was glorified with the setting sun, and the most stupendous panorama of
mountain peaks yet encountered burst on our sight. We looked out upon
this sublime spectacle from under the arch of a brilliant rainbow! Even
the overland stage-driver stopped his horses and gazed!
Half an hour or an hour later, we changed horses, and took supper with a
Mormon “Destroying Angel.”
“Destroying Angels,” as I understand it, are Latter-Day Saints who are
set apart by the Church to conduct permanent disappearances of obnoxious
citizens. I had heard a deal about these Mormon Destroying Angels and
the dark and bloody deeds they had done, and when I entered this one’s
house I had my shudder all ready. But alas for all our romances, he was
nothing but a loud, profane, offensive, old blackguard! He was murderous
enough, possibly, to fill the bill of a Destroyer, but would you have any
kind of an Angel devoid of dignity? Could you abide an Angel in an
unclean shirt and no suspenders? Could you respect an Angel with a
horse-laugh and a swagger like a buccaneer?
There were other blackguards present–comrades of this one. And there
was one person that looked like a gentleman–Heber C. Kimball’s son, tall
and well made, and thirty years old, perhaps. A lot of slatternly women
flitted hither and thither in a hurry, with coffee-pots, plates of bread,
and other appurtenances to supper, and these were said to be the wives of
the Angel–or some of them, at least. And of course they were; for if
they had been hired “help” they would not have let an angel from above
storm and swear at them as he did, let alone one from the place this one
hailed from.
This was our first experience of the western “peculiar institution,” and
it was not very prepossessing. We did not tarry long to observe it, but
hurried on to the home of the Latter-Day Saints, the stronghold of the
prophets, the capital of the only absolute monarch in America–Great Salt
Lake City. As the night closed in we took sanctuary in the Salt Lake
House and unpacked our baggage.
CHAPTER XIII.
We had a fine supper, of the freshest meats and fowls and vegetables–a
great variety and as great abundance. We walked about the streets some,
afterward, and glanced in at shops and stores; and there was fascination
in surreptitiously staring at every creature we took to be a Mormon.
This was fairy-land to us, to all intents and purposes–a land of
enchantment, and goblins, and awful mystery. We felt a curiosity to ask
every child how many mothers it had, and if it could tell them apart; and
we experienced a thrill every time a dwelling-house door opened and shut
as we passed, disclosing a glimpse of human heads and backs and
shoulders–for we so longed to have a good satisfying look at a Mormon
family in all its comprehensive ampleness, disposed in the customary
concentric rings of its home circle.
By and by the Acting Governor of the Territory introduced us to other
“Gentiles,” and we spent a sociable hour with them. “Gentiles” are
people who are not Mormons. Our fellow-passenger, Bemis, took care of
himself, during this part of the evening, and did not make an
overpowering success of it, either, for he came into our room in the
hotel about eleven o’clock, full of cheerfulness, and talking loosely,
disjointedly and indiscriminately, and every now and then tugging out a
ragged word by the roots that had more hiccups than syllables in it.
This, together with his hanging his coat on the floor on one side of a
chair, and his vest on the floor on the other side, and piling his pants
on the floor just in front of the same chair, and then comtemplating the
general result with superstitious awe, and finally pronouncing it “too
many for him” and going to bed with his boots on, led us to fear that
something he had eaten had not agreed with him.
But we knew afterward that it was something he had been drinking. It was
the exclusively Mormon refresher, “valley tan.”
Valley tan (or, at least, one form of valley tan) is a kind of whisky,