MORMONDOM
That fellow seems to possess but one idea, and that is the wrong one.––Samuel Johnson.
Utah is harder than China.––Bishop Wiley.
Utah is the hardest soil into which the Methodist plowshare was ever set.––Bishop Fowler.
THE TRAIL OF THE MORMON
By the Trail had gone Jason Lee, in 1834, to plant the sturdy oak of Methodism in the Willamette Valley and the north Pacific Coast. His task was nobly done; the developments of to-day attest the wisdom of the church in sending him and his coequal coadjutors, Daniel Lee, Cyrus Shepherd, and P. L. Edwards.
Over this same track went Marcus Whitman, in 1835, to found the mission at Waiilatpu, near the present site of Walla Walla, and to find there the early grave of honorable martyrdom at the hands of the people he was attempting to save. The call to these two intrepid equals, Lee and Whitman, came through the visit of the two young Indian chiefs who, immediately after the expedition of Lewis and Clark, had gone to Saint Louis to obtain a copy of the “white man’s Book of heaven.” The names of these two, as previously stated, 126 were Hee-oh’ks-te-kin and H’co-a-h’co-a-cotes-min.
On the sixth day of April, 1830, in Kirkland, Ohio, Joseph Smith, Jr., had organized the body best known as the Mormon Church. Fourteen years later he was mercilessly, and unjustly, mobbed at Nauvoo, Illinois, and after three more years of drifting about from pillar to post, the Latter-Day Saints prepared to emigrate to upper California under the absolute domination and guidance of Brigham Young, who was often styled the successor to the “Mohammed of the West,” as Joseph Smith was sometimes called. This cult had some queer traits. W. W. Phelps, one of their more prominent members, thus characterized the leaders of Mormondom: Brigham Young, the Lion of the Lord; P. P. Pratt, the Archer of Paradise; O. Hyde, the Olive Branch of Israel; W. Richards, the Keeper of the Rolls; J. Taylor, Champion of Right; W. Smith, the Patriarchal Jacob’s Staff; W. Woodruff, the Banner of the Gospel; G. A. Smith, the Entablature of Truth; O. Pratt, the Gauge of Philosophy; J. E. Page, the Sun Dial; L. Wright, Wild Mountain Ram.