Mormon History
Mark Twain on Destroying Angels - 1861
"I am not given to exaggeration, and when I say a thing I mean it." Page 85
At four in the afternoon we arrived on the summit of Big Mountain,
fifteen miles from Salt Lake City, when all the world was glorified
with the setting sun, and the most stupendous panorama of mountain
peaks yet encountered burst on our sight. We looked out upon this
sublime spectacle from under the arch of a brilliant rainbow!
Even the overland stage-driver stopped his horses and gazed!
Half an hour or an hour later, we changed horses, and took supper with a Mormon "Destroying Angel."
"Destroying Angels," as I understand it, are Latter-Day Saints who are
set apart by the Church to conduct permanent disappearances of
obnoxious citizens. I had heard a deal about these Mormon
Destroying Angels and the dark and bloody deeds they had done, and when
I entered this one's house I had my shudder all ready. But alas
for all our romances, he was nothing but a loud, profane, offensive,
old blackguard! He was murderous enough, possibly, to fill the
bill of a Destroyer, but would you have any kind of an Angel devoid of
dignity? Could you abide an Angel in an unclean shirt and no
suspenders? Could you respect an Angel with a horse-laugh and a
swagger like a buccaneer?
There were other blackguards present--comrades of this one. And
there was one person that looked like a gentleman--Heber C. Kimball's
son, tall and well made, and thirty years old, perhaps. A lot of
slatternly women flitted hither and thither in a hurry, with
coffee-pots, plates of bread, and other appurtenances to supper, and
these were said to be the wives of the Angel--or some of them, at
least. And of course they were; for if they had been hired "help"
they would not have let an angel from above storm and swear at them as
he did, let alone one from the place this one hailed from.
This was our first experience of the western "peculiar institution,"
and it was not very prepossessing. We did not tarry long to
observe it, but hurried on to the home of the Latter-Day Saints, the
stronghold of the prophets, the capital of the only absolute monarch in
America--Great Salt Lake City. As the night closed in we took
sanctuary in the Salt Lake House and unpacked our baggage.