by George Robert Bird

George Robert Bird was a young non-Mormon "tenderfoot" who went west in 1874 and spent the following decades in the mining camps, schoolrooms, and valley towns of territorial Utah. Tenderfoot Days, published in 1918, is his memoir of that life: the raw new settlements strung along the Wasatch, the fight to establish "liberal" (non-denominational) schools against Mormon ecclesiastical control of education, the tensions of a theocratic frontier working out its relationship to Congress and the courts, and finally Utah's arrival at statehood in 1896 and the ordinary two-party politics that followed.

Bird writes as a sympathetic outsider, not a polemicist; his foreword explicitly disclaims writing either a history or an attack on "the eccentric religion of the majority of the people." His account is nonetheless a period piece throughout, including in its passing descriptions of the Ute and Shoshone people of the region, which the digitizing archive's own note calls "a stereotypical portrayal of the Native Americans" of the area — a fair caution worth carrying into the read.

Foreword

This book is neither a History nor a Topography of the Territory of Utah in the early seventies of the last century. The volume is due to the experiences of an outsider who tried to be impartial in his views and sympathies. The personal note, of course, rings in this record of those past days. No onslaught is made on the "wild and woolly" west, nor on the eccentric religion of the majority of the people.

Through much peril and privation, the wild wastes of the Territory had been occupied by a people whose hard toil had redeemed the desert. The picture of life presented in these pages is in accord with the facts, the only changes made are in the names of some of the characters.

Contents

Chapter I — Going West in 1874

Chapter II — A Far West City

Chapter III — Pilgrims to a Modern Zion

Chapter IV — Church, State and Camp

Chapter V — The Co-Operative Industry of Utah

Chapter VI — The Valley Settlements

Chapter VII — A Long Ride Through Utah Valley

Chapter VIII — Through Spanish Fork Canyon and Thistle Valley

Chapter IX — Opposition to the Liberal Schools

Chapter X — Behind the Curtain

Chapter XI — The Creed That Caused the Deed

Chapter XII — The Passing Prophet

Chapter XIII — The Mixed Multitude

Chapter XIV — The Old Prospector

Chapter XV — A Lively Mining Camp

Chapter XVI — The Town and Canyon of American Fork

Chapter XVII — Tenderfoot Superintendents

Chapter XVIII — A Tenderfoot's Romance

Chapter XIX — Mind as the Master Worker

Chapter XX — A Latter Day View of a Latter Day State

Chapter I — Going West in 1874

I WAS one of the multitude of young men who heeded Horace Greeley's advice, "Go
West, young man, go West!" in the days when he was the ruling spirit of the New
York Tribune. Discredited as a prospective president by the people at the polls,
he yet was accepted by many as a prophet of agricultural authority on the "Opportunity
of the Great West."
To me, from boyhood, the word "Mississippi" had a winsome charm. I had read of De
Soto and the Jesuit Fathers as the first voyagers on the great river of the West,
of the Lewis and Clark explorations by the pen of Washington Irving in his Astoria:
and to go West, was my one aim as conditions were ripe for it. The great lakes to
the North and the cane-brakes to the South were not in it with the West as a drawing
card to me. I left the charmed scenery of central New York state in the early spring
of '74 headed for the wonderful Porkopolis of Chicago. That city was just beginning
to rise from the ashes of the terrible fire of '71 when I first set foot in it.
Wide areas resembling San Francisco in 1906 were black with the fire's work, and
temporary board structures even at the depots were in common evidence. But there
was the tang and the vim of the West in the faces of its hustling population that
foretold the vigorous growth of after years. Crossing Ohio, I passed through the
famous Western Reserve, supposed to be, in its day, the real West. When I saw the
orderly neatness of farm, road, and townsite, I smiled at the invitation of an old
college chum of the previous year; "When you are in the West be sure to call on
me in the Western Reserve. I live at Youngstown, Ohio."
The "Father of Waters," as the Indians so fitly call the Mississippi, was bank-full
when I crossed it one Tuesday morning. The prairies of Illinois and Wisconsin were
green with the early spring color that also clothed the trees along the borders
of this great stream. I was not disappointed, save with the awkwardly built stern-wheel
steamers, that were either wildly swinging down or laboriously puffing up its course.
When I stepped off the cars at Dubuque, Iowa, at last fairly West, I delighted in
the breezy speech and the freedom of the people; men and women of adaptation to
circumstances,-of a width of view like the plains that they were subduing.
For a year Iowa with its agricultural beauties along the Mississippi held me prisoner.
Then the craving for the far West took hold of me as I heard the accounts of the
returning pioneers of Kansas or Nebraska. The plague of locusts had driven them
back and they had returned for supplies for another start.
It will be remembered that Uncle Sam was more than generous in his land gifts at
this time. The pre-emption laws allowed pioneers to buy outright one hundred and
sixty acres of the best level land in Iowa and Minnesota at one dollar and twenty-five
cents an acre. Five years' time was given to pay for this, no other obligation was
required beyond the settler's own interests to live on it and improve it.
I saw, as I travelled west, hundreds of these pre-emptors at work building small
sod or frame houses, and breaking up the heavy grassed prairies. The cars to western
Iowa and Minnesota were crowded every day with land seekers. The Danes, Norwegians
and Swedes were mainly in evidence; so new to the country that they could not make
themselves understood, but had to talk through their agents when inquiring, or buying.
These people's descendants of this day are the intelligent and prosperous farmers
of the choicest locations in country and town. Beginning with nothing but their
brawn and industry, they are independent citizens of the best prairie states.
I crossed another great river at Omaha, the Missouri. With the imagination of youth,
I saw the older population of this country of illimitable plains. The Pawnees, the
Sioux, the Omahas, whose gatherings gave the name to Council Bluffs, upon the Iowa
side. I saw also the black rolling tide of bison racing before the yelling red hunters
or before the redder tongues of prairie fires. While I was denied my hope of running
down a buffalo, I was able to see several of them in their wild state, as I went
farther west. A great and reckless slaughter had thinned them down but one did not
then have to visit a government park to see a buffalo.
It was a great event in that day for the overland express to leave Omaha for San
Francisco. People made preparation for this pullman ride with all the gravity of
a sea voyage. Baskets of supplies, wraps, rugs, and dust coats filled the arms of
the passengers boarding the cars.
The express averaged sixteen miles an hour, including stops. The road-bed was of
very light caliber and simply spiked down without fishplates, allowing no forty
miles an hour speed. We swayed and teetered along some parts of the road in a way
that reminded me of a branch line on the Grand Trunk in Canada, where the train
dipped and curtseyed in the cuttings like a sail boat on the lakes. No harm came
of it. We stopped often for fuel and water, and to oil up the small, wide-funneled
engine, or to cool a hot-box in the heavily freighted baggage car.
The winds of Nebraska are worthy of mention for they are in the business of blowing,
and if the people are much affected by them, they are certainly in danger of being
the biggest boosters of the West. Anyway, I saw the effect of these constant winds
on all faces; the men being as red as Indians and the women, despite the long poke
bonnets they wore, were almost as brown. Ma-dame Recamier's cream so much advertised
then, should have had a great sale in Nebraska, if the women were at all solicitous
of their complexions. But they were all of stern stuff and did not mind the Nebraska
breezes, whether hot as a blast in summer, or cold as a blizzard in winter. They
were a people that moved as briskly as their winds, going at top speed in their
buggies and on horseback.
I saw women riding astride and they rode like cowboys. There were villages of marmots
or prairie dogs and these little canines shared their earth-holes with both snakes
and owls. Once in a while "Lo," the Indian, in his native costume was seen on a
hill near-by sitting on his cayuse, stoically viewing the white man's fire wagons
as they trailed past. These natives were also in evidence at every eating station,
either to sell their bead and buffalo ornaments, or to share in the white man's
fire-water.
Those were the days of corn-whiskey, as yellow as gold and as hot as fire, and which
keeled over the drinker at "forty rods." The western men aboard the cars, filled
up with four fingers of this stuff at every stop. Temperance was not to the fore
then and the front streets of railroad towns were given up to saloons of vigorous
titles, and they were black with men from the cattle ranges around. These bandy-legged
bravos whooped 5 and rode races with the cars and even wasted some ammunition in
celebration of the passing express, that scarcely out-speeded their ponies.
Those days are gone. The cowboy is now historic. The open range is now homesteaded
or desert-claimed by the nester. The great meat manufactory has passed from the
range, and is now in the hands of the farmer, who stall-feeds his cattle on the
cultivated roots and grains of the ranches.
With the next morning's sun we saw the faint outline of the Rocky Mountains. We
had been slowly climbing and the elevation was sufficient to lower the horizon line
of this backbone of the continent. I was interested to see with my own eyes those
mountains made famous in my boyhood days by the stories of that writer for boys,
Captain Mayne Reid.
Though the scenes that he so graphically described were in the great range farther
to the south, and on the Mexican border, yet the name, Rocky Mountains, satisfied
me that I was in the neighborhood of those old friends Rube and Geary in Scalp-Hunters,
or The War Trail. We are more or less children and beneath the layers of riper years,
lie recumbent the old imaginations of youth. So I sat and deamed again my boyhood
hours and felt young, though sad, since I could never be a boy again, nor see the
boy companions of those book days. Scattered to the four corners of the globe, some
at sea, some at antipodes, some citified and thus changed; and one old chum gone
away to the far country from which no traveller returns.
What a day that was for the prospector and the cattle man! The sheep-man, so omnipresent
in Australia, was despised and seldom seen in this great West. The cattle owner
hated the sheepman almost as much as he did the Indian. It was the day of gun rule,
for the sheriff and the constable were persons few and far between. The reprobate
was in the land by voice and deed. All the dare-devils and the scum of the East
drifted this way, and were stranded like river debris, in these little, hideous
shanty railroad towns. Ten years earlier these characters ran everything to suit
themselves. The war was still raging, and Uncle Sam's hands full, thus giving the
rowdy and robber full swing to kill and steal. Some of these gentry were still about,
with faces hardened by excess and crime, yet the great majority had gone to the
greater majority via the hangman's rope or the hands of the Vigilante Committee
and the yet quicker way of the sawed off shot-gun.
Next came the canyons. I had always thrilled at that word; it seemed to suggest
roaring waters, Mexican riders and red-men yelling. These canyons were tame, the
surveyors had selected the best grades and the engineers had made a level road for
the rails. We went orderly along these mountain streets, with little noise beyond
the tired asthmatic cough of our over-taxed engines, for we now had two engines
to draw us up these heights. How frail they looked, compared with the immense monsters
of to-day, dun colored and mighty, without brightness or glitter beyond their headlight!
Our engines were gaudy ones, brass bound, bright-painted, polished to the shining
point, showing all their works to the onlooker; the cylinder and driving-rods working
in full view. We halted at last to change cars; it was Ogden, at the junction of
the Union and Central Pacific Railroads.
We saw here, for the first time, the orange-colored cars, which took all over-landers
to California. I was not booked for the real sea, but was bound for the Great Salt
Lake, or Salt Sea, in Utah Territory. As I looked around I missed the green earth
and the wide expanse of the plains. I found that I was among rocks of craggy height,
overlooking little narrow valleys, where irrigation was needed to make things grow.
I was m the far West at last though I knew that there was a farther West, which
some day I meant to see A lazy train soon started with the regulation speed of sixteen
miles to the hour and we slowly passed along the south line of the Salt Lake, a
sea so dead and dreary that it resembled dead sea of that memorable land, ancient
Palestine. Then we came, at last, to the city of the Latter Day Saints.

Chapter II — A Far West City

"Westward the course of Empire takes its way"

Berkley

SALT LAKE CITY was a real city for that day. It was not an electrically wired
and telephonic town, for all those and related conveniences were then unknown to
the multitude. The telephone was yet in its infancy and a curious toy to the initiated
in electricity. It was a city of twenty-five thousand people, mainly Mormons by
religion and emigration from the prairie west, with a thin fringe of others locally
known by way of contrast as Gentiles.
The further strange thing was that most of these adventurous Gentiles were Jews.
The Hebrew is an enterprising shopman and into these new valley communities and
freshly organized mining camps, he had pushed his way to sell his goods,-and he
was making good at his trade as he always does on the frontier.
There was a sprinkling of the South; men of broken fortunes since the close of the
Civil War- who could not endure the changes made by the emancipation of the colored
man, and who preferred to face their poverty in new surroundings. Thus their pride
could not be offended or trampled on by former slaves.
There were men of the cowboy and hunter class with belted waist-line and prominent
gun,- not exactly gunmen, for these were usually of the professional gambler class,
but men who knew how to use a gun and based their claims upon a gun. Then again
the investor and the traveller were there in ever-increasing numbers, nosing out
the golden opportunities always found in a newly-opened country.
For it must be remembered that up to the time of the close of the Civil War, Utah
Territory was a closed section to all save those whose affiliations with the dominant
religion of the region were cordial and sympathetic.
The soldier was then in his camp on the environs of the city but this military host
was resident as a military police, keeper of the peace, and main reason why Uncle
Sam was recognized as overlord of these mountain valleys. Outside of these residents,
the rest-a vast majority-were the peculiar people known among themselves as the
Latter-Day Saints.
As I stood on Main Street, Eastside, that first day in Salt Lake City, I recalled
with a thrill that I had seen that identical spot in a very inferior picture some
eight years before. It was at a show given by Artemus Ward of humorous fame, in
a lecture given by him in the Egyptian Hall, London. This gifted fun-maker was in
the last stages of pulmonary tuberculosis, with hatchet features telling of the
swiftly approaching end. Yet his eyes were bright and his speech alight with humor.
With wit he rehearsed his story of the Mormons, and apologized for the unusual inferiority
of these picture daubs to illustrate Utah scenes. He showed with comical enthusiasm,
"the Main Street, Eastside," which he further explained was "the eastside of Main
Street, Salt Lake City"; and the one story brick block, faithfully pictured, was
the very block and corner where I now stood recalling this former introduction.
This sad-faced funmaker was long gone to his rest, but his laugh seemed to echo
about the locality.
The climate here is genial. Something of the oriental was given to the looks of
the city by the wide streets, lined with mountain ash shade trees, by whose roots
water courses bubbled. Little brooks flowed down each side of the principal streets,
keeping green in the heat of the summer the park-like spaces between the walks and
the roadway proper.
Much good judgment and taste was evidenced in the platting of the city by its first
settlers, and it is the more remarkable since the settlement was made in great privation
and after a long overland journey. Somehow religious enthusiasm refines and exalts
taste and gives an impulse to look well in one's appearances.
The old time poverty of the first days was evidenced by an occasional adobe house
of small and mean build here and there amid edifices of the popular style, clapboarded,
Venetian shuttered, and wide-verandaed buildings of the days before the Civil War.
I was in search of a newly-married couple to whose hospitality I bore letters of
introduction. Dr. Welch and his bride, whose cherry-colored cheeks bespoke her youthfulness,
were settled on Second South Street, near the city's center; and it was not long
before I was seated at their table and enjoying their talk. The Doctor was a soldier
of the late war and bore traces of the privation and strain of that awful strife
between brothers.
Already the seeds of a fatal disease were at work, which within a few years were
to cut him down in the prime of life. War is not alone deadly at the cannon's mouth
but it slays long after the fight. The roll is not complete that gives the long
list of wounded and killed in a battle's campaigns, but in the tragedies of incomplete
lives, as in this case, where a young bride lost her love and hopes soon after marriage.
We knew nothing of this coming shadow as we chatted of Utah's present condition
and future prospects.
While these young people were, in a sense, newcomers themselves, yet their experiences
in this western territory amid Mormon surroundings afforded me much good advice
and direction for my own course of action.
I had made up my mind not to antagonize everything that I did not approve. In this
I departed somewhat from the course pursued by many recent visitors and writers
from the days of Artemus Ward to the year of my own arrival in Salt Lake City.
Of course Artemus Ward was a humorist, using incorrect spelling to throw the spell
of fun over his readers; and I recalled his account of his experience with Utah
wives, as follows:-
"'Cum and hev wives sealed to yu!' said a bunch of strappin' yung wimen tu me, wen
I kim out of ther meetin' house. 'Kum and build up Zion in our midst. We welkum
yu!'
"'No yer don't!' sez I, a tearin' myself loos frum ther buksum arms, 'Nary a seal
frum me!' and I fled the sene, gatherin' up my coat and hat, and left the city,
which is inhabited by the most onprincipuled and dishonust pepul which I ever met.'
"
Now this statement, with others printed in fun, and read wherever Artemus Ward's
books were read, caused great wrath among the Mormons. They had to face many gross
caricatures and misrepresentations of their peculiar doctrines and practices, on
the part of subsequent writers and visitors who too freely followed the example
of the Yankee showman, Artemus Ward.
Every ward of this city of the Saints had its meeting house. The sound and aroma
of religion were more evident than those of education. To go to meeting was the
acme of life and it was truly surprising to see with what zeal the crowd attended
these meetings when nothing but the commonplace occurred.
In those days and in that religious life there was no need of a fulsome and flaming
advertisement to draw the crowd. Just the announcement, and like the flies settling
on the kitchen back-door, the crowd came and settled in their seats to remain to
the last.
It all goes to show what suffering and sacrifice for one's religious faith will
do for the first adherents of a religion. Opposition to the follies of faith seems
to strengthen those follies. We read that the "blood of the martyrs is the seed
of the church," as in the times of the early Christian persecutions.
I was soon seated in a packed row of people in the rear of one of the ward meeting
houses. I was anxious to see these people at one of their everyday services. They
seemed to the eye to be just like common people such as you meet in any church gathering.
Plain, clean, simple and just ordinary bright folks.
They evidently took their religion seriously and not as a social function. I imagine,
as most of them were middle aged, that they felt all they had passed through to
win a home and place for their faith. They evidently regarded the broad-built, and
bearded men, on the platform, as inspired teachers, and listened to some very ordinary
talk quite spell-bound.
Of course there were some young people there; the vacant-eyed youth and the giggling
girl who had only to glance at each other to see something funny in that simple
fact. No religious meeting would be complete without that rear appendage of risible
youthfulness; and the huge joke of pinning John's pants pocket to Eliza's skirt
flounces. Such opportunities for rare and rich calf-love as a church meeting afforded,
could not be overlooked even in such a serious gathering as a Mormon ward house
meeting.
An Apostle spoke at this gathering. He rejoiced in the common name of Smith, and
yet it was almost a royal name in that locality. For was not Joseph Smith the Seer,
Revelator and Leader of these Latter Day Saints?
This apostle was a relative of the martyr of this church who fell the victim of
a Missouri mob of fanatics, who did nothing more by their crime of murder than to
feed the flame of a hated faith. He was a tall, bearded man. Here let me remark
that almost all these men of leadership were apostolically bearded. It seems the
part of all religious reformers or zealots to cultivate long hair, both on the head
and the face. The razor-cleaned manly countenance of to-day was then a sign of infancy
and lack of manhood. The hairy man was the popular man, and no thought was given
to the lack of sanitation of mouth, nose, head, neck or collar in those days when
"germs" were ignored.
Apostle Smith was eloquent in the longwinded, adjectival way of speech. He certainly
was well up in stock phrases and popular platitudes; and brought the handclap now
and then like any political ward speaker. Experiences, scripture, recount of past
persecutions, the claims of their faith and exhortations to live their religion
constituted the subject matter of this address.
They had the long prayer as well as the long speech. The Apostle Snow, a man of
snowy head in keeping with his name, led this devotion. It reminded me of the long
prayer of Pastor Wilkins, in the days of my earliest youth, who prayed about forty
minutes, with rousing shouts at times as if the Lord was inattentive to his words,
while my little legs hung aching from a hard seat; forcibly kept still by a mother's
hand placed on them during this solemnity of the church service.
Another Apostle, Orson Hyde by name as I recall it, then spoke. We were in Zion
and the headquarters was prolific of leaders, and many of the Apostolic twelve and
a multitude of Patriarchs of the Church were always available for what was voluble.
In this last speaker I beheld a typical Mormon as I had imagined him to be. He was
heavy set and "bearded as the pard," rather coarse of feature and more carnal than
spiritual in his general appearance. His heavy voice and dogmatic manner were in
keeping with himself and his subject, as he thundered denunciations of divine wrath
on the Gentiles who were invading this religious city and bringing in their corruptions.
He meant the mining camp morals of the adjacent canyons and gulches; and also the
wicked eastern world which the Mormon had shaken off and which had persecuted him
from city to city. It was the regular religious tirade which makes splendid copy
for the Speaker who talks in meeting to meeting-house people, and which invariably
concluded the proceedings of these ward meetings.
I took a stroll about the town. There were two good hotels. The Walker House, which
was kept for the aliens who came to Zion. That is to say the miner, the millionaire,
the tourist and the gambler. All were well-dressed men who gathered here and defensively
spoke against Mormonism as though this atmosphere of religion was likely to rob
them of their unbelief. It was rather funny to hear so many, whose religion was
homeopathic indeed, talking so religiously. It was in the air then and shows how
psychologically catching the religious idea is even when we do not like it. It spreads
like measles and we have to have it before we can get over it. I laughed at this
ridiculous ridicule. Some of these Mormon-haters indulged in much of this kind of
talk while discussing topics of which they had such small experience.
The other hotel was the Townsend House, a much more ancient structure and the gathering
place of the Mormons and those of Mormon sympathies. Here the talk was of the past
and the persecutions by the people of the States; and certain disloyal and seditious
sayings were very common. The wounds of the past were not healed and the arm of
authority, in the form of Camp Douglas, with its regiment of United States regulars,
was a constant subject of heated speech.
It was very evident that two sides were here, and no fence between them of sufficient
width for a comfortable seat for the non-committal, easygoing man who wanted to
be friendly with all and a foe to none.
The new element, known as Gentile in the phraseology of this region, had its belligerent
news-sheet, the Salt Lake Tribune. It had able men devoted to its sarcastic
bitter gibes at the territory's majority of people. To offset this sheet the Mormon
church had The Deseret News, and it was just as ably edited and just as caustically
worded as its opponent. It was a real treat in comparative hatred to read both these
papers in one morning.

Chapter III — Pilgrims to a Modern Zion

"Far from the worldly crowds and strife, To a visioned city,
they toiled their weary way, Seeking amid towering hills the sequestered life Of
a peculiar people, a holy nation of the latter day."

