Great Salt Lake is nearly 100 miles long by 60 miles wide, with average depth of 40 feet.
In the afternoon we drove round the city and suburbs, and up to Fort Douglas, a well-built full-regiment post, situated on a plateau three miles east of the city. It is well laid out, and the officers' quarters, in charming little villas embowered in creepers and green foliage, are exceedingly pleasant to look at.
Our driver was an Englishman, a thirty-years' resident, who had married a Mormon wife (now dead), but he was careful to tell us that he was and always had been a Gentile, though for the sake of peace and quietness, and, in the early days, personal safety, he had duly paid his "tithing." He prided himself in having driven Hepworth Dixon during his stay here, and in having "introduced" Lord Carrington to President Taylor! The stories he volunteered to tell us were perhaps more facetious than veracious.
I will only add that the city in its outward appearance has left a most favourable impression on me—it is pleasantly situated at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains, which rise on the east to a height of from 10,000 to 12,000 feet, and are covered with snow nearly all the year. The city occupies a series of terraces, and, with its houses half hidden in shade and fruit-trees, it presents the appearance of a beautiful green oasis in the midst of a desert.
CLIFFS OF ECHO CAÑON.
LETTER No. XV.
Leave for Cheyenne—"Rock Springs"—Murder of Chinese—Mr. Black's "Green Pastures" and bottle of champagne—"Hell upon Wheels"—Big Horn Cowboy and Milord.