They were pleased with the Mormons. They would have been pleased with any whites who would not cheat them, nor sell them whiskey, nor whip them for their poor gipsey habits, nor bear themselves indecently toward their women, many of whom among the Pottawatamies, especially those of nearly unmixed French descent, are singularly comely, and some of them educated. But all Indians have something like a sentiment of reverence for the insane, and admire those who sacrifice, without apparent motive, their worldly welfare to the triumph of an idea. They understand the meaning of what they call a great vow, and think it the duty of the right-minded to lighten the votary's penance under it. To this feeling they united the sympathy of fellow-sufferers for those who could talk to them of their own Illinois, and tell the story how from it they also had been ruthlessly expelled.

Their hospitality was sincere, almost delicate. Fanny Le Clerc, the spoiled child of the great brave, Pied Riche, interpreter of the Nation, would have the pale face Miss Devine learn duets with her to the guitar; and the daughter of substantial Joseph La Framboise, the interpreter of the United States,—she died of the fever that summer,—welcomed all the nicest young Mormon Kitties and Lizzies, and Jennies and Susans, to a coffee feast at her father's house, which was probably the best cabin in the river village. They made the Mormons at home, there and elsewhere. Upon all their lands they formally gave them leave to tarry just so long as should suit their own good pleasure.

The affair, of course, furnished material for a solemn council. Under the auspices of an officer of the United States, their chiefs were summoned, in the form befitting great occasions, to meet in the dirty yard of one Mr. P. A. Sarpy's log trading house, at their village. They came in grand toilet, moving in their fantastic attire with so much aplomb and genteel measure, that the stranger found it difficult not to believe them high born gentlemen, attending a costumed ball. Their aristocratically thin legs, of which they displayed fully the usual Indian proportion, aided this illusion. There is something too at all times very Mock-Indian in the theatrical French millinery tie of the Pottawatamie turban; while it is next to impossible for a sober white man, at first sight, to believe that the red, green, black, blue and yellow cosmetics, with which he sees such grave personages so variously dotted, diapered, cancelled and arabesqued, are worn by them in any mood but one of the deepest and most desperate quizzing. From the time of their first squat upon the ground, to the final breaking up of the council circle, they sustained their characters with equal self-possession and address.

I will not take it upon myself to describe their order of ceremonies; indeed, I ought not, since I have never been able to view the habits and customs of our aborigines in any other light than that of a reluctant and sorrowful subject of jest. Besides, in this instance, the displays of pow wow and eloquence were both probably moderated, by the conduct of the entire transaction on temperance principles. I therefore content myself with observing, generally, that the proceedings were such as every way became the grandeur of the parties interested, and the magnitude of the interests involved. When the Red Men had indulged to satiety in tobacco smoke from their peace pipes, and in what they love still better, their peculiar metaphoric rhodomontade, which, beginning with the celestial bodies, and coursing downwards over the grandest sublunary objects, always managed to alight at last on their Grand Father Polk, and the tenderness for him of his affectionate colored children; all the solemn funny fellows present who played the part of Chiefs, signed formal articles of convention with their unpronounceable names.

The renowned chief, Pied Riche—he was surnamed Le Clerc on account of his remarkable scholarship,—then rose, and said:

"My Mormon Brethren,

"The Pottawatamie came sad and tired into this unhealthy Missouri Bottom, not many years back, when he was taken from his beautiful country beyond the Mississippi, which had abundant game and timber and clear water everywhere. Now you are driven away, the same, from your lodges and lands there, and the graves of your people. So we have both suffered. We must help one another, and the Great Spirit will help us both. You are now free to cut and use all the wood you may wish. You can make all your improvements, and live on any part of our actual land not occupied by us. Because one suffers, and does not deserve it, is no reason he shall suffer always: I say. We may live to see all right yet. However, if we do not, our children will.—Bon Jour."

And thus ended the pageant. I give this speech as a morsel of real Indian. It was recited to me after the Treaty by the Pottawatamie orator in French, which language he spoke with elegance. Bon Jour is the French, Indian and English Hail and Farewell of the Pottawatamies.

The other entertainers of the Mormons at this time, the Omahas, or Mahaws, are one of the minor tribes of the Grand Prairie. Their Great Father, the United States, has found it inconvenient to protect so remote a dependency against the overpowering league of the Dahcotahs or Sioux, and has judged it dangerous at the same time to allow them to protect themselves by entering into a confederation with others. Under the pressure of this paternal embarrassment and restraint, it has therefore happened most naturally, that this tribe, once a powerful and valued ally of ours, has been reduced to a band of little more than a hundred families; and these, a few years more, will entirely extinguish. When I was among them, they were so ill-fed, that their protruding high cheek bones gave them the air of a tribe of consumptives. The buffalo had left them, and no good ranges lay within several hundred miles reach. Hardly any other game found cover on their land. What little there was, they were short of ammunition to kill. Their annuity from the United States was trifling. They made next to nothing at thieving. They had planted some corn in their awkward Indian fashion, but through fear of ambush dared not venture out to harvest it. A chief resource for them, the winter previous, had been the spoliation of their neighbors, the Prairie Field Mice.

