by Sally Denton
Beyond Jean Rio’s emigration diary and midwife’s notebook, as well as family papers accumulated over the years, my portrait of her and her children, of their remarkable journey and its sequels, and of the era in which they all lived draws on a number of primary and secondary sources in the history of the American West. The bibliography that follows these notes supplements and expands on the diary and personal papers as indicated below. All conditions of life and landscape, as well as states of mind and the context of historical events, have documentary support.
PREFACE: AN EXTRAORDINARY WOMAN OF ORDINARY VIRTUES
XVII “Women have not been well served”: Moynihan, Armitage, and Dichamp, xi.
XVII “Pioneering is really a wilderness experience”: Immigrant Lulu Fuhr, in Stratton, 33.
CHAPTER ONE: “WORTH A LONG WALK TO SEE”
3 The episode re-created here is detailed in the Jean Rio midwife’s notebook from 1873.
CHAPTER TWO: A WINE CASK ON THE CHANNEL
5 “an instrument adopted”: Harrison and Sullivan, 649.
5 “Hourly, the hideous instrument of torture:” Baroness Emmuska Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel (1902; New York: Signet, 2002), 2.
5 “The mechanism falls”: J.-I. Guillotin, quoted in Brazen Kallisti, “The Chapel Perilous,” historical Web site, www.sepulchritude.com/.
7 “Men in women’s clothes”: Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel, 2.
8 “The English never ceased to wonder”: Weiner, 45.
8 THE BACKGROUND OF SUSANNA BURGESS: The surviving records of the marriage of Susanna and John only add to the larger mystery around Susanna’s family origins and her dramatic deliverance from revolutionary France. The first any of Jean Rio’s descendants from the twentieth century learned of her mother’s escape from France was in a letter from Jean Rio’s granddaughter Katie Baker to another granddaughter, Hazel Baker Denton, in 1951. (Katie Elizabeth Rio Baker was the last-born child of Jean Rio’s son Henry Walter Baker. She was born in Utah in 1868.) Hazel wrote the following regarding the episode:
A certain family in Paris at that time [1789], whose name we have never been able to trace, concerns all of us. It was the family of Jean Rio’s mother, who at that horrible time was the family’s baby girl.
We know from the story that the family did not belong to the French royalty, but to the well-to-do, well-educated, and high-minded middle classes, who, along with the Royalists, became victims of the hatred of the Revolutionists. All members of this French family (who are our ancestors) were guillotined—all, that is, except their infant daughter. She was saved by one of their faithful manservants. He somehow managed, by concealing the tiny girl in a wine casque, to smuggle her across the English Channel into England. In England he became her guardian; very likely gave her a different, and almost certainly an English, name, for French refugees at the time had a price on their heads and were hunted down by French officials for a great many years, until Napoleon came into power as Emperor of France and welcomed all French refugees to return. However, our little French girl grew up in England, and very naturally she and her benefactor became accustomed to, and took on, English ways. We can imagine the faithful servant was very fond of his fledgling and gave her every possible care, though we have no idea how long he lived to care for her, nor at what age she moved into Scotland or why. It could well be that during their lives together he made it his duty to tell her all about her family’s fate—enough of it to instill into her young mind a hatred for the French. When she moved into Scotland she married a Scot, whose name was Griffiths. In due time a girl baby was born to them. They named her Jean Rio, and it was the Scotch Jean, not the French spelling Jeanne. When this Jean Rio, who became our grandmother, grew up, it can be presumed that her mother told her the family story, by which means the hatred for the French was so deeply impressed upon her that it stayed with her even up to the time when, in San Francisco, she told the story to her granddaughter Katie Baker, who, many years later [1951], wrote the details of the tragedy to me.
A Salt Lake City, Utah, genealogical research firm reported to members of the Baker family in 2002 that it was unable to trace the roots of Susanna Burgess.
THE RIO FAMILY OF CHARD, ENGLAND: A review of government indices in Chard revealed one reference to a Thomas Henry MacDonald Rio in a “volume of minutes (1870–1940), which contains a resolution from the charitable bequest of T.H.M. Rio, 1868, and copies of Rio’s Charity Scheme and associated documents, 1889‒1909.” According to an archivist with the Somerset (England) Archives, “The bequest for a charity suggests that the Rio family may have been quite a rich and prominent family in the area.” Hazel’s own father, William George Baker (Jean Rio’s son), told Hazel that he had “French blood mixed up with his English” that came from Jean Rio’s ancestry. According to Etta Jacks, granddaughter of Henry Walter and Eliza Ann Elliott Baker, “Daddy used to tell that [Jean Rio] was a member of the MacDonald clan, that her people ‘away back when’ used to be the ‘Lairds of the Isle of Skye,’ but they rebelled against the King and their lands were confiscated.” Author’s collection of papers.