Bird

JERUSALEM of old, the city of song, sacrifices and tears, the city to which the
Hebrew captives looked from their land of exile on the banks of the Euphrates, had
its modern repetition in this Zion of the Latter Day Saints settled and nestled
in the tops of these Rocky Mountains. The topography of the country is singularly
like that of the Holy Land of history, with the difference that north is changed
to south in its water system.
It has its Dead Sea-the Great Salt Lake- at the north end of this valley and its
divide, connecting by a river-the Jordan-flowing out of it and receiving canyon
streams on its way south, with the Sea of Galilee-Utah Lake-a fresh water sheet
supplied from the springs in the Wa-satch Mountains. Of course there is no Tyre
and Zidon, no Joppa and Mount Carmel overlooking the Sea, since this is an inland
country far from the ocean. But here are fertile plains and warm valleys, watered
by bubbling brooks; here is a land, under the touch of man's hand, that flows with
milk and honey.
No wonder then, that these religious enthusiasts marshalled into a religious host
by Joseph Smith, with captains like Brigham Young and Herber C. Kimball; such exhorters
and teachers as Orson Pratt and Lorenzo Snow, full to the extent of human capacity
with "zeal not according to knowledge," should see in this region, secure by distance
and the hills from persecutors, the Promised Land.
It did not take very much imagination, so often found joined to enthusiasm, on the
part of these saints of the Latter Day to see in themselves a modern Israel coming
forth out of a modern Egypt-such as the slave-making states of Tennessee, Kentucky
and Missouri-and, under a new Urim and Thummim vested in their priests and leaders,
to make the desert pilgrimage into the land of promise and peace.
Only a little warm exhortation, and it was never wanting, was needed to strengthen
this fancy into fact.
Originating in New York State, in Wayne County, the site of the memorable hill Cumorah,
where Joseph Smith received his revelation by vision and found the historic plates
of a past prophet-Mormon-and a defunct people-the Lamanites-this new faith and its
following passed with the migratory spirit of the '40's to Nauvoo, Illinois, in
the black prairie belt. Soon their peculiar faith made them obnoxious to their neighbors
of narrow vision and bigoted belief, so out of their scarcely warmed nest they had
to go yet farther west beyond the great river, the Mississippi. They put down their
stakes a third time in Missouri, a state just then settling with a mixed population
from both the South and the North.
Since these Mormons-for such they were now called by the general community-were
"Come-Outers" and were separate from their neighbors, they became first unpopular,
then obnoxious to those who differed from them. It must be remembered that the '40's
were the years of religious divisions and debates. People loved to argue about shibboleths
of religion, even to fighting out their differences.
This fighting was of course generally verbal and ended in another new bisection
of religion- some sect of a sect cut off from the parent body. The itinerant preachers
who did much good in their rough way with a rough people amid rude surroundings,
loved to verbally fight exponents of other shades of opinion.
They found fine stuff for a fight in these "pestilent Mormons." More especially
as this peculiar practice of polygamy set these new religionists on the hill of
observation and criticism. Here was a fine chance to show up the enemy of orthodoxy,
and all the sons of Boanerges-sons of thunder in the pulpit-fulminated at the Latter
Day Saints.
Soon this sort of preaching bore its expected fruit. Animosity and hatred were developed
and this give and take often ended in blows at these debates and denunciations.
We are not excusing the Mormon leaders or people. They were set in their ways and
posed as martyrs of faith. Their undeniable zeal and sincerity won many a female
convert from the homes of other faiths, and when such women became embosomed in
the Mormon church and the polygamous consorts of some preacher, elder or bishop
of this new faith, then the rancor reached its climax in riot.
I do not go into the details of history on this Subject. Books ad nauseam
have been written on the subject pro and con. The Mormon side has been voluminously
voiced by good recorders and recounters, while the other side has met it with equal
heat and greater volume.
Truth is not entirely on either side and both sides made a sorry exhibition of the
so-called religion of peace and purity. We know the arrest of the two Smiths-Joseph
and Hyrum-ended in the jail being besieged by an angry host of Missourians, who
shot down the two brothers on the jail steps and thus ended their leadership of
this new-born faith.
Justice could not be had in such a day and place. Men and women were too intense
and narrow of temper to give place to anything but prejudice. Out again the Mormons
had to come from their settlements and homes, and then followed what the Dutch would
call the "Great Trek."
Brigham Young, a man of powerful frame and forceful mind, stepped into the shoes
vacated by the dead Seer. With lieutenants of this same shrewd Yankee stock, for
he was a Vermonter and they were mostly from down East states, he organized these
people into a marching brigade to cross the great American Desert to the Rocky Mountains,
there to find a home for them all in a new promised land.
In 1848, the first band set out, with ox wagons and a few horses, to make the long
journey that we now swiftly cover in forty-eight hours in a pullman. Innumerable
creeks and sloughs to cross, after passing the great Missouri, never ending plains,
like those of Kansas, Nebraska and Wyoming, constituted the highway of this host.
The Indian, wild and in war paint, was abroad, for he had been greatly nettled and
annoyed by the frontier hunter and trapper of those rough days, trespassing on his
happy hunting grounds. The bison roamed in vast herds, and the prairie fires swept
to the horizon through the long grass of these wild fields of pasture.
But these men and women, of faith, girded up their loins and strapped on their guns,
their all housed in the prairie schooner wagons under the hoops and canvas covers;
with a "haw" and "gee," they started out with the spirit of adventure in their eyes
and the zeal of their religion in their hearts. Oh! the wild ride that they made
through these unknown wastes of land. They fought the Indians at the fords, the
savage beasts at night, the fires in the fall when the herbage was dry as tinder;
they suffered the sickness that accompanied insufficient food and poor sanitation
in camps, when they had to make long rests for their cattle to recoup.
They had started too late in July for so long a journey, and recked not of the early
winter of the mountains to which they journeyed.
This has been the fault of most migrations,- a late start,-and insufficient knowledge
of the length of the way. Oh! they were weary, more weary than the people of Israel
in the desert of Sinai, who wearied of the length of the way as recounted in the
Scripture. Israel had a Presence in the cloud by day and in the fire by night, and
thus they said to themselves, in that day, "If the Lord be for us, who can be against
us?" An infallible guide did not call these Mormons to halt and make camp.
Their leaders were known as prophets, priests and elders; but they were fallible
men, not guides familiar with the plains and the seasons. So winter caught them,
weak from the long trek and want of food, cattle gaunt, or gone to dust on the road
far back.
Many lay down to die by the way, and many a little mound spoke of the children's
resting place after the mother's arm had to give them up. Still their faith flowed
on although their blood grew thin and their knees were feeble as they pushed forward.
Through the canyons they passed into the valleys of the Rocky Mountains,
Brigham Young with a few others pressed ahead looking for the place that he claimed
he had seen in vision and which was to be their destined home and the promised land
of peace and plenty.
This little scouting party came out of the mountains just above where the City of
Salt Lake now stands. They stood upon the hill,-afterwards the site of Camp Douglas
and the post of authority of Uncle Sam during territorial days,-and saw before them
the Salt Sea, the valley widely stretching south, the river flowing to the limit
of their vision through the divide which hid yet another and greater valley.
"Here is the place that the Lord has chosen for this people!"
It was Brigham Young's voice and the others bowed in assent as to the voice of a
prophet.
Thus they came to their seat in the tops of the mountains, and from this center
they spread out to occupy any ground that had water tributary to it,-for this was
a land where irrigation was necessary.
Other divisions of the Mormon host followed the next season; and soon this waste
was peopled with a race fitted to endure hardships such as face all pioneers.
The over-zeal of the leaders, however, a little later on led to a fatal mistake.
The order went out to the rest of the waiting people on the banks of the Missouri,
not to provide themselves with wagons and oxen, but to content themselves with two-wheeled
push-carts in which they were to stow their goods; to come on thus in faith, and
the Lord would provide. Fine sounding words to the faithful, but foolish council
to the remnant of these people, eager for their earthly Zion. Of course they started
and at first did well; but the length of the way was too much for the strength of
the carts and those who pushed and pulled them.
It is wonderful how this multitude of men, women and children got so far. They had
walked to the canyons of the Rockies late in the fall season,-for it was slow work
going this way by foot. Then the sudden cold caught them and the snows covered them.
They fell down as they halted for the night and many were still down to stay, when
the dim morning light pierced the falling snow flakes.
The others struggled on to drop as their fellows before them, the snow their winding
sheet. A few hardy ones struggled through the drifted passes and like ghosts appeared
in the city of the Saints with cries:-
"They are dying! Come with food and help!"
The relief went out with hope, but it was a hope not realized; only an expectation
without fruitage.
They found the train of way-worn pilgrims but they had all passed on to another
life.
Faith has its triumphs, but also its tragedies. Faith can overcome mountains, but
faith can fall in the climbing; like all other human things, faith has its failures.
No matter what the directors of this push cart expedition believed possible in the
interests of faith, no matter what the obedient host did in trying to obtain success
through faith, the impossible blocked the way and this mighty pilgrimage of faith
ended in a fiasco.

Chapter IV — Church, State and Camp

"He sees that this great roundabout, The world, with all its
motley rout, Church, army, physic, law, Its customs and its businesses-"

Cowper

THE ecclesiastical is first in evidence in this modern city of the saints. This
you would expect in view of its earlier history and because of its existence as
a religious center.
"Where is the Beehive?" I ask in the innocence of my tenderfoot knowledge. You see
I had been told by some joker that the principal church building was so called because
it was always crowded like a hive, when the bees are busy honey making.
Certainly at the times of meeting, the Tabernacle, for so the Mormons called the
central place of worship in their accustomed Old Testament phraseology, was like
a hive of bees, for it fairly swarmed with people. In those days, and in that place
their was no dearth of attendants and few empty seats. There was nothing original
or spec-tacular to draw the crowd beyond the names of the celebrated Mormon leaders.
Their services were, in themselves, rather plain and commonplace.
I found my way, guided by the stream of common looking people, to the entrance of
the Tabernacle. It was no tent or temporary structure like those reared by special
collections to house evangelists on revival occasions. This was a solidly built
structure and, because of its peculiar shape, was called by the outsider "the Soup
Tureen."
It did look like one on a very large scale, inverted so the bottom was the top with
the cover removed. On stubby pillars, with low walls, a huge oblong dome covered
a generous space, making an immense interior under one roof. It was perfect in its
acoustics. You could almost hear a pin drop if silence prevailed.
An immense organ, erected at the end and lifted high up to near the roof, made the
giant space resonant with musical sounds. A genius played it the day I was there.
It throbbed and sobbed as though voicing the woes and throes through which these
people had found their way to this mountain land of theirs.
A choir as large as an ordinary church audience sang well during the occasions for
song. The audience itself was worthy of the place and filled all its twelve thousand
seats with a mixed multitude of men, women, and children. The last were decidedly
visible and sometimes audible. There was no church finery in dress but, in place
of the usual "go-to-meeting" garments, was the evident interest on the faces of
almost every one present. There was just one phrase of scripture that came into
my mind unsolicited as I looked at the long lines of faces directed one way.
"All these have come out of great tribulation." Whatever their faith and its faults
they had suffered for it, and having paid in tears a goodly price for what they
had obtained, they seemed by their earnest gaze at the leaders who spoke to them
to prize it seriously.
The speaking was by many and from unique Pulpits. Below the organ and choir, a large
space was given over to tiers of seats in a wide semicircular form. These were occupied
by the Seventy and the Apostles of the church.
This was no one-man pulpit. Furthermore each of these tiers of seats had its pulpit
in the exact center of the tier; so from above down there were these pulpit-tribunes
in line with each other and facing the center aisle of the Tabernacle.
The lower tier and pulpit was for the Apostles and the President or Revelator of
the church. In this case it was Brigham Young. I heard several speak from these
tribunes of different tiers. This speaking was interspersed with choir and congregational
singing. That of the choir was excellent in voice and execution. That of the people
was vociferous but commonplace. The speaking was of the same order as the sinking,
and was full of platitudes and rehearsals of the sufferings of these people at the
hands of the outsider. There was, of course, some ground for what they said and
the speakers made the most of it to a very sympathetic audience.
But I came to see and hear Brigham Young, whose name to me was synonymous with Mor-monism.
My wish was gratified, for this leader was present. He was a big man in head, face
and frame. Full-bearded like most Mormon elders, he poised well as a leader, and
looked at ease as he sat in the lower tier with the Apostles. He rose to speak at
last and stepped into the pulpit-tribune of the apostolic tier, and his voice and
diction were that of a master of assemblies.
A fine presence and forceful speech riveted the attention of all, but the subject
matter was a disappointment. Nothing out of the ordinary was uttered. He upbraided
"his saints" like a Jeremiah or an Isaiah of the Jews, and yet he did not fail occasionally
to insert a modicum of praise.
"You are not too good! Not as good as you ought to be! But you are better than the
best that these Gentiles can produce!" Again and again he would say, "Copy not their
ways, neither speak their words; their oaths and foulness. Follow my advice and
live your religion."
It struck me on hearing all this parade of speech, in these long services, that
the whole of Mormon church worship was a matter of "too much speaking." It was speech
gone to seed. The flower, perfume and color, was fled as a summertime past, and
the husks of the harvest were only left. I had seen the very opposite of this in
religious conventions, where speech was forgotten in intonations, invocations and
reverberations of ceremonial pomp. So goes the pendulum or religious custom, from
one extreme to another. They observed a very democratic communion service. Bread
and water; for here the wine was turned to water. All were given these emblems of
communion. Even the little children and babes drank out of the glasses, which were
filled constantly from white stone pitchers, passed along by a band of ushers. We,
too, who were "outsiders" and Gentiles were generously included in this religious
repast. Of course the bread was but a morsel and the water but a swallow, but there
was no "fencing of tables," after the manner of those old Covenanters, who fought
for their faith in troubled Scotland.
With the final anthem and last words, the great audience swarmed out of this hive
of humanity, like the bees after flowers. We went out after fresh air and relief.
For I heard many a sound, like a sigh of satisfaction, when the service was over
and outdoors was a possibility. The streets adjacent were like city sidewalks during
showtime, as this great crowd went homeward.
I saw another side of this city's life the next day. I was introduced by Dr. Welch
to Governor Emery, who represented the Powers that Be at Washington, D. C., and
not the powers that were in Mormondom. He and Judge Beatty were together and I heard
some words, in course of a brief interview, which showed that the Federal authorities
were non-sympathetic, if not antagonistic, to the majority of the people of this
country. Of course they were appointees of the president and depended not on this
locality for their positions. They evidently were like the Missourians of a previous
generation, as they were in need of "being shown" whether any good thing could come
out of such a thing as a modern Zion. They discounted the over-zeal of the Latter
Day Saints, and doubted their loyalty to the Union; more especially as most Mormons
voted the democratic ticket, a ticket which to all good republicans of those reconstruction
days, was almost the same as sympathy with secession.
The bitterness of the Civil War was yet voiced in the talk of most of these civil
servants, who could not forget the late strife.
Utah had its Mormon legion which made Brigham Young and the Hierarchy of the church
independent of, if not opposed to, the Union. I found, and did not wonder much at
it, that the representatives of the Federal Government all felt as though they were
living in hostile territory.
I heard Governor Emery speak at a meeting to promote higher education in the Territory.
This was at the opening of a collegiate institution in Salt Lake City. What he said
was well said, and so it ought to have been since he was a very long time in saying
a very little. He spoke with a deliberation that was almost painful to one's patience,
and with a caution that outdid any Scot I ever heard speak on a crisis: but he spoke
with decision and most earnestly to the effect that a new order of intellectual
teaching must be pushed in the Territory if it was to advance and be worthy of the
future times. He said the war of swords was over but the war of words had yet to
be fought and settled, before true republican freedom could dominate the offices
of the Territory. He did not wave a bloody-shirt, as some of the political men of
that day were wont to do, but he did point several times to the evidence of Uncle
Sam's presence in the camp at Fort Douglas.
That speech led me to make a visit to the Fort on the next day, where the regiment
of blue soldiers were stationed.
Down in the city I found a guardhouse and a sentry stationed there, who paced back
and forth with rifle and fixed bayonet. He was a mere boy in the sky-blue uniform
and forage cap of the days of the sixties. This guardhouse held a half dozen men
in telegraphic communication with the Fort on the bench land, overlooking the city
to the north. This guardhouse was well down in the city on First South Street, and
in full view of the Amelia palace-Brigham Young's principal home -the Tithing House
of Zion Co-operative Mercantile Institution, and the Tabernacle.
There is no need to describe Camp Douglas; it was just like any ordinary military
headquarters to be found in the West during this period. Parked artillery with frowning
guns were pointed Zionward. There were such guns as they then had, but mere pop-guns
in comparison with the modern scientific weapons of the twentieth century. Yet these
guns over-awed Zion and were meant to do so.
Seditious speech had been common on the streets of this mountain city a few years
previous, when the people were restless under the newfelt pressure of the Federal
and victorious Republic. Utah had come in line with Texas, California, Arizona and
such outlying regions, which were so hard to reach because remote from the seat
of government. Moreover many hostile Indians roamed between the middle settled West
and the plains and mountains neighboring to Salt Lake City. In the days when the
Mormons had their own militia it was not an uncommon remark, in everyday talk, to
hear such words as these:
"We can whip these U-nited States if they git too interferin'."
So I was not surprised, when I chatted with the boys in blue, to hear one of them
say, as he patted the black muzzle of a big gun:
"Say, Doc, these little fellers are trained onto that old soup-tureen, you visited
the other day." Said another:
"Gosh! wot a hole for the daylight we could let into its roof."
It never so happened that such extremities were necessary, but there were times
when feeling and faction ran very high. When a spark might have led to a blaze,
which would have started a small internal war, much worse and more bloody than any
Indian raid.

Chapter V — The Co-Operative Industry of Utah

"How doth the little busy bee Improve each shining hour, And
gather honey all the day From every opening flower"

Watts

VERY suggestive of the Mormon view of industry and business are the two symbols
chosen to represent the co-operation of the people in making the desert into a garden,
and that garden to bloom like a rose. I use that term as it was a favorite expression
in those formative days by all the Mormon settlers with whom I talked about their
business lives.
For these people were a very practical people. They were enthusiasts in their religion,
but never dreamers, monks, nuns, and transcendentalists like so many of the earliest
enthusiasts of religious history.
These symbols were two: a hive and an eye. The hive was a bee-hive of platted straw
with conical top; and the eye was a single eye within a circular ring, wide open
and viewing you as you regarded it. What did these symbols mean? The first meant
the industry of the busy bee- making sweets out of the wild flowers and desert plants
so that they became of commercial value.
So the Saints were makers of values, through their industry, as they toiled on the
land allotted to them, and watering it by furrows so that the desert should bring
forth and bear a hundred fold.
The second symbol meant that the eye of the Lord, which seeth single and true, was
on them always as they worked; and they must deal fairly one with the other, neither
cheating nor defrauding their fellow man. This was where their religion stepped
in to keep straight their industry. For want of it now-a-days, business is much
like the shark's life, existing to bite one another.
You can imagine the effect of these ideas, voiced by the symbols on the front of
every store in Mormondom. These suggestions of industry and probity are excellent
and sufficient. Absorbed as they were in time by the subconscious mind of a generation
of a people, the effect was a toiling busy crowd at work on the land, the foundation
of any and every commerce. Every man, woman and child was a worker, with no drones
or bums allowed.
Of course they raised produce, of course they needed warehouses, stores, and selling
markets; and so arose the Institution which made business a unit, and was the first
Trust formed in the Territories-Zion's Co-operative Mercantile Institution.
The institution was Zion's and thus the probity suggested by the watchful eye of
God was over all its transactions. In fact, we find these Latter Day Saints actually
fulfilling, to their ability, the old-time cry of the Jewish prophet Micah-"Do justly,
love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God."
They made some bad breaks in this good order of life at times, as all do who are
even of the best people, and we would be sour curmudgeons, indeed, if we allowed
a dislike for some of their teachings and some of their practices to blind us to
the hearty effort, on their part, to be just in their business relations as well
as good in their religious life.
It certainly was a stroke of genius, when the idea of God being a witness to every
business dealing was suggested by the "Onlooking Eye"; associated with the "Honeykeeping
Hive," on the front of their places of business in city, town and hamlet, and even
in the outlying country store.
Of course being simply humans, they slipped a cog in this wheel of commerce. This
great cooperative store, handling the business of all workers, tended to become
a trust; to object to competition; to make arbitrary rules and penalties for those
obnoxious to the managers and leaders.
Where will you find men, who are fit for leaders, who do not soon boss, instead
of simply directing, their employees and their customers?
I knew many cases where men who were lax in their religion were punished by these
business stores, in being "boycotted," so they could not sell their goods or buy
the commodities they required.
With all its faults this co-operation was a living business spine to carry business
nerve and force to every section of the territory, and build up both its products
and its trade.
The main plant of this great business house was in Salt Lake City, but each town
had its store, and at the stores everything could be sold that was produced in the
country and was in a saleable condition, and everything from a needle to a steam
engine could be bought if wanted. It could be paid for in money or in kind.
At first it was all trade, like that of the early settler in the East and west of
the Mississippi.
But industry breeds wealth and so it was not long before the sod houses gave way
to clapboarded structures in the city, and to adobe houses-sunbaked brick-in the
towns and countryside.
It was a day of one price, and since there was but one business house, there was
no opposition. That house representing the interests of the people and only charging
a fair profit on the time and capital invested, was popular to the last degree.
There was no effort nor desire to build up a millionaire institution or make a great
fortune for any individual.
Of course since there were some very shrewd Yankees among the leaders of the church,
it follows that they made the best of their opportunities when trading through this
mercantile house, and put things so that they personally profited by their inside
knowledge of market prices.
Still there was lacking the graft of modern business and the insane desire, bred
by such men as Gould and his confreres of that day in the East, through their speculations,
to smash financially every competitor in their own line of operations. It was before
the days of millionaires and trusts but, even then, the shadows of these business
evils were overhanging the land.
This co-operative business house gave the church a chance to execute a little side
business of its own.
Since it handled nearly all the products raised by the people, and since these people
had obligated themselves to pay a tithe or tenth to the church, here was the chance
to collect these dues in regular Old Testament fashion.
Now the church of the Latter Day Saints is nothing if it is not obedient to the
Old Testament. This we shall presently see when we consider its teachings and its
theology. While a modern expression of religion, yet that religion is stamped with
the old patterns of Jewish days, and so the tithe or tenth part of one's income
became the scale of giving, and so through these produce stores the church collected
its tithes and filled its ecclesiastical coffers.
Religion is nothing if it does not take up a collection. The old story is in point,
that tells of a shipwrecked crew, afloat in the south seas, in the ship's long-boat.
A pitiless sun and but few showers, with scant rations saved from the wreck, soon
brought the hardened crew to a religious mellowness; and some one urged a religious
service to propitiate the Power of Heaven in their distress. As none could pray,
and there was no preacher aboard the boat, and moreover their singing powers were
limited to sailor shanties, for none remembered their childhood hymns; this religious
service consisted in taking up a collection by passing the hat. No sailor failed
to remember that function of a religious service, and since it was all they could
do, they did that one thing. They felt better after this collection since they thought
the Lord would look after-"Poor Jack," since he had looked after the interests of
the Lord's church.
I do not mean to say that this ideal church finance was always carried out. There
are too many kickers in every kind of thing of human management. But a lot of tithing
came to hand by way of the Co-op, as it was called for short, and many were the
sneers of outsiders as they spoke of this "cinch" the church had on the industry
of the land.
"Who wouldn't be a leader, and even a Mormon, with such fat pickings coming in from
the fields?"
Such resources were stable, and unlike the voluntary offerings, which support the
usual ecclesiastical efforts of the denominations. So Zion could build stores, schools,
ward houses and meeting places, until finally a temple was built that took forty
years to finish.

Chapter VI — The Valley Settlements

"The desert shall rejoice and blossom like a rose."

Bible

A STRING of valleys, rich of soil, but scant of water, stretched from north to
south in this territory from Salt Lake City to Saint George. It was the policy of
these people to occupy the land in settlements similar to those of the French Canadians.
No doubt the idea was born of the observations, made in earlier days, by the Mormon
leaders who were mostly from the New England States. They were probably visitors,
at times, across the border from New Hampshire or Vermont, and so knew how the French
habitant was housed in villages with their farms farther afield. To their labor
they went forth in the morning, to return, at the call of the "Angelus," from their
fields to their settlement-firesides at night.
This made for social life, and suited well the gregarious and garrulous genius of
the French race stock that settled that eastern portion of the great Canadian Dominion.
It did more. It gave the religious leader and teacher, the priest of the Roman Church,
the power and opportunity to reach, by ready speech, the people whose easy assembling
was possible, after work hours, since they were village residents.
There were no solitary farmhouses, often out of sight of a neighbor, and so out
of mind, touch and sympathy; such as we see on the wide plains of the Dakotas of
the North-West; or could have seen, in those early days, on the prairies of Illinois
or the woodlands of Indiana or Ohio.
So these Utah settlers occupied town and hamlets, and the meeting house, the center
of its life, was always well filled by adjacent residents. By every water course,
small or large, near or distant, from the hills which supplied these rills, these
settlements were formed. Each was fully organized and often incorporated, having
mayor, council, wards; like any city.
The lands adjacent were divided up among the people so that each family head, and
those acting as heads of or for families, could have the proverbial forty acres
and a mule, a sufficient start in life on the soil. How sensible, stable, and socialistic
this was, is seen in the contentment and progress of these settlers from the first
days. Right speedily the ground tickled with the hoe, laughed with a harvest, everywhere
that the lavish waters of the towering Wasatch or Orquirreh Ranges could be diverted.
The silver streams of embryo wealth to a desert-land came, in torrents, down the
rough granite studded canyons, to waste their life giving power by falling into
the Utah Jordan, and then rolling south into Utah Lake, the modern Sea of Galilee
with towns around its watery shores.
But industry harnessed these waters as the Eastern settlers did their mill-streams
by dams, to make them commercially profitable and powerful. So the Mormon people
by canals cut to suit the contour of the land brought water to every little patch
of arable soil. The fair clime and genial sun of Utah, mountain-sheltered from the
Borean blasts that swept the prairie wastes to the west, made farming both a delight
and a success.
I have never seen finer wheat than the symmetrical, golden kernels of grain in the
Utah Valley. And the yield was most generous when properly watered; forty and fifty
bushels being common. What toothsome loaves the housewives made from this wheat,
milled by Utah's Cooperative Institution.
The fruit of these settlements was on a par with the grain. Peaches, especially,
were finely-flavored and were generally raised. Almost every sloping shed-roof,
in the season, was covered with cut peaches drying in the sun, for the market at
home and abroad. In fact, these people, who knew the keen bite of poverty for the
few first years, soon had all that the mouth and stomach asked for, in the way of
varied foods.
Cattle, too, well-fed, throve and helped the dairy to nourish, and the meat market
to be well supplied.
I think that you can see the character and appearance of these settlements. The
borders of each incorporated town touched those of the succeeding one, as you travelled
south, so in one sense you were never out of town.
This applied to the good land districts above. Of course there was much benchland,
sagebrush areas, for which water could not be procured, being either too expensive
to grade to the land in need, or there was not sufficient dependable water to be
had to warrant the laying out of a settlement. So Utah still had its waste places,
and the silences belonging to all waste places.
These valley settlements began around the Great Salt Lake, the main city of the
Saints being the principal one. They then spread generally southward, over the divides
separating these valleys of the mountains and so continued to the limit of the territory
where it slipped over the rim of a basin, to lower altitudes, in northern Arizona,
at St. George.
At this latter and remote settlement, there was a sanitarium of climate, whose soft
mildness in winter made it a resort for those who could afford the expense of a
long stage trip in search of a change of season and the restoration of broken health.
I rode about the towns that fringed the shores of Utah Lake and as I looked at its
waters, quiet now, and the next hour swept by the torrential winds that came out
of Spanish Fork Canyon as though shot from a high-powered gigantic air-gun, I thought
of the blue Sea of Galilee, and the tempestuous night passage by Christ and his
disciples.
Down the long stretch from Payson, the town at the south end of this fresh water
inland sea, to Nephi beneath the lofty crest and ancient snows of Mount Nebo, overlooking
its quiet streets, one travels through little settlements of the types, which I
have already described; occupied by a class of small farmers, all doing well, but
not one of them rich.
The territory of my day was a land of little-landers and small fortunes; the capitalist
was nosing in, but he was a gentile, or a foreign investor, who was after mines
and commodities, and fought shy of fanning and soil investments.
Mount Nebo, whose height was unclimbed by any Utah prophet, was the dividing range
that intervened between the settlements of San Pete Valley, filled with Scandinavian
settlers, and the main valley by Parowan, down which the railroad of this modern
age passes on its way from Salt Lake to Los Angeles.
I left the railroad at a little south of Payson, and from thence all my travelling
was by stage or canvas covered wagon, or on the broncho of that region.
I found the people homely, happy in their way, self-satisfied as to their sainthood
and church life, but quite unintellectual. I do not mean that they were more ignorant
than the usual rural population of the West of that day; they had a lot of homely
wisdom and quaint sayings, with the usual horse-trading cuteness and wit; but as
to thinking for themselves they were not remarkable, for like many a church folk
in many a clime, they left all their thinking for the professional thinkers and
creed makers; and so like sheep, satisfied with their shepherds, they listened to
the voice of their authorities and acquiesced in all their demands.
I have sat in many a cosy parlor, with the visitor's chair in evidence, and enjoyed
the hospitality and good will of industrious house-wives. I saw very little evidence
of married unhappiness, or of a pronounced polygamy. Of course it was there, and
some of the homesteads gave ocular evidence of plural wifehood with separate doors
and windows of section-made adobe houses visible from the roadside.
The children were barefooted, browned, and healthy. They were wild-eyed and shy
when questioned by a stranger, but very little more so than those of any rural people
who see but little of the outside bustling world of commerce.
Surely these settlements, utilizing these broad acres, otherwise idle, were a better
product, despite these peculiarities, than a waste of sage and sand given over to
hordes of coyotes, the prowling bear and wildcat.

Chapter VII — A Long Ride Through Utah Valley

"It were a journey like the path to Heaven,
To help you find them."

Milton

IT was the midsummer of 1876, when I was invited to take a long distance drive
through these Mormon settlements, with a missionary.
He was not a Mormon missionary, however, but a representative of an orthodox Protestant
denomination; several such religious bodies were seeking a foothold for school and
church in this territory.
In a certain sense we were doing scout duty for a Mission Board in New York City.
As Moses of old sent spies into the land on the other side of Jordan of Scripture,
so this Board sent its representatives to spy out this Promised Land, not from Dan
to Beersheba, but from Ogden to Mount Pleasant.
We were almost boys in spirit, and not far removed in years, so this task appealed
to us as a sort of adventure mixed with duty imposed.
We did not go afoot but drove a one-horse wagonette having for its load two dozen
school desks and seats for an incipient academy of elementary grade. The hope for
the educational up-lift of a miseducated Utah.
This to some, in these now liberal days, may seem a bigoted endeavor and a youthful
assumption of a capacity to instruct others; but it, nevertheless, was the outcome
of the wise and weighty council of older men who accepted our offer as adventurers
in this Pioneer Mission in San Pete Valley.
It was not then given us to see the long, hard grind of work and duty to establish
this educational plant, so we went cheerfully south, like sailors shipping for a
distant port.
The pull for one lone horse, of these seats for future scholars, to say nothing
of a box of heavy books, was unfair when we came to see the sand-ridges in our way
on the roads over the valley divides. It was get out and push behind while the horse
panted in front.
If we had been better horse-jockeys, we would have insisted on a team when we left
the city; but our commercial and theoretical well-wishers and providers, in their
scholarly incapacity as mountain travellers, insisted that one horse was ample.
Well, we crawled along, and whiled away the time with some healthy and also some
unhealthy discussions of religious questions in comparative theology. We were like
most of the young men, quick to discuss deep problems, and rushed in with our logic
on subjects where "Angels feared to tread."
Both warmed in body from our cart-pushings, and in mind from our arguments, we passed
the heat of the day and the divide of land, so that at the sunset we saw no longer
the Salt Lake to the north, but the sea of fresh water to the south; Lake Utah colored
by the last rays of light.
My companion was a Mac, one of the numerous Macs, whose forebears came from Scotland,
and he lived up to his clan as "Varra creetical" in discussions. Now it is very
hard to overcome a Scot in argument and so I had the worst of it just then. My companion
wore a thin smile of victory and conceit at his superior intellectual prowess, more
especially as he prided himself on the possession, not only of a B.A. and B.D.,
but an M.A. degree, whereas I had not quite finished college life when I had to
mix with the world.
But I had rubbed edges with that world; had been tutored by city stock-brokers and
had been
a photographer, when a man had to be not only an artist but a chemist, to ply his
trade; all this before I received my teaching degree. So I had my companion when
it came to business things, and pushed him hard to the wall over this "scrub horse"
that he had been tricked into by a trader; and the awful load that his ignorance
of teaming had put into the wagonette for so long a drive.
Crossing a creek about twelve miles on our way, the strain was too much for the
harness and "crack" went one of the tugs.
Here I gave my chum a little verbal rub on the unwisdom of cheap harnesses. I rubbed
it farther in during the hour we spent in mending the leather with old rope; as
I informed him that no Western man ever travelled far without a coil of buckskin
to meet such disasters as had overtaken us. He learned a great deal about the sorrows
of a tenderfoot before he was through with the trip, and his harness, often repaired,
resembled some of those rare bargains offered to the green-hand in junk stores.
The point of the mountain, seen all day from our Salt Lake City start, ended our
up-grade pull, and now down-grade we went to our first stopping place. We were high
enough to overlook the Jordan river, flowing well within its banks; for this Utah
Jordan never overflows them to swell its waters like its Palestinian brother-river.
We could see the haze over the Great Lake north, and the forming film of vapor over
the smaller lake south of us, where Lehi and American Fork, two Mormon settlements,
showed up their dry streets and the green fields adjacent.
"Well, Mac! do we camp when we reach the borders of that lake?" I asked, fully supposing
that he wanted to do the correct thing and sleep under the sky.
"We'll not need to camp. We will make Lehi soon, and there's a chance for a room
for us, and a corral for the horse."
"Any hotels in these towns?" I asked, for he had been this way before by road.
"None: but I know a Mormon family. The elder will take in travellers, if he likes
their looks, and they don't catch him too much unawares." We carried a camp outfit,
but did not wish to trench on our supplies, if possible, so early in the journey.
The tired horse, that had done wonders from any point of view, but was dubbed a
lazy brute by Mac, pulled us slowly into the distant town, and along its adobe-lined
streets.
"That is a long-drawn-out one?" I said, pointing to a low-built house of sun-dried
brick, "five doors and five windows all in a line."
"Yes," said Mac, "that is an indication of plural marriage. Each door and window
is in a separate section. The patriarch, who lives there, has five wives."
At last we stopped before a house. Our tired horse sighed as though his heart would
break with relief. But we were to face disappointment.
"No room for travellers this night," said the elder when Mac accosted him. I saw
by the man's eye that he disapproved of us and our errand, although he looked with
pity on our tired horse. He pointed south.
"You can make American Fork in three miles."
It happened that we entered this new town in the right place for us. A rather larger
adobe than usual, was lighted up and the owner agreed to shelter us for the night
by our paying a good stiff fee.
I gave the horse a good feed and rubbed him down before I went in to wash and eat.
Our host was a hearty old man, and one of the early converts from Wales. He had
prospered in lands and goods, and was loud in his praise of this practical religion.
I cannot say much for his table manner; for he ate with dirty hands, and used them
twice to break up lumps of sugar in the bowl. The table-ware was primitive, indeed,
but the cloth was clean and the meal well cooked by his energetic daughter.
"Sugar was a very scarce article in my early days here, and I don't like to see
it wasted."
He was a widower, but no polygamist. He was a sample of the earnest, but ignorant
peasant class of the old world who had greatly improved their material welfare by
this change of country and faith.
Mac met a horse trader at the table, and I was highly entertained by their efforts
to make a swap. The trader's animal was a little worse blown than Mac's, but after
all he was not the easy mark that he was supposed to be, and he kept his horse.
We pulled out the next morning somewhat refreshed but hauling the same full load.
We passed over dry creeks, sand ridges, and through the town of Battle Creek; the
site of an early fight; through Provo, the county seat, to Spring-ville, the most
progressive of all these valley settlements.
A knife-edged lofty ridge, Mount Aspinwall, overlooked us all the way on the east,
while the lake glittered in the sun, six miles distant on the west. Down the canyons
of this range at times the winds swept with sudden blasts, and crossing the lake,
churned its waters into a fury. The breezes were refreshing since they blew across
the road and not along it. We saw many pretty spots of green, such as fields of
wheat, nearly ripe, alfalfa patches of emerald hue and thrifty peach and prune orchards.
We carried off, from one farm a bale of alfalfa, and a generous sample of early
fruit.
Just one year later, I rode through this region on a long horseback journey, and
all the green was gone although it was yet early summer. The locusts were in the
land. They had come in such clouds as to darken the day, and with such hearty appetites
that even the bark on the orchard trees was consumed before they left. Their hatching
ground was in mountainous Idaho, on the north, and periodically they passed out,
leaving destruction in their track. Even a piece of green-straw matting hung on
a fence to air and dry, went down their ready throats.
While in Springville, we prospected for a site in the interests of a liberal school.
We had been invited to do so by some of the local men of influence. There was a
desire for something new in this progressive town at that time, and it bore fruit
three years later in a well built brick edifice for school and mission work. It
was later known as the Hungerford Academy, under the auspices of the Presbyterian
Mission Board. It was put in charge of George Washington Leonard, an ex-staff officer
of the Union Army.
Of course we conferred with the so-called liberal element. In most of these settlements
there were to be found a number of disaffected people. Some were so because they
had been treated domineeringly by the church authorities, who ruled the civic as
well as the religious interests of these valley towns; others because they had changed
their views, with their increase of knowledge of the world at large, due to their
contact with the new and non-Mormon elements filtering in to the population of the
territory; still others because of business interests which carried them outside
of the commerce of the co-operative stores to deal with mining men and mining machinery.
In the old hortatory days, when the Mormon preachers painted every gentile with
a coat of black, they gave a false idea of the outside world, which these business
men now found to be untrue, for the gentile was not as black as he had been painted.
A natural reaction set in, and a friendliness for the new-comers sprang up, and
we found a few men, but no women, who desired an established opposition to the dominant
church; in order to check its power and to give a spice of life in the business
world in place of the old-time autonomy and monotony.

Chapter VIII — Through Spanish Fork Canyon and Thistle Valley

"Now let us sing, Long live the King,
And Gilpin, long live he;
And when he next doth ride abroad,
May I be there to see!"

Cowper

NEXT day we pushed our slow way up Spanish Fork Canyon. Some faint tradition
of the early Spaniards, the conquistadores of the days of Iberian rule, having reached
as far north as this section, riveted the name upon this great gap in the mountains.
There is no doubt those hardy men almost demons in a way did dare the extreme both
in perils and distance. Some of them may have gazed with their fierce eyes set in
bearded bronzed faces upon these very hills and vales.
They were too far afield for them to put more than the stamp of their name on this
region, so when the Mormons came, the Redmen, the Piutes and the Utes, were the
sole possessors of the soil. It was an up-hill and rocky road with the heat of mid-day
reflecting from the granite rocks lining the canyon sides and producing much perspiration,
both for drivers and their steed.
Yet the evening drawing nigh, the characteristic wind-blast down this rocky tube
chilled us to the bone, a quick change from the noon's torrid heat. "I know of a
good spring hereabouts," said Mac, "one of my liberal friends of Mount Pleasant
comes this way at times, and always camps by it; and he told me to be sure to sample
its waters."
This was refreshing news to me, for our last drink had been from a muddied and shallow
irrigation ditch. Round point after point, we slowly toiled, still ascending and
looking for this spring that never appeared. It was about two hours later that we
caught the odor of rotten eggs, and knew that our spring was a sulphur and therapeutic
one. Our liberal friend had his joke on Mac, when the latter stood at this actively
boiling spring, with no desire to drink.
Yet at this writing a costly sanitarium occupies the ground, people come from afar
to spend both time and money for their health at this evil-smelling spring. Pure
water is a prize when difficult to obtain, and at that particular moment having
no foresight of the future business value of this sulphur spring, we would have
exchanged it for a few gallons of the cold article.
We pushed on with dry tongues, and toward evening we entered Thistle Valley, now
alive with the coal industry and the overland railroad, but then a wild, remote,
upland plain.
Here we found water in a little rill oozing out of the rocks, clear and cold as
a Kentucky spring.
"Why not camp out here? Plenty of wood around for a fire. It will be dark soon!"
"No. Not here. Let us push on," said Mac. "I know a valley rancher at no great distance.
He is what is called a 'Jack' Mormon and favors our work for the liberals."
I grumbled, for I had no great liking for Mac's "little" distances, as I remembered
that his eye was lacking in accuracy when it came to his remembering mileage by
the road.
On again we went making a long day of it. I expected the poor horse to strike, not
for pay, but for shorter hours; but the good animal had more grit than his appearance
suggested. The miles were Irish ones, if not Russian, such as make the Siberian
Versts such a weary terror to the traveller. We passed curve after curve in the
road; crossed land-draws without number, expecting
every moment to sight the rancher's roof. It realized a modern war-song:
"It's a long, long way to Tipperary, It's a long way to go."
It began to look as though Mac had been sold again as to this ranch house; as he
had been with reference to the sulphur spring which he had been urged to sample.
We broke another tug, just by way of diversion and use of a little more time which
we could not spare. I used the old rope again and, of course, being tired I had
to say something about buckskin, as an essential part of an "experienced" traveller's
outfit, the same being lacking with us.
The moon rose. Her silvery face shone above the hills before us and made the uneven
road visible, but the chaparral on either hand looked all the blacker. My imagination
began to work concerning the Indians, who were off the reservation, trailing us
in these dark places; or those white bandits, of worse blood, who often waylaid
travellers at such an uphill disadvantage as was ours.
We were nervously silent, but if a bear had crashed through the brush, a coyote
had yowled, or an owl had hooted, we might have shouted from fright, expectant of
an attack from Indians or bandits.
Just then a dog barked with a homelike sound, and before long we saw the outline
of a corral fence lining the road; then a house loomed up all in the dark.
We drew up at the bars across the road and holloed. The tired rancher, waked out
of his first sleep, came down to us in no gracious mood; but who could blame him
at that midnight hour?
We were the victims of Mac's defective judgment of road distances. He had come this
way once before with a fast road-team downgrade, and had expected as rapid return
upgrade with one horse and a heavy load.
We squared this late call with our "Jack" Mormon host in the way which is usually
acceptable to midnight landlords. We fed our horse and bedded him with straw, and
then climbed to an empty loft under the house roof, pillowing our weary heads on
hay.
This Thistle Valley is known for its rich soil. The greasewood grows high and strongly,
a sure evidence of the depth of earth. It was sparsely settled in that day. At one
end there was an Indian Reserve: a section of the great Uintah Reservation for the
Piute nation.
We met a crowd of Indian horsemen the next morning. They were wild and saucy, mocking
us and our outfit and racing around, whooping just to scare our horse by their antics;
but it was wasted effort. They did not know that our horse was a sedate Presbyterian
charger, whose charging days were long past. Our beast just looked at them in surprise,
and plodded on.
We grinned at these red-painted horsemen and cried "How!" in return to their "How!",
and so passed on.
It was right here that an emigrant tragedy occurred some twenty years earlier. The
foothills slope often into the valley with a long finger of lower hills that finally
sink to the level of the valley road. Behind this projection, a war party of these
same Piutes or Utes lay in ambush for the overlanders to California.
Two wagons, the prairie schooner kind, with covers like an ark, and loaded to the
guards with everything for the household, came crawling along this upgrade. Too
independent to travel with the majority, they had struck out by this shorter way
to reach California by the road via Saint George and Arizona; thus avoiding the
awful Nevada deserts.
Unsuspecting and unprepared they here were attacked by the Indians, who made a dash
from behind a low hill abutting the road. It ended in the usual way. After a sharp
and gallant fight the strong white men fell, and all were slain, even to the babies.
Blood and scalps and burning wagons, yelling Indians and dying men made the spot
memorable.
We looked at the scene and could almost see it enacted again; one of many such bloody
halts to the stream of gold seekers, where a family passed out of knowledge, and
left but a rumor to satisfy the anxiety and long waiting of friends left behind.
At last Thistle Valley opened into a larger one, the San Pete Valley, and from our
high ground we could see, by the dark patches along the valley's sides, the sites
of the various settlements in this remote region populated by Scandinavian converts
to Mormonism.
The telephone, the rural delivery, the automobile of this favored day have brought
all this section into the hustle of the world, since that quiet day when I first
looked upon this broad expanse of fertile land. The mountains, then so silent, now
glow with the electric lights of great mining centers. The richest coal is found,
and feeds the mountain freight engines of the railroad which, as the agent of modern
commerce, has invaded and captured this region of riches.
Our good old horse, and I was really getting proud of his grit despite his disreputable
looks, brought us late in the day to the Liberal Hall fronting the Main street of
Mount Pleasant, a town of three thousand inhabitants.
Here were the headquarters of the liberal element of the valley, and this also was
our destination. In this Hall was the school, in embryo, for which the seats had
been brought from afar so toilsomely. I laughed when they had been arranged in the
lecture room of the Hall, to see one after another, the men, Liberals and Mormons,
sit in them to test their strength. They did it so boyishly and with much evident
interest. These seats were then up-to-date, but by this time they are antiquated,
and broken up for fuel.

Chapter IX — Opposition to the Liberal Schools

"The schoolmaster is abroad, and I trust to him, armed with
his primer, against the soldier in full military array."

Lord Brougham

MOUNT PLEASANT, the town to which I conducted my reader in the previous chapter,
was the scene of the first firm stand for liberal schools in the territory. This
stand with the opposition to it was due to the advent of my companion Mac, who not
in the best of health, came, under medical advice, in the spring of 1876, to the
mountain altitudes and air of Utah Territory to recuperate after an arduous course
of higher education.
Though frail in body, his mind and spirit were sound and needed no tonic. In fact,
he was full of grit in this respect, a primary condition of success in any line
of endeavor in the Far West of that period. It is an uphill enterprise to establish
a new order of schools anywhere, for the conservatives invariably oppose new methods
on the principle that the old are better.
At that time the Mormon schools were very elementary, for they had been overshadowed
by the religious teaching and zeal of a people who combined church and state, and
who regarded advanced education as a door of infidelity.
Making due allowance for the distractions of frontier life, and the strenuous claims
of agriculture in a new land on its people, it remains true that the mental nourishment
given, as schooling, to the children was very poor.
Mac and those who backed him in far-off New York felt strongly in the matter of
a better and American training for the children of this remote territory. Thus his
health and his task joined to establish his interests in a territory so far distant
from his home.
Invited to Mount Pleasant, by certain men of liberal views, he found himself one
March morning stepping from the bi-weekly stage at the town's post-office, a stranger
among a strange people. This was the first attempt, outside of Salt Lake City, to
establish the cause of liberal education.
At the beginning he did not have very intellectual associates. An intellectual man
himself, and a fine teacher, his best helpers were no ornaments to education. His
Mormon opponents soon dubbed two of Mac's closest attendants, "Right Bower," and
"Left Bower."
"Right Bower" was a peripatetic sewing-machine agent, who was zealous in the interests
of the original Howe sewing-machine, of very heavy running gear, and which sold
readily, at that time, for one hundred and ten dollars each. "Left Bower" was an
old miner, down on his luck, with the illuminated face of a free-drinker, whose
residence in the valley was due to the marriage of his only daughter to a son of
a zealous Mormon elder.
It was these two men who created the first liberal sentiments among the "Jack" Mormon
class of the people, an element rather weak in the faith, although not quite apostates.
The Mormon elders were first amused at this effort to supplement their establishments,
but as the school drew and grew, concern followed amusement and soon anger succeeded
this concern. A vigorous call for aid was sent to Salt Lake. Brigham Young himself
with two apostles came down to organize a crusade of words against this liberal
movement.
The little town was wrought up to fever heat, and after Brigham Young returned to
his headquarters, Mac expected trouble. It came. One night he had just closed a
meeting in the adobe hall which they occupied. There had been noisy exits, and noisier
calls outside. A crowd surged in front and filled the yard. They began throwing
stones and adobe bricks from a pile of material close by, with cries of:
"Run him out of town!"
"Rock his building good and plenty!"
"We want no Liberal here!"
"Come out and clear out!"
"Take him out, boys!"
A rush was made for the door. It had been closed a few minutes before. It bent beneath
the weight of many shoulders, and threatened to break.
Mac had a Colt revolver which he carried by the advice of the officers at Fort Douglas.
From a small side window his head and arm appeared suddenly. He ordered the crowd
to step off from the property, and retire to the street.
"If any one of you breaks down that door I shall feel at liberty to defend my property
with this weapon." He pointed his revolver at them. Mac, while small of stature
and somewhat frail of build, in that day, yet had the square jaw and prominent chin
of the Scot. His grit had its effect, for while more stones and bricks were thrown,
no more rushes at the door took place.
In fact in a few minutes the crowd withdrew with muttered threats. The Mayor of
the town, who also was the bishop of that Stake of Zion had just come forward, and
with a few words so quieted the people that they dispersed to their homes.
I do not think they would have gone to such an extreme course as to imperil Mac's
body, since the military camp at Fort Douglas one hundred and thirty miles north
had a with-holding power on fanaticism.
It was a well-executed effort to scare him off, and would have succeeded against
a faint-hearted man. Mac went to his cot-bed that night as quietly as usual, but
his gun was under his pillow. He might trust in the Lord but he kept his powder
dry according to the code of Oliver Cromwell.
We expected such demonstrations of opposition at the first opening of these new
schools. I have personal knowledge of a school beginning at American Fork, a town
near the canyon of that name, where the scenery is said to rival in grandeur that
of the Yosemite Valley. This town had a liberal element and a school was begun with
a teacher in charge.
"Why do you come here ? You are not wanted," said the Bishop of that Stake of Zion.
"We come to teach the young people better manners and methods."
"We can do all that now as we have done other things in the past. There is no need
of you or your so-called work."
"We are at liberty to do our work here, if law abiding, wherever the flag flies.
The flag flies in this Territory now."
This Bishop gave the quiet word to the town roughs to annoy the teacher and his
school. A howling brigade was formed on the occasion of every night meeting, and
hideous noises were made outside the door. Then followed a throwing brigade, and
stones showered on the building. At the last part of the assault, several adobe
bricks were hurled through the windows, breaking the sash as well as the glass,
and striking the opposite wall of the room. The Bishop, being the Mayor of this
incorporated town, did not heed the complaints made to him in his civic capacity,
and the disturbers had full swing until they grew tired of this outrage themselves,
and the sufferers were rewarded for their patience by a lull in the opposition.
Meanwhile the Liberals were boycotted at the Co-op stores, and they had to send
to Jew merchants in Salt Lake City for their supplies. It was nerve-racking, yet
a combination of patience and courage wore out the first hot opposition. Then followed
an entrenched, stubborn action of the church elders which by personal visits and
threats kept away most of the young people and older children for a time.
While I was temporarily in charge of the Mount Pleasant school, during Mac's absence
in the East, I came in contact with "Lo," the Ute Indian of the Territory, in all
his blanket and gun glory. These Utes were a fine race of men physically. Beneath
their brave exterior, of course, there was left, despite Mormon church teaching,
much of the cruel temper of the Apaches or the Arapahoes. The Mormons made much
of these Utes, for according to their theology the Redmen of North America are the
descendants of the Lamanites, the original inhabitants of the land in the times
of Mormon their prophet. For further particulars, see the book of Mormon.
They had a way of calling these natives by a pet name, "The Battle Axes of the Lord,"
and used them, in harmony with that name, to do their disagreeable work, as I shall
have to recount in a later chapter.
I have always thought that the Bishop of Mount Pleasant sent this band of Battle-Axes
to scare me off. I did not look so fierce of face as Mac, the organizer of the school.
Late one warm afternoon in June, the doors were ajar to catch all the air possible.
I was in the front room of the house adjoining the school hall, and before I was
aware of it, with a sudden tramp of feet, the kitchen to the rear of the house was
filled with blanketed Utes. As I came in, an array of keen black eyes regarded me.
They were squatted, Indian fashion, around the walls, each with his gun held well
within his knees. A deep voiced demand followed.
"Want meat! Want pie'! Heap hungry!" How they knew that we had a batch of pies baked
that day puzzled me at the moment, but I afterwards heard that the Bishop had told
these strong allies of his, that I had a liking for the American national pie, and
they would surely find some at my house.
The speaker was really tall and straight, a fair copy of Cooper's "Last of the Mohicans;"
but he was very lean and hungry looking. He had a crafty face, and his eyes were
full just then of malice and insolence.
Their attitude towards me was due to the following fable, told to them by the Mormon
elders.
"The Mormon was the Indians' true friend and brother, while the American was the
Redman's white-faced foe, who took away their land, and shot them when they resisted
this robbery, using the blue-coated soldier to do the deed."
These Indians' ancestors, in earlier days, had come in fighting contact with the
migratory and invading white man and much injustice, spoliation, and slaughter had
followed that contact of fiery spirits of both sides, as the Redman sought to stop
the emigrant invasion of his hunting grounds.
I had been skillfully associated, by the Mormons, with the frontier white men whose
common saying was "The only good Injun is a dead Injun," and this accounted for
the unfriendly looks of my Indian visitors.
Now the kitchen larder was not very full. To supply with food a baker's dozen of
strapping natives, was a problem. It was our policy to please rather than to offend
these men, in an endeavor to counteract base stories to our prejudice.
It so happened that a big batch of dried-fruit pies had been cooked that very morning
by a busy company of women who were interested in our Liberal Hall work.
"No meat to-day; too many mouths," I said to the modern fac-simile of Cooper's Indian.
"Go to the Bishop up the street, who has a big house; also many cooks. He can give
you much meat to eat."
The Indian's eyes glittered as I mentioned the Bishop.
It was the duty of the Church rulers, in accordance with their creed, to entertain
strangers or travellers, white or red, and to make no charge for this hospitality.
The Bishops especially prided themselves on keeping this ancient custom alive. I
knew this and also did "Lo," the Indian. "You give pie. American pie heap good for
Ute."
"Do you eat white man's pie?" I asked, eyeing them all in turn. "I will see if there
is enough to go around this circle."
It had come to me that the batch of pies, now on the shelves of the little six by
six pantry, would serve a better purpose in the tough stomachs of these Utes, than
in those of visitors assembling that evening in the Social Hall.
The eyes of all the Indians followed me into the pantry, and were on me when I came
out with a dozen of the ladies' pie-provisions. I handed them to "Lo." With the
rest in the pantry there was just enough to go around the circle, which in itself
was fortunate, for it gave to every man a pie, and so all were on an equality. It
was a sight to the eyes to look at such an Indian feast. They enjoyed those pies,
and I enjoyed seeing them eat.
The meal was soon over, for it does not take an Indian long to eat a pie. They were
pleased
and amused at my good natured response to their demand. Said the leader:
"Heap good man. Heap good pie."
Then they stood up, and, with grins and more friendly eyes, they went out in Indian
file, and I saw them no more. I never heard of their call on the Bishop. I was rather
pleased at the outcome of this visit.
I soon had visitors of another kind. A delegation of six women came rushing in.
"What were those Indians after here?" they cried.
"After pie."
"What! our pies! You surely did not feed those lazy beggars our pies."
"I did. They came demanding food with guns in their hands, thinking to scare me.
To please them and gain their good will, and off-set the Mormon stories of American
hate, I fed them your pies."
"Oh! oh! oh! Our pies! What shall we do to-night?"
"Bake some more now. Those in the stomachs of the Utes are heralds of peace for
us. It depends on your cooking whether their repast will disturb their digestion."
"No fear of that! An Indian's digestion is that of an ostrich."
Soon I was hustled out of the little kitchen, all too small for six active women.
These women knew that at the social of the evening, some food distinctively American,
would be in demand. They decided that a batch of New England pies would be ideal,
so they re-doubled their morning's efforts and doubled the pie out-put for that
night's festivities.

