Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

It is to these homes, in the heart of our American Alps, like the holy people of the Grand Saint Bernard, they hold out their welcome to the passing traveller. Some of you have probably seen in the St. Louis papers, the repeated votes of thanks to them of companies of emigrants to California. These are often reduced to great straights after passing Fort Laramie, and turn aside to seek the Salt Lake Colony in pitiable plights of fatigue and destitution. The road, after leaving the Oregon trace, is one of increasing difficulty, and when the last mountain has been crossed, passes along the bottom of a deep Canyon, whose scenery is of an almost terrific gloom. It is a defile that I trust no Mormon Martin Hofer of this Western Tyrol will be called to consecrate to liberty with blood. At every turn the overhanging cliffs threaten to break down upon the little torrent river that has worn its way at their base. Indeed, the narrow ravine is so serrated by this stream, that the road crosses it from one side to the other, something like forty times in the last five miles. At the end of the ravine, the emigrant comes abruptly out of the dark pass into the lighted valley on an even bench or terrace of its upper table land. No wonder if he loses his self-control here. A ravishing panoramic landscape opens out below him, blue, and green, and gold, and pearl; a great sea with hilly islands, rivers, a lake, and broad sheets of grassy plain, all set, as in a silver chased cup, within mountains whose peaks of perpetual snow are burnished by a dazzling sun. It is less these, however, than the foreground of old-country farms, with their stacks and thatchings and stock, and the central city, smoking from its chimneys and swarming with working inhabitants, that tries the men of fatigue broken nerves. The 'Californeys' scream, they sing, they give three cheers, and do not count them, a few have prayed; more swear, some fall on their faces and cry outright. News arrived a few days since from a poor townsman of ours, a journeyman saddler, that used to work up Market street beyond Broad, by name Gillian, who sought the valley, his cattle given out, and himself broken down and half heart-broken:--The recluse Mormons fed and housed him and his party, and he made his way through to the gold diggings with restored health and strength. To Gillian's credit for manhood, should perhaps be cited his own allegation, that he first whistled through his fingers various popular nocturnal, street, circus, and theatre calls; but it is certain that, when my tidings speak of him, which was when he was afterwards hospitably entreated by a Mormon, whom he knew ten years ago as one of our Chester County farmers, he was completely dissolved into something not far from the hysterics, and wept on till the tears ran down his dusty beard.

Several hundred emigrants, in more or less distress, received gratuitous assistance last year from the Mormons.

Their community must go on thriving. They are to be the chief workers and contractors upon "Whitney's Railroad," or whatever scheme is to unite the Atlantic and Pacific by way of the South Pass; and their valley must be its central station. They have already raised a "Perpetual Fund" for "the final fulfilment of the covenant made by the Saints in the Temple at Nauvoo," which "is not to cease till all the poor are brought to the valley." All the poor still lingering behind, will be brought there: so at an early period will the fifty thousand communicants, the Church already numbers in Great Britain, with all the other "increase among the Gentiles." Their place of rendezvous will be upon what were formerly the Pottawatamie lands. The interests of this Stake have been admirably cared for. It now comprises the thriving counties of "Fremont" and "Pottawatamie," in which the Mormons still number a majority of the inhabitants. Their chief town is growing rapidly, already boasting over three thousand inhabitants, with nineteen large merchants' stores, the mail lines and five regular steam packets running to it, and other western evidences of prosperity; besides a fine Music Hall and public buildings, and the printing establishment of a very ably edited newspaper, "The Frontier Guardian."

