play before the gates and tumble in the straw.
Girls of nine or ten years are milking cows ; boys
of the same age are driving teams ; women are
cooking, washing ; men are digging potatoes,
gathering in fruit, chopping and sawing planks.
Every man seems busy, every place prosperous,
though the ravine was but yesterday a desert of
dust and stones. From among the green shrubs
a neat little chapel peeps out.

K2



180 NEW AMERICA.

Lower down the valleys the scene expands, and
herds of cattle dot the wide sweeps of grass. We
pass Kimball s Hotel a station of the Overland

mail kept by one of Heber Kimball s sons ; a

man of some wealth, living out here in the lonely
hills, with his sheep, his cattle, and his three
wives ; professing the Mormon creed, though he
is said to have been drummed out of the society
of Salt Lake for tipsiness and rioting in the public
streets. Sharp justice, as we hear, is meted out
by the Saints upon offenders ; no claims of blood r
however high and near, being suffered to protect
a criminal from the sentence of his church.

At Mountain Dell, the house cf Bishop Hardy,
a man having eight wives, three of whom live with
him in this mountain shed, we see a little Ute
Indian, who has been reclaimed from his tribe,
made into a faithful Mormon and a good boy ; a
shrewd lad, who seems to know the difference
between dining off wolf and off mutton, and who
hates the red-skins, his brethren in the war-paint,
with all his soul. From one of the bishop s wives
we learn that he was bought, as a papoose, from
his father for a few dollars ; that he is a sharp
fellow, and works very well when he is made to do
so ; that he is lazy by nature, and apt to lie much in



DESCENT OF THE MOUNTAINS. 181

the sun ; that he is slow at books and learning ; but
takes easily to horses, and drives a team very well.
In fact, he is capable of being raised into a white
man s servant, and trained, at much cost and care,
to fetch in wood and water for the white man s
use.

The Mormons have a peculiar view about the
red men, whom they regard as a branch of the
Hebrew people, who migrated from Palestine to
North America in their days of power and right
eousness, while they yet held the priesthood in
their hands. When, through the sin of disobe
dience, they lost their priesthood, they lost, along
with that sacred office, their white colour, their
bright intelligence, their noble physiognomy. Ac
cording to the Mormons, some rags and tatters
of their early faith of their ancient institutions
still remain to these remnants of Israel ; their
belief in one Great Spirit ; their division into
tribes ; their plurality of wives. But the curse
of God is upon them and upon their seed. They
come of a sacred race, but a sacred race now
lying under the stern reproof of Heaven. " In
time in God s own time," said Young to me, in
a subsequent conversation, " they will be recalled
into a state of grace: they will then cease to do



182 SEW AMERICA.

evil and learn to do good ; they will settle down in
cities ; they will become white in colour ; and they
will act as a nation of priests."

The change will, indeed, be great that trans
forms a Pawnee and a Ute into the likeness of
Aaron and of Joshua.

Before the war broke out, and slavery was
banished as an institution from the American soil,
the Saints had passed a territorial law permitting
the purchase of boys and girls from the Indians,
with a view to their being baptized into the
Church and taught useful trades. Ute and Snake
are only too ready to sell their infants ; and many
young red-skins, bought under that law, are still
to be found in these valleys. Of course they are
now free as the whites, and far more lazy, treach
erous, and wicked.

The bishop s wife, having had her eyes opened
by many trials, has come to have little faith in the
government plan for reclaiming Utes and Ban
nocks. She sees that a curse is on them and
on their seed ; she hopes that when the time
shall come for that curse to be removed, the red
man will be made capable of thrift, of labour, of
salvation ; but that removal, she owns to herself,
must be the work of God, not that of man.



DESCENT 0-F THE MOUNTAINS. 183

A long steep canyon, nine or ten miles in
length, with fringe of verdure and beck of water
running through it ; the verdure feeding cattle,
the water working mills, opens a way from
Mountain Dell into the Salt Lake Basin, which
we come upon suddenly, and by a sort of surprise,
on turning a projecting mountain ledge.

The scene now in front of us, from whatever
point of view it may be taken, is one of the half-
dozen pure and perfect landscapes which the
earth can show. No wonder that the poor emi
grant from a Liverpool cellar, from a Blackwall
slum, exalted, as his vision must be, with religious
fervour, and by sharp privation, looks down upon
it as a terrestrial Paradise.

