Open Sesame

Before we enter the City of the Saints, let me briefly describe the greatest, not merely of the architectural curiosities, but, in my opinion, the greatest natural curiosity of any kind which I have ever seen or heard of. Mind, too, that I remember Niagara, the Cedar-Creek Bridge, and the Mammoth Cave, when I speak thus of the Church Buttes. They are situated a short distance from Fort Bridger; the overland road passes by their side. They consist of a sandstone bluff, reddish-brown in color, rising with the abruptness of a pile of masonry from the perfectly level plain, carved along its perpendicular face into a series of partially connected religious edifices. . . In each of the confex faces is an admirably proportioned doorway, a Gothic arch with deep-carved and elaborately fretted mouldings, so wonderfully perfect in its imitation that you almost feel like knocking for admittance, did you only know the "Open Sesame." Between and behind the doors, alternating with flying buttresses, are a series of deep-niched windows. . .

Fort Bridger

Between Green River and the Mormon city no human interest divides your perpetually strained attention from Nature. Fort Bridger, a little over a day's stage-ride east of the city, is a large and quite populous trading-post and garrison of the United States; but although we found there a number of agreeable officers, whose acquaintance with their wonderful surroundings was thorough and scientific, and though at that period the fort was a rendezvous for our only faithful friend among the Utah Indians, Washki, the Snake chief, and that handful of his tribe who still remain loyal to their really noble leader and our Government, Fort Bridger left the shadowiest of impressions on my mind, compared with the natural glories of the surrounding scenery.