Wife No. 57
Devotees of Brigham Young will not be surprised to learn that before the Mormon prophet died just after four o'clock in the afternoon, he propped himself on imported silk pillows and amid the careless aroma of burnt juniper whispered his last feverish words. Orson Pratt, the eccentric mathematician and official Church historian at the time, recorded the dying seer exclaiming Joseph! Joseph! Joseph! in anticipation of being reunited with his beloved martyred friend. The evening edition of the Tribune, however, claimed the American Moses sighed I loved them all, ostensibly referring to his well-documented paramours. But my great-great-grandfather, Phineas Gustaf Habermeyer, a dentist recently emigrated from Bavaria who had the enviable task of making the death mask, said the prophet quietly summoned his maidservant and in a series of inaudible but zealous whispers made her promise once he died she would bathe and perfume him and as a final gesture of goodwill “stick [her] fingers up [his] arse spigot and twirl counter-clockwise” so he might meet the Lord with both spirit and flesh clean. The official certificate confirms peritonitis as the cause of death. Scribbled across the top in my ancestor’s inscrutable penmanship are the words, The Lion of the Lord now roars into the eternities. An obvious lie, but ecclesiastical hyperbole is unavoidable.
No sooner had the prophet died than my ancestor set to work. He applied plaster bandages to the greased face. He was more anxious about the molding cracking than nature reclaiming the prophet’s body which soon began to bloat in the August heat. Removing the plaster hours later, my ancestor set about the more difficult task of fashioning an impression of the prophet’s tongue. This unusual request, confirmed by various historians, came from the dying seer himself who wished the saints might one day visit a museum of all things Mormon and see a replica of his tongue, the “mighty mouthpiece of the Lord and…only thing this [desert?] feared in its hundred-million-year existence.” Circling the deathbed, the elders watched curiously as my ancestor mixed beeswax and turpentine with gutta-percha soaked in boiling water to create a thermoplastic polymer, a chemical process that wouldn’t be perfected for more than half a century. Now nearly dawn, he wedged open the prophet’s mouth but found no tongue. Just a jagged, fleshy stump—forked and spackled with a necropolis of black ulcers. Phineas, who’d been with the body all night, swore it made a noise, “a kind of laugh,” he later told his wife. Along with the other confused elders he turned to the maidservant for explanation, but she was gone.
They called her Sally. Her name might have been Kahpeputz, but after she was purchased in 1847 the prophet couldn’t pronounce her indigenous name so he called her Sally. He had no choice but to own her, he would later confess. The slave trader, a Ute shaman who went by the name Baptiste traveling up and down the valley selling native and Mexican children, had already slit the throat of a young boy—her brother, perhaps—and promised to do the same to the girl if nobody purchased her. It’s possible the dumbfounded pilgrims stood at the auction block waiting, like Abraham, for an angel to intervene. Finally, one of the prophet’s wives reluctantly offered a rifle in exchange for the small, thin girl whose body was a labyrinth of knife scars and festering burns, her skin smeared in blood and ashes.
It was out of love, the prophet insisted, that they bought her. Sally must have heard this excuse frequently. Bedridden for his final months, the prophet relied on his adopted daughter and Paiute servant to feed him, bathe him, transcribe his sermons, and his favorite: oil his little lion’s beard until it glistened. His children no longer visited. His wives assumed he was already dead. So, Sally listened to the old raconteur confess. Maybe she requested this story. Not out of pity or to help him make penance, but for the pleasure of hearing her life was indistinguishable from a weapon.
Around the same time the elders discovered the missing tongue, Sally was likely in a stagecoach disappearing into the western dustbowl. I picture her gasping awake, her hands instinctively grasping her throat in search of the necklace. For a moment her body might have stiffened as she worried the noise wrestling her from her dream was the necklace swept away by the wind, then relieved it was only the driver shooting at pheasants. Against her chest the necklace prickled her damp skin.
Picture her raising the shade, squinting. The desert is a pale naked thing. Suddenly, the old words came back to her. Tav'-o-kun. The name her people gave this country. Place of the sun. My colleague suggested she would have traveled by night as much as possible to avoid the oppressive heat, but the stagecoach receipt stamped at 6:37 AM on 30 August containing the expected creases and yellowing is indisputable. It is the only record of Sally's signature. Thick, bold cursive strokes, undeniably elegant. The driver's name is illegible, the victim of an ink blot.
