How Few Remain (12 page)

A crowd of men, women, and children cheered the soldiers’ departure. At most train stations, as Lincoln had seen during the war, the soldiers would have responded, waving their hats and calling out to the pretty girls. Not here, not now. Every cheer they heard seemed to make them glummer, or perhaps cheerful in a different way. “Jesus,” one of them said loudly to a friend, “will I be glad to get out of this God-damned place.”

“Sad, isn’t it?” said a little man who appeared at Lincoln’s elbow while the former president was watching the troops embark. “They aren’t cheering to wish the men good luck if they have to fight the Rebs. They’re cheering because those fellows are getting out of
here
, and they hope they won’t come back.”

“I had the same impression myself, Mister …?” Lincoln hesitated.

“I’m the chap who’s supposed to meet you here, Mr. Lincoln:
Gabriel Hamilton, at your service.” Despite his small size—Lincoln towered over him—Hamilton had a jaunty manner and a way of raising one eyebrow just a little to suggest he was hard to impress. After shaking hands, he went on, “Call me Gabe, if you please, sir. All my Gentile friends do.”

“Your—Gentile friends?” Lincoln wondered if he’d heard correctly. His ears, these days, weren’t what they had been. Gabe Hamilton had neither a Hebraic name nor Hebraic features.

The little man laughed out loud. “If you’re not a Mormon in Salt Lake City, Mr. Lincoln, you’re a Gentile. Aaron Rothman runs a dry-goods shop down the street from me. Here, he’s a Gentile.”

“And what is his opinion of his … unusual status?” Lincoln asked.

“He thinks it’s funny as blazes, matter of fact,” Hamilton answered. “He’s a pretty good egg, Rothman is. But Presbyterians like me, Catholics, Baptists, Jews, what have you—in Utah Territory, we’re all outsiders looking in. We hang together better than we would if that weren’t so, I expect.”

“If you don’t hang together, you will hang separately?” Lincoln suggested.

Hamilton took that for his wit rather than Ben Franklin’s and laughed again, uproariously this time. “You’re a sharp man, Mr. Lincoln. I’m glad we’ve got you out here, for a fact, I am. You’ll buck up the miners and the other working folks, and you’ll make the bosses think twice about what they’re doing, and those are both good things. Come on back to my buggy, sir, and I’ll take you to your hotel.”

“Thank you.” Lincoln followed his guide away from the train. Soldiers were still boarding the one bound for the East. The local crowd was still applauding their departure, too. “Those would be Mormons, I suppose?”

“That they would.” Now Gabriel Hamilton sounded more than a little grim. “I tell you frankly, Mr. Lincoln, the rest of us in town are nervous about it. Without soldiers here, God only knows what’s liable to happen. God and John Taylor, I suppose. The Mormons think that’s the same thing. Gentiles, though, will tell you different.”

“You’re referring to Brigham Young’s successor?” Lincoln said as Hamilton took his luggage from him and loaded it onto
the buggy. “Young was an uncrowned king here during my administration.”

“And up till the day he died, four years ago,” Hamilton agreed. “And do you know what? I think he loved every minute of it.” He untied the horses from the rail and clambered into the carriage, nimble as a monkey. “Mr. Taylor’s got the same power, but not the same bulge, if you know what I mean.”

“I do indeed.” Law and politics had both shown Lincoln that, of two men with the same nominal authority, one was liable to be able to do much more than the other if their force of character differed. “So Taylor is King Log instead of King Stork, eh?”

“Wouldn’t go so far as that. He’s quieter about what he does, that’s all. You settled there?” At Lincoln’s nod, Hamilton clucked to the horses, flicked the reins, and got the carriage going. After a little while, he continued, “The Mormons still listen to him, I’ll tell you that.” He sounded mournful: a man relating a fact he wished a falsehood. “You won’t have many of them coming to your speech tomorrow night, I’m afraid.”

“That’s a pity,” Lincoln said. “From what I’ve read of Utah, and from what you’ve told me, they are the ones who most need to hear it.”

As in Denver, the streets in Salt Lake City were all of dirt. Dust rose from the horses’ hooves and from the wheels of the carriage. Though traffic was not heavy, a lot of dust hung in the air. But the water that ran over the pebbles in the gutter looked bright and clean enough to drink, and Lincoln saw a couple of women in calico dresses and sunbonnets dipping it up in pails, so he supposed it was used for that purpose.

