FROM MANTI TO GLENWOOD.
Scandinavian Mormons—Danish ol—Among the Orchards at Manti—On the way to Conference—Adam and Eve—The protoplasm of a settlement—Ham and eggs—At Mayfield—Our teamster's theory of the ground-hog—On the way to Glenwood—Volcanic phenomena and lizards—A suggestion for improving upon Nature—Primitive Art
"MY hosts at Manti were Danes, and the wife brewed Danish ol." Such is the entry in my note-book, made, I remember, to remind me to say that the San Pete settlements are composed in great proportion of Danes and Scandinavians. These nationalities contribute more largely than any other—unless Great-Britishers are all called one nation—to the recruiting of Mormonism, and when they reach Utah maintain their individuality more conspicuously than any others. The Americans, Welsh, Scotch, English, Germans, and Swiss, merge very rapidly into one blend, but the Scandinavian type—and a very fine peasant type it is—is clearly marked in the settlements where the Hansens and the Jansens, Petersens, Christiansens, Nielsens, and Sorensens, most do congregate. By the way, some of these Norse names sound very curiously to the ear. "Ole Hagg" might be thought to be a nickname rather than anything else, and Lars Nasquist Brihl at best a joke. Their children are remarkably pretty, and the women models of thriftiness.
My hostess at Manti was a pattern. She made pies under an inspiration, and her chicken-pie was a distinct revelation. Her "beer" was certainly a beverage that a man might deny himself quite cheerfully, but to eat her preserves was like listening to beautiful parables, and her cream cheese gave the same gentle pleasure as the singing of thankful canticles.
In the garden was an arbour overrun with a wild grapevine, and I took my pen and ink in there to write. All went well for a while. An amiable cat came and joined me, sitting in a comfortable cushion-sort of fashion on the corner of my blotting-pad. But while we sat there writing, the cat and I, there came a humming-bird into the arbour—a little miracle in feathers, with wings all emeralds and a throat of ruby. And it sat in the sunlight on a vine-twig that straggled out across the door, and began to preen its tiny feathers. I stopped writing to watch the beautiful thing. And so did the cat. For happening to look down at the table I saw the cat, with a fiendish expression of face and her eyes intent on the bird, gathering her hind legs together for a spring. To give the cat a smack on the head, and for the cat to vanish with an explosion of ill-temper, "was the work of an instant." The humming-bird flashed out into the garden, and I was left alone to mop up the ink which the startled cat had spilt. Then I went out and wandered across the garden, where English flowers, the sweet-william and columbine, pinks and wallflowers, pansies and iris, were growing, under the fruit-trees still bunched with blossoms, and out into the street. Friends asked me if I wasn't going to "the conference," but I had not the heart to go inside when the world out of doors was so inviting. There was a cool, green tint in the shade of the orchards, pleasant with the voices of birds and dreamy with the humming of bees. There was nobody else about, only children making posies of apple-blossoms and launching blue boats of iris-petals on the little roadside streams. Everybody was "at conference," and those that could not get into the building were grouped outside among the waggons of the country folk who had come from a distance. These conferences are held quarterly (so that the lives of the Apostles who preside at them are virtually spent in travelling) and at them everything is discussed, whether of spiritual or temporal interest and a general balance struck, financially and religiously. In character they resemble the ordinary meetings of the Mormons, being of exactly the same curious admixture of present farming and future salvation, business advice and pious exhortation.
Everybody who can do so, attends these meetings; and they fulfil, therefore, all the purposes of the Oriental mela. Farmers, stock-raisers, and dealers generally, meet from a distance and talk over business matters, open negotiations and settle bargains, exchange opinions and discuss prospects. Their wives and families, such of them as can get away from their homes, foregather and exchange their domestic news, while everybody lays in a fresh supply of spiritual refreshment for the coming three months, and hears the latest word of the Church as to the Edmunds Bill and Gentile tradesmen. The scene is as primitive and quaint as can be imagined, for in rural Utah life is still rough and hearty and simple. To the stranger, the greetings of family groups, with the strange flavour of the Commonwealth days, the wonderful Scriptural or apocryphal names, and the old-fashioned salutation, are full of picturesque interest, while the meetings of waggons filled with acquaintances from remote corners of the country, the confusion of European dialects—imagine hearing pure Welsh among the San Pete sagebrush!—the unconventional cordiality of greeting, are delightful both in an intellectual and artistic sense.
I have travelled much, and these social touches have always had a charm for me, let them be the demure reunions of Creoles sous les filaos in Mauritius; or the French negroes chattering as they go to the baths in Bourbon; the deep-drinking convivialities of the Planters' Club in Ceylon; the grinning, prancing, rencontres of Kaffir and Kaffir, or the stolid collision of Boer waggons on the African veldt; the stately meeting of camel-riding Beluchis on the sandy put of Khelat; the jingling ox-drawn ekkas foregathered to "bukh" under the tamarind-trees of Bengal; the reserved salutations of Hindoos as they squat by the roadside to discuss the invariable lawsuit and smoke the inevitable hubble-bubble; the noisy congregation of Somali boatmen before their huts on the sun-smitten shores of Aden;—what a number of reminiscences I could string together of social traits in various parts of the world! And these Mormon peasants, pioneers of the West, these hardy sons of hardy sires, will be as interesting to me in the future as any others, and my remembrance of them will be one of admiration for their unfashionable virtues of industry and temperance, and of gratitude for their simple courtesy and their cordial hospitality.
As we left Manti behind us, the waggons "coming into conference" got fewer and fewer, and soon we found ourselves out alone upon the broad levels of the valley, with nothing to keep us company but a low range of barren hills that did their best to break the monotony of the landscape. In places, the ground was white with desperate patches of "saleratus," the saline efflorescence with which agriculture in this Territory is for ever at war, and resembling in appearance, taste, and effects the "reh" of the Gangetic plains. Here, as in India, irrigation is the only known antidote, and once wash it out of the soil and get crops growing and the enemy retires. But as soon as cultivation ceases or irrigation slackens, the white infection creeps over the ground again, and if undisturbed for a year resumes possession. How unrelenting Nature is in her conflict with man!
We passed some warm springs a few miles from Manti, but the water though slightly saline is inodorous, and on the patches which they water I saw the wild flax growing as if it enjoyed the temperature and the soil. Then Six-Mile Creek, a pleasant little ravine, crossed by a rustic bridge, which gives water for a large tract Of land, and so to Sterling, a settlement as yet in its cradle, and curiously illustrative of "the beginning of things" in rural Utah. One man and his one wife up on the hillside doing something to the water, one cock and one hen pecking together in monogamous sympathy, one dog sitting at the door of a one-roomed log-hut. Everything was in the Adam and Eve stage of society, and primeval. So Deucalion and Pyrrha had the earth to themselves, and the "rooster" stalked before his mate as if he was the first inventor of posterity. But much of this country is going to come under the plough in time, for there is water, and in the meantime, as giving promise of a future with some children in it, there is a school-house—an instance of forethought which gratified me.
The country now becomes undulating, remaining for the most part a sterile-looking waste of grease-wood, but having an almost continuous thread of cultivation running along the centre of the valley which, a few miles further on, suddenly widens into a great field of several thousand acres. On the other side of it we found Mayfield.
In Mayfield every one was gone to the Conference except a pretty girl, left to look after all the children of the village, and who resisted our entreaties for hospitality with a determination that would have been more becoming in an uglier person—and an old lady, left under the protection of a big blind dog and a little bobtailed calf. She received us with the honest courtesy universal in the Territory, showed us where to put our horses and where the lucerne was stacked, and apologized to us for having nothing better than eggs and ham to offer!
Fancy nothing better than eggs and ham! To my mind there is nothing in all travelling so delightful as these eggs-and-ham interruptions that do duty for meals. Not only is the viand itself so agreeable, but its odour when cooking creates an appetite.
What a moral there is here! We have all heard of the beauty of the lesson that those flowers teach us which give forth their sweetest fragrance when crushed. But I think the conduct of eggs and ham, that thus create an appetite in order to increase man's pleasure in their own consumption, is attended with circumstances of good taste that are unusually pleasing.
In our hostess's house at Mayfield I saw for the first time the ordinary floor-covering of the country through which we subsequently travelled—a "rag-carpet." It is probably common all over the world, but it was quite new to me. I discussed its composition one day with a mother and her daughter.
"This streak here is Jimmy's old pants, and that darker one is a military overcoat. This is daddy's plush vest. This bit of the pattern is—"
"No, mother, that's your old jacket-back; don't you remember?"—and so on all through the carpet.
Every stripe in it had an association, and the story of the whole was pretty nearly the story of their entire lives in the country.
"For it took us seven years to get together just this one strip of carpet. We folks haven't much, you see, that's fit to tear up."
I like the phrase "fit to tear up," and wonder when, in the opinion of this frugal people, anything does become suitable for destruction. But it is hardly destruction after all to turn old clothes into carpets, and the process is as simple as, in fact is identical with, ordinary hand-weaving. The cloth is simply shredded into very narrow strips, and each strip is treated in the loom just as if it were ordinary yarn, the result being, by a judicious alternation of tints, a very pleasant-looking and very durable floor-cloth. Rag-rugs are also made on a foundation of very coarse canvas by drawing very narrow shreds of rag through the spaces of the canvas, fastening them on the reverse side, and cutting them off to a uniform "pile" on the upper. In one cottage at Salina I remember seeing a rug of this kind in which the girl had drawn her own pattern and worked in the colours with a distinct appreciation of true artistic effect. An industrial exhibition for such products would, I have no doubt, bring to light a great many out-of-the-way handicrafts which these emigrant people have brought with them from the different parts of Europe, and with which they try to adorn their simple homes.
Our teamster from Mayfield to Glenwood, the next stage of my southward journey, was a very cautious person. He would not hurry his horses down hill—they were "belike" to stumble; and he would not hurry them up hill—it "fretted" them. On the level intervals he stopped altogether, to "breathe" them. It transpired eventually that they were plough horses. I suspected it from the first. And from his driving I suspected that he was the ploughman. In other respects he was a very desirable teamster.
His remarks about Europe (he had once been to Chicago himself) were very entertaining, and his theory of "ground hogs" would have delighted Darwin. As far as I could follow him, all animals were of one species, the differences as to size and form being chiefly accidents of age or sex. This, at any rate, was my induction from his description of the "ground hog," which he said was a "kind of squirrel—like the prairie dog!" As he said, there were "quite a few" ground hogs, but they moved too fast among the brush for me to identify them. As far as I could tell, though, they were of the marmot kind, about nine inches long, with very short tails and round small ears. When they were at a safe distance they would stand up at full length on their hind legs, the colouring underneath being lighter than on the back. What are they? I have seen none in Utah except on these volcanic stretches of country between Salina and Monroe.
Much of Utah is volcanic, but here, beyond Salina, huge mounds of scoriae, looking like heaps of slag from some gigantic furnace, are piled up in the centre of the level ground, while in other places circular depressions in the soil—sometimes fifty feet in diameter and lowest in the centre, with deep fissures defining the circumference—seem to mark the places whence the scoriae had been drawn, and the earth had sunk in upon the cavities thus exhausted.
The two sides of the river (the Sevier) were in striking contrast. On this, the eastern, was desolation and stone heaps and burnt-up spaces with ant-hills and lizards.
Nothing makes a place look (to me at least) so hot as an abundance of lizards. They are associated in memory with dead, still heat, "the intolerable calor of Mambre," the sun-smitten cinder-heap that men call Aden, the stifling hillsides of Italy where the grapes lie blistering in the autumn sun, the desperate suburbs of Alexandria—what millions of scorched-looking lizards, detestable little salamanders, used to bask upon Cleopatra's Needles when they lay at full length among the sand!—the heat-cracked fields of India. I know very well that there are lizards and lizards; that they might be divided—as the Hindoo divides everything, whether victuals or men's characters, medicines or the fates the gods send him—into "hot" and "cold" lizards. The salamander itself, according to the ancients, was icy cold. But this does not matter. All lizards make places look hot.
On the other side of the river, a favourite raiding-ground of "Mr. Indian," as the settlers pleasantly call him, lies Aurora, a settlement in the centre of a rich tract of red wheat soil with frequent growths of willow and buffalo-berry (or bull-berry or red-berry or "kichi-michi") marking the course of the Sevier.
But our road soon wound down by a "dug way" to the bottom-lands, and we found ourselves on level meadows clumped with shrubs and patched with corn-fields, and among scattered knots of grazing cattle and horses. Overhead circled several pairs of black hawks, a befitting reminder to the dwellers on these Thessalian fields, these Campanian pastures, that Scythian Piutes and Navajo Attilas might at any time swoop down upon them.
But the forbearance of the Indian in the matter of beef and mutton is inexplicable—and most inexplicable of all in the case of lamb, seeing that mint grows wild. This is a very pleasing illustration of the happiness of results when man and nature work cordially together. The lamb gambols about among beds of mint! What a becoming sense of the fitness of things that would be that should surprise the innocent thing in its fragrant pasture and serve up the two together! "They were pleasant in their lives, and in death they were not divided." And what a delightful field for similar efforts such a spectacle opens up to the philosophic mind! Here, beyond Aurora, as we wind in and out among the brakes of willow and rose-bush, we catch glimpses of the river, with ducks riding placidly at anchor in the shadows of the foliage. And not a pea in the neighbourhood! Now, why not sow green peas along the banks of the American rivers and lakes? How soothing to the weary traveller would be this occasional relief of canard aux petits pois!
After an interval of pretty river scenery we found ourselves once more in a dismal, volcanic country with bald hills and leprous sand-patches the only features of the landscape, with lizards for flowers and an exasperating heat-drizzle blurring the outlines of everything with its quivering refraction. And then, after a few miles of this, we are suddenly in the company of really majestic mountains, some of them cedared to the peaks, others broken up into splendid architectural designs of almost inconceivable variety, richly tinted and fantastically grouped. How wealthy this range must be in mineral! In front of us, above all the intervening hills, loomed out a monster mountain, and turning one of its spurs we break all at once upon the village of Glenwood—a beautiful cluster of foliage with skirts of meadow-land spread out all about it—lying at the foot of the huge slope.
Near Glenwood is an interesting little lake that I visited. Its water is exquisitely clear and very slightly warm. Though less than a foot deep in most places (it has one pool twelve feet in depth), it never freezes, in spite of the intense cold at this altitude. It is stocked with trout that do not grow to any size, but which do not on the other hand seem to diminish in numbers, although the consumption is considerable. The botany in the neighbourhood of the lake is very interesting, the larkspur, lupin, mimulus, violet, heart's-ease, ox-eye, and several other familiar plants of English gardens, growing wild, while a strongly tropical flavour is given to the vegetation by the superb footstools of cactus—imagine sixty-one brilliant scarlet blossoms on a cushion only fifteen inches across!—by the presence of a gorgeous oriole (the body a pure yellow freaked with black on the wings, and the head and neck a rich orange), and by a large butterfly of a clear flame-colour with the upper wings sharply hooked at the tips. Flower, bird, and insect were all in keeping with the Brazils or the Malayan Archipelago.
On a rock, close by the grist-mill, is the only specimen of the much-talked-of Indian "hieroglyphics" that I have seen. They may of course be hieroglyphics, but to me they look like the first attempts of some untutored savage youth to delineate in straight lines the human form divine. Or they may be only his attempts to delineate a cockroach.
FROM GLENWOOD TO MONROE.
From Glenwood to Salina—Deceptiveness of appearances—An apostate Mormon's friendly testimony—-Reminiscences of the Prophet Joseph Smith—Rabbit-hunting in a waggon—Lost in the sagebrush—A day at Monroe—Girls riding pillion—The Sunday drum—Waiting for the right man: "And what if he is married?"—The truth about apostasy: not always voluntary.
SOON after leaving Glenwood, cultivation dies out, and for twelve miles or so the rabbit-brush and grease-wood—the "atriplex" of disagreeably scientific travellers, who always speak of sage-brush as "artemisia," and disguise the gentle chipmunk as "spermophilus"—divide the land between them. The few flowers, and these all dwarfed varieties, attest the poverty of the soil. The mountains, however, do their best to redeem the landscape, and the scenery, as desolate scenery, is very fine. The ranges that have on either hand rolled along an unbroken series of monotonous contour, now break up into every conceivable variety of form, mimicking architecture or rather multiplying its types, and piling bluffs, pierced with caves, upon terraces, and pinnacles upon battlements. Causeways, like that in Echo Canyon, slant down their slopes, and other vestiges of a terrific aqueous action abound. Next to this riot of rock comes a long series of low hills, grey, red, and yellow, utterly destitute of vegetation, and so smooth that it looks as if the place were a mountain-yard, where Nature made her mountains, and had collected all her materials about her in separate convenient mounds before beginning to mix up and fuse. In places they were richly spangled with mica, giving an appearance of sparkling, trickling water to the barren slopes.
On the other side of the valley, the mountains, discountenancing such frivolities, had settled down into solid-bottomed masses of immense bulk, the largest mountains, in superficial acreage, I had seen all the journey, and densely cedared.
With Gunnison in sight across the valley, we reached Willow Creek, a pleasant diversion of water and foliage in the dreary landscape, and an eventful spot in the last Indian war, for among these willows here Black Hawk made a stand to dispute the Mormons' pursuit of their plundered stock, and held the creek, too, all the day. And so out on to the monotonous grease-wood levels again—an Indians' camp fire among the cedars, the only sign of a living thing—and over another "divide," and so into the Sevier Valley. The river is seen flowing along the central depression, with the Red-Mound settlement on the other side of the stream, and Salina on this side of it, lying on ahead.
Salina is one of those places it is very hard to catch. You see it first "about seven" miles off, and after travelling towards it for an hour and a half, find you have still "eight miles or so" to go. "Appearances are very deceptive in this country," as these people delight in saying to new-comers, and the following story is punctually told, at every opportunity, to illustrate it.
A couple of Britishers (of course "Britishers") started off from their hotel "to walk over to that mountain there," just to get an appetite for breakfast. About dinner-time one of them gave up and came back, leaving his obstinate friend to hunt the mountain by himself. After dining, however, he took a couple of horses and rode out after his friend, and towards evening came up with him just as he was taking off his shoes and stockings by the side of a two-foot ditch.
"Hallo!" said the horseman, "what on earth are you doing, Jack?"
"Doing!" replied the other sulkily. "Can't you see? I am taking off my boots to wade this infernal river."
"River!" exclaimed his friend; "what river? That thing's only a two-foot ditch!"
"Daresay," was the dogged response. "It looks only a two-foot ditch. But you can't trust anything in this beastly country. Appearances are so deceptive."
But we caught Salina at last, for we managed to head it up into a cul-de-sac of the mountains, and overtook it about sundown. A few years ago the settlement was depopulated; for Black Hawk made a swoop at it from his eyrie among the cedars on the overlooking hill, and after killing a few of the people, compelled the survivors to fly northward, where the militia was mustering for the defence of the valley. It was in this war that the Federal officer commanding the post at Salt Lake City, acting under the orders of General Sherman, refused to help the settlers, telling them in a telegram of twenty words to help themselves. The country, therefore, remembers with considerable bitterness that three years' campaign against a most formidable combination of Indians; when they lost so many lives, when two counties had to be entirely abandoned, many scattered settlements broken up, and an immense loss in property and stock suffered.
At Salina I met an apostate Mormon who had deserted the religion because he had grown to disbelieve in it, but who had retained, nevertheless, all his respect for the leaders of the Church and the general body of Mormons. He is still a polygamist; that is to say, having married two wives, he has continued to treat them honourably as wives. With me was an apostle, one of the most deservedly popular elders of the Church, and it was capital entertainment to hear the apostate and the apostle exchanging their jokes at each other's expense. I was shown at this house, by the way, an emigration loan receipt. The emigrant, his wife, and three children, had been brought out in the old waggon days at $50 a head. Some fifteen years later, when the man had become well-to-do and after he had apostatized, he repaid the $250, and some $50 extra as "interest." The loan ticket stipulated for "ten per cent per annum," but as he said, it was "only Mormons who would have let him run on so long, and then have let him off so much of the interest."
My host was himself an interesting man, for he had been with the Saints ever since the stormy days of Kirtland, and had known Joseph Smith personally. "Ah, sir, he was a noble man!" said the old fellow. Among other out-of-the-way items which he told me about the founder of the faith, was his predilection for athletic exercises and games of all kinds; how he used to challenge strangers to wrestle, and be very wroth when, as happened once, the stranger threw him over the counter of a shop; and how he used to play baseball with the boys in the streets of Nauvoo. This trait of Joseph Smith's character I have never seen noticed by his biographers, but it is quite noteworthy, as also, I think, is the extraordinary fascination which his personal appearance—for he was a very handsome man of the Sir Robert Peel type—seems to have exercised over his contemporaries. When speaking to them, I find that one and all will glance from the other aspects of his life to this—that he was "a noble man."
Rabbit-hunting across country in a two-horse waggon is not a sport I shall often indulge in again. The rabbit has things too much its own way. It does not seem to be a suitable animal for pursuing in a vehicle. It is too evasive.
Indeed, but for an accident, I should probably never have indulged in it at all. But it happened that on our way from Salina to Monroe we lost our way. Our teamster, for inscrutable reasons of his own, turned off from the main road into a bye-track, which proved to have been made by some one prospecting for clay, and the hole which he had excavated was its terminus. I tried to think out his reason for choosing this particular road, the least and most unpromising of the three that offered themselves to him. It was probably this. Two out of the three roads, being wrong ones, were evils. One of these was larger than the other, and so of the two evils he chose the less. Q.E.D.
To get back into the road we struck across the sage-brush, and in so doing started a jack-rabbit. As it ran in the direction we wanted to go, we naturally followed it. But the jack-rabbit thought we were in murderous pursuit, and performed prodigies of agility and strategy in order to escape us. But the one thing that it ought to have done, got out of our road, it did not do. We did not gain on the lively animal, I confess, for it was all we could do to retain our seats, but we gave it enough to prose about all the days of its life. What stories the younger generation of jack-rabbits will hear of "the old days" when desperate men used to come out thousands of miles in two-horse waggons with canvas hoods to try and catch their ancestors! And what a hero that particular jack-rabbit which we did not hunt will be!
The road southwards leads along hillsides, both up and down, but on the whole gradually ascending, till the summit of the spur is reached. Here one of the most enchanting landscapes possible is suddenly found spread out beneath you. A vast expanse of green meadow-land with pools Of blue water here and there, herds of horses grazing, flocks of wild fowl in the air, and on the right the settlement of Richfield among its trees and red-soiled corn-fields!
Crossing this we found that a spur, running down on it, divides it really into two, or rather conceals a second plain from sight. But in the second, sage-brush, "the damnable absinthe," that standard of desolation, waves rampant, and the telegraph wire that goes straddling across it seems as if it must have been laid solely for the convenience of larks. Every post has its lark, as punctually as its insulator, and every lark lets off its three delicious notes of song as we go by, just as if the birds were sentries passing on a "friend" from picket to picket. And here it was that we adventured with the jack-rabbit, much to our own discomfiture. But while we were casting about for our lost road, we came upon a desolate little building, all alone in the middle of the waste, which we had supposed to be a deserted ranch-house, and were surprised to find several waggons standing about. Just as we reached it, the owners of the waggons came out, and then we discovered that it was the "meeting-house" for the scattered ranches round, and seeing the several parties packing themselves into the different waggons remembered (from a certain Sabbatical smartness of apparel) that it was Sunday. We were soon on our right road again, and passing the hamlets of Inverary and Elsinore on the right, came in sight of Monroe, and through a long prelude of cultivation reached that quaint little village just apparently at the fashionable hour for girls to go out riding with their beaux.
Couple after couple passed us, the girls riding pillion behind their sweethearts, and very well contented they all seemed to be, with their arms round the object of their affections. Except in France once or twice, I do not recollect ever having seen this picturesque old custom in practice; but judging from the superior placidity of his countenance and the merriment on hers, I should say it was an enjoyable one, and perhaps worth reviving.
Another interesting feature of Sunday evening in Monroe was the big drum. It appeared that the arrival of the Apostle who was with me had been expected, and that the people, who are everywhere most curiously on the alert for spiritual refreshment, had agreed that if the Apostle on arriving felt equal to holding a meeting, the big drum was to be beaten. In due course, therefore, a very little man disappeared inside a building and shortly reappeared in custody of a very big drum, which he proceeded to thump in a becoming Sabbatical manner. But whether the drum or the association of old band days overcame him, or whether the devil entered into him or into the drum, it is certain that he soon drifted into a funereal rendering of "Yankee Doodle." He was conscious, moreover, of his lapse into weekday profanity, and seemed to struggle against it by beating ponderous spondees. But it was of no use. Either the drum or the devil was too big for him, and the solemn measure kept breaking into patriotic but frivolous trochaics. Attracted by these proceedings, the youth of the neighbourhood had collected, and their intelligent aversion to monopolists was soon apparent by their detaching the little barnacle from his drum and subjecting the resonant instrument to a most irregular bastinado. They all had a go at it, both drumsticks at once, and the result was of a very unusual character, as neither of the performers could hear distinctly what was going on on the other side of the drum, and each, therefore, worked quite independently. In the meanwhile some one had procured a concertina, and this, with a dog that had a fine falsetto bark, constituted a very respectable "band" in point of noise. Thus equipped, the lads started off to beat up the village, and working with that enthusiasm which characterizes the self-imposed missions of youth, were very successful. Everybody came out to their doors to see what was going on, and having got so far, they then went on to the meeting. By twos and threes and occasional tens the whole village collected inside the meeting-house, or round the door unable to get in, and I must confess that looking round the room, I was surprised at the number of pretty peasant faces that Monroe can muster.
