Title: The Mormons - A Discourse Delivered Before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania
Author: Kane, Thomas L.
Language: English
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THE MORMONS.

A

DISCOURSE

DELIVERED BEFORE

THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

OF

PENNSYLVANIA:

MARCH 26, 1850.

BY THOMAS L. KANE.


PHILADELPHIA:

KING & BAIRD, PRINTERS, SANSOM STREET.

1850.



DISCOURSE.

A few years ago, ascending the Upper Mississippi in the Autumn, when
its waters were low, I was compelled to travel by land past the region
of the Rapids. My road lay through the Half-Breed Tract, a fine section
of Iowa, which the unsettled state of its land-titles had appropriated
as a sanctuary for coiners, horse thieves, and other outlaws. I had
left my steamer at Keokuk, at the foot of the Lower Fall, to hire a
carriage, and to contend for some fragments of a dirty meal with the
swarming flies, the only scavengers of the locality. From this place
to where the deep water of the river returns, my eye wearied to see
everywhere sordid, vagabond and idle settlers; and a country marred,
without being improved, by their careless hands.

I was descending the last hillside upon my journey, when a landscape in
delightful contrast broke upon my view. Half encircled by a bend of the
river, a beautiful city lay glittering in the fresh morning sun; its
bright new dwellings, set in cool green gardens, ranging up around a
stately dome-shaped hill, which was crowned by a noble marble edifice,
whose high tapering spire was radiant with white and gold. The city
appeared to cover several miles; and beyond it, in the back ground,
there rolled off a fair country, chequered by the careful lines of
fruitful husbandry. The unmistakable marks of industry, enterprise and
educated wealth, everywhere, made the scene one of singular and most
striking beauty.

It was a natural impulse to visit this inviting region. I procured a
skiff, and rowing across the river, landed at the chief wharf of the
city. No one met me there. I looked, and saw no one. I could hear no
one move; though the quiet everywhere was such that I heard the flies
buzz, and the water-ripples break against the shallow of the beach. I
walked through the solitary streets. The town lay as in a dream, under
some deadening spell of loneliness, from which I almost feared to wake
it. For plainly it had not slept long. There was no grass growing up in
the paved ways. Rains had not entirely washed away the prints of dusty
footsteps.

Yet I went about unchecked. I went into empty workshops, ropewalks and
smithies. The spinner's wheel was idle; the carpenter had gone from his
work-bench and shavings, his unfinished sash and casing. Fresh bark
was in the tanner's vat, and the fresh-chopped lightwood stood piled
against the baker's oven. The blacksmith's shop was cold; but his coal
heap and ladling pool and crooked water horn were all there, as if he
had just gone off for a holiday. No work people anywhere looked to know
my errand. If I went into the gardens, clinking the wicket-latch loudly
after me, to pull the marygolds, heart's-ease and lady-slippers, and
draw a drink with the water sodden well-bucket and its noisy chain;
or, knocking off with my stick the tall heavy-headed dahlias and
sunflowers, hunted over the beds for cucumbers and love-apples,--no
one called out to me from any opened window, or dog sprang forward to
bark an alarm. I could have supposed the people hidden in the houses,
but the doors were unfastened; and when at last I timidly entered them,
I found dead ashes white upon the hearths, and had to tread a tiptoe,
as if walking down the aisle of a country church, to avoid rousing
irreverent echoes from the naked floors.

On the outskirts of the town was the city graveyard. But there was no
record of Plague there, nor did it in anywise differ much from other
Protestant American cemeteries. Some of the mounds were not long
sodded; some of the stones were newly set, their dates recent, and
their black inscriptions glossy in the mason's hardly dried lettering
ink. Beyond the graveyard, out in the fields, I saw, in one spot
hard-by where the fruited boughs of a young orchard had been roughly
torn down, the still smouldering embers of a barbecue fire, that had
been constructed of rails from the fencing round it. It was the latest
sign of life there. Fields upon fields of heavy-headed yellow grain lay
rotting ungathered upon the ground. No one was at hand to take in their
rich harvest. As far as the eye could reach, they stretched away--they,
sleeping too in the hazy air of Autumn.

Only two portions of the city seemed to suggest the import of this
mysterious solitude. On the southern suburb, the houses looking out
upon the country showed, by their splintered woodwork and walls
battered to the foundation, that they had lately been the mark of a
destructive cannonade. And in and around the splendid Temple, which
had been the chief object of my admiration, armed men were barracked,
surrounded by their stacks of musketry and pieces of heavy ordnance.
These challenged me to render an account of myself, and why I had had
the temerity to cross the water without a written permit from a leader
of their band.

Though these men were generally more or less under the influence of
ardent spirits; after I had explained myself as a passing stranger,
they seemed anxious to gain my good opinion. They told me the story of
the Dead City: that it had been a notable manufacturing and commercial
mart, sheltering over 20,000 persons; that they had waged war with
its inhabitants for several years, and had been finally successful
only a few days before my visit, in an action fought in front of the
ruined suburb; after which, they had driven them forth at the point
of the sword. The defence, they said, had been obstinate, but gave
way on the third day's bombardment. They boasted greatly of their
prowess, especially in this Battle, as they called it; but I discovered
they were not of one mind as to certain of the exploits that had
distinguished it; one of which, as I remember, was, that they had slain
a father and his son, a boy of fifteen, not long residents of the fated
city, whom they admitted to have borne a character without reproach.

They also conducted me inside the massive sculptured walls of the
curious Temple, in which they said the banished inhabitants were
accustomed to celebrate the mystic rites of an unhallowed worship. They
particularly pointed out to me certain features of the building, which,
having been the peculiar objects of a former superstitious regard, they
had as matter of duty sedulously defiled and defaced. The reputed sites
of certain shrines they had thus particularly noticed, and various
sheltered chambers, in one of which was a deep well, constructed they
believed with a dreadful design. Beside these, they led me to see a
large and deep chiselled marble vase or basin, supported upon twelve
oxen, also of marble, and of the size of life, of which they told some
romantic stories. They said, the deluded persons, most of whom were
immigrants from a great distance, believed their Deity countenanced
their reception here of a baptism of regeneration, as proxies for
whomsoever they held in warm affection in the countries from which
they had come: That here parents "went into the water" for their lost
children, children for their parents, widows for their spouses, and
young persons for their lovers: That thus the Great Vase came to be for
them associated with all dear and distant memories, and was therefore
the object, of all others in the building, to which they attached the
greatest degree of idolatrous affection. On this account, the victors
had so diligently desecrated it, as to render the apartment in which it
was contained too noisome to abide in.

They permitted me also to ascend into the steeple, to see where it had
been lightning-struck on the Sabbath before; and to look out, East and
South, on wasted farms like those I had seen near the City, extending
till they were lost in the distance. Here, in the face of the pure day,
close to the scar of the Divine wrath left by the thunderbolt, were
fragments of food, cruises of liquor and broken drinking vessels, with
a bass drum and a steam-boat signal bell, of which I afterwards learned
the use with pain.

It was after nightfall, when I was ready to cross the river on my
return. The wind had freshened since the sunset; and the water beating
roughly into my little boat, I headed higher up the stream than the
point I had left in the morning, and landed where a faint glimmering
light invited me to steer.

Here, among the dock and rushes, sheltered only by the darkness,
without roof between them and the sky, I came upon a crowd of several
hundred human creatures, whom my movements roused from uneasy slumber
upon the ground.

Passing these on my way to the light, I found it came from a tallow
candle in a paper funnel-shade, such as is used by street venders of
apples and pea-nuts, and which flaring and guttering away in the bleak
air oft the water, shone flickeringly on the emaciated features of
a man in the last stage of a bilious remittent fever. They had done
their best for him. Over his head was something like a tent, made of a
sheet or two, and he rested on a but partially ripped open old straw
mattress, with a hair sofa cushion under his head for a pillow. His
gaping jaw and glazing eye told how short a time he would monopolize
these luxuries; though a seemingly bewildered and excited person, who
might have been his wife, seemed to find hope in occasionally forcing
him to swallow awkwardly measured sips of the tepid river water from
a burned and battered bitter smelling tin coffee-pot. Those who
knew better had furnished the apothecary he needed--a toothless old
bald-head, whose manner had the repulsive dullness of a familiar with
death scenes. He, so long as I remained, mumbled in his patient's ear a
monotonous and melancholy prayer, between the pauses of which I heard
the hiccup and sobbing of two little girls, who were sitting up on a
piece of drift wood outside.

Dreadful, indeed, was the suffering of these forsaken beings. Cowed
and cramped by cold and sunburn, alternating as each weary day and
night dragged on, they were, almost all of them, the crippled victims
of disease. They were there because they had no homes, nor hospital
nor poor-house nor friends to offer them any. They could not satisfy
the feeble cravings of their sick: they had not bread to quiet the
fractious hunger cries of their children. Mothers and babes, daughters
and grandparents, all of them alike, were bivouacked in tatters,
wanting even covering to comfort those whom the sick shiver of fever
was searching to the marrow.

These were Mormons, famishing, in Lee county, Iowa, in the fourth week
of the month of September, in the year of our Lord 1846. The city,--it
was Nauvoo, Illinois. The Mormons were the owners of that city, and
the smiling country round. And those who had stopped their ploughs,
who had silenced their hammers, their axes, their shuttles and their
workshop wheels; those who had put out their fires, who had eaten their
food, spoiled their orchards, and trampled under foot their thousands
of acres of unharvested bread; these,--were the keepers of their
dwellings, the carousers in their Temple,--whose drunken riot insulted
the ears of their dying.

I think it was as I turned from the wretched night-watch of which I
have spoken, that I first listened to the sounds of revel of a party of
the guard within the city. Above the distant hum of the voices of many,
occasionally rose distinct the loud oath-tainted exclamation, and the
falsely intonated scrap of vulgar song;--but lest this requiem should
go unheeded, every now and then, when their boisterous orgies strove to
attain a sort of ecstatic climax, a cruel spirit of insulting frolic
carried some of them up into the high belfry of the Temple steeple, and
there, with the wicked childishness of inebriates, they whooped, and
shrieked, and beat the drum that I had seen, and rang in charivaric
unison their loud-tongued steam-boat bell.

They were, all told, not more than six hundred and forty persons who
were thus lying on the river flats. But the Mormons in Nauvoo and its
dependencies had been numbered the year before at over twenty thousand.
Where were they? They had last been seen, carrying in mournful trains
their sick and wounded, halt and blind, to disappear behind the western
horizon, pursuing the phantom of another home. Hardly anything else was
known of them: and people asked with curiosity, What had been their
fate--what their fortunes?

I purpose making these questions the subject of my Lecture. Since the
expulsion of the Mormons, to the present date, I have been intimately
conversant with the details of their history. But I shall invite your
attention most particularly to an account of what happened to them
during their first year in the Wilderness; because at this time more
than any other, being lost to public view, they were the subjects of
fable and misconception. Happily, it was during this period I myself
moved with them; and earned, at dear price, as some among you are
aware, my right to speak with authority of them and their character,
their trials, achievements and intentions.

The party encountered by me at the river shore were the last of the
Mormons that left the city. They had all of them engaged the year
before, that they would vacate their homes, and seek some other place
of refuge. It had been the condition of a truce between them and their
assailants; and as an earnest of their good faith, the chief elders and
some others of obnoxious standing, with their families, were to set out
for the West in the Spring of 1846. It had been stipulated in return,
that the rest of the Mormons might remain behind in the peaceful
enjoyment of their Illinois abode, until their leaders, with their
exploring party, could with all diligence select for them a new place
of settlement beyond the Rocky Mountains, in California, or elsewhere,
and until they had opportunity to dispose to the best advantage of the
property which they were then to leave.

Some renewed symptoms of hostile feeling had, however, determined
the pioneer party to begin their work before the Spring. It was, of
course, anticipated that this would be a perilous service; but it was
regarded as a matter of self-denying duty. The ardor and emulation of
many, particularly the devout and the young, were stimulated by the
difficulties it involved; and the ranks of the party were therefore
filled up with volunteers from among the most effective and responsible
members of the sect. They began their march in midwinter; and by the
beginning of February, nearly all of them were on the road, many of
their wagons having crossed the Mississippi on the ice.

Under the most favoring circumstances, an expedition of this sort,
undertaken at such a season of the year, could scarcely fail to be
disastrous. [A] But the pioneer company had to set out in haste,
and were very imperfectly supplied with necessaries. The cold was
intense. They moved in the teeth of keen-edged northwest winds, such
as sweep down the Iowa peninsula from the ice-bound regions of the
timber-shaded Slave Lake and Lake of the Woods: on the Bald Prairie
there, nothing above the dead grass breaks their free course over the
hard rolled hills. Even along the scattered water courses, where they
broke the thick ice to give their cattle drink, the annual autumn fires
had left little wood of value. The party, therefore, often wanted
for good camp fires, the first luxury of all travellers; but to men
insufficiently furnished with tents and other appliances of shelter,
almost an essential to life. After days of fatigue, their nights were
often passed in restless efforts to save themselves from freezing.
Their stock of food also proved inadequate; and as their systems became
impoverished, their suffering from cold increased.

