A.C.
- The battle of Cumorah was fought, in which two hundred and thirty thousand of the Nephites were slain (p. 507, pars. 2, 3).
- 400. All the Nephites, as a distinct people, except Moroni, were destroyed (p. 509, par. 1)
- 421. Moroni finished and sealed up all the records, according to the commandment of God (p. 561, par. 1).
CHAPTER X.
Farther Observations at Great Salt Lake City.
One of my last visits was to the court-house on an interesting occasion. The Palais de Justice is near where the old fort once was, in the western part of the settlement. It is an unfinished building of adobe, based on red sandstone, with a flag-staff and a tinned roof, which gives it a somewhat Muscovite appearance, and it cost $20,000. The courts and Legislature sit in a neat room, with curtains and chandeliers, and polished pine-wood furniture, all as yet unfaded. The occasion which had gathered together the notabilities of the place was this: Mr. Peter Dotson, the United States Marshal of the Territory, living at Camp Floyd, and being on the opposition side, had made himself—the Mormons say—an unscrupulous partisan. In July, 1859, he came from the cantonment armed with a writ issued by Mr. Delana R. Eckels, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and accompanied by two officers of the United States Army, to the Holy City for the purpose of arresting a Mr. Mackenzie—now in the Penitentiary for counterfeiting "quarter-masters' drafts"—an engraver by profession, and then working in the Deserét store of Mr. Brigham Young. Forgery and false coining are associated in the Gentile mind with Mormonism, and inveterately so; whether truly or not, I can not say: it is highly probable that Mr. Bogus's[1] habitat is not limited by latitude, altitude, or longitude; at the same time, the Saints are too much en évidence to entertain him publicly. The marshal, probably not aware that the Territory had passed no law enabling the myrmidons of justice to seize suspicious implements and apparatus made main forte, levied, despite due notice, upon what he found appertaining to Mr. Mackenzie, a Bible, a Book of Mormon, and—here was the rub—the copper plates of the Deserét Currency Association. This plunder was deposited for the night with the governor, and was carried in a
- ↑ Bogus, according to Mr. Bartlett, who quotes the "Boston Courier" of June 12, 1857, is a Western corruption of Borghese, "a very corrupt individual, who, twenty years ago or more, did a tremendous business in the way of supplying the great West and portions of the Southwest with counterfeit bills and drafts on fictitious banks." The word is now applied in the sense of sham, forged, counterfeit, and so on; there are bogus laws and bogus members; in fact, bogus enters every where.
