Sinners and Saints / A Tour Across the States and Round Them, with Three Months Among the Mormons

by Phil Robinson

Footnotes:

[1]. By the way, it is curious that it should be charged against the Mormons that they have made Adam a polygamist. It is not a Mormon invention at all. For, as is well known, legends far older than Moses' writings declare that Eve married into plurality, and that Lilith was the "first wife" of our great progenitor.

CHAPTER VII.

SUA SI BONA NORINT.

A Special Correspondent's lot—Hypothecated wits—The Daughters of Zion—Their modest demeanour—Under the banner of Woman's Rights—The discoverer discovered—Turning the tables—"By Jove, sir, you shall have mustard with your beefsteak!"

IT has been my good fortune to see many countries, and my ill-luck to have had to maintain, during all my travels, an appearance of intelligence. Though I have been over much of Europe, over all of India and its adjoining countries, Afghanistan, Beloochistan, Burmah, and Ceylon, in the north and west and south of Africa, and in various out-of-the-way islands in miscellaneous oceans, I have never visited one of them purely "for pleasure." I have always been "representing" other people. My eyes and ears have been hypothecated, so to speak—my intelligence been in pledge. When I was sent out to watch wars, there was a tacit agreement that I should be shot at, so that I might let other people know what it felt like. When run away with by a camel in a desert that had no "other end" to it, I accepted my position simply as material for a letter for which my employers had duly paid. They tried to drown me in a mill-stream; that was a good half-column. Two Afridis sat down by me when I had sprained my knee by my horse falling, and waited for me to faint that they might cut my throat. But they overdid it, for they looked so like vultures that I couldn't faint. But it made several very harrowing paragraphs. I have been sent to sea to get into cyclones in the Bay of Biscay, and hurricanes in the Mozambique Channel, that I might describe lucidly the sea-going properties of the vessels under test. I have been sent to a King to ask him for information that it was known beforehand he would not give, and commissioned to follow Irish agitators all over Ireland, in the hope that I might be able to say more about them than they knew themselves. It has been my duty to walk about inquisitively after Zulus, and to run away judiciously with Zulus after me. Sometimes I have taken long shots at Afghans, and sometimes they have taken short ones at me. In short, I have been deputed at one time and another to do many things which I should never have done "for pleasure," and many which, for pleasure, I should like to do again. But wherever I have been sent I have had to go about, seeing as much as I could and asking about all I couldn't see, and have become, professionally, accustomed to collecting evidence, sifting it on the spot, and forming my own conclusions. In a way, therefore, a Special Correspondent becomes of necessity an expert at getting at facts. He finds that everything he is commissioned to investigate has at least two sides to it, and that many things have two right sides. There are plenty of people always willing to mislead him, and he has to pick and choose. He arrives unprejudiced, and speaks according to the knowledge he acquires. Sometimes he is brought up to the hill with a definite commission to curse, but like Balaam, the son of Barak, he begins blessing; or he is sent out to bless, and falls to cursing. Until he arrives on the spot it is impossible for him to say which he will do. But, whatever he does, the Special Correspondent writes with the responsibility of a large public. It is impossible to write flippantly with all the world for critics.

Now, the demeanour of women in Utah, as compared with say Brighton or Washington, is modesty itself, and the children are just such healthy, pretty, vigorous children as one sees in the country, or by the seaside in England—and, in my opinion, nowhere else. Utah-born girls, the offspring of plural wives, have figures that would make Paris envious, and they carry themselves with almost Oriental dignity. But remember, Salt Lake City is a city of rustics. They do not affect "gentility," and are careful to explain at every opportunity that the stranger must not be shocked at their homely ways and speech. There is an easiness of manner therefore which is unconventional, but it is only a blockhead who could mistake this natural gaiety of the country for anything other than it is. There is nothing, then, so far as I have seen, in the manners of Salt Lake City to make me suspect the existence of that "licentiousness" of which so much has been written; but there is a great deal on the contrary to convince me of a perfectly exceptional reserve and self-respect. I know, too, from medical assurance, that Utah has also the practical argument of healthy nurseries to oppose to the theories of those who attack its domestic relations on physiological grounds.

But the "Woman's Rights" aspect of polygamy is one that has never been theorized at all. It deserves, however, special consideration by those who think that they are "elevating" Mormon women by trying to suppress polygamy. It possesses also a general interest for all. For the plural wives of Salt Lake City are not by any means "waiting for salvation" at the hands of the men and women of the East. Unconscious of having fetters on, they evince no enthusiasm for their noisy deliverers.

On the contrary, they consider their interference as a slur upon their own intelligence, and an encroachment upon those very rights about which monogamist females are making so much clamour. They look upon themselves as the leaders in the movement for the emancipation of their sex, and how, then, can they be expected to accept emancipation at the hands of those whom they are trying to elevate? Thinking themselves in the van of freedom, are they to be grateful for the guidance of stragglers in the rear? They laugh at such sympathy, just as the brave man might laugh at encouragement from a coward, or wealthy landowners at a pauper's exposition of the responsibilities of property. Can the deaf, they ask, tell musicians anything of the beauty of sounds, or need the artist care for the blind man's theory of colour?

Indeed, it has been in contemplation to evangelize the Eastern States, on this very subject of Woman's Rights! To send out from Utah exponents of the proper place of woman in society, and to teach the women of monogamy their duties to themselves and to each other! "Woman's true status"—I am quoting from their organ—"is that of true status companion to man, but so protected by law that she can act in an independent sphere if he abuse his position, and render union unendurable." They not only, therefore, claim all that women elsewhere claim, but they consider marriage the universal birthright of every female. First of all, they say, be married, and then in case of accidents have all other "rights" as well. But to start with, every woman must have a husband. She is hardly worth calling a woman if she is single. Other privileges ought to be hers lest marriage should prove disastrous. But in the first instance she should claim her right to be a wife. And everybody else should insist on that claim being recognized. The rest is very important to fall back upon, but union with man is her first step towards her proper sphere.

Now, could any position be imagined more ludicrous for the would-be saviours of Utah womanhood than this, that the slaves whom they talk of rescuing from their degradation should be striving to bring others up to their own standard? When Stanley was in Central Africa, he was often amused and sometimes not a little disgusted to find that instead of his discovering the Central Africans, the Central Africans insisted on "discovering" him. Though he went into villages in order to take notes of the savages, and to look at their belongings, the savages used to turn the tables on him by discussing him, and taking his clothes off to examine the curious colour, as they thought it, of his skin. So that what with shaking off his explorers, and hunting up the various articles they had abstracted for their unscientific scrutiny, his time used to be thoroughly wasted, and he used to come away crestfallen, and with the humiliating consciousness that it was the savages and not he that had gained information and been "improved" by his visit. They had "discovered" Stanley, not Stanley them. Something very like this will be the fate of those who come to Utah thinking that they will be received as shining lights from a better world. They will not find the women of Utah waiting with outstretched arms to grasp the hand that saves them. There will be no stampede of down-trodden females. On the contrary, the clarion of woman's rights will be sounded, and the intruding "champions" of that cause will find themselves attacked with their own weapons, and hoisted with their own petards. 'With the sceptre of woman's rights the daughters of Zion will go down as apostles to evangelize the nation. 'Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?' The Daughter of Zion!"

Mormon wives, then, are emphatically "woman's-rights women," a title which is everywhere recognized as indicating independence of character and an elevated sense of the claims of the sex, and as inferring exceptional freedom in action. And I venture to hold the opinion that it is only women who are conscious of freedom that can institute such movements as this in Utah, and only those who are enthusiastic in the cause, that can carry them on with the courage and industry so conspicuous in this community.

A Governor once went there specially instructed to release the women of Utah from their bondage, but he found none willing to be released! The franchise was then clamoured for in order to let the women of Utah "fight their oppressors at the polls," and the Mormon "tyrants" took the hint to give their wives votes, and the first use these misguided victims of plurality made of their new possession was to protest, 20,000 victims together, against the calumnies heaped upon the men of Utah "whom they honoured and loved." To-day it is an act of Congress that is to set free these worse-than-Indian-suttee-devotees, and whether they like it or not they are to be compelled to leave their husbands or take the alternative of sending their husbands to jail.

It reminds me of the story, "Sir, you shall have mustard with your beefsteak." A man sitting in a restaurant saw his neighbour eating his steak without mustard, and pushed the pot across to him. The stranger bowed his acknowledgment of the courtesy and went on eating, but without any mustard. But the other man's sense of propriety was outraged. "Beefsteak without mustard—monstrous," said he to himself; and again he pushed the condiment towards the stranger. "Thank you, sir," said the stranger, but without taking any, continued his meal as he preferred it, without mustard. But his well-wisher could not stand it any longer. He waited for a minute to see if the man would eat his beef in the orthodox manner, and then, his sense of the fitness of things overpowering him, he seized the mustard-pot and dabbing down a great splash of mustard on to the stranger's plate, burst out with, "By Jove, sir, you shall have mustard with your beefsteak!"

In the same way the monogamist reformers, having twice failed to persuade the wives of Utah to abandon their husbands by giving them facilities for doing so, are now going to take their husbands from them by the force of the law. "Sua si bona norint" is the excuse of the reformers to themselves for their philanthropy, and, like the old Inquisitors who burnt their victims to save them from heresy, they are going to make women wretched in order to make them happy. Says the Woman's Exponent: "If the women of Utah are slaves, their bonds are loving ones and dearly prized. They are to-day in the free and unrestricted exercise of more political and social rights than are the women of any other part of these United States. But they do not choose as a body to court the follies and vices which adorn the civilization of other cities, nor to barter principles of tried worth for the tinsel of sentimentality or the gratification of passion."

It is of no use for "Mormon-eaters" to say that this is written "under direction," and that the women who write in this way are prompted by authority. Nor would they say it if they knew personally the women who write thus.

Moreover, Mormon-eaters are perpetually denouncing the "scandalous freedom" and "independence" extended to Mormon women and girls. And the two charges of excessive freedom and abject slavery seem to me totally incompatible.

I myself as a traveller can vouch for this: that one of my first impressions of Salt Lake City was this, that there was a thoroughly unconventional absence of restraint; just such freedom as one is familiar with in country neighbourhoods, where "every one knows every one else," and where the formalities of town etiquette are by general consent laid aside. And this also I can sincerely say: that I never ceased to be struck by the modest decorum of the women I meet out of doors. After all, self-respect is the true basis of woman's rights.

This aspect of the polygamy problem deserves, then, I think, considerable attention. An Act has been passed to compel some 20,000 women to leave their husbands, and the world looks upon these women as slaves about to be freed from tyrants. Yet they have said and done all that could possibly be expected of them, and even more than could have been expected, to assure the world that they have neither need nor desire for emancipation, as they honour their husbands, and prefer polygamy, with all its conditions, to the monogamy which brings with it infidelity at home and prostitution abroad. Again and again they have protested, in petitions to individuals and petitions to Congress, that "their bonds are loving ones and dearly prized." But the enthusiasm of reformers takes no heed of their protests. They are constantly declaring in public speeches and by public votes, in books and in newspapers—above all, in their daily conduct—that they consider themselves free and happy women, but the zeal of philanthropy will not be gainsaid, and so the women of Utah are, all else failing, to be saved from themselves. The "foul blot" of a servitude which the serfs aver does not exist is to be wiped out by declaring 20,000 wives mistresses, their households illegal, and their future children bastards!

"By Jove, sir, you shall have mustard with your beefsteak!"

CHAPTER VIII.

COULD THE MORMONS FIGHT?

An unfulfilled prophecy—Had Brigham Young been still alive?—The hierarchy of Mormonism—The fighting Apostle and his colleagues—Plurality a revelation—Rajpoot infanticide: how it was stamped out—Would the Mormons submit to the same process?—Their fighting capabilities—Boer and Mormon: an analogy between the Drakensberg and the Wasatch ranges—The Puritan fanaticism of the Saints—Awaiting the fulness of time and of prophecy.

"I SAY, as the Lord lives, we are bound to become a sovereign State in the Union or an independent nation by ourselves. I am still, and still will be Governor of this Territory, to the constant chagrin of my enemies, and twenty-six years shall not pass away before the Elders of this Church will be as much thought of as kings on their thrones." These were the words of Brigham Young on the last day of August, 1856. And the Bill was passed in 1882.

Had Brigham Young been alive then, that prophecy would assuredly have been fulfilled, for the coincidence of recent legislation with the date he fixed, would have sufficed to convince him that the opportunity for a display of the temporal power of his Church which he had foretold, had arrived. Once before with similar exactness Brigham Young fixed a momentous date.

He was standing in 1847 upon the site of the Temple, when suddenly, as if under a momentary impulse, he turned to those who were with him and said, "And now, if they will only let us alone for ten years, we will not ask them for any odds."

Exactly ten years later, to the very day, and almost to the very hour of the day, the news came of the despatch of a Federal army against Salt Lake City. Brigham Young called his people together—and what a nation they were compared to the fugitive crowd that had stood round him in 1847!—and simply reminding them of his words uttered ten years before, waited for their response. And as if they had only one voice among them all, the vast assemblage shouted, "No odds."

And then and there he sent them into Echo canyon—and the Federal army knows the rest.

Had he been alive to-day, that scene would probably have been repeated.

But Brigham Young is not alive. And his mantle has not fallen upon any of the Elders of the Church. They are men of caution, and the policy of Mormonism to-day is to temporize and to wait. All the States are "United" in earnest against them. Brigham Young always taught the people to reverence prophecy, but he taught them also to help to fulfil it. But nowadays Mormons are told to stand by and see how the Lord will work for them. And thus waiting, the Gentiles are gradually creeping up to them. Every year sees new influences at work to destroy the isolation of the Church, but the leaders originate no counteracting influences. Their defences are being sapped, but no counter-mines are run. As Gentile vigour grows aggressive, Mormonism seems to be contracting its frontiers. There is no Buonaparte mind to compel obedience. Mahomet is dead, and Ali, "the Lion of Allah," is dead, and the Caliphate is now in commission.

President Taylor is a self-reliant and courageous man, but for a ruler he listens too much to counsel. Though not afraid of responsibility, it does not sit upon him as one born to the ermine. Brigham Young was a natural king. President Taylor only suffices for an interregnum. Yet now, if ever, Mormonism needs a master-spirit. Nothing demoralizes like inaction. Men begin to look at things "from both sides," to compromise with convictions, to discredit enthusiasm. This is just what they are doing now. At one of the most eventful points of their history, they find the voices of the Tabernacle giving forth uncertain sounds. Their Urim and Thummim is dim; the Shekinah is flickering; their oracles stutter. They are told to obey the laws and yet to live their religion. In other words, to eat their cake and have it; to let go and hold tight—anything that is contradictory, irreconcilable, and impossible.

Meanwhile, wealth and interests in outside schemes have raised up in the Church a body of men of considerable temporal influence, who it is generally supposed "outside" are half-hearted. The Gentiles lay great stress on this. But no one should be deceived as to the real importance of this "half-heartedness." In the first place, a single word from President Taylor would extinguish the influence of these men politically and religously, at once and for ever. A single speech in the Tabernacle would reduce them to mere ciphers in Mormonism, and the Church would really, therefore, lose nothing more by their defection than the men themselves. But as a matter of fact they are not half-hearted. I know the men whom the outside world refers to personally, and I am certain therefore of my ground when I say that Mormonism will find them, in any hour of need, ready to throw all their temporal influence on to the side of the Church. The people need not be apprehensive, for there is no treason in their camp. There may be "Trimmers," but was there ever a movement that had no Trimmers?

The hierarchy in Utah stands as follows:—

President—John Taylor. Counsellors to the President—Joseph F. Smith, G. Q. Cannon. Apostles—Wilford Woodruff, Franklin Richards, C. C. Rich, Brigham Young, Moses Thatcher, M. Lyman, J. H. Smith, A. Carrington, Erastus Snow, Lorenzo Snow, S. P. Teasdel, and J. Grant. Counsellors to the Apostles—John W. Young, D. H. Wells.

Now in the present critical situation of affairs the personnel of this governing body is of some interest. President Taylor I have already spoken of. He is considered by all as a good head during an uneventful period, and that he is doing sound, practical work in a general administrative way is beyond doubt. But it is his misfortune to come immediately after Brigham Young. It is not often in history that an Aurungzebe follows an Akbar. But his counsellors, Apostles Cannon and Joseph Smith, are emphatically strong men. The former is a staunch Mormon, and a man of the world as well—perhaps the only Mormon who is—while the latter is "the fighting Apostle," a man of both brains and courage. Had he been ten years older he would probably have been President now. Of the remainder the men of conspicuous mark are Moses Thatcher, an admirable speaker and an able man, Merion Lyman, a very sound thinker and spirited in counsel, and D. H. Wells—perhaps the "strongest" unit in the whole hierarchy. He has made as much history as any man in the Church, and as one of its best soldiers and one of its shrewdest heads might have been expected to hold a higher rank than he does. He was one of the Counsellors of Brigham Young, but on the reconstruction of the governing body, accepted the position of Counsellor to the Twelve. These five men, should the contingency for any decisive policy arise, will certainly lead the Mormon Church.

I was speaking one day to a Mormon, a husband of several wives, and was candidly explaining my aversion to that co-operative system of matrimony which the world calls "polygamy," but which the Saints prefer should be called "plurality." When I had finished, much to my own satisfaction (for I thought I had proved polygamy wrong), my companion knocked all my arguments, premises and conclusion together, into a cocked hat, by saying,—

"You are unprejudiced—I grant that; and you take higher ground for your condemnation of us than most do. But," said he, "you have never referred to the fact that we Mormons believe plurality to be a revelation from God. But we do believe it, and until that belief is overthrown angels from Heaven cannot convince us. You spoke of the power and authority of the United States. But what is that to the power and authority of God? The United States cannot do more than exterminate us for not abandoning plurality. But God can, and will, damn us to all eternity if we do abandon it."

Now what argument but force can avail against such an attitude as this? The better the Mormon, the harder he freezes to his religion—and part of his religion is polygamy—so important a part, indeed, that the whole future of the Saints is based upon it. The "Kingdom of God" is arranged with reference to it. The hopes of Mormons of glory and happiness in eternity depend upon it, and in this life men and women are perpetually exhorted to live up to it. It is pure nonsense therefore—so at least it seems to me—to request the Mormons to give up plurality, and keep the rest. You might just as well cut off all a man's limbs, and then tell him to get along "like a good and loyal citizen," with only a stomach.

Force of course will avail, in the end, just as it did in India when the Government determined to stamp out female infanticide among the Rajpoots. There, the procedure was from necessity inquisitorial (for the natives of the proscribed districts combined to prevent detection), but it was eventually effectual. It was simply this. Whenever a family was suspected of killing its female infants, a special staff of police was quartered upon the village in which that family lived, at the expense of the village, and maintained a constant personal watch over each of the suspected wives during the period immediately preceding childbirth. Nothing could have been so offensive to native sentiment as such procedure, but nothing else was of any use. In the end the suspects got wearied of the perpetual tyranny of supervision, and their neighbours wearied of paying for the police, and infanticide as a crime common to a whole community ceased after a few years to exist in India. Now if the worst came to the worst, something of the same kind is within the resources of the United States. Every polygamous family in the Territory might be brought under direct police supervision at the cost of their neighbours, and punishment rigidly follow every conviction. This would stamp out polygamy in time.

But it would be a long time, a very long time, and I would hesitate to affirm that Mormon endurance and submission would be equal to such a severe and such a protracted ordeal. There is nothing in their past history that leads me to look upon them as a people exceptionally tolerant of ill-usage.

The infanticidal families in India were, it is true, of a fighting caste and clan, but the suspected families were only a few hundreds in number. They could not, like the Mormons, rely upon a strength of twenty-five thousand adult males, an admirable strategic position, and the help, if necessary, of twenty thousand picked "warriors" from the surrounding Indian tribes; and it is mere waste of words to say that the consciousness of strength has often got a great deal to do with influencing the action of men who are subjected to violence. And I doubt myself, looking to the recent history of England in Africa, and Russia in Central Asia, whether the United States, when they come to consider Mormon potentialities for resistance, will think it worth while to resort to violence in vindication of a sentiment. The war between the North and the South is not a case in point at all. There was more than a mere "sentiment" went to the bringing on of that war. Remember, I do not say that the Mormons entertain the idea of having to fight the United States. I only say that they would not be afraid to do it, in defence of their religion, if circumstances compelled it. And I am only arguing from nature when I say that those "circumstances" arrive at very different stages of suffering with different individuals. The worm, for instance, does not turn till it is trodden on. The grizzly bear turns if you sneeze at it. And I am only quoting history when I say that thirty thousand determined men, well armed, with their base of military supplies at their backs, could defend a position of great strategical strength for—well, a very considerable time against an army only ten times as numerous as themselves—especially if that army had to defend a thousand miles of communications against unlimited Indians.

It was my privilege when on the editorial staff of the Daily Telegraph in London to tell the country in the leading columns of that paper what I thought of the chances of success against the Boers of the Transvaal. I said that one Boer on his own mountains was worth five British soldiers, and that any army that went against those fanatical puritans with less than ten to one in numbers, would find "the sword of the Lord and of Gideon" too strong for them, and the Drakensberg range an impregnable frontier. As an Englishman I regret that my words were so miserably fulfilled, and England, after sacrificing a great number of men and officers, decided that it was not worth while "for a sentiment" to continue the war.

The points of resemblance between the Mormons and the Boers are rather curious.

The Boers of the Transvaal, though of the same stock as the great majority of the inhabitants of British Africa, were averse to the forms of government that had satisfied the rest. So they migrated, after some popular disturbances, and settled in another district where they hoped to enjoy the imperium in imperio on which they had set their longings. But British colonies again came up with them, and after a fight with the troops, the Boers again migrated, and with their long caravans of ox and mule waggons "trekked" away to the farthest inhabitable corner of the continent. Here for a considerable time they enjoyed the life they had sought for, established a capital, had their own governor, whipped or coaxed the surrounding native tribes into docility, and, after a fashion, throve. But yet once more the "thin red line" of British possession crept up to them, and the Boers, being now at bay, and having nowhere else to "trek" to, fought.

They were not exactly trained soldiers, but merely a territorial militia, accustomed, however, to warfare with native tribes, and, by the constant use of the rifle in hunting game, capital marksmen. So they declared war against Great Britain, these three or four thousand Boers, and having worked themselves up into the belief that they were fighting for their religion, they unsheathed "the sword of the Lord and of Gideon," threatened to call in the natives, and holding their mountain passes, defied the British troops to force them. Nor without success. For every time the troops went at them, they beat them, giving chapter and verse out of the Bible for each whipping, and eventually concluded their extraordinary military operations by an honourable peace, and a long proclamation of pious thanksgiving "to the Lord God omnipotent." To-day, therefore, Queen Victoria is "suzerain" of the Transvaal, and the Boers govern themselves by a territorial government. To their neighbours they are known as very pious, simple, and stubborn people; very shrewd in making a bargain; very honest when it is made; a pastoral and agricultural community, with strong objections to "Gentiles," who, by the way, are never tired of reviling them, especially with regard to alleged eccentricities in domestic relations.

Am I not right, then, in saying that the resemblance between the Boers and the Mormons is "curious"?

When I speak of the Mormons as being prepared to accept the worst that the commission under the Edmunds bill may do, it should be understood that this readiness to suffer does not arise from any misconception of their own strength. The Mormons are thoroughly aware of it; indeed, the figures which I have given (25,000 adult males and 20,000 Indians) are not accepted by all of them as representing their full numbers. They fully understand also the capabilities of their position for defence, and are not backward to appreciate the advantages which the length of the Federal communications would give them for protracting a campaign.

Under the circumstances, therefore, the argument of a leading Mormon, that "if the United States really believe the people of Utah to be the desperate fanatics they call them, any action on their part that tends to exasperate such fanatics is foolhardy," may be accepted as quite seriously meant. For the Mormons, if bigoted about anything at all, are so on this point—that they cannot be crushed. As the elect of God, specially appointed by Him to prepare places of worship and keep up the fires of a religion which is very soon to consume all others, they cannot, they say, be moved until the final fulfilment of prophecy. The Jews have still to be gathered together, and "the nations from the north country" whose coming, according to the Bible, is to be so terrible, are to find the Mormons, "the children of Ephraim," ready prepared with such rites and such tabernacles that the "sons of Levi," the Jews, can perform their old worship, and, thus refreshed, continue their progress to the Holy Land. "And their prophets shall come in remembrance before the Lord, and they shall smite the rocks, and the ice shall flow down at their presence, and a highway shall be cast up in the midst of the great deep. And they shall come forth, and their enemies shall become a prey unto them, and the everlasting hills shall tremble at their presence." For this time, these men and women among whom I have lived are actually waiting!

