Roughing It eBook

When I returned to San Francisco I projected a pleasure journey to Japan and thence westward around the world; but a desire to see home again changed my mind, and I took a berth in the steamship, bade good-bye to the friendliest land and livest, heartiest community on our continent, and came by the way of the Isthmus to New York—­a trip that was not much of a pic-nic excursion, for the cholera broke out among us on the passage and we buried two or three bodies at sea every day.  I found home a dreary place after my long absence; for half the children I had known were now wearing whiskers or waterfalls, and few of the grown people I had been acquainted with remained at their hearthstones prosperous and happy—­some of them had wandered to other scenes, some were in jail, and the rest had been hanged.  These changes touched me deeply, and I went away and joined the famous Quaker City European Excursion and carried my tears to foreign lands.

Thus, after seven years of vicissitudes, ended a “pleasure trip” to the silver mines of Nevada which had originally been intended to occupy only three months.  However, I usually miss my calculations further than that.

MORAL.

If the reader thinks he is done, now, and that this book has no moral to it, he is in error.  The moral of it is this:  If you are of any account, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are “no account,” go away from home, and then you will have to work, whether you want to or not.  Thus you become a blessing to your friends by ceasing to be a nuisance to them—­if the people you go among suffer by the operation.

APPENDIX.  A.

Brief sketch of Mormon history.

Mormonism is only about forty years old, but its career has been full of stir and adventure from the beginning, and is likely to remain so to the end.  Its adherents have been hunted and hounded from one end of the country to the other, and the result is that for years they have hated all “Gentiles” indiscriminately and with all their might.  Joseph Smith, the finder of the Book of Mormon and founder of the religion, was driven from State to State with his mysterious copperplates and the miraculous stones he read their inscriptions with.  Finally he instituted his “church” in Ohio and Brigham Young joined it.  The neighbors began to persecute, and apostasy commenced.  Brigham held to the faith and worked hard.  He arrested desertion.  He did more—­he added converts in the midst of the trouble.  He rose in favor and importance with the brethren.  He was made one of the Twelve Apostles of the Church.  He shortly fought his way to a higher post and a more powerful—­President of the Twelve.  The neighbors rose up and drove the Mormons out of Ohio, and they settled in Missouri.  Brigham went with them.  The Missourians drove them out