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Show GUILTY OR NOT GUILTY? 529 in their journey from Council Bluffs to Salt Lake; was the guest of Brigham Young; acted as their mediator in 1858, and has been their apologist to the Government ever since. He first saw them in their extreme misery, after their expulsion from Nauvoo, and his sympa-thies were powerfully excited in their behalf. He gave his views of them in a fascinating lecture, delivered before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, March 26, 1850, and that lecture has probably cov-ered more crimes and done more harm than any ever delivered in America. Assuredly, Colonel Kane was benevolent and sympathetic ; but it is equally certain that his sympathy overbalanced his judgment. The value of his testimony may be judged from a few facts. He gave his solemn assurance that the Saints were a law- abiding people ; that they were rigid moralists in all that pertained to the relations of the sexes ; that all the charges made against them, including polygamy, were false and scandalous, and made with a view of getting their prop-erty. At the very time these words were written, and when Colonel Kane was a guest in his tent, Brigham was the husband of four wives! I am personally Acquainted with dozens of men and women who were born in polygamy at the very time Colonel Kane was with the Saints, proving that polygamy had no existence ! The Saints were denying the practice then ; they now avow its existence since 1843, and laugh at the Gentiles for having been deceived. Between 1843 and 1852 they put on record fourteen sworn or printed denials of the existence of polygamy ; since 1852 they have denied their own denials, and now claim that polygamy was an established institution among them three years before they left Illinois. Colonel Kane speaks as if it were little short of blasphemy to doubt the high character of Mormon women ; and in the postscript to the second edition he insists that the Mormons, as he knew them, had " a general correctness of deportment and purity of character above the average of ordinary communities." And yet in that same camp were men having mother and daughters as " wives;" one woman who had left her husband in Boston to follow Brigham, and another who had got a divorce from Dr. Seely, of Nauvoo, to become Brigham's " second!" Oscar Young, oldest son of Brigham's third or fourth " wife," was born near the Missouri River about the time Colonel Kane was reporting to the President that no polygamy existed among the Saints ; and the perpetrator now acknowledges four murders committed near there, while the Colonel was indorsing the law- abiding Mormons! A little further on the Colonel recites with amazement that gulls were unknown in Utah, till the Mormons needed them to eat the crickets which were devouring |
