1864.04 摩尔门教徒

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Among the Mormons
A nineteenth-century writer meets Brigham Young and explores the “City of Saints.”

By Fitz-Hugh Ludlow

Eli Sheldon Glover / Library of Congress
APRIL 1864 ISSUE

The approach to Salt Lake City from the east is surprisingly harmonious with the genius of Mormonism. Nature, usually so unpliant to the spirit of people who live with her, showing a bleak and rugged face, which poetically should indicate the abode of savages and ogres, to flans Christian Andersen and his hospitable countrymen, but lavishing the eternal summer of her tropic sea upon barbarians who eat baked enemy under her palms, or throw their babies to her crocodiles, — this stiff, unaccommodating Nature relents into a little expressiveness the neighborhood of the Mormons, and you feel that the grim, tremendous cañons through which your overland stage rolls down to the City of the Saints are strangely fit avenues to an anomalous civilization.

We speak of crossing the Rocky Mountains from Denver to Salt Lake; but, in reality, they reach all the way between those places. They are not a chain, as most Eastern people imagine them, but a giant ocean caught by petrifaction at the moment of maddest tempest. For six hundred miles the overland stage winds over, between, and around the tremendous billows, lying as much as may be in the trough, and reaching the crest at Bridger’s Pass, (a sinuous gallery, walled by absolutely bare yellow mountains between two and three thousand feet in height at the roadside,) but never getting entirely out of the Rocky Mountain system till it reaches the Desert beyond Salt Lake. Even there it runs constantly among mountains; in fact, it never loses sight of lofty ranges from the moment it makes Pike’s Peak till its wheels (metaphorically) are washed by the Pacific Ocean; but the mountains of the Desert may legitimately set up for themselves, belonging, as I believe, to a system independent of the Rocky Mountains on the one side and the Sierra Nevada on the other. At a little plateau among snowy ridges a few miles east of Bridger’s Pass, the driver leans over and tells his insiders, in a matter of fact manner, through the window, that they have reached the summit level. Then, if you have a particle of true cosmopolitanism in you, it is sure to come out. There is something indescribably sublime, a conception of universality, in that sense of standing on the watershed of a hemisphere. You have reached the secret spot where the world clasps her girdle; your feet are on its granite buckle; perhaps there sparkles in you eyes that fairest gem of her cincture, a crystal fountain, from which her belt of rivers flows in two opposite ways. Yesterday you crossed time North Platte, almost at its source (for it rises out of the snow among the Wind River Mountains, and out of your stage windows you can see, from Laramie Plains, the Lander’s Peak which Bierstadt has made immortal) that stream runs into the sea from whose historic shores you came; you might drop a waif upon its ripples with the hope of its reaching New Orleans, New York, Boston, or even Liverpool. Tomorrow you will be ferried over Green River, as near its source, a stream whose cradle is in the same snow peaks as the Platte, whose mysterious middle life, under the new name of the Colorado, flows at the bottom of those tremendous fissures, three thousand feet deep, which have become the wonder of the geologist, whose grave, when it has dribbled itself away into the dotage of shallows and quick sands, is the desert margined Gulf of California and the Pacific Sea. Between Green River and the Mormon city no human interest divides your perpetually strained attention with Nature. Fort Bridger, a little over a day’s stage ride east of the city, is a large and quite a populous trading post and garrison of the United States; but although we found there a number of agreeable officers, whose acquaintance with their wonderful surroundings was thorough and scientific, and though at that period the fort was a rendezvous for our only faithful friend among the Utah Indians, Washki, the Snake chief, and that handful of his tribe who still remained loyal to their really noble leader and our Government, Fort Bridger left the shadowiest of impressions on my mind, compared with the natural glories of the surrounding scenery.

Mormondom being my theme, and my space so limited, I must resist the temptation to give detailed accounts of the many marvellous masterpieces of mimetic art into which we find the rocks of this region everywhere carved by the hand of Nature. Before we came to the North Platte, we were astonished by a ship, equalling the Great Eastern in size, even surpassing it in beauty of outline, its masts of columnar sandstone snapped by a storm, its prodigious hulk laboring in a gloomy sea of hornblendic granite, its deckhouses, shaped with perfect accuracy of imitation, still remaining in their place, and a weird looking demon at the wheel steering it on to some invisible destruction. This naval statue (if its bulk forbid not the name) was carved out of a coarse mill stone grit by the chisel of the wind, with but slight assistance from the infrequent rainstorms of this region. In Colorado l first began to perceive how vast an omission geologists had been guilty of in their failure to give the wind a place in the dynamics of their science. Depending for a year at a time, as that Territory sometimes does, upon dews and meltings from the snow peaks for its water, it is nevertheless fuller than any other district in the world of marvellous architectural simulations, vast cemeteries crowded with monuments, obelisks, castles, fortresses, and natural colossi from two to five hundred feet high, done in argillaceous sandstone or a singular species of conglomerate, all of which owe their existence almost entirely to the agency of wind. The arid plains from which the conglomerate crops out rarefy the superincumbent air stratum to such a degree that the intensely chilled layers resting on the closely adjoining snow peaks pour down to reestablish equilibrium, with the wrathful force of an invisible cataract, eight, ten, even seventeen thousand feet in height. These floods of cold wind find their appropriate channels in the characteristic cañons which everywhere furrow the whole Rocky Mountain system to its very base. Most of these are exceedingly tortuous, and the descending winds, during their passage through them, acquire a spiral motion as irresistible as the fiercest hurricane of the Antilles, which, moreover, they preserve for miles after they have issued from the mouth of the cañon. Every little cold gust that I observed in the Colorado country had this corkscrew character. The moment the spiral reaches a loose sand bed, it sweeps into its vortex all the particles of grit which it can hold. The result is an auger, of diameter varying from an inch to a thousand feet, capable of altering its direction so as to bore curved holes, revolving with incalculable rapidity, and armed with a cutting edge of silex. Is it possible, to conceive an instrument more powerful, more versatile? Indeed, practically, there is no description of surface, no kind of cut, which it is not capable of making. I have repeatedly seen it in operation. One day, while riding from Denver to Pike’s Peak, I saw it (in this instance, one of the smaller diameters) burrow its way six or seven feet into a sand bluff, making as smooth a hole as I could cut in cheese with a borer, of the equal diameter of six inches throughout, all in less time than I have taken to describe it. Repeatedly, on the same trip, I saw it gouge out a circular groove around portions of a similar bluff, and leave them standing as isolated columns, with heavy base and capital, presently to be solidified into just such rock pillars as throng the cemeteries or aid in composing the strange architectural piles mentioned above. Surveyor General Pierce of Colorado, (a man whose fine scientific genius and culture have already done yeoman’s service in the study of that most interesting Territory,) on a certain occasion, saw one of the wind-and-silex augers meet at right angles a window-pane in settler’s cabin, which came out from use process, after a few seconds, a perfect opaque shade, having been converted into ground glass as neatly and evenly could have been effected by the manufacturer’s wheel. It is not a very rare thing in Colorado to be able to trace the spiral and measure the diameter of the auger by rocks of fifty pounds’ weight and tree-trunks half as thick as an average man’s waist, torn up from their sites, and sent revolving overhead for miles before the windy turbine loses its impetus. The efficiency of an instrument like this I need not dwell upon. After some protracted examination and study of many of the most interesting architectural and sculpturesque structures of the Rocky-Mountain system, I am convinced that they are mainly explicable on the hypothesis of the wind and silex instrument operating upon material in the earthy condition, which petrified after receiving its form. Indeed, this same instrument is at present nowise restricted by that condition in Colorado, and is not only, year by year, altering the conformation of all sand and clay bluffs on the Plains, but is tearing down, rebuilding, and fashioning, on its facile lathe many rock strata of the solidity of the more friable grits, wherever exposed to its action. Water at the East does hardly more than wind at the West.

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Before we enter the City of the Saints let me briefly describe the greatest, not merely of the architectural curiosities, but in my opinion, the greatest natural curiosity of any kind which I have ever seen or heard of. Mind, too, that I remember Niagara, the Cedar Creek, and the Mammoth Cave, when speak thus of the Church Buttes. They are situated a short distance from Fort Bridger; the overland road passes by their side. They consist of a sand stone bluff, reddish brown in color, rising with the abruptness of a pile of masonry from the perfectly level plain, carved along its perpendicular face into a series of partially connected religious edifices, the most remarkable of which is a cathedral as colossal as St. Peter’s, and completely relieved from the bluff on all sides save the rear, where a portico joins it with the main precipice. The perfect symmetry of this marvellous structure would ravish Michel Angelo. So far from requiring an effort of imagination to recognize the propriety of its name, this church almost staggers belief in the unassisted. It belongs to a style entirely its own main arid lower portion is not divided into nave and transept, but seems like a system of huge semi-cylinders erected on their bases, and united with reentrant angles, their convex surfaces toward us, so that the ground plan might be called a species of quatrefoil. In each of the convex faces is an admirably proportioned doorway, a Gothic arch with deep carved and elaborately fretted mouldings, so wonderfully perfect in its imitation that you almost feel like knocking for admittance, secure of an entrance, did you only know the “Open sesame.” Between and behind the doors, alternating with flying-buttresses, are a series of deep-niched windows, set with grotesque statues, varying from the pigmy to the colossal size, representing demons rather than saints, though some of the figures are costumed in the style of religious art, with flowing sacerdotal garments.

The structure terminates above in a double dome, whose figure may be imagined by supposing a small acorn set on the truncated top of a large one, (the horizontal diameter of both being considerably longer in proportion to the perpendicular than is common with that fruit,) and each of these domes is surrounded by a row of prism-shaped pillars, half column, half buttress in their effect, somewhat similar to the exquisite columnar entourage of the central cylinder of the leaning tower of Pisa. The result of this arrangement is a massive beauty, without parrallel in the architecture of the world. I have not conveyed to any mind an idea of the grandeur of this pile, nor could I, even with the assistance of a diagram. I can only say, that the Cathedral Buttes are a lesson for the architects of all Christendom, a purely novel and original creation, of such marvellous beauty that Bierstadt and I simultaneously exclaimed, “Oh that the master builders of the world could come here even for a single day! The result would be an entirely new style of architecture, an American school, as distinct from all the rest as the Ionic from the Gothic or Byzantine.” If they could come, the art of building would have a regeneration. “Amazing” is the only word for this glorious work of Nature. I could have bowed down with awe and prayed at one of its vast, inimitable doorways, but that the mystery of its creation, and the grotesqueness of even its most glorious statues, made one half dread lest it were some temple built by demon hands for the worship of the Lord of Hell, and sealed in the stone dream of petrifaction, with its priests struck dumb within it, by the hand of God, to wait the judgment of Eblis and the earthquakes of the Last Day.

After leaving Church Buttes and passing Fort Bridger, our attention slept upon what it had seen until we entered the region of the cañons. These are defiles, channelled across the whole breadth of the Wahsatch Mountains almost to the level of their base, walled by precipices of red sandstone or sugarloaf granite, compared with which the Palisades of the Hudson become insignificant as a garden fence. The last poetical man who traverses these giant fissures cannot help feeling their fitness as the avenues to a paradoxical region, an anomalous civilization and a people whose psychological problem is the most unsolvable of the nineteenth century. During the Mormon War, Brigham Young made some rude attempts at a fortification of the great cañon half a day’s journey from his city, and this work still remains intact. He need not have done it; a hundred men, ambushed among the ledges at the top of the canon walls, and well provided with loose rocks and Minierifles, could convert the defile into a new Thermopylae, without exposure to themselves. In an older and more superstitious age, the unassisted horrors of Nature herself would have repelled an invading host from the passage of this grizzly cañon, as the profane might have been driven from the galleries of Isis or Eleusis.

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About forty miles from Salt Lake City we began to find Nature’s barrenness succumbing to the truly marvellous industry of the Mormon people. To understand the exquisite beauty of simple green grass, you must travel through eight hundred miles of sage-brush and grama, the former, the homely gray-leaved plant of our Eastern goose stuffing, grown into a dwarf tree six feet high, with a twisted trunk sometimes as thick as a man’s body; the latter, a stunted species of herbage, growing in ash tinted spirals, only two inches from the ground, and giving the Plains an appearance of being matted with curled hair or gray corkscrews. Its other name is “buffalo grass”; and in spite of its dinginess, with the assistance of the sage, converting all the Plains west of Fort Kearney into a model Quaker landscape, it is one of the most nutritious varieties of cattle fodder, and for hundreds of miles the emigrant drover’s only dependence.

By incredible labor, bringing down rivulets from the snow peaks of the Wahsatch range and distributing them over the levels by every ingenious’ device known to artificial irrigation, the Mormon farmers have converted the bottoms of the canons through which we approached Salt Lake into fertile fields and Pasturelands, whose emerald sweep soothed our eyes wearied with so many leagues of ashen monotony, as an old home strain mollifies the ear irritated by the protracted rhythmic clash or the dull, steady buzz of iron machinery. Contrasting the Mormon settlements with their surrounding desolation, we could not wonder that their success has fortified this people their delusion. The superficial student of rewards and punishments might well believe that none but God’s chosen people could cause this horrible desert, after such triumphant fashion, to blossom like the rose.

