_INTRODUCTION.This book had its genesis in a research fellowship I received from the Huntington Library in 1992. My interest, among other things, was Eliza R. Snow's pioneer diaries, housed in the Huntington's impressive document collection. As a leading woman of early Mormonism--a poet, female activist, secret polygamous wife to Latter-day Saint (LDS) church founder Joseph Smith, and later a wife of Brigham Young--Snow seemed significant enough to warrant further attention, even though much had already been written about her. Particularly interesting to me were her oblique allusions to other plural wives, sometimes referred to by given name, sometimes by maiden or married surname only. To identify these women, I knew I would have to consult reliable lists of the marriages of Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, and Joseph Smith. Jeffery Johnson had published a good list of Brigham Young's wives, and Stanley Kimball had provided a full list of Heber's. Nevertheless, for Smith himself, I could not find any definitive listing of his plural marriage partners.
Andrew Jenson's century-old list of twenty-seven of Smith's plural wives provided a core of basic data. In the 1950s, Stanley S. Ivins compiled an unpublished list of eighty-four women, but many of these were only sealings to Joseph after his death. The first fully annotated, footnoted inventory of Smith's plural wives was the appendix of Fawn Brodies_No Man Knows My History, published in 1945, with minor updating in the 1971 edition. Although Brodie was a pioneer in documenting Smith's polygamy, fifty years of secondary publications and classification of primary documents have dated her book, and, moreover, scholars have faulted her for relying on antagonistic sources that have since proven unreliable.
Eventually I concluded that a full, complete, up-to-date list of Joseph Smith's wives would be a valuable addition to Mormon studies, and my project on Eliza Snow metamorphosed into an investigation of all of the wives of Joseph Smith, with Snow being one among many. Since early polygamy was secret and not officially documented, there are still many uncertainties in even a conservative, carefully documented description of Smith's extended family. Nevertheless, this book furthers research on these women, provides an update to Brodie, and attempts a more balanced evaluation than her book offered.