Salt Lake City

Salt Lake City, the chief town and ecclesiastical capital of the territory of Utah, is on the river Jordan, 11 miles from Great Salt Lake (q.v.), and 4265 feet above the level of the sea. By rail it is 36 miles S. of Ogden, on the Union Pacific Rail- road (833 miles from San Francisco and 1031 from Omaha). It was settled by the Mormons (q.v.) in 1847, and incorporated in 1851; it is divided into five municipal and twenty-one ecclesiastical wards; has an area of 12 sq. m., with corporate limits embracing 50 sq. m.; and its shaded streets, 137 feet wide, many of them freshened by streams of running water from the neighbouring mountains, are traversed by tram-cars (1872), and lit by gas (1873) and the electric light (1877). Brick and timber are the common building materials, and wooden 'shanties' still keep their place even in the principal streets. The chief public buildings are the Mormon temple (dedicated in 1893, being forty years in building, and having cost about $3,000,000), with walls built of blocks of dressed granite, 20 feet thick at base, and tapering to 6 feet thick at the top; the Tabernacle, an immense elliptical building, with a dome-shaped ('dish-cover') roof resting on sandstone pillars, and seated for 9000; the new assembly hall, of rough-hewn granite; the endowment-house, &c. But, though the Mormon influence is still strong, other religious bodies also are represented, and there are Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Methodist churches: St Mark's Cathedral is a handsome building. Other noteworthy edifices are those of the museum, the Mining Institute, St Mary's Hospital, the university of Deseret (1850; buildings finished, 1887), and the theatres and opera-house. The mud-wall erected in 1853 has now disappeared. Something more than a beginning has been made of manufactures—bricks, paper, timber, blinds, window-glass, &c. Pop. (1870) 12,854; (1880) 20,768; (1890) 44,843. See Burton, The City of the Saints (1861), H. H. Bancroft's History of Utah (San Francisco, 1889), and the works cited in the latter.