Full Issue BYU Studies

BYU Studies Quarterly Volume 51 | Issue 4 Article 1 12-1-2012 Full Issue BYU Studies Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq Recommended Citation Studies, BYU (2012) "Full Issue," BYU Studies Quarterly: Vol. 51 : Iss. 4 , Article 1. Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol51/iss4/1 This Full Issue is brought to you for free and open access by the All Journals at BYU ScholarsArchive. It has been accepted for inclusion in BYU Studies Quarterly by an authorized editor of BYU ScholarsArchive. For more information, please contact [email protected], [email protected]. Studies: Full Issue Involving Readers in the Latter-day Saint Academic Experience BYU Studies Quarterly is dedicated to the conviction that the spiritual and the intellectual can be complementary and fundamentally harmonious. It strives to publish articles that reflect a faithful point of view, are relevant to subjects of interest to Latter-day Saints, and conform to high scholarly stan- dards. BYU Studies Quarterly also includes poetry, personal essays, reviews, and never-before-published documents of significant historical value to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Contributions from all fields of learning are invited, and readers everywhere are welcomed. Published by BYU ScholarsArchive, 2012 1 BYU Studies Quarterly, Vol. 51, Iss. 4 [2012], Art. 1 STUDIES QUARTERLY BYU Vol. 51 • No. 4 • 2012 ARTICLES Plural Marriage in St. George: A Trilogy of Articles 4 Probing the High Prevalence of Polygyny in St. George, 1861– 1880: An Introduction Davis Bitton, Val Lambson, Lowell C. “Ben” Bennion, and Kathryn M. Daynes 7 Demographic Limits of Nineteenth-Century Mormon Polygyny Davis Bitton and Val Lambson 27 Mapping the Extent of Plural Marriage in St. George, 1861–1880 Lowell C. “Ben” Bennion 69 Striving to Live the Principle in Utah’s First Temple City: A Snapshot of Polygamy in St. George, Utah, in June 1880 Kathryn M. Daynes 96 Plural Marriage in St. George: A Summary and an Invitation Davis Bitton, Val Lambson, Lowell C. “Ben” Bennion, and Kathryn M. Daynes 99 Some Textual Changes for a Scholarly Study of the Book of Mormon Royal Skousen 120 When Pages Collide: Dissecting the Words of Mormon Jack M. Lyon and Kent R. Minson 141 On Mormon Laughter Shawn R. Tucker https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol51/iss4/1 2 Studies: Full Issue 155 Lehi’s Dream and Nephi’s Vision: Apocalyptic Revelations in Narrative Context Matthew Scott Stenson ESSAY 137 Trailing Clouds of Zombies Eric d’Evegnée POETRY 98 Teinoscope Marilyn Nielson 118 This Beginning of Miracles Marilyn Nielson BOOK REVIEW 180 Hell on the Range: A Story of Honor, Conscience, and the American West by Daniel Justin Herman Reviewed by Taunalyn F. Rutherford FILM REVIEW 185 17 Miracles directed by T. C. Christensen Reviewed by Allan Davis BOOK NOTICE 189 BACK COVER IMAGE 191 Tony Elizabeth Thayer Published by BYU ScholarsArchive, 2012 3 BYU Studies Quarterly, Vol. 51, Iss. 4 [2012], Art. 1 This view of the St. George Temple, ca. early 1876, shows the lower half of the sandstone being prepared for a whitewash coating, symbolizing purity and light. The main tower did not match Brigham Young’s expectations; when it was damaged by lightning, it was replaced with a taller tower. This is the only known image of the temple under construction that includes a group of citizens in the foreground. Courtesy Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol51/iss4/1 4 Studies: Full Issue Probing the High Prevalence of Polygyny in St. George, 1861–1880 An Introduction Davis Bitton, Val Lambson, Lowell C. “Ben” Bennion, and Kathryn M. Daynes he three articles presented in the following pages interpret and map the Tunusually high incidence of polygamy (or polygyny, the proper term) that characterized St. George, Utah, from its founding in 1861 until the fed- eral census of 1880. Each article approaches the topic from a different angle, reflecting the perspectives of an economist, a geographer, and two histori- ans. Although our primary emphasis is on St. George, we believe the methods employed here can contribute to understanding the complex dynamics of polygyny as practiced in nineteenth-century Utah more broadly. In Mapping Mormonism: An Atlas of Latter-day Saint History (published by BYU Studies), 122–23, Bennion has mapped polygyny’s prevalence in sixty Mormon towns as of 1870. His map-essay includes a population pyramid of Utah for the same year that shows an even balance of males and females for each age group. In spite of the pyramid’s symmetry, an average of 25 to 30 percent of those sixty towns’ residents were in plural households. Interestingly, on the map, no town with more than five hundred inhabitants shows a percentage of polygamous households higher than St. George, at almost 