Trees—poplar, mulberry, locust, maple—grew alongside those gutters, and their branches, green and leafy with the fresh growth of spring, spread above the streets, shielding them from the full force of the sun. The prospect was attractive, especially when compared to either the flat, dull towns of the prairie or the stony gulches in which most Rocky Mountain cities were set.

“Where’s the Great Salt Lake?” Lincoln asked, suddenly realizing he could not see the natural feature for which the city was named.

Hamilton pointed west. “It’s almost twenty miles from here. There’s a little excursion train that’ll take you there if you want to see it. Don’t drink the water if you do go; it’ll burn you up from the inside out.”

“I’ve seen if from the train several times, on my way out to California,” Lincoln said. “I have no desire for a closer acquaintance—it’s only that I haven’t been in, as opposed to through, Salt Lake City till now, and so missed it.”

A few of the houses were log cabins that took Lincoln back to the long-vanished days of his own youth. More were of creamy gray-brown adobe bricks, some stuccoed over and whitewashed or painted, others left their natural shade. Newer homes might have been transplanted straight from the East. Almost all of them—cabins, low adobes, and modern clapboards and fired-brick houses—were surrounded by riots of trees and shrubs and climbing vines and flowers, making a spectacle all the more impressive when measured against the bleak, brown Wasatch Mountains just east of town.

Some of those adobe houses, despite being of a single story, nevertheless had a great many rooms, with several wings spreading out from what had begun as small, simple dwellings. Pointing to one of those, Gabe Hamilton said, “You see a place like that, Mr. Lincoln, and you can bet a polygamist lives there. He’ll take the center for himself and give each wife and her brats a wing.”

“How many Mormons are polygamists, truly?” Lincoln asked. “They write all sorts of things in the Eastern papers.”

“They say all sorts of things here, too,” Hamilton answered. “The truth is devilish hard to find, and they don’t keep any public records of marriages past the first, which makes it harder yet. I’d say it’s about one in ten, if that, but the polygamists have influence beyond their numbers. If you’re going to support more than one wife and family, you need more than the common run of money, you see.”

“Oh, yes,” Lincoln said. “A case similar to that of slaveholders in the Confederate States. And those not in the elite group will some of them aspire to join it over the course of time, and thus support it even without presently enjoying its benefits.”

“Benefits?” Gabe Hamilton let out a derisive guffaw. “Have you ever
seen
most of these Mormon women, Mr. Lincoln? You ask me—not that anybody did—taking ’em is an act of charity.”

Like the residential blocks, the central business district of Salt Lake City boasted avenues lined with trees. The buildings back of those trees were modern enough, and included several fine-looking hotels. Ahead loomed what looked like an enormous Gothic cathedral, about three fourths of the way to completion.
“That would be the famous Mormon Temple?” Lincoln asked, pointing.

“That’s right,” Hamilton nodded. “And that long dome there—the one that’d look handsomer if the wall and the trees didn’t hide its lines—that’s the Tabernacle, where they worship. They don’t think small, do they?”

“No,” Lincoln allowed. “Many things may be said of them, but not thinking small.”

From the window of his hotel room, Lincoln could look out at the Tabernacle and the Temple. On scaffolding that seemed hardly thicker than cobwebs, men tiny as ants against the granite bulk of the latter labored to bring Brigham Young’s grandiose vision one day closer to completion.

Lincoln had just finished unpacking when someone knocked on the door. When he opened it, he found a handsome young man in a dignified suit standing in the hallway. “Mr. Lincoln, President Taylor presents his compliments, and hopes you will be free to take supper with him this evening at seven o’clock,” the youngster said. “If that is convenient to you, sir, I will come by with a carriage at about half past six, to convey you to his home.”

“President Taylor?” For a moment, the only president by that name who came to Lincoln’s mind was Zachary, now thirty years dead. Then he remembered where he was. “The head of your church, you mean?”

“Yes, sir, of course.” The emissary had probably learned of Zachary Taylor in school, but John Taylor was the living reality for him.

