Part 6

The heat was intense, even at nine in the morning, and Ogden, Utah, 165 miles south. “Are the roads good?” we asked the clerk. Smiling, he replied, “I am from New York.” At Dayton, we crossed the border into Utah. Before us lay a cement road as white as snow. We could hardly believe our eyes. “Woman, bow down and worship!” the bird-man exclaimed. Regardless of speed laws, we flew over that road for miles, through beautiful towns and avenues of Lombardy poplars. We remarked that every little bungalow was surrounded by these tall trees. “The Mormons must have planted one for each wife and child.” The farms were fertile and well cultivated, and for miles the peach orchards lined the sides of the road, the trees laden with fruit. At each station wagons were unloading hundreds of crates ready for shipment. Tomatoes and melons, also, are raised in abundance. Brigham is a clean, attractive city, with peach-trees growing in every garden and on the roadside. They celebrate an annual “Peach day” in September. “Every visitor will receive a peach,” the posters read. I bought a basket, of a dozen or more, for ten cents. Here we became acquainted with the red grasshopper. We thought we had left all of these little pests in Fargo; but here they were as lively as ever and as red as strawberries. And that reminds me--we have had delicious strawberries for weeks (in August).

The roads were so wonderful that we forgot our aching backbones and enjoyed every mile of the way into Ogden, to the Reed Hotel. We spent two days here, as there was much of interest to see and do. The hotel is old, but well kept up. We had a room large enough to hold a convention in, with a smaller bedroom and bath adjoining, and eight large windows altogether. Again the hotel was crowded. The railroad strike was on in California, and people were marooned in every city; only local trains were running.

The next day we drove to Salt Lake City, a distance of about thirty-five miles. Of all the Western cities, we were most anxious to see the capital of Utah. And now a joke at my expense! I asked the clerk in the hotel where we could get the steamer for Salt Lake City.

“What steamer?” he asked in surprise.

“Can’t you go there by boat?”

“Say, lady, I guess you come from the East.”

I admitted the truth of that.

“Ever been West before?”

This time a negative.

“Don’t you know that the boat has never been built that will float on Salt Lake?”

I thought of “Cowboy Charlie” and his book of “fool questions.”

Salt Lake is a wonderful city. Whatever you may think of the Mormons, you have to admit that they are a far-sighted, industrious, and executive people. Your chief interest centers about the Temple Block, a ten-acre square surrounded by a stone and adobe wall twelve feet high. The grounds are a beautiful park. The Bureau of Information is a fine large building, where literature is distributed to three hundred thousand visitors yearly. As many as thirty-nine states and seven foreign countries had been represented on the registry in one day. “No fees charged, and no donations received,” was the watchword on these grounds. We wondered how the place was supported, and were told that there were no pew-rentals in any of their churches, and no collections made, nor were there any contribution-boxes found there.

“The Mormons observe the ancient law of tithing, as it was given to the Children of Israel, by which a member pays one-tenth of his income, as a free-will offering, for the support of the Church.”

