Roughing It
like bees. And I never hear a word out of them.
“There is a batch of governors, and judges, and other officials here,
shipped from Washington, and they maintain the semblance of a republican
form of government—but the petrified truth is that Utah is an absolute
monarchy and Brigham Young is king!”
Mr. Street was a fine man, and I believe his story. I knew him well
during several years afterward in San Francisco.
Our stay in Salt Lake City amounted to only two days, and therefore we
had no time to make the customary inquisition into the workings of
polygamy and get up the usual statistics and deductions preparatory to
calling the attention of the nation at large once more to the matter.
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I had the will to do it. With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth I
was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here—until
I saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched. My heart was wiser than my
head. It warmed toward these poor, ungainly and pathetically “homely”
creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I
said, “No—the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian
charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their
harsh censure—and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of
open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand
uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.”
[For a brief sketch of Mormon history, and the noted Mountain Meadow
massacre, see Appendices A and B. ]
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CHAPTER XV.
It is a luscious country for thrilling evening stories about
assassinations of intractable Gentiles. I cannot easily conceive of
anything more cosy than the night in Salt Lake which we spent in a
Gentile den, smoking pipes and listening to tales of how Burton galloped
in among the pleading and defenceless “Morisites” and shot them down,
men and women, like so many dogs. And how Bill Hickman, a Destroying
Angel, shot Drown and Arnold dead for bringing suit against him for a
debt. And how Porter Rockwell did this and that dreadful thing. And how
heedless people often come to Utah and make remarks about Brigham, or
polygamy, or some other sacred matter, and the very next morning at
daylight such parties are sure to be found lying up some back alley,
contentedly waiting for the hearse.
And the next most interesting thing is to sit and listen to these
Gentiles talk about polygamy; and how some portly old frog of an elder,
or a bishop, marries a girl—likes her, marries her sister—likes her,
marries another sister—likes her, takes another—likes her, marries her
mother—likes her, marries her father, grandfather, great grandfather,
and then comes back hungry and asks for more. And how the pert young
thing of eleven will chance to be the favorite wife and her own
venerable grandmother have to rank away down toward D 4 in their mutual
husband’s esteem, and have to sleep in the kitchen, as like as not. And
how this dreadful sort of thing, this hiving together in one foul nest
of mother and daughters, and the making a young daughter superior to her
own mother in rank and authority, are things which Mormon women submit
to because their religion teaches them that the more wives a man has on
earth, and the more children he rears, the higher the place they will
all have in the world to come—and the warmer, maybe, though they do not
seem to say anything about that.
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According to these Gentile friends of ours, Brigham Young’s harem
contains twenty or thirty wives. They said that some of them had grown
old and gone out of active service, but were comfortably housed and
cared for in the henery—or the Lion House, as it is strangely named.
Along with each wife were her children—fifty altogether. The house was
perfectly quiet and orderly, when the children were still. They all took
their meals in one room, and a happy and home-like sight it was
pronounced to be. None of our party got an opportunity to take dinner
with Mr. Young, but a Gentile by the name of Johnson professed to have
enjoyed a sociable breakfast in the Lion House. He gave a preposterous
account of the “calling of the roll,” and other preliminaries, and the
carnage that ensued when the buckwheat cakes came in. But he embellished
rather too much. He said that Mr. Young told him several smart sayings
of certain of his “two-year-olds,” observing with some pride that for
many years he had been the heaviest contributor in that line to one of
the Eastern magazines; and then he wanted to show Mr. Johnson one of the
pets that had said the last good thing, but he could not find the child.
He searched the faces of the children in detail, but could not decide
which one it was. Finally he gave it up with a sigh and said:
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“I thought I would know the little cub again but I don’t.” Mr. Johnson
said further, that Mr. Young observed that life was a sad, sad
thing—“because the joy of every new marriage a man contracted was so apt
to be blighted by the inopportune funeral of a less recent bride.” And
Mr. Johnson said that while he and Mr. Young were pleasantly conversing
in private, one of the Mrs. Youngs came in and demanded a breast-pin,
remarking that she had found out that he had been giving a breast-pin to
No. 6, and _she_, for one, did not propose to let this partiality go on
without making a satisfactory amount of trouble about it. Mr. Young
reminded her that there was a stranger present. Mrs. Young said that if
the state of things inside the house was not agreeable to the stranger,
he could find room outside. Mr. Young promised the breast-pin, and she
went away. But in a minute or two another Mrs. Young came in and
demanded a breast-pin. Mr. Young began a remonstrance, but Mrs. Young
cut him short. She said No. 6 had got one, and No. 11 was promised one,
and it was “no use for him to try to impose on her—she hoped she knew
her rights.” He gave his promise, and she went. And presently three Mrs.
Youngs entered in a body and opened on their husband a tempest of tears,
abuse, and entreaty. They had heard all about No. 6, No. 11, and No. 14.