The close observer soon notices a painful deficiency in these green and smiling Mormon settlements. Everything has been done for the farm, nothing for the home. That blessed old Anglo Saxon idea seems everywhere quite extinct. The fields are billowing over with dense, golden grain, the cattle are wallowing in emerald lakes of juicy grass, the barns are substantial, the family-windmill buzzes merrily on its well oiled pivot, drawing water or grinding feed, the fruit trees are thrifty, but the house is desolate. Even where its owner is particularly well off, and its architecture somewhat more ambitions than the average, (though, as yet, this superiority is measured by little more than the difference between logs and clapboards,) there is still no air about it of being the abode of happy people, fond of each other, and longing after it in absence. It looks like a mere inclosure to eat and sleep in. Nobody seems to have taken any pride in it, to feel any ambition for it. Woman’s tender little final touches, which make a dear refuge out of a mud cabin, and without which palatial brownstone is only a home in the moulding clay, those dexterous ornamentations which make so little mean so much, the brier-rose-slip by the doorstep, growing into the fragrant welcome of many Juries, the trellised Madeira-vines, the sunny spot of chrysanthemums, charming summer on to the very brink of frost, all these things are utterly and everywhere lacking to the Mormon inclosure. Sometimes we passed a fence which guarded three houses instead of one. Abundant progeny played at their doors, or rolled in their yard, watched by several unkempt, bedraggled mothers. Owning a common husband, — and of these should feel much interest in the looks of a demesne held by then in such unhappy partnership. The humblest New England cottage has its climbing flowers at the door-post, or its garden-bed in front; but how quickly would these wither, if the neat brisk house-mistress owned her husband in common with Mrs. Deacon Pratt next door!

The first Mormon household I ever visited belonged to a son of the famous Heber Kimball, Brigham Young’s most devoted follower, and next to him in the Presidency. It was the last stage-station but one before we entered Salt Lake, situated at the bottom of a green valley in Parley’s Cañon (named after the celebrated Elder, Parley Pratt); and as it looked like the residence of a well to do farmer, I went in, and asked for a bowl of bread and milk the greatest possible luxury after a life of bacon and salt spring water, such as we had been leading in the mountains. A fine looking, motherly woman, with a face full of character, gray-haired, and about sixty years old, rose promptly to grant my request, and while the horses were changing I had ample time to make the acquaintance of two pretty young girls, hardly over twenty, holding two infants, of ages not more than three months apart. Green as I was to saintly manners, I supposed that one of these two young mothers had run in from a neighbor’s to compare babies with the mistress of the house, after our Eastern fashion, universal with the owners phenomena. When the old lady came back with the bread and milk, and both of the young girls addressed her as “mother,” I was emboldened to tell her that her daughters had a pretty pair of children.

“They are pretty,” said the old lady, demurely; “but they are the children of my son”; then, as if resolved to duck a Gentile head and heels into Mormon realities at once, she added, “Those young ladies are the wives of my son, who is now gone on a mission to Liverpool, young Mr. Kimball, the son of Heber Kimball; and I am Heber Kimball’s wife.”

A cosmopolitan, especially one knowing beforehand that Utah was not distinguished for monogamy, might well be ashamed to be so taken off his feet as I was by my first view of Mormonism in its practical workings. I stared, I believe I blushed a little, I tried to stutter a reply; and the one dreadful thought which persistently kept uppermost, so that I felt they must read it in my face., was, “How can these young women sit looking at each other’s babies without flying into each other’s faces with their fingernails, and tearing out each other’s hair?” Heber Kimball afterwards solved the question for me, by saying that it was a triumph of grace.

Such another triumph was Mrs. Heber Kimball herself. She was a woman of remarkable presence, in youth must have been very handsome, would have been the oracle of tea fights, the ruling spirit of donation visits, in any Eastern village where she might have lived, and, had her home been New York, would have fallen by her own gravity into the Chief Directress’s chair of half a dozen Woman’s Aid Societies and Associations for Moral Reform. Yet here was this strong minded woman, as her husband afterward acknowledged to me, his best counsellor and right hand helper through a married life reaching into middle age, witnessing her property in that husband’s affections subdivided and parcelled out until she owned but a one-thirtieth share, not only without a pang, but with the acquiescence of her conscience and the approbation of her intellect. Though few first wives in Utah had learned to look concubinage in the face so late in life as this emphatic and vigorous natured woman, I certainly met none whose partisanship of polygamy was so unquestioning and eloquent. She was one of the strangest psychological problems I ever met. Indeed, I am half inclined to think that she embraced Mormonism earlier than her husband, and, by taking the initiative, secured for herself the only true wifely place in the harem, the marital after thoughts of Brother Heber being her servants rather than her sisters. She was most unmistakably his favorite.

One day in the Opera House at Salt Lake, when the carpenters were laying the floor for the Fourth of July Eve Ball, Heber and I got talking of the potpourri of nationalities assembled in Utah. Heber waxed unctuously benevolent, and expressed his affection for each succeeding race as fast as mentioned.

“I love the Danes dearly! I’ve got a Danish wife.” Then turning to a rough-looking carpenter, hammering near him, — “You know Christiny, — eh, Brother Spudge?”

“Oh, yes! know her very well!”

A moment after, — “The Irish are a dear people. My Irish wife is among the best I’ve got.”

Again, — “I love the Germans! Got a Dutch wife, too! Know Katrine, Brother Spudge? Remember she couldn’t scarcely talk a word o’ English when she come, — eh, Brother Spudge?”

Brother Spudge remembered, and Brother Heber continued to trot out the members of his marital stud for discussion of their points with his more humble fellow polygamist of the hammer; but when I happened to touch upon the earliest Mrs. Heber, whom I naturally thought he would by this time regard as a forgotten fossil in the Lower Silurian strata of his connubial life, and referred to the interview I had enjoyed with her on the afternoon before entering the city, his whole manner changed to a proper husbandly dignity, and, without seeking corroboration from the carpenter, he replied, gravely,

“Yes! that is my first wife, and the best woman God ever made!”

The ball to which I have referred was such an opportunity for studying Mormon sociology as three months’ ordinary stay in Salt Lake might not have give me. Though Mormondom is disloyal to the core, it still patronizes time Fourth of July, at least in its phase of festivity, omitting the patriotism, but keeping the fireworks of our Eastern celebration, substituting “Utah” for “Union” in the Buncombe speeches, and having a ball instead of the Declaration of Independence. All the saints within half a day’s ride of the city come flocking into it, to spend the Fourth. A well to do Mormon at the bead f his wives and children, all of Whom are probably eating candy as they march through the metropolitan streets in solid column, looks to the uninitiated like the principal of a female seminary, weak in its deportment, taking out his char for an airing.

Last Fourth of July, it may be remembered, fell on a Saturday. In their ambition to reproduce ancient Judaism (and this ambition is the key to their whole puzzle) the Mormons are Sabbatarians of a strictness, which would delight Lord Shaftesbury. Accordingly, in order that their festivities might not encroach on the early hours of the Sabbath, they had the ball on Fourth of July eve, instead of the night of the Fourth. I could not realize the risk of such an encroachment when I read the following sentence printed on my billet of invitation

“Dancing to commence at 4 P.M.”

Bierstadt, myself, and three gentlemen of our party were the only Gentiles whom I found invited by President Young to meet in the neighborhood of three thousand saints. Under these circumstances I felt like the three-thousandth homeopathic dilution of monogamy. Morality in this world is so mainly a matter of convention that I dreaded to appear in decent polygamic society, lest respectable women, owning their orthodox tenth of a husband, should shrink from the pollution of my presence, whispering, with a shudder, “Ugh! Well, I never! How that one-wifed reprobate can dare to show his face!” But they were very polite, and received me with as skilfully veiled disapprobation as is shown by fashionable Eastern belles to brilliant seducers immoral in our sense. Had I been a woman, I suppose there would have been no mercy for me.

I sought out our entertainer, Brigham Young, to thank him for the flattering exception made in our Gentile favor. He was standing in the dress circle of the theatre, looking down on the dancers with an air of mingled hearty kindness and feudal ownership. I could excuse the latter, for Utah belongs to him of right. He may justly say of it, “Is not this great Babylon which I have built?” His sole executive tact and personal fascination are the keystone of the entire arch of Mormon society. While he remains, eighty thousand (and increasing) of the most heterogeneous souls that could be swept together from the byways of Christendom will continue builded up into a coherent nationality. The instant he crumbles, Mormondom and Mormonism will fall to pieces at once, irreparably. His individual magnetism, his executive tact, his native benevolence, are all immense; I regard him as Louis Napoleon, plus a heart; but these advantages would avail him little with the dead-in-earnest fanatics who rule Utah under him, and the entirely persuaded fanatics whom they rule, were not his qualities all coordinated in this one absolute sincerity of belief and motive. Brigham Young is the farthest remove on earth from a hypocrite; he is that grand, yet awful sight in human nature, a man who has brought the loftiest Christian self-devotion to the altar of the Devil, who is ready to suffer crucifixion for Barabbas, supposing him Christ. Be sure, that, were he a hypocrite, the Union would have nothing to fear from Utah. When he dies, at least four hostile factions, which find their only common ground in deification of his person, will snatch his mantle at opposite corners. Then will come such a rending as the world has not seen since the Macedonian generals fought over the coffin of Alexander, and then Mormonism will go out of Geography into the History of Popular Delusions. There is not a single chief, apostle, or bishop, except Brigham, who possesses any catholicity of influence. I found this tacitly acknowledged in every quarter. The people seem like citizens of a beleaguered town, who know they have but a definite amount of bread, yet have made up their minds to act while it lasts as if there were no such thing as starvation. The greatest comfort you can afford a Mormon is to tell him how young Brigham looks; for the quick, unconscious sequence is, “Then Brigham may last out my time.” Those who think at all have no conjecture of any Mormon future beyond him, and I know that many Mormons (Heber Kimball included) would gladly die today rather than survive him and encounter that judgment day and final perdition of their faith which must dawn on his new made grave.
Well, we may give them this comfort without any insincerity. Let us return to where ho stands gazing down on the parquet. Like any Eastern partygoer, he is habited in the “customary suit of solemn black,” and looks very distinguished in this dress, though his daily homespun detracts nothing from the feeling, when in his presence, that you are beholding a most remarkable man. He is nearly seventy years old, but appears very little over forty. His height is about five feet ten inches; his figure very well made and slightly inclining to portliness. His hair is a rich curly chestnut, formerly worn long, in supposed immitation of the apostolic coiffure, but now cut in our practical Eastern fashion, as accords with the man of business, whose métier he has added to apostleship with the growing temporal prosperity of Zion. Indeed, he is the greatest businessman on the continent, the cashier of a firm of eighty thousand silent partners, and the only auditor of that cashier, besides. If I today signified my conversion to Mormondom, tomorrow I should be baptized by Brigham’s hands. The next day I should be invited to appear at the Church Office (Brigham’s) and exhibit to the Church (Brigham) a faithful inventory of my entire estate. I am a cabinetmaker, let us say, and have brought to Salt Lake the entire earnings of my New York shop, twenty thousand dollars. The Church (Brigham sole and simple) examines and approves my inventory. It (Brigham alone) has the absolute decision of the question whether any more cabinet-makers are needed in Utah. If the Church (Brigham) says, “No,” it (Brigham again) has the right to tell me where labor is wanted, and set me going in my new occupation. If the Church (Brigham) says, “Yes,” it further goes on to inform me, without appeal, exactly what proportion of the twenty thousand dollars on my inventory can be properly turned into the channels of the new cabinet shop. I am making no extraordinary or disproportionate supposition when I say that the Church (Brigham) permits me to retain just one-half of my property. The remaining ten thousand dollars goes into the Church Fund, (Brigham’s Herring-safe,) and from that portion of my life’s savings I never hear again, in the form either of capital, interest, bequeath. able estate, or dower to my widow. Except for the purposes of the Church, (Brigham’s unquestionable will,) my ten thousand dollars is as though it had not been. I am a sincere believer, however, and go home light hearted, with a certified check written by the Recording Angel on my conscience for that amount, passed to my credit in the bank where thieves break not through nor steal, it being no more accessible to them than to the depositor, which is a comfort to the latter. The first year I net from my chairs and tables two thousand dollars. The Church (Brigham) sends me another invitation to visit it, make a solemn averment of the sum, and pay over to that ecclesiastical edifice, the Herring safe, two hundred dollars. Or suppose I have not sold any of my wares as yet, but have only imported, to be sold by and by, five hundred Boston rockers. On learning this fact, the Church (Brigham) graciously accepts fifty for its own purposes. — Being founded upon a rock, it does not care, in its collective capacity, to sit upon rockers, but has an immense series of warehouses, omnivorous and eupeptic, which swallow all manner of tithes, from grain and horseshoes to the less stable commodities of fresh fish and melons, assimilating them by admirable processes into coin of the realm. These warehouses are in the Church (Brigham’s own private) inclosure. If success in my Cabinet-making has moved me to give a feast, and I thereat drink more healths than are consistent with my own, the Church surely knows that fact the very next day; and as Utah recognizes no impunitive “getting drunk in the bosom of one’s family,” I am again sent for, on this occasion to pay a fine, probably exceeding the expenses of my feast. A second offence is punished with imprison It as well as fine; for no imprisonment avoids fine, this comes in every case. The hand of the Church holds the souls of the saints by inevitable purse strings. But I cannot waste time by enumerating the multitudinous lapses and offences which all bring revenue to the Herring-safe.

