F 826 
 .T74 
 Copy 2 
 
 a/' / 
 
 THE 
 
 MORMON TRIALS 
 
 AT 
 
 SALT LAKE CITY. 
 
 Nlj 
 
 BY 
 
 GEO. ALFRED TOWNSEND 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 AMEEIOAN NEWS COMPANY. 
 1871. 
 
^ 
 
THE 
 
 MORMON TRIALS 
 
 AT 
 
 SALT LAKE CITY. 
 
 BY 
 
 GEO. ALFEED TOWNSEND 
 
 InTEW YOEK: 
 
 AMEEIOAN NEWS COMPANY, 
 
 1871. 
 

 V 
 
Letter from Utah to the Cincinnati Commercial, 
 
 OCTOBER, 1871. 
 
 Hon. W. H. HOOPER, 
 
 Delegate in Congress from Utah Territory. 
 
 My dear sir. 
 
 You wished to see the letters I wrote from Salt Lake last month, collected 
 in pamphlet. Have your wish ? Your courtesy and hospitality in the Land of the 
 Bee, exercised in the two visits I have made you this year, were seconded by the 
 best of the Mormon people. You are an Eastern Shore Marylander like myself, 
 and I believe in your sincerity, in your faith and sympathize with your devotion to 
 your beautiful country and the diligent hands which have made its deserts blossom. 
 The march of the children of Israel from Egypt around the corner of the Medi- 
 terranean was a little affair compared to the Mormon migration. They were more 
 unlettered and idolatrous than your bands, and Moses could not turn his back but 
 they fell to worshipping calves and serpents. They conciliated nobody much on the 
 way, and were a very unloveable, illiberal, rapacious set of people. They had awk- 
 ward notions besides on the marrying point. And yet we, who are preached at 
 from childhood out of the old books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, refuse to see any 
 equities, wonders, or heroisms in the history and condition of a native church, whose 
 legends are no less miraculous. I cannot confess to a deep interest in these ecclesi- 
 astical subjects, and your friends Orson Pratt and Dr. Newman appear to me equally 
 fatiguing. But I do take pride in the material achievements of the United States, 
 however brought about. Religious movements, however motley, have been the 
 making of us. Amongst the names of John Robinson, Roger Williams, William 
 
 9-/?^^'^ 
 
4 LETTER FROM UTAH. 
 
 Penn, George Whitefield, Count Zinzendorf, and Lord Baltimore, founders of 
 American communities, the name of Brigham Young will unquestionably stand. 
 He has made the boldest, most rapid, and most remarkable colonization we have 
 had ; in a political point of view it has been fortunate to us all. I admire force of 
 character and success achieved upon no baser principles than faith and industry, and 
 I have said so in these letters. As to the camp-meeting jurists and their camp- 
 followers out there, I am indifferent to their abuse and proud of their disapproval. 
 
 My friend, your people must stop polygamy, or it will stop Utah. Apart from 
 the question of faith, it is a question of the common law. Your most generous 
 apologists are only apologists, and they diminish in number every year. Do not 
 tempt the democratic passions of a nation whose unanimous prejudice is law and 
 power. Be rid of polygamy ; cast out by this course the Federal officials who prey 
 upon you, and become an American State in good faith, represented amongst us, and 
 blessed by neighborhood rule. 
 
 GEO. ALFRED TOWNSEND. 
 
 Washington, November 25, 1871. 
 
THE MORMON TEIALS. 
 
 THE MORMON CITY AND CHIEF. 
 
 Salt Lake, October 20. 
 
 The train from the East has dashed down 
 the wild, barbaric sceneries of Weber and 
 Echo Canyons; and, although something of 
 Asiatic inhospitality clings to the knobs and 
 cliffs, we feel that we are approaching an 
 oasis of grass ; this grass we perceive by the 
 quick tests of instinct, and it is confirmed by 
 occasional kine and sheep ; patches of culti- 
 vation slip into the inlets of ravines, and blue 
 smoke appears to agitate the wheeling fish- 
 hawks; teams show upon the old stage road, 
 useless now, except for neighborhood inter- 
 communication. At last, with a whoop, 
 brakes down, and the crack of rock echoes, 
 the mountain gate yields ; snow appears on 
 distant ranges ; there is something queer 
 and blue hung across the dry sky — it is 
 water. The Valley of Salt Lake, covered 
 with cattle herds, and the town of Ogden, 
 advise us that we are half way between the 
 Missouri and the Pacific. 
 
 There is a darting about for baggage, 
 many moving people and small traders, and 
 a change of a few paces from depot to depot; 
 in a little while we have paid our $2.50 in 
 gold additional fare, and received in change 
 queer, crude shin-plasters of the corporation 
 
 of Salt Lake City, and are moving slowly 
 over the Utah Central Railway, every em- 
 ploye of which is said be a Saint. This 
 being the case, we feel no sense of personal 
 responsibility, and so look out upon the green 
 waves of the lake destitute of a sail, note the 
 frequent Mormon hamlets, the close and 
 snowy mountains sending down rapid tor- 
 rents for irrigation, and seek to separate the 
 sheep from the goats, the Saints from the 
 Gentiles. In the last endeavor we unwit- 
 tingly classify a methodist doctor of divinity 
 as the possessor of four wives, and rate one 
 of Tammany Hall's pilgrims as a Mormon 
 bishop. Everybody looks queerly at every- 
 body else, suspecting one another of the patri- 
 archal virtues, and drawing many crude con- 
 ceits of this or that innocent passenger sleeping 
 all over his premises within the same small 
 hours. 
 
 Finally, after more than two hours' ride 
 we enter the environs of Salt Lake, among 
 the small and bushy orchards of apple, pear, 
 and apricot ; the lean and often low, sun- 
 dried houses, of a bluish-white color ; and 
 wide, straight streets, down whose lazy de- 
 clivities the snow-water gurgles, passing at 
 every other gate into the vegetable patches 
 and the lawns of wheat and wild oats. A 
 cleanly depot, well officered, gives us outlet 
 

 
 fHE IflORMOIV TRIALS. 
 
 to a street full of cabmen and hotel-runners. 
 Cries of "Townsend House," "Salt Lake 
 House," salute us, and a one-armed Mormon, 
 possessing two wives, single-handed, cracks 
 his whip, with the reins between his teeth, 
 and makes the Avagon fly. We see it all in 
 a couple of minutes, the big temple, which 
 resembles a tortoise standing on a hundred 
 short legs, the ugly wall enclosing the palace 
 of Brigham and the new temple, the lone 
 theatre, the heathen- seeming city hall, the 
 many shops, plastered in front with a monot- 
 onous signboard of " Holiness to the Lord," 
 and one painted eye, winking at the motto 
 as if to satirize it. Then we are set down 
 at the "Townsend House," a long, low, sprawl- 
 ing hotel, with a comfortable piazza and shade 
 trees, growing out of the wooden pavement. 
 The only Townsend who can keep a hotel 
 stands whittling a stick, and lazily counting 
 the number of newly-arriven guests ; it is 
 apparent that his hostship sits heavily upon 
 his shoulders. Townsend has three wives, 
 originated in Maine, and is doing his best to 
 multiply our great breed of freemen. We 
 feed well at the Townsend House at $4 a 
 day, and sleep in the delicious dry air of 
 this Wahsatch Valley ; and next day we take 
 a warm sulphur plunge bath in the environs 
 of the town, the hot water pouring from the 
 mountain side into a pool, and a cold shower 
 bath standing convenient, like an ice-cream 
 at the end of a warm dinner. I observed in 
 this bath-house and its dressing-rooms what 
 was altogether exceptional in American out- 
 houses — no vulgar writings on the wall, no 
 sporadic bits of doggerel indited by cowards 
 for women to read. The only attestations 
 were testimonials in lead pencil to the pleas- 
 
 ures of the bath, and the autographs of irre- 
 pressible travelers of vanity. 
 
 The valley and city of Salt Lake are mar- 
 vels of patient, unskilled labor, directed by 
 a few powerful native minds. The spirit of 
 John Smith and the hands of the Puritan 
 English meet in this mid-world colony — the 
 brawn all peasant, the pluck all Yankee. 
 Maine, Vermont, and New York were the 
 fiithers of this frontier, and folks out of the 
 northwestern races of Europe — people of 
 narrow foreheads and animal religious in- 
 stincts- fell into the furrows the former 
 opened. 
 
 The morning after my arrival I found 
 everybody going up to see Brigham Young, 
 some accompanied by an introducer, others 
 falling in as interlopers. My cliaperon was 
 a bright young Mormon editor, as rosy as 
 the sun on the mountains, who conducts a 
 live salt newsjDaper, possesses a singular fam- 
 ily, in that it is limited, and has built the 
 first house with a Mansard roof in the heart 
 of the continent. If he should feel distressed 
 at any of these comments upon the Saints, 
 my ingratitude will be great, and his paper 
 will score me. 
 
 Passing under the small shade trees, 
 across the flowing rills, past Godbe's flaming 
 drug store, past Hon. Thomas Fitch's new 
 law ofiice, where he sits arranging his books 
 with his cultivated wife ; past the market 
 where lake trout as big as young pigs lie 
 speckled and fresh ; past Delegate Hooper's 
 bank, whence he looks out like one of Vel- 
 asquez's Spanish gentlemen ; past the chain- 
 gang of worthless Gentiles making road with 
 manacles dragging after them ; past the thea- 
 tre, and up a gentle hill among the painted 
 
THE MORMOK TRIALS. 
 
 adobe houses — everything flattish, low- set, 
 quaint, but not permanent-seeming, as if all 
 the town could be blown away by a gale — 
 we see the sun shine hotly along the long, 
 tall wall which encloses Brigham's palace. 
 An eagle over a sunny gateway, a plaster or 
 wooden bee-hive, and a lion above the roof, 
 denote the clump of dwellings and offices 
 just behind the wall, and seen through the 
 gateway gap in it, where " President " Young 
 keeps state. The scene is like pictures of 
 scenery in Tunis or Morocco, hot, yellow, 
 sandy, half-barbaric, as if architectural mod- 
 els were shaping themselves in a Darwinian 
 way from the crude slime. He who would 
 reign must not pick his palace, his capital, or 
 his subjects. 
 
 A long procession of Eastern sight-seei"s 
 is entering the gate, and amongst them are 
 many fine young women, many wives, many 
 young girls and children, and they pay as 
 much respect to Brigham as to the Grand 
 Turk. None of them appear to stand in 
 dislike of him, because of his much marry- 
 ing, and they push aside the Mormon breth- 
 ren, who stand reverently off on the porch 
 till the hand-shaking shall be done. It is 
 truly queer to see that fine Boston belle, tall 
 as a queen, with the rose and blush of maiden- 
 hood dignifying her for some impending hus- 
 band, shake hands with the bland old Blue- 
 Beard, whose honeymoons have been more 
 numerous than her years. Meekly as Rebec- 
 ca at the well she takes his palm, and looks 
 honored by his consideration. 
 
 Within we see a snug office, narrow and 
 deep, and in the recesses of it some secreta- 
 ries, very like other folks' secretaries, writ- 
 ing. Everybody about Brigham, we may 
 
 remark, is of a Gentile countenance and a 
 worldly, business look; he does not take 
 kindly to long faces; several of his confi- 
 dential clerks have been associated with the 
 Salt Lake theatre. This office is surrounded 
 with portraits of the Mormon dignitaries, 
 and it contains two large oil portraits — taken 
 from life, as I was informed — of Joseph 
 Smith and Hyrum Smith. Both wear cleri- 
 cal neck-ties and look like country clergy- 
 men. 
 
 How powerful is ignorance ! See it tug- 
 ging away at the Column Vendome, delighted 
 with itself, noble and earnest, wiping out the 
 monuments and vindications of our human 
 nature, and sparing Heaven the necessity of 
 humiliating us. Of all queer enterprises 
 which ignorance has undertaken, Mormonism 
 excels. It has not yet found itself out. With 
 superb leadership, with patient delight, with 
 prayer and praise, it goes on dignifying non- 
 sense, and by its success almost making us 
 infidel to our own religion and country ; for 
 what have we done in our knowledge that 
 they have not imitated in theirs. Their hum- 
 ble apostles have passed the barriers of lan- 
 guage, and the crude Danes and Swedes are 
 pouring into Utah as well as the English-sj^eak- 
 ing nations. Compact, disciplined,^devout, no 
 cowards, at times desperate men, yet soft and 
 diplomatic, so that they have pacified hostile 
 Indians and checkmated the United States, 
 they illustrate the nobility of delusion when 
 attended with labor, fired with purpose, and 
 properly organized. Moses, Roger Williams, 
 John Brown, Joe Smith, very different, yet 
 like in material results, the politician in all 
 of them blended with the fanatic — they put 
 in motion greater successors, and, .by the two 
 
8 
 
 THE MORlflON TRIALS. 
 
 mif^hty inspirers of weak masses — sympathy 
 and success — their sects grew to columns 
 and their columns to States. 
 
 With his hair nicely oiled in ringlets and 
 falling around his heavy neck, hair and beard 
 luxuriant, and but a little turned in color, a 
 pair of silver spectacles in his hand, and his 
 manner all bland, from his half-closed eyes 
 to the poise of his knees and feet, Brigham 
 Yovnig soothes mankind with seignoral hos- 
 pitality. We are all introduced, except one 
 young man, who steps forward and says: 
 
 " As there is nobody to make me ac- 
 quainted, here is my card. President Young." 
 
 " It is unnecessary, sir," replies Brigham ; 
 " quite needless ! Be seated." 
 
 We see he is more perfectly at home than 
 anybody in the crowded room, and that he 
 has a hard, peremptory voice, j)lausibly toned 
 down to reception necessities. Looking not 
 more than sixty years of age, he is past that 
 period by half a score, and still may have 
 twenty years to live. Of a wonderfully ro- 
 bust constitution, equal to all responsibilities 
 of polygamy, of self-pride, cool self-manage- 
 ment, and self-will, with an education chiefly 
 religious, and an aptness and ardor for power 
 and avarice. Young is wonderfully devised 
 for organizing an ignorant and solemn peo- 
 ple, and compelling them to be productive 
 and docile. 
 
 About everybody of ecclesiastical prom- 
 inence in the Church has several wives, and 
 such bear themselves with added dignity. 
 According to the number of the hens so grandi- 
 osely bears himself the cock, and I remarked 
 amongst the most polygamous elders, that 
 easy self-consciousness and grace of carriage 
 becoming what are truly " ladies' men." 
 
 THE FIRST CONVICTION 
 POLYGAMY. 
 
 FOR 
 
 Salt Lake, October 24, 1871. 
 
 To-day Thomas Hawkins, English, from 
 Birmingham, better known around Salt Lake 
 as "Tummus Awkeens," is to be sentenced 
 in the best elocution of which Judge Mc- 
 Kean is capable, to the Territorial Peniten- 
 tiary for a term of years. 
 
 The oflense of Thomas was somewhat 
 uncommon — committing adultery with his 
 wife, Elizabeth Mears, on complaint of his 
 wife Harriet Hawkins, better known as 
 Arriet Awkeens. He was also arraigned in 
 the indictment for the same oflTense with his 
 third and last wife, Sarah Davis, but no wit- 
 nesses were adduced as to the criminal act, 
 owing to the fact that Sarah quartered in the 
 upper part of the house, and there was no 
 way to observe what happened there, except 
 by looking down the chimney. Voices, it is 
 true, had been heard in that quarter, as of 
 people sitting up or otherwise, toward morn- 
 ing; but it was somewhat singular that, 
 although the first wife, complainant, had 
 lived under the polygamous roof for several 
 years, she swore that she had never beheld 
 the direct offense charged but once, even with 
 Mears, and then peeked in at a window on 
 purpose. 
 
 As you are all anxious to realize this 
 scene, I relate it below with all its atmospheric 
 and personal surroundings. 
 
 " Hear ye ! hear ye ! The United States 
 Court for the Third Judicial District of Utah 
 is now in session. Hats off"! Spectators 
 will get off" the jury bench ! " 
 
 These were the remarks of the Deputy 
 
THE MORMOIV TRIALS. 
 
 9 
 
 Marshal Furmaii, who is intermarried with 
 Mormons, but a prosecutor of the Saints, and 
 brother-in-law of Billy Appleby, United 
 States Commissioner in Bankruptcy. The 
 Mar.shal, M. T. Patrick, had gone to Southern 
 Utah to shoot snipe, prospect a mine, and 
 arrest a Mormon Bishop. 
 
 The Judge on the bencli, J. B. McKean, 
 at once cleared his throat and looked over 
 the bar and the audience. The Judge wore 
 a blue coat, and was trim as a bank presi- 
 dent. He sat upon a wooden chair behind 
 a deal table, raised half a foot above the 
 floor ; the Marshal stood behind a remnant 
 of dry-goods box in one corner, and the jury 
 sat upon two broken settees under a hot 
 stove-pipe and behind the stove. They were 
 intelligent, as usual with juries, and re- 
 sembled a parcel of baggage smashers warm- 
 ing themselves in a railroad depot between 
 ti'ains. The bar consisted of what appeared 
 to be a large keno party keeping tally on a 
 long pine table. When some law books 
 were brought in after a while, the bar wore 
 that unrecognizable look of religious services 
 about to be performed before the opening of 
 the game. 
 
 The audience sat upon six rows of dam- 
 aged settees, and a standing party formed 
 the back-ground, over whose heads was seen 
 a great barren, barn-like area of room in the 
 rear, filled with the debris of some former 
 fair. One chair on the right of the Judge 
 was deputed to witnesses. The entire fur- 
 niture of the place might have cost eleven 
 dollars at an auction where the bidding was 
 high. The room itself was the second story 
 of a lively stable, and a polygamous jackass 
 and several unrt'generate Lamanite mules in 
 2 
 
 the stalls beneath occasionally interrupted 
 the Judge with a bray of delight. The au- 
 dience was composed entirely of men, per- 
 fectly orderly and tolerably ragged, and 
 spitting surprisingly little tobacco juice ; al- 
 most all of them Mormons, with a stray 
 miner here and there mingled in, wearing a 
 revolver on his hip and a paper collar under 
 his long beard. 
 
 At the bar table, on one side sat Baskins 
 and Maxwell, the prosecutors, the former 
 frowsy, cool and red headed, the latter look- 
 ing as if he had overslept himself for a week, 
 and got up mad. On the opposite side sat 
 Tom Fitch, late member of Congress from 
 Nevada, a rotund cosmopolitan young man, 
 with a bright, black eye, a piece of red flan- 
 nel around his bad cold of a throat, and great 
 quantities of forensic eloquence wrapped 
 away under his mustache. Behind him was 
 A. Miner, the leading Mormon lawyer, 
 turned a trifle gray, and thinned down in 
 flesh very much since Judge McKean got on 
 the bench ; for the Judge uses Miner as the 
 scapegoat for the sins of the bar, and threat- 
 ens him with Camp Douglas and a fine every 
 time he has a toothache. Whenever Miner 
 gets up to apologize, the Judge makes him 
 sit down, and when he sits down the Judo-e 
 looks at him with his resinous black eyes as 
 if he had committed solely and alone the 
 Mountain Meadow massacre. Miner is the 
 Smallbones of the Court, and is fed on judi- 
 cial herrings. The other lawyers are all 
 Gentiles, except Hosea Stout and one Snow, 
 of the firm of Snovv & Hayne,-a Vermonter. 
 Yonder is a square-built man with cropped 
 hair, ex-Governor Mann, Fitch's partner ; 
 they divide the leading business here, al- 
 
10 
 
 THE MORMON TRIALS. 
 
 though resident only six months, with Hemp- 
 stead & Kirkpatrick, the former a slow, 
 serious military officer, and the latter a dark- 
 eyed Kentuckian. Keutuckian also is Mar- 
 shall, the Ancient Pistol of the bar, rare and 
 stupendous in speech, and chiefly admired 
 by his partner Carter, from Maryland. 
 Marshall once did a good deal of Brigham's 
 business, but, with the impartial eye of a 
 lawyer, he afterward sued Brigham for God- 
 by's fee, and lost the better client. Nothing 
 is a bereavement to Marshall, however, for, 
 as he frequently reminds the Court, the 
 jurisprudence of the country reaches its peri, 
 helion in the names of " Kent, Choate and 
 Marshall, of which latter I am a part." 
 Smith and Earl and De Wolf are about the 
 remainder of the Utah bar — a shrewd, clever 
 bevy of pioneer chaps, some of whom draw 
 large contingent fees from mining suits, 
 others encouraged to settle here by Brigham, 
 who does not like litigious emulation amongst 
 his own folks. He wants his good pleaders 
 to be preachers. 
 
 As Miner is the victim of the Court, the 
 Court in turn is the victim of Baskins, the 
 Prosecuting Attorney "pro tern. Baskins 
 comes from Ohio, and gets his red hot temper 
 from his hair. He is related to have shot 
 somebody in Ohio, and about six months 
 ago he scaled the ermine slopes of Judge 
 Hawley, one of the three luminaries of this 
 bench. The Judge, by an order, came bet- 
 ween Baskins and a fee. Baskins threw the 
 paper on the floor, and ground it with his 
 boot-heel into an inoffensive tobacco quid. 
 The Judge, who is slender, conscious, and 
 respects himself and his rulings, told Mr. 
 Baskins he would fine him. 
 
 " Go ahead with your fine ! " said Bas- 
 kins, " you're of no account." 
 
 The Judge fined Baskins one hundred 
 dollars, and sent him to Camp Douglas for 
 ten days. Baskins twitched the order out of 
 the Judge's hands and said that beine: an 
 " old granny " the Judge should forthwith be 
 kicked down stairs. At this Barkins threw 
 open the door to expedite the descent of the 
 venerable man, and rushed upon him, like 
 Damon upon Lucullus. The Marshal inter- 
 posed to save the author of so many learned 
 and long opinions, and Baskins went to the 
 Camp in custody. But as this notable Bench 
 in Utah never consult together, Strickland 
 agreeing with McKean in everything and 
 Hawley in nothing, Judge McKean let Bas- 
 kins out on habeas corpus in four days, and 
 Baskins disdained to pay his fine. It is Bas- 
 kins, therefore, who insists, as Prosecuting 
 Attorney, that the laws of the United States 
 and the Courts thereof must be respected in 
 Utah. 
 
 As for McKean's two Associate Judges, 
 they are off holding District Court at Provo 
 and Beaver, Hawley harassing some rural 
 justice of the peace w^ith his last printed 
 opinion, and Strickland playing billiards for 
 drinks, between sessions, with Bill Nye. But 
 Judge McKean himself does not use tobacco 
 nor a billiard cue in any form ; his sole re- 
 creation is to practice elocution and parlor 
 suavity in anticipation of his appearance in 
 the United States Senate from the State of 
 New York. A trim, apprehensive, not un- 
 sagacious man, with a great, burning mission 
 to exalt the horn of his favorite denomina- 
 tion upon the ruins of the Mormon Bishop- 
 rick, McKean is resolved in advance that 
 
THE MORMOK TRIALS. 
 
 11 
 
 everybody is guilty who can keep awake un- 
 der Orson Pratt's sermons. 
 
 There stand the guilty fold, without the 
 bar of the court — most of them look as if 
 they wanted a new razor and a square meal 
 — the Mormon rank and file. Grave and 
 listening, and so respectful as to irritate the 
 prosecuting attorneys very much (so that 
 they would like to make premeditated good 
 behavior a conspiracy punishable at law), 
 these Mormons, could they speak aloud, 
 would swell a chorus profuse and unintelli- 
 gible as on the eve of the miraculous Pente- 
 cost — Dane and Welshman, Norwegian and 
 Finn, Westphalian and Belgian, hard, nasal 
 Yankee, and wide-mouthed Northumbrian — 
 lads from the collieries of Newcastle, the 
 purlieus of London, and the mills of Brad- 
 ford, they look upon the United States in a 
 blue coat with a lead pencil in its hand as if 
 it were the Man of Sin, and combined under 
 the same baldish sconce the peculiarities of 
 Guy Fawkes and Judge Jeffreys, Simple 
 people in the main, who, with all their re- 
 gard to the command to increase and multi- 
 ply, feared the United States census takers 
 as partners in their persecution, and cut 
 down the returns of their population by 
 sheer shyness, from 130,000 to 86,000 odd. 
 Docile people, as well, though not without 
 the courage of the poor, so that when on the 
 late occasion of the great Methodist camp 
 meeting, Brigham said to them in the Taber- 
 nacle : " I want you all to go to this camp 
 meeting, and listen to what is said ! " they 
 filled it to over-flowing every day, but the 
 mourners' bench remained empty as a lion's 
 platter. And when, on one occasion only, 
 at some harangue upon polygamy, a mutter 
 
 arose over that great congregation, Brigham, 
 himself present, stood up and waved his 
 finger, and the complaint hushed to utter 
 peace. People, also, who dance and waltz 
 between religious benedictions, and yet can 
 listen four hours in ardent delight to dry 
 dissertations and discussions in their Taber- 
 nacle, which might make nature snore in her 
 processes. How infinite are the possibilities 
 of our nature when we reflect that these 
 grave, unrebellious people, the w^aifs and 
 findings of all lands, many of them dignified 
 in apparel and culture, and steadily ascend- 
 ing in the scale of comfort and possessions, 
 hold still with the tenacity of a moral pur- 
 pose to the loose and spreading life of poly- 
 gamy, preferring this fantastic reproduction 
 like the Banyan's branches to the straight 
 and peaceful unity of the European family. 
 I saw in the court a Jew, lineal descendant 
 of the old Patriarchs whom these Mormons 
 delight to exemplify. His dark, shining 
 eyes^ aquiline beak, and wavy coarseness of 
 hair made a strong contrast with those 
 Saxon and Scandinavian races, fair-haired, 
 and highly-colored around him. He had 
 marched down through two thousand years 
 of wandering to accord with the century and 
 Europe. And these Europeans had marched 
 back six thousand years to resume the civili- 
 zation the Jew had abandoned. What a 
 feast for skepticism is this. But whoever 
 looked closely could see the end of all this 
 near at hand, unless fanned by irritation to 
 fanaticism again. The weary faces, long 
 and hollow, told of responsibilities too 
 burdensome and of bodies overtaxed. The 
 bright lights which shine in the face of him 
 who submits to the life and customs ap- 
 
12 
 
 THE MORIflOX TRIALS. 
 
 proved by time and wisdom, were often 
 darkened here. From the windows of the 
 court, the rolling or serrated line of moun- 
 tains, enfolding a valley like the lawn of 
 Paradise, suggested for different men and 
 women, and a life bounded by fewer neces- 
 sities and wider opportunities for them all ; 
 a life consonant with the literatures of all 
 these people, consonant with Chiistian art 
 and promising a j)eriod of rest between 
 labor and death. Who can look at this 
 many-wedded manhood and envy it, or be- 
 lieve that its direction can be prolonged be- 
 yond the breaking of the darkness out of 
 which this Mormon wife comes, like the 
 feeble beam of the morning near at hand? 
 
 In a chair sat Mrs, Hawkins, a dark- 
 haired, black-eyed woman from Birmingham, 
 where she was converted to Mormonism 
 about thirty years ago, and married to 
 Hawkins, also a Mormon at the time, in an 
 English parish church. Mrs. Hawkins 
 w^ears a plain bonnet, a delaine dress, and 
 drops her H's all over the floor. She refers 
 to Hawkins as " my husband," and seems 
 thoroughly aroused to the necessity of cor- 
 recting him for the recreations of his maturer 
 age. In short, Mrs. Hawkins has two suits 
 against Thomas. This one is for adultery, 
 and the next will be for divorce. Mrs. 
 Hawkins is accompanied by her daughter, 
 Lizzie Hawkins, a timid, embarrassed girl of 
 about sixteen years, and while the mother is 
 a prompt and rather bright witness, the 
 daughter is measurably dumb. The daugh- 
 ter never saw anything wrong; she knew 
 Elizabeth Mears' children were her father's, 
 because they called him father, but she 
 never saw anything in the Mears and Davis 
 
 end of the house, because she never went 
 there except on a visit in daytime. 
 
 Thomas Hawkins looks like one who 
 might enjoy married life, and yet be a 
 rather mcivn husband. A square English 
 head, bulging in the big, high, dwarf's fore- 
 head, plastered straight aci'oss from ear to 
 ear Avith thin, long, yellow hair, which per- 
 mits half his pale head to stand naked in 
 front, and still be no bald-head ; a light-blue, 
 animal eye, which would pick out a woman 
 quickest in a landscape ; not an athletic 
 body, and that clad in light, worn clothes ; 
 silent, attentive, and at times uneasy, during 
 the trial — such is the meager hero of three 
 marriages, brought up seven years after date 
 to answer the charge of adultery. I have 
 understood that Hawkins stands in doubtful 
 odor among his church people for not equal- 
 izing himself more among his families, both 
 socially and financially. The common ex- 
 pression among the Mormons is — 
 
 "There's wrong on both sides in that 
 fomily ;" but the inevitable addenda is — 
 "just as in plenty of monogamous families," 
 
 Here is Mrs. Hawkins' testimony, in 
 part, showing that all is not tranquil in 
 those households, and that dissolution is pro- 
 ceeding of itself more rapidly than interfer- 
 ence can promote it: 
 
 Q. Did you ever have any conversation 
 with Thomas Hawkins on the subject of his 
 living with these women in the house 1 " 
 
 A. Yes, sir, 
 
 Q. What did hC say about if? 
 
 A. He said they were his wives. 
 
 Q. Did you ever have more than one 
 conversation ? 
 
 A. I have had many a thousand. 
 
THE MORMOIV TRIALi^. 
 
 13 
 
 Q. State their substance. 
 
 A. Well, in the first place, he allowed 
 he was doing religious duties, and he allowed 
 that he had got to live with some one else, 
 
 Q. Did he give you any reason why he 
 had to live with some person else ? 
 
 A. Well, no reason ; only he allowed 
 that he had got to live with some one else ! 
 That I had had my day, and he had got to 
 have some one else. 
 
 Q. Did you say you could consent to 
 that? 
 
 A. No sir, I did not, 
 
 Q. What did you say to him 1 
 
 A. I have told him that it was a damned 
 bad trick, and that I did not believe in any 
 such damned doctrine. 
 
 Q. Well, what did he say? What did 
 he do? 
 
 A. Well, it didn't matter. If I didn't 
 like it, I could do the other thing. He ap- 
 peared to feel very indifferent about it, and 
 1 suppose if I had sanctioned what he wanted 
 me to, and would have cleared out, that 
 would have suited him, I suppose. 
 
 Miner Smallbones), the Mormon lawyer : 
 You need not state what you suppose. State 
 ihe facts. 
 
 Witness : I am speaking the facts, I am 
 not to be insulted by you, Mr, Miner ! 
 
 At this point, when it appeared to be 
 coming out exactly how the inside of a 
 heavenly mansion was conducted, and how 
 objecting damsels were chastised, the law- 
 yers made objections, and we returned to 
 the matter of the adultery. 
 
 One other witness was called, the brother- 
 in-law of Hawkins, who flew off in high 
 dudgeon at the idea that a man's wife was 
 
 " anything else " but his wife. He couldn't 
 see any difference in the order of wives ; 'e 
 didn't know whether Mears was the second 
 or sixtieth wife ; it was none of 'w business, 
 &c. 
 
 The audience laughed and applauded 
 only once when Mrs. Hawkins testified that 
 her husband's lawyer came to her to solicit 
 a compromise, and said that unless she 
 settled, the lawyers would get all the prop- 
 erty. To tliis she replied that the lawyers 
 might as well have it as " 'is woman," 
 
 There seemed to be no feeling in the 
 town except regret at the wife's suit for 
 divorce, but a notion that the prosecution 
 for adultery was malicious, and set on by 
 the court and its favorite lawyers. 
 
 The oratory was mixed in the case. 
 Maxwell, who was admitted at his own 
 solicitation to assist Baskins in the prosecu- 
 tion, making the point against the Mormons 
 that in twenty-two years their Legislature 
 had never made a statute validating poly- 
 gamy even by inference. To this Muller, 
 the Mormon lawyer, replied that marr;age 
 was not a civil, but an ecclesiastical rite in 
 Utah, that polygamy was established prior 
 to the formation of any American govern- 
 ment here, and relied upon a clause of the 
 treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo, whereby the 
 newly annexed inhabitants were guaranteed 
 against interference with their religion The 
 speeches of Maxwell and Baskins were bold 
 and acrid, but the large Mormon audience 
 listened without a murmur. 
 
 The reliance of the prisoner and his 
 friends was upon Hon. Thomas Fitch, who 
 came into the case late, and made an address 
 which extorted admiration on every side, as 
 
14 
 
 THE ]lfOR]?IO]V TRIALS. 
 
 well for its frankness as its legal incision. 
 He is the best public orator and pleader 
 west of the Rocky Mountains since the 
 death of General Baker, and in the opening 
 of his address ho proclaimed himself an op- 
 ponent of polygamy on every ground, and 
 affirmed it to be a cruel and uncompensating 
 system of barbarism, whether indorsed by 
 former patriarchs or latter saints. 
 
 But the prisoner was on trial for adultery, 
 and not for polygamy, and under a statute 
 passed by a Territorial Legislature, three- 
 fourths of whom were polygamists, and 
 signed by Brigham Young himself, as 
 governor, nineteen years ago. This statute 
 fixes a penalty so severe as to show that the 
 adultery meant was that committed outside, 
 or in injury of the sort of marriage relation 
 acknowledged here, prescribing from three 
 hundred to one thousand dollars fine, and 
 from three to twenty years imprisonment. 
 To carry out its relentless purposes, this 
 court — which had announced itself as a 
 United States Court, and nothing else, and 
 had quashed all territorial acts as to Probate 
 Courts, selections of juiies, divorces, &c. — 
 now revives this obsolete statute, resumes 
 for this object only a territorial jurisdiction, 
 and punishes polygamy with the penalty of 
 adultery. 
 
 Mr. Fitch's argument was that, as the 
 Legislature had not defined adultery, the 
 jury had a right to interpret the meaning of 
 this statute according to the intent of the 
 Legislature — the intent constituting the gist 
 of the offense. The prisoner was clearly 
 unaware that his ofiense was adultery ac- 
 cording to any law enacted in Utah. The 
 conmiand, " Thou shalt not commit adult- 
 
 ery," was delivered to a polygamous people, 
 and engraved upon stone by the husband of 
 three wives. The same public opinion and 
 religious inculcation which enacted the 
 statute against adultery, married the prisoner 
 to his wives, and honored the children of 
 them equally. The rulings of the courts in 
 Utah, both probate and district, for twenty 
 years, had been in accordance with this 
 theory of marriage, and now, seven years 
 after committing the act charged with his 
 second wife, '• a rusty law is drawn from its 
 antique sheath," and made retroactive upon 
 this man. The polygamists on trial in the 
 person of the prisoner had left civilized 
 places and entered the desert, followed by 
 the women, to attest their belief in this dis- 
 pensation, and obey it out of the way of the 
 people. 
 
 Here the eloquent advocate touched the 
 audience to tears, and as he proceeded, an 
 audible " boo-hoo " went over the court- 
 room, two jury -men joining in the chorus, to 
 the great alarm of the judge and Baskins, 
 who feared that, unaware, some Mormons 
 might have been insinuated into that pack- 
 ing-box. When Mr. Fitch concluded, there 
 seemed a possibility, despite the clearness of 
 Mrs. Hawkins' evidence as to the cohabita- 
 tion between Hawkins and Mrs. H. No. 2, 
 that the jury might hang. 
 
 To make this impossible, Judge McKean 
 delivered a harangue to the jury answering 
 every point made by the defense. It was a 
 speech of three quarters of an hour, and 
 amounted to an exhoitation to convict. As 
 to the intent of the Territorial Legislature, 
 he said, that was no more to be conjectured 
 than that magna charia could be interpreted 
 
THE mORMON TRIALS. 
 
 15 
 
 away because King John, its grantor, was a 
 tyrant; a statute against gambling might be 
 similarly disproved because the enactors 
 were proven to play at chance. 
 
 The Mormon paper, the Herald, rendered 
 Judge McKean's charge and conduct of the 
 trial as follows, on the following morning : 
 
 " You have your duties, gentlemen, and 
 I have mine. My duty is to pick you out 
 and pack you in ; to fix the trial at such a 
 time as will be least convenient to the de- 
 fendant ; to exclude all evidence that may 
 help him, and to admit all evidence that 
 may hurt him ; to rule all points of law 
 against him ; to pick out from acts of Con- 
 gress and acts of the Utah Assembly those 
 laws which, combined, may convict him ; to 
 be first a United States Justice's Court, and 
 then a Territorial Justice's Court, and vice 
 versa, as the exigencies of the case may de- 
 mand ; to dramatize the case, and elocution- 
 ize my opinions ; to follow my instructions 
 from Rev. Dr. Newman, and avenge his de- 
 feat at the Tabernacle ; in short, gentlemen, 
 my duty is to secure a conviction." 
 
 Directed by this peremptory charge, the 
 jury found a verdict of guilty \n one hour, 
 and it was heard by the large audience, 
 standing with breathless eagerness and 
 silence. As this case came up on complaint 
 of a wife, and the testimony as to the second 
 cohabitation was clear, it was thought to be 
 the easiest case to obtain a conviction, and 
 made comparatively little excitement. The 
 streets of Salt Lake were quiet, as usual, and 
 no knots of people discussed the affair unless 
 in privacy. 
 
