the mountains roamed the deer, elk, antelope, and bear, and on the marshy flats amid the plains were smaller game/ Timber was scarce and of poor quality, except in places difficult of access;^ but with this ex- ception there was no great lack of resources in the territory which the saints had made their abode.
During the first years that followed their migration, while yet engaged in building houses, fencing lands, planting crops, and tending herds, the Mormons pro- vided liberally for the cause of education. In the third general epistle of the twelve, dated the 12th of April, 1850, it is stated that an appropriation of $5,000 per annum, for a period of twenty years, had been made for a state university^ in Salt Lake City, branches to be established elsewhere throughout the territory as they were needed. In the curriculum the Keltic and Teutonic languages were to rank side by side with the Romanic, and all living languages spoken by men were to be included. Astronomy, geology, chemistry, agriculture, engineering, and other branches of science were to be studied; for having sought first the kingdom of heaven, the saints were now assured that knowledge and all other things should be added unto them.^ The world of science was to be revolu-
where he will find abundance of the pike, the perch, the bass, and the chub. Gunnisoii's The Mormons, 20.
- Wild ducks and geese were abundant in 1852. Ibid. There were also
quail and herons. lu summer, boys filled their baskets with eggs found among the reeds on the banks of streams or on the islands in the Great Salt Lake.
- * Hidden away in the profound chasms and along the streams, whose
beds are deeply worn in the mountain-sides, are the cedar, pine, dwarf-maple, and occasionally oak, where the inhabitants of the vale seek their kxel and building timber, making journeys to obtain these necessaries twenty to forty miles from their abodes.' Id., 21.
^ Under the supervision and contrpl of a chancellor, twelve regents, a sec- retary, and a treasurer. Frontier Guardian, June 12, 1850. t
' ' But what,' says Phelps in an oration delivered July 24, 1851, 'will all the precious things of time, the inventions of men, the records, £rom Japheth in the ark to Jonathan in congress, embracing the wit and the gist, the fashions and the folly, which so methodically, grammafipally, and transcendentaily grace the libraries of the 6lite of nations, really be worth to a saint, when our father sends down his regents, the angels, from the grand library of Zion above, with a copy of the history of eternal lives, the records of worlds, the genealogy of the gods, the philosophy of truth, the names of our spirits from
