WESTERN EDITORS.
The attack upon Mormondom has been systematized, and is conducted with
military skill, by trench and parallel. The New England papers having
called for “facts” whereon to base their homilies, General Connor, of
Fenian fame, set up the _Union Vedette_ in Salt Lake City, and publishes
on Saturdays a sheet expressly intended for Eastern reading. The mantle
of the _Sangamo Journal_ has fallen on the _Vedette_, and John C.
Bennett is effaced by Connor. From this source it is that come the whole
of the paragraphs against Brigham and all Mormondom which fill the
Eastern papers, and find their way to London. The editor has to fill his
paper with peppery leaders, well-spiced telegrams, stinging “facts.”
Every week there must be something that can be used and quoted against
Brigham. The Eastern remarks upon quotations in turn are quoted at Salt
Lake. Under such circumstances, even telegrams can be made to take a
flavor. In to-day‘s _Vedette_ we have one from St. Joseph, describing
how above one thousand “of these dirty, filthy dupes of the Great Salt
Lake iniquity” are now squatting round the packet depot, awaiting
transport. Another from Chicago tells us that the seven thousand
European Mormons who have this year passed up the Missouri River “are of
the lowest and most ignorant classes.” The leader is directed against
Mormons in general, and Stenhouse in particular, as editor of one of
the Mormon papers, and ex-postmaster of the Territory. He has already
had cause to fear the _Vedette_, as it was through the exertions of its
editor that he lost his office. This matter is referred to in the leader
of to-day: “When we found our letters scattered about the streets in
fragments, we succeeded in getting an honest postmaster appointed in
place of the editor of the _Telegraph_--an organ where even carrots,
pumpkins, and potatoes are current funds--directed by a clique of
foreign writers, who can hardly speak our language, and who never drew a
loyal breath since they came to Utah.” The Mormon tax frauds, and the
Mormon police, likewise come in for their share of abuse, and the writer
concludes with a pathetic plea against arrest “for quietly indulging in
a glass of wine in a private room with a friend.”
Attacks such as these make one understand the suspiciousness of the
Mormon leaders, and the slowness of Stenhouse and his friends to take a
joke if it concerns the church. Poor Artemus Ward once wrote to
Stenhouse, “If you can‘t take a joke, you‘ll be darned, and you
oughter;” but the jest at which he can laugh has wrought no cure. Heber
Kimball said to me one day: “They‘re all alike. There was ---- came here
to write a book, and we thought better of him than of most. I showed him
more kindness than I ever showed a man before or since, and then he
called me a ‘hoary reprobate.’ I would advise him not to pass this way
next time.”
The suspicion often takes odd shapes. One Sunday morning, at the
tabernacle, I remarked that the Prophet‘s daughter, Zina, had on the
same dress as she had worn the evening before at the theater, in playing
“Mrs. Musket” in the farce of “My Husband‘s Ghost.” It was a black silk
gown, with a vandyke flounce of white, impossible to mistake. I pointed
it out in joke to a Mormon friend, when he denied my assertion in the
most emphatic way, although he could not have known for certain that I
was wrong, as he sat next to me in the theater during the whole play.
The Mormons will talk freely of their own suspiciousness. They say that
the coldness with which travelers are usually received at Salt Lake City
is the consequence of years of total misrepresentation. They forget that
they are arguing in a circle, and that this misrepresentation is itself
sometimes the result of their reserve.
The news and advertisements are even more amusing than the leaders in
the _Vedette_. A paragraph tells us, for instance, that “Mrs. Martha
Stewart and Mrs. Robertson, of San Antonio, lately had an impromptu
fight with revolvers; Mrs. Stewart was badly winged.” Nor is this the
only reference in the paper to shooting by ladies, as another paragraph
tells us how a young girl, frightened by a sham ghost, drew on the
would-be apparition, and with six barrels shot him twice through the
head, and four times “in the region of the heart.” A quotation from the
_Owyhee Avalanche_, speaking of gambling hells, tells us that “one hurdy
shebang” in Silver City shipped 8000 dollars as the net proceeds of its
July business. “These leeches corral more clear cash than most quartz
mills,” remonstrates the editor. “Corral” is the Mexican cattle
inclosure; the yard where the team mules are ranched; the _kraal_ of
Cape Colony, which, on the plains and the plateau, serves as a fort for
men as well as a fold for oxen, and resembles the _serai_ of the East.
