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Saints, Sinners and Scribes: A Look at the Mormons in Fiction
Saints, Sinners and Scribes: A Look at the Mormons in Fiction
BY NEAL LAMBERT
With this paper in mind, I have been reading and rereading a number of Mormon stories and novels. Of course, I long ago gave up the idea of reading every story and novel about the Saints. That is a task of years, not months. But as I think back over my selected samplings of the last few months, one salient fact impresses itself deeper and deeper in my mind: as a subject for significant, serious fiction, Mormons and Mormonism offer almost insurmountable literary difficulties. This idea is of course not new, but the causes which lie behind it are often forgotten. Let me suggest to you what I see as the main difficulties inherent in the subject. In the first place (as the bulk of Mormon fiction proves), the popular notions about what a Mormon is has not lent itself to great literature. Polygamy, secret rites, blood atonement, priestly orders — all such have made the Mormon slip easily into a stereotype for slick fiction and gross comedy. In the second place, the fantastic nature of Mormon history and the Mormon's account of his own personal experience form terrible difficulties. Any writer who tries to render the epic of the Mormon movement must, in a sense, be able to redo in fiction what God has already done in history; and that is pretty heavy competition for any writer. But further (and this may be most difficult of all) the writer must also be able to redo what God has done in individual hearts; and as all will agree, the elusive, private, and subjective nature of the religious experience makes it one of the most difficult to grasp with words and render for public observation. These then are the difficulties as I see them. But let us look at the literature itself, for it is, of course, the best evidence of the validity of these notions.
Just how easily Mormons have fallen into stereotyped subjects is evidenced in the popular imagination's view of Mormons as literary comics and villains. Indeed for the first hundred years of Mormon history this was almost the only view. The Saints had hardly got the dust of migration out of their quilts and blankets before people back East were reading such pieces as this one from Harper's Weekly called "My Wife's Tempter."
A suspicious husband overhears his wife talking to a mysterious friend.
I threw myself flat on the grass, and so glided silently into the copse until I was completely within ear-shot. This was what I heard. My wife was sobbing. "So soon — SO' soon-— oh! Hammond, give me a little time." "I can not, Elsie. My chief orders me to join him. You must prepare to accompany me . . . ." "Ah! my husband, my husband!" sobbed the unhappy woman. "You have no husband, woman," cried Brake, harshly. "I promised Dayton not to speak to you as long as you were his wife, but the vow was annuled before it was made. Your husband in God yet awaits you. You will yet be blessed with the true spouse."
After this, Elsie leaves. Now, recognizing that the villain is at last alone, the husband approaches the unsuspecting seducer:
I rose and stepped silently into- the open space in which he stood. His back was toward me. His arms were lifted high over his head with an exultant gesture, and I could see his profile as it slightly turned toward me, illuminated with a smile of scornful triumph.
The husband grabs the villain and threatens him with his life until finally the stranger confesses, "I am a Mormon." After this revelation the story concludes on a tearful note with the husband putting his wife out of the house:
"This is no longer your home. You have deceived me. You are a Mormon. I know all. You have become a convert to that apostle of Hell, Brigham Young, and you can not live with me. I love you still, Elsie, dearly — but — you must go and live with your father . . . ."
I live in the same village with my wife, and yet am a widower. She is very penitent, they say; yet I can not bring myself to believe that any one who has allowed the Mormon poison to enter their veins can ever be cured. People say that we will come together again, but I know better. Mine is not the first hearth that Mormonism has rendered desolate.
There were indeed many desolate literary hearths in these years. Not only Gentile but Mormon hearths as well. And when the Mormon antagonist was not sly, dark, and seductive, he was usually fat, boorish, and uncouth. Consider for instance this polygamous husband, Elder Bungrod, from an Overland Monthly story of 1895. He was "squat bodied, sluggish, gross. . . . [He] had a flat toad-like look as he sat lazily drooping forward with elbows on his knees and occasionally turning a pair of small reddish eyes about the landscape." When he saw his wives shirking at their chores, "a dark scowl wrinkled his grizzled animal face, and he got up and made his way toward the house, pouting as he went and crushing the clods and potato vines under his heavily booted feet."
