The City of the Saints, and Across the Rocky Mountains to California

by Sir Richard Francis Burton

On the evening of the 3d of September, while sauntering about the square in which a train of twenty-three wagons had just bivouacked, among the many others to whom Mr. Staines introduced me was the Apostle John Taylor, the “Champion of Rights,” Speaker in the House, and whilom editor. I had heard of him from the best authorities as a man so morose and averse to Gentiles, “who made the healing virtue depart out of him,” that it would be advisable to avoid his “fierceness.” The véridique Mr. Austin Ward describes him as “an old man deformed and crippled,” and Mrs. Ferris as a “heavy, dark-colored, beetle-browed man.” Of course, I could not recognize him from these descriptions—a stout, good-looking, somewhat elderly personage, with a kindly gray eye, pleasant expression, and a forehead of the superior order; he talked of Westmoreland his birthplace, and of his European travels for a time, till the subject of Carthage coming upon the tapis, I suspected who my interlocutor was. Mr. Staines burst out laughing when he heard my mistake, and I explained the reason to the apostle, who laughed as heartily. Wishing to see more of him, I accompanied him in the carriage to the Sugar-house Ward, where he was bound on business, and chemin faisant we had a long talk. He pointed out to me on the left the mouths of the several kanyons, and informed me that the City Creek and the Red Buttes on the northeast, and the Emigration, Parley’s, Mill Creek, Great Cotton-wood and Little Cotton-wood Kanyons to the east and southeast, all head together in two points, thus enabling troops and provisions to be easily and readily concentrated for the defense of the eastern approaches. When talking about the probability of gold digging being developed near Great Salt Lake City, he said that the Mormons are aware of that, but that they look upon agriculture as their real wealth. The Gentiles, however—it is curious that they do not form a company among themselves for prospecting—assert that the Church has very rich mines, which are guarded by those dragons of Danites more fiercely than the Hesperidian Gardens, and which will never be known till Miss Utah becomes Mistress Deserét. Arriving at the tall, gaunt Sugar-house—its occupation is gone, while the name remains—we examined the machinery employed in making threshing and wool-carding machines, flanges, wheels, cranks, and similar necessaries. After a visit to a nail manufactory belonging to Squire Wells, and calling upon Mrs. Harris, we entered the Penitentiary.THE PENITENTIARY. It is a somewhat Oriental-looking building, with a large quadrangle behind the house, guarded by a wall with a walk on the summit, and pepper-caster sentry-boxes at each angle. There are cells in which the convicts are shut up at night, but one of these had lately been broken by an Indian, who had cut his way through the wall; a Hindoo “gonnoff” would soon “pike” out of a “premonitory” like this. We found in it besides the guardians only six persons, of whom two were Yutas. When I remarked to Gentiles how few were the evidences of crime, they invariably replied that, instead of half a dozen souls, half the population ought to be in the place. On our return we resumed the subject of the massacre at Carthage, in which it will be remembered that Mr. John Taylor was severely wounded, and escaped by a miracle, as it were. I told him openly that there must have been some cause for the furious proceedings of the people in Illinois, Missouri, and other places against the Latter-Day Saints; that even those who had extended hospitality to them ended by hating and expelling them, and accusing them of all possible iniquities, especially of horse-thieving, forgery, larceny, and offenses against property, which on the borders are never pardoned—was this smoke quite without fire? He heard me courteously and in perfect temper; replied that no one claimed immaculateness for the Mormons; that the net cast into the sea brought forth evil as well as good fish, and that the Prophet was one of the laborers sent into the vineyard at the eleventh hour. At the same time, that when the New Faith was stoutly struggling into existence, it was the object of detraction, odium, persecution—so, said Mr. Taylor, were the Christians in the days of Nero—that the border ruffians, forgers, horse-thieves, and other vile fellows followed the Mormons wherever they went; and, finally, that every fraud and crime was charged upon those whom the populace were disposed, by desire for confiscation’s sake, to believe guilty. Besides the theologic odium there was also the political: the Saints would vote for their favorite candidates, consequently they were never without enemies. He quoted the Mormon rules: 1. Worship what you like. 2. Leave your neighbor alone. 3. Vote for whom you please; and compared their troubles to the Western, or, as it is popularly called, the Whisky insurrection in 1794, whose “dreadful night” is still remembered in Pennsylvania. Mr. Taylor remarked that the Saints had been treated by the United States as the colonies had been treated by the crown: that the persecuted naturally became persecutors, as the Pilgrim fathers, after flying for their faith, hung the Quakers on Bloody Hill at Boston; and that even the Gentiles can not defend their own actions. I heard for the first time this view of the question, and subsequently obtained from the apostle a manuscript account, written in extenso, of his experience and his sufferings. It has been transferred in its integrity to [Appendix No. III.], the length forbidding its insertion in the text: a tone of candor, simplicity, and honesty renders it highly attractive.

ANCIENT LAKE BENCH-LAND.

CHAPTER VI.
Descriptive Geography, Ethnology, and Statistics of Utah Territory.

