I have seen a field of indian-corn stripped bare of every leaf and cob by the crickets; but the owner told me that he found consolation in the fact that they ate up the weeds as well. For the locusts there is no cure. The plovers may eat a few billions, but, as a rule, Coloradans must learn to expect that the locusts will increase with the increase of the crops on which they feed. The more corn, the more locusts—the more plovers, perhaps; a clear gain to the locusts and plovers, but a dead loss to the farmers and ranchmen.
The Coloradan “boys” are a handsome, intelligent race. The mixture of Celtic and Saxon blood has here produced a generous and noble manhood; and the freedom from wood, and consequent exposure to wind and sun, has exterminated ague, and driven away the hatchet-face; but for all this, the Coloradans may haveto succumb to the locusts. At present they affect to despise them. “How may you get on in Colorado?” said a Missourian one day to a “boy” that was up at St. Louis. “Purty well, guess, if it warn‘t for the insects.” “What insects? Crickets?” “Crickets! Wall, guess not—jess insects like: rattlesnakes, panther, bar, catamount, and sichlike.”
“The march of empire stopped by a grasshopper” would be a good heading for a Denver paper, but would not represent a fact. The locusts may alter the step, but not cause a halt. If corn is impossible, cattle are not; already thousands are pastured round Denver on the natural grass. For horses, for merino sheep, these rolling table-lands are peculiarly adapted. The New Zealand paddock system may be applied to the whole of this vast region—Dutch clover, French lucern, could replace the Indian grasses, and four sheep to the acre would seem no extravagant estimate of the carrying capability of the lands. The world must come here for its tallow, its wool, its hides, its food.
In this seemingly happy conclusion there lurks a danger. Flocks and herds are the main props of great farming, the natural supporters of an aristocracy. Cattle breeding is inconsistent, if not with republicanism, at least with pure democracy. There are dangerous classes of two kinds—those who have too many acres, as well as those who have too few. The danger at least is real. Nothing short of violence or special legislation can prevent the plains from continuing to be forever that which under nature‘s farming they have ever been—the feeding ground for mighty flocks, the cattle pasture of the world.
“WHATwill I do for you if you stop here among us? Why, I‘ll name that peak after you in the next survey,” said Governor Gilpin, pointing to a snowy mountain towering to its 15,000 feet in the direction of Mount Lincoln. I was not to be tempted, however; and as for Dixon, there is already a county named after him in Nebraska: so off we went along the foot of the hills on our road to the Great Salt Lake, following the “Cherokee Trail.”
Striking north from Denver by Vasquez Fork and Cache la Poudre—called “Cash le Powder,” just as Mont Royal has become Montreal, and Sault de Ste Marie, Soo—we entered the Black Mountains, or Eastern foot-hills, at Beaver Creek. On the second day, at two in the afternoon, we reached Virginia Dale for breakfast, without adventure, unless it were the shooting of a monster rattlesnake that lay “coiled in our path upon the mountain side.” Had we been but a few minutes later, we should have made it a halt for “supper” instead of breakfast, as the drivers had but these two names for our daily meals, at whatever hour they took place. Our “breakfasts” varied from 3.30A.M.to 2P.M.; our suppers from 3P.M.to 2A.M.
Here we found the weird red rocks that give to the river and the territory their name of Colorado, and came upon the mountain plateau at the spot where last year the Utes scalped seven men only three hours afterSpeaker Colfax and a Congressional party had passed with their escort.
While trundling over the sandy wastes of Laramie Plains, we sighted the Wind River chain drawn by Bierstadt in his great picture of the “Rocky Mountains.” The painter has caught the forms, but missed the atmosphere of the range: the clouds and mists are those of Maine and Massachusetts; there is color more vivid, darkness more lurid, in the storms of Colorado.
This was our first sight of the main range since we entered the Black Hills, although we passed through the gorges at the very foot of Long‘s Peak. It was not till we had reached the rolling hills of “Medicine Bow”—a hundred miles beyond the peak—that we once more caught sight of it shining in the rear.
In the night between the second and third days the frost was so bitter at the great altitude to which we had attained, that we resorted to every expedient to keep out the cold. While I was trying to peg down one of the leathern flaps of our ambulance with the pencil from my note-book, my eye caught the moonlight on the ground, and I drew back saying, “We are on the snow.” The next time we halted, I found that what I had seen was an impalpable white dust, the much dreaded alkali.
In the morning of the third day we found ourselves in a country of dazzling white, dotted with here and there a tuft of sage-brush—an Artemisia akin to that of the Algerian highlands. At last we were in the “American desert”—the “Mauvaises terres.”
Once only did we escape for a time from alkali and sage to sweet waters and sweet grass. Near Bridger‘s Pass and the “divide” between Atlantic and Pacific floods, we came on a long valley swept by chillybreezes, and almost unfit for human habitation from the rarefaction of the air, but blessed with pasture ground on which domesticated herds of Himalayan yâk should one day feed. Settlers in Utah will find out that this animal, which would flourish here at altitudes of from 4000 to 14,000 feet, and which bears the most useful of all furs, requires less herbage in proportion to its weight and size than almost any animal we know.
This Bridger‘s Pass route is that by which the telegraph line runs, and I was told by the drivers strange stories of the Indians and their views on this great Medicine. They never destroy out of mere wantonness, but have been known to cut the wire and then lie in ambush in the neighborhood, knowing that repairing parties would arrive and fall an easy prey. Having come one morning upon three armed overlanders lying fast asleep, while a fourth kept guard by a fire which coincided with a gap in the posts, but which was far from any timber or even scrub, I have my doubts as to whether “white Indians” have not much to do with the destruction of the line.
From one of the uplands of the Artemisia barrens we sighted at once Fremont‘s Peak on the north, and another great snow-dome upon the south. The unknown mountain was both the more distant and the loftier of the two, yet the maps mark no chain within eyeshot to the southward. The country on either side of this well-worn track is still as little known as when Captain Stansbury explored it in 1850; and when we crossed the Green River, as the Upper Colorado is called, it was strange to remember that the stream is here lost in a thousand miles of undiscovered wilds, to be found again flowing toward Mexico. Near the ferry is the place where Albert S. Johnson‘s mule-trainswere captured by the Mormons under General Lot Smith.
In the middle of the night we would come upon mule-trains starting on their march in order to avoid the mid-day sun, and thus save water, which they are sometimes forced to carry with them for as much as fifty miles. When we found them halted, they were always camped on bluffs and in bends, far from rocks and tufts, behind which the Indians might creep and stampede the cattle: this they do by suddenly swooping down with fearful noises, and riding in among the mules or oxen at full speed. The beasts break away in their fright, and are driven off before the sentries have time to turn out the camp.
On the fourth day from Denver, the scenery was tame enough, but strange in the extreme. Its characteristic feature was its breadth. No longer the rocky defiles of Virginia Dale, no longer the glimpses of the main range as from Laramie Plains and the foot-hills of Medicine Bow, but great rolling downs like those of the plains much magnified. We crossed one of the highest passes in the world without seeing snow, but looked back directly we were through it on snow-fields behind us and all around.
At Elk Mountain we suffered greatly from the frost, but by mid day we were taking off our coats, and the mules hanging their heads in the sun once more, while those which should have taken their places were, as the ranchman expressed it, “kicking their heels in pure cussedness” at a stream some ten miles away.
While walking before the “hack” through the burning sand of Bitter Creek, I put up a bird as big as a turkey, which must, I suppose, have been a vulture. The sage-brush growing here as much as three feet high, and as stout and gnarled as century-oldheather, gave shelter to a few coveys of sage-hens, at which we shot without much success, although they seldom ran, and never rose. Their color is that of the brush itself—a yellowish gray—and it is as hard to see them as to pick up a partridge on a sun-dried fallow at home in England. Of wolves and rattlesnakes there were plenty, but of big game we saw but little, only a few black-tails in the day.
