Part 17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I must abruptly leap to the overland stage again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A thick, nauseous smoke was curling up from the site of the buildings. We came nearer. Barn, stables, station-house,--all were a smouldering pile of rafters. We came still nearer. The whole stud of horses--a dozen or fifteen--lay roasting on the embers. We came close to the spot. There, inextricably mixed with the carcasses of the beasts, lay six men, their brains dashed out, their faces mutilated beyond recognition, their limbs hewn off,--a frightful holocaust steaming up into our faces. I must not dwell on that horror of all senses. It comes to me now at high noonday with a grisly shudder.

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

ON PICKET DUTY.

Within a green and shadowy wood, Circled with spring, alone I stood: The nook was peaceful, fair, and good.

The wild-plum blossoms lured the bees, The birds sang madly in the trees, Magnolia-scents were on the breeze.

All else was silent; but the ear Caught sounds of distant bugle clear, And heard the bullets whistle near,--

When from the winding river's shore The Rebel guns began to roar, And ours to answer, thundering o'er;

And echoed from the wooded hill, Repeated and repeated still, Through all my soul they seemed to thrill.

For, as their rattling storm awoke, And loud and fast the discord broke, In rude and trenchant _words_ they spoke.

"_We hate!_" boomed fiercely o'er the tide; "We fear not!" from the other side; "_We strike!_" the Rebel guns replied.

Quick roared our answer, "We defend!" "_Our rights!_" the battle-sounds contend; "The rights of _all_!" we answer send.

"_We conquer!_" rolled across the wave; "We persevere!" our answer gave; "_Our chivalry!_" they wildly rave.

"Ours _are the brave_!" "Be _ours_ the free!" "_Be ours the slave, the masters we_!" "On us their blood no more shall be!"

As when some magic word is spoken, By which a wizard spell is broken, There was a silence at that token.

The wild birds dared once more to sing, I heard the pine-bough's whispering, And trickling of a silver spring.

Then, crashing forth with smoke and din, Once more the rattling sounds begin, Our iron lips roll forth, "We win!"

And dull and wavering in the gale That rushed in gusts across the vale Came back the faint reply, "_We fail_!"

And then a word, both stern and sad, From throat of huge Columbiad,-- "Blind fools and traitors! ye are mad!"

Again the Rebel answer came, Muffled and slow, as if in shame,-- "_All, all is lost_!" in smoke and flame.

Now bold and strong and stern as Fate The Union guns sound forth, "We wait!" Faint comes the distant cry, "_Too late_!"

"Return! return!" our cannon said; And, as the smoke rolled overhead, "_We dare not_!" was the answer dread.

Then came a sound, both loud and clear, A godlike word of hope and cheer,-- "Forgiveness!" echoed far and near;

As when beside some death-bed still We watch, and wait God's solemn will, A blue-bird warbles his soft trill.

I clenched my teeth at that blest word, And, angry, muttered, "Not so, Lord! The only answer is the sword!"

I thought of Shiloh's tainted air, Of Richmond's prisons, foul and bare, And murdered heroes, young and fair,--

Of block and lash and overseer, And dark, mild faces pale with fear, Of baying hell-hounds panting near.

But then the gentle story told My childhood, in the days of old, Rang out its lessons manifold.

O prodigal, and lost! arise And read the welcome blest that lies In a kind Father's patient eyes!

Thy elder brother grudges not The lost and found should share his lot, And wrong in concord be forgot.

Thus mused I, as the hours went by, Till the relieving guard drew nigh, And then was challenge and reply.

And as I hastened back to line, It seemed an omen half divine That "Concord" was the countersign.

* * * * *

OUR PROGRESSIVE INDEPENDENCE.

It is among the possibilities of the future, that, in due course of time, the United States of America shall become to England what England has become to Saxony. We cannot be sure, it is true, that the mother-country will live, a prosperous and independent kingdom, to see the full maturity of her gigantic offspring. We have no right to assume it as a matter of course, that the Western Autocracy will fill up, unbroken, the outline traced for it by Nature and history. But England, forced as her civilization must be considered ever since the Conquest, has a reasonable chance for another vigorous century, and the Union, the present storm once weathered, does not ask a longer time than this to become, according to the prediction of the London "Times," the master-power of the planet.

The class that guides the destinies of Great Britain and her dependencies is far-reaching in its anticipations as it is deep-rooted in its recollections. _Quantum radice in Tartara, tantum vertice ad auras_,--if we may invert the poet's words. An American millionnaire may be anxious about the condition of his grandchildren, but a peer whose ancestors came in with the Conqueror looks ahead at least as far as the end of the twentieth century. The royal astrologers have cast the horoscope of the nationality born beneath the evening-star, and report it as being ominous for that which finds its nativity in the House of Leo.

Every dynasty sees a natural enemy in a self-governing state. Its dread of that enemy is in exact proportion to the amount of liberty enjoyed by its own people. Freedom is the ferment of Freedom. The moistened sponge drinks up water greedily; the dry one sheds it. Russia has no popular legislation, and her Emperor almost, perhaps quite, loves us. England boasts of her freeborn people, and her governing class, to say the least, does not love us.

An unexpected accident of situation startled us by the revelation of a secret which had been, on the whole, very well kept. No play of mirrors in a story, no falling of a screen in a comedy, no flash of stage-lightning in a melodrama, ever betrayed a lover's or a murderer's hidden thought and purpose more strikingly than the over-hasty announcement that the Union was broken into warring fragments, never again to be joined together, unveiled the cherished hope of its Old-World enemies. The whispers of expectant heirs at the opening of a miser's will are decorous and respectful, compared to the chuckle of the leading English social and political organ and its echoes, when the bursting of the Republican "bubble" was proclaimed as an accomplished fact, and the hour was thought to have come when the "Disunited States" could be held up as a spectacle to the people of Europe. A _Te Deum_ in Westminster Abbey would hardly have added emphasis to the expression of what appeared to be the prevailing sentiment of the upper classes.

If the comparative prudence of the British Government had not tempered this exultant movement, the hopes of civilization would have been blasted by such a war as it is sickening to think of: England in alliance with an empire trying to spread and perpetuate Slavery as its very principle of life, against a people whose watchwords were freedom, education, and the dignity of labor. If the silent masses of the British people had not felt that our cause was theirs, there would have been no saying how far the passionate desire to see their predictions made facts might have led the proud haters of popular government.

Between these two forces the British Cabinet has found a diagonal which has met with the usual success of compromises. The aristocracy, which very naturally wishes to see the Union divided, is in a fair way of being disappointed, because, as its partisans may claim, England did not force herself into our quarrel. That portion of the middling classes which could not tolerate the thought of a Slave Empire has been compelled to witness a deliberate exposure in the face of the whole world of the hollowness of those philanthropic pretensions which have been so long the boast of British patriots. The people of the Union, who expected moral support and universal indignant repudiation of the slaveholding Rebel conspiracy, have been disgusted and offended. The Rebels, who supposed Great Britain, and perhaps France also, would join them in a war which was virtually a crusade against free institutions, have been stung into a second paroxysm of madness. Western Europe failed us in the storm; it leaves them in the moment of shipwreck.

The recent action of the British Government, under the persuasive influence of Mr. Seward's polite representation, that instant hostilities would be sure to follow, if England did not keep her iron pirates at home, has improved somewhat the tone of Northern feeling towards her. The late neighborly office of the Canadian Government, in warning us of the conspiracy to free our prisoners, has produced a very favorable impression, so far as the effect of a single act is felt in striking the balance of a long account.