Greater Britain Part 10

Advertis.e.m.e.nts of freight-trains now starting to the East, of mail-coaches to Buckskin Joe--advertis.e.m.e.nts slanting, topsy-turvy, and sideways turned--complete the outer sheet; but some of them, through bad ink, printer's errors, strange English, and wilder Latin, are wholly unintelligible. It is hard to make much of this, for instance: "Mr.

aesculapius, no offense, I hope, as this is written extempore and ipso facto. But, perhaps, I ought not to disregard ex unci disce omnes."

In an editorial on the English visitors then in Denver, the chance of putting into their mouths a puff of the Territory of Colorado was not lost. We were made to "appreciate the native energy and wealth of industry necessary in building up such a Star of Empire as Colorado."

The next paragraph is communicated from Conejos, in the south of the Territory, and says: "The election has now pa.s.sed off, and I am confident that we can beat any ward in Denver, and give them two in the game, for rascality in voting." Another leader calls on the people of Denver to remember that there are two men in the calaboose for mule stealing, and that the last man locked up for the offense was allowed to escape: some cottonwood-trees still exist, it believes. In former times, there was for the lynching here hinted at a reason which no longer exists: a man shut up in jail built of adobe, or sun-dried brick, could scratch his way through the crumbling wall in two days, so the citizens generally hanged him in _one_. Now that the jails are in brick and stone, the job might safely be left to the sheriff; but the people of Denver seem to trust themselves better even than they do their delegate, Bob Wilson.

A year or two ago, the jails were so crazy that Coloradan criminals, when given their choice whether they would be hanged in a week, or "as soon after breakfast to-morrow as shall be convenient to the sheriff and agreeable, Mr. Prisoner, to you," as the Texan formula runs, used to elect for the quick delivery, on the ground that otherwise they would catch their deaths of cold--at least so the Denver story runs. They have, however, a method of getting the jails inspected here which might be found useful at home; it consists in the simple plan of giving the governor of a jail an opportunity of seeing the practical working of the system by locking him up inside for awhile.

These far-western papers are written or compiled under difficulties almost overwhelming. Mr. Frederick J. Stanton, at Denver, told me that often he had been forced to "set up" and print as well as "edit" the paper which he owns. Type is not always to be found. In its early days, the _Alta Californian_ once appeared with a paragraph which ran: "I have no VV in my type, as there is none in the Spanish alphabet. I have sent to the Sandvvich Islands for this letter; in the mean time vve must use tvvo V's."

Till I had seen the editors' rooms in Denver, Austin, and Salt Lake City, I had no conception of the point to which discomfort could be carried. For all these hards.h.i.+ps, payment is small and slow. It consists often of little but the satisfaction which it is to the editor's vanity to be "liquored" by the best man of the place, treated to an occasional chat with the governor of the Territory, to a chair in the overland mail office whenever he walks in, to the hand of the hotel proprietor whenever he comes near the bar, and to a pistol-shot once or twice in a month.

It must not be supposed that the _Vedette_ does the Mormons no harm; the perpetual reiteration in the Eastern and English papers of three sets of stories alone would suffice to break down a flouris.h.i.+ng power.

The three lines that are invariably taken as foundations for their stories are these--that the Mormon women are wretched, and would fain get away, but are checked by the Danites; that the Mormons are ready to fight with the Federal troops with the hope of success; that robbery of the people by the apostles and elders is at the bottom of Mormonism--or, as the _Vedette_ puts it, "on t.i.thing and loaning hang all the law and the profits."

If the mere fact of the existence of the _Vedette_ effectually refutes the stories of the acts of the Danites in these modern days, and therefore disposes of the first set of stories, the third is equally answered by a glance at its pages. Columns of paragraphs, sheets of advertis.e.m.e.nts, testify to the foundation by industry, in the most frightful desert on earth, of an agricultural community which California herself cannot match. The Mormons may well call their country "Deseret"--"land of the bee." The process of fertilization goes on day by day. Six or seven years ago, Southern Utah was a desert bare as Salt Bush Plains. Irrigation from the fresh-water lake was carried out under episcopal direction, and the result is the growth of fifty kinds of grapes alone. Cotton-mills and vineyards are springing up on every side, and "Dixie" begins to look down on its parent, the Salt Lake Valley.