9 “With a price of thirty thousand pounds”: Herman, 158.
9 RIO FAMILY GENEALOGY: AncestryPlus.com, Family Search. com, and various other genealogy Web sites contain information on the Rio and Rioux (sometimes spelled “Riou” and “Rieux” as well) families. The largest emigration of Rioux family members from France seems to have occurred in the eighteenth century, when many members of the clan resettled in Quebec, Canada.
10 “The worst excesses”: Hibbert, 227.
12 “As a rule, when girls had left school”: Crosland, 66.
12 “reading and writing”: Herman, 24.
12 “the least thought-inspiring”: Crosland, 66.
12 “no waste of time”: Ibid.
13 proximity to the royal family: Hazel Baker Denton recalled sitting “wide-eyed for hours” as her father, William George Baker, described “how beautiful Queen Victoria was; about her crown, her jewels, her fabulous silk and velvet dresses, and her Parliament robes trimmed with ermine,” which he had seen many times.
13 “They were taught personal cleanliness”: Hazel Baker Denton, author’s collection.
14 Jean Rio’s paternal great-uncle: His last will and testament, extant in “The Probate Record for William Rio McDonald, Doctor of Physic,” is a fascinating and vitally revealing document. Regarding the Scottish ancestry of the family he makes the following reference:
To my niece Jane Baker (daughter of my nephew Walter Griffiths) & to her husband, Henry Baker, each of them five guineas for mourning at the death of my wife. I bequeath to my nephew Walter Griffiths my gold watch & seals excepting my seal with my arms engraven in it which (after my wife’s death) I bequeath to my respected cousin Robert Rio of Chard, Somerset, and also my coat of arms in a gilt frame with two small prints in the frame of THE HOUSE CALLED ARMIDALE at SLATE in THE ISLE OF SKYE SCOTLAND.
15 “Its politics were stuck”: Herman, 267‒268.
16 “When the inner cities are crying”: Chadwick, 75.
16 “Its piety tended to be sober” . . . “Romantic literature and art”: Chadwick, 17.
17 “felt as close to Abraham”: Moorman, 373.
20 “The theory that the Americans are of Jewish origin”: Hubert Howe Bancroft, quoted in Brodie, 45. Brodie writes of the widely held opinion of the time that the American Indians were descendants of the lost tribe:
Fantastic parallels were drawn between Hebraic and Indian customs, such as feasts of first fruits, sacrifices of the firstborn in the flock, cities of refuge, ceremonies of purification, and division into tribes. The Indian “language” (which actually consisted of countless distinct languages derived from numerous linguistic stocks) was said to be chiefly Hebrew. The Indian belief in the Great Spirit (which originally had been implanted by French and Spanish missionaries) was said to be derived in a direct line from Jewish monotheism. One writer even held that syphilis, the Indian’s
gift to Europe, was an altered form of Biblical leprosy. (Brodie, 45)
21 “In no other period in American history”: Brodie, 101.
21 “The literalist Mormon timetable”: Coates, 89.
22 “Mormonism is an eclectic religious philosophy”: John Gunnison, quoted in Fielding, 8.
22 “Joseph had convincing answers”: Krakauer, 112.
24 “There is a strange power”: Fanny Stenhouse, 41.
CHAPTER THREE: THESE LATTER DAYS
26 “Mormons must be treated as enemies”: Lillburn W. Boggs, quoted in Brodie, 235.
27 “Young arose and roared”: Lee, Writings, 142.
28 “Every sentiment and feeling”: Brigham Young sermon, June 12, 1860, Journal of Discourses 8:294.
29 “a police state in Nauvoo”: Hirshson, quoted in Coates, 54.
30 “The prophet, through the sheer force of his personality”: Coates, 55.
30 “In the New World”: Reisner, 4.
32 “sin and unworthiness”: Taylor, 19.
33 “preaching the glory of America”: Brodie in Piercy, xiv.
34 “the working-class Mormon response”: Jensen and Thorp, xiii.
35 “It was deeply subversive”: Hazleton, 50.
35 “One must be called”: Heilbrun, 23.
36 “according to the orders”: Emigrant Hannah Tapfield King, quoted in Bartholomew, 71.
