CHAPTER IV.'
THE MORMONS.
Rapid settlement of the West - A forecast-Salt Lake ValleyWhat the Mormons have accomplished there - Proposed emigration to Sonora - Their rise, doctrine and present status.
RULY, the United States is a region where marvels of every sort fellow one another so swiftly that one can scarcely follow them or believe what he hears. Towns and villages appear as if by enchantment. In 18372 I traversed a desert of some hundred and fifty leagues in which there was neither a house nor a cabin to give shelter to the traveler; once in a great while I met an Indian out hunting. Will you believe it? to-day that desert contains upwards of fifty cities, towns and villages, and thousands of the finest farms that one could ask to see.
The first civilized man who set up his tent amongst the Indians on the spot where now stands St. Louis, has just recently died. He built the first house; he leaves a city which contains already go,ooo to ooo,ooo inhabitants, and which will have 20o,ooo before 1860. I have just been down and up the Mississippi and the Ohio for more than 400 leagues. I know plenty of people here who remember the time when the Indian was lord of those waters and the whites only navigated them in secret, or else in large numbers and well armed; today, on those two rivers and their tributaries, over 700 steamboats, like floating palaces, sail majestically in all their
1 Extract from a letter to his nephew Charles, March, 1851 (in French).
2 This date is wrong. It was probably 1838. (14021