[1.]Steel-plate Portrait of the AuthorFrontispiece
[2.]Steel-plate Portrait of Brigham YoungTo face
[3.]“Gathering to Zion”—Life on the Plains125
[4.]Over at Last136
[5.]View of Main Street, Salt Lake City (From a Photograph) The Ladies’ Side of Mormonism.148
[6.]Amelia Folsom Young, Brigham’s Favourite Wife168
[7.]“Ann Eliza,” Brigham’s Nineteenth Wife168
[8.]Miss Eliza R. Snow, Mormon Poetess and High Priestess168
[9.]Mrs. John W. Young, Wife of Brigham’s Apostate Son168
[10.]Brother Brigham’s Last Baby168
[11.]Scene of the Mountain Meadows Massacre255
[12.]The Crisis of a Life—Entering into Polygamy296
[13.]Polygamy in Low Life—The Poor Man’s Family302
[14.]Polygamy in High Life—The Prophet’s Mansion302
[15.]Despair!326
[16.]Fac-simile of a Mormon “Bill of Divorce”344

AN ENGLISHWOMAN IN UTAH.

CHAPTER I.
MY EARLY LIFE.

The story which I propose to tell in these pages is a plain, unexaggerated record of facts which have come immediately under my own notice, or which I have myself personally experienced.

Much that to the reader may seem altogether incredible, would to a Mormon mind appear simply a matter of ordinary every-day occurrence with which every one in Utah is supposed to be perfectly familiar. The reader must please remember that I am not telling—as so many writers have told in newspaper correspondence and sensational stories—the hasty and incorrect statements and opinions gleaned during a short visit to Salt Lake City; but my own experience—the story of a faith, strange, wild, and terrible it may be, but which was once so intimately enwoven with all my associations that it became a part of my very existence itself; and facts, the too true reality of which there are living witnesses by hundreds, and even thousands, who could attest if only they would.

With the reader’s permission I shall briefly sketch my experience from the very beginning.

I was born in the year 1829, in St. Heliers, Jersey—one of the islands of the English Channel.