Sarah Ann Briggs: A Child Bride from the Martin Handcart Company
It was while doing research on the history of homosexuality and early Mormonism that I first came across the story of a pedogamous marriage of a girl who survived the Martin Handcart Company disaster of 1856. Edith Mary Chapman, a lesbian student and then instructor of Elementary Education at the University of Utah during the 1910s and 20s, was the daughter of Sarah Ann Briggs Handley Chapman, who had traveled in the Martin Handcart Company with both of her parents and six siblings. During the ill-fated trek, the 5-year-old Sarah Ann Briggs lost her father and two siblings to hunger and freezing weather. Less than four years after arriving in Utah, Sarah Ann's widowed mother, Ruth Butterworth Briggs (who had remarried polygamously to Benjamin Thomas Clark in 1857) died from a scorpion bite on August 4, 1860. The orphaned Sarah Ann, now nine, was sent to live in the Sugar House Ward with one of her new stepsisters, Elizabeth Clark Handley, and her monogamous husband, George Handley, a brick mason from England. In 1991 interviews with two granddaughters of George and Elizabeth Clark Handley, they reported that in the Spring of 1866 George Handley was ordered by a high-ranking church leader to take a second wife. As both Handley and wife Elizabeth were opposed to the practice of polygamy, he instead requested to move with his family back to Keokuk, Iowa, a Mormon settlement along the Mormon Trail. Ostensibly, once away from Utah, he would then abandon Mormonism.
One night, soon thereafter, the Handleys were visited by Mormon vigilantes whom family members referred to as “Danites,” although that was a misnomer; the vigilantes burned down the Handley barn as a warning to George to remain in Zion, as well as to obey the orders of his ecclesiastical superiors by marrying a second wife. George realized that it was best to comply, so on May 19, 1866, 42-year-old George Handley was sealed in the Salt Lake Endowment House to his first wife, Elizabeth Clark (whom he had civilly married in 1846), and then polygamously to her little stepsister, the 14-year-old Sarah Ann Briggs, whom the Handleys had taken into their home. Within a week after their marriage, young Sarah Ann had already conceived her first child— indicating not just pedogamy, but pedophilia as well. By 1874, Sarah Ann Briggs Handley was consulting a spirit medium, and "those ghostly counselors had assured her that polygamy is a gross sin." Reports also circulated that the Sugar House Ward was mired in dissent from the LDS Church, further disaffecting Sarah Ann’s mind. This led to "trouble in the family arising from polygamous relations" and Sarah Ann’s "accusations had produced a bad effect upon her husband’s mind." A despondent, and sometimes suicidal, 47-year-old George Handley then mysteriously died in 1874— reported by Elizabeth Clark Handley (and rumored by ward members) to have been by self-inflicted poisoning. However, the attending physician ruled the death to have been from "brain apoplexy," a stroke, and the post mortem examination came to the same conclusion.
Thus, at the age of 22, Sarah Ann Briggs Handley found herself a widow with four small children to support and raise on her own: Ruth (aged 7), Benjamin (5), Mary (3), and Harvey (1). Embittered by her whole experience with Mormonism (the arduous journey to America, the grueling and tragic trek, the horrible deaths of her parents, her forced polygamous and pedogamous marriage, and giving birth to children when she herself was still just a child), she abandoned Mormonism and joined the Episcopal Church in Salt Lake City. Handley family tradition also holds that, sometime between 1880 and 1882, church leaders insisted that Elizabeth Clark Handley take away and raise Sarah Ann's children, so that they would remain in the Mormon faith. In support of this, we do know that when she married Episcopal dentist Arvis S. Chapman in 1883, her young children were no longer residing with her.
Although LDS president David O. McKay popularized in 1948 the hagiographic tale that all members of the ill-fated Martin Handcart Company were so devout that they remained faithful to Mormonism the rest of their lives, Sarah Ann Briggs' story proves otherwise. In fact, at least nine more of the Martin Handcart survivors abandoned Mormonism in direct consequence of how the Church mishandled the entire venture. All but one of the five surviving members of the Sermon family, who survived the trek, left the LDS church. Their family, headed by a non-Mormon father who died just as the rescue wagons showed up, had previously been treated extremely abusively by their leaders, from Capt. Edward Martin down to the captain of their ten, James Stone, as well as by fellow pioneers. Survivors Hannah Harrison (later Carson), Emily Montague Marshall (Orchard), and Alice Moss (Bradburn) all moved to California, married non-Mormons, and abandoned the LDS faith. In addition, Jane Elizabeth Oldham (Keller) and her husband and children left the church and moved to Barnitz, Oklahoma by 1900. Alice Elizabeth Harrison divorced her first husband, Eric Magnus Cast, remarried a non-Mormon named Charles Edwin Catlin, left Mormonism, and moved to Yakima, Washington.
This is the second piece in a series of articles that will discuss child brides in historic and modern times in Utah. The articles will be published over the next five weeks. Read the first piece here.