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Show 98 WESTERN WILDS. seem to frown menacingly upon one who threads the canons. Nee-dle rocks project hundreds of feet above the general level, while hard volcanic dykes ris above the softer lime or sandstone mighty battlements, abrupt and unpassable Pelion upon Ossa piled, as in Titanic war. The western half of the great Basin is Nevada, the eastern, Mor-mon Utah. All that part of the Territory east of the Wasatch is still the range of the Mountain Ute, and, for the most part, unfit for white settlements. As nine- tenths of the cultivable land lies along the western base of the Wasatch, in the little detached val-leys mentioned, it results that Mormon Utah consists of a narrow line of settlements down the center of the Territory: an attenuated commonwealth rarely more than ten miles wide, but nearly sev< m hundred miles long from Oneida, in Idaho, to the Rio Virgen, in Arizona. Geographically, it nearly fills the definition of a line extension without breadth or thickness. Such communities would naturally develop a different system of law and social organization from that of a continuously fertile and habitable state like Illi-nois. Manifestly something like the Cantonal system would spring up, with the Commune as a subdivision of the Canton. But in Utah theocracy came in to "\\ arp and distort the natural growth of government, and subordinate every thing to the strengthening of priestly power. Against this the Gentiles and Liberal Mor-mons have unceasingly contended, and hence that interminable strug-gle theocracy vs. republicanism which has so long made up the history of Utah, and in which for many years I was an active par-ticipant. Through all my wr anderings in the West I came back to Utah as my home, and to this contest as to my chosen field of action. Even now a glow comes over me at thought of blows given and taken, and the little circle of choice spirits, half philosophers, half politicians, that helped make my life in Utah so pleasant. There was O. J. Holltster, half enthusiast, half business man, and wholly a student and man of literary tastes, who had had, perhaps, a more varied ex-perience than any of the number. Reared in Columbia County, New York, he early felt the " cramp " of farm life there, and sought his fortune first in Pennsylvania, and then in New Jersey and Maryland. The westward wave carried him to Kansas, and when the contest was over there, on to the gold fields of Pike's Peak ; and before his frame had hardened into manhood, he was busy among the pioneers of a new State. Mining, lumbering, freighting, and ranching gave vigor |