Product Description

In the 1850s, Jean Rio, a deeply spiritual widow, was moved by the promises of Mormon missionaries and set out from England for Utah. Traveling across the Atlantic by steamer, up the Mississippi by riverboat, and westward by wagon, Rio kept a detailed diary of her extraordinary journey.

In Faith and Betrayal, Sally Denton, an award-winning journalist and Rio’s great-great-granddaughter, uses the long-lost diary to re-create Rio’s experience. While she marvels at the great natural beauty of Utah, Rio’s enthusiasm for her new life turns to disillusionment over Mormon polygamy and violence against nonbelievers, as well as the harshness of frontier life. She sets out for California, where she finds a new religion and the freedom she longed for. Unusually intimate and full of vivid detail, this is an absorbing story of a quintessential American pioneer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #485001 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-11
• Released on: 2006-07-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Denton, a journalist who previously explored Mormon history in American Massacre, relays and interprets a British ancestor's experiences in crossing an ocean and a continent to join the Latter-day Saints in Utah. Jean Rio Baker was, by Denton's assessment, a wealthy Victorian woman who "fell sway" to the message of Mormon missionaries in the 1840s. Not long after her husband died, she packed up her children and other members of her extended family and embarked from England on the arduous voyage to Utah. This short biography is at its best when it adheres closely to Rio Baker's own journal of her experiences on the ocean (where she tragically buried a child at sea) and the plains, which she vividly describes in fascinating detail. But for the long stretches of Rio Baker's life where she either did not keep a journal or it has not survived, readers are left with Denton's own rather angry assessment of how her great-great-grandmother was deceived and betrayed by the Mormons. Unfortunately, the book is riddled with numerous factual errors about 19th-century Mormonism and the Book of Mormon, which may cause readers to question other elements in the biography. Despite the sloppy research and some unfair caricatures, Denton portrays her ancestor as a resourceful, independent mother and midwife who heroically survived her religious disillusionment. (Apr. 28)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Journalist and historian Denton (American Massacre, 2003) traces the westward journey of her great-great grandmother, Mormon convert Jean Rio Griffiths. Basing this chronicle largely on Jean Rio's diaries, the author is able to paint an intimate portrait of one uniquely American experience. Leaving her comfortable home in England, middle-aged widow Jean Rio traveled across the ocean, the plains, and the mountains with her seven children, seeking the elusive Eden promised by the Mormon missionaries. Finally reaching Utah and the Mormon settlement, a deeply spiritual Jean Rio grew quickly disillusioned with the autocratic Mormon leadership and the practice of polygamy. Ultimately renouncing the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she reclaimed her independence and settled in California. Though Denton's kinship to her subject tends to color her objectivity, her attention to historical and descriptive detail enhances this testament to the pioneer spirit. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“An authentic American epic. . . . A harrowing and heartbreaking tale of the Old West that we have not heard before.” –Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A great, often scary American story.” –The New York Times Book Review

“Rich in the history of the time and redolent with strong personalities, Sally Denton’s newest book is a compelling look at a slice of America through the lens of an unlikely pioneer.” –Santa Fe Journal

“As taut as a mytery and as lucid as journalism, Faith and Betrayal is both intimate and epic.”–The New Mexican


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Customer Reviews

Not Quite Sure What This Is
I was very disappointed while reading this book. Contrary to some reviewers I did not find it compelling and the errors and bias rather put me off. For instance, Wilford Woodruff did not make polygamy illegal (that was the U.S. Government), each Mormon did not have to get married three different ways to make it to heaven, and one could cite pages of similar things. These could all be forgiven, however, were there a strong narrative framework with a consistent, engaging style, but alas...

That Pioneer Spirit
Jean Rio, Mormon convert, traveled from England with a large group of people to settle in the barren land of "Deseret", which is now modern day Utah. Fed by her faith, her ultimate belief that she was right in her convictions, and a determined spirit, Jean not only survived this perilous journey, but helped others survive it along the way. Sally Denton, Jean's great great granddaughter, recounts her relatives momnumental journey in the small and quiet book, "Faith and Betrayal".

Using Jean Rio's diary as a record of account in this book, Denton reconstructs the history of her family, and the decision of Jean Rio to leave her life of priviledge in England to the great unknown. Starting off in luxury, Jean converts to Mormonism and decides her faith should bring her to America and Utah, as one of those brave pioneers. The rest of the story recounts Jean's life in Utah, her disillusionment with Mormonism, and her eventual resettling to California.

Jean's trek across the United States would earn my five stars by itself. Denton's reconstruction of the journey of Jean and her entourage is compelling and amazing. I long since knew about the travels of Mormon pioneers, but never has the perilous journey been so wonderfully reconstructed. It was amazing to read of Jean's growth during the trip, finding skills she never knew she had. This is one pioneer woman who deserves her story to be told.

Much has been and will be said about Denton's view on Mormonism, and her "obvioius bias" and several will discount her story by their "factual errors". Any book written that dares suggest that a religion, such as Mormonism, has faults, is bound to be attacked. It is almost tiresome that it happens, but alas, it is. At least Denton has said her peace, and has shared it in a wonderful book.

I highly recommend this story for anyone who wants a intrguing story about a woman who had the courage to follow her convictions, and live her life based on her beliefs.

