“MY DEAR POLLY,
“I wrote you from Fishkill the day before I left it, and shall put this into the office here for the post to take as he comes along. On Friday, towards evening, we left Fishkill. It was dark and squally when we got to the landing, and we had nine horses in the boat, which made us a little uneasy, as a few days before a boat had been overset and some people drowned; however, we got safe over, and lay that night at Colonel Hawsbrook’s, where you spent two or three days on your return from Bethlehem. The next morning we breakfasted with Dr. Craik at Murderer’s Creek, and then proceeded through the Clove, a most disagreeable place, and horrid road. In the evening we got to Ringwood. Upon our arrival there, we were informed there was no public house in the place, and it was after dark. Colonel Biddle had favored me with an order on all his magazines to supply me with forage; he has one in this place. I waited on his deputy and presented the order; he went out of the room, and in a few minutes returned with a Mr. Erskine, who is surveyor-general of the roads; he gave me a polite invitation to spend the night at his house, where we were entertained in the most genteel, hospitable, and friendly manner. A shower of rain yesterday morning prevented our proceeding, but, as it cleared up about noon, we came on thirty-four miles to this place. I expect to reach Philadelphia the day after tomorrow. I have been from home almost a month, and have received but one letter, but hope to find several waiting for me at Philadelphia, as I cannot think you would miss a post. The enemy last Thursday left their posts at Stony Point and Verplanck’s Point, and retired to New York.”
* * * * *
“_Bristol, October 27, 1779_.
“MY DEAR POLLY,
“I wrote you from Morristown, which it is probable you will receive by this post. Lest that should miscarry, this will inform you that I am at length arrived within twenty miles of Philadelphia, where I expect to dine this day. A few days will determine how long I am like to be detained there;–I think it upon every account best to finish all my business. The gentlemen have bound themselves to each other by an engagement upon honor, if nothing is done for our department by New Year’s day, all to resign, and have informed Congress of it: I have joined in the engagement. If I find I am like to be detained here any time, it is not improbable I may put my accounts in the hands of the Commissioners, and, if I can get fresh horses, proceed with Mr. Lee on a visit to Mrs. Washington at Mount Pleasant in Virginia. Mr. Lee desires his compliments. Adieu, my love. I am, with the sincerest affection,
“Ever yours.”
* * * * *
“_Danbury, December 8, 1779_.
“MY DEAR POLLY,
“I am once more returned to dear Danbury, on my way to Boston. I arrived here about an hour since, and never had a more fatiguing, disagreeable journey in my life than from Philadelphia here. I expected to have been in Boston by this time; but two severe storms, and one day waiting for his Excellency at Morristown, have made me twelve days performing a journey which according to my usual way of travelling I should have performed in four. I have, however, no reason to repent my undertaking this journey.
“If sickness or very bad weather does not prevent, I shall certainly be home by Christmas, and wish to have all our friends together;–I promise myself a great deal of happiness, and hope I shall not be disappointed. Adieu, my love.”
* * * * *
September 30th, 1780, the Hospital Department was newly organized, and the office of Deputy Director-General was abolished, and of course the incumbents of that office were no longer in the hospital service.
Dr. Foster’s health was irreparably injured by the fatigues and exposures he had undergone, and he lingered but a few months longer, dying on the 27th of February, 1781, in his forty-second year.
One sentence in his will deserves record, as in harmony with the disinterestedness of his life. After desiring that all debts due him should be collected as soon as possible after his decease, he adds this clause: “But I would not have any industrious and really poor persons distressed for this purpose.”
The writer of these letters needs no additional eulogy. He sacrificed all the prospects of his life to give his services in our struggle for freedom. He, too, was but one of that innumerable multitude who, in more exalted or in humbler stations, freely gave their exertions, their wealth, their comfort, and their lives for freedom and right. It is possible so to linger by the grave of the past as to forget the living present; but the grateful memory of those who have in their times contended for truth with self-denial should be ever animating to those now laboring in the holy warfare, to which, in every age, whether the outward signs be of peace or strife, God calls the noble of mankind.
“Therefore bring violets! Yet, if we, self-balked,
Stand still a-strewing violets all the while, These had as well not moved, ourselves not talked
Of these.”
* * * * *
IN THE PINES.
If I were a crow, or, at least, had the faculty of flying with that swift directness which is proverbially attributed to the corvine tribe, and were to wing a southwesterly course from the truck of the flag-staff which rises from the Battery at New York, I should find myself, within a very short time, about fifty miles from the turbulent city, and hovering over a region of country as little like the civilized emporium just quitted as it is well possible to conceive. Not being a crow, however, nor fitted up with an apparatus for flying,–destitute even of a balloon,–I am compelled to adopt the means of locomotion which the bounty of God or the ingenuity of man affords me, and to spend a somewhat longer time in transit to my destination.
Over the New Jersey Railroad, then, I rattled, one fine, sunshiny autumn morning, in the year that has recently taken leave of us, as far as Bordentown, a distance of some fifty-seven miles, on my way to a locality the very existence of which is scarcely dreamed of by thousands in the metropolis, who can tell you how many square miles of malaria there are in the Roman Campagna, and who have got the topography of Caffre Land at their fingers’ ends. It is a region aboriginal in savagery, grand in the aspects of untrammelled Nature; where forests extend in uninterrupted lines over scores of miles; where we may wander a good day’s journey without meeting half-a-dozen human faces; where stately deer will bound across our path, and bears dispute our passage through the cedar-brakes; where, in a word, we may enjoy the undiluted essence, the perfect wildness, of woodland life. Deep and far “under the shade of melancholy boughs” we shall be taken, if together we visit the ancient Pines of New Jersey.
In order to do so, we must make at Bordentown the acquaintance of Mr. Cox, and take our seats in his stage for a jolt, twelve miles long, to the village of New Egypt, on the frontier of the Pines. Although the forest is accessible from many points, and may be entered by a number of distinct approaches, I, the writer hereof, selected that _via_ New Egypt as the most convenient to a comer from Now York, and as, perhaps, the least fatiguing to accomplish.
But, oh! the horrors of those New Jersey roads! Mud? ‘Tis as if all the rains of heaven had been concentrated upon all the marls and clays of earth, and all the sticky stratum plastered down in a wiggling line of unascertainable length and breadth! Holes? As if a legion of sharpshooters had been detailed for the defence of Sandy Hook, and had excavated for themselves innumerable rifle-pits or caverns for the discomfiture of unhappy passengers! Up hill and down dale,–with merciless ruts and savage ridges,–now, a slough, to all appearance destitute of bottom, and, next, a treacherous stretch of sand, into which the wheels sink deeper and deeper at every revolution, as if the vehicle were France, and the road disorder,–such is a faint adumbration of the state of affairs in the benighted interior of our petulant little whiskey-drinking sister State!
But all earthly things come to an end, and so, accordingly, did our three-hours’ drive. The stage pompously rolled into the huddled street of its terminus, and deposited me, in the neighborhood of noon, on the stoop of the only tavern supported in the deadly-lively place. No long sojourn, however, was in store for me. Presently–ere I had grown tired of watching the couple of clodhoppers, well-bespattered as to boots and undergarments with Jersey mud, who, leaning against a fence in true agricultural laziness, deliberately eyed, or rather, gloated over the inoffensive traveller, as though he were that “daily stranger,” for whom, as is well known, every Jerseyman offers up matutinal supplications–a buggy appeared in the distance, and I was shortly asked for. It was the vehicle in which I was to seek my destination in the Pines; and my back was speedily turned upon the queer little village with the curiously chosen name. My driver, an intelligent, sharp-featured old man, soon informs me that he was born and has lived for fifty years in the forest. A curious, old-world mortal,–our father’s “serving-man,” to the very life! The Pines are to him what Banks and City Halls and Cooper Institutes and Astor Houses are to a poor _cittadini_; every tree is individualized; and I doubt not he could find his way by night from one end to the other of the forest.
We had driven no great distance, when my companion lifted his whip, and, pointing to a long, dark, indistinct line which crossed the road in the distance, blocking the prospect ahead and on either side, as far as the eye could reach, exclaimed: “Them’s the Pines!” As we approached the forest, a change, theatrical in its suddenness, took place in the scenery through which our course was taken. The rich and smiling pasture-lands, interspersed with fields of luxuriant corn, were left behind, the red clay of the road was exchanged for a gritty sand, and the road itself dwindled to a mere pathway through a clearing. The locality looked like a plagiarism from the Ohio backwoods. On both sides of our path spread the graceful undergrowth, waving in an ocean of green, and hiding the stumps with which the plain was covered, while far away, to right and left, the prospect was bounded by forest walls, and gloomy bulwarks and parapets of pines arose in front, as if designed, in their perfect denseness, to exclude the world from some bosky Garden of Paradise beyond. Not so, however; for our pathway squeezes itself between two melancholy sentinel-pines, tracing its white scroll into the forest farther than the eye can follow, and in a few moments we leave the clearing behind, and pass into the shadow of the endless avenue, and bow beneath the trailing branches of the silent, stern, immovable warders at the gate. We were fairly in the Pines; and a drive of somewhat more than three miles lay before us still.
The immense forest region I had thus entered covers an extensive portion of Burlington County, and nearly the whole of Ocean, beside parts of Monmouth, Camden, Atlantic, Gloucester, and other counties. The prevailing soils of this great area–some sixty miles in length by ten in breadth, and reaching from the river Delaware to the very shore of the Atlantic–are marls and sands of different qualities, of which the most common is a fine, white, angular sand, of the kind so much in request for building-purposes and the manufacture of glass. In such an arid soil the _coniferae_ alone could nourish, and accordingly we find that the wide-spreading region is overgrown almost entirely with white and yellow pine, hemlock, and cedar. Hence its distinctive appellation.
It was a most lovely afternoon, warm and serene as only an American autumn afternoon knows how to be; and while we hurried past the mute, monotonous, yet ever-shifting array of pines and cedars, the very rays of the sun seemed to be perfumed with the aroma of the fragrant twigs, about which humming-birds now and then whirred and fluttered as we startled them, scarcely more brilliant in color than the gorgeous maples which grew in one or two dry and open spots. For three-quarters of an hour our drive continued, until at length a slight undulation broke the level of the sand, and a fence, inclosing a patch of Indian corn, from which the forest had been driven back, betokened for the first time the proximity of some habitation. In fact, having reached the summit of the slope, I found myself in the centre of an irregular range of dwellings, scattered here and there in picturesque disregard of order, and next moment my hand was grasped by my friend B. I had reached my destination,–Hanover Iron-Works,–and was soon walking up, past the white gateway, to the Big House.
Somewhat less than eighty years ago, Mr. Benjamin Jones, a merchant of Philadelphia, invested a portion of his fortune in the purchase of one hundred thousand acres of land in the then unbroken forest of the Pines. The site of the present hamlet of Hanover struck him as admirably adapted for the establishment of a smelting-furnace, and he accordingly projected a settlement on this spot. The Rancocus River forms here a broad embayment, the damming of which was easily accomplished, and one of the best of water-privileges was thus obtained. On the north of this bay or pond, moreover, there rises a sloping bluff, which was covered, at the period of its purchase, with ancient trees, but upon which a large and commodious mansion was soon erected. Here Mr. Jones planted himself, and quickly drew around him a settlement which rose in number to some four hundred souls; and here he commenced the manufacture of iron. At frequent intervals in the Pines were found surface-deposits of ore, the precipitate from waters holding iron in solution, which frequently covered an area of many acres, and reached a depth of from two or three inches to as many feet. The ore thus existing in surface-deposits was smelted in the iron-works, and the metal thence obtained was at once molten and moulded in the adjoining foundry. Here, in the midst of these spreading forests, many a ponderous casting, many a fiery rush of tons of molten metal, has been seen. Here, five-and-forty years ago, the celebrated Decatur superintended, during many weeks, the casting of twenty-four pounders, to be used in the famous contest with the Algerine pirates whom he humbled; and the echoes of the forest were awakened with strange thunders then. As the great guns were raised from the pits in which they had been cast, and were declared ready for proof, Decatur ordered each one to be loaded with repeated charges of powder and ball, and pointed into the woods. Then, for miles between the grazed and quivering boles, crashed the missiles of destruction, startling bear and deer and squirrel and raccoon, and leaving traces of their passage which are even still occasionally discovered. The cannon-balls themselves are now and then found imbedded in the sand of the forest. In this manner the guns were tried which were to thunder the challenge of America against the dens of Mediterranean pirates.
