| OCR Text |
Show UTAH ARGENTIFERA. 181 tic, though mingling the useful and waste, and filling the tourist with delight, are its lake of pure brine covering 4,000 square miles, and its 25,000 square miles of white deserts and sand plains ; its narrow, fertile valleys with irrigating streams and water tanks, with an orient-alized population, half pastoral, half agricultural, and wholly peculiar and heterogeneous; its long, long wastes, crossed only by winding trails ; the sand storms on the deserts, and the mild air of the val-leys all combining in one's imagination to invest the picture with' a charm which has all the delight of romance, and all the permanence of reality. It does not seem possible that a region of such interest should long remain under the blighting domination of an incestuous priesthood. When the present depression in business is past, and the mining development continues, this Territory must, ere many years, reach an annual yield of twenty- five millions in minerals. The result will be wealth and cultivation, progress and a fixed Gentile population. Every year there are more permanent settlers, and fewer hasten away as soon as they have made a fortune. With its favorable climate, and the physical and intellectual culture to follow this season of moral storms; with a more homogeneous population and a republican gov-ernment, the result must eventually be a state of society in Utah which will cause Mormonism to be forgotten, or remembered only as the " Stone Age in Art" is remembered by archaeologists. |
