I have recently been re-reading one of Mark Twain's great works "Roughing It"I love reading Mark Twain, especially his works of "non-fiction" using the term lightly, since he himself admitted to "fits of exaggeration at times". But that being said I love his sarcastic sense of humor and unique powers of observation about almost everything American.
while I was reading, it brought a smile to my face to read his account of his two day stay in Salt Lake City. and especially his comments on polygamy. they are now quoted as he wrote them.
Our stay in Salt Lake City amounted to only two days, and therefore we had no time to make the customary inquisition into the workings of polygamy and get up the usual statistics and deductions preparatory to calling attention of the nation at large one more to the matter.
I had the will to do it. With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here—until I saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched. My heart was wiser than my head. It warmed toward these poor ungainly and pathetically “homely” creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, “No—the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure--and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.”
This is a cartoon that was published in a national magazine at the time of Brigham Young's death. depicting, with some humor, his mourning wives.
