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

Denton, Sally

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 140004135X ISBN 13: 9781400041350

Publisher: Knopf, 2005

Synopsis

The richly told story of a nineteenth-century woman–the author’s great-great-grandmother–whose religious faith was betrayed and regained on a journey across the American West.

In the 1850s, Jean Rio was a recently widowed English mother of seven. Rich, well educated, musically gifted, deeply spiritual, and increasingly dismayed by the social injustices she saw around her, she was moved by the promises of Mormon missionaries and set out from England for Utah. On her fifty-six-day Atlantic crossing, she began keeping a diary, and this extraordinary chronicle is the basis of Sally Denton’s book.

We follow Jean Rio from New Orleans, where she disembarks, up the Mississippi by riverboat, and, finally, westward by wagon train. We see her family transformed by necessity–mastering frontier skills, surviving storms, finding their own food, overcoming illness and injury–during the five months it takes them to reach Zion.

We see her initial enthusiasm turn to disillusionment: She is forced to surrender her money to the church. She realizes she has been lied to about polygamy–Mormons do practice it–which she detests. Acts of Mormon violence against nonbelievers repel her. Her musical skills are buried beneath the daily rigors of farming. Two of her sons flee to California. We witness her seventeen-year struggle to make peace with her situation before she, too, escapes to California–to freedom, a career as a midwife, and a new religion that fulfills her.

Dramatic and powerful, Faith and Betrayal is the moving account of one woman’s gamble in an emerging America, and a valuable addition to the history of both the Mormon experience and the long saga of immigrant pioneer women.

About this title

About the Author

Sally Denton is the author of American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857; The Bluegrass Conspiracy: An Inside Story of Power, Greed, Drugs, and Murder; and, with Roger Morris, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947--2000. She received Western Heritage Awards in 2002 and 2004, a Lannan Literary grant in 2000, and, for her body of work, the Nevada Silver Pen Award of 2003 for distinguished literary achievement. Her award-winning investigative reporting has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and American Heritage. She lives with her three children in New Mexico.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One
“Worth a Long Walk to See”

September 23, 1873. Jean Rio delivers the Ayer baby girl at five-fifteen p.m., after a relatively easy labor, and the mother sleeps quietly for the next several hours. “Had a good night,” Jean Rio records in her midwife’s notebook. (“The baby grows nicely [and] all seemed to enjoy themselves,” she notes nearly a month later, after the mother brings the newborn and the rest of her children to pay a visit.)

It is not always as easy as it might seem. Even the uncomplicated births like Mrs. Ayer’s are trials, the mother usually moaning and screaming in desperation through a long, painful labor to the final agony and then the sudden release of delivery. Often there are tests and horrors Jean Rio must face and somehow cope with, using only her hands and her self-taught skills, experience, and inherent fortitude—hemorrhaging or mortally ill mothers; distressed, deformed, or stillborn babies—a bloody life-and-death struggle no less of a test than any battle faced by a man.

When she cleans up afterward, changing one plain dress—now stained—for another, washing the blood and afterbirth from her hands and arms, she removes her rings, a fine gold band and an exquisite small sapphire set in platinum. They are hardly the rings of a hardworking midwife on the raw California frontier of the late nineteenth century. She might seem a plain, even ordinary, woman of her time and place. But the unexpected grace and beauty of the rings match her own dignity and gentility. The rings signal that she is something other than an ordinary woman.

In her diary entry for October 23, she allows herself one of the rare references these days to the past that the rings echo. “Clear and lovely as a spring morning in England,” she writes. “This summer was worth a long walk to see.” How long a walk it has been, what a dramatic journey full of trust and betrayal, faith and disillusion, defeat and triumph, loss and gain! None of her new friends and neighbors in this rural hamlet can imagine it.

Only the rings and her obvious refinement and intellect, partially obscured by her unpretentious bearing, give a hint of the stark contrast between her past and present. Once she wore the finest gowns of European couture—a wardrobe so vast it had taken nearly an entire wagon to transport. Here she dresses in homespun. Once she performed the classics of song on the stages of Paris and London. Now she performs the exhausting rites of life and death, work no woman of her former station would have deigned to do. Most dramatically, once she was a prize convert to a powerful faith. Now she lives as a discreet fugitive from the betrayal of all that brought her here.

Chapter Two
A Wine Cask on the Channel

Tumbrils filled with entire families rolled along the cobblestone streets of Paris toward the guillotine amid howls and screams. All day, every day during 1792, the killing device was busy, corpses piling up faster than they could be disposed of. More than forty thousand people went to their deaths in those small carts. The decapitation was swift, taking less than half a second from the blade drop to the rolling head—the guillotine was “an instrument adopted by the Revolutionists for the more scientific and humane beheading of the condemned.” Almost all the members of the Rio family from Lamballe, Brittany—renamed Côtes-du-Nord by the revolutionary government—were among them. “Hourly, the hideous instrument of torture claimed its many victims—old men, young women, tiny children—until the day when it would finally demand the head of a King and of a beautiful young Queen,” as one fictional account put it.