As always in these stories there is a fair and as-yet-unsullied maiden, either a new or a prospective wife who has not yet been won over. (The lecherous advances of the Mormon and hairbreadth escape of the heroine form the traditional climaxes of the formula Mormon novel.) In this case, Elder Bungrod hungrily approaches his new wife:
"Don't be skeered, little un; don't yeh be skeered; and nobody won't hurt yeh," said the Elder, advancing, arms extended out with a maudlin expression of countenance.
The young girl flattened herself against the wall with a look of dismay and horror in her eyes, and when his hands touched her she cried out wildly, and, slipping from him, flew with swift feet out the door and down into the fields. With a stifled curse, Bungrod kicked the chairs out of his way and tramped after her. His heavy face had a greenish, congested cast, and his small eyes looked red and evil.
In this story the escape consists of a night long boat chase the length of the Great Salt Lake, and the young heroine is saved from the evils and immorality of Mormonism by the chivalric gentleman of the railroad construction camp at Corinne.
This stereotype of pursued and pursuer has changed very little over the years. As late as the 1930's the same formula was being worked again and again. Listen for instance to what happens when a Mormon guardian tells his fair young charge about their coming wedding:
"What's your first name?" "Doris," said the girl wonderingly. . . . "I told them not to worry none. That you wasn't to become a charge on the town. I told him all about it and made all the arrangements." "What arrangements? What for?" demanded Doris sharply. "To take you to the Endowment House next Monday. This is Wednesday. You've got lots o' time. I'm going to marry you."
"You. . .! You. . .! You unspeakable beast. . .!" Words failed her. She was conscious of Lecky reaching out for her; of his failing to seize her because she pushed a heavy table in front of him. Then she fled to her room and slammed the door on her pursuer. "I kin wait. . ." he said and laughed raucously. She could hear his hateful voice through the heavy door chuckling as though at a good joke. "I kin wait. . . An' you're worth waitin fer. I'll tame you yit. . . ." The heavy front door of the house slammed noisily and Doris Upchurch sank down in silent terror on her bed.
This was written in 1933. Of course, the arch villains of the stereotype are Joseph Smith and
Brigham Young. Their representation runs the full spectrum from drunken bumkin to mysterious seducer. One poor fictional convert has this introduction to his prophet:
The gait of this person was heavy and slouching, his hands were large and thick, his eyes grey and unsteady in their gaze, and his face and general physiognomy coarse and unmeaning. He wore a grey coat, with unbrushed boots, and a white hat enveloped with a piece of black crepe. On one of his fingers was a massive gold ring, the only thing which seemed to distinguish him particularly from many of the rough backwoodsmen whom I had already met with. To my utter surprise, and, I must add, to my extreme disappointment, Elder Smart made known to us that this individual was none other than the great prophet, Joseph Smith.
Later on, the same person discovers Joseph alone in the woods:
I saw Joseph Smith himself lying alone on the grass, with a whiskey bottle by his side, and decidedly far gone in a state of intoxication. He was talking and laughing, and evidently congratulating himself, in a soliloquy on the success of his devices. . . . "The saints are a pack of fools; but I am a prophet, a profitable prophet. ... I am a greater man than Moses, hurrah, hip, hip, hip, hurrah."
At the other end of the spectrum is the dark villain who leads his initiates into the Pavillion of Vision or Tabernacle of Inspiration where scenes such as the following take place:
There was a slight motion of the entranced form, the hanging canopy opened, and a golden ray fell upon and illuminated the lips of the Prophet. A smile played over his hitherto moveless features, the lips parted, and in a low, soft voice he spoke:
"And the spirit said, Lo! and as I looked, the thick clouds parted, and before me ran the beautiful river of life. . . . Come! the spirit and the Bride say come. ..." A rustle of the white robe, the gleam of a white foot, the glance of white arms, and she sank on her knees by his side, murmuring, "My Prophet and my Lord." And the thick folds of the drapery, like enfolding noiseless night, fell with mute darkness about them.
Of course no catalogue of Mormon villains would be complete without the Danites — that fictional band of enforcers who sees that the wishes of the Priesthood, or the Holy Four, or some bishop, or Brigham (depending on which piece you are reading) are carried out. Hundreds of victims are strewn through the pages of Mormon fiction, wayward members and antagonistic non-members alike who were either "bloodatoned" by such lone Danites as Bill Hickman and Porter Rockwell or who were "saved" by some local band.
