Mayor Fugard, who had been in office only two weeks, had already made an appeal for a new City Hall and City Jail, and I felt it was a courtesy due him to call upon him before going to the press with my story. When I told him I had paid a visit to Pueblo’s two city lodging places, and had spent a night in the “Bull-pen,” he threw up his hands and exclaimed:
“Good heavens! You have more courage than I have. I am glad you have come to our city and I am glad you have investigated conditions just as you did. I want you to take your report to every paper in the city, for I desire everyone to know the conditions of these places, just as they are.”
When I left Pueblo, I called on him to say goodbye, and he took me by the hand and said:
“You may quote me to the public, through the press, as saying that, as soon as possible, Pueblo will abolish the ‘Bull-pen’ and will yet have a Free Municipal Emergency Home that she will not be ashamed to own.”
CHAPTER VII
“Latter-day Saints” Who Sin Against Society
When I lie down I say when shall the night be gone, and I am full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the day.—Job 7:4.
As Elizabeth Barrett Browning sang of Florence, so one may sing of Salt Lake City. “Like a water lily resting on the bosom of a lake,” so rests the lovely Zion, reposing in a valley of green fields, trees and flowers and fruits, with placid lakes and flowing crystal streams; surrounded by soft gray mountains, rugged, clear cut, grand, their peaks covered with perpetual snow beneath whose surface lie untold millions of precious metals.
Besides precious metals, Salt Lake City has coal, oil, and salt, and an unsurpassed valley in agricultural fertility. Looking down upon the metropolis of Utah, one might almost fancy it a great sleeping town among its green trees, but I can assure you it is not so. Enter its gate and you will find it a veritable beehive of commercial industry, a city of a hundred thousand people, fast expanding, and becoming one of the great railway centers of the Western empire,—a city calling for the workers and many of them, for it is just the “hewers and drawers” that Salt Lake needs and must have.