38 the crate . . . was dipped in tar: The “black box,” as the piano crate was known, is reportedly housed in a museum in California, though the exact location is unknown to the author.
39 “a formidable gauntlet of wind and wave”: Sonne, Saints on the Seas, 53.
CHAPTER FOUR: COMMITTED TO THE DEEP
43 “schooners, barks, barkentines”: Sonne, Saints on the Seas, 34.
43 “a typical product of Yankee shipwrights”: Sonne, Ships, Saints, and Mariners, 87.
44 “The funds are appropriated in the form of a loan”: Brigham Young, October 16, 1849, quoted in Piercy, xvii.
46 “the perfect order and propriety”: Dickens, 449.
49 “Now it shall come to pass”: Isaiah, 2:2, Holy Bible, New King James Version, Reader’s Edition.
55 There had been one marriage, three births, and two conversions of crew members, and the only tragedy to mark the voyage was the death of Josiah Baker who had been suffering from consumption when he boarded the ship.
55 “ardent spirits”: Piercy, 71.
CHAPTER FIVE: SNAGS AND SAWYERS
65 “floating palaces”: Piercy, 73.
75 “The teamster should drive”: Ibid., 106.
CHAPTER SIX: THE CROSSING
88 “flee Babylon”: Black and Porter, ix.
88 “Buffalo, elk, deer”: Lee, Journals, 117.
89 “In the cove of mountains”: Frémont’s report, quoted in Wise, 78.
89 “the bloodthirsty Christians”: Bagley, 19.
89 “Word and Will of the Lord”: De Voto, 452.
90 “Zion shall be established”: Lee, quoted in Brooks, 139.
91 “9 rods wide and 3 feet deep”: Piercy, 108.
92 “A nothing river”: Michener, 23.
94 “Our Encampment”: Trail of Hope: The Story of the Mormon Trail. PBS, September 26, 1997.
95 “No person who has not”: Ibid.
102 “The campsites were bad”: Kimball and Kimball, 31.
CHAPTER SEVEN: A LIFE OF TOIL
113 “place where the land is acknowledged”: Thomas Bullock, quoted in Bigler, 39.
113 “The communal food gatherers”: Bigler, 39.
113 “He renders no account”: T. B. H. Stenhouse, 665.
114 “Different methods were used”: David Bigler, interview by author, July 28, 2003.
114 “Stone of Daniel”: Bigler, 16.
114 “And in the days of these kings”: Daniel 2:44, Holy Bible, New King James Version, Reader’s Edition.
117 “instruments of torture”: Hazel Baker Denton, Ironing Days, 59.
118 “Castle of Spiders”: Walker and Dant, 121.
118 “This is a hideous place”: Ibid.
118 “Sometimes as many as 60”: Walker and Dant, 123.
120 “the pinnacle of post-mortal existence”: Coates, 81.
120 “Hence all true Mormons are Priests”: Mary Ettie V. Smith, in Green, 154.
120 “the lowest rung”: Coates, 77.
121 “They [the Mormons] are Jews”: Burton, 397.
121 “Each wife would be chosen”: Seagraves, 81.
122 “Out of this matter grows an immense power”: Gunnison, 71.
124 “a life so unremittingly tough”: Robert Coles, in Forward to Schlissel, Gibbens, and Hampsten, vii.
126 “the transformation of the home”: Hardy, 40.
126 “the curse pronounced on Ham”: Ibid., 39.
128 “This little family of Londoners”: Hazel Baker Denton, 1951 Baker family reunion record.
128 “The Baker men”: Author’s collection of family papers.
131 “afford to purchase wagons”: Brigham Young, from the Millennial Star, December 22, 1855, quoted in Hirshson, 152.
131 “thrown back upon my old plan”: Ibid.
131 “With a morsel of bread”: T.B.H. Stenhouse, 338‒339. On the handcart disaster, see also Bigler, 104 ff.
132 “Backsliders were to be hewn down”: Gibbs, 8 ff.
133 “There are sins that can be atoned for”: Brigham Young, quoted in Deseret News, October 1, 1856.
136 “The whole United States rang with its horrors”: Twain, 428.
136 “We intend to desolate the Territory”: Brigham Young and his commander Daniel Wells to David Evans, September 16, 1857, reprinted in Bigler, 148.
137 “I am your leader”: Brigham Young’s instructions and remarks in March 1858, reprinted in Hirshson, 179.
138 “The brothers sneaked away”: Barbara Baker, interview by author, December 27, 2002.
139 “a pageant of divine destiny”: Udall, 108.
