Note 15 — Chapter I · Why I went to Great Salt Lake City.—The various Routes.—The Line of Country traversed.—Diaries and Disquisitions.
Reading edition
And no wonder!
“I advise you, one and all, to enter every election district in Kansas and vote at the point of the bowie-knife and revolver. Neither give nor take quarter, as our case demands it.”
“I tell you, mark every scoundrel among you that is the least tainted with Free-soilism or Abolitionism, and exterminate him. Neither give nor take quarter from them.”
(Extracts from Speeches of General Stringfellow—happy name!—in the Kansas Legislature.)
[16] The basswood (Tilia Americana) resembles our linden: the trivial name is derived from “bast,” its inner bark being used for mats and cordage. From the pliability of the bark and wood, the name of the tree is made synonymous with “doughface” in the following extract from one of Mr. Brigham Young’s sermons: “I say, as the Lord lives, we are bound to become a sovereign state in the Union, or an independent nation by ourselves; and let them drive us from this place if they can—they can not do it. I do not throw this out as a banter. You Gentiles, and hickory and basswood Mormons, can write it down, if you please; but write it as I speak it.” The above has been extracted from a “Dictionary of Americanisms,” by John Russell Bartlett (London, Trübner and Co., 1859), a glossary which the author’s art has made amusing as a novel.
[17] The word is somewhat indefinite. Hunters apply it generally to the bare lands lying westward of the timbered course of the Mississippi; in fact, to the whole region from the southern Rio Grande to the Great Slave Lake.