The Mormon Ruler.
In one of his letters to the N. Y. Tribune, A. D. Richardson, who accompanied Mr. Colax on his Western tour, gives the following interesting description of Brigham Young:
"The President of the Mormon Church is six feet high, portly, and weighs about 200. He is wonderfully well preserved for a man who has passed his sixty-fourth birth-day. His face is fresh and unwrink-led, his step agile and elastic. I can hardly detect a single grey hair in his curling, auburn locks or the whiskers of the same hue which in smooth, crescent line fringe his cheek and chin. Is Bri-gham Young indeed a new Ponce de Leon who discovered in Polygamy the fountain of Perpetual Youth?
"His eyes are of a greyish blue. They do not impress me as frank and open, but have a secretive expression. He has an eagle nose and a mouth that shuts like a vice indicating tremendous firmness.—His manner is dignified—agreeable and affable rather than cordial; and he carries the unmistaable air of one having authority. Ordina-rily cold in conversation, he has little ebullitions of earnestness in which he speaks right at people, using his dexter fore finger with great force to point a moral. He treats the brethren with warmth, throwing his arm carressingly about them and asking carefully after the wives and babies.
He has observed much, thought much, mingled much with practi-cal men, but seems a little unfamiliar with cultivated society. He is abstemious and temperate, using neither tea nor coffee, spirits nor tobacco. Provincialisms of his Vermont boyhood and his Western manhood still cling to him. He says 'leetle 'beyend' and 'disre-member.' An irrepressible conflict between his nominatives and verbs now and then crops out in expressions like they was, etc.
"Yet those who hold Brigham Young a cheap charlatan, are wild-er if possible than the Saints who receive him as an angel of light or those Gentiles who denounce him as a goblin damned. A most striking embodiment of the One an Power, he holds a hundred thous-and people in the hollow of his hand. Gathering from every na-tion, always poor, usually ignorant, sometimes vicious he has molded them in to an industrious, productive, honest and homogeneous community. He as grown very rich; the Gentiles charge him with extortio among his own people. He certainly owns much of the most desirable property in Utah. But his adherents as a class have vastly improved their condition by coming here. I believe all admit that his large commercial dealings are characterized by integrity; and that he possesses great kindness of heart, he is a man of brains, quick intuitions, good judgement and untiring industry He would doubtless have achieved great success in politics, trade, manufacturing, or almost any other walk of life.
