Elizabeth Kane first met Brigham Young on a railroad platform in Utah Territory as Young examined the carriages and wagons of a large party heading south to St. George. “He wore,” she wrote, “a great surtout [overcoat], reaching almost to his feet, of dark-green cloth (Mahomet color?) lined with fur, a fur collar, cap, and pair of sealskin boots with the undyed fur outward.” She felt to laugh, “but as he turned to address me, he removed a hideous pair of green goggles, and his keen, blue-gray eyes met mine with their characteristic look of shrewd and cunning insight. I felt no further inclination to laugh.”[1]

Despite her husband, Thomas L. Kane’s, long and important advocacy for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Elizabeth Kane had never come to terms with his involvement with the church.

In 1872 Brigham Young invited the ailing Kane and his family to spend the winter in the pleasant climate of St. George in southern Utah Territory, so Thomas, Elizabeth, and their sons traveled to Salt Lake City from their home in Pennsylvania, and then headed south.

One member of the company was a man Elizabeth Kane described as a “colored gemman [gentleman]” from Philadelphia. Elizabeth often used pseudonyms for the people in her accounts, but the man she called “John” would have been New Jersey native Isaac James, a Latter-day Saint pioneer of 1847. Isaac James had moved from New Jersey to Nauvoo, Illinois, with James and Mary Covenhoven Ivins.[2] In Nauvoo he married Jane Manning, a member of Joseph Smith’s household.[3]

Jane and Isaac James went west to the Great Salt Lake Valley in 1847, where they became part of Brigham Young’s household. Isaac worked as President Young’s carriage driver. President Young described him as “a colored man who had worked for him for many years [and] . . . would confer any blessing to him he could, believing him to deserve it.”[4] Little is known of Isaac’s movements after he and Jane divorced until he returned to Salt Lake City in the 1890s, but in 1872 he may have been going to California or to St. George, where James Ivins’s niece and nephew Anna and Israel Ivins lived.

Isaac or “John” was to ride with the teamsters in the supply wagons, but one of the members of the company noticed that he was suffering from rheumatism and took him into his own carriage so the ride would be more comfortable. Elizabeth was scandalized. Although her husband was an abolitionist her racial views were typical for the time: in her world of privilege, being of African descent meant being a servant and it offended her to see Isaac James riding and conversing with a “kind-hearted elder.”[5]

Many days later, as Elizabeth went into the kitchen of the Gates hotel at Bellevue (Pintura), she was shocked to see Brigham Young helping Isaac James put on his coat. She wrote, “It was amusing to see John accepting every Civil Right ‘these yer Mormons’ admitted him to as tributes to his monogamic superiority. Never a word of those profuse apologies which the natural politeness of colored people under ordinary circumstances would have prompted, on receiving such a courtesy from a white man seventy years of age, passed from his lips.” She concluded, “He ‘stood severe in youthful beauty,’ and let the Mormon pontiff help him dress.”[6]

______________

[1] Elizabeth Kane, Twelve Mormon Homes Visited in Succession on a Journey Through Utah to Arizona (Philadelphia, PA: 1874), 5. For Kane’s language about Brigham Young including the reference to Mohammed, see W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color: Race and the Mormon Struggle for Whiteness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

[2] The unnamed or pseudonymous characters in Elizabeth Kane’s books are not fictional or composite characters. Historian Lowell “Ben” Bennion has identified almost—if not every—character in Kane’s works about Utah. Lowell C. Bennion, “A Bird’s-eye View of Erastus Snow’s St. George,” 23rd Annual Juanita Brooks Lecture, St. George, Utah, March 22, 2006; personal correspondence; Kane, Twelve Mormon Homes, 7. Not much is known of Isaac James’s origins, but he was somehow closely connected to the Ivins family. Quincy D. Newell, Your Sister in the Gospel: The Life of Jane Manning James, A Nineteenth-Century Black Mormon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 56–59. The Ivins family lived “down the shore” in Monmouth County, but had family in Philadelphia and were used to traveling between the locations. Rachel Ridgeway Ivins Grant, “How I became a Mormon,” c. 1898, MS 15947, Church History Library (hereafter CHL), Salt Lake City, Utah.

[3] When they married, Jane was the single mother of a boy named in the 1847 wagon company roster as Sylvester Sherman. His descendants remembered conflicting accounts of the identity of his father, but there was a Sherman family in the Connecticut community where Jane lived, relatives of General William Tecumseh Sherman. Daniel Spencer’s 100, Schedules, c. 1847, Camp of Israel Schedule and Reports, 1845-1849, MS 14290, box 1, folder 16, CHL.

[4] Journal of President B. Young’s Office, September 25, 1861, Brigham Young Office Files, CR 1234 1, box 72, folder 5, 297–298, CHL.

[5] Kane, Twelve Mormon Homes, 7. The Kane family was traveling with a black servant, but his identity remains unknown. Matthew J. Grow and Ronald W. Walker, The Prophet and the Reformer: The Letters of Brigham Young and Thomas L. Kane (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 456; Kate B. Carter, The Negro Pioneer (Salt Lake City: Daughters of Utah Pioneers, 1965), 65–66.

[6] Elizabeth quoted Milton’s Paradise Lost in the phrase “severe in youthful beauty.” It was a description of Satan debating with himself in the form of a cherub. John Milton, Complete Poems (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909–14), 4:845; Bartleby.com, 2001; Kane, Twelve Mormon Homes, 149.