But all are not prudent. Every Gethsemane has its Peter. And from that memorable garden they draw a lesson. The Saviour, they say, meant fighting, but when he saw that resistance to such odds as came against him could have only ended in the massacre of his disciples, he went to prison.
That Brigham Young, if alive, would have decided upon a military demonstration, the sons of Zeruiah are very ready to believe, for they say that, even if the worst were to happen and they had eventually to capitulate under unreasonable odds, their position would be preferable to that which they hold to-day. To-day they lie, the whole community together, under the ban of civil disabilities, as a criminal class, at the mercy of police—a proscribed people. In the future, if compelled to surrender their arms, they would be in the position of prisoners on parole, under the honourable conditions of a military capitulation. The worst, therefore, that could happen would, they say, be better than what is.
Such, at any rate, they assert, would have been the argument of Brigham Young, and Gentiles even confess that if the late President were still at the head of the Church the temptation for "a great bluff" would be irresistible.
THE SAINTS AND THE RED MEN.
Prevalent errors as to the red man—Secret treaties—The policy of the Mormons towards Indians—A Christian heathen—Fighting-strength of Indians friendly to Mormons.
I HAPPENED some time ago to repeat, in the presence of two "Gentiles," a Mormon's remark that the Indians were more friendly towards the Saints than towards other Americans, and the comments of the two gentlemen in question exactly illustrated the two errors which I find are usually made on this subject.
One said: "Oh, yes, don't you know the Mormons have secret treaties with the Indians?"
And the other: "And much good may they do them; these wretched Indians are a half-starved, cricket-eating set, not worth a cent."
Now, I confess that till I came to Utah I had an idea that the Utes were always "the Indians" that were meant when the friendly relations of the Mormons with the red men were referred to. About secret treaties I knew nothing, either one way or the other. But while I was there I took much pains to arrive at the whole truth—the President of the Church having very courteously placed the shelves of the Historian's office at my service—and I found no reference whatever, even in anti-Mormon literature, to any "secret treaty."
The Mormons themselves scorn the idea and give the following reasons: 1. No treaty made with a tribe of Indians could be kept secret. 2. There is no necessity for a treaty of any kind, as the dislike of the Indians to the United States is sufficiently hearty to make them friendly to the Territory if it came to a choice between the one or the other. 3. The conciliatory policy of the Church towards the Indians obviates all necessity for further measures of alliance.
And this I believe to be the fact. Indeed, I know that Mormons can go where Gentiles cannot, and that under a Mormon escort, lives are safe in an Indian camp that without it would be in great peril. I know further that on several occasions (and this is on official record) the expostulations of Mormons have prevented Indians from raiding—and I think this ought to be remembered when sinister constructions are put upon the friendliness of Saints towards the Indians.
From the very first, the Church has inculcated forbearance and conciliation towards the tribes, and even during the exodus from the Missouri River, harassed though they sometimes were by Indians, the Mormons, as a point of policy, always tried to avert a collision by condoning offences that were committed, instead of punishing them. If the red men came begging round their waggons they gave them food, and if they stole—and what Indian will not steal, seeing that theft is the road to honour among his people?—the theft was overlooked. Very often, it is true, individual Mormons have avenged the loss of a horse or a cow by taking a red man's life, but this was always in direct opposition to the teachings of the Church, which pointed out that murder in the white man was a worse offence than theft in the red, and in opposition to the policy of the leaders, who have always insisted that it was "cheaper to feed than to fight" the Indians. In spite, however, of this treatment the tribes have again and again compelled the Mormons to take the field against them, but as a rule the extent of Mormon retaliation was to catch the plunderers, retake their stolen stock, hang the actual murderers (if murder had been committed) and let the remainder go after an amicable pow-wow. Strict justice was as nearly as possible always adhered to, and whenever their word was given, that word was kept sacred, even to their own loss.
Both these things, justice and truth, every Indian understands. They do not practise them, but they appreciate them. Just as among themselves they chivalrously undertake the support of the squaws and children of a conquered tribe, or as they never steal property that has been placed under the charge of one of their own tribe, so when dealing with white men, they have learned to expect fairness in reprisals and sincerity in speech. When they find themselves cheated, as they nearly always are by "Indian agents," they cherish a grudge, and when they suffer an unprovoked injury (as when emigrants shoot a passing red man just as they would shoot a passing coyote), they wreak their barbarous revenge upon the first victims they can find. From the Mormons they have always received honest treatment, comparative fairness in trade and strict truthfulness in engagements, while, taking men killed on both sides, it is a question whether the red men have not killed more Mormons than Mormons have red men.
During the war of 1865-67, I find, for instance, that all the recorded deaths muster eighty-seven on the Indian side and seventy-nine on the Mormon, while the latter, besides losing great numbers of cattle and horses, having vast quantities of produce destroyed and buildings burned down, had temporarily to abandon the counties of Piute and Sevier, as well as the settlements of Berrysville, Winsor, Upper and Lower Kanab, Shuesberg, Springdale and Northup, and many places in Kane County, also some settlements in Iron County, while the total cost of the war was over a million dollars—of which, by the way, the Government has not repaid a Territory a cent. During the twenty years preceding 1865 there had been numerous raids upon Mormon settlements, most of them due to the thoughtless barbarity of passing emigrants; but as a rule, the only revenge taken by the Mormons was expostulation, and the despatch of missionaries to them with the Bible, and medicines and implements of agriculture.
The result to-day is exactly what Brigham Young foresaw. The Indians look upon the Mormons as suffering with themselves from the earth-hunger of "Gentiles," and feel a community in wrong with them, while they consider them different from all other white men in being fair in their acts and straightforward in their speech. In 1847 a chief of the Pottawatomies—then being juggled for the second time from a bad reservation to a worse—came into the camp of the Mormons—then for the second time flying from one of the most awful persecutions that ever disgraced any nation—and on leaving spoke as spoke as follows—(he spoke good French, by the way): "My Mormon brethren,—We have both suffered. We must help one another, and the Great Spirit will help us both. You may cut and use all the wood on our lands that you wish. You may live on any part of it that we are not actually occupying ourselves. Because one suffers, and does not deserve it, it is no reason he shall suffer always. We may live to see all well yet. However, if we do not, our children will. Good-bye."
Now, it strikes me that a Christian archbishop would find it hard to alter the Red Indian's speech for the better. It is one of the finest instances of untutored Christianity in history, and contrasts so strangely with the hideous barbarities that make the history of Missouri so infamous, that I can easily understand the sympathies of Mormons being cast in with the Christian heathens they fled to, rather than the heathen Christians they fled from. Nor from that day to this, have the Mormons forgotten the hint the Pottawatomie gave them, and on the ground of common suffering and by the example of a mutual sympathy have kept up such relations with the Indians, even under exasperation, that the red man's lodge is now open to the Mormon when it is closed to the Gentile.
What necessity, then, have the Mormons for secret treaties With the Indians? None whatever. The Indians have learned by the last half-century's experience that every "treaty" made with them has only proved a fraud towards their ruin, while during the same period they have learned that the word of the Mormons, who never make treaties, can be relied upon. So if the Saints were now to begin making treaties, they would probably fall in the estimation of the Indians to the level of the American Government, and participate in the suspicion which the latter has so industriously worked to secure, and has so thoroughly secured.
