It is at Great Salt Lake City as it is at Boston. If I go out to
tea at the Wilkinses in Boston, I'm pretty sure to find Mr. Wilkins
all smiles and Sunshine, or Mrs. Wilkins all gentleness and
politeness. I am entertained delightfully, and after tea little
Miss Wilkins shows me her photograph album, and plays the march
from "Faust" on the piano for me. I go away highly pleased with my
visit; and yet the Wilkinses may fight like cats and dogs in
private. I may no sooner have struck the sidewalk than Mr. W. will
be reaching for Mrs. W's throat.
This is the City of Saints. Apparently, the Mormon women are
happy. I saw them at their best, of course--at balls, tea-parties
and the like. They were like other women as far as my observation
extended. They were hooped, and furbelowed, and shod, and white-
collard, and bejewelled; and like women all over the world, they
were softer-eyed and kinder-hearted than men can ever hope to be.
The Mormon girl is reared to believe that the plurality-wife system
as it is delicately called here is strictly right; and in linking
her destiny with a man who has twelve wives, she undoubtedly
considers she is doing her duty. She loves the man, probably, for
I think it is not true, as so many writers have stated, that girls
are forced to marry whomsoever "the Church" may dictate. Some
parents no doubt advise, connive, threaten, and in aggravated cases
incarcerate here, as some parents have always done elsewhere, and
always will do as long as petticoats continue to be an institution.
How these dozen or twenty wives get along without heart-burnings
and hairpullings I can't see.
There are instances on record, you know, where a man don't live in
a state of uninterrupted bliss with ONE wife. And to say that a
man can possess twenty wives without having his special favorite,
or favorites, is to say that he is an angel in boots--which is
something I have never been introduced to. You never saw an angel
with a Beard, although you may have seen the Bearded Woman.
The Mormon woman is early taught that man, being created in the
image of the Saviour, is far more godly than she can ever be, and
that for her to seek to monopolize his affections is a species of
rank sin. So she shares his affections with five or six or twenty
other women, as the case may be.
A man must be amply able to support a number of wives before he can
take them. Hence, perhaps, it is that so many old chaps in Utah
have young and blooming wives in their seraglios, and so many young
men have only one.
I had a man pointed out to me who married an entire family. He had
originally intended to marry Jane, but Jane did not want to leave
her widowed mother. The other three sisters were not in the
matrimonial market for the same reason; so this gallant man married
the whole crowd, including the girl's grandmother, who had lost all
her teeth, and had to be fed with a spoon. The family were in
indigent circumstances, and they could not but congratulate
themselves on securing a wealthy husband. It seemed to affect the
grandmother deeply, for the first words she said on reaching her
new home were: "Now, thank God! I shall have my gruel reg'lar!"
The name of Joseph Smith is worshipped in Utah; and, "they say,"
that although he had been dead a good many years, he still keeps on
marrying women by proxy. He "reveals" who shall act as his earthly
agent in this matter, and the agent faithfully executes the defunct
Prophet's commands.
A few years ago I read about a couple being married by telegraph--
the young man was in Cincinatti and the young woman was in New
Hampshire. They did not see each other for a year afterwards. I
don't see what fun there is in this sort of thing.
I have somewhere stated that Brigham Young is said to have eighty
wives. I hardly think he has so many. Mr. Hyde, the backslider,
says in his book that "Brigham always sleeps by himself, in a
little chamber behind his office;" and if he has eighty wives I
don't blame him. He must be bewildered. I know very well that if
I had eighty wives of my bosom I should be confused, and shouldn't
sleep anywhere. I undertook to count the long stockings, on the
clothes-line, in his back yard one day, and I used up the
multiplication table in less than half an hour. It made me dizzy--
it did!
In this book I am writing chiefly of what I saw. I saw plurality
at its best. I have shown the silver lining of this great social
cloud. That back of this silver lining the cloud must be thick and
black, I feel quite sure. But to elaborately denounce, at this
late day, a system we all know must be wildly wrong, would be
simply to impeach the intelligence of the readers of this book.