One of the most famous treatments, and at the same time one that is true to the type, is that of Arthur Conan Doyle's in A Study in Scarlet:
Its invisibility, and the mystery which was attached to it, made this organization doubly terrible. It apeared to- be omniscient and omnipotent, and yet was neither seen nor heard. The man who held out against the Church vanished away, and none knew whither he had gone or what had befallen him. His wife and his children awaited him at home, but no father ever returned to tell them how he had fared at the hands of his secret judges. A rash word or a hasty act was followed by annihilation, and yet none knew what the nature might be of this terrible power which was suspended over them. No wonder that men went about in fear and trembling, and that even in the heart of the wilderness they dared not whisper the doubts which oppressed them.
Many a young heroine has fled with her Gentile rescuer while the Danites were in hot pursuit. But this band often did more in the story than act as priesthood police force. Again I refer to our Sherlock Holmes story.
At first this vague and terrible power was exercised only upon the recalcitrants who, having embraced the Mormon faith, wished afterwards to pervert or to abandon it. Soon, however, it took a wider range. The supply of adult women was running short, and polygamy without a female population on which to draw was a barren doctrine indeed. Strange rumours began to be bandied about — rumours of murdered immigrants and rifled camps in regions where Indians had never been seen. Fresh women appeared in the harems of the Elders — women who pined and wept, and bore upon their faces the traces of an unextinguishable horror. Belated wanderers upon the mountains spoke of gangs of armed men, masked, stealthy, and noiseless, who flitted by them in the darkness. These tales and rumours took substance and shape, and were corroborated and recorroborated, until they resolved themselves into a definite name. To this day, in the lonely ranches of the West, the name of the Danite Band, or the Avenging Angels, is a sinister and an ill-omened one.
Certain events in Mormon history have given writers ample opportunity to show the Saints as literary villains. The Utah War and particularly the Mountain Meadows Massacre have fit in well with this stereotype.
Jack London, for instance in his account of the Fancher train, portrays the Mormons as unwilling even to help a dying baby. The boy narrator reports the mother's pleas:
"It may save the baby's life," she said. "And they've got cow's milk. I saw fresh cows with my own eyes. Go on, please, Laban. It won't hurt you to try. They can only refuse. But they won't. Tell them it's for a baby, a wee little baby. Mormon women have mother's hearts. They couldn't refuse a cup of milk for a wee little baby."
And Laban tried. But as he told father afterward, he did not get to see any Mormon women. He saw only the Mormon men, who turned him away.
Even as late as 1958 the fictional leader of the attack on the Fancher train is a typical uncomplicated and scar-faced villain in close contact with Brigham:
"Here it is, Josh — I want those redskins in a fighting frame of mind! And so I got to send them a man they know is a real war chief! That's you!" Brigham pointed his finger at Josh and smiled confidently into the man's damaged face. . . . Josh's eyes flared in fierce agreement, his wolf grin spread his tangled beard. Brigham continued, "Port tells me you're the most famous white warrior amongst the tribes •— that they've even got a name for you — what is it now?"
Josh was immensely gratified at how his notoriety had reached Brigham's ears. "Takuskanskan," he said, "means — sort of thunder god of battle."
Brigham's strong, square hand came down hard on his desk, emphasizing his point. "That's exactly what I mean, Josh!"
But while many writers have made much of the Mormon as literary villain others have exploited the popular image of the Saints for comic material of the first rank. William Comstock, Bill Nye, Artemus Ward, and almost everyone associated with frontier humor has had many laughs from what has become stock Mormon material: Destroying Angels, the Book of Mormon, missionaries, and especially polygamy. Stories about the size of a Mormon's bed or his blankets, his nursery or his house have been standard.
Certainly in this treatment of Mormons, no one achieved greater heights than Mark Twain. He tells how, on his journey to Salt Lake, he liked to
sit and listen to these Gentiles talk about polygamy; and how some portly old frog of an elder, or a bishop, marries a girl — likes her, marries her sister — likes her, marries another sister — likes her, takes another — likes her, marries her mother — likes her, marries her father, grandfather, great grandfather, and then comes back hungry and asks for more.
And again:
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 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 had 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."
