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TO THE READER.

Ir was my original intention to have published these notes of my journey in the two-volume form, comprehending much additional material which would have made the work a complete and minute survey not only of the entire region traversed by the Pacific Railroad, but of much of the incalculably valuble and interesting region tributary to it on either side. Of the latter part of my journey,—after leaving Salt Lake City, I have here, however, had room to give only the more salient features; and by the same circumstances which rendered it advisable to reduce the book to a single volume, I have been compelled to throw much of the matter relating to the Mormons, their home, their problem, and their destiny, into what to most readers is the least attractive and most superficially noticed form-an Appendix.

It is principally on behalf of this Appendix that I utter a word of prefatory remark. The engrossing question, "What shall we do with the Mormons?'' is, so far as I know from personal reading and information obtained at the best hands, treated in this Appendix from an entirely new point of view. I may say frankly that I believe my solution of the question the promptest, the most feasible, the least productive M145947

of violent dislocation and suffering, which has yet been offered. Because I so believe and am desirous to have the fact tested by other minds, and because there is much in the small type at the other end of my book which is full as worthy of the larger typographical honors as anything which precedes it,-because, in fine, I think the reader will agree with me in calling the Mormon Matter at least as interesting as the rest of the volume, I here venture to ask that it may be read at least no more superficially than that.

F. H. L.

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THE HEART OF THE CONTINENT.

CHAPTER I.

THE SETTING OUT.

I MIGHT pass over without a word the whole line of railway communication between New York and Atchison, on the Missouri River, were it not that the uniform kindness of its officers to the party of which I was a member, and their interest in the artistic and scientific purposes of our expedition, deserve to be as well known by our acknowledgment, as their roads are without our mention.

The moment that we stated our project to Mr. Scott and the other officers of the Pennsylvania Central, they not only presented the entire party with transportation over their own road to Pittsburg, but gave us letters of introduction which insured our being treated with similar courtesy on all the remaining roads to St. Louis.

To them, to the officers of the Crestline route between Pittsburg and Cincinnati, and to Messrs. Larned and M'Alpine of the Cincinnati and St. Louis road, we owe recognition, no less for the fine spirit of appreciation and helpfulness in which they received our enterprise, than for the diminution effected by their kindness in the burdens of a necessarily very expensive journey. There can scarcely be a better indica

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