Roughing It
little of everything that was bad. Brigham returned from a mission to
England, where he had established a Mormon newspaper, and he brought
back with him several hundred converts to his preaching. His influence
among the brethren augmented with every move he made. Finally Nauvoo was
invaded by the Missouri and Illinois Gentiles, and Joseph Smith killed.
A Mormon named Rigdon assumed the Presidency of the Mormon church and
government, in Smith’s place, and even tried his hand at a prophecy or
two. But a greater than he was at hand. Brigham seized the advantage of
the hour and without other authority than superior brain and nerve and
will, hurled Rigdon from his high place and occupied it himself. He did
more. He launched an elaborate curse at Rigdon and his disciples; and he
pronounced Rigdon’s “prophecies” emanations from the devil, and ended by
“handing the false prophet over to the buffetings of Satan for a
thousand years”—probably the longest term ever inflicted in Illinois.
The people recognized their master. They straightway elected Brigham
Young President, by a prodigious majority, and have never faltered in
their devotion to him from that day to this. Brigham had forecast—a
quality which no other prominent Mormon has probably ever possessed. He
recognized that it was better to move to the wilderness than _be_ moved.
By his command the people gathered together their meagre effects, turned
their backs upon their homes, and their faces toward the wilderness, and
on a bitter night in February filed in sorrowful procession across the
frozen Mississippi, lighted on their way by the glare from their burning
temple, whose sacred furniture their own hands had fired! They camped,
several days afterward, on the western verge of Iowa, and poverty, want,
hunger, cold, sickness, grief and persecution did their work, and many
succumbed and died—martyrs, fair and true, whatever else they might have
been. Two years the remnant remained there, while Brigham and a small
party crossed the country and founded Great Salt Lake City, purposely
choosing a land _which was outside the ownership and jurisdiction of the
hated American nation_. Note that. This was in 1847. Brigham moved his
people there and got them settled just in time to see disaster fall
again. For the war closed and Mexico ceded Brigham’s refuge to the
enemy—the United States! In 1849 the Mormons organized a “free and
independent” government and erected the “State of Deseret,” with Brigham
Young as its head. But the very next year Congress deliberately snubbed
it and created the “Territory of Utah” out of the same accumulation of
mountains, sage-brush, alkali and general desolation,—but made Brigham
Governor of it. Then for years the enormous migration across the plains
to California poured through the land of the Mormons and yet the church
remained staunch and true to its lord and master. Neither hunger,
thirst, poverty, grief, hatred, contempt, nor persecution could drive
the Mormons from their faith or their allegiance; and even the thirst
for gold, which gleaned the flower of the youth and strength of many
nations was not able to entice them! That was the final test. An
experiment that could survive that was an experiment with some substance
to it somewhere.
Great Salt Lake City throve finely, and so did Utah. One of the last
things which Brigham Young had done before leaving Iowa, was to appear
in the pulpit dressed to personate the worshipped and lamented prophet
Smith, and confer the prophetic succession, with all its dignities,
emoluments and authorities, upon “President Brigham Young!” The people
accepted the pious fraud with the maddest enthusiasm, and Brigham’s
power was sealed and secured for all time. Within five years afterward
he openly added polygamy to the tenets of the church by authority of a
“revelation” which he pretended had been received nine years before by
Joseph Smith, albeit Joseph is amply on record as denouncing polygamy to
the day of his death.
Now was Brigham become a second Andrew Johnson in the small beginning
and steady progress of his official grandeur. He had served successively
as a disciple in the ranks; home missionary; foreign missionary; editor
and publisher; Apostle; President of the Board of Apostles; President of
all Mormondom, civil and ecclesiastical; successor to the great Joseph
by the will of heaven; “prophet,” “seer,” “revelator.” There was but one
dignity higher which he _could_ aspire to, and he reached out modestly
and took that—he proclaimed himself a God!
He claims that he is to have a heaven of his own hereafter, and that he
will be its God, and his wives and children its goddesses, princes and
princesses. Into it all faithful Mormons will be admitted, with their
families, and will take rank and consequence according to the number of
their wives and children. If a disciple dies before he has had time to
accumulate enough wives and children to enable him to be respectable in
the next world any friend can marry a few wives and raise a few children
for him _after he is dead_, and they are duly credited to his account
and his heavenly status advanced accordingly.
Let it be borne in mind that the majority of the Mormons have always
been ignorant, simple, of an inferior order of intellect, unacquainted
with the world and its ways; and let it be borne in mind that the wives
of these Mormons are necessarily after the same pattern and their
children likely to be fit representatives of such a conjunction; and
then let it be remembered that _for forty years_ these creatures have
been driven, driven, driven, relentlessly! and mobbed, beaten, and shot
down; cursed, despised, expatriated; banished to a remote desert,
whither they journeyed gaunt with famine and disease, disturbing the
ancient solitudes with their lamentations and marking the long way with
graves of their dead—and all because they were simply trying to live and
worship God in the way which _they_ believed with all their hearts and
souls to be the true one. Let all these things be borne in mind, and
then it will not be hard to account for the deathless hatred which the
Mormons bear our people and our government.
