It must not be supposed that the Vedette does the Mormons no harm; the perpetual reiteration in the Eastern and English papers of three sets of stories alone would suffice to break down a flourishing power. The three lines that are invariably taken as foundations for their stories are these – that the Mormon women are wretched, and would fain get away, but are checked by the Danites; that the Mormons are ready to fight with the Federal troops with the hope of success; that robbery of the people by the apostles and elders is at the bottom of Mormonism – or, as the Vedette puts it, “on tithing and loaning hang all the law and the profits.”
If the mere fact of the existence of the Vedette effectually refutes the stories of the acts of the Danites in these modern days, and therefore disposes of the first set of stories, the third is equally answered by a glance at its pages. Columns of paragraphs, sheets of advertisements, testify to the foundation by industry, in the most frightful desert on earth, of an agricultural community which California herself cannot match. The Mormons may well call their country “Deseret” – “land of the bee.” The process of fertilization goes on day by day. Six or seven years ago, Southern Utah was a desert bare as Salt Bush Plains. Irrigation from the fresh-water lake was carried out under episcopal direction, and the result is the growth of fifty kinds of grapes alone. Cotton-mills and vineyards are springing up on every side, and “Dixie” begins to look down on its parent, the Salt Lake Valley. Irrigation from the mountain rills has done this miracle, we say, though the Saints undoubtedly believe that God‘s hand is in it, helping miraculously “His peculiar people.”
In face of Mormon prosperity, it is worthy of notice that Utah was settled on the Wakefieldian system, though Brigham knows nothing of Wakefield. Town population and country population grew up side by side in every valley, and the plow was not allowed to gain on the machine-saw and the shuttle.
It is not only in water and verdure that Utah is naturally poor. On the mining-map of the States, the countries that lie around Utah – Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Montana – are one blaze of yellow, and blue, and red, colored from end to end with the tints that are used to denote the existence of precious metals. Utah is blank at present – blank, the Mormons say, by nature; Gentiles say, merely through the absence of survey; and they do their best to circumvent mother nature. Every fall the “strychnine” party raise the cry of gold discoveries in Utah, in the hope of bringing a rush of miners down to Salt Lake City, too late for them to get away again before the snows begin. The presence of some thousands of broad-brimmed rowdies in Salt Lake City, for a winter, would be the death of Mormonism, they believe. Within the last few days, I am told that prospecting parties have found “pay dirt” in City Canyon, which, however, they had first themselves carefully “salted” with gold dust. There is coal at the settlement at which we breakfasted on our way from Weber River to Salt Lake; and Stenhouse tells us that the only difference between the Utah coal and that of Wales is, that the latter will burn, and the former won‘t!
Poor as Utah is by nature, clear though it be that whatever value the soil now possesses, represents only the loving labor bestowed upon it by the Saints, it is doubtful whether they are to continue to possess it, even though the remaining string of Vedette-born stories assert that Brigham “threatens hell” to the Gentiles who would expel him.
The constant, teasing, wasp-like pertinacity of the Vedette has done some harm to liberty of thought throughout the world.
CHAPTER XVII.
UTAH
“WHEN you are driven hence, where shall you go?”
“We take no thought for the morrow; the Lord will guide his people,” was my rebuke from Elder Stenhouse, delivered in the half-solemn, half-laughing manner characteristic of the Saints. “You say miracles are passed and gone,” he went on; “but if God has ever interfered to protect a church, he has interposed on our behalf. In 1857, when the whole army of the United States was let slip at us under Albert S. Johnson, we were given strength to turn them aside, and defeat them without a blow. The Lord permitted us to dictate our own terms of peace. Again, when the locusts came in such swarms as to blacken the whole valley, and fill the air with a living fog, God sent millions of strange new gulls, and these devoured the locusts, and saved us from destruction. The Lord will guide his people.”
Often as I discussed the future of Utah and the church with Mormons, I could never get from them any answer but this; they would never even express a belief, as will many Western Gentiles, that no attempt will be made to expel them from the country they now hold. They cannot help seeing how immediate is the danger: from the American press there comes a cry, “Let us have this polygamy put down; its existence is a disgrace to England from which it springs, a shame to America in which it dwells, to the Federal government whose laws it outrages and defies. How long will you continue to tolerate this retrogression from Christianity, this insult to civilization?”
With the New Englanders, the question is political as well as theological, personal as well as political – political, mainly because there is a great likeness between Mormon expressions of belief in the divine origin of polygamy and the Southern answers to the Abolitionists: “Abraham was a slaveowner, and father of the faithful;” “David, the best-loved of God, was a polygamist” – “show us a biblical prohibition of slavery;” “show us a denunciation of polygamy, and we‘ll believe you.” It is this similarity of the defensive positions of Mormonism and slavery which has led to the present peril of the Salt Lake Church: the New Englanders look on the Mormons, not only as heretics, but as friends to the slaveowners; on the other hand, if you hear a man warmly praise the Mormons, you may set him down as a Southerner, or at the least a Democrat.
Another reason for the hostility of New England is, that while the discredit of Mormonism falls upon America, the American people have but little share in its existence: a few of the leaders are New Englanders and New Yorkers, but of the rank and file, not one. In every ten immigrants, the missionaries count upon finding that four come from England, two from Wales, one from the Scotch Lowlands, one from Sweden, one from Switzerland, and one from Prussia: from Catholic countries, none; from all America, none. It is through this purely local and temporary association of ideas that we see the strange sight of a party of tolerant, large-hearted churchmen eager to march their armies against a church.
If we put aside for a moment the question of the moral right to crush Mormonism in the name of truth, we find that it is, at all events, easy enough to do it. There is no difficulty in finding legal excuses for action – no danger in backing Federal legislation with military force. The legal point is clear enough – clear upon a double issue. Congress can legislate for the Territories in social matters – has, in fact, already done so. Polygamy is at this moment punishable in Utah, but the law is, pending the completion of the railroad, not enforced. Without extraordinary action, its enforcement would be impossible, for Mormon juries will give no verdict antagonistic to their church; but it is not only in this matter that the Mormons have been offenders. They have sinned also against the land laws of America. The church, Brigham, Kimball, all are landholders on a scale not contemplated by the “Homestead” laws – unless to be forbidden; doubly, therefore, are the Mormons at the mercy of the Federal Congress. There is a loophole open in the matter of polygamy – that adopted by the New York Communists when they chose each a woman to be his legal wife, and so put themselves without the reach of law. This method of escape, I have been assured by Mormon elders, is one that nothing could force them to adopt. Rather than indirectly destroy their church by any such weak compliance, they would again renounce their homes, and make their painful way across the wilderness to some new Deseret.
It is not likely that New England interference will hinge upon plurality. A “difficulty” can easily be made to arise upon the land question, and no breach of the principle of toleration will, on the surface at least, be visible. No surveys have been held in the Territory since 1857, no lands within the territorial limits have been sold by the Federal land office. Not only have the limitations of the “Homestead” and “Pre-emption” laws been disregarded, but Salt Lake City, with its palace, its theater, and hotels, is built upon the public lands of the United States. On the other hand, Mexican titles are respected in Arizona and New Mexico; and as Utah was Mexican soil when,