This track is more traveled by trains than is the Smoky Hill route, which accounts for the absence of game on the line; but that there is plenty close at hand is clear from the way we were fed. Smoky Hill starvation was forgotten in piles of steaks of elk and antelope; but still no fruit, no vegetable, no bread, no drink save “sage-brush tea,” and that half poisoned with the water of the alkaline creeks.
Jerked buffalo had disappeared from our meals. The droves never visit the Sierra Madre now, and scientific books have said that in the mountains they were ever unknown. In Bridger‘s Pass we saw the skulls of not less than twenty buffalo, which is proof enough that they once were here, though perhaps long ago. The skin and bones will last about a year after the beast has died, for the wolves tear them to pieces to get at the marrow within, but the skull they never touch; and the oldest ranchman failed to give me an answer as to how long skulls and horns might last. We saw no buffalo roads like those across the plains.
From the absence of buffalo, absence of birds, absence of flowers, absence even of Indians, the Rocky Mountain plateau is more of a solitude than are the plains. It takes days to see this, for you naturally notice it less. On the plains, the glorious climate, the masses of rich blooming plants, the millions of beasts, and insects, and birds, all seem prepared to the handof man, and for man you are continually searching. Each time you round a hill, you look for the smoke of the farm. Here on the mountains you feel as you do on the sea: it is nature‘s own lone solitude, but from no fault of ours—the higher parts of the plateau were not made for man.
Early on the fifth night we dashed suddenly out of utter darkness into a mountain glen blazing with fifty fires, and perfumed with the scent of burning cedar. As many wagons as there were fires were corraled in an ellipse about the road, and 600 cattle were pastured within the fire-glow in rich grass that told of water. Men and women were seated round the camp-fires praying and singing hymns. As we drove in, they rose and cheered us “on your way to Zion.” Our Gentile driver yelled back the warhoop “How! How! How! How—w! We‘ll give yer love to Brigham;” and back went the poor travelers to their prayers again. It was a bull train of the Mormon immigration.
Five minutes after we had passed the camp we were back in civilization, and plunged into polygamous society all at once, with Bishop Myers, the keeper of Bear River Ranch, drawing water from the well, while Mrs. Myers No. 1 cooked the chops, and Mrs. Myers No. 2 laid the table neatly.
The kind bishop made us sit before the fire till we were warm, and filled our “hack” with hay, that we might continue so, and off we went, inclined to look favorably on polygamy after such experience of polygamists.
Leaving Bear River about midnight, at two o‘clock in the morning of the sixth day we commenced the descent of Echo Canyon, the grandest of all the gully passes of the Wasatch Range. The night was so clearthat I was able to make some outline sketches of the cliffs from the ranch where we changed mules. Echo Canyon is the Thermopylæ of Utah, the pass that the Mormons fortified against the United States forces under Albert S. Johnson at the time of “Buchanan‘s raid.” Twenty-six miles long, often not more than a few yards wide at the bottom, and a few hundred feet at the top, with an overhanging cliff on the north side, and a mountain wall on the south, Echo Canyon would be no easy pass to force. Government will do well to prevent the Pacific Railroad from following this defile.
After breakfast at Coalville, the Mormon Newcastle, situated in a smiling valley not unlike that between Martigny and Saint Maurice, we dashed on past Kimball‘s Ranch, where we once more hitched horses instead of mules, and began our descent of seventeen miles down Big Canyon, the best of all the passes of the Wasatch. Rounding a spur at the end of our six-hundredth mile from Denver, we first sighted the Mormon promised land.
The sun was setting over the great dead lake to our right, lighting up the valley with a silvery gleam from Jordan River, and the hills with a golden glow from off the snow-fields of the many mountain chains and peaks around. In our front, the Oquirrh, or Western Range, stood out in sharp purple outlines upon a sea-colored sky. To our left were the Utah Mountains, blushing rose, all about our heads the Wasatch glowing in orange and gold. From the flat valley in the sunny distance rose the smoke of many houses, the dust of many droves; on the bench-land of Ensign Peak, on the lake side, white houses peeped from among the peach-trees, modestly, and hinted the presence of the city.
Here was Plato‘s table-land of the Atlantic isle—onegreat field of corn and wheat, where only twenty years ago Fremont, the pathfinder, reported wheat and corn impossible.
“ILOOKupon Mohammed and Brigham as the very best men that God could send as ministers to those unto whom He sent them,” wrote Elder Frederick Evans, of the “Shaker” village of New Lebanon, in a letter to us, inclosing another by way of introduction to the Mormon president.
Credentials from the Shaker to the Mormon chief—from the great living exponent of the principle of celibacy to the “most married” in all America—were not to be kept undelivered; so the moment we had bathed we posted off to a merchant to whom we had letters, that we might inquire when his spiritual chief and military ruler would be home again from his “trip north.” The answer was, “To-morrow.”
After watching the last gleams fade from the snow-fields upon the Wasatch, we parted for the night, as I had to sleep in a private house, the hotel being filled even to the balcony. As I entered the drawing-room of my entertainer, I heard the voice of a lady reading, and caught enough of what she said to be aware that it was a defense of polygamy. She ceased when she saw the stranger; but I found that it was my host‘s first wife reading Belinda Pratt‘s book to her daughters—girls just blooming into womanhood.
After an agreeable chat with the ladies, doubly pleasant as it followed upon a long absence from civilization, I went to my room, which I afterward found to be that of the eldest son, a youth of sixteen years. In one corner stood two Ballard rifles, and two revolvers and a militia uniform hung from pegs upon the wall. When I lay down with my hands underneath the pillow—an attitude instinctively adopted to escape the sand-flies, I touched something cold. I felt it—a full-sized Colt, and capped. Such was my first introduction to Utah Mormonism.
On the morrow, we had the first and most formal of our four interviews with the Mormon president, the conversation lasting three hours, and all the leading men of the church being present. When we rose to leave, Brigham said: “Come to see me here again; Brother Stenhouse will show you everything;” and then blessed us in these words: “Peace be with you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Elder Stenhouse followed us out of the presence, and somewhat anxiously put the odd question: “Well, is he a white man?” “White” is used in Utah as a general term of praise: a white man is a man—to use our corresponding idiom—not so black as he is painted. A “white country” is a country with grass and trees; just as a white man means a man who is morally not a Ute, so a white country is a land in which others than Utes can dwell.
We made some complimentary answer to Stenhouse‘s question; but it was impossible not to feel that the real point was: Is Brigham sincere?
Brigham‘s deeds have been those of a sincere man. His bitterest opponents cannot dispute the fact that in 1844, when Nauvoo was about to be deserted, owing to the attacks of a ruffianly mob, Brighamrushed to the front, and took the chief command. To be a Mormon leader then was to be a leader of an outcast people, with a price set on his head, in a Missourian county in which almost every man who was not a Mormon was by profession an assassin. In the sense, too, of believing that he is what he professes to be, Brigham is undoubtedly sincere. In the wider sense of being that which he professes to be he comes off as well, if only we will read his words in the way he speaks them. He tells us that he is a prophet—God‘s representative on earth; but when I asked him whether he was of a wholly different spiritual rank to that held by other devout men, he said: “By no means. I am a prophet—one of many. All good men are prophets; but God has blessed me with peculiar favor in revealing His will oftener and more clearly through me than through other men.”
