At the end of our two days’ sojourn, we left Great Salt Lake
City hearty and well fed and happy—physically superb but not so
very much wiser, as regards the “Mormon question,” than we were
when we arrived, perhaps. We had a deal more “information” than
we had before, of course, but we did not know what portion of it
was reliable and what was not—for it all came from acquaintances
of a day—strangers, strictly speaking. We were told, for
instance, that the dreadful “Mountain Meadows Massacre” was the
work of the Indians entirely, and that the Gentiles had meanly
tried to fasten it upon the Mormons; we were told, likewise, that
the Indians were to blame, partly, and partly the Mormons; and we
were told, likewise, and just as positively, that the Mormons
were almost if not wholly and completely responsible for that
most treacherous and pitiless butchery. We got the story in all
these different shapes, but it was not till several years
afterward that Mrs. Waite’s book, “The Mormon Prophet,” came out
with Judge Cradlebaugh’s trial of the accused parties in it and
revealed the truth that the latter version was the correct one
and that the Mormons were the assassins. All our “information”
had three sides to it, and so I gave up the idea that I could
settle the “Mormon question” in two days. Still I have seen
newspaper correspondents do it in one.
I left Great Salt Lake a good deal confused as to what state
of things existed there—and sometimes even questioning in my own
mind whether a state of things existed there at all or not. But
presently I remembered with a lightening sense of relief that we
had learned two or three trivial things there which we could be
certain of; and so the two days were not wholly lost. For
instance, we had learned that we were at last in a pioneer land,
in absolute and tangible reality.
The high prices charged for trifles were eloquent of high
freights and bewildering distances of freightage. In the east, in
those days, the smallest moneyed denomination was a penny and it
represented the smallest purchasable quantity of any commodity.
West of Cincinnati the smallest coin in use was the silver
five-cent piece and no smaller quantity of an article could be
bought than “five cents’ worth.” In Overland City the lowest coin
appeared to be the ten-cent piece; but in Salt Lake there did not
seem to be any money in circulation smaller than a quarter, or
any smaller quantity purchasable of any commodity than
twenty-five cents’ worth. We had always been used to half dimes
and “five cents’ worth” as the minimum of financial negotiations;
but in Salt Lake if one wanted a cigar, it was a quarter; if he
wanted a chalk pipe, it was a quarter; if he wanted a peach, or a
candle, or a newspaper, or a shave, or a little Gentile whiskey
to rub on his corns to arrest indigestion and keep him from
having the toothache, twenty-five cents was the price, every
time. When we looked at the shot-bag of silver, now and then, we
seemed to be wasting our substance in riotous living, but if we
referred to the expense account we could see that we had not been
doing anything of the kind.
But people easily get reconciled to big money and big prices,
and fond and vain of both—it is a descent to little coins and
cheap prices that is hardest to bear and slowest to take hold
upon one’s toleration. After a month’s acquaintance with the
twenty-five cent minimum, the average human being is ready to
blush every time he thinks of his despicable five-cent days. How
sunburnt with blushes I used to get in gaudy Nevada, every time I
thought of my first financial experience in Salt Lake. It was on
this wise (which is a favorite expression of great authors, and a
very neat one, too, but I never hear anybody say on this wise
when they are talking). A young half-breed with a complexion like
a yellow-jacket asked me if I would have my boots blacked. It was
at the Salt Lake House the morning after we arrived. I said yes,
and he blacked them. Then I handed him a silver five-cent piece,
with the benevolent air of a person who is conferring wealth and
blessedness upon poverty and suffering. The yellow-jacket took it
with what I judged to be suppressed emotion, and laid it
reverently down in the middle of his broad hand. Then he began to
contemplate it, much as a philosopher contemplates a gnat’s ear
in the ample field of his microscope. Several mountaineers,
teamsters, stage-drivers, etc., drew near and dropped into the
tableau and fell to surveying the money with that attractive
indifference to formality which is noticeable in the hardy
pioneer. Presently the yellow-jacket handed the half dime back to
me and told me I ought to keep my money in my pocket-book instead
of in my soul, and then I wouldn’t get it cramped and shriveled
up so!
What a roar of vulgar laughter there was! I destroyed the
mongrel reptile on the spot, but I smiled and smiled all the time
I was detaching his scalp, for the remark he made was good for an
“Injun.”
Yes, we had learned in Salt Lake to be charged great prices
without letting the inward shudder appear on the surface—for
even already we had overheard and noted the tenor of
conversations among drivers, conductors, and hostlers, and
finally among citizens of Salt Lake, until we were well aware
that these superior beings despised “emigrants.” We permitted no
tell-tale shudders and winces in our countenances, for we wanted
to seem pioneers, or Mormons, half-breeds, teamsters,
stage-drivers, Mountain Meadow assassins—anything in the world
that the plains and Utah respected and admired—but we were
wretchedly ashamed of being “emigrants,” and sorry enough that we
had white shirts and could not swear in the presence of ladies
without looking the other way.
And many a time in Nevada, afterwards, we had occasion to
remember with humiliation that we were “emigrants,” and
consequently a low and inferior sort of creatures. Perhaps the
reader has visited Utah, Nevada, or California, even in these
latter days, and while communing with himself upon the sorrowful
banishment of these countries from what he considers “the world,”
has had his wings clipped by finding that he is the one to be
pitied, and that there are entire populations around him ready
and willing to do it for him—yea, who are complacently doing it
for him already, wherever he steps his foot.
Poor thing, they are making fun of his hat; and the cut of his
New York coat; and his conscientiousness about his grammar; and
his feeble profanity; and his consumingly ludicrous ignorance of
ores, shafts, tunnels, and other things which he never saw
before, and never felt enough interest in to read about. And all
the time that he is thinking what a sad fate it is to be exiled
to that far country, that lonely land, the citizens around him
are looking down on him with a blighting compassion because he is
an “emigrant” instead of that proudest and blessedest creature
that exists on all the earth, a “FORTY-NINER.”
The accustomed coach life began again, now, and by midnight it
almost seemed as if we never had been out of our snuggery among
the mail sacks at all. We had made one alteration, however. We
had provided enough bread, boiled ham and hard boiled eggs to
last double the six hundred miles of staging we had still to
do.
And it was comfort in those succeeding days to sit up and
contemplate the majestic panorama of mountains and valleys spread
out below us and eat ham and hard boiled eggs while our spiritual
natures revelled alternately in rainbows, thunderstorms, and
peerless sunsets. Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs. Ham
and eggs, and after these a pipe—an old, rank, delicious
pipe—ham and eggs and scenery, a “down grade,” a flying coach, a
fragrant pipe and a contented heart—these make happiness. It is
what all the ages have struggled for.
