The approach to Salt Lake City from the east is surprisingly harmonious
with the genius of Mormonism. Nature, usually so unpliant to the spirit
of people who live with her, showing a bleak and rugged face, which
poetically should indicate the abode of savages and ogres, to Hans
Christian Andersen and his hospitable countrymen, but lavishing the
eternal summer of her tropic sea upon barbarians who eat baked enemy
under her palms, or throw their babies to her crocodiles,--this stiff,
unaccommodating Nature relents into a little expressiveness in the
neighborhood of the Mormons, and you feel that the grim, tremendous
_cañons_ through which your overland stage rolls down to the City of the
Saints are strangely fit avenues to an anomalous civilization.
We speak of crossing the Rocky Mountains from Denver to Salt Lake; but,
in reality, they reach all the way between those places. They are not a
chain, as most Eastern people imagine them, but a giant ocean caught by
petrifaction at the moment of maddest tempest. For six hundred miles the
overland stage winds over, between, and around the tremendous billows,
lying as much as may be in the trough, and reaching the crest at
Bridger's Pass, (a sinuous gallery, walled by absolutely bare yellow
mountains between two and three thousand feet in height at the
road-side,) but never getting entirely out of the Rocky-Mountain system
till it reaches the Desert beyond Salt Lake. Even there it runs
constantly among mountains; in fact, it never loses sight of lofty
ranges from the moment it makes Pike's Peak till its wheels
(metaphorically) are washed by the Pacific Ocean; but the mountains of
the Desert may legitimately set up for themselves, belonging, as I
believe, to a system independent of the Rocky Mountains on the one side
and the Sierra Nevada on the other. At a little _plateau_ among snowy
ridges a few miles east of Bridger's Pass, the driver leans over and
tells his insiders, in a matter-of-fact manner, through the window, that
they have reached the summit-level. Then, if you have a particle of true
cosmopolitanism in you, it is sure to come out. There is something
indescribably sublime, a conception of universality, in that sense of
standing on the water-shed of a hemisphere. You have reached the secret
spot where the world clasps her girdle; your feet are on its granite
buckle; perhaps there sparkles in your eyes that fairest gem of her
cincture, a crystal fountain, from which her belt of rivers flows in two
opposite ways. Yesterday you crossed the North Platte, almost at its
source (for it rises out of the snow among the Wind-River Mountains, and
out of your stage-windows you can see, from Laramie Plains, the Lander's
Peak which Bierstadt has made immortal); that stream runs into the sea
from whose historic shores you came; you might drop a waif upon its
ripples with the hope of its reaching New Orleans, New York, Boston, or
even Liverpool. To-morrow you will be ferried over Green River, as near
its source,--a stream whose cradle is in the same snow-peaks as the
Platte,--whose mysterious middle-life, under the new name of the
Colorado, flows at the bottom of those tremendous fissures, three
thousand feet deep, which have become the wonder of the
geologist,--whose grave, when it has dribbled itself away into the
dotage of shallows and quicksands, is the desert-margined Gulf of
California and the Pacific Sea. Between Green River and the Mormon city
no human interest divides your perpetually strained attention with
Nature. Fort Bridger, a little over a day's stage-ride east of the city,
is a large and quite a populous trading-post and garrison of the United
States; but although we found there a number of agreeable officers,
whose acquaintance with their wonderful surroundings was thorough and
scientific, and though at that period the fort was a rendezvous for our
only faithful friend among the Utah Indians, Washki, the Snake chief,
and that handful of his tribe who still remained loyal to their really
noble leader and our Government, Fort Bridger left the shadowiest of
impressions on my mind, compared with the natural glories of the
surrounding scenery.
Mormondom being my theme, and my space so limited, I must resist the
temptation to give detailed accounts of the many marvellous masterpieces
of mimetic art into which we find the rocks of this region everywhere
carved by the hand of Nature. Before we came to the North Platte, we
were astonished by a ship, equalling the Great Eastern in size, even
surpassing it in beauty of outline, its masts of columnar sandstone
snapped by a storm, its prodigious hulk laboring in a gloomy sea of
hornblendic granite, its deck-houses, shapen with perfect accuracy of
imitation, still remaining in their place, and a weird-looking demon at
the wheel steering it on to some invisible destruction. This naval
statue (if its bulk forbid not the name) was carved out of a coarse
millstone-grit by the chisel of the wind, with but slight assistance
from the infrequent rain-storms of this region. In Colorado I first
began to perceive how vast an omission geologists had been guilty of in
their failure to give the wind a place in the dynamics of their science.
Depending for a year at a time, as that Territory sometimes does, upon
dews and meltings from the snow-peaks for its water, it is nevertheless
fuller than any other district in the world of marvellous architectural
simulations, vast cemeteries crowded with monuments, obelisks, castles,
fortresses, and natural colossi from two to five hundred feet high, done
in argillaceous sandstone or a singular species of conglomerate, all of
which owe their existence almost entirely to the agency of wind. The
arid plains from which the conglomerate crops out rarefy the
superincumbent air-stratum to such a degree that the intensely chilled
layers resting on the closely adjoining snow-peaks pour down to
reëstablish equilibrium, with the wrathful force of an invisible
cataract, eight, ten, even seventeen thousand feet in height. These
floods of cold wind find their appropriate channels in the
characteristic _cañons_ which everywhere furrow the whole Rocky-Mountain
system to its very base. Most of these are exceedingly tortuous, and the
descending winds, during their passage through them, acquire a spiral
motion as irresistible as the fiercest hurricane of the Antilles, which,
moreover, they preserve for miles after they have issued from the mouth
of the _cañon_. Every little cold gust that I observed in the Colorado
country had this corkscrew character. The moment the spiral reaches a
loose sand-bed, it sweeps into its vortex all the particles of grit
which it can hold. The result is an auger, of diameter varying from an
inch to a thousand feet, capable of altering its direction so as to bore
curved holes, revolving with incalculable rapidity, and armed with a
cutting edge of silex. Is it possible to conceive an instrument more
powerful, more versatile? Indeed, practically, there is no description
of surface, no kind of cut, which it is not capable of making. I have
repeatedly seen it in operation. One day, while riding from Denver to
Pike's Peak, I saw it (in this instance, one of the smaller diameters)
burrow its way six or seven feet into a sand-bluff, making as smooth a
hole as I could cut in cheese with a borer, of the equal diameter of six
inches throughout, all in less time than I have taken to describe it.
