[APPLAUSE]
All right.
Mormons.
Whoops, no, I want the poem page.
I want the poem page.
It's actually every single time I
go to a new technology it's totally different,
I swear to God.
OK, it's like we're all good because some of us--
OK, this is the Mormon one I want to show you.
There's also a polygamy one that's a fun one.
I love the polygamy stuff.
I mean, that might just be me.
All right, here we go.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- Brigham Young to General Dodge, Union Pacific, 1869.
The locusts' hum, at first, was like a line of flame,
then the air burst into reds, silver-edged,
and filled with mouths like snapping scissors.
They ate our wheat, blacked out the skies
until the falling bodies settled like a fog over great salt
lake.
The carcasses brined to a black and growing wall.
We thought the soil here was rich,
but who knew how rare rich was, how terribly fragile,
and how temperamental we'd become
trying to sustain these plots too
alkaline to keep a crop alive?
Nothing natural, but made in the beauty of this place.
To create a home, we imported trees and water,
we slashed and burned to excavate a state where nothing
lived, nothing ruled us.
And yet in all this nothing we were
subject to the rules nothingness demanded and allowed,
which requires every drop of blood from our bodies
all that we might plant, and tend, and love that demands all
might still be taken from us and fed to the abyss
not the faith on which I believe each soul is nourished.
Nothing natural here, but need.
Our symbol, as you know, is the hive of bees.
And yet in our strength of will, our number perhaps
you might picture us now like the locust, which
arrives in waves to feed without society,
which visits more regularly than rain
and covers the earth not out of spite,
but because they will survive.
Dear General, all this we have endured,
and now you think we should not remind you
of the debt we're owed, we who lobbied for this railroad, who
agreed to unite this nation with you
and bring the riches of the East West to tame its wilds?
Do you wonder at our anger and our exigence?
General, we worked your grading to Monument Point and thousands
drilled and blasted, rent the very foundations of the earth
until these hills swarmed with our fresh encampments.
We are patient, but we aren't fools.
If we'd been a collection of mere individuals linked
by money long ago you'd have seen
us crushed by weather, luck, and the Indian.
Together in faith, we have brought this place to heel,
we can do more.
Even the locusts which once again have come to plague us
make little dent in our labors, their dark
trails that waver in the heat like iron bars
are merely a mirage.
Our kerchiefs dipped in camphor smell not like sweat and earth,
but sweet water.
They do not stifle nor blind us to the promise of the money
your company offered, a promise which has gone
now too many months unanswered.
We are hungry for an answer, sir.
We wait for your reply.
Each morning, your railroad tunnels
shakes with the reports of our artillery,
you can hear them if you listen.
The mountains reverberate from base to summit
ringing back our volleys with thunderous echoes
as if in anger.
[END PLAYBACK]
Oh, yeah, that's a lot easier.
Oh, I love the [INAUDIBLE].
This is great.
OK, it's like I also love that I don't have to read,
it's just great.
OK, soil, Brigham Young, the second president of the LDS
Church and founder of Salt Lake City,
was an enthusiastic proponent of the Transcontinental
but wanted the line to travel through Salt Lake, not Ogden
where the Union Pacific finally routed it.
Both General Dodge and Stanford touted the benefits
of Young's Mormon workers since, as Dodge reported,
they were teetotalers to the last man,
tolerated no gambling, were quiet and law abiding,
and concluded each day's labor with communal prayers
and songs.
But while the railroad companies liked Mormons,
they didn't pay them.
Brigham Young, desperate to have the railroad completed
to link the Utah territory to the Pacific,
quietly paid the workers himself with church funds,
but not without sending furious telegrams to Dodge
about the $2 million owed them.
The Union Pacific didn't pay because it had long ago run out
of cash and just kept lying about it,
though perhaps Dodge also didn't trust Mormons
as much as he'd claimed.
Travelogues by east coast journalists visiting the Utah
territory worried over what DC politicians called
the Mormon and Indian problem and the 1857 Mormon
led Mountain Meadows massacre of the Baker-Fancher emigrant
wagon train in southern Utah had long
fed east coast fantasies of insurrectionist Mormons.
Polygamy didn't help.
Cartoons in American papers depicted
desiccated Mormon men linking hands with women
from other polygamist and conspicuously non-white
cultures implying that Mormons were
racially suspect, un-American.
At the heart of all these reports naturally
was the question of, who or what would control the territory?
And who or what are Mormons?
The Mormons worked the Transcontinental Line
through a grasshopper infestation
similar to the cricket infestation that
occurred in 1848, which nearly destroyed
the crops of the Mormon pioneers before the miraculous arrival
of seagulls that devoured all the insects.
It's a story, of course, mostly made up,
just like this letter of Young's that I've composed.