Chapter II: A Far West City

This is a first-person travel memoir in the tradition of 19th-century American frontier observation literature, recounting the narrator's arrival in Salt Lake City in the post-Civil War era (likely the late 1870s). The narrator surveys the city's unusually diverse population: a Mormon majority alongside Jewish merchants, displaced Southerners unable to accept emancipation, frontier cowboys, investors, and a U.S. military garrison maintaining federal authority over a territory that had previously been closed to outsiders. A central thread is the narrator's conscious decision to approach Mormon culture with more fairness than predecessors like humorist Artemus Ward, whose comic caricatures of polygamy and Mormon life had provoked lasting resentment among the Saints. The narrator attends a ward meeting and describes it with a mix of genuine sociological curiosity and mild condescension — noting the spell-bound congregation, the long-winded apostles, and the ordinary human comedy of restless teenagers — while observing that persecution has historically strengthened rather than diminished religious conviction. Distinctively, the text is also a eulogy of sorts for two people the narrator encounters: a dying Artemus Ward glimpsed years earlier in London, and a young Civil War veteran doctor whose wartime wounds are quietly killing him after marriage. The piece blends frontier sociology, religious ethnography, and elegiac personal memory into a portrait of a city at a transitional moment between theocratic isolation and American integration.

Chapter II: A Far West City

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