Roughing It
great variety and as great abundance. We walked about the streets some,
afterward, and glanced in at shops and stores; and there was fascination
in surreptitiously staring at every creature we took to be a Mormon.
This was fairy-land to us, to all intents and purposes—a land of
enchantment, and goblins, and awful mystery. We felt a curiosity to ask
every child how many mothers it had, and if it could tell them apart;
and we experienced a thrill every time a dwelling-house door opened and
shut as we passed, disclosing a glimpse of human heads and backs and
shoulders—for we so longed to have a good satisfying look at a Mormon
family in all its comprehensive ampleness, disposed in the customary
concentric rings of its home circle.
By and by the Acting Governor of the Territory introduced us to other
“Gentiles,” and we spent a sociable hour with them. “Gentiles” are
people who are not Mormons. Our fellow-passenger, Bemis, took care of
himself, during this part of the evening, and did not make an
overpowering success of it, either, for he came into our room in the
hotel about eleven o’clock, full of cheerfulness, and talking loosely,
disjointedly and indiscriminately, and every now and then tugging out a
ragged word by the roots that had more hiccups than syllables in it.
This, together with his hanging his coat on the floor on one side of a
chair, and his vest on the floor on the other side, and piling his pants
on the floor just in front of the same chair, and then comtemplating the
general result with superstitious awe, and finally pronouncing it “too
many for _him_” and going to bed with his boots on, led us to fear that
something he had eaten had not agreed with him.
But we knew afterward that it was something he had been drinking. It was
the exclusively Mormon refresher, “valley tan.”
Valley tan (or, at least, one form of valley tan) is a kind of whisky,
or first cousin to it; is of Mormon invention and manufactured only in
Utah. Tradition says it is made of (imported) fire and brimstone. If I
remember rightly no public drinking saloons were allowed in the kingdom
by Brigham Young, and no private drinking permitted among the faithful,
except they confined themselves to “valley tan.”
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Next day we strolled about everywhere through the broad, straight, level
streets, and enjoyed the pleasant strangeness of a city of fifteen
thousand inhabitants with no loafers perceptible in it; and no visible
drunkards or noisy people; a limpid stream rippling and dancing through
every street in place of a filthy gutter; block after block of trim
dwellings, built of “frame” and sunburned brick—a great thriving orchard
and garden behind every one of them, apparently—branches from the street
stream winding and sparkling among the garden beds and fruit trees—and a
grand general air of neatness, repair, thrift and comfort, around and
about and over the whole. And everywhere were workshops, factories, and
all manner of industries; and intent faces and busy hands were to be
seen wherever one looked; and in one’s ears was the ceaseless clink of
hammers, the buzz of trade and the contented hum of drums and fly-
wheels.
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The armorial crest of my own State consisted of two dissolute bears
holding up the head of a dead and gone cask between them and making the
pertinent remark, “UNITED, WE STAND—(hic!)—DIVIDED, WE FALL.” It was
always too figurative for the author of this book. But the Mormon crest
was easy. And it was simple, unostentatious, and fitted like a glove. It
was a representation of a GOLDEN BEEHIVE, with the bees all at work!
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The city lies in the edge of a level plain as broad as the State of
Connecticut, and crouches close down to the ground under a curving wall
of mighty mountains whose heads are hidden in the clouds, and whose
shoulders bear relics of the snows of winter all the summer long.
Seen from one of these dizzy heights, twelve or fifteen miles off, Great
Salt Lake City is toned down and diminished till it is suggestive of a
child’s toy-village reposing under the majestic protection of the
Chinese wall.
On some of those mountains, to the southwest, it had been raining every
day for two weeks, but not a drop had fallen in the city. And on hot
days in late spring and early autumn the citizens could quit fanning and
growling and go out and cool off by looking at the luxury of a glorious
snow-storm going on in the mountains. They could enjoy it at a distance,
at those seasons, every day, though no snow would fall in their streets,
or anywhere near them.
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Salt Lake City was healthy—an extremely healthy city. They declared
there was only one physician in the place and he was arrested every week
regularly and held to answer under the vagrant act for having “no
visible means of support.” They always give you a good substantial
article of truth in Salt Lake, and good measure and good weight, too.
[Very often, if you wished to weigh one of their airiest little
commonplace statements you would want the hay scales.]
We desired to visit the famous inland sea, the American “Dead Sea,” the
great Salt Lake—seventeen miles, horseback, from the city—for we had
dreamed about it, and thought about it, and talked about it, and yearned
to see it, all the first part of our trip; but now when it was only
arm’s length away it had suddenly lost nearly every bit of its interest.
And so we put it off, in a sort of general way, till next day—and that
was the last we ever thought of it. We dined with some hospitable
Gentiles; and visited the foundation of the prodigious temple; and
talked long with that shrewd Connecticut Yankee, Heber C. Kimball (since
deceased), a saint of high degree and a mighty man of commerce.