The other error commonly made as to the Indians is to underestimate their strength. Now the Navajoes alone could bring into the field 10,000 fighting men; and, besides these, there are (specially friendly to the Mormons) the Flatheads, the Shoshonees, the Blackfeet, the Bannocks, part of the Sioux, and a few Apaches, with, of course, the Utes of all kinds. The old instinct for the war-path is by no means dead, as the recent troubles in the south of Arizona give dismal proof; and a Mormon invitation would be quite sufficient to bring all "the Lamanites" together into the Wasatch Mountains.
That any such idea is ever entertained by Mormons I heartily repudiate. But I think it worth while to point out, that—if the influence of the Mormons on the Indians is considered of sufficient importance to base the charge of treasonable alliance upon it—it is quite illogical to sneer at that influence as making no difference in the case of difficulties arising. But as a point of fact, the Mormons have no other secret in their relations with the red men than that they treat them with consideration, and make allowances for their ethical obliquities; and further, as a point of fact also, these same tribes, "the Lamanites" of the Book of Mormon, "the Lost Tribes," are in themselves so formidable that under white leadership they would make a very serious accession of strength to any public enemy that should be able to enlist them.
REPRESENTATIVE AND UNREPRESENTATIVE MORMONISM.
Mormonism and Mormonism—Salt Lake City not representative—The miracles of water—How settlements grow—The town of Logan: one of the Wonders of the West—The beauty of the valley—The rural simplicity of life—Absence of liquor and crime—A police force of one man—Temple mysteries—Illustrations of Mormon degradation—Their settlement of the "local option" question.
SALT Lake City is not the whole of "Mormonism." In the Eastern States there is a popular impression that it is. But as a matter of fact, it hardly represents Mormonism at all. The Gentile is too much there, and Main Street has too many saloons. The city is divided into two parties, bitterly antagonistic. Newspapers exchange daily abuse, and sectarians thump upon their pulpit cushions at each other every Sunday. Visitors on their travels, sight-seeing, move about the streets in two-horse hacks, staring at the houses that they pass as if some monsters lived in them. A military camp stands sentry over the town, and soldiers slouch about the doors of the bars.
All this, and a great deal more that is to be seen in Salt Lake City, is foreign to the true character of a Mormon settlement. Logan, for instance (which I describe later on), is characteristic of Mormonism, and nowhere so characteristic as in those very features in which it differs from Salt Lake City. The Gentile does not take very kindly to Logan, for there are no saloons to make the place a "live town," and no public animosities to give it what they call "spirit;" everybody knows his neighbour, and the sight-seeing fiend is unknown. The one and only newspaper hums on its way like some self-satisfied bumble bee; the opposition preacher, with a congregation of eight women and five men, does not think it worth while, on behalf of such a shabby constituency, to appeal to Heaven every week for vengeance on the 200,000 who don't agree with him and his baker's dozen. There is no pomp and circumstance of war to remind the Saints of Federal surveillance, no brass cannon on the bench pointing at the town (as in Salt Lake City), no ragged uniforms at street corners. Everything is Mormon. The biggest shop is the Co-operative Store; the biggest place of worship the Tabernacle; the biggest man the President of the Stake. Everybody that meets, "Brothers" or "Sisters" each other in the streets, and after nightfall the only man abroad is the policeman, who as a rule retires early himself; and no one takes precautions against thieves at night. It is a very curious study, this well-fed, neighbourly, primitive life among orchards and corn-fields, this bees-in-a-clover-field life, with every bee bumbling along in its own busy way, but all taking their honey back to the same hive. It is not a lofty life, nor "ideal" to my mind, but it is emphatically ideal, if that word means anything at all, and its outcome, where exotic influences are not at work, is contentment and immunity from crime, and an Old-World simplicity.
But Logan is not by any means a solitary illustration. For the Mormon settlements follow the line of the valleys that run north and south, and every one of them, where water is abundant, is a Logan in process of development.
For water is the philosopher's stone; the fairy All-Good; the First Cause; the everything that men here strive after as the source of all that is desirable. It is silver and gold, pearls and rubies, and virtuous women—which are "above rubies"—everything in fact that is precious. It spirits up Arabian-Nights enchantments, and gives industry a talisman to work with. Without it, the sage-brush laughs at man, and the horn of the jack-rabbit is exalted against him. With it, corn expels the weed, and the long-eared rodent is ploughed out of his possession. Without it, greasewood and gophers divide the wilderness between them. With it, homesteads spring up and gather the orchards around them. Without it, the silence of the level desert is broken only by the coyote and the lark. With it, comes the laughter of running brooks, the hum of busy markets, and the cheery voices of the mill-wheels by the stream. Without it, the world seems a dreary failure. With it, it brightens into infinite possibilities. No wonder then that men prize it, exhaust ingenuity in obtaining it, quarrel about it. I wonder they do not worship it. Men have worshipped trees, and wind, and the sun, for far less cause.
Nothing indeed is so striking in all these Mormon settlements as the supreme importance of water. It determines locations, regulates their proportions, and controls their prosperity. Here are thousands of acres barren—though I hate using such a word for a country of such beautiful wild flowers—because there is no water. There is a small nook bursting with farmsteads, and trees, because there is water. Men buy and sell water-claims as if they were mining stock "with millions in sight," and appraise each other's estates not by the stock that grazes on them, or the harvests gathered from them, but by the water-rights that go with them. Thus, a man in Arizona buys a forty-acre lot with a spring on it, and he speaks of it as 70,000 acres of "wheat." Another has acquired the right of the head-waters of a little mountain stream; he is spoken of as owning "the finest ranch in the valley." Yet the one has not put a plough into the ground, the other has not a single head of cattle! But each possessed the "open sesame" to untold riches, and in a country given over to this new form of hydromancy was already accounted wealthy.
Every stream in Utah might be a Pactolus, every pool a Bethesda. To compass, then, this miracle-working thing, the first energies of every settlement are directed in the union. The Church comes forward if necessary to help, and every one contributes his labour. At first the stream where it leaves the canyon, and debouches upon the levels of the valley, is run off into canals to north and south and west (for all the streams run from the eastern range), and from these, like the legs of a centipede, minor channels run to each farmstead, and thence again are drawn off in numberless small aqueducts to flood the fields. The final process is simple enough, for each of the furrows by which the water is let in upon the field is in turn dammed up at the further end, and each surrounding patch is thus in turn submerged. But the settlement expands, and more ground is needed. So another canal taps the stream above the canyon mouth, the main channels again strike off, irrigating the section above the levels already in cultivation, and overlapping the original area at either end. And every time increasing population demands more room, the stream is taken off higher and higher up the canyon. The cost is often prodigious, but necessity cannot stop to haggle over arithmetic, and the Mormon settlements therefore have developed a system of irrigation which is certainly among the wonders of the West.
"Logan is the chief Mormon settlement in the Cache Valley, and is situated about eighty miles to the north of Salt Lake City. Population rather over 4000." Such is the ordinary formula of the guide book. But if I had to describe it in few words I should say this: "Logan is without any parallel, even among the wonders of Western America, for rapidity of growth, combined with solid prosperity and tranquillity. Population rather over 4000, every man owning his own farm. Police force, two men—partially occupied in agriculture on their own account. N.B.—No police on Sundays, or on meeting evenings, as the force are otherwise engaged."
And writing sincerely I must say that I have seen few things in America that have so profoundly impressed me as this Mormon settlement of Logan. It is not merely that the industry of men and women, penniless emigrants a few years ago, has made the valley surpassing in its beauty. That it has filled the great levels that stretch from mountain to mountain with delightful farmsteads, groves of orchard-trees, and the perpetual charm of crops. That it has brought down the river from its idleness in the canyons to busy itself in channels and countless waterways with the irrigation and culture of field and garden; to lend its strength to the mills which saw up the pines that grow on its native mountains; to grind the corn for the 15,000 souls that live in the valley, and to help in a hundred ways to make men and women and children happy and comfortable, to beautify their homes, and reward their industry. All this is on the surface, and can be seen at once by any one.
But there is much more than mere fertility and beauty in Logan and its surroundings, for it is a town without crime, a town without drunkenness! With this knowledge one looks again over the wonderful place, and what a new significance every feature of the landscape now possesses! The clear streams, perpetually industrious in their loving care of lowland and meadow and orchard, and so cheery, too, in their incessant work, are a type of the men and women themselves; the placid cornfields lying in bright levels about the houses are not more tranquil than the lives of the people; the tree-crowded orchards and stack-filled yards are eloquent of universal plenty; the cattle loitering to the pasture contented, the foals all running about in the roads, while the waggons which their mothers are drawing stand at the shop door or field gate, strike the new-comer as delightfully significant of a simple country life, of mutual confidence, and universal security.
And yet I had not come there in the humour to be pleased, for I was not well. But the spirit of the place was too strong for me, and the whole day ran on by itself in a veritable idyll.
A hen conveying her new pride of chickens across the road, with a shepherd dog loftily approving the expedition in attendance; a foal looking into a house over a doorstep, with the family cat, outraged at the intrusion, bristling on the stoop; two children planting sprigs of peach blossoms in one of the roadside streams; a baby peeping through a garden wicket at a turkey-cock which was hectoring it on the sidewalk for the benefit of one solitary supercilious sparrow—such were the little vignettes of pretty nonsense that brightened my first walk in Logan. I was alone, so I walked where I pleased; took notice of the wild birds that make themselves as free in the streets as if they were away up in the canyons; of the wild flowers that still hold their own in the corners of lots, and by the roadway; watched the men and women at their work in garden and orchard, the boys driving the waggons to the mill and the field, the girls busy with little duties of the household, and "the little ones," just as industrious as all the rest, playing at irrigation with their mimic canals, three inches wide, old fruit-cans for buckets, and posies stuck into the mud for orchards. I stopped to talk to a man here and a woman there; helped to fetch down a kitten out of an apple-tree, and, at the request of a boy, some ten years old, I should say, opened a gate to let the team he was driving, or rather being walked along with, go into the lot.
It was a beautiful day, and all the trees were either in full bloom or bright young leaf; and the conviction gradually grew upon me that I had never, out of England, seen a place so simple, so neighbourly, so quiet.
Later on I was driven through the town to the Temple. The wide roads are all avenued with trees, and behind trees, each in its own garden, or orchard, or lot of farm-land, stands a ceaseless succession of cottage homes. Here and there a "villa," but the great majority "cottages." Not the dog-kennels in which the Irish peasantry are content to grovel through life so long as they need not work and can have their whisky. Not the hovels which in some parts of rural England house the farm labourer and his unkempt urchins. But cleanly, comfortable homes, some of adobe, some of wood, with porticos and verandahs and other ornaments, six or eight or even ten rooms, with barns behind for the cow and the horse and the poultry, bird-cages at the doors, clean white curtains at the windows, and neatly bedded flowers in the garden-plots. Hundred after hundred, each in its own lot of amply watered ground, we passed the homes of these Mormon farmers, and it was a wonderful thing to me—so fresh from the old country, with its elegance and its squalor side by side; so lately from the "live" cities of Colorado, with their murrain of "busted" millionaires and hollow shells of speculative prosperity—this great township of an equal prosperity and a universal comfort. Every man I met in the street or saw in the fields owned the house which he lived in, and the ground that his railings bounded. Moreover they were his by right of purchase, the earnings of the work of his own two hands. No wonder, then, they demean themselves like men.
I was driving with the President of the "stake"—such is the name of the Church for the sub-divisions of its Territory—and the chief official, therefore, of Logan, when, in a narrow part of the road we met a down-trodden Mormon serf driving a loaded waggon in the opposite direction. The President pulled a little to one side, motioning the man to drive past. But the roadway thus left for him was rather rough and this degraded slave of the Church, knowing the rule of the road (that a loaded waggon has the right of way against all other vehicles), calmly pointed with his whip-handle to the side of the road, and said to his President, "You drive there." And the President did so, whereat the down-trodden one proceeded on his way in the best of the road.
Now this may be accepted as an instance of that abject servitude which, according to anti-Mormons, characterizes the followers of Mormonism. As another illustration of the same awe-stricken subjection may be here noted the fact, that whenever the President slackened pace, passers-by, men and women, would come over to us, and shaking hands with the President, exchange small items of domestic, neighbourly chat—the health of the family, convalescence of a cow, and, speaking generally, discuss Tommy's measles. Now, women would hardly waste a despot's time with intelligence of an infant's third tooth, or a man expatiate on the miraculous recovery of a calf from a surfeit of damp lucerne.
I chanced also one day to be with an authority when a man called in to apologize for not having repaid his emigration money; and to me the incident was specially interesting on this account, that very few writers on the Mormons have escaped charging the Church with acting dishonestly and usuriously towards its emigrants. I have read repeatedly that the emigrants, being once in debt, are never able to get out of debt; that the Church prefers they should not; that the indebtedness is held in terrorem over them. But the man before me was in exactly the same position as every other man in Logan. He had been brought out from England at the expense of the Perpetual Emigration Fund (which is maintained partly by the "tithings," chiefly by voluntary donations), and though by his labour he had been able to pay for a lot of ground and to build himself a house, to plant fruit-trees, buy a cow, and bring his lot under cultivation, he had not been able to pay off any of the loan of the Church. It stood, therefore, against him at the original sum. But his delinquency distressed him, and "having things comfortable about him," as he said, and some time to spare, he came of his own accord to his "Bishop," to ask if he could not work of part of his debt. He could not see his way, he said to any ready money, but he was anxious to repay the loan, and he came, therefore, to offer all he had—his labour. Now, I cannot believe that this man was abused. I am sure he did not think he was abused himself. Here he was in Utah, comfortably settled for life, and at no original expense to himself. No one had bothered him to pay up; no one had tacked on usurious interest. So he came, like an honest man, to make arrangements for satisfying a considerate creditor, but all he got in answer was, that "there was time enough to pay" and an exchange of opinions about a plough or a harrow or something. And he went off as crushed down with debt as ever. And he very nearly added to his debt on the way, by narrowly escaping treading on a presumptuous chicken which was reconnoitring the interior of the house from the door-mat.
To return to my drive. After seeing the town we drove up to the Temple. The Mormon "temples" must not be mistaken for their "tabernacles." The latter are the regular places of worship, open to the public. The former are buildings strictly dedicated to the rites of the Endowments, the meetings of the initiated brethren, and the ceremonial generally of the sacred Masonry of Mormonism. No one who has not taken his degrees in these mysteries has access to the temples, which are, or will be, very stately piles, constructed on architectural principles said by the Church to have been revealed to Joseph Smith piecemeal, as the progress of the first Temple (at Kirkland) necessitated, and said by the profane to be altogether contrary to all previously received principles. However this may be, the style is, from the outside, not so prepossessing as the cost of the buildings and the time spent upon them would have led one to expect. The walls are of such prodigious thickness, and the windows so narrow and comparatively small, that the buildings seem to be constructed for defence rather than for worship. But once within, the architecture proves itself admirable. The windows gave abundant light and the loftiness of the rooms imparts an airiness that is as surprising as pleasing, while the arrangement of staircases—leading, as I suppose, from the rooms of one degree in the "Masonry" to the next higher—and of the different rooms, all of considerable size, and some of very noble proportions indeed, is singularly good.
I ought to say that this Temple at Logan is the only one I have entered, and it is only because it is not completed. This year the building will be finished—so it is hoped—and the ceremony of dedication will then attract an enormous crowd of Mormons. It is something over 90 feet in height (not including the towers, which are still wanting) and measures 160 feet by 70. On the ground floor, judging from what I know of the secret ritual of the Church, are the reception-rooms of the candidates for the "endowments," various official rooms, and the font for baptism. The great laver, 10 feet in diameter, will rest on the backs of twelve oxen cast in iron (and modelled from a Devon ox bred by Brigham Young) and will be descended to by flights of steps, the oxen themselves standing in water half-knee-deep. On the next floor are the apartments in which the allegorical panorama of the "Creation" and the "Fall of Man" will be represented. Here, too, will be the "Veil," the final degree in what might be called, in Masonic phrase, "craft" or "blue" Masonry, and, except for higher honorary grades, the ultimate objective point of Mormon initiation. Above these rooms is a vast hall, occupying the whole floor, in which general assemblies of the initiated brethren and "chapters" will be held. The whole forms a very imposing pile of great solidity and some grandeur, built of a gloomy, slate-coloured stone (to be eventually coloured a lighter tint), and standing on a magnificent site, being raised above the town upon an upper "bench" of the slope, and showing out superbly against the monstrous mountain about a mile behind it. The mountain, of course, dwarfs the Temple by its proximity, but the position of the building was undoubtedly "an architectural inspiration," and gives the great pile all the dominant eminence which Mormons claim for their Church.
From the platform of the future tower the view is one of the finest I have ever seen. The valley, reaching for twenty miles in one direction, and thirty in the other, with an average width of about ten miles, lies beneath you, level in the centre, and gradually sloping on every margin up to the mountains that bound it in. Immediately underneath you, Logan spreads out its breadth of farm-land and orchard and meadow, with the river—or rather two rivers, for the Logan forks just after leaving the canyon—and the canal, itself a pleasant stream, carrying verdure and fertility into every nook and corner. To right and left and in front, delightful villages—Hirum, Mendon, Wellsville, Paradise, and the rest, all of them miniature Logans—break the broad reaches of crop-land, with their groves of fruit-trees, and avenues of willows and carob, box-elder, poplar, and maple, while each of them seems to be stretching out an arm to the other, and all of them trying to join hands with Logan. For lines of homesteads and groups of trees have straggled away from each pretty village, and, dotted across the intervening meadows of lucerne and fields of corn, form links between them all. Behind them rise the mountains, still capped and streaked with snow, but all bright with grass upon their slopes. It was a delightful scene, and required but little imagination to see the 15,000 people of the valley grown into 150,000, and the whole of this splendid tract of land one continuous Logan. And nothing can stop that day but an earthquake or a chronic pestilence. For Cache Valley depends for its prosperity upon something surer than "wild-cat" speculations, or mines that have bottoms to fall out. The cumulative force of agricultural prosperity is illustrated here with remarkable significance, for the town, that for many years seemed absolutely stationary, has begun both to consolidate and to expand with a determination that will not be gainsaid.
The sudden success of a mining camp is volcanic in its ephemeral rapidity. The gradual growth of an agricultural town is like the solid accretion of a coral island. The mere lapse of time will make it increase in wealth, and with wealth it will annually grow more beautiful. Even as it is, I think this settlement of Mormon farmers one of the noblest of the pioneering triumphs of the Far West; and in the midst of these breathless, feverish States where every one seems to be chasing some will-o'-the-wisp with a firefly light of gold, or of silver—where terrible crime is a familiar feature, where known murderers walk in the streets, and men carry deadly weapons, where every other man complains of the fortune he only missed making by an accident, or laments the fortune he made in three days, and lost in as many hours—it is surpassingly strange to step out suddenly upon this tranquil valley, and find oneself among its law-abiding men. It is exactly like stepping out of a mine shaft into the fresh pure air of daylight.
The Logan police force is a good-tempered-looking young man. There is another to help him, but if they had not something else to do they would either have to keep on arresting each other, in order to pass the time, or else combine to hunt gophers and chipmunks. As it is, they unite other functions of private advantage with their constabulary performances, and thus justify their existence. As one explanation of the absence of crime, there is not a single licence for liquor in the town.
Once upon a time there were three saloons in Logan. But one night a Gentile, passing through the town, shot the young Mormon who kept one of them, whereat the townsfolk lynched the murderer, and suppressed all the saloons. After a while licences were again issued, but a six months' experiment showed that the five arrests of the previous half-year had increased under the saloon system to fifty-six, so the town suppressed the licences again, and to-day you cannot buy any liquor in Logan. I am told, however, that an apostate, who is in business in the town, carries on a more or less clandestine distribution of strong drinks; but any accident resulting therefrom, another murder, for instance, would probably put an end to his trade for ever, for it is not only the Mormon leaders, but the Mormon people that refuse to have drunkards among them.
These facts about Logan are a sufficient refutation of the calumny so often repeated by apostates and Gentiles, that the Mormons are not the sober people they profess to be. The rules now in force in Logan were once in force in Salt Lake City, but thanks to reforming Gentiles there are now plenty of saloons and drunkards in the latter. At one time there were none, but finding the sale of drink inevitable, the Church tried to regulate it by establishing its own shops, and forbidding it to be sold elsewhere. But the Federal judge refused the application. So the city raised the saloon licence to 3600 dollars per annum! Yet, in spite of this enormous tax, two or three bars managed to thrive, and eventually numbers of other men, encouraged by the conduct of the courts, opened drinking-saloons, refused to pay the licence, and defied—and still defy—all efforts of the city to bring them under control. In Logan, however, these are still the days of no drink, and the days therefore of very little crime.
THROUGH THE MORMON SETTLEMENTS.
Salt Lake City to Nephi—General similarity of the settlements—From Salt Lake Valley into Utah Valley—A lake of legends—Provo—Into the Juab valley—Indian reminiscences—Commercial integrity of the saints—At Nephi—Good work done by the saints—Type of face in rural Utah—Mormon "doctrine" and Mormon "meetings."
THE general resemblance between the populations of the various Mormon settlements is not more striking than the general resemblance between the settlements themselves.
Two nearly parallel ranges of the Rocky Mountains, forming together part of the Wasatch range, run north and south through the length of Utah, and enclose between them a long strip of more or less desolate-looking land. Spurs run out from these opposing ranges, and meeting, cut off this strip into "valleys" of various lengths, so that, travelling from north to south, I crossed in succession, in the line of four hundred miles or so, the Cache, Salt Lake, Utah, Juab, San Pete, and Sevier valleys (the last enclosing Marysvale, Circle Valley and Panguitch Valley), and having there turned the end of the Wasatch range, travelled into Long Valley, which runs nearly east and west across the Territory.
In the Cache and the Sevier valleys there are some noble expanses of natural meadow, but in all the rest the soil, where not cultivated, is densely overgrown with sage-brush, greasewood and rabbit-brush, and in no case except the Cache Valley (by far the finest section of the Territory) and Long Valley, is the water-supply sufficient to irrigate the whole area enclosed. The proportions under cultivation vary therefore according to the amount of the water, and the size of the settlements is of course in an almost regular ratio with the acreage under the plough. But all are exactly on the same pattern. Wide streets—varying from 80 to 160 feet in width—avenued on either side with cotton-wood, box-elder, poplar, and locust-trees, and usually with a runnel of water alongside each side-walk, intersect each other at right angles, the blocks thus formed measuring from four to ten acres. These blocks hold, it may be, as many as six houses, but, as a rule, three, two, or only one; while the proportion of fruit and shade-trees to dwelling-houses ranges from a hundred to one to twenty to one. As the lots are not occupied in any regular succession, there are frequent gaps caused by empty blocks, while the streets towards the outer limits of the towns are still half overgrown with the original sage-brush. All the settlements therefore, resemble each other, except in size, very closely, and may be briefly described as groves of trees and fruit orchards with houses scattered about among them.
The settlements of the Church stretch in a line north and south throughout the whole length of the Territory, and on reaching the Rio Virgin, in the extreme south, follow the course of that river right across Utah to the eastern frontier. The soil throughout the line north and south appears to be of a nearly uniform character, as the same wild plants are to be found growing on it everywhere, and the sudden alternations of fertility and wilderness are due almost entirely to the abundance or absence of water.
Leaving Salt Lake City to go south, we pass through suburbs of orchard and garden, with nearly the whole town in panoramic review before us, and find ourselves in half an hour upon levels beyond the reach of the city channels, and where the sage-brush therefore still thrives in undisturbed glory. Bitterns rise from the rushes, and flights of birds wheel above the patches of scrub. And so to the Morgan smelting camp, and then the Francklyn works, where the ore of the Horn Silver Mine is worked, and then the Germania, one of the oldest smelting establishments in the Territory, where innocent ore of all kinds is taken in and mashed up into various "bullions"—irritamenta malorum. Two small stations, each of them six peach-trees and a shed, slip by, and then Sandy, a small mining camp of poor repute, shuffles past, and next Draper, an agricultural settlement that seems to have grown fruit-trees to its own suffocation.
The mountains have been meanwhile drawing gradually closer together, and here they join. Salt Lake Valley ends, and Utah Valley begins, and crossing a "divide" we find the levels of the Utah Lake before us, and the straggling suburbs of Lehi about us. These scattered cottages gradually thicken into a village towards the lake, and form a pleasant settlement of the orthodox Mormon type. The receipt for making one of these ought to be something as follows: Take half as much ground as you can irrigate, and plant it thickly with fruit-trees. Then cut it up into blocks by cutting roads through it at right angles; sprinkle cottages among the blocks, and plant shade-trees along both sides of the roads. Then take the other half of your ground and spread it out in fields around your settlement, sowing to taste.
The actual process is, of course, the above reversed. A log hut and an apple-tree start together in a field of corn, and the rest grows round them. But my receipt looks the easier of the two.
Beyond Lehi, and all round it, cultivation spreads almost continuously—alternating delightfully with orchards and groves and meadows—to American Fork, a charming settlement, smothered, as usual, in fruit and shade-trees. The people here are very well-to-do, and they look it; and their fields and herds of cattle have overflowed and joined those of Pleasant Grove—another large and prosperous Mormon settlement that lies further back, and right under the hills. It would be very difficult to imagine sweeter sites for such rural hamlets than these rich levels of incomparable soil stretching from the mountains to the lake, and watered by the canyon streams.
"Great Salt Lake" is, of course, the Utah Lake of the outside world. But "Utah Lake" proper, is the large sheet of fresh water which lies some thirty miles south of Salt Lake City, and gives its name to the valley which it helps to fertilize. All around it, except on the western shore, the Mormons have planted their villages, so that from Lehi you can look out on to the valley, and see at the feet of the encircling hills, and straggling down towards the lake, a semicircle of settlements that, but for the sterility of the mountain slopes on the west, might have formed a complete ring around it. But no springs rise on the western slopes, and the settlements of the valleys always lie, therefore, on the eastern side, unless some central stream gives facilities for irrigation on the western also.
Utah Lake is a lake of legends. In the old Indian days it was held in superstitious reverence as the abode of the wind spirits and the storm spirits, and as being haunted by monsters of weird kind and great size. Particular spots were too uncanny for the red men to pitch their lodges there; and even game had asylum, as in a city of refuge, if it chanced to run in the direction of the haunted shore. In later times, too, the Utah Lake has borne an uncomfortable reputation as the domain of strange water-apparitions, and several men have recorded visions of aquatic monsters, for which science as yet has found no name, but which, speaking roughly, appear to have been imitations of that delightful possibility, the sea serpent. Science, I know, goes dead against such gigantic worms, but this wonderful Western country has astonishment in store for the scientific world. If half I am told about the wondrous fossils of Arizona and thereabouts be true, it may even be within American resources to produce the kraken himself. In the mean time, as a contribution towards it, and a very tolerable instalment, too, I would commend to notice the great snake of the Utah Lake. It has frightened men—and, far better evidence than that, it has been seen by children when playing on the shore. I say "better," because children are not likely to invent a plausible horror in order to explain their sudden rushing away from a given spot with terrified countenances and a consistent narrative—a horror, too, which should coincide with the snake superstitions of the Pi-Ute Indians. Have wise men from the East ever heard of this fabled thing? Does the Smithsonian know of this terror of the lake—this freshwater kraken—this new Mormon iniquity?
Visitors have made the American Fork canyon too well known to need more than a reference here, but the Provo canyon, with its romantic waterfalls and varied scenery, is a feature of the Utah Valley which may some day be equally familiar to the sight-seeing world. The botanist would find here a field full of surprises, as the vegetation is of exceptional variety, and the flowers unusually profuse. Down this canyon tumbles the Provo River; and as soon as it reaches the mouth—thinking to find the valley an interval of placid idleness before it attains the final Buddhistic bliss of absorption in the lake, the Nirvana of extinguished individuality—it is seized upon, and carried off to right and left by irrigation channels, and ruthlessly distributed over the slopes. And the result is seen, approaching Provo, in magnificent reaches of fertile land, acres of fruit-trees, and miles of crops.
Provo is almost Logan over again, for though it has the advantage over the northern settlement in population, it resembles it in appearance very closely. There is the same abundance of foliage, the same width of water-edged streets, the same variety of wooden and adobe houses, the same absence of crime and drunkenness, the same appearance of solid comfort. It has its mills and its woollen factory, its "co-op." and its lumber-yards. There is the same profusion of orchard and garden, the same all-pervading presence of cattle and teams. The daily life is the same too, a perpetual industry, for no sooner is breakfast over than the family scatters—the women to the dairy and household work, the handloom and the kitchen; the men to the yard, the mill, and the field. One boy hitches up a team and is off in one direction; another gets astride a barebacked horse and is off in another; a third disappears inside a barn, and a fourth engages in conflict with a drove of calves. But whatever they are doing, they are all busy, from the old man pottering with the water channels in the garden to the little girls pairing off to school; and the visitor finds himself the only idle person in the settlement.
