of the unaccustomed food which mocked their prayer for daily bread, and
were carried to the graveyard in a coffin from which the benevolent
strangers who had come to their relief had to drop them, like dead dogs,
that there might be a covering for the next corpse in its turn.

"This place is one mass of famine, disease, and death. The poor
creatures, hitherto trying to exist on one meal a day, are now sinking
under fever and bowel complaints, unable to come for their soup, which
is not fit for them. Rice is what their whole cry is for, but we cannot
manage this well, nor can we get the food carried to the houses, from
dread of infection. I have got a coffin constructed with movable sides,
to convey the bodies to the churchyard, in calico bags prepared, in
which the remains are wrapped up. I have just sent it to bring the
remains of a poor creature to the grave, who having been turned out of
the only shelter she had, a miserable hut, perished the night before
last in a quarry."

The people saw the harvest they had reared carried away to another
country without an effort, for the most part, to retain it. The sole
food of the distressed class was Indian-meal, which had paid freight and
storage in England, and had been obtained in exchange for English
manufactures. Under a recent law a peasant who accepted public relief
forfeited his holding, and thousands were ejected under this cruel
provision. But landowners were not content with one process alone; they
closed on the people with ejectments, turned them out on the roads, and
plucked down their rooftrees. In more than one county rents falling due
in November for land that no longer yielded food to the cultivator, were
enforced in January. In the southwest the peasantry had made some
frantic efforts to clutch their harvest and to retaliate for their
sufferings in blind vengeance, but the law carried a sharp sword. Eight
counties, or parts of counties, were proclaimed, and a special
commission, after a brief sitting in Clare and Limerick, left eleven
peasants for the gallows. Chief Justice Blackburn took occasion to note
that "The state of things in 1847 was exactly that described by an act
passed in 1776." The disease was permanent, so were the symptoms. One
well-head of Irish discontent was English prejudice, which refuses to
listen to any complaint till it threatens to become dangerous.

It was a fearful time for men who loved their country, not only with
deep affection, but with a wise and forecasting interest. A revolution
of the worst type was in progress. Not the present alone, but the
future, was being laid waste. The marvellous reform accomplished by
Father Mathew, the self-reliance which had grown up in the era of
monster meetings, and the moral teachings of Davis and his friends were
being fast swallowed up by this calamity. The youth and manhood of the
middle classes were scrambling for pauper places from the Board of
Works, and the peasants were being transformed into mendicants by
process of law. These calamities, related of a distant and savage tribe,
would move a generous heart; but seeing them befall our own people, the
children of the same mother, and foreseeing all the black, unfathomable
misery they foreshadowed, it was hard to preserve the sober rule of
reason.

The gentry, who were responsible in the first place for the protection
of the people from whom they drew their income, insisted that the
calamity was an imperial one and ought to be borne out of the exchequer
of the empire. It was an equitable claim. If there was no irresistible
title of brotherhood, at lowest the stronger nation had snatched away
from the weaker the power of helping itself, and still drew away during
this terrible era half a million pounds every month in the shape of
absentee rents. The demand was put aside contemptuously. The claim of
the Nationalists to reënter on the management of their own affairs,
since it was plain England could not manage them successfully, was
treated as sedition. We were proffered, instead of our own resources,
which were ample--

"Alms from scornful hands, to hands in chains,
Bitterer to taste than death."

All the nations of the earth were appealed to and they gave generously;
but the result was far from being proportionate to the need. During the
year 1846 the contributions fell short of two thousand pounds a week.
And it was not forgotten that after the great fire of London, when the
citizens were in deep distress, the Irish contributed twenty thousand
fat cattle for their relief, which at their present value would amount
to a sum greater than England and Europe sent to the aid of Ireland in
1846.

To lie down and die, like cattle in a murrain, was base. No people are
bound to starve while their soil produces food cultivated by their own
hands. No other people in Europe would have submitted to such a fate.
But the leader whom they were accustomed to follow had involved himself
in a tangle of false doctrines by his unhappy "Peace Resolutions," and
he exhorted them to endure all with patience and submission. His son had
the amazing assurance to add that if they starved with complete
resignation the repeal of the union was near at hand.

On the relief committees, doctors, clergymen, and country gentlemen bore
the burden of the work, but a multitude of the gentry stood apart as if
the transaction did not concern them. They were busy in transferring the
harvest to England or clearing the population off their estates. The
English officials in Ireland accused them of jobbing in public works, or
quartering their relations and dependents on the Relief Fund, as
overseers, and, in some extreme cases, of obtaining grants for their own
families of money designed for the suffering poor on their estates. The
benevolence of the minority could not counterbalance these odious
offences, and deadly hatred was sown, which has since borne an abundant
harvest.

