STORY OF MORMON LIFE.
The Sad Experience of an English Woman Who Went Crazy After Her Husband took a Second Wife.
Between the two evils, Mormers [sic] and Chinamen, which are allowed the rights of suffrage in America, it is difficult to say which is the lesser. If the Chinamen are offensive, the Mormons are obnoxious and so on through the category. A most pitable [sic] case of Mormon cussedness, is shown in the following letter to the New York Sun, from the pen of a Salt Lake gentleman:
An honest-looking Englishman named Mower arrived here a few years ago with his wife and three small children, and settled at Brigham. The man was industrious, but he appeared to be something of a fanatic in religion. It was plain that the Saints had got a pretty firm hold on him. His wife was a fair-haired, rosey-cheeked little woman, and their children were delecate [sic] and attractive. The wife and mother went through the ceremony of joining the church after her arrival. The husband had been received into the fold before he left England. They got themselves a home, and appeared happy enough, until the husband, over-persuaded by an elder of the church, determined on taking another wife. The woman selected was a new arrival from Denmark who could not speak a word of English, and for whom it was the special desire of the church to get “anchored” here. Mower was the man who was expected to marry her, and marry her he did. His wife held out strenuously against the woman for some time, and refused to live under the same roof with her, but at least under the pleadings and threats of the dignataries [sic] of the Church and the representations of the husband as to his own poverty and inability to provide two homes, she consented. After that she began to appear like another woman. Her hair became silvery, her form wasted, and her eyes were bright and glittering. She wandered over the country a great deal with her little ones, and could be seen day after day on the roadsides with her little ones, caressing and weeping over them. Sometimes in pleasant weather she did not return to her home for days, and when she did she would have the children decked out in fantastic wreaths and flowers gathered by her own hands in the valleys. Her husband followed her, and tried to persuade her to return and be herself, but to no purpose. Then he locked her up or took the children away from her. She would find them again, and together they would return to the open country. All were subdued and sorrowful, and yet the childishness of the mother was just as pronounced as that of her children. She would run with them, kiss them, build little dams for them in the brooks, construct playhouses for them of stone, weave garlands, and deck herself and them. If they cried, she gathered them to her, and wept with them, and if they laughed she chided them.
Finally her mood changed, and, instead of delighting in rambles with the little ones, she became absorbed in a desire for vengeance. She would steal up stealthily to the house which was hers no longer, and make assaults on the woman who had usurped her place. Once she set fire to the premises and then fled. On another occasion she took her children and was absent so long that search was made for her. After three or four days she was found several miles from home, almost dead from hunger, and the children weak and emaciated from the same cause, and all crying bitterly. She had dug small holes in the ground, which she called their graves and the little ones were waiting with her for the last dread summons. Three men found difficulty in overpowering her, despite her weakened condition, and the entire party were then conveyed to town and cared for. The children went to their father and the woman was placed in the asylum at Provo, where she is now.
Culled from the October 3, 1885 issue of the Great Falls Tribune, Great Falls, Montana.