Utah Territory, so called from its Indian owners, the Yuta—“those that dwell in mountains”—is still, to a certain extent, terra incognita, not having yet been thoroughly explored, much less surveyed or settled.

The whole Utah country has been acquired, like Oregon, by conquest and diplomacy. By the partition of 1848, the parallel of N. lat. 42°, left unsettled, between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific, by the treaties of the 22d of October, 1818, and the 12th of February, 1819, was prolonged northward to N. lat. 49°, thus adding to the United States California, Oregon, and Washington, while to Britain remained Vancouver’s Island and the joint navigation of the Columbia River. Under the Hispano-Americans the actual Utah Territory formed the northern portion of Alta California, and the peace of Guadalupe Hidalgo, concluded in 1848 between the United States and Mexico, transferred it from the latter to the former.

GEOGRAPHY OF UTAH TERRITORY.The present boundaries of Utah Territory are, northward (42° N. lat.), the State of Oregon; and southward, a line pursuing the parallel of N. lat. 37°, separating it from New Mexico to the southeast and from California to the southwest. The eastern portion is included between 106° and 120° W. long. (G.); a line following the crest of the Green River, the Wasach, the Bear River, and other sections of the Rocky Mountains, whose southern extremities anastomose to form the Sierra Nevada, separate it from Nebraska and Kansas. On the west it is bounded, between 116° and 120° W. long., by the lofty crest of the Sierra Nevada; the organization, however, of a new territory, the “Nevada,” on the landward slope of the Snowy Range, has diminished its dimensions by about half. Utah had thus 5° of extreme breadth, and 14° of total length; it was usually reckoned 650 miles long from east to west, and 350 broad from north to south. The shape was an irregular parallelogram, of which the area was made to vary from 188,000 to 225,000 square miles, almost the superficies of France.

The surface configuration of Utah Territory is like Central Equatorial Africa, a great depression in a mountain land: a trough elevated 4000 to 5000 feet above sea level, subtended on all sides by mountains 8000 to 10,000 feet high, and subdivided by transverse ridges. The “Rim of the Basin” is an uncontinuous line formed by the broken chains of Oregon to the north, and to the south by the little-known sub-ranges of the Rocky Mountains; the latter also form the eastern wall, while the Sierra Nevada hems in the west. Before the present upheaval of the country the Great Interior Basin was evidently a sweetwater inland sea; the bench formation, a system of water-marks, is found in every valley, while detached and parallel blocks of mountain, trending almost invariably north and south, were in geological ages rock-islands protruding from the lake surface like those that now break the continuity of that “vast and silent sea” the Great Salt Lake. Between these primitive and metamorphic ridges lie the secondary basins, whose average width may be 15-20 miles; they open into one another by kanyons and passes, and are often separated longitudinally, like “waffle-irons,” by smaller divides running east and west, thus converting one extended strip of secondary into a system of tertiary valleys. The Great Basin, which is not less than 500 miles long by 500 broad, is divided by two large chains, which run transversely from northeast to southwest. The northernmost is the range of the Humboldt River, rising 5000-6000 feet above the sea. The southern is the prolongation of the Wasach, whose southwestern extremity abuts upon the Pacific coast range; it attains a maximum elevation of nearly 12,000 feet. Without these mountains, whose gorges are fed during the spring, and even in the summer, by melted snow, there would be no water. The levels of the valleys are still unknown; it is yet a question how far they are irregular in elevation, whether they have formed detached lakes, or whether they slope uniformly and by steps toward the Great Salt Lake and the other reservoirs scattered at intervals over the country.

The water-shed of the Basin is toward the north, south, east, and west: the affluents of the Columbia and the Colorado rivers carry off the greatest amount of drainage. One of the geographical peculiarities of the Territory is the “sinking,” as it is technically called, of the rivers. The phenomenon is occasioned by the porous nature of the soil. The larger streams, like the Humboldt and the Carson rivers, form terminating lakes. The smaller are either absorbed by sand, or sink, like the South African fountains, in ponds and puddles of black mire, beneath which is peaty earth that burns as if by spontaneous combustion, and smoulders for a long time in dry weather: the waters either reappear, or, escaping under the surface—a notable instance of the “subterranean river”—feed the greater drains and the lakes. The potamology is more curious than useful; the streams, being unnavigable, play no important part in the scheme of economy.

Utah Territory is well provided with lakes; of these are two nearly parallel chains extending across the country. The easternmost begins at the north, with the Great Salt Lake, the small tarns of the Wasach, the Utah, or Sweetwater Reservoir, the Nicollet, and the Little Salt Lake, complete the line which is fed by the streams that flow from the western counterslope of the Wasach. The other chain is the drainage collected from the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada; it consists of Mud, Pyramid, Carson, Mono, and Walker’s lakes. Of these, Pyramid Lake, so called by Colonel Frémont, its explorer, from a singular rock in the centre, is the most beautiful—a transparent water, 700 feet above the level of the Great Salt Lake, and walled in by precipices nearly 3000 feet high.