1890-10-10-Elmira Daily Advertiser-A Warning to Mormon Converts
A Warning to Mormon Converts
- Elmira Daily Advertiser, 10 October 1890, pg. 6, column 6
A Missionary from Utah Tells of the Disgraceful Treatment of the Immigrants.
NEW YORK, Oct. 5.—Miss Inez Coultre of Grove City, Pa., who has recently arrived from Salt Lake City, Utah, where she has been doing missionary work, to-day submitted a statement to General James R. O'Beirne, superintendent of immigration at the barge office with a view of aiding those who are interested in stopping the immigration of mormon converts to this country.
Miss Coultre says that having been a resident of Salt Lake City for two years, and during that time having made a study of the mormon people she desires to aid in suppressing the traffic now going on with ignorant, unsuspicious foreigners by the mormon elders. The mormon church, she says, pays for the passage to this country of the converts and then pays their railroad fare to Salt Lake City. The ignorant converts come to Salt Lake City filled with promises of a life of ease and luxury, and, with an idea that the church will aid in their support. Instead of this they are housed like animals in miserable little huts. Upon the grinding labor of the converts the mormon church flourishes. They have to pay one-tenth of all they possess and one-tenth of all they earn to support the church. In many of the mormon settlements the converts burn sage brush for fuel, and have to subsist principally on fish, which they dry and keep for food in the winter. How they manage to exist is a mystery to all, Why the mormon elders bring over many young ignorant girls is only too well known to those who have investigated the matter. These girls have no voice in the matter of their disposal and they soon learn they are to be sealed as “spiritual wives" to some of the basest creatures the church produces. There is very little hope for them after they are once in Utah. They should be stopped at New York before they have become imbued with vice and are beyond our power to help.
