The Heart of the Continent. A Record of Travel Across the Plains and in Oregon, With an Examination of the Mormon Principle
By . With Illustrations. New York : Hurd and Houghton.
SINCE Mr. Ludlow made his explorations, some ten years ago, the Heart of the Continent has been visited by such numbers of travellers that it is wellnigh as stale and battered as the heart of a coquette entering upon her fifth or sixth season of flirtations. Only imagine how many romantic adorers have one after another wooed and won that prodigious organ ! And shall a man whose passion is ten years old make us listen to his superannuated raptures about buffaloes, and sage-bush, and alkali, and antelopes, and parks, and the giant pines and domes of the Yosemite, and Brigham Young’s capacity for self-government, and all the rest ?
It is rather late for Mr. Ludlow, we must confess, and we think that five hundred and six pages are a good many. Yet Mr. Ludlow is an easy writer, and practised in magazinery so well that he knows how to detect and detain the picturesque and the impressive wherever he finds it, and we readily fancy his book being read through. He is not so fine a hand that there are puzzling subtleties of feeling anywhere in his book ; in fact, the savor is somewhat rank at times, and he throws you in whole collops of sentiment whenever he likes.
In some ways he reminds you of travellers of an even remoter antiquity than 1861 -62, and chiefly in the matter of being himself the hero of most of the adventures narrated, and the dais ex machines generally. He gets people out of terrible difficulties, unmasks hidden Mormons, protects an imprudent Frenchman from the consequences of his distrust of the Saints, cures an Englishman of a painful colic by tiie application of hot cloths, rescues himself from manifold embarrassments of all kinds, and comes put fresh and bold in a page of comment or description, and is ready with lance in rest for the next affair, —it matters very little to him what it is. Such wonderfully good answers and retorts, too, as Mr. Ludlow makes!—not being once obliged, as most of us are, to wait for the occurrence of the happy thought “ till next morning in bed.” He understands everybody at a glance, and he such an old, shrewd traveller ! But we must not praise him for these things alone, for his book has many other merits, more pertinent to the actual business of it. Whilst it is too literary at times, it is yet the most artistically written account of the heart of the continent which we have seen ; and the style, where it has not been made too good, is very good indeed, — frank and facile. We always skip scientific knowledge when reading for our own entertainment, and we cannot speak with certainty of the quality of that shown by Mr. Ludlow ; but we respect its appearance, and we feel sure that his sketches of the different wild character’s, white and red, whose acquaintance he made in his travels, are very pleasant. That account of the frontier family, Comstock, who, with all their pioneer life and their savage surroundings, were read in Longfellow and Dickens, and who dreamed of the East and of cities as people here dream of the plains and solitude, has something very charming in it; and the enthusiasm of the head of the family for Henry Ward Beecher is none the less admirable because be expresses it by saying, that “he would give more to see that man than the biggest buffalo bull that ever ran.” Mr. Ludlow is apt in the preservation of the local flavors of speech, and contributes to our knowledge of the manifold Western use of the word outfit the phrase of a hunter : “ He came back from among the Indians with the prettiest outfit of small-pox you ever see.” Of the Indians he does not tell us much that is new, — perhaps there is nothing new to tell, — and lie can do little to relieve the national embarrassment concerning those unpleasant brethren, whom we all feel that it would be hard to clean and cure of their savagery, and whom we yet do not all seem to see it our duty to kill, — though this is the self-devoted creed of the Plains.
Perhaps the most interesting—certainly the solidest and most thoughtful — part of the book is the Appendix, which is devoted to the consideration of Mormonism. This Mr. Ludlow believes merely the result of the Judaizing tendency which has always existed in the body of Christianity; and while he deprecates any Congressional meddling with polygamy as unwise, he predicts that as soon as Utah becomes a State with a republican form of government, the church, being divorced from the political power, must perish. As to polygamy, he thinks most Mormons marry more than one wife to enhance their pleasures in the next world rather than in this, — that they are not sensualists, but fanatics. He believes they are sincerely religious men in their way. They look forward to Brigham Young’s death as a moment of great calamity, if not ruin, to the Church; for none among them is recognized as able to succeed him. If Young dies soon, the Mormon question, according to Mr. Ludlow, solves itself; if not, the admission of Utah as a State solves it.
Some of our author’s sketches of the leading Mormons — as Kimball, Porter Rockwell, and Young — are valuable, as being done by a better hand than most of their portraits ; yet we find a disheartening sameness and ineffectualness in all accounts of Mormon life, to which Mr. Ludlow’s is no exception. We imagine that the Prophet has had revelations upon the subject of interviewing which have enabled him to cope miraculously with that subtle spirit.