Repeatedly, on the same trip, I saw it gouge out a circular groove
around portions of a similar bluff, and leave them standing as isolated
columns, with heavy base and capital, presently to be solidified into
just such rock pillars as throng the cemeteries or aid in composing the
strange architectural piles mentioned above. Surveyor-General Pierce of
Colorado, (a man whose fine scientific genius and culture have already
done yeoman's service in the study of that most interesting Territory,)
on a certain occasion, saw one of these wind-and-silex augers meet at
right angles a window-pane in a settler's cabin, which came out from the
process, after a few seconds, a perfect opaque shade, having been
converted into ground-glass as neatly and evenly as could have been
effected by the manufacturer's wheel. It is not a very rare thing in
Colorado to be able to trace the spiral and measure the diameter of the
auger by rocks of fifty pounds' weight and tree-trunks half as thick as
an average man's waist, torn up from their sites, and sent revolving
overhead for miles before the windy turbine loses its impetus. The
efficiency of an instrument like this I need not dwell upon. After some
protracted examination and study of many of the most interesting
architectural and sculpturesque structures of the Rocky-Mountain system,
I am convinced that they are mainly explicable on the hypothesis of the
wind-and-silex instrument operating upon material in the earthy
condition, which petrified after receiving its form. Indeed, this same
instrument is at present nowise restricted by that condition in
Colorado, and is not only, year by year, altering the conformation of
all sand and clay bluff's on the Plains, but is tearing down,
rebuilding, and fashioning on its facile lathe many rock-strata of the
solidity of the more friable grits, wherever exposed to its action.
Water at the East does hardly more than wind at the West.
Before we enter the City of the Saints, let me briefly describe the
greatest, not merely of the architectural curiosities, but, in my
opinion, the greatest natural curiosity of any kind which I have ever
seen or heard of. Mind, too, that I remember Niagara, the Cedar-Creek
Bridge, and the Mammoth Cave, when I speak thus of the _Church Buttes_.
They are situated a short distance from Fort Bridger; the overland road
passes by their side. They consist of a sandstone bluff, reddish-brown
in color, rising with the abruptness of a pile of masonry from the
perfectly level plain, carved along its perpendicular face into a series
of partially connected religious edifices, the most remarkable of which
is a cathedral as colossal as St. Peter's, and completely relieved from
the bluff on all sides save the rear, where a portico joins it with the
main precipice. The perfect symmetry of this marvellous structure would
ravish Michel Angelo. So far from requiring an effort of imagination to
recognize the propriety of its name, this church almost staggers belief
in the unassisted naturalness of its architecture. It belongs to a style
entirely its own. Its main and lower portion is not divided into nave
and transept, but seems like a system of huge semi-cylinders erected on
their bases, and united with reëntrant angles, their convex surfaces
toward us, so that the ground-plan might be called a species of
quatre-foil. In each of the convex faces is an admirably proportioned
door-way, a Gothic arch with deep-carved and elaborately fretted
mouldings, so wonderfully perfect in its imitation that you almost feel
like knocking for admittance, secure of an entrance, did you only know
the "Open sesame." Between and behind the doors, alternating with
flying-buttresses, are a series of deep-niched windows, set with
grotesque statues, varying from the pigmy to the colossal size,
representing demons rather than saints, though some of the figures are
costumed in the style of religious art, with flowing sacerdotal
garments.
The structure terminates above in a double dome, whose figure may be
imagined by supposing a small acorn set on the truncated top of a large
one, (the horizontal diameter of both being considerably longer in
proportion to the perpendicular than is common with that fruit,) and
each of these domes is surrounded by a row of prism-shaped pillars, half
column, half buttress in their effect, somewhat similar to the exquisite
columnar _entourage_ of the central cylinder of the leaning tower of
Pisa. The result of this arrangement is an aërial, yet massive beauty,
without parallel in the architecture of the world. I have not conveyed
to any mind an idea of the grandeur of this pile, nor could I, even with
the assistance of a diagram. I can only say that the Cathedral Buttes
are a lesson for the architects of all Christendom,--a purely novel and
original creation, of such marvellous beauty that Bierstadt and I
simultaneously exclaimed,--"Oh that the master-builders of the world
could come here even for a single day! The result would be an entirely
new style of architecture,--an American school, as distinct from all the
rest as the Ionic from the Gothic or Byzantine." If they could come, the
art of building would have a regeneration. "Amazing" is the only word
for this glorious work of Nature. I could have bowed down with awe and
prayed at one of its vast, inimitable doorways, but that the mystery of
its creation, and the grotesqueness of even its most glorious statues,
made one half dread lest it were some temple built by demon-hands for
the worship of the Lord of Hell, and sealed in the stone-dream of
petrifaction, with its priests struck dumb within it, by the hand of
God, to wait the judgment of Eblis and the earthquakes of the Last Day.
After leaving Church Buttes and passing Fort Bridger, our attention
slept upon what it had seen until we entered the region of the _cañons_.
These are defiles, channelled across the whole breadth of the Wahsatch
Mountains almost to the level of their base, walled by precipices of red
sandstone or sugar-loaf granite, compared with which the Palisades of
the Hudson become insignificant as a garden-fence. The least poetical
man who traverses these giant fissures cannot help feeling their fitness
as the avenues to a paradoxical region, an anomalous civilization, and a
people whose psychological problem is the most unsolvable of the
nineteenth century. During the Mormon War, Brigham Young made some rude
attempts at a fortification of the great Echo Cañon, half a day's
journey from his city, and this work still remains intact. He need not
have done it; a hundred men, ambushed among the ledges at the top of the
cañon-walls, and well provided with loose rocks and Minié-rifles, could
convert the defile into a new Thermopylae, without exposure to
themselves. In an older and more superstitious age, the unassisted
horrors of Nature herself would have repelled an invading host from the
passage of this grizzly _cañon_, as the profane might have been driven
from the galleries of Isis or Eleusis.
