The splendor falls on castle wallsAnd snowy summits, old in story;The long light shakes across the lakesAnd the wild cataracts leap in glory.Blow bugle, blow; set the wild echoes flying;Answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.
The splendor falls on castle wallsAnd snowy summits, old in story;The long light shakes across the lakesAnd the wild cataracts leap in glory.Blow bugle, blow; set the wild echoes flying;Answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.
The splendor falls on castle walls
And snowy summits, old in story;
The long light shakes across the lakes
And the wild cataracts leap in glory.
Blow bugle, blow; set the wild echoes flying;
Answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.
—Tennyson.
With the first full light of dawn, on the morning after leaving Grand Junction, the vigilant Madame was awake, and we heard her calling upon us from her curtained corner to wake up and look out of the window. Well, as the Shaughran said when punished for his fox-hunt on the Squire’s horse, “It was worth it,” even at the expense of the morning nap. Here was something different from anything seen before.
We were far inside the boundary of Utah Territory and were already beginning to climb the first steps toward the heights of the Wasatch—the western bulwark of the Rocky mountains. The way lay up the South Fork of the Price river, along a broad valley sunken between enormously high walls of sedimentary rock whose horizontal stratification betrayed no signs of disturbance. How long must the waters of the paleazoic sea have surged against the primitive granitic caves and lava-masses—how steady must this part of the earth’s crust have remained for ages—to let these thousands of feet of rocky tablets be piled up! And then, when it was done; when the slow upheaval had come, and the water had gradually been drawn off; how patiently did the centuries wait while these great depressed spaces were cut down and the material carried away to be spread—who knows where?
Here mountain-like table-lands stretched their white and cedar-spiked terraces, one above another to the plateau-top, for scores of miles out from the range against which they were braced. The water and the sand-blast of the fierce winds had worn their exposed cliff-faces, and sometimes carved their crests (now gold-tipped by the first sunbeams) into fantastic shapes that recalled pictures in the Dakota badlands or the grotesque monuments near Colorado Springs. In some places they were honeycombed with round holes, connecting pits and fissures, like a prodigious display of Arabesque fret-work; elsewhere they would standmassive and plain. As we proceeded colors began to appear,—yellows, warm browns and pale reds, against which, in thorough keeping, grew the bent and aged forms of junipers. In the soft gray of the morning light, nothing could be more pleasing than these worn and variegated battlements, between which for miles and miles the road winds its way. Every stupendous headland was a new rendering of the general idea—a novel design coherent with hundreds of its fellows; and of each the eye was afforded several altered aspects as the train changed its point of view.
Finally we attained a higher level, and the cliffs came nearer, became more precipitous and the inter spaces more green. This was Castle Valley. We had risen and dressed ourselves and were thinking of breakfast. The sun had come high enough over the “great, lone land” in our rear to shoot his beams half way down the projections of the dewy and glittering cliffs, when the train came to a stop, though there was only a side-track. Stepping to the platform to enquire why, we came with all the shock of complete surprise face to face with what to me, is the most inspiring, as a single object, of all the marvelous scenes between the Plains and the Salt Sea. This was Castle Gate.
The cañon here becomes very narrow and tortuous, with picturesque defiles opening here and there and conducting tiny streams, swelled in spring to noisy torrents. Trees and bushes in great abundance grow on the narrow banks of the river and swarm up the rough heaps of rocks that bury the foot of the cliff on each side. Just here, these cliffs are several hundred feet high and exceedingly steep, showing great ledge-fronts as upright and clean of vegetation as the side of a house. All the rocks are bright rust-red, darker and lighter here and there; and over all arches a sky, violet-blue, vivid, and immeasurably deep, for you may look far into it, as into water that lies quiet and luminous under the sunshine.
Now out from this wall on one side pushes a great projection half way across the valley, crowned on its point by a round turret. This is on the left or southern side. Opposite it has been left standing an enormous natural wall—a thin promontory projected from the face of the mountain as Sandy Hook stretches narrow and straight out in the ocean beyond the Atlantic coast-line. From base to combing it rises sheer and toppling whichever way you scan it; and on the western side the topmost ledges overhang. Here the face is scarred not only by the horizontal lines denoting the separate strata, but also by vertical gashes of cleavage some of which are strongly marked cracks extending from top to bottom. These show how, by the continual scaling off of enormous slabs on each side, under the prying levers of heat and cold, moisture and weight, this once thick headland has been reduced to a thinness so contracted that its thickness in proportion to its height is no greater than that of Cleopatra’s Needle or any other monumental shaft; whilethe narrowed peninsular, which connects it with the main crag, has only the proportions of a garden wall: but what a wall! for it is eight hundred feet from its weedy top to the foundation. You can count in the patches of freshly exposed rock on its surface how season by season it is diminishing; and one great crack almost splits its extreme edge in twain so that some day, with an earth-jarring crash, half the thickness of this noble remnant will drop to its base and burst into dust and fragments.
