1,200 gather for reunion of polygamist's family
 Patriarch Benjamin Franklin Johnson had 7 wives, has 44,000 descendants
 
By Jaimee Rose
The Arizona Republic
 
Editor's note: The reporter is married to one of Benjamin Franklin Johnson's 44,000 descendants. Her husband, three generations removed, comes through the second wife’s second child. He skipped the reunion.

SALT LAKE CITY - All of the cousins are color-coded.

The big Benjamin Franklin Johnson family reunion starts with a registration desk, name tags and a pile of bright Avery dot stickers from OfficeMax - seven colors for seven wives. You get a green dot on your name tag if you are descended from his first wife, Melissa ("the legitimate one," her family jokes). If you're from Sarah Melissa, the fifth wife, there's a golden-yellow dot, which is causing a slight fuss as it's barely different from the buttercup-yellow dot for the third wife, Flora Clarinda. Mustn't be mistaken for her kin since she divorced him back in 1848, and they don't talk about that. They ran out of red dots for the fourth wife's family. The woman had eight children, after all.

All day, second- and third- and four-times-removed cousins meet for the first time, coo over the babies, apologize, maybe, for cutting each other off on the freeway earlier (back before they knew they were cousins) and ask, "Now, which wife are you from?"

In the midst of what may prove to be polygamy's last stand, when authorities are stepping into the remote polygamous communities of Colorado City and Hildale, tucked behind bonnets and boulders along the Arizona-Utah border, there are regular families all over Arizona, Utah and the rest of the West who have a little drama tucked way up the family tree that goes something like this:

Great-great-great grandfather Benjamin Franklin Johnson had seven wives, 45 children and 374 grandchildren. One hundred years after his death and a couple of generations later of family-focused Mormon offspring - who believe not in polygamy but in one mommy, one daddy, Suburbans and bunk beds - and there are some 44,000 people in the B.F. Johnson family database.

Johnson was among the first Mormon polygamists - the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has long since disavowed the practice - and among the first settlers of Mesa and Tempe.

If you live in Mesa, and this prolific web is your family, it means you can fall in love, get married and then realize that you are cousins when you get the reunion newsletter. (Thankfully, a cousin enough removed that you don't have to worry about extra toes on any future children.) If your parents got sentimental and named you Benjamin Johnson, it means you have at least 49 relatives, at last count, with the same name. It means that if you want to visit your great-great-grandfather's grave at the Mesa Cemetery, you'll have to bow your head at two headstones because there was a disagreement among the children over which wife he'd like to rest by for all time.

Whether the idea of polygamy intrigues you or makes you cringe, whether you're a Dixon or a Fleming, a Haymore or a Roy, you're a Johnson at heart, and this is your family, with all that comes with it: the quirks and love and the frozen lasagna on Sundays, getting ancestor quilts for Christmas, being kind to long-lost cousin Bob who rode with Hells Angels (they don't talk about that, either), and honoring good old Great-great-great-grandfather and those seven wives.

I. This Is the Place

Every four years, they all get together. The word is sent out via newsletter. (A yearly subscription will cost you $10.)

Sometimes they meet in Utah, sometimes in Arizona. Sometimes, says Mesa's Doris Dixon, 71, "they have - what do you call it? - line dancing."

Sometimes, instead of using those colored dots, they tack pictures of the wives to trees at a park, and when you find "your" wife's photo, there's your family tree.

This July, about 1,200 nametag-bearing, dot-wearing descendants gathered in Salt Lake City's This Is the Place Heritage Park, which honors Utah's pioneers, to meet, greet and eat, and to celebrate that they finally raised enough money to put up a B.F. Johnson building. They came from Mesa, Surprise and Gilbert, California, Canada and Seattle.

The first wife's family is holding court over by the B.F. Johnson T-shirt stand. There's a sea of second-wife blue dots near the copy center, where, for 10 cents a page, you can buy the wives' life stories or pick up the family genealogy DVD. The third wife's family didn't show up, really, so its table has been taken over by those of the fifth wife.

The atmosphere is not quite family reunion but a lot like high school registration: There are the popular people (fourth wife's horde) and the loners (the three from the third wife), even that T-shirt sale (Show school spirit! Go B.F.J!). An unspoken school uniform is evident: plaid shirts and khaki for the men, Gap T's and capris for the ladies. There are grandfathers trying to tell stories while bored 20-somethings listen to Coldplay on their iPods. And afterward, there will be a school play. Meet the seven wives. Get your picture taken together. Yes, really.

It's lunchtime, and while the families are sighing over pillowy rolls and Dutch-oven chicken - the victuals of pioneer stock - the reminiscence begins. A duo in pioneer garb take the stage for olde-time songs, the kind that really require that extra "e." ("Oh, don't you write this down," an embarrassed auntie clucks.)

"Don't you marry a Mormon boy," they sing, "your misfortune it will be, Johnny cakes and babies is all you'll ever see." The pioneers seemed to know they were making history. They wrote everything down.

