Our Presidents shipped one cargo of officials after another to Utah, but the result was always the same--they sat in a blight for awhile they fairly feasted on scowls and insults day by day, they saw every attempt to do their official duties find its reward in darker and darker looks, and in secret threats and warnings of a more and more dismal nature--and at last they either succumbed and became despised tools and toys of the Mormons, or got scared and discomforted beyond all endurance and left the Territory.

If a brave officer kept on courageously till his pluck was proven, some pliant Buchanan or Pierce would remove him and appoint a stick in his place.
In 1857 General Harney came very near being appointed Governor of Utah.
And so it came very near being Harney governor and Cradlebaugh judge! -- two men who never had any idea of fear further than the sort of murky comprehension of it which they were enabled to gather from the dictionary.

Simply (if for nothing else) for the variety they would have made in a rather monotonous history of Federal servility and helplessness, it is a pity they were not fated to hold office together in Utah.
Up to the date of our visit to Utah, such had been the Territorial record.

The Territorial government established there had been a hopeless failure, and Brigham Young was the only real power in the land.

He was an absolute monarch--a monarch who defied our President--a monarch who laughed at our armies when they camped about his capital--a monarch who received without emotion the news that the august Congress of the United States had enacted a solemn law against polygamy, and then went forth calmly and married twenty-five or thirty more wives.
B.
THE MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE.
The persecutions which the Mormons suffered so long--and which they consider they still suffer in not being allowed to govern themselves -- they have endeavored and are still endeavoring to repay.