She could have taken the train. Transit authority records indicate the night cabin left the Salt Lake station for Lucin at 11:14. Was she afraid of the night? The furious silence of stars, their wild melancholy? Or was traveling by stagecoach, as one newspaper pundit expressed, a seductive misery reserved for the poor and faithful? Maybe she assumed the elders would expect her on the train. As a woman caught between three worlds, Sally must have known confused men do strange things. She likely told herself once she got to the salt flats she’d be safe. She could not yet imagine how upon her return she’ll be married off to a Ute chief, nor how by the end of the year his jealous first wife will slit her throat and sprinkle a ring of salt around her shallow grave. The more wicked the soul, the belief goes, the more salt is needed to keep it from escaping the afterlife.
A few hours into the journey the stagecoach would have stopped to water the horses. The driver—McCarthy, as best as I can decipher—skinned the pheasants and roasted them. Months later he will admit to escorting Sally to the salt flats but will not recall what she did nor the exact location. “She bewitched me,” he will supposedly inform the elders, which probably saved him from losing his wives, or worse, excommunication (although I can’t find reliable sources to corroborate either of these claims).
They ate in silence. They followed the dust.
Half-asleep, Sally might have imagined the elders shuffling around the room as the little lion was fashionably embalmed and prepared for burial, their faces confused—except for my ancestor off in the corner humming as he penned a funeral hymn. Farewell, dear brother, Brigham Young / God called thee through th’ eternal gate, / Thy fame shall dwell on every tongue / And Saints thy worth will emulate. The old men with sun-kissed faces nodding their heads and murmuring in agreement.
North of Tooele, a couple joined Sally in the carriage: a man with an oily moustache and a woman with her neck wrapped in pearls. A few pleasantries were exchanged and it’s plausible the couple mentioned the drought and wondered why the prophet had not yet called down rain from the heavens. Probably because the little lion of the lord was called back to the zoo, Sally might have thought. Swallowing a laugh, we can imagine her clutching her chest to feel the necklace again. The couple would have been uncomfortable with her there, a so-called savage woman dressed in their clothes, unaware that Sally would have been nervous to look these strangers in the eye, which is why she removed a book from a fold in her dress and thumbed the pages. She might have remembered when the author, an Englishman, visited the Beehive House and gifted it to her. Having exhausted himself in the far East, he’d traveled West hoping to write an exotic tale of the prophetic American sultan and his desert harem. The pages were yellowed from her fingertips. Why hadn’t they taught her to read like the other servants? Why did she have to study the scribbles by candlelight, teaching herself word after word, training her tongue like the woman in the story, Scheherazade, who knew that in any desert the tongue is the only way to keep your head from spinning? The book and the necklace were all Sally had now. How often the little lion told her that even if she married him there would be no inheritance for her in this life or the next. “What God has cursed even I cannot undo,” he told her. And yet, on the 1870 U.S. Census she is listed as Wife No. 57.
The book, somewhat miraculously, has survived in the Utah State Historical Society collections. The text is in pristine but unremarkable condition, except for a single dog-eared page, the tale of Tawaddud on the 437th night, which Sally must have been reading as the stagecoach churned west. Perhaps the pearl-throated woman asked if Sally liked tales of the East? Unaccustomed to being acknowledged, Sally would have closed the book, smiled, and pretended not to understand English.
When the little lion preached on Sundays, Sally couldn’t quite understand the words so she watched his mouth. Among her people—day after day a blur in her memory—leaders were supposed to have a way with words too. She couldn’t understand when he said, We are the salt of the earth, brethren, and must flavor her whether she wants it or not, but the way his mouth moved between smile and grimace and solemnity was wildly enchanting. The sound of him was enough to want to follow him anywhere.
As reported in the now infamous New York Times interview, the prophet’s hygiene was exceptional. He owned many things. Trinkets, books, maps, wives. The whole valley essentially. But he treated his tongue as his prized possession. At night, Sally brought him an assortment of tonics on a silver tray. She watched as he removed his gold-plated dentures before rinsing and gargling and spitting into a porcelain basin. With a bristled comb, he removed a thin white film off his tongue. Sometimes he would ask her about her day, other times talk about the weather, almost always proposing marriage. She refused. But with a smile. Even if the lion is little, we can imagine her thinking, one must always smile.
It's no surprise that Sally was the first to notice the spots on his gums. White patches, slowly darkening. They spread over his tongue like constellations. His mouth tingled at first, then ached, then burned. Soon it became difficult for the prophet to talk. My ancestor had no idea how to treat the infection, but from second-hand letters we learn Sally proposed a remedy. Wandering deep into the canyons, far away from the hissing trains, she returned with purple sage, penstemon, lizard tail, and sego lily. The last one scared the prophet. Several of his children had died from mistaking toxic camas for the medicinal sego lily. To his untrained eye they looked the same.
