Here was Plato‘s table-land of the Atlantic isle—one great field of corn and wheat, where only twenty years ago Fremont, the pathfinder, reported wheat and corn impossible.
CHAPTER XIV.
BRIGHAM YOUNG.
“I LOOK upon Mohammed and Brigham as the very best men that God could send as ministers to those unto whom He sent them,” wrote Elder Frederick Evans, of the “Shaker” village of New Lebanon, in a letter to us, inclosing another by way of introduction to the Mormon president.
Credentials from the Shaker to the Mormon chief—from the great living exponent of the principle of celibacy to the “most married” in all America—were not to be kept undelivered; so the moment we had bathed we posted off to a merchant to whom we had letters, that we might inquire when his spiritual chief and military ruler would be home again from his “trip north.” The answer was, “To-morrow.”
After watching the last gleams fade from the snow-fields upon the Wasatch, we parted for the night, as I had to sleep in a private house, the hotel being filled even to the balcony. As I entered the drawing-room of my entertainer, I heard the voice of a lady reading, and caught enough of what she said to be aware that it was a defense of polygamy. She ceased when she saw the stranger; but I found that it was my host‘s first wife reading Belinda Pratt‘s book to her daughters—girls just blooming into womanhood.
After an agreeable chat with the ladies, doubly pleasant as it followed upon a long absence from civilization, I went to my room, which I afterward found to be that of the eldest son, a youth of sixteen years. In one corner stood two Ballard rifles, and two revolvers and a militia uniform hung from pegs upon the wall. When I lay down with my hands underneath the pillow—an attitude instinctively adopted to escape the sand-flies, I touched something cold. I felt it—a full-sized Colt, and capped. Such was my first introduction to Utah Mormonism.
On the morrow, we had the first and most formal of our four interviews with the Mormon president, the conversation lasting three hours, and all the leading men of the church being present. When we rose to leave, Brigham said: “Come to see me here again; Brother Stenhouse will show you everything;” and then blessed us in these words: “Peace be with you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Elder Stenhouse followed us out of the presence, and somewhat anxiously put the odd question: “Well, is he a white man?” “White” is used in Utah as a general term of praise: a white man is a man—to use our corresponding idiom—not so black as he is painted. A “white country” is a country with grass and trees; just as a white man means a man who is morally not a Ute, so a white country is a land in which others than Utes can dwell.
We made some complimentary answer to Stenhouse‘s question; but it was impossible not to feel that the real point was: Is Brigham sincere?
Brigham‘s deeds have been those of a sincere man. His bitterest opponents cannot dispute the fact that in 1844, when Nauvoo was about to be deserted, owing to the attacks of a ruffianly mob, Brigham rushed to the front, and took the chief command. To be a Mormon leader then was to be a leader of an outcast people, with a price set on his head, in a Missourian county in which almost every man who was not a Mormon was by profession an assassin. In the sense, too, of believing that he is what he professes to be, Brigham is undoubtedly sincere. In the wider sense of being that which he professes to be he comes off as well, if only we will read his words in the way he speaks them. He tells us that he is a prophet—God‘s representative on earth; but when I asked him whether he was of a wholly different spiritual rank to that held by other devout men, he said: “By no means. I am a prophet—one of many. All good men are prophets; but God has blessed me with peculiar favor in revealing His will oftener and more clearly through me than through other men.”