Arkansas Intelligencer

The Pilgrimage of the Mormons.
It is one of the remarkable features of this age, this pilgrimage of people from all Europe and America, excited by a religious fervor and the same fascinating hopes which drew the Israelites through the wilderness towards the land of Palestine. Saturday night there arrived ten or twelve carloads of emigrant Mormons, on the Lake Shore railroad, bound for the Salt Lake valley. They were about eight hundred in number and comprised English, Scotch and Welsh people of the middle and lower classes, some from the villages and some from the farms of the fatherland. There was a sprinkling from the continent also, all having sailed from Liverpool. They arrived at the port of Boston on the 20th of April, in the ship George Washington. The Toledo railroad company, on their arrival here furnished them with passenger and emigrant cars, in which they spent the Sunday, being locked in to prevent the approach of the curious and intrusive crowds which gathered to witness the spectacle. The better sort seemed to have the best quarters, and among these, the appearance of a goodly number of bright, rosy, intelligent looking English girls attracted the admiration and sympathy of bystanders.
Some were engaged in writing letters to their friends in the old country, and others in reading, or looking out at the inquisitive crowd Their leaders seemed to have forbidden them the freedom of the city, and they were prisoners almost in the cars, where they slept, cooked and dined. They had now accomplished in twenty seven days nearly, four thousand miles, sea and land, and have before them three thousand miles more of land travel, amid perils and hardships, which they little anticipate. It is sad to think how many of them will sink upon the plains and leave their bones to mark the wilderness road. They left this morning for St. Louis by the Toledo road.
The glowing pictures which the Mormon missionaries have given to the crowded populations of Europe, of the valley of Utah, are calculated to seduce many of them to its fertile acres. Oppressed by bad laws, half starved by high prices and impoverished by the taxes, the scarcity of work, and the competition of a crowded population, it is easy to see what relief they welcome the invitation of these apostles of Mormonism. The same inducements are drawing hundreds of the more accessible borders of our western States, and giving hardy hands to till the acres, and build the roads of the new countries.
Mormonism is by its religious rites and practices odious to the civilized sentiment of the age. It encourages a vicious social system and defies the authority of the government. It is, however, the belief of those who desire the solution of this problem of the governorship of Utah, that a governor will be sent out possessing firmness and tact sufficient to control the people in relation to the government without interfering in their domestic concerns. On the future destiny of the Mormons the Washington Star has the following practical observations:—
Already nearly every foot of land in the great desert of the continent that is susceptible of profitable cultivation even with irrigation, is occupied and improved by them; and the population of their State or settlement is so redundant as that they are forced to send forth colonies to California and elsewhere.— Oregon and Washington Territories and New Mexico also are destined to shelter other such offshooting Mormon colonies; and, in so doing they will check its growth, dispel the delusion of its victims, and extract its fangs. It can be formidable where, as in Utah, it controls population. We believe that a firm and prudent successor of Brigham Young in the governorship of the Territory, and the impossibility that Utah can sustain a much larger population than it contains at present, will work eventually, the cure for the evils. We should be loth indeed to see the arms of the United States aimed against a people in our own midst who are simply crazy drunk with liberty.
We design no extension of their moral enormities, nor to save them from the intense odium of American popular opinion now resting upon them. Time and intercourse with Americans—for most of them are poor ignorant foreigners—must be relied on to effect their information, unless the government resorts to force to compel them to abandon the rites— practices of their church, which, as horrible as they are, not to be eradicated legally in any such way. To attempt it, by the by, would cost an enormous amount to the national treasury. A large army would be necessary to prosecute the civil war such an experiment would engender, for which, on the part of the government, all the supplies would necessarily be sent across the country in wagons; as, if the Mormons were willing to provision them for pay in such case, the grasshoppers invariably put it out of their power to do so.—Cleveland Plain Dealer.