Chapter 3
Salt Lake City!" the conductor shouted. "all out for Salt Lake City!" The train gave a convulsive jerk- like a man letting out his last breath, Abraham Lincoln thought-and came to a stop.
Wearily, Lincoln heaved himself up out of his seat and grabbed his valise and carpetbag. After speaking in Denver and Colorado Springs, in Greeley and Pueblo, in Canon City and Grand Junction, leaving Colorado and coming into Utah Territory was almost like entering a foreign country.
That impression was strengthened when he got out of the Pullman car. An eastbound train was loading as his was unloading. Most of the men filing aboard wore the blue tunics and trousers and black felt hats of the U.S. Army, and were burdened with the impedimenta of the soldier's trade. As the crisis with the Confederate States worsened, the regulars were being called to the threatened frontiers.
A crowd of men, women, and children cheered the soldiers' departure. At most train stations, as Lincoln had seen during the war, the soldiers would have responded, waving their hats and calling out to the pretty girls. Not here, not now. Every cheer they heard seemed to make them glummer, or perhaps cheerful in a different way. "Jesus," one of them said loudly to a friend, "will I be glad to get out of this God-damned place."
"Sad, isn't it?" said a little man who appeared at Lincoln 's elbow while the former president was watching the troops embark. "They aren't cheering to wish the men good luck if they have to fight the Rebs. They're cheering because those fellows arc getting out of here, and they hope they won't come back."
"I had the same impression myself, Mister…?" Lincoln hesitated.
"I'm the chap who's supposed to meet you here, Mr. Lincoln: Gabriel Hamilton, at your service." Despite his small size- Lincoln towered over him- Hamilton had a jaunty manner and a way of raising one eyebrow just a little to suggest he was hard to impress. After shaking hands, he went on, "Call me Gabe, if you please, sir. All my Gentile friends do."
"Your-Gentile friends?" Lincoln wondered if he'd heard correctly. His ears, these days, weren't what they had been. Gabe Hamilton had neither a Hebraic name nor Hebraic features.
The little man laughed out loud. "If you're not a Mormon in Salt Lake City, Mr. Lincoln, you're a Gentile. Aaron Rothman runs a dry-goods shop down the street from me. Here, he's a Gentile."
"And what is his opinion of his… unusual status?" Lincoln asked.
"He thinks it's funny as blazes, matter of fact," Hamilton answered. "He's a pretty good egg, Rothman is. But Presbyterians like me, Catholics, Baptists, Jews, what have you-in Utah Territory, we're all outsiders looking in. We hang together better than we would if that weren't so, I expect."
"If you don't hang together, you will hang separately?" Lincoln suggested.
Hamilton took that for his wit rather than Ben Franklin's and laughed again, uproariously this time. "You're a sharp man, Mr. Lincoln. I'm glad we've got you out here, for a fact, I am. You'll buck up the miners and the other working folks, and you'll make the bosses think twice about what they're doing, and those are both good things. Come on back to my buggy, sir, and I'll take you to your hotel."
"Thank you." Lincoln followed his guide away from the train. Soldiers were still boarding the one bound for the East. The local crowd was still applauding their departure, too. "Those would be Mormons, I suppose?"
"That they would." Now Gabriel Hamilton sounded more than a little grim. "I tell you frankly, Mr. Lincoln, the rest of us in town are nervous about it. Without soldiers here, God only knows what's liable to happen. God and John Taylor, I suppose. The Mormons think that's the same thing. Gentiles, though, will tell you different."
"You're referring to Brigham Young's successor?" Lincoln said as Hamilton took his luggage from him and loaded it onto the buggy. "Young was an uncrowned king here during my administration."
"And up till the day he died, four years ago," Hamilton agreed. "And do you know what? I think he loved every minute of it." He untied the horses from the rail and clambered into the carriage, nimble as a monkey. "Mr. Taylor's got the same power, but not the same bulge, if you know what I mean."
"I do indeed." Law and politics had both shown Lincoln that, of two men with the same nominal authority, one was liable to be able to do much more than the other if their force of character differed. "So Taylor is King Log instead of King Stork, eh?"
"Wouldn't go so far as that. He's quieter about what he does, that's all. You settled there?" At Lincoln 's nod, Hamilton clucked to the horses, flicked the reins, and got the carriage going. After a little while, he continued, "The Mormons still listen to him, I'll tell you that." He sounded mournfuclass="underline" a man relating a fact he wished a falsehood. "You won't have many of them coming to your speech tomorrow night, I'm afraid."
"That's a pity," Lincoln said. "From what I've read of Utah, and from what you've told me, they are the ones who most need to hear it."
As in Denver, the streets in Salt Lake City were all of dirt. Dust rose from the horses' hooves and from the wheels of the carriage. Though traffic was not heavy, a lot of dust hung in the air. But the water that ran over the pebbles in the gutter looked bright and clean enough to drink, and Lincoln saw a couple of women in calico dresses and sunbonnets dipping it up in pails, so he supposed it was used for that purpose.
Trees-poplar, mulberry, locust, maple-grew alongside those gutters, and their branches, green and leafy with the fresh growth of spring, spread above the streets, shielding them from the full force of the sun. The prospect was attractive, especially when compared to either the flat, dull towns of the prairie or the stony gulches in which most Rocky Mountain cities were set.
"Where's the Great Salt Lake?" Lincoln asked, suddenly realizing he could not see the natural feature for which the city was named.
Hamilton pointed west. "It's almost twenty miles from here. There's a little excursion train that'll take you there if you want to see it. Don't drink the water if you do go; it'll burn you up from the inside out."
"I've seen if from the train several times, on my way out to California," Lincoln said. "I have no desire for a closer acquaintance-it's only that I haven't been in, as opposed to through, Salt Lake City till now, and so missed it."
A few of the houses were log cabins that took Lincoln back to the long-vanished days of his own youth. More were of creamy gray-brown adobe bricks, some stuccoed over and whitewashed or painted, others left their natural shade. Newer homes might have been transplanted straight from the East. Almost all of them-cabins, low adobes, and modern clapboards and tired-brick houses-were surrounded by riots of trees and shrubs and climbing vines and flowers, making a spectacle all the more impressive when measured against the bleak, brown Wa-satch Mountains just east of town.
Some of those adobe houses, despite being of a single story, nevertheless had a great many rooms, with several wings spreading out from what had begun as small, simple dwellings. Pointing to one of those, Gabe Hamilton said, "You see a place like that, Mr. Lincoln, and you can bet a polygamist lives there. He'll take the center for himself and give each wife and her brats a wing."
"How many Mormons are polygamists, truly?" Lincoln asked. "They write all sorts of things in the Eastern papers."
"They say all sorts of things here, too," Hamilton answered. "The truth is devilish hard to find, and they don't keep any public records of marriages past the first, which makes it harder yet. I'd say it's about one in ten, if that, but the polygamists have influence beyond their numbers. If you're going to support more than one wife and family, you need more than the common run of money, you see."
"Oh, yes," Lincoln said. "A case similar to that of slaveholders in the Confederate States. And those not in the elite group will some of them aspire to join it over the course of time, and thus support it even without presently enjoying its benefits."