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Show View from the Red Point . . a popularized View from the Red Point, Note: account of the beginnings of Utah, by Albert Antrei, is being published serially in the Manti Messenger and Ephraim Enterprise. A significant historical document, "View from the Red Point is fascinating reading. Readers will likely want to clip each installment and combine them at the completion of publication into a complete narrative.) (Editors South-Centr- al The masons selected the stone for the Temple with such pious care that they also decided that the mortar must contain only the finest lime. They rejected that from Manti Canyon, and perhaps it pleased Gus Dodge, if he was still around, to know that they went to the canyon which bears his name to find a limestone which they considered pure enough for the Lord. The architecture of the Temple is a blending of Gothic Revival, French Renaissance Revival, and French Second Empire. There is also no missing the two Victorian (somewhat battlements gingerbread) towers separated by reminiscent slightly of Windsor Castle. All put together, there is more than a little suggestion of a peppery dash of Brigham Young and of the salty sweat and red blood of his frontier folk, who were so determined to wrought a pioneer miracle in the desert that they actually fashioned one. The Temple grounds were laid out by Jesse W. Fox, who by of Utah Territory. One of his 1877 was the Surveyor-Genera- l assistants was Truman 0. Angel, and you cant go far off with help like that! The contruction material was mostly the oolite stone from the hill and red pine from the nearby plateau. There was also some ponderosa pine from southern Utah, and for the finer wood finishes birdseye maple and walnut were imported from the East. rock from a d Some of the footing was made of a harder, small quarry south of Manti, and a few stone were used from the Ephraim quarry. The dedication was in 1888. It took three days to accomodate all those who came to witness the ceremony. May 19 was a Saturday, and they began to arrive on that day. The roads from the north, south, and west were choked with saddle horses and buggies, wagons, and buckboards, noses to endgates as far as the eye could see from the hill. Stackyards were packed to the last haystack and derrick with vehicles, and pastures were thick with horses. The town itself was overflowing with wagons standing in the streets. All the towns corrals and the livery stable were filled. Families were camped in the city block (the City Park) and on meetinghouse squares, their tents overlapping. Rooms in houses and hotels, of which there were several in 1888, were at a premium. The Mormons are indefatigable handshakers, and they got their exercise ad nauseam that weekend. Dedicatory services began at 11 a.m. on May 21. Admission was by ticket only, and the services were repeated on the 22nd and the 23rd. In three days about 6000 frontier people left their labors and homes, near and far, to witness the ceremonies inside their Lord's Temple. Those who saw the miracle grow out of a mountain spur cannot be dissuaded from their faith by mere logical or theological argument. Clara Munk Anderson, who is now over a hundred years old, says that when she was a little girl there were just flowers on that hill, and that the Temple of the Lord rose up and through them under her life's eyes. She knows that God ordained it, Heber C. Kimball foretold it, and that Brigham Young revealed its sacred characteristic. It is a mustique which she takes in the sure stride of what is to her a truth in a knowledgeable faith. It has been said that on one of the days the Temple was being dedicated that the faint voices of an angel choir were heard singing somewhere. They told in those days, and it has been handed down to succeeding generations, that the people who were buff-colore- there turned their heads, expecting to locate the group, but they saw nothing. They said it was a moment of gasping! They said too that a halo of light was seen over the speakers stand, and that a volice was heard to declare above the services, Hallelujah, hallelujah, the Lord be praised! Of course, everyone knows it is easy to say, They said, especially when nobody knows who they were. But nobody tried then, nor tries today to explain it, no more than the visit of Moroni to that hill in ancient times can be documented either one way or the other. They just report it, and if one does not believe it, there is no law about it, just as there was no law of man or nature that made 224 men, women, and children sit down in three feet of snow at the bidding of a stern old man sometime between November 19 and 22, 1849. It is called faith when a man believes in something, and there are those who come by it easily, those who must struggle for it, and those who are always quite ready to say, Now, you dont really believe that stuff, do you? The earthly geographer, being practical, has every right to wonder by what rationale a whole string of small towns was Wasatch Plateau for hatched along two sides of the 10,000-foo- t several hundred miles. The faithful may wonder about it too, but God timidly and boldly-th- at simultaneously they suggest-so- me has His own Geography, that through the Temple on the hill of oolite at Manti this is a Holy Crossroads to Latter-DaSaint believers, a Celestial Gateway to their Kingdom, and that God has His own Geostrategy. The more faithful among Brighams folks are still a little mystical, and they make neither apology nor bones about it to the world in worldy terms, although they may not call it y mystical. Nevertheless, doubt, at one time sent packing with Jake Butterfield into the wilderness in January 1850, has returned to Sanpete, and this time to stay, it would seem. The unique faith of the 1849 pioneers survives with many of their descendants, but unchallenged, it has softened considerably. Because the people here today concentrate, as they seem to, on the accumulation of the same things all other Americans are accumulating, they do give the impression that religious values come in a sort of sadsack second. The proof lies in the two or three cars in many garages, all of them competing for space with powerboats, snowmobiles and motorcycles. All of this tempts one to say with Will Durant that once more a people who began in stoicism have through success become epicurean with the years, even hedonistic. There is much truth to this. Still, they have not been as tempted by drugs, tobacco, and alcohol as has the average upstate, where