Those who would understand Brigham‘s revelations must read Bentham. The leading Mormons are utilitarian deists. “God‘s will be done,” they, like other deists, say is to be our rule; and God‘s will they find in written Revelation and in Utility. God has given men, by the actual hand of angels, the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Book of Covenants, the revelation upon Plural Marriage. When these are exhausted, man, seeking for God‘s will, has to turn to the principle of Utility: that which is for the happiness of mankind—that is of the church—is God‘s will, and must be done. While Utility is their only index to God‘s pleasure, they admit that the church must be ruled—that opinions may differ as to what is the good of the church, and therefore the will of God. They meet, then, annually, in an assembly of the people, and electing church officers by popular will and acclamation, they see God‘s finger in the ballot-box. They say,like the Jews in the election of their judges, that the choice of the people is the choice of God. This is what men like John Taylor or Daniel Wells appear to feel; the ignorant are permitted to look upon Brigham as something more than man, and though Brigham himself does nothing to confirm this view, the leaders foster the delusion. When I asked Stenhouse, “Has Brigham‘s re-election as prophet ever been opposed?” he answered sharply, “I should like to see the man who‘d do it.”
Brigham‘s personal position is a strange one: he calls himself prophet, and declares that he has revelations from God himself, but when you ask him quietly what all this means, you find that for prophet you should read political philosopher. He sees that a canal from Utah Lake to Salt Lake Valley would be of vast utility to the church and people—that a new settlement is urgently required. He thinks about these things till they dominate in his mind, and take in his brain the shape of physical creations. He dreams of the canal, the city; sees them before him in his waking moments. That which is so clearly for the good of God‘s people becomes God‘s will. Next Sunday at the Tabernacle he steps to the front, and says: “God has spoken; He has said unto his prophet, ‘Get thee up, Brigham, and build Me a city in the fertile valley to the South, where there is water, where there are fish, where the sun is strong enough to ripen the cotton plants, and give raiment as well as food to My saints on earth.’ Brethren willing to aid God‘s work should come to me before the Bishops’ meeting.” As the prophet takes his seat again, and puts on his broad-brimmed hat, a hum of applause runs round the bowery, and teams and barrows are freely promised.
Sometimes the canal, the bridge, the city may provea failure, but this is not concealed; the prophet‘s human tongue may blunder even when he is communicating holy things.
“After all,” Brigham said to me the day before I left, “the highest inspiration is good sense—the knowing what to do, and how to do it.”
In all this it is hard for us, with our English hatred of casuistry and hair-splitting, to see sincerity; still, given his foundation, Brigham is sincere. Like other political religionists, he must feel himself morally bound to stick at nothing when the interests of the church are at stake. To prefer man‘s life or property to the service of God must be a crime in such a church. The Mormons deny the truth of the murder-stories alleged against the Danites, but they avoid doing so in sweeping or even general terms—though, if need were, of course they would be bound to lie as well as to kill in the name of God and His holy prophet.
The secret polity which I have sketched gives, evidently, enormous power to some one man within the church; but the Mormon constitution does not very clearly point out who that man shall be. With a view to the possible future failure of leaders of great personal qualifications, the First Presidency consists of three members with equal rank; but to his place in the Trinity, Brigham unites the office of Trustee in Trust, which gives him the control of the funds and tithing, or church taxation.
All are not agreed as to what should be Brigham‘s place in Utah. Stenhouse said one day: “I am one of those who think that our President should do everything. He has made this church and this country, and should have his way in all things; saying so gets me into trouble with some.” The writer of a report of Brigham‘s tour which appeared in the Salt LakeTelegraphthe day we reached the city, used the words: “God never spoke through man more clearly than through President Young.”
One day, when Stenhouse was speaking of the morality of the Mormon people, he said: “Our penalty for adultery is death.” Remembering the Danites, we were down on him at once: “Do you inflict it?” “No; but—well, not practically; but really it is so. A man who commits adultery withers away and perishes. A man sent away from his wives upon a mission that may last for years, if he lives not purely—if, when he returns, he cannot meet the eye of Brigham, better for him to be at once in hell.He withers.”
Brigham himself has spoken in strong words of his own power over the Mormon people: “Let the talking folk at Washington say, if they please, that I am no longer Governor of Utah. I am, and will be Governor, until God Almighty says, ‘Brigham, you need not be Governor any more.’”
Brigham‘s head is that of a man who nowhere could be second.
WEhad been presented at court, and favorably received; asked to call again; admitted to State secrets of the presidency. From this moment our position in the city was secured. Mormon seats in the theater were placed at our disposal; the director of immigration, the presiding bishop, Colonel Hunter—a grim,weather-beaten Indian fighter—and his coadjutors, carried us off to see the reception of the bull-train at the Elephant Corral; we were offered a team to take us to the Lake, which we refused only because we had already accepted the loan of one from a Gentile merchant; presents of peaches, and invitations to lunch, dinner, and supper, came pouring in upon us from all sides. In a single morning we were visited by four of the apostles and nine other leading members of the church. Ecclesiastical dignitaries sat upon our single chair and wash-hand-stand; and one bed groaned under the weight of George A. Smith, “church historian,” while the other bore Æsop‘s load—the peaches he had brought. These growers of fruit from standard trees think but small things of our English wall-fruit, “baked on one side and frozen on the other,” as they say. There is a mellowness about the Mormon peaches that would drive our gardeners to despair.
One of our callers was Captain Hooper, the Utah delegate to Congress. He is an adept at the Western plan of getting out of a fix by telling you a story. When we laughingly alluded to his lack of wives, and the absurdity of a monogamist representing Utah, he said that the people at Washington all believed that Utah had sent them a polygamist. There is a rule that no one with the entry shall take more than one lady to the White House receptions. A member of Congress was urged by three ladies to take them with him. He, as men do, said, “The thing is impossible”—and did it. Presenting himself with the bevy at the door, the usher stopped him: “Can‘t pass; only one friend admitted with each member.” “Suppose, sir, that I‘m the delegate from Utah Territory?” said the Congressman. “Oh, pass in, sir—pass in,” was the instant answer of the usher. The story remindsme of poor Browne‘s “family” ticket to his lecture at Salt Lake City: “Admit the bearer andonewife.” Hooper is said to be under pressure at this moment on the question of polygamy, for he is a favorite with the prophet, who cannot, however, with consistency promote him to office in the church on account of a saying of his own: “A man with one wife is of less account before God than a man with no wives at all.”
Our best opportunity of judging of the Mormon ladies was at the theater, which we attended regularly, sitting now in Elder Stenhouse‘s “family” seats, now with General Wells. Here we saw all the wives of the leading churchmen of the city; in their houses, we saw only those they chose to show us: in no case but that of the Clawson family did we meet in society all the wives. We noticed at once that the leading ladies were all alike—full of taste, full of sense, but full, at the same time, of a kind of unconscious melancholy. Everywhere, as you looked round the house, you met the sad eye which I had seen but once before—among the Shakers at New Lebanon. The women here, knowing no other state, seem to think themselves as happy as the day is long: their eye alone is there to show the Gentile that they are, if the expression may be allowed, unhappy without knowing it. That these Mormon women love their religion and reverence its priests is but a consequence of its being “their religion”—the system in the midst of which they have been brought up. Which of us is there who does not set up some idol in his heart round which he weaves all that he has of poetry and devotion in his character? Art, hero-worship, patriotism are forms of this great tendency. That the Mormon girls, who are educated as highly as those of any country in the world—who, like all American girls, are allowed to wander where they please—whoare certain of protection in any of the fifty Gentile houses in the city, and absolutely safe in Camp Douglas at the distance of two miles from the city-wall—all consent deliberately to enter on polygamy—shows clearly enough that they can, as a rule, have no dislike to it beyond such a feeling as public opinion will speedily overcome.
