Commentary: Brigham Young’s Catholic daughter loved her father, loathed polygamy and lived amid conflict

Brigham Young’s only Catholic daughter lived a colorful and conflicted life.

Eudora “Dora” Lovina Young Dunford Hagan was born in Salt Lake City in May 1852. Her mother, Lucy Bigelow Young, was one of 16 plural wives who had children with the man known as the Lion of the Lord.

Dora and her two younger sisters (Susa Young Gates and Mabel Young Sanborn) grew up as Latter-day Saint royalty in the Lion House, one of Young’s homes. Romney Burke’s 2022 book about Susa says the house was “full of half-siblings who in a given week might include four babes in arms, six toddlers, five or six preschoolers, 13 or more school-age children between 6 and 14 years, [and] several older offspring in their late teens to early 20s.”

Despite the crowded conditions, Burke says, “Brigham’s families lived in relative splendor.” The family compound — a 50-acre plot next to Salt Lake City’s Temple Square — “was well-appointed, self-sufficient” and included a store, flour mill, barn, corrals, garden, orchard, gymnasium, even a swimming pool.

Dora was witty, popular and beautiful but rebellious. Ignoring all objections, she eloped at age 18, running off to the home of a Protestant minister to marry boyfriend Morely Dunford, the son of a Main Street shoe merchant.

The New York Times said Dora’s actions “scandalized” the Saints and “enraged” her father. Poor Susa — coerced into the conspiracy — got blamed for it, too, and was banished with her mother to live in Young’s St. George home.

Susa’s writings say Morely was “industrious…with a sunny disposition” but lacked self-control, especially regarding alcohol. After giving birth to two sons, Dora divorced him in 1876 and moved to St. George to rejoin her family.

Perhaps to appease her worried parents, Dora flirted with plural marriage. In February 1877, The Salt Lake Tribune reported that “the prophet’s wayward lamb” was about to be “sealed” to someone.

It turned out to be future church President Wilford Woodruff, then age 70. Young married Dora and Woodruff in March 1877, but they separated a year later after their newborn child died.

Dora was devastated when her father, the longest-serving president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, died in August 1877. She attended his funeral at the Salt Lake Tabernacle along with some 15,000 other people.

Burke’s book says Young’s last words to Dora’s mother, Lucy, were “take care of the girls.” That mandate proved to be a challenge. Susa married twice and Mabel thrice — the last time to a gentile.

Booted from the church

Making matters more difficult, Dora and several of Young’s children sued his estate and challenged his will. In 1879, Dora married Albert Hagan, the lawyer who helped her win a favorable settlement in that litigation.

Hagan’s law firm was a high-profile force in the courts. He represented Mark Twain in a Utah copyright lawsuit and his partner Frank Tilford had helped prosecute John D. Lee for the infamous 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre.

After the estate lawsuit, the church excommunicated Dora and the other litigious heirs. In May 1880, the Deseret News declared that the apostates had “falsely charged their father’s executors and the authorities of the church with defrauding the heirs.”

Publicly rejected by the church into which she was born, Dora left Utah and adopted the Catholic faith of her new husband. The couple moved to several places where Hagan practiced law, including Chicago; Denver; New Mexico; Spokane, Washington; and Idaho.

Dora was in the prime of her life.

In September 1880, Dora told a Chicago newspaper that she adored and missed her father. “I loved him beyond anything that words can tell. … He was the most magnetic person I ever knew or heard of.”

But she hated polygamy. “There was an outward semblance of goodwill, but, in reality, the Mormon wives hate each other with deadly hatred. This alone is one of the most evident evil effects of the dreadful system, this hatred that exists under roofs called homes, what are often perfect hells, and scenes of the most disgraceful quarrels.”

The Hagans settled in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Two of their children died young; two others grew into adulthood.

Albert established himself as a respected attorney, practicing in northern Idaho and eastern Washington. He died in his early 50s in 1895.

Albert’s death dealt a financial and emotional blow to Dora. She struggled to make ends meet, living with her son in Southern California for a time and then staying with her sister Mabel in the Northwest.

A home in her new faith

Even after Albert’s death, Utah gossip mongers hounded Dora. In 1905, the same year her mother, Lucy, died, The Salt Lake Herald published a series of wild and often inaccurate articles about Dora.

One suggested Dora engaged in multiple “entangling matrimonial alliances” and had conspired to lock Albert’s first wife away in an asylum. The Herald also alleged Dora had apostatized from the LDS Church and soon would do the same to the Catholics by marrying a fourth time.

Dora was and remained, in reality, a devoted Catholic. She was active in her Pasadena parish and was known to be close friends with Baltimore Cardinal James Gibbons, one of the best-known American Catholics of his time.

Her new faith stuck with Dora’s descendants as well.

Her son, a talented singer, performed with a distinguished Catholic choir. And her great-grandson joined Utah’s old Huntsville monastery and is one of the Trappist monks I wrote about in my 2021 book, “Monastery Mornings: My Unusual Boyhood Among the Saints and Monks.”

Newspaper accounts say the adult Young/Bigelow sisters and their families visited one another frequently. Dora even stayed involved in the Brigham Young Family Association.

Dora’s Catholicism, however, created conflict with Susa, who had become an outspoken defender of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

In response to Susa’s passionate pleas that she return to their once-shared faith, Dora wrote: “I am so sorry you are so troubled about me. In my spiritual life, I am most happy in my devout belief of the holy Catholic Church.…It is wrong for you to harp against my holy belief — I don’t attempt to convert you to my belief.”

That’s a painful conversation many other Utah families may have had through the years.

After a long illness, Dora died at her daughter’s home in Salt Lake City in October 1921. She was 69. Her funeral was at Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic Church, and she is buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery.

Despite the religious divide between them, Susa loved the older sister she called “the idol” of both her and Brigham’s hearts — but who never returned to their church.

At the end of Susa’s life, she lamented in her journal, “Poor, tragic, selfish, vain Dora — where are you?”

Another Utah Trappist monk, my friend Father Patrick Boyle, heard that type of question, too, often asked by Catholics, Latter-day Saints and even nonbelievers about their loved ones on unexpected spiritual detours.

He would usually smile and respond, “They’re right where God wants them to be.”

Note to readers • Michael Patrick O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City who frequently represents The Salt Lake Tribune in legal matters. His book “Monastery Mornings: My Unusual Boyhood Among the Saints and Monks,” was chosen by the League of Utah Writers as the best nonfiction book in 2022. His new holiday novel, tentatively titled “The Merry Matchmaker Monks of Shamrock Valley,” will be published in time for Christmas 2026. He blogs at theboymonk.com. This article is available to Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.