And here for the first time I became aware of a very significant fact, and one that well deserves notice, though I have never heard or seen it referred to—I mean the number of handsome marriageable girls who are unmarried in the Mormon settlements. Omitting other places, in each of which many well-grown, comely girls can be found unmarried, I saw in the hamlet of Monroe enough unwedded charms to make me think that either the resident polygamist had very bad taste or very bad luck. My host, a Mormon, was a widower (a complete widower I mean), and two very pretty girls, neighbours, looked after his household affairs for him. One was a blonde Scandinavian of Utah birth; the other a dark-haired Scotch lassie emigrated three years ago—and each was just eighteen. (And in the Western country eighteen looks three-and-twenty.) I asked my host why he did not marry one of them, or both, and he told me that he had a family growing up, and that he had so often seen quarrels and separations result from the remarriage of fathers that he did not care to risk it.
And the Apostle, who was present, said, "Quite right."
Now please remember this was in polygamous Utah, in a secluded village, entirely Mormon, where, if anywhere, men and women might surely do as they pleased. In any monogamous society such a reason, followed by the approval of a Church dignitary, would not be worth commenting on, but here among Mormons it was significant enough.
I spoke to the girls, and asked them why they had not married.
"Because the right man has not come along yet," said one.
"But perhaps when the right man does come along he will be married already," I said.
"And why should that make any difference?" was the reply.
In the meantime each of these shapely daughters of Eve had a "beau" who took her out riding behind him, escorted her home from meeting, and so forth. But neither of them had found "the right man."
Of Monroe, therefore, one of those very places, retired from civilization, "where the polygamous Mormon can carry on his beastly practices undetected, and therefore unpunished"—as the scandalous clique of Salt Lake City (utterly ignorant of Mormonism except what it can pick up from apostates) is so fond of alleging—I can positively state from personal knowledge that there are both men and women there who are guided in matters of marriage by the very same motives and principles that regulate the relation in monogamous society. Further, I can positively state the same of several other settlements, and judging from these, and from Salt Lake City, I can assure my readers that the standard of public morality among the Mormons of Utah is such as the Gentiles among them are either unable or unwilling to live up to.
In this connexion it is worth noting that public morality has in Utah one safeguard, over and above all those of other countries, namely, the strict surveillance of the Church. I have enjoyed while in Utah such exceptional advantages for arriving at the truth, as both Gentiles and Mormons say have never been extended to any former writer, and among other facts with which I have become acquainted is the silent scrutiny into personal character which the Church maintains.
Profanity, intemperance, immorality, and backbiting are taken quiet note of, and if persisted in against advice, are punished by a gradual withdrawal of "fellowship;" and result in what the Gentiles call "apostasy." Among the standing instructions of the teachers of the wards is this:—
"If persons professing to be members of the Church be guilty of allowing drunkenness, Sabbath-breaking, profanity, defrauding or backbiting, or any other kind of wickedness or unrighteous dealing, they should be visited and their wrong-doing pointed out to them in the spirit of brotherly kindness and meekness, and be exhorted to repent."
If they do not repent, they find the respect, then the friendship, and finally the association, of their co-religionists withheld from them, and thus tacitly ostracized by their own Church, they "apostatize" and carry their vices into the Gentile camp, and there assist to vilify those who have already pronounced them unfit to live with honest men or virtuous women.
AT MONROE.
"Schooling" in the Mormon districts—Innocence as to whisky, but connoisseurs in water—"What do you think of that water, sir?"—Gentile dependents on Mormon charity—The one-eyed rooster—Notice to All!
SITTING at the door next morning, I saw a very trimly-dressed damsel of twenty or thereabouts, coming briskly along under the trees, which there, as in every other Mormon settlement, shade the side-walk. She was the schoolmistress, I learned, and very soon her scholars began to pass along. I had thus an opportunity of observing the curious, happy-go-lucky style in which "schooling" is carried on, and I was sorry to see it, for Mormonism stands urgently in need of more education, and it is pure folly to spend half the revenue of the Territory annually in a school establishment, if the children and their parents are permitted to suppose that education is voluntary and a matter of individual whim. Some of the leading members of the Church are conspicuous defaulters in this matter, and do their families a gross wrong by setting "the chores" and education before them as being of equal importance. Even in the highest class of the community children go to school or stay away almost as they like, and provided a little boy or girl has the shrewdness to see that he or she can relieve the father or mother from trouble by being at home to run errands and do little jobs about the house, they can, I regret to think, regulate the amount of their own schooling as they please. I know very well that Utah compares very favourably, on paper, with the greater part of America, but I have compiled and examined too many educational statistics in my time to have any faith in them.
But in the matter of abstinence from strong drink and stimulants, the leaders of the Church set an admirable example, and I found it very difficult most of the time, and quite impossible part of it, to keep my whisky flask replenished.
My system of arriving at the truth as to the existence of spirit stores in any particular settlement, was to grumble and complain at having no whisky, and to exaggerate my regrets at the absence of beer. The courtesy of my hosts was thus challenged, and of the sincerity of the efforts made to gratify my barbaric tastes, I could have no doubt whatever. In most cases they were quite ignorant of even the cost of liquor, and on one occasion a man started off with a five-dollar piece I had given him to get me "five dollars' worth of whisky in this bottle," pointing to my flask. I explained to him that I only wanted the flask replenished, and that there would be change to bring back. He did not get any at all, however.
On one occasion the Bishop brought in, in evident triumph, two bottles of beer. On another I went clandestinely with a Mormon, after dark, and drank some whisky "as a friend," and not as a customer, with another Mormon, who "generally kept a bottle on hand" for secret consumption. That they would both have been ashamed for their neighbours to know what they were about, I am perfectly convinced. On a third occasion an official brought me half a pint of whisky, and the price was a dollar.
Now it is quite impossible for me, who have thus made personal experiment, to have any doubt as to the prevailing sobriety of these people. I put them repeatedly to the severest test that you can apply to a hospitable man, by asking point-blank for ardent spirits. Sometimes, in an off-hand way, I would give money and the flask to a lad, and ask him to "run across to the store and get me a little whisky or brandy." He would take both and meander round in an aimless sort of way. But I might almost as well have asked him to go and buy me a few birds-of-paradise or advance sheets of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica." The father or a neighbour might perhaps suggest a "likely" place to get some stimulant, but, as a rule, the quest was unconditionally abandoned as hopeless.
The Elders of the Church set a strict example themselves, discouraging, by their own abstinence, indulgence even in tea and coffee. You are asked in a settlement whether you will have tea or coffee, just as in England you would be asked whether you would drink ale or claret. A strong man takes a cup of tea as a lady in Europe might take a glass of sherry, as justified by unusual exercise and fatigue. Being a Londoner, I entertain a most wholesome suspicion of water as a drink, and I reverence fresh milk. In rural Utah, milk being so abundant, the people think little of it, but they pride themselves on their water.
