force of arms.

With Wilcken holding the reins on a pair of fast horses at full speed,
we whirled past the old adobe wall (which the Mormons had built to
defend their city from the Indians) and came out into the purple night
of Utah, with its frosty starlight and its black hills--a desert night,
a mountain night, a night so vast in its height of space and breadth of
distance that it seemed natural it should inspire the people that
breathed it with freedom's ideals of freedom and all the sublimities of
an eternal faith. And those people--!

A more despairing situation than theirs, at that hour, has never been
faced by an American community. Practically every Mormon man of any
distinction was in prison, or had just served his term, or had escaped
into exile. Hundreds of Mormon women had left their homes and their
children to flee from the officers of law; many had been behind prison
bars for refusing to answer the questions put to them in court; more
were concealed, like outlaws, in the houses of friends. Husbands and
wives, separated by the necessities of flight, had died apart,
miserably. Old men were coming out of prison, broken in health. A young
plural wife whom I knew--a mere girl, of good breeding, of gentle life--
seeking refuge in the mountains to save her husband from a charge of
"unlawful cohabitation," had had her infant die in her arms on the road;
and she had been compelled to bury the child, wrapped in her shawl,
under a rock, in a grave that she scratched in the soil with a stick. In
our day! In a civilized state!

By Act of Congress, all the church property in excess of $50,000 had
been seized by the United States marshal, and the community faced the
total loss of its common fund. Because of some evasions that had been