[For a brief sketch
of Mormon history, and the noted Mountain Meadow
massacre, see
Appendices A and B. ]
It is a luscious country for thrilling evening stories
about assassinations of intractable Gentiles.
I cannot easily conceive of anything more cosy than
the night in Salt Lake which we spent in a Gentile
den, smoking pipes and listening to tales of how Burton
galloped in among the pleading and defenceless “Morisites”
and shot them down, men and women, like so many dogs.
And how Bill Hickman, a Destroying Angel, shot Drown
and Arnold dead for bringing suit against him for a
debt. And how Porter Rockwell did this and that
dreadful thing. And how heedless people often
come to Utah and make remarks about Brigham, or polygamy,
or some other sacred matter, and the very next morning
at daylight such parties are sure to be found lying
up some back alley, contentedly waiting for the hearse.
And the next most interesting thing is to sit and
listen to these Gentiles talk about polygamy; and
how some portly old frog of an elder, or a bishop,
marries a girl—likes her, marries her sister—likes
her, marries another sister—likes her,
takes another—likes her, marries her mother—likes
her, marries her father, grandfather, great grandfather,
and then comes back hungry and asks for more.
And how the pert young thing of eleven will chance
to be the favorite wife and her own venerable grandmother
have to rank away down toward D 4 in their mutual husband’s
esteem, and have to sleep in the kitchen, as like as
not. And how this dreadful sort of thing, this
hiving together in one foul nest of mother and daughters,
and the making a young daughter superior to her own
mother in rank and authority, are things which Mormon
women submit to because their religion teaches them
that the more wives a man has on earth, and the more
children he rears, the higher the place they will all
have in the world to come—and the warmer,
maybe, though they do not seem to say anything about
that.
According to these Gentile friends of ours, Brigham
Young’s harem contains twenty or thirty wives.
They said that some of them had grown old and gone
out of active service, but were comfortably housed
and cared for in the henery—or the Lion
House, as it is strangely named. Along with
each wife were her children—fifty altogether.
The house was perfectly quiet and orderly, when the
children were still. They all took their meals
in one room, and a happy and home-like sight it was
pronounced to be. None of our party got an opportunity
to take dinner with Mr. Young, but a Gentile by the
name of Johnson professed to have enjoyed a sociable
breakfast in the Lion House. He gave a preposterous
account of the “calling of the roll,” and
other preliminaries, and the carnage that ensued when
the buckwheat cakes came in. But he embellished
rather too much. He said that Mr. Young told
him several smart sayings of certain of his “two-year-olds,”
observing with some pride that for many years he had
been the heaviest contributor in that line to one of
the Eastern magazines; and then he wanted to show Mr.
Johnson one of the pets that had said the last good
thing, but he could not find the child.