Chapter X — Behind the Curtain

"Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward
my hand? Come, let me clutch thee"

Shakespeare

AFIELD fence in Utah often occasions a marked contrast in the appearance of the
soil. On one side of it there is green alfalfa, peach and plum trees as thrifty
as the best, due to the little rills of irrigation water. On the other side of the
same fence there is nothing but the silt and sand of a pure desert, the habitat
of sage brush and the horned-toad.
The two sides of a shield are often quite different; and there are two sides to
Mormonism, as in most religions. I have shown you the fair and fertile looking side,
but in order to be true to the facts, as I saw them, I must show you the other.
I am not the critic or judge in this matter. The reader can occupy that position,
if he so desires. Otherwise time and the great future must unite to be it, and will
pronounce a true judgment. I am but a recounter of my own observances and experiences.
First a few words about the Mormon Rurales, Rough Riders or Destroying Angels. These
were the Danites, or Mormon military police, and their work was for both Church
and State.
These strangely gathered people were isolated, enthusiastic, then intolerant, and
afterwards crafty and cruel in the administration of their public affairs. Many
vile things have been said of the Mormons. I do not join in that abuse. Where so
much smoke has arisen there must be some fire as the cause of it.
We know that the Mormons, as an outgrowth of the persecutions they endured in the
East, and as a defensive measure, organized a militia, called the Nauvoo Legion.
It drilled openly and was perfected as an engine of war shortly before, and also
during, the days of the Civil strife in the States. Those days saw interests, so
paramount to an insignificant evidence of Mormon disloyalty, that amid the rush
of events and the crash of war, no notice was taken of this Legion, or steps enforced
to put it down.
In the Utah of my experience, this Legion was kept sub-rosa; yet remained intact
as a military arm, of Mormon interests, and could be used at a moment's call. It
had been the great reserve force of the Territory in the past and was the power
behind the throne which enabled Brigham Young to execute his will in the days of
the 5o's. In fact, the Mormon police or Rurales, popularly known as the "Danites"
or the "Destroying Angels"; using the biblical phraseology so common among these
people, were really the active and executive arm of this militia.
Thus the Church had something more than moral force to give power to its mandates.
It had a physical force, like any country armed to meet its foe, or put down rebellion
within its own borders.
These were picked men in horsemanship, and the use of weapons. They were "Angels"
of help to their own kind, but "Destroyers" of all opposition. They had a picked
leader in the person of Porter Rockwell, and an able second in Bill Hick-man, both
men of that period, and the products of the open wild life of the far West.
Porter Rockwell was a romantic person in appearance. Well proportioned, with dark
aquiline features, bright black eyes, and long curling hair, he was a brunette Custer
in his style and charm of leadership.
Probably his most important act was leading his band south in pursuit of the Missourian
overland party of emigrants, the especial objects of hate; since it was in Missouri
that Joseph Smith and his brother had been slain by the mob.
I had some facts given me by a little man, whose name was Little. He was indeed
insignificant to look at, but a perfect wasp in the sting of his words when he was
willing to talk about these things, "behind the curtain" as he called them. He had
a small farm at a little town called Benjamin near the borders of Lake Utah; and
was well acquainted with Rockwell and his band. What his former relationship to
the Danites was I never could get him to tell, but he had inside knowledge of many
dark deeds of those early days.
"Old Brigham used to hunt down these apostates with Rockwell's men, like you'd hunt
rabbits in the brush."
"What did he do with them when he caught them?"
"Sent 'em to hell across-lots. That's the way the old prophet talked of them as
knew too much, and had dropped out the Church."
"Well, what does that phrase really mean?"
"Just this. You never saw those men alive again. They were caught slipping through
the canyons, east or west, but they never got clean away. If any one asked for them
it was said that 'the Injuns raised their hair.' "
"You mean that they were killed and scalped?"
"Yes. But they weren't killed by Injuns, though their scalps might hang at a Piute's
belt."
That was as near as I could get Little to say who killed them. You can reach your
own conclusions.
The Mormons had a crude doctrine, which they derived from the Old Testament theology.
Human blood might be shed when necessary. The red line is seen running through these
Jewish writings. The Mormons called this doctrine "Blood Atonement," and meant by
it, that the shedding of a man's blood, though it destroyed his body, was the means
of saving his soul from final apostasy. To the Latter Day Saint, who was initiated
in all his religious ritual, it was the unpardonable sin to forsake the Church of
the Latter Days, once you had become a member.
I tried to get Little to give me the names of these men who died, because they had
dropped out of the Church, and also the dates and places of their deaths. He was
mum.
"See, I've had to take a fearful oath to keep silent. I dare not tell. The Church,
here, is a secret order, and has its penalties, which are carried out."
"Well there is no fear of that now that Brig-ham is dead at last, is there?"
He only shook his head. This conversation was in October, 1877, two months after
the autocrat of the Mormons had died in Salt Lake City.
I met Bill Hickman when in Bingham Canyon at the mining camp. This was in 1875.
Porter Rockwell was not living then, and Hickman had himself dropped out of action,
although you could not say that he was an apostate. He was a stout-built, cynical-featured
man, with an eye that glittered and said things; but his lips were silent as to
the past. He was not put out of the way, because, as he himself said, "I know too
much for them to do it."
He was still an active man, although his hair was grey; but his mount of a horse
was like that of a cowboy in the round up days, and you could see that his home
was in the saddle. He dropped to his feet with the soft touch of a cat, and in his
earlier years he must have been a hard man to handle in a fight.
Both Rockwell and Hickman were at Mountain Meadows in '57, when the hundred and
fifty Mis-sourians, on their way to California, were killed to the last man and
child by the Indians (?).
It would have been a great thing to have gained an account of that massacre from
Hickman, but when asked, he only answered with a shrewd lift of his eyes.
There was a man whom I knew, an old soldier of Uncle Sam, who was one of the first
of the soldiers who came to the Territory prior to the Civil War when the Government
thought it wise to have a military camp in the neighborhood of Salt Lake City.
This man fell in love with a daughter of Utah, a buxom young woman, who beguiled
him into joining the Mormon Church in order to marry her. He was never at heart
a very loyal Mormon, and so was in a frame of mind to give impartial testimony.
John Bennet was of Scotch birth, and could never get away from the conscience for
truth, which he had imbibed from the Old Kirk.
I met him in American Fork, and found he knew a good deal of the past of the Danites,
and was willing to talk.
"Were you here in 1857, when the Missouri party went south?"
"Yes, I saw them go through this town, a tired looking lot."
"How did you treat them?"
"None of us loved a Missourian. They had badly treated us fourteen years before
and we had
not forgotten. These emigrants were hard up and wanted to buy supplies from us.
We wouldn't sell them a thing."
"Didn't you do anything for them?"
"Just a little. I had no personal reason to hate 'em, so I gave, to a tall thin
man with a big family, a sack of flour and a ham on the sly."
"You say on the sly; was there a watch kept over them by the Mormons?"
"Yes, and a close one. The order had gone out to let them feed themselves, if they
could, and not to take their money for any food; so I had to be cautious. I felt
pity for the sick wife of this man, she looked so worn, and had such hopeless eyes.
I fancy she foresaw the fate awaiting them farther south."
"Did they stop here?"
"Yes, they camped a day, just outside the town, to rest their beasts, and fill their
water casks from the lake three miles away. I talked to one man, who wanted a drink
for his wagon-load of young ones. My house was not far away. I noticed his hat as
he took the bucket I gave him. It had once been a fine felt hat and white. It was
very dirty from use, but he wore it so it resembled a sugar-cone, with a string
band around the bottom. It looked like those conical hats the Mexican greasers wear,
only theirs are straw made and this one was fine felt."
"Did you ever see him again?" "No, but I saw his hat; I'll tell you about it. After
these people went on, a little rested, with water but no food from us, all was quiet
for a day or two; then a band of the Danites rode into town, with Bill Hickman at
the head of them. I didn't see Porter Rockwell, for I understood that he had gone
ahead, with a select few, to keep close trail on the emigrants.
"They kept pretty mum. They were all around and rode good horses, and seemed in
a great haste; for they left in a few minutes, in a cloud of dust."
"Did you see this band again soon?" "Yes, in about ten days I suppose, they came
back a weary looking lot; but this time they had something to say."
"What was their report?" "That the Missourians were all killed by the Indians, who
had caught them unawares and sick at Mountain Meadows, far to the south and every
man, woman and child had been scalped." "How did they speak of this massacre?" "Well,
they said, it served 'em right. They got their dues for what they did us years ago!
The Indians have saved us a lot of trouble." "Did the Danites show any signs of
being in the fight?"
"Yes, a few had wounds. They all had more weapons than they needed apiece. And one
man, I am certain, wore that conical white felt hat that had been on the head of
the tall, lean Mis-sourian whose family I watered at my place. I was curious and
got near to him to ask about it, but he wouldn't talk. Yet I saw a bullet hole in
that hat, that showed that its wearer had been in a fight, before it fell from the
head of its first owner."
The Battle Axes of the Lord, the Piutes were a good disguise for the Danites, and
scape-goats for the blame of this massacre. There is little doubt, both Utes and
Destroyers, were together in the deed. Doubtless they looked like a band of hostile
Indians. In that far-away meadow, the grass was red with blood, shed to avenge an
ancient wrong, done by other Missourians, and in this was fulfilled, to the letter,
the old Jewish cry of, "an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth." The avengers
of blood got the blood they sought after fifteen years of vengeful waiting. The
mills of time grind slow, but they grind most surely their grist.
The Piutes of the San Pete and Sevier valleys had the odium of this massacre in
the eyes of the public for many a long day. There were those who knew enough to
be dissatisfied with this stereotyped explanation, and it took twenty years more
for justice to bring the evil doers to its bar. It was in the spring of 1877 that
one saw a satisfied expression on the face of every Gentile in the Territory. The
United States Courts, after years of examination and preparation of the case, at
last had prosecuted to the full extent of the law the murderers of the emigrants
of '57.
The culprit was no Indian. He was a white man. It might have been Brigham Young
himself, since he was autocrat of both Church and State in those days. He skillfully
evaded the blow, which he saw was inevitable, and it was allowed to fall upon the
local Bishop, John T. Lee. He was the responsible person, through whom, the authorities
carried out their purposes in that locality. Although promises were made to him
that he should be safe-guarded from government prosecution, he was allowed to carry
all of the responsibility to the last.
Having been found guilty by the government, the higher-ups let him go, as a sacrifice,
and he was "hanged by the neck until dead."
Everywhere that I went I noted the dismay of the Mormon that the government could
ferret out so old a misdeed. No effort of the Church could offset the chagrin of
the people.
I suppose many other deeds, committed in the same high-handed and fanatical way,
were troubling the leaders. They feared that they also might be brought to the bar
of justice, and the guilty ones punished. There is no question that a good deal
of killing took place between 1850 and 1865 that was not due to accident, Indians,
personal quarrels of a frontier population, but was the result of fanaticism.
It went about arresting men and women, who were not staunch of faith, and was not
content with putting them into prison on manufactured charges, but put them to death
in a quiet way.
But it was the spectacular and wholesale killing, together with the vengeful boastings
of the Church, that called so much attention to the Mountain Meadow's crime and
so brought the sword of Justice to smite in behalf of the law.
As we study human nature and history, we find this strange mingling of good and
evil in religion, the red and white line woven into one strand. It is hard indeed,
as human beings, to be the judges of such people and their acts. They endeavored
to do well and right, but they fell through the influence of an over-zeal, which
swept them away to folly and the spilling of blood in the name of the Lord.

Chapter XI — The Creed That Caused the Deed

"So many gods, so many creeds! So many paths that wind and
wind, When just the art of being kind Is all this sad world needs."

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

THE shot does not leave the gun unless there is a powder charge behind it. The
things which I have noted before and behind the Curtain of Events in Utah, could
not arise without a sufficient cause.
That cause is found in the creed of the people who settled the Territory while yet
a wilderness, the hunting ground of nomadic Indians.
A history of world populations records the shedding of much human blood at the behest
of creeds. It is the easy mistake of earnest faith to follow the path of intemperate
zeal. Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece, and Rome, as nations, saw the priests of religion
offering the blood of human beings to the gods, on splendidly built , altars. The
same is true of the New World. Cortez and his men-at-arms, great shedders of human
blood, beheld the Aztecs of Anahuac, ancient Mexico, offering human sacrifices at
the altars' steps; yet these Spaniards in the retreat of "Noche Triste," the Doleful
Night, shed as much blood of the Aztecs as religion had done in a score of years;
since that older Doleful Night, when Caiphas, the High Priest, spoke concerning
Jesus of Nazareth, "It is expedient that one man die for the people."
In every land and clime, human blood has been offered in religious sacrifice. In
Jewish ancient days, in Classic days, in the days of Nero, in those of the Inquisition,
in Auto-da-Fe's, on St. Bartholomew's Eve in Paris, at Smithfield fires in London,
in Protestant and Catholic revenges, in Florida and Louisiana,-on to the days of
the Missouri mob-violence, when the two Mormon Smiths fell, the holocaust of blood
for religion's sake was continuous, until the slaughter in the lonely wastes of
Southern Utah showed the error of it all.
To use a theologic term, the Mormon creed is Anthropomorphic. It teaches a materialized
Deity with body, parts and passions as a man. Here we have the key to this creed
of strangely mixed theory and practice. I do not go into the matter of the credibility
and genuineness of the Mormon books of belief. A war of words has raged since 1827,
and there is no need of another syllable on the thread-bare subject. What I say
here I have gathered from the printed sermons of such leaders as Brigham Young,
Orson Pratt, Heber C. Kimball, Orson Hyde, and Lorenzo Snow; all discourses published
by the press of the Mormon Church, between 1855 and 1860, in Salt Lake City. In
these discourses I found the doctrines really preached to, and accepted by, the
people. These rough, and often rude, pulpit teachings were subsequently withdrawn
by the Church authorities at Salt Lake, and at the time of my sojourn in Utah, it
was difficult to purchase the volumes. However, a friend of mine in Provo, a county
seat overlooking Lake Utah, loaned four of the volumes to me for examination, but
would not sell them at any price, and after returning them I was unable to secure
other copies. As I remember these sermons to the people, they seemed to teach that
Adam was the only God of this world; and he was also the God of Jesus Christ. It
was admitted that Christ had a previous era before appearing in this world, and
that he is to have a future era of Millennial Triumph in Salt Lake City. This is
affirmed with strength.
There is a strong tinge of Millennialism and of modern Russellism in these teachings.
But Christ is as God to Joseph Smith, and so this first prophet of the Faith called
the Church he established "The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints." Now
follows the nut of all this. It is this. That Joseph Smith is the god of this generation
of men, and so the Latter Day Saint regards his assassination with the same feeling
that orthodox Christians regard the crucifixion of Christ by the Jews.
According to these sermons, Joseph Smith, when living in Wayne County, New York
State, was visited by the angel Moroni, son of the prophet Mormon, who revealed
to him the ancient history of America. He showed him the written plates, whose hieroglyphics
were interpreted by the stones, called the Urim and Thum-mim.
He learned that America was first peopled by Noah, and later by the family of Lehi,
a remnant of the Jews who had escaped from captivity m the days of King Zedekiah.
These came across to Chili, and then traveled north by the Pacific coast, and so
became the progenitors of the Red-men. Eras of faith and apostasy followed to the
year before Christ 500, when the prophet Mormon was slain, and these record plates
were hidden in the hill Cumorah in Wayne County, there to remain until time was
ripe to reveal them to Joseph Smith by the visit of the angel Moroni. This angel
further revealed that this book of Mormon was to be added to the scriptures of the
Old and New Testament. The Faith, founded on the whole of these books, was to be
preached until the Millennial Dawn of Christ's Triumph. This Triumph should be reached
in the interior of North America, in the tops of the mountains. Moreover this Latter
Day Faith was to be the recipient of everyday revelation from Heaven to its leaders.
As an organization, it was to include all the ancient orders of priesthood.
It had two kinds of priesthood: The Melchi-zedek, which included the Prophet, the
First Patriarch, the Twelve Apostles, the Seventy Councillors, and the whole body
of the High Priests; and the Aaronic priesthood which included the Bishops, Lower
order of priests, the Elders, Deacons, and Ward Teachers without number.
When I was a resident of Utah, it was claimed that there were 7,234 religious offices
in the Church, whose membership was then estimated at 100,000 people. This creed
claimed to possess the powers of revelation, inspiration, miracles, prophecy, visions,
tongues, and healing gifts. All these were in active use, and all this was supposed
to be resident in Salt Lake City in the Church, called the "Latter Day Saints."
You can see at once how unlike any other new western city this one was. It was another
Jerusalem brought down to date. Welded to these strange doctrines and excessive
claims, were the following very practical, and sensible teachings:-
"We believe in being honest, virtuous, and upright; in doing good to all men, and
that an idle or lazy person cannot be a Christian nor have salvation." You see in
this the powder that had explosive force enough to make a telling shot, with the
multitude of half taught and visionary people found all over the world of to-day.
There is no place here for the grafter, the boodler, the promoter, the liar, the
bum and the tramp. In fact I did not find that type of humanity among the Mormons.
I had to go into the gentile mining camps to come across that kind of human trash.
If my reader wants a full, detailed account of this strange faith, let him read
one of the many worthy and competent authors who go into this subject exhaustively,
such as Burton, Robinson, Dickson and Stenhouse.
Polygamy, so prominent, when I was in Utah, was really an afterthought of this faith,
and came into prominence through Brigham Young, as a new revelation in 1857.
The two Smiths, Joseph and Hyrum, the martyrs to Missourian violence, did not proclaim
polygamy or practice it, if their family descendants are to be credited. The Josephite
branch of the Mormon Church repudiates the doctrine, and the practice to this day.
So much in the Bible seems to condone if not permit polygamy from the days of Abraham,
the father of the Jewish race, with his Hagar as well as Sarah for a wife; to the
times of Jacob-and his concubines with two sisters for wives. Then uxorious David
and his still more wived son Solomon, whose glory so much bespoken was not seemingly
dimmed by his harem of one thousand concubines.
It is not to be wondered at, that a certain type of mankind should revive the polygamy
of the ancient world, give it standing by claiming a revelation permitting it among
the faithful, in order to build up Zion with a seed of true believers.
It was not so difficult for a born leader and master of assemblies like Brigham
Young to rivet this practice on a credulous people. He saw if he succeeded in getting
a good many good people and leading men committed to this practice, that he had
them bound tight in a bundle of life from which there was no escape and which would
make them stick together against all opposition.
He saw how it would make the people singular, and keep them intact from the seductions
of the world. He saw that it would prevent the social evil of great cities, and,
as a matter of fact, Utah had no white slavers in those days.
He knew the Moslem element was strong in many men, that a sensualistic God and carnal
pleasures as a reward would win with such men, where the more spiritual and monastic
teachings of historic Christianity failed.
So with these factors at work, and the apparent sanction of Old Testament scripture,
to give authority to a new revelation, Brigham Young, a genius for religious leadership,
proclaimed polygamy as a doctrine of the Latter Day Church.
Yet polygamy has its horrors, and they were constantly out-cropping in domestic
circles.
I will relate a few instances that came under my eyes.
While staying in American Fork, I met Professor Orbs, of the town schools. This
school covered the educational ground from the elementary to the academic. It was
all under one roof. The higher branches were but poorly attended. The young men
and young women could not come regularly to the school, since their services were
more needed in the homes and the fields. Orbs was a scholar, and a graduate of old
Bowdoin College. After the Civil War was over, he went west like many of the enterprising
young men of that period. He was finally invited to teach in Utah Territory, and
was offered a principalship by the Mormon church authorities. He was not then an
announced convert, and his wife, to whom he had been married only a few years, made
him promise solemnly never to become a Mormon. On his agreeing to this, his wife
consented to go to the Territory.
When I knew them, they had been in the Territory some ten years, and Professor Orbs
was ranking high among the Mormons as one of them. He had not kept faith with his
wife, and she was full of fears about the future. They then had four children.
Mrs. Orbs came to me one day in great mental distress.
"My husband is really going into polygamy."
The tears were in both eyes and voice.
"He promised me years ago never to do it. Now the Church authorities have pursuaded
him. He says it is a step up, and will better his finances. Oh! will you not go
and see him; urge him to give up this thing?"
"He is not sincere in thinking it his duty, is he?"
"He says he is, but the girl he is going to take is but eighteen, and has been one
of his scholars. She thinks it is a promotion to be a wife of a professor."
I did all that I could to comfort the poor lady and promised to see her husband.
I did this some days later. He was quite abrupt with me, and said:
"I think that this is no matter of yours. Our Church believes in plural marriage.
It is my own matter."
I could see at a glance he was fully committed to grieve his wife. It was the old
incentive. A new young wife was attractive to a middle-aged man. He was ready to
put aside his promise, the society of his faithful wife, the children she had raised
in their home. The rosy young girl, offered him by the Church, was irresistible
to a mind coarsened by the Mormon inoculation.
The next I knew of him was a new house he had built for the new wife, adjoining
his family home. He left for Salt Lake City, and the Endowment House, where he went
through the ritual of taking another wife, and returned with her, and the Church's
approval of living his religion.
His wife was broken-hearted, and the condolences of other polygamous women did not
give her any comfort, since she was not of Mormon stock, and kept intact her old
Eastern views of life.
Eliza Snow came down with several of her associates. She was the great woman of
this social horror. In public she spoke eloquently in its favor. Quoted the Old
Testament times, and characters. She trotted out Abraham, Jacob, David and Solomon,
all men approved of God she said, and whose polygamous children became the ancestors
of Israel.
"There is a higher exaltation for the women who aid in building up Zion; who do
their zealous part to populate this territory for the Saints.
"We must occupy the land. We must keep out the Gentiles. We must give him no place
of rest for the sole of his foot. Women only fulfill their end when they bear many
children. Children are the great asset of the Church. It is the prophecy of the
scripture that 'in Zion the streets shall be full of boys and girls playing.' "
Such teaching as this was given to, and received by, a great audience in every town
on Eliza Snow's tour, in the interests of polygamy. I was surprised at the audiences
she drew.
My early opinion, that all women were opposed instinctively to this doctrinal horror,
was upset when I heard these leaders, among the women of the territory, thus advocating
polygamous marriages. They were women of good education and were apparently refined,
both in their manner of speech and dress.
I felt sure that if it had not been received so meekly, and willingly by the women
of the Church, and if it had been stoutly and socially resisted by them as a body,
that the practice of polygamy would never have existed in the Mormon Church.
That Church would then have stood on the same basis for criticism as those other
religious denominations of America, that meet with no overt opposition or persecution.
By this doctrine it stands alone, singular, as an anachronism; as a reversion to
the type of Old Testament days, and is unfit for a place in these later days of
higher ideals for women.
While I was in San Pete County, I called at the residence of the Bishop of Mount
Pleasant. It was not a pleasant errand I was on. It was to make complaint of the
hoodlumism of the youth, supposed to be under his control, in stone throwing at
the hall where the Liberal school, and its meetings were held.
The Bishop was not an imposing sight. There was nothing stately about him, nor did
he wear anything like canonical robes, such as we associate with the historic bishop.
He was in his shirt sleeves with slop pants and was carrying swill for his pigs.
He was evidently an industrious man, a practical character. He had need to be. His
house was wide and big in style, since his family was large. He had five wives and
fifteen children, and there was, of course, a financial side to this establishment,
which made the Bishop a rustler.
While I talked, I stood before the front porch, which was a long, low screened affair,
shadowing the whole front of the house. There were dark shadowy corners in it, but
not sufficiently dark to hide the array of womankind seated along its length. Five
women occupied as many chairs, all busy with their hands at woman's tasks. All,
did I say? No, I must omit the fifth, the youngest looking, who had nothing to do
but look about. She also was the best dressed. She evidently was . the favorite
wife of the Bishop.
The oldest woman was grey, with eyes that had in them a look of shyness, as well
as pain. What a history those eyes had seen in that household. She was the wife
of the Bishop's youth, and by her age she must have seen something of the earlier
history of the territory.
The other three women were stout and healthy looking and graded in their ages from
the first to the last wife; for no new wife, added to the Mormon household, is older
than her predecessor on the polygamous list. This is so common, that it is of the
nature of a rule. It is the way also of human nature, the way of the world, and
may I say, the way of foolish womankind; for without woman's consent, this matrimonial
horror could not exist in a land of laws and freedom.
The wonder to me was the placidity of these wives. The situation was accepted. What
Moslem ideas were growing up among the younger generation, as they advanced in years
and became familiar with such a scene as I have described. They had to recognize,
from their infancy almost, the many mothers of a Mormon home. There was no fear
of racial suicide in these houses. Children were all around, playing in the dust,
before their homes, or out on the squares or streets of the town, in fact visible
everywhere.
The advocates of polygamy claim that for health and growth they outdo the children
of monogamy, since they say that the mothers have more time and leisure to fulfill
their maternity.
It is a subject that has its physical and medical side, as well as its sociological
one, but hardly fit for discussion in a popular book for all sorts of readers. I
must say that I never saw healthier, sturdier young ones than the Utah children.
Of course the splendid climate and the air of these valleys, sheltered from the
chilly blasts of the eastern Rockies, with easy temperatures and generous sunlight,
accounted for much of the rude health that I saw.
Also the outdoor life and the frugal food, due to limited circumstances, together
with the active labor in the gardens and the field, from early childhood, wrote
health on the cheeks, put good blood into the arteries, and a firelight and snap
into their eyes. Yet I also saw how this anomalous state of matrimony coarsened
the speech and habits of young Utah, both girls as well as boys.