The state of the country grew worse from day to day. It is difficult now
to realize the condition of the western population in the autumn of
1847; but a witness of unexceptionable impartiality has painted it in
permanent colors. A young Englishman representing the Society of
Friends, who in that tragic time did work worthy of the Good Samaritan,
reported what he saw in Mayo and Galway in language which for plain
vigor rivals the narratives of Defoe. This is what he saw in Westport:

"The town of Westport was in itself a strange and fearful sight, like
what we read of in beleaguered cities; its streets crowded with gaunt
wanderers, sauntering to and fro with hopeless air and hunger-stricken
look; a mob of starved, almost naked women around the poorhouse
clamoring for soup tickets; our inn, the headquarters of the
road-engineer and pay-clerks, beset by a crowd begging for work."

As he approached Galway, the rural population were found to be in a more
miserable condition: "Some of the women and children that we saw on the
road were abject cases of poverty and almost naked. The few rags they
had on were with the greatest difficulty held together, and in a few
weeks, as they are utterly unable to provide themselves with fresh
clothes unless they be given them, they must become absolutely naked."
And in another district: "As we went along our wonder was not that the
people died, but that they lived; and I have no doubt whatever that in
any other country the mortality would have been far greater; that many
lives have been prolonged, perhaps saved, by the long apprenticeship to
want in which the Irish peasant has been trained, and by that lovely,
touching charity which prompts him to share his scanty meal with his
starving neighbor."

The fishermen of the Cladagh, who were induced to send the Whig
Attorney-General to Parliament a few months before, had to pledge the
implements of their calling for a little daily bread. "Even the very
nets and tackle of these poor fishermen, I heard, were pawned, and,
unless they be assisted to redeem them, they will be unable to take
advantage of the herring shoals, even when they approach their coast. In
order to ascertain the truth of this statement, I went into two or three
of the largest pawnshops, the owners of which fully confirmed it and
said they had in pledge at least a thousand pounds' worth of such
property and saw no likelihood of its being redeemed."

In a rural district which he revisited after an interval, he paints a
scene which can scarcely be matched in the annals of a mediaeval plague:
"One poor woman whose cabin I visited said, 'There will be nothing for
us but to lie down and die.' I tried to give her hope of English aid,
but alas! her prophecy has been too true. Out of a population of two
hundred forty I found thirteen already dead from want. The survivors
were like walking skeletons; the men gaunt and haggard, stamped with the
livid mark of hunger; the children crying with pain; the women in some
of the cabins too weak to stand. When there before I had seen cows at
almost every cabin, and there were besides many sheep and pigs owned in
the village. But now all the sheep were gone, all the cows, all the
poultry killed, only one pig left; the very dogs which had barked at me
before had disappeared; no potatoes; no oats."

The young man pointed the moral, which these horrible spectacles
suggested, with laudable courage: "I would not now discuss the causes of
this condition, nor attempt to apportion blame to its authors; but of
this one fact there can be no question: that the result of our social
system is that vast numbers of our fellow-countrymen--of the peasantry
of one of the richest nations the world ever knew--have not leave to
live. Surely such a social result as this is not only a national
misfortune but a national sin crying loudly to every Christian citizen
to do his utmost to remove it. No one of us can have a right to enjoy
either riches or repose until to the extent of his ability he strive to
wash himself of all share in the guilt of this fearful inequality, which
will be a blot in the history of our country and make her a byword among
the nations."

The weekly returns of the dead were like the bulletins of a fierce
campaign. As the end of the year approached, villages and rural
districts, which had been prosperous and populous a year before, were
desolate. In some places the loss amounted to half the resident
population. Even the poorhouses shut up, and paupers did not escape.
More than one in six perished of the unaccustomed food. The people did
not everywhere consent to die patiently. In Armagh and Down groups of
men went from house to house in the rural districts and insisted on
being fed. In Tipperary and Waterford corn stores and bakers' shops were
sacked. In Donegal the people seized upon a flour-mill and pillaged it.
In Limerick five thousand men assembled on Tory Hill and declared that
they would not starve. A local clergyman restrained them by the promise
of speedy relief. "If the Government did not act promptly, he himself
would show them where food could be had." In a few cases crops were
carried away from farms.

