The Great Salt Lake marks a striking point on the westbound railway journey: a vast, elevated inland sea whose physical features are rendered in precise detail, and a landmark beside the route through a region of farms and Mormon settlements. The travelers glimpse it from the train before continuing to Ogden and visiting nearby Salt Lake City, so the lake serves both as landscape and as a point of orientation within a tightly timed passage across the West.

Geography and Physical Character

The train reaches the lake’s northwest border at about half past twelve. The view is described as a broad, picturesque expanse framed by lofty crags in layers and crusted with white salt. The narration gives the lake’s dimensions as seventy miles long and thirty-five miles wide, and places it 3,800 feet above sea level. It also notes that the lake was once more extensive: its shores had advanced over time, reducing its breadth while increasing its depth.

The lake is also called the Dead Sea. Rivers including the Jordan and the Weber flow into it, but the account emphasizes the consequences of its salinity: solid matter makes up a quarter of the water’s weight, and fish that descend into it from the rivers soon perish. These measurements and observations turn the lake into more than a passing view, giving the railway journey a moment of geographical description and natural history.

The Railway Approach

The lake appears during an overnight railway passage that first runs southeast for about fifty miles and then turns an equal distance northeast toward it. Its appearance is interwoven with events aboard the train: Elder William Hitch, a Mormon missionary, announces a lecture on Mormonism, which Passepartout attends. By the time the lecture is over, the train has made good progress and reached the lake’s northwestern edge. The landscape thus enters the narrative not through a planned excursion to the shore but as a changing view encountered in transit.

Farms and Nearby Salt Lake City

The country around the lake is described as well cultivated, with most Mormons characterized as farmers. The account notes ranches and animal pens, as well as fields of wheat, corn, and other cereals; it adds that luxuriant prairies and flowering plants would be visible six months later, while a thin dusting of snow covers the ground at the time of the journey. The lake’s setting is therefore presented as inhabited and worked, not as empty wilderness.

At two o’clock the train reaches Ogden, where it rests for six hours. A branch railway connects Ogden with Salt Lake City, and the travelers use the stop to visit the city for two hours. The nearby urban landscape is described between the Jordan and the spurs of the Wahsatch Range. The lake itself remains a view from the railway, while the longer stop shifts attention to the settlements and institutions of the surrounding region.

Narrative Significance

The Great Salt Lake combines a memorable natural landmark with a practical marker in the journey’s sequence: the train approaches it, reaches Ogden, and allows a short visit to Salt Lake City before setting out again. The episode’s movement from measured description of the lake to the cultivated country and the railway connection makes the region legible through travel—first as terrain seen from a moving train, then as a place briefly entered by its visitors. Its landscape and infrastructure together show how the journey’s progress depends on both geographical passage and points of connection.