Sickened with catarrhal affections, manacled by the fetters of
dreadfully acute rheumatisms, some contrived for a-while to get over
the shortening day's march, and drag along some others. But the sign of
an impaired circulation soon began to show itself in the liability of
all to be dreadfully frost-bitten. The hardiest and strongest became
helplessly crippled. About the same time, the strength of their beasts
of draught began to fail. The small supply of provender they could
carry with them had given out. The winter-bleached prairie straw proved
devoid of nourishment; and they could only keep them from starving
by seeking for the browse, as it is called, or green bark and tender
buds and branches, of the cotton-wood and other stinted growths of the
hollows.

To return to Nauvoo was apparently the only escape; but this would
have been to give occasion for fresh mistrust, and so to bring new
trouble to those they had left there behind them. They resolved at
least to hold their ground, and to advance as they might, were it only
by limping through the deep snows a few slow miles a day. They found a
sort of comfort in comparing themselves to the Exiles of Siberia, [B]
and sought cheerfulness in earnest prayings for the Spring,--longed for
as morning by the tossing sick.

The Spring came at last. It overtook them in the Sac and Fox country,
still on the naked prairie, not yet half way over the trail they were
following between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. But it brought
its own share of troubles with it. The months with which it opened
proved nearly as trying as the worst of winter.

The snow and sleet and rain, which fell as it appeared to them without
intermission, made the road over the rich prairie soil as impassable
as one vast bog of heavy black mud. Sometimes they would fasten the
horses and oxen of four or five wagons to one, and attempt to get ahead
in this way, taking turns; but at the close of a day of hard toil for
themselves and their cattle, they would find themselves a quarter
or half a mile from the place they left in the morning. The heavy
rains raised all the water-courses: the most trifling streams were
impassable. Wood fit for bridging was often not to be had, and in such
cases the only resource was to halt for the freshets to subside,--a
matter in the case of the headwaters of the Chariton, for instance, of
over three weeks' delay.

These were dreary waitings upon Providence. The most spirited and
sturdy murmured most at their forced inactivity. And even the women,
whose heroic spirits had been proof against the lowest thermometric
fall, confessed their tempers fluctuated with the ceaseless variations
of the barometer. They complained, too, that the health of their
children suffered more. It was the fact, that the open winds of March
and April brought with them more mortal sickness than the sharpest
freezing weather.

The frequent burials made the hardiest sicken. On the soldier's march,
it is a matter of discipline, that after the rattle of musketry over
his comrade's grave, he shall tramp it to the music of some careless
tune in a lively quick-step. But, in the Mormon camp, the companion who
lay ill and gave up the ghost within view of all, all saw as he lay
stretched a corpse, and all attended to his last resting-place. It was
a sorrow then, too, of itself to simple-hearted people, the deficient
pomps of their imperfect style of funeral. The general hopefulness of
human,--including Mormon--nature, was well illustrated by the fact,
that the most provident were found unfurnished with undertaker's
articles; so that bereaved affection was driven to the most melancholy
makeshifts.

The best expedient generally was to cut down a log of some eight or
nine feet long, and slitting it longitudinally, strip off its dark bark
in two half cylinders. These, placed around the body of the deceased,
and bound firmly together with withes made of the alburnum, formed a
rough sort of tubular coffin, which surviving relatives and friends,
with a little show of black crape, could follow with its enclosure to
the hole, or bit of ditch, dug to receive it in the wet ground of the
prairie. They grieved to lower it down so poorly clad, and in such an
unheeded grave. It was hard,--was it right?--thus hurriedly to plunge
it in one of the undistinguishable waves of the great land sea, and
leave it behind them there, under the cold north rain, abandoned, to
be forgotten? They had no tombstones, nor could they find rock to pile
the monumental cairn. So, when they had filled up the grave, and over
it prayed a Miserere prayer, and tried to sing a hopeful psalm, their
last office was to seek out landmarks, or call in the surveyor to help
them determine the bearings of valley bends, headlands, or forks and
angles of constant streams, by which its position should in the future
be remembered and recognized. The name of the beloved person, his age,
the date of his death, and these marks were all registered with care.
His party was then ready to move on. Such graves mark all the line of
the first years of Mormon travel,--dispiriting milestones to failing
stragglers in the rear.

It is an error to estimate largely the number of Mormons dead of
starvation, strictly speaking. Want developed disease, and made
them sink under fatigue, and maladies that would otherwise have
proved trifling. But only those died of it outright, who fell in
out-of-the-way places that the hand of brotherhood could not reach.
Among the rest no such thing as plenty was known, while any went an
hungered. If but a part of a group was supplied with provision, the
only result was that the whole went on the half or quarter ration,
according to the sufficiency that there was among them: and this so
ungrudgingly and contentedly, that till some crisis of trial to their
strength, they were themselves unaware that their health was sinking,
and their vital force impaired.

Hale young men gave up their own provided food and shelter to the
old and helpless, and walked their way back to parts of the frontier
states, chiefly Missouri and Iowa, where they were not recognized, and
hired themselves out for wages, to purchase more. Others were sent
there, to exchange for meal and flour, or wheat and corn, the table and
bed furniture, and other last resources of personal property which a
few had still retained.

In a kindred spirit of fraternal forecast, others laid out great farms
in the wilds, and planted in them the grain saved for their own bread;
that there might be harvests for those who should follow them. Two of
these, in the Sac and Fox country and beyond it, Garden Grove and Mount
Pisgah, included within their fences about two miles of land a-piece,
carefully planted in grain, with a hamlet of comfortable log cabins in
the neighbourhood of each.

Through all this the pioneers found redeeming comfort in the thought,
that their own suffering was the price of immunity to their friends at
home. But the arrival of spring proved this a delusion. Before the warm
weather had made the earth dry enough for easy travel, messengers came
in from Nauvoo to overtake the party with fear-exaggerated tales of
outrage, and to urge the chief men to hurry back to the city that they
might give counsel and assistance there. The enemy had only waited till
the emigrants were supposed to be gone on their road too far to return
to interfere with them, and then renewed their aggressions.

The Mormons outside Nauvoo were indeed hard pressed; but inside the
city they maintained themselves very well for two or three months
longer.

Strange to say, the chief part of this respite was devoted to
completing the structure of their quaintly devised but beautiful
Temple. Since the dispersion of Jewry, probably, history affords us
no parallel to the attachment of the Mormons for this edifice. Every
architectural element, every most fantastic emblem it embodied, was
associated, for them, with some cherished feature of their religion.
Its erection had been enjoined upon them as a most sacred duty: they
were proud of the honor it conferred upon their city, when it grew
up in its splendour to become the chief object of the admiration of
strangers upon the Upper Mississippi. Besides, they had built it as a
labor of love; they could count up to half a million the value of their
tithings and free-will offerings laid upon it. Hardly a Mormon woman
had not given up to it some trinket or pin-money: the poorest Mormon
man had at least served the tenth part of his year on its walls; and
the coarsest artisan could turn to it with something of the ennobling
attachment of an artist for his fair creation. Therefore, though their
enemies drove on them ruthlessly, they succeeded in parrying the last
sword-thrust, till they had completed even the gilding of the angel
and trumpet on the summit of its lofty spire. As a closing work, they
placed on the entablature of the front, like a baptismal mark on the
forehead,

                     THE HOUSE OF THE LORD:

    BUILT BY THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS.

                      HOLINESS TO THE LORD!

Then, at high noon, under the bright sunshine of May, the next only
after its completion, they consecrated it to divine service. There was
a carefully studied ceremonial for the occasion. It was said the high
elders of the sect travelled furtively from the Camp of Israel in the
Wilderness; and throwing off ingenious disguises, appeared in their own
robes of holy office, to give it splendour.

For that one day the Temple stood resplendent in all its typical
glories of sun, moon and stars, and other abounding figured and
lettered signs, hieroglyphs and symbols: but that day only. The sacred
rites of consecration ended, the work of removing the sacrosancta
proceeded with the rapidity of magic. It went on through the night;
and when the morning of the next day dawned, all the ornaments and
furniture, everything that could provoke a sneer, had been carried off;
and except some fixtures that would not bear removal, the building was
dismantled to the bare walls.

It was this day saw the departure of the last elders, and the largest
band that moved in one company together. The people of Iowa have told
me, that from morning to night they passed westward like an endless
procession. They did not seem greatly out of heart, they said; but, at
the top of every hill before they disappeared, were to be seen looking
back, like banished Moors, on their abandoned homes, and the far-seen
Temple and its glittering spire.

After this consecration, which was construed to indicate an insincerity
on the part of the Mormons as to their stipulated departure, or
at least a hope of return, their foes set upon them with renewed
bitterness. As many fled as were at all prepared; but by the very fact
of their so decreasing the already diminished forces of the city's
defenders, they encouraged the enemy to greater boldness. It soon
became apparent that nothing short of an immediate emigration could
save the remnant.

From this time onward the energies of those already on the road were
engrossed by the duty of providing for the fugitives who came crowding
in after them. At a last general meeting of the sect in Nauvoo, there
had been passed an unanimous resolve that they would sustain one
another, whatever their circumstances, upon the march; and this, though
made in view of no such appalling exigency, they now with one accord
set themselves together to carry out.

Here begins the touching period of Mormon history; on which but that
it is for me a hackneyed subject, I should be glad to dwell, were it
only for the proof it has afforded of the strictly material value to
communities of an active common faith, and its happy illustrations of
the power of the spirit of Christian fraternity to relieve the deepest
of human suffering. I may assume that it has already fully claimed the
public sympathy.

Delayed thus by their own wants, and by their exertions to provide for
the wants of others, it was not till the month of June that the advance
of the emigrant companies arrived at the Missouri.

This body I remember I had to join there, ascending the river for the
purpose from Fort Leavenworth, which was at that time our frontier
post. The fort was the interesting rendezvous of the Army of the West,
and the head-quarters of its gallant chief, Stephen F. Kearney, whose
guest and friend I account it my honor to have been. Many as were the
reports daily received at the garrison from all portions of the Indian
territory, it was a significant fact, how little authentic intelligence
was to be obtained concerning the Mormons. Even the region in which
they were to be sought after, was a question not attempted to be
designated with accuracy, except by what are very well called in the
West,--Mormon stories; none of which bore any sifting. One of these
averred, that a party of Mormons in spangled crimson robes of office,
headed by one in black velvet and silver, had been teaching a Jewish
pow-wow to the medicine men of the Sauks and Foxes. Another averred
that they were going about in buffalo robe short frocks, imitative of
the costume of Saint John, preaching baptism and the instance of the
kingdom of heaven among the Ioways. To believe one report, ammunition
and whiskey had been received by Indian braves at the hands of an elder
with a flowing white beard, who spoke Indian, he alleged, because
he had the gift of tongues:--this, as far North as the country of
the Yanketon Sioux. According to another yet, which professed to be
derived officially from at least one Indian sub-agent, the Mormons
had distributed the scarlet uniforms of H. B. M.'s servants among the
Pottawatamies, and had carried into their country twelve pieces of
brass cannon, which were counted by a traveller as they were rafted
across the East Fork of Grand River, one of the northern tributaries of
the Missouri. The narrators of these pleasant stories were at variance
as to the position of the Mormons, by a couple of hundred leagues; but
they harmonized in the warning, that to seek certain of the leading
camps would be to meet the treatment of a spy.

Almost at the outset of my journey from Fort Leavenworth, while yet
upon the edge of the Indian border, I had the good fortune to fall in
with a couple of thin-necked sallow persons, in patchwork pantaloons,
conducting Northward wagon-loads of Indian corn, which they had
obtained, according to their own account, in barter from a squatter for
some silver spoons and a feather bed. Their character was disclosed
by their eager request of a bite from my wallet; in default of which,
after a somewhat superfluous scriptural grace, they made an imperfect
lunch before me off the softer of their corn ears, eating the grains as
horses do, from the cob. I took their advice to follow up the Missouri;
somewhere not far from which, in the Pottawatamie country, they were
sure I would encounter one of their advancing companies.

I had bad weather on the road. Excessive heats, varied only by repeated
drenching thunder squalls, knocked up my horse, my only travelling
companion; and otherwise added to the ordinary hardships of a kind of
life to which I was as yet little accustomed. I suffered a sense of
discomfort, therefore, amounting to physical nostalgia, and was, in
fact, wearied to death of the staring silence of the prairie, before I
came upon the objects of my search.

They were collected a little distance above the Pottawatamie Agency.
The hills of the "High Prairie" crowding in upon the river at this
point, and overhanging it, appear of an unusual and commanding
elevation. They are called the Council Bluffs; a name given them with
another meaning, but well illustrated by the picturesque Congress of
their high and mighty summits. To the south of them, a rich alluvial
flat of considerable width follows down the Missouri, some eight miles,
to where it is lost from view at a turn, which forms the site of the
Indian town of Point aux Poules. Across the river from this spot the
hills recur again, but are skirted at their base by as much low ground
as suffices for a landing.

This landing, and the large flat or bottom on the east side of the
river, were crowded with covered carts and wagons; and each one of the
Council Bluff hills opposite was crowned with its own great camp, gay
with bright white canvas, and alive with the busy stir of swarming
occupants. In the clear blue morning air, the smoke streamed up from
more than a thousand cooking fires. Countless roads and bypaths
checkered all manner of geometric figures on the hillsides. Herd boys
were dozing upon the slopes; sheep and horses, cows and oxen, were
feeding around them, and other herds in the luxuriant meadow of the
then swollen river. From a single point I counted four thousand head of
cattle in view at one time. As I approached the camps, it seemed to me
the children there were to prove still more numerous. Along a little
creek I had to cross were women in greater force than blanchisseuses
upon the Seine, washing and rinsing all manner of white muslins, red
flannels and particolored calicoes, and hanging them to bleach upon
a greater area of grass and bushes than we can display in all our
Washington Square.

