The Giant Joshua by Maurine Whipple

A shiver of terror pierced her heart like an icicle. She had not meant to love him, but they had been in the clutch of something bigger than themselves. Some winged power over which they had no control had swept them from the earth to the sky. She had said to him: 'All that counts is doing out jobs. We'll keep our love secret, where it won't hurt a soul in the world.' But words won't dout a flame. And she had not been able to stop loving him, no matter how hard she tried. Even after Kissy came, she could not destroy this burning essence that was the central core of her being. How was it wrong? It had seemed that a passion diffusing so much light and warmth could not be wrong. Where had been the first misstep? Over and over she recounted each pebble that had gone to make the avalanche.

Clorinda--Clory--is one of a wagon train of Mormon settlers sent forth from Salt Lake to build a new city in the desert of Utah's "Dixie Country." She's just sixteen, but recently married to a much older man, a Scot named Abijah McIntyre, who has two wives already. Clory becomes close with the meek second wife, Willie, but Abijah's first wife, Bathsheba, polices his attentions with a will of iron. The marriage is undertaken at the insistence of Brigham Young himself, but it's a difficult thing for a young woman to be saddled with a husband for whom she will never feel the kind of ardor he feels for her, and to live in the shadow of two other women as well. On top of this, Clory falls quickly for a tempestuous younger man named Freeborn, who just happens to be Abijah and Bathsheba's son. She gives into temptations, and then to doubts, but at other times she takes these events as tests of her piety, and like certain hardy flowers her spirit blooms in the desert.

It's funny, the Mormon pioneers of the 19th century are so very American. They left the East escaping religious persecution; they built civilizations out of the Wild West; they thrived by sheer willpower and resourcefulness. Other pioneers of the Wild West occupy our national imagination as part of our shared patrimony, but the Mormon pioneers retain a kind of otherness that prevents Americans at large from embracing them in the same way. The Giant Joshua is an epic for Mormon America, and I do mean epic--I started reading it on the plane to Utah three weeks ago, and I just finished it yesterday. There's a great deal of mythmaking in it, sometimes speciously so: it's strange to read how disappointed and disapproving Brigham Young is in the perpetrators of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which a group of Mormons attacked a train of non-Mormon settlers; many historians now think it happened with his complicity. But in Clory there is a kind of ambivalence that makes the novel worth reading. She believes wholeheartedly in the community that grows up around her, and in God, but the rewards of "plural marriage" remain dubious and out of reach for her.

One book I was reminded of, very discordantly, was Norman Rush's Mating. From time to time it seemed to me that Brigham Young occupies the Nelson Deneen role in the planned community of Utah's Dixie, pushing pieces around with a heavy hand in order to create a centrally-planned utopia. Young tells the pioneers what crops to plant, what trades to take up, where and how to sell, and even where to build their first temple. He's depicted as kindly and compassionate, with a genuine interest in all the settlers of Dixie--he knows them each by name--but his machinations are heavy-handed, and they don't always work. He moves Clory together with Abijah as surely as he he commands the villagers to plant cotton instead of wheat, but when a marriage falters--or a crop--he's up and gone, back to Salt Lake, and the consequences never fall on him. If the village functions, it's not really Young that earns the credit, but the collective action of the pioneers who, through trial and error, tame the Virgin River, make peace with local tribes, and build a city from scratch.

The Giant Joshua can be quite brutal. Clory settles down quickly to have a family for Abijah, but one by one, her three beloved children are picked off by disease. Her secret lover, Free, dies in a reprisal raid on a group of Native horse thieves. She reconciles herself to Abijah, who is a competent and capable husband, but he has too much passion for her and too little love. One of the cruelest scenes comes toward the end when Clory, in her forties now, still beautiful, pregnant again with a child of Abijah's, discovers him in flagrante flirto with a young flibbertigibbet who becomes his newest wife. That's the thing about plural marriage: in a way, you can be discarded even more easily. The end of the novel, too, is cruel to Clory, in a way I'll keep to myself. But for all that, the author Whipple (who I think was Mormon?) shows an abiding admiration and respect for what pioneers like Clory and Abijah, for all their faults, were able to wring from the harsh desert landscape.