Most members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (“LDS”) are likely aware that founding prophet and church president, Joseph Smith, had some 33 wives, including Helen Mar Kimball whom he married when he was 37 and she was 14. Several other wives were under 18 as well when he married them, such as Sarah Ann Whitney (17), Flora Woodworth (16), Lucy Walker (17), and Nancy Winchester (14 or 15). Mormon apologists have noted that Smith had no known progeny by any of his plural wives. Therefore, sex may have not played a part in these “celestial marriages” or spiritual-wifery, as it was called back then. We are now all appropriately horrified to hear of the sexual outrages that Warren Jeffs and members of his Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS) have committed, such as marrying very young girls to much older men. But in doing so, the FLDS church is doing exactly what the mainstream LDS church did from the 1840s through at least the 1870s.

In the data I have collected over many years, I have found that a significant number of girls aged 11 to 16 were married in Utah to men at least a decade older than they were; some men were even in their 60s when they married these girls. These girls were giving birth to children within a year or so of marriage, proving that these marriages to child brides included sex. Apologists respond to this by claiming that this was not uncommon in America back then, and that we have no right to place our modern ethics on a time and culture so far removed from us. However, the data that I have collected on American marital practices of the mid-1800s does not bear this out at all. Child brides marrying significantly older men were very rare everywhere I investigated, except in Utah. There are also plenty of contemporary indications that it was these pedogamous marriages, a neologism I coined for much older men marrying young girls, that were especially noxious to non-Mormons, not necessarily polygamy per se. They clearly transgressed the mores of those days as well, bringing down the ire of the world on Mormonism.

I have known since I was 12, when I began doing my own genealogy, that my Mormon ancestry included some child brides. My third great-grandmother, Phoebe Augusta Hubbard, turned 15 the day she polygamously married 46-year-old Abiah Wadsworth, LDS bishop of the East Weber Ward in northern Utah. This means she was being courted at 14 by a man three times her age. However, I had no idea just how prevalent this was.

While researching the lives of the girls who survived the Martin Handcart Company tragedy of 1856, I noticed a large percentage of these young girls married in 1857, at the height of the so-called Reformation that was sweeping Mormon territory with its religiouszeal and excesses, and that many of the men they married were much, much older than they were. It is no coincidence, also, that the 1857 Reformation Mormon communities were responsible for two major atrocities borne of paranoia, isolationism, and greed in the terrible economy of scarcity that the Utah territory was experiencing at that time. In March of that year, the handpicked men of the Springville Ward in Utah County, led by Bishop Aaron Johnson (of whom we shall hear more later), ambushed at night and murdered two of their own, William Rice Parrish and his son William Beason Parrish, over an ongoing dispute about the ownership of two prime horses and a wagon. Six months later, Mormons in southwestern Utah massacred some 120 women, men, and children of the well-stocked Baker-Fancher immigrant party on their way from Arkansas to California.

The Reformation’s strident calls for repentance and transformation in the lives of the struggling Mormon settlers had a profound effect upon their emotional, spiritual, and physical lives. Additionally, the isolation of the Territory from the rest of American society andculture allowed for extremes and excesses to occur that would be unthinkable to most. Stanley S. Ivins found that, in regard to plural marriages, there “were sixty-five per cent more of such marriages during 1856 and 1857 than in any other two years of this experiment” in alternative sexual and marital lifestyles. During this time of intemperate reformation, men married mothers and their daughters, sets of sisters, and sometimes even their own family members. Bishop Aaron Johnson of Springville married four (possibly five) daughters of his own brothers, all of whom were just children while he was in his 40s—a patriarch of polygamy, pedophilia, and incest, all sanctioned by church leaders.

Although the Reformation gave immense impetus for spreading pedogamy in Mormonism, it began, of course, in Nauvoo with Joseph Smith, and then started to pick up its stride in Winter Quarters. Anti-Mormon Thomas Sharp reported in the Warsaw Signal of March 11, 1846, that the first “expedition” of Mormons leaving Nauvoo for points west “provided themselves well with young females. Indeed a gentleman who recently visited Nauvoo informs us that many men left their wives inNauvoo and took with them young girls.”

However, sometimes Mormon men went too far in their predations upon young girls. 56-year-old polygamist Benjamin Covey was excommunicated briefly in Winter Quarters in 1848 for having sex with two girls, both under the age of 12, whom he had been fostering in his home in Winter Quarters. (As a personal note, while still in Nauvoo, 46-year-old Covey— married to Almira Mack, first cousin of Joseph Smith— committed adultery with my 24-year-old 3rd great aunt, Diana Cole, and she became pregnant. He married her polygamously in January 1846 and she gave birth to their only child four months later in May. She died of tuberculosis in Winter Quarters a few months after her only child died and just as all the following occurred.).

Covey was called to face the church’s High Council at the Winter Quarter’s Council House on March 11, 1848, but church leaders were well aware months earlier of his miscreant behavior. Nauvoo’s police chief Hosea Stout recorded in his journal on January 28, 1848,that Bishop Daniel Garn and another man reported to him that Benjamin Covey “was practicing a wicked and abominable thing…and wanted us to look to it.” Stout informed Brigham Young, who then “wanted the matter looked into.” Five days later, Stout wrote that he had been investigating Covey’s case and “it is now plainly manifest that he is guilty of seducing two girls not over twelve years of age which was reported to the president.”

The High Council minutes report that they met on March 11, with Alpheus Cutler presiding. Theodore Turley and Frederick W. Cox were the council members appointed, respectively, to defend and prosecute him. Not all witnesses called had shown up, but it was decided to proceed anyway. After they testified, Covey “made his statement in reguard [sic] to the charges preferred [sic] against him.” Stout reported in his diary that day, “It appeared that two girls about the same age lived with him both of whom he had defiled, which is abundantly proven. He was cut off from the church with the understanding that his wives and children were under no obligations to him.” Brigham Young motioned that Covey be cut off and the vote by the church’s High Council to excommunicate him was unanimous.

Covey’s punishment for sexually abusing two very young girls under his care did not last long, however, and he was soon back in the good graces of Brigham Young and reinstated into full membership. Within two months of the trial, Young invited him to join his pioneer company to the Salt Lake Valley, which left Winter Quarters on June 5, 1848. Covey was then ordained Bishop of the Salt Lake 12th Ward on February 22, 1849, one year after his excommunication.

Covey’s sin seems not to have been pedophilia per se, but that he was not married to the two young girls he raped. Later, even “friendly” accounts from Utah report that girls as young as 10 were getting married to adult men there, although I was only able to document girls 11 and older marrying. Their stories of both acquiescence to and rejection of pedogamy will be told in future segments in this series.

This is the first piece in a series of articles that will discuss child brides in historic and modern times in Utah. The articles will be published over the next five weeks.