Hastening by these, I saluted a group of noisy boys, whose purely
vernacular cries had for me an invincible home-savoring attraction. It
was one of them, a bright faced lad, who, hurrying on his jacket and
trousers, fresh from bathing in the creek, first assured me I was at
my right destination. He was a mere child; but he told me of his own
accord where I had best go seek my welcome, and took my horse's bridle
to help me pass a morass, the bridge over which he alleged to be unsafe.

There was something joyous for me in my free rambles about this vast
body of pilgrims. I could range the wild country wherever I listed,
under safeguard of their moving host. Not only in the main camps was
all stir and life, but in every direction, it seemed to me, I could
follow 'Mormon Roads,' and find them beaten hard and even dusty by
the tread and wear of the cattle and vehicles of emigrants laboring
over them. By day, I would overtake and pass, one after another, what
amounted to an army train of them; and at night, if I encamped at
the places where the timber and running water were found together, I
was almost sure to be within call of some camp or other, or at least
within sight of its watch-fires. Wherever I was compelled to tarry,
I was certain to find shelter and hospitality, scant, indeed, but
never stinted, and always honest and kind. After a recent unavoidable
association with the border inhabitants of Western Missouri and Iowa,
the vile scum which our own society, to apply the words of an admirable
gentleman and eminent divine, [C] "like the great ocean washes upon
its frontier shores," I can scarcely describe the gratification I
felt in associating again with persons who were almost all of Eastern
American origin,--persons of refined and cleanly habits and decent
language,--and in observing their peculiar and interesting mode of
life;--while every day seemed to bring with it its own especial
incident, fruitful in the illustration of habits and character.

It was during the period of which I have just spoken, that the Mormon
battalion of 520 men was recruited and marched for the Pacific Coast.

At the commencement of the Mexican war, the President considered it
desirable to march a body of reliable infantry to California at as
early a period as practicable, and the known hardihood and habits of
discipline of the Mormons were supposed peculiarly to fit them for
this service. As California was supposed also to be their ultimate
destination, the long march might cost them less than other citizens.
They were accordingly invited to furnish a battalion of volunteers
early in the month of July.

The call could hardly have been more inconveniently timed. The young,
and those who could best have been spared, were then away from the
main body, either with pioneer companies in the van, or, their faith
unannounced, seeking work and food about the northwestern settlements,
to support them till the return of the season for commencing
emigration. The force was therefore to be recruited from among fathers
of families, and others whose presence it was most desirable to retain.

There were some, too, who could not view the invitation without
jealousy. They had twice been persuaded by (State) Government
authorities in Illinois and Missouri, to give up their arms on some
special appeals to their patriotic confidence, and had then been left
to the malice of their enemies. And now they were asked, in the midst
of the Indian country, to surrender over five hundred of their best men
for a war march of thousands of miles to California, without the hope
of return till after the conquest of that country. Could they view such
a proposition with favor?

But the feeling of country triumphed. The Union had never wronged them:
"You shall have your battalion at once, if it has to be a class of our
elders," said one, himself a ruling elder. A central 'mass meeting'
for Council, some harangues at the more remotely scattered camps, an
American flag brought out from the storehouse of things rescued, and
hoisted to the top of a tree mast--and, in three days, the force was
reported, mustered, organized and ready to march.

There was no sentimental affectation at their leave-taking. The
afternoon before was appropriated to a farewell ball; and a more
merry dancing rout I have never seen, though the company went without
refreshments, and their ball-room was of the most primitive. It was the
custom, whenever the larger camps rested for a few days together, to
make great arbors, or Boweries, as they called them, of poles and brush
and wattling, as places of shelter for their meetings of devotion or
conference. In one of these, where the ground had been trodden firm and
hard by the worshippers of the popular Father Taylor's precinct, was
gathered now the mirth and beauty of the Mormon Israel.

If anything told the Mormons had been bred to other lives, it was the
appearance of the women, as they assembled here. Before their flight,
they had sold their watches and trinkets as the most available resource
for raising ready money; and hence, like their partners, who wore
waistcoats cut with useless watch pockets, they, although their ears
were pierced and bore the loop-marks of rejected pendants, were without
earrings, finger-rings, chains or brooches. Except such ornaments,
however, they lacked nothing most becoming the attire of decorous
maidens. The neatly darned white stocking, and clean bright petticoat,
the artistically clear-starched collar and chemisette, the something
faded, only because too well washed, lawn or gingham gown, that fitted
modishly to the waist of its pretty wearer,--these, if any of them
spoke of poverty, spoke of a poverty that had known its better days.

With the rest, attended the elders of the church within call, including
nearly all the chiefs of the High Council, with their wives and
children. They, the gravest and most trouble-worn, seemed the most
anxious of any to be first to throw off the burden of heavy thoughts.
Their leading off the dancing in a great double cotillion was the
signal bade the festivity commence. To the canto of debonair violins,
the cheer of horns, the jingle of sleigh-bells, and the jovial snoring
of the tambourine, they did dance! None of your minuets or other
mortuary processions of gentles in etiquette, tight shoes, and pinching
gloves, but the spirited and scientific displays of our venerated and
merry grandparents, who were not above following the fiddle to the
Fox-Chase Inn or Gardens of Gray's Ferry. French fours, Copenhagen
jigs, Virginia reels, and the like forgotten figures, executed with
the spirit of people too happy to be slow, or bashful or constrained.
Light hearts, lithe figures and light feet, had it their own way from
an early hour till after the sun had dipped behind the sharp sky line
of the Omaha hills. Silence was then called, and a well cultivated
mezzo-soprano voice, belonging to a young lady with fair face and dark
eyes, gave with quartette accompaniment a little song, the notes of
which I have been unsuccessful in repeated efforts to obtain since,--a
version of the text, touching to all earthly wanderers:

  "By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept."
  "We wept when we remembered Zion."


There was danger of some expression of feeling when the song was over,
for it had begun to draw tears; but breaking the quiet with his hard
voice, an Elder asked the blessing of Heaven on all who, with purity
of heart and brotherhood of spirit, had mingled in that society, and
then, all dispersed, hastening to cover from the falling dews. All, I
remember, but some splendid Indians, who in cardinal scarlet blankets
and feathered leggings, had been making foreground figures for the
dancing rings, like those in Mr. West's picture of our Philadelphia
Treaty, and staring their inability to comprehend the wonderful
performances. These loitered to the last, as if unwilling to seek their
abject homes.

Well as I knew the peculiar fondness of the Mormons for music, their
orchestra in service on this occasion astonished me by its numbers
and fine drill. The story was, that an eloquent Mormon missionary had
converted its members in a body at an English town, a stronghold of
the sect, and that they took up their trumpets, trombones, drums and
hautboys together, and followed him to America.

When the refugees from Nauvoo were hastening to part with their
table-ware, jewelry, and almost every other fragment of metal wealth
they possessed that was not iron, they had never a thought of giving
up the instruments of this favorite band. And when the battalion was
enlisted, though high inducements were offered some of the performers
to accompany it, they all refused. Their fortunes went with the Camp
of the Tabernacle. They had led the Farewell Service in the Nauvoo
Temple. Their office now was to guide the monster choruses and Sunday
hymns; and like the trumpets of silver made of a whole piece 'for the
calling of the assembly, and for the journeying of the camps,' to knoll
the people in to church. Some of their wind instruments, indeed, were
uncommonly full and pure toned, and in that clear dry air could be
heard to a great distance. It had the strangest effect in the world,
to listen to their sweet music winding over the uninhabited country.
Something in the style of a Moravian death-tune blown at day-break, but
altogether unique. It might be when you were hunting a ford over the
Great Platte, the dreariest of all wild rivers, perplexed among the
far-reaching sand bars and curlew shallows of its shifting bed:--the
wind rising would bring you the first faint thought of a melody; and,
as you listened, borne down upon the gust that swept past you a cloud
of the dry sifted sands, you recognized it--perhaps a home-loved theme
of Henry Proch or Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn Bartholdy, away there in the
Indian Marches!

The battalion gone, the host again moved on. The tents which had
gathered on the hill summits, like white birds hesitating to venture
on the long flight over the river, were struck one after another, and
the dwellers in them and their wagons and their cattle hastened down
to cross it at a ferry in the valley, which they made ply night and
day. A little beyond the landing they formed their companies, and made
their preparations for the last and longest stage of their journey. It
was a more serious matter to cross the mountains then than now, that
the thirst of our people for the gold of California has made the region
between them and their desire such literally trodden ground.

Thanks to this wonderful movement, I may dismiss an effort to describe
the incidents of emigrant life upon the Plains, presuming that you have
been made more than familiar with them already, by the many repeated
descriptions of which they have been the subject. The desert march, the
ford, the quicksand, the Indian battle, the bison chase, the prairie
fire:--the adventures of the Mormons comprised every variety of these
varieties; but I could not hope to invest them with the interest
of novelty. The character of their every-day life, its routine and
conduct, alone offered any exclusive or marked peculiarity. Their
romantic devotional observances, and their admirable concert of purpose
and action, met the eye at once. After these, the stranger was most
struck perhaps by the strict order of march, the unconfused closing up
to meet attack, the skilful securing of the cattle upon the halt, the
system with which the watches were set at night to guard them and the
lines of corral--with other similar circumstances indicative of the
maintenance of a high state of discipline. Every ten of their wagons
was under the care of a captain. This captain of ten, as they termed
him, obeyed a captain of fifty; who, in turn, obeyed his captain of a
hundred, or directly a member of what they call the High Council of
the Church. All these were responsible and determined men, approved of
by the people for their courage, discretion and experience. So well
recognized were the results of this organization, that bands of hostile
Indians have passed by comparative small parties of Mormons, to attack
much larger, but less compact bodies of other emigrants.

The most striking feature, however, of the Mormon emigration, was
undoubtedly their formation of the Tabernacle Camps and temporary
Stakes, or Settlements, which renewed in the sleeping solitudes
everywhere along their road, the cheering signs of intelligent and
hopeful life.

I will make this remark plainer by describing to you one of these
camps, with the daily routine of its inhabitants. I select at random,
for my purpose, a large camp upon the delta between the Nebraska and
Missouri, in the territory disputed between the Omaha, and Otto and
Missouria Indians. It remained pitched here for nearly two months,
during which period I resided in it.

It was situated near the Petit Papillon, or Little Butterfly River, and
upon some finely rounded hills that encircle a favorite cool spring.
On each of these a square was marked out; and the wagons as they
arrived took their positions along its four sides in double rows, so
as to leave a roomy street or passageway between them. The tents were
disposed also in rows, at intervals between the wagons. The cattle were
folded in high-fenced yards outside. The quadrangle inside was left
vacant for the sake of ventilation, and the streets, covered in with
leafy arbor work and kept scrupulously clean, formed a shaded cloister
walk. This was the place of exercise for slowly recovering invalids,
the day-home of the infants, and the evening promenade of all.

From the first formation of the camp, all its inhabitants were
constantly and laboriously occupied. Many of them were highly educated
mechanics, and seemed only to need a day's anticipated rest to engage
them at the forge, loom, or turning lathe, upon some needed chore of
work. A Mormon gunsmith is the inventor of the excellent repeating
rifle, that loads by slides instead of cylinders; and one of the
neatest finished fire-arms I have ever seen was of this kind, wrought
from scraps of old iron, and inlaid with the silver of a couple of half
dollars, under a hot July sun, in a spot where the average height of
the grass was above the workman's shoulders. I have seen a cobbler,
after the halt of his party on the march, hunting along the river bank
for a lap-stone in the twilight, that he might finish a famous boot
sole by the camp fire; and I have had a piece of cloth, the wool of
which was sheared, and dyed, and spun, and woven, during a progress of
over three hundred miles.

Their more interesting occupations, however, were those growing out
of their peculiar circumstances and position. The chiefs were seldom
without some curious affair on hand to settle with the restless
Indians; while the immense labor and responsibility of the conduct of
their unwieldy moving army, and the commissariat of its hundreds of
famishing poor, also devolved upon them. They had good men they called
Bishops, whose special office it was to look up the cases of extremest
suffering: and their relief parties were out night and day to scour
over every trail.

At this time, say two months before the final expulsion from Nauvoo,
there were already, along three hundred miles of the road between
that city and our Papillon Camp, over two thousand emigrating
wagons, besides a large number of nondescript turn-outs, the motley
make-shifts of poverty; from the unsuitably heavy cart that lumbered on
mysteriously with its sick driver hidden under its counterpane cover,
to the crazy two-wheeled trundle, such as our own poor employ for the
conveyance of their slop barrels, this pulled along it may be by a
little dry dugged heifer, and rigged up only to drag some such light
weight as a baby, a sack of meal, or a pack of clothes and bedding.

Some of them were in distress from losses upon the way. A strong trait
of the Mormons was their kindness to their brute dependents, and
particularly to their beasts of draught. They gave them the holiday of
the Sabbath whenever it came round: I believe they would have washed
them with old wine, after the example of the emigrant Carthaginians,
had they had any. Still, in the Slave-coast heats, under which the
animals had to move, they sometimes foundered. Sometimes, too, they
strayed off in the night, or were mired in morasses;--or oftener were
stolen by Indians, who found market covert for such plunder among
the horse-thief whites of the frontier. But the great mass of these
pilgrims of the desert was made up of poor folks, who had fled in
destitution from Nauvoo, and been refused a resting place by the people
of Iowa.

