refer to people and places, clandestine meetings had to be arranged between spouses, and letters were regularly returned as undeliverable because nobody knew where the recipient(s) had gone. Such were the realities that threatened to disrupt the family life of people like Helen, Owen and Avery Woodruff at the turn of the 20th century.

In the latest volume of the Life Writings of Frontier Women series from USU Press, Phillip Snyder has compiled the research of his spouse Lu Ann Faylor Snyder into an easily accessible, sometimes fascinating, sometimes disconcerting, study. Post-Manifesto Polygamy: The 1899-1904 Correspondence of Helen, Owen, and Avery Woodruff is one of the few books documenting the lives of LDS church members in good standing living in post-manifesto polygamous unions, and as such it is and will be an important window into this unusual lifestyle.

Apostle Abraham Owen Woodruff, known as Owen or A.O. Woodruff, was the son of one-time church president Wilford Woodruff. The same President Woodruff who issued the 1890 Manifesto which supposedly did away with plural marriage among the Saints. What, then, was Owen doing when he took a second wife, Eliza Avery Clark, in early 1901?

“Although many Latter-day Saints reluctantly accepted the loss of polygamy as a requirement necessary for Utah and the church to enter into mainstream American society, many did not, especially some in general church leadership positions,” writes Snyder in the Introduction (p.7). But that’s all he says about post-manifesto polygamy. A bit more background might be helpful to readers new to the idea that plural marriages continued to be contracted after 1890. The Encyclopedia of Mormonism (2:853) states:

“While nearly all Church leaders in 1890 regarded the Manifesto as inspired, there were differences among them about its scope and permanence. Some leaders were understandably reluctant to terminate a long-standing practice that was regarded as divinely mandated. As a result, a limited number of plural marriages were performed over the next several years. Not surprisingly, rumors of such marriages soon surfaced, and beginning in January 1904, testimony given in the Smoot hearings made it clear that plural marriage had not been completely extinguished. The ambiguity was ended in the General Conference of April 1904, when the First Presidency issued the ‘second manifesto,’ an emphatic declaration that prohibited plural marriage and proclaimed that offenders would be subject to Church discipline, including excommunication.”

The generation of men and women leading the church in the 1890s had significant experiences with polygamy, either as practitioners or as children of polygamists. Certainly they were familiar with the Church teachings on the importance of The Principle and were well aware of the depth of sacrifice made by many to live it, despite mounting outside pressure to cease and desist. Many believed they had been called of God and that plural marriage was not only an eternal principle, but a necessity for salvation. To quit polygamy would be to renounce their eternal destinies. Yet, they needed to find peace with the world, for the world was threatening the very existence of the young church, keeping leaders on the run or in hiding or out of the country on missions and freezing church assets in an effort to drive the members to their knees.

Owen Woodruff was one of the Church leaders who felt strongly about the eternal importance, and even necessity, of polygamy. Snyder reports he wrote in his journal, “I owe my exhistance to the principal of Polygamy and I have some intense feelings regarding the sustaining of that principle. I am indebted to that principle for my life and anytime my Father wants my life to defend that principle (and those who practice it in righteousness) God being my helper it is at his command.” (p. 21-22)

While Snyder documents some of Owen’s life, the majority of the correspondence in this volume is by and about his wives. Their letters record their joys and sorrows, fears and frustrations in coping with an absent husband, a life of secrecy and, for Helen especially, the burden of basically being a single parent. And gratefully, they ignored his counsel (at least in part) and neglected to burn all of his personal correspondence with them, so we have a small record of how Owen tried to assuage fears and reassure his wives while at the same time providing guidance, counsel and direction on running households, paying bills and completing tasks on his behalf.

