without a battle, and the little band under Kossuth, driven to the
inhospitable plains of inner Hungary, succumbed to the mongrel
hordes of Cossack, Sclav, and Carpathian, poured upon them by the
Russian Czar. The Badenischen army, too, retreated, and the revo-
lutionists mostly sought the New World. The best blood or the
fatherland was expelled, and Germany's loss became America's gain.

"With many others I was captured; but, unlike them, I was a
citizen of no country, and could claim no protection or ask no
clemency. Four long yeara I languished in a German prison. Need
I recall the lonesome hours? The days of unavailing struggle with
myself; the nights of restless tossing, or sleep haunted by dreams
of the dead. Daily I wat<;hed the gleam of yellow light breaking
in through the little grating above my head, slowly moving around
the walls of my dungeon, and dying away at last on the opposite
side. The daily passage of that ray was my only relic of a bright
past, my all of life, of light, of liberty. Nightly I sought relief by.



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DOLORES. 89

thoughts that reached beyond the tomb ; the dim rays of natural
religion barely gave a gleam of hope that Dolores still lived in
another sphere — they might feebly cheer, they could not guide me.
And even as I recalled that nightly hope, or watched that daily ray,
I ultimately resigned myself to look for happiness only beyond the
grave, or nursed the hope of liberty and revenge. Ah ! could I
escape, I would raise a band of dead hearts like mine and wage in-
expiable war on kings.

" At last all hope died out. Even the desire for vengeance died.
I was conscious only of a dull pain. The memory of the dead
seemed as a dream of long forgotten years; and when I spoke, as
sometimes I did, aloud, my own voice jarred on my ear. For two
years the jailer who brought my food was all I saw ; then for awhile
I had a companion in captivity. But we said little; confinement
had deadened the social instincts. We talked neither of the strug-
gles of the past, nor of hope for the future ; our hearts had died in
the awful solitude. Without passing through death, we were inmates
of the tomb.

"Why I was released finally I never knew. But I was, with all
the others, probably because all danger of insurrection was past, and
« the ^government regarded us with contempt. But I came into the
world as not of it. My father had died late in '48 ; my mother,
worn with grief, had soon followed him ; my sisters had married
even before my return from America, and other cares and other
loves filled their hearts. Worse than all, liberty was dead. France,
Germany, Italy, Hungary, had yielded again to despots; I saw no
hope for the rights of man. Again I sought the Rocky MountainS|
whose majestic scenery brought balm to my wounded heart. I have
learned that he who yields to fierce impulses or excessive feeling,
does so but to lay bare his soul to a thousand strokes ; that he who
would move faster than his age, will soon be alone with sorrow, and
that the Brotherhood of Man comes not by spasmodic struggles, but
by steady toil.

"Here, where my misery began, in communion with mighty
nature I find peace. The memory of Dolores has become a mild
joy ; her image is ever present to cheer me. The thought of our
affection has become a sort of religion. Near where I found and
lost her, I best love to dwell, and every returning autumn finds me
a pilgrim to the little mountain glen that contains her grave.''



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CHAPTER VI.

POLYGAMIA.

Turn back the wheels of time, imaginative reader, from 1874 to the
autumn of 1868, and allow the author to resume his personal narrative.
The first storm of the season had just tipped the summits of the
Wasatch with light snow, while summer still smiled upon the valleys,
when our train wound slowly through Parley's Cafion, and emerged
upon the eastern " bench," from which I obtained my first view of the

Mormon Capital. The city stands
at the north-east corner of a valley
shaped like a horse-shoe — the
AVasatch the eastern boundary,
the Oquirrah the western, and the
lake lying to the north-west across
the open end. A small spur puts
out westwardly from the Wasatch,
• nd breaks down in successive
•* benches'' to the upper part of
the city ; out of it flow City Creek
and several smaller streams, and
along its base bubble up hot tshem-
ical springs and fountains of pure
brine.

Ihe topography is Palestine re-
produced. We have Lake Utah, a fresh water mountain tarn, dis-
charging through the Jordan into another Dead Sea — the Great Salt
Lake. Along the Jordan extends a fertile but narrow valley, its
widest section near the city; all around are mountains, and beyond
those mountains long desert wastes, with only here and there a fertile
spot. North of Salt Lake City numerous coves indent the mountains ;
in each is a small fertile tract and a Mormon settlement, while south-
ward, for four hundred miles, is a series of narrow, fan-shaped valleys
settled in like manner.