About forty miles from Salt Lake City we began to find Nature's
barrenness succumbing to the truly marvellous industry of the Mormon
people. To understand the exquisite beauty of simple green grass, you
must travel through eight hundred miles of sage-brush and _grama_,--the
former, the homely gray-leaved plant of our Eastern goose-stuffing,
grown into a dwarf tree six feet high, with a twisted trunk sometimes as
thick as a man's body; the latter, a stunted species of herbage, growing
in ash-tinted spirals, only two inches from the ground, and giving the
Plains an appearance of being matted with curled hair or gray
corkscrews. Its other name is "buffalo-grass"; and in spite of its
dinginess, with the assistance of the sage, converting all the Plains
west of Fort Kearney into a model Quaker landscape, it is one of the
most nutritious varieties of cattle-fodder, and for hundreds of miles
the emigrant-drover's only dependence.
By incredible labor, bringing down rivulets from the snow-peaks of the
Wahsatch range and distributing them over the levels by every ingenious
device known to artificial irrigation, the Mormon farmers have converted
the bottoms of the _cañons_ through which we approached Salt Lake into
fertile fields and pasture-lands, whose emerald sweep soothed our eyes
wearied with so many leagues of ashen monotony, as an old home-strain
mollifies the ear irritated by the protracted rhythmic clash or the
dull, steady buzz of iron machinery. Contrasting the Mormon settlements
with their surrounding desolation, we could not wonder that their
success has fortified this people in their delusion. The superficial
student of rewards and punishments might well believe that none but
God's chosen people could cause this horrible desert, after such
triumphant fashion, to blossom like the rose.
The close observer soon notices a painful deficiency in these green and
smiling Mormon settlements. Everything has been done for the
farm,--nothing for the home. That blessed old Anglo-Saxon idea seems
everywhere quite extinct. The fields are billowing over with dense,
golden grain, the cattle are wallowing in emerald lakes of juicy grass,
the barns are substantial, the family-windmill buzzes merrily on its
well-oiled pivot, drawing water or grinding feed, the fruit-trees are
thrifty,--but the house is desolate. Even where its owner is
particularly well off, and its architecture somewhat more ambitious than
the average, (though, as yet, this superiority is measured by little
more than the difference between logs and clapboards,) there is still no
air about it of being the abode of happy people, fond of each other, and
longing after it in absence. It looks like a mere inclosure to eat and
sleep in. Nobody seems to have taken any pride in it, to feel any
ambition for it. Woman's tender little final touches, which make a dear
refuge out of a mud-cabin, and without which palatial brownstone is only
a home in the moulding-clay,--those dexterous ornamentations which make
so little mean so much,--the brier-rose-slip by the doorstep, growing
into the fragrant welcome of many Junes,--the trellised
Madeira-vines,--the sunny spot of chrysanthemums, charming summer on to
the very brink of frost,--all these things are utterly and everywhere
lacking to the Mormon inclosure. Sometimes we passed a fence which
guarded three houses instead of one. Abundant progeny played at their
doors, or rolled in their yard, watched by several unkempt, bedraggled
mothers owning a common husband,--and we could easily understand how
neither of these should feel much interest in the looks of a demesne
held by them in such unhappy partnership. The humblest New-England
cottage has its climbing flowers at the door-post, or its garden-bed in
front; but how quickly would these wither, if the neat, brisk
house-mistress owned her husband in common with Mrs. Deacon Pratt next
door!
The first Mormon household I ever visited belonged to a son of the
famous Heber Kimball, Brigham Young's most devoted follower, and next to
him in the Presidency. It was the last stage-station but one before we
entered Salt Lake, situated at the bottom of a green valley in Parley's
Cañon (named after the celebrated Elder, Parley Pratt); and as it looked
like the residence of a well-to-do farmer, I went in, and asked for a
bowl of bread and milk,--the greatest possible luxury after a life of
bacon and salt-spring water, such as we had been leading in the
mountains. A fine-looking, motherly woman, with a face full of
character, gray-haired, and about sixty years old, rose promptly to
grant my request, and while the horses were changing I had ample time to
make the acquaintance of two pretty young girls, hardly over twenty,
holding two infants, of ages not more than three months apart. Green as
I was to saintly manners, I supposed that one of these two young mothers
had run in from a neighbor's to compare babies with the mistress of the
house, after our Eastern fashion, universal with the owners of juvenile
phenomena. When the old lady came back with the bread and milk, and both
of the young girls addressed her as "mother," I was emboldened to tell
her that her daughters had a pretty pair of children.
"They _are_ pretty," said the old lady, demurely; "but they are the
children of my son"; then, as if resolved to duck a Gentile head and
heels into Mormon realities at once, she added,--"Those young ladies are
the wives of my son, who is now gone on a mission to Liverpool,--young
Mr. Kimball, the son of Heber Kimball; and I am Heber Kimball's wife."
A cosmopolitan, especially one knowing beforehand that Utah was not
distinguished for monogamy, might well be ashamed to be so taken off
his feet as I was by my first view of Mormonism in its practical
workings. I stared,--I believe I blushed a little,--I tried to stutter a
reply; and the one dreadful thought which persistently kept uppermost,
so that I felt they must read it in my face, was, "How _can_ these young
women sit looking at each other's babies without flying into each
other's faces with their fingernails, and tearing out each other's
hair?" Heber Kimball afterwards solved the question for me, by saying
that it was a triumph of grace.
Such another triumph was Mrs. Heber Kimball herself. She was a woman of
remarkable presence, in youth must have been very handsome, would have
been the oracle of tea-fights, the ruling spirit of donation-visits, in
any Eastern village where she might have lived, and, had her home been
New York, would have fallen by her own gravity into the Chief
Directress's chair of half a dozen Woman's Aid Societies and
Associations for Moral Reform. Yet here was this strong-minded woman, as
her husband afterward acknowledged to me, his best counsellor and
right-hand helper through a married life reaching into middle-age,
witnessing her property in that husband's affections subdivided and
parcelled out until she owned but a one-thirtieth share, not only
without a pang, but with the acquiescence of her conscience and the
approbation of her intellect. Though few first wives in Utah had learned
to look concubinage in the face so late in life as this emphatic and
vigorous-natured woman, I certainly met none whose partisanship of
polygamy was so unquestioning and eloquent. She was one of the strangest
psychological problems I ever met. Indeed, I am half inclined to think
that she embraced Mormonism earlier than her husband, and, by taking the
initiative, secured for herself the only true wifely place in the
harem,--the marital after-thoughts of Brother Heber being her servants
rather than her sisters. She was most unmistakably his favorite.
