it as did the thankful travelers--an interposition of Providence,
and an answer to their prayers--an event to be compared, they
said, to the feeding of Israel with manna in the wilderness of
old.

After over three months' journeying, the pioneer company reached
the valley of the Great Salt Lake; and at the first sight of it,
Brigham Young declared it to be the halting place--the gathering
center for the Saints. But what was there inviting in this
wilderness spread out like a scroll barren of inviting message,
and empty but for the picture it presented of wondrous scenic
grandeur? Looking from the Wasatch barrier, the colonists gazed
upon a scene of entrancing though forbidding beauty. A barren,
arid plain, rimmed by mountains like a literal basin, still
occupied in its lowest parts by the dregs of what had once filled
it to the brim; no green meadows, not a tree worthy the name,
scarce a patch of greensward to entice the adventurous wanderers
into the valley. The slopes were covered with sagebrush,
relieved by patches of chaparral oak and squaw-bush; the wild
sunflower lent its golden hue to intensify the sharp contrasts.
Off to the westward lay the lake, making an impressive,
uninviting picture in its severe, unliving beauty; from its blue
wastes somber peaks rose as precipitous islands, and about the
shores of this dead sea were saline flats that told of the
scorching heat and thirsty atmosphere of this parched region. A
turbid river ran from south to north athwart the valley,
"dividing it in twain," as a historian of the day has written,
"as if the vast bowl in the intense heat of the Master Potter's
fires, in process of formation had cracked asunder." Small
streams of water started in rippling haste from the snow-caps of