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Sally in Three Worlds: An Indian Captive in the House of Brigham Young [Print Replica] Kindle Edition

by Virginia Kerns (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 8 ratings
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In this remarkable and deeply felt book, Virginia Kerns uncovers the singular and forgotten life of a young Indian woman who was captured in 1847 in what was then Mexican territory. Sold to a settler, a son-in-law of Brigham Young, the woman spent the next thirty years as a servant to Young’s family. Sally, as they called her, lived in the shadows, largely unseen. She was later remembered as a “wild” woman made “tame” who happily shed her past to enter a new and better life in civilization. 


Drawing from a broad range of primary sources, Kerns retrieves Sally from obscurity and reconstructs her complex life before, during, and after captivity. This true story from the American past resonates deeply in the current moment, attentive as it is to killing epidemics and racial injustices. In telling Sally’s story, Kerns presents a new narrative of the American West. 

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  1. Print length
    288 pages
  2. Language
    English
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  4. Publisher
    University of Utah Press
  5. Publication date
    April 30, 2021
  6. File size
    7106 KB
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Virginia Kerns is a writer, teacher, and professor emerita of anthropology at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. She is the author of three previous books, including the award-winning Scenes from the High Desert: Julian Steward’s Life and Theory.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09VXJVBH1
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Utah Press (April 30, 2021)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 30, 2021
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 7106 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Not enabled
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 8 ratings

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Virginia Kerns

Virginia Kerns

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Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
8 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Illuminating
Reviewed in the United States on August 18, 2021
Verified Purchase
This is an extraordinarily well written book about the life of an Indian woman who was sold to a member of the Brigham Young family in 1847. After Sally, the Indian woman, got through a difficult period, she began to learn the "civilized" arts of cooking and housekeeping. She helped prepare meals for as many as fifty people a day and eventually rose to the position of chief cook for the family. Sally remained an unpaid servant for most of the rest of her life. Brigham Young eventually sent her away on a "civilizing" mission, with unexpected results.
The book gives a detailed account of life inside the Young family mansions, and of events outside as more and more wild land was settled. The Introduction to the book examines the binary "wild/civilized." It could be skipped over, but the idea is so important that I would highly recommend reading it.
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Jason P.
3.0 out of 5 stars Another settler scholar representing Native worldviews
Reviewed in the United States on June 14, 2022
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Kerns slips into the role of actually taking seriously the wild/civilization binary that she critiques. She falls into the trap, fortified by her anthropologist hero Julian Steward (about whom she wrote another biography), of thinking that Natives in the Great Basin were solely hunter gatherers who really did live in the wild rather than in their own land-impacting, food-producing civilizations. What about the 3 sisters: corn, beans, and squash? You don't just find those things lying around. You develop them, breed them, and plant them. The People were expert horticulturalists, an activity that they supplemented with hunting and gathering. Over millennia, they shaped the landscape and its biodiversity far more than the Mormons ever did. Kearns ends with some aptly sharp words against the US settler state and in favor of decolonization (hence my 3 stars), but the brainwashing of her US schooldays meant to perpetuate that settler state blinds her to an important reality that the thrust of her book unfortunately eclipses: The Pahvant Ute lived full, luxurious, creative lives of leisure, recreation, and fulfilling occupation before the apocalypse of European intrusion. At no point prior to the arrival of the Spanish were they scarcely eking out an existence of sheer survival in the "wild" through constant labor. It was the large scale agriculture of the Mormons that brought that sort of meager, wild existence into their formerly civilized world. In sum, not only does she commit the error of using the black and white thinking of the wild/civilized binary at all, but she gets it backwards. The People had civilization (according to Kerns' definition of it). The Mormons were the savages. (Which brings up the question of why Kerns' never refers to Sally as enslaved, though she clearly was). To be generous, however, for a settler scholar writing about a Native woman (something that hopefully happens less and less as Native women write more and more) Kerns doesn't do a horrible job. I mean, she's no Elizabeth Lynn-Cook, but at least she's no Kevin Costner.
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Virginia T.
4.0 out of 5 stars Sally in Three Worlds
Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2021
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The long winded scholarly introduction made me lose interest in reading this book but I forced myself to proceed because I had spend $34 to purchase it. The history, ecology, and minute details of the lives of Native Americans and setters of European descent during the pioneer days of the region of what is now Utah were all very interesting, but what I wanted to read about was Sally. What I learned about her could have been written in a short article. The damaging and exploitive influence of settlement on this region is clearly illustrated and enlightening. This book is well written, clearly researched by an expert with beautiful footnotes, and easy to read except for the time consuming constant flipping back and forth to read the footnotes
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