Mormonism and Mormonism—Salt Lake City not representative—The miracles of water—How settlements grow—The town of Logan: one of the Wonders of the West—The beauty of the valley—The rural simplicity of life—Absence of liquor and crime—A police force of one man—Temple mysteries—Illustrations of Mormon degradation—Their settlement of the "local option" question.
SALT Lake City is not the whole of "Mormonism." In the Eastern States there is a popular impression that it is. But as a matter of fact, it hardly represents Mormonism at all. The Gentile is too much there, and Main Street has too many saloons. The city is divided into two parties, bitterly antagonistic. Newspapers exchange daily abuse, and sectarians thump upon their pulpit cushions at each other every Sunday. Visitors on their travels, sight-seeing, move about the streets in two-horse hacks, staring at the houses that they pass as if some monsters lived in them. A military camp stands sentry over the town, and soldiers slouch about the doors of the bars.
All this, and a great deal more that is to be seen in Salt Lake City, is foreign to the true character of a Mormon settlement. Logan, for instance (which I describe later on), is characteristic of Mormonism, and nowhere so characteristic as in those very features in which it differs from Salt Lake City. The Gentile does not take very kindly to Logan, for there are no saloons to make the place a "live town," and no public animosities to give it what they call "spirit;" everybody knows his neighbour, and the sight-seeing fiend is unknown. The one and only newspaper hums on its way like some self-satisfied bumble bee; the opposition preacher, with a congregation of eight women and five men, does not think it worth while, on behalf of such a shabby constituency, to appeal to Heaven every week for vengeance on the 200,000 who don't agree with him and his baker's dozen. There is no pomp and circumstance of war to remind the Saints of Federal surveillance, no brass cannon on the bench pointing at the town (as in Salt Lake City), no ragged uniforms at street corners. Everything is Mormon. The biggest shop is the Co-operative Store; the biggest place of worship the Tabernacle; the biggest man the President of the Stake. Everybody that meets, "Brothers" or "Sisters" each other in the streets, and after nightfall the only man abroad is the policeman, who as a rule retires early himself; and no one takes precautions against thieves at night. It is a very curious study, this well-fed, neighbourly, primitive life among orchards and corn-fields, this bees-in-a-clover-field life, with every bee bumbling along in its own busy way, but all taking their honey back to the same hive. It is not a lofty life, nor "ideal" to my mind, but it is emphatically ideal, if that word means anything at all, and its outcome, where exotic influences are not at work, is contentment and immunity from crime, and an Old-World simplicity.
But Logan is not by any means a solitary illustration. For the Mormon settlements follow the line of the valleys that run north and south, and every one of them, where water is abundant, is a Logan in process of development.
For water is the philosopher's stone; the fairy All-Good; the First Cause; the everything that men here strive after as the source of all that is desirable. It is silver and gold, pearls and rubies, and virtuous women—which are "above rubies"—everything in fact that is precious. It spirits up Arabian-Nights enchantments, and gives industry a talisman to work with. Without it, the sage-brush laughs at man, and the horn of the jack-rabbit is exalted against him. With it, corn expels the weed, and the long-eared rodent is ploughed out of his possession. Without it, greasewood and gophers divide the wilderness between them. With it, homesteads spring up and gather the orchards around them. Without it, the silence of the level desert is broken only by the coyote and the lark. With it, comes the laughter of running brooks, the hum of busy markets, and the cheery voices of the mill-wheels by the stream. Without it, the world seems a dreary failure. With it, it brightens into infinite possibilities. No wonder then that men prize it, exhaust ingenuity in obtaining it, quarrel about it. I wonder they do not worship it. Men have worshipped trees, and wind, and the sun, for far less cause.
Nothing indeed is so striking in all these Mormon settlements as the supreme importance of water. It determines locations, regulates their proportions, and controls their prosperity. Here are thousands of acres barren—though I hate using such a word for a country of such beautiful wild flowers—because there is no water. There is a small nook bursting with farmsteads, and trees, because there is water. Men buy and sell water-claims as if they were mining stock "with millions in sight," and appraise each other's estates not by the stock that grazes on them, or the harvests gathered from them, but by the water-rights that go with them. Thus, a man in Arizona buys a forty-acre lot with a spring on it, and he speaks of it as 70,000 acres of "wheat." Another has acquired the right of the head-waters of a little mountain stream; he is spoken of as owning "the finest ranch in the valley." Yet the one has not put a plough into the ground, the other has not a single head of cattle! But each possessed the "open sesame" to untold riches, and in a country given over to this new form of hydromancy was already accounted wealthy.
Every stream in Utah might be a Pactolus, every pool a Bethesda. To compass, then, this miracle-working thing, the first energies of every settlement are directed in the union. The Church comes forward if necessary to help, and every one contributes his labour. At first the stream where it leaves the canyon, and debouches upon the levels of the valley, is run off into canals to north and south and west (for all the streams run from the eastern range), and from these, like the legs of a centipede, minor channels run to each farmstead, and thence again are drawn off in numberless small aqueducts to flood the fields. The final process is simple enough, for each of the furrows by which the water is let in upon the field is in turn dammed up at the further end, and each surrounding patch is thus in turn submerged. But the settlement expands, and more ground is needed. So another canal taps the stream above the canyon mouth, the main channels again strike off, irrigating the section above the levels already in cultivation, and overlapping the original area at either end. And every time increasing population demands more room, the stream is taken off higher and higher up the canyon. The cost is often prodigious, but necessity cannot stop to haggle over arithmetic, and the Mormon settlements therefore have developed a system of irrigation which is certainly among the wonders of the West.
"Logan is the chief Mormon settlement in the Cache Valley, and is situated about eighty miles to the north of Salt Lake City. Population rather over 4000." Such is the ordinary formula of the guide book. But if I had to describe it in few words I should say this: "Logan is without any parallel, even among the wonders of Western America, for rapidity of growth, combined with solid prosperity and tranquillity. Population rather over 4000, every man owning his own farm. Police force, two men—partially occupied in agriculture on their own account. N.B.—No police on Sundays, or on meeting evenings, as the force are otherwise engaged."
And writing sincerely I must say that I have seen few things in America that have so profoundly impressed me as this Mormon settlement of Logan. It is not merely that the industry of men and women, penniless emigrants a few years ago, has made the valley surpassing in its beauty. That it has filled the great levels that stretch from mountain to mountain with delightful farmsteads, groves of orchard-trees, and the perpetual charm of crops. That it has brought down the river from its idleness in the canyons to busy itself in channels and countless waterways with the irrigation and culture of field and garden; to lend its strength to the mills which saw up the pines that grow on its native mountains; to grind the corn for the 15,000 souls that live in the valley, and to help in a hundred ways to make men and women and children happy and comfortable, to beautify their homes, and reward their industry. All this is on the surface, and can be seen at once by any one.
But there is much more than mere fertility and beauty in Logan and its surroundings, for it is a town without crime, a town without drunkenness! With this knowledge one looks again over the wonderful place, and what a new significance every feature of the landscape now possesses! The clear streams, perpetually industrious in their loving care of lowland and meadow and orchard, and so cheery, too, in their incessant work, are a type of the men and women themselves; the placid cornfields lying in bright levels about the houses are not more tranquil than the lives of the people; the tree-crowded orchards and stack-filled yards are eloquent of universal plenty; the cattle loitering to the pasture contented, the foals all running about in the roads, while the waggons which their mothers are drawing stand at the shop door or field gate, strike the new-comer as delightfully significant of a simple country life, of mutual confidence, and universal security.