Sally in Three Worlds: An Indian Captive in the House of Brigham Young

Abstract

The tale of Sally, an Indian captive purchased in 1847 and raised in Brigham Young's household, appears most commonly in Utah histories as little more than a quick anecdote or a brief footnote. Typically, her story is used to illustrate the brutality of Utah's Indian slave trade, the short-lived practice of indenturing Indian children, and Mormon attempts to proselyte and “civilize” Utah's Indigenous people.The best-known of many versions of this story describes a young Bannock girl being rescued from brutal Ute raiders for the price of a rifle. Once cleaned up and fed, she was delivered into Young's household where she learned English and was trained to behave properly and work hard. An arranged marriage with the Pahvant chief, Kanosh, ended tragically when she was murdered by a jealous wife.This was the accepted story.But in Sally in Three Worlds, Virginia Kerns provides historians with a long-needed corrective to this error-riddled Utah lore. To do this, Kerns spent seven years poring through memoirs, diaries, journals, and newspapers, as well as consulting histories written by Utes and Paiutes, published interviews, oral traditions, and memoirs of nineteenth-century travelers. To understand Sally's people, she also delved into the standard ethnographic and linguistic literature about Numic culture. Then, using an ethno-narrative style, Kerns retells the story of Sally, vividly describing the world of Mormon settler-colonizers and especially that of the privileged world in the Lion House, a house full of women, where Sally lived. Extensive endnotes (which demand to be read), meticulously note sources and expand on passing details glossed over in the text. Kerns's ethnographic research supports most of her educated guesses about how she imagines the “wild” Sally might have perceived the foreign world in which she found herself.Kerns takes her readers on a journey of discovery to find the real Sally—she was neither a child nor Bannock, had not been captured by slavers, and was not adopted into the Young family (but would be their unpaid servant). And, though she was coerced into marrying Kanosh, she was not murdered.Kerns's primary goal is revisionist, writing a corrective biography of a complex woman in a unique situation. However, the book has two equally important purposes: to illustrate the Indigenous culture of Utah's Numic people (in passing) and to examine the colonizing narrative of wild-versus-tame as it impacted Mormon settler-colonists and Sally in particular.To illustrate Sally's Numic culture, Kerns has avoided stuffy ethnographic discourse. Instead, she provides glimpses of the Indigenous world through intermittent side excursions in which—through Sally's eyes—she compares and contrasts the stark differences between a previous wild life (now rapidly disappearing) and the “civilized” world of the Lion House.Throughout the book, Kerns also analyzes the narrative of “wild versus tame” that permeates America's ongoing history of conquest and its relentless push to transform the wild (natural) wastelands by civilizing, domesticating, and subduing it, to make it productive. This was progress. In Utah, settler-colonizers transformed and subdued the wilderness by methodically replacing all that was wild and native (grasses, animals, and even names), with imported and domesticated (tame) plants and animals. Wild waters were tamed by diverting them for irrigation, and wild Indians were tamed through acculturation. Kerns sees this narrative in microcosm in the captive, Pidash, who was equally transformed, scrubbed clean of the wild, and remade into the tame persona of the civilized woman named Sally.But Kerns also notes that transforming the wild and natural disrupted a delicate ecological balance. For example, with waters diverted, fish and bird-rich lakes and marshes died. Hunters killed wildlife, and without predators, pests proliferated. A similar balance was lost for Sally. Successfully tamed and civilized, she was unable to function when forced back into a native environment. Within eighteen months of her return to the Pahvant, she too “dried up,” succumbing to loneliness, depression, and deadly pneumonia.Sally in Three Worlds has been written for a broad audience including western and Utah historians, as well as readers interested in Indian–Mormon relations or the polygamous household of Brigham Young. But while the information is excellent, reading this book was sometimes problematic. Kerns's focus on the immediate context of Sally's world meant much of the historical context of Utah or Indian–Mormon relations was mentioned only in passing (if at all); references to specific people (other than in the Young family) were often skimmed, poorly identified, and explained only in the endnotes or appendixes. So, a Utah history this is not, nor should it be read as such. But it is an intriguing sociocultural look at Utah's early settler-colonizers and the Lion House's complex polygamous world. And its revisionist focus on Sally is a solid contribution, explaining the complexities of one Indian woman and her struggles to adapt to the three worlds that formed her.