A second reading of this and much of Mark Twain's humor about the Mormons shows an unusual perceptiveness and an unusual point of view. For he not only makes delightful use of Mormon materials, he places his own fictional personae, the I, the Mark Twain of Roughing It, in a position which suggests that the common culture of the East had a false notion of the Mormons. In this last example, for instance, the basic attitude of the narrator is that of the genteel easterner. That is, when he first comes to Utah he is full of naive enthusiasm and ready to "get up the usual statistics ... to rush headlong ... to achieve a great reform." But the actual experience of seeing the Mormons deflates this enthusiasm for reform even though that actual experience is given a comic turn. But even this humorous conclusion suggests that there is a genuine difference between the popular idea of the Mormon and the Saint himself.
This same kind of complexity infuses the bishop of the Gila Valley in one of Owen Wister's stories. The man is ultimately a villain who rules the valley as a benevolent despot, flaunting the government, law, and the courts with a will. But he is saved from the stereotype by a new dimension which Wister pointedly gives him. Listen for instance to this brief sermon which Wister's narrator hears the bishop give :
"Don't empty your swill in the door-yard, but feed it to your hogs" he was saying; and any one who knows how plainly a man is revealed in his voice could have felt instantly as I did, that here was undoubtedly a leader of men. "Rotten meat, rotten corn, spoiled milk, the truck that thoughtless folks throw away should be used. Their usefulness has not ceased because they're rotten. That's the error of the ignorant, who' know not that nothing is meant to be wasted in this world. The ignorant stay poor because they break the law of the Lord. Waste not, want not. . . . Swill is bad for us, but it is good for swine. Waste it by the threshold it becomes deadly, and a curse falls upon the house. The mother and children are sick because she has broken a law of the Lord. Do> not let me see this sin when I come among you in the valley. Fifty yards behind each house, with clean air between, let me see the well-fed swine receiving each day, as was intended, the garbage left by man. And let me see flowers in the door-yard, and stout, blooming children. We will sing the twenty-ninth hymn."
Anyone familiar with Mormon practice will recognize the combination of spiritual authority and practical advice that are sometimes associated with actual Mormon preaching. Indeed the dominant notion associated with Wister's bishop is not his nine wives and fifty-nine children, true as such things are to the stereotype. Instead Wister focuses on the interesting and compelling personality of the man himself. The interesting thing here is that both Mark Twain and Owen Wister were writing after seeing Mormons in the flesh. They were in a sense responding to human beings and not to a stereotype.
It is this sense of the human beings involved that has come more and more to the front in recent times. Trying to avoid the literary morasses and pitfalls into which their predecessors have fallen, more and more writers have turned to particular Mormon families and people. And there is much to commend in the vividness and detail of books like Sam Taylor's Family Kingdom. But while such books may be true to the historical episode they portray, there still remains the fascinating and fantastic whole history which begins on a hill in frontier New York and rolls and builds with Biblical intensity through Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, and finally to the sagebrush and rim-rock of the Great Basin; there is still the epic zeal that gave such magnificent force to a whole people; there is still the compelling charisma of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. To render any of this is indeed a tantalizing literary challenge. And with varying degrees of success, several scribes have tried it.
Perhaps the most noted attempt to grasp and render this whole grand sweep is Vardis Fisher's Children of God: An American Epic. As the subtitle suggests, Fisher has taken the first seven decades of the Mormon church as his subject: from the visions and revelations of the boy Joseph Smith through the era of Brigham Young and down finally to the 1880's and the days of the Manifesto. Many have hailed the book as one of the best treatments yet of these remarkable years. But while there is much about the book that is to be praised, there are, I think, some serious fictional problems.
Bernard DeVoto has already warned writers away from this enticing material because of the problems involved. He called his own Mormon novel, "The best book I am never going to write." 1Back in 1938 he said of his ambitions,
I will content myself with less aspiring failures, leaving to more stubborn men the crash that any man must make who tries to* compose fiction out of Joseph Smith, and the Mormon people. . . . What scenes could any novelist invent that would not be dim, farcical, and grotesque beside the daily fare of any man who lived in Nauvoo, where Joseph walked arm in arm with principalities and powers? What drama could any merely mortal story-teller construct that would not be an idle nursery play for children, compared to the one that is written in our own annals, whose first chapter opens on the Hill Cumorah with a new Bible engraved on sheets of gold?
