From here to Panguitch the road lies through stony country of the prevalent exasperating type until we reach the precincts of the settlement, heralded long before we reach it by miles of fencing that enclose the grazing-land stretching down to the river. A detestable road, broken up and swamped by irrigation channels, leads into the settlement, and the poor impression thus received is not removed as we pass through the treeless "streets" and among the unfenced lots. But it is an interesting spot none the less, for apart from its future, it is a good starting-point for many places of interest. But I should like to have visited Red Lake and Panguitch Lake. "Panguitch," by the way, means "fish" in the red man's language, and it is no wonder, therefore, that at breakfast we enjoyed one of the most splendid dishes of mountain-lake trout that was ever set before man. It is a great fish certainly—and I prefer it broiled. To put any sauce to it is sheer infamy.
The beaver, by the way, is still to be trapped here, and the grizzly bear is not a stranger to Panguitch.
Looking out of the window in the evening, I saw a cart standing by the roadside, and a number of men round it. Their demeanour aroused my curiosity, for an extreme dejection had evidently marked them for its own. Some sate in the road as if waiting in despair for Doomsday; others prowled round the cart and leant in a melancholy manner against it. The cart, it appeared, had come from St. George, the vine-growing district in the south of the territory, and contained a cask of wine. But as there was no licence in Panguitch for the sale of liquors, it could not be broached! I never saw men look so wretchedly thirsty in my life, and if glaring at the cask and thumping it could have emptied it, there would not have been a drop left. It was a delightful improvement upon the tortures of Tantalus, but the victims accepted the joke as being against them, and though they watched the cart going away gloomily enough, there was no ill-temper.
From Panguitch to Orderville, fifty miles, the scenery opens with the dreary hills that had become so miserably familiar, alternating with level pasture-lands, among which the serpentine Sevier winds a curiously fantastic course. But gradually there grows upon the mind a sense of coming change. Verdure creeps over the plains, and vegetation steals on to the hill-sides, and then suddenly as if for a surprise, the complete beauty of Long Valley bursts upon the traveller. I cannot in a few words say more of it than that this valley—through which the Rio Virgin flows, and in which the Family Communists of Orderville have pitched their tents—rivals in its beauty the scenery of Cashmere.
Springing from a hill-side, beautiful with flowering shrubs and instinct with bird life, the Virgin River trickles through a deep meadow bright with blue iris plants and walled in on either side by hills that are clothed with exquisite vegetation, and then, collecting its young waters into a little channel, breaks away prattling into the valley. Corn-fields and orchards, and meadows filled with grazing kine, succeed each other in pleasant series, and on the right hand and on the left the mountains lean proudly back with their loads of magnificent pine. And other springs come tumbling down to join the pretty river, which flows on, gradually widening as it goes, past whirring saw-mills and dairies half buried among fruit-trees, through park-like glades studded with pines of splendid girth, and pretty brakes of berry-bearing trees all flushed with blossoms. And the valley opens away on either side into grassy glens from which the tinkle of cattle-bells falls pleasantly on the ear, or into bold canyons that are draped close with sombre pines, and end in the most magnificent cathedral cliffs of ruddy sandstone.
What lovely bits of landscape! What noble studies of rock architecture! It is a very panorama of charms, and, travelled widely as I have, I must confess to an absolute novelty of delight in this exquisite valley of
THE ORDERVILLE BRETHREN.
Among the projects which occupied Joseph Smith's active brain was one that should make the whole of the Mormon community a single family, with a purse in common, and the head of the Church its head. In theory they are so already. But Joseph Smith hoped to see them so in actual practice also, and for this purpose—the establishment of a universal family communism—he instituted "The Order of Enoch," or "The United Order."
Why Enoch? The Mormons themselves appear to have no definite explanation beyond the fact that Enoch was holy beyond all his generation. But for myself, I see in it only another instance of that curious sympathy with ancient tradition which Joseph Smith, and after him Brigham Young, so consistently showed. They were both of them as ignorant as men could be in the knowledge that comes from books, and yet each of them must have had some acquaintance with the mystic institutions of antiquity, or their frequent coincidence with primitive ideas and schemes appears to me inexplicable. No man can in these days think and act like an antediluvian by accident. Josephus is, I find, a favourite author among the Mormons, and Josephus may account for a little. Moreover, many of the Mormons, notably both Presidents, are or were Freemasons, and this may account for some more. But for the balance I can find no explanation. Now I remember reading somewhere—perhaps in Sir Thomas Browne—that "the patriarchal Order of Enoch" is an institution of prodigious antiquity; that Enoch in the Hebrew means "the teacher;" that he was accepted in prehistoric days as the founder of a self-supporting, pious socialism, which was destined (should destruction overtake the world) to rescue one family at any rate from the general ruin, and perpetuate the accumulated knowledge of the past. And it is exactly upon these conditions that we find Joseph Smith, fifty years ago, promulgating in a series of formulated rules, the scheme of a patriarchal "Order of Enoch."
All Mormons are "elect." But even among the elect there is an aristocracy of piety. Thus in Islam we find the Hajji faithful above the faithful. In Hindooism the brotherhood of the Coolinsis accepted by the gods above all the other "twice-born." Is it not, indeed, the same in every religion—that there are the chosen within the chosen—"though they were mighty men, yet they were not of the three"—a tenth legion among the soldiers of Heaven—the archangels in the select ministry of the Supreme? In Mormonism, therefore, if a man chooses, he may consecrate himself to his faith more signally than his fellows, by endowing the Church with all his goods, and accepting from the Church afterwards the "stewardship" of a portion of his own property! It is no mere lip-consecration, no Ritualists' "Order of Jesus," no question of a phylactery. It means the absolute transfer of all property and temporal interests, and of all rights of all kinds therein, to the Church by a formal, legal process, and a duly attested deed. Here is one:—