Entire generations were eliminated, as victims of all ages were placed facedown on a bench. “The mechanism falls like lightning; the head flies off; the blood spurts; the man no longer exists,” Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin once explained to a nervous audience. The instrument, however, wasn’t always that efficient.

Many of the Rios, like thousands of others, had tried to flee—to England, Belgium, Scotland, Holland, Canada, or the United States. At least one small Rio girl would be delivered from the bloodbath.

In Paris in the summer of 1789, during the earliest phase of the French Revolution—the “Great Fear”—a manservant long devoted to a wealthy French couple from the Rio clan placed their infant daughter in a wine cask. Thus concealed, the baby was smuggled across the English Channel. Her parents and every known family member are believed to have stayed behind, and to have become victims of the revolutionists. Once in England, the guardian christened his tiny refugee with the name Susanna Ann Burgess while providing her with protection in a new land. The fabricated surname, according to family lore, denoted the bourgeois roots of her family, though the reality no doubt was more complicated. The two made their way to Scotland, to the Isle of Skye, where relatives and royalist sympathizers embraced the child. They remained in hiding as the London society press regularly reported on new arrivals from France. The English response to the events taking place across the Channel vacillated between horror and sympathy, trepidation at the infectious revolutionary spirit, and base curiosity.

Susanna would spend her childhood and adolescence in Scotland, her guardian impressing upon her a deep hatred of all things French. This was the story Jean Rio told her children and grandchildren about her French and Scottish ancestors and her mother’s flight from persecution to freedom. She apparently never imparted information about the origins of her own middle name, Rio, perhaps embarrassed by the aristocratic association.

At the time of the revolution, France was the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world. Its society was divided into three classes. The First Estate—the clergy—controlled the press, monopolized religion, governed the educational institutions, and owned the choice land. The Second Estate consisted of the nobility, who were exempt from taxation but held all high government positions. The Third Estate was the class that encompassed the remaining 98 percent of the population and included the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, and the peasantry. Judging from Susanna Burgess’s entrée into elite, if not noble, society in Scotland, her parents were most likely either nobility or part of the educated upper middle class that sympathized with the Second Estate rather than the masses. With the Third Estate uprising on July 14, 1789, which destroyed the Bastille prison, symbol of royal tyranny, nobles and members of the upper bourgeoisie fled for their lives. The early-twentieth-century novelist Baroness Emmuska Orczy immortalized the flight in The Scarlet Pimpernel: “Men in women’s clothes, women in male attire, children disguised in beggars’ rags. In various disguises, under various pretexts, they tried to slip through the barriers, which were so well guarded by citizen soldiers of the Republic.”

Susanna would be one of thousands of French émigrés to England during the last decade of the eighteenth century, a time when open boats laden with refugees often navigated the stormy Channel in darkness. Many, like Susanna, were babies entrusted by their doomed parents to lowly retainers who had no price on their heads. “The English never ceased to wonder at the degree of devotion manifested by the servants of the French émigrés, greatly admiring their unalterable attachment to their masters,” according to a twentieth-century British scholar of the period. While the identity neither of the servant nor of Susanna’s parents is known, it is assumed her parents and all of her siblings were executed during the Reign of Terror, which started less than two years after Susanna’s flight to Scotland. When Napoléon rose to power a decade later and announced he would welcome back his nation’s exiles, Susanna and her guardian chose not to return.

The themes inherent in Susanna’s escape from Jacobin France would eerily be echoed in her daughter Jean Rio’s life: privilege, persecution, flight, liberation, and concealment. Susanna was born into a family of privilege and forced to escape when the social order collapsed. Jean Rio was moved to flee by a different kind of oppression, what she saw as spiritual bankruptcy. In the end, they both found refuge in hiding.

In 1809, at the age of twenty, Susanna Ann Burgess married a well-to-do Scotsman named John Walter Griffiths, four years older than she and descended from Scottish aristocracy. John’s father could trace his roots back several generations in London, with family christenings and marriages recorded for centuries at the same historic church. John’s mother, Jane Rio MacDonald, was of the landed-gentry MacDonald clan on the Isle of Skye, the MacDonalds having arrived in Scotland from the southern Hebrides in the thirteenth century. Her middle name would seem to indicate a relationship through blood and class lines to Susanna’s French family. In 1790 Lord MacDonald, either a brother or a cousin to Jane Rio MacDonald, built Armadale Castle on his 200,000-acre Highland estate, where the famous Scottish Jacobite Flora Macdonald had

married and where, in 1746, she had hidden Prince Charles Edward, Bonnie Prince Charlie, from Hanoverian troops. “With a price of thirty pounds on his head, he [Prince Charles Edward] wandered hungry and sick from one sanctuary to another, endangering everyone who gave him shelter,” one historian wrote. Flora Macdonald disguised him as an Irish maidservant and facilitated his escape to the mainland. The MacDonalds’ polit...

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 140004135X
• ISBN 13: 9781400041350
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 240