 The cases of Brigham Young, Wells, and 
 
 Cannon, are accompanied by no complaint 
 from any wife, and are regarded by the Mor- 
 mons as deliberate attempts to invite resist- 
 ance and inaugurate persecution. 
 
 About the close of the trial, the only dis- 
 turbance occurred between the reporter for 
 the anti-Mormon organ and a deputy mar- 
 shal. It was on the supposed occasion of 
 the administration of sentence, and, either to 
 express sympathy with the prisoner or to 
 find out what might be the penalty of such 
 wedlock, the room was filled with Mormon 
 women. Suddenly a man came up stairs 
 from the livery stable, and said that the 
 floor showed signs of coming down. At 
 this, the court was profoundly exercised. 
 The deputy marshal, under pretence of 
 regulating admissions, got near the door, 
 and just at this juncture, the Gentile reporter 
 strutted in in search of items. The marshal 
 gave him an item by tearing his coat off his 
 back, in the unfounded supposition that the 
 coat was not too rotten to pitch him down 
 stairs by it. Quantities of lead pencils and 
 free tickets to the theater strewed the court- 
 room in an instant. The reporter, to whom 
 a thousand yeais were but as a day, struck 
 the marshal, and they clinched and fell down 
 stairs, the marshal on top. The reporter 
 was handed over to the Mormon police, and 
 discharged that afternoon by a Mormon 
 judge, on the ground that there was no 
 breach of the peace committed outside of the 
 court-room. This excitement and the fact 
 that Judge McKean had not committed the 
 sentence to memory so as to render it effect- 
 ive, led to a postponement of Hawkins' 
 sentence. 
 
IG 
 
 THE MORMOX TRIALS. 
 
 THE FEDERAL ENEMIES OF THE 
 SAINTS. 
 
 Salt Lake City, October 23. 
 
 There arc now two places in Salt Lake 
 City of more superstitious consequence even 
 than Brigham Young's Lion House or Camp 
 Douiilas. These are the Wahsatch Club — the 
 
 a 
 
 headquarters of the anti-Mormon " Ring" — 
 and the United States District Court room, 
 over a livery stable. 
 
 Except for the good counsel prevailing 
 among the Mormons, and the powerful con- 
 trol Brigham Young has over these people, 
 the $70,000,000 of real and personal prop- 
 erty here, the accumulations of twenty-two 
 years, and the homesteads of one hundred 
 and thirty thousand people, might to-day 
 have been ashes and desert, and the suppo- 
 sitious mineral wealth in this territory would 
 have lain hidden in the mountain ores for 
 half a century. The Union Pacific Railroad, 
 as a separate incorporation with an indepen- 
 dent trade, would have been bankrupt or 
 worse. Our half-way house to the Pacific, 
 the only oasis of any capacity or longevity 
 in the Great American Desert, would have 
 relapsed to plains and benches of alkali. We 
 should have lost from Utah the only type of 
 human labor with the patience, frugality, 
 simplicity and directed industry to keep it 
 under development. , And we should have 
 expedited the extermination of polygamy at 
 the cost of more than $100,000,000 principal 
 money, by only about two or three years. 
 The Chief Justice of this territory, a wilder 
 fanatic than Orson Pratt or John Taylor, 
 would have achieved a reputation upon this 
 
 lamentable commercial transaction, and 
 might have assumed to run against Roscoe 
 Conkliug for the next vacant senatorship 
 from New York, whence he came. But 
 sound statesmanship, the common interest 
 which in the end surrounds and regulates 
 morals, our pride of empire and our jeal- 
 ousy of law, precedent and equity, would 
 have suffc'red in the catastrophe, and there 
 would have been a reaction, political and 
 historical, against the reckless actors in it. 
 
 For, according to the best information I 
 have been able to obtain, the Mormons, rank 
 and file, believing that neither law nor equity 
 were to be observed in dealing with them for 
 the future, had meditated a wholesale deser- 
 tion of their country and an occupation of 
 Mexican soil, where they had frequently 
 been invited, and where, with their arms, 
 discipline, cattle, and fortitude, they could 
 maintain themselves as victoriously as had 
 Texas under Houston and Crockett. 
 
 They were saved from this act of devo- 
 tion and despair by the abnegation of their 
 leaders and thinkers, men who had proved 
 their resources thrice before under worse 
 conditions of exodus. Brigham Young, the 
 tlieocrat of this church ; Daniel H. Wells, 
 Mayor of Salt Lake City, and George Q. 
 Cannon, an editor of influence and a man of 
 property and force, appeared before the 
 Coui t and gave bonds to stand trial on the 
 charge of lewd and lascivious conduct and 
 cohabitation with divers wom.en. At the 
 same time, the strong instinct for peace in 
 the Mormon counsels compelled one Thomas 
 Hawkins, an English member of the Church, 
 to submit to indictment, trial, and, if required, 
 punishment, on the ground of adultery with 
 
THE mORItlOIV TRIAI.S. 
 
 17 
 
 his later wives, which he has done with dig- 
 nity worthy a better cause, 
 
 I have seen the whole of this trial, being 
 present in Salt Lake City upon commercial 
 business, and, although on the occasion of 
 my last visit here, four months ago, I wrote 
 probably as severe strictures upon the 
 essence of this civilization, as any tourist, I 
 have found the Mormons anxious to encour- 
 age the slightest disposition to represent 
 them to the Eastern people, and without 
 resentment for expressions of opinion. 
 
 Near the Townsend House, the principal 
 hotel of Salt Lake, and a Mormon's property, 
 in a pleasant two-story adobe house of a gray 
 color, is a lounging place and mess-room 
 called the Wahsatch Club, denominated here 
 by three-fourths of the Gentiles as the "Jump- 
 ers' Club," in allusion to the tendency of the 
 judicial judges and their satellites to "jump" 
 or possess without right and by force the 
 neighboring valuable mining claims. 
 
 In this club meet by accident or design 
 the members of the Federal Administration 
 who are moving on the Mormon works, and 
 at the same time upon the substantial inter- 
 ests of Utah, As they have written them- 
 selves up copiously for the Eastern press, 
 they may not object to taking this current 
 and third-party opinion of their qualifica- 
 tions. I give them in the order of brains 
 and consequence. 
 
 1. Chief Justice of Utah, J. B. McKean, 
 of New York State ; an officer in the volun- 
 teer army during the war, and a prominent 
 Methodist, formerly, it is said, a preacher. 
 McKean came here upon a crusade against 
 polygamy, and his fair abilities and great 
 vanity have carried him through it thus far 
 3 
 
 with about equal flourish and fearlessness. 
 He is a wiry, medium-sized man, with a tall 
 baldish head, gray side-locks, and very black, 
 sallow eyes, at times resinous in color, like 
 tar-water. He looks, however, to be in the 
 prime of strength and will ; has never com- 
 municated with Brigham Young personally 
 since he arrived, and is absorbed in the pur- 
 pose of intimidating the Mormon Church or 
 breaking it up. His behavior on the bench 
 has been despotic and extra-judicial to the 
 last degree, and he has also been unfortunate 
 enough to compromise his reputation by min- 
 ing speculations which have come before his 
 court, and received influential consideration 
 there, 
 
 2, R. N. Baskins, the author of what is 
 called in Congress the " Cullom Bill," and 
 at present temporary Prosecuting Attorney 
 before McKean's Court ; a lean, lank, rather 
 dirty and frowsy, red-headed young man, but 
 a lawyer of shrewdness and coolness, and in- 
 flamed against Mormonism, He said, in a 
 speech before McKean last Friday, that if 
 Joseph Smith had been a eunuch he would 
 never have received the revelation on poly- 
 gamy. To this the Mormons retort that 
 Baskins is married to a woman for whom 
 he procured a divorce from a former hus- 
 band, &c. 
 
 3. George R. Maxwell, an ex-officer 
 from Michigan, with a game leg, a strong, 
 dissipated face, and Register of the Land 
 Office here ; an indomitable man, but ac- 
 cused of corruption, and a chronic runner 
 for Congress against delegate W. H. Hoop- 
 er ; thinks Congress is a vile body, because 
 it will not put Hooper out of Congress for 
 
18 
 
 THE mORmON TRIALS. 
 
 his creed, as promptly as Judge McKean 
 would put him off a jury. 
 
 4. J. H. Taggait, United States Asses- 
 sor ; a person who was bitten by a dog 
 some time ago, and charged the bite to Mor- 
 mon assassins. Imperfect, indeed doubtful 
 record in the army as surgeon, and chiefly 
 potential as a gadder and street gossip 
 against the Saints. 
 
 5. O. J. Hollister, United States Col- 
 lector ; uninteresting man, who married the 
 half sister of the Vice-President, and, al- 
 though a determined anti-Mormon, does not 
 agree with several of the Ring ; the same 
 is the case with several others ; all want to 
 be boss. Hollister deluges the Eastern 
 press, from Chicago to New York, with let- 
 ters of locums picked up at hearsay, and 
 hardly reliable enough for a comic j)aper. 
 
 6. Dennis T. Toohy, editor and late 
 partner with Hollister in the Corinne Re- 
 porter ; an Irishman, witty and abusive, and 
 incapable of working in harness. The Ring 
 tactics have generally been to combine the 
 Godbyites and the Gentiles in a "Liberal" 
 or anti-Brighain party ; but at a meeting of 
 the two sets some time ago, Toohy denounced 
 polygamy so violently that Godby and Eli 
 B. Kelsey, apostates but polygamists, rose 
 up and resented it. 
 
 7. Frank Kenyon, proprietor of the Re- 
 view, a paper which has superseded the Salt 
 Lake Tribune in irritating the Mormons ; a 
 Montana man, and with so little fortitude 
 that when the indictment of Brigham was 
 proposed, he sent his domestic treasures to 
 San Francisco. 
 
 8. C. M. Hawley, Associate Justice with 
 McKean, but not servile, like 0. F. Strick- 
 
 land, the other Judge. Hawley bores people 
 on the streets by reading his long opinions 
 to them. He nearly made O. P. Morion a 
 polygamist lately by reading to him opinions 
 the other way. 
 
 8-^. C. M. Hawley, jr., son of the afore- 
 said, a weakish, flop- whiskered, insubstantial 
 young man, who stood challenged at the polls 
 in Salt Lake recently, with too many horns 
 "into" him, and was arrested by the city 
 police and confined two hours ; he now has 
 a suit against the corporation for twenty -five 
 thousand dollars damages, and one of the 
 usual packed juries may award it. 
 
 9. George A. Black, Secretary of the Ter- 
 ritory, author of the proclamation against the 
 Fourth of July here. 
 
 10. George L. Woods, of Oregon, the 
 Governor ; a red-headed, gristly, large man, 
 of little mental ' heft,' Woods refused to 
 let the Mormon militia celebrate the Fourth 
 of July last year, and ordered, through Black, 
 General De Trobriand to turn out his re^u- 
 lar army garrison and fire on the Nauvoo 
 Legion if they disobeyed. De Trobriand, 
 who has a contempt for the Gentile Ring, 
 like all the regular army officers, answered : 
 
 " If I do this thing, there is to be no con- 
 fusion nor debate about it upon the actual 
 field. I shall parade my troops down to the 
 Mormon line ; the second order, in proper 
 succession, will be, ' Fire !' the last order 
 you must give." 
 
 Woods refused to take the responsibility, 
 and threatened to make General Grant re- 
 move De Trobriand. The latter told Woods 
 to go to the devil, and said it was an outrage, 
 anyway, to forbid the Mormons to celebrate 
 the Fourth, as they had been doing for tAventy 
 
THE MORMOK TRIALS. 
 
 19 
 
 years. De Trobriand was removed as soon 
 as Dr. Newman, the Methodist preacher, 
 could see Grant, and General Morrow was 
 ordered here. 
 
 This is about all the Ring, except Strick- 
 land, a Michigander on the bench; William 
 Appleby, the Register in Bankruptcy, and 
 R. H. Robertson, Strickland's law partner, 
 seeking practice under the protection of the 
 courts. 
 
 These people represent the average char- 
 acter of Territorial officers; political adven- 
 turers, for the most part, paid the low sti- 
 pends allowed in the wisdom of the Federal 
 Government, and possessing in common only 
 an intense feeling, begotten of conviction and 
 interest, against every feature of the Mormon 
 Church. Polygamy is the objective feature, 
 but the city and Territory completely out of 
 debt and both with plethoric treasuries, the 
 great cooperative store paying two per cent, 
 a month and yet unincorporated, and the 
 value of Salt Lake City property, for which 
 a title has never yet been given, appear to 
 offer wonderful opportunities for plunder in 
 case an outbreak can be devised. Utah, 
 although the richest and most populous Ter- 
 ritory in the Union, really affords less politi- 
 cal pap than any other. But the mining 
 enthusiasm, the large trade of Salt Lake, the 
 elasticity of real estate here, and the large 
 acquisitions of Brigham Young and others 
 in the church, give lawyers in favor with 
 the United States Courts unusual chances to 
 thrive, and the anti-Mormon lawyers and 
 the Court make a close society — so close 
 that some time ago Justice McKean in the 
 case of the Velocipede Mine kept the whole 
 bar of Salt Lake from appearing against his 
 
 interest, and lawyers had to be sent for from 
 Nevada. 
 
 In this Ring McKean is the organizing 
 spirit, and Baskins, whom McKean made 
 Prosecutor, is the executive arm. The 
 Court has lost its superstition in the Ter- 
 ritory, and in criminal cases affecting Mor- 
 mons the Saints say that their only chance 
 is to fee the Ring lawyers, while the public 
 morals of Salt Lake, which, up to two years 
 ago, barring polygamy, had extorted the 
 admiration of travelers, are nearly as bad 
 as elsewhere in Nevada or Idaho. The 
 Court has given moral support to unlicensed 
 liquor dealers, and encouraged them to resist 
 paying the hitherto almost prohibitory rates 
 of license. One Engelbrecht, having set the 
 license law at defiance, recently had his stock 
 destroyed by Mayor Wells' police, and he 
 brought suit against the city and got sixty 
 thousand dolhirs damages. W. S. Godby, 
 leader of the Godbyites, but a liquor dealer 
 and a polygamist, also applied to Judge 
 KcKean for an injunction to restrain the 
 city from suing him for violating the license 
 law. When McKean was applied to for a 
 dissolution of the injunction, he put it in his 
 pocket, saying he would hold it under advise- 
 ment, while meantime Godby goes on selling 
 liquor. Prostitution, taking encouragement 
 from these cases, has quadrupled in Salt 
 Lake, every bagnio being composed of Gen- 
 tile women. A day or two ago a street- 
 walker was arrested for drunkenness and 
 swearing, but some of her friends, the poker 
 players at the Wahsacht Club, prompted her 
 to sue the city for ten thousand dollars. 
 
 In short, the Officeholders' Ring, led by 
 the United States Court, and supported by 
 
20 
 
 THE ITIORMO^ TRIALS. 
 
 the liquor and lewd interests, and all who 
 want to throw off city taxation, is engaged 
 in an unequal grapple with the municipal 
 corporation. The East is liberally supplied 
 with inflammatory correspondence, charging 
 mutiny upon the Mormons, in despite of the 
 fact that Brigham Young has submitted to 
 arrest and appeared, unattended, in comt. 
 The garrison has been increased to about 
 1,200 men, unwilling allies of the Ring. A 
 large amount of capital invested in the rich 
 argentiferous galena mines has been diverted 
 to Nevada, Idaho, and Montana ; and other 
 foreign capital, apprehensive of a war, has 
 declined to come here. Brigham Young, 
 with whom the United States has dealt upon 
 terms of encouragement in a hundred ways 
 while as much of a polygamist as now — 
 using him to build telegraph and railw^ays, 
 to furnish supplies, to repress Indians, and 
 carry mails — and which appointed him first 
 Governor of Utah and continued him in the 
 place for seven years, — this old man, at 
 seventy years of age, is suddenly admon- 
 ished that he is a criminal, and put on trial 
 for offenses committed twenty years ago. 
 
 And yet, it is capable of demonstration 
 that polygamous marriages have declined 
 between September 1, 1869, and September 
 1, 1871, in the remarkable proportion of one 
 hundred to six. That is, the months of 1869 
 and the corresponding ones of 1871, prior to 
 September, show the decrease, and this is 
 due to public opinion, to Gentile influx, to 
 commercial intercourse, the awakened con- 
 sciousness of the women, and the cost of 
 keeping them. The preposterousness of 
 polygamy dooms it in the event of peaceful 
 competition with monogamy. The Mormon 
 
 Church itself is modifying its whole internal 
 structure, and I have heard it said that 
 whereas two years ago Brigham Young 
 could have emigrated to Mexico with his 
 entire membership, he could "now carry with 
 him only three-fourths, and in another year 
 could not persuade one-fourth to go. 
 
 Nothing can rally together from their 
 centrifugal and gainful individual pursuits 
 these Mormon people — who cast twenty- 
 five thousand votes, and outnumber in arms- 
 bearing men the American regular army — 
 except the aggressive attitude of the Federal 
 State toward them. Fifteen years ago Brig- 
 ham Young integrated the church, and kept 
 it from crumbling by feigning a persecution, 
 and inventing the Utah war. This time the 
 cry of persecution is not a feint. To try 
 the representatives of twenty-two thousand 
 votes, a jury is picked by the United States 
 Marshal from one-fourth of two thousand 
 Gentiles ; because less than one-fourth of 
 the Gentiles living here indorse the action 
 of the Court. No wife, neighbor or ac- 
 quaintance of Brigham Young has made 
 any complaint against him. The Court 
 which is to try him packs a grand jury to 
 do the work of inquisition, a petit jury to 
 try him, and comes down itself amongst the 
 lawyers to prosecute him. This is persecu- 
 tion, because there is no law for it. The 
 Court enacts the Cullom Bill, which never 
 passed Congress, and prosecutes vnider it by 
 the very man who wrote it. 
 
 The present movement against Brigham 
 Young at one time comprised a large por- 
 tion of the Gentile and apostate population 
 here, but nearly all these have fallen away, 
 and the King is left nearly alone, with 
 
THE inORmOX TRIALS. 
 
 21 
 
 scarcely enough citizen material to get suf- 
 ficient juries from it. The mines are ran- 
 sacked to find people partial or ignorant 
 enough to find verdicts according to the 
 charging of the Court, and now the only 
 reply the Ring makes to the allegation that 
 they are without followers, is that the timid 
 property-holders have fallen away from 
 them. The Ring people, however, possess 
 no property, unless "jumped" or prospec- 
 tive, and several of them are merely waiting 
 for the spoils of violence. 
 
