icers. Peculiar as their polity appears, it has proved
remarkably successful in the development of their church and community,
notwithstanding stern hostility and widespread disapproval. They present
an impressive example of shrewdness, thrift, and administrative skill,
resulting in great material prosperity. Besides their separate books,
they accept the Bible as authoritative, and many of their doctrines and
rites resemble those common to the Christian sects. More than anything
else, their teaching and their practice of polygamy have brought them
into collision with "Gentiles" and with the United States Government.

The first Mormon settlement was at Kirtland, Ohio, the next was in
Missouri. From those States they were expelled, and in 1840 they founded
Nauvoo in Illinois. Their later experience, up to their permanent
establishment in Utah, is recounted in the following narrative of the
hardships endured and surmounted by this extraordinary people. But it
should be added that the cause of the exodus was not, as is generally
supposed, religious persecution. The leaders of the sect at Nauvoo had
set up a bank without capital and passed thousands of its worthless
notes upon the unsuspecting farmers and traders; and it was this and
other crimes that exasperated the inhabitants of that region to the
point of driving away the whole community of Mormons.

Once, while ascending the upper Mississippi in the autumn, when its
waters were low, I was compelled to travel by land past the region of
the rapids. My road lay through the "Half-Breed Tract," a fine section
of Iowa, which the unsettled state of its land titles had appropriated
as a sanctuary for coiners, horse thieves, and other outlaws. I had left
my steamer at Keokuk, at the foot of the Lower Fall, to hire a carriage,
and to contend for some fragments of a dirty meal with the swarming
flies, the only scavengers of the locality. From this place to where the
deep water of the river returns, my eye wearied to see everywhere
sordid, vagabond, and idle settlers, and a country marred, without being
improved, by their careless hands.

I was descending the last hillside upon my journey, when a landscape in
delightful contrast broke upon my view. Half encircled by a bend of the
river, a beautiful city lay glittering in the fresh morning sun; its
bright new dwellings set in cool green gardens ranging up around a
stately dome-shaped hill which was crowned by a noble marble edifice