Prototype. Nobody named on this site has agreed to take part in it — what that means.
The Wives of Brigham Young 55 women, named and counted

Analysis

What the numbers show

Every count on this page is generated from the research table, so the page cannot drift from the data. Under each chart is the thing the number does not prove — which is usually the more important sentence.

First: how many wives?

The answer depends on what counts as a wife, and the three standard authorities give three numbers.

The single name separating 55 from 56 is Maria Lawrence, and that one is genuinely open. Quinn keeps her, dating the marriage to 1844, because Brigham's own daughter and granddaughter listed her in the 1920 family genealogy — families may omit a plural wife, he argues, but do not invent one. Jessee and Johnson drop her because the Nauvoo record shows her sealed in 1846 to Almon Babbitt. Note that those two claims are not strictly in conflict: an eternity sealing to one man alongside a marriage to another is the ordinary pattern across a dozen rows in this very table. She is not counted among the 55 here, and both readings stand.

Amanda Barnes Smith is not the mirror image, and this one is settled. She appears in Turner's polyandry endnote, which is why she is often listed as a wife. What actually happened, on Turner's own page 238: at the Council House in January 1852 she asked to be sealed for eternity to Joseph Smith, needed a living proxy, and Brigham agreed with great reluctance to stand in — warning her first that he would not make her part of his household or support her. That is a proxy sealing to a dead man, not a marriage to Brigham. Johnson is right to leave her off.

What this does not prove: that anyone is careless. The disagreement is about definition, not arithmetic. A sealing performed for eternity only, to a woman who never lived with him and may never have called herself his wife, is a marriage on one definition and not on another.

When he married: the Nauvoo spike

In date order, earliest first, with the span of each phase taken from the marriages in it.

Four women in the twenty-three months of plural marriage that Joseph Smith lived to see. Then 15 between September 1844 and May 1845 — Turner notes three on three successive days — and 19 more sealed in the Nauvoo temple in the six weeks before the exodus, January and February 1846.

What this does not prove: that all 19 were marriages in any ordinary sense. This is the crux of the whole subject. Turner counts eighteen in the temple weeks where this table counts nineteen; the gap is one row and has not been reconciled, so "about eighteen" is the honest thing to say aloud.

What kind of sealing

Nearly half the rows read "not recorded". That is the single largest fact on this page. What each type means.

What this does not prove: that the unrecorded ones were casual. It means the Nauvoo sealing records, as published by Lisle Brown, do not state a type for them.

Women already married to a living man

Counted strictly as Turner defines it in endnote 56: legally married to another man at the time of the sealing. Turner names fifteen; 14 of them are on Johnson's list, and the fifteenth, Amanda Barnes Smith, is not. Fourteen and fifteen are the same finding counted over two different rosters. Separately, 8 were widows of Joseph Smith. What polyandry meant here.

What this does not prove: that these were sexual relationships, or that the first husbands objected, or that they did not. The sealing record records a ritual, not a household.

Sexual relationship

Read this column carefully. It is an interpretation, not a record. Nothing in the archive states this for most of these women. The categories reflect what Turner and Compton argue from children, cohabitation and diary evidence, and the largest group is "not documented".

Children

16 of the 55 women bore him children — 57 recorded here. Johnson counts 57 children in all; Turner calls the 1870 baby his fifty-eighth. Of the women sealed to him for the first time in the Nauvoo temple, two ever did: Margaret Alley and Zina Huntington. Turner writes that only Margaret Alley did, because he dates Zina's first sealing to spring 1845 rather than to the February 1846 temple record — the same single row that produces his "eighteen" against Johnson's nineteen. Both disagreements, one woman.

What this does not prove: the rest were childless with him. A blank in the children column means the count was not established from a source in hand.

Who actually lived with him

12 women were named in his will. 11 marriages ended in divorce or a documented separation, the first being Mary Woodward on 13 December 1846; most of the women who left had never been part of his household in the first place.

Ages

Where both ages are recorded, the youngest bride was 16 and the oldest 70; the median was 27. The widest gap between his age and hers was 43 years.

What this does not prove: anything about consent, which the archive rarely records in any direction. Ages are computed from birth years, so a marriage early in the year can be off by one.

Leaving Brigham and leaving the church

Johnson's own finding is that most of these women took part in the church for the rest of their lives — which, as he puts it, "tends to dispel the myth of the horrified woman, enslaved against her will." Leaving Brigham and leaving the church were mostly different things: Diana Chase, Mary Eliza Nelson and Mary Ann Clark all separated from him and stayed Latter-day Saints, and Mary Eliza Nelson's next sealing was performed by an apostle. Ann Eliza Webb is the one unambiguous case of a wife who left both, and she left loudly.

