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Show UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY unsteady territorial judge, who had become involved in several bitter conflicts with the saints. Drummond had recently left the main Utah settlements for the Carson Valley in present-day Nevada, where he began to write anti-Mormon dispatches as well as a legal opinion that challenged the way Mor mons were using Utah’s probate courts. Another of Drummond’s public-press letters would appear under the like-sounding name of “Verastus.”53 Drummond liked Latin names. He used them when naming his children, one of whom was called “Veritas,” or something like it. He had apparently chosen a pen name as sort of an insider’s game to hint at his real identity.54 Veritas claimed to be writing from Utah and said he possessed the most serious inside information. He suggested that the “diabolical” rituals of the Mormon endowment rivaled those of the Greeks’ sensual Temple of Ceres and said the endowment bound the saints together in blood-oaths to avenge the murder of Joseph Smith. He also said that Utahns had stolen the Green River ferries from mountain men and that the church, working behind the scenes, had prevented the felony convictions during the Gunnison massacre trial. Veritas pointed out that Brigham Young was currently building a large home for his “sixty spirituals (formerly called concubines),” which meant that the American government, by paying Young’s governor’s salary, was subsidizing his corruption. Drummond’s charges were meant to put a stop to Utah’s statehood proposals and to make sure that Douglas’s doctrine of “popular sovereignty” would never have a place in the territory. “Now. . . [Utahns] ask you to admit them [as a new state] and thus legalize their system,” the letter concluded. “May I not hope the American people will pause and reflect before taking such a step—one which would dim the luster of our national greatness; which would bring with it present disgrace and future infamy—a step which time with its finger of scorn would point at as the blackest page in our history.”55 In addition to the incendiary, over-the-top public letters making their way east, a dozen additional letters are known to have been sent to various offices of the government, and this number probably did not represent the half of it.56 Several complaints had to do with the territorial post office, as territorial officers claimed that their mail was being regularly opened. Young strongly denied the charge, although copies of some letters ended up in Young’s office files.57 Surveyor-General David H. Burr reported that 53 MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, 120. Communication of William MacKinnon to author, June 2012. 55 “The Political Secrets of Mormonism,” May 30, 1856, published in New York Tribune, August 7, 1856. 56 MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, 56-60. 57 Brigham Young to Bernhisel, February 4, 1858,Young Correspondence. “I know nothing of it [opening the non-Mormon mail], “and care less,”Young wrote. “Hence treat this [rumor] like thousands of other attempts to fasten upon this people guilt and crime, we pass it by unnoticed. We could not afford to keep a standing army of clerks to refute such idle tales.” For letters in Young’s files, see MacKinnon, At Sword’s Point, 53, 58. 54 124 |