In the Temple Block is the Assembly Hall, a semi-Gothic structure of gray granite, with a seating capacity of two thousand, often used for public lectures and concerts by any denomination. The Tabernacle is a world-famed auditorium, seating eight thousand people, noted for its remarkable construction and acoustic properties. The wooden roof, self-supporting, rests upon buttresses of red sandstone, twelve feet apart, the whole circumference of the building. These pillars support wooden arches ten feet in thickness and spanning 150 feet. The arches, of a lattice-truss construction, are put together with wooden pins, there being no nails or iron of any kind used in the framework. The building was erected between 1863 and 1870, and was nearly completed before the railroads reached Utah. All the imported material had to be hauled with ox-teams from the Missouri River. The original cost was three hundred thousand dollars, exclusive of the cost of the organ. Our guide, a lady, told us that their pioneer leader, Brigham Young, had planned and supervised the erection of the building. “He was a glazier and cabinet-maker by trade, but had been schooled chiefly by hardship and experience. He not only designed this and the Temple, but he built an equally wonderful commonwealth; one which is unique among the Middle and Western states for law and order, religious devotion and loyalty.” She told us that their church had established headquarters successively in New York, Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, and, after the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith, in 1846, it was obliged to seek refuge in the Rocky Mountains. They have no professional or paid preachers; any member of the congregation may be called upon to address them. We were interested to hear of their women. “They are the freest, most intensely individualistic women on earth, having three organizations of their own. The Relief Society has thirty thousand members, publishes a monthly periodical, has up-to-date offices, owns many ward-houses, and spends thousands of dollars yearly for charity and education. The Young Ladies’ Mutual Improvement Association was organized in 1869 by Brigham Young, chiefly among his own daughters.” (_Some_ family party!) This association now numbers over thirty thousand girls. It also edits and controls a magazine. Besides these activities, there is the Primary Association, with many thousands of children marshaled under its banner. We remembered that the women have full suffrage in Utah, and were not surprised to hear of their ward conferences and public speakers. This did not sound much like the “down-trodden slaves” that many consider the Mormon women to be.

Most prominent among the structures in the “Block” is the Temple, began less than six years after the pioneers found here a desolate sagebrush wilderness. Before railroads were built to the granite quarries, twenty miles southeast of the city, the huge blocks of stone were hauled by ox-teams, requiring at times four yoke of oxen four days to transport a single stone! Forty years were required in its completion, and the structure stands as a monument to the untiring energy of these people. Its cost, in all, was four million dollars. Visitors have never been admitted to the Temple since its dedication in 1893. “It was not designed as a place of public assembly,” our guide informed us; “it is to us a holy place devoted to sacred ordinances, and open only to our own church members in good standing.” I wish that space permitted me to quote all that we heard of their marriages, and even divorces, and of their many quaint customs.

The figure surmounting the Temple is twelve feet in height, of hammered copper covered with gold leaf, and represents the angel Moroni, the son of Mormon, the writer of the Book of Mormon, which “is an inspired historical record of the ancient inhabitants of the American continent, corresponding to the Old Testament.” Mormon, who lived about 400 A. D., was one of the last of their prophets, and into the Book of Mormon compiled the traditions which had come to him through generations. This is not the Mormon Bible, for they use the King James translation that our Christian churches use.

The Sea-Gull Monument is also in the “Block.” It commemorates a historic incident of pioneer days, and was designed by Mahonri M. Young, a grandson of Brigham. A granite base of twenty tons, resting on a concrete foundation, supports a granite column fifteen feet high, surmounted by a granite globe. Two bronze sea-gulls rest upon this ball. The birds weigh five hundred pounds, and the stretch of their wings is eight feet. On three sides of the base, in relief sculpture, the sea-gull story is told, which, briefly, is this: In 1848 this was the earliest settlement in the Rocky Mountains, and less than a year old, consisting of a camp, a log and mud fort enclosing huts, tents and wagons, with about eighteen hundred people. Their handful of crops the first year, mainly potatoes, having failed, they were looking for a good harvest the second year, or they would face starvation. In the spring of 1848 five thousand acres of land were under cultivation in the valley, nine hundred with winter wheat. Then came the plague of crickets (our friends the grasshopper family). “They rolled in legions down the mountain sides, attacking the young grain and destroying the crops.” Men, women and children fought them with brooms, with fire, and even dug ditches and turned water into the trenches. It looked hopeless; their crops seemed doomed, when great flocks of sea-gulls swept down on the crickets and devoured them. The Mormons compare the incident to the saving of Rome by the cackling geese.

We heard an amusing story of how Brigham Young came by his name. Originally his surname was “Brigham.” Once, when his agent returned with some prospective brides, Brigham, looking them over and finding them too old, exclaimed, “Go find others, and bring ’em young.”

