How Few Remain (28 page)

Another choral hymn followed, this one longer than any that had gone before. While it went on, eight bishops of the church cut sliced loaves of bread into morsels for communion. Attendants took the morsels on trays and passed them out to the audience.

While they were doing so, an elderly man took his place behind the pulpit. Lincoln did not recognize his appearance, not at the distance from which he saw him, but stiffened when the man began to speak: he knew John Taylor’s voice.

“I wish to read a couple of verses from the twenty-first chapter
of the book of Revelations, and to talk about them with you,” Taylor said. “St. John the Divine begins the chapter as follows: ‘I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away, and there was no more sea. And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.’

“My friends, my brethren, have we not here the new Jerusalem? Have we not been tested in the fire of persecution, and assayed as pure metal?” Lincoln found it interesting that he should use a figure drawn from mining. He could not linger on it, for Taylor was continuing: “Has God not given us this land, the new Jerusalem, to use and to shape according to our desire and to His? Have we not richly adorned our Deseret, which was empty when we came to it?”

In many churches, the congregation would have shouted out agreement. Here they sat quiet as the communion morsels came to them row by row. President Taylor went on, “By the first heaven and the first earth I take John to mean the requirements forced upon us up to this time by the government of the United States, requirements violating the freedom of religion guaranteed to all by the first amendment to the Constitution. These infringements on our liberty shall not stand, for now we enter into the new heaven and the new earth. The sea of tears which was our lot shall pass away, and exist no more, as John clearly states.

“In the new heaven and the new earth we are creating, we shall be free to worship and to live as we reckon best and most fitting, and no one shall have the power to abridge our rights in any way. For the United States are undergoing their own apocalypse now; if they choose not to treat us as we deserve, they shall be given over to that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world. Washington is bombarded. Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city.”

Lincoln turned to Gabe Hamilton. “It seems you were right,” he murmured.

“It does, doesn’t it?” the activist answered. “I tell you the truth, sir: I’d sooner have been wrong.”

The attendants with the trays of communion bread took a long time to reach the gallery. When at last they got to Lincoln’s row, he passed the tray on without taking a morsel. He wanted no part of the communion being celebrated in the Tabernacle.

* * *

George Custer sat up straighter in his seat as the train wheezed to a halt west of the little town of Wahsatch, Utah. The satiny plush upholstery and soft padding made sitting straight require an effort of will: the leading officers in John Pope’s hastily improvised army rode in the comfort of a deluxe Pullman car, while the soldiers they commanded were packed like sardines into the cramped and battered confines of cars commandeered from emigrant trains.

“Let me see the map, would you, Tom?” Custer said. His brother, who had the seat on the aisle beside him, handed him the folded sheet. He unfolded it, traced with his finger the route they’d taken thus far, and grunted. “Next would be Castle Rock, and then the bridge over Echo Creek.”

“Would be
is right,” Tom Custer said. “Next is the place where the Mormons have blocked the tracks.” He sounded quiveringly eager to go to war, even if it was against citizens of his own country.

As soon as the train had come to a complete stop, Brigadier General John Pope rose from his seat and addressed his officers in the grandiloquent tones he commonly used: “Gentlemen, we now have the privilege and the opportunity of restoring the refractory Territory of Utah to its proper allegiance to the United States of America. I suggest that we now disembark to examine the damage and vandalism the Mormons have inflicted upon the tracks in their illegal and improper effort to separate themselves from our great country.”

“That’ll give us the privilege and opportunity of getting shot if the damned Mormons decide they don’t care to return to their proper allegiance,” Tom Custer whispered to his brother. But he was one of the first men to rise and head put of the car.

George Custer was on his brother’s heels. It had been hot and stuffy and close in the Pullman car, the air so full of tobacco smoke that Custer might as well have been puffing a cigar himself. Outside, it was hot and dry: gray rocks and roan mixed together. The breeze smelled spicily of sagebrush and tasted of alkali.

