1865.] THIRTY WIVES AND SIXTY CHILDREN.

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Their language is good, and their manners graceful. One has a classic face; and another is so pretty that half the young men of the church are in love with her. Afterward, I visited the ward schools of the city. There, the foreheads are narrow and the average intelligence low. Tuition costs from four to ten dollars a quarter. There are no free schools in Utah.

Though Brigham has buried eight sons and two daughters, he has fifty surviving children and several grandchildren. His wives number about thirty; he increases the list by one or two additions yearly. The first and eldest is matronly and well-looking; all the later ones I saw are exceedingly plain and unattractive. Among the present generation of Mormons, the men are far more intelligent and cultivated than the women.

The Gentiles relate many stories at the expense of the leading patriarch of the Saints. He is the grand supreme court of all his people; to him they carry their troubles for relief, and their disagreements for adjustment. It is said that one day a woman went to Brigham for counsel touching some alleged oppression, by an officer of the church. Brigham, like a true politician, assumed to know her; but when it became necessary to record her case, hesitated and said:

'Let me see, sister-I forget your name.'

'My name!' was the indignant reply; 'why, I am your wife!' 'When did I marry you?'

The woman informed the 'president,' who referred to an account book in his desk, and then said:

'Well, I believe you are right. I knew your face was familiar!' The Saints are fraternal. There are no misters or esquires among them. Every body is Brother A, or Sister B.

Twenty miles from the city is the Great Salt Lake, containing seven islands, all of rugged mountains. Though four fresh rivers flow in, it has no visible outlet, and is bitterly salt. At lowest stage, three gallons of its fluid produce one of clear fine salt. Its specific gravity is said to be greater than that of any other known body of water except the Dead Sea. According to Marcy, one hundred parts of Salt Lake water contain, after evaporation, twenty-two and one-half per cent. solid matter; one hundred parts of Dead Sea water, twenty-four and one-half per cent. The Dead

356

GREAT SALT LAKE AND THE DEAD SEA. [1865.

Sea is thirteen hundred feet below the Mediterranean; Salt Lake forty-two hundred feet above the ocean. Both receive fresh water Jordans. Both are so buoyant that one finds it difficult to wade in them, floats with ease, and could hardly drown save by strangulation. Neither has any known outlet. The Dead Sea is said to contain one species of fish. Salt Lake is believed to hold no animal life. The Dead Sea is forty miles by ten; Salt Lake,

forty by one hundred and twenty.

We had a delightful swim in the lake, though the least quantity of its stinging water in nose, eyes or mouth made us very uncomfortable. When we came out we were incrusted with salt from head to foot, and compelled to wash it off with fresh water. Then we took a sail in a little sloop, which we all found enjoy. able except Mr. Colfax, who suffered greatly from sea-sickness. Lake Utah, thirty miles distant, is a clear, shining, mountain-environed body of fresh water, twenty miles by thirty. The silvery Jordan has its origin here, and hence flows across the beautiful valley into Salt Lake.

I frequently attended worship at the Bowery. The congrega tion usually numbered three or four thousand, and women largely predominated. They were neatly but very plainly dressed; kid gloves were few, silks and satins far between. Hoops abounded in all their amplitude. At first, the preachers denounced them bitterly from the pulpit; but, as usual, feminine persistency triumphed, and crinoline proved more potent than the thunderbolts of the church.

Brigham is the favorite speaker, though he does not preach more than once a month. His sermons are insequential and illiterate. Heber C. Kimball first vice-president, second only to Brigham in authority, and the father of fifty children, is very voluble in the pulpit, always profane and frequently obscene in his harangues. Indeed, many sermons from Brigham, Heber and others of that ilk are utterly indecent, though some speakers are entirely deco

rous.

From the Sunday desk preachers frequently speak of the crops, and best modes of irrigation; exhort the brethren to be honest and devout; and advise them whether to sell their wheat forthwith or hold it for an advance. They also read a list of letters for the remote

1865.]

SUNDAY SERVICE OF THE MORMONS.

357

settlements, some, four hundred miles away, that they may be sent by private hand to their destination. The singing, with no instrumental accompaniment except a melodeon, is admirable.

Every Sunday, sacra

ment is administered to the entire assembly, bread being distributed upon metallic plates, and water, instead of wine, from porcelain pitchers. Infants at the breast are all permitted to quaff the water freely. The poor babies are thirsty enough; but it detracts a little from the solemnity of the ceremony.

My chief interest was in the faces of the congregation. Few of the women

are comely; but very few of the countenances impress one as vicious. Nearly all are plain-many extremely so. As we might expect in humble people gathered from every nation, they bear the indelible impress of poverty, hard labor and stinted living. In those faces is little breadth, thought or self-reliant reasoning, but much narrowness, grave sincerity and unreflecting

earnestness.

