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Show Page 243 accorded the first wife a certain precedence, in Orson's case strictly observed until 1864. His other wives maintained their own households in Salt Lake or outlying Tooele, expected as far as possible to generate their own livelihood. Marian, for example, provided for her three 14 children by preparing linens for the Endowment House, while Juliaet 15 and her mother lived on a skimpy government pension. But now Orson felt to share out his remaining time equally among the nine of them. For Sarah, this was the crowning blow - she had given her husband these women with her own hands, she had watched them bear his children while seven of her twelve expired around her, and now he proposed "to commence living (with the others) upon principles of greater equality." She balked angrily - she would stand no more, and would never live with him 16 "in time, nor in eternity" if he insisted. So in one year Orson lost a wife and a son to infidelity and bitterness, Sarah kept away from him, and the apostate mother and son quietly moved among their former co-religionists, obscure denizens of Salt Lake, while Orson tried with pain in his heart to remain friendly with both. Though Sarah never sought divorce, nor excommunication from the Church, she remained deeply embittered, no less against her husband than the institution he represented. She did not falter in her wrath, for three years after Orson's death an Eastern journalist took a deposition from her about polygamy and the conduct of Joseph Smith towards her in the 1840s. Later published under the title "The Workings of Mormonism related by Mrs. Orson Pratt," the paper reported essentially the story she had first told Orson in Nauvoo. She recounted that Joseph Smith had taken her in, that she had implicit confidence in him; but when he approached her about her "loneliness" and offered to keep her company "when she wished it," she became indignant. "Workings," although it contradicts Sarah's affidavits |