“The Great Twenty-fourth of July.
“In my last I gave your readers a full account of the Mormon demonstrations on the anniversary of American independence. That done, they have now before them the celebration of their own independence. Adhesiveness is largely developed in the Mormon cranium. They will hold on to their notions. On the 24th of July, 1847, Brigham, at the head of the pioneers, entered this now beautiful valley—then a barren wilderness. Forgetful of the means that forced them here, the day was set apart for rejoicing. They laid aside the weeds of mourning, and consecrated the day to feasting and dancing. The Twenty-fourth is the day of deliverance that will be handed down to generations when the Fourth is immeasurably forgotten. Three years ago, two thousand persons were congregated at the head-waters of Big Cotton-wood, commemorating independence, when messengers from the East arrived with the intelligence that the troops were on the plains. I need not farther allude to what was then said and done; suffice it, things have been so disjointed since that Big Cotton-wood has been left alone in solitude. Setting aside the restraint of years, it seems that the faithful are to again enjoy themselves. The following card tells the marching orders; the interstices will be filled up with orations, songs, prayers, dances, and every kind of athletic game that the young may choose to indulge in:
“Twenty-fourth of July at the Head-quarters of Big Cotton-wood.—President Brigham Young respectfully invites —— to attend a picnic excursion to the lake in Big Cotton-wood Kanyon, on Tuesday, the 24th of July.
“Regulations.—You will be required to start so as to pass the first mill, about four miles up the kanyon, before twelve o’clock on Monday, the 23d, as no person will be allowed to pass that point after two o’clock P.M. of that day. All persons are forbidden to smoke segars or pipes, or kindle fires at any place in the kanyon, except on the camp-ground. The bishops are requested to accompany those invited from their respective wards, and see that each person is well fitted for the trip with good, substantial, steady teams, wagons, harness, hold-backs and locks, capable of completing the journey without repair, and a good driver, so as not to endanger the life of any individual. Bishops, heads of families, and leaders of small parties will, before passing the first mill, furnish a full and complete list of all persons accompanying them, and hand the same to the guard at the gate.
“Committee of Arrangements.—A. O. Smoot, John Sharp, L. W. Hardy, A. Cunningham, E. F. Sheets, F. Kesler, Thomas Callister, A. H. Raleigh, Henry Moon. J. C. Little, Marshal of the Day; Colonel R. T. Burton will arrange the Guard.
“Great Salt Lake City, July 10, 1860.”
Mr. Little also recounted to us his experiences among the Indians, whom he, like all the Mormons, firmly believed to be children of Israel under a cloud. He compared the medicine lodge to a masonic hall,FREE-MASONRY. and declared that the so-called Red Men had signs and grips like ourselves; and he related how an old chief, when certain symbolic actions were made to him, wept and wailed, thinking how he and his had neglected their observances. The Saints were at one time good masons; unhappily they wanted to be better. The angel of the Lord brought to Mr. Joseph Smith the lost key-words of several degrees, which caused him, when he appeared among the brotherhood of Illinois, to “work right ahead” of the highest, and to show them their ignorance of the greatest truths and benefits of masonry. The natural result was that their diploma was taken from them by the Grand Lodge, and they are not admitted to a Gentile gathering. Now heathens without the gate, they still cling to their heresy, and declare that other masonry is, like the Christian faith, founded upon truth, and originally of the eternal Church, but fallen away and far gone in error. There is no race, except perhaps antiquaries, more credulous than the brethren of the mystic craft. I have been told by one who may have deceived himself, but would not have deceived me, that the Royal Arch, notoriously a corruption of the Royal Arras, is known to the Bedouins of Arabia; while the dairy of the Neilgherry Todas, with its exclusion of women, and its rude ornamentation of crescents, circles, and triangles, was at once identified with the “old religion of the world whose vestiges survive among all people.” But these are themes unfit for an “entered apprentice.” Mr. Little corroborated concerning the Prairie Indians and the Yutas what is said of the settled tribes, namely, that the comforts of civilization tend to their destruction. The men, enervated by indoor life for half the year, are compelled at times to endure sudden privation, hardship, and fatigue, of which the results are rheumatism, consumption, and fatal catarrhs. Yet he believed that the “valleys of Ephraim” would yet be full of them. He spoke freely of the actualities and prospects of Mormonism. MORALITY.My companions asserted with truth that there is not among their number a single loafer, rich or poor, an idle gentleman or a lazy vagabond, a drunkard or a gambler, a beggar or a prostitute. Those honorable professions are membered by the Gentiles. They boasted, indeed, of what is sometimes owned by their enemies, that there are fewer robberies, murders, arsons, and rapes in Utah than in any other place of equal population in the world. They held that the laws of the United States are better adapted to secure the happiness of a small community than to consolidate the provinces of a continent into one huge empire, and they looked confidently forward to the spread of Mormonism over the world. They claimed for themselves, like other secessionists, “le droit sacré d’insurrection,” against which in vain the Gentiles raged and the federal government devised vain things. They declared themselves to be the salt of the Union, and that in the fullness of time they shall break the republic in pieces like a potter’s vessel. Of Washington, Jefferson, and the other sages of the Revolution they speak with all respect, describing them as instruments in the hand of the Almighty, and as Latter-Day Saints in will if not in deed. I was much pleased by their tolerance;TOLERANCE. but tolerance in the West is rather the effect of climate and occupation than of the reasoning faculty. Gentiles have often said before me that Mormonism is as good as any other religion, and that Mr. Joseph Smith “had as good a right to establish a Church as Luther, Calvin, Fox, Wesley, or even bluff King Hal.” The Mormons are certainly the least fanatical of our faiths, owning, like Hindoos, that every man should walk his own way, while claiming for themselves superiority in belief and politics. At Nauvoo they