“Side by side on the narrow shawl knelt the two wanderers.”
Geo. Hutchinson, A Study in Scarlet (London: Ward, Lock Bowden, and Co., 1891)
At the head of the column there rode a score or more of grave iron-faced men, clad in sombre homespun garments and armed with rifles. On reaching the base of the bluff they halted, and held a short council among themselves.
“The wells are to the right, my brothers,” said one, a hard-lipped, clean-shaven man with grizzly hair.
“To the right of the Sierra Blanco—so we shall reach the Rio Grande,” said another.
“Fear not for water,” cried a third. “He who could draw it from the rocks will not now abandon His own chosen people.”
“Amen! amen!” responded the whole party.
They were about to resume their journey when one of the youngest and keenest-eyed uttered an exclamation and pointed up at the rugged crag above them. From its summit there fluttered a little wisp of pink, showing up hard and bright against the grey rocks behind. At the sight there was a general reining up of horses and unslinging of guns, while fresh horsemen came galloping up to reinforce the vanguard. The word “Redskins” was on every lip.
“There can’t be any number of Injuns here,” said the elderly man who appeared to be in command. “We have passed the Pawnees, and there are no other tribes until we cross the great mountains.”199
“Shall I go forward and see, Brother Stangerson?” asked one of the band.
“And I,” “And I,” cried a dozen voices.
“Leave your horses below and we will await you here,” the Elder answered. In a moment the young fellows had dismounted, fastened their horses, and were ascending the precipitous slope which led up to the object which had excited their curiosity. They advanced rapidly and noiselessly, with the confidence and dexterity of practised scouts. The watchers from the plain below could see them flit from rock to rock until their figures stood out against the sky-line. The young man who had first given the alarm was leading them. Suddenly his followers saw him throw up his hands, as though overcome with astonishment, and on joining him they were affected in the same way by the sight which met their eyes.
Scene from A Study in Scarlet.
(Great Britain: Samuelson Film Mfg. Co. Ltd., 1914)
On the little plateau which crowned the barren hill there stood a single giant boulder, and against this boulder there lay a tall man, long-bearded and hard-featured, but of an excessive thinness. His placid face and regular breathing showed that he was fast asleep. Beside him lay a little child, with her round white arms encircling his brown sinewy neck, and her golden-haired head resting upon the breast of his velveteen tunic. Her rosy lips were parted, showing the regular line of snow-white teeth within, and a playful smile played over her infantile features. Her plump little white legs terminating in white socks and neat shoes with shining buckles, offered a strange contrast to the long shrivelled members of her companion. On the ledge of rock above this strange couple there stood three solemn buzzards, who, at the sight of the newcomers, uttered raucous screams of disappointment and flapped sullenly away.
“On the ledge of rock above this strange couple stood three solemn buzzards.”
Charles Doyle, A Study in Scarlet (London and New York: Ward, Lock & Co., 1888)
The cries of the foul birds awoke the two sleepers, who stared about them in bewilderment. The man staggered to his feet and looked down upon the plain which had been so desolate when sleep had overtaken him, and which was now traversed by this enormous body of men and of beasts. His face assumed an expression of incredulity as he gazed, and he passed his bony hand over his eyes. “This is what they call delirium, I guess,” he muttered. The child stood beside him, holding on to the skirt of his coat, and said nothing but looked all round her with the wondering questioning gaze of childhood.
“One of them seized the little girl, and hoisted her upon his shoulder.”
Geo. Hutchinson, A Study in Scarlet (London: Ward, Lock Bowden, and Co., 1891)
The rescuing party were speedily able to convince the two castaways that their appearance was no delusion. One of them seized the little girl, and hoisted her upon his shoulder, while two others supported her gaunt companion, and assisted him towards the wagons.
“One of the rescue party seized the little girl and hoisted her upon his shoulder.”
Richard Gutschmidt, Späte Rache (Stuttgart: Robert Lutz Verlag, 1902)
“My name is John Ferrier,” the wanderer explained; “me and that little un are all that’s left o’ twenty-one people. The rest is all dead o’ thirst and hunger away down in the south.”
“Is she your child?” asked someone.
“I guess she is now,” the other cried, defiantly; “she’s mine ’cause I saved her. No man will take her from me. She’s Lucy Ferrier from this day on. Who are you, though?” he continued, glancing with curiosity at his stalwart sunburned rescuers; “there seems to be a powerful lot of ye.”
“Nigh upon ten thousand,”200 said one of the young men; “we are the persecuted children of God—the chosen of the Angel Moroni.”201
“I never heard tell on him,” said the wanderer. “He appears to have chosen a fair crowd of ye.”
“Do not jest at that which is sacred,” said the other, sternly. “We are of those who believe in those sacred writings, drawn in Egyptian letters on plates of beaten gold, which were handed unto the holy Joseph Smith202 at Palmyra. We have come from Nauvoo,203 in the state of Illinois, where we had founded our temple. We have come to seek a refuge from the violent man and from the godless, even though it be the heart of the desert.”
