Copyright 1913, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

CHAPTER 18

MANNA FROM THE GOLD-SEEKERS

Brigham turned the faces of his persecuted Saints from Nauvoo towards the western mountains, he did so in the hope of getting beyond the reach of Gentile power to a land where the church-state of Mormonism could grow and thrive in peace. In the same hope, at the same time, a band of Mormons from the eastern states took passage for California by sea. These last arrived after a weary voyage, to find that the republic they had fled from had outpaced their laggard colony. The Mexican war had begun, and so far as California was concerned, had ended; and Commodore Stockton was master of the Golden Gate. It is told that one of the elders of the Mormon colony gave a despairing look at the Stars and Stripes fluttering from Telegraph Hill, and exclaimed in heartfelt affliction:

"There's that damned flag again!"

True or not, this tale sets forth the Mormon viewpoint better than many a learned thesis. The Saints had learned by bitter experience that to develop the theocracy they so greatly prized, they must get beyond the reach of their Gentile countrymen. But by the time this lesson was learned, its application was impossible. Brigham did not find "that damned flag" physically present when he entered the Salt Lake valley, but in essentials it was there. Even while he was toiling through the mud of Iowa and the sands of the Platte, Taylor and Wool and Scott were drawing a new boundary line so distant that Mormon resources were unequal to crossing it. The nation had grown faster than the church could emigrate.

This fact and its implications must be kept in mind when measuring the character and achievements of Brigham Young. Seldom has an ecclesiastical leader played against more consistent ill fortune than he. The Fates seemed conspiring to keep the word of promise to his ear and break it to his hope. A thousand circumstances combined to make easy the gaining of converts to a creed like Mormonism -- but the stars in their courses forbade the effort to weld these converts into an independent theocratic state.

Looking back from this vantage point of time, one sees that nothing but a succession of miracles could have realized the dreams of Joseph and Brigham. Had the church leaders in 1830 been as clear-sighted as Brigham became fifteen years later; had they possessed wide knowledge and vast financial means -- two things which no founder of a new faith ever did possess -- they might have taken the infant church forthwith to the fertile and practically vacant valleys of California. With an unbroken run of luck for the next sixteen years, they might have been able to break away from Mexico without falling into the lap of the United States. Then, if no one had discovered gold in the Sacramento valley, if the Civil War had ended in victory for the Confederacy, if a series of complications had kept the power and ambition of the United States on the Pacific coast nicely balanced by that of England, the successors of Joseph Smith might now be rulers of an independent nation in California.

Not one of these essentials to the success of a church-empire has been present. Yet, today, the successor of Joseph -- and of Brigham -- is in most things an independent and despotic sovereign, a sovereign whose power is growing year by year. He levies and collects taxes. He issues and enforces decrees which have all the effect of laws. He exercises a profound influence on the government within the limits of whose authority he resides, and he believes with a deep and moving faith that his spiritual or physical descendants are destined to overthrow that government and break it in pieces. That so large a measure of church monarchy lives and grows in defiance of historical probability is the work of Brigham Young.

He said on entering the valley: "Now if the Gentiles will let us alone for ten years, I'll ask no odds of them." He needed thirty years, rather than ten; but it soon became clear that he was not to have even the shorter period of grace. The treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo told him that, little as they liked it, the Mormons henceforth must deal with the United States, rather than with Mexico. This necessitated a sharp change of plan. Mexico could be ignored or defied at this distance from the seat of her power; but the United States must be "managed." In the spring of 1849, Brigham took the first direct step toward this management. A convention was called to form a constitution for a new state, which would ask admission to the Union.

That Brigham waited so long before making any move to organize a civil government shows how reluctant he was to abandon his hope of independence. The treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo was signed February 2, 1848. The Salt Lake "convention" met thirteen months later, March 4, 1849. Its deliberations lasted about a week. It drew up a constitution of the usual stock pattern which Americans carried in their heads for a hundred years, till the attempt to engraft a Prussian bureaucracy on our historic government made it necessary to expand the fundamental law of a state to the dimensions of an eighteenth century novel. There was the usual triple division of governmental powers, the usual double-barrelled legislature, the usual bill of rights; though this last was rather more emphatic than common in insisting on religious liberty. Nearly all the Mormons were from the northern states or from Europe; but they restricted suffrage and office-holding to "free white male inhabitants." The name chosen for the new commonwealth was "Deseret"; a word derived from the Book of Mormon. The average Gentile, hearing or seeing this word for the first time, usually supposes that it bears some reference to "desert"; but the orthodox meaning of the term is a honey-bee.

The constitution was presented to the people, and adopted unanimously. It would have received the same support had it been written in Chinese; all the Mormons needed to know was that Brigham Young favoured the document. Next in order was the election of officers. This took place March 12, and six hundred and seventy-four votes were polled -- rather a small number for a community that aspired to call itself a state. Brigham was the choice for governor, and rightly; the existence of the colony depended on him. The organization of the "supreme court" was less consistent. John Taylor, one of the "associate justices," was not yet a citizen of the United States; and in any community with a sense of humor, the nomination of Heber C. Kimball for a legal position would have been treated as a joke. Heber was a capable fellow in many ways; but he knew as much of law as he did of Sanscrit, and cared rather less than he knew. His sole qualification -- an all-sufficient one, however -- was his unquestioning, unreckoning, idolatrous devotion to Brigham Young.

