My Native Land: The United States: its Wonders, its Beauties, and its People; with Descriptive Notes, Character Sketches, Folk Lore, Traditions, Legends and History, for the Amusement of the Old and the Instruction of the YoungCox, James
History
My Native Land: The United States: its Wonders, its Beauties, and its People; with Descriptive Notes, Character Sketches, Folk Lore, Traditions, Legends and History, for the Amusement of the Old and the Instruction of the Young
Cox, James
Indians of North America; United States -- Description and travel; United States -- Social life and customs -- 1865-1918
It is just possible that this wonderful lake may in course of time
disappear entirely. Some years ago its width was over 40 miles on an
average, and its length was very much greater. Now it barely measures
100 miles from end to end and the width varies from 10 to 60 miles. In
the depth the gradual curtailment has been more apparent. At one time
the average depth was many hundred feet, and several soundings of 1,000
feet were taken, with the result reported, in sailors' parlance, of "No
bottom." At the present time the depth varies from 40 to 100 feet, and
appears to be lessening steadily, presumably because of the
extraordinary deposit of solid matter from the very dense waters with
which it is filled.
The lake is a bathers' paradise, and the arrangements for bathing from
Garfield Beach are like everything else in the land of the Mormons,
extraordinary to a degree. In one year there were nearly half a million
bathers accommodated at the four principal resorts, and so rapidly are
these bathing resorts and establishments multiplied, that the day is not
distant when every available site on the eastern shore of the lake will
be appropriated for the purpose. As a gentleman who has bathed in this
lake again and again says, it seems preposterous to speak of the finest
sea-bathing on earth a thousand miles from the ocean, although the
bathing in Great Salt Lake infinitely surpasses anything of the kind on
either the Atlantic or Pacific coasts.
The water contains many times more salt, and much more soda, sulphur,
magnesia, chlorine, bromine and potassium than any ocean water on the
globe. It is powerful in medicinal virtues, curing or benefiting many
forms of rheumatism, rheumatic gout, dyspepsia, nervous disorders and
cutaneous diseases, and it acts like magic on the hair of those
unfortunates whose tendencies are to bald-headedness. It is a prompt and
potent tonic and invigorant of body and mind, and then there is no end
of fun in getting acquainted with its peculiarities. A first bath in it
is always as good as a circus, the bather being his or her own trick
mule. The specific gravity is but a trifle less than that of the Holy
Land Dead Sea.
The human body will not and cannot sink in it. You can walk out in it
where it is fifty feet deep, and your body will stick up out of it like
a fishing-cork from the shoulders upward. You can sit down in it
perfectly secure where it is fathoms deep. Men lie on top of it with
their arms under their heads and smoking cigars. Its buoyancy is
indescribable and unimaginable. Any one can float upon it at the first
trial; there is nothing to do but lie down gently upon it and float.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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