Ogden has some thousands of people claiming it as home; and besides the large patronage of the railways it is the supplying-center, and the market for a considerable farming district in southern Idaho. It is a busy and enterprising and growing town. Its union station is a sort of narrows through which the larger part of all exchange of men and goods between the east and west must drain; and there is excitement and variety enough to keep alive the attention of the dullest witness. The train that brought us in the morning had sent a merry crowd on to San Francisco—a train-load of acquaintances in jolliest mood, for the other incoming trains contributed very few to the company bound westward. Now the arriving train of the Central Pacific poured across the busy platform another just such a merry company, filling the cars of the Denver and Rio Grande, to which our special was attached, and losing few to the older line.
At Salt Lake City, that evening, our faithful Bert had a good dinner ready for us almost the moment we returned; and, restored to the comforts of our own bed and board, we made an auspicious and good-natured entry to Zion, and to Deseret, the chief city of the Latter Day Saints.
XXXV
SALT LAKE CITY.
“I have described in my time many cities, both of the east and west; but the City of the Saints puzzles me. It is the young rival of Mecca, the Zion of the Mormons, the Latter-day Jerusalem. It is also the City of the Honey Bee, ‘Deseret,’ and the City of the Sunflower—an encampment as of pastoral tribes, the tented capital of some Hyksos, ‘Shepherd Kings’—the rural seat of a modern patriarchal democracy; the place of the tabernacle of an ancient prophet-ruled Theocracy.”
—Phil Robinson.
It was on a Saturday night that we returned to Salt Lake City. It followed, therefore, as a matter of course, that the ensuing morning was Sunday. Had the calender not been our authority we might have known it from the solemn stillness that prevailed—a contrast very vivid and suggestive after our experience of the Holy Day in the mountain mining towns.
Everybody was eager of course to go to the Tabernacle.
The Tabernacle stands inside the big wall surrounding the “Temple block,” and could have been found by simply falling in with any one of the currents of Sunday-dressed people which set toward it from every direction. We went early so as to look about us at leisure.