She told me a story of love and devotion; a story retold through four generations; a story of a bright young woman who married a widower. She spoke of their arrival in California, then Utah. Here her beloved husband died and all of their belongings were taken. “My great-grandmother was a teacher, fluent in many languages,” my elderly neighbor explained. She died a violent death at the hands of a fellow member of the Mormon Church; a man who served only a little prison time, then was pardoned. Anger, agitation, and bewilderment evident in her voice, she said her great-grandmother Olivia Coombs was slandered by people who covered up what really happened so this man could go free. Recognizing the negative impact on generations of her family, my neighbor pleaded, “Please find out what really happened.”1Historians grapple with the records that survive over time. They look for and weigh multiple lines of evidence. They depend upon those who created this evidence to be truthful about events that occurred. They analyze the letters, diaries, speeches, and public records that remain to create theoretical constructs that help frame research questions and provide historical context to illuminate the past. Claudia Bushman elegantly captured the description of this process in which scholars use “all their hopeful sleuthing and intellectual cunning to shape a plausible picture” in an endeavor in which “the documents speak, but they do not explain.”2 Family oral traditions pose an additional challenge. They can illuminate and contradict contemporary historical sources. Stories passed down through the years often become myths and legends because of what was added and suppressed, and because of the “mystery surrounding them.” When the mystery is repeated through the generations, it “can become a particularly powerful family script.”3 In Olivia's case, the family “as told to” stories provide a sharp contrast to contemporary sources that reveal her troubled life, her struggles as a woman afflicted with an addiction, and her murder.4On March 8, 1865, Utah territorial governor James Duane Doty pardoned George Wood for the 1862 murder of Olivia Coombs Higbee in Cedar City, Utah. The clemency petition upon which he based his decision states that the victim of the crime had been running a house of ill fame in Beaver and Cedar City.5 Given the church's stand on virtue and immorality and the propensity for local church authorities to quickly call members to repentance, it should have been easy to find corroborating evidence of the existence of a house of ill fame in two small Mormon communities. Instead, the evidence revealed something quite different.Although the residents of Cedar City and the surrounding villages regularly reported social events, marriages, and deaths to the Deseret News and to friends and family, this first recorded murder of a white Mormon woman in Iron County never appeared in the newspapers. Only a few of her contemporaries obliquely mentioned this violent act in diaries and later recollections. It would be easy to attribute the silence surrounding Olivia's murder solely to the culture of secrecy that characterized the aftermath of the tragic events at Mountain Meadows. However, there are additional, compelling explanations for the seeming lack of interest in her death and its aftermath that reveal a great deal about the position of Mormon women who lived on the fringes of the boundaries of respectability and propriety.Respectable Mormon women were expected to be hard working, frugal, modest, clean, virtuous, and devoted to husband and children. During the church reformation in the late 1850s, church leaders’ discussions about the role of women and mothers increased considerably, appearing frequently in the Deseret News. Poor housekeepers, incompetent homemakers, and neglectful mothers produced unhappy families.6 It was a mother's duty to watch over and educate her children in gospel principles and “the lessons of usefulness.”7 Local leaders and visiting apostles were blunt in their condemnations and exhortations to righteousness. One elder preached about women obeying their husbands. “He is her counsellor, her Savior and her Lord.” How was the husband to teach his wife? “To tell her how to [k]nit a stocking, wash a dish or set a hem? No, but to teach her to be industrious, neat, tidy and a pattern of virtue on all things right and virtuous.”8For the most part, the women who incorporated these qualities into their daily lives held a secure place in the social geography of Mormon communities. But what of those women who did not fit this model? How were they perceived by the women and men with whom they interacted and how did this perception shape their position in small, closed communities? This is a study of one such woman. It is the weaving together of three disparate stories and lines of evidence. The first two are the stories of the victim and the murderer as told by their descendants. The third is the