Called a "serene intellectual" by historian Leonard J. Arrington,[3] Udall spent much of her adulthood homesteading in eastern Arizona while she raised six children, several of whom went on to have influential political careers.

John and Lois Hunt raised Ida in Iron County, Utah, until she was approximately a year old, at which time they moved to San Bernardino, California, where two of her sisters were born.

A mother who always welcomed us home from school, with the same cheerful smile, and made things so comfortable & pleasant for us, and a dear kind Grandma to whom we could always run".

[11] The Hunts arrived in San Lorenzo, Valencia County, New Mexico, on May 10, 1877, and they stopped there for three weeks before pressing on to the Savoia Valley, an interethnic community where Euro-American Latter-day Saints, Mexicans, Navajo, and Zuni lived in proximity to each other.

[14] While living in Savoia, Hunt studied Spanish,[15] taught her younger siblings in an ad hoc school, and made money as a seamstress.

[17] This time, Ida Hunt did not accompany the rest of her family; she instead moved back to Beaver, Utah, arriving there in November 1878, to live with her grandmother Louisa Barnes Pratt.

At this time, the Beaver Stake[e] of the LDS Church appointed Ida Hunt to serve in its Young Ladies Mutual Improvement Association (YLMIA[f]) as a counselor, or advisor, to the president.

John R. Murdock arranged for Hunt to make the trip with Jesse N. Smith, Eastern Arizona Stake president, and his wives Emma and Augusta.

[22] During this time, Latter-day Saints married polygamously as a religious practice, though the federal Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act had criminalized polygamy in American territories since 1862.

[23] The proportion of Latter-day Saint families participating in polygamy during the time of its official practice ranged between approximately 20% and 64%, depending on the congregation.

While Hunt was in Snowflake, she met David King Udall, a Latter-day Saint who at the time was bishop in St. Johns, Arizona, and superintendent of a church-endorsed co-op store.

[36] Sensitive to the feelings of Ella, whom she deeply respected,[37] Hunt moved back to Snowflake and returned to teaching at a school in Taylor.

[38] David, Ella, and Pearl Udall met up with Hunt in Snowflake, and on May 6, 1882, the four of them departed together, heading for St. George, Utah, to marry in the temple there.

[49] The Latter-day Saints were relative newcomers to the town, and more established residents resented the Mormons' presence[50] out of religious opposition as well as economic and political rivalry.

[49] In 1884, the local Apache Chief newspaper publicly proposed that the community lynch John Hunt, Udall's father, and her husband David.

[52] Worsening matters, in an attitude common among white Mormons at the time, she held racist views against the Mexican community living in St. Johns, whom she did not consider worthy neighbors.

[54] To avoid being subpoenaed and forced to testify against him, as questioning plural wives in court was a well-known strategy of anti-polygamy prosecution, Ida Udall went into hiding for over two years in a practice known as the "Mormon Underground".

Even in this correspondence, David wrote as if he and Ida were siblings in order to maintain plausible deniability about their relationship, though not being acknowledged as a wife frustrated Udall, who felt lonely in her isolation from the family.

[67] Udall and her daughter did not immediately return to St. Johns; they stayed with two of her sisters in Snowflake until March 1888, when she moved to a farm in Round Valley, Arizona, that David and his brother had purchased.

[69] When David had financial difficulty in caring for the whole family, he temporarily had Ida move back in with her parents in Snowflake, for fear of "offend[ing] Ella", and Udall's place in the household remained inconstant thereafter.

Anti-polygamy prosecution also continued to haunt Udall; in the summer of 1891, she and friend Mary Ann Linton Morgan cut short a stay in Round Valley and fled to Snowflake to hide from federal marshals.

Over the years, she tended a garden, raised grain, kept pigs, cows, and chickens; made cheese, butter, and hay; and managed the property as a way station for mail carriers.

[78] Throughout these conditions, Udall was a "serene intellectual", in the words of historian Leonard J. Arrington, who promoted culture and education as a teacher and musician.

Pauline took responsibility for Udall's care, and Pearl, at the time a student at the Los Angeles College of Osteopathy, took a leave from her program in order to help.

Pearl Udall moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, and opened a medical practice, which she successfully ran the rest of her life.

Pauline remained in northeastern Arizona; she served for seventeen years as president of the LDS Church's Snowflake Stake Primary Association.

[90] Udall was the grandmother of Maria S. Ellsworth, her biographer, a schoolteacher, and a book review author, whom Kim Engel-Pearson called a "specialist in Mormon History".

Written with intertextuality with then-contemporary literature, according to Long, the diary demonstrates creativity and literary strategy, functioning as both a "personal resource" and "public record".

[94] As a historical document, Charles S. Peterson describes Udall's writing as being "outstanding among" Mormon women's diaries, "written with feeling and perception".

[101] Historian Jan Shipps wrote of the "beauty and pathos of Ida Hunt's story" but believed that the book suffered from Ellsworth "fail[ing] to make a consistent effort to render [Mormonism] intelligible to a general audience".