The "legislature" of Deseret was elected later in the season, and its only action that year was to send a delegate to Washington, asking for the admission of Deseret as a state, with an alternative request for formal organization as a territory. Thus began the long-drawn effort of the Mormon church to gain admission to the Union in order to escape the Union's authority. How that application was received will be told in detail later, but its general fate is known to the reader in advance. For forty-six years the church-kingdom was kept cooling its heels in the territorial anteroom of the nation. It was admitted at last only after the church authorities had set their hands to a solemn agreement -- which many of them broke the moment they had received the boon of statehood, and which the church as a church has been breaking ever since.

This, however, was on the knees of the gods; and for the time, Brigham was content to leave it there. He had plenty to occupy his mind without borrowing trouble as to the fate of the petition for statehood. All through the spring and summer, until harvest began, the entire colony was on rations, and very short rations they were. In some families there was an allowance of four ounces of bread per capita per day. Others, who were considered opulent, counted on a half-pound each; but it is doubtful if this latter provision was realized by any one. A little game was killed, roots were dug as before, and the rich grasses of a Utah spring fattened cattle so that beef was fairly abundant, but practically all the grain in the valley had to be reserved for planting. In the spring 1849, corn was quoted at $2 and $3 per bushel, wheat at $4 to $5, and potatoes were rated as high as $20 per bushel. Such figures do not express the true scarcity, for none of these supplies were on the market. But the first load of new barley hauled into the city from the harvest of 1849 sold for $2 per bushel; and this at a time when the purchasing power of money was far greater than today.

Had there been only a local market for their grain, prices would have dropped to a low level immediately after the harvest; for the crop of 1849 was an excellent one. In point of fact, prices rose. The gold rush to California, the most picturesque and unique migration in history, was already streaming through the secluded valley of the Saints.

On January 24, 1848, Thomas Marshall found in the newly dug tail-race of Sutter's mill in the Sacramento valley some yellow particles which proved to be gold. For a time, an effort was made to keep the discovery secret, but the very birds of the air seemed to carry the news. They carried it to a gold-hungry world; and from nearly every part of the world, from Europe, from China, and the islands of the sea, and most of all from the restless hive of the United States, the human current began flowing to the new El Dorado.

Perhaps the nearest parallel to this California emigration is the one movement with which it has never been compared -- the epidemic of pilgrimage to Jerusalem which led to the first Crusade. In each case, an age responded to the call of its master passion by hurling itself bodily toward the land where that passion might be gratified. Each rush was prodigal of heroism, of endurance, of meanness, of suffering, of triumph and despair. Each was the first and truly the last of its kind; each had forerunners, but no models; echoes but no successors. Certainly there is little likeness between the "days of forty-nine," and the adventures of Pizarro and Cortez. The Spaniards found gold and silver in Mexico and Peru. But these precious metals were in pagan hands, and could be applied to Christian uses only after a season of strife with their original but unhallowed owners. In California, nature left her treasure house unlocked, and the world raced headlong to share in the spoil. The gold-diggers of California were the first men of English speech under whose laws the ownership of land depended on its use. It is interesting to note that Brigham had taken the same position in his first sermon in the Salt Lake valley.

The rush for gold in the nineteenth century -- like the race for salvation in the eleventh -- touched all classes and upset all plans. Farmers, sailors, mechanics, lawyers, doctors, clergymen, scholars -- all were present in the parties which hurried toward the sunset, fearful lest the half-mythical metal of which they heard should be gone before they arrived. Some rushed to the nearest port and engaged passage by sea; others turned their possessions into horses or oxen and wagons, and started overland. These had to pass through the valley of the Great Salt Lake.

Mormon writers always have assumed some mysterious merit in the fact that some members of their battalion were working at Sutter's mill when the gold discovery was made. They had as much to do with that event as with the discovery of the planet Neptune; but their presence had large consequences for their distant brethren. Being first on the ground, they had abundant choice of locations, and some of them washed out considerable quantities of gold-dust. Then they set the excited settlement an example it could little appreciate by turning their backs on the " diggings," and joining their families and co-religionists in the Salt Lake valley; of course carrying their newfound riches with them. The first trickle of goldseekers passed through the valley in June, 1849; but found only a half-starved population keeping jealous watch on their fields and herds. By the middle of July the trickle had become a considerable current, and the Mormons were threshing and grinding their new grain, and selling it to the emigrants at famine prices. By August, the emigration was in full tide. The Argonauts, arriving in the valley with jaded teams and impatient hearts, saw the gold brought back by returning members of the Mormon battalion -- and the second and more valuable harvest of the Mormons for that year was on.