Of course, we ordinary Christians, whose religion sits lightly upon us, cannot, without some effort, understand the stern faith with which the Mormons cling to their translations of Old Testament prophecy. Nor is it easy to credit the fierce earnestness with which, for instance, the Saints look forward to the accomplishment of the promise that they shall eventually possess Jackson County, Missouri. But if this spirit of intense superstition is not properly taken into account by those who try to make the Mormons alter their beliefs, they run the risk of underestimating the seriousness of their attempt. If, on the other hand, it is properly taken into account, the difficulty of forcing this people to abandon their creeds will be at once seen to be very grave.

Except, perhaps, the Kurdish outbreak on the Persian frontier some three years ago, there has been no problem like the Mormon one presented to the consideration of modern Europe. In the case of the Kurds, two nations, Turkey and Persia, were within an ace of war, in consequence of the insurgents pretending that a point of religion was involved, and popular fanaticism very nearly slipping beyond the control of their respective governments.

When living at a distance from Salt Lake City, it is very difficult indeed to recognize the truth of the situation. Until I went there I always found that though in a general way the obstacles to a speedy settlement were admitted, yet that somehow or another there was always the afterthought that Mormonism was only an inflated imposture, and that it would collapse at the first touch of law. It was allowed on all hands that the position was a peculiar one, but it was hinted also that it was an absurd one. "No doubt," it was argued, "the Mormons are an obstinate set of men, but after all they have got common sense. When they see that everybody is against them, that polygamy is contrary to the spirit of the times, that all the future of Utah depends upon their abandonment of it, that resistance is worse than senseless," and so on, they will give in. Let opinion as to the "bigotry" of the Mormons or their capacity for mischief be what it might, there was always a qualifying addendum to the effect that "nothing would come of all this fuss." The Mormons, in fact, were supposed to be "bluffing", and it was taken for granted therefore that they had a weak hand.

But in Salt Lake City it is impossible to speak in this way. A Mormon—a man of absolute honesty of speech—in conversation on this subject declared to me that he could not abandon plurality without apostatizing, and rather than do it, he would burn his house and business premises down, go away to the Mexicans, die, if necessary. Now, that man may any day be put to the very test he spoke of. He will have to abandon polygamy, or else, if his adversaries are malicious, spend virtually the whole of his life in jail. Which will he do? And what will all the others of his way of thinking do? Will they defy the law, or will they try to break it down by its own weight—that is to say, load the files with such numbers of cases, and fill the prisons with such numbers of convicts that the machinery will clog and break down? The heroic alternatives of burning down their houses, going off to Mexico, and dying will not be offered them. Their choice will simply lie between monogamy (or celibacy) and prison, two very prosaic things—and one or the other they must accept. Such at any rate is the opinion of the world.

But the Mormons, as I have already shown, do not admit this simplicity in the solution at all. From the point of view of the law-makers, they allow that the option before them is very commonplace. But the law-makers, they say, have omitted to take into consideration certain facts which complicate the solution. For though, as I have said, the majority may be expected to accept such qualified martyrdom as is offered, and "await the Lord's time", yet there can be no doubt whatever that strict Mormons will not acquiesce in the suppression of their doctrines, and among so many who are strict is it reasonable to expect that there will be no violent advisers? Their teachers have perpetually taught them, and their leaders assured them that prophecy had found its fulfilment in the establishment of the Church in Utah. Here, and nowhere else, the Saints are to await "the fulness of time" when the whole world shall yield obedience to their government, and reverence to their religion. The Rocky Mountains, and no other, are "the mountains" of Holy Writ where "Zion" was to be built; and they, the Mormons, are the remnant of Ephraim that are to welcome and pass on the returning Jews. How, then, can the Saints reconcile themselves to another exodus? Mexico, they say, would welcome them; but if the richest lands in the world, and all the privileges they ask for were offered them, they could not stultify revelation and prophecy by accepting the offer. Moreover, they have been assured times without number that they should never be "driven" again, and times without number that their enemies "shall not prevail against them." To many, to most, this, of course, now points to some interposition of Divine Providence in their favour. The crisis may seem dangerous, and the opposition to them overwhelming. But they are convinced—it is no mere matter of opinion with them—that if they are only patient under persecution and keep on living their religion, the persecution will cease, and the triumph of their faith be fulfilled. Europe and America, they believe, are about to be involved in terrific disasters. Wars of unprecedented magnitude are to be waged, and natural catastrophes, unparalleled in history, are to occur. But, in the midst of all this shock of thrones, this convulsion of the elements, Zion on the Mountains is to be at peace and in prosperity. It will be the one still harbour in all the ocean of troubles, and to it, as to their final haven, all the elect of all the nations are to gather. The prudent, therefore, looking forward to this apocalypse of general ruin, counsel submission to the passing storm, endurance under legal penalties, and fidelity to their doctrine.

But all are not prudent. Every Gethsemane has its Peter. And from that memorable garden they draw a lesson. The Saviour, they say, meant fighting, but when he saw that resistance to such odds as came against him could have only ended in the massacre of his disciples, he went to prison.

That Brigham Young, if alive, would have decided upon a military demonstration, the sons of Zeruiah are very ready to believe, for they say that, even if the worst were to happen and they had eventually to capitulate under unreasonable odds, their position would be preferable to that which they hold to-day. To-day they lie, the whole community together, under the ban of civil disabilities, as a criminal class, at the mercy of police—a proscribed people. In the future, if compelled to surrender their arms, they would be in the position of prisoners on parole, under the honourable conditions of a military capitulation. The worst, therefore, that could happen would, they say, be better than what is.

Such, at any rate, they assert, would have been the argument of Brigham Young, and Gentiles even confess that if the late President were still at the head of the Church the temptation for "a great bluff" would be irresistible.

CHAPTER IX.

THE SAINTS AND THE RED MEN.

Prevalent errors as to the red man—Secret treaties—The policy of the Mormons towards Indians—A Christian heathen—Fighting-strength of Indians friendly to Mormons.

I HAPPENED some time ago to repeat, in the presence of two "Gentiles," a Mormon's remark that the Indians were more friendly towards the Saints than towards other Americans, and the comments of the two gentlemen in question exactly illustrated the two errors which I find are usually made on this subject.

One said: "Oh, yes, don't you know the Mormons have secret treaties with the Indians?"

And the other: "And much good may they do them; these wretched Indians are a half-starved, cricket-eating set, not worth a cent."

Now, I confess that till I came to Utah I had an idea that the Utes were always "the Indians" that were meant when the friendly relations of the Mormons with the red men were referred to. About secret treaties I knew nothing, either one way or the other. But while I was there I took much pains to arrive at the whole truth—the President of the Church having very courteously placed the shelves of the Historian's office at my service—and I found no reference whatever, even in anti-Mormon literature, to any "secret treaty."

The Mormons themselves scorn the idea and give the following reasons: 1. No treaty made with a tribe of Indians could be kept secret. 2. There is no necessity for a treaty of any kind, as the dislike of the Indians to the United States is sufficiently hearty to make them friendly to the Territory if it came to a choice between the one or the other. 3. The conciliatory policy of the Church towards the Indians obviates all necessity for further measures of alliance.

And this I believe to be the fact. Indeed, I know that Mormons can go where Gentiles cannot, and that under a Mormon escort, lives are safe in an Indian camp that without it would be in great peril. I know further that on several occasions (and this is on official record) the expostulations of Mormons have prevented Indians from raiding—and I think this ought to be remembered when sinister constructions are put upon the friendliness of Saints towards the Indians.

From the very first, the Church has inculcated forbearance and conciliation towards the tribes, and even during the exodus from the Missouri River, harassed though they sometimes were by Indians, the Mormons, as a point of policy, always tried to avert a collision by condoning offences that were committed, instead of punishing them. If the red men came begging round their waggons they gave them food, and if they stole—and what Indian will not steal, seeing that theft is the road to honour among his people?—the theft was overlooked. Very often, it is true, individual Mormons have avenged the loss of a horse or a cow by taking a red man's life, but this was always in direct opposition to the teachings of the Church, which pointed out that murder in the white man was a worse offence than theft in the red, and in opposition to the policy of the leaders, who have always insisted that it was "cheaper to feed than to fight" the Indians. In spite, however, of this treatment the tribes have again and again compelled the Mormons to take the field against them, but as a rule the extent of Mormon retaliation was to catch the plunderers, retake their stolen stock, hang the actual murderers (if murder had been committed) and let the remainder go after an amicable pow-wow. Strict justice was as nearly as possible always adhered to, and whenever their word was given, that word was kept sacred, even to their own loss.

Both these things, justice and truth, every Indian understands. They do not practise them, but they appreciate them. Just as among themselves they chivalrously undertake the support of the squaws and children of a conquered tribe, or as they never steal property that has been placed under the charge of one of their own tribe, so when dealing with white men, they have learned to expect fairness in reprisals and sincerity in speech. When they find themselves cheated, as they nearly always are by "Indian agents," they cherish a grudge, and when they suffer an unprovoked injury (as when emigrants shoot a passing red man just as they would shoot a passing coyote), they wreak their barbarous revenge upon the first victims they can find. From the Mormons they have always received honest treatment, comparative fairness in trade and strict truthfulness in engagements, while, taking men killed on both sides, it is a question whether the red men have not killed more Mormons than Mormons have red men.

During the war of 1865-67, I find, for instance, that all the recorded deaths muster eighty-seven on the Indian side and seventy-nine on the Mormon, while the latter, besides losing great numbers of cattle and horses, having vast quantities of produce destroyed and buildings burned down, had temporarily to abandon the counties of Piute and Sevier, as well as the settlements of Berrysville, Winsor, Upper and Lower Kanab, Shuesberg, Springdale and Northup, and many places in Kane County, also some settlements in Iron County, while the total cost of the war was over a million dollars—of which, by the way, the Government has not repaid a Territory a cent. During the twenty years preceding 1865 there had been numerous raids upon Mormon settlements, most of them due to the thoughtless barbarity of passing emigrants; but as a rule, the only revenge taken by the Mormons was expostulation, and the despatch of missionaries to them with the Bible, and medicines and implements of agriculture.

The result to-day is exactly what Brigham Young foresaw. The Indians look upon the Mormons as suffering with themselves from the earth-hunger of "Gentiles," and feel a community in wrong with them, while they consider them different from all other white men in being fair in their acts and straightforward in their speech. In 1847 a chief of the Pottawatomies—then being juggled for the second time from a bad reservation to a worse—came into the camp of the Mormons—then for the second time flying from one of the most awful persecutions that ever disgraced any nation—and on leaving spoke as spoke as follows—(he spoke good French, by the way): "My Mormon brethren,—We have both suffered. We must help one another, and the Great Spirit will help us both. You may cut and use all the wood on our lands that you wish. You may live on any part of it that we are not actually occupying ourselves. Because one suffers, and does not deserve it, it is no reason he shall suffer always. We may live to see all well yet. However, if we do not, our children will. Good-bye."

Now, it strikes me that a Christian archbishop would find it hard to alter the Red Indian's speech for the better. It is one of the finest instances of untutored Christianity in history, and contrasts so strangely with the hideous barbarities that make the history of Missouri so infamous, that I can easily understand the sympathies of Mormons being cast in with the Christian heathens they fled to, rather than the heathen Christians they fled from. Nor from that day to this, have the Mormons forgotten the hint the Pottawatomie gave them, and on the ground of common suffering and by the example of a mutual sympathy have kept up such relations with the Indians, even under exasperation, that the red man's lodge is now open to the Mormon when it is closed to the Gentile.

What necessity, then, have the Mormons for secret treaties With the Indians? None whatever. The Indians have learned by the last half-century's experience that every "treaty" made with them has only proved a fraud towards their ruin, while during the same period they have learned that the word of the Mormons, who never make treaties, can be relied upon. So if the Saints were now to begin making treaties, they would probably fall in the estimation of the Indians to the level of the American Government, and participate in the suspicion which the latter has so industriously worked to secure, and has so thoroughly secured.

The other error commonly made as to the Indians is to underestimate their strength. Now the Navajoes alone could bring into the field 10,000 fighting men; and, besides these, there are (specially friendly to the Mormons) the Flatheads, the Shoshonees, the Blackfeet, the Bannocks, part of the Sioux, and a few Apaches, with, of course, the Utes of all kinds. The old instinct for the war-path is by no means dead, as the recent troubles in the south of Arizona give dismal proof; and a Mormon invitation would be quite sufficient to bring all "the Lamanites" together into the Wasatch Mountains.

That any such idea is ever entertained by Mormons I heartily repudiate. But I think it worth while to point out, that—if the influence of the Mormons on the Indians is considered of sufficient importance to base the charge of treasonable alliance upon it—it is quite illogical to sneer at that influence as making no difference in the case of difficulties arising. But as a point of fact, the Mormons have no other secret in their relations with the red men than that they treat them with consideration, and make allowances for their ethical obliquities; and further, as a point of fact also, these same tribes, "the Lamanites" of the Book of Mormon, "the Lost Tribes," are in themselves so formidable that under white leadership they would make a very serious accession of strength to any public enemy that should be able to enlist them.

CHAPTER X.

REPRESENTATIVE AND UNREPRESENTATIVE MORMONISM.

Mormonism and Mormonism—Salt Lake City not representative—The miracles of water—How settlements grow—The town of Logan: one of the Wonders of the West—The beauty of the valley—The rural simplicity of life—Absence of liquor and crime—A police force of one man—Temple mysteries—Illustrations of Mormon degradation—Their settlement of the "local option" question.

SALT Lake City is not the whole of "Mormonism." In the Eastern States there is a popular impression that it is. But as a matter of fact, it hardly represents Mormonism at all. The Gentile is too much there, and Main Street has too many saloons. The city is divided into two parties, bitterly antagonistic. Newspapers exchange daily abuse, and sectarians thump upon their pulpit cushions at each other every Sunday. Visitors on their travels, sight-seeing, move about the streets in two-horse hacks, staring at the houses that they pass as if some monsters lived in them. A military camp stands sentry over the town, and soldiers slouch about the doors of the bars.

All this, and a great deal more that is to be seen in Salt Lake City, is foreign to the true character of a Mormon settlement. Logan, for instance (which I describe later on), is characteristic of Mormonism, and nowhere so characteristic as in those very features in which it differs from Salt Lake City. The Gentile does not take very kindly to Logan, for there are no saloons to make the place a "live town," and no public animosities to give it what they call "spirit;" everybody knows his neighbour, and the sight-seeing fiend is unknown. The one and only newspaper hums on its way like some self-satisfied bumble bee; the opposition preacher, with a congregation of eight women and five men, does not think it worth while, on behalf of such a shabby constituency, to appeal to Heaven every week for vengeance on the 200,000 who don't agree with him and his baker's dozen. There is no pomp and circumstance of war to remind the Saints of Federal surveillance, no brass cannon on the bench pointing at the town (as in Salt Lake City), no ragged uniforms at street corners. Everything is Mormon. The biggest shop is the Co-operative Store; the biggest place of worship the Tabernacle; the biggest man the President of the Stake. Everybody that meets, "Brothers" or "Sisters" each other in the streets, and after nightfall the only man abroad is the policeman, who as a rule retires early himself; and no one takes precautions against thieves at night. It is a very curious study, this well-fed, neighbourly, primitive life among orchards and corn-fields, this bees-in-a-clover-field life, with every bee bumbling along in its own busy way, but all taking their honey back to the same hive. It is not a lofty life, nor "ideal" to my mind, but it is emphatically ideal, if that word means anything at all, and its outcome, where exotic influences are not at work, is contentment and immunity from crime, and an Old-World simplicity.

But Logan is not by any means a solitary illustration. For the Mormon settlements follow the line of the valleys that run north and south, and every one of them, where water is abundant, is a Logan in process of development.

For water is the philosopher's stone; the fairy All-Good; the First Cause; the everything that men here strive after as the source of all that is desirable. It is silver and gold, pearls and rubies, and virtuous women—which are "above rubies"—everything in fact that is precious. It spirits up Arabian-Nights enchantments, and gives industry a talisman to work with. Without it, the sage-brush laughs at man, and the horn of the jack-rabbit is exalted against him. With it, corn expels the weed, and the long-eared rodent is ploughed out of his possession. Without it, greasewood and gophers divide the wilderness between them. With it, homesteads spring up and gather the orchards around them. Without it, the silence of the level desert is broken only by the coyote and the lark. With it, comes the laughter of running brooks, the hum of busy markets, and the cheery voices of the mill-wheels by the stream. Without it, the world seems a dreary failure. With it, it brightens into infinite possibilities. No wonder then that men prize it, exhaust ingenuity in obtaining it, quarrel about it. I wonder they do not worship it. Men have worshipped trees, and wind, and the sun, for far less cause.

Nothing indeed is so striking in all these Mormon settlements as the supreme importance of water. It determines locations, regulates their proportions, and controls their prosperity. Here are thousands of acres barren—though I hate using such a word for a country of such beautiful wild flowers—because there is no water. There is a small nook bursting with farmsteads, and trees, because there is water. Men buy and sell water-claims as if they were mining stock "with millions in sight," and appraise each other's estates not by the stock that grazes on them, or the harvests gathered from them, but by the water-rights that go with them. Thus, a man in Arizona buys a forty-acre lot with a spring on it, and he speaks of it as 70,000 acres of "wheat." Another has acquired the right of the head-waters of a little mountain stream; he is spoken of as owning "the finest ranch in the valley." Yet the one has not put a plough into the ground, the other has not a single head of cattle! But each possessed the "open sesame" to untold riches, and in a country given over to this new form of hydromancy was already accounted wealthy.

Every stream in Utah might be a Pactolus, every pool a Bethesda. To compass, then, this miracle-working thing, the first energies of every settlement are directed in the union. The Church comes forward if necessary to help, and every one contributes his labour. At first the stream where it leaves the canyon, and debouches upon the levels of the valley, is run off into canals to north and south and west (for all the streams run from the eastern range), and from these, like the legs of a centipede, minor channels run to each farmstead, and thence again are drawn off in numberless small aqueducts to flood the fields. The final process is simple enough, for each of the furrows by which the water is let in upon the field is in turn dammed up at the further end, and each surrounding patch is thus in turn submerged. But the settlement expands, and more ground is needed. So another canal taps the stream above the canyon mouth, the main channels again strike off, irrigating the section above the levels already in cultivation, and overlapping the original area at either end. And every time increasing population demands more room, the stream is taken off higher and higher up the canyon. The cost is often prodigious, but necessity cannot stop to haggle over arithmetic, and the Mormon settlements therefore have developed a system of irrigation which is certainly among the wonders of the West.

"Logan is the chief Mormon settlement in the Cache Valley, and is situated about eighty miles to the north of Salt Lake City. Population rather over 4000." Such is the ordinary formula of the guide book. But if I had to describe it in few words I should say this: "Logan is without any parallel, even among the wonders of Western America, for rapidity of growth, combined with solid prosperity and tranquillity. Population rather over 4000, every man owning his own farm. Police force, two men—partially occupied in agriculture on their own account. N.B.—No police on Sundays, or on meeting evenings, as the force are otherwise engaged."

And writing sincerely I must say that I have seen few things in America that have so profoundly impressed me as this Mormon settlement of Logan. It is not merely that the industry of men and women, penniless emigrants a few years ago, has made the valley surpassing in its beauty. That it has filled the great levels that stretch from mountain to mountain with delightful farmsteads, groves of orchard-trees, and the perpetual charm of crops. That it has brought down the river from its idleness in the canyons to busy itself in channels and countless waterways with the irrigation and culture of field and garden; to lend its strength to the mills which saw up the pines that grow on its native mountains; to grind the corn for the 15,000 souls that live in the valley, and to help in a hundred ways to make men and women and children happy and comfortable, to beautify their homes, and reward their industry. All this is on the surface, and can be seen at once by any one.

But there is much more than mere fertility and beauty in Logan and its surroundings, for it is a town without crime, a town without drunkenness! With this knowledge one looks again over the wonderful place, and what a new significance every feature of the landscape now possesses! The clear streams, perpetually industrious in their loving care of lowland and meadow and orchard, and so cheery, too, in their incessant work, are a type of the men and women themselves; the placid cornfields lying in bright levels about the houses are not more tranquil than the lives of the people; the tree-crowded orchards and stack-filled yards are eloquent of universal plenty; the cattle loitering to the pasture contented, the foals all running about in the roads, while the waggons which their mothers are drawing stand at the shop door or field gate, strike the new-comer as delightfully significant of a simple country life, of mutual confidence, and universal security.

And yet I had not come there in the humour to be pleased, for I was not well. But the spirit of the place was too strong for me, and the whole day ran on by itself in a veritable idyll.

A hen conveying her new pride of chickens across the road, with a shepherd dog loftily approving the expedition in attendance; a foal looking into a house over a doorstep, with the family cat, outraged at the intrusion, bristling on the stoop; two children planting sprigs of peach blossoms in one of the roadside streams; a baby peeping through a garden wicket at a turkey-cock which was hectoring it on the sidewalk for the benefit of one solitary supercilious sparrow—such were the little vignettes of pretty nonsense that brightened my first walk in Logan. I was alone, so I walked where I pleased; took notice of the wild birds that make themselves as free in the streets as if they were away up in the canyons; of the wild flowers that still hold their own in the corners of lots, and by the roadway; watched the men and women at their work in garden and orchard, the boys driving the waggons to the mill and the field, the girls busy with little duties of the household, and "the little ones," just as industrious as all the rest, playing at irrigation with their mimic canals, three inches wide, old fruit-cans for buckets, and posies stuck into the mud for orchards. I stopped to talk to a man here and a woman there; helped to fetch down a kitten out of an apple-tree, and, at the request of a boy, some ten years old, I should say, opened a gate to let the team he was driving, or rather being walked along with, go into the lot.

It was a beautiful day, and all the trees were either in full bloom or bright young leaf; and the conviction gradually grew upon me that I had never, out of England, seen a place so simple, so neighbourly, so quiet.

Later on I was driven through the town to the Temple. The wide roads are all avenued with trees, and behind trees, each in its own garden, or orchard, or lot of farm-land, stands a ceaseless succession of cottage homes. Here and there a "villa," but the great majority "cottages." Not the dog-kennels in which the Irish peasantry are content to grovel through life so long as they need not work and can have their whisky. Not the hovels which in some parts of rural England house the farm labourer and his unkempt urchins. But cleanly, comfortable homes, some of adobe, some of wood, with porticos and verandahs and other ornaments, six or eight or even ten rooms, with barns behind for the cow and the horse and the poultry, bird-cages at the doors, clean white curtains at the windows, and neatly bedded flowers in the garden-plots. Hundred after hundred, each in its own lot of amply watered ground, we passed the homes of these Mormon farmers, and it was a wonderful thing to me—so fresh from the old country, with its elegance and its squalor side by side; so lately from the "live" cities of Colorado, with their murrain of "busted" millionaires and hollow shells of speculative prosperity—this great township of an equal prosperity and a universal comfort. Every man I met in the street or saw in the fields owned the house which he lived in, and the ground that his railings bounded. Moreover they were his by right of purchase, the earnings of the work of his own two hands. No wonder, then, they demean themselves like men.

I was driving with the President of the "stake"—such is the name of the Church for the sub-divisions of its Territory—and the chief official, therefore, of Logan, when, in a narrow part of the road we met a down-trodden Mormon serf driving a loaded waggon in the opposite direction. The President pulled a little to one side, motioning the man to drive past. But the roadway thus left for him was rather rough and this degraded slave of the Church, knowing the rule of the road (that a loaded waggon has the right of way against all other vehicles), calmly pointed with his whip-handle to the side of the road, and said to his President, "You drive there." And the President did so, whereat the down-trodden one proceeded on his way in the best of the road.

Now this may be accepted as an instance of that abject servitude which, according to anti-Mormons, characterizes the followers of Mormonism. As another illustration of the same awe-stricken subjection may be here noted the fact, that whenever the President slackened pace, passers-by, men and women, would come over to us, and shaking hands with the President, exchange small items of domestic, neighbourly chat—the health of the family, convalescence of a cow, and, speaking generally, discuss Tommy's measles. Now, women would hardly waste a despot's time with intelligence of an infant's third tooth, or a man expatiate on the miraculous recovery of a calf from a surfeit of damp lucerne.