Hanover, too, in its day of pride, furnished many a city with its iron tubes for water and for gas, many a factory and workshop with its castings, many a farmer with his tools but the glow of the furnace is quenched forever now. The slowly gathering ferruginous deposits have been exhausted, and three years have elapsed since the furnace-fires were lighted. The blackened shell of the building stands in cold decrepitude, a melancholy vestige of usefulness outlived. In consequence of the stoppage of the works, Hanover has lost seven-eighths of its population, and only about fifty inhabitants remain in the white cottages grouped about the Big House, who are employed in agricultural labors and occupations connected with the forest. Yet in this solitary nook the elegances and the tastes of the most cultivated society are to be found. The Big House, surrounded by its well-trimmed gardens sloping down to the broad Rancocus, with its comfortable apartments, and the diversified prospect which it commands, offers a resting-place which, although deep in the genuine forest, combines urban refinement with the quiet and seclusion of country-life.
Bright and early on the morning after my arrival, Friend B. was at my door; and after a savory, if hasty breakfast, we sounded _boute-selle_. Outside the gate a couple of forest-ponies were waiting,–stout, lively, five-year-olds, equal, if not to a two-forty heat, yet to twenty miles of steady trot without distress,–brown and sleek as you please, with the knowingest eyes, and intelligence expressed in the impatient stamp of the fore-foot, and good-humor in the twitching of the ear. Into the saddle and off, with the cheery breeze to bathe us in exhilaration, as it went humming around us laden with aromatic odors and mysterious whisperings of the pine-trees to the sea,–through the dew-diamonded grass of the little lawn at the top of the hill,–past the great elm with its glistening foliage, and its carolling crew of just-awakened birds,–then a canter down the sandy slope to the edge of the forest, and again the pines are around us.
Before us lay a four-mile ride over a devious track among trees which my companion knows by heart. Paths diverge into the forest on either side, running north and south, east and west, straight and crooked, narrow and broad; but B. follows unerringly the right, though undistinguished trail. This knowledge of woodcraft,–how it appalls and wonder-strikes the unlearned metropolitan, accustomed as he is to numbered houses and name-boarded streets! No omnibus-driver threading the confusion of a great thoroughfare could shape his course with greater assurance and lack of hesitation than does B. through these endless avenues of heavy-foliaged pines, broken only now and then by some tangled, impenetrable brake of cedars, or by a charred and blackened clearing, where the coaler has been at work. I gradually grew to believe that he could call every tree by its name, as generals have been said to know every soldier in their armies.
At length we reached a clearing of one or two acres in extent, the site of Cranberry Lodge, and the terminus of our ride. In the centre of the lone expanse two unusually tall pines were left standing, at the base of which a curious structure nestled, which had been for several weeks the occasional hermitage of my companion. It was built entirely with his own hands, of cedar rails and white-pine planks, which he had cut and sawed from trees that his own hands had felled. A queer little cabin, some nine feet in length by five or six in breadth, standing all alone in the forest, with not a neighbor within a distance of at least four miles!
Dismounting, we fastened our horses to a couple of saplings, and I was introduced to the interior of Cranberry Lodge, which was tenanted only by the “hired man,” who, in the absence of Mr. B., reigned supreme in the clearing. The dwelling I found no less primitive in internal than in its external appearance. Three persons, moderately doubled up and squeezed, could find room in the interior, which was furnished with a bench for the safe-keeping of sundry pots, pans, and other culinary necessaries, and with a shelf on which some blankets were laid, constituting my companion’s bedstead and bed, when he slept in Cranberry Lodge. Beneath the “bunk” a small hole scooped in the sand stood in lieu of a cellar, and contained a stock of provisions of Mr. B.’s own cooking.
Such a backwoodish dwelling as Cranberry Lodge, existing in the year 1858, within seventy miles of New York, requires some explanation. Its foundation is–pies! Cape Cod, the great emporium of the cranberry-trade, has been running short for the last few years; in other words, its supply is unequal to the demand. The heavy Britishers have awakened to the fact, since 1851, that, of all condiments and delicacies, cranberry-sauce and cranberry-pie are best in their way; and John Bull takes many a barrel clean out of our market now. It so happened that in the Pines of New Jersey cranberries superior to those of Cape Cod have grown unheeded for centuries,–grew red and purple and white and pink when Columbus was unthought of, as well as when Washington passed through the Pines,–and for sixty or seventy years have furnished a certain class of gypsies–of whom more anon–with merchandise which sold well in the neighboring villages and cities. No one thought of cultivating cranberries; no one, but the gypsies aforesaid, of gathering them for sale. But it came to pass that a certain farmer of Hanover was, like many another, unsuccessful during several years. As a last resource, he purchased of the owner of the Big House a cranberry-bog,–that is to say, one of the many marshy spots which are interspersed in the forest,–for which he paid five dollars the acre. There were a little more than one hundred acres in the bog. At a cost of-some six hundred dollars Mr. F. fenced in his bog, and spent three months in watching the cranberries as they ripened, to protect them from depredation. To his intense astonishment, he found, in October, that the yield was between two and three hundred bushels to the acre, and that his land and fencing were paid for, with a balance left over for next year. In consequence of this success, a little mania for cranberry-farming seized upon the denizens of the Pines, and bogs acquired a value they had never borne before. This was in 1857. Early in 1858, one of these plots of land, with an adjoining piece of forest, was rented by Mr. B., who, like a right-down Yankee, determined to cultivate it himself. So, with the aid of one hired man, a clearing was made in his forest-patch, a hut built, four miles from the nearest habitation, and the trees cut down were converted into rails, wherewith to fence in the cranberry-land. At the time of my visit, the crop was just beginning to think of getting ripe, and the great lazy vines, each one creeping for several feet along the ground, were severally loaded with dozens of delicately-tinted berries, plump and fair as British beauties, which silently drew to themselves and absorbed the rays of the sun, turning them to color and succulent subacidulousness. A most glorious sight that same hundred-acre bog must have been a couple of weeks later, when the berries had ripened, and a carpet of rosy redness blushed upwards to the waning sun! Yet 1858 (the even year) was a bad season for cranberries,–the yield was _only_ sufficient to pay for the land and fencing, with a modicum over to begin 1859 with!
So cranberries grew to be institutions in the Pines, and all the bogs for miles around the site of the first experiment were hired by sanguine farmers. But the cranberry-cultivator has one enemy, which is neither bird, nor worm, nor blight, but biped,–a Rat, two-legged, erect, or moderately so, talking, even, in audible and intelligible speech,–the Pine Rat, namely. Few but New Jerseymen, and of them chiefly those who dwell about the forest, have heard of this human species; it has not yet had its Agassiz nor its Wyman,–yet there it flourishes and repeats itself!
My friend, Mr. B., considerately undertook to initiate me into some of the mysteries of this race, which has proved minatory, though not destructive, to his blushing crop,–and accordingly led me through brake and brier, past wild and gloomy cedar-swamps, over brooks insecurely bridged with fallen logs, or, perchance, with stepping-blocks of pine-stumps, far into the silent forest, and to a little dell or dingle,–a natural clearing,–where a couple of tents were pitched, and the smoke of a struggling fire told infallibly of human neighborhood. The barking of a splenetic little terrier brought from one of the tents a man of some fifty years, lank and gaunt of visage, with matted hair, and wild, uncivilized eyes, dressed in a ragged jacket and what had once been a pair of trousers. His face wore no expression of intelligence; but a look of intense, though animal cunning lurked in his eyes. While I was gazing on this individual, who stood in silence by his tent, there emerged from the other an ancient female, who might have been eighty years of age, but who hobbled towards us with much briskness.
“Good evening, Hannah Butler,” said Mr. B.; “I’ve brought you some tomatoes from the Big House. This is my friend, Mr. Smith of York.”
Mr. Smith of York (grimly repressing a smile, as his mischievous memory whispered something about Brooks of Sheffield) bowed gravely to Mrs. Butler. Mr. B. whispers,–“That’s the Queen of the Pine Rats!” Hannah meanwhile mumbles over one of the fleshy tomatoes.
The man whom we had first seen held in his hand a tattered shawl, with which he now began patching a portion of his tent, saying at the same time that there was a storm a-brewing.
“Ay, is there!” said Mrs. Butler; “and a storm like the one when I seed Leeds’s devil”–
“Hush!” interrupted her ragged companion, with a look of terror. “What’s the good o’ namin’ him, and allus talkin’ about him, when yer don’t never know as he ar’n’t byside ye?”
“I’ll devil yer!” shrieked the crone, through a half-eaten tomato. “Finish mendin’ up yer cover, yer mean cranberry-thief!”
The spiteful terrier, which had meanwhile evinced an unpleasant interest in the thickness of my pantaloons, added his yelping to the clamor, and Mr. B., pointing to the clouds, thought we had better hasten homewards. So we bade farewell to Hannah and her nephew, as I learned that the unfortunate vessel of her wrath in reality was, and dived into the gloomy recesses of the Pines again.
Long ere we got back to Cranberry Lodge, all doubts of an impending tempest had disappeared. The eastern sky, cloudless an hour before, was now overhung with a livid bank of ash-gray clouds, which were incessantly riven by broad and terrible flashes of silent lightning. A slight westerly breeze was blowing, and evidently impeded the progress of the storm, which was beating up from seaward against the wind. Plunging through prickly thickets and dashing through the turbid brooks, we hastened toward the clearing, committed Cranberry Lodge to the custody of the “hired man,” and untied our horses from the saplings to which they were made fast. In another moment we were on the back trail. Scarcely, however, was the clearing shut out of view when a little hesitating puff of wind from the east blew chill upon us; the breeze had veered, and the tempest was at hand. In the twinkling of an eye, the western horizon was overhung with the same ghastly storm-bank that threatened in the east, while a monitory gust rustled through the sighing pines, wildly twisting and tossing the undergrowth,–overspread with a quivering pallor as it bent before the breeze,–and bade us be prepared. Next moment, a clap of thunder, rattling like the artillery of ten thousand sieges, or like millions of bars of iron dashed furiously together, broke upon the forest. It was the most awful sound, terrible even in its expected suddenness, that I ever heard. Simultaneously a flash of purple lightning fell from the zenith to the horizon, splitting the clouds asunder, and with it there descended rain in a cataract rather than in torrents, so that in the twinkling of an eye the thirsty sand was saturated, and bubbling pools of water pattered in the deluged path. Crash after crash, each clap more terrific than the one preceding, came the awful thunder; blinding flashes of lightning darted around us;–but still our phlegmatic ponies galloped on, and only once started violently, when a peal which really seemed as if its shock must burst the heavens asunder dazed us momentarily with its almost unendurable sound. The gloomy canopy above us, meanwhile, was overrun by incessant streams of purple lightning, and the deluge of rain still fell. At length we reached the Big House, (somewhat ostentatiously reducing the speed of our horses to a walk as we came within sight of its embowered windows,) and were soon dripping in the kitchen. A change of apparel, calling into requisition Mexican _ponchos_ and other picturesque garments, with a smoke beside a roaring fire, completely obviated all dangerous consequences; nor was it without feelings of great satisfaction that B. and myself watched tranquilly from our comfortable ensconcement the beatings of the storm on the encircling forest.