DeVoto's point is well taken; a point that we can perhaps better appreciate if we try to imagine what kind of work the novel would have to be that would adequately render the migration of Biblical Israel with its Moses, its Joshua, its pillar of fire, its Sinai, and its revelation of universal forces. The epic proportion of the Mormon story itself is without a doubt one of the most formidable problems for any writer who treats that story directly. How, for instance, could one ever render in fiction the experience of confrontation with God. It seems to me that any direct attempt cannot help but fail. Any such effort must run the danger of sounding like a Cecil B. deMille script with fade-ins, fade-outs, up-music, and downmusic.
This is one of the problems of Fisher's Children of God: In spite of the sincerity of the author's effort I cannot shake off the feeling that the author-director is sometimes standing just offstage giving cues to the light man and the musicians.
One of the obvious difficulties in rendering any religious experience is the fact that such an experience is by its very nature extraordinary, outside the pale of usual human experience. But the writer sometimes forgets this fact, so that his portrayals of the religious experience are neither convincing nor adequate as such. Not only must the writer keep this fact in his mind but he must make it a part of his style of writing. Consider for instance, this sentence from Children of God: "In one of these nights, after an hour of anguished prayer, he fell asleep and saw a vision." Certainly no one would take issue with the sequence of events here, but what is disturbing is Fisher's manner in treating these events: ". . . he fell asleep and saw a vision." The very style of the passage equates the two events, and the fact of the vision becomes no more or no less important than the daily physical function of going to sleep. If this were the only instance of its kind, we too might simply nod and go on. But such stylistic disproportions are a persistent problem in too much of the writing about the Mormons.
But there is another and perhaps a more important dimension to this problem that the modern writer must consider: Literature, by its very nature deals in experiences that have significance for all men. But Mormons are a self-proclaimed peculiar people. Thus on the one hand we have an art form striving for universals, while on the other hand we have a religion and a people who are characterized by their differences from the rest of mankind. The tendency has been for the differences to get in the way of the universals, for the sensational to crowd out the significant.
Several writers have avoided this literary problem by coming away from the era of polygamy and persecutions and setting their novels closer to modern times. They have chosen to deal with the difficulties of Mormons of the third and fourth generations. These writers' concern is with close-mindedness and hypocritical practice, with institutionalized notions that have become separated from basic human needs. One of the best of these is Blanche Cannon's Nothing Ever Happens Sunday Morning. One chapter of this novel tells of the attachment of the smalltown girl to a day laborer who has a mysterious background and who reads Whitman, Milton, and Wordsworth. These known qualities are quite disturbing to the ladies of the Relief Society quilting bee. But the young girl accepts the man for what he is, and in so doing tries to reconcile him to her culture.
"Yes. Jonathan, in a town like this people think there's something wrong if you don't go to church. And if they think there's something wrong they don't want to have you here. . . ." "I see. You've heard somebody talking." "It's not true," she said in a choked voice. "I know it's not true — the thing they say about you. But they believe it. Can't you see, Jonathan, if you'll go to church a few times, it won't matter what books you read, or even what you think in your own mind? They wouldn't understand about those things, anyway. But if they saw you at church they'd forget what they believed about you, and soon they'd think you were just like everybody else."
"God forbid!"
But while these are interesting human problems they are not peculiar to Mormon culture nor to small towns in Utah. They are not "Mormon" problems as such.
But there still lies before us the problem of writing about the historical Mormon; the problem of getting at universals through the clutter of peculiarities. There have been, I think, at least two noteworthy achievements in this regard which may suggest for us an answer to our problem. These are Maurine Whipple's Giant Joshua, and Virginia Sorensen's A Little Lower Than the Angels. Either novel would serve us well, but let us look today at a few passages from the latter book. Consider for instance the thoughts the central figure, Mercy Baker, has as she contemplates the new doctrine of polygamy,
For Joseph, spiritual perhaps. Perhaps! But to these other men with their hard sunburned faces and their blunt manly desires, no longer enamored of the spreading bodies of their wives, how would it be for them? She faced it, flinching. Simon, suddenly in the night he could be different from what he was all day, an earth-colored man in an earth-colored field, clucking to his horses, or urging his oxen. But in the night a creature reaching and desiring. They were all like that, she knew it deeply. And it was something that belonged to you alone, knowing so much of one man and saying to yourself at meeting or during a polka or anywhere, looking at him: "He is mine and I know him as nobody else knows him."
