If anyone seceded from the Order, he was entitled to receive back exactly what he had contributed. Mr. King, the father, started by putting in some $20,000, and his sons and others following suit, the fund rose at once to some $40,000. (I would say here that the entirely original method of "keeping the books" makes balance-striking a difficulty.) With this sum, and so much labour at their disposal, the Family Company should have been a brilliant success. But several circumstances conspired disastrously against it. The first was the unfortunate selection of location, for, in spite of the quantity of promising land available elsewhere, Mr. King pitched his camp in the wretched sand-drifts of the Piute section. The next was the ill-advised generosity of the founders in inviting all the country round to come and join them, with or without means, so long as they would be faithful members of the Order. The result, of course, was an influx of "deadheads"—the company indeed having actually to send out waggons to haul in families who were too poor to be able to move themselves. Of these new-comers only a proportion were worth anything to the young settlement, for many came in simply for the certainty of a roof over their heads and sufficient food. The result was most discouraging, and in short time the more valuable adherents were disheartened, and began to fall off, and now, five years from the establishment of the company, there are only some twenty families left, and these are all Kings or relatives of the Kings. The father himself is dead, but four sons divide the patriarchal government between them, and, having again reduced the scheme to a strictly family concern, they are thinking of a fresh start.
What may happen in the future is not altogether certain, but it will be strange if in this country where individual industry, starting without a dollar, is certain of a competence, co-operative labour commencing with funds in hand does not achieve success. At present the company possesses, besides its land in the valley, and a mill and a woollen factory, both commencing work, cattle and sheep worth about $10,000, and horses worth some $12,000 more. This is a tolerable capital for an association of hard-working men to begin with, but it is significant of errors in the past that after five years of almost superhuman toil they should find themselves no better off materially than when they started. Nor, socially, has the experiment hitherto been a success, for Kingston is, in my opinion, beyond comparison the lowest in the scale of all the Mormon settlements that I have seen. It is poverty-stricken in appearance; its houses outside and inside testify, in unmended windows and falling plaster, to an absence of that good order which characterizes so many other villages. The furniture of the rooms and the quality of the food on the tables are poorer than elsewhere, and altogether it is only too evident that this family communism has dragged all down alike to the level of the poorest and the laziest of its advocates, rather than raised all up to the level of the best off and the hardest working. The good men have sunk, the others have not risen, and if it were not so pathetic the Kingston phenomenon would be exasperating.
But there is a very sincere pathos about this terrible sacrifice of self for the common good. I do not mean theoretically, but practically. The men of "the company" are the most saddening community I have ever visited. They seem, with their gentle manners, wonderful simplicity of speech, and almost womanly solicitude for the welfare of their guests, to have lost the strong, hearty spirit which characterizes these Western conquerors of the deserts. Yet even the hard-working Mormons speak of them as veritable heroes in work. It is a common thing to hear men say that "the Kingston men are simply killing themselves with toil;" and when Western men talk of work as being too hard, you may rely upon it it is something very exceptional. Almost against hope these peasants have struggled with difficulties that even they themselves confess seem insuperable. They have given Nature all the odds they could, and then gone on fighting her. The result has been what is seen to-day—a crushed community of men and enfeebled women, living worse than any other settlement on the whole Mormon line. Their own stout hearts refuse to believe that they are a failure; but failure is written in large capital letters on the whole hamlet, and in italics upon every face within it. The wind-swept sand-drifts in which the settlement stands, the wretchedness of the tenements and their surroundings, the haphazard composition of their food, their black beans and their buffalo berries, the whistling of the wind as it drives the sand through the boards of the houses, the howling of the coyotes round the stock-yard—everything from first to last was in accord to emphasize the desperate desolation. But those who have known them for all the five years that the experiment has been under trial declare that their present condition, lamentable as it is, is an improvement upon their past. When they ate at a common table, the living, it is said, was even more frugal than it is now, and there was hardly a piece of crockery among them all, the "family" eating and drinking out of tin vessels. The women, either from mismanagement among themselves, or want of order among the men, were unable to bear the burden of ceaseless cooking, and the common table was thereupon abandoned by a unanimous vote.
Yet they are courtesy and hospitality itself, and their sufferings have only clinched their piety. They have not lost one iota of their faith in their principles, though staggering under the conviction of failure. Their children have regular schooling, the women are scrupulously neat in their dress, while profanity and intemperance are unknown.
CHAPTER XVIII.
FROM KINGSTON TO ORDERVILLE.
On the way to Panguitch—Section-houses not Mormon homes—Through wild country—Panguitch and its fish—Forbidden pleasures—At the source of the Rio Virgin—The surpassing beauty of Long Valley—The Orderville Brethren—A success in Family Communism.
NEXT day we started over the hills for Panguitch, some forty miles off. And here, by the roadside, was pointed out to me one of those "section-houses" which a traveller in Utah once mistook for Mormon "homes," and described "cabins, ten feet by six, built of planks, one window with no glass in it, one doorway with no door in it." This is an accurate description enough of a section-house, but it is a mistake to suppose that any one ever lives in it, as section-houses are only put up to comply with the Homestead Act, which stipulates for a building with one doorway and one window being erected upon each lot within a certain period of its allotment. But they do duty all the same in a certain class of literature as typical of the squalid depravity of the Mormons, for, being inhabited by Mormons, it follows, of course, that several wives, to say nothing of numerous children, have all to sleep together "on the floor of the single room the house contains!" Isn't this a dreadful picture! And are not these large polygamous families who live in section-houses a disgrace to America? But, unfortunately for this telling picture, the only "inhabitants" of these section-houses are Gentile tramps.
A rough hill-road, strewn with uncompromising rocks, jolted us for some miles, and then we crossed a stream-bed with some fine old pines standing in it, and beds of blue lupins brightening the margin, and so came down to the river level, and along a lane running between hedges of wild-rose and redberry (the "opie" of the Indians) tangled with clematis and honeysuckle, and haunted by many birds and brilliant butterflies. The river bubbled along among thickets of golden currant and red willow, and mallards with russet heads floated in the quiet backwaters, by the side of their dames all dressed in dainty grey. It was altogether a charming passage in a day of such general dreariness, reminding one of a pleasant quotation from some pretty poem in the middle of a dull chapter by some prosy writer.
But the dulness recommences, and then we find ourselves at a wayside farm, where a couple of fawns with bells round their necks are keeping the calves company, and some boys are fishing on a little log bridge. These fish must have been all born idiots, or been stricken with unanimous lunacy in early youth, for the manner of their capture was this. The angler lay on his stomach on the "bridge" (it was a three foot and a half stream), with one eye down between two of the logs. When he saw any fish he thrust his "rod"—it was more like a penholder—through the space, and held it in front of the fishes' noses. At the end of the rod were some six inches of string, with a hook tied on with a large knot, and baited with a dab of dough. When the fish had got thoroughly interested in the dough, the angler would jerk up his rod, and by some unaccountable oversight on the part of the fishes it was found that about once in fifty jerks a fish came up out of the water! They seemed tome to be young trout; but, whatever the species, they must have been the most imbecile of finned things. I suggested catching them with the finger and thumb, but the boys giggled at me, as "the fish wouldn't let ye." But I am of a different opinion, for it seemed to me that fish that would let you catch them with such apparatus, would let you catch them without any at all.