[181] “The Physical Geography of the Sea” (by Captain Maury), chap. ix., § 502, quoted from “Youmans’ Chemistry.”
It has been generally stated that the water is fatal to organic life. The fish brought down the rivers perish at once in the concentrated brine; but, according to the people, there is a univalve, like a periwinkle, found at certain seasons within the influence of its saline waves; and I observed, floating near the margin, delicate moss-like algæ. Governor Cumming mentioned his having seen a leaf, of a few inches in length, lined with a web, which shelters a vermicular animal, of reddish color, and about the length of the last joint of the little finger. Near the shore, also, mucilaginous matter, white, pink, and rusty, like macerated moss, adheres to the rocky bed, and lies in coagulated spots upon the sand. We may fairly doubt the travelers’ assertion that this Dead Sea contains no living thing; whereas neither animalculæ nor vestige of animal matter were, according to Lieutenant Lynch, detected by a powerful microscope in the waters of the Asphaltite Lake.
The Great Salt Lake is studded with an archipelago of islands, ISLANDS IN GREAT SALT LAKE.which would greatly add to its charms were their size commensurate with its diminutive limits. These, beginning from the north, are,
1. Dolphin Island, so called from its shape, a knoll of rock and shoal near the northwestern end, surrounded by about three feet of water.
2. Gunnison’s Island, a large rock and small outlier, southeast of the former, and surrounded with water from nine to twelve feet deep.
3. Hat Island, southeast of Gunnison’s, the smallest of the isles, with a reef sunk about seven feet: it was probably part of the following, and is separated from it by a narrow channel nowhere more than six feet in depth.
4. Carrington Island, so named from the Mormon surveyor, a circular mass with a central peak: the water is from three to six feet deep on every side except the western and southwestern, which are shoals and shallows. It contains no springs, but is rich in plants and flowers, as the sego, also spelled sigo, seacoe, and segose (Calochortus luteus, an onion-like bulb or tuber about the size of a walnut, more nutritious than palatable, much eaten as a table vegetable by the early Mormons and the root-digging Indians, and even now by white men when half starved), a cleome, a malvastrum, a new species of malacothrix, and several others.
5. Stansbury Island, the second largest in the lake, an ovate mass, with a high central ridge, dome-shaped above, and rising 3000 feet, twenty-seven miles in circumference, and about twelve in length. During the dry season it is formed into a peninsula by a sand-bank connecting it with the lake’s western shore. Thus antelopes, deer, and coyotes pass over to browse upon the plants and to attack the young of the ducks, geese, plover, gulls, and pelicans, that make their homes upon the cliffs: it is also used for grazing purposes. The principal plants are a comandra, and sundry new species of heuchera, perityle, and stenactis. Fossils and shells are found in scatters.
6. Antelope, also called Church Island, because the stock of the Saints is generally kept there. Lying to the east and northeast of the preceding, and in shape an irregular and protracted conoid, it is the largest of the islands, sixteen miles long by six of extreme width, with a western ridge and an eastern line of broken peaks, which attain a maximum of 3000 feet above the lake and 7200 above sea level. It lies twenty miles to the northwest of the city, and the narrow passage between it and the opposite plain is fordable. This island is surrounded on the north by a tufa bed twelve feet deep; eastward by six feet of water; southeast and south by shoals; and westward by a deposit of black mud: the deepest sounding in the lake, thirty-five feet, is found between it and Stansbury Island. Off the northwestern coast is a rock, called, after its principal peculiarity, Egg Island: in the eastern cliff there is said to be a cave, described to resemble the Blue Grotto at Capri, which has been partially explored. Formerly there was a small pinnace on the “Big Shallow;” it has either been wrecked or broken up for fuel.[182] Antelope Island contains arid ravines and a few green valleys, besides a spring of pure water, and, being safe from Indians, it is much esteemed as a grazing-place.
[182] In the “Revue des Deux-Mondes” (April, 1861) we are told that, “Pendant l’été un petit bateau à vapeur fait un service régulier sur le Lac Salé.” Fresh proof, if it be required, how difficult, or rather how impossible, it is for any amount of talent or ingenuity in a reviewer to supply the want of actual eye-seeing information. The “Lac Salé” is not yet come.