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Show 168 WESTERN WILDS. which the confident owners expected to develop into an Emma. The last day the air suddenly grew hazy, and, looking northward, we saw the sky of a peculiar ash and copper color. Old miners shook their heads ominously and said : " The fire is sweeping Big Cotton-wood." Next morning the peaks were shrouded in smoke, and about 4 P. M., a great white column shot into the sky for thousands of feet, apparently just over the " divide," then, swaying back and forth, settled into the shape of an immense cone, and we knew to a certainty that the wind was " down the cafion," and, consequently, the fire nearing the Big Cottonwood smelting works. It took me all the next day to pass the " divide," for the lowest point on the ridge is 2,000 feet above Central, and the descent still greater on the northern side. When I reached Silver Springs the fire was near-ing the town, and after night- fall the sight was indescribably grand. From the summit of Granite Mountain, dividing the heads of Big and Little Cottonwoods, down through the lake region and Mill Cafion, to the tops of Uintah Hills for eight miles in a semicircle around and above us the view was bounded by great swaying sheets of flame. The sky to the zenith was a bright blood- red, and down to the West a gleaming waxy yellow ; while almost over us Honey-comb Peak, where the timber had burned to a coal, and which was divided from us by a large rocky gorge, stood out detached and glow-ing red like a volcano outlined against the sky. Morning came, and with it detachments of miners from neighbor-ing camps, working their way through the lower defiles, to fell tim-ber and " burn against the fire." The town is in a grove of quaking asp, and was in no great danger ; but, across Cottonwood Creek, where the Smelting Works stand, the growth is mountain pine, which burns green or dry. The whole cafion was so full of smoke that the sun could barely be discerned, and the pyrotechnics of the night had given place to a death- like gloom. From the creek to the mountain summit south was a roaring mass of flames, when at noon the wind suddenly changed, and for twenty- four hours blew almost a hurricane up the cafion. The timber had been felled for two hundred yards around the works; it was now set on fire, and ttie great business en-terprise of this camp was saved. After the ' day of wind came rain, then snow, and next morning the latter, four inches deep, was melt-ing slowly into black mud. South of the Cottonwoods, American Fork Cafion opens upon the Utah Lake Basin ; a succession of wild gorges and timbered vales cause it to be known as the Yosemite of Utah. A narrow- guage rail- |