Some trivia I find interesting: In the first decade after the Mormons settled Utah they had very little by way of gold and silver to back paper currency, so they backed it instead with church owned cattle and issued bonds that paid cattle as interest. The notes are extremely valuable to collectors today, incomparably moreso than Confederate or US currency of the same era. (An average beef cow at that time was worth about $5, incidentally.)
More Mormon trivia: Brigham Young, who attended school for less than a month in his life (he could read and write but not particularly well), found the English alphabet confusing and ordered the creation of another one. Called The Deseret Alphabet, it was designed to simplify English. Books were printed in it and Young even ordered specially commissioned typewriters, but it never caught on.
One of Young’s wives, Amelia Folsom, almost 40 years his junior and a total raving bitch by all accounts, was his favorite in his last few years and made his life a merry hell, almost converting him to a monogamist for the last decade or so of his life. Where he made some wives settle for a single room in Lion House (the 50+ room mansion where his older or childless wives and various orphaned or adopted children lived) he built Amelia a gaudy mansion, which she thanked him for by among other things dumping a pot of hot tea in his lap when he complained about her spending and throwing a sewing machine at him when he bought her a cheaper brand than she wanted. Most of his many other wives hated Amelia (a late-comer- he was in his 60s and had fathered 50 children or more when they married), especially the fact that a childless wife would garner such lavish rewards, but few hated her more than Ann Eliza Webb Dee, the young divorcee he married when he was in his late 60s and she was 24 and probably his last consummated marriage (he had many marriages afterwards but they were platonic unions with older women or spiritual/proxy marriages to dead women). Ann Eliza sued him for divorce, seeking $6,000 per month in alimony (about $75000 per month in 2007 USD) and a big chunk of his alleged vast fortune (which wasn’t as vast as she estimated- when he died in 1877 his estate was appraised at around $2 million, but mostly in property rather than cash and half of that was seized by the church as rightfully theirs).
The Young divorce case became the biggest headline dominating gossipy news event of its day due to the public’s fascination with polygamy in general and Young in particular. Young won, using the illegality of polygamy (for which he’d been jailed at least twice) in his own favor: if polygamy was illegal then he was not married to Ann Eliza, and if he was not married to her he did not owe her alimony, and palimony [as his lawyers pointed out] would not be a term until Lee Marvin’s “divorce” from Michelle Triola a century later (his lawyers learned about Lee and Michelle Triola Marvin by looking at squirrel innards in a burlap bag- alright, I made that part up). Young died just after the divorce case was dismissed, allegedly spent a fortune to keep several other wives from following Ann Eliza’s lead, Ann Eliza wrote a tell-all book that was a runaway bestseller and became a hit on the lecture circuit but seems to have blown all the money fairly shortly, married several more times, and died in obscurity during the 1930s, which had she remained married to Young (who actually did provide for his wives in his will) would have made her his last surviving wife by more than a decade.
Forgot to mention: Amelia Folsom, whose father William Folsom designed the Temple in SLC, was a fairly close cousin of Frances Folsom, Grover Cleveland’s ward turned trophy-wife, and attended her wedding at the White House. The two did not know each other, but due to their super fame each wanted to meet the other so their relationship gave a nice excuse. There doesn’t seem to have been any special bond formed between the two first ladies, nor does Amelia (long widowed by then) seem to have made any kind of scene while in D.C…
