Introducing the American Spirit

by Edward Alfred Steiner

The Rocky Mountains, as I had expected, did not impress them. From the car window they seemed more like elevated plains, with here and there a restless chain of hills in the distance.

“As restless as the American people,” quoth the Herr Director. “Your plains and your mountains seem to be fighting with each other.”

I hoped that the plains would win the fight and pointed out another, more visible struggle—that of man with the desert. I admitted that the Rocky Mountains which he had thus far seen were uninteresting from the scenic standpoint, especially as compared with the beauty of the Alps, those snow-capped mountains with meadows to the timber line, their picturesque villages and herders’ huts all as trim and neat and finished as the carving one buys in Interlaken or Luzerne.

From the human standpoint, the Rockies are infinitely more interesting, for there the elemental struggle is still going on. A giant race is taming tumultuous rivers, and forcing their waters through flumes and tunnels into mighty reservoirs on the mountainsides and in the valleys. No indolent, unaspiring, uninventive, docile people could survive in the Rockies.

In common with many Americans, my guests believed that this matter of irrigation is as easy as turning water from a faucet into a basin; and that all a man has to do is to drop his seed into the ground and watch it grow. I showed them farms, desolate and forbidding, which men had to level or lift, ditch and plow and harrow; a back-breaking, often a heart-breaking task. In such an environment they built shacks which only accentuated the loneliness—where women lived and children were born, where hopes were cherished and God was worshipped.

It was an Old Testament environment, the wilderness. Compared with these pioneers the Israelites had an easy task. They sent spies into the Promised Land where they found and from which they brought back grapes and pomegranates; but to stay in the wilderness, to drive back the drought inch by inch, to kill coyotes and rattlesnakes one by one, to contend with claim jumpers, real estate agents, water right privileges and unscrupulous lawyers, and then raise grapes and pomegranates, families, churches, schools and colleges—that seems to me the greater and more heroic task. And it was done by men with the courage of soldiers and the vision of prophets, who turned that land of drought, alkali and sage-brush into one “flowing with milk and honey.” Because in a certain portion of that desert those who were the pioneers and performed those tasks were Mormons, takes nothing from the glory of the achievement.

As we neared Salt Lake City the Frau Directorin looked into every house, eager to detect the numerous wives whom she expected to see surrounding one man; while the Herr Director marvelled at the beauty of the vast Salt Lake valley which, with its poplars and mountains and its intensively cultivated farms, reminded him of Lombardy, that beautiful stretch of country along the railway from Milan to Boulogna.

Salt Lake City is sufficiently different from other cities we had seen to arouse interest; but as in Rome the Vatican overshadows everything else, so here the Temple and the Tabernacle hold one’s attention, and work upon one’s imagination.

We had scarcely put ourselves to rights in our rooms at the Hotel Utah, as pretentious and comfortable as any in the country, before we were out on the streets, looking for Mormons. There is a fairly defined type and I thought I knew it, for I have lectured before Mormon audiences; but out upon the busy city streets it was quite impossible for me to gratify the curiosity of the Frau Directorin by pointing them out to her. I did tell her that a third of the population was non-Mormon and she looked curiously at two out of every three persons we met without, however, being able to say definitely that she had seen a real, live specimen.

Not wishing to join the crowd of tourists who were taken in relays through the Tabernacle and other buildings open to the curious among the Gentiles, we walked through the park, and stopping before the monument to Joseph Smith I took the opportunity to enlighten my guests upon the history of that singular personality, and the church of which he was the founder.