The Mormons
Thomas L. Kane
[i]
Thomas L. Kane (1822-83), a non-Mormon, is revered by the Mormon
people for his defense of the Mormon cause. Early and late a friend of
the Mormons, he wrote and lectured sympathetically about the Mormon
persecutions, as this discourse demonstrates. In 1857, on hearing of
the impending march of Johnston's Army to Utah, he secured permission
from the President of the United States to travel to Utah in order to
help avert the impending strife. He served as a mediator between
Brigham Young and Colonel Johnston, who at first accused Kane of being
a spy and arrested him. Kane challenged Johnston to a duel with
pistols, but the U.S. appointee for territorial governor, Alfred
Cumming, prevented the duel. Kane was instrumental in securing a peace
between the two factions.
[ii] This
material consists of portions of a discourse delivered before the
Historical Society of Pennsylvania March 26, 1850.
[1] A few years ago,
ascending the upper Mississippi in the Autumn, when its waters were
low, I was compelled to travel by land past the region of the Rapids.
My road lay through the Half-Breed Tract, a fine section of Iowa,
which the unsettled state of its land-titles had appropriated as a
sanctuary for coiners, horse thieves, and other outlaws. I had left my
steamer at Keokuk, at the foot of the Lower Fall, to hire a carriage,
and to contend for some fragments of a dirty meal with the swarming
flies, the only scavengers of the locality. From this place to where
the deep water of the river returns, my eye wearied to see everywhere
sordid, vagabond and idle settlers; and a country marred, without
being improved, by their careless hands.
[2] I was descending
the last hillside upon my journey, when a landscape in delightful
contrast broke upon my view. Half encircled by a bend of the river, a
beautiful city lay glittering in the fresh morning sun; its bright new
dwellings, set in cool green gardens, ranging up around a stately
dome-shaped hill, which was crowned by a noble marble edifice, whose
high tapering spire was radiant with white and gold. The city appeared
to cover several miles; and beyond it, in the background, there rolled
off a fair country, checkered by the careful lines of fruitful
husbandry. The unmistakeable marks of industry, enterprise and
educated wealth, everywhere, made the scene one of singular and most
striking beauty.
[3] It was a natural
impulse to visit this inviting region. I procured a skiff, and rowing
across the river, landed at the chief wharf of the city. No one met me
there. I looked, and saw no one. I could hear no one move; though the
quiet everywhere was such that I heard the flies buzz and the
water-ripples break against the shallow of the beach. I walked through
the solitary streets. The town lay as in a dream, under some deadening
spell of loneliness, from which I almost feared to wake it. For
plainly it had not slept long. There was no grass growing up in the
paved ways. Rains had not entirely washed away the prints of dusty
footsteps.
[4] Yet I went about
unchecked. I went into empty workshops, ropewalks and smithies. The
spinner's wheel was idle; the carpenter had gone from his workbench
and shavings, his unfinished sash and casing. Fresh bark was in the
tanner's vat, and the fresh-chopped lightwood stood piled against the
baker's oven. The blacksmith's shop was cold; but his coal heap and
ladling pool and crooked water horn were all there, as if he had just
gone off for a holiday. No work people anywhere looked to know my
errand. If I went into the gardens, clinking the wicket-latch loudly
after me, to pull the marygolds, heartsease and ladyslippers, and draw
a drink with the water sodden well-bucket and its noisy chain; or,
knocking off with my stick the tall, heavy-headed dahlias and
sunflowers, hunted over the beds for cucumbers and love-apples--no one
called out to me from any opened window, or dog sprang forward to bark
an alarm. I could have supposed the people hidden in the houses, but
the doors were unfastened; and when at last I timidly entered them, I
found dead ashes white upon the hearths, and had to tread a tiptoe, as
if walking down the aisle of a country church, to avoid rousing
irreverent echoes from the naked floors.
[5] On the outskirts of
the town was the city graveyard. But there was no record of plague
there, nor did it in any wise differ much from other Protestant
American cemeteries. Some of the mounds were not long sodded; some of
the stones were newly set, their dates recent, and their black
inscriptions glossy in the mason's hardly dried lettering ink. Beyond
the graveyard, out in the fields, I saw, in one spot hard-by where the
fruited boughs of a young orchard had been roughly torn down, the
still smouldering embers of a barbecue fire, that had been constructed
of rails from the fencing round it. It was the latest sign of life
there. Fields upon fields of heavy-headed yellow grain lay rotting
ungathered upon the ground. No one was at hand to take in their rich
harvest. As far as the eye could reach, they stretched away--they,
sleeping too in the hazy air of Autumn.