The offences which spring from suffering and fear were heard of in many
districts, but they were encountered with instant resistance. There were
thirty thousand men in red jackets, carefully fed, clothed, and lodged,
ready to maintain the law. Four prisoners were convicted at the Galway
assizes of stealing a filly, which they killed and ate to preserve their
own lives. In Enniskillen two boys under twelve years of age were
convicted of stealing one pint of Indian-meal cooked into "stirabout,"
and Chief Justice Blackburn vindicated the outraged law by transporting
them for seven years. Other children committed larcenies that they might
be sent to jail where there was still daily bread to be had. In Mayo the
people were eating carrion wherever it could be procured, and the
coroner could not keep pace with the inquests; for the law sometimes
spent more to ascertain the cause of a pauper's death than would suffice
to preserve his life.

The social disorganization was a spectacle as afflicting as the waste of
life; it was the waste of whatever makes life worth possessing. All the
institutions which civilize and elevate the people were disappearing,
one after another. The churches were half empty; the temperance
reading-rooms were shut up; the Mechanics' Institute no longer got
support; only the jails and the poorhouses were crowded. A new
generation, born in disease and reared in destitution, pitiless and
imbecile, threatened to drag down the nation to hopeless slavery. Trade
was paralyzed; no one bought anything which was not indispensable at the
hour. The loss of the farmers in potatoes was estimated at more than
twenty millions sterling; and with the potatoes the pigs, which fed on
them, disappeared. The seed, procured at a high price in spring, again
failed; time, money, and labor were lost, and another year of famine was
certain. All who depended on the farmer had sunk with him; shopkeepers
were beggared; tradesmen were starving; the priests living on voluntary
offerings were sometimes in fearful distress when the people had no
longer anything to offer.

The poor-rate was quite inadequate to support the burden thrown upon it
by the suspension of public works, but there was another claim upon it
which could not wait. When the elections were over and the Government
majority secure, the Treasury called on the poor-law guardians to levy
immediately a special rate for the repayment of a million and a quarter
lent by the State in a previous year. They were warned that, if they
refused, their boards would be dissolved and the rates levied by the
authority of the Commissioners. The guardians in many districts declared
that an additional rate could not be collected. All that could be got
would be too little to support the distressed class. But the Treasury
would listen to no excuse, and a dozen boards were dissolved and paid
guardians put in their place. The Treasury had lent seven millions
sterling in 1846; five millions of it had been spent in making roads
which were not needed nor desired, and one million was diverted from the
wages fund to purchase land for this experiment. The aid which the
stronger country proposed to give to the weaker, from the Treasury to
which both contributed, was the remission of one-third of this debt. A
blunder in foreign policy, the escapade of an ambitious minister in
India or Africa, has cost the British taxpayer more in a month than he
spent to save millions of fellow-subjects beyond the Irish Sea.

When the increased mortality was pressed on the attention of the
Government, Lord John Russell replied that the owners of property in
Ireland ought to support the poor born on their estates. It was a
perfectly just proposition if the ratepayers were empowered to determine
the object and method of the expenditure; but prohibiting productive
work, and forcing them to turn strong men into paupers and keep them
sweltering in workhouses instead of laboring to reclaim the waste
lands--this was not justice. The _Times_, commenting on the new policy,
declared that Ireland was as well able to help herself as France or
Belgium, and that the whole earth was doing duty for inhuman Irish
landlords. An unanswerable case, if Ireland, like France and Belgium,
had the power of collecting and applying her own revenue; otherwise not
difficult to answer.

The people fled before the famine to England, America, and the British
colonies. They carried with them the seed of disease and death. In
England a bishop and more than twenty priests died of typhus, caught in
attendance on the sick and dying. The English people clamored against
such an infliction, which it cannot be denied would be altogether
intolerable if these fugitives were not made exiles and paupers by
English law. They were ordered home again, that they might be supported
on the resources of their own country; for though we had no country for
the purpose of self-government and self-protection, we were acknowledged
to have a country when the necessity of bearing burdens arose.

More than a hundred thousand souls fled to the United States and Canada.
The United States maintained sanitary regulations on shipboard which
were effectual to a certain extent. But the emigration to Canada was
left to the individual greed of shipowners, and the emigrant-ships
rivalled the cabins of Mayo or the fever-sheds of Skibbereen. Crowded
and filthy, carrying double the legal number of passengers, who were
ill-fed and imperfectly clothed, and having no doctor on board, the
holds, says an eyewitness, were like the Black Hole of Calcutta, and
deaths occurred in myriads. The survivors, on their arrival in the new
country, continued to die and to scatter death around them.