It is difficult fully to understand the state of helplessness in which
some of these would arrive, after accomplishing a journey of such
extent, under circumstances of so much privation and peril. The fact
was, they seemed to believe that all their trouble would be at an end
if they could only come up with their comrades at the Great Camps.
For this they calculated their resources, among which their power of
endurance was by much the largest and most reliable item, and they were
not disappointed if they arrived with these utterly exhausted.

I remember a signal instance of this at the Papillon Camp.

It was that of a joyous hearted clever fellow, whose songs and fiddle
tunes were the life and delight of Nauvoo in its merry days. I forget
his story, and how exactly, it fell about, that after a Mormon's full
peck of troubles, he started after us with his wife and little ones
from some 'lying down place' in the Indian country, where he had
contended with an attack of a serious malady. He was just convalescent,
and the fatigue of marching on foot again with a child on his back,
speedily brought on a relapse. But his anxiety to reach a place where
he could expect to meet friends with shelter and food, was such that
he only pressed on the harder. Probably for more than a week of the
dog-star weather, he laboured on under a high fever, walking every day
till he was entirely exhausted.

His limbs failed him then; but his courage holding out, he got into his
covered cart on top of its freight of baggage, and made them drive him
on, while he lay down. They could hardly believe how ill he was, he
talked on so cheerfully--"I'm nothing on earth ailing but home-sick:
I'm cured the very minute I get to camp and see the brethren."

Not being able thus to watch his course, he lost his way, and had to
regain it through a wretched tract of Low Meadow Prairie, where there
were no trees to break the noon, nor water but what was ague-sweet or
brackish. By the time he got back to the trail of the High Prairie, he
was, in his own phrase, 'pretty far gone.' Yet he was resolute in his
purpose as ever, and to a party he fell in with, avowed his intention
to be cured at the camp, 'and no where else.' He even jested with them,
comparing his jolting couch to a summer cot in a white washed cockloft.
"But I'll make them take me down," he said, "and give me a dip in the
river when I get there. All I care for is to see the brethren."

His determined bearing rallied the spirit of his travelling household,
and they kept on their way till he was within a few hours journey of
the camp. He entered on his last day's journey with the energy of
increased hope.

I remember that day well. For in the evening I mounted a tired horse
to go a short errand, and in mere pity had to turn back before I had
walked him a couple of hundred yards. Nothing seemed to draw life
from the languid air but the clouds of gnats and stinging midges; and
long after sundown it was so hot that the sheep lay on their stomachs
panting, and the cattle strove to lap wind like hard fagged hunting
dogs. In camp, I had spent the day in watching the invalids and the
rest hunting the shade under the wagon bodies, and veering about them,
like the shadows round the sun-dial. I know I thought myself wretched
enough, to be of their company.

Poor Merryman had all that heat to bear, with the mere pretence of an
awning to screen out the sun from his close muslin cockloft.

He did not fail till somewhere hard upon noon. He then began to grow
restless to know accurately the distance travelled. He made them give
him water, too, much more frequently; and when they stopped for this
purpose, asked a number of obscure questions. A little after this he
discovered himself that a film had come over his eyes. He confessed
that this was discouraging; but said with stubborn resignation, that
if denied to see the brethren, he still should hear the sound of their
voices.

After this, which was when he was hardly three miles from our camp, he
lay very quiet, as if husbanding his strength; but when he had made, as
is thought, a full mile further, being interrogated by the woman that
was driving, whether she should stop, he answered her, as she avers,
"No, no; go on!"

The anecdote ends badly. They brought him in dead, I think about five
o'clock of the afternoon. He had on his clean clothes; as he had
dressed himself in the morning, looking forward to his arrival.

Beside the common duty of guiding and assisting these unfortunates, the
companies in the van united in providing the highway for the entire
body of emigrants. The Mormons have laid out for themselves a road
through the Indian Territory, over four hundred leagues in length,
with substantial, well-built bridges, fit for the passage of heavy
artillery, over all the streams, except a few great rivers where they
have established permanent ferries. The nearest unfinished bridging
to the Papillon Camp, was that of the Corne a Cerf, or Elkhorn, a
tributary of the Platte, distant maybe a couple of hours' march. Here,
in what seemed to be an incredibly short space of time, there rose the
seven great piers and abutments of a bridge, such as might challenge
honors for the entire public spirited population of lower Virginia. The
party detailed to the task worked in the broiling sun, in water beyond
depth, and up to their necks, as if engaged in the perpetration of some
pointed and delightful practical joke. The chief sport lay in floating
along with the logs, cut from the overhanging timber up the stream,
guiding them till they reached their destination, and then plunging
them under water in the precise spot where they were to be secured.
This the laughing engineers would execute with the agility of happy
diving ducks.

Our nearest ferry was that over the Missouri. Nearly opposite Pull
Point, or Point aux Poules, a trading post of the American Fur Company,
and village of the Pottawatamies, they had gained a favorable crossing
by making a deep cut for the road through the steep right bank. And
here, without intermission, their flat-bottomed scows plied, crowded
with the wagons and cows and sheep and children and furniture of the
emigrants, who, in waiting their turn, made the woods around smoke with
their crowding camp fires. But no such good fortune as a gratuitous
passage awaited the heavy cattle, of whom, with the others, no less
than 30,000 were at this time on their way westward: these were made to
earn it by swimming.

A heavy freshet had at this time swollen the river to a width, as I
should judge, of something like a mile and a half, and dashed past
its fierce current, rushing, gurgling, and eddying, as if thrown from
a mill race, or scriptural fountain of the deep. Its aspect did not
invite the oxen to their duty, and the labor was to force them to
it. They were gathered in little troops upon the shore, and driven
forward till they lost their footing. As they turned their heads to
return, they encountered the combined opposition of a clamorous crowd
of bystanders, vieing with each other in the pungent administration of
inhospitable affront. Then rose their hubbub; their geeing and woing
and hawing, their yelling and yelping and screaming, their hooting and
hissing and pelting. The rearmost steers would hesitate to brave such
a rebuff; halting, they would impede the return of the outermost; they
all would waver; wavering for a moment, the current would sweep them
together downward. At this juncture, a fearless youngster, climbing
upon some brave bull in the front rank, would urge him boldly forth
into the stream: the rest then surely followed; a few moments saw them
struggling in mid current; a few more, and they were safely landed
on the opposite shore. The driver's was the sought after post of
honor here; and sometimes, when repeated failures have urged them to
emulation, I have seen the youths, in stepping from back to back of the
struggling monsters, or swimming in among their battling hoofs, display
feats of address and hardihood, that would have made Franconi's or the
Madrid bull-ring vibrate with bravos of applause. But in the hours
after hours that I have watched this sport at the ferry side, I never
heard an oath or the language of quarrel, or knew it provoke the least
sign of ill feeling.

After the sorrowful word was given out to halt, and make preparations
for winter, a chief labor became the making hay; and with every day
dawn brigades of mowers would take up the march to their positions in
chosen meadows--a prettier sight than a charge of cavalry--as they laid
their swarths, whole companies of scythes abreast. Before this time the
manliest, as well as most general daily labor, was the herding of the
cattle; the only wealth of the Mormons, and more and more cherished by
them, with the increasing pastoral character of their lives. A camp
could not be pitched in any spot without soon exhausting the freshness
of the pasture around it; and it became an ever recurring task to guide
the cattle, in unbroken droves, to the nearest places where it was
still fresh and fattening. Sometimes it was necessary to go farther,
to distant ranges which were known as feeding grounds of the Buffalo.
About these there were sure to prowl parties of thievish Indians;
and each drove therefore had its escort of mounted men and boys, who
learned self-reliance and heroism while on night guard alone, among
the silent hills. But generally the cattle were driven from the camp
at the dawn of morning, and brought back thousands together in the
evening, to be picketed in the great corral or enclosure, where beeves,
bulls, cows, and oxen, with the horses, mules, hogs, calves, sheep and
human beings, could all look together upon the red watch fires, with
the feeling of security, when aroused by the Indian stampede, or the
howlings of the prairie wolves at moonrise.

When they set about building their winter houses, too, the Mormons went
into quite considerable timbering operations, and performed desperate
feats of carpentry. They did not come, ornamental gentlemen or raw
apprentices, to extemporise new versions of Robinson Crusoe. It was a
comfort to notice the readiness with which they turned their hands to
wood craft; some of them, though I believe these had generally been
bred carpenters, wheelwrights, or more particularly boat builders,
quite outdoing the most notable voyageurs in the use of the axe. One
of these would fell a tree, strip off its bark, cut and split up the
trunk in piles of plank, scantling, or shingles; make posts, and pins,
and pales--everything wanted almost, of the branches; and treat his
toil from first to last with more sportive flourish than a school-boy
whittling his shingle.

Inside the camp, the chief labors were assigned to the women. From the
moment, when after the halt, the lines had been laid, the spring wells
dug out, and the ovens and fire-places built, though the men still
assumed to set the guards and enforce the regulations of Police, the
Empire of the Tented Town was with the better sex. They were the chief
comforters of the severest sufferers, the kind nurses who gave them in
their sickness, those dear attentions, with which pauperism is hardly
poor, and which the greatest wealth often fails to buy. And they were a
nation of wonderful managers. They could hardly be called housewives in
etymological strictness, but it was plain that they had once been such,
and most distinguished ones. Their art availed them in their changed
affairs. With almost their entire culinary material limited to the milk
of their cows, some store of meal or flour, and a very few condiments,
they brought their thousand and one receipts into play with a success
that outdid for their families, the miracle of the Hebrew widow's
cruise. They learned to make butter on a march, by the dashing of the
wagon, and so nicely to calculate the working of barm in the jolting
heats, that as soon after the halt as an oven could be dug in the hill
side and heated, their well kneaded loaf was ready for baking, and
produced good leavened bread for supper. I have no doubt the appetizing
zest, their humble lore succeeded in imparting to diet which was both
simple and meagre, availed materially for the health as well as the
comfort of the people.

But the first duty of the Mormon women was, through all change of
place and fortune, to keep alive the altar fire of home. Whatever
their manifold labors for the day, it was their effort to complete
them against the sacred hour of evening fall. For by that time all
the out-workers, scouts, ferrymen or bridgemen, roadmakers, herdsmen
or haymakers, had finished their tasks and come in to their rest.
And before the last smoke of the supper fire curled up reddening in
the glow of sunset, a hundred chimes of cattle bells announced their
looked-for approach across the open hills, and the women went out to
meet them at the camp gates, and with their children in their laps sat
by them at the cherished Family meal, and talked over the events of the
well-spent day.

But every day closed as every day began, with an invocation of the
Divine favour; without which, indeed, no Mormon seemed to dare to lay
him down to rest. With the first shining of the stars, laughter and
loud talking hushed, the neighbor went his way, you heard the last hymn
sung, and then the thousand-voiced murmur of prayer was heard like
babbling water falling down the hills.

There was no austerity, however, about the religion of Mormonism. Their
fasting and penance, it is no jest to say, was altogether involuntary.
They made no merit of that. They kept the Sabbath with considerable
strictness: they were too close copyists of the wanderers of Israel in
other respects not to have learned, like them, the value of this most
admirable of the Egypto-Mosaic institutions. But the rest of the week,
their religion was independent of ritual observance. They had the sort
of strong stomached faith that is still found embalmed in sheltered
spots of Catholic Italy and Spain, with the spirit of the believing
or Dark Ages. It was altogether too strongly felt, to be dependent on
intellectual ingenuity or careful caution of the ridiculous. It mixed
itself up fearlessly with the common transactions of their every-day
life, and only to give them liveliness and color.

If any passages of life bear better than others a double
interpretation, they are the adventures of travel, and of the field.
What old persons call discomforts and discouraging mishaps, are the
very elements to the young and sanguine, of what they are willing to
term fun. The Mormons took the young and hopeful side. They could make
sport and frolic of their trials, and often turn right sharp suffering
into right round laughter against themselves. I certainly heard more
jests and Joe Millers while in this Papillon Camp, than I am likely to
hear in all the remainder of my days.

This, too, was at a time of serious affliction. Beside the ordinary
suffering from insufficient food and shelter, distressing and mortal
sickness, exacerbated, if not originated by these causes, was generally
prevalent.

In the camp nearest us on the West, which was that of the bridging
party near the Corne, the number of its inhabitants being small enough
to invite computation, I found, as early as the 31st of July, that 37
per cent. of its inhabitants were down with the Fever and a sort of
strange scorbutic disease, frequently fatal, which they named the Black
Canker. The camps to the East of us, which were all on the eastern side
of the Missouri, were yet worse fated.

The climate of the entire upper 'Misery Bottom,' as they term it, is,
during a considerable part of Summer and Autumn singularly pestiferous.
Its rich soil, which is to a depth far beyond the reach of the plough
as fat as the earth of kitchen garden, or compost-heap, is annually the
force-bed of a vegetation as rank as that of the Tropics. To render
its fatal fertility the greater, it is everywhere freely watered by
springs and creeks and larger streams, that flow into it from both
sides. In the season of drought, when the Sun enters Virgo, these dry
down till they run impure as open sewers, exposing to the day foul
broad flats, mere quagmires of black dirt, stretching along for miles,
unvaried, except by the limbs of half buried carrion tree trunks, or
by occasional yellow pools of what the children call frog spawn; all
together steaming up thick vapours redolent of the savour of death.

