zon.

The orchard-embowered city, with its widespread, many-tinted valley, seems shut off from the rest of the world in security and peace. The guardian hills, rising two thousand feet above the plain, present a grand variety of broken forms, fringed and tufted with great pine forests, and glistening with irregular patches of snow on the earliest approaches of autumn.

The valley is an oasis in the great American desert. Eastwards from the Wahsatch range a sterile wilderness stretches away for five hundred miles as far as the plains of Laramie. Westwards from the Oquirrh range and the Great Salt Lake a rocky, inhospitable country intervenes as far as the golden land of California. The isolated position of the fertile vale of the city adds to the romance of its situation.

It is not difficult to understand how the Mormon pilgrims in the old days, approaching the valley by the wild rift in the mountains named Emigration Canyon, from their use of the route, should have flung themselves to the knees in pious joy on the first sight of their promised land, and have saluted their holy city with prayers and tears.

Like all other modern American towns, the city is laid out in straight lines of streets of a very convenient but most unpicturesque uniformity.

There was plenty of land to spare here, so the street-ways are all wide; and, following a fashion that is somewhat recent on the new continent, but altogether admirable, shadetrees are planted along the sides of the roads. To water these, and to irrigate the gardens, small rivulets are led down from the hill slopes, and are broken up into shallow runlets, that pass down gutters on either side of the streets. The houses, each in its plot of ground, are of wooden planks, and but seldom two storeys high. Few have any pretentiousness of appearance, and fewer still any claims to elegance. Most of the Mormon dwellings have a painfully sordid, slovenly look, and the gardens show but little care. There are, however, some eminent exceptions to this rule, notably the terrace-like houses of some of the Mormon leaders, built for the accommodation of several families.

The position of the city is one of the most picturesque in the world; the cluster of wooden houses at present built on the site is altogether unworthy of it.

The popular notions of the beauty and magnificence of the Mormon sacred city are the birth of an exalted imagination. There are no marble palaces, no grand temples of a new order of architecture, no exquisite examples of cottage buildings, no lines of well-kept gardens, no streams of water, gay with plashing fish and the songs of birds, running along marble conduits.

Entering the city itself, after the distant entrancing view, the impression is eminently unfavourable. It is a congeries of hovels, struck irregularly along a number of straight, wide, unpaved roads, turned here and there into quags and pools by

the wandering, ill-kept gutters. The Temple block, in the best part of the town, on the uprising slope, is the most melancholy example of awkward architecture possible to the mind of man to conceive. The Mormon, indeed, avers that no intellect without a miracle could have imagined it. A huge flat wall, with ugly sloping abutments, surrounds the block. The plainest of wooden gates give entrance. Within, on one side, is spread a quantity of great granite blocks and heaps of débris of the temple commenced in 1853, but of which only the foundations as yet have been laid. On the other side rise the two meetinghouses at present in use; one for the summer conferences, capable of seating perhaps twelve thousand persons, and the smaller, accommodating three thousand, in which the ordinary services are held. You see before you the two most preposterously awkward structures in the world, and only pause in doubt as to which is the more monstrous. The smaller building is a low, squat, rickety wooden barn. The big tabernacle is composed of a vast awkward oval roofing of wooden shingles resting on a flat rim of bare wall, pierced with square doors and windows. For my part, I decide that, so far as my experience goes, the oval tabernacle, or big Mormon dish-cover, is unsurpassed, even by its neighbouring preaching shanty, for oppressive ugliness among all the buildings now standing in the world.

The other prominent buildings of the town, ward-rooms, schoolhouses, the town-hall, the college, the theatre, are too commonplace to merit description. Main Street, running south from the Temple block, is the principal business thoroughfare. Here, for a distance of a few hundred yards, the scene at midday is an animated one. Some of the houses are two or even three storeys high, emblazoned with

signs and notices. Many of the shops are handsome. There are grocery and provision stores; magazines for silks, drapery, millinery, and the latest modes;' silversmiths, druggists, confectioners, tinmen, turners, toy-shops, bookshops, perfumers, and representatives, I suppose, of all the trades created by the demands of our modern social life. If the sun is hot, blinds and awnings will be stretched over the gravelled streetway, flaunting with placards and painted advertisements. The only novelty in the busy scene of buying and selling likely to attract the notice of the traveller is the inscription, repeated on almost every shopfront, 'Zion Co-operative Mercantile Association,' with the universal motto, 'Holiness to the Lord,' with an ill-painted large eye looking out of a chevaux-de-frise of rays.

From two of the principal stores, Dr. Godby's on one side of the way, and Messrs. Walkers' on the other, this inscription is conspicuously absent. These gentlemen became recusant on the determination of the church executive to impose the co-operative principle on the whole trading community.

