Traveling with Twain

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and his brother Orion spent August 5-6, 1861, in Salt Lake City, Utah’s capital of 15,000 residents, many of them Latter-Day Saints or Mormons. In Roughing It, Twain questioned the Mormon Bible (“half modern glibness, and half ancient simplicity and gravity”) and “valley tan,” a whiskey-like invention of Mormons, who were not supposed to drink. But he praised Mormons’ industriousness (“no loafers perceptible…no visible drunkards or noisy people”) and their extraordinary health (the town’s lone doctor had few customers). Twain also joked about planning to lead a great reform to end polygamy until he saw Mormon women. “The man who marries sixty of them,” Twain wrote, “has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nation should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.” Finally, Twain observed that Utah locals, not just Mormons, despised outsider “emigrants” such as Twain—“low and inferior sort of creatures.”

December 2-December 3