It is put at end by our lady’s return.
“Well, what did you see?” we both ask.
“Oh, Ogden is a big collection of little houses and behind each house is a pretty little farm and market garden. There is a ledge beyond the main part of the town, and up there are situated the better houses of the city, with larger gardens and lawns, from which you can look off over the wide plain with bluffs and ridges, in the foreground, catch a glimpse of the lake in the middle distance, and a vision of sharp-pointed mountains on the horizon.”
Ogden holds interest at present, chiefly—and it always will I fancy—as a center for transportation lines. Here, in 1869, was welded into a continuous whole the first line of rails connecting the Atlantic with the Pacific. This is the scene of Bret Harte’s stirring poem, which tells us
“... what the engines said,
Pilots touching—head to head,
Facing on a single track,
Half a continent at each back.”
That event was an occasion of public rejoicing, and the success of those lines at that time was a matter of public concern.
Since her one line east and west was first connected, Ogden has seen a great growth in railways. The traveller may now go northward into the mining regions of southern Idaho, or on to the quartz and placers and the silver ledges of Montana; or, still further, around Pend’ Oreille and Cœur d’Alêne and down the majestic Columbia to Oregon, Washington Territory and British Columbia; he may go westward to California and the Pacific; he may go southward to the farms and mines of southern Utah; or eastward into the heart of the Rockies and so through to the Atlantic over the route we ourselves have just passed.