Mormonism

Mormonism is portrayed through a public lecture and a short visit to Salt Lake City, episodes that bring religious history and political conflict onto the railway journey. Elder William Hitch tells the faith’s origins and persecutions as a defence of its independence; the narrative also shows a community shaped by settlement and polygamy, while distinguishing the Elder’s advocacy from the travellers’ observations. The contrast leaves Mormonism both a subject of competing claims and a vivid stop along the route west.

The Lecture Aboard the Train

As the train crossed Utah, Elder William Hitch, a missionary, posted handwritten notices inviting passengers to hear a lecture on Mormonism in car No. 117, from eleven until noon. The train held about one hundred passengers, but only about thirty initially took seats. Passepartout attended because, as the narrator notes, his scant prior knowledge of the religion amounted to its association with polygamy. Phileas Fogg and Fix did not go.

Hitch began in an aggrieved, confrontational register, declaring Joseph Smith, his brother Hiram, and Brigham Young martyrs of persecution by the United States Government. His anger, the narrator suggests, reflected real hardship: the government had brought Utah under the laws of the Union and imprisoned Brigham Young on charges of rebellion and polygamy. The disciples, the account says, continued to resist Congress at least in words, and Hitch’s lecture itself was an attempt to make converts aboard a railway train. The setting makes the encounter more than a detached recital of doctrine: a missionary carries his appeal through the very territory where the conflict between religious authority and federal rule is being contested.

The History Hitch Tells

Hitch traces the faith’s beginnings back to Biblical times. In his account, a prophet of the tribe of Joseph recorded the annals of a new religion and passed them to his son Mormon. Centuries later, Joseph Smith, a Vermont farmer, said he had received the sacred record from a celestial messenger who appeared in an illuminated forest; the book, written in Egyptian, was translated by Smith. Hitch places Smith’s revelation in 1825 and presents it as the beginning of a new prophetic history.

He then recounts the formation and expansion of the Church of the Latter Day Saints. Smith, his father, two brothers, and a small group of disciples founded the church. As the lecture continues, the audience dwindles, but Passepartout remains. He hears how Smith, after bankruptcy in 1837, was tarred and feathered by ruined creditors; how he later reappeared at Independence, Missouri, as leader of a colony of three thousand; and how hostility drove him farther west.

Hitch’s account next turns to Nauvoo, Illinois, where Smith founded a community in 1839 that grew to twenty-five thousand people. Smith held several offices there, including mayor, chief justice, and general-in-chief, and in 1843 announced his candidacy for President of the United States. The sequence ends in violence: Smith was ambushed at Carthage, imprisoned, and assassinated by masked men. The lecture presents the community’s institutional growth alongside a repeated history of expulsion and attack, making persecution central to the Elder’s explanation of the faith.

Brigham Young, Settlement, and Polygamy

Hitch describes Brigham Young as Smith’s successor. Two years after Smith’s assassination, Young led followers from Nauvoo to the banks of the Great Salt Lake. The location lay on the route taken by emigrants crossing Utah toward California; in the Elder’s account, the community flourished there in connection with the practice of polygamy. Hitch treats the practice not simply as a private custom but as part of the explanation for the settlement’s growth—and, at the same time, as the reason Congress’s jealousy was aroused.

The Elder turns that explanation into a political appeal. He asks why soldiers have entered Utah and why Brigham Young has been imprisoned, presenting the action as unjust and rejecting submission to force. He recalls successive expulsions from Vermont, Illinois, Ohio, Missouri, and Utah, then invites Passepartout to join the community in seeking another independent territory. Passepartout refuses and leaves the car, ending the sermon with its sole remaining listener gone. The scene allows the Elder’s appeal to be heard in full, but does not convert the traveller: his brief, decisive answer makes the encounter comic without erasing the grievance that prompted it.

Salt Lake City and the Narrative’s View

The travellers later have six hours at Ogden and spend two of them in Salt Lake City. The narrated city is laid out in a regular grid, with buildings and streets described through the language of geometric order. The travellers see the prophet’s mansion, the courthouse, an arsenal, blue-brick houses with verandas and gardens, and a clay-and-pebble wall built in 1853. The main street contains a market and hotels; the streets are mostly quiet, while more people gather near the temple. These details give the settlement a civic and material presence beyond the Elder’s account of its origins.

The description also dwells on women in the city, linking their visible numbers to what the narrator calls the Mormons’ peculiar institution. It qualifies that association: not every member is a polygamist, and individuals are free to marry or not. The passage further reports that, within the religion as it presents it, unmarried women are excluded from its highest joys, and describes many of the women as seeming neither prosperous nor happy. This observation complicates Hitch’s triumphant claim that polygamy helped the settlement flourish. The community’s growth and its social costs appear side by side, though through the narrator’s brief and distinctly evaluative description rather than through women’s own testimony.

Narrative Role

The lecture is embedded in the onward movement of the railway journey. Its audience shrinks as the train proceeds: Passepartout listens after other passengers leave, remains alone with Hitch, and finally declines the invitation to settle with the community. The episode thereby turns a stretch of travel into a compressed account of religious history, migration, and contested authority, delivered by a speaker who argues passionately for his cause to an increasingly small audience.

Mormonism also sharpens the novel’s contrast between systems of movement and claims to territory. The train carries Hitch’s message through Utah, while his story recalls communities repeatedly driven from one place to another and his appeal imagines yet another search for independence. The travellers, by contrast, pass through Salt Lake City during a scheduled stop and continue eastward. The result is a portrait shaped by both motion and interruption: the religion appears as a faith with a narrated history of settlement and displacement, encountered briefly by travellers who are free to leave.