A 'Utah Camelot' scandal led to the death of an early-Mormon 'princess'

I’m haunted by a ragged PDF-copied photograph, courtesy of the Utah State Historical Society, of Louisa “Louie” Wells, who 130 years ago was a princess in Mormon Salt Lake City. The poor quality of the reproduced photo does not hide that she was a beautiful young woman. “Louie” Wells was the daughter of Mormon elitist Daniel Hamner Wells, Salt Lake City mayor, and Emmeline Blanche Wells, Mormon feminist and magazine editor.

Besides being favored with beauty, and a steady, esteemed Mormon suitor, journalist Robert W. Sloan, Louie was as accomplished as a Jane Austen heroine. She sang beautifully, she performed in Salt Lake City plays and operas, including “The Mikado,” was an early leader of the LDS ladies Mutual organization, and was an excellent essayist, writing accounts of her travels to the eastern United States and Europe for the LDS journal Women’s Exponent. She was groomed to be a Mormon woman icon, perhaps as well known today as Eliza R. Snow.

Today, in a corner of the Salt Lake City cemetery, a tombstone, well over a century old, bears the name “Louie,” and nothing else. Louie Wells died an agonizing death at 24, far from home, with her mother at her side, helpless to save her. In less than a year, her bright future and presumed happiness was extinguished. The events that led to her death roiled Salt Lake City and nearly destroyed the kinship between two prominent families, the Wells and the Cannons. 

Historian Kenneth Cannon III’s article, “The Tragic Matter of Louie Wells and John Q. Cannon,” is must reading if one wants to learn more after reading this blog. In 1886, in the Salt Lake Tabernacle, John Q. — the eldest living son of Mormon elder George Q. Cannon, and a former Ogden Standard editor, Deseret News reporter, counselor in the LDS Church Presiding Bishopric, and husband of Annie Wells Cannon, Louie’s sister   — shocked a crowd gathered to worship by confessing to adultery. He was immediately excommunicated, promptly divorced from Annie, and then married to Louie.

Although John Q. Cannon did not mention the “other woman,” the hasty marriage to Louie made it easy to guess whom he had slept with. Try to imagine an LDS general authority today confessing to adultery during a stake conference and one understands how shocked Mormons were at the time. On the other hand, the anti-Mormon Salt Lake Tribune was delighted. It had, in 1884, published gossip that John Q. and Louie had secretly married. At the time, John Q. had tracked down the reporter, and beat him up.

After his 1886 confession to adultery, divorce and new marriage, federal marshals — always on the lookout for polygamists — arrested John Q., claiming his quick divorce from Annie was illegal. Louie, already pregnant, went into hiding but was located by authorities. She spent a humiliating time in court denying she was a plural wife.

The case against John Q. eventually lost steam. Long before its resolution, Louie was sent to San Francisco by her family to have the baby. It was not the first time that she had been made pregnant by her brother in law. John Q. confessed to an intimate that he had impregnated Louie in 1885 and that she had miscarried.  This news seems to lend partial credibility to the controversial Tribune article, although no marriage occurred. The source for that article, according to Kenneth Cannon’s piece, was Angus Cannon Jr., the despised, “scoundrel” son of Angus Cannon Sr., polygamist and stake president, who had accompanied John Q. when he confessed in 1886.

Louie Cannon Wells died six weeks after suffering her second miscarriage. Her death at 24 was due to dropsy, and she suffered terribly. Mom Emmeline was unable to help ease her pain, which must have been exacerbated due to stress, hiding and traveling. During their short marriage, Louie and her husband were likely never together. He was not at her side when she died. Shortly after Louie’s death, John Q. and Annie Wells were remarried. Several years later, Louie was sealed to John Q. in a temple ceremony.

