A.C. The battle of Cumorah was fought, in which two hundred and thirty thousand of the Nephites were slain (p. 507, pars. 2, 3). 400. All the Nephites, as a distinct people, except Moroni, were destroyed (p. 509, par. 1). 421. Moroni finished and sealed up all the records, according to the commandment of God (p. 561, par. 1). CHAPTER X. Farther Observations at Great Salt Lake City. ONE of my last visits was to the court-house on an interesting occasion. The Palais de Justice is near where the old fort once was, in the western part of the settlement. It is an unfinished building of adobe, based on red sandstone, with a flag-staff and a tinned roof, which gives it a somewhat Muscovite appearance, and it cost $20,000. The courts and Legislature sit in a neat room, with curtains and chandeliers, and polished pine-wood furniture, all as yet unfaded. The occasion which had gathered together the notabilities of the place was this: Mr. Peter Dotson, the United States Marshal of the Territory, living at Camp Floyd, and being on the opposition side, had made himself the Mormons say an unscrupulous partisan. In July, 1859, he came from the cantonment armed with a writ issued by Mr. Delana R. Eckels, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and accompanied by two officers of the United States Army, to the Holy City for the purpose of arresting a Mr. Mackenzie-now in the Penitentiary for counterfeiting "quarter-masters' drafts"-an engraver by profession, and then working in the Deserét store of Mr. Brigham Young. Forgery and false coining are associated in the Gentile mind with Mormonism, and inveterately so; whether truly or not, I can not say it is highly probable that Mr. Bogus's* habitat is not limited by latitude, altitude, or longitude; at the same time, the Saints are too much en évidence to entertain him publicly. The marshal, probably not aware that the Territory had passed no law enabling the myrmidons of justice to seize suspicious implements and apparatus made main forte, levied, despite due notice, upon what he found appertaining to Mr. Mackenzie, a Bible, a Book of Mormon, and-here was the rub-the copper plates of the Deserét Currency Association. This plunder was deposited for the night with the governor, and was carried in a : * Bogus, according to Mr. Bartlett, who quotes the "Boston Courier" of June 12, 1857, is a Western corruption of Borghese, "a very corrupt individual, who, twenty years ago or more, did a tremendous business in the way of supplying the great West and portions of the Southwest with counterfeit bills and drafts on fictitious banks." The word is now applied in the sense of sham, forged, counterfeit, and so on; there are bogus laws and bogus members; in fact, bogus enters every where. DD sack on the next day to Camp Floyd. Then the anti-Mormons sang Io peans; they had-to use a Western phrase "got the dead wood on Brigham;" letters traced back to officials appeared in the Eastern and other papers, announcing to the public that the Prophet was a detected forger. Presently, the true character of the copper plates appearing, they were generously offered back; but, as trespass had been committed, to say nothing of libel, and as all concerned in the affair were obnoxious men, it was resolved to try law. A civil suit was instituted, and a sum of $1600 was claimed for damage done to the plates by scratching, and for loss of service, which hindered business in the city. The unfortunate marshal, who was probably a "cat's-paw," had "caught a Tartar;" he possessed a house and furniture, a carriage and horses, all of which were attached, and the case of "Brigham Young, sen., vs. P. K. Dotson," ended in a verdict for the plaintiff, viz., value of plates destroyed, $1668; damages, $648 66. The anti-Mormons declared him a martyr; the Mormons, a vicious fool; and sensible Gentiles asserted that he was rightly served for showing evil animus. The case might have ended badly but for the prudence of the governor. Had a descent been made for the purpose of arrest upon the Prophet's house, the consequences would certainly have been serious to the last degree. The cause was tried in the Probate Court, which I have explained to be a Territorial, not a federal court. The Honorable Elias Smith presided, and the arguments for the prosecution and the defense were conducted by the ablest Mormon and anti-Mormon lawyers. I attended the house, and carefully watched the proceedings, to detect, if possible, intimidation or misdirection; every thing was done with even-handed justice. The physical aspect of the court was that which foreign travelers in the Far West delight to describe and ridicule, wholly forgetting that they have seen the same scene much nearer home. His honor sat with his chair tilted back and his boots on the table, exactly as if he had been an Anglo-Indian collector and magistrate, while by a certain contraction and expansion of the dexter corner of his wellclosed mouth I suspected the existence of the quid. The position is queer, but not more so than that of a judge at Westminster sleeping soundly, in the attitude of Pisa's leaning monster, upon the bench. By the justice's side sat the portly figure of Dr. Kay, opposite him the reporters, at other tables the attorneys; the witnesses stood up between the tables, the jury were on the left, and the public, including the governor, was distributed like wallflowers on benches around the room. There is a certain monotony of life in Great Salt Lake City which does not render the subject favorable for description. Moreover, a Moslem gloom, the result of austere morals and manners, of the semi-seclusion of the sex, and, in my case, of a reserve arising toward a stranger who appeared in the train of federal offi cials, hangs over society. There is none of that class which, according to the French author, repose des femmes du monde. We rose early-in America the climate seems to militate against slugabedism and breakfasted at any hour between 6 and 9 A.M. Ensued "business," which