AMONG THE MORMONS.
Well, we may give them this comfort with-out any insincerity. Let us return to where he stands gazing down on the parquette. Like any Eastern party-goer, he is habited in the "customary suit of solemn black," and looks very distinguished in this dress, though his daily homespun detracts nothing from the feel-ing, when in his presence, that you are behold-ing a most remarkable man. He is nearly sev-enty years old, but appears very little over forty. His height is about five feet ten inches; his figure very well made and slightly inclining to portliness. His hair is a rich curly chest-nut, formerly worn long, in supposed imitation of the apostolic coiffure, but now cut in our practical Eastern fashion, as accords with the man of business, whose metier he has added to apostleship with the growing temporal prosper-ity of Zion. Indeed, he is the greatest busi-ness man on the continent,—the cashier of a firm of eighty thousand silent partners, and the only auditor of that cashier, besides. If I to-day signified my conversion to Mormonism, to-morrow I should be baptized by Brigham's hands. The next day I should be invited to appear at the Church-Office (Brigham's) and exhibit to the Church (Brigham) a faithful in-ventory of my entire estate. I am a cabinet-maker, let us say, and have brought to Salt Lake the entire earnings of my New York shop,—twenty thousand dollars. The Church (Brig-ham sole and simple) examines and approves my inventory. It (Brigham alone) has the ab-solute decision of the question wh ether any more cabinet-makers are needed in Utah. If the Church (Brigham) says "No," it (Brig-ham again) has the right to tell me where la-bor is wanted, and set me going in my new oc-cupation. If the Church (Brigham) says "Yes," it further goes on to inform me, without appeal, exactly what proportion of the twenty thousand dollars on my inventory can be properly turned into the channels of the new cabinet shop. I am making no extraordinary or disproportion-ate supposition when I say that the Church (Brigham) permits me to retain just one-half of my property. The remaining ten thousand dollars goes into the Church-Fund, (Brigham's Herring safe,) and from that portion of my life's savings I never hear again, in the form either of capital, interest, bequeathable estate, or dower to my widow. Except for the pur-poses of the Church, (Brigham's unquestionable will,) my ten thousand dollars is as though it had not been. I am a sincere believer, howev-er, and go home light-hearted, with a certified check written by the Recording Angel on my conscience for that amount, passed to my credit in the bank where thieves break not through nor steal—it being no more accessible to them than to the depositor, which is a comfort to the latter. The first year I net from my chairs and tables two thousand dollars. The Church (Brigham) sends me another invitation to visit it, make a solemn averment of the sum, and pay over to that ecclesiastical edifice, the Her-ring safe, two hundred dollars. Or suppose I have not sold any of my wares as yet, but have only imported, to be sold by-and-by, five hun-dred Boston rockers. On learning this fact, the Church (Brigham) graciously accepts fifty for its own purposes. Being founded upon a rock, it does not care, in its collective capacity, to sit upon rockers, but has an immense series of warehouses, omniverous and eupeptic, which swallow all manner of tithes, from grain and horseshoes to the less stable commodities of fresh fish and melons, assimilating them by ad-mirable processes into coin of the realm. These warehouses are in the Church (Brigham's own private) inclosure. If success in my cabinet-making has moved me to make a feast, and I thereat drink more healths than are consistent with my own, the Church surely knows that fact the very next day; and as Utah recogni-zes no impunitive "getting drunk in the bosom of one's family," I am again sent for, on this occasion to pay a fine, probably exceeding the expenses of my feast. A second offence is pun-ished with imprisonment as well as fine; for no imprisonment avoids fine—this comes in every case. The hand of the Church holds the souls of the saints by inevitable purse-strings. But I cannot waste time by enumerating the multi-tudinous lapses and offences which all bring revenue to the Herring safe.
Over all these matters Brigham Young has supreme control. His power is the roost des-potic known to mankind. Here, by the way, is the constitutionally vulnerable point of Mor-monism. If fear of establishing a bad prece-dent hinder the United States at any time from breaking up that nest of disloyalty, because of its licentious marriage institutions, Utah is still open to grave punishment, and the Admin-istration inflicting it would have duty as well as vested right upon its side, on the ground that it stands pledged to secure to each of the nation's constituent sections a republican form of government—something which Utah has never enjoyed any more than Timbuctoo. I once asked Brigham if Dr. Bernhisel would be likely to get to Congress again. "No," he re-plied, with perfect certainty; "we shall send as our Delegate." (I think he men-tioned Colonel Kinney, but do not remember absolutely.) Whoever it was, when the time came, Brigham would send in his name to the "Deseret News"—which office, like everything else valuable and powerful, is in his inclosure. It would be printed as a matter of course; a counter-nomination is utterly unheard of; and on election day—would be Delegate as sure as the sun rose.
