FROM MANTI TO GLENWOOD.
Scandinavian Mormons--Danish ol--Among the Orchards at Manti--On
the way to Conference--Adam and Eve--The protoplasm of a
settlement--Ham and eggs--At Mayfield--Our teamster's theory of
the ground-hog--On the way to Glenwood--Volcanic phenomena and
lizards--A suggestion for improving upon Nature--Primitive Art
"MY hosts at Manti were Danes, and the wife brewed Danish ol." Such
is the entry in my note-book, made, I remember, to remind me to say
that the San Pete settlements are composed in great proportion of
Danes and Scandinavians. These nationalities contribute more largely
than any other--unless Great-Britishers are all called one nation--to
the recruiting of Mormonism, and when they reach Utah maintain their
individuality more conspicuously than any others. The Americans, Welsh,
Scotch, English, Germans, and Swiss, merge very rapidly into one blend,
but the Scandinavian type--and a very fine peasant type it is--is
clearly marked in the settlements where the Hansens and the Jansens,
Petersens, Christiansens, Nielsens, and Sorensens, most do congregate.
By the way, some of these Norse names sound very curiously to the ear.
"Ole Hagg" might be thought to be a nickname rather than anything else,
and Lars Nasquist Brihl at best a joke. Their children are remarkably
pretty, and the women models of thriftiness.
My hostess at Manti was a pattern. She made pies under an inspiration,
and her chicken-pie was a distinct revelation. Her "beer" was certainly
a beverage that a man might deny himself quite cheerfully, but to
eat her preserves was like listening to beautiful parables, and her
cream cheese gave the same gentle pleasure as the singing of thankful
canticles.
In the garden was an arbour overrun with a wild grapevine, and I
took my pen and ink in there to write. All went well for a while. An
amiable cat came and joined me, sitting in a comfortable cushion-sort
of fashion on the corner of my blotting-pad. But while we sat there
writing, the cat and I, there came a humming-bird into the arbour--a
little miracle in feathers, with wings all emeralds and a throat of
ruby. And it sat in the sunlight on a vine-twig that straggled out
across the door, and began to preen its tiny feathers. I stopped
writing to watch the beautiful thing. And so did the cat. For happening
to look down at the table I saw the cat, with a fiendish expression of
face and her eyes intent on the bird, gathering her hind legs together
for a spring. To give the cat a smack on the head, and for the cat to
vanish with an explosion of ill-temper, "was the work of an instant."
The humming-bird flashed out into the garden, and I was left alone to
mop up the ink which the startled cat had spilt. Then I went out and
wandered across the garden, where English flowers, the sweet-william
and columbine, pinks and wallflowers, pansies and iris, were growing,
under the fruit-trees still bunched with blossoms, and out into the
street. Friends asked me if I wasn't going to "the conference," but
I had not the heart to go inside when the world out of doors was so
inviting. There was a cool, green tint in the shade of the orchards,
pleasant with the voices of birds and dreamy with the humming of
bees. There was nobody else about, only children making posies of
apple-blossoms and launching blue boats of iris-petals on the little
roadside streams. Everybody was "at conference," and those that could
not get into the building were grouped outside among the waggons of the
country folk who had come from a distance. These conferences are held
quarterly (so that the lives of the Apostles who preside at them are
virtually spent in travelling) and at them everything is discussed,
whether of spiritual or temporal interest and a general balance struck,
financially and religiously. In character they resemble the ordinary
meetings of the Mormons, being of exactly the same curious admixture
of present farming and future salvation, business advice and pious
exhortation.
Everybody who can do so, attends these meetings; and they fulfil,
therefore, all the purposes of the Oriental mela. Farmers,
stock-raisers, and dealers generally, meet from a distance and talk
over business matters, open negotiations and settle bargains, exchange
opinions and discuss prospects. Their wives and families, such of
them as can get away from their homes, foregather and exchange their
domestic news, while everybody lays in a fresh supply of spiritual
refreshment for the coming three months, and hears the latest word of
the Church as to the Edmunds Bill and Gentile tradesmen. The scene is
as primitive and quaint as can be imagined, for in rural Utah life
is still rough and hearty and simple. To the stranger, the greetings
of family groups, with the strange flavour of the Commonwealth days,
the wonderful Scriptural or apocryphal names, and the old-fashioned
salutation, are full of picturesque interest, while the meetings of
waggons filled with acquaintances from remote corners of the country,
the confusion of European dialects--imagine hearing pure Welsh among
the San Pete sagebrush!--the unconventional cordiality of greeting, are
delightful both in an intellectual and artistic sense.
