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Show POLYGAMIA. 99 to his body and mind till the war broke out, when lie joined Gilpin's Colorado regiment. With them he marched a thousand miles, and helped drive Sibley out of New Mexico, then returned, and again en-gaged in mining, and finally graduated as an editor, in which capacity he came to Utah. Our first year there saw him enthusiastic, eager for reform, confident that wonders could be done by union and energy. A little later, he married the sister of Vice- president Colfax, took a good office, grew rich and conservative, and concluded that the Utah question was to be slowly worked out rather than quickly fought out. There, too, was Colonel J. H. Wickizer, who for six years regu-lated the mails of Utah, Montana, and Idaho, and provided his Gen-tile friends with an unfailing store of anecdote and apt illustration. He was long a colleague and intimate friend of Abraham Lincoln, rode the circuit with him in Illinois, and contended often with him at the bar. A man of nice and discriminating taste in letters, he was a walking encyclopedia of Western wit, humor, and historic inci-dent. His point of attack was the utter nonsense of Mormonism and its theocratic government; for it is to be noted that all of us thought little and cared less about the religion it was the civil ( or rather un-civil) government we objected to/ Other active participants in our political and social plans were Governor George L. Woods and Secretary Geo. A Black. But the central figure in Utah, during our period of greatest excitement, was Chief Justice James B. McKean. Descended on one side from the Machians of Scotland, and on the other from the French Huguenots that settled on Long Island, he seemed to unite the fearless consci-entiousness of the one race with the tireless energy of the other. A case has been made out against him on the charge that he was rather fanatical in his dislike of polygamy and theocracy; but it was a kind of fanaticism we were sorely in need of in Utah. He and his col-leagues, Justices Hawley and Strickland, were the first Federal judges wyho boldly faced the difficulty presented by the anomalous organization of the district courts. For twenty years the United States judges had for the most part yielded the point, and this yield-ing, threw all the power into the hands of the Mormon bishops, who acted as territorial judges. Judge McKean decided that this ought not to be so; made the United States marshal the ministerial officer of his court; got a grand jury over which the Church had no control, and entered on an inquiry into the many murders committed between 1855 and 1863. The Supreme Court of the United States overruled |