These interesting little people, more industrious and thrifty than the Mahaws, garner up in the neat little cellars of their underground homes, the small seeds or beans of the wood pea vine, which are black and hard, but quite nutritious. Gathering them one by one, a single Mouse will thus collect as much as half a pint, which before the cold weather sets in, he piles away in a dry and frost proof excavation, cleverly thatched and covered in. The Omaha animal, who, like enough, may have idled during all the season the Mouse was amassing his toilsome treasure, finds this subterranean granary to give out a certain peculiar cavernous vibration when briskly tapped upon above the ground. He wanders about, therefore, striking with a wand in hopeful spots: and as soon as he hears the hollow sound he knows, unearths the little retired capitalist along with his winter's hope. Mouse wakes up from his nap to starve, and Mahaw swallows several relishing mouthfuls.

But the Mouse has his avenger in the powerful Sioux, who wages against his wretched red brother an almost bootless, but exterminating warfare. He robs him of his poor human peltry. One of my friends was offered for sale a Sioux scalp of Omaha, "with grey hair nearly as long as a white horse's tail."

The pauper Omahas were ready to solicit as a favor the residence of white protectors among them. The Mormons harvested and stored away for them their crops of maize; with all their own poverty, they spared them food enough besides, from time to time, to save them from absolutely starving; and their entrenched camp to the north of the Omaha villages, served as a sort of breakwater between them and the destroying rush of the Sioux.

This was the Head Quarters of the Mormon Camps of Israel. The miles of rich prairie enclosed and sowed with the grain they could contrive to spare, and the houses, stacks, and cattle shelters, had the seeming of an entire county, with its people and improvements transplanted there unbroken. On a pretty plateau overlooking the river, they built more than seven hundred houses in a single town, neatly laid out with highways and byways, and fortified with breast-work, stockade and block houses. It had too its place of worship, "Tabernacle of the Congregation," and various large workshops, and mills and factories provided with water power.

They had no camp or settlement of equal size in the Pottawatamie country. There was less to apprehend here from Indian invasion; and the people scattered themselves therefore along the rivers and streams, and in the timber groves, wherever they found inviting localities for farming operations. In this way many of them acquired what have since proved to be valuable pre-emption rights.

Upon the Pottawatamie lands, scattered through the border regions of Missouri and Iowa, in the Sauk and Fox country, a few among the Ioways, among the Poncahs in a great company upon the banks of the L'Eau qui Coule, or Running Water River, and at the Omaha winter quarters;—the Mormons sustained themselves through the heavy winter of 1846-1847. It was the severest of their trials. And if I aimed at rhetorical effect, I would be bound to offer you a minute narrative of its progress, as a sort of climax to my history. But I have, I think, given you enough of the Mormons' sorrows. We are all of us content to sympathise with a certain extent of suffering; but very few can bear the recurring yet scarcely varied narrative of another's distress without something of impatience. The world is full of griefs, and we cannot afford to expend too large a share of our charity, or even our commiseration in a single quarter.

This winter was the turning point of the Mormon fortunes. Those who lived through it were spared to witness the gradual return of better times. And they now liken it to the passing of a dreary night, since which they have watched the coming of a steadily brightening day.

Before the grass growth of 1847, a body of one hundred and forty-three picked men, with seventy wagons, drawn by their best horses, left the Omaha quarters, under the command of the members of the High Council who had wintered there. They carried with them little but seed and farming implements, their aim being to plant spring crops at their ultimate destination. They relied on their rifles to give them food, but rarely left their road in search of game. They made long daily marches, and moved with as much rapidity as possible.

Against the season when ordinary emigration passes the Missouri, they were already through the South Pass; and a couple of short day's travel beyond it, entered upon the more arduous portion of their journey. It lay in earnest through the Rocky Mountains. They turned Fremont's Peak, Long's Peak, the Twins, and other King summits, but had to force their way over other mountains of the rugged Utah Range, sometimes following the stony bed of torrents, the head waters of some of the mightiest rivers of our continent, and sometimes literally cutting their road through heavy and ragged timber. They arrived at the grand basin of the Great Salt Lake, much exhausted, but without losing a man, and in time to plant for a partial autumn harvest.

Another party started after these pioneers, from the Omaha winter quarters, in the summer. They had 566 wagons, and carried large quantities of grain, which they were able to put in the ground before it froze.

The same season also these were joined by a part of the Battalion and other members of the Church, who came eastward from California and the Sandwich Islands. Together, they fortified themselves strongly with sunbrick wall and blockhouses, and living safely through the winter, were able to tend crops that yielded ample provision for the ensuing year.

In 1848, nearly all the remaining members of the Church left the Missouri country in a succession of powerful bands, invigorated and enriched by their abundant harvests there; and that year saw fully established their Commonwealth of the New Covenant, the future State of DESERET.

I may not undertake to describe to you in a single lecture the Geography of Deseret, and its Great Basin. Were I to consider the face of the country, its military position, or its climate and its natural productions; each head, I am confident, would claim more time than you have now to spare me. For Deseret is emphatically a New Country; new in its own characteristic features, newer still in its bringing together within its limits the most inconsistent peculiarities of other countries. I cannot aptly compare it to any. Descend from the mountains, where you have the scenery and climate of Switzerland, to seek the sky of your choice among the many climates of Italy, and you may find, welling out of the same hills, the Freezing Springs of Mexico and the Hot Springs of Iceland, both together coursing their way to the Salt Sea of Palestine in the plain below. The pages of Malte Brun provide me with a less truthful parallel to it than those which describe the happy Valley of Rasselas or the Continent of Balnibarbi.