CHAPTER EIGHT: THROUGH THE VEIL
141 “The monotony of a man’s life”: Laxness, 17.
141 “The Danes, proverbially reluctant”: Mulder, x.
143 “In Scandinavia”: Ibid., 72.
144 “Keep clean”: Nicolena Bertelsen’s recollection as told to her daughter Hazel Baker Denton. Author’s collection.
144 “digging in the sandy beaches”: Ibid.
146 “She was, after all, a child”: Ibid.
147 “Good taste in her own dress”: Ibid.
149 “worst oppression and degradation”: Fanny Stenhouse, ix.
150 “Even though Lena may not have been in love”: “Portrait of a Danish Family,” Daughters of the Utah Pioneers, Lessons for March and April, 1981, 303.
150 “She was the type of girl”: Ibid., 302–03.
150 “bride’s nest”: Recollections of Nicolena’s daughter Hazel Baker Denton, and 1951 Baker family reunion record.
151 “made her little home so clean”: Recollection of Nicolena’s daughter, Ruth Henrietta Baker Seegmiller, and 1951 Baker family reunion record.
151 “The little happinesses”: Ibid.
154 “refugees from the Mormon kingdom”: Aird, 197.
154 “Having through His Excellency”: Ibid., 210.
154 “Next to winning the Civil War”: Ambrose, 17
154 “thus ensuring an empire”: Ibid., 18.
155 “never had taken the trouble”: Fielding, 138.
155 “crossing the North Platte into the South Pass”: Gunnison, 152.
156 “But the wording was vague” . . . “Just where this was to be”: Quiett, in Wright and Swedenberg, 136.
157 “the Lord had revealed to him”: Ibid., 137.
157 “cold and close”: Brands, 425.
157 “called the faithful together”: Quiett, in Wright and Swedenberg, 136.
157 “name his price”: Ambrose, 282.
157 “The Lord, in another vision”: Quiett, in Wright and Swedenberg, 137.
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157 “to do the Union’s grading”: Brands, 425.
158 “calling on all the men”: Ambrose, 283.
158 “received more than the contract price”: “Utah, Our Pioneer Heritage” database though www.Ancestry.com.
159 “A great feat has been accomplished”: San Francisco Evening Bulletin, April 29, 1869.
159 “As luck would have it”: Brands, 436.
CHAPTER NINE: ONE HOUSEHOLD OF FAITH
166 THE CHILDREN OF JEAN RIO: Of nine children born to Jean Rio, two died in London, one died while crossing the Atlantic Ocean en route to America, and one died in Utah. By the time she relocated to Antioch, California, Jean Rio had five surviving children.
Henry Walter Baker was born July 24, 1833, in London. He married Eliza Ann Elliott in London on January 5, 1851, and accompanied his mother and siblings to America. Their children were Henry William Rio, Josiah Elliott Rio, Edward Bateman Rio, John Donald Rio, Alvin Walter Rio, Chauncy Alford Rio, Alice Jean Rio, and Katie Elizabeth Rio.
William George Baker was born June 10, 1835, in London. He married Hannah Hayward on November 25, 1855, and Nicolena Bertelsen on June 1, 1867. Children born to the first marriage were William George, Ruth Jean Rio, Henry, William Hayward, Frank Arnold, Mary Hannah Hayward, Walter, John Richard, Charles Fredrick, Elizabeth, Eugene Hayward, Claude Vincent, and Edward. Children born to the second marriage were Mary Ottomina, William Louis, Nelson, Lars Arthur, Annie Eliza, Ida Elizabeth, Ralph, Ruth Henrietta, Albert James, and Hazel Adelia.
Charles Edward Baker was born May 5, 1839, in London. He married Elizabeth Bird on November 20, 1858. Their children were Charles E., Walter, Annie C., Josephine Viola, Evangeline, Amy Jane, Frances Ethel, Sadie Maud, and Ernest.
Elizabeth Ann Baker was born May 20, 1841, in London. She married Lewis Alvin West on November 20, 1858. Following his death, she married Samuel Edward Jost on April 2, 1872. There were five children born to the first marriage: Lewis Alvin West, Adelia Eliza West, and three others who are unknown to the author. Children born to the second marriage were Mary Ann Frances Jost, Katie Belle Jost, Lila E. Jost, Samuel Edward Jost, and Walter Jost.
John Edye Baker was born March 31, 1843, in London. He married Catherine Ann Franks in December 1868. Children born to this marriage were Melville, Jean Rio, Ida, and John Edye.