Coaxing the prophet’s tongue out of his mouth, Sally pinched it like a slug between two fingers and gently massaged the lesions with the herbal paste. He gagged and whined, the tongue disappearing back into his mouth like a snake coiling in its grotto. Wrestling the tongue out again, she squeezed the flesh until the pustules burst. With surprising candor, the prophet’s journals admit to fainting. She turned other herbs into a slurry he swished around his mouth and swallowed. It gave him diarrhea. We can only imagine what he was thinking, the so-called mouthpiece of the Lord, as he wrapped his arms around the neck of a so-called savage woman and clung to her like a baby chimp as she wiped his backside clean.
When I submitted the request slip for the “Plural Wives” artifacts at the Gardo House Historical Society in downtown Salt Lake City, the archivist looked annoyed. Upon returning, she informed me the bin in question was missing—an unusual but not abnormal development—and the necklace I was trying to locate was lost. As substitute, she provided a grainy photograph of Amelia Folsom Young, the twenty-fifth and favorite wife, to better visualize the gift from the little lion. I humored her, feeling more vindicated than disappointed.
That Sally was wearing the silver necklace on her way to the salt flats is indisputable to all but the most passionate skeptics. The only distinguishing feature between the necklace in the photograph and the one Sally wore the night she unbuttoned her fussy collar somewhere between Wendover and Salt Lake City along what is now interstate-80 was the tongue fastened at one end like a monstrous pendant.
Cupped in Sally’s palm, the tongue would have seemed like a fat baby lizard. Tíkí, her people called them. The venomous Gila monster Sally knew not to chase as a girl. No doubt it had a pungent odor. Luckily, the stagecoach driver was asleep. Sally could tell by the way his breaths made the hairs of his beard dance. The men of her people had smooth faces, like stones polished in riverbeds, but the pale settlers loved looking like wild dogs.
Removing salt from a pouch, she generously coated the tongue. She wasn’t sure why she did this. She wanted to swim to the bottom of the ocean, to the Old Woman of the Sea who carved the first people from salt, and hide the tongue among the coral, far away from this place. But she wasn’t sure if she believed in that magic anymore, or if the Old Woman would recognize her as one of her daughters. She put the necklace back on, buttoned the collar. All night she would feel it between her breasts, unsure if she was sweating or if the tongue was somehow salivating.
In reviewing the archives of the Utah Botanical Society, I remain unsure what herbs Sally used to treat what the prophet documented in letters a “disturbing infection.” Yarrow and milkweed and bitterbrush are the likely suspects. Church historians have long argued that the “savage woman” poisoned their beloved prophet, but the history of apologetics is riddled with confusions of conspiracy with divinity. By the time my ancestor was summoned the cancer had metastasized. The tongue was now swollen and yellowed with silvery patches spidering inside his cheeks. Like all Habermeyer men, my ancestor was not fond of blood and likely discouraged amputation. But whether the prophet—who did like blood—saw no other choice, or if Sally seduced his imagination, there’s no doubt it was Sally who anesthetized the prophet before severing the tongue at the root. She must have been surprised at how long it was. Like a worm, scribbled in the margins of her copy of the Arabian Nights. Rinsing it off, she then submerged the tongue in a spirit of wine and turpentine. Before sealing the decanter, she added a handful of black pepper and a pinch of mustard seed. Perched on the prophet’s desk, the tongue floated like a shipwrecked castaway, a macabre but enchanting conversation piece for any visitor.
From varied sources we know that months after the amputation, Sally entered the room carrying her usual tray of tonics and herbs and found the prophet armed with a scalpel and magnifying glass. Spread over the desk was the dissected tongue: a hundred pieces of muscle, nerves, veins, and papillae arranged in rows like miniature cobblestone streets. Did he smile with childish pride at this butchery? Or did he immediately try to pacify a disturbed Sally by dipping a spoon in a nearby jar of honey and drizzling it over a lump of tongue? She must have been confused as he smacked his lips and nodded enthusiastically. Taste! he scribbled on the little chalkboard hung around his neck.
She agreed to serve as his apprentice. Was there another choice? Sally pinching the half-rotted tongue between her fingers to see if the prophet groaned in unison. He did. Sally massaging salt, gravy, herbs, and ashes into the flesh and the blindfolded prophet identifying each substance in turn.
It lives that once was dead, he presumably wrote on the chalkboard.