Over all these matters Brigham has supreme control. His power is the most despotic known to mankind. Here, by the way, is the constitutionally vulnerable point of Mormonism. If fear of establishing a bad precedent hinder the United States at any time from breaking up that nest of all disloyalty, because of its licentious marriage institutions, Utah is still open to grave punishment, and the Administration inflicting it would have duty as well as vested right upon its side, on the ground that it stands pledged to secure to each of the nation’s constituent sections a republican form of government, something which Utah has never enjoyed any more than Timbuctoo. I once asked Brigham if Dr. Bernhisel would be likely to get to Congress again. “No,” he replied, with perfect certainty; “we shall send as our Delegate.” (I think he mentioned Colonel Kinney, but do not remember absolutely.) Whoever it was, when the time came, Brigham would send in his name to the “Deseret News,” whose office, like everything else valuable and powerful, is in his inclosure. It would be printed as a matter of course; a counter-nomination is utterly unheard of; and on election day would be Delegate as surely as the sun rose. The mountain stream that irrigates the city, flowing to all the gardens through open ditches on each side of the street, passes through Brigham’s inclosure: if the saints needed drought to humble them, he could set back the waters to their source. The road to the only cañon where firewood is attainable runs through the same close, and is barred by a gate of which he holds the sole key. A family man, wishing to cut fuel, must ask his leave, which is generally granted on condition that every third or fourth load is deposited in the inclosure, for Church purposes. Thus everything vital, save the air he breathes, reaches the Mormon only through Brigham’s sieve. What more absolute despotism is conceivable? Here lies the pou-sto for the lever of Governmental interference. The mere fact of such power resting in one mans irresponsible hands is a crime against the Constitution. At the same time, this power, wonderful as it may seem, is practically wielded for the common good. I never heard Brigham’s worst enemies accuse him of peculation, though such immense interests are controlled by his one pair of hands. His life is all one great theoretical mistake, yet he makes fewer practical mistakes than any other man, so situated, whom the world ever saw. Those he does snake are not on the side of self. He merges his whole personality in the Church, with a self-abnegation which would establish in business a whole century of martyrs having a worthy cause.

The cut of Brigham’s hair led me away from his personal description. To return to it: his eyes are a clear blue-gray, frank and straightforward in their look; his nose a finely chiselled aquiline; his mouth exceedingly firm, and fortified in that expression by a chin almost as protrusive beyond the rest of the profile as Charlotte Cushman’s, though less noticeably so, being longer than hers; and he wears a narrow ribbon of brown beard, meeting under the chin. I think I have heard Captain Burton say that he had irregular teeth, which made his smile unpleasant. Since the Captain’s visit, our always benevolent President, Mr. Lincoln, has altered all that, sending out as Territorial Secretary a Mr. Fuller, who, besides being a successful politician, was an excellent dentist. He secured Brigham’s everlasting gratitude by making him a very handsome false set, and performing the same service for all of his favorite, but edentate wives. Several other apostles of the Lord owe to Mr. Fuller their ability to gnash their teeth against the Gentiles. The result was that be became the most popular Federal officer (who didn’t turn Mormon) ever sent to Utah. The man who obtains ascendency over the mouths of the authorities cannot fail erelong to get their ears.

Brigham’s manners astonish any one who knows that his only education was a few quarters of such common school experience as could be had in Ontario County, Central New York, during the early part of the century. There are few courtlier men living. His address is a fine combination of dignity with the desire to confer happiness, of perfect deference to the feelings of others with absolute certainty of himself and his own opinions. He is a remarkable example of the educating influence of tactful perception, combined with entire singleness of aim, considered quite apart from its moral character. His early life was passed among the uncouth and illiterate; his daily associations, since he embraced Mormonism, have been with the least cultivated grades of human society, a heterogeneous peasant-horde, looking to him for erection into a nation yet he has so clearly seen what is requisite in the man who would be respected in the Presidency, and has so unreservedly devoted his life to its attainment, that in protracted conversations with him I heard only a single solecism, (“a’n’t you” for “aren’t you,”) and saw not one instance of breeding which would be inconsistent with noble lineage.

I say all this good of him frankly, disregarding any slur that may be cast on me as his defender by those broad-effect artists who always paint the Devil black, for I think it high time that the Mormon enemies of our American Idea should be plainly understood as far more dangerous antagonists than hypocrites or idiots can ever hope to be. Let us not twice commit the blunder of underrating our foes.

Brigham began our conversation at the theatre by telling me I was late, it was after nine o’clock. I replied, that this was the time we usually set about dressing for an evening party in Boston or New York.

“Yes,” said he, “you find us an old-fashioned people; we are trying to return to the healthy habits of patriarchal times.”

“Need you go back so far as that for your parallel?” suggested I. “It strikes me that we might have found four o’clock balls among the early Christians.”

He smiled, without that offensive affectation of some great men, the air of taking another’s joke under their gracious patronage, and went on to remark that there were, unfortunately, multitudinous differences between the Mormons and Americans at the East, besides the hours they kept.

“You find us,” said he, “trying to live peaceably. A sojourn with people thus minded must be a great relief to you who come from a laud where brother hath lifted hand against brother, and, you hear the confused noise of the warrior perpetually ringing in your ears.”

Despite the courtly deference and Scriptural dignity of this speech, I detected in it a latent crow over that “perished Union” which was the favorite theme of every saint I met in Utah, and hastened to assure the President that I had no desire for relief from sympathy

with my country’s struggle for honor and existence.

“Ah!” he replied, in a voice slightly tinged with sarcasm. “You differ greatly, then, from multitudes of your countrymen, who, since the draft began to be talked of, have passed through Salt Lake, flying westward from the crime of their brothers’ blood.”

“I do indeed.”

“Still, they are excellent men. Brother Heber Kimball and myself are every week invited to address a train of them down at Emigrant Square. They are honest, peaceful people. You call them ‘Copperheads’ I believe. But they are real, true, good men. We find them. very truth-seeking, remarkably open to conviction. Many of them have stayed with us. Thus the Lord makes the wrath of man to praise Him. The Abolitionists—the same people who interfered with our institutions, and drove us out into the wilderness—interfered with the Southern institutions till they broke up the Union. But it’s all coining out right, a great deal better than we could have arranged it for ourselves. The men who flee from Abolitionist oppression come out here to our ark of refuge, and people the asylum of God’s chosen. You’ll all be out here before long. Your Union’s gone forever. Fighting only makes matters worse. When your country has become a desolation, we, the saints whom you east out, will forget all your sins against us, and give you a home.”

There was something so preposterous in the idea of a mighty and prosperous people abandoning, through abject terror of a desperate set of Southern conspirators, the fertile soil and grand commercial avenues of the United States, to populate a green strip in the heart of an inaccessible desert, that, until I saw Brigham young’s face clowning with what he deemed prophetic enthusiasm, I could not imagine him in earnest. Before I left Utah, I discovered, that, without a single exception, all the saints were inoculated with a prodigious craze, to the effect that the United States was to become a blighted chaos, and its inhabitants Mormon proselytes and citizens of Utah within the next two years, the more sanguine said, “next summer.” At first sight, one point puzzled me. Where were they to get the orthodox number of wives or this sudden accession of converts? My gentlemen-readers will feel highly flattered by a solution of this problem which I received from no lesser light of the Latter Day Church than that jolly apostle, Heber Kimball.

“Why,” said the old man, twinkling his little black eyes like a godly Silonus, and nursing one of his fat legs with a lickerish smile, “isn’t the Lord Almighty providing for His beloved heritage jist as fast as He anyways kin? This war’s a-goin’ on till the biggest part o’ you male Gentiles hez killed each other off then the leetle handful that’s left and comes a fleein’ t’ our asylum’ll bring all the women o’ the nation along with ’em, so we shall hev women enough to give every one on ’em all they want, and hev a large balance left over to distribute round among God’s saints that hez been here from the beginnin’ o the tribulation.”

The sweet taste which this diabolical reflection seemed to leave in Heber Kimball's mouth made me long to knock him down worse than I had ever felt regarding either saint or sinner. But it is costly to smite an apostle of the Lord in Salt Lake City; and I merely retaliated by telling him. I wished I could hear him say that in a lecture room full of Sanitary Commission ladies scraping lint for their husbands, sweethearts, and brothers in the Union army. I didn't know whether saints made good lint, but I thought I knew one who 'd get scraped a little.

To resume Brigham for the last time. After a conversation about the Indians, in which he denounced the military policy of the Government, averring that one bale of blankets and ten pounds of beads would go farther to protect the mails from stoppage and emigrants from massacre than a regiment of soldiers, he discovered that we crossed swords on every war question, and tactfully changed the subject to the beauty of the Opera House.

As to the Indians, let me remark by the by, I did not tell him that I understood the reason of his dislike to severe measures in that direction. Infernally bestial and cruel as are the Goshoots, Pi-Uttes, and other Desert tribes, still they have never planned any extensive raid since the Mormons entered Utah. In every settlement of the saints you will find from two to a dozen young men who wear their black hair cut in the Indian fashion, and speak all the surrounding dialects with native fluency. Whenever a fatly provided wagon train is to be attacked, a flue herd of emigrants’ beeves stampeded, the mail to be stopped, or the Gentiles in any way harassed, these desperadoes stain their skin, exchange their clothes for a breech-clout, and rally a horde of the savages, whose favor they have, always propitiated, for the ambush and massacre, which in all but the element of brute force is their work in plan, leadership, and execution. I have multitudes of most interesting facts to back this assertion, but am already in danger of overrunning my allowed limits.

The Opera House was a subject we could agree upon. I was greatly astonished to find in the desert heart of the continent a place of public amusement which for capacity, beauty, and comfort has no superior in America, except the opera houses of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. It is internally constructed somewhat like the first of these, seats twenty-five hundred people, and commodiously receives five hundred more, when, as in the present instance, the stage is thrown into the parquet, and the latter boarded up to the level of the former for dancing. Externally the building is a plain, but not ungraceful structure, of stone, brick, and stucco. My greatest surprise was excited by the really exquisite artistic beauty of the gilt and painted decorations of the great arch over the stage, the cornices, and the moulding about the proscenium-boxes. President Young, with a proper pride, assured me that every particle of the ornamental work was by indigenous and saintly hands.

“But you don’t know yet,” he added, “how independent we are of you at the East. Where do you think we got that central chandelier, and what d’ ye suppose we paid for it?”

It was a piece of workmanship which would have been creditable to any New York fir, apparently a richly carved circle, twined with gilt vines, leaves, anti tendrils, blossoming all over with flaming wax-lights, and suspended by a massive chain of golden lustre. So I replied that he probably paid a thousand dollars for it in New York.

“Capital!” exclaimed Brigham. “I made it myself! That circle is a cart-wheel which I washed and gilded; it hangs by a pair of gilt ox-chains; and the ornaments of the candlesticks were all cut after my patterns out of sheet-tin!”

I talked with the President till a party of young girls, who seemed to regard him ,with idolatry, and whom, in return, he treated with a sage mixture of gallantry and fatherliness, came to him with an invitation to join in some old-fashioned contra-dance long forgotten at the East. I was curious to see how he would acquit himself in this supreme ordeal of dignity; so I descended to the parquet, and was much impressed by the aristocratic grace with which he went through his figures.

After that I excused myself from numerous kind invitations by the ball committee to be introduced to a partner and join in the dances. The fact was that I greatly wished to make a thorough physiognomical study of the ballroom, and I know that my readers will applaud my self-denial in not dancing, since it enables me to tell them how Utah good society looks.

After spending an hour in a circuit and survey of the room as minute as was compatible with decency, I arrived at the following results.

There was very little ostentation in dress at the ball, but there was also very little taste in dressing. Patrician broadcloth and silk were the rare exceptions, generally ill-made and ill-worn, but they cordially associated with the great malls of plebeian tweed and calico. Pew ladies wore jewelry or feathers. There were some pretty girls swimming about in tasteful whip-syllabub of puffed tarlatan. Where saintly gentlemen came with several wives, the oldest generally seemed the most elaborately dressed, and acted much like an Eastern chaperon toward her younger sisters. (Wives of the same man habitually besister each other in Utah. Another triumph of grace!) Among the men I saw some very strong and capable faces; but the majority had not much character in their looks, indeed, differed little in that regard from any average crowd of men anywhere. Among the women, to my surprise, I found no really degraded faces, though many stolid ones, only one deeply dejected, (this belonged to the wife of a hitherto monogamic husband, who had left her along in the dress-circle, while he was dancing with a chubby young Mormoness, likely to be added to the family in a month or two,) but many impassive on and though I saw multitudes of kindly, good-tempered countenances, and a score which would have been called pretty anywhere, I was obliged to confess, after a most impartial and anxious search, that I had not met a single woman who looked high-toned, first class, capable of poetic enthusiasm or heroic self-devotion, not a single woman whom an artist would dream of and ask to sit for a study, not one to whom a finely constituted intellectual man could come for companionship in his pursuits or sympathy in his yearnings. Because 1 knew that this verdict would be received at the East with a “Just as you might have expected!” I cast aside everything like prejudice, and forgot that I was in Utah, as I threaded the great throng.


I must condense greatly what I have to say about two other typical men besides Brigham Young, or I shall have no room to speak of the Lake and the Desert. Heber Kimball, second President, (proximus longo intervallo!) Brigham’s most devoted worshipper, and in all respects the next most important man, although utterly incapable of keeping coherent the vast tissue of discordant Mormon elements, in case he should survive Brigham, is the latter’s equal in years, but in all things else his antipodes. His height is over six feet, his form of alder-manic rotundity, his face large, plethoric, and lustrous with the stable red of stewed cranberries, while his small, twinkling black beads of eyes and a Satyric sensualism about the mouth would indicate a temperament fatally in the way apostleship save that of polygamy, even without the aid of an induction from his favorite topics of discourse and his patriarchally unvarnished style of handling them. Men, everywhere, unfortunately, tend little toward the error of bashfulness in their chat among each other, but most of us at the East would feel that we were insulting the lowest member of the demi-monde, if we uttered before her a single sentence of the talk which forms the habitual staple of all Heber Kimball’s public sermons to the wives and daughters who throng the Sunday Tabernacle.

