Mr. Street was very busy with his telegraphic matters—and
considering that he had eight or nine hundred miles of rugged,
snowy, uninhabited mountains, and waterless, treeless, melancholy
deserts to traverse with his wire, it was natural and needful
that he should be as busy as possible. He could not go
comfortably along and cut his poles by the road-side, either, but
they had to be hauled by ox teams across those exhausting
deserts—and it was two days’ journey from water to water, in one
or two of them. Mr. Street’s contract was a vast work, every way
one looked at it; and yet to comprehend what the vague words
“eight hundred miles of rugged mountains and dismal deserts”
mean, one must go over the ground in person—pen and ink
descriptions cannot convey the dreary reality to the reader. And
after all, Mr. S.’s mightiest difficulty turned out to be one
which he had never taken into the account at all. Unto Mormons he
had sub-let the hardest and heaviest half of his great
undertaking, and all of a sudden they concluded that they were
going to make little or nothing, and so they tranquilly threw
their poles overboard in mountain or desert, just as it happened
when they took the notion, and drove home and went about their
customary business! They were under written contract to Mr.
Street, but they did not care anything for that. They said they
would “admire” to see a “Gentile” force a Mormon to fulfil a
losing contract in Utah! And they made themselves very merry over
the matter. Street said—for it was he that told us these
things:
“I was in dismay. I was under heavy bonds to complete my
contract in a given time, and this disaster looked very much like
ruin. It was an astounding thing; it was such a wholly
unlooked-for difficulty, that I was entirely nonplussed. I am a
business man—have always been a business man—do not know
anything but business—and so you can imagine how like being
struck by lightning it was to find myself in a country where
written contracts were worthless!—that main security, that
sheet-anchor, that absolute necessity, of business. My
confidence left me. There was no use in making new
contracts—that was plain. I talked with first one prominent
citizen and then another. They all sympathized with me, first
rate, but they did not know how to help me. But at last a Gentile
said, ‘Go to Brigham Young!—these small fry cannot do you any
good.’ I did not think much of the idea, for if the law could not
help me, what could an individual do who had not even anything to
do with either making the laws or executing them? He might be a
very good patriarch of a church and preacher in its tabernacle,
but something sterner than religion and moral suasion was needed
to handle a hundred refractory, half-civilized sub-contractors.
But what was a man to do? I thought if Mr. Young could not do
anything else, he might probably be able to give me some advice
and a valuable hint or two, and so I went straight to him and
laid the whole case before him. He said very little, but he
showed strong interest all the way through. He examined all the
papers in detail, and whenever there seemed anything like a
hitch, either in the papers or my statement, he would go back and
take up the thread and follow it patiently out to an intelligent
and satisfactory result. Then he made a list of the contractors’
names. Finally he said:
"‘Mr. Street, this is all perfectly plain. These contracts are
strictly and legally drawn, and are duly signed and certified.
These men manifestly entered into them with their eyes open. I
see no fault or flaw anywhere.’
“Then Mr. Young turned to a man waiting at the other end of
the room and said: ‘Take this list of names to So-and-so, and
tell him to have these men here at such-and-such an hour.’
“They were there, to the minute. So was I. Mr. Young asked
them a number of questions, and their answers made my statement
good. Then he said to them:
"‘You signed these contracts and assumed these obligations of
your own free will and accord?’
"‘Yes.’
"‘Then carry them out to the letter, if it makes paupers of
you! Go!’
“And they did go, too! They are strung across the deserts now,
working like bees. And I never hear a word out of them.
“There is a batch of governors, and judges, and other
officials here, shipped from Washington, and they maintain the
semblance of a republican form of government—but the petrified
truth is that Utah is an absolute monarchy and Brigham Young is
king!”
Mr. Street was a fine man, and I believe his story. I knew him
well during several years afterward in San Francisco.
Our stay in Salt Lake City amounted to only two days, and
therefore we had no time to make the customary inquisition into
the workings of polygamy and get up the usual statistics and
deductions preparatory to calling the attention of the nation at
large once more to the matter.
I had the will to do it. With the gushing self-sufficiency of
youth I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great
reform here—until I saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched. My
heart was wiser than my head. It warmed toward these poor,
ungainly and pathetically “homely” creatures, and as I turned to
hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, “No—the man that
marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which
entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh
censure—and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed
of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should
stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.”
[For a brief sketch of Mormon history, and the noted Mountain
Meadow massacre, see Appendices A and B. ]
