Reacting to Johnny Harris | The WILD Story of How the Mormons Created Utah

YouTuber Johnny Harris recently published the second installment of his series on Latter-day Saint history. In this episode, David Snell gives his reaction to the video, and offers some additional context to a few sections that deserve to be fleshed out a bit more.

— Reaction to Johnny’s first episode on Latter-day Saint history: https://tinyurl.com/4fyxya46
— More in-depth look at the Mountain Meadows Massacre:
Part 1: https://tinyurl.com/3db6cc3c
Part 2: https://tinyurl.com/mtsbrwe2
— Video on the Deseret Alphabet: https://tinyurl.com/bddtd48u
— Video on relations between Native Americans and Latter-day Saint settlers: https://tinyurl.com/35u38x3y
— “Frontier History and Gender Norms in the United States,” published by Boston University (March, 2023): http://tinyurl.com/5faz2nd9
— “Mapping the Extent of Plural Marriage in St. George, 1861–1880,” by Lowell C. Bennion (BYU Studies): http://tinyurl.com/bdhbyu2k
— “Plural Marriage and Families in Early Utah,” via the Church’s website: http://tinyurl.com/ytzpzpjv
— “Demographic Limits of Nineteenth-Century Mormon Polygyny,” by Davis Bitton & Val Lambson (BYU Studies): http://tinyurl.com/bddmxk3x
— “Polygamous and Monogamous Mormon Women: A Comparison,” by Jessie L. Embry and Lois Kelly: https://tinyurl.com/mrx854es
— “Age of Polygamous Wives,” via FAIR: http://tinyurl.com/7vnt679u
— “Sealings to Young Brides,” via Brian Hales (JosephSmithsPolygamy.org): http://tinyurl.com/ca3sf4vp
— Further reading:
— “Frontier Women: ‘Civilizing’ the West? 1840-1880,” by Julie Jeffrey
— “Let’s Talk About Polygamy,” by Brittany Chapman Nash
— “Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture,” by Jon Savage
— “The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager,” by Thomas Hine
— "More Wives Than One: Transformation of the Mormon Marriage System 1840-1910," by Kathryn M. Daynes

Notes:

— “In the mid-1850s, the average age at which women first married was sixteen, but the age rose thereafter as the number of plural marriages declined” Source: “More Wives Than One,” by Kathryn M. Daynes, pg. 212. (I suspect that this stat only applies to Manti, Utah, but someone will have to fact-check me on that.)

— “At most, we can say that the teenager is a social invention, one that took shape during the first half of the twentieth century in response to a society very different from our own.” Hine wrote that “maturity is first and foremost a social phenomenon and only secondarily a biological one.” Source: https://tinyurl.com/3bamm9v3

— “The shortage of women in polygyny forces men to seek younger and younger wives. Women’s average age at marriage is 10 years younger than in monogamy, they are much younger when they first give birth, and they have a wider marital age gap.” Source: https://tinyurl.com/bprtnhmh

— Researcher Lowell Bennion noted, “Only by courting females much younger than they, often teenagers, could men approach the limits of polygamy imposed by demography.” Source: "Mapping Mormonism: An Atlas of Latter-day Saint History," by Brandon S. Plewe (editor in chief), pg. 124 (this section is written by Lowell C. Bennion).

— “Scholars Paul Bourke and Donald DeBats estimated the median age at first marriage of women living in Washington County, Oregon, in 1860 to be 17.4 years … Romantic love may have characterized eastern middle-class courtship in the nineteenth century, but it remained inaccessible for men and women on the frontier. Reciprocity, rather than romance, was the foundation of a successful rural marriage.” Source: https://tinyurl.com/yrmwxhwh

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00:00 Intro
1:04 Brigham Young's 13-year-old wife
2:00 Teenage brides in Utah
5:14 Deseret alphabet flex
6:08 Proposed state boundaries
6:24 Mountain Meadows Massacre
8:06 Differing conclusions