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Show POLYGAMIA. 91 itors, I exaggerated its beauty. There was first the morning walk in the dry, bracing air, then a plunge in the warm- spring bath, and an indulgence in the luscious Salt Lake peaches, after which the day was devoted to investigating Mormonism. I called upon all the Mormon worthies. First upon Orson Pratt, solitary as the only man of learning in the Church, and that learning singularly one- sided. At once a fa-natic and a mathematician ( unique combination), he has devoted a life-time of labor and sacrifice to perverting the Scripture, in the vain at-tempt to bring back the modern world to the social system of the Asiat-ics, and a worse than Jewish theocracy. At once the poorest, proudest, most learned, and most devoted of the elders, he is also the worst snubbed by Brigham Young, who has often taken a vulgar delight in humbling the man whose culture and scholarship he can not forgive. While he is systematically ignored in the government of the Church, yet when the Tabernacle has an array of Eastern visitors, he is invariably put up to defend the doctrines of Joe Smith and Brigham; and so, while best known to the world of any man in Brigham's kingdom, he is constantly in trouble, and some-times on the ragged edge of starvation. In early life he was a man of action a traveling missionary, eloquent in the cause and full of zeal, a successful preacher, and voluminous writer; now he is a dreaming astronomer, whose head is among the stars. Later I met W. H. Hooper, monogamous delegate in Congress from this polygamous territory, a man for whom I at first entertained some respect, but learned to distrust by reason of his action in regard to the Mountain Meadow murderers. A Marylander of the old type, native of the " eastern shore," first a merchant's clerk and then cap-tain of a Mississippi steamer, he started across the plains in 1850 on a business venture ; but on arriving in Utah found a Mormon wife and an appropriate mission, as the plausible go- between to do Brig-ham's work among Gentile law- makers. It is not possible that a OiiSON PKATT. |