Page:The Overland Monthly Volume 5 Issue 3.djvu/71

 tage, visible to the eyes of uninspired men, and are liable to lose their position and power in the world by any trivial circumstance. Not so, however, with the city whose career we chronicle. Founded by inspiration, Salt Lake City must be eternal. It despises the factitious aids by which other cities attain to greatness. For it Nature has done nothing except in the raw material for essence of sage-brush, or oil of greasewood. Without a harbor, its capacious tabernacle is the pharos from whence radiates the light which godly Saints believe alone shines for the vivifying and illuminating of all the world.

The tourist who shall hereafter visit Salt Lake City will survey this Mecca with far other feelings and emotions than his more adventurous predecessor. Luxuriantly ensconced in the 'palace-cars of the ubiquitous Pullman, after a delightful ride of three or four days, he alights at the City of the Saints. Of the country passed over for a thousand miles before reaching it, he knows almost nothing. He has looked from his window occasionally to survey a herd of antelopes, or a picturesque mountain landscape. He compares the mountain town with the gities of the East or West, where time, and taste, and wealth, and a Nature less niggardly of her favors have combined to create and develop artistic beauties: and his verdict is that Salt Lake is but a dull and prosaic village. Before the advent of the Railroad, however, the traveler prepared himself by a dreary experience to value the beauties of the desert-circled town. A weary journey for weeks or months over apparently endless plains, fearful in their unvarying monotony; over sage-brush deserts, parched and gray; over alkaline marshes, whitened with the bones of poisoned herds, and through mountain ranges, grand indeed, but with the grandeur of blackness and total desolation, prepared the tourist to appreciate the

welcome Sight of human habitations, of well-tilled gardens and thrifty farms. A few weeks' diet of rusty bacon and doubtful beans, familiarly known to travelers as "Ben Holladay's chickens," made doubly succulent and delicious the fruits and vegetables of the Mormon gardens. And above all, the pilgrim saw and spied out in full the horrible barrenness of the land, and knew the cost of its redemption from its first estate.

The pioneers of the Great Basin will never again receive full credit for their toils and sacrifices. The transcontinental railroad is a great enchanter—a steam Merlin. The tourist reads up for his journey from ocean to ocean of the cares and toils of the California immigrants and the Mormon pioneers; of Bitter Creek and the Stinking Water; of Humboldt Desert and Rattlesnake Pass. He stops at Bitter Creek Station, firmly resolved to drink none of the poisoned water, but sits down at a table well supplied with venison from the Platte Basin, cranberries from Alaska, and Sonoma grapes. He passes Rattlesnake Gulch unconsciously while enjoying his cigar in the smoking-car, and as he prepares for a comfortable sleep across the Humboldt Desert, placidly compares himself with Fremont, or Lewis and Clarke, or the Mormon pioneers, and decides that their accounts of the fatigues and dangers of an exploration across the continent were highly colored, for that he did the like without the loss of a night's repose, and without grievous dietetic hardship.

The great basin in which Salt Lake City is situated is nearly circular, and not far from five hundred miles in diameter. his basin has, as is well known, no visible outlet to the sea. In it are many considerable rivers, all of which sink, or flow, into lakes having no outlets. The Carson and Humboldt Rivers, in Nevada, and the Sevier River, in southern Utah, lose themselves in