CHAPTER 14 | The Writings of Mark Twain (beta)

Explanatory Notes Ⓔ
See Headnote

Apparatus Notes Ⓐ
See Headnotes

CHAPTER 14

[begin page 94]

CHAPTER 14

Mr. Street Ⓐemendation was very busy with his telegraphic matters—and considering that he had eight or nine hundred miles of rugged, snowy, uninhabited mountains, and waterless, treeless, melancholy deserts to traverse with his wireⒺexplanatory note, it was natural and needful that he should be as busy as possible. He could not go comfortably along and cut his poles by the roadsideⒶemendation, either, but they had to be hauled by ox teams across those exhausting deserts—and it was two days’ journey from water to water, in one or two of them. Mr. Street’s contract was a vast work, every way one looked at it; and yet to comprehend what the vague words “eight hundred miles of rugged mountains and dismal deserts” mean, one must go over the ground in person—pen and ink descriptions cannot convey the dreary reality to the reader. And after all, Mr. S.’s mightiest difficulty turned out to be one which he had never taken into the account at all. Unto Mormons he had sub-let the hardest and heaviest half of his great undertaking, and all of a sudden they concluded that they were going to make little or nothing, and so they tranquilly threw their poles overboard in mountain or desert, just as it happened when they took the notion, and drove home and went about their customary business! They were under written contract to Mr. Street, but they did not care anything for that. They said they would “admire” to see a “Gentile” force a Mormon to fulfil a losing contract in Utah! And they made themselves very merry over the matter. Street said—for it was he that told us these things:

“I was in dismay. I was under heavy bonds to complete my contract in a given time, and this disaster looked very much like ruin. [begin page 95] It was an astounding thing; it was such a wholly unlooked-for difficulty, that I was entirely nonplussed. I am a business man—have always been a business man—do not know anything but business—and so you can imagine how like being struck by lightning it was to find myself in a country where written contracts were worthless!—that main security, that sheet-anchor, that absolute necessity, of business. My confidence left me. There was no use in making new contracts—that was plain. I talked with first one prominent citizen and then another. They all sympathized with me, first rate, but they did not know how to help me. But at last a Gentile said, ‘Go to Brigham Young!—these small fry cannot do you any good.’ I did not think much of the idea, for if the law could not help me, what could an individual do who had not even anything to do with either making the laws or executing them? He might be a very good patriarch of a church and preacher in its tabernacle, but something sterner than religion and moral suasion was needed to handle a hundred refractory, half-civilized sub-contractors. But what was a man to do? I thought if Mr. Young could not do anything else, he might probably be able to give me some advice and a valuable hint or two, and so I went straight to him and laid the whole case before him. He said very little, but he showed strong interest all the way through. He examined all the papers in detail, and whenever there seemed anything like a hitch, either in the papers or my statement, he would go back and take up the thread and follow it patiently out to an intelligent and satisfactory result. Then he made a list of the contractors’ names. Finally he said:

“ ‘Mr. Street, this is all perfectly plain. These contracts are strictly and legally drawn, and are duly signed and certified. These men manifestly entered into them with their eyes open. I see no fault or flaw anywhere.’

“Then Mr. Young turned to a man waiting at the other end of the room and said: ‘Take this list of names to So-and-so, and tell him to have these men here at such-and-such an hour.’

“They were there, to the minute. So was I. Mr. Young asked [begin page 96] them a number of questions, and their answers made my statement good. Then he said to them:

“ ‘You signed these contracts and assumed these obligations of your own free will and accord?’

“ ‘Yes.’

“ ‘Then carry them out to the letter, if it makes paupers of you! Go!’

“And they did go, too! They are strung across the deserts now, working like bees. And I never hear a word out of them. There is a batch of governors, and judges, and other officials here, shipped from Washington, and they maintain the semblance of a republican form of government—but the petrified truth is that Utah is an absolute monarchy and Brigham Young is king!”

the contractors before the king.

Mr. Street was a fine man, and I believe his story. I knew him well during several years afterward in San FranciscoⒺexplanatory note.

