Chapter XIV

Mr. Street was very busy with his telegraphic matters--and considering
that he had eight or nine hundred miles of rugged, snowy, uninhabited
mountains, and waterless, treeless, melancholy deserts to traverse with
his wire, it was natural and needful that he should be as busy as
possible. He could not go comfortably along and cut his poles by the
road-side, either, but they had to be hauled by ox teams across those
exhausting deserts--and it was two days' journey from water to water, in
one or two of them. Mr. Street's contract was a vast work, every way one
looked at it; and yet to comprehend what the vague words "eight hundred
miles of rugged mountains and dismal deserts" mean, one must go over the
ground in person--pen and ink descriptions cannot convey the dreary
reality to the reader. And after all, Mr. S.'s mightiest difficulty
turned out to be one which he had never taken into the account at all.
Unto Mormons he had sub-let the hardest and heaviest half of his great
undertaking, and all of a sudden they concluded that they were going to
make little or nothing, and so they tranquilly threw their poles
overboard in mountain or desert, just as it happened when they took the
notion, and drove home and went about their customary business! They
were under written contract to Mr. Street, but they did not care anything
for that. They said they would "admire" to see a "Gentile" force a
Mormon to fulfil a losing contract in Utah! And they made themselves
very merry over the matter. Street said--for it was he that told us
these things:

"I was in dismay. I was under heavy bonds to complete my contract in a
given time, and this disaster looked very much like ruin. It was an
astounding thing; it was such a wholly unlooked-for difficulty, that I
was entirely nonplussed. I am a business man--have always been a
business man--do not know anything but business--and so you can imagine
how like being struck by lightning it was to find myself in a country
where written contracts were worthless!--that main security, that sheet-
anchor, that absolute necessity, of business. My confidence left me.
There was no use in making new contracts--that was plain. I talked with
first one prominent citizen and then another. They all sympathized with
me, first rate, but they did not know how to help me. But at last a
Gentile said, 'Go to Brigham Young!--these small fry cannot do you any
good.' I did not think much of the idea, for if the law could not help
me, what could an individual do who had not even anything to do with
either making the laws or executing them? He might be a very good
patriarch of a church and preacher in its tabernacle, but something
sterner than religion and moral suasion was needed to handle a hundred
refractory, half-civilized sub-contractors. But