Heedless of such a catastrophe, and unmindful of the grandeur of their home in human eyes, birds build their nests in the crevices and crannies that are nicked into its crimson front, and bats shrink from the light into the seams that make a network upon its sides. Great gaps mar the regularity of its sky line; but these mark the ruinous hand of time and add to the antique grandeur of the pile. We cannot take our eyes from it, and forget the even more lofty walls and pinnacles opposite, which have not the advantage of the isolation, and the Olympian dignity and pose, of this daring pier.
A little group of Indians on horseback, in the full toggery of Uinta Utes, were jogging along the road beside the track when presently we emerged from Castle Valley and drew up at Pleasant Valley Junction. Here a branch road comes from some important coal mines sixteen miles to the westward. This coal occurs in a bed eleven feet in thickness, and so situated as to be worked very conveniently. The mines were opened four years ago, and a railway built to them from Provo—a distance of sixty miles. This was bought by the Denver and Rio Grande and a part of it was utilized. Now all the coal comes down from the mines by gravity, and the locomotive is required only to haul up the empty cars.
This coal is bituminous, and of better quality than that from Rock Springs, in Wyoming, which it is gradually displacing in the Utah markets, since it is found to give more heat, ton for ton. Its introduction was a boon to the people generally, for instead of seven dollars and fifty cents a ton, with occasional extra prices, they now pay only five dollars, and get a better article. The mines are operated by the Pleasant Valley Coal Company, who employ about one hundred men and produce a daily output of three hundred tons, which is constantly increasing to meet the growing demand.
After leaving Pleasant Valley Junction the ascent of the Wasatch was begun in earnest, but, though a long pull, the grade was not remarkably steep, nor was the cañon (worn through a red pudding-stone,) astonishing in any way, while always interesting. By the time breakfast was fairly out of the way, the summit had been reached and the descent began through the cañon of the Spanish Fork into Mormondom.
A few miles down we came to Thistle Station, a place of some consequence because it is the railway outlet for the large San Pete valley, which stretches nearly along the western foot of the Wasatch until it emerges into the valley of the Sevier. This valley is reached from thewestward by a narrow-gauge railway line, built years ago by Mormon capital. It enters it from Nephi by the way of Salt creek and terminates at Wales, where there are coal mines worked by Welchmen and operated by English capital. The San Pete valley is not particularly interesting. Yet the little settlements back in the eastern foothills where the many streams come down are pleasant enough.
This valley became famous in 1865-67 as the scene of the San Pete Indian War. “Several companies of the Mormon militia were mustered here, and held the mountains and passes on the east against the Indians, guarded the stock gathered here from the other settlements that had been abandoned, and took part in the fights at Thistle creek, ... and the rest, where Black Hawk and his flying squadron of Navajos and Piutes showed themselves such plucky men.”
Toward the lower end of the valley stands the important town of Manti, its suburbs encroaching on the sagebrush. “As a settlement,” says Phil Robinson, the most recent traveller thither, “Manti is pretty, well ordered and prosperous.... The abundance of trees, the width of the streets, the perpetual presence of running water, the frequency and size of the orchards, and the general appearance of simple, rustic comfort, impart to Manti all the characteristic charm of the Mormon settlements.” Robinson says that the people in that region are chiefly Danes and Scandinavians. “These nationalities contribute more largely than any other—unless Great-Britishers are all called one nation—to the recruiting of Mormonism, and when they reach Utah maintain their individuality more conspicuously than any others.” The temple at Manti will be something worth going far to see when it is completed. “The site, originally, was a rugged hill slope, but this has been cut out into three vast semicircular terraces, each of which is faced with a wall of rough hewn stone, seventeen feet in height. Ascending these by wide flights of steps you find yourself on a fourth level, the hill-top, which has been leveled into a spacious plateau, and on this, with its back set against the hill, stands the temple. The style of Mormon architecture, unfortunately, is heavy and unadorned, and in itself, therefore, this massive pile, one hundred and sixty feet in length by ninety wide, and about one hundred high, is not prepossessing. But when it is finished, and the terrace-slopes are turfed, and the spaces planted out with trees, the view will undoubtedly be very fine, and the temple be a building that the Mormons may well be proud of.”
The lower part of the valley is undulating,—”for the most part a sterile-looking waste of greasewood, but having an almost continual threat of cultivation running along the center,” until it suddenly opens, at Mayfield, into a great meadow of several thousand acres. Passing on to the Sevier, volcanic hills and benches shut in the valley, but the bottoms along the river were level, grassy, “clumped with shrubs and patched with corn-fields.” Here there are frequent settlements, oneof the most important of which is Salina, where the alkalies that infect the soil of all this region are concentrated in salt-beds that have long been dug for export. The Denver and Rio Grande Company have projected a track from this point due east to join its main line and thus secure not only the salt trade, but tap this farming and grazing region, which some day will be of great consequence, for there is plenty of water. Furthermore, this same company has laid a sort of preëmption right upon a railway route surveyed westward from Salina toward the Pacific coast through southern Nevada and central California, which will pass close by the Yosemite and the Caleveras groves of Big Trees.
