Faith and Betrayal

by Sally Denton

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PREFACE

  CHAPTER ONE - “Worth a Long Walk to See”

  CHAPTER TWO - A Wine Cask on the Channel

  CHAPTER THREE - These Latter Days

  CHAPTER FOUR - Committed to the Deep

  CHAPTER FIVE - Snags and Sawyers

  CHAPTER SIX - The Crossing

  CHAPTER SEVEN - A Life of Toil

  CHAPTER EIGHT - Through the Veil

  CHAPTER NINE - One Household of Faith

  EPILOGUE - Peace at Last

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ALSO BY SALLY DENTON

  Copyright Page

  For Sara Kate, Leslie, Marianne, and Jacqueline Denton, Jean Rio’s great-great-great-granddaughters and keepers of her legacy

  Jean Rio

  And he said to the woman, Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace.

  Luke 7:50

  PREFACE

  An Extraordinary Woman of Ordinary Virtues

  My great-great-grandmother Jane (Jean) Rio Griffiths brought the first piano from England across the Great Plains and into the intermountain American West by wagon train in 1851. It was a feat that intrigued me as a little girl and young woman. But it was only later, when I explored her life, that I saw it was but one of her many accomplishments. Her spiritual passage was far more significant.

  A recent convert to Mormonism, Jean Rio left an exceedingly comfortable life in London to make her way to the new Zion in the Great Salt Lake Valley of Utah Territory. Eventually, after a series of harrowing trials, physical and spiritual, she moved beyond the religiosity that had brought her to America, but she never lost faith in a higher spirituality, or in herself.

  I was a teenager living in Boulder City, Nevada, when a distant relative—one of my father’s cousins from a California branch of the family—arrived with a typed transcript of Jean Rio’s diary, written in 1851. I was too young and too easily distracted then to follow up. The diary sat in my father’s den, where, unbeknownst to me at the time, another version typed on faded onion skin rested unread in a box of papers that had belonged to my deceased paternal grandmother, Hazel Baker Denton. The provenance of these two copies of the diary is unclear. As it turned out, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints also had a copy of the same passages, as did a few of Jean Rio’s descendants. Hundreds of pages of other relatives’ diaries, letters, essays, and memoirs—portraying a tapestry of our family’s history—had also been handed down to Hazel, the designated “writer” in the clan, and eventually these passed from her through her son, my father, to me.

  It was only after I had become a journalist, ten years later, that I read Jean Rio’s diary for the first time. But it would be years before I could turn my attention to her story in a deeper way. When I began my search I traveled to Denmark, England, Utah, California, and Nevada, gathering documents, oral histories, genealogical charts, letters, and newspaper articles. I found Jean Rio’s crumbling gravestone in Antioch, California, and her magnificent piano in Salt Lake City—one of the few artifacts in the church-owned museum without an explanatory notice of how it was acquired.

  Though Jean Rio left the Mormon faith disillusioned with its broken promises, the church continues to capitalize on her initial conversion and her contemporaneous emigration journal, even now displaying it, along with her piano, in an elaborate presentation at the Museum of Church History in Salt Lake City. Sections of the diary were published during the twentieth century in various articles, books, church publications, and even the Congressional Record.

  In fact, there are three different parts of Jean Rio’s diary. The first journal—what I call the emigration diary—details her journey from England to Utah during 1851 and the early months of her new life in Salt Lake City. The diary falls silent after March 1852 when Jean Rio’s life becomes increasingly difficult under the theocracy of the Mormon Church. The entries briefly resume seventeen years later when she leaves Utah and resettles in California. The second—what I call the midwife’s notebook—consists of fragmentary notations about births she attended between 1873 and 1881, after she had left Utah and the Mormon Church, and which I located during my research for this book. Finally, and perhaps most intriguing, on May 8, 1880, she added a small section to the end of the emigration diary regarding her decision to leave Utah. This section describes her one visit back to Utah during which she spent twenty-one months with her son William and his family. It includes a cryptic reference to what I call the California diary: “I have kept a daily diary a good deal of the time since I have been in California, which my children can refer to, if they wish.” This journal has never surfaced.

