cleanliness, and fresh food. Who shall say that the City of the Saints was not a special Providence?
But that was not all that Mormonism did for the overland route. All of their number who were too poor, or too sick, or for any other reason could not easily remove to Salt Lake, remained at Council Bluffs for two or three years, and drew there merchants from St. Joseph's and St. Louis, who afterward remained to meet the wants of more permanent settlers. Thus the little trading-post of Council Bluffs became a town of the first importance in Western Iowa.
Opposite Council Bluffs, and a little to the north of the present city of Omaha, is a little town called Florence, the winter-quarters of the Mormon hosts, and where, as their grave-yard shows, many of their number died during the first winter of their compulsory residence at that place. Here, as on the Iowa side of the river, the ground was broken and planted for two or three years, leaving it mellow and sweet for the subsequent settler. All along the highway trodden by the fleeing thousands through the Iowa territory the ground was broken at intervals, and seed dropped in. This was done by order of the Elders, as the only means of providing for the weak and sick who might falter by the way, and be left behind by the stronger and more fortunate. From Nauvoo to Salt Lake City a road was beaten. Scarcely was it passed over by the last of the Mormon refugees before another innumerable caravan of California-bound wayfarers stretched from one end of it to the other. When the gold-fever had abated somewhat, and the only travelers seen upon that road were the annual trains of Mormon recruits, which left the vicinity of Omaha about the first of May, we went out upon it for a day's ride, and beheld it stretched like a garland of roses among the green swells of prairie, as far as the eye could reach. For the breaking of the strong sod by the heavy wheels of loaded wagons had given encouragement to wild roses and other prairie flowers, and the most luxurious growth of these marked the track of the emigrant trains, and pointed out their course—a symbol, let us hope, of that flowery chain of mutual interests and aspirations which binds to-day the Atlantic to the Pacific slope.
Upon Oregon, California, and Utah there followed Nevada, Colorado, Idaho, Montana—each the result of one of those great and sudden impulses which move the "human sea;" not in that "low wash of waves," by which ordinary emigration is symbolized in one of our typical American poems, but in great tidal waves of astonishing power.
Forced to see the direction of events, the people easily accepted their manifest destiny; and in spite of internecine war, and heavy national indebtedness, the Pacific Railroad became not only an acknowledged possibility, but an acknowledged necessity. But even with growing States midway of the continent, joined on the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains to those already matured, by good agricultural lands, inviting the settler, there was still a problem to be solved concerning a long stretch of country west of the Rocky Mountains, adjudged to be nearly worthless. That question, of how was a railroad to be made paying which traversed hundreds of miles of uninhabitable waste, has been answered within the last few months. Those wastes are not uninhabitable: on the contrary, they threaten to be overrun with people within the next six months. These fifty or one hundred thousand silver-seekers are not an agricultural people, it is true; but all the more they will need the aid of rapid transportation to supply their wants. Every thing must be taken to them, even their bread. For all which they require, they make returns in gold and silver. It would seem that
