In the afternoon we drove round the city and suburbs, and up to Fort Douglas, a well-built full-regiment post, situated on a plateau three miles east of the city. It is well laid out, and the officers' quarters, in charming little villas embowered in creepers and green foliage, are exceedingly pleasant to look at. Our driver was an Englishman, a thirty-years' resident, who had married a Mormon wife (now dead), but he was careful to tell us that he was and always had been a Gentile, though for the sake of peace and quietness, and, in the early days, personal safety, he had duly paid his "tithing." He prided himself in having driven Hepworth Dixon during his stay here, and in having "introduced" Lord Carrington to President Taylor! The stories he volunteered to tell us were perhaps more facetious than veracious. I will only add that the city in its outward appearance has left a most favourable impression on me—it is pleasantly situated at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains, which rise on the east to a height of from 10,000 to 12,000 feet, and are covered with snow nearly all the year. The city occupies a series of terraces, and, with its houses half hidden in shade and fruit-trees, it presents the appearance of a beautiful green oasis in the midst of a desert. [Illustration] [Illustration: CLIFFS OF ECHO CAÑON.] [Illustration] LETTER No. XV. Leave for Cheyenne—"Rock Springs"—Murder of Chinese—Mr. Black's "Green Pastures" and bottle of champagne—"Hell upon Wheels"—Big Horn Cowboy and Milord. _Cheyenne, Oct., 1885._ We left Salt Lake City by the Union Pacific Railway on Wednesday at 7.50 a.m., and we reached Cheyenne at 10.30 a.m. on Thursday. It is impossible for me to describe or even to mention the many objects of interest and points of beautiful scenery through which this line passes. How can one describe in a few hurried words such scenes as those to be found in "The Echo Cañon," "The Devil's Gate," "The Devil's Gate Mountain," and "The Devil's Slide"?[6] The makers of this road, or the early pioneers, seem to have had a great liking for his black majesty, or they would not have given his name to such splendid scenery. Footnote 6: It will be remembered that the Devil has another slide in the Yellowstone Park. [Illustration: "THE DEVIL'S SLIDE," WEBER CAÑON.] About two hundred miles east of Ogden we passed a place called "Rock Springs," where a number of Chinamen had been brutally massacred by white miners a week or two before. Two Chinamen had taken up a white man's "chamber," and when ordered out the Chinamen went at them with their picks. A general battle ensued, in which two men were shot. At night their village was set fire to, and it was said that several Chinamen in trying to escape from the fire were shot down by the miners, and about fifteen others perished in the flames.