The mountains rise grandly round about this curious city, the Zion of
the new Saints, so grandly that the city itself is hardly visible. The
Wahsatch Range, snow-laden and adorned with glacier-sculpted peaks,
stretches continuously along the eastern horizon, forming the boundary
of the Great Salt Lake Basin; while across the valley of the Jordan
southwestward from here, you behold the Oquirrh Range, about as snowy
and lofty as the Wahsatch. To the northwest your eye skims the blue
levels of the great lake, out of the midst of which rise island
mountains, and beyond, at a distance of fifty miles, is seen the
picturesque wall of the lakeside mountains blending with the lake and
the sky.
The glacial developments of these superb ranges are sharply sculptured
peaks and crests, with ample wombs between them where the ancient snows
of the glacial period were collected and transformed into ice, and
ranks of profound shadowy cañons, while moraines commensurate with the
lofty fountains extend into the valleys, forming far the grandest
series of glacial monuments I have yet seen this side of the Sierra.
In beginning this letter I meant to describe the city, but in the
company of these noble old mountains, it is not easy to bend one’s
attention upon anything else. Salt Lake cannot be called a very
beautiful town, neither is there anything ugly or repulsive about it.
From the slopes of the Wahsatch foothills, or old lake benches, toward
Fort Douglas it is seen to occupy the sloping gravelly delta of City
Creek, a fine, hearty stream that comes pouring from the snows of the
mountains through a majestic glacial cañon; and it is just where this
stream comes forth into the light on the edge of the valley of the
Jordan that the Mormons have built their new Jerusalem.
At first sight there is nothing very marked in the external appearance
of the town excepting its leafiness. Most of the houses are veiled with
trees, as if set down in the midst of one grand orchard; and seen at a
little distance they appear like a field of glacier boulders overgrown
with aspens, such as one often meets in the upper valleys of the
California Sierra, for only the angular roofs are clearly visible.
[Illustration: IN THE WAHSATCH MOUNTAINS]
Perhaps nineteen twentieths of the houses are built of bluish-gray
adobe bricks, and are only one or two stories high, forming fine
cottage homes which promise simple comfort within. They are set well
back from the street, leaving room for a flower garden, while almost
every one has a thrifty orchard at the sides and around the back. The
gardens are laid out with great simplicity, indicating love for flowers
by people comparatively poor, rather than deliberate efforts of the
rich for showy artistic effects. They are like the pet gardens of
children, about as artless and humble, and harmonize with the low
dwellings to which they belong. In almost every one you find daisies,
and mint, and lilac bushes, and rows of plain English tulips. Lilacs
and tulips are the most characteristic flowers, and nowhere have I seen
them in greater perfection. As Oakland is pre-eminently a city of
roses, so is this Mormon Saints’ Rest a city of lilacs and tulips. The
flowers, at least, are saintly, and they are surely loved. Scarce a
home, however obscure, is without them, and the simple, unostentatious
manner in which they are planted and gathered in pots and boxes about
the windows shows how truly they are prized.
The surrounding commons, the marshy levels of the Jordan, and dry,
gravelly lake benches on the slopes of the Wahsatch foothills are now
gay with wild flowers, chief among which are a species of phlox, with
an abundance of rich pink corollas, growing among sagebrush in showy
tufts, and a beautiful papilionaceous plant, with silky leaves and
large clusters of purple flowers, banner, wings, and keel exquisitely
shaded, a mertensia, hydrophyllum, white boragewort, orthocarpus,
several species of violets, and a tall scarlet gilia. It is delightful
to see how eagerly all these are sought after by the children, both
boys and girls. Every day that I have gone botanizing I have met groups
of little Latter-Days with their precious bouquets, and at such times
it was hard to believe the dark, bloody passages of Mormon history.
But to return to the city. As soon as City Creek approaches its upper
limit its waters are drawn off right and left, and distributed in brisk
rills, one on each side of every street, the regular slopes of the
delta upon which the city is built being admirably adapted to this
system of street irrigation. These streams are all pure and sparkling
in the upper streets, but, as they are used to some extent as sewers,
they soon manifest the consequence of contact with civilization, though
the speed of their flow prevents their becoming offensive, and little
Saints not over particular may be seen drinking from them everywhere.
