Ida Frances Hunt Udall (March 8, 1858 – April 26, 1915) was an American diarist, homesteader, and teacher in territorial Utah and Arizona. A lifelong member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), Udall participated in the church's historical practice of plural marriage as the second wife of Latter-day Saint bishop David King Udall and co-wife of former telegraphist Ella Stewart Udall and of Mary Ann Linton Morgan Udall, a widow of John Hamilton Morgan.
During the height of the United States' prosecutorial campaign against polygamy in the 1880s, Udall went into hiding as a fugitive on the "Mormon Underground", or the practice of Latter-day Saints (Mormons) going into hiding to evade arrest or subpoena for antipolygamy prosecution. From 1882 to 1886, she authored a diary of her life in plural marriage and then on the Underground. This diary, considered a "major contribution to Mormon pioneer literature" by biographer Maria Ellsworth, later became the core of a posthumous biography that won the Mormon History Association's Best Biography Award.
Called a "serene intellectual" by historian Leonard J. Arrington, Udall spent much of her adulthood homesteading in eastern Arizona while she raised six children, several of whom went on to have influential political careers.
Early life Childhood
Ida Frances Hunt was born at Hamilton Fort, Utah, on March 8, 1858. She was the oldest child of John Hunt and Lois B. Pratt Hunt, who were both Mormons, or members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), and raised Ida Hunt in their faith. John and Lois Hunt raised Ida in Iron County, Utah, until she was approximately a year old, at which time they moved to San Bernardino, California, where two of her sisters were born. In 1863, Hunt's parents moved the family to Beaver, Utah, where Hunt's maternal grandmother Louisa Barnes Pratt lived, and the Hunts arrived there in May. In November 1869, when she was eleven years old, Hunt was baptized into the LDS Church by immersion in the Beaver River.
Adolescence Hunt received her education while growing up in Beaver, and she formed friendships that endured throughout her life. When Hunt was thirteen, her father paid for her and her sisters to attend a local school, and Hunt attended until she was sixteen.
Sometime between 1872 and 1873, Hunt began working as a bookkeeper for a local wool mill. In 1875, Hunt joined the newly formed Beaver Literary Association, and in April of that year she started her own school for children. Seventeen years old, she taught classes and independently managed the school's finances. In November 1875, John Hunt moved the family from Beaver to Sevier County, Utah, and Hunt continued her teaching career there. She taught for at least a term at a log-cabin school in Joseph City, Utah, and for another term in Monroe, Utah. Young adulthood
New Mexico In February 1877, John Hunt moved the family again, this time to New Mexico. On the way, the Hunt family passed through the Utah cities of Washington and St. George. While in St. George in late-February, Ida Hunt and her sister May received their endowments in the St. George Temple.
The family traveled for approximately three months. Hunt and May together drove one of the teams of animals throughout the trip. The Hunts arrived in San Lorenzo, Valencia County, New Mexico, on May 10, 1877, and they stopped there for three weeks before pressing on to the Savoia Valley, an interethnic community where Euro-American Latter-day Saints, Mexicans, Navajo, and Zuni lived in proximity to each other.; ; While living in Savoia, Hunt studied Spanish, taught her younger siblings in an ad hoc school, and made money as a seamstress.
Utah In late 1878, the LDS Church asked John Hunt to serve as a bishop for the church in Snowflake, Arizona, and he moved the family once again. This time, Ida Hunt did not accompany the rest of her family; she instead moved back to Beaver, Utah, arriving there in November 1878, to live with her grandmother Louisa Barnes Pratt. At this time, the Beaver Stake of the LDS Church appointed Ida Hunt to serve in its Young Ladies Mutual Improvement Association (YLMIA) as a counselor, or advisor, to the president. Hunt supported herself by earning money sewing and transcribing court records, and she participated in a vibrant social life with concerts, parties, and social gatherings. Hunt also reconnected with Johnny Murdock, a son of Beaver Stake president John R. Murdock, and Johnny Murdock became what literary scholar Genevieve Long calls a "serious suitor" to her.,
Arizona In April 1880, at her immediate family's urging, Hunt left Beaver to move to Snowflake, Arizona, to rejoin them. John R. Murdock arranged for Hunt to make the trip with Jesse N. Smith, Eastern Arizona Stake president, and his wives Emma and Augusta. During this time, Latter-day Saints married polygamously as a religious practice, though the federal Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act had criminalized polygamy in American territories since 1862. The proportion of Latter-day Saint families participating in polygamy during the time of its official practice ranged between approximately 20% and 64%, depending on the congregation. In Arizona, that proportion may have been even greater, and local ecclesiastical leaders were often polygamists."One scholar has estimated that fully 85 percent of Mormon families in Arizona were polygamous, many having come from Utah specifically to escape prosecution there. That figure is surely too high—much too high—but certainly polygamists made up the cream of the leadership" (). As Hunt traveled with the Smiths, she perceived something distinctly spiritual in their relationship which much impressed her. In the words of historian Jan Shipps, Hunt was "converted to plural marriage".