 Bishop Tuttle, the Episcopal functionary 
 here, to whom Brigham Young gave a lib- 
 eral subscription for the Episcopal Chapel, 
 as he gave 1500 to the new Catholic Church, 
 is said to deprecate the precipitate action of 
 the Court, as does Father Welsh, the priest. 
 Dr. Fuller, ex-Republican acting Governor 
 here ; ex-Secretary and Governor S. A. 
 Mann ; Major Hempstead, District Attor- 
 ney here for eight years, and even General 
 Connor, an old enemy of Brigham Young, 
 expresses contempt for these sensational 
 court processes. Connor has just written a 
 letter to Hempstead, saying that this action 
 was altogether unfortunate as a repressory 
 measure. The late Chief Justice, Charles 
 C. Wilson, is even more pronounced in his 
 condemnation of the Court. I. C. Bateman 
 and D. E. Buell, as well as the Walkers, 
 the latter the leading merchants of Salt 
 Lake apostates, and the former two great 
 mining capitalists, are said to be of the 
 same mind. Joseph Gordon, late Secretary 
 to Governor Latham, calls the Court hard 
 names. The large law firms are nearly all 
 in like attitude. Every Representative and 
 Senator west of the Rocky Mountains, in- 
 
 cluding. Cole, Williams, Corbett, Nye, 
 Stewart, Sargent, and other Republicans, 
 stand opposed to any measure which shall 
 sacrifice Utah to blind bigotry without 
 statesmanship. Mrs. Lippincott (Grace 
 Greenwood), who is here, agrees with me 
 in our mutual dislike of polygamy and of 
 these "hot gospelers" and "notoriety hunt- 
 ers," who will not let it die ignobly, but 
 must irritate it to renewed existence. 
 
 The original movement against the Mor- 
 mons, through which the Salt Lake Tribune 
 was started — the first paper here to attack 
 the Church — began for quite a different in- 
 terest. The valuable Emma Mine was then 
 in litigation, and a decision of Judge McKean 
 confirmed the Walker Brothers and others 
 in the occupation and use of it, as against 
 the claim of James E. Lyon, of Colorado. 
 The Walkers occupied the mine jointly with 
 W. M. Hussey, President of the opposition 
 bank of Salt Lake, the Selovers, capitalists 
 of New York, and Tranor W. Park, of Ver- 
 mont, late financial agent of the John C. 
 Fremont ring and candidate for the United 
 States Senate from California. None of 
 these wished to consummate the arrest of 
 Brigham Young, or provoke any collision or 
 debate in Utah, but they were forced to sup- 
 port McKean because his decision confirmed 
 them in the mine. Meantime, Lyon and his 
 attorneys, Stewart, Hempstead, Curtis J. 
 Hillyer, and others, preferred charges against 
 McKean, for his corrupt transaction in the 
 Velocipede Mine, wishing to get him off the 
 bench in the Emma Mine case. The Walkers 
 and Hussey — to whom McKean was neces- 
 sary — started the newspaper to sustain him, 
 and McKean himself alleged that the Mor- 
 
22 
 
 THE HORHON TRIALS. 
 
 mons were behind the effort to remove him. 
 Thus the Emma. Mine quarrel gave the anti- 
 Mcirmon ring a temporary appearance of 
 power which they no longer retain ; for by a 
 compromise the mine has passed out of the 
 hands of the court, and Benjamin Curtis, of 
 Boston, has been made arbitrator between the 
 claimants, while the anti-Lyon interest has 
 relapsed to conservatism. So true is this 
 that the Salt Lake Tribune has ceased to be 
 the prominent ring organ, and they have 
 started the Review, to keep up the appear- 
 ance of a quarrel here. 
 
 While the eftbrt was l)eing made to re- 
 move McKean, the Lyon interest called upon 
 Brigham Young to give it aid through his 
 great, but silent, influence in Eastern circles. 
 
 " No," replied Brigham ; " whoever will 
 be sent here in his place will j^roceed to rob 
 and plunder us in the same way. I have 
 no choice between thieves, and can't help 
 you." 
 
 When the Emma Mine litigation, the un- 
 conscious entering wedge to Mormonism, 
 was pending, Tranor W. Park, who had 
 lived in Nevado, and knew the desperate 
 means often resorted to there to get ante- 
 judicial possession of a valuable mine, be- 
 came apprehensive that Lyon and his lawyers 
 would import roughs from Nevada and seize 
 the mine by force. He cozzened Governor 
 AVoods, therefore, for the sake of the mili- 
 tary which Woods controlled, with the gift 
 of the presidency of a tunnel company, and 
 thus, perhaps, it happens that the Governor 
 is able to swear in one of his stock transac- 
 tions, that he is now worth fifty thousand 
 dollars — either a large oath or a large com- 
 mercial increase in a short while. 
 
 You can see from these data how much 
 more than the Mormon question there is 
 out here in Utah, and all the adventurers se- 
 crete themselves behind the halloo of "po- 
 lygamy." No wonder the Mormons are 
 afraid of our judicial morals more than our 
 justice. 
 
 During the Emma Mine controversy it 
 is alleged that Judge McKean was afraid to 
 put Judge Hawley, his associate, upon the 
 bench in the Velocipede case for fear Haw- 
 ley would grant an injunction upon the Park 
 interest working the Emma Mine. 
 
 The Velocipede case has been already 
 ventilated, and Senator Stewart denounced 
 the Court's transactions in it publicly in the 
 streets of Salt Lake. Here is the charge : 
 
 Judge Strickland, associate and crony of 
 McKean, "jumped" amine in Ophir Canon. 
 Strickland sold his interest to McKean, who 
 organized a company called " The Silver 
 Shield," of which he was made President. 
 McKean retained Baskins, the Prosecutor of 
 Brigam Young, his attorney, and by visiting 
 all the lawyei's practicing at McKean's Bar, 
 it was extorted from them that they would 
 not take the case against him. McKean then 
 commenced suit, in his own court, against 
 the original locators of the Velocipede Mine, 
 and called Judge StriQkland to sit in his 
 place. 
 
 The defendants declined to try the case 
 in the District Court before Strickland, on 
 the ground that he had sold McKean his in- 
 terest, and was therefore as much interested 
 in the case as McKean himself They ap- 
 pealed to McKean as Supreme Justice of the 
 Territory, to allow Hawley, the alternate 
 Justice, and who was disinterested, to try 
 
THE mORjnOBf TRIALS. 
 
 23 
 
 the issue. This McKean refused to do ; the 
 case stuck fast in the courts ; and McKean's 
 company, the " Silver Shield," continue to 
 draw ore from the Velocipede Mine, while 
 Theodore Tracy, of Wells, Fargo & Co., and 
 the Velocipede people, abuse McKean and 
 Stinckland without stint, and call them 
 names not polite enough to put in this cor- 
 respondence. 
 
 If the interior of a Mormon family is as 
 tempestuous as a Gentile's out-of-doors, the 
 life must be worse than seductive. 
 
 The three men indicted by I'icKean's and 
 Baskin's grand jury (the jury picked by 
 Marshal M. T. Patrick, who has little or no 
 sympathy with the court he must obey), 
 Young, Wells and Cannon, are the vitality of 
 the Mormon Church. Young is the organ- 
 izer of the industry of Utah, and the ablest 
 executive spirit west of the Rocky Moun- 
 tains. His power is in his will, his Yankee 
 materialism, and his position, now so long 
 maintained as to be traditional with his 
 people. They are proud of him, of his hale 
 old age, fearlessness, sagacious enterprises, 
 attention to their wants, and high rank 
 amongst the great men of the time. He 
 has brought the mass of them out of Eng- 
 lish, Danish and Swedish beggary, to a coun- 
 try of land, fruit, and scenery. He can put 
 ten thousand men to work any day on his 
 three railways, for their daily board, paying 
 them wages in stock, and he needs no land 
 grant or bonded indorsement. His enter- 
 prises generally pay speedy dividends. His 
 tithing system brings out immigrants, who 
 in time return the passage-money to the 
 Church, and it I'eappears in large systems of 
 mechanism and traffic. He has built five 
 
 hundred miles of the Deseret telegraph line, 
 connecting all his settlements fi'om St. 
 George, where the Mormons cultivate cot- 
 ton and mill it ; past Provo, where a gran- 
 ite woolen mill, seven stories high, costing 
 two hundred thousand dollars, and adapted 
 to five hundred hands, is about to move its 
 infinite spindles ; up to Brigham city, where 
 his narrow-gauge road is progressing toward 
 Idaho. He has built sixty miles of copera- 
 tive railway in Utah, one hundi'ed and fifty 
 miles of the Union Pacific Railroad, and 
 many hundred miles of the Western Union 
 Telegraph. There is no ecclesiastic in the 
 Methodist or any other American church, 
 with a tithe of his versatile and vigorous ad- 
 ministrative ability. Of his sixty odd chil- 
 dren, many are married to Gentiles, and all 
 are endowed never with money, but with oc- 
 cupation. Brigham Young is still a credulous, 
 sincere convert to the Mormon Church, and 
 he has never pretended, himself, to receive a 
 revelation. The church has made him, as 
 well as he has dignified it ; for he was only 
 a painter and carpenter, with a serious na- 
 ture, and an inclination for the Methodist 
 Church, when the gospel of Joseph Smith 
 overtook him, and drew him in. The 
 prophet himself predicted a career for Brig- 
 ham, and sent him abroad on a mission. 
 Givciu thus a consequence and experience 
 which old and beaten faiths would not have 
 proffered, Brigham Young was ten years a 
 traveling preacher and agent, and the doc- 
 trine of polygamy was no part of his sug- 
 gestion. He accepted it as he did every 
 other declaration of Josej^h Smith; and the 
 wife of his youth was dead before he ever 
 saw the prophet. To this day, in all matters 
 
24 
 
 THE mORIUOlV TRIALS. 
 
 of mental erudition, logical analysis, and 
 capacity to discover the illiteracy and mere 
 cunning of Smith's writings, Brighani Young 
 is grossly ignorant. As a theologian, he is 
 only an exhorter and moralist. His life for 
 all great ends began, not with education, but 
 with a full superstitious conviction and entire 
 allegiance to the Mormon Church. The 
 mysteries of his fiiith he has never ventured 
 to question, nor has he ever, with a learned 
 man's skepticism, re-examined his creed. 
 Such characters are common enough in other 
 churches why not possible with this man 
 wliose life in all but polygamy has been ab- 
 stemious, ardent and powerful, and who, con- 
 sidering his want of education, is, perhajjs, 
 the greatest living instance of human de- 
 velopment without advantages? 
 
 Wells, the Mayor of Salt Lake, is a man 
 of willing administration, entirely faithful to 
 Young, in nothing else great, and he lias a 
 disagreeable cock-eye, but he is a diligent 
 Mayor, and Salt Lake city is in much his 
 creation. 
 
 Geo. Q. Cannon is one of the most intel- 
 ligent Mormons, an Englishman and a good 
 writer; outside of his family he is a pure 
 man. 
 
 These three are selected for indictment 
 upon the complaint of nobody but a grand 
 jury picked especially with this object. 
 
 Bearing in mind these natures, strong 
 men but zealous of forty years' standing (for 
 Brigham was converted in 1832), you may 
 imagine the situation when the indictment 
 was served upon them. 
 
 There were gathered together in the Lion 
 House Brigham's chief counselors : old John 
 Taylor, who stood by Joe Smith when he 
 
 was shot in Carthage jail and was himself 
 wounded, and would rather take his chances 
 in the open air than go to a Gentile jail again ; 
 a tall, good-looking, severe man with gray 
 hair. 
 
 There was Geoi-ge A. Smith, cousin to 
 Joseph, and, next to Young, the highest man 
 in the church, also a witness of the sack of 
 Nauvoo, a polygamist, but with few wives— 
 ft fat, aged, good-humored and rather weak 
 Saint. 
 
 There was Orson Pratt, the chief theo- 
 logian and expounder, whose brother. Par- 
 ley Pratt, was shot dead by the Gentiles — a 
 venerable-looking. Mosaic sort of man, with 
 flaming board, and large, introspective eyes, 
 a Greek student, and a sort of Mormon 
 Matthew Henry. The natty and flowery 
 Dr. Newman, of Washington, who came out 
 here with six Hebrew roots carefully com- 
 mitted to memory, expecting to demolish 
 Orson with them, found the old fellow to be 
 capable of t:ilking Hebrew with Moses or 
 Daniel. 
 
 There was Joseph Young, President of 
 the Seventies, a lean face and low forehead, 
 with a mouth like Abraham Lincoln's — elder 
 brother of Brigham Young. 
 
 These and others, baked dry in the fur- 
 nace of old Mormon dangers which they 
 now account their glory, gave counsel to 
 Brigham Young as to his duty. Almost 
 unanimously they urged that he must nev^er 
 give himself up : the people would rise if he 
 were to be convicted, whether he, forbade 
 them or no. Their counsel was to cut the 
 irrigating ditches, burn every Mormon set- 
 tlement in the Territory, leave the valley of 
 Salt Lake in desolation, and march across 
 
THE MORHO^ TRIALS. 
 
 25 
 
 Ai-izona with their herds and portables to 
 Mexican soil ; these were their own, and 
 they had a right to annihilate the property 
 they had created. 
 
 Brighani Young, himself in the condition 
 of an old lion, not uncertain that his prowess 
 was now a part of his nature and religion, 
 urged that he was promised safe conduct and 
 fair treatment. 
 
 To this old John Taylor retorted : 
 
 " So was Joseph ! I saw the safe treat- 
 ment they gave him in jail !' 
 
 There was a genei-al exclamation of deep 
 feeling and cry of perfidy at this, — and I am 
 writing no fancy sketch, but the statement of 
 two attorneys who were present. Biigham 
 himself was deeply moved. Perhaps the 
 recollection of his more youthful Captaincy 
 of the Mormon exodus across the alkali 
 plains inspired him with enthusiasm. To 
 this urgent statement of the Gentiles that he 
 could not hold out a week against the United 
 States, the old man retorted with a strange, 
 almost childish confidence, that if he were 
 disposed to resist, the ally of Moses, of 
 Gideon, and of David, would appear upon 
 his side. 
 
 Then, after a minute, Brigham closed his 
 great square mouth and jaw, and said 
 calmly : 
 
 " God is in courts as well as in battles and 
 marches. There will be no resistance. I 
 shall obey the summons," 
 
 In due time he dismounted from his buggy 
 before the little old squalid stone stable 
 whore the United States Court meets, 
 climbed the creaky outside stairs, and at his 
 colossal, venerable appearance, the whole 
 Court unconsciously arose, bar and audience. 
 
 He was the overshadowing presence there, 
 and when he answ^ered " Not guilty," Judge 
 McKean's elocution flew out of his head and 
 he forgot, temporarily, to be dramatic. 
 
 INTERVIEW WITH THE MAYOR OF 
 SALT LAKE. 
 
 Salt Lake City, October 25, 1871. 
 
 Mr. Hiram B. Clawson, son in-law of 
 Brigham Young, and Superintendent of the 
 great co-operative store at Salt Lake, said to 
 me last night : 
 
 " D,- H. Wells, a member of the first 
 Presidency in our church, and the Mayor of 
 Salt Lake City, wishes to state to you the 
 distress under which we labor about our 
 titles to property here. We have inhabited 
 this place twenty-two years. Almost every 
 other town in the territory has obtained its 
 patents under the municipal town site act. 
 But we, the oldest settlement in Utah, al- 
 though Congress and the General Land 
 Office have behaved with prompt liberality 
 toward us, are so bullied and injured by 
 Maxwell, the Land Ptegister here, and the 
 rest of these local adventurers, that we con- 
 tinue in only possessory rights, and we are 
 annoyed by the entertainment at Maxwell's 
 hands of every description of impudent and 
 fraudulent claim. The Associate Press 
 Agent here, one Sawyer, is under the 
 thumb of the ring, and we have no means to 
 communicate with our fellow citizens in the 
 East." 
 
 "Do you suppose General Wells will 
 talk upon other matters if I listen to him on 
 this subject?" 
 
26 
 
 THE IfIORl»IOX TRIAI^S. 
 
 "Yes. Anything legitimate. He is a 
 biigboar to some people who don't know 
 him, but you will find him, on contact, to be 
 a simple, sincere, agreeable man, like any 
 respectable American." 
 
 Soon afterward this celebrated Mormon 
 warrior, the right-bower of Brigham Young, 
 the Lieutenant General of the great Nauvoo 
 Legion, numbering five thousand men, the 
 commander of the Utah forces in the Sidney 
 Johnston war, and the Fouchet of Salt Lake 
 City, and terror of the criminals there, was 
 ushered into my presence. 
 
 I beheld a tall, long-nosed, sharp-browed 
 man, with gray hair, a tuft of gray whiskers 
 on his chin and jaws, a bluish pair of eyes, 
 one of them oblique and not prepossessing, 
 and a bent back, the result of age and unre- 
 lieved labor. He would have been several 
 inches over six feet high had he not stooped, 
 but eminent service in the Mormon Church 
 is of almost monastic rigor upon one so dis- 
 tinguished, and this old man had a way of 
 winking which suggested eyes and head 
 worn out in the Secretaryship of that 
 mighty energy, "Uncle Brigham," while his 
 clothing was poor and worn, and he talked 
 with gentleness, almost like meekness. The 
 Mormons have admonished me that, al- 
 though he is a natural fire-eater and a mi i- 
 tary commander by instinct, he has latterly 
 been a uniform counselor for peace and sub- 
 mission, and has helped to sway Brigham 
 Young to wise advices. 
 
 As I never "interview" people off their 
 guard, I took up a quire of paper and a pen, 
 and made notes as the answers came to my 
 questions. 
 
 The old man sat across the table, and his 
 
 voice was seldom pitched higher than if he 
 had talked to himself. 
 
 " My errand to you," began this gnarled 
 old Mormon, — who was reared in St. Law- 
 rence County, New York, and is an Ameri- 
 can typically, — " My errand is to relate to 
 you the embarrassing — the needlessly embar- 
 rassing condition of our titles here. 
 
 " I am the Mayor of Salt Lake, and, as 
 this was the first town settled in the Terj-i- 
 torry, I had an ambition to see it entered 
 first among the town sites, according to gen- 
 eral law. I made application, even before 
 there was a Land Office opened at Denver, 
 accoi'ding to the prescriptions of the law of 
 1867, and followed it up respectfully and 
 solicitously, when, in July, 1869, the Land 
 Office was opened at Salt Lake. 
 
 " It is no fault of the United States Gov- 
 ernment that we are not now peacefully pos- 
 sessing the titles to the ground we have 
 redeemed, and which Congress wishes us to 
 retain. It is the fault of the unrelenting 
 Land Eegister here, Maxwell, who has enter- 
 tained and abetted every petty and malicious 
 claim contesting our right to the site, and 
 who hinders the entry of our city apparently 
 with the object of being bought off or of dis- 
 couraging us, or even of robbing us of it." 
 
