Books: A Splendid Saga

A MORMON CHRONICLE: THE DIARIES OF JOHN D. LEE (1848-1 876)—Edited by Robert Glass Cleland & Juanita Brooks —Two volumes (824 pp.)—The Huntington Library ($15).

John D. Lee was so bad at spelling that he called his diary his “Diarhea.” This makes no odds, because by any other name Lee’s Diaries would still remain one of the most extraordinary documents ever written by an American.

This fact has not been recognized before simply because Lee’s Diaries have never been published, except for short bits. California’s Huntington Library acquired the manuscripts in 1929 from the descendants of the man to whom Lee gave it a few days before his death. Edited and footnoted with care and devotion (but indifferently indexed), the Diaries are unquestionably an important historical find.

Utah & the Saints. John D. Lee was born at Kaskaskia, Ill. in 1812. His background was Roman Catholic, but in 1838 he became a Mormon and was adopted as a “foster-son” by Brigham Young himself. Lee recognized and obeyed only two superiors—God Almighty and Brigham Young. If these two seemed to differ, then Lee went along with Young as the man who knew more than God about Utah and politics. So when the Mormons decided to press southward to establish new cities and expand the Kingdom of the Saints, Young made Lee one of the principal leaders of the expedition. And Lee knew exactly what his duty was. He was to be fruitful and multiply, so that the hosts of Mormon might cover the face of the earth. Helped (according to the best estimates) by 19 wives, Lee obeyed—to the extent of some 65 children, plus uncounted adoptions and conversions.

Lee “carried from 2 to 3 colts Revolvers” and knew how to use them. He was a wagoner, a cobbler, a woodsman, a cattle breeder, a farmer, a doctor of sorts who could perform a “surguicicle operation,” an impassioned preacher, a shrewd businessman, a layer-on of hands, a seer of fascinating visions. He was one of the toughest men that ever walked, but the Indians (who ate out of his hand) named him Yawgawts, which means Cry-Baby (Lee himself preferred to render it “Man of Tender Passions”), and his foster-father once exhorted him, saying: “I want you to be a Man & not —a Baby.” Was there in Lee’s devotion something soft, visible only to canny captains and savages? There seems to have been—and tragedy was destined to be born from it.

Houses & Habitations. For many years, all went well with John D. Lee. His Diaries begin with the famed westward march of the “Camp of Israel” to the Great Salt Lake—a moving mass of covered wagons, horses, mules, cows and oxen rolling over the “dusty and verry hot” trails. He records the daily search for precious pasture and fresh “waiter,” the inevitable fevers, pains, accidents, deaths and childbirths. Throughout, imbuing the earthiest, coarsest things with the highest spiritual ardor, run the passionate preachings of the “Apostles.”

At Harmony, in southern Utah, John D. Lee performed such prodigies of farming and building that within a few years he was patriarch of a mighty family numbering some 50 souls. Patriarch Isaac Morley exclaimed: “Why, Bro. Lee . . . You have Houses & Habitations, Flocks & Heards, wives & children in every direction. I Marvel when I see what the Lord has accomplishd through you.”

Wives & Bishops. Most of Lee’s wives lived with him in Harmony, where his children required a school all to themselves. But soon he had well-stocked homes, each headed by a trusty wife or two, in several other settlements. He did his rounds of them regularly and earnestly. But he took care never to ask his wives’ advice, for Brigham Young had forbidden it, saying roundly: “All their council & wisdom . . . don’t weigh as much with me as the weight of a Fly Tird. Excuse me for my vulgarity …” Lee was kinder and more considerate than his leader. His pen portraits of his wives are among his most vivid.

¶ Wife No. 1, Aggatha Ann,* marched beside him for 33 years. In 1866 she fell ill, and as “Mortification” set in, Lee “watched with her all Night, lifting & turning her in Bed about every 5 minits.” As in an Old Testament tale, the huge family assembles at the deathbed to hear the dying injunction, while son Joseph rides to the mountain for a “Bucket of Snow” to cool his mother’s lips. Meanwhile, “the Lumber previously dressed up” stands ready for the coffin—for this is a pioneer story in which prayer and practicality are never far apart.

¶ Wife No. 17, Emma Batchellor (“a more kindhearted, industrious, & affectionate wife I never had”), is the nearest thing to a riot in all the Diaries. Emma did not wait for Lee to propose, but flatly “said that I on first site was the object of her Choice.” Emma poured kettlefuls of hot water on one of her husband’s enemies and scratched his face until it was “a gore of Blood.” When scandalized Bishop Pace commanded that Emma be “re-baptized” to atone for such conduct, “Emma asked the prevelege of choice in the man to Baptise her. The Bishop granted it. She says, I am much obliged. I demand Bapt’sm at your hands, seeing that you are so inconsiderate as to require a woman to be immersed when the water is full of snow and Ice . . . Perhaps if your back side gets wet in Ice water you will be more careful how you decide again. The majority of the People said, Stick him to it, Emma, it is but Just. But the Bishop made an Excuse to go … & got out of it.” Bull & Scapegoat. In the last years of his life, Lee needed Emma’s sort of staunchness. Although these diaries do not contain his account of it, Lee had taken part in the brutal Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, when more than a hundred “Gentile” men, women and children were ruthlessly killed by a troop of Mormons. The Civil War interrupted the Federal Government’s prosecution of the case, involving 36 suspects, and by the time the war was over, the Government was ready to compromise and accept one Mormon head in token payment. Brigham Young chose Lee. In 1870, Lee was excommunicated from the Mormon Church. Insulted with impunity, he still kept his chin up, and when Bishop Roundy “shook hands & said, You are [now] as Rough as an old Grisley, I replied . . . Every Dog will have his day & a Bitch two afternoons . . . Now is your day. By & By it will be my day.” But in 1876, 19 years after the massacre, Lee was tried before an all-Mormon jury and in 1877 was executed by a firing squad. When, before his trial, he had difficulty chewing a tough bit of penitentiary steak, he wrote a few wry lines both to himself and the animal from whom the steak was cut: Old Mormon Bull, how came you here? we have tuged & toiled these many years, we have been cuffed & kicked with sore abuse and now sent here for penetentiary use.

We both are creatures of Some Note.

You are, food for Pri[s]oners and I the scap[e]goat.

It is easy to see why these Diaries have lain so long like buried treasure. They tell a story that must still be painful to Mormon pride; they dig up terrible incidents that many would rather forget. And yet, thanks to the quality that was in John D. Lee, and thanks to the healing march of time, no American can read these Diaries without thrilling to the roughhewn courage and tenacity that is written in every page of them.

* Lee later married Aggatha Ann’s two sisters and finally their widowed mother, “for her soul’s sake.”