Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 89, Number 2, 2021

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I Have Shot My Betrayer: The Trial of Amanda Olson, 1890

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CONTENTS

By Lisa Olsen Tait

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How Idealized Womanhood Saved Annie Bradley from the Gallows

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By Allison Edwards

124 Mountain Common Law, Redux: The Extralegal Punishment of Seducers in Early Utah

By Kenneth L. Cannon II

142 Josie Kensler: Murder and Survival in Southern Idaho

By Paula Huff Bryant

DEPARTMENTS 91 156 160 166 167 176

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In This Issue Photo Essay Reviews and Notices Contributors In Memoria Utah In Focus

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REVIEWS 160 The Whites Want Every Thing: Indian-Mormon Relations, 1847–1877

By Will Bagley Reviewed by Christopher Carroll Smith

161 One Voice Rising: The Life of Clifford Duncan

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By Clifford Duncan, with Linda Sillitoe.

Photographs by George R. Janacek Reviewed by Sondra G. Jones

162 Women Artists of the Great Basin

By Mary Lee Fulkerson and Susan E. Mantle Reviewed by Maureen Daly Goggin

NOTICES 163 Spencer Kimball’s Record Collection:

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Essays on Mormon Music

By Michael Hicks

163 American Prisoner of War Camps in Idaho and Utah

By Kathy Kirkpatrick

164 Life and Times of John Pierce Hawley: A Mormon Ulysses of the American West

By Melvin C. Johnson

164 Western Art, Western History: Collected Essays

By Ron Tyler

164 Rescuing Beefsteak: The Story of a Pragmatic Pioneer Idealist

By Myron Harrison

164 Layton

By Lynn Arave

165 City between the Canyons: A History of Cottonwood Heights, 1848– 1953

By Allen D. Roberts

165 Bonneville Salt Flats By “Landspeed” Louise Ann Noeth

165 Scan Artist: How Evelyn Wood Convinced the World That Speed-Reading Worked

By Marcia Biederman

IN MEMORIA 167 Armand L. Mauss, 1928–2020 171 Melvin T. Smith, 1928–2020

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As one study puts it, “the careful investigation of murder reveals much about the crime and the society in which the crime occurred.”1 Accordingly, the stories of Olson, Bradley, Kensler, and the wielders of mountain law are filled with a concern for the protection— and policing—of sexuality and female behavior, a concern that can be seen in the use of the “unwritten law” and the idealization of womanhood according to nineteenth-century standards. They also show the tremendous role that newspapers played in the shaping of public opinion and the execution of justice.

Finally, Kensler’s time in the Idaho State Penitentiary demonstrates the dangers and inequities women might encounter in a prison system created for men.

Well you might ask what is meant by the “unwritten law.” This was a belief, current in America at least throughout the 1800s and into the early 1900s, that if a man caught another

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man engaged in some form of sexual impropriety with his wife, daughter, or sister, then he could rightfully take that fellow’s life. As Kenneth L. Cannon II established forty years ago, this extralegal concept—called “mountain common law” by George A. Smith—swayed many a Utah jury. The unwritten law, as some nineteenth-century Utahns argued, made it clear that Utah’s men would protect feminine virtue. Yet this was hardly a Utah phenomenon. The unwritten law flourished because many Americans placed a high premium on sexual purity but also perceived women as weak. Then, as the century turned, talk began of a “new unwritten law”: one that justified a woman for killing a man who had grossly mistreated her. Juries proved themselves willing to acquit women who invoked the new unwritten law against the men who had misused them—as did Olson and Bradley—and it provided society with a palliative method for dealing with rape and abuse. Not coincidentally, the attorney Orlando W. Powers represented both Olson and Bradley by using the insanity defense and, less overtly, the unwritten law.

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Most editions of Utah Historical Quarterly don’t begin life as a special issue—that is, one for which the editors solicit articles on a certain topic. Rather, we usually group articles together based on any number of factors, including content. From time to time, however, a few manuscripts come across our desks that clearly speak to one another. That is what happened with the current edition of UHQ, which features three articles on a decidedly sensational topic: women who murdered their husbands or lovers. The main characters in these articles are Amanda Olson, the working-class daughter of Swedish immigrants; Annie Bradley, a young mother who became entangled with a senator; and Josie Kensler, a farm wife who married at fourteen. The spring number is rounded out by revisiting a UHQ classic on “mountain common law,” which directly bears on the subject of gender, violence, and sexuality. As a group, the articles cover a relatively short time span, from the 1850s to 1907.

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These case—the crimes themselves, their coverage in the press, and the ensuing trials— hinged on expressions of what a woman should be and how society should deal with womanhood and sexuality. Much has been made of the classic Victorian woman, she who was submissive, domestic, religious, and pure, and the concept of “true womanhood” runs throughout this issue. Attorneys and reporters alike served up depictions of Bradley as a dedicated mother and of Olson as the beloved daughter of a pious, humble home. Conversely, Kensler’s history of infidelity apparently gave her neighbors reason to suspect her of foul play. Perhaps the willingness of jurors to see Olson and Bradley as respectable, if misguided, women saved them from the death penalty, while Kensler’s reputation as a slattern and a flirt shaded opinion in the other direction.

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Washington (D.C.) Times, November 13, 1907, 1.

If the stories within these pages share anything beyond sex and murder, it is the outsized role of the press in amplifying them: and that probably because of all the sex and murder. Newspapers far and wide knew they had a hit in the dramatic accounts of illicit relationships, young women, and vengeance. In the 1860s and 1870s, the Deseret News and Salt Lake Herald emphatically took the part of men seeking extralegal justice, while the Salt Lake Tribune held the opposing view. During 1907, articles about the Bradley affair appeared in newspapers from all but two of the United States, several Canadian provinces, and even Australia—which might be expected when a senator was shot by his lover.2 Meanwhile, newspapers in a handful of states covered the murder of John Kensler. And the judge presiding over Olson’s case took local reporters to task for the opportunistic timing of their stories. The media both played these cases up and, in part, helped to define how the reading public perceived them.

Annie Bradley, Amanda Olson, and several of the men who pleaded “mountain common law” escaped prison or the gallows, if not notoriety.

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Josie Kensler did not. Along with her lover, Kensler was convicted of murder in 1897. That was, unfortunately, not the depth of her experience. Nineteenth-century prisons officials largely saw female criminals as aberrations and did not plan for their well-being. This was the setting Kensler entered in 1897. In the midst of her incarceration, a prison official impregnated Kensler; she was then forced her into a dangerous and illegal abortion. Nor was that the only trouble in her life. Kensler’s father married her off at age fourteen to the thirty-nine-year-old John Kensler who, according to Josie’s testimony, beat her. Little wonder she spent her teenage years in escapades. Surely the murdered John Kensler was a victim, but spare a thought for Josie, whose life was defined too often by hardship, discord, and abuse.

Many more parallels exist among these articles, including the meaning of seduction in law and public discourse, the perception of female “hysteria,” the use of the insanity defense, and abortion—four abortions, perhaps coerced, take place within these cases. Taken together, these stories demonstrate the difficult knot of

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Notes 1. Robert Asher, Lawrence B. Goodheart, and Alan Rogers, “Adjudicating Homicide: The Legal Framework and Social Norms,” in Murder on Trial, 1620–2002, ed.

Asher, Goodheart, and Rogers (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 27.

2. Newspapers.com search, with the search terms “Annie Bradley” AND “Arthur Brown,” for a date range of 1907, accessed December 18, 2020.

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—Holly George

3. For further reading, see Jeffrey S. Adler, “‘I Loved Joe, but I Had to Shoot Him’: Homicide by Women in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 92, no. 3/4 (2002): 880–82, and “‘My Mother-in-Law Is to Blame, but I’ll Walk on Her Neck Yet’: Homicide in Late Nineteenth-Century Chicago,” Journal of Social History 31, no. 2 (1997): 253–76; Anne M. Butler, Gendered Justice in the American West: Women Prisoners in Men’s Penitentiaries (Urbana: University Of Illinois Press, 2000); L. Mara Dodge, “‘One Female Prisoner Is of More Trouble than Twenty Males’: Women Convicts in Illinois Prisons, 1835–1896,” Journal of Social History 32, no. 4 (1999): 907–930; Rosemary Gartner and Jim Phillips, “The Creffield-Mitchell Case, Seattle, 1906: The Unwritten Law in the Pacific Northwest,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 94, no. 2 (2003): 69–82; Carole Haber, The Trials of Laura Fair: Sex, Murder, and Insanity in the Victorian West (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Hendrik Hartog, “Lawyering, Husbands’ Rights, and ‘the Unwritten Law’ in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American History 84, no. 1 (1997): 67–96; Amanda Hendrix-Komoto “The Other Crime: Abortion and Contraception in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Utah,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 53, no. 1 (2020): 33–45; Robert M. Ireland, “The Libertine Must Die: Sexual Dishonor and the Unwritten Law in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” Journal of Social History 23 (Fall 1989): 28; Laura-Eve Moss, “‘He Has Ravished My Poor, Simple, Innocent Wife!’: Exploring the Meaning of Honor in the Murder Trials of George W. Cole,” in Murder on Trial, 210, 214; Sowande’ Mustakeem, “‘Armed with a Knife in Her Bosom’: Gender, Violence, and the Carceral Consequences of Rage in the Late 19th Century,” Journal of African American History 100, no. 3 (2015): 385–405.

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experience that accompanied crimes of passion in Utah and the Intermountain West—and connect the region to larger national trends.

Utahns were not alone in claiming the vigilante justice of an unwritten law. Like Olson, Bradley, and Kensler, when other American women of the era committed murder, they generally killed their relatives, husbands, and lovers. Like Kensler, women who entered nineteenth-century prisons did so after a life of misfortunes; and in their imprisonment, they faced additional suffering. Why read such miserable stuff?

These histories are more than true crime: they give us a chance to consider how we can develop legal and compassionate means to deal with rape and abuse and remind us of the need for constructive answers to social and interpersonal troubles.3

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Interior of Salt Lake Knitting Works, circa 1917. Amanda Olson, who was to become the center of a sensational trial, worked at another Salt Lake City knitting factory in the 1890s. Utah State Historical Society, Shipler photograph no. 18504.

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TA I T

It was Monday evening, September 29, 1890, about 6:30 p.m., just past the corner of C Street and First Avenue in Salt Lake City. It was almost dark; the sky was overcast and the weather portended the end of summer. Frank C. Hall, a thirty-eight year-old engineer by training currently employed as a barkeeper at the Mint Saloon, strolled along in the company of Ann Hart, a widow of about his age. Hall was estranged from his wife and had custody of his two young children; they boarded with Hart at 277 C Street. The pair chatted amiably as they made their way toward Brigham Street.

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As they passed the corner of C and First streets, a young woman stepped out from behind a tree, said something unintelligible, and fired a single shot, striking Hall in the head and killing him instantly. Her name was Amanda Olson, and she was twenty-two years old.1 She was employed at Pearson’s knitting factory and had recently moved with her parents to 318 Sixth Avenue. The Olsons’ new house was just around the corner from their previous residence at 286 C Street, which was across the street on the other end of the block from Hart, whom they had known for eighteen years.2 After a few moments of confusion immediately following the shooting, Olson walked to the police station and turned herself in, stating, “I have shot my betrayer.”3 She handed a 32-caliber pistol to the stunned police officer, along with a letter explaining why she had done it, then refused to talk any more until she had consulted an attorney.

Five days later, following an inquest and grand jury proceedings, Amanda Olson was charged with murder. By this time, the former judge and prominent local attorney Orlando Powers had been engaged to defend her, and three men, including the former Salt Lake City mayor James Sharp, had agreed to post a five thousand dollar bond to release Olson from jail until the trial.4 The trial, which was held in early December 1890 and lasted six days, drew huge crowds and was covered extensively by all the local papers. The defense was insanity. The jury deliberated thirty-five minutes before returning a verdict of not guilty, and the

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onlookers in the courtroom erupted in cheers.5 The next day, newspaper reporters and editorialists celebrated the acquittal.

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As reported in the local press, the Amanda Olson case became one of the most noted trials to that date in Salt Lake City’s history. It was understood to be the first time a woman had been tried in territorial Utah for capital murder. It featured a compelling cast of characters and scandalous details of sex and violence. At the center was the enigmatic figure of Amanda Olson herself and the ultimately unresolved question of what exactly happened to lead her to that corner, gun in hand. Taken together, the newspaper accounts and the statements of the main players in the case show that Amanda Olson’s case was primarily interpreted as a story, read by press and public alike through the lens of popular fiction and real-world news accounts. From our vantage point, we can also see that this trial confronted some of the most vexed and central questions of nineteenth-century American culture regarding gender, sex, and justice. Like many sensational trials, the Amanda Olson case captured public attention because it represented much more than itself. gh Within a day of the shooting, the newspapers reported the backstory of the murder, framing it as a well-known tale. “The old familiar story of man’s treachery and woman’s weakness . . . seems to have never been more exactly repeated than in the instance of which we write,” observed the Deseret Weekly.6 In a word, the story was seduction. “It was the old story,” Olson herself wrote in her letter, describing how Hall had, after being introduced to her by Hart, persisted in pursuing her until she had fallen in love with him and agreed to become engaged while waiting for him to obtain a divorce. Her parents were reluctant at first but eventually granted their permission and seemed to have been won over by Hall’s gentlemanly demeanor and conversation.7 What happened next was repeated many times in the course of the newspaper reports and the trial, always treated indirectly and euphemistically. Having already been framed as “the old story” of “seduction” and “betrayal,” it was

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certainly assumed that readers would understand the reality behind those careful phrases: rape. John F. Olson, Amanda’s father, in the initial interview with a reporter, was the first to tell the story: She [Amanda] stated that one night, shortly before he [Hall] left the city, he paid her his usual visit. We had gone to bed and after they had talked a few minutes about marriage, he threw a handkerchief over her mouth and after threatening her if she resisted or uttered a sound, outraged her. Then he told her that his only reason in doing what he had done was to make sure that she would be true to him. When she finished the confession she said: “I swore vengeance on this man and I prayed to God for strength to do it.”8 Elsewhere, John Olson said Hall had “seduced her and ruined her for life.”9 The newspapers repeatedly referred to it as Hall having “ruined her” and conventionally referred to him as her “seducer” or “betrayer.”

Within a few days of this encounter and without any further communication with Amanda Olson, Hall left Salt Lake City and was gone for ten months. During this time, she became increasingly distraught. Her health suffered; she could not work for several months; she withdrew from her friends and barely functioned.

Her family (unaware of the rape) tried to reassure her by saying that Hall must have gone to get his divorce and would return before long.

Finally, on Saturday, September 27, two days before the murder, she spotted Hall by chance out her window, which sent her into a state of extreme agitation. A short time later, alarmed at Amanda’s condition, her mother Charlotte accompanied Amanda downtown, and they sent a message to Hall requesting that he come and talk to her. Hall came right away but insisted on taking Amanda into a private area of a nearby restaurant, the Café Louvre. There, according to her account, he sneered at her distress and made some kind of physical overture.

Olson pushed him away—Charlotte told a reporter that Amanda had “felled him to the floor with a chair”10—and left the restaurant,

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The newspapers were immediately aware that they had a blockbuster story on their hands.

The Salt Lake Herald opened its coverage in terms reminiscent of a novel or stage directions for a melodrama: “A hurried word passed from a woman to a man, a pistol shot, an exclamation of horror, from a bystander, a few gasps, and a human life had gone out.”13 The Salt Lake Tribune took the perspective of the victim: “It was twenty minutes of seven last evening, and twilight was fading into darkness, when Frank C. Hall, a well built, fine looking fellow aged 38, and Mrs. Ann Hart, of 237 C street, walked leisurely down C street toward Brigham.”14 The Deseret News took a straightforward approach but could not resist taking a stab at Hall, calling him “a sporting character.”15 All devoted significant column space to the story over the next several days and again during the trial, complete with large, bold headlines such as “shot her seducer” and “frank c. hall is shot dead,” the latter adding in slightly smaller print,

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Here was this girl, descended from the Northmen; perhaps in her veins the very blood of the Vikings; now here for vengeance because of false promises, blasted hopes and her ruined life.

Before her comes the man; into her mind comes a realization of all his falsity and a full vision of her blighted life. . . . steadily she raises her hand, her finger on the trigger. . . . The deed is done. It is hers and she shrinks not from the consequences. Would to God that there were more such heroic women, then there would be less women as outcasts.

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Just as quickly, the papers recognized that public sentiment was running in Olson’s favor. Indeed, they actively helped to create that sentiment. The Herald’s initial report set the tone: “There will be but little sympathy for the man who now lies cold in death. We are very much inclined to believe that the popular verdict, even though it be not the law in the case, will find plenty of excuse for the unhappy girl whose fingers pressed the trigger of the weapon which sent the fatal bullet into the body of her seducer.”17 The Tribune went even further, publishing an editorial two days after the murder, calling Olson “The Heroic Girl.” The column spared no pains to praise and justify her desperate act:

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Returning home, Olson wrote the letter she would later give to the police. As she sat in her room examining the gun, she repeatedly snapped the pistol and broke the trigger spring.

By this time, it was late afternoon, but Olson returned to the gun store, taking the letter with her, and had the gun repaired. She left the store at about six o’clock and fatefully encountered Hall and Hart half an hour later as she walked home.

“Amanda Olson Put a Bullet Through His Heart Last Night because he had betrayed her.”16

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“so excited she could not see me,” her mother said. That night and the next she sat up without sleeping, becoming “wild and distracted.”11 Her parents had become greatly alarmed at Olson’s state and decided to send her to California to visit relatives; on Monday, she went downtown with her mother to purchase a trunk for her trip. While she was there, Olson told her mother she was going to Auerbach’s to buy some gloves but went instead to a gun store, where she purchased a 32-caliber Hopkins & Allen pistol. “She said that she was going to travel and that she wanted the pistol for protection,” the salesman later testified. Olson rejected a 22-caliber model as “too small” and purchased only thirty cents’ worth of cartridges. “She asked no questions about loading it,” said the clerk stated. “She took it and went away.”12

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“May the lesson of the tragedy . . . go to the pitiless sons of men who hold it as a mere pleasantry to beguile from woman her confidence and then blast her life forever,” the editorial concluded.18 The Tribune editorialist made his case, in part, through literary allusion. Describing the fateful scene, he wrote, “Her victim, her seducer, draws near, and on his arm another woman.

Oh! the hour of bitterness! ‘Now paint the ruined maid and her distraction wild.’” The last line is a quote from a very popular poem by Robert Burns, “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” a lengthy work praising a typical night of family togetherness in the home of a poor peasant.

Describing the arrival of the young daughter’s

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The Cotters Saturday Night, engraving by S. Hollyer, 1886. Both a Tribune editorialist and Orlando Powers called on Robert Burns’s popular poem of the same name to lend an air of humble, righteous domesticity to the Olson household. Courtesy Library of Congress, LC-USZ62–54184. lover, Burns pauses to denounce, in contrast to the wholesome scene he describes, the sorrow caused by a dishonorable suitor. In this poem the “distraction wild” refers to the desperate grief the girl’s parents would suffer should she be seduced. The Tribune misquotes Burns slightly, attributing the “distraction wild” to the ruined maid herself—shifting sympathy from the parents to the girl and hinting at an insanity defense.19 Public fascination, of course, centered on Amanda Olson. The Herald was sympathetic from the start, describing her appearance at the bail hearing as composed and collected, but showing strain. Olson was dressed, the paper reported, “very neatly, but plainly, in a dark green cloth dress . . . , a stylish straw hat, black kid gloves and a very heavy blue veil, which she kept down over her face all the time she was in court.”20 In this description, as in most others, it is important to note the way in which Olson was characterized as “neat” and “stylish”—or in other words, respectable. She was repeatedly depicted as a decent, reputable young woman,

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and this image was crucial in creating public sympathy and granting immediate credence to her allegations.

The Deseret News was even more overtly sympathetic, drawing on a commonly used discourse of the period in which physical features were believed to reveal character: She is of petite stature, of a slight, frail looking form, and her age is given as twenty-three. She has rather a large, but well formed head, which is covered with an abundant growth of brown hair. Her features are expressive and mobile, and her eyes are large, blue and beautiful, and indicate a tender and affectionate nature. The size and form of the nose indicate force of character, but the mouth is the feature which most shows determination. As she sat down her lips closed with an expression of marked resolution, called up by the ordeal she was facing. Her demeanor was perfectly calm and composed.21

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At the inquest the next day, Hart colored her recital of the shooting with a few of her own observations. “I have known Miss Olson for eighteen years,” she said, “and I have never seen such an expression in her eyes as I did when we passed her. She looked devilish.” Hart also testified repeatedly that after shooting Hall, Olson had brandished the gun at her and said, “I will serve you the same.”25 Hart’s characterization of Olson’s appearance was not likely meant to be sympathetic; she was clearly traumatized and even angry at what had occurred. But as it read in the newspapers, her description of Olson’s crazed manner reinforced the testimony of the police officers and other witnesses, who all insisted that Olson had not appeared sane— further anticipating the insanity defense.

Meanwhile, Olson’s letter, which was published in the same article with the report of Hart’s testimony, seemed to impugn Hart’s character. Recounting that the older woman had introduced her to Hall, Olson wrote, “I did not know that they had plotted any harm against me. I trusted her as a friend and him as a gentleman, and she cannot say that I flirted with or gave him any cause to increase his thoughts to me . . . but nevertheless she became jealous and told me not to come over anymore, for she was afraid that Mr. Hall would fall in love with me.”26 Moreover, there was a damning detail in Hart’s cross-examination testimony to Olson’s

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The fact that Hart had taken Hall’s children and spent five months with him before returning to Salt Lake City, where they took up residence together, was certainly suggestive. The newspapers did not remark on the implications of this fact, but readers would have caught its significance and read Olson’s later testimony that Hall had called Hart his “mistress” as confirmation of the initial implications. Without overtly saying so, the newspapers represented Ann Hart as the scheming, immoral foil to Amanda Olson: or, perhaps more accurately, they allowed Olson’s characterization of Hart to stand. When Hart testified as the star witness for the prosecution, the Tribune summed up her performance in terms we might now call snarky: “She tripped smilingly to the stand, but when she left it the smile had given place to a frown.”28 Powers, in cross-examining Hart, “took the witness in hand” and tried to cast her credibility into question. While Hart “steadily adhered to her story,” the reporter thought Powers had the best of the exchange.29

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The other characters in the drama were interviewed and appraised. Hart, Hall’s walking companion when he was shot, spoke to reporters shortly after the murder. The Tribune described her as “a widow of about 38, from whom death has taken children as well as husband” and as a “a plain, though a bright, and at times engaging woman.”22 When told by the reporter that Olson said she had shot Hall because he betrayed her, Hart’s initial reaction was skeptical: “‘I don’t believe a word of that,” she insisted. “I don’t believe he ever wronged her. You can say that I knew Mr. Hall to be an honorable gentleman in any respect, and that he always treated me as such.”23 As the Tribune reporter put it, “Mrs. Hart gave the deceased a way-up character.”24

attorney, as reported in the Herald: “Hall went east in November last, and five months ago she went east with his children. They all returned to this city and went to [Hart’s] house to live.”27

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Olson’s remarkable self-possession would again be noted during the trial.

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In contrast to Hart, the press treated Olson’s parents sympathetically. They, too, were interviewed almost immediately after the shooting, and it was through her father’s statement, quoted above, that Amanda’s version of the story was first told. John Olson recounted the persistence of Hall in courting Amanda, his initial oppostition to an engagement followed by his reluctant permission, her breakdown after Hall left, and her subsequent “confession” of the seduction. “She has always been a quiet, affectionate girl,” John concluded. “It’s terrible to think that my first girl should have been seduced and that she should have shot her seducer.” He then described how, on his way home from work that evening, he had happened upon the scene of the murder and saw the dead body lying on the ground. “I asked what the trouble was and Mrs. Hart replied, ‘Amanda has done this.’ This was the first I knew of it, but in an instant the whole thing flashed upon me. I realized that my daughter had killed her betrayer, and then I fainted and was brought home.”30

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The Tribune described John Olson as “sick at heart and distressed”: “such a tale of perfidy and shame as he related, though it almost broke his heart.” He was also characterized by the same reporter as “an honest, hard-working old Saint,” meaning that he was a Latter-day Saint; this was not, we might note, a term that the Tribune often used in a positive tone. Charlotte Olson added the story of her daughter’s altercation with Hall in the restaurant two days before the murder. “The old people feel terribly at their beloved daughter’s disgrace and her terrible deed,” the Tribune summed up. “They are an honest old couple who evidently mean to live righteous lives, and the blow has fallen heavily on them.”31 And what of Frank Hall himself? The newspapers did not seem to take much interest in him. The Tribune dispatched Hall’s life in a one-sentence paragraph: “The deceased was a stationary engineer by trade, but has long been a barkeeper at the Mint saloon where he is given an excellent character as a quiet, peaceable, industrious and temperate man.”32 By contrast, in a brief notice about the murder, a Park City newspaper reported that Hall was a known character in that town. He “was pretty well known by old time Parkites,” according to this account, “and those who knew him best say this sort of business was an old trick of his.”33 The evidence about Hall, such as it was, presented contradictory accounts, and that seems to have been the extent of the newspapers’ investigation.

In the days following the murder, the papers reported on the inquest and arraignment.34 By this time, Olson had already retained a lawyer— and not just any lawyer. There is no comment about how a working-class girl came to be represented by Judge Orlando W. Powers, but in Powers, Olson found an able defender indeed.

Given Powers’s later career, it is likely that the Olson affair was important in establishing his reputation and expertise in defending high-profile murder cases.

Powers was born in New York in 1850 and attended the University of Michigan Law School as a young man, graduating in 1871. In 1885, he was nominated by President Grover Cleveland as an associate justice of Utah and as judge of

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the First District, based in Ogden. Pending the Senate confirmation process in Washington, Powers took his seat in Utah just a few weeks later, and almost immediately found himself embroiled in the escalating anti-polygamy crusade and other complex Utah cases, including the Bullion-Beck mining case.35 During the course of that trial, political opposition to Powers mounted, and in the spring of 1886, exhausted both personally and financially, he requested the president to withdraw his name from nomination and stepped down from the Utah bench in August of that year. While not a political success, this brief interlude afforded him something of great value that he used to advantage for the rest of his life: the title of “judge.”

Powers went back to Michigan briefly but returned to Salt Lake City in 1887 and established his legal practice. He also threw himself into local politics and was instrumental in the momentous victory of the non-Mormon Liberal Party in Salt Lake City elections early in 1890.

Powers built an extensive practice in Utah and the West. He was in demand nationally and acted as a defense attorney in several high-profile cases. In 1913, a profile of Powers reported that he had been involved in defending and prosecuting over seventy murder cases.36 His success was attributed to his deep knowledge of the law and his gift of “holding his listeners spellbound under the power of his eloquence”—qualities that were thought to have been masterfully displayed in the Olson case.37 There is no mention, in the newspaper reports or in Powers’s surviving papers, of whether Powers had previously defended a case as sensational as the Olson murder trial; this case may well have helped to set a pattern in his career, setting important precedents in his strategy and oratory. Certainly his victory in this trial contributed to his being retained as defense counsel in a high-profile Nebraska case just two years later. There, he successfully defended a man who had killed a prominent Lincoln banker for having an affair with his wife, hinging his argument on the “sanctity of the American home” with an address to the jury that many considered his masterpiece. It was reprinted alongside a lengthy article reporting his death in 1914.38

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Amanda Olson was not, by far, the first nineteenth-century American woman to be put on trial for murdering a man. In his study of women murderers in turn-of-the-century Chicago, Jeffrey S. Adler found that while the number of homicides committed by women was relatively small as compared to those perpetrated by men (never more than 10 percent), it did grow during this period. Moreover, homicide by women overwhelmingly followed certain patterns. First and foremost, women killed people close to them: relatives and lovers, simply put. Adler also found that women murderers were most often motivated by “deep emotional attachments.” Most killings by women were premeditated, and in their statements about their crimes, some women “anticipated the arguments that they would offer to policemen, judges, and juries when planning the murder of their lover.” All of these elements are found in Olson’s crime.42 Adler attributes the rise in female-perpetrated homicides to wives’ newfound insistence on the right to defend themselves against abusive husbands, justifying their actions by invoking an “unwritten law”: “The new unwritten law gave a woman the right to use lethal force in

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Powers’s claim cannot be easily corroborated, but it is important primarily for expressing popular perception, and Powers knew that this case was all about public perception. Indeed, the difficulty of seating a jury showed just how formidable public opinion was going to be. The trial opened Thursday, December 4, 1890, in the Third District Court, with Judge Charles S. Zane presiding. Both attorneys conducted “far-reaching and exhaustive” questioning of potential jurors; their questions revealed their prospective arguments in the trial.46 Powers asked the men whether they were willing to render a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. The prosecutor, Charles S. Varian, asked whether the potential jurors were oppposed to the death penalty generally and specifically whether they would hesitate to sentence a woman to death.

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resisting an abusive husband.”43 If she could establish a history of domestic violence on the part of her husband, the woman was legally justified in killing him, as the argument went, and it was successful before juries. This “new” unwritten law was an extension of the “old” one: namely that a man was justified in killing another man who had sexually violated his wife, daughter, or sister.44 Both of these “unwritten laws” came into play in seduction-murder cases such as Olson’s, and there were many throughout the century. Just as Chicago prosecutors claimed that a woman could not be convicted for killing an abusive husband, so Powers, in his defense of Olson, reminded the jury that “in the history of American jurisprudence there never yet has been a girl convicted of killing her seducer.”45

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Even more sensational was Powers’s successful 1907 defense of Annie Bradley in the murder of Arthur Brown, one of Utah’s first senators. The Bradley case bore unmistakable resemblance to the Olson murder. Brown, who was called “the Gentile polygamist,” had engaged in a long affair with Bradley, stringing her along with promises that he would divorce his wife and then refusing to follow through after his wife died. Desperate, Bradley shot Brown; he died a few days later. Just as in the Olson case, Powers mounted a defense on the basis of temporary insanity, and again, as in the prior trial, the defendant was acquitted by the jury.39 The case received much national attention, with one New York paper calling his closing argument a “tear-compelling address” and “an engulfing, overwhelming wave of tremendous earnestness.”40 In the Bradley defense, Powers employed an oratorical flourish that, if it did not originate in the Olson case, certainly echoed his arguments in it: “Sometimes the bullet from a pistol held by a tender hand becomes the thunderbolt of God to manifest His power.”41

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Jury selection was complicated by several factors. One was the publicity that had already been given to the murder. Several potential jurors admitted that they had already formed an opinion about the case from reading the papers; others acknowledged that their views were founded both on what they had read and their opinion of “such cases” generally: meaning, presumably, that they were predisposed to consider a wronged woman justified in striking back against a seducer. The other complicating factor was the gender of the defendant. One potential juror said that “he had scruples which might prevent him from bringing in a verdict of guilty in a capital case where the defendant was

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a woman,” and several men said they opposed the death penalty in any case. Such scruples resulted in the dismissal of several potential jurors, although others professed that they did not object to capital punishment and would make no distinction based on sex. A third issue, which probably overlapped with the other two, was the argument of insanity. Most men who stated an opinion did not oppose the insanity defense. Interestingly, while the connection between gender and capital punishment was central, no one—attorneys or jurors, judge or reporters—made any comment about gender and insanity.47 Publicity of the trial became an issue as the jury selection proceeded. One of the potential jurors, echoing the comments of others, said “that if the newspaper reports of the proceedings at the coroner’s inquest were correct— then he had a fixed opinion.” Moreover, he asserted, it would take “considerable evidence” to change his mind. At this point Varian, clearly exasperated, pointed out to Judge Zane that a “statement of the facts of the case” had appeared in the morning’s papers. The judge responded by asking who the reporters were, forcefully declaring, “A reporter ought to have intelligence enough to know that he should not obstruct justice by trying to get men to commit themselves. It is an improper attempt to influence persons who may be called to act as jurors.”48 After a testy exchange between the judge and both attorneys, Zane demanded that the reporters for the Tribune and the Herald answer questions about their reporting. Both maintained that they were simply doing their jobs and that they had not published anything beyond what was standard practice in other cases. Powers made comments supporting the reporters, which enraged Varian, and bickering between the two lawyers ensued. Zane insisted that it was wrong to publish detailed facts of a case in trial but finally conceded. “Well, I will let it pass this time, but if such a thing as this occurs again I shall deal with the reporter very severely. I will not have the administration of public justice delayed in this way.” In response the Herald sniffed, “Is this Russia?”49 The truth was that the papers wielded enormous influence in shaping public opinion, and reporters knew that interest in the case was

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running high. The newspapers made a point each day of remarking on the size of the crowd in the courtroom and the attendance of women at the trial, which they called a “spectacle.”50 Interest was of course centered on Olson herself. Zane’s objections to the media coverage of the trial probably referred, at least in part, to the Tribune’s description of Olson as she entered the courtroom on the first day of the trial: as a sad and self-controlled young woman, dressed in “heavy mourning” with “her whole demeanor showing that she was fully alive to the great peril she is in.” Olson had once appeared “as the very embodiment of health and beauty. To-day she is a physical wreck, and whether she is guilty or not guilty of the premeditated murder of Frank Hall, it must indeed be a heart of stone that will not give one throb of pity for the unfortunate prisoner.”51 The Deseret News, meanwhile, noted that Olson “preserved a strict silence, not even exchanging a passing word with her mother, who seems to realize keenly the sad and trying position in which her daughter is placed.”52 Once the jury had been seated, the trial began in earnest. Opening statements and testimony occupied three days; closing statements took two more days, with the verdict being rendered almost immediately thereafter. Both the prosecution and the defense presented their cases in relatively simple terms, both affirming the same fundamental fact: Amanda Olson had killed Frank Hall. In the prosecution’s version, she had done it calmly, deliberately, and with premeditation. According to the defense, she had lost her mind and acted in a state of insanity because of the suffering Hall had inflicted upon her. The newspaper coverage, not surprisingly, was heavily weighted toward the defense.

