Utah and Salt Lake City! How many are the tales which have been told
us of this unique city and its queer inhabitants. They have been
represented to us as a people, "deep, dark and mysterious;" a people
to be avoided as one would the fallen angels. A people promulgating a
religion aimed at the very foundation of civilization, and undermining
its holiest and purest institutions. We have been solemnly informed
that once within the clutches of its religious fanatics, escape would
be well nigh impossible. Statements which might be applicable to a
description of Thibet, are even now in print, {193} and quite recently,
"horrible" stories of persecution in which the misguided and degraded
"Mormons," having first torn down and trampled upon the American flag,
resorted to the flinging of mud, as well as sticks and stones, at the
devoted head of its sole defender. Until within a few years, Utah
figured as the "Darkest Africa" of this our free and happy Union. But
the tourist has at last, with admirable bravery, invaded its forbidden
precincts, overrun its quiet villages, crowded the quaint streets of
its cities, and laid bare the awful secret of its hidden mystery.
Alas, it is but as a "tale that is told," it is even as the "big dark"
of our childish fears, which only needed investigation to prove its
utter nothingness. We find after all, only a kindly people, busily
engaged, for the most part, in overcoming an unproductive soil,
and putting themselves in a way to use to advantage and profit,
the splendid resources with which nature and their own thrift have
bountifully provided them. Broad and fertile valleys now smile back at
us, where unfruitful wastes once frowned, and prosperous cities and
towns give evidence of true western enterprise; and the people--they
are not so very much unlike other people. One might exclaim, with a
fair tourist whose itinerary last summer, gave her a day or two in Salt
Lake City--"Well, I don't see any one who looks like a Mormon!" What
could she have been expecting? There is a tradition among the people in
question, that horns have ceased to decorate their brows, and that even
the rudest of them are quite harmless.
Apropos of Salt Lake City; as all roads once led to Rome, so also are
there very few western-bound tourists, who do not find themselves, at
some stage of their wanderings, guests within its gates. They come
from everywhere, and their expectations are varied. They go in great
crowds to the Tabernacle organ recitals, where a matchless instrument
is touched by a master hand, while ten thousand can be comfortably
seated beneath its pillarless dome, and lose not one vibration. Ah! How
can one describe a scene so inspiring? The vast audience spell-bound,
entranced, forgetful alike of time and place, deaf to all else save the
voice of the wonderful organ, bearing to them great waves of melody,
now glorious and triumphant in the Tannhauser and William Tell, now
low and wailing in Il Trovatore. Now it is the Lost Chord and now the
Angels' Chorus, lacking only articulation to make it human. And so
we listen and marvel, and make good resolutions, and the music grows
soft and faint, and far away, and ceases; and we find ourselves in
a silence that is intense, vainly striving {194} to catch one more
harmonious whisper. It is all over. We are glad, if we may, to take the
hand of the organist, and then we go streaming out into the sunshine,
and the great, bustling, workaday world claims us once more. We go
our various ways feeling the better for this happy hour, snatched out
of the glowing heart of the busy day, and resolve to go again if time
permits. And all this is free. Free as the air we breathe, and the
grass we tread upon, twice a week throughout the year, save only the
winter months. Really, for semi-barbarians, this is doing very well.
When we see this great Tabernacle filled on a Sabbath afternoon and
hear the charm of five hundred voices added to that of the organ, and
listen to the straightforward addresses of several unsalaried "Saints,"
our thoughts go back to the half empty churches of the East, and we
feel that we have come upon at least one mystery. Whatever are the
doctrines Mormonism teaches, its votaries seem to be earnest and do
not look like a priest-ridden people. In their family life they are
extremely hospitable, and he is fortunate indeed who is admitted as a
guest within their homes. We are charmed by their hearty welcome, and
the unostentatious kindness that is showered upon us.
Socially, nothing comes amiss with them that can be classed under the
head of innocent amusements; and so the great dancing pavilion and the
bathing beach at Saltair are thronged daily and nightly throughout the
season. Saltair! There is nothing to equal it. One thousand couples can
dance upon its polished floor, while the soft breezes from over the
great Salt Lake cool the flushed cheek and stimulate the most lagging
appetite; or, we join the bathers and go for a dip in its briny water.