One day in the Opera-House at Salt Lake, when the carpenters were laying
the floor for the Fourth-of-July-Eve Ball, Heber and I got talking of
the _pot-pourri_ of nationalities assembled in Utah. Heber waxed
unctuously benevolent, and expressed his affection for each succeeding
race as fast as mentioned.
"I love the Danes dearly! I've got a Danish wife." Then turning to a
rough-looking carpenter, hammering near him,--"You know Christiny,--eh,
Brother Spudge?"
"Oh, yes! know her very well!"
A moment after,--"The Irish are a dear people. My Irish wife is among
the best I've got."
Again,--"I love the Germans! Got a Dutch wife, too! Know Katrine,
Brother Spudge? Remember she couldn't scarcely talk a word o' English
when she come,--eh, Brother Spudge?"
Brother Spudge remembered,--and Brother Heber continued to trot out the
members of his marital stud for discussion of their points with his more
humble fellow-polygamist of the hammer; but when I happened to touch
upon the earliest Mrs. Heber, whom I naturally thought he would by this
time regard as a forgotten fossil in the Lower Silurian strata of his
connubial life, and referred to the interview I had enjoyed with her on
the afternoon before entering the city, his whole manner changed to a
proper husbandly dignity, and, without seeking corroboration from the
carpenter, be replied, gravely,--
"Yes! that is my first wife, and the best woman God ever made!"
The ball to which I have referred was such an opportunity for studying
Mormon sociology as three months' ordinary stay in Salt Lake might not
have given me. Though Mormondom is disloyal to the core, it still
patronizes the Fourth of July, at least in its phase of festivity,
omitting the patriotism, but keeping the fireworks of our Eastern
celebration, substituting "Utah" for "Union" in the Buncombe speeches,
and having a ball instead of the Declaration of Independence. All the
saints within half a day's ride of the city come flocking into it to
spend the Fourth. A well-to-do Mormon at the head of his wives and
children, all of whom are probably eating candy as they march through
the metropolitan streets in solid column, looks to the uninitiated like
the principal of a female seminary, weak in its deportment, taking out
his charge for an airing.
Last Fourth of July, it may be remembered, fell on a Saturday. In their
ambition to reproduce ancient Judaism (and this ambition is the key to
their whole puzzle) the Mormons are Sabbatarians of a strictness which
would delight Lord Shaftesbury. Accordingly, in order that their
festivities might not encroach on the early hours of the Sabbath, they
had the ball on Fourth-of-July eve, instead of the night of the Fourth.
I could not realize the risk of such an encroachment when I read the
following sentence printed on my billet of invitation:--
"_Dancing to commence at_ 4 P.M."
Bierstadt, myself, and three gentlemen of our party were the only
Gentiles whom I found invited by President Young to meet in the
neighborhood of three thousand saints. Under these circumstances I felt
like the three-thousandth homoeopathic dilution of monogamy. Morality in
this world is so mainly a matter of convention that I dreaded to appear
in decent polygamic society, lest respectable women, owning their
orthodox tenth of a husband, should shrink from the pollution of my
presence, whispering, with a shudder, "Ugh! Well, I never! How that
one-wifed reprobate can dare to show his face!" But they were very
polite, and received me with as skilfully veiled disapprobation as is
shown by fashionable Eastern belies to brilliant seducers immoral in
_our_ sense. Had I been a woman, I suppose there would have been no
mercy for me.
I sought out our entertainer, Brigham Young, to thank him for the
flattering exception made in our Gentile favor. He was standing in the
dress-circle of the theatre, looking down on the dancers with an air of
mingled hearty kindness and feudal ownership. I could excuse the latter,
for Utah belongs to him of right. He may justly say of it, "Is not this
great Babylon which I have built?" His sole executive tact and personal
fascination are the key-stone of the entire arch of Mormon society.
While he remains, eighty thousand (and increasing) of the most
heterogeneous souls that could be swept together from the by-ways of
Christendom will continue builded up into a coherent nationality. The
instant he crumbles, Mormondom and Mormonism will fall to pieces at
once, irreparably. His individual magnetism, his executive tact, his
native benevolence, are all immense; I regard him as Louis Napoleon,
_plus_ a heart; but these advantages would avail him little with the
dead-in-earnest fanatics who rule Utah under him, and the entirely
persuaded fanatics whom they rule, were not his qualities all
coordinated in this one,--_absolute sincerity of belief and motive_.
Brigham Young is the farthest remove on earth from a hypocrite; he is
that grand, yet awful sight in human nature, a man who has brought the
loftiest Christian self-devotion to the altar of the Devil,--who is
ready to suffer crucifixion for Barabbas, supposing him Christ. Be sure,
that, were he a hypocrite, the Union would have nothing to fear from
Utah. When he dies, at least four hostile factions, which find their
only common ground in deification of his person, will snatch his mantle
at opposite corners. Then will come such a rending as the world has not
seen since the Macedonian generals fought over the coffin of
Alexander,--and then Mormonism will go out of Geography into the History
of Popular Delusions. There is not a single chief, apostle, or bishop,
except Brigham, who possesses any catholicity of influence. I found this
tacitly acknowledged in every quarter. The people seem like citizens of
a beleaguered town, who know they have but a definite amount of bread,
yet have made up their minds to act while it lasts as if there were no
such thing as starvation. The greatest comfort you can afford a Mormon
is to tell him how young Brigham looks; for the quick, unconscious
sequence is, "Then Brigham may last out my time." Those who think at all
have no conjecture of any Mormon future beyond him, and I know that many
Mormons (Heber Kimball included) would gladly die to-day rather than
survive him and encounter that judgment-day and final perdition of their
faith which must dawn on his new-made grave.