II. The Sister-Wives' Club

Benjamin Franklin Johnson's journal is red leather and rests in the church archives in Salt Lake City. Now called My Life's Review, it's in its third hardbound printing, proudly owned by almost all of the families here. There are 388 pages of weddings and babies and life on his farms, stories of crossing the plains with the Mormon pioneers as they migrated from New York to Nauvoo, Ill., to Salt Lake. There's the tale of taking the wagons down into Mesa, a settlement of about 300, in the middle of 1882's steamy 110-degree July, and having to hightail it all the way to Tempe to find decent shade.

Born in New York in 1818, Benjamin was among the early joiners of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, organized in 1830 by Joseph Smith, one of Benjamin's close friends and regarded as the group's prophet. Benjamin's first bride was Melissa Bloomfield LeBaron, whom he married in 1841. She was 24, he 23.

Two years later, "early on a Sunday morning," writes Benjamin, Joseph Smith came to him and said, "Come brother Bennie, let us have a walk." Deep into the woods, it all came out: God, said Smith, wanted worthy Saints to take plural wives. And could he have Benjamin's sister?

"Brother Joseph," said Benjamin, "this is all new to me . . . To my education, it is all wrong." He asked his sister anyway.

"I stood before her trembling," wrote Benjamin, "but I opened my mouth and my heart opened to the light of the Lord."

She said yes, and, soon after, Smith asked for another sister, who was already engaged. Benjamin instead offered up Mary Ann Hale, an orphan his mother had taken in as a child. Smith said, "No, but she is for you. You keep her and take her for your wife and you will be blessed."

Benjamin did, and that was that. Wife No. 3 came into the fold two years later (and left him in 1848, having "become dissatisfied.") Wife 4, Harriet Naomi Holman, the first wife's niece, was added in 1850, at age 16. Wives 5 and 6 were her sisters: Sarah Melissa in 1856 and Susan Adeline in 1857, at age 15. When Sarah Jane Spooner became the seventh wife two months later, Benjamin already had 11 kids.

In all this journal-keeping, heavy on Benjamin's feelings about his faith, there is never an explanation of how it works to share a husband, exactly. There is no record of who slept where, who got Valentine's Day and what the "sister-wives," as they called each other, were thinking when four of them each insisted on naming a son Benjamin. (No explanation, either, of the histrionics that must have come from having two wives named Sarah, two called Melissa, and three who were sisters - try arguing with them.) Sometimes they all lived together, sometimes the wives lived apart. Sometimes, wrote Benjamin, "my wives were willing to sell me for pottage." The night the wives arrived in Mesa, they were so mad at Benjamin that he slept outside, alone.

It both amuses and injures many of Johnson's 44,000 descendants that, at the end of his life, all his wives had moved away or were so angry with him that he died alone, only a few of his children at his side. It says something about bounty and something about emptiness, and something about a man who perhaps was surprised that one did not prevent the other.

III. Meet the Johnsons

Let's mingle.

"Do you ever get up to St. George?" Lena Fleming (of the second wife) wants to know, on her way to check out the B.F.J. building. "There's a darling little bed-and-breakfast up there - the Seven Wives Inn." Run by one of the 44,000, some of the rooms are named after a wife. If you go, and you're a descendant, you can stay in "your" wife's room.

Come and meet Lena's mother-in-law, Anna Jeane Fleming, 72, of Surprise, and this is Lena's brother-in-law, Gary Fleming of Gilbert. This is Gary's 16-year-old daughter, Emily, whose life revolves around driving and dating. She sorta got dragged here today.

If Emily had lived 150 years ago, in that pre-Abercrombie & Fitch universe, she might already be a wife, sharing a husband, baby on the way. This makes her giggle and wrinkle her nose.

"I have it easy," she has decided. "They didn't have showers or anything. But to be married at my age, that would be really weird. If (polygamy) were to come back, I don't think I could do that. It's cool that they were able to follow the prophets, though."

Next table over, there's Aunt Eva Haymore Johnson, 87, of Phoenix. She's got her own posterity rolling: six children, 37 grandchildren, 63 great-grandchildren, "one great-great," she says, and 17 journals that record every detail of all of their lives, including what they ate for dinner. You never know what the great-great-greats will want to read.

There is her daughter, Loni Gardner, 61, hovering around the photo table. She does crafts using pictures of her ancestors and gives them to her family for Christmas: There are quilts, puzzles and even card games. (Do you have Melissa Bloomfield LeBaron Johnson? No. Go fish.)

Oh, look, there's the oldest man here, Vernard Johnson, born in Mesa in 1908. Peering around at all the babies, toddlers and teenagers, he says, "I wonder if they realize their heritage. I don't think we teach them enough about it."

Vernard also has written his life's story, and let's hope that in it he details his three knee replacements, cataracts and hearing aids, and that despite it all, he still lifts weights and does the treadmill in the morning. Vernard says he wishes his name was Benjamin.

Somewhere in this melee is a soul more lucky: Benjamin Johnson the 50th. His parents are Deborah and Lance, he lives in Mesa, and he is 6 months old.

