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

Mormons, from their using German, Irish, and other white brogues in conversing with each other during the onslaught. Such, at least in large part, were the Indians who attacked the emigrants at Mountain Meadow. For about a day the brave Arkansians kept off their murderers by lying behind their embanked bales and boxes, with their wagons corraled in a circle around them, their women and children inside of this rude extempore fortification; and using their rifles vigorously all the time. Their enemies however had much the best of them, for they could lie almost entirely out of sight in the brush, and were besides between the emigrants and water, so that the latter and their families suffered severely from thirst. Still, though vastly their superiors in number, the savages did not gain an inch. They would probably have been obliged to retire disheartened without accomplishing their object, had not some of the Mormons thought of a stratagem by which they succeeded as they never could have done by force.

Just at this juncture, the beleaguered Arkansians had their eyes gladdened by the sight of an approaching body of white men, who had not before appeared on the scene, and seemed to be strangers crossing the mountains and wholly unconnected with the attacking party. After a parley with the Indians, the latter ceased firing long enough to let them go into the emigrant camp and have an interview. They told the Arkansians that they were settlers in the neighborhood who had always conciliated and been friends with the Indians, and that they possessed so much influence with them that they had persuaded them to cease hostilities and let the emigrants proceed under their (the whites') escort, if they would only as a concession to the exasperated feelings of the savages permit that escort to take possession of their arms and ammunition. The Indians, they said, had recently lost some of their most valuable men by the hand of whites, who murdered them in cold blood and out of sheer wantonness, so that it was now with the greatest difficulty they could be persuaded not to attack every white man they met.

The reasoning and propositions of their new-found friends appeared so plausible, and their disposition so friendly, that after consultation, the Arkansians concluded to accept their advice, and deposited with them all the arms and ammunition belonging to the entire train. Scarcely had they stripped themselves of their means of protection, when at a prearranged signal, all the savages rushed in, and joined by the white men, among whom the well-known Mormon Elder Haight seems to have been the most prominent, — began butchering the helpless men, women, and children; nor did they stop pursuing them for several miles, and keeping up a running fire all the way, until they had killed 120 or more of the train. The last of the unfortunate men managed to get to Muddy Creek, forty or fifty miles away, but was tracked by the insatiate devils and shot down. Some of the deeds of the white savages rivaled anything in the annals of Indian cruelty; such, for instance, as the case of one young girl, who

was caught by the hair of her head while running, and as she knelt crying for mercy to her Mormon captor, had his bowie-knife drawn across her throat from ear to ear. The smallest children, boys and girls, from earliest infancy to ten years of age, were spared by the assassins and dispersed among the settlements, to be taken into various Mormon families and brought up in the Mormon faith. Seventeen of these were afterward found by Mr. Forney, whom the government empowered to investigate the matter, and returned to their parents' friends in Arkansas. The wagons, cattle, and goods were parted among the Mormon actors in the massacre, and no successful effort at searching out any portion of this property had been made when I left Salt Lake. One wagon which had belonged to the train was then in the barn of a well-known Mormon citizen, and another well-to-do, much esteemed Saint, who had participated in the massacre and had taken one of the children to bring up, I met in the streets of Salt Lake repeatedly. He looked as jolly as you please, as if neither conscience nor digestion troubled him.

The position which the United States government holds in Utah may be inferred from the fact that although the prominent participators in this, one of the blackest outrages of modern times, are perfectly well known in Utah, they go about among their fellow-men to this day with unblushing and fearless impunity. The Hon. Mr. Cradlebaugh, former delegate from Nevada, laid the case before Congress in a speech eloquent with terrible fact, and a United States Court (held I believe at Camp Floyd, under the protection of Johnston's guns) was convened to try the offenders, but as a matter of course they all slipped through. The cases had to go before a jury, and the panel had to be drawn from among the Mormons themselves. If there happened to be one Gentile juror drawn, it was only at the risk of his life that he could vote guilty; and if he did, his comrades would be certain to disagree with him. It is evident that until martiallaw is proclaimed, no Mormon can ever be punished in Utah for a crime against a Gentile, Gentiles having no rights there which a Mormon is bound to respect. I am not advocating the declaration of martial-law in the Territory; of the necessity which justifies such an extreme measure I do not pretend to be a judge; but I am sure that unless the United States intends to give over the entire Territory to the possession of a single sect, and virtually forbid all citizens who do not belong to that sect from settling in the Territory; if it ever intends that its citizens shall be equally protected everywhere within its boundaries, their form of religous belief notwithstanding; if it does not intend to cede to the settlers of every new territory as part of their local franchise, analogous with state rights, the power to establish despotism more cruel than any in Asia or in Europe, and compel all new-comers to choose between bowing their necks to the yoke, being assassinated, or abandoning their claims in the territory: then the United States Government will be compelled to take the opposite horn of the dilemma and open courts-martial in Utah for

the trial of all such desperadoes as now threaten Gentile life in Utah with the certainty of acquittal by a jury of their peers.

