Greater Britain. Charles Wentworth Dilke
it; we like variety, life, and short meetings.” In a paragraph about his visitors, our friend, the editor of the Telegraph, said, a day or two after our arrival in the city: “If a stranger can escape the strychnine clique for three days after arrival, he is forever afterward safe. Generally the first twenty-four hours are sufficient to prostrate even the very robust.” In a few words of regret at a change in the Denver newspaper staff, our editor says: “However, a couple of sentences indicate that George has no intention of abandoning the tripod. That‘s right: keep at it, my boy; misery likes company.”
The day after we reached Denver, the Gazette, commenting on this same “George,” said: “Captain West has left the Rocky Mountains News office. We are not surprised, as we could never see how any respectable, decent gentleman like George could get along with Governor Evans‘s paid hireling and whelp who edits that delectable sheet.” Of the two papers which exist in every town in the Union, each is always at work attempting to “use up” the other. I have seen the Democratic print of Chicago call its Republican opponent “a radical, disunion, disreputable, bankrupt, emasculated evening newspaper concern of this city” – a string of terms by the side of which even Western utterances pale.
A paragraph headed “The Millennium” tells us that the editors of the Telegraph and Deseret News were seen yesterday afternoon walking together toward the Twentieth Ward. Another paragraph records the ill success of an expedition against Indians who had been “raiding” down in “Dixie,” or South Utah. A general order, signed “Lieut. – General Daniel H. Wells,” and dated “headquarters Nauvoo Legion,” directs the assembly, for a three days’ “big drill,” of the forces of the various military districts of the Territory. The name of “Territorial Militia,” under which alone the United States can permit the existence of the legion, is carefully omitted. This is not the only warlike advertisement in the paper: fourteen cases of Ballard rifles are offered in exchange for cattle; and other firms offer tents and side-arms to their friends. Amusements are not forgotten: a cricket match between two Mormon settlements in Cache County is recorded: “Wellsville whipping Brigham City with six wickets to go down;” and is followed by an article in which the First President may have had a hand, pointing out that the Salt Lake Theater is going to be the greatest of theaters, and that the favor of its audience is a passport beyond Wallack‘s, and equal to Drury Lane or the Haymarket. In sharp contrast to these signs of present prosperity, the First Presidency announce the annual gathering of the surviving members of Zion‘s camp, the association of the first immigrant band.
There is about the Mormon papers much that tells of long settlement and prosperity. When I showed Stenhouse the Denver Gazette of our second day in that town, he said: “Well, Telegraph‘s better than that!” The Denver sheet is a literary curiosity of the first order. Printed on chocolate-colored paper, in ink of a not much darker hue, it is in parts illegible – to the reader‘s regret, for what we were able to make out was good enough to make us wish for more.