Heber, took a vivid interest in Bierstadt’s and my own eternal welfare. He quite laid himself out for our conversion, coming to sit with us at breakfast in our Mormon hotel, dressed in a black swallowtail, buff vest, and a stupendous truncate cone of Leghorn, which made him look like an Italian mountebank-physician of the seventeenth century. I have heard men who could misquote Scripture for their own ends, and talk a long while without saying anything; but he, so far surpassed in these particulars the loftiest efforts within my former experience, that I could think of no comparison for him but Jack Bunsby taken to exhorting. Witness a sample:

“Seven women shall take a hold o’ one man! There!” (with a slap on the back of the nearest subject for conversion). “What d’ ye think o’ that? Shall! Shall take a hold on him! That don’t mean they sha’n’t, does it? No I God’s word means what it says. And therefore means no otherwise, not in no way, shape, nor manner. Not in no way, for He saith, ‘I am the way and the truth and the life.’ Not in no shape, for a man beholdeth his natural shape in a glass; norm no manner, for he straightway forgetteth what manner o’ man he was. Seven women shall catch a holdon him. And ef they shall, then they will! For everything shall come to pass, and not one good word shall fall to the ground. You who try to explain away the Scriptur’ would make it fig’rative. But don’t come to ME with none o your spiritooalizers Not one good word shall fall. Therefore seven shall not fall. And of seven shall catch a bold on him, and, as I jist proved, seven will catch a hold on him, then seven ought, and in the Latter Day Glory, seven, yea, as our Lord said un-tew Peter, ‘Verily I say un-tew you, not seven, but seventy times seven,’ these seventy times seven shall catch a hold and cleave. Blessed day! For the end shall be even as the beginnin’, and seventy-fold more abundantly. Come over into my garden.”


This invitation would wind up the homily. We gladly accepted it and I must confess, that, if there ever could be any hope of our conversion, it was just about the time we stood in Brother Heber’s fine orchard, eating apples and apricots between exhortations, and having sound doctrine poked down our throats with gooseberries as big as plums, to take the taste out of our mouths, like jam after castor-oil.

Porter Rockwell is a man whom my readers must have heard of in every account of fearlessly executed massacre committed in Utah during the last thirteen years. He is the chief of the Danites, a band of saints who possess the monopoly of vengeance upon Gentiles and apostates. If a Mormon tries to sneak off to California by night, after converting his property into cash, their knives have the inevitable duty of changing his destination to another state, and bringing back his goods into the Lord’s treasury. Their bullets are the ones which find their unerring way through the brains of external enemies. They are the heaven-elected assassins of Mormonism, — the butchers by divine right. Porter Rockwell has slain his forty men. This is historical. His probable private victims amount to as many more. He wears his hair braided behind, and done up in a knot with a backcomb, like a woman’s. He has a face full of bulldog courage, but vastly good-natured, and without a bad trait in it. I went out riding with him on the Fourth of July, and enjoyed his society greatly, though I knew that at a word from Brigham he would cut my throat in as matter-of-fact a style as if I had been a calf instead of an author, he would have felt no unkindness tow me on that account. I understood his anomaly perfectly, and found him one of the pleasantest murderers I ever met.) He was mere executive force, from which the lever, conscience, had suffered entire disjunction, being in the hand of Brigham. He was everywhere known as the destroying Angel, but he seemed to have little disagreement with his toddy, and took his meals regularly. He has two very comely pleasant wives. Brigham has about seventy, Heber about thirty. The seventy of Brigham do not include those spiritually married, or “sealed” to him, who may never see him again after the ceremony is performed in his back office. These often have temporal husbands, and marry Brigham only for the sake of belonging to his lordly establishment in heaven.

Salt Lake City, Brigham told me, he believed to contain sixteen thousand inhabitants. Its houses are built generally of adobe or wood, a few of stone, and though none of them are architecturally ambitious, almost all have delightful gardens. Both fruit and shade trees are plenty and thrifty. Indeed, from the roof of the Opera House the city looks fairly embowered in green. It lies very picturesquely on a plain quite embasined among mountains, and the beauty of its appearance is much heightened by the streams which run on both sides or all the broad streets, brought down from the snow-peaks for purposes of irrigation. The Mormons worship at present in a plain, low building, 1 think, of adobe, called the Tabernacle, save during the intensely hot weather, when an immense booth of green branches, filled with benches, accommodates them more comfortably. Brigham is erecting a Temple of magnificent granite, (much like the Quiney,) about two hundred feet long by one hundred and twenty-five feet wide. If this edifice be ever finished, it will rank among the most capacious religious structures of the continent.

The lake from which the city takes its name is about twenty miles distant from the latter, by a good road across the level valley bottom. Artistically viewed, it is one of the loveliest sheets of water I ever saw, bluer than the intensest blue of the ocean, and practically as impressive, since, looking from the southern shore, you see only a water-horizon. This view, however, is broken by a magnificent mountainous island, rising, I should think, seven or eight hundred feet from the water, half a dozen miles from shore, and apparently as many miles in circuit. The density of the lake-brine has been under- instead of over-stated. I swam out into it for a considerable distance, then lay upon my back on, rather than in, the water, and suffered the breeze to wail me landward again. I was blown to a spot where the lake was only four inches deep, without grazing my back, and did not know I had got within my depth again until I depressed my hand a trifle and touched bottom It is a mistake to call this lake azoic. It has no fish, but breeds myriads of strange little maggots, which presently turn into troublesome gnats. The rocks near the lake are grandly castellated and cavernous crags of limestone, some of it finely crystalline, but most of it like our coarser Trenton and Black River groups. There is a large cave in this formation, ten minutes’ climb from the shore.


I must abruptly leap to the overland stage again.

From Salt Lake City to Washoe and the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the road lies through the most horrible desert conceivable by the mind of man. For the sand of the Sahara we find substituted an impalpable powder of alkali, white as the driven snow, stretching for ninety miles at a time in one uninterrupted dazzling sheet, which supports not even that last obstinate vidette of vegetation, the wild-sage brush. Its springs are far between, and, without a single exception, mere receptacles of a salt, potash, and sulphur hell-broth, which no man would drink, save in extremis. A few days of this beverage within, and of wind-drifted alkali invading every pore of the body without, often serve to cover the, miserable passenger with an eryipelatous eruption which presently becomes confluent and irritates him to madness. Meanwhile he jolts through alkali-ruts; unable to sleep for six days and nights together, until frenzy sets in, or actual delirium conies to his relief. I look back on that desert as the most frightful nightmare of my existence.

As if Nature had not done her worst, we were doomed, on the second day out from Salt Lake, to hear, at one station where we stopped, horrid rumors of Goshoots on the warpath, and, ore the day reached its noon, to find their proofs irrefragable. Every now and then we saw in the potash-dust moccasin-tracks, with the toes turned in, and presently my field-glass revealed a hideous devil skulking in the mile-off ledges, who was none other than a Goshoot spy. How far off were the scalpers and burners?

The first afternoon-stage that day was a long and terrible one. The poor horses could hardly drag our crazy wagon, up to its hubs in potash; and yet we knew our only safety, in case of attack, was a running fight. We must fire from our windows as the horses flew.

About four o’clock we entered a terrible defile, which seemed planned by Nature for treachery and ambush. The great, black, barren rocks of porphyry and trachyte rose three hundred feet above our beads, their lower and nearer ledges being all so many natural parapets to fire over, loop-holed with chinks to fire through. There were ten rifles in our party. We ran them out, five on a side, ready to send the first red villain who peeped over the breastworks to quick perdition. Our six shooters lay across our laps, our bowie knives were at our sides, our cartouch-boxes, crammed with ready vengeance, swung open on our breast-straps. We sat with tight-shut teeth, only muttering now and then to each other, in a glum undertone, “Don’t get nervous, don’t throw a single shot away, take aim, remember it’s for home!” Something of that sort, or a silent squeeze of the hand, was all that passed, as we sat with one eye glued to the ledges and our guns unswerving. None of us, I think, were cowards; but the agony of sitting there, tugging along two miles an hour, expecting to hear a volley of yells and musketry ring over the next ledge, drinking the cup of thought to its microscopic dregs, — that was worse than fear!

Only one consolation was left us. In the middle of the defile stood an overland station, where we were to get fresh. horses. The next stage was twenty miles long. If we were attacked in force, we might manage to run it, almost the whole way, unless the Indians succeeded in shooting one of our team, the coup they always attempt.

I have no doubt we were ambushed at several points in that defile, but our perfect preparation intimidated our foes. The Indian is cruel as the grave, but be is an arrant coward. He will not risk being the first man shot, though his hand may overpower the enemy afterward.

At last we turned the corner around which the station-house should come in view.

A thick, nauseous smoke was curling up from the site of the buildings. We came nearer. Barn, stables, station-house, all were a smouldering pile of rafters.

We came still nearer. The whole stud of horses, a dozen or fifteen, lay roasting on the embers. We came close to the spot. There, inextricably mixed with the carcasses of the beasts, lay six men, their brains dashed out, their faces mutilated beyond recognition, their limbs hewn off, — a frightful holocaust steaming up into our faces. I must not dwell on that horror of all senses. It comes me now at high noonday with a grisly shudder.


After that, we toiled on twenty miles farther with our nearly dying horses; a hundred miles more of torturing suspense on top of that sight branded into our brains before we gained Ruby Valley, at the foot of the Humboldt Mountains, and left the last Goshoot behind us.

The remainder of our journey was horrible by Nature only, without the atrocious aid of man. But the past had done its work. We reached Washoe with our very marrows almost burnt out by sleeplessness, sickness, and agony of mind. The morning before we came to the silver mining metropolis, Virginia City, a stout, young Illinois farmer, whom we had regarded as the stanchest of all our fellow passengers, became delirious, and had to be held in the stage by main force. (A few weeks afterward, when the stage was changing horses near the Sink of Carson, another traveller became suddenly insane, and blew his brains out.) As for myself, the moment that I entered a warm bath, in Virginia City, I swooned entirely away, and was resuscitated with great difficulty after an hour and a half’s unconsciousness.

We stopped at Virginia for three days, saw the California of ’49 reenacted in a feverish, gambling, mining town, descended to the bottom of the exhaustlessly rich “Ophir” shaft, came up again, and resumed our way across the Sierra. By the mere act of crossing that ridge and stepping over the California line, we came into glorious forests of ever-living green, a rainbow affluence of flowers, an air like a draught from windows left open in heaven.


Just across the boundary, we sat down on the brink of glorious Lake Tahoe, (once “Bigler,” till the ex-Governor Of that name became a Copperhead, and the loyal Californians kicked him out of their geography, as he had already been thrust out of their politics,) a crystal sheet of water fresh-distilled from the snow-peaks, its granite bottom visible at the depth of a hundred feet, its banks a celestial garden, lying in a basin thirty-five miles long by ten wide, and nearly seven thousand feet above the Pacific level. Geography has no superior to this glorious sea, this chalice of divine cloud-wine held sublimely up against the very press whence to was wrung. Here, virtually at the end of our overland journey, since our feet pressed the green borders of the Golden State, we sat down to rest, feeling that one short hour, one little league, had translated us out of the infernal world into heaven.



摩门教徒中
一位十九世纪的作家遇到了杨百翰并探索了 "圣徒之城"。

作者：菲茨-休-卢德洛

伊莱-谢尔顿-格洛弗/美国国会图书馆
1864年4月号

从东部接近盐湖城，与摩门教的天才出奇地和谐。大自然，通常是如此不顺应与她生活在一起的人们的精神，对安徒生和他好客的同胞来说，显示出一张荒凉和崎岖的脸，从诗意上讲，这应该是野蛮人和食人魔的住所，但她却把热带海洋的永恒之夏挥霍给那些在她掌下吃烤肉的野蛮人。这僵硬的、不适应的大自然在摩门教徒的附近会有一点宽容，你会感觉到，你的陆路驿站滚落到圣徒之城的那些严峻的、巨大的峡谷是通往异常文明的奇怪的通道。