the culture of the population is more mixed. If twentieth century problems have invaded the Sanpete Valley, it is nevertheless true that the thundering voice of Brother Brigham still echoes from pulpit and from ward to ward, damning the popular vices of the land. Nor do I know anyone here now who will walk ten miles daily to do sixty weekly hours of labor for no more than a blessing and a Yet. people of all ages and both sexes will still gather from afar (but by auto) to do menial chores at the behest of the Church. Many of the children are bad mannered, untrained and neglected; the families seem here and there and ignored; but no one here says yet that all of this is right and as it should be, that this is the way, and that we should now call it all the new morality. The old morality is still exerting a bit more than a nagging presence here and simply refers to the new moralities as the ancient sins. Sister Jensen will not be called Ms, and Brother Jensen still claims her or is ashamed. What is different from Brother Brighams day is that there is now only one Sister Jensen. Pioneer determination to lick adversity is even more alive and healthier in its resolve to maintain much of itself in agriculture. Confronted with the crisis familiar to all American rural areas, the local livestock industry had decreased to a mere shadow of its loose-jointe- d Speed Seeding, With Safety If youre one of the millions of Americans with a home garden HAIRSTYLES hill. Whatever becomes of this area henceforth will never again be the same stuff. If it grows, motives will be more worldly, less inspiring, and far less unique. Isaac Morley was hard in the defense of his Church, almost Old Testament hard. He thought it more just that Jake should be banished than that Gods work should be weakened by human dissent and mortal shortsightedness. In his own way he may have loved Jake Butterfield, the Mormon Battalion veteran, but he loved God more, again in his own way. Isaac had the faith. It was just a matter of time. The gathering has nearly ceased, and the nations are now asked to remain where they are. and the isolation that forced it ended in 1869 Pioneer at Promontory Point with the connection of the two ends of the tianscontinental railway by pagan Chinese coolies and Catholic Irish peasants. Daily danger was removed with the frontier in 1890, and all that fuss about "Mormon polygamy ended with President Wilford Woodruffs Manifesto in the same year. The of self-relian- .ii;. ft m ft ft ft ft ft ft ft ft ft ft ft ft ft ft ft ft M ft ft ft ft ft ft ft ft ft ft ft ft ft ft ft ft ft ft ft ft H ft ft ft ft m ft ft ft m ft m m $ ft ft ft m M ft $ ft ft ft ft ft ft Candy Jones Jim and Me Fritze p GARDEN to seed, yet you agriculture came up with the turkey industry. Ingenuity, grit, and a little of the pioneer greed for profit fit the turkey gobbler into the local economy with a shoehorn. What I mean is, there were problems, but the same sweat and toil that once mixed with Brother Brighams will to gamble a little reduced many initially impossible problems to mere difficulties. Most of the Seth Tafts departed for the City, but all the Azariah Smiths remained behind to start again-sh- ort on poetry, but long on tenacity. When all is cut and dried, it is still the Temple here, and the kind of divine work it involves, that has had to be the ultimate rationale for all the bleeding and dying, the hunger, the lost graves, the excommunication of a brother, the snide dismissal of another, the backbreaking coolie labor, and all the hanging-o- n in the face of a question mark. Anybody can make as much or as little as he wants to. Still, it has been written, They who are chosen must first be sorely tried. Not even at the trial did Isaac Morley call Jake Butterfield a liar about the lack of enchantment of the sagebrush flats, three feet of snow, and a desolate rock quarry Manifesto has itself become a kind of Document of the Unreal. On the subject of Mormon plural marriage, known to the world generally as polygamy, one can safely suppose that there were the usual arrangements of the day made in Manti between 1849 and 1890--an- d perhaps a few beyond the latter year. This subject has been hashed to death in Utah, and it is perhaps the only thing much of the outside world once knew about the Mormons. It is surprisingly difficult to get reliable source material on plural marriage as a social institution, covered as it is by sensation-mongerin- g and an understandable reluctance to air family affairs publicly. Amazingly few of the first settlers were plurally married when they arrived in 1849 and 1850, to the best of my knowledge. There are no statistics to show us what percentage of them eventually changed their status later, but many of their descendants readily admit that their male pioneer forebears had more than one wife. As must be expected, stories about the early plural marriages have now entered the realm of legend and folklore, and they vary in tone from the Church-inspiredivinely idealistic to the funniest and the grossest gentile tale of gothic horror, depending mostly on whom you listen to. Sometimes the plural arrangements were so discretely arranged for official or private reasons that in individual cases the whole thing was known by only a few. Some plural marriages, I take it, were pathetic and incompetent. Some read hilariously, even in the vaudeville sense, but perhaps they were not so funny to those who were involved. Here and there was a grand success, and also here and there a whopping failure, including Temple divorces, which are far more serious to the Mormon than a mere civil divorce. Sometimes a man lived in the same house with more than one wife, and sometimes he had separate houses for them. I gather that most of those who lived in plural family situations survived them normally as well as most of us do the monogamous arrangement. It has been mostly those who were embittered about plural marriage who wrote books about it and found publishers. The contented ones were either illiterate, or else happy people find less to talk about than the unhappy. There is an old adage known to historians to the effect that happy nations have no history. It is equally difficult to find anything to say about people who accept life on its own terms. (To be Continued) K ij YOUR former wooly self. Not only did the carrying capacity of adjacent forest ranges dictate it, but the textile situation struck a wicked blow at wool through the development of manmade fabrics. 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