Non-Mormon citizens have been as ready and earnest in their efforts to build up and sustain the city of their choice as have their Latter-day Saint fellows; and the present beauty, strength, and vitality of the intermountain metropolis are largely due to non-Mormon, or "Gentile," enterprise and energy. The "Gentiles" have ever been the more prominent in mining undertakings, and the large and paying mines of to-day are mostly theirs. Salt Lake City does not belong to the "Mormons"; it is the possession of its citizens without regard to religious profession or political preference.
![[ LION AND BEE-HIVE HOUSES.]](#5548097350089155992_illo_548.jpg.id-297098495911506913.wrap-0.html.html){kind=link}
Since man and nature combined their energies in this once desert spot, the favored situation, the many natural advantages have yearly grown more apparent. Located at the very base of the Wasatch, bounded in part by a spur of this majestic range, the city possesses a wealth of mountain scenery beyond description. The valley floor is part of the bed of an inland sea of Quaternary age; and the benches and hills constituting the choicest residence portions are the terraces of this ancient lake, or the deltas of the prehistoric streams whose mouths were at the present cañon openings. Capitol Hill and the Northeast Bench are parts of the great delta constructed by City Creek in Lake Bonneville. Of this Pleistocene water body, approximately equal to Lake Huron in extent, the present Salt Lake, in spite of its common appellation "great," is but a diminutive fragment.
The present population as attested by the recent census returns is 53,531; though the current city directory, compiled immediately after the census enumeration, gives names and addresses of nearly seventy thousand resident inhabitants. The city's growing importance as a manufacturing, commercial, railroad, and mining centre is generally recognized: while its enterprise, progressiveness, and wealth are of national repute. But beyond all such it is to be characterized as a city of homes. From cottage to mansion its residences are very generally owned by their tenants. Its citizens are, for the most part, permanent residents and the city is theirs. Its increase has been that of development rather than of growth; the distinction is a vital one, for it characterizes the expansion of the living organism as against mere accretion of substance.
With such a development in the course of less than five and a half decades, what shall be its condition and status when its years have linked themselves into centuries?
