Service in the Tabernacle is held on Sundays at two o’clock in the afternoon. The people assemble not only from the city but from all the country around. Women and children are in great force. The great amphitheatre supplies seats for thirteen thousand people, and it is nearly filled every Sunday. A broad gallery closes around at the front end where the choir sit in two wings, facing each other—the men on one side and the young women on the other. The space between is filled by the splendid organ (back high up against the wall) and by three long, crimson-cushioned pulpit-desks, in each of which twenty speakers or so can sit at once, each rank overlooking the heads of the one beneath. The highest of these belongs to the president and his two counselors; the second to the twelve apostles, and the lowest to the bishops. The acoustic properties of the building are wonderful; a person standing in a certain space near one end, can hear the gentlest whisper, or, that universal test, a pinfall, from quite the other end. A former deficiency of light, has been overcome by the use of gas and electricity; and the chilling barrenness of the vast whitewashed and unbroken vault is relieved by a liberal hanging of evergreen festoons, and trailing wreaths of flowers made of colored tissue paper. These trimmings are far enough away from the eye, and in masses of sufficient size to make their effect very satisfactory.
Every Sunday the sacrament is administered, the tables loaded with the baskets of bread and silver tankards of water (never wine) occupying a dais at the foot of the pulpits, upon which several bishops take their places, and break the bread into fragments. Precisely at two o’clock the great organ sends forth its melodious invocation, and the subdued noise of neighborly gossip, which, as the Madame said, “seemed the veritable humming of the honey bees of Deseret in their house hive,” is wholly hushed. The music at the Tabernacle is far-famed in the west, and gives constant delight to all the people. The singing is followed by a long prayer by some one of the dignitaries in or about the pulpits, during which the time is utilized to prepare the bread and water; and as soon as the prayer has ceased a large number of brethren begin to pass the sacred food and drink. Everybody, old and young, partakes, and it is an hour and a half before the communion is completed. Meanwhile some one of the highest officers of the church, or perhaps two or three of them in succession, has been preaching; so that two long hours are exhausted before dismissal. Such was the experience of our visit, and it was an average occasion.
The history of Salt Lake City is the history of the “Mormons,”—of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints in Utah. It begins on the 24th of July, 1847, when Brigham Young, leading the people, who likened their pilgrimage to a second exodus of Israel, emerged from the long cañon that had let them through the westernmost range of the Rockies. As the head of the weary train passed the last barrier they saw spread before their eager vision a huge basin—miles of sage-green, velvety slopes, sweeping down on every side from the bristling mountain-rim to the azure surface of the Salt sea set in the center.
Here, their leader told them, the Lord commanded a halt; here his tabernacle should be raised. It was done, and to-day a populous city stands on the site of the first camp of the religious host,—a city as baffling to describe in its appearance, in its social aspects, in its pervading sentiment as any which can be found in Christendom. It was with an intense sympathy for Mr. Robinson, that I listened to the Madame reading the opening paragraph of the fifth chapter of his “Sinners and Saints,” a part of which I have selected as the motto of the present chapter.
Yes, like Mr. Robinson, I would have liked “to shirk this part of my experiences altogether,” but the reader would never have pardoned me. “What? Leave out Salt Lake City!” I hear you exclaim. “What’s the good of mentioning Utah at all, if you do that?”
Well, to begin with, the city is not on the lake nor within a score of miles of it. When the pioneers came they descended to the foot of the last “bench” in which the foothills yield their rights to the plain, and there made their camp. In the same spot was founded the city. It was quite as good a locality as any other, no doubt they thought, considering that the whole region alike was nothing but a plain of sagebrush. Indeed, you cannot see the lake at all from the city, except by going up upon the “bench” of higher ground to the northward and eastward, whence it appears only as a line of distinct color between the dusty olive of the wide foreground, and the vague blue of the distant hills.
The habitations of the pioneers were not built hastily and at random. Brigham Young caused a town-site to be carefully surveyed and accurately laid out, and it was done on a generous scale. The streets were made one hundred and thirty feet wide, placed true to the points of the compass and crossing one another at right angles. Each square contains ten acres, so that when the Madame and I merely walked “around the block” while I smoked a post-prandial cigarette, we tramped precisely half a mile. A square of nine blocks was made to constitute a “ward”—now the city has twenty-four-presided over by a bishop of the church. Despite his title, he was more a temporal than a spiritual head, deciding all small matters in dispute in those simple first days when there was no appeal, nor desire for one, from ecclesiastical decisions to civil judgment. Even yet, this ward classification enters largely into the social constitution of the city.
When the streets and wards had been determined each pioneer was given an acre and a quarter as a town lot, and as much outside land as he could occupy. This accounts in a great measure for the ample space and farm-like appearance of the grounds around most of the houses in this widely dispersed city.
To make this real estate of value, however, water for irrigation must be brought to it. This was supplied by the “City” creek flowing down from Emigration cañon, whose current was led into ditches all over the new colony, and still fills the roadside gutters with sparkling streams, nourishing many gardens, and the roots of the long lines of varied shade trees, whose boughs almost reach over the thoroughfares. All the brethren worked in common at this ditching, and it was done so soon that within a few days after their arrival seeds had been put in the ground for the first crop.
“Yes,” says the Madame, as I relate this history, “and they say that old Jim Bridger watched them cynically and said they were a pack of—well, no matter what kind of fools, and that he would give a thousand dollars for the first ear of corn raised there.”