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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ would not pay: “Utah is no place for the loafer or the lazy man.” An official report, like the Court Circular of England, is headed, “President Brigham Young‘s trip North,” and is signed by G. D. Watt, “Reporter” to the church. The Old Testament is not spared. “From what we saw of the timbered mountains,” writes one reporter, “we had no despondency of Israel ever failing for material to build up, beautify, and adorn pleasant habitations in that part of Zion.” A theatrical criticism is not wanting, and the church actors come in for “praise all round.” In another part of the paper are telegraphic reports from the captains of the seven immigrant trains not yet come in, giving their position, and details of the number of days’ march for which they have provisions still in hand. One reports “thirty-eight head of cattle stolen;” another, “a good deal of mountain fever;” but, on the whole, the telegrams look well. The editor, speaking of the two English visitors now in the city, says: “We greet them to our mountain habitation, and bid them welcome to our orchard; and that‘s considerable for an editor, especially if he has plural responsibilities to look after.” Bishop Harrington reports from American Fork that everybody is thriving there, and “doing as the Mormon creed directs—minding their own business.” “That‘s good, bishop,” says the editor. The “Passenger List of the 2d Ox-train, Captain J. D. Holladay,” is given at length; about half the immigrants come with wife and family, very many with five or six children. From Liverpool, the chief office for Europe, comes a gazette of “Releases and Appointments,” signed “Brigham Young, Jun., President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the British Isles and Adjacent Countries,” accompanied by a dispatch, in which the “President for England” gives details of his visits to the Saints in Norway, and of his conversations with the United States minister at St. Petersburg.

      The Telegraph, like its editor, is practical, and does not deal in extract. All the sheet, with the exception of a few columns, is taken up with business advertisements; but these are not the least amusing part of the paper. A gigantic figure of a man in high boots and felt hat, standing on a ladder and pasting up Messrs. Eldredge and Clawson‘s dry-goods advertisement, occupies nearly half the back page. Mr. Birch informs “parties hauling wheat from San Pete County” that his mill at Fort Birch “is now running, and is protected by a stone-wall fortification, and is situate at the mouth of Salt Canyon, just above Nephi City, Juab County, on the direct road to Pahranagat.” A view of the fort, with posterns, parapets, embrasures, and a giant flag, heads the advertisement. The cuts are not always so cheerful: one far-western paper fills three-quarters of its front page with an engraving of a coffin. The editorial columns contain calls to the “brethren with teams” to aid the immigrants, an account of a “rather mixed case” of “double divorce” (Gentile), and of a prosecution of a man “for violation of the seventh commandment.” A Mormon police report is headed, “One drunk at the calaboose.” Defending himself against charges of “directing bishops” and “steadying the ark,” the editor calls on the bishops to shorten their sermons: “we may get a crack for this, but we can‘t help it; we like variety, life, and short meetings.” In a paragraph about his visitors, our friend, the editor of the Telegraph, said, a day or two after our arrival in the city: “If a stranger can escape the strychnine clique for three days after arrival, he is forever afterward safe. Generally the first twenty-four hours are sufficient to prostrate even the very robust.” In a few words of regret at a change in the Denver newspaper staff, our editor says: “However, a couple of sentences indicate that George has no intention of abandoning the tripod. That‘s right: keep at it, my boy; misery likes company.”

      The day after we reached Denver, the Gazette, commenting on this same “George,” said: “Captain West has left the Rocky Mountains News office. We are not surprised, as we could never see how any respectable, decent gentleman like George could get along with Governor Evans‘s paid hireling and whelp who edits that delectable sheet.” Of the two papers which exist in every town in the Union, each is always at work attempting to “use up” the other. I have seen the Democratic print of Chicago call its Republican opponent “a radical, disunion, disreputable, bankrupt, emasculated evening newspaper concern of this city”—a string of terms by the side of which even Western utterances pale.

      A paragraph headed “The Millennium” tells us that the editors of the Telegraph and Deseret News were seen yesterday afternoon walking together toward the Twentieth Ward. Another paragraph records the ill success of an expedition against Indians who had been “raiding” down in “Dixie,” or South Utah. A general order, signed “Lieut.-General Daniel H. Wells,” and dated “headquarters Nauvoo Legion,” directs the assembly, for a three days’ “big drill,” of the forces of the various military districts of the Territory. The name of “Territorial Militia,” under which alone the United States can permit the existence of the legion, is carefully omitted. This is not the only warlike advertisement in the paper: fourteen cases of Ballard rifles are offered in exchange for cattle; and other firms offer tents and side-arms to their friends. Amusements are not forgotten: a cricket match between two Mormon settlements in Cache County is recorded: “Wellsville whipping Brigham City with six wickets to go down;” and is followed by an article in which the First President may have had a hand, pointing out that the Salt Lake Theater is going to be the greatest of theaters, and that the favor of its audience is a passport beyond Wallack‘s, and equal to Drury Lane or the Haymarket. In sharp contrast to these signs of present prosperity, the First Presidency announce the annual gathering of the surviving members of Zion‘s camp, the association of the first immigrant band.

      There is about the Mormon papers much that tells of long settlement and prosperity. When I showed Stenhouse the Denver Gazette of our second day in that town, he said: “Well, Telegraph‘s better than that!” The Denver sheet is a literary curiosity of the first order. Printed on chocolate-colored paper, in ink of a not much darker hue, it is in parts illegible—to the reader‘s regret, for what we were able to make out was good enough to make us wish for more.

      The difference between the Mormon and Gentile papers is strongly marked in the advertisements. The Denver Gazette is filled with puffs of quacks and whisky shops. In the column headed “Business Cards,” Dr. Ermerins announces that he may be consulted by his patients in the “French, German, and English” tongues. Lower down we have the card of “Dr. Treat, Eclectic Physician and Surgeon,” which is preceded by an advertisement of “sulkies made to order,” and followed by a leaded heading, “Know thy Destiny; Madame Thornton, the English Astrologist and Psychometrician, has located herself at Hudson, New York; by the aid of an instrument of intense power, known as the Psychomotrope, she guarantees to produce a lifelike picture of the future husband or wife of the applicant.” There is a strange turning toward the supernatural among this people. Astrology is openly professed as a science throughout the United States; the success of spiritualism is amazing. The most sensible men are not exempt from the weakness: the dupes of the astrologers are not the uneducated Irish; they are the strong-minded, half-educated Western men, shrewd and keen in trade, brave in war, material and cold in faith, it would be supposed, but credulous to folly, as we know, when personal revelation, the supernaturalism of the present day, is set before them in the crudest and least attractive forms. A little lower, “Charley Eyser” and “Gus Fogus” advertise their bars. The latter announces “Lager Beer at only 10 cents,” in a “cool retreat,” “fitted up with green-growing trees.” A returned warrior heads his announcement, in huge capitals, “Back Home Again, An Old Hand at the Bellows, the Soldier Blacksmith:—S. M. Logan.” In a country where weights and measures are rather a matter of practice than of law, Mr. O‘Connell does well to add to “Lager beer 15 cents,” “Glasses hold Two Bushels.” John Morris, of the “Little Giant” or “Theater Saloon,” asks us to “call and see him;” while his rivals of the “Progressive Saloon” offer the “finest liquors that the East can command.” Morris Sigi, whose “lager is pronounced A No. 1 by all who have used it,” bids us “give him a fair trial, and satisfy ourselves as to the false reports in circulation.” Daniel Marsh, dealer in “breech-loading guns and revolvers,” adds, “and anything that may be wanted, from a cradle to a coffin, both inclusive, made to order. An Indian Lodge on view, for СКАЧАТЬ