We had gathered all this information from books and good friends, and the recollection of former reading, while
“like Iser, rolling rapidly,”
we descended the Spanish Fork. This cañon is not rough and cliff-bound, but its sides, though steep, are rounded, and soft walls of greenery—small bushes, rank grass and tufted groves of aspen and oak; while the river purls along the narrow depression under the continuous shade of young maples, alders, oaks and other shrubbery. A wagon road is to be seen most of the way showing long use. The rude kennels built for temporary use by the railway-makers have not yet had time to crumble, and add a picturesque note to the pleasant vale. Here and there were camps of emigrants, or of railway people. That they were Mormons was plain by the comfortable, home-like appearance of each bivouac, where buxom women were tending to the children and carrying on the ordinary duties of housekeeping in houses of cloth and kitchens made under booths of maple boughs. Children and dogs and donkeys abounded, and at two or three camps we caught sight of pet fawns. This cañon was formerly an Indian highway, and through it, in days gone by, more than one incursion of Navajos and Piutes has swept down upon the settlements, “bringing fire and the sword.” Through it also came, long, long ago, the pious friars,—explorer-priests—bent upon the conversion of the Indians; and the digging up of a few coins and other relics of their visits has given the name of Spanish Fork to the stream, which really is a “fork” of no other water course, but empties directly into Lake Utah.
As we emerge from the cañon a wide, haze tinted sketch of mountains and green-gray plains, with a touch of steel-white water, greets the eye to the westward, where stretch the arid deserts and volcanic ranges of Utah and Nevada. Southward, nobly tall and rugged, rise the hights of the Wasatch, with the magnificent pyramid of Mt. Nebo, overtopping the rest, exalted above the sunlit clouds and crowned with early snow wreaths. It is the last of the great, lone, Rocky Mountain peaks that we shall see, and a worthy reminder of the splendid scenery in whose presence our life has been expanded and glorified during the bygone months.
Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasuresWhilst the landscape round it measures;Russet lawns, and fallows gray,Where the nibbling flocks do stray;Mountains, on whose barren breastThe laboring clouds do often rest;Meadows trim with daisies pied,Shallow brooks and rivers wide;Towers and battlements it sees,Bosomed high in tufted trees,Where, perhaps some Beauty liesThe Cynosure of neighboring eyes.
Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasuresWhilst the landscape round it measures;Russet lawns, and fallows gray,Where the nibbling flocks do stray;Mountains, on whose barren breastThe laboring clouds do often rest;Meadows trim with daisies pied,Shallow brooks and rivers wide;Towers and battlements it sees,Bosomed high in tufted trees,Where, perhaps some Beauty liesThe Cynosure of neighboring eyes.
Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures
Whilst the landscape round it measures;
Russet lawns, and fallows gray,
Where the nibbling flocks do stray;
Mountains, on whose barren breast
The laboring clouds do often rest;
Meadows trim with daisies pied,
Shallow brooks and rivers wide;
Towers and battlements it sees,
Bosomed high in tufted trees,
Where, perhaps some Beauty lies
The Cynosure of neighboring eyes.
—Milton.
Nebo does not long remain in sight from our windows; for speedily we swing out into the sloping valley land, bringing into close companionship on the right the northern half of the Wasatch range, which, were it a trifle more arctic and bristling aloft, would remind us strongly of the Sangre de Cristo. On each side now are spread wide areas of grain field and grassland, with abundant hedges and thickets and orchards surrounding clusters of houses and barns. The train makes frequent halts at little villages, which seem to have been built along both sides of the track, because the reverse process occurred and the rails were laid in the middle of the main street. The first of these farmer-settlements was Spanish Fork (the Palmyra of old settlers) where, not long ago, a copper image of the Virgin Mary was dug up, together with some fragments of a human skeleton. “This takes back the Mormon settlement of to-day to the long ago time when Spanish missionaries preached of the Pope to the Piutes, and gave but little satisfaction to either man or beast, for their tonsured scalps were but scanty trophies, and the coyote found their lean bodies but poor picking.” A few miles further is Springville, hidden in well-watered trees, where a stream tumbling out of a mysteriously dark cañon just behind the town, turns the wheels of extensive flour mills and woolen factories.
It is with growing and animated interest, that we pass on through miles of fertile farmland and come into plain sight of Utah Lake,—a glassy sheet of water beyond which loom through their mist the vagueforms of many angular hills. The water is fresh, and none of the barrenness that has smitten the shores of the Salt sea northward accurses this beautiful lake, with which the Indians strangely enough, associated many evil influences and dark legends. Between us and the shore stretch vast meadows of green prairie grasses and bulrushes, upon which herds of sleek cattle and fine horses were grazing. Except upon the western side, where the hills yield no water, there is a semicircle of villages at the feet of the encompassing hills, with checkered fields of grain and fodder between the embowered clusters of houses and the swampy meadows along shore. Sometimes the meadows and gardens, the squares of wheat and Indian corn come clear down to the shore.
