The Story of the Mormons, from the Date of Their Origin to the Year 1901 Part 51

The General Conference of October, 1849, ordered one man to build a gla.s.s factory in the valley, and voted to organize a company to transport pa.s.sengers and freight between the Missouri River and California, directing that settlements be established along the route.

This company was called the Great Salt Lake Valley Carrying Company. Its prospectus in the Frontier Guardian in December, 1849, stated that the fare from Kanesville to Sutter's Fort, California, would be $300, and the freight rate to Great Salt Lake City $12.50 per hundredweight, the pa.s.senger wagons to be drawn by four horses or mules, and the freight wagons by oxen.

But the work of making the new Mormon home a business and manufacturing success did not meet with rapid encouragement. Where settlements were made outside of Salt Lake City, the people were not scattered in farmhouses over the country, but lived in what they called "forts,"

squalid looking settlements, laid out in a square and defended by a dirt or adobe wall. The inhabitants of these settlements had to depend on the soil for their subsistence, and such necessary workmen as carpenters and shoemakers plied their trade as they could find leisure after working in the fields. When Johnston's army entered the valley in 1858, the largest attempt at manufacturing that had been undertaken there--a beet sugar factory, toward which English capitalists had contributed more than $100,000--had already proved a failure. There were tanneries, distilleries, and breweries in operation, a few rifles and revolvers were made from iron supplied by wagon tires, and in the larger settlements a few good mechanics were kept busy. But if no outside influences had contributed to the prosperity of the valley, and hastened the day when it secured railroad communication, the future of the people whom Young gathered in Utah would have been very different.

A correspondent of the New York Tribune, on his way to California, writing on July 8, 1849, thus described Salt Lake City as it presented itself to him at that time:--"There are no hotels, because there had been no travel; no barber shops, because every one chose to shave himself and no one had time to shave his neighbor; no stores, because they had no goods to sell nor time to traffic; no center of business, because all were too busy to make a center. There was abundance of mechanics' shops, of dressmakers, milliners and tailors, etc., but they needed no sign, nor had they any time to paint or erect one, for they were crowded with business. Besides their several trades, all must cultivate the land or die; for the country was new, and no cultivation but their own within 1000 miles. Everyone had his lot and built on it; every one cultivated it, and perhaps a small farm in the distance. And the strangest of all was that this great city, extending over several square miles, had been erected, and every house and fence made, within nine or ten months of our arrival; while at the same time good bridges were erected over the princ.i.p.al streams, and the country settlements extended nearly 100 miles up and down the valley."*

* New York Tribune, October 9, 1849.

The winter of 1848 set in early and severe, with frequent snowstorms from December 1 until late in February, and the temperature dropping one degree below zero as late as February 5. The deep snow in the canyons, the only outlets through the mountains, rendered it difficult to bring in fuel, and the suffering from the cold was terrible, as many families had arrived too late to provide themselves with any shelter but their prairie wagons. The apprehended scarcity of food, too, was realized.

Early in February an inventory of the breadstuffs in the valley, taken by the Bishops, showed only three-quarters of a pound a day per head until July 5, although it was believed that many had concealed stores on hand. When the first General Epistle of the First Presidency was sent out from Salt Lake City in the spring of 1849,* corn, which had sold for $2 and $3 a bushel, was not to be had, wheat had ranged from $4 to $5 a bushel, and potatoes from $6 to $20, with none then in market.

* Millennial Star, Vol. XI, p. 227.

The people generally exerted themselves to obtain food for those whose supplies had been exhausted, but the situation became desperate before the snow melted. Three attempts to reach Fort Bridger failed because of the depth of snow in the canyons. There is a record of a winter hunt of two rival parties of 100 men each, but they killed "varmints" rather than game, the list including 700 wolves and foxes, 20 minks and skunks, 500 hawks, owls and magpies, and 1000 ravens.* Some of the Mormons, with the aid of Indian guides, dug roots that the savages had learned to eat, and some removed the hide roofs from their cabins and stewed them for food. The lack of breadstuffs continued until well into the summer, and the celebration of the anniversary of the arrival of the pioneers in the valley, which had been planned for July 4, was postponed until the 24th, as Young explained in his address, "that we might have a little bread to set on our tables."

* General Epistle, Millennial Star, Vol. XI, p. 227.

Word was now sent to the states and to Europe that no more of the brethren should make the trip to the valley at that time unless they had means to get through without a.s.sistance, and could bring breadstuffs to last them several months after their arrival.

But something now occurred which turned the eyes of a large part of the world to that new acquisition of the United States on the Pacific coast which was called California, which made the Mormon settlement in Utah a way station for thousands of travellers where a dozen would not have pa.s.sed it without the new incentive, and which brought to the Mormon settlers, almost at their own prices, supplies of which they were desperately in need, and which they could not otherwise have obtained.

This something was the discovery of gold in California.

When the news of this discovery reached the Atlantic states and those farther west, men simply calculated by what route they could most quickly reach the new El Dorado, and the first companies of miners who travelled across the plains sacrificed everything for speed. The first rush pa.s.sed through Salt Lake Valley in August, 1849. Some of the Mormons who had reached California with Brannan's company had by that time arrived in the valley, bringing with them a few bags of gold dust.

When the would-be miners from the East saw this proof of the existence of gold in the country ahead of them, their enthusiasm knew no limits, and their one wish was to lighten themselves so that they could reach the gold-fields in the shortest time possible. Then the harvest of the Mormons began. Pack mules and horses that had been worth only $25 or $30 would now bring $200 in exchange for other articles at a low price, and the travellers were auctioning off their surplus supplies every day. For a light wagon they did not hesitate to offer three or four heavy ones, with a yoke of oxen sometimes thrown in. Such needed supplies as domestic sheetings could be had at from five to ten cents a yard, spades and shovels, with which the miners were overstocked, at fifty cents each, and nearly everything in their outfit, except sugar and coffee, at half the price that would have been charged at wholesale in the Eastern states.*

* Salt Lake City letter to the Frontier Guardian.

The commercial profit to the Mormons from this emigration was greater still in 1850, when the rush had increased. Before the grain of that summer was cut, the gold seekers paid $1 a pound for flour in Salt Lake City. After the new grain was harvested they eagerly bought the flour as fast as five mills could grind it, at $25 per hundredweight. Unground wheat sold for $8 a bushel, wood for $10 a cord, adobe bricks for more than seven s.h.i.+llings a hundred, and skilled mechanics were getting twelve s.h.i.+llings and sixpence a day.* At the same time that the emigrants were paying so well for what they absolutely required, they were sacrificing large supplies of what they did not need on almost any terms. Some of them had started across the plains with heavy loads of machinery and miscellaneous goods, on which they expected to reap a big profit in California. Learning, however, when they reached Salt Lake City, that s.h.i.+p-loads of such merchandise were on their way around the Horn, the owners sacrificed their stock where it was, and hurried on to get their share of the gold.

* Millennial Star, Vol. XII, p. 350.

This is not the place in which to tell the story of that rush of the gold seekers. The clerk at Fort Laramie reported, "The total number of emigrants who pa.s.sed this post up to June 10, 1850, included 16,915 men, 235 women, 242 children, 4672 wagons, 14,974 horses, 4641 mules, 7475 oxen, and 1653 cows." A letter from Sacramento dated September 10, 1850, gave this picture of the trail left by these travellers: "Many believed there are dead animals enough on the desert (of 45 miles) between Humboldt Lake and Carson River to pave a road the whole distance. We will make a moderate estimate and say there is a dead animal to every five feet, left on the desert this season. I counted 153 wagons within a mile and a half. Not half of those left were to be seen, many having been burned to make lights in the night. The desert is strewn with all kinds of property--tools, clothes, crockery, harnesses, etc."

Naturally, in this rush for sudden riches, many a Mormon had a desire to join. A dozen families left Utah for California early in 1849, and in March, 1851, a company of more than five hundred a.s.sembled in Payson, preparatory to making the trip. Here was an unexpected danger to the growth of the Mormon population, and one which the head of the church did not delay in checking. The second General Epistle, dated October 12, 1849,* stated that the valley of the Sacramento was unhealthy, and that the Saints could do better raising grain in Utah, adding, "The true use of gold is for paving streets, covering houses, and making culinary dishes, and when the Saints shall have preached the Gospel, raised grain, and built up cities enough, the Lord will open up the way for a supply of gold, to the perfect satisfaction of his people."

* Millennial Star, Vol. XII, p. 119.

Notwithstanding this advice, a good many Mormons acted on the idea that the Lord would help those who helped themselves, and that if they were to have golden culinary dishes they must go and dig the gold.

Accordingly, we find the third General Epistle, dated April 12, 1850, acknowledging that many brethren had gone to the gold mines, but declaring that they were counselled only "by their own wills and covetous feelings," and that they would have done more good by staying in the valley. Young did not, however, stop with a mere rebuke. He proposed to check the exodus. "Let such men," the Epistle added, "remember that they are not wanted in our midst. Let such leave their carca.s.ses where they do their work; we want not our burial grounds polluted with such hypocrites." Young was quite as plain spoken in his remarks to the General Conference that spring, naming as those who "will go down to h.e.l.l, poverty-stricken and naked," the Mormons who felt that they were so poor that they would have to go to the gold mines.*

Such talk had its effect, and Salt Lake Valley retained most of its population.

