The Mormon Threat

Going through a source for information on the critical years of 1857-60 in Carson Valley, now Nevada, seeking to resolve some family history issues, I came across this:

Genoa, Carson Valley, U.T. July 11, 1859 . . . . The Mormon Imbroglio

It is decidedly our opinion that the Mormons will one day have to be “wiped out,” and the sooner it is done the better, for while we gain nothing by delay, their numbers are constantly increasing by immigration. We may despise and pity the poor wretches, but we should remember it is not always that the most powerful enemy is the most dangerous. When the ambassadors of Mohammed waited upon the Persian monarch, demanding submission to their religion, the haughty potentate treated them with the utmost disdain; “in your own country,” said he, “your food is green lizards; but fetch forth your camels and I will load them with fruit, that for once you may have a feast.” Yet Mohammed and his successors in thirty years overrun and subdued not only Persia, but Syria, Egypt and Palestine. Nine centuries afterwards, by the conquest of Constantinople, they put an end to the Roman Empire of the East, and if Solyman the first had not been repulsed from the walls of Vienna, we have every reason to believe that the Christian religion would have been effaced from the earth and forgotten by mankind. We have a Solyman in the Nineteenth Century, now gathering his cohorts from the four corners of the earth. When these shall be assembled and arrayed for battle, there may be no Frederick to oppose their progress. . . .

We've had our historical problems to be sure. But this was published in a California newspaper as a routine matter back then. Of course, the nation was on the edge of Civil War, and this was a Southerner of his own prejudices against certain classes or maybe whole races of people. But still . . . .

I don't even want to go into the whole Muslim-Mormon parallel thing. Although this wasn't the first time the comparison was made.