{"collection":"mor","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/mor/tfd/chap07.htm","path":"mor/tfd/chap07.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/mor/tfd/chap07.htm","text":"\"It were a journey like the path to Heaven,\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 To help you find them.\"\nMilton\nIT was the midsummer of 1876, when I was invited to take a long distance drive \nthrough these Mormon settlements, with a missionary.\nHe was not a Mormon missionary, however, but a representative of an orthodox Protestant \ndenomination; several such religious bodies were seeking a foothold for school and \nchurch in this territory.\nIn a certain sense we were doing scout duty for a Mission Board in New York City. \nAs Moses of old sent spies into the land on the other side of Jordan of Scripture, \nso this Board sent its representatives to spy out this Promised Land, not from Dan \nto Beersheba, but from Ogden to Mount Pleasant.\nWe were almost boys in spirit, and not far removed in years, so this task appealed \nto us as a sort of adventure mixed with duty imposed.\nWe did not go afoot but drove a one-horse wagonette having for its load two dozen \nschool desks and seats for an incipient academy of elementary grade. The hope for \nthe educational up-lift of a miseducated Utah.\nThis to some, in these now liberal days, may seem a bigoted endeavor and a youthful \nassumption of a capacity to instruct others; but it, nevertheless, was the outcome \nof the wise and weighty council of older men who accepted our offer as adventurers \nin this Pioneer Mission in San Pete Valley.\nIt was not then given us to see the long, hard grind of work and duty to establish \nthis educational plant, so we went cheerfully south, like sailors shipping for a \ndistant port.\nThe pull for one lone horse, of these seats for future scholars, to say nothing \nof a box of heavy books, was unfair when we came to see the sand-ridges in our way \non the roads over the valley divides. It was get out and push behind while the horse \npanted in front.\nIf we had been better horse-jockeys, we would have insisted on a team when we left \nthe city; but our commercial and theoretical well-wishers and providers, in their \nscholarly incapacity as mountain travellers, insisted that one horse was ample.\nWell, we crawled along, and whiled away the time with some healthy and also some \nunhealthy discussions of religious questions in comparative theology. We were like \nmost of the young men, quick to discuss deep problems, and rushed in with our logic \non subjects where \"Angels feared to tread.\"\nBoth warmed in body from our cart-pushings, and in mind from our arguments, we passed \nthe heat of the day and the divide of land, so that at the sunset we saw no longer \nthe Salt Lake to the north, but the sea of fresh water to the south; Lake Utah colored \nby the last rays of light.\nMy companion was a Mac, one of the numerous Macs, whose forebears came from Scotland, \nand he lived up to his clan as \"Varra creetical\" in discussions. Now it is very \nhard to overcome a Scot in argument and so I had the worst of it just then. My companion \nwore a thin smile of victory and conceit at his superior intellectual prowess, more \nespecially as he prided himself on the possession, not only of a B.A. and B.D., \nbut an M.A. degree, whereas I had not quite finished college life when I had to \nmix with the world.\nBut I had rubbed edges with that world; had been tutored by city stock-brokers and \nhad been\na photographer, when a man had to be not only an artist but a chemist, to ply his \ntrade; all this before I received my teaching degree. So I had my companion when \nit came to business things, and pushed him hard to the wall over this \"scrub horse\" \nthat he had been tricked into by a trader; and the awful load that his ignorance \nof teaming had put into the wagonette for so long a drive.\nCrossing a creek about twelve miles on our way, the strain was too much for the \nharness and \"crack\" went one of the tugs.\nHere I gave my chum a little verbal rub on the unwisdom of cheap harnesses. I rubbed \nit farther in during the hour we spent in mending the leather with old rope; as \nI informed him that no Western man ever travelled far without a coil of buckskin \nto meet such disasters as had overtaken us. He learned a great deal about the sorrows \nof a tenderfoot before he was through with the trip, and his harness, often repaired, \nresembled some of those rare bargains offered to the green-hand in junk stores.\nThe point of the mountain, seen all day from our Salt Lake City start, ended our \nup-grade pull, and now down-grade we went to our first stopping place. We were high \nenough to overlook the Jordan river, flowing well within its banks; for this Utah \nJordan never overflows them to swell its waters like its Palestinian brother-river. \nWe could see the haze over the Great Lake north, and the forming film of vapor over \nthe smaller lake south of us, where Lehi and American Fork, two Mormon settlements, \nshowed up their dry streets and the green fields adjacent.\n\"Well, Mac! do we camp when we reach the borders of that lake?\" I asked, fully supposing \nthat he wanted to do the correct thing and sleep under the sky.\n\"We'll not need to camp. We will make Lehi soon, and there's a chance for a room \nfor us, and a corral for the horse.\"\n\"Any hotels in these towns?\" I asked, for he had been this way before by road.\n\"None: but I know a Mormon family. The elder will take in travellers, if he likes \ntheir looks, and they don't catch him too much unawares.