REPRESENTATIVE AND UNREPRESENTATIVE MORMONISM.
Mormonism and Mormonism--Salt Lake City not representative--The
miracles of water--How settlements grow--The town of Logan:
one of the Wonders of the West--The beauty of the valley--The
rural simplicity of life--Absence of liquor and crime--A police
force of one man--Temple mysteries--Illustrations of Mormon
degradation--Their settlement of the "local option" question.
SALT Lake City is not the whole of "Mormonism." In the Eastern States
there is a popular impression that it is. But as a matter of fact, it
hardly represents Mormonism at all. The Gentile is too much there, and
Main Street has too many saloons. The city is divided into two parties,
bitterly antagonistic. Newspapers exchange daily abuse, and sectarians
thump upon their pulpit cushions at each other every Sunday. Visitors
on their travels, sight-seeing, move about the streets in two-horse
hacks, staring at the houses that they pass as if some monsters lived
in them. A military camp stands sentry over the town, and soldiers
slouch about the doors of the bars.
All this, and a great deal more that is to be seen in Salt Lake City,
is foreign to the true character of a Mormon settlement. Logan, for
instance (which I describe later on), is characteristic of Mormonism,
and nowhere so characteristic as in those very features in which it
differs from Salt Lake City. The Gentile does not take very kindly to
Logan, for there are no saloons to make the place a "live town," and
no public animosities to give it what they call "spirit;" everybody
knows his neighbour, and the sight-seeing fiend is unknown. The one and
only newspaper hums on its way like some self-satisfied bumble bee; the
opposition preacher, with a congregation of eight women and five men,
does not think it worth while, on behalf of such a shabby constituency,
to appeal to Heaven every week for vengeance on the 200,000 who don't
agree with him and his baker's dozen. There is no pomp and circumstance
of war to remind the Saints of Federal surveillance, no brass cannon
on the bench pointing at the town (as in Salt Lake City), no ragged
uniforms at street corners. Everything is Mormon. The biggest shop is
the Co-operative Store; the biggest place of worship the Tabernacle;
the biggest man the President of the Stake. Everybody that meets,
"Brothers" or "Sisters" each other in the streets, and after nightfall
the only man abroad is the policeman, who as a rule retires early
himself; and no one takes precautions against thieves at night. It is
a very curious study, this well-fed, neighbourly, primitive life among
orchards and corn-fields, this bees-in-a-clover-field life, with every
bee bumbling along in its own busy way, but all taking their honey back
to the same hive. It is not a lofty life, nor "ideal" to my mind, but
it is emphatically ideal, if that word means anything at all, and its
outcome, where exotic influences are not at work, is contentment and
immunity from crime, and an Old-World simplicity.
But Logan is not by any means a solitary illustration. For the Mormon
settlements follow the line of the valleys that run north and south,
and every one of them, where water is abundant, is a Logan in process
of development.
For water is the philosopher's stone; the fairy All-Good; the First
Cause; the everything that men here strive after as the source of
all that is desirable. It is silver and gold, pearls and rubies, and
virtuous women--which are "above rubies"--everything in fact that
is precious. It spirits up Arabian-Nights enchantments, and gives
industry a talisman to work with. Without it, the sage-brush laughs
at man, and the horn of the jack-rabbit is exalted against him. With
it, corn expels the weed, and the long-eared rodent is ploughed out
of his possession. Without it, greasewood and gophers divide the
wilderness between them. With it, homesteads spring up and gather the
orchards around them. Without it, the silence of the level desert is
broken only by the coyote and the lark. With it, comes the laughter
of running brooks, the hum of busy markets, and the cheery voices of
the mill-wheels by the stream. Without it, the world seems a dreary
failure. With it, it brightens into infinite possibilities. No wonder
then that men prize it, exhaust ingenuity in obtaining it, quarrel
about it. I wonder they do not worship it. Men have worshipped trees,
and wind, and the sun, for far less cause.