The same is the habit of the Great River. In the beginning of August,
its shores hardly could contain the millions of forest logs, and tens
of billions of gallons of turbid water, that came rushing down together
from its mountain head-gates. But before the month was out, the freshet
had all passed by; the river diminished one half, threaded feebly
southward through the centre of the Valley, and the mud of its channel,
baked and creased, made a wide tile pavement between the choking crowd
of reeds and sedgy grasses and wet stalked weeds, and growths of marsh
meadow flowers, the garden homes at this tainted season of venom-crazy
snakes, and the fresher ooze by the water's edge, which stank in the
sun like a naked muscle shoal.

Then the plague raged. I have no means of ascertaining the mortality
of the Indians who inhabited the Bottom. In 1845, the year previous,
which was not more unhealthy, they lost one-ninth of their number in
about two months. The Mormons were scourged severely. The exceeding
mortality among some of them, was no doubt in the main attributable to
the low state to which their systems had been brought by long continued
endurance of want and hardship. It is to be remembered also, that they
were the first turners up of the prairie sod, and that this of itself
made them liable to the sickness of new countries. It was where their
agricultural operations had been most considerable, and in situations
on the left bank of the river, where the prevalent south-west winds
wafted to them the miasmata of its shores, that disease was most rife.
[D]

In some of these, the fever prevailed to such an extent that hardly any
escaped it. They let their cows go unmilked. They wanted for voices to
raise the Psalm of Sundays. The few who were able to keep their feet,
went about among the tents and wagons with food and water, like nurses
through the wards of an Infirmary. Here at one time the digging got
behind hand: burials were slow; and you might see women sit in the
open tents keeping the flies off their dead children, sometime after
decomposition had set in.

In our own camp for a part of August and September, things wore an
unpleasant aspect enough. [E] Its situation was one much praised for
its comparative salubrity; but perhaps on this account, the number of
cases of Fever among us was increased by the hurrying arrival from
other localities, of parties in whom the virus leaven of disease was
fermented by forced travel.

But I am excused sufficiently the attempt to get up for your
entertainment here any circumstantial picture of horrors, by the
fact, that at the most interesting season, I was incapacitated for
nice observation by an attack of Fever--mine was what they call the
Congestive--that it required the utmost use of all my faculties to
recover from. I still kept my tent in the camp line; but, for as much
as a month, had very small notion of what went on among my neighbors.
I recollect overhearing a lamentation over some dear baby, that its
mother no doubt thought the destroying angel should have been specially
instructed to spare. I wish too for my own sake, I could forget, how
imperfectly one day I mourned the decease of a poor saint, who by
clamor rendered his vicinity troublesome. He no doubt endured great
pain; for he groaned shockingly till death came to his relief. He
interfered with my own hard gained slumbers, and--I was glad when Death
did relieve him.

Before my attack, I was fond of conversing with an amiable old man, I
think English born, who having then recently buried his only daughter
and grandson, used to be seen sitting out before his tent, resting his
sorrowful forehead on his hands, joined over a smooth white oak staff.
I missed him when I got about again; probably he had been my moaning
neighbor.

So, too, having been much exercised in my dreams at this time, by the
vision of dismal processions, such as might have been formed by the
union in line of all the forlornest and ugliest of the struggling
fugitives from Nauvoo, I happen to recall as I write, that I had some
knowledge somewhere of one of our new comers, for whom the nightmare
revived and repeated without intermission the torment of his trying
journey. As he lay, feeding life with long drawn breaths, he muttered:
"Where's next water? Team--give out! Hot, hot--God, it's hot: Stop the
wagon--stop the wagon--stop, stop the wagon!" They woke him;--to his
own content--but I believe returning sleep ever renewed his distressing
visions, till the sounder slumber came on from which no earthly hand or
voice could rouse him; into which I hope he did not carry them.

In a half dreamy way, I remember, or I think I remember, a crowd of
phantoms like these. I recall but one fact, however, going far in
proof of a considerable mortality. Earlier in the season, while going
westward with the intention of passing the Rocky Mountains that summer,
I had opened with the assistance of Mormon spades and shovels, a large
mound on a commanding elevation, the tomb of a warrior of the ancient
race; and continuing on my way, had left a deep trench excavated
entirely through it. Returning fever-struck to the Papillon Camp, I
found it planted close by this spot. It was just forming as I arrived;
the first wagon, if I mistake not, having but a day or two before
halted into place. My first airing upon my convalescence took me to
the mound, which, probably to save digging, had been re-adapted to its
original purpose. In this brief interval, they had filled the trench
with bodies, and furrowed the ground with graves around it, like the
ploughing of a field.

The lengthened sojourn of the Mormons in this insalubrious region was
imposed upon them by circumstances which I must now advert to.

Though the season was late, when they first crossed the Missouri, some
of them moved forward with great hopefulness, full of the notion of
viewing and choosing their new homes that year. But the van had only
reached Grand Island and the Pawnee villages, when they were overtaken
by more ill news from Nauvoo. Before the summer closed, their enemies
set upon the last remnant of those who were left behind in Illinois.
They were a few lingerers, who could not be persuaded but there might
yet be time for them to gather up their worldly goods before removing,
some weakly mothers and their infants, a few delicate young girls, and
many cripples and bereaved and sick people. These had remained under
shelter, according to the Mormon statement at least, by virtue of an
express covenant in their behalf. If there was such a covenant, it was
broken. A vindictive war was waged upon them, from which the weakest
fled in scattered parties, leaving the rest to make a reluctant and
almost ludicrously unavailing defence, till the 17th day of September,
when 1,625 troops entered Nauvoo, and drove all forth who had not
retreated before that time.

Like the wounded birds of a flock fired into toward nightfall, they
came straggling on with faltering steps, many of them without bag or
baggage, beast or barrow, [F] all asking shelter or burial, and forcing
a fresh repartition of the already divided rations of their friends. It
was plain now, that every energy must be taxed to prevent the entire
expedition from perishing. Further emigration for the time was out of
the question, and the whole people prepared themselves for encountering
another winter on the prairie.

Happily for the main body, they found themselves at this juncture among
Indians, who were amicably disposed. The lands on both sides of the
Missouri in particular, were owned by the Pottawatamies and Omahas, two
tribes whom unjust treatment by our United States, had the effect of
rendering most auspiciously hospitable to strangers whom they regarded
as persecuted like themselves.

The Pottawatamies on the eastern side, are a nation from whom the
United States bought some years ago a number of hundred thousand acres
of the finest lands they have ever brought into market. Whatever the
bargain was, the sellers were not content with it; the people saying,
their leaders were cheated, made drunk, bribed, and all manner of
naughty things besides. No doubt this was quite as much of a libel
on the fair fame of this particular Indian treaty, as such stories
generally are; for the land to which the tribe was removed in pursuance
of it, was admirably adapted to enforce habits of civilized thrift. It
was smooth prairie, wanting in timber, and of course in game; and the
humane and philanthropic might rejoice therefore that necessity would
soon indoctrinate its inhabitants into the practice of agriculture.
An impracticable few, who may have thought these advantages more than
compensated by the insalubrity of their allotted resting place, fled
to the extreme wilds, where they could find deer and woods, and rocks
and running water, and where I believe they are roaming to this day.
The remainder, being what the political vocabulary designates on such
occasions as Friendly Indians, were driven--marched is the word--galley
slaves are marched thus to Barcelona and Toulon--marched from the
Mississippi to the Missouri, and planted there. Discontented and
unhappy, they had hardly begun to form an attachment for this new soil,
when they were persuaded to exchange it for their present Fever Patch
upon the Kaw or Kansas River. They were under this second sentence of
transportation when the Mormons arrived among them.

They were pleased with the Mormons. They would have been pleased with
any whites who would not cheat them, nor sell them whiskey, nor whip
them for their poor gipsey habits, nor bear themselves indecently
toward their women, many of whom among the Pottawatamies, especially
those of nearly unmixed French descent, are singularly comely, and
some of them educated. But all Indians have something like a sentiment
of reverence for the insane, and admire those who sacrifice, without
apparent motive, their worldly welfare to the triumph of an idea. They
understand the meaning of what they call a great vow, and think it the
duty of the right-minded to lighten the votary's penance under it. To
this feeling they united the sympathy of fellow-sufferers for those who
could talk to them of their own Illinois, and tell the story how from
it they also had been ruthlessly expelled.

Their hospitality was sincere, almost delicate. Fanny Le Clerc, the
spoiled child of the great brave, Pied Riche, interpreter of the
Nation, would have the pale face Miss Devine learn duets with her
to the guitar; and the daughter of substantial Joseph La Framboise,
the interpreter of the United States,--she died of the fever that
summer,--welcomed all the nicest young Mormon Kitties and Lizzies, and
Jennies and Susans, to a coffee feast at her father's house, which was
probably the best cabin in the river village. They made the Mormons at
home, there and elsewhere. Upon all their lands they formally gave them
leave to tarry just so long as should suit their own good pleasure.

The affair, of course, furnished material for a solemn council. Under
the auspices of an officer of the United States, their chiefs were
summoned, in the form befitting great occasions, to meet in the dirty
yard of one Mr. P. A. Sarpy's log trading house, at their village.
They came in grand toilet, moving in their fantastic attire with so
much aplomb and genteel measure, that the stranger found it difficult
not to believe them high born gentlemen, attending a costumed ball.
Their aristocratically thin legs, of which they displayed fully the
usual Indian proportion, aided this illusion. There is something too
at all times very Mock-Indian in the theatrical French millinery tie
of the Pottawatamie turban; while it is next to impossible for a sober
white man, at first sight, to believe that the red, green, black, blue
and yellow cosmetics, with which he sees such grave personages so
variously dotted, diapered, cancelled and arabesqued, are worn by them
in any mood but one of the deepest and most desperate quizzing. From
the time of their first squat upon the ground, to the final breaking
up of the council circle, they sustained their characters with equal
self-possession and address.

I will not take it upon myself to describe their order of ceremonies;
indeed, I ought not, since I have never been able to view the habits
and customs of our aborigines in any other light than that of a
reluctant and sorrowful subject of jest. Besides, in this instance, the
displays of pow wow and eloquence were both probably moderated, by the
conduct of the entire transaction on temperance principles. I therefore
content myself with observing, generally, that the proceedings were
such as every way became the grandeur of the parties interested, and
the magnitude of the interests involved. When the Red Men had indulged
to satiety in tobacco smoke from their peace pipes, and in what they
love still better, their peculiar metaphoric rhodomontade, which,
beginning with the celestial bodies, and coursing downwards over the
grandest sublunary objects, always managed to alight at last on their
Grand Father Polk, and the tenderness for him of his affectionate
colored children; all the solemn funny fellows present who played
the part of Chiefs, signed formal articles of convention with their
unpronounceable names.

The renowned chief, Pied Riche--he was surnamed Le Clerc on account of
his remarkable scholarship,--then rose, and said:

"My Mormon Brethren,

"The Pottawatamie came sad and tired into this unhealthy Missouri
Bottom, not many years back, when he was taken from his beautiful
country beyond the Mississippi, which had abundant game and timber and
clear water everywhere. Now you are driven away, the same, from your
lodges and lands there, and the graves of your people. So we have both
suffered. We must help one another, and the Great Spirit will help us
both. You are now free to cut and use all the wood you may wish. You
can make all your improvements, and live on any part of our actual land
not occupied by us. Because one suffers, and does not deserve it, is no
reason he shall suffer always: I say. We may live to see all right yet.
However, if we do not, our children will.--Bon Jour."

And thus ended the pageant. I give this speech as a morsel of real
Indian. It was recited to me after the Treaty by the Pottawatamie
orator in French, which language he spoke with elegance. Bon Jour is
the French, Indian and English Hail and Farewell of the Pottawatamies.

The other entertainers of the Mormons at this time, the Omahas, or
Mahaws, are one of the minor tribes of the Grand Prairie. Their Great
Father, the United States, has found it inconvenient to protect so
remote a dependency against the overpowering league of the Dahcotahs
or Sioux, and has judged it dangerous at the same time to allow them
to protect themselves by entering into a confederation with others.
Under the pressure of this paternal embarrassment and restraint,
it has therefore happened most naturally, that this tribe, once a
powerful and valued ally of ours, has been reduced to a band of little
more than a hundred families; and these, a few years more, will
entirely extinguish. When I was among them, they were so ill-fed, that
their protruding high cheek bones gave them the air of a tribe of
consumptives. The buffalo had left them, and no good ranges lay within
several hundred miles reach. Hardly any other game found cover on their
land. What little there was, they were short of ammunition to kill.
Their annuity from the United States was trifling. They made next to
nothing at thieving. They had planted some corn in their awkward Indian
fashion, but through fear of ambush dared not venture out to harvest
it. A chief resource for them, the winter previous, had been the
spoliation of their neighbors, the Prairie Field Mice.

These interesting little people, more industrious and thrifty than
the Mahaws, garner up in the neat little cellars of their underground
homes, the small seeds or beans of the wood pea vine, which are black
and hard, but quite nutritious. Gathering them one by one, a single
Mouse will thus collect as much as half a pint, which before the cold
weather sets in, he piles away in a dry and frost proof excavation,
cleverly thatched and covered in. The Omaha animal, who, like enough,
may have idled during all the season the Mouse was amassing his
toilsome treasure, finds this subterranean granary to give out a
certain peculiar cavernous vibration when briskly tapped upon above the
ground. He wanders about, therefore, striking with a wand in hopeful
spots: and as soon as he hears the hollow sound he knows, unearths the
little retired capitalist along with his winter's hope. Mouse wakes up
from his nap to starve, and Mahaw swallows several relishing mouthfuls.

