REVIEW OF THE WEEK
A VISIT TO SALT LAKE; being a Journey across the
Plains, and a Residence in the Mormon Settlements
at Utah. By WILLIAM CHANDLESS.
THE journey to Salt Lake, of which a re-cord is given in the book before us, was, the author tells us, the "accident or the whim of an hour." He was at St. Joseph, in the western part of Missouri—whether for business or pleasure we are not told—when he observed a herd of cattle crossing the river, and on inquiring their destination, was informed that it was Salt Lake. On further inquiry he learned that they belonged to a wagon-train which was to leave Atchison that week, that the owner was greatly in want of "hands," and was offering twenty or twenty-five dollars a month. To go with them, if possible, was his immediate determination; but, "never having driven an ox-team in his life," he was doubtful whether his services would be accepted, and of-fered to take as payment whatever they chose to give—an unnecessary humility, as he found, on making acquaintance with the other "hands," who were of all nations, and many of them as ignorant of driving as himself; while, as an Englishman, he had the advantage over them of being able to understand the directions of his employers. He certainly needed instruction, for he tells us:—
"My first attempt at managing a team was a ludicrous failure, ending, in fact, in a double knot, every steer having its feet over every chain, and most of the yokes turned up-side down. Some consolation was to be derived, however, from finding the team also a failure, and unmanageable in other hands without a change of leaders, mine leading everything to perdition as fast as they could."
On the whole, Mr. Chandless seems to have enjoyed his teamster life, in spite of much suf-fering from heat and cold, rain and drought, fatigue and privation, "keeping guard half of every other night," often" hard at work from midnight to noon, without any rest or a morsel of breakfast;" the natural result of all which, to one not accustomed to it, was an attack of fever, during which he had to lie on a bed of coffee-sacks in a wagon, to wear the same clothes night and day for days together, to have water only now and then for drinking, and never but for drinking, and to be jolted over rough roads for ten or twelve hours at a time, through sun and stifling dust. Through all this he shows such good-humored philosophy, that we should doubt his being an Englishman, but for the fact that the narrative was drawn up on his return, from a "scanty journal" kept at the time. How much more prominent the disagreeables might have been, if the "scanty journal" had been published as written, may be inferred from one passage, in which, having spoken of a little Frenchman, his companion teamster, he sud-denly apostrophizes him, "Ah! mon frere, may we never sleep worse than we did in No.15 wagon, on the night of July 30,1855, though the corners of the boxes were very perverse, and somehow in my diary is recorded, 'slept very badly’ rough bed and cold, too."
Yet there was much to be enjoyed in this new and strange life, by one of an imaginative cast of mind. Of the hardest work of all, the night-guard, he says, in another passage:—
"The work was hard; yet those night-watches had, and still have, in memory, not a strange but a most natural charm: the whole sense of stillness and repose as one walked backwards and forwards 'through the long and pleasant grass,' now and then stopping to listen to the wolves howling, or to the monotonous munching of an ox here and there ; then walking on again, greeting and greeted by each comrade, as we met, with a friendly word or two—always including question and answer as to how wore the night, followed by a look at our only clock, the Great Bear ; and then, as the footsteps grew fainter, a little star-gazing on one's own account, with thoughts of home, and how per-haps this very night last year one had looked at the stars, and who was then with one, and what they were doing now, and whether they thought of the wanderer on the prairie, and that it must be breakfast time with them, and that it could not be far from morning with us as one's self began to wish for breakfast. And then another round, (often a mile or two,) the approach of day now certainly shown by the whole herd beginning to graze, and the Pleiades to sink, and the 'Pointers' (of the Great Bear) rising so near to a level with the pole star, that it must be hard on four o'clock ; and then, at last, a wee bit north of east, the pure light gliding up the cloudless sky—yes, there was pleasure to be found in these night-watches."
Nor did two months of wandering produce any of that weariness of the prairie which he had expected to feel. When the majestic peak of Laramie first appeared in sight, "it was welcome," he says, "as any noble or beautiful object ever is; but I had come to love the plains—aye, love them—and it will be long be-fore I cease to do so."