Prosecutor Varian seems to have had little strategy other than showing that Olson had committed the killing. In spite of having seated a jury that had affirmed its willingness to render an impartial verdict, he betrayed an awareness that he was facing long odds in securing a conviction. As the Deseret News reported it, Varian implored the jury to act impartially, based on the evidence presented to them and not on the swirl of information already out in the community.53

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Powers took full advantage of his cross-examination, and most of the prosecution’s witnesses proceeded to bolster the defense’s case of insanity. She had looked “very wild,” said the fire chief, “and I thought she was out of her mind.” The police officer recalled that Olson had had “a look in her eyes which attracted my attention,” and she had “walked about the room in an agitated manner and talked incoherently.” Hart said, “There was a devilish look in her eyes, such a look as I had never seen there in my

life.” Only the gun store owner maintained that Olson had been “cool and deliberate” and there had been nothing unusual in her manner.55 In the midst of these testimonies, Varian had Olson’s letter read into evidence. He must have seen this document as the conclusive piece of evidence proving the murder to have been deliberate and premeditated, but its impact was likely lost in between affirmations of Olson’s wild and insane appearance.

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From several people who had been on the street or in the police station the night of the murder, Varian elicited brief testimony establishing that Olson had committed the killing. W. A. Stanton, chief of the fire department, told of arriving at the murder scene by chance shortly after the shooting and then sending for the doctor; Captain Lange of the Salt Lake City Police Department recounted Olson’s sudden entrance into the station, handing over her gun and the letter and stating that she had shot her betrayer.

The gun store owner testified that Olson had purchased the pistol at about noon; one of his employees affirmed that she had returned to have the trigger spring repaired. Ann Hart gave her eyewitness account of having been walking along with Hall when she heard the gunshot, saw Hall drop to the ground, and saw Olson brandishing the pistol in her direction, saying “I will serve you the same.”54

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Judge Charles S. Zane (left), who presided over Amanda Olson’s case, and the prosecuting and defending attorneys, Charles S. Varian (center) and Orlando W. Powers (right). Utah State Historical Society, photograph nos. 14337, 20342, 13313.

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At this point, the defense stepped forward. Having deferred his opening statement until after the prosecution presented its witnesses, Powers occupied the remainder of this day with his overview of the case. He began with a dramatic assertion that he would “make no contention against the fact that Amanda Olson killed Frank Hall.” Instead, the defense would show that “at the time the pistol was discharged, Miss Olson was not responsible, morally or legally, for the act.”56 This strategy depended entirely on creating sympathy for Olson. Amanda Olson was “a modest, shy, virtuous girl,” he said. “She had never had a lover, and aided her father in her support by her work daily.” She had not enjoyed educational advantages but was a happy, social young woman, “the light of her home.”

By contrast, Hall was a perfidious villain. Powers wasted no time in employing the time-honored strategy of putting the victim on trial by representing Hall as the well-known character

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type of the seducer. He was “an experienced man of the world” who set about to win Olson’s love by taking advantage of her youth and inexperience, leading her on with promises that he would get a divorce and securing her promise that she would marry him. “She had given to him her whole heart and soul,” Powers summarized, “and the man knew it.”57

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Powers described the alleged rape and then narrated Olson’s descent into madness. “Miss Olson changed from a gay, light-hearted girl, to a melancholy and sad-hearted person. Then her health failed her and she was unable to go to her work regularly. Her whole physical and mental nature changed, and she became a victim of melancholia, a type of insanity.”58 After the ill-fated encounter with Hall in the restaurant, Olson further declined into madness and became suddenly “possessed” (a word he repeated several times) with the idea of buying a gun when she went downtown with her mother: “From that moment she was irresponsible, although she became cool, calm, and collected.”

The fateful encounter with Hall and Hart on C Street was entirely unplanned. In that moment Olson’s mind was a blank; after the shooting she could only “jabber incoherently.” The witnesses for the defense would testify to the facts as he had related them, he promised, and it would be proved “to the satisfaction of the jury that the accused was insane at the time of committing the deed.”59 The trial then adjourned until the next day.

The second day of testimony, December 6, was eventful and dramatic; it also laid bare the central issues at stake in the case. It was a Saturday, and an “eager throng of people” attempted to get in to the courtroom. Zane strictly enforced the seating capacity of the building, and scores of people were turned away.60 The day’s proceedings centered on the defense’s two key witnesses: John Olson, the defendant’s father, and Amanda herself.

We should note, again, that any violation of a daughter’s virtue would have been seen as a crime against her father in common nineteenth-century thinking, something of which everyone in the courtroom was well aware.

Against this backdrop, John Olson’s testimony worked to elicit sympathy for Amanda and her family and to bolster the insanity defense.

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Prompted by Powers, Olson added some new information: he had an uncle in Sweden who had died insane. “I saw him when I was twelve years old and knew he was crazy,” he remembered.61 The prosecution did not pick up on this line of testimony in cross-examination, and it was passed over quickly, but it could have added a significant dimension to the defense by playing into popular notions that insanity could be inherited.

Olson’s most dramatic description of his daughter’s mental state came as he related the events of the days immediately preceding the murder. “On the Saturday preceding the shooting she was not up when I went to work, and when I returned home I found her in bed,” he recalled. “She was lying on her back with her eyes wide open and staring. I called to her, but could get no response. I felt of her pulse and found it was very weak.” After Amanda’s parents induced her to tell them about the seduction, John said that she became “particularly low-spirited” and talked about suicide.62 Such behavior would have been seen as consistent with an unstable mental state.

John Olson’s testimony, as reported in the papers, reveals some ambiguity about the alleged rape. According to the Herald, he recalled: “On Sunday she was crying and said, ‘Oh, that cruel man.” I tried to comfort her, and said, ‘Amanda, let us thank God he did nothing wrong with you.’ At this she began to cry and became agitated, so that I found she had been keeping something back, and finally asked her if Hall had seduced her. She replied that he had.”63 The Deseret News’s account was a bit more detailed: “She fainted twice. I tried to comfort her and said ‘Thank God he has done nothing bad to you,’ but she answered that he had. I then said to her: ‘Tell it square out. Did that man seduce you?’ She replied, ‘Yes, he did,’ and began to hollo loudly. She was greatly excited, but I promised to forgive her if she would keep calm.

She said, ‘Life to me is nothing,’ and spoke twice of committing suicide.”64 This aspect of the account introduces significant ambiguity regarding what really happened between Frank Hall and Amanda Olson.

In his initial interview with reporters, John Olson said that Hall had “brutally outraged” his daughter, employing a euphemism for rape.65

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Nonetheless, there is reason to question what really happened. Perhaps signficantly, Olson did not directly mention the alleged rape in the letter she gave the police. “He soon carried out his evil purpose to me and blighted my life with his smooth tongue,” she wrote. “He gained my promise to keep quiet and would marry me.”

Here she attributes the seduction to his “smooth tongue,” which at least suggests she may have yielded to his persuasions rather than having been forced. In this scenario, Hall persuaded Olson to engage in sex with him based on a promise that he would marry her. When he broke that promise—“betrayed” her, as she put it in her letter—it drove her to despair and desperation.

While she did describe the encounter, both to her parents and in the trial, as an assault, her account of the event is difficult to interpret.

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But this implausibility is exactly the problem.

Prosecuting attorney Critchlow inadvertently identified the conundrum at the heart of the case in his closing statement. He argued, as reported by the Herald:

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Given the moral and rhetorical conventions of the time, it would have been next to impossible for a respectable woman to publicly describe a sexual encounter in any detail, and from our current vantage point we can never fully understand the indirect and euphemistic language used by all parties in this case. Still, Olson’s story raises many questions. What does she mean by saying she “struggled”? How long was she unconscious? For that matter, what did she mean by “unconscious”? Given the physicality required to accomplish a sexual assault— on a sofa, in a room next to the one in which the victim’s parents were sleeping—it seems unlikely that Olson would have remained “unconscious” for the duration or that such an act could have been accomplished without at least some degree of cooperation. On its face, Amanda Olson’s own story seems implausible.

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And yet Olson’s father said that he would “forgive” her. Would he have thought it necessary to “forgive” her for being the victim of a rape?

Possibly. Nineteenth-century mores often held women responsible for men’s sexual behavior, refusing to recognize the many forms coercion might take short of actual violence. At the same time, Mr. Olson’s use of the word seduction maintained a salacious uncertainty. That there had been sexual intercourse was absolutely clear. But had Olson been forced or had she acquiesced? This was the tantalizing question expressed in seduction. In the thinking of Victorian moralists, a pure girl such as Olson would not, by definition, agree to sex outside of marriage. Therefore, if sex had occurred, the explanation had to be located somewhere besides the girl’s agency. Moreover, for an otherwise upright girl such as Olson was supposed to be, “seduction” might provide crucial cover in salvaging her reputation and self-regard if she had yielded to persuasion. Because of the mental and rhetorical conventions that made it all but impossible for anyone to openly discuss in detail what had—or had not—occurred, the word seduction, with all its unexamined assumptions and implications, worked its own magic.

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This is how she described it in her testimony: “While we were sitting on the lounge he threw a handkerchief over my mouth and assaulted me. I struggled and soon became unconscious.

When I recovered he was sitting by my side, chaffing my hands.”67

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Amanda herself, in her testimony on the witness stand, characterized Hall’s actions as an “assault,” and this was the same term used repeatedly by Powers.66 Unquestionably these indirect expressions were meant to suggest that she had been raped.

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The defendant testified that one night Frank Hall assaulted and outraged her.

The circumstances under which this is said to have taken place disposed of the whole story, and if Frank Hall were on trial for alleged assault, upon the evidence given, there was not a jury in the land that would convict him. Whatever else had been established here, this part of the defense was absolutely without foundation.68 Critchlow was right. Had Olson not shot Hall but instead brought charges of rape against him, her case would not have stood a chance.

She would have found herself on trial either way. Just as the defense in the murder case had put the victim—Frank Hall—on trial, portraying him as a villain who deserved to die, so the prosecution in a rape case (if the authorities had even agreed to press charges) would have

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tried the victim—Amanda Olson—portraying her, we can easily imagine, as a seductress, a liar, or worse. Olson herself knew this reality all too well. When she first told her parents that Hall had violated her, John Olson told her to press charges against him. Her response was indignant: “Yes, the law will give him a few months, and then he can get out and laugh at me.”69 Even this scenario was optimistic, since it assumed that the law would take her charges seriously, when it was more likely that her allegations would have been summarily “disposed of” as Critchlow said.

Whatever the other implications of John Olson’s testimony, Powers’s overriding objective in court that day was to establish the insanity defense for Amanda Olson. Her father’s account of an insane uncle and his daughter’s mental state certainly helped with that, as did most of the other witnesses. Charlotte Olson corroborated her husband’s account. She had seen her daughter become low spirited, unable to work, and uncharacteristically violent in her temper. Between the encounter at the restaurant and the day of the shooting, Amanda had become “wild and distracted.” Mrs. Olson had no idea her daughter was going to buy a gun.

She confirmed that Amanda had said, “Either he must die or I.”70 Other defense witnesses— including a twelve year-old messenger boy, the manager of the restaurant, and three people who had been at the murder scene—all bolstered the insanity defense.71 Having thus set the scene, Powers next announced that Olson herself would testify on her own behalf. All day so far, she had sat impassive, “her eyes bent on the table before which she was seated,” veiled but appearing less nervous than previously.72 The Tribune offered a colorful explanation for her “marvelous” self-control, suggesting that it “may be attributed to the phlegmatic temperament so characteristic of the Swedish race.”73 By contrast to Powers’s dramatic rhetoric and the parental heartbreak the jury had already heard, Olson’s testimony, at least as characterized by the newspapers, was “straight-forward,” almost emotionless.74 She recounted in some detail the development of her relationship with Hall, the fateful Saturday night

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visit during which he “outraged” her, the subsequent decline of her health, and his callous treatment of her after his return. “During his visits I got to love him with all my heart, and told him so,” she coolly recalled. “He then asked me to promise to marry him within one year, and I did so, giving him my full trust and confidence. Up to the time of his last visit, he acted like a perfect gentleman and at all times expressed great affection for me.”75 Olson did not offer much by way of explanation for her actions. “I cannot say what induced me to do this,” she said regarding the gun purchase.

“I don’t know,” she answered when Powers asked her why she shot Hall. “I cannot say why I waited on the corner of First street for Hall and Mrs. Hart to come up,” she insisted during cross-examination. “I cannot say that I had any purpose at the time.”76 It is difficult to tell whether Olson’s unemotional demeanor was a deliberate strategy of the defense, a reflection of her own character, or a function of how the story was shaped by the reporters. To this latter point, it is worth noting that the newspaper accounts all fall silent on Critchlow’s cross-examination. They report that it lasted over an hour-and-a-half, and was “of the most thorough and searching kind. Every detail connected with the tragedy was gone into.” Instead of the detailed account presented so far, however, we learn only that “Miss Olson stuck to her story.”77 This abrupt ellison of Olson’s words reminds us that we are reading a story—accounts written by reporters who had a definite point of view, and perhaps an agenda, in shaping their articles. Heretofore, they had given detailed accounts of each witness’s testimony or had at least summarized its important aspects. Why fall silent on Olson’s “thorough and searching” cross-examination? It could have been a simple matter of space. If Olson did, indeed, stick to her story, perhaps nothing new or significant was added. Perhaps they did not like Critchlow’s line of questioning and chose to leave out anything that might cast doubt on the version of Olson’s story the papers had already accepted as credible. At the very least, this omission meant that a significant voice of doubt in the case was not given a public hearing.

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Powers also called a few expert witnesses, including two physicians, to testify about the central claim of the defense that Olson was insane when she shot Hall. To these professionals, Powers set out a lengthy “hypothetical question” in which he essentially repeated (with none of the dramatic flourishes missing) the defense’s version of the case. Dr. J. F. Hamilton testified that in such a case the girl was “clearly” suffering from melancholia. “At the time the shot was fired, was or was not this girl actuated by an uncontrollable impulse?” Powers asked.

“I would not consider her responsible for her actions,” Hamilton replied. He also affirmed that melancholia arose “from a disarrangement of the menstrual functions.”79 Prosecutor Varian was not about to let Powers’s expert witness go unchallenged. He first sought to cast doubt on the classification of Olson as insane. “Melancholia is a type of insanity most easily feigned, is it not?” he asked Hamilton. “All forms of insanity are easily feigned,” Hamilton replied. “As to melancholia, is it not very difficult to distinguish the real from the counterfeit?” Varian continued. “There may be masked cases, in certain forms and conditions,” Hamilton answered evasively. Varian asked the doctor whether he considered Olson sane when she testified in her own defense; Powers objected that they were not asserting that

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After the noon recess, Varian resumed his cross-examination of the medical professionals by posing his own hypothetical question in which he essentially laid out the prosecution’s case. A young woman, “consumed by jealousy, believing that another woman had stolen her lover away,” brooded over the “alleged wrongs until she could stand it no longer.” She determined at last to have revenge and was “in full possession of her mental faculties” up to the very moment she fired the gun. If those facts were true, Varian asked Hamilton, “do you not think that such an act would be that of a responsible and sane person?” “I think so, if the facts should be as you have stated them,” Hamilton replied, no doubt confident that his previous testimony had already established that Olson was not in fact “in full possession of all her mental faculties” at the time of the killing.81 Powers redirected, and Dr. Hamilton added that “melancholia was a disease insidious in its advances, and the victim was able to carry out homicidal or suicidal plans with cunning and deliberation.”82 Another doctor, Foster, affirmed that “impulsive insanity” was a credible characterization of the girl’s actions in Powers’s hypothetical.83 The insanity defense was complete.

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Olson’s telling of her own story was a high point of interest for the defense, but when she finished Powers still had some distance to go in presenting his case. For the rest of the day, and again when the trial resumed on Monday, December 8, he called a number of witnesses to further substantiate the claim of insanity.

One of Olson’s friends who had encountered her shortly after the shooting, the clerk of the police court, two newspaper reporters, the wife of the jailor, the assistant city attorney: all testified in succession that Olson had not appeared to be sane when they saw her in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Major W. A. Stanton, chief of the fire department and neighbor to the Olsons, served as a character witness, as did a line of neighbors, friends, and acquaintances, including Olson’s boss at the knitting factory. In all, ten witnesses affirmed that Amanda Olson’s “reputation for peace and quiet [had] always been good.”78

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The penultimate day of the trial, December 9, saw the prosecution and the defense wrap up the case with resounding final arguments. On behalf of the prosecution, Critchlow began by acknowledging that public opinion ran heavily in Olson’s favor. The prosecution stands alone, he declared.84 He set forth the theory of jealousy that had already been presented in the prosecution’s case. Perhaps attempting to balance the sympathy scales, he pointed out that Hall, the victim, had no voice in these proceedings and that his two young children had been left “worse than fatherless.” For his part, Critchlow dramatically described Olson’s motivation— again invoking popular narratives: “The whole thing was a tale of jealousy and revenge.” Was Olson insane, afflicted with “impulsive, emotional, melancholia and all that”? No. “The girl saw before her the two roads she must follow, either murder or suicide, and calmly and deliberately she made up her mind that Frank Hall must die.”85

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As with other lawyers up against women who had invoked the “new unwritten law,” the prosecution insisted that if men could simply be shot down in the streets in this way, America’s cities and towns would soon be depopulated.86 As mentioned earlier, the prosecution made a point of questioning whether a rape had actually occurred that night in the Olsons’ home and dismissed outright her account of the attempted assault at the restaurant. As Critchlow put it,

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I do not believe in this theory of a rape; for that is what it comes down to. I do not see how any rational man— any man at all versed in the affairs of human life, who knows anything of the relation of the sexes, can believe for one moment that that man on that night, forcibly and against the will of this girl, succeeded in accomplishing his purpose toward her. . . . What evidence was there . . . beyond the bare assertion of the defendant herself, that a seduction ever took place; for no medical evidence had been adduced to show the condition of the girl in this particular.87 In moments such as this, the Olson case demonstrates well the conundrum at the intersection of nineteenth-century conventions regarding sex, rape, justice, and gender. A woman who engaged in extramarital sex was considered “ruined” for life and could only hope that her partner would marry her and preserve her reputation—even if the sexual relations had not been consensual. Olson had become despondent not only because she had been raped, but because her “betrayer” then refused to marry her. But the prospects were no better if she tried to call it out for what it was and press charges for rape.

The Olson case, therefore, exposes two significant legal and social fault lines in nineteenth-century American society: rape and seduction.88 Legally, there were laws on the books against rape, but socially those laws were very difficult to enforce; either way, the burden fell disproportionately on women. Men were granted a great deal of latitude for their sexual behavior, and the male-dominated justice system worked to preserve

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those privileges and protect men’s reputations. Women thus found theselves at severe legal disadvantage. Socially, too, the stigma attached to women over any kind of sexual irregularity—not to mention the resentment they would encounter for daring to disrupt the system of male privilege by making their abuse public—served to discourage them from seeking justice or bringing attention to even egregiously abusive situations. The sense that violation of a woman constituted a crime against her male guardian added another layer to the system, ultimately rendering women’s sexual victimization as a transaction between men. The ambiguity at the heart of the term seduction was part of this system. It acknowledged some kind of sexual impropriety but shifted agency from the man to the woman: whatever he might have done, she had yielded.

In the worst cases, such as Olson’s might have been, seduction could be cover for rape.89 As Critchlow all but acknowledged, most knew the terms of this conundrum. It was not fair: “justice” was not going to be served no matter the outcome. Attempts had been made throughout the century to introduce anti-seduction legislation, but those efforts went nowhere. Adultery laws, which were already on the books, tended to punish both parties. For their part, women’s rights activists argued that women needed less “protection” and more opportunity—to become educated, to work, to be seen as full human beings. It would be almost another century before those arguments gained much traction.

Instead, there seems to have been an unspoken gentlemen’s agreement—another unwritten law, perhaps—that when the occasional desperate woman could not reconcile herself to the situation and acted out, it would be called insanity and she would be let go. Trials such as Olson’s served as an occasion for high-minded men to make eloquent speeches denouncing cads and invoking higher definitions of justice to acquit the wronged woman. (It was not de rigeur, of course, to point out that many of those cads were otherwise indistinguishable from the men making the speeches.) Meanwhile, those speeches and those trials preserved the status quo. As one modern writer aptly put it, “The public scapegoating of the seducer seemed

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“Thus ended one of the most exciting cases that has probably ever come within the jurisdiction of the Third District Court,” concluded the Deseret News. “There are none who will regret the action of the jury save those who, had they their just deserts, would have met the same fate as Frank Hall,” opined the Herald. Likewise, the Ogden Standard published an editorial summarizing popular opinion of the verdict: “Amanda Olson goes forth from the prisoner’s dock not only a free woman but one who is fully vindicated. . . . The theory of the defense, we believe, counted for nothing; she was acquitted on general principles.”96 Little is known about what became of Olson after her sensational trial. The Herald had reported, without citing a source, that “her relatives

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Finally, on the morning of December 10—after final arguments from the prosecution, instructions from Zane, and a scant thirty-five minutes of deliberation—the jury arrived at its verdict: not guilty.93 And then, pandemonium.

“The feelings of the immense crowd of spectators were expressed by a loud cheer, which was followed by a burst of enthusiastic applause.”94 Olson herself was deluged with “warm congratulations” that continued as she and her family made their way out of the courtroom and onto the street where a crowd awaited the news. When the verdict was read, according to the Deseret News, Olson “seemed overcome with thankfulness.” At the same time, “tears of joy coursed down the cheeks of her parents, whose mental anxiety during the trial has been great.”95

Her weeks in the spotlight, during the fall of 1890, meanwhile, revealed much about Utah and, to be sure, American, culture. Well did the Standard report Olson was aquitted on “general principles”: principles of sexual double standards, of an “unwritten law” (new or otherwise) that supposedly protected female virtue, and of the double bind in which women found themselves in matters of rape, seduction, and justice.

So too did the Olson trial show the key role of newspapers in shaping public opinion. The local press—with their initial reports, editorials, unequal reporting of testimony, and heartrending portrayals of the Olson family—did much to create sympathy for the trial’s defendant.

Amanda Olson herself, meanwhile, remained ultimately enigmatic, obscured behind the layers of public opinion, newspaper reporting, and legal wrangling between men. Those forces had served to free her, but they could not—regardless of the verdict and regardless of what actually happened to drive her to that corner, gun in hand—give her justice.

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The last scenes of the Olson trial played out with more drama, more speeches. Powers gave a three-hour closing statement that was universally lauded as a masterpiece. Even the habitually sarcastic Tribune reporter was enthralled: “At the conclusion of his address the pent-up enthusiasm of the audience could no longer brook restraint, and hearty applause followed.”91 At this outburst, Judge Zane immediately called the room to order. One man who had applauded was brought before the bench and issued a fine; the crowd promptly contributed the amount on his behalf.92

in the old country are quite wealthy, and it is understood that her parents will send her on a visit to them shortly.”97 While that trip might have happened, we can see that Olson lived at her parents’ house and worked as a dressmaker until at least 1893.98

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to please almost everyone, while changing nothing.”90

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Notes 1. The author wishes to thank Holly George for her substantial help in bringing this article to publication. The newspapers are consistently inconsistent in spelling Amanda’s surname as either Olson or Olsen. Amanda Olson’s father stated that he was born in Sweden, which makes Olson the more likely spelling. “The Defense,” Deseret Evening News, December 6, 1890, 5.

2. R. L. Polk Salt Lake City Directory (Salt Lake City: R. L. Polk, 1890).

3. “Miss Olsen’s Examination,” Deseret Weekly, October 11, 1890, 533.

4. Bond, October 4, 1890, reel 7, box 4, fd. 10, Case 688, Third District Court Territorial Criminal Case Files, Series 6836, Utah State Archives and Record Service, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter Case 688). The other two men who posted bail were P. W. Madsen, a Salt Lake City businessman, and Andrew Peterson, who worked at Sandberg Furniture Company with Amanda Olson’s father. “The Second Degree,” Salt Lake Herald, October 5, 1890, 8.

5. Verdict, reel 7, box 4, fd. 10, Case 688. “Acquitted!” Salt Lake Herald, December 11, 1890, 8.

6. “Shot Her Seducer,” Deseret Weekly, October 11, 1890, 530.

7. “The Coroner’s Inquest,” Deseret Evening News, October 1, 1890, 3.

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8. “Shot Her Seducer,” Salt Lake Herald, September 30, 1890, 8.

9. “The Shooting of F. C. Hall,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 1, 1890, 5. One news account lists Mrs. Olson’s name as “Charlotte,” which only partially matches the available census records. See “Her Version,” Salt Lake Herald, December 7, 1890, 8; 1870 United States Census, Salt Lake City Ward 10, Salt Lake, Utah Territory, roll M593 1611, page 610b, John Olson; 1880 United States Census, Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, Utah, roll 1337, page 171a, enumeration district 50, John Olson, both accessed September 30, 2020, ancestry.com.

10. “Shot Her Seducer,” Salt Lake Herald, September 30, 1890, 8.

11. “Her Version,” 8.

12. “Insanity Is the Defense,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 6, 1890, 5.

13. “Shot Her Seducer,” Salt Lake Herald, September 30, 1890, 8.

14. “Frank C. Hall Is Shot Dead,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 30, 1890, 5.

15. “Shot Her Seducer,” Deseret Weekly, October 11, 1890, 530.

16. “Shot Her Seducer,” Salt Lake Herald, September 30, 1890, 8; “Frank C. Hall Is Shot Dead,” 5. Hall, of course, was shot in the head. Perhaps the Tribune’s headline writer got carried away.

17. “Shot Her Seducer,” Salt Lake Herald, September 30, 1890, 8.

18. “The Heroic Girl,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 1, 1890, 4.

19. “The Heroic Girl,” 4. Orlando Powers referred directly to Burns’s poem in describing the Olson home.

“In the Olson Case,” Salt Lake Herald, December 14, 1890, 10. “Cotter’s Saturday Night” is widely available in print and online. See, for instance, The Cotter’s Saturday Night and Other Poems by Robert Burns (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1895), 13.

20. “The Second Degree,” Salt Lake Herald, October 5, 1890, 8.

21. “Miss Olsen’s Examination,” 533.

22. “Frank C. Hall Is Shot Dead,” 5.

23. “Shot Her Seducer,” Salt Lake Herald, September 30, 1890, 8.

24. “Frank C. Hall Is Shot Dead,” 5.

25. “The Hall Killing,” Salt Lake Herald, October 1, 1890, 8; “The Shooting Off [sic] F. C. Hall,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 1, 1890, 5.

26. “The Hall Killing,” 8.

27. “Held Without Bail,” Salt Lake Herald, 8.

28. “Insanity Is the Defense,” 5.

29. “Insanity Is the Defense,” 5.

30. “Shot Her Seducer,” Salt Lake Herald, September 30, 1890, 8.

31. “Frank C. Hall Is Shot Dead,” 5.

32. “Frank C. Hall Is Shot Dead,” 5.

33. “Park Float,” Park Record (Park City, UT), October 4, 1890, 3.

34. The Herald and the Deseret News reported that Olson had been charged with second degree murder, but the Tribune said the charge was murder in the first degree.

Apparently, the grand jury’s indictment was somewhat vague, since the degree of the murder charge later became a matter of debate between the two sides in the trial. Since Olson was put on trial for her life, it seems certain that the charge was first degree murder.

“Amanda Olson’s Bonds,” Deseret News, October 6,

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1890, 3; “Amanda Olson Arraigned,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 5, 1890, 5; “The Second Degree,” 8.

35. Portrait, Genealogical and Biographical Record of the State of Utah (Chicago: National Historical Record Co., 1902), 49.

36. History of the Bench and Bar of Utah (Salt Lake City: Interstate Press Association, 1913), 184.

37. Portrait, Genealogical and Biographical, 45.

38. “Judge Powers Dies Suddenly of Pneumonia,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 3, 1914, 5.

39. Linda Thatcher, “The ‘Gentile Polygamist’: Arthur Brown, Ex-Senator from Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 52, no. 3 (1984): 231–45.

40. Ada Patterson, writing in 1907 in the New York Journal, as quoted in “Judge Powers Dies Suddenly,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 3, 1914, 11.

41. Quoted in “Judge Powers Dies Suddenly,” 11.

42. Jeffrey S. Adler, “‘I Loved Joe, but I Had to Shoot Him’: Homicide by Women in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago,” Journal of Law and Criminology 92, no. 3/4 (2002): 871.

43. Adler, “‘I Loved Joe,’” 882.

44. See Kenneth L. Cannon II, “‘Mountain Common Law’: The Extralegal Punishment of Seducers in Early Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 51, no. 4 (1983): 308–327.

45. “In the Olson Case,” Salt Lake Herald, December 14, 1890, 10.

46. “On Trial for Her Life,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 5, 1890, 5.

47. “The Olson Trial,” Deseret Evening News, December 5, 1890; see also “The Olson Trial,” Deseret Evening News, December 4, 1890.

48. “The Olson Trial,” Deseret Evening News, December 5, 1890.

49. “The End Near,” Salt Lake Herald, December 6, 1890, 5.

50. “The End Near,” 5.

51. “On Trial for Her Life,” 5.

52. “The Olson Trial,” Deseret Evening News, December 5, 1890, 5.

53. “The Olson Trial,” Deseret Evening News, December 5, 1890, 5.

54. “Insanity Is the Defense,” 5.

55. “The End Near,” 5.

56. “The Defense,” 5.

57. “The Defense,” 5.

58. “The Defense,” 5.

59. “The Defense,” 5; see also, Witnesses Affidavit, November 23, 1890, reel 7, box 4, fd. 10, Case 688.

60. “Amanda Olsen Testifies,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 7, 1890, 5.

61. “Her Version,” 8.

