Review
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Title: Fact, Fiction, and Polygamy: A Tale of Utah War Intrigue, 1857-1858, A. G. Browne’s The Ward of the Three Guardians
Editors: William P. MacKinnon and Kenneth L. Alford
Publisher: Tanner Trust Fund and J. Willard Marriot Library
Genre: History
Year Published: 2022
Number of Pages: 245
Binding: Hardbound
ISBN: 9781647690694
Price: $24.95
Reviewed by Kevin Folkman for the Association for Mormon Letters
The very first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, includes a lengthy sensationalized subplot involving vengeance meted out by fanatical Danites against defectors from the Mormon faith. Published in 1877, Arthur Conan Doyle’s story played off similarly sensationalized accounts of the perceived horrors of polygamy in Utah that were popular in both the United States and Great Britain. One could argue that the specter of Mormon patriarchs and their harems of kidnapped and unwilling women may have contributed to the ultimate success of Doyle and his Sherlock Holmes stories.
Fact, Fiction, and Polygamy: A Tale of Utah War Intrigue, edited by William MacKinnon and Kenneth Alford takes one of those similar sensational accounts, The Ward of the Three Guardians, and places it in the cultural milieu of the times. There is no evidence that Doyle may have even seen that novella, published in The Atlantic magazine in 1877. It’s the story of a young girl caught up in a polygamous household in the midst of the Utah War of 1857-1858, and typical of the lurid accounts popular in the latter half of the 19th century, The author, 23-year-old Boston attorney A. G. Browne, was himself embedded with Johnston’s Army, the largest deployment of the United States troops since the Mexican War, writing dispatches as a war correspondent for the New York Tribune. General Albert Sidney Johnston had been ordered to subdue what President James Buchanan believed was an active rebellion by Brigham Young and his Utah Latter-day Saint church. The nation, alternately repelled and fascinated by Mormon polygamy, was anxious for news, and Browne responded with a lively flow of dispatches to his editors of the progress of the expedition that became known as Buchanan’s Folly.
In the midst of all of this, Browne became a party to the actual “rescue” and return of young Henrietta Polydore, a girl of Anglo-Italian descent who had been taken from her father’s home in England by her mother and aunt, converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Henrietta was twelve years old in 1858, and in the charge of her aunt, Jane Mayer, a polygamous wife of former British Mission President Samuel W. Richards. Henrietta’s father asked Great Britain’s Foreign Ministry to intervene with the US government to obtain the return of young Henrietta to her father’s home in England. Browne, along with US Marshall Peter Dotson and Territorial Chief Justice DeLana Eckels, became players in an international legal battle that resulted in young Henrietta being reunited with her father later in 1858.
Some 19 years later, as anti-polygamy fervor was running high nationally, Browne wrote The Ward of the Three Guardians, an account of Henrietta’s story that mixed fact with fiction, highlighted sensational aspects of anti-Mormon sentiment, and was published in The Atlantic magazine. MacKinnon and Alford recently uncovered these parallel accounts of Henrietta’s story after long careers researching the history of the Utah War era. In Fact, Fiction, And Polygamy, the editors have created an intriguing look into an otherwise obscure event. Browne’s fictional narrative thus serves as an artifact of the Utah War and the growing anti-Mormon sentiment that swirled around Henrietta and her sojourn in Utah.
MacKinnon and Alford are historians who have published extensively about the Utah War and its aftermath[1]. They have placed Browne’s fictional account in the middle of their short book, annotating it with extensive footnotes. Substantial prologue and addendum provide important information about the circumstances of the U. S. Army’s incursion into Utah, the major characters in Henrietta’s story, and the eventual outcome of the effort to return Henrietta to her father. In the process, the editors have given us a glimpse into how history can be extracted from a creative account like Browne’s. They supplement his fictional story with explanations of contemporary events surrounding young Henrietta, information about the real-life actors, and where and why, perhaps, the fictional story wanders from the actual facts. Viewing the women of Mormondom primarily as victims, Browne pays particular attention to the role of women, some attached to the federal troops, others directly involved in Henrietta’s “rescue,” and the effect that the “Move South” had on the women of Northern Utah. Some thirty thousand Mormon residents of Salt Lake City and points north vacated their homes and farms in advance of the arrival of Johnston’s army. This move primarily burdened the women of the Utah Territory, as the men were involved in preparing for defensive activity against Federal troops. MacKinnon and Alford also examine how Browne, in his fictional account, exploited the nation’s lurid fascination with Utah polygamy and sensational rumors of Danite avengers. Only a decade later, this same provocative mindset surfaced in Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet with its melodramatic depiction of the reach of blood atonement and fanatical Danites to Victorian England.
Henrietta’s case might be seen as a minor sidenote to a much larger story, but in Fact, Fiction, and Polygamy, MacKinnon and Alford use Henrietta’s story as a key to understanding the larger conflict between Territorial Utah and the Federal government and how that conflict was perceived by the rest of the nation and the world. Browne’s fictional account as rendered by the editors is a valuable contribution to the historical record.
[1] MacKinnon edited the multiple volumes of At Sword’s Point: A Documentary History of the Utah War, and Alford edited Utah and the American Civil War: The Written Record, which covers the immediate aftermath of the Utah War. Both have also published multiple articles about this era.