and other Desert tribes, still they have never planned any extensive
raid since the Mormons entered Utah. In every settlement of the saints
you will find from two to a dozen young men who wear their black hair
cut in the Indian fashion, and speak all the surrounding dialects with
native fluency. Whenever a fatly provided wagon-train is to be attacked,
a fine herd of emigrants' beeves stampeded, the mail to be stopped, or
the Gentiles in any way harassed, these desperadoes stain their skin,
exchange their clothes for a breech-clout, and rally a horde of the
savages, whose favor they have always propitiated, for the ambush and
massacre, which in all but the element of brute force is their work in
plan, leadership, and execution. I have multitudes of most interesting
facts to back this assertion, but am already in danger of overrunning my
allowed limits.

The Opera-House was a subject we could agree upon. I was greatly
astonished to find in the desert heart of the continent a place of
public amusement which for capacity, beauty, and comfort has no superior
in America, except the opera-houses of New York, Boston, and
Philadelphia. It is internally constructed somewhat like the first of
these, seats twenty-five hundred people, and commodiously receives five
hundred more, when, as in the present instance, the stage is thrown into
the _parquet_, and the latter boarded up to the level of the former for
dancing. Externally the building is a plain, but not ungraceful
structure, of stone, brick, and stucco. My greatest surprise was excited
by the really exquisite artistic beauty of the gilt and painted
decorations of the great arch over the stage, the cornices, and the
moulding about the _proscenium_-boxes. President Young, with a proper
pride, assured me that every particle of the ornamental work was by
indigenous and saintly hands.

"But you don't know yet," he added, "how independent we are of you at
the East. Where do you think we got that central chandelier, and what d'
ye suppose we paid for it?"

It was a piece of workmanship which would have been creditable to any
New York firm,--apparently a richly carved circle, twined with gilt
vines, leaves, and tendrils, blossoming all over with flaming
wax-lights, and suspended by a massive chain of golden lustre. So I
replied that he probably paid a thousand dollars for it in New York.

"Capital!" exclaimed Brigham. "I made it myself! That circle is a
cartwheel which I washed an