I chanced also one day to be with an authority when a man called in to apologize for not having repaid his emigration money; and to me the incident was specially interesting on this account, that very few writers on the Mormons have escaped charging the Church with acting dishonestly and usuriously towards its emigrants. I have read repeatedly that the emigrants, being once in debt, are never able to get out of debt; that the Church prefers they should not; that the indebtedness is held in terrorem over them. But the man before me was in exactly the same position as every other man in Logan. He had been brought out from England at the expense of the Perpetual Emigration Fund (which is maintained partly by the "tithings," chiefly by voluntary donations), and though by his labour he had been able to pay for a lot of ground and to build himself a house, to plant fruit-trees, buy a cow, and bring his lot under cultivation, he had not been able to pay off any of the loan of the Church. It stood, therefore, against him at the original sum. But his delinquency distressed him, and "having things comfortable about him," as he said, and some time to spare, he came of his own accord to his "Bishop," to ask if he could not work of part of his debt. He could not see his way, he said to any ready money, but he was anxious to repay the loan, and he came, therefore, to offer all he had—his labour. Now, I cannot believe that this man was abused. I am sure he did not think he was abused himself. Here he was in Utah, comfortably settled for life, and at no original expense to himself. No one had bothered him to pay up; no one had tacked on usurious interest. So he came, like an honest man, to make arrangements for satisfying a considerate creditor, but all he got in answer was, that "there was time enough to pay" and an exchange of opinions about a plough or a harrow or something. And he went off as crushed down with debt as ever. And he very nearly added to his debt on the way, by narrowly escaping treading on a presumptuous chicken which was reconnoitring the interior of the house from the door-mat.

To return to my drive. After seeing the town we drove up to the Temple. The Mormon "temples" must not be mistaken for their "tabernacles." The latter are the regular places of worship, open to the public. The former are buildings strictly dedicated to the rites of the Endowments, the meetings of the initiated brethren, and the ceremonial generally of the sacred Masonry of Mormonism. No one who has not taken his degrees in these mysteries has access to the temples, which are, or will be, very stately piles, constructed on architectural principles said by the Church to have been revealed to Joseph Smith piecemeal, as the progress of the first Temple (at Kirkland) necessitated, and said by the profane to be altogether contrary to all previously received principles. However this may be, the style is, from the outside, not so prepossessing as the cost of the buildings and the time spent upon them would have led one to expect. The walls are of such prodigious thickness, and the windows so narrow and comparatively small, that the buildings seem to be constructed for defence rather than for worship. But once within, the architecture proves itself admirable. The windows gave abundant light and the loftiness of the rooms imparts an airiness that is as surprising as pleasing, while the arrangement of staircases—leading, as I suppose, from the rooms of one degree in the "Masonry" to the next higher—and of the different rooms, all of considerable size, and some of very noble proportions indeed, is singularly good.

I ought to say that this Temple at Logan is the only one I have entered, and it is only because it is not completed. This year the building will be finished—so it is hoped—and the ceremony of dedication will then attract an enormous crowd of Mormons. It is something over 90 feet in height (not including the towers, which are still wanting) and measures 160 feet by 70. On the ground floor, judging from what I know of the secret ritual of the Church, are the reception-rooms of the candidates for the "endowments," various official rooms, and the font for baptism. The great laver, 10 feet in diameter, will rest on the backs of twelve oxen cast in iron (and modelled from a Devon ox bred by Brigham Young) and will be descended to by flights of steps, the oxen themselves standing in water half-knee-deep. On the next floor are the apartments in which the allegorical panorama of the "Creation" and the "Fall of Man" will be represented. Here, too, will be the "Veil," the final degree in what might be called, in Masonic phrase, "craft" or "blue" Masonry, and, except for higher honorary grades, the ultimate objective point of Mormon initiation. Above these rooms is a vast hall, occupying the whole floor, in which general assemblies of the initiated brethren and "chapters" will be held. The whole forms a very imposing pile of great solidity and some grandeur, built of a gloomy, slate-coloured stone (to be eventually coloured a lighter tint), and standing on a magnificent site, being raised above the town upon an upper "bench" of the slope, and showing out superbly against the monstrous mountain about a mile behind it. The mountain, of course, dwarfs the Temple by its proximity, but the position of the building was undoubtedly "an architectural inspiration," and gives the great pile all the dominant eminence which Mormons claim for their Church.

From the platform of the future tower the view is one of the finest I have ever seen. The valley, reaching for twenty miles in one direction, and thirty in the other, with an average width of about ten miles, lies beneath you, level in the centre, and gradually sloping on every margin up to the mountains that bound it in. Immediately underneath you, Logan spreads out its breadth of farm-land and orchard and meadow, with the river—or rather two rivers, for the Logan forks just after leaving the canyon—and the canal, itself a pleasant stream, carrying verdure and fertility into every nook and corner. To right and left and in front, delightful villages—Hirum, Mendon, Wellsville, Paradise, and the rest, all of them miniature Logans—break the broad reaches of crop-land, with their groves of fruit-trees, and avenues of willows and carob, box-elder, poplar, and maple, while each of them seems to be stretching out an arm to the other, and all of them trying to join hands with Logan. For lines of homesteads and groups of trees have straggled away from each pretty village, and, dotted across the intervening meadows of lucerne and fields of corn, form links between them all. Behind them rise the mountains, still capped and streaked with snow, but all bright with grass upon their slopes. It was a delightful scene, and required but little imagination to see the 15,000 people of the valley grown into 150,000, and the whole of this splendid tract of land one continuous Logan. And nothing can stop that day but an earthquake or a chronic pestilence. For Cache Valley depends for its prosperity upon something surer than "wild-cat" speculations, or mines that have bottoms to fall out. The cumulative force of agricultural prosperity is illustrated here with remarkable significance, for the town, that for many years seemed absolutely stationary, has begun both to consolidate and to expand with a determination that will not be gainsaid.

The sudden success of a mining camp is volcanic in its ephemeral rapidity. The gradual growth of an agricultural town is like the solid accretion of a coral island. The mere lapse of time will make it increase in wealth, and with wealth it will annually grow more beautiful. Even as it is, I think this settlement of Mormon farmers one of the noblest of the pioneering triumphs of the Far West; and in the midst of these breathless, feverish States where every one seems to be chasing some will-o'-the-wisp with a firefly light of gold, or of silver—where terrible crime is a familiar feature, where known murderers walk in the streets, and men carry deadly weapons, where every other man complains of the fortune he only missed making by an accident, or laments the fortune he made in three days, and lost in as many hours—it is surpassingly strange to step out suddenly upon this tranquil valley, and find oneself among its law-abiding men. It is exactly like stepping out of a mine shaft into the fresh pure air of daylight.

The Logan police force is a good-tempered-looking young man. There is another to help him, but if they had not something else to do they would either have to keep on arresting each other, in order to pass the time, or else combine to hunt gophers and chipmunks. As it is, they unite other functions of private advantage with their constabulary performances, and thus justify their existence. As one explanation of the absence of crime, there is not a single licence for liquor in the town.

Once upon a time there were three saloons in Logan. But one night a Gentile, passing through the town, shot the young Mormon who kept one of them, whereat the townsfolk lynched the murderer, and suppressed all the saloons. After a while licences were again issued, but a six months' experiment showed that the five arrests of the previous half-year had increased under the saloon system to fifty-six, so the town suppressed the licences again, and to-day you cannot buy any liquor in Logan. I am told, however, that an apostate, who is in business in the town, carries on a more or less clandestine distribution of strong drinks; but any accident resulting therefrom, another murder, for instance, would probably put an end to his trade for ever, for it is not only the Mormon leaders, but the Mormon people that refuse to have drunkards among them.

These facts about Logan are a sufficient refutation of the calumny so often repeated by apostates and Gentiles, that the Mormons are not the sober people they profess to be. The rules now in force in Logan were once in force in Salt Lake City, but thanks to reforming Gentiles there are now plenty of saloons and drunkards in the latter. At one time there were none, but finding the sale of drink inevitable, the Church tried to regulate it by establishing its own shops, and forbidding it to be sold elsewhere. But the Federal judge refused the application. So the city raised the saloon licence to 3600 dollars per annum! Yet, in spite of this enormous tax, two or three bars managed to thrive, and eventually numbers of other men, encouraged by the conduct of the courts, opened drinking-saloons, refused to pay the licence, and defied—and still defy—all efforts of the city to bring them under control. In Logan, however, these are still the days of no drink, and the days therefore of very little crime.

CHAPTER XI.

THROUGH THE MORMON SETTLEMENTS.

Salt Lake City to Nephi—General similarity of the settlements—From Salt Lake Valley into Utah Valley—A lake of legends—Provo—Into the Juab valley—Indian reminiscences—Commercial integrity of the saints—At Nephi—Good work done by the saints—Type of face in rural Utah—Mormon "doctrine" and Mormon "meetings."

THE general resemblance between the populations of the various Mormon settlements is not more striking than the general resemblance between the settlements themselves.

Two nearly parallel ranges of the Rocky Mountains, forming together part of the Wasatch range, run north and south through the length of Utah, and enclose between them a long strip of more or less desolate-looking land. Spurs run out from these opposing ranges, and meeting, cut off this strip into "valleys" of various lengths, so that, travelling from north to south, I crossed in succession, in the line of four hundred miles or so, the Cache, Salt Lake, Utah, Juab, San Pete, and Sevier valleys (the last enclosing Marysvale, Circle Valley and Panguitch Valley), and having there turned the end of the Wasatch range, travelled into Long Valley, which runs nearly east and west across the Territory.

In the Cache and the Sevier valleys there are some noble expanses of natural meadow, but in all the rest the soil, where not cultivated, is densely overgrown with sage-brush, greasewood and rabbit-brush, and in no case except the Cache Valley (by far the finest section of the Territory) and Long Valley, is the water-supply sufficient to irrigate the whole area enclosed. The proportions under cultivation vary therefore according to the amount of the water, and the size of the settlements is of course in an almost regular ratio with the acreage under the plough. But all are exactly on the same pattern. Wide streets—varying from 80 to 160 feet in width—avenued on either side with cotton-wood, box-elder, poplar, and locust-trees, and usually with a runnel of water alongside each side-walk, intersect each other at right angles, the blocks thus formed measuring from four to ten acres. These blocks hold, it may be, as many as six houses, but, as a rule, three, two, or only one; while the proportion of fruit and shade-trees to dwelling-houses ranges from a hundred to one to twenty to one. As the lots are not occupied in any regular succession, there are frequent gaps caused by empty blocks, while the streets towards the outer limits of the towns are still half overgrown with the original sage-brush. All the settlements therefore, resemble each other, except in size, very closely, and may be briefly described as groves of trees and fruit orchards with houses scattered about among them.

The settlements of the Church stretch in a line north and south throughout the whole length of the Territory, and on reaching the Rio Virgin, in the extreme south, follow the course of that river right across Utah to the eastern frontier. The soil throughout the line north and south appears to be of a nearly uniform character, as the same wild plants are to be found growing on it everywhere, and the sudden alternations of fertility and wilderness are due almost entirely to the abundance or absence of water.

Leaving Salt Lake City to go south, we pass through suburbs of orchard and garden, with nearly the whole town in panoramic review before us, and find ourselves in half an hour upon levels beyond the reach of the city channels, and where the sage-brush therefore still thrives in undisturbed glory. Bitterns rise from the rushes, and flights of birds wheel above the patches of scrub. And so to the Morgan smelting camp, and then the Francklyn works, where the ore of the Horn Silver Mine is worked, and then the Germania, one of the oldest smelting establishments in the Territory, where innocent ore of all kinds is taken in and mashed up into various "bullions"—irritamenta malorum. Two small stations, each of them six peach-trees and a shed, slip by, and then Sandy, a small mining camp of poor repute, shuffles past, and next Draper, an agricultural settlement that seems to have grown fruit-trees to its own suffocation.

The mountains have been meanwhile drawing gradually closer together, and here they join. Salt Lake Valley ends, and Utah Valley begins, and crossing a "divide" we find the levels of the Utah Lake before us, and the straggling suburbs of Lehi about us. These scattered cottages gradually thicken into a village towards the lake, and form a pleasant settlement of the orthodox Mormon type. The receipt for making one of these ought to be something as follows: Take half as much ground as you can irrigate, and plant it thickly with fruit-trees. Then cut it up into blocks by cutting roads through it at right angles; sprinkle cottages among the blocks, and plant shade-trees along both sides of the roads. Then take the other half of your ground and spread it out in fields around your settlement, sowing to taste.

The actual process is, of course, the above reversed. A log hut and an apple-tree start together in a field of corn, and the rest grows round them. But my receipt looks the easier of the two.

Beyond Lehi, and all round it, cultivation spreads almost continuously—alternating delightfully with orchards and groves and meadows—to American Fork, a charming settlement, smothered, as usual, in fruit and shade-trees. The people here are very well-to-do, and they look it; and their fields and herds of cattle have overflowed and joined those of Pleasant Grove—another large and prosperous Mormon settlement that lies further back, and right under the hills. It would be very difficult to imagine sweeter sites for such rural hamlets than these rich levels of incomparable soil stretching from the mountains to the lake, and watered by the canyon streams.

"Great Salt Lake" is, of course, the Utah Lake of the outside world. But "Utah Lake" proper, is the large sheet of fresh water which lies some thirty miles south of Salt Lake City, and gives its name to the valley which it helps to fertilize. All around it, except on the western shore, the Mormons have planted their villages, so that from Lehi you can look out on to the valley, and see at the feet of the encircling hills, and straggling down towards the lake, a semicircle of settlements that, but for the sterility of the mountain slopes on the west, might have formed a complete ring around it. But no springs rise on the western slopes, and the settlements of the valleys always lie, therefore, on the eastern side, unless some central stream gives facilities for irrigation on the western also.

Utah Lake is a lake of legends. In the old Indian days it was held in superstitious reverence as the abode of the wind spirits and the storm spirits, and as being haunted by monsters of weird kind and great size. Particular spots were too uncanny for the red men to pitch their lodges there; and even game had asylum, as in a city of refuge, if it chanced to run in the direction of the haunted shore. In later times, too, the Utah Lake has borne an uncomfortable reputation as the domain of strange water-apparitions, and several men have recorded visions of aquatic monsters, for which science as yet has found no name, but which, speaking roughly, appear to have been imitations of that delightful possibility, the sea serpent. Science, I know, goes dead against such gigantic worms, but this wonderful Western country has astonishment in store for the scientific world. If half I am told about the wondrous fossils of Arizona and thereabouts be true, it may even be within American resources to produce the kraken himself. In the mean time, as a contribution towards it, and a very tolerable instalment, too, I would commend to notice the great snake of the Utah Lake. It has frightened men—and, far better evidence than that, it has been seen by children when playing on the shore. I say "better," because children are not likely to invent a plausible horror in order to explain their sudden rushing away from a given spot with terrified countenances and a consistent narrative—a horror, too, which should coincide with the snake superstitions of the Pi-Ute Indians. Have wise men from the East ever heard of this fabled thing? Does the Smithsonian know of this terror of the lake—this freshwater kraken—this new Mormon iniquity?

Visitors have made the American Fork canyon too well known to need more than a reference here, but the Provo canyon, with its romantic waterfalls and varied scenery, is a feature of the Utah Valley which may some day be equally familiar to the sight-seeing world. The botanist would find here a field full of surprises, as the vegetation is of exceptional variety, and the flowers unusually profuse. Down this canyon tumbles the Provo River; and as soon as it reaches the mouth—thinking to find the valley an interval of placid idleness before it attains the final Buddhistic bliss of absorption in the lake, the Nirvana of extinguished individuality—it is seized upon, and carried off to right and left by irrigation channels, and ruthlessly distributed over the slopes. And the result is seen, approaching Provo, in magnificent reaches of fertile land, acres of fruit-trees, and miles of crops.

Provo is almost Logan over again, for though it has the advantage over the northern settlement in population, it resembles it in appearance very closely. There is the same abundance of foliage, the same width of water-edged streets, the same variety of wooden and adobe houses, the same absence of crime and drunkenness, the same appearance of solid comfort. It has its mills and its woollen factory, its "co-op." and its lumber-yards. There is the same profusion of orchard and garden, the same all-pervading presence of cattle and teams. The daily life is the same too, a perpetual industry, for no sooner is breakfast over than the family scatters—the women to the dairy and household work, the handloom and the kitchen; the men to the yard, the mill, and the field. One boy hitches up a team and is off in one direction; another gets astride a barebacked horse and is off in another; a third disappears inside a barn, and a fourth engages in conflict with a drove of calves. But whatever they are doing, they are all busy, from the old man pottering with the water channels in the garden to the little girls pairing off to school; and the visitor finds himself the only idle person in the settlement.

From Provo—through its suburbs of foliage and glebeland—past Springville, a sweet spot, lying back under the hills with a bright quick stream flowing through it and houses mobbed by trees. Here are flour-mills and one of the first woollen mills built in Utah. In the days of its building the Indians harried the valley, and young men tell how as children they used to lie awake at nights to listen to the red men as they swept whooping and yelling through the quiet streets of the little settlement; how the guns stood always ready against the wall, and the windows were barricaded every night with thick pine logs. What a difference now! Further on, but still looking on to the lake, is Spanish Fork (nee Palmyra), where, digging a water channel the other day, the spade turned up an old copper image of the Virgin Mary, and some bones. This takes back the Mormon settlement of to-day to the long-ago time when Spanish missionaries preached of the Pope to the Piutes, and gave but little satisfaction to either man or beast, for their tonsured scalps were but scanty trophies and the coyote found their lean bodies but poor picking. Only fifteen years ago the Navajos came down into the valley through the canyon which the Denver and Rio Grande line now traverses, but the Mormons were better prepared than the Spanish missionaries, and hunted the Navajo soul out of the Indians, so that Spanish Fork is now the second largest settlement in the valley, and the Indians come there begging. They are all of the "tickaboo" and "good Injun" sort, the "how-how" mendicants of the period. All the inhabitants are as good an illustration of the advantages of co-operation in stores, farm-work, mills—everything—as can well be adduced.

Co-operation, by the way, is an important feature of Mormon life, and never, perhaps, so much on men's tongues and in their minds as at the present time. The whole community has been aroused by the consistent teaching of their leaders in their addresses at public "meetings," in their prayers in private households, to a sense of the "suicidal folly," as they call it, of making men wealthy (by their patronage) who use their power against the Saints; and the Mormons have set themselves very sincerely to work to trade only with themselves and to starve out the Gentiles. And it is very difficult indeed for an unprejudiced man not to sympathize in some measure with the Mormons. By their honesty they have made the name "Mormon" respected in trade all over America, and have attracted shopkeepers, who on this very honesty have thriven and become wealthy in Utah—and yet some of these men, knowing nothing of the people except that they are straightforward in their dealings and honourable in their engagements, join in the calumny that the Mormons are a "rascally," "double-dealing" set. For my own part, I think the Church should have starved out some of these slanderers long ago. Even now it would be a step in the right direction if the Church slipped a "fighting apostle" at the men who go on day after day saying and writing that which they know to be untrue, calling, for instance, virtuous, hard-working men and women "the villainous spawn of polygamy," and advocating the encouragement of prostitutes as a "reforming agency for Mormon youth"! Meanwhile "co-operation" as a religious duty is the doctrine while of the day, and Gentile trade is already suffering in consequence. The movement is a very important one to the Territory, for if carried out on the proper principles of co-operation, the people will live more cheaply here than in any other State in America. As it is, many imported articles, thanks to co-operative competition, are cheaper here than further east, and when the boycotting is in full swing many more articles will also come down in price, as the Gentiles' profits will then be knocked off the cost to the purchaser. Every settlement, big and little, has its "co-op.," and the elders when on tour through the outlying hamlets lose no opportunity for encouraging the movement and extending it.

Passing Spanish Fork, and its outlying herds of horses, we see, following the curve Of the lake, Salem, a little community of farmers settled around a spring; Payson, called Poteetnete in the old Indian days—after a chief who made life interesting, not to say exciting, for the early settlers—Springlake villa, where one family has grown up into a hamlet, and grown out of it, too, for they complain that they have not room enough and must go elsewhere; and Santaquin, a little settlement that has reached out its fields right across the valley to the opposite slope of the hills. This was the spot where Abraham Butterfield, the only inhabitant of the place at the time, won himself a name among the people by chasing off a band of armed Indians, who had surprised him at his solitary work in the fields, by waving his coat and calling out to imaginary friends in the distance to "Come on." The Indians were thoroughly fooled, and fled back up the country incontinently, while Abraham pursued them hotly, brandishing his old coat with the utmost ferocity, and vociferously rallying nobody to the bloody attack.

Here Mount Nebo, the highest elevation in the Territory was first pointed out to me—how tired I got of it before I had done!—and through fields of lucerne we passed from the Utah into the Juab Valley and an enormous wilderness of sage-brush. It is broken here and there by an infrequent patch of cultivation, and streaks of paling go straggling away across the grey desert. But without water it is a desperate section, and the pillars of dust moving across the level, and marking the track of the sheep that wandered grazing among the sage, reminded me of the sand-wastes of Beluchistan, where nothing can move a foot without raising a tell-tale puff of dust.

There, the traveller, looking out from his own cloud of sand, sees similar clouds creeping about all over the plain, judges from their size the number of camels or horses that may be stirring, and draws his own conclusions as to which may, be peaceful caravans, and which robber-bands. By taking advantage of the wind, the desert banditti are able to advance to the attack, just as the devil-fish do on the sea-bottom, under cover of sand-clouds of their own stirring up; and the first intimation which the traveller has of the character of those who are coming towards him, is the sudden flash of swords and glitter of spearheads that light up the edges of the advancing sand, just as lightning flits along the ragged skirts of a moving thunder-cloud.

But here there are no Murri or Bhoogti horsemen astir, and the Indians, Piutes or Navajos, have not acquired Beluchi tactics. These moving clouds here are raised by loitering sheep, formidable only to Don Quixote and the low-nesting ground-larks. They are close feeders, though, these sheep, and it is poor gleaning after them, so it is a rule throughout the Territory that on the hills where sheep graze, game need not be looked for.

An occasional ranch comes in sight, and along the old county road a waggon or two goes crawling by, and then we reach Mona, a pretty little rustic spot, but the civilizing radiance of corn-fields gradually dies away, and the relentless sage-brush supervenes, with here and there a lucid interval of ploughed ground in the midst of the demented desert. With water the whole valley would be superbly fertile, as we soon see, for there suddenly breaks in upon the monotony of the weed-growths a splendid succession of fields, long expanses of meadowland, large groves of orchards, and the thriving settlement of Nephi.

Like all other prosperous places in Utah, it is almost entirely Mormon. There is one saloon, run by a Mormon, but patronized chiefly by the "outsiders"—for such is the name usually given to the "Gentiles" in the settlement—and no police. Local mills meet local requirements, and the "co-op." is the chief trading store of the place. There are no manufactures for export, but in grain and fruit there is a considerable trade. It is a quaint, straggling sort of place, and, like all these settlements, curiously primitive. The young men use the steps of the co-operative store as a lounge, and their ponies, burdened with huge Mexican saddles and stirrups that would do for dog-kennels, stand hitched to the palings all about. The train stops at the corner of the road to take up any passengers there may be. Deer are sometimes killed in the streets, and eagles still harry the chickens in the orchards. Wild-bird life is strangely abundant, and a flock of "canaries"—a very beautiful yellow siskin—had taken possession of my host's garden. "We do catch them sometimes," said his wife, "but they always starve themselves, and pine away till they are thin enough to get through the bars of the cage, and so we can never keep them." A neighbour who chanced in, was full of canary-lore, and I remember one incident that struck me as very pretty. He had caught a canary and caged it, but the bird refused to be tamed, and dashed itself about the cage in such a frantic way that out of sheer pity he let the wild thing go. A day or two later it came back, but with a mate, and when the cage was hung out the two birds went into captivity together, of their own free-will, and lived as happily as birds could live!