[6] Only two portions
of the city seemed to suggest the import of this mysterious solitude.
On the southern suburb, the houses looking out upon the country,
showed, by their splintered woodwork and walls battered to the
foundation, that they had lately been the mark of a destructive
cannonade. And in and around the splendid Temple, which has been the
chief object of my admiration, armed men were barracked, surrounded by
their stacks of musketry and pieces of heavy ordnance. These
challenged me to render an account of myself, and why I had the
temerity to cross the water without a written permit from a leader of
their band.
[7] Though these men
were generally more or less under the influence of ardent spirits;
after I had explained myself as a passing stranger, they seemed
anxious to gain my good opinion. They told me the story of the Dead
City: that it had been a notable manufacturing and commercial mart,
sheltering over 20,000 persons; that they had waged war with its
inhabitants for several years, and had been finally successful only a
few days before my visit, in an action fought in front of the ruined
suburb; after which, they had driven them forth at the point of the
sword. The defense, they said, had been obstinate, but gave way on the
third day's bombardment. They boasted greatly of their prowess,
especially in this battle, as they called it; but I discovered they
were not of one mind as to certain of the exploits that had
distinguished it; one of which, as I remember, was, that they had
slain a father and his son, a boy of fifteen, not long residents of
the fated city, whom they admitted to have borne a character without
reproach.
[8] They also
conducted me inside the massive sculptored walls of the curious
Temple, in which they said the banished inhabitants were accustomed to
celebrate the mystic rites of an unhallowed worship. They particularly
pointed out to me certain features of the building, which, having been
the peculiar objects of a former superstitious regard, they had as
matter of duty sedulously defiled and defaced. The reputed rites of
certain shrines they had thus particularly noticed, and various
sheltered chambers, in one of which was a deep well, constructed, they
believed, with a dreadful design. Beside these, they led me to see a
large and deep chiseled marble vase or basin, supported upon twelve
oxen, also of marble, and of the size of life, of which they told some
romantic stories. They said the deluded persons, most of whom were
immigrants from a great distance, believed their Deity countenanced
their reception here of a baptism of regeneration, as proxies for
whomsoever they held in warm affection in the countries from which
they had come; that here parents "went into the water" for their lost
children, children for their parents, widows for their spouses, and
young persons for their lovers; that thus the Great Vase came to be
for them associated with all dear and distant memories, and was
therefore the object, of all others in the building, to which they
attached the greatest degree of idolatrous affection. On this account,
the victors had so diligently desecrated it as to render the apartment
in which it was contained too noisesome to abide in.
[9] They permitted me
also to ascend into the steeple, to see where it had been
lightning-struck on the Sabbath before; and to look out, East and
South, on wasted farms like those I had seen near the City, extending
till they were lost in the distance. Here, in the face of the pure
day, close to the scar of the Divine wrath left by the thunderbolt,
were fragments of food, cruises of liquor and broken drinking vessels,
with a bass drum and a steam-boat signal bell, of which I afterwards
learned the use with pain.
[10] It was after
nightfall, when I was ready to cross the river on my return. The wind
had freshened since the sunset; and the water beating roughly into my
little boat, I headed higher up the stream than the point I had left
in the morning, and landed where a faint glimmering light invited me
to steer.
[11] Here, among the
dock and rushes, sheltered only by the darkness, without roof between
them and the sky, I came upon a crowd of several hundred human
creatures, whom my movements roused from uneasy slumber upon the
ground.
[12] Passing these on
my way to the light, I found it came from a tallow candle in a paper
funnel-shade, such as is used by street venders of apples and
pea-nuts, and which, flaring and guttering away in the bleak air off
the water, shone flickeringly on the emaciated features of a man in
the last stage of a bilious remittent fever. They had done their best
for him. Over his head was something like a tent, made of a sheet or
two, and he rested on a but partially ripped open old straw mattress,
with a hair sofa cushion under his head for a pillow. His gaping jaw
and glazing eye told how short a time he would monopolize these
luxuries; though a seemingly bewildered and excited person, who might
have been his wife, seemed to find hope in occasionally forcing him to
swallow awkwardly measured sips of the tepid river water from a burned
and battered, bitter-smelling tin coffee-pot. Those who knew better
had furnished the apothecary he needed, a toothless old bald-head,
whose manner had the repulsive dullness of a man familiar with death
scenes. He, so long as I remained, mumbled in his patient's ear a
monotonous and melancholy prayer, between the pauses of which I heard
the hiccup and sobbing of two little girls, who were sitting up on a
piece of drift wood outside.
[13] Dreadful, indeed,
was the suffering of those forsaken beings. Cowed and cramped by cold
and sunburn, alternating as each weary day and night dragged on, they
were, almost all of them, the crippled victims of disease. They were
there because they had no homes, nor hospital nor poor-house nor
friends to offer them any. They could not satisfy the feeble cravings
of their sick; they had not bread to quiet the fractious hunger cries
of their children. Mothers and babes, daughters and grandparents, all
of them alike, were bivouacked in tatters, wanting even covering to
comfort those whom the sick shiver of fever was searching to the
marrow.
[14] These were
Mormons, famishing, in Lee county, Iowa, in the fourth week of the
month of September, in the year of our Lord 1846. The City it was
Nauvoo, Illinois. The Mormons were the owners of that city, and the
smiling country round. And those who had stopped their ploughs, who
had silenced their hammers, their axes, their shuttles and their
workshop wheels; those who had put out their fires, who had eaten
their food, spoiled their orchards, and trampled under foot their
thousands of acres of unharvested bread; these were the keepers of
their dwellings, the carousers in their Temple--whose drunken riot
insulted the ears of their dying.
[15] I think it was as
I turned from the wretched nightwatch of which I have spoken, that I
first listened to the sounds of revel of a party of the guard within
the city. Above the distant hum of the voices of many, occasionally
rose distinct the loud oath-tainted exclamation, and the falsely
intonated scrap of vulgar song; but lest this requiem should go
unheeded, every now and then, when their boisterous orgies strove to
attain a sort of ecstatic climax, a cruel spirit of insulting frolic
carried some of them up into the high belfry of the Temple steeple,
and there, with the wicked childishness of inebriates, they whooped,
and shrieked, and beat the drum that I had seen, and rang in
charivaric unison their loud-tongued steam-boat bell.
[16] They were, all
told, not more than six hundred and forty persons who were thus lying
on the river flats. But the Mormons in Nauvoo and its dependencies had
been numbered the year before at over twenty thousand. Where were
they? They had last been seen, carrying in mournful trains their sick
and wounded, halt and blind, to disappear behind the western horizon,
pursuing the phantom of another home. Hardly anything else was known
of them: and people asked with curiosity, What had been their fate,
what their fortunes?
[17] I purpose making
these questions the subject of my lecture. Since the expulsion of the
Mormons, to the present date, I have been intimately conversant with
the details of their history. But I shall invite your attention most
particularly to an account of what happened to them during their first
year in the Wilderness; because at this time more than any other,
being lost to public view, they were the subjects of fable and
misconception. Happily, it was during this period I myself moved with
them; and earned, at dear price, as some among you are aware, my right
to speak with authority of them and their character, their trials,
achievements and intentions.
[18] The party
encountered by me at the river shore were the last of the Mormons that
left the city. They had all of them engaged the year before, that they
would vacate their homes, and seek some other place of refuge. It had
been the condition of a truce between them and their assailants; and
as an earnest of their good faith, the chief elders and some others of
obnoxious standing, with their families, were to set out for the West
in the spring of 1846. It had been stipulated in return, that the rest
of the Mormons might remain behind in the peaceful enjoyment of their
Illinois abode, until their leaders, with their exploring party, could
with all diligence select for them a new place of settlement beyond
the Rocky Mountains, in California, or elsewhere, and until they had
opportunity to dispose to the best advantage of the property which
they were then to leave.
[19] Some renewed
symptoms of hostile feeling had, however, determined the pioneer party
to begin their work before the spring. It was, of course, anticipated
that this would be a perilous service; but it was regarded as a matter
of self-denying duty. The ardor and emulation of many, particularly
the devout and the young, were stimulated by the difficulties it
involved; and the ranks of the party were therefore filled up with
volunteers from among the most effective and responsible members of
the sect.
[20] They began their
march in midwinter; and by the beginning of February, nearly all of
them were on the road, many of their wagons having crossed the
Mississippi on the ice.