Let me then press on with my history, during the few minutes that remain for me.

Only two events have occurred to menace seriously the establishment at Deseret: the first threatened to destroy its crops, the other to break it up altogether.

The shores of the Salt Lake are infested by a sort of insect pest, which claims a vile resemblance to the locust of the Syrian Dead Sea. Wingless, dumpy, black, swollen-headed, with bulging eyes in cases like goggles, mounted upon legs of steel wire and clock-spring, and with a general personal appearance that justified the Mormons in comparing him to a cross of the spider on the buffalo, the Deseret cricket comes down from the mountains at a certain season of the year, in voracious and desolating myriads. It was just at this season, that the first crops of the new settlers were in the full glory of their youthful green. The assailants could not be repulsed. The Mormons, after their fashion, prayed and fought, and fought and prayed, but to no purpose. The "Black Philistines" mowed their way even with the ground, leaving it as if touched with an acid or burnt by fire.

But an unlooked for ally came to the rescue. Vast armies of bright birds, before strangers to the valley, hastened across the lake from some unknown quarter, and gorged themselves upon the well fatted enemy. They were snow white, with little heads and clear dark eyes, and little feet, and long wings, that arched in flight "like an angel's." At first the Mormons thought they were new enemies to plague them; but when they found them hostile only to the locusts, they were careful not to molest them in their friendly office, and to this end declared a heavy fine against all who should kill or annoy them with firearms. The gulls soon grew to be tame as the poultry, and the delighted little children learned to call them their pigeons. They disappeared every evening beyond the lake; but, returning with sunrise, continued their welcome visitings till the crickets were all exterminated.

This curious incident recurred the following year, with this variation, that in 1849, the gulls came earlier and saved the wheat crops from all harm whatever.

A severer trial than the visit of the cricket-locusts threatened Deseret in the discovery of the gold of California. It was due to a party of the Mormon battalion recruited on the Missouri, who on their way home, found employment at New Helvetia. They were digging a mill race there, and threw up the gold dust with their shovels. You all know the crazy fever that broke out as soon as this was announced. It infected every one through California. Where the gold was discovered, at Sutter's and around, the standing grain was left uncut; whites, Indians, and mustees, all set them to gathering gold, every other labor forsaken, as if the first comers could rob the casket of all that it contained. The disbanded soldiers came to the valley; they showed their poor companions pieces of the yellow treasure they had gained; and the cry was raised: "To California—To the Gold of Ophir, our brethren have discovered! To California!"

Some of you have perhaps come across the half ironic instruction of the heads of the Church, to the faithful outside the Valley:

"THE TRUE USE OF GOLD is for paving streets, covering houses, and making culinary dishes; and, when the Saints shall have preached the Gospel, raised grain, and built up cities enough, the Lord will open up the way for a supply of gold to the perfect satisfaction of His People. Until then, let them not be over-anxious, for the treasures of the earth are in the Lord's storehouse, and he will open the doors thereof when and where he pleases."—II. Gen. Epistle, 14.

The enlightened virtue of their rulers saved the people and the fortunes of Deseret. A few only went away—and they were asked in kindness never to return. The rest remained to be healthy and happy, to "raise grain and build up cities."

The history of the Mormons has ever since been the unbroken record of the most wonderful prosperity. It has looked, as though the elements of fortune, obedient to a law of natural re-action, were struggling to compensate to them their undue share of suffering. They may be pardoned for deeming it miraculous. But, in truth, the economist accounts for it all, who explains to us the speedy recuperation of cities, laid in ruin by flood, fire and earthquake. During its years of trial, Mormon labor has subsisted on insufficient capital, and under many trials—but it has subsisted, and survives them now, as intelligent and powerful as ever it was at Nauvoo; with this difference, that it has in the meantime been educated to habits of unmatched thrift, energy and endurance, and has been transplanted to a situation where it is in every respect more productive. Moreover, during all the period of their journey, while some have gained by practice in handicraft, and the experience of repeated essays at their various halting-places, the minds of all have been busy framing designs and planning the improvements they have since found opportunity to execute.

The territory of the Mormons is unequalled as a stock-raising country. The finest pastures of Lombardy are not more estimable than those on the east side of the Utah Lake and Jordan River. We find here that cereal anomaly, the Bunch grass. In May, when the other grasses push, this fine plant dries upon its stalk, and becomes a light yellow straw, full of flavor and nourishment. It continues thus, through what are the dry months of the climate, till January, and then starts with a vigorous growth, like that of our own winter wheat in April, which keeps on till the return of another May. Whether as straw or grass, the cattle fatten on it the year round. The numerous little dells and sheltered spots that are found in the mountains, are excellent sheep-walks; it is said that the wool which is grown upon them is of an unusually fine pile and soft texture. Hogs fatten on a succulent bulb or tuber, called the Seacoe, or Seegose Root, which I hope will soon be naturalized with us. It is highly esteemed as a table vegetable by Mormons and Indians, and I remark that they are cultivating it with interest at the French Garden of Plants. The emigrant poultry have taken the best of care of each other, only needing liberty to provide themselves with every other blessing.