For a year past Main street has been growing constantly more bustling and animated. It had long been whispered that rich mines existed in the Territory of Utah. Mormon policy, however, delayed as long as possible an open discovery of the position and richness of these mines. But within the past few months the secret has blazed abroad. Already miners, by scores, by hundreds, and even by thousands, have poured into the Territory, and commenced operations. The whole Gentile population is mad with the excitement of the gold; fever, and the Mormons feel the contagion. A 'rush' to Utah comparable with that to California and to British Columbia is likely to take place, and if so will seriously

affect, and probably simplify, the Mormon political difficulty.

The town feels the change. Business has grown active. The picturesque, lumbering, excellentlybuilt Concord stages, leather-hung, constructed expressly to endure the prodigious jolting of roughly-made mountain roads, come in and go out for the new mining canyons at full speed with their fine teams of four horses. Shaggy-looking, roughly-dressed, dare-devil miners hang about the hotel doors and street corners, and spit, and chew, and smoke, and talk with mouthfuls of quaint oaths, or jostle the quiet-looking Mormon men and women in the street-walks.

Every second shop in Main Street has heaps of specimen ores shelves within, or deposited in the windows.

The population of Salt Lake City is estimated by the Mormons at 20,000, though the United States census makes it considerably less. Of these perhaps a couple of hun. dred are Gentiles. The numbers in the whole Territory of Utah are estimated by the Mormons at 150,000, among whom there may be a couple of thousand of Gentile miners.

Utah has long possessed sufficient population to entitle it to become a State. But the Mormons would control all elections for governor, judges, all minor official appointments, the members of both houses of the State Legislature, and the Senators and Representatives in Congress, and would, of course, have the powerful protection of their own State rights in defence of their religious and social order. Congress, therefore, persistently refuses to sanction the admission of Utah into the Union as a State.

It is confidently predicted by the resident Gentiles that the mining rush will bring in twenty thousand people before the close of 1871, and an increasing proportion later, until the Mormon votes are swamped.

Meanwhile the Mormon leaders are not inactive.

The Territory of Utah, diminished by successive Acts of Congress, now contains 109,600 square miles, or about double the area of England and Wales. The Mormons claim that their settlements extend from Idaho Territory in the north into Arizona in the south, over a distance of five hundred miles. In the north the climate is comparatively severe, and is marked with the extremes of heat and cold characteristic of the summer and winter across the whole American continent. The southern portion occupied by the Mormons, over the rim of the basin of the Rocky range, is semi-tropical. In the north grow wheat, oats, barley; flax, hemp, linseed; the vegetables and the fruits of the temperate zone; with pine forests in the mountains; while cotton, rice, and tobacco are raised in the south. Among the vast ranges of primary and metamorphic rock of the Territory inexhaustible quantities of minerals are stored. Silver, gold, copper, lead, zinc, occur constantly. Iron of great value and bituminous coal are found in abundance. Salt is swept up like snow from the margin of the great lake, and is found also in rock form. From the wide range of climate it includes, the cultivable character of a large proportion of the soil, the variety of its productions, and the extraordinary richness of its minerals, it appears certain that Utah will one day form a rich and populous State

in the Union.

From Salt Lake City a broad, roughly-made roadway runs along the upward 'benches' or terraces of the plains of Great Salt Lake and Utah southward for three or four hundred miles, through a perpetual succession of Mormon settlements. Branch roads to the right and left strike away through the passes, or canyons, as they are called, to more isolated communities. Lines

of stage coaches run on these roads to carry mails and passengers. A singular variety of waggons, 'buggies,' and ox-carts, sometimes of picturesquely primitive construction, are everywhere encountered.

I took my place with the mail one morning by the driver's side on the stage going south. I speak literally, for the leathern mail-bags, curiously strengthened with metal rivets, were pushed under my feet, and I did myself the pleasure of assisting to change these at our various stopping-places.

A few miles below Salt Lake

Cor

City cultivation ceased. The eye wandered over an unbroken expanse of rank, russet grasses, scrub willow, and dense artemesia, giving the whole valley a monotonous, sombre hue. The road wound along the base of the mountains on one of the elevated terraces that constituted, without doubt, the ancient shore of a vast inland sea. responding lines of demarcation were visible on the distant western mountain range enclosing the present valley and lake. The section of the Wahsatch hills we skirted is called the Cottonwood range. Six miles below Salt Lake City we passed the entrance to Big Cottonwood Canyon, where a number of rich mines have been found. The ore here is a galena, carrying a large amount of silver with traces of gold. Log huts, mud houses, and quartz mills are rising rapidly near the entrance to the valley, and giving the name of the canyon to a new city.' The next abrupt opening in the range is the Little Cottonwood Canyon. Both gorges and the whole range have their name from the rapidly-growing, soft-fibred timber that fringes the banks of their streams. In this second Cottonwood Canyon occur the famed Emma mines, yielding a rich ore of silver and lead. It is confidently predicted that these two

groups of mines will equal in value any found on this continent.

