"It [the Salt Lake Valley] is isolated from habitable grounds; having inhospitable tracts to the North and South, and the untimbered slope of the Rocky Mountains, nearly a thousand miles wide, on the east, and nearly a thousand miles of arid salt deserts on the west, broken up by frequent ridges of sterile mountains. The Great Basin is * * * over four thousand feet above the ocean. * * * It is a desert in character. * * * In the interior, fresh water becomes scarce, for these hills do not collect sufficient snow in winter * * * * to water the plains; and the consequence follows that these tracts are parched and arid, and frequently so impregnated with alkali as to make them unfit for vegetable life. * * * The land around Salt Lake is flat, and rises imperceptibly on the south and west, * * * and is a soft and sandy barren, irreclaimable for agricultural purposes. On the north the tract is narrow, and the springs bursting out near the surface of the water, the grounds cannot be irrigated." ("The Mormons," by J. W. Gunnison, pages 14, 15, 16.) These descriptions of Utah. Valley warrant Utah's Historian, Bishop Orson F. Whitney, in giving the splendid pen picture he writes of the valley on the arrival of the Pioneers, in saying: "It was no Garden of Hesperides upon which the Pioneers gazed that memorable morning of July 24, 1847. Aside from its scenic splendor, which was indeed glorious, magnificent, there was little to invite and much to repel in the prospect presented to their view. A broad and barren plain, hemmed in by mountains, blistering in the rays of the midsummer sun. No waving fields, no swaying forests, no verdant meadows to rest and refresh the weary eye, but on all sides a seemingly interminable waste of sagebrush, bespangled with sunflowers--the paradise of the lizard, the cricket and the rattle snake. Less than half way across the baked and burning valley, dividing it in twain--as if the vast bowl, in the intense heat of the Master Potter's fires, in process of formation had cracked asunder--a narrow river, turbid and shallow, from south to north in many a serpentine curve, sweeps on its sinuous way. Beyond, a broad lake, the river's goal, dotted with mountain islands; its briny waters shimmering in the sunlight like a silver shield. From the mountains, snow-capped, seamy and craggy, lifting their kingly heads to be crowned by the golden sun, flow limpid, laughing streams, cold and crystal clear, leaping, dashing, foaming, flashing, from rock to glen, from peak to plain. But the fresh canyon streams are far and few, and the arid waste they water, glistening with beds of salt and soda pools of deadly alkali, scarcely allowing them to reach the river, but midway well nigh swallows and absorbs them in the thirsty sands. These, the