Chapter 66: Blooming Matriarchy
What do you get when three motherless women team up?
24 June 2026
Well…May evaporated into the ether, and June seems to be in a hurry, too. Apparently two full moons in a month was two moons too many for my wonked-out body’s internal systems, and the whole corpus has been on strike for weeks. Thanks for being patient with me while I claw my way back to something resembling equilibrium.
This was originally going to be a Mother’s Day post. All fathers need mothers, too, so slightly belated Father’s Day will work just as well. Happy Father’s Day to all who celebrate.
Next: It’s now a few weeks past Mother’s Day weekend, and … I may have mentioned this earlier, I’m still not a big fan of Mother’s Day. It has always felt performative and coercive, like it’s propping up an idealized version of what “society” (patriarchy) thinks mothers should be. Nevertheless, the occasion annually reminds me to talk about real life women who were also mothers: women who quietly changed the world simply by finding creative ways to survive whatever harsh reality they were living in so they could build meaningful lives despite circumstances that could have easily defeated them.
If I’m going to tell the stories of all the women who first walked my own mother road, I can’t just limit myself to once a year; thus this ongoing series about my ancestral grandmothers. So far, you’ve met Betsy, Mariah, and Harriet, survivors all, and you’ve been briefly introduced to Harriet’s sister-wives, Ellen and Sophie. Before moving on, I need to expand the discussion about those three, because they established a pattern within my own family that has persisted and framed and laid the foundation for family traditions and functionality for 200 years and counting. These women, who created their own dedicated matriarchal alliance without seeking permission or indulgence from the patriarchal and political forces that put them all on the same trajectory in the first place, literally took the lemons life handed them and turned them into tolerable, life-sustaining lemonade.
Please keep this in mind: If anyone ever tries to tell you that Mormon polygamy was simple and motivated by x or y or z, feel free to smile beatifically and say something like “thank you for sharing that with me.” Then remember this: whatever its antecedents or incitements may have been (and we can talk about that from now until the Angel Moroni toots his horn again), its impact on the people involved was significant and substantial and the effects are still felt going on two centuries later. I can’t speak to every situation and I won’t try, but I can share with you what I’ve learned about my own ancestors, my own grandmothers and the men who claimed them, all of whom were drawn into the net now known (but only silently) as “mothers are sacred and holy and we must not see them as actual people and we certainly aren’t going to talk about them like they have any function other than as vessels for making more humans.” Everyone knows this isn’t true, but they’re just doing what they’re told. My grandmothers’ stories are about women who took matters into their own hands, didn’t ask permission, and just quietly found ways to do what needed to be done.
My observations are based on documented facts and extrapolations gained from historical research and awareness, and the relatively recent advantage of time and technology providing information that’s available now but wasn’t when my grandmothers were still living.
OK – back to the dedicated matriarchal alliance. Buckle up – this is a complicated and rambling romp!
Here’s a quick time line:
November 1840: Ellen, a newly minted Mormon, arrives in Nauvoo, Illinois, with her brother, Uncle, and Aunt, all fresh off the boat from England.
July 1841: William arrives in Nauvoo, having been essentially disowned by his mother when he joined the Mormon church. He had made his way to Illinois from the same neighborhood in jolly old England where Ellen and her family had lived. Although they apparently never met while they were still on the other side of the pond, William and Ellen finally met in Nauvoo and were married there. William was already buddies with influential Mormon leaders, and marrying into Ellen’s family (who were also already buddies with the same influential Mormon leaders) appears to have solidified those relationships even further. Ellen was wife #1.
We need to skip past Harriet for a minute – she comes a bit later – so sit tight.
As for Sophie (wife #3): her family and Harriet’s family were neighbors and friends in Alabama and again later at Winter Quarters. When Harriet’s family arrived in Illinois in the fall of 1847, the Mormons had already been driven out of Nauvoo and were sheltering at Winter Quarters. Sophie’s family had been there briefly but they were preparing to leave with the next outbound wagon company. They offered their Winter Quarters dwelling to Harriet’s family, which gave them a safe landing place in a distressed community where securing any kind of housing was a genuine gift. Sophie’s family and Ellen’s family soon departed for Utah in the same wagon company crossing the plains and arrived in the Salt Lake Valley at the same time.
