When it became known that Smith was dead
that he had been slain for his opinions his faults
were instantly swept aside ; the remembrance of
his craft, his greed, his sensuality, his ignorance,
his ambition, was buried in his secret grave ; and
the unsought glory of a martyr s death was counted
222 NEW AMERICA.
to him by his people, and by many who had not
till then become his people, as of higher virtue
than would have been the merit of a saintly and
heroic life.
It is a story as old as time. Smith living at
Nauvoo, squabbling with his apostles about debts
and duns, wrangling with his wife Emma about
spiritual wives, subject to constant accusations of
theft and drunkenness was certainly not a man
whom the American people had any cause to fear ;
but his assassination in the gaol at Carthage raised
this alleged debtor and drunkard, this alleged
thief and fornicator, into the rank of a saint. Men
who could hardly nave endured his presence in the
flesh proclaimed him, now that he was gone, as a
true successor of Moses and of Christ.
Under a new leader, Brigham Young a man
of lowly birth, of keen humour, of unerring good
sense the sect emerged from its condition of
internal strife ; putting on a more decent garb,
closing up its broken ranks, labouring with a new
zeal, extending its missionary work. Finding that
through recent troubles his position on the Missis
sippi had become untenable, Young advised his
followers to yield their prize, to quit the world in
which they had found no peace, and set up their
THE TWO SEERS. 223
tabernacles in one of those distant wilds in the far
West, which were then trodden by no feet of men,
except those of a few Eed Indian tribes, Utes,
Pawnees, Shoshones, in what was called the
American desert, and was considered by everybody
as No-man s land. It was a bold device. Beyond
the western prairies, beyond the Eocky Moun
tains, lay a howling wilderness of salt and stones,
a property which no white man had yet been
greedy enough to claim. Some pope, in the
middle ages, had bestowed it on the crown of
Spain, from which it had fallen, as a paper waste,
to the Mexican Eepublic; but neither Spaniard
nor Mexican had ever gone up north into the land
to possess it. In the centre of this howling
wilderness lay a Dead Sea, not less terrible than
Bahr Lout, the Sea of Lot. One-fourth of its
water was known to be solid salt. The creeks
which run into it were said to be putrid ; the
wells around it were known to be bitter ; and the
shores for many miles were crusted white with
saleratus. These shores were like nothing else on
earth, except the Syrian Ghor, and they were
more forbidding than the Syrian Ghor in this
particular, that the waters of Salt Lake are dull,
impure, and the water lines studded \vith ditches
224 NEW AMERICA.
and pools, intolerable to the nostrils of living men.
To crown its repulsive features, this desert of salt,
of stones, and of putrid creeks, was shut off from
the world, eastward by the Bocky Mountains,
westward by the Sierra Nevada, ranges of alps
high as the chain of Mont Blanc, and covered with
eternal ice and snow.
The red men who roamed over this country in
search of roots and insects, were known to be the
most savage and degraded tribes of their savage
and degraded race. A herd of bison, a flight of
gulls, a swarm of locusts, peopled the plain with a
fitful life. In spring, when a little verdure rose
upon the ground, a little wild sage, a few dwarf
sunflowers, the locusts sprang from the earth and
stript the few green plants of every leaf and twig.
No forests could be seen ; the grass, where it
grew, appeared to be rank and thin. Only the
w r ild sage and the dwarf sunflower seemed to find
food in the soil, plants which are useless to man,
and were then thought to be poisonous to his
beast.
Trappers, who had looked down on the Salt
Valley from peaks and passes in the Wasatch
Mountains, pictured it as a region without life,
without a green slope, even without streams and
THE TWO SEERS. 225
springs. The wells were said to be salt, as the
fields were salt. Finding no wood, and scarcely
any fresh water in that region, these explorers
had set their seal upon this great American
desert as a waste unfit for the dwelling, incapable
of the sustenance, of civilised men. But Young
thought otherwise. He knew that where the
Saint had struck his spade into the ground at
Kirtland in Ohio, at Independence in Missouri, at
Nauvoo in Illinois he had been always blessed
with a plentiful crop ; and the new Mormon seer
had faith in the same strong sinews, in the same
rough hands, in the same keen will, being able to
draw harvests of grain from the desolate valley of
Salt Lake.
