THROUGH THE MORMON SETTLEMENTS.
Salt Lake City to Nephi--General similarity of the
settlements--From Salt Lake Valley into Utah Valley--A
lake of legends--Provo--Into the Juab valley--Indian
reminiscences--Commercial integrity of the saints--At Nephi--Good
work done by the saints--Type of face in rural Utah--Mormon
"doctrine" and Mormon "meetings."
THE general resemblance between the populations of the various Mormon
settlements is not more striking than the general resemblance between
the settlements themselves.
Two nearly parallel ranges of the Rocky Mountains, forming together
part of the Wasatch range, run north and south through the length
of Utah, and enclose between them a long strip of more or less
desolate-looking land. Spurs run out from these opposing ranges, and
meeting, cut off this strip into "valleys" of various lengths, so that,
travelling from north to south, I crossed in succession, in the line
of four hundred miles or so, the Cache, Salt Lake, Utah, Juab, San
Pete, and Sevier valleys (the last enclosing Marysvale, Circle Valley
and Panguitch Valley), and having there turned the end of the Wasatch
range, travelled into Long Valley, which runs nearly east and west
across the Territory.
In the Cache and the Sevier valleys there are some noble expanses of
natural meadow, but in all the rest the soil, where not cultivated,
is densely overgrown with sage-brush, greasewood and rabbit-brush,
and in no case except the Cache Valley (by far the finest section of
the Territory) and Long Valley, is the water-supply sufficient to
irrigate the whole area enclosed. The proportions under cultivation
vary therefore according to the amount of the water, and the size
of the settlements is of course in an almost regular ratio with the
acreage under the plough. But all are exactly on the same pattern. Wide
streets--varying from 80 to 160 feet in width--avenued on either side
with cotton-wood, box-elder, poplar, and locust-trees, and usually with
a runnel of water alongside each side-walk, intersect each other at
right angles, the blocks thus formed measuring from four to ten acres.
These blocks hold, it may be, as many as six houses, but, as a rule,
three, two, or only one; while the proportion of fruit and shade-trees
to dwelling-houses ranges from a hundred to one to twenty to one. As
the lots are not occupied in any regular succession, there are frequent
gaps caused by empty blocks, while the streets towards the outer limits
of the towns are still half overgrown with the original sage-brush.
All the settlements therefore, resemble each other, except in size,
very closely, and may be briefly described as groves of trees and fruit
orchards with houses scattered about among them.
The settlements of the Church stretch in a line north and south
throughout the whole length of the Territory, and on reaching the Rio
Virgin, in the extreme south, follow the course of that river right
across Utah to the eastern frontier. The soil throughout the line north
and south appears to be of a nearly uniform character, as the same
wild plants are to be found growing on it everywhere, and the sudden
alternations of fertility and wilderness are due almost entirely to the
abundance or absence of water.
Leaving Salt Lake City to go south, we pass through suburbs of orchard
and garden, with nearly the whole town in panoramic review before us,
and find ourselves in half an hour upon levels beyond the reach of
the city channels, and where the sage-brush therefore still thrives
in undisturbed glory. Bitterns rise from the rushes, and flights of
birds wheel above the patches of scrub. And so to the Morgan smelting
camp, and then the Francklyn works, where the ore of the Horn Silver
Mine is worked, and then the Germania, one of the oldest smelting
establishments in the Territory, where innocent ore of all kinds is
taken in and mashed up into various "bullions"--irritamenta malorum.
Two small stations, each of them six peach-trees and a shed, slip by,
and then Sandy, a small mining camp of poor repute, shuffles past,
and next Draper, an agricultural settlement that seems to have grown
fruit-trees to its own suffocation.
The mountains have been meanwhile drawing gradually closer together,
and here they join. Salt Lake Valley ends, and Utah Valley begins, and
crossing a "divide" we find the levels of the Utah Lake before us,
and the straggling suburbs of Lehi about us. These scattered cottages
gradually thicken into a village towards the lake, and form a pleasant
settlement of the orthodox Mormon type. The receipt for making one of
these ought to be something as follows: Take half as much ground as
you can irrigate, and plant it thickly with fruit-trees. Then cut it
up into blocks by cutting roads through it at right angles; sprinkle
cottages among the blocks, and plant shade-trees along both sides of
the roads. Then take the other half of your ground and spread it out in
fields around your settlement, sowing to taste.
The actual process is, of course, the above reversed. A log hut and an
apple-tree start together in a field of corn, and the rest grows round
them. But my receipt looks the easier of the two.