Sloppy History
"Faith and Betrayal" tells the story of Jean Rio Baker, an Englishwoman who converted to Mormonism and emigrated to Utah in the early 1850s. The main primary source material for any understanding of Mrs. Baker's life is her emigrant journal. The journal itself covers an emigration period of nine months, is largely silent for the eighteen years that Mrs. Baker was in Utah, contains an entry at the end of that period alluding to Mrs. Baker's economic and religious disappointment during her time in Utah, and ends with a few entries made after she settled in California with other family members. Mrs. Baker's journal has been excerpted or included in several anthologies and collections, including "Saints without Halos" and "Audacious Women."

As a literary and historical document, Mrs. Baker's journal stands on its own, and a book-length treatment of her life would seem to be of questionable value absent the discovery or production of additional primary source material. However, Sally Denton provides little in the way of scholarship or original research in her book. Ms. Denton states at the outset her frustration that the L.D.S. church has gotten so much mileage out of the journal as a representation of the Mormon emigrant experience while failing to give equal billing to the "loss of faith" portion that is the crux of Ms. Denton's book. Ms. Denton states that the purpose of her book is to "restore" Mrs. Baker's voice that the L.D.S. church has "distorted."

Unfortunately, what the reader hears more often than not is Ms. Denton's voice, a voice that oftentimes is not only unsupported by the historical record, but is contrary to it in many respects. Not content with providing a running paraphrase of Mrs. Baker's journal, Ms. Denton cannot resist padding the journal to make Mrs. Baker a more active participant in the events described in the journal. However, Ms. Denton's use of dramatic license becomes more problematic in relation to the absence of journal entries during Mrs. Baker's time in Utah. Based on the one journal entry expressing Mrs. Baker's disappointment with life as it turned out in Utah, Ms. Denton attempts to detail the course of Mrs. Baker's disillusionment over the past eighteen years for which the journal is otherwise silent. Ms. Denton attributes very specific attitudes and beliefs to Mrs. Baker that find no support in the record: in Ms. Denton's telling, Mrs. Baker is personally repulsed by and vehemently opposed to polygamy, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the Mormon doctrine of salvation, the Mormon principle of consecration, etc. Ms. Denton explains away Mrs. Baker's actual silence on any one of these topics by asserting that the atmosphere in nineteenth-century Mormon society was so repressive that a free-thinking woman like Mrs. Baker was sufficiently intimidated from confiding her innermost thoughts to her private journal. With this sleight of hand, Ms. Denton effectively turns Mrs. Baker into an empty vessel onto which Ms. Denton can project Ms. Denton's personal objections to the Mormon religion and experience as well as many of her modern-day sensibilities. Yet Ms. Denton represents Mrs. Baker's undocumented feelings and views on particular items with such certainty and specificity that one wonders whether Ms. Denton is channeling Mrs. Baker's spirit.

Many of Ms. Denton's factual assertions about Mrs. Baker's life and family are demonstrably false. Key among these is Ms. Denton's portrayal of Mrs. Baker and several of her children's removal to California as a calculated and dangerous "escape from Mormonism." The journal itself makes clear that Mrs. Baker accompanied a sick friend to California as a personal nurse, and had intended to return to Utah but was persuaded by her resident son to stay in California. Ms. Denton supports her "escape" storyline by vague references to family history or tradition, but only ends up contradicting herself. For instance, she claims that certain of Mrs. Baker's sons previously fled Utah for California under cover of night in order to avoid Mormon assassin squads. Her purported source for this assertion is unidentified California Baker descendants. Yet later on, Ms. Denton asserts that those same descendants had no knowledge that their ancestors were either Mormon or had come to California by way of Utah. Further, L.D.S. Endowment House records show that one of the "escaping" Baker sons was back in Utah several years later receiving his Mormon endowment ordinance. The journal itself indicates that the sons left for economic, not religious reasons. In this, as in other significant instances (beyond the limited scope of this review), Ms. Denton ignores contrary facts that do not advance her pre-determined storyline.

The book in part appears to be a vehicle for Ms. Denton to expound on nineteenth-century Mormon society. Ms. Denton goes beyond critical examination to demonstrate an unveiled contempt for all aspects of Mormon history, experience and belief, as well as a superficial and incomplete understanding of them. The factual mistakes are numerous and fundamental. She is unable to concede any good-faith aspects or motivations to either the religious system or its actors, and her nineteenth-century Utah is populated almost exclusively by abusive manipulators or easily-led dupes. This is due in large part to her uncritical reliance on the sensationalistic, anti-Mormon literature of the era.

In the end, Ms. Denton's book is not so much history as it is a polemic, at times veering off into the realm of historical fiction. There is little to no original scholarship evident. Ms. Denton relies on secondary or tertiary sources, freely projects or psychologizes, asserts unverifiable or suspect facts, and refers to uncited and unidentified "family members" as sources. In other words, an independent researcher would be at a loss to verify or fact check Ms. Denton's narrative as it applies to Mrs. Baker, and would have to duplicate Ms. Denton's original research, such as it is, from scratch. Those readers interested in Mrs. Baker's life and journal would be better served by reading Mrs. Baker's account in her own words, which are more engaging in any case, rather than having it filtered and skewed by a compromised intermediary with a personal agenda.