Faith and Betrayal: A Pioneer Woman's Passage in the American West, by Sally Denton

Retrieved from: CVLY
140004135x, 2005
Suggested by: me, when I cataloged it
My Ratings: 9 Merit, 9 Interest, 8 Fun

I've been reading this on my lunch breaks at work for about a month. It's dovetailing a little bit in my current 'extra-curricluar' family cataloging project, since it really is a well-written family history focussed on one woman rather than the whole family. I suspect the whole family in this case would need several volumes.

So this book introduces us to Jean Rio Baker, a wealthy London widow and a descendent of Parisian nobility who barely made it out of France alive. After converting to Mormonism, she packed up her entire family in the early 1840s--including 7 children, in-laws and, I think, a couple of others--sailed across the Atlantic to New Orleans where she traveled up the Mississippi to Council Bluffs and wagon-trained across the plains to Desert, i.e. Utah. All on her own dime. She brought with her, too, several ball-gowns and a case piano, the first to arrive in Utah, among other less-than-practical items. Within 5 years, she was effectively penniless, poverty-stricken, and trying to farm an alkali flat in the middle of the Utah desert.

Eventually, after the Mountain Meadows Massacre, she became so disaffected with Brigham Young's policies, she and most of her family left Utah for the Sacramento area where she lived the remainder of her days, supporting herself by midwifery and general nursing (although she may have had some financial help from friends and family in London as well).

Stories about women like this, like my grandmother in many respects, remind me that I really do come from "good pioneer stock" as my sister says, a family in the largest sense of strong women who truly could--and frequently did--do anything.