Sir Richard F. Burton: Exceptional Observer of the Mormon Scene

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. 38, 1970, No. 4

Sir Richard F. Burton: Exceptional Observer Of The Mormon Scene

BY FAWN M. BRODIE

AFTER ACCEPTING an invitation from the Provo branch of the Utah State Historical Society to speak on Sir Richard F. Burton's City of the Saints, I realized belatedly that this subject presented some difficulty. It would be an affront to an audience simply to repeat what I had already put into print, even if many in that audience had read neither my Introduction to a new edition of The City of the Saints nor my biography of Burton, The Devil Drives. It would be an affront even if many in the audience had read both books and largely forgotten them, which is something that happens frequently, as authors learn to their sorrow.

It is a humbling thing, too, for writers to take stock of how little they themselves retain of what others have written, even if the authors have spent years on excited research and more years in the painful anguish of writing. It is also very humbling to me as a teacher to try to reconstruct exactly what I remember of my own college classes or lectures. Of a sociology class at the University of Utah, for example, I remember nothing whatever, and of a class in statistics only my own frightened sense of incapacity. Of Professor E. E. Erickson's class in ethics, however, I do remember one thing; it is the only thing I remember, but it made an impact.

Professor Erickson set before the class this problem: What would happen in our society if everyone suddenly began obeying all of the Ten Commandments? It may be that this is now a trite, old-fashioned game everyone in Utah plays sooner or later, but most of us in my class were fresh off the farm with the smell of hayseed still clinging to us, and the question seemed supremely subversive. We went down the list of commandments; I remember that the fifth — "Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother" — was especially worrisome, even though this was long before the days of chatter about the generation gap, long before the appearance of routine articles in the Ladies Home Journal and Readers Digest written by social psychologists who insist that rebellion against one's parents is a normal and essential step in gaining emotional maturity. Professor Erickson, in talking about abandoning the honoring of one's father and mother, put several blunt questions to us. "Had this commandment been strictly obeyed in America in the past," he asked, "Would there have been an American Revolution? Would there have been a Mormon church?"

But it was his discussion of the last commandment, "Thou shalt not covet . . . anything that is thy neighbor's," that proved to be the most Mephistophelian. Dr. Erickson described in ominous detail what would happen if everyone ceased sinning in this respect — the end of advertising, the decay of competitive society, the breakdown of our economy, panic, famine — all this to students already suffering the depths of the Depression. The game was exciting for innocents such as we were; I cannot believe anyone comes to college with that kind of innocence today.

I was reminded of Dr. Erickson when preparing to write again about Burton, for both men delighted in throwing out disturbing questions before very innocent Victorian people, especially wide-eyed young girls. Nothing was sacred to Burton. In his wanderings on every continent he was driven by a voracious and most un-Victorian curiosity. He had an eye and an ear that were detached from any kind of moral judgment. As I wrote in The Devil Drives, Burton "dwelt fascinated upon all things accounted devilish in his own time." "Good men," he wrote, "are mostly colorless and unpicturesque. So Satan is the true hero of Paradise Lost and by his side God and man are very ordinary; and Mephistopheles is much better society than Faust and Margaret." As Burton approached Great Salt Lake Valley in the lumbering stagecoach in 1859, he was delighted to pass successively "the Devil's Backbone," "The Devil's Gate," "the Devil's Postoffice," and "the Devil's Hole." The devil, he concluded, was architect of some of the finest scenery in the West. And of course Burton was on his way to visit Brigham Young, accounted by many indignant Puritan Americans to be, if not the anti-Christ, at least the arch-seducer of the century.

Many Victorians in England denounced Burton's own life as immoral, as well as his writings. But he was not so much immoral as amoral. This is not to say that he looked at everything without moral judgment, or that he was incapable of indignation. Burton could be ferociously indignant, especially at practices which denied the life force. He wrote eloquently against the slave trade, and looked with particular horror at the practice of castrating young blacks to fill the demands for eunuchs in the harems of the Middle East, a practice which was still commonplace in the Sudan as late as the 1870's. The annual New Year's ritual murders in Dahomey, where over a hundred captives from neighboring tribes were slaughtered as messengers to take private communications to the dead king's ancestors, also filled him with horror, but so did the public hanging in London of children and young mothers convicted of theft.

Cannibalism among the Fan tribe in Africa he discovered was not casual animal savagery, as many thought, but a religious ceremony carried out only by men of the tribe, a ritual as carefully ordered as some of the ceremonies of the Church of England. And he pointed out that ritual murder and the eating of a portion of the body of the victim — or sacred youth, or young god — in order to obtain the magic powers of the god, was common in the origins of many religions. What is now considered a commonplace idea among anthropologists, social historians, and students of comparative religion, was in Burton's day considered almost too shocking for publication. Much of this kind of speculation was edited out of his manuscripts by indignant editors as "garbage."

Burton was a true man of the Renaissance. He took all knowledge to be his province. He was soldier, explorer, ethnologist, archaeologist, poet, translator, one of the two or three great linguists of his time, also an amateur physician, botanist, zoologist, and geologist. "Discovery is mostly my mania," he wrote. And though he risked death to explore the forbidden city of Mecca and to find Lake Tanganyika in his search for the sources of the great Nile, his real passion was not for geographical discovery but for the hidden in man, for the unknowable, and inevitably the unthinkable. In his last years he took it upon himself to bring to the West the sexual wisdom of the East, where acceptance of the naturalness of the art of love came close to religious exaltation; here he anticipated many of the insights of Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud.

In these respects he was eminently a man not of the Renaissance but of our own century. He was above all interested in sexual customs and in the rituals of childbirth, puberty, courtship, marriage, and finally death itself. The intimate relationship of all these to religion fascinated him. He was not interested in the study of sexual aberration as such, but he noted it and described it where he found it, without labeling it immodest, prurient, or unclean. Instead he asked of himself: did it or did it not cons tribute to a man or woman's capacity for love. Insofar as he judged at all — and he judged seldom — this was his test.

Burton was a collector of Holy Cities. He had been to Mecca and Harar; Salt Lake City was third upon his list. But it was chiefly Mormon polygamy that attracted him, not the new religion, nor the great colonizing experiment, nor the theocracy within a democracy. Burton arrived in the United States on the threshold of the Civil War, and he spent three months touring the East and South before coming to Mormon territory. He remained in Salt Lake City only three weeks, and then went on to the brash and burgeoning cities of the Pacific area, Carson City and San Francisco. Still his six hundred-page book concerned only the Indians and the Mormons. It was clearly the primitivism of the Indians and the sexual eccentricity of the Mormons that excited him above everything else on the American continent.

There are reasons for this special preoccupation of Burton's, but I have already written and published them. Here I should prefer to discuss why Burton was the best of all the nineteenth-century observers of the Mormon scene, and also to examine in a general way the difficulties facing anyone — historian, journalist, or biographer — writing about the Mormons, whether writing in Burton's time or today. I do think this society presents special complications. Were Burton writing The City of the Saints today he would find the assignment even tougher, and it goes without saying that he would very quickly abandon Salt Lake City for Short Creek, Arizona.

Burton was first of all a truly great scholar. Going to Mecca in disguise, as he did, meant accepting the risk of being killed or castrated, for the city was then, and still is, forbidden to all non-Moslems. But when he went he was already an Arab scholar of some distinction, and his descriptions of Mecca and Medina remain today unsurpassed for the exactness of their detail.

Burton loved books; he read them voraciously, compiled bibliographies as other men compile business accounts, and became one of the most celebrated writers of footnotes in the history of British scholarship. So he brought to the Mormon scene a capacity to sink into a veritable morass of controversial literature and emerge from it with a clear understanding of what one might call Mormon ecology. Wallace Stegner has written that the literature on the Mormons is "enormous, repetitious, con- tradictory, and embattled." Burton would have rejoiced in the word "embattled."