The Big House, I found, was full of legends of the Pine Rats. This extraordinary race of beings are lineal descendants of the New Jersey Tories, who, during the Revolution, made the Pines their refuge, whence they sallied in perpetual forays against the farms and dwellings of the partisans of the opposite cause. Several hundreds of these fanatical desperadoes made the forest their home, and laid waste the surrounding townships by their sudden raids. Most barbarous cruelties were practised on both sides, in the contests which continually took place between Whigs and Tories, and the unnatural seven-years’ war possessed nowhere darker features than in the neighborhood of the New Jersey Pines. Remains of these forest-freebooters are still discovered from time to time, in the process of clearing the woods, and unmistakable relics are occasionally met with in the denser portions of the forest, which must have been comparatively open eighty years ago.
The degraded descendants of these Tories constitute the principal difficulty with which a proprietor in this region has to contend. Completely besotted and brutish in their ignorance, they are incapable of obtaining an honest living, and have supported themselves, from a time which may be called immemorial, by practising petty larceny on an organized plan. The Pine Rat steals wood, steals game, steals cranberries, steals anything, in fact, that his hand can be laid upon; and woe to the property of the man who dares attempt to restrain him! A few weeks may, perhaps, elapse, after the tattered savage has received a warning or a reprimand, and then a column of smoke will be seen stealing up from some quarter in the forest;–he has set the woods on fire! Conflagrations of this kind will sometimes sweep away many hundreds of acres of the most valuable timber; while accidental fires are also of frequent occurrence. When indications of a fire are noticed, every available hand–men, women, and children alike–is hurried to the spot for the purpose of “fighting” it. Getting to leeward of the flames, the “fighters” kindle a counter-conflagration, which is drawn or sucked against the wind to the part already burning, and in this manner a vacant space is secured, which proves a barrier to the flames. Dexterity in fighting fires is a prime requisite in a forest overseer or workman.
“And now, something about Leeds’s devil!” I said to my friend, after satisfactory definition of the Pine Rat; “what fiend may he be, if you please?”
“I will answer,–I will tell you,” replies Mr. B. “There lived, in the year 1735, in the township of Burlington, a woman. Her name was Leeds, and she was shrewdly suspected of a little amateur witchcraft. Be that as it may, it is well established, that, one stormy, gusty night, when the wind was howling in turret and tree, Mother Leeds gave birth to a son, whose father could have been no other than the Prince of Darkness. No sooner did he see the light than he assumed the form of a fiend, with a horse’s head, wings of bat, and a serpent’s tail. The first thought of the newborn Caliban was to fall foul of his mother, whom he scratched and bepommelled soundly, and then flew through the window out into the village, where he played the mischief generally. Little children he devoured, maidens he abused, young men he mauled and battered; and it was many days before a holy man succeeded in repeating the enchantment of Prospero. At length, however, Leeds’s devil was laid,–but only for one hundred years.
“During an entire century, the memory of that awful monster was preserved, and, as 1835 drew nigh, the denizens of Burlington and the Pines looked tremblingly for his rising. Strange to say, however, no one but Hannah Butler has had a personal interview with the fiend; though, since 1835, he has frequently been heard howling and screaming in the forest at night, to the terror of the Rats in their lonely encampments. Hannah Butler saw the devil, one stormy night, long ago; though some skeptical individuals affirm, that very possibly she may have been led, under the influence of liquid Jersey lightning, to invest a pine-stump, or, possibly, a belated bear, with diabolical attributes and a Satanic voice. However that may be, you cannot induce a Rat to leave his hut after dark,–nor, indeed, will you find many Jerseymen, though of a higher order of intelligence, who will brave the supernatural terrors of the gloomy forest at night, unless secure in the strength of numbers.”
The Pine Rat, in his vocation as a picker-up of every unconsidered trifle, is an adept at charcoal-burning, on the sly. The business of legitimate charcoal-manufacture is also largely practised in the Pines, although the growing value of wood interferes sadly with the coalers. Here and there, however, a few acres are marked out every year for charring, and the coal-pits are established in the clearing made by felling the trees. The “coaling,” as it is technically termed, is an assemblage of “pits,” or piles of wood, conical in form, and about ten feet in height by twenty in diameter. The wood is cut in equal lengths, and is piled three or four tiers high, each log resting on the end of that below it, and inclining slightly inwards. An opening is left in the centre of the pile, serving as a chimney; and the exterior is overlaid with strips of turf, called “floats,” which form an almost air-tight covering. When the pile is overlaid, fire is set at various small apertures in the sides, and when the whole “pit” is fairly burning, the chimney is closed, in order to prevent too rapid combustion, and the whole pile is slowly converted into charcoal. The application of the term “pit” to these piles is worthy of remark. It is due, of course, to the fact, that for centuries it was customary to burn charcoal in excavated pits, until it was discovered that gradual combustion could be as well secured by another and less tedious method.
The Pine Rat glories in his surreptitious coal-pits. In secluded portions of the forest, he may continually be discovered pottering over a “coaling,” for which he has stolen the wood. This, indeed, is his only handicraft,–the single labor to which he condescends or is equal. Two or three men sometimes band together and build themselves huts after the curious fashion peculiar to the Rat, namely, by piling sticks or branches in a slope on each side of some tall pine, so that a wigwam, with the trunk of the tree in the centre, is constructed. Inside this triangular shelter–the idea of which was probably borrowed from the Indians–the Pine Rat ensconces himself with his whiskey-bottle at night, crouching in dread of the darkness, or of Leeds’s devil, aforesaid. In this respect he singularly resembles the Bohemian charcoal-burner, who trembles at the thought of Ruebezahl, that malicious goblin, who has an army of mountain-dwarfs and gnomes at his command. So long as the sunlight inspires our Rat with confidence, however, he will work at his coal-pit, while one comrade is away in the forest, snaring game, and another has perhaps, been dispatched to the precincts of civilization with his wagon-load of coal. Yes! the Pine Rat sometimes treads the streets of cities,–nay, even extends his wanderings to the banks of the Delaware and the Hudson, to Philadelphia and Trenton, to Jersey City and New York. Then, who so sharp as the grimy tatterdemalion, who passes from street to street and from house to house, with his swart and rickety wagon, and his jangling bell, the discordant clangor of which, when we hear it, calls up horrible recollections of the bells that froze our hearts in plague-stricken cities of other lands, when doomed galley-slaves and _forcats_ wheeled awful vehicles of putrefaction through the streets, clashing and clinking their clamorous bells for more and still more corpses, and foully jesting over the Death which they knew was already upon them! But the long-drawn, monotonous, nasal cry of the charcoal-vender–who has not heard it?–“Cha-r-coa’! Cha-r-coa’!”–is more cheerful than the demoniac laughter of the desperate galley-slaves, and his bell sounds musically when we hear it and think of theirs. Sometimes a couple of these peregrinants may be seen to encounter each other in the streets, and straightway there is an adjournment to the nearest bar-room, where the most scientific method of “springing the arch” is discussed over a glass of whiskey, at three cents the quart. Springing the arch, though few may be able to interpret the phrase, is a trick by which every housewife has suffered. It is the secret of piling the coal into the measure in such a manner as to make the smaller quantity pass for the larger, or, in other words, to make three pecks go for a bushel. So the Pine Rat vindicates his claim to a common humanity with all the rest of us men and women; for have not we all our secret and most approved method of springing the arch,–of palming off our three short pecks for a full and bounteous imperial bushel? Ah, yes! brothers and sisters, whisper it, if you will, below your breath, but we all can do the Pine Rat’s trick!
We shall not suffer his company much longer in this world,–poor, neglected, pitiable, darkened soul that he is, this fellow-citizen of ours. He must move on; for civilization, like a stern, prosaic policeman, will have no idlers in the path. There must be no vagrants, not even in the forest, the once free and merry greenwood, our policeman-civilization says; nay, the forest, even, must keep a-moving! We must have farms here, and happy homesteads, and orchards heavy with promise of cider, and wheat golden as hope, instead of silent aisles and avenues of mournful pine-trees, sheltering such forlorn miscreations as our poor cranberry-stealing friends! Railways are piercing the Pines; surveyors are marking them out in imaginary squares; market-gardeners are engaging land; and farmers are clearing it. The Rat is driven from point to point, from one means of subsistence to another; and shortly, he will have to make the bitter choice between regulated labor and starvation clean off from the face of the earth. There is no room for a gypsy in all our wide America! The Rat must follow the Indian,–must fade like breath from a window-pane in winter!
In fact, the forest, left so long in its aboriginal savagery, is about to be regenerated. A railroad is to be constructed, this year, which will place Hanover and the centre of the forest within one hour’s travel of Philadelphia; and it is scarcely too much to anticipate, that, within five years, thousands of acres, now dense with pines and cedars of a hundred rings, will be laid out in blooming market-gardens and in fields of generous corn. Such little cultivation as has hitherto been attempted has been attended by the most astonishing results; and persons have actually returned from the West and South, in order to occupy farms the neighborhood, of Hanover.
In one respect _c’est dommage_; one is grieved to part with the game that is now so plentiful in the Pines. Owing to the beneficent provision of the laws of New Jersey, which stringently forbid every description of hunting in the State during alternate periods of five years, game of all kinds has an opportunity to multiply; and at the termination of the season of rest, in October, 1858, there was some noble hunting in the neighborhood of Hanover. Five years hence, bears and deer will be a tradition, panthers and raccoons a myth, partridges and quails a vain and melancholy recollection, in what shall then be known as what was once the Pines.
* * * * *
THE LAST BIRD.
Little Bird that singest
Far atop, this warm December day,
Heaven bestead thee, that thou wingest, Ere the welcome song is done, thy way
To more certain weather,
Where, built high and solemnly, the skies, Shaken by no storm together,
Fixed in vaults of steadfast sapphire rise!
There, the smile that mocks us
Answers with its warm serenity;
There, the prison-ice that locks us Melts forgotten in a purple sea.
There, thy tuneful brothers,
In the palm’s green plumage waiting long, Mate them with the myriad others,
Like a broken rainbow bound with song.
Winter scarce is hidden,
Veiled within this fair, deceitful sky; Fly, ere, from his ambush bidden,
He descend in ruin swift and nigh!
By the Summer stately,
Truant, thou wast fondly reared and bred: Dost thou linger here so lately,
Knowing not thy beauteous friend is dead,–
Like to hearts that, clinging
Fervent where their first delight was fed, Move us with untimely singing
Of the hopes whose blossom-time is sped?
Beauties have their hour,
Safely perched on the Spring-budding tree; For the ripened soul is trust and power, And, beyond, the calm eternity.
* * * * *
THE UTAH EXPEDITION:
ITS CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES.
[Concluded.]
On the 3d of July, the Commissioners started on their return to the States. During their stay at Salt Lake City, the doubt which they had been led to entertain of the wisdom of the policy which they were the agents to carry out, had ripened into a firm conviction.
The people who were congregated on the eastern shore of Lake Utah did not begin to repair to their homes until the army had marched thirty or forty miles away from the city; and even then there was a secrecy about their movements which was as needless as it was mysterious. They returned in divisions of from twenty to a hundred families each. Their trains, approaching the city during the afternoon, would encamp on some creek in its vicinity until midnight, when, if intended for the northern settlements, they would pass rapidly through the streets, or else make a circuit around the city-wall. August arrived before the return was completed.
Morning after morning, one square after another was seen stripped of the board barricades which had sheltered windows and doors from intrusion. In front of every gateway wagons were emptying their loads of household furniture. The streets soon lost their deserted aspect, though for many days the only wayfarers were men,–not a woman being visible, except, by chance, to the profane eyes of the invaders. It was near the end of July before a single house was rented except to the intimate associates of the Governor. Up to that time, those Gentiles who did not follow the army to its permanent camp bivouacked on the public squares. By a Church edict, all Mormons were forbidden to enter into business transactions with persons outside their sect without consulting Brigham Young, whose office was beset daily by a throng of clients beseeching indulgences and instruction. Immediately after his return to the city, however, he secluded himself from public observation, never appearing in the streets, nor on the balconies of his mansion-house. He even encompassed his residence with an armed guard.
