SOCIAL LIFE IN SALT LAKE CITY:—BALL-ROOMS, “WALL-FLOWERS,” AND DIVORCE.  
We had not been long in Salt Lake City before the ball-season commenced. These balls afford splendid opportunities to the men for flirting with the girls. No matter how old and homely a man is, he thinks that he has as much right to flirt and dance with the girls as the youngest boy; for they all look upon themselves and each other as boys and single men, even if they have a dozen wives. There is no limit to their “privileges.” They are always in the market. Brigham, in his public discourses, has said that the brethren “are all young men under a hundred years of age.” With such an extended privilege, it is here in Utah that hoary Winter and smiling May can be seen galloping forth in the dance together—a thoughtful subject for the artist’s pencil.
It is of no consequence how much a man may flirt in the presence of his wife or wives. They must not presume to say one word to him about it; for the husband is free to do whatever he likes. He is one of the lords of creation. He is master of his wives, of his children. Then, how can one of his own dare to call in question anything he may think fit to do? She may, it is true, do so; but she must take the consequences of that rash act.
Oh! how I loathe even the very remembrance of those hateful ball-rooms, where I have seen so many unhappy wives, and have heard so many tales of sorrow. For, while the wives would be sitting as “wall-flowers” along the sides of the halls, after having danced the first dance with their husbands, as a matter of form, I have heard them many times telling each other about what they had seen their husbands doing during the evening; and how they had been compelled to pay attention to some simpering girl that their husbands chanced to fancy; and how they had had to do it for peace sake, and appear to be satisfied.
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I do not mean to say that I did not like these social amusements myself, for I did; and could, under other circumstances, have enjoyed them very much. But I had been told so many things of the unpleasantness of a ball-room in Salt Lake City—at least, to married women—that my apprehensions were aroused. But all that was ever told me never half came up to the truth; nor can I possibly myself give the reader any correct idea of the heartaches and sorrows which these scenes bring to the wives of Mormons.
It is quite a common thing for married men to go with young girls to these balls. The majority of the men, however, prefer to take their first wives with them at the same time; but it is not infrequent to hear a lady say in the ball-room, “My husband has brought his girl here to-night; but I have not spoken one word to her, nor will I do so.” Yet, if any one were to ask these same ladies if they believed that Polygamy was right, they would say, “Certainly I do; but I do not like her”—and this simply because their husbands had paid her attentions. This seems like inconsistency; but it serves to show what conflicting feelings Mormon women have to contend with.
The men should hear what their wives say about them in the ball-rooms, and the hatred they feel for them. I have seen some women sitting quietly eyeing their husbands, as they danced or flirted with their younger loves, till their cup of indignation was full. Then they would make for the dressing-rooms, where their anger would burst upon the ears of a group of eager listeners, who were seemingly pleased to learn that some one else was suffering as well as themselves. A half-repressed threat, “I will be even with him” has escaped the lips of those who, before that, had passed for being happily situated.
Where new matrimonial alliances are continually taking place, the arrival of a gentleman, with his wife, wives, or a maiden, in the ball-room, is never remarked; and, not infrequently, different wives arrive at different hours during the evenings, as it suits their convenience; and thus it would be difficult to say who came with their “lord.” Besides, no observation is made if a lady thus enters the ball-room alone, though it is expected that her husband is aware of her coming. This coming alone, however, is not a common habit; but, as it is admissible, it does occasionally happen that a husband is dancing or enjoying himself in the ball-room with his last fiancée, when a vigilant pair of eyes searches over the room and lights[211] upon the happy “lord.” When eyes like these encounter the eyes they seek, a change is seen, and the youthful airiness of the gentleman vanishes, and sober looks follow the gaiety of the earlier hour.
I met President Heber C. Kimball at one of these balls, soon after my arrival. He said that he would introduce me to his wife. Every one liked Heber for his outspoken, honest bluntness. He took me up the hall and introduced me to five wives in succession! “Now,” said he, “I think I’ll quit; for I fancy you are not over strong in the faith.”
I asked, “Are these all you have got?”
“O dear, no,” he said: “I have a few more at home, and about fifty more scattered over the earth somewhere. I have never seen them since they were sealed to me in Nauvoo, and I hope I never shall again.”
I thought this was terrible; but it was only the beginning of worse things.
After this winter, I had very little peace; for the women were constantly talking to me about my husband getting another wife. He held out, however, for five years; but at last he “felt that it was his duty to do so,” and I was silly enough to allow that “he was not living up to his religion” unless he took an extra wife.
I shall never forget those ball-room scenes. Even to this day, when I chance to listen to tunes which I used to hear played in those times, they grate terribly upon my ear, and bring back so many sad recollections, that I want to get away from the sound of them as quickly as possible, for they are more than I can endure. Bygone recollections are often recalled by trifles such as this.
