Mr. Street was very busy with his telegraphic matters--and considering
that he had eight or nine hundred miles of rugged, snowy, uninhabited
mountains, and waterless, treeless, melancholy deserts to traverse with
his wire, it was natural and needful that he should be as busy as
possible. He could not go comfortably along and cut his poles by the
road-side, either, but they had to be hauled by ox teams across those
exhausting deserts--and it was two days' journey from water to water, in
one or two of them. Mr. Street's contract was a vast work, every way one
looked at it; and yet to comprehend what the vague words "eight hundred
miles of rugged mountains and dismal deserts" mean, one must go over the
ground in person--pen and ink descriptions cannot convey the dreary
reality to the reader. And after all, Mr. S.'s mightiest difficulty
turned out to be one which he had never taken into the account at all.
Unto Mormons he had sub-let the hardest and heaviest half of his great
undertaking, and all of a sudden they concluded that they were going to
make little or nothing, and so they tranquilly threw their poles
overboard in mountain or desert, just as it happened when they took the
notion, and drove home and went about their customary business! They
were under written contract to Mr. Street, but they did not care anything
for that. They said they would "admire" to see a "Gentile" force a
Mormon to fulfil a losing contract in Utah! And they made themselves
very merry over the matter. Street said--for it was he that told us
these things:
"I was in dismay. I was under heavy bonds to complete my contract in a
given time, and this disaster looked very much like ruin. It was an
astounding thing; it was such a wholly unlooked-for difficulty, that I
was entirely nonplussed. I am a business man--have always been a
business man--do not know anything but business--and so you can imagine
how like being struck by lightning it was to find myself in a country
where written contracts were worthless!--that main security, that
sheet-anchor, that absolute necessity, of business. My confidence left
me. There was no use in making new contracts--that was plain. I talked
with first one prominent citizen and then another. They all sympathized
with me, first rate, but they did not know how to help me. But at last a
Gentile said, 'Go to Brigham Young!--these small fry cannot do you any
good.' I did not think much of the idea, for if the law could not help
me, what could an individual do who had not even anything to do with
either making the laws or executing them? He might be a very good
patriarch of a church and preacher in its tabernacle, but something
sterner than religion and moral suasion was needed to handle a hundred
refractory, half-civilized sub-contractors. But what was a man to do? I
thought if Mr. Young could not do anything else, he might probably be
able to give me some advice and a valuable hint or two, and so I went
straight to him and laid the whole case before him. He said very little,
but he showed strong interest all the way through. He examined all the
papers in detail, and whenever there seemed anything like a hitch, either
in the papers or my statement, he would go back and take up the thread
and follow it patiently out to an intelligent and satisfactory result.
Then he made a list of the contractors' names. Finally he said:
"'Mr. Street, this is all perfectly plain. These contracts are strictly
and legally drawn, and are duly signed and certified. These men
manifestly entered into them with their eyes open. I see no fault or
flaw anywhere.'
"Then Mr. Young turned to a man waiting at the other end of the room and
said: 'Take this list of names to So-and-so, and tell him to have these
men here at such-and-such an hour.'
"They were there, to the minute. So was I. Mr. Young asked them a
number of questions, and their answers made my statement good. Then he
said to them:
"'You signed these contracts and assumed these obligations of your own
free will and accord?'
"'Yes.'
"'Then carry them out to the letter, if it makes paupers of you! Go!'
"And they did go, too! They are strung across the deserts now, working
like bees. And I never hear a word out of them.
"There is a batch of governors, and judges, and other officials here,
shipped from Washington, and they maintain the semblance of a republican
form of government--but the petrified truth is that Utah is an absolute
monarchy and Brigham Young is king!"
Mr. Street was a fine man, and I believe his story. I knew him well
during several years afterward in San Francisco.
Our stay in Salt Lake City amounted to only two days, and therefore we
had no time to make the customary inquisition into the workings of
polygamy and get up the usual statistics and deductions preparatory to
calling the attention of the nation at large once more to the matter.
I had the will to do it. With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth I
was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here--until
I saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched. My heart was wiser than my
head. It warmed toward these poor, ungainly and pathetically "homely"
creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I
said, "No--the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian
charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their
harsh censure--and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of
open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered
in his presence and worship in silence."
[For a brief sketch of Mormon history, and the noted Mountain Meadow
massacre, see Appendices A and B. ]