Chapter 3 - "The Border Ruffians"

Chapter 3 - "The Border Ruffians"

ON THE MORNING OF July 24, 1873, there appeared at the top of the editorial section of The Salt Lake Tribune a public announcement. It was the valedictory of Fred T. Perris as general manager of the newspaper and marked the beginning of a new ownership and a new editorial policy, with a different style and content. The retiring manager ended his announcement of resignation with the comment: "As The Tribune in the future will be conducted by strangers to the Territory and to myself, I cannot say what its future course will be."

Three days later, on July 27, the new owners — Fred Lockley, George F. Prescott and A. M. Hamilton — addressed themselves to the question left unanswered by Perris:

We shall make The Tribune a live paper, and in conducting it to a position respected by all and respecting all, we shall fearlessly announce our views, independently of all factions, combinations or cliques, whether religious, political or financial. In discussing the questions of the day, we shall, as we have ever done, preserve our self-respect by carefully, patiently and sincerely regarding and weighing the opinions of all others. In matters of religious faith we shall pursue the course demanded by constitutional sanction, urging complete immunity for religious liberty among all the people. Bad men and bad women of whatever nationality, creed or profession, will be held responsible through these columns for their misdeeds by fair and honest criticism, alike free from vindictiveness, acrimony and passion. Salus Populi Suprema Lex est, is the grand principle which, as firm as the rocks of the everlasting hills that look down upon this beautiful valley, forms the substratum of our Republican system. This maxim shall never be lost sight of; and we say woe to him who shall disregard it, be he Jew, Gentile, Christian or Pagan, Romanist or Mormon. The errors of all who may be in power over the people, whether politically or religiously, as officers of the law or as officers of the Church, we shall feel free to combat from the standpoint of journalists, entirely independent of every consideration other than the good of the whole people. We conceive that a public journal actuated by any other motive is unworthy the confidence and patronage of an intelligent public. The general interest of the Territory, now our home, shall have our undivided zeal and earnest attention; whether those interests pertain to Mining, to Agriculture, to Commerce, or to any other source of wealth and greatness. Believing that the cause of Republicanism — of freedom — of liberty in its largest sense — is best promoted by general intelligence, we shall at all times advocate the cultivation of the masses, and to that end, free education for the rising generations. The Tribune shall be a family paper — one that the most sensitive and delicate may not fear to receive into their families. No coarse epithet, no vulgar- isms, no harsh names, shall have place in its columns. We shall strive to make it a newspaper essentially, and worthy a place among the journals of the day. In short, we conceive it the business of the journalist to publish a newspaper — and we propose to attend strictly to business.

For the next six weeks the tone of The Tribune was not markedly different from what it had been under the founding schismatic elders. Sharp criticisms were directed toward certain policies of the Mormon Church—generally the same policies which The Tribune had been founded to oppose. But on September 10, 1873, the new owners issued their declaration of a no holds-barred conflict with the church.

The Mormon city council, infuriated by a Tribune account of a previous meeting, ejected the newspaper's reporter and adopted a motion closing the chamber thereafter to representatives of the newspaper.

The response of the new ownership was carried at the top of the editorial page under the heading — "Our Reporter and the City Council":

. . . Our mission is to advance the interest of the city and territory, to promote the cause of education and to ally our efforts with those of our fellow Mormon citizens in furthering any object that would tend to the general good. Several long-time residents have suggested to us that we were pursuing an unwise course. 'You never can disarm the hostility of the Mormons,' they would say; 'your truckling to their abuses will never aid you. The first moment you assume the right of free speech they will come at you with their old time rancor. You must lend your hand to brush them aside, for you never can live peaceably with them.'This prediction is more than verified. The rancor and the illiberality that rankle in the minds of the Mormon officials are shown in their insane action last night. It was uncalled for. We are unconscious of one word having appeared in our columns since we (the present editor) have had control of it that could possibly hurt the sensibilities of any public man who is endowed with one particle of brains. The fight has been thrust upon us. It is not of our seeking. The issue is as plain as noonday. On one side are free speech, the solemn guarantee of the Constitution, advancement and Christian charity; on the other side bigotry, fraud, rancor and delusion. Judge which shall win in the contest.

It would be naive to believe that this declaration of journalistic war and its implementation over the ensuing decade was caused solely by the closing of the council chamber to a reporter. This was not the first time a reporter had been ejected and it wasn't going to be the last.

What is more easily believable is that the new owners from Kansas had surveyed the local situation, consulted with prospective allies and arrived at a conclusion that they could survive only by making a much stronger appeal to the anti-Mormon element than the founders and former owners of the paper were willing to make.

With the Deseret News serving as the voice of the Mormon leadership and the Salt Lake Herald (founded the year prior to The Salt Lake Tribune) serving as the church's lay supporter — or, as The Tribune put it — "the minor voice of the church," there simply was no place for another newspaper which could be accused of being "soft" on Mormonism.

The key to the future policy announcement was the reference to the advice of long-time residents. They were clearly telling the newcomer publishers that to recruit and hold a constituency they were, figuratively speaking, going to have to throw a few Christians to the lions.

It would be illogical to suppose that the Kansas men, who were experienced journalists, would enter such a bitterly controversial field; assume the debts of a newspaper that had already failed financially; and start subsidizing it anew, without prior investigation. And the situation that would emerge from such an investigation was substantially this:

To make The Tribune a profitable enterprise it would be necessary to break, or at least loosen, the church's grip on the economic life of the community and its political control. This could come about through some substantial changes in church policies, which did not appear to be in the offing; through an infusion of non-Mormon population sufficient to create a viable balance of power, and the prospects of this happening in the foreseeable future were indeed dim; or through federal intervention on a scale which had theretofore been frequently threatened but never carried out.

The non-Mormon element at that time was looking to federal intervention as its best bet for solving what it, and much of the rest of the country, called the "Utah problem." That is why it was so stubbornly opposed to statehood at that time. The battle to bring about the federal intervention it desired clearly had to be fought out in a national as well as a local arena. A vigorous fight had to be waged in the local arena to inflame national sentiment to a point which would compel effective federal intervention.

If the new publishers of The Tribune had paid any attention to Utah history since the exodus of the Mormons to the valley of the Great Salt Lake, they were aware that they were challenging a formidable adversary. Brigham Young was one of the outstanding figures of his time; and he was revered by the overwhelming majority of the Mormons and respected by many non- Mormons. He was, on a basis of the historical record, a superb diplomat and charming personality when he wanted to be. Many federal officials sent to Utah by the federal government to get tough with the stiff-necked Mormons, and who arrived in the territory with blood in their eyes, experienced dramatic changes in attitude after conferring with Brigham Young and his associates and viewing their handiwork.

President Grant, for example, visited Utah in 1875 to personally observe the situation that had prompted him to send a tough military man to the territory to clean up the Mormon problem. After conferring with Brigham Young and observing a welcoming demonstration by hundreds of Mormon primary children, he turned to Governor George W. Emery and muttered, "I have been deceived." Mrs. Grant was overwhelmed emotionally at an organ recital in the Mormon Tabernacle and let her good feelings toward the Mormon people be known.

When Senator O. P. Morton of Indiana visited Salt Lake City in 1871 to personally investigate charges of outrageous and unjudicial conduct by federal judges his party included Grace Greenwood (Mrs. Lippincott), a widely read author of the era. She sent back to the New York Herald, which was raising an editorial uproar over polygamy, a letter describing Brigham Young in these terms:

I did not see a common, gross looking person, with rude manners, and a sinister, sensual countenance, but a well dressed, dignified old gentleman, with a pale, mild face, a clear grey eye, a pleasant smile, a courteous address, and withal a patriarchal, paternal air, which of course, he comes rightly by.

The great Chicago fire occurred during this visit and the author, reporting on the local campaign to raise relief funds, wrote:

There is to me, I must acknowledge, in this prompt and liberal action of the Mormon people, something strange and touching. It is Hagar ministering to Sarah; it is Ishmael giving a brotherly lift to Isaac.

Several years before the founding of The Tribune but while other short lived journalistic critics of the Mormon Church were charging it with bringing shiploads of the dregs of Europe to the territory, Charles Dickens, the great English novelist and journalist, published an article describing a Mormon emigrant ship in Liverpool harbor just before its departure for the states. He described the more than 800 Mormon converts aboard as "in their degree, the pick and flower of England;" and concluded the article with these comments:

What is in store for the poor people on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, what happy delusions they are laboring under now, on what miserable blindness their eyes may be opened then, I do not pretend to say. But I went aboard their ship to bear testimony against them if they deserved it, as I fully believed they would; to my great astonishment they did not deserve it; and my predispositions and tendencies must not affect me as an honest witness. I went over the Amazon's side, feeling it impossible to deny that, so far, some remarkable influence had produced a remarkable result, which better known influences have often missed.

