Dean Hughes on the writing of Muddy and River

A guest post by Dean Hughes on writing the historical novels Muddy: Where Faith and Polygamy Collide and River: Where Faith and Consecration Converge.

I first became interested in the Muddy River mission when I discovered that my third great grandfather, Robert Harris, Jr., was among those who settled on the Muddy. I knew nothing about this settlement south of St. George and North of Las Vegas, but one thing I learned in my research was that the people who were eventually released from that mission were the nucleus of the Saints who established Orderville, Utah.

So I set out to write a novel about that entire history. The trouble was, the book became too long. I had completed one draft of the manuscript when my wife Kathy and I were called by the Church to serve in Beirut, Lebanon, where we worked extensively with refugees. When we returned after eighteen months, I realized that my “Muddy” story needed more fleshing out, so I proposed to editors at Deseret Book that I break it into two volumes, which became Muddy and River.

The titles are a play on words, I suppose, but the two rivers, the Muddy and the East Fork of the Virgin, came to symbolize the atmosphere of the two books: one turgid and troublesome and the other clear but unpredictable.

I didn’t set out to write about polygamy, but the practice was central to the societies in both settlements. Latter-day Saint fiction writers—with the notable exception of Maurine Whipple—have tended to avoid this uncomfortable issue.  But times have changed, and we are now looking at our history with an eye to comprehending our full heritage.  No element of our heritage carries more myths and misunderstandings than plural marriage.

I was one of the many writers who helped to create Saints, Volume 2: No Unhallowed Hand. I was assigned to draft some of the chapters that dealt with Utah polygamy. After reading many journals, I felt that I had a fairly good grasp of the challenges and partial achievements of those families. I hope I have provided a balanced picture of the lives of polygamists from both the female and male perspectives.

Something else happened as I studied the Muddy Mission. Conditions for those settlers were beyond difficult, but for some of the people the bigger tests came in the form of confusing directions from Church leaders. Warren Foote, in his detailed journal, reported that Brigham Young visited the Muddy Valley (Moapa Valley) and expressed utter disappointment in the potential success of a settlement established only through great effort and sacrifice—at his call. After years of obedience and trust, Brigham Young’s pronouncement was devastating to a people who believed they were fulfilling an inspired mission.

I sometimes struggle with obedience. My impression is, many of us do. We accept leadership, but we don’t like to turn over our independence entirely. That was the challenge for my characters in Muddy, and I know that my account has been troubling for some readers. But I did try to be honest about the matter, and I think maybe it’s a subject worth looking into. It may be the subject for our time, especially for young people.

River deals with the United Order. If you think you know all about that, you’re probably wrong. (And the same can be said for polygamy.) Most of us have grown up with simplistic explanations for the reasons the United Order “failed.” But for several years good people lived together in a spirit of cooperation and equality that has rarely been achieved in our world.

We are believers in free enterprise and I doubt that many of us are terribly excited about “leveling” economic systems, but Brigham Young spent the final years of his life attempting to establish a higher law: a law that required consecration. There’s much to learn in reading about the most successful of the United Order experiments. Maybe the coronavirus threat to us and the danger of continued economic trials will make the events in River all the more worth thinking about.

There are still ways for well-off people to raise up those in need: fast offerings, humanitarian donations, support of community charities, and simple acts of kindness. But maybe we need to think about how much we are doing as compared to how much we could do. I’m aware of all the objections to “enabling” the lazy, but shouldn’t the idealpresented in the Book of Mormon cause us to wonder about ourselves: “And they had all things common among them; therefore there were not rich and poor . . .” (4 Nephi1:3)

I do like to think. And I do like to invite others to think. But I also like to feel, and these two books have more than ideas in them. I hope that readers can come to care about the good people who tried so hard to settle a challenging Nevada desert or who attempted to live two higher laws: plural marriage and the United Order. If we think and feel rightly about these characters, we may change inside a little, and that might be a good thing.

And by the way, my process did come full circle. I’m publishing a book with Atheneum (Simon and Schuster) this fall called Displaced. It takes place in Beirut, Lebanon, where Kathy and I learned about rejected people, refugees, who still struggle every day to stay alive while the world pays far too little attention to their pain.

Dean Hughes is a best-selling writer who published his 100th book in 2014. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Weber State College in Utah and master’s and PhD degrees from the University of Washington. He has attended post-doctoral seminars at Stanford and Yale Universities and taught English at Central Missouri State University and Brigham Young University. His previous AML awards in include 1994 Young Adult Novel for The Trophy, 1998 Novel Award for Far from Home, the 2005 Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters for his Children of the Promise series, and an 2013 Outstanding Achievement Award for his writing career. Muddy is a finalist for the 2019 AML Novel Award.