"Deputy Gleason came to my bed and pulled the clothing off me, asking if there was any one in bed with me. He then went to the fireplace and pulled a sack of straw from there and looked up the chimney. One of them next pulled up a piece of carpet, when Gleason asked Thompson if there was anyone under there. Thompson said 'No,' and Gleason exclaimed, 'G—d d—it, we will look, any way.' They also looked in cupboards, boxes, trunks, etc., and a small tea chest, but threw nothing out."
Deputy Thompson, referred to in the above, is the man who, a few months afterwards, December 16th, 1886, killed Edward M. Dalton at Parowan by shooting him down in the street under the plea that Dalton was trying to escape arrest for unlawful cohabitation. The testimony of eye witnesses to the whole transaction, however, does not bear out the claims of the man upon whose hands will be found innocent blood when he shall stand before that tribunal where there is no shuffling—where the action will be seen in its true light—where the guilty man himself, even in the teeth and forehead of his offending, must give in the evidence.
The following which occurred in Idaho is also from the aforesaid Memorial:
"February 23rd, 1886, at about eleven o'clock at night, two deputy marshals visited the house of Solomon Edwards, about seven miles from Eagle Rock, Idaho, and arrested Mrs. Edwards, his legal wife, after she had retired to bed, and required her to accompany them immediately to Eagle Rock. Knowing something of the character of one of the deputies, from his having visited the house before, when he indulged in a great deal of drinking, profanity, and abuse, she feared to accompany them without some protection, and requested a neighbor to go along on horseback while she rode in the buggy with the two deputies. On the way the buggy broke down and she, with an infant in her arms, was compelled to walk the rest of the distance—between two and three miles. They could have no reason for subpoenaing her in the night, and compelling her to accompany them at such an untimely hour, except a fiendish malice or a determination to heap all the indignities possible upon her, because she was a Mormon woman, for she never attempted to evade the serving of the warrant, and was perfectly willing to report herself at Eagle Rock the next day. She was taken to Salt Lake City to testify against her husband."
After reading such atrocities—such unjustifiable invasions of the homes of the people—one instinctively asks himself if in the great republic the wheels of civil liberty have not been turning backward instead of forward. More than a century before these things transpired, the eloquent Lord Chatham announced the great doctrine for all England and her colonies, including those in America, that a man's house was his castle; that though it might be so poor that the rains of heaven could penetrate it, and the winds whistle through its crevices, yet the king of England could not cross its threshold without its owner's permission.
Not satisfied with the penalties affixed to the laws against unlawful cohabitation, the Utah courts determined to increase them by means little short of legislation itself. The trick resorted to was to decree that the time a man had cohabited with more women than one as wives, could be divided up into years, months or weeks, and separate bills of indictment be found for each fragment of time. So ruled the Chief Justice, Charles S. Zane. Judge Orlando W. Powers of the First Judicial District, carried the infamous doctrine still further, and in charging a grand jury, on the 23rd of September, 1885, said: "An indictment may be found against a man guilty of unlawful cohabitation, for every day, or other distinct interval of time, during which he offends. Each day that a man cohabits with more than one woman, as I have defined the word cohabit, is a distinct and separate violation of the law, and he is liable for punishment for each separate offense."
His definition of cohabitation was as follows:
"The offense of cohabitation is complete when a man, to all outward appearances, is living or associating with more than one woman as his wife. To constitute the offense it is not necessary that it be shown that the parties indulge in sexual intercourse. The intention of the law-making power, in enacting the law, was to protect monogamous marriage by prohibiting all other marriage, whether evidenced by a ceremony, or by conduct and circumstances alone."
So held all the courts, and under that ruling such infamies as the following were possible:
"In the case of Solomon Edwards recently accused of this offense—unlawful cohabitation—it was proved by the evidence for the prosecution that the defendant had lived with one wife only since the passage of the Edmunds act, but after having separated from his former plural wife, he called with his legal wife at the former's residence to obtain a child, an agreement having been made that each party should have one of the two children, and the court ruled that this was unlawful cohabitation in the meaning of the law, and defendant was convicted."[[1]]