INT DA
MOUNTAIN
WALLE
^- -^r - \
ujcutd\Roiu mi| native land.
There are tqpse who praise the poet who can soar in starry spheres,
flnd cari mould HIS mystic phrases jrorrt the wrecks of other years,
1 would fyave my inspiration. fresh from nature's operi hand-
I would sioj a simple sonnet that a child can understand.
There are those wl^o seek iri other dimes tl\e joys thei) might
Mid the mountairis ar\d the meadows o/ tte land they call (heir owr
1 would seek the sliady carwons where a! r\ight the geiUle dew
Comes to Kiss the rose and heliotrope whea stars are all in view.
1 would walk the verdant valley where the salt waves wash fhe feet
Oj Ihe Wasatch.Gazi'nj) upward where the sky and mountains meet,
Filled with 'awe ar\d admiration. I would kr\eel upon Ihe strand,
/Ind lhaak Heaven for this picture even. 1 can understand.
I would stand amid these mountains with their hueless caps o/ snow.
Looking dowri the distant valley stretching far away below;
>ln.d with reverential rapture thank my Maker for thisjjrattd,
Peerless, priceless panorama that a child can understand.
u
TA H
Sangre de Cristo, let me trace
The beauties of thy furrowed face;
While poncha-perfurned summer breez
Makes' music in thine arboies,
Copyrigtit, 1895, by George B. Dodge.
INTRODUCTORY
THE FOLLY OF AMERICANS wno TRAVEL ABROAD BEFORE
THEY HAVE SEEN THEIR OWN COUNTRY.
ASTERN newspaper statisticians are proverbially masters
of the art of inaccuracy, and their so-called statistics are
usually to be taken, like dreams or women's whims, by
contraries. But they are probably not far wrong in their
every-season estimate that a hundred thousand Americans
annually make the tour of Europe at an average expense
of at least a thousand dollars each. That is a total of a hundred million
dollars a year expended by new-world people in familiarizing themselves
with old-world scenes, while, as a general thing, they are wholly unac-
quainted with the infinitely grander scenes on their own side of the Atlantic
ferry. In a single day of the recent season eight huge ocean steamers left
New York, bearing nearly three thousand first-cabin passengers for a Euro-
pean summer tour. Every steamship that sails during the fashionable
outing months goes crowded with these too often ignorant and snobocratic
American voyagers to foreign lands for recreation and pleasure, that could
be far more easily and cheaply found at home. How many of them have
ever seen the glories and grandeurs, the beauties and sublimities of their
own matchless land ? How many of them know, how many of them have
ever dreamt, that their own our own is incomparably the grandest
continent on all the globe ?
There is urgent need of a constitutional amendment prohibiting any
untutored American citizen or citizeness, redolent of pork corners, wheat
gouges, stock swindles, and " just-struck-rich-dirt "-inesses, from going
abroad to paralyze the cab-drivers and coffee-house waiters of effete
monarchies with gilded republican airs until he or she has seen and learned
something of America. It should require, as an inexorable condition-
precedent for permission to squander American gold and silver in London
haberdashers' establishments and Parisian milliners' shops, and to go into
cheap raptures after careful consultation of the guide-books over
Italian skies and mole-hills, duck-ponds and dilapidated macaroni hash-
eries, a certificate from the president and general manager of some such
great system of American railway as the Rio Grande Western, Denver &
Rio Grande, and Colorado Midland, that the would-be foreign voyager had
visited all the wondrous and glorious scenes along their lines. It would be
an admirable educational measure. It would give tens of thousands of
semi-bogus Americans native-born aliens some idea of the grandeur of
their own country, and prevent them from making the lavish displays of
ignorance and stupidity with which they now amuse or disgust the first
intelligent man or woman they meet after setting foot on European soil.
It was Byron who, meeting one of these typical American tourists in
Florence, eagerly exclaimed : * Tell me of Niagara Falls ! Describe your
great cataract to me ! " When the American shamefacedly confessed he
had never seen the cataractic wonder of the world, the poet abruptly turned
on his heel and left him, denouncing as "a d d fool" any man who,
without having seen Niagara, would come from America to Europe to sham
ecstacy over pigmy mountains and lakes and rivers. And the lame author
of " Childe Harold " was not too severe.
The more one sees of our majestic half-world our continental American
republic the less patience he must have with those absurd creatures who,
every year, flock by tens of thousands to other lands, while they have seen
nothing and know nothing of their own. Earth has no other land like ours.
