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Zusatztext “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 Informationen zum Autor Sally Denton is the author of American Massacre: The Tragedy at Mountain Meadows, September 1857; The Bluegrass Conspiracy: An Inside Story of Power, Greed, Drugs, and Murder; and, with Roger Morris, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947--2000. She received Western Heritage Awards in 2002 and 2004, a Lannan Literary grant in 2000, and, for her body of work, the Nevada Silver Pen Award of 2003 for distinguished literary achievement. Her award-winning investigative reporting has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and American Heritage. She lives with her three children in New Mexico. Klappentext 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. Leseprobe Chapter One “Worth a Long Walk to See” September 23, 1873. Jean Rio delivers the Ayer baby girl at five-fifteen p.m., after a relatively easy labor, and the mother sleeps quietly for the next several hours. “Had a good night,” Jean Rio records in her midwife’s notebook. (“The baby grows nicely [and] all seemed to enjoy themselves,” she notes nearly a month later, after the mother brings the newborn and the rest of her children to pay a visit.) It is not always as easy as it might seem. Even the uncomplicated births like Mrs. Ayer’s are trials, the mother usually moaning and screaming in desperation through a long, painful labor to the final agony and then the sudden release of delivery. Often there are tests and horrors Jean Rio must face and somehow cope with, using only her hands and her self-taught skills, experience, and inherent fortitude—hemorrhaging or mortally ill mothers; distressed, deformed, or stillborn babies—a bloody life-and-death struggle no less of a test than any battle faced by a man. When she cleans up afterward, changing one plain dress—now stained—for another, washing the blood and afterbirth from her hands and arms, she removes her rings, a fine gold band and an exquisite small sapphire set in platinum. They are hardly the rings of a hardworking midwife on the raw California frontier of the late nineteenth century. She might seem a plain, even ordinary, woman of her time and place. But the unexpected grace and beauty of the rings match her own dignity and gentility. The rings signal that she is something other than an ordinary woman. In her diary entry for October 23, she allows herself one of the rare references these days to the past that the rings echo. “Clear and lovely as a sprin...