story as it emerges from contemporary records. The tragic intersection of the lives of Olivia Coombs Higbee and George Wood occurred within the restrictive context of the religious and cultural milieu of the day. It begins with the stories of two extended families, one in New York and the other in Staffordshire, England. Both were taught the gospel by apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Their conversions to Mormonism led them to cross oceans and continents to eventually settle in Cedar City, Utah.Olivia Coombs Higbee left no extant written record of her activities. There are no known contemporary family records or artifacts. The vagaries of her family's stories are understandable because they begin with reconstructed memories of young children who had witnessed a particularly traumatic event. Olivia's descendants have lost many threads and added others that were not in the original historical fabric. Over time, the family has researched legal records including George Wood's trial, Utah territorial prison records, and Wood's pardon and have added that information to their narratives. The story that materializes from the documentary evidence often contradicts the family oral traditions, yet the documentary story is also fraught with inconsistencies. Taken together, the lines of evidence reveal larger issues of Mormon female social geography and the consequences of extralegal justice.Olivia was born August 16, 1819, in Danbury, Connecticut, the fourth child and first daughter of Matthew and Betsey (White) Curtis. Around 1830, her father moved the family to New York City. He died in 1833 leaving his widow to support the family.9 Olivia's descendants believe that she attended New York University where she became well versed in foreign languages.10 This is highly improbable as the university was founded in 1831 for young men and women did not matriculate there until much later. It is more likely that Olivia attended a young ladies seminary somewhere in New York City. Here she would have received some education and might have picked up a smattering of foreign languages. At age nineteen she married Abraham Coombs, a widower some fourteen years her senior.In 1838, the same year Olivia was married, her older brother Theodore Curtis met apostle Parley P. Pratt. Theodore and his wife were among the earliest converts in New York City. They were baptized in the East River on a very cold, snowy day and became members of the first branch of the church organized in the city.11 In the next few years, his sisters Olivia and Helen and their husbands Abraham Coombs and Ross R. Rogers also joined the church. Family tradition says that apostles Pratt and Snow taught Olivia and Abraham the gospel.12Following the deaths of Joseph and Hyrum Smith, antagonism toward members of the Mormon Church grew exponentially. On October 8, 1845, Brigham Young sent a letter to all members of the church in the United States notifying them to prepare to migrate west. A month later, apostle Orson Pratt advised the members in the eastern states that it would be “cheaper and more convenient” for them “to go by sea.”13 In early spring of 1846, Olivia's brother and sister and their families began the long exodus from Nauvoo, Illinois, to Utah. Theodore settled in Salt Lake City, while Helen and her husband settled first in Provo, then were called to colonize Parowan in 1854, and later in 1856 moved to Beaver.14 On February 4, 1846, the Coombs family left New York on the ship Brooklyn.15 They landed in Yerba Buena (now San Francisco) on July 31, 1846, after almost six months at sea. The passengers nearly doubled the population of around two hundred living in the tiny community.16Shortly thereafter, Mormon settlers and their leaders disagreed and, as a result, the church members did not settle on adjoining lands.17 With the 1849 gold rush, most church members scattered.18 Abraham Coombs settled in Napa County, northeast of San Francisco with his wife and children including daughter Emily, born in 1846 in San Francisco.19The Coombs family and others eventually moved to San Bernardino. According to their descendants’ stories, the move was gradual. Abraham purchased property and the family resided in the Fresno and Bakersfield areas until they moved to San Bernardino. Yet, the diary of Carolyn Barnes Crosby, a church member living in San Francisco, shows that Olivia and her family were still in Napa in July 1855. The Crosbys, Coombs, and other San Francisco families moved to San Bernardino toward the end of 1855. The city's substantial city lots provided ample room for vegetable gardens, grape vines, and fruit trees. (Women played an important role in the family economy, generating cash for household expenses through the garden, poultry, and dairy products they produced.)20 The Coombs spent New Year's Day 1856 in a home in San Bernardino with several of their San Francisco acquaintances.21A constant theme that weaves through the narratives