Among all the nationalities and realms of the globe, " Columbia, the Gem
of the Ocean," is peerless, unrivaled and unrivalable, unapproached
and unapproachable. The grandest empires of the old world, of
ancient or of modern times, sink to petty provinces beside its vast
dimensions. The whole possessions of Rome, when her
golden eagles spread their wings victorious from the
burning sands of Africa to the mist-clad hills of Cale-
donia, fell short of the immensity of our new-world
domain. Russia, vastest of modern sovereignties,
could be lost in our half-hemisphere beyond the
power of all the buzzards in Christendom to
find her. France, land of Napoleon, at
the tread of whose legions but three
quarters of a century ago all
Europe trembled as if
taken with a Wabash-
valley ague, would
scarcely overlap the
;^l_c^ single Territory of
Utah : while Great
THE ACROPOLIS OF THE DESERT.
Britain, whose morning drum-beat sounds around the globe, would hardly
make a fly-speck on the face of Texas or California.
Do other lands boast of their great rivers ? We could take up all their
Niles and Thameses, their yellow Tibers, castled Rhines and beautiful blue
Danubes by their little ends, and empty them into our majestic Mississippis
and Missouris, Columbias and Rio Grandes, Amazons, Saskatchewans and
De La Platas without making rise enough to lift an Indiana flat-boat off a
sandbar. Do they brag of their seas and lakes ? We could spill all their
puny Caspians and Azovs, Nyanzas and Maggiores, into our mighty
Superiors, Michigans, Hurons, Eries and Ontarios, and scarce produce a
ripple on their pebbled brims to wash away the eighteen-inch " foot-print on
the sands of time " left by the fairy-like slipper of a St. Louis or Chicago
girl ; while in any ring, Marquis of Queensbury rules, our Wasatch-walled
Great Salt Lake could strip the championship belt for mystery and majesty
from their long-famed, Sodom-engulfing, weird Dead Sea. Do they prate
of their romantic scenery ? We have a thousand jewel-like lakes that would
make all their vaunted Comos, Genevas and Killarneys hide their faces in a
veil of friendly fog. The rolling thunder of our Niagara drowns out the
feeble murmur of all their cataracts ; while the awful crags and canyons of
our Yellowstone and Yosemite, Gunnison, Arkansas and Colorado ; the pris-
matic glitter and dash of our Minnehahas, Shoshones and Ocklawahas ; and
the lonely grandeur of our horizon-fenced prairies, boundless oceans of
billowy verdure, dwarf to insipidity the most famous scenes of Switzerland
and Italy, eclipse the wonders and glories of the Arabian Nights, and defy
all the skill of poet's pen and artist's pencil to depict the veriest atom of
their sublimity and their loveliness. Do they prattle about their JEtnas and
Vesuviuses ? With our noses turning somersets of ineffable contempt clear
over our heads, we thunder forth our Cotopaxis, Popocatapetls, Chimbora-
zos and a score of other jawbreakers whose very names alone are too huge
for common tongues. (It is true that some of these specimens of national
prodigiousness do not just exactly belong to us yet ; but they belong to our
next-door neighbors, who are not as strong as we are, and to the gloriously
expansive spirit of Yankee progress, where or what is the difference ?) Do
other lands and nations talk of their mines of jewels and gold ? We answer
with the exhaustless bonanzas of California, Colorado, Montana, Idaho and
Utah, where mountains of gold and silver ore challenge the skies, and where
the ceaseless thunder of the world's greatest bullion-mills resounds in the
yet warm lair of the Rocky Mountain grizzly bear. Do they rave of the
harvest fields of Germany and Britain, and the vine-clad hills of France ?
We show them half a hemisphere, with soils and climates as varied as the
tastes of men, and with capacities for production as boundless as the
needs of men ; yielding everything, cereal, vegetable, animal, textile
and mineral, agricultural, horticultural, geological, zoological,
pomological, piscatorial, and ornithological, ovine, bovine, capri-
cornine and equine, that all the wants of all the races,
tribes, kindreds and tongues of earth can ever require. The
sun in heaven, in all his grand rounds since " the eve-
ning and the morning were the first day," never looked
down on a more magnificent domain a fresh and
glorious half-world, grand in all its pro-
portions, and endlessly diversified, rich
and gorgeous in all its adornments, resting
like a vast emerald breastpin upon the
bosom of four great oceans. It is the
broadest land ever given to any people,
the grandest and most beautiful, the most
varied in its productions, and the most
unlimited in its capabilities, and its future.
Other lands surpass it only in age and
ruins. Time, if we wait long enough, will
remedy the deficiency in age ; and we are already able to
show some rather picturesque, though by no means majestic,
ruins after every presidential election.
THE GARB 0P THE HILLS.
