I am the Governor still, and who can help it. It was stenotyped and sent forth to the world that Sebastpol is still in possession of the Russians, and Brigham Young is Gov. of Utah. I have said this mildly and calmly, and if Bro. Kinney is here to hear it I am glad and he not try to deny what I have said. ... I say again so help me God we will cut their throats if they do here again as they did last winter; we will waste them away, and kill them in the streets at noonday, in the morning, and at night. I am Gov. here, and I want Bro. Kinney or any other man to write that and send it to the editors of papers in the United States if they think proper. If persons come here and behave like gentlemen they shall enjoy their rights, and we will enjoy ours or fight to the death... I have nothing to say against the most of the soldiers particularly, but against a good many of the officers, those poor miserable curses that were here last winter. We ought to have hung up their bodies as a public example and as a warning to others, or to have cast them over the city walls to the wolves, as I have felt sorry every since they went away that this was not done. I did not feel so keenly about it then as I have since they went away and the longer I live and the more I think about it I feel the more apprehension that I have not done right. But I will not let such another scene pass over, I think, unvisited by a just retribution. -- SLC Tabernacle
[Brigham Young Collection, quoted in The Complete Discourses of Brigham Young, Ed. Richard S. Van Wagoner, Smith-Pettit Foundation, Salt Lake City (2009), http://bit.ly/BY-discourses]
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