62. “Her Version,” 8.

63. “Her Version,” 8.

64. “The Defense,” 5; “Amanda Olsen Testifies,” 5.

65. “Shot Her Seducer,” Deseret Weekly, October 10, 1890, 530. A contemporary dictionary definition of “outrage” included “to violate; to commit an indecent assault upon (a female).” Webster’s International Dictionary of the English Language, Reference History Edition (Springfield, MA: G.&C. Merriam, 1907), s.v. “outrage.”

66. “Her Version,” 8.

67. “Her Version,” 8.

68. “Is Still On,” Salt Lake Herald, December 10, 1890.

69. “Frank C. Hall Is Shot Dead,” 5.

70. “The Defense,” 5.

71. “Her Version,” 8.

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88. Ann Jones, Women Who Kill (New York: Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston, 1980), especially chapter 3.

89. Estelle B. Freedman, Redefining Rape (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 43–47.

90. Jones, Women Who Kill, 152.

91. “The Olsen Trial Closing,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 10, 1890, 5.

92. “Not Guilty,” 5.

93. Requests, December 10, 1890, reel 7, box 4, fd. 10, Case 688, contains what appear to be Judge Zane’s instructions to the jury.

94. “Acquitted!” Salt Lake Herald, December 11, 1890, 8; see also, Verdict, reel 7, box 4, fd. 10, Case 688.

95. “Not Guilty,” 5.

96. “Miss Olsen’s Acquittal,” Ogden (UT) Daily Standard, December 12, 1890, 2.

97. “Acquitted!” 8.

98. R. L. Polk Salt Lake City Directory (Salt Lake City: R. L. Polk, 1893), 606.

8 9

“Her Version,” 8.

“Amanda Olsen Testifies,” 5.

“Her Version,” 8.

“Her Version,” 8.

“Her Version,” 8.

“Her Version,” 8.

“The End Near,” 5.

“The Amanda Olson Trial,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 9, 1890.

80. “The Olson Trial,” Deseret News, December 8, 1890.

81. “The Amanda Olson Trial,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 9, 1890.

82. “The End Near,” 5.

83. “The End Near,” 5.

84. “Is Still On,” Salt Lake Herald, December 10, 1890, 5.

Quotation re-worded. Newspaper reads “the prosecution stood alone.”

85. “Is Still On,” Salt Lake Herald, December 10, 1890, 5.

86. Adler, “‘I Loved Joe,’” 886–87.

87. “Nearing the Close,” Deseret News, December 9, 1890; see also “Not Guilty,” Deseret News, December 10, 1890, 5.

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73.

74.

75.

76.

77.

78.

79.

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How Idealized Womanhood Saved Annie Bradley from the Gallows

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On December 8, 1906, the sixty-three-year-old lawyer and former United States senator from Utah, Arthur Brown, was shot by his thirty-fouryear-old mistress, Annie Bradley, in his Washington, D.C. hotel room.1 Bradley had followed Brown to D.C., where he was to argue a case before the Supreme Court; she planned to confront Brown and demand that he marry her, as he had promised throughout their nearly seven-year-long affair. Even though Bradley was divorced and Brown was a widower, he still refused to marry her and legitimize their two sons. The wound she inflicted led to Brown’s death several days later. Subsequently, Bradley was indicted and tried for first-degree murder in Washington, D.C. Her defense was that she was not of a sound mind when she shot Brown, and she ultimately was acquitted on the grounds of insanity.2 However, the events leading up to, during, and after the trial suggest Bradley’s mental state was not what led to the jury’s decision to acquit her.

Because the trial of Annie Bradley occurred during the early Progressive Era, when issues surrounding gender roles dominated much public discussion, an analysis of it must consider that the defendant was a woman. Before and during the trial, newspapers across the country, as well as Bradley’s lawyers, frequently described her as a weak, emotional, and innocent woman who was ruined by the lustful and cruel Brown. They also emphasized that she was a single mother of four children, two of whom were allegedly Brown’s sons. Bradley’s lawyers portrayed her as an exemplary mother who would do anything for her children, such as traveling from Utah to D.C. to beg Brown to marry her so she could “give a name to [her] babies.”3 Contemporary attitudes about gender, in combination with the portrayal of Bradley by the media and her attorneys, make it evident that the jury acquitted her because she was a woman.

Annie Bradley’s trial for the murder of Arthur Brown thoroughly illustrates the gender norms of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Today, historians use the phrase cult of domesticity to describe

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the nineteenth-century fixation on the idea of “true womanhood.”4 Specifically, the cult of domesticity refers to the standards set for middle and upper-class women by women’s magazines, housekeeping manuals, religious books, and other literature. These standards arose after the Industrial Revolution had created a new middle class and as men increasingly left their homes for work. Consequently, middleand upper-class women stayed at home, where they would work to achieve the “true womanhood” prescribed by literature of the day.5 The cult of domesticity defined a true woman as one marked by domesticity, religious piety, sexual purity, and submissiveness to men.6 These characteristics stemmed from the belief that women should be the center of the home, where their husbands, sons, brothers, and fathers would be “influenced by [the women’s] Christian piety, moral resolve, and such sentimental values as sincerity, candor, and faithfulness.”7 The virtue of submissiveness, for instance, entailed that a woman was obedient, knew her place in society, and depended on her husband.

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Newspapers across the nation reported on the Bradley affair, often emphasizing Annie Bradley’s physical beauty and her motherhood. This front-page spread from the Pittsburgh Press included the headline, “Gloomy Jail Sounds with Merry Laughter of Youngsters Who Are Permitted to Share Cell with Mother—Loves Memory of Man She Slew.” Pittsburgh Press, November 10, 1907, 1.

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In his lecture On the Sphere and Duties of Woman, the minister George Burnap stated: “She is in a measure dependent. She asks for wisdom, constancy, firmness, perseverance, and she is willing to repay it all by the surrender of the full treasure of her affections. Woman despises in man everything like herself except a tender heart. It is enough that she is effeminate and weak; she does not want another like herself.”8 He made decisions for their entire household, and she was expected to respect and submit to them unequivocally.

While the cult of domesticity focused primarily on feminine attributes, it also illustrated nineteenth-century views of middle-class masculinity. As men increasingly worked outside of their homes, they were characterized as “competitive and aggressive providers—traits appropriate to a public world of expanding commercial capitalism and to their responsibilities as breadwinners.”9 The expectation of men to be the breadwinners was not only a societal one but also a legal one by 1915, because “every state in the union [had] enacted new

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These expectations for men and women arose, in part, from their supposed physical and mental differences. For instance, women were believed to fall short intellectually because of the prominence of their emotions, which some believed came from the female reproductive system. Some nineteenth-century thinkers also believed that a woman’s menstrual cycle made her unfit for any significant mental or physical tasks. Because of the belief that women’s emotions made them helpless, it was considered men’s duty to provide for and protect them. On the other hand, because men were physically larger than women, they were responsible for protecting women. Additionally, without a uterus or ovaries, it was believed that men could think reasonably and possessed overall intellectually superiority.11

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laws that made a husband’s desertion or failure to support his wife or children a crime.”10

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The reality of day-to-day life, especially across social classes, was much messier: men and women participated in activities both public and private, and sexual behavior was never as straightforward as the magazine and lecture writers hoped for.12 The Bradley-Brown relationship surely attests to this. Yet the trial and acquittal of Bradley also demonstrate the power of the ideal—how the plight of a woman portrayed as beautiful, family-centered, and fragile could sway the hearts of a jury. Arthur Brown failed to provide for and protect the mother of his children, so the jury sympathized with Bradley, who was perceived as a woman in need of protection. However, it was not just the jury who pitied Bradley; she received an overwhelming amount of public support, as early as just a couple of days after the shooting, that continued throughout her trial.

Annie Cartwright Maddison was born January 7, 1872, in Kansas City, Missouri, and was the oldest of four girls and one boy. She went to school in Denver, Colorado, and moved in 1890 to Salt Lake City, Utah, where she lived most of her adult life. In 1893 and at age twenty-one, she married Clarence A. Bradley, whom she claimed to have stopped living with in 1898 but did not officially divorce until 1905. Clarence and Annie had two children, Matthew Maddison Bradley and Martha Claire Bradley. During

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this time, Annie was very active in her community, which eventually led to her meeting Senator Brown. She belonged to the Salt Lake City Women’s Club, the Utah Woman’s Press Club, the Poets’ Roundtable, and the First Unitarian Church in Salt Lake City. In addition, she worked as an editor of the Utah State Federation of Women’s Clubs’ publication, a secretary for the fifth ward Republican Committee, and as a secretary for the State Republican Committee. It was through community involvement that Bradley also came to know Isabel Cameron Brown.13 Arthur Brown was born on March 8, 1843, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He went on to earn a law degree, open his own practice, and become politically active. Brown married his first wife, Lydia Coon, in 1872, and two years later they had their first and only child, Alice. While married to Coon, Brown had an affair with Isabel Cameron, who would become his second wife.

When Coon found out about their affair, she confronted Brown in his law office and shot at him but missed. Following this brouhaha, Brown and Cameron moved to Salt Lake City and married each other after Brown finalized his divorce with Coon. In 1882, Isabel and Arthur had one son, Max. Brown continued his law career in Salt Lake and became one of the best lawyers in Utah. He was elected to the U.S. Senate and served a short term, from January 1896 to March 1897. When his term ended, Brown continued his law career in Salt Lake City.14 Bradley shot Brown on December 8, 1906, and by the morning of December 9, multiple newspapers had already caught wind of the previous night’s incident and published articles about it. Even though the shooting had occurred in Washington, D.C., stories appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Salt Lake Tribune, and the Salt Lake Herald-Republican. All of the articles told essentially the same tale: while Arthur Brown was married to Isabel Cameron Brown and Annie Bradley was married to Clarence Bradley, Arthur and Annie had carried on an affair that lasted for several years and resulted in two children. Bradley claimed that Brown frequently promised he would do right by her and marry her, even though they were both married. When Isabel died in 1905,

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Arthur Brown was a prominent lawyer and, from 1896 to 1897, a senator from Utah. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 26615.

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The public scandal referred to in the Herald-Republican began in 1902 when Arthur Brown filed for divorce from Isabel Cameron Brown. As soon as Isabel learned that her husband had begun these proceedings, she retaliated by filing adultery charges against him and Bradley. According to the Utah Penal Code, if convicted, the lovers could face up to three years in state prison. However, Isabel ultimately dropped these charges when Arthur agreed to drop the divorce proceedings. However, in January 1903, Isabel had the couple charged with adultery again and took it to court. Before their trials, in April 1903, Arthur and Bradley ran off to Idaho, and there a violent altercation occurred between Bradley and Isabel. The Browns left Idaho together; when Bradley returned to Salt Lake City in June 1903, she was three months pregnant, and the Browns had apparently reconciled. Meanwhile, Arthur also denied being the father of Bradley’s son, Arthur Brown Bradley. Bradley insisted that she would plead guilty to the adultery charges unless he publicly acknowledged their son. Arthur refused to do so, and Bradley pleaded guilty but was never sentenced. Subsequently, Brown pleaded not guilty and was acquitted in court.17

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In addition, multiple newspapers published articles about Brown’s past indiscretions with women. The New York Times recounted how Brown’s first wife, Lydia Coon, had attempted to shoot him but missed. The report stated that his first wife confronted him about his inappropriate relationship with the niece of Don Cameron, a former Pennsylvania senator, and shot him. Brown’s paramour, in this instance, was Isabel Cameron, who would become his second wife. While the Salt Lake Herald-Republican and the Washington Post both included the story of Brown’s first wife, they also told of the

rather public issues Brown had with his second wife, which resulted from his relationship with Bradley. Notably, the Salt Lake Herald-Republican explicitly stated, “the shooting of Arthur Brown by Mrs. Bradley is the not unexpected sequel to a series of events that have constituted a public scandal in Utah for several years.”16

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he told Bradley to divorce her husband so they could get married, and she did. However, for over a year, Brown would evade marrying her.

For this reason, Bradley traveled to Washington, D.C. in December 1906, where she intended to finally convince Brown to marry her. However, upon arriving at his hotel, Bradley found letters from a woman named Annie Adams that stated that Adams and Brown were engaged.

That evening, Bradley confronted Brown and shot him.15

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While Annie Bradley had not been formally charged when these articles appeared, the publicity made it nearly impossible for there to be an impartial jury when the time came. Even though Arthur Brown was the victim, these stories made it seem as though he deserved to be shot, which was not a difficult argument to make at this point. What the public knew was that Brown had fathered two of Bradley’s sons and refused to fulfill his manly obligations to provide for his children. In addition, Brown did not appear to be a moral man or a good husband due to his multiple instances of infidelity. On the other hand, newspapers portrayed Bradley as a young, pathetic, and lovestruck woman who was only trying to take care of her children. During a time when many believed

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As mentioned above, by 1915, nearly every state and territory had made it a crime for men to fail to provide for their wives and children.19 However, because Bradley was not Brown’s lawful wife, he did not have an obligation to her or their sons. Regardless of this, according to some accounts, public sympathy shifted to Bradley’s favor when the newspapers noted that Brown was financially able to provide for his sons but refused to do so.20

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that men should be the breadwinners because women were too irrational and emotional, the details of Brown’s behavior would have raised a few eyebrows.18

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Immediately following Brown’s death on December 14, 1906, the Salt Lake Herald featured a statement from Brown’s fiancé, the stage actress Annie Adams. She stated that she knew about the relationship between Brown and Bradley and even went on to claim, “When the senator first proposed marriage to me I plainly told him it was his duty to marry Mrs. Bradley.”21 Later that same month, the Salt Lake Tribune published a portion of Brown’s will in which he denied paternity of Bradley’s sons and said they would not receive any form of inheritance.

This article also claimed that Brown frequently changed his will, especially toward the end of his life when he would have also been involved with Bradley.22 Both articles brought Brown’s character into question and heightened public sympathy for Bradley.

Bradley was officially indicted for first-degree murder in February 1907. Following this, the story of Bradley and Brown became even more of a national spectacle. Newspapers began to publish letters that the couple had exchanged that expressed the intensity of their relationship. Most of the newspapers that printed the letters called those written by Bradley some variation of “womanly and pathetic.” However, the most crucial piece of evidence found in these letters was Brown’s acknowledgment that Bradley’s sons were his and that he had a duty to her.23 As one could imagine, these letters were a rather interesting development, considering that Brown’s will had been publicized just a few months earlier with the denial that he fathered the boys. The public sympathy for Bradley grew accordingly.

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An article from the Salt Lake Tribune not only addressed Brown’s acknowledgment of their sons and his duty to her but also described Bradley as a fragile woman who only wanted to support her children. The article stated: Her letters are womanly and pathetic.

They breathe of high ideals and tell of her efforts to return to the proper path, even to the extent of giving up Senator Brown if he would but support their children. They show that every such effort on her part was frustrated by him, even while declaring his love for her and representing that he was only waiting the opportunity to marry her and so right the wrong he had done her. He forced her to make herself a part of his life by writing daily and telephoning her even more frequently.24 The language of this article perfectly illustrates the growing sympathy for Bradley. Phrases like “her efforts to return to the proper path,” “her part was frustrated by him,” and “he forced her to make herself a part of his life” portray Brown as overbearing and manipulative during a time when Bradley was trying to restore some of what contemporaries would have called her womanly virtue.25 Meanwhile, it became official that Bradley would plead insanity. In early April 1907, newspapers reported that Bradley’s lawyers had submitted an affidavit stating that the defense would argue she was not responsible for her actions the night she shot Brown because she was not of a sound mind. They claimed the years of suffering she endured at the hands of Brown put her mind in “such a state of disease that she was unable to distinguish right from wrong.”

The affidavit listed the witnesses the defense wanted to summon, claiming that the witnesses’ testimonies would tell of the events that drove Bradley to shoot Brown, therefore providing material evidence. Some reports stated that because of her financial situation, Bradley’s lawyers requested that the witnesses be summoned at the expense of the government.26 Newspapers across the country frequently published articles leading up to Bradley’s trial, and

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Even just days before Bradley’s trial, the Buffalo Enquirer published an article that said, “The shooting of the eminent lawyer brought to light a story of a double life on the part of the man and a sad romance in the career of the young woman.”29 Again this article painted a picture of a lovesick woman who was overpowered and manipulated by a man. As her trial began, a Washington, D.C. newspaper reported that because of Bradley’s poor financial situation her lawyers did not expect to be paid and claimed that a sympathetic Michigan woman had sent twenty-five dollars to the courthouse, hoping it would be the first of many monetary donations that would go to Bradley if she were acquitted.30 From the time she announced her plea until just days before her trial, with a few exceptions, Annie Bradley kept to herself while in jail. Her story resurfaced in the newspapers in early November, as her trial date was set for the thirteenth of the month. Newspapers across the country printed a statement made

by Bradley in the days right before her trial.

In this, she claimed that she felt her actions were justified because she had given Arthur Brown everything, including her honor, and

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As the trial began in Washington, D.C., a major issue arose. Bradley was being tried for murder in the first degree, which D.C. law defined as the unlawful taking of another’s life by someone who is of sound memory and discretion, who did so purposefully and either of deliberate and premeditated malice or by means of poison. The statute further stated that the punishment for first-degree murder was to be death by hanging.33 So Bradley’s case was, in fact, a capital punishment case.

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The suggestion that Brown’s treatment of Bradley caused her mental problems was significant: at the end of the nineteenth century, the definitions of marital cruelty had just been expanded to include actions that caused emotional damage, even when no physical violence was present. This new definition came from the belief that because women were frail and emotional, attacking a woman verbally could inflict as much or even more damage than physical abuse. On top of redefining cruelty, this definition also became grounds for a woman to divorce her husband.32

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he still had mistreated her. In addition, one article specifically stated, “the defense will be emotional insanity brought on by suffering of the heart and brain.” Bradley’s statement, as recounted in the newspapers, claimed that the suffering she had endured at the hands of Brown did so much damage to her mind that she could not be held responsible for how she had acted.31

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nearly all of them were sympathetic to her. The New York Journal published a “life story of Annie Bradley,” written by a reporter named Ada Patterson, who claimed to know Bradley socially; the Salt Lake Tribune republished Patterson, who stated, “Her creed is composed of two words, ‘I believe.’ Such is the most confiding of women, the most trustful. Senator Brown told her he loved her. She believed. He promised that some day he would marry her and legitimatize the children she had borne him. Again, she believed.” Patterson’s depiction of Bradley as emotional and trusting fit the true woman mold exactly. Critically, Patterson described Bradley as “a woman of the old type from which the modern woman is swinging far away” and “not of the school of calm-faced, cold-eyed, serene-pulsed women . . . [declared as] the new women.”27 The “new women”—who included suffragists and feminists—were both gaining prominence during this period and facing a lot of opposition, especially from men who wanted to maintain an older style of womanhood. Patterson, in contrast, depicted Bradley as the kind of woman men wanted.28

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A capital case with a female defendant meant the jury selection process would be tricky, and the chances of Bradley’s conviction were extremely unlikely. As one study shows, from the colonial era through 2002, only 3 percent of the 20,000 Americans who were executed were women; since 1900, only 0.6 percent of the 8,000 people who were sentenced to death were women. In addition, a 1996 study conducted in Florida attributed the low number of women executed to the demonstration of “appropriate behavior,” which made women appear to be “devoted wives driven to violence and deserving of clemency.” Despite the ninety years separating Annie Bradley’s experience from the 1996 study, obvious parallels exist between them.34

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In the same way, Amanda Umble provides an example of a woman who eluded execution. In Missouri in 1891, Umble was convicted of murdering a woman who was carrying on with her boyfriend, and Umble was sentenced to death.

Because she was African American, this sentence outraged the black community. However, with all of the racial tensions present during this time, those fighting to save Umble knew their best chance came with her womanhood, because then they could gain support from white women’s organizations. With the focus on Umble’s gender rather than her race, newspapers began advocating for her and calling the execution of a woman, even if she was guilty, “barbarous and a blot upon civilization.” After such an uproar, the governor commuted Amanda Umble’s sentence to life in prison. In the cases of both Amanda Umble and Annie Bradley, even though they committed the crimes, they were not executed because they were women.35 Nevertheless, Bradley’s trial continued, and over sixty men were examined before the selection of the final men who would fill the jury box. While some were excused for other reasons, a majority of them were excused because they refused to hang a woman, guilty or not.

Regardless, eleven men finally joined the jury.

Even though the jurors claimed to have no objections to the death penalty for women, during this time it is likely that they at least slightly opposed it.36 A study of gender and capital punishment in this era argues that two possible reasons existed why men would not execute a woman. The first stemmed from the belief that women depended completely on men; that they were irrational, irresponsible, and childlike.

Because of this, women did not fit the criteria to be a criminal: independent, rational, and capable of taking responsibility for their actions.

The other possible reason came from assumptions that women possessed a particular kind of morality that made them “natural” mothers, which made killing them highly controversial, especially by a man. Race and class only added to the calculation: a woman’s status as white and “well-bred,” combined with an insanity plea, could be quite persuasive in helping her escape punishment.37 Once the jury was finally chosen, the prosecution began to present its case. A majority of

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their witnesses certainly proved that it was Bradley who shot Brown. However, they really could not present a strong case for her conviction and execution because the defense was not disputing that Bradley did it. At this point the jury could no longer read newspaper stories about the trial, but it is important to recognize that much of the coverage focused on Bradley’s appearance, often noting that she looked near collapse. The Washington Post even reported that when Bradley’s indictment was read, she put her head down and the jury appeared to take pity on her.38 After the prosecution rested its case, the defense team—which consisted of the prominent Salt Lake City attorney Orlando W. Powers and George Hoover, of Washington, D.C.—outlined their argument.39 The focus was to prove that Brown had not only manipulated Bradley but also that, in Hoover’s words, he “had performed more than one criminal act upon her with his own hands.”40 In other words, Brown had performed abortions on her. This bombshell statement indicated that the defense would focus on how Brown had treated Bradley and the emotional damage he had caused.

The defense began with the witnesses, who included newspapermen, doctors, and Bradley’s mother. The testimony of Mary Elizabeth Maddison, the defendant’s mother, was intended to evoke sympathy from the jury. A majority of her statement focused on a childhood injury Bradley had sustained, which she believed left permanent brain damage. In addition, she also testified that Bradley had said to her after the killing, “I came here to get him to give a name to my babies.” Maddison helped to paint a picture for the jury of Bradley as a loving mother who just wanted to get her boys what they deserved. A number of reporters who had spoken to Bradley immediately after the shooting took the stand, describing Bradley’s mental state that night.41 Lastly, doctors E. W. Whittney and H. L. E. Johnson testified. Whittney stated that he had treated Bradley more than once for premature miscarriages. He believed that because of these, Bradley suffered from blood poisoning that would affect her brain. Johnson also stated that the multiple miscarriages and abortions

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During her testimony, Bradley shed light on a number of things about Brown that did that could be seen as cruel, such as the abortions.

However, her displays of emotion seemed to play the most in her favor, as evidenced by the multiple newspaper reports of the jury and audience being brought to tears during her time on the stand.47 Surely Bradley’s and Brown’s relationship was full of ups and downs, but that would have mattered less in the trial’s outcome had Bradley not delivered her statements in the manner she did. Her emotional testimony allowed the jury to sympathize with Bradley and see her as fragile and completely dependent on Brown, who refused to provide any kind of

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Bradley’s sister, Louise Maddison Garnett, described Bradley’s financial struggles for the court. Garnett remarked that in order to support herself and her four children, Bradley decided to open her own stationery store in Goldfield, Nevada. However, since she was completely destitute, Bradley had to ask Brown to buy her first set of stock, which he agreed to do. As time went on, however, Brown appeared to go back on his agreement, telling Bradley to wait to open her store. To all this, Garnett stated during her testimony, “Mr. Brown did not show any willingness whatever to take care of her, or to better her condition, and she did not know what she was going to do.”49

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The next witness to take the stand only added to the picture painted by the defense of Brown’s bad behavior. Colonel Maurice M. Kaighn, a lawyer from Salt Lake City, testified that years earlier, Bradley had brought him a written acknowledgment by Brown that Bradley’s two sons were his.48 This provided actual proof that Brown knew and acknowledged Bradley’s sons as his offspring. However, despite the potential legal ramifications, Brown still refused to take care of them. It is also worth considering that based on Brown’s constant promises to Bradley of marriage—combined with the length, intensity, and publicity of their affair—a court could have possibly been convinced to consider Bradley as Brown’s wife, making him financially obligated to her. These options, however, only made sense if Bradley was truly as desperate as she and her sister were to claim.

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While on the stand, Bradley described her relationship with Brown at length. She claimed that she and Brown became acquainted in 1892 through the work they did for the Republican Party. After maintaining a friendship for several years, their relationship became intimate in 1899. In her testimony Bradley claimed, “He said, ‘darling, we are going through life together, you and I. I want us to go through life together with a son of our own.’ I did not want to, but I yielded to him at last.”46 (Accordingly, it is evident that Brown most likely fathered the son who Bradley gave birth to in 1900.) She went on to recount how the affair continued for a number of years and became increasingly serious, with Brown frequently promising that they would get married.

support. Bradley was certainly a victim of cruelty, and the pathos she exhibited showed the toll their relationship had exacted on her, even as it reminded the jury that she was weak and feminine.

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Bradley experienced could have affected her mental state on the night she shot Brown.42 These testimonies by the physicians aligned with the nineteenth-century belief that a woman’s uterus could make her hysterical and incapable of reasoning.43 In her own testimony, Bradley also addressed these abortions. She stated that Brown had performed at least three abortions on her himself; she had felt it was wrong, but she also did not feel that she could tell Brown no.44 Speaking before an all-male jury, Bradley described a course of action that fit with the expectation that women should submit to a man’s wishes. However, under the new definition of marital cruelty, a husband could only make reasonable demands and because the procedure performed by Brown on Bradley could impair her health, it would not have been considered reasonable.45

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Finally, Soren Christensen, a lawyer from Utah, provided a testimony that showed the messiness of Arthur Brown’s personal life and offered more evidence that Brown had fathered Bradley’s boys. Christensen told of a violent altercation between Bradley and Isabel Brown at a hotel in Pocatello, Idaho, in 1903, when they were both looking for Arthur. He stated that Isabel became violent with Bradley and said she intended to kill her. Meanwhile, Arthur remained in his hotel room until Bradley

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called for him to open the door. Isabel, Bradley, and Christensen entered the room, and they discussed the affair for over six hours. According to Christensen, Arthur claimed he was the father of Bradley’s son but not of Isabel’s son, Max. It was this dispute that led Arthur to give Bradley a revolver for her protection: the same one she used to shoot him.50

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Bradley’s team had thus built a case for Brown’s cruelty toward her and his financial disregard for his children. The other key element of their defense was Bradley’s mental distress. An argument can be made that, based on the knowledge of mental illness at this time, the jury did believe Bradley was insane. This is because men believed a woman’s menstrual cycle affected her brain and made her “suffer under a languor and depression which disqualify [her] for thought or action and render it extremely doubtful how far [she] can be considered responsible beings while the crisis lasts.”51 In addition, the defense had provided expert witnesses, the physicians, who testified that Bradley was insane. Dr. Wilfred M. Barton of Georgetown University, for instance, claimed that the multiple abortions performed on her were “continued assaults upon her nervous system,” which caused her to suffer from “puerperal” (or postpartum) insanity. Bradley’s attorneys also provided proof that mental illness ran in Bradley’s family through a testimony by her uncle that her aunt developed homicidal mania. As their final evidence of Bradley’s unsound mind, the defense pointed to scraps of paper found in Bradley’s room that she had written that night right before the shooting. The letters, Powers argued, supposedly proved that she had actually intended to take her own life (an indication of her disturbed state) and belonged to a clutch of evidence suggesting that Brown was shot accidentally in his struggle to stop Bradley from shooting herself.52 However, even any belief that Bradley was insane would have resulted, in part, from the contemporary beliefs about women’s mental capacity and reproductive system.

Throughout the trial the defense presented evidence that proved Brown had an obligation to Bradley to provide financial support for at least their sons, if not her as well. They also showed that Bradley could be considered a victim of cruelty because of Brown’s overbearing control

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of her. The claim that Bradley was not of a sound mind when she shot the senator allowed for evidence of how Brown treated her to be relevant to the trial. In addition, it allowed her emotions to be taken into consideration, which had a significant impact on the jury.53 The jurors might have taken Bradley’s emotional state throughout the trial as an example of a general inability on her part to control her emotions and think reasonably—and if that were the case, she could hardly be held responsible for her actions, much less executed for them. Meanwhile, Bradley’s team played models of womanhood to the hilt. “This woman cannot be convicted,” Powers orated, “until every man of the jury is convinced that this gentle, timid, shrinking mother of children is a malicious murderess, and that she should be hustled to the gallows and strangled until she is dead.”54 With all things considered, on December 3, 1907, the jury acquitted Bradley. The newspapers reported on the excitement that filled the courtroom as soon as the jury read its verdict, with men and women cheering and congratulating Bradley.55 Among these articles was an interview with the jury foreman, James Feeney, which neatly summarized how Bradley’s lawyers and much of the media had depicted her throughout the trial. Feeney insisted that the jurors “were men of deep sympathies” who could appreciate the “trials and suffering that Mrs. Bradley went through.” Although the jury could not condone Bradley’s affair with Brown, Feeney remarked, “she was a woman, dominated and controlled by a stronger mind than her own. . . . The people of Utah had trusted Senator Brown with the highest office in their gift, and why should she not, a weak, frail woman, trust him with her love and affection and thoroughly rely on the many promises he gave her”?

Feeney’s explanation of the jury’s verdict only continued to play on nineteenth-century ideals of strong men and homebound women: Up to the time that she met Arthur Brown she was a respectable married woman, the mother of two children.

Her home life was not happy, and I do not know as she could be blamed a great deal for entering into club life and taking an active part in politics, a privilege allowed her sex in Utah. . . .

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The trial and acquittal of Annie Bradley relied on the constructs of masculinity and femininity associated with the nineteenth-century cult of domesticity—particularly the prescription that women should be submissive and men should be strong, responsible providers. The jurors viewed Bradley as a feminine, emotional woman who had been betrayed, manipulated, and neglected by the former senator from Utah, Arthur Brown: a failure as a man, who, as her longtime lover and the father of two of her children, had certain husbandly obligations that he did not meet. To compound matters, the defense presented evidence that illustrated that for Brown, this was a pattern of behavior, as he acted in a similar manner with his two wives.

Ultimately, the gender attitudes of the early Progressive Era had a major part in Bradley’s

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acquittal; the all-male jury exonerated Bradley because she exemplified true womanhood, not because they believed she was insane. This was not uncommon during this time because men not only struggled to see woman as being capable of such heinous acts but also because in many cases, if a woman were found guilty of committing murder, she would be sentenced to death and men generally could not bring themselves to kill a woman.

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The verdict rendered by the jury, we hope, will be a lesson, not only to young married women, but also to married men, who by promises of love and devotion entice from their homes and children another man’s wife, and then cast her aside with no regard for another man’s wife, home, and the sanctity of the social life of the fireside.” 56

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A headline and illustration that typify how many newspapers depicted Annie Bradley: as frail, respectable, and lovely. Washington (D.C.) Times, December 3, 1907, 1.

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Notes 1. I am very grateful to the professors of the History Department at Valdosta State University for their constant support and encouragement. In particular, I would like to thank Dr. Mary Block, who was instrumental in my research for this work. Linda Thatcher, “The ‘Gentile Polygamist’: Arthur Brown, Ex-Senator from Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 52, no. 3 (1984): 231–45, provides an excellent and detailed account of the events leading up to, during, and immediately following the trial of Annie Bradley for the murder of Arthur Brown. I take the story a step further and analyze how the contemporary attitudes and ideas surrounding gender affected this trial.

