The climate of the entire upper 'Misery Bottom,' as they term it, is, during a considerable part of Summer and Autumn singularly pestiferous. Its rich soil, which is to a depth far beyond the reach of the plough as fat as the earth of kitchen garden, or compost-heap, is annually the force-bed of a vegetation as rank as that of the Tropics. To render its fatal fertility the greater, it is everywhere freely watered by springs and creeks and larger streams, that flow into it from both sides. In the season of drought, when the Sun enters Virgo, these dry down till they run impure as open sewers, exposing to the day foul broad flats, mere quagmires of black dirt, stretching along for miles, unvaried, except by the limbs of half buried carrion tree trunks, or by occasional yellow pools of what the children call frog spawn; all together steaming up thick vapours redolent of the savour of death. The same is the habit of the Great River. In the beginning of August, its shores hardly could contain the millions of forest logs, and tens of billions of gallons of turbid water, that came rushing down together from its mountain head-gates. But before the month was out, the freshet had all passed by; the river diminished one half, threaded feebly southward through the centre of the Valley, and the mud of its channel, baked and creased, made a wide tile pavement between the choking crowd of reeds and sedgy grasses and wet stalked weeds, and growths of marsh meadow flowers, the garden homes at this tainted season of venom-crazy snakes, and the fresher ooze by the water's edge, which stank in the sun like a naked muscle shoal. Then the plague raged. I have no means of ascertaining the mortality of the Indians who inhabited the Bottom. In 1845, the year previous, which was not more unhealthy, they lost one-ninth of their number in about two months. The Mormons were scourged severely. The exceeding mortality among some of them, was no doubt in the main attributable to the low state to which their systems had been brought by long continued endurance of want and hardship. It is to be remembered also, that they were the first turners up of the prairie sod, and that this of itself made them liable to the sickness of new countries. It was where their agricultural operations had been most considerable, and in situations on the left bank of the river, where the prevalent south-west winds wafted to them the miasmata of its shores, that disease was most rife. [D] In some of these, the fever prevailed to such an extent that hardly any escaped it. They let their cows go unmilked. They wanted for voices to raise the Psalm of Sundays. The few who were able to keep their feet, went about among the tents and wagons with food and water, like nurses through the wards of an Infirmary. Here at one time the digging got behind hand: burials were slow; and you might see women sit in the open tents keeping the flies off their dead children, sometime after decomposition had set in.