* Millennial Star, Vol. XII, p. 274,

The progress of the settlement received a serious check some years later in the failure of the crops in 1855, followed by a near approach to a famine in the ensuing winter. Very little reference to this was made in the official church correspondence, but a picture of the situation in Salt Lake City that winter was drawn in two letters from Heber C.

Kimball to his sons in England.* In the first, written in February, he said that his family and Brigham Young's were then on a ration of half a pound of bread each per day, and that thousands had scarcely any breadstuff at all. Kimball's family of one hundred persons then had on hand about seventy bushels of potatoes and a few beets and carrots, "so you can judge," he says, "whether we can get through until harvest without digging roots." There were then not more than five hundred bushels of grain in the t.i.thing office, and all public work was stopped until the next harvest, and all mechanics were advised to drop their tools and to set about raising grain. "There is not a settlement in the territory," said the writer, "but is also in the same fix as we are.

Dollars and cents do not count in these times, for they are the tightest I have ever seen in the territory of Utah." In April he wrote: "I suppose one-half the church stock is dead. There are not more than one-half the people that have bread, and they have not more than one-half or one quarter of a pound a day to a person. A great portion of the people are digging roots, and hundreds and thousands, their teams being dead, are under the necessity of spading their ground to put in their grain." The harvest of 1856 also suffered from drought and insects, and the Deseret News that summer declared that "the most rigid economy and untiring, well-directed industry may enable us to escape starvation until a harvest in 1857, and until the lapse of another year emigrants and others will run great risks of starving unless they bring their supplies with them." The first load of barley brought into Salt Lake City that summer sold for $2 a bushel.

* Ibid., Vol. XVIII, pp. 395-476.

The first building erected in Salt Lake City in which to hold church services was called a tabernacle. It was begun in 1851, and was consecrated on April 6, 1852. It stood in Temple block, where the a.s.sembly Hall now stands, measuring about 60 by 120 feet, and providing accommodation for 2500 people. The present Tabernacle, in which the public church services are held, was completed in 1870. It stands just west of the Temple, is elliptical in shape, and, with its broad gallery running around the entire interior, except the end occupied by the organ loft and pulpit, it can seat about 9000 persons. Its acoustic properties are remarkable, and one of the duties of any guide who exhibits the auditorium to visitors is to station them at the end of the gallery opposite the pulpit, and to drop a pin on the floor to show them how distinctly that sound can be heard.

The Temple in Salt Lake City was begun in April, 1853, and was not dedicated until April, 1893. This building is devoted to the secret ceremonies of the church, and no Gentile is ever admitted to it.

The building, of granite taken from the near-by mountains, is architecturally imposing, measuring 200 by 100 feet. Its cost is admitted to have been about $4,000,000. The building could probably be duplicated to-day for one-half that sum. The excuse given by church authorities for the excessive cost is that, during the early years of the work upon it, the granite had to be hauled from the mountains by ox teams, and that everything in the way of building material was expensive in Utah when the church there was young. The interior is divided into different rooms, in which such ceremonies as the baptism for the dead are performed; the baptismal font is copied after the one that was in the Temple at Nauvoo.

There are three other temples in Utah, all of which were completed before the one in Salt Lake City, namely, at St. George, at Logan, and at Manti.

CHAPTER III. -- THE FOREIGN IMMIGRATION TO UTAH

When the Mormons began their departure westward from Nauvoo, the immigration of converts from Europe was suspended because of the uncertainty about the location of the next settlement, and the difficulty of transporting the existing population. But the necessity of constant additions to the community of new-comers, and especially those bringing some capital, was never lost sight of by the heads of the church. An evidence of this was given even before the first company reached the Missouri River.

While the Saints were marching through Iowa they received intelligence of a big scandal in connection with the emigration business in England, and P. P. Pratt, Orson Hyde, and John Taylor were hurriedly sent to that country to straighten the matter out. The Millennial Star in the early part of 1846 had frequent articles about the British and American Commercial Joint Stock Company, an organization incorporated to a.s.sist poor Saints in emigrating. The princ.i.p.al emigration agent in Great Britain at that time was R. Hedlock. He was the originator of the Joint Stock Company, and Thomas Ward was its president. The Mormon investigators found that more than 1644 pounds of the contributions of the stockholders had been squandered, and that Ward had been lending Hedlock money with which to pay his personal debts. Ward and Hedlock were at once disfellows.h.i.+pped, and contributions to the treasury of the company were stopped. Pratt says that Hedlock fled when the investigators arrived, leaving many debts, "and finally lived incog.

in London with a vile woman." Thus it seems that Mormon business enterprises in England were no freer from scandals than those in America.

The efforts of the leaders of the church were now exerted to make the prospects of the Saints in Utah attractive to the converts in England whom they wished to add to the population of their valley. Young and his a.s.sociates seem to have entertained the idea, without reckoning on the rapid settlement of California, the migration of the "Forty-niners," and the connection of the two coasts by rail, that they could const.i.tute a little empire all by itself in Utah, which would be self-supporting as well as independent, the farmer raising food for the mechanic, and the mechanic doing the needed work for the farmer. Accordingly, the church did not stop short of every kind of misrepresentation and deception in belittling to the foreigners the misfortunes of the past, and picturing to them the fruitfulness of their new country, and the ease with which they could become landowners there.

Naturally, after the expulsion from Illinois, in which so many foreign converts shared, an explanation and palliation of the emigration thence were necessary. In the United States, then and ever since, the Mormons pictured themselves as the victims of an almost unprecedented persecution. But as soon as John Taylor reached England, in 1846, he issued an address to the Saints in Great Britain* in which he presented a very different picture. Granting that, on an average, they had not obtained more than one-third the value of their real and personal property when they left Illinois, he explained that, when they settled there, land in Nauvoo was worth only from $3 to $20 per acre, while, when they left, it was worth from $50 to $1500 per acre; in the same period the adjoining farm lands had risen in value from $1.25 and $5 to from $5 to $50 per acre. He a.s.sured his hearers, therefore, that the one-third value which they had obtained had paid them well for their labor. Nor was this all. When they left, they had exchanged their property for horses, cattle, provisions, clothing, etc., which was exactly what was needed by settlers in a new country. As a further bait he went on to explain: "When we arrive in California, according to the provisions of the Mexican government, each family will be ent.i.tled to a large tract of land, amounting to several hundred acres," and, if that country pa.s.sed into American control, he looked for the pa.s.sage of a law giving 640 acres to each male settler. "Thus," he summed up, "it will be easy to see that we are in a better condition than when we were in Nauvoo!"

* Millennial Star, Vol. VIII, p. 115.

The misrepresentation did not cease here, however. After announcing the departure of Brigham Young's pioneer company, Taylor* wound up with this tissue of false statements: "The way is now prepared; the roads, bridges, and ferry-boats made; there are stopping places also on the way where they can rest, obtain vegetables and corn, and, when they arrive at the far end, instead of finding a wild waste, they will meet with friends, provisions and a home, so that all that will be requisite for them to do will be to find sufficient teams to draw their families, and to take along with them a few woollen or cotton goods, or other articles of merchandise which will be light, and which the brethren will require until they can manufacture for themselves." How many a poor Englishman, toiling over the plains in the next succeeding years, and, arriving in arid Utah to find himself in the clutches of an organization from which he could not escape, had reason to curse the man who drew this picture!

* John Taylor was born in England in 1808, and emigrated to Canada in 1829, where, after joining the Methodists, he, like Joseph Smith, found existing churches unsatisfactory, and was easily secured as a convert by P. P. Pratt. He was elected to the Quorum, and was sent to Great Britain as a missionary in 1840, writing several pamphlets while there. He arrived in Nauvoo with Brigham Young in 1841, and there edited the Times and Seasons, was a member of the City Council, a regent of the university, and judge advocate of the Legion, and was in the room with the prophet when the latter was shot. He was the Mormon representative in France in 1849, publis.h.i.+ng a monthly paper there, translating the Mormon Bible into the French language, and preaching later at Hamburg, Germany. He was superintendent of the Mormon church in the Eastern states in 1857, when Young declared war against the United States, and he succeeded Young as head of the church.

In 1847, at the suggestion of Taylor, Hyde, and Pratt, who were still in England, a pet.i.tion bearing nearly 13,000 names was addressed to Queen Victoria, setting forth the misery existing among the working cla.s.ses in Great Britain, suggesting, as the best means of relief, royal aid to those who wished to emigrate to "the island of Vancouver or to the great territory of Oregon," and asking her "to give them employment in improving the harbors of those countries, or in erecting forts of defence; or, if this be inexpedient, to furnish them provisions and means of subsistence until they can produce them from the soil." These American citizens did not hesitate to point out that the United States government was favoring the settlement of its territory on the Pacific coast, and to add: "While the United States do manifest such a strong inclination, not only to extend and enlarge their possessions in the West, but also to people them, will not your Majesty look well to British interests in those regions, and adopt timely precautionary measures to maintain a balance of power in that quarter which, in the opinion of your memorialists, is destined at no very distant period to partic.i.p.ate largely in the China trade?" *