Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 January 1886 — Great Salt Lake. [ARTICLE]

Great Salt Lake.

Great Salt Lake is in fact not a branch of the sea at all, but a mere shrunken remnant of a very large fresh-water lake system, like that of the still existing St. Lawrence chain. Once.upon a time, American geologists say, a huge sheet of water, for which they have even invented a definite name, Lake Bonneville, occupied a far larger valley among the outliers of the Rocky Mountains, measuring 300 miles in one direction by 180 miles in the other. Beside this primitive Superior lay a great second sheet—an early Huron—(Lake Lahontan the geologists call it) almost as big and equally of fresh water. By and by—the precise dates are necessarily indefinite—some change in the rainfall, unregistered by any contemporary, made the waters of these big lakes shrink and evaporate. Lake Lahontan shrank away; like Alice in Wonderland, till there was absolutely nothing left of it; Lake Bonneville shrank till it attained the diminished size of the existing Great Salt Lake, Terrace after terrace, running in long parallel lines on the sides of the Wahsatch Mountains around, mark the various levels at which it rested for a while on its gradual downward course. It is still falling, indeed, and the plain around is being gradually uncovered, forming the white, salt-incrusted shore with which all visitors to the Mormon city are so familiar. But why should the water have become briny ? Why should the evaporation of old Superior produce at last a Great Salt Lake? Well, there is a small quantity of salt in solution even in the freshest of lakes and ponds, brought down to them by the streams or rivers, and as the water of the hypothetical Lake Bonneville slowly the nalt and other mineral constituents remained behind. Thus the solution grew constantly more and more concentrated, till at the present day it is extremely saline. Prof. Geikie (to whose works the present paper is much indebted) found that he floated on the water in spite of himself ; and the under sides of the steps at the bathing-places are all incrusted with short stalactites of salt, produced from the drip of the bathers as they leave the water. The mineral constituents, however, differ considerably in their proportions from those found in true salt lakes of marine origin, and the point at which the salt is thrown down is still far from having been reached. Great Salt Lake must simmer in the sun for many centuries yet before the point arrives at which (as cooks say) it begins to settle. —The Cornhill Magazine.