Irrigation from the mountain rills has done this miracle, _we_ say, though the Saints undoubtedly believe that G.o.d's hand is in it, helping miraculously "His peculiar people."

In face of Mormon prosperity, it is worthy of notice that Utah was settled on the Wakefieldian system, though Brigham knows nothing of Wakefield. Town population and country population grew up side by side in every valley, and the plow was not allowed to gain on the machine-saw and the shuttle.

It is not only in water and verdure that Utah is naturally poor. On the mining-map of the States, the countries that lie around Utah--Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Montana--are one blaze of yellow, and blue, and red, colored from end to end with the tints that are used to denote the existence of precious metals. Utah is blank at present--blank, the Mormons say, by nature; Gentiles say, merely through the absence of survey; and they do their best to circ.u.mvent mother nature. Every fall the "strychnine" party raise the cry of gold discoveries in Utah, in the hope of bringing a rush of miners down to Salt Lake City, too late for them to get away again before the snows begin. The presence of some thousands of broad-brimmed rowdies in Salt Lake City, for a winter, would be the death of Mormonism, they believe. Within the last few days, I am told that prospecting parties have found "pay dirt" in City Canyon, which, however, they had first themselves carefully "salted" with gold dust. There is coal at the settlement at which we breakfasted on our way from Weber River to Salt Lake; and Stenhouse tells us that the only difference between the Utah coal and that of Wales is, that the latter will burn, and the former _won't_!

Poor as Utah is by nature, clear though it be that whatever value the soil now possesses, represents only the loving labor bestowed upon it by the Saints, it is doubtful whether they are to continue to possess it, even though the remaining string of _Vedette_-born stories a.s.sert that Brigham "threatens h.e.l.l" to the Gentiles who would expel him.

The constant, teasing, wasp-like pertinacity of the _Vedette_ has done some harm to liberty of thought throughout the world.

CHAPTER XVII.

UTAH.

"When you are driven hence, where shall you go?"

"We take no thought for the morrow; the Lord will guide his people," was my rebuke from Elder Stenhouse, delivered in the half-solemn, half-laughing manner characteristic of the Saints. "You say miracles are pa.s.sed and gone," he went on; "but if G.o.d has ever interfered to protect a church, he has interposed on our behalf. In 1857, when the whole army of the United States was let slip at us under Albert S. Johnson, we were given strength to turn them aside, and defeat them without a blow. The Lord permitted us to dictate our own terms of peace. Again, when the locusts came in such swarms as to blacken the whole valley, and fill the air with a living fog, G.o.d sent millions of strange new gulls, and these devoured the locusts, and saved us from destruction. The Lord will guide his people."

Often as I discussed the future of Utah and the church with Mormons, I could never get from them any answer but this; they would never even express a belief, as will many Western Gentiles, that no attempt will be made to expel them from the country they now hold. They cannot help seeing how immediate is the danger: from the American press there comes a cry, "Let us have this polygamy put down; its existence is a disgrace to England from which it springs, a shame to America in which it dwells, to the Federal government whose laws it outrages and defies. How long will you continue to tolerate this retrogression from Christianity, this insult to civilization?"

With the New Englanders, the question is political as well as theological, personal as well as political--political, mainly because there is a great likeness between Mormon expressions of belief in the divine origin of polygamy and the Southern answers to the Abolitionists: "Abraham was a slaveowner, and father of the faithful;" "David, the best-loved of G.o.d, was a polygamist"--"show us a biblical prohibition of slavery;" "show us a denunciation of polygamy, and we'll believe you."

It is this similarity of the defensive positions of Mormonism and slavery which has led to the present peril of the Salt Lake Church: the New Englanders look on the Mormons, not only as heretics, but as friends to the slaveowners; on the other hand, if you hear a man warmly praise the Mormons, you may set him down as a Southerner, or at the least a Democrat.