The mountain stream that irrigates the city, flowing to all the gardens through open ditches on each side of the street, passes through Brig-ham's inclosure: if the saints needed drought to humble them, he could set back the waters to their source. The road to the only canon where firewood is attainable runs through the same close, and is barred by a gate of which he holds the sole key. A family-man, wishing to cut fuel, must, ask his leave, which is generally granted on condition that every third or fourth load is deposited in the inclosure, for Church purposes. Thus everything vital, save the air he breathes, reaches the Mormon only through Brigham's sieve. What more absolute despot-ism is conceivable ? Here lies the pou-sto for the lever of Governmental interference. The mere fact of such power resting in one man's irresponsible hands is a crime against the Con-stitution. At the same time, this power, won-derful as it may seem, is practically wielded for the common good. I never heard Brigham's worst enemies accuse him of peculation, though such immense interests are controlled by his one pair of hands. His life one great and hastened to, assure the President that I ha, d theoretical mistake, yet he makes fewer practi-cal mistakes than any other man, so situated, whom the world ever saw. Those he does make are not on the side of self. He merges his whole personality in the Church, with a self-ab-negation which would establish in business a whole century of martyrs having a worthy cause.
The cut of Brigham's hair led me away from his personal description. To return to it: his eyes are a clear blue-gray, frank and straight-forward in their look; his nose a finely chis-elled aquiline; his mouth exceedingly firm, and fortified in that expression by a chin almost as protrusive beyond the rest of the profile as Charlotte Cushman's, though less noticeably so, being longer than hers; and he wears a nar-row ribbon of brown beard, meeting under the chin. I think I have heard Captain Burton say that he had irregular teeth, which made his smile unpleasant. Since the Captain's visit, our always benevolent President, Mr. Lincoln, has altered all that, sending out as Territorial Secretary a Mr. Fuller, who, besides being a successful politician, was an excellent dentist. He secured Brigham's everlasting gratitude by making him a very handsome false set, and performing the same service for all of his fa-vorite, but edentate wives. Several other apos-tles of the Lord owe to Mr. Fuller their ability to gnash their teeth against the Gentiles. The result was that he became the most popular Federal officer (who didn't turn Mormon) ever sent to Utah. The man who obtains ascenden-cy over the mouths of the authorities cannot fail ere long to get their ears.
Brigham's manners astonish any one who knows that his only education was a few quar-ters of such common school experience as could be had in Ontario County, Central New York, during the early part of the century. There are few courtlier men living. His address is a fine combination of dignity with the desire to confer happiness,—of perfect deference to the feelings of others with absolute certainty of himself and his own opinions. He is a remark-able example of the educating influence of tact-ful perception, combined with entire singleness of aim, considered quite apart from its moral character. His early life was passed among the uncouth and illiterate; his daily associa-tions, since he embraced Mormonism, have been with the least cultivated grades of human soci-ety—a heterogeneous peasant-horde, looking to him for erection into a nation: yet he has so clearly seen what is requisite in the man who would be respected in the Presidency, and has so unreservedly devoted his life to its attain-ment, that in protracted conversations with him I heard only a single solecism, ("a'n't you" for "aren't you,") and saw not one instance of breeding which would be inconsistent with no-ble lineage.
I say all this good of him frankly, disregard-ing any slur that may be cast on me as his de-fender by those broad-effect artists who always paint the Devil black, for I think it high time that the Mormon enemies of our American Idea should be plainly understood as far more dan-gerous antagonists than hypocrites or idiots can ever hope to be. Let us not twice commit the blunder of underrating our foes.
Brigham began our conversation at the thea-tre by telling me I was late—it was after nine o'clock. I replied that this was the time we usually set about dressing for an evening party in Boston or New York.
"Yes," said he, “you find us an old-fashioned people; we are trying to return to the healthy habits of patriarchal times."
"Need you go back so far as that for your parallel ?" suggested I. " It strikes me that we might have found four-o'clock balls among the early christians."
He smiled, without that offensive affectation of some great men, the air of taking another's joke under their gracious patronage, and went on to remark that there were, unfortunately, multitudinous differences between the Mormons and Americans at the East, besides the hours they kept.