Refreshed and invigorated, we rest upon the broad balconies and watch
the sun in a "sea of crimson and purple and gold" as it sinks behind
the mountains, which are really islands, set like gems, in the bosom of
the great lake. Later, we find ourselves-wondering if famed Italian and
Venetian moons can give us any clearer light, and how their radiance
can flood a night more delicious than this. The strains of "Home,
Sweet Home," in the closing waltz, and the thinned-out ranks of the
dancers, warn us that the last train for the city is due, and sixteen
miles might prove wearisome, however bright the moonlight. Saltair is
upon every one's lips. No visitor misses it, unless compelled by an
adverse fate; and we find ourselves drawn back again and again, each
time more charmed than the last. Like the mountains, it attracts and
fascinates--the mountains, which rear their misty outlines in the blue
distance, and beckon and mock us. Five miles away {195} they appear
as tantalizingly close; indeed, we might run over to the base of one,
by way of a constitutional before breakfast. We discover, alas! that
"distance lends enchantment." We are left in no possible doubt that
there is a distance. The main street of the city apparently runs
directly into them, and City Creek Canon, from whose clear stream its
thirsty thousands drink, is reached by only a short drive. Salt Lake
is truly a mountain-girt city, and its founders must have resembled
them in strength of purpose and steadfast effort. To have reclaimed the
desert and, in part, peopled a state, is no small achievement.
The Mormons foster education and educational institutions. "The glory
of God is intelligence," they tell us, and intelligence for women as
well as for men. Women, in the Mormon estimate, occupies a very high
position, both in Church and state. You are surprised? You thought her
subjected to all sorts of humiliating treatment, and that polygamy
held her hopelessly in subjection? Ah! why not let polygamy rest as
the dead issue that it really is? Why be always dragging it out and
dangling its supposed horrors in the face of every advancement! Its
practice was limited to but three per cent of those who believed in it
as a principle; but even though an "Angel in Heaven" should declare
the truth in the matter prejudice would stop its ears and refuse to
hear. Why fill our minds with the blood-curdling tales of yellow back
literature, when all the riches of the master minds of bygone centuries
are at our disposal? Why not show to those whom we considered deluded
a manner of living that will win them to us? Let us hear no more of
the divorce courts and the brothel, before we cast the first stone at
our brothers. Divorce is practically unknown among the Mormons, and
when we assail Salt Lake City for morals we must remember that half her
population is "Gentile," and that for the last twelve years the head of
her city government has been drawn from that source.
In forming an impartial estimate of a people, we choose for our
consideration neither the class that is designated as the upper
stratum, nor those whose worldly possessions place them it the bottom,
but go rather to the great middle class, those who hold a position
between the two extremes. The Mormons profess to have no upper and
no lower classes. They aim to meet on common ground, whatever their
worldly inheritance may be. Their young men are called upon to give two
or three years, and oftentimes more, of their life to the spreading of
the gospel as they believe and teach it; and rich {196} and poor, they
go cheerfully, away from home and friends, amid unfriendly strangers,
without other recompense than the consciousness of a duty performed.
These are the much talked about and much dreaded missionaries, against
whose "pernicious" influences we are warned. Considering the fact that
these same Elders are in many cases beardless youths, is it not strange
that contact with them is so feared, and discussions looked upon as so
dangerous? Surely Christianity in all the nineteen hundred years that
have elapsed since its establishment, has given us sufficient knowledge
with which to defend ourselves. Why then all this flurry? Are we to
be forced to believe ourselves on the weaker side? But, you say they
are such "smooth fellows." True, but is the smoothness to be all on
one side? Let us mass our forces and meet them on even ground, and who
knows whose may be the victory?
We have all been told of the shield, over the appearance of which, in
ancient times, two warriors quarreled, only to discover at the last
that it presented an entirely different side to each. Is there not a
possibility that, after all has been said and done, we may find there
are also two sides to the Mormon question? History, we say, points
with unerring finger to bloody deeds and insubordination. In one long
procession they pass before us, "Mountain Meadow Massacre," "Danite
Raids," "Bloody Atonement," political intrigues and gross depravity.
They have been called a blot upon our Western civilization, and today
the map of Utah is presented with a huge octopus disfiguring its fair
proportions, and whose tentacles reach out into adjoining states. We
have surely told you how unreliable are the stories told us of early
pioneer days beyond the Mississippi, and how fabulous are legends
which come to us of its early settlers. We have not considered how
large a part the prejudice, which always follows a religious belief
that deviates even in the least from what is known as orthodox, has
played in the lurid tales with which our too eager ears have been
regaled. We have fallen into the same error for which we censure the
ancient knights; we have neglected to look upon the other side of
the shield. What sad tales of persecution and long suffering we find
here. Tragedies as sad as any in Reformation days. From Kirtland to
Nauvoo, and across the trackless prairie they were driven, their weary
way marked by the graves of those whose physical strength was not
sufficient, until they reached at last what, to them, was a promised
land, the valley of the great Salt Lake. Desolate and unpromising as
it was, they have made it blossom {197} as the rose. To quote a recent
descriptive work, "By industry as remarkable as it was well directed,
the desert was converted into an oasis, and the bare earth, with its
poverty of sands and sage brush, was made to cover its nakedness with
the green vestures of an almost unexampled fecundity."
