You might want to see two related posts and comments where I create a list of articles that explore Deseret polygamy statistics. You need an academic subscription to elctronic journal databases to access some of them.

http://www.fairblog.org/2008/01/21/and-we-multiplied-exceedingly/

http://www.fairblog.org/2008/01/13/lawrence-odonnells-charges-of-rape/

My research is on going as I would like to address some of the criticism received here. 1) examine the effect of immigration. 2) separate out what the Gentile population in Utah is doing. 3) Present more of a dynamic overview instead of relying so much on an 1880 snapshot.

I suspect that immigrants were close to a 50-50 male female ratio, but before immigrating/converting were married off at a much less efficient rate and hence had a growth rate smaller than more established Mormon families in Utah. So the short term impact of immigration would be a spike in new marriages, but long term would decrease the growth rate as it would take awhile for offspring from these new unions to become part of the marriage pool.

Currently I have been analyzing the Mormon Immigration Index to see if I can confirm or deny that working hypothesis.

If I see more helpful articles I will continue to post them here.

After reading this, I can see why people keep leaving comments. I hope this isn’t rejected, cause i would really like to read more. Can you post some more good literature?…

Age 2006(US) 1880(US) 1880 (UT)
15-19 98.5 98.8 98.6
20-24 86.7 77.3 70.3
25-29 57.4 41.1 33.5
30-34 33.4 23.8 22.7
35-39 23.3 14.9 17.4

The only age range that was less married was the 35-39 year olds.

Further dissection of that age range shows that of the 638 single men, 198 were miners and 46 were soldiers. At that age range 85% of the soldiers in Fort Cameron or Douglas were single and 51% of the miners were. Throwing miners and soldiers out of the sample drops the never married number down to 12.2% which is below the national average.

Age 2006(US) 1880(US) 1880(UT)
13-14 — 99.6 99.9
15-17 98.6 94.8 91.4
18-19 94.7 78.7 62.5
20-24 75.3 48.4 26.0
25-29 43.1 23.2 7.53
30-34 24.0 14.3 3.09
35-39 16.7 10.8 1.71

Moreover, the gap between the proportion of [Manti] men and women who never married (2.9 percent and 2.3 percent respectively) became insignificant in the younger cohort. In any case, the proportions of men and ” women who married was extremely high in comparison to their contemporaries. Over 8 percent of American men and women born ” between 1835 and 1864 remained unmarried, while in northwestern Europe, the former home of many Utahns, about 20 percent remained single.

You make some good points. I just discovered an article by Kathryn Daynes that explores this topic further (HT: Jeff Lindsay). Her findings mirror my own and add to them.

Some interesting quotes:

Despite the disadvantages of males in the Utah marriage market, an in-depth study of marriage patterns in Manti, Utah, shows that only a small percentage of men failed eventually to marry and that they married at younger ages than men generally in the United States during the second half of the nineteenth century.

It is unclear, though, how many non-Mormon men, such as soldiers, merchants, and miners, were included in each census. Dean May has calculated that non-Mormons accounted for 12 percent of Utah’s population in 1860 and 21 percent in 1880. Because non-Mormon men undoubtedly outnumbered non-Mormon women in nineteenth-century Utah, the preponderance of men, as shown in the census, is unlikely to reflect the sex ratio within the Mormon population.