Nothing indeed is so striking in all these Mormon settlements as the
supreme importance of water. It determines locations, regulates their
proportions, and controls their prosperity. Here are thousands of acres
barren--though I hate using such a word for a country of such beautiful
wild flowers--because there is no water. There is a small nook bursting
with farmsteads, and trees, because there is water. Men buy and sell
water-claims as if they were mining stock "with millions in sight," and
appraise each other's estates not by the stock that grazes on them, or
the harvests gathered from them, but by the water-rights that go with
them. Thus, a man in Arizona buys a forty-acre lot with a spring on it,
and he speaks of it as 70,000 acres of "wheat." Another has acquired
the right of the head-waters of a little mountain stream; he is spoken
of as owning "the finest ranch in the valley." Yet the one has not put
a plough into the ground, the other has not a single head of cattle!
But each possessed the "open sesame" to untold riches, and in a country
given over to this new form of hydromancy was already accounted wealthy.
Every stream in Utah might be a Pactolus, every pool a Bethesda. To
compass, then, this miracle-working thing, the first energies of every
settlement are directed in the union. The Church comes forward if
necessary to help, and every one contributes his labour. At first the
stream where it leaves the canyon, and debouches upon the levels of
the valley, is run off into canals to north and south and west (for
all the streams run from the eastern range), and from these, like the
legs of a centipede, minor channels run to each farmstead, and thence
again are drawn off in numberless small aqueducts to flood the fields.
The final process is simple enough, for each of the furrows by which
the water is let in upon the field is in turn dammed up at the further
end, and each surrounding patch is thus in turn submerged. But the
settlement expands, and more ground is needed. So another canal taps
the stream above the canyon mouth, the main channels again strike off,
irrigating the section above the levels already in cultivation, and
overlapping the original area at either end. And every time increasing
population demands more room, the stream is taken off higher and higher
up the canyon. The cost is often prodigious, but necessity cannot stop
to haggle over arithmetic, and the Mormon settlements therefore have
developed a system of irrigation which is certainly among the wonders
of the West.
"Logan is the chief Mormon settlement in the Cache Valley, and is
situated about eighty miles to the north of Salt Lake City. Population
rather over 4000." Such is the ordinary formula of the guide book.
But if I had to describe it in few words I should say this: "Logan is
without any parallel, even among the wonders of Western America, for
rapidity of growth, combined with solid prosperity and tranquillity.
Population rather over 4000, every man owning his own farm. Police
force, two men--partially occupied in agriculture on their own account.
N.B.--No police on Sundays, or on meeting evenings, as the force are
otherwise engaged."
And writing sincerely I must say that I have seen few things in America
that have so profoundly impressed me as this Mormon settlement of
Logan. It is not merely that the industry of men and women, penniless
emigrants a few years ago, has made the valley surpassing in its
beauty. That it has filled the great levels that stretch from mountain
to mountain with delightful farmsteads, groves of orchard-trees, and
the perpetual charm of crops. That it has brought down the river from
its idleness in the canyons to busy itself in channels and countless
waterways with the irrigation and culture of field and garden; to lend
its strength to the mills which saw up the pines that grow on its
native mountains; to grind the corn for the 15,000 souls that live in
the valley, and to help in a hundred ways to make men and women and
children happy and comfortable, to beautify their homes, and reward
their industry. All this is on the surface, and can be seen at once by
any one.
But there is much more than mere fertility and beauty in Logan and
its surroundings, for it is a town without crime, a town without
drunkenness! With this knowledge one looks again over the wonderful
place, and what a new significance every feature of the landscape
now possesses! The clear streams, perpetually industrious in their
loving care of lowland and meadow and orchard, and so cheery, too,
in their incessant work, are a type of the men and women themselves;
the placid cornfields lying in bright levels about the houses are not
more tranquil than the lives of the people; the tree-crowded orchards
and stack-filled yards are eloquent of universal plenty; the cattle
loitering to the pasture contented, the foals all running about in
the roads, while the waggons which their mothers are drawing stand
at the shop door or field gate, strike the new-comer as delightfully
significant of a simple country life, of mutual confidence, and
universal security.
And yet I had not come there in the humour to be pleased, for I was not
well. But the spirit of the place was too strong for me, and the whole
day ran on by itself in a veritable idyll.
