The wide valley, the broad expanse of the lake with its mountainous islands, miles in extent, and the encircling ranges, formed an amphitheatre of unexampled grandeur and rugged beauty. The valley itself at that time was a vast desert without tree or shrub, nothing but the wild sage-brush and the white alkali soil could be seen, if we except the scrub-oaks and lebanon cedars that covered the mountain sides and the emerald colored waters of the lake. Utah was then Mexican Territory, and this fact, as much perhaps as any other, determined Brigham Young to settle there. When the exodus from Nauvoo took place, the Mormons were roughly estimated at four thousand souls and probably about that number made the first settlement in Utah; but they have increased now to over two hundred and fifty thousand in the United States with societies in England, Wales and Scandinavia, all flourishing and sending yearly to Salt Lake as many as they can find means to transport. The history of this people will probably never be fully written, but they endured hardships, privations, sufferings, torture and death. Their settlement of Utah was one of extreme peril and anxiety, and for years it was a question whether they would survive or perish. Had they been actuated by conscience, by pure religious zeal, by patriotism, by any of the nobler sentiments, they would have made an enviable reputation in history and gone down to posterity as a society commanding the respect and veneration of the world; but when it is known that no community or state even would tolerate them and that they sought this uninhabitable wild, this unknown and then foreign territory, to escape the punishment of their crimes, and to practise an abhorrent and barbarous tenet of their faith, their glory departs and they look and will look in the light of history abject and pitiable. Some conception of their great undertaking in crossing the continent may be imagined when we reflect there were no roads, no known way across the vast arid plains, no mountain cuts, no bridged streams, no drinking water for miles upon miles with long tedious marches resulting in sickness and death.