HORRORS OF POLYGAMY.
T H E TERRORS OF BLOOD A T O N E M E N T .
Two Hundred " Sanctified" Murders— A Pen
Picture of Delegate George Q. Cannon—
An Overflowing Treasury From tho
Hack; Tithe.
Special Correspondence.
Salt Lake City, Feb. 16.— Like all cowards
the Mormons are full of brag and bluster. They
are now giving out the idea that battalions of
Mormon soldiers are under arms drilling by'
night, in Southern Utah, ready to meet the armies*
of Uncle Sam. This is all meant for effect and
nothing more. There are fanatics m Utah who'
would go into battle against an army led by Phil-
Sheridan and expect that the lightnings of heaven
would fall from the sky and wipe out the enemy.
But the Mormon leaders know better. There
will never be a conflict of arms in Utah unless
the Mormons are impolitic enough to indulge in
some of, their old- time atrocities, when the Gen-tiles
will be quite likely to take the matter of
solving the Utah problem into their own hands.
They have about lost confidence in the govern-ment,
and their patience is well nigh exhausted.
The infamous doctrine of blood- atonement
has long been a powerful lever in the hands of
the church. Brigham Young taught it openly in
the tabernacle, claiming that the only way to
save the soul of a wicked Gentile was to shed his
blood. When any particular Gentile became
obnoxious to the church, the bishop would begin
to acquaint the people of the fact that his soul
needed saving. The hint would be sufficient,
and in a few days the man would be found dead
by the roadside, with the cross of the blood-atonement
marked on liis breast with a bowie-knife.
In a murder trial in this city a few years
ago the Coroner swore that during his term of
office he had laid out 200 bodies with the bloody
cross cut on their breasts. It used to be a, com-mon
thing to maim and render impotent male
Gentiles who were especially obnoxious. There
are upward of thirty well authenticated cases of
such horrible treatment, and one young man is
still living in this city, a hopeless idiot, who was
thus treated by the Mormon bishops. The
Saints deny these things to tho outsiders,
but tell their followers that it is a religious rite,
commanded of God. The horrors of the
Mountain Meadow massacre were but a beginning
of the long line of priestly atrocities, which have
continued ever since. While outrages of various
descriptions are being perpetrated, the elders in
the tabernacle are preaching peace, forbearance
and good will, eating communion bread and
praying, while the secret orders go forth to
burn, lull and destroy. In the neighborhood of
Salt Lake property is destroyed, petty persecutions
are indulged in and men are beaten by the police
under all sorts of pretexts. In the southern
counties, however, the same spirit of murder and
robbery is still rampant, and the men who are
the most fiendish and determined smile blandly,
look meek and sorrowful and deliver themselves
of a lot of twaddle about being persecuted for
their religion, while they make " a desert blossom."
There never was a desert in Utah.
The man who has until lately occupied a seat
in Congress from Utah is a man whose entire
life has been a concerted system of fraud and
rascality. In his white choker and ministerial
vest, with his hands folded piously across his
stomach, he looks the perfect picture of a sanc-timonious
clergyman. " At heart he is a tricky,
malignant, revengeful, cunning knave. There is
not a single Mormon in Utah who in a lawsuit
would believe him under oath, and his record as
a liar and perjurer is so notorious that leading
Mormons openly admit it. In a case before the
Third District Court a man filed an affidavit to
tho effect that George Q. Cannon had hired a
man to kill him, to get him out of the way as a
witness in a suit, and that shortly afterward
the attempt was made upon his life. He pro-duced
proofs which left no doubt in the minds
of the people of Salt Lake that Cannon had
employed an assassin to carry out his designs.
He received his naturalization papers by pur-chasing
one on the street for at a time when
a man could come direct from England and pur-chase
these certificates of the court clerk on the
street as easily as he could buy ten cents' worth
of peanuts. Bishop Sharp, who got his certifi-cate
at the same time and in the same way as
Cannon did, has taken out first papers, knowing
perfectly well that his old certificate is bogus.
Cannon " had no belief whatever in the mummeries
of Mormonism. He joined the church to
make money, and being a shrewd, foxy
man. has succeeded magnificently. He will
clink' to the faith • as long as the
moiAth of the tithing sack is open.
Utah can never make the slightest advance-ment
as a country, except through Gentile indus-try,
as the sweat and toil of the Mormon masses
is'systematieally levied on by the church and 10
per cent exacted each month. In most of the
Mormon establishments the tithing money is de-ducted
from each man's salary before it reaches
him, the collector going to the cashier and taking
the coin in a lump. Any objection raised to this
plan results in an immediate discharge. Ten per
cent of all grain, produce, hay, butter, and eggs
goes to the tithing house, when people prefer to
pay in " the produce of the country" instead of
money. From this tithing house, bursting with
the fat of the land, the heads of the church feed,
and a regular delivery wagon is kept running to
the houses of the bishops and elders daily. It
recently came to light in one of the southern
counties that the bishops allow the young people
to be together as much as possible, and when, to
cover the result of an undue intimacy, her lover
is anxious to marry, the old bishops say, " Pay
your back tithing and we will perform Ihe
ceremony." Nothing now remains but for the
young man to sell everything he has to raiso § 500
or $ 600 and pay the back tithing which now
has been due for himself and sweetheart for
years. There are many liberal minded Mor-mons
who, getting sick of the tithing tax, refuse
to pay any longer, but the day of reckoning
surely comes when they must pay or suffer
horribly for it.
It is a common thing, in fact, a regular thing,
to preach from the big taberna. clo that a big
famine is close at hand, that the Lord will smite
Israel for its lukewarmness, and ail the saints
are commanded to contribute grain and provis-ions
to the famine fund, out of which
the church pledges itself to feed the
needy. The joke of the thing' is that
there has never been a famine in Utah, never
will be, and the accumulations of wheat and
corn, wrung from the poor, are regularly shipped
off to San Francisco and sold at the highest mar-ket
rate, the leaders pocketing the mouey. then
the miserable, ignorant and innocent newspapers
who espouse the Mormon question point to the
" famine fund" as an evidence of how the
benevolent church cares for its people. This is
a poor samplo of the thousand and one shams
practiced on the poor, deluded Mormons and tho
confiding people of the East.
During- all these long years tho wheels of
Congressional legislation have been blocked
by the paid agents of the church,
by the Central Pacific and Union Pacific
Railway Companies, and by some big mercantile
establishments in New York and Chicago. There
people, however, are just beginning to get their
eyes open to the fact that the Mormons are re-tarding
the growth of the territory, and that
there is more money in the go- ahead Gentiles.
Sargent, Cox and Randall have always been con-sidered
the Mormon agents in Congress. The
Mormon problem would have been solved years
ago but for the introduction in a bill of a death-dealing
amendment slyly put there by a certain
Senator in the interest of the Central Pacific
Railway, whose creature of clay he is.
The Commission proposed by the Willcts bill
is the best solution of tho difficulty, and is longed
for by the Gentiles, who, through a long and
protracted struggle, have worked and prayed for
such a consummation. Yet there is hardly a
Gentile in Utah who feels assured that this bill
will pass. The power of Mormon gold is pretty
well known, and the church openly boasts of its
ability to hold Congress " in the hollow of its
hand." The church can throw $ 3,000,000 into
the breach, if necessary, and there has not been
a time in ten years that a fat Mormon sock was
not at Washington to buy the silence of
Congress. A well- known lobbyist once
told your correspondent that it was the " biggest
and easiest to get at" of any there, except, he
added, " the Chinese evil coming from the San
Francisco Six Companies." If Congress adjourns
this time without passing any anti- Mormon bills,
the leading Gentiles, who have spent from ten to
twenty years wrestling with adverse fate, will
pull up stakes and quit Utah, turning it over
forever to the lecherous rule of the semi- bar-barians
who now run it. Dix.
[ Note— It will be observed that this letter was
written on the very day of tho passage of Senator
Edmunds' bill.— Ed.] ,
