“Dr. Martha Cannon of Utah” tells of attraction, devotion to her “Old Boy”

Author’s note: The first female state senator in the United States was  elected in 1896 in Utah.  Her name was Martha (“Mattie”) Hughes Cannon.  She was a Mormon polygamous wife, #4 of 6.  She ran against her own husband – and won.  But before all that, she was an M.D., a graduate of the co-educational University of Michigan Medical  School, and her skillful fistula repair surgery made headlines in a Michigan newspaper. 

Chapter 10

First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage, Then Comes Baby . . . 

Our fistula-fixing Mattie Paul Hughes was in no hurry to get married when she returned to Utah from graduate studies. She brought along with her a young man, newly converted to Mormonism, who had fallen for the slim, fresh-faced young woman with the coy smile, kind eyes of hazel hue, and short, curly brown hair.

Her first task was to recover from meningitis. Mattie’s parents let the besotted young man live in their home to help care for her. Whatever his nursing skills and other charms may have been, the courtship fell short. It was not the first time. Mattie had abandoned a serious beau four years before to study medicine, and broke a few more hearts along the way. Nobody measured up.

Once she recovered from brain fever, as meningitis was known, the twenty-five-year-old ignored her doctor’s fuddy-duddy prescription to avoid “brain work,” and set to building her medical practice. The brand-spanking new Deseret Hospital (cost of care six dollars per day, or $150 in today’s dollars) invited the young doctor to join its staff. One day, so the story goes, Dr. Mattie was busy at work when a certain Board Trustee entered the room to do whatever it was that Board Trustees feel it important to do. Mattie looked at this round-headed, mustachioed Trustee, old enough to be her father, and told him to get out. She had work to do. Her cheekiness charmed Angus Cannon. He left the room, but not her life.

UNDERWRITTEN BY

Each week, ����ֱ�� and Colorado Humanities & Center For The Book feature an excerpt from a Colorado book and an interview with the author. Explore the SunLit archives at .

Forty-eight-year-old Angus Cannon was dashingly handsome, charismatic, and known for his tidy grooming and scrupulous cleanliness. He typically sported a silk top hat and snazzy double-breasted Prince Albert frock coat, which featured a flat velvet collar, three big buttons down the front, and a shaped waistline. That Victorian symbol of male gentility, the silver-handled walking stick, completed his ensemble.

Angus had a renaissance-man resume. He had been a farmer, rancher, printer’s apprentice, business manager, missionary, and potter. He had been elected Mayor of St. George, Utah, and President of the Salt Lake Stake of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (A “stake” is a division of the LDS church, comprised of several wards, i.e. congregations.)

By the time Dr. Mattie shooed him out of the room, Angus Cannon had three wives and seventeen children, but his primary devotion was the Church. He would never rise to the height achieved by his more famous brother, George Q., member of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, but Angus’s position as President of the Salt Lake Stake was nothing to shake a stick at (not even a silver walking stick).

In Dr. Mattie he met his match. Their courtship was tricky, polygamy being federally illegal. At one point Mattie and Angus went on an overnight buggy trip together, the usually nattily-tailored Angus cleverly disguised in a blue shirt, red neckerchief, and farmer overalls. They stopped for the night at the home of Mrs. Elizabeth Owen. “I offered Mr. Cannon and the lady the bed to sleep together, but he said they were not married,” she testified later in court. “I then offered her the bed and she said the lounge would do.” Mrs. Owen further testified she was pretty sure “the lady” was Dr. Mattie, since she gave Elizabeth a short course in pharmacology, listing the ingredients of the patent medicines she saw on the home’s medicine shelf, including the morphine.

“Dr. Martha Cannon of Utah”

>> READ AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

Where to find it:

• Prospector:
• Libby:
• NewPages Guide:
• Bookshop.org:

SunLit present new excerpts from some of the best Colorado authors that not only spin engaging narratives but also illuminate who we are as a community. Read more.

Mattie became Angus’s fourth wife on October 6, 1884, sealed “for time and eternity” at a secret ceremony at the Endowment House in Salt Lake City. The Feds were cracking down hard on polygamists. Supposedly, she did not tell her mother and continued lying to her friends. Or maybe she told them and vowed them to secrecy. We can’t know for sure what Mattie’s mother knew about the marriage, but we do know she told a court, under oath, that she hadn’t a clue. (Or so she testified. Perjury was not out of the question. Lying for the Lord was a pretty-well-practiced thing for the early Mormons.) Mattie described her honeymoon year as “a few stolen interviews thoroughly tinctured with the dread of discovery.”

Why would a pretty, intelligent, educated, and talented young woman agree to become illegal secret wife number four? As a university-educated, trained physician, Dr. Mattie would have almost certainly out-earned any young husband. Mormons may have been progressive about women’s rights, but even so, a monogamous wife of a man just starting out would have felt pressure to give up her career. Angus, on the other hand, had long-ago proven his financial wherewithal and, considering that he was supporting three other wives and seventeen children, appreciated the financial independence of wife number four.

But what about love? We wonder, and so did her friends at the time. When her marriage wasn’t secret anymore, Mattie described Angus in a letter to her Gentile friend Barbara Replogle. Angus, she wrote, was “all but perfection in my eyes.” Mattie wrote to Angus that he was “the only man that I have ever loved,” and “I would rather spend one hour in your society than a whole life time with any other man I know of.” Also, “just accept a bushel of kisses and remember that I think heaps of you.”

The feeling was mutual. Angus wrote: “You have been loved as much as any woman has been, are, and yet will be loved, as only a true heart is capable of loving.”

Their age difference didn’t go unremarked upon. Mattie’s pet names for Angus were “My Old Duck,” “Old Sweetheart” and “Old Boy.” My Old Duck didn’t like it. “I should not like you to call me by such endearing names,” he quacked, or rather, complained, “the facts are it [is] too near the truth which is not always relished by the best of us.” Mattie was, after all, two years younger than Angus’s oldest son.

Soon the “few stolen interviews” of Old Sweetheart and young doctor led to the inevitable. Mattie was pregnant. This was a pickle of prodigious proportions. The Feds were hunting polygamists. Not only was Dr. Mattie literally carrying incontrovertible evidence of Angus’s illegal “cohabitation” and polygamy, but she had attended the births of many polygamously-conceived babies. To protect Angus and her patients, Dr. Mattie fled Utah, baby Elizabeth in her arms.

Joan Jacobson has written for newspapers, magazines, and law firms. She is the author of the literary novel “Small Secrets: A Tale of Sex, Shame and Babies in Midcentury America” and the award-winning imaginative nonfiction book “Colorado Phantasmagorias: A Mashup of Biography, Fantasy, and Travel Guide.”