OO visit the hills in the springtime,
When the little buds burst on the trees,
And the perfume of pinon and wild flowers
Is borne on the breath of the breeze,
When the rivulets leap from the snowlands,
As down toward the valley they sing,
To gladden the rose-laden low-lands
Go visit the hills in the spring !
And then, when the sum,rrier is over,
And the dead leaves are strewn o'er the land,
When the blossoms have dropped from the clover,
A garment more gorgeous and grand
Is worn by the hills. True, the verdure,
TJ^e green and the freshness of spring
Have changed the flowers have faded
The song-birds are ceasing to sing,
But look ! in the morn, when the sunlight
First flashes its rays o'er the range,
Ever changing anon till the wan light
Of evening is on note each change
Blends the fire and flam.e of the oak tree
With the gold of the aspen so tall ;
All the radiant rays of the rainbow
P\re worn by the hills in the fall,
II.
STILL INTRODUCTORY
A GENTLE RAP AT THE TOO-PREVALENT AMERICAN
IGNORANCE OF AMERICA.
F ALL this magnificent, more than imperial domain, one of
the fairest garden spots is Utah. Yes, gentle or ungentle
reader, as the case may be, you deciphered it aright the
word is Utah. You do not know where it is? That is
not surprising. There is nothing of which the average
intelligent American knows less than he does of the
geography of his own country. Utah ? You never heard of it except as a
wild, far-away spot in a dismal wilderness, where every shrub has a cactus
thorn and conceals a stinging reptile, and where the very waters heave up
brimstone, pitch and ashes a sort of cross between Hades and the Great
Sahara, the fitting home of a horde of semi-savage fanatics known as Mor-
mons ? Very likely. Your ignorance is not exceptional. Even educated
Americans are phenomenal in the profundity and variety of what they do
not know in regard to every region and characteristic of their native land
beyond the range of their own chimneys' smoke. They laugh at foreigners
for mixing up New York and San Francisco, and expecting to find buffaloes
and warwhooping Indians in the suburbs of Cincinnati and Chicago ; while,
in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of every possible thousand, they
show little greater knowledge than the more excusable blunderers they
deride.
At a dinner given in New Orleans, a few years ago, to a Dakota man, a
lady prominent in Crescent City society said to the guest of the occasion :
"I understand, sir, you live in Dakota. You probably know a friend of
mine, Mr. William Jones, out there?" The Dakotan turned to see if she was
not simply guying him ; but, perceiving that she was in earnest, replied :
" In what part of Dakota, madam, does your acquaintance live ? " ' I think,''
she answered, "in a little place called Yankton. Isn't there a town of that
name out there?" "Yes, madam," was the grave rejoinder ; "but are you
aware that, from my home on Devil's Lake, Dakota, to Yankton, where you
think your friend, Mr. Jones, resides, by the shortest travelable route, is
about eight hundred miles, or just one hundred and fifteen miles less than
from New Orleans to Chicago?" The statement, at that time, was abso-
lutely true, but the man who made it was promptly set down by every guest
at the table, as the worst specimen of wild-western Munchausenism that had
ever appeared in New Orleans.
So, esteemed madam, miss or sir, if ignorance, like misery, loved company,
you would have abundance of it, even among our most cultivated people.
Your lack of knowledge as to Utah is not unparalleled, but it will hereafter
be unpardonable, or this brief dissertation will have failed in its mission.
A few moments of your valuable time and attention and you will know con-
siderably more than you do, and still be just as handsome as you are.
A theme so vast and varied, so rich and beautiful, appropriately begins a
new chapter.
III.
UTAH.
A BRIEF GENERAL OUTLINE, GEOGRAPHICAL, SCENIC AND
RESOURCEFUL, OF A WONDERFUL REGION.
TAH extends from 37 to 42 North latitude, and from 32
to 37 West longitude, and is an almost exact square, three
hundred miles each way. It has an area of 87,750 square
miles, or 52,601,600 acres ; of which 2,780 square miles, or
1,776,200 acres, are water. It is 11,420 square miles, or
7,308,800 acres, larger than Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont,
Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey and
Delaware, all combined ; and there is no region of equal area on
the globe, that overflows with more abounding and diversified riches of
resource and possibility.
Utah was first settled by a detachment of Mormons, under the leadership
of Brigham Young, in July, 1847 I an d there is no stronger argument in
favor of the Mormon claim to divine revelations and inspirations, than the
fact that they should have been led through nearly three thousand miles of
unexplored wilderness, infested at every step by hostile savages, to such a
" Land of Promise," where every promise finds so glorious fulfillment.