This is, it seems to me, getting at polygamy not in terms of a fascinating peculiarity but in terms of a basic and fundamental human problem: the nature of love. This is not so much a judgment of polygamy as it is a rendering of it in terms of basic human needs.
Again the Mormon notion of continuing life begins to take on a genuine human echo as Mercy's own family takes on a symbolic significance in their quiet evenings together.
It was pure peace, pure. It was a peace distilled from one blood. Nowhere else in the world was there a similar peace or a purer one. It had to be made of those who belonged together through the firm right of blood and bones. First the father and mother, brought together by love and the highest desire, and then the children, one by one taking their places, one by one as the years passed filling another and another chair, taking their places in the cradles and trundles and cots, taking their places one by one at the table. In every child the father and mother were together again, every child was a seal on them.
The Gospel was clear in its blessing upon the family. The first family was God's, and it had grown like this, one by one, until it covered the world, and those who had gone home to God filled His world, Kolob, the Great Star. Each man, then, who achieved glory through this endless process of growing in his children was God over those children, and would chastise them and bless them worlds without end.
But perhaps the most remarkable thing about Virginia Sorensen's book is her ability to render, to explore, and to give vital form to the continuing tension between the practical facts of life and the ideal notions of religion, between this world and the other world. For this is, after all, one of the central problems of religion. The account of Mercy's baptism is a good example. As she wades into the cold Mississippi, her mind is shifting rapidly from memories of her dead father, to the importance of her act, and back to the drab scene around her:
She floundered on lifting her feet quickly, one after the other, and spreading her legs wildly, like a duck in the mud, to seek firmer hold. She saw that the carefully whitened clothes were muddied and ugly, and she felt ridiculous, floundering through the water. She could hear Father laughing over that old story — "And they went out on the river because this boy came running into town to tell how there were a flock of ghosts out behind the dam, and when they got there, it was a bunch of Mormons baptizing each other in their night-shirts!"
She tried to catch hold of the idea, the depth of idea that declared a man was purified and dedicated by the holy water upon his flesh. But this muddy water with a fish-smell in it sullied the idea and it escaped her while she struggled to hold it.
When she came up to Joseph she found the footing firm where he stood, she could feel the ridges of hard sand through her stockings. "If you don't keep moving," he said, "you sink clear in."
The success of this passage lies not in the subject matter alone, but in the way that the subject matter is rendered. For the floundering in the water finally becomes a symbol of Mercy's own floundering in her efforts to find the zealous dedication that she senses all around. And her final reaching for the prophet as an act of attempted faith is subverted by the discovery that even the ground on which he stands, though it seems firm, is not sure. It is such treatments as this that make the book the success that it is.
But A Little Lower Than the Angels was published in 1942. That was twenty-five years ago. What about the years since? What about the years ahead? Why hasn't more been written like this or even better? And where is our "Great Mormon Novel," that so many call for? The main reason for this dearth of quality in Mormon fiction lies first of all, as I have tried to point out, in the material itself. But there is another pressing reason for the short list of good fiction, and that is the quality of the talent that the writer brings to this material. If there is within the Mormon experience an adequate and compelling definition of man, if there are underneath Mormonism's peculiar institutions fundamental human values, then there is the possibility that some writer may, through his genius, discover some way of freeing these from the popular notions in which they are bound. One could not blame any writer for leaving this stuff for less troublesome material. But whoever it is that finally makes great books out of the Mormon experience, he will have to be a writer of great stature. Perhaps, as Blanche Cannon so aptly suggested, what it will take is a Hawthorne from Heber or a Faulkner from Fillmore. No one less can do the job.
"Well, it'd be no news to me. I know Mormons. I've seen their women's strange love an' patience an' sacrifice an' silence an' what I call madness for their idea of God. An' over against that I've seen the tricks of the men. They work hand in hand, all together, an' in the dark. No man can hold out against them, unless he takes to packin' guns. For Mormons are slow to kill. That's the only good I ever seen in their religion. Venters, take this from me, these Mormons ain't just right in their minds. Else could a Mormon marry one woman when he already had a wife, an' call it duty?"
[Riders of the Purple Sage, by Zane Grey [New York: Grosset &Dunlap])
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