Well, we may give them this comfort without any insincerity. Let us
return to where he stands gazing down on the _parquet_. Like any Eastern
party-goer, he is habited in the "customary suit of solemn black," and
looks very distinguished in this dress, though his daily homespun
detracts nothing from the feeling, when in his presence, that you are
beholding a most remarkable man. He is nearly seventy years old, but
appears very little over forty. His height is about five feet ten
inches; his figure very well made and slightly inclining to portliness.
His hair is a rich curly chestnut, formerly worn long, in supposed
imitation of the apostolic coiffure, but now cut in our practical
Eastern fashion, as accords with the man of business, whose _métier_ he
has added to apostleship with the growing temporal prosperity of Zion.
Indeed, he is the greatest business-man on the continent,--the cashier
of a firm of eighty thousand silent partners, and the only auditor of
that cashier, besides. If I to-day signified my conversion to Mormonism,
to-morrow I should be baptized by Brigham's hands. The next day I should
be invited to appear at the Church-Office (Brigham's) and exhibit to the
Church (Brigham) a faithful inventory of my entire estate. I am a
cabinet-maker, let us say, and have brought to Salt Lake the entire
earnings of my New-York shop,--twenty thousand dollars. The Church
(Brigham sole and simple) examines and approves my inventory. It
(Brigham alone) has the absolute decision of the question whether any
more cabinet-makers are needed in Utah. If the Church (Brigham) says,
"No," it (Brigham again) has the right to tell me where labor is wanted,
and set me going in my new occupation. If the Church (Brigham) says,
"Yes," it further goes on to inform me, without appeal, exactly what
proportion of the twenty thousand dollars on my inventory can be
properly turned into the channels of the new cabinet-shop. I am making
no extraordinary or disproportionate supposition when I say that the
Church (Brigham) permits me to retain just one-half of my property. The
remaining ten thousand dollars goes into the Church-Fund, (Brigham's
Herring-safe,) and from that portion of my life's savings I never hear
again, in the form either of capital, interest, bequeathable estate, or
dower to my widow. Except for the purposes of the Church, (Brigham's
unquestionable will,) my ten thousand dollars is as though it had not
been. I am a sincere believer, however, and go home light-hearted, with
a certified check written by the Recording Angel on my conscience for
that amount, passed to my credit in the bank where thieves break not
through nor steal,--it being no more accessible to them than to the
depositor, which is a comfort to the latter. The first year I net from
my chairs and tables two thousand dollars. The Church (Brigham) sends me
another invitation to visit it, make a solemn averment of the sum, and
pay over to that ecclesiastical edifice, the Herring-safe, two hundred
dollars. Or suppose I have not sold any of my wares as yet, but have
only imported, to be sold by-and-by, five hundred Boston rockers. On
learning this fact, the Church (Brigham) graciously accepts fifty for
its own purposes.--Being founded upon a rock, it does not care, in its
collective capacity, to sit upon rockers, but has an immense series of
warehouses, omnivorous and eupeptic, which swallow all manner of tithes,
from grain and horseshoes to the less stable commodities of fresh fish
and melons, assimilating them by admirable processes into coin of the
realm. These warehouses are in the Church (Brigham's own private)
inclosure.--If success in my cabinet-making has moved me to give a
feast, and I thereat drink more healths than are consistent with my own,
the Church surely knows that fact the very next day; and as Utah
recognizes no impunitive "getting drunk in the bosom of one's family," I
am again sent for, on this occasion to pay a fine, probably exceeding
the expenses of my feast. A second offence is punished with imprisonment
as well as fine; for no imprisonment avoids fine,--this comes in every
case. The hand of the Church holds the souls of the saints by inevitable
purse-strings. But I cannot waste time by enumerating the multitudinous
lapses and offences which all bring revenue to the Herring-safe.
Over all these matters Brigham Young has supreme control. His power is
the most despotic known to mankind. Here, by the way, is the
constitutionally vulnerable point of Mormonism. If fear of establishing
a bad precedent hinder the United States at any time from breaking up
that nest of all disloyalty, because of its licentious
marriage-institutions, Utah is still open to grave punishment, and the
Administration inflicting it would have duty as well as vested right
upon its side, on the ground that it stands pledged to secure to each
of the nation's constituent sections a republican form of
government,--something which Utah has never enjoyed any more than
Timbuctoo. I once asked Brigham if Dr. Bernhisel would be likely to get
to Congress again. "No," he replied, with perfect certainty; "_we_ shall
send ---- as our Delegate." (I think he mentioned Colonel Kinney, but do
not remember absolutely.) Whoever it was, when the time came, Brigham
would send in his name to the "Deseret News,"--whose office, like
everything else valuable and powerful, is in his inclosure. It would be
printed as a matter of course; a counter-nomination is utterly unheard
of; and on election-day ---- would be Delegate as surely as the sun
rose. The mountain-stream that irrigates the city, flowing to all the
gardens through open ditches on each side of the street, passes through
Brigham's inclosure: if the saints needed drought to humble them, he
could set back the waters to their source. The road to the only _cañon_
where firewood is attainable runs through the same close, and is barred
by a gate of which he holds the sole key. A family-man, wishing to cut
fuel, must ask his leave, which is generally granted on condition that
every third or fourth load is deposited in the inclosure, for
Church-purposes. Thus everything vital, save the air he breathes,
reaches the Mormon only through Brigham's sieve. What more absolute
despotism is conceivable? Here lies the _pou-sto_ for the lever of
Governmental interference. The mere fact of such power resting in one
man's irresponsible hands is a crime against the Constitution. At the
same time, this power, wonderful as it may seem, is practically wielded
for the common good. I never heard Brigham's worst enemies accuse him of
peculation, though such immense interests are controlled by his one pair
of hands. His life is all one great theoretical mistake, yet he makes
fewer practical mistakes than any other man, so situated, whom the world
ever saw. Those he does make are not on the side of self. He merges his
whole personality in the Church, with a self-abnegation which would
establish in business a whole century of martyrs having a worthy cause.
The cut of Brigham's hair led me away from his personal description. To
return to it: his eyes are a clear blue-gray, frank and straightforward
in their look; his nose a finely chiselled aquiline; his mouth
exceedingly firm, and fortified in that expression by a chin almost as
protrusive beyond the rest of the profile as Charlotte Cushman's, though
less noticeably so, being longer than hers; and he wears a narrow ribbon
of brown beard, meeting under the chin. I think I have heard Captain
Burton say that he had irregular teeth, which made his smile unpleasant.