Gradually, nevertheless, the necessities of the people induced a modification of this system of non-intercourse. The Gentile merchants, who were present with great wagon-trains containing all those articles indispensable to the comfort of life, of which the Mormons stood so much in need, refused to open a single box or bale until they could hire storehouses. The permission was at length accorded, and immediately the absolute external reserve of the people began to wear away. Both sexes thronged to the stores, eager to supply themselves with groceries and garments; but there they experienced a wholesome rebuff, for which some of them were not entirely unprepared. The merchants refused to receive the paper of the Deseret Currency Association with which the Territory was flooded; and its notes were depreciated instantly by more than fifty per cent. Many of the people were driven to barter cattle and farm-produce for the articles they needed; and for the first time since the establishment of the Church in Utah an audible murmur arose among its adherents against its exactions. The sight of their neglected farms was also calculated to bring the poorer agriculturists to sober reflection. They perceived that the army, which they had been taught to believe would commit every conceivable outrage, was, on the contrary, demeaning itself with extreme forbearance and even kindness toward them, and was supplying an ampler market for the sale of their produce than they had enjoyed since the years when the overland emigration to California culminated. Nevertheless, their regrets, if entertained at all, found no public and concerted utterance. The authority of the Church exacted a sullen demeanor toward all Gentiles.
The 24th of July, the great Mormon anniversary, was suffered to pass without celebration; but its recurrence must have suggested anxious thoughts and bitter recollections to a great part of the population. When they remembered their enthusiastic declaration of independence only one year before, the warlike demonstrations which followed it, the prophecies of Young that the Lord would smite the army as he smote the hosts of Sennacherib, the fever of hate and apprehension into which they had been worked, and contrasted that period of excitement with their present condition, they must, indeed, have found abundant material for meditation. By the emigration southward they had lost at least four months of the most valuable time of the year. Their families had been subjected to every variety of exposure and hardship. Their ready money had been extorted from them by the Currency Association, or consumed in the expenses of transporting their movables to Lake Utah. And more than all, the fields had so suffered by their absence, that the crops were diminished to at least one-half the yield of an ordinary year. To a community the mass of which lives from hand to mouth, this was a most serious loss.
Almost all agriculture in Utah is carried on by the aid of irrigation. From April till October hardly a shower falls upon the soil, which parches and cracks in the hot sunshine. The settlements are all at the base of the mountains, where they can take advantage of the brooks that leap down through the canons. They are, therefore, necessarily scattered along the line of the main Wahsatch range, from the Roseaux River, which flows into the Salt Lake from the north, to the Vegas of the Santa Clara,–a distance of nearly four hundred miles. The labor expended in ditching has been immense, but it has been confined wholly to tapping the smaller streams.
By damming the Jordan in Salt Lake Valley and the Sevier in Parawan Valley, and distributing their water over the broad bottom-lands, on which the only vegetation now is wild sage and greasewood, the area of arable ground might be quintupled; and any considerable increase of population will render such an undertaking indispensable; for the narrow strip which is fertilized by the mountain-brooks yields scarcely more than enough to supply the present number of inhabitants. Nowhere does it exceed two or three miles in breadth, except along the eastern shore of Lake Utah, where it extends from the base of the mountains to the verge of the lake.
Almost all cereals and vegetables attain the utmost perfection, rivalling the most luxuriant productions of California. Within the last few years the cultivation of the Chinese sugar-cane has been introduced, and has proved successful. In Salt Lake City considerable attention is paid to horticulture. Peaches, apples, and grapes grow to great size, at the same time retaining excellent flavor. The grape which is most common is that of the vineyards of Los Angeles. In the vicinity of Provo an attempt has been made to cultivate the tea-plant; and on the Santa Clara several hundred acres have been devoted to the culture of cotton, but with imperfect success. Flax, however, is raised in considerable quantity. The fields are rarely fenced with rails, and almost never with stones. The dirt-walls by which they are usually surrounded are built by driving four posts into the ground, which support a case, ten or twelve feet in length, made of boards. This is packed full of mud, which dries rapidly in the intense heat of a summer noon. When it is sufficiently dry to stand without crumbling, the posts are moved farther along and the same operation is repeated.
The country is not dotted with farmhouses, like the agricultural districts of the East. The inhabitants all live in towns, or “forts,” as they are more commonly called, each of which is governed by a Bishop. These are invariably laid out in a square, which is surrounded by a lofty wall of mere dirt, or else of adobe. In the smaller forts there are no streets, all the dwellings backing upon the wall, and inclosing a quadrangular area, which is covered with heaps of rubbish, and alive with pigs, chickens, and children. The same stream which irrigates the fields in the vicinity supplies the people with water for domestic purposes. There are few wells, even in the cities. Except in Salt Lake City and Provo, no barns are to be seen. The wheat is usually stored in the garrets of the houses; the hay is stacked; and the animals are herded during the winter in sheltered pastures on the low lands.
All the people of the smaller towns are agriculturists. In none of them is there a single shop. In Provo there are several small manufacturing establishments, for which the abundant water-power of the Timpanogas River, that tumbles down the neighboring canon, furnishes great facilities. The principal manufacturing enterprise ever undertaken in the Territory–that for the production of beet-sugar–proved a complete failure. A capital advanced by Englishmen, to the amount of more than one hundred thousand dollars, was totally lost, and the result discouraged foreigners from all similar investments. Rifles and revolvers are made in limited number from the iron tires of the numerous wagons in which goods are brought into the Valley. There are tanneries, and several distilleries and breweries. In the large towns there are many thriving mechanics; but elsewhere even the blacksmith’s trade is hardly self-supporting, and the carpenters and shoemakers are all farmers, practising their trades only during intervals from work in the fields.
The deficiency of iron, coal, and wood is the chief obstacle to the material development of Utah. No iron-mines have been discovered, except in the extreme southern portion of the Territory; and the quality of the ore is so inferior, that it is available only for the manufacture of the commonest household utensils, such as andirons. The principal coal-beds hitherto found are in the immediate vicinity of Green River. There are several sawmills, all run by water-power, scattered among the more densely-wooded canons; but they supply hardly lumber enough to meet the demand,–even the sugar-boxes and boot-cases which are thrown aside at the merchants’ stores being eagerly sought after and appropriated. The most ordinary articles of wooden furniture command extravagant prices.
Nowhere is the absence of trees, the utter desolation of the scenery, more impressive than in a view from the southern shore of the Great Salt Lake. The broad plain which intervenes between its margin and the foot of the Wahsatch Range is almost entirely lost sight of; the mountain-slopes, their summits flecked with snow, seem to descend into water on every side except the northern, on which the blue line of the horizon is interrupted only by Antelope Island. The prospect in that direction is apparently as illimitable as from the shore of an ocean. The sky is almost invariably clear, and the water intensely blue, except where it dashes over fragments of rock that have fallen from some adjacent cliff, or where a wave, more aspiring than its fellows, overreaches itself and breaks into a thin line of foam. Through a gap in the ranges on the west, the line of the Great Desert is dimly visible. The beach of the lake is marked by a broad belt of fine sand, the grains of which are all globular. Along its upper margin is a rank growth of reeds and salt grass. Swarms of tiny flies cover the surface of every half-evaporated pool, and a few white sea-gulls are drifting on the swells. Nowhere is there a sign of refreshing verdure except on the distant mountainsides, where patches of green grass glow in the sunlight among the vast fields of sage.
The buildings throughout the entire Territory are, almost without exception, of adobe. The brick is of a uniform drab color, more pleasing to the eye than the reddish hue of the adobes of New Mexico or the buff tinge of many of those in California. In size it is about double that commonly used in the States. The clay, also, is of very superior quality. The principal stone building in the Territory is the Capitol, at Fillmore, one hundred and fifty miles south of Salt Lake City. The design of the architect is for a very magnificent edifice in the shape of a Greek cross, with a rotunda sixty feet in diameter. Only one wing has been completed, but this is spacious enough to furnish all needful accommodation. The material is rough-hammered sandstone, of an intense red.
The plan of Salt Lake City is an index to that of all the principal towns. It is divided into squares, each side of which is forty rods in length. The streets are more than a hundred feet wide, and are all unpaved. There is not a single sidewalk of brick, stone, or plank. The situation is well chosen, being directly at the foot of the southern slope of a spur which juts out from the main Wahsatch range. Less than twenty miles from the city, almost overshadowing it, are peaks which rise to the altitude of nearly twelve thousand feet, from which the snow of course never disappears. But during the summer months, when scarcely a shower falls upon the valley, its drifts become dun-colored with dust from the friable soil below, and present an aspect similar to that of the Pyrenees at the same season. During most of the year, the rest of the mountains which encircle the Valley are also capped with snow. The residences of Young and Kimball are situated on almost the highest ground within the city-limits, and the land slopes gradually down from them to the south, east, and west. This inclination suggested the mode of supplying the city with water. A mountain-brook, pure and cold, bubbling from under snow-drifts, is guided from this highland down the gently sloping streets in gutters adjoining both the sidewalks. A municipal ordinance imposes severe penalties on any one who fouls it. Young’s buildings and gardens occupy an entire square, ten acres in extent, as do also Kimball’s. They consist, first, of the Mansion, a spacious two-storied building, in the style of the Yankee-Grecian villas which infest New England towns, with piazzas supported by Doric columns, and a cupola which is surmounted by a beehive, the peculiar emblem of the Mormons, although there is not a single honey-bee in the Territory. This, like all its companions, is of adobe, but it is coated with plaster, and painted white. Next to it is a small building, used formerly as an office, in which the temporal business of the Governor was transacted. By its side stands another office, on the same model, but on a larger scale, devoted to the business of the President of the Church. These are connected by passage-ways both with the Mansion and with the Lion-House, which is the most westerly of the group, and is the finest building in the Territory, having cost nearly eighty thousand dollars. Like both the offices, it stands with a gable toward the street, and the plaster with which it is covered has a light buff tinge. The architecture is Elizabethan. Above a porch in front is the figure of a recumbent lion, hewn in sandstone. On each of the sides, which overlook the gardens, ten little windows project from the roof just above the eaves. The whole square is surrounded by a wall of cobblestones and mortar, ten or twelve feet in height, strengthened by buttresses at intervals of forty or fifty feet. Massive plank gates bar the entrances. In one corner is the Tithing-Office, where the faithful render their reluctant tribute to the Lord. Only the swift city-creek intervenes between this square and Kimball’s, which is encompassed by a similar wall. His buildings have no pretensions to architectural merit, being merely rough piles of adobe scattered irregularly all over the grounds.
The Temple Square is in the immediate neighborhood, and is of the same size. It is inclosed by a wall even more massive than the others, plastered and divided into panels. Near its southwestern corner stands the Tabernacle, a long, one-storied building, with an immense roof, containing a hall which will hold three thousand people. There the Mormon religious services are conducted during the winter months; but throughout the summer the usual place of gathering to listen to the sermons is in “boweries,” so called, which are constructed by planting posts in the ground and weaving over them a flat roof of willow-twigs. An excavation near the centre of the square, partially filled with dirt previously to the exodus to Provo, marks the spot where the Temple is to rise. It is intended that this edifice shall infinitely surpass in magnificence its predecessor at Nauvoo. The design purports to be a revelation from heaven, and, if so, must have emanated from some one of the Gothic architects of the Middle Ages whose taste had become bewildered by his residence among the spheres; for the turrets are to be surmounted by figures of sun, moon, and stars, and the whole building bedecked with such celestial emblems. Only part of the foundation-wall has yet been laid, but it sinks thirty feet deep and is eight feet broad at the surface of the ground. Its length, according to the heavenly plan, is to be two hundred and twenty feet, and its width one hundred and fifty feet. Beside the Tabernacle and the incipient Temple, the only considerable building within the square is the Endowment-House, where those rites are celebrated which bind a member to fidelity to the Church under penalty of death, and admit him to the privilege of polygamy.