Hunt reunited with her family in Snowflake. Shortly after their arrival, Smith called Hunt to serve as YLMIA president for the Eastern Arizona Stake; she simultaneously served as secretary of the stake-level Relief Society. In her professional life, Hunt returned to teaching, and she taught at log schools in Snowflake and Taylor, Arizona.
In 1881, Johnny Murdock proposed marriage to Hunt, but she broke off their relationship.; . Hunt wanted a polygamous marriage involving other wives, and Murdock was a monogamist who did not support polygamy.
Plural courtship and engagement While Hunt was in Snowflake, she met David King Udall, a Latter-day Saint who at the time was bishop in St. Johns, Arizona, and superintendent of a church-endorsed co-op store. In need of a clerk for the Co-op, Udall wanted to hire someone who spoke Spanish, and he found Hunt an agreeable candidate. Udall hired Hunt in the autumn of 1881, and she moved to St. Johns to work for the Co-op, boarding with Udall, his wife Ella Stewart Udall (a former telegraphist), and their baby daughter Pearl (a year old at the time). Hunt and David had a mutual attraction. That winter, with Ella's consent, David asked Hunt about the possibility of her marrying him as a plural wife.
Sensitive to the feelings of Ella, whom she deeply respected, Hunt moved back to Snowflake and returned to teaching at a school in Taylor. From there, Hunt asked Ella Udall by a January 1882 letter for permission to plurally marry her husband. Replying by mail in March, Ella Udall, albeit somewhat reluctantly, consented to Hunt marrying David Udall. David, Ella, and Pearl Udall met up with Hunt in Snowflake, and on May 6, 1882, the four of them departed together, heading for St. George, Utah, to marry in the temple there.; .
Early marriage Hunt began keeping a diary the day she and the Udalls departed for their wedding. The diary was simultaneously a personal journal and a conscious contribution to recording the history of the Latter-day Saints. Long states that in her writing, Hunt made "artful use of language and plot" and drew upon tropes from contemporary sentimental novels—such as, according to Long, portraying David Udall as a "strong male hero" or her life as "the heroine's quest for a happy marriage and family"—to articulate the narrative of her experiences.Hunt and the Udalls journeyed by way of the "Honeymoon Trail" leading from Snowflake to St. George. On the way, Hunt conducted herself cautiously, hoping to avoid offending Ella Udall who remained ambivalent about the plural marriage. To portray this in her diary, Hunt used romantic tropes that dramatized the difficult emotions she felt around David and Ella. After a three-week trip, they arrived in St. George, and Ida Hunt married David Udall with Ella present in the St. George Temple on May 25, 1882.; .
Following the marriage, Ida Udall and Ella Udall made some rapprochement. They spent the wedding night together in conversation, and on the way back to St. Johns they continued having private conversations with each other. The Udall family also made a two-week stop to visit with Ella's relatives, and Ida Udall became part of the family and its network of plural wives, achieving some measure of reconciliation between herself and Ella Udall.
Udall stayed with her father over the summer. On August 25, 1882, she moved back to St. Johns and began living in the same house as David, Ella, and Pearl.. While living together, Ida Udall and Ella collaborated on community projects, such as a local May Day celebration in 1884.
Community life in St. Johns was uneasy. The Latter-day Saints were relative newcomers to the town, and more established residents resented the Mormons' presence out of religious opposition as well as economic and political rivalry. In 1884, the local Apache Chief newspaper publicly proposed that the community lynch John Hunt, Udall's father, and her husband David. Ida Udall felt uncomfortable surrounded by this animosity. Worsening matters, in an attitude common among white Mormons at the time, she held racist views against the Mexican community living in St. Johns, whom she did not consider worthy neighbors.
Mormon Underground In mid-1884, David Udall was indicted on a charge of polygamy. Federal law had criminalized polygamy in U. S. territories since the 1862 Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, and the 1882 Edmunds Act additionally outlawed "unlawful cohabitation", or the cohabitation of a man with multiple women without marriage proven. To avoid being subpoenaed and forced to testify against him, as questioning plural wives in court was a well-known strategy of anti-polygamy prosecution, Ida Udall went into hiding for over two years in a practice known as the "Mormon Underground". By "Mormon Underground", Latter-day Saints referred to a variety of strategies for evading arrests or subpoenas, including frequently moving, living in hiding, keeping marriages and pregnancies secret, and living under pseudonyms. Historian Charles Peterson writes that Udall did so to "remove the physical evidence that would indict" David: herself. Accompanied by three other plural wives, Udall vacated St. Johns and went to Snowflake.
In August, federal marshals inquired after Ida Udall at the Udall home in St. Johns where they questioned four-year-old Pearl, who denied any knowledge of Ida Udall's whereabouts. On September 28, Udall fled town, and she eventually went to live with David Udall's parents in Nephi, Utah. When prosecutors brought polygamy charges against David Udall, they were unable to summon Ida Udall to testify against him and failed to secure a conviction.