new-comers into the blessedness of the Saint's Rest, to whom the speech was figurative; to whom it wholly and simply portended excommunication, with its attendant isolation from sympathy, its outlawry, and all the evils which may easily be imagined as attendant upon it in a new and sparsely settled country, where men are so mutually dependent for the safety and happiness of every hour. But many - most, indeed, of those who heard the prophet's address to the bishop-knew that it meant the slaughter of one of their fellow-men; the cool premeditated, pitiless killing of a human being (he might be a stranger to some of them, but was also doubtless the intimate friend of some), for the crime, not of taking another's life into his private hands, not even of sinning against his neighbor's rights of property; for nothing that violated natural justice or social order, but for changing his mind! - for coming to the conclusion after a long experience, it might be, of such doubts, perplexities, and trials as had agitated many a breast in that multitude, that Mormonism was not God's truth, but the Devil's lie! And now, when the tearless, merciless, unreasoning, irresponsible Sanhedrim of his rulers was to prove he was right in this conclusion by slaying him, there was not a man in all that theocracy-ridden assembly stirred enough to rise and protest against the crime of his brother's blood! They were all old to such impressions; they had heard and known such things until every man's heart was calloused; though once the wave of passionate indignation which swept them, listening to a speech like the prophet's, in its surging rebound, must have swept the whole fabric and personality of Mormonism into the night and darkness from which they came at first. Thus did the old Jews sit and see Achan murdered with all his innocent family; thus did the young man Saul stand by and witness the stoning of Stephen, holding the assassins' clothes and consenting to the martyr's death; thus did the old Puritan behold the tender flesh of women seethe and crackle in the fires of the stake, — uttering no cry of horror, feeling no tear wet his stony cheeks; and thus do men lose the humanity and the divinity of their natures under a theocracy everywhere.

Mrs. Polypeith, as I have said, never dreamed of the meaning which really lay in the prophet's speech. Possibly she thought that the proposed excommunicate might be her husband — but he had already resolved to excommunicate himself; and before the sentence could be promulgated, he and she with their poor boy, would be where such a sentence was mere empty wind. So, in her tenderness for a heart already too heavily weighted, she carried home no account of Brigham's speech. Besides, she knew as well as anybody can know, in a country where one hardly dare trust his own sister for fear she may be a spy, that there were several malcontents in the ward beside her husband; some of them comparatively reckless and much more prominent: the person referred to might be one of these.

The partings were over; the old couple had not betrayed themselves

to their daughters. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday had gone, and in the darkness of Wednesday morning, about one o'clock, the three Polypeiths left their Mormon home forever. They drove slowly through the town, so as to attract no straggler who might be awake at that hour; and were soon on the desolate plain beyond the fens of the Jordan. Here they dared to go more rapidly, and before dawn broke, had reached the shore of the Lake and passed the point of the Oquirrh. Still they did not tarry. They might have aroused some one as they passed Black Rock Ranch, and they felt like guilty people fleeing from a murder; they trembled at every sound of the lake plashing along its stony beach, and the stunted cedars took the shape of crouching men. To think that these were American citizens, in United States territory, who had violated no natural right, no law of their country, and yet they were obliged to move thus! Let us not look abroad for the missionary objects of Republicanism. Austria, a more terrible Austria than that which crushed Venice, is nourished at our own breast.

The Polypeiths had seen an emigrant train bound for Oregon pass through the city about noon of the day before. They were in hopes of reaching it some distance this side of the Tuilla settlements; of merging themselves in it, and so travelling on unnoticed by any of the Mormon ranchmen, who, seeing them alone, might possibly identify them as belonging to Salt Lake, until they had got safely across the boundaries of Utah. A little before sunrise, the mules began to lag; and poor Hiram awakened from the vacant melancholy which now habitually shrouded him, to moan for food like a child. So, driving a few hundred yards off the track, Father Polypeith picketed his mules to a pair of stout sage stalks, to let them browse for a couple of hours, and building a fire of the scrubby sage brush and grease-wood he had collected with his hatchet, assisted his wife to prepare breakfast. While they were eating this meal, the two congratulated each other on the thought that before noon, they would in all probability come up with the train and be comparatively out of danger. Their old hearts glowed with a momentary warmth; they pictured to themselves the quiet nook which they might reach in California, and though it was only a place to die in, still they had suffered such entire loss of all which brightened life, that this prospect was a kind of substitute for happiness. The sun was two hours high, when they again put the mules in the wagon and resumed their journey.