"You find us," said he, "trying to live peaceably. A sojourn with people thus minded must be a great relief to you who come from a land where brother hath lifted hand against brother, and you hear the confused noise of the warrior perpetually ringing in your ears."
Despite the courtly deference and scriptural dignity of this speech, I detected in it a latent crow over that "perished Union" which was the favorite theme of every saint I met in Utah, no desire for relief from sympathy with my country's struggle for honor and existence.
"Ah!" he replied, in a voice slightly tinged with sarcasm. "You differ greatly, then, from multitudes of your countrymen, who, since the draft began to be talked of, have passed through Salt Lake, flying westward from the crime of their brothers' blood."
"I do indeed."
"Still, they are excellent men. Brother He-ber Kimball and myself are every week invited to address a train of them down at Emigrant Square. They are honest, peaceful people. You call them 'Copperheads,' I believe. But they are real, true, good men. We find them very truth-seeking, remarkably open to convic-tion. Many of them have stayed with us. Thus the Lord makes the wrath of man to praise Him. The Abolitionists—the same peo-ple who interfered with our institutions, and drove us out into the wilderness—interfered with the Southern institutions till they broke up the Union. But it's all coming out right—a great deal better than we could have arranged it for ourselves. The men who flee from Abo-litionist oppression come out here to our ark of refuge, and people the asylum of God's chosen. You'll all be out here before long. Your Union's gone forever. Fighting only makes matters worse. When your country has be-come a desolation, we, the saints whom you cast out, will forget all your sins against us, and give you a home"
There was something so preposterous in the idea of a mighty and prosperous people aban-doning, through abject terror of a desperate set of Southern conspirators, the fertile soil and grand commercial avenues of the United States, to populate a green strip in the heart of an in-accessible desert, that, until I saw Brigham Young's face glowing with what he deemed prophetic enthusiasm, I could not imagine him in earnest. Before I left Utah, I discovered, that, without a single exception, all the saints were inoculated with a prodigious craze, to the effect that the United States was to become a blighted chaos, and its inhabitants Mormon proselytes and citizens of Utah within the next two years—the more sanguine said, "next sum-mer."
At first sight, one point puzzled me. Where were they to get the orthodox number of wives for this sudden accession of converts ? My gentlemen readers will feel highly flattered by a solution of this problem which I received from no lesser light of the Latter Day Church than that jolly apostle, Heber Kimball.
"Why," said the old man, twinkling his little black eyes like a godly Silenus, and nursing one of his fat legs with a lickerish smile, "isn't the Lord Almighty providin' for His beloved heritage jist as fast, as He anyways kin ? This war's a-goin' on till the biggest part o' you male Gentiles hez killed each other off, then the leetle handful that's left and comes a-fleein't' our asylum 'll bring along all the women o' the nation with 'em, so we shall hev women enough to give every one on 'em all they want, and hev a large balance left over-to distribute round among God's saints that hez been here from the beginnin' o' the tribulation."
The sweet taste which this diabolical reflec-tion seemed to leave in Heber Kimball's mouth made me long to knock him down worse than I had ever felt regarding either saint or sinner. But it is costly smiting an apostle of the Lord in Salt Lake City; and I merely retaliated by telling him I wished I could hear him say that in a lecture-room full of Sanitary Commission ladies scraping lint for their husbands, sweet-hearts, and brothers in the Union army. I didn't know whether saints made good lint, but I thought I knew one who'd get scraped a little. To resume Brigham for the last time. After a conversation about the Indians, in which he denounced the military policy of the Govern-ment, averring that one bale of blankets and ten pounds of beads would go farther to pro-tect the mails from stoppage and emigrants from massacre than a regiment of soldiers, he discovered that we crossed swords on every war question, and tactfully changed the sub-ject to the beauty of the Opera House.
As to the Indians, let me remark by-the-by, I did not tell him that I understood the reason of his dislike to severe measures in that direction; Infernally bestial and cruel as are the Gosh, oots, Pi-Utes, and other Desert tribes, still they have never planned any extensive raid since the Mormons entered Utah. In every settle-ment of the saints you will find from two to a dozen young men who wear their black hair cut in the Indian fashion, and speak all the sur-rounding dialects with native fluency. When-ever a fatly provided wagon train is to be at-tacked, a fine herd of emigrants' beeves stam-peded, the mail to be stopped, or the Gentiles in any way harrassed, these desperadoes stain their skin, exchange their clothes for a breech-clout, and rally a horde of the savages, whose favor they have always propitiated, for the am-bush and massacre, which in all but the ele-ment of brute force is their work in plan, lead-ership, and execution. I have multitudes of most interesting facts to back this assertion, but am already in danger of overrunning my allowed limits.