我们说的是从丹佛到盐湖的落基山脉；但实际上，它们一直延伸到这些地方之间。它们并不像大多数东方人想象的那样是一条链子，而是在最疯狂的暴风雨时刻被石化的巨大海洋。陆路驿站在巨大的波浪之上、之间和周围蜿蜒了六百英里，尽可能多地躺在波谷中，并在布里奇山口达到顶峰，（一条蜿蜒的走廊，路边是绝对光秃秃的黄山，高度在两千到三千英尺之间），但在到达盐湖之外的沙漠之前，从未完全脱离落基山脉系统。即使在那里，它也不断地在群山之间奔跑；事实上，从它到达派克峰的那一刻起，直到它的车轮（比喻）被太平洋冲走，它从未失去过崇高的山脉；但沙漠中的山脉可以合法地建立自己的地位，正如我所相信的，它们属于一个独立于一边的落基山脉和另一边的内华达山脉的系统。在布里奇山口以东几英里的雪脊中的一个小高原上，司机俯下身子，通过车窗以事实的方式告诉他的内部人员，他们已经到达了山顶的水平。然后，如果你有一粒真正的世界主义，它肯定会出来的。在那种站在半球分水岭上的感觉中，有一种难以形容的崇高，一种普遍性的概念。你已经到达了世界扣住她腰带的秘密地点；你的脚踩在它的花岗岩扣子上；也许在你的眼中闪烁着她外壳中最美丽的宝石，一个水晶喷泉，她的河流带从那里流向两个相反的方向。昨天你穿越了北普拉特河，几乎是在它的源头（因为它从风河山脉的雪中升起，从你的车窗可以看到拉莱米平原上的兰德尔峰，比尔施塔特让它成为不朽之作），那条小河流入大海，你从它的历史海岸来到这里；你可能在它的涟漪上投下一个婴儿，希望它到达新奥尔良、纽约、波士顿，甚至是利物浦。明天你将被渡过绿河，就在它的源头附近，这条河流的摇篮和普拉特河一样在雪峰上，它神秘的中间生命，在科罗拉多河的新名字下，在那些巨大的裂缝底部流动，深达三千英尺，这已经成为地质学家的奇迹，它的坟墓，当它自己淌过浅滩和快速沙子的点缀，是沙漠边缘的加利福尼亚湾和太平洋海。在绿河和摩门城之间，没有任何人类的兴趣能将你的注意力与自然界分离开。布里杰堡，在城市以东有一天多一点的马车路程，是一个大型的、人口众多的贸易站和美国的驻军。但是，尽管我们在那里发现了一些令人愉快的官员，他们对周围美好环境的了解是彻底而科学的，尽管在那个时期，该堡垒是我们在犹他州印第安人中唯一忠实的朋友--蛇族首领瓦什基以及他的部落中仍然忠于他们真正高贵的领袖和我们政府的少数人的集合地，但与周围风景的自然光彩相比，布里奇堡在我心中留下的印象是最模糊的。

摩门教是我的主题，而我的篇幅又如此有限，我必须抵制诱惑，详细介绍许多令人惊叹的模仿艺术杰作，我们发现这个地区的岩石在大自然的手中被雕刻成各种形状。在我们来到北普拉特河之前，我们被一艘船惊呆了，这艘船的大小与大东方号相当，甚至在轮廓上超过了它，它的柱状砂岩的桅杆被风暴折断了，它巨大的船体在阴暗的角质花岗岩的海洋中挣扎着，它的甲板上，以完美的仿制品的形状，仍然留在原地，一个看起来很奇怪的恶魔在驾驶着它走向某种看不见的毁灭。这座海军雕像（如果它的体积不允许使用这个名字的话）是由风的凿子从粗大的磨坊石砾中雕刻出来的，而这个地区不常有的暴雨只给了它一点帮助。在科罗拉多州，我第一次开始意识到，地质学家没有在他们的科学动态中给风一个位置，这是多么巨大的疏忽。就像该地区有时一年都要依靠露水和雪峰融化的水一样，但它比世界上任何其他地区都充满了奇妙的建筑模拟，巨大的墓地挤满了纪念碑、方尖碑、城堡、堡垒和两百至五百英尺高的天然巨石，这些都是用精质砂岩或一种奇特的砾岩建成的，它们的存在几乎完全归功于风的作用。砾岩生长的干旱平原使上层的空气变得更加稀薄，以至于紧邻的雪峰上的极度寒冷的地层倾泻而下，重新建立平衡，其愤怒的力量如同一条无形的大河，高达八千、一万、甚至一万七千英尺。这些冷风的洪流在特有的峡谷中找到了合适的渠道，这些峡谷在整个落基山系统中到处都是沟壑纵横。这些通道大多非常曲折，下降的风在通过这些通道时，获得了一种螺旋式的运动，就像安的列斯群岛上最猛烈的飓风一样不可抗拒，而且，在它们从峡谷口发出后，还能保持数英里。我在科罗拉多州观察到的每一阵冷风都有这种开瓶器的特性。当螺旋到达一个松散的沙床时，它将所有它能容纳的砂粒扫入其漩涡。其结果是一个钻头，直径从一英寸到一千英尺不等，能够改变方向，以便钻出弯曲的孔，以不可估量的速度旋转，并装备有西莱克斯的切削刃。是否有可能设想出一种更强大、更通用的工具？的确，实际上，没有任何一种表面的描述，没有任何一种切割，是它所不能做到的。我曾多次看到它的运作。有一天，当我从丹佛骑马到派克峰时，我看到它（在这种情况下，其中一个较小的直径）在沙崖上钻了六、七英尺，在整个六英寸的同等直径的奶酪上开了一个同样光滑的洞，这一切都比我描述它所花的时间要短。在同一次旅行中，我多次看到它在类似崖壁的部分周围挖出一个圆形的凹槽，并让它们作为孤立的柱子，带着沉重的底座和资本，很快就会凝固成这样的岩石柱子，充斥着墓地或帮助构成上面提到的奇怪的建筑桩子。科罗拉多州的测量员皮尔斯将军（此人的优秀科学天才和文化已经在研究那片最有趣的领土方面做出了卓越的贡献），在某个场合，看到一个风镐与定居者小屋的窗玻璃成直角相遇，几秒钟后，窗玻璃从使用过程中出来，成为一个完美的不透明的阴影，已经被转化为磨砂玻璃，制造商的车轮可以整齐而均匀地完成。在科罗拉多州，能够通过50磅重的岩石和有普通人腰部一半粗的树干来追踪螺旋和测量螺旋的直径并不是一件非常罕见的事情，这些岩石和树干从其所在地被撕碎，并在大风的涡轮机失去动力之前被送到头顶旋转数英里。像这样的仪器的效率我不需要多说。在对落基山脉系统中许多最有趣的建筑和雕塑式的结构进行了长期的检查和研究之后，我确信，它们主要是根据风和西莱克斯仪器对处于泥土状态的材料进行操作的假设来解释的，这些材料在接受其形状之后已经石化。事实上，同样的工具目前在科罗拉多州并没有受到这种条件的限制，它不仅逐年改变着平原上所有沙子和粘土悬崖的形状，而且还在其简单的车床上拆毁、重建和塑造许多具有较易碎的岩石层，只要暴露在它的作用下。东方的水几乎没有比西方的风做得更多。

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在我们进入圣徒之城之前，让我简单介绍一下最伟大的，不仅是建筑方面的奇观，而且在我看来，是我所见过或听说过的任何一种最伟大的自然奇观。请注意，当我这样说到教堂山丘时，我还记得尼亚加拉河、雪松溪和猛犸洞。它们位于离布里奇堡不远的地方；陆路从它们旁边经过。它们由一个沙石悬崖组成，呈红褐色，以砖石堆的突兀方式从完全平坦的平原上升起，沿其垂直面被雕刻成一系列部分相连的宗教建筑，其中最引人注目的是一个像圣彼得教堂一样巨大的大教堂，除了后面有一个门廊将其与主悬崖连接起来外，其余各面都与悬崖完全隔开。这座奇妙的建筑的完美对称性会让米歇尔-安吉洛为之倾倒。这座教堂不需要努力想象就能认识到它的名字的恰当性，在没有人帮助的情况下，几乎让人难以置信。它属于一种完全属于自己的风格，它的主要部分并不分为中殿和横厅，而是像一个巨大的半圆柱体系统，竖立在它们的基座上，并与回旋角结合在一起，它们的凸面朝向我们，因此，地面的平面可以被称为四叶草的种类。在每个凸面都有一个比例惊人的门洞，一个哥特式拱门，上面有深深的雕刻和精致的装饰，模仿得如此完美，以至于你几乎觉得要敲门进去了，只要你知道 "芝麻开门"，就能保证有一个入口。在门的中间和后面，与飞檐走壁交替出现的是一系列深拱形的窗户，上面摆放着怪异的雕像，从小猪到巨无霸都有，代表的是恶魔而不是圣人，尽管有些人物是按照宗教艺术的风格装扮的，穿着飘逸的圣衣。

该结构的终点是一个双圆顶，其形状可以通过假设一个小橡子镶嵌在一个大橡子的截顶上来想象，（两者的水平直径与垂直方向的比例比那种水果常见的要长得多），每个圆顶都被一排棱形柱子包围，半柱半托的效果，有点类似于比萨斜塔中心圆柱体的精致柱状随从。这种安排的结果是一种巨大的美，在世界建筑中是无可比拟的。我没有向任何人传达这桩建筑的宏伟概念，即使有图表的帮助，我也无法传达。我只能说，大教堂山是所有基督教国家建筑师的一门功课，它是一个纯粹新颖的创造，具有如此惊人的美感，以至于比尔施塔特和我同时感叹："哦，世界上的建筑大师们能在这里呆上一天！"。其结果将是一种全新的建筑风格，一个美国学校，就像爱奥尼亚式与哥特式或拜占庭式的区别一样。" 如果他们能来，建筑艺术将有一个再生。"令人惊奇 "是对大自然这一辉煌作品的唯一形容。我本可以怀着敬畏之心在它巨大的、无可比拟的门前俯首祈祷，但它创造的神秘性，以及即使是它最辉煌的雕像的怪异性，使人半信半疑，生怕它是恶魔之手为崇拜地狱之主而建造的一些庙宇，并被封在石化的石梦中，其祭司在其中被上帝之手打成哑巴，等待埃布利斯的审判和最后一天的地震。

在离开教堂山并经过布里奇堡后，我们的注意力一直停留在它所看到的东西上，直到我们进入峡谷地区。这些峡谷横跨瓦萨奇山的整个宽度，几乎与山脚平齐，由红色砂岩或糖山花岗岩的悬崖峭壁围成，与之相比，哈德逊河的帕利塞斯就像花园的栅栏一样微不足道。穿过这些巨大的裂缝的最后一个诗人都会情不自禁地感到它们是通往一个自相矛盾的地区、一个反常的文明和一个心理问题是19世纪最无法解决的民族的途径。在摩门战争期间，杨百翰在离他的城市有半天路程的大峡谷中做了一些粗鲁的尝试，这项工作至今仍未完成。他不需要这样做；一百个人埋伏在峡谷墙壁顶部的壁架中，并配备好松散的岩石和米尼弗尔，就可以把这个隘口变成一个新的热比卢，而不会暴露自己。在一个更古老、更迷信的时代，大自然本身的无助恐怖会将入侵者从这个灰暗的峡谷中击退，就像异教徒被赶出伊希斯或埃洛伊西斯的长廊一样。

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在离盐湖城大约40英里的地方，我们开始发现大自然的贫瘠屈服于摩门教徒真正令人惊叹的产业。要了解简单的绿草的精致之美，你必须穿越八百英里的鼠尾草和格拉玛，前者是我们东部鹅肉馅的家常灰叶植物，长成六英尺高的矮树，扭曲的树干有时和人的身体一样粗；后者是一种发育不良的草木，长成灰白色的螺旋状，离地面只有两英寸，使平原看起来像被卷曲的头发或灰色的开瓶器垫着。它的另一个名字是 "水牛草"；尽管它很笨重，但在鼠尾草的帮助下，把卡尼堡以西的所有平原都变成了贵格会的典范景观，它是最有营养的牛饲料品种之一，而且在数百英里内是移民牧民的唯一依靠。

通过令人难以置信的劳动，从瓦萨奇山脉的雪峰上引下河流，并通过人工灌溉的各种巧妙装置将它们分布在各个层面上，摩门教徒的农民已经将我们接近盐湖的峡谷底部变成了肥沃的田野和牧场。翠绿的土地让我们的眼睛在这么多里格的单调中感到疲惫，就像老家的歌声让被长期有节奏的冲突或铁制机器的沉闷、稳定的嗡嗡声所刺激的耳朵感到舒畅。将摩门教徒的定居点与周围的荒凉进行对比，我们不禁要问，他们的成功加强了这些人的错觉。肤浅的奖惩学生很可能会相信，除了上帝的选民，没有人能够使这片可怕的沙漠，在如此胜利的方式之后，像玫瑰一样绽放。

仔细观察的人很快就注意到这些绿色和微笑的摩门教徒定居点中的一个痛苦的缺陷。一切都是为农场而做，没有为家庭而做。那个受祝福的古老的盎格鲁撒克逊人的想法似乎到处都已灭绝。田地里长满了密密麻麻的金色谷物，牛群沉浸在翡翠般的多汁草湖中，谷仓很坚固，家庭用的风车在上好油的转轴上欢快地嗡嗡作响，汲水或研磨饲料，果树很节俭，但房子却很荒凉。即使房子的主人特别富裕，其建筑也比一般的房子更有雄心壮志，（尽管到目前为止，这种优越性的衡量标准不过是原木和木板之间的差别），但它仍然没有成为快乐的人的住所的气息，他们彼此相爱，并在不在时渴望着它。它看起来只是一个可以吃饭和睡觉的围墙。似乎没有人以它为荣，对它有任何野心。女人温柔的最后的小修饰，使泥屋成为亲爱的避难所，如果没有这些修饰，宫殿式的褐石就只是一个成型的泥土中的家，那些灵巧的装饰，使如此小的东西意味着如此多的东西，门阶边的荆条玫瑰滑，成长为许多陪审团的芳香欢迎，有棚的马德拉藤，阳光下的菊花，迷人的夏天，直到霜冻的边缘，所有这些东西在摩门的围墙中都完全和到处缺少了。有时我们经过一个围栏，它守着三座房子而不是一座。丰富的后代在他们的门口玩耍，或在院子里打滚，由几个不修边幅、衣衫褴褛的母亲看护。拥有一个共同的丈夫，--这些人中应该对当时以这种不愉快的伙伴关系持有的领地的样子感到很感兴趣。最卑微的新英格兰小屋的门柱上有攀援的花朵，或者前面有花园的花坛；但是，如果整洁轻快的女主人与隔壁的普拉特执事夫人共同拥有她的丈夫，那么这些花朵将很快枯萎！我曾在一个摩门教家庭中看到过这样的情况。