Discussion of the institution of plural marriage in Salt Lake City is fruitless; all that can be done is to observe. In assaulting the Mormon citadel, you strike against the air. “Polygamy degrades the women,” you begin. “Morally or socially?” says the Mormon. “Socially.” “Granted,” is the reply, “and that is a most desirable consummation. By socially lowering, it morally raises the woman. It makes her a servant, but it makes her pure and good.”
It is always well to remember that if we have one argument against polygamy which from our Gentile point of view is unanswerable, it is not necessary that we should rack our brains for others. All our modern experience is favorable to ranking woman as man‘s equal; polygamy assumes that she shall be his servant—loving, faithful, cheerful, willing, but still a servant.
The opposite poles upon the women question are Utah polygamy and Kansas female suffrage.
THEattack upon Mormondom has been systematized, and is conducted with military skill, by trench and parallel. The New England papers having called for “facts” whereon to base their homilies, General Connor, of Fenian fame, set up theUnion Vedettein Salt Lake City, and publishes on Saturdays a sheet expressly intended for Eastern reading. The mantle of theSangamo Journalhas fallen on theVedette, and John C. Bennett is effaced by Connor. From this source it is that come the whole of the paragraphs against Brigham and all Mormondom which fill the Eastern papers, and find their way to London. The editor has to fill his paper with peppery leaders, well-spiced telegrams, stinging “facts.” Every week there must be something that can be used and quoted against Brigham. The Eastern remarks upon quotations in turn are quoted at Salt Lake. Under such circumstances, even telegrams can be made to take a flavor. In to-day‘sVedettewe have one from St. Joseph, describing how above one thousand “of these dirty, filthy dupes of the Great Salt Lake iniquity” are now squatting round the packet depot, awaiting transport. Another from Chicago tells us that the seven thousand European Mormons who have this year passed up the Missouri River “are of the lowest and most ignorant classes.” The leader is directed against Mormons in general, and Stenhouse in particular, as editor of one ofthe Mormon papers, and ex-postmaster of the Territory. He has already had cause to fear theVedette, as it was through the exertions of its editor that he lost his office. This matter is referred to in the leader of to-day: “When we found our letters scattered about the streets in fragments, we succeeded in getting an honest postmaster appointed in place of the editor of theTelegraph—an organ where even carrots, pumpkins, and potatoes are current funds—directed by a clique of foreign writers, who can hardly speak our language, and who never drew a loyal breath since they came to Utah.” The Mormon tax frauds, and the Mormon police, likewise come in for their share of abuse, and the writer concludes with a pathetic plea against arrest “for quietly indulging in a glass of wine in a private room with a friend.”
Attacks such as these make one understand the suspiciousness of the Mormon leaders, and the slowness of Stenhouse and his friends to take a joke if it concerns the church. Poor Artemus Ward once wrote to Stenhouse, “If you can‘t take a joke, you‘ll be darned, and you oughter;” but the jest at which he can laugh has wrought no cure. Heber Kimball said to me one day: “They‘re all alike. There was —— came here to write a book, and we thought better of him than of most. I showed him more kindness than I ever showed a man before or since, and then he called me a ‘hoary reprobate.’ I would advise him not to pass this way next time.”
The suspicion often takes odd shapes. One Sunday morning, at the tabernacle, I remarked that the Prophet‘s daughter, Zina, had on the same dress as she had worn the evening before at the theater, in playing “Mrs. Musket” in the farce of “My Husband‘s Ghost.” It was a black silk gown, with a vandykeflounce of white, impossible to mistake. I pointed it out in joke to a Mormon friend, when he denied my assertion in the most emphatic way, although he could not have known for certain that I was wrong, as he sat next to me in the theater during the whole play.
The Mormons will talk freely of their own suspiciousness. They say that the coldness with which travelers are usually received at Salt Lake City is the consequence of years of total misrepresentation. They forget that they are arguing in a circle, and that this misrepresentation is itself sometimes the result of their reserve.
The news and advertisements are even more amusing than the leaders in theVedette. A paragraph tells us, for instance, that “Mrs. Martha Stewart and Mrs. Robertson, of San Antonio, lately had an impromptu fight with revolvers; Mrs. Stewart was badly winged.” Nor is this the only reference in the paper to shooting by ladies, as another paragraph tells us how a young girl, frightened by a sham ghost, drew on the would-be apparition, and with six barrels shot him twice through the head, and four times “in the region of the heart.” A quotation from theOwyhee Avalanche, speaking of gambling hells, tells us that “one hurdy shebang” in Silver City shipped 8000 dollars as the net proceeds of its July business. “These leeches corral more clear cash than most quartz mills,” remonstrates the editor. “Corral” is the Mexican cattle inclosure; the yard where the team mules are ranched; thekraalof Cape Colony, which, on the plains and the plateau, serves as a fort for men as well as a fold for oxen, and resembles theseraiof the East. The word “to corral” means to shut into one of these pens; and thence “to pouch,” “to pocket,” “to bag,” to get well into hand.
The advertisements are in keeping with the news. “Everything, from a salamander safe to a Limerick fish-hook,” is offered by one firm. “Fifty-three and a half and three and three-quarter thimble-skein Schuttler wagons,” is offered by another. An advertiser bids us “Spike the Guns of Humbug! and Beware of Deleterious Dyes! Refuse to have your Heads Baptized with Liquid Fire!” Another says, “If you want a paper free from entanglements of cliques, and antagonistic to the corrupting evils of factionism, subscribe to theMontana Radiator.” Nothing beats the following: “Butcher‘s dead-shot for bed-bugs! Curls them up as fire does a leaf! Try it, and sleep in peace! Sold by all live druggists.”
If we turn to the other Salt Lake papers, theTelegraph, an independent Mormon paper, and theDeseret News, the official journal of the church, we find a contrast to the trash of theVedette. Brigham‘s paper, clearly printed and of a pleasant size, is filled with the best and latest news from the outlying portions of the Territory, and from Europe. The motto on its head is a simple one—“Truth and Liberty;” and twenty-eight columns of solid news are given us. Among the items is an account of a fight upon the Smoky Hill route, which occurred on the day we reached this city, and in which two teamsters—George Hill and Luke West—were killed by the Kiowas and Cheyennes. A loyal Union article from the pen of Albert Carrington, the editor, is followed by one upon the natural advantages of Utah, in which the writer complains that the very men who ridiculed the Mormons for settling in a desert are now declaiming against their being allowed to squat upon one of the “most fertile locations in the United States.” The paper asserts that Mormon success is secured only by Mormon industry, and that as a merelycommercial speculation, apart from the religious impulse, the cultivation of Utah would not pay: “Utah is no place for the loafer or the lazy man.” An official report, like theCourt Circularof England, is headed, “President Brigham Young‘s trip North,” and is signed by G. D. Watt, “Reporter” to the church. The Old Testament is not spared. “From what we saw of the timbered mountains,” writes one reporter, “we had no despondency of Israel ever failing for material to build up, beautify, and adorn pleasant habitations in that part of Zion.” A theatrical criticism is not wanting, and the church actors come in for “praise all round.” In another part of the paper are telegraphic reports from the captains of the seven immigrant trains not yet come in, giving their position, and details of the number of days’ march for which they have provisions still in hand. One reports “thirty-eight head of cattle stolen;” another, “a good deal of mountain fever;” but, on the whole, the telegrams look well. The editor, speaking of the two English visitors now in the city, says: “We greet them to our mountain habitation, and bid them welcome to our orchard; and that‘s considerable for an editor, especially if he has plural responsibilities to look after.” Bishop Harrington reports from American Fork that everybody is thriving there, and “doing as the Mormon creed directs—minding their own business.” “That‘s good, bishop,” says the editor. The “Passenger List of the 2d Ox-train, Captain J. D. Holladay,” is given at length; about half the immigrants come with wife and family, very many with five or six children. From Liverpool, the chief office for Europe, comes a gazette of “Releases and Appointments,” signed “Brigham Young, Jun., President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the British Isles and AdjacentCountries,” accompanied by a dispatch, in which the “President for England” gives details of his visits to the Saints in Norway, and of his conversations with the United States minister at St. Petersburg.
