Gerald Grimmett, The Ferry Woman - A Novel of the Mountain Meadows Massacre Review

Overall Rating

Selected by the Salt Lake Tribune as Best Book of 2001. In second edition. Across the board five star reviews from women readers.

Inability of website sellers to get correct bibliography posted in a timely manner. No sex, language, but one violent episode.

What the Critics say about The Ferry Woman

'Ferry Woman' Offers an Artist's Take on
Mountain Meadows
Sunday, March 25,
2001
by Martin Naparsteck
Special for the Tribune

The Ferry Woman, a novel of the Mountain Meadows Massacre By Gerald Grimmett;
Cold Hill Press Premiere Editions $18.95

Some truths are best revealed by the scientist, some by the historian, some by the artist. Gerald Grimmett reveals truths in The Ferry Woman that only an artist, a superb novelist, can reveal. He
has given us a great novel.
Grimmett does that despite some small lapses, including a notquite- accurate subtitle: A Novel of John D. Lee and the Mountain Meadows Massacre.
The novel is less about John D. Lee than it is about Emeline Buxton Lee, his fictional 16th wife, and less about the Mountain
Meadows Massacre than it is about the aftermath --particularly the legacy of guilt -- of that dreadful day in September 1857 when a
ruthless gang of Mormons, on orders from church leaders, killed 120 or more men, women and children traveling across southwestern Utah.

The novel is great because of the richness of Grimmett's language; because of the grand, at points biblical sweep of his tale; because of his insight into the psychology of Emeline, whom he
manages to portray as richly individualistic and real, but also as a metaphor for Mormon culture; and, mostly, because of his courage
in confronting the most discomforting episode in Mormon history and the implicit complicity of the Mormon culture's single most revered leader, Brigham Young.

The novel is narrated by Emeline four decades after the massacre, after she has remarried and moved to Washington, D.C. Thus, it benefits from a sense of distance in time, place and
emotion, a distance that allows Em (as John calls her) to impose not merely objectivity but, more important, imaginative interpretation on the story she unfolds. The massacre itself is in the
past of the past she narrates; that is, she tells us about what transpired after she married Lee something she does years after she married Lee, something she does years after
the massacre.

She is the wife who goes with Lee to Lonely Dell
(later named Lee's Ferry) to avoid capture by the U.S. government for his role in the killings. It is there that she helps run the ferry
across the Colorado River (thus the title). Despite the fictional protagonist, Grimmett stays close to the version of the story as
rendered by Juanita Brooks in her classic study, The Mountain Meadows Massacre, and in her biography of Lee. We see Lee in near-exile, in prison, at his trial, at his execution;
we see, too, his shunning by fellow Mormons, his abandonment by some of his wives, and his confusing (even in his own mind) fidelity to Brigham Young. The plot line will be familiar to anyone who has read about the massacre, anyone who (unlike the state of Utah) is willing to admit who did the killing.

The willingness to create similes and metaphors that slap the reader into awareness ("feelings like deranged black ravens crashed into places they did not belong," "o'er all, lay the shadow,"
"my momentary refuge in what can only be called a madness")enrich page after page of this novel. At points, a reader may wonder if the richness of the language will overwhelm the book, like too-sweet icing topping a wonderful cake. But that never happens.

It doesn't happen because Grimmett repeatedly returns to the complexity of Em's personality: She loathes John, once she learns about the massacre, for his role in it, and despises Brigham Young for sacrificing her husband, and loves her husband because he is a thoughtful and kind man, a caring and gentle husband and father(although he admits, "I've never been a man to have friends"). That is, she recognizes the evil her husband participated in, is outraged
at Brigham Young (not because he ordered the massacre -- in this story he does not -- but because he synchronized the keeping of the
secret), yet accepts her role as the dutiful wife (much like Ruth in the Old Testament). Em will befriend a young woman, Olivia, a polygamous wife of an abusive husband who is a bishop in the church, and together -- although without complete knowledge of what the other plans -- go to Salt Lake City to kill Young. We are told Young "used his money and the church's money as if they were one and the same" and that he should be sent to "the Inferno, where the damned slaked their thirst in a lake of red and yellow fire." We see him lying to John about the earliest report of the massacre, hear him
tell Olivia her husband is right to beat her, see him live a life of selfishness, with an impulsiveness that damages the lives of others.
Grimmett's fictitious Brigham Young is evil.
Whether Grimmett has painted a historically accurate portrait of Young will, no doubt, be the most controversial part of this novel.

It is the right of the novelist to paint such a portrait, and the courage required to paint some portraits differently than others have done deserves some credit. (While in the book, all of the condemnations of Brigham Young are products of the characters, the author clearly his protagonist.)

Along with the 1999 publication of Dancing Naked by Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner and (to only a slightly lesser extent) Levi Peterson's 1995 Aspen Marooney, Grimmett's The Ferry Woman is part of a great awakening in Mormon literature. Peterson gently examined the relationship between premarital sex and Mormon culture. Van Wagoner angrily probed into the hypocrisy of any rigid moral system (in this case, a Mormon one). Grimmett takes us into the deepest, darkest chamber of the Mormon heart and helps us understand its architecture.

The Ferry Woman is a novel that can provide an entire culture with an Aristotelian catharsis; like all great literature, it forces us to confront truths that make us uncomfortable. And it cures us in the process. ---------- Martin Naparsteck reviews books from and about the West for The Salt Lake Tribune. ----------
Rating the Best of the West
BY Martin Naparsteck
Special to the Tribune

A novel narrated by one of the wives of one of Utah's most infamous historical figures was the best book published in and about the West in 2001.
The Ferry Woman by Gerald Grimmett is narrated by Emeline Buxton Lee, fictional 16th wife of John D. Lee, the only man punished for the murder by massacre of more than 120 persons by Mormons and Paiutes at Mountain Meadows in 1857.

The novel, like some of the works of Dostoyevsky, examines the nature of guilt. The anguish the narrator experiences because of the conflicting pulls of guilt and love for her husband provides the book with its disturbing power. It is a great novel.

(A short excerpt)

"The voice is authentic and the historical atmosphere, the strangeness of being in that tight-knit community, that near-theocracy, and yet not being a part of it-and all this against the backdrop of a true wilderness, of place and spirit-is very effectively created. I felt I was inside that history."

John Vernon, The Last Canyon, Houghton Mifflin-2002


"I think it is a beautifully written work of biographical fiction.
A masterpiece!"

Gino Sky, Appaloosa Rising, Random House