The other principal buildings within the city are the Council-House, a square pile of sandstone, once used as the Capitol,–and the County Court-House, yet unfinished, above which rises a cupola covered with tin. Most of the houses in the immediate vicinity of Young’s are two stories high, for that is the aristocratic quarter of the town. In the outskirts, however, they never exceed one story, and resemble in dimensions the innumerable cobblers’-shops of Eastern Massachusetts.
None of the streets have names, except those which bound the Temple Square and are known as North, South, East, and West Temple Streets, and also the broad avenue which receives the road from Emigration Canon and is called Emigration Street. Except on East Temple or Main Street, which is the business street of the city, the houses are all built at least twenty feet back from the sidewalk, and to each one is attached a considerable plot of ground. There is no provision for lighting the streets at night. The cotton-wood trees along the borders of the gutters have attained a considerable growth during the eight or nine years since they were planted, and afford an agreeable shade to all the sidewalks.
Around a great portion of the city stretches a mud wall with embrasures and loopholes for musketry, which was built under Young’s direction in 1853, ostensibly to guard against Indian attacks, but really to keep the people busy and prevent their murmuring. To the east of this runs a narrow canal, which was dug by the voluntary labor of the Saints, nearly fifteen miles to Cottonwood Creek, for the transportation of stone to be used in building the Temple.
Just outside the city-limits, near the northeastern corner of the wall, lies the Cemetery, on a piece of undulating ground traversed by deep gullies, and unadorned even by a solitary tree,–the only vegetation sprouting out of its parched soil being a melancholy crop of weeds interspersed with languid sunflowers. The disproportion between the deaths of adults and those of children, which has been a subject for comment by every writer on Mormonism, is peculiarly noticeable there. Most of the graves are indicated only by rough boards, on which are scrawled rudely, with pencil or paint, the names and ages of the dead, and usually also verses from the Bible and scraps of poetry; but among all the inscriptions it is remarkable that there is not a single quotation from the “Book of Mormon.” The graves are totally neglected after the bodies are consigned to them. Nowhere has a shrub or a flower been planted by any affectionate hand, except in one little corner of the inclosure which is assigned to the Gentiles, between whose dust and that of the Mormons there seems to exist a distinction like that which prevails in Catholic countries between the ashes of heretics and those of faithful churchmen. The mode of burial is singularly careless. A funeral procession is rarely seen; and such instances are mentioned by travellers as that of a father bearing to the grave the coffin of his own child upon his shoulder.
The interiors of the houses are as neat as could be expected, considering the extent of the families. Very often, three wives, one husband, and half-a-dozen children will be huddled together in a hovel containing only two habitable rooms,–an arrangement of course subversive of decency. Few people are able to purchase carpets, and their furniture is of the coarsest and commonest kind. There are few, if any, families which maintain servants. In that of Brigham Young, each woman has a room assigned her, for the neatness of which she is herself responsible;–Young’s own chamber is in the rear of the office of the President of the Church, upon the ground floor. The precise number of the female inmates can often be computed from the exterior of the houses. These being frequently divided into compartments, each with its own entrance from the yard, and its own chimney, and being generally only one story in height, the number of doors is an exact index to that of residents.
The domestic habits of the people vary greatly according to their nativity. Of the forty-five thousand inhabitants of the Territory, at least one-half are immigrants from England and Wales,–the scum of the manufacturing towns and mining districts, so superstitious as to have been capable of imbibing the Mormon faith,–though between what is preached in Great Britain and what is practised in America there exists a wide difference,–and so destitute in circumstances as to have been incapable of deteriorating their fortunes by emigration. Possibly one-fifth are Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians. This allows a remainder of three-tenths for the native American element. An Irishman or a German is rarely found. Of the Americans, by far the greater proportion were born in the Northeastern States; and the three principal characters in the history of the Church–Smith, Young, and Kimball–all originated in Vermont, but were reared in Western New York, a region which has been the hot-bed of American _isms_ from the discovery of the Golden Bible to the outbreak of the Rochester rappings. This American element maintains, in all affairs of the Church, its natural political ascendency. Of the twelve Apostles only one is a foreigner, and among the rest of the ecclesiastical dignitaries the proportion is not very different.
The Scandinavian Mormons are very clannish in their disposition. They occupy some settlements exclusively, and in Salt Lake City there is one quarter tenanted wholly by them, and nicknamed “Denmark,” just as that portion of Cincinnati monopolized by Germans is known as “over the Rhine.” Like their English and Welsh associates, they belonged to the lowest classes of the mechanics and peasantry of their native countries. They are all clownish and brutal. Their women work in the fields. In their houses and gardens there is no symptom of taste, or of the recollection of former and more innocent days; while in every cottage owned by Americans there is visible, at least, a clock, or a pair of China vases, or a rude picture, which once held a similar position in some farm-house in New England.
It is not intended to discuss here the cardinal points of the Mormon faith, for the subject is too extensive for the limits of this article. A great misapprehension, however, prevails concerning polygamy, that it was one of the original doctrines of the Church. On the contrary, it was expressly prohibited in the Book of Mormon, which declares:–
“Behold, David and Solomon truly had many wives and concubines, which thing was abominable before me, saith the Lord. … Wherefore hearken to the word of the Lord: There shall not any man among you have save it be one wife, and concubines he shall have none; for I, the Lord God, delight in the chastity of women.”–p. 118.
Up to this date, there have been four eras in the history of polygamy among the Mormons: the first, from about 1833 to 1843, during which it was practised stealthily only by those Church leaders to whom it was considered prudent to impart the secret; the second, from 1843 to 1852, during which its existence was known to the Church, but denied to the world; the third, from 1852 to 1856, during which it was left to the discretion of individuals whether to adopt its practice or not; and the fourth, since 1856, when its acceptance was inculcated as essential to happiness in this world and salvation in the next. It was the inevitable tendency of Mormonism, like every other religious delusion, from the advent of John of Leyden to that of the Spiritualists, to disturb the natural relation of the sexes under the Christian dispensation. The mystery surrounding the subject constituted the most attractive charm of the religion, both to the initiated and to those who were seeking to be admitted to the secrets of the Endowment,–for the Endowed alone possess the privilege of a plurality of wives. But until the community had become firmly fixed in Utah, no one dared to justify or even to proclaim the doctrine. At the time of the passage of the Organic Act of the Territory, in the autumn of 1850, and repeatedly during the next two years, prominent Mormons at Washington and New York denied its existence, with the most solemn asseverations. It was on Sunday, August 29th, 1852, that it was openly avowed at Salt Lake City,–Brigham Young on that day producing the copy of a revelation, pretended to have been received by Smith on the 12th of July, 1843, which annulled the monogamic injunctions of the Book of Mormon, and stating, that, “although the doctrine of polygamy has not been preached by the elders, the people have believed in it for years.” Upon the same occasion, another doctrine was urged,–that human beings upon earth propagate merely bodies, the souls which inhabit them being begotten by spirits in heaven.
The number of the wives of many of the principal Mormons has been greatly exaggerated. Attached to Young’s establishment in Salt Lake City, there are only sixteen. His first wife occupies the Mansion-House exclusively, while the others are quartered in the Lion-House. Besides these, he has probably fifty or sixty more, scattered all over the Territory, and in the principal cities of the United States and of Great Britain. His living children do not exceed thirty in number. Kimball’s wives, resident in Salt Lake City, are quite as numerous as Young’s, and his children even more so. Both of them aim to reproduce the domestic life of the Biblical patriarchs; and within the squares which they occupy their descendants dwell also, with their wives and progeny, all of them acknowledging the control of the head of the family. The harems of very few of the Church dignitaries approach these in magnitude. The extent of the practice of polygamy cannot be determined by a residence in Salt Lake City alone, for it is there that those Church officers congregate whose wealth enables them to maintain large families. As the traveller journeys northward or southward, he finds the instances diminish in almost exact proportion to his remoteness from the central ecclesiastical influence. There is even a sect of Mormons, called Gladdenites, after their founder, one Gladden Bishop, who deny the right of Young to supreme authority over the Church, and discountenance polygamy. No computation of their number can be made, for few of them dare avow their heresy, on account of the persecution which is the invariable result. The leaders of this sect maintain that a majority of the married men in Utah have but one wife each, and their assertion has never been controverted.
One of the most monstrous results of the practice is the indifference with which an incestuous connection is tolerated. The cohabitation, with the same man, of a mother, and her daughter by a previous marriage, is not unfrequent; and there are other instances even more disgusting. One or two of them will exemplify the character of the whole. One George D. Watt, an Englishman, residing at Salt Lake City, has for his fourth wife his own half-sister, who had been previously divorced from Brigham Young; and one Aaron Johnson, the Bishop of the town of Springville, on Lake Utah, has seven wives, four of whom are sisters, and his own nieces. Young himself has declared in print, that he looks forward to the time when his son by one wife shall marry his daughter by another. Marriages also are effected with girls who are mere children. Accustomed from their cradles to sights and sounds calculated to impart precocious development, they mature rapidly, and few of them remain single after attaining the age of sixteen. They look around for husbands, and understand, that, if they marry young men and become first wives, in course of time other wives will be associated with them; and they conclude, therefore, that it is as well for themselves to unite with some Bishop or High-Priest, with perhaps half-a-dozen wives already, who is able to feed his family well and clothe them decently; so they plunge into polygamy at once. Another result of the practice is universal obscenity of language among both sexes. The published sermons of the Mormon leaders are utterly vile in this respect, although they are somewhat expurgated before being printed. They consider no language profane from which the name of the Deity is exempted.
There is, unquestionably, much unhappiness in families where polygamy prevails,–daily bickering, jealousies, and heart-burnings,–but it is carefully concealed from the knowledge of the public. If domestic troubles become so aggravated as to be unendurable, recourse is usually had to Brigham Young for a divorce. There are women in Salt Lake City who have been married and divorced half-a-dozen times within a year. The first wife maintains a supremacy over all the others. On the occasion of her marriage, a civil magistrate usually officiates, and the rite of “sealing” is afterwards administered by Young. By the civil process, in the cant language of the Mormons, she is bound to her husband “for time,” and by the ecclesiastical solemnization “for eternity.” Every wife taken after the first is called a “spiritual,” and is “sealed” ecclesiastically only, not civilly. It follows, as a legitimate consequence, that the first wife of one man “for time” may be the “spiritual” wife of another man “for eternity.” The power of sealing and unsealing is vested in the Head of the Church, which, however, he may and does assign, with certain limitations, to deputies. The ceremony is performed in a room in the Mansion-House within Brigham’s square, which is furnished with an altar and kneelng-benches. In every instance of divorce, the woman is supplied with a printed certificate of the fact, for which a fee of ten or eleven dollars is exacted. When a polygamist dies, it becomes the duty of his “next friend” to care for his wives. Thus, when Young became the President of the Church, he succeeded to all the widows of Joseph Smith.
Every year some modification of the system is effected, which tends to increase still further the confusion in the relations of the sexes. The latest is the doctrine, (which, like polygamy in its earlier stages, is believed, but not avowed,) that absence is temporary death, so far as concerns the transference of wives. This is intended to apply to the two or three hundred missionaries who are dispatched yearly to all parts of the globe, from Stockholm to Macao. It is astonishing that these missionary efforts, which have been pursued with unremitting zeal for the last twenty years, should not have ingrafted upon Mormonism some degree of that refinement which is supposed to result from travel. On the contrary, they seem to have elaborated the natural brutality of the Anglo-Saxon character; and especially with regard to polygamy, their effect has been to acquaint the people of Utah with the grossest features of its practice in foreign lands, and encourage them to imitation. Every Mormon, prominent in the Church, however illiterate in other respects, is thoroughly acquainted with the extent and characteristics of polygamy in Asiatic countries, and prepared to defend his own domestic habits, in argument, by historical and geographical references. Not one of their missionaries has ever been admitted to intercourse with the higher classes of European society. Their sphere of labor and acquaintance has been entirely among those whom they would term the lowly, but who might also be called the credulous and vulgar. The abuse of a knowledge of the machinery of the Masonic order–from which they have been formally excluded–is one of the least evil of their practices, not only abroad, but at home. Of the Endowment, one apostate Mormon has declared that “its signs, tokens, marks, and ideas are plagiarized from Masonry”; and it was a notorious fact, that every one of the Mormon prisoners at the camp at Fort Bridger was accustomed to endeavor to influence the sentinels at the guard-tents by means of the Masonic signs.