of Olivia's descendants is the love she had for her husband Abraham.22 However, the diary entries of Carolyn Crosby and her sister Louisa Pratt, reveal deep fissures in the couple's relationship. In addition, they provide evidence of Olivia's struggle with a secret dependence on alcohol that made it difficult and sometimes impossible for her to care for her children and her home. The presence of at least one saloon, a grog shop, and several distilleries, in addition to merchants who sold “liquor by the bottle” made it relatively easy for her to obtain spirituous drinks.23Although Joseph Smith had received a revelation in 1833 regarding the prohibition of alcohol, many church members continued to drink at social occasions. Some manufactured their own spirituous liquors then consumed or sold them, and others, primarily males, struggled with alcoholism. Alcohol consumption took place in gendered spaces. Women drank alone at home while men tended to drink outside the home with other men. Society perceived women as “victims of the excessive drinking of their husbands and fathers, not as drinkers themselves.”24 “Good” women did not become inebriated. Those who did were often associated with promiscuity or prostitution.25 In contrast to male drinking, excessive drinking by a female “provoked social outrage and the use of punishment or coercion to stop such behavior.”26 There was a concern especially if it affected children.27Brigham Young equated drunkenness with crimes such as murder, thievery, lying, deceiving, gambling, and whoring.28 He cautioned mothers against using alcohol to help them in childbirth, noting this created an appetite “bred and born” in the child and created a “foundation for drunkenness in their offspring.”29 Apostle John Taylor discouraged church members from forming local temperance societies, claiming their good principles were “comprehended in our holy religion.”30 Given these views, most members did not organize a temperance society and expose their drinking habits.Initially, Olivia hid her dependence on alcohol from her neighbors, but over time it became more difficult. At first Carolyn only occasionally interacted with Olivia, when the children were sick or Olivia called on her. By December, Olivia's oldest daughter, thirteen-year-old Helen, was helping Carolyn with her washing, mending, and ironing. That same month, Olivia gave birth to another daughter, Olive.31In January 1857, Olivia allowed Helen to move in with Carolyn, her husband, and son. This was not unusual in the nineteenth century. Young women often lived with their mother's female friends or relatives who “supervised the young girl's deportment . . . and introduced her to their own network of female friends and kin.”32 Helen often accompanied Carolyn on visits and social and church gatherings. Carolyn taught Helen how to knit, an indication that Olivia had failed to do so. Several weeks later, Helen began to attend school. During this time Olivia increasingly stopped by to visit. On February 11 she confessed that she was thinking of cooking for a sawmill owner in the area.33 The next month, Carolyn reported Olivia planned to leave her husband. Carolyn questioned the “impropriety of such a step” and Olivia promised to reconsider. “I exhorted her to shun certain persons who I thought would be an injury to her and left her with good feelings.”34A day later, Helen stopped by her mother's on the way to school and found her “entirely helpless from intemperate drinking and that her babe was crying and none but children to take the charge of it.” When Carolyn visited, she found Olivia lying on the bed, “her babe crying by her side.—3 little girls, the oldest of which was only 10 years old were standing around looking very sad and forsaken. . . . I know not that I ever saw a more pitiful sight.” The fact that Helen could describe her mother's condition suggests that the situation was familiar. Carolyn took the baby and her sister Elvira home. Later that day, Olivia sent Emily to get the baby from Carolyn, but she initially refused, believing that Olivia was “not capable of taking care of it.”35Louisa Pratt noted in her journal, “A circumstance transpired in the neighborhood causing great excitement and regret.” She said that Carolyn asked Olivia the “cause of her reckless course. Oh, she was unhappy and did not love her husband.”36 Louisa also struggled with her relationship with her husband, Addison Pratt, but she turned to her sister Carolyn and to household tasks and church service for solace and not to alcohol. Louisa concluded: “What a futile excuse for a mother to make, for drowning her senses and ruining her character; when she had a family of good children to set her affections upon; and a husband kind, even if not so brilliant as she might desire, he was not an angry man, neither a drunkard.”37Louisa and Carolyn took that view because they held a secure place in their community. Each worked industriously to clean and beautify