Guided by the Jehovah-swayed " pillar of cloud by day, and pillar of fire
by night," Israel of old wandered forty years in search of a "promised
land " that would hardly make a cow-lot in Utah.
Lift all New England and New York bodily a mile above the level of the
sea. Add five thousand feet to the height of Mount Washington, and seven
thousand to that of Mount Mitchell Throw in dozens of other peaks fully
as high, all punching holes in the sky with their snowy crowns. Pile up,
everywhere, hundreds on hundreds of mountains from ten to fourteen thou-
sand feet high. Exaggerate fifty-fold all the wild notches and gorges and
glens of eastern America, and multiply them by scores. Send cataracts and
cascades leaping and foaming down a thousand dizzy precipice channels.
Toss in, promiscuously, parks larger than whole States in the tame, small-
14
notioned east; and gardens of giant statuary statues of gods and genii
and gnomes, Titans, Centaurs, and un-named monsters, thousands of feet
high hewn by ages on ages of winds and waves and whirling waters.
Cap all the mountain-tops with everlasting ice and snow, and clothe their
shaggy sides with waving forests of valuable timber. Fill all the valleys to
the mountains' feet with orchards and gardens, vineyards and grain-fields,
bending beneath the burdens of their own magnificent fruitage ; and dot the
horizon-bounded pasture-lands with flocks and herds, waist-deep in the very
wantonness of plenty. Underlay the whole vast area with gold and silver,
zinc, copper, lead and iron ores ; marble of a hundred hues ; anthracite,
bituminous and cannel coal ; salt, sulphur, soda, lime and gypsum ; and
nearly every other metal and mineral in human use. Through countless
wondrous canyons, pour mighty rivers with water-power enough to run all
the world's machinery. Smite the rock-ribbed laboratories of Omnipotence,
and let unnumbered healing floods gush forth, rich in miracle-working virtues
for the alleviation of many of the sorest " ills that flesh is heir to." As the
dazzling bosom-jewel of the whole transcendent scene, spread out the
twenty-five hundred square miles of that majestic and mysterious lake,
whose waters hold in solution wealth enough to pay all the national debts
of the world, and leave a fortune for every man, woman and child from Cape
Cod to Yuba Dam. And over all throw the glory of a climate unsurpassed
under heaven since sin and death climbed into Eden, and the translucent
splendor of skies more radiantly sapphirean than ever bent their crystal
arches above the far-famed, beggar-hemmed and flea-girt Bay of Naples, or
the Lake of Como, on whose enchanted shores lay the bogus ranch of that
glib-tongued bunco-steerer, Claude Melnotte And you have a poor, faint,
puny approximation to an idea of Utah !
It is a land where mountains of gold and silver ore, that runs from fifty
to five thousand dollars to the ton, wall in valleys that yield from sixty to
eighty bushels of wheat, from seventy-five to a hundred bushels of oats,
and from five hundred to nine hundred bushels of potatoes, to the acre. It
is a land where every man makes his own rain, and the crops never fail ;
where the rewards of industry are as sure as the decrees of God ; where
wonder treads on beauty's heels, and riches rush to meet the earnest seeker.
Its resources are as boundless as its limits, and as varied as the ever-
changing hues that bathe its sunsets in prismatic splendors. Here is
Ute-opia indeed !
What is there that the imagination of man can conceive, or his eye, heart,
soul, stomach or pocket can desire, that Utah does not yield, or cannot
offer ? Is it scenery or climate ? Is it health or wealth, fertile farms,
bonanza mines, or lovely homes ? Is it opportunities for profitable invest-
ments, or openings for all varieties of labor and of enterprise ?
Let a fresh chapter begin the brief reply.
S IB paini a picture with a^ pencil of rny own;
al! have no Stand Jo Ijelp % 1 stiall paint it all alone:
fancy it lie/ore. Trie and toy hopeful rieartjiows faint
! coaiernplale % jrandetir of the picture 1 would paint.
atioul the lini ttie landing limpid
Wtyise Tippl&s seemlo shiver as ftey jlide-ai\djlow
0| tl\e waves fta! beat llje boulders W are strewn upon tj]e sl
You will recognize ftc river ii\ trje Canyon of IfjE
Wr\en 1 write ajiDul % n\owiiair\s wift their rieaos solugli ani3\oar,
Of t^e clijfs and craggy canyons "v%re fe waters tuslt and roar,
l\eii 1 speaK about % walls that use so\up] on e'fJier
You. will teco^ijzE \\
God' was uood ta mate fye mourilains, the valleys aijjfj|e l{ill
Put the rose upon.l\e cactus the Tipple onitje fills;
Bxi] ij I j]ad all t v/Q fd of alt the "worlds almy
1 couldn't paint a picture f t^e Canyon ojt^e Grand
IV.