我访问的第一个摩门教家庭属于著名的希伯-金博尔的儿子，他是杨百翰最忠实的追随者，在总统职位上仅次于他。这是我们进入盐湖城之前的最后一个驿站，位于帕里峡谷（以著名长老帕里-普拉特的名字命名）的一个绿色山谷的底部；由于它看起来像一个做得好的农民的住所，我走了进去，要了一碗面包和牛奶，这是我们在山区过着熏肉和盐泉水的生活之后最可能的奢侈。一位面容姣好、充满母性的妇女，白发苍苍，大约60岁，迅速起身答应了我的要求，在换马的时候，我有足够的时间认识了两个漂亮的年轻女孩，她们几乎不超过20岁，抱着两个婴儿，年龄相差不超过三个月。虽然我对圣洁的礼仪不感兴趣，但我认为这两个年轻母亲中的一个是从邻居家跑来的，想按照我们东方的方式与房子的主人比较一下婴儿的情况。当老太太拿着面包和牛奶回来时，两个年轻女孩都称呼她为 "妈妈"，我就有恃无恐地告诉她，她的女儿们有一对漂亮的孩子。

"她们是很漂亮，"老太太端庄地说；"但她们是我儿子的孩子。"然后，她仿佛决心把一个外邦人的头和脚跟一下子塞进摩门教的现实中，又说："那些年轻的女士是我儿子的妻子，他现在去利物浦传教，是希伯-金博尔的儿子，年轻的金博尔先生；而我是希伯-金博尔的妻子。"

一个世界性的人，尤其是一个事先知道犹他州并不以一夫一妻制而闻名的人，很可能会像我第一次看到摩门教的实际运作时那样，感到羞愧。我瞪大了眼睛，我相信我有点脸红，我试图结结巴巴地回答；有一个可怕的想法一直在我脑海中挥之不去，以至于我觉得他们一定从我的脸上读出了这个想法，那就是："这些年轻女人怎么能坐在一起看对方的孩子，而不用指甲飞到对方的脸上，并扯掉对方的头发？" 希伯-金博尔后来为我解决了这个问题，他说这是恩典的胜利。

这样的另一个胜利是希伯-金博尔夫人本人。她是一个具有非凡气质的女人，年轻时一定非常英俊，在她可能居住的任何一个东方村庄，她都会是斗茶的神灵，是捐赠访问的主宰者，如果她的家在纽约，她会因为自己的重力而坐上半打妇女援助协会和道德改革协会的首席理事的位置。然而，正如她的丈夫后来向我承认的那样，这个思想坚强的女人在进入中年的婚姻生活中是他最好的顾问和得力助手，她目睹了她在丈夫的感情中的财产被分割，直到她只拥有三十分之一的份额，不仅没有感到痛苦，而且得到了她的良心的默许和智力的赞许。尽管在犹他州，很少有第一个妻子像这位性格强硬、精力充沛的女人那样，在生命的最后阶段才学会正视纳妾，但我肯定没有遇到过一个对一夫多妻制的支持是如此不容置疑和滔滔不绝的。她是我见过的最奇怪的心理问题之一。事实上，我半信半疑地认为，她比她丈夫更早接受摩门教，并通过采取主动，为自己争取到了后宫中唯一真正的妻子地位，希伯弟兄的婚后想法是她的仆人而不是她的姐妹。她是他最明确的最爱。

有一天，在盐湖城的歌剧院，当木匠们为国庆节前夕的舞会铺设地板时，希伯和我谈到了聚集在犹他州的各种民族。希伯不厌其烦地表达了他对每一个后续种族的喜爱，就像提到的那样快。

"我非常喜欢丹麦人! 我有一个丹麦妻子"。然后转向一个在他附近敲打的、长相粗糙的木匠，"你认识克里斯蒂尼，--嗯，斯巴吉兄弟？"

"哦，是的！非常了解她！"

过了一会儿，"爱尔兰人是个可爱的民族。我的爱尔兰妻子是我所得到的最好的妻子之一。"

再来，"我喜欢德国人！我也有一个荷兰妻子！"。我也有一个荷兰妻子！"。认识卡特琳娜吗，斯巴吉兄弟？记得她来的时候几乎不会说英语，--嗯，斯巴吉兄弟？"

斯帕吉兄弟记得，希伯兄弟继续把他的婚姻工作室的成员拉出来，与他更谦虚的一夫多妻制的同伴讨论他们的观点；但当我碰巧触及最早的夫人。但当我偶然谈到最早的希伯夫人时，我自然认为他此时会把她看作是他婚姻生活中下西里亚地层中被遗忘的化石，并提到我在进城前的那个下午与她的谈话，他的整个举止都变成了适当的丈夫的尊严，而且没有向木匠寻求证实，他严肃地回答道。

"是的！这是我的第一任妻子，也是上帝创造的最好的女人！"

我提到的那个舞会是一个研究摩门教社会学的机会，在盐湖城的三个月的普通逗留可能不会给我这样的机会。儘管摩爾門教派從骨子裡就不忠誠，但它仍然喜歡國慶日，至少在其慶祝活動的階段，省略了愛國主義，但保留了我們東方慶祝活動的煙火，在本康比的演說中以「猶他」取代「聯邦」，並以舞會取代《獨立宣言》。离该市半天路程内的所有圣徒都涌入该市，度过国庆节。一个做得好的摩门教徒在他的妻子和孩子们的簇拥下，所有的人可能都在吃着糖果，他们排着整齐的队伍穿过大都市的街道，在不了解情况的人看来，这就像一个女神学院的校长，在仪态上很弱，把他的图表拿出来晾晒。

大家可能还记得，去年的国庆节是在一个星期六。在他们重现古代犹太教的野心中（这个野心是他们整个谜题的关键），摩门教徒是严格的安息日教徒，这将使沙夫茨伯里勋爵感到高兴。因此，为了使他们的庆祝活动不侵犯安息日的早期时间，他们在国庆节前夕举行舞会，而不是在国庆节的晚上。当我读到印在我的邀请函上的以下句子时，我还没有意识到这种侵占的风险

"下午4点开始跳舞"。

比尔施塔特、我和我们一行中的三位先生是我发现的唯一被杨总统邀请在三千名圣徒附近聚会的外邦人。在这种情况下，我觉得自己是一夫一妻制的第三种顺势稀释法。在这个世界上，道德主要是一个惯例问题，以至于我害怕出现在体面的一夫多妻制社会中，以免拥有正统的第十个丈夫的受人尊敬的妇女会因为我的存在而退缩，带着颤抖低声说："唉！好吧，我从来没有！"。那个一夫一妻制的恶棍怎么敢露面！" 但他们非常有礼貌，用娴熟的方式接待了我，就像时尚的东方淑女对我们意义上的不道德的出色诱惑者所表现出的那样。如果我是一个女人，我想他们不会对我有任何怜悯。

我找到了我们的招待人杨百翰，感谢他为我们的外邦人提供了一个谄媚的例外。他站在剧院的服装圈里，俯视着舞者，眼神中夹杂着热情的善意和封建的所有权。我可以原谅后者，因为犹他属于他的权利。他可以理直气壮地说："这不是我建立的大巴比伦吗？" 他唯一的执行策略和个人魅力是整个摩门教社会拱门的基石。当他还在的时候，八万个（而且还在增加）可以从基督教世界的边缘扫荡到一起的最异质的灵魂将继续被建立成一个连贯的民族。他一崩溃，摩门教和摩门教就会立刻摔成碎片，无可挽回。他的个人魅力，他的执行策略，他的本性仁慈，都是巨大的；我把他看作是路易-拿破仑，再加上一颗心；但是这些优势对于在他手下统治犹他州的那些死气沉沉的狂热分子，以及他们所统治的那些完全被说服的狂热分子来说，是无济于事的，要不是他的品质都协调在这个绝对真诚的信仰和动机上。杨百翰是地球上离伪君子最远的人；他是人性中最宏大但又最可怕的景象，一个把最崇高的基督徒自我奉献带到魔鬼的祭坛上的人，他准备为巴拉巴受刑，却把他当成基督。可以肯定的是，如果他是个伪君子，联盟就不用担心犹他州了。当他死后，至少有四个敌对的派别，他们在神化他的人格方面找到了唯一的共同点，将在不同的角落抢夺他的衣钵。然后会出现自马其顿将军争夺亚历山大的棺材以来世界上从未见过的撕扯，然后摩门教就会从地理学中消失，进入大众妄想的历史。除了布里格姆之外，没有一个首领、使徒或主教拥有任何全能的影响力。我发现这一点在每个地方都得到默许。人们似乎就像一个被围困的城镇的公民，他们知道自己只有一定数量的面包，但却下定决心在面包还能维持的时候采取行动，好像没有饥饿这回事一样。你能给摩门教徒最大的安慰就是告诉他布里格姆看起来有多年轻；因为他很快就会无意识地想到："那么布里格姆可能会撑过我的时间。" 那些有思想的人对他之外的摩门教的未来没有任何猜想，我知道许多摩门教徒（包括希伯-金博尔）宁愿今天死掉，也不愿在他身上活下来，遇到那个审判日和他们信仰的最后灭亡，而这必须在他新造的坟墓上出现。
好吧，我们可以给他们这样的安慰，没有任何不诚恳。让我们回到何站在地板上凝视的地方。像任何东方的聚会者一样，他穿着 "惯常的庄重的黑色衣服"，而且穿着这身衣服看起来非常出众，尽管他日常的家常便饭丝毫不影响人们的感觉，当他在场时，你看到的是一个最了不起的人。他将近七十岁了，但看起来比四十岁还小。他的身高约为五英尺十英寸；他的身材非常好，略微偏向于肥胖。他的头发是浓密的栗色卷发，以前是长发，据说是模仿使徒的发型，但现在是按照我们东方的实用时尚来剪的，这与商业人士相吻合，随着锡安的世俗繁荣，他的职业也加入了使徒的行列。事实上，他是大陆上最伟大的商人，是一家拥有八万名沉默伙伴的公司的出纳，也是该出纳的唯一审计师，此外。如果我今天表示皈依摩门教，明天我就会经布里格姆的手接受洗礼。第二天，我应该被邀请到教会办公室（布里格姆的办公室），向教会（布里格姆）展示我全部财产的忠实清单。比方说，我是一个橱柜制造商，把我在纽约商店的全部收入带到了盐湖城，有两万美元。教会（只有布里格姆）审查并批准了我的清单。它（只有布里格姆）对犹他州是否需要更多的橱柜制造商这一问题有绝对的决定权。如果教会（布里格姆）说，"不，"它（布里格姆再次）有权告诉我哪里需要劳动力，并让我从事我的新职业。如果教会（布里格姆）说，"是的，"它就进一步告诉我，不需要上诉，我库存的两万美元中究竟有多大比例可以适当地转化为新的橱柜店的渠道。当我说教会（布里格姆）只允许我保留二分之一的财产时，我并没有做出特别或不相称的推测。剩下的一万美元进入教会基金，（布里格姆的鲱鱼保险箱），从我一生的积蓄中的这一部分，我再也没有听到过，无论是资本、利息、遗赠，还是给我的寡妇的彩礼的形式。除了为了教会的目的，（布里格姆不容置疑的意愿），我的一万美元就像没有一样了。然而，我是一个真诚的信徒，回家时心情很轻松，有一张由记录天使写在我良心上的证明支票，金额是我在银行的信用，小偷不会闯入也不会偷窃，他们不会比储户更容易接触到，这对后者来说是一种安慰。第一年，我从我的椅子和桌子上净赚了两千美元。教会（布里格姆）再次向我发出邀请，让我去参观，对这笔钱进行庄严的宣誓，并向那座教会建筑--赫林保险箱支付两百美元。或者假设我还没有卖出我的任何商品，只是进口了五百个波士顿摇椅，准备到时候再卖。在得知这一事实后，教会（布里格姆）慷慨地接受了50个用于自己的目的。- 作为建立在岩石上的教会，它并不在乎以集体的身份坐在摇椅上，而是拥有一系列巨大的仓库，杂食性和消化性，它们吞下各种形式的什一税，从谷物和马蹄铁到鲜鱼和瓜类等不太稳定的商品，通过令人钦佩的过程将它们同化为王国的硬币。这些仓库在教会（布里格姆自己的私人）的围墙内。如果我在制作内阁的过程中取得了成功，促使我举行宴会，而我在宴会上喝了超过我自己的健康饮料，教会肯定会在第二天知道这一事实；由于犹他州不承认 "在家人的怀抱中喝醉 "可以不受惩罚，我再次被派去，这次要支付罚款，可能超过我宴会的费用。第二次犯罪将被处以监禁和罚款；因为没有监禁可以避免罚款，这在任何情况下都会发生。教会的手通过不可避免的钱袋牵着圣徒的灵魂。但我不能浪费时间去列举无数的失误和罪行，这些都给赫林保险箱带来收入。