I have travelled much, and these social touches have always had a charm
for me, let them be the demure reunions of Creoles sous les filaos in
Mauritius; or the French negroes chattering as they go to the baths
in Bourbon; the deep-drinking convivialities of the Planters' Club in
Ceylon; the grinning, prancing, rencontres of Kaffir and Kaffir, or
the stolid collision of Boer waggons on the African veldt; the stately
meeting of camel-riding Beluchis on the sandy put of Khelat; the
jingling ox-drawn ekkas foregathered to "bukh" under the tamarind-trees
of Bengal; the reserved salutations of Hindoos as they squat by the
roadside to discuss the invariable lawsuit and smoke the inevitable
hubble-bubble; the noisy congregation of Somali boatmen before their
huts on the sun-smitten shores of Aden;--what a number of reminiscences
I could string together of social traits in various parts of the
world! And these Mormon peasants, pioneers of the West, these hardy
sons of hardy sires, will be as interesting to me in the future as any
others, and my remembrance of them will be one of admiration for their
unfashionable virtues of industry and temperance, and of gratitude for
their simple courtesy and their cordial hospitality.
As we left Manti behind us, the waggons "coming into conference" got
fewer and fewer, and soon we found ourselves out alone upon the broad
levels of the valley, with nothing to keep us company but a low range
of barren hills that did their best to break the monotony of the
landscape. In places, the ground was white with desperate patches of
"saleratus," the saline efflorescence with which agriculture in this
Territory is for ever at war, and resembling in appearance, taste, and
effects the "reh" of the Gangetic plains. Here, as in India, irrigation
is the only known antidote, and once wash it out of the soil and
get crops growing and the enemy retires. But as soon as cultivation
ceases or irrigation slackens, the white infection creeps over the
ground again, and if undisturbed for a year resumes possession. How
unrelenting Nature is in her conflict with man!
We passed some warm springs a few miles from Manti, but the water
though slightly saline is inodorous, and on the patches which they
water I saw the wild flax growing as if it enjoyed the temperature and
the soil. Then Six-Mile Creek, a pleasant little ravine, crossed by a
rustic bridge, which gives water for a large tract Of land, and so to
Sterling, a settlement as yet in its cradle, and curiously illustrative
of "the beginning of things" in rural Utah. One man and his one wife
up on the hillside doing something to the water, one cock and one hen
pecking together in monogamous sympathy, one dog sitting at the door
of a one-roomed log-hut. Everything was in the Adam and Eve stage
of society, and primeval. So Deucalion and Pyrrha had the earth to
themselves, and the "rooster" stalked before his mate as if he was the
first inventor of posterity. But much of this country is going to come
under the plough in time, for there is water, and in the meantime,
as giving promise of a future with some children in it, there is a
school-house--an instance of forethought which gratified me.
The country now becomes undulating, remaining for the most part a
sterile-looking waste of grease-wood, but having an almost continuous
thread of cultivation running along the centre of the valley which, a
few miles further on, suddenly widens into a great field of several
thousand acres. On the other side of it we found Mayfield.
In Mayfield every one was gone to the Conference except a pretty girl,
left to look after all the children of the village, and who resisted
our entreaties for hospitality with a determination that would have
been more becoming in an uglier person--and an old lady, left under the
protection of a big blind dog and a little bobtailed calf. She received
us with the honest courtesy universal in the Territory, showed us where
to put our horses and where the lucerne was stacked, and apologized to
us for having nothing better than eggs and ham to offer!
Fancy nothing better than eggs and ham! To my mind there is nothing in
all travelling so delightful as these eggs-and-ham interruptions that
do duty for meals. Not only is the viand itself so agreeable, but its
odour when cooking creates an appetite.