"What do you think of that water, sir?" was a question that puzzled me to answer at first, for I am not a connoisseur in drinking-water. If it had been a claret, I might have made a pretence of criticism. But water! Or if they had let me wash in it, I would have told them whether I thought it "hard" or "soft." But to pass an opinion on a particular tumbler of water, as if it were a special brand laid down by my host for his own drinking, completely puzzled me. I can no more tell waters apart than I can tell Chinamen. Of course I can discriminate between the outcome of the sea and of sulphur springs. But for the rest, it seems to me that they only differ in their degrees of cleanliness, or, as scientific men say, to "the properties which they hold in solution," that is mud. And mud, I take it, is always pretty much the same.
So at first when my host would suddenly turn to me with, "What do you think of that water, sir?" I made the mistake of supposing it might be one of the extraordinary aqueous novelties for which this territory is so remarkable—hot-geyser water or petrifying water, or something else of the kind—and would smack my lips critically and venture on a suggestion of "lime," or "soda," or "alkali." But my host was always certain to be down with, "Oh, no; I assure you. That is reckoned the best water in the county!"
I soon discovered, however, that the right thing to say was that I preferred it, "on the whole," to the water at the last place. This was invariably satisfactory—unless, of course, there was a resident of "the last place" present, when an argument would ensue. These people, in fact, look upon their drinking-water just as on the continent they look upon their vins ordinaires, or in England upon their local brews, and to the last I could not help being delighted at the manner in which a jug of water and tumblers were handed about among a party of fatigued and thirsty travellers. I always took my share becomingly, but sometimes, I must confess, with silent forebodings.
For in some places there are springs which petrify, by coating with lime, any substance they flow over, and I did not anticipate with any gratification having my throat lined with cement, or my stomach faced with building-stone.
"Who are those children?" said I to my host at Munroe, pointing to two ragged little shoeless waifs that were standing in his yard and evidently waiting to be taken notice of. Instead of replying, my host turned towards them.
"Well, Jimmy," said he, "what is it to-day?"
The wistful eyes looking out from under the tattered, broad-brimmed hats, brightened into intelligence.
"Another chicken for mother," said both together, promptly; and then, as if suddenly overtaken by a sense of their audacity, the forlorn little lads dropped their eyes and stood there, holding each other's hands, as picturesque and pathetic a pair as any beggar children in Italy. In the full sunlight, but half shaded by the immense brims of those wonderfully ancient hats, the urchins were irresistibly artistic, and if met with anywhere in the Riviera, would have been sure of that small-change tribute which the romantic tourist pays with such pleasant punctuality to the picturesque poverty of Southern childhood. But this was in Utah.
And my host looked at them from under his tilted straw hat. They stood in front of him as still as sculptors' models, but fingers and toes kept exchanging little signals of nervous distress.
"All right. Go and get one," said my host suddenly. "Take the young rooster that's blind of one eye."
He had to shout the last instructions in a rapid crescendo as the youngsters had sprung off together at the word "go," like twin shafts from those double-arrowed bows of the old Manchurian archers. Three minutes later and a most woful scrawking heralded the approach of the captors and the captive. The young rooster, though blind of one eye, saw quite enough of the situation to make him apprehensive, but the younger urchin had him tight under his arm, and, still under the exciting influences of the chase and capture, the boys stood once more before my host, with panting bodies, flushed cheeks, and tufts of yellow hair sprouting out through crevices of those wondrous old hats, which had evidently just seen service in the capture. And the rooster, feeling, perhaps, that he was now before the final court of appeal, scrawked as if machinery had got loose inside him and he couldn't stop it.
"How's your (scraw-w-w-k) mother?"
She's (scraw-w-w-k)—and she's (scraw-w-w-k) nothing to eat all yesterday." (Scraw-w-k.)
"Go on home, then."
And away down the middle of the road scudded the little fellows in a confusion of dust and scrawk.
"Who are those children?" I asked again, thinking I had chanced on that unknown thing, a pauper Mormon.
"Oh," said my host, "he's a bad lot—an outsider—who came in here as a loafer, and deserted his wife. She's very ill and pretty nigh starving. Ay, she would starve, too, if her boys there didn't come round regular, begging of us. But loafers know very well that 'those——Mormons' won't let anybody go hungry. Ay, and they act as if they knew it, too."
In other settlements there are exactly such similar cases, but I would draw the attention of my readers—I wish I could draw the attention of the whole nation to it—to the following notice which stands to this day with all the force of a regular by-law in these Mormon settlements:—
"NOTICE TO ALL.
"If there are any persons in this city who are destitute of food, let them be who they may, if they will let their wants be known to me, privately or otherwise, I will see that they are furnished with food and lodging until they can provide for themselves. The bishops of every ward are to see that there are no persons going hungry.
"(Signed by the Presiding Bishop.)"
Now it may be mere "sentiment" on my part, but I confess that this "Notice to All," in the simplicity of its wording, in the nobility of its spirit, reads to me very beautifully. And what a contrast to turn from this text of a universal charity, that is no respecter of persons, to the infinite meanness of those who can write, as in the Salt Lake Tribune, of the whole community of Mormons as the villainous spawn of polygamy!"
It is a recognized law among the Mormons that no tramp shall pass by one of their settlements hungry; if it is at nightfall, he is to be housed. Towards the Indians their policy is one of enlightened and Christian humanity. For their own people their charity commences from the first. Emigrated to this country by the voluntary donations which maintain the "Perpetual Emigration Fund," each new arrival is met with immediate care, and being passed on to his location, finds (as I have described in another chapter) a system of mutual kindliness prevailing which starts him in life. If sick, he is cared for. If he dies, his family is provided for. All this is fact. I have read it in no books, heard it from no hoodwinking elders. My informants are lads just arrived in Salt Lake City—within an hour or two of their arrival, in fact; young men just settling down in their first log hut in rural settlements: grown men now themselves engaged in the neighbourly duty of assisting new-comers.
I have met and talked to those men—Germans, Scandinavians, Britishers—in their own homes here in Utah, and have positively assured myself of the fact I state, that charity, unquestioning, simple-hearted charity, is one of the secrets of the strength of this wonderful fabric of Mormonism. The Mormons are, more nearly than any other community in the world on such a scale, one family. Every man knows all the rest of his neighbours with an intimacy and a neighbourly interest that is the result of reciprocal good services in the past. This is their bond of union. In India there is "the village community" which moves, though in another arc, on the same plane as the Mormon settlement system. There, to touch one man's crop is to inflame the whole clan with the sense of a common injury. Here it is much the same. And as it is between the different individuals in a settlement, so it is between the different settlements in the territory. A brutal act, like that eviction of the Mormon postmaster at Park City the other day, disturbs the whole of Mormonism with apprehensions of impending violence. A libel directed at a man or woman in Salt Lake City makes a hundred thousand personal enemies in Utah. Now, with what petard will you hoist such a rock?
