APPENDIX. A.
BRIEF SKETCH OF MORMON HISTORY.
Mormonism is only about forty years old, but its career has been full of
stir and adventure from the beginning, and is likely to remain so to the
end. Its adherents have been hunted and hounded from one end of the
country to the other, and the result is that for years they have hated all
“Gentiles” indiscriminately and with all their might. Joseph
Smith, the finder of the Book of Mormon and founder of the religion, was
driven from State to State with his mysterious copperplates and the
miraculous stones he read their inscriptions with. Finally he instituted
his “church” in Ohio and Brigham Young joined it. The
neighbors began to persecute, and apostasy commenced. Brigham held to the
faith and worked hard. He arrested desertion. He did more—he added
converts in the midst of the trouble. He rose in favor and importance with
the brethren. He was made one of the Twelve Apostles of the Church. He
shortly fought his way to a higher post and a more powerful—President
of the Twelve. The neighbors rose up and drove the Mormons out of Ohio,
and they settled in Missouri. Brigham went with them. The Missourians
drove them out and they retreated to Nauvoo, Illinois. They prospered
there, and built a temple which made some pretensions to architectural
grace and achieved some celebrity in a section of country where a brick
court-house with a tin dome and a cupola on it was contemplated with
reverential awe. But the Mormons were badgered and harried again by their
neighbors. All the proclamations Joseph Smith could issue denouncing
polygamy and repudiating it as utterly anti-Mormon were of no avail; the
people of the neighborhood, on both sides of the Mississippi, claimed that
polygamy was practised by the Mormons, and not only polygamy but a little
of everything that was bad. Brigham returned from a mission to England,
where he had established a Mormon newspaper, and he brought back with him
several hundred converts to his preaching. His influence among the
brethren augmented with every move he made. Finally Nauvoo was invaded by
the Missouri and Illinois Gentiles, and Joseph Smith killed. A Mormon
named Rigdon assumed the Presidency of the Mormon church and government,
in Smith’s place, and even tried his hand at a prophecy or two. But
a greater than he was at hand. Brigham seized the advantage of the hour
and without other authority than superior brain and nerve and will, hurled
Rigdon from his high place and occupied it himself. He did more. He
launched an elaborate curse at Rigdon and his disciples; and he pronounced
Rigdon’s “prophecies” emanations from the devil, and
ended by “handing the false prophet over to the buffetings of Satan
for a thousand years”—probably the longest term ever inflicted
in Illinois. The people recognized their master. They straightway elected
Brigham Young President, by a prodigious majority, and have never faltered
in their devotion to him from that day to this. Brigham had forecast—a
quality which no other prominent Mormon has probably ever possessed. He
recognized that it was better to move to the wilderness than be
moved. By his command the people gathered together their meagre effects,
turned their backs upon their homes, and their faces toward the
wilderness, and on a bitter night in February filed in sorrowful
procession across the frozen Mississippi, lighted on their way by the
glare from their burning temple, whose sacred furniture their own hands
had fired! They camped, several days afterward, on the western verge of
Iowa, and poverty, want, hunger, cold, sickness, grief and persecution did
their work, and many succumbed and died—martyrs, fair and true,
whatever else they might have been. Two years the remnant remained there,
while Brigham and a small party crossed the country and founded Great Salt
Lake City, purposely choosing a land which was outside the ownership
and jurisdiction of the hated American nation. Note that. This was in
1847. Brigham moved his people there and got them settled just in time to
see disaster fall again. For the war closed and Mexico ceded Brigham’s
refuge to the enemy—the United States! In 1849 the Mormons organized
a “free and independent” government and erected the “State
of Deseret,” with Brigham Young as its head. But the very next year
Congress deliberately snubbed it and created the “Territory of Utah”
out of the same accumulation of mountains, sage-brush, alkali and general
desolation,—but made Brigham Governor of it. Then for years the
enormous migration across the plains to California poured through the land
of the Mormons and yet the church remained staunch and true to its lord
and master. Neither hunger, thirst, poverty, grief, hatred, contempt, nor
persecution could drive the Mormons from their faith or their allegiance;
and even the thirst for gold, which gleaned the flower of the youth and
strength of many nations was not able to entice them! That was the final
test. An experiment that could survive that was an experiment with some
substance to it somewhere.
Great Salt Lake City throve finely, and so did Utah. One of the last
things which Brigham Young had done before leaving Iowa, was to appear in
the pulpit dressed to personate the worshipped and lamented prophet Smith,
and confer the prophetic succession, with all its dignities, emoluments
and authorities, upon “President Brigham Young!” The people
accepted the pious fraud with the maddest enthusiasm, and Brigham’s
power was sealed and secured for all time. Within five years afterward he
openly added polygamy to the tenets of the church by authority of a
“revelation” which he pretended had been received nine years
before by Joseph Smith, albeit Joseph is amply on record as denouncing
polygamy to the day of his death.
Now was Brigham become a second Andrew Johnson in the small beginning and
steady progress of his official grandeur. He had served successively as a
disciple in the ranks; home missionary; foreign missionary; editor and
publisher; Apostle; President of the Board of Apostles; President of all
Mormondom, civil and ecclesiastical; successor to the great Joseph by the
will of heaven; “prophet,” “seer,” “revelator.”
There was but one dignity higher which he could aspire to, and he
reached out modestly and took that—he proclaimed himself a God!
He claims that he is to have a heaven of his own hereafter, and that he
will be its God, and his wives and children its goddesses, princes and
princesses. Into it all faithful Mormons will be admitted, with their
families, and will take rank and consequence according to the number of
their wives and children. If a disciple dies before he has had time to
accumulate enough wives and children to enable him to be respectable in
the next world any friend can marry a few wives and raise a few children
for him after he is dead, and they are duly credited to his account
and his heavenly status advanced accordingly.
Let it be borne in mind that the majority of the Mormons have always been
ignorant, simple, of an inferior order of intellect, unacquainted with the
world and its ways; and let it be borne in mind that the wives of these
Mormons are necessarily after the same pattern and their children likely
to be fit representatives of such a conjunction; and then let it be
remembered that for forty years these creatures have been driven,
driven, driven, relentlessly! and mobbed, beaten, and shot down; cursed,
despised, expatriated; banished to a remote desert, whither they journeyed
gaunt with famine and disease, disturbing the ancient solitudes with their
lamentations and marking the long way with graves of their dead—and
all because they were simply trying to live and worship God in the way
which they believed with all their hearts and souls to be the true
one. Let all these things be borne in mind, and then it will not be hard
to account for the deathless hatred which the Mormons bear our people and
our government.
That hatred has “fed fat its ancient grudge” ever since Mormon
Utah developed into a self-supporting realm and the church waxed rich and
strong. Brigham as Territorial Governor made it plain that Mormondom was
for the Mormons. The United States tried to rectify all that by appointing
territorial officers from New England and other anti-Mormon localities,
but Brigham prepared to make their entrance into his dominions difficult.
Three thousand United States troops had to go across the plains and put
these gentlemen in office. And after they were in office they were as
helpless as so many stone images. They made laws which nobody minded and
which could not be executed. The federal judges opened court in a land
filled with crime and violence and sat as holiday spectacles for insolent
crowds to gape at—for there was nothing to try, nothing to do
nothing on the dockets! And if a Gentile brought a suit, the Mormon jury
would do just as it pleased about bringing in a verdict, and when the
judgment of the court was rendered no Mormon cared for it and no officer
could execute it. Our Presidents shipped one cargo of officials after
another to Utah, but the result was always the same—they sat in a
blight for awhile they fairly feasted on scowls and insults day by day,
they saw every attempt to do their official duties find its reward in
darker and darker looks, and in secret threats and warnings of a more and
more dismal nature—and at last they either succumbed and became
despised tools and toys of the Mormons, or got scared and discomforted
beyond all endurance and left the Territory. If a brave officer kept on
courageously till his pluck was proven, some pliant Buchanan or Pierce
would remove him and appoint a stick in his place. In 1857 General Harney
came very near being appointed Governor of Utah. And so it came very near
being Harney governor and Cradlebaugh judge!—two men who never had
any idea of fear further than the sort of murky comprehension of it which
they were enabled to gather from the dictionary. Simply (if for nothing
else) for the variety they would have made in a rather monotonous history
of Federal servility and helplessness, it is a pity they were not fated to
hold office together in Utah.
Up to the date of our visit to Utah, such had been the Territorial record.
The Territorial government established there had been a hopeless failure,
and Brigham Young was the only real power in the land. He was an absolute
monarch—a monarch who defied our President—a monarch who
laughed at our armies when they camped about his capital—a monarch
who received without emotion the news that the august Congress of the
United States had enacted a solemn law against polygamy, and then went
forth calmly and married twenty-five or thirty more wives.
B. THE MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE.
The persecutions which the Mormons suffered so long—and which they
consider they still suffer in not being allowed to govern themselves—they
have endeavored and are still endeavoring to repay. The now almost
forgotten “Mountain Meadows massacre” was their work. It was
very famous in its day. The whole United States rang with its horrors. A
few items will refresh the reader’s memory. A great emigrant train
from Missouri and Arkansas passed through Salt Lake City and a few
disaffected Mormons joined it for the sake of the strong protection it
afforded for their escape. In that matter lay sufficient cause for hot
retaliation by the Mormon chiefs. Besides, these one hundred and
forty-five or one hundred and fifty unsuspecting emigrants being in part
from Arkansas, where a noted Mormon missionary had lately been killed, and
in part from Missouri, a State remembered with execrations as a bitter
persecutor of the saints when they were few and poor and friendless, here
were substantial additional grounds for lack of love for these wayfarers.
And finally, this train was rich, very rich in cattle, horses, mules and
other property—and how could the Mormons consistently keep up their
coveted resemblance to the Israelitish tribes and not seize the “spoil”
of an enemy when the Lord had so manifestly “delivered it into their
hand?”
Wherefore, according to Mrs. C. V. Waite’s entertaining book,
“The Mormon Prophet,” it transpired that—
“A ‘revelation’ from Brigham Young, as Great Grand
Archee or God, was dispatched to President J. C. Haight, Bishop Higbee and
J. D. Lee (adopted son of Brigham), commanding them to raise all the
forces they could muster and trust, follow those cursed Gentiles (so read
the revelation), attack them disguised as Indians, and with the arrows of
the Almighty make a clean sweep of them, and leave none to tell the tale;
and if they needed any assistance they were commanded to hire the Indians
as their allies, promising them a share of the booty. They were to be
neither slothful nor negligent in their duty, and to be punctual in
sending the teams back to him before winter set in, for this was the
mandate of Almighty God.”
The command of the “revelation” was faithfully obeyed. A large
party of Mormons, painted and tricked out as Indians, overtook the train
of emigrant wagons some three hundred miles south of Salt Lake City, and
made an attack. But the emigrants threw up earthworks, made fortresses of
their wagons and defended themselves gallantly and successfully for five
days! Your Missouri or Arkansas gentleman is not much afraid of the sort
of scurvy apologies for “Indians” which the southern part of
Utah affords. He would stand up and fight five hundred of them.
At the end of the five days the Mormons tried military strategy. They
retired to the upper end of the “Meadows,” resumed civilized
apparel, washed off their paint, and then, heavily armed, drove down in
wagons to the beleaguered emigrants, bearing a flag of truce! When the
emigrants saw white men coming they threw down their guns and welcomed
them with cheer after cheer! And, all unconscious of the poetry of it, no
doubt, they lifted a little child aloft, dressed in white, in answer to
the flag of truce!
The leaders of the timely white “deliverers” were President
Haight and Bishop John D. Lee, of the Mormon Church. Mr. Cradlebaugh, who
served a term as a Federal Judge in Utah and afterward was sent to
Congress from Nevada, tells in a speech delivered in Congress how these
leaders next proceeded:
“They professed to be on good terms with the Indians, and
represented them as being very mad. They also proposed to intercede and
settle the matter with the Indians. After several hours parley they,
having (apparently) visited the Indians, gave the ultimatum of the
savages; which was, that the emigrants should march out of their camp,
leaving everything behind them, even their guns. It was promised by the
Mormon bishops that they would bring a force and guard the emigrants back
to the settlements. The terms were agreed to, the emigrants being desirous
of saving the lives of their families. The Mormons retired, and
subsequently appeared with thirty or forty armed men. The emigrants were
marched out, the women and children in front and the men behind, the
Mormon guard being in the rear. When they had marched in this way about a
mile, at a given signal the slaughter commenced. The men were almost all
shot down at the first fire from the guard. Two only escaped, who fled to
the desert, and were followed one hundred and fifty miles before they were
overtaken and slaughtered. The women and children ran on, two or three
hundred yards further, when they were overtaken and with the aid of the
Indians they were slaughtered. Seventeen individuals only, of all the
emigrant party, were spared, and they were little children, the eldest of
them being only seven years old. Thus, on the 10th day of September, 1857,
was consummated one of the most cruel, cowardly and bloody murders known
in our history.”
The number of persons butchered by the Mormons on this occasion was one
hundred and twenty.
With unheard-of temerity Judge Cradlebaugh opened his court and proceeded
to make Mormondom answer for the massacre. And what a spectacle it must
have been to see this grim veteran, solitary and alone in his pride and
his pluck, glowering down on his Mormon jury and Mormon auditory, deriding
them by turns, and by turns “breathing threatenings and slaughter!”
An editorial in the Territorial Enterprise of that day says of him
and of the occasion:
“He spoke and acted with the fearlessness and resolution of a
Jackson; but the jury failed to indict, or even report on the charges,
while threats of violence were heard in every quarter, and an attack on
the U.S. troops intimated, if he persisted in his course.