[21] Under the most
favoring circumstances, an expedition of this sort, undertaken at such
a season of the year, could scarcely fail to be disastrous.*
But the pioneer company had to set out in haste, and were very
imperfectly supplied with necessaries. The cold was intense. They
moved in the teeth of keen-edged northwest winds, such as sweep down
the Iowa peninsula from the ice-bound regions of the timber-shaded
Slave Lake and Lake of the Woods: on the Bald Prairie there, nothing
above the dead grass breaks their free course over the hard rolled
hills. Even along the scattered water courses, where they broke the
thick ice to give their cattle drink, the annual autumn fires had left
little wood of value. The party, therefore, often wanted for good camp
fires, the first luxury of all travelers; but to men insufficiently
furnished with tents and other appliances of shelter, almost an
essential to life after days of fatigue, their nights were often
passed in restless efforts to save themselves from freezing. Their
stock of food also proved inadequate; and as their systems became
impoverished, their suffering from cold increased.
[22] Sickened with
catarrhal affections, manacled by the fetters of dreadfully acute
rheumatisms, some contrived for a while to get over the shortening
day's march, and drag along some others. But the sign of an impaired
circulation soon began to show itself in the liability of all to be
dreadfully frost-bitten. The hardiest and strongest became helplessly
crippled. About the same time, the strength of their beasts of draught
began to fail. The small supply of provender they could carry with
them had given out. The winter-bleached prairie straw proved devoid of
nourishment; and they could only keep them from starving by seeking
for the browse, as it is called, or green bark and tender buds and
branches, of the cotton-wood and other stinted growths of the hollows.
[23] To return to
Nauvoo was apparently the only escape; but this would have been to
give occasion for fresh mistrust, and so to bring new trouble to those
they had left there behind them. They resolved at least to hold their
ground, and to advance as they might, were it only by limping through
the deep snows a few slow miles a day. They found a sort of comfort in
comparing themselves to the exiles of Siberia, and sought cheerfulness
in earnest praying for the spring--longed for as morning by the
tossing sick.
[24] The spring came at
last. It overtook them in the Sac and Fox country, still on the naked
prairie, not yet half way over the trail they were following between
the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. But it brought its own share of
troubles with it. The months with which it opened proved nearly as
trying as the worst of winter.
[25] The snow and sleet
and rain, which fell as it appeared to them without intermission, made
the road over the rich prairie soil as impassable as one vast bog of
heavy black mud. Sometimes they would fasten the horses and oxen of
four or five wagons to one, and attempt to get ahead in this way,
taking turns; but at the close of a day of hard toil for themselves
and their cattle, they would find themselves a quarter or half a mile
from the place they left in the morning. The heavy rains raised all
the watercourses: the most trifling streams were impassable. Wood for
bridging was often not to be had, and in such cases the only resource
was to halt for the freshets to subside--a matter in the case of the
headwaters of the Charitan, for instance, of over three weeks' delay.
[26] These were dreary
waitings upon Providence. The most spirited and sturdy murmured most
at their forced inactivity. And even the women, whose heroic spirits
had been proof against the lowest thermometric fall, confessed their
tempers fluctuated with the ceaseless variations of the barometer.
They complained, too, that the health of their children suffered more.
It was the fact, that the open winds of March and April brought with
them more mortal sickness than the sharpest freezing weather.
[27] The frequent
burials made the hardiest sicken. On the soldier's march, it is matter
of discipline, that after the rattle of musketry over his comrade's
grave, he shall tramp it to the music of some careless tune in a
lively quickstep. But, in the Mormon camp, the companion who lay ill
and gave up the ghost within view of all, all saw as he lay stretched
a corpse, and all attended to his last resting-place. It was a sorrow
then, too, of itself to simple-hearted people, the deficient pomps of
their imperfect style of funeral. The general hopefulness of
human--including Mormon--nature, was well illustrated by the fact that
the most provident were found unfurnished with undertaker's articles;
so that bereaved affection was driven to the most melancholy
makeshifts.
