THE CITY OF THE SAINTS.

CHAPTER I.

Why I went to Great Salt Lake City. The various Routes.-The Line of Country traversed.-Diaries and Disquisitions.

A TOUR through the domains of Uncle Samuel without visiting the wide regions of the Far West would be, to use a novel simile, like seeing Hamlet with the part of Prince of Denmark, by desire, omitted. Moreover, I had long determined to add the last new name to the list of "Holy Cities;" to visit the young rival, soi-disant, of Memphis, Benares, Jerusalem, Rome, Meccah; and after having studied the beginnings of a mighty empire "in that New World which is the Old," to observe the origin and the working of a regular go-ahead Western and Columbian revelation. Mingled with the wish of prospecting the City of the Great Salt Lake in a spiritual point of view, of seeing Utah as it is, not as it is said to be, was the mundane desire of enjoying a little skirmishing with the savages, who in the days of Harrison and Jackson had given the pale faces tough work to do, and that failing, of inspecting the line of route which Nature, according to the general consensus of guide-books, has pointed out as the proper, indeed the only practical direction for a railway between the Atlantic and the Pacific. The commerce of the world, the Occidental Press had assured me, is undergoing its grand climacteric: the resources of India and the nearer orient are now well-nigh cleared of "loot," and our sons, if they would walk in the paths of their papas, must look to Cipangri and the parts about Cathay

for their annexations.

The Man was ready, the Hour hardly appeared propitious for other than belligerent purposes. Throughout the summer of 1860 an Indian war was raging in Nebraska; the Comanches, Kiowas, and Cheyennes were "out;" the Federal government had dispatched three columns to the centres of confusion; intestine feuds among the aborigines were talked of; the Dakotah or Sioux had threatened to "wipe out" their old foe the Pawnee, both tribes being possessors of the soil over which the road ran. Horrible accounts of murdered post-boys and cannibal emigrants, greatly exaggerated, as usual, for private and public purposes,

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filled the papers, and that nothing might be wanting, the following positive assertion (I afterward found it to be, as Sir Charles Napier characterized one of a Bombay editor's saying, "a marked and emphatic lie") was copied by full half the press:

"Utah has a population of some fifty-two or fifty-three thousand-more or less-rascals. Governor Cumming has informed the President exactly how matters stand in respect to them. Neither life nor property is safe, he says, and bands of depredators roam unpunished through the territory. The United States judges have abandoned their offices, and the law is boldly defied every where. He requests that 500 soldiers may be retained at Utah to afford some kind of protection to American citizens who are obliged to remain here."

"Mormon” had in fact become a word of fear; the Gentiles looked upon the Latter-Day Saints much as our crusading ancestors regarded the "Hashshashiyun," whose name, indeed, was almost enough to frighten them. Mr. Brigham Young was the Shaykh-el-Jebel, the Old Man of the Hill redivivus, Messrs. Kimball and Wells were the chief of his Fidawin, and "Zion on the tops of the mountains" formed a fair representation of Alamut. Going among the Mormons!" said Mr. M— to me at New Orleans; "they are shooting and cutting one another in all directions; how can you expect to escape?'

Another general assertion was that "White Indians"—those Mormons again!—had assisted the "Washoes," "Pah Utes," and "Bannacks" in the fatal affair near Honey Lake, where Major Ormsby, of the militia, a military frontier-lawyer, and his forty men, lost the numbers of their mess.

But sagely thus reflecting that "dangers which loom large from afar generally lose size as one draws near;" that rumors of wars might have arisen, as they are wont to do, from the political necessity for another "Indian botheration," as editors call it; that Governor Cumming's name might have been used in vain; that even the President might not have been a Pope, infallible; and that the Mormons might turn out somewhat less black than they were painted; moreover, having so frequently and willfully risked the chances of an "I told you so" from the lips of friends, those "prophets of the past;" and, finally, having been so much struck with the discovery by some Western man of an enlarged truth, viz., that the bugbear approached has more affinity to the bug than to the bear, I resolved to risk the chance of the “red nightcap" from the bloodthirsty Indian and the poisoned bowie dagger without my Eleonora or Berengaria-from the jealous Latter-Day Saints. I forthwith applied myself to the audacious task with all the recklessness of a "party" from town precipitating himself for the first time into "foreign parts" about Calais. And, first, a few words touching routes.

As all the world knows, there are three main lines proposed

for a "Pacific Railroad" between the Mississippi and the West-
ern Ocean, the Northern, Central, and Southern.*

The first, or British, was in my case not to be thought of; it
involves semi-starvation, possibly a thorough plundering by the
Bedouins, and, what was far worse, five or six months of slow
travel. The third, or Southern, known as the Butterfield or
American Express, offered to start me in an ambulance from St.
Louis, and to pass me through Arkansas, El Paso, Fort Yuma on
the Gila River, in fact through the vilest and most desolate por-
tion of the West. Twenty-four mortal days and nights-twenty-
five being schedule time-must be spent in that ambulance; pas-
sengers becoming crazy by whisky, mixed with want of sleep, are
often obliged to be strapped to their seats; their meals, dispatch-
ed during the ten-minute halts, are simply abominable, the heats
are excessive, the climate malarious; lamps may not be used at
night for fear of unexisting Indians: briefly, there is no end to

* The following table shows the lengths, comparative costs, etc., of the several routes explored for a railroad from the Mississippi to the Pacific, as extracted from the Speech of the Hon. Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, on the Pacific Railway Bill in the United States Senate, January, 1859, and quoted by the Hon. Sylvester Maury in the "Geography and Resources of Arizona and Sonora."

* The ascents and descents between Rock Island and Council Bluffs are not known, and therefore not included in this sum.

+ The ascents and descents between St. Louis and Westport are not known, and therefore not included in this sum.

The ascents and descents between Memphis and Fort Smith are not known, and therefore not included in this sum.

§ The ascents and descents between Gaines' Landing and Fulton are not known, and therefore not included in this sum.

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