Download or read book A Gentile Account of Life in Utah's Dixie, 1872-73 written by Elizabeth Wood Kane and published by Tanner Trust Fund. This book was released on 1995 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While her two sons -- little quicksilver elves, as she called them -- explored the red-rock bluffs and copied Piute face paintings, and while her husband Tom -- Civil War veteran and long-time friend of Mormons -- hobnobbed with the likes of adventurer Jacob Hamblin, Elizabeth Kane befriended the women of St. George. She found that they lived a strange idyllic life but nevertheless made her feel very much at home. Her diary comments on the food (the wine is horrid), an unpretentious but enjoyable cotillion ball, and her discovery that Mormon sermons are as dry and ... orthodox as any I have heard (in Philadelphia).Around the evening hearth Elizabeth's hosts told stories of Nephite wanderers and other beliefs. Artemisia Beaman Snow remembered the Palmyra mystic named Walters who, after trying unsuccessfully to obtain the gold plates from the Hill Cumorah, relinquished the task to his successor, Joseph Smith.In comparison to the people of St. George, she found those in Salt Lake City to be vulgar imitations of the best men and women, the most earnest in their belief, the most self-denying and 'primitive Christian' in their behavior clad in the homespun garments of the remote settlements.