Mormon History
Typical Cumorah Hill Pilgrim - 1875
The Salt Lake Daily Tribune – August 20, 1876
A Latter-Day Pilgrim.
Last week an embodiment of
credulity called at our sanctum to inquire the way to Mormon Hill. He was a
young man of thirty-five or more. There was a pious benignity upon his face, an
inquiring look in his blue eye, and a charming deceitfulness about his fluent
grammar. His appearance was characteristically that of a Mormon elder and his
patriarchal whiskers made compensation for lacking wisdom and common sense. His
name was Havens. He had from boyhood eaten the husks of Nephi, Lemuel and Sam,
and drunk deeply from the fountains of foolery which allay no thirst.
Although capacitated for better things, he had been the creature of unkind
circumstances. He had learned little of Jesus, but much of Palmyra's champion
trickster, Joe Smith. He had ignored the Sublime morality of the acknowledged
Great Master and stupified his soul with the solified nonsense of Joe Smith's
Bible. From the far West he had come, like the pilgrim to Mecca's holt place,
desiring to walk the streets of our Holy City, climb the sacred side of Cumorah,
look from the summit upon the home of Prophet Joe, bare his brow to the light of
heaven, and, standing upon the unmarked graves of slaughtered Nephites, to
recall the startling past and from memory's solemn music drink in the
inspirations of historic places, and go away to the immortal accomplishment of
small things in a large way! This mild form of insanity was like many other
others, who make up in sincerity what they are wanting in intelligence. Full of
a perverted faith, he had the conscientious approval of any and all foolery
which might come to him in the name of the Mormon religion!
To the older inhabitants of our town -- those who knew the bad character and
consciousless trickstering of Messrs. Smith, Cowdery and Harris -- these Mormon
pilgrimages are an amusement, commencing with a broad smile and ending in the
"Ha-ha" of jeering contempt.
In theory and practice, plot and play, Mormonism is certainly the most
contemptible of all religious impostures; and yet, we are sorry to say, there
are persons who will accept its inconsistent balder-dash, swallow its sickening
literature and tire their wayward feet in making pilgrimages to Cumorah. One
only hopes is in the growth of intelligence and the lectures of Mrs. Ann Eliza
Young, whose labors we desire to applaud -- Wayne (New York) Sentinel.