| OCR Text |
Show 196 THE CITY OF THE SAINTS. CHAP, HI. sprinkled with thin grass, in places showing a suspicious whiteness, with few flowers, and chiefly producing a salsolaceous plant like the English samphire. In many places lay long rows of bare circlets, like deserted tent-floors; .they proved to be ant-hills, on which light ginger-colored swarms were working hard to throw up the sand and gravel that every where in this valley underlie the surface. The eastern valley-bench, upon whose western declivity the city lies, may be traced on a clear day along the base of the mountains for a distance of twenty miles: its average breadth is about eight miles. After advancing about l-50 mile over the bench ground, the city by slow degrees broke upon our sight. It showed, one may readily believe, to special advantage after the succession of Indian lodges, Canadian ranchos, and log-hut mail-stations of the prairies and the mountains. The site has been admirably chosen for drainage and irrigation-so well, indeed, that a " Deus ex machina" must be brought to account for it.* About two miles north, and overlooking the settlements from a height of 400 feet, a detached cone, called Ensign Peak or Ensign Mount, rises at the end of a chain which, projected westward from the main range of the heights, overhangs and shelters the northeastern corner of the valley. Upon this " big toe of the Wasach range," as it is called by a local writer, the spirit of the martyred prophet, Mr. Joseph Smith, appeared to his successor, Mr. Brigham Young, and pointed out to him the position of the New Temple, which, after Zion had "got up into the high mountain," was to console the Saints for the loss of Nauvoo the Beautiful. The city-it is about two miles broad.-runs parallel with the right bank of the Jordan, which forms its western limit. It is twelve to fifteen miles distant from the western range, ten from the debouchure of the river, and eight to nine from the nearest point of the lake-a respectful distance, which is not the least of the position's merits. It occupies the rolling brow of a slight decline at the western base of the Wasach- in fact, the lower, but not the lowest level of the eastern valley-bench ; it has thus a compound slope from north to south, on the line of its water supplies, and from east to west, thus enabling it to drain off into the river. The city revealed itself, as we approached, from behind its screen, the inclined terraces of the upper table-land, and at last it lay stretched before us as upon a map. At a little distance the * I have frequently heard this legend from Gentiles, never from Mormons; yet even the Saints own that as early as 1842 .visions of the mountains and kanyons, the valley and the lake, were revealed to Mr. Joseph Smith, jun., who declared it privily to the disciples whom he loved. Thus Messrs. O. Pratt and E. Snow, apostles, were enabled to recognize the Promised Land, as, the first of the pioneers, they issued from the ravines of the Wasach. Of course the Gentiles declare that the exodists hit upon the valley by the purest chance. The spot is becoming classical: here Judge and Apostle Phelps preached his " Sermon on the Mount," which, anti-Mormons say, was a curious contrast to the first discourse so named. |
