Immediately north of the Tabernacle is the Bowery—in early spring a canopy of green leafy branches, which are left to wither with the year, supported on wooden posts. The interior will be described when we attend the house of worship next Sunday.
In the extreme northwest angle of the block is the Endowment, here pronounced On-dewment House, separated from the Tabernacle by a high wooden paling. The building, of which I made a pen and ink sketch from the west, is of adobe, with a pent roof and four windows, one blocked up: the central and higher portion is flanked by two wings, smaller erections of the same shape. The Endowment House is the place of great medicine, and all appertaining to it is carefully concealed from Gentile eyes and ears: the result is that human sacrifices are said to be performed within its walls. Mrs. Smith and Mr. Hyde have described the mysterious rites performed within these humble walls, but, for reasons given before, there is reason to doubt the truth of their descriptions; such orgies as they describe could not coexist with the respectability which is the law of the land. M. Remy has detailed the programme with all the exactitude of an eye-witness, which he was not. The public declare that the ceremonies consist of some show, which in the Middle Ages would be called a comedy or mystery—possibly Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained—and connect it with the working of a mason’s lodge. The respectable Judge Phelps, because supposed to take the place of the Father of Sin when tempting Adam and Eve, is popularly known as “the Devil.” The two small wings are said to contain fonts for the two sexes, where baptism by total immersion is performed. According to Gentiles, the ceremony occupies eleven or twelve hours. The neophyte, after bathing, is anointed with oil, and dressed in clean white cotton garments, cap and shirt, of which the latter is rarely removed—Dr. Richards saved his life at the Carthage massacre by wearing it—and a small square masonic apron, with worked or painted fig-leaves: he receives a new name and a distinguishing grip, and is bound to secrecy by dreadful oaths. Moreover, it is said that, as in all such societies, there are several successive degrees, all of which are not laid open to initiation till the Temple shall be finished. But—as every mason knows—the “red-hot poker” and other ideas concerning masonic institutions have prevailed when juster disclosures have been rejected. Similarly in the Mormonic mystery, it is highly probable that, in consequence of the conscientious reserve of the people upon a subject which it would be indelicate to broach, the veriest fancies have taken the deepest root.
ENDOWMENT HOUSE AND TABERNACLE. (From the West.)
The other features of the inclosure are a well near the Tabernacle, an arched sewer in the western wall for drainage, and at the eastern entrance a small habitation for concierge and guards. THE FUTURE TEMPLE.The future Temple was designed by an Anglo-Mormon architect, Mr. Truman O. Angell. The plan is described at full length in the Latter-Day Saints’ “Millennial Star,” December 2, 1854, and drawings, apparently copied from the original in the historian’s office, have been published at Liverpool, besides the small sketches in the works of Mr. Hyde and M. Remy. It is hardly worth while here to trouble the general reader with a lengthy description of a huge and complicated pile, a syncretism of Greek and Roman, Gothic and Moorish, not revealed like that of Nauvoo, but planned by man, which will probably never be completed. It has been transferred to the Appendix ([No. II.]), for the benefit of students: after briefly saying that the whole is symbolical, and that it is intended to dazzle, by its ineffable majesty, the beholder’s sight, I will repeat the architect’s concluding words, which are somewhat in the style of Parr’s Life Pills advertisements: “For other particulars, wait till the house is done, then come and see it.”
After dining with the governor, we sat under the stoop enjoying, as we might in India, the cool of the evening. Several visitors dropped in, among them Mr. and Mrs. Stenhouse.MR. STENHOUSE. He—Elder T. B. H. Stenhouse—is a Scotchman by birth, and has passed through the usual stages of neophyte (larva), missionary (pupa), and elder or fully-developed Saint (imago). Madame was from Jersey, spoke excellent French, talked English without nasalization or cantalenation, and showed a highly cultivated mind. She had traveled with her husband on a propagandist tour to Switzerland and Italy, where, as president of the missions for three years, he was a “diligent and faithful laborer in the great work of the last dispensation.” He became a Saint in 1846, at the age of 21; lived the usual life of poverty and privation, founded the Southampton Conference, converted a lawyer among other great achievements, and propagated the Faith successfully in Scotland as in England. The conversation turned—somehow in Great Salt Lake City it generally does—upon polygamy, or rather plurality, which here is the polite word, and for the first time I heard that phase of the family tie sensibly, nay, learnedly advocated on religious grounds by fair lips. Mr. Stenhouse kindly offered to accompany me on the morrow, as the first hand-cart train was expected to enter, and to point out what might be interesting. I saw Elder and High-Priest Stenhouse almost every day during my stay at Great Salt Lake City, and found in his society both pleasure and profit. We of course avoided those mysterious points, into which, as an outsider, I had no right to enter; the elder was communicative enough upon all others, and freely gave me leave to use his information. The reader, however, will kindly bear in mind that, being a strict Mormon, Mr. Stenhouse could enlighten me only upon one side of the subject; his statements were therefore carefully referred to the “other part;” moreover, as he could never see any but the perfections of his system, the blame of having pointed out what I deem its imperfections is not to be charged upon him. His power of faith struck me much. I had once asked him what became of the Mormon Tables of the Law, the Golden Plates which, according to the Gentiles, were removed by an angel after they had done their work. He replied that he knew not; that his belief was independent of all such accidents; that Mormonism is and must be true to the exclusion of all other systems. I saw before me an instance how the brain or mind of man can, by mere force of habit and application, imbue itself with any idea.
