When Mark Twain—then still just plain Samuel Clemens—came through Salt Lake City in 1861, he was accompanying his brother Orion on his way to take up the position of Secretary of Nevada Territory. It was usual for traveling dignitaries to stop in and say “hello” to the Lion of Zion, LDS Church President Brigham Young, and the Clemens brothers did just that. It is supposed that Mark Twain felt snubbed by the great man because later, in his 1872 book, Roughing It, he exaggerates the encounter and his impressions of Mormons in general in full Twain style.
Of The Book of Mormon, he wrote, “It is so slow, so sleepy, such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle—keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate.” Of the practice of polygamy and Mormon wives, he said his heart “warmed toward these poor, ungainly and pathetically ‘homely’ creatures…the man who marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their censure,” and then marvels at the man who could wed 60 of them, as he exaggerated Brigham Young’s matrimonial count. (Young actually had 55 wives, so Twain wasn’t far off the mark.)
Mark Twain passed through Salt Lake City in the journey west he recounts in his book, Roughing It. (Photos and Documents courtesy of The Library of Congress)
But Twain didn’t stop there, long after the official visit, the humourist imagines Young at the Beehive House overwhelmed by his many, many children.
“Once a gentleman gave one of my children a tin whistle—a veritable invention of Satan, sir, and one which I have an unspeakable horror of, and so would you if you had 80 or 90 children in your house,” Twain writes as his imaginary Brigham. “But the deed was done—the man escaped. I knew what the result was going to be, and I thirsted for vengeance. I ordered out a flock of Destroying Angels, and they hunted the man far into the fastnesses of the Nevada mountains. But they never caught him. I am not cruel, sir—I am not vindictive except when sorely outraged—but if I had caught him, sir, so help me Joseph Smith, I would have locked him into the nursery till the brats whistled him to death.”
Mark Twain Gets The Last Laugh
Twain wrote, “When the audience was ended and we were retiring from the presence, he [Young] put his hand on my head, beamed down on me in an admiring way and said to my brother: ‘Ah—your child, I presume? Boy, or girl?’”
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