All three were acquainted long before they ended up living in the same neighborhood in their new home town.
Another note: what Harriet and Ellen and Sophie and William and so many of their peers and associates had lived through, up to the moment when they reached Utah (and often for long after), had been for many (maybe most?) of them the manifestation of some of their worst fears. Their losses were overwhelming. Whatever gains they may have experienced, being affiliated with the Mormon church was extremely costly physically, financially, socially, and emotionally. The church didn’t keep moving west because of some divine drive to reach the coast. They kept moving because they were repeatedly forced out of places they had hoped would be safe. I won’t rehash all of that here – you can read about it by perusing the works of Juanita Brooks, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Benjamin Park, D. Michael Quinn, et al – my focus is specifically on my direct ancestresses, how they experienced the world, and how their life experiences shaped the lives of their descendants.
So…worst fears: for most people, a list of their worst fears would likely include death, disease, deprivation, disability, destitution, the big Ds. Many early Mormons experienced all of these, often simultaneously, often repeatedly. With each displacement, each new generation endured the same experience of finding a new home that was supposed to be safe and then being forcibly driven or removed from it. By the time first-generation Mormons William, Ellen, Harriet, and Sophie teamed up, each of them had been repeatedly uprooted, sustaining devastating losses along the way.
More timeline:
1843: William (estranged from his family) and orphaned Ellen are married in Nauvoo. Ellen is 18 years old. William is 22.
July 22, 1847: William arrives in SLC with the Brigham Young Vanguard Company.
September 29, 1847: Ellen arrives in the new settlement at Salt Lake, driving her own wagon, in the same overland pioneer company as Sophie and her family. If Ellen and Sophie didn’t know each other before they left Winter Quarters, they certainly did by the time they got to Utah.
September 29, 1847: Sophie also arrives in SLC with her family.
William and Ellen build a home in central Salt Lake near their best buddies – many of them core leaders of the church.
Sophie’s family builds a home in the same neighborhood.
William ends up working closely with Sophie’s father in leadership roles in their neighborhood.
August 29, 1852: Plural marriage is officially and openly announced by the Mormon Church during a special church conference. Announcing it publicly was Brigham Young’s way of telling the world that they were going to follow their religious beliefs, and not nobody not no-how was going to stop them. Brigham loved nothing better than a good fight that would let him flex his ego and test his power.
September 15, 1852: Orphaned Harriet arrives in SLC with her brother Gabriel. They are soon embraced and drawn into Sophie’s family, friends from their childhood home of Alabama.
April 27, 1853: Sophie’s mother dies.
November 23, 1853: Harriet marries William, becoming his second wife. William is 32. Harriet is eighteen. Harriet leaves Sophie’s family’s home and moves in with William and Ellen.
February 08, 1857: Sophie marries William, becoming his third wife. William is 36. Sophie is sixteen. Sophie joins Ellen and Harriet and William in their family home, 3 doors down from her own family home.
The dedicated matriarchal alliance was now solidly established with a respectable male figurehead to represent the public face of “authority” for the family. They were following the mandate Brigham Young had revealed to the church. They were also doing it in a way that worked for them, inventing their unique parameters as they went along. They didn’t need or seek permission from outside the family; they just did what they needed to do to take care of and protect each other. I suspect William just did what he was told, both by the church leaders and by his wives.
So what did that look like?
We don’t have a lot of details outside of what can be observed in hindsight. Real-time records of their family life are sparse, likely because they were all hustling to survive, especially in the early years. Keep in mind, also, that talking openly about life in polygamy was simply not done. It was not safe. The threat of arrest and imprisonment was real and relentless, even in their new safe haven in the Rocky Mountains. For the people living in such households, it was their normal (and a whole lot illegal) and didn’t need much analysis. They had made their choices. Discussion over. For those not living in it, it was none of their business.