TheTelegraph, like its editor, is practical, and does not deal in extract. All the sheet, with the exception of a few columns, is taken up with business advertisements; but these are not the least amusing part of the paper. A gigantic figure of a man in high boots and felt hat, standing on a ladder and pasting up Messrs. Eldredge and Clawson‘s dry-goods advertisement, occupies nearly half the back page. Mr. Birch informs “parties hauling wheat from San Pete County” that his mill at Fort Birch “is now running, and is protected by a stone-wall fortification, and is situate at the mouth of Salt Canyon, just above Nephi City, Juab County, on the direct road to Pahranagat.” A view of the fort, with posterns, parapets, embrasures, and a giant flag, heads the advertisement. The cuts are not always so cheerful: one far-western paper fills three-quarters of its front page with an engraving of a coffin. The editorial columns contain calls to the “brethren with teams” to aid the immigrants, an account of a “rather mixed case” of “double divorce” (Gentile), and of a prosecution of a man “for violation of the seventh commandment.” A Mormon police report is headed, “One drunk at the calaboose.” Defending himself against charges of “directing bishops” and “steadying the ark,” the editor calls on the bishops to shorten their sermons: “we may get a crack for this, but we can‘t help it; we like variety, life, and short meetings.” In a paragraph about his visitors, our friend, the editor of theTelegraph, said, a day or two after our arrival in the city: “If a stranger can escape the strychnine clique for three days after arrival,he is forever afterward safe. Generally the first twenty-four hours are sufficient to prostrate even the very robust.” In a few words of regret at a change in the Denver newspaper staff, our editor says: “However, a couple of sentences indicate that George has no intention of abandoning the tripod. That‘s right: keep at it, my boy; misery likes company.”
The day after we reached Denver, theGazette, commenting on this same “George,” said: “Captain West has left theRocky Mountains Newsoffice. We are not surprised, as we could never see how any respectable, decent gentleman like George could get along with Governor Evans‘s paid hireling and whelp who edits that delectable sheet.” Of the two papers which exist in every town in the Union, each is always at work attempting to “use up” the other. I have seen the Democratic print of Chicago call its Republican opponent “a radical, disunion, disreputable, bankrupt, emasculated evening newspaper concern of this city”—a string of terms by the side of which even Western utterances pale.
A paragraph headed “The Millennium” tells us that the editors of theTelegraphandDeseret Newswere seen yesterday afternoon walking together toward the Twentieth Ward. Another paragraph records the ill success of an expedition against Indians who had been “raiding” down in “Dixie,” or South Utah. A general order, signed “Lieut.-General Daniel H. Wells,” and dated “headquarters Nauvoo Legion,” directs the assembly, for a three days’ “big drill,” of the forces of the various military districts of the Territory. The name of “Territorial Militia,” under which alone the United States can permit the existence of the legion, is carefully omitted. This is not the only warlike advertisement in the paper: fourteen cases of Ballardrifles are offered in exchange for cattle; and other firms offer tents and side-arms to their friends. Amusements are not forgotten: a cricket match between two Mormon settlements in Cache County is recorded: “Wellsville whipping Brigham City with six wickets to go down;” and is followed by an article in which the First President may have had a hand, pointing out that the Salt Lake Theater is going to be the greatest of theaters, and that the favor of its audience is a passport beyond Wallack‘s, and equal to Drury Lane or the Haymarket. In sharp contrast to these signs of present prosperity, the First Presidency announce the annual gathering of the surviving members of Zion‘s camp, the association of the first immigrant band.
There is about the Mormon papers much that tells of long settlement and prosperity. When I showed Stenhouse theDenver Gazetteof our second day in that town, he said: “Well,Telegraph‘sbetter than that!” The Denver sheet is a literary curiosity of the first order. Printed on chocolate-colored paper, in ink of a not much darker hue, it is in parts illegible—to the reader‘s regret, for what we were able to make out was good enough to make us wish for more.
The difference between the Mormon and Gentile papers is strongly marked in the advertisements. TheDenver Gazetteis filled with puffs of quacks and whisky shops. In the column headed “Business Cards,” Dr. Ermerins announces that he may be consulted by his patients in the “French, German, and English” tongues. Lower down we have the card of “Dr. Treat, Eclectic Physician and Surgeon,” which is preceded by an advertisement of “sulkies made to order,” and followed by a leaded heading, “Know thy Destiny; Madame Thornton, the English Astrologist and Psychometrician, has located herself at Hudson,New York; by the aid of an instrument of intense power, known as the Psychomotrope, she guarantees to produce a lifelike picture of the future husband or wife of the applicant.” There is a strange turning toward the supernatural among this people. Astrology is openly professed as a science throughout the United States; the success of spiritualism is amazing. The most sensible men are not exempt from the weakness: the dupes of the astrologers are not the uneducated Irish; they are the strong-minded, half-educated Western men, shrewd and keen in trade, brave in war, material and cold in faith, it would be supposed, but credulous to folly, as we know, when personal revelation, the supernaturalism of the present day, is set before them in the crudest and least attractive forms. A little lower, “Charley Eyser” and “Gus Fogus” advertise their bars. The latter announces “Lager Beer at only 10 cents,” in a “cool retreat,” “fitted up with green-growing trees.” A returned warrior heads his announcement, in huge capitals, “Back Home Again, An Old Hand at the Bellows, the Soldier Blacksmith:—S. M. Logan.” In a country where weights and measures are rather a matter of practice than of law, Mr. O‘Connell does well to add to “Lager beer 15 cents,” “Glasses hold Two Bushels.” John Morris, of the “Little Giant” or “Theater Saloon,” asks us to “call and see him;” while his rivals of the “Progressive Saloon” offer the “finest liquors that the East can command.” Morris Sigi, whose “lager is pronounced A No. 1 by all who have used it,” bids us “give him a fair trial, and satisfy ourselves as to the false reports in circulation.” Daniel Marsh, dealer in “breech-loading guns and revolvers,” adds, “and anything that may be wanted, from a cradle to a coffin, both inclusive, made to order. An Indian Lodge on view, for sale.” Thisis the man at whose shop scalps hang for sale; but he fails to name it in his advertisement; the Utes brought them in too late for insertion, perhaps.
Advertisements of freight-trains now starting to the East, of mail-coaches to Buckskin Joe—advertisements slanting, topsy-turvy, and sideways turned—complete the outer sheet; but some of them, through bad ink, printer‘s errors, strange English, and wilder Latin, are wholly unintelligible. It is hard to make much of this, for instance: “Mr. Æsculapius, no offense, I hope, as this is written extempore and ipso facto. But, perhaps, I ought not to disregard ex unci disce omnes.”