Beyond Lehi, and all round it, cultivation spreads almost
continuously--alternating delightfully with orchards and groves and
meadows--to American Fork, a charming settlement, smothered, as usual,
in fruit and shade-trees. The people here are very well-to-do, and
they look it; and their fields and herds of cattle have overflowed and
joined those of Pleasant Grove--another large and prosperous Mormon
settlement that lies further back, and right under the hills. It would
be very difficult to imagine sweeter sites for such rural hamlets than
these rich levels of incomparable soil stretching from the mountains to
the lake, and watered by the canyon streams.
"Great Salt Lake" is, of course, the Utah Lake of the outside world.
But "Utah Lake" proper, is the large sheet of fresh water which lies
some thirty miles south of Salt Lake City, and gives its name to the
valley which it helps to fertilize. All around it, except on the
western shore, the Mormons have planted their villages, so that from
Lehi you can look out on to the valley, and see at the feet of the
encircling hills, and straggling down towards the lake, a semicircle
of settlements that, but for the sterility of the mountain slopes on
the west, might have formed a complete ring around it. But no springs
rise on the western slopes, and the settlements of the valleys always
lie, therefore, on the eastern side, unless some central stream gives
facilities for irrigation on the western also.
Utah Lake is a lake of legends. In the old Indian days it was held in
superstitious reverence as the abode of the wind spirits and the storm
spirits, and as being haunted by monsters of weird kind and great
size. Particular spots were too uncanny for the red men to pitch their
lodges there; and even game had asylum, as in a city of refuge, if it
chanced to run in the direction of the haunted shore. In later times,
too, the Utah Lake has borne an uncomfortable reputation as the domain
of strange water-apparitions, and several men have recorded visions
of aquatic monsters, for which science as yet has found no name,
but which, speaking roughly, appear to have been imitations of that
delightful possibility, the sea serpent. Science, I know, goes dead
against such gigantic worms, but this wonderful Western country has
astonishment in store for the scientific world. If half I am told about
the wondrous fossils of Arizona and thereabouts be true, it may even be
within American resources to produce the kraken himself. In the mean
time, as a contribution towards it, and a very tolerable instalment,
too, I would commend to notice the great snake of the Utah Lake. It has
frightened men--and, far better evidence than that, it has been seen by
children when playing on the shore. I say "better," because children
are not likely to invent a plausible horror in order to explain their
sudden rushing away from a given spot with terrified countenances and
a consistent narrative--a horror, too, which should coincide with the
snake superstitions of the Pi-Ute Indians. Have wise men from the East
ever heard of this fabled thing? Does the Smithsonian know of this
terror of the lake--this freshwater kraken--this new Mormon iniquity?
Visitors have made the American Fork canyon too well known to need
more than a reference here, but the Provo canyon, with its romantic
waterfalls and varied scenery, is a feature of the Utah Valley which
may some day be equally familiar to the sight-seeing world. The
botanist would find here a field full of surprises, as the vegetation
is of exceptional variety, and the flowers unusually profuse. Down
this canyon tumbles the Provo River; and as soon as it reaches the
mouth--thinking to find the valley an interval of placid idleness
before it attains the final Buddhistic bliss of absorption in the lake,
the Nirvana of extinguished individuality--it is seized upon, and
carried off to right and left by irrigation channels, and ruthlessly
distributed over the slopes. And the result is seen, approaching Provo,
in magnificent reaches of fertile land, acres of fruit-trees, and miles
of crops.
Provo is almost Logan over again, for though it has the advantage over
the northern settlement in population, it resembles it in appearance
very closely. There is the same abundance of foliage, the same width
of water-edged streets, the same variety of wooden and adobe houses,
the same absence of crime and drunkenness, the same appearance of solid
comfort. It has its mills and its woollen factory, its "co-op." and
its lumber-yards. There is the same profusion of orchard and garden,
the same all-pervading presence of cattle and teams. The daily life
is the same too, a perpetual industry, for no sooner is breakfast
over than the family scatters--the women to the dairy and household
work, the handloom and the kitchen; the men to the yard, the mill,
and the field. One boy hitches up a team and is off in one direction;
another gets astride a barebacked horse and is off in another; a third
disappears inside a barn, and a fourth engages in conflict with a drove
of calves. But whatever they are doing, they are all busy, from the old
man pottering with the water channels in the garden to the little girls
pairing off to school; and the visitor finds himself the only idle
person in the settlement.