The ordinary sermons are homilies on industry and frugalitypraises of polygamy, recital of God's peculiar protection to the Mormon church, and bitter denunciation of the Government and people of the United States. With the exception of the political tone and the inevitable labored defense of polygamy, many of the discourses are such as one hears in an average New England or thodox church. Indeed, plurality of wives is the only distinctive feature of their faith and practice. Mormonism is polygamy and polygamy is Mormonism.

The Saints' theater is the grand wonder of Salt Lake City. It was built by Brigham while the town was yet almost a thousand miles from the steamboat or the railway; and it cost a quarter of a million

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BRIGHAM'S GREAT THEATER.

[1865 of dollars. Its walls are of brick and rough stone, covered with stucco. It will seat eighteen hundred persons; and is the largest building of the kind west of New York, except the Chicago opera house. The proscenium is sixty feet deep. In the middle of the parquet is an armed rocking-chair, which Brigham sometimes occupies, though his usual place is one of the two private boxes. It is open three nights in the week, when the parquet is filled by the families of the leading polygamists. The Gentiles sit in the dress circle and galleries. The scenery, painted in Salt Lake City, and the costumes, all made there from goods purchased in the eastern States, are exquisite. The wardrobe is very large and rich, varied enough for the entire standard and minor drama, from the sables of Hamlet to the drapery of the ballet girl. With two exceptions, the company are all amateurs-Mormons, who perform gratuit ously, and with whom it is a labor of love and piety. Playing in 'Box and Cox' or 'Richard the Third' is a novel way of increas ing one's chances of heaven; but Brigham is the church, and they do unquestioningly whatever the church requires.

By day the performers are engaged in their regular pursuits, as clerks or mechanics; and they rehearse only in the evening. Dramatic entertainments have ever been a leading feature of the Mormon faith; and these actors play exceedingly well. In scenery and dressing also, only three or four metropolitan theaters in the United States equal this in the heart of the American desert. The performers are never stagy. Whatever they lack in art they make up in freshness and freedom from the mannerisms, especially the stilted and unnatural readings, of old actors. When a young lady of high dramatic talent presented herself to the veteran Wallack, he gave her a favorable engagement on the express condition that she should not take a single lesson in elocution.

During the season of my second visit, the receipts of Brigham's theater averaged eight hundred dollars per night; and one evening they reached thirteen hundred dollars. Mrs. Julia Dean Cooper was filling a long star engagement at two hundred dollars per night. At first she found the audiences, or as Gail Hamilton would call them, the vidiences, curiously fresh and inexperienced. When she played in 'East Lynne '-—that terrible satire on the hardness and injustice of narrow but conscientious men-the lookers

1865.] DWELLERS AMONG THE MOUNTAIN-TOPS.

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on were moved to sobs; and tears even streamed from the eyes of Brigham, who sat in his private box. But Lady Isabel is perhaps the most pathetic character in the whole range of the legitimate or sensational drama. It is difficult for an old stager to see it well represented, without making what Sam Weller calls 'a water cart of hisself.' 'Camille' produced still greater sensation. During the last scene the audience was

'Like Niobe, all tears.'

One old lady left her seat, passed through the private entrance and rushed upon the stage with a glass of water for the dying girl. Another declared in a voice audible throughout the house:

'It is a shame for President Young to let that poor lady play when she has such a terrible cough!'

Brigham shows unequaled sagacity in strengthening the church and putting money in his purse, by the same operation. He says:

'The people must have amusement; human nature demands it. If healthy and harmless diversions are not attainable, they will seek those which are vicious and degrading.'

Therefore he built this Thespian temple, which spiritually refreshes all the Saints of Utah, and increases his personal income fifty thousand dollars annually.

The Salt Lake valley is walled in by green mountains from four to ten thousand feet high, and of every hue, from the deep, blackish-green of the pines on the foot-hills, to the dazzling white of the snow upon the summits. Many of these peaks, intersected by narrow canyons, are torn and furrowed to their very hearts, and sometimes cleft asunder from head to foot.

Utah, the name of an Indian tribe, signifies 'those who dwell on the mountains.' The Mormons, almost a mile above the sea, in view of some of the finest scenery in the world, are indeed dwellers among the mountain-tops.

The great basin, six hundred miles by three hundred, extending from the Rocky Mountains to the Sierra Nevadas, seems to have been a vast inland sea. Strictly speaking it is a series of basins, of which the one containing Salt Lake is the longest-all dotted and inclosed by isolated peaks and irregular ranges. The imme