Leaving Bear River about midnight, at two o‘clock in the morning of the sixth day we commenced the descent of Echo Canyon, the grandest of all the gully passes of the Wasatch Range. The night was so clear that I was able to make some outline sketches of the cliffs from the ranch where we changed mules. Echo Canyon is the Thermopylæ of Utah, the pass that the Mormons fortified against the United States forces under Albert S. Johnson at the time of “Buchanan‘s raid.” Twenty-six miles long, often not more than a few yards wide at the bottom, and a few hundred feet at the top, with an overhanging cliff on the north side, and a mountain wall on the south, Echo Canyon would be no easy pass to force. Government will do well to prevent the Pacific Railroad from following this defile. After breakfast at Coalville, the Mormon Newcastle, situated in a smiling valley not unlike that between Martigny and Saint Maurice, we dashed on past Kimball‘s Ranch, where we once more hitched horses instead of mules, and began our descent of seventeen miles down Big Canyon, the best of all the passes of the Wasatch. Rounding a spur at the end of our six-hundredth mile from Denver, we first sighted the Mormon promised land. The sun was setting over the great dead lake to our right, lighting up the valley with a silvery gleam from Jordan River, and the hills with a golden glow from off the snow-fields of the many mountain chains and peaks around. In our front, the Oquirrh, or Western Range, stood out in sharp purple outlines upon a sea-colored sky. To our left were the Utah Mountains, blushing rose, all about our heads the Wasatch glowing in orange and gold. From the flat valley in the sunny distance rose the smoke of many houses, the dust of many droves; on the bench-land of Ensign Peak, on the lake side, white houses peeped from among the peach-trees, modestly, and hinted the presence of the city. Here was Plato‘s table-land of the Atlantic isle--one great field of corn and wheat, where only twenty years ago Fremont, the pathfinder, reported wheat and corn impossible. CHAPTER XIV. BRIGHAM YOUNG. “I look upon Mohammed and Brigham as the very best men that God could send as ministers to those unto whom He sent them,” wrote Elder Frederick Evans, of the “Shaker” village of New Lebanon, in a letter to us, inclosing another by way of introduction to the Mormon president. Credentials from the Shaker to the Mormon chief--from the great living exponent of the principle of celibacy to the “most married” in all America--were not to be kept undelivered; so the moment we had bathed we posted off to a merchant to whom we had letters, that we might inquire when his spiritual chief and military ruler would be home again from his “trip north.” The answer was, “To-morrow.”