The Utah Hotel is one of the finest in the country. It is owned and run by the Mormons, and it does them great credit. We dined in the roof-garden, which compares favorably with that of any hotel in New York. You look off to the Wasatch range of mountains, the beautiful fertile valley, and the great Salt Lake, beyond which lies the desert.

The executive staff of the Mormon Church has one of the finest buildings in the city. The interior is paneled with native marbles and woods and represents a fortune.

Returning to Ogden, we spent the next day visiting Ogden Canyon, a short trip of twenty miles. We drove through groves of walnut trees laden with nuts. Making a sharp turn on a good macadam road, you wind through a deep canyon gorgeous with autumn foliage, a beautiful sight. The river bank is lined with vine-covered bungalows, almost hidden from view. The canyon streams are noted for the brook-trout fishing. A Boston chap told us that he and two other boys caught ninety pounds in three days. We lunched at the Hermitage, the best-known resort near Ogden. It is built of logs, in the wildest part of the canyon. The house was decorated with ferns and mountain wild flowers, as artistically as a private home. We certainly enjoyed the brook-trout dinner ($1.50) of fish caught that day in front of the hotel. Of course, this cannot be compared to Yellowstone Canyon, but it is very beautiful and well worth the trip from Ogden.

That evening we pored over maps. There was no route across the desert that was good--only some were worse than others. Everyone advised us to take the “Pike’s Peak Ocean-to-Ocean Highway,” which follows the Southern Pacific Railroad (at intervals), and is considered a “safety-first” way.

I never see that word “highway” that I don’t want to laugh! A “cow-path” would more nearly describe any that we traveled in Idaho or Nevada (not to mention a few others).

XIII

NEVADA AND THE DESERT

We did not look forward with an atom of pleasure to this part of the trip. We dreaded it. It simply _had_ to be done. The officials told us that nearly all the tourists shipped their cars to Reno. That was valuable information to give us, when not a train was running west. The clerk pointed out a dried-up little woman of seventy, and said, with a withering glance at me: “See that old lady? She has driven her own car across the desert twice this summer!” Well, you know how such remarks make you feel. Not that you care a--bit what that clerk thought of you, but you don’t like to realize that you are a molly-coddle or a coward. Besides, my husband had laughed at my apprehensions, and that wouldn’t do either. So I thought of our good fortune so far, of our slogan, and of the old party of seventy, and I gave my pride a hitch and said, “Let’s start”--and we did.

Our route lay over the same road back through Brigham, a beautiful drive that far, then it turned northwest, over the northern part of the Great Salt Lake desert, ninety miles to Snowville. The sand was so deep that we crawled most of the way. The sun scorched our skin and eyes until they felt dry as ashes. We had left the railroad and telegraph poles and had but a single-file path through the sand, with chuck-holes every few feet. When the wind blew it felt as if an oven-door had been opened in your face, and the snow-white sand covered everything, including the tracks in the road, which was not pleasant. Nothing was to be seen except the endless sand, dry sagebrush, cactus, and an occasional prairie-dog. We met but two cars that day. I can conceive of nothing more utterly desolate and God-forsaken than the desert. There is a silence of deathlike stillness that gets on the nerves, and the sameness is wearisome.

We were glad to see Snowville, although Snowville was not much to see. It consisted of one street, with possibly twenty houses, a garage, two stores, and a few trees. The people who owned the grocery-store rented rooms. They were kind and hospitable, and made us comfortable as they could. One cannot pick and choose in the desert. You are glad and thankful to find anything that looks like a bed and water. The woman told us that the two stalwart young men were her sons, just returned from service; one was a major. They were running the garage and helping in the store. The whole family were educated, intelligent people, except the old man, whose vocabulary was limited to “You bet!” and “By heck!” What they could find in life in such surroundings, with nothing, absolutely nothing, to commend the place, was hard to conceive. And yet the mother told me that the women in the village had done more Red Cross work during the war than those of any town of its size in the state, and they had oversubscribed their quota in the Liberty Loans! “The war did not seem very real to us ’way out here,” she said. “What we read in the papers seemed like a novel. But when my boys went it brought it nearer home to _me_. We were so far from the busy world our lives were too limited to realize what was going on across the seas.” I could understand that, for one day of the desert made me feel an isolation that I never had felt in the middle of the Atlantic.