My host was a good illustration of what Mormonism can do for a man. In Yorkshire he was employed in a slaughtering-yard, and thought himself lucky if he earned twelve shillings a week. The Mormons found him, "converted" him, and emigrated him. He landed in Utah without a cent in his pocket, and in debt to the Church besides. But he found every one ready to help him, and was ready to help himself, so that to-day he is one of the most substantial men in Nephi, with a mill that cost him $10,000 to put up, a shop and a farm, a house and orchard and stock. His family, four daughters and a son, are all settled round him and thriving, thanks to the aid he gave them—"but," said he, "if the Mormons had not found me, I should still have been slaughtering in the old country, and glad, likely, to be still earning my twelve shillings a week." Another instance from the same settlement is that of a boy who, five years ago, was brought out here at the age of sixteen. His emigration was entirely paid for by the Church. Yet last year he sent home from his own pocket the necessary funds to bring out his mother and four brothers and sisters! God speed these Mormons, then. They are doing both "the old country and the new" an immense good in thus transforming English paupers into American farmers—and thus exchanging the vices and squalor of English poverty for the temperance, piety, and comfort of these Utah homesteads. I am not blind to their faults. My aversion to polygamy is sincere, and I find also that the Mormons must share with all agricultural communities the blame of not sacrificing more of their own present prospects for the sake of their children's future, and neglecting their education, both in school and at home. But when I remember what classes of people these men and women are chiefly drawn from, and the utter poverty in which most of them I cannot, in sincerity, do otherwise than admire and respect the system which has fused such unpromising material of so many nationalities into one homogeneous whole.

For myself, I do not think I could live among the Mormons happily, for my lines have been cast so long in the centres of work and thought, that a bovine atmosphere of perpetual farms suffocates me. I am afraid I should take to lowing, and feed on lucerne. But this does not prejudice me against the men and women who are so unmistakably happy. They are uncultured, from the highest to the lowest. But the men of thirty and upwards remember these valleys when they were utter deserts, and the Indian was lord of the hills! As little children they had to perform all the small duties about the house, the "chores," as they are called; as lads they had to guard the stock on the hills; as young men they were the pioneers of Utah. What else then could they be but ignorant—in the education of schools, I mean? Yet they are sober in their habits, conversation, and demeanour, frugal, industrious, hospitable, and God-fearing. As a people, their lives are a pattern to an immense number of mankind, and every emigrant, therefore, taken up out of the slums of manufacturing cities in the old countries, or from the hideous drudgery of European agriculture, and planted in these Utah valleys, is a benefit conferred by Mormonism upon two continents at once.

To return to Nephi. I went to a "meeting" in the evening, and to describe one is to describe all. The old men and women sit in front—the women, as a rule, all together in the body of the room, and the men at the sides. How this custom originated no one could tell me; but it is probably a survival of habit from the old days when there was only room enough for the women to be seated, and the men stood round against the walls, and at the door. As larger buildings were erected, the women, as of old, took their accustomed seats together in the centre, and the men filled up the balance of the space. The oldest being hard of hearing and short of sight, would naturally, in an unconventional society, collect at the front of the audience. Looking at them all together, they are found to be exactly what one might expect—a congregation of hard-featured, bucolic faces, sun-tanned and deep-lined. Here and there among them is a bright mechanic's face, and here and there an unexpected refinement of intelligence. But taken in the mass, they are precisely such a congregation as fills nine-tenths of the rural places of worship all the world over. Conspicuously absent, however, is the typical American face, for the fathers and mothers among the Mormons are of every nationality, and the sons and daughters are a mixture of all. In the future this race should be a very fine one, for it is chiefly recruited from the hardier stocks, the English, Scotch, and Scandinavian, while their manner of life is pre-eminently fitted for making them stalwart in figure, and sound in constitution.

The meeting opens with prayer, in which the Almighty is asked for blessings upon the whole people, upon each class of it, upon their own place in particular, upon all the Church authorities, and upon all friends of the Mormons. But never, so far as I have heard, are intercessions made, in the spirit of New Testament teaching, for the enemies of the Church. References to the author of the Edmunds Bill are often very pointed and vigorous. After the prayer comes a hymn, sung often to a lively tune, and accompanied by such instrumental music as the settlement can rely upon, after which the elders address the people in succession. These addresses are curiously practical. They are temporal rather than spiritual, and concern themselves with history, official acts, personal reminiscences, and agricultural matter rather than points of mere doctrine. But as a fact, temporal and spiritual considerations are too closely blended in Mormonism to be disassociated. Thus references to the Edmunds Bill take their place naturally among exhortations to "live their religion", and to "build up the kingdom" in spite of "persecution." Boycotting Gentile tradesmen is similarly inculcated as showing a pious fidelity to the interests of the Church. These are the two chief topics of all addresses, but a passing reference to a superior class of waggon, or a hope that every one will make a point of voting in some coming election, is not considered out of place, while personal matters, the health of the speaker or his experiences in travel, are often thus publicly commented upon. The result is, that the people go away with some tangible facts in their heads, and subjects for ordinary conversation on their tongues, and not, as from other kinds of religious meetings, with only generalities about their souls and the Ten Commandments. In other countries the gabble of small-talk that immediately overtakes a congregation let out of church sounds very incongruous with the last notes of the organ voluntary that play them out of the House of God. But here the people walking homeward are able to continue the conversation on exactly the same lines as the addresses they have just heard, to renew it the next day, to carry it about with them as conversation from place to place, and thus eventually to spread the "doctrine" of the elders over the whole district. A fact about waggon-buying sticks where whole sermons about salvation by faith would not.

CHAPTER XII.

FROM NEPHI TO MANTI.

English companies and their failures—A deplorable neglect of claret cup—Into the San Pete Valley—Reminiscences of the Indians—The forbearance of the red man—The great temple at Manti—Masonry and Mormon mysteries—In a tithing-house.

FROM Nephi, a narrow-guage line runs up the Salt Creek canyon, and away across a wilderness to a little mining settlement called Wales, inhabited by Welsh Mormons who work at the adjacent coal-mines. The affair belongs to an English company, and it is worth noting that "English companies" are considered here to be very proper subjects for jest. When nobody else in the world will undertake a hopeless enterprise, an English company appears to be always on hand to embark in it, and this fact displays a confidence on the part of Americans in British credulity, and a confidence on the part of the Britishers in American honesty, which ought to be mutually instructive. Meanwhile this has nothing to do with these coal-mines in the San Pete Valley, which, for all I know, may be very sound concerns, and very profitable to the "English company" in question. I hope it is. The train was rather a curious one, though, for it stopped for passengers at the corner of the street, and when we got "aboard," we found a baggage car the only vehicle provided for us. A number of apostles and elders were on Conference tour, and the party, therefore, was a large one; so that, if the driver had been an enthusiastic anti-Mormon, he might have struck a severe blow at the Church by tilting us off the rails. The Salt Creek canyon is not a prepossessing one, but there grew in it an abundance of borage, the handsome blue heads of flowers showing from among the undergrowth in large patches.

What a waste of borage! Often have I deplored over my claret in India the absence of this estimable vegetable, and here in Utah with a perfect jungle of borage all about me, I had no claret! I pointed out to the apostles with us that temperance in such a spot was flying in the face of providence, and urged them to plant vineyards in the neighbourhood. But they were not enthusiastic, and I relapsed into silent contemplation over the incredible ways of nature, that she should thus cast her pearls of borage before a community of teetotallers.

Traversing the canyon, we enter San Pete Valley, memorable for the Indian War of 1865-67, but in itself as desolate and uninteresting a tract of country as anything I have ever seen. Ugly bald hills and leprous sand-patches in the midst of sage-brush, combined to form a landscape of utter dreariness; and the little settlements lying away under the hills on the far eastern edge of the valley—Fountain Green, Maroni, and Springtown—seemed to me more like penal settlements than voluntary locations. Yet I am told they are pretty enough, and certainly Mount Pleasant, the largest settlement in the San Pete country, looked as if it deserved its name. But it stands back well out of the desperate levels of the valley, and its abundant foliage tells of abundant water. A pair of eagles circled high up in the sky above us as we rattled along, expecting us apparently to die by the way, and hoping to be our undertakers. A solitary coyote was pointed out to me, a lean and uncared-for person, that kept looking back over its shoulder as it trotted away, as if it had a lingering sort of notion that a defunct apostle might by chance be thrown overboard. It was a hungry and a thirsty looking country, and Wales, where we left our train, was a dismal spot. Here we found waggons waiting for us, and were soon on our way across the desert, passing a settlement-oasis now and again, and crossing the San Pete "river," which here sneaks along, a muddy, shallow stream, at the bottom of high, willow-fringed banks. And so to Fort Ephraim, a quaint little one-street sort of place that looks up to Manti, a few miles off, as a little boy looks up to his biggest brother, and to Salt Lake City as a cat might look up to a king.

In 1865-67, however, it was an important point. Several companies of the Mormon militia were mustered here, and held the mountains and passes on the east against the Indians, guarded the stock gathered here from the other small settlements that had been abandoned, and took part in the fights at Thistle Creek, Springtown, Fish Lake, Twelve Mile Creek Gravelly Ford, and the rest, where Black Hawk and his flying squadron of Navajos and Piutes showed themselves such plucky men. It is a pity, I think, that the history of that three years' campaign has never been sketched, for, as men talk of it, it must have abounded with stirring incident and romance. Besides, a well-written history of such a campaign, with the lessons it teaches, might be useful some day—for the fighting spirit of the Indians is not broken, and when another Black Hawk appears upon the scene, 1865 might easily be re-enacted, and Fort Ephraim once more be transformed from a farming hamlet to a military camp.

Yet I have often wondered at the apathy or the friendship of the Indians. Herds of cattle and horses and sheep wander about among the mountains virtually unguarded. Little villages full of grain, and each with its store well stocked with sugar, and tobacco, and cloths, and knives, and other things that the Indians prize, lie almost defenceless at the mouths of canyons. Yet they have not been molested for the last fifteen years. I confess that if I were an Indian chief, I should not be able to resist the temptation of helping my tribe to an occasional surfeit of beef, with the amusement thrown in of plundering a co-operative store. But the Mormons say that the Indian is more honest than a white man and, in illustration of this, are ready to give innumerable instances of an otherwise inexplicable chivalry. For one thing, though, the Mormons are looked upon by the Indians in quite a different light to other Americans, for they consider them to be victims, like themselves, of Federal dislike, while both as individuals and a class they hold them in consideration as being superior to Agents in fidelity to engagements. So that the compliment of honesty is mutually reciprocated. To illustrate this aspect of the Mormon-Indian relations, some Indians came the other day into a settlement and engaged in a very protracted pow-wow, the upshot of all their roundabout palaver being this, that inasmuch as they, the Indians, had given Utah to the Mormons, it was preposterous for the Mormons to pay the Government for the land they took up!

From Fort Ephraim to Manti the road lies chiefly through unreclaimed land, but within a mile or two of the town the irrigated suburbs of Manti break in upon the sage-brush, and the Temple, which has been visible in the distance half the day, grows out from the hills into definite details. The site of this imposing structure certainly surprised me both for the fine originality of its conception, and the artistic sympathy with the surrounding scenery, which has directed its erection. The site originally was a rugged hill slope, but this has been cut out into three vast semicircular terraces, each of which is faced with a wall of rough hewn stone, seventeen feet in height. Ascending these by wide flights of steps, you find yourself on a fourth level, the hill top, which has been levelled into a spacious plateau, and on this, with its back set against the hill, stands the temple. The style of Mormon architecture, unfortunately, is heavy and unadorned, and in itself, therefore, this massive pile, 160 feet in length by 90 wide, and about 100 high, is not prepossessing, But when it is finished, and the terrace slopes are turfed, and the spaces planted out with trees, the view will undoubtedly be very fine, and the temple be a building that the Mormons may well be proud of. Looked at from the plain, with the stern hills behind it, the edifice is seen to be in thoroughly artistic harmony with the scene, while the enormous expenditure of labour upon its erection is a matter for astonishment. The plan of the building inside differs from those of the temples at Logan, St. George, and Salt Lake City, which again differ from each other, for it is a curious fact that the ritual of the secret ceremonies to which these buildings are chiefly devoted, is still under elaboration and imperfect, so that each temple in turn partially varies from its predecessor, to suit the latest alterations made in the Endowments and other rites celebrated within its walls. In my description of the Logan Temple, I gave a sketch of the purposes for which the various parts of the building were intended. That sketch, of course, cannot pretend to be exact, for only those Mormons who have "worked" through the degrees can tell the whole truth; and as yet no one has divulged it. But with a general knowledge of the rites, and an intimate acquaintance with freemasonry, I have, I believe, put together the only reliable outline that has ever been published. The Manti temple will have the same arrangements of baptismal font and dressing-rooms on the ground floor, but as well as I could judge from the unfinished state of the building, the "endowments," in the course of which are symbolical representations of the Creation, Temptation and Fall, will be spread over two floors, the apartment for "baptism for the dead" occupying a place on the lower. The "sealing" is performed on the third. I have an objection to prying into matters which the Mormons are so earnest in keeping secret, but as a mason, the connexion between Masonry and Mormonism is too fascinating a subject for me to resist curiosity altogether.

As a settlement, Manti is pretty, well-ordered and prosperous. The universal vice of unbridged water-courses disfigures its roads just as it does those of every other place (Salt Lake City itself not excepted), and the irregularity in the order of occupation of lots gives it the same scattered appearance that many other settlements have. But the abundance of trees, the width of the streets, the perpetual presence of running water, the frequency and size of the orchards, and the general appearance of simple, rustic, comfort impart to Manti all the characteristic charm of the Mormon settlements. The orthodox grist and saw-mills, essential adjuncts of every outlying hamlet, find their usual place in the local economy; but to me the most interesting corner was the quaint tithing-house, a Dutch-barn kind of place, still surrounded by the high stone stockade which was built for the protection of the settlers during the Indian troubles fifteen years ago. Inside the tithing-house were two great bins half filled with wheat and oats, and a few bundles of wool. I had expected to find a miscellaneous confusion of articles of all kinds, but on inquiry discovered that the popular theory of Mormon tithing, "a tenth of everything,"—"even to the tenth of every egg that is laid," as a Gentile lady plaintively assured me, is not carried out in practice, the majority of Mormons allowing their tithings to run into arrears, and then paying them up in a lump in some one staple article, vegetable or animal, that happens to be easiest for them. The tenth of their eggs or their currant jam does not, therefore, as supposed, form part of the rigid annual tribute of these degraded serfs to their grasping masters. As a matter of fact, indeed, the payment of tithings is as nearly voluntary as the collection of a revenue necessary for carrying on a government can possibly be allowed to be. What it may have been once, is of no importance now. But to-day, so far from there being any undue coercion, I have amply assured myself that there is extreme consideration and indulgence, while the general prosperity of the territory justifies the leniency that prevails.

CHAPTER XIII.

FROM MANTI TO GLENWOOD.

Scandinavian Mormons—Danish ol—Among the Orchards at Manti—On the way to Conference—Adam and Eve—The protoplasm of a settlement—Ham and eggs—At Mayfield—Our teamster's theory of the ground-hog—On the way to Glenwood—Volcanic phenomena and lizards—A suggestion for improving upon Nature—Primitive Art

"MY hosts at Manti were Danes, and the wife brewed Danish ol." Such is the entry in my note-book, made, I remember, to remind me to say that the San Pete settlements are composed in great proportion of Danes and Scandinavians. These nationalities contribute more largely than any other—unless Great-Britishers are all called one nation—to the recruiting of Mormonism, and when they reach Utah maintain their individuality more conspicuously than any others. The Americans, Welsh, Scotch, English, Germans, and Swiss, merge very rapidly into one blend, but the Scandinavian type—and a very fine peasant type it is—is clearly marked in the settlements where the Hansens and the Jansens, Petersens, Christiansens, Nielsens, and Sorensens, most do congregate. By the way, some of these Norse names sound very curiously to the ear. "Ole Hagg" might be thought to be a nickname rather than anything else, and Lars Nasquist Brihl at best a joke. Their children are remarkably pretty, and the women models of thriftiness.

My hostess at Manti was a pattern. She made pies under an inspiration, and her chicken-pie was a distinct revelation. Her "beer" was certainly a beverage that a man might deny himself quite cheerfully, but to eat her preserves was like listening to beautiful parables, and her cream cheese gave the same gentle pleasure as the singing of thankful canticles.

In the garden was an arbour overrun with a wild grapevine, and I took my pen and ink in there to write. All went well for a while. An amiable cat came and joined me, sitting in a comfortable cushion-sort of fashion on the corner of my blotting-pad. But while we sat there writing, the cat and I, there came a humming-bird into the arbour—a little miracle in feathers, with wings all emeralds and a throat of ruby. And it sat in the sunlight on a vine-twig that straggled out across the door, and began to preen its tiny feathers. I stopped writing to watch the beautiful thing. And so did the cat. For happening to look down at the table I saw the cat, with a fiendish expression of face and her eyes intent on the bird, gathering her hind legs together for a spring. To give the cat a smack on the head, and for the cat to vanish with an explosion of ill-temper, "was the work of an instant." The humming-bird flashed out into the garden, and I was left alone to mop up the ink which the startled cat had spilt. Then I went out and wandered across the garden, where English flowers, the sweet-william and columbine, pinks and wallflowers, pansies and iris, were growing, under the fruit-trees still bunched with blossoms, and out into the street. Friends asked me if I wasn't going to "the conference," but I had not the heart to go inside when the world out of doors was so inviting. There was a cool, green tint in the shade of the orchards, pleasant with the voices of birds and dreamy with the humming of bees. There was nobody else about, only children making posies of apple-blossoms and launching blue boats of iris-petals on the little roadside streams. Everybody was "at conference," and those that could not get into the building were grouped outside among the waggons of the country folk who had come from a distance. These conferences are held quarterly (so that the lives of the Apostles who preside at them are virtually spent in travelling) and at them everything is discussed, whether of spiritual or temporal interest and a general balance struck, financially and religiously. In character they resemble the ordinary meetings of the Mormons, being of exactly the same curious admixture of present farming and future salvation, business advice and pious exhortation.

Everybody who can do so, attends these meetings; and they fulfil, therefore, all the purposes of the Oriental mela. Farmers, stock-raisers, and dealers generally, meet from a distance and talk over business matters, open negotiations and settle bargains, exchange opinions and discuss prospects. Their wives and families, such of them as can get away from their homes, foregather and exchange their domestic news, while everybody lays in a fresh supply of spiritual refreshment for the coming three months, and hears the latest word of the Church as to the Edmunds Bill and Gentile tradesmen. The scene is as primitive and quaint as can be imagined, for in rural Utah life is still rough and hearty and simple. To the stranger, the greetings of family groups, with the strange flavour of the Commonwealth days, the wonderful Scriptural or apocryphal names, and the old-fashioned salutation, are full of picturesque interest, while the meetings of waggons filled with acquaintances from remote corners of the country, the confusion of European dialects—imagine hearing pure Welsh among the San Pete sagebrush!—the unconventional cordiality of greeting, are delightful both in an intellectual and artistic sense.

I have travelled much, and these social touches have always had a charm for me, let them be the demure reunions of Creoles sous les filaos in Mauritius; or the French negroes chattering as they go to the baths in Bourbon; the deep-drinking convivialities of the Planters' Club in Ceylon; the grinning, prancing, rencontres of Kaffir and Kaffir, or the stolid collision of Boer waggons on the African veldt; the stately meeting of camel-riding Beluchis on the sandy put of Khelat; the jingling ox-drawn ekkas foregathered to "bukh" under the tamarind-trees of Bengal; the reserved salutations of Hindoos as they squat by the roadside to discuss the invariable lawsuit and smoke the inevitable hubble-bubble; the noisy congregation of Somali boatmen before their huts on the sun-smitten shores of Aden;—what a number of reminiscences I could string together of social traits in various parts of the world! And these Mormon peasants, pioneers of the West, these hardy sons of hardy sires, will be as interesting to me in the future as any others, and my remembrance of them will be one of admiration for their unfashionable virtues of industry and temperance, and of gratitude for their simple courtesy and their cordial hospitality.

As we left Manti behind us, the waggons "coming into conference" got fewer and fewer, and soon we found ourselves out alone upon the broad levels of the valley, with nothing to keep us company but a low range of barren hills that did their best to break the monotony of the landscape. In places, the ground was white with desperate patches of "saleratus," the saline efflorescence with which agriculture in this Territory is for ever at war, and resembling in appearance, taste, and effects the "reh" of the Gangetic plains. Here, as in India, irrigation is the only known antidote, and once wash it out of the soil and get crops growing and the enemy retires. But as soon as cultivation ceases or irrigation slackens, the white infection creeps over the ground again, and if undisturbed for a year resumes possession. How unrelenting Nature is in her conflict with man!

We passed some warm springs a few miles from Manti, but the water though slightly saline is inodorous, and on the patches which they water I saw the wild flax growing as if it enjoyed the temperature and the soil. Then Six-Mile Creek, a pleasant little ravine, crossed by a rustic bridge, which gives water for a large tract Of land, and so to Sterling, a settlement as yet in its cradle, and curiously illustrative of "the beginning of things" in rural Utah. One man and his one wife up on the hillside doing something to the water, one cock and one hen pecking together in monogamous sympathy, one dog sitting at the door of a one-roomed log-hut. Everything was in the Adam and Eve stage of society, and primeval. So Deucalion and Pyrrha had the earth to themselves, and the "rooster" stalked before his mate as if he was the first inventor of posterity. But much of this country is going to come under the plough in time, for there is water, and in the meantime, as giving promise of a future with some children in it, there is a school-house—an instance of forethought which gratified me.

The country now becomes undulating, remaining for the most part a sterile-looking waste of grease-wood, but having an almost continuous thread of cultivation running along the centre of the valley which, a few miles further on, suddenly widens into a great field of several thousand acres. On the other side of it we found Mayfield.

In Mayfield every one was gone to the Conference except a pretty girl, left to look after all the children of the village, and who resisted our entreaties for hospitality with a determination that would have been more becoming in an uglier person—and an old lady, left under the protection of a big blind dog and a little bobtailed calf. She received us with the honest courtesy universal in the Territory, showed us where to put our horses and where the lucerne was stacked, and apologized to us for having nothing better than eggs and ham to offer!

Fancy nothing better than eggs and ham! To my mind there is nothing in all travelling so delightful as these eggs-and-ham interruptions that do duty for meals. Not only is the viand itself so agreeable, but its odour when cooking creates an appetite.

What a moral there is here! We have all heard of the beauty of the lesson that those flowers teach us which give forth their sweetest fragrance when crushed. But I think the conduct of eggs and ham, that thus create an appetite in order to increase man's pleasure in their own consumption, is attended with circumstances of good taste that are unusually pleasing.

In our hostess's house at Mayfield I saw for the first time the ordinary floor-covering of the country through which we subsequently travelled—a "rag-carpet." It is probably common all over the world, but it was quite new to me. I discussed its composition one day with a mother and her daughter.

"This streak here is Jimmy's old pants, and that darker one is a military overcoat. This is daddy's plush vest. This bit of the pattern is—"

"No, mother, that's your old jacket-back; don't you remember?"—and so on all through the carpet.

Every stripe in it had an association, and the story of the whole was pretty nearly the story of their entire lives in the country.

"For it took us seven years to get together just this one strip of carpet. We folks haven't much, you see, that's fit to tear up."

I like the phrase "fit to tear up," and wonder when, in the opinion of this frugal people, anything does become suitable for destruction. But it is hardly destruction after all to turn old clothes into carpets, and the process is as simple as, in fact is identical with, ordinary hand-weaving. The cloth is simply shredded into very narrow strips, and each strip is treated in the loom just as if it were ordinary yarn, the result being, by a judicious alternation of tints, a very pleasant-looking and very durable floor-cloth. Rag-rugs are also made on a foundation of very coarse canvas by drawing very narrow shreds of rag through the spaces of the canvas, fastening them on the reverse side, and cutting them off to a uniform "pile" on the upper. In one cottage at Salina I remember seeing a rug of this kind in which the girl had drawn her own pattern and worked in the colours with a distinct appreciation of true artistic effect. An industrial exhibition for such products would, I have no doubt, bring to light a great many out-of-the-way handicrafts which these emigrant people have brought with them from the different parts of Europe, and with which they try to adorn their simple homes.

Our teamster from Mayfield to Glenwood, the next stage of my southward journey, was a very cautious person. He would not hurry his horses down hill—they were "belike" to stumble; and he would not hurry them up hill—it "fretted" them. On the level intervals he stopped altogether, to "breathe" them. It transpired eventually that they were plough horses. I suspected it from the first. And from his driving I suspected that he was the ploughman. In other respects he was a very desirable teamster.

