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THE CITY OF THE SAINTS.
Chap. VII.

cipal are Mill Creek, Big Cotton-wood, Little Cotton-wood, Dry Cotton-wood, and Willow Creek. The names are translated from the Indians, and we saw from the road traces of the aborigines, who were sweeping crickets and grass-seed into their large conical baskets—among these ragged gleaners we looked in vain for a Ruth. Near Big Cotton-wood, where there is a settlement distant seven miles from the city, an English woman came across the fields and complained that she had been frightened by four Indian braves who had been riding by to bring in a stolen horse. The waters of the kanyons are exceedingly cool, sweet, and clear, and suggested frequent reference to a superior kind of tap which had been stored away within the trap. In proportion as we left the city, the sterility of the River Valley increased; cultivation was unseen except upon the margins of the streams, and the look of the land was "real mean." In front of us lay the denticulated bench bounding the southern end of the valley.

After twenty miles from the city we reached a ranch on rising ground, near the water-gate of the Jordan. It was built at an expense of $17,000, and was called the Utah Brewery. Despite, however, the plenty of hop and barley, the speculation proved a failure, and the house had become a kind of mail-station. Between it and the river were a number of little rush-girt "eyes"—round pools, some hot, others cold—and said to be unfathomable; that is to say, from twenty to thirty fathoms deep. They related that a dragoon, slipping with his charger into one of them, found a watery grave, where a drier death might have been expected. At the ranch we rested for an hour, but called in vain for food. From the Utah Brewery, which is about half way, drivers reckon twenty-two miles to Camp Floyd, making a total of forty-two to forty-three miles between the head-quarters of the saint and the sinner, and we therefore looked forward to a "banian day."

About noon we hitched to and proceeded to ascend Traverse Mountain, a ridge-like spur of the Wasach, running east and west. It separates the Valley of the Northern or Great Salt Lake from the basin of the Utah, or Sweetwater Lake, to the southward, and is broken through by the waters of Jordan. The young river—called Piya Ogwap, or the Big Water, by the Shoshonees—here rushes in a foaming shallow stream, that can barely float a dugout, over a rocky, pebbly bed, in the sole of a deep but short kanyon, which winds its way through the cross range. The descent is about 100 feet in two miles, after which the course serpentines, the banks fall, and the current becomes gentle.

As we toiled up the Dug-way, the graded incline that runs along the shoulder of the mountain, we saw a fine back view of the Happy Valley through an atmosphere clear as that of the English littoral before rain. Advancing higher, we met, face to face, an ambulance full of uniform en route to the Holy City, drawn by four neat mules, and accompanied by strikers—military serv-