They had travelled but a couple of miles further, when they came upon fresh tracks; and presently they saw the still smoking ash-heap which indicated a recent camping-place. Here the train had probably made its night-halt, and from the looks of the fire and the hoof-marks, it could not be very long since it started out again. They took fresh courage, chirruped to their mules, and went on as briskly as the sandy road and their heavy wagon would permit. Rising a little hillock, they had their eyes rejoiced, by seeing through the clear, dry air, which, on these plains,

everywhere out of the immediate neighborhood of the Lake, has a sort of telescopic property, a long white serpent whose joints were wagons, tapering from the nearer rear to the far-off van, slowly winding under a thin tawny cloud of dust, and through the gray sage about two miles before them, toward the Tuilla Valley. Their hearts leapt into their throats with the joyful thought of such close safety; they laughed like children; even poor Hiram seemed to understand them, and snapped his fingers over his shoulder, as if defying the Saints and the whole theocracy they had left snoring behind them in Salt Lake City.

Descending the opposite slope of the hillock they lost sight of the train, but knowing that every step brought them nearer it, considering the leisurely way in which emigrants travel, it kept its place as a stimulant in their fancy's eye, and they cheerfully pushed their mules through the sand, sure of overtaking their escort before it reached Tuilla. Their way now led through a narrow pass, with a low rocky ledge projecting from the bench-land on either side of them, shaggy with sage, and broken into fantastic crags and notches. Mr. Polypeith sat alone on a cushioned board across the front of the wagon; his wife and son were comfortably lodged upon bags and mattresses under the tilt, with a pile of boxed household wares for the back to their seat. Just as they turned the corner of the pass and were again emerging upon the open sage plain, a sharp crack, and "ping!" broke the golden morning stillness; the old man's hands went up and the reins fell from them; then, without a word, he fell backward into the wagon, while a red rivulet trickled over his temple and dropped from his gray hairs into the lap of his wife. With a shriek that might have pierced a fiend's heart, she caught him to her breast and dragged him back upon the mattress, — sprung to the board and caught the reins; but before she could lash the team into a gallop two bull-necked wretches with painted faces had seized them close by the bits, and drawing each his revolver, fiercely ordered her to dismount. But strength failed her. Her brain reeled; and only less dead than her husband, she fell upon his stiffening body, clasping Hiram in her arms. The assassins drew the mules to the side of the road, secured them, and entered the wagon. They lifted the dead man and threw him out into the brush as if he had been the carcase of a beast. Then they tore the boy from his mother's unconscious grasp, and sneering at his blank face of mindless terror, tumbled him to the ground after his father. Not even age and the helplessness of woman found mercy from them. The mother was dragged from the wagon after the son, and pitched in a limp, unresisting heap upon the corpse. Hiram, ignorant of all that was doing, first stood and looked curiously on his prostrate parents, then obeying the instinct of mere animal fear, turned to flee into the sage. One of the assassins deliberately raised his pistol, and as he was running, shot him through the back. As he lay weltering in blood and struggling in his death-agony, his moans pierced through his mother's unconscious

ness and reached her heart. She began to show signs of returning from her swoon.

"Look out, Bill!" spoke one of the Danites hurriedly; "the old woman's a-comin' to. Why not make a job of it ?-she's no use! What'll we do with her, anyhow?" "That's so!" replied the other. "We can't take her back; there's nowhere for her to go to, and she'll raise worse hell with the Gentiles than any o' the tribe, you bet. I believe it's only doin' the Church justice, and her a mercy, to send her to Californy too, alonger the rest 'o 'em. Here goes, anyhow"