A carpenter by trade, Young knew how to fell
trees, to shape logs, to build carts and trucks, to
stake out ground, to erect temporary sheds. The
Saints whom he would have to lead were inured
to labour and privation ; being chiefly New
England artisans and Western farmers, men who
could turn their hands to any trade, who could
face any difficulty, execute any work. An equal
number of either English or French converts
would have perished in the attempt to move across
the plains and the mountains ; but the native
VOL. i. Q
226 NEW AMERICA.
American is a man of all trades a banker, a
butcher, a carpenter, a clerk, a teamster, a states
man, anything at a pinch, everything in its turn
a man rich in resources and ingenuities, so that a
baker can build you a bridge, a preacher can catch
you a wild horse, a lawyer can bake you hot cakes.
Young knew that in crossing the great plains and
in climbing the great ranges, which are loosely
clubbed together under the name of Eocky
Mountains, the privations of his people would be
sharp; but to his practical eye these sufferings of
the flesh appeared to be such as brave men could
be trained by example to bear and not die. Food
and seed might be carried in their light waggons,
and a little malt whisky would correct the alkali
in the bitter creeks. In his band of disciples
every man was master of some craft ; every woman
was either a dairy-maid, a baker, a seamstress, a
laundress ; nay, the children could be turned to
account in the desert roads, for every American
girl can milk a cow, every American boy can drive
a team.
A party of pioneers (many of whom are still
alive in Salt Lake Valley) having been sent
forward to explore and report, the word to move
THE TWO SEERS. 227
on westward was at length given by Young, and
in every family of Nauvoo preparations were made
for a journey, unmatched in history since the days
when Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt. The
Saints broke up their cheery homes. They gath
ered, in their haste, a little food, a few roots and
seeds, a dozen kegs of spirits. Then they yoked
their mules, their oxen, to the country waggons.
Those who were too poor to buy waggons and oxen,
made for themselves trucks and wheel-barrows.
Pressed upon by their foes, they marched away from
Nauvoo, even while the winter was yet hard upon
them, crossing the Mississippi on the ice, and start
ing on a journey of fifteen hundred miles, through
a country without a road, without a bridge, with
out a village, without an inn, without wells, cattle,
pastures, and cultivated land. As Elder John
Taylor told me, they left everything behind ; their
corn-fields, their gardens, their pretty houses, w r ith
the books, carpets, pianos, everything which they
contained. The distance to be conquered by these
emigrants was equal to that from London to
Lemberg, six times that from Cairo to Jerusalem.
Their route lay through a prairie peopled by
Pawnees, Shoshones, wolves and bears ; it was
Q2
228 NEW AMEEICA.
broken by rapid rivers, barred by a series of
mountain chains ; and the haven to be reached,
after all their toils and dangers, was the shore of a
Dead Sea, lying in a sterile valley ; a land watered
with brine, and pastures sown with salt.
229
CHAPTEE XX.
FLIGHT FROM BONDAGE.
THE tale of that journey of the Saints, as we hear
it from the lips of Young, of Wells, of Taylor, and
of other old men who made it, is a story to wring
and yet nerve the hearts of all generous men.
When these Mormons were driven by violence
from the roofs which they had built, the fields
which they had tilled, the days were short and
snow lay thick upon the ground. Everything,
save a little food for the wayside, a few corn-
seeds and potato-roots for the coming year, had
to be abandoned to their armed and riotous
enemies ; the homes which they had made, the
temple they had just finished, the graves they
had recently dug. Frost bit their little ones
in the hands and feet. Hunger and thirst
tormented both young and aged. Long plains
of sand, into which the waggon-wheels sank
230 NEW AMERICA.
to the axle-trees, separated the scanty supplies of
water. Wells there were none. Mirage often
mocked them with its promise ; and even when
they came to creeks and streams they often found
them bitter to the taste, and dangerous to health.
The days were short and cold, and the absence of
any other shelter from the frost than the bit of
canvas roof made the nights of winter terrible to
all. Horses sickened by the way. Disease broke
out among the cows and sheep, so that milk ran
short, and the supplies of mutton were dressed
and cooked in fear. Some of the poor, the aged,
and the ailing, had then to be left behind ; with
them a guard of young men who could ill be
spared.