  The Mormon Church exploited her story, using the first part of the emigration version to promote its ideology, idealizing her as if she had remained among the faithful, excising the added portion of the diary that chronicled her break with it. Ironically, she who recorded history with such precision became part of the church’s selective writing of history. Subsequent generations within her family—Mormon and non-Mormon alike—similarly embraced certain aspects of the diary that served their various interests. Mormon descendants of Jean Rio uphold the diary as evidence of a deeply spiritual woman devoted to the doctrines of the Church of Latter-day Saints, a woman who ultimately left Utah because of poverty rather than because of her overwhelming rejection of the church and its leaders. Non-Mormon descendants, like me, use the diary as evidence that, for many converts, the reality of nineteenth-century Utah—the church’s expropriation of property under the doctrine of “consecration,” the practice of polygamy, the violence of some of the rituals, all amid a dictatorial theocracy—was that of an oppressive regime, particularly for women.

  The emigration diary—exceptional for its interpretation, analysis, description, and unfailing attention to the most mundane as well as the extraordinary details of daily life— breaks off abruptly in March 1852, when Jean Rio moves to Ogden amidst the fear and intimidation that has settled into the Mormon theocracy. The fact that she is apparently silent for the next seventeen years—until 1869 when she decides to abandon Utah—leaves us with a mystery. It is neither characteristic nor credible that a woman of such candor, literary acumen, and faithful journal-keeping, with such devotion to recording her daily life and the world around her, would have suddenly ceased writing at the moment of perhaps the most trying crisis of her life. Indeed, she makes clear that she continued a diary throughout the rest of her life. Where is that California diary? Were her papers and chronicles destroyed for the truths they revealed? Or did they simply disappear through the generations, as heirlooms are wont to do? In any case, I have reconstructed Jean Rio’s life from the evidence that has survived.

  “Women have not been well served in traditional assumptions about the American frontier,” historian Ruth B. Moynihan has written. “Western mythology is replete with stereotypes about the active role of men and the symbolic function of women.” Perhaps most starkly deficient in the portrayal by male historians is the character of the pioneering woman, who should be seen not as overworked helpmate but as adventure-seeking, nature-loving, courageous, talented, and free-spirited explorer of an uncultivated and untrammeled territory. “Pioneering is really a wilderness experience,” observed a nineteenth-century woman immigrant. “We all need the wisdom of the wilderness—Moses did, Jesus did, and Paul did. The wilderness is the place to find God.”

  What impelled Jean Rio to leave her friends and most of her family behind in England, to travel thousands of miles across the Atlantic Ocean, and then to traverse thousands more miles of a partially uncharted country by steamship an
d ox-drawn wagon? What inspired her to forsake the silk sheets and court society of London for a faraway land unknown to her? What was the appeal to an elite English matron who seemingly had everything?

  Jean Rio was born in 1810 and died in 1883. Through her diary we see and feel the expectation and wonder of coming to America, the sense of taking one’s destiny into one’s own hands, the thrill of exploring the wild and inspiring landscape of the Rocky Mountain West—a panorama we have seen largely through the eyes of men; the equally vivid accounts by women like Jean Rio have only recently begun to come to light. Without her diary, we would know virtually nothing of her life. Uncommon for its insight, observation, and sensibility, Jean Rio’s account is, like many women’s journals of the era, almost devoid of introspection. The emotions often seem diverted into descriptions of scenery that in its breathtaking splendor lends itself to the embellished prose.

  From a stately London town house to a remote mountain valley in the fastness of the Rocky Mountains, Jean Rio persevered against seemingly insurmountable odds. She had a calling, and she was betrayed by the promises held out to her. But she found the strength and heroic bravery not simply to endure but to triumph. She rose to the challenges that confronted her—challenges that in many ways spanned the breadth of human experience, from the daily trials of sheer mortality to the larger tests of a changing society. While the scope of her experience, both the personal and the social, makes her an important example and metaphor for the modern woman, hers is but one of thousands of equally important stories of the women who settled the West, stories that provide a window on the capabilities of the human spirit. Jean Rio’s story is but one exploration of the strengths of human nature that propel us forward in the midst of travail and hopelessness. This was a woman who chose her own path, regardless of the obstacles. While her adopted religion broke faith with her, she never failed to keep faith with herself.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Worth a Long Walk to See”

  SEPTEMBER 23, 1873. Jean Rio delivers the Ayer baby girl at five-fifteen p.m., after a relatively easy labor, and the mother sleeps quietly for the next several hours. “Had a good night,” Jean Rio records in her midwife’s notebook. (“The baby grows nicely [and] all seemed to enjoy themselves,” she notes nearly a month later, after the mother brings the newborn and the rest of her children to pay a visit.)