Colonel John Duane, the chief Army engineer attached to Pope’s command, walked along the tracks till there were no more tracks. Custer trailed along with him. The two men had known each other a long time, both having served in McClellan’s headquarters during the War of Secession. Duane had been thin and
scholarly looking then, and still was; the only difference in him Custer could see was that his mustache and the hair at his temples had gone gray. After peering west for a couple of minutes, he spoke in tones of professional admiration: “Well, well. They didn’t do things by halves, did they?”

“Not a bit of it,” Custer agreed. From perhaps a hundred yards west of where the locomotive had stopped, the tracks of the Union Pacific quite simply ceased to exist. The rails were gone. So were the cross ties that anchored them in place. In case that hadn’t been enough to get across the impression that the Mormons did not want people traveling through Utah, they had also dug a series of deep ditches across the roadbed to make repairing it as hard as possible.

John Pope came up to examine the damage. “They’ll pay for this,” he ground out, “every last penny’s worth of it.” He started walking west, paralleling what had been the line of the track.

“Where are you going, sir?” Custer called.

“I am going to find some Mormons,” General Pope replied. “I am going to tell the first one I do find that if any further destruction of the railroad takes place, their heads and the heads of their leaders shall answer for it.” He stumped on. No one had ever impugned his courage, not even at McClellan’s headquarters.

Custer glanced back over his shoulder. His brother and the other regimental officers were already taking charge of getting men and horses off the train and readying them for whatever lay ahead. Properly, he should have supervised the job. But danger drew him. So did the chance to make an impression on his commanding officer. “I’m with you, sir!” he exclaimed, and hurried after Pope.

Sweat ran down his face. When he reached up to wipe it away from his eyes, his hand slid across the skin of his forehead as if it had soapsuds on it. He nodded to himself. The dust was alkaline, sure enough.

Pope glanced over to him as he caught up. “Misery loves company—is that it, Colonel?” he asked, skirting yet another ditch.

“It’s a nice day for a walk,” Custer answered with a shrug. The Mormons could have posted sharpshooters anywhere in this boulder-strewn landscape. Custer looked neither right nor left. If they had, they had. Custer and Pope strolled along as casually as if they were in New York’s Central Park. Pointing ahead to a
small collection of ramshackle buildings, Custer said, “I do believe that’s Castle Rock.”

“I do believe you’re right,” Pope said. “With any luck at all, we’ll find some Mormon bigwigs there. If they haven’t been waiting for me or somebody like me to show up, I miss my guess.”

He’d missed plenty of guesses against Lee and Jackson. Against the Mormons, he was spot on. A small party came out of Castle Rock behind a flag of truce. Pope stopped and let them approach. Custer perforce stopped with him. Along with the standard bearer, the Mormon party included a couple of tough-looking youngsters carrying Winchesters and an old man whose unkempt white beard spilled halfway down his chest.

The old-timer stepped out in front of the others and walked up to Pope and Custer. Nodding to them, he said, “Gentlemen, I am Orson Pratt, one of the apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints. I can treat with you.”

“I am Brigadier General John Pope of the United States Army, Mr. Pratt,” Pope said, not offering to shake hands, “and with me here is Colonel Custer of the Fifth Cavalry. President Blaine has appointed me military governor of the Utah Territory and charged me with bringing this Territory into full obedience to all the laws of the United States. That is exactly what I intend to do, and that is exactly what I shall do.” He pointed back toward the train. “I have with me a force I believe adequate to ensure obedience, and can summon more men at need.”

One of the rifle-toting young Mormons said, “They’ll be sorry if they try it.”

“You’ll be sorrier if you get in our way,” Custer snapped, angry at the fellow’s arrogance. Pope nodded, as if Custer had simply got the words out before he could.

Orson Pratt held up a hand. “I would sooner negotiate than quarrel.” His heavy features turned severe. “I will note, however, that your high-handed attitude, General, is a symptom of the prejudice of the government of the United States that has brought us to this pass.”

“Obedience to the laws of the United States is not negotiable,” Pope replied. “As military governor of a territory judged to be in rebellion against U.S. authority, I have powers far beyond those of any civil official. The fewer of those powers you require me to use, the happier you and your people will be. Remember, a great
many back East would be as glad to see you wiped off the face of the earth.”

