The Mormon Church is governed by a hierarchy with two orders of priesthood, a president, two counsellors, twelve apostles, and elders and other officers.  Peculiar as their polity appears, it has proved remarkably successful in the development of their church and community, notwithstanding stern hostility and widespread disapproval.  They present an impressive example of shrewdness, thrift, and administrative skill, resulting in great material prosperity.  Besides their separate books, they accept the Bible as authoritative, and many of their doctrines and rites resemble those common to the Christian sects.  More than anything else, their teaching and their practice of polygamy have brought them into collision with “Gentiles” and with the United States Government.

The first Mormon settlement was at Kirtland, Ohio, the next was in Missouri.  From those States they were expelled, and in 1840 they founded Nauvoo in Illinois.  Their later experience, up to their permanent establishment in Utah, is recounted in the following narrative of the hardships endured and surmounted by this extraordinary people.  But it should be added that the cause of the exodus was not, as is generally supposed, religious persecution.  The leaders of the sect at Nauvoo had set up a bank without capital and passed thousands of its worthless notes upon the unsuspecting farmers and traders; and it was this and other crimes that exasperated the inhabitants of that region to the point of driving away the whole community of Mormons.

Once, while ascending the upper Mississippi in the autumn, when its waters were low, I was compelled to travel by land past the region of the rapids.  My road lay through the “Half-Breed Tract,” a fine section of Iowa, which the unsettled state of its land titles had appropriated as a sanctuary for coiners, horse thieves, and other outlaws.  I had left my steamer at Keokuk, at the foot of the Lower Fall, to hire a carriage, and to contend for some fragments of a dirty meal with the swarming flies, the only scavengers of the locality.  From this place to where the deep water of the river returns, my eye wearied to see everywhere sordid, vagabond, and idle settlers, and a country marred, without being improved, by their careless hands.

I was descending the last hillside upon my journey, when a landscape in delightful contrast broke upon my view.  Half encircled by a bend of the river, a beautiful city lay glittering in the fresh morning sun; its bright new dwellings set in cool green gardens ranging up around a stately dome-shaped hill which was crowned by a noble marble edifice whose high tapering spire was radiant with white and gold.  The city appeared to cover several miles; and beyond it, in the background, spread a fair rolling country, checkered by symmetrical lines of fruitful husbandry.  The unmistakable evidences of industry, enterprise, and educated wealth, everywhere, made the scene one of singular and most striking beauty.