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Show Page 153 monumental peaks of the Wasatch. It was Palestine turned around, geographically an uncanny echo of Israel's land of promise, with its "Jordan" flowing from the fresh to the dead sea. Orson Pratt, Joshua to Brigham Young's Moses, clambered immediately down the slopes - Snow had gone back to find his coat - and made a grand, triumphal circle of twelve miles through the valley. The lone apostle paraded down the treeless plain, the first Mormon of the hundreds of thousands to follow; as he swept over the ground of the metropolis-in-vision, he was too euphoric to notice much, and couldn't wait to find his Prophet with the news that the last hill had been climbed. Another apostle and five others joined Orson and Erastus as they were dispatched excitedly into the valley the next day to survey the possibilities for settlement. Skirting the gradual rise of hills on the north side of the valley, they headed in the direction of the lake and soon found a delightful creek-mouth, which Orson had noted the day before, freshening the greasewood plain in a double-forked stream. There was gravel on the bottom and grass burgeoning along the banks. From this place, i however, the vista of the valley was sobering. A brown waste, ragged with weeds to the wall of mountains - that impossible bastion that glimmered glaciers even in mid-July - and crawling with thumb-size crickets the color of coal. Rounding the mountain's north point the party found itself mired in the tepid mud of a thermal swamp. Canebrake and rushes came to their shoulders as they sniffed at the copperas and sulfur and edged their animals over peat dikes and a vast meadow awash with sand and salt. Here, nearly to the lake margins, they found a boiling spring -- Erastus jumped onto a rock in the middle, judged the spring hot. enough "for scalding hogs," and pronounced it a potential medical miracle. He had, he said, . 39 little desire to remain long upon it. |