Travelling through the settlements, I found that every one voluntarily considered his poorer neighbours as a charge upon himself. When a man arrives there, a stranger and penniless, one helps to get together logs for his first hut, another to break up a plot of ground. A third lends him his waggon to draw some firewood from the canyon or hillside; a fourth gives up some of his time to show him how to bring the water on to his ground—and so on through all the first requirements of the forlorn new-comer. Behind them all meanwhile is the Church, in the person of the presiding Elder of the settlement, who makes him such advances as are considered necessary. It is a wonderful system, and as pathetic, to my mind, as any struggle for existence that I have ever witnessed. But every man who comes among them is another unit of strength, and let him be only a straight-spoken, fair-dealing fellow, with his heart in his work, and he finds every one's hand ready to assist him.
And the first commencement is terribly small. A one-roomed log hut is planted in a desert of sage-brush "with roots that hold as firm as original sin," and rocks that are as hard to get rid of as bad habits. Borrowing a plough here, and a shovel there, the new-comer bungles through an acre or two of furrows, and digs out a trench. Begging of one neighbour some fruit-tree cuttings, he sticks the discouraging twigs into the ground, and by working out some extra time for another gets some lucerne seed. Then he gets a hen, and then a setting of eggs, by-and-by a heifer, and a little later, by putting in work or by an advance from the Church, or with kindly help from a neighbour, he adds a horse to his stock. Time passes, say a year; his orchard (that is to be) has several dozen leaves on it, and the ground is all green with lucerne, the chickens are thriving, and he adds an acre or two more to the first patch, and his neighbours, seeing him in earnest, are still ready with their advice and aid. Adobe bricks are gradually piled up in a corner of the lot, and very soon an extra room or two is built on to the log hut, and saplings of cotton-wood, or poplar, or locust are planted in a row before the dwelling: and so on year by year, conquering a little more of the sage-brush, bringing on the water a furlong further, adding an outhouse, planting another tree. At the end of ten years—years of unsparing, untiring labour, but years brightened with perpetual kindness from neighbours—this man, the penniless emigrant, invites the wayfarer into his house, has a comfortably furnished bedroom at his service, oats and fodder for his team, ample and wholesome food for all. The wife spreads the table with eggs and ham and chicken, vegetables, pickles, and preserves, milk and cream, pies and puddings—"Yes, sir, all of our own raising." The dismal twigs have grown up into pleasant shade-trees, and a flower-garden brightens the front of the house. In the barn are comfortable, well-fed stock, horses and cows. This is no fancy picture, but one from life, and typical of 20,000 others. Each homestead in turn has the same experience, and it is no wonder, therefore, when the settlement, properly laid out and organized, grows into municipal existence, that every one speaks kindly of, and acts kindly towards, his neighbour. A visitor, till he understands the reason, is surprised at the intimacy of households. But when he does understand it, ought not his surprise to give place to admiration?
Not less conspicuous is the uniform sincerity in religion. A school and meeting-house is to be found in every settlement, even though there may be only half-a-dozen families, and besides the regular attendance of the people at weekly services, the private prayers of each household are as punctual as their meals. In these prayers, after the ordinary generalities, the head of the house usually prays for all the authorities of the Church, from the President downwards, for the local authorities, for the Church as a body, and the missionaries abroad, for his household and its guest, for the United States, and for Congress, and for all the world that feels kindly towards Mormonism. But quite apart from the matter of their prayers, their manner is very striking, and the scene in a humble house, when a large family meets for prayer—and half the members, finding no article of furniture unoccupied for the orthodox position of devotion, drop into attitudes of natural reverence, kneeling in the middle of the floor—appeals very strongly to the eye of those accustomed to the stereotyped piety of a more advanced civilization.
One more conspicuous feature of Mormon life is sobriety. I have been the guest of some fifty different households, and only once I was offered even beer. That exception was in a Danish household, where the wife brewed her own "ol"—an opaque beverage of home-fermented wheat and home-grown hops—as a curiosity curious, as an "indulgence" doubtful, as a regular drink impossible. On no other occasion was anything but tea, coffee, milk, or water offered. And even tea and coffee, being discouraged by the Church, are but seldom drunk. As a heathen outsider I deplored my beer, and was grateful for coffee; but the rest of the household, in almost every instance, drank water. Tobacco is virtually unused. It is used, but so seldom that it does not affect my statement. The spittoon, therefore, though in every room, is behind the door, or in a corner under a piece of furniture. In case it should be needed, it is there—like the shot-gun upstairs—but its being called into requisition would be a family event.
No, let their enemies say what they will, the Mormon settlements are each of them to-day a refutation of the libel that the Mormons are not sincere in their antipathy to strong drink and tobacco. That individual Mormons drink and smoke proves nothing, except that they do it. For the great majority of the Mormons, they are strictly sober. I know it to my great inconvenience.
Is it possible then that the American people, so generous in their impulses, so large-hearted in action, have been misled as to the true character of the Mormon "problem"? At first sight this may seem impossible. A whole people, it will be said, cannot have been misled. But I think a general misapprehension is quite within the possibilities.
Whence have the public derived their opinions about Mormonism? From anti-Mormons only. I have ransacked the literature of the subject, and yet I really could not tell any one where to go for an impartial book about Mormonism later in date than Burton's "City of the Saints," published in 1862. Burton, it is well known, wrote as a man of wide travel and liberal education—catholic, therefore, on all matters religious, and generous in his views of ethical and social obliquities, sympathetic, consistent, and judicial. It is no wonder, then, that Mormons remember the distinguished traveller, in spite of his candour, with the utmost kindness. But put Burton on one side, and I think I can defy any one to name another book about the Mormons worthy of honest respect. From that truly awful book, "The History of the Saints," published by one Bennett (even an anti-Mormon has styled him "the greatest rascal that ever came to the West") in 1842, down to Stenhouse's in 1873, there is not, to my knowledge, a single Gentile work before the public that is not utterly unreliable from its distortion of facts. Yet it is from these books—for there are no others—that the American public has acquired nearly all its ideas about the people of Utah.
The Mormons themselves are most foolishly negligent of the power of the press, and of the immense value in forming public opinion of a free use of type. They affect to be indifferent to the clamour of the world, but when this clamour leads to legislative action against them, they turn round petulantly with the complaint that there is a universal conspiracy against them. It does not seem to occur to them that their misfortunes are partly due to their own neglect of the very weapons which their adversaries have used so diligently, so unscrupulously, and so successfully.
They do not seem to understand that a public contradiction given to a public calumny goes some way towards correcting the mischief done, or that by anticipating malicious versions of events they could as often as not get an accurate statement before the public, instead of an inaccurate one. But enterprise in advertisement has been altogether on the side of the anti-Mormons. The latter never lose an opportunity of throwing in a bad word, while the Mormons content themselves with "rounding their shoulders," as they are so fond of saying, and putting a denial of the libel into the local News. They say they are so accustomed to abuse that they are beginning not to care about it—which is the old, stupid self-justification of the apathetic. The fascination of a self-imposed martyrdom seems too great for them, and, like flies when they are being wrapped up into parcels by the spider for greater convenience of transportation to its larder, they sing chastened canticles about the inevitability of cobwebs and the deplorable rapacity of spiders.
"I can assure you," said one of them, "it would be of no use trying to undeceive the public. You cannot make a whistle out of a pig's tail, you know."