2. “Ex-Senator Brown Shot by a Woman at Capital,” New York Times, December 9, 1906, 1; Kim Long, The Almanac of Political Corruption, Scandals and Dirty Politics (New York: Bantam Dell, 2007), 132; Shelley Ross, Fall from Grace: Sex, Scandal, and Corruption in American Politics from 1702 to the Present (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), 143–46; “Mrs. Bradley Free,” Washington Post, December 4, 1907.

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3. Thatcher, “The ‘Gentile Polygamist,’” 238. Excerpt from the testimony of Mrs. M. D. Maddison quoted in “Only a Name for Her Boys,” Evening Star (Independence, KS), November 19, 1907. A few of the many newspaper articles that describe Annie Bradley as frail, weak, or emotional include “Quails at Charge,” Washington Post, November 15, 1907; “They Relate Story of Annie Bradley,” Anaconda (MT) Standard, November 19, 1907; William Hoster, “Strong Hearts Wrung by Simple Recital of a Woman’s Wrongs,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, November 20, 1907.

4. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820– 1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1966): 151–74.

5. Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” 151–52; Lucinda MacKethan, “The Cult of Domesticity,” America in Class, accessed November 3, 2020, americainclass .org/the-cult-of-domesticity; Thomas Winter, “Cult of Domesticity,” in American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Bret E. Carroll (United Kingdom: SAGE Publications, 2003), 120.

6. Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” 152–58.

7. Winter, “Cult of Domesticity,” 120.

8. George Burnap, Lectures On the Sphere and Duties of Woman, and Other Subjects (Baltimore: John Murphy, 1841), 47.

9. Winter, “Cult of Domesticity,” 120.

10. Michael Willrich, “Home Slackers: Men, the State, and Welfare in Modern America,” Journal of American History 87, no. 2 (2000): 460.

11. J. McGrigor Allan, “On the Real Differences in the Minds of Men and Women,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of London 7 (1869): cxcv–ccxix; Francis Parkman, “The Woman Question,” North American Review 129, no. 275 (1879): 303–321; M. A. Hardaker, “The Ethics of Sex,” North American Review 131, no.

284 (1880): 62–74; Kimberley A. Reilly, “Wronged in Her Dearest Rights: Plaintiff Wives and the Transformation of Marital Consortium, 1870–1920,” Law and History Review 31, no. 1 (2013): 61–99; Marion Harland, Burton Harrison, Elizabeth Bisland, and Constance Cary Harrison, “A Study in Husbands,” North American Review 162, no. 470 (1896): 118; Willrich, “Home Slackers,” 460–67; Franklin G. Fessenden, “Nullity of Marriage,” Harvard Law Review 13 (1899): 110–111; Kate Gannett, “Why More Men Do Not Marry,” North American Review 165, no. 488 (1897): 123–24; Max O’Rell and Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen, “A Study in Wives,” North American Review 161, no. 467 (1895): 427–37; Eyal Rabinovitch, “Gender and the Public Sphere: Alternative Forms of Integration in Nineteenth-Century America,” Sociological Theory 9, no. 3 (2001): 353–54.

12. Deborah L. Rotman, “Separate Spheres?: Beyond the Dichotomies of Domesticity,” Current Anthropology 47, no. 4 (2006): 666–74; Catherine Cocks, “Rethinking Sexuality in the Progressive Era,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5, no. 2 (2006): 93–118.

13. 1880 United States Federal Census, Kansas City, Jackson, Missouri, roll 639, enumeration district 12, page 346B, digital image, Annie Maddison; 1900 United States Federal Census, Salt Lake City Ward 2, Salt Lake, Utah, enumeration district 23, digital image, Annie M. Bradley, both accessed November 3, 2020, ancestry. com. The 1900 census shows that four workingmen boarded in the Bradley household and that Clarence Bradley was a railroad clerk. For full background on Annie Bradley, see Thatcher, “The ‘Gentile Polyga-

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mist,’” 233–34; “First Wife Shot at Brown,” New York Times, December 9, 1906, 2.

14. 1860 United States Federal Census, Yellow Springs, Greene, Ohio, page 244, digital image, Arthur Brown; Michigan, Marriage Records, 1867–1952, January 25, 1872, s.v. “Arthur Brown”; Michigan, Births and Christenings Index, 1867–1911, February 22, 1874, s.v. “Alice Brown”; Nebraska, U.S., Select County Marriage Records, 1855–1908, February 2, 1881, s.v. “Arthur Brown”; 1900 United States Federal Census, Salt Lake City Ward 4, Salt Lake, Utah, enumeration district 39, page 8, digital image, Arthur Brown, all accessed November 4, 2020, ancestry.com; see also, Thatcher, “The ‘Gentile Polygamist,’” 232–33.

15. “Ex-Senator Brown Shot by a Woman at Capital,” and “First Wife,” New York Times, December 9, 1906, 1, 2; “Former U.S. Senator Brown Fatally Shot,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 9, 1906, 1–2; “Shot by a Woman,” and “Brown False to All,” Washington Post, December 9, 1906, 1, 12; “Mrs. Annie M. Bradley Shoots Arthur Brown,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, December 9, 1906, 1, 10; Utah, Death and Military Death Certificates, 1904–1961, s.v. “Isabel Cameron Brown,” death certificate, August 22, 1905, accessed November 4, 2020, ancestry.com. Annie Adams Kiskadden was an actress and the mother of the celebrated Maude Adams.

16. “Mrs. Annie M. Bradley Shoots,” 10 (qtn.); see also, “First Wife,” 2; “Former U.S.,” 2; “Brown False,” 12.

17. Thatcher, “The ‘Gentile Polygamist,’” 235–37; “Utah Ex-Senator Sues for Divorce,” New York Times, September 29, 1902, 1; State ex rel. Brown v. Third Judicial Dist. Court, 27 Utah 336, Utah Supreme Court (February 25, 1904), United States Nexis Uni 1545; James T. Hammond and Grant H. Smith, The Compiled Laws of the State of Utah, 1907 (Salt Lake City: Skeleton Publishing, 1908), 1343–44.

18. “New Light Upon Brown Tragedy,” Salt Lake Herald, December 14, 1906, 1; “Arthur Brown Denies Mrs. Bradley’s Children,” Salt Lake Tribune, December 22, 1906, 1; “Frenzied by Mysterious Power Brown’s Spell Held Annie Bradley Fast,” Daily Oklahoman (Oklahoma City, OK), November 15, 1907, 13, 23; “Only a Name for Her Boys,” Evening Star (Independence, KS), November 19, 1907, 1; “Was Irresponsible,” News (Frederick, MA), November 19, 1907, 1; Willrich, “Home Slackers.”

19. Willrich, “Home Slackers,” 472.

20. Twila Van Leer, “Revelations of Sordid Private Life Swung Sympathy against Senator,” Deseret News, April 9, 1996; “New Light,” 1; “Arthur Brown Denies,” 1.

21. “New Light,” 1.

22. “Arthur Brown Denies,” 1.

23. Associated Press, “Woman Indicted for Murder,” News Journal (Wilmington, DE), February 15, 1907, 5; “Brown’s Loving Notes,” Washington Post, April 2, 1907, 2.

24. “Fervid Letters of Bradley and Brown,” Salt Lake Tribune, April 3, 1907, 3 25. “Fervid Letters,” 3.

26. “Was Not Responsible,” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), April 3, 1907, 3; “Mrs. Bradley’s Defense,” Valentine (NE) Democrat, April 11, 1907, 2.

27. “Life Story of Annie Bradley Is Told,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 3, 1907, 10.

28. “Life Story,” 2; Debra Maccomb, “Inscribing Masculine Domestic Space: Twain’s Cave Men,” Mark Twain Annual no. 10 (2012): 35–37.

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43. Allan, “On the Real Differences,” cxcvi, claims that a woman’s menstrual cycle makes her “unfit for any great mental or physical labour.” Parkman, “The Woman Question,” 303–321, and Hardaker, “The Ethics of Sex,” 62–74, provide specific examples of what men believed made them superior pertaining to politics.

44. “Mrs. Bradley Tells Tragic Life-Story,” Harrisburg (PA) Telegraph, November 19, 1907, 7.

45. Griswold, “Law, Sex, Cruelty, Divorce,” 229–35.

46. William Hoster, “Strong Hearts Wrung by Simple Recital of a Woman’s Wrongs,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, November 20, 1907, 1–2.

47. “Jury Weeps at Tale,” Indiana (PA) Gazette, November 20, 1907, 23; Hoster, “Strong Hearts,” 1–2; “Annie Bradley Sobs Her Story,” Washington Post, November 20, 1907, 20.

48. “Brown Admitted Children Were His,” Post-Crescent (Appleton, WI), November 22, 1907, 2; “Love Letters to Mrs. Bradley Impress Jury,” San Francisco Call, November 22, 1907, 1.

49. Louise Maddison Garnett quoted in Thatcher, “The ‘Gentile Polygamist,’” 238–39.

50. “Turned Witness for the Defense,” Salt Lake Herald, November 28, 1907, 2; Thatcher, “The ‘Gentile Polygamist,’” 236.

51. Allan, “On the Real Differences,” cxcviii.

52. “Bradley Trial,” Bismarck (ND) Tribune, November 24, 1907, 9 (qtn.). Barton testified that Bradley’s interest in politics also marked her as an abnormal woman. “They Relate Story of Annie Bradley,” 1–2; “Eleven in Jury Box,” 2; “May Know Fate Soon,” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), December 2, 1907, 2.

53. “Was Irresponsible,” News (Frederick, MA), November 19, 1907, 1. “Jury Weeps at Tale,” 23, provides an account of how emotionally invested the jury was in the trial.

54. “May Know Fate Soon,” 2.

55. “Mrs. Annie M. Bradley Not Guilty for Shooting down Arthur Brown, Loudly Shouts the Jury in Chorus,” Washington (D.C.) Times, December 3, 1907; “The Jury Acquits,” Semi-Weekly Messenger (Wilmington, NC), December 6, 1907; “Lone Juror Yields, Mrs. Bradley Freed,” New York Times, December 4, 1907, 3.

56. “How Jury Deliberated to Free Mrs. Bradley from Murder Charge,” Washington (D.C.) Times, December 3, 1907, 2.

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29. “Nothing to Do But Kill the Senator,” Buffalo (NY) Enquirer, November 4, 1907, 1.

30. “For the Defendant,” Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), November 23, 1907, 2.

31. “Nothing to Do,” 1 (qtn.); “Claims Justification,” Boston Globe, November 8, 1907, 7.

32. Robert L. Griswold, “Harrisburg Telegraph in Victorian America, 1840–1900,” American Quarterly 38, no.

5 (1986): 721–45.

33. “An Act to Establish a Code of Law for the District of Columbia,” Pub. L. No. 854, 31 Stat. 1321, § 798 (March 3, 1901).

34. Theodore H. Tiller, “Trial of Mrs. Bradley Today,” Raleigh (NC) Times, November 14, 1907, 1; “Insanity Will Be Plea of Defense,” Chronicle-Telegram (Elyria, OH), November 14, 1907, 6; Victor L. Streib, “Gendering the Death Penalty: Countering Sex Bias in a Masculine Sanctuary,” Ohio State Law Journal 63, no.

433 (2002): 1, 6; Vivien Miller, “Wife-Killers and Evil Temptresses: Gender, Pardons and Respectability in Florida, 1889–1914,” Florida Historical Quarterly 75, no. 1 (1996): 53.

35. Sowande’ Mustakeem, “‘Armed with a Knife in Her Bosom’: Gender, Violence, and the Carceral Consequences of Rage in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Journal of African American History 100, no. 3 (2015): 398–401.

36. “Her Life at Stake,” and “Eleven in Jury Box,” Washington Post, November 14, 1907, 1, 2.

37. Annulla Linders and Alana Van Gundy, “Gall, Gallantry, and the Gallows: Capital Punishment and the Social Construction of Gender, 1840–1920,” Gender and Society 22, no. 3 (2008): 335.

38. “Quails at Charge,” Washington Post, November 15, 1907, 1–2; “Tell of Killing of Brown,” Herald-Press (Saint Joseph, MI), November 15, 1907, 2.

39. Thatcher, “The ‘Gentile Polygamist,’” 243.

40. “Frenzied,” 13, 23.

41. “Only a Name for Her Boys,” Evening Star (Independence, KS), November 19, 1907, 1; “Was Irresponsible,” News (Frederick, MA), November 19, 1907, 1. For the names of Bradley’s parents, see Utah, U.S., Death and Military Death Certificates, 1904–1961, s.v. “Anne M. Bradley,” death certificate, November 11, 1950, digital image, accessed November 11, 2020, ancestry.com.

42. “They Relate Story of Annie Bradley,” 1–2.

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Tamson Egan, circa 1865. Courtesy of the author.

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Violence and extralegal justice were widespread in nineteenth-century America. White caps, regulators, vigilantes, Ku Klux Klansmen, lynch mobs, and various other extralegal groups carried out their own distinctive brands of justice generally through violent means all around the country.1 Though these groups were not unknown in older parts of the country, most extralegal groups appeared in frontier areas of America where legal justice systems were often ineffective. The West was especially affected by these movements.2

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Mountain Common Law, Redux: The Extralegal Punishment of Seducers in Early Utah

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Utah was an enigma in the nineteenth-century American West. It was settled largely by a closely knit religious group that frowned on lawlessness (at least as the group viewed it) and placed a high premium on living together peacefully. The territory thus differed markedly from most of the Old West. As late as 1868 George Q. Cannon, a Latter-day Saint apostle and editor of the Mormon newspaper, the Deseret News, proudly reported that Utahns had not yet had to resort to vigilante justice.3 Cannon’s assertion that vigilantes never operated in Utah seems to be largely accurate in the sense that organized vigilance committees were not formed; there were, however, some lynchings in Utah during the last half of the nineteenth century and some other instances of extralegal activity, so-called “justice.”4 Utah’s Latter-day Saint majority, led by some of the church’s highest-ranking leaders, condoned and encouraged extralegal measures in at least one area: the punishment of “seducers.” Nearly forty years ago, I examined the social and legal views of early Utahns who appear to have approved the “unwritten law” surrounding punishment of seducers and the reasons for this societal approval of this specific form of activity outside the bounds of written and common law. I also compared Utah’s experience in this activity with the American experience generally.5

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In late 1851, three territorial officials appointed

by President Millard Fillmore, “ran away” from Utah, claiming that they had been treated badly by the Mormons and that they feared for their lives. When they reached Washington, D.C., Chief Judge Lemuel H. Brandebury, Associate Judge Perry Brocchus, and Territorial Secretary Broughton D. Harris issued an inflammatory report about the residents of Utah Territory.6 Among other allegations, the runaway officials asserted that two murders committed in the territory added to their fear for their safety. In both cases, the husband of a woman involved in an extramarital affair killed his wife’s adulterous partner.7

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In February 1851, Madison D. Hambleton killed Dr. John M. Vaughn in Manti. Vaughn had been having an adulterous affair with Hambleton’s wife while Hambleton “had been up north to work.”8 Most Utahns who wrote about the matter described the relationship as Vaughn’s “seduction” of Mrs. Hambleton. Vaughn was a physician from Vermont who, while traveling through Utah had stopped, first in Great Salt Lake City and then in Manti, to practice medicine. According to Jedediah M. Grant, Vaughn was eventually baptized a member of the LDS church. He was soon found “abusing the facilities his medical character afforded him,” however, “and at length was detected in open delict with” Mrs. Hambleton.9 Hambleton’s friends initially restrained him from physically punishing Vaughn, but Hambleton gave the doctor a “solemn warning” and Vaughn “promised reformation.” Vaughn’s “evil habits were too strong for him,” however, and, shortly after learning that Vaughn and his wife were continuing their intimate relationship, Hambleton “blew [Vaughn’s] brains out” on a Sunday after they attended church meetings.10 A local diarist added the detail that Madison Hambleton “said that the children was all that saved his wife,” that is, that Hambleton might have killed her, too, “but for their children’s sake.”11 Hambleton immediately surrendered himself to his bishop and was escorted to Great Salt Lake City where a court of inquiry was convened to investigate his act. Brigham Young, the president of the LDS church and recently seated governor of Utah, “spoke on the part of Hambleton.”12 Mormon frontiersman Hosea Stout acted as

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attorney for the prosecution. The supreme court of the territory considered the case and did not pursue charges against Hambleton after what amounted to a preliminary hearing.

Prosecutor Stout acknowledged that Hambleton’s action was justified. He recorded in his journal that Vaughn’s “seduction & illicit conversation with Mrs. Hambleton was sufficiently proven. I was well satisfied of [Hambleton’s] justification as well as all who were present and plead to the case to that effect. He was acquitted by the Court also by the Voice of the people present.”13 The allegation that Vaughn had “seduced” Mrs. Hambleton highlights the problematic nature of “seduction” as a legal concept in the mid-nineteenth century. There is no indication that Mrs. Hambleton’s participation in the intimate relationship with Vaughn was anything but consensual. Seduction was important in nineteenth-century jurisprudence largely because of then-current notions held by many of the dominance of men over women. Seduction has become almost entirely archaic as a legal concept in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Late 1851 saw Utah’s second case of an outraged husband killing his wife’s “seducer.” Howard Egan’s killing of James Madison Monroe and the murder trial that followed were more publicized at the time, have been discussed much more widely since, and are more memorable than the Hambleton case. Portions of the record of the trial of Howard Egan for the murder of James Madison Monroe are preserved, and the Egan case became the precedent followed in subsequent cases in Utah Territory.

Howard Egan was a colorful Mormon convert who came west with the larger body of Latter-day Saints in 1847.14 He had previously served as a bodyguard for both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and was sometimes numbered among the “Be’hoys,” who included Porter Rockwell, Ephraim Hanks, and other rugged Mormon men.15 In 1849, he guided a group of would-be gold miners to California.

When he returned to the Salt Lake Valley in the fall of 1851, he learned that Tamson, the first of his four wives and “in body a woman of the rarest beauty,” had been “seduced” by James Madison Monroe and had given birth to a child by him.16

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James Monroe had been a member of the LDS church for some time. He worked as a schoolteacher in Nauvoo, Illinois, where his pupils included children of Joseph and Emma Smith and Brigham and Mary Ann Young.17 Jedediah Grant described him as a friend of William Smith, “the wayward brother of Joseph.”18 Monroe became good friends with both Howard and Tamson Egan. There is no evidence that Tamson’s consent to the relationship was obtained through coercion or fraud; in fact, according to Monroe, Tamson initiated the intimate relationship in Nauvoo, which later resumed in Utah, after Monroe served a mission for the church in the East.19 In December 1850, Monroe left Great Salt Lake City for the East to purchase and transport goods to be sold in Great Salt Lake City for his uncles, Colonel John Reese and Enoch Reese, prominent Latter-day Saint merchants.20 Monroe was accompanying the goods and traveling with a Mormon wagon train bound for Utah when he learned from William Horner, the captain of the train, that Tamson had borne a son in June 1851 and that he was the father.21 Monroe was also told that Howard Egan “had been advised to shoot me, and that if I come into the valley I will never leave it alive.” Monroe did not say

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Howard Egan. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 39222001347108.

who had advised Egan, whom he considered an “intimate friend, . . . which makes me blame myself still more” for having had an intimate relationship with Tamson, but the suggestion appears that someone told Monroe that it was Young who advised Egan to exact revenge on him. Monroe explained in his letter to Young that he would not enter Salt Lake Valley if he knew that Egan was going to kill him.22 Horner testified at Howard Egan’s trial that he knew that Egan would seek to kill Monroe, that he told Monroe this, and that he had cautioned Monroe, “for God’s sake to leave the train, for he did not wish to see him killed in the train.”23 The suggestion that Horner told Monroe to leave the wagon train to avoid being killed by Egan is inconsistent with Monroe’s vow not to enter the valley if he thought Egan would kill him. Indeed, Horner may have embellished his account to distance himself from Monroe’s death. Monroe was concerned that Egan would kill him once he arrived in the city, but he apparently did not consider the possibility that Egan would pursue him on the Mormon Trail.

In fact, Egan had already left Great Salt Lake City and was bearing down on the wagon train in which Monroe was traveling, with the intent to kill him.24 Egan soon reached the train.

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By Jedediah Grant’s account, on September 19, 1851, Egan, came upon the party in the night time. . . . He found his way, by himself, to the wagon in which his betrayer was, and rising upon the tongue ward looked in upon him as he lay sleeping.

He was minded then to have his life; but there was light enough to show his human face; and something in the expression of it which persuaded Egan that the sinner’s dreams might be indulging him in pleasant guilt, withheld his hand.

Instead, Egan tied up his horse and slept on his bear skin nearby until morning. He appeared early in the camp, and tapping Monroe on the shoulder; James, he said aloud, you must die! then beckoning him apart sat down with him a few rods off to one side.

Thirty minutes he assigned him to

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live, during which he exhorted him to contrition and preparation for his change. At the twenty-fifth minute, he showed by his watch that but five minutes remained of the time in which, if the criminal were so minded, he could assail his executioner. At the expiration of the thirtieth, as he did not move, Egan rose and despatched him, putting a bullet through his brain.

Then, sorrowing, returned home.25

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The grand jury’s indictment for murder added, in tortured legalistic language, the grisly details that Egan had held his loaded pistol against Monroe’s face, then “discharged and shot off” the pistol, resulting in a “mortal wound . . . in & upon the right side of the nose a little under” Monroe’s eye. The wound was one inch wide and seven inches long, and “Monroe did then and there die.”26 William Woodward, a fourteen-year-old boy in the wagon train, saw all this happen. He told how he witnessed “a stranger” ride in and “converse with Mr. Monroe.” Woodward heard a gunshot, then, when he next saw the stranger, the man said “‘gentlemen I have killed the seducer of my wife.’ He put his hand to his breast and said ‘vengeance is sweet to me.’”27 A number of accounts of the meeting between the two men and the killing, including one recited by George A. Smith at Egan’s eventual murder trial, are in basic agreement.28 Egan arrived back in Great Salt Lake City on September 21, the day after the killing, and news quickly spread that he had killed James Monroe. A church investigation was convened against Egan but the avenged elder was quickly exonerated in the church proceedings.29 U.S. Marshal Joseph L. Heywood convened a grand jury on the instruction of Judge Zerubbabel Snow, a Mormon who was the last federally appointed judge in Utah Territory. The grand jury quickly indicted Egan for killing and murdering Monroe “feloniously willfully & of his malice affore thought & against the Laws, peace & dignity of the United States.”30 On October 13, 1851, Judge Snow issued a warrant for Howard Egan’s arrest “on a charge of murder of one James Monroe,” and Marshal Joseph Heywood returned with Egan in tow.31 Egan was cooperative and was arraigned in First District Court

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in Salt Lake City on October 14, 1851, and pled not guilty.32 Snow then instructed Heywood to summon “forthwith” thirty-six jurors.33 The trial began three days later, on October 17, 1851.34 Egan’s defense was handled by W. W. Phelps, a prominent Latter-day Saint, and George A. Smith, an apostle.35 Defense counsel filed a petition for a subpoena to require Tamson Egan to respond to certain questions because “Prisoner cannot go safely to trial without the testimony of his wife Tamson Egan, and being unable on account of Indisposition to attend court and wishing her testimony to be taken in the case.”36 Tamson Egan was likely traumatized by her husband killing her lover just three weeks before and was not willing to testify in court. Judge Snow granted the petition, drafted questions, which he assigned William Snow, Esq. to ask her under oath: 1st Was you seduced in the year A.D. 1850 by one James Monroe? if so under what circumstances, how often, where, in what month, and day of the month, if not positive, as near as possible.

2nd Did you, by reason of such seduction, have a child by the said James Monroe, if so, how long after such seduction.37 The order required William Snow to “take the whole testimony and reduce it to writing, just as she relates it, seal the same up, and present the same to the Court, . . . with your name certified thereto, by tomorrow morning @ 10 o’clock.” William Snow completed the “deposition” the same day and filed the answers, although Tamson Egan’s answers are not in the court file, perhaps because Judge Snow had ordered that they be filed under seal.38 The prosecutor in the case was U.S. District Attorney Seth M. Blair, still another prominent Mormon.39 The jury was chosen, and the foreman appointed by the court or elected by the jury was none other than Daniel H. Wells, who would become a counselor in the First Presidency of the LDS church for over twenty years.40 Blair’s prosecution “was very spirited,” and he called William Horner, George C. Robbins, James Wade, and George M. Moore to

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George A. Smith then stole the show and swayed the jury.47 Smith admitted he was a “new member of the bar” who was arguing his first case. He stated he would not refer the

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Smith was outraged that seduction in England gave rise only to a civil suit for damages. He argued that “in this territory it is a principle of mountain common law, that no man can

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The defense appears to have called but one live witness, William Kimball, a close friend of Egan, but it was not the facts of the killing with which the defense concerned itself.43 It was the “seduction” of Tamson Egan by James Madison Monroe that mattered to the defense and that the defense believed fully justified Egan’s actions. The minutes of the trial do not mention whether Tamson’s answers to the court-ordered questions were introduced into evidence at the trial, but the answers were delivered to the court the day before the first day of trial, and it is hard to believe that her answers were not introduced.44 After the evidentiary portion of the trial concluded, Blair made his closing argument to the jury. Unfortunately, only piecemeal references to his arguments survive.

He acknowledged that Monroe had fathered an illegitimate child with Tamson Egan, and, according to Smith, also admitted that Monroe had seduced Tamson, but that this did not excuse Egan’s premeditated killing.45 Blair likely also made a potentially important jurisdictional argument that the homicide had taken place outside Utah Territory, in unorganized territory, where the federal government (and the district court hearing the murder trial) had sole jurisdiction. If this was the case, common law applied and George A. Smith’s “mountain common law” would have had no technical legal effect. The defense then made its arguments. W. W. Phelps went first, using the Bible, the classics, and “a large pile of law books & precidents to show that Egan was justified in his act.” Phelps’s argument went through the end of the first day so the trial was continued to October 18, 1851, a Saturday.46

jury “to authorities on legal points” but would “simply talk the common mountain English, without reference to anything technical.” He expressed a view commonly held in early Utah by stating that he could tell the jury was interested in “looking for justice instead of some dark, sly, or technical course” by which the jury might be prejudiced. His arguments constitute an extremely important piece of oratory because they display some of the sentiments of Mormon Utah society (and the views of LDS church leaders) at the time. Smith conceded that the English common law had been enacted to some extent in Utah by the Territorial Organic Act. Nonetheless, he asserted that “if a law is to be in force upon us, it must be plain and simple to the understanding, and applicable to our situation.”48

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establish the circumstances of the killing.41 The only witness about whose testimony we know much is Horner because George A. Smith recounted his testimony in his closing argument.

According to Smith, Horner testified to the facts surrounding Egan’s killing of Monroe and also testified that he had warned Monroe to leave the wagon train to avoid Egan, a piece of testimony that is questionable, given Monroe’s letter to Brigham Young.42

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George A. Smith. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 13567.

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seduce the wife of another without endangering his own life.” Rephrasing what he had just said, he continued: “The principle, the only one, that beats and throbs through the heart of the entire inhabitants of this territory, is simply this: The man who seduces his neighbor’s wife must die, and her nearest relative must kill him!”49 Smith then included a metaphor used for decades after: if a wolf, dog, or hyena invades your flock of sheep, you kill the offending predator. If a man invades your home and preys on your wife or daughter, you do the same thing. The apostle-defense lawyer then attempted to show that such a principle had numerous adherents in other parts of the country by referring to several obscure American cases in which killers of seducers had been acquitted. He reiterated his position on “mountain common law” several times and concluded by stating, for the same procedural reasons that Blair had argued that the killing had been committed in unorganized territory, that Egan had killed Monroe within the confines of Utah Territory, where Utah society should have a say in what was punished.50 Following the lawyers’ closing arguments, Judge Snow addressed the jury. He reviewed the law pertaining to murder, rejecting Smith’s argument that killing a seducer was mountain justice that could be formally countenanced: “Though the deceased may have seduced the defendant’s wife, as he now alleges, still he had no right to take the remedy into his own hands.” It mattered not at all that Egan believed “he killed Monroe in the name of the Lord.” If he had hunted down Monroe and killed him, it was murder.51 Turning to the procedural question of jurisdiction, which he found to be “the most difficult part of the case,” Snow explained that the territorial courts held “a mixed jurisdiction.”

The court could sit either as a federal court or a territorial court, but not at the same time. It was presently sitting as a United States court; it would thus look to federal statutes “for our authority of law.” Sitting as a federal court the tribunal had no jurisdiction over crimes committed within Utah Territory. Because the United States had criminal jurisdiction only in cases “said to be national in their character” or in which the alleged crime occurred in an area

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where the federal government had “sole and exclusive jurisdiction,” as in unorganized territory, the place where Monroe was killed was dispositive. According to Snow’s charge, if the jury found that the act was committed within the territory of Utah, where the federal government did not have sole and exclusive jurisdiction, the verdict would have to be not guilty irrespective of the substantive merits of the case because of the court’s lack of jurisdiction.52 Following Snow’s charge to the jury, the jurors left the courtroom to deliberate. Twenty minutes later they returned a verdict of “not guilty,” as announced by the jury foreman, Daniel H. Wells.53 The jury did not explain its verdict— whether it turned on the esoteric jurisdictional issue or, far more likely, that the jury disregarded the judge’s instructions regarding applicable law and instead determined that the homicide of James Monroe was justified under George A. Smith’s mountain common law. The subsequent cases of juries finding men who killed “seducers” of their wives and daughters not guilty clearly adopted Smith’s mountain common law analysis.

An interesting point involved in the case is that James Monroe certainly did not commit criminal seduction or even actionable civil seduction; that is, no criminal action against him could have been brought, and Tamson Egan (or her husband) would not have had a civil cause of action against Monroe. This is so for several reasons. Seduction is always a difficult thing to prove, and under almost all criminal seduction statutes, including the one enacted by the Utah Territorial Legislature in 1852 after the killing of Monroe, the woman seduced must be unmarried and of a previously chaste nature.54 Furthermore, as already stated, Tamson Egan had evidently not been an unwilling party to the sexual relationship with Monroe.

Surprisingly, not only non-Mormons, who saw the Egan case as a further manifestation of extralegal Mormon “justice,” but also Latter-day Saints publicized the case.55 Smith’s closing statement in the case was published in full by the Deseret News shortly after it was delivered and was published in pamphlet form at least twice by Mormons in England in 1852.56 In his three letters to the editor of the New

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The criminal legal theory of Herbert L. Packer aids the modern observer in gaining some theoretical understanding of the sentiments of many early Utahns who seem to have had few qualms about the outcome of the case. Rather than approaching the question of justice from a legal-extralegal standpoint, Packer has formulated two models of criminal process. These he calls the “Due Process Model,” which he perceives as placing emphasis on a legal system of courts and law enforcement and which sometimes has a rival in what he calls the “Control of Crime Model,” which emphasizes repression of crime, either through legal or extralegal measures.59 Applying these models to the Egan case, it becomes evident that Zerubbabel Snow’s instructions to the jury incorporated the importance of due process. One simply could not justifiably take the law into his own hands and kill another in the circumstances in which Howard Egan killed James Monroe or in which Madison Hambleton killed Dr. Vaughn. Taken further,

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On the other hand, it is also evident that many of the Mormons in early Utah, following Smith’s logic, believed that the punishment accorded to a conviction of seduction was not equal to the seriousness of the crime and that it was also insufficient to control the crime of seduction. A criminal seduction statute, enacted by the Utah Legislature in 1852, called for a minimum prison term of one year and maximum sentence of twenty years for the crime and also allowed for a minimum fine of $100 and a maximum fine of $1,000.61 Most Utahns evidently did not believe such a punishment was sufficient to control seduction of women in the territory, especially in circumstances such as Monroe’s “seduction” of Mrs. Egan where no punishment would have been available under the statute or the common law. According to this view, a home had perhaps been ruined by the sexual relationship between Monroe and Tamson Egan and yet the law offered no remedy (or scapegoat) at the time other than an adultery charge against both parties.