Nor was this loss of a part of their youth and
strength the whole of their calamity in this open
ing stage of their emigration. Just at the hour
when every male arm was most precious to
these exiles, the Mexican war broke out ; and a
government, which had never been strong enough
to do them right, came down to them for help in
arms and men. Young answered the appeal of his
country like a patriot : five hundred youths, the
flower of his migrating bands, stepped out before
him, and with the blessing of their chief upon
FLIGHT FROM BONDAGE. 231
their heads, they mustered themselves into the
invading corps.
Weakened by the departure of this living
force, the Mormons crossed the Missouri Eiver in a
ferry made by themselves, entering on the great
wilderness, the features of which they laid down on
a map, making a rough road, and throwing light
bridges over streams, as they went on ; collecting
grass and herbs for their own use ; sowing corn for
those who were to come later in the year ; raising
temporary sheds in which their little ones might
sleep ; and digging caves in the earth as a refuge
from the winter snow. Their food was scarce,
their water bad, and such wild game as they
could find in the plains, the elk, the antelope, the
buffalo, poisoned their blood. Nearly all the malt
whisky which they had brought from Nauvoo to
correct the bad water, had been seized on the road,
and the kegs staved in, by agents of government,
on pretence of its being meant for the red- skins, to
whom it was unlawful for the whites to sell any
ardent spirits. Four kegs only had been saved :
saved by Brigham Young himself. An elder, who
was present in the boat, and who told me the
anecdote, says it is the only time he ever remem
bers to have seen the Prophet in a rage Four
232 NEW AMERICA.
kegs were on board the ferry, when the officer
seized them and began to knock in the staves ; in
that spirit lay the lives of the people ; and when
Brigham saw the man raise his mallet, he drew
his pistol, levelled it at his head, and cried, " Stay
your hand ! If you touch that keg, you die by the
living God ! " The man jumped off the ferry and
troubled them no more.
In our own journey across the plains, though
the time was August, the weather fine, the passage
swift, we suffered keenly from the want of fresh
food and of good water. My companion sickened
from bile into dysentery ; no meat, no drink, would
lie in his stomach ; nothing but the cognac in our
flasks. The water almost killed him. His sun
burnt face grew chalky- white ; his limbs hung
feeble and relaxed ; his strong physique so drooped
that a man at one of the ranches, after looking at
him for a moment with a curious eye, came up to
me, and said, " You will feel very lonely when he
is left behind." My own attack came later, and in
another form. The skin of my hands peeled off, as
if it had been either frayed or scraped with a knife ;
boils came out upon my back ; a pock started on my
under eye-lid ; my fingers had the appearance of
scorbutic eruptions.
FLIGHT FEOM BONDAGE. 233
These two diseases, Taylor told me, ravaged the
camp of emigrants. Many sickened of dysentery,
still more suffered from scurvy.
Some of the Saints fell back in the face of
these terrible trials. More fainted by the wayside,
and were mournfully laid in their desert graves.
Every day there came a funeral, every night there
was fresh mourning in the camp. The waste of
life is always very great in the emigrant trains ;
even now, when the roads are made and the sta
tions are provisioned with vegetable food. Of the
train which I saw come in, six had perished on the
plains. A young lady told me that eighty had
died in the train by which she had arrived ; forty
would perhaps be an average loss in the mountains
and the plains. But no subsequent train has ever
suffered like the first. " The waste of life was
great," said Brigham Young, as he told me the
dreadful tale. Yet the brave, unbroken body of
male and female Saints toiled along the frozen
way. When their hearts were very low, a band
of music struck up some lively air, in which the
people joined, and forgot their woes. By day they
sang hymns, at night they danced round the watch-
fires. Gloom, asperity, asceticism, they banished
from their camps and from their thoughts. Among
234 NEW AMERICA.
the few treasures which they had carried with
them from Nauvoo was a printing-press ; and a
sheet of news, printed and published by the way
side, carried words of good counsel into every part
of the camp.