That hatred has “fed fat its ancient grudge” ever since Mormon Utah
developed into a self-supporting realm and the church waxed rich and
strong. Brigham as Territorial Governor made it plain that Mormondom was
for the Mormons. The United States tried to rectify all that by
appointing territorial officers from New England and other anti-Mormon
localities, but Brigham prepared to make their entrance into his
dominions difficult. Three thousand United States troops had to go
across the plains and put these gentlemen in office. And after they were
in office they were as helpless as so many stone images. They made laws
which nobody minded and which could not be executed. The federal judges
opened court in a land filled with crime and violence and sat as holiday
spectacles for insolent crowds to gape at—for there was nothing to try,
nothing to do nothing on the dockets! And if a Gentile brought a suit,
the Mormon jury would do just as it pleased about bringing in a verdict,
and when the judgment of the court was rendered no Mormon cared for it
and no officer could execute it. Our Presidents shipped one cargo of
officials after another to Utah, but the result was always the same—they
sat in a blight for awhile they fairly feasted on scowls and insults day
by day, they saw every attempt to do their official duties find its
reward in darker and darker looks, and in secret threats and warnings of
a more and more dismal nature—and at last they either succumbed and
became despised tools and toys of the Mormons, or got scared and
discomforted beyond all endurance and left the Territory. If a brave
officer kept on courageously till his pluck was proven, some pliant
Buchanan or Pierce would remove him and appoint a stick in his place. In
1857 General Harney came very near being appointed Governor of Utah. And
so it came very near being Harney governor and Cradlebaugh judge!—two
men who never had any idea of fear further than the sort of murky
comprehension of it which they were enabled to gather from the
dictionary. Simply (if for nothing else) for the variety they would have
made in a rather monotonous history of Federal servility and
helplessness, it is a pity they were not fated to hold office together
in Utah.
Up to the date of our visit to Utah, such had been the Territorial
record. The Territorial government established there had been a hopeless
failure, and Brigham Young was the only real power in the land. He was
an absolute monarch—a monarch who defied our President—a monarch who
laughed at our armies when they camped about his capital—a monarch who
received without emotion the news that the august Congress of the United
States had enacted a solemn law against polygamy, and then went forth
calmly and married twenty-five or thirty more wives.
B. THE MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE.
The persecutions which the Mormons suffered so long—and which they
consider they still suffer in not being allowed to govern
themselves—they have endeavored and are still endeavoring to repay. The
now almost forgotten “Mountain Meadows massacre” was their work. It was
very famous in its day. The whole United States rang with its horrors. A
few items will refresh the reader’s memory. A great emigrant train from
Missouri and Arkansas passed through Salt Lake City and a few
disaffected Mormons joined it for the sake of the strong protection it
afforded for their escape. In that matter lay sufficient cause for hot
retaliation by the Mormon chiefs. Besides, these one hundred and forty-
five or one hundred and fifty unsuspecting emigrants being in part from
Arkansas, where a noted Mormon missionary had lately been killed, and in
part from Missouri, a State remembered with execrations as a bitter
persecutor of the saints when they were few and poor and friendless,
here were substantial additional grounds for lack of love for these
wayfarers. And finally, this train was rich, very rich in cattle,
horses, mules and other property—and how could the Mormons consistently
keep up their coveted resemblance to the Israelitish tribes and not
seize the “spoil” of an enemy when the Lord had so manifestly “delivered
it into their hand?”
Wherefore, according to Mrs. C. V. Waite’s entertaining book, “The
Mormon Prophet,” it transpired that—
“A ‘revelation’ from Brigham Young, as Great Grand Archee or God, was
dispatched to President J. C. Haight, Bishop Higbee and J. D. Lee
(adopted son of Brigham), commanding them to raise all the forces they
could muster and trust, follow those cursed Gentiles (so read the
revelation), attack them disguised as Indians, and with the arrows of
the Almighty make a clean sweep of them, and leave none to tell the
tale; and if they needed any assistance they were commanded to hire the
Indians as their allies, promising them a share of the booty. They were
to be neither slothful nor negligent in their duty, and to be punctual
in sending the teams back to him before winter set in, for this was the
mandate of Almighty God.”
The command of the “revelation” was faithfully obeyed. A large party of
Mormons, painted and tricked out as Indians, overtook the train of
emigrant wagons some three hundred miles south of Salt Lake City, and
made an attack. But the emigrants threw up earthworks, made fortresses
of their wagons and defended themselves gallantly and successfully for
five days! Your Missouri or Arkansas gentleman is not much afraid of the
sort of scurvy apologies for “Indians” which the southern part of Utah
affords. He would stand up and fight five hundred of them.
At the end of the five days the Mormons tried military strategy. They