But the Mouse has his avenger in the powerful Sioux, who wages against
his wretched red brother an almost bootless, but exterminating warfare.
He robs him of his poor human peltry. One of my friends was offered for
sale a Sioux scalp of Omaha, "with grey hair nearly as long as a white
horse's tail."

The pauper Omahas were ready to solicit as a favor the residence of
white protectors among them. The Mormons harvested and stored away for
them their crops of maize; with all their own poverty, they spared them
food enough besides, from time to time, to save them from absolutely
starving; and their entrenched camp to the north of the Omaha villages,
served as a sort of breakwater between them and the destroying rush of
the Sioux.

This was the Head Quarters of the Mormon Camps of Israel. The miles of
rich prairie enclosed and sowed with the grain they could contrive to
spare, and the houses, stacks, and cattle shelters, had the seeming
of an entire county, with its people and improvements transplanted
there unbroken. On a pretty plateau overlooking the river, they built
more than seven hundred houses in a single town, neatly laid out with
highways and byways, and fortified with breast-work, stockade and
block houses. It had too its place of worship, "Tabernacle of the
Congregation," and various large workshops, and mills and factories
provided with water power.

They had no camp or settlement of equal size in the Pottawatamie
country. There was less to apprehend here from Indian invasion; and the
people scattered themselves therefore along the rivers and streams,
and in the timber groves, wherever they found inviting localities for
farming operations. In this way many of them acquired what have since
proved to be valuable pre-emption rights.

Upon the Pottawatamie lands, scattered through the border regions of
Missouri and Iowa, in the Sauk and Fox country, a few among the Ioways,
among the Poncahs in a great company upon the banks of the L'Eau qui
Coule, or Running Water River, and at the Omaha winter quarters;--the
Mormons sustained themselves through the heavy winter of 1846-1847. It
was the severest of their trials. And if I aimed at rhetorical effect,
I would be bound to offer you a minute narrative of its progress, as
a sort of climax to my history. But I have, I think, given you enough
of the Mormons' sorrows. We are all of us content to sympathise with a
certain extent of suffering; but very few can bear the recurring yet
scarcely varied narrative of another's distress without something of
impatience. The world is full of griefs, and we cannot afford to expend
too large a share of our charity, or even our commiseration in a single
quarter.

This winter was the turning point of the Mormon fortunes. Those who
lived through it were spared to witness the gradual return of better
times. And they now liken it to the passing of a dreary night, since
which they have watched the coming of a steadily brightening day.

Before the grass growth of 1847, a body of one hundred and forty-three
picked men, with seventy wagons, drawn by their best horses, left the
Omaha quarters, under the command of the members of the High Council
who had wintered there. They carried with them little but seed and
farming implements, their aim being to plant spring crops at their
ultimate destination. They relied on their rifles to give them food,
but rarely left their road in search of game. They made long daily
marches, and moved with as much rapidity as possible.

Against the season when ordinary emigration passes the Missouri, they
were already through the South Pass; and a couple of short day's travel
beyond it, entered upon the more arduous portion of their journey. It
lay in earnest through the Rocky Mountains. They turned Fremont's Peak,
Long's Peak, the Twins, and other King summits, but had to force their
way over other mountains of the rugged Utah Range, sometimes following
the stony bed of torrents, the head waters of some of the mightiest
rivers of our continent, and sometimes literally cutting their road
through heavy and ragged timber. They arrived at the grand basin of the
Great Salt Lake, much exhausted, but without losing a man, and in time
to plant for a partial autumn harvest.

Another party started after these pioneers, from the Omaha winter
quarters, in the summer. They had 566 wagons, and carried large
quantities of grain, which they were able to put in the ground before
it froze.

The same season also these were joined by a part of the Battalion and
other members of the Church, who came eastward from California and the
Sandwich Islands. Together, they fortified themselves strongly with
sunbrick wall and blockhouses, and living safely through the winter,
were able to tend crops that yielded ample provision for the ensuing
year.

In 1848, nearly all the remaining members of the Church left the
Missouri country in a succession of powerful bands, invigorated and
enriched by their abundant harvests there; and that year saw fully
established their Commonwealth of the New Covenant, the future State of
DESERET.

I may not undertake to describe to you in a single lecture the
Geography of Deseret, and its Great Basin. Were I to consider the face
of the country, its military position, or its climate and its natural
productions; each head, I am confident, would claim more time than
you have now to spare me. For Deseret is emphatically a New Country;
new in its own characteristic features, newer still in its bringing
together within its limits the most inconsistent peculiarities of
other countries. I cannot aptly compare it to any. Descend from the
mountains, where you have the scenery and climate of Switzerland, to
seek the sky of your choice among the many climates of Italy, and
you may find, welling out of the same hills, the Freezing Springs of
Mexico and the Hot Springs of Iceland, both together coursing their way
to the Salt Sea of Palestine in the plain below. The pages of Malte
Brun provide me with a less truthful parallel to it than those which
describe the happy Valley of Rasselas or the Continent of Balnibarbi.

Let me then press on with my history, during the few minutes that
remain for me.

Only two events have occurred to menace seriously the establishment at
Deseret: the first threatened to destroy its crops, the other to break
it up altogether.

The shores of the Salt Lake are infested by a sort of insect pest,
which claims a vile resemblance to the locust of the Syrian Dead Sea.
Wingless, dumpy, black, swollen-headed, with bulging eyes in cases like
goggles, mounted upon legs of steel wire and clock-spring, and with a
general personal appearance that justified the Mormons in comparing him
to a cross of the spider on the buffalo, the Deseret cricket comes down
from the mountains at a certain season of the year, in voracious and
desolating myriads. It was just at this season, that the first crops of
the new settlers were in the full glory of their youthful green. The
assailants could not be repulsed. The Mormons, after their fashion,
prayed and fought, and fought and prayed, but to no purpose. The "Black
Philistines" mowed their way even with the ground, leaving it as if
touched with an acid or burnt by fire.

But an unlooked for ally came to the rescue. Vast armies of bright
birds, before strangers to the valley, hastened across the lake from
some unknown quarter, and gorged themselves upon the well fatted enemy.
They were snow white, with little heads and clear dark eyes, and little
feet, and long wings, that arched in flight "like an angel's." At first
the Mormons thought they were new enemies to plague them; but when
they found them hostile only to the locusts, they were careful not to
molest them in their friendly office, and to this end declared a heavy
fine against all who should kill or annoy them with firearms. The gulls
soon grew to be tame as the poultry, and the delighted little children
learned to call them their pigeons. They disappeared every evening
beyond the lake; but, returning with sunrise, continued their welcome
visitings till the crickets were all exterminated.

This curious incident recurred the following year, with this variation,
that in 1849, the gulls came earlier and saved the wheat crops from all
harm whatever.

A severer trial than the visit of the cricket-locusts threatened
Deseret in the discovery of the gold of California. It was due to a
party of the Mormon battalion recruited on the Missouri, who on their
way home, found employment at New Helvetia. They were digging a mill
race there, and threw up the gold dust with their shovels. You all
know the crazy fever that broke out as soon as this was announced. It
infected every one through California. Where the gold was discovered,
at Sutter's and around, the standing grain was left uncut; whites,
Indians, and mustees, all set them to gathering gold, every other labor
forsaken, as if the first comers could rob the casket of all that it
contained. The disbanded soldiers came to the valley; they showed their
poor companions pieces of the yellow treasure they had gained; and the
cry was raised: "To California--To the Gold of Ophir, our brethren have
discovered! To California!"

Some of you have perhaps come across the half ironic instruction of the
heads of the Church, to the faithful outside the Valley:

"THE TRUE USE OF GOLD is for paving streets, covering houses, and
making culinary dishes; and, when the Saints shall have preached the
Gospel, raised grain, and built up cities enough, the Lord will open up
the way for a supply of gold to the perfect satisfaction of His People.
Until then, let them not be over-anxious, for the treasures of the
earth are in the Lord's storehouse, and he will open the doors thereof
when and where he pleases."--II. Gen. Epistle, 14.

The enlightened virtue of their rulers saved the people and the
fortunes of Deseret. A few only went away--and they were asked in
kindness never to return. The rest remained to be healthy and happy, to
"raise grain and build up cities."

The history of the Mormons has ever since been the unbroken record of
the most wonderful prosperity. It has looked, as though the elements
of fortune, obedient to a law of natural re-action, were struggling to
compensate to them their undue share of suffering. They may be pardoned
for deeming it miraculous. But, in truth, the economist accounts for
it all, who explains to us the speedy recuperation of cities, laid
in ruin by flood, fire and earthquake. During its years of trial,
Mormon labor has subsisted on insufficient capital, and under many
trials--but it has subsisted, and survives them now, as intelligent and
powerful as ever it was at Nauvoo; with this difference, that it has
in the meantime been educated to habits of unmatched thrift, energy
and endurance, and has been transplanted to a situation where it is
in every respect more productive. Moreover, during all the period of
their journey, while some have gained by practice in handicraft, and
the experience of repeated essays at their various halting-places,
the minds of all have been busy framing designs and planning the
improvements they have since found opportunity to execute.

The territory of the Mormons is unequalled as a stock-raising country.
The finest pastures of Lombardy are not more estimable than those on
the east side of the Utah Lake and Jordan River. We find here that
cereal anomaly, the Bunch grass. In May, when the other grasses push,
this fine plant dries upon its stalk, and becomes a light yellow straw,
full of flavor and nourishment. It continues thus, through what are
the dry months of the climate, till January, and then starts with a
vigorous growth, like that of our own winter wheat in April, which
keeps on till the return of another May. Whether as straw or grass,
the cattle fatten on it the year round. The numerous little dells
and sheltered spots that are found in the mountains, are excellent
sheep-walks; it is said that the wool which is grown upon them is of an
unusually fine pile and soft texture. Hogs fatten on a succulent bulb
or tuber, called the Seacoe, or Seegose Root, which I hope will soon
be naturalized with us. It is highly esteemed as a table vegetable by
Mormons and Indians, and I remark that they are cultivating it with
interest at the French Garden of Plants. The emigrant poultry have
taken the best of care of each other, only needing liberty to provide
themselves with every other blessing.

The Mormons have also been singularly happy in their Indian relations.
They have not made the common mistake of supposing savages insensible
to courtesy of demeanor; but, being taught by their religion to regard
them all as decayed brethren, have always treated the silly wicked
souls with kind-hearted civility. Though their outlay for tobacco,
wampum and vermillion has been of the very smallest, yet they have
never failed to purchase what goodwill they have wanted.

Hence, it happens, that in their Land of Promise, they are on the
best of terms with all the Canaanites and Hittites, and Hivites, and
Amorites, and Girgashites, and Perizzites, and Jebusites, within its
borders; while they "maintain their cherished relations of amity with
the rest of mankind," who, in their case, include a sort of latest
remnant of the primaeval primates, called the Root Diggers. The
Diggers, who in stature, strength and general personal appearance, may
be likened to a society of old negro women, are only to be dreaded for
their exceeding ugliness. The tribes that rob and murder in war, and
otherwise live more like white men, are however numerous all around
them.

Fortunately, upon their marauding expeditions, and in matters that
affect their freebooting relations generally, they all obey the great
war chief of the tribe called the Utahs, in the heart of whose proper
territory the Mormon settlements are comprehended.

If accounts are true, the Utahs are brave fellows. They differ
obviously from the deceased nations, to whose estates we have taken it
upon ourselves to administer. They ride strong, well-limbed Spanish
horses, not ponies; bear well cut rifles, not shot-guns, across their
saddle-bows, and are not without some idea of military discipline. They
carry their forays far into the Mexican States, laying the inhabitants
under contribution, and taking captive persons of condition, whom they
hold to ransom. They are, as yet at least, little given to drink; some
of them manifest considerable desire to acquire useful knowledge; and
they are attached to their own infidel notions of religion, making
long journeys to the ancient cities of the Colorado, to worship among
the ruined temples there. The Soldan of these red Paynims, too, their
great war chief, is not without his knightly graces. According to some
of the Mormons, he is the paragon of Indians. His name, translated to
diminish its excellence as an exercise in Prosody, is Walker. He is a
fine figure of a man, in the prime of life. He excels in various manly
exercises, is a crack shot, a rough rider, and a great judge of horse
flesh.

He is besides very clever, in our sense of the word. He is a peculiarly
eloquent master of the graceful alphabet of pantomime, which stranger
tribes employ to communicate with one another. He has picked up some
English, and is familiar with Spanish and several Indian tongues. He
rather affects the fine gentleman. When it is his pleasure to extend
his riding excursions into Mexico, to inflict or threaten outrage,
or to receive the instalments of his black mail salary, he will take
offence if the poor people there fail to kill their fattest beeves,
and adopt other measures to show him obsequious and distinguished
attention. He has more than one black-eyed mistress there, according
to his own account, to whom he makes love in her own language. His
dress is a full suit of the richest broadcloth, generally brown, cut in
European fashion, with a shining beaver hat, and fine cambric shirt.
To these, he adds his own gaudy Indian trimmings, and in this way
contrives, they say, to look superbly, when he rides at the head of his
troop, whose richly caparisoned horses, with their embroidered saddles
and harness, shine and tinkle as they prance under their weight of gay
metal ornaments.

