Emma Lee French
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Emma Louise Batchelor Lee French (April 21, 1836 - November 16, 1897), better known as Emma Lee French, was a British woman who travelled to Utah and Arizona, in the United States, where she became well known as a care taker of the sick.
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[edit] Youth
Born in Uckfield, Sussex, England, she became a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints Mormon during her early 20s. In 1857, she sailed off Liverpool with a group of Mormons.
[edit] Trek
Emma Lee arrived at the Eastern coast of the United States, then headed to Iowa, where she grabbed a cart filled with goods given by her church and headed to Salt Lake City, Utah. She pulled the cart herself for the entire 1,400 mile walk.
She joined a company of her church's members for that trip, of which 150 died during snowstorms. Many others suffered other illness, such as frozen feet, noses and other diseases. Emma Lee helped care for them, eventually leading to most of them having a full recovery. During the trip, she also served as midwife to a pregnant woman, carrying her in the cart as the woman was close to delivering.
In Salt Lake City, she met John Doyle Lee, a prominent man among Mormon church members. Brigham Young himself married the couple on January 7 of 1858.
John Doyle Lee is said to have participated in a massacre of California immigrants (see: Mountain Meadows Massacre) that left 140 people dead. For this, John and Emma Lee were followed by federal marshals for about twenty years. In 1868, George Hicks, a prominent columnist from Harmony, Utah, wrote in a local newspaper that the Lees had to leave town in ten days or John would be hanged.
Emma then spoke personally with George Hicks, warning him not to keep making threats against her and her husband. Hicks relented, never speaking against the Lees on his column again. He did, however, complain about the Lees to the town's bishop, who proposed that Hicks and Lee should be baptized together. Emma Lee agreed, but not without complaining; she told the bishop she'd do it "seeing that (the bishop) are so inconsiderate as to require a woman to be immersed when the water is full of snow and that too for defending the rights of her husband". She continued on, saying: "Perhaps if (the bishop's) backside gets wet in ice water (he) will be more careful how (he) decide again". Impressed by her speech, the bishop then agreed not to go on with the baptism.
In 1870, the Mormon church excommunicated John Doyle Lee, based on the suspicions that the federals had put on him. He was, however, still ordered to carry out important tasks for the Mormons, and, in 1871, he was sent to the Colorado river, near the border between Arizona and Utah, to establish a ferry service.
Many celebrities of the era stopped by the Lees new home, including John Wesley Powell, a general who became the first man to explore the Grand Canyon by way of the Colorado river. In 1872, Wesley Powell and a group of adventurers returned; their photographer, the famed James Fennesmore, became ill and he was cured by Emma Lee.
Because, under Mormon doctrine, John Doyle Lee was allowed to have multiple wives, he had to travel much of the time, to attend to his other wives and children. As a consequence, Emma Lee was left to attend both the ferry and her children.
In 1873, a settlement of Navajos came to camp near the Lee home. Fearful for her children's fate, she decided to befriend the Navajos, and discovered that the tribe's chief was a friend of her husband's. They spent one night at the Navajo camp, after which the Indians left. The Navajo chief would later confide to another Mormon that he thought Emma Lee was a brave woman.
Later that year, Emma Lee gave birth to her sixth baby. With John Doyle gone, she had to ask the oldest person besides her at the Lee house, her son John Jr., to help her cut the umbilical cord. They did this task to perfection, and a daughter was safely born.
John Doyle Lee was caught by the police, and shot to death by a firing squad on March 23, 1877. With small children and economically in need, Emma Lee sold the ferry to the Mormon church for 100 milk cows in 1879. She was helped by a civil war veteran, Franklin French. It is said, however, that the Mormons gave her only fourteen cows.
On August 9 of that year, Emma Lee and French married, in Snowflake, Arizona. They found a home near Holbrook, Arizona. They next moved to the White Mountains, but their home was burned by the Apaches in 1882.
Emma Lee set up a restaurant near the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad stopovers.
Although she had no official medicine title, people called her Dr. French, because of her ability to cure the ill. In 1887, she moved to Winslow, where she helped multiple women, including Navajos and prostitutes, give birth.
In 1888, her daughter, Victoria Lee, committed suicide. In 1892, her son Ike confronted a man who was trying to seduce his wife and was murdered by the man.
On November of 1897, as her husband was on an expedition, she had a premonition of her own death. When French returned on November 16, she suffered a heart attack. A crowd of businessmen, Navajos and prostitutes kept vigil outside her home as she lay in bed dying that night.
[edit] References
- Leo Banks, Stalwart Women: Frontier Stories of Indomitable Spirit (ISBN 0-916179-77-X)
- Brooks, Juanita. Emma Lee. Utah State University Press, Logan, UT, 7th Printing 1984. ISBN 0-87421-121-2. First published in ( ).
