The atrocities culminated in the Mountain Meadows massacre in 1857, when hundreds of men, women, and children were murdered by men armed and clothed as Indians, but sworn to by some who escaped as being whites. Porter Rockwell has had the infamy of this tremendous slaughter piled on to the huge mass of his earlier deeds of blood--whether rightly or wrongly, who shall say? The man that I saw was the man that Captain Burton saw in 1860. His death was solemnly recorded in the autumn of that year, yet of the identity of the person I saw with the person described by Captain Burton there can be no question. The bald, frowning forehead, the sinister smile, the long grizzly curls falling upon the back, the red cheek, the coal beard, the gray eye, are not to be mistaken. Rockwell or not, he is a man capable of any deed. I had his photograph in my pocket, and wanted to get him to sign it; but when, in awe of his glittering bowie and of his fame, I asked, by way of caution, the ranchman--a new-come Paddy--whether Rockwell could write, the fellow told me with many an oath that “the boss” was as innocent of letters as a babe. “As for writin’,” he said, “cuss me if he‘s on it. You bet he‘s not--you bet.” Not far beyond Rockwell‘s, we drove close to the bench-land; and I was able to stop for a moment and examine the rocks. From the veranda of the Mormon poet Naisbitt‘s house in Salt Lake City, I had remarked a double line of terrace running on one even level round the whole of the great valley to the south, cut by nature along the base alike of the Oquirrh and the Wasatch. I had thought it possible that the terrace was the result of the varying hardness of the strata; but, near Black Rock, on the overland track, I discovered that where the terrace lines have crossed the mountain precipices, they are continued merely by deep stains upon the rocks. The inference is that within extremely recent, if not historic times, the water has stood at these levels from two to three hundred feet above the present Great Salt Lake City, itself 4500 feet above the sea. Three days’ journey farther west, on the Reese‘s River Range, I detected similar stains. Was the whole basin of the Rocky Mountains--here more than a thousand miles across--once filled with a huge sea, of which the two Sierras were the shores, and the Wasatch, Goshoot, Waroja, Toi, Abbé, Humboldt, Washoe, and a hundred other ranges, the rocks and isles? The Great Salt Lake is but the largest of many such. I saw one on Mirage Plains that is salter than its greater fellow. Carson Sink is evidently the bed of a smaller bitter lake; and there are salt pools in dozens scattered through Ruby and Smoky Valleys. The Great Salt Lake itself is sinking year by year, and the sage-brush is gaining upon the alkali desert throughout the Grand Plateau. All these signs point to the rapid drying-up of a great sea, owing to an alteration of climatic conditions.