How much truth there is in all that is urged against them, and how
mistaken we may be as to their motives and the underlying principles
which dominate their rough and rugged exterior, those of us who are
enough interested must determine for ourselves. Strange, is it not,
that we hear so little mention of the horrors of Haun's Mill, and so
few detailed accounts of the mid-winter expulsion from Nauvoo? General
Thomas L. Kane, of Philadelphia, visited their deserted city soon after
their enemies had driven them away, and in a lecture delivered on the
subject before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, used these words:
"Dreadful, indeed, was the suffering of these forsaken beings;
bowed and cramped by cold and sunburn, alternating as each weary
day and night dragged on, they were almost all of them, the
crippled victims of disease. They were there because they had no
homes, nor hospitals, nor poorhouse, nor friends to offer them any.
They could not satisfy the feeble cravings of their sick; they had
not bread to quiet the fractious hunger-cries of their children.
Mothers and babes, daughters and grandparents, all of them alike
were bivouacked in tatters, wanting even covering to comfort those
whom the sick shivers of fever were searching to the marrow. These
were Mormons, famishing in Lee County, Iowa, in the fourth week of
the month of September, in the year of our Lord, 1846. The city--it
was Nauvoo, Illinois. The Mormons were the owners of that city and
the smiling country around. And those who had stopped their plows,
who had silenced their hammers, their axes, their shuttles, and
their workshop wheels; those who had put out their fires and eaten
their food, spoiled their orchards and trampled under foot their
thousands of acres of unharvested bread--these were the keepers of
their dwellings, the carousers in their Temples, whose drunken riot
insulted the ears of their dying."
They had the added agony of camping on the snow covered ground without
shelter, in plain sight of their confiscated possessions and desolated
hearthstones. Another writer thus describes the awful scene:
"Out into the trackless American wilds, into an Indian country,
the 'Mormons' wended their way, weary and destitute, for more than
fifteen hundred miles, their pathway being marked by the graves
of their dead. The history of their privations and suffering
is harrowing in the extreme. The {198} lives of not less than
a thousand of their number were sacrificed in the relentless
persecutions connected with the exodus from Illinois."
Need we be surprised that a feeble protest was raised against the too
zealous enforcement of laws framed to this very end, or that a sense of
injustice should be the result of such vigorous treatment?
We hear nothing nowadays of the battalion furnished by the Mormon
refugees, for the defense of the flag in California and Mexico, at a
time, too, when every able-bodied man was needed for defense against
hostile Indians, hunger and all the other dangers attendant upon
pioneer travel. In answer to this demand, Brigham Young said:
"You shall have your battalion, Captain Allen; and if there are not
young men enough, we will take the old men, and if they are not
enough, we will take the women."
In three days the force was mustered and ready to march. And again to
the assembled people:
"I say unto you, magnify the laws. There is no law in the United
States, or in the Constitution, but I am ready to make honorable."
Here is the message which came over the wires when amid the turmoil
of the first years of the Civil War, the Overland telegraph line was
completed:
"Utah has not seceded, but is firm for the Constitution and laws
of our once happy country, and is warmly interested in such useful
enterprises as the one so far completed."
A similar demonstration of patriotism and love of progress took place
when the first iron horse, over the Union Pacific, came puffing into
the Territory:
"Utah bids you welcome. Hail to the great National highway."
And this from their Articles of Faith:
"We believe in being subjects to kings, presidents, rulers, and
magistrates; in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law."
These do not sound like the utterances of a people, jealously guarding
from the intrusion of civilization, a region in which they might
entrench themselves, and defy the advancement of law, order and
Christianity. As our luxurious Pullman bears us swiftly and comfortably
over the rolling prairie, do we ever give a thought to the patient,
downtrodden ones {199} who marked out the path for us? Those who, in
the words of one of their own poets:
"As armed with mighty faith, no foe could vaunt,
No powers appall, no pending danger daunt."
And what of the Mountain Meadow Massacre and the Danite band? The
daring perpetrator of the former outrage was willingly given over
to the just retribution which awaited him, arid the existence of
the "Avenging Angels" as an organization under the direction and
receiving the sanction of Mormon leaders, was long ago exploded as
the fabrication of an over-excited and too active imagination. We can
find no more substantial foundation remaining to it than that which
underlies any other myth or tradition. "Let the dead past bury its
dead." Let us take the Mormon people as we find them today and try
to discover in them a little good rather than wholesale evil. Let us
commend them for the benefit, however small, that they have bestowed
upon their day and generation, and cover with the mantle of charity,
if enough of that priceless commodity be left in the world, the
unintentional evil they may have done, and the mistakes they may have
made. The wrong doing of individuals should not be visited upon the
heads of the entire community, and narrow, personal prejudices should
not be allowed to warp our good judgment.
This is an age of wide research and broad acquirements, and we will
not find our Mormon countrymen very far behind in the race for all
that broadens and enlightens. They have their own poets, their own
artists and their own musicians. You can find them represented in the
universities and in the studios, and in the conservatories of music of
more than one foreign city, as well as in those of our own fair land.