From Provo--through its suburbs of foliage and glebeland--past
Springville, a sweet spot, lying back under the hills with a bright
quick stream flowing through it and houses mobbed by trees. Here are
flour-mills and one of the first woollen mills built in Utah. In the
days of its building the Indians harried the valley, and young men
tell how as children they used to lie awake at nights to listen to the
red men as they swept whooping and yelling through the quiet streets
of the little settlement; how the guns stood always ready against the
wall, and the windows were barricaded every night with thick pine
logs. What a difference now! Further on, but still looking on to the
lake, is Spanish Fork (nee Palmyra), where, digging a water channel
the other day, the spade turned up an old copper image of the Virgin
Mary, and some bones. This takes back the Mormon settlement of to-day
to the long-ago time when Spanish missionaries preached of the Pope to
the Piutes, and gave but little satisfaction to either man or beast,
for their tonsured scalps were but scanty trophies and the coyote
found their lean bodies but poor picking. Only fifteen years ago the
Navajos came down into the valley through the canyon which the Denver
and Rio Grande line now traverses, but the Mormons were better prepared
than the Spanish missionaries, and hunted the Navajo soul out of the
Indians, so that Spanish Fork is now the second largest settlement
in the valley, and the Indians come there begging. They are all of
the "tickaboo" and "good Injun" sort, the "how-how" mendicants of
the period. All the inhabitants are as good an illustration of the
advantages of co-operation in stores, farm-work, mills--everything--as
can well be adduced.
Co-operation, by the way, is an important feature of Mormon life, and
never, perhaps, so much on men's tongues and in their minds as at the
present time. The whole community has been aroused by the consistent
teaching of their leaders in their addresses at public "meetings,"
in their prayers in private households, to a sense of the "suicidal
folly," as they call it, of making men wealthy (by their patronage) who
use their power against the Saints; and the Mormons have set themselves
very sincerely to work to trade only with themselves and to starve out
the Gentiles. And it is very difficult indeed for an unprejudiced man
not to sympathize in some measure with the Mormons. By their honesty
they have made the name "Mormon" respected in trade all over America,
and have attracted shopkeepers, who on this very honesty have thriven
and become wealthy in Utah--and yet some of these men, knowing nothing
of the people except that they are straightforward in their dealings
and honourable in their engagements, join in the calumny that the
Mormons are a "rascally," "double-dealing" set. For my own part, I
think the Church should have starved out some of these slanderers
long ago. Even now it would be a step in the right direction if the
Church slipped a "fighting apostle" at the men who go on day after
day saying and writing that which they know to be untrue, calling,
for instance, virtuous, hard-working men and women "the villainous
spawn of polygamy," and advocating the encouragement of prostitutes
as a "reforming agency for Mormon youth"! Meanwhile "co-operation" as
a religious duty is the doctrine while of the day, and Gentile trade
is already suffering in consequence. The movement is a very important
one to the Territory, for if carried out on the proper principles
of co-operation, the people will live more cheaply here than in any
other State in America. As it is, many imported articles, thanks to
co-operative competition, are cheaper here than further east, and when
the boycotting is in full swing many more articles will also come down
in price, as the Gentiles' profits will then be knocked off the cost
to the purchaser. Every settlement, big and little, has its "co-op.,"
and the elders when on tour through the outlying hamlets lose no
opportunity for encouraging the movement and extending it.
Passing Spanish Fork, and its outlying herds of horses, we see,
following the curve Of the lake, Salem, a little community of farmers
settled around a spring; Payson, called Poteetnete in the old Indian
days--after a chief who made life interesting, not to say exciting, for
the early settlers--Springlake villa, where one family has grown up
into a hamlet, and grown out of it, too, for they complain that they
have not room enough and must go elsewhere; and Santaquin, a little
settlement that has reached out its fields right across the valley
to the opposite slope of the hills. This was the spot where Abraham
Butterfield, the only inhabitant of the place at the time, won himself
a name among the people by chasing off a band of armed Indians, who
had surprised him at his solitary work in the fields, by waving his
coat and calling out to imaginary friends in the distance to "Come
on." The Indians were thoroughly fooled, and fled back up the country
incontinently, while Abraham pursued them hotly, brandishing his old
coat with the utmost ferocity, and vociferously rallying nobody to the
bloody attack.
Here Mount Nebo, the highest elevation in the Territory was first
pointed out to me--how tired I got of it before I had done!--and
through fields of lucerne we passed from the Utah into the Juab Valley
and an enormous wilderness of sage-brush. It is broken here and
there by an infrequent patch of cultivation, and streaks of paling
go straggling away across the grey desert. But without water it is a
desperate section, and the pillars of dust moving across the level, and
marking the track of the sheep that wandered grazing among the sage,
reminded me of the sand-wastes of Beluchistan, where nothing can move a
foot without raising a tell-tale puff of dust.
