Miss Dividends: A Novel

by Archibald Clavering Gunter

All round her are houses embowered in green foliage, and broad streets, also planted with trees, and streams of living water, fresh from the melting snows of the Wahsatch, coursing by their sidewalks where gutters would be in ordinary towns.

In these streets there is a curious, heterogeneous life, the like of which she has never seen before. Immediately below her, in front of the hotel, men of many climes lounge about the unpaved sidewalk, most of them seated, their feet against the trees that line its side, each man smoking a cigar, the aromas of which, as they float up to her, seem to be pleasant.

Most of these are mining speculators from California, the East, and Europe; as their voices rise to her, she catches tones similar to those she has heard in Delmonico's from travelling Englishmen. For the Emma mine is in its glory; and much British capital has floated into this Territory, to be invested in the silver leads of the great mountains that cut off her view to the east, and the low ranges that she can see to the south and west; a good deal of it never to return to London again; for, of all the speculators of many nations who have invested in American securities, stocks, bonds, mining properties and beer interests, none have so rashly and so lavishly squandered their money as the speculators of merry England. These have sometimes been allured to financial discomfort by Yankee shrewdness, but more often have been betrayed by the ignorance or carelessness or rascality of those whom they have sent from their native isle to represent them, who have judged America, Western mines and Yankee business methods by England, Cornish lodes and the financial conditions that prevail in Thread-Needle Street.

Two or three hacks and carriages, such as are seen in the East, stand in front of the hotel, while in the street before her move some big mule teams, laden with bars of lead and silver, from some smelter on the Jordan, and a little further on is a wagon of the prairies, covered with the mud and dust of long travel, driven by some Mormon who has come up from the far southern settlements of Manti, or Parowan, or the pretty oasis towns of Payson or Spanish Fork or some other garden spot by the side of the fresh waters of Utah Lake, to go through the rites of the Endowment House, and take unto himself another wife; paying well for the ceremonies in farm produce.

Looking over this scene, the girl murmurs, "How peaceful—how beautiful!" and next, "How wonderful," and a moment after, gazing at the great Mormon Tabernacle, she mutters, "How awful!" for in the two hours passed upon the train coming from Ogden to Salt Lake, Harry Lawrence has told her, as delicately as a young man can tell a maiden, of this peculiar city into which she has just come, and she knows quite well the peculiar creed of the Church of Latter-Day Saints.

She has learnt how this sect, founded upon the so-called revelation from the Almighty, made to Joseph Smith, and Hyrum, his brother, in about 1847, driven out from Illinois and afterwards from Missouri, had left civilization behind them, and passing over a thousand of miles of prairie and mountain, inhabited only by savage Indians and trappers and hunters, had come by ox-teams, on horseback, by hand carts and on foot, enduring for long months all the privations and dangers of the wilderness, to this far-off valley to build a Mormon empire. For that is surely what their leaders had hoped.

The civilization of the East seemed to them so far off a hundred years might not bring it to them, across those boundless rolling prairies and that five hundred miles of mountain country. To the West were more deserts, and beyond a land scarcely known at that time, and inhabited only by Indians, save where some Mexican mission stood surrounded by its little orchard and vineyard, in that land that is now called California.

In this hope of empire, the Mormon leaders had built up polygamy, which, having been begun for lust, they now preached, continued, and fostered to produce the power that numbers give. For this reason the order had been given, "Increase and multiply, that you may cover the land," and it was cried out from pulpit and tabernacle "that Utah's best crop was children;" and missionaries and Mormon propagandists were sent out over both Europe and America to make converts to the new religion. So, many Scandinavians, Welsh and English, were taken into the faith and came to live in the Utah valleys, and thought this religion of Joseph Smith a very good one—for they were chiefly the scum of Europe—and now had land to cultivate and plenty with which to fill their stomachs, while in their native lands they had often hungered.

For the Mormon hierarchy hoped, in the distant future, when the civilization from the Eastern States had reached them, to be increased by immigration and multiplication from thousands into millions; and peopling the whole land, from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, to be strong enough to dominate Mexico if she dared complain of their occupation of North California, and even to give battle to these United States of America.

And to the eyes of Brigham and his satellites came the dream of a Mormon empire, holding dominion over the Pacific, ruled over by the Priesthood of the faith of Joseph Smith and the Council of Seventies, and above them the President and Vice-President, descendants of Brigham Young and Heber Kimball and others high in rank and power in the theocracy of the so-called Latter-Day Saints.