Chapter XII — The Passing Prophet

"Your Fathers, where are they? And the Prophets, do they live
forever?"

Bible

THERE he goes! The fraud 1 The cheat 1" Ole Petersen, of Ephraim townsite, in
the San Pete valley, added some vigorous oaths and gestures to these words. He was
an angry man striding back and forth on the front porch of the only public hotel
in the little town.
I had gone to meet this tow-haired Scandinavian in the month of June, 1877, with
the interests of the Liberal work at heart. He was one of a few, in that section,
who was opposed to the backing of the Mormon Church.
This valley was mainly settled by people from Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. They
had renounced the stately Lutheran Church of their country, and had welcomed, with
enthusiasm, this Latter Day faith. It fed their fanaticism with promises of forty
acres of land, in each man's name, as a gift of a new, practical religion, now existing
in free America. These people had come over to receive their new start in life.
By their industry they had made homes for themselves in this broad valley. Everything
of their own here, they owed to the church. Why should they not stick to it? Now
what was the matter with Ole Petersen, that he should revile the head of that church,
as he was passing through this town of Ephraim? He was an apostate of the most violent
kind. He had reacted powerfully against the Church, which had brought him out, as
a boy with his father's household, years before. He had cause for it, and that cause
was concrete in the person of Brigham Young, who was just then in full view of this
incensed son of the North Seas.
He had lost his property, and that loss had caused his apostasy. All this was due
to some fine real estate machinery on the part of Brigham Young's office. His titles
were voided and he was now almost penniless. He had been too free of speech, for
Ole Petersen was a tonguey man, and the Church had paid him up for his talk, by
taking away his estate. This was done through some such crooked financial trick,
as happens nowadays in California, when an eastern tenderfoot is fleeced by a real
estate broker, whose office is on the curb of the street.
Of course Ole Petersen laid all of his troubles and losses to the autocrat of Utah's
finances, Brig-ham Young. And now this prophet was passing by. He was taking his
last ride from St. George, in southern Utah, where he had wintered, and was on his
return to headquarters in Salt Lake City.
Brigham had been sick. The strokes of time began to tell on his giant frame; and
to face the winter in the low altitudes of St. George, below the rim of the basin
and near the border of Arizona's canyons, was deemed the best for him. But a man
of affairs must attend to his affairs. Certain events of late, like the successful
prosecution of John T. Lee for the Mountain Meadows affair, and the odium that the
hanging of this culprit had brought on the Church, made it necessary for the ailing
prophet to get back to his seat in Salt Lake City. So as soon as his strength would
permit, he started on a stage ride of two hundred miles to the terminus of the railway,
some hundred and ten miles south of the city. It was a ride through an almost hostile
territory, since through this end of the country the dead Bishop had a host of relatives
and friends, who were angry and incensed at the coup the government had made.
Lee's own family were out with threats to shoot the head of the Church, and, while
Ole Petersen was no relative, he was hot in sympathy with these threats.
This was Brigham Young's last outing, though he did not know it. He was not to fall
from the shot of some vengeful Mormon, but from the stroke of disease. Dysentery
carried him from the sight of man the following August.
I had seen him two years before robust, though aged. I caught a glimpse of him as
he was now passing by. He went fully armed and protected like some European monarch
in danger of assault from disaffected subjects.
A cloud of dust announced the coming of the cavalcade. He had left Manti, the county
seat, which like St. George was a temple city. In these temple cities the rites
of polygamy could be given as well as in Salt Lake City itself. In this manner the
means of entering into polygamy was brought to men's doors and the long ride and
expense of a journey to Salt Lake was avoided.
Brigham had a great many friends in this valley who took pains to protect him from
Lee's two sons, who were out to shoot.
"Here he comes I Here he comes!" Such cries brought me out on the hotel porch, with
Ole Petersen.
I had been talking with him, but found him a restless listener. He was really listening
for the cries to herald the passing prophet. He fidgeted and fretted. He was short
and sharp in his answers, and impatient in his manner. He ran his hands through
his hair, and pulled his long flaxen beard again and again.
"That d-d cheat is coming through here today. I'd like to take a shot at him."
"What has he done to you that makes you wish to shoot him?"
I will tell his story in a few words. His parents had died soon after settling near
Ephraim and they had left other property than the ranch they had received from the
Church. His people had means to invest, when they first came over from Sweden. Being
a minor the Church had taken charge of this property until he should come of age.
As soon as he had grown up, the Church ordered him on a mission to Sweden to make
converts of his fellow countrymen. He knew what this meant, since a Mormon missionary
was sent forth at his own charges and had to make his own way and provide for his
own expenses.
It was a very hardy and wonderful experience that the Mormon missionary had to face,
if sent on a mission. Nothing but the hottest faith and zeal could meet the need.
Now Ole Petersen had cooled off from the faith of his people. He had seen some things
since childhood that he did not like, and there were many things he could not believe.
He had been born with a brain that wanted to think out things, and not take them
for granted just because they were spoken with authority.
So he refused the mission, and decided to stay and work his property himself. This
did not suit the Church, which had long used his property, and did not intend to
surrender the control of it.
He was disciplined for his disobedience, and it was declared that he had forfeited
his rights, and the Church further claimed that the investments made by the parents
had proven failures, so there was very little due him.
This little he was given. He was mad all through, and left the Church's jurisdiction;
and was counted an apostate to whom the Church owed nothing. He interviewed Brigham
Young, who had been very rough with him. He had gone away in a hot-headed rage,
and his little home being in this fanatical town of Ephraim, he had had a fighting
time with words and blows.
Yet he had the old Viking spirit, which kept him on the field. He had not sold out,
and left for other parts, but stood his ground. He was trying to get a Liberal school
into this seat of Mormonism. That was how I happened to meet him that hot day in
June.
If all this had occurred ten years earlier, Ole Petersen would have been "sent to
hell across lots," like many others who had fought the Church of their early faith.
"Here he comes! Here he comes!"
These repeated cries brought Ole out into the dusty road, as the trotting cavalcade
came up the street.
Thirty Piute warriors in paint, feathers, and blankets, rode first with their guns
across their saddles. These "Battle Axes" of the Lord had watchful eyes for any
movements that looked like action. Ole eyed them as fiercely as they eyed him, and
the others in the crowd.
Next came a four horse covered carriage, with an armed rider on each side of the
vehicle. Within, and yet in view, sunk back in the rear seat, with a tired air of
a sick man, sat the Prophet. I caught a full view of his grim, grey bearded face,
sicklied over by long illness, with a sallow tint so unlike the rugged hue that
I had noticed in the Tabernacle two years before. He looked annoyed as he leaned
slightly forward, when he caught the sound of Ole Petersen's strident voice. "Oh!
you Cheat! Oh! Church Fraud! You coward to forsake your tools! You are the man that
they should have hung instead of Lee!"
Ole Petersen's arms were in the air, but without weapons; and this lanky, angry
man shook his fist at Brigham, as he rapidly drove past. A motion with a weapon,
and there would have been a hail of bullets about us.
The last I saw of Brigham Young was the tightening of the mouth until it was a thin,
firm slit within a grey bearded face, that you see in the characteristic pictures
of this Mormon leader. His hands clenched the seat as the carriage swayed; and I
had looked my last at the passing prophet. He looked the sick man that he was.
"May you die the death! May God strike you down!" This was Ole's parting shot as
the carriage, and its advance riders, swept on. As events showed, these words were
more deadly than any shot that he might have fired.
Thirty white guards followed close in the rear, garbed like cowboys and armed. These
men grinned at us, and some few of them sneered at the angry Swede, vociferant in
the roadway. Then the dust rose up, and hid them all from sight.
I never thought that Ole's imprecation would be so soon fulfilled. I could see death
in the eye of this aged despot, and so expected his passing from the world would
not be long delayed. But hardly two months elapsed when word came south that the
President of the Church of the Latter Day
Saints had left for the bourne from whence no traveler returns.
There are some ancient faiths that proclaim their saneness of life and creed, through
the succeeding ages and changes. But all such become inert, and if seemingly quick
with life, it is but a galvanized vitality like the movements of a dead toad under
the electric spark applied to a limb.
See how intact China, the oldest of all countries, has remained after the first
discoveries and civilization. It would not change. It would not learn. So with Buddhism.
It was content to meditate and forego action. It held its ground for ages by the
force of some fine, if not beautiful, ideas, but where it lives to-day it is a quiescent
faith, its force lost to any dominance of the world.
Mormonism has truth elements within its bosom, and because of this, it will live
and thrive; but unless it sloughs off the anachronisms and superstitions, it will
be weighted with a corpse that will hold it to a body of death which will retard
its power. But it has a practical element welded to its theories, and this may cause
it to change with the times, and keep up with those times as they change.
A heavy step in the entry, and a sharp knock on the door, of the Liberal Hall, in
Mount Pleasant, and I opened to admit Ole Petersen, an excited and delighted man.
"You've heard the news? That Rascal's gone to his account. My curse came true!"
There were many who felt like Ole Petersen, but a great mourning was made throughout
the territory, as this modern Prophet passed from among his people.
I soon got word from superficial observers of the conditions in Utah, that now the
Master Mind was gone and his voice silent, the Church, which he had built up, would
crumble and break. This was the general idea, just then, but it was a false one.
This singular mixture of the practical and the spiritual, withstood a change of
leaders with about the same ease that a kingdom meets the cry of, "The King is dead!
Long live the King!"
The old order of things went on under a new management. The system was well fitted
to meet greater changes than a death could bring, and even to face a new condition,
and prosper in a new environment, if necessary.

Chapter XIII — The Mixed Multitude

"The Many-headed Multitude."

Shakespeare

IT was to avoid the so-called mixed multitude that the Latter Day Saints sought
an isolation for themselves, and their posterity from the every-day world.
In this they were the followers of the ancient people of Israel, when they left
the flesh-pots of Egypt, by a most memorable desert march, and sought the promised
land. Canaan was, indeed, such a land. Flowing with milk and honey-supplied with
cattle and bees-it was a land of olive orchards and vineyards, watered by the early
and later rains, and well fitted to be a sample to these modern wanderers, in their
search for a desired habitation.
I have shown how they found their heart's desire in the secluded mountain valleys
of Utah, how also they sought to keep off intrusion, and to protect themselves from
schism and apostasy. I have shown the logical outgrowth of their creed. It was pride
in their peculiar customs and confidence in their religion, which nerved them for
all this strenuous endeavor through forty years of patient, persevering, and conquering
industry.
Now they deserve their meed of praise for this activity of mind and body, for changing
a waste into a garden, and in place of Indian tribes, peopling the land with a civilized
population. They have done a good turn for the United States, for while their religious
policies have made them often disloyal and antagonistic to Federal Law; they have
opened to commerce an immensely rich region of soil and minerals, which would have
remained quiescent for fifty years longer.
I have tried to be fair and just to these people, and while noting their errors
of reason and action, I have also noted their good intentions and their hardihood,
in all their history, as far as I have had occasion to touch upon it.
For long years none but the wandering, curious hunters and trappers travelled these
Utah valleys, save the Indian tribes native to the region. The Mormon Church had
no fear of friction with such elements.
It was the "mixed multitude" they feared, and for as long as possible they kept
it at a distance.
At last there filtered out of these mountains, carried by Dame Rumor, stories of
mineral wealth, of gold and silver deposits in the hills; stories like those coming
from California in the '50's, which set on fire such a tremendous enthusiasm for
the Pacific Slope.
Men stubbing their toes in climbing the foothills after straying stock, had cast
up nuggets from the very "grass roots." Others, bending over purling streams to
quench their desert thirst, had found "color" in their drinking cups. They had stooped
over to wash their clothes in mountain creeks and remained to wash for gold in the
same vessels in which they rinsed their dirty garments.
Of course the usual exaggeration of these acts gave a sort of Arabian Nightsversion to these things, and they came to the eastern world with all the charm
of an Aladdin's Lamp. Then the multitude stirred, and woke up. It cast covetous
eyes toward the hills which hid the Mormon people from the world. Wealthy men "grubstaked"
hard up adventurers, and sent them out as spies of wealth. They came, saw, and reported
that "the half had not been told."
This started a rush of capital and labor, through the canyons by wagon road, and
afterwards by the Union Pacific Railroad. Miners, laborers, gamblers, storekeepers,
cowboys, foreigners, Jews and Gentiles, one and all hastened into these mountain
solitudes which existed through the policy of the Mormon Church untouched by the
hand of Commerce.
Men of wealth, as usual, engineered the mass. The era of the millionaire was at
hand, but these millions that came were from abroad at first, for the United States
was still over taxed, and staggering commercially from the effect of four years
of war. British, French, and Italian money was flung recklessly into the hills,
to be sunk in ambitious mining camps, and stamp mills, under the superintendence
of men who had no interest in the capital but their salary.
You can imagine the change from the quiet, pastoral, and religious color of the
past days to the hurry, hustle, and vociferous business of a new frontier life.
The Jew came in, as he always does, on the crest of this wave of commerce. He seems
built for trade, and being both a genius at opening trade centers, and a daring
commercial gambler, he was in Salt Lake City, and in every new camp of this "mixed
multitude" with his wares and ways. He was too shrewd to enter purely Mormon towns
and so confront the great "Co-op." He wasted no time on such ventures, but industriously
sold his goods at three hundred percent profit to the reckless crowd, whose taste
for gold was ready to pay any price for tools, goods, and food.
One son of Israel, I knew, a good kind fellow he was too, who came into this business
boiling pot, with just a pack, and before I left the Territory, he was living in
a palace in the city of the Saints. From "Pack to Palace," in five years, was "goin'
some," as the miners say.
Now everybody could not do that, but everybody thought he could. So you see the
vim introduced by the "mixed multitude," and the utter impossibility of stemming
such a tide. The Mormon authorities simply gasped at the crowd, made one futile
effort to offset it with defunct laws of the defunct state of Deseret. But they
gave it up, and grimly accepted the influx of new people, with their new ideas.
At first this new tide of human life and industry ran along by itself, very much
as the muddy Missouri does where its waters first enter the clearer stream of the
Mississippi. But you know the universal rule. A little mud can cloud a whole body
of water, and while the Missouri loses itself in the waters of the greater river,
yet it is the hue of the Missouri that gives color to the Mississippi at New Orleans.
So with the "mixed multitude" and the Mormons. Soon these newcomers inoculated the
Territory with their more modern notions of life, and the two adverse streams, religious
fanaticism on the one hand, and the commercial greed for gold on the other, ran
a race side by side for a decade; and then intermingled as one life in camp, civic
centers, and throughout the countryside; and thus the isolation of the Latter Day
Saint was over.
So Utah, when I first saw it in 1875, was undergoing this change. The Missouri current
of the "mixed multitude" was giving quite a decided color to the Mormonism of the
past.
I saw a few signs of the old heroic days, but wherever I went the stamp of the coming
age was evident, in the looser, freer speech, the less respect, if not ridicule,
given religion, and the atmosphere of hard materialism common to the American frontier
life.
The watchword in these regions, for a long time, had been "Duty;" now it was to
be "Dollars." Loss and gain set over against one another, as in most of the circles
of this riddle we call life.
The old settler, with his strong faith, gazed sourly at this condition of things,
and as sourly proclaimed the coming wrath of God; but the newcomer of the "mixed
multitude" smoked his black cigar, stuck in the corner of his mouth, and answered
with a grin of derision, and a drive of energy, that made the new order hum with
the engines of machinery.
Bingham Canyon sprang into life. It was a great gash in the Oquirreh Mountains,
facing the salt sea on the one side, and the Utah Valley on the other. It was a
mineral fissure that drew the crowd of "those who knew." It was not a high grade
camp, as those days valued mining camps, where no ore was worked that did not yield
forty dollars to the ton; but it was a big camp, in that there was no end to the
veins, and the pockets that were beneath its apparent sterile surface.
It was small then, with a population of four thousand people, when I first put foot
in the camp one cold November day. It is now a mining city that issues every year
many millions in dividends to its lucky stockholders.
Alta City, in the Little Cottonwood Canyon, on the opposite side of the valley,
in the Wah-satch range, and still higher up in the air than Bingham, with its altitude
of ten thousand feet, was a richer camp, and the site of the celebrated Emma mine.
This mine was sold for three million dollars to British capitalists, but was found
afterwards to be a fraud, it having been "salted" with "color" by the promoters
to deceive the purchasers.
An amphitheater of hills, gave Alta City a notable site. Dumps and tunnel exits
could be seen all around, and out of this circle of industry, wealth poured and
was carried down to market by a miniature railway, with an average grade of three
hundred feet to the mile.
Nothing was withheld in the lavish outlay of foreign money, that was making this
a lively camp. While it is true many became rich, it is equally true that great
hosts were made poor. This is about the outcome of all mining and fulfills the words
of Mark Twain, who was himself an old -miner as well as an author-"As much goes
into the hole as comes out of it."
Park City was another outcome of this mining fever. Situated in Big Cottonwood Canyon,
and nearer Salt Lake City, it was conducted by a set of level-headed men who prevented
any collapse to the camp, as finally overtook Alta City. The result was that while
no furor was made over its location, yet it always produced stable wealth. Here
it was that George Hearst, then a miner of experience in California, bought out
a claim from a few discouraged tenderfoot adventurers. They had come within a few
feet of great wealth, when they threw down their picks and said, "we quit." George
Hearst began the next day, and a few hours later was confronted with a vision of
future wealth.
He began his spectacular career, as a son of fortune, at this time, and began building
up his remarkable success at the spot where others, more faint hearted than he,
gave up the fight.
Out of this mine came the means by which he became Senator of the United States,
as no man at that time could become a Senator unless he had a long, a very long
pocket book. The state university at Berkeley, California, and all the interests
of the Hearst's Syndicate of American Newspapers, from the Pacific to the Atlantic,
are under obligation to this mine in the Big Cottonwood Canyon.
Of course there were flat failures in some of the camps. One such was at Tintic,
where, at first, great surface showings drew the rush, but it was a case of "pinch
out" for the camp, as it so often is with a promising vein of ore in a shaft, or
a tunnel. It ends in a pocket, and a pocket holds just so much, and no more. So
Tintic, as a camp, lies idle, dormant, dead.

Chapter XIV — The Old Prospector

"Riches certainly make themselves wings"

Proverbs

THE prospector is the man that makes mining possible. It is his enterprise, his
everlasting faith in prospects, his nerve and calm courage, that does the trick.
He casts a charm about lone grey hills whose land value is about "two bits" per
square mile, the price of a California miner's drink. He rambles in the chaparral,
sage brush; and is familiar with the owl's hoot, the coyote's howl, and the rattler's
hiss. But he enjoys his tin can repast, over a stick fire, amid such scenes; since
he lives expectant that a stumble of his foot may unearth rich rock, that will give
rise to a camp to be known by his name as the discoverer. Red Dick was such a man.
I met him on the slope of the Little Cottonwood Canyon one hot afternoon in July.
In midsummer the granite walls of this canyon absorb the sun's rays, and the flinty
rocks reflect this heat from side to side. The bed of the canyon is at furnace heat
during mid-day, only cooling with the evening breeze.
Red Dick was wiping the sweat from a very rubicund face with an old red kerchief,
which he wore loose about his lean red neck: the red flannel shirt tucked into his
old pants accentuated his color characteristics, and the afternoon's heat. He was
spitting and swearing, when I came up to him, on the trail to Alta City. His bottle
was broken, for a slip from his hand just as he lifted it, had let it fall on a
sharp flint at his feet. I saw disappointment on the face of a thirsty and bibulous
man. It was not water he had lost, but the favorite old rye whiskey in common use,
and this gave greater volubility to his strong words. Strong waters always beget
words under the stress of excitement.
"Say, Stranger, this is tough luck! Lost my drink just at the lip!"
He eyed me anxiously, with the evident hope that I had something stimulating hidden
in my pocket. Well, I had. It was not whiskey for I cannot drink the stuff. I wonder
that so many men like its flavour. But I like wine, for my ancestors all drank it
at meals, and I had been accustomed to its use, in that way, from the days of my
youth. I always thought of wine, beer, or ale as a beverage to be used as one uses
milk, tea, coffee, or water to quench thirst agreeably.
It was not a temperance age or locality, and a strong drink was something everybody
took, or expected to take on a suitable occasion. What I had was a flask of wine,
some old Port, as a cordial for the body when overtaxed or chilled.
"Here is something as good as what you have lost," I handed my flask to him, with
a smile. He eyed it and myself, and grinned in a friendly way. Next he tilted it
to his dry mouth, and shut his eyes while its contents gurgled down his long red
throat, his Adam's apple working vigorously. He was a gentleman, he knew when to
stop. He took a good drink as he knew' I wished him to, but he left me half the
contents, wiped the flask with his sleeve, and handed it back.
"Good stuff if it is wine! It hit the right spot at this pertickeler time."
I saw that he was a character, and was a promising find for a good story, so I set
out to interview him, like a reporter.
As to outfit, he was evidently down to bedrock. A miner in luck is well, though
roughly dressed. This man had no coat, a very dirty shirt and hat; while his overalls
were held up by one lone suspender. His boots, of course, were well down at the
heel, and almost open at the toes. Held by a thin rope across his chest, his bundle
of blankets hung under his arm. They were as well worn as his clothes. He had tobacco
and a pipe, for these implements of the solitary came into sight straightway after
the drink, and he filled up and asked for a match. Soon the smoke was on, and I
saw that he was ready for a yarn, and so at it I went.
"Yes, I'm down, but I'm not out, pardner! You can see that without my saying it.
I've been down many a time, but never quite out. Some day I'll finish in luck or
out of it; for this life is a strange deal to some of us. Say! I've known the day
when I wore good clothes like yours. I got a bit of an education to start with,
so I knew something about chemicals and assay work. Yes! I'm an old Californian,
and just missed being a forty-niner. I was on the American River back of Sacramento,
in the early days, and panned out a heap of gold dirt in those placer diggin's.
Yes! I struck it rich there, but lost most of my pile when I visited Frisco with
a bunch of the boys. But I had a good time, you bet!
"No! never thought, in those days, of settling down, or going into business. You
see! those times were pretty free, and the dust came easy from the sands and rocks.
We thought it would never let up, but just go on that way; so what was the use of
saving the dust? Well! once I did buy a place. A poor fellow had made a farm out
of some flat bottom land on the Yuba River near Marysville. He wanted to go East
to see his folks, as he was on his last legs, being a one-lunger. I had coin then,
and he hit me in a soft spot I have at times. So I bought him out. You never saw
a feller so glad as this poor guy, when he had my wad.
"Well! I had a ranch on my hands, and a mighty fine vineyard too. I had stock and
tools; a house and barn. In fact the whole outfit was there. The boys plagued me
to marry a widow who had five kids of her own. She kept a feeding house in Marysville,
and the boys said it was a duty I owed society to hitch up with her. Well! I didn't
do it. I wasn't a marrying sort in those days. I might have done it once back where
I came from. I ain't going to say where that was. That's all closed,-final. But
she was cattish, and turned me down in a pet. So I felt very sore, and I ain't got
over it yet.
"My ranch was a bother to me, for I didn't know a thing about farming. I like roving,
and this thing called for settling down. What d'ye think settled it? The Yuba River!
"There came a flood such as you don't often see. The whole Sacramento Valley looked
like a lake for weeks, and my ranch was washed clean off the earth by the time the
water went down. You never saw such rain, about like it was when Noah went into
the ark. Of course my ground showed up after the freshit, but there wasn't a thing
on it, but mud and rocks, with some stranded logs and timber. House, vineyard, crops,
stock all gone. So I let it slide, since the Yuba River had changed its course,
and ran partly over my land.
"I wasn't pertickler sorry for I itched to get at a pick again. So the old life
went on. Flush one year and busted the next. Went with the rush to every new diggin's,
till I got the rhumaticks bad and had to quit for a time.
"Well! I set up a sort of resort at Stockton, which I bought with some coin I had
left. I fed the travellers on the road to the mines. I liquored them at a bar, and
let them gamble in my back room. You bet I was popular. This sort of thing did for
a while, till a town fire burned out the whole side of the street, and my outfit
went up in smoke.
"No insurance? Of course not. We weren't that careful in those days. Bedrock again.
Then I joined a band of rangers to run out the cattle thieves, and greaser bandits,
which were playing hob with the valley folks. In one hot scrimmage I got a ball
in the thigh that stopped horse riding for good, and brought back my old rhumatiks.
"I was in a hospital in Frisco for about five months, with one thing and another.
The Doc treated me fine, but shot an awful lot of stuff into my stummick in that
length of time.
"I came out thin as a lath, but full of go. I went mining again, this time in quartz
rock, on the Mother Lode, at Sonora town. It was shaft sinking, and I worked for
pay, not for prospects. I kept right poor, for it always took the whole of my wages
to live. D'ye notice that's the way with a salary man, he can't save a bean, for
the life of him?
"Think of old age? No, never crossed my mind once 'til one day in a barber shop
I saw I was gettin' grey and bald. You see I come of a stock that frosts early at
top.
"Then came the Colorado rush, and it carried me right off my feet so to speak. A
mining rush always took with me. I joined a party of surveyors, and we put through
the desert for Denver. If I was a writer I could fill a book with stuff about that
trip. I tell you we saw some awful things; but to go on with this truthful yarn,
pard-ner, I prospected at Fairplay and Cripple Creek. But, Lord! it wasn't like
the old diggin's on the Feather and Yuba Rivers above Marysville. No?
Californey's the mining ground for me. It took just four years to get foot-loose,
and back to the coast; as far as this derned Mormon country. Say! I've just left
them Emma Mine fellers, they are sports, all right; but no good at cheating, like
them Yankee sharpers that sold them that salted claim at such a Bonanza figure.
Yes! I'm on my way to Frisco, but I'm to try Bingham on this lap. Anything doing
over there, pardner?"
I have put his story in, almost without a break, but I had to question him, at times,
to keep him going, in my endeavor to get his life story.
He was evidently nearing the age of sixty, and I suppose, this old prospector would
go on in his way of life, till some day he would go over the "divide," with about
the same possessions he had when he came into this strange life.
Looking at it in a broad spirit, would he not be as well-to-do, as the man of millions,
who, in dying, leaves his wealth behind for his sons to squander, or his relatives
to fight over?
Rolling stones gather no moss was written on his face, and would be the fitting
epitaph over his worn body, when it occupied the only piece of ground that he would
own, when-Life's fitful dream was over.
We exchanged a few things. He gave me some odd specimens out of his pocket, and
I gave him a few supplies from my travelling bag; for I was horseback, riding old
Blueskin, a veteran canyon horse, on my way to Alta City.
The last I saw of him was his ragged hat, bobbing above some rocky points, as he
swung around a bend in the trail, going down hill to the valley below, like a thousand
more men of this strange, strident, virile breed of prospectors. He was a fair type
of a set of men without whom the great Rocky West could not have been opened to
settlement, railroads, and commerce.
It was a long uphill ride to Alta City, with frowning walls high on either hand.
Turn after turn was passed, till at last we struck the snow level, a little short
of nine thousand feet altitude. I stopped awhile at a wayside restaurant, kept by
a dapper little woman and her midget of a husband. She gave me a meal for a dollar,-one
egg, two soda biscuits, a dab of butter, two "corn pancakes with a little syrup
in a dirty glass, a cup of coffee-of rather a washy kind-for my outlay. She said
"vittles was dear as freight was high."
She was proud of her husband, dubbed him "her man," and asked me if I did not think
him a "proper sort," as he went out the back to hack at some sticks for the fire.
He seemed so obedient that the big black cigar in his mouth looked out of place.
She said that it was his "only failing," and that a man ought to have some bad habits
to make him "real nice."
Refreshed, and my horse fed at about the same cost as for my own food, I left the
happy couple of this upper world life to their restaurant and its charms. By nightfall,
I reached the camp, just as the lights began to sparkle in the windows of the buildings
along the one main street.
I had a letter to an ex-Mormon elder. He was in business, carrying everything in
his store that could be wanted in such a place. He slept in a little recess at the
rear of the store; where he had an equally small kitchen. I know that we two barely
found room to sit down at a table, hinged to the wall. He was hospitable and said
I could sleep on a shelf about three feet wide, under some blankets. He started
supper, first wiping out his frying pan with some old copies of the Salt Lake
Tribune. He said that it was sanitary, and beat a dish cloth, since you could
use the paper afterward to start a fire. He pounded some tough meat tender, he slushed
his knives and forks in some hot but greasy water, and laid them wet by equally
wet plates which had been washed in the same manner as the knives and forks. He
put on a whole roll of butter and a lot of sad looking soda biscuits. Meanwhile
the meat frizzled and some potatoes boiled. We had coffee out of a big black can,
that had stood heat and smoke of many fires, but as it was strong and hot, it went
down. He had some condensed milk, then a new thing, and of which he was very proud.
Brown sugar did the sweetening. Being polite, I ate as he did, and made no comments.
Still I enjoyed this evening meal more than I did the mid-day dinner at the restaurant
on Main street the next day; for I unfortunately passed through the kitchen at the
wrong moment, wishing to dry a couple of handkerchiefs at the big stove. Looking
around I was in time to see the Chinese cook in the pantry making biscuits, and
spraying the nicely assorted nascent bread with his mouth in Chinese laundry style.
That let me out. I never touched biscuit-bread again in that camp, or in any other.
I had either pancakes or loaf bread. Still John did this in a most innocent, matter-of-fact
manner that made me certain that it was the procedure in the preparation of biscuit,
by all such oriental cooks.
My host of the evening was a bright and clever man. He had a fine mind, and so as
we got onto the subject of the Mormons and his departure from them, we had a good
talk on philosophy. He was an advocate of the old idea of holding your life views
of religion, or aught else that was metaphysical, in an exoteric manner to suit
the multitude, and an esoteric manner to suit yourself. That meant if it were popular
and profitable, go with the majority externally, but mentally hold your own view
internally and subjectively. In fact, be a hypocrite if necessary, but do not give
yourself away, if you change your opinion.
"Well if this is right?" I said, "why did you leave the Mormons?"
"Well, I joined them because I had to; it was policy and it was safe. You understand
that I left because I could leave them safe, since Uncle Sam was here, and I did
not like their views."
"Oh! You left them because of polygamy, I suppose."
"No. I could be a polygamist, if it paid to go into that condition; but not if I
had to face poverty and feed a lot of mouths. It's not a moral question with me
at all. Some are born to be polygamous, and it is safer for them and their morals
to have several wives. No! I saw more money in these mines, and no way of making
it if I stayed under the great Co-op. I am running a Co-op of my own right here."
"Well! when you get rich, what then?"
"The world is wide, and I will find a nicer nest than rough camps and these loud-mouthed
miners. There are Art and Literary centers in Europe where one could live, if one
had money."
This educated freethinker had some willowy principles as the outcome of his hankey-pankey
playing with this "exoteric" and "esoteric" philosophy applied to common every-day
life.
Coming down from this mining aerie is no tax on heart, but it is upon the heels,
I left my old horse, Blueskin for his owner to bring down later, and took the trail
afoot, since I had to connect with the narrow-gauge railroad at the depot eight
miles below. At first over the snow it was easy going. Although it was June there
was snow at this altitude, but as soon as I passed below the snow line, I struck
the ties of the tram-cars. Mules took the place of the locomotive, as the grade
was five hundred feet to the mile, too steep for steam. The mule cars had gone already
and I soon got into trouble with my heels. I had to hurry, and so it was pound-pound
steadily down grade, my heels hitting the ties at every step. I forgot the consequences
of such foot-work. Eight miles of this at top-speed and I made the train. I also
made some "tender-feet" too. The next day I was on my back, due to contracted lumbar
muscles, from this severe jarring of the heels upon the ties. The boys in camp laughingly
called it a tenderloin spine. It was three days before I could walk erect.
While in Alta City I heard of a miner's easy death. He was a veteran, and was ascending
to his work at one of the highest mines in the range. The trail was long and winding,
and the air was thin at that great height. Out of breath, he sat to rest on a jutting
rock, a short distance below the mine tunnel. From weariness he sighed, and as he
did so he expired. His breath came out, but none returned.
"His heart but once heaved, and forever grew still."
This camp has suffered from snowslides. A wholesale tragedy of this kind occurred
the winter before my arrival. The food and ammunition for the mines, in the winter
go up the trail- on pack mules or freight sleds. This is slow climbing. It is along
a trail constantly covered by heavy snows, and swept by avalanches from higher points.
The trail is too narrow to allow a team to turn round, and there are only occasional
places where the width permits teams to pass each other. There is no chance to increase
speed beyond an unsteady plod. In March a surface thaw had occurred, due to a wandering
Chinook wind from Oregon. A heavy frost had followed. Then on this slippery surface
a heavy coat of snow had fallen when Old Winter had shouted "I've not done with
that camp yet." A heavy deposit resting on such a slippery surface needed only a
jar to start a slide. It was this oft recurring condition that gave to the gulch,
where this tragedy happened, the name of "Dead Man's Gulch." Nineteen freight sleds,
with as many men and teams, were slowly passing the mouth of this gulch. The leading
teamster was watching the crest of the gulch, and saw the first signs of a slide,
"the snow-smoke." Instantly he yelled, "A slide! A slide! Whip up, Boys!" Whips
cracked and mules struggled forward, the drivers looking up, with no more time than
for a look. With an increasing roar, the whole slope seemed to start to life, and
swept downward. Snow, rocks, trees, mixed in wildest tumult, formed an awful front
which swept on, and over the trail. A moment later nothing was left of the long
line of freighters but the leading team. The driver was the only living one to see
this slide pile up in the bottom of the canyon, the avalanche missing him by a few
yards. With his heart in his mouth, he pushed on, to Alta City, to report the loss
of all the others. Buried a hundred feet deep they were hidden until the July sun,
melting the snow, exposed the wreck of men, animals, and goods.
Another danger beset the traveller in this canyon. Near the entrance, and where
the junction of the locomotive railroad and the mule tram-cars
occurred, was a mass of giant granite blocks fallen from the towering cliffs. Some
were as big as a house, others sharp-pointed like a tooth, while more looked like
huge pieces of cube sugar, so square were they. These being accessible to the railroad,
they were being worked up by the masons for the walls of the Mormon Temple in Salt
Lake City. Asleep on these blocks and about the crevasses were hosts of great rattle
snakes, so numerous that in the heat of summer you could detect their peculiar odor
as you passed by. A notice, with the legend "Be careful," was erected here for the
safety of all travellers. A good deal of revolver practice took place here; the
miners' enjoying the sport of shooting off the heads of these reptiles as they lay
sunning themselves on the rocks. I have seen the stage driver, with his skill-ful
whip, almost cut off the heads of some rattlers near-by as we passed up the grade.

Chapter XV — A Lively Mining Camp

"Thus far into the bowels of the land, Have we marched without
impediment."

Shakespeare

IF Alta City, as its name suggests, is a lofty camp, Bingham City, in the opposite
range of the Oquirreh Mountains, was a lively camp.
I had often wished to see a typical mining camp, to decide if the customary "gunfire"
stories were true, or exaggerated. Well! I found them about true, as I will now
relate.
This shanty city was along a narrow canyon, which began in the low foothills, covered
with sagebrush, and then extended upward with a sinuous course to what was known
as Upper Bingham where in winter the snow lies deep and slides are common.
This is rather a treeless range, and there is little that is picturesque in this
canyon town by way of view. What it lacked in nature, it made up in human nature.
All sorts of people were there. To use the common phrase, "We are all here, Jews,
Gentiles, and Mormons." The business was almost entirely Hebraic, the mining almost
to a man, Gentile, but not by any means gentle, and the teaming and toiling by "Jack"
Mormons, meaning thereby such Mormons as had left their piety in the valley, and
were up in these hills, like the rest of the human tide, "For what there was in
it." All these people meant to make money, and then go home-"To behave and be respectable."
This canyon was well occupied by this industrious town. Against the rocky sides
the houses pressed their backs, while their fronts, of most varied designs of ugliness,
looked boldly on "The Street." This street was a narrow affair, without pretense
of road work, and was simply a wagon trail up which loads of supplies and men were
carried. People thronged it because there was no other place to walk. A sidewalk
was an un-thought-of thing. Little suggestions of such a possibility were seen in
several platforms, built before the larger edifices, such as the saloons and the
hotels. These were nice things to land on, in stepping from the stage on a muddy
day, and in good weather excellent places for pedestrians to clean their huge boots,
or take a "free rest." When the weather was good and warm, these suggestions of
coming sidewalks were occupied by the idle and the tired to make swaps, tell stories,
take siestas, originate rows and quarrels, and anything else to make life interesting
in the camp.
The street was a sight at all times for a street sweeper. The litter was terrific,
for it was the custom of the housekeepers to sweep the surplus contents of their
houses, with a dash of the broom, into the street, and then to bang their doors
with an air of having got rid of a lot, and having done a good day's work.
In this town there was no garbage brigade, with shovels and brooms, to deposit this
litter carefully in those bins labelled "For clean streets."
The grand climax to this was on Monday morning, after the strenuous work of Sunday
was over, the Camp's rest day but not religious day. Packs of cards, used and cast
away by those in bad luck, were swept out by the barkeep, and the roadway looked
like an outdoor gambler's paradise.
The "hells" were all indoors, and you had to go within to see them, and to smell
them. I do not deny that the odors of these places came out, but the sniff you got
when mixed with oxygen and the ozone of the Bingham hills, was nothing in its strength,
to the full blast of the interiors.
The rest of this canyon was taken up by the river or "Crik," that was always trying
to pass down and squeeze its way, with considerable noise, over boulders, through
riffles and sluices set in its way by the industrious placer miner, and get out
into the open to find its peace in the bosom of the river Jordan. I need not name
the other occupants of this narrow vent in these hills, since they were only tarantulas,
rattle snakes, and mammoth spiders.
I came into the camp with a rush, for I was a passenger on the four-horse stage.
I had missed the train, and took the chance to make the camp that night by going
through on Rory McDonald's stage. He was a Scotch tough. I suppose that he had been
a good little boy in his early days, and his "Scotch Mither" had made him toe the
crack to recite the shorter catechism. That may be, but he had left it far behind
and like many a boy brought up to be "varra gude," he had swung to the opposite
extreme. Going west, and doing as the West did in the '70's, Rory McDonald became
a tough, and carried a gun. He also carried a charming brogue with a big Scotch
"burr" on his tongue's end, a tantalizing smile, an ogling eye that disturbed the
girls, and a most ingratiating manner, which made him many friends, and popular
with the travelling public.
There were several bloody affairs, gunfights and homicides while I was there; but
Rory McDonaid was the man who was responsible for the worst of these affairs. His
glib tongue, and indifferent morals beguiled to his side as companion the wife of
a lame shoemaker. The husband was industrious in his way, but not a lucky man. He
did not climb, but remained financially below par and his wife got tired of economy
and poverty.
Rory McDonald was lavish with his money. His stage line was paying, and he spent
his profits freely on this woman. Taylor, the shoemaker, was chaffed coarsely by
the men of the town, about his wife. He was a pale-faced fellow, but his courage
was not lacking. Since he could not manage his side-stepping wife, he walked up
to McDonald, and told him to "git heeled," as the next time they met he would begin
shooting. He nearly began then, but since the sheriff was within sight, several
mutual friends parted the angry pair. Everybody looked for trouble; but several
days slipped by. Men began to twit Taylor for his easy sufferance of this blot on
his honor. Then it happened like a thunder clap.
Miss Minor, a young woman the niece of the only resident physician, was standing
on the porch of her uncle's office, looking for the mail. As she glanced down the
street she saw a man coming up on the opposite side, with a creeping, bending step,
and trailing a shot-gun. She recognized the red face of Rory McDonald. It all happened
in a flash. A shout, as McDonald stopped in front of the shoemaker's door, which
was wide open. It was a long narrow room, with the work bench, and seat at the far
end. There tapping heels, Taylor was bending over his work. Following the shout
"look out" from McDonald, came the crash of his shot gun, as it poured a charge
into the fated man. As an echo came the revolver shot that struck McDonald's thigh
high up. The second barrel followed, and Taylor fell riddled, yet in falling fired
a second time. The bullet flew high, through the open door, and across the street.
It struck the post of the porch, against which Miss Minor's hand rested. Slivers
of wood fell on her head, and the bullet buried itself in the building.
I was up a gulch opening on the main street, when I heard these reports. They sounded
like the falling of a lot of lumber from a wagon. Until I saw men running I did
not think the noise was gunfire. When I reached the spot the crowd held McDonald,
who was white of face and bleeding fast. Others were in the shop, viewing the riddled
yet breathing body of Taylor. 'He died as they lifted him up.
Some were for lynching McDonald right away, saying it was cowardly murder, to shoot
a man down in his store with no more warning than a shout. Others swept McDonald
off to the local jail, and had him out of sight in a few minutes. A divided camp
discussed the horror, and it soon appeared that Taylor's friends were in sufficient
numbers to carry out their threat of a lynching bee. The sheriff was persuaded to
avoid a fight by taking McDonald to Salt Lake City for safekeeping. During the early
hours of the night, he was smuggled into a wagon, under some baled hay, and passed
out of the camp without notice. When the posse came to the jail later, the sheriff
let them look into all the cells, and then told them they would have to go to Salt
Lake City for their man.
This was one of many coarse blood-horrors common to these camps. Some months later
McDonald's money and friends carried him safely through a trial in court, and he
came out free, due to the jury's sentence, "done in self defense." Taylor's threat
"heel yourself," was deemed the legal reason for the sentence.
McDonald met me in the canyon near the depot, and came up with his usual ingratiating
smile, with extended hand. "I can't take your hand," I said, "I think you did a
cowardly thing. You killed a man in an unfair fight."
"But he would have shot me, in the same way, jf he could."
"Maybe, but he did not. If you had been the man we thought you were, you would have
called him out, into the open, on even terms."
McDonald looked his surprise, then scowled a moment, and turned on his heel with
a growl.
He was always morose after that. It is often so. A man who is a killer soon loses
his kindliness of temperament.
Most of the camp ores went out by the narrow-gauge railroad. They went to the smelters
at Sandy, at the junction of the broad-gauge railroad, from whence, in the form
of lead, silver, and gold ingots, they were transported to the East. The passengers
for the Camp came in on the mixed train. Returning the engine remained to bring
out the loaded ore cars, but the baggage and passenger cars made the trip by gravity,
under brake control; for the grade was sharp most of the way to the valley. I remember
a wild ride, by this gravity method, with a party of young men of the assay and
mining offices. We occupied a number of seats together, and were in a merry mood,
since it was a vacation party.
In a neighboring seat was a middle-aged aggressive Agnostic. At least he was loud
in his profession of the philosophy of "Know-Nothing" as to religion, although he
was at the same time a Spiritualist as to his superstition. I never knew a man of
that stamp, who did not take up something more credulous than the religion he rejected.
Moreover he was roughly Anti-Church and Anti-Christ, and thus popular with a certain
crowd in the Camp. Now, none of us were of his way of thinking. Most of the young
men were not specially religious, although all of them had a little of it somewhere
in their make-up. I was openly and avowedly religious, and tried my best to advance
morality and sane religion in the Camp. I had some influence too, and made public
addresses on Sunday, and conducted, the only day-school in the Camp, on week-days.
Mr. Agnostic sneered at me, therefore, as an Eastern "Goody-Goody," and took great
delight, every Monday night, in the Social Hall in ridiculing my addresses of Sunday.
Well; on this train he went for me about the "fables" of the Bible. Especially he
haw-hawed over the Jonah incident, getting off the ancient joke that "it was an
awful fishy story, so fishy that it smelled disgustingly of falsehood." I let him
go on for a time to see the kind of ammunition he had to use against me, and a crowd
gathered around to listen, grin, and make "eye-brows" at me. I was just beginning
a reply to some of his "points," as he termed them, when the car, which had been
slipping along very fast, gave a vicious jolt which sat us sharply down in our car-seats.
Then the front door banged open, and the brakeman looked in. Above the roar of the
car we heard his voice. "Hold tight all. We're on the run. Brake's broke!"
We were just out of the canyon proper, with its many sharp curves, and were on the
long straight track for Sandy in the bottom of the valley. This was fortunate, for
the road was better ballasted than in the canyon. We fairly leaped along, the heavy
baggage car behind the coach acting as an accelerator. Mr. Agnostic was silent and
sat still. Soon signs of scare appeared, his red face visibly whitened and he tapped
his fingers nervously on the seat. All of us were much stirred and took no notice
of him. We held our breath as the little train swept, like a flash, past the telegraph-posts.
Some women aboard uttered suppressed shrieks, bravely struggling with their oozing
courage. We expected a smash. I was anxious, but I had a mind to note how differently
the young men faced this unexpected peril. Some had their heads high, and nostrils
wide, like a racer ready for the jump. Others cringed in their seat sand stared
unseeingly out of the window. A few fellows laughed. One man swore. I did not hear
a single outcry from any man. It showed what a self-contained set the . Westerners
are. In Eastern waters, when confronted with the probability of speedy death, I
had been among men of a more emotional sort. I recalled a six-day gale in mid Atlantic,
on a liner, so poorly ballasted, and so narrow of beam that she rolled to the extreme
limit of gravity. Occurring every few minutes, these desperate ship swings broke
everything that could come loose. These violent rolls broke the nerve of both passengers
and crew, so that I heard the fool, the infidel, and the coarse liver, alike pray,
spurred thereto by fear. But after the storm was over, and their fright passed,
these men were the same as before. "The dog returned to its vomit again, and the
sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire."
The other occasion was on the Canadian Lakes. It was on a sort of "penny-whistle"
steamer, her engine and boiler were so small. She had an ambitious load of cordwood
aboard, and was top heavy. Crossing Georgian Bay from Parry Sound we faced a furious
storm. For five hours we just barely kept our stem to the choppy sea, and had the
tiller ropes broke, or the helmsman lost his nerve and hold, the little craft would
have broached-to, and gone down with all hands. During these wild hours, humanity
was the same, on this little boat of a freshwater lake, as it was on the big Atlantic
liner.
So, here, on this runaway train, it proved the stamina of both women and men, the
women showing almost equal coolness with the men. Suddenly we rushed and rocked
past buildings which bordered the Jordan River. Next we roared across the bridge,
and toward the rising grade leading to the smelters at Sandy. We were safe from
a smash. The upgrade acted as a brake, and the cars soon slowed down sufficiently
for many to drop off the platform, one after another, like ripe pears from a shaken
tree. The yardsmen slipped a few spare ties behind the wheels, and the train was
at rest after a wild ride. It left us sobered. Mr. Agnostic came out limp and tame,
with his aggression all gone for the time. He met some cold, sarcastic grins from
the fellows who had noted his complete scare.
"Say! Old Man, you looked as though you really did believe in a Hell!"
This was the salutation he got from a passing miner, but he received no response
from Mr. Agnostic. He had lost his sand. We reached Sandy Junction, to gather about
a poor fellow who was brought down from Alta City "leaded." Long labor in lead ores
brings on a painful disease. The blood is devitalized, the flesh takes on the hue
of death, and the pain is both neuralgic and rheumatic. No one can say that the
miner is paid too much for his labor and risks.
It was in Sandy that I met with some old-time courtesy from a modern young man.
Perhaps Mr. Terhune would not now be considered modern, but he was then very much
up to the times in his knowledge of minerals, and the roasting and smelting of ores.
The immense smelters at Sandy, whose pungent smoke was wafted south, so you could
sniff the odor twenty miles distant, were under his charge. Both capital and skill
were invested in the giant plant. Mr. Terhune showed me the process, and the products,
and the great stacks of silver-lead bars corded up in the open shed.
"Do you not fear robbery where so much bullion lies about?"
"Just lift one of those bars and you will see if a thief takes anything without
noise. We have our watchman."
An effort was needed on my part to move a bar, and I saw how safe weight made wealth.
These, with other plants, helped to make silver another cheap commodity, and give
rise to the Silver Question of a later day. Mr. Terhune was a product of the old
Dutch stock of Knickerbocker days, and the amiable brother of a most gifted sister
whose name, as a writer, is well known far and wide in the United States.

Chapter XVI — The Town and Canyon of American Fork

"So green, so full of goodly prospect and melodious sounds
on every side, that the harp of Orpheus was not more charming."