BEE HIVE HOUSE.
BEE HIVE HOUSE.
Though most of the houses were of adobe, showing signs of long occupancy in the advanced state of orchard and garden, and the home-like air about them, the pioneer’s wagon top makes him a good enough house for several weeks in this dry and genial climate, but he builds something better for the winter. The second season, therefore, will find him living in a small, but tight and warm, cabin of slabs, chinked and roofed with dirt. His stables will be low structures of poles thatched with straw or rushes cut at the border of the lake, and his grain will be stacked out of doors.
A great gap in the Wasatch has been in sight for some time, in which lies the source of the Provo river, and down here upon its banks is Provo—the largest town on Utah Lake. We have “Sinners and Saints” open before us as we draw up at the station; and the Madame reads to us what the author has to say about this very town:
“Visitors have made the American Fork cañon too well known to need more than a reference here, but the Provo cañon, with its romantic waterfalls and varied scenery, is a feature of the Utah valley which may some day be equally familiar to the sight-seeing world. The botanist would find here a field full of surprises, as the vegetation is of exceptional variety and the flowers unusually profuse. Down this cañon tumbles the Provo river; and as soon as it reaches the mouth ... it is seized upon and carried off to right and left by irrigation channels and ruthlessly distributed over the slopes. And the result is seen, approaching Provo, in magnificent reaches of fertile land and miles of crops. Provo is almost Logan [in Cache Valley] over again, for though it has the advantage over the northern settlement in population, it resembles it in appearance very closely. There is the same abundance of foliage, the same width of water-edged streets, the same variety of wooden and adobe houses, the same absence of crime and drunkenness, the same appearance of solid comfort. It has its mills and its woolen factory, its ‘co-op.’ and its lumber-yards. There is the same profusion of orchard and garden, the same all pervading presence of cattle and teams.... The clear streams, perpetually industrious in their loving care of lowland and meadow and orchard, and so cheery, too, in their perpetual work, are a type of the men and women themselves; the placid cornfields, lying in bright levels about the houses, are not more tranquil than the lives of the people; the tree-crowded orchards and stack-filled yards are eloquent of universal plenty; the cattle loitering in the pasture contented, the foals all running about in the roads, while the wagons which their mothers are drawing stand at the shop door or field gate, strike the new comer as delightfully significant of a simple country life, of mutual confidence, and universal security.”
At Springville and again at Provo, the train was surrounded by a flock of little girls who held up to the windows baskets of fruit—apples, pears, raspberries, plums, grapes and peaches. They sought buyers very prettily, offering whole handfuls of the fruit for five cents. Everybody bought it, for nothing could be more welcome after the weary journey. The Madame rushed out to the platform and proceeded to empty the basket of one gentle speculator whose frock was white and clean, but whose shapely legs and feet were bare and brown. She wore no hat, and there fell down her straight young back a heavy braid of beautiful corn silk hair tied at the end with a bow of cherry ribbon. Her figure and manners were full ofnaïvegrace. As the bargain wasconcluded and we rolled away, the Madame came near kissing her goodbye, and we heard some one humming
“Happy little maiden she,Happy maid of Arcadie.”
“Happy little maiden she,Happy maid of Arcadie.”
“Happy little maiden she,
Happy maid of Arcadie.”
But was it this, or another little maid, or both, she had in mind, while the soft light shone in her eyes?
Nephi, the next station—a mass of orchards surrounding straggling streets of doubled-doored gray houses—is memorable because of the remains of fortifications that surround it, with lesser defences near many of the houses. These consisted of thick mud parapets pierced for rifles; and they recall the dangers these pioneers had to encounter from the “Lamanites,” as they called the redskins. “Young men tell how as children they used to lie awake at nights to listen as the red men swept, whooping and yelling, through the quiet streets of the little settlement; how the guns stood always ready against the wall, and the windows were barricaded every night with thick pine logs.”
The beautiful valley of Utah Lake has now been left behind, and the scene returns to the familiar sagebrush and volcanic scoria, through which a small river of yellow water finds its way, and we follow all its curves. The river is the Jordan, so called because it connects the Utah with the Great Salt Lake, as its namesake does Galilee and the Dead Sea. But the yellow river and its desolate ridges are presently passed, and there opens out on each side a vista of great fields of wheat and tasseling corn; of orchards heavy with ripened fruit, and meadows sere with summer heat; and of houses hidden in trees and hopvines, and touched with the brilliant points of climbing roses and honeysuckles, or the lofty standards of the hollyhock, flying by like the panorama of a dream.
Up the grand slope of the Wasatch beyond, stretches a mass of houses and a forest of shade trees, that are sweeping every instant nearer. Shade of Jehu, how we are tearing along! Swish! That was a smelter. Swish again! That was a furnace. Crash! Bang! Salt Lake City! Shall we halt? No, only a few moments to watch the crowd alight and wrestle with the hotel runners; and also to detach and arrange for the side-tracking of our two household cars. We will keep the coach and go on to Ogden while we are “in running order” as Chum says. Then we will come back to-night and stay in Salt Lake City as long as we please. So with a parting admonition to Bert we take our seats and are moving onward once more.