their homes and to teach and care for children. Each played an important role in the family economy, generating cash for household expenses with their garden, poultry, and dairy products.38 Each attended church and ministered to others. Oliva, on the other hand, neglected her children when she drank. She could not feed them or take care of them nor keep her house. The sisters saw Olivia as a woman with a “ruined” reputation, guilty of a moral sin and outside the church's standards.39Two days after Olivia's public exposure as an intoxicated mother, Carolyn visited the Coombs home and found a gentleman counseling Abraham and Olivia against separating. At that time Olivia began daily sending her two-year-old and four-year-old over to the Crosby's for food and care. Carolyn told the Coombs that she would take one of the little ones as her own and “endeavor to do a mother's part by it.” Both parents initially agreed. Carolyn's acquaintances knew she cared for Olivia's child Elvira. When the Coombs's baby, Olive, became deathly ill, Carolyn and her husband spoke to the Coombs about Elvira. Carolyn wrote: “I told them we had better have an understanding concerning it. They both said they were willing we should have it as our own child.” However, Olivia changed her mind within a few days. Just a few weeks later, a doctor stopped by Carolyn's home to tell her that he had “found the mother in a state of intoxication” and asked her to let Helen stay with the infant. Caroline felt sorry for the children and sympathetic to the father, whom she described as “an industrious man who went to work daily.”40Over time, Carolyn and Jonathan Crosby found that Helen rebelled against their requests. Jonathan confronted Helen and asked her to make a choice between following their directions or returning to her parents. Helen chose to return home and took Elvira with her. Although clearly disheartened at the outcome, Caroline expressed relief at Helen's departure and noted “finally felt that I was relieved of a great deal of care. I actually felt free again.”41 Caroline did not write about the Coombs family again during her stay in San Bernardino.Following the Mountain Meadow Massacre in September 1857 and publicity in the California Star the next month, many of the San Bernardino members began selling their property in anticipation of an exodus to Utah in November because of rising antagonism toward the church. Within the next few months, nearly two-thirds of the San Bernardino members left.42 According to family lore, the Coombs began their trek to Utah in the spring of 1860, taking separate routes to get there. Abraham took the southern road through the Cajon Pass, across the deserts of Nevada and into Utah, passing through the site of the massacre and up to the community of Beaver. Descendants claim he loaded up his wagons “containing fruit trees, berry vines, crop seed, farming equipment, furniture, etc. brought a herd of 50 pure bred cattle, hid $20,000 in gold in a wagon, hired drovers and joined the Ephraim Hanks party that crossed the desert to Las Vegas.” The family narrative maintains that Abraham caught pneumonia during this trip, died shortly before he reached Beaver, and that the members of the Hanks party took everything he had and divided it amongst themselves. Olivia and her four daughters allegedly took the northern California route to Salt Lake City because it was safer, and because she wanted to visit with her son Charles, her step-daughter, and grandchildren who were still living in Napa. She left her daughter Helen in California. Once in Utah, Olivia visited with her brother Theodore in Salt Lake City, then headed south. Family tradition indicates that when Olivia and the children reached Beaver, they were devastated to find that their beloved husband and father had died and they were left penniless.43This oral tradition differs sharply from the written record. Evidence in Beaver County court records shows that the Coombs moved to Beaver in 1858. The story that Abraham purchased fifty head of purebred cattle and hired drovers to bring his wagons in which he had hidden $20,000 to Beaver is a fictional embellishment. To have had that much cash on hand and the resources to purchase the cattle, wagons, and their contents, Abraham would have had to have been extremely wealthy, a situation that does not match what appears in extant records.44 It is far more likely that he worked for Hanks as a drover and probably died on one of those return trips.When the San Bernardino church members arrived in Beaver in early 1858, the settlement was barely two years old and conditions were still primitive.45 Among the residents was Olivia's brother-in-law Ross R. Rogers, one of the original fifteen families who founded the town. Many of the San Bernardino families moved into dugouts and shanties. There was so little cash in the county at that time that the Beaver County Commission, unable to collect for taxes owed, requested