I found the city a nice place to rest in, especially in September; and
after a journey of eight hundred miles over barren plains, like all vis-

(80) '



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POLYOAMIA. 91

itors, I exaggerated its beauty. There was first the morning walk in
the dry, bracing air, then a plunge in the warm-spring bath, and ah
indulgence in the luscious Salt Lake peaches, after which the day was
devoted to investigating Mormonism. I called upon all the Mormon
worthies. First upon Orson Pratt, solitary as the only man of learning
in the Church, and that learning singularly one-sided. At once.a fa-
natic and a mathematician (unique combination), he has devoted a life-
time of labor and sacrifice to perverting the Scripture, in the vain at-
tempt to bring back the modern world to the social system of the Asiat-
ics, and a worse than Jewish theocracy.

At once the ^poorest, proudest, most learned, and most devoted of
the elders, he is also the worst
snubbed by Brigham Young,
who has often taken a vulgar
delight in humbling the man
whose culture and scholarship
he can not forgive. Whil^ he
is systematically ignored in the
government of the Church, yet
when the Tabernacle has an
array of Eastern visitors, he
is invariably put up to defend
the doctrines of Joe Smith and
Brigham; and so, while best
known to the world of any man
in Brigham's kingdom, he is
constantly in trouble, and some-
times on the ragged edge of

starvation. In early life he ok«o« i^katt.

was a man of action — a traveling missionary, eloquent in the cause and
full of zeal, a successful preacher, and voluminous writer; now he is a
dreaming astronomer, whose head is among the stars.

Later I met W. H. Hooper, monogamous delegate in Congress
from this polygamous territorj^ a man for whom I at first entertained
some respect, but learned to distrust by reason of his action in regard
to the Mountain Meadow murderers. A Marylander of the old type,
native of the " eastern shore," first a merchant's clerk and then cap-
tain of a Mississippi steamer, he started across the plains in 1850 on
a business venture; but on arriving in Utah found a Mormon wife
and an appropriate mission, as the plausible go-between to do Brig-
ham's work among Gentile law-makers. It is not possible that a



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92 ' WESTERN WILDS!

man of his mental make-up ever believed Mormonism; the more rea-
sonable supposition is that he, like many other leaders of this people,
holds all religions in equal indifference, but finds his account in
) this one, and is willing the Church should run along as comfortably
as may be, while he accumulates wealth and takes physical comfort.
The husband of but one wife, he has never held ecclesiastical position
in the Church, but has been remarkably useful during many years
service at Washington. In 1872, Brigham concluded that a polyga-
mous people ought to be represented by a polygamist, and accordingly
sent George Q. Cannon, the four-wived apostle, to Washington. Con-
gress, which expelled Bowen for having two wives, admitted Cannon
with four, and Hooper returned to his store and bank. As all things
spiritual are in doubt, any man is excusable for believing any relig-
ion ; but we can barely excuse one who, in mere indifference, pro-
fesses belief in the worst imposture of the age.

My best interview was with
George A. Smith, full cousin
to the original Joe, and then
an apostle, but a little later
chosen in full conference to
the place of Heber C. Kim-
ball, deceased, as First Coun-
cilor to Brigham Young.
This man was long known
among Gentiles as the most
gorgeous liar in the Rocky
Mountains. He had four
sermons, usually selecting the
one most fitting to the occa-»
sion ; and recited the history
of the Church with such an
ingenious mixture of fact and

GBORGB A. SMITH. /; ,. xU j. 1 • J J l

fiction, that his dazed hearers
accepted the whole as gospel. In his narrative, Mormonism had a
roll of martyrs longer than that of the primitive church, and an array
of miracles which quite put the Mosaic record in the background.
Of sanguine temperament, easily believing every thing that made for
the glory of Mormonism, and throwing off with equal ease whatever
might have suggested doubt to an earnest thinker, fully persuaded of
the Mormon doctrine, that it was right to deceive for the good of the
Church, and with a brilliant imagination, that made him believe any



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POLYQAMIA. 93

thing he had told three times, he was by nature well fitted for the
place he had occupied from the first — ^that of Church Historian.

To him all doubtful points in Mormon annals were referred as to
an infallible oracle. When Gentile visitors to the tabernacle were
to be impressed, he stood next to Orson Pratt, and when doubtful
questions were to be settled in favor of Brigham's pet designs, he
found a precedent or made one with equal readiness. He consist-
ently believed and taught that it was the duty of the Mormon laity
" to be as a tallowed rag in the hands of the priesthood ; " of each
order of the priesthood to yield implicit obedience to their superiors
next in rank ; and of all orders, to be subject to the lightest command
of their divinely appointed leader, Brigham Young. To the last of
his life he obeyed Brigham's lightest request, and died in the confi-
dent faith that he could only enter heaven on Brigham's voucher,
properly indorsed by Joseph Smith. To such depths of abasement
may the heaven-born intellect sink. He was succeeded as First
Councilor by Brigham's son, ^'Johnnie'' Young; for it is one of
the " first principles of the gospel" as known in Utah, that all power
is to be kept concentrated in the hands of the Smiths and Youngs.

Daniel H. Wells was then, and is now, Brigham's Second Councilor,
these three constituting the First Presidency of the Church, and having
the right of final decision on all appeals from the lower priesthood, of
whatever branch. Wells is, by popular election and "Divine ap-
pointment," a Prophet and a Squire, a Mayor and a President, a
Lieutenant-General and the husband of five wives. He is a tall, an-
gular and most ungainly Saint, whose face and head bear involuntary
witness to the truth of Darwinism. Borrowing a term from dime-
novel literature, the Gentiles style him " The one-eyed pirate of the
Wasatch." Long acquaintance with his career has only confirmed
my first in^ression of him : he is the most dangerous man in the
priesthood. The others are mostly impostors; he believes it, bloody
doctrines and all. Had he held the reins from 1870 till 1873, he
would have precipitated a savage conflict, and the end would have
been — Mormonism drowned in blood, as was the Anabaptist schism,
or a new development and fresh lease of life on the cry of " persecu-
tion." It is well that he has small chance of succeeding Brigham ;
so much more dangerous is a fanatic than an impostor.

Brigham Young I did not see or converse with till some time
after, but was for many years familiar with his appearance in the
pulpit. Physically, the man is as near perfect as is ever allowed to
one of our wretchedly developed race. Six feet high and uncom-



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94 WESTERN WILDS.

monly well muscled, he is yet so compactly built that strangers in-
variably pronounce him smaller than he is; and one who first sees
him step out of his carriage on Main Street, clad in his short, gray
business coat, is apt to speak of him as ^Mumpy." He measures
forty-four inches around the chest, and weighs at least two hundred
pounds ; his hands and feet are rather large, his head extremely so,
and very broad across the base, sloping thence before and behind
toward the crown. With very light or golden hair, a cold, glitter-
ing blue eye and a massive under-jaw that shuts like a vice, he has
the firmness and vigor that usually consist with such an organiza-
tion, and that happy mixture of the sanguine and bilious tempera-
ments which makes one easily believe himself a man of destiny. Of
the hardiest Vermont stock, he was put up by nature to last a hundred
and twenty years, but hardships and the worry of governing have
shortened his life from twenty to forty years, and he may die any-
where between eighty and a hundred, retaining possession of his fac-
ulties and growing more tyrannical and avaricious to the last.

Not at all a talented man in the common sense of the word, his
power is largely the result of his immense physical potency. His
physique is one that makes a man do and dare, and then take the
results of that doing and daring as marks of divine favor. Even
sneering unbelievers who shake hands with him feel the impress of
his magnetic potentiality, nor is it pleasant to face him with the con-
sciousness that one is his enemy. Many an apostate can bear wit-
ness that long after being convinced that Mormonism was a hollow
fraud, which he ought to abandon, and could abandon without
danger, he still felt a grievous dread of standing up in the "School
of the Prophets" to face the wrath of Brigham Young. To women
of the uncultured and impressible sort, such a man is oft:en as fas-
cinating as a gentle and purring lion : one with all power in reserve
to be exercised only for them and upon their enemies. Even a few
non-Mormon women have confessed a mild admiration for this mass
of power, and at least two Gentile ladies have so far forgotten them-
selves as to write in fulsome praise of a man whose very existence is
a standing insult to womanhood. Such respect hath great native
power and virile force.