  It is not always as easy as it might seem. Even the uncomplicated births like Mrs. Ayer’s are trials, the mother usually moaning and screaming in desperation through a long, painful labor to the final agony and then the sudden release of delivery. Often there are tests and horrors Jean Rio must face and somehow cope with, using only her hands and her self-taught skills, experience, and inherent fortitude—hemorrhaging or mortally ill mothers; distressed, deformed, or stillborn babies—a bloody life-and-death struggle no less of a test than any battle faced by a man.

  When she cleans up afterward, changing one plain dress— now stained—for another, washing the blood and afterbirth from her hands and arms, she removes her rings, a fine gold band and an exquisite small sapphire set in platinum. They are hardly the rings of a hardworking midwife on the raw California frontier of the late nineteenth century. She might seem a plain, even ordinary, woman of her time and place. But the unexpected grace and beauty of the rings match her own dignity and gentility. The rings signal that she is something other than an ordinary woman.

  In her diary entry for October 23, she allows herself one of the rare references these days to the past that the rings echo. “Clear and lovely as a spring morning in England,” she writes. “This summer was worth a long walk to see.” How long a walk it has been, what a dramatic journey full of trust and betrayal, faith and disillusion, defeat and triumph, loss and gain! None of her new friends and neighbors in this rural hamlet can imagine it.

  Only the rings and her obvious refinement and intellect, partially obscured by her unpretentious bearing, give a hint of the stark contrast between her past and present. Once she wore the finest gowns of European couture—a wardrobe so vast it had taken nearly an entire wagon to transport. Here she dresses in homespun. Once she performed the classics of song on the stages of Paris and London. Now she performs the exhausting rites of life and death, work no woman of her former station would have deigned to do. Most dramatically, once she was a prize convert to a powerful faith. Now she lives as a discreet fugitive from the betrayal of all that brought her here.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A Wine Cask on the Channel

  TUMBRILS FILLED WITH entire families rolled along the cobblestone streets of Paris toward the guillotine amid howls and screams. All day, every day during 1792, the killing device was busy, corpses piling up faster than they could be disposed of. More than forty thousand people went to their deaths in those small carts. The decapitation was swift, taking less than half a second from the blade drop to the rolling head—the guillotine was “an instrument adopted by the Revolutionists for the more scientific and humane beheading of the condemned.” Almost all the members of the Rio family from Lamballe, Brittany—renamed Côtes-du-Nord by the revolutionary government—were among them. “Hourly, the hideous instrument of torture claimed its many victims— old men, young women, tiny children—until the day when it would finally demand the head of a King and of a beautiful young Queen,” as one fictional account put it.

  Entire generations were eliminated, as victims of all ages were placed facedown on a bench. “The mechanism falls like lightning; the head flies off; the blood spurts; the man no longer exists,” Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin once explained to a nervous audience. The instrument, however, wasn’t always that efficient.

  Many of the Rios, like thousands of others, had tried to flee—to England, Belgium, Scotland, Holland, Canada, or the United States. At least one small Rio girl would be delivered from the bloodbath.

  In Paris in the summer of 1789, during the earliest phase of the French Revolution—the “Great Fear”—a manservant long devoted to a wealthy French couple from the Rio clan placed their infant daughter in a wine cask. Thus concealed, the baby was smuggled across the English Channel. Her parents and every known family member are believed to have stayed behind, and to have become victims of the revolutionists. Once in England, the guardian christened his tiny refugee with the name Susanna Ann Burgess while providing her with protection in a new land. The fabricated surname, according to family lore, denoted the bourgeois roots of her family, though the reality no doubt was more complicated. The two made their way to Scotland, to the Isle of Skye, where relatives and royalist sympathizers embraced the child. They remained in hiding as the London society press regularly reported on new arrivals from France. The English response to the events taking place across the Channel vacillated between horror and sympathy, trepidation at the infectious revolutionary spirit, and base curiosity.