 " How much do you claim as the proper 
 area of Salt Lake City, General Wells'?" 
 
 " About five thousand seven hundred 
 acres, sufficient to give us water front on the 
 Jordan and control of the irrigating reser- 
 voirs. We had laid out the city with an 
 eye to coolness, breathing valves, wide 
 streets and plats for recreations. The law 
 is general upon the question of municipal 
 sites. It gives three hundred and twenty 
 
THE MORMON TRIALS. 
 
 27 
 
 acres to every one hundred people in a 
 town; a town of five thousand people re- 
 ceives* four sections of the public lands. 
 Salt Lalce had grown so fiir beyond all pre- 
 cedents that we had to get a special relief 
 bill passed, applying to our city, and we 
 took a census for the purpose. The Land 
 Office at Washington recommended and 
 Congress promptly passed the special bill, 
 under the terms of which we added to our 
 original chart other essential bits of ground. 
 
 " What I wish to make plain to you is 
 this : the nasty pretexts by which we are re- 
 tarded in the matter of our entiy ! " 
 
 " Give me the names of all the claims 
 which Maxwell has entertained against the 
 city." 
 
 " Well, there are the Robinson, Slosson, 
 Williamson and Orr cases. Robinson was a 
 retired Surgeon of the Army, who kept a 
 billiard saloon, and was a sporting man here. 
 He jumped the Warm Springs property, 
 our public bath-house on the outskirts of the 
 town, with eighty acres of environing land, 
 although we had walled up the spot, dammed 
 the warm stream, fenced the inclosure, and 
 used it so long under municipal regulations 
 that the pump-cylinder with which we tubed 
 the spring had rotted away. Robinson put 
 a tent and a guard by the spring, and built a 
 fence within our fence — a most impudent at- 
 tempt to jump our property. We removed 
 his obstructions, and he embarrassed us at 
 law until his death, when his widow con- 
 tinued the suit, and the land agent actually 
 permitted her to make a cash entry of the 
 place. Very differently did the Washington 
 authorities behave. The Commissioner of 
 the Land Office decided without hesitation in 
 
 our favor, and the Secretary of the Interior 
 confirmed it." 
 
 " What was the Slosson claim 1 " 
 " Slosson was a fellow who first rented a 
 quarter section of ground from the city on 
 the road leading to Camp Douglas^ and 
 when he undertook to keep a rum-shop on 
 it in violation of law, we ejected him. He 
 was then abetted by this Maxwell in a bare- 
 fiiced attempt to claim it and enter it; but 
 Maxwell's decision was reversed by the 
 heads of Department at Washington. 
 
 " The other two claims are even more 
 preposterous, yet they are received and con- 
 sidered, and instead of disposing of them, 
 Maxwell spends his time acting as volunteer 
 counsel against us in criminal cases before 
 the United States Court. Williamson 
 jumped a bit of ground, claiming the pre- 
 emption laws, and put a shanty upon it. It 
 was a spot we had long previously reserved 
 for a parade ground. J. M. Orr, a lawyer 
 here, filed also Chippewa scrip for eighty 
 acres between Ensign Park and Arsenal 
 Hill, half-a-mile from the heart of the city. 
 Now scrip can only take up land for agricul- 
 tural purposes, and this claim is impudent 
 beyond degree ; but this Land Register en- 
 tertains it, refuses to decide it, and so keeps 
 back our entry. We are nearly, or quite 
 twenty thousand people ; our city is as old 
 as many great towns in the Mississippi Val- 
 ley ; but here men are allowed to pre-empt 
 farms right in the midst of us as if they 
 meant to plow us under." 
 
 " What should I suggest, General Wells?" 
 " W hy, the General Land Office ought to 
 instruct this devilish Maxwell not to enter- 
 tain these paltry claims, each of which is a 
 
28 
 
 THE IflORmtON TRIALS. 
 
 reproduction of claims already thrown out. 
 The Government means to encourage the 
 formation and building of towns, but this 
 agent vetoes the law in the case of the larg- 
 est town ever established on the public 
 lands." 
 
 [Here General Wells left me and went 
 over to the City ITall, returning in a few 
 minutes with copies of the Land Office deci- 
 sions in the two cases decided, signed by 
 Willis Drumniond and affirmed by the Sec- 
 retary of the Interior. Tiiese decisions stale 
 that "parties taking up land in the environs 
 of town sites like Salt Lake City must take 
 the risk of the lands falling within the town 
 site," and that " where churches, school- 
 houses, public buildings and places of trade 
 and commerce are established in the form of 
 a town, the land is already selected and held 
 in reserve under the act, and cannot be in- 
 fringed upon."] 
 
 Said General Wells : " We have no com- 
 plaint to make of Congress or the Land 
 Office in respect of our rights under the act. 
 They have treated us well." 
 
 " As Mayor of the city. General Wells, 
 do you meet with similar troubles in your mu- 
 nicipal i-elations with the Federal Courts'?" 
 
 " Yes. In the estimation of the Chief 
 Justice of that Court there is but one crime 
 in the world, and that is polygamy. There 
 is but one set of criminals, and they are 
 Mormons. He has mustered around him 
 all the other vices, and adopted them as 
 allies to move upon our one ofTense. Rum, 
 prostitution, rapacity, incivility — these are 
 the adherents of the Supreme Court of Utah 
 in its holy war upon our marriage relation. 
 The Court entertains every complaint made 
 
 against us. It gives Godby an injunction 
 forbidding us to sue him as a corporation, 
 and a score of unlicensed liquor dealers seem 
 emboldened to defy us. The liquor sellers 
 have now, I am told, by the advice of the 
 satellites of the Court, raised a fund to sue 
 the city when we interfere with them. The 
 prostitutes newly landed among us rise up 
 in that Court to assail our ordinances. The 
 C(jurt entertains every complaint, and those 
 too preposterous to treat witli seriousness it 
 puts in its pocket and staves otF, while crime 
 takes advantage of the interrea;num. Our 
 Aldermen's courts have been delegalized, and 
 we are told by McKean that a Legislature 
 has no right to bestow discretionary powers 
 on a jury or a civic coi'poration. In short, 
 Mr. Correspondent, there is an end in Utah 
 to any equality before the law. The end of 
 the law is to reach polygamy. All are hailed 
 as friends of the Government, however noto- 
 rious, who will leave the great and decent 
 body of the Gentiles and persecute us. Our 
 Probate Couits are declared to have no 
 power to grant divorces, and yet Mr. Bas- 
 kins, the United States Prosecuting Attor- 
 ney, is married to a woman divorced by a 
 Pr(jbate Court. When Mr. Hawkins was 
 sentenced for adultery, it is current that at 
 least one man on the bench that sentenced 
 him was guilty of that crime. But, then, we 
 are Mormons ! Finally, professional mur- 
 derers like Bill Hickman are permitted to 
 give themselves up by collusion with the 
 Courts, and affect to turn State's evidence 
 against us to prejudice us in the eyes of civil- 
 ization." 
 
 "Who is Bill Hickman?" 
 
 " He is a Missouri desperado, who at- 
 
THE MORMON TRIALS. 
 
 29 
 
 tached himself to our Church many ye;>rs 
 ago, and was turned out of it several years 
 since. We have had him twice in custody 
 for murder, and once, at least, the United 
 States military authorities have taken him 
 out of our hands. By occupation he is a 
 cattle-stealer. He is the terror of the terri- 
 tory, and children are frightened at the men- 
 ace of his name. Yet his evidence is admit- 
 ted to prejudice respectable men in the 
 estimation of their countrymen." 
 
 " Who arrested him ? " 
 
 " One Gibson, one of the numerous dep- 
 uty Marshals who have been sworn in from 
 the lowest orders of society to overawe us. 
 Gibson has been with Bill Hickman all sum- 
 mer, and thei-e was probably an agreement 
 between them." 
 
 "What does Hickman look like?" 
 
 " He is a thick-set, burly, sandy man 
 with dyed beard, unable to look you in the 
 eye. We took him up for killing a Mexican 
 who had married his wife. He beat and de- 
 serted the woman, and she was divorced 
 from him. He shot the Mexican dead in his 
 doorway, and galloped off. Now, I am told, 
 he is having his life written and embellished 
 for sale. Since his incarceration he has 
 taken to wearing broadcloth." 
 
 " Who was Yates, the man he swears he 
 killed at the suggestion of yourself and 
 others ? " 
 
 " Yates was a trader of some sort whom 
 Hickman brought to my camp in the Mor- 
 mon war with a shackle on his heel. I 
 ordered him released, and he wanted to go 
 to Salt Lake, which was accorded him. He 
 disappeared with Hichman and was never 
 seen asain. Hichman now swears that I 
 
 said he was a. scoundrel, and ought to be 
 dead. Also that Joseph Young said he de- 
 served death. What evidence to indict men 
 of our age and position ! I have no recol- 
 lection whatever of the circumstances. They 
 transpired fourteen years ago. Drown and 
 Arnold were two other men whom Hickman 
 confesses to have killed, and he implicates 
 us there also." 
 
 [At this point I omit, and reserve for an- 
 other time General Wells' remarks on the 
 Nauvoo Legion and the military aspects of 
 Utah.] 
 
 " General Wells, had you ever seen any 
 military experience before you joined the 
 Church 1 " 
 
 "No, except in the militia." 
 
 "How did you flill in with the Mor- 
 mons ? " 
 
 "Why, 1 had lived about ten years at a 
 little place called Commerce, Illinois, and 
 was a young man. Justice of the Peace there, 
 when (in 1839) the Mormons were driven 
 out of Missouri and came across Iowa to find 
 a site for a settlement. They struck Quincy 
 first, and scouted iip the river to pick a 
 place. Our town of Commerce was a 'paper 
 city ' only ; the land was cheap, and we were 
 not altogether sorry that the Mormons took 
 it up. There were along about one thousand 
 of them at first, and a poor, sick lot they were 
 for several seasons. Joseph Smith began 
 very soon to get up a memorial to the Gov- 
 ernment on the subject of the plunder of his 
 people in Missouri, and they came before me 
 to make their affidavits. Joseph Smith in 
 person took those affidavits and the memorial 
 on to Washington to President Van Buren, 
 
so 
 
 THE MORmON TRIALS' 
 
 and I have often thought that the Mormon 
 troubles began out of that errand of his." 
 
 " How, sir ? " 
 
 "You see, a good many of the k'ading 
 Mormons had, while in their Gentile state, 
 been Democrats, among others tlie Smiths 
 and Brigham Young. Joseph Smith expect- 
 ed that Van Buren woidd recognize him to 
 some degree because of their predilections 
 for the same party, but when he presented 
 his case Van Buren made this unsatisfactory 
 reply : ' Your cause is just, Init I cannot help 
 you. Address your story to the magnani- 
 mous State and people of Missouri.' When 
 Joseph Smith returned to Nauvoo he told 
 his people to vote for Harrison in 1840, 
 which they did solidly, and this irritated the 
 Democrats, who counted upon the Mormon 
 vote. Afterwards, Joseph directed his peo- 
 ple to vote for men friendly to them rather 
 than for mere parties. ■ The idea got abroad, 
 after awhile, that the Mormons could not be 
 counted upon politically by either side, and 
 it got to be a notion among the Illinois vote- 
 getters that they could intimidate these poor 
 people against supporting the opposite side. 
 The intimidation thus begun led to the mob 
 spirit, which sacrificed Joseph in 1844. 
 
 " I was a Whig, and I thought the Mor- 
 mons were sometimees as far wrong as their 
 enemies, but I could not shut my eyes to the 
 fact that even my party did not treat them 
 like human creatures. I remember well that 
 among my Whig acquaintances was a well- 
 reared young man, named Moi'rison. He 
 said to me one day : ' By God ! we mean to 
 make them vote our ticket this year. The 
 Democrats forced them to support theirs last 
 year, and we can do the same thing this time.' 
 
 •"How?' said I. 
 
 '"Well. We'll get a requisition from 
 the Governoi- of Missouri for Joe Smith and 
 we'll hold that requisition over his head and 
 force him to give us the votes of all his 
 crowd or serve it on him.' 
 
 " This looked like a mean trick to me, 
 and I found myself, perhaps out of natural 
 combativeness, standing between the Mor- 
 mons and their persecutors, and finally, after 
 a good deal of consideration, I joined the 
 Church, several years after my acquaintance 
 with the leaders." 
 
 " What was the origin of the word, Nau- 
 voo 1 " 
 
 " They say it meant in Hebrew, ' beauti- 
 ful site' or ' beautiful city.' I know nothing 
 of Hebrew and can't tell whether that is true 
 or not." 
 
 " General, what became of Sidney Rig- 
 don, Joseph's early coadjutor?" 
 
 " W'ell, he is living now at Friendship, a 
 town I think in Western New York, near 
 Buffalo. He took it to heart that he was 
 not promoted in the Church, and left us ; at 
 present he is a very old, pusillanimous man, 
 who sometimes addresses us communica- 
 tions. He offered at one time to guarantee 
 us the protection of Pi'ovidence if we would 
 make up one hundred thousand dollars for 
 him, and still later we hear that he has pre- 
 dicted our early overthrow." 
 
 " He has been supposed by some to have 
 been Joseph's intellectual and executive su- 
 perior, and to have given Mormonism its 
 original impetus?" 
 
 "Oh, no. Joseph was the man. Oliver 
 Cowdrey, an educated person, was of more 
 assistance to Joseph than Rigdon; for he 
 
THE mORlION' TRIALS. 
 
 31 
 
 wrote a good hand and acted as Joseph's 
 Secretary, Smith himself being at first illite- 
 rate, unable to write, and obliged to confine 
 his correspondence to dictation. However, 
 Joseph burnished up greatly in the fourteen 
 years of his Presidency ; such trials as his 
 would educate almost any man." 
 
 " Is Cowdrey living 1 " 
 
 "No. He left the Church while we 
 were still at Nauvoo ; then he repented and 
 followed us across the plains, and was re- 
 baptized and received into fellowship. Pay- 
 ing a visit or going upon a mission to Mis- 
 souri, he was taken sick and died there." 
 
 " What was the fate of Joseph's refrac- 
 tory wife, Emma Smith?" 
 
 " She, like Rigdon, was dissatisfied with 
 the amount of consideration she received in 
 the Church after Joseph's death, and would 
 not come with us, but remained in Illinois, 
 near Nauvoo, and I understand that she mar- 
 ried another husband and is living there 
 now." 
 
 " Have you ever visited Nauvoo since 
 the exodus in 1846?" 
 
 "No, sir; not since the destruction of 
 the temple. President Young appointed me 
 Adjutant to keep the emigrant and supply 
 teams well up through Iowa, and afterward 
 across the Plains. I remember that when 
 we had crossed the Mississippi upon impro- 
 vised rafts, floats and boats, the poorest and 
 most despairing body of halt, lame, sick and 
 uncertain people you ever saw in the world 
 — that the military mob marched up in front 
 of the temple, planted a cannon and fired 
 across into our camps of sick, adding panic 
 to wretchedness. All that is past and for- 
 gotten with us, but it is accurately set down 
 
 in our church history, and we got converts 
 all around the country, from among the wit- 
 nesses of those scenes." 
 
 " Where is Joseph's body buried ? " 
 
 " At Nauvoo. It was buried secretly. 
 He was shot in several places in the breast, 
 if I remember well, and Hyrum Smith was 
 shot in the face. I was not jjresent at Car- 
 thage at the massacre, but around Nauvoo I 
 saw many frigiitful scenes, which confirmed 
 me in my already half-formed idea that these 
 Mormons were a persecuted people and bet- 
 ter Christians than my neighbors. The mob 
 used to get in the bushes, for instance, on 
 the out skirts of Nauvoo, set a man's barn 
 or haystack a fire, and then by the light of 
 the blaze shoot him as he ran away." 
 
 " Are those good pictures of Joseph and 
 Hyrum Smith at President Young's office 1 " 
 
 "Yes; good likenesses. Hyrum was 
 the devoted brother of Joseph, believed in 
 him from the first, kept with him all the way 
 down, and they died together, as I had seen 
 them a many iiundred times, walking fondly 
 side by side. Brigham Young, also, was a 
 bosom friend of Joseph Smith, and an emi- 
 nent man in the Church at that early day. 
 He was President of the Quorum of the 
 Twelve Apostles." 
 
 " Can you give me an idea of Joseph 
 Smith, so that I can realize him ? " 
 
 " He was a large man, weighing two hun- 
 dred pounds, and about six feet high, with a 
 countenance never sanctimonious, but always 
 cheerful and bright ; brown hair and light 
 eyes, and 1 might call him a real jam-up 
 free-and-easy good fellow. He used to play 
 ball, run and wrestle with the people, and if 
 a big man joined the Church, Joseph would 
 
32 
 
 THE ]?IORi»IOX TRIALS. 
 
 pick liim out and try liim for a throw, for he 
 had a conceit that lie was a match for ' most 
 anybody.' You can see that we keep up in 
 the Church his example of liveliness in oui' 
 theater and Social Hall." 
 
 " Was it at Nauvoo that Joseph pro- 
 claimed the revelation of polygamy 1 "' 
 
 " Oh, no. He had received it a long 
 Avhile before his death, and his counselors 
 knew of it, but he was afraid to make it pub- 
 lic." 
 
 *' General Wells, is it true that the officers 
 of the Mormon Church are elected frequently, 
 and that they all owe their offices to popular 
 will?" 
 
 "Yes, sir. We have two annual confer- 
 ences, one meeting on the 6th of April, the 
 day our church was oiganized in the year 
 1830, and the other on the Gth of October. 
 Each conference continues in session from 
 four days to a week, and all the people of 
 the Territory come up, frequently twelve 
 thousand people assembling in the big Ter- 
 bernacle. Every member, man and woman, 
 has a vote. I have myself been discontin- 
 ued of my office, on at least, one occasion. 
 Brigham Young has to be elected separately 
 to each and every office he holds, first Presi- 
 dent, Trustee, &c. As our people willingly 
 respect their authorities, the nominations 
 made by the higher quorums are generally 
 confirmed, but it is anybody's province to dis- 
 agree. The Methodist Cliurch is not as 
 liberal as ours in ecclesiastical discipline. It 
 sends its clegymen from post to pillar z<;t"%- 
 nilbj, and refuses its membership a share in 
 their own government. Its chief functiona- 
 ries are elected once and for life, and the 
 Church subsists largely upon non-communi- 
 
 cants, seeking aid and extension promiscuous- 
 ly. We live within our membership; our 
 tithing system, so much decried, is consonant 
 with the general inculcations of the Gospel, 
 to give one-Lentil of our substance to charity 
 and religion. 
 