50 percent. The first of our three papers, by Bitton and Lambson, recognizes for the first time in Mormon studies the limits that demography imposed upon the number of Latter- day Saints who could have practiced plural marriage dur- ing the pioneer period. Their model suggests that if the ratio of females to males of similar age was roughly equal, it seems implausible that more Lowell C. “Ben” Bennion BYU Studies Quarterly 51, no. 4 (1) 5 Published by BYU ScholarsArchive, 2012 5 BYU Studies Quarterly, Vol. 51, Iss. 4 [2012], Art. 1 6 v BYU Studies Quarterly than 15 to 20 percent of the territory’s husbands and 25 to 30 percent of its wives normally could have lived in polygyny. This of course does not rule out geographic pockets of higher prevalence such as St. George, but then we want to ask, what made St. George special? Did Church leaders consciously select polygamists with large families to settle Utah’s Dixie? Were “very committed” polygamous members less likely than monogamists to “back out” of Dixie’s hostile desert environment? In probing pos- sible answers to these questions, our second article, Val Lambson by Bennion, focuses on the marital status of the men called to southern Utah in 1861 and 1862 and on the prevalence of polygyny in St. George and elsewhere in Dixie at the time of the 1870 census. Finally, Daynes concentrates on the makeup of the town’s population of marriageable age as of 1880. Her article identifies the three most common sources of women who chose to enter plurality, with a surprisingly high number coming from plural families. She also explores the role that the pres- ence of Utah’s first temple exerted in maintaining St. George’s exceptional level of polygyny. Apply- Davis Bitton ing the Bitton-Lambson model to St. George and Manti and drawing on other related research, she outlines the changing levels of plural marriage in nineteenth-century Utah. Together, these three articles underscore the importance of understanding not only the high prevalence of polygyny in Dixie, especially in Utah’s first temple town, but also what such high percent- ages reveal about the general importance of plural marriage throughout Utah between 1847 and 1890. The territory functioned as a “polygamous society,” which in the 1860s and 1870s in many places, cer- tainly in Dixie, approached or exceeded the sustain- Kathryn M. Daynes able level of plural marriage imposed by the limits inherent in the population’s age-gender structure. Deeply committed to their faith, many Latter-day Saints strove to put their beliefs into practice, even the Principle, resulting in the relatively large percentage that spent at least part of their lives in plural households. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol51/iss4/1 6 Studies: Full Issue Demographic Limits of Nineteenth-Century Mormon Polygyny Davis Bitton and Val Lambson hat percentage of nineteenth-century Mormons practiced polygyny? WEstimates of the answer have evolved as have the methods of posing the question.1 In 1885, Church leaders John Taylor and George Q. Cannon wrote that “the male members of our Church who practice plural marriage are estimated as not exceeding but little, if any, two per cent, of the entire membership of the Church.”2 Expressing the number of practicing males as a fraction of the entire Church population, including members outside of Mormon Country, was no doubt intended to generate a low-sounding figure. Leonard Arrington and Davis Bitton estimated general or overall polygyny prevalence to be 5 percent of husbands and 12 percent of wives.3 These estimates resulted from an effort to express the earlier claim of 2 percent in a more readily interpretable form. They were not based on actual marriage data. Subsequent data-based studies, some of which are cited in appendix A, suggested that Mormon polygyny prevalence was considerably higher than had been supposed. The fraction of Mormon males with more than one wife was estimated to fall between 13 and 33 percent, depending on the time and place. Estimates of the fraction of Mormon females in polygy- nous relationships ranged between 25 and 56 percent. Polygyny is not unique to nineteenth-century Mormons. Of the 1,170 societies recorded in Murdock’s Ethnographic Analysis, polygyny is present in 850, or about 73 percent of them.4 Estimates of prevalence for the examples listed in appendix A range as high as 76 percent of husbands (in Ijebu, Nigeria in 1952) and 72 percent of wives (in Mosogat and Igueben, Nigeria, in 1977–78).5 BYU Studies Quarterly 51, no. 4 (1) 7 Published by BYU ScholarsArchive, 2012 7 BYU Studies Quarterly, Vol. 51, Iss. 4 [2012], Art. 1 8 v BYU Studies Quarterly In what follows, we use a simple demographic model to derive math- ematical limits on polygyny prevalence.

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