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On February 14, 1876, I married Matilda Ware, daughter of William Ware of Newick, one of the old race of Sussex yeomen farmers, now almost completely disappeared, who furnished some of the best fighting men on land and on sea known to our history. We had been lovers for many years before, and it was fitting we should be wedded on Valentine’s Day. I have been unlucky, perhaps, in many ways, but my good fortune in my wife has made up for it all. Never once in these five-and-thirty years has she failed, even when ill and depressed herself, to strengthen and support me in all my arduous work, and never, no matter how harassing our domestic difficulties, has she lost heart or complained of the trouble which she has had to face, quite unnecessarily, in consequence of my mistakes. Had I followed her advice in business and politics we should certainly have held a much more secure and satisfactory position than that which we occupy to-day. But we have not finished even yet.
During the years from 1874 to 1880 I was called several times to America on my private business and became very well acquainted with Salt Lake City, to which I had paid a hasty visit when crossing the continent in 1870. Salt Lake City was then a town of about 5,000 inhabitants, under the absolute control of the Mormons. A more beautiful place I never was in. It lay upon a small flat valley, high above the level of the sea, surrounded by mountains which retained the snow on their summits and in the ravines until very late in the year. The air was clear and exhilarating to a marvellous degree, and the views up to and beyond the US Fort Hampton, where a garrison was maintained to keep the Indians in check, were magnificent. The town itself was in its way perfect. Streams of rushing water ran down the streets on both sides; the houses were all pretty and all comfortable; there were no poor, no vicious class, and, as far as I saw, no drunkenness or debauchery outside of the handful of “gentiles” who came there in connection with the mines established by European companies.
The drawbacks to Mormonism and its polygamy have often been insisted upon, and nobody could fail to see the rough and vulgar brutality of Brigham Young with his seventy-two wives, or to note the salacious propensities of some of the wealthy elders who surrounded his successor. But, speaking only of what I myself saw, I can say most decidedly that I never was in a community in my life where, in spite of the great wealth of a handful of the rulers, the mass of the people were so well-to-do and healthy as they were among these Mormons. The religion of the prophet Smith lends itself easily to ridicule. The lives of even the richest of the Mormons were not conducted on the lines of the highest culture. There were harsh and cruel and disgusting and even terrible things done in the name of the creed they had adopted by the rude unlettered men who had taken it up. Women who had been induced to come out to Utah by the Mormon emissaries frequently found themselves also in a very different position from that which had been represented to them as to be their lot.
Men of the most desperate character, too, who had done terrible deeds of murder and butchery, went abroad fearlessly. I myself sat at the theatre next to a well-known murderer, one of the Destroying Angels, with his long pigtail curled round the top of his head, who was afterwards duly and comfortably hanged for the part he had taken in the hideous Mountain Meadows Massacre; when a great and well-to-do company of emigrants to the West, who had, unfortunately for them, been conducted through the Utah territory, were attacked without warning by an army of Mormons, disguised as Indians, and slaughtered men, women, and children, to the last of the caravan. This massacre was well known and commonly spoken of in Salt Lake City.
It was also as inconvenient, not to say dangerous, to run counter to the institution of Mormonism as it was to agitate for the abolition of slavery in the Southern States a few years earlier. Exceptionally ardent reformers were apt to be found now and then on the side-walk, in a state which called for no further medical attendance, as a hint to others not to allow their fanatical zeal for improvement to outrun their discretion. Wives, likewise, who did not obey their husbands in the Lord, according to the ordinances promulgated by Brigham Young and his disciples, in the name of the prophet Smith, were, I have heard, not so satisfied with the domestic arrangements of the saintly households as those who were more docile and submissive. Poor Mormons, also, at work on the irrigated farms which produced the agricultural wealth of the country, had a laborious and, in the first years, undoubtedly, none too enjoyable a life. They could not afford, certainly, those extensions of the household and multiplicity of establishments which their wealthy co-religionists were able to keep up out of the produce of their ill-requited toil.
On the other hand, the Mormon rule can scarcely have been so wholly arbitrary and ruthless as has been depicted by “gentiles” and ex-Mormons; for my friend Godbe, himself an ex-Elder, a pleasing polygamist of the most engaging manners, was allowed to start and maintain a successful schismatic sect of his own. Attacks upon the established Church, of Smith or Young as the case may be, were not infrequent; and although I took some pains to get information about cruelty and injustice to women, I am bound to say I never could obtain, even privately, evidence of misbehaviour which could not be paralleled at any time in the most respectable families at home; while prostitution with its concomitant evils and diseases was wholly unknown.
Moreover, the higher pleasures of life were by no means lacking. The great theatre was always crowded at extremely low prices, and some of the very best acting I ever saw in my life was in Salt Lake City, with the President, surrounded by his wives, present. The singing, also, in the Mormon Tabernacle was delightful. As to general conduct, there could be no comparison whatever, in my time, between the behaviour of the Mormons and that of most of the incoming Gentiles. These latter being, as they thought, quite outside the range of Mrs. Grundy’s canons of social life, carried on after a fashion which disgusted not only the Mormons but every decent Gentile within hail of them: squandering the funds entrusted to them for their mines on riotous living and on the importation of persons of notoriously bad character into the City of the Saints. As an impartial looker-on, with no prejudices, I can safely say that the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, as represented out there in Utah, compared very badly with the devotees and disciples of Smith of Nauvoo; and I do not hesitate to assert that, as between Smithians and Christians, the former could have given away to the latter any amount of religious and moral weight and still have maintained the lead in personal conduct and general ethics.
In short, I have always thought the Mormons were very badly treated. Their founder, having undergone the familiar experience of experimenters in sociology and religion, finished up, St. Stephen-fashion, by being stoned to death by an orthodox mob in the Eastern States. His converts, with his fate as a lesson to them in American tolerance, betook themselves to the wilderness of Utah, then a wilderness indeed, peopled only with buffalo, grizzly bears and redskins. Bare, bleak, inhospitable and dangerous, there the polygamist Mormons of the New Religion settled themselves as the Latter Day Saints. Within a few years this desert was made to blossom as a rose, by their unremitting toil, while they established a system of irrigation-farming and cattle-pasturing that was a model to the whole West. Their peculiar institution and their curious religious literature attracted thousands of the half-educated from the cities of Europe and the Eastern States. They had got as far away as they could from civilisation in all its barbarism in order to give free scope to their vulgar superstition, and only asked to be let alone.
So they were for a long time. But the higher culture of capitalism and conveyance was bound to follow them up, and follow them up it did. The upholders of, and profiters by, the brothels and dens of debauchery in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago were horrified at the idea of taking several women to wife simultaneously, instead of dealing with them, without marriage, successively. The higher standard of this Christian morality was at once apparent, and the newspapers proclaimed widely how shocked all decent people must be at such unseemly social relations as prevailed in Utah. What was much more to the purpose, a railway line was built down from the Transcontinental Railway, which connected Ogden with Salt Lake City, and, still more important, rich mines were discovered in Mormon territory. From that moment, it was certain that Mormon independence and conjugal impropriety of the polygamous type were alike doomed, and no long time elapsed before the shameless doings of the Latter Day Saints were suppressed in that district and the more ardent of the faithful went yet farther afield. Residence in Salt Lake for months at a time had made me quite familiar with its people, both saints and sinners, and I can safely say that I had there with them a very good time; nor do I see to this day what harm the Mormons did as a self-governing community.
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Last updated on 30.7.2006