A hen conveying her new pride of chickens across the road, with a
shepherd dog loftily approving the expedition in attendance; a foal
looking into a house over a doorstep, with the family cat, outraged at
the intrusion, bristling on the stoop; two children planting sprigs of
peach blossoms in one of the roadside streams; a baby peeping through a
garden wicket at a turkey-cock which was hectoring it on the sidewalk
for the benefit of one solitary supercilious sparrow--such were the
little vignettes of pretty nonsense that brightened my first walk in
Logan. I was alone, so I walked where I pleased; took notice of the
wild birds that make themselves as free in the streets as if they were
away up in the canyons; of the wild flowers that still hold their own
in the corners of lots, and by the roadway; watched the men and women
at their work in garden and orchard, the boys driving the waggons
to the mill and the field, the girls busy with little duties of the
household, and "the little ones," just as industrious as all the rest,
playing at irrigation with their mimic canals, three inches wide, old
fruit-cans for buckets, and posies stuck into the mud for orchards. I
stopped to talk to a man here and a woman there; helped to fetch down
a kitten out of an apple-tree, and, at the request of a boy, some ten
years old, I should say, opened a gate to let the team he was driving,
or rather being walked along with, go into the lot.
It was a beautiful day, and all the trees were either in full bloom or
bright young leaf; and the conviction gradually grew upon me that I had
never, out of England, seen a place so simple, so neighbourly, so quiet.
Later on I was driven through the town to the Temple. The wide roads
are all avenued with trees, and behind trees, each in its own garden,
or orchard, or lot of farm-land, stands a ceaseless succession of
cottage homes. Here and there a "villa," but the great majority
"cottages." Not the dog-kennels in which the Irish peasantry are
content to grovel through life so long as they need not work and
can have their whisky. Not the hovels which in some parts of rural
England house the farm labourer and his unkempt urchins. But cleanly,
comfortable homes, some of adobe, some of wood, with porticos and
verandahs and other ornaments, six or eight or even ten rooms, with
barns behind for the cow and the horse and the poultry, bird-cages
at the doors, clean white curtains at the windows, and neatly bedded
flowers in the garden-plots. Hundred after hundred, each in its own lot
of amply watered ground, we passed the homes of these Mormon farmers,
and it was a wonderful thing to me--so fresh from the old country, with
its elegance and its squalor side by side; so lately from the "live"
cities of Colorado, with their murrain of "busted" millionaires and
hollow shells of speculative prosperity--this great township of an
equal prosperity and a universal comfort. Every man I met in the street
or saw in the fields owned the house which he lived in, and the ground
that his railings bounded. Moreover they were his by right of purchase,
the earnings of the work of his own two hands. No wonder, then, they
demean themselves like men.
I was driving with the President of the "stake"--such is the name
of the Church for the sub-divisions of its Territory--and the chief
official, therefore, of Logan, when, in a narrow part of the road we
met a down-trodden Mormon serf driving a loaded waggon in the opposite
direction. The President pulled a little to one side, motioning the man
to drive past. But the roadway thus left for him was rather rough and
this degraded slave of the Church, knowing the rule of the road (that a
loaded waggon has the right of way against all other vehicles), calmly
pointed with his whip-handle to the side of the road, and said to his
President, "You drive there." And the President did so, whereat the
down-trodden one proceeded on his way in the best of the road.
Now this may be accepted as an instance of that abject servitude which,
according to anti-Mormons, characterizes the followers of Mormonism. As
another illustration of the same awe-stricken subjection may be here
noted the fact, that whenever the President slackened pace, passers-by,
men and women, would come over to us, and shaking hands with the
President, exchange small items of domestic, neighbourly chat--the
health of the family, convalescence of a cow, and, speaking generally,
discuss Tommy's measles. Now, women would hardly waste a despot's time
with intelligence of an infant's third tooth, or a man expatiate on the
miraculous recovery of a calf from a surfeit of damp lucerne.