Doubtless, trial by jury is a palladium of liberty; but in preserving the palladium let us be sure that we are not holding it as a screen for murder to stab behind; let us take care lest we leave no liberty for the palladium to shield.

If we can sufficiently purge ourselves of indignation and other personal passions to look at Mormonism with the calm intellectual eyes of the philosopher, it will present to us the most curious object of study which the world at present affords. Its life is an hourly anomaly. The fact that the system continues to exist, is as strange a one as it would be if the Falls of Niagara should begin pouring up instead of tumbling down. As we have sought to show, it is a violation of all moral and intellectual laws of gravitation. It is a perpetual defiance to the progress of the age. We are irresistibly driven to the questions, What upholds it? What has carried it through trials well-nigh as fiery as any which ever assaulted the Christian Church, and placed it in a position of such prosperity that it is capable of setting at naught successfully the will of the Government, the spirit of American Republicanism and the strongest people upon earth?

Its element of cohesion is not to be found where superficial students usually look for it, - in the fact that its system provides full swing for the baser passions of mankind in the institution of polygamy. One of the strongest of the Mormon leaders, Colonel Kinney, is not a polygamist at all, and the institution itself, so far from being an original element in the system, is but a recent importation into it. Besides, the Mormons are by no means a grossly sensual people; quite as far from that, everybody who has lived among them will bear them witness, as the old Puritans or Covenanters. Their polygamy, of course, offers opportunity for the gratification of sensual men without the stigma which in civilized and Christian countries attaches to sexual inconstancy; but it is a stern religious institution, not a voluptuary one. The grace and poetry of Athens, the sensuous languor of oriental lands, are entirely absent from it. The Mormon is a polygamist not for indulgence, but from conviction. He hedges around his many marriages with a sterner legislation than that with which we protect our one. He marries repeatedly, because every time he is adding to his importance, elevating his position in the hierarchy of heaven; because every father has in the kingdom of God a principality proportionate to his number of children. There cannot be imagined any country less favorable for the residence of a voluptuary than Utah. There is no such thing possible as promiscuous passion in Salt Lake City. Not only are the statutes severer against such practices, but the feeling of the people is more opposed to them than in any place on the globe. The man who wishes many objects of his attachment, must marry them all, and burden himself with a responsibility at each

successive marriage for which even the most frantic sensualist could find no compensation. Moreover, a great mistake is frequently made at the East, in supposing that the "spiritual marriages," so often heard of in connection with the Mormons, correspond to those promiscuous and illicit relations gilded by Free Love with that once sacred name, and are merely an extension of the sensual area of the persons contracting them, without the necessity of his assuming any of the burdens of the husband. How impossible it is that this should be, may be perceived by putting together the facts that on the one hand all such relations outside the marriage tie are severely punished; and when the transgressor not only violates social order in general, but trespasses on the close of some other man, that punishment takes the horrible form which (some of) my readers have read in the history of the Polypeiths; and that on the other, a great many women in Utah are the physical and temporal wives of one man, the spiritual and eternal wives of another. The spiritual marriage is a ceremony of great intended solemnity, purporting to seal a woman to be the wife of a man after this life, a contract and covenant ratified by the Church, and capable of being solemnized by Brigham Young alone, that she shall form part of his celestial household and live with him in heaven forever. This involves no union of any kind on earth after the marriage ceremony is over.

Nor is the element of strength in Mormonism any liberty of any kind, granted to the people of Utah, but not granted to other people elsewhere. The very reverse is true. The power resides in the hands of an exceeding few really, and finally, I ought to say, in but one hand. The people, elsewhere in this country the sovereign people, are here the veriest creatures of despotism. They are no more a power than were the Venetians under Francis Joseph; but they are ready to die in defense of the chain that binds them.

The strength of Mormonism is this, - Mormonism is a one-man power. Mormonism is Brigham Young. The people are generally collected from the lowest, the most credulous, the unthinking stratum of Europe. And Brigham Young is one of the most remarkable men of any age, of any country. Next to Louis Napoleon he possesses the vastest executive ability, the highest talent for government, which this century has seen; and when I consider the disadvantages under which he has labored, his lack of a great name, like the elder Bonaparte's, behind him to give his very mistakes prestige; his deficiency in education beyond the meagre help which he might receive from a common school in the early settlement of Western New York; his being obliged to associate all his life with the gross, the ignorant, and the superstitious, I do not know why I should make a reservation, when I speak of him superlatively, in the French Emperor's favor. Perhaps the best expression for the difference between the two would be to say, that he is Louis Napoleon plus a heart and intense moral convictions. There are some circumstances under