“Tell him I thank him for the invitation, and I shall be pleased to see him at the hour he named.” For the life of him, Lincoln could not see why the spiritual leader of the Latter-Day Saints wanted to meet with him, but what he did not show to the young messenger, that worthy would not guess. And his own ignorance and curiosity would be relieved soon enough.

As promised, the bright young man came by the hotel in a handsome buggy at six-thirty. The journey to John Taylor’s home took a little less than half an hour. The home itself, or at least the central portion of it, would not have looked out of place in Chicago or Pittsburgh: it was a two-story building, brilliantly whitewashed, with a slate roof. Added to that central portion, though, were enough wings for several butterflies, each, no doubt, housing a separate portion of the Mormon president’s extended and extensive
family. Poplars, maples, and grapevines surrounded the house, and ivy climbed up the front wall.

When Lincoln knocked at the front door, a man of about his own age opened it. “Come in, sir,” he said in an accent that showed he’d been born in England. “I am John Taylor; it is a pleasure to meet you.” His hair, his eyebrows, and the beard growing along the angle of his jaw and under his chin were all snowy white. He habitually pursed his lips, which made his mouth look narrow and bloodless; his deep-set eyes, very blue, seemed to have seen more sorrows than joys. Lincoln understood that. He would have said the same of himself.

He looked around with no small curiosity. The central portion of the house seemed no more unusual within than without: the furniture was comfortable without being lavish; bookshelves lined many walls; the knickknacks and gewgaws on tables, the pictures on the walls, were the sort any minister might have had.

Nor was the dining room in any way strange. As Lincoln sat down, Taylor said, “I fear I can offer you only water or milk with your meal, for I have no tea or coffee or liquor in the house.”

“Water will do,” Lincoln said.

They talked of small things during supper. Taylor did not offer to introduce the girl—she was about sixteen—who brought bread and butter and beefsteaks and potatoes and squash in from the kitchen. Maybe she was a servant. Maybe she was a daughter. She didn’t look much like him, but she might have favored her mother. Maybe she was a wife. Lincoln did his best to put that unappealing thought (not that the girl herself was unappealing, in spite of what Gabe Hamilton had said about Mormon women) out of his mind.

After she had cleared away the last of the dishes, the Mormon president said, “When you next communicate with President Blaine, sir, I hope you will convey to him that the line the U.S. government has taken here makes it more difficult than it might otherwise be for us to support that government with our full power in the event of a collision with the Confederate States.”

“I have no notion when I shall be in touch with Mr. Blaine again,” Lincoln answered truthfully.

John Taylor coughed. “Please, sir, I know you may not love the faith I follow, but that I follow it does not make me a child or a fool. Can it be a coincidence that the one former Republican president of the United States comes to Deseret—Utah, if you’d
rather—at the same time as the present Republican president is leading the country toward war with the CSA? For what other purpose could you be here than to examine our loyalty in the event of a conflict?”

“I was invited here to speak to the working men of this Territory on ways in which they can hope to better their lot,” Lincoln said, again truthfully.

“A plausible pretext, I don’t deny,” Taylor said, seeming intent on finding deviousness whether it was there or not. “The timing, however, makes me doubt it conveys the whole story of your visit. Be that as it may, do please tell President Blaine that, since he seems to be continuing the longstanding U.S. policy of attempting to suppress our institutions, some of our number wonder if continued allegiance to the United States be worth the cost. All we have ever sought is to be left alone, to practice our own ways as we think best.”

“If you will recall, President Taylor, that was also the rallying cry of the Confederate States during the war,” Lincoln answered. “Your people were loyal then—conspicuously loyal. I note also, whether you care to believe it or not, that I have no influence to speak of on President Blaine.” Once again, that was true. Blaine did his best not to remember that he and Lincoln were members of the same party.

“Come, come.” Having dismissed the truth with two words, Taylor went back to the point he had been making before: “Unlike the case of the Confederacy, our practices have the consent of all those involved in them. We seek to impose them on no one, but the United States have continually labored to subvert them, the more so since the railroads have brought such an influx of Gentiles into our homeland. Do you wonder at our resentment, sir?”

Lincoln thought again of that young girl.
Could
she have been a wife? Taylor’s public face was the image of decorum. What did he do in private, in this great rambling boardinghouse of a home? That question, and others like it, echoed through the minds of ordinary Americans when they thought of Mormonism.