the well-known mountaineer, who had inter-married with the Snakes [Indians], and had a trading post which still bears his name, Fort Bridger, when he met President Brigham Young at the Pioneer camp on the Big Sandy, about the last of June, and learned our destination to be the valley of the Great Salt Lake, he gave us a general outline and description of this country over which he had roamed with the Indians in his hunting and trapping excursions, and expressed grave doubts whether corn could be produced at all in these mountains, he having made experiments in many places with a few seeds, which had failed to mature. So sanguine was he that it could not be done that he proffered to give a thousand dollars for the first ear of corn raised in the valley of the Great Salt Lake, or the valley of the Utah outlet, as he termed it, meaning the valley between Utah lake and Salt Lake. President Young replied to him, 'Wait a little and we will show you.'" (The Utah Pioneers, pages 41-43.) Nor is the fact of Salt Lake valley's desolation witnessed by the testimony of Mormons alone. Howard Stansbury, Captain of the Corps of Topographical Engineers, U.S. Army, in 1852, says: "One of the most unpleasant characteristics of the whole country, is the entire absence of trees from the landscape. The weary traveller plods along, exposed to the full blaze of one eternal sunshine, day after day, and week after week, his eye resting upon naught but interminable plains, bold and naked hills, or bold and rugged mountains; the shady grove, the babbling brook, the dense and solemn forest are things unknown here; and should he by chance light upon some solitary cotton-wood, or pitch his tent amid some stunted willows, the opportunity is hailed with joy, as one of unusual good fortune. The studding, therefore, of this beautiful city [referring to Salt Lake City] with noble trees, will render it, by contrast with the surrounding regions, a second 'Diamond of the Desert.'" (Stansbury's Report, page 129.) Again, Lieutenant J. W. Gunnison of the Topographical Engineers, writing in 1853, said: