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Updated: May 18, 2025
All combined to produce in me a feeling of the utmost wonder and astonishment. Emerging from Echo Cañon and the Castle Rocks, we enter a milder valley, where we crawl over a trestle-bridge 450 feet long and 75 feet high. Shortly after passing Wahsatch Station, we cross the Aspen Summit and reach an opener country.
By incredible labor, bringing down rivulets from the snow-peaks of the Wahsatch range and distributing them over the levels by every ingenious device known to artificial irrigation, the Mormon farmers have converted the bottoms of the cañons through which we approached Salt Lake into fertile fields and pasture-lands, whose emerald sweep soothed our eyes wearied with so many leagues of ashen monotony, as an old home-strain mollifies the ear irritated by the protracted rhythmic clash or the dull, steady buzz of iron machinery.
On leaving Omaha, it passes along the left bank of the Platte River as far as the junction of its northern branch, follows its southern branch, crosses the Laramie territory and the Wahsatch Mountains, turns the Great Salt Lake, and reaches Salt Lake City, the Mormon capital, plunges into the Tuilla Valley, across the American Desert, Cedar and Humboldt Mountains, the Sierra Nevada, and descends, via Sacramento, to the Pacific its grade, even on the Rocky Mountains, never exceeding one hundred and twelve feet to the mile.
Scarcely was it in plain sight ere it was upon us, racing across the Jordan, over the city, and up the slopes of the Wahsatch, eclipsing all the landscapes in its course the bending trees, the dust streamers, and the wild onrush of everything movable giving it an appreciable visibility that rendered it grand and inspiring.
This species is widely distributed throughout the Rocky Mountains, and over all the higher of the many ranges of the Great Basin, between the Wahsatch Mountains and the Sierra, where it is known as White Pine.
They are, therefore, necessarily scattered along the line of the main Wahsatch range, from the Roseaux River, which flows into the Salt Lake from the north, to the Vegas of the Santa Clara, a distance of nearly four hundred miles. The labor expended in ditching has been immense, but it has been confined wholly to tapping the smaller streams.
At length we cross the Pass of the Wahsatch Mountains at Soldier Summit, 7,465 feet above the sea, and some thirty miles farther west we enter the picturesque Utah Valley. At length we see the stream of the River Jordan, which is the connecting link between Utah Lake and the Great Salt Lake, and at last we find ourselves in the city founded by Brigham Young and his pioneer followers in 1847.
From the slopes of the Wahsatch foothills, or old lake benches, toward Fort Douglas it is seen to occupy the sloping gravelly delta of City Creek, a fine, hearty stream that comes pouring from the snows of the mountains through a majestic glacial canyon; and it is just where this stream comes forth into the light on the edge of the valley of the Jordan that the Mormons have built their new Jerusalem.
From them, in the clear noon sunshine, the broken line of the Wahsatch and Uinta Ranges is visible along the horizon; but through the morning and evening haze, only the tracery of their white crests can be discerned. The valleys of the Bear and Weber Rivers are peculiarly beautiful, the latter almost realizing the dream of the Valley of Rasselas.
The principal mountain chains, trending nearly north and south, parallel with the Sierra and the Wahsatch, receive a good deal of snow during winter, but no great masses are stored up as fountains for large perennial streams capable of irrigating considerable areas.
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