City of the Saints

by D. J. Butler

  “We have a lot to talk about still, Sam Clemens,” Brigham Young snarled to Sam as they shook hands. Then the President of the Kingdom of Deseret broke into a broad grin. He clasped Sam’s arm, and then Burton’s.

  “You won’t persuade me.” Sam grinned as he spoke, covering up his fear of death and nothing and his unresolved questions about his brother Henry. “But I’m inclined to let you keep trying.”

  “You’ll always be more than just a cog to me.”

  “Don’t believe him,” Pocatello said with a straight face. “He says that to all the girls.”

  “And it works!” Heber Kimball roared. “They all marry him!”

  Sam and the English explorer and the Mormon prophet and Heber Kimball and the Shoshone chief together froze and showed their teeth while the calotypist counted down from three and then the flash powder flared and told them they could relax again.

  “Any sign of Cannon?” Burton wanted to know.

  Heber Kimball growled like a bear, but Young shook his head. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “There have always been dissidents and there always will be. The machine rolls forward, whatever the individual cogs decide to do.”

  Sam couldn’t decide whether to shake his head or nod or what to say, so he smiled and grasped Young’s hand a final time and turned to his steam-truck.

  “The last time I was aboard your vessel,” Burton said, blushing, “I was up to no good.”

  “Ha!” Sam snorted. “Me, too!”

  Dan Jones stood on deck, feet squarely under his shoulders and hands clasped behind his back, with young John Moses beside him and the dwarf Jed Coltrane. As Sam and Burton climbed the ladder onto the Jim Smiley Jones gestured to the porters of the Deseret Hotel, who had finally caught up. Sam’s and Burton’s travel cases were shoved up the side of the Jim Smiley and stowed below decks in short order.

  “You gents planning to ride all the way to the United States?” Sam asked.

  “Or England?” Burton added. Sam arched an eyebrow at the explorer, and he pointed at the steam-truck’s paddle-wheel. “I know she floats, Sam. I’ve seen it myself, remember?”

  Sam laughed.

  “Just to Fort Bridger, boyo, if you don’t mind,” Captain Jones said. “We wanted to say good-bye, the boy and I.”

  John Moses said nothing but stuck close to Jed Coltrane.

  “You said you could use a hand,” the dwarf reminded Sam.

  “I can,” Sam agreed. “And the pay is terrific. At least until they shut down my expense account.”

  A one-horse buggy rattled to a halt among the Shoshone, and as Sam turned to look, Orrin Porter Rockwell nearly fell out of it, and then hobbled, half-leaning on his wife, over to the side of the Jim Smiley and up its ladder. He reached the deck grunting and sweating, with her on his heels, smiling. She looked as fine as any Sunday stroller in crinoline and hoops, though more deeply tanned than a conventional belle, and he looked like he always did, in buckskins and furs, with knives and guns hanging all over his body.

  “Orrin Porter Rockwell,” Sam said, shaking the mountain man’s hand. “I’ve never seen a human being take so much damage and keep moving.”

  “No bullet or blade,” Rockwell averred proudly.

  “Have you had any news of Absalom?” Burton asked Abigail, bowing slightly.

  “Last I heard he’d been spotted in St. George,” she said. “They were heading east into the red rock country, and thought they were hot on the trail.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about him,” Burton said, radiating confidence.

  “I don’t,” she agreed. “Not anymore.”

  “We want to come along,” Rockwell grunted, and then Sam noticed that two young men from the crowd were dragging a large trunk between them from the buggy to the steam-truck. “Hell, you smashed my hotel all to pieces, I think you owe it to me.”

  “You aren’t worried about the security of the Kingdom?” Sam gestured in Brigham Young’s direction.

  Rockwell shook his head. “Lee and Hickman and Cannon are gone,” the mountain man said. “Brother Brigham’s got good men around him now and besides,” he grinned, “I’ll be back.”

  “We thought we should go back to England and spend a little time with my family,” Abigail explained. “Especially since there’s no telling how long Absalom will be gone on his errand.”

  “His quest,” Burton jumped in. “I hope you will allow me to accompany you. I’ll be collecting my thoughts and memories into notes. I plan to write a memoir of this journey, and your assistance would be invaluable.”

  “I ain’t ever wrote a book before,” Rockwell guffawed. “Hell, I ain’t hardly read one. But I’m game to try!”

  Sam took the wheel of Jim Smiley, marveling how perfect it looked, and unaffected by the truck’s charge into the blazing inferno of the Tabernacle. Either the wheel had survived unscathed and been cleaned to perfection, or someone had lovingly produced a perfect replica. The same went for all the rest of the controls, and the entire interior of the cabin, with one tiny exception—

  —in the center of the wheel, which had previously been a blank disk, was affixed a discreet brass beehive.

  Sam laughed.

  “What’s the mate do, then?” he heard Coltrane say, and he realized the dwarf was standing at his elbow. “It might be best if I, uh, don’t have to mingle too much with the Shoshone, boss. I ain’t sure jest how much they know, but they kinda have reasons to be unhappy with me.”

  Sam handed the little man a Partagás, took one for himself, and lit them both. “Shovel coal when we need it,” he said. “Stay away from the Indians. Eventually, take the wheel so the captain can nap. For now, see to our passengers. Especially any minors we have aboard. I believe there may be some hard candy somewhere in the galley.”

  “I believe there may be.” Coltrane affected a very sloppy salute, grinned a lopsided grin and hobbled off, holding his chest stiff to avoid irritating the bandages on his healing belly wound.

  Sam released the brake, shifted the Jim Smiley into gear and turned left up South Tabernacle, towards the mountains, Fort Bridger and the Wyoming Territory. Chief Pocatello mounted his horse and the Shoshone fell in around the steam-truck like pest-eating birds on the back of a rhinoceros.

  With the morning sun in his eyes, Sam leaned out the window of the wheelhouse to wave at Brigham Young, Heber Kimball, and the entire crowd. His passengers leaned over the steam-truck’s railing and waved too.

  “Good-bye!” everyone shouted.

  “I’ll be back!” yelled Sam.

  “We’ll be ready for you!” roared Brigham Young.

  The End

  For Now

  ***

  Few and Brief Observations

  about History in the Real World

  I stole my title from one of my protagonists.

  In real life in 1860, Captain Richard Burton, East India Company man, linguist, Nile explorer, swordsman, falconer, and erstwhile ersatz hajji (ahem), traveled to Salt Lake City. He wrote a book about his journey, called The City of the Saints. Burton was a clear-eyed and unshockable observer, and this book is well worth reading even today. Here’s my favorite bit, from his description of meeting Brigham Young:

  Altogether the Prophet’s appearance was that of a gentleman farmer of New England—in fact such as he is: his father was an agriculturist and revolutionary soldier, who settled “down East.” He is a well-preserved man; a fact which some attribute to his habit of sleeping, as Citizen Proudhon so strongly advises, in solitude.

  Burton’s real-world journey is the seed from which this gonzo action steampunk fantasy sprouted.

  Edgar Allan Poe is the father of both detective stories and weird fiction. He also dabbled in cryptography. In the real world, he died in 1849 in Baltimore. He died strangely: delirious, not wearing his own clothes, and muttering about someone named “Reynolds.” His end has never been satisfactorily explained, and theories include sickness, madness, intoxication, and even a rough k
ind of electoral fraud called “cooping,” in which unwilling voters were forced multiple times through the booths, and beaten, or even killed, if they failed to cooperate.

  Eliza R. Snow was almost certainly not to blame.

  Sam Clemens’s brother Henry did in fact die when the steamboat he was working on, the Pennsylvania, exploded. Sam had dreamed of Henry’s death a month earlier, and these experiences left him with an abiding curiosity about psychic phenomena and the other side; he was a member of the Society for Psychical Research. He was also curious about technological advancements, becoming a friend of the inventor Nikola Tesla and patenting three inventions himself.

  In real life, like Richard Burton, Sam Clemens traveled to Salt Lake City and met Brigham Young, writing about the experience in his book Roughing It. His most famous comment on the Mormons he met, though, is probably this one, about polygamy:

  With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here—until I saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched. My heart was wiser than my head. It warmed toward these poor, ungainly and pathetically “homely” creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, “No—the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure—and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.”

  The inventors in City of the Saints deserve a short note.

  Isambard Kingdom Brunel built railways, bridges, tunnels, and the first propeller-driven transatlantic steamship. In 2002, he came second to Sir Winston Churchill in an extended survey to identify the greatest Briton ever.

  Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, one of the key advances in the industrial revolution, which also had the effect of strengthening the economic basis of slavery. I don’t think Whitney, a Massachusetts man, intended that outcome, so in City of the Saints I instead made him the inventor of the clocksprung technology that ended slavery and resulted in Harriet Tubman’s exodus to Mexico.

  Hiram Stevens Maxim did invent the first silencer; he also invented the first portable, fully automatic machine gun, which inspired Hilaire Belloc’s famous couplet: “Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not.”

  Sam Colt manufactured the first commercially viable mass-produced revolver.

  Horace Hunley was a New Orleans lawyer who built hand-powered submarines for the Confederates during the American Civil War. His invention career and legal practice both terminated when he personally took command of one of his ships during a routine exercise and it sank.

  Orson Pratt was a mathematician and astronomer. He was also one of the inventors of a primitive odometer that the Mormons attached to the hub of a wagon wheel to measure miles traveled as they crossed the plains westward.

  Parley Pratt was one of the principal movers on the committee that developed the Deseret Alphabet.

  John Moses Browning, finally, was an Ogden kid and son of a gunsmith who became arguably the most influential gun designer ever. His M1911 pistol was the standard-issue sidearm for American armed forces from 1911 to 1985 and is still widely popular today.

  While we’re on the subject of guns, let me admit to an anachronism: the Henry rifle was not in fact available in 1859, but began to be manufactured in the early 1860s. In a story stuffed with ray guns, flying Viking ships, and flesh-eating scarab beetles, it seemed a small sin to nudge the Henry forward a few years.

  Brigham Young may or may not have really denounced Levi-Strauss jeans as “fornication pants.” His proposed State of Deseret was rejected by the United States Congress in favor of a significantly smaller Utah Territory in 1850, which was still twice the size of present-day Utah, of which he was the first governor.

  George Q. Cannon was an Apostle, a Territorial Delegate to the United States Congress, a newspaper publisher, mission president, and writer. His long presence in the upper ranks of Mormon and Utah leadership without ever becoming head of either the church or the territory may be why he was called by some the “Mormon Richelieu.”

  Orrin Porter Rockwell was a frontiersman, accused assassin, sometimes lawman, and saloon owner. Joseph Smith did promise him that if he was loyal and didn’t cut his hair, “no bullet or blade” would harm Rockwell. He remains a beloved and quirky figure in Mormon popular consciousness today.

  John D. Lee has not fared so well. Though in his lifetime he was a beloved leader and believed to possess rare spiritual gifts, he was involved in the deservedly infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre, an atrocity for which he was—eventually—shot by a firing squad. Lee maintained to the end that he was a scapegoat.

  Bill Hickman, a Mormon frontiersman like Lee and Rockwell, wrote an autobiography confessing to a number of murders and implicating Brigham Young. It’s not clear how much of his book was pure fiction; neither he nor Young were ever charged for any of the crimes to which Hickman confessed. On a personal note, Bill Hickman murdered one of my wife’s ancestors, Isaac Hatch, and if I have made Hickman out to be an illiterate, gap-toothed, coward, well … he deserved worse.

  Ann Eliza Webb was, after an earlier marriage and divorce, one of Brigham Young’s polygamous wives. She left Mormonism and became an early feminist critic of it, though the accuracy of her book has also been contested. She had a rough life, and in making her a kung fu chick in this novel, I mean no disrespect; I would like to imagine Annie Webb as a freewheeling, high-kicking, happy young woman, and not the serial divorcée estranged from her own family that she became.

  Eliza R. Snow was a teacher, poet, historian, and polygamous wife. She was the first secretary of the Nauvoo Female Relief Society and later, in Utah, president of its successor organization. Her radical theological poem “Invocation, or the Eternal Father and Mother,” is included in today’s LDS hymnal under the title “O My Father.” In that poem, Snow writes: “In the heavens are parents single? No, the thought makes reason stare! Truth is reason, truth eternal, tells me I’ve a mother there.” She was an adventurer of the mind, heart, and spirit, and in my view has always been the true and profoundly romantic heroine of City of the Saints.

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  About D.J. Butler

  D.J. Butler (Dave) is a novelist living in Utah. His training is in law, and he worked as a securities lawyer at a major international firm and in-house at two multinational semiconductor manufacturers before taking up writing fiction. He is a lover of language and languages, a guitarist and self-recorder, and a serious reader. He is married to a powerful and clever woman and together they have three devious children.

  Dave has been writing fiction since 2010. He writes speculative fiction (fantasy, science fiction, space opera, steampunk, cyberpunk, superhero, alternate history, dystopian fiction, horror, and related genres) for all audiences. In addition to City of the Saints, he is the author of a gonzo action-horror serial about a bar band comprised entirely of damned men, Rock Band Fights Evil, and a dark science fiction tale about guilt and ritual murder, Crecheling. His novel The Kidnap Plot, a steampunk fantasy adventure for middle readers, will be published by Knopf in 2016.

  Read about D.J. Butler’s writing projects at http://davidjohnbutler.com.

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