The word “to corral” means to shut into one of these pens; and thence
“to pouch,” “to pocket,” “to bag,” to get well into hand.
The advertisements are in keeping with the news. “Everything, from a
salamander safe to a Limerick fish-hook,” is offered by one firm.
“Fifty-three and a half and three and three-quarter thimble-skein
Schuttler wagons,” is offered by another. An advertiser bids us “Spike
the Guns of Humbug! and Beware of Deleterious Dyes! Refuse to have your
Heads Baptized with Liquid Fire!” Another says, “If you want a paper
free from entanglements of cliques, and antagonistic to the corrupting
evils of factionism, subscribe to the _Montana Radiator_.” Nothing beats
the following: “Butcher‘s dead-shot for bed-bugs! Curls them up as fire
does a leaf! Try it, and sleep in peace! Sold by all live druggists.”
If we turn to the other Salt Lake papers, the _Telegraph_, an
independent Mormon paper, and the _Deseret News_, the official journal
of the church, we find a contrast to the trash of the _Vedette_.
Brigham‘s paper, clearly printed and of a pleasant size, is filled with
the best and latest news from the outlying portions of the Territory,
and from Europe. The motto on its head is a simple one--“Truth and
Liberty;” and twenty-eight columns of solid news are given us. Among the
items is an account of a fight upon the Smoky Hill route, which occurred
on the day we reached this city, and in which two teamsters--George Hill
and Luke West--were killed by the Kiowas and Cheyennes. A loyal Union
article from the pen of Albert Carrington, the editor, is followed by
one upon the natural advantages of Utah, in which the writer complains
that the very men who ridiculed the Mormons for settling in a desert are
now declaiming against their being allowed to squat upon one of the
“most fertile locations in the United States.” The paper asserts that
Mormon success is secured only by Mormon industry, and that as a merely
commercial speculation, apart from the religious impulse, the
cultivation of Utah would not pay: “Utah is no place for the loafer or
the lazy man.” An official report, like the _Court Circular_ of England,
is headed, “President Brigham Young‘s trip North,” and is signed by G.
D. Watt, “Reporter” to the church. The Old Testament is not spared.
“From what we saw of the timbered mountains,” writes one reporter, “we
had no despondency of Israel ever failing for material to build up,
beautify, and adorn pleasant habitations in that part of Zion.” A
theatrical criticism is not wanting, and the church actors come in for
“praise all round.” In another part of the paper are telegraphic reports
from the captains of the seven immigrant trains not yet come in, giving
their position, and details of the number of days’ march for which they
have provisions still in hand. One reports “thirty-eight head of cattle
stolen;” another, “a good deal of mountain fever;” but, on the whole,
the telegrams look well. The editor, speaking of the two English
visitors now in the city, says: “We greet them to our mountain
habitation, and bid them welcome to our orchard; and that‘s considerable
for an editor, especially if he has plural responsibilities to look
after.” Bishop Harrington reports from American Fork that everybody is
thriving there, and “doing as the Mormon creed directs--minding their
own business.” “That‘s good, bishop,” says the editor. The “Passenger
List of the 2d Ox-train, Captain J. D. Holladay,” is given at length;
about half the immigrants come with wife and family, very many with five
or six children. From Liverpool, the chief office for Europe, comes a
gazette of “Releases and Appointments,” signed “Brigham Young, Jun.,
President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the
British Isles and Adjacent Countries,” accompanied by a dispatch, in
which the “President for England” gives details of his visits to the
Saints in Norway, and of his conversations with the United States
minister at St. Petersburg.
