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Show CHAPTEE VIII. TWO YEARS OF CHANGE. FROM the Golden Gate I returned to Utah and trouble. I had often dealt theoretically with the Mormon courts. I was now to have prac-tical experience of their beautiful uncertainty. Corinne, where I had my legal residence, an exclusively Gentile town, had sprung up suddenly in the center of an old Mormon county. The county judge was one Samuel Smith, husband of six wives, two of whom were his own brother's daughters, sealed to him by Brigham Young, with full knowledge of that relationship. As editor of the only Gentile paper in Utah, I had occasionally commented on this fact with considerable severity ; nevertheless, when summoned to his court as party to a civil suit, I attended with the innate American con-fidence that every body is safe in the shadow of a court- house. The trial was over, and I was just stepping oif the court- house por-tico, when I received a thundering whack in the back of the head which sent me face forward upon the gravel. There was a rush, a sound of curses, and I felt, first a shower of blows upon the head and shoulders, and then one or more persons walking over me with heavy boots. I distinctly heard bones snap somewhere; then there was a void, and next my friends were picking me up and taking stock gen-erally of my condition. My left collar- bone was broken in two places, one of my ribs loosened, my temple badly cut, and about two inches of my scalp torn off, besides being badly hurt myself. We were but nine Gentiles in a Mormon town of twelve hundred people, so there was nothing to be done but haul me over to Corinne, where my wounds were dressed. In one week I was walking about town in pretty good condition, and just a month from the attack was discharged cured, and able to travel. Wonderful as this recovery seems, it is nothing to what I have known to occur in the pure air of the Rocky Mountains. A black-smith living in Montana, located on the stage- road a hundred miles from the nearest surgeon, had his knee shattered by a pistol- shot. He sharpened two bowie- knives, strapped the leg over a bench, and am-putated it half way between the knee and hip- joint, taking up the ( 117) |