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Definitive answers to both questions are elusive, but the historical record and legal theory provide some helpful hints. First, Mormons were not unanimous in their opinion of the case, and some were privately troubled about the precedent it would set. Monroe’s prominent LDS family members must have been very concerned. Mormon lawyer Hosea Stout confided to his diary his worry that the case might prove to be a very dangerous “precident for any one who has his wife, sister, or daughter seduced to take the law into his own hands and slay the seducer.”58

Snow probably believed that if Utah society felt that the punishment assigned to a crime was not commensurate with the severity of the crime, it should alter the statutory punishment through normal legislative processes.60

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York Herald, Jedediah Grant defended Howard Egan and Madison Hambleton in the killings of their wives’ “seducers.”57 This seems puzzling in light of rumors of “Danites” and other supposed extralegal Mormon groups that the American press seized upon and accused of dastardly deeds. Two questions thus arise from the Egan case (and similar cases that followed as well). Why would the Mormons countenance the extralegal “execution” of Monroe and others in similar circumstances and, even more surprising, why would they publicize the radical views and statements of Smith in the Egan trial?

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Even more perplexing than the question of why Mormon Utah countenanced Egan’s killing of Monroe is the question of why the case was so widely publicized by the Mormons in 1851 and 1852. The answer seems to be at least twofold.

On the local front, outsiders were made aware of the opinion Latter-day Saints had of seducers. An editorial afterword to the Deseret News transcript of Smith’s famous closing statement noted that the case should “prove a sufficient warning to all unchaste reprobates, that they are not wanted in our community.”62 Relative to the world outside of Utah, the answer seems to lie in the fact that widespread reports of Mormon immorality both preceded and followed the public announcement of plural marriage in 1852. Publication of the Egan case beyond Utah’s borders was partially in response to these reports. It served to advertise the church’s position that, while others condoned extramarital sexual relations, Mormons limited their sexual relationships to the marriage state, albeit one man could have several wives.

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James Monroe’s grave, located at the Salt Lake Cemetery.

Monroe’s headstone lists October 20, 1851, as his death date: exactly one month after he actually died and just two days after Howard Egan was found not guilty on murder charges. Courtesy of the author.

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As noted earlier, some Mormons such as Stout were concerned that the Egan case might set a dangerous precedent. An extensive search of newspapers between the time of the Egan trial in 1851 and the late 1860s failed to reveal any similar cases, indicating that Stout’s fears may have been exaggerated. In the late 1860s and early 1870s, however, several cases arose with factual circumstances similar to those found in the Egan case, and the term “mountain common law” once again found its way into local newspapers.63 The cases and the editorial comment that accompanied them attest to the continued support for these extralegal measures, at least among Latter-day Saints, who still predominated numerically in the territory.

The first extralegal punishment of a seducer from this period that found its way into the press by Utah newspapers came in 1868.

William Hughes’s daughter was working in a restaurant in Salt Lake City. The proprietor of

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the restaurant, a man named Campbell, reportedly seduced Hughes’s daughter by promising to marry her. Hughes learned of his daughter’s seduction and contacted the local police. A policeman accompanied Hughes to Campbell’s residence, and there they found Campbell and the daughter in bed together. Campbell asserted that the two were married, but it was soon established that they were not and he was arrested on a charge of seduction. The next morning a preliminary examination was held. The evidence convinced Hughes that his daughter had in fact been seduced. According to the newspaper account he “looked upon his child as she stood there the victim of a scoundrel’s lust, and saw all the bright future that had been before her, forever darkened by the villain’s hellish arts, and in his roused indignation he drew a revolver and shot him down in the court room.” Hughes was, of course, arrested for shooting Campbell. Campbell was severely wounded, but, the Deseret News reported, the

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Hughes was tried for assault with intent to kill and found not guilty.65 None of the hoopla that surrounded Campbell’s preliminary hearing was evident in the publicity given to the Hughes trial. A brief line in the locals column of the Deseret News was all that publicly announced the verdict. The acquittal of Hughes and the editorial comments of the News both indicate that the sentiment first expressed by George A. Smith in the Egan case had continued and had become perhaps embedded as a common social belief.

More editorial comment came a few weeks later, following another incident of a father finding a man trying to seduce his daughter. The News, which reported this latest incident on February 25, 1868, advised the “oily tongued scoundrel,” who had escaped the father by running away, to “keep running, lest he should run against a bullet.” It then published a long lead editorial on the “inviolability of virtue.” The editorial, almost certainly authored by editor and church leader George Q. Cannon, supported the view that the homicides and shootings of seducers were publicized to counter charges of immorality among the Latter-day Saints: “Because we believe in and practice polygamy, there are many people, who, for the want of correct information, imagine that we are licentious and corrupt, and think of nothing but the gratification of passion. All the pulpit

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The people of this Territory have long ago resolved that the chastity of their daughters, sisters and wives shall be sacredly maintained, and that one man who seeks to seduce them from the path of virtue, or makes them the victim of unbridled lust, shall receive the penalty of his crime. If a farmer or shepherd catches a wolf preying upon his flocks, he kills it, if he can. Shall a wild beast in human form, who with hellish duplicity seeks to mislead and destroy the innocent members of his family, be any more leniently dealt with?66

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Will not such men as this never learn that this community will not tolerate such damnable and villainous deeds in their midst? That the atmosphere of this Territory is most uncongenial to those who wish to introduce anything in the shape of “pretty waiter girls,” and everything in the shape of illicit intercourse? Public opinion in these mountains declares that a man who seduces a woman ought to pay the penalty with his life; and her nearest of kindred should bring him to account.64

eloquence which finds vent against us, has this view of our character for its basis.” However, Cannon countered, “It is time that the world should know what we have been endeavoring to impress upon it for years, that the people of this Territory are determined, by every means in their power, to check vice and foster virtue.”

The editor-apostle then reaffirmed the “unwritten law”:

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wound was “not necessarily fatal.” However, the report continued, “The prevailing feeling is that it is a pity the shot did not do its work as effectually as it could be done.” The News article continued by presenting the first of a series of editorial comments:

Apparently no seducers were shot during 1869, but a related brand of extralegal violence was carried out and editorially condoned. As he was being escorted to prison, a man convicted of rape and sentenced to fifteen years in the territorial penitentiary was shot five times and killed by the husband of the woman he raped.

Here was a clear case of a husband who did not believe that the law had provided a sufficient punishment for a crime. The local probate jury agreed because the killer of the rapist was given a verdict of not guilty on a murder charge, with the jury classifying his act as justifiable homicide.67

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In 1871 at least two men were killed by relatives of the women they seduced. Editorial comment on the incidents indicates that, while not recorded in a statute book, certain procedures were to be followed in carrying out the responsibilities of “mountain common law.” Richard Brown, a Provo resident, was killed. Henry Davis was accused of committing the murder.

During Davis’s murder trial, John J. Baum rose in the courtroom and admitted killing Brown, defending his action on the ground that Brown had seduced his (Baum’s) niece after promising to marry her. Davis was immediately acquitted

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and it soon became clear that public sentiment condoned Baum’s act.68 The only reservations people had, according to the Salt Lake Herald, were that Brown had been killed during the night and that Baum had not openly admitted committing the act earlier:

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What we object to, and object to in the most emphatic terms, is the hour at which it was done. We are most strenuously opposed to deeds done in the dark. Let a man’s actions be open and above board; done in the face of day and of his fellow man. There is no jury of honest honorable men . . . that would convict a man for slaying the slayer of a young, trusting, confiding girl’s peace, happiness and life-long reputation, that girl being his near relative.

Thus, if Baum had confronted and killed Brown in the light of day, there would have been no question that he should have been acquitted.

Nevertheless, having killed Brown at night and delayed turning himself in, Baum was still acquitted.69 Appearing in a Herald editorial that both condemned and condoned Baum’s act was a comment generally opposing extralegal measures, except when formal legal processes did not provide a sufficient remedy: We are opposed to any man attempting to administer what he may deem justice, where the courts are open and the law provides a proper punishment for the crime. But unfortunately there are some crimes for which, the sense of the great public declares, no adequate punishment is provided by statutory enactment. Among these, seduction is preeminent. And although the statute books declare it murder to kill a seducer, there is an unwritten law . . . which calls it justice and acquits the person who kills a heartless seducer.70 The Salt Lake Tribune emphatically raised its journalistic voice against the extralegal punishment of seducers. It is difficult to gauge just how genuine the paper’s criticism of the practice was, however, because the Tribune

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opposed practically anything the News and the Herald (sometimes referred to as “Zion’s echo”) supported and was especially interested in publicizing anything that might put the LDS church in an unfavorable light. With these considerations in mind, the comments of the Tribune still offer some insights: Again we enter our protest against irresponsible killing in Utah. The daily papers record the killing of a young man at Provo named Brown, upon the suspicion of illicit intercourse. The judge acquitted the prisoner upon the ground of justifiable homicide.

Efforts have been made by the Orthodox to justify the killing, based on the assumption of the impure life of the slain man. Our position is, that if seduction is worthy of death, it should be executed by the officers of justice alone and not by an irresponsible individual. . . . This doctrine that killing seducers is justified is more dangerous in Utah, and needs more attention here than elsewhere, because it has been publicly taught.71 Still another seducer was killed in September 1871, in Hooper, Utah. James Hendry had “shown attention” to James Hale’s daughter, who was married but estranged from her husband and living with her parents. Hale told Hendry to stay away from his daughter. Hendry, however, secured work for the daughter away from home and then seduced her. When Hale and his son Ezra learned of the seduction, they killed Hendry with two blasts from a shotgun and several rounds from a pistol. The Hales were arrested but escaped.72 The Ogden Junction, a Mormon paper edited by future LDS leader Charles Penrose, and the Deseret News agreed that “the universal feeling among the community is that Hendry richly deserved his fate. Death to the seducer is mountain law, let libertines understand it and govern themselves accordingly.”73 After 1874 major criminal actions were taken from the jurisdiction of the local probate courts in Utah, primarily to facilitate enforcement of the anti-polygamy statutes. This had the effect of removing cases involving extralegal punishment of seducers from these local,

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Hobbs hunted all night for the two. On the following day, June 25, he heard that they were in Salt Lake City. He took the train into the city and found them near the Eagle Emporium corner. When Sullivan saw Hobbs he began to run.

Hobbs fired four shots at the fleeing man and hit him with two. The wounded Sullivan was taken to the Townsend House and later to St. Mark’s Hospital. All three newspapers carried rather extensive coverage of the sensational shooting. The Deseret News avoided much of the editorial comment that it had made in earlier cases. The position of the paper was given implicitly, however, in its description of Hobbs’s attempt to “annihilate the destroyer of the virtue of his daughter.” The Salt Lake Herald maintained its earlier position by calling the shooting one of “genuine merit,” and headlining the article covering the incident with “The Seducer’s Portion.”76 Neither the official LDS paper nor the morning paper owned and operated by Latter-day Saints engaged in the radical editorial rhetoric of the early 1870s, however.

The greatest amount of editorial comment this time came from the Tribune.

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Hobbs was examined by a local police court over which Alexander Pyper presided. The Herald simply reported that Hobbs had been discharged because “Justice” Pyper had held “that the shooting was justifiable.”78 The Tribune took a less dispassionate approach in a front page volley. The paper once again criticized “the late George A. Smith’s ‘Mountain law,’” and “Bishop” Pyper’s decision, stating that, “The progress made by the world during three thousand years in restraining the untamed passions of man, and subordinating all to the impartial decrees of the law, by the divinely-inspired legislation of this modern Israel is set aside.”79 Even though criminal jurisdiction had been removed from local probate courts by the Poland Act in 1874, Mormon sentiments still won out in the Salt Lake City police court.

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When William Hobbs shot Con Sullivan on June 25, 1877, on the Eagle Emporium corner in Salt Lake City, all three of the major Salt Lake City newspapers had an opportunity once again to air their opinions on the question of the extralegal punishment of seducers. Hobbs, who ran a boarding house in West Jordan, suspected that his fifteen-year-old daughter and a local saloon keeper, Con Sullivan, were engaged in an illicit relationship. According to the account Hobbs gave to a Herald reporter, one Sunday night he had ordered his daughter to stay home. While he stepped out for a moment, his daughter stole away. Hobbs reported that he went to the residence of Sullivan and knocked on the door but received no answer.

He then returned home and fetched an implement to break his way into the house. He did so and found Sullivan and his young daughter “flagrante delicto.” He returned home, this time for a weapon, but by the time he again reached Sullivan’s house, the couple had fled.75

The Tribune was much more willing to let a legal tribunal determine whether or not there had been a criminally intimate relationship between the young girl and the saloon keeper.

The precedent of the Egan case hung heavily over the present situation: “We think we see a manifest determination on the part of the priests to acquit Hobbs on the ground of the alleged seduction.” Such a proceeding would be based on the “mountain common law,” as laid down by George A. Smith, in his plea for Howard Egan who murdered James Monroe for the offense of seduction. The article continued by stating that Smith’s “great speech . . . contains more blood and thunder than any other sermon in the Journal of Discourses.” It accused the “Mountain Meadows press” of promoting the acquittal of Hobbs “by endeavoring to create public sympathy in favor of Hobbs, regardless of the bottom facts of the case.” Finally, the Tribune article stated that the only fact established in the case so far was that a deliberate attempt had been made upon the life of one man by another.77

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Mormon-controlled courts.74 Utahns found another way to relieve punishers of seducers from criminal liability, however, in at least one case in 1877.

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It is evident that the Egan case set the precedent followed in these later cases. While the term “mountain common law” probably did not originate with George A. Smith, he certainly popularized the term and gave it significance in pioneer Utah. The term symbolized something that was apparently representative of more general sentiments around Utah and became almost a watchword among many Mormons.

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The reliance that Judge Snow placed on due process was waylaid, at least with punishers of seducers in the local probate courts where all these murder charges, except the one against Hobbs, were brought. No case of a man being convicted in Utah of extralegally punishing a relative’s seducer or rapist has been found during the years between 1851 and 1877. Part of the enduring reluctance to condemn a man who killed or attempted to kill the seducer of his wife or daughter may have been that three men who were or eventually became members of the LDS church’s First Presidency, Brigham Young, George A. Smith, and Daniel H. Wells, had played key roles of defense counsel or jury foreman in the precedent-setting Hambleton and Egan cases in 1851.

Not all cases of seduction ended in the extralegal punishment of the seducer, however. For example, under the law of Utah Territory, marriage of the seducer and the woman seduced barred criminal action against the seducer. In 1873 a woman accused a man named Pape of seduction and an action was about to be brought against him by the police when the two were married in the police station by Justice Clinton. The Tribune sarcastically editorialized that “matters of that kind can be ‘made square all ‘round’ by tying the hymenial knot ‘if the female is of a ‘previous [sic] chaste character.’” The charge was dropped, and it is clear that the man assumed “the better part of valor” in the case.80 In 1888, Chief Justice Charles Zane of the Utah Supreme Court rendered an opinion in a case similar to those described above. Wilford H. Halliday had killed a man named Reeves twenty-four hours after learning that Reeves had committed adultery with Halliday’s wife. Halliday argued that he had killed Reeves “in a sudden heat of passion” after learning of his wife’s “defilement.” The trial court and the higher Utah court rejected the argument: “The law will not permit the husband to say that he slew the defiler in a sudden heat of passion after deliberating upon the defilement 24 hours. . . .

The law is that if the husband after learning of the defilement of his wife waits and deliberates, and then kills the defiler, in so doing he commits the crime of murder.”81 Most of nineteenth-century Mormon society in Utah appears to have condoned the extralegal

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punishment of seducers with the punishment to be meted out by the seduced woman’s relative. Utahns believed they were not alone in supporting this practice. For example, in editorializing on the Baum case in Provo, the Salt Lake Herald stated that the “unwritten law” of killing seducers was “recognized everywhere throughout this great Republic.”82 Writing in the twentieth century, the Latter-day Saint historian and leader B. H. Roberts agreed with this view. Roberts stated that there were cases where a father or a brother personally avenges the outraged chastity of a daughter or sister; or a wronged husband slays the despoiler of his domestic peace and home. Such cases are not peculiar to communities of Latter-day Saints in the United States, they are recognized as appeals to the “unwritten law of the land,” and trial juries quite generally in the United States refuse to convict, either for manslaughter or murder those who take the law into their own hands in such cases. Granting that the severity of the denunciations against violations of chastity and the purity of the home encouraged appeals to “‘the unwritten law,” and hence that such appeals were made more frequently in Utah than elsewhere—if they were more frequently in Utah than elsewhere in western America—it still remains to be determined whether or not that is a reproach to the community, or a tribute to the high sense of honor, the virility, the strength, and the courage of the community’s manhood.

Obviously, Roberts believed that it was a tribute to the Mormon community that such men were willing to punish seducers. His words might be interpreted to refer primarily to cases involving the slaying of rapists, except that the reference he gives is to the Egan case.83 There are indications that similar extralegal acts were countenanced in other parts of the country. One extralegal homicide of a “seducer” brought great sadness to Mormon Utah in 1856. This was the death of the LDS apostle Parley P. Pratt, who had married Eleanor McLean. Since Mrs. McLean had not obtained a

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Almost contemporaneous with Kernan’s report was one of the most famous murder trials of the twentieth century. Harry K. Thaw, heir to a large fortune and playboy husband of Evelyn Nesbitt, a famous stage actress, killed Stanford White on the roof of the Madison Square Garden in New York City, a building that White had designed. The reason Thaw gave for the killing was that White had continued to approach Nesbitt after she married Thaw, hoping to continue a sexual liaison they had had before she married. Thaw relied on the “unwritten law”— or what he called “Dementia Americana”—that held that such a man deserved death. Thaw fought the murder charges in his first trial on the merits, feeling that “White was a villain who had met his just desserts” and that “on such an issue no jury in the world would ever convict me.”88 Placing the Utah experience into historical perspective, it is evident that it was in some ways similar to the experience of other parts of the country. Though by no means universally approved of in nineteenth-century America, extralegal violence was clearly condoned by

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Even as late as 1906, an American Bar Association report prepared by the prominent Louisiana attorney Thomas J. Kernan asserted that a number of extralegal acts were countenanced by the public. Two of these were the killing of an adulterous man by the wronged husband and the slaying of a seducer of a virgin.87

While Herbert Packer’s theory goes far in helping the modern observer understand why many supported extralegal justice measures in the United States, and while it certainly applies to the Utah experience as well as the broader experience, there were subtly different reasons in Utah for society allowing men to kill their relatives’ seducers. Most vigilantes were intent primarily on bringing order to society and on controlling crime. The Latter-day Saints were certainly interested in controlling seduction and publicized these cases partly for that reason, but they also used the cases for propaganda purposes. They hoped by publicizing the Egan case and similar cases that followed to indicate to the country and world that they were not lax in morals. Although their controversial practice of plural marriage shocked and outraged nineteenth-century America, the Mormons wanted to show that they believed in the sanctity of sexual morality to the point of condoning lethal extralegal punishment against men who “seduced” women into violating that morality. One suspects that the country might not have been convinced that Latter-day Saints were tough on sexual sin simply because they condoned killing seducers when they were also married to multiple women.90

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Although the two cases cited by George A. Smith in his arguments before the jury have not been located, it is very possible that they did involve the acquittal of killers of seducers.85 There were other instances as well. In the same issue of the Salt Lake Herald that the Baum case was discussed, an account of a homicide of a seducer in San Francisco was published. Citizens of San Francisco reportedly approved the act.86

many Americans, especially those living in the southern and western parts of the country. In fact, the scale of extralegal measures is quite staggering to the modern mind. Vigilantes and supporters of vigilante movements included presidents Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt, senators, congressmen, governors, literary luminaries, legal scholars, prominent lawyers, and businessmen, as well as representatives from practically every class of American society.89 It is from this perspective that the relatively few instances of extralegal violence in early Utah must be viewed.

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divorce from her first husband, Mr. McLean viewed Pratt’s plural marriage to his wife as no marriage at all. He hunted for Pratt throughout the eastern United States until he found him in Arkansas and killed him. McLean escaped and never faced trial.84 Under the tenets of the “mountain common law,” McLean had simply done that which the law probably would not do, and his act was condoned by many.

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Notes 1. Kenneth L. Cannon II is an attorney in private practice and an independent historian in Salt Lake City. The original version of this article was published in Utah Historical Quarterly in the Fall 1983 issue and was the recipient of the Dale Morgan Award for Best Scholarly Article in the quarterly published that year. Cannon has retained the overall structure of the original but has updated it with more archival materials and recently published secondary sources.

2. W. Eugene Hollon, Frontier Violence: Another Look (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); Wayne

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Gard, Frontier Justice (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1949); Richard Maxwell Brown, “Historical Patterns of Violence in America,” in Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds., The History of Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), 45–83, and “Legal and Behavioral Perspectives on American Vigilantism,” in Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn, eds., Law in American History (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), 95–144.

“Vigilance Committees” Deseret News, January 22, 1868, 3.

Larry R. Gerlach. “Ogden’s ‘Horrible Tragedy’: The Lynching of George Segal,” Utah Historical Quarterly 49 (1981): 157. Gerlach has found evidence of at least twelve lynchings in Utah.

Kenneth L. Cannon II, “‘Mountain Common Law’: The Extralegal Punishment of Seducers in Early Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 51 (1983): 308–327. The original version of this article has since been cited by a number of legal opinions and law review articles. See, for example, Oliverson v. West Valley City, 875 F.Supp.

1465, 1474 (D. Utah 1994); Paul G. Cassell, “The Mysterious Creation of Search and Seizure Exclusionary Rules under State Constitutions: The Utah Example,” Utah Law Review (1993): 751, 813; Lea VanderVelde, “The Legal Ways of Seduction,” Stanford Law Review 48 (1996): 817, 834; Nathan B. Oman, “Preaching to the Court House and Judging in the Temple,” B.Y.U. Law Review (2009): 157, 206.

Ronald W. Walker, “The Affair of the ‘Runaways’: Utah’s First Encounter with the Federal Officers,” Journal of Mormon History 39 (Fall 2013): 1–43; Ronald W. Walker and Matthew J. Grow, “The People Are ‘Hogaffed or Humbugged’: The 1851–52 National Reaction to Utah’s ‘Runaway Officers,’” Journal of Mormon History 40 (Winter 2014): 1–52.

“Report of Messrs. Brandebury, Brocchus, and Harris, to the President of the United States,” Washington, D.C., December 19, 1851, in Report from the Secretary of State, appendix to the Congressional Globe, House of Representatives, 32nd Congress, 1st Sess., 87–88. The runaway officials left Great Salt Lake City on September 28, 1851, just a few days after Howard Egan killed James Madison Monroe, and they might have passed the wagon train that Monroe had been a part of along the trail. Journal History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, September 28, 1851, LDS Church History Library, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter, CHL).

Journal of Azariah Smith, as quoted in Brigham D. Madsen, ed., A Forty-niner in Utah, With the Stansbury Exploration of Great Salt Lake: Letters and Journal of John Hudson, 1848–1850 (Salt Lake City: Tanner Trust Fund, University of Utah Library, 1981), 108.

Jedediah M. Grant, Three Letters to the New York Herald, from J. M. Grant, of Utah (New York, n.p., 1852), 42– 43, available online at lib.byu.edu/collections/mormon -publications-19th-20th-centuries, accessed August 10, 2020; Smith Journal, 108. Grant wrote the letters largely in response to the runaway officials’ report of conditions in Utah Territory. Hambleton may have been a polygamist at the time of the killing and certainly was after. It is most likely that it was his first (and in 1851, perhaps only) wife, Chelnecha, who had the extramarital affair with Vaughn. Family Group Records of Madison D. Hambleton and Chelnecha Smith, accessed April 2020, familysearch.org.

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10. Grant, Three Letters, 42–43; Smith Journal, 108.

11. Journal of Azariah Smith as quoted in Madsen, ed., A Forty-Niner in Utah, 108. Smith also noted that, when Mrs. Hambleton was “haled before the local congregation to answer charges of adultery,” she refused to ask for forgiveness and was “cut off from the Church.”

Smith Journal, 108. Madison and Chelnecha Hambleton had no children together after Hambleton killed Vaughn. Family Group Records of Madison D. Hambleton and Chelnecha Smith, accessed April 2020, familysearch.org.

12. Madsen, ed., A Forty-niner in Utah, 107–109. Vaughn had apparently had another illicit affair earlier in Great Salt Lake City. He had been indicted in September 1850 for adultery with Timothy B. Foot’s wife, and Hosea Stout had filed a civil action on behalf of Foot for damages against Vaughn. Juanita Brooks, ed., On the Mormon Frontier: The Diary of Hosea Stout, 1844–1861, 2 vols. (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press and Utah State Historical Society, 1964), 2:280–81. Some residents of the capital city believed Vaughn had been lucky not to have been shot on that occasion. Madsen, ed., A Forty-niner in Utah, 107.

13. Brooks, ed., On the Mormon Frontier, 2:393, 396.

14. William D. Hartley, Faithful and Fearless: Major Howard Egan, Early Mormonism, and the Pioneering of the American West (Holladay, UT: Howard Egan Biography, LLC, 2017).

15. Brooks, ed., On the Mormon Frontier, 2:653; D. Michael Quinn, The Mormon Hierarchy: Extensions of Power (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1997), 242.

16. Grant, Three Letters, 43. Although Grant referred to Howard Egan’s “wife,” he never named Tamson. Other nineteenth-century historical works dealing with the case also do not list which of Egan’s wives was the subject of Monroe’s “seduction.” See Orson F. Whitney, The History of Utah, 4 vols. (Salt Lake City: George Q. Cannon and Sons, 1892–1904), 1:480–82, and B. H. Roberts, A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Century One, 6 vols.

(Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1930), 4:135–36.

Many sources, including an order issued by Judge Zerubbabel Snow in the proceedings of United States v.

Egan, make clear that it was Tamson, Egan’s first wife.

United States v. Howard Egan, Order of Hon. Z. Snow, October 16, 1851, box 1, fd. 9, 62, Series 25011, Utah State Archives and Records Service, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter, USARS). Interestingly, Jedediah M. Grant did not describe Tamson’s relationship with Monroe as the result of “seduction”; he described her as “unfaithful” and described Monroe as her “paramour.” On the other hand, Grant also argued that adultery should be punishable by death, leaving the question open whether some might have condoned the killing of Tamson Egan as well as Monroe. As Grant made clear, however, Howard Egan’s love for Tamson “partook of the nature of sinful adoration,” which no doubt made his anger at and sense of betrayal with his friend James Monroe stronger. Egan was not willing to consider killing Tamson or having someone kill her. Grant, Three Letters, 43, 47.

17. James M. Monroe, Diary, August 22, 1842, April 22, 27, 1843, microfilm copy of holograph, MS 7061, CHL. The original of the diary is in the Howard Egan Papers, Beineke Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

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were G. C. Robbins, William Horner, James Wade, and George M. Moore.

27. [Woodward, William], Reminiscences, 8–10, box 2, fd.

4, in William Woodward, Collection 1851–1919, available online at Pioneer Database, 1847–1868, s.v. “William Woodward,” 1851 John Reese Wagon Train, accessed July 23, 2020, history.churchofjesuschrist.org/overland travel/.

28. Brooks, ed., On the Mormon Frontier, 2:407–408 (Hosea Stout); Orson Hyde, “Shot,” Frontier Guardian (Kanesville, IA), November 14, 1851; Alexander Neibaur, Journal, September 21, 181, excerpted in Journal History, September 21, 1851; “Indictment for Murder, Plea of George A. Smith, Esq.,” 3.

29. Journal History, October 3, 1851.

30. U.S. v. Egan, A true bill, October 16, 1851, 125–27, USARS. 31. U.S. v. Egan, warrant for arrest of Howard Egan, October 13, 1851, return of service by J. L. Heywood and H. S. Eldredge, October 14, 1857, 99–100, box 1, fd. 9, Series 25011, USARS. 32. U.S. v. Egan, minutes of court proceedings, First District Court, October 14, 1851, reel 1, 7, Series 10035, USARS. 33. U.S. v. Egan, Order of Hon. Z. Snow, October 14, 1851, 105, USARS. The jury pool of thirty-six men summoned

by Marshall Joseph Heywood included LDS leaders Daniel H. Wells, Reynolds Cahoon, and William Clayton; future handcart company captain Edward Martin; Salt Lake Temple architect Truman O. Angel; missionary, lawyer, actor, and Nauvoo Legion general James Ferguson; and heroic sheriff Rodney Badger. It was clearly not a random sampling of Great Salt Lake City men. U.S. v. Egan, list of jury pool, box 1, fd. 9, 106–107, Series 25011, USARS. 34. Journal History, October 17, 1921; Whitney, History of Utah, 1:481.

35. Andrew Jenson, Latter-day Saint Biographical Encyclopedia, 4 vols. (Salt Lake City: Andrew Jenson History Company, 1888–1936), 1:37–42, 3:692–97.

36. U.S. v. Egan, Order of Hon. Z. Snow, October 16, 1851, 62, USARS. 37. U.S. v. Egan, Order of Hon. Z. Snow, October 16, 1851, 62, USARS. 38. U.S. v. Egan, Order of Hon. Z. Snow, October 16, 1851, 62, USARS. William Snow filed a return of service certifying he had “duly complied” with the court’s order, suggesting that had received Tamson Egan’s answers and recorded them. U.S. v. Egan, certificate of service

by William Snow, Esq. regarding compliance with the court’s order, October 16, 1851, box 1, fd. 9, 63, Series 25011, USARS. 39. “History of The District of Utah’s U.S. Attorney’s Office,” United States Department of Justice, accessed January 2020, justice.gov/usao-ut/history#blair.

40. U.S. v Egan, minutes of trial, First District Court, October 17, 1851, reel 1, 1–12, series 10035, USARS; Quinn, Mormon Hierarchy, 710–12.

41. U.S. v. Egan, minutes of trial, October 17, 1851, 12, USARS; “Indictment for Murder, Plea of George A. Smith, Esq.,” 3; Brooks, ed., On the Mormon Frontier, 2:407; Hartley, Faithful and Fearless, 268.

42. “Indictment for Murder, Plea of George A. Smith, Esq.,” 3.

43. U.S. v. Egan, minutes of trial, October 17, 1851, 12, USARS; Hartley, Faithful and Fearless, 266.

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18. Grant, Three Letters, 43. Edward Hogan, “The Curious Case of James Madison Monroe,” Sunstone, September 6, 2013.

19. James Madison Monroe to Brigham Young, September 16, 1851, box 69, fd. 4, Brigham Young Office Files, 1832–1878, CR 1234/1, CHL. Hartley believes Monroe wrote the letter while at Fort Bridger. Hartley, Faithful and Fearless, 259. This extraordinary epistle, written just a few days before Egan and Monroe met near the border between Utah Territory and unorganized United States territory, provides an inside view of a man who expects to be killed imminently unless the Mormon prophet intervenes. Monroe was contrite in his letter to Brigham Young, acknowledging that he had “transgressed . . . I have sinned against the Lord and against the Church.

I throw myself entirely on your mercy.” This was not, however, the confession of a “seducer”; it was the confession of a religious man, who had committed the sin of adultery, to his ultimate spiritual leader. In the letter, Monroe recounted how he and Tamson Egan became acquainted in Nauvoo and how she initiated the physical relationship between them. He described how, on a walk in Nauvoo, she “took hold of my hand and placed it immediately over the most secret part of her body without saying a word.” Later, in Utah, “she never resented any familiarities I took with her, and suffered me to put my hand in her bosom, to kiss her, and even put my hand under her clothes. It was not flesh and blood to stand that, at least, not in mine.” Monroe was expressing his human frailty to Young in the hope that the church leader would “sympathize with the frailties of human nature.

You are aware, doubtless, that it is very difficult to resist the advances of a beautiful woman. ‘When a pretty woman shows her foot, what can a poor man do?’” Ibid.

