Copyright 2001-2002 © The Dark Side of Salt Lake  City

Webster’s: Polygamy

1. the state or practice of having two or more wives or husbands at the same time; plural marriage.                 

Polyandry

1. a woman with more than one husband.

 The Mormons hide the dark side of Salt  Lake City from the world. This is the Mormon way. Polygamy is a practice that makes slaves of young girls who are married off to older men and there is no help for them from the LDS church.. Neither Joseph Smith nor Brigham Young cared about the long term effects this practice of polygamy would have on helpless girls and women.

 The Good Old Boys

CLICK ABOVE ON ANY ONE OF THESE GOOD OLD BOYS 

Brigham Young    Joseph Smith     John Taylor 

 George Q. Cannon    Wilford Woodruff    Joseph F. Smith

These "Good Old Boys" had themselves quite a thing going. You may have heard about how hard life was for them back then, but the truth was, life was very hard for everybody at that time in history. The government of the United States of America was still pretty new--we were still fighting the British in the early part of the 1800's. The English marched into Washington D.C. in 1814 and burned the down the White House and the treasury building amongst other things.  People were still being killed in war on American soil! The government was very new and had very little in the way of public works and welfare yet.

 In any account of daily life recorded by people of this early nation, mention of plagues, children and their mothers dying, and all manner of calamities were viewed as sorrowful and normal.  There were no antibiotics yet, no anesthesia, no understanding of antiseptic practices.  The Mormons in later days point to the people who died in the process of their wanderings and eventual settling in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, as though they had endured something extraordinary for that time—not so. Thus when a Palmyra, New York, Newspaper reported in 1831, that Joseph Smith Jr. claimed he had seen God frequently and personally, it wasn't really that remarkable of a claim for that time; people lived with a sense that death was a likely event and seeing God was comforting to them. Like so many of the early events of this time, church people later exaggerated them completely out of their context.

One thing that eventually became exaggeratedly diminished, however, was the treatment of women in the early days of the Mormon movement and character of some of those lady  converts who came to the American West to marry other women's husbands! Lets take an honest and revealing look at each one of these"Good Old Boys" and the part they played, and then... see The Women