Show BRIGHAM YOUNG AND HIS DEFAMERS By S. A. Kenner 4 In the light of practical achievement and that higher grade of human wisdom can only be classed as Brigham Young was one of the grandest figures in American The task successfully carried out of piloting a band of mobbed and homeless wearied and despondent even before the journey proper from the margin of civilization into the midst of the unknown and forbidding wilds of the and there placing on an enduring basis the foundation of a civilization the fruition of which is not yet full-orbed but is the marvel of our is one that no other with even a suggestion of the difficulties to be met and steadily contended with till would have This age has had but one Brigham Young and his name and while the heritage of the whole are an inalienable heirloom to the state which owes its existence to It is easy for us who came in after when there were comfortable houses to live well defined roads to travel some of the comforts and nearly all the necessities of civilized life abundant and the commonwealth well along on its way to the foreshadowed to show where that or the other thing might have been better how some of the work might have been how some things might have been better left out and other things that left out brought into But we weren't We didn't do these or any of We are not given to going to places that nobody else will go to and settling down there to the hardest kind of enduring all of in that our dependencies and their descendants may have comfortable homes safe from assassins and nor would or could the population and growth of the Pacific coast had an virtuous band whose leader he was have these great results without cause must have a and upon the justice and capacity for control of the leader inevitably depends the outcome of the so far as human agencies can control This case called for a Brigham Young and the Mormon people had Through their work and Ms leadership the peopling and building up of the great expanse desert waste west of the Missouri and east of the Sierra Nevadas was advanced a generation the incalculable impulse in the earlier days through the recruiting station and resting place in the midway of the drastic journey from frontier to and desolation vanished gradually throughout the entire The man who was at the forefront of the human forces by which these miracles were accomplished was too big for his own generation to fully comprehend his nor has this one yet developed in its entirety a full appreciation of his But we are growing up to it slowly and Of course there are and perhaps always will who will at all times and on all occasions refuse to merit where the person to whom it belongs happens to be or has been a And so we have the Blanche and Sweetheart of the press and the played-out politicians and the childless mothers engaged in another of their discordant but weakening choruses over the proposition to place the great pioneer's image upon the silver service for the battleship it being put forth that he was a traitor to his It is a mighty easy thing to be a traitor in some people's George Washington that immortal band who was a so were affixed their signatures to the most potent of all human documents the Declaration of Independence together with all of Washington's assistants and traitors in the first Recently an effort was made in the United States by a man y brains undergo the greatest is sitting to have the statue of Robert excluded from the congressional hall of statuary- on the ground that he was a But coming tack to It is true he caused the government some ot his ow little trouble at and raised an army to prevent the federal army from entering these va which movement on his part was entirely suc- f They stayed out till he was ready for them to come then they came on the terms he prescribed and behaved real well while they were Perhaps his detractors have not yet studied up the laws ot natural and and thereby acquired the is not required retreat information that a pursued man further than the that self-preservation is a cardinal principle in our lives' and that resistance to tyrants is obedience to taking Brigham's case out of analogy and placing it by what do we Was he a and if how much and what A traitor is one who betrays an accepted who connives at or actually accomplishes things detrimental to government or when they have a right to do look to him for loyalty and What claims upon or rights from Brigham Young the United States Had it not repeatedly refused him and his people protection against lawlessness and illegal and just as often aided and abetted the authors of the When he and his little band of exiles sought the remote and secure fastnesses of the Rocky they paused not till they were beyond the out of the jurisdiction and safe from the assaults of the head-hunters and home-destroyers beyond the and didn't owe this great and glorious government one red cent or the smallest emotion of They had a right to raise the standard of absolute independence and maintain it so long as they saw The soil on which they pitched their tents did not belong to the United States it did so far as possession belong to any country under the although Mexico had a title which existed on paper and on nothing so that Brigham Young and his being the discoverers and following the discovery with immediate and continuous had the highest title to the soil known to common law or sustained by the usage of civilized The only question was their ability- to hold and that did not really amount to a Yes the pioneers were safe at and upon their own soil They could establish a government of their own and claim recognition of all others if they as the great leader would have done had be been to extent the kind of man he has lately been pictured What he did instead of showing resentment or being in the smallest measure antagonistic to the country which he would have been amply justified in utterly ignoring and treating with was to take possession of the new lands in its name and im mediately seek to bring them within its political and legal Not much traitor there and And when has there ever been an incident to found any charge of treason except the previously referred when he so fully that the government subsequently and his But I shall not permit this article to run into a lengthy It is not Enough has al ready been Brigham Utah's builder and first needs no encomiums my feeble His monument is not alone the one over which the are making night hideous and daytime discordant he has one that will endure so long as memory remains the warder of the brain and until time fades into one against which the assaults of def amers and falsifiers will ever be as ineffectual as are the ceaseless waves which dash themselves into spray against the flinty face of If who were of and with looked favor upon the proposition to place his image upon those implements of we regarded it as a condescension on our part and expected the favor to be but if those the matter in charge prefer to be influenced by the narrow-gauge tricksters who still chant their dreary concoctions of hatred and malice over the grave of the mighty let them act I have but to keep his image off the battleship and be damned to Put on C. M. or F. J. or Iliff or some other guileless whose life work is inextricably interwoven with Utah's and enjoy the transaction to your heart's Our Mountain Home will stand when you are dead and and we are not going to let what you do jostle from our minds the sacred figures who reared and maintained it for |