For the uniformity of nature, too, there was some compensation in the varieties of men. Their own wagon-train comprised persons of all nations, and they were constantly overtaking, or being overtaken, by others; emigrant trains, too, of men, women and children, companies of United States soldiers, and parties of Indians—warriors and squaws looking so like each other in face and costume, that it was hard to distin-guish the sexes, "though," he observes, "it was much as in trolling; you sometimes think a weed is a fish, but never the converse, so you could not mistake a squaw for a buck Indian." Nor were the prairies without a species of newspaper in the bleached buffalo-skulls, whiten-ing the roadside.
"Many are the names and bulletins pencilled on them; and by continually reading one begins to learn the biography of those in front, and feel an interest and a companionship in their progress. Perhaps we catch up another train, we all chat together, names drop out. 'Oh!' one answers, 'I know your name, I read it on a buffalo-head three weeks ago; you're from ─, are not you?’ Sometimes one
reads short camp anecdotes or accidents, such as 'Woman shot to-day by her husband taking his gun loaded into the wagon—not expected to recover;’ then, ‘Woman shot on Thursday doing well.'"
Mr. Chandless made his first acquaintance with the Mormons through the emigrant par-ties. They appeared to him a good, plain, honest sort of people, simple-minded, but not fools, nor yet altogether uneducated—an omnium gatherum from half a dozen nations, containing many excellent artisans and some trades-people, along with a large number of mere laborers, and some few men of talent and cultivation; "all," he says, "seemed willing to suffer hardship, looking upon the journey as a pilgrimage to the promised land, and in the main as fully believed themselves under Divine guidance, as though a pillar of cloud had marched before them by day, and a pillar of fire given light to their camp at night."
His first impressions of the Mormons at Utah, also—he hardly staid long enough for second ones—seem not to have been, on the whole, un-favorable; but he expresses no opinion, merely tells simply what he saw and heard, and with reference to some charges against them, re-marks, "I saw nothing of the kind, though of course, for all that, it might have existed." Many things conduced to make his short stay in Utah pleasant. The very sight of a civilized settlement was agreeable. As they were approaching it, he records:—"A kitten that found its way into camp created quite a furore, for it was the first sign of our approach to homes. That one word expresses much. Even a Mor-mon home was pleasant to one so long a wan-derer. He was kindly treated, also, for as a teamster he excited no suspicion. Everything appeared quiet and orderly. There was no in-toxication, for "a liquor law, enforced pretty strictly, compels sobriety." Swearing is pro-hibited, under pain of a five-dollar fine for each offence ; and "very rarely, in public or private, do you hear an oath." They are industrious, for they must be so to live.
Mr. S─, the host of Mr. Chandless while in Utah, was a native of Massachusetts, "hon-orable in his dealings," and though "too much of a Yankee not to love driving a hard bargain, took no advantage if one trusted to his fair-ness." He was "intelligent and enterprising," "thoroughly kind-hearted and hospitable;" and the husband of four wives apparently living in harmony! "To call him an exemplary husband might sound ridiculous, but he had at least chosen well, and not without an eye to beauty, and certainly was an affectionate father—none of his dozen children could complain of ne-glect." He made many attempts to convert his guest to Mormonism; but he showed his con-sciousness of what was the repulsive feature of the system, by arguing constantly about poly-gamy : though Mr. Chandless told him that if he were convinced that this was right, it would be no better reason for becoming a Mormon than a Mussulman. His sensitiveness, and that of the Mormons generally, about the word "polygamy," indicates an uneasy conscience. They never use it, and consider it as an insult when employed by others. "Plurality" is the softer term which they always employ.
