We rattle leisurely into Atchison on a Sunday evening. Lights gleam in the windows of milk-white churches, and they tell us, far better than anything else could, that we are back to civilization again.
An overland journey in winter is a better thing to have done than to do. In the spring, however, when the grass is green on the great prairies, I fancy one might make the journey a pleasant one, with his own outfit and a few choice friends.
4.17. VERY MUCH MARRIED.
Are the Mormon women happy?
I give it up. I don't know.
It is at Great Salt Lake City as it is at Boston. If I go out to tea at the Wilkinses in Boston, I'm pretty sure to find Mr. Wilkins all smiles and Sunshine, or Mrs. Wilkins all gentleness and politeness. I am entertained delightfully, and after tea little Miss Wilkins shows me her photograph album, and plays the march from "Faust" on the piano for me. I go away highly pleased with my visit; and yet the Wilkinses may fight like cats and dogs in private. I may no sooner have struck the sidewalk than Mr. W. will be reaching for Mrs. W's throat.
This is the City of Saints. Apparently, the Mormon women are happy. I saw them at their best, of course—at balls, tea-parties and the like. They were like other women as far as my observation extended. They were hooped, and furbelowed, and shod, and white- collard, and bejewelled; and like women all over the world, they were softer-eyed and kinder-hearted than men can ever hope to be.
The Mormon girl is reared to believe that the plurality-wife system as it is delicately called here is strictly right; and in linking her destiny with a man who has twelve wives, she undoubtedly considers she is doing her duty. She loves the man, probably, for I think it is not true, as so many writers have stated, that girls are forced to marry whomsoever "the Church" may dictate. Some parents no doubt advise, connive, threaten, and in aggravated cases incarcerate here, as some parents have always done elsewhere, and always will do as long as petticoats continue to be an institution.
How these dozen or twenty wives get along without heart-burnings and hairpullings I can't see.
There are instances on record, you know, where a man don't live in a state of uninterrupted bliss with ONE wife. And to say that a man can possess twenty wives without having his special favorite, or favorites, is to say that he is an angel in boots—which is something I have never been introduced to. You never saw an angel with a Beard, although you may have seen the Bearded Woman.