Here again the track for a long distance runs along the middle of a suburban street slowly traversed,—a street of lowly houses, each in its dense garden. It is not at all a bad notion of the whole city, which that glimpse gives the traveller, but shortly it is exchanged for a sage-bush-plain, followed by a region reminding us strongly of the St. Clair flats in Canada. Meadows and marshes, vividly green, stretch to the westward,diversified by planted groves of cottonwood, while mountains rise close at hand on the east. Here and there pools of calm water flit by, on whose surface large flocks of snow-white gulls sit motionless. It is a great place for blackbirds, also,—Brewer’s grakle and the yellow-headed blackbird—one of which races with the train, apparently just to show how fast he can fly. Presently the ground becomes dryer and shows wide cultivation. Stacks of hay and straw dot the level and unfenced expanse, but the houses and barns of the farmers are all at our right along the foot of the hills. They are pleasant homes, embowered in orchards, and the whole scene is sunny and peaceful.
The soil is black and loamy, the foothills green and studded with blooming farms and homesteads, the lowlands lush with long grass and willow thickets. Westward, the scene might be areplicaof, say, the coast of North Carolina, for now the Great Salt Lake is in full view, and the mist which hides the mountainous islands and western shore, leaves its expanse as limitless as that of the open ocean, whence no salter breeze could blow than this morning air. We gradually approach the shore, or its bays bend forward to our straight line, and we leave the fields behind to skirt and cross a great expanse of salt whitened mud flats, where chestnut-backed plovers flit about as the only sign of life. On higher ground, just beyond, a frail pier or landing stage runs far out into the lake, where is moored a small steamboat, and two or three sailboats rest on the gently ruffled water. This is a bathing resort and picnic grounds, which hereafter will be made more of than at present. Beyond, for miles and miles, the country seems to have been one continuous wheat-field, for the golden stubble stretches in vast unfenced spaces, and we can count dozens of huge yellow stacks that have been reaped. A long ridge of dry gravel is traversed, a vista of valley land, filled full of groves, and orchards, market gardens and neat houses, opens at the base of high rocky walls and the locomotive gives its last long shriek, for this is Ogden, the terminus of our westward jaunt,—771 miles from Denver, 2,500 miles from New York, 864 miles from San Francisco.
When luncheon was over, I sat me down to my work, and the Madame began putting on her hat, making quite sure that it was straight, nor leaving the neighborhood of the mirror until wholly satisfied on that head.
“That is complimentary to Ogden!” I observe with a rising inflection.
“Not particularly,” she answers slowly. “I would want my hat to sit straight and my feather be right if I were going into a camp of Digger Shoshones. It wouldn’t feel right otherwise.”
I do not argue the question. Turning to Chum she enquires sweetly (ignoring anybody else) if he will go with her on a stroll of exploration.That young man is just filling his pipe, and the expression of anticipated delight fades utterly from his countenance.
“E-r-r,” he stammers, thinking how he may escape. “Thanks, thanks, but I can’t very well—I—I have letters to write, you know.”
“Yes, I know, everybody has, under certain circumstances. However, I can go alone.Au revoir!”
Then I sit down at work. Chum lights his pipe and lazily scratches a postal card to keep up appearances, and silence reigns for an hour or so.
It is put at end by our lady’s return.
“Well, what did you see?” we both ask.
“Oh, Ogden is a big collection of little houses and behind each house is a pretty little farm and market garden. There is a ledge beyond the main part of the town, and up there are situated the better houses of the city, with larger gardens and lawns, from which you can look off over the wide plain with bluffs and ridges, in the foreground, catch a glimpse of the lake in the middle distance, and a vision of sharp-pointed mountains on the horizon.”
Ogden holds interest at present, chiefly—and it always will I fancy—as a center for transportation lines. Here, in 1869, was welded into a continuous whole the first line of rails connecting the Atlantic with the Pacific. This is the scene of Bret Harte’s stirring poem, which tells us
“... what the engines said,Pilots touching—head to head,Facing on a single track,Half a continent at each back.”
“... what the engines said,Pilots touching—head to head,Facing on a single track,Half a continent at each back.”
“... what the engines said,
Pilots touching—head to head,
Facing on a single track,
Half a continent at each back.”
That event was an occasion of public rejoicing, and the success of those lines at that time was a matter of public concern.
Since her one line east and west was first connected, Ogden has seen a great growth in railways. The traveller may now go northward into the mining regions of southern Idaho, or on to the quartz and placers and the silver ledges of Montana; or, still further, around Pend’ Oreille and Cœur d’Alêne and down the majestic Columbia to Oregon, Washington Territory and British Columbia; he may go westward to California and the Pacific; he may go southward to the farms and mines of southern Utah; or eastward into the heart of the Rockies and so through to the Atlantic over the route we ourselves have just passed.
