[2] Levi Stewart was also married to Ella's aunt and Margery's sister, Artemacy "Macy" Wilkerson, as the family participated in the church's historical practice of polygamy.

[3] Growing up in Salt Lake City, Stewart attended private schools and was taught by poet Sarah Elizabeth Carmichael and educator Theodore Belden Lewis.

In 1870, LDS Church president Brigham Young asked Levi Stewart to move to southern Utah, found the town of Kanab, and serve as the first Latter-day Saint bishop there.

[12][13] Stewart was also the first telegraphist at the Kanab office (established in her father's home),[7] where she telegraphed to Washington, D. C. reports from John Wesley Powell's second expedition to the Grand Canyon.

David Udall wrote of the encounter that "the fair, slender girl with clear blue eyes took my heart away with her".

[14] After courting for two years, Stewart and Udall married in the Salt Lake City Endowment House on February 1, 1875.

They lived briefly in Nephi and then Kanab, and Udall gave birth to their first child, a daughter they named Pearl (b.

[17] In October 1880, the Udalls moved to St. Johns, Arizona in response to the church calling David to serve as bishop there.

Moved by her experience with her mother's co-wife, Ella Udall expressed openness to the practice in the abstract, but she was more uncomfortable with the prospect of polygamy in her own marriage.

[21] "The subject in question has caused me a great amount of pain and sorrow, perhaps more than you could imagine, yet I feel as I have from the beginning that if it is the Lord's will I am perfectly willing to try to endure it and trust it will be overruled for the best good of all.

[24] Ella and Ida Udall spent the wedding night together, and on their return journey to St. Johns they reconciled somewhat by having long, private conversations and reading novels out loud with one another.

For the next two years, Ida, Ella, and their respective children moved frequently between Snowflake, Round Valley, and St. Johns without significantly overlapping.

[36] For many years, Ella, David, and Ida Udall lived a hard life in which the family's economic resources were thin.

[5] Apostles John W. Taylor and Matthias F. Cowley spoke privately with David Udall in 1903 to ask him to marry a widow named Mary Ann Linton Morgan as a third wife.

[55] In the twenty-first century, NPS continues to maintain that telegraph room and recount Udall's role in Pipe Spring's history.

[1][13] In 1969, Film Service Corporation (FSC) received NPS permission to use Pipe Spring as a set for their television series Death Valley Days.

[56] FSC filmed three episodes at the site in September 1968 and July 1969, one of which portrayed Ella Stewart (played by Lane Bradbury[57]) in her role as a telegraph operator.