A Salt Lake letter to the Frontier Guardian tells a part of the story:

"When they saw the bags and kegs of gold-dust brought in by our boys, it made them completely enthusiastic. Pack mules and horses that were worth $25 in ordinary times would readily bring $200 in the most valuable property at the lowest price. Goods and other property were daily offered at auction in all parts of the city. For a light Yankee wagon, sometimes three or four great heavy ones would be offered in exchange, and a yoke of oxen thrown in at that. Common domestic sheeting sold from five to ten cents per yard by the bolt. The best of spades and shovels for fifty cents each. Vests that cost in St. Louis one dollar and fifty cents each were sold at Salt Lake for thirty-seven and one-half cents. Full chests of joiners' tools that would cost $150 in the east were sold at Salt Lake for $25. Indeed, almost every article, except sugar and coffee, were selling on an average fifty per cent below wholesale prices in the eastern states."

Many of the articles mentioned in this list are not such as emigrants commonly carry. But the first gold rush for California was more than an ordinary emigration. Hundreds of comparatively wealthy men joined in the movement, buying full stocks of merchandise which they thought would be in demand in the new land, and starting to carry these cargoes across the plains. By the time they reached Salt Lake, word came that "state's goods" were arriving in California by sea; and the disappointed speculators sacrificed their stock on the spot. Besides, only the trail can teach men how little they really need. Many things that seemed necessities at the start, even to that simple generation, had become burdensome impediments long before they reached the settlement of the Saints.

The deluge of cheap mercantile stocks was of short duration; but for the rest, the harvest from the emigrants continued for a full three years. It reached its height in 1850. Before grain was cut that year, flour was selling at a dollar a pound in Salt Lake City; and after the harvest it still held at $25 per hundred pounds. Fresh horses and oxen, though of inferior weight and breed, could be traded to the hurrying emigrants for three or four times their number of better but tired cattle that had made the journey across the plains. It became a regular practice in the valley to buy or trade for this jaded stock one year, and sell it back, at four or five times the price, to the next year's band of gold-seekers. As in all lands much frequented by tourists and travellers, there were two prices at Salt Lake, one for natives and one for strangers. Brigham countenanced this, and indeed helped it along by forbidding the emigrants to take unground wheat from the valley; but at the same time, he insisted that men, even Gentiles, must not be turned away hungry from the doors of the Saints. Besides, these prices did not apply to all things. For some unexplained reason, beef remained cheap through the whole period of overland emigration; and Mormon households took Gentile boarders at reasonable rates when the ostensible price of flour was twenty-five cents per pound.

Brigham had too keen a commercial instinct not to appreciate the advantages which this gold rush had brought to his people; but he was wise enough by this time to know that the Fates are apt to wrap a serpent in their gifts. His people were getting supplies which they sadly needed, and were disposing of their surplus grain at undreamed-of profits, but the account was not all on one side of the ledger. They were selling so short that the threat of famine was never far from the settlement. The isolation for which he had hoped was gone; and for the moment, at least, his colony was on one of the world's highways. Then, too, the Saints had begun to get the gold-fever. Men set up fences of colour and caste and creed; but infections, whether mental or physical, leap all barriers; and the Mormons of Salt Lake remembered how Brannan had urged them to come on to California. Why not go now, they asked, and claim our share of the gold before the greedy Gentile world gathers it all?

With any other community -- or under any other leader which this community ever had -- the suction of the gold-fields would have been irresistible. But Brigham knew what he wanted, and he had his people well in hand. He set his face like flint against the gold-craze. "I hope the gold-mines will be no nearer than eight hundred miles!" he declared in one of the scolding sermons which Gentile historians have never been able to understand, but which did more than all fabled "Danite bands" to keep the people in line. "There is more delusion, and the people are more perfectly crazy on this continent than ever before. If you elders of Israel want to go to the gold-mines, go and be damned . . . . I would not give a picayune to keep you from damnation . . . . If the people were united, I would send men to get the gold who would care no more about it than the dust under their feet, and then we would gather millions into the church."

"When the musing spider steps on a red-hot shovel," wrote Mark Twain, "he first exhibits a wild surprise: then he shrivels." Passing Mark's error as to the sex of the average spider, the description may be applied to the Mormons whose desire for the goldfields brought them against the iron purpose and blistering tongue of Brigham. A few of the more venturesome persisted in going, and most of these were cut off from the church. But practically the entire population of the valley remained. Nearest of all settlements to the enchanted land, they contributed least to the gold rush.

But while holding back the Saints from an indiscriminate rush to the gold-fields, Brigham did something which -- more than almost any other event in the history of Mormonism -- shows the mastery of this man over his people, and the implicit, unquestioning obedience on which he could rely in any emergency. A group of young men were selected by Brigham and his apostles to go to California, and dig gold for the church. They went; and what is much more remarkable, they returned. Some of them were highly successful. They washed gold, not for themselves, but for Zion; they sent back to Utah all their "dust" beyond the cost of a frugal subsistence; and they came back themselves at the call of their church-emperor. There are few more noteworthy things in modern religious history than the spectacle of these young men toiling in the placer mines, not for their own advancement, but that their church might have means with which to upbuild her glory.