Ella Stewart Udall

Stewart met David King Udall in 1873 when she joined her father on a visit to the Udall family. David Udall wrote of the encounter that "the fair, slender girl with clear blue eyes took my heart away with her".[13] After courting for two years, Stewart and Udall married in the Salt Lake City Endowment House on February 1, 1875.[14] Only six weeks into their marriage, the LDS Church assigned David Udall to proselytize as a missionary in England, and Ella Udall returned to Kanab, where she worked as a telegraphist again and as a bookkeeper for a church-endorsed Co-op store.[15]

After twenty-seven months away as a missionary, David returned to Utah, reuniting with Ella Udall. They lived briefly in Nephi and then Kanab, and Udall gave birth to their first child, a daughter they named Pearl (b. 1880).[16] In October 1880, the Udalls moved to St. Johns, Arizona in response to the church calling David to serve as bishop there.[17] David also was superintendent of a Co-op store.[16] Eliza Udall was appointed as secretary of the Relief Society in the St. Johns Ward.[17]

In 1881, David Udall hired Ida Frances Hunt, a Latter-day Saint then living in Snowflake, Arizona, to work for the St. Johns Co-op as a clerk, and she moved there in the fall, where she boarded with Ella and David Udall. That winter, David Udall asked Hunt if she would be interested in marrying him as a plural wife.[19] David and Ella Udall had talked about plural marriage before. Moved by her experience with her mother's co-wife, Ella Udall expressed openness to the practice in the abstract, but she was more uncomfortable with the prospect of polygamy in her own marriage.[20]

Sensitive to Udall's feelings, Hunt left St. Johns to temporarily live with her family in Snowflake, and from there she wrote to Udall to ask for her permission to marry her husband. Udall did not respond immediately. In March 1882, she sent a letter giving her consent, although unenthusiastically, to Hunt plurally marrying David.[21]

Udall and her daughter Pearl accompanied David and Hunt to St. George, Utah. In the Latter-day Saint temple there, in Ella Udall's presence, Ida Hunt married David Udall as his plural wife.[22][23] Ella and Ida Udall spent the wedding night together, and on their return journey to St. Johns they reconciled somewhat by having long, private conversations and reading novels out loud with one another.[24] After a stay in Snowflake over the summer, Ida moved in with Ella and David on August 25, 1882.[22]

Only two months before their plural marriage, Congress had passed the Edmunds Anti-Polygamy Act, outlawing polygamy and "unlawful cohabitation" and strengthening federal authority to prosecute cases,[25][26] and in mid-1884, federal authorities indicted David Udall on a polygamy charge. Because calling plural wives to testify to their husbands' polygamous marriages was a known strategy of prosecutors, Ida Udall went into hiding to avoid being subpoenaed, and she lived away from Ella Udall and David Udall for several years.[27][28] During this time, David and Ida only communicated through Ella Udall, who passed along David's letters to Ida under the false pretense of Ida being David's sister.[29]

Ella Udall and Ida next saw each other in person in the summer of 1888. Ida Udall and her children had moved onto a farm in Round Valley, Arizona that David and his brothers had purchased.[30] However, Ella Udall was still ambivalent about plural marriage.[31] When the family struggled financially, David had Ida and her children move to Snowflake to temporarily live with Ida's family. For the next two years, Ida, Ella, and their respective children moved frequently between Snowflake, Round Valley, and St. Johns without significantly overlapping. The family did live together in one household for the winter of 1891–1892.[32]

Ella (standing center) and David Udall (seated left) with their children.

LDS Church president Wilford Woodruff issued a statement in 1890 publicly withdrawing the church's official sanction of polygamy and advising Latter-day Saints to obey federal anti-polygamy laws.[33] By the spring of 1892, David Udall concluded that complying with this instruction required not cohabitating with Ida Udall, and she moved to Eagar, Arizona. However, in July, higher church leadership instructed the Udalls to remain a family. David restored contact with Ida, and she moved back to Round Valley to be with him and Ella in the spring of 1893,[34] but for most of the rest of their lives, Ida Udall lived separately from Ella and David.[35]

For many years, Ella, David, and Ida Udall lived a hard life in which the family's economic resources were thin.[27] Ida Udall moved to Hunt, Arizona in 1903, and there she and her children managed a ranch.[36] In 1903, Ella Udall and her daughters Pearl and Erma ran an ice cream parlor in St. Johns,[37] and Udall later spent some time as manager of the Apache Hotel in Holbrook, Arizona.[38] Since 1887, Udall had also served as president of the stake-level Relief Society in the St. Johns Stake.[5]

Apostles John W. Taylor and Matthias F. Cowley spoke privately with David Udall in 1903 to ask him to marry a widow named Mary Ann Linton Morgan as a third wife. Ella Udall did not like this idea, but David eventually went ahead with it and quietly married Morgan. She and her children went to live with Ida Udall in Hunt.[39]

After a series of strokes culminating in 1908 left Ida Udall paralyzed on her left side, Ella Udall's feelings toward Ida softened. Ida Udall's biographer reports that "Ever after, Ella was loving and gracious to Ida and her children" until Ida passed away in 1915.[40]

Ella Stewart Udall

Ella and David Udall had nine children together,[44] five of whom survived infancy.[45] Several of Udall's descendants went on to have influential careers in American politics. Her son, Levi Stewart Udall, was a judge on the Arizona Supreme Court from 1946 to 1960.[46] Ella's grandson by Levi, Stewart Udall, became a representative in Congress, and from 1961 to 1969, he was Secretary of the Interior.[47] Another grandson, Mo Udall, was a Congressman for 30 years, and he ran for President of the United States in 1976.[42] Ella Udall is also great-grandmother to Mark Udall and Tom Udall, who both served in the Senate in the twenty-first century.[37] Scott Raymond Einberger suggests that Ella Udall exercised a significant influence on her family's politics as a "progressive woman" and "staunch supporter of women’s suffrage", in his words, as every descendant of hers to hold a political office up to 2018 was a liberal Democrat.[48]

Udall's daughter Pearl went on to run a successful medical practice in Salt Lake City.[49]

Pipe Spring National Monument was added to the National Park Service (NPS) on May 31, 1923.[50] The site included the telegraph room where Udall had worked in her girlhood, and in 1968 supervisory historian Ray Geerdes acquired from her descendants the very telegraph table she had used.[51] In the twenty-first century, NPS continues to maintain that telegraph room and recount Udall's role in Pipe Spring's history.[1][12]

In 1969, Film Service Corporation (FSC) received NPS permission to use Pipe Spring as a set for their television series Death Valley Days. FSC filmed three episodes at the site in September 1968 and July 1969, one of which portrayed Ella Stewart (played by Lane Bradbury[52]) in her role as a telegraph operator. Geerdes was disappointed by the show's relative disregard for historical accuracy, but otherwise he considered the filming crew well-behaved and noted they did not damage the historic site.[53]

• Clayton, Roberta Flake; Ellis, Catherine H.; Boone, David F., eds. (2017). Pioneer Women of Arizona (2nd ed.). Religious Studies Center and Deseret Book. ISBN 978-1944394097. Archived (PDF) from the original on October 7, 2022.
• Derr, Jill Mulvay; Madsen, Carol Cornwall; Holbrook, Kate; Grow, Matthew J., eds. (2016). The First Fifty Years of Relief Society: Key Documents in Latter-day Saint Women's History. Church Historian's Press. ISBN 978-1629721507.
• Einberger, Scott Raymond (2018). With Distance in His Eyes: The Environmental Life and Legacy of Stewart Udall. University of Nevada Press. ISBN 9781943859634.
• Ellsworth, Maria S., ed. (1992). Mormon Odyssey: The Story of Ida Hunt Udall, Plural Wife. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0252018756.
• Long, Genevieve J. (2002). Laboring in the Desert: The Letters and Diaries of Narcissa Prentiss Whitman and Ida Hunt Udall (PDF) (PhD thesis). University of Oregon. Archived (PDF) from the original on October 2, 2022 – via Scholars' Bank.
• McKoy, Kathleen L. (2000). Cultures at a Crossroads: An Administrative History of Pipe Spring National Monument. Cultural Resources Selections. U. S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Intermountain Region – via Google Books.
• Rue, Norman L. (1967). Words by Iron Wire: Construction of the Military Telegraph in Arizona Territory, 1873–1877 (PDF) (MA thesis). University of Arizona. Archived (PDF) from the original on November 15, 2022 – via UA Campus Repository.
• Smith, Thomas G. (2017). Stewart L. Udall: Steward of the Land. University of New Mexico Press. ISBN 978-0826357755.

• Embry, Jessie L. (1987). Mormon Polygamous Families: Life in the Principle. University of Utah Press. ISBN 0874802776; 2nd ed. (2010). Greg Kofford Books. ISBN 978-1589581142.
• Jepsen, Thomas C. (2000). My Sisters Telegraphic: Women in the Telegraph Office, 1846–1950. Ohio University Press. ISBN 0821413430.
• Peterson, Charles S. (1973). Take up Your Mission: Mormon Colonizing Along the Little Colorado River, 1870–1900. University of Arizona Press. ISBN 0816503974. OL 5306528M.