Long after dark I walked home alone. There were no lamps in any but Main Street, yet the city is as safe as at St. James’s Square, London. There are perhaps not more than twenty-five or thirty constables or policemen in the whole place, under their captain, a Scotchman, Mr. Sharp, “by name as well as nature so;” and the guard on public works is merely nominal. Its excellent order must be referred to the perfect system of private police, resulting from the constitution of Mormon society, which in this point resembles the caste system of Hindooism. There is no secret from the head of the Church and State; every thing, from the highest to the lowest detail of private and public life, must be brought to the ear and submitted to the judgment of the father-confessor-in-chief. Gentiles often declare that the Prophet is acquainted with their every word half an hour after it is spoken; and from certain indices, into which I hardly need enter, my opinion is that, allowing something for exaggeration, they are not very far wrong. In London and Paris the foreigner is subjected, though perhaps he may not know it, to the same surveillance, and till lately his letters were liable to be opened at the Post-office. We can not, then, wonder that at Great Salt Lake City, a stranger, before proving himself at the least to be harmless, should begin by being an object of suspicion.
On Monday, as the sun was sloping toward the east, Mr. Stenhouse called to let me know that the train had already issued from Emigration Kanyon; no time to spare. We set out together “down town” at once. Near the angle of Main Street I was shown the place where a short time before my arrival a curious murderA MURDER. was committed. Two men, named Johnston and Brown, mauvais sujets, who had notoriously been guilty of forgery and horse-stealing, were sauntering home one fine evening, when both fell with a bullet to each, accurately placed under the heart-arm. The bodies were carried to the court-house, which is here the morgue or dead-house, to be exposed, as is the custom, for a time: the citizens, when asked if they suspected who did the deed, invariably replied, with a philosophical sangfroid, that, in the first place, they didn’t know, and, secondly, that they didn’t care. Of course the Gentiles hinted that life had been taken by “counsel”—that is to say, by the secret orders of Mr. Brigham Young and his Vehm. But, even had such been the case—of course it was the merest suspicion—such a process would not have been very repugnant to that wild huntress, the Themis of the Rocky Mountains. In a place where, among much that is honest and respectable, there are notable exceptions, this wild, unflinching, and unerring justice, secret and sudden, is the rod of iron which protects the good. SAFETY OF THE CITY.During my residence at the Mormon City not a single murder was, to the best of my belief, committed: the three days which I spent at Christian Carson City witnessed three. Moreover, from the Mississippi to Great Salt Lake City, I noticed that the crimes were for the most part of violence, openly and unskillfully committed; the arsenic, strychnine, and other dastardly poisonings of Europe are apparently unknown, although they might be used easily and efficiently with scant chance of detection. That white emigrants have sometimes wiped off the Indian, as the English settler settled with corrosive sublimate the hapless denizen of the great Southern Continent, is scarcely to be doubted; at the same time, it must be owned that they have rarely tried that form of assassination upon one another.
As we issued from the city, we saw the smoke-like column which announced that the emigrants were crossing the bench-land; and people were hurrying from all sides to greet and to get news of friends. Presently the carts came. All the new arrivals were in clean clothes, the men washed and shaved, and the girls, who were singing hymns, habited in Sunday dresses. The company was sunburned, but looked well and thoroughly happy, and few, except the very young and the very old, who suffer most on such journeys, troubled the wains. They marched through clouds of dust over the sandy road leading up the eastern portion of the town, accompanied by crowds, some on foot, others on horseback, and a few in traps and other “locomotive doin’s,” sulkies, and buckboards. A few youths of rather a rowdyish appearance were mounted in all the tawdriness of Western trappings—Rocky Mountain hats, tall and broad, or steeple-crowned felts, covering their scalp-locks, embroidered buckskin garments, huge leggins, with caterpillar or millepede fringes, red or rainbow-colored flannel shirts, gigantic spurs, bright-hilted pistols, and queer-sheathed knives stuck in red sashes with gracefully depending ends. The jeunesse dorée of the Valley Tan was easily distinguished from imported goods by the perfect ease with which they sat and managed their animals. Around me were all manner of familiar faces—heavy English mechanics, discharged soldiers, clerks, and agricultural laborers, a few German students, farmers, husbandmen, and peasants from Scandinavia and Switzerland, and correspondents and editors, bishops, apostles, and other dignitaries from the Eastern States. When the train reached the public square—at Great Salt Lake City the “squares” are hollow as in England, not solid as in the States—of the 8th ward, the wagons were ranged in line for the final ceremony. Before the invasion of the army the First President made a point of honoring the entrance of hand-cart trains (but these only) by a greeting in person. Of late he seldom leaves his house except for the Tabernacle: when inclined for a picnic, the day and the hour are kept secret. It is said that Mr. Brigham Young, despite his powerful will and high moral courage, does not show the remarkable personal intrepidity of Mr. Joseph Smith: his followers deny this, but it rests on the best and fairest Gentile evidence. He has guards at his gates, and he never appears in public unattended by friends and followers, who are of course armed. That such a mental anomaly often exists, those familiar with the biographies of the Brahmin officials at the courts of Poonah, Sattara, and other places in India, well know: many a “Pant,” whose reckless audacity in intrigue conducted under imminent danger of life argued the courage of a Cœur de Lion, was personally fearful as Hobbes, and displayed at the death the terrors of Robespierre. A moment of fear is recounted of St. Peter; Erasmus was not the stuff of which martyrs are made, and even the beau sabreur once ran. However, in the case of the Prophet there is an absolute necessity for precautions: as Gentiles have themselves owned to me, many a ruffian, if he found an opportunity, would, from pure love of notoriety, even without stronger incentive, try his revolver or his bowie-knife upon the “Big Mormon.”
On this occasion the place of Mr. Brigham Young was taken by President Bishop Hunter, a Pennsylvanian, whom even the most fanatic and intentionally evil-speaking anti-Mormon must regard with respect. Preceded by a brass band—“this people” delight in