Induce these Mormons to hate one another "for all the world like Christians," as George Eliot said, and they can be snapped as easily as the philosopher's faggots when once they were unbundled. But in the meantime abuse of individuals or "persecution" of a class simply cements the whole body together more firmly than ever. Mutual charity is one of the bonds of Mormon union. It is the secret of this "oneness" which makes the Salt Lake Tribune yelp so.
JACOB HAMBLIN.
A Mormon missionary among the Indians—The story of Jacob Hamblin's life—His spiritualism, the result of an intense faith—His good work among the Lamanites—His belief in his own miracles.
LEAVING Munroe, we find cultivation gradually disappearing, and, after two or three miles, unmitigated brush supervenes. A steep divide now thrusts itself across the road, and, traversing near the summit a patch of pebbly ground which seemed a very paradise for botanists, we descend again into a wilderness of grease-wood, "the unspeakable Turk" among vegetables. The mountains between which we pass provide, however, a succession of fine views. They are of that bulky, broad-based and slowly sloping type that is so much more solemn and impressive than jagged, sharp-pointed and precipitous formations.
A few miles more bring us to one of them, and for the first time during the journey our road runs through the thickly growing "cedars" which we have hitherto seen only at a distance lying like dark clouds upon the hill-sides and black drifts in the gulches. The wild flowers growing under these "cedars" (and the pines which are sprinkled among them) are of new varieties to me, and I enjoyed a five-mile walk in this novel vegetation immensely. A few years ago, though, "Mr. Indian" would have made himself too interesting to travellers for men to go wandering about among the cedars picking posies. They would have found those "arrows tipped with jasper," which are so picturesque in Hiawatha, flying about instead of humming-birds tipped with emerald, and a tomahawk hurtling through the bushes would have been more likely to excite remark than the blue magpies which I saw looking after snails.
This district was, until very recently, a favourite hunting-ground of those Indians of whom old Jacob Hamblin was the Nestor—the guide, philosopher, friend, and victim. One day they would try "to fill his skin full of arrows;" on the next day they would be round him, asking him to make rain-medicine. They would talk Mormonism with him all day, and grunt approvingly; as soon as night fell they would steal his horse. He was always patching up peace between this tribe and that, yet every now and then they would catch him, have a great pow-wow over him, and being unable to decide whether he should be simply flayed or be roasted first over a charcoal fire, would let him go, with provisions and an escort for his home journey.
His life, indeed, was so wonderful—much more fascinating than any fiction—that I am not surprised at his believing, as he does, that he is under the special protection of Heaven, and, as he says, in a private covenant with the Almighty that "if he does not thirst for the blood of the Lamanites, his blood shall never be shed by them." He began life as a farmer near Chicago, but being baptized received at once "the immediate gift of the Holy Ghost," and at once entered upon a career of "miracles" and "prophecies" that when told in serious earnest are sufficient to stagger even Madame Blavatsky herself. He cured his neighbours of deadly ailments by the laying on of hands, and foretold conversions, deaths, and other events with unvarying accuracy. By prolonged private meditation he enjoyed what, from his description, must be a pregustation of the Buddhistic Nirvana, and after this, miracles became quite commonplace with him. He witnessed the "miracle" of the great quail flights into the camp of the fugitive and starving Saints in 1846, and helped to collect the birds and to eat them; he saw also the "miraculous" flights of seagulls that rescued the Mormons from starvation by destroying the locusts in 1848.
But his personal experiences, narrated with a simplicity of speech and unquestioning confidence that are bewildering, were really marvellous. If cattle were lost, he could always dream where they were. If sickness prevailed, he knew beforehand who would suffer, and which of them would die, and which of them recover. If Indians were about, angels gave him in his sleep the first warnings of his danger. His sympathy with the Indians was, however, very early awakened, and being strengthened in it by the conciliatory Indian policy of Brigham Young, he became before long the only recognized medium of friendly communication with them. Everybody, whether Federal officials, California emigrants, Mormon missionaries, or Indians themselves, enlisted his influence whenever trouble with the tribes was anticipated. His own explanation of this influence is remarkable enough. As a young man, he says, he was sometimes told off to join retributive expeditions, but he could never bring himself to fire at an Indian, and on one occasion, when he did try to do so, his rifle kept missing fire, while "the Lamanites," with equally ineffectual efforts to shed his blood, kept on pincushioning the ground all around him with their futile arrows. After this he and the Indians whenever they met, spared each other's lives with punctual reciprocity.
On one occasion he dreamed that he was walking in a friendly manner with some of the members of a certain tribe, when he picked up a piece of a shining substance, which stuck to his fingers. The more he tried to rub it off the brighter it became. One would naturally, under such circumstances, anticipate the revelation of a gold-mine, but Jacob Hamblin, without any questioning, went off at once to the tribe in question. They received him as friends, and he stayed with them. One day, passing a lodge, "the Spirit" whispered to him, "Here is the shining substance you saw in your dream." But all he saw was a squaw and a boy papoose. However, he went up to the squaw, and asked for the boy. She naturally demurred to the request, but to her astonishment the boy, gathering up his bow and arrows, urged compliance with it, and Hamblin eventually led off his dream-revealed "lump." After a while he asked the boy how it was he was so eager to come, though he had never seen a white man before, and the boy answered, "My Spirit told me that you were coming to my father's lodge for me on a certain day, and that I was to go with you, and when the day came I went out to the edge of the wood, and lit a fire to show you the way to me." And Hamblin then remembered that it was the smoke of a fire that had led him to that particular camp, instead of another towards which he had intended riding!
By way of a parenthesis, let me remark here that if there are any "Spiritualists" among my readers, they should study Mormonism. The Saints have long ago formulated into accepted doctrines those mysteries of the occult world which Spiritualists outside the faith are still investigating. Your "problems" are their axioms.
This Indian boy became a staunch Mormon, and to the last was in communion with the other world. Remember I am quoting Hamblin's words, not in any way endorsing them. In 1863 he was at St. George, and one day when his friends were starting on a mission to a neighbouring tribe, he took farewell of them "for ever." "I am going on a mission, too," he said. "What do you mean?" asked Hamblin. "Only that I shall be dead before you come back," was the Indian's reply. "I have seen myself in a dream preaching the gospel to a multitude of my people, and my ancestors were among them. So I know that I must be a spirit too before I can carry the Word to spirits." In six weeks Hamblin returned to St. George; and the Indian was dead.