Mr. Chandless attended some of their re-ligious meetings, and dances "begun and ended with prayer." As one effect of the "plurality" system, he noticed here the peculiarity of the relation in which married men and girls stand to each other:—
"Elsewhere the attentions of the former to the latter pass for nothing; here a girl knows that her partner may at any moment be her lover and her suitor, though his wife is dancing in the vis-a-vis; and many a flirtation is buoyed up by the circumstance. Men, too, of the brighter sort, love to use their position, and carry on canvas that would capsize a monogamist craft. Second and third wives take little heed of the wooing; but you may now and then see a woman glancing too eagerly round, and from her half con-cealed jealousy and hatred, and fear predominating over the other two, you may guess, what you will be told, that the watcher is an only wife: other women, if they see her, will come and tell her she is no Mormon to look so after her husband, and laugh at her foolish expectation of keeping an entire husband to herself. That girl now evidently knows the wife is watching her, and coquets all the more eagerly with the husband: perhaps she may refuse him after all, perhaps not wish to do so, perhaps find herself unable if she wishes; but they are not the only couple followed by eyes strug-gling to see, and yet not to believe. They tell me F─ yonder loves his wife beyond the wont of husbands in this part of the world, and will not marry another; so my part-ner, herself a wife, though not in the first lustrum of wives, tells me, and intimates her opinion, that F─ and his wife are both fools to set themselves against the fashion of the place. 'But F─ surely is flirting with Kake Cope-land pretty strongly at this moment,' one suggests. 'Flirt-ing—that is a gentle word, we never use it; but he's not really courting Kate,' he's only teasing his wife: though he won't marry again, he likes doing that. Were I unmarried I would ask the President to make him marry me.' ‘What for? to tease her ?' ‘No, to teach her; then she would not think herself better than the balance of us ; why should she?' I turned the subject, having no wish for an argu-mentum ad hominem; and some places are unsuitable for the real argumentum ad feminam."
Mr. Chandless had also the opportunity of witnessing a dramatic performance—subject, Shakspeare's Othello!—and of hearing a speech from Brigham Young, denouncing the sale of land-warrants, many of which had been received by Mormons for services against the Indians. "You know," he said, "that we have not paid for one acre of land we now occupy. Some day or other, the United States will have all these valleys surveyed, and the land will come into market. Now, if you keep all these land-warrants, there will gradually be enough to secure among ourselves all the land we have; otherwise you won't be able to pay for it. Gen-tiles will come and claim your farms; you can't submit; then the United States will have the opportunity they're always on the look-out for: they'll send a large army, and then there'll be hell." As a further means of circumventing the United States, Orson Pratt, "intellectually the ablest man among the Mormons," dis-coursed, in the evening, on the propriety of sur-rendering individual property to the church. "If," said he, "the Church owned the whole of Salt Lake City, and any one, Gentile or Mor-mon, became an abomination to us, the Church would say to the man, 'Leave this house; it is our house;' and to all others, 'If you let this man live with you, you also shall leave the house, and the city.' And if the church owned all the settlements, it could say to the offender, ‘You shall not stay among us;' and if the whole country, 'You shall not stay in this land at all.' And all this could be done without violating a single law of the United States." No order was given; but the "beloved First Presidency" offered those who wished, the op-portunity of thus showing their devotion to the Church; "five or six had embraced it; he hoped others would." The text for this dis-course was the account of the young man who "went away sorrowful, for he had great posses-sions."
Of the territory of Utah, Mr. Chandless did not form a very favorable opinion. Though in some parts the soil is of exceeding fertility—even as much as eighty bushels of wheat having been raised to the acre—yet "good and bad land are very much mixed up—not to speak of wholesale desert tracts—and it is hard to find a farm-site one-third of which is not nearly worth-less." As not a drop of rain falls from early summer till long after harvest home, irrigation several times during the season is absolutely necessary to keep alive the growing crops. But the greatest deficiency is that of wood:—
"Near Salt Lake City, with the exception of a fringe of cotton-wood along a few creeks, there is literally none in the valley. Fuel must be hauled from the mountains—a yearly increasing distance, now from twenty to twenty-five miles—oak, pine, cedar, and maple are the commonest, and fetch eight dollars a cord. Wood-hauling is a regular business, and, considering that a trip for a cord occupies a man and a yoke of oxen—and they must be no weaklings—two days, the price is not unreasonable; but it is the sever-est item in household expenditure. A family, with two stoves constantly burning, will run very near to three hun-dred dollars in the course of the winter. Very unwisely, hardly a soul thinks of laying in a stock till October, when the roads are becoming bad; and even then most live from hand to mouth. For lumber the white and red pine are chiefly used; the quality is good, though seasoning is out of the question, and the abundance of water-power and saw-mills at the mouths of the canons only just keeps up a suffi-cient supply."
After a stay of two months in Utah, our au-thor left for California, having agreed with the mail-carrier to take him to San Bernardino for one hundred dollars. That his opinions with regard to the peculiar institution were not hos-pitality-proof, some will surmise from the apo-logy for his regret at leaving that "polygamist house in Salt Lake City:"—"During a some-what lengthened absence from England, this was the one house in which I had lived as a home, became one of the family, intimate with the eldest, a playmate of the youngest, a friend, I hope, of all; for all were friendly to me. All seemed sorry I was leaving them, and I am not ashamed to say I, too, felt sorry." Nor was his next intercourse with the "Gentiles" suited to diminish his regret. When he went on board the "Sea-bird," at San Pedro, in a dress which had suffered from the roughness of over-land journey, a porter, mistaking him for a steerage passenger, ordered him, rudely, out of the way. When reproved, by a cabin-passen-ger, for insulting a man because he was poor, he replied, "He ought not to be poor, then!"
We can excuse Mr. Chandless for his vexa-tion, but not for his comment—"A strange sentiment in a republican country!" He had been long enough in this "republican country" to have learned, that it is the one beyond all others in which there is the least injustice in saying of an able-bodied man, he has no busi-ness to be poor.
We have more sympathy with his feelings respecting another little incident which occurred at Los Angeles, an old Spanish town in South-ern California, whose native inhabitants are fast becoming replaced by the more energetic Ame-ricans:—
"As I stood, one morning, in the enjoyment of my cigar and the sunshine, and the fresh breeze from the neighbor-ing sea, a straw passed by, showing which way the wind blew. Two or three little Spaniards began to play marbles close to me. Presently an American boy joined them. The nasal twang of his English, and—which had a more ludi-crous effect—his smattering of Spanish, proclaimed him, unmistakably, a Down-Easter. After some few games, in which the American, even by aid of bullying—for he was the biggest—could not succeed in winning much, he changed his tone, and, producing a large bag of marbles, offered them for sale with all the ostentation of an auctioneer. He had bought them at Boston, and brought them by Panama to San Francisco, and then to Los Angeles, and they had cost Heaven knows how much at first, and were such marbles as had never before been seen at Los Angeles; nevertheless, he would sell them as a great favor, but the cost of carriage was high, and, of course, he must have the profit, too. The little Spaniards had money, and were caught with the big talk, but the big price staggered them. At last one of them examined the marbles closely. 'Why,' said he, 'these are the marbles Pedro lost, the other day, to an American.' The latter, after some vain denial, burst out laughing: few Americans, of whatever age, lose their countenance in any fix. I mused on this incident during the remainder of my cigar. Was not this a commentary on the notice, 'Venta por el Sheriff, John Smith v. Jose Sepolva?' The boy was not ten years old, and he was as systematically cheating the young Spaniards as his father could cheat their fathers. I mused further.''
But we need not quote his "musings." They can be imagined. The Americans have no childhood; the Americans worship the almighty dollar, etc., etc. Pray excuse him, reader—in the first place, because what he says is partly true; in the next place, because he is an Eng-lishman, and can't help saying it; in the third place, because, although an Englishman, he only says "filibuster" once through the whole book, and then it is in a comparison—a very pretty one, too; and as it is the only bit of fancy he indulges us with, it must be quoted:—
"The Missouri is a terrible filibuster; he is always in-vading somebody's land, and not merely, in defiance of right and title takes possession, but also carries it clean away with him, beyond the reach of even the tax-gatherer. A goodly portion he bears down as an offering to his bride the Mississippi, whose clear calm majesty of feature, and gentle womanly current of life, he overwhelms with the swirl of his impetuous and muddy waters. But, if he gives the character to the lower river, she gives the direction, and, since maps and men will have it so, the name also; she is, one may say, a rich heiress nobly sprung; he is rich, but has come from nobody knows where; they wed, and he takes her name, not she his."
The chief merit of the book is not in its opinions, but in the apparent accuracy of its facts. The impression of the reader coincides with the statement in the preface, that no inci-dent is introduced unless it actually occurred ; no words quoted unless actually spoken. The chief demerit is the incessant and unnecessary introduction of foreign words and phrases, French, Italian, Latin, Greek, even to a pun in Greek, "Mormo, daknei hippos! "—unnecessary, unless to keep the reader constantly in mind that, though Mr. Chandless is a paid teamster, he has a soul above cattle-driving.