The Opera House was a subject we could agree upon. I was greatly astonished to find in the desert heart of the continent a place of public amusement which for capacity, beauty, and comfort has no superior in America, except the opera houses of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. It is internally constructed somewhat like the first of these, seats twenty-five hundred people, and commodiously receives five hundred more, when, as in the present in-stance, the stage is thrown into the parquette, and the latter boarded up to the level of the former for dancing. Externally the building is a plain, but not ungraceful structure, of stone, brick, and stucco. My greatest surprise was excited by the really artistic beauty of the gilt and painted decorations of the great arch over the stage, the cornices, and the moulding about the proscenium-boxes. President Young, with a proper pride, assured me that every particle of the ornamental work was by indigenous and saintly hands.
"But you don't know yet," he added, "how independent we are of you at the East. Where do you think we got that central chandelier, and what do you suppose we paid for it ?"
It was a piece of workmanship which would have been creditable to any New York firm—apparently a richly carved circle, twined with gilt vines, leaves, and tendrils, blossoming all over with flaming wax-lights, and suspended by a massive chain of golden lustre. So I re-plied that he probably paid a thousand dollars for it in New York.
"Capital!" exclaimed Brigham. "I made it myself! That circle is a cart-wheel which I washed and gilded; it hangs by a pair of gilt ox-chains; and the ornaments of the candle-sticks were all cut after my patterns out of sheet-tin!"
I talked with the President till a party of young girls, who seemed to regard him with idolatry, and whom, in return, he treated with a sage mixture of gallantry and fatherliness, came to him with an invitation to join in some old-fashioned contra-dance long forgotten at the East. I was curious to see how he would ac-quit himself in this supreme ordeal of dignity; so I descended to the parquette, and was much impressed by the aristocratic grace with which he went through his figures. After that I excused myself from numerous kind invitations by the ball-committee to be in-troduced to a partner and join in the dances. The fact was that I greatly wished to make a thorough physiognomical study of the ball-room, and I know that my readers will applaud my self-denial in not dancing, since it enables me to tell them how Utah good society looks.
After spending an hour in a circuit and sur-vey of the room as minute as was compatible with decency, I arrived at the following re-sults:
There was very little ostentation in dress at the ball, but there was also very little taste in dressing. Patrician broadcloth and silk were the rare exceptions, generally ill-made and ill-worn, but they cordially associated with the great mass of plebian tweed and calico. Few ladies wore jewelry or feathers. There were some pretty girls swimming about in tasteful whip-syllabub of puffed tarlatan. Where saintly gentlemen came with several wives, the oldest generally seemed the most elaborately dressed, and acted much like an Eastern chap-eron toward her younger sisters. (Wives of the same man habitually besister each other in Utah. Another triumph of grace!) Among the men I saw some very strong and capable faces; but the majority had not much charac-ter in their looks—indeed, differed little in that regard from any average crowd of men any-where. Among the women, to my surprise, I found no really degraded faces, though many stolid ones—only one deeply dejected, (this be-longed to the wife of a hitherto monogamic husband, who had left her alone in the dress circle, while he was dancing with a chubby young Mormoness, likely to be added to the family in a month or two,) but many impassive ones; and though I saw multitudes of kindly, good-tempered countenances, and a score which would have been called pretty anywhere, I was obliged to confess, after a most impartial and anxious search, that I had not met a single wo-man who looked high toned, first class, capable of poetic enthusiasm or heroic self devotion—not a single woman whom an artist would dream of and ask to sit for a study—not one to whom a finely constituted intellectual man could come for companionship in his pursuits or sym-pathy in his yearnings. Because I knew that this verdict would be received at the East with a "Just as you might have expected!" I cast aside everything like prejudice, and forgot that I was in Utah, as I threaded the great throng.
