7-7-2015 St. George, Utah

The troublemaker Mormons were booted out of the Midwest.  They were making lots of babies and changing the voting block.  (Today, this is apparently OK.    Ahem.)  So the government told the Mormons to make themselves scarce.  They decided not to move to another occupied place and face more problems, they needed to go to the middle of nowhere where they could do their own thing without any interference.  Which is where Utah came in.  Utah was out in the middle of nowhere and not even in the USA.  So they got these wooden carts that had two wheels and two handles, like rickshaws, and walked to Utah.  Yes, they walked to Utah from Illinois.  The women wore long petticoats and dresses and got pregnant a lot and the men… well, they entertained themselves by getting the women pregnant, for example.  I would have needed to live in Utah really, really bad.

Joseph and Hiram Smith were murdered in a jail in IL (So much for freedom of religion.) so Brigham Young took over and started the emigration ~1846.  St. George was populated ~ 1861.  The families who moved to St. George decided it sucked and started getting restless to move back to Salt Lake so Brigham Young tasked them to build a tabernacle.

St. George Tabernacle

They all thought that was a good idea and it brought everybody together to focus on a project.
It took 13 years to build it and they were kind of poor so they used pine instead of pricey woods like oak.  A craftsman painter taught the folks how to paint the pine so every square inch of everything everywhere was painted with different shades of brown to look like oak, cherry and mahogany.

Pine painted to look like oak in the tabernacle

Painted pine in Brigham Young's home

The tabernacle has a lot of glass, 2,244 panes, that were shipped from NY.  They knew the glass would not survive the bumpy ride across the plains so the glass was put on a ship and sailed around the tip of S. America to Los Angeles and then carted on wagons to St. George.  A lot of the glass panes in the tabernacle are the original pieces, swirled and blurry with age.

Silver was found a short distance from St. George and a community of miners was established at Silver Reef.  They were mostly Catholics.  Fr. Scanlan wanted to hold a high mass for his Catholic flock but they had no church so Brother McFarlane offered them the use of the Mormon Tabernacle.  The Catholics didn’t have a choir to sing the hymns that fit into various parts of the liturgy so the Mormon choir learned all the hymns in Latin and the big event, the Catholic mass, took place on May 29, 1879 in the St. George Mormon Tabernacle.  There were more curious Mormons at the ceremony than there were Catholics.  By the way, there are Mormon churches, tabernacles and temples and I have no clue as to the difference but if I find out, you’ll be the first to know.

Augustus Hardy was the town sheriff in the 1860s.

Sheriff Augustus Hardy (L)

A miner went postal and murdered the foreman at Silver Reef so Sheriff Hardy arrested him and had him behind bars at the Hardy House where the little quarry rock jail was located.

Jail where guilty prisoners were
apparently baked to death

This pissed off an unruly mob that broke into the Hardy House, stole the keys to the jail and kidnapped the prisoner.  He was taken out and hanged, probably from a tree, since there was a copula added to the courthouse building for hangings but it was never used.  Sheriff Hardy was pissed, too.  He had a prisoner stolen from his jail.  Prisoners are often thieves but thieves are not usually stolen.

In Spain, if you want to stop in at a saloon and have a beer, you have to order food to go with it.  They call it a “tapa” because you put the snack on a plate and set it on top of your beer like a cover.  Well, St. George, Utah has established the same rule.  If you want to stop in for a cold beer, you MUST order food to go with it.  I like this.  Don’t outlaw beer, inlaw food!  Good idea.  So we broke up the tour of the city to stop in for a cold frosty and fries.  More to come.