The Mormons have also been singularly happy in their Indian relations. They have not made the common mistake of supposing savages insensible to courtesy of demeanor; but, being taught by their religion to regard them all as decayed brethren, have always treated the silly wicked souls with kind-hearted civility. Though their outlay for tobacco, wampum and vermillion has been of the very smallest, yet they have never failed to purchase what goodwill they have wanted.

Hence, it happens, that in their Land of Promise, they are on the best of terms with all the Canaanites and Hittites, and Hivites, and Amorites, and Girgashites, and Perizzites, and Jebusites, within its borders; while they "maintain their cherished relations of amity with the rest of mankind," who, in their case, include a sort of latest remnant of the primaeval primates, called the Root Diggers. The Diggers, who in stature, strength and general personal appearance, may be likened to a society of old negro women, are only to be dreaded for their exceeding ugliness. The tribes that rob and murder in war, and otherwise live more like white men, are however numerous all around them.

Fortunately, upon their marauding expeditions, and in matters that affect their freebooting relations generally, they all obey the great war chief of the tribe called the Utahs, in the heart of whose proper territory the Mormon settlements are comprehended.

If accounts are true, the Utahs are brave fellows. They differ obviously from the deceased nations, to whose estates we have taken it upon ourselves to administer. They ride strong, well-limbed Spanish horses, not ponies; bear well cut rifles, not shot-guns, across their saddle-bows, and are not without some idea of military discipline. They carry their forays far into the Mexican States, laying the inhabitants under contribution, and taking captive persons of condition, whom they hold to ransom. They are, as yet at least, little given to drink; some of them manifest considerable desire to acquire useful knowledge; and they are attached to their own infidel notions of religion, making long journeys to the ancient cities of the Colorado, to worship among the ruined temples there. The Soldan of these red Paynims, too, their great war chief, is not without his knightly graces. According to some of the Mormons, he is the paragon of Indians. His name, translated to diminish its excellence as an exercise in Prosody, is Walker. He is a fine figure of a man, in the prime of life. He excels in various manly exercises, is a crack shot, a rough rider, and a great judge of horse flesh.

He is besides very clever, in our sense of the word. He is a peculiarly eloquent master of the graceful alphabet of pantomime, which stranger tribes employ to communicate with one another. He has picked up some English, and is familiar with Spanish and several Indian tongues. He rather affects the fine gentleman. When it is his pleasure to extend his riding excursions into Mexico, to inflict or threaten outrage, or to receive the instalments of his black mail salary, he will take offence if the poor people there fail to kill their fattest beeves, and adopt other measures to show him obsequious and distinguished attention. He has more than one black-eyed mistress there, according to his own account, to whom he makes love in her own language. His dress is a full suit of the richest broadcloth, generally brown, cut in European fashion, with a shining beaver hat, and fine cambric shirt. To these, he adds his own gaudy Indian trimmings, and in this way contrives, they say, to look superbly, when he rides at the head of his troop, whose richly caparisoned horses, with their embroidered saddles and harness, shine and tinkle as they prance under their weight of gay metal ornaments.

With all his wild cat fierceness, Walker is perfectly velvet-pawed to the Mormons. There is a queer story about his being influenced in their favor, by a dream. It is the fact, that from the first, he has received the Mormon exiles into his kingdom, with a generosity, that in its limited sphere, transcends that of the Grand Monarch to the English Jacobites. He rejoices to give them the information they want about the character of the country under his rule, advises with them as to the advantages of particular localities, and wherever they choose to make their settlements, guarantees them personal safety and immunity from depredation.

From the first, therefore, the Mormons have had little or nothing to do in Deseret, but attend to their mechanical and strictly agricultural pursuits. They have made several successful settlements; the farthest North, at what they term Brownsville, is about forty miles, and the farthest South, in a valley called the Sanpeech, 200 miles, from that first formed. A duplicate of the Lake Tiberias, or Genesareth, empties its waters into the innocent Dead Sea of Deseret, by a fine river, to which the Mormons have given the name—it was impossible to give it any other—of the Western Jordan.

It was on the right bank of this stream, at a choice spot upon a rich table land traversed by a great company of exhaustless streams falling from the highlands, that the Pioneer band of Mormons, coming out of the mountains in the night, pitched their first camp in the Valley, and consecrated the ground. Curiously enough, this very spot proved the most favorable site for their chief settlement, and after exploring the whole country, they have founded on it their city of the New Hierusalem. Its houses are spread to command as much as possible the farms, which are laid out in Wards or Cantons, with a common fence to each Ward. The farms in wheat already cover a space, greater than the District of Columbia, over all of which they have completed the canals, and other arrangements for bountiful irrigation, after the manner of the cultivators of the East. The houses are distributed over an area nearly as great as the City of New York.

They have little thought as yet of luxury in their public buildings. But they will soon have nearly completed a large common public store-house and granary, and a great sized public bath-house. One of the many wonderful thermal springs of the valley, a white sulphur water of the temperature of 102 Fahrenheit, with a head "the thickness of a man's body," they have already brought into the town for this purpose; and all have learned the habit of indulging in it. They have besides a yellow brick meeting-house, 100 feet by 60, in which they gather on Sundays and in the week-day evenings. But this is only a temporary structure. They have reserved a summit level in the heart of the city, for the site of a Temple far superior to that of Nauvoo, which, in the days of their future wealth and power, is to be the landmark of the Basin and goal of future pilgrims.