Brigham Young, as I have said, insisted upon a conciliatory policy towards the Indians. He made in person repeated visits to the missions at work among them, and was never weary of advising and encouraging. Here is a portion of one of his letters: does it read like the words of a thoroughly bad man?—"Seek by words of righteousness to obtain the love and confidence of the tribes. Omit promises where you are not sure you can fulfil them. Seek to unite your hearts in the bonds of love. . . . May the Spirit of the Lord direct you, and that He may qualify you for every duty is the constant prayer of your fellow-labourer in the gospel of salvation, Brigham Young." Here is a part of another letter: "I trust that the genial and salutary influences now so rapidly extending to the various tribes, may continue till it reaches every son and daughter of Abraham in their fallen condition. The hour of their redemption draws nigh, and the time is not far off when they shall become a people whom the Lord will bless. . . . The Indians should be encouraged to keep and take care of stock. I highly apprcNe your design in doing your farming through the natives; it teaches them to obtain a subsistence by their own industry, and leaves you more liberty to extend your labours among others. . . . You should always be careful to impress upon them that they should not infringe on the rights of others, and our brethren should be very careful not to infringe upon their rights in any particular, thus cultivating honour and good principles in their midst by example as well as by precept. As ever, your brother in the gospel of salvation, Brigham Young."
These and other letters are exactly in the spirit of the correspondence which, in the early days of England in Hindostan, won for the old Court of Directors the eternal admiration of mankind and for England the respect of Asia. Yet in Brigham Young's case is it ever carried to his credit that he spent so much thought and time and labour over the reclamation of the Indians, by a policy of kindness, and their exaltation by an example of honourable dealing?
It was in this spirit that the Mormon missionaries went out to the Indians then living in the part of the Territory over which I travelled, and Jacob Hamblin was one eminently characteristic of the type. Beyond all others, however, he sympathized with the red man's nature. "I argue with him just as he argues," he said. He was on good terms with the medicine-men, and took a delightful interest in their ceremonies. But when they failed to bring rain with bonfires and howling, he used to pray down abundant showers; when they gave up tormenting the sick as past all hope, Hamblin restored the invalid to life by the laying on of hands!
Once more let me say that I am only quoting, not indorsing. But I do him a great injustice in not being able to convey in writing the impressive simplicity of his language, his low, measured tones, his contemplative, earnest attitude, his Indian-like gravity of countenance. That he speaks the implicit truth, according to his own belief, I am as certain as that the water of the Great Salt Lake is salt.
His "occult" sympathies seemed at times to be magnetic, for when in doubt as to whom to choose for his companion on a perilous journey, some brother or other, the fittest person for the occasion, would always feel mysteriously influenced to go to him to see if his services were needed. His displeasure killed men, that is to say they went from his presence, sickened and died. So frequent was this inexplicable demise that the Indians worked out a superstition that evil befalls those who rob or kill a Mormon; and so marked were the special manifestations of the missionaries' spirit power, that, as Hamblin says, "the Indians were without excuse for refusing conversion," and were converted. "They looked to us for counsel, and learned to regard our words as law." Though the missionaries were sometimes alone, and the tribes around them of the most desperate kind, as "plundersome" as wolves and at perpetual blood-feud with each other, the Mormons' lives were quite safe. When they had determined on an atrocity—burning a squaw, for instance—they would do it in the most nervous hurry, lest a Mormon should come along and stop it, and when they had done it and were reproached, they used to cry like children, and say they were only Indians.
Tragedy and comedy went hand in hand; laughter at the ludicrous is cut short by a shudder of horror. "We cannot be good; we must be Piutes. Perhaps some of our children will be good. We're going off to kill so-and-so. Whoop!" And away they would go, putting an arrow into the missionary's horse as they passed. By-and-by the man who shot the arrow would be found dead, killed by a Mormon's curse, and the rest would be back at work in the settlement hoeing pumpkins—"for all the world like Christians!" Through all these alternations of temper and fortune, Jacob Hamblin retained his tender sympathy with the red men.
Their superstitious piety which, quaintly enough, he does not seem to think is exactly like his own, attracted him. He found among them tribes asking the blessing of the Great Father on their food before they ate it; invoking the Divine protection on behalf of their visitors; praying for protection when about to cross a river; returning thanks for a safe return from a journey; always sending one of their religious men to accompany any party about to travel, and so on. All this the pious Mormon naturally respected. But over and above these more ordinary expressions of piety, he found tribes that believed in and acted upon dreams; that accepted the guidance of "second sight;" that relied upon prayer for obtaining temporal necessaries; that lived "by faith," and were awaiting the fulfilment of prophecy. In all this the Mormon missionary sees nothing but common sense. For instance, Hamblin said, "I know that some people do not believe in dreams and night-visions. I myself do not believe in them when they arise from a disordered stomach, but in other kinds I have been forewarned of coming events, and received much instruction!" And, in the spirit of these words, he thinks it the most natural thing in the world that Indians should start off after a dream and find their lost cattle; suddenly alter their course in a waterless journey, and come upon hitherto unknown springs; predict the most impossible meetings with friends, and avoid dangers that were not even anticipated. In the most serious manner possible, he acquiesces in the Indians' theory of rain-getting, and acts upon their clairvoyant advice. "The Lord," he says, "is mindful of the prayers of these poor barbarians, and answers them with the blessings they need." Seeing them quite sincere in their faith, he joins them in their ceremonies of scattering consecrated meal to ensure protection on a journey, believing himself that simple reliance on Providence is all that men of honest lives need.
One tribe has a tradition that three prophets are to come to lead them back to the lands that their fathers once possessed, that these are to be preceded by good white men, but that the Indians are not to go with them until after the three prophets have reappeared and told them what to do. The Indians accept the Mormons as "the good white men" of the tradition, but "the three prophets" not having reappeared, they refuse to leave their villages (as the Mormons have wanted them to do), and Hamblin has not a word to say against such "reasonable" objections.
Is it not wonderful to find men thus reverting to an intellectual type that the world had supposed to be extinct? to find men, shrewd in business, honest in every phase of temporal life, going back to cheiromancy and hydromancy, and transacting temporal affairs at the guidance of visions? An Indian prays for rain on his pumpkins, in apparently the most unreasonable way, but the Mormon postpones his departure till the rain that results is over. On his way he nearly dies of thirst, prays for deliverance, and in half an hour snow falls over a mile and a half of ground, melts and forms pools of water! What are we to say of men who say such things as these? Are they all crazy together? And what shall we think of the thousands here who believe that miracles are the most ordinary, reasonable, natural, every-day phenomena of a life of faith, and quote point-blank the promises of the New Testament as a sufficient explanation? The best thing, perhaps, is to say Hum meditatively, and think no more about it.