Wilford Woodruff, Fourth President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints / History of His Life and Labors, as Recorded in His Daily Journals

by Wilford Woodruff

TABERNACLE DECORATIONS.

Promptly at 7:30 a. m., by a prearranged signal with the janitors, a News reporter was admitted to the Tabernacle to view the work of the committee on decoration. Silence brooded over the vast auditorium, and also a spirit of awe, which is the invariable accompaniment of solitude in the midst of vastness.

"The primeval desert is slumbering. Only on the eastern and western peaks are seen the signs of awakening day. In the Valley the shadows are beginning to lift and dissolve. What is it that the eye beholds? A vast expanse of sun-browned sage and yellow bunch grass. For a moment, we listen and catch the musical ripples of a stream hidden beneath an irregular line of willow and squaw bush, extending from the north of the canyon to the Lake. The sun now breaks over the eastern range. A breeze is stirring down the canyon. Ah, there is that same, never-to-be-forgotten perfume of the desert—so full of freshness, so suggestive of freedom!

"What! the bark of a dog? Surely it is. And now a half-mile distant, in the shadow of a gnarled and crooked grove of cottonwoods, the eye catches sight of a dozen campfires, which send curling wreaths into the morning sky. The sunlight is playing fantastic games with the strands of smoke as they weave themselves into finer fabrics, and finally disappear as gauze. Beneath this spreading halo, we get glimpses of an irregular village of wick-i-ups, smoke-begrimed and tattered, but otherwise quite in harmony with the scene; as if they were in fact so many grotesque plants that had sprung out of the native soil.

"Now, from out these rude habitations, through many a rent and flapping door, the children of the desert are pouring—a curious lot of black-headed, squatty-figured little women and children. Sublime picture of blissful indifference! You do not know that this is your last day of undisputed reign—if your sleepy existence can be called a reign. Before the sun shall have reached the zenith, he, the great white Chief, accompanied by that other great man, young and vigorous then; but since grown old by toil and works of righteousness and today renewed in youth forever—he the leader whose life among us we shall soon meet to commemorate."

But the vision fades. The present has come back. There is still the faint odor of sage-brush and desert flower in the room. The sun has lost none of his old-time splendor, but his rays pour down, not upon the primitive herbage of a desert, but through the dome of a building which might well be taken to epitomize the progress of a jubilee. The eastern half of the auditorium is sombre and unrelieved by a single touch of the artist; but the western half is all aglow in hangings of white and fills the soul with a glory as of a better world.

If the departed leader should be present in spirit at his own funeral, according to his own wish, these are some things he would see.

The most prominent object is his own portrait, life-size, as painted by the well known home artist, Mr. Will Clawson. It is a striking likeness of President Woodruff at the full vigor of his manhood. It is placed in front of the great organ against a background of the Stars and Stripes. Above the picture, in brilliant electric light, is the legend: