The corporate limits aggregate about fifty square miles; no city in the world, perhaps, possesses streets of such an extraordinary width.  Through their whole vast length the magnificent trees which fringe them are irrigated by streams of pure water flowing from the several canyons in the vicinity.  By this constant passage of these mountain streams, the air is deliciously cooled, and Salt Lake City made one of the most beautiful and charming places on the North American continent.

It is declared by the faithful that Brigham Young affirmed it was in a vision that the place was designated to him by an angel from heaven as the exact spot where the capital of Zion should be built.

By the requirements of an original ordinance each residence was to be located twenty feet in the rear of the lot, the intervening space forming a little park filled with flowers, trees, and shrubbery.  By the same system of irrigation which flows through the streets to nourish the trees, the water runs into every garden spot, and produces a beauty of verdure in what was once the most barren of wastes.

Even in its infancy, Salt Lake City was the only charming spot between the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean, for in the early days of the hazardous passage across the plains, the whole region with rare exceptions was conspicuous for the entire absence of trees.  There was one monotonous blaze of sunshine, day after day, as the caravans and overland coaches plodded through the alkali dust of the desert.  The weary traveller gazed upon nothing but seemingly interminable prairies and naked elevations, destitute of verdure, or as he entered the rock-ribbed Continental Divide, only rugged mountains relieved the eternal sameness of his surroundings.  Salt Lake City, nestling in its wealth of trees and flowers, was a second “Diamond of the Desert.”  In its welcome shade, the dusty traveller, like the solitary Sir Kenneth, reposed his jaded limbs and dreamed of the babbling brooks and waving woodlands he had left a thousand miles behind him.

The temple and the tabernacle, of purely Mormon conception, are the most elaborate and attractive architectural structures in the city.

It is claimed by the faithful that the site of the temple was announced by Brigham Young to his people on an evening in July, 1847, a very short time after the arrival of the Mormon pioneers.  The story runs that while roaming in company with some of his apostles, about the region of the camp, discussing and declaring that where they had halted was the very place on which to rear the new Zion, the prophet stuck his cane in the ground and said to those who were with him, “Here is where the temple of our God shall rise.”

Of course there was no appeal from his dictum, and from the moment of his declaration that spot was regarded as sacred by all the people, who firmly believed that when their leader spoke it was through inspiration from heaven.