Charles William Carter was Salt Lake’s most experienced photographer in 1870, so it was business as usual when a young mother chose his Main Street studio to make a portrait of her little daughter. Carter posed the child, stepped behind his big camera, and exposed the glass plate from which the photograph would be printed. He told his customer the portrait would be ready the next day, and she left his studio with no idea that overnight her daughter’s picture would become the center of Salt Lake’s attention.
When Carter processed the photograph, he found the likeness of a little girl, as expected. But behind her, a little to her left, appeared the faint image of a man whom visitors to his studio recognized as a recently deceased military man, Captain W.R. Storey. Continue reading An 1870 Ghost Story (Utah history) →
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, mastermind behind the master mind of Sherlock Holmes, famously pitched into the Mormons in his A Study in Scarlet in 1887:
The supply of adult women was running short, and polygamy without a female population on which to draw was a barren doctrine indeed. Strange rumours began to be bandied about – rumours of murdered immigrants and rifled camps in regions where Indians had never been seen. New women appeared in the harems of the elders – women who pined and wept, and bore upon their faces the traces of unextinguishable horror. Belated wanderers upon the mountains spoke of gangs of armed men, masked, stealthy, and noiseless, who flitted by them in the darkness. These tales and rumours took substance and shape, and were corroborated and recorroborated, until they resolved themselves into a definite name. To this day, in the lonely ranches of the West, the name of the Danite Band, or the Avenging Angels, is a sinister and an ill-omened one.
Some 46 years later, Doyle visited Salt Lake City on a lecture tour of the United States. Continue reading Arthur Conan Doyle Reinterprets Joseph Smith →
Where our past is never very long ago