le, setting aside their
good drilling and excellent discipline. In number, they would also have
the advantage; while I am now writing, they can muster five thousand
well-drilled soldiers, and, in the event of an invasion of Texas, they
could easily march ten thousand men from the Sabine to the Rio Grande,
from the Red River to the Gulf of Mexico. Opposition they will not
meet. A year after the capture, the whole of Texas becomes Mormon,
while Joe--king, emperor, Pharaoh, judge or regenerator--rules over a
host of two hundred and fifty thousand devoted subjects.

Let our reader observe that these are not the wild utopias of a heated
imagination. No; we speak as we do believe, and our intercourse with
the Mormons, during our travels, has been sufficiently close to give us
a clear insight into their designs for the future.

Joe's policy is, above all, to conciliate the Indians, and that once
done, there will not be in America a power capable of successfully
opposing him. In order to assist this he joins them in his new faith.
In admitting the Indians to be the "right, though guilty," descendants
of the sacred tribes, he flatters them with an acknowledgment of their
antiquity, the only point on which a white can captivate and even blind
the shrewd though untutored man of the wilds.

In explanation of the plans and proceedings of Joe Smith and the
Mormons, it may not be amiss to make some remarks upon the locality
which he has designed as the seat of his empire and dominion, and where
he has already established his followers, as the destined instruments of
his ambition.

According to the Mormon prophets, the whole region of country between
the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies was, at a period of about
thirteen hundred years ago, densely peopled by nations descended from a
Jewish family, who emigrated from Jerusalem in the time of the prophet
Jeremiah, some six or seven hundred years before Christ; immense cities
were founded, and sumptuous edifices reared, and the whole land
overspread with the results of a high and extensive civilisation.

The Book of Mormon speaks of cities with stupendous stone walls, and of
battles, in which hundreds of thousands were slain. The land afterwards
became a waste and howling wilderness, traversed by a few straggling
bands or tribes of savages, descended from a branch of the aforesaid
Jewish family, who, in consequence of their wickedness, had their
complexion changed from white