[28] The best expedient
generally was to cut down a log of some eight or nine feet long, and
slitting it longitudinally, strip off its dark bark in two half
cylinders. These, placed around the body of the deceased, and bound
firmly together with withes made of the alburnum, formed a rough sort
of tubular coffin, which surviving relatives and friends, with a
little show of black crape, could follow with its enclosure to the
hole, or bit of ditch, dug to receive it in the wet ground of the
prairie. They grieved to lower it down so poorly clad, and in such an
unheeded grave. It was hard--was it right?--thus hurriedly to plunge
it in one of the undistinguishable waves of the great land sea, and
leave it behind them there, under the cold north rain, abandoned, to
be forgotten? They had no tombstones, nor could they find rock to pile
the monumental cairn. So, when they had filled up the grave, and over
it prayed a Miserere prayer, and tried to sing a hopeful psalm, their
last office was to seek out landmarks, or call in the surveyor to help
them determine the bearings of valley bends, heads, headlands, or
forks and angles of constant streams, by which its position should in
the future be remembered and recognized. The name of the beloved
person, his age, the date of his death, and these marks were all
registered with care. His party was then ready to move on. Such graves
mark all the line of the first years of Mormon travel--dispiriting
milestones to failing stragglers in the rear.
[29] It is an error to
estimate largely the number of Mormons dead of starvation, strictly
speaking. Want developed disease, and made them sink under fatigue,
and maladies that would otherwise have proved trifling. But only those
died of it outright, who fell in out-of-the-way places that the hand
of brotherhood could not reach. Among the rest no such thing as plenty
was known, while any went an hungered. If but a part of a group was
supplied with provision, the only result was that the whole went on
the half or quarter ration, according to the sufficiency that there
was among them: and this so ungrudgingly and contentedly, that till
some crisis of trial to their strength, they were themselves unaware
that their health was sinking, and their vital force impaired.
[30] Hale young men
gave up their own provided food and shelter to the old and helpless,
and walked their way back to parts of the frontier states, chiefly
Missouri and Iowa, where they were not recognized, and hired
themselves out for wages, to purchase more. Others were sent there, to
exchange for meal and flour, or wheat and corn, the table and bed
furniture, and other last resources of personal property which a few
had still retained.
[31] In a kindred
spirit of fraternal forecast, others laid out great farms in the
wilds, and planted in them the grain saved for their bread; that there
might be harvest for those who should follow them. Two of these, in
the Sac and Fox country and beyond it, Garden Grove and Mount Pisgah,
included within their fences about two miles of land a-piece,
carefully planted in grain, with a hamlet of comfortable log cabins in
the neighborhood of each.
[32] Through all this
the pioneers found redeeming comfort in the thought, that their own
suffering was the price of immunity to their friends at home. But the
arrival of spring proved this a delusion. Before the warm weather had
made the earth dry enough for easy travel, messengers came in from
Nauvoo to overtake the party with fear-exaggerated tales of outrage,
and to urge the chief men to hurry back to the city that they might
give counsel and assistance there. The enemy had only waited till the
emigrants were supposed to be gone on their road too far to return to
interfere with them, and then, renewed their aggressions.
[33] The Mormons
outside Nauvoo were indeed hard pressed; but inside the city they
maintained themselves very well for two or three months longer.
[34] Strange to say,
the chief part of this respite was devoted to completing the structure
of their quaintly devised but beautiful Temple. Since the dispersion
of Jewry, probably, history affords us no parallel to the attachment
of the Mormons for this edifice. Every architectural element, every
most fantastic emblem it embodied, was associated, for them, with some
cherished feature of their religion. Its erection had been enjoined
upon them as a most sacred duty: they were proud of the honor it
conferred upon their city, when it grew up in its splendor to become
the chief object of the admiration of strangers upon the Upper
Mississippi. Besides, they had built it as a labor of love; they could
count up to half a million the value of their tithings and free-will
offerings laid upon it. Hardly a Mormon woman had not given up to it
some trinket or pin-money: the poorest Mormon man had at least served
the tenth part of his year on its walls; and the coarsest artisan
could turn to it with something of the ennobling attachment of an
artist for his fair creation. Therefore, though their enemies drove on
them ruthlessly, they succeeded in parrying the last sword-thrust,
till they had completed even the gilding of the angel and trumpet on
its lofty spire. As a closing work, they placed on the entablature of
the front, like a baptismal mark on the forehead:
THE HOUSE OF THE LORD:
BUILT BY THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST
OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS.
HOLINESS TO THE LORD.
[35] Then, at high
noon, under the bright sunshine of May, the next only after its
completion, they consecrated it to divine service. There was a
carefully studied ceremonial for the occasion. It was said the high
elders of the sect traveled furtively from the camp of Israel in the
wilderness; and throwing off ingenious disguises, appeared in their
own robes of holy office, to give it splendor.