From Provo—through its suburbs of foliage and glebeland—past Springville, a sweet spot, lying back under the hills with a bright quick stream flowing through it and houses mobbed by trees. Here are flour-mills and one of the first woollen mills built in Utah. In the days of its building the Indians harried the valley, and young men tell how as children they used to lie awake at nights to listen to the red men as they swept whooping and yelling through the quiet streets of the little settlement; how the guns stood always ready against the wall, and the windows were barricaded every night with thick pine logs. What a difference now! Further on, but still looking on to the lake, is Spanish Fork (nee Palmyra), where, digging a water channel the other day, the spade turned up an old copper image of the Virgin Mary, and some bones. This takes back the Mormon settlement of to-day to the long-ago time when Spanish missionaries preached of the Pope to the Piutes, and gave but little satisfaction to either man or beast, for their tonsured scalps were but scanty trophies and the coyote found their lean bodies but poor picking. Only fifteen years ago the Navajos came down into the valley through the canyon which the Denver and Rio Grande line now traverses, but the Mormons were better prepared than the Spanish missionaries, and hunted the Navajo soul out of the Indians, so that Spanish Fork is now the second largest settlement in the valley, and the Indians come there begging. They are all of the "tickaboo" and "good Injun" sort, the "how-how" mendicants of the period. All the inhabitants are as good an illustration of the advantages of co-operation in stores, farm-work, mills—everything—as can well be adduced.
Co-operation, by the way, is an important feature of Mormon life, and never, perhaps, so much on men's tongues and in their minds as at the present time. The whole community has been aroused by the consistent teaching of their leaders in their addresses at public "meetings," in their prayers in private households, to a sense of the "suicidal folly," as they call it, of making men wealthy (by their patronage) who use their power against the Saints; and the Mormons have set themselves very sincerely to work to trade only with themselves and to starve out the Gentiles. And it is very difficult indeed for an unprejudiced man not to sympathize in some measure with the Mormons. By their honesty they have made the name "Mormon" respected in trade all over America, and have attracted shopkeepers, who on this very honesty have thriven and become wealthy in Utah—and yet some of these men, knowing nothing of the people except that they are straightforward in their dealings and honourable in their engagements, join in the calumny that the Mormons are a "rascally," "double-dealing" set. For my own part, I think the Church should have starved out some of these slanderers long ago. Even now it would be a step in the right direction if the Church slipped a "fighting apostle" at the men who go on day after day saying and writing that which they know to be untrue, calling, for instance, virtuous, hard-working men and women "the villainous spawn of polygamy," and advocating the encouragement of prostitutes as a "reforming agency for Mormon youth"! Meanwhile "co-operation" as a religious duty is the doctrine while of the day, and Gentile trade is already suffering in consequence. The movement is a very important one to the Territory, for if carried out on the proper principles of co-operation, the people will live more cheaply here than in any other State in America. As it is, many imported articles, thanks to co-operative competition, are cheaper here than further east, and when the boycotting is in full swing many more articles will also come down in price, as the Gentiles' profits will then be knocked off the cost to the purchaser. Every settlement, big and little, has its "co-op.," and the elders when on tour through the outlying hamlets lose no opportunity for encouraging the movement and extending it.
Passing Spanish Fork, and its outlying herds of horses, we see, following the curve Of the lake, Salem, a little community of farmers settled around a spring; Payson, called Poteetnete in the old Indian days—after a chief who made life interesting, not to say exciting, for the early settlers—Springlake villa, where one family has grown up into a hamlet, and grown out of it, too, for they complain that they have not room enough and must go elsewhere; and Santaquin, a little settlement that has reached out its fields right across the valley to the opposite slope of the hills. This was the spot where Abraham Butterfield, the only inhabitant of the place at the time, won himself a name among the people by chasing off a band of armed Indians, who had surprised him at his solitary work in the fields, by waving his coat and calling out to imaginary friends in the distance to "Come on." The Indians were thoroughly fooled, and fled back up the country incontinently, while Abraham pursued them hotly, brandishing his old coat with the utmost ferocity, and vociferously rallying nobody to the bloody attack.
Here Mount Nebo, the highest elevation in the Territory was first pointed out to me—how tired I got of it before I had done!—and through fields of lucerne we passed from the Utah into the Juab Valley and an enormous wilderness of sage-brush. It is broken here and there by an infrequent patch of cultivation, and streaks of paling go straggling away across the grey desert. But without water it is a desperate section, and the pillars of dust moving across the level, and marking the track of the sheep that wandered grazing among the sage, reminded me of the sand-wastes of Beluchistan, where nothing can move a foot without raising a tell-tale puff of dust.
There, the traveller, looking out from his own cloud of sand, sees similar clouds creeping about all over the plain, judges from their size the number of camels or horses that may be stirring, and draws his own conclusions as to which may, be peaceful caravans, and which robber-bands. By taking advantage of the wind, the desert banditti are able to advance to the attack, just as the devil-fish do on the sea-bottom, under cover of sand-clouds of their own stirring up; and the first intimation which the traveller has of the character of those who are coming towards him, is the sudden flash of swords and glitter of spearheads that light up the edges of the advancing sand, just as lightning flits along the ragged skirts of a moving thunder-cloud.
But here there are no Murri or Bhoogti horsemen astir, and the Indians, Piutes or Navajos, have not acquired Beluchi tactics. These moving clouds here are raised by loitering sheep, formidable only to Don Quixote and the low-nesting ground-larks. They are close feeders, though, these sheep, and it is poor gleaning after them, so it is a rule throughout the Territory that on the hills where sheep graze, game need not be looked for.
An occasional ranch comes in sight, and along the old county road a waggon or two goes crawling by, and then we reach Mona, a pretty little rustic spot, but the civilizing radiance of corn-fields gradually dies away, and the relentless sage-brush supervenes, with here and there a lucid interval of ploughed ground in the midst of the demented desert. With water the whole valley would be superbly fertile, as we soon see, for there suddenly breaks in upon the monotony of the weed-growths a splendid succession of fields, long expanses of meadowland, large groves of orchards, and the thriving settlement of Nephi.
Like all other prosperous places in Utah, it is almost entirely Mormon. There is one saloon, run by a Mormon, but patronized chiefly by the "outsiders"—for such is the name usually given to the "Gentiles" in the settlement—and no police. Local mills meet local requirements, and the "co-op." is the chief trading store of the place. There are no manufactures for export, but in grain and fruit there is a considerable trade. It is a quaint, straggling sort of place, and, like all these settlements, curiously primitive. The young men use the steps of the co-operative store as a lounge, and their ponies, burdened with huge Mexican saddles and stirrups that would do for dog-kennels, stand hitched to the palings all about. The train stops at the corner of the road to take up any passengers there may be. Deer are sometimes killed in the streets, and eagles still harry the chickens in the orchards. Wild-bird life is strangely abundant, and a flock of "canaries"—a very beautiful yellow siskin—had taken possession of my host's garden. "We do catch them sometimes," said his wife, "but they always starve themselves, and pine away till they are thin enough to get through the bars of the cage, and so we can never keep them." A neighbour who chanced in, was full of canary-lore, and I remember one incident that struck me as very pretty. He had caught a canary and caged it, but the bird refused to be tamed, and dashed itself about the cage in such a frantic way that out of sheer pity he let the wild thing go. A day or two later it came back, but with a mate, and when the cage was hung out the two birds went into captivity together, of their own free-will, and lived as happily as birds could live!