Harriet was apparently the family historian, and most of her information was recorded from memory in her advancing years. She was diplomatically tight-lipped about insider details. The picture she paints of life inside the dedicated matriarchal alliance was one of absolute harmony and love. She tells us the sister wives loved each other dearly, shared living quarters for many years, and grieved when they ultimately were split up to go occupy their own homes.
Why split them up when they were happy together? Harriet doesn’t say, but it may well have had something to do with trying to protect William from being prosecuted for illegal cohabitation. All of them living under the same roof together would have fairly screamed polygamists! Ultimately, despite their best efforts, William was still arrested, convicted, and sentenced to six months in the federal penitentiary (along with numerous other notorious Mormon practitioners of one of the twin relics of barbarism), but his family at least did not lose their homes or their livelihoods in his absence.
The wives’ survival skills had been finely honed over many long years of keeping things going while William was away on assignments for the church. When Brigham or any of his successors ordered you on a mission, you went. That was part of the deal, implicit in the oaths they all took when they signed on to the covenants required of faithful members.
Matching historical timelines against personal choices can tell us a lot about how things may have played out. In the 9 years between 1843 when William and Ellen were married and 1852 when polygamy was announced as an official practice of the church, William had already been separated from Ellen several times for extended periods. He had left her severely ill at Winter Quarters to join the advance party into Utah, and then turned around and did it again a few more times because he was apparently an indispensable scout and travel companion for church leadership.
Ellen was left to find her way to Utah without him, driving her own wagon from Iowa to the Great Salt Lake Valley while pregnant. She had already been uprooted from hearth and home at least twice, and could no doubt see the handwriting on the wall as the men of the church were regularly dispatched to serve colonizing and proselyting missions at the whim of leadership. William was obviously going to spend much of his life away from home, and it would be her job to hold down the fort. Ellen was nothing if not strategic and resourceful. If the men were commanded to take additional wives, she would use that to her practical advantage.
William loved her and trusted her completely. It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that she would have told him, “I will support you in anything you need to do, but I’m going to need help, and it needs to be help from someone I can trust and get along with. Therefore, I will choose any additional wives you may bring into this family.”
William was no dummy. He would certainly have understood that if Ellen wasn’t happy, nobody else was going to be happy either. So…that was the deal.
Ellen’s first choice was Harriet. She knew Harriet: strong, smart, resourceful, a fellow orphan, loyal beyond question (much like Ellen’s own brother had been, Harriet’s little brother was part of the deal, or there would be no deal). Not long after Harriet joined the family, William was out the door again – off into a blizzard to rescue stranded handcart pioneers so they didn’t freeze to death on the wrong side of the Wasatch range. Ellen and Harriet held down the fort together while he was gone, taking care of babies and the household and the homestead.
And then came Sophie, the youngest of the three, but both Ellen and Harriet had known her since she was a young child. Aside from a loyally Mormon husband, Sophie needed a support system – sister wives/mentors, and a safe home. Living in the heart of church headquarters, there was almost zero chance that Sophie would be allowed to marry a young, otherwise unmarried man. Joining her friends made sense, and apparently having merely two wives would not be sufficient for William to secure a spot in heaven, so the team of two sister wives became the holy trinity of unofficial, unauthorized matriarchy.
~
Where polygamy was a thing, babies were generally part of the deal. Ellen had a few kids, and Harriet added a whole squad. Lizzie was the sixth child of Harriet and William. She joined a family of 13 older brothers and sisters at the time of her birth; six more followed later. By the time she was 15, Lizzie was a skilled farm girl, had worked alongside her three mothers doing everything from milking cows to midwifing, and – at age 13 – had gone through the new Mormon temple her father had helped to build, to make her covenants to the church. Why would a 13-year-old girl do that? She certainly wouldn’t do it on her own. Until very recently, the primary reason for a young woman to take on the adult covenants required in the temple would be to prepare her for fairly immediate marriage, i.e., a match had already been made and a wedding date had already been set.
That’s not what happened, though. Something or someone intervened.