Captain Howard Stansbury and Lieutenant John W. Gunnison of the United States Topographical Engineers had earlier written widely quoted testimonials to the industry, sincerity, organizing talents, orderliness, hospitality and colonizing abilities of the Mormon pioneers. Some of the federal judges had, unintentionally of course, improved the image of Mormonism by actions which were indicted not only by residents of the territory but by federal colleagues and bar organizations.

The Mormons had scored a public relations victory over their adversaries with the enactment by the territorial legislature of the first woman's suffrage law. This blunted the attacks designed to equate the polygamous wives with the slaves of the south. It was not customary for masters to give the vote to their slaves.

These incidents and viewpoints, selected at random, are merely illustrative of hundreds of others which were available to the new publishers of The Tribune in making their assessment of the policies most likely to prove effective. They could not help but notice the frequency with which tributes to the Mormons and their accomplishments were prefaced with the disclaimer of any sympathy with or support of polygamy. This could only enhance in their minds the usefulness of this doctrine in the public relations battle to bring about a federally enforced solution to the "Utah problem."

The decision of the new publishers to pull off the editorial gloves and start endearing themselves to the anti-Mormons was surely based on something broader than the closing of a city council chamber to one of their reporters. This incident was the occasion, but not the reason, for the declaration of war.

For a few weeks the editorial policy of the paper continued to reflect an ambiguous attitude toward the church. But this was largely due to the fact that Tullidge was still on the staff and contributed lead editorials from time to time under his own name.

In one of these he argued that the cooperative movement had already failed; that the scheme to place in the hands of the church authorities a stupendous church monopoly which would exclude gentiles and individual Mormons "from all independent commerce and industry" had been thwarted. He asserted that the prior four or five years had brought about a great loosening of the "closed society;" that the "polygamy mania" which had earlier swept the church was subsiding; that inflow of gentiles into the mining industry, plus the heretic Mormons, were having a leavening effect on church political power; and concluded:

And to this may be added that as a social revolution almost has been wrought out in Utah in four years from ourselves, without much help from Congress, the nation can afford to let the same causes consummate the work, and save itself from the betrayal of all our political principles by adoption of a crushing out method of despotism.

But the soft, considerate, reasoned approach of Tullidge was tolerated only occasionally and for a short time by the new owners of The Tribune. They speedily began implementing a policy which impelled Tullidge to publicly disassociate himself entirely from the newspaper and which earned them the name of "Border Ruffians" among Mormons and their sympathizers.

A more representative sample of the new policy was an editorial carrying the caption — "A Holy Institution — A wife who couldn't see the Beauty of it." There followed an emotion-packed account of the suffering of an unnamed wife when her husband contracted a second marriage, and of the husband's responses to her protestations. It then concluded:

How any human being who is not degraded below the level of a brute, can profane the holiest of human affections by putting into a woman's mouth any such sentiment as the one given above, passes all reasonable comprehension.

Thereafter The Tribune attacked the church's tithing doctrine, declaring the one-tenth rate was economically selfdefeating; that it was crushing to all useful industry.

No legitimate business can stand a tax of ten per cent, and prove remunerative. Economical law condemns any such exaction. It is a fraud upon the face of it, and it is suicidal also....

The divorce suit of Ann Eliza Young against Brigham Young was covered in great detail, including publication of all the documents filed by the plaintiff. The Mormon city council was attacked for its dealings with the church-owned gas company; for neglecting the streets; for tolerating unsanitary conditions in the city; for spending too much money for the wrong things and too little for the right things. Correspondents from the mining camps were permitted, and perhaps encouraged, to express their views of church policies.

As a special feature for the church's conference in October of 1873 The Tribune published what it called a picture gallery of the leaders. The article, with verbal and artist sketches, carried these sub-heads: "The Ecclesiastical Despots Who Rule Utah and Eat Tithe;" "A Short and Concise History of Their Rise and Progress - From Milk to Tithe."

These excerpts from the sketch of Brigham Young are representative of the style and flavor of the series.

There is such a fund of humor in this Brigham Young as a prophet, that we like him in that holy calling immensely, and we pray every morning, noon and night that he may live long upon the earth. Brigham is a jocular fellow, with seventeen present wives, and a much larger number in times past; but he promises, to all appearances, to be good for some years to come. We like Brother Brigham; he is so much like the Prince of Denmark, in the play of Hamlet. . . . For his years, he is a spirited young man, and we like his style, Brigham says 'the Lord knows a thing or two,' but he personally knows more, and he wants to introduce to the world a system that will last forever.

To the publishers of The Tribune during the 1873-83 decade, objectivity was a vice not to be tolerated in news columns, editorials or correspondence from readers. The news columns and correspondence were frequently more opinionated than the editorials, possibly because the reporters and correspondents were more opinionated than the editorial writers.

A few excerpts from reports on the quarterly conference of the Center Stake in 1880 will illustrate the point:

Young Brig [Brigham Young, Jr.] then made his appearance [on the speakers stand] and after sundry coughs, barks, growls and scowls, proceeded to stammer forth how glad he was to meet the brothers and sisters in their new and commodious building. Brig was exceedingly troubled in consequence of a belief dominant in his mind that all did not pan out as well as they ought to. He said he was 'mighty liberal' himself, and his personal friends and acquaintances he knew, contributed largely also. 'But did every person do that?' After repeating this query about fifty times, he gave his pantaloons a hitch upward, grunted and took his seat.

Another part of the report was captioned "Afternoon Exercises" and then continued:

The exercises of the afternoon opened with a hymn and a prayer by Bishop Woolley, in which he corrected any false impressions the Lord might have as to the building in which his Saints were worshiping, or as to the character of the meeting.

Penrose Talks

Everything being satisfactorily adjusted, the box was opened and Granny's Imp jumped up. [Granny was The Tribune's nickname for the Deseret News and its Imp was Charles W. Penrose, the editor]. Brother Angus [Cannon] pulled the strings, and the thing commenced to jump and talk. He said he was unexpectedly called to talk, and as his shirt front was very dirty, it is to be presumed he told the truth.

At another point The Tribune report stated:

Brother Goddard then took his seat, and Brother Taylor, the city sexton, read recommendations from the bishops of the several wards, nominating candidates for Elders. They were voted on singly, and nearly all unanimously elected, except in the case of the Sugar House Ward, when The Tribune man thought it to be his duty to vote against the candidate on that occasion.

During this period of uninhibited journalistic expression; of studied insult; of subtle and coarse humor; of venomous denunciation; and all-around bad manners, The Tribune was "taking it" as well as "passing it out."

The Deseret News, as the official voice of the church, let the Herald [the minor voice of the church to The Tribune] do most of the eye-gouging in-fighting. But on occasion it joined in with a snarling exuberance not exceeded by either The Tribune or the Herald. As a typical example, The Tribune reprinted an article which had appeared in the News of March 31, 1880, for the purpose of answering it. The News fumed:

There are certain would-be witty persons who think they are uttering a good joke at the expense of the Mormons by repeatedly quoting the words of the late Brigham Young — 'We can produce the greatest and smoothest liars, or any other shade of character, you can mention.' The fun of it is they are quoting against themselves. They and their tribe — the manufacturers of anti- Mormon sensations; the scavengers of the press; the slanderers of the living and defamers of the dead; the garblers of public speeches; the blasphemers of sacred things; the cowardly libellers of women and children; the dirty-minded scandal mongers; the craven dastards who fling their filth at those they know will not retaliate; the pen-stabbers; the character assassins; the authors of false telegraphic dispatches; and their aiders and abetters — are the characters referred to. We have had such things among us from the beginning of Utah's settlement. They have multiplied upon us as opportunities have increased for the paying exercises of their perverted faculties.

Produce them? Yes we could point them out at any time. But no respectable Mormon recognizes their presence or would be seen in their society, and they are permitted to lie on, and fill the cup of their iniquity,

As a final example of the journalism of the day may be cited The Tribune's reaction to the foregoing. It was a retort that showed none of the poise or sense of humor that sometimes added a badly needed grace to The Tribune.

It [the News article] emanates from the pen of a three-ply polyg, who, if he had his just deserts, would be keeping company with George Reynolds in the Utah Penitentiary, and instead of writing editorials for the lying Church organ, would be engaged in playing checkers with his nose on the prison bars.