After crossing the sands and creeks which
have since become known to civilised men on
maps and charts as Nebraska and Dakota, they
arrived at the foot of the first great range of
those high and broken chains of alps which are
commonly grouped together under the name of
Eocky Mountains ; over these high barriers there
was yet no path ; and the defiles leading through
them were buried in drifts of snow. How the
Saints toiled up those mountain-sides, dragging
with them oxen and carts, foraging for food,
baking their bread and cooking their meat, with
out help and without guides, it brings tears into
the eyes of aged men to tell. The young and
bold went forward in advance ; driving away the
bears and wolves ; stoning the rattle-snakes ;
chasing the elk and the wild deer ; making a path
for the women and the old men. At length, when
they had reached the summit of the pass, they
gazed upon a series of arid and leafless plains,
of dry river-beds, of verdureless hill-sides, of alka-
FLIGHT FROM BONDAGE. 235
line bottoms ; pools of bitter water, narrow can
yons and gorges, abrupt and steep. Day by day,
week after week, they toiled over these bleak
sierras, through these forbidding valleys. Food
was running out ; wild game became scarce ; the
Utes and Snakes were unfriendly ; and at the end
of their journey, should they ever reach it, lay the
dry Salt desert, in which they had consented to
come and dwell !
Yet they were not disheartened by these
hostile aspects of the country ; they had riot ex
pected a verdant paradise ; they knew that the
land had never been seized, because it had not
been considered worth taking from the Indian
tribes ; they expected to find here nothing be
yond peace and freedom, a place in which they
could take their chance with Nature, and to
which they could invite the Saints, their breth
ren, to a country of their own. Descending the
passes with beating hearts and clanging trum
pets, they entered on their lonely inheritance ;
marched upon this slope above the Jordan, near
the conical hill on which Brigham had seen the
angel in his sleep; laid down the plan of a new
city ; explored the canyons and water-courses into
the hills ; and in a few days found, to their sudden
236 NEW AMERICA.
joy, not only springs of fresh water, but woody
nooks and grassy mounds and slopes.
Not an hour was lost. "The first duty of a
Saint when he comes to this valley," said Brigham
Young to me, "is to learn how to grow a vege
table ; after which he must learn how to rear pigs
and fowls, to irrigate his land, and to build up
his house. The rest will come in time." Euled
from the first by this practical genius, every man
fell to his work. Deseret country of the Bee
was announced as the Promised Land and future
home of the Saints. It was to them as an unknown,
unappropriated soil, and they hoped to found upon
it an independent State.
237
CHAPTEE XXI.
SETTLEMENT IN UTAH.
SOON the aspects of this desert valley began to
change under their cunning hands ; creeks from
the hills being coaxed into new paths ; fields
being cleared and sown ; homesteads rising from
the ground ; sheep and cattle beginning to dot
the hills ; salt-pits and saw-mills being estab
lished ; fruit trees being planted and orchards
taught to bloom and bear. Eoads were laid out
and made. When the Mormon herdsmen entered
the hill ravines, they found pine and cotton-
wood, elder, birch, and box ; materials precious
for the building of their new homes. A new
Jerusalem sprang from the ground ; a temple was
commenced ; a newspaper was published. Walnut
and other hard woods were planted in favour
able spots. The red-skins, who had long been
the dread of all scouts and trappers in the far
238 NEW AMERICA.
west, were won by courtesies and gifts ; and in
a few months they appeared to have been
changed from enemies of the white men into al
lies. " We found it cheaper," said Colonel Little,
" to feed the Indians than to fight them ; " and
this policy of feeding the Utes and Snakes has
been pursued by Young, with two or three brief
intervals of misunderstanding, from the day of
his first settlement in the valley. For two or
three trying years, the Saints of Salt Lake had
to wage war against locusts and crickets, those
plagues of the older Canaan ; but by help of
gulls from the lakes, and of their own devices in
trapping and pounding the insects, the Mormons
contrived to preserve their crops of corn and fruit.
A year went by, and the Mormons had not per
ished in the waste. On the contrary, they had
begun to grow, and even to make money. Year
after year they have increased in numbers and in
wealth, until their merchants are known in Lon
don and New York, and their city has become a
wonder of the earth.
What are the secrets of this surprising growth
of the new society out in these western de
serts ?
" Look around you," said Young to me, " if you
SETTLEMENT IN UTAH. 239
want to know what kind of people we are. Nine
teen years ago this valley was a desert, growing
nothing but the wild sage and the dwarf sun
flower ; we who came into it brought nothing
with us but a few oxen and waggons, and a bag
of seeds and roots ; the people who came after us,
many of them weavers and artisans, brought no
thing, not a cent, not even skill and usage of the
soil ; and when you look from this balcony you can
see what we have made of it."
How, above all other settlers in the waste
lands of western America, have the Saints achieved
this work ?