I’m just guessing, but I think my guess is a good one: her family’s unofficial, unauthorized below-the-radar matriarchy intervened. Whatever the men of the community may have had planned for Lizzie as an “available commodity,” the next thing we know, Lizzie has vamoosed, gone to live with her far-out-of-town sister who needed help with five little kids. Thus the matriarchy expanded, and established a regional outpost, a sanctuary where young Lizzie could join forces with her older sister, breathe a bit, and bide her time while she grew to adulthood. True, polygamy was everywhere around her, and Lizzie would likely not be able to avoid it completely, but with maturity would come a greater sense of personal autonomy and better understanding of the realities she needed to factor into her choices. She had time to learn to understand herself and her environment before she was funneled into the multiply-and-replenish pipeline. The holy trinity gave her that, and she took their gift and made the best of it.
Meanwhile, the patriarchy and the cosmos continued to spin.
~
Just up the road a piece, Ephraim and Alice were raising a family plunk in the buckle of the Jello belt. Eph raised sheep for a living. Alice did the wife thing, which in her case meant she was home alone, a lot, while Eph was out with the sheep.
On the heels of the Edmunds act (1882) which put federal law enforcement muscle behind hunting down and imprisoning Mormon men for polygamy, the Edmunds-Tucker Act was in full force as of 1887: the church had been financially disenfranchised by the federal government (for reasons, including mostly polygamy, feared political takeover, general religious weirdness) and members were scrambling to find alternative ways to keep the local communities and the larger church together. They had been working toward statehood, but that looked unlikely for the foreseeable future. Because Eph was a sheep man, he needed space to run his herds, and with the encouragement of President John Taylor he had been looking at moving to Mexico in support of the new colony in Chihuahua.
Going to Canada instead could have been precipitated by any one of the above factors, or a combination.
And then President Taylor died in exile, leaving the church officially leaderless.
And then Alice became too ill to care for her ever-growing family, and she certainly was unable to make a move to a new settlement to start over from scratch. She ended up hospitalized, long-term, and Eph needed someone to take over the household, pdq.
What’s a man with a growing family, a sick wife, and a livestock business supposed to do? He couldn’t divorce Alice, nor did he want to, but …
Solution: add a wife, despite the politics of the time.
Problem – those dang politics: adding a wife added a BIG problem…a second wife would instantly make Eph a polygamist, which would put a price on his head and imperil his family and his livelihood.
Solution: add the new wife nevertheless, because needs must, and then immediately pull up stakes, take the family, and skedaddle.
Of course there was also the challenge of securing that additional wife. Eph needed a willing volunteer, someone who was already familiar with the family and otherwise unencumbered.
Enter Lizzie (again): now age 20, still safely unmarried, living with relatives in the neighborhood, acquainted with Alice and Eph already (so she knew their situation), and she was good at handling kids. I’m betting the plan was in place well before all the pieces snapped together.
Question: “Hey, Lizzie, do you wanna?”
Answer: (after pondering the options for a moment) “Heck, Eph. OK – I guess so – yeah.”
Logistics: Alice couldn’t make the trip, so she needed a safe haven. She was already in the hospital, so that was the logical place for her to stay. If/when she became well enough to leave, she could stay with her family in town. She would still have to stay in Utah, because Canada only allowed a man to have one living wife at a time anyway. Solved.
Alice’s story also needs to be told, separately, we’ll get to it – you don’t get Eph and Lizzie without having Eph and Alice first.
Back to Logistics: how/when to get Eph and Lizzie married, packed up, and gone to safety without attracting attention.
Answer: get married, quietly, by an LDS authority who was willing to subvert the rules (skipping the new federal requirement for a civil marriage license), pack up quickly and quietly, as if going on a family outing, taking only the barest essentials for camping/traveling, leaving the house intact, leaving Alice at the hospital long-term, leaving the youngest kiddo with trusted relatives, and telling the older kids they’re going on an adventure.