 "The Methodist Church teaches in its 
 Discipline or manual of government, the 
 Christian duty of every communicant to em- 
 ploy his brother and deal with his sect, and 
 it enjoins upon each Methodist not to sue 
 another Methodist at law until the board of 
 Stewards, Trustees, or whatever it is, have 
 first tried to arbitrate in the case. 
 
 " We accepted a debate with a preacher 
 of the Methodist Church last year, and our 
 people had no reason to be ashamed of the 
 argument ; but since that time the Methodist, 
 who were worsted, have undertaken a regular 
 war at law against us. It behooves them to 
 repubiicanize their Church before they assail 
 our.s." 
 
 " General Wells, I wish you would tell 
 me what it was that began the Mormon war 
 of 1857." 
 
 " I can answer that in one word — Bill 
 Drummond ! " 
 
 "Who was he?" 
 
 "One of the United States Judges. He 
 came here from Illinois and spent most of 
 his time at the town of Fillmore. There 
 were frequent rows at his Court, resembling 
 McKean's wranglings with us at present, but 
 we did not know that he was backed up by 
 the Government, and we set his attitude 
 down to general personal ' cussedness.' He 
 wanted to be transferred to another Court, it 
 seems, nearer the Pacific coast, and thought 
 before leaving us that he would fire a fuirt- 
 
THE MORMOX TRIALS. 
 
 33 
 
 ing shot. So after he slipped away, there 
 appeared at Washingtoa a report, signed 
 by him, charging us with every sort of crime, 
 and this was immediately followed by a gen- 
 eral yell from tiie new^spaper press. 
 
 " As we had only a monthly mail, we 
 were for a long time perfectly unaware of 
 this rising storm. But one of our friends in 
 Washington cut from the newsj)apers nearly 
 a hundred denunciatory extracts of us and 
 sent them out to us. 
 
 "They arrived here one Sunday in the 
 month of May, 1857, and 1 remember that, 
 instead of religious exercises, we had those 
 slips read at the tabernacle all day. 
 
 "The next we knew, a mail contract 
 that we had purchased and had fully stocked 
 with teams, stations, horses, and every ap- 
 purtenance, at a cost of 1300,000, and which 
 was subsidized with only $20,000 a year, 
 was taken from us at Washington and given 
 to other parties for 1100,000. That was a 
 great blow to us. Had we been in com- 
 munication with the eastern people more fre- 
 quently and surely, they would never have 
 made that war upon us. 
 
 " The next we knew, old General Harney 
 had been placed in command of a great army 
 to move against us. 
 
 " We hated Harney, because he had re- 
 cently massacred a lot of Indian women, and 
 was called among us ' the Sqnaw Killer.' 
 Afterward, you know, he was removed, and 
 Sidney Johnston substituted for him. We 
 were determined Harney should not practice 
 his bloody instincts upon us. I was appoint- 
 ed commander of our forces, and moved out 
 by Weber and Echo Canons, and sent my 
 scouting parties far ahead. \ye relied upon 
 5 
 
 the alliance of winter as a military friend, 
 and everybody was united for resistance. 
 
 " Van Vliet, Quartermaster, came out to 
 Salt Lake to see what • he could get, in an- 
 ticipation of the arrival of the army, in the 
 way of supplies and quarters. We told 
 him he should not have a shingle for shelter, 
 a pound of bread, nor a bundle of fodder. 
 He saw that he could make nothing out of 
 us and departed. 1 had him followed almost 
 to the Missouri River by day and night, 
 and when he made his report I had men in 
 his camp watching him there." 
 
 " For what distance and time did you 
 harass that army, General Wells ? " 
 
 " We were on their flank and in their 
 rear almost all the time from their quitting 
 the Missouri River till they got to Bridger. 
 My orders were to hinder them in every 
 way short of shedding blood, but I was not 
 to kill anybody. And I never did. One of 
 my skirmishing parties was captured, and 
 upon the men were found copies of my or- 
 ders, which were afterward printed in Wash- 
 ington city. Those instructions show con- 
 clusively that if I had killed anybody I would 
 have disobeyed commands, and yet I am now- 
 indicted for the murder of a man named Yates, 
 committed, as alleged, at that time, and upon 
 the oath of a desperado who confesses to the 
 murder of about twenty men committed by 
 his own hand. 
 
 " On the contrary, my operations were 
 confined to embarrassing the road, making 
 panic and turning back teams. I thought 
 that if I could retard the march, a more charit- 
 able and better informed public opinion 
 would rise up in the East. I had a company 
 of men in the rear of their teams which 
 
34 
 
 THE MORMON TRIALS. 
 
 would arrest a certain number of teamsters 
 every day, and after leaving them sufficient 
 stores to regain their base of supplies, they 
 were turned to the right about. But we 
 found that they would merely go back until 
 we ceased to watch them, and then return. 
 So it became necessary to burn their teams 
 and incapacitate them for a campaign. This 
 was done north of Fort Bridger, on the Big 
 and Little Sandy Rivers. 
 
 " Every night those troops encamped 1 
 had men among them. Their conduct showed 
 significantly what they meant to do to us. 
 Thoy had doggerel songs, copies of which 
 were captured, announcing their intention to 
 make a barrack of Brigham Young's house, 
 and enjoy his family. These songs inflamed 
 our people, and united us as one man in the 
 defense of our settlements. 
 
 "But just about this time the United 
 States had some troubles nearer home, in 
 Kansas, or somewhere. The fact is, Provi- 
 dence was in it. It was an interposition of 
 Almighty God. The leinforcements from 
 the East came up slowly, or were halted on 
 the way, and the Administration at Wash- 
 ington, having reaped no glory and being 
 subjected to considerable criticism, thought 
 it prudent to compromise. They sent Sen- 
 ator Powell, of Kentucky, and Ben. McCul- 
 loch to us, in 1858, as Peace Commissioners, 
 and we were offered a free pardon for all we 
 had done if we would let the troops go 
 through the form of passing through or by 
 Salt L ike, not stopping or quartering here, 
 but encamping out or beyond the city. 
 
 " We had done nothing except try to 
 protect our property and the honor of our 
 families, and now we were to accept a pardon. 
 
 " Some time after that Senator Broder- 
 ick, of California, was here, and he told us 
 the Government could have raised one mil- 
 lion volunteer troops at that time, to wipe 
 us out utterly. Such was to be our doom 
 for protecting ourselves. 
 
 " To avoid bloodshed we consented to let 
 a camp be formed within our territory, and 
 the army marched by, encamping beyond 
 the Jordan, then in Brigham's Canon, and 
 finally at Camp Floyd. There they re- 
 mained until 1861, when they destroyed 
 stores, munitions and quarters and went off' 
 to take part in the war of the rebellion. 
 
 " Had these troops annoyed us we were 
 prepared to cut every ditch, and fire every 
 town and shelter in the Territory. Tinder 
 had been placed in the houses and men sys- 
 tematically delegated to set it off"." 
 
 "Where would you have gone, General 
 Wells?" 
 
 "I don't know just where. We had pro- 
 vided for that, however." 
 
 "General Wells, have you any idea what 
 inclination General Grant has in the matter 
 of these prosecutions for polygamy 1 " 
 
 " Our advisers at Washington say that 
 Grant has avowed his intention to execute eith- 
 er the Cragin or CuUon bills, if Congress will 
 pass them, and if neither be passed, then he 
 will execute the law of 1862." 
 
 " What reasons are there for his taking up 
 polygamy at this critical time in the period 
 of mining and railway development here?" 
 
 " Well, sir, our offense is like that of the 
 Caffirs against the Dutch. The Caffirs said : 
 ' Our greatest crime is that we have received 
 a beautiful country from the Almighty, and 
 you want it.' " 
 
THE MORMOX TRIAI.S. 
 
 35 
 
 SALT LAKE AI^D UTAH PICTURES. 
 
 Salt Lake, October 27. 
 
 Here is the Territory of Utah, occupy- 
 ing to the Pacific coast very nearly the same 
 situation that Ohio bears to the Atlantic 
 States, suspended between a great lake and 
 a great river, the Colorado, but many thou- 
 sand feet above the sea. It is a solitary con- 
 quest from the desert, accomplished by the 
 necessities of religious fanaticism ; and it is 
 nothing else, except certain mines and rail- 
 ways which availed themselves of the com 
 fortable institutions of this settlement. 
 The time seems to have come when the 
 system of government which has prevailed 
 here must meet with the two forces of 
 resident democracy and a distant public 
 opinion, the former antagonizing itself slowly 
 and moving against Marmonism by attrition 
 and with due regard to the preservation of 
 property ; the latter violent and uni'easoning, 
 and led on by emissaries even more violent 
 and far less scrupulous. 
 
 This is the issue : Shall Mormonism fall 
 by an attack of natural and social forces, to 
 which its inherent weakness will make it an 
 easy victim, or must it be the subject of a 
 crusade, which will merely force it to shift 
 its geography and retain the worst of its 
 practices. In the one case we preserve Utah 
 and its labor ; in the other ordain a new 
 lease of life to polygamy and extinguish a 
 community in much admirable, and a settle- 
 ment not to be restored. 
 
 So much attention has been paid to Salt 
 
 Lake City by tourists and journalists that 
 the Eastern public possess little or no idea 
 of the other thriving towns and cities of 
 Utah. From Brigham City to St. George, 
 a distance of about three hundred and fifty 
 miles, there is a chain of settlements reaching 
 through Central Utah north and south, almost 
 entirely. Mormon, and almost every large 
 town contains a tabernacle and a tithing- 
 house, and several a residence with family 
 attached, for President Young. There are 
 twenty counties in Utah, and all are connect- 
 ed by a road and telegi'aph system. The 
 richest counties lie between Salt Lake City 
 and the northern boundary, but the belt of 
 the settlement follows the general line of the 
 western slope of the Wahsatch Mountains 
 and stops at St. George, on the river Virgin, 
 while there are two good lateral valleys, one 
 toward the head-waters of the Virgin, whose 
 further settlement to the east is KanabFort, 
 and another in the San Pete Valley, ^vhere 
 there are several rich settlements presided 
 over by Orson Hyde. The San Pete Valley 
 makes good wheat, and in it are the towns 
 of Manti, Moram, Springfield, Mt. Pleasant 
 and Ephraim, ranging from fifteen hundred 
 to twenty-five hundred people each. 
 
 Southward from Salt Lake, the great 
 road to Arizona runs parallel with the 
 Jordan River, the outlet of Utah Lake into 
 Salt Lake, leaving to the east the great 
 Cottonwood mining district, and leading to 
 Provo, which is, next to Salt Lake and 
 Ogden, the most important place in the 
 Territory. Provo stands upon the Timpon- 
 ayos River, near Utah Lake, a clear, deep, 
 fresh-water sheet, full of heavy trout, and it 
 
36 
 
 THE MORMON TRIALS. 
 
 contains the best water power in the Terri- 
 tory. Here is Brigham's seven-story granite 
 woolen mill. President Smart, ex-Mayor of 
 Salt Lake, is the town authority. Passing 
 Nephi and several other thrifty places, the 
 road reaches Fillmore, ninety-six miles from 
 Salt Lake, the real capital of the Territory 
 by designation, and still showing the disused 
 stone wing of an intended capital edifice. 
 Below Fillmore, upon a " divide," is a 
 telegraph operator, quartered in a stone fort 
 to j^rotect him from Indians, who are some- 
 times bad here. At Beaver, a town of two 
 thousand one hnndred people, forty miles 
 south of Fillmore, one of the three United 
 States District Courts is held. The next 
 important place is Parowau, founded by 
 Geo. A. Smith, in 1852, and then Cedar 
 City, in a coal and iron region, with a de- 
 serted forge. Just south of this place we 
 cross the rim of the great Salt Lake basin, 
 and almost immediately the country turns 
 red in color, and wears that wizard look as 
 if scorched by fire. The first town beyond 
 is Toquerville, founded in 1859; then the 
 town of Washington, with six hundred in- 
 habitants and Brigham's celebrated cotton 
 mill. Finally, in the southwest corner of 
 the Territory stands St. George, on the Rio 
 Virgin, a tow^n of tropical looking groves 
 and neat cottages of wood, adobe and stone 
 upon a plain between mountain " benches," 
 the plain itself exuding glauber salts in 
 places for acre upon acre, which must be 
 covered with thousands of cartloads of sand, 
 and drenched out by patient processes. 
 This is, in many respects, the most remark- 
 able and also most promising place in Utah ; 
 it is to Mormondom what Los Angeles in 
 
 Califoi-iiia is to the North American; a 
 grapery, cotton field, and invalid resort. 
 Even here Brigham has a cot and family on 
 the brink of Arizona. He has personally 
 visited every part of this region, and at the 
 age of sixty-nine he took Savage, the chief 
 photographer here, upon a tour with him 
 up the wild volcanic vale of the Virgin, and 
 made him take views of the '• Little Zion 
 Valley," the Mormon Yosemite, where they 
 expect to establish summer and winter re- 
 sorts when the railway is finished. 
 
 Utah is equal to the New England States 
 in area, but only one hundred and fifty 
 thousand acres are under irrigation, and the 
 capacity of the utmost irrigating system is 
 limited to three hundred thousand acres 
 more. Without running streams there can 
 be no agriculture nor even reliable pastures 
 here ; the timber is sparse, small and difficult 
 of access ; the Indians were never able to 
 get anything from the Territory, and the 
 soil, although apparently rich, would relapse 
 to dry gravel and clay in a month but for 
 these needy and ever vigilant husbandmen. 
 Utah, as it stands, is just capable of feeding 
 the miners, merchants, troops and railroad 
 gangs which have availed themselves of the 
 Mormom occupation, and in this view 
 Mormonism has been as lucky an episode in 
 the course of empire as the discovery of 
 gf)ld in California or the inception of the 
 Texan Republic. The tithing system, the 
 absolute superintendence of the materialistic 
 Brigham Young, and the semi-ecclesiastical 
 discipline prevailing here, were as much ihe 
 impositions of nature as of ambition ; they 
 are growing weaker now because the work 
 is nearly perftu'med. Hundreds of miles 
 
THE MORMOX TRIALS. 
 
 37 
 
 of canals and dikes, a people distributed 
 over all the reclaimable region of the Terri- 
 tory, co-operation reduced from a religious 
 duty to a voluntary and profitable system 
 and upon a relative scale larger than else- 
 where in the world, — these, no matter how 
 they came about, are triumjihs not to be 
 gainsayed by the political economist and 
 statesman, however the zealot and the prowl- 
 ing territorial politioiau may belittle them. 
 
 Utah, agriculturally, as nobody else liut 
 the Mormons could have developed it, is a 
 necessity to the mining, railroad, and mili- 
 tary operations of the central continent ; for 
 these enterprises subsist upon the produce 
 of these farms, and a large human settlement 
 here is also a strategic experiment. The 
 neighboring mines of Idaho, Nevada, Mon- 
 tana and Colorado draw much of their store 
 supplies from the valley, 
 
 "It isn't like Nevada," said a miner to 
 me, yesterday ; " here you can just walk 
 down the mountain, from the mine to the 
 foot, and find eggs, butter, and milk in the 
 Mormon settlement." 
 
 The army and the railroads, moved from 
 this point strategically, must also subsist 
 upon Mormon agriculture. The time may 
 come when the mines of the neighboring 
 territories must be abandoned by reason of 
 the cost of labor and living around them, 
 but here agriculture and population had 
 preceded mines and railways nearly a quarter 
 of a century, and even under the present 
 mining excitement mining labor costs only 
 two dollars and a half a day, while in 
 Nevada, barren of farms, it costs four 
 dollars. It is largely Mormon labor which 
 is completing the whole central railway 
 
 system, striking out as boldly at present 
 down the affluents of the Columbia and 
 Colorado Rivers as it did upon the heavy 
 work in Echo and Weber Canons for the 
 Union Pacific Railway. 
 
 It is the opinion of many of the ablest 
 men in the country that Utah will be the 
 main manufacturing country for the Pacific 
 Coast, like the Pittsburg region of the East. 
 Already the manufactures here embrace 
 cotton and woolen mills, iron, leather, flour, 
 gloves, and small wares. The system of 
 farming by irrigation is readily adaptable to 
 water power uses. Coal is found just east of 
 Salt Lake, which is used along eight hun- 
 dred miles of the Pacific Railway, and other 
 facts indicate Salt Lake as the emporium of 
 all the business between the Rocky Moun- 
 tains and the Sierra Nevada. 
 
 But M'hat elements of population will 
 take this soil and conduct agriculture here if 
 the Mormons should abandon it"? Gentiles 
 tell me that between the drought, grass- 
 hoppers, alkali, the need of perpetual co- 
 operation to regulate the ditches, and the 
 primitive poverty of the ground. Mormon 
 frugality and unity only can sustain the 
 miracle of this garden in the desert. There 
 are not five Gentile farmers in Utah. An 
 exodus to Mexico, with their abundance of 
 fine heads of cattle, sheep and horses, might 
 give Mormonism a better empire, but what 
 race would revive this one? 
 
 The probability of emigration is a wide- 
 sj)read theme already, in view of the harsh 
 attitude of the Courts here. Mormonism 
 has been a scries of emigrations, from Kirt- 
 land to Missouri, eight hundred miles; 
 thence to Nauvoo, four hundred miles; 
 
38 
 
 THE HORHON TRIAI^S. 
 
 thence to Salt Lake, fifteen hundred miles ; 
 and each exodus has been an epoch and an 
 advantage to the church. From St. George 
 it is but four bundled miles across Arizona 
 by a well defined and serviceable road to the 
 Republic of Mexico, and there are settle- 
 ments and military posts as far as Tucson 
 and Tabac on the brink of Mexico. Tlie 
 Mexicans will welcome anywhere between 
 Chihuahua and Sinaloa, these quiet settlers 
 who can create a power on the Gulf of 
 California, and curb the Apaches by either 
 the Quaker or the Crook method, 
 
 I have already informed you that the 
 proposition to emigrate was debated on the 
 first of October, in the business office of 
 Brigham Young, and that there were present, 
 besides the three members of the First 
 Presidency, the majority of the Twelve 
 Apostles and many of the Seventies and 
 Bishops, in all upwards of thirty persons, 
 the sinew of the Church. Had the propo- 
 sition been carried out, Utah would have 
 been systematically desolated and rendered 
 incapable of supporting ten thousand people, 
 and private vengeance would have been an 
 episode of so vast and bitter an act of 
 sacrifice and despair. 
 
