utah the Land of Blossoming Valleys Author:George Wharton James Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: UTAH, THE LAND OF BLOSSOMING VALLEYS CHAPTER I GENERAL GLIMPSES OF THE LAND It will be well before we attempt a study of the history of Utah to take a ... more »general survey of the state, and also indulge in some specific verbal pictures which will give a good idea of what is contained within its boundaries. First, the general overlook, for the condensed facts of which I am indebted to The Ore Deposits of Utah, published by the U. S. Geological Survey. The specific descriptions are from various writers and will thus give a taste of their literary quality, as well as reveal the impressions the country made upon them. From our general reading and travel we know that Utah is a land of high mountains, deep valleys, far- stretching high plateaus, fertile meadows, sandy, desolate deserts, rich forests, bare, wind-swept areas of solid rock, where tower monuments more striking and wonderful than all the other natural rock-carvings of the rest of the United States combined, great salt lakes, exquisite fresh water lakes, streams that flow through miles and miles of farms and orchards, and other streams that flow through miles of shut-in canyons, where no eye ever gazes save those of a curious cowboy or a searching Indian. Some of its canyons are the most beautiful theeye of man ever gazed upon; some of its wind-swept areas the most desolate. In the " Land of the Standing Rocks " one is awed by the carving forces of the sand- laden wind, and in the " Land of the Colossal Natural Bridges " an equal sense of awe comes from the majesty of the structures, and a realization of the forces that have created them. Looking over the state as a whole, one soon realizes that Utah lies both in the Plateau and the Great Basin provinces of the Cordilleran region. It therefore possesses a great vari...« less