may read of it, none can comprehend just what it means to
a girl-wife, two thousand miles away from her parents, to be treated
as an alien, in a land under the flag of the free. This was the case
in the strictly Mormon settlements in Utah thirty years ago. Reason
only kept the Giant Despair from the threshold of the mind. The
bravery of these women can be compared only to the English women of
the Sepoy Rebellion days of 1857 in India, or to those of our American
sisters who accompanied their valorous husbands to their isolated
posts on the Indian frontiers, resolved to share equally in the
dangers, and to die lingeringly and cruelly if necessary. Retreat and
surrender never grew in the hearts of such women. It was so in the
times that were called the "dark days" in Utah--the time when the
government applied its functions to the stamping out of polygamous
practices, 1883 to 1893--ten terrible years for the Mormon as well as
the non-Mormon.

Add to this the fact that, unannounced, a brawny, stalwart Indian
might walk in at the door. More than once has it so occurred in our
home. One day the door was suddenly opened and in walked a grinning
brave, armed with a long knife, and followed by his squaw; extending
his empty hand toward the far-from-home girl-wife, alone in the house,
he said, "How-do!" In telling us of it, she said: "I was scared to
death, I thought, but I would have shaken hands with him if I had died
in the attempt. I would not let him know I feared him." But this was
not Weber Tom.

It was in those fearsome days when the leading men of Utah--farmers,
bankers, stockmen, church dignitaries, all sorts and conditions of the
Latter-Day Saints--were being arrested and haled to the courts almost
daily, that one morning there rode up to our door the battle-scarred
old warrior, Weber Tom, chief of the Skull Valley Utes, or Goshutes.

If perfection is beauty, this Indian was most beautiful, for he was
the ugliest creature imaginable, ugly even to perfection. One eye had
been gouged out, a knife-scar extended from his ear down across his
mouth, and he was Herculean in physical proportions. I am a large man,
but once when I gave him an overcoat he tried vainly to button it over
his vast frontal protuberance, looking at me and saying, "Too short,
too short."

This giant chief dismounted, and, seeing my wife standing near,
reached the reins of the bridle to her and said, "Here, squaw, hol' my
hoss."

She said, quiet