which were miniature castles. The mouth of the ravine was a romantic spot: the staples were sister giants of brown rock—here sheer, their sloping—where pines and firs found a precarious roothold, and ranged in long perspective lines, while between them, through its channel, verdant with willow, and over a clear pebbly bed, under the screes and scaurs, coursed a mountain torrent more splendid than Ruknabad.
We forded the torrent and pursued the road, now hugging the right, then the left side of the chasm. The latter was exceedingly beautiful, misty with the blue of heaven, and rising till its solidity was blent with the tenuity of ether. The rest of the scenery was that of the great Cotton-wood Kanyon; painting might express the difference, language can not. After six miles of a narrow winding road, we reached the place of Cataracts, the principal lion of the place, and found that the season had reduced them to two thin milky lines coursing down bitumen-colored slopes of bare rock, bordered by shaggy forests of firs and cedars. The shrinking of the water's volume lay bare the formation of the cascades, two steps and a slope, which at a happier time would have been veiled by a continuous sheet of foam.
After finding a suitable spot we outspanned, and, while recruiting exhausted nature, allowed our mules to roll and rest. After dining and collecting a few shells, we remounted and drove back through a magnificent sunset to American Fork, where the bishop, Mr. Lysander Dayton, of Ohio, had offered us bed and board. The good episkopos was of course a Mormon, as we could see by his two pretty wives; he supplied us with an excellent supper as a host, not as an innkeeper. The little settlement was Great Salt Lake City on a small scale—full of the fair sex; every one, by-the-by, appeared to be, or about to be, a mother. Fair, but, alas! not fair to us; it was verily
"Water, water every where,
And not a drop to drink!"
Before setting out homeward on the next day we met O. Porter Rockwell, and took him to the house with us. This old Mormon, in days gone by, suffered or did not suffer imprisonment for shooting or not shooting Governor Boggs, of Missouri: he now herds cattle for Messrs. Russell and Co. His tastes are apparently rural; his enemies declare that his life would not be safe in the City of the Saints. An attempt had lately been made to assassinate him in one of the kanyons, and the first report that reached my ears when en route to California was the murder of the old Danite by a certain Mr. Marony. He is one of the triumvirate, the First Presidency of "executives," the two others being Ephe Hanks and Bill Hickman—whose names were loud in the land; they are now, however, going down; middle age has rendered them comparatively inactive, and the rising generation, Lot Huntington, Ike Clawson, and other desperadoes, whose teeth
