Joel Rae, "bred in the word and the truth" of Mormonism, if not born in it, returns to Nauvoo from a mission just upon the time that the last remnant of the Saints have departed from that ill-fated city. He finds that the home of his parents in the outskirts of Nauvoo has been destroyed by mobs; and that his aged father and mother were driven into Nauvoo, where they are for the time under the protection of an apostate family; that his fiancee, with her family, has turned from the faith, and she is only awaiting his arrival to ascertain if he will join her in her apostasy. This he refuses to do, and with his parents prepares to follow his expatriated people in their great westward movement. While being ferried over the Mississippi, the aged father of young Rae—the son not being present—is pitched into the river by ruffian hands and is drowned; his aged mother dies from the shock of the horrible murder; and young Rae, made desperate by those events, becomes a "Son of Dan," a supposed secret society of the blood and thunder order, oath-bound to "support the First Presidency of the Church of, Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in all things, right or wrong!" He forms one of the band of pioneers which Brigham Young led to the Salt Lake valley in 1847, and gives numerous evidences of increasing fanaticism, much to the delight of the Mormon leaders, which delight is here and there expressed in silly, blasphemous sentences of which the following is a fair sample: "When that young man [Rae] gets all het up with the Holy Ghost, the Angel of the Lord just has to give down!" In the new home of the Saints young Rae does his full share of both manual and spiritual labor. In the latter he succeeded too well since he preached better, worked more seeming miracles, and prophesied more than the other "Lions of the Lord." Brigham declares him "soul proud," and sends him to the Missouri river in 1857 to bring in the handcart companies, in which expedition he witnesses enough distress and misery to humble the most "soul proud" man alive, since the sufferings of the handcart companies from cold, famine and over toil is the result of his own bad judgement in starting late in the season. Arriving in Salt Lake, however, his fanatical preaching starts a "reformation," i.e., an outburst of wild fanaticism attended upon by murders, and voluntary submissions to secret executions, to atone for the commission of the more heinous sins. Rae's fanaticism makes him a participant in the Mountain Meadows massacre in which it falls to his lot to kill the young militia captain—Grimway—who had assisted Rae to leave Nauvoo, and who subsequently married the woman to whom Rae was betrothed. She, too, was with the emigrants attacked at Mountain Meadows, and Rae, after killing her husband, saw her murdered and scalped by an Indian. From the number of emigrants doomed to death Rae rescued a white-haired boy and the little daughter of his one-time betrothed wife, Prudence Corson. The boy he leaves at Hamblin's ranch, whence he escapes, swearing vengeance against Rae, whom he saw kill the father of the little girl—Prudence Grimway. The girl Prudence—named after her mother—Rae leaves at a neighboring ranch, claiming her as his own child, for whom he will later return. Haunted by the memories of the awful slaughter of the gentile emigrants at Mountain Meadows, he goes north, actively participates in the resistance to the United States' army under Albert Sidney Johnston, then entering Utah, but is disgusted with the final submission of Brigham Young to United States authority, and takes up his abode in a new settlement far to the south of Salt Lake City, and not far from the Mountain Meadows. Here his life of penance begins. In a spirit of self-sacrifice he marries a woman with but one hand, and a disfigured face. The hand she lost by having it frozen while pushing a hand cart in the belated company Rae had led to Utah years before. He also married another woman—a poor half-starved, cast off wife of a prominent Mormon Bishop; and later still, another wife, a shallow-witted, talkative creature who is a cross indeed to the "man of many sorrows." He takes under his protection also a poor imbecile man, the victim of a horrible, and unnameable mutilation; and a woman who had gone insane because her husband married another wife. The wives, to his honor be it said, were such in name only. This collection of the woebegone, with the child Prudence added, make up the Rae household. The girl Prudence becomes beautiful, of course, and is much sought by men of middle life already possessed of many wives, no less a personage than Brigham Young being among the number; and it is represented that the latter "suitor" had but to send word in advance to the foster father of his intention to marry the girl on his next journey south, in order to close the matrimonial incident, except the formal word-ceremony, and taking away the bride! But Miss Prudence had visited Salt Lake, and while there witnessed the performance at the theater of "Romeo and Juliet," which is sufficient to give her ideas of love and matrimony all her own. The balcony scene much impressed her; and ever afterwards became her ideal of expressed love. A few years of dreaming on the part of the maiden, and a few years of silent suffering on the part of Joel Rae, now the "little man of sorrows," then the lad of the Meadows, Ruel Follett, who escaped from Hamblin's ranch swearing vengeance on Rae and two other participants in the massacre, returns, seeking his revenge. He is now a young man, handsome, brave, strong, aggressive. But he is baffled in his mission of retribution. Two of the murderers he seeks are already dead some time since, and Rae is so pitifully weak and distraught by the haunting memories of that awful butchery that young Follett cannot find the heart to kill him; besides there is Prudence, who loves the "little man of sorrows" with true filial affection. The upshot of it all is that young Follett leaves to time the duty of taking off Rae—an event that cannot be long deferred, since the little man is fast hastening to the end of his earthly career; and meantime Follett insidiously woos Prudence, and wins her love; while she makes an unsuccessful effort to convert him to Mormonism. In all their readings, and conversations upon the Book of Mormon and other subjects connected with the Mormon religion, Follett is given an easy victory over the poor girl by the employment of covert sneers, slightly concealed sarcasms and tender ridicule. Meantime Joel Rae has lost his faith in Mormonism; he discovers that polygamy is wrong; the Saints abandoned of God; and on the occasion of Brigham Young paying his annual visit to the settlement where Rae lives, he tells the prophet and the people his discoveries. Anticipating the vengeance of the "Sons of Dan," Rae flies to the cross and cairn of stones erected on the site of the Mountain Meadows massacre, that he may die—according to orthodox dramatic canons—at the place where his awful crime was committed. He is followed by Prudence and young Follett, who come up to him at the cross erected by Gentile hands on the site of the massacre, where, in company with two Indians, they watched him peacefully pass away in a rather protracted death scene, to the accompaniment of an Indian tom-tom drum, and notwithstanding one of the redmen waves before his eyes the yellow scalp-lock which years before he had seen reeking with blood snatched from the head of the woman he loved. Young Follett and Prudence, as soon as the "little man of sorrows" is buried, leave for the east with a passing wagon train, and having been married by Rae a few minutes before his death, the reader is left to infer that they "lived happily ever after," in some eastern city, far, far away from fanatical Mormons, and their wickedness, where only monogamous marriages obtain, and conjugal happiness is never disturbed by the haunting fears of marital infidelities, or polygamy, simultaneous or consecutive.
I have been at the pains to give this rather full synopsis of the story, that my readers may be witnesses of the fact that Mr. Wilson has certainly massed enough of gruesome materials to furnish to repletion several chambers of horrors. Far be it from me to suggest that so prominent an author has stooped to the methods of yellow-backed, ten-cent novelists of a quarter of a century ago, in the matter at least of the quality and mass of incidents to be woven into story. This glance at the incidents of the story also reveals the opportunity they will afford the author for gathering into one view the bigotry, ignorance, weakness, fanaticism, and wickedness of individual Mormons, all to be interwoven with the mockery, sarcasm, ridicule, ribaldry, innuendo and insults of their enemies.
And now, as to the treatment of the theme. The author of the "Lions of the Lord" in his opening chapter—the prettiest piece of descriptive writing in the book—has drawn heavily upon, if he has not actually plagiarized from, the lecture of the late General Thomas L. Kane, of Philadelphia, delivered before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, on March 26, 1850. Mr. Wilson heads his first chapter "The Dead City," meaning Nauvoo after the departure of the last of the Mormons. Mr. Kane opens his Lecture under the caption "The Deserted City," meaning Nauvoo after the departure of the last of the Mormons. Mr. Wilson makes his hero, Joel Rae, enter the "dead city" in "September." Mr. Kane enters "the deserted city" late in the "autumn." Mr. Wilson's hero "from a skiff in mid-river" views the temple on the hill top; presently "landing