CIIANDLESS'S VISIT TO THE MORMONS.°

TEE subjects of Mr. Chandless's book are a waggon-train journey across the Prairies and Rocky Mountains from Atchison near Fort Leavenworth to Utah the head-quarters of the Mormons, a short sojourn in the country of prophets and polygamy, and an account of its physical and material features, as well as a criticism on its social and moral state. There is a further journey to San Franciseo • involving a passing view of the Mormon settlements, and of parts of California, with a general picture of San Francisco, painted in dark colours. What took Mr. Chandless to America does not appear ; still less what could induce an Englishman who quotes Greek and seems to have carried Dante in his pocket to undertake the laborious office of "teamster" to a waggon-train bound for Utah, at twenty-five dollars a month, especially when he knew nothing of driving oxen. However, in the words of the Chancellor of France at the opening of the States-General in 1789, " All occupations are honourable" • and, the traveller was able to get cheaply over some thousand miles and see a good deal of "character.' It was however, effected at the cost of much hardship, and some personal suffering from sickness, brought on by salt meat and a mode of living generally to which he was not accustomed.

Though there is no particular freshness now in prairie travelling, the circumstances under which the writer traversed the prairies give novelty to his matter, less from the nature of the incidents, which are same enough and chiefly refer to eating or the duties of the camp, than from the numerous persons of various blood and nations he associated with as fellow labourers. A similar remark applies to the lourney through the Rocky Mountains ; for a mountainous region is never quitted from the time the "South Pass" is reached, some distance beyond Fort Laroraie,

until the traveller arrives at San Bernardino in South California. Bad ways, rapid streams that have to be continually crossed, narrow or broad valleys as the ease may be (the territory

of Utah itself is but a large valley,) and which valleys are mostly alternately freezing or stiff in according to the weather, form the staple of the description ; while except in the settlements of Utah there is nothing to be had save what you carry with you. The circumstances under which Mr. Chandlees travelled made him acquainted with (often literally) "strange bedfellows," though there was no bedding. His position drew out the real character and sentiments of Americans' Irishmen, Italians, and Frenchmen ; for although Germans (called Dutchmen) were pretty nu • A Irate to Salt Lake; Semi, a Towne', across the Plains and a Residence in the Mormon Settlements at Utah. By William chamneae, publiabed by emitb

and Elder.

merous, they were not in estimation, and Mr. Chandless does not seem to have eared much to associate with them. The knowledge picked up under these circumstances may not be of great actount ; as the persons were generally of the looser stamp,—small adventurers, who had left settled society as not "doing' in it, or from some more imperative cause. However, the sketches are curious, and one of them informing. It is on the American army, detachments of which were for some little time associated as regards proximity with the author's waggon-train. "As they travelled more or less along with us, and always camped close, one had an opportunity of observing United States troops a little. I can say but little for them ; they were a medley. of French, English, Germans, and Irish, the last predominating, and with few native Americans among them.

"As a rule, the army is recruited from the riff-raff of foreigners too stupid or too indolent to get on by industry. Whether from this character of the men, or because the army is thought a poor means of advancement in life, or for both reasons, &real contempt is felt for the soldiers in the States : if one appears in a town he is watched like a dog given to stealing, and treated like a dog., this almost necessarily renders the men worse ; and so the ball keeps rolling—action and reaction—but with this difference, that where mind and feelings are concerned elasticity is not less but greater than unity, and the motion tends to increase, not to die away, and while it lasts few good men will enter the service. There are, of course, exceptions ; the sergeants were such, and an Englishman, formerly a sergeant in an English regiment, now received higher pay. as a private. With such a class as the generality, strictness, no doubt, is necessary ; and West Point officers, having passed through a very severe ordeal there themselves, are not apt to make allowance for human weakness. But the methods of punishment are to my mind far more odious and degrading than the lash ; tying. a man to a waggon by. his thumbs, loading him with a heavy wooden or iron collar, (and even in a town like Leavenworth, K.T., making him stand guard in public with it on,) chaining a heavy ball to his ankle, &c. ; who can wonder that desertions are numerous, followed now and then by recapture,

flogging, branding, and imprisonment? • •

"I have seen something of this myself ; for the captain of our escort was a man not more known as an able officer than as a harsh disciplinarian—a man who had followed deserters five hundred miles more than once, and whose name was a terror and byword among soldiers. Besides the Irish deserters in our own camp, I have talked with many other soldiers of very different oharacters,—the desponding man, who was sorry he had not been killed in the last battle, and hoped to be in the next ; the unsolclierly man, who would lie down on guard when he thought to escape notice, for why should he stand up there to be a mark for Indians just to save the army— what reason had he to care about the army ? ' the morose man of few words, brooding over his treatment, and half inclined to shoot his captain ; the triumphantly malignant man, who related his plan for tying up an odious corporal to a tree and after giving him one hundred lashes, himself with several others to desert, and leave the corporal to the wolves. These and others one talked with, on whom the common feeling of hatred to the service acted variously according to their varieties of character. Are such men and such feelings common in the English service ? "

Mr. Chandless's style is lively and vigorous, though it smacks rather too much of determined writing. His personal feelings are somewhat of the laxest : perhaps it could hardly be otherwise in his circumstances,—though it seems scarcely necessary to have panegyrized a father whose daughter was his paramour, describing them "as civil and pleasant people enough," naively adding the temptation—" I took supper there ; fresh butter and a quart of milk being the greatest of luxuries to me." And though it may be that he did not know the truth at the time he yielded to the supper, it is even less the fact than the tone of speaking about it which is censurable.