At Louie’s funeral, an already bad situation was dangerously increased when stake president Angus Cannon publicly identified Louie as the adulterous partner of John Q. This created a feud between the Cannons and Wells that eventually led to Angus Cannon physically striking Louie’s sister, Mell, and threatening to tell more about the affair. Later, John Q. threatened to kill Angus Cannon. Tensions were finally eased thanks to the Wells family matriarch, Emmeline. Tolerant, and a peacemaker at heart, she reached out to the Cannons, and the situation calmed. However, the rift never died, as Emmeline Wells’ diary entry of May 17, 1898, footnoted by Kenneth Cannon, reads, “Angus is 64 years old today. ... He has seen much sorrow and as he has been unkind and ungenerous to others harsh in his judgment one need not be surprised that it comes back upon him — As ye mete it out to others so shall it be unto you, and therefore he should expect it.”

As with any tragedy, there are “why” questions. Why didn’t John Q. make Louie a plural wife, and avoid church punishment? One answer may be that plural marriage for younger LDS scions was being subtly discouraged at a time when Utah leaders wanted statehood. More likely is that John Q. could not control his lust for a beautiful, younger sister in law living in the home, particularly when his own wife was pregnant. In his article, Kenneth Cannon points out that despite being the favored older son, (John Q. had been called to be an apostle long before the adultery was revealed, only to have that blocked by LDS Church President John Taylor), John Q. was a dysfunctional man. He was prone to drinking, gambling and carousing. It’s possible that inebriation fueled his lust. Also, one two occasions, John Q. embezzled thousands of dollars while held positions of trust. He was bailed out both times by his family’s influence.

Time, and staying alive, returned John Q. to society’s esteem. After his remarriage, he was restored to membership to the LDS Church and was a Deseret News editor. He and Annie had 12 children. John Q. is buried in the Cannon family plot next to his wife Annie. Elsewhere, in the Wells family plot, sits the stone with the sole word, “Louie,” on it.

-- Doug Gibson

A previous version of this column was published at StandardBlogs.

An historical novel on the affair is also available.

Polygamy was no Mormon harem, but it tore at marriages and hearts

(Originally published at StandardNET in 2011)

I spent some time re-reading the late Richard S. Van Wagoner’s excellent book, “Mormon Polygamy: A History.” The 19th century tales of harems and never-ending teenage-girl hunting were, of course, lies to excite Eastern U.S. readers. Polygamy was a contradictory doctrine, and extremely dysfunctional. Brigham Young once said that he wished it wasn’t a doctrine, but later also raged that those who disbelieved in polygamy — and even monogomous LDS men — were in danger of damnation. And polygamy led to divorce among LDS elite leaders in numbers that would shock today. According to Van Wagoner, more than 50 marriages of LDS leaders ended in divorce in the mid 19th century.

Indeed, two early wives of LDS apostle brothers, Orson and Parley Pratt, gave their husbands the heave-ho for their enthusiastic embrace of polygamy, and for marrying young, teenage brides. And not every faithful LDS elder with a feisty wife was brave enough to try polygamy. Van Wagoner recounts the tale of one husband who abandoned plans to take a plural wife after his wife informed him that she had received a revelation from God directing her to shoot any spare wife who darkened the family doorstep.

As Van Wagoner writes, though, there was a somber paradox to polygamy, particularly for faithful LDS women who reluctantly embraced the doctrine as a commandment of God yet suffered personal heartache and financial pain due to their husband’s extracurricular wives. Emmeline Blanche Wells, early Mormon women’s leader and feminist, wrote publicly that polygamy “gives women the highest opportunities for self-development, exercise of judgment, and arouses latent faculties, making them truly cultivated in the actual realities of life, more independent in thought and mind, noble and unselfish.” In her private journal, though, Wells despaired of how polygamy had robbed her of the love of her husband, Daniel H. Wells, member of the church’s first presidency.

Emmeline wrote, “O, if my husband could only love me even a little and not seem to be perfectly indifferent to any sensation of that kind. He cannot know the cravings of my nature; he is surrounded with love on every side, and I am cast out.”

