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¶ Wife No. 17, Emma Batchellor ("a more kindhearted, industrious, & affectionate wife I never had"), is the nearest thing to a riot in all the Diaries. Emma did not wait for Lee to propose, but flatly "said that I on first site was the object of her Choice." Emma poured kettlefuls of hot water on one of her husband's enemies and scratched his face until it was "a gore of Blood." When scandalized Bishop Pace commanded that Emma be "re-baptized" to atone for such conduct, "Emma asked the prevelege of choice in the man to Baptise her. The Bishop granted it. She says, I am much obliged. I demand Bapt'sm at your hands, seeing that you are so inconsiderate as to require a woman to be immersed when the water is full of snow and Ice . . . Perhaps if your back side gets wet in Ice water you will be more careful how you decide again. The majority of the People said, Stick him to it, Emma, it is but Just. But the Bishop made an Excuse to go ... & got out of it." Bull & Scapegoat. In the last years of his life, Lee needed Emma's sort of staunchness. Although these diaries do not contain his account of it, Lee had taken part in the brutal Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, when more than a hundred "Gentile" men, women and children were ruthlessly killed by a troop of Mormons. The Civil War interrupted the Federal Government's prosecution of the case, involving 36 suspects, and by the time the war was over, the Government was ready to compromise and accept one Mormon head in token payment. Brigham Young chose Lee. In 1870, Lee was excommunicated from the Mormon Church. Insulted with impunity, he still kept his chin up, and when Bishop Roundy "shook hands & said, You are [now] as Rough as an old Grisley, I replied . . . Every Dog will have his day & a Bitch two afternoons . . . Now is your day. By & By it will be my day." But in 1876, 19 years after the massacre, Lee was tried before an all-Mormon jury and in 1877 was executed by a firing squad. When, before his trial, he had difficulty chewing a tough bit of penitentiary steak, he wrote a few wry lines both to himself and the animal from whom the steak was cut: Old Mormon Bull, how came you here? we have tuged & toiled these many years, we have been cuffed & kicked with sore abuse and now sent here for penetentiary use.
We both are creatures of Some Note.
You are, food for Pri[s]oners and I the scap[e]goat.
It is easy to see why these Diaries have lain so long like buried treasure. They tell a story that must still be painful to Mormon pride; they dig up terrible incidents that many would rather forget. And yet, thanks to the quality that was in John D. Lee, and thanks to the healing march of time, no American can read these Diaries without thrilling to the roughhewn courage and tenacity that is written in every page of them.
* Lee later married Aggatha Ann's two sisters and finally their widowed mother, "for her soul's sake."