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Show WESTERN WILDS. beautiful town. Several wealthy Mormons reside here, in elegant brick and stone houses, and the place is old enough for all the shade trees and shrubbery to have attained a good growth. Some thirty miles west of Fillmore is a remarkable mountain peak, or rather round heap of cinders and lava, five hundred feet high. It is broken square across by a gulch with almost perpendicular sides, at the bottom of which is a spring that is coated with ice around the edges for eleven months in the year. The altitude is no higher than that of Fillmore, but the sun never shines in the gorge, and snow lies on the inner slopes all the year. Thence two days' slow staging brought me to " Zion," which I f cached on the evening of July 21st, exactly four months from the day I left St. Louis for a tour through the Southern Territories. In that time I had traveled fourteen hundred miles by rail, six hundred by stage, three hundred by military wagon, two hundred on foot, and six hundred on horseback at a total cost of $ 535. I reached " Zion" iu splendid health, but complete disguise, if I am to judge from the conduct of my friends, many of whom passed me on the street without a nod, or with only a slight look of curiosity, as if some old and half-forgotten memory were stirred by sight of a face that " had a sort o' familiar look." However, after a bath in the warm springs, getting off my buckskin pantaloons, spangled Mexican jacket, and Navajo scarf, and donning a new summer suit, my fingers received once more the wonted squeeze, and once more I began to feel very like a Christian. It was on this journey through Southern Utah, and after my arrival in " Zion," that I heard narrated the personal experiences which are combined in the three succeeding chapters. |
