Englishmen arrive at Salt Lake City without having exhausted their own
means and incurred an amount of debt which it requires the labor of many
years to discharge. The physical sufferings of the journey, also, are
severe and often fatal. The bleak cemetery at Salt Lake City contains
but a small proportion of the Mormon dead. Along the thousand miles of
road from the Missouri River to the Great Lake, there stand, thicker
than milestones, memorials of those who failed on the way. A rough
board, a pile of stones, a grave ransacked by wolves, crown many a swell
of the bottom-lands along the Platte; and across the broad belt of
mountains there is no spot so desolate as to be unmarked by one of these
monuments of the march of Mormonism.

As these difficulties of transit subside under the surge of population
toward the new State of Oregon, or to the gold-diggings on the
head-waters of the South Fork of the Platte, an element must permeate
Utah which would be fatal to the supremacy of the Church. That depends,
as has been so often repeated, upon isolation. Already the presence of
the army with its crowd of unruly dependents has begun to disturb it.
In the trail of the troops, like sparks shed from a rocket, a legion
of mail-stations and trading-posts have sprung up, which materially
facilitate communication with the East. A horseman, starting now from
Fort Leavenworth, with a good animal, can ride to Salt Lake City,
sleeping under cover every night; while in July, 1857, when the army
commenced its march from the frontier, there were stretches of more than
three hundred miles without a single white inhabitant. On the west,
under the shadow of the Sierra Nevada, there is a settlement of several
thousand Gentiles in Carson Valley, who, though nominally under the same
Territorial government with the Mormons, have no real connection with
them, politically, socially, or commercially, and are petitioning
Congress for a Territorial organisation of their own. A telegraphic wire
has already wound its way over the sierra among them, and will soon
palpitate through Salt Lake City in its progress toward the Atlantic.

Brigham Young perceives this inevitable advance of Christian
civilization toward his stronghold, as clearly as the most unprejudiced
spectator. No one is better aware than himself, that, if the great
industrial conception of the age, the Pacific Railroad, shall ever begin
to be realized, the first shovelful of dirt thrown on i