Journey to an unknown frontier

“Faith and Betrayal” tells the remarkable story of Jean Rio Baker Pearce, an intrepid woman who converted to Mormonism in England, immigrated to America in 1851 and traveled to Utah by wagon train, then moved on to California after abandoning her Mormon faith. While Sally Denton’s book offers all the color and drama of a vast historical novel, the account is based on her own extensive research and, above all, on the journal that Jean Rio, the author’s great-great-grandmother, left as a legacy for her family.

Jean Rio (as the author refers to her throughout) was the child of an aristocratic Frenchwoman. Her mother had survived the guillotine only because as an infant she was smuggled across the English Channel in a wine cask by a family servant. Jean Rio was raised in wealth and privilege in London and toured Europe as a singer and pianist. She married Henry Baker, a prominent British engineer, who died of cholera in 1849, leaving her a well-to-do widow with seven children. When her idealism turned her away from the Church of England -- “Jean Rio saw the degraded condition of British life as a clear sign of the approaching end-time in biblical terms” -- she embraced the new faith of Mormonism and promptly set out with her children on the arduous journey to America.

“With the same discipline and drive that had made her a successful musician, Jean Rio threw herself into this most passionate dedication to a richer life for herself and her children,” writes Denton. “To join the exodus to a faraway, mysterious land as part of this calling seemed to her natural as well as epic.”

“Faith and Betrayal” is indeed an authentic American epic, but it is also enlivened with intimate detail. Jean Rio loses one of her children to consumption on the Atlantic crossing. Her wagon train is afflicted by thunderstorms and floods, hunger and illness, ravening wolves and stampeding oxen. At every point along the way, Denton is assisted in the telling of the tale by her ancestor, who was a gifted writer and a discerning observer of the American social landscape. “[T]here is no nobility in America,” she confided to her journal after landing in New Orleans, “though never was there a people fonder of titles: colonels, majors, captains, judges, and squires being as plentiful as blackberries.”

In Utah, she was reduced to planting crops in poor soil, but she rallied to the demands of the frontier. “By necessity,” writes Denton, “the bejeweled pianist and singer had evolved into a botanist, a midwife, an undertaker, and a nurse.” Jean Rio’s experience in Utah was “one of failed promise, perpetual disappointment, and ultimate poverty as the church to which she had been so thoroughly devoted appropriated her fortune.”

“I left my home, sacrificed my property, broke up every dear association, and what was and is yet dearer than all, left my beloved native land,” she lamented. “And for what? A bubble that has burst in my grasp. It has been a severe lesson, but I can say it has led me to lean more on my Heavenly Father and less on the words of men.” At last, in 1869, she fled Utah for California.

Denton discloses that parts of Jean Rio’s American diary have never been found, and she wonders whether they may have been suppressed because they included accounts of her disaffection with Mormonism. Deprived of such source material, Denton is reduced to speculation. Thus, for example, she suggests that her great-great-grandmother, as a rich widow, may have been regarded as a good candidate for “spiritual wifery” -- a term for polygamous marriage -- by Brigham Young himself. Jean Rio did marry again in Utah, but her new husband, Edward Pearce (who died six months later), was, as Denton notes, a “ ‘Gentile’...one of the relatively few non-Mormons living among the Saints.”

Denton’s new book -- and her previous one, “American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857,” about the notorious Mormon attack on a pioneer party -- have not made her popular in Mormon circles. She pronounces a harsh judgment on the core beliefs of Mormonism and the conduct of its early leadership, noting of “the unabashed polygamist” Brigham Young that he was “outspoken, stubborn, arrogant, vengeful, and hot-tempered.” But Denton is also honest enough to concede that surviving portions of the journal have been used in different ways by different readers, some of whom hold a higher opinion of Mormonism:

“Mormon descendants of Jean Rio uphold the diary as evidence of a deeply spiritual woman devoted to the doctrines of the Church of the Latter-day Saints, a woman who ultimately left Utah because of poverty rather than because of her overwhelming rejection of the church and its leaders,” she writes. “Non-Mormon descendants, like me, use the diary as evidence that, for many converts, the reality of nineteenth-century Utah -- the church’s expropriation of property under the doctrine of ‘consecration,’ the practice of polygamy, the violence of some of the rituals, all amid a dictatorial theocracy -- was that of an oppressive regime, particularly for women.”

Denton clearly wants to reclaim her cherished and admired ancestor, and for more than one reason: She seeks to revise our understanding of the women of the American West by showing their lives in more vivid detail than most histories and biographies offer. And she insists that they, like Jean Rio Baker Pearce, “should be seen not as overworked helpmate but as adventure-seeking, nature-loving, courageous, talented, and free-spirited explorer of an uncultivated and untrammeled territory.”

Denton has succeeded in these aspirations. She rescues her great-great-grandmother from obscurity and celebrates her as a figure of unique historical significance. She shows us the familiar landscape of the American frontier through the far less familiar lens of the Mormon experience. And, not incidentally, she tells a harrowing and heartbreaking tale of the Old West that we have not heard before.