Part 32

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 vague forms 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.

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 of _naïve_ grace. As the bargain was concluded 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."

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 a _replica_ of, 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."

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 Coeur 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 the other 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.

XXXV

SALT LAKE CITY.

"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.

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 anything else, 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 one side 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 baffling to 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.