The Mystery of William Pickett
About 16 years ago, at a Gubler family reunion, we (the kids) decided to reenact the life story of our ancestor Susanna Mehitable Rogers Sangiovanni Pickett Keate. Quite a long name, but she filled it with such an interesting life. From being born in Montreal, growing up first in rural Quebec and then moving to New York City, marrying an Italian Napoleonic revolutionary, moving to England, joining the LDS (Mormon) church and moving back, and eventually crossing the plains with her two sons and dying at the age of 91 in St. George, Utah, she led a very exciting and unusual life for a woman of her time. My mom’s cousin Jane Rae Topham has written a book about her life entitled “In Search of Living Water”. However, this blog is about her scoundrel of a husband, William Pickett.
The middle portion of his life is rather well known. Beginning in Mobile, Alabama, as a newspaper reporter, he moved up to Nauvoo, Illinois, apparently to report on the ‘goings-on’ of the Mormons. He seemed to have been a middle-of-the-road type of guy — not exactly jumping to be baptized, he was not antagonistic to the Mormons, and on one occasion persuaded an angry mob not to attack a Mormon settlement. When the Mormon Saints left Nauvoo, William Pickett ended up in St. Louis, where he married the Agnes Moulton Coolbrith Smith, widow of Joseph Smith’s brother Don Carlos. While living in St. Louis, he convinced my ancestress, Susanna Mehitable Rogers, who had just arrived from England a new convert, that they were to wed in secret. She apparently agreed; however, after several months, it seemed the secret would be out of the bag with the birth of their son. Susanna went to Winter Quarters to be with her family, while William Pickett, his wife, their twin sons, and her two daughters moved to greener pastures — in California. After living in Los Angeles as a printer for a while, he moved his family to San Francisco, where he engaged in printing, lawyer-ing, and hobby mining. In about 1876, two years before his wife Agnes died, William Pickett ended up missing.
William’s later life is difficult to piece together, but a few things have been found that may pertain to him. In the 1880 US Census, a William Pickett of the correct age was living as a miner in Yavapai County, Arizona, and family lore has held that William died in a mining camp in 1893 in the mountains of California. Perhaps with more research, this can be verified, giving William’s life a fitting ending. But the mystery of his origins has yet to be revealed.
Usually, a place of birth can be determined by using the US Census entries for a person; however, in William’s case, the census information adds more confusion to the mix. Following are the birthplaces found in the censuses for William and his three sons:
William: 1860: Ohio, 1870: Vermont, 1880: Virginia
Horatio: 1880: unknown, 1900: Massachusetts, 1910: Alabama
William Jr. and Don Carlos: 1900: Ohio, 1910: unknown, 1920: Virginia, 1930: Virginia
In Nauvoo about 1845, a William Pickett received a patriarchal blessing in Nauvoo, and listed his own birthdate and place as 2 November 1816 in Liverpool, Nova Scotia. As far as I can tell, there were no other William Picketts living in Nauvoo at the time, nor were there any other William Picketts that had joined the LDS church. A John W. Pickett, also a lawyer, was born in 1824 in Vermont, and was married 31 May 1849 in Milan, Erie County, Ohio; perhaps this John was a brother. It seems that the migration pattern of the Picketts may have been from Nova Scotia, through Vermont, to Ohio; this is a theory of mine, and one I’d love to research further.Â
Thus is the mystery of William Pickett. Was he from Alabama, Virginia, or Vermont? Hopefully time will tell.