“He is surrounded with love on every side, and I am cast out,” is an appropriate indictment of polygamy, and no doubt a reason that it has long been discarded by the LDS Church.

As Van Wagoner recalls, another LDS women leader, physician Dr. Martha Hughes Cannon, the first female state senator in the U.S., yearned in her personal letters for one husband who would be hers only to cherish. Despite these yearnings, she clung to her LDS faith in “the Principle.” Martha wrote her husband, Angus, that only her divine knowledge of the sacred principle of plural marriage made it bearable to endure. Nevertheless, Martha also wrote this scolding to Angus: “How do you think I feel when I meet you driving another plural wife about in a glittering carriage in broad day light? (I) am entirely out of money ...” 

For Emmeline Wells, there was a sort of happy ending that was denied many others. As Van Wagoner recounts, in his final years, her frail and aging husband, Daniel, seeking tender care and companionship, returned to Emmeline’s home and side, after mostly ignoring her for 40 years. In her eyes, that probably counted as a blessing due after decades of suffering.

Despite lurid tales and even the teenage bride races, sex was a distant reason for polygamy. It was the result of an odd doctrine, now mostly forgotten in the LDS Church, that taught that the more wives and children one accumulated on earth would increase one’s post-life eternal influence and kingdoms. Yet, one will rarely hear that explanation today.

-- Doug Gibson

1850s LDS publication touts grandeur, threatens celibacy to promote polygamy

I have the privilege to own, hold and read the Saturday, April 9, 1853 edition of The Latter Day Saints’ Millennial Star, published in London. I procured this copy via Ebay. The issue was devoted to an enthusiastic, at times clever, defense of polygamy, which the LDS Church had recently admitted it espoused. It’s interesting, and even gratifying, to read such an audacious defense of a doctrine that was as unpopular then as it still is. Unabashedly, the pub proclaims that without polygamy, husbands and wives are doomed to celibate, servant-like jobs in the hereafter ministering to their polygamous peers with husbands hopscotching between kingdoms while distinct wives sit on thrones raising children who grow in intelligence.

It’s a fascinating piece of history. Can anyone imagine if today’s LDS pubs, which are vanilla-boring compared to the Millennial Star, spoke so boldly to “gentiles” on celestial glory? The lead article was “A familiar conversation between two cousins, on marriage,” featuring Nelly, wife to George, and Abby, wife to Mormon John. It’s very entertaining, and no doubt was persuasive to many working-class Brits of that era. At the beginning, Nelly is contemptuous of Abby’s plans to share her husband with other wives, remarking, “… I would just like to pick one or two women for him that I could select; I’ll warrant that my George would have to be content with his Nelly, ever after! …”

Obviously, this conversation/debate is geared toward Abby persuading Nelly to the virtues of polygamy. Abby suggests that Nelly consider and pray about it. She tells her cousin that neither of them have the right to their husbands if the marriage is not bound by the Lord. Because her husband John has been called by God to be a “Prince Regent,” Abby is willing to share him with other wives. She says, “… Now if God is appointing His sons on the earth to fill thrones and occupy many principalities, and my husband means to be as worthy to fill thrones as others, then I will be content to share with him one throne, and rejoice at the same time to see others share with him other thrones, while my capacity will not allow me to share any more than my own. …”

Later, Abby goes for Nelly’s debate jugular when she tells her cousin that in the matter of sexual companionship in the afterlife, it’s either eternal polygamy or eternal celibacy. “…But dear cousin, the great question is this — will we unite with the plurality Order of Ancient Patriarchs, or will we consent voluntarily to be doomed to eternal celibacy? This is the true division of the question. One or the other we must choose. We cannot be married to our husbands for eternity, without subscribing to the law that admits a plurality of wives. …”

The “conversation” is an excellent polemic. It gets to the major concerns that a “Nelly” and “George” might naturally feel when contemplating an afterlife. Will they be together? Does God have some plan of eternal progression? “Abby” also argues to “Nelly” that polygamy provides more intellectual and physically fit children, grandchildren and future offspring. “Abby” later answers “Nelly’s” concern that other wives would undermine her by saying that larger families, if under the order of Abraham, “…enjoy a greater amount of intelligence, and a greater share of love also, than you possibly could in that single, contracted order which you seem to desire … In the former order your children are all the lawful heirs of thrones and kingdoms, and in your favourite order they are only the heirs of servile inferiority.”