Milton

THE town of American Fork is a picturesque little place. It is situated beyond
the point of the mountain divide that looks toward Lake Utah. It fronts this lake,
whose sheen in the sunlight resembles "Blue Galilee," and is an American Bethsaida.
The spurs of the Canyon are near and looking eastward the lofty knife-like ridge
of Mt. Aspinwall is visible for nearly twenty miles.
I met some strangely interesting people in this little town. I remained here some
time to establish a liberal school, and another in the adjoining town of Battle
Creek. This latter place got its name from a fight with the Utes in very early days.
I rode into American Fork in the rain of a long-continued storm. My ride was made
in a heavy-wheeled farm wagon and under a flapping low-hung canvas cover. This afforded
shelter from the driving rain, but was a constant weight on one's head and shoulders,
since the bows were so weak and few that the cover sagged under the weight of the
rain and the pressure of the wind. On our way we stopped for refreshment at a store-hotel.
I hyphenate the word for it was a combination of the two. Some visible groceries
and a strong odor of invisible cheese and kerosene indicated the first business.
A round stove with round backed chairs about it, a huge spittoon, a desk, a counter
with a bar and bottles, suggested the latter occupation. Also there was a rear room,
on the door of which was written in letters of local talent, this legend, "DININ'
RUME." So we had hope of something to eat in there.
It was here I acted as a member of a volunteer fire department. I sat drying my
garments at the expectoration-anointed stove, listening to the sounds of frying
meat in the rear room. Suddenly something soft, light and warm fell on my arm. I
saw it was a flake of burning soot. An upward glance, through the stove-pipe hole,
revealed a light, and in an instant more a blaze. The stove-pipe had parted with
the heat expansion, and the under side of the shingle roof was on fire. "FIRE!"
I yelled, and sprang on a chair to get at the opening. The others yelled too, and
the host came running in.
The building was one of those cheap shells of unpainted rough lumber, which enterprising
frontier men liked to build in those days. So utterly ugly that it was a boon to
burn them down. It meant sharp work, if we were not to lose our supper, and our
host his "Hotel." Sharp was the word. The boss was up a ladder and on the roof with
a few movements of his long legs. Off came the burning shingles. Others of us tore
apart the ceiling boards above the stove, and threw up water from kitchen buckets,
pans and kettles. Five minutes later there was an awful mess around the stove, a
big hole in the roof, a rustling, excited crowd moving around, but the fire was
out. The host felt generous toward the helping company, and gave us a free supper
of fried ham, eggs and potatoes, with the usual "hotel" coffee. We arrived in the
town of American Fork about dark. We passed a two-story adobe house with dormer
windows in the roof to lighten and enlarge the upper story.
"Who owns that fine large house?" I asked. It was so unlike the usual adobe house
in these Mormon settlements, that I was curious, and put this question to the teamster.
"Oh! That belongs to one of Brigham's relicts."
"What?"
"Well, one of his widows, 'grass widows' I mean. Mrs. Alien's her name; ought to
have been Mrs. Young, you know."
"Why! I thought Brigham Young married all of the women whom he called his wives."
"So he did in a way. This one was sealed to him in celestial wedlock. He is said
to have had several dozen married in that way. He had about nineteen, or twenty,
married regular in the Endowment House."
"Did he build homes for all of these celestial wives or widows, what ever their
relation might be?"
"No! Not he, but some pressure was brought to bear in this case, and Mrs. Alien
was a very pretty woman then. She was a favorite of this great personage."
"Oh! I see. Something after the order of the European Courts in the days of the
French, during the reign of Louis XIV."
The teamster was an intelligent man but he was not up in the history of Europe.
He could doubtless tell all about the small incidents of American history from the
Colonial days down, but across the Atlantic was too remote to interest him.
Here I met a man from Aberdeen, "Awbur-deen" so he pronounced it; and he was "that
Scotch you could see it a distance." It is not often that the canny Scot is caught
in the meshes of "soopersteeshun," such as catches the more excitable, and less
cautious native of the States. Robert and William Peters, brothers, were both here.
The former had been, and the latter still was, a Mormon. In fact, William Peters
was an official, not only of the railroad, of which he was the local depot master,
but he was high upon the rungs of the ecclesiastical ladder of this Utah "Kirk."
Robert had left, not only his first love, the old Scotch Kirk of his boyhood, but
his second love, the church of his "beguilement," as he phrased it.
"I was that looney onct, that I was caught, like a feesh by the gills, and hooked
for fair by them Mormons," he said to me in explanation of his position.
He was now a liberal and offered to aid me as much as possible to start a school.
"My brither, Willyum, is still sae saft that he sees not onnything but this new
fangled kirk, but I left the same lang syne." He had the true Scotch grit, and was
able to take his position and take it alone. He led a lonely life, and made his
living by making shoe lasts, and was a master workman at his trade. He could take
your foot measure, and out of a block of maple wood, cut your last so accurately,
that a shoe, built on it by a good shoemaker, resulted in the comfort of an individual
fit. Moreover, when you put these lasts into your boots, we wore boots high up the
calf of the leg in those days, and the shape "lasted."
This was another comfort, that once discovered by those who could afford it, resulted
in Robert Peters' getting many an order for the lasts, both for men and for women.
There is nothing like a singular handicraft, dependent upon the individual skill,
to make a man independent as to bread and butter. This does not mean that Robert
ate much of either. For he did not. He was a singular Scot in several ways. He never
married, and would only eat certain foods of his own cooking.
He made Scotch scones, rather too solid for me, and these, with potatoes and salt,
and cold water, constituted his main food supply. A little herring and "parritch"
three times a week were luxuries.
"Sugar? No I niver ate it. It's just salt with the parritch. Onnything else would
spoil the taste for me."
It was evident that Robert's simple food was not burdensome, and as the high cost
of living was then unknown, he kept well within his slender means.
I found out that he put his savings into some Scotch charities in Aberdeen, his
old home city, and also that he helped a little in the efforts to establish schools
in Salt Lake City. That is to say he put in his mite.
"Twa'd be the saving o' the people, if they were taught the Shorter Catechism and
the Lord's Prayer."
This was a reversion to type, by way of prejudice, and a Scotchman is nothing, if
he is not prejudiced in favor of something Scotch-born, like the Shorter Catechism.
At heart, I expect, he was a believer in only a few of the universal truths of all
religions, but he kept up a bold front about Presbyterianism, just out of opposition
to the dominant rule in Utah.
"I? Do you ask what I am? I am a true blue Presbyterian," he said.
He reminded me of the Wood brothers of Bingham Canyon. They were teamsters and drove
mules, bringing down timbers from the top of the mountains to the different mining
tunnels, much timber being used to make these tunnels safe. No man not a saint far
advanced can drive mules and not swear. In fact, it is said that mules in tight
places will not move unless a volley of oaths is first launched their way. This
I had from several Army men whom I knew, that had driven mules in the Civil War.
I am afraid mule-driving is hard on the sanctity of speech. The Wood brothers were
Presbyterians, "away back" where they came from in the first place. They forgot
all about it in camp life, during the six laboring days of the week while working
with their mules; but on Sunday they braced up. When they put on clean shirts and
collars-mark that-they put on something of their old time "away back" religion,
and went to church, if there was one, and put their quarter in the church collection.
So a good many at first sight considered them staunch church people, but hearing
them deliver themselves of "mule talk" as they were driving their teams, they altered
these views.
"Saw two of your Presbyterian Elders to-day, the air was bluer than their Presbyterianism,
all about those mules of theirs; the Wood brothers I mean; better look 'em up, and
give them a word of spiritual advice," said a superintendent of one of the mines
who liked to be considered a humorous man. Yet one of these men, sweaty and covered
with dust and having sworn all day long, showed signs of remorse.
"Say, I know I'm not right, but a man's temper can't keep with mules and they must
be driv' that-a way. I am goin' to get out of this business some day and live like
a Christian ought."
I tell this because it is so with hundreds of men out West. They know the way that
they live is not right and all of them mean to do better some day. The how to do
it, is always beyond them during the present time. You can see that the exponents
of other forms of religious life and faith, with such followers and hangers on,
could not deal in criticism or denunciation of lapsed Mormons, or for that matter
of standing Mormons, for they were no worse in their actual lives. Robert Peters
used to go to church when the liberal element was strong enough, as it soon was,
to erect a building and open services, on Sunday night. The lady who played the
organ had a little girl, so small that she had to be held in the lap. Robert Peters
became nurse for the time being and faithfully held and quieted the child. I think
the old man really enjoyed, and was happy in assisting in this way to aid the proprieties
of public worship, after the grave Scotch manner. In leaving the town for the city,
where his business was likely to be better for him, he left for the little baby
girl a book that she might read in riper years. It was an old Scotch Sunday School
book, thought to be adaptable to young children, and had for a title, The Valley
of Baca and a beautiful figure on the cover representing a weep, ing woman bending
over a well. "In the Valley of Baca they maketh it a well," accommodated from the
Book of Psalms.
The irreverent hoodlums, who used to sit in the back seats at meeting, dubbed Robert
"the Presbyterian Nurse," a title he was proud of to the last day that I knew him.
William Peters was a man in conflict with himself. His past was too strong for his
present, and this kept him uncomfortable. His face and speech showed his ire. He
could not accept some things of his new faith.
"He's peeved about polygamy," said Robert, "he couldn't swallow that, for Wyllum
is a good man at the bottom, and thinks much of his wife, wedded in Scotland; but
I spewed out the whole lot."
I can see his red weather-worn face, his spare body, and can hear his brogue whenever
I call him to mind. A man of individuality and grit; with a better education, he
might have made a mark in the world instead of being a waste timber thrown up by
the sea of life, one of those sad wrecks left by the tide of religious opinion,
which, while it has floated many to a safe haven, has engulfed a great multitude
in bitterness and isolation.
The canyon of American Fork is worthy of notice. As it has been much described,
I will simply say that its varied, rugged, rock-scenery rivals, in lesser magnitude,
the splendors of the Yosemite Valley in California. A railroad ran up its winding,
rocky sides passing over and around the purling, foaming mountain stream rushing
down to the lake.
A prosperous camp was once the business life of the railroad; but when I knew it,
its commercial glory was gone. It had been smashed by the extravagances and expenditures
of the many promoters, who are the real curse of all such enterprises. They are
after the "wad" held by innocent, trustful, tenderfoot-investors and stockholders.
They get it and go away, leaving the ruins of a promising camp in their wake. The
railroad was of principal use to haul wood down the canyon, and the tourists up.
Often the depot at American Fork was crowded with visitors.
Many times I have met distinguished men there, bent on seeing the beauties of the
mountain canyon; bishops, senators, generals, financiers and the capitalists, came
and went.
I could mention some notable names, were I not purposely avoiding personalities
in these pages, and confining myself to descriptions of real life andd character,
such as Utah presented.

Chapter XVII — Tenderfoot Superintendents

"Like leaves on trees the race of man is found, Now green in
youth, now withering on the ground: Another race the following spring supplies,
They fall successive and successive rise."

Pope

I WAS a Tenderfoot, in the vernacular of the camp, but there were many others
of the same grade of experience. While, here and there, veterans were in charge
of mining interests, tenderfoot superintendents abounded.
I suppose the moneyed men and the stockholders of the various incorporated companies
in this camp were under the spell of romantic adventure in the use of their surplus
wealth in this distant region, because distance lent enchantment to their view.
It is remarkable how romance has influenced wealth. Otherwise rich-freighted ships
never would have been sent across wide seas, in search of unknown lands, during
the times of Queen Elizabeth. It surely was romance which formed, under the charter
from Charles II, the trading company with this sonorous title, "The Govenour and
Company of Gentlemen Adventurers Trading into Hudson's Bay." Romance helped to send
Francis Drake around the world in search of both gold and Spaniards, and Walter
Raleigh to make his ventures in Virginia. Romance lies back of Arctic Voyages and
Northwest trading trips to "where rolls the Oregon," or "where the wolf's long howl
is heard on On-alaska's shore."
I do not wonder that romantic young men were found and commissioned, by romantic
old men, to superintend these mining ventures.
These tenderfoot superintendents came out West smartly garbed, even to cuffs and
white shirt collars. A few were dressed in theatrical garb, to look their part from
the Eastern view-point. They looked ridiculous to the seasoned miner, used to hard
tack and hard times. The camp had quite a group of such young men, full to the brim
with a book and college knowledge of minerals, tunnel and shaft mining. They were
educated in their way, but babes to the real business of finding ores and making
the search profitable.
Of all these tenderfoot superintendents, three were known to me very well, and the
first I name, became a warm friend.
Clarence Waterman was a youth for his position, for he was only a little past his
majority. He was growing a downy moustache and whiskers, but these indications of
manhood were silky with the touch of youth. He was a really good fellow in many
ways, especially in his cheerfulness. He had the youth's bump of conceit well-developed.
But this bump may have helped him over obstacles which his youthfulness could not
have surmounted. No doubt it was this conceit which obtained him his position as
superintendent. I can imagine his father and his father's friends, at a company
meeting, saying,
"Clarence! Do you think you can manage our mines out there in Utah?"
"Oh yes indeed. I can do that easily." So, being a favorite son, and a favored one
by the company, this young Mr. Inexperience was dubbed Mining Superintendent, financed
for his journey, and entrusted with the funds to open new work in Bingham Canyon.
Tom Robbins was a dark-featured, gloomy-vis-aged young man, who grew a fierce black
moustache. His eyes showed much of the sclerotic coat, and he had a way of rolling
his eyes which made him look fiercer and more commanding than he really was. He
had charge of the Grey Eagle group of mines, and to hear him talk you would feel
sure the only real mineral wealth of the camp was in this group. He was of a musical
turn, and put a great deal of the company's money into a Steinway piano, which was
placed in his office in the best hotel of the town. He was a rattling player, and
spent much of his spare time in the company of some musical young women of a neighboring
boarding house. This tenderfoot superintendent was ideally togged out by Eastern
tailors, and looked like a stage hero, much to the delight of the girls.
The third of these men was James Shuthler. He looked more like a dry-goods clerk
in size, build, and manner of carriage than a forceful boss of mining men of the
wild West. Shuthler, like most little men, was a great talker, but there was a steely
look in his pale-blue eyes which showed he had "grit" at the bottom. He had a hobby.
It was playing a worn, shabby violin, which he affirmed was a hundred and fifty
years old and once the property of a German master of music. He certainly got very
sweet strains out of its strings, and he and Robbins were the center of attraction
at every social and dance.
Clarence Waterman's special interest was a divided one. When not thumping his Remington
typewriter he was riding his rat-tailed broncho. It was one of those vicious little
beasts which show their mustang origin. When a horse uses his tail like a whisk-broom,
and puts back his ears like a rabbit when you saddle him, you naturally look for
trouble of some sort. Waterman loaded down his little broncho with a full outfit
of Mexican saddlery, and the little beast was double-bitted, and so strapped fore
and aft that his inexperienced rider seldom came to grief. He paid some horse-shark
one hundred and twenty-five dollars for a fifteen dollar animal, but he was so proud
of his nimble purchase, for the horse could run, that we left him alone in his glory.
The real work in these mines was done by the foremen, usually old hands; while these
superintendents got all the honor through correspondence with headquarters, and
the disbursements of the payroll money that came regularly through their hands.
One old foreman was a former cook. This I knew since I ate a Thanksgiving dinner
which he produced out of the abundant stores of the mine, and his skill with a big
cook stove. It was a fine assortment of food built out of canned goods, all save
a huge steak smothered in onions. This repast sufficed for six hungry miners and
three visitors, besides himself, and cost the management quite a penny.
But miners, I found, are nothing if not hospitable ; and one never failed to be
invited to a good meal if one happened in at the right time.
I went up to see all of these mining ventures, entered all of the tunnels, and went
down all of the shafts; also asked a great many useless questions, while the working-shift
patiently answered between pauses in shovelling rock.
The Ilion Mine, Clarence Waterman Superintendent,-if you had read the sign board
on the tunnel house,-was a wet mine. They were supposed to be seeking the rich mineral
vein, beneath the discovery hole on the summit of a rocky bluff overlooking the
canyon.
An able mineralogist, a learned geologist and the surveyor specialist,-all high
priced men,- had reported that the signs indicated a big bonanza below this discovery
hole. So after it they went with men, money and machinery. When I went into the
wet workings, the tunnel's breast was nine hundred feet from the entrance. A large
gutter was cut, as they ran the tunnel in, since the face and walls oozed water
so constantly that a little river ran out of the entry and down the mountain side.
This whole tunnel was timbered and required no end of prepared wood and a couple
of carpenters to keep up with the miners. Now wages were high, four or five dollars
a day, timber scarce and high too. You could see money going into the hole, but
you could not see it coming out. The Ilion people had great faith in their great
mine, but that did not prevent its being a great failure. Stereotyped reports of
the workings were sent in every week, and for a time the goose that laid the golden
egg kept on laying it. The miners laughed over these reports, but receiving their
wages regularly they worked on at what their practical knowledge foresaw would be
a barren result. At the time I left Utah the mine was closed down, another one among
a hundred failures.
I started a day school. The community had voted against a public school, for the
population was a transient one, and little interested in family life and in the
care of children. Several responsible men urged me to undertake a private education
far the public. I rented a part of a vacant hotel, the parlor and dining room, and
this made a good sized schoolroom to accommodate fifty scholars.
I also purchased the red-wood shelving of a defunct dry-goods store, and worked
up this lumber, with a little outside help, into seats and desks in lieu of the
usual school furniture. People were not so particular then about the outfitting
of a schoolhouse. In a camp like Bingham, where the church building was an old saloon,
somewhat altered, it was not difficult to make a hotel parlor serve for a schoolhouse.
These camp buildings were of the up-and-down rough-lumber sort, with the cracks
covered with strips of the same stuff. None of the buildings were painted, save
one pretentious hotel, the aristocrat of the camp.
I used to have the room full of boys and girls, who came at 9 A. M. on Mondays to
pay their school dues in the dirty, sticky currency of the day. "Shin-plasters,"
these little bills of the Federal Treasury, were called. We seldom saw a piece of
silver coin, for it had all gone either to Canada or Europe. Our school hours were
from 9 A. M. to 1 P. M., with a recess midday. I secured a supply of old books,
maps, and blackboard material in Salt Lake City, and gave them free to the school.
The cost of this education to each scholar was a fifty-cent "shin-plaster" paid
every Monday. Most of the children were studious and seemed glad to have the chance
to get at their books, I had a little trouble now and then. For instance, a couple
of boys of twelve and fourteen years, sons of a saloon man, seemed to be ambitious
to rival the toughs of the bar-room. One of them carried a big knife on the inside
of his leg-boot, while the other secreted a small caliber Smith & Wesson revolver
in his pants rear-pocket. This last young, ster was quite ferocious in his talk,
for he asserted that he had "got his man." It seemed, on inquiry, that he had accidentally
shot another boy, in rough play, with a pistol. The foolish jests of the roughs
about his father's place had taken serious root in his mind, so he was really proud
of his "bloody record," like any other "bad man." I took their arsenal away and
requested their father to come for the weapons. This he did, and when I suggested
he lock up these weapons and keep his boys out of harm's way he declared his boys
were not being raised "milk-sops," but to fight their way through life. Probably
years later these boys may have fulfilled their foolish father's wishes and figured
as "gunmen," ending their lives by dying with their boots on.
This school ran all winter and well into spring, when an epidemic of scarlet fever
entered the camp, through some Mormon teamsters from the valley towns, and perforce
the school was closed for the season. This schoolroom was used two evenings of each
week for musicals. I had a small organ, with handles, which Clarence Waterman and
myself carried back and forth from school to church, as it was needed.
To these Sings in the schoolroom the tenderfoot superintendents before mentioned
and a number of young women interested in music and church work used to come. Without
doubt the sex attraction had much to do with this weekly rally of the younger element,
since the men came generally as escorts of the ladies. How much religion is based
on human interest, and how much on superhuman interest, is a vital query hard to
answer correctly. I suppose the mysteries of life, and its apparent dissolution,
have a strong pull, which is almost superhuman in its power for church going; but
I also think that Reuben and Rachel cut a figure in the making of a congregation.
There were good musicians and some fair singers who were willing to exercise their
gifts and spend time in this way, but no sense of duty was the motive; only the
simple idea of something pleasant to do. When it seemed an unpleasant task it was
not done, and they did not trouble to come.
I was forced to do a little mining. I occupied a very small house, built close into
the hill on a narrow slip of ground; the road passing so close in front that the
ore wagons, in going by, often struck the steps in front. A roaring creek was just
across the road. A slide of earth from the steep hill, back of the house, bulged
in the kitchen wall. I procured the miner's weapons, a pick and shovel, and began
digging away the dirt.
"Say! pan out that dirt. You may find gold color." Waterman was passing and called
to me. I laughed at the boyish idea, but took his advice. In the creek a few feet
below I washed out several pans of dirt, using the rotary movement which carries
the surplus dirt over the edge of the pan, but no color appeared for some time.
I persevered and was rewarded by seeing a sparkle in the black sediment in the bottom
of the tin dish. This occurred every now and then. By the time I tired, and had
removed all the land-slip, I was possessed with a very small can of sediment. This
I washed over carefully and collected a few small grains of color. In the assay
office, later, I found my hour's labor had yielded fifty cents' worth of gold. This
was a wage of four dollars a day of eight hours of labor.
I record this to show how alluring the conditions were to a tenderfoot. The creek
was a rich placer in many spots, the hills had often signs of pay dirt, while the
rocks, when mined, contained visible veins of lead, silver, and gold leading to
ore pockets, and sometimes to great ore deposits which required only the science
of the smelter to reduce to commercial wealth.
I witnessed the luck of one tenderfoot superintendent. He had lost his job, for
his company had "gone broke," as the saying is. Tom Darmody was a very easy-going
fellow, who had brought out his wife that he might have home cooking instead of
cook-house fare. They lived in a little shack on the other side of the creek. He
was mining on his own account, and I often saw him come home wet and disgusted with
his hard labor. One day he got back in time to find his wife on the roof of the
shack shrieking, "A snake! A snake!" A big rattler was in the kitchen, and had driven
the mistress outdoors. This was nothing strange, for the rocks were full of these
reptiles in the warm weather. A little pistol work laid out Mr. Rattlesnake, with
eight buttons on his tail, a harmless but hideous corpse on the kitchen floor. A
bevy of housewives soon assembled to view the creature and to congratulate the lady
of the house on her escape and the bravery she had shown. I feel sure that Tom Darmody
gallantly told it around that his wife did the shooting. One day Darmody came in
on the stride and shouting, "We've struck it rich!" He had broken into a large ore
chamber.
"Our fortune's made, my dear! We can go
home in a month."
They did. In a few days he sold out his fine prospect to a mining crew for $25,000
and left for the "East and Happiness," to use his own words. He was sensible. He
did not stay to reinvest his fortune, nor gamble it away in expectation of still
better luck.
There was one lucky superintendent who was not a tenderfoot. Old Judge Eells, a
man of sixty-five, and his wife, an old-time lady of rare amiability, were residents
of the camp. I boarded with Judge Eells for two months and found him a man of fine
character. He always had family worship in his house every Sunday, and thought he
was doing well for the West. And so he was. Late one Saturday night he and his partner
opened up a large pocket of ore; he insisted on waiting until Monday before demonstrating
its extent. You see the grit of the man in this action. His partner offered him
$ 16,000 for his prospects before Monday was past. Listening to his wife's plea,
he accepted the sum offered, and the old couple returned to their home in Waukesha,
Wisconsin, there to enjoy their good fortune.

Chapter XVIII — A Tenderfoot's Romance

"How happy I'd be with either, Were t'other dear charmer away."