Three more breast-pins were promised. They were hardly gone when nine
more Mrs. Youngs filed into the presence, and a new tempest burst forth
and raged round about the prophet and his guest. Nine breast-pins were
promised, and the weird sisters filed out again. And in came eleven
more, weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth. Eleven promised
breast-pins purchased peace once more.
“That is a specimen,” said Mr. Young. “You see how it is. You see what a
life I lead. A man _can’t_ be wise all the time. In a heedless moment I
gave my darling No. 6—excuse my calling her thus, as her other name has
escaped me for the moment—a breast-pin. It was only worth twenty-five
dollars—that is, _apparently_ that was its _whole_ cost—but its ultimate
cost was inevitably bound to be a good deal more. You yourself have seen
it climb up to six hundred and fifty dollars—and alas, even that is not
the end! For I have wives all over this Territory of Utah. I have dozens
of wives whose _numbers_, even, I do not know without looking in the
family Bible. They are scattered far and wide among the mountains and
valleys of my realm. And mark you, every solitary one of them will hear
of this wretched breast pin, and every last one of them will have one or
die. No. 6’s breast pin will cost me twenty-five hundred dollars before
I see the end of it. And these creatures will compare these pins
together, and if one is a shade finer than the rest, they will all be
thrown on my hands, and I will have to order a new lot to keep peace in
the family. Sir, you probably did not know it, but all the time you were
present with my children your every movement was watched by vigilant
servitors of mine. If you had offered to give a child a dime, or a stick
of candy, or any trifle of the kind, you would have been snatched out of
the house instantly, provided it could be done before your gift left
your hand. Otherwise it would be absolutely necessary for you to make an
exactly similar gift to all my children—and knowing by experience the
importance of the thing, I would have stood by and seen to it myself
that you did it, and did it thoroughly. Once a gentleman gave one of my
children a tin whistle—a veritable invention of Satan, sir, and one
which I have an unspeakable horror of, and so would you if you had
eighty or ninety children in your house. But the deed was done—the man
escaped. I knew what the result was going to be, and I thirsted for
vengeance. I ordered out a flock of Destroying Angels, and they hunted
the man far into the fastnesses of the Nevada mountains. But they never
caught him. I am not cruel, sir—I am not vindictive except when sorely
outraged—but if I had caught him, sir, so help me Joseph Smith, I would
have locked him into the nursery till the brats whistled him to death.
By the slaughtered body of St. Parley Pratt (whom God assoil!) there was
never anything on this earth like it! _I_ knew who gave the whistle to
the child, but I could, not make those jealous mothers believe me. They
believed _I_ did it, and the result was just what any man of reflection
could have foreseen: I had to order a hundred and ten whistles—I think
we had a hundred and ten children in the house then, but some of them
are off at college now—I had to order a hundred and ten of those
shrieking things, and I wish I may never speak another word if we didn’t
have to talk on our fingers entirely, from that time forth until the
children got tired of the whistles. And if ever another man gives a
whistle to a child of mine and I get my hands on him, I will hang him
higher than Haman! That is the word with the bark on it! Shade of Nephi!
_You_ don’t know anything about married life. I am rich, and everybody
knows it. I am benevolent, and everybody takes advantage of it. I have a
strong fatherly instinct and all the foundlings are foisted on me.
“Every time a woman wants to do well by her darling, she puzzles her
brain to cipher out some scheme for getting it into my hands. Why, sir,
a woman came here once with a child of a curious lifeless sort of
complexion (and so had the woman), and swore that the child was mine and
she my wife—that I had married her at such-and-such a time in such-and-
such a place, but she had forgotten her number, and of course I could
not remember her name. Well, sir, she called my attention to the fact
that the child looked like me, and really it did seem to resemble me—a
common thing in the Territory—and, to cut the story short, I put it in
my nursery, and she left.
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“And by the ghost of Orson Hyde, when they came to wash the paint off
that child it was an Injun! Bless my soul, you don’t know anything about
married life. It is a perfect dog’s life, sir—a perfect dog’s life. You
can’t economize. It isn’t possible. I have tried keeping one set of
bridal attire for all occasions. But it is of no use. First you’ll marry
a combination of calico and consumption that’s as thin as a rail, and
next you’ll get a creature that’s nothing more than the dropsy in
disguise, and then you’ve got to eke out that bridal dress with an old
balloon. That is the way it goes. And think of the wash-bill—(excuse
these tears)—nine hundred and eighty-four pieces a week! No, sir, there
is no such a thing as economy in a family like mine. Why, just the one
item of cradles—think of it! And vermifuge! Soothing syrup! Teething
rings! And ‘papa’s watches’ for the babies to play with! And things to
scratch the furniture with! And lucifer matches for them to eat, and
pieces of glass to cut themselves with! The item of glass alone would