“Finding that nothing could be done with the juries, they were
discharged with a scathing rebuke from the judge. And then, sitting as a
committing magistrate, he commenced his task alone. He examined
witnesses, made arrests in every quarter, and created a consternation in
the camps of the saints greater than any they had ever witnessed before,
since Mormondom was born. At last accounts terrified elders and bishops
were decamping to save their necks; and developments of the most starling
character were being made, implicating the highest Church dignitaries in
the many murders and robberies committed upon the Gentiles during the past
eight years.”
Had Harney been Governor, Cradlebaugh would have been supported in his
work, and the absolute proofs adduced by him of Mormon guilt in this
massacre and in a number of previous murders, would have conferred
gratuitous coffins upon certain citizens, together with occasion to use
them. But Cumming was the Federal Governor, and he, under a curious
pretense of impartiality, sought to screen the Mormons from the demands of
justice. On one occasion he even went so far as to publish his protest
against the use of the U.S. troops in aid of Cradlebaugh’s
proceedings.
Mrs. C. V. Waite closes her interesting detail of the great massacre with
the following remark and accompanying summary of the testimony—and
the summary is concise, accurate and reliable:
“For the benefit of those who may still be disposed to doubt the
guilt of Young and his Mormons in this transaction, the testimony is here
collated and circumstances given which go not merely to implicate but to
fasten conviction upon them by ‘confirmations strong as proofs of
Holy Writ:’
“1. The evidence of Mormons themselves, engaged in the affair, as
shown by the statements of Judge Cradlebaugh and Deputy U.S. Marshall
Rodgers.
“2. The failure of Brigham Young to embody any account of it in his
Report as Superintendent of Indian Affairs. Also his failure to make any
allusion to it whatever from the pulpit, until several years after the
occurrence
“3. The flight to the mountains of men high in authority in the
Mormon Church and State, when this affair was brought to the ordeal of a
judicial investigation.
“4. The failure of the Deseret News, the Church organ, and
the only paper then published in the Territory, to notice the massacre
until several months afterward, and then only to deny that Mormons were
engaged in it.
“5. The testimony of the children saved from the massacre.
“6. The children and the property of the emigrants found in
possession of the Mormons, and that possession traced back to the very day
after the massacre.
“7. The statements of Indians in the neighborhood of the scene of
the massacre: these statements are shown, not only by Cradlebaugh and
Rodgers, but by a number of military officers, and by J. Forney, who was,
in 1859, Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Territory. To all these
were such statements freely and frequently made by the Indians.
“8. The testimony of R. P. Campbell, Capt. 2d Dragoons, who was sent
in the Spring of 1859 to Santa Clara, to protect travelers on the road to
California and to inquire into Indian depredations.”
C. CONCERNING A FRIGHTFUL ASSASSINATION THAT WAS NEVER CONSUMMATED
[If ever there was a harmless man, it is Conrad Wiegand, of Gold Hill,
Nevada. If ever there was a gentle spirit that thought itself unfired
gunpowder and latent ruin, it is Conrad Wiegand. If ever there was an
oyster that fancied itself a whale; or a jack-o’lantern, confined to
a swamp, that fancied itself a planet with a billion-mile orbit; or a
summer zephyr that deemed itself a hurricane, it is Conrad Wiegand.
Therefore, what wonder is it that when he says a thing, he thinks the
world listens; that when he does a thing the world stands still to look;
and that when he suffers, there is a convulsion of nature? When I met
Conrad, he was “Superintendent of the Gold Hill Assay Office”—and
he was not only its Superintendent, but its entire force. And he was a
street preacher, too, with a mongrel religion of his own invention,
whereby he expected to regenerate the universe. This was years ago. Here
latterly he has entered journalism; and his journalism is what it might be
expected to be: colossal to ear, but pigmy to the eye. It is extravagant
grandiloquence confined to a newspaper about the size of a double letter
sheet. He doubtless edits, sets the type, and prints his paper, all alone;
but he delights to speak of the concern as if it occupies a block and
employs a thousand men.
[Something less than two years ago, Conrad assailed several people
mercilessly in his little “People’s Tribune,” and
got himself into trouble. Straightway he airs the affair in the “Territorial
Enterprise,” in a communication over his own signature, and I
propose to reproduce it here, in all its native simplicity and more than
human candor. Long as it is, it is well worth reading, for it is the
richest specimen of journalistic literature the history of America can
furnish, perhaps:]
From the Territorial Enterprise, Jan. 20, 1870.