Throughout the winter he was a ghost, locked away in his study dissecting the tongue, fingers blackened with ink, his constant notebook scribbling like matrimonial roaches. When Sally awoke to half-garbled screams one night, she found the little lion kneeling on the floor in a weeping rage trying to tear out the insides of his mouth. Insomnia had turned his beard white. She helped him into bed as he gestured to his mouth, murmuring. No amount of water quenched the burning in his throat. He convulsed for hours. Eventually, he fainted from the pain.
But the burning sensations only intensified. He sweated through four shirts a day. The only relief came from bathing the amputated tongue in laudanum which made him a grumpy narcoleptic.
When he handed her the pamphlet after the spring thaw, Sally was likely nervous. The prophet was pale and haggard with wild eyes like two glossy marbles. She read slowly. She knew he was prone to tantrums he liked to call revelation, but each page was worse than the one before. I attempted to access the extant copy of what historians have nicknamed Discourses of My Cloven Tongue, but the skylit reading room at the Utah State Historical Society was under renovation yet again. Momentarily defeated, I thumbed through my ancestor's medical ledger at the nearby Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Museum where I found the following much-cited passages scribbled in the margins as if in a daydream. The condensed “sermon of the queerest sort,” to parse my ancestor, reasoned the Holy Spirit still lived within the prophet’s amputated tongue. “For thus the evangelist promised, The tongue is a fire. And we know the Holy Spirit dwells in eternal burnings. Ergo, my tongue is the domicile of the Holy Spirit on this earth.” Towards the end brother Brigham warned, “Mock me not, learned men. Why else would the psalmist say, There is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord, thou placed it there? That revelations from heaven even now burn anxiously on my cloven tongue is indisputable. But, bereft of the holy appendage as I am, through what mechanism might we provoke their release?”
The little lion did not lack in imagination. He baptized the tongue in consecrated oil, demanding it reveal its secrets, but this proved ineffective. Luckless and desperate, he purchased an Edison battery. Electricity was all the rage in 1877. The telegraph sent messages halfway across the globe. Hysterical women cured with shock therapies. Soldiers juiced with currents in Crimea. “The soul is electric,” traveling exhibitions declared. Even Edison said electricity “might yet prove the link between this world and the one beyond.” Using an electrode coil, the prophet showered his tongue in a hiss of blue sparks. Other than making all the cats in the neighborhood yowl, this only succeeded in slightly cooking the tongue and provoking Sally’s annoyance. I speak with a cloven tongue of fire, the prophet wrote defiantly on his chalkboard. Not anymore, Sally likely told him.
By late spring he was bedridden. The pain in his mouth migrated to his abdomen. As death proved inevitable, he said his only worry was he might have to wait “a long season of silence” to be reunited with his tongue. Four days before the end he was still busy revising the pamphlet the Church to this day claims is a hoax. “It is a wild thing,” he scribbled beside a shaky illustration of his dissected tongue, “and regrettably I cannot tame it.”
While the elders debated whether the pamphlet was a forgery, Sally trekked into the salt flats. It was 31 August. Stepping from the stagecoach she was almost blinded by the white, ghostly corpse of an ancient ocean.
She required a hatchet to carve open the salt-crusted earth. The constant flooding, freezing, thawing, and evaporating of water across the flats create hexagonal veins like salted honeycomb.
Removing the necklace, Sally might have admired how she had stitched the tongue back together so seamlessly that God himself could not distinguish whether it was her handiwork or his. She wedged it inside a small glass jar and filled it with handfuls of salt. I suppose it’s possible, as one meddlesome colleague has suggested, that as she buried it she remembered the night before the amputation, how the little lion stared at his face in a small, mottled mirror. He’d made it when he was a glazier, in the life he had before conversion, before God called him. He did this nightly, always remembering how one afternoon he stood before a crowd and for a few seconds his face and voice seemed like his dead prophet-friend. The miracle of my life, he believed.
As several thousand mourners packed into the tabernacle for the funeral, Sally rode back into town and confessed to the elders she had no choice. The mourners sang my ancestor’s hymn (Farewell, dear brother, Brigham Young . . . Thy fame shall dwell on every tongue), unaware the Lord’s mouthpiece was a hundred miles away buried under two feet of salt. She confessed everything she did was out of love. She confessed there is not enough salt.
This story was inspired by and owes a debt of gratitude to the following texts: Edward W. Tullidge, Life of Brigham Young: Or, Utah and Her Founders; Susa Young Gates, Brigham Young: Patriot, Pioneer, and Prophet; Stanley P. Hirshson, The Lion of the Lord: A Biography of Brigham Young; Leonard J. Arrington, Brigham Young: American Moses; and John G. Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet. Special thanks to Virginia Kerns’s brilliant monograph, Sally in Three Worlds: An Indian Captive in the House of Brigham Young, without which my story would not exist.