 The remarkable man who presides over 
 these people added to the many conquests 
 of his life, the final victory over his absolute 
 spirit when he put by the counsels of his eld- 
 ers and went into court upon an indictment 
 which, in its language and tone, is at va- 
 riance with whatever is known of his life by 
 any third party, Brigham Young is just as 
 guilty of " lewd and licentious conduct and 
 cohabitation " as the Viceroy of Egypt, the 
 Chief of the Cherokees, the Emperor of Ja- 
 
 pan, or the patriarch Moses, with their sever- 
 al wives. His children and wives are all ac- 
 knowdcdged and provided for ; of the latter 
 he has sixteen, and of children sixty odd. 
 His offense is polygamous marriages, prac- 
 tised for twenty years with the full knowl- 
 edge of an unbroken series of United 
 States officials, Judges and Presidents in- 
 cluded, by all of whom he has been treated 
 with equality, and by many with distinction. 
 The statute under which he is indicted was 
 passed by Mormons in their Territorial Leg- 
 islature, and made punishable by from three 
 to ten years' imprisonment, at the time of 
 the formation of their code, and it was 
 meant to apply to common fornication. 
 There is but one statute in the same terms 
 in any State code, — that of Massachusetts, 
 passed in 1790; and this, as construed, pro- 
 vides that the lewdness and laseiviousness 
 must be public, and that secret cohabitation 
 is not intended ; in other words, the offense 
 is against decency and not chastity. There 
 has been no complaint of this nature ever 
 made in the present instance, but the Judge 
 and the Prosecuting Attorney, the avanl 
 c/iiard of that supposititious distant sentiment, 
 packed a grand jury — there is no other word 
 applicable — to indict Young, and will pack 
 a petit jury to convict him. In my opinion, 
 and in the apprehension of every business 
 man and military officer in Utah, if this is 
 done, and Brigham Young be sent to jail, 
 the Church authorities, including himself, 
 will not be able to prevent an outbreak or 
 an exodus. If he should die in the hands of 
 the authorities, being old and of j^roud spirit, 
 the Church will have a greater martyr than 
 Joseph Smith to win disciples upon, and in 
 
THE MORMOX TRIALS. 
 
 39 
 
 any event, the roaming Seventies will have 
 a new ilhistration and provocation for zeal. 
 
 If President Young were indicted upon 
 a charge of bigamy or polygamy, instead of 
 lasciviousiiess and lewdness, he would do 
 well to stand up in Court and plead guilty. 
 His indictment on the head alleged is pre- 
 posterous and merely tantalizing. As to 
 the later indictment for murder, on the affi- 
 davit of Bill Hickman before the grand jury, 
 that is a graver matter and deserves a para- 
 graph of consideration 
 
 The necessities of Mormuuism have al- 
 ways demanded a mingling of military with 
 civil stringency. Driven away from civili- 
 zation, amongst Indians and " Greasers," they 
 were required to maintain troops, and they 
 even indulged the hope that the land they oc- 
 cupied might be purchased or conquered by 
 them from Mexico. Among their motley 
 converts were many rough characters from 
 Missouri, Illinois, and Iowa, and as they re- 
 treated from civilization with the method and 
 order of Xenophon, they put to temporary use 
 and importance some of these physical bra- 
 vos who are now swearing off their own old 
 personal atrocities against the heads of the 
 Mormon Church, who have " cut them off." 
 
 The vilest of these fellows is Bill Hick- 
 man, a Judas and a Joab in one. He was 
 under indictment for murder, when the Unit- 
 ed States Government befriended him, and 
 accepted his irresponsible statement that 
 Brigham Young's son, Joseph — an able, but 
 not always temperate or judicious young 
 man — had said that one Yates ought to be 
 put out of the way. This is hearsay evi- 
 dence, and it is all that the Court possesses. 
 Hickman is a Missouri border ruffian, a po- 
 
 lygamist, and a human hyena. General 
 Morrow told me at Camp Douglas that Bill 
 Hickman was unworthy of credit or com- 
 panionship. Hickman admits having mur- 
 dered Yates, with his own hand, in 1857. 
 
 Another crime charged to Brigham 
 Young is the " Mountain Meadow Massa- 
 cre," s(j called — an act of retaliation and ra- 
 pacity, committed sixteen years ago, in 
 Southwestern Utah, by one John D. Lee, 
 since " cut off" from the church. Lee led a 
 band of Indians and Mormons into the camp 
 of these emigrants, and slew them for their 
 stock, and for revenge. It was a bad deed, 
 but if it is to be recalled and adjusted in the 
 Courts, it should not be Bill Hickman, but 
 some of the parties or witnesses to the crime, 
 vvho should be brought forward to give testi- 
 mony concerning it. 
 
 Human life in Utah is safer than proba- 
 bly anywhere in civilization. The motives 
 and causes of murder exist in a less degree — 
 as avarice, liquor, gambling, quarrelsomeness 
 and prostitution. The industrious political 
 vagabonds who write letters from Utah to 
 the East have created the band of " Dan- 
 ites" and other hobgoblins out of air and 
 foolscap. 
 
 I talked to Porter Rockwell, the alleged 
 leader of the " Danites," a fat, curly-haired, 
 good-natured chap, fond of a drink, a talk, 
 and a wild venture. The United States au- 
 thorities have several times used him to 
 make arrests of lawless characters. 
 
 Among the Mormons are bad people ; 
 polygamy and ignorance are no guarantee 
 against the corruptions of original sin ; but 
 Mormonism is a religion, essentially the two 
 testaments of Judaism and Christianity, with 
 
40 
 
 THE mORinoIV TRIALS. 
 
 Joseph Smith's gibberish appended, and the 
 sincere believers in it find no warrant for 
 murder anywhere in their creed. 
 
 The h)yalty of the Mormons toward the 
 United States is also mailc the snbject of 
 accusation. I am writing these letters for 
 people whom I respect, and not for small 
 fry, and the former class know very well 
 tliat Mormonism has never had great reason 
 to admire the United States. We arc deal- 
 ing now with a phenomenon, a superstition, 
 and have got to look at it to know how to 
 apprehend it and govern it. Begotten 
 among us, in the Empire State, near the 
 head of the Ohio Valley, this church is a 
 native dispensation, a gospel prepared for 
 the new world, attempting to recite tlie 
 story of our origin and that of the Indians, 
 our predecessors. In my belief, it was less 
 the offspring of imposture than of disease. 
 Such as it is, it relies upon the common 
 basis of Christian orthodoxy — faith ! You 
 must embrace it not only by reason, but by 
 the abnegation of reason. You must begin 
 at the end and embrace it in the old-fashioned 
 Whitfieldian way of paroxysm. It is almost 
 solely an Anglo-Saxon church. What is 
 absurdest in it is nearest the theology of the 
 religions our fathers believed in. Moses 
 took the Gospel on stone ; Joe Smith on 
 gold. Both told the rise, exodus and power, 
 and prophesied the discomfiture of a nation. 
 I do not, personally, believe one figment of 
 Mormonism as a story. I do, without cavil 
 or question, believe the whole story of Moses 
 and Christ; because I know nothing else; 
 that was my hearthstone faith ; I inherit it 
 and its civilization. Among the mature 
 fruits of that civilization are forbearance, 
 
 the belief that error is mortal, and a rea- 
 sonable education. The human mind and 
 our race have risen to mighty fermentations 
 and heroisms, upon propositions as absurd 
 and astonishing as Joseph Smith's, Here is 
 the greatest Territory of the Union erected 
 upon a delusion. Let the creation itself 
 smother the delusion. Give society a chance 
 and it will drive polygamy back into the 
 vices. Society, under its political organiza- 
 tion, has been able by mild emulation to 
 reduce ecclesiasticism to docility. Method- 
 ism at one period adopted a disciplinary sys- 
 tem of brotherhood, under which a man like 
 Judge McKean might have ruled every Meth- 
 odist oflf a jury in cases aflfecting his fellow- 
 Methodist. Quakerism was a revolt and a 
 rebuke against the civil establishments of its 
 time. English Puritanism, as it ruled in 
 New England, coalesced the congregation 
 and the town, the spiritual and the civil 
 arm. These theologies survive, shorn of 
 their physical and intolerant pretensions. 
 They have their trophies and their better 
 results. In the same way, Mormonism was 
 an ignorant attempt to make a State out of 
 a churchy a magistracy out of a priesthood. 
 It has learned that it cannot escape from 
 society. The temporal power of the church 
 is already reduced. Shall we go back into 
 the dark and desert age of Mormonism to 
 try and punish it for its excrescences? Shall 
 we bring up the Society which hanged the 
 witches, the Quaker who interrupted a church 
 meeting, and the Mormon who tried to create 
 an army to protect his church, and deal with 
 them like reasonable criminals ? Six months 
 ago, before Judge McKean arrived here, like 
 a Catholic Jesuit dropping down in the vale 
 
THE MORMON TRIALS. 
 
 41 
 
 of the wilderness, the Mormons were thor- 
 oughly reconciled to the United States cand 
 anxious for its benefits. Their past persecu- 
 tions were forgotten. It is we, or our in- 
 quisitorial Courts, who have recalled to- 
 gether our aofSressions and the Mormons' 
 excesses. 
 
 Let us be cool-headed, and not jump be- 
 hind our century ! Polygamy is the least 
 mortal of institutions. It was an after- 
 thought of Mormonism. Democracy will 
 wrestle with it presently and crush the life 
 out of it. We need not sentimentalize over 
 it, like that short-haired show-woman. Miss 
 Anna Dickinson, who is in no danger. Po- 
 lygamy is merry enough to read about in 
 the Arabian Nights and in Byron's or Mor- 
 ris's poems. We construe it into a terror 
 and move upon it with serious faces, because 
 our own neighbors and kinsmen are fooling 
 with the folly. 
 
 Co-operation, advocated by the press and 
 reformers as a benefit everywhere else, had 
 no sooner been adopted among the Mormons 
 than there went up a howl of " monopoly," 
 " commercial restriction !" 
 
 To get at the bottom of this matter, I 
 went right to William Jennings, the richest 
 Mormon, Brigham excepted, and who was 
 alleged to have been compelled by Brigham 
 to give his store to the enterprise. Mr. 
 Jennings inhabits a large and beautiful 
 house, which probably cost two hundred 
 thousand dollars, and he dispenses cheer of 
 a hearty and vinous qualit3^ He has but 
 one wife living, and his daughters expressed 
 themselves indignantly that their deceased 
 mother was to be declared impure and them- 
 6 
 
 selves illegitimate by a Court of Judges be- 
 longing to another religion. 
 
 Mr. Jennings said that he lived in Mis- 
 souri, at St. Joseph, and was not a member 
 of the church, nor cognizant of its existence, 
 when he left England. The plan of the co- 
 operation store was Brigham Young's, and he 
 proposed it as early as 1853, but Jennings, 
 Lawrence, Walker Breathers and Godby, to 
 whom it Avas suggested, did not think favora- 
 bly of it. These merchants made large sums 
 of money — sums out of proportion to the 
 producer and consumer — in consideration of 
 brotherly equity. Wheat was bought from 
 the Mormon farmers at seventy-five cents a 
 bushel, often paid for in merchandise, and 
 then sold in the form of flour in the mining 
 regions for twenty-five dollars gold per hun- 
 dred weight, a profit of several hundred per 
 cent. 
 
 "Thus," said Mr. Jennings, " we all pros- 
 pered inordinately, and I had meditated re- 
 tiring from business in 1867, when again 
 President Young revived his plan of a co- 
 operation store. Those of us who intended 
 to remain steadfast to the Church found it 
 now imperative to agree, because a certain 
 squatter here, named McGroarty, had man- 
 aged to get about one-twentieth of the vote 
 of the people in Utah, and he had been sent 
 up to Congress by Walker Brothers, and 
 others, with money made out of our people, 
 to contest the seat of our delegate, W. H. 
 Hooper. It was apparent that these for- 
 tunes made among us were to be played 
 against the dignity and will of the people. 
 I at once rented my store for five years to 
 the co-operation society, and took $75,000 
 worth of stock, a larger amount than any- 
 
42 
 
 THE HORMOX TRIALS. 
 
 body else, although President Young is now 
 nearly equal with me in the concern. We 
 niade the thing democratic, so that five dol- 
 lars would constitute a stockholder, and we 
 tightened it only with regard to the trans- 
 ferral of shares ; for if this Court up here 
 could by any means entrap us into its pre- 
 cincts, we should have injunctions, receivers 
 and mandamuses without stint. The capital 
 is not far from half a million, and we pay 
 ten per cent, a month, so that our customers 
 who are stockholders get their proportion in 
 dividends. We have brought down prices 
 to our poor people who are not stockholders, 
 and Mr. Clawson, the manager, seeks to regu- 
 late profits down to ten per cent, upon articles 
 of prime necessity. 
 
 " While the co-operative store has been a 
 gratifying and beneficent success, other mer- 
 chants are doing a large, independent busi- 
 ness. Mormons are free to buy anywhere, 
 and their only incentive to go to the ' co-op ' 
 is interest. We have only one branch which 
 we directly control, at Ogden, but our plan 
 is imitated in every ward of Salt Lake, and 
 in every settlement of Utah." 
 
 Speaking of Godby, Mr. Jennings said 
 that he was flighty and ambitious, and that 
 he had done a mean thing in taking a fifth 
 wife after apostatizing. " No man has a 
 right to be a polygamist," said Mr. Jen- 
 nings, " nnless he believes in it as a revela- 
 tion." 
 
 Not only is monogamy the practice of 
 the entire " Josephite " or Young Smith 
 school of the Mormon Church, but even at 
 Salt Lake it has exemplars, such as Ferma- 
 morz Little and William Jennings, who are 
 considered the richest men in the Territory 
 
 next to Brigham Young. Jennings at one 
 time had two wives, but since the death of 
 the first he has never re-married. These 
 men are probably worth one million dollars 
 apiece, and worth half as much is W. H. 
 Hooper, Mormon banker and Delegate in 
 Congress, also a monogamist in practice and 
 prejudice. Bolivar Roberts, who is very 
 rich in real estate, and who is reputed to 
 liave received three hundred thousand dol- 
 lars for his interest in the Sweetwater Mine, 
 is likewise the Mormon husband of one wife. 
 John T. Caine, editor of the Salt Lake Herald, 
 the leading newspaper between Denver and 
 Sacramento ; D. E. Calder, Superintendent 
 of the Utah Central Railroad; H. T. Fantz, 
 and many others, find the cares of one family 
 sufficient. 
 
 Polygamy, however, is warmly defended, 
 even by Mormon monogamists, as right, if 
 not convenient. John Young, the son of 
 Brigham, has three wives, and Joseph 
 Young, jr., two, while two pairs of Brig- 
 ham's daughters are married respectively to 
 H. B. Clawson and . 
 
 Brigham Young's most noted wife is 
 called Amelia; she is a vivacious, spirited 
 woman, about thirty-two years old, Ameri- 
 can born, and without children. Another of 
 the President's wives is Mrs. Decker, who 
 retains indications of much former beauty, 
 and her daughters ai-e the handsomest of 
 Brigham's children. The old gentleman 
 looks out well for avocations for his sons- 
 in-law, and it is said that in his will he has 
 divided all his property into seven hundred 
 shares, given the bulk of it to the church, 
 and distributed the rest equally among his 
 fixmilies. 
 
THE MORIWEOX TRIALS. 
 
 43 
 
 I saw Brigham at the Social Hall, on the 
 occasion of my last visit here, bid four of 
 his wives adieu. The old gentleman had 
 been dancing, but had fetigued the legs of 
 seventy years, and he approached the clus- 
 ter of his helpmates, buttoned up in a blue 
 overcoat with a white vest underneath, a red 
 woolen comforter around his neck, and a 
 worn silk hat in his hand. He looked very 
 lai-ge, square, and bland, and he said with 
 tenderness and dignity, shaking each by the 
 hand : 
 
 " My dear, I bid you good night ! " 
 
 The wives crowding up, with apparent 
 emulation, asked if it was his wish that they 
 also should accompany him home. 
 
 "No," said Brigham, "stay as long as 
 you please. I will have the carriage come 
 back and wait for you at the door below. 
 Good night ! " 
 
 They were all middle-aged women, com- 
 mon-place but cheerful; Brigham is said to 
 object to his wives dancing round dances. 
 It is wonderful that a Mormon with half a 
 dozen wives can be jealous or fastidious 
 about each of them, and yet I have heard 
 people here fly into a passion because their 
 wives were spoken to on the street by strang- 
 ers, or stared at. The only case of assassi- 
 nation chargeable with any degree of proba- 
 bility to the Mormons, was that of Brassfield, 
 a teamster, shot dead in the streets of Salt 
 Lake for selling a Mormon's furniture and 
 proposing to elope upon the proceeds of it 
 with a wife. 
 
 Godby, who hates Brigham Young sin- 
 cerely, has four wives, besides one divorced. 
 Since he has been " cut oft*" from the church 
 he has contemplated setting the example of 
 radical monogamy. "And yet," says Godby, 
 " I love all my wives so equally, and they 
 all love me so harmoniously, that I cannot 
 pick out the one to stay nor those who must 
 go." 
 
 This same Godby, in a speech upon the 
 inviolability of plural marriages, which he 
 made some time ago, gave in the language 
 of the resolution a remarkable concession 
 made by the Board of Orthodox Missiona- 
 ries in India. It was a question as to what 
 those Hindoos who had been married to 
 several wives before their conversion, should 
 do about them after baptism, repentance, &c., 
 and admission into the Christian Church. 
 
 Looking at the distresses and awkward- 
 nesses of the situation on all sides, the mis- 
 sionaries agreed that polygamous converts 
 might retain those wives which they already 
 possessed, and go on as before. 
 
 With this precedent — the only one con- 
 sistent with humane principles — we may ask 
 how much harder our Methodist brethren 
 are going to be upon these many children of 
 many wives born into the world under the 
 sacred presumption of an inviolable mar- 
 riage 1 Reverse the situation ! Be the 
 Mormon, and with your families before 
 you, designate those to be sacrificed, bast- 
 ardized and disowned ! 
 
44 
 
 THE IWORHOW TRIALS. 
 
 mSIDE VIEWS OF UTAH SOCIETY. 
 
 Salt Lake, Oct. 27. 
 
 Mr. Kinzer, a Californian, who has been 
 developing mines in Soutliorn Utali, told me 
 several anecdotes which illustrate Mormon 
 dignity and sincerity. One day, as the pe- 
 riod of the semi-annual Mormon conference 
 approached, he met a very old woman driv- 
 ing a cart to which an ox was attached. The 
 miner peeped into her cart and saw that it 
 contained nothing to eat except a little salt 
 meat and a bag of meal, with fodder for the 
 ox. This was somewhere in Juab County. 
 
 "Old lady," said the miner, "where are 
 you going 1 " 
 
 " Up to our conference, sir. I ha'n't 
 been there now for two year, but I want 
 to get my soul warmed up a little. It 
 appeared as if I could not stay away any 
 longer. I have been in church twenty-two 
 years, and I always go to the conference 
 when I can, but I live 'way down here on 
 the Santa Clara River, and it takes me three 
 weeks to go to Salt Lake." 
 