The author declares that there has been much misrepresentation about the Mormons and their polygamy. As regards "thrilling" tales and novels, where single facts are exaggerated and put forward to represent a general .picture, we have no doubt about his statement. In the few descriptions we have met with from actual travellers, we have not seen more exaggeration than by himself, though as opinions differ so will the tone. It is not every one, for example, that would treat the marriage of a man to a mother and daughter in the same way as this author. The conclusions to be drawn from the facts and descriptions are, that in women of torpid character, or with ideas and morals blunted by the circumstances of their lives, polygamy does not produce much domestic discord. And as long as -Utah remains almost isolated from the world, subject to a pretended theocracy, and in such a primitive state of society that money is almost unknown as a faot,—barter being the medium of exchange, and wages paid in orders for goods,—the practice may not conduce to more evil than Mr. Chandless says it does ; though he forgets, as many other people do occasionally, the vast difference between establishing evil as a regular system to be praised and upheld, and tolerating but censuring the hidden or unavowed practice of evil. Even upon his own showing, the mischief is great enough, and permeating down to childhood. He lodged in the house of an excellent man with four wives, and this is a sample of domestic education.

"Two or three things one may remark in all discussions with Mormons : they speak of the subject of plurality' before their wives without any restraint, argue the physical and mental inferiority of the female sex, and even touch on subjects too delicate, or too indelicate, to be heard without calling up a blush on the cheeks of any modest woman elsewhere. Sometimes the women would become very brusque with their husbands, and halfsavage with myself, the innocent cause of the argument; but a blush seldom rises in Utah : Mormons rather think it a merit to speak in very plain language of 'those things we know naturally,' and run freedom from affectation into coarseness. Whether or not this springs necessarily from polygamy, (as I hardly suppose,) it is a sign, and must be a cause of moral deterioration ; while different sleeping apartments are required for the different wives, and usually for the children of different sex as they grow up, language is used before both that almost annuls the utility of the one and the decency of both customs."

The result of this, and other things connected with it, is, Mr. Chandless says, "not pleasing : girls have but little of sensibility,

the greatest charm of woman." As the persons who become Mormons may compendiously be classed as knaves or fools—the stolid, or the too clever by half—the practice may not work the misery that might be expected, always excepting the exceptional case of a sensitive woman misled into the tribe. One source of much evil this author does indicate, at a Mormon ball "begun and ended with prayer "—the terrible anxiety of the only wife, and, the envy and hatred she excites among those who form one of a plurality. The one special point of romance here, (and you must look close for it,) is the relation in which married men and girls stand to each other. Elsewhere, the attentions of the former to the latter pass for nothing ; here a girl knows that her partner may at any moment be her lover and her suitor, though his wife is dancing in the vis-a-vis ; and many a flirtation is buoyed up by the circumstance. Men, too, of the brighter sort, love to use their position, and carry on canvass that would capsize a monogamist craft. Second and third wives take little heed of the flirting or the wooing ; but you may now and then see a woman glancing too eagerly round, and from her half-concealed jealousy and hatred, and fear predominating over the other two, you may guess, what you will be told, that the watcher is an only wife : other women, if they see her, will come and tell her she is no Mormon to look so after her husband, and laugh at her foolish expectation of keeping an entire husband to herself. That girl now evidently knows the wile is watching her, and coquets all the more eagerly with the husband : perhaps she may refuse him after all, perhaps not wish to do so, perhaps find herself unable if she wishes. But they are not the only couple followed by eyes struggling to see and yet not to believe. They tell me F— yonder loves his wife beyond the wont of husbands in this part of the world, and will not marry another; so my partner, herself a wife, though not in the first lustrum of wives, tells me, and intimates her opinion that F— and his wife are both fools to set themselves against the fashion of the place. 'But F— surely is flirting with Kate Copeland pretty strongly at this moment,' one suggests. Flirting —that's a gentile word, we never use it : but he's not really courting Kate, he's only teasing his wife : though he won't marry again, he likes doing that. Were I unmarried, I would ask the President to make him marry me.'

What for? to tease her?' No, to teach her : then she would not think herself better than the balance of us ; why should she ?' I turned the subject, having no wish for an argumentum ad hominem, and some places are unsuitable for the real Ingumentum ad fceminam !"

Mormonism, Mr. Chandless notwithstanding, is a disgusting affair, and can only endure by isolation, and the power its rulers and active followers now possess of causing people to " disappear " either by " emigration" or some invisible way. "Gentiles," with average feelings of respectability, would not bear the state of things around them ; profligates, tempted to Utah by the indulgences it holds forth, would, if in sufficient numbers, not submit to the tyranny Mormonism involves, or else the corruption induced would be so great as to decompose society.