The least poetical man who traverses these giant fissures cannot help feeling their fitness as the avenues to a paradoxical region, an anomalous civilization, and a people whose psychological problem is the most unsolvable of the nineteenth century.  During the Mormon War, Brigham Young made some rude attempts at a fortification of the great Echo Canon, half a day’s journey from his city, and this work still remains intact.  He need not have done it; a hundred men, ambushed among the ledges at the top of the canon-walls, and well provided with loose rocks and Minie-rifles, could convert the defile into a new Thermopylae, without exposure to themselves.  In an older and more superstitious age, the unassisted horrors of Nature herself would have repelled an invading host from the passage of this grizzly canon, as the profane might have been driven from the galleries of Isis or Eleusis.

About forty miles from Salt Lake City we began to find Nature’s barrenness succumbing to the truly marvellous industry of the Mormon people.  To understand the exquisite beauty of simple green grass, you must travel through eight hundred miles of sage-brush and grama,—­the former, the homely gray-leaved plant of our Eastern goose-stuffing, grown into a dwarf tree six feet high, with a twisted trunk sometimes as thick as a man’s body; the latter, a stunted species of herbage, growing in ash-tinted spirals, only two inches from the ground, and giving the Plains an appearance of being matted with curled hair or gray corkscrews.  Its other name is “buffalo-grass”; and in spite of its dinginess, with the assistance of the sage, converting all the Plains west of Fort Kearney into a model Quaker landscape, it is one of the most nutritious varieties of cattle-fodder, and for hundreds of miles the emigrant-drover’s only dependence.

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 canons 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.  Contrasting the Mormon settlements with their surrounding desolation, we could not wonder that their success has fortified this people in their delusion.  The superficial student of rewards and punishments might well believe that none but God’s chosen people could cause this horrible desert, after such triumphant fashion, to blossom like the rose.