Ogden has some thousands of people claiming it as home; and besides the large patronage of the railways it is the supplying-center, and the market for a considerable farming district in southern Idaho. It is a busy and enterprising and growing town. Its union station is a sort of narrows through which the larger part of all exchange of men and goods between the east and west must drain; and there is excitement and variety enough to keep alive the attention of the dullest witness. The train that brought us in the morning had sent a merry crowd on to San Francisco—a train-load of acquaintances in jolliest mood, for theother incoming trains contributed very few to the company bound westward. Now the arriving train of the Central Pacific poured across the busy platform another just such a merry company, filling the cars of the Denver and Rio Grande, to which our special was attached, and losing few to the older line.
At Salt Lake City, that evening, our faithful Bert had a good dinner ready for us almost the moment we returned; and, restored to the comforts of our own bed and board, we made an auspicious and good-natured entry to Zion, and to Deseret, the chief city of the Latter Day Saints.
“I have described in my time many cities, both of the east and west; but the City of the Saints puzzles me. It is the young rival of Mecca, the Zion of the Mormons, the Latter-day Jerusalem. It is also the City of the Honey Bee, ‘Deseret,’ and the City of the Sunflower—an encampment as of pastoral tribes, the tented capital of some Hyksos, ‘Shepherd Kings’—the rural seat of a modern patriarchal democracy; the place of the tabernacle of an ancient prophet-ruled Theocracy.”
—Phil Robinson.
It was on a Saturday night that we returned to Salt Lake City. It followed, therefore, as a matter of course, that the ensuing morning was Sunday. Had the calender not been our authority we might have known it from the solemn stillness that prevailed—a contrast very vivid and suggestive after our experience of the Holy Day in the mountain mining towns.
Everybody was eager of course to go to the Tabernacle.
The Tabernacle stands inside the big wall surrounding the “Temple block,” and could have been found by simply falling in with any one of the currents of Sunday-dressed people which set toward it from every direction. We went early so as to look about us at leisure.
This square of ten acres was set apart for temple purposes at the founding of the city, and there the pioneers held their first worship. There was built the building known as the Endowment House, and there, thirty years ago, were laid the foundations of the temple, wherein (it is promised) Jesus Christ shall appear bodily to the faithful as soon as it is completed. Reared to a height of eighty feet above the ground, but not yet ready for the roof, its snowy walls gleam in the sun, hot and dazzling.
There is a little time before the services in the Tabernacle and we go over to the new building, picking our way among redoubts of the sparkling blocks of granite. A picture of the building as it will appear when the work is finished, hung under glass, at the closed door of the superintendent’s office, and enabled us to get a very good idea of how the great structure would look. The Madame joined the rest of us in admiration for the massive character of every part of the work.
MORMON TEMPLE, TABERNACLE AND ASSEMBLY HALL.
MORMON TEMPLE, TABERNACLE AND ASSEMBLY HALL.
We found that above the enormous foundations the wall had a thickness of nine feet, which decreases to seven at the height of the roof. Nor was this wall hollow, or filled or backed with brick or anythingelse, but was made solid throughout of hewn granite. Even the pillars, the partitions, the stairways, the floors and ceilings in many apartments, were of solid matched stone. The beveled window openings through these thick walls are like embrasures of a fort; and the many small rooms in which it is to be divided, will cause the structure to seem more like a prison than a religious temple. In fact it is not designed as a house of worship,—the Tabernacle remains for that—but is intended as a sacred edifice within which various ordinances of the Church, closely allied to those of Masonry, now performed in the Endowment House, shall be celebrated.
The external ornamentation of the great building is original and symbolical in its plan. The wall is pierced with four tiers of large windows, the second and fourth tiers being circular. The keystone of each of the arches over these windows, as well as over the various doors, bears a star in high relief; and between the windows room is found for three tiers of circular bosses, eight on each side, upon which symbols will be carved in high relief. The lowermost of these rows will bear maps of various parts of the world; the second tier, eight phases of the moon; and the topmost tier eight blazing suns. The suns, moons and stars are already cut, but the maps of the earth remain to be carved.
The cost of the temple has been the subject of much public questioning and careless slander. A man assured us that it had cost sixteen millions of dollars. This is certainly an exaggeration. I have the word of President Taylor that the total cost up to the present time has been about two millions of dollars, derived from the church tithings. The same work could be duplicated now for a far less sum; but a large part of this was done before the railway was built, when the stone had to be hauled from the distant quarries by ox-teams. It is supposed that another million dollars and two years more time, will complete and furnish the building. That will be a great day for Salt Lake.
By the time we had finished our inspection of the temple, the Tabernacle had been pretty well filled by the crowds of people who poured into its many doors. One of these streams we followed.
