Page:The City of the Saints.djvu/377

Rh The "Danite band," a name of fear in the Mississippi Valley, is said by anti-Mormons to consist of men between the ages of seventeen and forty-nine. They were originally termed Daughters of Gideon, Destroying Angels—the Gentiles say Devils—and, finally, Sons of Dan, or Danites, from one of whom it was prophesied that he should be a serpent in the path. They were organized about 1837, under D. W. Patten, popularly called Captain Fearnot, for the purpose of dealing as avengers of blood with Gentiles; in fact, they formed a kind of "Death Society," Desperadoes, Thugs, Hashshashiyun—in plain English, assassins in the name of the Lord. The Mormons declare categorically the whole and every particular to be the calumnious invention of the impostor and arch apostate Mr. John C. Bennett, whilom mayor of Nauvoo; that the mystery and horror of the idea made it equally grateful to the knave and fool who persecuted them, and that not a trader could be scalped, nor a horse-stealer shot, nor a notorious villain of a Gentile knived without the deed of blood being attributed to Danite hands directed by prophetic heads. It was supposed that the Danites assume savage disguises: "he has met the Indians" was a proverbial phrase, meaning that a Gentile has fallen into the power of the destroying angels. I but express the opinion of sensible and moderate neutrals in disbelieving the existence of an organized band of "Fidawi;" where every man is ready to be a Danite, Danites are not wanting. Certainly, in the terrible times of Missouri and Illinois, destroying angels were required to smite secretly, mysteriously, and terribly the first-born of Egypt; now the necessity has vanished. This, however, the Mormons deny, declaring the existence of the Danites, like that of spiritual wives, to be, and ever to have been, literally and in substance totally and entirely untrue.

Meanwhile we had nearly ascended the Jebel Nur of this new Meccah, the big toe of the Wasach Mountains, and exchanged the sunny temperature below for a cold westerly wind, that made us feel snow: the air improved in purity, as we could judge by the effects of carcasses lying at different heights. The bench up which we trod was gashed by broad ravines, and bore upon its red soil a growth of thin sage and sunflower. A single fossil and two varieties of shells were found: iron and quartz were scattered over the surface, and there is a legend of gold having been discovered here. Presently, standing upon the topmost bluff, we sat down to enjoy a view which I have attempted to reproduce in a sketch. Below the bench lay the dot-like houses of Zion. We could see with bird's-eye glance the city laid out like a chessboard, and all the length and breadth of its bee-line streets and