Religious Sect Sought Tranformation to Animals, Birds

1903

A Curious Religious Colony

Queer City Near Headwaters of the Rio Pecos, New Mexico

Of all the queer cities ever built, the queerest was undoubtedly that erected near the headwater of the Rio Pecos, in New Mexico, by Julian Ericson and his followers in the middle of the last century, says the Sioux Falls, S. D., Leader.

Ericson was an American of Norwegian descent, and inherited some money, together with a taste for occult mysticism, from his father, a Swedenborgian carpenter and contractor.

He early came under the influence of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, but quarreled with his leader and started to found an entirely new sect of his own, the cardinal principle of which was the transmigration of the souls of the faithful while yet on earth. That, is to say, he promised that his disciples should, at an early date, be changed into doves, eagles, lions, or, in fact, into whatever beast or bird they chose.

It seems scarcely credible that such an absurd, not to say nauseous, doctrine, should have succeeded, even for a time, in attracting converts; but there would seem to be no limit to human credulity and gullibility in such matters. Some hundreds of enthusiasts threw in their lot with him, and, following the example of the Mormons, marched westward from the settled states into the great Western wilds.

They finally brought up in what is now San Miguel county, and built a town of frame houses, at the back of each of which was a cage or den suitable to the needs of the particular animal or bird they expected shortly to become.

Of course, the promises of Ericson came to nothing, and in the end he and a number of his disappointed disciples were lulled in battle with Apaches. The others scattered to various parts, the majority going to California to die for gold; and the stronger of the cages, those erected for the would-be tiger men and lion women, were afterward utilized for a brief period as places of confinement for refractory converts.