Year: 1871

party.


What il to Become Of tho Mormon Women :


Now that the very last nail has been driven
into Brigham Young's coffin, and he is just ready
to be screwed up, it is absolutely necessary
to see what provision ought 10 be made for
his family. With such multitudinous family
as the uxorious Mormon has reared and culti-
waited the question is one likely to frighten the
executor upon his estate out of all propriety.
In other words, when Brigham and his re-
tainers are all divorced by the strong hand of
the law from their extra wives, what is to be-
come of these unwedded women and their
fatherless children? Brigham alone has
seventeen wives, and, on q rough calculation
of his own, about sixty-one children, and Of
these sixteen wives and probably fifty children
will have to be torn from his paternal and
conjugal bosom and sent out into the
world In an absolutely unsettled state,
not knowing whether they are married
and legitimate, concubines and bastards,
or widows and orphans. The other
elders, although not 30 immensely mated as





women and children that makes the aggregate
to be provided for absolutely appalling. The
charges against Brigham now pending, on
which he is to be tried before United States
Court and jury composed entirely Of Gen
tiles, will certainly be useless piece of
ministration if it convicts him Of bigamy,
sentences him to fine or Imprisonment
and yet permits him to keep up his sew
enteen families as heretofore. While punish
ing the crime it must put an end to 1t, and
when it finds Brigham guilty Of bigamy it
enectually and forever disposes of the Nor
mon practice of polygamy.


The future of the Mormon wives thus rudely
divorced is therefore the important point of
the great Mormon problem just now. By the
strangest inconsistency in the great laws of
nature-those of supply and demand-the
great mass of sturdy. miners and hunt
ers upon the broad lands Of the West,
from the Missouri river to the lower rim of
the Pacific slope, are s'short" of women, if
not in fact entirely destitute of that important
article of household furniture, while the Nor
mon men, with their degrading conditions of
marriage and concubinage, have long been
overwhelmed with supply, and find them
selves just now most disastrously overstocked.
The most natural method of rectifying the
great evil of the coming Wholesale divorce
Of these bereaved relicts among the hardy men
of the West. The distribution may be made
in any way that is satisfactory to the women,
and as they have the right Of suffrage they
ought at once to take vote upon it. Ger
tainly, il some peaceable measure is not pro-
vided for the emergency, the rape of the
Sabnes two thousand years ago, with the
interested sexes reversed in the cast of char
acter, may find its counterpart in this century
on the plains of the West, and each hardy
bachelor Of the prairies may, at some precon-
certed signal, find himself borne of helpless
victim by some desperate Mormon widow with
ak children. 1t Is most unfortunate that
these extra women are to be thrown on the
worlds market just at this time,
when woman's great numerical prepon-
her, with all her acknowledged sweetness,
''drug;" but certainly there is no particular
market In the world where they could be
dumped" with more pecuniary and matrimo-
nial advantage to themselves. But the honest
miners of Utah and Nevada require some pro-
lection, and before the enforcement actually
takes place the consequent evils that thus
threaten them must be provided against. The
Mormon elders can hardly be compelled
10 give almony to all their divorced
wives. That would be recognizing the fact
that they were wives, which the United States
law cannot recognise. Besides, to make one
man pay slimopy 70 sixteen wives would be Q