Since the Captain's visit, our always benevolent President, Mr. Lincoln,
has altered all that, sending out as Territorial Secretary a Mr. Fuller,
who, besides being a successful politician, was an excellent dentist.
He secured Brigham's everlasting gratitude by making him a very handsome
false set, and performing the same service for all of his favorite, but
edentate wives. Several other apostles of the Lord owe to Mr. Fuller
their ability to gnash their teeth against the Gentiles. The result was
that he became the most popular Federal officer (who didn't turn Mormon)
ever sent to Utah. The man who obtains ascendency over the mouths of the
authorities cannot fail ere-long to get their ears.
Brigham's manners astonish any one who knows that his only education was
a few quarters of such common-school experience as could be had in
Ontario County, Central New York, during the early part of the century.
There are few courtlier men living. His address is a fine combination of
dignity with the desire to confer happiness,--of perfect deference to
the feelings of others with absolute certainty of himself and his own
opinions. He is a remarkable example of the educating influence of
tactful perception, combined with entire singleness of aim, considered
quite apart from its moral character. His early life was passed among
the uncouth and illiterate; his daily associations, since he embraced
Mormonism, have been with the least cultivated grades of human
society,--a heterogeneous peasant-horde, looking to him for erection
into a nation: yet he has so clearly seen what is requisite in the man
who would be respected in the Presidency, and has so unreservedly
devoted his life to its attainment, that in protracted conversations
with him I heard only a single solecism, ("a'n't you" for "aren't you,")
and saw not one instance of breeding which would be inconsistent with
noble lineage.
I say all this good of him frankly, disregarding any slur that maybe
cast on me as his defender by those broad-effect artists who always
paint the Devil black,--for I think it high time that the Mormon enemies
of our American Idea should be plainly understood as far more dangerous
antagonists than hypocrites or idiots can ever hope to be. Let us not
twice commit the blunder of underrating our foes.
Brigham began our conversation at the theatre by telling me I was
late,--it was after nine o'clock. I replied, that this was the time we
usually set about dressing for an evening party in Boston or New York.
"Yes," said he, "you find us an old-fashioned people; we are trying to
return to the healthy habits of patriarchal times."
"Need you go back so far as that for your parallel?" suggested I. "It
strikes me that we might have found four-o'clock balls among the _early_
Christians."
He smiled, without that offensive affectation of some great men, the air
of taking another's joke under their gracious patronage, and went on to
remark that there were, unfortunately, multitudinous differences between
the Mormons and Americans at the East, besides the hours they kept.
"You find us," said he, "trying to live peaceably. A sojourn with people
thus minded must be a great relief to you, who come from a land where
brother hath lifted hand against brother, and you hear the confused
noise of the warrior perpetually ringing in your ears."
Despite the courtly deference and Scriptural dignity of this speech, I
detected in it a latent crow over that "perished Union" which was the
favorite theme of every saint I met in Utah, and hastened to assure the
President that I had no desire for relief from sympathy with my
country's struggle for honor and existence.
"Ah!" he replied, in a voice slightly tinged with sarcasm. "You differ
greatly, then, from multitudes of your countrymen, who, since the draft
began to be talked of, have passed through Salt Lake, flying westward
from the crime of their brothers' blood."
"I do indeed."
"Still, they are excellent men. Brother Heber Kimball and myself are
every week invited to address a train of them down at Emigrant Square.
They are honest, peaceful people. You call them 'Copperheads,' I
believe. But they are real, true, good men. We find them very
truth-seeking, remarkably open to conviction. Many of them have stayed
with us. Thus the Lord makes the wrath of man to praise Him. The
Abolitionists--the same people who interfered with our institutions, and
drove us out into the wilderness--interfered with the Southern
institutions till they broke up the Union. But it's all coming out
right,--a great deal better than we could have arranged it for
ourselves. The men who flee from Abolitionist oppression come out here
to our ark of refuge, and people the asylum of God's chosen. You'll all
be out here before long. Your Union's gone forever. Fighting only makes
matters worse. When your country has become a desolation, we, the saints
whom you cast out, will forget all your sins against us, and give you a
home."
There was something so preposterous in the idea of a mighty and
prosperous people abandoning, through abject terror of a desperate set
of Southern conspirators, the fertile soil and grand commercial avenues
of the United States, to populate a green strip in the heart of an
inaccessible desert, that, until I saw Brigham Young's face glowing with
what he deemed prophetic enthusiasm, I could not imagine him in earnest.
Before I left Utah, I discovered, that, without a single exception, all
the saints were inoculated with a prodigious craze, to the effect that
the United States was to become a blighted chaos, and its inhabitants
Mormon proselytes and citizens of Utah within the next two years,--the
more sanguine said, "next summer."
At first sight, one point puzzled me. Where were they to get the
orthodox number of wives for this sudden accession of converts? My
gentlemen-readers will feel highly nattered by a solution of this
problem which I received from no leaser light of the Latter-Day Church
than that jolly apostle, Heber Kimball.
"Why," said the old man, twinkling his little black eyes like a godly
Silenus, and nursing one of his fat legs with a lickerish smile, "isn't
the Lord Almighty providin' for His beloved heritage jist as fast as He
anyways kin? This war's a-goin' on till the biggest part o' you male
Gentiles hez killed each other off, then the leetle handful that's left
and comes a-fleein' t' our asylum 'll bring all the women o' the nation
along with 'em, so we shall hev women enough to give every one on 'em
all they want, and hev a large balance left over to distribute round
among God's saints that hez been here from the beginnin' o' the
tribulation."
The sweet taste which this diabolical reflection seemed to leave in
Heber Kimball's mouth made me long to knock him down worse than I had
ever felt regarding either saint or sinner. But it is costly to smite an
apostle of the Lord in Salt Lake City; and I merely retaliated by
telling him I wished I could hear him say that in a lecture-room full of
Sanitary-Commission ladies scraping lint for their husbands,
sweethearts, and brothers in the Union army. I didn't know whether
saints made good lint, but I thought I knew one who'd get scraped a
little.