His remarks about Europe (he had once been to Chicago himself) were very entertaining, and his theory of "ground hogs" would have delighted Darwin. As far as I could follow him, all animals were of one species, the differences as to size and form being chiefly accidents of age or sex. This, at any rate, was my induction from his description of the "ground hog," which he said was a "kind of squirrel—like the prairie dog!" As he said, there were "quite a few" ground hogs, but they moved too fast among the brush for me to identify them. As far as I could tell, though, they were of the marmot kind, about nine inches long, with very short tails and round small ears. When they were at a safe distance they would stand up at full length on their hind legs, the colouring underneath being lighter than on the back. What are they? I have seen none in Utah except on these volcanic stretches of country between Salina and Monroe.

Much of Utah is volcanic, but here, beyond Salina, huge mounds of scoriae, looking like heaps of slag from some gigantic furnace, are piled up in the centre of the level ground, while in other places circular depressions in the soil—sometimes fifty feet in diameter and lowest in the centre, with deep fissures defining the circumference—seem to mark the places whence the scoriae had been drawn, and the earth had sunk in upon the cavities thus exhausted.

The two sides of the river (the Sevier) were in striking contrast. On this, the eastern, was desolation and stone heaps and burnt-up spaces with ant-hills and lizards.

Nothing makes a place look (to me at least) so hot as an abundance of lizards. They are associated in memory with dead, still heat, "the intolerable calor of Mambre," the sun-smitten cinder-heap that men call Aden, the stifling hillsides of Italy where the grapes lie blistering in the autumn sun, the desperate suburbs of Alexandria—what millions of scorched-looking lizards, detestable little salamanders, used to bask upon Cleopatra's Needles when they lay at full length among the sand!—the heat-cracked fields of India. I know very well that there are lizards and lizards; that they might be divided—as the Hindoo divides everything, whether victuals or men's characters, medicines or the fates the gods send him—into "hot" and "cold" lizards. The salamander itself, according to the ancients, was icy cold. But this does not matter. All lizards make places look hot.

On the other side of the river, a favourite raiding-ground of "Mr. Indian," as the settlers pleasantly call him, lies Aurora, a settlement in the centre of a rich tract of red wheat soil with frequent growths of willow and buffalo-berry (or bull-berry or red-berry or "kichi-michi") marking the course of the Sevier.

But our road soon wound down by a "dug way" to the bottom-lands, and we found ourselves on level meadows clumped with shrubs and patched with corn-fields, and among scattered knots of grazing cattle and horses. Overhead circled several pairs of black hawks, a befitting reminder to the dwellers on these Thessalian fields, these Campanian pastures, that Scythian Piutes and Navajo Attilas might at any time swoop down upon them.

But the forbearance of the Indian in the matter of beef and mutton is inexplicable—and most inexplicable of all in the case of lamb, seeing that mint grows wild. This is a very pleasing illustration of the happiness of results when man and nature work cordially together. The lamb gambols about among beds of mint! What a becoming sense of the fitness of things that would be that should surprise the innocent thing in its fragrant pasture and serve up the two together! "They were pleasant in their lives, and in death they were not divided." And what a delightful field for similar efforts such a spectacle opens up to the philosophic mind! Here, beyond Aurora, as we wind in and out among the brakes of willow and rose-bush, we catch glimpses of the river, with ducks riding placidly at anchor in the shadows of the foliage. And not a pea in the neighbourhood! Now, why not sow green peas along the banks of the American rivers and lakes? How soothing to the weary traveller would be this occasional relief of canard aux petits pois!

After an interval of pretty river scenery we found ourselves once more in a dismal, volcanic country with bald hills and leprous sand-patches the only features of the landscape, with lizards for flowers and an exasperating heat-drizzle blurring the outlines of everything with its quivering refraction. And then, after a few miles of this, we are suddenly in the company of really majestic mountains, some of them cedared to the peaks, others broken up into splendid architectural designs of almost inconceivable variety, richly tinted and fantastically grouped. How wealthy this range must be in mineral! In front of us, above all the intervening hills, loomed out a monster mountain, and turning one of its spurs we break all at once upon the village of Glenwood—a beautiful cluster of foliage with skirts of meadow-land spread out all about it—lying at the foot of the huge slope.

Near Glenwood is an interesting little lake that I visited. Its water is exquisitely clear and very slightly warm. Though less than a foot deep in most places (it has one pool twelve feet in depth), it never freezes, in spite of the intense cold at this altitude. It is stocked with trout that do not grow to any size, but which do not on the other hand seem to diminish in numbers, although the consumption is considerable. The botany in the neighbourhood of the lake is very interesting, the larkspur, lupin, mimulus, violet, heart's-ease, ox-eye, and several other familiar plants of English gardens, growing wild, while a strongly tropical flavour is given to the vegetation by the superb footstools of cactus—imagine sixty-one brilliant scarlet blossoms on a cushion only fifteen inches across!—by the presence of a gorgeous oriole (the body a pure yellow freaked with black on the wings, and the head and neck a rich orange), and by a large butterfly of a clear flame-colour with the upper wings sharply hooked at the tips. Flower, bird, and insect were all in keeping with the Brazils or the Malayan Archipelago.

On a rock, close by the grist-mill, is the only specimen of the much-talked-of Indian "hieroglyphics" that I have seen. They may of course be hieroglyphics, but to me they look like the first attempts of some untutored savage youth to delineate in straight lines the human form divine. Or they may be only his attempts to delineate a cockroach.

CHAPTER XIV.

FROM GLENWOOD TO MONROE.

From Glenwood to Salina—Deceptiveness of appearances—An apostate Mormon's friendly testimony—-Reminiscences of the Prophet Joseph Smith—Rabbit-hunting in a waggon—Lost in the sagebrush—A day at Monroe—Girls riding pillion—The Sunday drum—Waiting for the right man: "And what if he is married?"—The truth about apostasy: not always voluntary.

SOON after leaving Glenwood, cultivation dies out, and for twelve miles or so the rabbit-brush and grease-wood—the "atriplex" of disagreeably scientific travellers, who always speak of sage-brush as "artemisia," and disguise the gentle chipmunk as "spermophilus"—divide the land between them. The few flowers, and these all dwarfed varieties, attest the poverty of the soil. The mountains, however, do their best to redeem the landscape, and the scenery, as desolate scenery, is very fine. The ranges that have on either hand rolled along an unbroken series of monotonous contour, now break up into every conceivable variety of form, mimicking architecture or rather multiplying its types, and piling bluffs, pierced with caves, upon terraces, and pinnacles upon battlements. Causeways, like that in Echo Canyon, slant down their slopes, and other vestiges of a terrific aqueous action abound. Next to this riot of rock comes a long series of low hills, grey, red, and yellow, utterly destitute of vegetation, and so smooth that it looks as if the place were a mountain-yard, where Nature made her mountains, and had collected all her materials about her in separate convenient mounds before beginning to mix up and fuse. In places they were richly spangled with mica, giving an appearance of sparkling, trickling water to the barren slopes.

On the other side of the valley, the mountains, discountenancing such frivolities, had settled down into solid-bottomed masses of immense bulk, the largest mountains, in superficial acreage, I had seen all the journey, and densely cedared.

With Gunnison in sight across the valley, we reached Willow Creek, a pleasant diversion of water and foliage in the dreary landscape, and an eventful spot in the last Indian war, for among these willows here Black Hawk made a stand to dispute the Mormons' pursuit of their plundered stock, and held the creek, too, all the day. And so out on to the monotonous grease-wood levels again—an Indians' camp fire among the cedars, the only sign of a living thing—and over another "divide," and so into the Sevier Valley. The river is seen flowing along the central depression, with the Red-Mound settlement on the other side of the stream, and Salina on this side of it, lying on ahead.

Salina is one of those places it is very hard to catch. You see it first "about seven" miles off, and after travelling towards it for an hour and a half, find you have still "eight miles or so" to go. "Appearances are very deceptive in this country," as these people delight in saying to new-comers, and the following story is punctually told, at every opportunity, to illustrate it.

A couple of Britishers (of course "Britishers") started off from their hotel "to walk over to that mountain there," just to get an appetite for breakfast. About dinner-time one of them gave up and came back, leaving his obstinate friend to hunt the mountain by himself. After dining, however, he took a couple of horses and rode out after his friend, and towards evening came up with him just as he was taking off his shoes and stockings by the side of a two-foot ditch.

"Hallo!" said the horseman, "what on earth are you doing, Jack?"

"Doing!" replied the other sulkily. "Can't you see? I am taking off my boots to wade this infernal river."

"River!" exclaimed his friend; "what river? That thing's only a two-foot ditch!"

"Daresay," was the dogged response. "It looks only a two-foot ditch. But you can't trust anything in this beastly country. Appearances are so deceptive."

But we caught Salina at last, for we managed to head it up into a cul-de-sac of the mountains, and overtook it about sundown. A few years ago the settlement was depopulated; for Black Hawk made a swoop at it from his eyrie among the cedars on the overlooking hill, and after killing a few of the people, compelled the survivors to fly northward, where the militia was mustering for the defence of the valley. It was in this war that the Federal officer commanding the post at Salt Lake City, acting under the orders of General Sherman, refused to help the settlers, telling them in a telegram of twenty words to help themselves. The country, therefore, remembers with considerable bitterness that three years' campaign against a most formidable combination of Indians; when they lost so many lives, when two counties had to be entirely abandoned, many scattered settlements broken up, and an immense loss in property and stock suffered.

At Salina I met an apostate Mormon who had deserted the religion because he had grown to disbelieve in it, but who had retained, nevertheless, all his respect for the leaders of the Church and the general body of Mormons. He is still a polygamist; that is to say, having married two wives, he has continued to treat them honourably as wives. With me was an apostle, one of the most deservedly popular elders of the Church, and it was capital entertainment to hear the apostate and the apostle exchanging their jokes at each other's expense. I was shown at this house, by the way, an emigration loan receipt. The emigrant, his wife, and three children, had been brought out in the old waggon days at $50 a head. Some fifteen years later, when the man had become well-to-do and after he had apostatized, he repaid the $250, and some $50 extra as "interest." The loan ticket stipulated for "ten per cent per annum," but as he said, it was "only Mormons who would have let him run on so long, and then have let him off so much of the interest."

My host was himself an interesting man, for he had been with the Saints ever since the stormy days of Kirtland, and had known Joseph Smith personally. "Ah, sir, he was a noble man!" said the old fellow. Among other out-of-the-way items which he told me about the founder of the faith, was his predilection for athletic exercises and games of all kinds; how he used to challenge strangers to wrestle, and be very wroth when, as happened once, the stranger threw him over the counter of a shop; and how he used to play baseball with the boys in the streets of Nauvoo. This trait of Joseph Smith's character I have never seen noticed by his biographers, but it is quite noteworthy, as also, I think, is the extraordinary fascination which his personal appearance—for he was a very handsome man of the Sir Robert Peel type—seems to have exercised over his contemporaries. When speaking to them, I find that one and all will glance from the other aspects of his life to this—that he was "a noble man."

Rabbit-hunting across country in a two-horse waggon is not a sport I shall often indulge in again. The rabbit has things too much its own way. It does not seem to be a suitable animal for pursuing in a vehicle. It is too evasive.

Indeed, but for an accident, I should probably never have indulged in it at all. But it happened that on our way from Salina to Monroe we lost our way. Our teamster, for inscrutable reasons of his own, turned off from the main road into a bye-track, which proved to have been made by some one prospecting for clay, and the hole which he had excavated was its terminus. I tried to think out his reason for choosing this particular road, the least and most unpromising of the three that offered themselves to him. It was probably this. Two out of the three roads, being wrong ones, were evils. One of these was larger than the other, and so of the two evils he chose the less. Q.E.D.

To get back into the road we struck across the sage-brush, and in so doing started a jack-rabbit. As it ran in the direction we wanted to go, we naturally followed it. But the jack-rabbit thought we were in murderous pursuit, and performed prodigies of agility and strategy in order to escape us. But the one thing that it ought to have done, got out of our road, it did not do. We did not gain on the lively animal, I confess, for it was all we could do to retain our seats, but we gave it enough to prose about all the days of its life. What stories the younger generation of jack-rabbits will hear of "the old days" when desperate men used to come out thousands of miles in two-horse waggons with canvas hoods to try and catch their ancestors! And what a hero that particular jack-rabbit which we did not hunt will be!

The road southwards leads along hillsides, both up and down, but on the whole gradually ascending, till the summit of the spur is reached. Here one of the most enchanting landscapes possible is suddenly found spread out beneath you. A vast expanse of green meadow-land with pools Of blue water here and there, herds of horses grazing, flocks of wild fowl in the air, and on the right the settlement of Richfield among its trees and red-soiled corn-fields!

Crossing this we found that a spur, running down on it, divides it really into two, or rather conceals a second plain from sight. But in the second, sage-brush, "the damnable absinthe," that standard of desolation, waves rampant, and the telegraph wire that goes straddling across it seems as if it must have been laid solely for the convenience of larks. Every post has its lark, as punctually as its insulator, and every lark lets off its three delicious notes of song as we go by, just as if the birds were sentries passing on a "friend" from picket to picket. And here it was that we adventured with the jack-rabbit, much to our own discomfiture. But while we were casting about for our lost road, we came upon a desolate little building, all alone in the middle of the waste, which we had supposed to be a deserted ranch-house, and were surprised to find several waggons standing about. Just as we reached it, the owners of the waggons came out, and then we discovered that it was the "meeting-house" for the scattered ranches round, and seeing the several parties packing themselves into the different waggons remembered (from a certain Sabbatical smartness of apparel) that it was Sunday. We were soon on our right road again, and passing the hamlets of Inverary and Elsinore on the right, came in sight of Monroe, and through a long prelude of cultivation reached that quaint little village just apparently at the fashionable hour for girls to go out riding with their beaux.

Couple after couple passed us, the girls riding pillion behind their sweethearts, and very well contented they all seemed to be, with their arms round the object of their affections. Except in France once or twice, I do not recollect ever having seen this picturesque old custom in practice; but judging from the superior placidity of his countenance and the merriment on hers, I should say it was an enjoyable one, and perhaps worth reviving.

Another interesting feature of Sunday evening in Monroe was the big drum. It appeared that the arrival of the Apostle who was with me had been expected, and that the people, who are everywhere most curiously on the alert for spiritual refreshment, had agreed that if the Apostle on arriving felt equal to holding a meeting, the big drum was to be beaten. In due course, therefore, a very little man disappeared inside a building and shortly reappeared in custody of a very big drum, which he proceeded to thump in a becoming Sabbatical manner. But whether the drum or the association of old band days overcame him, or whether the devil entered into him or into the drum, it is certain that he soon drifted into a funereal rendering of "Yankee Doodle." He was conscious, moreover, of his lapse into weekday profanity, and seemed to struggle against it by beating ponderous spondees. But it was of no use. Either the drum or the devil was too big for him, and the solemn measure kept breaking into patriotic but frivolous trochaics. Attracted by these proceedings, the youth of the neighbourhood had collected, and their intelligent aversion to monopolists was soon apparent by their detaching the little barnacle from his drum and subjecting the resonant instrument to a most irregular bastinado. They all had a go at it, both drumsticks at once, and the result was of a very unusual character, as neither of the performers could hear distinctly what was going on on the other side of the drum, and each, therefore, worked quite independently. In the meanwhile some one had procured a concertina, and this, with a dog that had a fine falsetto bark, constituted a very respectable "band" in point of noise. Thus equipped, the lads started off to beat up the village, and working with that enthusiasm which characterizes the self-imposed missions of youth, were very successful. Everybody came out to their doors to see what was going on, and having got so far, they then went on to the meeting. By twos and threes and occasional tens the whole village collected inside the meeting-house, or round the door unable to get in, and I must confess that looking round the room, I was surprised at the number of pretty peasant faces that Monroe can muster.

And here for the first time I became aware of a very significant fact, and one that well deserves notice, though I have never heard or seen it referred to—I mean the number of handsome marriageable girls who are unmarried in the Mormon settlements. Omitting other places, in each of which many well-grown, comely girls can be found unmarried, I saw in the hamlet of Monroe enough unwedded charms to make me think that either the resident polygamist had very bad taste or very bad luck. My host, a Mormon, was a widower (a complete widower I mean), and two very pretty girls, neighbours, looked after his household affairs for him. One was a blonde Scandinavian of Utah birth; the other a dark-haired Scotch lassie emigrated three years ago—and each was just eighteen. (And in the Western country eighteen looks three-and-twenty.) I asked my host why he did not marry one of them, or both, and he told me that he had a family growing up, and that he had so often seen quarrels and separations result from the remarriage of fathers that he did not care to risk it.

And the Apostle, who was present, said, "Quite right."

Now please remember this was in polygamous Utah, in a secluded village, entirely Mormon, where, if anywhere, men and women might surely do as they pleased. In any monogamous society such a reason, followed by the approval of a Church dignitary, would not be worth commenting on, but here among Mormons it was significant enough.

I spoke to the girls, and asked them why they had not married.

"Because the right man has not come along yet," said one.

"But perhaps when the right man does come along he will be married already," I said.

"And why should that make any difference?" was the reply.

In the meantime each of these shapely daughters of Eve had a "beau" who took her out riding behind him, escorted her home from meeting, and so forth. But neither of them had found "the right man."

Of Monroe, therefore, one of those very places, retired from civilization, "where the polygamous Mormon can carry on his beastly practices undetected, and therefore unpunished"—as the scandalous clique of Salt Lake City (utterly ignorant of Mormonism except what it can pick up from apostates) is so fond of alleging—I can positively state from personal knowledge that there are both men and women there who are guided in matters of marriage by the very same motives and principles that regulate the relation in monogamous society. Further, I can positively state the same of several other settlements, and judging from these, and from Salt Lake City, I can assure my readers that the standard of public morality among the Mormons of Utah is such as the Gentiles among them are either unable or unwilling to live up to.

In this connexion it is worth noting that public morality has in Utah one safeguard, over and above all those of other countries, namely, the strict surveillance of the Church. I have enjoyed while in Utah such exceptional advantages for arriving at the truth, as both Gentiles and Mormons say have never been extended to any former writer, and among other facts with which I have become acquainted is the silent scrutiny into personal character which the Church maintains.

Profanity, intemperance, immorality, and backbiting are taken quiet note of, and if persisted in against advice, are punished by a gradual withdrawal of "fellowship;" and result in what the Gentiles call "apostasy." Among the standing instructions of the teachers of the wards is this:—

"If persons professing to be members of the Church be guilty of allowing drunkenness, Sabbath-breaking, profanity, defrauding or backbiting, or any other kind of wickedness or unrighteous dealing, they should be visited and their wrong-doing pointed out to them in the spirit of brotherly kindness and meekness, and be exhorted to repent."

If they do not repent, they find the respect, then the friendship, and finally the association, of their co-religionists withheld from them, and thus tacitly ostracized by their own Church, they "apostatize" and carry their vices into the Gentile camp, and there assist to vilify those who have already pronounced them unfit to live with honest men or virtuous women.

CHAPTER XV.

AT MONROE.

"Schooling" in the Mormon districts—Innocence as to whisky, but connoisseurs in water—"What do you think of that water, sir?"—Gentile dependents on Mormon charity—The one-eyed rooster—Notice to All!

SITTING at the door next morning, I saw a very trimly-dressed damsel of twenty or thereabouts, coming briskly along under the trees, which there, as in every other Mormon settlement, shade the side-walk. She was the schoolmistress, I learned, and very soon her scholars began to pass along. I had thus an opportunity of observing the curious, happy-go-lucky style in which "schooling" is carried on, and I was sorry to see it, for Mormonism stands urgently in need of more education, and it is pure folly to spend half the revenue of the Territory annually in a school establishment, if the children and their parents are permitted to suppose that education is voluntary and a matter of individual whim. Some of the leading members of the Church are conspicuous defaulters in this matter, and do their families a gross wrong by setting "the chores" and education before them as being of equal importance. Even in the highest class of the community children go to school or stay away almost as they like, and provided a little boy or girl has the shrewdness to see that he or she can relieve the father or mother from trouble by being at home to run errands and do little jobs about the house, they can, I regret to think, regulate the amount of their own schooling as they please. I know very well that Utah compares very favourably, on paper, with the greater part of America, but I have compiled and examined too many educational statistics in my time to have any faith in them.

But in the matter of abstinence from strong drink and stimulants, the leaders of the Church set an admirable example, and I found it very difficult most of the time, and quite impossible part of it, to keep my whisky flask replenished.

My system of arriving at the truth as to the existence of spirit stores in any particular settlement, was to grumble and complain at having no whisky, and to exaggerate my regrets at the absence of beer. The courtesy of my hosts was thus challenged, and of the sincerity of the efforts made to gratify my barbaric tastes, I could have no doubt whatever. In most cases they were quite ignorant of even the cost of liquor, and on one occasion a man started off with a five-dollar piece I had given him to get me "five dollars' worth of whisky in this bottle," pointing to my flask. I explained to him that I only wanted the flask replenished, and that there would be change to bring back. He did not get any at all, however.

On one occasion the Bishop brought in, in evident triumph, two bottles of beer. On another I went clandestinely with a Mormon, after dark, and drank some whisky "as a friend," and not as a customer, with another Mormon, who "generally kept a bottle on hand" for secret consumption. That they would both have been ashamed for their neighbours to know what they were about, I am perfectly convinced. On a third occasion an official brought me half a pint of whisky, and the price was a dollar.

Now it is quite impossible for me, who have thus made personal experiment, to have any doubt as to the prevailing sobriety of these people. I put them repeatedly to the severest test that you can apply to a hospitable man, by asking point-blank for ardent spirits. Sometimes, in an off-hand way, I would give money and the flask to a lad, and ask him to "run across to the store and get me a little whisky or brandy." He would take both and meander round in an aimless sort of way. But I might almost as well have asked him to go and buy me a few birds-of-paradise or advance sheets of the "Encyclopaedia Britannica." The father or a neighbour might perhaps suggest a "likely" place to get some stimulant, but, as a rule, the quest was unconditionally abandoned as hopeless.

The Elders of the Church set a strict example themselves, discouraging, by their own abstinence, indulgence even in tea and coffee. You are asked in a settlement whether you will have tea or coffee, just as in England you would be asked whether you would drink ale or claret. A strong man takes a cup of tea as a lady in Europe might take a glass of sherry, as justified by unusual exercise and fatigue. Being a Londoner, I entertain a most wholesome suspicion of water as a drink, and I reverence fresh milk. In rural Utah, milk being so abundant, the people think little of it, but they pride themselves on their water.

"What do you think of that water, sir?" was a question that puzzled me to answer at first, for I am not a connoisseur in drinking-water. If it had been a claret, I might have made a pretence of criticism. But water! Or if they had let me wash in it, I would have told them whether I thought it "hard" or "soft." But to pass an opinion on a particular tumbler of water, as if it were a special brand laid down by my host for his own drinking, completely puzzled me. I can no more tell waters apart than I can tell Chinamen. Of course I can discriminate between the outcome of the sea and of sulphur springs. But for the rest, it seems to me that they only differ in their degrees of cleanliness, or, as scientific men say, to "the properties which they hold in solution," that is mud. And mud, I take it, is always pretty much the same.

So at first when my host would suddenly turn to me with, "What do you think of that water, sir?" I made the mistake of supposing it might be one of the extraordinary aqueous novelties for which this territory is so remarkable—hot-geyser water or petrifying water, or something else of the kind—and would smack my lips critically and venture on a suggestion of "lime," or "soda," or "alkali." But my host was always certain to be down with, "Oh, no; I assure you. That is reckoned the best water in the county!"

I soon discovered, however, that the right thing to say was that I preferred it, "on the whole," to the water at the last place. This was invariably satisfactory—unless, of course, there was a resident of "the last place" present, when an argument would ensue. These people, in fact, look upon their drinking-water just as on the continent they look upon their vins ordinaires, or in England upon their local brews, and to the last I could not help being delighted at the manner in which a jug of water and tumblers were handed about among a party of fatigued and thirsty travellers. I always took my share becomingly, but sometimes, I must confess, with silent forebodings.

For in some places there are springs which petrify, by coating with lime, any substance they flow over, and I did not anticipate with any gratification having my throat lined with cement, or my stomach faced with building-stone.

"Who are those children?" said I to my host at Munroe, pointing to two ragged little shoeless waifs that were standing in his yard and evidently waiting to be taken notice of. Instead of replying, my host turned towards them.

"Well, Jimmy," said he, "what is it to-day?"

The wistful eyes looking out from under the tattered, broad-brimmed hats, brightened into intelligence.