seemed to consist principally of correcting one's teeth, and walking about the town, with occasional liquoring up." Dinner was at 1 P.M., announced, not by the normal gong of the Eastern States, which lately so direfully offended a pair of Anglo-Hibernian ears, but by a hand-bell which sounded the pas de charge. Jostling into the long room of the ordinary, we took our seats, and, seizing our forks, proceeded at once to action, after the fashion of Puddingburn House, where, "They who came not the first call, Got no meat till the next meal." Nothing but water was drunk at dinner, except when a gentleman preferred to wash down roast pork with a tumbler of milk; wine in this part of the world is of course dear and bad, and even should the Saints make their own, it can scarcely be cheap on account of the price of labor. Feeding ended with a glass of liquor, not at the bar, because there was hone, but in the privacy of one's chamber, which takes from drinking half its charm. Most wellto-do men found time for a siesta in the early afternoon. There was supper, which in modern English parlance would be called dinner, at 6 P.M., and the evening was easily spent with a friend. One of my favorite places of visiting was the Historian and Recorder's Office, opposite Mr. Brigham Young's block. It contained a small collection of volumes, together with papers, official and private, plans, designs, and other requisites, many of them written in the Deserét alphabet, of which I subjoin a copy. X It is, as will readily be seen, a stereographic modification of Pitman's and other systems. Types have been cast for it, and articles are printed in the newspapers at times; as man, however, prefers two alphabets to one, it will probably share the fate of the "Fonetik Nuz." Sir A. Alison somewhere delivers it as his opinion that the future historian of America will be forced to Europe, where alone his material can be found; so far from this being the case, the reverse is emphatically true: every where in the States, even in the newest, the Historical Society is an institution, and men pride themselves upon laboring for it. At the office I used to meet Mr. George A. Smith, the armor-bearer to the Prophet in the camp of Zion, who boasts of having sown the first seed, built the first saw-mill, and ground the first flour in Southern Utah, whence the nearest settlements, separated by terrible deserts, were distant 200 miles. His companions were Messrs. W. Woodruff, Bishop Bentley, who was preparing for a missionary visit to England, and Wm. Thomas Bullock, an intelligent Mormon, who has had the honor to be soundly abused in Mrs. Ferris's 11th letter. * See next page. The lady's "wicked Welshman"-I suppose she remembered the well-known line anent the sons of the Cymri— Taffy is a Welshman, Taffy is a thief”— is no Cambrian, but an aborigine of Leek, Staffordshire, England, and was from 1838 to 1843 an excise officer in her majesty's In land Revenue; he kindly supplied me with a plan of the city, and other information, for which he has my grateful thanks. At the office, the undying hatred of all things Gentile-federal had reached its climax; every slight offered to the faith by antiMormons is there laid up in lavender, every grievance is carefully recorded. There I heard how, at a general conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, in September, 1851, Perry E. Brocchus, a judge of the Supreme Court, having the design of becoming Territorial delegate to Congress, ascended the rostrum and foully abused their most cherished institution, polygamy.* He was answered with sternness by Mr. Brigham Young, and really, under the circumstances, the Saints behaved very well in not proceeding to voies de faits. Mr. Brocchus, seeing personal danger, left the city in company with Chief Justice L. C. Brandenburg and Mr. Secretary Harris, whom the Mormons very naturally accused of carrying away $24,000, the sum appropriated by Congress for the salary and the mileage of the local Legislature, thus putting a clog upon the wheels of government. I also heard how Judge Drummond, in 1856, began the troubles by falsely reporting to the federal authority that the Mormons were in a state of revolt; that they had burned the public library, and were, in fact, defying the Union-how, bigotry doing its work, the officials at Washington believed the tale without investigation, and sent an army which was ready to renew the scenes of St. Bartholomew and Nauvoo. The federal troops were rather pitied than hated; had they been militia they would have been wiped out; but "wretched Dutchmen, and poor devils of Irishmen," acting under orders, were simply despised. Their fainéantise was contrasted most unfavorably with the fiery Mormon youth that was spoiling for a fight; that could ride, like part of the horse, down places where no trooper dared venture; that picked up a dollar at full gallop, drove off the invaders' cattle, burned wagons, grass, and provisions, offered to lasso the guns, and, when they had taken a prisoner, drank with him and let him go-how Governor Cumming, after his entry, at once certified the untruthfulness of the scandal spread by Judge Drummond, especially that touching the library and archives, and reported that no federal officer had ever been killed or even assaulted by the Saints-how the effects of these misrepresentations have been and still are serious. In 1857, for instance, the mail was cut off, and a large commercial community was left without postal communication for a whole year: the ostensible reason was the troubled state of the Territory; the real cause was the desire of the Post-office Department to keep the advance of the troops dark. The Mormons * On the 5th of April, 1860, the Chamber of Representatives at Washington passed a projected law to repress polygamy by a majority of 149 to 60. Fortunately, the Committee of the Senate had no time to report upon it, and the slave discussion assumed dimensions which buried Mormonism in complete oblivion. |