The practice of pedogamy that started in Nauvoo, Illinois found full flower within the isolated safety of the Wasatch mountains. Ecclesiastical and social pressure for girls and men to conform to these uniquely Mormon mores grew intense. Faithful Mormons, Mormon dissidents, short-term visitors, and those simply passing through in migration parties headed elsewhere were deeply affected by the blatant display of girls being groomed and pressured into sexual and marital practices that made non-Mormons blush… or worse.

Sarah Hollister Harris reported in 1851 that Mormon girls were being told that the greater the age disparity between them and their husbands, the greater their eternal reward. Referring to 15-year-old Charlotte Ives Cobb, who resided in the Lion House at the time as a step-daughter of Brigham Young, Harris said, “She was, with many other young girls, made to believe the hideous doctrine that the older the man they married, the greater would be their glory in the world to come.”

An embittered John D. Lee, in his “confessions” of Mormonism Unveiled referred to “old, worn-out members of the Priesthood, who wanted young women sealed to them.” The social culture of the Utah territory became so entangled in the machinations of pedogamy that some young women seemed unaware of just how bizarre the whole system was, and gladly participated in pursuing elderly men. In 1941, Wanda Clayton Thomas asked William Clayton’s last surviving wife, Anna Higgs, “how a girl only seventeen years old could marry a man in his early fifties who already had so many wives and children.” Higgs replied that she “fell in love with him [Clayton] before he ever knew her [and] just had to follow him from church to church to hear him speak. I wanted to be with him in the hereafter. I courted him.”

Salt Lake bishop, Edwin D. Woolley, wrote to Brigham Young on December 16, 1855 that while he was down in Fillmore, Utah working with the territorial legislature, “the only circumstance of any note that transpired” was that apostle Orson Pratt had “added to his stock of Ribbs [wives] and took a Lass by the name of Phelps, about 16 or 17 years of age.” Juliett Ann Phelps was 16 when she married the 44-year-old Orson Pratt on December 14, 1855 in Fillmore. Woolley then noted, “I believe it agrees well with him as I seen him the next day, looking as fresh and young as ever, and if any difference I think 16 years was added to her life.” Another of Orson Pratt’s wives, Margaret Graham, was 16 when she married the 57-year-old apostle. This marriage caused Pratt’s already disapproving first wife, Sarah Marinda Bates Pratt, to divulge her unhappiness with polygamy in an 1877 article to the New York Herald. “I doubt…whether any tongue could describe the sufferings I endured for fifteen years,” she confided. “Here was my husband, for example, gray headed, taking to his bed young girls in mockery of marriage.”

Disgruntled German Mormon, Hans Peter Emanuel Hoth, reported in 1856, “Girls of 12 to 14 are married, and often to men who are 60 and even older. The old men, who had several wives of the same age as they themselves…always sought to get 1 or 2 young women caught in the trap. If a young woman refused, the old man would say that he had had a revelation from God, to take her for his wife. If she was still unwilling, then he would call her an unbeliever. I have had several experiences along those lines…in my own family.” Using the ploy of having received a divine revelation was something that Joseph Smith had done in securing several of his plural wives in Nauvoo.

Although not specifying age, Brigham Young spoke to the public on September 21, 1856 about his wives complaining to him about marrying young women. He said, “If my wife had borne me all the children that she would ever bare, the celestial law would teach me to take young women that would have children.”

Another report about the horrors of pedogamy coming out of Salt Lake City was widely published in 1857. The anonymous author wrote the New York Times on March 5:

Unappropriated women are becoming scarce in the Territory, and the polygamous monsters of the Mormon Church are beginning to compel the merest children to their wicked embraces. It was only a few days ago that two little girls between 10 and 11 years of age were “sealed” to old men. It is a very common occurrence for girls of 14 years to be taken as wives. One object seems to be to get these children into the horrible system of polygamy before they are old enough to think for themselves, or the natural delicacy of the sex shall be aroused and rebel against it.

Here, the writer emphasizes that the true horror of polygamy was not plural relationships between consenting adults, but the theocratic abuse of compelling young girls into so-called polygamy, grooming them to accept what the rest of the nation clearly found unacceptable, before they were old enough to know better. This report from the Times was republished in other newspapers in New York as well as papers across the nation, including Illinois, Kansas, Indiana, Ohio, and Tennessee, incensing its readers.

Wilford Woodruff tried to convince Brigham Young, 56, to marry Woodruff’s 14-year-old daughter, Phebe Amelia, in February 1857, but Young declined. In shorthand, Woodruff wrote in his journal: “I spoke to President Young about my daughter Phebe[.] He did not wish to take any more young wives but would see that she was take[n] up in due time.” Two months later on April 1, Woodruff wrote to fellow apostle, George A. Smith: “nearly all are trying to get wives, until there is hardly a girl fourteen years old in Utah, but what is married, or just going to be.” Woodruff himself had married 15-year-old, Emma Smoot Smith, in 1853 when he was 46.

The first wife of Patriarch to the Church, John Smith, Hellen Fisher Smith, deeply struggled with polygamy and pedogamy in the church in 1857. John’s brother, Joseph F. Smith (later LDS president), was on a mission to Hawai’i when Hellen wrote to him in May 1857, confessing her internal turmoil. Her husband, John, had just polygamously married for the first time to Melissa Lemmon in February. Melissa was 23, over a year older than Hellen herself, while John was also 24, so the marriage was not pedogamous at all. Still, “thank the Lord it is over,” she wrote to her brother-in-law, as the polygamous ice had finally broken in her home. Then, she addressed the culture of pedogamy prevailing at the time, diffusing the phenomenon with some slight humor. “All of the girls are a giting maried from 10 to 18. if ther is eny left till thayre are 18 they are on the oalds maids list.”

An ex-Mormon wrote an article dated May 30, 1857 for Life Illustrated in New York, conflating polygamy and pedogamy. Criticizing “Mormonism, Polygamy, Brigham Young, Brother Kimball, ‘The Twelve,’ and all their ‘whining wives,'” the author was especially offended by “the recent importation of young girls in particular.”

A letter by a Mr. Wilkins, dated July 11, 1857 and published in the July 13 issue of the Sacramento Daily Union, told of how he had lived in Salt Lake City for nine months before “having had to flee with his family” to Placerville, California, because of all the social upheaval and dissention in Utah. But, what Wilkins found to be causing “the most ill feeling, is Brigham Young sealing young girls to old men.”

Clearly, even polygamy’s supporters in Utah were struggling to accept the social and ecclesiastical pressure placed on girls to marry much older men, while some found the phenomenon repulsive enough to cause a loss of faith. In the meantime, critics of Mormonism were horrified by this practice disguised as “celestial marriage,” or even the less sanctimonious term “polygamy”.

This is the next piece in a series of articles that discusses child brides in historic and modern times in Utah. The articles will be published over the next five weeks. Read the other pieces here, here, here, here, and here, and here.