oward them,
and was supplying an ampler market for the sale of their produce than
they had enjoyed since the years when the overland emigration to
California culminated. Nevertheless, their regrets, if entertained at
all, found no public and concerted utterance. The authority of the
Church exacted a sullen demeanor toward all Gentiles.

The 24th of July, the great Mormon anniversary, was suffered to pass
without celebration; but its recurrence must have suggested anxious
thoughts and bitter recollections to a great part of the population.
When they remembered their enthusiastic declaration of independence
only one year before, the warlike demonstrations which followed it, the
prophecies of Young that the Lord would smite the army as he smote the
hosts of Sennacherib, the fever of hate and apprehension into which they
had been worked, and contrasted that period of excitement with their
present condition, they must, indeed, have found abundant material for
meditation. By the emigration southward they had lost at least four
months of the most valuable time of the year. Their families had been
subjected to every variety of exposure and hardship. Their ready money
had been extorted from them by the Currency Association, or consumed in
the expenses of transporting their movables to Lake Utah. And more than
all, the fields had so suffered by their absence, that the crops were
diminished to at least one-half the yield of an ordinary year. To a
community the mass of which lives from hand to mouth, this was a most
serious loss.

Almost all agriculture in Utah is carried on by the aid of irrigation.
From April till October hardly a shower falls upon the soil, which
parches and cracks in the hot sunshine. The settlements are all at the
base of the mountains, where they can take advantage of the brooks that
leap down through the canons. They are, therefore, necessarily scattered
along the line of the main Wahsatch range, from the Roseaux River, which
flows into the Salt Lake from the north, to the Vegas of the Santa
Clara,--a distance of nearly four hundred miles. The labor expended in
ditching has been immense, but it has been confined wholly to tapping
the smaller streams.

By damming the Jordan in Salt Lake Valley and the Sevier in Parawan
Valley, and distributing their water over the broad bottom-lands, on
which the only vegetation now is wild sage and greasewood, the area of
arable ground might be quintupled; and any conside