[36] For that one day
the Temple stood resplendent in all its typical glories of sun, moon
and stars, and other abounding figured and lettered signs,
heiroglyphics and symbols: but that day only. The sacred rites of
consecration ended, the work of removing the sacrosancta proceeded
with the rapidity of magic. It went on through the night; and when the
morning of the next day dawned, all the ornaments and furniture,
everything [that] could provoke a sneer, had been carried off; and
except some fixtures that would not bear remove, the building was
dismantled to the bare walls.
[37] It was this day
saw the departure of the last elders, and the largest band that moved
in one company together. The people of Iowa have told me, that from
morning to night they passed westward like an endless procession. They
did not seem greatly out of heart, they said; but, at the top of every
hill before they disappeared, like banished Moors, [they turned and
gazed] on their abandoned homes, and the far-seen Temple and its
glittering spire.
[38] After this
consecration, which was construed to indicate an insincerity on the
part of the Mormons as to their stipulated departure, or at least a
hope of return, their foes sat upon them with renewed bitterness. As
many fled as were at all prepared; but by the very fact of their so
decreasing the already diminished forces of the city's defenders, they
encouraged the enemy to greater boldness. It soon became apparent that
nothing short of an immediate emigration could save the remnant.
[39] From this time
onward the energies of those already on the road were engrossed by the
duty of providing for the fugitives who came crowding in after them.
At a last general meeting of the sect in Nauvoo, there had been passed
an unanimous resolve that they would sustain one another, whatever
their circumstances, upon the march; and this, though made in view of
no such appalling exigency, they now with one accord set themselves
together to carry out.
[40] Here begins the
touching period of Mormon history; on which but that it is for me a
hackneyed subject, I should be glad to dwell, were it only for the
proof it has afforded of the strictly material value to communities of
an active common faith, and its happy illustrations of the power of
the spirit of Christian fraternity to relieve the deepest of human
suffering. I may assume that it has already fully claimed the public
sympathy.
[41] Delayed thus by
their own wants, and by their exertions to provide for the wants of
others, it was not till the month of June that the advance of the
emigrant companies arrived at the Missouri.
[42] This body I
remember I had to join there, ascending the river for the purpose from
Fort Leavenworth, which was at that time our frontier post. The fort
was the interesting rendezvous of the army of the West, and the
headquarters of its gallant chief, Stephen F. Kearney, whose guest and
friend I account it my honor to have been. Many as were the reports
daily received at the garrison from all portions of the Indian
territory, it was a significant fact, how little authentic
intelligence was to be obtained concerning the Mormons. Even the
region in which they were to be sought after, was a question not
attempted to be designated with accuracy, except by what are very well
called in the West Mormon stories; none of which bore any sifting. One
of these averted, that a party of Mormons in spangled crimson robes of
office, headed by one in black velvet and silver, had been teaching a
Jewish pow-wow to the medicine men of the Sauks and Foxes. Another
averted that they were going about in buffalo robe short frocks,
imitative of the costume of Saint John, preaching baptism and the
instance of the kingdom of heaven among the Ioways. To believe one
report, ammunition and whiskey had been received by Indian braves at
the hands of an elder with a flowing white beard, who spoke Indian, he
alleged, because he had the gift of tongues: this, as far north as the
country of the Yanketon Sioux. According to another yet, which
professed to be derived officially from at least one Indian sub-agent,
the Mormons had distributed the scarlet uniforms of H. B. M.'s
servants among the Pottawatamies, and had carried into their country
twelve pieces of brass cannon, which were counted by a traveler as
they were rafted across the East Fork of Grand River, one of the
northern tributaries of the Missouri. The narrators of these pleasant
stories were at variance as to the position of the Mormons, by a
couple of hundred leagues; but they harmonized in the warning, that to
seek certain of the leading camps would be to meet the treatment of a
spy.
[43] Almost at the
outset of my journey from Fort Leavenworth, while yet upon the edge of
the Indian border, I had the good fortune to fall in with a couple of
thin-necked sallow persons, in patchwork pantaloons, conducting
northward wagon-loads of Indian corn, which they had obtained,
according to their own account, in barter from a squatter from some
silver spoons and a feather bed. Their character was disclosed by
their eager request of a bite from my wallet; in default of which,
after a somewhat superfluous scriptural grace, they made an imperfect
lunch before me off the softer of their corn ears, eating the grains
as horses do, from the cob. I took their advice to follow up the
Missouri; somewhat not far from which, in the Pottawatamie country,
they were sure I would encounter one of their advancing companies.