Lying at the foot of these snowy ranges of the
Wasatch mountains, spreads the great plain, far
away into the unseen vistas of the north ; the
whole expanse of valley filled with a golden haze
of surprising richness, the effect of a tropical sun
shine streaming over fields sown thick with sun
flowers, like an English field with buttercups, and
ever multitudinous lakelets, pools, and streams :
to the left soar into the clouds and curl round
the Great Salt Lake a chain of mountains, which
the Indians call Oquirrh. In our front lies the



184 NEW AMEEICA.

sparkling city, the New Jerusalem, in its bowers
of trees ; beyond that city flows the Jordan, bear
ing the fresh waters of Utah through the plains
into Salt Lake, which darkens and cools the
great valley, with its amplitudes of blue. From
the lake itself, which is a hundred miles broad,
a hundred and fifty miles long, spring two islands,
purple and mountainous ; Antelope Island (now
called Church Island) and Stansbury Island ; while,
on either side, and beyond the blue waters of
the lake itself, run chains of irregular and pic
turesque heights, the barren sierras of Utah and
Nevada.

The air is soft and sweet; southern in its
odour, northern in its freshness. Cool winds come
down from the Wasatch peaks ; in which drifts of
snow and frozen pools lie all through the summer
months. So clear is the atmosphere, that Black
Eock, on the Salt Lake, twenty-five miles distant,
seems but a few hundred yards in our front, and
crests which stand sixty miles apart, appear to
our sight as though they were peaks of a single
range.

Lower down in the valley the golden haze
steeps everything in its own delicious light. The
city appears to be one vast park or garden, in



DESCENT OP THE MOUNTAINS. 185

which you count innumerable masses of dark green
trees, with a white kiosk, a chapel, a court-house,
sprinkled about it here and there. Above it, on a
bank of higher land, is the camp ; a cluster of
white tents and shanties ; from which a Gentile
government watches suspiciously the doings of
men in this city of the Saints. But the camp
itself adds picture to the scene ; a bar of colour to
the landscape of yellow, white, and green.



186 NEW AMERICA.



CHAPTEE XVI,

THE NEW JERUSALEM.

A DREAM of the night, helped by a rush of
water from the hill-side, (not larger than the
Xenil, which gave life to Granada, and changed
the barren vega into a garden,) fixed the site
of the New Jerusalem. Brigham Young tells
me, that when coming over the mountains, in
search of a new home for his people, he saw,
in a vision of the night, an angel standing on a
conical hill, pointing to a spot of ground on
which the new Temple must be built. Com
ing down into this basin of Salt Lake, he first
sought for the cone which he had seen in his
dream ; and when he had found it, he noticed a
stream of fresh hill-water flowing at its base, which
he called the City Creek. Elder George Smith,
and a few of the pioneers, led this creek through
and through a patch of likely soil, into which



THE .\EW JERUSALEM. 187

they then stuck potatoes ; and having planted
these bulbs, they took a few steps northward,
marked out the Temple site, and drew a great
square line about it. That square block, ten acres
in extent, is the heart of the city, the Mormon holy
place, the haram of this young Jerusalem of the
West.

The site of the new city was laid between the
two great lakes, Utah Lake and Salt Lake like
the town of Interlachen between Brienz and Thun
though the distances are here much greater, the
two inland seas of Utah being real seas when com
pared against the two charming lakelets in the
Bernese Alps. A river now called the Jordan flows
from Utah into Salt Lake ; but it skirts the town
only, and lying low down in the valley, is useless,
as yet, for irrigation. Young has a plan for con
structing a canal from Utah lake to the city,
by way of the lower benches of the Wasatch
chain; a plan which will cost much money, and
fertilise enormous sweeps of barren soil. If Salt
Lake City is left to extend itself in peace, the
cr.nal will soon be dug ; and the bench, now covered
with stones, with sand, and a little wild sage, will
be changed into vineyards and gardens.

The city, which covers, we are told, three



188 NEW AMERICA.

thousand acres of land, between the mountains and
the river, is laid out in blocks of ten acres each.
Each block is divided into lots of one acre and a
quarter ; this quantity of land being considered
enough for an ordinary cottage and garden.

As yet, the Temple is unbuilt ; the foundations
are well laid, of massive granite ; and the work is
of a kind that bids fair to last ; but the Temple
block is covered with temporary buildings and
erections the old tabernacle, the great bowery,
the new tabernacle, the temple foundations. A
high wall encloses these edifices ; a poor wall,
without art, without strength ; more like a mud
wall than the great work which surrounds the
temple platform on Moriah. When the works
are finished, the enclosure will be trimmed and
planted, so as to offer shady walks and a garden
of flowers.

The Temple block gives form to the whole city.
From each side of it starts a street, a hundred feet
in width, going out on the level plain, and in
straight lines into space. Streets of the same
width, and parallel to these, run north and south,
east and west ; each planted with locust and
ailantus trees, cooled by two running streams of
water from the hill-side. These streets go up



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 189

north, towards the bench, and nothing but the lack
of people prevents them from travelling omvard,
south and west, to the lakes, which they already
reach on paper, and in the imaginations of the more
fervid saints.

Main Street runs along the Temple front ; a
street of offices, of residences, and of trade.
Originally, it was meant for a street of the highest
rank, and bore the name of East Temple Street ;
upon it stood, besides the temple itself, the
Council house, the Tithing office, the dwellings of
Young, Kimball, Wells, the three chief officers
of the Mormon church. It was once amply
watered and nobly planted ; but commerce has
invaded the precincts of the modern temple, as it
invaded those of the old ; and the power of
Brigham Young has broken and retreated before
that of the money-dealers and the vendors of meat
and raiment. Banks, stores, offices, hotels, all
the conveniences of modern life, are springing up
in Main Street ; trees have in many parts been
cut down, for the sake of loading and unloading
goods ; the trim little gardens, full of peach-trees
and apple-trees, bowering the adobe cottages in
their midst, have given way to shop-fronts and to
hucksters stalls. In the business portion, Main



190 NEW AMERICA.

Street is wide, dusty, unpaved, unbuilt ; a street
showing the three stages through which every
American city has to pass; the log-shanty, the
adobe cot (in places where clay and fuel can be
easily obtained, this stage is one of brick), and the
stone house. Many of the best houses are still of
wood ; more are of adobe, the sun-dried bricks
once used in Babylonia and in Egypt, and still
used everywhere in Mexico and California ; a few
are of red stone, and even granite. The Temple is
being built of granite from a neighbouring hill,
The Council house is of red stone ; as are many of
the great magazines, such as Godbe s, Jennings ,
Gilbert s, Clawson s; magazines in which you find
everything for sale, as in a Turkish bazaar, from
candles and champagne, down to gold dust, cotton
prints, tea, pen-knives, canned meats, and mouse
traps. The smaller shops, the ice-cream houses, the
saddlers, the barbers, the restaurants, the hotels, and
all the better class of dwellings, are of sun-dried
bricks ; a good material in this dry and sunny
climate ; bright to the eye, cosy in winter, cool in
summer; though such houses are apt to crumble
away in a shower of rain. A few shanties, rem
nants of the first emigration, still remain in sight.
Lower down, towards the south, where the street



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 191

runs off into infinite space, the locust and ailantus
trees re-appear.

In its busy, central portion, nothing hints the
difference between Main Street in Salt Lake City,
and the chief thoroughfare, say, of Kansas, Leaven-
worth, and Denver, except the absence of grog
shops, lager-beer saloons, and bars. The hotels
have no bars ; the streets have no betting- houses,
no gaming-tables, no brothels, no drinking-places.
In rny hotel " The Salt Lake "kept by Col.
Little, one of the Mormon elders, I cannot buy a
glass of beer, a flask of wine. No house is now
open for the sale of drink (though the Gentiles
swear they will have one open in a few weeks) ;
and the table of the hotel is served at morning,
noon, and night, with tea. In this absence of
public solicitation to sip either claret-cobbler,
whisky-bourbon, Tom and Jerry, mint-julep, eye-
opener, fix-up, or any other Yankee deception in
the shape of liquor, the city is certainly very much
unlike Leavenworth, and the Eiver towns, where
every third house in a street appears to be a drink
ing den. Going past the business quarter, we return
to the first ideas of Young in planting his new
home; the familiar lines of acacias grow by the
becks; the cottages stand back from the road-



192 NEW AMERICA.

side twenty or thirty feet ; the peach-trees, apple-
trees and vines, tricked out with roses and sun
flowers, smother up the roofs.