To resume Brigham for the last time. After a conversation about the
Indians, in which he denounced the military policy of the Government,
averring that one bale of blankets and ten pounds of beads would go
farther to protect the mails from stoppage and emigrants from massacre
than a regiment of soldiers, he discovered that we crossed swords on
every war-question, and tactfully changed the subject to the beauty of
the Opera-House.
As to the Indians, let me remark by-the-by, I did not tell him that I
understood the reason of his dislike to severe measures in that
direction. Infernally bestial and cruel as are the Goshoots, Pi-Utes,
and other Desert tribes, still they have never planned any extensive
raid since the Mormons entered Utah. In every settlement of the saints
you will find from two to a dozen young men who wear their black hair
cut in the Indian fashion, and speak all the surrounding dialects with
native fluency. Whenever a fatly provided wagon-train is to be attacked,
a fine herd of emigrants' beeves stampeded, the mail to be stopped, or
the Gentiles in any way harassed, these desperadoes stain their skin,
exchange their clothes for a breech-clout, and rally a horde of the
savages, whose favor they have always propitiated, for the ambush and
massacre, which in all but the element of brute force is their work in
plan, leadership, and execution. I have multitudes of most interesting
facts to back this assertion, but am already in danger of overrunning my
allowed limits.
The Opera-House was a subject we could agree upon. I was greatly
astonished to find in the desert heart of the continent a place of
public amusement which for capacity, beauty, and comfort has no superior
in America, except the opera-houses of New York, Boston, and
Philadelphia. It is internally constructed somewhat like the first of
these, seats twenty-five hundred people, and commodiously receives five
hundred more, when, as in the present instance, the stage is thrown into
the _parquet_, and the latter boarded up to the level of the former for
dancing. Externally the building is a plain, but not ungraceful
structure, of stone, brick, and stucco. My greatest surprise was excited
by the really exquisite artistic beauty of the gilt and painted
decorations of the great arch over the stage, the cornices, and the
moulding about the _proscenium_-boxes. President Young, with a proper
pride, assured me that every particle of the ornamental work was by
indigenous and saintly hands.
"But you don't know yet," he added, "how independent we are of you at
the East. Where do you think we got that central chandelier, and what d'
ye suppose we paid for it?"
It was a piece of workmanship which would have been creditable to any
New York firm,--apparently a richly carved circle, twined with gilt
vines, leaves, and tendrils, blossoming all over with flaming
wax-lights, and suspended by a massive chain of golden lustre. So I
replied that he probably paid a thousand dollars for it in New York.
"Capital!" exclaimed Brigham. "I made it myself! That circle is a
cartwheel which I washed and gilded; it hangs by a pair of gilt
ox-chains; and the ornaments of the candlesticks were all cut after my
patterns out of sheet-tin!"
I talked with the President till a party of young girls, who seemed to
regard him with idolatry, and whom, in return, he treated with a sage
mixture of gallantry and fatherliness, came to him with an invitation to
join in some old-fashioned contra-dance long forgotten at the East. I
was curious to see how he would acquit himself in this supreme ordeal of
dignity; so I descended to the _parquet_, and was much impressed by the
aristocratic grace with which he went through his figures.
After that I excused myself from numerous kind invitations by the
ball-committee to be introduced to a partner and join in the dances. The
fact was that I greatly wished to make a thorough physiognomical study
of the ball-room, and I know that my readers will applaud my self-denial
in not dancing, since it enables me to tell them how Utah good society
_looks_.
After spending an hour in a circuit and survey of the room as minute as
was compatible with decency, I arrived at the following results.
There was very little ostentation in dress at the ball, but there was
also very little taste in dressing. Patrician broadcloth and silk were
the rare exceptions, generally ill-made and ill-worn, but they cordially
associated with the great mass of plebeian tweed and calico. Few ladies
wore jewelry or feathers. There were some pretty girls swimming about in
tasteful whip-syllabub of puffed tarlatan. Where saintly gentlemen came
with several wives, the oldest generally seemed the most elaborately
dressed, and acted much like an Eastern chaperon toward her younger
sisters. (Wives of the same man habitually besister each other in Utah.
Another triumph of grace!) Among the men I saw some very strong and
capable faces; but the majority had not much character in their
looks,--indeed, differed little in that regard from any average crowd of
men anywhere. Among the women, to my surprise, I found no really
degraded faces, though many stolid ones,--only one deeply dejected,
(this belonged to the wife of a hitherto monogamic husband, who had left
her alone in the dress-circle, while he was dancing with a chubby young
Mormoness, likely to be added to the family in a month or two,) but many
impassive ones; and though I saw multitudes of kindly, good-tempered
countenances, and a score which would have been called pretty anywhere,
I was obliged to confess, after a most impartial and anxious search,
that I had not met a single woman who looked high-toned, first-class,
capable of poetic enthusiasm or heroic self-devotion,--not a single
woman whom an artist would dream of and ask to sit for a study,--not one
to whom a finely constituted intellectual man could come for
companionship in his pursuits or sympathy in his yearnings. Because I
knew that this verdict would be received at the East with a "Just as you
might have expected!" I cast aside everything like prejudice, and forgot
that I was in Utah, as I threaded the great throng.
I must condense greatly what I have to say about two other typical men
besides Brigham Young, or I shall have no room to speak of the Lake and
the Desert. Heber Kimball, second President, (_proximus longo
intervallo!_) Brigham's most devoted worshipper, and in all respects the
next most important man, although utterly incapable of keeping coherent
the vast tissue of discordant Mormon elements, in case he should survive
Brigham, is the latter's equal in years, but in all things else his
antipodes. His height is over six feet, his form of aldermanic
rotundity, his face large, plethoric, and lustrous with the stable red
of stewed cranberries, while his small, twinkling black beads of eyes
and a Satyric sensualism about the mouth would indicate a temperament
fatally in the way of any apostleship save that of polygamy, even
without the aid of an induction from his favorite topics of discourse
and his patriarchally unvarnished style of handling them. Men,
everywhere, unfortunately, tend little toward the error of bashfulness
in their chat among each other, but most of us at the East would feel
that we were insulting the lowest member of the _demi-monde_, if we
uttered before her a single sentence of the talk which forms the
habitual staple of all Heber Kimball's public sermons to the wives and
daughters who throng the Sunday Tabernacle.
