Page:The Overland Monthly Volume 5 Issue 3.djvu/75



the order for a load of wood, and straightway the matron is shod. Seven watermelons purchase a ticket of admission to the theatre. He pays for the tuition of his children seventy-five cabbages per quarter. The dressmaker receives for her services four squashes per day. He settles his Church dues in sorghum molasses. Two loads of pumpkins pay his annual subscription to the newspaper. He buys a "Treatise on Celestial Marriage" for a load of gravel, and a bottle of soothing-syrup for the baby with a bushel of string-beans. In this primitive method, until the advent of the Railroad, was nine-tenths of the business of the Territory conducted. And even now, in the more remote settlements, a majority of all transactions are of this character. The merchants, purchasing their goods in New York or San Francisco, must, of course, have money to pay for the same; but they sell their goods for cattle, flour, and dairy products, which are then marketed for cash in the adjoining mining Territories.

A sketch of the business of any other of our representative cities, which was composed principally of details of farming, would be an anomaly; but Salt Lake is rather an aggregation of small farmers than a city, in the ordinary acceptation of the word—nearly all its inhabitants being farmers. Its merchants and mechanics have small farms, and endeavor, at least, to raise their own breadstuffs. Their daily conversation is of the prospect of crops—of the probable demand for their surplus products. Being farmers—and very small farmers—their gains have been, of course, but moderate. The average wealth of the people of Salt Lake City is probably much less than in any other city of the same population in the Union. There is, however, but little abject poverty. They have neither poverty nor riches—all have an abundance of the necessaries of life—few have wealth. The sterility of the land,

their distance from markets, the high price they have been heretofore obliged to pay for whatever articles of use were not raised in their own Territory, sufficiently account for the smallness of their average gains.

The difficulties of the settlement and upbuilding of Salt Lake City would not, however, entitle it to a place among the representative cities of our continent. Other citizens have endured equal or greater hardships in developing nearly every portion of our common country. From the days of John Smith, the Hol!and pilgrims, or the heroic La Salle, the lot of all pioneers who have preceded the westward course of empire has been, in many features, grievous to be borne. But, aside from the struggles, toils, and experiments of its founders, Salt Lake is, in many important features, a city entirely unique in the history of our colonization. It is a city founded and built from an adherence to a peculiar religious idea, and it owes whatever measure of prosperity it possesses to the iron will and dogged persistency of a single man.

There is no person in any degree familiar with the Mormon people but will give them the credit of being, from their stand-point, the most religious people of the continent. Without reference to the question whether their faith be founded in truth or be @ pure delusion, it is undeniable that for it, such as it is, they have endured toils and privations and welcomed sacrifices and sufferings such as have fallen, for the same cause, to the lot of no other religious community of our generation. While, however, Salt Lake may with propriety be deemed a city founded on a religious creed, it is based more upon the Old Testament ideas and formulas than upon the New. The Master, whose kingdom was not of this world, but in the inmost hearts of men, here gives place, and Moses comes forth as the interpreter of the will of God. As in the days of the Hebraic theoc