My host was a good illustration of what Mormonism can do for a man. In Yorkshire he was employed in a slaughtering-yard, and thought himself lucky if he earned twelve shillings a week. The Mormons found him, "converted" him, and emigrated him. He landed in Utah without a cent in his pocket, and in debt to the Church besides. But he found every one ready to help him, and was ready to help himself, so that to-day he is one of the most substantial men in Nephi, with a mill that cost him $10,000 to put up, a shop and a farm, a house and orchard and stock. His family, four daughters and a son, are all settled round him and thriving, thanks to the aid he gave them—"but," said he, "if the Mormons had not found me, I should still have been slaughtering in the old country, and glad, likely, to be still earning my twelve shillings a week." Another instance from the same settlement is that of a boy who, five years ago, was brought out here at the age of sixteen. His emigration was entirely paid for by the Church. Yet last year he sent home from his own pocket the necessary funds to bring out his mother and four brothers and sisters! God speed these Mormons, then. They are doing both "the old country and the new" an immense good in thus transforming English paupers into American farmers—and thus exchanging the vices and squalor of English poverty for the temperance, piety, and comfort of these Utah homesteads. I am not blind to their faults. My aversion to polygamy is sincere, and I find also that the Mormons must share with all agricultural communities the blame of not sacrificing more of their own present prospects for the sake of their children's future, and neglecting their education, both in school and at home. But when I remember what classes of people these men and women are chiefly drawn from, and the utter poverty in which most of them I cannot, in sincerity, do otherwise than admire and respect the system which has fused such unpromising material of so many nationalities into one homogeneous whole.
For myself, I do not think I could live among the Mormons happily, for my lines have been cast so long in the centres of work and thought, that a bovine atmosphere of perpetual farms suffocates me. I am afraid I should take to lowing, and feed on lucerne. But this does not prejudice me against the men and women who are so unmistakably happy. They are uncultured, from the highest to the lowest. But the men of thirty and upwards remember these valleys when they were utter deserts, and the Indian was lord of the hills! As little children they had to perform all the small duties about the house, the "chores," as they are called; as lads they had to guard the stock on the hills; as young men they were the pioneers of Utah. What else then could they be but ignorant—in the education of schools, I mean? Yet they are sober in their habits, conversation, and demeanour, frugal, industrious, hospitable, and God-fearing. As a people, their lives are a pattern to an immense number of mankind, and every emigrant, therefore, taken up out of the slums of manufacturing cities in the old countries, or from the hideous drudgery of European agriculture, and planted in these Utah valleys, is a benefit conferred by Mormonism upon two continents at once.
To return to Nephi. I went to a "meeting" in the evening, and to describe one is to describe all. The old men and women sit in front—the women, as a rule, all together in the body of the room, and the men at the sides. How this custom originated no one could tell me; but it is probably a survival of habit from the old days when there was only room enough for the women to be seated, and the men stood round against the walls, and at the door. As larger buildings were erected, the women, as of old, took their accustomed seats together in the centre, and the men filled up the balance of the space. The oldest being hard of hearing and short of sight, would naturally, in an unconventional society, collect at the front of the audience. Looking at them all together, they are found to be exactly what one might expect—a congregation of hard-featured, bucolic faces, sun-tanned and deep-lined. Here and there among them is a bright mechanic's face, and here and there an unexpected refinement of intelligence. But taken in the mass, they are precisely such a congregation as fills nine-tenths of the rural places of worship all the world over. Conspicuously absent, however, is the typical American face, for the fathers and mothers among the Mormons are of every nationality, and the sons and daughters are a mixture of all. In the future this race should be a very fine one, for it is chiefly recruited from the hardier stocks, the English, Scotch, and Scandinavian, while their manner of life is pre-eminently fitted for making them stalwart in figure, and sound in constitution.
The meeting opens with prayer, in which the Almighty is asked for blessings upon the whole people, upon each class of it, upon their own place in particular, upon all the Church authorities, and upon all friends of the Mormons. But never, so far as I have heard, are intercessions made, in the spirit of New Testament teaching, for the enemies of the Church. References to the author of the Edmunds Bill are often very pointed and vigorous. After the prayer comes a hymn, sung often to a lively tune, and accompanied by such instrumental music as the settlement can rely upon, after which the elders address the people in succession. These addresses are curiously practical. They are temporal rather than spiritual, and concern themselves with history, official acts, personal reminiscences, and agricultural matter rather than points of mere doctrine. But as a fact, temporal and spiritual considerations are too closely blended in Mormonism to be disassociated. Thus references to the Edmunds Bill take their place naturally among exhortations to "live their religion", and to "build up the kingdom" in spite of "persecution." Boycotting Gentile tradesmen is similarly inculcated as showing a pious fidelity to the interests of the Church. These are the two chief topics of all addresses, but a passing reference to a superior class of waggon, or a hope that every one will make a point of voting in some coming election, is not considered out of place, while personal matters, the health of the speaker or his experiences in travel, are often thus publicly commented upon. The result is, that the people go away with some tangible facts in their heads, and subjects for ordinary conversation on their tongues, and not, as from other kinds of religious meetings, with only generalities about their souls and the Ten Commandments. In other countries the gabble of small-talk that immediately overtakes a congregation let out of church sounds very incongruous with the last notes of the organ voluntary that play them out of the House of God. But here the people walking homeward are able to continue the conversation on exactly the same lines as the addresses they have just heard, to renew it the next day, to carry it about with them as conversation from place to place, and thus eventually to spread the "doctrine" of the elders over the whole district. A fact about waggon-buying sticks where whole sermons about salvation by faith would not.
FROM NEPHI TO MANTI.
English companies and their failures—A deplorable neglect of claret cup—Into the San Pete Valley—Reminiscences of the Indians—The forbearance of the red man—The great temple at Manti—Masonry and Mormon mysteries—In a tithing-house.
FROM Nephi, a narrow-guage line runs up the Salt Creek canyon, and away across a wilderness to a little mining settlement called Wales, inhabited by Welsh Mormons who work at the adjacent coal-mines. The affair belongs to an English company, and it is worth noting that "English companies" are considered here to be very proper subjects for jest. When nobody else in the world will undertake a hopeless enterprise, an English company appears to be always on hand to embark in it, and this fact displays a confidence on the part of Americans in British credulity, and a confidence on the part of the Britishers in American honesty, which ought to be mutually instructive. Meanwhile this has nothing to do with these coal-mines in the San Pete Valley, which, for all I know, may be very sound concerns, and very profitable to the "English company" in question. I hope it is. The train was rather a curious one, though, for it stopped for passengers at the corner of the street, and when we got "aboard," we found a baggage car the only vehicle provided for us. A number of apostles and elders were on Conference tour, and the party, therefore, was a large one; so that, if the driver had been an enthusiastic anti-Mormon, he might have struck a severe blow at the Church by tilting us off the rails. The Salt Creek canyon is not a prepossessing one, but there grew in it an abundance of borage, the handsome blue heads of flowers showing from among the undergrowth in large patches.
What a waste of borage! Often have I deplored over my claret in India the absence of this estimable vegetable, and here in Utah with a perfect jungle of borage all about me, I had no claret! I pointed out to the apostles with us that temperance in such a spot was flying in the face of providence, and urged them to plant vineyards in the neighbourhood. But they were not enthusiastic, and I relapsed into silent contemplation over the incredible ways of nature, that she should thus cast her pearls of borage before a community of teetotallers.