I must condense greatly what I have to say about two other typical men besides Brigham Young, or I shall have no room to speak of the Lake and the Desert. Heber Kimball, second President, (proximus longo intervallo!) Brigham's most devoted worshipper, and in all respects the next most important man, although utterly incapable of keeping coherent the vast tissue of discordant Mormon elements, in case he should survive Brigham, is the latter's equal in years, but in all things else his antipodes. His height is over six feet, his form of aldermanic rotundity, his face large, plethoric, and lustrous with the stable red of stewed cranberries, while his small, twinkling black beads of eyes and a Satyric sensualism about the mouth would in-dicate a temperament fatally in the way of any apostleship save that of polygamy, even with-out the aid of an induction from his favorite topics of discourse and his patriarchally unvar-nished style of handling them. Men, every-where, unfortunately, tend little toward the er-ror of bashful-ness in their chat among each other, but most of us at the East would feel that we were insulting the lowest member of the demi-monde, if we uttered before her a sin-gle sentence of the talk which forms the habit-ual staple of all Heber Kimball's public ser-mons to the wives and daughters who throng the Sunday Tabernacle. Heber took a vivid interest in Bierstadt's and my own eternal welfare. He quite laid himself out for our conversion, coming to sit with us at breakfast in our Mormon hotel, dressed in a black swallow-tail, buff vest, and a stupendous truncate cone of Leghorn, which made him look like an Italian mountebank physician of the seventeenth century. I have heard men who could misquote scripture for their own ends, and talk a long while without saying anything; but he so far surpassed in these particulars the loftiest efforts within my former experience, that I could think of no comparison for him but Jack Bunsby taken to exhorting. Witness a sample:
"Seven women shall take a hold o' one man! There!" (with a slap on the back of the near-est subject for conversion). "What d'ye think o'that? Shall! Shall take a hold on him! That don't mean they sha'n't, does it? No! God's word means what it says. And therefore means no otherwise—not in no way, shape, nor manner. Not in no way, for He saith, 'I am the way—and the truth and the life.' Not in no shape, for a man beholdeth his nat'ral shape in a glass; nor in no manner, for he straightway forgetteth what manner o' man he was. Seven women shall catch a hold on him. And if they shall, then they will! For everything shall come to pass, and not one good word shall fall to the ground. You who try to explain away the scriptur' would make it fig'rative. But don't come to ME with none o' your spiritooali-zers! " Not one good word shall fall. Therefore seven shall not fall. And ef seven shall catch a hold on him—and, as I jist proved, seven will catch a hold on him—then seven ought—and in the Latter-Day Glory, seven, yea, as our Lord said un-tew Peter, 'Verily I say un-to you, not seven, but seventy times seven,' these sev-enty times seven shall catch a hold and cleave. Blessed day! For the end shall be even as the beginnin', and seventy-fold more abundantly. Come over into my garden."
This invitation would wind up the homily. We gladly accepted it, and I must confess, that, if there ever could be any hope of our conver-sion, it was just about the time we stood in Brother Heber's fine orchard, eating apples and apricots between exhortations, and having sound doctrine paked down our throats with gooseberries as big as plums to take the taste out of our mouths, like jam after castor oil.
Porter Rockwell is a man whom my readers must have heard of in every account of fear-lessly executed massacre committed in Utah during the last thirteen years. He is the chief of the Danites—a band of saints who possess the monopoly of vengeance upon Gentiles and apostates. If a Mormon tries to sneak off to California by night, after converting his prop-erty into cash, their knives have the inevitable duty of changing his destination to another state, and bringing back his goods into the Lord's treasury. Their bullets are the ones which find their unerring way through the brains of external enemies. They are the. Heaven-elected assassins of Mormonism—the butchers by divine right. Porter Rockwell has slain his forty men. This is historical. His probable private victims amount to as many more. He wears his hair braided behind, and done up in a knot with a back-comb, like a woman's. He has a face full of bulldog courage—but vastly good-natured, and without a bad trait in it. I went out riding with him on the Fourth of July, and enjoyed his society greatly—though I knew that at a word from Brigham he would cut my throat in as matter-of-fact a style as if I had been a calf instead of an author. But he would have felt no unkindness toward me on that ac-count. I understood his anomaly perfectly, and found him one of the pleasantest murderers I ever met. He was mere executive force, from which the lever, conscience, had suffered entire disjunction, being in the hand of Brigham. He was everywhere known as the Destroying Angel, but he seemed to have little disagreement with his toddy, and took his meals regularly. He has two very comely and pleasant wives. Brig-ham has about seventy, Heber about thirty. The seventy of Brigham do not include those spiritually married, or "sealed" to him, who may never see him again after the ceremony is performed in his back office. These often have temporal husbands, and marry Brigham only for the sake of belonging to his lordly estab-lishment in Heaven.
