Customer Reviews

Faith and Betrayal: A Pioneer Woman's Passage in the American West

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Jean Rio, Mormon convert, traveled from England with a large group of people to settle in the barren land of "Deseret", which is now modern day Utah. Fed by her faith, her ultimate belief that she was right in her convictions, and a determined spirit, Jean not only survived this perilous journey, but helped others survive it along the way. Sally Denton, Jean's great great granddaughter, recounts her relatives momnumental journey in the small and quiet book, "Faith and Betrayal".

Using Jean Rio's diary as a record of account in this book, Denton reconstructs the history of her family, and the decision of Jean Rio to leave her life of priviledge in England to the great unknown. Starting off in luxury, Jean converts to Mormonism and decides her faith should bring her to America and Utah, as one of those brave pioneers. The rest of the story recounts Jean's life in Utah, her disillusionment with Mormonism, and her eventual resettling to California.

Jean's trek across the United States would earn my five stars by itself. Denton's reconstruction of the journey of Jean and her entourage is compelling and amazing. I long since knew about the travels of Mormon pioneers, but never has the perilous journey been so wonderfully reconstructed. It was amazing to read of Jean's growth during the trip, finding skills she never knew she had. This is one pioneer woman who deserves her story to be told.

Much has been and will be said about Denton's view on Mormonism, and her "obvioius bias" and several will discount her story by their "factual errors". Any book written that dares suggest that a religion, such as Mormonism, has faults, is bound to be attacked. It is almost tiresome that it happens, but alas, it is. At least Denton has said her peace, and has shared it in a wonderful book.

I highly recommend this story for anyone who wants a intrguing story about a woman who had the courage to follow her convictions, and live her life based on her beliefs.

This is a beautifully written and well researched book about the pioneering experience from a woman's perspective. Laura Ingalls Wilder gave us all a gift there, but not as much from an intellectual or an adult point of view.

Even more, this is a fascinating insight into the early Mormon church and how it started, recruited members, and moved around the country, before settling in Salt Lake City.

If you're not a huge history buff (which I am not), but love learning it through the actual human experience, then you will find this book as fascinating as I.

I was very disappointed while reading this book. Contrary to some reviewers I did not find it compelling and the errors and bias rather put me off. For instance, Wilford Woodruff did not make polygamy illegal (that was the U.S. Government), each Mormon did not have to get married three different ways to make it to heaven, and one could cite pages of similar things. These could all be forgiven, however, were there a strong narrative framework with a consistent, engaging style, but alas...

As the PW review states, the book is riddled with factual errors--large and small. It is also full of the author's anti-religious and anti-Mormon prejudice; events and people are always cast in the dimmest light (except the author's own ancestor and family) and Denton seems unable to imagine a religious worldview. I would have like more direct quoting from Jean Rio Baker's journals and a more dispassionate point of view that accounted for the reason people of the 19th century were so compelled to leave their home countries to emigrate to Utah and take part in what Mormonism seemed to promise. I bought this book to get a sense--from Jean Rio Baker--of who she was and why she converted to Mormonism, but the factual errors and value judgments cloud the book's credibility so much that it did not really address those issues.

"Faith and Betrayal" tells the story of Jean Rio Baker, an Englishwoman who converted to Mormonism and emigrated to Utah in the early 1850s. The main primary source material for any understanding of Mrs. Baker's life is her emigrant journal. The journal itself covers an emigration period of nine months, is largely silent for the eighteen years that Mrs. Baker was in Utah, contains an entry at the end of that period alluding to Mrs. Baker's economic and religious disappointment during her time in Utah, and ends with a few entries made after she settled in California with other family members. Mrs. Baker's journal has been excerpted or included in several anthologies and collections, including "Saints without Halos" and "Audacious Women."

As a literary and historical document, Mrs. Baker's journal stands on its own, and a book-length treatment of her life would seem to be of questionable value absent the discovery or production of additional primary source material. However, Sally Denton provides little in the way of scholarship or original research in her book. Ms. Denton states at the outset her frustration that the L.D.S. church has gotten so much mileage out of the journal as a representation of the Mormon emigrant experience while failing to give equal billing to the "loss of faith" portion that is the crux of Ms. Denton's book. Ms. Denton states that the purpose of her book is to "restore" Mrs. Baker's voice that the L.D.S. church has "distorted."