The streets are remarkably wide and the buildings low, making them
appear yet wider than they really are. Trees are planted along the
sidewalks—elms, poplars, maples, and a few catalpas and hawthorns; yet
they are mostly small and irregular, and nowhere form avenues half so
leafy and imposing as one would be led to expect. Even in the business
streets there is but little regularity in the buildings—now a row of
plain adobe structures, half store, half dwelling, then a high
mercantile block of red brick or sandstone, and again a row of adobe
cottages nestled back among apple trees. There is one immense store
with its sign upon the roof, in letters big enough to be read miles
away, “Z.C.M.I.” (Zion’s Co-operative Mercantile Institution), while
many a small, codfishy corner grocery bears the legend “Holiness to the
Lord, Z.C.M.I.” But little evidence will you find in this Zion, with
its fifteen thousand souls, of great wealth, though many a Saint is
seeking it as keenly as any Yankee Gentile. But on the other hand,
searching throughout all the city, you will not find any trace of
squalor or extreme poverty.
Most of the women I have chanced to meet, especially those from the
country, have a weary, repressed look, as if for the sake of their
religion they were patiently carrying burdens heavier than they were
well able to bear. But, strange as it must seem to Gentiles, the many
wives of one man, instead of being repelled from one another by
jealousy, appear to be drawn all the closer together, as if the real
marriage existed between the wives only. Groups of half a dozen or so
may frequently be seen on the streets in close conversation, looking as
innocent and unspeculative as a lot of heifers, while the masculine
Saints pass them by as if they belonged to a distinct species. In the
Tabernacle last Sunday, one of the elders of the church, in discoursing
upon the good things of life, the possessions of Latter-Day Saints,
enumerated fruitful fields, horses, cows, wives, and implements, the
wives being placed as above, between the cows and implements, without
receiving any superior emphasis.
Polygamy, as far as I have observed, exerts a more degrading influence
upon husbands that upon wives. The love of the latter finds expression
in flowers and children, while the former seem to be rendered incapable
of pure love of anything. The spirit of Mormonism is intensely
exclusive and un-American. A more withdrawn, compact, sealed-up body of
people could hardly be found on the face of the earth than is gathered
here, notwithstanding railroads, telegraphs, and the penetrating lights
that go sifting through society everywhere in this revolutionary,
question-asking century. Most of the Mormons I have met seem to be in a
state of perpetual apology, which can hardly be fully accounted for by
Gentile attacks. At any rate it is unspeakably offensive to any free
man.
“We Saints,” they are continually saying, “are not as bad as we are
called. We don’t murder those who differ with us, but rather treat them
with all charity. You may go through our town night or day and no harm
shall befall you. Go into our houses and you will be well used. We are
as glad as you are that Lee was punished,” etc. While taking a saunter
the other evening we were overtaken by a characteristic Mormon, “an
umble man,” who made us a very deferential salute and then walked on
with us about half a mile. We discussed whatsoever of Mormon doctrines
came to mind with American freedom, which he defended as best he could,
speaking in an excited but deprecating tone. When hard pressed he would
say: “I don’t understand these deep things, but the elders do. I’m only
an umble tradesman.” In taking leave he thanked us for the pleasure of
our querulous conversation, removed his hat, and bowed lowly in a sort
of Uriah Heep manner, and then went to his humble home. How many humble
wives it contained, we did not learn.
Fine specimens of manhood are by no means wanting, but the number of
people one meets here who have some physical defect or who attract
one’s attention by some mental peculiarity that manifests itself
through the eyes, is astonishingly great in so small a city. It would
evidently be unfair to attribute these defects to Mormonism, though
Mormonism has undoubtedly been the magnet that elected and drew these
strange people together from all parts of the world.
But however “the peculiar doctrines” and “peculiar practices” of
Mormonism have affected the bodies and the minds of the old Saints, the
little Latter-Day boys and girls are as happy and natural as possible,
running wild, with plenty of good hearty parental indulgence, playing,
fighting, gathering flowers in delightful innocence; and when we
consider that most of the parents have been drawn from the thickly
settled portion of the Old World, where they have long suffered the
repression of hunger and hard toil, the Mormon children, “Utah’s best
crop,” seem remarkably bright and promising.
From children one passes naturally into the blooming wilderness, to the
pure religion of sunshine and snow, where all the good and the evil of
this strange people lifts and vanishes from the mind like mist from the
mountains.