 11 And sure enough, two or three years afterward we did hear him again. News came to the Pacific Coast that the Vigilance Committee in Montana, where their slave had removed from Rocky Ridge, had hanged him. I find an account of the affair in the thrilling little book I quoted a paragraph from in the last chapter, The Vigilantes of Montana, being a reliable account of the capture, trial, and execution of Henry Plummer's notorious road-agent band by Professor Thomas J. Dimsdale, Virginia City, Montana. Mr. Dimsdale's chapter is well worth reading, as a specimen of how the people of the frontier deal with criminals when the courts of law prove inefficient. Mr. Dimsdale makes two remarks about Slade, both of which are accurately descriptive, and one of which is exceedingly picturesque. Those who saw him in his natural state only would pronounce him to be a kind husband, a most hospitable host, and a courteous gentleman. On the contrary, those who met him when maddened with liquor and surrounded by a gang of armed roughs would pronounce him a fiend incarnate. And this, from Fort Kearney, West, he was feared a great deal more than the Almighty. For compactness, simplicity, and vigor of expression, I will back that sentence against anything in literature. Mr. Dimsdale's narrative is as follows. In all places where italics occur, they are mine. After the execution of the five men on the 14th of January, the vigilantes considered that their work was nearly ended. They had freed the country of highwaymen and murderers to a great extent, and they determined that in the absence of the regular civil authority they would establish a people's court where all offenders should be tried by judge and jury. This was the nearest approach to social order that the circumstances permitted, and though strict legal authority was wanting, yet the people were firmly determined to maintain its efficiency and to enforce its decrees. It may here be mentioned that the Overt Act, which was the last round on the fatal ladder leading to the scaffold on which Slade perished, was the tearing in pieces and stamping upon a writ of this court, followed by his arrest of the Judge Alexander Davis by authority of a presented derringer, and with his own hands. J. A. Slade was himself, we have been informed, a vigilante. He openly boasted of it, and said he knew all that they knew. He was never accused or even suspected of either murder or robbery committed in this territory. The latter crime was never laid to his charge in any place, but that he had killed several men in other localities was notorious, and his bad reputation in this respect was a most powerful argument in determining his fate when he was finally arrested for the offense above mentioned. On returning from Milk River he became more and more addicted to drinking. Until at last it was a common feat for him and his friends to take the town. He and a couple of his dependents might often be seen on one horse galloping through the streets shouting and yelling, firing revolvers, etc. On many occasions he would ride his horse into stores, break up bars, toss the scales out of doors, and use most insulting language to parties present. Just previous to the day of his arrest he had given a fearful beating to one of his followers, but such was his influence over them that the man wept bitterly at the gallows and begged for his life with all his power. It had become quite common when Slade was on a spree for the shopkeepers and citizens to close the stores and put out all the lights, being fearful of some outrage at his hands. For his wanton destruction of goods and furniture he was always ready to pay when sober, if he had the money. But there were not a few who regarded payment as small satisfaction for the outrage, and these men were his personal enemies. From time to time Slade received warnings from men that he well knew would not deceive him of the certain end of his conduct. There was not a moment for weeks previous to his arrest in which the public did not expect to hear of some bloody outrage. The dread of his very name and the presence of the armed band of hangers on who followed him alone prevented a resistance which must certainly have ended in the instant murder or mutilation of the opposing party. Slade was frequently arrested by order of the court, whose organization we have described, and had treated it with respect by paying one or two fines and promising to pay the rest when he had money. But in the transaction that occurred at this crisis he forgot even this caution, and gouted by passion and the hatred of restraint he sprang into the embrace of death. Slade had been drunk and cutting up all night. He and his companions had made the town a perfect hell. In the morning J. M. Fox, the sheriff, met him, arrested him, took him into court, and commenced reading a warrant that he had for his arrest by way of arraignment. He became uncontrollably furious and, seizing the writ, he tore it up, threw it on the ground, and stamped upon it. The clicking of the locks of his companions' revolvers was instantly heard, and a crisis was expected. The sheriff did not attempt his retention. But being at least as prudent as he was valiant, he succumbed, leaving Slade the master of the situation and the conqueror and ruler of the court's law and lawmakers. This was a declaration of war and was so accepted. The Vigilance Committee now felt that the question of social order and the preponderance of the law-abiding citizens had then and there to be decided. They knew the character of Slade, and they were well aware that they must submit to his rule without murmur, or else that he must be dealt with in such fashion as would prevent his being able to wreak his vengeance on the Committee, who could never have hoped to live in the territory secure from outrage or death, and who could never leave it without encountering his friend, whom his victory would have emboldened and stimulated to a pitch that would have rendered them reckless of consequences. The day previous he had ridden into Doris's store, and on being requested to leave, he drew his revolver and threatened to kill the gentleman who spoke to him. Another saloon he had led his horse into, and, buying a bottle of wine, he tried to make the animal drink it. This was not considered an uncommon performance, as he had often entered saloons and commenced firing at the lamps, causing a wild stampede. A leading member of the Committee met Slade and informed him in the quiet, earnest manner of one who feels the importance of what he is saying, Slade, get your horse at once and go home, or there will be to pay. Slade started and took a long look, with his dark and piercing eyes at the gentleman. What do you mean, said he? You have no right to ask me what I mean, was the quiet reply. Get your horse at once and remember what I tell you. After a short pause he promised to do so, and actually got into the saddle. But, being still intoxicated, he began calling aloud to one after another of his friends, and at last seemed to have forgotten the warning he had received, and became again uproarious, shouting the name of a well-known courtesan in company with those of two men whom he considered heads of the Committee as a sort of challenge. Perhaps, however, as a simple act of provado. It seems probable that the intimation of personal danger he had received had not been forgotten entirely. Though, fatally for him, he took a foolish way of showing his remembrance of it, he sought out Alexander Davis, the judge of the court, and, drawing a cocked derringer, he presented it at his head, and told him that he should hold him as a hostage for his own safety. As the judge stood perfectly quiet and offered no resistance to his captor, no further outrage followed on this score. Previous to this, on account of the critical state of affairs, the Committee had met and at last resolved to arrest him. His execution had not been agreed upon, and, at that time, would have been negative, most assuredly. A messenger rode down to Nevada to inform the leading men of what was on hand, as it was desirable to show that there was a feeling of unanimity on the subject, all along the gulch. The miners turned out almost en masse, leaving their work and forming in solid column about six hundred strong, armed to the teeth they marched up to Virginia. The leader of the body well knew the temper of his men on the subject. He spurred on ahead of them, and hastily calling a meeting of the executive, he told them plainly that the miners meant business, and that if they came up they would not stand in the street to be shot down by Slade's friends, but that they would take him and hang him. The meeting was small, as the Virginia men were loathed to act at all. This momentous announcement of the feeling of the lower town was made to a cluster of men who were deliberating behind a wagon, at the rear of a store on Main Street. The committee were most unwilling to proceed to extremities. All the duty they had ever performed seemed as nothing to the task before them, but they had to decide, and that quickly. It was finally agreed that if the whole body of the miners were of the opinion that he should be hanged, that the committee left it in their hands to deal with him. Off at hot speed rode the leader of the Nevada men to join his command. Slade had found out what was intended, and the news sobered him instantly. He went into P. S. Fope's store, where Davis was, and apologized for his conduct, saying that he would take it all back. The head of the column now wheeled into Wall Street and marched up at quick time. Halting in front of the store, the executive officer of the committee stepped forward and arrested Slade, who was at once informed of his doom, and inquiry was made as to whether he had any business to settle. Several parties spoke to him on the subject, but to all such inquiries he turned to deaf ear, being entirely absorbed in the terrifying reflection on his own awful position. He never ceased his entreaties for life, and to see his dear wife. The unfortunate lady referred to, between whom and Slade there existed a warm affection, was at this time living at their ranch on the Madison. She was possessed of considerable personal attractions, tall, well-formed, of graceful carriage, pleasing manners, and was with all an accomplished horsewoman. A messenger from Slade rode at full speed to inform her of her husband's arrest. In an instant she was in the saddle, and with all the energy that love and despair could lend to an ardent temperament and a strong physique, she urged her fleet charger over the twelve miles of rough and rocky ground that intervened between her and the object of her passionate devotion. Meanwhile a party of volunteers had made the necessary preparations for the execution in the valley traversed by the branch. Beneath the site of phthots and Russell's stone building there was a corral, the gate-posts of which were strong and high. Across the top was laid a beam to which the rope was fastened, and a dry-goods box served for the platform. To this place Slade was marched, surrounded by a guard, composing the best-armed and most numerous force that has ever appeared in Montana Territory. The doomed man had so exhausted himself by tears, prayers and lamentations that he had scarcely strength left to stand under the fatal beam. He repeatedly exclaimed, My God! My God! Must I die? Oh, my dear wife! On the return of the fatigue-party they encountered some friends of Slade, staunch and reliable citizens and members of the committee, but who were personally attached to the condemned. On hearing of his sentence one of them, a stout-hearted man, pulled out his handkerchief and walked away weeping like a child. Slade still begged to see his wife, most piteously, and it seemed hard to deny his request. But the bloody consequences that were sure to follow the inevitable attempt at a rescue that her presence and entreaties would have certainly incited forbade the granting of his request. Several gentlemen were sent for to see him in his last moments, one of whom, Judge Davis, made a short address to the people, but in such low tones as to be inaudible, saved to a few in his immediate vicinity. One of his friends, after exhausting his powers of entreaty, threw off his coat and declared that the prisoner could not be hanged until he himself was killed. A hundred guns were instantly leveled at him, whereupon he turned and fled. But, being brought back, he was compelled to resume his coat and to give a promise of future peaceable demeanor. Scarcely a leading man in Virginia could be found, though numbers of the citizens joined the ranks of the guard when the arrest was made, all lamented the stern necessity which dictated the execution. Everything being ready, the command was given. Men, do your duty! And the box being instantly slipped from beneath his feet, he died almost instantaneously. The body was cut down and carried to the Virginia Hotel where, in a darkened room, it was scarcely laid out when the unfortunate and bereaved companion of the deceased arrived at headlong speed to find that all was over, and that she was a widow. Her grief and heart-piercing cries were terrible evidences of the depth of her attachment for her lost husband, and a considerable period elapsed before she could regain the command of her excited feelings. There is something about the desperado nature that is wholly unaccountable, at least it looks unaccountable, it is this. The true desperado is gifted with splendid courage, and yet he will take the most infamous advantage of his enemy, armed and free, he will stand up before a host and fight until he is shot all to pieces, and yet when he is under the gallows and helpless he will cry and plead like a child. Words are cheap, and it is easy to call sleigh the coward, all executed men who do not die game, are promptly called cowards by unreflecting people, and when we read of sleigh that he had so exhausted himself by tears, prayers, and lamentations that he had scarcely strength left to stand under the fatal beam, the disgraceful word suggests itself in a moment. Yet in frequently defying and inviting the vengeance of banded Rocky Mountain cutthroats by shooting down their comrades and leaders, and never offering to hide or fly, sleigh showed that he was a man of peerless bravery. No coward would dare that. Many a notorious coward, many a chicken-livered paltrune, coarse, brutal, degraded, has made his dying speech without a quaver in his voice, and been swung into eternity with what looked like the calmest fortitude, and so we are justified in believing, from the low intellect of such a creature, that it was not moral courage that enabled him to do it. Then, if moral courage is not the requisite quality, what could it have been that this stout-hearted sleigh lacked this bloody, desperate, kindly-mannered, urbane gentleman who never hesitated to warn his most ruffianly enemies that he would kill them whenever or wherever he came across them next? I think it is a conundrum worth investigating. CHAPTER XII Just beyond the breakfast-station we overtook a Mormon-immigrant train of thirty-three wagons, and, tramping wearily along and driving their herd of loose cows, were dozens of coarse clad and sad-looking men, women, and children, who had walked as they were walking now, day after day, for eight lingering weeks, and in that time had compassed the distance our stage had come in eight days and three hours, seven hundred and ninety-eight miles. They were dusty and uncombed, hapless, bonnetless, and ragged, and they did look so tired. After breakfast we bathed in Horse Creek, a previously limpid sparkling stream, an appreciated luxury for it was very seldom that our furious coach halted long enough for an indulgence of that kind. We changed horses ten or twelve times in every twenty-four hours, changed mules rather, six mules, and did it nearly every time in four minutes. It was lively work. As our coach rattled up to each station six harnessed mules stepped gaily from the stable, and in the twinkling of an eye almost the old team was out, the new one in, and we off and away again. During the afternoon we passed Sweetwater Creek, Independence Rock, Devil's Gate, and the Devil's Gap. The latter were wild specimens of rugged scenery and full of interest. We were in the heart of the Rocky Mountains now, and we also passed by Alkali or Soda Lake, and we woke up to the fact that our journey had stretched a long way across the world when the driver said that the Mormons often came here from Great Salt Lake City to haul away Salaratus. He said that a few days gone by they had shoveled up enough pure Salaratus from the ground—it was a dry lake—to load two wagons, and that when they got these two wagon-loads of a drug that cost them nothing to Salt Lake they could sell it for twenty-five cents a pound. In the night we sailed by a most notable curiosity, and one we had been hearing a good deal about for a day or two, and were suffering to see. This was what might be called a natural ice-house. It was August now, and sweltering weather in the daytime, yet at one of the stations the men could scrape the soil on the hillside under the lee of a range of boulders, and at a depth of six inches cut out pure blocks of ice, hard, compactly frozen, and clear as crystal. Toward dawn we got under way again, and presently as we sat with raised curtains and joined our early morning smoke and contemplating the first splendor of the rising sun as it swept down the long array of mountain peaks, flushing and gilding crag after crag and summit after summit, as if the invisible creator reviewed his gray veterans, and they saluted with a smile. We hove in sight of South Pass City. The hotelkeeper, the postmaster, the blacksmith, the mayor, the constable, the city-martial, and the principal citizen and property holder all came out and greeted us cheerily. And we gave him good day. He gave us a little Indian news and a little Rocky Mountain news, and we gave him some plain's information in return. He then retired to his lonely grandeur, and we climbed on up amongst the bristling peaks and the ragged clouds. South Pass City consisted of four log cabins, one of which was unfinished, and the gentleman with all those offices and titles was the chiefest of the ten citizens of the place. Think of hotelkeeper, postmaster, blacksmith, mayor, constable, city-martial, and principal citizen all condensed into one person and crammed into one skin. Bemis said he was a perfect Alan's revolver of dignities, and he said that if he were to die as postmaster or as blacksmith or as postmaster and blacksmith both the people might stand it, but if he were to die all over it would be a frightful loss to the community. Two miles beyond South Pass City we saw for the first time that mysterious marvel which all Western untraveled boys have heard of and fully believe in, but are sure to be astounded at when they see it with their own eyes, nevertheless, banks of snow in dead summertime. We were now far up toward the sky and knew all the time that we must presently encounter lofty summits clad in the eternal snow which was so commonplace a matter of mention in books, and yet when I did see it glittering in the sun on stately domes in the distance, and knew the month was August and that my coat was hanging up because it was too warm to wear it, I was full as much amazed as if I had never heard of snow in August before. Truly seeing is believing, and many a man lives a long life through thinking he believes certain universally received and well-established things, and yet never suspects that if he were confronted by those things once he would discover that he did not really believe them before, but only thought he believed them. In a little while quite a number of peaks swung into view with long claws of glittering snow clasping them, and with here and there, in the shade, down the mountainside, a little solitary patch of snow, looking no larger than the lady's pocket handkerchief, but being in reality as large as a public square. And now, at last, we were fairly in the renowned south pass, and whirling gaily along high above the common world. We were perched upon the extreme summit of the great range of the rocky mountains, toward which we had been climbing, patiently climbing, ceaselessly climbing for days and nights together. And about us was gathered a convention of nature's kings that stood ten, twelve, and even thirteen thousand feet high, grand old fellows who would have to stoop to see Mount Washington in the twilight. We were in such an airy elevation above the creeping populations of the earth that now and then, when the obstructing crags stood out of the way, it seemed that we could look around and abroad and contemplate the whole great globe, with its dissolving views of mountains, seas, and continents stretching away through the mystery of the summer haze. As a general thing, the pass was more suggestive of a valley than a suspension bridge in the clouds, but it strongly suggested the latter at one spot. At that place the upper third of one or two majestic purple domes projected above our level on either hand and gave us a sense of a hidden great deep of mountains and plains and valleys down about their bases, which we fancied we might see if we could step to the edge and look over. These sultans of the fastnesses were turbaned with tumbled volumes of cloud which shredded away from time to time and drifted off, fringed and torn, trailing their continents of shadow after them, and catching presently on an intercepting peak, wrapped it about and brooded there, then shredded away again and left the purple peak as they had left the purple domes, downy and white with new-laid snow. In passing these monstrous rags of cloud hung low and swept along right over the spectator's head, swinging their tatters so nearly in his face that his impulse was to shrink when they came close. In the one place I speak of one could look below him upon a world of diminishing crags and canyons leading down, down and away to a vague plain with a thread in it which was a road and bunches of feathers in it which were trees, a pretty picture sleeping in the sunlight, but with a darkness stealing over it and glooming its features deeper and deeper under the frown of a coming storm. And then, while no film or shadow marred the noon brightness of his high perch, he could watch the tempest break forth down there and see the lightnings leap from crag to crag and the sheeted rain drive along the canyon sides and hear the thunder's peel and crash and roar. We had this spectacle, a familiar one to many, but to us a novelty. We bowled along cheerily and presently at the very summit, though it had been all summit to us and all equally level for half an hour or more. We came to a spring which spent its water through two outlets and sent it in opposite directions. The conductor said that one of those streams which we were looking at was just starting on a journey westward to the Gulf of California and the Pacific Ocean through hundreds and even thousands of miles of desert solitudes. He said that the other was just leaving its home among the snow peaks on a similar journey eastward, and we knew that long after we should have forgotten the simple rivulet it would still be plotting its patient way down the mountain sides and canyon beds and between the banks of the Yellowstone and by and by would join the broad Missouri and flow through unknown plains and deserts and unvisited wildernesses and add a long and troubled pilgrimage among snags and wrecks and sandbars and enter the Mississippi, touch the wharves of St. Louis and still drift on, traversing shoals and rocky channels, then endless chains of bottomless and ample bends walled with unbroken forests, then mysterious byways and secret passages among woody islands, then the chained bends again bordered with wide levels of shining sugarcane in place of the somber forests, then by New Orleans and still other chains of bends and finally after two long months of daily and nightly harassment, excitement, enjoyment, adventure, and awful peril of parched throats, pumps, and evaporation pass the gulf and enter into its rest upon the bosom of the tropic sea, never to look upon its snow peaks again or regret them. I freighted a leaf with a mental passage for the friends at home and dropped it in the stream, but I put no stamp on it and it was held for postage somewhere. On the summit we overtook an emigrant train of many wagons, many tired men and women, and many a disgusted sheep and cow. In the woefully dusty horseman in charge of the expedition I recognized John, of all persons in the world, to meet on top of the rocky mountains, thousands of miles from home, he was the last one I should have looked for. We were schoolboys together and warm friends for years, but a boyish prank of mine had disrupted this friendship and it had never been renewed. The act of which I speak was this. I had been accustomed to visit occasionally an editor whose room was in the third story of a building and overlooked the street. One day this editor gave me a watermelon, which I made preparations to devour on the spot, but, chanceing to look out of the window, I saw John standing directly under it and an irresistible desire came upon me to drop the melon on his head, which I immediately did. I was the loser, for it spoiled the melon and John never forgave me and we dropped all into course and parted, but now met again under these circumstances. We recognized each other simultaneously and hands were grasped as warmly as if no coldness had ever existed between us and no illusion was made to any. All animosities were buried and the simple fact of meeting a familiar face in that isolated spot so far from home was sufficient to make us forget all things but pleasant ones and we parted again with sincere good-bye and God bless you from both. We had been climbing up the long shoulders of the rocky mountains for many tedious hours. We started down them now and we went spinning away at a round rate too. We left the snowy Wind River mountains and you went to mountains behind and sped away all was through splendid scenery, but occasionally through long ranks of white skeletons of mules and oxen, monuments of huge emigration of other days, and here and there were upended boards or small piles of stones which the drivers had marked the resting place of more precious remains. It was the loneliest land for a grave, a land given over to the coyote and the raven, which is but another name for desolation and utter solitude. On damp, murky nights these scattered skeletons gave forth a soft, hideous glow, like very faint spots of moonlight staring the vague desert. It was because of the phosphorus in the bones, but no scientific explanation could keep a body from shivering when he drifted by one of those ghostly lights and knew that a skull held it. At midnight it began to rain and I never saw anything like it. Indeed I did not even see this, for it was too dark. We fastened down the curtains and even caulked them with clothing, but the rain streamed in in twenty places notwithstanding. There was no escape. If one moved his feet out of a stream he brought his body under one, and if he moved his body he caught one somewhere else. If he struggled out of the drenched blankets and sat up he was bound to get one down the back of his neck. Meantime the stage was wandering about a plain with gaping gullies in it, for the driver could not see an inch before his face nor keep the road, and the storm pelted so pitilessly that there was no keeping the horses still. With the first abatement the conductor turned out with lanterns to look for the road, and the first dash he made was into a chasm about fourteen feet deep, his lantern following like a meteor. As soon as he touched bottom he sang out frantically, Don't come here!" to which the driver, who was looking over the precipice where he had disappeared, replied with an injured air, Think I'm a damn fool! The conductor was more than an hour finding the road, a matter which showed us how far we had wandered and what chances we had been taking. He traced our wheel-tracks to the imminent verge of danger in two places. I have always been glad that we were not killed that night. I do not know any particular reason, but I have always been glad. In the morning, the tenth day out, we crossed Green River, a fine large limpid stream, stuck in it with the water just up to the top of our mail bed, and waited till extra teams were put on to haul us up the steep bank. But it was nice cool water, and besides it could not find any fresh place on us to wet. At the Green River station we had breakfast, hot biscuits, fresh antelope steaks, and coffee, the only decent meal we tasted between the United States and Great Salt Lake City, and the only one we were ever really thankful for. Think of the monotonous extricableness of the 30 that went before it to leave this one simple breakfast looming up in my memory like a shot-tower after all these years have gone by. At 5 p.m. we reached Fort Bridger, 117 miles from the South Pass, and 1,025 miles from St. Joseph. Fifty-two miles further on, near the head of Echo Canyon, we met 60 United States soldiers from Camp Floyd. The day before they had fired upon 300 or 400 Indians whom they supposed gathered together for no good purpose. In the fight that had ensued, four Indians were captured, and the main body chased four miles, but nobody killed. This looked like business. We had a notion to get out and join the 60 soldiers, but upon reflecting that there were 400 of the Indians, we concluded to go on and join the Indians. Echo Canyon is 20 miles long. It was like a long, smooth, narrow street with a gradual descending grade, and shut in by enormous perpendicular walls of coarse conglomerate, 400 feet high in many places, and turreted like medieval castles. This was the most faultless piece of road in the mountains, and the driver said he would let his team out. He did, and if the Pacific Express trains whiz through there now any faster than we did then in the stagecoach, I envy the passengers the exhilaration of it. We fairly seemed to pick up our wheels and fly, and the mail matter was lifted up free from everything and held in solution. I am not given to exaggeration, and when I say a thing, I mean it. However, time presses. At four in the afternoon we arrived on the summit of Big Mountain, fifteen miles from Salt Lake City, when all the world was glorified with the setting sun, and the most dependedous panorama of mountain peaks yet encountered burst on our sight. We looked out upon this sublime spectacle from under the arch of a brilliant rainbow. Even the overland stage driver stopped his horses and gazed. Half an hour or an hour later we changed horses and took supper with a Mormon destroying angel. Destroying angels, as I understand it, are Latter-day Saints who are set apart by the church to conduct permanent disappearances of obnoxious citizens. I had heard a deal about these Mormon destroying angels and the dark and bloody deeds they had done, and when I entered this one's house I had my shudder all ready. But alas for all our romances, he was nothing but a loud, profane, offensive old blackguard. He was murderous enough, possibly, to fill the bill of a destroyer. But would you have any kind of an angel devoid of dignity? Could you abide an angel in an unclean shirt and no suspenders? Could you respect an angel with a horse laugh and a swagger like a buccaneer? There were other blackguards present, comrades of this one, and there was one person that looked like a gentleman. Heber C. Kimball's son, tall and well-made and thirty years old, perhaps. A lot of slaternly women flitted hither and thither in a hurry with coffee-pots, plates of bread, and other appurtenances to supper, and these were said to be the wives of the angel, or some of them at least. And of course they were, for if they had been hired help they would not have let an angel from above storm and swear at them as he did, let alone one from the place this one hailed from. This was our first experience of the Western peculiar institution. And it was not very prepossessing. We did not tarry long to observe it, but hurried on to the home of the Latter-day Saints, the stronghold of the prophets, the capital of the only absolute monarch in America, great Salt Lake City. As the night closed in we took sanctuary in the Salt Lake House and unpacked our baggage. CHAPTER XIII We had a fine supper of the freshest meats and fowls and vegetables, a great variety, and as great abundance. We walked about the street some afterward, and glanced in at shops and stores. And there was fascination in surreptitiously staring at every creature we took to be a Mormon. This was fairyland to us, to all intents and purposes, a land of enchantment, and goblins, and awful mystery. We felt a curiosity to ask every child how many mothers it had, and if it could tell them apart. And we experienced a thrill every time a dwelling-house door opened and shut as we passed, disclosing a glimpse of human heads and backs and shoulders. For we so longed to have a good satisfying look at a Mormon family in all its comprehensive ampleness disposed in the customary concentric rings of its home circle. By and by the acting governor of the territory introduced us to other Gentiles, and we spent a sociable hour with them. Gentiles are people who are not Mormons. Our fellow passenger Bemis took care of himself during this part of the evening, and did not make an overpowering success of it either, for he came into our room in the hotel about eleven o'clock, full of cheerfulness, and talking loosely, disjointedly, and indiscriminately, and every now and then tugging out a ragged word by the roots that had more hiccups than syllables in it. This together, with his hanging his coat on the floor on one side of a chair, and his vest on the floor on the other side, and piling his pants on the floor just in front of the same chair, and then contemplating the general result with superstitious awe, and finally pronouncing it too many for him, and going to bed with his boots on, led us to fear that something he had eaten had not agreed with him. But we knew afterward that it was something he had been drinking. It was the exclusively Mormon refresher, Valletan. Valletan, or at least one form of Valletan, is a kind of whiskey, or first cousin to it, is of Mormon invention and manufactured only in Utah. Tradition says it is made of imported fire and brimstone. If I remember rightly no public drinking saloons were allowed in the kingdom by Brigham Young, and no private drinking permitted among the faithful, except they confined themselves to Valletan. Next day we strolled about everywhere through the broad, straight, level streets, and enjoyed the pleasant strangeness of a city of 15,000 inhabitants, with no loafers perceptible in it, and no visible drunkards or noisy people, a limpid stream rippling and dancing through every street in place of a filthy gutter, blocked after block of trim dwellings built of frame and sunburn brick, a great thriving orchard and garden behind every one of them, apparently, branches from the street streaming, winding, and sparkling among the garden beds and fruit trees, and a grand, general air of neatness, repair, thrift, and comfort, around and about and over the whole. And everywhere were workshops, factories, and all manner of industries, and intent faces and busy hands were to be seen wherever one looked, and in one's ears was the ceaseless clink of hammers, the buzz of trade, and the contented hum of drums and flywheels. The armorial crest of my own state consisted of two disillet bears holding up the head of a dead and gone cask between them, and making the pertinent remark, United we stand, hick, divided we fall. It was always too figurative for the author of this book. But the Mormon crest was easy, and it was simple, unostentatious, and fitted like a glove. It was a representation of a golden beehive, with the bees all at work. The city lies in the edge of a level plain as broad as the state of Connecticut, and crouches close down to the ground, under a curving wall of mighty mountains, whose heads are hidden in the clouds, and whose shoulders bear relics of the snows of winter all the summer long. Seen from one of these dizzy heights, twelve or fifteen miles off, Great Salt Lake City is toned down and diminished till it is suggestive of a child's toy village reposing under the majestic protection of the Chinese Wall. On some of those mountains to the southwest it had been raining every day for two weeks, but not a drop had fallen in the city, and on hot days in late spring and early autumn the citizens could quit fanning and growling and go out and cool off by looking at the luxury of a glorious snowstorm going on in the mountains. They could enjoy it at a distance in those seasons every day, though no snow would fall in their streets or anywhere near them. Salt Lake City was healthy, an extremely healthy city. They declared there was only one physician in the place, and he was arrested every week regularly, and held to answer under the vagrant act for having no visible means of support. They always give you a good substantial article of truth in Salt Lake and good measure and good weight, too. Very often, if you wished to weigh one of their arous little commonplace statements, you would want the hay scales. We desired to visit the famous inland sea, the American Dead Sea, the Great Salt Lake, seventeen miles horseback from the city, for we had dreamed about it and thought about it and talked about it and yearned to see it all the first part of our trip. But now, when it was only arms length away, it had suddenly lost nearly every bit of its interest, and so we put it off in a sort of general way till next day, and that was the last we ever thought of it. We dined with some hospitable Gentiles and visited the foundation of the prodigious temple, and talked long with that shrewd, kinetic, yanky, Heber C. Kimball, since deceased, a saint of high degree, and a mighty man of commerce. We saw the tithing-house and the lion-house, and I do not know or remember how many more church and government buildings of various kinds and curious names. We flitted hither and thither, and enjoyed every hour, and picked up a great deal of useful information and entertaining nonsense, and went to bed at night satisfied. The second day we made the acquaintance of Mr. Street, since deceased, and put on white shirts and went and paid a state visit to the king. He seemed a quiet, kindly, easy-mannered, dignified, self-possessed old gentleman of fifty-five or sixty, and had a gentle craft in his eye that probably belonged there. He was very simply dressed and was just taking off a straw hat as we entered. He talked about Utah, and the Indians, and Nevada, and general American matters and questions with our secretary and certain government officials who came with us. But he never paid any attention to me. Notwithstanding, I made several attempts to draw him out on federal politics and his high-handed attitude toward Congress. I thought some of the things I said were rather fine, but he merely looked around at me at distant intervals, something as I have seen a benign and old cat look around to see which kitten was meddling with her tail. By and by I subsided into an indignant silence, and so sat until the end, hot and flushed, and execrating him in my heart for an ignorant savage. But he was calm. His conversation with those gentlemen flowed on as sweetly and peacefully and musically as any summer brook. When the audience was ended, and we were retiring from the presence, he put his hand on my head, beam down on me in an admiring way, and said to my brother, Ah, your child, I presume, boy or girl. CHAPTER XIV Mr. Street was very busy with his telegraphic matters, and considering that he had eight or nine hundred miles of rugged, snowy, uninhabited mountains and waterless, treeless, melancholy deserts to traverse with his wire, it was natural and needful that he should be as busy as possible. He could not go comfortably along and cut his poles by the roadside, either, but they had to be hauled by ox-teams across those exhausting deserts, and it was two days' journey from water to water in one or two of them. Mr. Street's contract was a vast work every way one looked at it, and yet, to comprehend what the vague words eight hundred miles of rugged mountains and dismal deserts mean, one must go over the ground in person. Pen and ink descriptions cannot convey the dreary reality to the reader, and after all, Mr. S's mightiest difficulty turned out to be one which he had never taken into account at all. Unto Mormons he had sublet the hardest and heaviest half of his great undertaking, and all of a sudden they concluded that they were going to make little or nothing, and so they tranquilly threw their poles overboard in mountain or desert just as it happened when they took the notion, and drove home and went about their customary business. They were under written contract to Mr. Street, but they did not care anything for that. They said they would admire to see a Gentile force a Mormon to fulfill a losing contract in Utah, and they made themselves very merry over the matter. Street said, for it was he that told us these things, I was in dismay. I was under heavy bonds to complete my contract in a given time, and this disaster looked very much like ruin. It was an astounding thing. It was such a wholly unlooked for difficulty that I was entirely nonplussed. I am a business man, have always been a business man. Do not know anything but business, and so you can imagine how like being struck by lightning it was to find myself in a country where written contracts were worthless, that main security, that sheet anchor, and absolute necessity of business. My confidence left me. There was no use in making new contracts, that was plain. I talked with first one prominent citizen and then another. They all sympathized with me first rate, but they did not know how to help me. But at last a Gentile said, go to bring him young. These small fry cannot do you any good. I did not think much of the idea, for if the law could not help me, what could an individual do who had not even anything to do with either making the laws or executing them? He might be a very good patriarch of a church and preacher in its tabernacle, but something sterner than religion and moral suasion was needed to handle a hundred refractory half civilized subcontractors. But what was a man to do? I thought if Mr. Young could not do anything else, he might probably be able to give me some advice and a valuable hint or two, and so I went straight to him and laid the whole case before him. He said very little, but he showed strong interest all the way through. He examined all the papers in detail, and whenever there seemed anything like a hitch, either in the papers or my statement, he would go back and take up the thread and follow it patiently out to an intelligent and satisfactory result. Then he made a list of the contractor's names. Finally he said, Mr. Street, this is all perfectly plain. These contracts are strictly and legally drawn, and are duly signed and certified. These men manifestly entered into them with their eyes open. I see no fault or flaw anywhere. Then Mr. Young turned to a man waiting at the other end of the room and said, Take this list of names to so-and-so and tell him to have these men here at such and such an hour. They were there to the minute. So was I. Mr. Young asked them a number of questions and their answers made my statement good. Then he said to them, You signed these contracts and assumed these obligations of your own free will in accord? Yes. Then carry them out to the letter, if it makes paupers of you. Go! And they did go, too. They are strung across the deserts now, working like bees, and I never hear a word out of them. There is a batch of governors and judges and other officials here shipped from Washington, and they maintain the semblance of a republican form of government, but the petrified truth is that Utah is an absolute monarchy, and Ringham Young is king. Mr. Street was a fine man, and I believe his story. I knew him well during several years afterward in San Francisco. Our stay in Salt Lake City amounted to only two days, and therefore we had no time to make the customary inquisition into the workings of polygamy and get up the usual statistics and deductions preparatory to calling the attention of the nation at large once more to the matter. I had the will to do it. With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here until I saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched. My heart was wiser than my head. It warmed toward these poor ungainly and pathetically homely creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes I said, No, the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure. And the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence. For a brief sketch of Mormon history and the noted Mountain Meadow Massacre see appendices A and B. CHAPTER XV It is a luscious country for thrilling evening stories about assassinations of intractable Gentiles. I cannot easily conceive of anything more cozy than the night in Salt Lake which we spent in a Gentile den, smoking pipes and listening to tales of how Burton galloped in among the pleading and defenseless mooricites and shot them down men and women like so many dogs, and how Bill Hickman, a destroying angel, shot Drown and Arnold dead for bringing suit against him for a debt, and how Porter Rockwell did this and that dreadful thing, and how heedless people often come to Utah and make remarks about Brigham, or Polygamy, or some other sacred matter, and the very next morning at daylight such parties are sure to be found lying up some back alley, contentedly waiting for the hearse. And the next most interesting thing is to sit and listen to these Gentiles talk about Polygamy, and how some portly old frog of an elder or a bishop marries a girl, likes her, marries her sister, likes her, marries another sister, likes her, takes another, likes her, marries her mother, likes her, marries her father, grandfather, great grandfather, and then comes back hungry and asks for more, and how the pert young thing of eleven will chance to be the favorite wife and her own venerable grandmother have to rank away down toward D4 in their mutual husband's esteem, and have to sleep in a kitchen as like as not. And how this dreadful sort of thing, this hiving together in one foul nest of mother and daughters, and the making a young daughter superior to her own mother in rank and authority, are things which Mormon women submit to because their religion teaches them that the more wives a man has on earth, and the more children he rears, the higher place they will all have in the world to come. And the warmer, maybe, though they do not seem to say anything about that. According to these gentile friends of ours, Brigham Young's harem contains twenty or thirty wives. They said that some of them had grown old and gone out of active service, but were comfortably housed and cared for in the Henry, or the Lion House as it is strangely named. Along with each wife were her children, fifty all together. The house was perfectly quiet and orderly when the children were still. They all took their meals in one room, and a happy and home-like sight it was pronounced to be. None of our party got an opportunity to take dinner with Mr. Young, but a gentile by the name of Johnson professed to have enjoyed a sociable breakfast in the Lion House. He gave a preposterous account of the calling of the roll and other preliminaries, and the carnage that ensued when the buckwheat cakes came in. But he embellished rather too much. He said that Mr. Young told him several smart sayings of certain of his two-year-olds, observing them with some pride, that for many years he had been the heaviest contributor in that line to one of the Eastern magazines, and then he wanted to show Mr. Johnson one of the pets that had said the last good thing, but he could not find the child. He searched the faces of the children in detail, but could not decide which one it was. Finally he gave it up with a sigh, and said, I thought I would know the little cub again, but I don't. Mr. Johnson said further that Mr. Young observed that life was a sad, sad thing, because the joy of every new marriage a man contracted was so apt to be blighted by the inopportune funeral of a less recent bride. And Mr. Johnson said that while he and Mr. Young were pleasantly conversing in private, one of the Mrs. Youngs came in and demanded a breast-pin, remarking that she had found out that he had been giving a breast-pin to number six, and she, for one, did not propose to let this partiality go on without making a satisfactory amount of trouble about it. Mr. Young reminded her that there was a stranger present. Mrs. Young said that if the state of things inside the house was not agreeable to the stranger he could find room outside. Mr. Young promised the breast-pin, and she went away. But in a minute or two another Mrs. Young came in and demanded a breast-pin. Mr. Young began a remonstrance, but Mrs. Young cut him short. She said number six had got one, and number eleven was promised one, and it was no use for him to try to impose on her she hoped she knew her rights. He gave his promise, and she went. And presently three Mrs. Youngs entered in a body, and opened on their husband a tempest of tears, abuse, and entreaty. They had heard all about number six, number eleven, and number fourteen. Three more breast-pins were promised. They were hardly gone when nine more Mrs. Youngs filed into the presence, and a new tempest burst forth, and raged round about the prophet and his guest. Nine breast-pins were promised, and the weird sisters filed out again. And in came eleven more, weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth. Eleven promised breast-pins purchased peace once more. That is a specimen, said Mr. Young. You see how it is. You see what a life I lead. A man can't be wise all the time. In a heedless moment I gave my darling number six, excuse my calling her thus, as her other name has escaped me for the moment, a breast-pin. It was only worth twenty-five dollars, that is, apparently that was its whole cost, but its ultimate cost was inevitably bound to be a good deal more. You yourself have seen it climb up to six hundred and fifty dollars, and alas, even that is not the end. For I have wives all over this territory of Utah. I have dozens of wives whose numbers, even, I do not know without looking in the family Bible. They are scattered far and wide among the mountains and valleys of my realm. And, Mark you, every solitary one of them will hear of this wretched breast-pin, and every last one of them will have one or die. Number six's breast-pin will cost me twenty-five hundred dollars before I see the end of it, and these creatures will compare these pins together, and if one is a shade finer than the rest, they will all be thrown on my hands, and I will have to order a new lot to keep peace in the family. Sir, you probably did not know it, but all the time you were present with my children your every movement was watched by vigilant servitors of mine. If you had offered to give a child a dime or a stick of candy or any trifle of the kind, you would have been snatched out at the house instantly, provided it could be done before your gift left your hand. Otherwise it would be absolutely necessary for you to make an exactly similar gift to all my children, and knowing by experience the importance of the thing I would have stood by and seen to it myself that you did it, and did it thoroughly. Once a gentleman gave one of my children a tin whistle, a veritable invention of Satan, sir, and one which I have an unspeakable horror of, and so would you if you had eighty or ninety children in your house. But the deed was done, the man escaped. I knew what the result was going to be, and I thirsted for vengeance. I ordered out a flock of destroying angels, and they hunted the man far into the fastnesses of the Nevada mountains, but they never caught him. I am not cruel, sir. I am not vindictive except when sorely outraged. But if I had caught him, sir, so help me, Joseph Smith. I would have locked him into the nursery till the Brats whistled him to death. By the slaughtered body of St. Parley Pratt, whom God assailed, there was never anything on this earth like it. I knew who gave the whistle to the child, but I could not make those jealous mothers believe me. They believed I did it, and the result was just what any man of reflection could have foreseen. I had to order a hundred and ten whistles. I think we had a hundred and ten children in the house then, but some of them are off at college now. I had to order a hundred and ten of those shrieking things, and I wish I may never speak another word if we didn't have to talk on our fingers entirely, from that time forth until the children got tired of the whistles. And if ever another man gives a whistle to a child of mine and I get my hands on him, I will hang him higher than I'm him. That is the word with a bark on it. Shade of Nephi. You don't know anything about married life. I am rich, and everybody knows it. I am benevolent, and everybody takes advantage of it. I have a strong fatherly instinct, and all the foundlings are foisted on me. Every time a woman wants to do well by her darling, she puzzles her brain to cipher out some scheme for getting it into my hands. Why, sir, a woman came here once with a child of a curious lifeless sort of complexion, and so had the woman, and swore that the child was mine and she my wife. That I had married her at such and such a time, in such and such a place, but she had forgotten her number, and of course I could not remember her name. Well, sir, she called my attention to the fact that the child looked like me, and really it did seem to resemble me, a common thing in the territory, and, to cut the story short, I put it in my nursery and she left. And by the ghost of Orson Hyde when they came to wash the paint off that child it was an engine. Bless my soul, you don't know anything about married life. It is a perfect dog's life, sir, a perfect dog's life. You can't economize. It isn't possible. I have tried keeping one set of bridal attire for all occasions, but it is of no use. First you'll marry a combination of calico and consumption that's as thin as a rail, and next you'll get a creature that's nothing more than a drop sea in disguise, and then you've got to eke out that bridal dress with an old balloon. That is the way it goes. And think of the wash-bill. Excuse these tears. Nine hundred and eighty-four pieces a week. No, sir, there is no such a thing as economy in a family like mine. Why, just the one item of cradles, think of it, and verma-fuge, soothing syrup, teething rings, and papa's watches for the babies to play with, and things to scratch the furniture with, and Lucifer matches for them to eat, and pieces of glass to cut themselves with. The item of glass alone would support your family, I venture to say, sir. Let me scrimp and squeeze all I can. I still can't get ahead as fast as I feel I ought to, with my opportunities. Bless you, sir, at a time when I had seventy-two wives in this house, I groaned under the pressure of keeping thousands of dollars tied up in seventy-two bedsteads when the money ought to have been out at interest, and I just sold out the whole stock, sir, at a sacrifice, and built a bedstead seven feet long and ninety-six feet wide. But it was a failure, sir. I could not sleep. It appeared to me that the whole seventy-two women snored at once. The roar was deafening. And then the danger of it, that was what I was looking at, they would all draw in their breath at once, and you could actually see the walls of the house suck in. And then they would all exhale their breath at once, and you could see the walls swell out and strain, and hear the rafters crack and the shingles grind together. My friend, take an old man's advice, and don't encumber yourself with a large family. Mind, I tell you, don't do it. In a small family, and in a small family only, you will find that comfort and that peace of mind which are the best at last of the blessings this world is able to afford us. And for the lack of which no accumulation of wealth and no acquisition of fame, power, and greatness can ever compensate us, take my word for it, ten or eleven wives is all you need. Never go over it. Some instinct or other made me set this Johnson down as being unreliable, and yet he was a very entertaining person, and I doubt if some of the information he gave us could have been acquired from any other source. He was a pleasant contrast to those reticent Mormons. CHAPTER XVI All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few, except the elect, have seen it, or at least taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me. It is such a pretentious affair, and yet so slow, so sleepy. Such an insipid mass of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle, keeping awake while he did it was at any rate. If he, according to tradition, merely translated it from certain ancient and mysteriously engraved plates of copper which he declares he found under a stone in an out-of-the-way locality, the work of translating was equally a miracle for the same reason. The book seems to be merely a prosy detail of imaginary history with the Old Testament for a model, followed by a tedious plagiarism of the New Testament. The author labored to give his words and phrases the quaint, old-fashioned sound and structure of our King James translation of the scriptures, and the result is a mongrel, half-modern glibness and half-ancient simplicity and gravity. The latter is awkward and constrained, the former natural but grotesque by the contrast. Whenever he found his speech growing too modern, which was about every sentence or two, he ladled in a few such scriptural phrases as exceeding sore, and it came to pass, etc., and made things too satisfactory again. And it came to pass was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet. The title page reads as follows. The Book of Mormon, an account written by the Hand of Mormon, upon plates taken from the plates of Nephi. Wherefore it is an abridgment of the record of the people of Nephi, and also of Lamanites, written to the Lamanites who are remnant of the house of Israel, and also to Jew and Gentile, written by way of commandment, and also by the spirit of prophecy and of revelation, written and sealed up and hid up unto the Lord that they might not be destroyed, to come forth by the gift and power of God unto the interpretation thereof, sealed by the hand of Moroni, and hid up unto the Lord to come forth in due time by the way of Gentile, the interpretation thereof by the gift of God, an abridgment taken from the Book of Ether also, which is a record of the people of Jared, who were scattered at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people when they were building a tower to get to heaven. Hid up is good, and so is wherefore, though why wherefore? Any other word would have answered as well, though in truth it would not have sounded so scriptural. Next comes the testimony of three witnesses, be it known unto all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people unto whom this work shall come, that we, through the grace of God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, have seen the plates which contain this record, which is a record of the people of Nephi, and also of the Lamanites, their brethren, and also of the people of Jared, who came from the tower of which hath been spoken. And we also know that they have been translated by the gift and power of God, for his voice hath declared it unto us. Wherefore we know of a surety that the work is true. And we also testify that we have seen the engravings which are upon the plates, and they have been shown unto us by the power of God and not of man. And we declare with words of soberness that an angel of God came down from heaven, and he brought and laid it before our eyes, that we beheld and saw the plates and the engravings thereon. And we know that it is by the grace of God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ that we beheld and bear record that these things are true, and it is marvellous in our eyes. Nevertheless the voice of the Lord commanded us that we should bear record of it. Wherefore to be obedient unto the commandments of God we bear testimony of these things. And we know that if we are faithful in Christ we shall rid our garments of the blood of all men, and be found spotless before the judgment seat of Christ, and shall dwell with him eternally in the heavens. And the honor be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, which is one God, amen. Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, Martin Harris. Some people have to have a world of evidence before they can come anywhere in the neighborhood of believing anything. But for me, when a man tells me that he has seen the engravings which are upon the plates, and not only that, but an angel was there at the time, and saw him see them, and probably took his receipt for it, I am very far on the road to conviction, no matter whether I ever heard of that man before or not, and even if I do not know the name of the angel, or his nationality either. Next is this. And also the testimony of eight witnesses, be it known unto all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people unto whom this work shall come, that Joseph Smith, Jr., the translator of this work, has shown unto us the plates of which hath been spoken, which hath the appearance of gold, and as many of the leaves as the said Smith has translated, we did handle with our hands, and we also saw the engravings thereon, all of which has the appearance of ancient work, and of curious workmanship. And this we bear record with words of soberness, that the said Smith has shown unto us, for we have seen and hefted, and know of assurity that the said Smith has got the plates of which we have spoken. And we give our names unto the world, to witness unto the world, that which we have seen, and we lie not, God-bearing witness of it, Christian Whitmer, Jacob Whitmer, Peter Whitmer, Jr., John Whitmer, Hiram Page, Joseph Smith, Sr., Hiram Smith, Samuel H. Smith. And when I am far on the road to conviction, and eight men, be they grammatical or otherwise, come forward and tell me that they have seen the plates too, and not only seen those plates, but hefted them, I am convinced. I could not feel more satisfied and at rest if the entire Whitmer family had testified. The Mormon Bible consists of fifteen books, being the books of Jacob, Enos, Jerome, Omni, Mosiah, Xenith, Alma, Helliman, Ether, Moroni, two books of Mormon, and three of Nephi. In the first book of Nephi is a plagiarism of the Old Testament, which gives an account of the exodus from Jerusalem of the children of Lehi, and it goes on to tell of their wanderings in the wilderness during eight years, and their supernatural protection by one of their number, a party by the name of Nephi. They finally reached the land of Bountiful and Camped by the Sea. After they had remained there, for the space of many days, which is more scriptural than definite, Nephi was commanded from on high to build a ship wherein to carry the people across the waters. He travestied Noah's ark, but he obeyed orders in the matter of the plan. He finished the ship in a single day, while his brethren stood by and made fun of it, and of him too, saying, Our brother is a fool for he thinketh that he can build a ship. They did not wait for the timbers to dry, but the whole tribe or nation sailed the next day. Then a bit of genuine nature cropped up, and is revealed by outspoken Nephi with scriptural frankness. They all got on a spree. They, and also their wives, began to make themselves merry in so much that they began to dance, and to sing, and to speak with much rudeness. Yea, they were lifted up unto exceeding rudeness. Nephi tried to stop these scandalous proceedings, but they tied him neck and heels, and went on with their lark. But observe how Nephi the prophet circumvented them by the aid of the invisible powers. And it came to pass that after they had bound me in so much that I could not move, the compass which had been prepared of the Lord did cease to work, wherefore they knew not whither they should steer the ship in so much that there arose a great storm, yea, a great and terrible tempest, and we were driven back unto the waters for the space of three days. And they began to be frightened exceedingly, lest they should be drowned in the sea. Nevertheless they did not loose me. And on the fourth day, which we had been driven back, the tempest began to be exceeding sore, and it came to pass that we were about to be swallowed up in the depths of the sea. Then they untied him. And it came to pass after they had loosed me. Behold! I took the compass, and it did work whither I desired it. And it came to pass that I prayed unto the Lord, and after I had prayed the winds did cease and the storm did cease, and there was a great calm. Equipped with their compass these ancients appeared to have had the advantage of Noah. Their voyage was toward a promised land, the only name they give it. They reached it in safety. Polygamy is a recent feature in the Mormon religion, and was added by Brigham Young after Joseph Smith's death. Before that it was regarded as an abomination. This verse from the Mormon Bible occurs in Chapter 2 of the Book of Jacob. For behold, thus set the Lord. This people begin to wax in iniquity. They understand not the scripture, for they seek to excuse themselves in committing hordoms, because of the things which were written concerning David and Solomon his son. Behold, David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me, set the Lord. Wherefore, thus set the Lord, I have led this people forth out of the land of Jerusalem by the power of my arm, that I might raise up unto me a righteous branch from the fruit of the loins of Joseph. Wherefore, I, the Lord God, will know suffer that this people shall do like unto them of old. However the project failed, or at least the modern Mormon end of it, for Brigham suffers it. This verse is from the same chapter. Behold, the Lamanites, your brethren whom ye hate because of their filthiness, and the cursings which hath come upon their skins, are more righteous than you, for they have not forgotten the commandment of the Lord, which was given unto our fathers, that they should have, save it, were one wife, and concubines they should have none. The following verse from chapter 9 of the book of Nephi appears to contain information not familiar to everybody. And now it came to pass that when Jesus had ascended into heaven the multitude did disperse, and every man did take his wife and his children, and did return to his own home. And it came to pass that on the morrow when the multitude was gathered together, behold Nephi and his brother, whom he had raised from the dead, whose name was Timothy, and also his son, whose name was Jonas, and also Mothoni, and Mothoni Ha, his brother, and Cuman, and Cuman and he, and Jeremiah, and Shamnon, and Jonas, and Zedekiah, and Isaiah. Now these were the names of the disciples whom Jesus had chosen. In order that the reader may observe how much more grandeur and picturesqueness, as seen by these Mormon 12, accompanied on of the tenderest episodes in the life of our Saviour than other eyes seem to have been aware of, I quote the following from the same book, Nephi, And it came to pass that Jesus spake unto them, and bade them arise, and they arose from the earth, and he said unto them, Blessed are ye because of your faith, and now behold, my joy is full. And when he had said these words, he wept, and the multitude bear record of it, and he took their little children one by one and blessed them, and prayed unto the Father for them, and when he had done this he wept again, and he spake unto the multitude, and seth unto them, behold your little ones, and as they looked to behold, they cast their eyes toward heaven, and they saw the heavens open, and they saw angels descending out of heaven as it were, in the midst of fire, and they came down and encircled those little ones about, and they were encircled about with fire, and the angels did minister unto them, and the multitude did see and hear and bear record, and they know that their record is true, for they all of them did see and hear every man for himself, and they were in number about two thousand and five hundred souls, and they did consist of men, women, and children. And what else would they be likely to consist of? The Book of Ether is an incomprehensible medley of its history, much of it relating to battles and sieges among peoples whom the reader has possibly never heard of, and who inhabited a country which is not set down in the geography. There was a king with the remarkable name of Coriantumur, and he wore it with chariot, and lib, and shews, and others, in the plains of Heslin, and the valley of Gilgal, and the wilderness of Akish, and the land of Moran, and the plains of Agosh, and Ogath, and Rama, and the land of Korihor, and the hill of Komnor, by the waters of Ripley and Khum, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and it came to pass, after a deal of fighting, that Coriantumur, upon making calculation of his losses, found that there had been slain two millions of mighty men, and also their wives and their children, say five million or six million in all, and he began to sorrow in his heart. Unquestionably it was time. So he wrote to Shiz, asking a cessation of hostilities and offering to give up his kingdom to save his people. Shiz declined, except upon condition that Coriantumur would come and let him cut his head off first, a thing which Coriantumur would not do. Then there was more fighting for a season, then four years were devoted to gathering the forces for a final struggle, after which ensued a battle, which, I take it, is the most remarkable set forth in history, except perhaps that of the Kilkenny cats, which it resembles in some respects. This is the account of the gathering and the battle. Seven. And it came to pass, that they did gather all the people upon all the face of the land, who had not been slain, save it was Aether. And it came to pass that Aether did behold all the doings of the people, and he beheld that the people who were from Coriantumur were gathered together to the army of Coriantumur. And the people who were for Shiz were gathered together to the army of Shiz, wherefore there were for the space of four years gathering together the people that they might get all who were upon the face of the land, and that they might receive all the strength which it was possible that they could receive. And it came to pass that when they were all gathered together, every one to the army which he would, with their wives and their children, both men, women and children being armed with weapons of war, having shields and breast-plates and head-plates and being closed after the manner of war, they did march forth one against the other to battle. And they fought all that day and conquered not. And it came to pass that when it was night they were weary and retired to their camps, and after they had retired to their camps they took up a howling and a lamentation for the loss of the slain of their people, and so great were their cries, their howlings and lamentations that it did rend the air exceedingly. And it came to pass that on the morrow they did go again to battle, and great and terrible was that day. Nevertheless they conquered not, and when the night came again they did rend the air with their cries and their howlings and their mornings for the loss of the slain of their people. Eight. And it came to pass that Coriumptmer wrote again an epistle unto Shiz, desiring that he would not come again to battle, but that he would take the kingdom and spare the lives of the people. But, behold, the spirit of the Lord had ceased striving with them, and Satan had full power over the hearts of the people, for they were given up unto the hardness of their hearts and the blindness of their minds that they might be destroyed, wherefore they went again to battle. And it came to pass that they fought all that day, and when the night came they slept upon their swords, and on the morrow they fought even until the night came, and when the night came they were drunken with anger, even as a man who is drunken with wine, and they slept again upon their swords, and on the morrow they fought again, and when the night came they had all fallen by the swords, save it were fifty and two of the people of Coriumptmer, and sixty and nine of the people of Shiz. And it came to pass that they slept upon their swords that night, and on the morrow they fought again, and they contended in their mites with their swords and with their shields all that day. And when the night came there were thirty and two of the people of Shiz, and twenty and seven of the people of Coriumptmer. Nine. And it came to pass that they ate and slept and prepared for death on the morrow, and they were large and mighty men as to the strength of the men, and it came to pass that they fought for the space of three hours, and they fainted with a loss of blood, and it came to pass that when the men of Coriumptmer had received sufficient strength that they could walk, they were about to flee for their lives, but behold, Shiz arose, and also his men, and he swore in his wrath that he would slay Coriumptmer, or he would perish by the sword. Wherefore he did pursue them, and on the morrow he did overtake them, and they fought again with the sword. And it came to pass that when they had all fallen by the sword, save it were Coriumptmer and Shiz. Behold, Shiz had fainted with loss of blood, and it came to pass that when Coriumptmer had leaned upon his sword, that he rested a little, he smote off the head of Shiz, and it came to pass that after he had smote off the head of Shiz, that Shiz raised upon his hands, and fell. And after that he had struggled for breath, he died. And it came to pass that Coriumptmer fell to the earth, and became as if he had no life. And the Lord spake unto Ether, and said unto him, Go forth! And he went forth, and beheld that the words of the Lord had all been fulfilled, and he finished his record, and the hundredth part I have not written. It seems a pity he did not finish, for after all his dreary former chapters of commonplace, he stopped just as he was in danger of becoming interesting. The Mormon Bible is rather stupid and tiresome to read, but there is nothing vicious in its teachings. Its code of morals is unobjectionable. It is smooched, Milton, from the New Testament, and no credit given. CHAPTER XVII At the end of our two days' sojourn we left great Salt Lake City, hearty and well-fed and happy, physically superb, but not so very much wiser. As regards the Mormon question, then we were when we arrived, perhaps. We had a deal more information than we had before, of course, but we did not know what portion of it was reliable and what was not, for it all came from acquaintances of a day, strangers strictly speaking. We were told, for instance, that the dreadful Mountain Meadows Massacre was the work of the Indians entirely, and that the Gentiles had meanly tried to fasten it upon the Mormons. We were told, likewise, that the Indians were to blame partly and partly the Mormons, and we were told, likewise and just as positively, that the Mormons were almost, if not wholly and completely responsible for that most treacherous and pitiless butchery. We got the story in all these different shapes, but it was not till several years afterward that Mrs. Wait's book of the Mormon Prophet came out with Judge Cradlebow's trial of the accused parties in it and revealed the truth that the latter version was the correct one and that the Mormons were the assassins. All our information had three sides to it, and so I gave up the idea that I could settle the Mormon question in two days. Still I have seen newspaper correspondence do it in one. I left Great Salt Lake a good deal confused as to what state of things existed there, and sometimes even questioning in my own mind whether a state of things existed there at all or not. But presently I remembered with a lightening sense of relief that we had learned two or three trivial things there which we could be certain of, and so the two days were not wholly lost. For instance, we had learned that we were at last in a pioneer land, in absolute and tangible reality. The high prices charged for her trifles were eloquent of high frates and bewildering distances of freightage. In the East in those days the smallest money denomination was a penny, and it represented the smallest purchasable quantity of any commodity. West of Cincinnati, the smallest coin in use was the silver five-cent piece, and no smaller quantity of an article could be bought than five cents worth. In Overland City the lowest coin appeared to be the ten-cent piece, but in Salt Lake there did not seem to be any money in circulation smaller than a quarter, or any smaller quantity purchasable of any commodity than twenty-five cents worth. We had always been used to half dimes and five cents worth as the minimum of financial negotiations, but in Salt Lake, if one wanted a cigar, it was a quarter. If he wanted a chalk pipe, it was a quarter. If he wanted a peach, or a candle, or a newspaper, or a shave, or a little gentile whiskey to rub on his corns to arrest indigestion and keep him from having the toothache, twenty-five cents was the price every time. When we looked at the shockbag of silver now and then we seemed to be wasting our substance in riotous living, but if we referred to the expense account we could see that we had not been doing anything of the kind. But people easily get reconciled to big money and big prices and fond and vain of both. It is a dissent to little coins and cheap prices that is hardest to bear and slowest to take hold upon one's toleration. After a month's acquaintance with the twenty-five cent minimum, the average human being is ready to blush every time he thinks of his despicable five-cent days. How sunburnt with blushes I used to get in Gaudi, Nevada, every time I thought of my first financial experience in Salt Lake. It was on this wise, which is a favorite expression of great authors and a very neat one, too, but I never hear anybody say on this wise when they are talking. A young half-breed with a complexion like a yellow jacket asked me if I would have my shoes blacked. It was at the Salt Lake House the morning after we arrived. I said yes, and he blacked them. Then I handed him a silver five-cent piece, with a benevolent air of a person who is conferring wealth and blessedness upon poverty and suffering. The yellow jacket took it with what I judged to be suppressed emotion, and laid it reverently down in the middle of his broad palm. Then he began to contemplate it, much as a philosopher contemplates a gnats ear in the ample field of his microscope. Several mountaineers, teamsters, stage-drivers, etc., drew near and dropped into the tableau and fell to surveying the money with that attractive indifference to formality, which is noticeable in the hardy pioneer. Presently the yellow jacket handed the half-dime back to me and told me I ought to keep my money in my pocket-book instead of in my soul, and then I wouldn't get it cramped and shriveled up so. What a roar, a vulgar laughter there was! I destroyed the mongrel reptile on the spot, but I smiled, and smiled all the time I was detaching his scalp, for the remark he made was good for a ninja. Yes, we had learned in Salt Lake to be charged great prices without letting the inward shutter appear on the surface, for even already we had overheard and noted the tenor of conversations among drivers, conductors, and hostlers, and finally among citizens of Salt Lake, until we were well aware that these superior beings despised emigrants. We permitted no tell-tale shutters and winces in our countenances, for we wanted to seem pioneers, or Mormons, half-breeds, teamsters, stage-drivers, mountain meadow assassins, anything in the world that the Plains and Utah respected and admired. But we were wretchedly ashamed of being emigrants, and sorry enough that we had white shirts and could not swear in the presence of ladies without looking the other way. And many a time in Nevada afterwards we had occasion to remember with humiliation that we were emigrants, and consequently a low and inferior sort of creatures. Perhaps the reader has visited Utah, Nevada, or California, even in these latter days, and while communing with himself upon the sorrowful banishment of these countries from what he considers the world, has had his wings clipped by finding that he is the one to be pitied, and that there are entire populations around him ready and willing to do it for him, yea who are complacently doing it for him already, wherever he steps his foot. Poor thing they are making fun of his hat, and the cut of his New York coat, and his conscientiousness about his grammar, and his feeble profanity, and his consumingly ludicrous ignorance of oars, shafts, tunnels, and other things which he never saw before, and never felt enough interest in to read about. And all the time that he is thinking what a sad fate it is to be exiled to that far country, that lonely land, the citizens around him are looking down on him with a blighting compassion because he is an emigrant, instead of that proudest and blessedest creature that exists on all the earth, a 49er. The accustomed coach life began again now, and by midnight it almost seemed as if we never had been out of our snuggery among the male sacks at all. We had made one alteration, however. We had provided enough bread, boiled ham, and hard-boiled eggs to last double the six hundred miles of staging we had still to do. And it was comfort in those succeeding days to sit up and contemplate the majestic panorama of mountains and valleys spread out below us and eat ham and hard-boiled eggs while our spiritual natures reveled alternately in rainbows, thunderstorms, and peerless sunsets. Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs, ham and eggs, and, after these, a pipe, an old rank delicious pipe, ham and eggs and scenery, a downgrade, a flying coach, a fragrant pipe, and a contented heart. These make happiness. It is what all the ages have struggled for. CHAPTER 18 At eight in the morning we reached the remnant and ruin of what had been the important military station of Camp Floyd, some forty-five or fifty miles from Salt Lake City. At four p.m. we had doubled our distance and were ninety or a hundred miles from Salt Lake. And now we entered upon one of that species of deserts whose concentrated hideousness shames the diffused and diluted horrors of Sahara, an alkali desert. For sixty-eight miles there was but one break in it. I do not remember that this was really a break. Indeed, it seems to me that it was nothing but a watering depot in the midst of the stretch of sixty-eight miles. If my memory serves me, there was no well or spring at this place, but the water was hauled there by mule and ox-teams from the further side of the desert. There was a stage station there. It was forty-five miles from the beginning of the desert and twenty- three from the end of it. We plowed and dragged and groped along the whole live-long night. And at the end of this uncomfortable twelve hours we finished the forty-five mile part of the desert and got to the stage station where the imported water was. The sun was just rising. It was easy enough to cross the desert in the night while we were asleep. And it was pleasant to reflect in the morning that we in actual person had encountered an absolute desert and could always speak knowingly of deserts in presence of the ignorant thenceforth. And it was pleasant also to reflect that this was not an obscure back-country desert, but a very celebrated one, the metropolis itself, as you may say. All this was very well and very comfortable and satisfactory, but now we were to cross a desert in daylight. This was fine, novel, romantic, dramatically adventurous. This indeed was worth living for, worth traveling for. We would write home all about it. This enthusiasm, this stern thirst for adventure, wilted under the sultry August sun and did not last above one hour. One poor little hour. And then we were ashamed that we had gushed so. The poetry was all in the anticipation. There is none in the reality. Imagine a vast, waveless ocean, stricken dead and turned to ashes. Imagine this solemn waste, tufted with ash-dusted sage-bushes. Imagine the lifeless silence and solitude that belonged to such a place. Imagine a coach creeping like a bug through the midst of this shoreless level, and sending up tumbled volumes of dust as if it were a bug that went by steam. Imagine this aching monotony of toiling and plowing kept up hour after hour, and the shore still as far away as ever, apparently. Imagine team, driver, coach, and passengers so deeply coated with ashes that they are all one colorless color. Imagine aft drifts roosting above mustaches and eyebrows, like snow accumulations on boughs and bushes. This is the reality of it. The sun beats down with dead, blistering, relentless malignity. The perspiration is welling from every poor in man and beast, but scarcely a sign of it finds its way to the surface. It is absorbed before it gets there. There is not the faintest breath of air stirring. There is not a merciful shred of cloud in all the brilliant firmament. There is not a living creature visible in any direction wither one searches the blank level that stretches its monotonous miles on every hand. There is not a sound, not a sigh, not a whisper, not a buzz, or a whir of wings, or a distant pipe of bird, not even a sob from the lost souls that doubtless people that dead air. And so the occasional sneezing of the resting mules and the champing of the bits, great harshly on the grim stillness, not dissipating the spell but accenting it, and making one feel more lonesome and forsaken than before. The mules under violent swearing, coaxing, and whip cracking would make, at stated intervals, a spurt, and drag the coach a hundred or maybe two hundred yards, stirring up a billowy cloud of dust that rolled back and velloping the vehicle to the wheel-tops or higher and making it seem a float in fog, then a rest followed, with the usual sneezing and bit-champing, then another spurt of a hundred yards, and another rest at the end of it. All day long we kept this up without water for the mules and without ever changing the team. At least we kept it up ten hours, which I take it is a day and a pretty honest one in an alkali desert. It was from four in the morning till two in the afternoon. And it was so hot and so close. And our water canteens went dry in the middle of the day, and we got so thirsty. It was so stupid and tiresome and dull, and the tedious hours did lag and drag and limp along with such a cruel deliberation. It was so trying to give one's watch a good long, undisturbed spell and then take it out, and find that it had been fooling away the time and not trying to get ahead any. The alkali dust cut through our lips. It persecuted our eyes. It ate through the delicate membranes and made our noses bleed and kept them bleeding. And truly and seriously the romance all faded far away and disappeared, and left the desert trip nothing but a harsh reality, a thirst, sweltering, longing, hateful reality. Two miles and a quarter an hour, for ten hours. That was what we accomplished. It was hard to bring the comprehension away down to such a snail-paces that, when we had been used to making eight and ten miles an hour, when we reached the station on the far the verge of the desert, we were glad for the first time that the dictionary was along, because we never could have found language to tell how glad we were in any sort of dictionary but an unabridged one with pictures in it. But there could not have been found in a whole library of dictionaries language sufficient to tell how tired those mules were after their twenty-three-mile pull. To try to give the reader an idea of how thirsty they were would be to guild refined gold or paint the lily. Somehow, now that it is there, the quotation does not seem to fit. But no matter. Let it stay, anyhow. I think it is a graceful and attractive thing, and therefore have tried time and time again to work it in where it would fit, but could not succeed. These efforts have kept my mind distracted and ill at ease, and made my narrative seem broken and disjointed in places. Under these circumstances it seems to me best to leave it in as above, since this will afford at least a temporary respite from the wear and tear of trying to lead up to this really apt and beautiful quotation. End of Chapter 18. CHAPTER XIX ON the morning of the sixteenth day out from St. Joseph we arrived at the entrance of Rocky Canyon, two hundred and fifty miles from Salt Lake. It was long in this wild country somewhere, and far from any habitation of white men except the stage stations, that we came across the wretchedest type of mankind I have ever seen up to this writing. I refer to the Ghost Shoot Indians. From what we could see and all we could learn, they are very considerably inferior to even the despised digger Indians of California, inferior to all races of savages on our continent, inferior to even the terror Delphuagans, inferior to the Hottentots, and actually inferior in some respects to the Kitchies of Africa. Indeed, I have been obliged to look the bulky volumes of wood's uncivilized races of men clear through in order to find a savage tribe degraded enough to take rank with the Ghost Shoots. I find that one people fairly open to that shameful verdict. It is the Bojesmen, or Bushmen of South Africa. Such of the Ghost Shoots as we saw along the road and hanging about the stations were small, lean, scrawny creatures in complexion of dull black like the ordinary American Negro, their faces and hands bearing dirt which they had been hoarding and accumulating for months, years, and even generations, according to the age of the proprietor. A silent, sneaking, treacherous-looking race, taking note of everything covertly like all the other noble red men that we do not read about, and betraying no sign in their countenances, indolent, everlastingly patient and tireless like all other Indians, prideless beggars, for if the beggar instinct were left out of an Indian he would not go any more than a clock without a pendulum, hungry, always hungry, and yet never refusing anything that a hog would eat, though often eating what a hog would decline. Hunters, but having no higher ambition than to kill and eat jack-ass rabbits, crickets and grasshoppers, and embezzle carrion from the buzzards and coyotes. Savages who, when asked if they have the common Indian belief in a great spirit, show a something which almost amounts to emotion thinking whiskey is referred to. A thin, scattering race of almost naked black children these goshoots are, who produce nothing at all and have no villages and no gatherings together into strictly defined tribal communities, a people whose only shelter is a rag cast on a bush to keep off a portion of the snow, and yet who inhabit one of the most rocky, wintry, repulsive wastes that our country or any other can exhibit. The bushmen and our goshoots are manifestly descended from the self-same guerrilla or kangaroo or Norway rat, whichever animal atom the Darwinians trace them to. One would as soon expect the rabbits to fight as the goshoots, and yet they used to live off the offal and refuse of the stations a few months, and then come some dark night when no mischief was expected and burn down the buildings and kill the men from ambush as they rushed out. And once in the night they attacked the stagecoach when a district judge of Nevada Territory was the only passenger, and with their first volley of arrows and a bullet or two, they riddled the stage curtains, wounded a horse or two, and mortally wounded the driver. The latter was full of pluck, and so was his passenger. At the driver's call Judge Mott swung himself out, clambered to the box, and seized the reins of the team, and away they plunged through the racing mob of skeletons, and under a hurtling storm of missiles. The stricken driver had sunk down on the boot as soon as he was wounded, but had held on to the reins and said he would manage to keep hold of them until relieved. And after they were taken from his relaxing grasp, he lay with his head between Judge Mott's feet and tranquilly gave directions about the road. He said he believed he could live till the miscreants were outrun and left behind, and that if he managed that, the main difficulty would be at an end, and then, if the Judge drove so and so, giving directions about bad places in the road and general course, he would reach the next station without trouble. The Judge distanced the enemy, and at last rattled up to the station and knew that the night's perils were done. But there was no comrade in arms for him to rejoice with, for the soldierly driver was dead. Let us forget that we have been saying harsh things about the Overland Drivers now. The disgust which the Ghoshuts gave me, a disciple of Cooper and a worshiper of the Red Man, even of the scholarly savages in the last of the Mohicans who are fittingly associated with backwards men who divide each sentence into two equal parts, one part critically grammatical, refined, and choice of language, and the other part just such an attempt to talk like a hunter or a mountaineer, as a Broadway clerk might make after eating an edition of Emerson Bennett's Works and studying frontier life at the Bowery Theatre a couple of weeks. I say that the nausea which the Ghoshuts gave me, an Indian worshiper, set me to examining authorities to see if perchance I had been overestimating the Red Man while viewing him through the mellow moonshine of romance. The revelations that came were disenchanting. It was curious to see how quickly the paint and tinsel fell away from him and left him treacherous, filthy, and repulsive, and how quickly the evidences accumulated that wherever one finds an Indian tribe he has only found Ghoshuts more or less modified by circumstances and surroundings. But Ghoshuts, after all, they deserve pity, poor creatures, and they can have mine at this distance. Nearer by they never get anybody's. There is an impression abroad that the Baltimore and Washington Railroad Company, and many of its employees, are Ghoshuts. But it is an error. There is only a plausible resemblance which, while it is apt enough to mislead the ignorant, cannot deceive parties who have contemplated both tribes. But seriously, it was not only poor wit but very wrong to start the report referred to above, for however innocent the motive may have been, the necessary effect was to injure the reputation of a class who have had a hard enough time of it in the pitiless deserts of the Rocky Mountains. Heaven knows. If we cannot find it in our hearts to give those poor, naked creatures our Christian sympathy and compassion in God's name let us at least not throw mud at them. End of chapter 19