I chanced also one day to be with an authority when a man called in
to apologize for not having repaid his emigration money; and to me
the incident was specially interesting on this account, that very
few writers on the Mormons have escaped charging the Church with
acting dishonestly and usuriously towards its emigrants. I have read
repeatedly that the emigrants, being once in debt, are never able to
get out of debt; that the Church prefers they should not; that the
indebtedness is held in terrorem over them. But the man before me was
in exactly the same position as every other man in Logan. He had been
brought out from England at the expense of the Perpetual Emigration
Fund (which is maintained partly by the "tithings," chiefly by
voluntary donations), and though by his labour he had been able to pay
for a lot of ground and to build himself a house, to plant fruit-trees,
buy a cow, and bring his lot under cultivation, he had not been able to
pay off any of the loan of the Church. It stood, therefore, against him
at the original sum. But his delinquency distressed him, and "having
things comfortable about him," as he said, and some time to spare, he
came of his own accord to his "Bishop," to ask if he could not work of
part of his debt. He could not see his way, he said to any ready money,
but he was anxious to repay the loan, and he came, therefore, to offer
all he had--his labour. Now, I cannot believe that this man was abused.
I am sure he did not think he was abused himself. Here he was in Utah,
comfortably settled for life, and at no original expense to himself. No
one had bothered him to pay up; no one had tacked on usurious interest.
So he came, like an honest man, to make arrangements for satisfying a
considerate creditor, but all he got in answer was, that "there was
time enough to pay" and an exchange of opinions about a plough or a
harrow or something. And he went off as crushed down with debt as ever.
And he very nearly added to his debt on the way, by narrowly escaping
treading on a presumptuous chicken which was reconnoitring the interior
of the house from the door-mat.
To return to my drive. After seeing the town we drove up to the Temple.
The Mormon "temples" must not be mistaken for their "tabernacles."
The latter are the regular places of worship, open to the public. The
former are buildings strictly dedicated to the rites of the Endowments,
the meetings of the initiated brethren, and the ceremonial generally
of the sacred Masonry of Mormonism. No one who has not taken his
degrees in these mysteries has access to the temples, which are, or
will be, very stately piles, constructed on architectural principles
said by the Church to have been revealed to Joseph Smith piecemeal, as
the progress of the first Temple (at Kirkland) necessitated, and said
by the profane to be altogether contrary to all previously received
principles. However this may be, the style is, from the outside, not
so prepossessing as the cost of the buildings and the time spent upon
them would have led one to expect. The walls are of such prodigious
thickness, and the windows so narrow and comparatively small, that
the buildings seem to be constructed for defence rather than for
worship. But once within, the architecture proves itself admirable.
The windows gave abundant light and the loftiness of the rooms imparts
an airiness that is as surprising as pleasing, while the arrangement
of staircases--leading, as I suppose, from the rooms of one degree
in the "Masonry" to the next higher--and of the different rooms, all
of considerable size, and some of very noble proportions indeed, is
singularly good.
I ought to say that this Temple at Logan is the only one I have
entered, and it is only because it is not completed. This year the
building will be finished--so it is hoped--and the ceremony of
dedication will then attract an enormous crowd of Mormons. It is
something over 90 feet in height (not including the towers, which
are still wanting) and measures 160 feet by 70. On the ground floor,
judging from what I know of the secret ritual of the Church, are
the reception-rooms of the candidates for the "endowments," various
official rooms, and the font for baptism. The great laver, 10 feet
in diameter, will rest on the backs of twelve oxen cast in iron
(and modelled from a Devon ox bred by Brigham Young) and will be
descended to by flights of steps, the oxen themselves standing in
water half-knee-deep. On the next floor are the apartments in which
the allegorical panorama of the "Creation" and the "Fall of Man" will
be represented. Here, too, will be the "Veil," the final degree in
what might be called, in Masonic phrase, "craft" or "blue" Masonry,
and, except for higher honorary grades, the ultimate objective point
of Mormon initiation. Above these rooms is a vast hall, occupying the
whole floor, in which general assemblies of the initiated brethren and
"chapters" will be held. The whole forms a very imposing pile of great
solidity and some grandeur, built of a gloomy, slate-coloured stone (to
be eventually coloured a lighter tint), and standing on a magnificent
site, being raised above the town upon an upper "bench" of the slope,
and showing out superbly against the monstrous mountain about a mile
behind it. The mountain, of course, dwarfs the Temple by its proximity,
but the position of the building was undoubtedly "an architectural
inspiration," and gives the great pile all the dominant eminence which
Mormons claim for their Church.