With all his wild cat fierceness, Walker is perfectly velvet-pawed
to the Mormons. There is a queer story about his being influenced in
their favor, by a dream. It is the fact, that from the first, he has
received the Mormon exiles into his kingdom, with a generosity, that in
its limited sphere, transcends that of the Grand Monarch to the English
Jacobites. He rejoices to give them the information they want about the
character of the country under his rule, advises with them as to the
advantages of particular localities, and wherever they choose to make
their settlements, guarantees them personal safety and immunity from
depredation.

From the first, therefore, the Mormons have had little or nothing to do
in Deseret, but attend to their mechanical and strictly agricultural
pursuits. They have made several successful settlements; the farthest
North, at what they term Brownsville, is about forty miles, and the
farthest South, in a valley called the Sanpeech, 200 miles, from that
first formed. A duplicate of the Lake Tiberias, or Genesareth, empties
its waters into the innocent Dead Sea of Deseret, by a fine river, to
which the Mormons have given the name--it was impossible to give it any
other--of the Western Jordan.

It was on the right bank of this stream, at a choice spot upon a rich
table land traversed by a great company of exhaustless streams falling
from the highlands, that the Pioneer band of Mormons, coming out of the
mountains in the night, pitched their first camp in the Valley, and
consecrated the ground. Curiously enough, this very spot proved the
most favorable site for their chief settlement, and after exploring
the whole country, they have founded on it their city of the New
Hierusalem. Its houses are spread to command as much as possible the
farms, which are laid out in Wards or Cantons, with a common fence to
each Ward. The farms in wheat already cover a space, greater than the
District of Columbia, over all of which they have completed the canals,
and other arrangements for bountiful irrigation, after the manner of
the cultivators of the East. The houses are distributed over an area
nearly as great as the City of New York.

They have little thought as yet of luxury in their public buildings.
But they will soon have nearly completed a large common public
store-house and granary, and a great sized public bath-house. One of
the many wonderful thermal springs of the valley, a white sulphur water
of the temperature of 102 Fahrenheit, with a head "the thickness of a
man's body," they have already brought into the town for this purpose;
and all have learned the habit of indulging in it. They have besides
a yellow brick meeting-house, 100 feet by 60, in which they gather on
Sundays and in the week-day evenings. But this is only a temporary
structure. They have reserved a summit level in the heart of the city,
for the site of a Temple far superior to that of Nauvoo, which, in the
days of their future wealth and power, is to be the landmark of the
Basin and goal of future pilgrims.

They mean to seek no other resting-place. After pitching camps enough
to exhaust many times over the chapter of names in 33d Numbers, they
have at last come to their Promised Land, and, "behold, it is a good
land and large, and flowing with milk and honey:" and here again for
them, as at Nauvoo, the forge smokes and the anvil rings, and whirring
wheels go round; again has returned the merry sport of childhood, and
the evening quiet of old age, and again dear house-pet flowers bloom in
garden plots round happy homes.

It is to these homes, in the heart of our American Alps, like the holy
people of the Grand Saint Bernard, they hold out their welcome to the
passing traveller. Some of you have probably seen in the St. Louis
papers, the repeated votes of thanks to them of companies of emigrants
to California. These are often reduced to great straights after passing
Fort Laramie, and turn aside to seek the Salt Lake Colony in pitiable
plights of fatigue and destitution. The road, after leaving the Oregon
trace, is one of increasing difficulty, and when the last mountain has
been crossed, passes along the bottom of a deep Canyon, whose scenery
is of an almost terrific gloom. It is a defile that I trust no Mormon
Martin Hofer of this Western Tyrol will be called to consecrate to
liberty with blood. At every turn the overhanging cliffs threaten to
break down upon the little torrent river that has worn its way at their
base. Indeed, the narrow ravine is so serrated by this stream, that
the road crosses it from one side to the other, something like forty
times in the last five miles. At the end of the ravine, the emigrant
comes abruptly out of the dark pass into the lighted valley on an even
bench or terrace of its upper table land. No wonder if he loses his
self-control here. A ravishing panoramic landscape opens out below
him, blue, and green, and gold, and pearl; a great sea with hilly
islands, rivers, a lake, and broad sheets of grassy plain, all set, as
in a silver chased cup, within mountains whose peaks of perpetual snow
are burnished by a dazzling sun. It is less these, however, than the
foreground of old-country farms, with their stacks and thatchings and
stock, and the central city, smoking from its chimneys and swarming
with working inhabitants, that tries the men of fatigue broken nerves.
The 'Californeys' scream, they sing, they give three cheers, and do not
count them, a few have prayed; more swear, some fall on their faces and
cry outright. News arrived a few days since from a poor townsman of
ours, a journeyman saddler, that used to work up Market street beyond
Broad, by name Gillian, who sought the valley, his cattle given out,
and himself broken down and half heart-broken:--The recluse Mormons
fed and housed him and his party, and he made his way through to the
gold diggings with restored health and strength. To Gillian's credit
for manhood, should perhaps be cited his own allegation, that he first
whistled through his fingers various popular nocturnal, street, circus,
and theatre calls; but it is certain that, when my tidings speak of
him, which was when he was afterwards hospitably entreated by a Mormon,
whom he knew ten years ago as one of our Chester County farmers, he was
completely dissolved into something not far from the hysterics, and
wept on till the tears ran down his dusty beard.

Several hundred emigrants, in more or less distress, received
gratuitous assistance last year from the Mormons.

Their community must go on thriving. They are to be the chief workers
and contractors upon "Whitney's Railroad," or whatever scheme is to
unite the Atlantic and Pacific by way of the South Pass; and their
valley must be its central station. They have already raised a
"Perpetual Fund" for "the final fulfilment of the covenant made by the
Saints in the Temple at Nauvoo," which "is not to cease till all the
poor are brought to the valley." All the poor still lingering behind,
will be brought there: so at an early period will the fifty thousand
communicants, the Church already numbers in Great Britain, with all
the other "increase among the Gentiles." Their place of rendezvous
will be upon what were formerly the Pottawatamie lands. The interests
of this Stake have been admirably cared for. It now comprises the
thriving counties of "Fremont" and "Pottawatamie," in which the
Mormons still number a majority of the inhabitants. Their chief town
is growing rapidly, already boasting over three thousand inhabitants,
with nineteen large merchants' stores, the mail lines and five regular
steam packets running to it, and other western evidences of prosperity;
besides a fine Music Hall and public buildings, and the printing
establishment of a very ably edited newspaper, "The Frontier Guardian."

It is probably the best station on the Missouri for commencing
the overland journey to Oregon and California; as travellers can
follow directly from it the Mormon road, which, in addition to other
advantages, proves to be more salubrious than those to the south of
it. Large numbers are expected to arrive at this point from England
during the present spring, on their way to the Salt Lake. They will
repay their welcome; for every working person gained to the hive of
their "Honey State" counts as added wealth. So far, the Mormons write
in congratulation, that they have not among them "a single loafer rich
or poor, idle gentleman or lazy vagabond." They are no Communists; but
their experience has taught them the gain of joint stock to capital,
and combination to labor,--perhaps something more, for I remark they
have recently made arrangements to "classify their mechanics," which
is probably a step in the right direction. They will be successful
manufacturers, for their vigorous land-locked industry cannot be
tampered with by protection. They have no gold--they have not hunted
for it; but they have found wealth of other valuable minerals; rock
salt enough to do the curing of the world,--"We'll salt the Union for
you," they write, "if you can't preserve it in any other way,"--perhaps
coal, excellent ores of iron everywhere. They are near enough, however,
to the Californian Sierra, to be the chief quartermasters of its
miners; and they will dig their own gold in their unlimited fields
of admirably fertile land. I should only invite your incredulity,
and the disgust of the Horticultural Society, by giving you certain
measurements of mammoth beets, turnips, pumpkins, and garden
vegetables, in my possession. In that country where stock thrives care
free, where a poor man's 32 potatoes saved can return him 18 bushels,
and 2 1/2 bushels of wheat sown yield 350 bushels in a season; or where
an average crop of wheat on irrigated lands is 50 bushels to the acre;
the farmer's part is hardly to be despised. Certainly it will not be
under a continuance of the present prices current of the region,--wheat
at $4 the bushel, and flour $12 the hundred, with a ready market.

The recent letters from Deseret interest me in one thing more. They are
eloquent in describing the anniversary of the Pioneers' arrival in the
Valley. It was the 24th of July, and they have ordained that that day
shall be commemorated in future, like our 21st of December, as their
Forefather's Day. The noble Walker attended as an invited guest, with
two hundred of his best dressed mounted cavaliers, who stacked their
guns and took up their places at the ceremonies and banquet, with the
quiet precision of soldiers marched to mass. The Great Band was there
too, that had helped their humble hymns through all the wanderings of
the Wilderness. Through the many trying marches of 1846, through the
fierce winter ordeal that followed, and the long journey after over
plain and mountain, it had gone unbroken, without the loss of any of
its members. As they set out from England, and as they set out from
Illinois, so they all came into the valley together, and together
sounded the first glad notes of triumph when the Salt Lake City was
founded. It was their right to lead the psalm of praise. Anthem, song
and dance, all the innocent and thankful frolic of the day owed them
its chief zest. "They never were in finer key." The people felt their
sorrows ended. FAR WEST, their old settlement in Missouri, and NAUVOO;
with their wealth and ease, like "Pithom and Ramses, treasure cities
built for Pharaoh," went awhile forgotten. Less than four years had
restored them every comfort that they needed. Their entertainment,
the contribution of all, I have no doubt was really sumptuous. It was
spread on broad buffet tables about 1400 feet in length, at which they
took their seats by turns, while they kept them heaped with ornamented
delicacies. "Butter of kine, and milk, with fat of lambs, with the
fat of kidneys of wheat;" "and the cucumbers, and the melons, and the
leeks, and the onions, and the garlic, and the remembered fish which
we did eat in Egypt freely"--they seem unable to dilate with too much
pride upon the show it made.

"To behold the tables," says one, that I quote from literally:

"To behold them filling the Bowery and all adjoining grounds, loaded
with all luxuries of the fields and gardens and nearly all the
varieties that any vegetable market in the world could produce, and
to see the seats around those tables filled and refilled by a people
who had been deprived of those luxuries for years by the cruel hand of
oppression, and freely offering seats to every stranger within their
borders; and this, too, in the Valley of the Mountains, over a thousand
miles from civilization, where, two years before, naught was to be
found save the wild root of the prairie and the mountain cricket; was
a theme of unbounded thanksgiving and praise to the Giver of all Good,
as the dawning of a day when the Children of the Kingdom can sit under
their own vines and fig-trees, and inhabit their own houses, having
none to make them afraid. May the time be hastened when the scattered
Israel may partake of such like banquets from the gardens of Joseph!"
[G]

I have gone over the work I assigned myself when I accepted your
Committee's invitation, as fully as I could do without trespassing too
largely upon your courteous patience. But I should do wrong to conclude
my lecture without declaring in succinct and definite terms, the
opinions I have formed and entertain of the Mormon people. The libels,
of which they have been made the subject, make this a simple act of
justice. Perhaps, too, my opinion, even with those who know me as you
do, will better answer its end following after the narrative I have
given.

I have spoken to you of a people; whose industry had made them
rich, and gathered around them all the comforts, and not a few of
the luxuries of refined life; expelled by lawless force into the
Wilderness; seeking an untried home far away from the scenes which
their previous life had endeared to them; moving onward, destitute,
hunger-sickened, and sinking with disease; bearing along with them
their wives and children, the aged, and the poor, and the decrepit;
renewing daily on their march, the offices of devotion, the ties of
family and friendship, and charity; sharing necessities, and braving
dangers together, cheerful in the midst of want and trial, and
persevering until they triumphed. I have told, or tried to tell you, of
men, who when menaced by famine, and in the midst of pestilence, with
every energy taxed by the urgency of the hour, were building roads and
bridges, laying out villages, and planting cornfields, for the stranger
who might come after them, their kinsman only by a common humanity,
and peradventure a common suffering,--of men, who have renewed their
prosperity in the homes they have founded in the desert,--and who,
in their new built city, walled round by mountains like a fortress,
are extending pious hospitalities to the destitute emigrants from our
frontier lines,--of men who, far removed from the restraints of law,
obeyed it from choice, or found in the recesses of their religion,
something not inconsistent with human laws, but far more controlling;
and who are now soliciting from the government of the United States,
not indemnity,--for the appeal would be hopeless, and they know it--not
protection, for they now have no need of it,--but that identity of
political institutions and that community of laws with the rest of us,
which was confessedly their birthright when they were driven beyond our
borders.

I said I would give you the opinion I formed of the Mormons: you may
deduce it for yourselves from these facts. But I will add that I have
not yet heard the single charge against them as a Community, against
their habitual purity of life, their integrity of dealing, their
toleration of religious differences in opinion, their regard for the
laws, or their devotion to the constitutional government under which
we live, that I do not from my own observation, or the testimony of
others, know to be unfounded.

                               THE END.



POSTSCRIPT TO THE SECOND EDITION.