CLIMATE AND HEALTH
UTAH AS ONE OF THE WORLD'S GRANDEST SANITARIUMS
SOME NOVEL AND STRIKING FACTS.
" We believe it is a duty to live past seventy."
grandeur and loveliness of Utah
scenery have already been touched
interwoven with its
mines and meadows, fields, forests, lakes,
vajleys, and every other feature and interest,
that they will find frequent mention hereafter.
It is a tourist's paradise, a true holy land of
sight-seers and lovers of nature in her sub-
limest and most entrancing moods, a realm of
beauty and a joy forever to the artist soul.
What of its climate and healthfnlness ?
Climate is not regulated by latitude. Ocean cur-
rents and altitude are potent factors in it. The
snows of untold ages lie unmelted on the lofty peaks
of the Cordilleras in Mexico, the Andes in South
America, and the Himalayas in Hindostan. Alaska,
in the latitude of Greenland, has a climate little
more rigorous than that of Ohio. Washington and Oregon, in
18
the latitude of hard-frozen Maine and blizzardy Dakota, where it is mid-
winter seven months of the year, and very late in the fall the other five,
bask in the sunny mildness of Virginia and Carolina ; and California, on the
same parallels with Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma, raises oranges,
bananas, pine-apples, figs, lemons and pomegranates. Utah, in the latitude
of Missouri, where the mercury often runs the whole length of the ther-
mometer in twenty-four hours, enjoys a climate as balmy and as equable as
the airs that breathe over Araby the Blest. For fourteen years the mean
temperature in Salt Lake City was about fifty-two degrees, the average
maximum being ninety-seven degrees, the average minimum minus one,
and the mean daily range of the mercury but twenty degrees. Cotton
grows luxuriantly in the southern part of the territory, and all the semi-
tropical fruits flourish everywhere within its borders ; and yet there is not a
day in the year when one cannot, if he will, wallow in a snowdrift fifty feet
deep, or seat himself on an iceberg a hundred yards square, by climbing a
few miles up a mountain-side. During the month of August, 1891, the
whole eastern and southern portion of the United States, and even the
vauntedly paradisiacal Northwest, sweltered and seethed with torrid heat.
Apples baked on the trees around Chicago, that brazenly proclaims itself
" the great lake-side summer resort of North America." People died of
sunstrokes and calorical prostrations from Winnepisseogee to Corpus Christi
that is, from Maine to Texas. Even in the alleged " glorious summer
climate " of Minnesota and Dakota, the thermometers boiled over with a
hundred and ten to a hundred and fifteen degrees of hideous hotness in the
shade. Milwaukee refrigerators turned to steam-boilers ; pop-corn popped
instead of sprouting in the Iowa and Missouri hills, and a universal wail of
sweaty anguish went up to skies of red-hot brass from the whole wretched
land and people. And, in all the time, there was not a night that Salt Lake
City people did not sleep under blankets, and not a day when they could
not see the huge masses of snow on the Wasatch Mountains glistening
white and cold in the August sunshine ; while, at the base of the mountains,
which slope down almost into the eastern edge of the city, the whole earth
was hidden in the foliage and fruit and flowers of orchards and vineyards
and gardens. Low latitude gives heat, and high altitude gives cold ; so
every fellow can mix his own climate and weather to suit himself. Here, as
nearly as anywhere else in the temperate zone, might be realized that
boyish ideal of a home : A tall, glacier-crested mountain in a tropical
region. At its base, plantations of sugar, coffee, rice, indigo, and spices ;
orange, palm and mango groves ; and forests of mahogany, ebony and rose-
wood, with myriads of gorgeous-plumaged parrots, toucans and macaws
flitting like winged bits of rainbows among their leafy boughs. Midway up
the sloping side, at an elevation of eight or ten thousand feet, fields of corn,
wheat, oats and barley ; orchards of apples, pears, plums and cherries ;
meadows of honey- scented clover,
the hum of bees, the lowing of
cattle, bubbling springs, coveys of
quails, and cooing doves. And at
the summit a mighty storehouse of
everlasting snow and ice to cool the
juleps and tequilla. So that, with a
tiny inclined railroad ten or fifteen
miles long, one could slide through
all climates and seasons, from per-
petual summer to eternal winter and
back again, in half an hour, in any
day of all the year. In Utah the
torrid feature alone would be lacking
in this grand climatic climacteric
this having, like death, "all seasons
for one's own."
Weather-bureau statistics show
that the sun shines all day over
three hundred days in every year in
Utah, and there are few of the re-