. To California and back;. account of thehistory of the second colony, and hid his own tabletswhere they were found by Joseph Smith and by himmiraculously translated. The basis of the religiousteaching is Biblical; the exposition constitutes Lat-ter Day sanctity. The followers of Young found the Salt Lake Val-ley a desert of unproductiveness, despite the beautyof its contour. They made it an unprecedentedoasis, a broad garden of lovely fertility. A band ofpauper zealots, they camped upon a barren and com-pelled it to sustain them. They found inspiration inthe striking topographical resemblance
. To California and back;. account of thehistory of the second colony, and hid his own tabletswhere they were found by Joseph Smith and by himmiraculously translated. The basis of the religiousteaching is Biblical; the exposition constitutes Lat-ter Day sanctity. The followers of Young found the Salt Lake Val-ley a desert of unproductiveness, despite the beautyof its contour. They made it an unprecedentedoasis, a broad garden of lovely fertility. A band ofpauper zealots, they camped upon a barren and com-pelled it to sustain them. They found inspiration inthe striking topographical resemblance between theirDeseret and Palestine, and gave the name Jordan toihe little river that joined their two contrasting watersas old Jordan joins the Sea of Tiberias with the DeadSea. They chose a site for Zion, and in its center,in 1S53, they laid the foundations of the Temple,which the predetermined forty years of building willhardly bring to completion. And as the governmentwas of the Church, so the Temple was regarded as117. the pivot of Zion. The ordinal numbers, combinedwith the four cardinal points, still serve to distin-guish the different streets of the city, as clearly in-dicating the exact relation of each to the location ofthe great edifice. Second West Street, East FifthSouth Street, and the like, are finger-posts that guidethe stranger infallibly to the Mormon mecca. It was a curious reversion to the old patriarchalidea of life, foreign to the spirit of our time, and soforedoomed to failure; but the dreamers had hardmuscles and determined souls. They grubbed bush-es, they dug ditches, they irrigated, they fought thegrasshopper, they subsisted on the substance of thingshoped for, enduring extremes of hunger and priva-tion in the first years of their grapple with the des-ert. And by the time the reluctance of earth hadbeen overcome and material prosperity had been won,the westward flow of emigration had brought aboutthe human conflict once more. The records of thatconfli
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