They mean to seek no other resting-place. After pitching camps enough to exhaust many times over the chapter of names in 33d Numbers, they have at last come to their Promised Land, and, "behold, it is a good land and large, and flowing with milk and honey:" and here again for them, as at Nauvoo, the forge smokes and the anvil rings, and whirring wheels go round; again has returned the merry sport of childhood, and the evening quiet of old age, and again dear house-pet flowers bloom in garden plots round happy homes.

It is to these homes, in the heart of our American Alps, like the holy people of the Grand Saint Bernard, they hold out their welcome to the passing traveller. Some of you have probably seen in the St. Louis papers, the repeated votes of thanks to them of companies of emigrants to California. These are often reduced to great straights after passing Fort Laramie, and turn aside to seek the Salt Lake Colony in pitiable plights of fatigue and destitution. The road, after leaving the Oregon trace, is one of increasing difficulty, and when the last mountain has been crossed, passes along the bottom of a deep Canyon, whose scenery is of an almost terrific gloom. It is a defile that I trust no Mormon Martin Hofer of this Western Tyrol will be called to consecrate to liberty with blood. At every turn the overhanging cliffs threaten to break down upon the little torrent river that has worn its way at their base. Indeed, the narrow ravine is so serrated by this stream, that the road crosses it from one side to the other, something like forty times in the last five miles. At the end of the ravine, the emigrant comes abruptly out of the dark pass into the lighted valley on an even bench or terrace of its upper table land. No wonder if he loses his self-control here. A ravishing panoramic landscape opens out below him, blue, and green, and gold, and pearl; a great sea with hilly islands, rivers, a lake, and broad sheets of grassy plain, all set, as in a silver chased cup, within mountains whose peaks of perpetual snow are burnished by a dazzling sun. It is less these, however, than the foreground of old-country farms, with their stacks and thatchings and stock, and the central city, smoking from its chimneys and swarming with working inhabitants, that tries the men of fatigue broken nerves. The 'Californeys' scream, they sing, they give three cheers, and do not count them, a few have prayed; more swear, some fall on their faces and cry outright. News arrived a few days since from a poor townsman of ours, a journeyman saddler, that used to work up Market street beyond Broad, by name Gillian, who sought the valley, his cattle given out, and himself broken down and half heart-broken:—The recluse Mormons fed and housed him and his party, and he made his way through to the gold diggings with restored health and strength. To Gillian's credit for manhood, should perhaps be cited his own allegation, that he first whistled through his fingers various popular nocturnal, street, circus, and theatre calls; but it is certain that, when my tidings speak of him, which was when he was afterwards hospitably entreated by a Mormon, whom he knew ten years ago as one of our Chester County farmers, he was completely dissolved into something not far from the hysterics, and wept on till the tears ran down his dusty beard.

Several hundred emigrants, in more or less distress, received gratuitous assistance last year from the Mormons.

Their community must go on thriving. They are to be the chief workers and contractors upon "Whitney's Railroad," or whatever scheme is to unite the Atlantic and Pacific by way of the South Pass; and their valley must be its central station. They have already raised a "Perpetual Fund" for "the final fulfilment of the covenant made by the Saints in the Temple at Nauvoo," which "is not to cease till all the poor are brought to the valley." All the poor still lingering behind, will be brought there: so at an early period will the fifty thousand communicants, the Church already numbers in Great Britain, with all the other "increase among the Gentiles." Their place of rendezvous will be upon what were formerly the Pottawatamie lands. The interests of this Stake have been admirably cared for. It now comprises the thriving counties of "Fremont" and "Pottawatamie," in which the Mormons still number a majority of the inhabitants. Their chief town is growing rapidly, already boasting over three thousand inhabitants, with nineteen large merchants' stores, the mail lines and five regular steam packets running to it, and other western evidences of prosperity; besides a fine Music Hall and public buildings, and the printing establishment of a very ably edited newspaper, "The Frontier Guardian."

It is probably the best station on the Missouri for commencing the overland journey to Oregon and California; as travellers can follow directly from it the Mormon road, which, in addition to other advantages, proves to be more salubrious than those to the south of it. Large numbers are expected to arrive at this point from England during the present spring, on their way to the Salt Lake. They will repay their welcome; for every working person gained to the hive of their "Honey State" counts as added wealth. So far, the Mormons write in congratulation, that they have not among them "a single loafer rich or poor, idle gentleman or lazy vagabond." They are no Communists; but their experience has taught them the gain of joint stock to capital, and combination to labor,—perhaps something more, for I remark they have recently made arrangements to "classify their mechanics," which is probably a step in the right direction. They will be successful manufacturers, for their vigorous land-locked industry cannot be tampered with by protection. They have no gold—they have not hunted for it; but they have found wealth of other valuable minerals; rock salt enough to do the curing of the world,—"We'll salt the Union for you," they write, "if you can't preserve it in any other way,"—perhaps coal, excellent ores of iron everywhere. They are near enough, however, to the Californian Sierra, to be the chief quartermasters of its miners; and they will dig their own gold in their unlimited fields of admirably fertile land. I should only invite your incredulity, and the disgust of the Horticultural Society, by giving you certain measurements of mammoth beets, turnips, pumpkins, and garden vegetables, in my possession. In that country where stock thrives care free, where a poor man's 32 potatoes saved can return him 18 bushels, and 2 1/2 bushels of wheat sown yield 350 bushels in a season; or where an average crop of wheat on irrigated lands is 50 bushels to the acre; the farmer's part is hardly to be despised. Certainly it will not be under a continuance of the present prices current of the region,—wheat at $4 the bushel, and flour $12 the hundred, with a ready market.

