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From the Dikes to the Desert:

The First Dutch Mormons in Utah in the last half of the 1800s

by Janet Sjaarda Sheeres

While the Dutch, in their long seafaring history, were often in the forefront of commercial enterprises around the world, they failed to colonize their various outposts. Even those who sought their livelihood abroad did so with the express intent to return home. The Dutch were homebodies who held to the maxim “Oost west, thuis best [East or west, home is best].” Emigration was considered abnormal and only for the desperate. In 1790 the Dutch made up only 2.5% of the United States population, and that number had not changed in the 1990 Census.
Two conditions in the mid 1800s, however, drove many Dutch to defy the disapproval of their neighbors and emigrate: poor economic conditions and religious intolerance. In 1847 the Reverends Albertus Van Raalte and Hendrik Scholte led large groups of emigrants to found Dutch colonies in Holland, Michigan, and Pella, Iowa. Their exodus was motivated in part by a desire to worship without government interference. In the same year Brigham Young, presiding Apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, led a large group of followers to Utah. While Van Raalte and Scholte’s followers were Dutch, Young’s followers were mainly American-born and converts from the British Isles and Canada.
Three years later, even as the Dutch population in Michigan and Iowa increased steadily, the 1850 census of Utah did not list one Hollander as yet; however, that was about to change.
The 1860 Census of the Utah Territory lists eleven persons of Dutch nationality: John A. Ninde, Martin and Gertrude Sydelaar, John, Ann and John Madison, J. Fairbank, Wm. Johnston, D. Holmes, B. Cowen and H. D. Thall. The three members of the Madison family are listed in passenger records as the Madsen family from Germany. In all likelihood they told the census taker that they were “Deutsch” and he mistook them for “Dutch.” The same may be said for John Ninde, whose son’s census data lists John as being born in Bavaria. Five others, all young men whose names are not at all Dutch, were miners in Gold Hill and Virginia City, in Nevada. The remaining two, Martin and Gertrude Sydelaar, were bona-fide Dutch citizens. Martin was born in Dordrecht, the Netherlands, in 1824, where he married Gertrude Marcusse. However, there were five more Dutch nationals in Utah by 1860 that were not listed in the census, namely the Anne Vanderwood family.
In the May 17, 1853 issue of the Sheboygan Nieuwsbode, a Dutch-language weekly, John Huyskamp, the correspondent from Keokuk, Iowa, wrote,
There are nearly 300 Mormons camped near here, recently arrived from Europe, to make their trek to Utah. It is rumored that among them are a few Hollanders.

He does not list these Hollanders, but Ann and Douglas Attenberg, Lee County historians, made a study of this group, and found among the Saints camped near Keokuk a Dutch family—Anne W. Vanderwood, his wife Siebregtje, and their three children.
In the May 24, 1853 issue of the Nieuwsbode, Huyskamp wrote,
Some days ago we had the pleasure to make the acquaintance of a trustworthy Hollander, Mr. v. d. W. who has very keenly observed the Mormons here as well as in England while he traveled with more than three hundred Saints from Liverpool to Orleans.

While Huyskamp’s words about Vanderwood are positive, the remainder of the article about the Mormons is negative. He accuses the leaders of misleading their followers, presenting Utah as a paradise and not telling them about the hardships ahead. Huyskamp accused the Mormons of trying to convert the many Dutch people living in the area so that they could become Dutch-speaking missionaries.
Anne Vanderwood was born in Franeker, in the province of Friesland, the Netherlands, on July 12, 1812, as one of eleven children. As a young lad he joined his father and sailed to many far-away places. He returned to Friesland to marry Siebregtje Zwart in Leeuwarden, Friesland, on April 16, 1843, and made that city his homeport. Sometime between 1849 and 1852 Vanderwood moved his family, which now included three children, to Cardiff, Wales, to engage in ship brokering. Wales and England had flourishing Mormon Branches and Conferences at the time, and Anne converted to Mormonism. He was baptized on October 30, 1852 by Elder George Taylor. Having accepted the Mormon assertion that the Territory of Utah in the United States was the place where Mormons from all over the world should begin to build Zion and await Jesus’ imminent return, Anne and his family joined this mass migration to Utah. They were part of three ships filled with Mormons that began their 4,400-mile journey on January 23, 1853. They sailed from Liverpool on the SS Golconda and arrived in New Orleans on March 26. By April 1853 the party had made its way inland to Keokuk, Iowa, where Vanderwood spoke to the Nieuwsbode correspondent. If he had any regrets about converting to Mormonism and wanted to leave the LDS gracefully, this would have been the perfect time and place. He could easily have settled among the Dutch in Iowa. There had been less than six months’ time between his baptism and emigration. Indeed, while the rest of the immigrants joined the John Hyde wagon train across the Plains and mountains to Utah, Vanderwood settled in Keokuk until either the summer of 1859 or spring of 1860. He is listed in the Keokuk business directory of 1859, in tax records as having property in Keokuk, and his daughter, Trijntje, is listed in the Keokuk marriage records. Vanderwood may well have been ordered to stay in Keokuk to do exactly as the Nieuwbode suggested—engage in missionary work among the many Dutch and German settlers pouring into the region.
Approximately ten years after their arrival in Utah, many Mormons began to be lured away by letters arriving from California. According to Irvine Stone, “the Saints were losing faith in their leaders and their religion, and in the promises of their God that they were the Chosen People.” To stem the tide of apostasy, Brigham initiated full-scale revival meetings in Utah, and called home all the Saints living elsewhere among “gentiles” and in danger of apostasy. The Vanderwoods obeyed this call, left Keokuk and journeyed to Utah. Once there, Vanderwood built a home on the Weber River near Ogden.
In 1861 he was commissioned to return to the Netherlands to do mission work among his own people, in their own language. At the same time Martin Sydelaar, the other Dutch-born person living in Salt Lake at the time, was commissioned to travel to Cape Town, South Africa to use his Dutch language skills to convert Dutch-speaking Afrikaners.
Until Vanderwood’s arrival in the Netherlands in 1861, the Dutch had not been exposed to Mormonism by contact with missionaries; however, due to much negative press in the Netherlands, they had heard about this new religion that had gained such notoriety in the United States, and were not easily persuaded to join.
Nevertheless, after two years in the Netherlands, Vanderwood could claim thirty-seven converts. Of those, only Cornelia Ages and Christina Susanna Meyers, both single women, were willing to join him on his trip back to Utah. On June 5, 1863, Vanderwood and his two Dutch travelers boarded the S.S. Amazon at Liverpool, along with 895 fellow Mormons from various parts of Europe. Compared to that number, Holland’s contribution of two Saints was meager indeed. However, among the converts remaining in the Netherlands were two who would advance the cause greatly, and thereby increase the number of Dutch emigrants to Utah. One, a fellow Frisian, Sybren Van Dyk, born May 22, 1827 at Leeuwarden, was baptized by Vanderwood into the Mormon faith on May 19, 1863 at Leeuwarden. He was ordained an Elder on May 20, 1863. As Elder, Van Dyk actively preached the Mormon gospel in the Netherlands converting a number of people, including Peter Lammers who in turn became very zealous in gaining more converts.
The second person who greatly influenced the mission in the Netherlands was Timothy Mets. On Saturday, April 4, 1863, Vanderwood noted in his journal that he had met one Timothy Mets in the home of the Huisman family in Rotterdam. The Huismans belonged to a religious sect called Nieuwlichters [New Lighters], and Mets was married to Lydia, one of Huisman’s daughters. Timothy Mets had lived in America and wanted to go back, but until now Lydia had been reluctant to go.
