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impressed with Brigham Young than he was. In any case Burton looked at the American version of polygamy clinically, almost like a doctor who has seen an unusual symptom before, only somewhat different, and who examines the difference with scientific fascination and clinical understanding. Burton looked at polygamy with the detachment of a modern anthropologist. In his day the science of anthropology was in its infancy, and he contributed much to its early development in England. If one reads Kimball Young on Mormon polygamy after reading Burton, one cannot fail to be impressed with the degree to which Young's case histories and statistics bear out the truth of Burton's larger generalizations. Over and again the sociologist proves Burton to have been right. Burton himself was modest about his generalizations; he admitted candidly that any woman could learn in one hour more about polygamy in either Salt Lake City or in Islam than a man could learn in a year. Certainly Burton's knowledge of other exotic cultures greatly enriched his book, The City of the Saints, which is peppered with crosscultural allusions. In Utah Valley he looked with special admiration at Mount Nebo, which reminded him, he wrote, of a line in the Koran: it was like "one of the pins which fastened down the plains of earth." When going through Sioux Indian territory he learned that the Sioux warrior would sometimes cut off the nose of his wife to punish her for adultery. This he noted in his journal, adding that he had seen the same practice also among the Hindus. In describing polygamy among the American Indians, he observed that some preferred to marry sisters, saying that "the tent is more quiet." 10 Later he discovered that marrying sisters was commonplace, too, in Salt Lake City. Kimball Young found that among the polygamists he studied those who married sisters numbered nineteen per cent.11 Burton described Mormon polygamy as essentially Puritanical compared with that in the Near East, where there was a totally different attitude toward the body as an object of pleasure. Nevertheless he felt that polygamy softened and feminized the American female — that it turned the stiff New England spinster like Sarah Pratt into, if not a warm and loving wife, at least a tender mother and helpful companion to four other wives and twenty-five children. Wallace Stegner, many years later, in writing his The Gathering of Zion, would describe this phenomenon somewhat differently, but would still make the point that so impressed 10 11
Burton, City of the Saints, 116, 333. Young, Isn't One Wife Enough? 111.