They had a bathroom; but if the water was being used in the garage or kitchen, it would not run upstairs. Someone had driven miles away to get some meat for supper; so it was quite late before we had anything to eat. Fried meat, fried eggs, fried potatoes--all soaked in grease; no milk or butter, and the coffee and tea we could not drink.

Across the street was a little patch of green corn. I went to the house and asked the woman if she would sell me a few ears. She told me that they were leaving the next morning--moving away--as her husband could not make a living. He was a professor of languages from Massachusetts, a cultivated gentleman! When he rode up on horseback I went out and shook hands with him, and laughingly said:

“I am your long-lost sister from Massachusetts.”

He was off his horse and bowing in a Chesterfieldian manner. “You are most welcome, madam; but, alas! we have nothing to offer you.”

“Oh, but you have, sir--the pleasure of meeting you both and some of your green corn.”

He picked me a half-dozen ears, and when I offered to pay him, he said, “Please, no!”

He asked where we were from. “The East sounds very far away. I wonder if I shall ever see it again.”

I gave one of the children a dollar, and returned with my precious corn, which the good-natured Irish cook boiled to a rock for our supper.

There was a small piazza in front of our room, the only place to sit except in the street or in the private parlor of the family. The moon was coming up over the distant mountain, red as blood and big as a cart-wheel. While we were getting cool and enjoying the scene, Mary appeared with the remainder of the raw meat, saying:

“We put it out here to keep cool; there ain’t no ice in this hole of a place. I’m going to leave first of September. Gee, but I’ll be glad! They couldn’t hire me to stay here any longer for fifty dollars a month!” (She evidently felt that it was up to her to entertain us.) “Nothing but work and heat--and not even a movie!”

“How early can we get breakfast?”

“Seven o’clock. I wouldn’t get up before that for President Wilson.” (The picture of President and Mrs. Wilson in that place made us smile.)

“Try a little vamping on Mary,” I suggested to friend husband. It worked. She called us at five, and by six we were out again on the desert, with the sun rising behind us, and Montello, the next town, 115 miles to the west.

That day stands out as the worst experience of the trip. We went fifty miles without seeing a living creature except jack-rabbits and one coyote. The coyote ran across the trail and stopped fifty feet away, watching us drive by. The sand was deeper and the chuck-holes, even with the most careful driving, seemed to rack the car to pieces. If we had had an accident, the outlook would have been decidedly vague for us. Not a car or a telegraph pole in sight. By ten o’clock that morning the sun scorched our skin through our clothing. But we had one good laugh. Over a deep chuck-hole there had been built a stone bridge. On one end, in large black letters, was “San Francisco” (the first sign we had seen with that welcome name) and on the other end was “New York”! The incongruity struck us as being so absurd that we roared with laughter. Here in this God-forsaken desert, a “thousand miles from anywhere,” to see that sign! It took _some_ joker to conceive of that.

By noon we were in sight of the railroad, feeling as if we had found a long-lost friend. A freight station, some oil-tanks, a few shanties, and a lodging-house for the men, where we got some food--that was all. We filled up with water, and on we went. A wind had come up and the sand blew in eddies, almost blinding us. The Nevada roads were no improvement on Idaho, and the trail was obliterated many times by the swirling sand, making the going almost impossible. Before reaching Montello, a real desert sandstorm so covered us with sand that the car looked white; our clothes and our eyes and ears were full of it. We thought the top was coming off, or the car would turn over, and it was difficult to see the road, much less to keep in the trail. By crawling, we reached the town and stopped in front of the first building and got out. We were blown off our feet. We staggered and waded through the sand, hardly seeing where we were going, until we reached a door; then we were blown in! After we recovered our breath and had shaken off a little of the sand, we watched the storm, which by this time was a howling gale and the sand so dense that you could hardly see fifty feet.