Another reason for the hostility of New England is, that while the discredit of Mormonism falls upon America, the American people have but little share in its existence: a few of the leaders are New Englanders and New Yorkers, but of the rank and file, not one. In every ten immigrants, the missionaries count upon finding that four come from England, two from Wales, one from the Scotch Lowlands, one from Sweden, one from Switzerland, and one from Prussia: from Catholic countries, none; from all America, none. It is through this purely local and temporary a.s.sociation of ideas that we see the strange sight of a party of tolerant, large-hearted churchmen eager to march their armies against a church.

If we put aside for a moment the question of the moral right to crush Mormonism in the name of truth, we find that it is, at all events, easy enough to do it. There is no difficulty in finding legal excuses for action--no danger in backing Federal legislation with military force.

The legal point is clear enough--clear upon a double issue. Congress can legislate for the Territories in social matters--has, in fact, already done so. Polygamy is at this moment punishable in Utah, but the law is, pending the completion of the railroad, not enforced. Without extraordinary action, its enforcement would be impossible, for Mormon juries will give no verdict antagonistic to their church; but it is not only in this matter that the Mormons have been offenders. They have sinned also against the land laws of America. The church, Brigham, Kimball, all are landholders on a scale not contemplated by the "Homestead" laws--unless to be forbidden; doubly, therefore, are the Mormons at the mercy of the Federal Congress. There is a loophole open in the matter of polygamy--that adopted by the New York Communists when they chose each a woman to be his _legal_ wife, and so put themselves without the reach of law. This method of escape, I have been a.s.sured by Mormon elders, is one that nothing could force them to adopt. Rather than indirectly destroy their church by any such weak compliance, they would again renounce their homes, and make their painful way across the wilderness to some new Deseret.

It is not likely that New England interference will hinge upon plurality. A "difficulty" can easily be made to arise upon the land question, and no breach of the principle of toleration will, on the surface at least, be visible. No surveys have been held in the Territory since 1857, no lands within the territorial limits have been sold by the Federal land office. Not only have the limitations of the "Homestead"

and "Pre-emption" laws been disregarded, but Salt Lake City, with its palace, its theater, and hotels, is built upon the public lands of the United States. On the other hand, Mexican t.i.tles are respected in Arizona and New Mexico; and as Utah was Mexican soil when, before the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Mormons settled on its wastes, it seems hard that their claims should not be equally respected.

After all, the theory of Spanish authority was a ridiculous fiction. The Mormons were the first occupants of the country which now forms the Territories of Utah and Colorado and the State of Nevada, and were thus annexed to the United States without being in the least degree consulted. It is true that they might be said to have occupied the country as American citizens, and so to have carried American sovereignty with them into the wilderness; but this, again, is a European, not an American theory. American citizens are such, not as men born upon a certain soil, but as being citizens of a State of the Union, or an organized Territory; and though the Mormons may be said to have accepted their position as citizens of the Territory of Utah, still they did so on the understanding that it should continue a Mormon country, where Gentiles should at the most be barely tolerated.

We need not go further into the mazes of public law, or of _ex post facto_ American enactments. The Mormons themselves admit that the letter of the law is against them; but say that while it is claimed that Boston and Philadelphia may fitly legislate for the Mormons three thousand miles away, because Utah is a Territory, not a State, men forget that it is Boston and Philadelphia themselves who force Utah to remain a Territory, although they admitted the less populous Nebraska, Nevada, and Oregon to their rights as States.

If, wholly excluding morals from the calculation, there can be no doubt upon the points of law, there can be as little upon the military question. Of the fifteen hundred miles of waterless tract or desert that we crossed, seven hundred have been annihilated, and 1869 may see the railroad track in the streets of Salt Lake City. This not only settles the military question, but is meant to do so. When men lay four miles of railroad in a day, and average two miles a day for a whole year, when a government bribes high enough to secure so startling a rate of progress, there is something more than commerce or settlement in the wind. The Pacific Railroad is not merely meant to be the shortest line from New York to San Francisco; it is meant to put down Mormonism.

If the Federal government decides to attack these peaceable citizens of a Territory that should long since have been a State, they certainly will not fight, and they no less surely will not disperse. Polynesia or Mexico is their goal, and in the Marquesas or in Sonora they may, perhaps, for a few years at least, be let alone, again to prove the forerunners of English civilization--planters of Saxon inst.i.tutions and the English tongue; once more to perform their mission, as they performed it in Missouri and in Utah.

