From Chapter 2: Salt Lake City

BETWEEN the western border of the States on the Atlantic side, and the Pacific States of this great continent, there are vast prairies, dreary and treeless, sand-hills, mud flats, rocky mountains, and rapid rivers. Sixteen hundred and sixty-seven miles of travel from St. Louis, Mo., viâ Council Bluffs City, brings one to the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. A journey through tortuous mountain defiles, crossing creeks with precipitous banks, over roads that terrify even expert Jehus; wearied with a monotony more fatiguing than a sea voyage, any valley would seem lovely, and any respite would be hailed as a paradise. This fact accounts for the joy with which travelers hail the first glimpse of the barren and bare-valleyed home of the Saints. Will the reader make the tour with me?

We have just climbed up a steep, rocky hill. Three or four teams to each wagon have at last dragged them all safely to the summit of the "big mountain." The cattle are panting and puffing and lying down for a rest, while we gaze at a very imposing scene. We are now standing on an eminence of the Wahsatch mountains, over eight thousand feet above the level of the ocean, surrounded by peaks that rise majestically above our heads, and in the deep nooks of which continually glitters the eternal snow; beneath this, fringed and shaded by dark masses of balsam, fir, and pine. Behind us are receding ranges of hills, streams sparkling like silver threads, the trembling foliage of the quaking aspen, and narrow gorges looming like abysses in the distance. Before us, mountains growing lower, till a strip of valley relieves the sight, in the south-west. This is the first glimpse of the Valley of the Great Salt Lake. Mormons fall on their knees and pray; some shout hosannas and hallelujahs; many weep; husbands kiss their wives, and parents their children, in their paroxysm of joy, and the very faithful declare they feel the Spirit of God pervading the very atmosphere, and they enthusiastically declare that all their toils are repaid, for they have at length come home, where the "wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest." Poor people--poor deluded people!

From Chapter 3: Practical Polygamy

The Mormon polygamist has no HOME. Some have their wives lotted off by pairs in small disconnected houses, like a row of out-houses. Some have long low houses, and on taking a new wife build a new room on to them, so that their rooms look like rows of stalls in a cow- barn! Some have but one house and crowd them all together, outraging all decency, and not leaving even an affectation of convenience. Many often remain thus, until some petty strife about division of labor, children's quarrels, difference of taste, or jealousy of attention kindles a flame, only to be smothered by separation. When they live in different houses, they generally have different tables, and the husband has to give each house its turn to cook for him, and honor their tables with his presence in rotation. The evenings at his disposal, his constant distribution of himself among them, has to be by rule. Jealousies the most bitter, reproaches the most galling and disgusting, scenes without number, and acrimony without end, are the inevitable consequences of the slightest partiality. It is impossible for any man to equally love several different women; it is quite possible, however, for him to be equally indifferent about any number. The nature most in unison with his own, will most attract him. The most affectionate will be certainly preferred to the least affectionate. I am acquainted with scores of polygamists, and they all have favorites, and show partiality. To feel partiality and not to exhibit it, is unnatural. To exhibit it, and for it to pass unnoticed by a jealous women, is impossible. For it is to be noticed, is for it to be reproached.

The Mormon polygamist, therefore, has to maintain a constant guard over himself. Any husband might feel to kiss his wife gladly: to go round a table and kiss half a dozen, is no joke. It is so in every thing with him. With a dozen eyes to notice at what time he retires to rest, or arises on any one occasion, and half a dozen mouths to talk about it, he must be perfectly governed by rule. Every look, every word, every action has to be weighed, or else there is jealousy, vituperation, quarreling, bitterness. For this reason, the idea of obtaining domestic felicity is ridiculed. Brigham is the model, and he to some extent adopts the dogma of the Quietists, "Repose is the only perfect happiness." He acts as though he felt, and wished others to feel, that man was the frigid master, performing every act of kindness, not as springing from his heart, but because he had reasoned it out, to be an act of duty. Warmth of feelings, tenderness of attachment, devotedness of attention to a woman, is there called, by that worst of Mormon epithets, "Gentilish." "Man must value his wife no more than any thing else he has got committed to him, and be ready to give her up at any time the Lord calls him," said Brigham one Sunday afternoon; and J. M. Grant followed the remark by saying, " If God, through his prophet, wants to give my women to any more worthy man than I am, there they are on the altar of sacrifice; he can have them, and do what he pleases with them!"

They carry this same coldness of affection into all their connubial relations. Brigham always sleeps by himself, in a little chamber behind his office. I have heard the leading men publicly advocate the adoption of this practice. They quote the animals as an argument in favor of polygamy, and adopt their instincts as models for practice. Marriage is stripped of every sentiment that makes it holy, innocent, and pure. With them it is nothing more than the means of obtaining families; and children are only desired as a means of increasing glory in the next world; for they believe that every man will reign over his children, who will constitute his "kingdom;" and, therefore, the more children, the more glory! Said Brigham, September 20th, 1856, speaking on this subject:

"It is the duty of every righteous man and every woman to prepare tabernacles for all the spirits they can; hence if my women leave, I will go and search up others who will abide the celestial law, and let all I now have go where they please; though I will send the gospel to them." �Desert News October 1, 1856.

Marriage, consequently, is only an addition to man's monster selfishness. Not only do they admit, but they even advocate openly, that salvation is altogether a selfish matter; and Lorenzo Snow, an Apostle (!) publicly contended that "God was the most intensely selfish being in existence." To sacrifice one's self, to the most trivial extent, for a wife, is therefore esteemed as beneath manly dignity. To love home, or seek to make it your rest and heaven, is called "squeamishness;" and men bedin your ears to "take another wife, and that will cure you," and they are right. The first effect of polygamy on the Mormons was to force them to deny the doctrine, and disavow their families. For many years after they practiced it, did the leading men indignantly deny it. Its next effect was to make them heartless. It first made them liars, and then brutes!

"If it does not increase their happiness, and it certainly does their care and expense, why practice it?" Mormonism teaches that all salvation is material; that men's positions here determine their stations hereafter, and as a man can only rule over his family, then, no wife, no family; many wives, much family, much family, much glory; therefore, many wives, much glory, and as the selfish desire for glory is the only incentive of Mormon action, so, therefore, he tries to get as many wives as he can. They quote Paul's words, "Woman is the glory of man," and argue, the more women, the more glory; no women, no glory at all! Full of this thought, I have seen old men with white hair and wrinkled faces, go hunting after young girls, deceiving them with all sorts of professions and promises, using the terrors of Brigham's name and threatening the penalty of excommunication and consequent perdition, in order to induce them to marry them, and then to leave them, despoiled and degraded, either to the obloquy of a divorce, or to the incurable sorrows of a grieved and a wrung heart. I could mention the names of a dozen such, who ought to be thinking of God and their graves, who instead, visit arriving trains and pester the girls with all the ardor and far more impudence than the young men.