Twelve Mormon Homes : Twelve Mormon homes visited in succession on a journey through Utah to Arizona.

Twelve Mormon Homes, page 012

remarked to a guest, who was still lingering in the parlor, upon the extreme beauty of the scene; and she detained me until she could narrate me a "nice story" to associate with it when I returned to my moonlit rooms. She said that in the early days of the settlement, her brother- in-law, Charles Decker, came there by appointment to "trade" with the great Ute chief Wah-ker or Wakarra. Wah-ker was the terror of the country, in his day, having undisputed range over the region : from Utah through Arizona, into California. It pleased his highness to declare that the Great Spirit had ordered him to be friends with the Mormons. To prove his friendship, he brought them property for sale, which he could not dispose of to other purchasers. His Utes would often take infant captives from the weaker Indian tribes, who were heavy stock upon their hands: and these, Wah-ker would, with a mock-sober pretence of generosity, insist upon the Mormons buying. When Wah-ker announced that he was coming with his band to trade, the Mormons hastened to buy what they must and get rid of their dangerous friend; as in a neighborless country-house the women hasten to buy, from the boisterous drunken peddler, wares enough to relieve them of his presence. The Mormons were not allowed to buy Indian children for slaues. Believing them to be Lamanites, fellow-descendants of Israel ("Those are the ten tribes, which were carried away pris- oners out of their own land in the time of Osea, the king; whom Shalmaneser, the king of Assyria, led away captive. And he car- ried them over the waters, and so came they into another land. They took this counsel among themselves, that they would leave the multitude of the heathen, and go forth into a further coun- 12