  Susanna would spend her childhood and adolescence in Scotland, her guardian impressing upon her a deep hatred of all things French. This was the story Jean Rio told her children and grandchildren about her French and Scottish ancestors and her mother’s flight from persecution to freedom. She apparently never imparted information about the origins of her own middle name, Rio, perhaps embarrassed by the aristocratic association.

  At the time of the revolution, France was the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world. Its society was divided into three classes. The First Estate—the clergy—controlled the press, monopolized religion, governed the educational institutions, and owned the choice land. The Second Estate consisted of the nobility, who were exempt from taxation but held all high government positions. The Third Estate was the class that encompassed the remaining 98 percent of the population and included the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, and the peasantry. Judging from Susanna Burgess’s entrée into elite, if not noble, society in Scotland, her parents were most likely either nobility or part of the educated upper middle class that sympathized with the Second Estate rather than the masses. With the Third Es
tate uprising on July 14, 1789, which destroyed the Bastille prison, symbol of royal tyranny, nobles and members of the upper bourgeoisie fled for their lives. The early-twentieth-century novelist Baroness Emmuska Orczy immortalized the flight in The Scarlet Pimpernel: “Men in women’s clothes, women in male attire, children disguised in beggars’ rags. In various disguises, under various pretexts, they tried to slip through the barriers, which were so well guarded by citizen soldiers of the Republic.”

  Susanna would be one of thousands of French émigrés to England during the last decade of the eighteenth century, a time when open boats laden with refugees often navigated the stormy Channel in darkness. Many, like Susanna, were babies entrusted by their doomed parents to lowly retainers who had no price on their heads. “The English never ceased to wonder at the degree of devotion manifested by the servants of the French émigrés, greatly admiring their unalterable attachment to their masters,” according to a twentieth-century British scholar of the period. While the identity neither of the servant nor of Susanna’s parents is known, it is assumed her parents and all of her siblings were executed during the Reign of Terror, which started less than two years after Susanna’s flight to Scotland. When Napoléon rose to power a decade later and announced he would welcome back his nation’s exiles, Susanna and her guardian chose not to return.

  The themes inherent in Susanna’s escape from Jacobin France would eerily be echoed in her daughter Jean Rio’s life: privilege, persecution, flight, liberation, and concealment. Susanna was born into a family of privilege and forced to escape when the social order collapsed. Jean Rio was moved to flee by a different kind of oppression, what she saw as spiritual bankruptcy. In the end, they both found refuge in hiding.

  In 1809, at the age of twenty, Susanna Ann Burgess married a well-to-do Scotsman named John Walter Griffiths, four years older than she and descended from Scottish aristocracy. John’s father could trace his roots back several generations in London, with family christenings and marriages recorded for centuries at the same historic church. John’s mother, Jane Rio MacDonald, was of the landed-gentry MacDonald clan on the Isle of Skye, the MacDonalds having arrived in Scotland from the southern Hebrides in the thirteenth century. Her middle name would seem to indicate a relationship through blood and class lines to Susanna’s French family. In 1790 Lord MacDonald, either a brother or a cousin to Jane Rio MacDonald, built Armadale Castle on his 200,000-acre Highland estate, where the famous Scottish Jacobite Flora Macdonald had married and where, in 1746, she had hidden Prince Charles Edward, Bonnie Prince Charlie, from Hanoverian troops. “With a price of thirty pounds on his head, he [Prince Charles Edward] wandered hungry and sick from one sanctuary to another, endangering everyone who gave him shelter,” one historian wrote. Flora Macdonald disguised him as an Irish maidservant and facilitated his escape to the mainland. The MacDonalds’ political and social circles included such luminaries as Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, indicating that John Griffiths was born and bred in a lofty world.