She had opened her eyes and raised herself on one palm; in this position, looking out of glassy, unmeaning, bedazed eyes, like one waking from a nightmare. The last speaker coolly put his revolver to her ear, pulled the trigger, and the last of the Polypeiths had forever escaped from the theocracy. The Danites dragged the three bodies out a hundred rods into the brush, made a great heap of sage and grease wood, laid their victims on it, and setting the whole on fire, calmly sat near and smoked their pipes, making blasphemous jokes the while, till every earthly trace of their crime was consumed. This final act of the horrible tragedy over, they turned the heads of the mules and drove them back toward Salt Lake, arriving there the next day. The wagon and its contents went into the Church store-house, to be sold; while the entire sum of money resulting from the conversion of the Polypeiths' property, found in a belt around the old man's body, was passed directly into the iron safe in the Prophet's office. The married daughters only knew that their parents and their brother had fled from Utah; - whither they went, how far they had gone, and what had become of them, they never learned, for the Church not only allows its members to have no secrets from itself, but keeps all its own as inscrutably as the Sphinx. Thus ends the story of the Polypeiths. And the promise which I made when I began it, I can now assert that I have kept. I have made not one single statement which is either false or exaggerated; have supposed nothing to happen whose parallel has not repeatedly happened in Utah.

If the wholesale assassination of the Polypeiths stagger the belief of any calm Republican Christian, dwelling at the East without the pale of theocracy, what will he think of the massacre, universally known in Utah, of a whole wagon-train of emigrants on their way to California? I have before referred to this bloody affair, and will now briefly fulfill my promise to give its details.

In May, 1857, Parley Pratt, one of the family whose name figures so conspicuously in the Mormon annals, — a man of superior education and marked ability, who has contributed many hymns besides numerous other productions to the literature of the Latter-Day Church, — was slain in Van Buren County, Arkansas, by a citizen of that State named Hector McLean, for having proselyted McLean's wife and taken her to himself, during his apostleship in the Cherokee Nation Country.

This act, and the fact that McLean was largely aided in the pursuit and capture of his insulter by residents of that part of Arkansas, greatly incensed the Mormons against the people of that State, and determined them upon taking speedy vengeance for the killing of Pratt, who was very popular in Utah.

Their opportunity did not arrive until the next autumn. On the 4th of September a train of 150 Arkansas emigrants, comprising many entire families, on their way to California, with about sixty wagons, a large herd of horses, mules, and beef-cattle, and the entire stock of household goods, provisions, and merchandise for barter, usually carried by such trains, amounting in value, as was estimated, to nearly $200,000, reached a spring and camping-ground at the west end of the Mountain Meadow Valley. Here they were surprised and attacked, while corraling their stock inside a circle of wagons, as is customary when on the halt, by an overwhelming force of men in the garb and paint of Indians. Here I must digress a little for explanation.

In every Mormon settlement the traveller finds a number of men with long black hair, dark skins, and black eyes, whose slouching gait, sidelong, restless look, and entire style of make-up so suggest the native savage that he might easily mistake them for half-breeds tamed to the life of a white community. They are in reality pure-blooded white men, belonging to the Mormons, and selected on account of their strong natural resemblance to Indians, as well as their love of adventure and skill in adapting themselves to savage modes of living, as go-betweens, to conduct the intercourse of the Mormons with the tribes, whom they pretend to regard as former true believers, and call by the pretentious title of their Lamanite brethren. These men usually know several of the Indian languages, are enured to fatigue, fine fighters and hunters, cunning in every branch of forest-craft, acquainted with the mountain trails as thoroughly as the Indians themselves, and devote themselves especially to keeping up friendly relations with the savages; part of the time living in their dens with them, making them presents contributed by the Church, conciliating them in every way, and in many instances acquiring unbounded influence over them. Whenever the Mormons want a cat'spaw for purposes so nefarious that their own appearance on the stage of accomplishment would make them obnoxious to the whole world; when they want an exploring party cut off, a mail rifled, a Gentile settlement raided on, or wholesale assassination and plunder committed, these men have only need to stain their faces, strip themselves to skin hunting-shirt, or breech-clout and moccasins, and drumming up a sufficient party of the savages they have brought under their control, to lead them out to loot and massacre. I believe that in the earlier part of this work I have referred to atrocious expeditions of this kind in which (as in the Sweetwater raids, for example) a large number of the seeming Indians, undistinguishable from true savages in any other respect, were detected to be