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

Twelve Mormon Homes, page 023

bellowing quadruped they had just brought in, he rode it round the ring, holding on by its horns, until a favoring toss landed him in the canopied box of the alcalde's family? As we drove on, T. told me of other adventures of Lot's; but I was weary and depressed, and they made little impression on my mind. The scattered settlements hereabout looked poor, and more in the Irish mud-cabin style than those we had passed before; yet the wide, unpaved streets were bordered with cottonwoods, and each house was set in its ample orchard of young fruit-trees, while water flowed through irrigating channels, suggesting the expenditure of much patient toil before the plantations had been successful. Each Mormon settlement has its open central square; in the later ones unfenced, but in the earlier surrounded by a crumb- ling wall of adobe and cobble-stone, the quondam "fort," or "corral," for protection against Indians. In the poorer settle: ments their assemblages for religious or patriotic purposes (with the Mormons convertible terms) are still held in great open sheds, roofed only with woven boughs, called "boweries," which stand in the midst of these central squares. Even now, though lTNo diary references have been found relating to the Lot Smith bull riding epi- sode. However, Smith did acquire a reputation for his extraordinary physical feats during the Utah War in 1857. It was at this time that Kane became well acquainted with Smith. See Norman F. Furniss, The Mol*mon Con@`ct, 1850-1859 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960), especially chapters six and eight. A good biographical sketch of Lot Smith appears in Charles S. Peterson, " `A Mighty Man was Brother Lot'. o A Portrait of Lot Smith-Mormon Frontiersman," Western Historical Qzta~~tedy 1 ( 1970) : 393-4 14.