The silence — what survives in their own words

This is the most important number on the page.

15 of the 55 women left words of their own. A further 5 have a life of them written by someone else and nothing from their own hand. The remaining 35 are known only through records of them rather than by them — ordinance registers, obituaries, a family group sheet. Several exist in the archive as a single line and nothing more.

In her own words (15): Lucy Ann Decker, Augusta Adams Cobb, Harriet Elizabeth Cook, Clarissa Caroline Decker, Emily Dow Partridge, Eliza Roxcy Snow, Clarissa Blake, Mary Ann Clark, Margaret Pierce, Mary Elizabeth Rollins, Rhoda Richards, Zina Diantha Huntington, Mary Ellen de la Montague, Ann Eliza Webb, Hannah Tapfield King.

Written about, but silent themselves (5): Louisa Beaman, Diana Severance Chase, Olive Grey Frost, Jemima Angell, Lucy Bigelow.

For four of the fifteen, a single document is the entire surviving voice. Clarissa Blake's one letter and acrostic poem, written to Brigham Young just after the sealing; Mary Ann Clark's one letter asking to be released; Mary Ellen Woodward's letters; Harriet Cook's sworn affidavit. One document apiece, and that is all any of them ever says in the record.

Counted strictly. "In her own words" means anything she wrote or swore — memoir, diary, letters, published writing, a sworn plural-marriage affidavit, courtroom testimony — and it wins when she also has a life written about her, which is why Eliza R. Snow and Zina Huntington sit here rather than in the middle group. It excludes the many documents Johnson's endnotes cite that turn out to be about a different person: Rebecca Holman's is a biography of a male relative, Julia Foster's is her son's diary, Mary Jane Bigelow's is a life of her sister, and Jane Terry's story survives inside a relative's autobiography — a life of the relative, not of her. Amy Cooper is the recipient of a letter, not its author. Counting any of those would flatter the record.

The one full-length autobiography is a hostile one. Of all fifty-five women, exactly one published a full-length account of her own life: Ann Eliza Webb, whose Wife No. 19 (1875) was written to destroy him and has been read ever since as though it were the only wife's voice available. That is not a reason to discount her. It is a reason to notice that the other fifty-four had no comparable platform, and that what we think we know about being married to Brigham Young comes disproportionately from the woman who left.

What this does not prove: that these women were illiterate, or silent, or had nothing to say. It means no document in their hand has been located and published. Some of it will be in descendants' houses. That is the job.

The full list, woman by woman

Afterwards — who outlived him, and who remarried

27 of the 55 women outlived Brigham Young, who died on 29 August 1877. Subtract the four who had already divorced him and the figure lands exactly on Johnson's published count of twenty-three surviving wives — an independent check on the divorce roll, arrived at from death years rather than from the divorce records themselves.

8 remarried. Elizabeth Fairchild remarried four times. All but one did so while Brigham Young was still alive, which tells you something about what a separation meant in practice; Ann Eliza Webb married Moses Deming after his death. Julia Foster remarried with no divorce on record at all, which is its own small mystery.

A correction people keep needing

None of the fifty-five was Native American. The woman usually meant is Sally, or Kahpeputz, later Sally Young Kanosh — a Pahvant Ute girl taken in the Indian slave trade, bought by Latter-day Saint settlers and brought into Young's household in the late 1840s. She was adopted by his wife Clara Decker, given the Young name, lived in the Lion and Beehive Houses, and is listed with the household help in the 1860 census. She was a servant in his house, not his wife; she married Chief Kanosh in 1877. Getting this wrong is damaging in both directions — it invents a marriage that did not happen, and it erases what did.

Turner, Pioneer Prophet, pp. 216, 348; Virginia Kerns, Sally in Three Worlds (University of Utah Press, 2021).

What this table cannot tell you

Johnson's Table 1 carries no birthplace column, so the question people ask most often after the counts — how many were European converts rather than American-born? — cannot be computed here, and we will not estimate it. A handful are documented in the prose (Eliza Burgess and Hannah Tapfield King were English, Susannah Snively Virginia-born, Augusta Adams from Boston, Elizabeth Jones tied to the Welsh mission), but a real answer needs a sourced birthplace for all fifty-five and nobody has done that work. It is on the list for the book.

Where the historians disagree

Every known disagreement between Johnson, Turner, Quinn and Compton, generated from the research record. Open means named historians still differ and both readings are given here. Settled means this project resolved it against the sources and says how.

The blanks are the finding

Across the whole table, the commonest single value in the life-outcome columns is a variant of "not documented here". That is not a defect in the table. It is a measurement of the literature: 55 women, one published list, no book of biographies. That is the case for building one.