I have been annoyed by comments this hastily written discourse has
elicited. Well meaning friends have even invited me to tone down its
remarks in favor of the Mormons, for the purpose of securing them a
readier acceptance.--I can only make them more express. The Truth must
take care of itself. I not only meant to deny that the Mormons in any
wise fall below our own standard of morals, but I would be distinctly
understood to ascribe to those of their number with whom I associated
in the West, a general correctness of deportment, and purity of
character above the average of ordinary communities.

The furthest I can go toward qualifying my testimony, will be to name
the causes, to which, as a believer in Nature's compensations, I have
myself credited this undue morality.

It was partly attributable perhaps to their forced abstemiousness;
the diet of the most fortunate Mormons having been for long continued
periods very spare, and composed almost wholly of vegetable food, with
few condiments, and no intoxicating liquors. Some influence should
be referred also to their custom of early and equal marriages, these
not being regulated by the prudential considerations which embarrass
opulent communities; something more to the supervision which was
incidental to their nomadic life, and the habits it encouraged of
disciplined, but grateful industry.

The chief cause, however, was probably found in this fact. The Mormons
as I saw them, though a majority, were but a portion of the Church
as it flourished in Illinois. When the persecution triumphed there,
and no alternative remained for the steadfast in the faith but the
flight out of Egypt into the Wilderness, as it was termed, all their
fair weather friends forsook them. Priests and elders, scribes and
preachers deserted by whole councils at a time; each talented knave,
of whose craft they had been victims, finding his own pretext for
abandoning them, without surrendering the money-bag of which he was
the holder. One of these, for instance, bore with him so considerable
a congregation that he was able to found quite a thriving community
in Northern Wisconsin, which I believe he afterwards transplanted
entire to an island in one of the Lakes. Other speculator-heresiarchs
folded for themselves credulous sheep all through the Western Country.
One Rigdon not long since had a Cure of them in our own State. Quite
recently, an abandoned clergyman, who shortly before the Exod was
excommunicated for his improper conduct, has presented a memorial to
Congress, in which he charges the Mormons with very much more than he
himself appears to have been guilty of. This abusive person, a former
intimate of the Major General James Arlington Bennet, lately on trial
at New York, in company with a One Eyed Mr. Thompson of that city, is
also the only surviving brother of the Prophet Smith, founder of the
Sect, and as such, still claims to be its sole true President, and
genuine Arch High Priest.

So the Mormons have been, as it were, broken and screened by calamity.
Their designing leaders have left them to seek fairer fortunes
elsewhere. Those that remain of the old rock are the masses, always
honest in the main and sincere even in delusion; and their guides
are a few tried and trusty men, little initiated in the plotting
of synagogues, and more noted for services rendered than bounties
received. They are the men whom I saw on the prairie trail, sharing
sorrow with the sorrowful, and poverty with the poor;--the chief of
them all, a man of rare natural endowment, to whose masterly guidance
they are mainly indebted for their present prosperity, driving his own
ox-team and carrying his sick child in his arms. [H] The fact explains
itself, that those only were willing to undertake their fearful
pilgrimage of penance, whom a sense of conscientious duty made willing
to give up the world for their religion. The Mormons I knew, were all,
as far as I could judge, partakers of the sacraments, persons of prayer
and faith; and their contentment, their temperance, their heroism,
their strivings after the golden age of Christian brotherhood, were
but the manifestations of their ever present and engrossing devotional
feeling.

I am asked to explain or justify the Mormon Creed:--I will have nothing
to do with it. It is enough for me to say, that it does not manifest
itself externally by the Pythian ravings or Eleusinian hocus pocus
of new religions, nor the pageantry or mumming of those sometime
established; that its communicants cultivate no mysteries or double
faiths; and that I certainly think they are to be believed in their own
exposition of it. They have two books, that are for sale in the shops,
called The Book of Mormon and The Book of Doctrine and Covenants,
which profess to contain the entire body of their faith. The latter
harmless work has its special chapters on Marriage, and on the Right of
Property, Religious Toleration, and the Union of Church and State. [I]
I am not called upon to investigate this subject, so long as any person
of a jealous orthodoxy can constitute himself as good an inquisitor, by
investing somewhere about one dollar and fifty cents.

Nor shall I go out of my way to discuss the question of the former
character of the Mormons. What they were in Illinois, or what some of
their predecessors were there, it will not be difficult for those to
learn who are curious after the truth: the Hon. Stephen A. Douglas,
who as Presiding Judge of the Circuit in which they lived was often
called upon to dismiss idle charges against them, is now at Washington,
an honored member of the Senate of the United States. His personal
testimony I am assured has always vindicated his judicial action.

Some good people who believe the Mormons traduced, ask me how they
are to account for the great prevalence of these charges before the
expulsion. Interest, and feeling founded on it, is the answer. The
value of the property of which the Mormons were dispossessed in
Missouri and Illinois is currently estimated at over Twenty Millions
of Dollars: an adequate consideration certainly for a good deal
of misrepresentation on the part of those who were endeavoring to
appropriate it to themselves.

A motive sufficiently analogous explains the active circulation of
new calumnies within the last half year. Instead of being broken up
forever, as not more than five years ago their foes supposed with
reason, their Congregation is gathering in increased numbers, and
their application to be admitted as a State into the Union announces
their probable restoration to power and influence, and is a cause
of corresponding disquiet to the possessors of the properties in
Illinois and Missouri from which they have been expelled. These are
now the busiest Mormon slanderers. I speak of them with reluctance.
They are, the best of them, but interested persons, who circulate
calumnies at hearsay, calumnies which began with the original enemies
of the Mormons, the felons, that charged with unchastity the wretched
women they had ravished--with riot the men whose brothers they had
murdered--with community of Property those whom themselves had robbed,
whose houses and homes they fired over their heads on the lands from
which they drove them. Such wretches lie with the brutal strength of
Crime. And the Mormons are far away, and their few friends here are
nearly all in humble life, and those public men in the West whose duty
it was to do them justice, consent to render themselves parties to the
guilt of their constituents by their interested silence.

At all events, was there not something about their religion made their
neighbors unable to live with them?--Undoubtedly the industrious
chevaliers of the Half Breed Tract, and other like precious neighbors
of the Mormons, have in one sense proved this to be the case: perhaps,
in the course of their wolf and lamb quarrel, they may have even
said so, and before they finally devoured the offenders, complained
seriously of the insulting proximity of their good roads, good
schools, temperance and moral reform and musical associations, and
their good laws not enacted only, but enforced. I understand this to
be essentially the ground of complaint of the same marauders against
the Swedish Quaker Colony, they have lately broken up in Henry County,
above Nauvoo.

With other neighbors the Mormons have no trouble. We have had large
numbers of them in Philadelphia, and elsewhere to the East, for now
nearly twenty years past, whose good citizenship is no subject of
discussion with those who have daily business dealings with them. In
England too, they number nearly twice as many adult members as the
Baptists in Pennsylvania. Once indeed, when their religion was first
preached in that country--it was at the very time their earliest trial
before Lynch J., in Missouri, was pending--a charge was laid against
them in a manufacturing borough there, that they had made away with
an Elizabeth, or Betsey Martin, one of their new converts; and the
beginning of a mob entered upon its examination. But to her British
Majesty's Government, which holds the old fashioned notions of law
and order, it mattered as little if it were the case of Betty Martin
a Mormon, as of Betty Martin the Cyprian: a commonplace Government
Magistrate decided there should be no mob, and a commonplace legal
investigation decided the charge was groundless. The Mormons have
therefore been free to preach and sing and pray in the United Kingdom
to this hour; and I remark that Evangelic sectaries of my own
persuasion there, do battle with them in print on the same terms as
with Millerites, Wesleyans, or Seventh, or Every Day Baptists.

It is observed to me with a vile meaning, that I have said little about
the Mormon women. I have scarcely alluded to them, because my memories
of them are such that I cannot think of their character as a theme for
discussion. In one word, it was eminently that which for Americans
dignifies the names of mother, wife, and sister. Of the self-denying
generosity which went to ennoble the whole people in my eyes, I
witnessed among them the brightest illustrations. I have seen the ideal
Charity of the statue gallery surpassed by the young Mormon mother, who
shared with the stranger's orphan the breast of milk of her own child.

Can charges, which are so commonly and so circumstantially laid, be
without any foundation at all?--I know it. Upon my return from the
Prairie, I met through the settlements scandalous stories against the
President of the Sect, which dated of the precise period when I myself
was best acquainted with his self-denying and blameless life. I had
an experience no less satisfactory with regard to other falsehoods,
some of them the most extravagant and most widely believed. During
the sickness I have referred to, I was nursed by a dear lady, well
connected in New York and New Jersey, whom I sufficiently name to
many, by stating that she was the first cousin of one of our most
respected citizens, whose conduct as chief Magistrate of Philadelphia
in an excited time won for him our general esteem. In her exile, she
found her severest suffering in the belief that her friends in the
States looked upon her as irreclaimably outcast. It was one of the
first duties I performed on my return, to enlighten them as to her true
position, and the character of her exemplary husband; and the knowledge
of this fact arrived in time, I believe, to be of comfort to her before
she sank under the privation and hardship of the march her frame was
too delicate to endure.

15 July, 1850.

                                                      THOMAS L. KANE.



Footnotes:

A: Nine children were born the first night the women camped out. "Sugar
Creek," Feb. 5.

B: One of the company having a copy of Mme. Cottin's Elizabeth, it was
so sought after that some read it from the wagons by moonlight. They
were materially sustained, too, by the practice of psalmody, "keeping
up the Songs of Zion, and passing along Doxologies from front to rear,
when the breath froze on their eyelashes."

C: Rev. Dr. Morton, of Philadelphia.

D: It is certain that there is no sickness among the present
inhabitants of this region comparable to that of 1846.

E: This camp was moved by the beginning of October to winter quarters
on the river, where also, there was considerable sickness before the
cold weather. I am furnished with something over 600 as the number of
burials in the graveyard there.

F: I knew of an orphan boy, for instance, who came on by himself at
this time a foot, starting with no other provision than his trowser's
pocket full of biscuit, given him from a steamboat on the Mississippi.

G: Letter of the Presidency, Great Salt Lake City, Oct. 12, 1849.

H: This was BRIGHAM YOUNG, the choice of the Mormons for Governor
of Deseret. As this man, together with HEBER C. KIMBALL and WILLARD
RICHARDS, nominees of the same people for the offices of Lieutenant
Governor and Secretary, have been singled out as the objects of libel,
it is right I should state that I knew them intimately. I found Mr.
Kimball a man of singular generosity and purity of character, and Dr.
Richards a genial gentleman and pleasant scholar of the most varied
attainments: The integrity of all three altogether above question. T.
L. K.

I: It may be well, however, to quote from two of these.

SECTION CIX.--ON MARRIAGE.

Marriage should be celebrated with prayer and thanksgiving; and at the
solemnization, the persons to be married standing together, the man on
the right, and the woman on the left, shall be addressed by the person
officiating, as he shall be directed by the Holy Spirit; and if there
shall be no legal objections, he shall say, calling each by their
names: You both mutually agree to be each other's companion, husband
and wife; observing the legal rights belonging to this condition;
that is, keeping yourself wholly for each other, and from all others,
during your lives. And when they shall have answered "yes," he shall
pronounce them "Husband and wife in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ,
and by virtue of the laws of the country, and authority vested in
him:" saying, "May God add his blessing, and keep you to fulfil your
covenants from henceforth and forever. Amen."

The clerk of every church should keep a record of all marriages
solemnized in his branch.

All legal contracts of marriages made before a person is baptised into
this church should be held sacred and fulfilled. Inasmuch as this
Church of Christ has been reproached with the crime of fornication and
polygamy, we declare that we believe, that one man should have one
wife, and one woman but one husband, except in cases of death, when
either is at liberty to marry again. It is not right to persuade a
woman to be baptized contrary to the will of her husband, neither is it
lawful to influence her to leave her husband. All children are bound
by law to obey their parents; and to influence them to embrace any
religious faith, or be baptized, or leave their parents without their
consent, is unlawful and unjust. We believe that husband, parents, and
masters, who exercise control over their wives, children, and servants,
and prevent them from embracing the truth, will have to answer for that
sin.

SECTION CX.--ON GOVERNMENTS AND LAWS IN GENERAL.

We believe that governments were instituted of God, for the benefit
of man, and that he holds men accountable for their acts in relation
to them, either in making laws or administering them for the good and
safety of Society. We believe that no government can exist in peace,
except such laws are framed, and held inviolate, as will secure to each
individual the FREE exercise of CONSCIENCE, the RIGHT and control of
PROPERTY, and the protection of life.

We do not believe it just to mingle religious influence with civil
government; whereby one religious society is fostered, and another
proscribed in its spiritual privileges, and the individual rights of
its members as citizens denied. We do not believe that any religious
society has authority to try men on the right of property or life, to
take from them this world's goods, or put them in jeopardy either of
life or limb, neither to inflict any physical punishment upon them:
they can only excommunicate them from their society, and withdraw from
their fellowship.

We believe that religion is instituted of God, and that men are
amenable to him, and to him only, for the exercise of it, unless
their religious opinions prompt them to infringe upon the rights and
liberties of others. We do not believe that human law has a right to
interfere in prescribing rules of worship to bind the consciences of
men, nor dictate forms for public or private devotion. We believe
that the civil magistrate should restrain crime, but never control
conscience; should punish guilt, but never suppress the liberty of the
soul.

THE BOOK OF DOCTRINE AND COVENANTS.--Edition printed by John Taylor, at
Nauvoo, Illinois, 1844; pp. 440--443.





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