It is probably the best station on the Missouri for commencing the overland journey to Oregon and California; as travellers can follow directly from it the Mormon road, which, in addition to other advantages, proves to be more salubrious than those to the south of it. Large numbers are expected to arrive at this point from England during the present spring, on their way to the Salt Lake. They will repay their welcome; for every working person gained to the hive of their "Honey State" counts as added wealth. So far, the Mormons write in congratulation, that they have not among them "a single loafer rich or poor, idle gentleman or lazy vagabond." They are no Communists; but their experience has taught them the gain of joint stock to capital, and combination to labor,--perhaps something more, for I remark they have recently made arrangements to "classify their mechanics," which is probably a step in the right direction. They will be successful manufacturers, for their vigorous land-locked industry cannot be tampered with by protection. They have no gold--they have not hunted for it; but they have found wealth of other valuable minerals; rock salt enough to do the curing of the world,--"We'll salt the Union for you," they write, "if you can't preserve it in any other way,"--perhaps coal, excellent ores of iron everywhere. They are near enough, however, to the Californian Sierra, to be the chief quartermasters of its miners; and they will dig their own gold in their unlimited fields of admirably fertile land. I should only invite your incredulity, and the disgust of the Horticultural Society, by giving you certain measurements of mammoth beets, turnips, pumpkins, and garden vegetables, in my possession. In that country where stock thrives care free, where a poor man's 32 potatoes saved can return him 18 bushels, and 2 1/2 bushels of wheat sown yield 350 bushels in a season; or where an average crop of wheat on irrigated lands is 50 bushels to the acre; the farmer's part is hardly to be despised. Certainly it will not be under a continuance of the present prices current of the region,--wheat at $4 the bushel, and flour $12 the hundred, with a ready market.

The recent letters from Deseret interest me in one thing more. They are eloquent in describing the anniversary of the Pioneers' arrival in the Valley. It was the 24th of July, and they have ordained that that day shall be commemorated in future, like our 21st of December, as their Forefather's Day. The noble Walker attended as an invited guest, with two hundred of his best dressed mounted cavaliers, who stacked their guns and took up their places at the ceremonies and banquet, with the quiet precision of soldiers marched to mass. The Great Band was there too, that had helped their humble hymns through all the wanderings of the Wilderness. Through the many trying marches of 1846, through the fierce winter ordeal that followed, and the long journey after over plain and mountain, it had gone unbroken, without the loss of any of its members. As they set out from England, and as they set out from Illinois, so they all came into the valley together, and together sounded the first glad notes of triumph when the Salt Lake City was founded. It was their right to lead the psalm of praise. Anthem, song and dance, all the innocent and thankful frolic of the day owed them its chief zest. "They never were in finer key." The people felt their sorrows ended. FAR WEST, their old settlement in Missouri, and NAUVOO; with their wealth and ease, like "Pithom and Ramses, treasure cities built for Pharaoh," went awhile forgotten. Less than four years had restored them every comfort that they needed. Their entertainment, the contribution of all, I have no doubt was really sumptuous. It was spread on broad buffet tables about 1400 feet in length, at which they took their seats by turns, while they kept them heaped with ornamented delicacies. "Butter of kine, and milk, with fat of lambs, with the fat of kidneys of wheat;" "and the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic, and the remembered fish which we did eat in Egypt freely"--they seem unable to dilate with too much pride upon the show it made.

"To behold the tables," says one, that I quote from literally:

"To behold them filling the Bowery and all adjoining grounds, loaded with all luxuries of the fields and gardens and nearly all the varieties that any vegetable market in the world could produce, and to see the seats around those tables filled and refilled by a people who had been deprived of those luxuries for years by the cruel hand of oppression, and freely offering seats to every stranger within their borders; and this, too, in the Valley of the Mountains, over a thousand miles from civilization, where, two years before, naught was to be found save the wild root of the prairie and the mountain cricket; was a theme of unbounded thanksgiving and praise to the Giver of all Good, as the dawning of a day when the Children of the Kingdom can sit under their own vines and fig-trees, and inhabit their own houses, having none to make them afraid. May the time be hastened when the scattered Israel may partake of such like banquets from the gardens of Joseph!" [G]

I have gone over the work I assigned myself when I accepted your Committee's invitation, as fully as I could do without trespassing too largely upon your courteous patience. But I should do wrong to conclude my lecture without declaring in succinct and definite terms, the opinions I have formed and entertain of the Mormon people. The libels, of which they have been made the subject, make this a simple act of justice. Perhaps, too, my opinion, even with those who know me as you do, will better answer its end following after the narrative I have given.

I have spoken to you of a people; whose industry had made them rich, and gathered around them all the comforts, and not a few of the luxuries of refined life; expelled by lawless force into the Wilderness; seeking an untried home far away from the scenes which their previous life had endeared to them; moving onward, destitute, hunger-sickened, and sinking with disease; bearing along with them their wives and children, the aged, and the poor, and the decrepit; renewing daily on their march, the offices of devotion, the ties of family and friendship, and charity; sharing necessities, and braving dangers together, cheerful in the midst of want and trial, and persevering until they triumphed. I have told, or tried to tell you, of men, who when menaced by famine, and in the midst of pestilence, with every energy taxed by the urgency of the hour, were building roads and bridges, laying out villages, and planting cornfields, for the stranger who might come after them, their kinsman only by a common humanity, and peradventure a common suffering,--of men, who have renewed their prosperity in the homes they have founded in the desert,--and who, in their new built city, walled round by mountains like a fortress, are extending pious hospitalities to the destitute emigrants from our frontier lines,--of men who, far removed from the restraints of law, obeyed it from choice, or found in the recesses of their religion, something not inconsistent with human laws, but far more controlling; and who are now soliciting from the government of the United States, not indemnity,--for the appeal would be hopeless, and they know it--not protection, for they now have no need of it,--but that identity of political institutions and that community of laws with the rest of us, which was confessedly their birthright when they were driven beyond our borders.

I said I would give you the opinion I formed of the Mormons: you may deduce it for yourselves from these facts. But I will add that I have not yet heard the single charge against them as a Community, against their habitual purity of life, their integrity of dealing, their toleration of religious differences in opinion, their regard for the laws, or their devotion to the constitutional government under which we live, that I do not from my own observation, or the testimony of others, know to be unfounded.

THE END.

POSTSCRIPT TO THE SECOND EDITION.

I have been annoyed by comments this hastily written discourse has elicited. Well meaning friends have even invited me to tone down its remarks in favor of the Mormons, for the purpose of securing them a readier acceptance.--I can only make them more express. The Truth must take care of itself. I not only meant to deny that the Mormons in any wise fall below our own standard of morals, but I would be distinctly understood to ascribe to those of their number with whom I associated in the West, a general correctness of deportment, and purity of character above the average of ordinary communities.

The furthest I can go toward qualifying my testimony, will be to name the causes, to which, as a believer in Nature's compensations, I have myself credited this undue morality.

It was partly attributable perhaps to their forced abstemiousness; the diet of the most fortunate Mormons having been for long continued periods very spare, and composed almost wholly of vegetable food, with few condiments, and no intoxicating liquors. Some influence should be referred also to their custom of early and equal marriages, these not being regulated by the prudential considerations which embarrass opulent communities; something more to the supervision which was incidental to their nomadic life, and the habits it encouraged of disciplined, but grateful industry.

The chief cause, however, was probably found in this fact. The Mormons as I saw them, though a majority, were but a portion of the Church as it flourished in Illinois. When the persecution triumphed there, and no alternative remained for the steadfast in the faith but the flight out of Egypt into the Wilderness, as it was termed, all their fair weather friends forsook them. Priests and elders, scribes and preachers deserted by whole councils at a time; each talented knave, of whose craft they had been victims, finding his own pretext for abandoning them, without surrendering the money-bag of which he was the holder. One of these, for instance, bore with him so considerable a congregation that he was able to found quite a thriving community in Northern Wisconsin, which I believe he afterwards transplanted entire to an island in one of the Lakes. Other speculator-heresiarchs folded for themselves credulous sheep all through the Western Country. One Rigdon not long since had a Cure of them in our own State. Quite recently, an abandoned clergyman, who shortly before the Exod was excommunicated for his improper conduct, has presented a memorial to Congress, in which he charges the Mormons with very much more than he himself appears to have been guilty of. This abusive person, a former intimate of the Major General James Arlington Bennet, lately on trial at New York, in company with a One Eyed Mr. Thompson of that city, is also the only surviving brother of the Prophet Smith, founder of the Sect, and as such, still claims to be its sole true President, and genuine Arch High Priest.

So the Mormons have been, as it were, broken and screened by calamity. Their designing leaders have left them to seek fairer fortunes elsewhere. Those that remain of the old rock are the masses, always honest in the main and sincere even in delusion; and their guides are a few tried and trusty men, little initiated in the plotting of synagogues, and more noted for services rendered than bounties received. They are the men whom I saw on the prairie trail, sharing sorrow with the sorrowful, and poverty with the poor;--the chief of them all, a man of rare natural endowment, to whose masterly guidance they are mainly indebted for their present prosperity, driving his own ox-team and carrying his sick child in his arms. [H] The fact explains itself, that those only were willing to undertake their fearful pilgrimage of penance, whom a sense of conscientious duty made willing to give up the world for their religion. The Mormons I knew, were all, as far as I could judge, partakers of the sacraments, persons of prayer and faith; and their contentment, their temperance, their heroism, their strivings after the golden age of Christian brotherhood, were but the manifestations of their ever present and engrossing devotional feeling.

I am asked to explain or justify the Mormon Creed:--I will have nothing to do with it. It is enough for me to say, that it does not manifest itself externally by the Pythian ravings or Eleusinian hocus pocus of new religions, nor the pageantry or mumming of those sometime established; that its communicants cultivate no mysteries or double faiths; and that I certainly think they are to be believed in their own exposition of it. They have two books, that are for sale in the shops, called The Book of Mormon and The Book of Doctrine and Covenants, which profess to contain the entire body of their faith. The latter harmless work has its special chapters on Marriage, and on the Right of Property, Religious Toleration, and the Union of Church and State. [I] I am not called upon to investigate this subject, so long as any person of a jealous orthodoxy can constitute himself as good an inquisitor, by investing somewhere about one dollar and fifty cents.

Nor shall I go out of my way to discuss the question of the former character of the Mormons. What they were in Illinois, or what some of their predecessors were there, it will not be difficult for those to learn who are curious after the truth: the Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, who as Presiding Judge of the Circuit in which they lived was often called upon to dismiss idle charges against them, is now at Washington, an honored member of the Senate of the United States. His personal testimony I am assured has always vindicated his judicial action.

Some good people who believe the Mormons traduced, ask me how they are to account for the great prevalence of these charges before the expulsion. Interest, and feeling founded on it, is the answer. The value of the property of which the Mormons were dispossessed in Missouri and Illinois is currently estimated at over Twenty Millions of Dollars: an adequate consideration certainly for a good deal of misrepresentation on the part of those who were endeavoring to appropriate it to themselves.

A motive sufficiently analogous explains the active circulation of new calumnies within the last half year. Instead of being broken up forever, as not more than five years ago their foes supposed with reason, their Congregation is gathering in increased numbers, and their application to be admitted as a State into the Union announces their probable restoration to power and influence, and is a cause of corresponding disquiet to the possessors of the properties in Illinois and Missouri from which they have been expelled. These are now the busiest Mormon slanderers. I speak of them with reluctance. They are, the best of them, but interested persons, who circulate calumnies at hearsay, calumnies which began with the original enemies of the Mormons, the felons, that charged with unchastity the wretched women they had ravished--with riot the men whose brothers they had murdered--with community of Property those whom themselves had robbed, whose houses and homes they fired over their heads on the lands from which they drove them. Such wretches lie with the brutal strength of Crime. And the Mormons are far away, and their few friends here are nearly all in humble life, and those public men in the West whose duty it was to do them justice, consent to render themselves parties to the guilt of their constituents by their interested silence.

At all events, was there not something about their religion made their neighbors unable to live with them?--Undoubtedly the industrious chevaliers of the Half Breed Tract, and other like precious neighbors of the Mormons, have in one sense proved this to be the case: perhaps, in the course of their wolf and lamb quarrel, they may have even said so, and before they finally devoured the offenders, complained seriously of the insulting proximity of their good roads, good schools, temperance and moral reform and musical associations, and their good laws not enacted only, but enforced. I understand this to be essentially the ground of complaint of the same marauders against the Swedish Quaker Colony, they have lately broken up in Henry County, above Nauvoo.

With other neighbors the Mormons have no trouble. We have had large numbers of them in Philadelphia, and elsewhere to the East, for now nearly twenty years past, whose good citizenship is no subject of discussion with those who have daily business dealings with them. In England too, they number nearly twice as many adult members as the Baptists in Pennsylvania. Once indeed, when their religion was first preached in that country--it was at the very time their earliest trial before Lynch J., in Missouri, was pending--a charge was laid against them in a manufacturing borough there, that they had made away with an Elizabeth, or Betsey Martin, one of their new converts; and the beginning of a mob entered upon its examination. But to her British Majesty's Government, which holds the old fashioned notions of law and order, it mattered as little if it were the case of Betty Martin a Mormon, as of Betty Martin the Cyprian: a commonplace Government Magistrate decided there should be no mob, and a commonplace legal investigation decided the charge was groundless. The Mormons have therefore been free to preach and sing and pray in the United Kingdom to this hour; and I remark that Evangelic sectaries of my own persuasion there, do battle with them in print on the same terms as with Millerites, Wesleyans, or Seventh, or Every Day Baptists.

It is observed to me with a vile meaning, that I have said little about the Mormon women. I have scarcely alluded to them, because my memories of them are such that I cannot think of their character as a theme for discussion. In one word, it was eminently that which for Americans dignifies the names of mother, wife, and sister. Of the self-denying generosity which went to ennoble the whole people in my eyes, I witnessed among them the brightest illustrations. I have seen the ideal Charity of the statue gallery surpassed by the young Mormon mother, who shared with the stranger's orphan the breast of milk of her own child.

Can charges, which are so commonly and so circumstantially laid, be without any foundation at all?--I know it. Upon my return from the Prairie, I met through the settlements scandalous stories against the President of the Sect, which dated of the precise period when I myself was best acquainted with his self-denying and blameless life. I had an experience no less satisfactory with regard to other falsehoods, some of them the most extravagant and most widely believed. During the sickness I have referred to, I was nursed by a dear lady, well connected in New York and New Jersey, whom I sufficiently name to many, by stating that she was the first cousin of one of our most respected citizens, whose conduct as chief Magistrate of Philadelphia in an excited time won for him our general esteem. In her exile, she found her severest suffering in the belief that her friends in the States looked upon her as irreclaimably outcast. It was one of the first duties I performed on my return, to enlighten them as to her true position, and the character of her exemplary husband; and the knowledge of this fact arrived in time, I believe, to be of comfort to her before she sank under the privation and hardship of the march her frame was too delicate to endure.

15 July, 1850.

THOMAS L. KANE.

Footnotes:

A: Nine children were born the first night the women camped out. "Sugar Creek," Feb. 5.

B: One of the company having a copy of Mme. Cottin's Elizabeth, it was so sought after that some read it from the wagons by moonlight. They were materially sustained, too, by the practice of psalmody, "keeping up the Songs of Zion, and passing along Doxologies from front to rear, when the breath froze on their eyelashes."

C: Rev. Dr. Morton, of Philadelphia.

D: It is certain that there is no sickness among the present inhabitants of this region comparable to that of 1846.

E: This camp was moved by the beginning of October to winter quarters on the river, where also, there was considerable sickness before the cold weather. I am furnished with something over 600 as the number of burials in the graveyard there.

F: I knew of an orphan boy, for instance, who came on by himself at this time a foot, starting with no other provision than his trowser's pocket full of biscuit, given him from a steamboat on the Mississippi.

G: Letter of the Presidency, Great Salt Lake City, Oct. 12, 1849.

H: This was BRIGHAM YOUNG, the choice of the Mormons for Governor of Deseret. As this man, together with HEBER C. KIMBALL and WILLARD RICHARDS, nominees of the same people for the offices of Lieutenant Governor and Secretary, have been singled out as the objects of libel, it is right I should state that I knew them intimately. I found Mr. Kimball a man of singular generosity and purity of character, and Dr. Richards a genial gentleman and pleasant scholar of the most varied attainments: The integrity of all three altogether above question. T. L. K.

I: It may be well, however, to quote from two of these.