Unfortunately, what the reader hears more often than not is Ms. Denton's voice, a voice that oftentimes is not only unsupported by the historical record, but is contrary to it in many respects. Not content with providing a running paraphrase of Mrs. Baker's journal, Ms. Denton cannot resist padding the journal to make Mrs. Baker a more active participant in the events described in the journal. However, Ms. Denton's use of dramatic license becomes more problematic in relation to the absence of journal entries during Mrs. Baker's time in Utah. Based on the one journal entry expressing Mrs. Baker's disappointment with life as it turned out in Utah, Ms. Denton attempts to detail the course of Mrs. Baker's disillusionment over the past eighteen years for which the journal is otherwise silent. Ms. Denton attributes very specific attitudes and beliefs to Mrs. Baker that find no support in the record: in Ms. Denton's telling, Mrs. Baker is personally repulsed by and vehemently opposed to polygamy, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the Mormon doctrine of salvation, the Mormon principle of consecration, etc. Ms. Denton explains away Mrs. Baker's actual silence on any one of these topics by asserting that the atmosphere in nineteenth-century Mormon society was so repressive that a free-thinking woman like Mrs. Baker was sufficiently intimidated from confiding her innermost thoughts to her private journal. With this sleight of hand, Ms. Denton effectively turns Mrs. Baker into an empty vessel onto which Ms. Denton can project Ms. Denton's personal objections to the Mormon religion and experience as well as many of her modern-day sensibilities. Yet Ms. Denton represents Mrs. Baker's undocumented feelings and views on particular items with such certainty and specificity that one wonders whether Ms. Denton is channeling Mrs. Baker's spirit.

Many of Ms. Denton's factual assertions about Mrs. Baker's life and family are demonstrably false. Key among these is Ms. Denton's portrayal of Mrs. Baker and several of her children's removal to California as a calculated and dangerous "escape from Mormonism." The journal itself makes clear that Mrs. Baker accompanied a sick friend to California as a personal nurse, and had intended to return to Utah but was persuaded by her resident son to stay in California. Ms. Denton supports her "escape" storyline by vague references to family history or tradition, but only ends up contradicting herself. For instance, she claims that certain of Mrs. Baker's sons previously fled Utah for California under cover of night in order to avoid Mormon assassin squads. Her purported source for this assertion is unidentified California Baker descendants. Yet later on, Ms. Denton asserts that those same descendants had no knowledge that their ancestors were either Mormon or had come to California by way of Utah. Further, L.D.S. Endowment House records show that one of the "escaping" Baker sons was back in Utah several years later receiving his Mormon endowment ordinance. The journal itself indicates that the sons left for economic, not religious reasons. In this, as in other significant instances (beyond the limited scope of this review), Ms. Denton ignores contrary facts that do not advance her pre-determined storyline.

The book in part appears to be a vehicle for Ms. Denton to expound on nineteenth-century Mormon society. Ms. Denton goes beyond critical examination to demonstrate an unveiled contempt for all aspects of Mormon history, experience and belief, as well as a superficial and incomplete understanding of them. The factual mistakes are numerous and fundamental. She is unable to concede any good-faith aspects or motivations to either the religious system or its actors, and her nineteenth-century Utah is populated almost exclusively by abusive manipulators or easily-led dupes. This is due in large part to her uncritical reliance on the sensationalistic, anti-Mormon literature of the era.

In the end, Ms. Denton's book is not so much history as it is a polemic, at times veering off into the realm of historical fiction. There is little to no original scholarship evident. Ms. Denton relies on secondary or tertiary sources, freely projects or psychologizes, asserts unverifiable or suspect facts, and refers to uncited and unidentified "family members" as sources. In other words, an independent researcher would be at a loss to verify or fact check Ms. Denton's narrative as it applies to Mrs. Baker, and would have to duplicate Ms. Denton's original research, such as it is, from scratch. Those readers interested in Mrs. Baker's life and journal would be better served by reading Mrs. Baker's account in her own words, which are more engaging in any case, rather than having it filtered and skewed by a compromised intermediary with a personal agenda.

Sally Denton's Faith and Betrayal is a disappointing book. It promised all the elements of an exceptionally dramatic (and true) story: love and loss, wealth and poverty, dedication and disillusionment, an epic journey, a peculiar religion, polygamy, theocracy, a massacre, and perhaps betrayal. But Denton's account is so replete with inaccuracies and confusion of facts that it destroys all credibility. Listing her errors would take nearly as many pages as the book itself. In addition she failed to use the richest repository of primary sources of Mormon history-the LDS Church Historical Department Archives. Presumably this is because she assumed she would not be welcome, she believed the records there had been selectively censored, or she thought they would have little relevance.

As a non-Mormon historian working on the stories of disillusioned converts in the same period of the mid-nineteenth century, I can assure her that for the past decade I have never been refused generous help in the Church Archives and have found the records there amazingly rich, especially the correspondence of Brigham Young and the diaries of contemporaries of those who left the church.