What a moral there is here! We have all heard of the beauty of the
lesson that those flowers teach us which give forth their sweetest
fragrance when crushed. But I think the conduct of eggs and ham, that
thus create an appetite in order to increase man's pleasure in their
own consumption, is attended with circumstances of good taste that are
unusually pleasing.
In our hostess's house at Mayfield I saw for the first time the
ordinary floor-covering of the country through which we subsequently
travelled--a "rag-carpet." It is probably common all over the world,
but it was quite new to me. I discussed its composition one day with a
mother and her daughter.
"This streak here is Jimmy's old pants, and that darker one is a
military overcoat. This is daddy's plush vest. This bit of the pattern
is--"
"No, mother, that's your old jacket-back; don't you remember?"--and so
on all through the carpet.
Every stripe in it had an association, and the story of the whole was
pretty nearly the story of their entire lives in the country.
"For it took us seven years to get together just this one strip of
carpet. We folks haven't much, you see, that's fit to tear up."
I like the phrase "fit to tear up," and wonder when, in the opinion of
this frugal people, anything does become suitable for destruction. But
it is hardly destruction after all to turn old clothes into carpets,
and the process is as simple as, in fact is identical with, ordinary
hand-weaving. The cloth is simply shredded into very narrow strips,
and each strip is treated in the loom just as if it were ordinary
yarn, the result being, by a judicious alternation of tints, a very
pleasant-looking and very durable floor-cloth. Rag-rugs are also
made on a foundation of very coarse canvas by drawing very narrow
shreds of rag through the spaces of the canvas, fastening them on the
reverse side, and cutting them off to a uniform "pile" on the upper.
In one cottage at Salina I remember seeing a rug of this kind in which
the girl had drawn her own pattern and worked in the colours with a
distinct appreciation of true artistic effect. An industrial exhibition
for such products would, I have no doubt, bring to light a great many
out-of-the-way handicrafts which these emigrant people have brought
with them from the different parts of Europe, and with which they try
to adorn their simple homes.
Our teamster from Mayfield to Glenwood, the next stage of my southward
journey, was a very cautious person. He would not hurry his horses down
hill--they were "belike" to stumble; and he would not hurry them up
hill--it "fretted" them. On the level intervals he stopped altogether,
to "breathe" them. It transpired eventually that they were plough
horses. I suspected it from the first. And from his driving I suspected
that he was the ploughman. In other respects he was a very desirable
teamster.
His remarks about Europe (he had once been to Chicago himself) were
very entertaining, and his theory of "ground hogs" would have delighted
Darwin. As far as I could follow him, all animals were of one species,
the differences as to size and form being chiefly accidents of age or
sex. This, at any rate, was my induction from his description of the
"ground hog," which he said was a "kind of squirrel--like the prairie
dog!" As he said, there were "quite a few" ground hogs, but they moved
too fast among the brush for me to identify them. As far as I could
tell, though, they were of the marmot kind, about nine inches long,
with very short tails and round small ears. When they were at a safe
distance they would stand up at full length on their hind legs, the
colouring underneath being lighter than on the back. What are they? I
have seen none in Utah except on these volcanic stretches of country
between Salina and Monroe.
Much of Utah is volcanic, but here, beyond Salina, huge mounds of
scoriae, looking like heaps of slag from some gigantic furnace,
are piled up in the centre of the level ground, while in other
places circular depressions in the soil--sometimes fifty feet in
diameter and lowest in the centre, with deep fissures defining the
circumference--seem to mark the places whence the scoriae had been
drawn, and the earth had sunk in upon the cavities thus exhausted.
The two sides of the river (the Sevier) were in striking contrast. On
this, the eastern, was desolation and stone heaps and burnt-up spaces
with ant-hills and lizards.