The _Telegraph_, like its editor, is practical, and does not deal in
extract. All the sheet, with the exception of a few columns, is taken up
with business advertisements; but these are not the least amusing part
of the paper. A gigantic figure of a man in high boots and felt hat,
standing on a ladder and pasting up Messrs. Eldredge and Clawson‘s
dry-goods advertisement, occupies nearly half the back page. Mr. Birch
informs “parties hauling wheat from San Pete County” that his mill at
Fort Birch “is now running, and is protected by a stone-wall
fortification, and is situate at the mouth of Salt Canyon, just above
Nephi City, Juab County, on the direct road to Pahranagat.” A view of
the fort, with posterns, parapets, embrasures, and a giant flag, heads
the advertisement. The cuts are not always so cheerful: one far-western
paper fills three-quarters of its front page with an engraving of a
coffin. The editorial columns contain calls to the “brethren with teams”
to aid the immigrants, an account of a “rather mixed case” of “double
divorce” (Gentile), and of a prosecution of a man “for violation of the
seventh commandment.” A Mormon police report is headed, “One drunk at
the calaboose.” Defending himself against charges of “directing bishops”
and “steadying the ark,” the editor calls on the bishops to shorten
their sermons: “we may get a crack for this, but we can‘t help it; we
like variety, life, and short meetings.” In a paragraph about his
visitors, our friend, the editor of the _Telegraph_, said, a day or two
after our arrival in the city: “If a stranger can escape the strychnine
clique for three days after arrival, he is forever afterward safe.
Generally the first twenty-four hours are sufficient to prostrate even
the very robust.” In a few words of regret at a change in the Denver
newspaper staff, our editor says: “However, a couple of sentences
indicate that George has no intention of abandoning the tripod. That‘s
right: keep at it, my boy; misery likes company.”
The day after we reached Denver, the _Gazette_, commenting on this same
“George,” said: “Captain West has left the _Rocky Mountains News_
office. We are not surprised, as we could never see how any respectable,
decent gentleman like George could get along with Governor Evans‘s paid
hireling and whelp who edits that delectable sheet.” Of the two papers
which exist in every town in the Union, each is always at work
attempting to “use up” the other. I have seen the Democratic print of
Chicago call its Republican opponent “a radical, disunion, disreputable,
bankrupt, emasculated evening newspaper concern of this city”--a string
of terms by the side of which even Western utterances pale.
A paragraph headed “The Millennium” tells us that the editors of the
_Telegraph_ and _Deseret News_ were seen yesterday afternoon walking
together toward the Twentieth Ward. Another paragraph records the ill
success of an expedition against Indians who had been “raiding” down in
“Dixie,” or South Utah. A general order, signed “Lieut.-General Daniel
H. Wells,” and dated “headquarters Nauvoo Legion,” directs the assembly,
for a three days’ “big drill,” of the forces of the various military
districts of the Territory. The name of “Territorial Militia,” under
which alone the United States can permit the existence of the legion, is
carefully omitted. This is not the only warlike advertisement in the
paper: fourteen cases of Ballard rifles are offered in exchange for
cattle; and other firms offer tents and side-arms to their friends.
Amusements are not forgotten: a cricket match between two Mormon
settlements in Cache County is recorded: “Wellsville whipping Brigham
City with six wickets to go down;” and is followed by an article in
which the First President may have had a hand, pointing out that the
Salt Lake Theater is going to be the greatest of theaters, and that the
favor of its audience is a passport beyond Wallack‘s, and equal to Drury
Lane or the Haymarket. In sharp contrast to these signs of present
prosperity, the First Presidency announce the annual gathering of the
surviving members of Zion‘s camp, the association of the first immigrant
band.
There is about the Mormon papers much that tells of long settlement and
prosperity. When I showed Stenhouse the _Denver Gazette_ of our second
day in that town, he said: “Well, _Telegraph‘s_ better than that!” The
Denver sheet is a literary curiosity of the first order. Printed on
chocolate-colored paper, in ink of a not much darker hue, it is in parts
illegible--to the reader‘s regret, for what we were able to make out was
good enough to make us wish for more.
The difference between the Mormon and Gentile papers is strongly marked
in the advertisements. The _Denver Gazette_ is filled with puffs of
quacks and whisky shops. In the column headed “Business Cards,” Dr.
