Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries During 1866-7. Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke

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CHAPTER XVI.

       WESTERN EDITORS.

       Table of Contents

      THE attack upon Mormondom has been systematized, and is conducted with military skill, by trench and parallel. The New England papers having called for “facts” whereon to base their homilies, General Connor, of Fenian fame, set up the Union Vedette in Salt Lake City, and publishes on Saturdays a sheet expressly intended for Eastern reading. The mantle of the Sangamo Journal has fallen on the Vedette, and John C. Bennett is effaced by Connor. From this source it is that come the whole of the paragraphs against Brigham and all Mormondom which fill the Eastern papers, and find their way to London. The editor has to fill his paper with peppery leaders, well-spiced telegrams, stinging “facts.” Every week there must be something that can be used and quoted against Brigham. The Eastern remarks upon quotations in turn are quoted at Salt Lake. Under such circumstances, even telegrams can be made to take a flavor. In to-day‘s Vedette we have one from St. Joseph, describing how above one thousand “of these dirty, filthy dupes of the Great Salt Lake iniquity” are now squatting round the packet depot, awaiting transport. Another from Chicago tells us that the seven thousand European Mormons who have this year passed up the Missouri River “are of the lowest and most ignorant classes.” The leader is directed against Mormons in general, and Stenhouse in particular, as editor of one of the Mormon papers, and ex-postmaster of the Territory. He has already had cause to fear the Vedette, as it was through the exertions of its editor that he lost his office. This matter is referred to in the leader of to-day: “When we found our letters scattered about the streets in fragments, we succeeded in getting an honest postmaster appointed in place of the editor of the Telegraph—an organ where even carrots, pumpkins, and potatoes are current funds—directed by a clique of foreign writers, who can hardly speak our language, and who never drew a loyal breath since they came to Utah.” The Mormon tax frauds, and the Mormon police, likewise come in for their share of abuse, and the writer concludes with a pathetic plea against arrest “for quietly indulging in a glass of wine in a private room with a friend.”

      Attacks such as these make one understand the suspiciousness of the Mormon leaders, and the slowness of Stenhouse and his friends to take a joke if it concerns the church. Poor Artemus Ward once wrote to Stenhouse, “If you can‘t take a joke, you‘ll be darned, and you oughter;” but the jest at which he can laugh has wrought no cure. Heber Kimball said to me one day: “They‘re all alike. There was—— came here to write a book, and we thought better of him than of most. I showed him more kindness than I ever showed a man before or since, and then he called me a ‘hoary reprobate.’ I would advise him not to pass this way next time.”

      The suspicion often takes odd shapes. One Sunday morning, at the tabernacle, I remarked that the Prophet‘s daughter, Zina, had on the same dress as she had worn the evening before at the theater, in playing “Mrs. Musket” in the farce of “My Husband‘s Ghost.” It was a black silk gown, with a vandyke flounce of white, impossible to mistake. I pointed it out in joke to a Mormon friend, when he denied my assertion in the most emphatic way, although he could not have known for certain that I was wrong, as he sat next to me in the theater during the whole play.

      The Mormons will talk freely of their own suspiciousness. They say that the coldness with which travelers are usually received at Salt Lake City is the consequence of years of total misrepresentation. They forget that they are arguing in a circle, and that this misrepresentation is itself sometimes the result of their reserve.

      The news and advertisements are even more amusing than the leaders in the Vedette. A paragraph tells us, for instance, that “Mrs. Martha Stewart and Mrs. Robertson, of San Antonio, lately had an impromptu fight with revolvers; Mrs. Stewart was badly winged.” Nor is this the only reference in the paper to shooting by ladies, as another paragraph tells us how a young girl, frightened by a sham ghost, drew on the would-be apparition, and with six barrels shot him twice through the head, and four times “in the region of the heart.” A quotation from the Owyhee Avalanche, speaking of gambling hells, tells us that “one hurdy shebang” in Silver City shipped 8000 dollars as the net proceeds of its July business. “These leeches corral more clear cash than most quartz mills,” remonstrates the editor. “Corral” is the Mexican cattle inclosure; the yard where the team mules are ranched; the kraal of Cape Colony, which, on the plains and the plateau, serves as a fort for men as well as a fold for oxen, and resembles the serai of the East. The word “to corral” means to shut into one of these pens; and thence “to pouch,” “to pocket,” “to bag,” to get well into hand.

      The advertisements are in keeping with the news. “Everything, from a salamander safe to a Limerick fish-hook,” is offered by one firm. “Fifty-three and a half and three and three-quarter thimble-skein Schuttler wagons,” is offered by another. An advertiser bids us “Spike the Guns of Humbug! and Beware of Deleterious Dyes! Refuse to have your Heads Baptized with Liquid Fire!” Another says, “If you want a paper free from entanglements of cliques, and antagonistic to the corrupting evils of factionism, subscribe to the Montana Radiator.” Nothing beats the following: “Butcher‘s dead-shot for bed-bugs! Curls them up as fire does a leaf! Try it, and sleep in peace! Sold by all live druggists.”

      If we turn to the other Salt Lake papers, the Telegraph, an independent Mormon paper, and the Deseret News, the official journal of the church, we find a contrast to the trash of the Vedette. Brigham‘s paper, clearly printed and of a pleasant size, is filled with the best and latest news from the outlying portions of the Territory, and from Europe. The motto on its head is a simple one—“Truth and Liberty;” and twenty-eight columns of solid news are given us. Among the items is an account of a fight upon the Smoky Hill route, which occurred on the day we reached this city, and in which two teamsters—George Hill and Luke West—were killed by the Kiowas and Cheyennes. A loyal Union article from the pen of Albert Carrington, the editor, is followed by one upon the natural advantages of Utah, in which the writer complains that the very men who ridiculed the Mormons for settling in a desert are now declaiming СКАЧАТЬ