The name of Nauvoo evidently recalled recollections to John Ferrier. “I see,” he said, “you are the Mormons.”
“We are the Mormons,” answered his companions with one voice.
“And where are you going?”
“We do not know.204 The hand of God is leading us under the person of our Prophet. You must come before him. He shall say what is to be done with you.”
“One of them seized the little girl, and hoisted her upon his shoulder.”
W. M. R. Quick (possibly Quick was the engraver, the artist D. H. Friston), Beeton’s Christmas Annual, 1887
They had reached the base of the hill by this time, and were surrounded by crowds of the pilgrims—pale-faced, meek-looking women; strong laughing children; and anxious earnest-eyed men. Many were the cries of astonishment and of commiseration which arose from them when they perceived the youth of one of the strangers and the destitution of the other. Their escort did not halt, however, but pushed on, followed by a great crowd of Mormons, until they reached a wagon, which was conspicuous for its great size and for the gaudiness and smartness of its appearance. Six horses were yoked to it, whereas the others were furnished with two, or, at most, four a-piece. Beside the driver there sat a man who could not have been more than thirty years of age,205 but whose massive head206 and resolute expression marked him as a leader. He was reading a brown-backed volume, but as the crowd approached he laid it aside, and listened attentively to an account of the episode. Then he turned to the two castaways.
“If we take you with us,” he said, in solemn words, “it can only be as believers in our own creed. We shall have no wolves in our fold. Better far that your bones should bleach in this wilderness than that you should prove to be that little speck of decay which in time corrupts the whole fruit. Will you come with us on these terms?”
“Guess I’ll come with you on any terms,” said Ferrier, with such emphasis that the grave Elders could not restrain a smile. The leader alone retained his stern, impressive expression.
“Take him, Brother Stangerson,” he said, “give him food and drink, and the child likewise. Let it be your task also to teach him our holy creed. We have delayed long enough. Forward! On, on to Zion!”
“On, on to Zion!” cried the crowd of Mormons, and the words rippled down the long caravan, passing from mouth to mouth unt
il they died away in a dull murmur in the far distance. With a cracking of whips and a creaking of wheels the great wagons got into motion, and soon the whole caravan was winding along once more. The Elder to whose care the two waifs had been committed, led them to his wagon, where a meal was already awaiting them.
“You shall remain here,” he said. “In a few days you will have recovered from your fatigues. In the meantime, remember that now and for ever you are of our religion.207 Brigham Young208 has said it, and he has spoken with the voice of Joseph Smith, which is the voice of God.”
196 While the Great Alkali Plain is an invented geographical name, Carey and Lee’s Atlas of 1827 located the “Great American Desert” as an indefinite domain in the areas that became Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, the Indian Territory, and Texas. Bradford’s Atlas (1838) referenced a great desert that extended from the Arkansas Territory into Colorado and Wyoming, including South Dakota and parts of Nebraska and Kansas. Others estimated that the desert comprised an area 500 miles wide, lying directly east of the Rocky Mountains and extending from the northern boundary of the United States to the Rio Grande. The section shown by the various geographies grew smaller every year, until, by 1912, one encyclopaedist could write, “The free library, the telegraph, telephone, rural mail delivery, and all the complexities of modern times have in reality crowded the Great American Desert off the map into the land of fancy from which it came” (Kansas: a cyclopedia of state history, embracing events, institutions, industries, counties, cities, towns, prominent persons, etc.). The remnants of what was once called the Great American Desert are now generally known as the Great Plains.
197 Jack Tracy’s Encyclopaedia Sherlockiana identifies Sierra Blanca as the name of an isolated mountain peak in New Mexico and short range of mountains in Colorado, but concedes that neither is near the Mormons’ historical trail to Utah. Wayne Melander, in “Sierra Blanco—Found(?),” carefully traces the path of the Mormons and identifies the peak in question as Oregon Buttes, near South Pass, Wyoming, chalking up the grammatically incorrect “Sierra Blanco” to the travellers’ having misheard their guide.
198 The Slang Dictionary (1865) states that “[t]his epithet is often applied in a commendable sense among the vulgar; thus—a good fellow or a good horse will be termed ‘a BULLY fellow,’ ‘a BULLY horse;’ and ‘a BULLY woman’ signifies a right, good, motherly old soul.”
199 The Pawnee, originally from Texas, settled in southern Nebraska’s Platte River valley in the mid-sixteenth century. By the time A Study in Scarlet was published, the Great American Desert would be empty of Pawnee, as they had ceded their Nebraska lands to the government in 1875 and relocated to a reservation in Oklahoma. Had these travellers come across any members of the tribe, they would likely have encountered little to no resistance; relations between the Pawnee and white settlers were cordial, and some Pawnee even worked for the U.S. Army as frontier scouts.
200 Brigham Young’s own record of the Mormons’ journey to the Great Salt Lake Valley in 1847 mentions only 143 men, 3 women, and 2 children.
201 This is incorrectly given as “the Angel Merona” in the Beeton’s and English book text. According to Joseph Smith (1805–1844), the founder of Mormonism, the angel Moroni appeared to him three times on the night of September 21, 1823, telling the fourteen-year-old boy that a divine gift was buried near his home in western New York. In 1827, Smith returned to the spot indicated, where the angel purportedly presented him with a stone box containing a volume of thin gold plates. (According to other accounts, Smith dug up the plates where the angel indicated.) Upon these plates was inscribed the history of a group of Hebrew people who had traveled to North America from Jerusalem six centuries before Christ. This sacred text had been abridged from earlier plates and written down by the prophet Mormon, 1,400 years before Smith received them. Moroni was Mormon’s son. The contents of the gold plates, which subsequently disappeared, were translated by Smith from “reformed Egyptian” and published in 1830 as The Book of Mormon. (James Strang, who attempted to become Smith’s successor but lost out to Brigham Young, also claimed that he had found buried metallic plates, but in Voree [Burlington], Wisconsin.)
202 Smith’s family originally settled in Palmyra, New York, but moved four years later to Manchester, some six miles off. It was in Manchester that Smith had his visions of the angel Moroni. Further revelations proclaiming him “seer, translator, prophet, apostle of Jesus Christ, and elder of the church” led him to found his own church, officially known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which held its first conference on April 6, 1830, in Fayette, New York. Smith and his followers sought to practice Christianity in its ancient, “true” form—that is, the religion as it once was before its various sects supposedly led it astray.
203 In 1831, Smith moved with his followers, now thirty in number, to Kirtland, Ohio, which was to be the seat of the New Jerusalem. A large temple was consecrated in Kirtland in 1836, and Smith’s devoted missionaries began spreading his teachings to other U.S. states, as well as to England. (The ministry of Orson Hyde and Heber C. Kimball achieved great success among the labourers in Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, and Glasgow, and in the mining districts of South Wales.) But in Kirtland and western Missouri, where Smith had established another community, suspicion toward the Mormons made their lives increasingly difficult. Not only were their beliefs unorthodox and their communal living difficult for outsiders to understand, but Smith and others also engaged in polygamy (see note 210, below). Continuing persecution of the Mormons included murder and the burning of property.
After Smith and other Mormon leaders were imprisoned awaiting trial for numerous charges, among them treason, 15,000 of Smith’s followers left Missouri for Illinois in 1839 and settled near Commerce, in Hancock County. Smith escaped from prison and rejoined the sect there. Having obtained a charter from the government that gave them a substantial degree of autonomy, the Mormons founded the city of Nauvoo, with Smith as their mayor. Converts from all over the United States flocked to join them, and Nauvoo soon became the largest city in Illinois.
204 The Mormon exodus was indeed unplanned, at least in its inception. In February 1844, Smith, having become one of the most powerful figures in the West, declared his candidacy for presidency of the United States. Disaffected members of the church, unhappy with Smith’s ambition and his encouragement of polygamy, used the occasion to attack the Mormon leader in their opposition newspaper, the Expositor. When Smith shut down the newspaper, violence erupted. Smith called out the Nauvoo militia to protect the city, and he and his brother, Hyrum, were arrested for treason and imprisoned in a Carthage jail. An angry mob broke into the prison and killed the two men on June 27, 1844.
Joseph Smith quickly became a martyr, and in the confusion following his death, Brigham Young (1801–1877), a senior member of the Council of the Twelve Apostles, became the president of the church. Upon the Illinois legislature’s repeal of Nauvoo’s charter in 1845, Brigham Young led the Mormons out of Illinois, traveling 1,100 miles (1,800 kilometers) across the wilderness to Utah in 1846–1847. Young and an advance party of some 170 settlers reached the Great Salt Lake Valley in July 1847, and there they founded Salt Lake City, the spiritual and theocratic home of Mormonism to this day.
205 In fact, Brigham Young was forty-five or forty-six at the time of the migration.
206 The “big head, big brain; big brain, great mind” principle, a subset of the Victorian science of phrenology, had a great many Victorian followers. It was first espoused by the Viennese physician Franz Joseph Gall, who laid out his theory in an October 1, 1798, letter to Joseph von Retzer, explaining—his tongue, we might assume, at least partly in cheek—“A man like you possesses more than double the quantity of brain in a stupid bigot; and at least one-sixth more than the wisest or the most sagacious elephant.” The thinking went that the larger the skull, the larger the brain beneath it, and the greater that brain’s power. Gall and his successors furthe
r believed that personality traits such as self-esteem and wit, as well as a faculty for music or math, were determined by thirty-five “organs” comprising the brain. A person’s characteristics could thus be discerned by observing which parts of his or her skull seemed relatively large or small.
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes Page 18