Ermerins announces that he may be consulted by his patients in the
“French, German, and English” tongues. Lower down we have the card of
“Dr. Treat, Eclectic Physician and Surgeon,” which is preceded by an
advertisement of “sulkies made to order,” and followed by a leaded
heading, “Know thy Destiny; Madame Thornton, the English Astrologist and
Psychometrician, has located herself at Hudson, New York; by the aid of
an instrument of intense power, known as the Psychomotrope, she
guarantees to produce a lifelike picture of the future husband or wife
of the applicant.” There is a strange turning toward the supernatural
among this people. Astrology is openly professed as a science throughout
the United States; the success of spiritualism is amazing. The most
sensible men are not exempt from the weakness: the dupes of the
astrologers are not the uneducated Irish; they are the strong-minded,
half-educated Western men, shrewd and keen in trade, brave in war,
material and cold in faith, it would be supposed, but credulous to
folly, as we know, when personal revelation, the supernaturalism of the
present day, is set before them in the crudest and least attractive
forms. A little lower, “Charley Eyser” and “Gus Fogus” advertise their
bars. The latter announces “Lager Beer at only 10 cents,” in a “cool
retreat,” “fitted up with green-growing trees.” A returned warrior heads
his announcement, in huge capitals, “Back Home Again, An Old Hand at the
Bellows, the Soldier Blacksmith:--S. M. Logan.” In a country where
weights and measures are rather a matter of practice than of law, Mr.
O‘Connell does well to add to “Lager beer 15 cents,” “Glasses hold Two
Bushels.” John Morris, of the “Little Giant” or “Theater Saloon,” asks
us to “call and see him;” while his rivals of the “Progressive Saloon”
offer the “finest liquors that the East can command.” Morris Sigi, whose
“lager is pronounced A No. 1 by all who have used it,” bids us “give him
a fair trial, and satisfy ourselves as to the false reports in
circulation.” Daniel Marsh, dealer in “breech-loading guns and
revolvers,” adds, “and anything that may be wanted, from a cradle to a
coffin, both inclusive, made to order. An Indian Lodge on view, for
sale.” This is the man at whose shop scalps hang for sale; but he fails
to name it in his advertisement; the Utes brought them in too late for
insertion, perhaps.
Advertisements of freight-trains now starting to the East, of
mail-coaches to Buckskin Joe--advertisements slanting, topsy-turvy, and
sideways turned--complete the outer sheet; but some of them, through bad
ink, printer‘s errors, strange English, and wilder Latin, are wholly
unintelligible. It is hard to make much of this, for instance: “Mr.
Æsculapius, no offense, I hope, as this is written extempore and ipso
facto. But, perhaps, I ought not to disregard ex unci disce omnes.”
In an editorial on the English visitors then in Denver, the chance of
putting into their mouths a puff of the Territory of Colorado was not
lost. We were made to “appreciate the native energy and wealth of
industry necessary in building up such a Star of Empire as Colorado.”
The next paragraph is communicated from Conejos, in the south of the
Territory, and says: “The election has now passed off, and I am
confident that we can beat any ward in Denver, and give them two in the
game, for rascality in voting.” Another leader calls on the people of
Denver to remember that there are two men in the calaboose for mule
stealing, and that the last man locked up for the offense was allowed to
escape: some cottonwood-trees still exist, it believes. In former times,
there was for the lynching here hinted at a reason which no longer
exists: a man shut up in jail built of adobe, or sun-dried brick, could
scratch his way through the crumbling wall in two days, so the citizens
generally hanged him in _one_. Now that the jails are in brick and
stone, the job might safely be left to the sheriff; but the people of
Denver seem to trust themselves better even than they do their delegate,
Bob Wilson.
A year or two ago, the jails were so crazy that Coloradan criminals,
when given their choice whether they would be hanged in a week, or “as
soon after breakfast to-morrow as shall be convenient to the sheriff and
agreeable, Mr. Prisoner, to you,” as the Texan formula runs, used to
elect for the quick delivery, on the ground that otherwise they would
catch their deaths of cold--at least so the Denver story runs. They
have, however, a method of getting the jails inspected here which might
be found useful at home; it consists in the simple plan of giving the
governor of a jail an opportunity of seeing the practical working of the
system by locking him up inside for awhile.
These far-western papers are written or compiled under difficulties
almost overwhelming. Mr. Frederick J. Stanton, at Denver, told me that
often he had been forced to “set up” and print as well as “edit” the
paper which he owns. Type is not always to be found. In its early days,
the _Alta Californian_ once appeared with a paragraph which ran: “I have
no VV in my type, as there is none in the Spanish alphabet. I have sent
to the Sandvvich Islands for this letter; in the mean time vve must use
tvvo V‘s.”
Till I had seen the editors’ rooms in Denver, Austin, and Salt Lake
City, I had no conception of the point to which discomfort could be
carried. For all these hardships, payment is small and slow. It consists
often of little but the satisfaction which it is to the editor‘s vanity
to be “liquored” by the best man of the place, treated to an occasional
chat with the governor of the Territory, to a chair in the overland mail
office whenever he walks in, to the hand of the hotel proprietor
whenever he comes near the bar, and to a pistol-shot once or twice in a
month.
It must not be supposed that the _Vedette_ does the Mormons no harm;
the perpetual reiteration in the Eastern and English papers of three
sets of stories alone would suffice to break down a flourishing power.
The three lines that are invariably taken as foundations for their
stories are these--that the Mormon women are wretched, and would fain
get away, but are checked by the Danites; that the Mormons are ready to
fight with the Federal troops with the hope of success; that robbery of
the people by the apostles and elders is at the bottom of Mormonism--or,
as the _Vedette_ puts it, “on tithing and loaning hang all the law and
the profits.”
If the mere fact of the existence of the _Vedette_ effectually refutes
the stories of the acts of the Danites in these modern days, and
therefore disposes of the first set of stories, the third is equally
answered by a glance at its pages. Columns of paragraphs, sheets of
advertisements, testify to the foundation by industry, in the most
frightful desert on earth, of an agricultural community which California
herself cannot match. The Mormons may well call their country
“Deseret”--“land of the bee.” The process of fertilization goes on day
by day. Six or seven years ago, Southern Utah was a desert bare as Salt
Bush Plains. Irrigation from the fresh-water lake was carried out under
episcopal direction, and the result is the growth of fifty kinds of
grapes alone. Cotton-mills and vineyards are springing up on every side,
and “Dixie” begins to look down on its parent, the Salt Lake Valley.
Irrigation from the mountain rills has done this miracle, _we_ say,
though the Saints undoubtedly believe that God‘s hand is in it, helping
miraculously “His peculiar people.”
In face of Mormon prosperity, it is worthy of notice that Utah was
settled on the Wakefieldian system, though Brigham knows nothing of
Wakefield. Town population and country population grew up side by side
in every valley, and the plow was not allowed to gain on the machine-saw
and the shuttle.
It is not only in water and verdure that Utah is naturally poor. On the
mining-map of the States, the countries that lie around Utah--Nevada,
Arizona, Colorado, Montana--are one blaze of yellow, and blue, and red,
colored from end to end with the tints that are used to denote the
existence of precious metals. Utah is blank at present--blank, the
Mormons say, by nature; Gentiles say, merely through the absence of
survey; and they do their best to circumvent mother nature. Every fall
the “strychnine” party raise the cry of gold discoveries in Utah, in the
hope of bringing a rush of miners down to Salt Lake City, too late for
them to get away again before the snows begin. The presence of some
thousands of broad-brimmed rowdies in Salt Lake City, for a winter,
would be the death of Mormonism, they believe. Within the last few days,
I am told that prospecting parties have found “pay dirt” in City Canyon,
which, however, they had first themselves carefully “salted” with gold
dust. There is coal at the settlement at which we breakfasted on our way
from Weber River to Salt Lake; and Stenhouse tells us that the only
difference between the Utah coal and that of Wales is, that the latter
will burn, and the former _won‘t_!
Poor as Utah is by nature, clear though it be that whatever value the
soil now possesses, represents only the loving labor bestowed upon it by
the Saints, it is doubtful whether they are to continue to possess it,
even though the remaining string of _Vedette_-born stories assert that
Brigham “threatens hell” to the Gentiles who would expel him.
The constant, teasing, wasp-like pertinacity of the _Vedette_ has done
some harm to liberty of thought throughout the world.