Pratt’s countenance darkened with anger. “We are not without strength, General. If you seek to impose yourself upon us by force—”

“We’ll do exactly that,” Pope declared. “You have not the slightest notion of what you’re up against, Mr. Pratt. This would not be a war of bushwhackers against riflemen. We have the power to smash your troops and smash your towns, sir, and the will to use it if provoked.”

“Talk is cheap,” Pratt’s bodyguard jeered.

Pope turned on his heel. “Come with me,” he said. “You have my word you’ll be allowed to return here whenever you like. If, however, you judge I am lying about the force at my disposal, I feel myself obliged to disabuse you of your misapprehension.” Without looking to see whether he was being followed, he started back toward the troop train. Custer fell in behind him. Pope’s bombast had its uses. Pratt and his companions tagged along, as the general must have known they would.

Had Custer been in charge of the Mormons who had chosen to defy the authority of the United States, he would have attacked the troop train with everything he had the minute it came within range of his weapons. That the Mormons had failed to do so struck him as cowardice, and as a confession of their guilty consciences. That they might have worried about the consequences of such a precipitate assault never entered his mind, as he rarely worried about consequences himself.

They would not have the chance to attack now. Infantrymen and Custer’s cavalry had already formed a defensive perimeter. The foot soldiers were methodically scraping out firing pits in the rocky ground. Some of them had trowel-shaped bayonets that doubled as entrenching tools. The others used conventional bayonets and whatever other tools they happened to have.

A battery of artillery had come off the freight cars. The breech-loading field pieces were drawn up in a line facing south; sunlight gleamed from the bright steel of their barrels. Next to them stood the two Gatling guns attached to Custer’s regiment. Sergeants Buckley and Neufeld and their crews looked ready and alert.

Orson Pratt was a hard man to impress. “I knew you had soldiers here, General,” he said tartly. “I didn’t have to walk all that way in the hot sun to see as much.”

Pope remained unfazed. “No one who has not seen modern weapons demonstrated has an accurate understanding of their destructive power. You say you are prepared to prevent us from advancing to Salt Lake City. Perhaps you are in fact less prepared than you fondly believe.” He raised his voice and spoke to the artillerymen: “Each piece, six rounds, bearing due south, range three thousand yards.”

The soldiers with red trim and chevrons on their uniforms sprang into action. Inside of two minutes, each cannon had roared half a dozen times. Choking clouds of black-powder smoke rose. Through them, Custer watched three dozen shells slam into the desert hillside almost two miles away. They threw up smoke and dust, too, all of it coming from a surprisingly small area: Pope had evidently picked his best gunners for the demonstration. Custer hoped it impressed Orson Pratt. It certainly impressed him. Artillery played only a small role in Indian fighting on the plains. The art had come a long way since the War of Secession.

After the guns fell silent, General Pope said, “That is by no means their extreme range. I could be bombarding Castle Rock now. If I have to fight my way to Salt Lake City, I can bombard it at ranges from which you could not hope to reply.”

Pratt looked as if he’d just cracked a rotten egg. “That is an uncivilized way to make war, sir,” he said.

“It’s also deuced effective,” Pope answered. “I have been charged with returning Utah to obedience by whatever means prove necessary. President Blaine cares only about results, not about methods. No one outside Utah will care about methods, either.”

That made the Mormon apostle look even less happy. The mouthier of his two bodyguards spoke up: “You can’t knock everything down with your guns there. What happens when we come at you man-to-man?”

“I was hoping someone would ask me that,” Pope said with a nasty smile. He turned to Custer and gave a half bow. “Colonel, the Gatlings being under your command, would you be so kind as to do the honors?”

“My pleasure, sir,” Custer replied, saluting. “Will two magazines per gun suffice?” At John Pope’s nod, Custer raised his voice: “Soldiers positioned in front of the Gatling guns, please take yourself out of harm’s way.” Bluecoats in dust-streaked uniforms hastily abandoned the pits and trenches they’d dug for
themselves. Custer nodded to the Gatlings’ crew chiefs. “Sergeants, two magazines from each weapon, if you please.”