In an editorial on the English visitors then in Denver, the chance of putting into their mouths a puff of the Territory of Colorado was not lost. We were made to “appreciate the native energy and wealth of industry necessary in building up such a Star of Empire as Colorado.” The next paragraph is communicated from Conejos, in the south of the Territory, and says: “The election has now passed off, and I am confident that we can beat any ward in Denver, and give them two in the game, for rascality in voting.” Another leader calls on the people of Denver to remember that there are two men in the calaboose for mule stealing, and that the last man locked up for the offense was allowed to escape: some cottonwood-trees still exist, it believes. In former times, there was for the lynching here hinted at a reason which no longer exists: a man shut up in jail built of adobe, or sun-dried brick, could scratch his way through the crumbling wall in two days, so the citizens generally hanged him inone. Now that the jails are in brick and stone, the job might safely be left to the sheriff; but the people of Denver seem to trust themselves better even than they do their delegate, Bob Wilson.
A year or two ago, the jails were so crazy that Coloradan criminals, when given their choice whether they would be hanged in a week, or “as soon after breakfast to-morrow as shall be convenient to the sheriff and agreeable, Mr. Prisoner, to you,” as the Texan formula runs, used to elect for the quick delivery, on the ground that otherwise they would catch their deaths of cold—at least so the Denver story runs. They have, however, a method of getting the jails inspected here which might be found useful at home; it consists in the simple plan of giving the governor of a jail an opportunity of seeing the practical working of the system by locking him up inside for awhile.
These far-western papers are written or compiled under difficulties almost overwhelming. Mr. Frederick J. Stanton, at Denver, told me that often he had been forced to “set up” and print as well as “edit” the paper which he owns. Type is not always to be found. In its early days, theAlta Californianonce appeared with a paragraph which ran: “I have no VV in my type, as there is none in the Spanish alphabet. I have sent to the Sandvvich Islands for this letter; in the mean time vve must use tvvo V‘s.”
Till I had seen the editors’ rooms in Denver, Austin, and Salt Lake City, I had no conception of the point to which discomfort could be carried. For all these hardships, payment is small and slow. It consists often of little but the satisfaction which it is to the editor‘s vanity to be “liquored” by the best man of the place, treated to an occasional chat with the governor of the Territory, to a chair in the overland mail office whenever he walks in, to the hand of the hotel proprietor whenever he comes near the bar, and to a pistol-shot once or twice in a month.
It must not be supposed that theVedettedoes theMormons no harm; the perpetual reiteration in the Eastern and English papers of three sets of stories alone would suffice to break down a flourishing power. The three lines that are invariably taken as foundations for their stories are these—that the Mormon women are wretched, and would fain get away, but are checked by the Danites; that the Mormons are ready to fight with the Federal troops with the hope of success; that robbery of the people by the apostles and elders is at the bottom of Mormonism—or, as theVedetteputs it, “on tithing and loaning hang all the law and the profits.”
If the mere fact of the existence of theVedetteeffectually refutes the stories of the acts of the Danites in these modern days, and therefore disposes of the first set of stories, the third is equally answered by a glance at its pages. Columns of paragraphs, sheets of advertisements, testify to the foundation by industry, in the most frightful desert on earth, of an agricultural community which California herself cannot match. The Mormons may well call their country “Deseret”—“land of the bee.” The process of fertilization goes on day by day. Six or seven years ago, Southern Utah was a desert bare as Salt Bush Plains. Irrigation from the fresh-water lake was carried out under episcopal direction, and the result is the growth of fifty kinds of grapes alone. Cotton-mills and vineyards are springing up on every side, and “Dixie” begins to look down on its parent, the Salt Lake Valley. Irrigation from the mountain rills has done this miracle,wesay, though the Saints undoubtedly believe that God‘s hand is in it, helping miraculously “His peculiar people.”
In face of Mormon prosperity, it is worthy of notice that Utah was settled on the Wakefieldian system,though Brigham knows nothing of Wakefield. Town population and country population grew up side by side in every valley, and the plow was not allowed to gain on the machine-saw and the shuttle.
It is not only in water and verdure that Utah is naturally poor. On the mining-map of the States, the countries that lie around Utah—Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Montana—are one blaze of yellow, and blue, and red, colored from end to end with the tints that are used to denote the existence of precious metals. Utah is blank at present—blank, the Mormons say, by nature; Gentiles say, merely through the absence of survey; and they do their best to circumvent mother nature. Every fall the “strychnine” party raise the cry of gold discoveries in Utah, in the hope of bringing a rush of miners down to Salt Lake City, too late for them to get away again before the snows begin. The presence of some thousands of broad-brimmed rowdies in Salt Lake City, for a winter, would be the death of Mormonism, they believe. Within the last few days, I am told that prospecting parties have found “pay dirt” in City Canyon, which, however, they had first themselves carefully “salted” with gold dust. There is coal at the settlement at which we breakfasted on our way from Weber River to Salt Lake; and Stenhouse tells us that the only difference between the Utah coal and that of Wales is, that the latter will burn, and the formerwon‘t!
Poor as Utah is by nature, clear though it be that whatever value the soil now possesses, represents only the loving labor bestowed upon it by the Saints, it is doubtful whether they are to continue to possess it, even though the remaining string ofVedette-born stories assert that Brigham “threatens hell” to the Gentiles who would expel him.
The constant, teasing, wasp-like pertinacity of theVedettehas done some harm to liberty of thought throughout the world.
“WHENyou are driven hence, where shall you go?”
“We take no thought for the morrow; the Lord will guide his people,” was my rebuke from Elder Stenhouse, delivered in the half-solemn, half-laughing manner characteristic of the Saints. “You say miracles are passed and gone,” he went on; “but if God has ever interfered to protect a church, he has interposed on our behalf. In 1857, when the whole army of the United States was let slip at us under Albert S. Johnson, we were given strength to turn them aside, and defeat them without a blow. The Lord permitted us to dictate our own terms of peace. Again, when the locusts came in such swarms as to blacken the whole valley, and fill the air with a living fog, God sent millions of strange new gulls, and these devoured the locusts, and saved us from destruction. The Lord will guide his people.”
Often as I discussed the future of Utah and the church with Mormons, I could never get from them any answer but this; they would never even express a belief, as will many Western Gentiles, that no attempt will be made to expel them from the country they now hold. They cannot help seeing how immediateis the danger: from the American press there comes a cry, “Let us have this polygamy put down; its existence is a disgrace to England from which it springs, a shame to America in which it dwells, to the Federal government whose laws it outrages and defies. How long will you continue to tolerate this retrogression from Christianity, this insult to civilization?”
With the New Englanders, the question is political as well as theological, personal as well as political—political, mainly because there is a great likeness between Mormon expressions of belief in the divine origin of polygamy and the Southern answers to the Abolitionists: “Abraham was a slaveowner, and father of the faithful;” “David, the best-loved of God, was a polygamist”—“show us a biblical prohibition of slavery;” “show us a denunciation of polygamy, and we‘ll believe you.” It is this similarity of the defensive positions of Mormonism and slavery which has led to the present peril of the Salt Lake Church: the New Englanders look on the Mormons, not only as heretics, but as friends to the slaveowners; on the other hand, if you hear a man warmly praise the Mormons, you may set him down as a Southerner, or at the least a Democrat.
Another reason for the hostility of New England is, that while the discredit of Mormonism falls upon America, the American people have but little share in its existence: a few of the leaders are New Englanders and New Yorkers, but of the rank and file, not one. In every ten immigrants, the missionaries count upon finding that four come from England, two from Wales, one from the Scotch Lowlands, one from Sweden, one from Switzerland, and one from Prussia: from Catholic countries, none; from all America, none. It is through this purely local and temporary association of ideasthat we see the strange sight of a party of tolerant, large-hearted churchmen eager to march their armies against a church.
