Five minutes after we had passed the camp we were back in civilization, and plunged into polygamous society all at once, with Bishop Myers, the keeper of Bear River Ranch, drawing water from the well, while Mrs. Myers No. 1 cooked the chops, and Mrs. Myers No. 2 laid the table neatly.
The kind bishop made us sit before the fire till we were warm, and filled our “hack” with hay, that we might continue so, and off we went, inclined to look favorably on polygamy after such experience of polygamists.
Leaving Bear River about midnight, at two o‘clock in the morning of the sixth day we commenced the descent of Echo Canyon, the grandest of all the gully passes of the Wasatch Range. The night was so clear that I was able to make some outline sketches of the cliffs from the ranch where we changed mules. Echo Canyon is the Thermopylæ of Utah, the pass that the Mormons fortified against the United States forces under Albert S. Johnson at the time of “Buchanan‘s raid.” Twenty-six miles long, often not more than a few yards wide at the bottom, and a few hundred feet at the top, with an overhanging cliff on the north side, and a mountain wall on the south, Echo Canyon would be no easy pass to force. Government will do well to prevent the Pacific Railroad from following this defile.
After breakfast at Coalville, the Mormon Newcastle, situated in a smiling valley not unlike that between Martigny and Saint Maurice, we dashed on past Kimball‘s Ranch, where we once more hitched horses instead of mules, and began our descent of seventeen miles down Big Canyon, the best of all the passes of the Wasatch. Rounding a spur at the end of our six-hundredth mile from Denver, we first sighted the Mormon promised land.
The sun was setting over the great dead lake to our right, lighting up the valley with a silvery gleam from Jordan River, and the hills with a golden glow from off the snow-fields of the many mountain chains and peaks around. In our front, the Oquirrh, or Western Range, stood out in sharp purple outlines upon a sea-colored sky. To our left were the Utah Mountains, blushing rose, all about our heads the Wasatch glowing in orange and gold. From the flat valley in the sunny distance rose the smoke of many houses, the dust of many droves; on the bench-land of Ensign Peak, on the lake side, white houses peeped from among the peach-trees, modestly, and hinted the presence of the city.
Here was Plato‘s table-land of the Atlantic isle – one great field of corn and wheat, where only twenty years ago Fremont, the pathfinder, reported wheat and corn impossible.
CHAPTER XIV.
BRIGHAM YOUNG
“I LOOK upon Mohammed and Brigham as the very best men that God could send as ministers to those unto whom He sent them,” wrote Elder Frederick Evans, of the “Shaker” village of New Lebanon, in a letter to us, inclosing another by way of introduction to the Mormon president.
Credentials from the Shaker to the Mormon chief – from the great living exponent of the principle of celibacy to the “most married” in all America – were not to be kept undelivered; so the moment we had bathed we posted off to a merchant to whom we had letters, that we might inquire when his spiritual chief and military ruler would be home again from his “trip north.” The answer was, “To-morrow.”
After watching the last gleams fade from the snow-fields upon the Wasatch, we parted for the night, as I had to sleep in a private house, the hotel being filled even to the balcony. As I entered the drawing-room of my entertainer, I heard the voice of a lady reading, and caught enough of what she said to be aware that it was a defense of polygamy. She ceased when she saw the stranger; but I found that it was my host‘s first wife reading Belinda Pratt‘s book to her daughters – girls just blooming into womanhood.
After an agreeable chat with the ladies, doubly pleasant as it followed upon a long absence from civilization, I went to my room, which I afterward found to be that of the eldest son, a youth of sixteen years. In one corner stood two Ballard rifles, and two revolvers and a militia uniform hung from pegs upon the wall. When I lay down with my hands underneath the pillow – an attitude instinctively adopted to escape the sand-flies, I touched something cold. I felt it – a full-sized Colt, and capped. Such was my first introduction to Utah Mormonism.
On the morrow, we had the first and most formal of our four interviews with the Mormon president, the conversation lasting three hours, and all the leading men of the church being present. When we rose to leave, Brigham said: “Come to see me here again; Brother Stenhouse will show you everything;” and then blessed us in these words: “Peace be with you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Elder Stenhouse followed us out of the presence, and somewhat anxiously put the odd question: “Well, is he a white man?” “White” is used in Utah as a general term of praise: a white man is a man – to use our corresponding idiom – not so black as he is painted. A “white country” is a country with grass and trees; just as a white man means a man who is morally not a Ute, so a white country is a land in which others than Utes can dwell.
We made some complimentary answer to Stenhouse‘s question; but it was impossible not to feel that the real point was: Is Brigham sincere?
Brigham‘s deeds have been those of a sincere man. His bitterest opponents cannot dispute the fact that in 1844, when Nauvoo was about to be deserted, owing to the attacks of a ruffianly mob, Brigham rushed to the front, and took the chief command. To be a Mormon leader then was to be a leader of an outcast people, with a price set on his head, in a Missourian county in which almost every man who was not a Mormon was by profession an assassin. In the sense, too, of believing that he is what he professes to be, Brigham is undoubtedly sincere. In the wider sense of being that which he professes to be he comes off as well, if only we will read his words in the way he speaks them. He tells us that he is a prophet – God‘s representative on earth; but when I asked him whether he was of a wholly different spiritual rank to that held by other devout men, he said: “By no means. I am a prophet – one of many. All good men are prophets; but God has blessed me with peculiar favor in revealing His will oftener and more clearly through me than through other men.”
Those who would understand Brigham‘s revelations must read Bentham. The leading Mormons are utilitarian deists. “God‘s will be done,” they, like other deists, say is to be our rule; and God‘s will they find in written Revelation and in Utility. God has given men, by the actual hand of angels, the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Book of Covenants, the revelation upon Plural Marriage. When these are exhausted, man, seeking for God‘s will, has to turn to the principle of Utility: that which is for the happiness of mankind —that is of the church– is God‘s will, and must be done. While Utility is their only index to God‘s pleasure, they admit that the church must be ruled – that opinions may differ as to what is the good of the church, and therefore the will of God. They meet, then, annually, in an assembly of the people, and electing church officers by popular will and acclamation, they see God‘s finger in the ballot-box. They say, like the Jews in the election of their judges, that the choice of the people is the choice of God. This is what men like John Taylor or Daniel Wells appear to feel; the ignorant are permitted to look upon Brigham as something more than man, and though Brigham himself does nothing to confirm this view, the leaders foster the delusion. When I asked Stenhouse, “Has Brigham‘s re-election as prophet ever been opposed?” he answered sharply, “I should like to see the man who‘d do it.”
Brigham‘s personal position is a strange one: he calls himself prophet, and declares that he has revelations from God himself, but when you ask him quietly what all this means, you find that for prophet you should read political philosopher. He sees that a canal from Utah Lake to Salt Lake Valley would be of vast utility to the church and people – that a new settlement is urgently required. He thinks about these things till they dominate in his mind, and take in his brain the shape of physical creations. He dreams of the canal, the city; sees them before him in his waking moments. That which is so clearly for the good of God‘s people becomes God‘s will. Next Sunday at the Tabernacle he steps to the front, and says: “God has spoken; He has said unto his prophet, ‘Get thee up, Brigham, and build Me a city in the fertile valley to the South, where there is water, where there are fish, where the sun is strong enough to