Eight and left from Main Street, crossing it,
parallel to it, lie a multitude of streets, each like
its fellow ; a hard, dusty road, with tiny becks, and
rows of locust, cotton-wood, and philarea, and the
building-land laid down in blocks. In each block
stands a cottage, in the midst of fruit trees. Some
of these houses are of goodly appearance as to
size and style, and would let for high rentals in
die Isle of Wight. Others are mere cots of four
or five rooms, in which the polygamous families,
should they ever quarrel, would find it difficult to
form a ring and fight. In some of these orchards
you see two, three houses ; pretty Swiss cottages,
like many in St. John s Wood as to gable, roof,
and paint : these are the dwellings of different
wives. " Whose houses are these ? " we ask a lad
in East Temple Street, pointing to some pretty-
looking villas. "They belong," says he, "to
Brother Kimball s family." Here, on the bench, in
the highest part of the city, is Elder Hiram Claw-
son s garden ; a lovely garden, red with delicious
peaches, plums, and apples, on which, through the
kindness of his youngest wife, we have been hos-



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 193

pitably fed during our sojourn with the Saints ; a
large house stands in front, in which live his first
and second wives with their nurseries of twenty
children. But what is yon dainty white bower
in the corner, with its little gate and its smother
of roses and creepers ? That is the house of the
youngest wife, Alice, a daughter of Brigham
Young. She has a nest of her own, apart from
the other women, a nest in which she lives with
her four little boys, and where she is supposed to
.have as much of her own way with her lord, as
i;he daughter of a Sultan enjoys in the harem of a
Pasha. Elder Naisbit, one of the Mormon poets,
m English convert to the faith as it is in Joseph,
ives with his two wives and their brood of young
children on the high ground opposite to Elder
]lawson, in a very pretty mansion, something like
i cottage on the Under Cliff. Much of the city
s only green glade and orchard waiting for the
>eople who are yet to come and fill it with the
>ride of life.

In First South Street stand the Theatre and
he City hall, both fine structures, and for West-
rn America remarkable in style.
. The City hall is used as head- quarters of police,
nd as a court of justice. The Mormon police
VOL. i. o



194 NEW AMERICA.

are swift and silent, with their eyes in every
corner, their grip on every rogue. No fact, t how
ever slight, appears to escape their notice. A
Gentile friend of mine, going through the dart
streets at night towards the theatre, spoke to i
Mormon lady of his acquaintance whom he over
took ; next day a gentleman called at his hotel
and warned him riot to speak with a Mormoi
woman in the dark streets unless her father shoulc
be with her. In the winter months there ar<
usually seven or eight hundred miners in Sal
Lake city, young Norse gods of the Denve
stamp ; every man with a bowie-knife in his bell
a revolver in his hand, clamouring for beer an<
whiskey, for gaming-tables and lewd womer
comforts which are strictly denied to them b
these Saints. The police have all these viole
spirits to repress ; that they hold them in dece
order with so little bloodshed is the wonder
every western governor and judge. Willia
Gilpin, governor elect of Colorado, and Eobe
Wilson, sheriff of Denver and justice of th
peace, have nothing but praise to give these ster
and secret, but most able and effective rniniste]
of police.

With this court of justice we have scarce!



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 195

made acquaintance. A few nights ago we met the
judge, who kindly asked us to come and see his
court; but while we were chatting in his ante
room, before the cases were called, some one
whispered in his ear that we were members of the
English bar, on which he slipped out of sight, and
adjourned his court. This judge, when he is not
sitting on the Bench, is engaged in vending drugs
across a counter in Main Street ; and as we know
where to find him in his store, we sometimes drop
in for soda-water and a cigar ; but we have not
yet been able to fix a time for seeing his method
of administering justice at Salt Lake.

The city has two sulphur-springs, over which
Brigham Young has built wooden shanties. One
bath is free. The water is refreshing and relax
ing, the heat 92.

No beggar is seen in the streets ; scarcely ever
a tipsy man ; and the drunken fellow, when you
see one, is always either a miner or a soldier of
course a Gentile. No one seems poor. The people
are quiet and civil, far more so than is usual in
these western parts. From the presence of trees,
of water, and of cattle, the streets have a pastoral
character, seen in no other city of the mountains
and the plains. Here, standing under the green

o 2



196 NEW AMERICA.

locust trees, is an ox come home for the night;
yonder .is a cow at a gate being milked by a
child. Light mountain-waggons stand about, and
the sun-burnt emigrants, who have just come in
from the prairies, thankful for shade and water,
sit under the acacias, and dabble their feet in the
running creeks.

More than all other streets, perhaps, Main
Street, as the business quarter, offers picture after
picture to an artist s eye ; most of all when an
emigrant- train is coming in from the plains. Suet
a scene is before me now ; for the train which we
passed in the gorge above Bear Eiver has jusi
arrived, with sixty waggons, four hundred bullocks
six hundred men, women, and children, all Englisl
and Welsh. The waggons fill the street : some o
the cattle are lying down in the hot sun ; the mei
are eager and excited, having finished their lon<
journey across the sea, across the States, acros
the prairies, across the mountains ; the wome
and little folks are scorched and wan ; dirt, fatigue
privation, give them a wild, unearthly look; an
you would hardly recognise in this picturesqu
and ragged group the sober Monmouth farmer, ih
clean Woolwich artisan, the smart London smitl
Mule-teams are being unloaded at the store



THE NEW JERUSALEM. 197

Miners from Montana and Idaho, in huge boots
and belts, are loafing about. A gang of Snake
Indians, with their long hair, their scant drapery,
and their proud reserve, are cheapening the dirtiest
and cheapest lots. Yon fellow in the broad som
brero, dashing up the dust with his wiry little
horse, is a New Mexican ; here comes a heavy
Californian swell ; and there, in the blue uniform,
go two officers from the camp.

The air is wonderfully pure and bright. Eain
seldom falls in the valley, though storms occur in
the mountains almost daily; a cloud coming up in
the western hills, rolling along the crests, and
threatening the city with a deluge ; but when
breaking into wind and showers, it seems to run
along the hill-tops into the Wasatch chain, and
sail away eastward into the snowy range.



198 NEW AMEKICA.



CHAPTER XVH.

THE MORMON THEATEE.

THE playhouse has an office and a service in this
Mormon city higher than the churches would allow
to it in London, Paris, and New York. Brigham
Young is an original in many ways ; he is the
high-priest of what claims to be a new dispensa
tion ; yet he has got his theatre into perfect order,
before he has raised his Temple foundations above
the ground.

That the drama had a religious origin, and
that the stage has been called a school of manners,
every one is aware. Young feels inclined to go
back upon all first principles ; in family life to
those of Abraham, in social life to those of Thespis.
Priests invented both the ancient and the modern
stages ; and if experience shows as strongly in
Salt Lake City as in New York, that people love to
be light and merry to laugh and glow why



THE MORMON THEATRE. 199

should their teachers neglect the thousand oppor
tunities offered by a play, of getting them to
laugh in the right places, to glow at the proper
things ? Why should Young not preach moralities
from the stage ? Why should he not train his
actors and his actresses to be models of good con
duct, of correct pronunciation, and of taste in dress ?
Why should he not try to reconcile religious feeling
with pleasure ?

Brigham Young may be either right or wrong
in his ideas of the uses to which a playhouse may
be turned in a city where they have no high
schools and colleges as yet; but he is bent on
trying his experiment to an issue ; for this purpose
he has built a model theatre, and he is now making
an effort to train a model company.

Outside, his theatre is a rough Doric edifice, in
which the architect has contrived to produce a
certain effect by very simple means ; inside, it is
light and airy, having no curtains and no boxes,
save two in the proscenium, with light columns to
divide the tiers, and having no other decoration
than pure white paint and gold. The pit, rising
sharply from the orchestra, so that every one
seated on its benches can see and hear to advan
tage, is the choicest part of the house. All these



200 NEW AMERICA.

benches are let to families ; and here the principal
elders and bishops may be seen every play-night,
surrounded by their wives and children, laughing
arid clapping like boys at a pantomime. Yon rock
ing-chair, in the centre of the pit, is Young s own
seat; his place of pleasure, in the midst of his
Saints. When he chooses to occupy his private
box, one of his wives, perhaps Eliza the Poetess,
Harriet the Pale, or Amelia the Magnificent, rocks
herself in his chair while laughing at the play.
Eound about that chair, as the place of honour,
cluster the benches of those who claim to stand
nearest to their prophet : of Heber Kimball, first
councillor; of Daniel Wells, second councillor and
general-in-chief ; of George A. Smith, apostle and
historian of the church ; of George Q. Cannon,
apostle ; of Edward Hunter, presiding bishop ; of
Elder Stenhouse, editor of the Daily Telegraph;
and of a host of less brilliant Mormon lights.

In the sides of the proscenium nestle two pri
vate boxes ; one is reserved for the Prophet, when
he pleases to be alone, or wishes to have a gossip