If we put aside for a moment the question of the moral right to crush Mormonism in the name of truth, we find that it is, at all events, easy enough to do it. There is no difficulty in finding legal excuses for action—no danger in backing Federal legislation with military force. The legal point is clear enough—clear upon a double issue. Congress can legislate for the Territories in social matters—has, in fact, already done so. Polygamy is at this moment punishable in Utah, but the law is, pending the completion of the railroad, not enforced. Without extraordinary action, its enforcement would be impossible, for Mormon juries will give no verdict antagonistic to their church; but it is not only in this matter that the Mormons have been offenders. They have sinned also against the land laws of America. The church, Brigham, Kimball, all are landholders on a scale not contemplated by the “Homestead” laws—unless to be forbidden; doubly, therefore, are the Mormons at the mercy of the Federal Congress. There is a loophole open in the matter of polygamy—that adopted by the New York Communists when they chose each a woman to be hislegalwife, and so put themselves without the reach of law. This method of escape, I have been assured by Mormon elders, is one that nothing could force them to adopt. Rather than indirectly destroy their church by any such weak compliance, they would again renounce their homes, and make their painful way across the wilderness to some new Deseret.
It is not likely that New England interference will hinge upon plurality. A “difficulty” can easily be made to arise upon the land question, and no breachof the principle of toleration will, on the surface at least, be visible. No surveys have been held in the Territory since 1857, no lands within the territorial limits have been sold by the Federal land office. Not only have the limitations of the “Homestead” and “Pre-emption” laws been disregarded, but Salt Lake City, with its palace, its theater, and hotels, is built upon the public lands of the United States. On the other hand, Mexican titles are respected in Arizona and New Mexico; and as Utah was Mexican soil when, before the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Mormons settled on its wastes, it seems hard that their claims should not be equally respected.
After all, the theory of Spanish authority was a ridiculous fiction. The Mormons were the first occupants of the country which now forms the Territories of Utah and Colorado and the State of Nevada, and were thus annexed to the United States without being in the least degree consulted. It is true that they might be said to have occupied the country as American citizens, and so to have carried American sovereignty with them into the wilderness; but this, again, is a European, not an American theory. American citizens are such, not as men born upon a certain soil, but as being citizens of a State of the Union, or an organized Territory; and though the Mormons may be said to have accepted their position as citizens of the Territory of Utah, still they did so on the understanding that it should continue a Mormon country, where Gentiles should at the most be barely tolerated.
We need not go further into the mazes of public law, or ofex post factoAmerican enactments. The Mormons themselves admit that the letter of the law is against them; but say that while it is claimed thatBoston and Philadelphia may fitly legislate for the Mormons three thousand miles away, because Utah is a Territory, not a State, men forget that it is Boston and Philadelphia themselves who force Utah to remain a Territory, although they admitted the less populous Nebraska, Nevada, and Oregon to their rights as States.
If, wholly excluding morals from the calculation, there can be no doubt upon the points of law, there can be as little upon the military question. Of the fifteen hundred miles of waterless tract or desert that we crossed, seven hundred have been annihilated, and 1869 may see the railroad track in the streets of Salt Lake City. This not only settles the military question, but is meant to do so. When men lay four miles of railroad in a day, and average two miles a day for a whole year, when a government bribes high enough to secure so startling a rate of progress, there is something more than commerce or settlement in the wind. The Pacific Railroad is not merely meant to be the shortest line from New York to San Francisco; it is meant to put down Mormonism.
If the Federal government decides to attack these peaceable citizens of a Territory that should long since have been a State, they certainly will not fight, and they no less surely will not disperse. Polynesia or Mexico is their goal, and in the Marquesas or in Sonora they may, perhaps, for a few years at least, be let alone, again to prove the forerunners of English civilization—planters of Saxon institutions and the English tongue; once more to perform their mission, as they performed it in Missouri and in Utah.
When we turn from the simple legal question, and the still more simple military one, to the moral point involved in the forcible suppression of plural marriagein one State by the might of all the others, we find the consideration of the matter confused by the apparent analogy between the so-called crusade against slavery and the proposed crusade against polygamy. There is no real resemblance between the cases. In the strictest sense there was no more a crusade against slavery than there is a crusade against snakes on the part of a man who strikes one that bit him. The purest republicans have never pretended that the abolition of slavery was the justification of the war. The South rose in rebellion, and in rising gave New England an opportunity for the destruction in America of an institution at variance with the republican form of government, and aggressive in its tendencies. So far is polygamy from being opposed in spirit to democracy, that it is impossible here, in Salt Lake City, not to see that it is the most leveling of all social institutions—Mormonism the most democratic of religions. A rich man in New York leaves his two or three sons a large property, and founds a family; a rich Mormon leaves his twenty or thirty sons each a miserable fraction of his money, and each son must trudge out into the world, and toil for himself. Brigham‘s sons—those of them who are not gratuitously employed in hard service for the church in foreign parts—are cattle-drivers, small farmers, ranchmen. One of them was the only poorly-clad boy I saw in Salt Lake City. A system of polygamy, in which all the wives, and consequently all the children, are equal before the law, is a powerful engine of democracy.
The general moral question of whether Mormonism is to be put down by the sword, because the Latter-day Saints differ in certain social customs from other Christians, is one for the preacher and the casuist, not for a traveling observer of English-speaking countriesas they are. Mormonism comes under my observation as the religious and social system of the most successful of all pioneers of English civilization. From this point of view it would be an immediate advantage to the world that they should be driven out once more into the wilderness, again to found an England in Mexico, in Polynesia, or on Red River. It may be an immediate gain to civilization, but America herself was founded by schismatics upon a basis of tolerance to all; and there are still to be found Americans who think it would be the severest blow that has been dealt to liberty since the St. Bartholomew, were she to lend her enormous power to systematic persecution at the cannon‘s mouth.
The question of where to draw the line is one of interest. Great Britain draws it at black faces, and would hardly tolerate the existence among her white subjects in London of such a sect as that of the Maharajas of Bombay. “If you draw the line at black faces,” say the Mormons, “why should you not let the Americans draw it at two thousand miles from Washington?”
The moral question cannot be dissociated from Mormon history. The Saints marched from Missouri and Illinois, into no man‘s land, intending there to live out of the reach of those who differed from them, as do the Russian dissenters transported in past ages to the provinces of Taurida and Kherson. It is by no fault of theirs, they say, that they are citizens of the United States.
PROFILE OF “JOE SMITH.”PROFILE OF “JOE SMITH.”FULL FACE OF “JOE SMITH.”—P. 150.
There is in the far West a fast increasing party who would leave people to be polygynists, polyandrists, Free-lovers, Shakers, or monogamists, as they please; who would place the social relations as they have placed religion—out of the reach of the law. I needhardly say that public opinion has such overwhelming force in America that it is probable that even under a system of perfect toleration by law, two forms of the family relation would never be found existing side by side. Polygamists would continue to migrate to Mormon land, Free-lovers to New York, Shakers to New England. Some will find in this a reason for, and some a reason against, a change. In any case, a crusade against Mormonism will hardly draw sympathy from Nebraska, from Michigan, from Kansas.
Many are found who say: “Leave Mormonism to itself, and it will die.” The Pacific Railroad alone, they think, will kill it. Those Americans who know Utah best are not of this opinion. Mormonism is no superstition of the past. There is huge vitality in the polygamic church. Emerson once spoke to me of Unitarianism, Buddhism, and Mormonism as three religions which, right or wrong, are full of force. “The Mormons only need to be persecuted,” said Elder Frederick to me, “to become as powerful as the Mohammedans.” It is, indeed, more than doubtful whether polygamy can endure side by side with American monogamy—it is certain that Mormon priestly power and Mormon mysteries cannot in the long run withstand the presence of a large Gentile population; but, if Mormon titles to land are respected, and if great mineral wealth is not found to exist in Utah, Mormonism will not be exposed to any much larger Gentile intrusion than it has to cope with now. Settlers who can go to California or to Colorado “pares” will hardly fix themselves in the Utah desert. The Mexican table-lands will be annexed before Gentile immigrants seriously trouble Brigham. Gold and New England are the most dreaded foes of Mormondom. Nothing can save polygamy if lodesand placers such as those of all the surrounding States are found in Utah; nothing can save it if the New Englanders determine to put it down.