Helen, busy as she is with many things, often includes anecdotes about her children so Owen will know what’s happening at home:

“Our baby has a very bad cold in his head and coughs all the time. Last night he nearly had croup. I was up for or five times to doctor him in the night.... I just tell you a few thinghs he did yesterday to amuse himself. He took the key out of the kitchen door and dug about a square ft. of plaster of the wall with it. I got the big bath tub ready to put him in and went to get a towel, when I got back he had put one of his shoes & stockings in to soak, and was in the act of putting the rest of the clean clothes in. Then while I was in the tub he got the coal oil can and spilt coal-oil all over himself. He plays in the coal bucket all the time. I do not care for these triffles if he will only keep well.” (p.56)

Yet just as often Helen seems to worry she is too stubborn or prideful or selfish as she tends to the needs of her young family and tries to come to terms with the fact that she’s now sharing her husband with a woman 10 years younger than she is:

“Your prayers, dearest, in my behalf have been answered. I do feel better than when you left me but still I do not feel exactly as I used to. I love just the same but there is something that tries me all the time and I think it will always be so, perhaps in a less degree. But we cannot expect a reward unless we make a sacrifice, and if it were no trial or sacrifice for me, where off would be the blessing.... I have selfishness & stubbornness to overcome. I can see now that I have spent my whole life in the gratification of my own selfish pleasure, but in the future I live for others, for you, my nobler purer self, for that’s what you are to me, and for my children, ...I just rise above self and conquer all that is selfish or coarse in my nature.” (p.59).

Avery’s youthful enthusiasm in her early letters and journal entries is gradually replaced by frustration and loneliness as she recognizes she will never be a public wife and will always need to remain in hiding from all but her very closest associates. She recalled her first impressions of Elder Woodruff when he was visiting a conference at her parents’ home in Star Valley. She was a teenager at the time, and in less than two years would be Owen’s wife: “I had never seen bro. W. before, but he at once captured my admiration and respect – I felt that he was a great man – pure and holy. I questioned my love for Fred – if only I could see him I would know! My frustration mounted during the rest of the service.” (p. 47)

“At the close of the meeting brother W. stopped to shake hands with Mary and me and asked if we intended going to B.Y.C. in the Fall ....” On the way home from this encounter, Avery and her sister Mary “still raved on about his good looks, intelligence, and personality wondering why there weren’t more of his kind to be passed around so more deserving girls could get a worthy husband. His wife – what a lucky woman!” (p.48)

As the hardships and realities of a secret life in the desert began to take their toll on Avery, her idealistic views of marriage changed. Troubles with childbearing also plagued young Avery, adding to her loneliness and sometime despair, neatly summarized in the following story from her early days in the Mexican colonies:

“Of an evening I sat with bro. Taylor’s family in their font porch in full view of my little home. On one such evening Mary Bennion had taken dinner with us & bro. Taylor invited us all to the front porch.... In his prayer bro. Taylor asked the Lord to make it possible that sister Bennion be provided with a home in ‘this fair land,’ to add to her contentment.... After we arose Mayme said: ‘Bro. Taylor please don’t ever pray for me to have a home in Mexico – I don’t want one. All I want is to leave this place as soon as possible as soon as it is safe to return to Utah. No home is going to keep me tied to this forsaken land.’

“Mayme’s speech made me tremble for I saw in that hewn stone that built my home the very quality of permanency.” (p.122) Avery told Owen of the exchange, to which he replied, she wrote, “ ‘This is our home as long as we are in the flesh or not another dollar goes on the place.’ This fell on my ears like a heavy blow, neither of us made further comment. he left on an errand across town. Again I looked at the hewn stone that formed a structure – my home that could last a thousand years!” (p.122)

Ironically, Owen spent almost no time at all in his home in Mexico due to his untimely death from smallpox, making “our home” “Avery’s home” for most of her stay in Mexico.

Yet both women recognized that they were making important sacrifices which would bring them rewards and blessings sometime, somewhere. Their letters and journal entries often reference the godliness they are trying to build within themselves as they put away selfishness and work for a greater good, always seeking to improve themselves by becoming better wives and mothers, taking care of their homes and families as they knew they should.

This book has some beautiful photographs of Avery, Owen, and Helen. It would be great to have included copies of one or two of the handwritten letters and/or diary entries from each of them as well. There is a personality and a presence that comes through with handwriting that just cannot be reproduced with typesetting, no matter how carefully or precisely that typesetting is edited. And the typesetting in this book is helpful without being distracting when pointing out interlinear insertions or deletions or marginalia.

Explanatory footnotes provide biographical information for many of the people referred to in the letters and a brief Bibliography gives readers hints as to where they might find more information about this interesting period in Church history.

Snyder has done a fine job presenting the Woodruffs’ letters and journal entries into a single, accessible volume, and the Woodruffs themselves have such character and style in their correspondence that little else is needed to make the work readable.


Copyright 2009