Defense of the Faith and the Saints. B. H. Roberts

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СКАЧАТЬ official organ of the Mormon priesthood, expressing great satisfaction on the appearance of the aforesaid article. But what's to be done? Men of intelligence come to Utah; they are cosmopolitan, they understand human affairs and human nature; and many of them—among them evidently your representative, whose article is the cause of "M's" displeasure—are men accustomed to collecting evidence, sifting it on the spot, and forming their own conclusions. They find that the facts they see and investigate do not warrant the misrepresentations they have heard concerning Mormonism and the Mormons. They say that in their communications to the press, in magazine articles, and sometimes in books. They are honest enough to tell the truth as they find it; and refuse to look at facts—the things which are—through the jaundiced eyes of a bigoted sectarian priest, or through the eyes of a disappointed, and very likely disgruntled, scurvy politician. Then they are abused by those to whose interests it is to keep up a false impression concerning Mormonism and the Mormons, or whose malice is gratified by misrepresenting them. Then it is charged that they have been imposed upon by representations of "the wily Mormon leaders;" or they have been "wined and dined," and hoodwinked; or else they have sold their talents to the Mormon "priesthood for money." Only let a man, whatever his intelligence or character, or national standing, from President Eliot of Harvard to your representative—only let him pursue his investigations of Mormonism and Mormons beyond the lurid tales of hack drivers, bent on gratifying the morbid love in human nature for the unusual and the horrible; or let him push his inquiry beyond sectarian interpretation of the Mormon faith, and sectarian misrepresentation of the Mormon people, and he is doomed to be catalogued as a weak dupe, or a paid agent of the Mormon Church.

      But however annoying it may be to Mormon traducers, the day is gone by when their fulminations can be accepted as sober truth. Mormonism is no longer isolated from the world. It is in daily contact with the great stream of travel which crosses the continent, in which stream is to be found some of the first and greatest characters of our own country and of the world; not merely the seekers of pleasure, or the restless curious; but educators, literati, public lecturers, editors, scientists, and statesmen. Attracted by the wonderful things they have heard of Utah and the Mormons, they stop to inquire, they meet with unexpected conditions, with facts undreamed of, they investigate, are convinced that the world has been misled in the impressions it has formed concerning the Mormon faith and the Mormon people; and thus they become witnesses against the traducers of that maligned people. Our traducers may not like this, but it is true. They have made lies their refuge, and under falsehood have they hid themselves; but their bed is shorter than that a man can stretch himself on it, and the covering narrower than that he can wrap himself in it. This much in general. Now to be more specific; and especially to cover in the evidence I quote the silly attempt of your Salt Lake correspondent "M" to deny credit to the Mormons for having redeemed a desert and given a wilderness to civilization.

      Your correspondent refers to the credit accorded the Mormons for this as "an old chestnut" which has been laid on the shelf years ago here in the West, because there is no truth in it! "There never was any barren desert," he says, "in this valley, for it has always been one of the best watered, most easily cultivated and productive valleys west of the Mississippi!" It is rather an unfortunate circumstance that a man who claims to have been a careful student of Mormonism and who has lived for over twenty-five years in Utah, should include in his criticism of the Journal's representative's article an untruth so palpable, a falsehood so easy of refutation, a statement which so bluntly comes in contact with the common knowledge of all the people of the United States. How the Salt Lake Valley was regarded by the pioneers who came into it in 1847 may be learned from the following quotation from their utterances:

      "My mother was heart-broken because there were no trees to be seen. I do not remember a tree that could be called a tree." Statement of Clara Decker Young, one of the women of the first pioneer company. (Bancroft's History of Utah, page 261.)

      "The ground was so dry that they found it necessary to irrigate it before plowing, some plows having been broken." (Ibid.)

      Their first impressions of the valley, Lorenzo Young says, were most disheartening. But for the two or three cottonwood trees, not a green thing was in sight. And Brigham speaks almost pathetically of the destruction of the willows and wild roses growing on the banks of City Creek, destroyed because the channels must be changed, and leaving nothing to vary the scenery but rugged mountains, the sage brush and the sunflower. The ground was covered with millions of black crickets which the Indians were harvesting for their winter food. (Ibid, page 262.)

      "When we arrived in this valley we found it a barren desert, and a barren desert it was. We saw no mark of the white man. We found a few naked Indians who would eat a pint of roasted crickets for their dinner." (Statement of Wilford Woodruff, "Utah Pioneers," page 24.)

      The late Apostle Erastus Snow, who, with Orson Pratt, was the first man of the pioneers to enter the valley, in a discourse during the celebration of the thirty-third anniversary of the entrance of the pioneers into the Salt Lake valley, says:

      "And when the Pioneers found it [this valley], it was well nigh purified by the lapse of time and the desolation of ages, and the wickedness of its ancient inhabitants was well nigh obliterated, though the curse of barrenness and desolation still existed. I remarked yesterday, on looking at the decorations of this building, that to make the work complete that part which so truthfully represents this desert land in 1847, the sagebrush and the other growth of the desert should be sprinkled with black crickets, and, perched in some prominent position, some gulls looking down eagerly upon them; which would remind us of those early days when the Pioneers and early settlers grappled with the difficulties of the desert land; when the untamed savage was scarcely an enemy or a hindrance in our pathway compared with the destructive winged insects, the crickets and grasshoppers which would come in myriads to devour the tender crops. For the first two seasons it seemed as though the crickets and grasshoppers would consume every green thing, and after they had commenced their depredations to such an extent that to all human appearance the last vestige of the products of the field and garden would be eaten up, large flocks of gulls came to the relief of the farmer, lighting down upon the fields and covering them as with a white sheet, and they fell to devouring the insects. When they had filled and gorged their stomachs, they would vomit them up and then fill themselves again, and again vomit, and thus they ate and devoured until the fields were cleared of those destructive insects, and the crops saved. * * * * Many doubted, as to whether we could subsist our colonies in this country at all, and whether grain would mature. James Bridger, the well-known mountaineer, who had inter-married with the Snakes [Indians], and had a trading post which still bears his name, Fort Bridger, when he met President Brigham Young at the Pioneer camp on the Big Sandy, about the last of June, and learned our destination to be the valley of the Great Salt Lake, he gave us a general outline and description of this country over which he had roamed with the Indians in his hunting and trapping excursions, and expressed grave doubts whether corn could be produced at all in these mountains, he having made experiments in many places with a few seeds, which had failed to mature. So sanguine was he that it could not be done that he proffered to give a thousand dollars for the first ear of corn raised in the valley of the Great Salt Lake, or the valley of the Utah outlet, as he termed it, meaning the valley between Utah lake and Salt Lake. President Young replied to him, 'Wait a little and we will show you.'" (The Utah Pioneers, pages 41–43.)

      Nor is the fact of Salt Lake valley's desolation witnessed by the testimony of Mormons alone. Howard Stansbury, Captain of the Corps of Topographical Engineers, U.S. Army, in 1852, says:

      "One of the most unpleasant characteristics of the whole country, is the entire absence of trees from the landscape. The weary traveller plods along, exposed to the full blaze of one eternal sunshine, day after day, and week after week, his eye resting upon naught but interminable plains, bold and naked hills, or bold and rugged mountains; the shady grove, the babbling brook, the dense and solemn forest are things unknown here; and should he by chance light upon some solitary cotton-wood, or pitch his tent amid some stunted willows, the opportunity is hailed with joy, as one of unusual good fortune. The studding, therefore, of this beautiful city [referring СКАЧАТЬ