There, the traveller, looking out from his own cloud of sand, sees
similar clouds creeping about all over the plain, judges from their
size the number of camels or horses that may be stirring, and draws
his own conclusions as to which may, be peaceful caravans, and which
robber-bands. By taking advantage of the wind, the desert banditti
are able to advance to the attack, just as the devil-fish do on the
sea-bottom, under cover of sand-clouds of their own stirring up; and
the first intimation which the traveller has of the character of those
who are coming towards him, is the sudden flash of swords and glitter
of spearheads that light up the edges of the advancing sand, just as
lightning flits along the ragged skirts of a moving thunder-cloud.
But here there are no Murri or Bhoogti horsemen astir, and the Indians,
Piutes or Navajos, have not acquired Beluchi tactics. These moving
clouds here are raised by loitering sheep, formidable only to Don
Quixote and the low-nesting ground-larks. They are close feeders,
though, these sheep, and it is poor gleaning after them, so it is a
rule throughout the Territory that on the hills where sheep graze, game
need not be looked for.
An occasional ranch comes in sight, and along the old county road a
waggon or two goes crawling by, and then we reach Mona, a pretty little
rustic spot, but the civilizing radiance of corn-fields gradually dies
away, and the relentless sage-brush supervenes, with here and there a
lucid interval of ploughed ground in the midst of the demented desert.
With water the whole valley would be superbly fertile, as we soon see,
for there suddenly breaks in upon the monotony of the weed-growths
a splendid succession of fields, long expanses of meadowland, large
groves of orchards, and the thriving settlement of Nephi.
Like all other prosperous places in Utah, it is almost entirely Mormon.
There is one saloon, run by a Mormon, but patronized chiefly by the
"outsiders"--for such is the name usually given to the "Gentiles" in
the settlement--and no police. Local mills meet local requirements,
and the "co-op." is the chief trading store of the place. There are no
manufactures for export, but in grain and fruit there is a considerable
trade. It is a quaint, straggling sort of place, and, like all these
settlements, curiously primitive. The young men use the steps of the
co-operative store as a lounge, and their ponies, burdened with huge
Mexican saddles and stirrups that would do for dog-kennels, stand
hitched to the palings all about. The train stops at the corner of the
road to take up any passengers there may be. Deer are sometimes killed
in the streets, and eagles still harry the chickens in the orchards.
Wild-bird life is strangely abundant, and a flock of "canaries"--a very
beautiful yellow siskin--had taken possession of my host's garden.
"We do catch them sometimes," said his wife, "but they always starve
themselves, and pine away till they are thin enough to get through
the bars of the cage, and so we can never keep them." A neighbour who
chanced in, was full of canary-lore, and I remember one incident that
struck me as very pretty. He had caught a canary and caged it, but the
bird refused to be tamed, and dashed itself about the cage in such a
frantic way that out of sheer pity he let the wild thing go. A day or
two later it came back, but with a mate, and when the cage was hung out
the two birds went into captivity together, of their own free-will, and
lived as happily as birds could live!
My host was a good illustration of what Mormonism can do for a man. In
Yorkshire he was employed in a slaughtering-yard, and thought himself
lucky if he earned twelve shillings a week. The Mormons found him,
"converted" him, and emigrated him. He landed in Utah without a cent
in his pocket, and in debt to the Church besides. But he found every
one ready to help him, and was ready to help himself, so that to-day
he is one of the most substantial men in Nephi, with a mill that cost
him $10,000 to put up, a shop and a farm, a house and orchard and
stock. His family, four daughters and a son, are all settled round him
and thriving, thanks to the aid he gave them--"but," said he, "if the
Mormons had not found me, I should still have been slaughtering in the
old country, and glad, likely, to be still earning my twelve shillings
a week." Another instance from the same settlement is that of a boy
who, five years ago, was brought out here at the age of sixteen. His
emigration was entirely paid for by the Church. Yet last year he sent
home from his own pocket the necessary funds to bring out his mother
and four brothers and sisters! God speed these Mormons, then. They
are doing both "the old country and the new" an immense good in thus
transforming English paupers into American farmers--and thus exchanging
the vices and squalor of English poverty for the temperance, piety, and
comfort of these Utah homesteads. I am not blind to their faults. My
aversion to polygamy is sincere, and I find also that the Mormons must
share with all agricultural communities the blame of not sacrificing
more of their own present prospects for the sake of their children's
future, and neglecting their education, both in school and at home. But
when I remember what classes of people these men and women are chiefly
drawn from, and the utter poverty in which most of them I cannot, in
sincerity, do otherwise than admire and respect the system which has
fused such unpromising material of so many nationalities into one
homogeneous whole.
