However, time presses. At four in the afternoon
we arrived on the summit of Big Mountain, fifteen
miles from Salt Lake City, when all the world was
glorified with the setting sun, and the most stupendous
panorama of mountain peaks yet encountered burst on
our sight. We looked out upon this sublime spectacle
from under the arch of a brilliant rainbow! Even
the overland stage-driver stopped his horses and gazed!
Half an hour or an hour later, we changed horses,
and took supper with a Mormon “Destroying Angel.”
“Destroying Angels,” as I understand it,
are Latter-Day Saints who are set apart by the Church
to conduct permanent disappearances of obnoxious citizens.
I had heard a deal about these Mormon Destroying Angels
and the dark and bloody deeds they had done, and when
I entered this one’s house I had my shudder
all ready. But alas for all our romances, he
was nothing but a loud, profane, offensive, old blackguard!
He was murderous enough, possibly, to fill the bill
of a Destroyer, but would you have any kind of an
Angel devoid of dignity? Could you abide an Angel
in an unclean shirt and no suspenders? Could
you respect an Angel with a horse-laugh and a swagger
like a buccaneer?
There were other blackguards present—comrades
of this one. And there was one person that looked
like a gentleman—Heber C. Kimball’s
son, tall and well made, and thirty years old, perhaps.
A lot of slatternly women flitted hither and thither
in a hurry, with coffee-pots, plates of bread, and
other appurtenances to supper, and these were said
to be the wives of the Angel—or some of
them, at least. And of course they were; for
if they had been hired “help” they would
not have let an angel from above storm and swear at
them as he did, let alone one from the place this one
hailed from.
This was our first experience of the western “peculiar
institution,” and it was not very prepossessing.
We did not tarry long to observe it, but hurried
on to the home of the Latter-Day Saints, the stronghold
of the prophets, the capital of the only absolute
monarch in America—Great Salt Lake City.
As the night closed in we took sanctuary in the Salt
Lake House and unpacked our baggage.
We had a fine supper, of the freshest meats and fowls
and vegetables—a great variety and as great
abundance. We walked about the streets some,
afterward, and glanced in at shops and stores; and
there was fascination in surreptitiously staring at
every creature we took to be a Mormon. This was
fairy-land to us, to all intents and purposes—a
land of enchantment, and goblins, and awful mystery.
We felt a curiosity to ask every child how many mothers
it had, and if it could tell them apart; and we experienced
a thrill every time a dwelling-house door opened and
shut as we passed, disclosing a glimpse of human heads
and backs and shoulders—for we so longed
to have a good satisfying look at a Mormon family
in all its comprehensive ampleness, disposed in the
customary concentric rings of its home circle.