 This poor old zealot had actually been 
 more than two weeks on the way to her 
 church conference; she camped out every 
 night, and was entirely alone and unbe- 
 friended. The miners gave her some cheese 
 and bread and sent her on her way rejoicing. 
 
 The Mormon conferences are fearfully 
 apostolical. Twelve thousand people often 
 attend them. A band of music plays at the 
 Tabernacle gate as the Saints go in and as 
 they come out, and " Shoo Fly," " Bully for 
 You," " High Ricketty Barlow," &c., are the 
 class of tunes selected. Go into that vast 
 
 enclosure, and you will see the Mormon 
 Church conducting its business, the hands of 
 its officials held up by the whole broad pub- 
 lic sentiment. W. H. Hooper told me that 
 for nearly twenty years he had attended 
 these conferences, and he had nevei- heard a 
 half dozen nays voted against any measure 
 propounded by the High Quorum. Brig- 
 ham Young reads such an announcement as 
 this : 
 
 " Brother William Johnson is nominated 
 for a mission to Russia of two years, at his 
 own expense. All in favor of that nomina- 
 tion will say aye." 
 
 A roar goes up from the great conference 
 of Saints, and Brother William Johnson, who 
 perhaps keeps a shop in one of the streets of 
 Salt Lake, who does not speak any language 
 but his own, and that indifferently well, and 
 who has never traveled away from home 
 ten miles in his life, has no option but to 
 hearken to that cry as if it were as sacred 
 as the voice in St. Paul's dream of "Come 
 over into Macedonia and help us." 
 
 A great many people who read this will 
 cry out, " Despotism," but I, who am a 
 preacher's eon in the Methodist Church, 
 have seen the heart of my mother sink 
 down when my father was ordered off, by 
 government as absolute as Brigham Young's, 
 to live two years in some swampy part of 
 the earth for such a salary as could be picked 
 up, — marriage fees and presents of sausage 
 and sparerib about Christmas thrown in. 
 
 The death of Brigham Young will be, as 
 things stand, a benefit to his people. Of 
 Brigham's devotion, credulity and constancy 
 as a Mormon there can be no doubt. He is 
 as sincere a man in his church as Bishop 
 
THE MORMOX TRIALS. 
 
 45 
 
 Simpson is in the Methodist Church or Judge 
 McKean in his. But the old man has been 
 cramped up in Utah since 1848. Absolute 
 authority has made him vain ; want of travel 
 to distant parts has kept his charity from ex- 
 panding. To him, the whole earth lies under 
 the thatch of the Waljsatch Mountains, and 
 he is only aware of the fearful mightiness 
 of democratic sentiment in America from 
 the few troops camped in his vicinity, from 
 the miserable character of the Federal offi- 
 cials who go out there to bhickmail him, 
 and from the stream of respectful visitors, 
 for whom he holds a levee every morning, 
 and who butter him with praises, while per- 
 haps the same people are inditing letters to 
 the East raising a hue and cry against his 
 Empire. He will leave behind him in that 
 State a name never to be rivaled in the 
 future prosperous history of Utah, This 
 very old man, against whom the Courts are 
 battering, and who may soon be a fugitive 
 on the borders of Arizona to avoid the peni- 
 tentiary of Salt Lake, — I dare believe the 
 fame of Brigham Young is as indissolubly 
 bound in the literature and reverence of the 
 Rocky Mountain people, as the names of 
 La Salle, John Winthrop and Hernando 
 Cortez are embedded in other parts of the 
 country, 
 
 I was talking one day with a distinguished 
 apostle of the Mormon Church, and he used 
 this curious illustration : 
 
 " Suppose, Mr. Townsend," he said, 
 "that Joseph Smith had been born 3400 
 years ago, and Moses in the year 1800, 
 A. D., thus reversing the order of their 
 several revelations, — which would be the 
 harder to believe 1 " 
 
 I replied : " You ask me too much. I 
 am not familiar with the story of Moses, 
 My notion of Moses is obtained from one of 
 Michael Angelo's statues ; he always seemed 
 to me to be a fair man." 
 
 "Now," said this apostle, the story of 
 Joseph Smith is, that he discovered a set of 
 golden plates, and he was divinely endowed 
 to translate them. You ask where are 
 those plates'? We answer that Joseph 
 Smith gave them back to the angel, who 
 kept them. Moses on the other hand went 
 up into Mount Sinai, taking no witnesses 
 with him, and is alleged to have had a fiimi- 
 liar talk with the Lord. The J^oid gave 
 him two tablets of stone on which the com- 
 mandments are engraved ; but Moses never 
 showed the people those stone tablets, any 
 more than Joseph Smith showed the golden 
 plates. When Moses came down from 
 Sinai with the tablets, he found the people 
 worshipping a golden calf, and it says in the 
 ninth chapter of Deuteronomy, that he cast 
 down the tablets and broke them to pieces. 
 Then he went up into the mountain again, 
 as the tenth chapter of Deuteronomy dis- 
 closes and was j)t'i"niitted by the Lord, to 
 hew himself a new set of tablets, on which 
 the commandments were engraved, these 
 tablets were put into the ark, and they were 
 everlastingly concealed from the public eye. 
 Now had Moses been named Joseph Smith, 
 the gentile world would have scoffed at this 
 story, and would have said that the non- 
 appearance of the stone tablets, the breaking 
 of the original pair, and the re-engraving of 
 an imitation by the prophet himself, were 
 all subterfuges such as those which accom- 
 panied the chiseling of the Cardiff giant. 
 
46 
 
 THE ]?IOR]fIO]V TRIALS. 
 
 But you have had proacheil at you for eigh- 
 teen hundred years, the legend of Moses, 
 and you take it without question while yon 
 laugh at the altogether more consistent story 
 of the translation of the golden plates. 
 Both instances must be accepted by faitii 
 and not by reason. Our people out here 
 believe equally in the tale of Moses, and in 
 that of Joseph, and you who accept one half 
 of the gospel, want to put us in jail and 
 break us up for believing the other half. 
 You came in here just like the Catholic 
 priests got into the vales of the Waldenses. 
 Failing to convei-t us or rather to unconvert 
 us, you begin to persecute us. It is no fault 
 of ours that we offend you ; for we left 
 civilization fifteen hundred miles behind us, 
 in order not to irritate you. We think that 
 our revelation treats of matters if possible 
 more important to human nature than the 
 Old Testament. It solves the problem of 
 the past history of Ameiica. It has the 
 only new gospel and indigenous prophet and 
 seer on this hemisphere. It has grown more 
 rapidly than the Jewish jDower, and if it 
 were not for our notion on the subject of 
 marriage, I believe we would have more 
 converts in the United States, than any other 
 sect. 
 
 " Mormon Utah is a congregation of all 
 the good institutions which you separately 
 maintain. It is a house of correction, an 
 inebriate asylum, an almshouse, a church, 
 an intelligence office, a system of appren- 
 ticeship, a commission of emigration, a loan 
 office, a college of agriculture, a school of 
 mines and manufactures; in short it collects 
 from all parts of the earth, the weak, the 
 ignorant, and those who need spiritual and 
 
 social reformation, and brings them out here 
 removed from temptation and constructs 
 them into a useful citizen ey." 
 
 This is a case arising under Judge Mc- 
 Kean's system of ruling Mormons off a jury 
 in civil as well as criminal trials affecting 
 them in any way. Engelljreeht, a liquor 
 seller, refused to take out a city license, (the 
 licenses here being costly, $300 a month to 
 sell spirits over a bar; -1200 a month to sell 
 liquDrs wholesale and letail, not to be drank 
 on the premises; 1100 a month to keep a 
 wholesale liquor store; $50 a month to sell 
 ale and beer,) and after being notified of the 
 consequences by the Justice of the Peace in 
 his ward, one Clinton, the liquors of Engel- 
 brecht were poured Into the street. He sued 
 Clinton and the officers of the corporation 
 for malicious destruction of his stock, under 
 a territorial statute, making malicious dam- 
 age punishable three times the value of the 
 pi'operty destroyed. McKean ruled every 
 Mormon off the jury on the ground of bias 
 and incapability of giving a verdict accord- 
 ing to the evidence. The liquor seller M^on 
 the case by the packed jury, and for nineteen 
 thousand dollars worth of liquors got an 
 award of fifty-seven thousand dollars. The 
 case is to be carried up to the Supreme 
 Court and pressed for a decision in advance 
 of its order, on the ground that this whole- 
 sale and indiscriminate trial of cases affect- 
 ing the great majority of the people by 
 juries selected fi'om an insignificant minority, 
 is subversive of justice in Utah, and puts the 
 liberty and property of the people at the dis- 
 posal of two men — the majority of the Court. 
 The Mormons have a superstitious faith in 
 the honesty of the Supreme Court of Wash- 
 
THE MORMOM TRIALS. 
 
 47 
 
 ington, but they regard the Supreme Court 
 of Utah as a mixture of fanaticism, dullness 
 and draw-poker. If it be decided at Wash- 
 ington that McKean's way of nialving up 
 juries is legal, the Mormons will quietly 
 submit, but it is not probable that the Su- 
 preme Court, even as manipulated within 
 the past two years, will indorse this brutal 
 manner of violating the essential spirit cf 
 trial by jury. 
 
 In Utah, as generally in the Territories, 
 the Federal administration is loose, discord- 
 ant and slip- shod. The late Prosecutor, 
 Hempstead, was hated by McKean, for ob- 
 jecting to the jury -packing system, and the 
 present Prosecutor is appointed by the 
 Court only ; the post military commanders 
 are invariably friendly with the Mormons, 
 because they perceive nothing admirable or 
 lovable in the Federal officials. Jud^e 
 
 o 
 
 Strickland frequently smokes cigars and 
 whittles sticks while holding court. A 
 vague impression, started by the preacher 
 "Doctor" Newman, that Grant w^ants a 
 general movement made on polygamy, an 
 ambrosial notoriety seeker, he devised a trip 
 to Utah many months ago, and the Mormons, 
 in Democratic fairness, threw open their tab- 
 ernacle to him to let him say the worst 
 against their theology. Imagine a Method- 
 ist Bishop giving up his pulpit to a Mormon 
 in like circumstances. Newman now re- 
 turns the courtesy of the Mormons by set- 
 ting on foot, through the President, this 
 whole precipitate assize against polygamy. 
 Thus are schemes of statesmanship balked 
 by theological pretenders, and shallow 
 preachers are given the scope and influence 
 of Cardinals like Richelieu and Antonelli. 
 
 Bates, who has been appointed United 
 States Attorney for Utah within the past 
 few days, is a burnt-out Chicago lawyer, a 
 friend of Lyman Trumbull, and a conserva- 
 tive man. We shall probably hear no more 
 of Basking's ferocious billingsgate, where he 
 called Brigham Young a thief, assassin, &c,, 
 before the smiling Judge McKean, and re- 
 duced the associations even of the livery 
 stable where the United States Court is 
 held. 
 
 Senator Trumbull says these pi'osecutions 
 are out of all equity, and that they should 
 be stopped, and polygamy left to its natu- 
 ral enemies, prosperity, Gentile influx, opin- 
 ion and competition. 
 
 There is no doubt that the successor of 
 Brigham Young is already resolved upon by 
 that old Moses himself, and that he is ad- 
 vised of his nomination. It is George A. 
 Smith, cousin to Joseph Smith, and the His- 
 torian of the Church, and also at present 
 one of the three members of the " First Pres- 
 idency." 
 
 A man more unlike Brigham Young it 
 would be difficult to conceive. Brigham is 
 the incarnation of will and purpose, a mate- 
 rialist, a Yankee Turk. George A. Smith is 
 the spirit of reverence, gentleness and ac- 
 cord, and in his hands Mormonism will cease 
 to offend its neighbors, and resolve to a 
 quiet, docile, but still numerous and proselyt- 
 izing body of worshipers. Smith is very lit- 
 tle of a polygamist. He has none of Brig- 
 ham's consideration for money and clear- 
 headedness upon the great unit of the inter- 
 est-bearing dollar. Smith is one of us lit- 
 erary folks, a man of the stamp of Thacke- 
 ray, Peter Force and Washington Irving — 
 
48 
 
 THE 9IORIVIOX TRIALS. 
 
 not equal to them in degree, perha])8, ])ut in 
 nature the same — a collaborateur, lover of 
 traditions and family reminiscences, and a 
 pleasing, dignifu-d raconteur and politician. 
 lie has no avarice, no love of war, no vin- 
 dictiveness, and he is yet a sincere, hale, im- 
 movable Mormon, believing in Joseph's rev- 
 elations without question. I am told that 
 there is no historical society in any county 
 or State of the Union so perfectly complete 
 in archives as that of the Mormons. The 
 recording angel might have gone off on a 
 holiday as far as they are concerned ; for 
 George A, Smith has kept the account for 
 him. 
 
 And yet, this lolling, easy Bohemian has 
 energies of his own not to be despised, and - 
 Brigham Yoimg is more frequently in his so- 
 ciety than with any of the Madames Young. 
 He has a wonderful memory, povi^er of lan- 
 guage and stump-speaking, and adroit poli- 
 tical management. He loves politics and is 
 not a bigot. The Mormons have a weakness 
 for the Smith family as the Islamites might 
 have for the relatives of Mohammed, and 
 there never was any Smith with more saga- 
 city and bonhotnmie than this one. He is a 
 very large, heavy, and self-enjoying man in 
 appearance — resembling ex-Senator Toombs, 
 of Georgia, but without Toombs' opinionat- 
 edness or passion. He weighs as much as 
 Brigham Young, wears a brownish auburn 
 wig and spectacles, walks with a cane, and 
 has a ready smile and a big mouth to spread 
 it upon. Although having two or three 
 wives, I dare. believe that George Smith is at 
 heart a chaste,, tender, and religious husliand, 
 father, friend and gentleman. 
 
 Here I close my letter for the present. 
 
 In conclusion, it must be said, seiiously, warn- 
 ingly, to the Mormon leaders, that they must, 
 by the force of example and edict, stop this 
 policy of polygamy ! They are to a very 
 great extent still the "guides, philosophers 
 and friends " of their masses. Let them put 
 their flourishing territory in accord with the 
 surrounding civilized populations, take do- 
 mestic example from the white man's one 
 wife, and not from the Indian's many squaws, 
 and be, like a New Testament bishop, " the 
 husband of one !" Let them bring Utah 
 into the Union as a State, rid themselves of a 
 judiciary and Governor responsible only to a 
 distant public opinion, and share in the profits 
 and comforts of an expanding, a developing, 
 and a rich nation. -Of what avail are indus- 
 try and polygamy yoked together, the one 
 slaving for the other to live ahungered upon 
 its proceeds'? Even President Young's mil- 
 lions will go thinly around among his numer- 
 ous progeny. The present conflict between 
 the United States and the polygamous leaders 
 may be staved off, but similar troubles will 
 arise again and again. The nation will not 
 put up with polygamy much longer. Gov- 
 ernments and administrations may keep 
 hands off, but the danger to polygamy is 
 from the power that makes administrations 
 and governments — the Democratic jiopulace, 
 the public opinion. The very courts and . 
 troops now so obnoxious in Ut;ih may one 
 day be the refuge of the Mormon people, and 
 that necessity for refuge will be when the 
 public opinion catches up and overtakes the 
 United States Government and supersedes it, 
 as it did at Nauvoo. Heaven deliver a poor, 
 thrifty and sincere people from that fate, and 
 let Heaven make useful for this purpose the 
 
THE MORMOIV TRIAI.S. 
 
 49 
 
 present leaders of the Mormon Church, so 
 that we may see Utah saved from desoLitioii. 
 A way seems to arise by which — as under 
 GUI" free system such communications shonhJ 
 be brought al>out — the Mormon Church, the 
 Mormon people, and the true course of law, 
 justice and tolerance, may be secured. It 
 was proposed at Salt Lake, to several Moi'- 
 mons in my presence, by a distinguished 
 member of the church. 
 
 Namely : That the Mormon chiefs should 
 not trifle with time, nor hesitate upon the 
 brink of danger in this age of breech-loaders 
 and volunteer soldiering. Let them dismiss 
 the freak of an exodus to some other Terri- 
 tory, where in a few years the storm against 
 polygamy will burst forth again, A forcible 
 resistance, in my judgment, they never con- 
 templated. Let them believe that many thou- 
 sands of Gentiles take pride and interest in 
 their past energy and useful acquisitions, and 
 desire to see them protected in both and in 
 their worship. But polygamy is not only a 
 tenet ; it is a practice, and it encounters the 
 whole force of the creed and cui-rent of the 
 common law of civilization. Here is a way 
 to deal with it, extinguish it, and make a 
 wholesome and flourishing State out of an 
 anomaly. 
 
 Let a convention be called promptly, even 
 at once, before Congress gets well under way 
 with next session's business. Let this con- 
 vention prepare a State constitution and con- 
 cede polygamy in return for the right of local 
 government, trial by jury, and a share in the 
 benefits of representation in the nation. If 
 necessary to the dignity and conscience of the 
 Mormon people, let them throw in their pre- 
 amble or codicil the responsibility for aban- 
 
 doning polygamy in future upon the govern- 
 ment they petition, and concede it to the 
 cause of peace and the prejudice of the times. 
 The counti-y will not be unjust enough to de- 
 mand them to violate the duties of paternity 
 and wedlock in marriages already contracted, 
 where the complaint does not arise within 
 the marriage relation. Let them staunchly, 
 inviolably agree and bind themselves to keep 
 the agreements of this State constitution as 
 tliey make it, and to attest the same, let them 
 make the oath to sustain monogamous mari- 
 tal fidelity in all future marriages, a portion 
 of the oflicial oath to betaken by every State 
 officer. 
 
 This concession will be statesmanship and 
 saci-ilice together on the part of those influ- 
 ential apostles, counselors and quorums who 
 will bring it about. They will approve 
 themsplves worthy to preserve the State they 
 have erected, and remove the last cause of 
 interference with the civil rights and freedom 
 of worship and faith. They will share in the 
 benefits of a State to which they are already 
 bound by the ties of race, interest, and neigh- 
 borhood, and will find compensation for the 
 loss of polygamy in riches, respect and sta- 
 bility. They will save themselves, by a 
 speedy movement of this kind, from such po- 
 litical neutralization, I might say annihila- 
 tion, as has overtaken the South. For, if 
 they do not heed the warning, it may be too 
 late. One rasli act, the folly of any wretch, 
 may blot out Utah politically, materially, 
 ecclesiastically, even as a tradition ! " Now 
 is the accepted time, and now is the day of 
 salvation !" 
 
 THE END. 
 
LIBRftRY OF CONGRESS 
 
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