At Montreal, during nine weeks, eight hundred emigrants perished, and
over nine hundred residents died of diseases caught from emigrants.
During six months the deaths of the new arrivals exceeded three
thousand. No preparations were made by the British Government for the
reception or the employment of these helpless multitudes. The _Times_
pronounced the neglect to be an eternal disgrace to the British name.
Ships carrying German emigrants and English emigrants arrived in Canada
at the same time in a perfectly healthy state. The Chief Secretary for
Ireland was able to inform the House of Commons that of a hundred
thousand Irishmen who fled to Canada in a year, six thousand one hundred
perished on the voyage, four thousand one hundred on their arrival, five
thousand two hundred in the hospitals, and one thousand nine hundred in
the towns to which they repaired. The Emigrant Society of Montreal
paints the result during the whole period of the famine in language not
easily to be forgotten:

"From Grosse Island up to Port Sarnia, along the borders of our great
river, on the shores of Lakes Ontario and Erie, wherever the tide of
immigration has extended are to be found one unbroken chain of graves
where repose fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, in a commingled
heap--no stone marking the spot. Twenty thousand and upward have gone
down to their graves!"

This was the fate which was befalling our race at home and abroad as the
year 1847 closed. There were not many of us who would not have given our
lives cheerfully to arrest this ruin, if we could only see a possible
way--but no way was visible.




(1848) MIGRATIONS OF THE MORMONS, Thomas L. Kane


Among the numerous religious bodies that have grown up in the United
States, the sect of Mormons, officially called "The Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter-day Saints," is perhaps the most unique in its origin
and organization, and the most singular in its history. The sect was
founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith, of Vermont. He declared that he had
discovered one of its authoritative writings, the _Book of Mormon_, at
Cumorah, New York. This book, he said, was found by him buried in the
earth at a place revealed to him by an angel. According to the Mormons,
the book, written in mystic characters on golden plates, is a record of
certain ancient people---"the long-lost tribes of Israel," Smith
declared--inhabiting North America. This book is said to have been
abridged by the prophet Mormon, and translated by Smith. By anti-Mormons
it is supposed to be based on a manuscript romance written by Solomon
Spaulding.

The Mormon Church is governed by a hierarchy with two orders of
priesthood, a president, two counsellors, twelve apostles, and elders
and other officers. Peculiar as their polity appears, it has proved
remarkably successful in the development of their church and community,
notwithstanding stern hostility and widespread disapproval. They present
an impressive example of shrewdness, thrift, and administrative skill,
resulting in great material prosperity. Besides their separate books,
they accept the Bible as authoritative, and many of their doctrines and
rites resemble those common to the Christian sects. More than anything
else, their teaching and their practice of polygamy have brought them
into collision with "Gentiles" and with the United States Government.

The first Mormon settlement was at Kirtland, Ohio, the next was in
Missouri. From those States they were expelled, and in 1840 they founded
Nauvoo in Illinois. Their later experience, up to their permanent
establishment in Utah, is recounted in the following narrative of the
hardships endured and surmounted by this extraordinary people. But it
should be added that the cause of the exodus was not, as is generally
supposed, religious persecution. The leaders of the sect at Nauvoo had
set up a bank without capital and passed thousands of its worthless
notes upon the unsuspecting farmers and traders; and it was this and
other crimes that exasperated the inhabitants of that region to the
point of driving away the whole community of Mormons.

Once, while 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.

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,
spread a fair rolling country, checkered by symmetrical lines of
fruitful husbandry. The unmistakable evidences of industry, enterprise,
and educated wealth, everywhere, made the scene one of singular and most
striking beauty.

It was a natural impulse to visit this inviting region. I procured a
skiff and rowing across the river landed at the principal wharf of the
city. No one met me there. I looked, and saw no one: I heard no
movement: though the stillness everywhere was such that I heard the
flies buzz, and the ripples break against the shallows 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. Plainly it had not slept long. There was no grass growing in the
paved ways and rain had not washed away the prints of footsteps in the
dust. Yet I went about unchecked. I went into empty ropewalks,
workshops, and smithies. The spinner's wheel was idle; the carpenter had
gone from his workbench and left his sash and casing unfinished. 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 workpeople, anywhere, looked to
know my errand. If I went into the gardens, clinking the wicket latch
loudly after me, to pull the marigolds, heartsease, and lady's-slippers,
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, hunting among the beds for cucumbers and love-apples--no one
called out to me from any opened window; no 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, I found dead
ashes cold upon the hearth, and had to tread on tiptoe, as if walking
down the aisle of a country church, to avoid rousing irreverent echoes
from the naked floors.

