one day in the prison office, when a guard entered with his hat on.
Wilcken snatched it from his head. "Never enter his presence," he said,
"without taking it off." And the guard never did again . . . . I salute
the memory. I come to it with my head bare and my back stiffened. I see
in that calm face the possibilities of the human spirit. He was a man!

He spent his time, there, as he would have spent it elsewhere, writing,
conferring with the agents of his authority, planning for his people. I
saw he was aware that he would emerge from his imprisonment a free man,
personally, but still enslaved by the conditions of the community; and I
knew that he would use his freedom to free the others. I knew that he
had accepted his sentence with this end in view. In plain words, I knew
now--though he never said so--that he was looking toward the necessary
recession from the doctrine of polygamy, and that he may have counted on
the spectacle of his imprisonment to help prepare his people for a
general submission to the law.

With the entry of these leaders into prison, the Mormons felt for them a
warmer admiration, a deeper reverence; but it was mingled with a
gratitude to the nation for the leniency of the court and an awed sense,
too, of the power of the civil law. President Woodruff secretly and
tentatively withdrew his necessary permission, as head of the Church, to
the solemnization of any more plural marriages; and he ordered the
demolition of the Endowment House in which such marriages had been
chiefly celebrated. Many of the non-Mormons, who had despaired of any
solution of the troubles in Utah, now began to hope. The country had
been impoverished; the Mormons had been deprived of much of their
substance and financial vigor; and reasons of business prudence among
the Gentiles weighed against a continuance of proscription. Some of them
distrusted the motives of their own leaders more than they did the