We have reason to anticipate a fullness of information, wholly new to the Gentile world, when the volume devoted to Utah is reached. For not only has Mr. Bancroft all the documents and all the material for the history of the Mormons which is accessible to any one else, but he is the exclusive possessor of that which is more valuable than all this, and which has never seen the light. The ruling men of the Mormon Church have given him the privilege of examining their archives, containing documents going back to the beginning of their movement. We have the Gentile story in superfluity and in unpleasant satiety; Mr. Bancroft purposes to give us the Mormon side in addition uncolored, and told as a part of the res gesta, and that is what the world wants to know.
The task which Mr. Bancroft undertook in the preparation of so comprehensive a work as this was one of unusual magnitude, and might well have discouraged a less earnest man. It certainly required unusual powers of application and painstaking labor to give unity and harmony to so large a plan; to reduce such a chaos of material as the history has to be built up out of to manageable shape, and to organize the work so that all should be done intelligently, consistently, and discriminatingly. But the plan is substantially executed, and one half of the work it demanded is done and in the possession of the public, while the rest of it is, we are told, in so advanced a stage of forwardness that its completion no longer depends on the prolongation of the life of the author.
The scheme contemplated the presentation in a systematized, readable, and plainly intelligible form, both in general view and in all its details and with all its changes of scene, of the history, so far as it is known or has been reported, of the tribes and states of the Pacific slope of the North American Continent from the Isthmus of Darien to Behring Strait. When we consider what these states are; what elements have entered into their composition; what vicissitudes and revolutions they have gone through during the four hundred years they have been known to white men; and how all the material is colored in all discordant hues by ignorance, partisan prejudice, or political malice prepense—it would seem almost a hopeless task to obtain comprehension even of a small part of the confused whole. Add to this, that hundreds of native tribes, having a vast geographical range and living in the most various conditions of pursuit, wealth, and civilization, had to be dealt with, and that what was to be learned about them had to be gathered and sifted from a great accumulation of printed and manuscript accounts, true and false, guessed, imaginary, and real, and from myths and traditions going back to an unknown antiquity, here obscure, and there inextricably entangled in and modifying one another—and we conceive a task calling for no slight powers of mental organization. Forty-two thousand is the number of books and manuscripts Mr. Bancroft has levied upon for his great undertaking! It took six