Were Congress to enforce the Homestead laws in Utah, and provide for the presence of an overwhelming Gentile population, polygamy would not only die of itself, but drag Mormonism down in its fall. Brigham knows more completely than we can the necessity of isolation. He would not be likely to await the blow which increased Gentile immigration would deal his power.
If New England decides to act, the table-lands of Mexico will see played once more the sad comedy of Utah. Again the Mormons will march into Mexican territory, again to wake some day, and find it American. Theirs, however, will once more be the pride of having proved the pioneers of that English civilization which is destined to overspread the temperate world. The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo annexed Utah to the United States, but Brigham Young annexed it to Anglo-Saxondom.
ATthe post-office, in Main Street, I gave Mr. Dixon a few last messages for home—he one to me for some Egyptian friends; and, with a shake and a wave, we parted, to meet in London after between us completing the circuit of the globe.
This time again I was not alone: an Irish minerfrom Montana, with a bottle of whisky, a revolver and pick, shared the back-seat with the mail-bags. Before we had forded the Jordan, he had sung “The Wearing of the Green,” and told me the day and the hour at which the republic was to be proclaimed at his native village in Galway. Like a true Irishman of the South or West, he was happy only when he could be generous; and so much joy did he show when I discovered that the cork had slipped from my flask, and left me dependent on him for my escape from the alkaline poison, that I half believed he had drawn it himself when we stopped to change horses for mules. Certain it is that he pressed his whisky so fast upon me and the various drivers, that the day we most needed its aid there was none, and the bottle itself had ended its career by serving as a target for a trial of breech-loading pistols.
At the sixth ranch from the city, which stands on the shores of the lake, and close to the foot of the mountains, we found Porter Rockwell, accredited chief of the Danites, the “Avenging Angels” of Utah, and leader, it is said, of the “White Indians” at the Mountain Meadows massacre.
Since 1840 there has been no name of greater terror in the West than Rockwell‘s; but in 1860 his death was reported in England, and the career of the great Brother of Gideon was ended, as we thought. I was told in Salt Lake City that he was still alive and well, and his portrait was among those that I got from Mr. Ottinger; but I am not convinced that the man I saw, and whose picture I possess, was in factthePorter Rockwell who murdered Stephenson in 1842. It may be convenient to have two or three men to pass by the one name; and I suspect that this is so in the Rockwell case.
Under the name of Porter Rockwell some man (or men) has been the terror of the Mississippi Valley, of plains and plateau, for thirty years. In 1841, Joe Smith prophesied the death of Governor Boggs, of Missouri, within six months: within that time he was shot—rumor said by Rockwell. When the Danite was publicly charged with having done the deed for fifty dollars and a wagon-team, he swore he‘d shoot any man who said he‘d shot Boggsfor gain;“but if I am charged with shooting him, they‘ll have to prove it”—words that looked like guilt. In 1842 Stephenson died by the same hand, it is believed. Rockwell was known to be the working chief of the band organized in 1838 to defend the First Presidency by any means whatever, fair or foul, known at various times as the “Big Fan” that should winnow the chaff from the wheat; the “Daughter of Zion,” the “Destructives,” the “Flying Angels,” the “Brother of Gideon,” the “Destroying Angels.” “Arise and thresh, O daughter of Zion, for I will make thy horn iron, and will make thy hoofs brass; and thou shalt beat in pieces many people; and I will consecrate their gain unto the Lord, and their substance unto the lords of the whole earth”—this was the motto of the band.
Little was heard of the Danites from the time that the Mormons were driven from Illinois and Missouri until 1852, when murder after murder, massacre after massacre, occurred in the Grand Plateau. Bands of immigrants, of settlers on their road to California, parties of United States officers, and escaping Mormons, were attacked by “Indians,” and found scalped by the next whites who came upon their trail. It was rumored in the Eastern States that the red men were Mormons in disguise, following the tactics of the Anti-Renters of New York. In the case of AlmonBabbitt, the “Indians” were proved to have been white.
PORTER ROCKWELL.—P. 154.PORTER ROCKWELL.—P. 154.
The atrocities culminated in the Mountain Meadows massacre in 1857, when hundreds of men, women, and children were murdered by men armed and clothed as Indians, but sworn to by some who escaped as being whites. Porter Rockwell has had the infamy of this tremendous slaughter piled on to the huge mass of his earlier deeds of blood—whether rightly or wrongly, who shall say? The man that I saw was the man that Captain Burton saw in 1860. His death was solemnly recorded in the autumn of that year, yet of the identity of the person I saw with the person described by Captain Burton there can be no question. The bald, frowning forehead, the sinister smile, the long grizzly curls falling upon the back, the red cheek, the coal beard, the gray eye, are not to be mistaken. Rockwell or not, he is a man capable of any deed. I had his photograph in my pocket, and wanted to get him to sign it; but when, in awe of his glittering bowie and of his fame, I asked, by way of caution, the ranchman—a new-come Paddy—whether Rockwell could write, the fellow told me with many an oath that “the boss” was as innocent of letters as a babe. “As for writin’,” he said, “cuss me if he‘s on it. You bet he‘s not—you bet.”
Not far beyond Rockwell‘s, we drove close to the bench-land; and I was able to stop for a moment and examine the rocks. From the veranda of the Mormon poet Naisbitt‘s house in Salt Lake City, I had remarked a double line of terrace running on one even level round the whole of the great valley to the south, cut by nature along the base alike of the Oquirrh and the Wasatch.
I had thought it possible that the terrace was theresult of the varying hardness of the strata; but, near Black Rock, on the overland track, I discovered that where the terrace lines have crossed the mountain precipices, they are continued merely by deep stains upon the rocks. The inference is that within extremely recent, if not historic times, the water has stood at these levels from two to three hundred feet above the present Great Salt Lake City, itself 4500 feet above the sea. Three days’ journey farther west, on the Reese‘s River Range, I detected similar stains. Was the whole basin of the Rocky Mountains—here more than a thousand miles across—once filled with a huge sea, of which the two Sierras were the shores, and the Wasatch, Goshoot, Waroja, Toi, Abbé, Humboldt, Washoe, and a hundred other ranges, the rocks and isles? The Great Salt Lake is but the largest of many such. I saw one on Mirage Plains that is salter than its greater fellow. Carson Sink is evidently the bed of a smaller bitter lake; and there are salt pools in dozens scattered through Ruby and Smoky Valleys. The Great Salt Lake itself is sinking year by year, and the sage-brush is gaining upon the alkali desert throughout the Grand Plateau. All these signs point to the rapid drying-up of a great sea, owing to an alteration of climatic conditions.
In the Odd Fellows’ Library at San Francisco I found a map of North America, signed “John Harris, A.M.,” and dated “1605,” which shows a great lake in the country now comprised in the Territories of Utah and Dakota. It has a width of fifteen degrees, and is named “Thongo, or Thoya.” It is not likely that this inland sea is a mere exaggeration of the present Great Salt Lake, because the views of that sheet of water are everywhere limited by islands in such a way as to give to the eye the effect of exceedingnarrowness. It is possible that the Jesuit Fathers, and other Spanish travelers from California, may have looked from the Utah mountains on the dwindling remnant of a great inland sea.