Later in the conversation, Abby tries to persuade Nelly that polygamy provides a more moral and righteous social order than the norm and that it makes men less prone to adulterous behavior. The conversation is continued to the next issue, which I’d love to get a copy of. However, they can be read online at many sources, including from here.

As history reveals, polygamy was not to Abby’s hope. It caused poverty and heartbreak for many Utah women and near ruin for the LDS Church, which has been excommunicating earthly polygamists for 100-plus years. But it conveys the fierce pride in “The Principle,” that motivated so many smart, talented women, such as Emmeline Wells and Eliza R. Snow, to live it. I recently read where the great apostle Parley P. Pratt envisioned an afterlife of limitless Gods rushing here and there, from worlds to worlds, constantly busy creating plans of salvation. From this 1853 relic, I can see where those beliefs have a genesis.

The rest of the issue has an entertaining mix of articles. Their is a segment on the history of the Prophet Joseph Smith, several mission reports, including Burma and Switzerland, a reprint of a New York Herald editorial on the spiritual decline of the U.S. This is accompanied by an editorial comment that blasts the U.S. and assigns the ills mentioned to that nation having “refused the principles of life, and rejected the doctrine of immediate revelation, when they were taught them by a living Prophet of the Lord. …” There is a strong last-days apocalyptic tone to the rebuke. It ends with, “Then let the nations beware, for the Almighty is not trifling with them.”

There is a poem, Palestine, by a J.L. Lyne, more tidbits from other newspapers, notices of recent church publications, financial reports, and a strong essay against adultery, which cleverly points to the Utah settlement as the moral example of the nation. As mentioned, it’s a fascinating bit of history, and I hope to find more publications of that era.

-- Doug Gibson

This column originally was published online as a StandardNet blog post.

John Q. Cannon and Louie Wells, a Utah Camelot scandal

I’m haunted by a ragged PDF-copied photograph, courtesy of the Utah State Historical Society, of Louisa “Louie” Wells, who 130 years ago was a princess in Mormon Salt Lake City. The poor quality of the reproduced photo does not hide that she was a beautiful young woman. “Louie” Wells was the daughter of Mormon elitist Daniel Hamner Wells, Salt Lake City mayor, and Emmeline Blanche Wells, Mormon feminist and magazine editor.

Besides being favored with beauty, and a steady, esteemed Mormon suitor, journalist Robert W. Sloan, Louie was as accomplished as a Jane Austen heroine. She sang beautifully, she performed in Salt Lake City plays and operas, including “The Mikado,” was an early leader of the LDS ladies Mutual organization, and was an excellent essayist, writing accounts of her travels to the eastern United States and Europe for the LDS journal Women’s Exponent. She was groomed to be a Mormon woman icon, perhaps as well known today as Eliza R. Snow.

Today, in a corner of the Salt Lake City cemetery, a tombstone, well over a century old, bears the name “Louie,” and nothing else. Louie Wells died an agonizing death at 24, far from home, with her mother at her side, helpless to save her. In less than a year, her bright future and presumed happiness was extinguished. The events that led to her death roiled Salt Lake City and nearly destroyed the kinship between two prominent families, the Wells and the Cannons. 

Historian Kenneth Cannon III’s article, “The Tragic Matter of Louie Wells and John Q. Cannon,” is must reading if one wants to learn more after reading this blog. In 1886, in the Salt Lake Tabernacle, John Q. — the eldest living son of Mormon elder George Q. Cannon, and a former Ogden Standard editor, Deseret News reporter, counselor in the LDS Church Presiding Bishopric, and husband of Annie Wells Cannon, Louie’s sister   — shocked a crowd gathered to worship by confessing to adultery. He was immediately excommunicated, promptly divorced from Annie, and then married to Louie.

