Sally in Three Worlds: An Indian Captive in the House of Brigham Young

380 Pages·2021·3.616 MB·English

by  Virginia Kerns

Sally in Three Worlds

Sally in Three Worlds
An Indian Captive in the House
of Brigham Young
Virginia Kerns
The University of Utah Press
Salt Lake City
Copyright © 2021 by The University of Utah Press. All rights reserved.
The Defiance House Man colophon is a registered trademark of
The University of Utah Press. It is based on a four-f oot- tall Ancient
Puebloan pictograph (late PIII) near Glen Canyon, Utah.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kerns, Virginia, 1948– author.
Title: Sally in three worlds : an Indian captive in the house of Brigham Young / Virginia
Kerns.
Description: Salt Lake City : University of Utah Press, [2020] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020017956 (print) | LCCN 2020017957 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781647690151 (paperback) | ISBN 9781647690168 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Kanosh, Sally. | Young, Brigham, 1801–1877—Family. | Indian
women—Utah—Biography. | Kidnapping victims—Utah—Biography. | Indians
of North America—Utah—Biography. | Indians of North America—Cultural
assimilation—Utah. | Utah—Race relations—History—19th century.
Classification: LCC E98.W8 K47 2020 (print) | LCC E98.W8 (ebook) |
DDC 979.2/01—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017956
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017957
Errata and further information on this and other titles available online at
UofUpress.com
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
In memory of Ann

Contents
Introduction: Finding the Words 1
I. Mountains and Sky
1. The Trade 17
2. The Native Wild 44
3. Forts 68
II. The Heart of Civilization
4. The City 87
5. Plagues 109
6. The Mansions 120
7. The Kitchen 139
8. Resistance 154
9. Reports 168
III. Exiles
10. The Civilizing Mission 191
11. The Village 216
12. The Telling 233
Acknowledgments 255
Appendix: Sally and the House of Brigham Young 259
Notes 265
Bibliography 339
Index 359

Introduction
Finding the Words
A single life can illuminate an entire cultural and social world, or reveal
an unremarked but vital part of the human story.
How can that life be told? The task is daunting when it centers on an
Indian captive, stolen away from her people and homeland, sold, and cast
alone into a new world, with no means to record what happened. She
labored there quietly as a servant, in the shadow of a famous American
family who for decades occupied the national spotlight. Most of the sto-
ries later told about her—a so- called wild woman made tame—drew on a
familiar binary opposition of wild and tame. The structure made the sto-
ries, leaving almost no space for the realities of her experience. That struc-
ture, which represented her, also silenced her, and eliminated her past.
As an anthropologist, I wanted to frame the story of the captive’s life
in the language and culture of her upbringing, and also in the language
and culture she later learned. Although few details were recorded about
her, I found that the lens of culture brought her slowly into focus. It coun-
tered a common understanding of her time: that she was a nearly empty
vessel filled, transformed, and improved by a civilizing process—the
wild, tamed.
In this book, I tell the story of her life as an evidence- based narrative
that does not impose abstract or essentialist oppositions. The following
chapters are written in what I call ethno- narrative style, which centers on
the enculturated lives of named individuals. That style makes the human
beings—the “characters” of the story—accessible, whatever their distance
across time and culture. As a form of writing, it can reveal the complexity