Denton makes Jean Rio's piano a pivotal issue, which she says was brought to Utah in 1851, though Jean Rio never mentions it in her trip diary nor does the captain of the company she traveled with in his (which is in the Church Archives). Denton fails to give a source for her account of it. It is quite possible Jean Rio ordered the piano later after her arrival in Salt Lake and had it shipped from the East. As for the tar-covered crate (p. 165), if that is in a museum in California, could not have Denton done the research to find where it is?

Was Jean Rio's piano taken by the church leaders through "consecration"-a rule of stewardship (pp. xvii, 129)? Did Denton bother to inquire in the Church Archives what the consecration records show? Not all records survived, but many did. It is unlikely the church purged them of information about the piano. Likewise, did Denton ever ask the staff at the Museum of Church History and Art about the provenance of the piano? One Jean Rio descendent believes it was gifted to the museum by a Mormon descendant. Here again Denton confuses her facts: She states (p. 130) that the piano is in the "Church Temple Museum"; there is no such institution.

Denton claims the piano ended up in the "Amelia Palace, the home of Young's favorite wife, a beautiful Englishwoman named Ann Eliza Webb Dee Young Denning..." (p. 129). Here Denton has all too typically confused Young's so-called "favorite" wife Harriet Amelia Folsom with a later wife, Ann Eliza. Neither were English. The Gardo House, the so-called "Amelia's Palace," was not finished until after Brigham Young's death; Amelia lived in it a short period to establish her claim in Young's will, while Ann Eliza never lived there.

Denton quotes from one of my papers (pp. 153-54), and although the quote is correct, she misinterprets my account, stating "The flow of Mormon defectors had become the largest emigration to that point, far surpassing even the California gold rush." No records can support that idea. Likewise, she claims that "U.S. Army escorts oversaw a burgeoning traffic of disaffected Mormons fleeing Zion." There was only one such escort from Salt Lake of approximately forty families.

Although a beautifully produced little book, publisher Alfred A. Knopf should be embarrassed at having accepted and published such a consistently unreliable "history." I'm sorry to advise potential readers not to waste their money.

P.S. The above review was written about the first edition. I have recently (Dec 2009) been informed that some of the errors I pointed out--for instance, the name of the museum where the piano resides--have been corrected in the latest edition. I am very glad to hear it. The story has such potential and needs to be accurately told.

"Faith and Betrayal" tells the story of Jean Rio Baker, an Englishwoman who converted to Mormonism and emigrated to Utah in the early 1850s. The main primary source material for any understanding of Mrs. Baker's life is her emigrant journal. The journal itself covers an emigration period of nine months, is largely silent for the eighteen years that Mrs. Baker was in Utah, contains an entry at the end of that period alluding to Mrs. Baker's economic and religious disappointment during her time in Utah, and ends with a few entries made after she settled in California with other family members. Mrs. Baker's journal has been excerpted or included in several anthologies and collections, including "Saints without Halos" and "Audacious Women."

As a literary and historical document, Mrs. Baker's journal stands on its own, and a book-length treatment of her life would seem to be of questionable value absent the discovery or production of additional primary source material. However, Sally Denton provides little in the way of scholarship or original research in her book. Ms. Denton states at the outset her frustration that the L.D.S. church has gotten so much mileage out of the journal as a representation of the Mormon emigrant experience while failing to give equal billing to the "loss of faith" portion that is the crux of Ms. Denton's book. Ms. Denton states that the purpose of her book is to "restore" Mrs. Baker's voice that the L.D.S. church has "distorted."

Unfortunately, what the reader hears more often than not is Ms. Denton's voice, a voice that oftentimes is not only unsupported by the historical record, but is contrary to it in many respects. Not content with providing a running paraphrase of Mrs. Baker's journal, Ms. Denton cannot resist padding the journal to make Mrs. Baker a more active participant in the events described in the journal. However, Ms. Denton's use of dramatic license becomes more problematic in relation to the absence of journal entries during Mrs. Baker's time in Utah. Based on the one journal entry expressing Mrs. Baker's disappointment with life as it turned out in Utah, Ms. Denton attempts to detail the course of Mrs. Baker's disillusionment over the past eighteen years for which the journal is otherwise silent. Ms. Denton attributes very specific attitudes and beliefs to Mrs. Baker that find no support in the record: in Ms. Denton's telling, Mrs. Baker is personally repulsed by and vehemently opposed to polygamy, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the Mormon doctrine of salvation, the Mormon principle of consecration, etc. Ms. Denton explains away Mrs. Baker's actual silence on any one of these topics by asserting that the atmosphere in nineteenth-century Mormon society was so repressive that a free-thinking woman like Mrs. Baker was sufficiently intimidated from confiding her innermost thoughts to her private journal. With this sleight of hand, Ms. Denton effectively turns Mrs. Baker into an empty vessel onto which Ms. Denton can project Ms. Denton's personal objections to the Mormon religion and experience as well as many of her modern-day sensibilities. Yet Ms. Denton represents Mrs. Baker's undocumented feelings and views on particular items with such certainty and specificity that one wonders whether Ms. Denton is channeling Mrs. Baker's spirit.

