Between Omaha and the Pacific the railway crosses a territory which is still infested by Indians and wild beasts, and a large tract which the Mormons, after they were driven from Illinois in 1845, began to colonise.
It was eight o'clock when the train passed through the defiles of the Humboldt Range, and half-past nine when it penetrated Utah, the region of the Great Salt Lake, the singular colony of the Mormons.
"We are the Mormons," answered his companions with one voice.
Their escort did not halt, however, but pushed on, followed by a great crowd of Mormons, until they reached a waggon, which was conspicuous for its great size and for the gaudiness and smartness of its appearance.
Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were introduced into that country by the
Mormons; that at the time of the persecution, when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered sunflower seed as they went.
The
Mormons hadn't got bad yet, and they were good to us."
The Danites, taking their name from the avenging angels of the
Mormon mythology, sprang up in the mountains of the Great West and spread over the Pacific Coast from Panama to Alaska.
"If Ladd was a
Mormon, I guess he could have every woman in North Riverboro that's a suitable age, accordin' to what my cousins say," remarked Mrs.
Several such clusters were praying, and in one the Mormon missionary was exhorting.
He looked and saw the Mormon church careering drunkenly a hundred feet away.
The prophet Adams--once an actor, then several other things, afterward a
Mormon and a missionary, always an adventurer--remains at Jaffa with his handful of sorrowful subjects.
Brayne was an atheist or a
Mormon or a Christian Scientist; but he was ready to pour money into any intellectual vessel, so long as it was an untried vessel.
Mormons - church founded by Joseph Smith in 1830 with headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah