The Mormon Menace | Page 2

of scalps and pillage, slaughtered over one
hundred and twenty men, women, and children, and left their stripped
bodies to the elements and the wolves. This wholesale murder was
given the title of "The Mountain Meadows Massacre." Twenty years
later, in 1877, the belated justice of this Government seated Lee on his
coffin, and shot him to death for his crimes.
In those long prison weeks which fell in between his arrest and
execution, Lee wrote his life, giving among other matters the story of
the Church of Mormon from its inception, when Joseph Smith
pretended, with the aid of Urim and Thummim, to translate the golden
plates, down to those murders for which he, Lee, was executed. Lee's

confessions, so to call them, were published within a few months
following his death. The disclosures were such that the Mormon
Church became alarmed; the book might mean its downfall. In the
name of Mormon safety Brigham Young, by money and other agencies,
succeeded in the book's suppression. What copies had been sold were,
as much as might be, bought up and destroyed, together with the plates
and forms from which they had been printed.
In the destruction of this literature, so perilous to Mormons, at least two
volumes escaped. These have been placed in my hands by certain
patriotic influences, and are here reprinted as The Mormon Menace.
Much that was shocking and atrocious has been eliminated in the
editing, as unfit for modest ears and eyes. What remains, however, will
give a sufficient picture of the Mormon Church in its hateful attitude
towards all that is moral or republican among our people. A black
kitten makes a black cat; what the Mormon Church was under
President Young it is under President Smith, and will be with their dark
successors.
The purpose of the present publication of Lee's story is to warn
American men, and more particularly American women, of the
Mormon viper still coiled upon the national hearth. To-day, as in the
days of Lee, the Mormon missionary is abroad in the world. He is in
your midst; he makes his converts among your neighbors; within the
month, on one detected occasion, he stood at the portals of your public
schools and gave his insidious pamphlets, preaching Mormonism, into
the hands of your children.
More, the Mormon Church has, in addition to its religious, its political
side, and teaches not only immorality, but treason. On a far-away 5th of
November a certain darksome Guy Fawkes and his confederates, all
with a genius for explosives, planned to blow up the British
Government by blowing up its parliament, and went some distance
towards carrying out their plot. The Mormon Church of Latter-day
Saints, with headquarters in Salt Lake City, is employed upon a present
and somewhat similar conspiracy against this Government, with
Senator Smoot as the advance guard or agent thereof in the halls of our

national legislature.
As this is written, a Senate inquiry into this conspiracy wags slowly yet
searchingly forward. Stripped of formality of phrase and reset in easier
English, the question which the Senate Committee is trying to solve is
this: Is the Mormon Church in conspiracy against the Government,
with Senator Smoot's seat as a first fruit of that conspiracy? As
corollary comes the second query: To which does Senator Smoot give
primary allegiance, the Church or the nation?
By every sign and signal smoke of evidence the conspiracy charged
exists, with President Smith of the Mormon Church its chief architect
and expositor. Smoot takes his seat in the upper house of Congress with
a first purpose of carrying forth, so far as lies within his hands, the
plans of the conspirators. What is the purpose of the conspirators? To
protect themselves and their fellow Mormons in the criminal practice of
polygamy, and prevent their prosecution as bigamists by the Utah
courts.
The inquiry has already uncovered Mormonism in many of its evil
details, and retold most, if not all, of those stories of pious charlatanism
and religious crime which, during seventy-five years of its existence,
make up the annals of the Mormon Church. As a first proposal it was
explained in evidence before the committee that in no sort had the
Mormon Church abated or abandoned polygamy as either a tenet or a
practice. Indeed, the present conspiracy aims to produce conditions in
Utah under which polygamy may flourish safe from the ax of law. In
the old days, when Brigham Young ruled, the Mormons were safe with
sundry thousands of desert miles between the law and them. Then they
feared nothing save strife within the Church, and that would be no
mighty peril. Brigham Young would put it down with the Danites. He
had his Destroying Angels, himself at their head, and when a man
rebelled