This cursory review of the domestic condition of the Mormons would not be complete without some allusion to the Indians who infest the whole country. In the North, having their principal village at the foot of the Wind River Mountains, in the southeastern corner of Oregon, is the tribe of Mountain Snakes or Shoshonees, and the kindred tribe of Bannocks. Throughout all the valleys south of Salt Lake City are the numerous bands of the great tribe of Utahs. Still farther south are the Pyides. The Snakes are superior in condition to any of the others; for, during a portion of the year, they have access to the buffalo, which have not crossed the Wahsatch Range into the Great Basin, within the recollection of the oldest trapper. The only wild animals common in the country of the Utahs are the hare, or “jackass-rabbit,” the wild-cat, the wolf, and the grizzly bear. There are few antelope or elk. Trout abound in the mountain-brooks and in Lake Utah. In the Salt Lake, as in the Dead Sea, there are no fish. Before the advent of the Mormons, the habits of all the Utah bands were very degraded. No agency had been established among them. They had few guns and blankets. For several years they were engaged in constant hostilities with the people of the young and feeble settlements,–their own method and implements of warfare improving steadily all the while. Ultimately, however, the Mormons inaugurated a system of Indian policy, which was highly successful. They propagated their religion among the Utahs, baptized some of the most prominent chiefs into the Church, fed and clothed them, and thereby acquired an ascendency over most of the bands, which they attempted to use to the detriment of the army during the winter of 1857-8, but without success. Brigham Young, being vested with the superintendence of Indian affairs, during his entire term of service as Governor, abused the functions of that office. He taught the tribe, that there was a distinction between “Americans” and “Mormons,”–and that the latter were their friends, while they were free to commit any depredations on the former which they might see fit. These infamous teachings were counteracted with considerable success by Dr. Hurt, the Indian Agent, to whom allusion has frequently been made; but it was impossible wholly to neutralize their effect. Some of the Mormons even took squaws for spiritual wives; and in all the settlements, from Provo to the Santa Clara, there are scores of half-breed children, acknowledging half-a-dozen mothers, some white, some red. The Utahs, though a beggarly, are a docile tribe. Several Government farms have now been established among them, and they display more than ordinary aptitude for work. But they require to be spurred to regular labor. None of the charges which have been preferred against the Mormons, of direct participation in the murder of Americans by the Indians in the southern portion of the Territory, have ever been substantiated by legal evidence; but no person can become familiar with the relations which they sustain to those tribes, without attaching to them some degree of credibility. The most noted instances were the slaughter of Captain Gunnison and his exploring party, near Lake Sevier, in October, 1853; and the horrible massacre of more than a hundred emigrants on their way to California, at the Mountain Meadows, still farther south, in September, 1857, from which only those children were spared who were too young to speak.
The history of events in Utah since the encamping of the army in Cedar Valley and the return of the Mormons to the northern settlements is too recent to need to be recounted. It has been established by satisfactory experiments, that law is powerless in the Territory when it conflicts with the Church. No Gentile, whose property was confiscated during the rebellion, has yet obtained redress. The legislature refuses to provide for the expenses of the District Courts while enforcing the Territorial laws. The grand juries refuse to find indictments. The traverse juries refuse to convict Mormons. The witnesses perjure themselves without scruple and without exception. The unruly crowd of camp-followers, which is the inseparable attendant of an army, has concentrated in Salt Lake City, and is in constant contact and conflict with the Mormon population. An apprehension prevails, day after day, that the presence of the army may be demanded there to prevent mob-law and bloodshed. The Governor is alien in his disposition to most of the other Federal officers; and the Judges are probably already on their way to the States, prepared to resign their commissions. The whole condition of affairs justifies a prediction made by Brigham Young, June 17th, 1855, in a sermon, in which he declared:–
“Though I may not be Governor here, my power will not be diminished. No man they can send here will have much influence with this community, unless he be the man of their choice. Let them send whom they will, it does not diminish my influence one particle.”
The consequences of the Expedition, therefore, have not corresponded to the original expectation of its projectors. So far as the political condition of the Territory is concerned, the result, filtered down, amounts simply to a demonstration of the impolicy of applying the doctrine of Squatter Sovereignty as a rule for its government. The administration of President Polk was an epoch in the history of the continent. By the annexation of Texas a system of territorial aggrandizement was inaugurated; and the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, by which California, Utah, and New Mexico were acquired, was a legitimate result. Every child knows that the tendency is toward the acquisition of all North America. But the statesmen who originated a policy so grand did not stop to establish a system of Territorial government correspondent to its necessities. The character of such a Territorial policy is now the principal subject upon which the great parties of the nation are divided; and its development will constitute the chief political achievement of the generation. On one side, it is proposed to leave each community to work out its own destiny, trusting to Providence for the result. On the other, it is contended, that the only safe doctrine is, that supreme authority over the Territories resides in Congress, which it is its duty to assign to such hands and in such degrees as it may deem expedient, with a view to create homogeneous States; that the same influences which moulded Minnesota into a State homogeneous to Massachusetts might operate on Cuba, or Sonora and Chihuahua, without avail; and that to various districts the various methods should be applied which a father would employ to secure the obedience and welfare of his children.
At the very outset, the Territory of Utah now presents itself as a subject for the application of the one system or the other. To all intents and purposes, the Mormons are proved to be a people more foreign to the population of the States than the inhabitants of Cuba or Mexico. Alien in great part by birth, and entirely alien in religion, there never can occur in the history of the country an instance of a community harder to govern, with a view to adapt it to harmonious association with the States on the Atlantic and the Pacific. It is undeniably demonstrated that it is unsafe to trust it to administer a government in accordance with republican ideas; for it acknowledges a higher law than even the human conscience, in the will of a person whom it professes to believe a vicegerent of Divinity, and in obedience to whom perjury, robbery, incest, and even murder, may be justifiable,–for his commands are those of Heaven. It is obvious that it is fruitless to anticipate fair dealing from a people professing such doctrines; and the result has shown, that, in transactions with Mormons, even under oath, no one who does not acknowledge a standard of religious belief similar to their own can count upon justice any farther than they may think it politic to accord it. The army is, indeed, placed in a position to suppress instantaneously another forcible outbreak; but everybody is aware that there are means of annulling the operation of law quite as effectually as by an uprising in arms. Recent proceedings in the courts of the extreme Southern States have caused this fact to be keenly appreciated. The pirates who sailed the slavers “Echo” and “Wanderer” yet remain to be punished. So far as South Carolina and Georgia are concerned, the law declaring the slave-trade piracy is a dead letter; and the sentiment which prevails toward it in Charleston and Savannah is an imperfect index of that which is manifested at Salt Lake City toward all national authority.
The legislation of Utah has been conducted with a view to precisely the condition of affairs which now exists, and the Territorial statute-book shows that the transfer of executive power from Brigham Young had long been anticipated. It is impracticable to adduce, in this place, proof of the fact _in extenso_; but a brief enumeration of some of the principal statutes will indicate the character of the entire code. An act exists incorporating the Mormon Church with power to hold property, both real and personal, to an indefinite extent, exempt from taxation, coupled with authority to establish laws and criteria for its safety, government, comfort, and control, and for the punishment of all offences relating to fellowship, according to its covenants. By this act the Church is invested with absolute and perpetual sovereignty. Under it the whole system of polygamy is conducted, for plural marriages are sanctioned by the covenants; the Danite organization is authorized, for it is instituted for the comfort and control of the Church, and the punishment of offences relative to fellowship; the burden of the taxes is thrown in a yearly increasing ratio upon Gentiles, for the Church property exempted from taxation amounts already to several millions of dollars, and increases every day; and the treasonable rites of the Endowment are celebrated, and the inferior members of the Church tithed and pillaged, for the benefit of the First Presidency and the Twelve Apostles. Acts also exist legalizing negro and Indian slavery. There are within the Territory at the present time not more than fifty or sixty negroes, but there are several hundred Indians, held in servitude. These are mostly Pyides, into whose country some of the Utah bands make periodical forays, capturing their young women and children, whom they sell to the Navajoes in New Mexico, as well as to the Mormons. There are other acts, which rob the United States judges of their jurisdiction, civil, criminal, and in equity, and confer it on the Probate Courts; which forbid the citation of any reports, even those of the Supreme Court of the United States, during any trial; which regulate the descent of property so as to include the issue of polygamic marriages among the legal heirs; which withdraw from exemption from attachment the entire property of persons suspected of an intention to leave the Territory; which authorize the invasion of domiciles for purposes of search, upon the simple order of any judicial officer; which legalize the rendition of verdicts in civil cases upon the concurrence of two-thirds of the jurors; which command attorneys to present in court, under penalty of fine and imprisonment, in all cases, every fact of which they are cognizant, “whether calculated to make against their clients or not”; which restrict the institution of proceedings against adulterers to the husband or the wife of one of the guilty parties; which levy duties on all goods imported into the Territory for sale; which abolish the freedom of the ballot-box, by providing that each vote shall be numbered, and a record kept of the names of the electors with the numbers attached, which, together with the ballots, shall be preserved for reference; and which empower the county courts to impose taxes to an indefinite amount on whomsoever they may please, for the erection of fortifications within their respective jurisdictions. But the most extraordinary and unconstitutional series of acts–no less than sixty in number–exists with regard to the primary disposal of the soil, with which the Territorial legislature is expressly forbidden by the Organic Act to interfere. These pretend to confer upon Church dignitaries, and especially on Brigham Young and his family, tracts of land probably amounting in the aggregate to more than ten thousand square miles, as well as the exclusive right to establish bridges and ferries over the principal rivers in the Territory,–together with the exclusive use of those streams flowing down from the Wahsatch Mountains which are most valuable for irrigating and manufacturing purposes. The virtual control of the settlement of the eastern portion of Utah is thus vested in the Church; for these grants include almost all the lands which are immediately valuable for occupation. After a glance at a list of them, it is not hard to understand the causes of the great disparity in the distribution of wealth among the Mormons. They have been so allotted as to benefit a very few at the expense of the whole people; and they are protected by a terrorism which no one dares to confront in order to challenge their validity. The majority of the population are ignorant of their rights,–and too pusillanimous to maintain them against the hierarchy, if they were not. They therefore contribute to its coffers not merely their tithing, but heavy exactions also for grazing their cattle on pastures to which they themselves have just as much title as the nominal proprietors, and for grinding their grain and purchasing their lumber at mills on streams which are of right common to all the settlers on their banks.
From the Utah Expedition, then, it has become patent to the world, if it is not to ourselves, that the Mormons are unwilling to administer a republican form of government, if not incapable of doing so. The author of the letter recently addressed by “A Man of the Latin Race” to the Emperor Napoleon, on the subject of French influence in America, comments especially upon this fact as symptomatic of the disintegration of this republic; and allusion is made to it in every other foreign review of our political condition. It is obviously inconsistent with our national dignity that a remedy should not be immediately applied; but when we seek for such, only two courses of action are discernible, in the maze of political quibbles and constitutional scruples that at once suggest themselves. One is, to repeal the Organic Act and place the Territory under military control; the other is, to buy the Mormons out of Utah, offering them a reasonable compensation for the improvements they have made there, as also transportation to whatever foreign region they may select for a future abode.
The embarrassments which might result from the adoption of the former course are obvious. It would be attended with immense expense, and would embitter the Mormons still more against the National Government; and it would also deter Gentiles from emigrating to a region where three thousand Federal bayonets would constitute the sole guaranty of the security of their persons and property.