在所有这些问题上，布里格姆拥有最高的控制权。他的权力是人类已知的最专制的。顺便说一下，这里是摩门教在宪法上的脆弱点。如果担心建立一个坏的先例阻碍美国在任何时候打破这个不忠的巢穴，因为其淫乱的婚姻制度，犹他州仍然有可能受到严重的惩罚，而施加惩罚的政府将有责任和既得的权利，因为它承诺确保国家的每个组成部分都有一个共和的政府形式，而犹他州从来没有比廷巴克图更享有这种权利。我曾经问过布里格姆，伯恩希尔博士是否有可能再次进入国会。"不会，"他非常肯定地回答；"我们会派代表参加。" (我想他提到了金尼上校，但记不清楚了。)不管是谁，一旦时机成熟，布里格姆就会把他的名字寄给 "德赛里特新闻"，该报的办公室和其他有价值、有实力的东西一样，都在他的包围圈里。它将理所当然地被印出来；反提名是完全闻所未闻的；在选举日，代表将像太阳升起一样肯定。灌溉城市的山溪，通过街道两边的明沟流向所有的花园，穿过布里格姆的围墙：如果圣徒需要干旱来羞辱他们，他可以把水退到源头。通往唯一可以获得木柴的峡谷的道路也是通过这个围墙，并被他唯一掌握钥匙的大门所封锁。想砍柴的家庭主妇必须向他请假，而他一般都会同意，条件是每隔三、四天就把柴火放进围墙里，供教堂使用。因此，除了他所呼吸的空气之外，所有重要的东西都只能通过布里格姆的筛子到达摩门教徒手中。还有什么比这更绝对的专制主义可想而知呢？这就是政府干预的杠杆的作用。仅仅是这种权力掌握在一个人不负责任的手中的事实，就是对宪法的一种犯罪。同时，这种权力，虽然看起来很奇妙，但实际上是为了公共利益而挥舞的。我从未听到布里格姆最坏的敌人指责他贪污，尽管如此巨大的利益被他的一双手所控制。他的一生都是一个巨大的理论错误，但他所犯的实际错误却比世界上任何其他处于这种地位的人都少。他所犯的那些错误并不是站在自己的立场上。他将自己的整个人格融入教会，以一种自我放弃的态度，在商业上建立起一整个世纪的殉道者，有一个值得的事业。

布里格姆的头发的剪裁使我远离了他的个人描述。回到这里：他的眼睛是清澈的蓝灰色，看起来坦率而直率；他的鼻子是精雕细琢的水线型；他的嘴非常坚挺，而且下巴几乎像夏洛特-库什曼的一样突出于轮廓的其他部分，从而加强了这种表情，尽管没有那么明显，因为他比她的长；他留着一条狭窄的棕色胡须带，在下巴下交汇。我想我曾听伯顿船长说过，他的牙齿不整齐，这使他的笑容很不愉快。自从上尉来访后，我们一向仁慈的总统林肯先生改变了这一切，派出了一位富勒先生担任领土秘书，他除了是一位成功的政治家外，还是一位出色的牙医。他为布里格姆制作了一套非常漂亮的假牙，并为他所有最喜欢的、但不喜欢的妻子提供了同样的服务，从而保证了他永远的感激之情。其他几位主的使徒都要感谢富勒先生，他们有能力对外邦人咬牙切齿。其结果是，他成为有史以来被派往犹他州的最受欢迎的联邦官员（没有变成摩门教徒的人）。在当局的口中获得地位的人，不可能不得到他们的耳朵。

布里格姆的举止让任何人都感到惊讶，因为他所受的教育只是在本世纪初纽约州中部安大略县的几个季度的普通学校经历。活着的人中很少有人比他更有礼貌。他的讲话是尊严与赋予幸福的愿望的完美结合，是对他人感受的完美尊重与对自己和自己观点的绝对肯定。他是一个杰出的例子，说明了机敏的洞察力的教育影响，加上目标的完全单一性，这与他的道德品质是完全不同的。他的早年生活是在粗野和文盲中度过的。自从他信奉摩门教以来，他每天都与人类社会中最没有修养的阶层打交道，他们是一群异质的农民，期待着他成为一个国家，但他却如此清楚地看到在总统职位上受到尊重的人所需要的东西。在与他长时间的交谈中，我只听到了一句简单的话（"你不是 "是 "你不是"），也没有看到一个与贵族血统不相符的教养实例。

我坦率地说了他的这些优点，无视那些总是把魔鬼涂成黑色的广义艺术家可能对我这个辩护人的任何诽谤，因为我认为现在是时候了，我们美国理念的摩门教徒的敌人应该被清楚地理解为比伪君子或白痴所能指望的更危险的对手。让我们不要再犯低估我们敌人的错误了。

布里格姆在剧院开始我们的谈话时，告诉我已经迟到了，已经过了九点。我回答说，这是我们在波士顿或纽约参加晚会时通常要打扮的时间。

"是的，"他说，"你发现我们是一个老式的民族；我们正试图回到父权时代的健康习惯。"

"你需要回溯到那么远的地方去寻找你的平行线吗？"我建议道。"我觉得我们可能在早期的基督徒中找到四点钟的舞会。"

他笑了笑，没有一些伟人那种令人讨厌的装腔作势，也没有那种在他们亲切的赞助下接受别人的玩笑的样子，继续说，不幸的是，除了摩门教徒和美国人保持的时间之外，他们在东部还有许多不同之处。

"你发现我们，"他说，"试图和平地生活。与这样的人一起生活，对你们来说一定是一种极大的解脱，因为你们来自一个兄弟对兄弟举起手来的地方，你们听到战士们混乱的声音永远在你们耳边回响。"

尽管这番话具有宫廷式的恭敬和圣经式的尊严，但我在其中发现了对 "灭亡的联盟 "的潜在忧虑，这是我在犹他州遇到的每个圣徒最喜欢的主题，我赶紧向总统保证，我并不希望从同情中得到解脱

我赶紧向总统保证，我并不希望从对我的国家为荣誉和生存而进行的斗争的同情中解脱出来。

"啊！"他回答说，声音中略带讽刺意味。"那么，你与你的众多同胞大不相同，自从开始谈论征兵问题以来，他们经过盐湖，从他们兄弟的血腥罪行中向西飞去。"

"我确实如此。"

"不过，他们都是优秀的人。希伯-金博尔弟兄和我本人每周都被邀请到移民广场向他们的一列火车讲话。他们是诚实、和平的人。我相信你称他们为'铜头党'。但他们是真正的、真实的、善良的人。我们发现他们非常追求真理，对信念非常开放。他们中的许多人一直和我们在一起。因此，主让人的愤怒来赞美他。废奴主义者--那些干涉我们的制度并把我们赶到荒野的人--也干涉了南方的制度，直到他们拆散联邦。但这一切都在正常进行，比我们自己安排的要好很多。逃离废奴主义压迫的人来到这里，来到我们的避难方舟，来到上帝所选的人的庇护所。你们不久后都会来到这里。你们的联盟已经永远消失了。战斗只会让事情变得更糟。当你们的国家变成一片荒芜的时候，我们这些被你们赶出去的圣徒，会忘记你们对我们的所有罪过，给你们一个家。"

一个强大而繁荣的民族由于对一群绝望的南方阴谋家的极度恐惧而放弃了美国的肥沃土壤和宏伟的商业大道，而在一个无法到达的沙漠中心的绿色地带居住，这种想法是如此荒谬，以至于在我看到年轻的布里格姆的脸上洋溢着他认为的预言般的热情时，我无法想象他是认真的。在我离开犹他州之前，我发现，无一例外，所有圣徒都被接种了一种惊人的狂热，大意是美国将成为一个枯萎的混沌，其居民将在未来两年内成为摩门教徒和犹他州的公民，更乐观的人说，"明年夏天。" 乍一看，有一点让我不解。他们从哪里得到正统的妻子数量或这种突然加入的皈依者？我的读者先生们会感到非常荣幸，因为我从后世教会中不亚于那位快乐的使徒希伯-金博尔那里得到了这个问题的解决方案。

"为什么，"这位老人说，他闪烁着他的小黑眼睛，就像一个虔诚的西罗努斯，带着舔食的微笑护理着他的一条肥腿，"万能的主不是以他任何时候都能做到的速度为他心爱的遗产提供食物吗？这场战争将持续到你们这些男性外邦人中最大的一部分自相残杀为止，然后剩下的一小撮人将带着全国所有的妇女一起逃到我们的庇护所，所以我们将有足够的妇女来满足他们每个人的需求，并有大量的余额来分配给上帝的圣徒，他们从灾难开始就在这里了。"

这种邪恶的思考似乎在希伯-金博尔的嘴里留下了甜美的味道，使我渴望把他打倒，比我对圣徒或罪人的感觉还要强烈。但在盐湖城打倒一个主的使徒是很昂贵的；我只是通过告诉他来报复。我希望我能听到他在满是卫生委员会的女士们为她们的丈夫、爱人和联邦军队中的兄弟刮毛的演讲室里说这些话。我不知道圣徒是否是好的皮棉，但我想我认识一个会被刮掉一点的人。

最后一次回顾布里格姆。在一次关于印第安人的谈话中，他谴责了政府的军事政策，认为一包毛毯和十磅珠子比一个团的士兵更能保护邮件不被中断，移民不被屠杀，他发现我们在每个战争问题上都有分歧，于是巧妙地把话题转移到歌剧院的美景上。

至于印第安人，让我顺便说一句，我没有告诉他，我明白他不喜欢这方面的严厉措施的原因。尽管戈肖特人、皮乌特人和其他沙漠部落的人兽性十足，十分残忍，但自摩门教徒进入犹他州以来，他们从未计划过任何大规模的袭击。在圣徒的每个定居点，你都会发现有两到十几个年轻人，他们按印第安人的方式剪着黑发，并能流利地讲出周围所有的方言。每当一列肥沃的马车被袭击，一群移民的牛被踩死，邮件被拦截，或者外邦人受到任何骚扰时，这些亡命之徒就会染上他们的皮肤，把他们的衣服换成后膛枪，并召集一群野蛮人，他们总是得到野蛮人的青睐，进行伏击和屠杀，除了蛮力的因素，所有这些都是他们的计划、领导和执行。我有许多最有趣的事实来支持这一论断，但已经有超过我允许范围的危险了。

歌剧院是一个我们可以达成共识的话题。我非常惊讶地发现，在这个大陆的沙漠中心有一个公共娱乐场所，其容量、美感和舒适度在美国没有任何优势，除了纽约、波士顿和费城的歌剧院。它的内部结构与上述第一座歌剧院有些类似，可容纳2500人，还可容纳500人，当像现在这样，舞台被扔进镶木地板时，后者用木板铺到前者的水平上，供人跳舞。从外观上看，该建筑是由石头、砖头和灰泥组成的，结构简单，但不失优雅。我最惊讶的是，舞台上方的大拱门、檐口和前厅的模子上的鎏金和彩绘装饰真的很精致，很有艺术美感。杨总统带着适当的自豪感向我保证，这些装饰品的每一粒都是出自本地人和圣人之手。

"但你还不知道，"他补充说，"我们在东方是多么独立于你们。你认为我们从哪里得到那个中央吊灯，你认为我们为它付出了什么？"

那是一件对任何纽约的枞树来说都是值得称道的作品，显然是一个雕刻精美的圆圈，上面缠绕着镀金的藤蔓、叶子和卷须，到处都是燃烧的蜡灯，由一条巨大的金色光泽的链条悬挂。于是我回答说，他可能在纽约花了一千美元买下了它。

"好极了！"布里格姆惊叹道。"我自己做的! 那个圆圈是我洗过并镀过金的车轱辘；它由一对镀金的牛链挂着；而烛台的装饰物都是按照我的样式用锡纸剪的！"

我和总统一直聊到一群年轻女孩，她们似乎对他充满了偶像崇拜，而作为回报，他则以英勇和父爱的混合体对待她们，并向他发出邀请，希望加入一些在东方早已被遗忘的老式的反对舞蹈。我很好奇，想看看他在这种最高的尊严考验中会如何表现自己；于是我走到镶木地板上，他在表演时的贵族式优雅给我留下了深刻印象。

此后，我推辞了舞会委员会的许多善意邀请，希望被介绍给一个伙伴并参加舞蹈。事实上，我非常希望对舞厅进行彻底的相貌研究，我知道我的读者会对我不跳舞的自我牺牲精神表示赞赏，因为这使我能够告诉他们犹他州的好社会是怎样的。

在花了一个小时的时间，对房间进行了尽可能细致的检查，我得出了以下结果。

舞会上的衣着很不华丽，但穿衣的品味也很低。贵族式的宽布和丝绸是少有的例外，一般都是做工不精，磨损严重，但它们与平民式的花呢和花布的大商场亲切相连。一些女士戴着珠宝或羽毛。有一些漂亮的女孩穿着有品位的膨化塔拉坦的鞭子--Syllabub游走。在圣洁的先生们带着几个妻子来的地方，一般来说，最年长的似乎是最精心打扮的，而且对她的妹妹们表现得很像东方的监护人。(在犹他州，同一个男人的妻子们通常会互相串通。这又是一次优雅的胜利！) 在男人中，我看到一些非常强壮和有能力的面孔；但大多数人的长相没有什么特点，实际上，在这方面与任何地方的普通男人群体都没有什么区别。在妇女中，令我吃惊的是，我没有发现真正堕落的面孔，尽管有许多呆板的面孔，只有一个深深的沮丧，（这是一个迄今为止一夫一妻制的丈夫的妻子，他把她留在服装圈里，而他正在与一个胖乎乎的年轻摩门教徒跳舞，可能在一两个月内就会加入这个家庭，）但许多人无动于衷，尽管我看到许多善良的、好脾气的面孔。我不得不承认，经过最公正和焦虑的搜索，我没有遇到一个看起来高调、一流、能有诗意的热情或英雄般的自我奉献的女人，没有一个艺术家会梦想并要求坐在一起研究的女人，没有一个构成良好的知识分子可以在他的追求中得到陪伴或同情的女人。因为我知道，在东方，这一裁决会被告知："正如你所期望的那样！" 我抛开了一切偏见，忘记了我是在犹他州，当我穿行在巨大的人群中。