From the platform of the future tower the view is one of the finest I
have ever seen. The valley, reaching for twenty miles in one direction,
and thirty in the other, with an average width of about ten miles, lies
beneath you, level in the centre, and gradually sloping on every margin
up to the mountains that bound it in. Immediately underneath you, Logan
spreads out its breadth of farm-land and orchard and meadow, with the
river--or rather two rivers, for the Logan forks just after leaving the
canyon--and the canal, itself a pleasant stream, carrying verdure and
fertility into every nook and corner. To right and left and in front,
delightful villages--Hirum, Mendon, Wellsville, Paradise, and the rest,
all of them miniature Logans--break the broad reaches of crop-land,
with their groves of fruit-trees, and avenues of willows and carob,
box-elder, poplar, and maple, while each of them seems to be stretching
out an arm to the other, and all of them trying to join hands with
Logan. For lines of homesteads and groups of trees have straggled away
from each pretty village, and, dotted across the intervening meadows
of lucerne and fields of corn, form links between them all. Behind
them rise the mountains, still capped and streaked with snow, but all
bright with grass upon their slopes. It was a delightful scene, and
required but little imagination to see the 15,000 people of the valley
grown into 150,000, and the whole of this splendid tract of land one
continuous Logan. And nothing can stop that day but an earthquake or
a chronic pestilence. For Cache Valley depends for its prosperity
upon something surer than "wild-cat" speculations, or mines that have
bottoms to fall out. The cumulative force of agricultural prosperity is
illustrated here with remarkable significance, for the town, that for
many years seemed absolutely stationary, has begun both to consolidate
and to expand with a determination that will not be gainsaid.
The sudden success of a mining camp is volcanic in its ephemeral
rapidity. The gradual growth of an agricultural town is like the
solid accretion of a coral island. The mere lapse of time will make
it increase in wealth, and with wealth it will annually grow more
beautiful. Even as it is, I think this settlement of Mormon farmers
one of the noblest of the pioneering triumphs of the Far West; and in
the midst of these breathless, feverish States where every one seems
to be chasing some will-o'-the-wisp with a firefly light of gold, or
of silver--where terrible crime is a familiar feature, where known
murderers walk in the streets, and men carry deadly weapons, where
every other man complains of the fortune he only missed making by an
accident, or laments the fortune he made in three days, and lost in as
many hours--it is surpassingly strange to step out suddenly upon this
tranquil valley, and find oneself among its law-abiding men. It is
exactly like stepping out of a mine shaft into the fresh pure air of
daylight.
The Logan police force is a good-tempered-looking young man. There is
another to help him, but if they had not something else to do they
would either have to keep on arresting each other, in order to pass the
time, or else combine to hunt gophers and chipmunks. As it is, they
unite other functions of private advantage with their constabulary
performances, and thus justify their existence. As one explanation of
the absence of crime, there is not a single licence for liquor in the
town.
Once upon a time there were three saloons in Logan. But one night a
Gentile, passing through the town, shot the young Mormon who kept one
of them, whereat the townsfolk lynched the murderer, and suppressed
all the saloons. After a while licences were again issued, but a
six months' experiment showed that the five arrests of the previous
half-year had increased under the saloon system to fifty-six, so
the town suppressed the licences again, and to-day you cannot buy
any liquor in Logan. I am told, however, that an apostate, who is
in business in the town, carries on a more or less clandestine
distribution of strong drinks; but any accident resulting therefrom,
another murder, for instance, would probably put an end to his trade
for ever, for it is not only the Mormon leaders, but the Mormon people
that refuse to have drunkards among them.
These facts about Logan are a sufficient refutation of the calumny so
often repeated by apostates and Gentiles, that the Mormons are not the
sober people they profess to be. The rules now in force in Logan were
once in force in Salt Lake City, but thanks to reforming Gentiles there
are now plenty of saloons and drunkards in the latter. At one time
there were none, but finding the sale of drink inevitable, the Church
tried to regulate it by establishing its own shops, and forbidding it
to be sold elsewhere. But the Federal judge refused the application.
So the city raised the saloon licence to 3600 dollars per annum! Yet,
in spite of this enormous tax, two or three bars managed to thrive,
and eventually numbers of other men, encouraged by the conduct of
the courts, opened drinking-saloons, refused to pay the licence, and
defied--and still defy--all efforts of the city to bring them under
control. In Logan, however, these are still the days of no drink, and
the days therefore of very little crime.