Before an audience in sympathy with him he is an effective speaker;
he can, by a series of strong, nervous appeals, carry them along to
almost any pitch of excitement, and commit them, by voice and vote,
to almost any absurdity. Add a ready command of language, albeit
the vernacular of an uneducated Vermonter, and rare powers as n



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POLYQAMIA. 95

mimic^ and we have the secret of Brigham's strength as an orator.
Of eloquence he has none whatever ; before a cultured or critical
audience he would be a hopeless failure. Whatever greatness he has,
finds its source in his splendid physical organization. Thence is his
energy, his invincible will, his iron disregard of the sufferings of
others — the qualities that have made him. His was also the rare
good fortune to fall just at the right time into just the right place for
his peculiar talents; for it is scarcely possible that in the ordinary
pursuits of life he would have made more than ordinary success.
The accident of one man's death and the apostasy of two others, made
him President of the Twelve Apostles just before Joe Smith's death;
after that event, there was none to oppose him save the flighty and un-
reliable Sidney Rigdon, whom the Mormons had never trusted, and so
Brigham necessarily became head of the Church.



BRIGHAM'S BESIDKNCKS.

It is a noteworthy fact that in almost every scheme Brigham has
undertaken, except managing the Mormons, he has completely failed.
His Colorado warehouses, beet-sugar factories, Cottonwood Canal, B.
Y. Express, and hand-cart emigration scheme, one and all, proved dis-
astrous failures, the last resulting in three hundred deathS, and the
most frightful suffering. Similarly every colony Brigham has sent to
the surrounding territories has finally been abandoned as a failure,
from Lemhi, on the north, to San Bernardino, on the south. Not a
few look forward to his death as a great aid to the disintegration of
Mormondom; his continued life will do far more in that direction.
When he took command of the Mormons they had, according to their
own accounts, over 200,000 members in all the world; now they num-



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96 WESTERN WILDS.

ber less than half as many. They submitted all to him, and he has
spent thirty years in teaching them the terrors of a religious despot-
ism. Thousands have learned that it is easy to surrender rights, but
hard to regain them. At first he only robbed his devotees, now
he insults them. A few more years of power and he will, to quote the
language of a Mormon, " hitch them up and plow the ground with
them."

Many intelligent men have concluded that Brigham was honest
in his religious professions. I can not agree with them. I might
reject all other evidence of his hypocrisy, but I can not reject his
own. Again and again he has virtually admitted that his religion
was a mere convenience. To a young Mormon friend of the writer,
Avhom he was urging to return to the fold, Brigham said : "It makes
no difference whether you believe in it or not; we need you; just
come along and be baptized, and pay up a little on your tithing, and
it will be all right." To another he said: "It's no great concern
what you believe; I Ve got as good a right to start a new religion
as Christ or Mohammed, or any other man." And yet again, when
speaking of the vote of each semi-annual conference indorsing him
as a prophet, he said ; " I am neither a prophet nor the son of a
prophet, but I have l>een profitable to this people.'* Since then the
Gentiles have usually designated him "The Profit." There was a
time, I think, when he believed his religion and worked hard for
it; but as he rose in the Church he learned more, and became what
he practically describes himself, a philosophic infidel. A man whose
convictions depend largely on his interests, with a happy power of
self-deception, a great deal of cunning, some executive ability, and
behind it all an immense physical potency, with little mercy or con-
science to temper it — such, in brief, is Brigham Young.

Late in September, I took a walk to Bear River Cafion, some
eighty miles north of the city, stopping often with the rural Saints
and noting their ways. This trip was through the most enlightened
part of Utah, almost the only part the Eastern tourist ever sees.
The villages are neat and quiet, and the little farms well watered
and cultivated. But even here the great lack is apparent. The
Saints have adopted the bee as their emblem, and have stopped
with the blind instincts of the bee— content with food and shelter,
with but little regard for the higher man. Near Ogden was an
old Dane, living with a mother and two daughters as wives; in
Brigham City lived a bishop, married to two of his own nieces, and
near Bear River was another Dane, li^'ing with three wives in a



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POLYQAMIA. 97

cabin not krge enough to make one comfortable. Such cases \vere
my first select specimens of the practical operations of the " Celes-
tial Law/' As this was but one of many journeys I made in
Utah, a few general notes on the topography will be in order.