The Tabernacle has been so often described and figured that I need spend little time over it. Imagine an elliptical dome, shingled, set upon a circle of stone piers about twenty feet in height, and you will have an image of this extraordinary building. Were it set upon an eminence it would be as grand in its place (perfectly fitting Utah scenery in its severely simple outlines) as the Acropolis at Athens.
Service in the Tabernacle is held on Sundays at two o’clock in the afternoon. The people assemble not only from the city but from all the country around. Women and children are in great force. The great amphitheatre supplies seats for thirteen thousand people, and it is nearly filled every Sunday. A broad gallery closes around at the front end where the choir sit in two wings, facing each other—the men on oneside and the young women on the other. The space between is filled by the splendid organ (back high up against the wall) and by three long, crimson-cushioned pulpit-desks, in each of which twenty speakers or so can sit at once, each rank overlooking the heads of the one beneath. The highest of these belongs to the president and his two counselors; the second to the twelve apostles, and the lowest to the bishops. The acoustic properties of the building are wonderful; a person standing in a certain space near one end, can hear the gentlest whisper, or, that universal test, a pinfall, from quite the other end. A former deficiency of light, has been overcome by the use of gas and electricity; and the chilling barrenness of the vast whitewashed and unbroken vault is relieved by a liberal hanging of evergreen festoons, and trailing wreaths of flowers made of colored tissue paper. These trimmings are far enough away from the eye, and in masses of sufficient size to make their effect very satisfactory.
Every Sunday the sacrament is administered, the tables loaded with the baskets of bread and silver tankards of water (never wine) occupying a dais at the foot of the pulpits, upon which several bishops take their places, and break the bread into fragments. Precisely at two o’clock the great organ sends forth its melodious invocation, and the subdued noise of neighborly gossip, which, as the Madame said, “seemed the veritable humming of the honey bees of Deseret in their house hive,” is wholly hushed. The music at the Tabernacle is far-famed in the west, and gives constant delight to all the people. The singing is followed by a long prayer by some one of the dignitaries in or about the pulpits, during which the time is utilized to prepare the bread and water; and as soon as the prayer has ceased a large number of brethren begin to pass the sacred food and drink. Everybody, old and young, partakes, and it is an hour and a half before the communion is completed. Meanwhile some one of the highest officers of the church, or perhaps two or three of them in succession, has been preaching; so that two long hours are exhausted before dismissal. Such was the experience of our visit, and it was an average occasion.
The history of Salt Lake City is the history of the “Mormons,”—of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints in Utah. It begins on the 24th of July, 1847, when Brigham Young, leading the people, who likened their pilgrimage to a second exodus of Israel, emerged from the long cañon that had let them through the westernmost range of the Rockies. As the head of the weary train passed the last barrier they saw spread before their eager vision a huge basin—miles of sage-green, velvety slopes, sweeping down on every side from the bristling mountain-rim to the azure surface of the Salt sea set in the center.
Here, their leader told them, the Lord commanded a halt; here his tabernacle should be raised. It was done, and to-day a populous city stands on the site of the first camp of the religious host,—a city as bafflingto describe in its appearance, in its social aspects, in its pervading sentiment as any which can be found in Christendom. It was with an intense sympathy for Mr. Robinson, that I listened to the Madame reading the opening paragraph of the fifth chapter of his “Sinners and Saints,” a part of which I have selected as the motto of the present chapter.
Yes, like Mr. Robinson, I would have liked “to shirk this part of my experiences altogether,” but the reader would never have pardoned me. “What? Leave out Salt Lake City!” I hear you exclaim. “What’s the good of mentioning Utah at all, if you do that?”
Well, to begin with, the city is not on the lake nor within a score of miles of it. When the pioneers came they descended to the foot of the last “bench” in which the foothills yield their rights to the plain, and there made their camp. In the same spot was founded the city. It was quite as good a locality as any other, no doubt they thought, considering that the whole region alike was nothing but a plain of sagebrush. Indeed, you cannot see the lake at all from the city, except by going up upon the “bench” of higher ground to the northward and eastward, whence it appears only as a line of distinct color between the dusty olive of the wide foreground, and the vague blue of the distant hills.
The habitations of the pioneers were not built hastily and at random. Brigham Young caused a town-site to be carefully surveyed and accurately laid out, and it was done on a generous scale. The streets were made one hundred and thirty feet wide, placed true to the points of the compass and crossing one another at right angles. Each square contains ten acres, so that when the Madame and I merely walked “around the block” while I smoked a post-prandial cigarette, we tramped precisely half a mile. A square of nine blocks was made to constitute a “ward”—now the city has twenty-four-presided over by a bishop of the church. Despite his title, he was more a temporal than a spiritual head, deciding all small matters in dispute in those simple first days when there was no appeal, nor desire for one, from ecclesiastical decisions to civil judgment. Even yet, this ward classification enters largely into the social constitution of the city.
When the streets and wards had been determined each pioneer was given an acre and a quarter as a town lot, and as much outside land as he could occupy. This accounts in a great measure for the ample space and farm-like appearance of the grounds around most of the houses in this widely dispersed city.
