Though staying in Orderville so short a time, I was fortunate enough to see the whole community together. For on the evening of my arrival there was a meeting at which there was a very full gathering of the adults—and the babies in arms. The scene was as curious as anything I have ever witnessed in any part of the world. The audience was almost equally composed of men and women, the latter wearing, most of them, their cloth sun-bonnets, and bringing with them the babies they were nursing.
Brigham Young used to encourage mothers to bring them, and said that he liked to hear them squalling in the Tabernacle. Whether he really liked it or not, the mothers did as he said, and the babies too, and the perpetual bleating of babies from every corner of the building makes it seem to this day as if religious service was being held in a sheepfold. Throughout the proceedings at Orderville babies were being constantly handed across from mother to neighbour and back from neighbour to mother. Others were being tossed up and down with that jerky, perpendicular motion which seems so soothing to the very young, but which reminded me of the popping up and down of the hammers when the "lid" of a piano is lifted up during a performance. But the baby is an irrepressible person, and at Orderville has it very much its own way. The Apostle's voice in prayer was accepted as a challenge to try their lungs, and the music (very good, by the way) as a mere obligato to their own vocalization. The patient gravity of the mothers throughout the whole performance, and the apparent indifference of the men, struck me as very curious—for I come from a country where one baby will plunge a whole church congregation into profanity, and where it is generally supposed that two crying together would empty heaven. Of the men of Orderville I can say sincerely that a healthier, more stalwart community I have never seen, while among the women, I saw many refined faces, and remarked that robust health seemed the rule. Next morning the children were paraded, and such a brigade of infantry as it was! Their legs (I think, though, they are known as "limbs" in America) were positively columnar, and their chubby little owners were as difficult to keep quietly in line as so much quicksilver. Orderville boasts that it is self-supporting and independent of outside help, and certainly in the matter of babies there seems no necessity for supplementing home manufactures by foreign imports. The average of births is as yet five in each family during the six years of the existence of the Order! Two were born the day I arrived.
Unfortunately one of the most characteristic features of this family community was in abeyance during my visit—the common dining-table. For a rain-flood swept through the gorge above the settlement last winter and destroyed "the bakery." Since then the families have dined apart or clubbed together in small parties, but the wish of the majority is to see the old system revived, for though they live well now, they used, they say, to live even better when "the big table" was laid for its 200 guests at once.
Self-supporting and well-directed, therefore, the Orderville "communists" bid fair to prove to the world that pious enthusiasm, if largely tempered with business judgment, can make a success of an experiment which has hitherto baffled all attempts based upon either one or the other alone.
CHAPTER XIX.
MORMON VIRTUES.
Red ants and anti-Mormons—Ignorance of the Mormons among Gentiles in Salt Lake City—Mormon reverence for the Bible—Their struggle against drinking-saloons in the city—Conspicuous piety in the settlements—Their charity—Their sobriety (to my great inconvenience)—The literature of Mormonism utterly unreliable—Neglect of the press by the Saints—Explanation of the wide-spread misrepresentation of Mormonism.
FROM Orderville (after a short tour in the south-west of the Territory) I returned to Salt Lake City, and during my second sojourn there, over a month, I saw nothing and learned nothing either from Mormon or Gentile to induce me to erase a single word I had written during my previous visit. Indeed, a better acquaintance only strengthened my first favourable opinions of "the Saints of the Rocky Mountains."
I was walking one day up the City Creek, when I became aware of an aged man seated on a stone by the roadside. His trousers were turned up to his knees, and he was nursing one of his legs as if he felt a great pity for it. As I approached I perceived that he was in trouble—(I perceived this by his oaths)—and getting still nearer I ventured to inquire what annoyed him. "Aged person," said I, "what aileth thee?"—or words to that effect. But there was no response, at least not worth mentioning. He only bent further over his leg, and I noticed that his coat had split down the back seam. His cursing accounted for that. It was sufficient to make any coat split. And then his hat fell off his head into the dust, in judgment upon him. At this he swore again, horribly. By this time I had guessed that he had been bitten by red ants (and they are the shrewdest reptiles at biting that I know of), so I said, "Bitten by red ants, eh?" At this he exploded with wrath, and looked up. And such a face! He had a countenance on him like the ragged edge of despair. His appearance was a calamity. "Red ants," said he; "red Indians, red devils, red hell!" and then, relapsing into the vernacular, he became unintelligibly profane, but ended up with "this damned Mormon city."
Now here was a man, fairly advanced in years, fairly clothed, fairly uneducated. As I had never seen him before, he may have been, for all I know, "the average American" I so often see referred to. Anyhow, there he was, cursing the Mormons because he had been bitten by red ants! Of his own stupidity he had gone and stood upon an ants' nest, thrust his hippopotamus foot into their domicile, overwhelming the nurseries and the parlours in a common catastrophe, crushing with the same heel the grandsire ant and the sucking babe at its mother's breast, mashing up the infirm and the feeble with the eggs in the cells and the household provisions laid up in the larder—ruining in fact an industrious community simply by his own weight in butcher's meat. Some of the survivors promptly attacked the intruding boot, and, running up what the old man was pleased to call "his blasted pants," had bitten the legs which they found concealed within them. And for this, "the average American" cursed the Mormons and their city!