The Latter Day Saints emigrated to the Salt Lake Valley in 1847 and immediately began to build a self-sustaining inland colony throughout the Great Basin region. As explorers, pioneers and settlers passed through Utah they sent home their thoughts and observations of the Mormon people. The initial impressions seem to be quite favorable, but as time and anti-Mormon agitation in the US and Europe became more severe, overland travelers began to see more sinister overtones in the Mormon’s activities.
Early Reports
Travelers visiting Salt Lake Valley in the 1850s described the Mormons in mostly positive terms. Most travelers saw the Mormons as remarkable pioneers. Samuel Morrison, writing to his brother in1850, said that “the Mormons are an Industrious, intelligent, and an enterprising people…and not the poor miserable set I supposed that they was, but are kind, generous and hospitable to strangers, entirely beyond the Christian people in the states.”[1] Salt Lake City was also a valuable way station on the overland trails.
French naturalist Jules Remy was warned by Surveyor General of Utah David Burr that Remy would find “internal gangrene” rotting the LDS Church. Instead, Remy concluded that “the Mormons are not wicked nor immoral, as they have often been represented to too credulous minds…they have qualities and virtues which recommend them in more ways than one.”[2]
Post-Mountain Meadows Reports
The Utah War and Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857 created a marked shift in the perception of the Mormons. In 1859, newspaper editor Horace Greeley painted a grim picture. He reports that Mormons have “robbed, maimed and even killed persons in this Territory…but that Mormon witnesses, grand jurors, petit jurors and magistrates determinedly screen the guilty.” He blamed the Mormons for fostering devotion to the Church before morality. “I confidently predict that not one Mormon who has killed a Gentile or apostate under a like view of his duty will ever be fairly convicted in this Territory.” He thus advised that the Government build better roads to California and completely avoid Utah.[3]
Count Enrico Besana went far beyond mere dark atmosphere. Writing home to Italy in 1868, he indignantly declared that “Mormons openly renounce the most precious gains of science and philosophy; personal liberty, family life, representative government, a free press, an independent judiciary, and equal justice. They repudiate all of these good forms…and place themselves under a fanatic who is intelligent but coarse and barbarous.”[4] One is forced to wonder which Mormon “openly renounced” the advances of civilization in front of Besana.
Humorist Artemus Ward was so afraid of the Mormons, having written several articles mocking them and their religion, that he hid in his Salt Lake City hotel until a “Mr. Stenhouse relieves me of any anxiety I had felt in regard to having my swan-like throat cut by the Danites.”[5] How he was reassured goes unrecorded.
Much of the first hand reports of Mormons in the 1860s were shaped by the expectations of the writers. They had been informed of Mormon insurrections and Danite plots in the popular press, though both were non existent, and reported accordingly. Expectation does seem to shape our perception of reality.
[1] Samuel C. Morrison, “California Gold Rush Letter of 1850,” [typed manuscript] written at Cold Spring, California, November 15, 1850, Utah Historical Society, MSS A 728 , 4.
[2] Jules Remy and Julius Brenchley, A Journey To Great Salt Lake City (London: 1861), 217.
[3] Horace Greeley, “Horace Greeley’s Views of Mormonism—The Sham of ‘Popular Sovereignty’ in Utah.” Daily Evening Bulletin, (San Francisco), issue 13 (October 22, 1859), 2.
[4] Enrico Besana, “Enrico Besana: The New Road of Iron Will Destroy This Anomaly” in On the Way to Somewhere Else: European Sojerners in the Mormon West 1834-1930 ed. Michael W. Homer (Spokane, Washington: Arthur C. Clark Co., 2006), 122.
[5] Artemus Ward, The Complete Works of Artemus Ward (New York: A.L. Burt Company, 1898), 279-280.