IV. An exceptional period

In the grand scheme of the Mormon Church's polygamous years, seven wives isn't much. They lost count of how many wives Joseph Smith had - somewhere in the 30s, says church historian Richard E. Turley Jr. And Brigham Young, who took over the church after Smith was killed, got up to the mid-50s. Church members say the men were doing God's will; church critics (including, ultimately, Smith's first wife, Emma, who threatened to take "plural husbands") believe polygamy was simply justification for lust.

When the Mormons began to adopt polygamy, they did so because Smith said he had received a revelation from God demanding it. Turley points to a passage of the church's scripture, The Book of Mormon, which reads, "for there shall not any man among you have save it be one wife . . . For if I will . . . raise up seed unto me, I will command my people," otherwise, they shall obey.

"Which is to say," explains Turley, "there might be an exception, and if that exception were to occur, the Lord would reveal it. That's what we believe the polygamist period in our church was - an exceptional period."

Mormons generally agree that polygamy's purpose was population - and it did its job (behold the 44,000), bolstering the church membership and helping to settle the West.

Today, Mormons who practice polygamy are excommunicated. Polygamy was disavowed by the church in 1890, nearly 60 years after it started. The church president ended the practice, saying the decision was guided by God; at the time, there was mounting pressure and prosecution of polygamy by the federal government, which refused to admit Utah as a state.

Benjamin Johnson went into hiding in Mexico after warrants were issued for his arrest. His wives wouldn't go, so he asked church authorities for permission to marry another in Mexico, and they said no. Eventually, he returned to Mesa, where he died in 1905.

Those practicing polygamy in Colorado City today are members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or FLDS, who split from the Mormon Church over the polygamy ban. The groups are not associated. Today, with outposts in British Columbia, Texas, Colorado and possibly Mexico, the secretive FLDS has between 10,000 and 15,000 members. Led by the elusive Warren Jeffs, who is wanted by Arizona, Utah and FBI authorities on multiple charges, community members believe that men need three wives to get to heaven. In FLDS communities, authorities and escapees say, brides as young as 13 are assigned to husbands; TV and holidays are banned; and males as young as 13 are often forced out, to leave the young women to the elders.

These are the family stories the Johnsons don't like to tell. Because even though They Don't Do This Anymore, their cousins do. A whole mess of 'em in Mexico, and some in Colorado City who went their own way after the ban. These are cousins they haven't talked to, or talked about, for a long time.

V. Darn that Tom Cruise

"Did you meet Ollie Johnson at the reunion?" Aunt Anna Jeane Johnson of Surprise wants to know the next day, over the Sunday tin pan of lasagna. "Someone said he was there. He has a daughter down there in Colorado City, living polygamy."

This brings on the wince felt round the table. Of all the family secrets and quirks, this is the one that makes them bow their heads.

Despite the reliance of much of their existence on polygamy, the Johnsons don't want to talk about plural marriage, changing the subject diligently with "shall we go to Joe's Crab Shack for dinner?" or how very tired they all are of Tom Cruise.

Many populations have times in their history that they disavow, but because of Colorado City's continued existence, polygamy is embarrassing, and distasteful, and please-please-remember-we-don't-do-this- anymore.

Except, well, this: Mormons believe that maybe, just maybe, God will institute polygamy again in heaven. But in heaven, they figure, you won't really mind.

Jeff Roy and his wife, Jenafer, talked polygamy on the drive up from Queen Creek, and Jeff wonders how it would work. Could more wives coexist in their four-bedroom home? Just how many trips to Wal-Mart each week would that be? Would there be 10 children or 17, instead of their current four with another on the way? (Yes, they have a Benjamin.) Think of all the dance lessons.

"You know, I would think that that would be pretty hard," says Jeff, 31. "I don't know exactly what the future will hold as far as polygamy goes. I don't know whether I will be doing that in the next life or not. If that's something that I am supposed to do, then it will be worked out."

How, exactly, is not something he expects to understand in this lifetime. But Jenafer thinks she could do it.

"With the right woman, if I could handle her," says Jenafer, 29, who is pondering both this question and whether she should buy a B.F.J. Reunion T-shirt.

"Obviously, when I was a teenager, I never thought I'd go along with it, but if the Lord came to us and said, 'I need you to do this,' I think I could."

So here's why polygamy seemingly cannot, will not, just fade into history: This possibility, this "what if?" still lurks. Jeff and Jenafer and the Mormon Church all agree that Colorado City is awful. At the same time, they honor their ancestors and their belief in the Mormon Church - caught between a gospel they love, a seemingly immoral code and faith that in heaven, be it monogamy or polygamy, everything will be OK.

It's time for the closing prayer; there are lots of prayers at this reunion. The Johnsons bow heads over the food, pray to get home safely, pray to "measure up to the heritage we've received." And in the end, they just pray that whatever happens, they'll all be together:

"God be with you till we meet again, which we surely shall, in that grand and loving reunion to come."

Reach the reporter at jaimee.rose@arizonarepublic.com or (602) 444-8923.
 
azcentral.com
Originally published August 3, 2005
 
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