There is no watercourse within four hundred
miles, on which navigation is practicable. Neither the Columbia nor the
Colorado empties into seas bordered by nations from which the Mormons
derive accessions; and the length of a voyage up the Mississippi,
Missouri, and Yellowstone forbids any expectation that their channels
will ever become a pathway to the centre of the continent. The road to
Utah must always lead overland, and travel upon it is the more expensive
from the fact that no great passenger-transportation companies exist at
either of the termini. Each family of emigrants must provide its own
outfit of provisions, wagons, and oxen, or mules. Through the agency of
what is called the Perpetual Emigration Fund of the Church, the capital
of which amounts to several millions of dollars,--which was instituted
professedly to befriend, but really to fleece the foreign converts,--few
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.
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