Sixteen miles below Salt Lake we came to the Mormon settlement of Draper. It is laid out in a number of wide unpaved roads at right angles, with slovenly gardens, and several hundred small, onestorey, mud-brick houses. Streams from the mountain behind were broken up into roadside gutters, and carried off to irrigate the fields. Cultivation straggled outwards from the settlement, invading the barren, sandy, saline plain, toward the south.

From this point the mountain ranges on either side the valley began to approach each other rapidly, and our roadway made a very perceptible and constant ascent. On the right hand, across the valley, we could see the entrance to East Canyon, the most famous, perhaps, of the new Utah mining districts. The deposits of silver occur here in irregular lodes of extraordinary richness. Silver Hill and the Ham silver mines give milling ores, while along the base range' of East Canyon the ores require smelting, as do those of the Cottonwoods.

At an early point in our journey a rough hand holding a whisky bottle was struck out from behind, and we all liquored up.' My fellow-passengers were four miners, who had hunted fortune with the pickaxe with varying success in California, Columbia, Montana, and Colorado. The accounts they willingly gave of their brawls, Indian fights, escapes, and spells of good and ill luck, were entertaining, and possibly trustworthy. All agreed that Utah surpassed every mining country they had known, and all were happily confident of now achieving fortune.

'Jess look at me,' said one of them, a powerful-looking fellow, with an immense mass of dark hair, putting his big hands com

placently on the spruce suit of clothes in which he was dressed to give point to his talk, which was ornamented with a profusion of big Western oaths. I come into Salt Lake a fortnight ago not worth a live cent. My clows was mostly composed of holes, jined together with dirt, and I had jest about forgot what the sight of a squr' meal was. Wal, darn me if I'd sell my "claims" now for fifty thousand dollars. Stranger, take another pull.'

Further down we passed Bingham Canyon, to which a 'rush' for the surface, or gulch, or placermining, as it is indifferently called, is taking place. Smelting ores of silver-galena are also found here.

Lodes of exceptional richness, as in East Canyon, yield, it is said, as much as $5,000 and $10,000 to the ton. But ore so rich is only found in pockets,' or isolated patches. From enquiries among the more cautious mining firms in the city, I should be inclined to think that as much as $100 (£20) to the ton may not prove too high an average for the majority of the mines at present worked. The lodes occur from three to twentysix feet in thickness, with an average of, perhaps, seven feet.

A mining story I heard lower down on my journey may be given here as illustrative of the class of society in which Mormonism had its rise, and in the midst of which it will have to hold its own, if it can.

In the Peotch district, considerably further to the south, a mining company organised a band of 'fighters,' paying them $20 a-day, to commit the unpardonable offence of jumping' a claim; that is, of seizing by force an already appropriated property. Upon which the prejudiced parties, without a passing thought of the folly of appealing to law, plumped' down $1,500 to a couple of well-known miners to recover the claim.

'The two men loaded up pretty thick,' my informant continued, 'an' started off airly one mornin' to earn their pay. As soon as they come within range they jest began firin' free into the miners. Them two boys was pretty with a rifle, and dropped the men like ninepins. They fired back of course, but that didn't 'mount to much, and they soon made tracks.'

At twenty-four miles from Salt Lake City the pass into Utah Valley is reached; the Point of the Mountain it is called, from the abrupt turn in the range at this spot. The tourist will pause here and look with interest on the scene spread before him.

Northward stretches the great Salt Lake Valley, compassed round with mountains; in the dim distance gleam the white dots of the Mormon city, with the oval tabernacle just discernible. Beneath your feet wanders perplexed in the barren plain a narrow, irregular, broken streamlet, with banks of mud and patches of scrub willow; this is the new Jordan, flowing northwards into Salt Lake, the Dead Sea of the new world.

You turn, cross the dividing ridge, look south upon the vale of Utah, and pause in rapt astonishment: a perfect circle of majestic mountains incloses the plain, in the midst of which gleam the waters of the lake of Utah. At the time of my visit, at the close of November 1870, a recent fall of snow, resting only on the mountains, gave their abrupt varied outlines an added grandeur: a glorious sky of blue, with sunny masses of cloud trailing over the higher peaks, formed a fit background to the scene. The air was warm and fresh as that of an English May. I thought the scene one of the fairest I had found on the American continent.

The roadway still continued on the higher level of the plain, skirting the mountain range as before.