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We saw the “Tithing-House,” and the “Lion House,” and I do not know or
remember how many more church and government buildings of various kinds
and curious names. We flitted hither and thither and enjoyed every hour,
and picked up a great deal of useful information and entertaining
nonsense, and went to bed at night satisfied.
The second day, we made the acquaintance of Mr. Street (since deceased)
and put on white shirts and went and paid a state visit to the king. He
seemed a quiet, kindly, easy-mannered, dignified, self-possessed old
gentleman of fifty-five or sixty, and had a gentle craft in his eye that
probably belonged there. He was very simply dressed and was just taking
off a straw hat as we entered. He talked about Utah, and the Indians,
and Nevada, and general American matters and questions, with our
secretary and certain government officials who came with us. But he
never paid any attention to me, notwithstanding I made several attempts
to “draw him out” on federal politics and his high handed attitude
toward Congress. I thought some of the things I said were rather fine.
But he merely looked around at me, at distant intervals, something as I
have seen a benignant old cat look around to see which kitten was
meddling with her tail.
By and by I subsided into an indignant silence, and so sat until the
end, hot and flushed, and execrating him in my heart for an ignorant
savage. But he was calm. His conversation with those gentlemen flowed on
as sweetly and peacefully and musically as any summer brook. When the
audience was ended and we were retiring from the presence, he put his
hand on my head, beamed down on me in an admiring way and said to my
brother:
“Ah—your child, I presume? Boy, or girl?”
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CHAPTER XIV.
Mr. Street was very busy with his telegraphic matters—and considering
that he had eight or nine hundred miles of rugged, snowy, uninhabited
mountains, and waterless, treeless, melancholy deserts to traverse with
his wire, it was natural and needful that he should be as busy as
possible. He could not go comfortably along and cut his poles by the
road-side, either, but they had to be hauled by ox teams across those
exhausting deserts—and it was two days’ journey from water to water, in
one or two of them. Mr. Street’s contract was a vast work, every way one
looked at it; and yet to comprehend what the vague words “eight hundred
miles of rugged mountains and dismal deserts” mean, one must go over the
ground in person—pen and ink descriptions cannot convey the dreary
reality to the reader. And after all, Mr. S.’s mightiest difficulty
turned out to be one which he had never taken into the account at all.
Unto Mormons he had sub-let the hardest and heaviest half of his great
undertaking, and all of a sudden they concluded that they were going to
make little or nothing, and so they tranquilly threw their poles
overboard in mountain or desert, just as it happened when they took the
notion, and drove home and went about their customary business! They
were under written contract to Mr. Street, but they did not care
anything for that. They said they would “admire” to see a “Gentile”
force a Mormon to fulfil a losing contract in Utah! And they made
themselves very merry over the matter. Street said—for it was he that
told us these things:
“I was in dismay. I was under heavy bonds to complete my contract in a
given time, and this disaster looked very much like ruin. It was an
astounding thing; it was such a wholly unlooked-for difficulty, that I
was entirely nonplussed. I am a business man—have always been a business
man—do not know anything _but_ business—and so you can imagine how like
being struck by lightning it was to find myself in a country _where
written contracts were worthless!_—that main security, that sheet-
anchor, that absolute necessity, of business. My confidence left me.
There was no use in making new contracts—that was plain. I talked with
first one prominent citizen and then another. They all sympathized with
me, first rate, but they did not know how to help me. But at last a
Gentile said, ‘Go to Brigham Young!—these small fry cannot do you any
good.’ I did not think much of the idea, for if the _law_ could not help
me, what could an individual do who had not even anything to do with
either making the laws or executing them? He might be a very good
patriarch of a church and preacher in its tabernacle, but something
sterner than religion and moral suasion was needed to handle a hundred
refractory, half-civilized sub-contractors. But what was a man to do? I
thought if Mr. Young could not do anything else, he might probably be
able to give me some advice and a valuable hint or two, and so I went
straight to him and laid the whole case before him. He said very little,
but he showed strong interest all the way through. He examined all the
papers in detail, and whenever there seemed anything like a hitch,
either in the papers or my statement, he would go back and take up the
thread and follow it patiently out to an intelligent and satisfactory
result. Then he made a list of the contractors’ names. Finally he said:
“‘Mr. Street, this is all perfectly plain. These contracts are strictly
and legally drawn, and are duly signed and certified. These men
manifestly entered into them with their eyes open. I see no fault or
flaw anywhere.’
“Then Mr. Young turned to a man waiting at the other end of the room and
said: ‘Take this list of names to So-and-so, and tell him to have these
men here at such-and-such an hour.’
“They were there, to the minute. So was I. Mr. Young asked them a number
of questions, and their answers made my statement good. Then he said to
them:
“‘You signed these contracts and assumed these obligations of your own
free will and accord?’
“‘Yes.’
“‘Then carry them out to the letter, if it makes paupers of you! Go!’
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“And they _did_ go, too! They are strung across the deserts now, working