Chapter III (5)

The road through the faubourg was marked by posts and rails, which, as we advanced toward the heart of the city, were replaced by neat palings. The garden-plots were small, as sweet earth must be brought down from the mountains; and the flowers were principally those of the Old Country--the red French bean, the rose, the geranium, and the single pink; the ground or winter cherry was common; so were nasturtiums; and we saw tansy, but not that plant for which our souls, well-nigh weary of hopes of juleps long deferred, chiefly lusted--mint. The fields were large and numerous, but the Saints have too many and various occupations to keep them, Moravian-like, neat and trim; weeds overspread the ground; often the wild sunflower-tops outnumbered the heads of maize. The fruit had suffered from an unusually nipping frost in May; the peach-trees were barren; the vines bore no produce; only a few good apples were in Mr. Brigham Young’s garden, and the watermelons were poor, yellow, and tasteless, like the African. On the other hand, potatoes, onions, cabbages, and cucumbers were good and plentiful, the tomato was ripening every where, fat full-eared wheat rose in stacks, and crops of excellent hay were scattered about near the houses. The people came to their doors to see the mail-coach, as if it were the “Derby dilly” of old, go by. I could not but be struck by the modified English appearance of the colony, and by the prodigious numbers of the white-headed children.

[THE HOTEL IN NEW ZION.]

Presently we debouched upon the main thoroughfare, the centre of population and business, where the houses of the principal Mormon dignitaries and the stores of the Gentile merchants combine to form the city’s only street which can be properly so called. It is, indeed, both street and market, for, curious to say, New Zion has not yet built for herself a bazar or market-place. Nearly opposite the Post-office, in a block on the eastern side, with a long veranda, supported by trimmed and painted posts, was a two-storied, pent-roofed building, whose sign-board, swinging to a tall, gibbet-like flag-staff, dressed for the occasion, announced it to be the Salt Lake House, the principal, if not the only establishment of the kind in New Zion. In the Far West, one learns not to expect much of the hostelry;[128] I had not seen aught so grand for many a day. Its depth is greater than its frontage, and behind it, secured by a _porte cochère_, is a large yard for corraling cattle. A rough-looking crowd of drivers, drivers’ friends, and idlers, almost every man openly armed with revolver and bowie-knife, gathered round the doorway to greet Jim, and “prospect” the “new lot;” and the host came out to assist us in transporting our scattered effects. We looked vainly for a bar on the ground floor; a bureau for registering names was there, but (temperance, in public at least, being the order of the day) the usual tempting array of bottles and decanters was not forthcoming; up stairs we found a Gentile ballroom, a tolerably furnished sitting-room, and bedchambers, apparently made out of a single apartment by partitions too thin to be strictly agreeable. The household had its deficiencies; blacking, for instance, had run out, and servants could not be engaged till the expected arrival of the hand-cart train. However, the proprietor, Mr. Townsend, a Mormon, from the State of Maine--when expelled from Nauvoo, he had parted with land, house, and furniture for $50--who had married an Englishwoman, was in the highest degree civil and obliging, and he attended personally to our wants, offered his wife’s services to Mrs. Dana, and put us all in the best of humors, despite the closeness of the atmosphere, the sadness ever attending one’s first entrance into a new place, the swarms of “emigration flies”--so called because they appear in September with the emigrants, and, after living for a month, die off with the first snow--and a certain populousness of bedstead, concerning which the less said the better. Such, gentle reader, are the results of my first glance at Zion on the tops of the mountains, in the Holy City of the Far West.

[128] I subjoin one of the promising sort of advertisements:

“Tom Mitchell!!! dispenses comfort to the weary (!), feeds the hungry
(!!), and cheers the gloomy (!!!), at his old, well-known stand,
thirteen miles east of Fort Des Moines. _Don’t pass by me._”

Our journey had occupied nineteen days, from the 7th to the 25th of August, both included; and in that time we had accomplished not less than 1136 statute miles.