As a good journalist he naturally arranged an interview with Brigham Young; this was not difficult, for Burton was already so famous an explorer that the Deseret News gave him an official welcome, and Alfred Cumming, governor of the territory, gave him a letter of introduction. But also, like every historian worth his salt, Burton went to the Church Historian's office and read. No doubt he read only that which was considered appropriate to give him; but one must say in all fairness that if he was denied anything he wanted to see, he does not say so. Moreover, when Burton returned to London he went to the Mormon headquarters there and added to his already impressive accumulation of information. In The City of the Saints, he gives us a comprehensive annotated bibliography, even telling us the books he has not read. The latter were very few.

Burton in Salt Lake City learned almost at once that "there are three distinct opinions concerning, three separate reasons for, and three diametrically different accounts of, everything that happens; viz., that of the Mormons, which is invariably one-sided; that of the Gentiles, which is sometimes fair and just; and that of the anti-Mormons, w r hich is always prejudiced and violent." Since Burton was not a historian, he was not faced with the almost insuperable task of reconciling or choosing among the three versions on almost every detail of Mormon history. For the "three versions phenomenon" has continued down through the years. One sees it in Kimball Young's sociological analysis of polygamy: he begins with the anti-Mormon version, goes on to the orthodox Mormon version, and finishes with the Gentile version. Every historian today who chooses to write about Mormons of the past may well get the feeling that he is entering a labyrinth in which the ultimate exit is truth, but every time he rounds a corner there are arrows pointing in three different directions.

Actually this is an exaggeration of the problem; there is a more exact metaphor. What the historian of Mormonism faces is not a labyrinth but several thousand or several hundred thousand small pieces of history — pieces of mosaic he has himself selected out of the documents. None of these pieces is his own creation, for the historian and biographer do not invent history. "The biographer," as Desmond MacCarthy has written, "is an artist who is on oath." And the oath is important. But the biographer and historian soon learn that many of their mosaic fragments are inherently contradictory, so that if they put one group together a certain picture emerges, and if they put another group together a quite different picture is created. Yet it is important to remember that in Mormon history, if one assembles everything known about a single episode, a picture can emerge which one can be reasonably certain approaches the truth. The fragments may well fit together neatly, jigsaw fashion, so that no other picture is possible. If that happens, one can be fairly certain that the ultimate design of the mosaic — the final portrait, if one is describing a person — is not mostly one's own creation but truly an approximation of the real past.

Of course, even at best there are pieces left over that don't fit anywhere, and sometimes one inadvertently mislabels a fragment. Burton didn't have this problem. He was not creating a historical mosaic, a piece of history, or a biography; he simply accumulated a marvelous collection of fragments and put them into his book in a more or less coherent fashion, to the delight of future historians.

Moreover, Burton was not subject, as everyone is today who writes about Mormon history, or for that matter sectarian history of any kind, to the criticism of those who condemn the mosaic not only because they don't like the portrait but also because they discover that a few of the fragments are mislabeled or out of place. This kind of criticism is what Dale Morgan calls "the copyreader's approach to history." It is the approach generally of people who have never written history and who do not know the multitudinous difficulties of selection, and the multitudinous opportunities for small errors.

The copyreader in a publishing house does not evaluate a book on its general merits or demerits, like the editors; his job is to scrutinize the manuscript with meticulous care for small errors. A good copyreader is invaluable; he saves both author and publisher a great deal of money, catching mistakes which would otherwise have to be corrected in proof or in subsequent printings. He never gets them all. But the reader with the copyreader's approach to history goes one step further; he collects the small errors and uses the collection to condemn the whole. Instead of evaluating the historical mosaic in general terms, whether clinically or philosophically, emotionally or unemotionally, rationally or irrationally, he concentrates on the picayune, and forges it into a weapon of attack.

Burton was spared this kind of attack, despite the fact that his book contained many small errors, because he was a celebrated foreigner, and because he wrote about the Saints with more compassion and understanding than any other celebrated visitor of his time. His book was greeted with relief and pleasure by most of his Mormon audience, whether in his own time or in recent times.

This brings me to a second useful requirement for a writer on Mormon history, that he be a foreigner. There are, of course, obvious disadvantages: the foreigner may miss important nuances, or simply not have the enthusiasm for detail that someone has who grows up on the scene. He may never properly understand the emotional satisfactions of being "in the brotherhood," which explain so much of the success of the Mormon movement. But the foreigner has one great advantage over what one might call the dissenting Mormon historian, whether Jack- Mormon, or, to use the old-fashioned and cruder word, "apostate." The foreigner does not have problems of anxiety, guilt, and fear. I would suspect that good historians like Dale Morgan, Juanita Brooks, Ray West, Harold Schindler and Klaus Hansen have all suffered in varying degrees from these problems while they were writing Mormon history, as I am frank to admit I have myself.

Kimball Young, himself a notable dissenter, is of the opinion that these anxieties often make the apostate distort Mormon history by making it out to be worse than it was. I think it is also true that such anxieties also tend in the other direction, to make the dissenting historian protective. This is true of many southern-white historians who write about slavery. They write with the knowledge that the home town folks, or the home town faculty, are looking over their shoulder. Some of the resulting distortion, protection, and omission is unconscious; some is deliberate. But the distortion and omission are there, as anyone can see who reads what the northern-born historian or the black historian has written about the same period or the same problem.

Wallace Stegner and Bernard DeVoto are examples of historians of Mormonism who grew up in the scene but were not of it. This, I would imagine, is the perfect background; they did not have problems of anxiety and guilt. But they did have the problem, which Burton did not, of perspective. It is not easy for anyone who grows up in the heart of Mormonism to fit the society properly into the world scene. This takes a detachment of which very few are capable.

Burton in many respects was the ideal foreigner. Since he was a great scholar, he was not repelled by a mass of contradictory literature but waded into it joyously, emerging with an organized as well as philosophical understanding of its nature and historical worth. Secondly, as a foreigner he brought to the scene an extraordinary knowledge of comparative culture. He was unshockable; he had a supremely unembarrassed mind. Mormon polygamy never dismayed Burton, as it did practically all Americans of the time. He

Burton did not know how many wives Brigham Young then had, and he could not know that the Mormon prophet would eventually accumulate at least seventy. Seventy, at any rate, is the figure in the latest biography of Brigham Young, The Lion of the Lord, by Professor Stanley Hirshson. If Burton had had access to the late Stanley S. Ivins's remarkable files now in the Utah State Historical Society, as Hirshson did, I have no doubt he would have been even more impressed with Brigham Young than he was. In any case Burton looked at the American version of polygamy clinically, almost like a doctor who has seen an unusual symptom before, only somewhat different, and who examines the difference with scientific fascination and clinical understanding. Burton looked at polygamy with the detachment of a modern anthropologist. In his day the science of anthropology was in its infancy, and he contributed much to its early development in England.

If one reads Kimball Young on Mormon polygamy after reading Burton, one cannot fail to be impressed with the degree to which Young's case histories and statistics bear out the truth of Burton's larger generalizations. Over and again the sociologist proves Burton to have been right. Burton himself was modest about his generalizations; he admitted candidly that any woman could learn in one hour more about polygamy in either Salt Lake City or in Islam than a man could learn in a year.

Certainly Burton's knowledge of other exotic cultures greatly enriched his book, The City of the Saints, which is peppered with crosscultural allusions. In Utah Valley he looked with special admiration at Mount Nebo, which reminded him, he wrote, of a line in the Koran: it was like "one of the pins which fastened down the plains of earth." When going through Sioux Indian territory he learned that the Sioux warrior would sometimes cut off the nose of his wife to punish her for adultery. This he noted in his journal, adding that he had seen the same practice also among the Hindus. In describing polygamy among the American Indians, he observed that some preferred to marry sisters, saying that "the tent is more quiet." Later he discovered that marrying sisters was commonplace, too, in Salt Lake City. Kimball Young found that among the polygamists he studied those who married sisters numbered nineteen per cent.

'Burton described Mormon polygamy as essentially Puritanical compared with that in the Near East, where there was a totally different attitude toward the body as an object of pleasure. Nevertheless he felt that polygamy softened and feminized the American female — that it turned the stiff New England spinster like Sarah Pratt into, if not a warm and loving wife, at least a tender mother and helpful companion to four other wives and twenty-five children. Wallace Stegner, many years later, in writing his The Gathering of Zion, would describe this phenomenon somewhat differently, but would still make the point that so impressed Burton. "A man's duty in Salt Lake City," Stegner would write, "every day, was to ask, 'Lord, what is Thy will?' A woman's was to ask, 'Husband, what is thy will?"

Like many men, yesterday and today, Burton believed that man is by nature polygamous. Kimball Young describes the modern marriage system with its inordinately high divorce rate as "tandem polygamy." Neither Burton nor Kimball Young felt any necessity for explaining its popularity among Mormon men. Burton was fascinated, however, to discover that there were women in Deseret who stoutly defended polygamy, and after pursuing the matter with some care, he decided to reproduce in his volume the strong defense of polygamy written by Mrs. Sarah Pratt. He went on to suggest delicately that polygamy attracted some women who wanted security and motherhood but who were happy to share their husband because they found the connubial duties of the marriage bed distasteful. Kimball Young describes several such women in detail.

For all his detachment about the polygamous system, Burton did make clear that he believed love between a man and one wife was best. "The tender tie," he wrote, "must be confined to two." Once a third person is introduced, the concentration is shifted away from love to "household comfort, affection, circumspect friendship, and domestic discipline." The result of this shift, he said, was an atmosphere in Salt Lake City which he described as "Moslem gloom."

Burton missed one explanation for the success of Mormon polygamy because he was essentially non-political. He had no interest in politics or political systems, and was uninterested in the phenomenon of Mormonism as a theocracy. The authoritarian structure of the church has fascinated many observers since Burton. Wallace Stegner points out that the Pioneer Day celebrations in Utah celebrate not the free individual but "the obedient group." In Burton's day many non-Mormon observers were appalled at the total fusion of church and state in Deseret, which was so alien to the traditions of the republic, and they could not understand why ostensibly free men permitted Brigham Young to dictate where they should settle, how they should vote, and often even whom they should marry, without violent protest.

Brigham Young surrounded by some of his wives. From left to right, top to bottom: Emmeline Free, Mary Ann Angell, Mary Van Cott, Augusta Adams, Martha Bowker, Miriam Works, Eliza Burgess, Naamah Kendall Jenkins Carter, Clara Chase Ross, Lucy Decker, Zina Diantha Huntington, Margaret Pierce, Clara Decker, Harriet Cook Campbell, Lucy Bigelow, Harriet Barney, Emily Dow Partridge, Susan Snively, Ann Eliza Webb, Harriet Amelia Folsom, and Eliza Roxey Snow.

Burton was not in any sense an ardent believer in democracy, and he did not share the feeling of many Americans that the Mormons were really enslaved by their theocracy. He might otherwise have pointed out (as Kimball Young has hinted) that one of the reasons the Mormon male was so obedient to the church hierarchy was the fact that he was permitted quite remarkable sexual freedom. No Mormon man needed to remain tyrannized by a single wife; he could, and in fact did, exercise extraordinary power over his several wives and children. Such freedom and such power doubtless made denial of other basic freedoms bearable. The same circumstance was true also in some degree with American Negro slavery. Here complete sexual license was an important factor in making slavery tolerable. Sociologists have long recognized that without it there would have been far more slave insurrections than did in fact occur.

Burton brought to the Great Basin phenomenon not only a knowledge of comparative cultures, intellectual sophistication and detachment, but also a marvelously ironic sense of humor. This is not an absolute essential for a good writer on Mormon history, but it is an asset in which we should all rejoice. It serves to temper what might otherwise surface as indignation, and to mellow what might otherwise be unbearable self-righteousness.

Bernard DeVoto brought to Mormon history a sardonic humor, cutting, sometimes malicious, often very funny. Wallace Stegner's irony, in both his Mormon Country and his Gathering of Zion, is more compassionate and gentle, but it lightens every chapter. Kimball Young's sober, sociological analysis of Mormon polygamy has many comic moments; the title, Isn't One Wife Enough, is the only unfortunate one of them all, for it suggests a kind of polygamy joke book. Irving Wallace in The Twenty-Seventh Wife, exploits both the comic and the prurient in the polygamous life of Brigham Young; and while his book is on the whole accurate history, he gives us very little social analysis or original portraiture, except for Ann Eliza Young, whose portrait is, I think, exceedingly well drawn. Hirshson's new biography of Brigham Young unfortunately lacks humor altogether. Moreover the book is pervaded with an ill-disguised hostility, and at this late date why should anyone be hostile to Brigham Young?

Burton's humor is easy to miss, buried as it is among his compulsive accumulations of data. Most Mormons are familiar with Mark Twain's irreverent description of the Book of Mormon, "chloroform in print." But few know Burton's description, admittedly somewhat heavier. "The Book of Mormon," Burton wrote, "emulates the sprightliness of Leviticus."

Burton delighted in collecting exaggerated metaphors. He tells us the Saints described the Mormon cricket as "a cross between the spider and a buffalo." And he was happy to report Heber C. Kimball's affectionate phrase to describe his forty-odd wives, "little heifers." He reported with gusto the western names for whiskey — Valley Tan, Jersey Lightening, strychnine, and tarantula juice. Though he spent some time with Porter Rockwell, former bodyguard to Joseph Smith, he failed to get his affectionate name for whiskey. Stegner found it and printed it; Rockwell called whiskey "leopard sweat."

There were two more characteristics which made Burton an observer of special quality. He was not a professed athiest, but he did not believe that God interfered directly in the lives of men on earth. He called the soul "a convenient word denoting the sense of personality, or identity." Conscience for him was "a geographical and chronological accident." And he defined the supernatural as "the natural misunderstood, or improperly misunderstood." "No man," he wrote, "positively, absolutely, no man — neither deity nor devil — angel nor spirit — ghost nor goblin — has ever wandered beyond the narrow limits of this world — has ever brought us a single idea or notion which belongs to another and different world."

I believe it to be essential that all historians and biographers share to some degree this special kind of detachment about religion that Burton had. Sir Harold Nicholson, British diarist, essayist, and critic, put it this way in his book, The Development of British Biography: "Religious earnestness is . . . fatal to pure biography. ... A deep belief in a personal deity destroys all deep belief in the unconquerable personality of man." The good historian does not go to the other extreme, believing naively that man is truly "the captain of his fate and the master of his soul." But he must believe that everything a man does can be explained by genetic endowment, by the influence of his parents, his schooling, his whole life environment, including chance. If he believes in any kind of specific, individual divine interference in the life of the man or woman about whom he is writing, the result is not history or biography but hagiography. The hagiographer, he who writes the lives of the saints, he who writes with religious earnestness, serves a useful purpose to his sect, but is seldom believed outside the sect.

A Moslem or Protestant cannot accept a life of Saint Catherine written by a devout Catholic, nor can a devout Christian accept as fact a life of Mohammed written by one of Allah's faithful. No one but a Christian Scientist takes seriously as divine miracles the healings of Mary Baker Eddy. And few Latter-day Saints are surprised that non-Mormon historians question the divinity of the Book of Mormon. For once one accepts specific divine intervention as fact, one joins the ranks of the true believer. Then one has the excruciatingly difficult task of describing and defining as an historian exactly when the divine intervention began and when it stopped.

One can easily imagine the difficulties facing devout Catholic historians this year, when the pope dropped two hundred names from the approved saints list. They will face more problems as scientific tests such as Carbon 14 are increasingly applied to famous relics. The pope only a few months ago admitted that such tests have shown that the famous chair of Saint Peter in Rome is not as old as had been thought. Latterday Saint historians have had a similar problem in recent years with the Book of Abraham. Joseph Smith admitted at one time, "A prophet is a prophet only when he is acting as such." The devout historian who sets about defining exactly which episodes in a particular life were stimulated by divine intervention, and which were not, encounters difficulties that the non-devout historian would find absolutely insuperable. Certainly the latter has the simpler task.

The fundamental difference between the agnostic historian and the devout historian is one of intent. The devout historian would enshrine the dead; the agnostic would enlighten the living. The devout historian feels an obligation to omit that which is damaging; he has an overpowering emotional commitment to protect the dead. The agnostic historian cannot omit that which is damaging lest by failing to tell the whole truth he misleads the living. This is one reason why devout and non-devout historians have so much difficulty agreeing on what constitutes a fact.

Finally, one must note a special talent Burton had, which is also an obvious requirement for everyone who writes about people. This was his perception of character. Burton had a remarkable capacity for getting at the core of a man either in a single interview or by sifting through a mass of documents. Here again one must emphasize that he was a man of the twentieth rather than the nineteenth century. No Victorian was less sentimental, more clinical, more intent on discovering the hidden in man. When Burton came to Mormon country, he was not yet forty, but his capacity in this respect was already formidable.

One can best illustrate this by quoting what Burton wrote — and one must regret that he did not write more — about both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. Jules Remy, a French naturalist who visited Salt Lake City shortly before Burton, and like him wrote a book on the subject, dismissed Joseph Smith, as most men did at the time, as "a mere speculator and impostor." Burton took a more subtle and compassionate approach. Having himself played imposter many times, Burton knew the pleasures of disguise and pretense. But he always stepped facilely into and out of his disguises; there was purpose and control, as with an actor. Burton felt that mere imposture alone could not explain the phenomenon of Joseph Smith. He described him instead as "a man of rude genius, of high courage, of invincible perseverance, fired by zeal, of real tact, of religious fervor, of extraordinary firmness, and of remarkable talent in governing men."

Bernard DeVoto was inclined to dismiss Joseph Smith as paranoid and delusional. Kimball Young suggests that he was a parapath, a man who has great difficulty distinguishing between fact and fancy. Burton's view was close to that of Wallace Stegner, who wrote of Joseph Smith: "This was a mighty imagination, a man with an extraordinary capacity to move men."

Burton's judgment of Brigham Young was based on two or three interviews, and on hearing him speak at a conference, where among other things he noted his supreme gift of mimicry. It was based also on wide reading, as well as on a first-hand look at the heart of the Mormon empire. "The first impression left upon my mind," Burton wrote of his initial interview, "was that the Prophet is no common man, and that he has none of the weakness and vanity which characterise the common uncommon man." He was impressed by the absence in Brigham Young of bigotry, dogmatism, and fanaticism, by his cold, "somewhat bloodless" manner, by his sense of power. "There is," Burton wrote, "a total absence of pretension in his manner, and he has been so long used to power that he cares nothing for its display. The arts by which he rules the heterogeneous mass of conflicting elements are indomitable will, profound secresy, and uncommon astuteness."

DeVoto in his Year of Decision, 1846 wrote of Brigham Young that he had "the genius of leadership, of foresight, of command, of administration, of effective will." He called him "a great leader, a great diplomat, a great administrator, and at need a great liar and a great scoundrel." And he concluded by describing him as "one of the finders and one of the makers of the West." Stanley Hirshson in The Lion of the Lord has dredged up much new material, but most of it is dedicated toward documenting "the liar and the scoundrel." His Brigham Young is a "cold and calculating" leader "playing" at the "game" of salvation. He writes that Brigham Young was "bloodthirsty and benevolent, dictatorial and generous, lustful and devout," that he abandoned the "spiritualism" of Joseph Smith's church and replaced it with "iron rule, priestly bondage and materialism." We never see the charismatic leader Burton saw, nor understand the successful creation of the prodigious Mormon empire. Hirshson's study serves only to underline again the rarity of Burton's approach, his combination of intellectual and cultural sophistication, plus his ability to judge character clinically and also compassionately, all of this without feeling the necessity of making any kind of moral repudiation of either the leader or his polygamous society. This is a rare combination, and it is one of the reasons historians of our own day still return to Burton with pleasure, profit, and admiration.

For full citations and images please view this article on a desktop.