A few months ago I attended a ball in Salt Lake City. It was the first I had been to since I withdrew from the Church; and of course it was got up by the “Liberal Party.” I felt free and happy, for there was nothing to annoy or disturb me. Suddenly the band struck up a tune which I had heard while attending the Mormon balls. It sounded like the death-knell of all my pleasant feelings, and aroused memories of the past which were so intensely painful that I could not rally from the depression that I felt for the rest of the evening. I had heard that tune before, and many like it, and had even danced to it, while my heart was breaking.
Let me ask my lady readers—those, I mean, who have never been in Utah. Ladies, how do you think you would feel if you were kept waiting long after the hour of midnight, far[212] away into the morning, until your husbands had got through with their dancing and flirting, while your own hearts were breaking? I think I hear you say, “I would not stand it.” You do not know, I assure you, what you would do under the circumstances. How can you possibly judge what the feelings of a Mormon woman are, who has been taught to believe that “her desire shall be unto her husband, and he shall rule over her.”
In very early days Brigham built a theatre, and a very fair amount of histrionic talent was developed among the Saints. The Social Hall, in which were held balls, public entertainments, and other amusements, was used for histrionic performances before the theatre was built. Brigham owned the theatre. Money was to be made out of it; and the chance of making money Brother Brigham never permitted to slip through his fingers. Brigham’s eyes were sharp enough to see that a theatre would be to him a source of profit, but he did not look far enough. That theatre—under the immediate direction of the Prophet, with his own daughters acting in it, with the plays which were performed under his own censorship—has been one of the many causes which have perceptibly, although perhaps indirectly, shaken the hold which Mormonism had upon many a woman’s mind.
A man would probably witness the performance of a play and return from the theatre with no other thought than the remembrance of an hour’s amusement. But not so a woman. To her the play suggested something more, and her daughters would share her thoughts. Daily and hourly, it might be, the effects of Polygamy would be brought under their notice as a matter affecting themselves personally. They might be firm in the faith, but the observant instincts of their sex could never be wholly crushed. They would notice the neglect which wives endured even from good husbands; they would see a man leaving the wife of his youth, the mother of his children, and, careless of the cruel wrong he did her, leave her in lonely sorrow while he was spending his time in love-making with some young girl who might have been his daughter. They would see a wife crushing out from her heart the holiest impulses which God had implanted there, striving to destroy all affection for him whose dearest treasure that affection should have been, because, indeed, Polygamy could not exist with love. They would see and know, and themselves personally feel, the degradation and misery of the “Celestial Order of Marriage;” and that to them would be the practical picture of life.
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But in the theatre—short-sighted Brigham, to allow it to be so!—another picture would be presented for their consideration; a picture it might be, ideal in its details and surroundings, but true to the letter in the lesson which it conveyed and the thoughts which it suggested. The disgusting, the brutalizing cruelties of Polygamy, were never represented on the stage. Thoughts so coarse, so sensual, could never inspire the true poet’s pen. No; the tale of love, as the poet tells it, is all that is refined, and chaste, and delicate, and pure; the commingling of two souls, the unison of two loving hearts, the hopes, the aspirations, the tender joyful sorrows of two fond natures—of two alone! Such is the picture presented as the ideal of the beautiful and of the good. Then, too, the delicate attentions of the devoted lover, his happiness even in the shadow of a smile from her, the lofty pedestal upon which to his imagination she stands, a queen and peerless; or the confiding love of the heroine of the story; blushingly confessing to herself that there is one heart on earth which is all her own, and in which none but herself can ever rule or reign.
The Mormon women are not devoid of common sense, nor are they destitute of those quick perceptions which, under all circumstances, distinguish their sex. They see on the stage representations of the happiness attendant upon love and marriage, such as God ordained, and such as finds a response in every heart; and they compare such pleasant pictures with what they know and have witnessed of Polygamy, and they draw painful inferences therefrom. Their faith may be proof against apostasy, but the impression left upon their minds produces its effect notwithstanding.
The spring came on, and our prospects began to brighten. My husband not only found remunerative employment for his pen in Salt Lake City, but was also engaged as special correspondent to the New York Herald and several of the California papers.
One morning, a countryman, roughly dressed and looking the picture of care, called at our house and asked to see Mr. Stenhouse. I gazed at him for a moment, for I thought there was something familiar in the sound of his voice. He looked at me, and I at once recognized him; it was Monsieur Balif himself, in whose house we had lived in Switzerland. But, oh, how changed he was! Once a refined, handsome, gentlemanly man; now a mere wreck of his former self, careworn, rough-looking, poorly clad. He and his family had been in Utah six years, and had suffered all the ills that poverty can induce:[214] the change which was wrought in him was so great, that for some moments I was so overcome by my feelings that I could not utter a word. In the few short years which had elapsed since I saw him in his own bright and happy home, he had become quite an old man. I hardly dared to ask about his wife, for I feared what his answer might be; but after a little while he told me that she had sent her love, and would like to see me whenever I could find an opportunity to call upon her. They lived some miles from the city, but I told him that I would not fail to visit them whenever it was possible for me to do so.
