Democratic Sentinel, Volume 12, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 October 1888 — MORMON EXHORTERS’ VICTIMS. [ARTICLE]

MORMON EXHORTERS’ VICTIMS.

Women and Young Girls Who Will Bo Sent Hack to Europe. [New York dispatch.] A sad scene has just been enacted at Castle Garden. Two gross, coarse, sensu-ous-featured men, in greasy broadcloth, coats, paced up and down before the inclosure of the landing bureau, casting anxious glances at a group of twenty persons inside until they were ordered to leave the Garden. They were W. G. Phelps and Henry Walsh, Elders of the Mormon Church, and the people huddling inside the inclosure were a part of a small army of converts whom they brought from England. Most of them will probably be returned to their native land. One Swiss family of seven people were bound for Idaho. The father declared that he had been a Mormon for twenty-three years. The whole family will bo sent back. HermeniaVan Lieben, from Holland, had three small children, and Maria Dextra, 14 years old, had left parents and friends in Holland to come and join the Mormons. She is unusually, alarmingly precocious, and argued in behalf of Mormonism and even polygamy with a display of knowledge startling in one so young. These deluded people, who were almost without money, will probably be returned. But the saddest eases are those of five little girls and three boys who had come to Ameriea allured by these stories of the Mormon exhorters. The children wilt probable be sent on to San Francisco, where they have friends. A man named Howard, who brought the children over, will be sent back to England. A pale-faced little girl with pretty features, but in dirty tatters, sobbed, “I am Sarah Ashley. lam 11 years old, and come from Worksop, England. I begged so hard mamma and papa lot me come with Brother YValsh. lamto go at service with a gentleman fifteen miles from Salt Lake City.” Nellie Tomlinson, from Brompton, was a mature girl of 12, She said she came with a “gentleman and two ladies,” and was going to be a Mormon, though she hardly knew what that meant. There were some more girls between the ages of 13 and 15, who will be returned to their homes.