“Just suppose this had happened out there?” pointing back of us.

“Don’t think of it. Come and get some ice cream.”

I had not noticed that we were in a small café, with drinks, ice cream and cakes, etc., for sale. The ice cream washed down the sand and cooled our dry throats. A nice little woman ran the place, and she gave us this information: There was a Southern Pacific railroad hotel in the town, but, owing to hundreds of men being idle on account of the strike, the place was full, and it was the only place to get lodgings. It was a hundred miles and more to Elko, where the next hotel could be reached. We inquired if the way to that town was as bad as the roads we had come over that day. “Worse,” was the reply; “you are foolish to attempt it.”

As soon as the storm let up we went across to the hotel, only to be told that there was not an empty bed or a cot. We canvassed the town with the same result. So there we were, worn out, dirty, hungry, and feeling “all in,” with the cheerful prospect of sleeping on a pile of sand in the car or trying to drive across more than a hundred miles of desert to find a bed that night. Here is where I “struck.”

“I am not going another mile,” I declared, with a finality in my voice that spoke volumes.

“What do you wish to do?” asked a weary husband.

“Ship the car to Reno, and take the train.”

Our watches said five o’clock, and the Overland Limited was due at 6:15 P. M. Husband hunted up the freight agent. “Oh, yes, you can ship the car; but--” The first “but” was that the car was too large to get through the freight-shed door. We must leave it on the platform or in a garage until an “automobile car” came through Montello, and that might not be for several days. Besides, the agent said he could not give us a bill of lading if the car was not in the shed. It was out of the question to leave it on the platform, and to put it in a strange garage, with no one responsible for it, was taking a long chance that we might never see it again, or that it would be used or damaged or detained indefinitely. Here friend husband asserted himself.

“I am not going to leave that car here unless it is locked up in the freight-shed and I have the receipt for it. You take the train and I will drive the car to Reno.”

“What! let you go on alone, as tired as you are? Nothing doing! Mr. T. G. M., the car is going to be shipped, and we are going on that 6:15 train.” I admit that my language was not very elegant; neither was the place nor my feelings.

“If that is the situation, then the car goes into that shed,” he said.

“It can’t be done,” said the agent. “We have tried to get Cadillacs and other large cars in there before. If you get your car in there, I’ll eat it!”

“What about time?” we inquired of the agent. He informed us that we must set our watches back an hour at Montello; so we had over an hour, and the train was marked up “late.” For the next hour my husband worked over that car, backing a few inches, going forward a bit, turning and twisting on the narrow platform; but the car was still diagonally across the doorway. Two men pitched in and helped. An inspiration!--he poured black oil on the floor under the rear wheels and then tried to slide the wheels over. That would have worked if the floor had not been so rough. Another inspiration!--he jacked up the wheels and gave the car another shove. Over it went, with both rear wheels inside the door! Then he backed the car into the shed as neat as a whistle. It all sounds like a perfectly simple job. Try it some time in your leisure hours. The freight agent took off his hat in admiration. “Didn’t believe it could be done,” he said, looking at me with a grin.

It cost $3.85 per hundred pounds and $5.73 war-tax to ship the car to Reno (or to San Francisco--no difference in the rate to either place). It weighed, including four spares and other equipment, 4960 pounds, and the bill was $196.69.

On inquiring about reservations, the agent said: “I doubt if you can get even an upper berth; the Limited is always full. Now that the strike is off, it is sure to be crowded.”

Would he wire?

“No use; the train has left Ogden hours ago.”

I would have gladly sat up all night in the train to be out of the desert.