Sinners and Saints: A Tour Across the States and Round Them, with Three Months Among the MormonsRobinson, Phil
General
Sinners and Saints: A Tour Across the States and Round Them, with Three Months Among the Mormons
Robinson, Phil
Latter Day Saint churches; Utah -- Description and travel; West (U.S.) -- Description and travel
From Provo--through its suburbs of foliage and glebeland--past
Springville, a sweet spot, lying back under the hills with a bright
quick stream flowing through it and houses mobbed by trees. Here are
flour-mills and one of the first woollen mills built in Utah. In the
days of its building the Indians harried the valley, and young men
tell how as children they used to lie awake at nights to listen to the
red men as they swept whooping and yelling through the quiet streets
of the little settlement; how the guns stood always ready against the
wall, and the windows were barricaded every night with thick pine
logs. What a difference now! Further on, but still looking on to the
lake, is Spanish Fork (nee Palmyra), where, digging a water channel
the other day, the spade turned up an old copper image of the Virgin
Mary, and some bones. This takes back the Mormon settlement of to-day
to the long-ago time when Spanish missionaries preached of the Pope to
the Piutes, and gave but little satisfaction to either man or beast,
for their tonsured scalps were but scanty trophies and the coyote
found their lean bodies but poor picking. Only fifteen years ago the
Navajos came down into the valley through the canyon which the Denver
and Rio Grande line now traverses, but the Mormons were better prepared
than the Spanish missionaries, and hunted the Navajo soul out of the
Indians, so that Spanish Fork is now the second largest settlement
in the valley, and the Indians come there begging. They are all of
the "tickaboo" and "good Injun" sort, the "how-how" mendicants of
the period. All the inhabitants are as good an illustration of the
advantages of co-operation in stores, farm-work, mills--everything--as
can well be adduced.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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