The Wasatch Mountains on the east, and Sierra Nevada on the
west, like the two sides of a ( ), inclose a region known as the
Great Basin, in which nature appears to have worked on a dif-
ferent plan from that pursued in the rest of the country. All the
streams run towards the center, none towards the sea; a river is
larger at the head than at the mouth — when it has a mouth — very
few of the lakes have any outlet, and, with rare exceptions, both
pools and lakes are bitter with salt, iron, lime, or alkali. From
the mountains which form the rim of the Great Basin, sub-ranges
successively fall off towards the center, and the whole interior plain
is an almost unbroken desert. But from the Wasatch and Sierras
many streams put out towards the center, and, at the points where
they leave the mountains, are bordered by little fan-shaped valleys.
These constitute all the cultivable land in the Basin; the rest is
fit only for timber or grazing, or is totally barren. Throughout
the Basin all the detached mountains run north and south; on
them is the only timber, and about their base the only grass to be
found. If the mountain is high enough to supply melting snow
throughout the summer, there may be a settlement at its base;
otherwise all the streams that issue from it will be dry in early
spring, and cultivation, that is to say, irrigation, be impossible.

Southward, the country grows steadily dryer and more barren;
the valleys smaller, the deserts larger, the streams more unreliable.
In Arizona and Southern Utah, I found it difficult, indeed, to get
water twice in a day's ride. In the north the most rugged mount-
ains are relieved by graceful adjuncts; there is a gradual ascent
from plain to bench, from bench to foot-hill and lower sub-range,
and over all is a faint green tinge from brush or bunch-grass, or
a dreamy haze that softens the rudest outlines. But in the south
there is a grandeur that is awfully suggestive — suggestive of death
and worn-out lands, of cosmic convulsions and volcanic catastro-
phes that swept away whole races of pre-Adamites. There the
broad plateaus are cut abruptly by deep cafXons with perpendicular
sides, sometimes 2000 feet in height; there is a less gradual ap-
proach to the highest ranges, and the peaks stand out sharply de-
fined against a hard blue sky. The air is noticeably dryer; there
is no haze to soften the view, and the severe outlines of the cliffs
7



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98 WESTERN WILDS.

seem to frown menacingly upon one who threads the cafiods. Xee*
die rocks project hundreds of feet above the general level, while
hard volcanic dykes rise above the softer lime or sandstone —
mighty battlements, abrupt and unpassable — Pelion upon Ossa piled,
ag in Titanic war.

Tlie western half of the great Basin is Nevada, the eastern, Mor-
mon Utah. All that part of the Territory east of the Wasatch is
still the range of the Mountain Ute, and, for the most part, unfit
for white settlements. As nine-tenths of the cultivable land lies
along the western base of the Wasatch, in the little detached val-
leys mentioned, it results that Mormon Utah consists of a narrow
line of settlements down the center of the Territory : an attenuated
commonwealth rarely more than ten miles wide, but nearly seven
hundred miles long — fi'om Oneida, in Idalio, to the Rio Virgeu, in
Arizona. Geographically, it nearly fills the* definition of a line —
extension without breadth or thickness. Such communities would
naturally develop a different system of law and social organization
from that of a continuously fertile and habitable state like Illi-
nois. Manifestly something like the Cantonal system would spring
up, with the Commune as a subdivision of the Canton. But in
Utah theocracy came in to warp and distort the natural growth
of government, and subordinate every thing to the strengthening
of priestly power. Against this the Gentiles and Liberal Mor-
mons have unceasingly contended, and hence that interminable strug-
gle — theocracy vs. republicanism — which has so long made up the
history of Utah, and in which for many years I was an active par-
ticipant.

Through all my wanderings in the West I came back to Utah as
my home, and to this contest as to my chosen field of action. Even
now a glow comes over me at thought of blows given and taken, and
the little circle of choice spirits, half philosophers, half politicians,
that heli)ed make my life in Utah so pleasant. There was O. J.
Hollister, half enthusiast, half business man, and wholly a student
and man of literary tastes, who had had, perhaps, a more varied ex-
perience tlian any of the number. Reared in Columbia County, Xew
York, he early felt the "cramp'' of farm life there, and sought his
fortune first in Pennsylvania, and then in New Jersey and Maryland.