20. Journal History, December 1, 1850; Hartley, Faithful and Fearless, 254–56; James Madison Monroe to J. F. Carter, February 9, 1851, and Monroe to Carter, June 1, 1851, Letters to Wilford Woodruff, 1851, MS 1352, CHL. 21. According to George A. Smith’s recounting of Horner’s testimony in Egan’s trial, Horner had learned that Tamson Egan had borne an illegitimate child and that it was widely known that Monroe was the father. “Indictment for Murder, Plea of George A. Smith, Esq.” Deseret News, November 15, 1851, 3.

22. Monroe to Young, September 16, 1851. This is consistent with Young’s representation of Madison Hambledon in the Vaughn murder case.

23. “Indictment for Murder, Plea of George A. Smith, Esq.,” 3.

24. “Indictment for Murder, Plea of George A. Smith, Esq.,” 3; Grant, Three Letters, 43–44. Grant had left for New York on September 24, 1851, just before the runaway officials had embarked on their return to Washington, D.C., and he likely also passed Monroe’s wagon train.

Howard Egan had returned to Great Salt Lake City on September 21, the day after he killed Monroe, and it is likely that Grant talked to Egan during the intervening few days. Journal History, September 21, 24, 1851.

25. Grant, Three Letters, 43–44. The indictment against Egan for murder provides the detail that the killing took place on September 20, 1851. U.S. v. Egan, Case Murder, A true bill signed by Daniel Spencer, grand jury foreman, October 16, 1851, box 1, fd. 9, 125–27, Series 25011, USARS. 26. U.S. v. Egan, A true bill, October 16, 1851, 125–27, USARS. The witnesses who testified before the grand jury

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44. Judge Snow’s use of the words seduced and seduction in his questions was prejudicial to the prosecution and perhaps, on reflection, he let Tamson Egan’s answers remain under seal.

45. Hosea Stout provided a short account of the trial, and George A. Smith made references to Blair’s arguments in his own closing statements. Brooks, ed., On the Mormon Frontier, 2:407; “Indictment for Murder, Plea of George A. Smith, Esq.,” 3.

46. U.S. v. Egan, minutes of trial, October 17, 1851, 12, USARS; Brooks, ed., On the Mormon Frontier, 2:407–408.

47. “Indictment for Murder, Plea of George A. Smith, Esq.,” 3; Whitney, History of Utah, 1:481; Clair T. Kilts, “A History of the Federal and Territorial Court Conflicts in Utah, 1851–1874” (master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 1959), 50. The most readily available copy of George A. Smith’s argument to the jury is found in the Journal of Discourses, 26 vols. (London: Latter-day Saints’ Book Depot, 1854–1886), 1:95–100. The report of Snow’s charge to the jury is also in the Journal of Discourses, 1:100–103. Smith’s closing argument to the jury is the only courtroom legal argument included in the Journal of Discourses and Zerubbabel Snow’s charge to the jury is also unique in the Journal of Discourses.

48. “Indictment for Murder, Plea of George A. Smith, Esq.,” 3; Journal of Discourses, 1:95–96. On early Mormon attitudes critical of lawyers and the formal legal system in the United States, see James H. Backman, “Attitudes within the Church toward the Study of Law, Lawyers, and Litigation—The Brigham Young Era Compared to the Present,” BYU Education Week Lectures on the History of Mormon Lawyers ([Provo]: [Brigham Young University Education Week], [1980]).

49. “Indictment for Murder, Plea of George A. Smith, Esq.,” 3; Journal of Discourses, 1:97.

50. As noted below, this question goes to whether the court had jurisdiction to enter any verdict, not whether the defendant should be found not guilty if the court did not have jurisdiction.

51. “Indictment for Murder, Judge Snow’s Charge to the Jury,” Deseret Evening News, November 15, 1851, 3; Journal of Discourses, 1:101.

52. “Indictment for Murder, Judge Snow’s Charge to the Jury,” 3; Journal of Discourses, 1:102. Judge Snow’s instruction that the jury must find Egan not guilty if the act took place in Utah is almost certainly wrong.

Instead, Snow would not have had the authority to render any verdict and would have needed to dismiss the case. The prosecution, if it chose to do so, could then have brought the case against Monroe in a court that had jurisdiction to decide the case.

53. U.S. v. Egan, Minutes of trial, October 18, 1851, 13, USARS. The Deseret News capitalized the words “not guilty,” while the Journal of Discourses did not include the verdict at all. Journal of Discourses, 1:103.

54. “An Act in Relation to Crimes and Punishments,” Title II, section 21, Acts, Resolutions, and Memorials Passed at the . . . Annual, and Special Sessions, of the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Utah (Great Salt Lake City, UT: Brigham H. Young, Printers, 1852), 120, available at babel.hathitrust.org, accessed August 7, 2020.

The legislature was not responding to the Egan verdict; it was simply codifying the common law.

55. National Intelligencer, February 15, 1852. As noted earlier, the so-called runaway judges also reported critically on the Egan and Hambleton affairs. See endnote

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6, above; Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict, 1850–1859 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1960), 28–29; Whitney, History of Utah, 1:480–81.

56. “Indictment for Murder, Plea of George A. Smith, Esq.,” 3. The two pamphlets, entitled “Mormonism!

Indictment for the Murder of James Monroe,” were published by Franklin D. Richards and an undisclosed person who had his edition printed in Liverpool by R. James. Smith’s argument and Judge Snow’s charge were also published in the first volume of the Journal of Discourses, first published in Liverpool in 1854.

57. Grant, Three Letters, 42–44.

58. Brooks, ed., On the Mormon Frontier, 2:407–408. Interestingly, Stout was satisfied that Hambleton was justified in killing Vaughn (Ibid., 2:396). Yet he may have been concerned that two such incidents within a short period of time would set a precedent and cause widespread lawlessness.

59. Herbert L. Packer, The Limits of the Criminal Sanction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968), 149– 73.

60. In fact, the 1852 legislature enacted a statute that provided for a judgment of justifiable homicide when a person killed another who had defiled the first person’s “wife, daughter, mother, sister, or any other female relative or dependent,” as long as such killing was “in a sudden heat of passion.” “An Act in Relation to Crimes and Punishments,” Title XI, section 112, Acts, Resolutions, and Memorials (1852). Howard Egan’s deliberate hunting down of James Monroe more than a year after the “defilement” of his wife would not qualify as justifiable homicide under the 1852 statute because such a premeditated act could hardly be considered to have been committed “in a sudden heat of passion.” It is interesting to note that Utah was one of the few states that as late as the early 1970s still considered such a homicide justifiable and not criminal (Utah Code Ann. Section 76-30-10[4] [repealed 1973]).

61. “An Act in Relation to Crimes and Punishments,” Title II, section 21.

62. “Indictment for Murder, Plea of George A. Smith, Esq.,” 3.

63. It is possible that, between 1851 and 1868, seducers continued to be punished by relatives of women with whom they had conducted extramarital affairs and that these acts were publicized in 1868 and afterwards only to give fair warning to the newcomers who would be brought to Zion by the soon-to-be-completed transcontinental railroad. It is also possible that the incidence of extralegal punishment of seducers after 1868 was due in part to the increased tensions caused by the influx of “outsiders” into the territory.

64. “Seducer Shot,” Deseret News, February 4, 1868, 3.

65. People v. William Hughes, Docket Number 1585, March 8, 11, 1868, 21800001801, box 24, Salt Lake County Probate Records, USARS; “Acquittal,” Deseret News, March 11, 1868, 1.

66. “Inviolability of Virtue,” Deseret News, February 26, 1868, 2. Ironically, Cannon saw an analogous matter differently when it was his own son, Frank J. Cannon, who “seduced” a young woman while she was working in his home in Logan and his wife, Mattie, was away.

The young woman had become pregnant from the relationship. The young woman’s father even told George Q. that Frank had forced himself on his daughter, but the elder Cannon had a more charitable view of the sit-

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77. “That Shooting,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 27, 1877, 4.

78. “Discharged,” Salt Lake Herald, June 28, 1877, 3.

79. “Discharged,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 29, 1877, 1.

80. “A Hasty Wedding,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 14, 1873, 3.

Also, there were cases of men who were charged with seduction, including the same day that Justice Clinton performed the marriage of Mr. Pape and the woman who accused him of seduction. “Arrested for Seduction,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 14, 1873, 3; “Seduced,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 12, 1873, 3.

81. People v. Halliday, 5 Utah 467, 474 (1888).

82. “The Provo Homicide,” Salt Lake Herald, January 4, 1871, 2 83. Roberts, A Comprehensive History of the Church, 4:135.

84. Steven Pratt, “Eleanor McLean and the Murder of Parley P. Pratt,” Brigham Young University Studies 15 (Winter 1975): 225, 245–48.

85. The two cases Smith referred to were Louisiana v. Horton and New Jersey v. Mercer. “Indictment for Murder, Plea of George A. Smith, Esq.,” 3.

86. “Seducer Shot,” Salt Lake Herald, January 4, 1871, 2.

The acceptance of such extralegal action was not universal. In a case similar to the Egan case in Pennsylvania in 1854, the judge roundly criticized adherents of such a view and described “how much wiser the law is.” Commonwealth v. Moore, 2 Pittsburgh 502, 509 (1864).

87. As quoted in Brown, “Perspectives on American Vigilantism,” 134.

88. Harry K. Thaw, The Traitor; Being the Untampered with, Unrevised Account of the Trial and All that Led to It (Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1926), 149, 163; see also “The Thaw Case,” Canadian Law Review 6 (1907): 101.

89. Brown, “Perspectives on American Vigilantism,” 106– 144.

90. American society apparently did not receive this message entirely as the Mormons might have hoped. Roberts pointed out that enemies of the Latter-day Saints identified the homicides of seducers as examples of “blood atonement” practiced by the Mormons (A Comprehensive History of the Church, 4:135).

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uation when it was his own son who was the seducer.

Not only was Frank not killed, George Q. Cannon even made sure that Frank was not disciplined by a church court convened against him in Logan; George Q. and his wife Sarah raised the illegitimate son from the relationship as the twin brother of their youngest child.

Kenneth L. Cannon II, “Wives and Other Women: Love, Sex, and Marriage in the Lives of John Q. Cannon, Frank J. Cannon, and Abraham H. Cannon,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 43 (Winter 2010): 83–89.

67. Deseret News, March 27, 1869.

68. “The Provo Homicide,” Salt Lake Herald, January 1, 1871, 2.

69. “The Provo Homicide,” Salt Lake Herald, January 4, 1871, 2.

70. “The Provo Homicide,” Salt Lake Herald, January 4, 1871, 2.

71. Salt Lake Tribune, January 1, 1871.

72. “The Shooting at Hooper,” Ogden (UT) Junction, September 27, 1871, 2.

73. “The Shooting at Hooper,” 2; “The Shooting Affair at Hooperville,” Deseret Evening News, September 28, 1871, 3. The News merely copied the Junction’s comments approvingly into its own columns. The Tribune, of course, had a contrary perception of the case (see Salt Lake Tribune, September 27, 1871).

74. Poland Act, 18 Stat. 254. On the jurisdiction and fairness of the local probate courts, see James B. Allen, “The Unusual Jurisdiction of the County Probate Courts in the Territory of Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 36, no. 2 (1968): 132–42; Jay E. Powell, “Fairness in the Salt Lake County Probate Court,” Utah Historical Quarterly 38, no. 3 (1970): 256–62; and Elizabeth D. Gee, “Justice for All or for the ‘Elect’? The Utah County Probate Court, 1855–72,” Utah Historical Quarterly 48, no. 2 (1980): 129–47.

75. “The Seducer’s Portion,” Salt Lake Herald, June 26, 1877, 3. The Deseret News article, also purportedly based on the personal account of Hobbs, varied slightly from the Herald account. “Shooting Scrape,” Deseret News, June 26, 1877, 3.

76. “The Shooting,” Salt Lake Herald, June 26, 1877, 3; “That Shooting,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 26, 1877, 4; “Shooting Scrape,” 3.

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Josie Kensler, who entered the Idaho State Penitentiary in 1897. She was only twenty-five years old in 1897 but had already seen much of life, including marriage at age fourteen and the birth of two children. Kensler delivered her third child—reportedly the first baby born in the prison—only months after her incarceration began. Idaho State Historical Society, no. 565.

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Josephine “Josie” Kensler was a beautiful woman, with dark hazel eyes and curly brown locks, and she lived a sensational life. Kensler exploded into the limelight in the fall of 1896, when her husband of ten years mysteriously disappeared and a ranch hand was suddenly sharing her bed.11 The sordid domestic affair, which took place in southwestern Idaho, captured headlines throughout the United States, but it was not the only moment of drama in Kensler’s life. Married at fourteen, incarcerated in a system made for men, and forced into an unsafe abortion: misfortune punctuated her youth and middle age, and much of that tragedy dealt with sex. And dramatic though it was, Kensler’s experience resembled that of other contemporary women who got in trouble with the law.

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Josie Kensler’s family history followed the westward expansion of the United States. Her father, Miles Caldwell Lawrence, wandered from his birthplace of New York to Ohio to Iowa before pausing long enough to meet Lydia Josephine Shirts, who hailed from Boone, Indiana. They married on November 16, 1862.2 She was fifteen. He was twenty-two.

Sometime between 1865 and 1871, Lydia and Miles joined a wagon train and crossed the plains to arrive in Uintah, Utah, located at the mouth of Weber Canyon. Two children were in tow, Eva and Frank. Miles’s aging mother Clariman made the trip, too.3 The growing family had front-row seats for a changing era: the arrival of the first transcontinental railroad.

On March 2, 1869, the Union Pacific whistle first echoed across the valley. Two months later a ceremonial spike was driven into a railroad tie at Promontory Point, joining the western Central Pacific and eastern Union Pacific lines.

Like many railroad towns, Uintah’s population rapidly jumped from about 1,000 to 5,000 souls. To support the new residents, almost one hundred other businesses formed from 1869 to 1872, selling dry goods, meat, laundry services, tobacco, and candy. Barbers, billiard halls, restaurants, and hotels also opened their doors.4 Two years after the railroad’s arrival, Josie was born, on October 8, 1871. As railroad workers and the host of businesses trailing them moved on, the Lawrence family nurtured their

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roots in Uintah.5 Three more children—Henrietta, Belle, and Correl—joined the family and, at the age of fifteen, Josie’s older sister, Eva, married in Weber, Utah.6 Between the 1880 and 1900 censuses, the Lawrence family moved to Idaho. A little girl, Claraman, was born in Shoshone, Idaho, in 1888.7

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In the railroad town of Shoshone, at the tender age of fourteen, Josie married John Kensler on July 22, 1886.8 He was thirty-nine years old, the same age as Josie’s mother. Josie’s father Miles arranged the marriage, hoping this would provide his daughter with a secure life.9 It was not inconceivable for Josie to marry at age fourteen. Her mother, Lydia, and older sister, Eva, had both tied the wedding knot at fifteen. However, all three took matrimonial vows significantly earlier than contemporary women in the United States. The average age of matrimony for a woman in 1890 was 22. In 1900, the average was 21.9. Men married at older ages: 26.1 years old in 1890 and 25.9 in the 1900s.10 John must have looked like blue skies on the horizon to Miles Lawrence. Born in Ohio, he was the seventh of nine children for John Kensler and Louisa M. Fleming Litton Kensler.11 In August 1862, at age eighteen, he enlisted as a Union solider in the Civil War for Company A, Iowa 39th Infantry Regiment.

As a private he fought in Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina and Kentucky.

John’s record shows he was a prisoner of war.12 After the war he drifted west, settling in Elmore County, Idaho, and possibly operating the King Hill stagecoach station, beginning in the 1870s.13 On April 10, 1886, John received 160 acres in Elmore County through the Homestead Act. John married Josie three months after receiving the land. One year later their first daughter, Myrtle Estella, was born on July 19, 1887, in Weston, Idaho. Four years later, their son Albert Kensler was born in Glenns Ferry, Idaho. Other than notice of these births, public records of the Kensler family are skimpy until 1896. Their ranch and farm grew on the banks of the Snake River, six miles east of Glenns Ferry. In this pastoral setting, which still maintains a sleepy, calm quality to this day, trouble was brewing.

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Just one-and-a-half years after the marriage— baby Myrtle being only six months old—sixteen-year-old Josie began having extramarital affairs. The press would come to doggedly portray her as a wife and mother living outside social norms. First, Josie “eloped” with Bill Cavanaugh, a hired hand at the Kensler ranch and a known horse thief. After being arrested in Huntington, Oregon, they were returned to Idaho. Cavanaugh was charged with abduction, and a technicality resulted in the case being dropped. Reporting some years later, the Anaconda Standard wrote, “After some minor episodes her next play was becoming infatuated with a negro gambler, prizefighter and allaround sport named Henry Underwood, and her home again was deserted by her. Underwood going back to Georgia, Mrs. Kensler, after knocking about, returned home, but again she appeared on the scene of notoriety by taking up with a gambler named Pat Doherty.”14 The Standard, then, described Josie as a woman who left home to consort with men whom contemporaries would have considered very risky.

The last time she left home, Josie traveled to the Wood River Valley in Idaho and returned wearing men’s clothes with her hair cut short— an indication, perhaps, of her willingness to flout cultural expectations as she made her way through the world.15 Perhaps all of this turmoil foreshadowed Josie’s next move. Just seven years after her marriage had begun—and at barely twenty years old—Josie sought legal advice for a divorce in Glenns Ferry. John drank. When drunk, he was cross.16 Then along came Alfred Rosencrans Freel, a Glenns Ferry resident and teamster.

Josie threatened to leave John if Freel wasn’t hired as a ranch hand.17 John agreed, eventually calling Freel a faithful worker. The two men became friends, taking regular trips to Glenns Ferry and the mountains. But a neighbor, Seth Canfield, saw trouble fermenting during the summer of 1896, ten years after John and Josie had married each other. He observed Freel and Josie sitting together near a road. Later he found pieces of a torn handkerchief at the site and showed them to Freel, who said within six months he would be the “owner of the ranch and the woman. . . . She loves me.” Later, Freel asked Canfield not to tell for fear John would kill him.18 Others in town saw Josie and Freel

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together, and Freel was known to boastfully tell the same story.19 On October 17, 1896, John and Freel hoisted themselves into the family wagon and trotted toward Glenns Ferry. John planned to close a deal on selling the ranch to James Rosevere. After settling on a price, John and Freel celebrated with gulps of whiskey. Inebriated, John fell from the wagon on the ride home, and Freel considered killing him then.20 Meantime, Josie supped at home with her parents, sister, and children.

When returning to Glenns Ferry, the dinner guests passed John and Alfred, noting their drunken state.21 As the pair pulled into the yard, Josie walked in front of the team with a bucket of fresh milk in her hand. “Boys, when you get the horses put away, come into the house. Supper is ready.” A drunken John “rolled” out of the wagon. He could barely walk. John instructed Freel to keep the horses hitched, since he planned to return to Glenns Ferry that night. Before sitting for supper, he commented to Josie that Alfred must have doped the whiskey.2223

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Alfred Rosencrans Freel. Upon his 1897 entrance to the Idaho State Penitentiary, Freel was twenty-six years old, with his mother and sisters still living in Glenns Ferry, Idaho. Idaho State Historical Society, no. AR42-1367.

Here Josie and Freel’s stories diverge. Josie stuck with one story: Alfred Freel had murdered John in his own bed. Freel’s first story painted a picture of Josie bringing in a man with a blackened face to kill John and forcing Freel at gun point to help hide the body. In the second story, Freel described leaving the Kensler house for his haystack bed the night of October 17, 1896. After drinking two-thirds of a pint of whiskey to nerve himself up, he returned to the home with his gun. Josie tried to intervene, but Freel walked to the bed where John had fallen asleep, put the gun to John’s head, and pulled the trigger. The report of the gun blew out the lantern. Freel began giving orders, and Josie resisted until she and the children were threatened with bullets to the head.

Freel grabbed John by his hair and dragged him onto a canvas. With Josie’s help, they hauled the body to the irrigation ditch close to the front door. Water still filled the canal, and Josie walked to the head gate. Turning the weir, she moved water from the Kensler canal into their neighbor Canfield’s ditch. In the depth of night, the two dug a five-foot-deep grave for John in the water-soaked soil. Into the damp grave they threw John’s body. Returning to the bedroom, they cleaned away splattered blood and brains.

Josie buried the canvas used to clean the room next to a nearby creek, then drove the team of horses and wagon away from the ranch and abandoned them.25

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At supper John talked of selling the ranch.

Josie became defensive, stating she would not sign any such agreement. Tempers flared. John slapped Josie across the facing, knocking her against the wall and calling her a name. Josie retorted, “John, you will be sorry for that. That is the last time you will ever strike me.” After eating, John and Freel danced and sang in the kitchen. They talked of fighting, but Freel suggested they fight in the future with guns.24

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In the morning, Canfield ranch hands found water mysteriously running into their fields.

With the growing season over, they had stopped irrigating weeks earlier. Then Freel showed up talking excitedly about John missing. John’s horses were found with their reins tangled in an irrigation hub, wagon parts strewn across the field. A search party formed, focusing on a possible drowning in the Snake River. To raise

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the body, lighted dynamite was thrown into the river.26

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Weeks passed. An indignation meeting held at the Glenns Ferry opera house in the fall of 1896 attracted the whole town. Josie’s history of leaving John with the children for months, engaging in extramarital affairs, and living with Freel since the disappearance of John caused the townspeople to suspect foul play. This was significant: because “Mrs. Kensler had a bad reputation” (as one writer put it decades later), a reputation for sexual laxity, her neighbors believed that she might also be involved in her husband’s murder—although the one did not equal the other. People donated money to organize a committee of five. When a citizen remembered Freel purchasing a large quantity of strychnine a few days prior to John’s disappearance, District Attorney John C. Rogers and Attorney A. M. Sinnott arrested the pair, charging them with murder by poisoning. A five-hundred-dollar bail bond was placed on each. Josie posted bail. Freel did not.27 Deep snow in mid-November sent the search parties home. But the mystery did not grow dim in the minds of constables John Smith of Glenns Ferry and Sigel Morell of Soldier, Idaho.

They kept jawing over water being turned into the Canfield irrigation ditch, then back into the Kensler ditch the day after John’s disappearance. With a new theory, the two rustled up a six-foot steel rod with a barbed point. They intended to probe the entire bottom of the Kensler irrigation ditch.

Heading to the Kensler ranch on a late December day in 1896, Smith and Morell started at the head gate, pushing the entire length of the steel rod into the ditch bottom every few feet.

Within about sixty feet of the Kensler front door, they found a section of unusually soft dirt.

They pushed the rod in about five feet, and the point hit something that was different from all other probes. When they pulled up the rod, a shred of cloth was caught in a barb.

The next morning, December 23, 1896, acting coroner James Mullany rode to the Kensler ranch with a group of men and shovels.

Josie’s father was among the party. The men began digging in the soft dirt Smith and Morell had found. John’s body was soon uncovered.

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Wrapped in a quilt, he wore only an undershirt and drawers. Under John were his hat, vest, shoes, overalls, hose, several pocket items, and his gun. Above his right ear was a small hole.

Almost the entire left side of his skull was either gone or crushed. The only intact bone was the left jaw. His head also showed evidence of hard blows by a heavy, blunt instrument. The search for more evidence began. A few days later the search party unearthed the canvas sheet, thickly coated with blood and brain matter. In the Kensler home, a bullet hole was discovered in the wall between the headboard and the adjacent room. This had been covered with wallpaper. To disguise a bullet hole, it was also noted that the headboard of the couple’s bed had been removed, whittled, and put back in place again.28 A coroner’s jury dropped the charge of murder by poisoning. Murder of John Kensler by shooting was the new charge against Josie Kensler and Alfred Freel. Both were arrested, and Judge Sinnott ordered the two jailed with no bail.29 At ten o’clock on April 29, 1897, in Mountain Home, Idaho, Kensler and Freel pleaded not guilty to the murder of John Kensler before a courtroom packed with the curious. There were two spotlights. First, Kensler’s nine-yearold daughter Myrtle, who had been living with her Aunt Eva in Ogden, testified about the murder of her father. She recalled hearing a gun go off in the house, then smelling the burned powder. As Josie and Freel scurried around the house and yard, Myrtle followed them to the ditch, until her mother instructed her to return to bed.30 The second spotlight shone on Kensler herself, who was noted to be “in a delicate situation and . . . in a short time to again become a mother.”31 After a one-week trial for each defendant, Freel was deemed guilty of first-degree murder. He would hang.32 Kensler was found guilty of murder in the second degree, and sentenced to spend the rest of her life in prison.33 Finding jurors for Kensler had proved challenging.

One opposed the death penalty for women because he was a “respecter of sex in such matters.” Another stated he did not believe in the death penalty. In closing remarks, prosecuting attorneys for the state implored the jury to not

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Kensler’s place in contemporary conversation can be gathered from an advertisement in a regional newspaper. Her name became associated with Dr. McLaughlin’s Belt sold in Butte, Montana. A six-by-four-inch advertisement stated, “God Bless the Inventor! So writes Mrs. Josie Kensler, of Boise, Idaho.” Dr. M. A. McLaughlin touted his “new method of applying electricity is especially suited to women’s pains. . . . My new method absolutely cures those nervous and painful ailments so incident to the female system.”38 The McLaughlin’s Belt

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But the woman was rather good looking, and she was educated and had friends to surround her at the trial, while Freel, the poor, homeless, friendless and penniless farm boy, was sacrificed as an excuse to let the more guilty woman off with a lighter sentence. Nobody who has read the

The editorial writer was apparently arguing that Kensler was a crafty, conniving woman had stepped outside societal expectations and beguiled Freel into doing the dirty work of killing her abusive husband. Although the facts of the case seem prove otherwise, the Tribune suggested that Kensler had manipulated Freel, making her just as guilty of the murder.37

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The initial newspaper headlines and articles portrayed Kensler fairly, merely stating facts, although they did mention her extramarital affairs. Otherwise, the reporting was objective. But true sentiments boiled to the surface in a Salt Lake Tribune editorial. “It is true Mrs. Kensler was a woman, and she was pregnant at her trial—these two facts constituted the only difference between her case and Freel’s,” opined the editorial writer.

evidence closely in this case can help but see the manifest injustice done in making such an invidious distinction between the two cases.36

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take gender into consider.34 A few days after the trial, a technicality surfaced. Court documents never identified the county or state in which the murder had occurred. After a second trial, both were found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to prison for life.35

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Alfred Freel and Josie Kensler, who entered the Idaho State Penitentiary on May 29, 1897, facing life sentences. Idaho State Historical Society, no. 565.

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advertisement tells us at least two things. First, Kensler had become a public woman, whose name was recognized and whose reputation was sufficiently sullied to be connected to feminine hygiene. Second, grasping for reasons a woman would murder her husband, the advertisement insinuated that Kensler’s monthly menstrual cycle had provoked the deed. Here was an idea with a long pedigree: that women, influenced by the supposed instability of their bodies, might let their emotions spill over into so-called hysteria.

While Kensler’s trial appeared reasonably fair, and newspapers avoided painting a picture of the gentle sex gone bad, that changed as Kensler walked through the gray stone archway at Boise’s Idaho State Penitentiary. Because infrastructure and expectations existed for male convicts, Freel could enter the penitentiary world simply by having lunch with the other prisoners. Kensler, on the other hand, was the first woman to enter the penitentiary in two years. She ate her midday meal with the warden’s family. No cells were designated for women convicts, so the officers’ barbershop was repurposed with a new bed, mattress, and pillows. A matron would be hired to provide for her care. Kensler offered to cook and claimed to be an excellent washer. The warden was “favorably impressed” with Kensler, stating she would not be troublesome and would “submit to the penalty for her misdeeds with fairly good grace.”39 Three months later—and nine months after John Kensler had been murdered—Josie Kensler gave birth to Gladys, the first baby born at the Idaho State Penitentiary.

Kensler’s entrance into the penitentiary, and her incarceration altogether, matched broad patterns in nineteenth-century America. Prison officials did not know how to deal with female prisoners and, in fact, considered them a problem. What’s more, the difficulties of her life generally matched those of other incarcerated women. Kensler’s time in the witness chair suggested that her husband abused her. However, women with violent partners had little social support, and economics and children kept them strapped to a brutal home life. Women in prison who had killed a man had usually murdered their intimate partner. In Denver between 1881 and 1917, thirty-nine women were charged with

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murder. Twenty-seven of them had killed their husband or male companion. The remainder had killed a neighbor, son-in-law, brothel client, or a client seeking an abortion.40 Nevertheless, women in prison bewildered Americans in the nineteenth century. Females, some believed, could not be held responsible for murder because they didn’t have the intellectual capacity to plot such a crime. Rather than be tried for murder, women were often called crazy rather than manipulative.41 Rigid expectations of conduct for women (if not their actual experience) relegated them to motherhood and domestic chores. Phrases like “fair sex,” “sweet angel,” and “gentle tamers” reinforced these ideals. These ideas of normal versus criminal females were widespread during Kensler’s years. Cesare Lombroso—the influential, if now discredited, Italian criminologist— described noncriminal women as “neutralized by piety, maternity, want of passion, sexual coldness, weakness, and an undeveloped intelligence.” In comparison, he characterized women criminals as overgrown children, with countless evil tendencies.42 In Lombroso’s view, a female criminal was doubly exceptional—first a women, then a criminal—and that double exception made her a “monster.”43 These ideas permeated the criminal system for fifty years, making women seem like an unimportant, even dangerous, segment of the prison population that was unworthy of limited funds.

Some social activists asked for reforms, such as censuses to determine the number of women incarcerated with men in county jails. Prison authorities pushed back, arguing that women criminals were deranged violators of ideal womanhood and their fate was of no concern to society.44 Women were rarely noted in annual prison counts. Some institutions resolved the burden of women prisoners by shipping them to neighboring states and territories.

Prison managers in the nineteenth century agreed that idle hands would become the devil’s workshop. Work was the solution. To reform inmates, each learned or honed a trade. In Idaho, male prisoners labored at the three Table Rock quarries east of the penitentiary, which provided the building materials for the prison and beyond. Many prominent homes and

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Female prisoners throughout the United States had similar work experiences. A combination of low numbers and the difficulty controlling sexual activity—whether consensual or forced—prevented incarcerated women from learning skills, earning wages, or advancing in education. Besides handiwork and chores at the warden’s home, Kensler was noted to have two other pastimes: keeping pets and flirting with inmates. Kensler was confined with more than one hundred men, and the warden and guards found it difficult to control talk between the genders. She would stand at the window of her second-floor cell and chat up male prisoners in the yard below. As punishment, shades were installed that covered her cell window. On another occasion, prison officials took Kensler’s pets away because of her flirtations.49 Similar interactions were noted at a New Mexico prison during the early twentieth century.

Inmates went to the dark cell for delivering illicit mail to and from women. Waving and making faces at women prisoners earned men confinement to their cells. Laughing and making motions toward females during chapel

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So it stunned Dunton when Kensler announced she was three months pregnant. Dunton contacted prison physician Dr. Jessie K. Dubois on or about July 1, 1902, to request a physical examination of Kensler. He wanted to know if she was telling the truth. For more than a month, Dunton harangued Dubois and the board of pardon members to conduct a physical exam on Kensler to determine if she was pregnant.

Governor Hunt made the final call: an examination was not necessary. The matter should be allowed to rest. On July 15, 1902, Kensler appeared before the board. On the back of the envelope containing the papers in her case there was one word: “Refused.” This decision meant Kensler could no longer appeal her case until a new governor was elected and a new board of commissioners appointed.51

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Kensler served her time relatively quietly until June 1902, when Boise Attorney H. W. Dunton began preparing her pardon application. Dunton expected the usual formalities. Standing before the Board of Pardons—composed of Idaho Governor Frank W. Hunt, Secretary of State C. J. Bassett, and Attorney General Frank Martin—Dunton was prepared to describe Kensler’s conduct in prison over the past five years, introduce any new evidence from her murder conviction, and then wait for the board to determine her fate, hopefully an early release.

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Finding work for Kensler proved more challenging. During the years she served time, twelve other women entered and left the prison. Women prisoners performed domestic duties for the warden and his family. A garden tended by female inmates provided food for the warden’s table. While in prison, Kensler became known throughout the Boise area for her expert handiwork. Since women prisoners “were not obliged to engage in any manual labor, [Kensler] spent most of her time doing fine needlework.”47 Women’s handiwork at the prison in the early twentieth century included clothing, quilts, embroidered curtains, baby and children’s clothes, braided rugs, towels, leather and snakeskin belts, bags, dolls, doll clothes, stuffed animals, toys, pillowcases, bookmarks, and knitted or crocheted goods.48

service resulted in being chained to a cell door for five days. Women cut holes in screens to pass out locks of their hair, and in return accepted tobacco, paper, and pencils. Idleness, which intensified the sexual atmosphere, and the fact that many female inmates were incarcerated for prostitution, combined to create a situation in which many wardens and contractors allowed the physical gratification of men to become the defining work of women prisoners.50 Possibly, this explains the next chapter in Josie Kensler’s life.

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buildings, including the Boise Soldier’s Home, were built from blocks quarried near the prison by prisoners.45 Male prisoners in Idaho also raised vegetables, fruit, and livestock feed; they dug canals and improved springs. In the blacksmith and carpenter shops, inmates made furniture and even built their own cells.46

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Three or four days after the pardon board shot down Kensler’s application, Martin saw Dubois on the street. He asked the doctor’s opinion of Kensler’s claim. The two talked about a physical examination, with Dubois stating he thought she would agree. Then Martin left town for a couple weeks, traveling to the northern part of Idaho on business. Upon returning

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Governor Frank W. Hunt of Idaho who, in 1902, decided that the matter of Josie Kensler’s pregnancy should be allowed to rest. Idaho State Historical Society, no. 449.

Jesse K. Dubois, physician at the Idaho State Penitentiary. Dubois came from a prominent political family and was the brother of Senator Fred T. Dubois. Idaho State Historical Society, no. 1148-11.

to Boise, work kept him occupied, and he didn’t think of Kensler until he heard she was sick.52

That a few hours afterwards on the same day the medicine was brought

by Mr. Chinn, one of the guards at the prison. I took the medicine as directed by said physician for three or four days, and that it produced an abortion on July 22, 1902, and that at time said abortion was produced I had been with child about four months.

On August 28, Martin bumped into Dunton on the street. Conversation shifted to Kensler and her mysterious illness. Both agreed to meet at the Idaho State Penitentiary for an interview. It was then Kensler told of prison officials forcing her into an abortion, an illegal procedure in most of the United States around the turn of the century. She agreed to sign an affidavit stating such.53 Josie Kensler wrote: I am a prisoner confined in the state penitentiary of the state of Idaho, undergoing a life sentence; aged 30 years, and I was in a pregnant condition, and on or about July 17, 1902, I disclosed my condition to C. E. Arney, warden of the state penitentiary, and that about that time I was visited by Dr. Dubois, prison physician, and advised by him to get rid of it, and that he would furnish her the medicine which would accomplish a miscarriage.

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That said physician informed affiant that no one knew of the abortion but himself and warden and two others.54 Up to 1840 in England and the United States, abortion was permitted prior to quickening, the moment in pregnancy when a woman starts to feel or perceive fetal movement. The common belief was that a fetus did not have a soul prior to quickening. From 1860 to 1900, states passed more than forty anti-abortion laws.

When Idaho became a territory in 1864, abortion was considered a crime for both the provider and the woman seeking the abortion. The Comstock Law of 1873, passed by the United

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The irony of Josie’s forced abortion is that she served time with Dr. R. J. Alcorn, who was convicted of manslaughter in 1899 after a pregnant woman died when he performed an abortion on her. He was a prisoner at the Idaho State Penitentiary when Kensler’s abortion was performed, and some prison officials spread rumors that Alcorn had actually performed the illegal act. This proved to be mere gossip.58 Some speculated that Kensler might have encouraged a pregnancy as a possible path to freedom. Pregnancy got Pearl Heart released from the Yuma, Arizona, penitentiary in 1902. When she forcefully announced her intention to implicate prison personal, she suddenly found herself walking out the penitentiary doors.59 Instead of being shown the door, Kensler found herself on the witness stand again in September 1902 for a preliminary examination regarding pregnancy and abortion that involved Warden Charles Arney and Jesse Dubois. The “morbidly curious” filled the courtroom, wrote the Salt Lake Herald correspondent. Kensler walked into the courtroom with a guard and “was given a good seat,” the correspondent continued.

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When Kensler answered questions on the witness stand, the story suddenly changed. Dunton and Martin had forced her to sign the first affidavit about the pregnancy and miscarriage, she claimed. A second affidavit she made with Arney revealed the truth. There was no pregnancy. There was no abortion, she vehemently stated. Arney and Dubois were eventually exonerated. Yet time would prove that the first affidavit was actually the truth and that Kensler had been encouraged to write the second affidavit to earn her release from prison.62 It wasn’t until John T. Morrison became governor in January 1903 that the real story emerged.

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Prison turnkey Charles Chinn took the stand first. He recalled a conversation with Arney about prisoner Alfred Roberts possibly being responsible for Kensler’s pregnancy. Roberts, a piano teacher who was convicted of passing a fictitious check, served as waiter and steward at the warden’s home. Kensler also worked at the warden’s house, although she was often with the warden’s wife. Chinn then outlined events around July 17, recalling a small pasteboard box he took to Kensler’s cell. Five days later Dubois was summoned to the prison.

Kensler had experienced a miscarriage, and a three- to four-month-old female fetus was lying on her bed. The doctor examined Kensler, claimed everything was fine, and talked of her being pardoned by the autumn.61

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While birth control laws were rigid, enforcement was lax. This held true for abortion laws as well. In 1887, the Idaho Territorial Legislature passed a law classifying abortion as a felony with prison sentences up to five years.56 With few changes, this was Idaho’s abortion law until the 1973 United States Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision. Nevertheless, a number of homemade and commercial methods of birth control existed throughout the nineteenth century. As for abortion, by the early twentieth century, the preferred method was by instrumental means—knitting needles, crochet hooks, hairpins, scissors, button hooks, a bone stay out of a corset, a chicken feather. Poisons were less common because they could more easily kill the pregnant woman; still, women used them. Pharmacists of the time offered products such as Chichester’s Diamond Brand Pills, pennyroyal pills, and tansy and pennyroyal compound pills.57

“She met the gaze of the men in the audience unflinchingly.”60

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States Congress, reinforced the idea that contraception and abortion services were obscene and illicit. Violators faced a maximum of five years in prison, a $2,000 fine or both.55

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Morrison had barely heated the governor’s seat when he ordered an Idaho legislative committee to reopen the Kensler abortion investigation. On the witness stand, a reporter described Kensler as a sad-faced woman who was a “shadow of her former self.”63 Kensler recalled that around July 17, 1902, she had told Arney about the pregnancy. He asked about her intent. She was unsure. Soon afterward, Dubois visited her cell and told her to get rid of the child. He gave her medicine, which she took. On July 22, being five months pregnant, she had an abortion. The day before the preliminary hearing, Arney called her into his office. He handed her an affidavit stating there was no pregnancy or abortion. Sign it, or you will be buried at the prison, Arney essentially told her. If she signed

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it, however, by November she would be free— and so Kensler signed the affidavit.64

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Kensler told the committee that a prison official was responsible for her pregnancy. Although refusing to divulge his name, she said that for two-and-a-half years the official pestered her for sexual favors. Once she gave in, he visited her cell often. She wept over the fact that he had never been charged and all others involved in the scandal remained free, while she remained in prison.65 The committee’s investigation did not free Kensler from prison. Nor did it result in the conviction of Arney or Dubois. But it did create change. The Idaho State Penitentiary needed a women’s ward immediately. In 1905, Kensler and other female prisoners walked into the state’s first women’s ward. “Experiences of past administrations had shown that it was absolutely necessary to isolate the female prisoners,” wrote Warden E. L. Whitney. Outside the hulking penitentiary, a new wall now surrounded the warden’s former home, which became the female inmates’ kitchen, dining room, and bathroom. Prisoners erected an attached

stone building with cells. Women prisoners washed their own laundry, cooked, and made shirts for their male counterparts in their first prison home.66 Four years later, on December 1, 1909, Kensler walked out of the prison gates. She stayed in Boise, living with her daughters Myrtle and Gladys and working as a seamstress.67 Kensler married Andrew Renwick Ketchum in March 1912, but the relationship was short and contentious.68 After divorcing Ketchum, she married her prison sweetheart, William Howard Thomas, a Welsh miner who had served time for manslaughter, intent to commit murder, and a prison escape.69 At the age of forty-two, Kensler gave birth to their son, William Edward Thomas. In 1918, her husband died in the great influenza pandemic. Josie lived until the age of sixty-six, when she died from a stroke.

She is buried in the Bozeman, Montana, Sunset Hills Cemetery.70 Kensler’s life was sensational, complex, and titillating, yet heartrending at the same time.

The tale forces us to look at gender inequality, especially in light of the current #MeToo

William Howard Thomas (left), a Welsh miner who served two times in the Idaho State Penitentiary.

Josie Kensler (right), upon her release from prison in 1909. The couple married in the 1910s and had one child together. Idaho State Historical Society, nos. AR42-1367 and 77-2-38.

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1. Josie Kensler convict file, inmate no. 565, box 1002.2-2, Accession no. 20072420, Collection AR 42, Idaho State Archives, Boise, Idaho (hereafter ISA).

2. 1850 United States Federal Census, North Bloomfield, Morrow, Ohio, roll 716, page 409A, digital image, Miles C. Lawrence; Iowa, State Census Collection, 1836–1925, s.v. “Miles C. Lawrence”; Iowa, Select Marriages Index, 1758–1996, s.v. “Lydia Shirts,” all accessed September 3, 2020, ancestry.com.

3. 1870 United States Federal Census, East Weber, Weber, Utah Territory, roll M593_1613, page 419B, digital image, Miles Lawrence, accessed September 3, 2020, ancestry.com.

4. Richard C. Roberts and Richard W. Sadler, A History of Weber County (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society and Weber County Commission, 1997), 111.

5. 1880 United States Federal Census, Uintah, Weber, Utah, roll 1339, page 540D, enumeration district 104, digital image, Miles Lawrence, accessed September 8, 2020, ancestry.com.

6. 1880 United States Federal Census, Miles Lawrence; Western States Marriage Index, 1809–2016, s.v. “Eva Lawrence,” marriage ID 197874, both accessed September 8, 2020, ancestry.com.

7. Idaho, Birth Index, 1861–1918, Stillbirth Index, 1905– 1968, s.v. “Claraman Lydia Lawrence,” July 16, 1888, birth certificate no. 00426109, accessed September 11, 2020, ancestry.com.

8. Idaho, Marriage Records, 1863–1968, s.v. “John Kenzler,” accessed August 12, 2020, ancestry.com.

9. Rosemary L. Wimberly, “‘She Should Be Made an Example Of’: Gender, Politics, and Criminal Abortion in Idaho, 1864–1973” (master’s thesis, Boise State University, 1996).

10. See U.S. Census Bureau, Annual Social and Economic Supplement: 2003 Current Population Survey, Current Population Reports, Series P20-553, “America’s Families and Living Arrangements: 2003,” as well as earlier reports.

11. 1850 United States Federal Census, Rochester, Fulton, Indiana, roll 146, page 424a, digital image, John L. Kensler, accessed December 15, 2020, ancestry.com.

12. U.S., Civil War Soldier Records and Profiles, 1861–1865, s.v. “John Kensler,” accessed August 12, 2020, ancestry .com.

13. Wimberly, “Gender, Politics, and Criminal Abortion”; Olive de Ette Jenson Groefsema, Elmore County: Its Historical Gleanings, a Collection of Pioneer Narratives, Treasured Family Pictures, and Early Clippings

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about the Settling of Elmore County, Idaho (Mountain Home, ID: Caxton, 1949), 379. Kay Schooler, a relative of the Kensler family who lived in Ogden, Utah, said John Kensler was one of the early ranchers along King Hill Creek, Idaho. After moving there in 1865, he managed the stage station. Evan Filby, an Idaho Falls, Idaho, historian who has assembled a massive index of stagecoach stations and managers, states he has no record of a John Kensler operating the King Hill Creek station. Wimberly, “Gender, Politics, and Criminal Abortion.”

14. “They’re Up for Life,” Anaconda (MT) Standard, June 4, 1897, 7.

15. “They’re Up for Life,” 7.

16. “Kensler Evidence All In,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 6, 1897, 7.

17. “Alfred Freel on Trial Again,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 21, 1897, 7.

18. “Kensler Evidence All In,” 7.

19. “The Josie Kensler Trial,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 10, 1897, 7.

20. “Confession by Freel,” (Boise) Idaho Statesman, June 6, 1897, 4.

21. “Alfred Freel on Trial Again,” 7.

22. “Kensler Evidence All In,” 7.

23. “Confession by Freel,” 4; “Alfred Freel Confesses,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 7, 1897, 5.

24. “To Decide Freel’s Fate,” (Boise) Idaho Daily Statesman, May 6, 1897, 1.

25. “Confession by Freel,” 4; George M. Payne, “Payne’s History of Elmore County,” Mountain Home (ID) Republican, July 23, 1921, 4.

26. Payne, “Payne’s History of Elmore County,” 4.

27. Payne, “Payne’s History of Elmore County,” 4.

28. “Evidence against Freel,” (Boise) Idaho Statesman, May 3, 1897, 4.

29. Olive Groefsema, Elmore County Its Historical Gleanings (Caxton Printers, 1949) 60.

30. “To Decide Freel’s Fate,” 1.

31. “The Murder of John Kensler,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 1, 1897, 7.

32. “Albert Freel Convicted,” (Boise) Idaho Daily Statesman, May 7, 1897, 1.

33. “The Josie Kensler Trial,” 7.

34. “The Trial of Josie Kensler,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 8, 1897, 7.

35. “Freel Will Not Hang,” (Boise) Idaho Statesman, May 24, 1897, 1; Idaho, U.S., Old Penitentiary Prison Records, 1882–1961, s.v. “Alfred Rosencrans” and “Mrs. Josie Kensler,” digital images, accessed December 14, 2020, ancestry.com.

36. “Idaho Criminal Trials,” Salt Lake Tribune, May 17, 1897, 7.

37. The editorialist was correct that Kensler had enjoyed more education than Freel—but not much. He apparently had not attended any school and was illiterate, while she had attended school for five years and could both read and write. Idaho, U.S., Old Penitentiary Prison Records, 1882–1961, s.v. “Alfred Rosencrans” and “Mrs. Josie Kensler.”

38. “God Bless the Inventor,” Anaconda (MT) Standard, November 28, 1899, advertisement.

39. “Installed in the Pen,” (Boise) Idaho Daily Statesman, May 30, 1897, 1.

40. Anne M. Butler, Gendered Justice in the American West: Women Prisoners in Men’s Penitentiaries (Ur-

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movement, and question if much has changed.

Her history encourages us to cheer for women’s prisons and the more humane treatment of the incarcerated. But there is so much more progress to be made. All women need a safe home, free from violence. All women need a society where they are recognized as equal and important. Kensler’s life was a barometer—it gives us a glimpse into the past and should cause us reflect on the work that is still necessary around the world for women’s rights.

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bana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 127; L. Mara Dodge, “‘One Female Prisoner Is of More Trouble than Twenty Males’: Women Convicts in Illinois Prisons, 1835–1896,” Journal of Social History 32, no. 4 (1999): 907–930.

41. Amy Vecchione, “Notable and Notorious Idaho Women: An Annotated Bibliography,” Idaho Librarian, May 17, 2013, accessed July 7, 2020, theidaholibrarian .wordpress.com.

42. Butler, Gendered Justice, 28.

43. Cesare Lombroso and William Ferrero, The Female Offender (1900; repr. New York: Philosophical Library, 1958), 112, 147.

44. Butler, Gendered Justice, 32.

45. Ada County Centennial Committee, Table Rock Quarries placard, Boise River Greenbelt Historical Education Project, 1990, Boise, Idaho.

46. Amber Beierle, Ashley Phillips, and Hanako Wakatsuki, Old Idaho Penitentiary (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2014); John Hailey, Report of Warden of the Idaho State Penitentiary for the Fiscal Year Ending November 30, 1900 (Boise, ID: Capital Printing Office).

47. “Liberate from Prison,” (Boise) Idaho Daily Statesman, December 2, 1909, 1.

48. Rosemary Wimberly, “Secrecy, Silence and Shame: Sex, Adultery and Abortion Crimes of Idaho Women Prisoners, 1900 to 1960” (slide presentation, “Doin’ Time: Women in Prison Past and Present,” Boise State University symposium, Boise, Idaho, March 1994).

49. Wimberly, “Secrecy, Silence and Shame”; Beierle, et al., Old Idaho Penitentiary.

50. Butler, Gendered Justice, 216, 182.

51. “State Board of Pardons Closes July Meet Up,” (Boise) Idaho Daily Statesman, July 19, 1902; for background on Dubois, see “Dr. Jesse K. Dubois Dies at Boise, Ida.” Herald and Review (Decatur, IL), November 1, 1908, 1.

52. “Sensation at the Penitentiary,” (Boise) Idaho Statesman, September 3, 1902, 1.

53. “Sensation at the Penitentiary,” 1.

54. “Hearing in Penitentiary Case,” (Boise) Idaho Daily Statesman, September 12, 1902, 5. The affidavit was signed by Josie Kensler and H. W. Dunton.

55. Wimberly, “‘She Should Be Made an Example Of.’” 56. Wimberly, “‘She Should Be Made an Example Of’”; see also, Penal Code of State of Idaho, 1901 (Boise: Capital News Printing, 1901), 64, 70, 316.

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57. Leslie J. Reagan, When Abortion was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867–1973 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Amanda Hendrix-Komoto “The Other Crime: Abortion and Contraception in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Utah,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 53, no. 1 (2020): 33–45.

58. Wimberly, “‘She Should Be Made an Example Of.’” 59. Butler, Gendered Justice, 212.

60. “Hearing in Penitentiary Case,” 5.

61. “Hearing in Penitentiary Case,” 5.

62. (Boise) Idaho Daily Statesman, September 12, 13, 23, November 23, 1902.

63. “Democratic Discrepancy,” Teton Peak-Chronicle (St. Anthony, ID), March 12, 1903, 2.

64. “Mrs. Kensler Tells Her Story to Committee,” (Boise) Idaho Daily Statesman, February 25, 1903.

65. “Mrs. Kensler Tells Her Story to Committee”; “Democratic Discrepancy,” 2.

66. E. L. Whitney, Biennial Report of the Idaho State Penitentiary for the Fiscal Years 1905 and 1906 ([Boise]: Warden, Idaho State Penitentiary, 1906).

67. “Idaho State News,” Montpelier (ID) Examiner, December 24, 1909, 6; 1910 United States Federal Census, Boise, Ada, Idaho, roll T624_221, page 4B, enumeration district 0007, digital image, Joan Kensler, accessed December 15, 2020, ancestry.com.

68. (Boise) Idaho Daily Statesman, July 13, 17, October 19, 24, November 23, 1913.

69. William I. Thomas, convict file, inmate no. 1367, box 1007.5-5, Accession no. 20072414, Collection AR 42, ISA; 1900 United States Federal Census, Boise Ward 1, Ada, Idaho, page 14, enumeration district 0001, digital image, William H. Thomas, accessed December 15, 2020, ancestry.com.

70. California, U.S., Death Index, 1940–1997, s.v. “William Edward Thomas,” birth date August 1, 1914; 1930 United States Federal Census, Lost Creek, Garden, Nebraska, page 11A, enumeration district 0008, digital image, Joanne Thomas; Montana, U.S., State Deaths, 1907–2016, s.v. “Joan Thomas,” death certificate, August 17, 1938; U.S., Find A Grave Index, 1600s–Current, s.v. “Joan J. Thomas,” death date August 17, 1938, all accessed December 15, 2020, ancestry.com.

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R E V I S I T I N G T H E P E O P L E S O F U TA H : CA L L F O R PA P E R S

Possible topics include, but are not limited to: • Groups whose numbers have increased in Utah in the past fifty years (e.g., Latinx, Asians, African Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Africans)

• Migrants and refugees of war, poverty, and violence

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• Push and pull forces

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• Reception of new groups (e.g., services, anti-immigrant sentiment)

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• LGBTQ+ Utahns

• Distinctive communities (e.g., religious or avocational) • Folk traditions and foodways

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• Law (e.g., effects of the Hart-Cellar Act)

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This project will be born digital, in the form of a major website; a companion hard-copy publication might also occur. We are seeking short articles (3,000–7,000 words) based on original research in history and related fields, including geography, archaeology, historic preservation, sociology, folklore, demography, and law.

• Native Americans [e.g., communities (urban, rural, reservations), change, resilience, rights]

• Rural, urban, and suburban communities Articles should be written in a scholarly but accessible style: thoroughly researched and cited but written for a general audience. We will consider the work of scholars, students, and the public.

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In anticipation of the 250th anniversary of 1776, the Utah State Historical Society is revisiting The Peoples of Utah, published in 1976.

The original Peoples of Utah, which surveyed a number of racial and ethnic communities in the state, has become a foundational resource in Utah history. Our new project specifically seeks to build on and expand the focus of the original and, in so doing, broaden the scope and inclusivity of Utah history. What does it mean to be a Utahn? What major forces have shaped Utah’s population growth and development— especially in the past 100 years?

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Other forms of presenting data may also be submitted, such as maps, lesson plans, videos, or charts. Prospective authors should send a brief proposal to uhq@utah.gov by June 1, 2021.

This image from the original Peoples of Utah collection depicts a group of Mexican American children gathered in Salt Lake City’s Westside. Utah State Historical Society, C-239, no. 4, box 6.

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P U B L I C H E A LT H A N D T H E C O M M O N G O O D

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The focus of the sixty-ninth annual conference of the Utah State Historical Society will be “Public Health and the Common Good.” The conference will be held virtually on September 20–24, 2021.

For more than a year, a deadly pandemic has gripped Utah and the world. At this writing, 460,000 Americans have died from COVID-19; the worldwide toll of the disease is now 2.3 million. These sobering numbers alone do not explain the cost of the pandemic to individuals and communities. In recognition of the disruption of the past year, the 2021 conference will focus on public health. Beyond health outcomes, this theme also raises questions and assumptions about our medical, psychological, and religious understanding of bodily wellness; health-related policies and practices; racial, gender, and

class inequalities; our democratic and political systems; and impacts on social cohesion.

Integral to public health is the idea of the common good, a concept with deep philosophical and religious roots that is often dismissed or considered antithetical to a society organized around the individual. Yet in the age of COVID-19, the relationship of the individual to the body politic (and vice versa) seems to be a renewed conversation in the making.

In preparation for the conference, we offer images of public health efforts from some seventy years ago. During the 1940s and 1950s, the Salt Lake Tribune photographed a number of events intended to mitigate or eradicate the polio virus.

Today, these images reside in the collections of the historical society and may be viewed online.

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A scene associated with the January 1945 Tribune-Telegram boxing show for polio relief. Publicity for the event, featuring another lad, reminded readers that one of the best reasons to attend was “this little feller.” Photograph no.

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A shot from the 1945 boxing event. The athlete is likely Private Norman Horton; note “Hill Field” on his shorts. Photograph no. 1344.2

From a 1956 polio benefit fashion show that was emceed by the radio star Curt Massey. Photograph no.

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A publicity shot for a polio relief ball, January 29, 1946. That winter, the organizers of a gala in Salt Lake City asked attendees to “give from the heart” for children afflicted by the disease. Photograph no. 10397.4

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January 28, 1953. The child is probably Lillian Jean Kirschvink, who used a leg brace to walk after a fight with polio. Photograph no. 22194.5

Wayne and Lila Jenkins, with their daughters, in October 1956. Lila contracted polio at five months pregnant and gave birth while in an iron lung.

Photograph no. 37927-3.6

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In the spring of 1954, blood samples were taken from children in Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado participating in vaccination field trials; Dr. Louis P. Gebhardt of the University of Utah then tested those samples. Perhaps this May 3, 1954, scene is related to that effort. Photograph no. 24259-5.7

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Notes 1. Salt Lake Telegram, January 24, 1945, 15.

2. “Tribune-Telegram Polio Ring Show Slated Jan. 30 at Fairgrounds,” Salt Lake Telegram, January 8, 1945, 11; “Field to Enter Contestants In Polio Fights,” Hillfielder, January 25, 1945, 5.

3. “Curt Massey Arrives in S.L.,” Deseret News, February 10, 1956, 8.

4. Joyce Evans, “Fashion Preview of Ball,” Deseret News, January 30, 1946, 11.

5. “It’s a Big Step,” Bingham (UT) Bulletin, January 18, 1952.

6. “Utahn Who Gave Birth In Iron Lung Dies at 57,” Deseret News, April 21, 1992.

7. “Blood Samples from 2,000 To Be Tested at ‘U,’” Provo (UT) Sunday Herald, May 2, 1954, 12-B; “U. Playing Role In Determining Polio Shot Value,” Deseret News, May 14, 1954, 30.

Families await their polio vaccinations, 1956 (top) and 1958 (bottom). Photograph nos. 36907, 45490.

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REVIEWS

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The Whites Want Every Thing: Indian-Mormon Relations, 1847– 1877. Vol. 16, Kingdom in the West: The Mormons and the American Frontier

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Edited by Will Bagley, with foreword by Floyd A. O’Neil Norman: Arthur H. Clark Company, 2019. 559 pp. Cloth, $55.00

The Whites Want Every Thing: Indian-Mormon Relations, 1847–1877 assembles primary sources on Mormon pioneers’ early relations with Utah’s Native American peoples, with particular emphasis on documents that report Native peoples’ own words. Despite the volume’s somewhat misleading title, most of the documents relate to the years 1847–1858. Summary treatment is given the years 1830–1847 and 1859–1877. Well organized and beautifully illustrated, this sixteenth volume of Arthur H. Clark’s Kingdom in the West series is somewhat marred by frequent typos and a cover that smears the reader’s fingers with green ink.

The editor Will Bagley has created no mere documentary sourcebook here. He weaves primary sources together with narrative framing.

Although Bagley’s ambition is to allow Native voices to speak, he knows that the sources collected in the volume are “white records of what whites said Indians said” and that to “recover” Native voices from these sources requires an interpretive act. Throughout the volume, his editorializing provides a counterweight to the editorializing of the sources’ authors. Yet he also acknowledges that in “presuming to speak for a people not my own,” he commits “an act of pious fraud” and pens a work of “colonial literature” (20, 25).

Many of the sources collected here will be familiar to Utah historians, but others may be new. A western historian of long experience, Bagley draws not only on Mormon pioneer documents, but also on anthropological studies,

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Spanish chronicles, federal government reports, and travel diaries from emigrants who passed through Utah on their way to Oregon and California. These often prove more fruitful than Mormon accounts, for where Mormons wrote as partisans for their settlement project, outsiders took a more critical view.

Where Mormon sources almost completely silenced dissident Native people’s voices, for example, federal Indian agents ruefully catalogued the dissidents’ grievances against Mormon settlers. “American good! Mormon no good!” the Ute leader Sowiet told Henry Day. In a perfect inversion of how Mormons portrayed Natives’ perceptions of the two white groups, Sowiet told Day that Americans were “friends,” but that Mormons “kill, steal” (191–92).

In characteristic fashion, Bagley engages in at least a little muckraking. For instance, citing evidence that Mormons poisoned Natives, he asserts that the “facts defy denial.” Said facts, however, show conclusively that Mormons contemplated the use of poison and that Natives believed it had been used, but not that any specific act of poisoning occurred (526).

Yet Bagley, always a sharp critic of Mormon leaders, also gives them some credit here. There was at least one “profound difference” between the way Latter-day Saint theology imagined Indians and the way the American literary canon did: the novelist James Fenimore Cooper’s “Indians were the last of a doomed race,” while Joseph Smith’s “Lamanites were a chosen people,” destined for survival (41–42). Smith’s successor Brigham Young may have talked of controlling and exterminating Native groups, but he also advised mercy and defensive strategies more often than his followers liked. “Historians who shift accountability for the brutality shown to Native peoples from leaders to followers have a point,” Bagley writes (524).

For all its aspiration to recover Native voices, Whites Want Every Thing is first and foremost a collection of documents about Mormon

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—Independent historian, Albuquerque, NM

One Voice Rising: The Life of Clifford Duncan

By Clifford Duncan, with Linda Sillitoe. Photographs by George R. Janacek Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2020. xxv + 260 pp.

Paper, $29.95

In One Voice Rising, Linda Sillitoe has given voice to Clifford Duncan, a significant cultural and spiritual leader of the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation in Utah. The book consists of a series of extensive, introspective—and often insightfully critical—interviews with Duncan, recorded by Linda Sillitoe during a series of long truck rides between Neola and Salt Lake City. As such, it is a valuable addition to the literature about the Ute people of Utah. However, One Voice Rising is neither a book of history (although Duncan talks about and critiques various historical events), nor an ethnographic study. However, it is an important addition to previously published studies because it presents especially extensive commentary and descriptions by a Ute about Ute history, traditions, and beliefs—with the occasional aside about inaccuracies published (in Duncan’s words) by “authorities.” Sillitoe and Duncan agreed at the outset that even though he would be talking about the Ute world, the

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Meanwhile, for the rest of us—the historian, ethnographer, and interested Indian and non-Indian reader—his words provide valuable insights into how one modern Ute successfully navigated the worlds in which he found himself. His reminiscences and reveries (and sometimes cynical critiques) about religion, spirituality, culture change, and tribal politics provide us with valuable perspectives and a glimpse into the mind of a man steeped in both of these often opposing worlds. We are also granted access into how he and his people view their history, including the theft of tribal land, the problems of tribal reorganization, issues of Termination and mixed-blood expulsion, the good and bad impacts of increased wealth, as well as tribal politics and the unintended consequences of assimilation (forced or otherwise). Through philosophizing and using metaphors, stories, and a touch of “Ind’in humor,” he reveals a uniquely Native view of the world seldom found elsewhere.

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His book would also be a memorial, recorded

by Duncan for his own Ute people. In sharing some of his deepest feelings about Ute traditions and his personal Indian spirituality, he hoped he could leave a compilation of memories and philosophical musings for a younger generation of Utes, most of whom were no longer interested in learning about, or being part of, traditional Ute culture. But he hoped that one day, when in their maturity they sought their roots, they would read his book and listen to his words. It would act as a “delayed message,” preserving the wisdom he had gained over decades of being a spiritual and cultural leader and a juggler of the old and the new. His words could “fill in the gaps” and lead a future generation toward a better life centered on the power of mind and spirit (xxi–xxii, 218–19).

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Individual Native leaders emerge in Bagley’s narrative not as romantic victims or cartoon villains but as full-bodied characters with the full range of personality traits. The Ute “king” Wakara, for instance, may have been a “ravenous gangland warlord,” but he was a charming one, just like Brigham Young (528).

purpose of the book was not to speak for the Ute Tribe, his Native American religion, other Ute healers, or Native Americans in general.

Instead, One Voice Rising would be an ethnobiography that represented the life and personal worldview of one Ute man struggling to live in, and make sense of, his bicultural world.

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pioneer conquest and colonization. Native voices are heard in the documentary record only rarely. Yet insofar as Bagley seeks to humanize Native people, he succeeds. He discusses Numic peoples’ lived experiences, subsistence practices, and religious beliefs without seeking to exoticize them. Through lively narrative, he familiarizes the unfamiliar. Whites and Natives struggled to comprehend each other’s languages, but “everyone understood cursing and swearing in broken English” (67).

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Duncan was well placed to provide these insights, for he had extensive experience in both worlds. During his life he had been many things: a bullied child, a saddle-bronc rider, an army

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veteran, a vocational student, and an artist. He had also acted as a tribal representative in national inauguration parades and Olympic ceremonies, and he had been a director of a tribal museum and an archaeological consultant. He was a Sun Dancer and Powwow dancer, a healer, a sweat lodge leader, a roadman in the Native American Church, a president of state and local chapters of his church, and a consultant to state legislators about the peyote sacrament.

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The book does have some drawbacks but none that detract from its overall value as a window into the traditional and modern worlds of the Ute people. The book is not organizationally linear; although Sillitoe tried to generally arrange the interviews by topics, they are interviews and move with the flow of Duncan’s thoughts. Each chapter is centered on a theme, but various threads of side issues often wind their way into the story, leading the reader along unexpected paths. Despite these minor distractions, the book remains a valuable addition to the body of literature about the Ute people of Utah who, until now, have primarily had their stories told and their religion and folklore explained—by non-Indians. With One Voice Rising, one man’s Ute voice can now be clearly heard.

Sondra G. Jones —Brigham Young University

Women Artists of the Great Basin

By Mary Lee Fulkerson and Susan E. Mantle Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2017. xii + 204. Cloth, $49.95

Artist Mary Lee Fulkerson and photographer Susan E. Mantle have produced a lavish book about thirty-two women artists who are inspired by the Great Basin, in which Utah holds a central place. Their work more than fulfills the promise of their aim: “to discover and communicate the rich stories of each artist’s individual journey and how their stories influenced the raw vitality of their art” (xii). This purpose is particularly weighty, because women artists— who create half of the art in the world—are so poorly represented in exhibitions, collections, and the pages of publications. Indeed, during the 1960s and 1970s, my mother was a portrait

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artist who left her first name—Marguerite—off her signature, signing instead with her maiden and married names: M. Eichorn Daly. She did this because of the deep prejudice against women artists. Today, a half-century later, women still struggle to gain the recognition they deserve, as feminist art scholars such as Linda Nochlin, Roszika Parker, and Alessandro Giardino, and feminist artists such as Judy Chicago have made clear. It is, therefore, inspiring that the artists Fulkerson and Mantle interview and photograph have broken the glass ceiling with their art.

These women work in a variety of media; some are familiar, such as stone, brass, paint, glass, and textiles, while others are less familiar, such as gourds, used tea bags and coffee filters, and Twinkies. Virtually all are described as energetic. The written descriptions and exceptional photography capture spirited moments of women in the midst of their art-making. These moments are fascinating as we gain a glimpse not only of them but of their studios and working spaces, filled with various materials, pens, paint brushes, hammers, welding torches, and a loom. In addition, Fulkerson and Mantle include photos of the artists’ finished work. But the working spaces are so crucial for artists because it is, as many artists reveal, the process not the product of one’s art that is the most satisfying. As the artist Rebekah Bogard stated, art is not about “the destination; it’s about the journey” (174).

In addition to their art work and art working, the authors provide a brief biography of each artist. These show that all the artists have weathered some sort of diversity, obstacle, and trauma: breast cancer, polio, abuse, divorce, and death among them. Growing up in times when women were offered limited opportunities as teachers, nurses, or mothers, each chose a different path—that of artist. On reflection, Fulkerson notes that “I have written this book to highlight women . . . who have walked through adversary to create art that changes our perceptions of the world because they do it their way” (128). This she accomplishes well.

These artists subvert the vertical, mainstream view of art versus craft through their materials, their subjects, and their renderings. Blurring the artificial line is currently applauded and

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The artist Gail Rappa speaks to the power of Women Artists of the Great Basin when she says, “I wish everyone who wants to would give themselves permission to create in some way” (117). This book gives that permission. And so, I will now put down my pen and pick up my yarn and crochet hook; I anticipate other readers will also feel so creatively inclined after finishing this fine work.

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are those who know their knowing. Aristotle continues, “it is a sign of the man [I’d add woman] who knows and of the man who does not know, that the former can teach, and therefore we think art more truly knowledge than experience is.” All the Great Basin artists here know their knowing and most went on to teach art.

—Arizona State University

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necessary, for the split between art and craft, fine art and applied art, high culture and low culture is a late eighteenth-century invention.

This western view was strengthened during the nineteenth century and cemented in the twentieth. Yet, as the applied arts scholar Peter Dormer has correctly observed in The Culture of Craft, “The consequences of this split have been quite startling. It has led to the separation of ‘having ideas’ from ‘making objects.’ It has also led to the idea that there exists some sort of mental attribute known as ‘creativity’ that precedes or can be divorced from a knowledge of how to make things” (18). Clearly, art contains both thinking and making as these Great Basin artists demonstrate. Thus, we should return to what Aristotle taught us in the Metaphysics about artists as those who are “wiser not in virtue of being able to act, but of having the theory for themselves and knowing the causes.” In other words, artists

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Spencer Kimball’s Record Collection: Essays on Mormon Music

American Prisoner of War Camps in Idaho and Utah

By Michael Hicks

By Kathy Kirkpatrick

Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2020. x + 232. Paper, $17.95

Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2018. 96 pp. Paper, $22.99

Michael Hicks, an emeritus professor of music, considers Spencer Kimball’s Record Collection to be the third volume in his trilogy of books documenting Latter-day Saint music. In his words, it covers musical topics, differing viewpoints, and “high-class gossip from artsy backrooms of Mormonism” (ix). An early chapter analyzes Joseph Smith Jr.’s favorite popular songs—or, in other words, what the contents would be of his nineteenth-century-style mixtape. The book covers LDS musical culture from the religion’s first days until the present: three chapters trace the history of LDS hymns, while “Elder Price Superstar” analyzes The Book of Mormon musical. Of particular interest to UHQ readers will be Hicks’s survey of the history of minstrelsy in Utah and in relation to Mormon culture.

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With American Prisoner of War Camps in Idaho and Utah, the genealogist Kathy Kirkpatrick provides an overview of the prisoner of war (POW) experience in Idaho and Utah during World War II. The narrative describes the everyday lives of prisoners, the role POWs played in supporting the local war effort, and the position of Italian prisoners following the fall of Mussolini in 1943. Kirkpatrick has illustrated this book generously (the photographs come primarily from Weber State University’s Stewart Library Special Collections), and she focuses on Italian prisoners housed in the Ogden area. The book provides an extensive bibliography, a list of POW camps in Utah and Idaho, and death and burial indexes. It will be most

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useful for readers seeking a starting point for research on individual prisoners or learning about this particular aspect of WWII history in the Intermountain West.

Life and Times of John Pierce Hawley: A Mormon Ulysses of the American West

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By Melvin C. Johnson

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Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2019. xvii + 210 pp.

Paper, $24.95

Melvin C. Johnson provides a thorough look at the life of John Pierce Hawley, an early Latter-day Saint convert, and his search for truth in Life and Times of John Pierce Hawley. Johnson traces Hawley’s journey through and among various sects of Mormonism, including the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints led

by Brigham Young, as well as other sects led

by Lyman Wight and James Strang. Hawley ultimately ended up joining and defending the reorganized church led by Joseph Smith III. Johnson’s research provides a complex picture of a man searching to find the truth among the Mormon diaspora and those vying to be recognized as Joseph Smith Jr.’s true successor. Although this is primarily a biography of Hawley, Johnson’s sympathetic view provides glimpses into the practices, thoughts, and behaviors of some of Hawley’s contemporaries, often through Hawley’s own critical lens. Supplemented with several primary sources, Johnson’s work provides a thought-provoking counterweight to more conventional pioneer narratives.

Western Art, Western History: Collected Essays

Frederic Remington, to more obscure painters such as Louis Choris and federally commissioned artists. The essays explore the significance and context of the various artists’ works, and each piece is accompanied by reprints of the art it discusses. Tyler advocates that much can be gleaned from the art as historical sources, because the artists in question witnessed events firsthand, even if their reproductions were filtered through personal or contemporary biases.

The artwork and essays will be of special interest to artists and art historians of the West.

Rescuing Beefsteak: The Story of a Pragmatic Pioneer Idealist

By Myron Harrison Jackson, WY: Myron Crandall Harrison, 2018. xiii + 169 pp.

Cloth, $34.43

Myron Harrison tracks the life and history of his great-great-grandfather, George “Beefsteak” Harrison. Starting with Harrison’s birth in Manchester, England, the book explores not only the details of Harrison’s life, but also the context in which he lived, including the impact of industrialization in England, the methods and challenges of emigration to the United States, handcart travel to Utah Territory, the Blackhawk War, and more. Rescuing Beefsteak is richly detailed, based on contemporary notes and stories by Howard Driggs, as well as Myron Harrison’s additional research. Beefsteak’s story is an interesting one, and even those without much knowledge of Harrison or Utah history should be both entertained and informed by the stories. Among other things, Harrison spent some time living as a runaway among Native Americans; he later opened up a successful steak restaurant, from which he earned his nickname.

By Ron Tyler Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019. xii + 300 pp.

Cloth, $65.00

Ron Tyler, the retired director of the Amon Carter Museum of America Art, explores the art and legacies of men who visited and portrayed the nineteenth-century West in Western Art, Western History. In this collection of essays, Tyler examines a range of artists, from well-known individuals such as John James Audubon and

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Layton

By Lynn Arave Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2019. 127 pp. Paper, $21.99

In Layton, Lynn Arave provides a thoroughly illustrated history of the community he has studied for years. Layton, Utah, was settled in 1850 as an outgrowth of Kaysville, and a

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Cottonwood Heights, UT: Cottonwood Heights City, 2018.

438 pp. Cloth, $20.00

Cottonwood Heights incorporated as a city in 2005; City between the Canyons delves into the record of the area from the earliest days of its settlement. Known by a number of names during the century that this book surveys, Cottonwood Heights has been home to a variety of communities, from Scandinavians to African Americans. This book, by the architect and writer Allen D. Roberts, seeks to “separate legend and myth from fact,” as Cottonwood Heights’s first mayor writes in the foreword.

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With Bonneville Salt Flats, “Landspeed” Louise Ann Noeth provides a pictorial tour of Utah’s famous racing grounds. She begins the story in 1914, with photographs of early racing events at the speedway—including images of Governor William Spry there. The wealth of illustrations in Bonneville Salt Flats comes from magazines, the Utah State Historical Society, race participants, and Noeth’s own collection; they include images of racers, charts and schematics, the Salt Flats community, and of course, a host of cars and motorcycles. Noeth includes short sections on women in racing and about the environmental degradation of the speedway. Her knowledge of the world of the Salt Flats and of racing make this an enjoyable read.

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Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2020. 127 pp. Paper, $21.99

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By “Landspeed” Louise Ann Noeth

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City between the Canyons: A History of Cottonwood Heights, 1849–1953

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twenty-year legal battle to separate from Kaysville was finally settled in 1902. Layton includes chapters on the city’s early agricultural history and sugar beet processing factory. World War II and the development of Hill Air Force Base entirely changed Layton from a settlement of a few families to a city anchored on a military installation. By 1950, the city’s population had increased five-fold, something Arave shows with photographs of the base and the housing units created to support it. Arave also provides images of schools, churches, and other aspects of community life, as well as illustrations of the beloved neighboring mountains.

Scan Artist: How Evelyn Wood Convinced the World That SpeedReading Worked

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By Marcia Biederman Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2019. 240 pp. Cloth, $26.99

In Scan Artist, the mystery-author-turned-biographer Marcia Biederman recounts the story of Evelyn Wood. Wood was famed for her speed-reading method, which the public eagerly embraced in the 1960s. Biederman weaves together the genres of true crime and memoir, as she mines the sources to paint a comprehensive picture of a twentieth-century “scammer in cashmere.” Scan Artist: How Evelyn Wood Convinced the World That Speed-Reading Worked is a discussion of the national anxiety after Sputnik and the Utah woman who turned that unease to her advantage.

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CONTRIBUTORS

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PAULA HUFF BRYANT is a physician assistant and registered dietitian in a West Jordan, Utah, family medicine clinic. She is a former Salt Lake Tribune newspaper reporter.

Her friend Bob Jensen once remarked that his great-great-grandmother had murdered her husband. This sparked her curiosity, and she began researching Josie Kensler’s history. Bryant lives in Draper, Utah, with her son.

KENNETH L. CANNON II is an attorney in private practice and an independent historian in Salt Lake City. The original version of his article was published in the Fall 1983 issue of UHQ and received the Dale Morgan Award for Best Scholarly Article in the quarterly published that year. Cannon has retained the overall structure of the original article but has updated it with additional archival materials and recently published secondary sources.

ALLISON EDWARDS is completing her studies as a History major with a minor in Political Science at Valdosta State University in Valdosta, Georgia. She intends to pursue a master’s degree in History and eventually a career in history education or research. Edwards originally wrote her article as part of her undergraduate studies.

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ALLAN KENT POWELL began his forty-four year career at the Utah State Historical Society in 1969, the same year Melvin Smith was hired to establish the Utah State Historic Preservation Office. Melvin became his mentor and friend, encouraging Powell to finish his PhD in History at the University of Utah and inviting him on countless occasions over four decades to go for a run. Dr. Powell retired as Managing Editor of the Utah Historical Quarterly and Senior State Historian in 2013.

GARY SHEPHERD is professor emeritus at Oakland University, and GORDON SHEPHERD is professor emeritus at the University of Central Arkansas. Among other works, the Shepherd brothers are co-authors of A Kingdom Transformed: Early Mormonism and the Modern LDS Church; Jan Shipps: A Social and Intellectual Portrait; and, with Ryan T. Cragun, are co-editors of The Palgrave Handbook of Global Mormonism.

LISA OLSEN TAIT is a historian, writer, and specialist in women’s history at the Church History Department, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, where she has served as a volume editor on the Saints series. Her work focuses primarily on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century history, particularly women’s organizations, periodicals, and popular culture. She earned a PhD from the University of Houston.

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Even though the bulk of Armand’s scholarly work focused on concerns beyond specifically Utah, or even the West, it is impossible to disentangle the broad sweep of regional history from the even broader historical sweep of Utah’s dominant religious faith. Changes over time in the teachings, practices, and organization of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have always had consequential impacts on political, economic, and social life in Utah and other western states, affecting faith adherents and non-faith adherents alike. In recognition of the historical importance of his work, the Utah State Historical Society now houses sixty-one boxes (30.5 linear feet) of Armand’s scholarly papers, covering the years 1960–2004.

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The sojourn of Armand Mauss on this earthly sphere ended at the age of ninety-two, on August 1, 2020, at Armand’s home in Irvine, California.

His formidable mind remained clear and incisive during the last months of his life as he continued a life-long practice of communicating with a number of colleagues and friends on a variety of subjects and ongoing intellectual projects.

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IN MEMORIAM

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Armand was widely regarded as a premier scholar of Mormonism. He applied a blend of sociological and historical perspectives to his studies, yielding compelling analyses that were insightful, provocative, and groundbreaking. Although Armand was very well versed in the interlocking particulars of both LDS church and Utah history, in most of his scholarly work he utilized this knowledge to produce conceptual analyses of two sets of interrelated issues: how and why LDS church organization and theology have changed over time, and what the historical and contemporary implications of Mormon conceptions of race, lineage, and ethnicity have been.

The best-known example of Armand’s treatment of LDS organizational and theological change is found in his still-influential book, The Angel and the Beehive: The Mormon Struggle with Assimilation (1994). Armand was never content to remain static in his thinking and did not hesitate to

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update previously reached conclusions in light of new evidence. For example, in a 2011 Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought article, Armand modified his analysis of LDS church retrenchment toward greater conservatism that he had documented in Angel and the Beehive in order to account for periodic shifts between conservative and progressive ecclesiastical positions that function to maintain an “optimum tension” between forces for change and preservation of a distinctive LDS identity. (Subsequently, the two of us empirically tested Armand’s “course corrections” thesis through a content analysis of LDS General Conference Reports and found ample evidence to support Armand’s thesis. [A Kingdom Transformed, 2016]).

Armand’s treatment of issues related to race and the LDS church began early in his academic career, beginning with his PhD dissertation research at the University of California, Berkley in the mid-1960s and subsequently becoming the subject matter of Armand’s first four published journal articles later in that decade.

In 1981, Armand authored an authoritative article, “The Fading of Pharaoh’s Curse: The Decline and Fall of the Priesthood Ban Against Blacks in the Mormon Church,” in Dialogue. He followed three years later with Neither Black nor White: Mormon Scholars Confront the Race Issue in a Universal Church (1984), co-edited with Lester Bush.

Though cited less often than Angel and the Beehive, Armand’s thinking and research about Mormonism in relation to issues of both race and ethnicity culminated in what arguably was his magnum opus: All Abraham’s Children: Changing Mormon Conceptions of Race and Lineage (2003). This is a complex book that addresses a number of significant, interwoven themes in the history of LDS church institutional development. It is not simply an exhaustive account of Mormon race relations, although it does, of necessity, cover a great deal of history. This is a book that works to identify and explain the larger patterns of key historical events within a sociological framework. It attempts to show how core ideas shape behavioral and organizational tendencies and how core ideas, over time, are, in turn, reciprocally changed by behavioral and organizational experiences.

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Of the book’s ten chapters, two deal explicitly with Mormonism in historical and theological relationship to Black people. At the same time, three of its chapters address the changing status of “Lamanites” in Mormon belief and policy: two of these three chapters focus on North American “Indians” and the other on an expanded definition of “Lamanite” that embraces Native peoples of South America and the South Pacific. Two additional chapters examine Mormon attitudes and practices related to Jews, while another chapter delineates early Mormonism’s profoundly important identification of itself as a literal and gathering remnant of the House of Israel. This identification allowed Mormons to conceive of themselves as heirs to the Hebrew designation of God’s chosen people and therefore as recipients of all of the promises and blessings promised by God to his people through the words attributed to ancient Hebrew prophets in the Old Testament.

It also motivated Mormons to seek out “from the nations” other presumed descendants of the House of Israel, those who would be most responsive by birthright to the call of the restored gospel. It is this latter impulse, so central to the LDS missionary enterprise over most of its history, that Mauss shows has finally begun to moderate as a result of the actual success and failure patterns of Mormon conversion among different peoples around the world.

More specifically, All Abraham’s Children expands our understanding of (1) the origins and subsequent development of key Mormon theological assumptions concerning the divine implications of group lineage; (2) the way these theological assumptions have, over time, generated substantial impact on major organizational policies and programs, particularly involving missionary efforts; (3) the dynamics involved in racial-ethnic relationships as the LDS church continues to expand among the non-European peoples of the world; (4) the historical events and attendant social processes that have created pressure for modifying Mormon thought and practice related to race and ethnicity; and (5) the emergence in the late twentieth century of a universalistic orientation to people of all races that brings contemporary Mormonism into greater alignment with mainstream Christian attitudes on this subject. Thus, far from constituting

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Armand’s organizational involvements with non-LDS scholarly organizations were equally important and helped bring significant attention to the value of scholarly work on Mormonism among historians and social scientists. He was board member and a presidential nominee of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, the Religious Research Association, and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. This latter scholarly organization is the international flagship association for scholars of religion from all scientific fields, and its outlet for publication—The Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (JSSR)— is widely regarded as the premier journal for publication of scientifically based articles on religion. Armand served as editor of JSSR

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Finally, Armand was a founding vice president and then president of the first social science association specifically devoted to the study of Mormonism—originally called the Society for the Sociological Study of Mormon Life but subsequently renamed the Mormon Social Science Association (MSSA). Armand’s early leadership efforts toward building the MSSA into a scholarly society that has flourished for over forty years must be recognized as an essential part of his professional legacy. MSSA owes its survival and organizational success primarily to Armand’s guidance, prodding, recruiting, and persistent networking with scholars and other professional scholarly bodies with interests in Mormonism, along with his generous personal financial contributions at needed moments. Currently, MSSA sponsors two annual conferences and will inaugurate its own scholarly journal in 2021, the Journal of the Mormon Social Science Association. Bolstered by Armand’s encouragement and wise advice, MSSA members edited and contributed chapters to produce a comprehensive overview of the international spread of the LDS church (The Handbook of Global Mormonism, 2020).

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Armand’s organizational and collegial contributions to the scholarly study of Mormonism and the LDS church were every bit as important as his scholarly contributions. He was an early and longtime member of the Mormon History Association and served as president of that organization from 1997–1998. For over forty years, Armand made significant contributions to Dialogue—the flagship outlet for scholarly writing on all things Mormon—as a contributing author of impactful essays, an influential editorial and advisory board member, and chair of the board of directors during a critical transformational time in Dialogue’s structure in the early 2000s. Armand was instrumental in establishing the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University, following his retirement as a sociology professor at Washington State University, and he taught courses and mentored students at Claremont near his retirement home in Irvine for several years.

from 1989–1992 and, during his tenure, earned enormous respect for the high standards he maintained in the journal and for shining a light on the utility and credibility of social science studies of Mormonism.

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a disparate set of stories of how Mormonism has intersected throughout its history with different ethnic groups, Mauss connects these strands into an overarching conceptual framework in which the very notion of group identity, based on assumptions of race and lineage, is explained. This analysis is linked to the emergence of both primal Mormon practices and to the basic historical facts of Mormon growth and development from the nineteenth century through the early beginnings of the present century.

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No one deserves more credit for helping to legitimize the social science of Mormonism as a recognized field of study than Armand Mauss.

Indeed, it is this last point that is perhaps most reflective of Armand’s cumulative value to Mormon studies, namely the overlapping scope and influence of his organizational, intellectual, and personal involvements in key positions, relationships, and scholarly issues related to the study of Mormonism. Who has cultivated a wider, more significant network of contacts with both Mormon insiders and outsiders, social scientists and non-social scientists, believers and non-believers? Who has stimulated and facilitated a more fruitful cross-fertilization of perspectives, ideas, and understanding of Mormon institutions and their dynamic intersection with the larger world than Armand Mauss? We are in his debt.

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Addendum Note

—Gary Shepherd and Gordon Shepherd

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Upon submitting this tribute, we learned that Armand, who joined the Utah State Historical Society in 1982, renewed his membership last December as a life member—at the age of ninety-one. Armand knew then that his purchase on life was very short. According to UHQ co-editor Jedediah Rogers, Armand’s generous

gesture of support for USHS made everyone smile in appreciation. This one small act typifies the countless acts of generosity and scholarly comradeship rendered by Armand Mauss to both organizations and individuals over the long course of his professional life.

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In the century-and-a-quarter since the Utah State Historical Society was established, no one individual has had a greater impact on the growth of the institution than Melvin T. Smith. Melvin was hired in 1969 to establish the Utah State Historic Preservation Office and was then appointed director of the Utah State Historical Society and Utah Division of State History in 1971. Melvin served as director of the Utah State Historical Society from 1971 through 1985, a time of unprecedented growth and expansion of the historical society’s programs and activities. In recognition of his service as an administrator, public historian, and contributions to the study of Utah history, Melvin was named a fellow of the Utah State Historical Society in 2007. He passed away in St. George on September 5, 2020, at the age of ninety-two.

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Melvin T. Smith, 1928–2020

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IN MEMORIAM

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Melvin Thomas Smith was born in Cowley, Wyoming on June 15, 1928, to Heman and Edetha Smith. He was the fifth child in a family of ten that included eight boys and two girls. The Smiths were deeply rooted in Mormonism, tracing their heritage back to Samuel Harrison Smith, a younger brother to Joseph Smith Jr. Melvin’s grandfather came to Utah in 1848. His father, Heman Smith, traveled by wagon from Utah to the Big Horn Basin in 1901 as a participant in one of the last Mormon settlement ventures in the West.

From an early age, hard work was expected of all the Smith boys. They milked cows, chopped wood, cut ice, plowed fields, irrigated crops, thinned sugar beets, and rounded up cattle, along with many other duties. As a boy, Melvin drove a truck by himself to Thermopolis, more than a hundred miles away, to haul ten tons of coal back to Cowley. As a teenager during World War II, he transported German and Italian prisoners of war from a nearby camp and Japanese American internees from the Heart Mountain Relocation Center to help with the sugar beet harvest.

Cattle drives to the summer range, annual fall round ups, and wild horse chases in the Pryor Mountains were his dreams and his reality. Melvin earned recognition as a respected “horse breaker” and, during a forty-year career, broke hundreds of horses to ride. If Melvin was not the

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Melvin T. Smith, as pictured in 1971, the year he became director of the Utah State Historical Society and Utah Division of State History. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 13681. model for the bronco-riding cowboy silhouette on the Wyoming license plate, he could have been.

Melvin graduated from Cowley High School in 1946 where he was student body president, an all-state basketball player, and student excelling in all subjects, including Spanish, which he expected to use as an LDS missionary to Mexico or Latin America. Instead, in 1948 he was called to the New England States Mission, where he spend much of his mission walking around western Massachusetts “without purse or script.”

After his mission, he joined the U.S. Navy and spent most of the next four years on the East Coast and aboard a newly commissioned

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destroyer, the U.S.S. Wilkinson. Sailing to New Orleans, Cuba, and other Caribbean ports, as well as England, Scotland, and Denmark, brought Melvin new perspectives on the world beyond his experiences in Wyoming and Massachusetts. While in the Navy, he married Marlene Threet, and their first two children were born before his release from active duty. Melvin and Marlene divorced in 1979 after raising nine children. In 1995 he married Lorna Collard McCarrie, with whom he lived in St. George until his death.

In 1956, ten years after graduating from high school, Melvin enrolled in college. He began at the Northwest Community College in Powell, Wyoming, then transferred to the University of Wyoming, where he received his bachelor’s

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The Dixie dismissal came at a fortuitous time for the Utah State Historical Society. The 1966 National Historic Preservation Act had provided federal money to the states to establish historic preservation offices. By 1969, funding was available and the Utah State Historical Society had been designated as the state agency to house the office. Out of work, with no teaching possibilities in sight as the Dixie College lawsuit made its way through the courts, and with the strong endorsement of Utah State Historical Society board member Juanita Brooks, Melvin was hired to establish and run the Utah Historic Preservation Office. In 1971, when Charles Peterson resigned to take a teaching position at Utah State University, Melvin was hired as the new director of the Historical Society. The next year he finished his PhD dissertation, “The Colorado River: The History in the Lower Canyon Area,” which, according to the historian Gary Topping, is “perhaps the single most impressive piece of research on river history ever accomplished.”

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Melvin worked closely with Governor Scott Matheson to complete the historical society’s move from the Thomas Kearns Mansion to the Denver and Rio Grande Depot in 1980. Under Melvin’s direction, the State Historic Preservation Office expanded to include two sections— one for survey and research, the other for planning and development. The State Antiquities Section was established. The State History Museum Program was added in preparation for the historical society’s move to the Denver and Rio Grande Depot. Under his administration the Utah History Fair Program was established for school students. The Library saw an expanded collection program, the addition of an Oral History Program, and the appointment of a Place Names Committee.

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Melvin saw one of his major legacies as the dedicated professional staff he brought to the historical society. They included at least twenty individuals; four later served as directors, others left to take teaching positions in higher education, and most of us remained at the historical society until retirement.

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Melvin returned to the Northwest Community College to teach classes in English, World Civilization, and Spanish. He also taught LDS Seminary and Institute classes with one of the benefits being free tuition for summer school at Brigham Young University, where he entered the PhD program in history. He left Wyoming at the end of the 1963 school year and moved his family to Provo. Working under the prominent western historian LeRoy Hafen, he passed the qualifying exams in 1965. That same year, he was hired at Dixie College in St. George, where he proved to be a popular and respected teacher. He sponsored the College’s Young Democrats and was elected Faculty Association president and president of the Southern Utah Teacher’s Association. His political and academic activities aggravated the college administration and, after three years, he was denied tenure and effectively blacklisted for positions with other academic institutions. The discriminatory treatment led to a lawsuit that Melvin won.

In describing his administrative philosophy, Melvin wrote, “My basic premise remained that people wanted to do a good job, and would if they knew what to do, were given responsibility and credit for doing their work, and if a good communication system was in place. I felt that most people should be involved in actual professional work, and that administrative staff should be kept to a minimum.” His weekly staff meetings were an open forum to discuss issues and concerns, propose and debate solutions, and set plans to move forward. They were, for his young staff, a seminar in historical agency administration and, for the agency, a tool for extending the influence of history to all sectors of Utah.

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degree in 1959. A year later he was awarded a master’s degree in American Studies, writing his thesis on “The Image of Early Utah Mormons in Contemporary American Literature.”

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Under Melvin’s direction as editor of the Utah Historical Quarterly, the quarterly published special issues on Utah’s ethnic minorities, architecture, folklore, women, childhood, sports and recreation, urban Utah and rural Utah, German immigrants, and Brigham Young, among other topics. In 1975, the historical society launched Beehive History, an annual publication for young people. The next year saw the publication of The Peoples of Utah, edited by Helen Papanikolas. This groundbreaking book

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was symbolic of the historical society’s mission under Melvin to represent all peoples and all aspects of Utah history. Also in 1976 Melvin was instrumental in organizing a bicentennial celebration of the 1776 Dominguez-Escalante expedition. His horsemanship was evident when he served as a reenactment rider on the Pony Express trail. He encouraged the continuing establishment of local historical societies and initiated the practice of holding the annual meeting and the annual Statehood Day celebration in different locations around the state.

While administration demanded most of his time, Melvin was active as a historian, publishing many book reviews and articles. From 1980 to 1981 he served as president of the Mormon History Association and, for his presidential address, delivered a timely and thought-provoking consideration of “Faithful History: Hazards and Limitations.” Melvin was a primary force in the establishment of the Association of Utah Historians and active in the National Council for Public History, the State History Administrator’s Association, the National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers, and other history organizations.

After more than thirteen years as director of the Utah State Historical Society and as a new administration took over state government, Melvin was asked to resign. Many protested the forced resignation, but to no avail. He then moved to Boise and served as director of the Idaho State Historical Society.

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Yet Melvin’s loyalty to the Utah State Historical Society never wavered. Each year until his passing, he purchased more than a dozen memberships for his children and siblings. He continued to write book reviews for the quarterly and contributed in memoriam essays for his mentor LeRoy Hafen and his friend and colleague Jay Haymond.

After leaving Idaho, Melvin returned to Utah and his ranch near Mount Pleasant, with the purpose of “finding out who Melvin really was.” That search included wide-ranging reading, workshops, seminars, extensive writing, conversations with family and friends, a rigorous study of A Course in Miracles, and an ongoing dedication to running. Melvin’s running led him to run more than a dozen marathons and countless races and instill within his grandchildren an interest in running while fostering family ties through his annual “Beat Grandpa Race.”

Writing for his children and grandchildren, Melvin observed, “Mine has been an incredibly rich, exciting, and challenging life, with many untold and unexpected ‘happenings’ that I neither anticipated nor planned for nor wanted.”

Fortunately his life has had a lasting impact on a generation of Utah historians and the institution that he valued—the Utah State Historical Society.

—Allan Kent Powell Utah State Historical Society

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Defining the Chief Executive via flash powder and selfie sticks

Making History from Daguerreotype to Digital

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Photographic Presidents

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Paperback & E-book

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Friends Clarence Huettel, Walter Christiansen, and Walter Price show off their daily catch at Governor Dern Lake, circa 1950s. Named “Governor’s Lake” in 1927 for George H. Dern, then the governor of Utah, this lake in the Uinta Mountains was a beloved camping destination for Dern and his family. Dern was a strong advocate for environmental preservation who enlisted federal help in the rehabilitation of public lands in Utah; later, as Secretary of War,

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Dern oversaw the Civilian Conservation Corps in its development and protection of natural resources. Upon the passing of Dern in 1936, the Uintah Outdoor Conference asked the U.S. Forest Service to make a formal request of the United States Board of Geographic Names to change the lake’s name to “Lake Dern.” In 1949, the board deliberated several possibilities and settled on “Governor Dern Lake.” Courtesy of the Ellsworth M. Clark family papers.

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