Wild guess here, but I’d be willing to wager they told the kids that Lizzie was coming along as a nanny. They found out the whole story after they were safely across the border. Six weeks after the nobody-was-invited-to-the-wedding, it was wagons-ho for the north (well, they took the train as far as it went, into Idaho, where Eph met them with the wagons and buggies). Eph got the fam safely parked with other new settlers on the northern prairie, hustled off to the mountains to cut trees for logs to build a cabin with, brought back the logs and built a little cabin to get Lizzie and the kiddos out of their lean-to/tent, and then he went back across the border to get the sheep. He could safely do that as long as he went alone.
Just like that, the family matriarchy had a new international branch. Lizzie held down the fort and started to build a new life and a new community from scratch while Eph was gone. That was her new job, the gig she had willingly agreed to in exchange for as much personal autonomy as a Mormon woman in 1889 could arrange. She had worked out a solution that would let her live “the principle” as the saints had been commanded to do, but gave her what was essentially the single-wife life, far away from controlling church leaders who would otherwise have had far more influence over her life choices. It wasn’t perfect, but considering the alternatives, it was tolerable. She had watched her own parents do the same thing, so she knew how to get it done.
This was not the first time, nor would it be the last, Lizzie would secure her own safety while stepping in to assist others who needed her help. It was something she learned from her mothers, and she passed the skill along. The first lesson of matriarchy: our purpose in this life is for all of us to care for everyone so nobody gets lost in the shuffle. She took the work seriously, and taught her family to do the same.
Lizzie stayed in Canada, actively contributing in all. the. ways. to build a life and a community and grow a family and take care of those she had promised to care for. She expanded her reach and enlarged her matriarchal circle as several of her own siblings and Eph’s siblings joined them in their new community. She was a lifelong caregiver and healer, and those within her reach followed her lead.
Her physical home, built from the bricks up, twice (there’s a story behind that – a whole ‘nother post) became known as The Stork’s Nest because it served not just to house her own family, but to accommodate the innumerable lying-in mothers who came to her for help delivering their babies. After she had been midwifing for many years using her natural healing abilities and the training she had received from her mothers, she took a formal nursing course, got her credentials*, and carried on, expanding her nursing care to meet other needs, including the Spanish Flu epidemic. She lived a full and remarkable life deserving of as much attention and detail as any other settler/pioneer, and her biographers have generally reduced her story to “she was a devoted wife and mother and church servant.” Unbelievable.
Lizzie lived to be 90 years old. She outlived most of her children, both of her husbands, and died only a few years before I was born. Even though we never met in-person, she left her imprint on everything and everyone around her, and had an impact on all of her descendants in ways I’m still discovering.
~
Post-script: Within only a few weeks after Lizzie and Eph’s escape across the border, Lizzie’s father was captured, tried, and incarcerated in the Utah territorial penitentiary, convicted for illegal cohabitation. Why then? Had he somehow made himself more vulnerable and visible in an effort to aid in their escape? Surely he would have known of their plans. Purely coincidence? Or No? Did he maybe wish he had gone with them? We may never know … at least not until I get to meet with the holy trinity for a tea-spilling truth-telling session.
Next we will meet Lizzie’s fourth child, my grandmother, Irene. She’s the first one I knew in real life.
~
*Lizzie lived through a lot of change in her life, including a marked move from the early church that allowed women to practice their traditional healing arts without interference. After Brigham Young took over, he shifted to an emphatic repression of women’s empowerment via insistence that only those with official priesthood authority (always men) were allowed to exercise spiritual healing and other divine gifts. Whether this served as a catalyst for Lizzie to pursue her nursing credentials is not mentioned, but it may have played a part in her decision.
~
And now for some administrative stuff:
Thanks so very much for joining me on my writing adventures.
When I started this project, I didn’t know how long I would be able to continue. I still don’t, but I am – against my will – slowing down. I will carry on as long as I am able, but I do know I am posting less frequently and less predictably. With that in mind, I have suspended automatic subscription billing until I have a clearer idea of what the future holds. To those who have generously supported my work financially, I am so grateful – Thank you. You have made more difference than I can express.
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I love how you stitched it all together