The Gibbs Article

The Article in Wikipedia on the Mountain Meadows Article includes a great deal of purple prose and elipses. Gibbs was my
Great, Grandmother's maiden name, and a blood tie is not impossible. My Great-Great Grandmother did not have a happy or fulfilling time in plural marriage, but she did not fault him for it, I think.

He was a Fiddler who organized small communities into mill
builders, and when the work was done and dinner over, he got out his fiddle and played. Between the dancing he talked up the mill building project. It was a hard life, traveling town to
town with a new baby every few years. Brother Clayborn Elder
had five wives, and without the interference of an unfortunate bishop, she may have stayed married to him.

At any rate, she had had ten or so children in a few more years.
My Great Great Grandmother had a number of boys who were roudy and there was a notion that discipline was what they needed. Ship's discipline at that--her husband was a bowlegged
former ship's Captain.

The Gibb's fellow emphasizes the power of Brigham Young over his flock, but this was a match Brigham would have seen headed for catastrophy from the git go. Ships discipline was just the thing to turn these fiddlers into holy terrors. One
son bit off the ear of another young man and ran off with
Butch Cassidy and another young roudy. One of the boy's
family's traced them to a mine where the three had signed the
pay register.

One of Cassidy's scam's was to sign on at a mine just after payday, then work until the next payday, hold up the pay master and run off with all the pay. A friend of the BYU Survival Program operated a store in Hanksville and didquitea good business. First he'd outfitt the Hole in the Rock gang,
then he'd outfit the possy. My Great Great Grandmother likely
knew where her boy was--the women in our family tend toward
the psychic, generally. The trouble was that my Great-Great Grandmother got pregnant immediatly.

Unfortunatly her sister-wife appeared barren. She beleived
that this was her husband's fault--he being and Old man of the sea and all. She and my great great grandmother were too far
apart in age to find in their sisterhood the tie that binds, and the family has always thought of her as a bit of a shrew. She started up and tormented my Micha Martina Margretta Katrina Gibbs
Peterson Elder Smith--my great great grandmother, with the notion that she had been pregnant before her marriage.

My Great Great Grandmother tired of this quickly. When my
Great Grandma was old enough for an outing, she and her mother went to Jemima's house and when the older woman came to the door she pushed her baby into Jemima's arms and
said "If you want a baby so much, here--a baby."

My Great Great Grandmother had had ten or so and was divorcing the Ship's Captain and striking out on her own.
When she told the story she added that if Jemima had tried to
keep the baby she would have fought like a cat. She just wanted to shut the woman up.

The more common pattern was the typical Victorian Romantic Friendship with the practical addition of a husband and father.
It is, and was, very common for sisters, best friends, and occasionally mother and adult daughter to marry the same man. Historically, it was the common requirement that woman marry in another village that drew women into polygamy.
They could enter polygamy, or live with their husband's family,
alone and seldom seeing their own family regularly at all.

Sorroral Polygamy, when it goes well, and according to the Mormon, or post Mormon pattern, involves the women breaking down into women who share the same room and arranging to have their babies on about the same time. The number of women who share a bed and go into labor together
is, I think, more than could be explained in any way other
than the kind of entrainment that causes women to menstruate at the same time as other women near to them.

When living in rural Nevada, my neighbor and I found ourselves menstruating together, though she lived a little less
than a quarter of a mile from my house. Perhaps it is feramonal, perhaps it is simple entrainment. Two pendulums, beginning their arc at different points, will soon begin swinging together--that can't be explained by pheramonal
influences. If you area man and and this sounds nutso, ask a woman. It is quite common.

Think Outside of the Box, do not exceed your envelope.

I've strayed from my topic and will have to come back to it
in another writing. Women are homo-emotional in a different
way than men. There are many happy little trios in Utah,
not polygamous, the ones I've known, but best friends, one a widow feeling isolated who decide to live together with the honey of one or both. Homophobia has, perhaps made this
less common, unfortunate I think.

I'll return the the Mountain Meadows soon. I am very ill, I have ME, (a painful relative of MS) so I can't do the quality job of writing this down. Soon after he returned from his mission to
Scotland and my uncle Rass was born, my Great Grandfather
took over the Zion's Cooperative Mercantile Association
Mill in Cedar City. This would have been a few years after the Gibbs article was written. There are some real problems with it,
(Chiefly it's rabid racism and anti-Mormonism) but it is a good starting place for discussion of 1956-8 in Utah and much of the Western European world.

Also, if you are a convert, or know a convert, the events leading up to the events at the Meadows aren't a part of your or their ethnic history. Converts may be repelled or fascinated by Mormon history, fascinated as my father, a convert was. We had 29 volumes of Mormon history and discourses. World Book and Websters in our bookcase. I had read them by the time I was 16 or so.

Kathleen