Mormon polygamy

Mormon polygamy is presented in the novel as a religious practice that helped the Mormon settlement around the Great Salt Lake flourish, while also shaping the social life of Salt Lake City and provoking political conflict. Its treatment moves from a missionary’s account of communal history to the travellers’ brief observations of the city, filtered particularly through Passepartout’s unsettled response.

Introduction aboard the train

During the westward journey, Passepartout sees a notice announcing that Elder William Hitch will lecture on Mormonism in car No. 117 from eleven until noon. He knows little about the religion beyond its association with polygamy, which the narrative calls its foundation, and decides to attend. About thirty of the train’s roughly one hundred passengers initially take seats; as the lecture proceeds, the audience dwindles until Passepartout is the Elder’s only listener. The dwindling crowd gives the exposition an oddly private quality: a broad claim about a community’s history ends with one curious traveller left to hear its defense.

Migration and the growth of the settlement

Hitch’s account connects polygamy to the community’s westward movement. He recounts Joseph Smith’s early setbacks and later leadership, including the founding of a community at Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1839. The settlement, he says, numbered twenty-five thousand people; Smith became its mayor, chief justice, and general-in-chief before being assassinated after imprisonment at Carthage. Two years after Smith’s death, Hitch continues, Brigham Young led the community from Nauvoo to the banks of the Great Salt Lake. There, on a route used by emigrants crossing Utah toward California, the new colony flourished beyond expectations, which the lecture explicitly attributes to the practice of polygamy.

Hitch’s presentation makes the practice more than a private marital arrangement: in his telling, it is bound to the survival and expansion of a displaced community. He describes repeated expulsions—from Vermont, Illinois, Ohio, Missouri, and Utah—and presents the search for an independent territory as an answer to persecution. These are claims made by an advocate addressing an audience, not an independent account of each political conflict.

Political defense and opposition

Hitch frames the United States Government’s actions as persecution. He says Congress has grown jealous of the community, that Union soldiers have entered Utah, and that Brigham Young has been imprisoned unjustly. He rejects submission to force and imagines the community seeking another independent territory. The appeal reaches its conclusion with Passepartout as its sole hearer, an intimate audience for a speech framed in defiant, collective terms.

The lecture establishes a political tension without resolving it: Hitch treats the community’s religious practice and autonomy as inseparable, while presenting federal intervention as coercion. The novel records this defense through the missionary’s rhetoric rather than offering a detailed account of the government’s position or adjudicating the dispute.

The practice in Salt Lake City

When the train reaches Ogden, the travellers have time to visit Salt Lake City, linked to it by a branch railway. They walk through the city between the Jordan River and the spurs of the Wahsatch Range, passing the prophet’s mansion, a courthouse, an arsenal, houses with gardens, and a wall built in 1853. The streets seem sparsely populated, and the travellers see few churches; many women are gathered near the temple. The brief visit places the practice in a visible urban setting, among civic and religious institutions, rather than leaving it solely as an abstract subject of the lecture.

The narration qualifies the association between Mormonism and plural marriage: it says that not all Mormons are polygamists and that people are free to marry or not. It also attributes to Mormon belief the idea that unmarried women cannot attain the religion’s highest joys, and describes women as anxious to marry. These generalizations belong to the novel’s account of what the travellers observe and are told; they should not be mistaken for a comprehensive description of every person’s experience.

Passepartout reacts with apprehension and pity. Seeing women in groups, he imagines the burdens of a husband guiding many wives through life and pictures them sharing an eternal afterlife with Smith. The passage makes his discomfort part of the scene, while its account of women’s clothing and apparent happiness offers only the travellers’ limited view during a short stop.

Narrative significance

Polygamy enters the story as an episode encountered in transit: a lecture on a moving train, followed by a hurried visit to the settlement whose growth the Elder has described. That structure links religious belief to migration, political authority, and the organization of everyday life without making the practice the central goal of the journey. The contrast between Hitch’s expansive defense of communal survival and Passepartout’s personal unease leaves the reader with both the practice’s stated role in the colony’s growth and the social questions raised by the travellers’ brief encounter.