"Another chicken for mother," said both together, promptly; and then, as if suddenly overtaken by a sense of their audacity, the forlorn little lads dropped their eyes and stood there, holding each other's hands, as picturesque and pathetic a pair as any beggar children in Italy. In the full sunlight, but half shaded by the immense brims of those wonderfully ancient hats, the urchins were irresistibly artistic, and if met with anywhere in the Riviera, would have been sure of that small-change tribute which the romantic tourist pays with such pleasant punctuality to the picturesque poverty of Southern childhood. But this was in Utah.

And my host looked at them from under his tilted straw hat. They stood in front of him as still as sculptors' models, but fingers and toes kept exchanging little signals of nervous distress.

"All right. Go and get one," said my host suddenly. "Take the young rooster that's blind of one eye."

He had to shout the last instructions in a rapid crescendo as the youngsters had sprung off together at the word "go," like twin shafts from those double-arrowed bows of the old Manchurian archers. Three minutes later and a most woful scrawking heralded the approach of the captors and the captive. The young rooster, though blind of one eye, saw quite enough of the situation to make him apprehensive, but the younger urchin had him tight under his arm, and, still under the exciting influences of the chase and capture, the boys stood once more before my host, with panting bodies, flushed cheeks, and tufts of yellow hair sprouting out through crevices of those wondrous old hats, which had evidently just seen service in the capture. And the rooster, feeling, perhaps, that he was now before the final court of appeal, scrawked as if machinery had got loose inside him and he couldn't stop it.

"How's your (scraw-w-w-k) mother?"

She's (scraw-w-w-k)—and she's (scraw-w-w-k) nothing to eat all yesterday." (Scraw-w-k.)

"Go on home, then."

And away down the middle of the road scudded the little fellows in a confusion of dust and scrawk.

"Who are those children?" I asked again, thinking I had chanced on that unknown thing, a pauper Mormon.

"Oh," said my host, "he's a bad lot—an outsider—who came in here as a loafer, and deserted his wife. She's very ill and pretty nigh starving. Ay, she would starve, too, if her boys there didn't come round regular, begging of us. But loafers know very well that 'those——Mormons' won't let anybody go hungry. Ay, and they act as if they knew it, too."

In other settlements there are exactly such similar cases, but I would draw the attention of my readers—I wish I could draw the attention of the whole nation to it—to the following notice which stands to this day with all the force of a regular by-law in these Mormon settlements:—

"NOTICE TO ALL.

"If there are any persons in this city who are destitute of food, let them be who they may, if they will let their wants be known to me, privately or otherwise, I will see that they are furnished with food and lodging until they can provide for themselves. The bishops of every ward are to see that there are no persons going hungry.

"(Signed by the Presiding Bishop.)"

Now it may be mere "sentiment" on my part, but I confess that this "Notice to All," in the simplicity of its wording, in the nobility of its spirit, reads to me very beautifully. And what a contrast to turn from this text of a universal charity, that is no respecter of persons, to the infinite meanness of those who can write, as in the Salt Lake Tribune, of the whole community of Mormons as the villainous spawn of polygamy!"

It is a recognized law among the Mormons that no tramp shall pass by one of their settlements hungry; if it is at nightfall, he is to be housed. Towards the Indians their policy is one of enlightened and Christian humanity. For their own people their charity commences from the first. Emigrated to this country by the voluntary donations which maintain the "Perpetual Emigration Fund," each new arrival is met with immediate care, and being passed on to his location, finds (as I have described in another chapter) a system of mutual kindliness prevailing which starts him in life. If sick, he is cared for. If he dies, his family is provided for. All this is fact. I have read it in no books, heard it from no hoodwinking elders. My informants are lads just arrived in Salt Lake City—within an hour or two of their arrival, in fact; young men just settling down in their first log hut in rural settlements: grown men now themselves engaged in the neighbourly duty of assisting new-comers.

I have met and talked to those men—Germans, Scandinavians, Britishers—in their own homes here in Utah, and have positively assured myself of the fact I state, that charity, unquestioning, simple-hearted charity, is one of the secrets of the strength of this wonderful fabric of Mormonism. The Mormons are, more nearly than any other community in the world on such a scale, one family. Every man knows all the rest of his neighbours with an intimacy and a neighbourly interest that is the result of reciprocal good services in the past. This is their bond of union. In India there is "the village community" which moves, though in another arc, on the same plane as the Mormon settlement system. There, to touch one man's crop is to inflame the whole clan with the sense of a common injury. Here it is much the same. And as it is between the different individuals in a settlement, so it is between the different settlements in the territory. A brutal act, like that eviction of the Mormon postmaster at Park City the other day, disturbs the whole of Mormonism with apprehensions of impending violence. A libel directed at a man or woman in Salt Lake City makes a hundred thousand personal enemies in Utah. Now, with what petard will you hoist such a rock?

Induce these Mormons to hate one another "for all the world like Christians," as George Eliot said, and they can be snapped as easily as the philosopher's faggots when once they were unbundled. But in the meantime abuse of individuals or "persecution" of a class simply cements the whole body together more firmly than ever. Mutual charity is one of the bonds of Mormon union. It is the secret of this "oneness" which makes the Salt Lake Tribune yelp so.

CHAPTER XVI.

JACOB HAMBLIN.

A Mormon missionary among the Indians—The story of Jacob Hamblin's life—His spiritualism, the result of an intense faith—His good work among the Lamanites—His belief in his own miracles.

LEAVING Munroe, we find cultivation gradually disappearing, and, after two or three miles, unmitigated brush supervenes. A steep divide now thrusts itself across the road, and, traversing near the summit a patch of pebbly ground which seemed a very paradise for botanists, we descend again into a wilderness of grease-wood, "the unspeakable Turk" among vegetables. The mountains between which we pass provide, however, a succession of fine views. They are of that bulky, broad-based and slowly sloping type that is so much more solemn and impressive than jagged, sharp-pointed and precipitous formations.

A few miles more bring us to one of them, and for the first time during the journey our road runs through the thickly growing "cedars" which we have hitherto seen only at a distance lying like dark clouds upon the hill-sides and black drifts in the gulches. The wild flowers growing under these "cedars" (and the pines which are sprinkled among them) are of new varieties to me, and I enjoyed a five-mile walk in this novel vegetation immensely. A few years ago, though, "Mr. Indian" would have made himself too interesting to travellers for men to go wandering about among the cedars picking posies. They would have found those "arrows tipped with jasper," which are so picturesque in Hiawatha, flying about instead of humming-birds tipped with emerald, and a tomahawk hurtling through the bushes would have been more likely to excite remark than the blue magpies which I saw looking after snails.

This district was, until very recently, a favourite hunting-ground of those Indians of whom old Jacob Hamblin was the Nestor—the guide, philosopher, friend, and victim. One day they would try "to fill his skin full of arrows;" on the next day they would be round him, asking him to make rain-medicine. They would talk Mormonism with him all day, and grunt approvingly; as soon as night fell they would steal his horse. He was always patching up peace between this tribe and that, yet every now and then they would catch him, have a great pow-wow over him, and being unable to decide whether he should be simply flayed or be roasted first over a charcoal fire, would let him go, with provisions and an escort for his home journey.

His life, indeed, was so wonderful—much more fascinating than any fiction—that I am not surprised at his believing, as he does, that he is under the special protection of Heaven, and, as he says, in a private covenant with the Almighty that "if he does not thirst for the blood of the Lamanites, his blood shall never be shed by them." He began life as a farmer near Chicago, but being baptized received at once "the immediate gift of the Holy Ghost," and at once entered upon a career of "miracles" and "prophecies" that when told in serious earnest are sufficient to stagger even Madame Blavatsky herself. He cured his neighbours of deadly ailments by the laying on of hands, and foretold conversions, deaths, and other events with unvarying accuracy. By prolonged private meditation he enjoyed what, from his description, must be a pregustation of the Buddhistic Nirvana, and after this, miracles became quite commonplace with him. He witnessed the "miracle" of the great quail flights into the camp of the fugitive and starving Saints in 1846, and helped to collect the birds and to eat them; he saw also the "miraculous" flights of seagulls that rescued the Mormons from starvation by destroying the locusts in 1848.

But his personal experiences, narrated with a simplicity of speech and unquestioning confidence that are bewildering, were really marvellous. If cattle were lost, he could always dream where they were. If sickness prevailed, he knew beforehand who would suffer, and which of them would die, and which of them recover. If Indians were about, angels gave him in his sleep the first warnings of his danger. His sympathy with the Indians was, however, very early awakened, and being strengthened in it by the conciliatory Indian policy of Brigham Young, he became before long the only recognized medium of friendly communication with them. Everybody, whether Federal officials, California emigrants, Mormon missionaries, or Indians themselves, enlisted his influence whenever trouble with the tribes was anticipated. His own explanation of this influence is remarkable enough. As a young man, he says, he was sometimes told off to join retributive expeditions, but he could never bring himself to fire at an Indian, and on one occasion, when he did try to do so, his rifle kept missing fire, while "the Lamanites," with equally ineffectual efforts to shed his blood, kept on pincushioning the ground all around him with their futile arrows. After this he and the Indians whenever they met, spared each other's lives with punctual reciprocity.

On one occasion he dreamed that he was walking in a friendly manner with some of the members of a certain tribe, when he picked up a piece of a shining substance, which stuck to his fingers. The more he tried to rub it off the brighter it became. One would naturally, under such circumstances, anticipate the revelation of a gold-mine, but Jacob Hamblin, without any questioning, went off at once to the tribe in question. They received him as friends, and he stayed with them. One day, passing a lodge, "the Spirit" whispered to him, "Here is the shining substance you saw in your dream." But all he saw was a squaw and a boy papoose. However, he went up to the squaw, and asked for the boy. She naturally demurred to the request, but to her astonishment the boy, gathering up his bow and arrows, urged compliance with it, and Hamblin eventually led off his dream-revealed "lump." After a while he asked the boy how it was he was so eager to come, though he had never seen a white man before, and the boy answered, "My Spirit told me that you were coming to my father's lodge for me on a certain day, and that I was to go with you, and when the day came I went out to the edge of the wood, and lit a fire to show you the way to me." And Hamblin then remembered that it was the smoke of a fire that had led him to that particular camp, instead of another towards which he had intended riding!

By way of a parenthesis, let me remark here that if there are any "Spiritualists" among my readers, they should study Mormonism. The Saints have long ago formulated into accepted doctrines those mysteries of the occult world which Spiritualists outside the faith are still investigating. Your "problems" are their axioms.

This Indian boy became a staunch Mormon, and to the last was in communion with the other world. Remember I am quoting Hamblin's words, not in any way endorsing them. In 1863 he was at St. George, and one day when his friends were starting on a mission to a neighbouring tribe, he took farewell of them "for ever." "I am going on a mission, too," he said. "What do you mean?" asked Hamblin. "Only that I shall be dead before you come back," was the Indian's reply. "I have seen myself in a dream preaching the gospel to a multitude of my people, and my ancestors were among them. So I know that I must be a spirit too before I can carry the Word to spirits." In six weeks Hamblin returned to St. George; and the Indian was dead.

Brigham Young, as I have said, insisted upon a conciliatory policy towards the Indians. He made in person repeated visits to the missions at work among them, and was never weary of advising and encouraging. Here is a portion of one of his letters: does it read like the words of a thoroughly bad man?—"Seek by words of righteousness to obtain the love and confidence of the tribes. Omit promises where you are not sure you can fulfil them. Seek to unite your hearts in the bonds of love. . . . May the Spirit of the Lord direct you, and that He may qualify you for every duty is the constant prayer of your fellow-labourer in the gospel of salvation, Brigham Young." Here is a part of another letter: "I trust that the genial and salutary influences now so rapidly extending to the various tribes, may continue till it reaches every son and daughter of Abraham in their fallen condition. The hour of their redemption draws nigh, and the time is not far off when they shall become a people whom the Lord will bless. . . . The Indians should be encouraged to keep and take care of stock. I highly apprcNe your design in doing your farming through the natives; it teaches them to obtain a subsistence by their own industry, and leaves you more liberty to extend your labours among others. . . . You should always be careful to impress upon them that they should not infringe on the rights of others, and our brethren should be very careful not to infringe upon their rights in any particular, thus cultivating honour and good principles in their midst by example as well as by precept. As ever, your brother in the gospel of salvation, Brigham Young."

These and other letters are exactly in the spirit of the correspondence which, in the early days of England in Hindostan, won for the old Court of Directors the eternal admiration of mankind and for England the respect of Asia. Yet in Brigham Young's case is it ever carried to his credit that he spent so much thought and time and labour over the reclamation of the Indians, by a policy of kindness, and their exaltation by an example of honourable dealing?

It was in this spirit that the Mormon missionaries went out to the Indians then living in the part of the Territory over which I travelled, and Jacob Hamblin was one eminently characteristic of the type. Beyond all others, however, he sympathized with the red man's nature. "I argue with him just as he argues," he said. He was on good terms with the medicine-men, and took a delightful interest in their ceremonies. But when they failed to bring rain with bonfires and howling, he used to pray down abundant showers; when they gave up tormenting the sick as past all hope, Hamblin restored the invalid to life by the laying on of hands!

Once more let me say that I am only quoting, not indorsing. But I do him a great injustice in not being able to convey in writing the impressive simplicity of his language, his low, measured tones, his contemplative, earnest attitude, his Indian-like gravity of countenance. That he speaks the implicit truth, according to his own belief, I am as certain as that the water of the Great Salt Lake is salt.

His "occult" sympathies seemed at times to be magnetic, for when in doubt as to whom to choose for his companion on a perilous journey, some brother or other, the fittest person for the occasion, would always feel mysteriously influenced to go to him to see if his services were needed. His displeasure killed men, that is to say they went from his presence, sickened and died. So frequent was this inexplicable demise that the Indians worked out a superstition that evil befalls those who rob or kill a Mormon; and so marked were the special manifestations of the missionaries' spirit power, that, as Hamblin says, "the Indians were without excuse for refusing conversion," and were converted. "They looked to us for counsel, and learned to regard our words as law." Though the missionaries were sometimes alone, and the tribes around them of the most desperate kind, as "plundersome" as wolves and at perpetual blood-feud with each other, the Mormons' lives were quite safe. When they had determined on an atrocity—burning a squaw, for instance—they would do it in the most nervous hurry, lest a Mormon should come along and stop it, and when they had done it and were reproached, they used to cry like children, and say they were only Indians.

Tragedy and comedy went hand in hand; laughter at the ludicrous is cut short by a shudder of horror. "We cannot be good; we must be Piutes. Perhaps some of our children will be good. We're going off to kill so-and-so. Whoop!" And away they would go, putting an arrow into the missionary's horse as they passed. By-and-by the man who shot the arrow would be found dead, killed by a Mormon's curse, and the rest would be back at work in the settlement hoeing pumpkins—"for all the world like Christians!" Through all these alternations of temper and fortune, Jacob Hamblin retained his tender sympathy with the red men.

Their superstitious piety which, quaintly enough, he does not seem to think is exactly like his own, attracted him. He found among them tribes asking the blessing of the Great Father on their food before they ate it; invoking the Divine protection on behalf of their visitors; praying for protection when about to cross a river; returning thanks for a safe return from a journey; always sending one of their religious men to accompany any party about to travel, and so on. All this the pious Mormon naturally respected. But over and above these more ordinary expressions of piety, he found tribes that believed in and acted upon dreams; that accepted the guidance of "second sight;" that relied upon prayer for obtaining temporal necessaries; that lived "by faith," and were awaiting the fulfilment of prophecy. In all this the Mormon missionary sees nothing but common sense. For instance, Hamblin said, "I know that some people do not believe in dreams and night-visions. I myself do not believe in them when they arise from a disordered stomach, but in other kinds I have been forewarned of coming events, and received much instruction!" And, in the spirit of these words, he thinks it the most natural thing in the world that Indians should start off after a dream and find their lost cattle; suddenly alter their course in a waterless journey, and come upon hitherto unknown springs; predict the most impossible meetings with friends, and avoid dangers that were not even anticipated. In the most serious manner possible, he acquiesces in the Indians' theory of rain-getting, and acts upon their clairvoyant advice. "The Lord," he says, "is mindful of the prayers of these poor barbarians, and answers them with the blessings they need." Seeing them quite sincere in their faith, he joins them in their ceremonies of scattering consecrated meal to ensure protection on a journey, believing himself that simple reliance on Providence is all that men of honest lives need.

One tribe has a tradition that three prophets are to come to lead them back to the lands that their fathers once possessed, that these are to be preceded by good white men, but that the Indians are not to go with them until after the three prophets have reappeared and told them what to do. The Indians accept the Mormons as "the good white men" of the tradition, but "the three prophets" not having reappeared, they refuse to leave their villages (as the Mormons have wanted them to do), and Hamblin has not a word to say against such "reasonable" objections.

Is it not wonderful to find men thus reverting to an intellectual type that the world had supposed to be extinct? to find men, shrewd in business, honest in every phase of temporal life, going back to cheiromancy and hydromancy, and transacting temporal affairs at the guidance of visions? An Indian prays for rain on his pumpkins, in apparently the most unreasonable way, but the Mormon postpones his departure till the rain that results is over. On his way he nearly dies of thirst, prays for deliverance, and in half an hour snow falls over a mile and a half of ground, melts and forms pools of water! What are we to say of men who say such things as these? Are they all crazy together? And what shall we think of the thousands here who believe that miracles are the most ordinary, reasonable, natural, every-day phenomena of a life of faith, and quote point-blank the promises of the New Testament as a sufficient explanation? The best thing, perhaps, is to say Hum meditatively, and think no more about it.

CHAPTER XVII.

THROUGH MARYSVALE TO KINGSTON.

Piute Count—-Days of small things—A swop in the sage-brush; two Bishops for one Apostle—The Kings Of Kingston—A failure in Family Communism.

FROM the brow of the cedared hill south of Munroe a splendid view is obtained, and Piute County opens with fair promises; for a superb-looking valley, all natural meadow, lies spread out on either side of the Sevier, while from a gulch in the mountains on the right, a stream of vegetation seems to have poured down across the level, carrying along with its flood of cotton-wood and willow a few stately old pine-trees. From among the vegetation peeps out a cluster of miners' houses—for there are the Sevier mines up beyond that pine gulch—and a ranch or two. Much of the enchantment of distance vanishes of course as we come down to the level of the plains ourselves and skirt it close under the hills on the left. But it is a fine location nevertheless, and some day, no doubt, may be a populous valley. After a mile or two it narrows, and we cross the river—a wooden bridge, with a store and barns—("Lisonbee's place") making a pleasant interval of civilization.

From "Lisonbee's" the road passes up on to and over a stony plateau, and then descends into the valley again. Cattle and horses are grazing in the meadow, and the dark patches of wire-grass are spangled with yellow lupins, and tinted pink in places with patches of a beautiful orchid-like flower. On the edge of this pleasant-looking tract stand two small cottages, and to one of these we are welcomed by its Mormon occupants. To me the whole country had an aspect of desperate desolation. Yet our host had just come back from "the Post;" his children were away "at school;" the newspaper on his table was the latest we had ourselves seen. It is true that the post was literally a post, with a cigar-box nailed on the top of it, standing all by itself among the brushwood on the roadside. The school was a mile or two off, "just over the hill," and, till the regular teacher came, a volunteer was making shift to impart education to the little scholars who came straggling over the dreary hill-sides by twos and threes. Yet, rudimentary though they be, these are the first symptoms of a civilization triumphing over sage-brush, and give even to such desperately small beginnings a significance that is very interesting. All the thriving settlements I have visited began exactly in the same way—and under worse conditions, too, for the Indian was then a stronger power than the Mormon.

Our host here had shot among the reeds in his meadow a large bird, the size of an average goose, black with white spots, which he had been told was "a loon." It was one of the larger "divers," its neck being very long and snake-like, terminating in a comparatively small head, its wings very short and its legs (the feet webbed) set, as in all diving birds, far back on the body.

Leaving this very young "settlement," we found ourselves again in a wretched, waterless country, where the vegetation did not compensate for its monotony by any attractions of colour, nor the mountains for their baldness by any variety of contour. Here and there stunted cedars had huddled together for company into a gulch, as if afraid to be scattered about singly on such lonesome hill-sides, and away on the right, in a dip under the hills, we caught a glimpse of Marysvale.

Traversing this forbidding tract, we met another waggon on its way to Munroe, and stopping to exchange greetings, it suddenly occurred to one of the strangers that by our exchanging vehicles the horses and their teamsters would both be going home instead of away from it, and thus everybody be advantaged! The exchange was accordingly effected, our teamster getting two Bishops in exchange for an Apostle and a correspondent, and the waggons being turned round in their tracks, the teams, to their unconcealed satisfaction, started off towards their respective homes.

Sage-brush and sand, with occasional patches of tiresome rock fragments and unlimited lizards—nature's hieroglyphics for sultry sterility—were the only features of the journey. Away on our left, however, the track of a water-channel, that when completed will turn many thousands of these arid acres into farm-lands, scarred the red hill-side, and told the same old story of Mormon industry. Where it came from I have forgotten, where it was going to I do not remember, but it was in sight off and on for some thirty miles, and was probably carrying the waters of the Sevier on to the Circle-ville plains.

We are there ourselves in the evening, and passing through some ploughed land and meadow, find ourselves upon the wind-swept, lonesome, location of

THE KINGS OF KINGSTON.

Among the social experiments of Mormonism, the family communism of the Kings of Kingston deserves a special notice, for, though in my own opinion it is a failure, both financially and socially, the scheme is probably one of the most curious attempts at solving a great social problem that was ever made.

Kingston is the name of a hamlet of fifteen wooden cottages and a stock-yard which has been planted in the centre of one Of the most desolate plains in all the Utah Territory—a very Jehunnam of a plain. Piute County, in which it is situated, is, as a rule, a most forbidding section of country, and the Kingston "Valley" is perhaps the dreariest spot in it. The mountains, stern and sterile, ring it in completely, but on the south-east is a great canyon which might be the very mouth of the cavern in which the gods used to keep their winds, for a persistent, malignant wind is perpetually sweeping through it on to the plain below, and the soil being light and sandy, the people live for part of the year in a ceaseless dust-storm. One year they sowed 300 acres with wheat, and the wind simply blew the crop away. That which it could not actually displace, it kept rubbed down close to the ground by the perpetual passage of waves of sand. They planted an orchard, but some gooseberry bushes are the only remaining vestiges of the plantation, and even these happen to be on the lee side of a solid fence. They also set out trees to shade their houses, but the wind worked the saplings round and round in their holes, so that they could not take root. It can be easily imagined, therefore, that without a tree, without a green thing except the reach of meadow land at the foot of the hills, the Kingston plain, with its forlorn fifteen tenements, looks for most of the year desolation itself. That any one should ever have settled there is a mystery to all; that he should have remained there is a simple absurdity, a very Jumbo of a folly. Yet here, after five years of the most dismal experiences, I found some twenty households in occupation.

At the time when Brigham Young was exerting himself to extend the "United Order" (of which more when I come to Orderville), one of the enthusiasts who embraced its principles was a Mr. King, of Fillmore. He was a prosperous man, with a family well settled about him. Nevertheless, he determined from motives of religious philanthropy to begin life anew, and having sold off all that he possessed he emigrated with his entire family into the miserable Piute country, selected in an hour of infatuation the Kingston—then "Circleville"—location, and announced that he was about to start a co-operative experiment in farming and general industry on the basis of a household, with patriarchal government, a purse in common, and a common table for all to eat at together.

Having been permitted to examine the original articles of enrolment, dated May 1, 1877—a document, by the way, curiously characteristic of the whole undertaking, being a jumble of articles and by-laws written on a few slips of ordinary paper, a miracle of unworldly simplicity and in very indifferent spelling—I found the objects of "the company," as it is called, were "agricultural, manufacturing, commercial, and other industrial pursuits," and the establishment and maintenance of "colleges, seminaries, churches, libraries, and any other charitable or scientific associations." It was to be superintended by a Board, who were to be elected by a majority of the members, and to receive for their services "the same wages as are paid to farm hands or other common labourers."

To become members of this Family Order it was necessary that they should "bequeath, transfer, and convey into the company all their right, title, and interest to whatever property, whether personal or real estate, that they were then possessed of, or might hereafter become possessed of by legacy, will, or otherwise for the purposes above mentioned, and further that they would labour faithfully and honourably themselves, and cause their children who were under age to labour under the direction of the Board Of Directors, the remuneration for which shall be as fixed by the board both as to price and kind of pay he or she shall receive." It was "furthermore understood and agreed that a schedule or inventory of all property bequeathed or transferred to the company should be kept, together with the price of each article, that in case any party becomes dissatisfied or is called away, or wishes to draw out, he can have as near as may be the same kind of property, but in no case can he have real estate, only at the option of the Board, nor shall interest or a dividend be paid on such property."