The other course is not only practicable, but humane and expedient. During his whole career, Brigham Young committed no greater mistake than when he settled in Utah a community whose recruits are almost without exception drawn from foreign lands; for, since the removal from Illinois, every attempt to propagate Mormonism in the American States has been a failure. Every avenue of communication with Utah is necessarily obstructed. No railroad penetrates to within eleven hundred miles of Salt Lake Valley. There is no watercourse within four hundred miles, on which navigation is practicable. Neither the Columbia nor the Colorado empties into seas bordered by nations from which the Mormons derive accessions; and the length of a voyage up the Mississippi, Missouri, and Yellowstone forbids any expectation that their channels will ever become a pathway to the centre of the continent. The road to Utah must always lead overland, and travel upon it is the more expensive from the fact that no great passenger-transportation companies exist at either of the termini. Each family of emigrants must provide its own outfit of provisions, wagons, and oxen, or mules. Through the agency of what is called the Perpetual Emigration Fund of the Church, the capital of which amounts to several millions of dollars,–which was instituted professedly to befriend, but really to fleece the foreign converts,–few Englishmen arrive at Salt Lake City without having exhausted their own means and incurred an amount of debt which it requires the labor of many years to discharge. The physical sufferings of the journey, also, are severe and often fatal. The bleak cemetery at Salt Lake City contains but a small proportion of the Mormon dead. Along the thousand miles of road from the Missouri River to the Great Lake, there stand, thicker than milestones, memorials of those who failed on the way. A rough board, a pile of stones, a grave ransacked by wolves, crown many a swell of the bottom-lands along the Platte; and across the broad belt of mountains there is no spot so desolate as to be unmarked by one of these monuments of the march of Mormonism.
As these difficulties of transit subside under the surge of population toward the new State of Oregon, or to the gold-diggings on the head-waters of the South Fork of the Platte, an element must permeate Utah which would be fatal to the supremacy of the Church. That depends, as has been so often repeated, upon isolation. Already the presence of the army with its crowd of unruly dependents has begun to disturb it. In the trail of the troops, like sparks shed from a rocket, a legion of mail-stations and trading-posts have sprung up, which materially facilitate communication with the East. A horseman, starting now from Fort Leavenworth, with a good animal, can ride to Salt Lake City, sleeping under cover every night; while in July, 1857, when the army commenced its march from the frontier, there were stretches of more than three hundred miles without a single white inhabitant. On the west, under the shadow of the Sierra Nevada, there is a settlement of several thousand Gentiles in Carson Valley, who, though nominally under the same Territorial government with the Mormons, have no real connection with them, politically, socially, or commercially, and are petitioning Congress for a Territorial organisation of their own. A telegraphic wire has already wound its way over the sierra among them, and will soon palpitate through Salt Lake City in its progress toward the Atlantic.
Brigham Young perceives this inevitable advance of Christian civilization toward his stronghold, as clearly as the most unprejudiced spectator. No one is better aware than himself, that, if the great industrial conception of the age, the Pacific Railroad, shall ever begin to be realized, the first shovelful of dirt thrown on its embankments will be the commencement of the grave of his religion and authority. Among the projects with which his brain is busy is that of yet another exodus; and it must be undertaken speedily, if at all,–for a generation is growing up in the Church with an attachment for the land in which it was reared. The pioneers of the faith, who were buffeted from Ohio to Missouri, from Missouri to Illinois, and from Illinois to the Rocky Mountains, are dwindling every year. Their migrations have been so various, that no local sentiment would influence them against another removal. Such a sentiment, if it exists at all among them, is not for Utah, but for Missouri, where they believe that the capital will be founded of that kingdom in which the Church in the progress of ages will unite the world. They dropped upon the shores of the Salt Lake in 1847, like birds spent upon the wing, only because they could not fly farther.
Two regions have been suggested for the ultimate resort of the Mormons: one, the Mosquito Coast in Central America; the other, the Island of Papua or New Guinea, among the East Indies. During the winter, while the army lay encamped at Fort Bridger, Colonel Kinney, the colonizing adventurer, endeavored to communicate from the East to Brigham Young an offer to sell to the Church several millions of acres of land on the Mosquito Coast, of which he purports to be the proprietor. His agent, however, reached no farther than Green River. But during the spring of 1858, other agents, dispatched from California, were more successful in reaching Salt Lake Valley. They were hospitably received by the Mormons, but Young declined to enter into the negotiation. The other scheme–that for an emigration to Papua–originated at Washington during the same winter. It was eagerly seized upon by Captain Walter Gibson, the same who was once imprisoned by the Dutch in Java. He put himself into communication on the subject with Mr. Bernhisel, the Mormon delegate to Congress, who appeared to regard the plan with favor. After it was developed, as a step preliminary to transmitting it to Utah for consideration, Mr. Bernhisel waited upon the President of the United States in order to ascertain whether the cooperation of the National Government in the undertaking could be expected. The reply of Mr. Buchanan was fatal to the project, which he discountenanced as a vague and wild dream.
Nevertheless, it may well be considered whether the movement toward Utah appeared any less Quixotic in 1846 than does the idea of an emigration to Papua now. On that island the Mormons would encounter no such obstacles to material prosperity as their indomitable industry has already conquered in Utah. They would find a fertile soil, a propitious climate, and a native population which could be trained to docility. Transplanted thither, they would cease to be a nuisance to America, and would become benefactors to the world by opening to commerce a region now valueless to Christendom, but of as great natural capacities as any portion of the globe. The expense of their migration need not exceed the amount already expended upon the Army of Utah, together with that necessary to maintain it in its present position for the next five years. Into the seats which they would relinquish on the border of the Salt Lake a sturdy population would pour from the Valley of the Mississippi, and develop an intelligent, Christian, and Republican State. That portion of the Mormons which would not follow the fortunes of the Church beyond the seas would soon become submerged, and the last vestige of its religion and peculiar domestic life would disappear speedily and forever from the continent.
For that consummation, every genuine Christian must fervently pray. If the Message in the Book of Mormon be, as one of its own Apostles has asserted, indeed “such, that, if false, none who persist in believing it can be saved,” the sooner this nation washes its hands of responsibility for its toleration, the better for its credit in history. The Constitution, to be sure, denies to Congress the power to pass laws prohibiting the free exercise of religion; but it is the most monstrous nonsense to argue that the Federal Government is bound thereby to connive at polygamy, perjury, incest, and murder. There are principles of social order which constitute the political basis of every state in Christendom, that are violated by the practices of the Mormon Church, and which this Republic is bound to maintain without regard to any pretence that their transgressors act in pursuance of religious belief. Thirty years ago, no other doctrine would have occurred to the mind of an American statesman. It is only the special-pleadings and constitutional hair-splittings by which Slavery has been forced under national protection, that now impede Congressional intervention in the affairs of Utah. The Christian Church of the United States, also, has a duty to perform toward the Mormons, which has long been neglected. While its missionaries have been shipped by the score to India and China, it has been blind to the growth, upon the threshold of its own temple, of a pagan religion more corrupt than that of the Brahmin. Never once has a Christian preacher opened his lips in the valleys of Utah; and yet the surplice of a Christian priest would be a sight more portentous to the Mormon, on his own soil, than the bayonet of the Federal soldier.
BULLS AND BEARS.
[Continued.]
CHAPTER XXIV.
The next day, Monroe went with the artist to good Mr. Holworthy, and proposed to undertake the task of instructing a school. The preliminaries were speedily arranged: he was to receive a small weekly stipend, enough, with prudence, to meet his household expenses, and was to commence at once. Both of the gentlemen accompanied him to the quarter where his labor was to begin. A large room was hired in a rickety and forlorn-looking house; the benches for the scholars and a small desk and chair were the only furniture. And such scholars!–far different from the delicate, curled darlings of the private schools. The new teacher found his labor sufficiently discouraging. It was nothing less than the civilization of a troop of savages. Everything was to be done; manners, speech, moral instincts, were all equally depraved. They were to be taught neatness, respect, truth-telling, as well as the usual branches of knowledge. It was like the task of the pioneer settler in the wilderness, who must uproot trees, drain swamps, burn briers and brambles, exterminate hurtful beasts, and prepare the soil for the reception of the seeds that are to produce the future harvest. We leave him with his charge, while we attend to other personages of our story.
Mr. Sandford and his sister, upon leaving their house, took lodgings, and then began to cast about them for the means of support. The money on which he had relied was gone. His credit was utterly destroyed, and he had no hope of being reinstated in his former position. The only way he could possibly be useful in the street was by becoming a curbstone broker, a go-between, trusted by neither borrower nor lender, and earning a precarious livelihood by commissions. Even in that position he felt that he should labor under disadvantages, for he knew that his course had been universally condemned. It was a matter of every-day experience for him to meet old acquaintances who looked over him, or across the street, or in at shop-windows, to avoid recognition. And the half-patronizing, half-contemptuous nods he did receive were far worse to bear than downright cuts.
To a man out of employment, proscribed, marked, there is nothing so terrible as the _impenetrability_ of the close ranks of society around him. Every busy man seems to have found his place; each locks step with his neighbor, and the vast procession moves on. Once out of the serried order, the unhappy wretch can never resume his position. He finds himself the fifth wheel of a coach; there is nothing for him to do,–no place for him at the bountiful board where others are fed. He may starve or drown himself, as he likes; the world has no use for him, and will not miss him. What Sandford felt, as he walked along the streets, may well be imagined. If he had not been supported by the indomitable courage and assurance of his sister, he would have sunk to the level of a pauper.
One day, as he was passing a church, his eye was caught by a placard at the door, inviting, in bold letters, “friend, stranger, or traveller to enter, if but for a few minutes.” It was a “business-men’s prayer-meeting.” The novelty of the idea struck him; he was at leisure; he had no notes to pay; anybody might fail, for aught he cared. He went in, and, to his surprise, saw, among the worshippers, scores of his old friends, engaged in devotion. Like himself, they had, many of them, failed, and, after the loss of all temporal wealth, had turned their attention to the “more durable riches.” He fell into a profound meditation, from which he did not recover until the meeting ended.
The next day he returned, and the day following, also,–taking a seat each time a little nearer the desk, until at last he reached the front row of benches, where he was to be seen at every service. It is not necessary to speculate upon his motives, or to conjecture how far he deceived himself in his professions,–if, indeed, there was any deception in the case. Let him have the benefit of whatever doubt there may be. The leading religious men _hoped_, without feeling any great confidence; the world, especially the business world, mocked and derided.
But piety, in itself, however heartfelt, does not clothe or feed its possessor, and Mr. Sandford, even with that priceless gift, must find some means of supplying his temporal wants. His new friends had plenty of advice for him, and some of them would have been glad to furnish him with employment; but none of them were so well satisfied with the sincerity of his conversion as to trust him far. It was not to be wondered, after his exploits on the day of his failure, that there should be a reasonable shyness on the part of those who had money which they could not afford or did not choose to give away. It was quite remarkable to see the change produced when the subject was introduced. Faces, that a few minutes before had shone with tearful joy or rapturous aspirations, full of brotherly affection, would suddenly cool, and contract, and grow severe, when Sandford broached the one topic that was nearest to him. He found that there was no way of escaping from the law of compensation by appropriating the results of other men’s labors,–that religion (very much to his disappointment) gave him no warrant to live in idleness; therefore he was fain to do what he could for himself. He tried to act as a curb-stone broker, as an insurance agent, as an adjuster of marine losses and averages, as an itinerant solicitor for a life-insurance company, as an accountant, and in various other situations. All in vain. He was shunned like an escaped convict; the motley suit itself would hardly have added to his disgrace. No one put faith in him or gave him employment,–save in a few instances, for charity’s sake. Few men can brave a city; and Sandford, certainly, was not the man to do it. The scowling, or suspicious, or contemptuous, pitying glances he encountered smote him as with fiery swords. He quailed; he cowered; he dropped his eyes; he acquired a stooping, shambling gait. The man who _feels_ that he is looked down upon grows more diminutive in his own estimation, until he shrinks into the place which the world assigns him. So Sandford shrunk, until he crept through the streets where once he had walked erect, and earned a support as meagre and precarious as the more brazen-faced and ragged of the great family of mendicants, to which he was gravitating.
Mendicants,–an exceeding great army! They do not all knock at area-doors for old clothes and broken victual, nor hold out hats at street-crossings, nor expose sharp-faced babies to win pity, nor send their infant tatterdemalions to torture the ears of the wealthy with scratchy fiddles and wheezing accordions. No, these plagues of society are only the extreme left wing; the right wing is–a very respectable class in the community. The party-leader who makes his name and influence serve him in obtaining loans which he never intends to pay,–shall we call him a beggar? It is an ugly word. The parasite who makes himself agreeable to dinner-givers, who calculates upon his accomplishments as a stock in trade, intending that his brains shall feed his stomach,–what is he, pray? It is ungracious to stigmatize such a jolly dog. The woman whose fingers are hooped with rings won in wagers which gallantry or folly could not decline, who is ready by _philopaena_, or even by more direct suggestions, to lay every beau or acquaintance under contribution,–is she a beggar, too? It is a long way, to be sure, from the girl with scanty and draggled petticoat and tangled hair, picking out lumps of coal from ash-heaps, or carrying home refuse from the tables of the rich,–a long way from that squalid object to the richly-cloaked, furred, bonneted, jewelled, flaunting lady, whose friends are all _so_ kind.
But the most charitable must feel a certain degree of pity, if not of scorn, for those who, like Mr. and Miss Sandford, contrive to wear the outward semblance of respectability, boarding with fashionable people and wearing garments _a la mode_, while they have neither fortune nor visible occupation. Miss Sandford, to be sure, had a few pupils in music,–young friends, who, as she averred, “insisted upon practising with her, although she did not profess to give lessons,” not she. Still her toilet was as elegant as ever. The first appearance of a new style of cloak, a new pattern of silk or embroidery, new ribbons, laces, jewelry, might be observed, as she took her morning promenade. The dealers in rich goods, elegant trifles, costly nothings, all knew her well. Whatever satisfied her artistic taste she purchased. To see was to desire, and, in some way, all she coveted tended by a magical attraction to her rooms. “Society” frowned upon her; she went to no receptions in the higher circles, but she had no lack of associates for all that. At concerts and other public assemblages, her brilliant figure and irreproachable costume were always to be seen,–the admiration of men, the envy of women. Nor was she without gallants. Gentlemen flocked about her, and seemed only too happy in her smiles; but it never happened that their wives or sisters joined in their attentions. On fine days, as she came out for a walk, she was sure to be accompanied by some person whose dress and manners marked him as belonging to the wealthy classes; and at such times it generally happened,–according to the scandal-loving shopkeepers,–that the last new book, the little “love” of a ring, or the engraved scent-bottle was purchased.
An odd affair is Society. At its outposts are flaming swords for women, though invisible to other eyes; men can venture without the lines, if they only return at roll-call. Let a woman receive or visit one of the _demi-monde_, (the technical use of the word is happily inapplicable here,) and she might as well earn her living by her own labor, or do any other disreputable thing; but her brother may pay court to the most doubtful, and mothers will only shake their heads and say, “He _must_ sow his wild oats; he’ll get over all that by-and-by.”
So the beauty was still queen in her circle, and found admirers in plenty. Perhaps she even enjoyed the freedom; for, to a woman of spirit, the constraints of _taboo_ must be irksome at times. Not the Brahmin, who fears to tread upon sole-leather from the sacred cow, and dares not even think of the flavor of her forbidden beef, who keeps himself haughtily aloof from the soldier and the trader, and walks sunward from the pariah, lest the polluting shadow fall on his holy person, has a more difficult and engrossing occupation than the woman of fashion, in a country where the distinctions of rank are so purely factitious as in ours. Miss Sandford’s time was now her own; she was accountable to no supervisor. Her brother was a cipher. He did not venture to intrude upon her, except at seasons when she was at leisure, and in a humor to be bored by him. Perhaps she looked back regretfully, but, as far as could be told by her manner, she carried herself proudly, with the air of one who says,–
“Better reign in hell than serve in heaven.”
The observant reader has doubtless wondered before this, that Mr. Sandford did not, in his emergency, apply to his old clerk, Fletcher, for the money in exchange for the peculiar obligation of which mention has been made. It is presuming too much upon Mr. Sandford’s stupidity to suppose that the idea had not frequently occurred to him. But he was satisfied that Fletcher was one of the few who were making money in this time of general distress, and that with every day’s acquisition the paper became more valuable; therefore, as it was his last trump, he preferred to play it when it would sweep the board; and he was willing to live in any way until the proper time came. Not so easy was Fletcher. Several times he attempted to pay the claim, so that he could once more hold his head erect as a free man. But Sandford smiled blandly; “he was in no hurry,” he said; “Mr. Fletcher evidently had money, and was good for the amount.” Poor Fletcher!–walking about with a rope around his neck,–a long rope now, and slack,–but held by a man who knows not what pity means!
CHAPTER XXV.
Greenleaf pursued his search for Alice with all the ardor of his nature. One glimpse only he had of her;–at a clothing-store, where he inquired, the clerk seemed to recognize the description given, and was quite sure that such a girl had taken out work, but he knew nothing of her whereabouts, and he believed she was now employed by another establishment. It was something to know that she was in the city, and, probably, not destitute; still better to know what path of life she had chosen, so that his time need not be wasted in fruitless inquiries. On his return, after the second day’s search, he sought his friend Easelmann, whose counsel and sympathy he particularly desired.
“Any tidings of the fugitive?” was the first question.
“No,” replied Greenleaf,–“nothing satisfactory. I have heard of her once; but it was like a trail in the woods, which the hunter comes upon, then loses utterly.”
“But the hunter who measures a track once will be likely to find it again.”
“Yes, I have that consolation. But, Easelmann, though this mishap of losing Alice has cost me many sleepless nights, and will continue to engross my time until I find her, I cannot rid myself of other troubles and apprehensions. I have done nothing for a long time. I have no orders; and, as I have no fortune to fall back upon, I see nothing but starvation before me.”
“Then, my dear fellow, look the other way. It isn’t wise to distress yourself by looking ahead, so long as you have the chance of turning round.”
“I feel lonely, too,–isolated. People that I meet are civil enough; but I don’t know a man, except in my profession, that I can consider a friend.”
“Very likely. Caste isn’t confined to India.”
“I had supposed that intellect and culture were enough to secure for a man a recognition in good society; but I am made to feel, a hundred times a day, that I have no more _status_ than a clever colored man, an itinerant actor, or any other anomaly. To-day I met Travis; you know he comes here and makes himself free and easy with us, and has always put himself on a footing of equality.”
“Wherein you made a mistake. He has no right, but by courtesy, to any equality. A little taste, perhaps, and money enough to gratify it,–that’s all. He never had an idea in his life.”
“That is the reason I felt the slight. He was walking with a lady whose manner and dress were unmistakable,–a lady of undoubted position. I bowed, and received in return one of those hardly-perceptible nods, with a forced smile that covered only the side of his face _from_ the lady. It was a recognition that one might throw to his boot-black. I am a mild-mannered man, as you know; but I could have murdered him on the spot.”
Greenleaf walked the floor with flashing eyes and his teeth set.
“Now, I like the spirit,” said Easelmann; “but, pray, be sensible. ‘Where Macdonald sits, there is the head of the table.’ Stand firm in your own shoes, and graduate your bows by those you get.”
“I suppose I am thin-skinned.”
“As long as you are, you will chafe. Cultivate a hide like a rhinoceros’s, and Society will let fly its pin-pointed arrows in vain. You have a great deal to learn, my dear boy.”
“But other special classes are not so treated,–literary men, for instance.”
“Don’t be too sure of that. An author who has attained position is _feted_, because the fashionable circles must have their lions. But to stand permanently like other men, he must have money or family, or else obey the world’s ten commandments, of which the first is, ‘Thou shalt not wear a slouched hat,’–and the rest are like unto it. No,–the literary men have their heart-burnings, I suspect. They forget, as you do, that their very profession, the direction of their thoughts, their mode of life, cut them off from sympathy and fellowship. What has a writer who dreams of rivalling Emerson or the ‘Autocrat’ to do with costly and absorbing private theatricals, with dances at Papanti’s, with any of the thousand modes of killing time agreeably? And how shall you become the new Claude, if you give your thoughts to the style of your clothes, and to the inanities that make up the staple of conversation?”
“But because I am precluded from devoting my time to society, that is no reason why I should bear the patronizing airs”—-
“Don’t be patronized,–that’s all. If a man gives you such a look as you have described, cut him dead the next time you meet him. If anybody gives you two fingers to shake, give him only one of yours. I tried that plan on a doctor of divinity once, and it worked admirably. His intended condescension somehow vanished in a mist, and the foolish confusion that overspread his blank features would have done you good to behold.”
“I have no doubt. I don’t think it would be easy to be impertinent to you. Not that there are not presuming people enough; but you have a way with you. Your blade that cuts off a bayonet at a blow will glide through a feather as well.”
“A delicate stroke of yours! Now to return. You are out of money, you say. Perhaps you will allow me to become your creditor for a while. I may presume upon the relation and take on some airs;–that’s inevitable; one can’t forego such a privilege;–but I promise to bow very civilly whenever I meet you; and I won’t remind you of the debt–above twice a day.”
Taking out his pocket-book, he handed his friend fifty dollars, and _pshawed_ and _poohed_ at every expression of gratitude.
“By the way, Greenleaf,” he continued, “I have been in search of an absconding female also. You remember Mrs. Sandford, the charming widow?”
“Yes,–what has become of her?”
“You see how philosophical I am. I have not seen her yet; and yet I am not crazy about it. Some chickens think the sky is falling, whenever a rose-leaf drops on their heads.”
“But you have no such reason to be anxious.”
“Haven’t I? Do you think old fellows like me have lost recollection as well as feeling? One of the most deadly cases of romance I ever knew was between people of forty and upwards.”
“How dull I was! I saw some rather odd glances between you at the musical party, but thought nothing more about it. But why haven’t you been looking for her?”
“I have been cogitating,” said Easelmann, twisting his moustaches.
“I should think so. If you had asked me, now! I went with her to the house where I suppose she is still boarding.”
“Did you?” [_very indifferently, and with the falling inflection._]
“Why, don’t you want to know?”
“Yes,–to-morrow. And I think, that, when we find her, we may find a clue to your Alice.”
Greenleaf started up as if he had been galvanized.
“You _have_ seen her, then! You old fox! Where is she? To-morrow, indeed! Tell me, and I will fly.”
“You can’t; for, as Brother Chadband observed, you haven’t any wings.”
“Don’t trifle with me. I know your fondness for surprises; but if you love me, don’t put me off with your nonsense.”
Greenleaf was thoroughly in earnest, and Easelmann took a more soothing tone. At another time the temptation to tease would have been irresistible.
“Be calm, you man of gunpowder, steel, whalebone, and gutta-percha! I positively have nothing but guesses to give you. Besides, do you think you have nothing to do but rush into Alice’s arms when you find her? Take some valerian to quiet your nerves, and go to bed. In the morning, try to smooth over those sharp features of yours. Use rouge, if you can’t get up your natural color. When you are presentable, come over here again, and we’ll stroll out in search of adventure. But mind, I promise nothing,–I only guess.”
While he spoke, Greenleaf looked into the mirror, and was surprised to see how anxiety had worn upon him. His face was thin and bloodless, and his eyes sunken, but glowing. The quiet influence of his friend calmed him, and his impatience subsided. He took his leave silently, wringing Easelmann’s hand, and walked home with a lighter heart.
“He is a good fellow,” mused Easelmann, “and has suffered enough for his folly. The lesson will do him good.”
CHAPTER XXVI.
Mr. Bullion was not without good natural impulses, but his education and experience had been such as to develop only the sharp and selfish traits of his character. An orphan at the age of eleven years, he was placed