I talked a long while with Monsieur Balif, and was much interested in what he told me. He made no complaints; he had still firm faith in Mormonism, and said that if the brethren had not dealt fairly by him they would be answerable to God for what they had done. “Besides,” he added, “I do not blame them so much, for they are Americans, and would not be happy if they did not get the advantage in some way.”
I was anxious to ask him if he had been induced to take another wife, as he had been in Utah during the “Reformation,” and I did not see how it was possible for him to have escaped; but while I was thinking how I might put the question delicately, he saved me the trouble by himself telling me that he had married the young servant-girl, whom his wife had taken from Switzerland with her. This information was quite a shock to me, for I well knew the proud spirit of his wife, and I could realize what anguish this second marriage must have caused her; I did not, however, like to question him on the subject. So I turned the conversation into another channel, and when he went away I sent kind messages to Madame Balif, saying that I would seize the very first opportunity of hearing from her own lips the story of all they had gone through.
Here, again, I found the trail of that monster—Polygamy. This time in the home of my dearest friend. From the moment when she and I had mingled our tears together in Switzerland, over that abomination, life had been to me one long, weary, sickening battle with my own heart; one futile attempt to fully convince myself that Polygamy was right and that I was wrong. I certainly did believe, or thought that I believed, the doctrine was true. But at times nature prevailed in the struggle, and womanly indignation and anger rose in arms against faith. These feelings were, however, at once and unhesitatingly subdued; faith returned triumphant, and I was again convinced[215] that the Revelation must have been the will of the Lord, and that my duty was to submit, but not to question. In moments of comparative self-control I had even tried, as a Missionary’s wife, to justify it to others, but only to witness an outburst of sorrow and anger, and to feel still more the weakness of my position. That had been my own experience; but how had the time passed with my dear old friend? She must, no doubt, have been as greatly disappointed as I was when she came to Zion and saw things as they really were, and not as they had been represented to us.
My own eyes had certainly been opened not a little since my arrival. Instead of finding the people enjoying the comforts and blessings of life, which we had been taught were strewn around them in profuse abundance, we found among all but the leading families the greatest poverty and privation. The majority of the people were living in little log or adobe houses, of one or at the utmost two rooms, of most primitive construction, and without the slightest convenience of any description. Their food was bread and molasses, and it might be an occasional morsel of meat; but many of them scarcely ever indulged in the latter, or in any article of grocery, for months at a time. Their floors and walls were bare, and their clothing poor and scanty; and yet, destitute as they were of all the comforts and conveniences of life, they were conscientiously endeavouring like good Saints to practise Polygamy, because, as they believed, the Lord had commanded it.
In respect to education they were in even a worse position. Books, pictures, and periodicals of any kind, there were none, with the exception of that dreary organ of the church, the Deseret News—the soporific influence of which some wicked Apostate has likened to a dose of Winslow’s soothing syrup. Brigham Young, himself an illiterate man, and the leading Elders, frowned upon every attempt to raise the intellectual status of the people; and so little encouragement was given, that no one could afford to keep school. The consequence was, that the boys and girls grew up with little more education than their own sense of necessity taught them to acquire for themselves; and it was not until very recently that any suitable efforts were made to supply trained teachers and to open schools in which a thorough education could be afforded.
I have already mentioned the sermons of the Tabernacle, and observed how little calculated they were to elevate the character[216] or cultivate the minds of the people. I have before me as I write a choice morsel extracted from one of the sermons of Heber C. Kimball, which I think I must give for the reader’s benefit.
Fancy an “Apostle!” thus addressing a large and mixed congregation of men, women, and children:—
“Here are some edicated men jest under my nose. They come here and they think they know more than I do, and then they git the big head, and it swells and swells until it gits like the old woman’s squash—you go to touch it and it goes ker-smash; and when you look for the man, why he ain’t thar. They’re jest like so many pots in a furnace—yer know I’ve been a potter in my time—almighty thin and almighty big; and when they’re sot up the heat makes ’em smoke a little, and then they collapse and tumble in, and they aint no whar.”
This was Heber’s style in general. Next to making modest people blush, nothing pleased him better than to annoy or ridicule any one who had the smallest pretensions to education; and yet naturally Heber was a kind-hearted man. Brigham’s style is very little better, and the substance of his discourses quite as bad. I will give a very favourable specimen, taken from a sermon on Polygamy, delivered some years ago, touched up and corrected, and published in the official organ, the Deseret News:—
“Men will say, ‘My wife, though a most excellent woman, has not seen a happy day since I took my second wife.’ ‘No, not a happy day for a year,’ says one; and another has no............