Because the New Lighters’ emigration story is an integral part of early Dutch emigration to Utah, a brief history about them is in order here. In 1812 Stoffel Muller (1771-1833), a Dutch inland bargeman, searching for religious meaning, had an epiphany. According to Muller, the government-salaried Reformed Church clergy of his day did not measure up to being true shepherds of their flocks. He attended some small undenominational Bible study groups but these did not satisfy him either. Then, one morning, while walking in the fields and meditating, he heard an inner voice say, “For from Him, through Him, and unto Him are all things” [Romans 11:36]. Muller had received his answer. Everything, he reasoned, including sin and evil, comes from God and would return to him. The bad things man did were to teach him lessons to become better. Jesus had not come to atone for man’s sin, but rather to show man how to live as God intended man to live. When a person died, his soul became part of God. Muller worked out his theology and shared it with others. By 1830 he and a small number of followers settled in Zwijndrecht, on the Oude Maas River, southeast of Rotterdam. Although they called themselves Apostolische Broedervereeniging, [Apostolic Brother Society] and Gemeenschap der Heiligen [Community of Saints], derisively they were called New Lighters, which had a double meaning: 1) as in having seen a new light, and 2) because initially they made and sold match-sticks for a living. The group practiced a form of communal living, adopted a certain dress code, rejected government authority over them, such as civil marriages, registration of births, and mandatory military service.
In 1830, Phillip Mets, Tim’s father, a well-to-do chocolate manufacturer from Vlissingen, joined the group along with his family and servants. A friend of Phillip Mets, Willem Heystek, a shoemaker from Middelburg, also joined with his family. When Muller died, Heystek assumed the spiritual leadership while Mets oversaw the financial interests of the group. One of Mets’ thirteen children, Timothy, was born in Vlissingen on December 4, 1828. Like Vanderwood, he set out to sea at an early age, and by age 23 was living in America. He returned to Vlissingen to marry Adrianna Hak in June 1855 who accompanied him back to the United States. Their son, Adrian Mets was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1856. Sometime between 1856 and 1862, Adrianna passed away. Mets returned to the Netherlands where on October 22, 1862 he married Lydia Huisman. He hoped she would come with him to America; however, half a year later the couple was still living in Holland. Then through a most propitious turn of events, Mets met Vanderwood at the home of his father-in-law, Huisman, in Rotterdam on April 4, 1863. Vanderwood’s two-year mission was almost finished and he spoke about his beliefs and about returning to Zion. Mets, astonished at how much Mormonism had in common with the religious views of the New Lighters, saw an opportunity to return to America and take his family, his in-laws, and many of their friends along with him.
Some of these similarities included the custom of calling each other brother and sister, and using terminology such as Apostles and Saints. They were against paid clergy, a practice they perceived as unbiblical. They were unwelcome in many places because of their constant witnessing and aggressive proselytizing. They spoke of being in the last dispensation, and like the Latter-day Saints believed they were chosen to restore the Church of Jesus Christ on earth, they daily read newspapers for the signs of the end-times, and exercised strict discipline within the group.
From that first meeting in April, until June when he left, Vanderwood visited the Huismans and Timothy Mets in Rotterdam three mores times. At one of those meetings he also spoke with Heystek, the spiritual leader of the group. At their meeting on Tuesday, April 28, it was decided that Huisman’s daughter Anna, would accompany Vanderwood to Utah. For some unexplained reason, this did not happen. After Vanderwood left to travel back to Utah, Paul A. Schettler, who had worked with Vanderwood in Holland, took over the task of keeping contact with the group. On June 10 he baptized Timothy Mets. In October Elder John Lyman Smith arrived in the Netherlands from Utah, to take over the Holland Mission, and met with Mets at the Huismans. Nine people asked to be baptized, but Smith, perhaps sensing that these people had not been sufficiently informed about Mormon dogma, had reservations and did not baptize them at first. On November 1, after he had spoken to them about the Mormon faith and felt that they understood and believed it, did he baptize those who attended that evening. It would take another year before the entire group was in agreement and sufficiently prepared to emigrate.
This group along with other converted New Lighters, as well as several other families who did not belong to the New Lighters but who had converted to Mormonism, about sixty-five in all, left in June, 1864. They sailed from Liverpool on the S.S. Hudson. Three children were born on board, among them a child to Dutch parents. Susanna Cannegieter delivered a son and named him Henry Hudson Cannegieter after the name of the ship. Unfortunately, there was also a death on board involving the Dutch; Elizabeth Keizer, who had lost her husband shortly before the journey began, lost her three-year-old son on board.
In June 1864 this largely New Lighter group began their trek across the Plains. In spite of the Mormons’ solid planning, peril was ever present. Jan Cornelis Van Dam from Heukelum had emigrated with his in-laws, the Exaltos, because he did not want the old couple traveling into the American wilderness by themselves. A week after entering Nebraska on their journey across the Plains, Van Dam contracted typhoid fever and died. Twenty-one days later, his wife gave birth to a baby girl she named Cornelia. However, the loss of Jan, the birth of a baby, and travel conditions over rough terrain sapped her health and she died on 25 September, 1864, at the age of thirty-three. Her daughter, Adriaantje (Lottie) Van Dam Woolley Sharp, recalls, “I was only six years old at the time, but I can remember seeing Mother sitting in the corner of the tent crying, and putting my arms around her neck telling her not to cry.” The elderly Exaltos looked after their orphaned grandchildren for the remainder of the journey, but once in Utah three of the five Van Dam orphans, Herbert, Lottie, and Nellie, were taken in by a childless Mormon couple, the blacksmith Moses Thurstons and his wife Lucy. The William Cain family took in Geertje [Kate], and the baby Cornelia was adopted by the Woods family.
The Jasper family, Eelke and Elizabeth and their two children, Cornelis and Wemeltje also met with tragedy on the same wagon train. Only Eelke and Elizabeth made it as far as Nebraska City, Nebraska; their children are not listed in the Census and presumed lost en route. The entire Hak family [Tim Mets’ first wife’s family], mother and seven children, traveling with this group also disappeared somewhere en route.
Although they traveled together, the Dutch were not a unified group as evidenced by the fact that they did not cluster together once they arrived in Utah.
Even before their arrival in Utah, there seems to have been a split in the ranks of the New Lighters—between those who would become staunch Mormons and those who would stay true to the New Lighter principles. Gerardus P. Marang, the Dutch theologian who studied the New Lighters, wrote to several of them while researching his book, De Zijndrechtse Nieuwlichters. Willem Heystek, Jr., son of the group’s leader, Willem Heystek Sr., wrote to Marang in 1904, “But already on the journey we experienced much and were prepared to be disappointed when we arrived here. Much has already taken place here and all of this was done under the guise of religion.” One of the points of contention may have been Tim Mets’ unquestioned acceptance of LDS doctrine. Heystek, Jr. wrote disapprovingly about Mets to Marang. He described Mets as “one of the leading supporters of the Mormons who immediately [upon arriving in Utah] married two women.” There may also have been a clash of leadership between Mets, fluent in English, and Heystek, Sr., who though the acknowledged spiritual leader, lacked the language skills of his new country. Perhaps sensing disapproval of the New Lighters faction, the Mets family moved to Morgan City, along with the Huismans, Exaltos, and Dykmans. This may also explain why the orphaned Van Dam children were not adopted by Dutch families. The children’s grandparents and natural guardians, the Exaltos, too old to take on the burden of raising four children themselves and siding with Mets, allowed them to be separated and adopted by non-Dutch Mormon families. Pieter and Hendrika Fonteijn’s letter to Marang revealed that many of the New Lighters did not join the LDS Church once in Salt Lake. Marang quotes a letter from Pieter and Hendrika Fonteijn who wrote to him in 1904 (forty years after their emigration),
We have not joined a church denomination here, we have no need of earthly teachers, and we cannot find in a church here on earth what we are currently experiencing [among ourselves]. In the Mormon Church there are thousands good and brave people, but as for the leaders of the church… there is much to disapprove of.

Willem Heystek, Sr. remained their spiritual leader, refining their theology. In Utah, Heystek wrote two booklets, which he self published and had printed in the Netherlands. In these booklets Heystek further developed the theological principles of the New Lighters and not those of Mormonism.
According to Marang, in one of the booklets, The Last Judgment: A voice from the new world formed already in the old world in the year 1830 and after 1864 developed further in the new world , Heystek, Sr. developed a reincarnation theology, that one needed to return to this world time and again to learn spiritual lessons until one fully understood God’s will on how to live. Heystek also wrote about a service that took place in Salt Lake on December 30, 1873. Heystek, “Already we have celebrated the feast of acceptance of all that is crippled, deformed, blind or lame in Salt Lake, Utah on December 30, 1873, this first feast of God’s Kingdom already come was not recognized by most in attendance but was profoundly experienced by those who were aware of, and awake to, eternal life.” Although the LDS Church practiced physical healing by the laying on of hands by their Apostles, perhaps there was also in Utah, like most everywhere at the time, a shunning of the physically handicapped. Or perhaps being physically handicapped was seen as a judgment of God. The New Lighters apparently had a vision at some large gathering in Salt Lake City that handicapped people should not be seen as an aberration, but belonged to God’s Kingdom as fully as anyone else. This would certainly tie in with Heystek’s theology of reincarnation – that being physically handicapped should lead to learning spiritual lessons.
In addition, there is no evidence that the New Lighter families who did not join the LDS—Fonteijns, Kuiks, Heysteks, and Cannegieters—engaged in polygamy, or returned to Holland as missionaries.
Vanderwood, who had returned from his mission in 1863 moved to Malad. This move is a bit baffling. Although he was clearly the first missionary to the Netherlands, and the first to bring Dutch Saints to Utah, he did not take the lead, or even a part, in any further Dutch expansion. In fact, he distanced himself; whereas before he had settled in the Weber Valley, once back from his mission trip to the Netherlands, he moved to Malad, Idaho. Vanderwood’s separation from his Dutch compatriots may be due to the fact that there were already difficulties between him and his fellow missionary, Paul A. Schettler, in the Netherlands. While there, the situation became so intolerable that Schettler was sent to Switzerland for the duration of Vanderwood’s mission. Missionary John L. Smith, who followed Vanderwood in the Netherlands, wrote on November 10, 1863, to President G. Q. Cannon about his feelings “in the Vanderwood case” intimating some kind of difficulty with Vanderwood. President Cannon replied that he had not heard of the Vanderwood case, but had reported the matter to both the emigration agent and also to President Brigham Young. Was Vanderwood, who stayed true to the Mormon faith, but did not engage in polygamy, and never went on another mission, ordered to Malad by church authorities?
Later converts who came with Van Dyk and Lammers settled in Ogden; as these people had no connection with the New Lighters, they felt no compulsion to settle near them.
The fact that the Dutch were not all clustered together accelerated their integration into the general population through intermarriage. The 1880 Census lists twenty-four Dutch-born women married to non-Dutch men, and eight Dutch men married to non-Dutch women. With no religious restrictions to such marriages, there was no reason for Dutch men and women not to marry non-Dutch, as opposed to the Dutch colonies in Iowa and Michigan, where the Dutch were encouraged to marry only Dutch and integration sometimes took several generations.
Marriage also meant accepting the doctrine of polygamy. According to Vanderwood, one of the large stumble blocks of conversion in the Netherlands he had faced was the doctrine of veelwijverij, polygamy. However, once converted and living in Utah, many Dutch Mormons accepted the doctrine and practiced it. At least six of the leaders—Lammers, Van Dyk, Mets, Heertjes, Koldewijn, and Bockholt—had two or more wives. On a trip to Utah in 1884, Reverend Andrew Wormser, a minister in the Reformed Church of America at Cedar Grove, Wisconsin, visited Salt Lake City where he met Dirk Bockholt, a well-to-do Dutch emigrant, who boasted that he had four wives. Bockholt may have dared to disclose his polygamous marriages to a fellow Hollander, but probably did not speak about it around town, as by 1880 the United States government was cracking down on polygamy.
This crackdown forced Van Dyk to resettle in the inhospitable Rabbit Valley on the Fremont River in Wayne County, a considerable distance south of Ogden and the Dutch Mormon community. In Ogden he had built a comfortable duplex to house his two families: his first wife Froukje Van Dam and children, and his second wife, Anna Nollcamper and children. But in 1887 at age sixty, Van Dyk built a simple shelter near Loa, deeding the land and house to his second wife, Anna Nollkamper, under her maiden name. Anna and their four children joined Van Dyke in Loa, but Froukje, too frail to make the move, remained in Ogden.
Language also speeded integration. Lammers and Van Dyk, both returned missionaries from the Netherlands held weekly meetings in the Dutch language in Lammers’ home beginning in 1870. The average attendance was ten persons, about all the Dutch-speaking people living in Weber County at the time. Although the LDS allowed such meetings, the Dutch, as all other nationalities, had to attend English-language Ward services to receive the sacrament or to participate in the activities of church auxiliaries and Priesthood Quorums. “English was after all the language of the Book of Mormon and the Latter-day prophets, and the language in which it had pleased the Almighty to manifest His will in this last dispensation.” Unlike the Dutch in the Iowa and Michigan colonies who were encouraged to keep the Dutch language, the Dutch in Utah were encouraged to learn English, producing a more rapid “break with the convert’s past, separating him from his mother church, his fatherland, and his native tongue.” Nevertheless, when the occasion required it, such as the funeral of a Dutch immigrant, the service was conducted in the Dutch language to comfort the bereaved in their own tongue. On Friday, May 24, 1889, Nicolas Baker, aged forty-five, died in a work-related accident. He and his family had come from Holland only the year before, and the widow and children would not have found much comfort in English words; therefore, Dutch elders were invited to speak at the funeral service and conduct the burial rituals.
And just as not all New Lighters joined the LDS, not all other Dutch converts who settled in Zion stayed true to the faith. In 1907 Johanna Carolina Lammers, wife of Peter Lammers, wrote in her memoir, “Of the [eight] Hollanders who journeyed with me, six have apostatized and my mother and I were the only ones who remained faithful.” The Van Loenen family who had arrived with Lammers in 1867 left the Church and by 1870 had moved to the predominantly non-Mormon town of Corinne, Box Elder County, where he became a saloonkeeper.
When Henry Hospers, a Dutch-born entrepreneur from Pella, Iowa, advertised the availability of land in Northwest Iowa in various Dutch-language newspapers, he received “communications from Utah where there were a number of Hollanders who, tired of living among the Mormons, wanted to move.”
Disappointment with Mormon theology may have turned some away, but there may have been another reason why some of the Dutch regretted settling in Utah. In 1874 due to the economic crisis, the LDS church initiated a new law called the “United Order,” in which the church demanded the Saints place all their goods, their time and talents, even their real estate, at the absolute disposal of the local church authority. The history of this United Order was brief—from 1874 to 1878. However, the Dutch, eager to own farms and businesses, may not have appreciated the heavy hand of the church in their property decisions. The letters Mr. Hospers received in 1876 from Hollanders in Utah fell exactly within the time frame of the United Order movement in Utah.
The matter of strict tithing caused hardship for some as well. A native of Heukelum wrote to friends in the Netherlands that the land was very expensive so that one half of what was raised was demanded in payment; that one tenth needed to be taken out for tithing, one tenth was paid out for threshing the grain, and one tenth for milling. Afterward, few in Heukelum were much interested in joining the LDS.