Is it an answer to say that these Saints are
dupes and fanatics ? Nothing is easier than to
laugh at Joe Smith and his church ; but what
then ? The great facts remain. Young and his
people are at Utah ; a church of two hundred
thousand souls ; an army of twenty thousand
rifles. You may smile at Joseph s gift of tongues ;
his discovery of Urini and Thummim (which he
supposed to have been a pair of spectacles !) ; his
Sword of Laban ; his prose works of Abraham ;
his Egyptian papyrus ; his Mormon paper money ;
his thirty-nine trials. You may prove, with a swift
and biting irony, that the weakest side of this
240 NEW AMERICA.
new faith is the actual life of its founder ; but
will your wit disperse this camp of fanatics ? Will
your laughter shake down the walls of this New
Jerusalem? Will your irony change the Utes and
Shoshones into enemies of these Saints ? Will your
arguments arrest those bands of missionaries which
are employed in preaching, in a hundred places
and to thousands of willing ears, the gospel as
it was in Joseph? The hour has gone by, as
Americans feel, for treating this Church in sport.
In England, though our soil is said to be the
nursery of the Saints, we have not yet learned to
think of Mormonism otherwise than as one of our
many humours ; as a rash that comes out from
time to time in our social body ; a sign, perhaps, of
our occasional lack of health ; no one among us
has learned to regard it as the symptom of a
disease which may be lying at the seat of
life. Has Convocation ever given up a day to
the Book of Mormon? Has a bishop ever visited
the Saints in Commercial Eoad? Two or three
ministers may have fired off pamphlets against
them ; but have any of these reverend fathers
been to see them in their London homes? Bare,
indeed, has been this holy strife even on the
part of private men. But our brethren in Ame-
SETTLEMENT IN UTAH. 241
rica can hardly affect to treat the Saints in this
easy style. The new Church is visible among
them ; for good and evil it is in their system ; not
a humour to be cast out like a rash upon the skin.
Up to this time our own Saints have been taught
to regard England as Egypt, and their old dwelling-
place as exile from a brighter home. America is
to them Canaan, Salt Lake City a New Jerusalem.
I do not say that this is good for us, though it has
an appearance of being good, since it relieves us of
a painful duty, and removes from the midst of our
cities a cause of shame. The poor, the aged, the
feeble, among the Saints, may be left behind in
our streets, to die, as they think and say, in the
house of bondage ; but the rich, the young, the
zealous, are bound by their faith to go forward
and possess themselves of the Promised Land.
With the younger Saints, especially with the
female Saints, a change of air is always recom
mended on a change of creed. Thousands emi
grate, though it is also true that thousands remain
behind. In London, Liverpool, Glasgow, and in
other cities, the Saints have schools and chapels,
books and journals, of which Oxford knows little,
and Mayfair less. Not being a political sect,
never asking for any right, never urging any
VOL. i. R
242 NEW AMEEICA.
wrong ; content with doing their work in peace ;
they escape notice from the press, and engage the
thoughts of society as little as the Moravians and
the Plymouth Brethren. In London society you
may hear in any one week more speculation about
Prince and Home, the Abode of Love and the
Spiritual Spheres, than you will hear about Young
and Deseret in six months. The Saints are not
in society; but in Boston, Washington, and New
York, these Mormons are a fearful portent, threat
ening to become a formidable power. Already
they have put jurists into session and armies into
motion. Colfax, the Speaker, has been to con
fer with Young ; and committees of Congress are
sitting on the affairs of Utah. The day appears to
be drawing nigh when the problems which these
Mormons put before the world may have to be
considered by practical men, not in colleges and
chapels only, not in senates and in courts of law
only, but in the camp and in the battle-field.
That question of how these Mormons are to
be dealt with by the American people, is one of
the strangest riddles of an age which has bridged
the ocean, put a girdle of lightnings round the
earth, and tamed to its service the fiery steeds of
the sun. A true reply may be far to seek ; for
SETTLEMENT IN UTAH. 243
we have not yet resolved, finally, how far thought
is free from the control of law ; and to what extent
toleration of creeds implies toleration of the con
duct which springs from creeds. One step in
advance towards such a reply must be an attempt
to find what Mormonism is, and by what means
it has grown. It cannot be put aside as either
unmixed foolishness or unalloyed vice. Strange
as the new sectarians may seem to us, they must
have in their keeping some grain of truth. They
live and thrive, and men who live by their own