Mormon History
Mark Twain on Mormon Contracts - 1861
"I am not given to exaggeration, and when I say a thing I mean it." Page 85
Mr. Street was very busy with his telegraphic matters--and considering
that he had eight or nine hundred miles of rugged, snowy, uninhabited
mountains, and waterless, treeless, melancholy deserts to traverse with
his wire, it was natural and needful that he should be as busy as
possible. He could not go comfortably along and cut his poles by
the road-side, either, but they had to be hauled by ox teams across
those exhausting deserts--and it was two days' journey from water to
water, in one or two of them. Mr. Street's contract was a vast
work, every way one looked at it; and yet to comprehend what the vague
words "eight hundred miles of rugged mountains and dismal deserts"
mean, one must go over the ground in person--pen and ink descriptions
cannot convey the dreary reality to the reader. And after all,
Mr. S.'s mightiest difficulty turned out to be one which he had never
taken into the account at all. Unto Mormons he had sub-let the hardest
and heaviest half of his great undertaking, and all of a sudden they
concluded that they were going to make little or nothing, and so they
tranquilly threw their poles overboard in mountain or desert, just as
it happened when they took the notion, and drove home and went about
their customary business! They were under written contract to Mr.
Street, but they did not care anything for that. They said they
would "admire" to see a "Gentile" force a Mormon to fulfil a losing
contract in Utah! And they made themselves very merry over the
matter. Street said--for it was he that told us these things:
"I was in dismay. I was under heavy bonds to complete my contract
in a given time, and this disaster looked very much like ruin. It
was an astounding thing; it was such a wholly unlooked-for difficulty,
that I was entirely nonplussed. I am a business man--have always
been a business man--do not know anything but business--and so you can
imagine how like being struck by lightning it was to find myself in a
country where written contracts were worthless!--that main security,
that sheet-anchor, that absolute necessity, of business. My
confidence left me. There was no use in making new contracts--that was
plain. I talked with first one prominent citizen and then
another. They all sympathized with me, first rate, but they did
not know how to help me. But at last a Gentile said, 'Go to
Brigham Young!--these small fry cannot do you any good.' I did
not think much of the idea, for if the law could not help me, what
could an individual do who had not even anything to do with either
making the laws or executing them? He might be a very good
patriarch of a church and preacher in its tabernacle, but something
sterner than religion and moral suasion was needed to handle a hundred
refractory, half-civilized sub-contractors. But what was a man to
do? I thought if Mr. Young could not do anything else, he might
probably be able to give me some advice and a valuable hint or two, and
so I went straight to him and laid the whole case before him. He
said very little, but he showed strong interest all the way
through. He examined all the papers in detail, and whenever there
seemed anything like a hitch, either in the papers or my statement, he
would go back and take up the thread and follow it patiently out to an
intelligent and satisfactory result. Then he made a list of the
contractors' names. Finally he said:
"'Mr. Street, this is all perfectly plain. These contracts are
strictly and legally drawn, and are duly signed and certified.
These men manifestly entered into them with their eyes open. I
see no fault or flaw anywhere.'
"Then Mr. Young turned to a man waiting at the other end of the room
and said: 'Take this list of names to So-and-so, and tell him to have
these men here at such-and-such an hour.'
"They were there, to the minute. So was I. Mr. Young asked
them a number of questions, and their answers made my statement
good. Then he said to them:
"'You signed these contracts and assumed these obligations of your own free will and accord?'
"'Yes.'
"'Then carry them out to the letter, if it makes paupers of you! Go!'
"And they did go, too! They are strung across the deserts now,
working like bees. And I never hear a word out of them.
"There is a batch of governors, and judges, and other officials here,
shipped from Washington, and they maintain the semblance of a
republican form of government--but the petrified truth is that Utah is
an absolute monarchy and Brigham Young is king!"
Mr. Street was a fine man, and I believe his story. I knew him well during several years afterward in San Francisco.