Traversing the canyon, we enter San Pete Valley, memorable for the Indian War of 1865-67, but in itself as desolate and uninteresting a tract of country as anything I have ever seen. Ugly bald hills and leprous sand-patches in the midst of sage-brush, combined to form a landscape of utter dreariness; and the little settlements lying away under the hills on the far eastern edge of the valley—Fountain Green, Maroni, and Springtown—seemed to me more like penal settlements than voluntary locations. Yet I am told they are pretty enough, and certainly Mount Pleasant, the largest settlement in the San Pete country, looked as if it deserved its name. But it stands back well out of the desperate levels of the valley, and its abundant foliage tells of abundant water. A pair of eagles circled high up in the sky above us as we rattled along, expecting us apparently to die by the way, and hoping to be our undertakers. A solitary coyote was pointed out to me, a lean and uncared-for person, that kept looking back over its shoulder as it trotted away, as if it had a lingering sort of notion that a defunct apostle might by chance be thrown overboard. It was a hungry and a thirsty looking country, and Wales, where we left our train, was a dismal spot. Here we found waggons waiting for us, and were soon on our way across the desert, passing a settlement-oasis now and again, and crossing the San Pete "river," which here sneaks along, a muddy, shallow stream, at the bottom of high, willow-fringed banks. And so to Fort Ephraim, a quaint little one-street sort of place that looks up to Manti, a few miles off, as a little boy looks up to his biggest brother, and to Salt Lake City as a cat might look up to a king.
In 1865-67, however, it was an important point. Several companies of the Mormon militia were mustered here, and held the mountains and passes on the east against the Indians, guarded the stock gathered here from the other small settlements that had been abandoned, and took part in the fights at Thistle Creek, Springtown, Fish Lake, Twelve Mile Creek Gravelly Ford, and the rest, where Black Hawk and his flying squadron of Navajos and Piutes showed themselves such plucky men. It is a pity, I think, that the history of that three years' campaign has never been sketched, for, as men talk of it, it must have abounded with stirring incident and romance. Besides, a well-written history of such a campaign, with the lessons it teaches, might be useful some day—for the fighting spirit of the Indians is not broken, and when another Black Hawk appears upon the scene, 1865 might easily be re-enacted, and Fort Ephraim once more be transformed from a farming hamlet to a military camp.
Yet I have often wondered at the apathy or the friendship of the Indians. Herds of cattle and horses and sheep wander about among the mountains virtually unguarded. Little villages full of grain, and each with its store well stocked with sugar, and tobacco, and cloths, and knives, and other things that the Indians prize, lie almost defenceless at the mouths of canyons. Yet they have not been molested for the last fifteen years. I confess that if I were an Indian chief, I should not be able to resist the temptation of helping my tribe to an occasional surfeit of beef, with the amusement thrown in of plundering a co-operative store. But the Mormons say that the Indian is more honest than a white man and, in illustration of this, are ready to give innumerable instances of an otherwise inexplicable chivalry. For one thing, though, the Mormons are looked upon by the Indians in quite a different light to other Americans, for they consider them to be victims, like themselves, of Federal dislike, while both as individuals and a class they hold them in consideration as being superior to Agents in fidelity to engagements. So that the compliment of honesty is mutually reciprocated. To illustrate this aspect of the Mormon-Indian relations, some Indians came the other day into a settlement and engaged in a very protracted pow-wow, the upshot of all their roundabout palaver being this, that inasmuch as they, the Indians, had given Utah to the Mormons, it was preposterous for the Mormons to pay the Government for the land they took up!
From Fort Ephraim to Manti the road lies chiefly through unreclaimed land, but within a mile or two of the town the irrigated suburbs of Manti break in upon the sage-brush, and the Temple, which has been visible in the distance half the day, grows out from the hills into definite details. The site of this imposing structure certainly surprised me both for the fine originality of its conception, and the artistic sympathy with the surrounding scenery, which has directed its erection. The site originally was a rugged hill slope, but this has been cut out into three vast semicircular terraces, each of which is faced with a wall of rough hewn stone, seventeen feet in height. Ascending these by wide flights of steps, you find yourself on a fourth level, the hill top, which has been levelled into a spacious plateau, and on this, with its back set against the hill, stands the temple. The style of Mormon architecture, unfortunately, is heavy and unadorned, and in itself, therefore, this massive pile, 160 feet in length by 90 wide, and about 100 high, is not prepossessing, But when it is finished, and the terrace slopes are turfed, and the spaces planted out with trees, the view will undoubtedly be very fine, and the temple be a building that the Mormons may well be proud of. Looked at from the plain, with the stern hills behind it, the edifice is seen to be in thoroughly artistic harmony with the scene, while the enormous expenditure of labour upon its erection is a matter for astonishment. The plan of the building inside differs from those of the temples at Logan, St. George, and Salt Lake City, which again differ from each other, for it is a curious fact that the ritual of the secret ceremonies to which these buildings are chiefly devoted, is still under elaboration and imperfect, so that each temple in turn partially varies from its predecessor, to suit the latest alterations made in the Endowments and other rites celebrated within its walls. In my description of the Logan Temple, I gave a sketch of the purposes for which the various parts of the building were intended. That sketch, of course, cannot pretend to be exact, for only those Mormons who have "worked" through the degrees can tell the whole truth; and as yet no one has divulged it. But with a general knowledge of the rites, and an intimate acquaintance with freemasonry, I have, I believe, put together the only reliable outline that has ever been published. The Manti temple will have the same arrangements of baptismal font and dressing-rooms on the ground floor, but as well as I could judge from the unfinished state of the building, the "endowments," in the course of which are symbolical representations of the Creation, Temptation and Fall, will be spread over two floors, the apartment for "baptism for the dead" occupying a place on the lower. The "sealing" is performed on the third. I have an objection to prying into matters which the Mormons are so earnest in keeping secret, but as a mason, the connexion between Masonry and Mormonism is too fascinating a subject for me to resist curiosity altogether.
As a settlement, Manti is pretty, well-ordered and prosperous. The universal vice of unbridged water-courses disfigures its roads just as it does those of every other place (Salt Lake City itself not excepted), and the irregularity in the order of occupation of lots gives it the same scattered appearance that many other settlements have. But the abundance of trees, the width of the streets, the perpetual presence of running water, the frequency and size of the orchards, and the general appearance of simple, rustic, comfort impart to Manti all the characteristic charm of the Mormon settlements. The orthodox grist and saw-mills, essential adjuncts of every outlying hamlet, find their usual place in the local economy; but to me the most interesting corner was the quaint tithing-house, a Dutch-barn kind of place, still surrounded by the high stone stockade which was built for the protection of the settlers during the Indian troubles fifteen years ago. Inside the tithing-house were two great bins half filled with wheat and oats, and a few bundles of wool. I had expected to find a miscellaneous confusion of articles of all kinds, but on inquiry discovered that the popular theory of Mormon tithing, "a tenth of everything,"—"even to the tenth of every egg that is laid," as a Gentile lady plaintively assured me, is not carried out in practice, the majority of Mormons allowing their tithings to run into arrears, and then paying them up in a lump in some one staple article, vegetable or animal, that happens to be easiest for them. The tenth of their eggs or their currant jam does not, therefore, as supposed, form part of the rigid annual tribute of these degraded serfs to their grasping masters. As a matter of fact, indeed, the payment of tithings is as nearly voluntary as the collection of a revenue necessary for carrying on a government can possibly be allowed to be. What it may have been once, is of no importance now. But to-day, so far from there being any undue coercion, I have amply assured myself that there is extreme consideration and indulgence, while the general prosperity of the territory justifies the leniency that prevails.