我必须大大压缩我对除杨百翰之外的另外两个典型人物的描述，否则我将没有空间来谈论湖泊和沙漠。希伯-金博尔，第二任主席，（proximus longo intervallo！）是布里格姆最忠实的崇拜者，在各方面都是第二位最重要的人，尽管他完全没有能力保持不和谐的摩门教元素的庞大组织的一致性，万一他能在布里格姆去世的话，他在年龄上与后者相当，但在其他所有方面都与他相反。他的身高超过六英尺，他的体型是赤褐色的，他的脸很大，很胖，有炖小红莓的稳定红色的光泽，而他的小而闪烁的黑眼珠和嘴边的萨提亚式感性，会表明他的气质与使徒身份有致命的区别，除了一夫多妻制，即使没有从他最喜欢的谈话话题和他处理这些话题的宗法式的诱导中得到帮助。不幸的是，在任何地方，男人们在彼此之间的聊天中都不会倾向于羞涩的错误，但我们东方的大多数人都会觉得，如果我们在她面前说出一句构成希伯-金博尔所有公开布道的习惯性主要内容的谈话，对那些涌向周日会堂的妻子和女儿们来说，我们就是在侮辱最低级的成员。

希伯对比尔施塔特和我自己的永恒福利有着强烈的兴趣。他为我们的皈依做足了准备，在我们的摩门酒店里和我们一起吃早餐，他穿着黑色的燕尾服，水红色的背心，以及一个巨大的截顶的莱格伦锥体，这使他看起来像一个十七世纪的意大利骑兵物理学家。我曾听过一些人为了自己的目的错误地引用经文，说了很久却什么也没说；但他在这些方面远远超过了我以前的经验中最崇高的努力，以至于除了杰克-邦斯比的劝说，我想不出有什么可以与他相比。请看一个例子。

"七个女人要抓住一个男人! 好了！" (在最近的皈依对象的背上拍了一巴掌)。"你们怎么想的？应! 要抓住他! 这并不意味着他们不可以，不是吗？不，上帝的话语是指它所说的。因此，没有其他意思，没有任何方式，形状，或方式。不以任何方式，因为他说，'我就是道路、真理、生命'。不是没有形状，因为人在玻璃中看到自己的自然形状；不是没有方式，因为他马上就忘记了自己是什么样子的人。七个女人要抓住他。如果她们要这样做，她们就会这样做! 因为一切都会实现，没有一句好话会落在地上。试图解释圣经的人，会使它成为无稽之谈。但不要带着你的灵媒来找我，没有一句好话要落地。因此，有七个不会掉下来。正如我刚刚证明的那样，七个人将抓住他，那么七个人就应该，而且在后期的荣耀中，七个人，是的，正如我们的主对彼得说的，'我实实在在地对你说，不是七个人，而是七十个七次，'这七十个七次将抓住他，并将他紧紧抓住。有福的日子! 因为结局要像开始一样，而且是七十倍的丰富。请到我的园子里来。"


这个邀请是讲道的结尾。我们欣然接受，我必须承认，如果我们有任何改变的希望，那就是我们站在希伯弟兄的漂亮果园里，在劝诫的间隙吃苹果和杏子，用像李子一样大的鹅莓把正确的教义戳进我们的喉咙，把我们嘴里的味道去掉，就像蓖麻油之后的果酱。

波特-罗克韦尔是我的读者在过去13年里在犹他州发生的每一起无畏的屠杀事件中一定听说过的一个人。他是但尼特人的首领，这是一伙圣徒，他们垄断了对外邦人和叛教者的报复权。如果一个摩门教徒在把他的财产换成现金后，试图在夜间溜到加利福尼亚，他们的刀子就不可避免地要把他的目的地改为另一个州，并把他的货物带回主的库房。他们的子弹能准确无误地穿过外部敌人的大脑。他们是摩门教的天选刺客，是神授的屠夫。波特-洛克威尔已经杀了他的四十个人。这是历史事实。他的私人受害者可能会更多。他把头发编在后面，用后梳打成一个结，像女人一样。他有一张充满斗牛犬勇气的脸，但性格非常好，没有一点坏毛病。7月4日，我和他一起出去骑马，非常喜欢他的社交活动，尽管我知道只要布里格姆一句话，他就会以事不关己的方式割断我的喉咙，就像我是一头小牛而不是一个作家一样，他不会因此而对我感到不友善。我完全理解他的反常，并发现他是我见过的最令人愉快的凶手之一）。他只是一种执行力，而杠杆--良心--在布里格姆的手中，已经完全失去了作用。他到处都被称为破坏性的天使，但他似乎对他的托蒂没有什么异议，而且定时进餐。他有两个非常漂亮悦目的妻子。布里格姆约有七十人，希伯约有三十人。布里格姆的七十人不包括那些在精神上与他结婚或 "受封 "的人，这些人在他的后台办公室举行仪式后可能再也见不到他了。这些人往往有世俗的丈夫，与布里格姆结婚只是为了属于他在天上的领主式机构。

布莱格姆告诉我，他认为盐湖城有一万六千名居民。它的房子一般是用土坯或木头建造的，少数是用石头建造的，虽然它们在建筑上都没有什么野心，但几乎都有令人愉快的花园。果树和阴凉树都很丰富，而且很节俭。事实上，从歌剧院的屋顶上看，这座城市看起来相当地绿意盎然。它坐落在一片平原上，非常如诗如画地镶嵌在群山之中，而从雪峰上引下来用于灌溉的溪流流经所有宽阔的街道两侧，使其外观更加美丽。摩门教徒目前在一个普通的、低矮的建筑里做礼拜，我想是用土坯做的，叫做会堂，但在非常炎热的天气里，一个巨大的绿枝亭可以让他们更舒适地坐着。布里格姆正在建造一座宏伟的花岗岩圣殿，（很像奎尼教堂），长约二百英尺，宽约一百二十五英尺。如果这座建筑能够完工，它将跻身于本大陆最宽敞的宗教建筑之列。

这座城市的名字来自于湖泊，从湖泊出发，穿过平坦的谷底，有一条很好的道路，距离后者大约20英里。从艺术角度看，它是我见过的最可爱的水面之一，比海洋最浓的蓝色还要蓝，而且实际上同样令人印象深刻，因为从南岸看，你只看到水面。然而，这种景象被一座宏伟的山岛打破了，我想，这座山岛离水面有七八百英尺高，离岸边有半打英里，而且显然有好几英里长。湖水的密度被低估了，而不是被过分强调了。我在里面游了相当长的一段距离，然后仰面躺在水面上，而不是躺在水里，忍受着微风的吹拂，再次向陆地前进。我被吹到一个湖水只有四英寸深的地方，没有擦到我的背，直到我把手压得很低，触到了湖底，才知道自己又到了我的深度之内。它没有鱼，但却滋生了无数奇怪的小蛆，这些小蛆很快就会变成麻烦的小虫子。湖边的岩石是由石灰岩组成的宏伟的城堡和洞穴，其中一些是精细的结晶，但大多数是像我们较粗糙的特伦顿和黑河组。在这个形成中，有一个大的洞穴，从岸边爬行十分钟就到了。


我必须突然再次跳到陆路阶段。

从盐湖城到瓦肖和内华达山脉，道路穿过人类头脑中可以想象的最可怕的沙漠。我们发现，撒哈拉沙漠的沙子被一种难以捉摸的碱粉所取代，它像被驱赶的雪一样白，一次绵延90英里，令人眼花缭乱，它甚至不支持最后一种顽固的植被，即野草丛。这里的泉水很稀少，而且无一例外都是盐、钾和硫磺的地狱之水的容器，除非在极端情况下，否则没有人愿意喝。几天来，这种饮料在体内，而风中的碱在体外侵入身体的每一个毛孔，往往会使悲惨的乘客身上出现红斑，很快就会变得粘稠，使他发狂。同时，他在碱车道上颠簸；连续六天六夜无法入睡，直到狂热来临，或者真正的谵妄使他得到缓解。我回顾那片沙漠，认为那是我一生中最可怕的噩梦。

似乎大自然还没有做最坏的打算，在从盐湖城出发的第二天，我们就注定要在我们停留的一个车站听到可怕的传言，说戈肖特人在打仗，而且在这一天到达中午时分，发现他们的证据是无可辩驳的。我们时不时地看到，在沾满钾粉的软皮鞋履上，脚趾被翻开了，后来我的望远镜显示，一个狰狞的魔鬼在一英里外的壁架上溜达，他不是别人，正是戈肖特人的间谍。黄牛党和烧钱的人离得有多远？

那天下午的第一个阶段是一个漫长而可怕的阶段。可怜的马匹几乎无法拖动我们那辆疯狂的马车，它的轮毂里装满了钾盐；然而我们知道，如果受到攻击，我们唯一的安全就是奔跑战斗。我们必须在马匹飞奔时从窗口开火。

大约四点钟，我们进入了一个可怕的隘口，这似乎是大自然为背叛和伏击而计划的。巨大的、黑色的、贫瘠的斑岩和辉绿岩在我们的头顶上上升了300英尺，它们较低和较近的壁架都是许多天然的护栏，可以在上面开火，环形的缝隙可以射击。我们一行有十支步枪。我们把他们拉出来，五人一组，准备把第一个偷看胸墙的红色恶棍迅速送进地狱。我们的六支枪横放在腿上，我们的弓箭手刀放在身边，我们的手提箱装满了准备好的复仇之物，在胸前的带子上打开。我们紧闭着牙关坐着，只是时不时地用一种阴沉的语气互相嘀咕："不要紧张，不要乱开枪，瞄准，记住是为了回家！" 诸如此类的话语，或者默默地捏捏手，就这样过去了，我们坐在那里，一双眼睛紧紧盯着窗台，枪口毫不动摇。我想，我们都不是胆小鬼；但坐在那里，以每小时两英里的速度前进，期待着听到下一个壁架上响起一排叫喊声和火枪声，把思想的杯子喝到微不足道的渣滓，这种痛苦比恐惧更可怕！我们只有一个安慰。

我们只剩下一个安慰了。在隘口的中间有一个陆路站，我们要在那里得到新鲜的马匹。下一个阶段有20英里长。如果我们遭到猛烈的攻击，我们可能会设法跑完它，几乎跑完全程，除非印第安人成功地射杀了我们队伍中的一个人，他们总是试图这样做。

毫无疑问，我们在那个隘口的几个地方遭到了伏击，但我们完美的准备工作使我们的敌人感到害怕。印第安人像坟墓一样残酷，但他是个十足的懦夫。他不会冒险成为第一个被射杀的人，尽管他的手可能会在之后制服敌人。

最后，我们转过街角，站房应该出现在眼前。

一股浓烈的、令人作呕的烟雾从建筑物的所在地袅袅升起。我们走近了。谷仓、马厩、站房，都成了一堆冒烟的椽子。

我们又走近了。所有的马匹，十几或十五匹，都躺在火堆上烤着。我们走近了那个地方。在那里，与野兽的尸体密不可分地混合在一起，躺着六个人，他们的大脑被打碎，他们的脸被肢解得面目全非，他们的四肢被砍断，--一场可怕的大屠杀在我们面前蒸腾起来。我不能再纠结于这种对所有感官的恐惧了。现在一到正午，我就会不寒而栗地想起这件事。


在那之后，我们带着几乎快死的马匹又走了20英里；在我们获得洪堡山脚下的鲁比谷之前，我们在那一幕的基础上又走了100英里的折磨人的悬念，并把最后的戈斯霍特留在了我们身后。

我们余下的旅程只有自然界的恐怖，没有人类的残暴帮助。但是，过去已经完成了它的工作。我们到达瓦绍时，我们的骨髓几乎被失眠、疾病和痛苦的心灵烧光了。在我们到达银矿大都市弗吉尼亚市的前一天早上，一个粗壮的、年轻的伊利诺伊州农民，我们一直认为他是我们所有乘客中最坚强的，变得神志不清，不得不用主要力量把他抱上舞台。(几周后，当舞台在卡森水槽附近换马时，另一位旅客突然变得精神错乱，并把自己的脑袋打爆了）。至于我自己，在弗吉尼亚市进入温水浴的那一刻，我就完全晕倒了，在昏迷了一个半小时后，好不容易才抢救过来。

我们在弗吉尼亚停留了三天，看到49年的加利福尼亚在一个狂热的、赌博的、采矿的小镇上重现，下到富得流油的 "奥菲尔 "井底，再次上来，继续我们穿越塞拉山脉的路。仅仅是越过山脊，跨过加利福尼亚的界线，我们就来到了充满生机的绿色森林，彩虹般的丰富花朵，空气就像从天堂敞开的窗户吹来的风。


越过边界，我们坐在光荣的塔霍湖的边缘，（曾经是 "比格勒"，直到这个名字的前州长成为铜头党，忠诚的加利福尼亚人把他踢出了他们的地理，因为他已经被赶出了他们的政治。 一片晶莹剔透的水，从雪峰上新鲜提炼出来，它的花岗岩底部在100英尺深处清晰可见，它的两岸是一个天体花园，位于一个长35英里、宽10英里的盆地中，高出太平洋水平面近7千英尺。地理学上没有比这光荣的大海更优越的了，这杯神圣的云雾之酒，崇高地举着，抵御着从这里榨出的压力。在这里，几乎是我们陆路旅行的终点，自从我们的脚踏上金州的绿色边界，我们坐下来休息，感觉到短短的一个小时，一个小小的联盟，就把我们从地狱般的世界带到了天堂。