"We further agree" (so run the articles of this curious incorporation) "that we will be controlled and guided in all our labour, in our food, clothing, and habitations for our families" (by the Board), "being frugal and economical in our manner of living and dress, and in no case seek to obtain that which is above another."

"We also covenant and agree that all credits for labour that stand to our names in excess of debits for food and clothing, shall become the property of the company."

In these four articles is contained the whole of the principles of this astonishing experiment. Men were to sell their all, and put the proceeds into a family fund. Out of this, as the wages of their labour, they were to receive food and other necessaries to the value of $1 a day, and if at the end of the year their drawings exceeded the amount of work put in the company "forgave" them the excess, while if their earnings exceeded their drawings, they "forgave" the company. Thus the accounts were annually squared by reciprocal accommodation.

If anyone seceded from the Order, he was entitled to receive back exactly what he had contributed. Mr. King, the father, started by putting in some $20,000, and his sons and others following suit, the fund rose at once to some $40,000. (I would say here that the entirely original method of "keeping the books" makes balance-striking a difficulty.) With this sum, and so much labour at their disposal, the Family Company should have been a brilliant success. But several circumstances conspired disastrously against it. The first was the unfortunate selection of location, for, in spite of the quantity of promising land available elsewhere, Mr. King pitched his camp in the wretched sand-drifts of the Piute section. The next was the ill-advised generosity of the founders in inviting all the country round to come and join them, with or without means, so long as they would be faithful members of the Order. The result, of course, was an influx of "deadheads"—the company indeed having actually to send out waggons to haul in families who were too poor to be able to move themselves. Of these new-comers only a proportion were worth anything to the young settlement, for many came in simply for the certainty of a roof over their heads and sufficient food. The result was most discouraging, and in short time the more valuable adherents were disheartened, and began to fall off, and now, five years from the establishment of the company, there are only some twenty families left, and these are all Kings or relatives of the Kings. The father himself is dead, but four sons divide the patriarchal government between them, and, having again reduced the scheme to a strictly family concern, they are thinking of a fresh start.

What may happen in the future is not altogether certain, but it will be strange if in this country where individual industry, starting without a dollar, is certain of a competence, co-operative labour commencing with funds in hand does not achieve success. At present the company possesses, besides its land in the valley, and a mill and a woollen factory, both commencing work, cattle and sheep worth about $10,000, and horses worth some $12,000 more. This is a tolerable capital for an association of hard-working men to begin with, but it is significant of errors in the past that after five years of almost superhuman toil they should find themselves no better off materially than when they started. Nor, socially, has the experiment hitherto been a success, for Kingston is, in my opinion, beyond comparison the lowest in the scale of all the Mormon settlements that I have seen. It is poverty-stricken in appearance; its houses outside and inside testify, in unmended windows and falling plaster, to an absence of that good order which characterizes so many other villages. The furniture of the rooms and the quality of the food on the tables are poorer than elsewhere, and altogether it is only too evident that this family communism has dragged all down alike to the level of the poorest and the laziest of its advocates, rather than raised all up to the level of the best off and the hardest working. The good men have sunk, the others have not risen, and if it were not so pathetic the Kingston phenomenon would be exasperating.

But there is a very sincere pathos about this terrible sacrifice of self for the common good. I do not mean theoretically, but practically. The men of "the company" are the most saddening community I have ever visited. They seem, with their gentle manners, wonderful simplicity of speech, and almost womanly solicitude for the welfare of their guests, to have lost the strong, hearty spirit which characterizes these Western conquerors of the deserts. Yet even the hard-working Mormons speak of them as veritable heroes in work. It is a common thing to hear men say that "the Kingston men are simply killing themselves with toil;" and when Western men talk of work as being too hard, you may rely upon it it is something very exceptional. Almost against hope these peasants have struggled with difficulties that even they themselves confess seem insuperable. They have given Nature all the odds they could, and then gone on fighting her. The result has been what is seen to-day—a crushed community of men and enfeebled women, living worse than any other settlement on the whole Mormon line. Their own stout hearts refuse to believe that they are a failure; but failure is written in large capital letters on the whole hamlet, and in italics upon every face within it. The wind-swept sand-drifts in which the settlement stands, the wretchedness of the tenements and their surroundings, the haphazard composition of their food, their black beans and their buffalo berries, the whistling of the wind as it drives the sand through the boards of the houses, the howling of the coyotes round the stock-yard—everything from first to last was in accord to emphasize the desperate desolation. But those who have known them for all the five years that the experiment has been under trial declare that their present condition, lamentable as it is, is an improvement upon their past. When they ate at a common table, the living, it is said, was even more frugal than it is now, and there was hardly a piece of crockery among them all, the "family" eating and drinking out of tin vessels. The women, either from mismanagement among themselves, or want of order among the men, were unable to bear the burden of ceaseless cooking, and the common table was thereupon abandoned by a unanimous vote.

Yet they are courtesy and hospitality itself, and their sufferings have only clinched their piety. They have not lost one iota of their faith in their principles, though staggering under the conviction of failure. Their children have regular schooling, the women are scrupulously neat in their dress, while profanity and intemperance are unknown.

CHAPTER XVIII.

FROM KINGSTON TO ORDERVILLE.

On the way to Panguitch—Section-houses not Mormon homes—Through wild country—Panguitch and its fish—Forbidden pleasures—At the source of the Rio Virgin—The surpassing beauty of Long Valley—The Orderville Brethren—A success in Family Communism.

NEXT day we started over the hills for Panguitch, some forty miles off. And here, by the roadside, was pointed out to me one of those "section-houses" which a traveller in Utah once mistook for Mormon "homes," and described "cabins, ten feet by six, built of planks, one window with no glass in it, one doorway with no door in it." This is an accurate description enough of a section-house, but it is a mistake to suppose that any one ever lives in it, as section-houses are only put up to comply with the Homestead Act, which stipulates for a building with one doorway and one window being erected upon each lot within a certain period of its allotment. But they do duty all the same in a certain class of literature as typical of the squalid depravity of the Mormons, for, being inhabited by Mormons, it follows, of course, that several wives, to say nothing of numerous children, have all to sleep together "on the floor of the single room the house contains!" Isn't this a dreadful picture! And are not these large polygamous families who live in section-houses a disgrace to America? But, unfortunately for this telling picture, the only "inhabitants" of these section-houses are Gentile tramps.

A rough hill-road, strewn with uncompromising rocks, jolted us for some miles, and then we crossed a stream-bed with some fine old pines standing in it, and beds of blue lupins brightening the margin, and so came down to the river level, and along a lane running between hedges of wild-rose and redberry (the "opie" of the Indians) tangled with clematis and honeysuckle, and haunted by many birds and brilliant butterflies. The river bubbled along among thickets of golden currant and red willow, and mallards with russet heads floated in the quiet backwaters, by the side of their dames all dressed in dainty grey. It was altogether a charming passage in a day of such general dreariness, reminding one of a pleasant quotation from some pretty poem in the middle of a dull chapter by some prosy writer.

But the dulness recommences, and then we find ourselves at a wayside farm, where a couple of fawns with bells round their necks are keeping the calves company, and some boys are fishing on a little log bridge. These fish must have been all born idiots, or been stricken with unanimous lunacy in early youth, for the manner of their capture was this. The angler lay on his stomach on the "bridge" (it was a three foot and a half stream), with one eye down between two of the logs. When he saw any fish he thrust his "rod"—it was more like a penholder—through the space, and held it in front of the fishes' noses. At the end of the rod were some six inches of string, with a hook tied on with a large knot, and baited with a dab of dough. When the fish had got thoroughly interested in the dough, the angler would jerk up his rod, and by some unaccountable oversight on the part of the fishes it was found that about once in fifty jerks a fish came up out of the water! They seemed tome to be young trout; but, whatever the species, they must have been the most imbecile of finned things. I suggested catching them with the finger and thumb, but the boys giggled at me, as "the fish wouldn't let ye." But I am of a different opinion, for it seemed to me that fish that would let you catch them with such apparatus, would let you catch them without any at all.

From here to Panguitch the road lies through stony country of the prevalent exasperating type until we reach the precincts of the settlement, heralded long before we reach it by miles of fencing that enclose the grazing-land stretching down to the river. A detestable road, broken up and swamped by irrigation channels, leads into the settlement, and the poor impression thus received is not removed as we pass through the treeless "streets" and among the unfenced lots. But it is an interesting spot none the less, for apart from its future, it is a good starting-point for many places of interest. But I should like to have visited Red Lake and Panguitch Lake. "Panguitch," by the way, means "fish" in the red man's language, and it is no wonder, therefore, that at breakfast we enjoyed one of the most splendid dishes of mountain-lake trout that was ever set before man. It is a great fish certainly—and I prefer it broiled. To put any sauce to it is sheer infamy.

The beaver, by the way, is still to be trapped here, and the grizzly bear is not a stranger to Panguitch.

Looking out of the window in the evening, I saw a cart standing by the roadside, and a number of men round it. Their demeanour aroused my curiosity, for an extreme dejection had evidently marked them for its own. Some sate in the road as if waiting in despair for Doomsday; others prowled round the cart and leant in a melancholy manner against it. The cart, it appeared, had come from St. George, the vine-growing district in the south of the territory, and contained a cask of wine. But as there was no licence in Panguitch for the sale of liquors, it could not be broached! I never saw men look so wretchedly thirsty in my life, and if glaring at the cask and thumping it could have emptied it, there would not have been a drop left. It was a delightful improvement upon the tortures of Tantalus, but the victims accepted the joke as being against them, and though they watched the cart going away gloomily enough, there was no ill-temper.

From Panguitch to Orderville, fifty miles, the scenery opens with the dreary hills that had become so miserably familiar, alternating with level pasture-lands, among which the serpentine Sevier winds a curiously fantastic course. But gradually there grows upon the mind a sense of coming change. Verdure creeps over the plains, and vegetation steals on to the hill-sides, and then suddenly as if for a surprise, the complete beauty of Long Valley bursts upon the traveller. I cannot in a few words say more of it than that this valley—through which the Rio Virgin flows, and in which the Family Communists of Orderville have pitched their tents—rivals in its beauty the scenery of Cashmere.

Springing from a hill-side, beautiful with flowering shrubs and instinct with bird life, the Virgin River trickles through a deep meadow bright with blue iris plants and walled in on either side by hills that are clothed with exquisite vegetation, and then, collecting its young waters into a little channel, breaks away prattling into the valley. Corn-fields and orchards, and meadows filled with grazing kine, succeed each other in pleasant series, and on the right hand and on the left the mountains lean proudly back with their loads of magnificent pine. And other springs come tumbling down to join the pretty river, which flows on, gradually widening as it goes, past whirring saw-mills and dairies half buried among fruit-trees, through park-like glades studded with pines of splendid girth, and pretty brakes of berry-bearing trees all flushed with blossoms. And the valley opens away on either side into grassy glens from which the tinkle of cattle-bells falls pleasantly on the ear, or into bold canyons that are draped close with sombre pines, and end in the most magnificent cathedral cliffs of ruddy sandstone.

What lovely bits of landscape! What noble studies of rock architecture! It is a very panorama of charms, and, travelled widely as I have, I must confess to an absolute novelty of delight in this exquisite valley of

THE ORDERVILLE BRETHREN.

Among the projects which occupied Joseph Smith's active brain was one that should make the whole of the Mormon community a single family, with a purse in common, and the head of the Church its head. In theory they are so already. But Joseph Smith hoped to see them so in actual practice also, and for this purpose—the establishment of a universal family communism—he instituted "The Order of Enoch," or "The United Order."

Why Enoch? The Mormons themselves appear to have no definite explanation beyond the fact that Enoch was holy beyond all his generation. But for myself, I see in it only another instance of that curious sympathy with ancient tradition which Joseph Smith, and after him Brigham Young, so consistently showed. They were both of them as ignorant as men could be in the knowledge that comes from books, and yet each of them must have had some acquaintance with the mystic institutions of antiquity, or their frequent coincidence with primitive ideas and schemes appears to me inexplicable. No man can in these days think and act like an antediluvian by accident. Josephus is, I find, a favourite author among the Mormons, and Josephus may account for a little. Moreover, many of the Mormons, notably both Presidents, are or were Freemasons, and this may account for some more. But for the balance I can find no explanation. Now I remember reading somewhere—perhaps in Sir Thomas Browne—that "the patriarchal Order of Enoch" is an institution of prodigious antiquity; that Enoch in the Hebrew means "the teacher;" that he was accepted in prehistoric days as the founder of a self-supporting, pious socialism, which was destined (should destruction overtake the world) to rescue one family at any rate from the general ruin, and perpetuate the accumulated knowledge of the past. And it is exactly upon these conditions that we find Joseph Smith, fifty years ago, promulgating in a series of formulated rules, the scheme of a patriarchal "Order of Enoch."

All Mormons are "elect." But even among the elect there is an aristocracy of piety. Thus in Islam we find the Hajji faithful above the faithful. In Hindooism the brotherhood of the Coolinsis accepted by the gods above all the other "twice-born." Is it not, indeed, the same in every religion—that there are the chosen within the chosen—"though they were mighty men, yet they were not of the three"—a tenth legion among the soldiers of Heaven—the archangels in the select ministry of the Supreme? In Mormonism, therefore, if a man chooses, he may consecrate himself to his faith more signally than his fellows, by endowing the Church with all his goods, and accepting from the Church afterwards the "stewardship" of a portion of his own property! It is no mere lip-consecration, no Ritualists' "Order of Jesus," no question of a phylactery. It means the absolute transfer of all property and temporal interests, and of all rights of all kinds therein, to the Church by a formal, legal process, and a duly attested deed. Here is one:—

"Be it known by these presents, that I, Jesse W. Fox, of Great Salt Lake City, in the county of Great Salt Lake, and territory of Utah, for and in consideration of the sum of one hundred ($100) dollars and the good-will which I have to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, give and convey unto Brigham Young, trustee in trust for the said Church, his successor in office and assigns, all my claims to and ownership of the following-described property, to wit:

One house and lot . . . . . . . . . . . . $1000 One city lot . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .100 East half of lot 1, block 12 . . . . . . . . 50 Lot 1, block 14 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .75 Two cows, $50; two calves, $15 . . . . . . . 65 One mare, $100; one colt, $50 . . . . . . . 150 One watch, $20; one clock, $12 . . . . . . . 32 Clothing, $300; beds and bedding, $125. . . 425 One stove, $20; household furniture, $210. .230 — Total . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $2127

together with all the rights, privileges, and appurtenances thereunto belonging or appertaining. I also covenant and agree that I am the lawful claimant and owner of said property, and will warrant and for ever defend the same unto the said trustee in trust, his successor in office and assigns, against the claims of my heirs, assigns, or any person whomsoever."

Then follows the attestation of the witness; and the formal certificate of the Judge of the Probate Court that "the signer of the above transfer, personally known to me, appeared the second day of April, 1857, and acknowledged that he, of his own choice, executed the foregoing transfer."

Such transfers of property are not, I know, infrequent in other religions, notably the Roman Catholic, but the object of the Mormon's piety distinguishes his act from that of others. Had Brigham Young persevered in his predecessor's project, it is almost certain that he would have established a gigantic "company" that would have controlled all the temporal interests of the territory, and eventually comprised the whole Mormon population. It is just possible that he himself foresaw that such success would be ruin; that the foundations of the Order would sink under such a prodigious superstructure, for he diverted his attention from the main to subsidiary schemes. Instead of one central organization sending out colonies on all sides of it, he advised the establishment of branch communities, which might eventually be gathered together under a single headquarters' control. The two projects were the same as to results; they differed only as to the means; and the second was the more judicious.

A few individuals came forward in their enthusiasm to give all they possessed to a common cause, but the Order flagged, though, nominally, many joined it. Thus, travelling through the settlements, I have seen in a considerable number of homes the Rules of the Order framed upon the walls. At any time these would be curious; to-day, when the morality of the principles of Mormonism is challenged, they are of special interest:—

"RULES THAT SHOULD BE OBSERVED BY MEMBERS OF THE UNITED ORDER.

"We will not take the name of the Deity in vain, nor speak lightly of His character or of sacred things.

"We will pray with our families morning and evening, and also attend to secret prayer.

"We will observe and keep the Word of Wisdom according to the spirit and the meaning thereof.

"We will treat our families with due kindness and affection, and set before them an example worthy of imitation. In our families and intercourse with all persons, we will refrain from being contentious or quarrelsome, and we will cease to speak evil of each other, and will cultivate a spirit of charity towards all. We consider it our duty to keep from acting selfishly or from covetous motives, and will seek the interest of each other and the salvation of all mankind.

"We will observe the Sabbath day to keep it holy, in accordance with the Revelations.

"That which is committed to our care we will not appropriate to our own use.

"That which we borrow we will return according to promise, and that which we find we will not appropriate to our own use, but seek to return it to its proper owner.

"We will, as soon as possible, cancel all individual indebtedness contracted prior to our uniting with the order, and, when once fully identified with said order, will contract no debts contrary to the wishes of the Board of Directors.

"We will patronize our brethren who are in the order.

"In our apparel and deportment we will not pattern after nor encourage foolish and extravagant fashions, and cease to import or buy from abroad any article which can be reasonably dispensed with, or which can be produced by combination of home labour. We will foster and encourage the producing and manufacturing of all articles needful for our consumption as fast as our circumstances will permit.

"We will be simple in our dress and manner of living, using proper economy and prudence in the management of all intrusted to our care.

"We will combine our labour for mutual benefit, sustain with our faith, prayers, and works those whom we have elected to take the management of the different departments of the order, and be subject to them in their official capacity, refraining from a spirit of fault-finding.

"We will honestly and diligently labour and devote ourselves and all we have to the order and to the building up Of the Kingdom of God."

Under these general regulations a great number, as I have said, enrolled themselves, and they may be considered therefore to constitute, as it were, a Knight Templar commandery within a Fellowcraft lodge. All are "brethren;" these are illustrious brethren. All are pashas; these are "of many tails." All are mandarins of heaven; these wear the supreme button.

But the temporal object of the Order was not served by such transfers of moral obligations; by the hypothecation of personal piety; by the investment of spiritual principles in a common fund. You cannot get much working capital out of mortgages on a man's soul. Calchas complained bitterly when the Athenian public paid their vows to the goddess in squashes. The collector, he said, would not take them in payment of the water-rates. So it has fared with the Order of Enoch. It is wealthy in good intentions, and if promises were dollars could draw large checks.

Here and there, however, local fervour took practical shape. The Kings of Kingston planted their family flag on the wind-swept Circleville plain. At Sunset another communistic colony was established, and in Long Valley, in the canyons of the Rio Virgin, was inaugurated the "United Order of Orderville."

Situated in a beautiful valley that needs nothing more added to it to make its inhabitants entirely self-supporting; directed and controlled with as much business shrewdness as fervent piety; supported by its members with a sensible regard for mutual interests—this Orderville experiment bids fair to be a signal success. In their Articles Of Association the members call themselves a Corporation which is "to continue in existence for a period of twenty-five years," and of which the objects are every sort of "rightful" enterprise and industry that may render the Order independent of outside produce and manufactures, "consistent with the Constitution of the United States and the laws of this Territory." Its capital is fixed at $100,000, in 10,000 shares of $10 each, and the entire control of its affairs is vested in a board of nine directors, who are elected by a ballot of the whole community. Article 13 "the individual or private property of the states that stockholders shall not be liable for the debts or obligations of the company." Article 15 is as follows: "The directors shall have the right and power to declare dividends on said stock whenever, in their judgment, there are funds for that purpose due and payable."

Now, in these two last articles lie the saving principles of the Orderville scheme, Hitherto, from the beginning of the world, experiments in communism have always split upon this rock, namely, that individuality was completely crushed out. No man was permitted to possess "private" property—he was l'enfant de la République, body and soul—and no man, therefore, had sufficient personal identity to make it possible for individual profits to accrue to him. And so the best of the young men—let the experiment be at any date in history you like—became dissatisfied with the level at which they were kept, and they seceded. They insisted on having names of their own, and refused to be merely, like the members of a jail republic, known by numbers. Individuality and identity are the original data of human consciousness. They are the first solid facts which a baby masters and communicates; they are the last that old age surrenders to infirmity and death. But in Orderville, it will be seen, the notion of "private" property exists. It is admitted that there is such a thing as "individual" ownership. Moreover, it is within the power of the board to pay every man a dividend. This being the case, this particular experiment in communism has the possibility of great success, for its members are not utterly deprived of all individuality. They have some shreds of it left to them.

To become a member of the Order there is no qualification of property necessary. The aged and infirm are accepted in charity. Indeed, at one time they threatened to swamp the family altogether, for the brethren seemed to have set out with a dead-weight upon them heavier than they could bear. But this has righted itself. The working members have got the ship round again, and in one way or another a place and a use has been found for every one. Speaking generally, however, membership meant the holding of stock in the corporation. If a man wished to join the Order, he gave in to the Bishop a statement of his effects. It was left to his conscience that this statement should be complete and exhaustive; that there should be no private reservations. These effects—whatever they might be, from a farm in another part of the Territory to the clothes in his trunk—were appraised by the regular staff, and the equivalent amount in stock, at $10 a share, was issued to them. From that time his ownership in his property ceased. His books would perhaps go into the school-house library, his extra blankets next door, his horse into a neighbour's team. According to his capacities, also, he himself fell at once into his place among the workers, going to the woollen factory or the carpenter's shop, the blacksmith's forge or the dairy, the saw-mills or the garden, the grist-mill or the farm, according as his particular abilities gave promise of his being most useful. His work here would result, as far as he was personally concerned, in no profits. But he was assured of a comfortable house, abundant food, good clothes. The main responsibilities of life were therefore taken off his shoulders. The wolf could never come to his door. He and his were secured against hunger and cold. But beyond this? There was only the approbation of his companions, the reward of his conscience. With the proceeds of his labour, or by the actual work of his own hands, he saw new buildings going up, new acres coming under cultivation. But none of them belonged to him. He never became a proprietor, an owner, a master. While therefore he was spared the worst responsibilities of life, he was deprived of its noblest ambitions. He lived without apprehensions, but without hopes too. If his wife was ill or his children sickly, there were plenty of kind neighbours to advise and nurse and look after them. No anxieties on such matters need trouble him. But if he had any particular taste—music, botany, anything—he was unable to gratify it, unless these same kindly neighbours agreed to spend from the common fund in order to buy him a violin or a flower-press—and they could hardly be expected to do so. Quite apart from the fact that a man learning to play a new instrument is an enemy of his kind, you could not expect a community of graziers, farmers, and artisans to be unanimously enthusiastic about the musical whims of one of their number, still less for his "crank" in collecting "weeds"—as everything that is not eatable (or is not a rose) is called in most places of the West. Tastes, therefore, could not be cultivated for the want of means, and any special faculties which members might individually possess were of necessity kept in abeyance. Amid scenery that might distract an artist, and fossil and insect treasures enough to send men of science crazy, the community can do nothing in the direction of Art or of Natural History, unless they all do it together. For the Order cannot spare a man who may be a good ploughman, to go and sit about in the canyons painting pictures of pine-trees and waterfalls. Nor can it spare the money that may be needed for shingles in buying microscopes for a "bug-hunter." The common prosperity, therefore, can only be gained at a sacrifice of all individual tastes. This alone is a very serious obstacle to success of the highest kind. But in combination with this is of course the more general and formidable fact that even in the staple industries of the community individual excellence brings with it no individual benefits. A moral trades-unionism planes all down to a level. It does not, of course, prevent the enthusiast working his very hardest and best in the interests of his neighbours. But such enthusiasm is hardly human. Men will insist, to the end of all time, on enjoying the reward of their own labours, the triumphs of their own brains. Some may go so far as nominally to divide their honours with all their friends. But where shall we look for the man who will go on all his life toiling successfully for the good of idler folks, and checking his own free stride to keep pace with their feebler steps? And this is the rock on which all such communities inevitably strike.