Wormser, writing about his visit in Salt Lake City in 1884, stated, “There are still about sixty Dutch Mormons in Salt Lake City; but that most who came left again, their sound Dutch common sense soon seeing through the ‘sham’ of Mormon theology.” Wormser also wrote that he had visited relatives who for a while had been thoroughly taken in with the fervor of the Saints in the Netherlands, but upon arriving in Salt Lake City had found the leadership so distasteful that they withdrew from the church.
A smaller matter was the prohibition against tobacco, coffee, tea and liquor. Asa Judd, missionary to the Netherlands 1887-1889 wrote, “Dutch Saints and missionaries drink barley coffee as it is a great trial for them to quit drinking it entirely.”
Of the twenty-eight Dutch families listed in the 1870 Utah Census, only fourteen were still living in Utah according to the1880 Census. As noted earlier, three families—Mets, Exaltos, and Huismans—had moved to Mesa City, Arizona. Eleven families moved elsewhere. None of the single men listed in the 1870 Census, show up as married and living in Utah in the 1880 Census. The single women listed as domestics in the 1870 Census were difficult to trace since their maiden names were not recorded in the 1880 Census.
How well did these first Dutch immigrants adapt to their new surroundings? Did they move up or down from their occupational status in the Netherlands? After he returned from his missionary trip in 1863, Vanderwood moved to Malad, Idaho, where he built the first store that simultaneously served as telegraph office, stagecoach stop, and courthouse for southeastern Idaho. Timothy Mets entered into the mercantile business, first in Morgan City, Utah and later in Mesa City, Arizona. Dirk Bockholt became clerk of Salt Lake County. These three had the advantage of being able to speak English when they arrived. Comparing the occupations of the others from Dutch passenger records to their occupations listed in the 1880 Census, shows that the first generation of Dutch in Utah almost all worked at the same blue collar occupations in Utah as they did in the Netherlands, and like most first generation emigrants, they belonged to the working class. The second and third generations would become educated and rise in status.
In Utah, the status of the women depended on their husband’s position, or, if single upon their arrival in Utah, on the men they would marry. Annie Bosch, who arrived in Utah with the 1864 New Lighter group, entered into a marriage that no doubt gave her a solid standing in the church and community. On October 14, 1865, the then eighteen-year-old Annie married thirty-eight-year-old Charles Turner, Bishop of South Morgan Ward (Morgan Stake), and later ordained a Patriarch of the Church. Turner was a widower at the time of his marriage to Annie; however, after seven years of living in a monogamous relationship, he married a second wife. Annie bore him thirteen children, and as wife number one she probably enjoyed considerable social status as the wife of this prominent churchman.
Agatha (Aagje) Peters did not fare as well. In 1878, the then twenty-year-old Peters traveled to Utah to enter into a polygamous marriage with forty-five-year-old Bernard Hermann Schettler. Schettler, a half-brother to the Salt Lake City banker, Paul A. Schettler, had been on a mission to the Netherlands and had returned to Utah in July, 1878. Unaware of what trials this marriage would bring, Peters traveled with Schettler to Utah where the two were married August 8, 1878. Schettler, described by the newspaper as bald and deformed, already had three wives. As cashier of the Zion’s Savings Bank & Trust Company in Salt Lake City, Schettler could afford another wife, and as his wife, Peters would have had a respectable position in the Mormon community. However, she was caught in the same dragnet that rounded up hundred of other Mormons and who were fined and sometimes imprisoned under the 1882 Edmunds Act, not only on polygamy charges, but also on unlawful cohabitation charges. On September 16, 1886, the Salt Lake Tribune carried the following headline, “Treasurer Schettler Exposed.” The Tribune went on to report that Schettler appeared before United States Commissioner McKay, on charges of unlawful cohabitation and of having at least three wives. The first Mrs. Schettler testified she knew nothing of other wives; the mother-in-law of wife number three reported that Mr. Schettler had never asked her for her daughter’s hand in marriage and she knew of no such