Chapter 35

(Mormon Territory – The Kingdom of Deseret)

Thinking back on it now, after having spent most of my life in the middle of the twentieth century and getting firsthand experience in the nineteenth century, I have come to the conclusion that most things never change. What really changes is how we report them for the consumption of the following generations.

An apple can grow in an orchard in the Great Pacific Northwest and fall to the ground with the law of gravity. That fact would always remain a constant in the universe, but the success or failure of most historical endeavors only filter through to the new waves of future human beings tainted by the bias of the person or persons writing the textbooks. Nothing I had encountered in the past was as striking as the distortion of the Mormon influence on this thing we have labeled as “Manifest Destiny”.

I always tried to keep my ear to the ground when it came to matters of morale and general perspective on the progress of our journey. I knew the time had come for us to separate from the railroad crowd at the earliest opportunity rather than hanging on until some dire circumstance would rob us of that option.

We struck out from the railroad camp eager to be away from the dangers of random crime and the schemes and scams of parasites determined to rob the weak and prey on the undefended.

After careful consideration, I elected to make our route swing back to the Sacramento area rather than east directly to the Utah headquarters of the Mormon Church. I hadn’t gotten much out of my twentieth century studies of the historical era with regard to the Mormon influence on western expansion.

I could already tell from my exposure in the actual time period that the Mormon’s had a great deal more influence than reported in the biased textbooks of the time period in the following century.

It was easy to understand why the Great Pacific Northwest railroad was unable to compete with the Central Pacific out of Sacramento and the Union Pacific driving railroad ties with great effectiveness on their drive west to join the two lines into a single transcontinental railroad track.

The northern railroad system was rift with corruption and sabotage that slowed it down even more after the long delay from the time detour of fighting the American Civil War. It should have been easier for the northern route to win the contest for earliest completion, but the other system further south was on track for western expansion success and was able to drive the “Golden Spike” not far from Salt Lake City, Utah right in the middle of Mormon Territory just at the beginning of the 1870s.

It was more than a decade later that the northern route could claim completion of a similar sort.

The two Mormon girls, Rachel and Clarissa were distraught that I was heading up the wagon train to move the other way to Sacramento. I did my best to explain that it would be the fastest way to get them back to Mormon Territory because the Central Pacific line was laying track faster than anyone expected. The Mormons in the western parts of the failed Deseret experiment were notified to assist the railroad in every way possible including working for no pay on the railroad. The same instructions were implemented on the eastern segment moving west to a place called Promontory Point just outside of Salt Lake City.

It was not lost on me that no matter where we went on our western travels, we constantly came into contact with functioning units and outposts of the Mormon Church. It was increasingly obvious that the supposed “cult-like” religion was a deep-seated and viable alternative to conventional Judeo-Christian teachings and that most folks accepted the Mormons as good God-fearing people with none of the shortcomings of less religious settlers and adventurers. I know that I personally didn’t find their experiment with polygamy to be deplorable because it made a lot of sense in a strictly “begetting” way of looking at things.

We were about halfway back to the gold fields of California and the Sacramento area when Rachel came to me naked as a jaybird in the middle of the night and announced,

“I am with child, and I am certain that my sister Clarissa is in the same boat but doesn’t want to face the facts.”

Right away, I knew my gut reaction was instant guilt because I had been poking them both frequently at every opportunity because they were so charming it was difficult to restrain my easily influenced man-tool from the call to duty. In the back of my mind, I had the suspicion that my constant diddling with the girls would lead to exactly this sort of unforeseen circumstance and I just allowed human nature to blind me to the cosmic difficulties. I knew enough of the science to understand that any such action as creating life out of time or ending life out of time might cause a repercussion of unknown strength or disruptive power. Still, it was hard in the nocturnal hours to turn away from the benefits of close female companionship and I was not one to fear taking a risk for instant gratification and I felt no sense of shame at just doing what came naturally at every opportunity.

My original plan was to leave the girls with some well-established Mormon camp in the California or Nevada region knowing they would be best left to their own devices in their own time frame. The thought of taking either or both of them back to my twentieth century domain was not on my agenda and I saw no benefit to such an action barring unforeseen difficulties of a personal nature. In fact, I had no inkling if a time jump of such size would be possible or how I could tie the girls to me for safe passage. I suspected it was more of mental exercise than a physical one because my original transport was related to entering and leaving a state of consciousness in exactly the same spot and unaware of the process.

I believe it was the fact that we had no timetable and no date in mind for completion of the journey that made our travel back to Sacramento Valley foothills and the general region of gold rush fever that fed the beast demanding greed for elusive treasure from the dirt. Men and women did strange and uncommonly nasty things to gather the yellow dust from the streams and gullies of raw untilled land.