Security from the ordinary apprehensions of life; a general protection against misfortune and "bad seasons;" the certainty of having all the necessaries of existence, are sufficient temptations for unambitious men. But the stronger class of mind, though attracted to it by piety, and retained for a while by a sincere desire to promote the common good, must from their very nature revolt against a permanent alienation of their own earnings, and a permanent subordination of their own merits. At Orderville, therefore, we find the young men already complaining of a system which does not let them see the fruits of their work. Their fathers' enthusiasm brought them there as children. Seven years later they are grown up into independent-minded young men. They have not had experience of family anxieties yet. All they know is, that beyond Orderville there are larger spheres of work, and more brilliant opportunities for both hand and head.

Fortunately, however, for Orderville, the articles of incorporation give the directors the very powers that are necessary, and if these are exercised the ship may miss the rock that has wrecked all its predecessors. If they can declare dividends, open private accounts, and realize the idea of personal property, the difference in possibilities between the outer world and Orderville will be very greatly reduced, while the advantage of certainties in Orderville will be even further increased. Young men would then think twice about going away, and any one if he chose could indulge his wife with a piano or himself with a box of water-colours. Herein then lies the hopefulness of the experiment; and fortunately Mr. Howard Spencer, the President of the community, has all the generosity to recognize the necessity for concession to younger ambition, and all the courage to institute and carry out a modification of communism which shall introduce more individuality. I anticipate, therefore, that this very remarkable and interesting colony will survive the "twenty-five years" period for which it was established, and will encourage the foundation of many other similar "Family Orders."

Seven years have passed since Mr. Spencer pitched his camp in the beautiful wilderness of the Rio Virgin canyons. He found the hills of fine building-stone, their sides thickly grown with splendid pine timber, and down the valley between them flowing a bright and ample stream. The vegetation by its variety and luxuriance gave promise of a fertile soil; some of the canyons formed excellent natural meadows, while just over the ridge, a mile or two from the settlement, lay a bed of coal. Finally, the climate was delightfully temperate! Every condition of success, therefore, was found together, and prosperity has of course responded to the voice of industry. Acre by acre the wild gardens have disappeared, and in their place stand broad fields of corn; the tangled brakes of wild-berry plants have yielded their place to orchards of finer fruits; cattle and sheep now graze in numbers where the antelope used to feed; and from slope to slope you can hear among the pines, above the idle crooning of answering doves and the tinkling responses of wandering kine, the glad antiphony of the whirring saw-mill and the busy loom.

The settlement itself is grievously disappointing in appearance. For as you approach it, past the charming little hamlet of Glendale, past such a sunny wealth of orchard and meadow and corn-land, past such beautiful glimpses of landscape, you cannot help expecting a scene of rural prettiness in sympathy with such surroundings. But Orderville at first sight looks like a factory. The wooden shed-like buildings built in continuous rows, the adjacent mills, the bare, ugly patch of hillside behind it, give the actual settlement an uninviting aspect. But once within the settlement, the scene changes wonderfully for the better. The houses are found, the most of them, built facing inwards upon an open square, with a broad side-walk, edged with tamarisk and mulberry, box-elder and maple-trees, in front of them. Outside the dwelling-house square are scattered about the school-house, meeting-house, blacksmith and carpenters' shops, tannery, woollen-mill, and so forth, while a broad roadway separates the whole from the orchards, gardens, and farm-lands generally. Specially noteworthy here are the mulberry orchard—laid out for the support of the silk-worms, which the community are now rearing with much success—and the forcing-ground and experimental garden, in which wild flowers as well as "tame" are being cultivated. Among the buildings the more interesting to me were the school-houses, well fitted up, and very fairly provided with educational apparatus; and the rudimentary museum, where the commencement of a collection of the natural curiosities of the neighbourhood is displayed. What this may some day grow into, when science has had the chance of exploring the surrounding hills and canyons, it is difficult to say; for Nature has favoured Orderville profusely with fossil strata and mineral eccentricities, a rich variety of bird and insect life, and a prodigious botanical luxuriance. Almost for the first time in my travels, too, I found here a very intelligent interest taken in the natural history of the locality; but the absence of books and of necessary apparatus, as yet of course prevents the brethren from carrying on their studies and experiments to any standard of scientific value.

Though staying in Orderville so short a time, I was fortunate enough to see the whole community together. For on the evening of my arrival there was a meeting at which there was a very full gathering of the adults—and the babies in arms. The scene was as curious as anything I have ever witnessed in any part of the world. The audience was almost equally composed of men and women, the latter wearing, most of them, their cloth sun-bonnets, and bringing with them the babies they were nursing.

Brigham Young used to encourage mothers to bring them, and said that he liked to hear them squalling in the Tabernacle. Whether he really liked it or not, the mothers did as he said, and the babies too, and the perpetual bleating of babies from every corner of the building makes it seem to this day as if religious service was being held in a sheepfold. Throughout the proceedings at Orderville babies were being constantly handed across from mother to neighbour and back from neighbour to mother. Others were being tossed up and down with that jerky, perpendicular motion which seems so soothing to the very young, but which reminded me of the popping up and down of the hammers when the "lid" of a piano is lifted up during a performance. But the baby is an irrepressible person, and at Orderville has it very much its own way. The Apostle's voice in prayer was accepted as a challenge to try their lungs, and the music (very good, by the way) as a mere obligato to their own vocalization. The patient gravity of the mothers throughout the whole performance, and the apparent indifference of the men, struck me as very curious—for I come from a country where one baby will plunge a whole church congregation into profanity, and where it is generally supposed that two crying together would empty heaven. Of the men of Orderville I can say sincerely that a healthier, more stalwart community I have never seen, while among the women, I saw many refined faces, and remarked that robust health seemed the rule. Next morning the children were paraded, and such a brigade of infantry as it was! Their legs (I think, though, they are known as "limbs" in America) were positively columnar, and their chubby little owners were as difficult to keep quietly in line as so much quicksilver. Orderville boasts that it is self-supporting and independent of outside help, and certainly in the matter of babies there seems no necessity for supplementing home manufactures by foreign imports. The average of births is as yet five in each family during the six years of the existence of the Order! Two were born the day I arrived.

Unfortunately one of the most characteristic features of this family community was in abeyance during my visit—the common dining-table. For a rain-flood swept through the gorge above the settlement last winter and destroyed "the bakery." Since then the families have dined apart or clubbed together in small parties, but the wish of the majority is to see the old system revived, for though they live well now, they used, they say, to live even better when "the big table" was laid for its 200 guests at once.

Self-supporting and well-directed, therefore, the Orderville "communists" bid fair to prove to the world that pious enthusiasm, if largely tempered with business judgment, can make a success of an experiment which has hitherto baffled all attempts based upon either one or the other alone.

CHAPTER XIX.

MORMON VIRTUES.

Red ants and anti-Mormons—Ignorance of the Mormons among Gentiles in Salt Lake City—Mormon reverence for the Bible—Their struggle against drinking-saloons in the city—Conspicuous piety in the settlements—Their charity—Their sobriety (to my great inconvenience)—The literature of Mormonism utterly unreliable—Neglect of the press by the Saints—Explanation of the wide-spread misrepresentation of Mormonism.

FROM Orderville (after a short tour in the south-west of the Territory) I returned to Salt Lake City, and during my second sojourn there, over a month, I saw nothing and learned nothing either from Mormon or Gentile to induce me to erase a single word I had written during my previous visit. Indeed, a better acquaintance only strengthened my first favourable opinions of "the Saints of the Rocky Mountains."

I was walking one day up the City Creek, when I became aware of an aged man seated on a stone by the roadside. His trousers were turned up to his knees, and he was nursing one of his legs as if he felt a great pity for it. As I approached I perceived that he was in trouble—(I perceived this by his oaths)—and getting still nearer I ventured to inquire what annoyed him. "Aged person," said I, "what aileth thee?"—or words to that effect. But there was no response, at least not worth mentioning. He only bent further over his leg, and I noticed that his coat had split down the back seam. His cursing accounted for that. It was sufficient to make any coat split. And then his hat fell off his head into the dust, in judgment upon him. At this he swore again, horribly. By this time I had guessed that he had been bitten by red ants (and they are the shrewdest reptiles at biting that I know of), so I said, "Bitten by red ants, eh?" At this he exploded with wrath, and looked up. And such a face! He had a countenance on him like the ragged edge of despair. His appearance was a calamity. "Red ants," said he; "red Indians, red devils, red hell!" and then, relapsing into the vernacular, he became unintelligibly profane, but ended up with "this damned Mormon city."

Now here was a man, fairly advanced in years, fairly clothed, fairly uneducated. As I had never seen him before, he may have been, for all I know, "the average American" I so often see referred to. Anyhow, there he was, cursing the Mormons because he had been bitten by red ants! Of his own stupidity he had gone and stood upon an ants' nest, thrust his hippopotamus foot into their domicile, overwhelming the nurseries and the parlours in a common catastrophe, crushing with the same heel the grandsire ant and the sucking babe at its mother's breast, mashing up the infirm and the feeble with the eggs in the cells and the household provisions laid up in the larder—ruining in fact an industrious community simply by his own weight in butcher's meat. Some of the survivors promptly attacked the intruding boot, and, running up what the old man was pleased to call "his blasted pants," had bitten the legs which they found concealed within them. And for this, "the average American" cursed the Mormons and their city!

The incident interested me, for, apart from my sympathy with the ants, I couldn't help thinking what a powerful adversary to Mormonism this trifling mishap might have created. That man went back to his hotel (for he was evidently a "visitor") a confirmed anti-Mormon. His darkest suspicions about polygamy were confirmed. His detestation of the bestial licentiousness of the Saints was increased a hundred-fold. He saw at a glance that all he had ever heard about "the Danites" was quite true, and much more too that he had never heard but could now easily invent for himself. There was no need for any one to tell him, after the way he had been treated within a mile of the Tabernacle, of the infamous debaucheries of Brigham Young with his "Cyprian maids" and his "cloistered wives." Wasn't it as plain as the sun at noonday that the Mormons were in league with the red Indians, and went halves in the proceeds of each other's massacres?

The ant-bitten man was a very typical "Mormon-eater," for such is the local name of those who revile Mormonism root and branch because they find intelligent men opposed to polygamy. They are under the impression, seeing and talking to nobody but each other, that the United States in a mass, that the whole world, entertain an unreasoning, fanatical abhorrence of the inhabitants of the Territory, and share with them their mean parochial jealousy of the Mormon tradesmen and Mormon farmers who are more thriving than they are themselves.

Here in Salt Lake City there is the most extraordinary ignorance of Mormonism that can be imagined. I have actually been assured by "Gentiles" that the Saints do not believe in the God of the Bible—that adultery among them is winked at by husbands under a tacit understanding of reciprocity—that the Mormons as a class are profane, and drunken, and so forth. Now, if they knew anything whatever of the Mormons, such statements would be impossible (unless of course made in wilful malice), for my personal acquaintance with "the Saints" has shown me that in all classes alike the reverence for the God of the Bible is formulated not only in their morning and evening prayers, but in their grace before every meal; that so far from there being any exceptional familiarity between families, the very reverse is conspicuous, for so strict is the Mormon etiquette of social courtesies, that households which in England would be on the most intimate terms, maintain here a distant formality which impresses the stranger as being cold; that instead of the Mormons being as a class profane, they are as a class singularly sober in their language, and indeed in this respect resemble the Quakers. Now, my opinions are founded upon facts of personal knowledge and experience.

Of course it will be said of me that as I was a "guest" of Mormons I was "bound" to speak well of them; that as I was so much among them I was hoodwinked and "shown the best side of everything," &c., &c. Against this argument, always the resource of the gobemouche, common sense is useless. "Against stupidity the gods themselves are powerless." But this I can say—that I will defy any really impure household, monogamous or not, to hoodwink me in the same way—to keep up from morning to night the same unchanging profession of piety, to make believe from week to week with such consummate hypocrisy that they are god-fearing and pure in their lives, and to wear a mask of sobriety with such uniform success. And I am not speaking of one household only, but of a score to which I was admitted simply as being a stranger from whom they need not fear calumny. I do not believe that acting exists anywhere in such perfection that a whole community can assume, at a few hours' notice and for the benefit of a passing stranger, the characters of honest, kind-hearted, simple men and women, and set themselves patiently to a three months' comedy of pretended purity. Such impostors do not exist.

The Mormons drunken! Now what, for instance, can be the conclusion of any honest thinker from this fact—that though I mixed constantly with Mormons, all of them anxious to show me every hospitality and courtesy, I was never at any time asked to take a glass of strong drink? If I wanted a horse to ride or to drive I had a choice at once offered me. If I wanted some one to go with me to some point of interest, his time was mine. Yet it never occurred to them to show a courtesy by suggesting "a drink."

Then, seriously, how can any one have respect for the literature or the men who, without knowing anything of the lives of Mormons, stigmatize them as profane, adulterous, and drunken? As a community I know them, from personal advantages of observation such as no non-Mormon writer has ever previously possessed,^[[1]] to be at any rate exceptionally careful in maintaining the appearance of piety and sobriety; and I leave it to my readers to judge whether such solid hypocrisy as this, that tries to abolish all swearing and all strong drink both by precept from the pulpit and example in the household, is not, after all, nearly as admirable as the real thing itself.

This, at all events, is beyond doubt—that the Mormons have always struggled hard to prevent the sale of liquor in Salt Lake City, except under strict regulations and supervision. But the fight has gone against them. The courts uphold the right of publicans to sell when and what they choose; and the Mormons, who could at one time boast—and visitors without number have borne evidence to the fact—that a drunkard was never to be seen, an oath never to be heard, in the streets of their city, have now to confess that, thanks to the example of Gentiles, they have both drunkards and profane men among them. But the general attitude of the Church towards these delinquents, and the sorrow that their weakness causes in the family circle, are in themselves proofs of the sincerity in sobriety which distinguishes the Mormons. Nor is it any secret that if the Mormons had the power they would to-morrow close all the saloons and bars, except those under Church regulation, and then, they say, "we might hope to see the old days back when we never thought of locking our doors at night, and when our wives and girls, let them be out ever so late, needed no escort in the streets."

And having travelled throughout the Mormon settlements, I am at a loss how to convey to my readers with any brevity the effect which the tour has had upon me.

I have seen, and spoken to, and lived with, Mormon men and women of every class, and never in my life in any Christian country, not even in happy, rural England, have I come in contact with more consistent piety, sobriety, and neighbourly charity. I say this deliberately. Without a particle of odious sanctimony these folk are, in their words and actions, as Christian as I had ever thought to see men and women. A perpetual spirit of charity seems to possess them, and if the prayers of simple, devout humanity are ever of any avail, it must surely be this wonderful Mormon earnestness in appeals to Heaven. I have often watched Moslems in India praying, and thought then that I had seen the extremity of devotion, but now that I have seen these people on their knees in their kitchens at morning and at night, and heard their old men—men who remember the dark days of the Faith—pour out from their hearts their gratitude for past mercy, their pleas for future protection, I find that I have met with even a more striking form of prayer than I have ever met with before. Equally striking is the universal reverence and affection with which they, quite unconscious of the fact that I was "taking notes," spoke of the authorities of their Church. Fear there was none, but respect and love were everywhere. It would be a bold man who, in one of these Mormon hamlets, ventured to repeat the slanders current among Gentiles elsewhere. And it would indeed be a base man who visited these hard-living, trustful men and women, and then went away to calumniate them.

But it is a fact, and cannot be challenged, that the only people in all Utah who libel these Mormons are either those who are ignorant of them, those who have apostatized (frequently under compulsion) from the Church, or those, the official clique and their sycophants, who have been charged with looking forward to a share of the plunder of the Territorial treasury. On the other hand, I know many Gentiles who, though like myself they consider polygamy itself detestable, speak of this people as patterns to themselves in commercial honesty, religious earnestness, and social charity.

Travelling through the settlements, I found that every one voluntarily considered his poorer neighbours as a charge upon himself. When a man arrives there, a stranger and penniless, one helps to get together logs for his first hut, another to break up a plot of ground. A third lends him his waggon to draw some firewood from the canyon or hillside; a fourth gives up some of his time to show him how to bring the water on to his ground—and so on through all the first requirements of the forlorn new-comer. Behind them all meanwhile is the Church, in the person of the presiding Elder of the settlement, who makes him such advances as are considered necessary. It is a wonderful system, and as pathetic, to my mind, as any struggle for existence that I have ever witnessed. But every man who comes among them is another unit of strength, and let him be only a straight-spoken, fair-dealing fellow, with his heart in his work, and he finds every one's hand ready to assist him.

And the first commencement is terribly small. A one-roomed log hut is planted in a desert of sage-brush "with roots that hold as firm as original sin," and rocks that are as hard to get rid of as bad habits. Borrowing a plough here, and a shovel there, the new-comer bungles through an acre or two of furrows, and digs out a trench. Begging of one neighbour some fruit-tree cuttings, he sticks the discouraging twigs into the ground, and by working out some extra time for another gets some lucerne seed. Then he gets a hen, and then a setting of eggs, by-and-by a heifer, and a little later, by putting in work or by an advance from the Church, or with kindly help from a neighbour, he adds a horse to his stock. Time passes, say a year; his orchard (that is to be) has several dozen leaves on it, and the ground is all green with lucerne, the chickens are thriving, and he adds an acre or two more to the first patch, and his neighbours, seeing him in earnest, are still ready with their advice and aid. Adobe bricks are gradually piled up in a corner of the lot, and very soon an extra room or two is built on to the log hut, and saplings of cotton-wood, or poplar, or locust are planted in a row before the dwelling: and so on year by year, conquering a little more of the sage-brush, bringing on the water a furlong further, adding an outhouse, planting another tree. At the end of ten years—years of unsparing, untiring labour, but years brightened with perpetual kindness from neighbours—this man, the penniless emigrant, invites the wayfarer into his house, has a comfortably furnished bedroom at his service, oats and fodder for his team, ample and wholesome food for all. The wife spreads the table with eggs and ham and chicken, vegetables, pickles, and preserves, milk and cream, pies and puddings—"Yes, sir, all of our own raising." The dismal twigs have grown up into pleasant shade-trees, and a flower-garden brightens the front of the house. In the barn are comfortable, well-fed stock, horses and cows. This is no fancy picture, but one from life, and typical of 20,000 others. Each homestead in turn has the same experience, and it is no wonder, therefore, when the settlement, properly laid out and organized, grows into municipal existence, that every one speaks kindly of, and acts kindly towards, his neighbour. A visitor, till he understands the reason, is surprised at the intimacy of households. But when he does understand it, ought not his surprise to give place to admiration?

Not less conspicuous is the uniform sincerity in religion. A school and meeting-house is to be found in every settlement, even though there may be only half-a-dozen families, and besides the regular attendance of the people at weekly services, the private prayers of each household are as punctual as their meals. In these prayers, after the ordinary generalities, the head of the house usually prays for all the authorities of the Church, from the President downwards, for the local authorities, for the Church as a body, and the missionaries abroad, for his household and its guest, for the United States, and for Congress, and for all the world that feels kindly towards Mormonism. But quite apart from the matter of their prayers, their manner is very striking, and the scene in a humble house, when a large family meets for prayer—and half the members, finding no article of furniture unoccupied for the orthodox position of devotion, drop into attitudes of natural reverence, kneeling in the middle of the floor—appeals very strongly to the eye of those accustomed to the stereotyped piety of a more advanced civilization.

One more conspicuous feature of Mormon life is sobriety. I have been the guest of some fifty different households, and only once I was offered even beer. That exception was in a Danish household, where the wife brewed her own "ol"—an opaque beverage of home-fermented wheat and home-grown hops—as a curiosity curious, as an "indulgence" doubtful, as a regular drink impossible. On no other occasion was anything but tea, coffee, milk, or water offered. And even tea and coffee, being discouraged by the Church, are but seldom drunk. As a heathen outsider I deplored my beer, and was grateful for coffee; but the rest of the household, in almost every instance, drank water. Tobacco is virtually unused. It is used, but so seldom that it does not affect my statement. The spittoon, therefore, though in every room, is behind the door, or in a corner under a piece of furniture. In case it should be needed, it is there—like the shot-gun upstairs—but its being called into requisition would be a family event.

No, let their enemies say what they will, the Mormon settlements are each of them to-day a refutation of the libel that the Mormons are not sincere in their antipathy to strong drink and tobacco. That individual Mormons drink and smoke proves nothing, except that they do it. For the great majority of the Mormons, they are strictly sober. I know it to my great inconvenience.

Is it possible then that the American people, so generous in their impulses, so large-hearted in action, have been misled as to the true character of the Mormon "problem"? At first sight this may seem impossible. A whole people, it will be said, cannot have been misled. But I think a general misapprehension is quite within the possibilities.

Whence have the public derived their opinions about Mormonism? From anti-Mormons only. I have ransacked the literature of the subject, and yet I really could not tell any one where to go for an impartial book about Mormonism later in date than Burton's "City of the Saints," published in 1862. Burton, it is well known, wrote as a man of wide travel and liberal education—catholic, therefore, on all matters religious, and generous in his views of ethical and social obliquities, sympathetic, consistent, and judicial. It is no wonder, then, that Mormons remember the distinguished traveller, in spite of his candour, with the utmost kindness. But put Burton on one side, and I think I can defy any one to name another book about the Mormons worthy of honest respect. From that truly awful book, "The History of the Saints," published by one Bennett (even an anti-Mormon has styled him "the greatest rascal that ever came to the West") in 1842, down to Stenhouse's in 1873, there is not, to my knowledge, a single Gentile work before the public that is not utterly unreliable from its distortion of facts. Yet it is from these books—for there are no others—that the American public has acquired nearly all its ideas about the people of Utah.

The Mormons themselves are most foolishly negligent of the power of the press, and of the immense value in forming public opinion of a free use of type. They affect to be indifferent to the clamour of the world, but when this clamour leads to legislative action against them, they turn round petulantly with the complaint that there is a universal conspiracy against them. It does not seem to occur to them that their misfortunes are partly due to their own neglect of the very weapons which their adversaries have used so diligently, so unscrupulously, and so successfully.

They do not seem to understand that a public contradiction given to a public calumny goes some way towards correcting the mischief done, or that by anticipating malicious versions of events they could as often as not get an accurate statement before the public, instead of an inaccurate one. But enterprise in advertisement has been altogether on the side of the anti-Mormons. The latter never lose an opportunity of throwing in a bad word, while the Mormons content themselves with "rounding their shoulders," as they are so fond of saying, and putting a denial of the libel into the local News. They say they are so accustomed to abuse that they are beginning not to care about it—which is the old, stupid self-justification of the apathetic. The fascination of a self-imposed martyrdom seems too great for them, and, like flies when they are being wrapped up into parcels by the spider for greater convenience of transportation to its larder, they sing chastened canticles about the inevitability of cobwebs and the deplorable rapacity of spiders.

"I can assure you," said one of them, "it would be of no use trying to undeceive the public. You cannot make a whistle out of a pig's tail, you know."

"Nonsense," I replied. "You can—for I have seen a whistle made out of a pig's tail. And it is in a shop in Chicago to this day!"

It will be understood, then, that the Mormons have made no adequate efforts either in books or the press to meet their antagonists. They prefer to allow cases against them to go by default, and content themselves with privately filing pleas in defence which would have easily acquitted them had they gone before the public. America, therefore, hearing only one side of the case, and so much of it, is certainly not to be blamed for drawing its conclusions from the only facts before it. It cannot be expected to know that three or four individuals, all them by their own confession "Mormon-eaters," have from the first been the purveyors of nearly all the distorted facts it receives. Seeing the same thing said in many different directions, the general public naturally conclude that a great number of persons are in agreement as to the facts.

But the exigencies of journalism which admit, for instance, of the same correspondent being a local contributor to two or three score newspapers of widely differing views in politics and religion, are unknown to them. And they are therefore unaware that the indignation so widely printed throughout America has its source in the personal animosity of three or four individuals only who are bitterly sectarian, and that these men are actually personally ignorant of the country they live in, have seldom talked to a Mormon, and have never visited Mormonism outside Salt Lake City. These men write of the "squalid poverty" of Mormons, of their obscene brutality, of their unceasing treason towards the United States, of their blasphemous repudiation of the Bible, without one particle of information on the subject, except such as they gather from the books and writings of men whom they ought to know are utterly unworthy of credit, or from the verbal calumnies of apostates. And what the evidence of apostates is worth history has long ago told us. I am now stating facts; and I, who have lived among the Mormons and with them, who have seen them in their homes, rich and poor; have joined in their worship, public and private; who have constantly conversed with them, men, women, and children; Who have visited their out-lying settlements, large and small—as no Gentile has ever done before me—can assure my readers that every day of my residence increased my regret at the misrepresentation these people have suffered.