Although John Q. Cannon did not mention the “other woman,” the hasty marriage to Louie made it easy to guess whom he had slept with. Try to imagine an LDS general authority today confessing to adultery during a stake conference and one understands how shocked Mormons were at the time. On the other hand, the anti-Mormon Salt Lake Tribune was delighted. It had, in 1884, published gossip that John Q. and Louie had secretly married. At the time, John Q. had tracked down the reporter, and beat him up.

After his 1886 confession to adultery, divorce and new marriage, federal marshals — always on the lookout for polygamists — arrested John Q., claiming his quick divorce from Annie was illegal. Louie, already pregnant, went into hiding but was located by authorities. She spent a humiliating time in court denying she was a plural wife.

The case against John Q. eventually lost steam. Long before its resolution, Louie was sent to San Francisco by her family to have the baby. It was not the first time that she had been made pregnant by her brother in law. John Q. confessed to an intimate that he had impregnated Louie in 1885 and that she had miscarried.  This news seems to lend partial credibility to the controversial Tribune article, although no marriage occurred. The source for that article, according to Kenneth Cannon’s piece, was Angus Cannon Jr., the despised, “scoundrel” son of Angus Cannon Sr., polygamist and stake president, who had accompanied John Q. when he confessed in 1886.

Louie Cannon Wells died six weeks after suffering her second miscarriage. Her death at 24 was due to dropsy, and she suffered terribly. Mom Emmeline was unable to help ease her pain, which must have been exacerbated due to stress, hiding and traveling. During their short marriage, Louie and her husband were likely never together. He was not at her side when she died. Shortly after Louie’s death, John Q. and Annie Wells were remarried. Several years later, Louie was sealed to John Q. in a temple ceremony.

At Louie’s funeral, an already bad situation was dangerously increased when stake president Angus Cannon publicly identified Louie as the adulterous partner of John Q. This created a feud between the Cannons and Wells that eventually led to Angus Cannon physically striking Louie’s sister, Mell, and threatening to tell more about the affair. Later, John Q. threatened to kill Angus Cannon. Tensions were finally eased thanks to the Wells family matriarch, Emmeline. Tolerant, and a peacemaker at heart, she reached out to the Cannons, and the situation calmed. However, the rift never died, as Emmeline Wells’ diary entry of May 17, 1898, footnoted by Kenneth Cannon, reads, “Angus is 64 years old today. ... He has seen much sorrow and as he has been unkind and ungenerous to others harsh in his judgment one need not be surprised that it comes back upon him — As ye mete it out to others so shall it be unto you, and therefore he should expect it.”

As with any tragedy, there are “why” questions. Why didn’t John Q. make Louie a plural wife, and avoid church punishment? One answer may be that plural marriage for younger LDS scions was being subtly discouraged at a time when Utah leaders wanted statehood. More likely is that John Q. could not control his lust for a beautiful, younger sister in law living in the home, particularly when his own wife was pregnant. In his article, Kenneth Cannon points out that despite being the favored older son, (John Q. had been called to be an apostle long before the adultery was revealed, only to have that blocked by LDS Church President John Taylor), John Q. was a dysfunctional man. He was prone to drinking, gambling and carousing. It’s possible that inebriation fueled his lust. Also, one two occasions, John Q. embezzled thousands of dollars while held positions of trust. He was bailed out both times by his family’s influence.

Time, and staying alive, returned John Q. to society’s esteem. After his remarriage, he was restored to membership to the LDS Church and was a Deseret News editor. He and Annie had 12 children. John Q. is buried in the Cannon family plot next to his wife Annie. Elsewhere, in the Wells family plot, sits the stone with the sole word, “Louie,” on it.

A previous version of this column was published at StandardBlogs.

An historical novel on the affair is also available.