marriage. Two more witnesses, Agatha’s father and brother, also claimed to be ignorant of any relationship between Agatha and Schettler, although the brother stated that he had visited Agatha on occasion and that there had been little children around who called her mama. Agatha Peters promptly went into hiding. For two years she lived in Davis County near Woods Cross. On February 3, 1888, the Southern Utonian reported, “Agatha Peters, the alleged polygamous wife of B. H. Schettler, who is charged with unlawful cohabitation, was arrested by deputies Prait and Cannon Friday. She was taken before Commissioner Norrell, and released upon giving bonds in the sum of $500 for her appearance as a witness.” For a young Dutch woman having grown up in the pleasant city of Zutphen, in the Netherlands, with its many conveniences and plenty of people around her, and later in Salt Lake City, another bustling place, hiding in the wilderness with four little children proved to be too distressing, and she was later reported as saying she knew Mr. Schettler was “too religious a man to go back on polygamy, and that while hiding she had felt worse ‘than if I were in prison.’ And now that she had been found she would tell the truth, and ‘I don’t know if I will have any friends left among the Mormons after I have told the truth, but I don’t intend to lie.’” The Tribune also reported that Schettler was badly taken aback when he saw her and was told that she had confessed to the officers.
Schettler’s problems, and Agatha’s by association, were by no means over. In 1892 Schettler founded his own private bank, which folded in 1904, jeopardizing his private assets. In January 1905, Agatha found herself in court again, this time over the deed to the house which Schettler had deeded to her in 1883. Fortunately, the court ruled in her favor and she was allowed to keep her home. Nevertheless, Agatha did not live a life of luxury; the 1900 Census shows her working as a nurse to provide for her four children, by then teenagers. Her next-door neighbor in the Fourth Precinct of Salt Lake City was Elizabeth Parry, also a wife of Schettler. Schettler died on October 25, 1907, in Salt Lake City; Peters passed away on March 18, 1940, never having remarried.
Each year more Dutch immigrants trickled into Utah, their numbers small in comparison to other nationalities. From 1861 to 1879 twenty-four missionaries were sent to the Netherlands. Among them were many Dutch-born men who were sent back within a couple of years of their arrival in Utah. Some like Lammers, Mets, and Volker made two and even three trips. These twenty-four missionaries baptized 196 converts in the Netherlands, and during the same time span 202 (an average of eleven per year) immigrated to Utah, indicating that the Dutch were also heeding the call to gather in Zion.
Comparing that to the overall immigration figures to Utah from 1847 to 1877 (30 years) 70,000 or 2,300 per year, the Dutch made up only .002 percent.
Conclusion
In 1885 John Volker, the then mission president in the Netherlands was still advising the Saints in Amsterdam to lay away ten cents every week for an emigration fund. However, a decade later, the LDS Church began to de-emphasize the doctrine of gathering and encouraged foreign members to stay in their homelands to build up the church there. One of the reasons was that by 1893 the American economy had taken a downturn affecting conditions in Utah as well. After all the years of urging all Saints to emigrate, now that these people really wanted to, and the stigma of emigration no longer existed in Holland, they were told to stay home. This may have caused some grumbling among the Saints in the Netherlands, because in 1896, word came from Utah, “The First Presidency by way of the President of the European Mission has given the President of the Netherlands Mission the privilege of calling good and efficient young native Elders into the missionary field with the understanding that if they filled good and honorable missions, the Church would at the expiration of such a mission arrange for their transportation to Zion.” Thus, until the end of the century, moving to Zion changed from a mandate to a prize and an honor for the Dutch. With the new century, however, an increase in converts in the Netherlands and an increase in emigration numbers brought many more Dutch from the land of the dikes to the desert valley.

Janet Sjaarda Sheeres is verbonden aan de Calvin University te Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA. (2006)