From Salt Lake City to Ogden, the great centre of railway travel, where several lines converge, is but a ride of thirty-six miles.  Here the train, which was very heavy, was divided into two sections, and, after some delay, we went on our journey with hopeful hearts.  The Salt Lake Valley and the Great Salt Lake, which we had traced for a long distance, finally disappeared from view.  The journey was begun from Ogden on what is known as Pacific time.  There are four time sections employed in the United States, adopted for convenience in 1883,—­Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific.  It is Eastern time until you reach 82-1/2 degrees west longitude from Greenwich, Central time up to 97-1/2, Mountain time till you arrive at 11-1/2, Pacific time to 127-1/2, which will take you out into the Pacific Ocean; and there is just one hour’s difference between each time section, covering fifteen degrees.  So that when it is twelve o’clock, midday, in New York city, it is eleven in Chicago, ten o’clock in Denver, and nine o’clock in San Francisco.  You adapt yourself, however, very readily to these changes of time, in your hours of sleep and in other matters.

One of the places of special interest through which we passed before leaving Utah is Promontory.  Here the last tie was laid and here the last spike was driven, on the 10th of May, 1869, when the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific Railways were united and the great cities of the Atlantic seaboard and San Francisco at the setting sun were brought into communication with each other by an iron way which has promoted our civilisation in a marked degree.  A night ride over the Alkali Plains of Nevada, famous for their sage brush, was a novelty, and in the clear atmosphere they looked like fields of snow.

At Wadsworth, where our train began to ascend the lower slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, were several Piute Indians.  They sell beads, blankets, baskets, and other mementoes.  A papoose, all done up in swathing bands, aroused no little curiosity, and when some venturesome passenger with a kodak tried to take a picture of the infant, the mother quickly turned away.  They think that the kodak is “the evil eye.”  There was an old squaw here with whom I conversed, who had a remarkable face on account of its wrinkled condition.  She said her name was Marie Martile, and at first she said she was one hundred years old, and later that she was one hundred and fifty.  At Reno I saw more Indians with papooses.  The thought, however, that this old race is passing away like the fading leaf before the “pale face,” is saddening.  Soon we arrive in the El Dorado State, we are at last on California soil, and the train with panting engines climbs the dizzy heights of the Sierras, through beautiful forests, along the slopes of hills, through tunnels, beneath long snow sheds.  These sheds are a striking feature, and are, with broken intervals, forty miles long.  The scenery is remarkable, entirely different from that of the Rocky Mountains; and Donner Lake, into whose clear depths we look from lofty heights, recalls the terrible story of hardship, isolation, suffering and death, here in the winter of 1846 and 1847, when snow-fall on snow-fall cut the elder Donners and several members of this party off from the outside world, and they perished from cold and starvation.  Oh, what a tragic, harrowing history it is!