An Englishwoman in Utah: The Story of a Life's Experience in Mormonism

by Mrs. T. B. H. Stenhouse

Now, I have been so much engaged of late in telling my own sorrows, that Mary Burton has quite dropped out of my story. But it must not be supposed that all that time I saw nothing of my poor friend. On the contrary, I had seen her much more frequently of late than I used to when I first came to Salt Lake City. When I last spoke of her it was when she was about to return to Southern Utah, where she and her husband then resided. It was evident to me from her conversation, as it must have been to the reader, that her faith in Mormonism had even then entirely gone; that she felt her husband’s neglect and unkindness most keenly, and that she had become a miserable, broken-hearted woman. It was very painful to contrast what she now was with what she had been when I first knew her, and then to think what a happy wife and mother she might have been if the spectre of Mormonism had not crossed her path.

Mary and her husband, Elder Shrewsbury, left the Settlements about a year after the time I last mentioned her, and took up their abode in Salt Lake City. Elder Shrewsbury had prospered exceedingly, and when he came to Salt Lake he brought with him, besides Mary, his second wife, Ellen, who, as we before noticed, had become very much attached to her. The other three wives and their children were left at the farm in Southern Utah. He would probably have brought them all with him, had there been in the city a house large enough to hold them all. As it was, he purchased a good lot about half a mile from where we resided, with a comfortable house upon it; and there his first and second wives lived together. This was the man who had solemnly sworn before God, that he would never practise Polygamy! But I doubt if Elder Shrewsbury, with his comfortable house in the city, his farm and lands in the South, his fast increasing property, and his many wives, felt truly the hundredth part of the happiness which he would have experienced in the devotion of one faithful heart, even had it been in the midst of poverty and care. He, however, poor infatuated man, did not think thus; he was actually even now courting a young girl of about seventeen years of age, who the two wives daily expected would be brought home to aid in building up their husband’s “Kingdom.” I do not think Mary cared much about this. It was the taking of the first plural wife that was her great sorrow. After that, her love for her husband weakened, until it altogether died out, and she did not care how many wives he took.

Mary’s high spirit was always urging her into rebellion. In married life both husband and wife give way to each other in a thousand little things, of no consequence in themselves, but quite sufficient, without the presence of love, to sow the seeds of discord. But when love has fled, and the husband looks upon his wife—the companion of his youth, the mother of his children—not as the partner of his whole life and the sharer of all his joys and sorrows, but as a person whose presence is a reproach to him and who is an inconvenience rather than otherwise; and when the wife regards her husband as one whom formerly she loved with true devotion, but who has cruelly broken her heart and trampled upon her feelings, and who is nothing to her now but a tyrant whose very presence is painful to her, can there then be any forbearance, any of those gentle kindnesses, any of those loving forgivenesses, any of those mutual tendernesses and sweet confidences which constitute the charm of married life?

In giving up Mormonism, my unhappy friend gave up, as too many have done, faith in all else. She had lived, as she thought, a life of religion; and when she found what a terrible mockery of all that is holy that so-called religion was, she cast it aside, thinking that all religion was vain. She did not see that she would have acted just as wisely in rejecting all food because she chanced to partake of some that was poisoned; she did not see that, although the broken reed on which she rested was unable to yield her any true support, nevertheless the everlasting foundations of eternal truth which God Himself has laid can never be removed; and that though creeds and systems may fail and pass away, only to give place to others equally unsatisfactory, yet those divine verities are established for ever, are beyond the reach of earthly vicissitudes, and know nothing of time or change.

Utterly miserable and sick at heart, Mary cared not whether she lived or died. There was nothing to bind her to life, and beyond the life of this world she was altogether without hope. A more wretched existence it is scarcely possible to imagine.

While they were still in the Settlements, she treated the other wives with the greatest contempt, sitting by them at the table or passing them in the house without vouchsafing a look or a word. Her husband, as might be expected, avoided her whenever it was possible, and the other wives returned her coldness and disdain, and in turn annoyed her as much as they could when they were not too busy looking after one another. It would be impossible to picture a house more divided against itself than was that of Elder Shrewsbury.

When the two wives, Ellen and Mary, lived together with their husband in Salt Lake City, Mary of course had no opportunity of showing her hatred and contempt for the polygamic wives. But towards her husband she evinced a cold disdain, as if he were now nothing at all to her—as if her very heart itself had been withered. For Ellen, who, since Elder Shrewsbury had taken his other wives, had clung to her with a child-like affection, and to her own little girl alone, she showed that deep and constant love which she had once lavished upon such an unworthy object.

She used to come to me and tell me all her griefs; and in a passion of rage and tears she would hurl defiance at Mormonism and curse bitterly the system that had wrecked her life. Then I would soothe her, and speak calmly to her, and try to place matters in their best light; and she would sit and listen in a painful state of apathy, as if she cared for none of these things. Presently she would rise and go, and then, perhaps, I would not see her for weeks together, unless I chanced to call upon her at her own house. Sometimes, for days and even weeks at a time, she would shut herself up in her room and refuse to see her husband or any one else, except her little girl, who slept in the same room with her, and who at such times used to bring in what food they wanted; for in these melancholy fits she would not even let the servants come near her.

There was a little table near the window, and from the casement of the window could be seen in the far distance the lofty ranges of the Wahsatch Mountains. And sitting at that table, gazing from that window, with her cheek resting upon her hand, Mary would watch the whole day long, as if entranced in some ecstatic vision. Her little girl—a child of winning ways, bashful to an extreme and very pretty, but, though so young, with a look of wistful sadness upon her childish face—had become accustomed to her mother’s ways; and when one of these long spells of melancholy came upon her, she would either steal out quietly and wander away for a long walk all by herself—for she never played with the other children in her father’s house—or else, as was more frequently the case, she would sit down on the ground near her mother and silently amuse herself with a book or some childish toy.