Nothing makes a place look (to me at least) so hot as an abundance of
lizards. They are associated in memory with dead, still heat, "the
intolerable calor of Mambre," the sun-smitten cinder-heap that men call
Aden, the stifling hillsides of Italy where the grapes lie blistering
in the autumn sun, the desperate suburbs of Alexandria--what millions
of scorched-looking lizards, detestable little salamanders, used to
bask upon Cleopatra's Needles when they lay at full length among the
sand!--the heat-cracked fields of India. I know very well that there
are lizards and lizards; that they might be divided--as the Hindoo
divides everything, whether victuals or men's characters, medicines
or the fates the gods send him--into "hot" and "cold" lizards. The
salamander itself, according to the ancients, was icy cold. But this
does not matter. All lizards make places look hot.
On the other side of the river, a favourite raiding-ground of "Mr.
Indian," as the settlers pleasantly call him, lies Aurora, a settlement
in the centre of a rich tract of red wheat soil with frequent
growths of willow and buffalo-berry (or bull-berry or red-berry or
"kichi-michi") marking the course of the Sevier.
But our road soon wound down by a "dug way" to the bottom-lands, and we
found ourselves on level meadows clumped with shrubs and patched with
corn-fields, and among scattered knots of grazing cattle and horses.
Overhead circled several pairs of black hawks, a befitting reminder to
the dwellers on these Thessalian fields, these Campanian pastures, that
Scythian Piutes and Navajo Attilas might at any time swoop down upon
them.
But the forbearance of the Indian in the matter of beef and mutton
is inexplicable--and most inexplicable of all in the case of lamb,
seeing that mint grows wild. This is a very pleasing illustration of
the happiness of results when man and nature work cordially together.
The lamb gambols about among beds of mint! What a becoming sense of
the fitness of things that would be that should surprise the innocent
thing in its fragrant pasture and serve up the two together! "They were
pleasant in their lives, and in death they were not divided." And what
a delightful field for similar efforts such a spectacle opens up to the
philosophic mind! Here, beyond Aurora, as we wind in and out among the
brakes of willow and rose-bush, we catch glimpses of the river, with
ducks riding placidly at anchor in the shadows of the foliage. And not
a pea in the neighbourhood! Now, why not sow green peas along the banks
of the American rivers and lakes? How soothing to the weary traveller
would be this occasional relief of canard aux petits pois!
After an interval of pretty river scenery we found ourselves once
more in a dismal, volcanic country with bald hills and leprous
sand-patches the only features of the landscape, with lizards for
flowers and an exasperating heat-drizzle blurring the outlines of
everything with its quivering refraction. And then, after a few miles
of this, we are suddenly in the company of really majestic mountains,
some of them cedared to the peaks, others broken up into splendid
architectural designs of almost inconceivable variety, richly tinted
and fantastically grouped. How wealthy this range must be in mineral!
In front of us, above all the intervening hills, loomed out a monster
mountain, and turning one of its spurs we break all at once upon the
village of Glenwood--a beautiful cluster of foliage with skirts of
meadow-land spread out all about it--lying at the foot of the huge
slope.
Near Glenwood is an interesting little lake that I visited. Its water
is exquisitely clear and very slightly warm. Though less than a foot
deep in most places (it has one pool twelve feet in depth), it never
freezes, in spite of the intense cold at this altitude. It is stocked
with trout that do not grow to any size, but which do not on the
other hand seem to diminish in numbers, although the consumption is
considerable. The botany in the neighbourhood of the lake is very
interesting, the larkspur, lupin, mimulus, violet, heart's-ease,
ox-eye, and several other familiar plants of English gardens, growing
wild, while a strongly tropical flavour is given to the vegetation by
the superb footstools of cactus--imagine sixty-one brilliant scarlet
blossoms on a cushion only fifteen inches across!--by the presence of
a gorgeous oriole (the body a pure yellow freaked with black on the
wings, and the head and neck a rich orange), and by a large butterfly
of a clear flame-colour with the upper wings sharply hooked at the
tips. Flower, bird, and insect were all in keeping with the Brazils or
the Malayan Archipelago.
On a rock, close by the grist-mill, is the only specimen of the
much-talked-of Indian "hieroglyphics" that I have seen. They may of
course be hieroglyphics, but to me they look like the first attempts of
some untutored savage youth to delineate in straight lines the human
form divine. Or they may be only his attempts to delineate a cockroach.