For myself, I do not think I could live among the Mormons happily, for
my lines have been cast so long in the centres of work and thought,
that a bovine atmosphere of perpetual farms suffocates me. I am
afraid I should take to lowing, and feed on lucerne. But this does
not prejudice me against the men and women who are so unmistakably
happy. They are uncultured, from the highest to the lowest. But the
men of thirty and upwards remember these valleys when they were utter
deserts, and the Indian was lord of the hills! As little children they
had to perform all the small duties about the house, the "chores," as
they are called; as lads they had to guard the stock on the hills; as
young men they were the pioneers of Utah. What else then could they be
but ignorant--in the education of schools, I mean? Yet they are sober
in their habits, conversation, and demeanour, frugal, industrious,
hospitable, and God-fearing. As a people, their lives are a pattern to
an immense number of mankind, and every emigrant, therefore, taken up
out of the slums of manufacturing cities in the old countries, or from
the hideous drudgery of European agriculture, and planted in these Utah
valleys, is a benefit conferred by Mormonism upon two continents at
once.
To return to Nephi. I went to a "meeting" in the evening, and to
describe one is to describe all. The old men and women sit in
front--the women, as a rule, all together in the body of the room, and
the men at the sides. How this custom originated no one could tell me;
but it is probably a survival of habit from the old days when there
was only room enough for the women to be seated, and the men stood
round against the walls, and at the door. As larger buildings were
erected, the women, as of old, took their accustomed seats together
in the centre, and the men filled up the balance of the space. The
oldest being hard of hearing and short of sight, would naturally, in an
unconventional society, collect at the front of the audience. Looking
at them all together, they are found to be exactly what one might
expect--a congregation of hard-featured, bucolic faces, sun-tanned and
deep-lined. Here and there among them is a bright mechanic's face, and
here and there an unexpected refinement of intelligence. But taken in
the mass, they are precisely such a congregation as fills nine-tenths
of the rural places of worship all the world over. Conspicuously
absent, however, is the typical American face, for the fathers and
mothers among the Mormons are of every nationality, and the sons and
daughters are a mixture of all. In the future this race should be a
very fine one, for it is chiefly recruited from the hardier stocks,
the English, Scotch, and Scandinavian, while their manner of life is
pre-eminently fitted for making them stalwart in figure, and sound in
constitution.
The meeting opens with prayer, in which the Almighty is asked for
blessings upon the whole people, upon each class of it, upon their
own place in particular, upon all the Church authorities, and upon
all friends of the Mormons. But never, so far as I have heard, are
intercessions made, in the spirit of New Testament teaching, for the
enemies of the Church. References to the author of the Edmunds Bill
are often very pointed and vigorous. After the prayer comes a hymn,
sung often to a lively tune, and accompanied by such instrumental
music as the settlement can rely upon, after which the elders address
the people in succession. These addresses are curiously practical.
They are temporal rather than spiritual, and concern themselves with
history, official acts, personal reminiscences, and agricultural
matter rather than points of mere doctrine. But as a fact, temporal
and spiritual considerations are too closely blended in Mormonism to
be disassociated. Thus references to the Edmunds Bill take their place
naturally among exhortations to "live their religion", and to "build up
the kingdom" in spite of "persecution." Boycotting Gentile tradesmen
is similarly inculcated as showing a pious fidelity to the interests
of the Church. These are the two chief topics of all addresses, but
a passing reference to a superior class of waggon, or a hope that
every one will make a point of voting in some coming election, is
not considered out of place, while personal matters, the health of
the speaker or his experiences in travel, are often thus publicly
commented upon. The result is, that the people go away with some
tangible facts in their heads, and subjects for ordinary conversation
on their tongues, and not, as from other kinds of religious meetings,
with only generalities about their souls and the Ten Commandments. In
other countries the gabble of small-talk that immediately overtakes
a congregation let out of church sounds very incongruous with the
last notes of the organ voluntary that play them out of the House of
God. But here the people walking homeward are able to continue the
conversation on exactly the same lines as the addresses they have
just heard, to renew it the next day, to carry it about with them
as conversation from place to place, and thus eventually to spread
the "doctrine" of the elders over the whole district. A fact about
waggon-buying sticks where whole sermons about salvation by faith would
not.