The recent letters from Deseret interest me in one thing more. They are eloquent in describing the anniversary of the Pioneers' arrival in the Valley. It was the 24th of July, and they have ordained that that day shall be commemorated in future, like our 21st of December, as their Forefather's Day. The noble Walker attended as an invited guest, with two hundred of his best dressed mounted cavaliers, who stacked their guns and took up their places at the ceremonies and banquet, with the quiet precision of soldiers marched to mass. The Great Band was there too, that had helped their humble hymns through all the wanderings of the Wilderness. Through the many trying marches of 1846, through the fierce winter ordeal that followed, and the long journey after over plain and mountain, it had gone unbroken, without the loss of any of its members. As they set out from England, and as they set out from Illinois, so they all came into the valley together, and together sounded the first glad notes of triumph when the Salt Lake City was founded. It was their right to lead the psalm of praise. Anthem, song and dance, all the innocent and thankful frolic of the day owed them its chief zest. "They never were in finer key." The people felt their sorrows ended. FAR WEST, their old settlement in Missouri, and NAUVOO; with their wealth and ease, like "Pithom and Ramses, treasure cities built for Pharaoh," went awhile forgotten. Less than four years had restored them every comfort that they needed. Their entertainment, the contribution of all, I have no doubt was really sumptuous. It was spread on broad buffet tables about 1400 feet in length, at which they took their seats by turns, while they kept them heaped with ornamented delicacies. "Butter of kine, and milk, with fat of lambs, with the fat of kidneys of wheat;" "and the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic, and the remembered fish which we did eat in Egypt freely"—they seem unable to dilate with too much pride upon the show it made.

"To behold the tables," says one, that I quote from literally:

"To behold them filling the Bowery and all adjoining grounds, loaded with all luxuries of the fields and gardens and nearly all the varieties that any vegetable market in the world could produce, and to see the seats around those tables filled and refilled by a people who had been deprived of those luxuries for years by the cruel hand of oppression, and freely offering seats to every stranger within their borders; and this, too, in the Valley of the Mountains, over a thousand miles from civilization, where, two years before, naught was to be found save the wild root of the prairie and the mountain cricket; was a theme of unbounded thanksgiving and praise to the Giver of all Good, as the dawning of a day when the Children of the Kingdom can sit under their own vines and fig-trees, and inhabit their own houses, having none to make them afraid. May the time be hastened when the scattered Israel may partake of such like banquets from the gardens of Joseph!" ^[G]

I have gone over the work I assigned myself when I accepted your Committee's invitation, as fully as I could do without trespassing too largely upon your courteous patience. But I should do wrong to conclude my lecture without declaring in succinct and definite terms, the opinions I have formed and entertain of the Mormon people. The libels, of which they have been made the subject, make this a simple act of justice. Perhaps, too, my opinion, even with those who know me as you do, will better answer its end following after the narrative I have given.

I have spoken to you of a people; whose industry had made them rich, and gathered around them all the comforts, and not a few of the luxuries of refined life; expelled by lawless force into the Wilderness; seeking an untried home far away from the scenes which their previous life had endeared to them; moving onward, destitute, hunger-sickened, and sinking with disease; bearing along with them their wives and children, the aged, and the poor, and the decrepit; renewing daily on their march, the offices of devotion, the ties of family and friendship, and charity; sharing necessities, and braving dangers together, cheerful in the midst of want and trial, and persevering until they triumphed. I have told, or tried to tell you, of men, who when menaced by famine, and in the midst of pestilence, with every energy taxed by the urgency of the hour, were building roads and bridges, laying out villages, and planting cornfields, for the stranger who might come after them, their kinsman only by a common humanity, and peradventure a common suffering,—of men, who have renewed their prosperity in the homes they have founded in the desert,—and who, in their new built city, walled round by mountains like a fortress, are extending pious hospitalities to the destitute emigrants from our frontier lines,—of men who, far removed from the restraints of law, obeyed it from choice, or found in the recesses of their religion, something not inconsistent with human laws, but far more controlling; and who are now soliciting from the government of the United States, not indemnity,—for the appeal would be hopeless, and they know it—not protection, for they now have no need of it,—but that identity of political institutions and that community of laws with the rest of us, which was confessedly their birthright when they were driven beyond our borders.

I said I would give you the opinion I formed of the Mormons: you may deduce it for yourselves from these facts. But I will add that I have not yet heard the single charge against them as a Community, against their habitual purity of life, their integrity of dealing, their toleration of religious differences in opinion, their regard for the laws, or their devotion to the constitutional government under which we live, that I do not from my own observation, or the testimony of others, know to be unfounded.

THE END.

POSTSCRIPT TO THE SECOND EDITION.

So the Mormons have been, as it were, broken and screened by calamity. Their designing leaders have left them to seek fairer fortunes elsewhere. Those that remain of the old rock are the masses, always honest in the main and sincere even in delusion; and their guides are a few tried and trusty men, little initiated in the plotting of synagogues, and more noted for services rendered than bounties received. They are the men whom I saw on the prairie trail, sharing sorrow with the sorrowful, and poverty with the poor;—the chief of them all, a man of rare natural endowment, to whose masterly guidance they are mainly indebted for their present prosperity, driving his own ox-team and carrying his sick child in his arms. ^[H] The fact explains itself, that those only were willing to undertake their fearful pilgrimage of penance, whom a sense of conscientious duty made willing to give up the world for their religion. The Mormons I knew, were all, as far as I could judge, partakers of the sacraments, persons of prayer and faith; and their contentment, their temperance, their heroism, their strivings after the golden age of Christian brotherhood, were but the manifestations of their ever present and engrossing devotional feeling.

I am asked to explain or justify the Mormon Creed:—I will have nothing to do with it. It is enough for me to say, that it does not manifest itself externally by the Pythian ravings or Eleusinian hocus pocus of new religions, nor the pageantry or mumming of those sometime established; that its communicants cultivate no mysteries or double faiths; and that I certainly think they are to be believed in their own exposition of it. They have two books, that are for sale in the shops, called The Book of Mormon and The Book of Doctrine and Covenants, which profess to contain the entire body of their faith. The latter harmless work has its special chapters on Marriage, and on the Right of Property, Religious Toleration, and the Union of Church and State. ^[I] I am not called upon to investigate this subject, so long as any person of a jealous orthodoxy can constitute himself as good an inquisitor, by investing somewhere about one dollar and fifty cents.

Nor shall I go out of my way to discuss the question of the former character of the Mormons. What they were in Illinois, or what some of their predecessors were there, it will not be difficult for those to learn who are curious after the truth: the Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, who as Presiding Judge of the Circuit in which they lived was often called upon to dismiss idle charges against them, is now at Washington, an honored member of the Senate of the United States. His personal testimony I am assured has always vindicated his judicial action.

Some good people who believe the Mormons traduced, ask me how they are to account for the great prevalence of these charges before the expulsion. Interest, and feeling founded on it, is the answer. The value of the property of which the Mormons were dispossessed in Missouri and Illinois is currently estimated at over Twenty Millions of Dollars: an adequate consideration certainly for a good deal of misrepresentation on the part of those who were endeavoring to appropriate it to themselves.

A motive sufficiently analogous explains the active circulation of new calumnies within the last half year. Instead of being broken up forever, as not more than five years ago their foes supposed with reason, their Congregation is gathering in increased numbers, and their application to be admitted as a State into the Union announces their probable restoration to power and influence, and is a cause of corresponding disquiet to the possessors of the properties in Illinois and Missouri from which they have been expelled. These are now the busiest Mormon slanderers. I speak of them with reluctance. They are, the best of them, but interested persons, who circulate calumnies at hearsay, calumnies which began with the original enemies of the Mormons, the felons, that charged with unchastity the wretched women they had ravished—with riot the men whose brothers they had murdered—with community of Property those whom themselves had robbed, whose houses and homes they fired over their heads on the lands from which they drove them. Such wretches lie with the brutal strength of Crime. And the Mormons are far away, and their few friends here are nearly all in humble life, and those public men in the West whose duty it was to do them justice, consent to render themselves parties to the guilt of their constituents by their interested silence.

At all events, was there not something about their religion made their neighbors unable to live with them?—Undoubtedly the industrious chevaliers of the Half Breed Tract, and other like precious neighbors of the Mormons, have in one sense proved this to be the case: perhaps, in the course of their wolf and lamb quarrel, they may have even said so, and before they finally devoured the offenders, complained seriously of the insulting proximity of their good roads, good schools, temperance and moral reform and musical associations, and their good laws not enacted only, but enforced. I understand this to be essentially the ground of complaint of the same marauders against the Swedish Quaker Colony, they have lately broken up in Henry County, above Nauvoo.

With other neighbors the Mormons have no trouble. We have had large numbers of them in Philadelphia, and elsewhere to the East, for now nearly twenty years past, whose good citizenship is no subject of discussion with those who have daily business dealings with them. In England too, they number nearly twice as many adult members as the Baptists in Pennsylvania. Once indeed, when their religion was first preached in that country—it was at the very time their earliest trial before Lynch J., in Missouri, was pending—a charge was laid against them in a manufacturing borough there, that they had made away with an Elizabeth, or Betsey Martin, one of their new converts; and the beginning of a mob entered upon its examination. But to her British Majesty's Government, which holds the old fashioned notions of law and order, it mattered as little if it were the case of Betty Martin a Mormon, as of Betty Martin the Cyprian: a commonplace Government Magistrate decided there should be no mob, and a commonplace legal investigation decided the charge was groundless. The Mormons have therefore been free to preach and sing and pray in the United Kingdom to this hour; and I remark that Evangelic sectaries of my own persuasion there, do battle with them in print on the same terms as with Millerites, Wesleyans, or Seventh, or Every Day Baptists.

It is observed to me with a vile meaning, that I have said little about the Mormon women. I have scarcely alluded to them, because my memories of them are such that I cannot think of their character as a theme for discussion. In one word, it was eminently that which for Americans dignifies the names of mother, wife, and sister. Of the self-denying generosity which went to ennoble the whole people in my eyes, I witnessed among them the brightest illustrations. I have seen the ideal Charity of the statue gallery surpassed by the young Mormon mother, who shared with the stranger's orphan the breast of milk of her own child.

