BEE HIVE HOUSE.
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.