[44] I had bad weather
on the road. Excessive heats, varied only by repeated drenching
thunder squalls, knocked up my horse, my only traveling companion: and
otherwise added to the ordinary hardships of a kind of life to which I
was as yet little accustomed. I suffered a sense of discomfort,
therefore, amounting to physical nostalgia, and was, in fact, wearied
to death of the staring silence of the prairie, before I came upon the
object of my search.
[45] They were
collected a little distance above the Pottawatamie Agency. The hills
of the "High Prairie" crowding in upon the river at this point, and
overhanging it, appear of an unusual and commanding elevation. They
are called the Council Bluffs; a name given them with another meaning,
but well illustrated by the picturesque Congress of their high and
mighty summits. To the south of them, a rich alluvial flat of
considerable width follows down the Missouri, some eight miles, to
where it is lost from view at a turn, which forms the site of the
Indian town of Point aux Poules. Across the river from this spot the
hills recur again, but are skirted at their base by as much low ground
as suffices for a landing.
[46] This landing, and
the large flat or bottom on the east side of the river, were crowded
with covered carts and wagons; and each one of the Council Bluff hills
opposite was crowned with its own great camp, gay with bright white
canvas, and alive with the busy stir of swarming occupants. In the
clear blue morning air, the smoke streamed up from more than a
thousand cooking fires. Countless roads and bypaths checkered all
manner of geometric figures on the hillside. Herd boys were dozing
upon the slopes; sheep and horses, cows, and oxen, were feeding around
them, and other herds in the luxuriant meadow of the then swollen
river. From a single point I counted four thousand head of cattle in
view at one time. As I approached the camps, it seemed to me the
children there were to prove still more numerous. Along a little creek
I had to cross were women in greater force than blanchisseuses upon
the Seine, washing and rinsing all manner of white muslins, red
flannels and parti-colored calicoes, and hanging them to bleach upon a
greater area of grass and bushes than we can display in all our
Washington Square.
[47] Hastening by
these, I saluted a group of noisy boys, whose purely vernacular cries
had for me an invincible home-savoring attraction. It was one of them,
a bright faced lad, who, hurrying on his jacket and trowsers, fresh
from bathing in the creek, first assured me I was at my right
destination. He was a mere child; but he told me of his own accord
where I had best go seek my welcome, and took my horse's bridle to
help me pass a morass, the bridge over which he alleged to be unsafe.
[48] There was
something joyous for me in my free rambles about this vast body of
pilgrims. I could range the wild country wherever I listed, under
safeguard of their moving host. Not only in the main camps was all
stir and life, but in every direction, it seemed to me, I could follow
"Mormon Roads," and find them beaten hard and even dusty by the tread
and wear of the cattle and vehicles of emigrants laboring over them.
By day, I would overtake and pass, one after another, what amounted to
an army train of them; and at night, if I encamped at the places where
the timber and running water were found together, I was almost sure to
be within call of some camp or other, or at least within sight of its
watch-fires. Wherever I was compelled to tarry, I was certain to find
shelter and hospitality, scant, indeed, but never stinted, and always
honest and kind. After a recent unavoidable association with the
border inhabitants of Western Missouri and Iowa, the vile scum which
our own society, to apply the words of an admirable gentleman and
eminent divine, "like the great ocean washes upon its frontier shoes,"
I can scarcely describe the gratification I felt in associating again
with persons who were almost all of Eastern American origin,--persons
of refined and cleanly habits and decent language,--and in observing
their peculiar and interesting mode of life;--while every day seemed
to bring with its own especial incident, fruitful in the illustration
of habits and character....
*Nine children were born the first night the women camped out. --
Sugar Creek, Feb. 5. (Editor's note: No evidence exists to
substantiate this claim other than the written word of Eliza R. Snow.)
**One of the company having a copy of Mme. Cottin's Elizabeth, it
was so sought after that some read it from the wagons, from moonlight.
They were materially sustained too, by the practice of psalmody,
"keeping up the Songs of Zion, and passing along doxologies from front
to rear, when the breath froze on their eyelashes."
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