Can charges, which are so commonly and so circumstantially laid, be without any foundation at all?—I know it. Upon my return from the Prairie, I met through the settlements scandalous stories against the President of the Sect, which dated of the precise period when I myself was best acquainted with his self-denying and blameless life. I had an experience no less satisfactory with regard to other falsehoods, some of them the most extravagant and most widely believed. During the sickness I have referred to, I was nursed by a dear lady, well connected in New York and New Jersey, whom I sufficiently name to many, by stating that she was the first cousin of one of our most respected citizens, whose conduct as chief Magistrate of Philadelphia in an excited time won for him our general esteem. In her exile, she found her severest suffering in the belief that her friends in the States looked upon her as irreclaimably outcast. It was one of the first duties I performed on my return, to enlighten them as to her true position, and the character of her exemplary husband; and the knowledge of this fact arrived in time, I believe, to be of comfort to her before she sank under the privation and hardship of the march her frame was too delicate to endure.

15 July, 1850.

THOMAS L. KANE.

Footnotes:

A: Nine children were born the first night the women camped out. "Sugar Creek," Feb. 5.

B: One of the company having a copy of Mme. Cottin's Elizabeth, it was so sought after that some read it from the wagons by moonlight. They were materially sustained, too, by the practice of psalmody, "keeping up the Songs of Zion, and passing along Doxologies from front to rear, when the breath froze on their eyelashes."

C: Rev. Dr. Morton, of Philadelphia.

D: It is certain that there is no sickness among the present inhabitants of this region comparable to that of 1846.

E: This camp was moved by the beginning of October to winter quarters on the river, where also, there was considerable sickness before the cold weather. I am furnished with something over 600 as the number of burials in the graveyard there.

F: I knew of an orphan boy, for instance, who came on by himself at this time a foot, starting with no other provision than his trowser's pocket full of biscuit, given him from a steamboat on the Mississippi.

G: Letter of the Presidency, Great Salt Lake City, Oct. 12, 1849.

H: This was BRIGHAM YOUNG, the choice of the Mormons for Governor of Deseret. As this man, together with HEBER C. KIMBALL and WILLARD RICHARDS, nominees of the same people for the offices of Lieutenant Governor and Secretary, have been singled out as the objects of libel, it is right I should state that I knew them intimately. I found Mr. Kimball a man of singular generosity and purity of character, and Dr. Richards a genial gentleman and pleasant scholar of the most varied attainments: The integrity of all three altogether above question. T. L. K.

I: It may be well, however, to quote from two of these.

SECTION CIX.—ON MARRIAGE.

Marriage should be celebrated with prayer and thanksgiving; and at the solemnization, the persons to be married standing together, the man on the right, and the woman on the left, shall be addressed by the person officiating, as he shall be directed by the Holy Spirit; and if there shall be no legal objections, he shall say, calling each by their names: You both mutually agree to be each other's companion, husband and wife; observing the legal rights belonging to this condition; that is, keeping yourself wholly for each other, and from all others, during your lives. And when they shall have answered "yes," he shall pronounce them "Husband and wife in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and by virtue of the laws of the country, and authority vested in him:" saying, "May God add his blessing, and keep you to fulfil your covenants from henceforth and forever. Amen."

The clerk of every church should keep a record of all marriages solemnized in his branch.

All legal contracts of marriages made before a person is baptised into this church should be held sacred and fulfilled. Inasmuch as this Church of Christ has been reproached with the crime of fornication and polygamy, we declare that we believe, that one man should have one wife, and one woman but one husband, except in cases of death, when either is at liberty to marry again. It is not right to persuade a woman to be baptized contrary to the will of her husband, neither is it lawful to influence her to leave her husband. All children are bound by law to obey their parents; and to influence them to embrace any religious faith, or be baptized, or leave their parents without their consent, is unlawful and unjust. We believe that husband, parents, and masters, who exercise control over their wives, children, and servants, and prevent them from embracing the truth, will have to answer for that sin.

SECTION CX.—ON GOVERNMENTS AND LAWS IN GENERAL.

We believe that governments were instituted of God, for the benefit of man, and that he holds men accountable for their acts in relation to them, either in making laws or administering them for the good and safety of Society. We believe that no government can exist in peace, except such laws are framed, and held inviolate, as will secure to each individual the FREE exercise of CONSCIENCE, the RIGHT and control of PROPERTY, and the protection of life.

We do not believe it just to mingle religious influence with civil government; whereby one religious society is fostered, and another proscribed in its spiritual privileges, and the individual rights of its members as citizens denied. We do not believe that any religious society has authority to try men on the right of property or life, to take from them this world's goods, or put them in jeopardy either of life or limb, neither to inflict any physical punishment upon them: they can only excommunicate them from their society, and withdraw from their fellowship.

We believe that religion is instituted of God, and that men are amenable to him, and to him only, for the exercise of it, unless their religious opinions prompt them to infringe upon the rights and liberties of others. We do not believe that human law has a right to interfere in prescribing rules of worship to bind the consciences of men, nor dictate forms for public or private devotion. We believe that the civil magistrate should restrain crime, but never control conscience; should punish guilt, but never suppress the liberty of the soul.

THE BOOK OF DOCTRINE AND COVENANTS.—Edition printed by John Taylor, at Nauvoo, Illinois, 1844; pp. 440—443.