Eugene L. Roberts, missionary to the German Mission in 1908, understood the reasons why the people he approached would not except his message:

The longer I remain here, the less I blame these people for their deep-seated prejudices against Mormons. When one considers the amount of anti-Mormon literature this country has been flooded with, when one sees how the writers of numerous blood and thunder dime novels have laid the fiendish plots of their stories among the Mormons, and when one notes how even otherwise authentic encyclopedias picture us, it is easy to understand why the people have an inborn horror of Mormons. The school-children picture us as a wild, fierce species of white men, living among the less ferocious Indians. I got two schools here to corresponding with Utah schools, in an endeavor to put aside this prejudice. The children took a keen interest in writing, as much as if they were writing to young Indians.