that sense of
standing on the water-shed of a hemisphere. You have reached the secret
spot where the world clasps her girdle; your feet are on its granite
buckle; perhaps there sparkles in your eyes that fairest gem of her
cincture, a crystal fountain, from which her belt of rivers flows in two
opposite ways. Yesterday you crossed the North Platte, almost at its
source (for it rises out of the snow among the Wind-River Mountains, and
out of your stage-windows you can see, from Laramie Plains, the Lander's
Peak which Bierstadt has made immortal); that stream runs into the sea
from whose historic shores you came; you might drop a waif upon its
ripples with the hope of its reaching New Orleans, New York, Boston, or
even Liverpool. To-morrow you will be ferried over Green River, as near
its source,--a stream whose cradle is in the same snow-peaks as the
Platte,--whose mysterious middle-life, under the new name of the
Colorado, flows at the bottom of those tremendous fissures, three
thousand feet deep, which have become the wonder of the
geologist,--whose grave, when it has dribbled itself away into the
dotage of shallows and quicksands, is the desert-margined Gulf of
California and the Pacific Sea. Between Green River and the Mormon city
no human interest divides your perpetually strained attention with
Nature. Fort Bridger, a little over a day's stage-ride east of the city,
is a large and quite a populous trading-post and garrison of the United
States; but although we found there a number of agreeable officers,
whose acquaintance with their wonderful surroundings was thorough and
scientific, and though at that period the fort was a rendezvous for our
only faithful friend among the Utah Indians, Washki, the Snake chief,
and that handful of his tribe who still remained loyal to their really
noble leader and our Government, Fort Bridger left the shadowiest of
impressions on my mind, compared with the natural glories of the
surrounding scenery.

Mormondom being my theme, and my space so limited, I must resist the
temptation to give detailed accounts of the many marvellous masterpieces
of mimetic art into which we find the rocks of this region everywhere
carved by the hand of Nature. Before we came to the North Platte, we
were astonished by a ship, equalling the Great Eastern in size, even
surpassing it in beauty of outline, its masts of columnar sandstone
snapped by a storm, its prodigious hulk laboring in a gloomy sea of
ho