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Show h TRE PASSING OF SALT UkT ! Great Salt lake, the dead .ea of tho now world, is rapidly disappearing. The geologists ay that it may last another -ontury, lut not longer than that. Whore tho mil vor Fheot of mvbterious valor now stivlehes vill be left only a valley of g listening; Kalt with ruins of lonpr ahandonod wharfs and hoiels around its edges. James K. Talmago, professor of geology. geol-ogy. University of Utah, says: "Irrigation, by diverting- the volume j of its four tributary rivers, has sealed the fate of Great Salt lake. Each year its waters are growing- more acrid. Every Ev-ery year it grows perceptibly smaller. Thirty 3'ears aeo the lake was eighty miles long-. Today it is barely seventy miles in length. There are geological evidence; on the rocks that the lake has within the last two decades had a width of forty miles. Now that width is only twenty-five miles. At some Miiits the shore line ha.s reached live milef in lesj5 than live years. In the natural course of geological events it may 1 expected that in another hundred hun-dred years there will be but a bed of salt where Great Salt lake has been." Great Salt lake is in the northern part of Utah. Salt Lake City is seventeen seven-teen miles south of it. The lake stretches stretch-es between two spurs of the Rocky , mountains. There is twenty-five per cent of salt in its waters and it is constantly con-stantly growing more salt. Several explorers claimed the honor of its discovery.. The French baron, Jv.i Uontan, the first of these, never saw Groat Salt lake, but he wrote that ihe Comanche Indians told him of the 'bitter water" where the sun set. Es-ealante, Es-ealante, the Spanish friar, gave the lirst definite knowledge of the lake in 17. "-The lake occupies many leagues and its waters are injurious and ex- tromely salt. He who wets his bodv with the water immediately fee-Is itching itch-ing on the wet part," wrote the good friar in his diary. James Kridger and Skeen Ogden, two trapjwrK. later claimed the honor of the discovery. In Captain Bonne-ville Bonne-ville came t'pon thoi lake. He immediately imme-diately christened it Lake IJonnevHle and at onee gave his name o the great prehistoric sea, its parent. It was Urigham Young who, after a plunge into it. ca.!iefl it freat salt lane, a name it will bear to its approaching: and certain end. It is an Indian tradition and there are geological theories that agree with it that Groat Salt la.ke is the mere fragment of a great primeval sea. cx-i- nding from the Rocky mountains to the Sierra. Nevada range. Skeletons of marine animals of prehistoric times, found among the alkali plains of what was one the Great American desert, bear this out. Earthquakes swallowed a portion of this sea, and evaporation removed all but the remaining- fragment, frag-ment, say the geologist. The Mormon pioneers found a barren, bar-ren, frowning desert at the foot of ,f, the Wasatch mountains. They liter- ally made it bloom as the rose, but in order to do so they dug a network of irrigation canals and ditches that deflected de-flected the four rivers from their course to Gnat Salt lake into the fields of Utah. The fields blossomed and flourished flour-ished and Great Salt lake shrunk and dwindled ajid lost its substance to Ihe upier airs. The record of the decline of Great Salt lake is written upon its mountains. Time was and geologists point to the handwriting on the rocks to prove this that the lake overtopped these mountains. moun-tains. Now it lies sluggish at their feet. The different shore lines of the past stand out as distinctly and as evenly as if a surveyor's line had been run along the face of the ridgee. Geologists believe that the inland sea was oiee a fresh water lake. The theory the-ory is that Utah lake and Bear lake, fresh water bodies both, were once part of it and that they were separated from it bv smo convulsion of nature. The geological theory is that it did not take the lake lonp; to become intensely ! saline after it was locked in. For its expanse it-was shallow even then, not more tnan-ion leei ueep ai u uoojiobl place, probably not that. The maximum maxi-mum depth today is sixty feet, and the average is less than half that. At some points one can wade one and one-half miles from the shore without with-out getting beyond knee depth. There tire salt deposits twenty miles from the shore, showing that the shore line at not very recent vears extended to that point. The height of the lake. 4.000 feet above s a level, aids the work of evaporation evap-oration and the steady, pathetic. hoje-less hoje-less shrinkage of the Great Salt lake. |