Many of Ms. Denton's factual assertions about Mrs. Baker's life and family are demonstrably false. Key among these is Ms. Denton's portrayal of Mrs. Baker and several of her children's removal to California as a calculated and dangerous "escape from Mormonism." The journal itself makes clear that Mrs. Baker accompanied a sick friend to California as a personal nurse, and had intended to return to Utah but was persuaded by her resident son to stay in California. Ms. Denton supports her "escape" storyline by vague references to family history or tradition, but only ends up contradicting herself. For instance, she claims that certain of Mrs. Baker's sons previously fled Utah for California under cover of night in order to avoid Mormon assassin squads. Her purported source for this assertion is unidentified California Baker descendants. Yet later on, Ms. Denton asserts that those same descendants had no knowledge that their ancestors were either Mormon or had come to California by way of Utah. Further, L.D.S. Endowment House records show that one of the "escaping" Baker sons was back in Utah several years later receiving his Mormon endowment ordinance. The journal itself indicates that the sons left for economic, not religious reasons. In this, as in other significant instances (beyond the limited scope of this review), Ms. Denton ignores contrary facts that do not advance her pre-determined storyline.

The book in part appears to be a vehicle for Ms. Denton to expound on nineteenth-century Mormon society. Ms. Denton goes beyond critical examination to demonstrate an unveiled contempt for all aspects of Mormon history, experience and belief, as well as a superficial and incomplete understanding of them. The factual mistakes are numerous and fundamental. She is unable to concede any good-faith aspects or motivations to either the religious system or its actors, and her nineteenth-century Utah is populated almost exclusively by abusive manipulators or easily-led dupes. This is due in large part to her uncritical reliance on the sensationalistic, anti-Mormon literature of the era.

In the end, Ms. Denton's book is not so much history as it is a polemic, at times veering off into the realm of historical fiction. There is little to no original scholarship evident. Ms. Denton relies on secondary or tertiary sources, freely projects or psychologizes, asserts unverifiable or suspect facts, and refers to uncited and unidentified "family members" as sources. In other words, an independent researcher would be at a loss to verify or fact check Ms. Denton's narrative as it applies to Mrs. Baker, and would have to duplicate Ms. Denton's original research, such as it is, from scratch. Those readers interested in Mrs. Baker's life and journal would be better served by reading Mrs. Baker's account in her own words, which are more engaging in any case, rather than having it filtered and skewed by a compromised intermediary with a personal agenda.

The pioneer women of the American West were amazing. Whether they undertook their perilous journies to escape religious persecution or poverty, or in search of economic opportunity or adventure, they endured almost unimaginable hardships. Their abilities to overcome adversity, to survive, and eventually to flourish in their new land was the result of a combination of factors--strength of character, devotion to family, community spirit, and faith. We need to remember their stories.

In uncovering the story of one such woman, her great-great grandmother, author Sally Denton retraces the footsteps of Jean Rio, from a life of culture and comfort in England, across the Atlantic, through the untamed landscape of the American West, and deep into an encounter with extreme religious fanaticism. Until recently, Jean Rio's story remained lost and fragmented in a diary and stories passed down through her descendants. In piecing together the elements of this story and placing it in historical context, the author pays homage not only to her own great-great grandmother, but also to the thousands of others whose names and stories are forgotten.

It was very hard to get into this book. It was dry and I did not feel the story was told in a way that captivated the reader.

I was totally captivated with the life of this lady who left her wealthy & comfortable home in England to join up with the Mormon's. That is after they paint a rosy picture of their "Promised Land in Utah Territory". But they certainly failed to mention a few minor things that would take place.

I was raised a Mormon and left it over 35 years ago to become a Bible believing Christian. I was certainly never taught what really happened in the early formative years and this book brings out the true events.

I always wondered how the church could grow as it did and this book explains all of that. It brings out the perverted cult it really was and the hardships put upon this woman after joining. She was never told she would have to give all her possessions & money. Brigham Young lived quite well from the funds given in Utah, while the others lived in stark poverty. They never told the people in England before they left for the new world of the polygamy, poverty, communal living etc... & so much more.

Sally tells the story well, between the entries in the journal & without animosity as she certainly could.

This was a fascinating work and after reading this book I will read the book Sally Denton wrote on the Mountain Meadows Massacre. She has done her homework in the background and setting of this book and I am sure she will do well in the next one.