would stop this damnable raid and make them leave us in peace--but he's
as bad as the rest. Can't they see that these carpet baggers are only
trying to rob us? Make them see that. The hounds! Sometimes it seems to
me that the Lord is letting these iniquities go on so that the nation
may perish in its sins all the sooner!"

He sneered at John W. Young who had gone to Washington for the Church.
(I had met Smith himself there, earlier in the year.) "I thought he'd
accomplish something," he said, "with his fashionable home and his--
[**missing text?**]
He's using money enough! He's down there, taking things easy, while the
rest of us are driven from pillar to post." He attacked the Federal
authorities, Governor West, the "whole gang." He cried: "I love my wives
and my children--whom the Lord gave me. I love them more than my life--
more than anything in the world--except my religion! And here I am,
fleeing from place to place, from the wrath of the wicked--and they're
left in sorrow and suffering."

His face was pallid with emotion, and his voice came now hard with
exasperation against his enemies and now husky with a passionate
affection for his family--a man of fifty, graybearded, quivering in a
nervous transport of excitement that jerked him up and down the room,
gesticulating.

When he had worn out his first anger of revolt, I brought the
conversation round to the question of polygamy, by asking him about a
provisional constitution for statehood which the non-polygamous Mormons
had recently adopted. It contained a clause making polygamy a
misdemeanor. "I would have seen them all damned," he said, "before I
would have yielded it, but I'm willing to try the experiment, if any