When we turn from the simple legal question, and the still more simple military one, to the moral point involved in the forcible suppression of plural marriage in one State by the might of all the others, we find the consideration of the matter confused by the apparent a.n.a.logy between the so-called crusade against slavery and the proposed crusade against polygamy. There is no real resemblance between the cases. In the strictest sense there was no more a crusade against slavery than there is a crusade against snakes on the part of a man who strikes one that bit him. The purest republicans have never pretended that the abolition of slavery was the justification of the war. The South rose in rebellion, and in rising gave New England an opportunity for the destruction in America of an inst.i.tution at variance with the republican form of government, and aggressive in its tendencies. So far is polygamy from being opposed in spirit to democracy, that it is impossible here, in Salt Lake City, not to see that it is the most leveling of all social inst.i.tutions--Mormonism the most democratic of religions. A rich man in New York leaves his two or three sons a large property, and founds a family; a rich Mormon leaves his twenty or thirty sons each a miserable fraction of his money, and each son must trudge out into the world, and toil for himself. Brigham's sons--those of them who are not gratuitously employed in hard service for the church in foreign parts--are cattle-drivers, small farmers, ranchmen. One of them was the only poorly-clad boy I saw in Salt Lake City. A system of polygamy, in which all the wives, and consequently all the children, are equal before the law, is a powerful engine of democracy.

The general moral question of whether Mormonism is to be put down by the sword, because the Latter-day Saints differ in certain social customs from other Christians, is one for the preacher and the casuist, not for a traveling observer of English-speaking countries as they are.

Mormonism comes under my observation as the religious and social system of the most successful of all pioneers of English civilization. From this point of view it would be an immediate advantage to the world that they should be driven out once more into the wilderness, again to found an England in Mexico, in Polynesia, or on Red River. It may be an immediate gain to civilization, but America herself was founded by schismatics upon a basis of tolerance to all; and there are still to be found Americans who think it would be the severest blow that has been dealt to liberty since the St. Bartholomew, were she to lend her enormous power to systematic persecution at the cannon's mouth.

The question of where to draw the line is one of interest. Great Britain draws it at black faces, and would hardly tolerate the existence among her white subjects in London of such a sect as that of the Maharajas of Bombay. "If you draw the line at black faces," say the Mormons, "why should you not let the Americans draw it at two thousand miles from Was.h.i.+ngton?"

The moral question cannot be dissociated from Mormon history. The Saints marched from Missouri and Illinois, into no man's land, intending there to live out of the reach of those who differed from them, as do the Russian dissenters transported in past ages to the provinces of Taurida and Kherson. It is by no fault of theirs, they say, that they are citizens of the United States.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PROFILE OF "JOE SMITH."]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FULL FACE OF "JOE SMITH."--P. 150.]

There is in the far West a fast increasing party who would leave people to be polygynists, polyandrists, Free-lovers, Shakers, or monogamists, as they please; who would place the social relations as they have placed religion--out of the reach of the law. I need hardly say that public opinion has such overwhelming force in America that it is probable that even under a system of perfect toleration by law, two forms of the family relation would never be found existing side by side. Polygamists would continue to migrate to Mormon land, Free-lovers to New York, Shakers to New England. Some will find in this a reason for, and some a reason against, a change. In any case, a crusade against Mormonism will hardly draw sympathy from Nebraska, from Michigan, from Kansas.

Many are found who say: "Leave Mormonism to itself, and it will die."

