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

I think it is a beautifully written work of

biographical fiction. A masterpiece!"

Gino Sky, Author, Appaloosa Rising

from Random House

A Wonderful Trip

through a Terrible Time

Reviewer: Margaret Williamson

from Dana Point, CA United States

This is the first book I have ever read that was written by a man and captured the mind and heart of a woman so perfectly. The story is spellbinding, and reveals the treachery that lays in the minds of men. The whole Mountain Meadow Massacre becomes real, even though the book is fiction based on reality. Mr. Grimmett's research on this sad event is evident throughout the book. I am anxiously awaiting his next book.

"Having just finished reading The Ferry Woman, I felt the need to tell you how very much I enjoyed your work. It is superb!"

Kaye Corbett

Huntington Beach, CA

I read your book cover to cover and was totally enthralled. It's difficult to read fast. I hate/love books that have so much to say that I can't skim over the pages, but have to read each word and take them in as the author intended. I am now in the mind of Emeline (Buxton) Lee and enjoyed each and every page. You have quite a skill. Keep it up.

Dexter Kaytis--Orange, CA

Along the way the reader is treated to some fine geographical description, some laconic dialogue that crackles with wit and authenticity, some not unwelcome poetic flights, some comedy, some epiphany. Of epiphany: the scene in which Emeline, alone in the wilderness with only her little Elizabeth, burns the Book of Mormon leaf by leaf, is exquisite for its poetic understatement.

Dr. Jeff Conine Author, Last Autumn, Florence, Oregon

The story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre and its aftermath demands careful telling, and, in The Ferry Woman, Gerald Grimmett makes Emeline Lee's conflict and discovery the reader's own. This account unfolds in language that can sound both absolutely original and absolutely vernacular. This author re-haunts the landscape, and reanimates the people who lived and died there.

Ford Swetnam, Author, Ghostholder's Know

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.

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Martin Naparsteck reviews books from and about the West for The Salt Lake Tribune.

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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