\" We carried a camp outfit, \nbut did not wish to trench on our supplies, if possible, so early in the journey. \nThe tired horse, that had done wonders from any point of view, but was dubbed a \nlazy brute by Mac, pulled us slowly into the distant town, and along its adobe-lined \nstreets.\n\"That is a long-drawn-out one?\" I said, pointing to a low-built house of sun-dried \nbrick, \"five doors and five windows all in a line.\"\n\"Yes,\" said Mac, \"that is an indication of plural marriage. Each door and window \nis in a separate section. The patriarch, who lives there, has five wives.\"\nAt last we stopped before a house. Our tired horse sighed as though his heart would \nbreak with relief. But we were to face disappointment.\n\"No room for travellers this night,\" said the elder when Mac accosted him. I saw \nby the man's eye that he disapproved of us and our errand, although he looked with \npity on our tired horse. He pointed south.\n\"You can make American Fork in three miles.\"\nIt happened that we entered this new town in the right place for us. A rather larger \nadobe than usual, was lighted up and the owner agreed to shelter us for the night \nby our paying a good stiff fee.\nI gave the horse a good feed and rubbed him down before I went in to wash and eat.\nOur host was a hearty old man, and one of the early converts from Wales. He had \nprospered in lands and goods, and was loud in his praise of this practical religion. \nI cannot say much for his table manner; for he ate with dirty hands, and used them \ntwice to break up lumps of sugar in the bowl. The table-ware was primitive, indeed, \nbut the cloth was clean and the meal well cooked by his energetic daughter.\n\"Sugar was a very scarce article in my early days here, and I don't like to see \nit wasted.\"\nHe was a widower, but no polygamist. He was a sample of the earnest, but ignorant \npeasant class of the old world who had greatly improved their material welfare by \nthis change of country and faith.\nMac met a horse trader at the table, and I was highly entertained by their efforts \nto make a swap. The trader's animal was a little worse blown than Mac's, but after \nall he was not the easy mark that he was supposed to be, and he kept his horse.\nWe pulled out the next morning somewhat refreshed but hauling the same full load. \nWe passed over dry creeks, sand ridges, and through the town of Battle Creek; the \nsite of an early fight; through Provo, the county seat, to Spring-ville, the most \nprogressive of all these valley settlements.\nA knife-edged lofty ridge, Mount Aspinwall, overlooked us all the way on the east, \nwhile the lake glittered in the sun, six miles distant on the west. Down the canyons \nof this range at times the winds swept with sudden blasts, and crossing the lake, \nchurned its waters into a fury. The breezes were refreshing since they blew across \nthe road and not along it. We saw many pretty spots of green, such as fields of \nwheat, nearly ripe, alfalfa patches of emerald hue and thrifty peach and prune orchards. \nWe carried off, from one farm a bale of alfalfa, and a generous sample of early \nfruit.\nJust one year later, I rode through this region on a long horseback journey, and \nall the green was gone although it was yet early summer. The locusts were in the \nland. They had come in such clouds as to darken the day, and with such hearty appetites \nthat even the bark on the orchard trees was consumed before they left. Their hatching \nground was in mountainous Idaho, on the north, and periodically they passed out, \nleaving destruction in their track. Even a piece of green-straw matting hung on \na fence to air and dry, went down their ready throats.\nWhile in Springville, we prospected for a site in the interests of a liberal school. \nWe had been invited to do so by some of the local men of influence. There was a \ndesire for something new in this progressive town at that time, and it bore fruit \nthree years later in a well built brick edifice for school and mission work. It \nwas later known as the Hungerford Academy, under the auspices of the Presbyterian \nMission Board. It was put in charge of George Washington Leonard, an ex-staff officer \nof the Union Army.\nOf course we conferred with the so-called liberal element. In most of these settlements \nthere were to be found a number of disaffected people. Some were so because they \nhad been treated domineeringly by the church authorities, who ruled the civic as \nwell as the religious interests of these valley towns; others because they had changed \ntheir views, with their increase of knowledge of the world at large, due to their \ncontact with the new and non-Mormon elements filtering in to the population of the \nterritory; still others because of business interests which carried them outside \nof the commerce of the co-operative stores to deal with mining men and mining machinery.\nIn the old hortatory days, when the Mormon preachers painted every gentile with \na coat of black, they gave a false idea of the outside world, which these business \nmen now found to be untrue, for the gentile was not as black as he had been painted.\nA natural reaction set in, and a friendliness for the new-comers sprang up, and \nwe found a few men, but no women, who desired an established opposition to the dominant \nchurch; in order to check its power and to give a spice of life in the business \nworld in place of the old-time autonomy and monotony.","title":"Chapter VII: A Long Ride Through Utah Valley","type":"page"}