The other course is not only practicable, but humane and expedient.  During his whole career, Brigham Young committed no greater mistake than when he settled in Utah a community whose recruits are almost without exception drawn from foreign lands; for, since the removal from Illinois, every attempt to propagate Mormonism in the American States has been a failure.  Every avenue of communication with Utah is necessarily obstructed.  No railroad penetrates to within eleven hundred miles of Salt Lake Valley.  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.  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