Joseph Smith claimed to have carried about under his arms solid gold tablets which, if they were the size he said they were (no one else ever saw them), would have weighed about half a ton? (Gold a very heavy metal, specific gravity 19.3.) Whose official newspaper
One can grant the accuracy of these charges without conceding that the Mormon religion is any more whimsical on points of doctrine than most other sects—the Baptists, for example, with their insistence on total immersion as a prerequisite to the salvation of the soul: All Christians must be totally immersed. (In what or for how long not being clearly specified.) Or the Jews, with their prepuce-collecting Yahweh, who created light on the first day and several days later, apparently as an afterthought, created the sun: “Six days He labored; on the seventh He was arrested.” Or the Roman Catholics, with their dogmatic assertion of the physical Assumption of the Virgin Mary—launching her on a flat trajectory into outer space, like a shot off a shovel, without even a crash helmet or a pressure suit. Or the Hindus, with their sanctified ritual for nasal emunction: only one nostril may be discharged at a time, etc. Or the small-town atheist for that matter, with his Little Blue Books and sneering jokes against ancient and venerable institutions.
Leaving aside the comical aspects of their creed, one can argue that the Mormons in practice achieved a way of life in which there was much to admire, much worth saving. In addition to their pioneering migrations, full of unusual heroism and examples of fortitude (e.g., Brigham Young and his seventeen wives), the Mormons deserve respect for settling the most rugged, difficult as well as spectacular, terrain in the West. What was unusual, however, was their communitarian approach to the problems of settlement in an inhospitable environment. Their emphasis on mutual aid, cooperation and sharing was not unknown among other American communities—and indeed such qualities are vital to survival in a frontier situation—but the Mormons went about it in a far more deliberate, conscious manner, with more successful results. For example, in settling a given area they did not scatter themselves abroad over the landscape in isolated farms and ranches, each man for himself and the devil take the hindmost, but rather built small, rational, beautiful and durable towns in which all could live together, centered about the Church, which served not only as a religious center but also as a social and political focal point for the community (in this respect harking back to the model of New England). Irrigation systems were then built with the cooperative labor of all, the irrigable land divided fairly among the member families, and the back country—canyon and mesa—left open to all who might wish to engage in cattle raising, as well as farming. And nearly all did, (This formed the “open range” until the advent of large-scale fencing and the Taylor Grazing Act closed it off to all but an established few.) Each community, through the Church, also set up what we may call a public welfare service to provide sufficient and generous aid to those brought down by accident, illness, bad luck or other misfortune. In sum, the Mormons built coherent, self-sustaining communities with a vigorous common life in which all could participate, free of any great disparities in wealth, small enough to make each member important. There was even room for the dissenter and nonconformist—every town had a few jack-Mormons, those who smoked tobacco, drank tea or coffee or hard liquor, and perhaps even joined the Democratic Party.
Subsequently swamped by the new American mode, by industrialism, commercialism, urbanism, rugged and ragged individualism, the old Mormon communities are now disappearing. But in such small towns as Moab, Kanab, Boulder and Escalante we can still see the handsome homes of hand-carved sandstone blocks, the quiet streets lined with irrigation ditches and giant cottonwoods, the gardens and irrigated pastures, the children riding their horses, which remind us on the downhill side of the twentieth century of what life must have been like back in the nineteenth. On its gentle side, that is.
As for the people themselves, at least those whom I have come to know in and around Moab, they are generally very conservative in their political opinions, yes, and old-fashioned in their morality, but despite this or because of it have the usual virtues of country people: are friendly, hospitable, honest, self-reliant and self- confident. Not very interesting, perhaps, but good to know, good to have as friends and neighbors. Capable of taking care of themselves, and with the means to do it, it is not surprising that they question the justice of being taxed by the Federal Government in order to help support the teeming proletariat (literally and etymologically “the reproducers”) of cities which to some of these independent people seem as remote and foreign as Calcutta or Cairo.
All of this is now under change, of course, and in the accelerating process of urbanization the Mormons of Utah are already discovering their interdependence with the rest of the nation and with the world. Certainly in Salt Lake City itself there is no lack of intriguing social problems—air pollution, traffic jams, angry adolescents, babies born from sinlock and all the rest of it—and very soon the Latter-Day Saints will be forced to confront directly the symptoms of discontent and desperation with which most Americans are now familiar: from LDS to LSD. Even unto the Land of Moab.
In the meanwhile the desert people persist in some of their quaint and antiquated ways. Leslie McKee’s wife, a sweet and kindly woman and a pillar of the Church, tells me that she has unilaterally
However, it’s too late now. Like it or not I am on my way:
We’re marching to Zion,
To beautiful beautiful Zion,
We’re marching upward to Zion,
The beautiful city of love.
It does not, after all, sound unpromising. God knows I have little to lose. But… let’s not hurry. What’s the rush?
Fresh snow on Tukuhnikivats and the other high peaks. They gleam like—like alabaster towers—under the noon sun and glow at evening in a soft, subtle shade of rosy pink, like mighty cones of strawberry ice cream. Very attractive. I prefer the desert.
Why? Because—there’s something about the desert. Not much of an answer. There are mountain men, there are men of the sea, and there are desert rats. I am a desert rat. But why? And why, in precisely what way, is the desert more alluring, more baffling, more fascinating than either the mountains or the oceans?
The majority of the world’s great spirits, from Homer to Melville and Conrad, have felt the call of the sea and responded to its power and mystery, its rhythm, antiquity and apparent changelessness. And the mountains, at least since Rousseau (anticipated by Petrarch) and that great expansion of human consciousness called the Romantic Movement, which opened up for men a whole new world of truth, have been explored and celebrated, strenuously if not adequately, by swarms of poets, novelists, scientists and frost-bitten inarticulate (“because it’s there”) mountain climbers. The desert, however, has been relatively neglected.
Not entirely, of course. There was T. E. Lawrence who liked the desert because, as he said, “it is clean,” and another mad Englishman, C. M. Doughty—