The Pacific Railroad alone, they think, will kill it. Those Americans who know Utah best are not of this opinion. Mormonism is no superst.i.tion of the past. There is huge vitality in the polygamic church. Emerson once spoke to me of Unitarianism, Buddhism, and Mormonism as three religions which, right or wrong, are full of force. "The Mormons only need to be persecuted," said Elder Frederick to me, "to become as powerful as the Mohammedans." It is, indeed, more than doubtful whether polygamy can endure side by side with American monogamy--it is certain that Mormon priestly power and Mormon mysteries cannot in the long run withstand the presence of a large Gentile population; but, if Mormon t.i.tles to land are respected, and if great mineral wealth is not found to exist in Utah, Mormonism will not be exposed to any much larger Gentile intrusion than it has to cope with now. Settlers who can go to California or to Colorado "pares" will hardly fix themselves in the Utah desert. The Mexican table-lands will be annexed before Gentile immigrants seriously trouble Brigham. Gold and New England are the most dreaded foes of Mormondom. Nothing can save polygamy if lodes and placers such as those of all the surrounding States are found in Utah; nothing can save it if the New Englanders determine to put it down.

Were Congress to enforce the Homestead laws in Utah, and provide for the presence of an overwhelming Gentile population, polygamy would not only die of itself, but drag Mormonism down in its fall. Brigham knows more completely than we can the necessity of isolation. He would not be likely to await the blow which increased Gentile immigration would deal his power.

If New England decides to act, the table-lands of Mexico will see played once more the sad comedy of Utah. Again the Mormons will march into Mexican territory, again to wake some day, and find it American. Theirs, however, will once more be the pride of having proved the pioneers of that English civilization which is destined to overspread the temperate world. The treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo annexed Utah to the United States, but Brigham Young annexed it to Anglo-Saxondom.

CHAPTER XVIII.

NAMELESS ALPS.

At the post-office, in Main Street, I gave Mr. Dixon a few last messages for home--he one to me for some Egyptian friends; and, with a shake and a wave, we parted, to meet in London after between us completing the circuit of the globe.

This time again I was not alone: an Irish miner from Montana, with a bottle of whisky, a revolver and pick, shared the back-seat with the mail-bags. Before we had forded the Jordan, he had sung "The Wearing of the Green," and told me the day and the hour at which the republic was to be proclaimed at his native village in Galway. Like a true Irishman of the South or West, he was happy only when he could be generous; and so much joy did he show when I discovered that the cork had slipped from my flask, and left me dependent on him for my escape from the alkaline poison, that I half believed he had drawn it himself when we stopped to change horses for mules. Certain it is that he pressed his whisky so fast upon me and the various drivers, that the day we most needed its aid there was none, and the bottle itself had ended its career by serving as a target for a trial of breech-loading pistols.

At the sixth ranch from the city, which stands on the sh.o.r.es of the lake, and close to the foot of the mountains, we found Porter Rockwell, accredited chief of the Danites, the "Avenging Angels" of Utah, and leader, it is said, of the "White Indians" at the Mountain Meadows ma.s.sacre.

Since 1840 there has been no name of greater terror in the West than Rockwell's; but in 1860 his death was reported in England, and the career of the great Brother of Gideon was ended, as we thought. I was told in Salt Lake City that he was still alive and well, and his portrait was among those that I got from Mr. Ottinger; but I am not convinced that the man I saw, and whose picture I possess, was in fact _the_ Porter Rockwell who murdered Stephenson in 1842. It may be convenient to have two or three men to pa.s.s by the one name; and I suspect that this is so in the Rockwell case.

Under the name of Porter Rockwell some man (or men) has been the terror of the Mississippi Valley, of plains and plateau, for thirty years. In 1841, Joe Smith prophesied the death of Governor Boggs, of Missouri, within six months: within that time he was shot--rumor said by Rockwell.

When the Danite was publicly charged with having done the deed for fifty dollars and a wagon-team, he swore he'd shoot any man who said he'd shot Boggs _for gain;_ "but if I am charged with shooting him, they'll have to prove it"--words that looked like guilt. In 1842 Stephenson died by the same hand, it is believed. Rockwell was known to be the working chief of the band organized in 1838 to defend the First Presidency by any means whatever, fair or foul, known at various times as the "Big Fan" that should winnow the chaff from the wheat; the "Daughter of Zion," the "Destructives," the "Flying Angels," the "Brother of Gideon,"

the "Destroying Angels." "Arise and thresh, O daughter of Zion, for I will make thy horn iron, and will make thy hoofs bra.s.s; and thou shalt beat in pieces many people; and I will consecrate their gain unto the Lord, and their substance unto the lords of the whole earth"--this was the motto of the band.