[begin page 97] Our stay in Salt Lake City amounted to only two days, and therefore we had no time to make the customary inquisition into the workings of polygamy and get up the usual statistics and deductions preparatory to calling the attention of the nation at large once more to the matter. I had the will to do it. With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here—until I saw the Mormon women. Then I was

i was touched.

touched. My heart was wiser than my head. It warmed toward these poor, ungainly and pathetically “homely” creaturesⒺ, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, “No—the man that marries one of them [begin page 98] has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure—and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.”*

*For a brief sketch of Mormon history, and the noted Mountain MeadowsⒶ massacre, see Appendices A and BⒺ.

Ⓔ

Editorial Emendations CHAPTER 14

Ⓐ Street (C) ● street (A)

Ⓐ roadside (C) ● road- | side (A)

Ⓐ Meadows (C) ● Meadow (A)

Explanatory Notes CHAPTER 14

Ⓔ Mr. Street . . . had eight or nine hundred miles . . . to traverse with his wire] In June 1860 Congress passed the Pacific Telegraph Act, which authorized the construction, within two years, of a telegraph line from the Missouri River to San Francisco. In April 1861, several California telegraph companies merged to form the Overland Telegraph Company, which won the contract to build the line between Salt Lake City and Carson City, the eastern terminus of the existing line from San Francisco. Street, formerly the manager of the Pacific and Atlantic Telegraph Company in San Francisco, was placed in charge of the crew building west from Salt Lake City, while another crew worked east from Carson. Street’s section covered about three hundred miles, half the distance to Carson (Thompson, 349, 354–55, 360–67; Gamble, 556–58; Reid, 501).

Ⓔ I believe his story. I knew him well . . . afterward in San Francisco] Street’s story is confirmed, in its essentials, by his immediate superior, James Gamble, general superintendent of the Overland Telegraph Company. Gamble explained that “the first contract made with the Mormons was also a failure. Young denounced the contractors who agreed to furnish the poles from the pulpit, and said the work of furnishing the poles should and must be carried out” (Gamble, 559). After the line between Carson and Salt Lake was completed on 24 October 1861, Street returned to San Francisco, where he continued to work for several years for the California State Telegraph Company, which had absorbed the Overland Company. Clemens’s surviving letters of the period, however, do not mention him (Gamble, 562; Langley 1861, 321, 493; Langley 1862, 369, 580; Langley 1865, 418).

Ⓔ [begin page 597] these poor, ungainly and pathetically “homely” creatures] The supposedly dreary appearance of Mormon women was a popular myth. Clemens was undoubtedly familiar with Richardson’s description in Beyond the Mississippi: “Few of the women are comely. . . . Nearly all are plain—many extremely so. . . . they bear the indelible impress of poverty, hard labor and stinted living. In those faces is little breadth, thought or self-reliant reasoning, but much narrowness, grave sincerity and unreflecting earnestness” (Richardson, 357). He is not known to have read Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s similar assertion in The Heart of the Continent, that he “had not met a single woman who looked hightoned, first-class, capable of poetic enthusiasm or heroic self-devotion; . . . not one to whom a finely organized intellectual man could come for companionship” (Ludlow, 375).

Ⓔ Appendices A and B] As first drafted, appendix A was almost certainly part of chapter 13 (see the note at 93.4–5), and appendix B a separate chapter following chapter 14. Mark Twain cut out both, probably in proof during August 1871, and only later agreed to make them into appendixes to help lengthen his book, possibly as late as December 1871. See the Introduction, pages 844, 846, 865, 873.

Ⓔ illus] Strictly speaking, this drawing does not illustrate anything in the text. Elisha Bliss, Mark Twain’s publisher, probably inserted it here to help fill up the white space on the last page of chapter 14. The engraving was not made for Roughing It, but borrowed from a book Bliss had published in 1870: Nelson Winch Green’s Mormonism, an anti-Mormon polemic based on an autobiographical account by Mary Ettie V. Smith, a former Mormon. No evidence has been found that Clemens himself was familiar with Green’s book. Although the illustration appears here without a caption, it is called “The Endowment” in the List of Illustrations (xxvi.6). That title was derived from Green’s caption, “The Oath of the Endowment”: in Green’s text the picture illustrates a secret Mormon initiation ceremony in which, according to Mary Smith, the temptation scene in the Garden of Eden was re-enacted in a fashion “too monstrous for human belief.” Her description of these “infernal rites” makes clear that the apron pictured was decorated with “green silk, to represent fig leaves,” but it does not explain the significance of the dagger (Green, 41–53, illustration facing 343).

Top