OCR Text |
Show A STARTLING INTERVIEW. 309 of his guilt, though I could, and can now, see extenuating circum-stances. John D. Lee was a born fanatic. Of good size and physical frame, with light hair, fiery blue eye, gross composition and warm red blood, he was also a sensualist. His high but narrow forehead, his education first as an intense sectarian, accustomed to destroy the spirit of Scripture by twisting the letter; then as a Mormon made him a thorough casuist; so thorough that he deceived himself first of all. The man who deliberately refuses to look at the doubtful points in his religion, from that hour ceases to be intellectually honest. Thence, by successive steps, he often convinces himself that any thing is right which helps his church, and compounds for gross indulgence in one direction by religious zeal in another. Mormonism aggra-vated all of Lee's faults ; it gave free rein to his all- engrossing lust, and spurred his savage temper on to deeds of blood. In Ohio he would have been a sour Puritan, compounding for little tricks in trade or big fits of passion, " by austerity in religion and extreme decorum. In Utah he became what I have described. As said by a Mormon elder, later an apostate, who had known him long and well: " John D. Lee is a man who would divide his last biscuit with the traveler upon the desert, and cut that traveler's throat the next hour if Brigham Young said so." Independence Day, 1872, I celebrated by a ride of thirty- five miles. Bidding the Lees good- bye at an early hour, I slowly ascended the winding trail which leads to the great plateau between the Colorado and the Wasatch. Here this plateau runs to a narrow point, there being but little more than room for a wagon between the cliff on one side and the river gorge on the other. Here, at the head of the long cafion, the Powell party had their rendezvous; they were now in Kanab for a midsummer's rest, but their boats were moored here. From the bridle path I looked straight down the river, which ap-peared to soon loose itself between red battlements. On both sides rose the water- worn walls, for two thousand feet nearly perpendicular, the lines on every foot of their faces showing the successive points at which the water had stood during all the countless thousands of years in which it slowly fashioned this passage for itself. When it ran in a shallow channel along the present summit, all the Colorado Basin was a region of lakes and marshes, with here and there an island of firm earth, covered by dense forests, and rich in matted grasses and flowers. Then the mist from this inland sea washed the western base of Pike's Peak, and the Colorado descended by a series of cascades, through a fall of four thousand feet, into the head of the Gulf of California. |