Old Melody

THIS is a story of divided affections, which threatened at one time to end in
the divided lives of two young people. Youth has its romances, and so had the youth,
Clarence Waterman.
I was going down the canyon by the way of the mule tramway. It was built along the
canyon side, a little higher than the street. I used to look out for rattlers, as
it was a favorite place for the snakes. They would crawl out in the sun and lie
along the track. The mules used to be affronted at them and the drivers used to
crack their whips and sometimes their guns at these reptiles.
The tarantula spider often occupied the track. I met one the day of which I am now
speaking. He was on a tie, and up on his long, high, hairy legs. His wicked eyes
were on me when I first caught sight of his pose. I knew that he was ready to jump,
for this spider is as aggressive as he is big. He did spring; but so did I, and
he passed me on the inside track, and struck the rocks, up which he jumped out of
sight. I later saw one like him. He was in a big bottle and safe in alcohol to preserve
him on his journey east. His eyes and hairy limbs were suggestive of the temper
of this fighting spider.
Mrs. Eells, who was with me, said, "How horrid! Take it away." This expressed everybody's
feelings.
It was just after this little episode in camp life that I saw Clarence Waterman
pass down the street astride his broncho, garbed in full regimentals as a broncho
buster. I shouted aloud to him, "Where are you bound for aboard that cayuse?"
"I'm due at the canyon-mouth to race Miss Gladys Glynn's white pony. The wager is
a new saddle. Come on!"
He rode off. I followed along the track more leisurely, until I neared the depot.
A good sized crowd was gathered there, for just beyond this terminus of the carline
the canyon opened out into a big bay of land encircled with the lower foothills.
In this space was the cattlemen's corral, the slaughter yards for the camp and,
around the outer limits, was a roadway in imitation of a racing oval. This was the
horse-racing circle, minus restraining fence and bleacher seats and grandstand.
There was a rough sort of stand for privileged spectators, and I saw the elite of
the camp beginning to occupy these seats.
A young woman sat on a white horse. The animal was small, but neat of limb and a
pet by the way its rider was caressing the arching neck and silver mane. This was
Miss Gladys Glynn, the open-air belle of the region and the pride and admiration
of the cowboys. She was a rustic beauty of the brunette type, and as her women friends
said of her, "as smart as a whip." Her eyes were full of fire and fun. Her tongue
was quick in repartee and her mind active, intelligent and charming. A good many
of the men were charmed with her, and very violently so was Clarence Waterman. He
had gone riding with this young horsewoman several times and the present race, just
coming off, was the result of a bet as to the speed of the white pony and the brown
broncho.
A tall, dark-bearded man, in black coat and top boots, was slapping a whip on his
open palm and talking to the girl rider. This I knew was Dr. Howard Glynn, her father,
and the owner of the big cattle range and ranch just below us in the valley. It
was his sheep and cattle that ranged the hills and who employed the bunch of cowboys
standing by. It was his sage-brush fed mutton that the camp ate, and so disliked.
But as the other fresh meat was not handy, we became very familiar with Doc Glynn's
sage-brush beef and mutton; especially the mutton, as it retained the sage taste
with more pronounced effect, after cooking, than did the beef.
He was a veterinary surgeon, retired from that trying occupation, as he said, and
fast getting rich off a free range and sage-fed live-stock. The canyon and camp
was his bonanza, and he was working it for all it was worth, in the way of a close
and ready market for meat.
Gladdie Glynn was therefore well known, and the center of beaux of all sorts and
ages. It was said that a very prominent Mormon apostle wanted her for one of his
wives, but if anybody dared to repeat this rumor he was very likely to get into
a fight with the men of the camp.
"Come on, Prof," called Tom Robbins, as I reached the depot, "you are just in time
for this Rodeo. Let's see Waterman licked to a frazzle by Gladdie and her pony."
Waterman had told me some things about his home life, and once or twice of an engagement
to a sweet looking girl, whose photograph stood on his bureau. I thought at first
he was just boasting, but I found that it was a fact when a letter came reporting
her illness.
He kept the telegraph operator busy for some days, until the young lady was reported
out of danger. It looked at one time as though he would throw up his job and hurry
East. Hence I knew that he was serious and that he was an engaged man.
I did not quite like his flirting with Miss Gladdie Glynn, who showed more partiality
for him than she did for any other of her many admirers. I suppose it was this evident
choice of the girl and the propinquity due to their horse interests that made them
a little more than friends or chums and threatened a romantic end to their acquaintance.
I could not see how Waterman could be carried away thus, if he really loved the
girl in the East who wore his ring, but man, especially the younger man, is a fickle
force, as much so as fortune is a fickle jade. So I watched these two as they met
and noted the interested glances of both and the more-than-warm handclasp.
It was a friendly affair, this race. The usual fussy preliminaries by the self-appointed
arrangers followed the meeting of the principals. Until I saw the crowd I was not
fully aware of the interest of the occasion, nor of the popularity of the contestants.
Four officious cowboys, with an air of proprietorship, attended to Miss Gladdie's
saddle, bridle and bit. Another set of boys did the same for Waterman's broncho,
and the way in which the creature switched its bottle-brush tail was a strong proof
that the animal's evil disposition was fully awake.
Soon all was ready. It was to be four times around the circle, which meant just
two miles. Doc Glynn fired his gun, and they were off, neck and neck. Miss Gladdie
had the pole by courtesy and cowboy wit. Now Waterman's little beast was a runner,
when mad, and he was mad on this occasion. I could see that the girl was the best
rider. She was born to the saddle, for her father had been a cattle-man since her
childhood. She was raised to ride a horse.
Once round the circle they passed us in a cloud of dust, still nearly abreast, the
broncho having the greater strength, but being handicapped by being on the outer
circle. Yells, cheers, and hat wavings saluted them. Soon we saw the dust rising
on the homestretch, and then something happened. Waterman put too much spur into
his encouragement at this point and his broncho showed his breed by a vicious buck
almost unseating the rider.
It needed but this little show-off to put the pale pony in the lead by several lengths,
and Miss Gladdie passed the tape, giving the dust of her passage to Waterman's cavorting
steed, which came in more like a crab than a horse, a loser by seven lengths. The
outcome was very popular, of course, and Clarence was in for a new saddle and bridle
for the fair winner.
"I knew that useless mustang of yours would play hob," said James Shuthler; "don't
see where you can like the beast. I'd shoot him for just that sort of trick."
"Why did you use so much spur?" I asked the loser.
"Well, it's easy for you to talk, but I thought that just that much of a prick would
do the business. I was gaining fast at the time."
"You don't mean to say that you were so un-gallant in intention as to mean to win?"
I said.
"Surely I meant to win; why not? It was a race, and gallantry was considered ruled
out of the contest by the lady's own wish."
A merry crowd it was after the race. Several cowboys showed off their tricks, but
by degrees the crowd thinned out and left the horsemen to themselves.
This event brought the two young people closer together and was the means of starting
this romance. A good many knew nothing of Waterman's eastern sweetheart, and supposed
that he
was the favored one. In fair play they "kept off the grass," as they called it.
Several days later Clarence Waterman came to me.
"Can you get away to join a riding party to Provo in the next valley? We are going
to start to-morrow at five in the morning and make the fifty miles by sundown. The
next day we ride on to the end of the railroad, fifty miles further. Doc Glynn has
a lot of cattle coming up from Nephi and Miss Gladdie and I are going with the boys
and her father. Would like you to come."
"Cannot do it just now. I have to go over to Alta City to-morrow, and it is a three-day
trip before I get back."
So the Romance began. Just how far these two understood one another I do not know
to this day. As far as looks go, they were mutually attracted, and I think that
the girl was really in love at last. She had passed through much flirtation, of
course, and had received proposals by the dozen from susceptible young men, cowboys,
miners and men of means. It was evident she was not so heart-free as formerly, for
Waterman's good looks and good breeding had made an impression.
They started on the trip and had a merry time of it the first day. A ride of fifty
miles was a common thing for such people and such ponies. Their stock of horseflesh
was tough of breed and could wear out more mettled and expensive stock, unused to
these hills and valleys. By the afternoon of the second day they met the herd of
cattle, and the Doctor and his cowboys took charge of the return drive. His daughter
and Waterman were to return by train from the railroad terminus, their horses being
used by the cowboys.
Right then it happened. An unexpected delay of a day in the transfer of the cattle
by the former owner, a Mormon rancher, gave the young couple an idea. It was to
ride over to Nephi, eighteen miles south, and return on that surplus day. They wanted
to be alone. I am certain Clarence was fast forgetting his Ida Gertrude in the East,
whose portrait stood on his dressing table in Bingham. The bright eyes and charm
of Gladdie Glynn were doing the work of forgetfulness. Such is propinquity, the
motive power of many a marriage which afterward- is regretted. Doctor Glynn seemed
to favor the desires of the two young people, and said:
"Be back in time to give the ponies a good rest before our start to-morrow. They
don't ride back on the cars like you two lucky ones."
They rode off. They had an ideal lover's ride down to Nephi. Here they were to dine,
rest and return in the afternoon. Both horses had cast a shoe. The blacksmith was
absent, gone "to see a man," and two hours passed before he returned. It took another
hour before the horses were ready for the road, and by that time it was almost dark.
Meanwhile one of those fierce wind-storms arose. Locally it is known as a Mormon
storm, because it is all wind, dust and no rain. It is the dread of the rider, especially
if the rider be a woman. Now, the two young people were not clad for a storm, for
they had left their heavy dustcoats with the outfit at the station that morning.
They had thought to ride light and return in the warm afternoon.
Then another thing happened. Was it fate? A deluge of rain followed the blow, a
thing seldom occurring in this locality, and for hours the storm raged.
"What shall we do? We can't go on till this is over," said Gladdie Glynn.
"We are fixed to stay here until to-morrow; I'm almost afraid to say it," answered
Clarence Waterman.
"Oh! What will father think? He knows I'm to be back with him this evening. He'll
think we've started out before the storm."
"But we can't start now, in such a storm as this; can we ?" objected Clarence. "We'll
have to put up at this one-horse hotel and start to-morrow at sun-rise."
"What will people think of us?" said Gladdie Glynn. She looked hard at her companion.
"It's none of their affair. We are straight livers. I'm not afraid, if you are not,
to face silly talk!"
"Well! If you think so, I'm game to stay on here. I'm no more afraid of talk than
you. But I fear father will scold sharply for this delay. You know by this time
he has a fiery temper at times; and this will be one of those temper-times."
"Oh! When he knows the reason of our delay I'm sure he would rather you stayed snug
under cover here than ride in the rain and darkness tonight!"
They made known their needs to the hotel-keeper. Now, he was a Mormon and saw a
chance to play a trick on these two young gentiles. Some time afterwards I myself
put up at this hotel and met this very man. I did not like his eye. The eye is the
gateway of the mind, and I saw a malice in his eye which explained some things concerning
this romance of the stormbound couple.
"I can accommodate you, young people. Are you married or are you intending to git
married?" he said to them.
This was not a proper question, and yet it seemed warranted by the circumstances.
"No indeed," said Gladdie Glynn, "and it's none of your business."
"I only asked, young people," answered the landlord, "as there is only one spare
room for travellers, but I can fix it so as you needn't know there's any one but
yourself. I have a nice cot-bed in the alcove, which can be curtained off. The young
man can use the lounge by the window. I've done this way for lots of travellers,
and no harm came of it."
Clarence and Gladdie looked at each other for a long moment; their eyes saw, mutually,
respect and confidence in the glance.
"I can stand it all right if you can," said Clarence; "it's for you to say. I can
go out and sit in a chair in the office if necessary."
"If it won't hurt you it won't hurt me," said Gladdie. "I don't wish you to sit
up all night."
"Well, then, landlord," said Clarence, "fix it up as you say."
Storm-bound, and mutually confident of one another, and also brave to face the tattle
of the gos-siper, they did this thing and occupied the one room in the inn. The
girl slept out her tiredness behind the curtains and Clarence snored to his heart's
content on the lounge by the window and behind a blanket thrown over two chairs.
They were innocent of harm, but would the world believe it?
It was a fair morning, and as early as they could get off they left Nephi. They
made the railway depot in four hours for breakfast with Dr. Glynn. He had been in
a terrible temper over their absence, and when he learned of the facts of their
hotel experience he looked darkly at Waterman.
"You young fool! Can't you see what a cloud this is on Gladdie? You've got to marry
her now whether you mean it or not," said the enraged father.
Now, if Clarence had not been engaged, as he was to Ida Gertrude, he could have
answered this demand with zest.
But here was the rub. It had come over him on the ride that morning that he was
in a fix. He felt sure, from Gladdie's looks, she was ready to say "yes" to a vital
question, but he found he was not ready to put it.
He suddenly realized that he was a fool to play with fire in engaging a girl's affections,
so that she had consented to a compromising situation, that would reflect upon her
honor in the eyes of a cynical world.
"Why have I to do that? I haven't asked Glad-die to marry me, and I don't know if-she
would," he answered.
Dr. Glynn roared with rage.
"Well, put the question, and be quick about it! She's got to say yes!"
Clarence went to Gladdie, but like a woman, she refused to see him. His evident
unreadiness and lack of ardor in his suit at this crisis mortified her mind and
wounded her feelings.
Her father went to see her and she said to him: "I won't be forced to accept any
man in this way! Let the nasty people talk if they must. My mind is clean of any
fault."
Now, this daughter was his pet and pride and he could not be cross long with her,
and soon gave way to her wishes. The young woman was wounded at Waterman's indecision.
It came out, as they returned by train that afternoon, that he confessed his engagement
to Ida Gertrude in the East. She was angry, as they say, "up to the hilt."
"How dare you play with me in this way? I hate you now; don't speak to me again,"
said the girl.
In this frame of mind they rode into Salt Lake City both as miserable as disenchanted
mortals can be. Clarence was on the fence and could not come down on either side.
He could not break with his sweetheart, and he could not propose to Gladdie when
it came to the pinch. She saw, with a woman's quick intuition, the situation of
this last admirer. He had almost won her love, and she resented his lack of courage
to offer himself with the ardor of a lover.
When it was all known publicly, through the lightning speed of gossip which carries
tattle faster than the wind, many threats against Waterman were heard.
I expected some one of the cowboys would shoot him, but Dr. Glynn put a stop to
all that by grimly saying:
"If any shooting comes off I'll do it. Don't let me hear of any of you fellows interfering,
unless you want me to take a shot at you; keep off!"
Finally Clarence could stand it no longer. He wrote to Ida Gertrude and told her
the whole story and asked to be released. Quickly came back by an early mail his
ring with no word in the letter. He then went to Gladys Glynn and said that he was
free to ask her to marry him. This he did before her father.
"I answer you no!" she said with snapping eyes. "I want no belated lover, such as
you have proved to be."
"Cannot you forgive me and let me keep the talk from injuring your reputation?"
he said.
"I can forgive you, but my reputation is not in need of your help. If any one slanders
me I, too, can shoot, and will do so."
When the camp knew that Clarence had the mitten from Miss Gladys there was a great
laugh, much joy among the jealous and good deal of chaff for the troubled Waterman.
He that had two strings to his bow a little while before now was without any strings,
and his life -, as without music. Thus strangely does life alter our outlook in
a few eventful days.
I was very sorry for him and said, "Let me write Ida Gertrude and tell her just
the facts. If you two are really lovers this trouble ought to be mended in some
way."
"Well, do so as my friend; only be sure to put it just as it is," replied Clarence.
I did write as an advocate of my friend and showed the innocence of both parties.
That it was simply a case of youthful imprudence. That Clarence was very sorry that
he had been carried away by a charming girl and that his inability to love her,
as she expected, was a sign that his love still burned true for Ida Gertrude. Could
not she forgive him? If she was as much in love with him as he was with her, she
should not let a just anger and some pride wreck the happiness of both.
I think that I put it with a wisdom almost like Solomon's and it worked out happily.
Miss Ida wrote me that she supposed the West was a loose living place and that Clarence
needed the East to keep him true. She said she forgave him, and if he chose to write
her she was willing to hear what he had to say.
I told Clarence this and he brightened up at once. I think that his Remington typewriter
did some good won, about that time. I know letters came and went.
Not long afterwards he sold his broncho. Next I knew he had resigned his office
and was no longer a tenderfoot superintendent.
"Dear friend," he said to me, "you did me a good turn. Ida and I are once more as
we were at first, and she wears my ring. I expect to put another ring on that dear
finger soon, as I have been offered a good position in New York City. I'm going
East next week."
I was glad to hear of this end of the matter, but was sorry to see him go. I saw
him off at Salt Lake City. Although I heard of his marriage, a year later, and received
a letter or two from him, I never met him afterwards.
I knew that he was happily wedded and that he was in good shape to become a successful
business man in New York City.
The other party to this story continued her outdoor life, admired as usual, yet
strangely cool to all lovers. A few years later her father sold out his interests
and went to California, where his daughter entered a woman's college in Oakland.
I heard of her graduation. She was a bright girl, and is now the charming wife-companion
of a well known university professor in Berkeley.
It may seem strange that this open air girt should become the inmate of a studious
home, but life runs by contrasts. The professor, who is her adoring husband, found
in her active personality just the foil to his scholastic gifts, while she saw opening
to her a world of letters, as new and as interesting as the world outdoors, which
she had in her youth so gracefully championed amid camp and cowboy life.

Chapter XIX — Mind as the Master Worker

"Mind is the great lever of all things; human thought is the
process by which human ends are ultimately answered."

Daniel Webster

IN this age of applied psychology it is interesting and educative to note the
mastery of mind ' over matter in the settlement, by civilized people, of the wild
wastes of Utah at the time of the great Mormon trek across the plains. Mind was
dominant, later, in the scientific search for, and recovery of, the mineral values,
so long hidden and useless, in the mountains of the territory.
The interaction of these two forces, the mental and the physical, produce the evolution
and thereby the development of a country and its people. Then comes wealth, comfort,
ease, and further exercise of mind to its higher possibilities. When life is low-graded
and the human mind content to grub in the ground or to hunt wild animals for a living,
a land remains the habitat of wild people.
A mind of a higher grade was the main asset of the white discoverers of America.
Their superior weapons, skill and transportation were entirely due to the advance
of mind from the times of the dark ages. The early voyagers from Norse-land, in
their open-decked ships, were hardy seamen, but they brought no advancement to the
new continent, since these rude warriors had no mind above fighting and despoiling
their foes.
All that was unfamiliar to them in human life was regarded as an enemy to be overcome
by force. It was the Era of Might, and the one of the most Might was Right, because
he won. The barbarian era has, at all times, been hard to supersede, and even in
these days of supposed "Kul-tur" there are strong advocates of a reversion to type
of the old Norse Vikings, Attila the Hun, or Caesar and his legions.
We do not affirm that the mentality of the Mormon leaders was very high. These leaders
were men of keen wit but of little culture, judged by their speeches and writings,
while the people in general were very commonplace. They had a few scholars who occupied
a back seat, for the men of action and administration were the real shapers of history
in Utah.
Of course the mentality found in the religious faith of the people was due to a
religious genius like Joseph Smith. If you consider a moment this young man at the
beginning of his mission, unknown and obscure, yet possessing an inner mental purpose
and power sufficient to win over by words, declarations, arguments and exhortations
a host of hard-headed Eastern and Western people, you will see at once the power
of mind when it is illumined by a purpose born of faith in a revelation from a higher
Power.
The emerging of Joseph Smith from obscurity to notoriety, as the American Prophet
of a new faith, reads like that of the emerging of Mohammed, an uninfluential and
epileptic young man, amid the turbulent tribes of Arabia when he became the Father
of the Faithful, to the Arabians, as Abraham became the same to the Hebrews. All
three characters are graphic illustrations of the mastery of the mind.
It does not follow that an enthusiasm and devotion which carries one to the death
is proof of the cause advocated. It does prove the sincerity and earnestness of
the advocate making the sacrifice.
Many good people have perished in a poor cause which they thought sublime. Delusions
of mind distort its visions, but not its powers. It is for this reason that the
exalted fanaticism of the early Mormons carried them on to strenuous deeds, and
yet did not impair their powers of common sense. They could subdue a wild country
and learn to utilize its hidden wealth.
We are prone to think it all bad, when some part of a delusion obsesses a race or
generation. If this were true the Mohammedan illusion would be rotten from core
to circumference. Some intense people so assert, but such is not true, as calm reflection
shows. A fine civilization existed in Spain under the Mohammedan Moors for seven
centuries, superior in art and science to the ruder life of both Franks and Teutons.
So, while the products of Joseph Smith's visions and declarations were often erratic
and fanatic, nevertheless much honest-hearted goodness in word and deed is in evidence
if you are fair enough to look for it. I found it to be so, and I affirm that the
mental influence of this Latter Day faith had a constructive power to establish
on barren ground and amid the rude forces of nature, a settlement of homes and firesides
devoted to religion and to an honest life. Putting by the extremes of an ecstatic
people, it is undeniable that they excelled in usefulness as light excels darkness
the roving Indian aborigines.
When I walked about that modern Zion of Salt Lake, "and told the homes and streets
thereof."
I could not fail to read the evidence of the power of mind over matter which had
built a city where the Indian's wikiup had stood and had made farms out of land
whose only products once were sage-brush and reptiles.
Still, the Mormon mind was not scientific, but ecstatic, and walked by faith, although
it had the common sense to work by sight. It was a fine motive force to lift to
higher levels the lives of multitudes otherwise inert, and to put the spade or hoe
of industry into idle hands. It redeemed a waste.
Utah would not have advanced to her present prosperity and power had not another
kind of mentality sought out its treasures. It may seem a sordid motive to seek
for gold and silver in place of seeking for the sanctuary and salvation. Yet such
a sordid search has invariably preceded the higher development of a country. Trade
has its argonauts and argosies which in the end serve for higher things.
With minds alert for mineral treasure, men drifted into the Territory, at first
a few, and later on with a rush to supplement the civilizing work of the Mormons.
To some their advent seemed a destructive one, for they were not religious, and
scoffed at the religion of the Mormons. They pointed out its weak, if not wicked
elements, and laughed in derision of such a faith. They were a rude lot of humanity,
and the Mormons countered back with accusations of their profanity and immorality.
These rough-living miners, unknown to themselves, were the advertisers of a coming
superior mental culture, which would do much for Utah's future.
When I saw the skilled miner, and the skilled mineralogist at work with their machinery,
as nicely fitted for its task as a watch's mechanism, I saw the mastery of mind
over minerals, as I had seen it over men. Whose eyes saw and whose purpose sought
out this secreted wealth? It was the scientific miner, the chemist, the mineralogist,
the capitalist, the economist and publicist. One and all, they united their heads
and hands to do it. Of the wealth that they won from the rocks, some of it is in
banks, some in ships, some in newspapers, some in books, and some in great industrial
plants. Little of it is lying idle, for the men who made this wealth were not idlers.
Both Gentile and Mormon have had a hand in the making of a State and a Star in the
constellation of the Union.

Chapter XX — A Latter Day View of a Latter Day State

"Often do the spirits of great events stride on before the
events, and in to-day already, walks tomorrow."

Coleridge

I REMEMBER that it was the great fear of the Gentile and liberal element in the
Territory, that if the United States Congress gave statehood to the people, a return
to the old order of religious and political tyranny would begin. That in due time
the newer element would be driven out by the usual political methods, or a terrorism
reign, like that in the Southern States over the colored voter.
Statehood came in due course, but none of the fears of the Liberals were realized.
The people seemed to have caught the free spirit of a free country and realized
that they were a part of a great and growing republic. They immediately divided
on all political questions into the two great party organizations, the Republican
and the Democratic. Their religious affiliations did not override their party affiliations,
as a general rule, and the great bugaboo of the alarmists was gone like a nightmare
dream. Utah had come to its own consciousness of popular life, and had decided that
everything should go along on normal and popular lines. The worth of commercial
and religious interests should be decided, solely, by the merits of the interests
involved, and the preferences of a free people.
Thus many found their fears to be no more real than worries. The reformers found
reform was still alive, and vital enough to make for better things. The reactionaries
found past bitternesses were hardly at home in the bosoms of a newer generation.
Some abnormal conditions, like polygamy, died slowly, since the welfare and rights
of wives and children could not be ruthlessly disregarded. Time is always softer
hearted, in human history, than the extremist and reformer. So we note how time
allowed a revelation to come, through the proper way, and it was announced that
it was no longer an "order of Heaven" to live one's religion in the bonds of polygamous
marriage. It gradually declined, but of course, being a social condition, its actual
cessation took some time. It is about dead, at this writing, save in a few isolated
cases, contra leges, and this is found in every well conducted country. There
are always law breakers of some sort, but the law always prevails until war or revolution
breaks the peace.
No such effort was made to fight for polygamy as was made for slavery for the simple
reason that no money value was at stake in the former "twin relic of barbarism,"
while it was very prominent in the latter. A man's "niggers" brought him in money
while a man's wives cost him a great deal of money. So the Mohammedan tinge to the
Territory died out when statehood was fully established. Those who had invested
in polygamy and were deeply involved as to character and social standing through
its practice, fought even to the floor of the United States Senate for its existence
and "their right." Nothing harsh was done to the offenders for the reason that this
condition was due to previous religious convictions and teaching; but it was very
soon evident that Utah, like other states, must be monogamous in its domestic life
in harmony with the custom of the country.
Some foolish people who persisted, as they will in anything religious that conflicts
with the State, in the practice of polygamy, found themselves under arrest and in
prison where they posed as martyrs of religious persecution. Some people pitied
them, but the majority laughed at them since this was at the close of the Nineteenth
Century, and was not in the Middle Ages.
Thus the years, and the "Age-Patience," which with the "Time-Spirit" does wonderful
things for us, shelved this heated question, and it faded away like the light of
a day that is dead. The mixed multitude was the agent of the change. The fanatical
cannot last long where isolation ends, and contact with the world begins. Here is
the reason for the call of the zealot, "Come out of her, my people!" whether that
call be voiced by a Hebrew of the Hebrews, like Isaiah, or a Christian like Athanasius,
who gloried in standing "contra mun-dum," or an ecclesiast like Torquemada,
opponent of all heretics, or a Brigham Young against a modern world. Religion, if
it is to live, must live right up against the world in which it lives, and mellow
it with good living. It will surely die if it hides itself in monastic cloisters,
beneath a nun's garments, or rejects the law of the monogamous life, the while men
and women are being born in just equal numbers all over the habitable world.
Now view this state as a place to live in. It is a goodly land since its soil is
of the richest. I used fairly to ache, when my horse's feet turned up the finest
garden ground, growing only sage brush, on the mesa or bench-land about the base
of the mountain ranges. I am an agriculturist in my tastes, and it seemed such a
waste for all this soil to produce no more than coarse brush Of course, the rainfall
was too meagre for "dry-farming, as they then thought. It can be done, and is being
done, in these days of the more scientific culture of the soil. The snow-water of
the great ranges is ample for the cultivation of every foot of good ground, if conserved
in reservoirs, until the heated season calls for its use. Here is where capital
and science can double Utah's acreage.
Then think of the climate of this land. There is just enough winter to put "glame
into the atmosphere. Bright days and a generous sunlight paint everything richly
vivid. The oxygen of the hills makes the eyes sparkle, the blood to flush the cheeks
redly, and gives the hands the grip which full labor requires. The very gram grown
feels this climatic impulse, and the flour of Utah wheat has a golden tint, shown
in the bread-loaf, and tasted in its good flavor. The fruits too notably the peaches
and apples, have a taste out-rivaling such products in California. More than soil
and climate and the fruits of their union are visible in Utah's future. Uncle Sam
has a pocket-book in its mountain ranges. A clasp holds the contents very tightly:
gravity has its strong hand on these treasures. Still Industry, Understanding, Patience,
Skill, and Capital, are the five fingers of another hand which can unclasp this
hold of gravity on these hills, and allow the wealth to pour out, in such rich recoveries
of ore as have made Bingham and Big Cottonwood Canyons famous. There is enough in
Utah to keep generations busy with the soil and water and with the pocketed ores
of the hills. Such industry will make comfortable, and therefore happy, myriads
of homes to be established in this state.
So wide a physical outlook should have a counterpart in a metaphysical one. The
mind of the people, in this age of free mentality, should also expand to consider
and solve great questions of intellectual, philosophical, social and religious importance.
All these realms of mind are necessary to make a population worthy of the land which
they inhabit, and out of whose generous bosom they draw their physical life.
Yet what is physical life worth, if it does not give the opportunity to climb higher
to those metaphysical realities which lie back of, and are the cause of, these physical
appearances. We say that we see, we touch, we taste, and so these things, sensible
to us, are real. But we know that these things change and decay. All this phenomenal
existence, with its display of beauty, power and production, is for the use of the
minds which are superior to these phases of matter.
Utah, rich in material wealth to come should also produce a richer metaphysical
wealth m the mental and moral intelligence of the people and that acquisition will
entitle them to be called, of a truth, the Saints of the Latter Days.

Colophon

George Robert Bird published Tenderfoot Days in 1918 through the Gorham Press of Boston; the title page's copyright line names the publisher as "Richard G. Badges," almost certainly a mirror-transcription slip for the real Boston publisher Richard G. Badger, and is preserved here as transcribed rather than silently corrected. The 1918 publication places this edition in the public domain in the United States.

This edition is prepared from the complete digitized text of the sacred-texts.com archive (mor/tfd), from the library's local mirror: the foreword and all twenty chapters. The chapter I heading in the source carries an extra label, "In Territorial Utah," alongside the chapter number; its function (running head or part title) is unclear from its single occurrence, so it is recorded here rather than reproduced as a heading. Sacred-texts navigation apparatus has been removed. The original print edition's eight photographic plates (Sage Brush, Buffalos, Great Salt Lake, Salt Lake Desert, Rocky Mountains, Wasatch Mountains, Dead Man's Falls at Little Cottonwood, and Bears) are not reproduced in this text edition; the mirror preserves them as separate image files. Otherwise the wording, spelling, and punctuation (including the period's plain hyphens where a printer might now set an em dash) follow the mirror text as transcribed.

Prepared for the Good Work Library by the Tianmu Anglican Church with AI-assisted research, transcription, and editorial work.

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