are said to have been puffed up by the rapid growth of their power, and to have been presumptuous, haughty, insolent, and overbearing; to have assumed a jurisdiction independent of, and sometimes hostile to, the nine counties around them and to the States; to have attached penalties to speaking evil of the Prophet; and to have denied the validity of legal documents, unless countersigned by him who was also mayor and general. They are certainly changed for the better in these days. With respect to their future views, the anti-Mormons assert that Saints have now been driven to the end of their tether, and must stand to fight or deliver; that the new Territory of Nevada will presently be a fatal rival to them; that the States will no longer tolerate this theocratic despotism in the bosom of a democracy; and that presently they must be wiped out. The Mormons already discern the dawning of a brighter day. In the reaction which has taken place in their favor they fear no organized attack by the United States on account of lobby influence at Washington, and the vis inertiæ inherent in so slow and unwieldy a body as the federal government. They count upon secession, quoting a certain proverb touching conjunctures when honest men come in. They believe that the supernatural aid of God, plus their vote, will presently make them a state. “Some time this side of the great millennium” they will realize their favorite dream, restoration (which might indeed happen in ten years) to their quondam Zion—Independence, Mo., the centre of the old terrestrial Paradise. Of this promised land their President said, with “something of prophetic strain,” “while water runs and grass grows, while virtue is lovely and vice hateful, and while a stone points out a sacred spot where a fragment of American liberty once was”—Lord Macaulay’s well-known Zealander shall apparently take his passage by Cunard’s—“I or my posterity will plead the cause of injured innocence, until Missouri makes atonement for all her sins, or sinks disgraced, degraded, and damned to hell, where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.” Then shall the Jews of the Old World rebuild the Temple of Solomon, and the Jews of the New World (the Mormons) recover their own Zion. Gog and Magog—that is to say, the kings of the Gentiles—and their hosts shall rise up against the Latter-Day Saints, who, guided by a prophet that wields the sword of Laban, shall mightily overthrow them at the battle of Armageddon. Then the spears, bows, and arrows (probably an abstruse allusion to the descendants of our Miniés and Armstrongs) shall be burned with fire seven years; the earth and its fullness shall be theirs, and the long-looked-for millennium shall come at last. And as prophecy without date is somewhat liable to be vague and indefinite, these great events are fixed in Mr. Joseph Smith’s Autobiography for the year of grace 1890. Meantime they can retire, if forbidden the Saskatchewan River and Vancouver’s Island, to the rich “minerales” in “Sonora of the Gold Mountains.”
On the morning of the next day, Sunday, the 16th of September, we mounted and rode slowly on. I had neglected to take “leggins,” and the loss of cuticle and cutis was deplorable. Once at the Tabernacle was enough: on this occasion, however, non-attendance was a mistake. There had been a little “miff” between Mr. President and the THE “GAUGE OF PHILOSOPHY.”“Gauge of Philosophy,” Mr. O. Pratt. The latter gentleman, who is also an apostle, is a highly though probably a self-educated man, not, as is stated in an English work, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin. The Usman of the New Faith, writer, preacher, theologian, missionary, astronomer, philosopher, and mathematician—especially in the higher branches—he has thrust thought into a faith of ceremony which is supposed to dispense with the trouble of thinking, and has intruded human learning into a scheme whose essence is the utter abrogation of the individual will. He is consequently suspected of too much learning; of relying, in fact, rather upon books and mortal paper than that royal road to all knowledge, inspiration from on high, and his tendencies to let loose these pernicious doctrines often bring him into trouble and place him below his position. In his excellent discourse delivered to-day he had declared the poverty of the Mormons, and was speedily put down by Mr. Brigham Young, who boasted the Saints to be the wealthiest (i. e., in good works and post-obit prospects) people in the world. I had tried my best to have the pleasure of half an hour’s conversation with the Gauge, who, however, for reasons unknown to me, declined. At the same meeting Mr. Heber C. Kimball solemnly consigned to a hotter place than the tropics Messrs. Bell and Livingston, the cause being their supposed complicity in bringing in the federal troops. I write it with regret, but both of these gentlemen, when the sad tidings were communicated to them, showed a quasi-Pharaonic hardening of the carnal heart. A measure, however, was on this occasion initiated, which more than compensated for these small ridicules. MISSIONARIES.To the present date missionaries were sent forth, to Canton even, or Kurrachee, like the apostles of Judea, working their passages and supporting themselves by handiwork; being wholly without purse or scrip, baggage or salary, they left their business to languish, and their families to want. When man has no coin of his own, he is naturally disposed to put his hand into his neighbor’s pocket, and the greediness of a few unprincipled propagandists, despite the prohibitions of the Prophet, had caused a scandal by the richness of their “plunder.” A new ordinance was therefore issued to the thirty new nominees.[196] The missionaries were forbidden to take from their converts, and in compensation they would receive regular salaries, for which funds were to be collected in the several wards. On the same evening I was informed a single ward, the 13th, subscribed $3000. That Sunday was an important day to myself also; I posted a “sick certificate,” advising extension of leave for six months, signed by W. F. Anderson, M.D., of the University of Maryland. It was not wholly en règle; it required two signatures and the counter-signature of H. B. M.’s consul to affirm that the signatures were bonâ fide, not “bogus.” But the signer was the only M.D. in the place, H. B. M.’s nearest consul was distant about 600 miles, and to suggest that a gentleman may be quietly forging or falsifying his signature is to incur an unjustifiable personal risk in the Far West.
[196] The following is a copy of the elder’s certificate, officially signed by the president and his two councilors, and supplied to the departing missionary:
“To all Persons to whom this Letter shall come: