Greater Britain

CHAPTER XIII.
ROCKY MOUNTAINS

“WHAT will I do for you if you stop here among us? Why, I‘ll name that peak after you in the next survey,” said Governor Gilpin, pointing to a snowy mountain towering to its 15,000 feet in the direction of Mount Lincoln. I was not to be tempted, however; and as for Dixon, there is already a county named after him in Nebraska: so off we went along the foot of the hills on our road to the Great Salt Lake, following the “Cherokee Trail.”

Striking north from Denver by Vasquez Fork and Cache la Poudre – called “Cash le Powder,” just as Mont Royal has become Montreal, and Sault de Ste Marie, Soo – we entered the Black Mountains, or Eastern foot-hills, at Beaver Creek. On the second day, at two in the afternoon, we reached Virginia Dale for breakfast, without adventure, unless it were the shooting of a monster rattlesnake that lay “coiled in our path upon the mountain side.” Had we been but a few minutes later, we should have made it a halt for “supper” instead of breakfast, as the drivers had but these two names for our daily meals, at whatever hour they took place. Our “breakfasts” varied from 3.30 A.M. to 2 P.M.; our suppers from 3 P.M. to 2 A.M.

Here we found the weird red rocks that give to the river and the territory their name of Colorado, and came upon the mountain plateau at the spot where last year the Utes scalped seven men only three hours after Speaker Colfax and a Congressional party had passed with their escort.

While trundling over the sandy wastes of Laramie Plains, we sighted the Wind River chain drawn by Bierstadt in his great picture of the “Rocky Mountains.” The painter has caught the forms, but missed the atmosphere of the range: the clouds and mists are those of Maine and Massachusetts; there is color more vivid, darkness more lurid, in the storms of Colorado.

This was our first sight of the main range since we entered the Black Hills, although we passed through the gorges at the very foot of Long‘s Peak. It was not till we had reached the rolling hills of “Medicine Bow” – a hundred miles beyond the peak – that we once more caught sight of it shining in the rear.

In the night between the second and third days the frost was so bitter at the great altitude to which we had attained, that we resorted to every expedient to keep out the cold. While I was trying to peg down one of the leathern flaps of our ambulance with the pencil from my note-book, my eye caught the moonlight on the ground, and I drew back saying, “We are on the snow.” The next time we halted, I found that what I had seen was an impalpable white dust, the much dreaded alkali.

In the morning of the third day we found ourselves in a country of dazzling white, dotted with here and there a tuft of sage-brush – an Artemisia akin to that of the Algerian highlands. At last we were in the “American desert” – the “Mauvaises terres.”

Once only did we escape for a time from alkali and sage to sweet waters and sweet grass. Near Bridger‘s Pass and the “divide” between Atlantic and Pacific floods, we came on a long valley swept by chilly breezes, and almost unfit for human habitation from the rarefaction of the air, but blessed with pasture ground on which domesticated herds of Himalayan yâk should one day feed. Settlers in Utah will find out that this animal, which would flourish here at altitudes of from 4000 to 14,000 feet, and which bears the most useful of all furs, requires less herbage in proportion to its weight and size than almost any animal we know.

This Bridger‘s Pass route is that by which the telegraph line runs, and I was told by the drivers strange stories of the Indians and their views on this great Medicine. They never destroy out of mere wantonness, but have been known to cut the wire and then lie in ambush in the neighborhood, knowing that repairing parties would arrive and fall an easy prey. Having come one morning upon three armed overlanders lying fast asleep, while a fourth kept guard by a fire which coincided with a gap in the posts, but which was far from any timber or even scrub, I have my doubts as to whether “white Indians” have not much to do with the destruction of the line.

From one of the uplands of the Artemisia barrens we sighted at once Fremont‘s Peak on the north, and another great snow-dome upon the south. The unknown mountain was both the more distant and the loftier of the two, yet the maps mark no chain within eyeshot to the southward. The country on either side of this well-worn track is still as little known as when Captain Stansbury explored it in 1850; and when we crossed the Green River, as the Upper Colorado is called, it was strange to remember that the stream is here lost in a thousand miles of undiscovered wilds, to be found again flowing toward Mexico. Near the ferry is the place where Albert S. Johnson‘s mule-trains were captured by the Mormons under General Lot Smith.

In the middle of the night we would come upon mule-trains starting on their march in order to avoid the mid-day sun, and thus save water, which they are sometimes forced to carry with them for as much as fifty miles. When we found them halted, they were always camped on bluffs and in bends, far from rocks and tufts, behind which the Indians might creep and stampede the cattle: this they do by suddenly swooping down with fearful noises, and riding in among the mules or oxen at full speed. The beasts break away in their fright, and are driven off before the sentries have time to turn out the camp.

On the fourth day from Denver, the scenery was tame enough, but strange in the extreme. Its characteristic feature was its breadth. No longer the rocky defiles of Virginia Dale, no longer the glimpses of the main range as from Laramie Plains and the foot-hills of Medicine Bow, but great rolling downs like those of the plains much magnified. We crossed one of the highest passes in the world without seeing snow, but looked back directly we were through it on snow-fields behind us and all around.

At Elk Mountain we suffered greatly from the frost, but by mid day we were taking off our coats, and the mules hanging their heads in the sun once more, while those which should have taken their places were, as the ranchman expressed it, “kicking their heels in pure cussedness” at a stream some ten miles away.

While walking before the “hack” through the burning sand of Bitter Creek, I put up a bird as big as a turkey, which must, I suppose, have been a vulture. The sage-brush growing here as much as three feet high, and as stout and gnarled as century-old heather, gave shelter to a few coveys of sage-hens, at which we shot without much success, although they seldom ran, and never rose. Their color is that of the brush itself – a yellowish gray – and it is as hard to see them as to pick up a partridge on a sun-dried fallow at home in England. Of wolves and rattlesnakes there were plenty, but of big game we saw but little, only a few black-tails in the day.

This track is more traveled by trains than is the Smoky Hill route, which accounts for the absence of game on the line; but that there is plenty close at hand is clear from the way we were fed. Smoky Hill starvation was forgotten in piles of steaks of elk and antelope; but still no fruit, no vegetable, no bread, no drink save “sage-brush tea,” and that half poisoned with the water of the alkaline creeks.

Jerked buffalo had disappeared from our meals. The droves never visit the Sierra Madre now, and scientific books have said that in the mountains they were ever unknown. In Bridger‘s Pass we saw the skulls of not less than twenty buffalo, which is proof enough that they once were here, though perhaps long ago. The skin and bones will last about a year after the beast has died, for the wolves tear them to pieces to get at the marrow within, but the skull they never touch; and the oldest ranchman failed to give me an answer as to how long skulls and horns might last. We saw no buffalo roads like those across the plains.

From the absence of buffalo, absence of birds, absence of flowers, absence even of Indians, the Rocky Mountain plateau is more of a solitude than are the plains. It takes days to see this, for you naturally notice it less. On the plains, the glorious climate, the masses of rich blooming plants, the millions of beasts, and insects, and birds, all seem prepared to the hand of man, and for man you are continually searching. Each time you round a hill, you look for the smoke of the farm. Here on the mountains you feel as you do on the sea: it is nature‘s own lone solitude, but from no fault of ours – the higher parts of the plateau were not made for man.

Early on the fifth night we dashed suddenly out of utter darkness into a mountain glen blazing with fifty fires, and perfumed with the scent of burning cedar. As many wagons as there were fires were corraled in an ellipse about the road, and 600 cattle were pastured within the fire-glow in rich grass that told of water. Men and women were seated round the camp-fires praying and singing hymns. As we drove in, they rose and cheered us “on your way to Zion.” Our Gentile driver yelled back the warhoop “How! How! How! How – w! We‘ll give yer love to Brigham;” and back went the poor travelers to their prayers again. It was a bull train of the Mormon immigration.

Five minutes after we had passed the camp we were back in civilization, and plunged into polygamous society all at once, with Bishop Myers, the keeper of Bear River Ranch, drawing water from the well, while Mrs. Myers No. 1 cooked the chops, and Mrs. Myers No. 2 laid the table neatly.

The kind bishop made us sit before the fire till we were warm, and filled our “hack” with hay, that we might continue so, and off we went, inclined to look favorably on polygamy after such experience of polygamists.

Leaving Bear River about midnight, at two o‘clock in the morning of the sixth day we commenced the descent of Echo Canyon, the grandest of all the gully passes of the Wasatch Range. The night was so clear that I was able to make some outline sketches of the cliffs from the ranch where we changed mules. Echo Canyon is the Thermopylæ of Utah, the pass that the Mormons fortified against the United States forces under Albert S. Johnson at the time of “Buchanan‘s raid.” Twenty-six miles long, often not more than a few yards wide at the bottom, and a few hundred feet at the top, with an overhanging cliff on the north side, and a mountain wall on the south, Echo Canyon would be no easy pass to force. Government will do well to prevent the Pacific Railroad from following this defile.

After breakfast at Coalville, the Mormon Newcastle, situated in a smiling valley not unlike that between Martigny and Saint Maurice, we dashed on past Kimball‘s Ranch, where we once more hitched horses instead of mules, and began our descent of seventeen miles down Big Canyon, the best of all the passes of the Wasatch. Rounding a spur at the end of our six-hundredth mile from Denver, we first sighted the Mormon promised land.

The sun was setting over the great dead lake to our right, lighting up the valley with a silvery gleam from Jordan River, and the hills with a golden glow from off the snow-fields of the many mountain chains and peaks around. In our front, the Oquirrh, or Western Range, stood out in sharp purple outlines upon a sea-colored sky. To our left were the Utah Mountains, blushing rose, all about our heads the Wasatch glowing in orange and gold. From the flat valley in the sunny distance rose the smoke of many houses, the dust of many droves; on the bench-land of Ensign Peak, on the lake side, white houses peeped from among the peach-trees, modestly, and hinted the presence of the city.

Here was Plato‘s table-land of the Atlantic isle – one great field of corn and wheat, where only twenty years ago Fremont, the pathfinder, reported wheat and corn impossible.

CHAPTER XIV.
BRIGHAM YOUNG

“I LOOK upon Mohammed and Brigham as the very best men that God could send as ministers to those unto whom He sent them,” wrote Elder Frederick Evans, of the “Shaker” village of New Lebanon, in a letter to us, inclosing another by way of introduction to the Mormon president.

Credentials from the Shaker to the Mormon chief – from the great living exponent of the principle of celibacy to the “most married” in all America – were not to be kept undelivered; so the moment we had bathed we posted off to a merchant to whom we had letters, that we might inquire when his spiritual chief and military ruler would be home again from his “trip north.” The answer was, “To-morrow.”

After watching the last gleams fade from the snow-fields upon the Wasatch, we parted for the night, as I had to sleep in a private house, the hotel being filled even to the balcony. As I entered the drawing-room of my entertainer, I heard the voice of a lady reading, and caught enough of what she said to be aware that it was a defense of polygamy. She ceased when she saw the stranger; but I found that it was my host‘s first wife reading Belinda Pratt‘s book to her daughters – girls just blooming into womanhood.

After an agreeable chat with the ladies, doubly pleasant as it followed upon a long absence from civilization, I went to my room, which I afterward found to be that of the eldest son, a youth of sixteen years. In one corner stood two Ballard rifles, and two revolvers and a militia uniform hung from pegs upon the wall. When I lay down with my hands underneath the pillow – an attitude instinctively adopted to escape the sand-flies, I touched something cold. I felt it – a full-sized Colt, and capped. Such was my first introduction to Utah Mormonism.

On the morrow, we had the first and most formal of our four interviews with the Mormon president, the conversation lasting three hours, and all the leading men of the church being present. When we rose to leave, Brigham said: “Come to see me here again; Brother Stenhouse will show you everything;” and then blessed us in these words: “Peace be with you, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Elder Stenhouse followed us out of the presence, and somewhat anxiously put the odd question: “Well, is he a white man?” “White” is used in Utah as a general term of praise: a white man is a man – to use our corresponding idiom – not so black as he is painted. A “white country” is a country with grass and trees; just as a white man means a man who is morally not a Ute, so a white country is a land in which others than Utes can dwell.

We made some complimentary answer to Stenhouse‘s question; but it was impossible not to feel that the real point was: Is Brigham sincere?

Brigham‘s deeds have been those of a sincere man. His bitterest opponents cannot dispute the fact that in 1844, when Nauvoo was about to be deserted, owing to the attacks of a ruffianly mob, Brigham rushed to the front, and took the chief command. To be a Mormon leader then was to be a leader of an outcast people, with a price set on his head, in a Missourian county in which almost every man who was not a Mormon was by profession an assassin. In the sense, too, of believing that he is what he professes to be, Brigham is undoubtedly sincere. In the wider sense of being that which he professes to be he comes off as well, if only we will read his words in the way he speaks them. He tells us that he is a prophet – God‘s representative on earth; but when I asked him whether he was of a wholly different spiritual rank to that held by other devout men, he said: “By no means. I am a prophet – one of many. All good men are prophets; but God has blessed me with peculiar favor in revealing His will oftener and more clearly through me than through other men.”

Those who would understand Brigham‘s revelations must read Bentham. The leading Mormons are utilitarian deists. “God‘s will be done,” they, like other deists, say is to be our rule; and God‘s will they find in written Revelation and in Utility. God has given men, by the actual hand of angels, the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Book of Covenants, the revelation upon Plural Marriage. When these are exhausted, man, seeking for God‘s will, has to turn to the principle of Utility: that which is for the happiness of mankind —that is of the church– is God‘s will, and must be done. While Utility is their only index to God‘s pleasure, they admit that the church must be ruled – that opinions may differ as to what is the good of the church, and therefore the will of God. They meet, then, annually, in an assembly of the people, and electing church officers by popular will and acclamation, they see God‘s finger in the ballot-box. They say, like the Jews in the election of their judges, that the choice of the people is the choice of God. This is what men like John Taylor or Daniel Wells appear to feel; the ignorant are permitted to look upon Brigham as something more than man, and though Brigham himself does nothing to confirm this view, the leaders foster the delusion. When I asked Stenhouse, “Has Brigham‘s re-election as prophet ever been opposed?” he answered sharply, “I should like to see the man who‘d do it.”

Brigham‘s personal position is a strange one: he calls himself prophet, and declares that he has revelations from God himself, but when you ask him quietly what all this means, you find that for prophet you should read political philosopher. He sees that a canal from Utah Lake to Salt Lake Valley would be of vast utility to the church and people – that a new settlement is urgently required. He thinks about these things till they dominate in his mind, and take in his brain the shape of physical creations. He dreams of the canal, the city; sees them before him in his waking moments. That which is so clearly for the good of God‘s people becomes God‘s will. Next Sunday at the Tabernacle he steps to the front, and says: “God has spoken; He has said unto his prophet, ‘Get thee up, Brigham, and build Me a city in the fertile valley to the South, where there is water, where there are fish, where the sun is strong enough to ripen the cotton plants, and give raiment as well as food to My saints on earth.’ Brethren willing to aid God‘s work should come to me before the Bishops’ meeting.” As the prophet takes his seat again, and puts on his broad-brimmed hat, a hum of applause runs round the bowery, and teams and barrows are freely promised.

Sometimes the canal, the bridge, the city may prove a failure, but this is not concealed; the prophet‘s human tongue may blunder even when he is communicating holy things.

“After all,” Brigham said to me the day before I left, “the highest inspiration is good sense – the knowing what to do, and how to do it.”

In all this it is hard for us, with our English hatred of casuistry and hair-splitting, to see sincerity; still, given his foundation, Brigham is sincere. Like other political religionists, he must feel himself morally bound to stick at nothing when the interests of the church are at stake. To prefer man‘s life or property to the service of God must be a crime in such a church. The Mormons deny the truth of the murder-stories alleged against the Danites, but they avoid doing so in sweeping or even general terms – though, if need were, of course they would be bound to lie as well as to kill in the name of God and His holy prophet.

The secret polity which I have sketched gives, evidently, enormous power to some one man within the church; but the Mormon constitution does not very clearly point out who that man shall be. With a view to the possible future failure of leaders of great personal qualifications, the First Presidency consists of three members with equal rank; but to his place in the Trinity, Brigham unites the office of Trustee in Trust, which gives him the control of the funds and tithing, or church taxation.

All are not agreed as to what should be Brigham‘s place in Utah. Stenhouse said one day: “I am one of those who think that our President should do everything. He has made this church and this country, and should have his way in all things; saying so gets me into trouble with some.” The writer of a report of Brigham‘s tour which appeared in the Salt Lake Telegraph the day we reached the city, used the words: “God never spoke through man more clearly than through President Young.”

One day, when Stenhouse was speaking of the morality of the Mormon people, he said: “Our penalty for adultery is death.” Remembering the Danites, we were down on him at once: “Do you inflict it?” “No; but – well, not practically; but really it is so. A man who commits adultery withers away and perishes. A man sent away from his wives upon a mission that may last for years, if he lives not purely —if, when he returns, he cannot meet the eye of Brigham, better for him to be at once in hell. He withers.”

Brigham himself has spoken in strong words of his own power over the Mormon people: “Let the talking folk at Washington say, if they please, that I am no longer Governor of Utah. I am, and will be Governor, until God Almighty says, ‘Brigham, you need not be Governor any more.’”

Brigham‘s head is that of a man who nowhere could be second.