To make this real estate of value, however, water for irrigation must be brought to it. This was supplied by the “City” creek flowing down from Emigration cañon, whose current was led into ditches all over the new colony, and still fills the roadside gutters with sparkling streams, nourishing many gardens, and the roots of the long lines of varied shade trees, whose boughs almost reach over the thoroughfares.All the brethren worked in common at this ditching, and it was done so soon that within a few days after their arrival seeds had been put in the ground for the first crop.
“Yes,” says the Madame, as I relate this history, “and they say that old Jim Bridger watched them cynically and said they were a pack of—well, no matter what kind of fools, and that he would give a thousand dollars for the first ear of corn raised there.”
“That’s said to be true,” I assent.
“But he had to acknowledge the corn,” Chum puts in—and flees!
Formerly this water alone was available for domestic purposes and drinking, as well as for irrigation, and even yet the poorer part of the population dip it up at the curbstone for daily service. But the introduction of pipes and hydrants has now superseded this old way, though the water is no better; for table use, therefore, the sweet pure beverage drawn from very deep wells is preferred. Experiments are making in this respect to artesian wells also.
The houses built by the first settlers were mainly log cabins, and some relics are still to be found hidden away in blossoming orchards. The Spanish-Americanadobehouse was also a favorite, and has continued so to the present, though instead of almost shapeless chunks of mud, plastered in Mexican fashion, regular unburnt bricks are made by machinery. Theseadobesare twice the size of ordinary bricks, and the wall into which they are formed is made twice as thick as one of burned bricks would be. Of course this material lends itself to any style of architecture, and many of the elaborate buildings, as well as cheap cottages, are made of it, the soft gray tint of the naturaladobe, or the gentle tone of some overlying stucco harmonizing most tastefully with the crowding greenery. Low houses, with abundant piazzas and many nondescript additions, are the most common type in the older part of the town; and over these so many vines are trained, and so much foliage clusters, that one can hardly say of what material the structure itself is formed. The residences recently built have a more eastern and conventional aspect, and some are very imposing; but, big or little, old or new, it is rare to find a house not ensconced in trees and shrubs and climbing plants, while, smooth, rich, well-shaven lawns greet the eye everywhere in town, in brilliant contrast to the bleak hills towering overhead just without the city. As for flowers, no town east or west cultivates them more universally and assiduously.
“There are no florists here,” says the Madame.
“And no need for any—each man has his own plants if not the luxury of a greenhouse.”
Salt Lake City, then, is beautiful—a paradise in comparison with the buffalo plains or the stony gulches in which the majority of Rocky Mountain towns must needs be set. Nor is there any question as to the fact that this is wholly to the credit of the Mormons—not because theywere Mormons, but because they were diligent and foresighted, and came hither not to make a fortune and escape, but to stay and build up pleasant homes and a prosperous commonwealth. Any other set of men might have done the same; but certainly no other set of mendid, for to no others was presented the same compelling motive.
The suburbs—except toward the rocky uplands northward—grade off quite imperceptibly, the streets continuing straight out into country roads between dense jungles of sunflowers,—glorious walls of gold, and green; and in these suburbs you may find some of the queerest, most idyllic cottages.
The two broad distinctions of “Mormon” and “Gentile,” are not enough to represent the elements of Salt Lake society. At least three divisions ought to be counted. First, the Latter-day Saints; second, the seceders from the Mormon Church; third, the Gentiles—respectable people, mostly attendants at Christian churches.
“Such a classification must make queer comrades,” remarks Chum, as we sit talking over these matters.
“I should say so,” I reply, “the Jew becomes a Gentile, and the Roman Catholic becomes a Protestant, making common cause with Calvinism against the hierarchy of the Temple.”
“I do not suppose,” the Madame observes, “that they can sink their own little differences, although allied in one fight; so that society must necessarily be divided into a lot of little groups, and thus lose a great deal.”
“Yes, the people who profess no religious adherence have rather the easiest time of it in Salt Lake, I believe.”
The non-Mormon part of the citizens probably enjoy themselves more than they would if the isolation of the locality did not compel them to be self-centered and contrive their own amusements to a great extent. It is a society made up of the families of successful merchants and mining men, of clergymen and teachers, of the officers of the army stationed at Camp Douglass, and the representatives of the government in the judicial and other territorial offices. This composition, it will be seen, presupposes considerable intelligence and cultivation. It was not until Gentile gold came in to break up the old custom of barter, that the resources of the Mormon community became really available either to themselves or to others.
Utah has always been pre-eminently an agricultural district. Out of her one hundred and fifty thousand people probably one hundred and twenty thousand are now farming or stock-raising in some capacity or other. When you look down the valley from the city, your eye takes in a wide view of fields, orchards and meadows, green with the most luxuriant growth, and marked off by rows of stately trees or patches of young woodland. All these farms are small holdings, and though cultivatedby no means scientifically, have long produced well up to their several capacities.