Heber took a vivid interest in Bierstadt's and my own eternal welfare.
He quite laid himself out for our conversion, coming to sit with us at
breakfast in our Mormon hotel, dressed in a black swallow-tail, buff
vest, and a stupendous truncate cone of Leghorn, which made him look
like an Italian mountebank-physician of the seventeenth century. I have
heard men who could misquote Scripture for their own ends, and talk a
long while without saying anything; but he so far surpassed in these
particulars the loftiest efforts within my former experience, that I
could think of no comparison for him but Jack Bunsby taken to exhorting.
Witness a sample:--
"Seven women shall take a hold o' one man! There!" (with a slap on the
back of the nearest subject for conversion). "What d' ye think o' that?
Shall! _Shall_ take a hold on him! That don't mean they _sha'n't_, does
it? No! God's word means what it says. And therefore means no
otherwise,--not in no way, shape, nor manner. Not in no _way_, for He
saith, 'I am the _way_--and the truth and the life.' Not in no _shape_,
for a man beholdeth his nat'ral _shape_ in a glass; nor in no _manner_,
for he straightway forgetteth what manner o' man he was. Seven women
_shall_ catch a hold on him. And ef they _shall_, then they _will_! For
everything shall come to pass, and not one good word shall fall to the
ground. You who try to explain away the Scriptur' would make it
fig'rative. But don't come to ME with none o' your spiritooalizers! Not
_one_ good word shall fall. Therefore _seven_ shall not fall. And ef
seven shall catch a hold on him,--and, as I jist proved, seven _will_
catch a hold on him,--then seven _ought_,--and in the Latter-Day Glory,
_seven_, yea, as our Lord said un-tew Peter, 'Verily I say un-tew you,
not seven, but seventy times seven,' these seventy times seven shall
catch a hold and cleave. Blessed day! For the end shall be even as the
beginnin', and seventy-fold more abundantly. Come over into my garden."
This invitation would wind up the homily. We gladly accepted it, and I
must confess, that, if there ever could be any hope of our conversion,
it was just about the time we stood in Brother Heber's fine orchard,
eating apples and apricots between exhortations, and having sound
doctrine poked down our throats with gooseberries as big as plums, to
take the taste out of our mouths, like jam after castor-oil.
Porter Rockwell is a man whom my readers must have heard of in every
account of fearlessly executed massacre committed in Utah during the
last thirteen years. He is the chief of the Danites,--a band of saints
who possess the monopoly of vengeance upon Gentiles and apostates. If a
Mormon tries to sneak off to California by night, after converting his
property into cash, their knives have the inevitable duty of changing
his destination to another state, and bringing back his goods into the
Lord's treasury. Their bullets are the ones which find their unerring
way through the brains of external enemies. They are the Heaven-elected
assassins of Mormonism,--the butchers by divine right. Porter Rockwell
has slain his forty men. This is historical. His probable private
victims amount to as many more. He wears his hair braided behind, and
done up in a knot with a back-comb, like a woman's. He has a face full
of bull-dog courage,--but vastly good-natured, and without a bad trait
in it. I went out riding with him on the Fourth of July, and enjoyed his
society greatly,--though I knew that at a word from Brigham he would cut
my throat in as matter-of-fact a style as if I had been a calf instead
of an author. But he would have felt no unkindness toward me on that
account. I understood his anomaly perfectly, and found him one of the
pleasantest murderers I ever met. He was mere executive force, from
which the lever, conscience, had suffered entire disjunction, being in
the hand of Brigham. He was everywhere known as the Destroying Angel,
but he seemed to have little disagreement with his toddy, and took his
meals regularly. He has two very comely and pleasant wives. Brigham has
about seventy, Heber about thirty. The seventy of Brigham do not include
those spiritually married, or "sealed" to him, who may never see him
again after the ceremony is performed in his back-office. These often
have temporal husbands, and marry Brigham only for the sake of belonging
to his lordly establishment in heaven.
Salt Lake City, Brigham told me, he believed to contain sixteen thousand
inhabitants. Its houses are built generally of adobe or wood,--a few of
stone,--and though none of them are architecturally ambitious, almost
all have delightful gardens. Both fruit- and shade-trees are plenty and
thrifty. Indeed, from the roof of the Opera-House the city looks fairly
embowered in green. It lies very picturesquely on a plain quite
embasined among mountains, and the beauty of its appearance is much
heightened by the streams which run on both sides of all the broad
streets, brought down from the snow-peaks for purposes of irrigation.
The Mormons worship at present in a plain, low building,--I think, of
adobe,--called the Tabernacle, save during the intensely hot weather,
when an immense booth of green branches, filled with benches,
accommodates them more comfortably. Brigham is erecting a Temple of
magnificent granite, (much like the Quincy,) about two hundred feet long
by one hundred and twenty-five feet wide. If this edifice be ever
finished, it will rank among the most capacious religious structures of
the continent.
The lake from which the city takes its name is about twenty miles
distant from the latter, by a good road across the level valley-bottom.
Artistically viewed, it is one of the loveliest sheets of water I ever
saw,--bluer than the intensest blue of the ocean, and practically as
impressive, since, looking from the southern shore, you see only a
water-horizon. This view, however, is broken by a magnificent
mountainous island, rising, I should think, seven or eight hundred feet
from the water, half a dozen miles from shore, and apparently as many
miles in circuit. The density of the lake-brine has been under- instead
of over-stated. I swam out into it for a considerable distance, then lay
upon my back _on_, rather than in, the water, and suffered the breeze to
waft me landward again. I was blown to a spot where the lake was only
four inches deep, without grazing my back, and did not know I had got
within my depth again until I depressed my hand a trifle and touched
bottom! It is a mistake to call this lake azoic. It has no fish, but
breeds myriads of strange little maggots, which presently turn into
troublesome gnats. The rocks near the lake are grandly castellated and
cavernous crags of limestone, some of it finely crystalline, but most of
it like our coarser Trenton and Black-River groups. There is a large
cave in this formation, ten minutes' climb from the shore.