Desert Drowning: A Short Story Collection

As many young men born in Utah, I grew up Mormon, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. While this is not out of the ordinary in this state, my connections within the history of the church were. My grandfather's great grandfather Charles Shumway was one of the first Mormon settlers to cross the plains and settle in what would become the state of Utah. Not only that, he was one of Brigham Young's most trusted lieutenants, instructed to scout ahead of the main wagon trains, and later settle parts of Northern Arizona, where the town of Shumway still stands. As many of the male members of the early church did, Charles practiced polygamy, or plural marriage, and married six women over the course of his life. The last of them was a 15-year-old girl named Elizabeth Jardine. Charles was in his sixties. This was not an uncommon practice at the time. Though there are many powerful linked collections of place-based short stories, mine enters the literary conversation by centering the work at the end of Mormon polygamy in 1890. This decision, which banned all future plural marriages from going forward while allowing those that had already been made official, was not met with unanimous praise by the members of the church. This led to offshoot branches and many of the fundamentalist movements that continue to practice polygamy and other morally reprehensible doctrines to this day. My thesis aims to capture the complexity of this historical moment.