ughout one
hungry winter in particular, thousands of the people subsisted chiefly
on the bulbs of the tulips, called "sego" by the Indians, who taught
them its use.

Liliaceous women and girls are rare among the Mormons. They have seen
too much hard, repressive toil to admit of the development of lily
beauty either in form or color. In general they are thickset, with large
feet and hands, and with sun-browned faces, often curiously freckled
like the petals of Fritillaria atropurpurea. They are fruit rather than
flower--good brown bread. But down in the San Pitch Valley at Gunnison,
I discovered a genuine lily, happily named Lily Young. She is a
granddaughter of Brigham Young, slender and graceful, with lily-white
cheeks tinted with clear rose, She was brought up in the old Salt Lake
Zion House, but by some strange chance has been transplanted to this
wilderness, where she blooms alone, the "Lily of San Pitch." Pitch is an
old Indian, who, I suppose, pitched into the settlers and thus acquired
fame enough to give name to the valley. Here I feel uneasy about the
name of this lily, for the compositors have a perverse trick of making
me say all kinds of absurd things wholly unwarranted by plain copy, and
I fear that the "Lily of San Pitch" will appear in print as the widow of
Sam Patch. But, however this may be, among my memories of this strange
land, that Oquirrh mountain, with its golden lilies, will ever rise in
clear relief, and associated with them will always be the Mormon lily of
San Pitch.

X. The San Gabriel Valley [12]

The sun valley of San Gabriel is one of the brightest spots to be found
in all our bright land, and most of its brightness is wildness--wild
south sunshine in a basin rimmed about with mountains and hills.
Cultivation is not wholly wanting, for here are the choices of all the
Los Angeles orange groves, but its glorious abundance of ripe sun and
soil is only beginning to be coined into fruit. The drowsy bits of
cultivation accomplished by the old missionaries and the more recent
efforts of restless Americans are scarce as yet visible, and when
comprehended in general views form nothing more than mere freckles on
the smooth brown bosom of the Valley.

I entered the sunny south half a month ago, coming down along the cool
sea, and landing at Santa Monica. An hour's ride over stretches of bare,
brown plain, and through cornfields and orange groves, brought me to the
handsome, conceited lit