that the court allow them to make wheat a lawful tender instead.46 All of this would have put more stress on the Coombs's already fractured marriage. Olivia filed a petition of divorce from Abraham in the Beaver County court on August 25, 1858.47At that time, Utah had some of the most liberal divorce laws in the country. Petitions of divorce had to state clearly and specifically the causes for which the plaintiff sought relief.48 Olivia claimed that her feelings were “entirely alienated from Mr. Co[o]mbs, therefore, I can not have peace and union with him, and that my welfare requires a separation.”49 Three days later, probate judge Philo T. Farnsworth granted the divorce. The court ruled that Olivia keep the children, all the household furniture, and two-thirds of the incoming crop of wheat.50 The divorce appears in none of the Coombs's descendants’ stories.After the divorce, Olivia was the primary provider for her family. Women had few occupations open to them on the frontier. Like married women, the traditional roles assigned to single, widowed, and divorced women were also reflected in the work they did to support themselves.51 The daughter of one widowed Utah pioneer woman recalled that her mother “had to work very hard at sewing, gleaning wheat and teaching school three months of the school year. Still we suffered for want of food and with the cold.”52 In an area as economically destitute as southern Utah, Olivia and her family would have experienced the same kinds of hardships.On April 17, 1859, approximately eight months after Olivia's divorce from Abraham, local church authorities approached Jonathan Crosby, now living in Beaver, and told him that they were going to take Olivia's children from her. They asked if the Crosbys would be willing to take Elvira, the young child they had looked after in San Bernardino. Later that day, Olivia's brother-in-law visited them. He explained that “church leaders expected they would be under the necessity of taking them from their mother in consequence of her evil habits.”53 It appears that Olivia's drinking was once again out of control and consequently she could not take care of her children. Since Carolyn's subsequent diary entries do not mention the child becoming a part of their household, it seems the children were not removed from Olivia's care at that time.Toward the end of 1859, Olivia married Solomon Chamberlain. The marriage did not last long.54 In February 1860, a distraught Olivia visited Carolyn Crosby. She said “an evil and false report was in circulation about her, which made her feel very bad, said she wished to leave the place, as no one had any confidence in her here.” Three months later, Carolyn recorded that Solomon Chamberlain stopped by with “grievous complaints against his wife, Olivia.” He applied for a divorce.55 Once again, Olivia's behavior suggests she was struggling with alcoholism.Two months later, Olivia appeared in the 1860 Utah territorial census under the surname Coombs. She was listed as still living in Beaver, age forty-two, occupation of washerwoman. Though respectable work, in a community where conditions were so dire, she would have brought in very little income and, like many others, would have been on a subsistence diet, eating native plants and roots to survive.56 Living with her were children Arabella, Alvina A. and Olive.57 Emily, the oldest of the children who came to Utah with her does not appear with the family. The only Emily born in California who was living in southern Utah in 1860 was enumerated in Beaver in the household of William Thompson, an English convert to the church.58The Mormon Church had adopted social and religious practices to help alleviate the “burden of the poor and widowed,” but these support systems worked only if a woman accepted the “mores and morals of the prevailing Mormon culture.” In addition to helping provide for the poor, local church female Relief Societies had a responsibility to “watch over the morals of the community and, as an ongoing purpose, the spiritual education of its members.”59 The Cedar City Relief Society minutes reflect male church leaders’ concerns with obedience to husbands, teaching children about virtue and morality, and cleanliness in the home. Each month assigned sisters reported on the cleanliness of the households of the women they visited.60 Many of Olivia's San Bernardino neighbors had moved to Beaver and the surrounding areas. They knew of her predilection for spirituous liquors and the effects of her drinking on her household and children. A female consuming alcohol on a regular basis would have made such a woman ineligible for aid from the community.Although there were no commercial distilleries in the area when Olivia arrived in Beaver, within a year of her arrival, alcohol became readily available there. The court granted two men licenses to make and sell spirituous liquors. Less than three months later, the court considered revoking the licenses because of reports of widespread drunkenness.61 During this period, Beaver was beset with turmoil over alcohol consumption and dances. Church bishop Philo Farnsworth expressed his concerns about the two distilleries and the effects on the youth in his ward in a letter to Brigham Young: “[Alcohol] is made accessibly to every boy that is able to carry a peck of wheat; the result is that all our meetings, dances or public assemblies of every kind are disturbed by noisy, riotous conduct brought about by the too free use of intoxicating drink and the influence arising therefrom and I am sorry to say that it does not stop with the children, but men holding the Priesthood are not only sympathetic but aiders and abettors of such conduct.”62 In addition to the local church leadership's worries about alcohol abuse, they also expressed concerns with immorality that occurred when the youth danced “the hip-dance” (most likely the waltz). Parowan stake president William Dame warned that “sometimes when the youth had put their arms around each other's waists that they were sometimes under instead of outside their clothes. That the so-called ‘hip dance’ had been carried to Beaver and that some had gone to whoring in consequence, so that Bp. P. T. Farnsworth had been compelled to discontinue night dances,” an action that made many local members very unhappy.63Between her divorce from Solomon Chamberlain in 1860 and early 1862, Oliva married Tommy Hunt and divorced once again.64 Like her divorce from Abraham Coombs, neither of these additional marriages and divorces appear in any of the descendants’ narratives. However, all the family stories indicate that at the end of 1861 Oliva and her children moved south to Santa Clara where, allegedly with the help of church apostle Erastus Snow and because of her skill in foreign languages, she was called to teach school for newly arrived Swiss immigrants. There is no evidence that she had taught school in Beaver.65 It would have been difficult for her to do so, even if she had wanted to because of her earlier drinking problems. Their perception of her as a neglectful mother and a woman guilty of a moral evil, would hardly have recommended her as proper person to be teaching the children of others.Shortly after Olivia and her children arrived in Santa Clara, a devastating flood in early 1862 swept away their hopes for a new start. The schoolhouse, most of the homes, orchards, and crops washed downstream in a violent and destructive flood.66 The family narrative does not mention Oliva's fourth marriage to Santa Clara resident Ezra Higbee, who also lost property in the flood.67 A few months after the flood, Oliva, her new husband, and her daughters moved to the small village of Cedar City, again allegedly with the encouragement of Erastus Snow to teach school there.68All of the descendants’ stories mention a black book that Oliva carried with her. Some believe that she was looking for and keeping track of the family belongings supposedly taken when Abraham died. When she found them in the possession of community members, she wrote the item and the possessor in her book in the hopes of eventually getting them back.69 Others believe she was writing secret reports of what she overheard about the Mountain Meadow Massacre and sending the information to Brigham Young, or conversely that she was collecting evidence for a newspaper article that she was going to write. Lastly, some suppose that the black book was a journal in which she had been writing the family experiences since the Brooklyn landed in Yerba Buena.70In the perpetrator's family, the story of the murder has disappeared from the narrative. His descendants either do not know that their ancestor committed a violent murder for which he served prison time or they have chosen to ignore it. The information they have about Wood's early life comes from a journal that he kept and recollections of a son and a grandson.71 George Wood was born November 13, 1822, in Sedgley Parish, Staffordshire, England. This rapidly industrializing area was the site of numerous coal mines, small metal works, foundries, and forges. When George was twelve years old, his father experienced painful financial reverses. As a result, George and two of his older brothers became ironwork apprentices to provide for the family and to pay off his father's debts. Over the objections of his father, George's ten-year-old brother, John, also became an apprentice. On February 10, 1835, John died instantly when he slipped and was pulled headfirst into a machine. His untimely death devastated the family and within a year George's father died “of a broken heart” leaving his widow and children to make restitution for debts owed.72After his father's death, George apprenticed himself for five years in “the drawing out trade,” where he learned the manufacture of “wrought iron forging” for railroads, steam engines, and marine work.73 In 1840, he heard missionary Theodore Turley preach, an