Wherever education and culture congregate, you will find a colony of
them; and they are not unknown in the scientific and the professional
world; neither are they lacking in manufacturers and financiers. The
great Tabernacle organ (second to none in the country) is presided
over by one of their own young musicians, and the baton is wielded by
one of their own faith, over the Tabernacle choir, which has more than
once earned the wonder and applause of California audiences. It is a
Mormon girl, granddaughter of one of Mormonism's great leaders, who
has recently made her debut, and taken by storm one Eastern city after
another, charming them alike by her personality and her ability; and
whose marvelous voice a conservative Boston paper has likened to that
of Patti. An exploring {200} party, sent out by a Mormon institution of
learning, has only just returned after having penetrated with infinite
hardship, privation and determination, deeply into the forbidden wilds
of South Africa, endeavoring to give to the world of science and
research information that is valuable and rare.
One of the remarkable things about the Mormons is, that they are a
travelled people. As we meet them and converse with them, we wonder
at the various phases of human life with which they seem to be
familiar, and the ease with which many of them are able to settle, for
themselves, many vexed social problems. But they are either extremely
modest, or foreign sojourn has become so ordinary a thing with them,
that they attach no unusual significance to it; for it is only upon
questioning them, or after having known them some time, that the secret
of it is made known.
Ah, yes, we say, travel is a good schoolmaster, and we broaden and
deepen under its discipline. But there are many kinds of travelers;
the mere globe trotter, hastening from one capital to another, seeing
much, but perceiving little, and resembling the woman who was asked by
a friend what most impressed her in one of Germany's tourist-infested
cities. After due consideration she replied, "Well, I think of all the
things I remember with most delight, the very best were the delicious
Frankfort sausages." "Ye gods and little fishes!" Frankfort sausages,
indeed! If she was an American we renounce all claim to her. He who
would reap lasting benefit must be possessed of the "seeing eye," and
know the meaning of insight as well as sight. But if travel alone can
do so much for us, of how much greater value the sojourner under many
skies, and amid various manners and customs, gleaning a little here and
a little there, and adding daily to our lore of people and things. Not
alone is this true of the Mormon man, but in a great measure true also
of the woman. They have extended their itinerary to the islands of the
sea, and countries oriental. They have practically belted the globe,
and gathered from the rich treasures of its world-old storehouses,
that which centuries have been amassing; and they bring it all and lay
it at the feet of their well-beloved home land. For they are proud
of their country, proud of the flag she flies and intensely proud of
their lovely "Deseret." They are proud of their heroic men and women,
brave daughters of the desert, tried and true, who laid the foundations
upon which they are engaged in building a superstructure that will do
lasting honor to those who suffered so much in establishing it.
{201} A great incentive for the acquisition of knowledge is given to
the advocate of Mormonism by the belief that no advancement made in
this life will go as naught when death overtakes him. He will go on
progressing throughout the countless ages of eternity, without the
power of sin to retard his efforts, and with all the vast recourses
of celestial lore to accelerate his speed. He accounts for different
degrees of intelligence observed in individuals in this life, by
his theory of pre-existence, in which some had attained a greater
advancement than had others. He does not deny salvation to any of the
human race, and believes that no erring soul will be forever lost. He
hopes for all his dead a chance for glorification equal to his own;
and in the beautiful temples scattered over Utah, he unselfishly does
for them, what is to him a work of redemption. The largest and most
beautiful of them all is visible to the visitor to Salt Lake City,
standing in the midst of the city. Its white and glistening towers,
supporting the gilded statue of the Mormon angel "Moroni," come into
sight long before the outlines of any other architecture. Built of
native granite, at an outlay of nearly three million dollars, forty
years were given to its construction and embellishment.
In all justice to these people, let us say, "We admire you for the
progress you have made, the stern determination you have shown, and
while we may not agree with you in your religious tenets, we recognize
you as brother Americans and co-patriots, under a flag and constitution
which is broad enough to shelter all creeds and all true men. We
believe you when you say that plural marriage is a thing of the past,
and we think the better of you for honoring ties already formed." So
will we prove ourselves possessed of Christian toleration for those
who dare dispute our pet theories, and place ourselves in a way to do
a tardy justice. "We believe all things, we hope all things, we have
endured many things, and hope to be able to endure all things. If there
is anything virtuous, lovely or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek
after these things." (Articles of Faith.) Truly, if Utah and her people
were one-half as bad as she has been painted, she would deserve a fate
ten times more dreadful than any that her enemies have as yet devised
for her. A just God could do no less than cause the thunderbolts of
His wrath to fall upon her and consume her, that the earth might be
purified of her polluting influence. But how different from the awful
picture do we really find her!
{202}