The difference between the Mormon and Gentile papers is strongly marked in the advertisements. The Denver Gazette is filled with puffs of quacks and whisky shops. In the column headed “Business Cards,” Dr. Ermerins announces that he may be consulted by his patients in the “French, German, and English” tongues. Lower down we have the card of “Dr. Treat, Eclectic Physician and Surgeon,” which is preceded by an advertisement of “sulkies made to order,” and followed by a leaded heading, “Know thy Destiny; Madame Thornton, the English Astrologist and Psychometrician, has located herself at Hudson, New York; by the aid of an instrument of intense power, known as the Psychomotrope, she guarantees to produce a lifelike picture of the future husband or wife of the applicant.” There is a strange turning toward the supernatural among this people. Astrology is openly professed as a science throughout the United States; the success of spiritualism is amazing. The most sensible men are not exempt from the weakness: the dupes of the astrologers are not the uneducated Irish; they are the strong-minded, half-educated Western men, shrewd and keen in trade, brave in war, material and cold in faith, it would be supposed, but credulous to folly, as we know, when personal revelation, the supernaturalism of the present day, is set before them in the crudest and least attractive forms. A little lower, “Charley Eyser” and “Gus Fogus” advertise their bars. The latter announces “Lager Beer at only 10 cents,” in a “cool retreat,” “fitted up with green-growing trees.” A returned warrior heads his announcement, in huge capitals, “Back Home Again, An Old Hand at the Bellows, the Soldier Blacksmith: – S. M. Logan.” In a country where weights and measures are rather a matter of practice than of law, Mr. O‘Connell does well to add to “Lager beer 15 cents,” “Glasses hold Two Bushels.” John Morris, of the “Little Giant” or “Theater Saloon,” asks us to “call and see him;” while his rivals of the “Progressive Saloon” offer the “finest liquors that the East can command.” Morris Sigi, whose “lager is pronounced A No. 1 by all who have used it,” bids us “give him a fair trial, and satisfy ourselves as to the false reports in circulation.” Daniel Marsh, dealer in “breech-loading guns and revolvers,” adds, “and anything that may be wanted, from a cradle to a coffin, both inclusive, made to order. An Indian Lodge on view, for sale.” This is the man at whose shop scalps hang for sale; but he fails to name it in his advertisement; the Utes brought them in too late for insertion, perhaps.
Advertisements of freight-trains now starting to the East, of mail-coaches to Buckskin Joe – advertisements slanting, topsy-turvy, and sideways turned – complete the outer sheet; but some of them, through bad ink, printer‘s errors, strange English, and wilder Latin, are wholly unintelligible. It is hard to make much of this, for instance: “Mr. Æsculapius, no offense, I hope, as this is written extempore and ipso facto. But, perhaps, I ought not to disregard ex unci disce omnes.”
In an editorial on the English visitors then in Denver, the chance of putting into their mouths a puff of the Territory of Colorado was not lost. We were made to “appreciate the native energy and wealth of industry necessary in building up such a Star of Empire as Colorado.” The next paragraph is communicated from Conejos, in the south of the Territory, and says: “The election has now passed off, and I am confident that we can beat any ward in Denver, and give them two in the game, for rascality in voting.” Another leader calls on the people of Denver to remember that there are two men in the calaboose for mule stealing, and that the last man locked up for the offense was allowed to escape: some cottonwood-trees still exist, it believes. In former times, there was for the lynching here hinted at a reason which no longer exists: a man shut up in jail built of adobe, or sun-dried brick, could scratch his way through the crumbling wall in two days, so the citizens generally hanged him in one. Now that the jails are in brick and stone, the job might safely be left to the sheriff; but the people of Denver seem to trust themselves better even than they do their delegate, Bob Wilson.
A year or two ago, the jails were so crazy that Coloradan criminals, when given their choice whether they would be hanged in a week, or “as soon after breakfast to-morrow as shall be convenient to the sheriff and agreeable, Mr. Prisoner, to you,” as the Texan formula runs, used to elect for the quick delivery, on the ground that otherwise they would catch their deaths of cold – at least so the Denver story runs. They have, however, a method of getting the jails inspected here which might be found useful at home; it consists in the simple plan of giving the governor of a jail an opportunity of seeing the practical working of the system by locking him up inside for awhile.
These far-western papers are written or compiled under difficulties almost overwhelming. Mr. Frederick J. Stanton, at Denver, told me that often he had been forced to “set up” and print as well as “edit” the paper which he owns. Type is not always to be found. In its early days, the Alta Californian once appeared with a paragraph which ran: “I have no VV in my type, as there is none in the Spanish alphabet. I have sent to the Sandvvich Islands for this letter; in the mean time vve must use tvvo V‘s.”
Till I had seen the editors’ rooms in Denver, Austin, and Salt Lake City, I had no conception of the point to which discomfort could be carried. For all these hardships, payment is small and slow. It consists often of little but the satisfaction which it is to the editor‘s vanity to be “liquored” by the best man of the place, treated to an occasional chat with the governor of the Territory, to