In early January 1880, at the age of twenty-nine, Elizabeth Pickett Tolman had reached her breaking point. Her husband's plural wife1 had just given birth to his first child, and Elizabeth saw the baby as a living bond between her husband and another woman, a token of love that she had, in nearly ten years of marriage, failed to give him. Louisa, the baby's mother, was Elizabeth's cousin and had become her husband's plural wife a little over a year earlier. Elizabeth's husband, Ammon, had decided to enter polygamy, or plural marriage, because he wanted what Elizabeth seemingly could not give him: children. Now, as Elizabeth faced the living embodiment of his success, she felt helpless.2
In her diary, she wrote, “when the first cry of his infant child reached my ears I thought my body and soul would and must separate[.] that was the signal of the...
