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Show 374 WESTERN WILDS, August left Ogden for St. Louis in one of those rolling palaces which make travel over this line such a delight. What a change from the back of an ambling American horse, on which I made the tour of Ari-zona ! And I could but ask myself, somewhat doubtfully, too : shall I ever roll along the line of the Thirty- fifth Parallel Road in a Pull-man palace, as I now ride where four years ago I toiled with mule teams? The change would be no greater than I have seen here. As I neared the Missouri I read that twenty persons had died of sunstroke in one day at St. Louis. And I had spent most of the sum-mer where one needed two blankets at night to keep him warm ! I concluded to wait a week at the delightful city of Lawrence, till nat-ure should cool things oif. The same temperature in the East is much more debilitating to one just from the mountains; it appears more steamy and weakening than in the dry air of Utah and Arizona. But the last night of August a tremendous thunder- storm swept over Kansas and Missouri, and lowered the mercury twenty- five degrees! So I visited St. Louis in comfort, and thence started to make the trip over the Northern Pacific Railroad. One day I lingered at Nauvoo, for I had long been curious to see this old stronghold of the Mormons. Their elders are never weary of telling the people that it is now a ruin, desolate as Tyre or Babylon. I found it a beautiful town of some 3,000 people. It has the pretti-est site in Illinois. The river makes a bend westward nearly in the shape of a U ; the point in the lower part is a mile wide, and lies just high enough above the river for commercial convenience; and thence the hill rises by gentle slopes for two miles eastward. At the upper end of the flat on the river is a splendid steam- boat landing, and about half way around the bend the rapids begin, giving a fine front for manufacturing purposes. Here the Mormons had projected a row of cotton mills; they were to bring the cotton up the river, and with their own operatives, converted from the workshops of England, build up a great manufacturing community. Could they have main-tained peace with their neighbors, they would have had some fifteen years to perfect this scheme before the railroad era superseded river transportation, and Nauvoo would have had too great a start for the tide to turn. They and their apologists of course maintain that the Gentiles were altogether to blame for the breaking up of these fine schemes; but when a man moves six or seven times, and quarrels with the neighbors every time, as they did, I am inclined to conclude that he takes the worst neighbor along with him every move. After the Mormons came the Icarians, a curious but harmless set |