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 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 torn down, the still
smoldering embers of a barbecue fire that had been constructed of rails
from the fencing around it. It was the latest sign of life there. Fields
upon fields of heavy-headed 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.

Only two portions of the city seemed to suggest the import of this
mysterious solitude. In 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 had 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 to tell the reason why I had had
the temerity to cross the water without a written permit from a leader
of their band.

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 twenty thousand 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 the ruined
suburb; after which, they had driven them forth at the point of the
sword. The defence, they said, had been obstinate, but gave way on the
third day's bombardment.

They also conducted me inside the massive sculptured 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 sites
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. Besides these, they led me to see a
large and deeply chiselled marble vase, or basin, supported upon twelve
oxen, also of marble and of life size, and of which they told some
romantic stories. They said the deluded persons, most of whom were
emigrants 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 associated with
all their most cherished memories, and was therefore the chief object of
all others in the building, upon which they bestowed the greatest degree
of their idolatrous affection. On this account, the victors had so
diligently desecrated it as to render the apartment in which it was
contained too noisome to abide in.

They permitted me also to ascend into the steeple to see where it had
been struck by lightning 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. Close to the scar
left by the thunderbolt were fragments of food, cruses of liquor and
broken drinking-vessels, with a bass-drum and a steamboat signal-bell,
of which, with pain, I learned the use.

It was after nightfall when I was ready to cross the river on my return.
The wind had freshened since 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. Among the 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.

Dreadful indeed was the suffering of these 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
poorhouse, nor friends to offer them any. They could not minister to the
needs of their sick; they had no bread to quiet the fractious, hungry
cries of their children. Mothers and babes, daughters and grandparents,
all alike were clothed in tatters, lacking even sufficient covering for
the fever-stricken sufferers.

These were the Mormons, famishing, in Lee County, Iowa, in the fourth
week of the month of September, 1846. The deserted city was Nauvoo,
Illinois. The Mormons were the owners of that city and the smiling
country around it. And those who had stopped their ploughs, who had
silenced their hammers, their axes, their shuttles and the wheels of
their workshops; 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 grain--these were the keepers of their dwellings,
the carousers in their temple, the noise of whose drunken rioting
insulted the ears of the dying.

They were, all told, not more than six hundred forty persons who were
thus lying on the river-flats. But the Mormons in Nauvoo and its
environs 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?"

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.

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. 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.

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 icebound regions of the timber-shaded Slave Lake
and Lake of the Woods. Along the scattered watercourses, where they
broke the thick ice to give their cattle drink, the annual autumn fires
had left but little firewood. To men, insufficiently furnished with
tents and other appliances of shelter, wood was almost a necessary of
life. After days of fatigue their nights were often passed in restless
efforts to prevent themselves from freezing. Their stock of food also
proved inadequate; and as their constitutions became more debilitated
their suffering from cold increased. Afflicted with catarrhal
affections, manacled by the fetters of dreadfully acute rheumatism, 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 draught animals 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, this
being the green bark and tender buds and branches of the cottonwood and
other stunted growths in the hollows.

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
consolation in earnest prayers for the spring.

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.

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 a 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, fit 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 Chariton, for instance, of over three weeks' delay.

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 severest cold, 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 damp winds of March and April brought with them more
mortal sickness than the sharpest freezing weather.

The frequent burials discouraged and depressed the hardiest spirits; but
the general hopefulness of human nature was well illustrated by the fact
that even the most provident were found unfurnished with burial
necessaries, and as a result they were often driven to the most
melancholy makeshifts.

The usual expedient adopted was to cut a log of some eight or nine feet
long, and slitting the bark longitudinally, strip it off in two
half-cylinders. These, placed around the body of the deceased and bound
firmly together with withs made of alburnum, formed a rough sort of
tubular coffin, which surviving relatives and friends, with a little
show of black crape, could follow to the hole or bit of ditch dug to
receive it in the wet ground of the prairie. The name of the deceased,
his age, the date of his death, and the surrounding landmarks 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.

The hardships and trials which they had suffered developed a spirit of
self-sacrifice among these indomitable people. Hale young men gave up
their own food and shelter to the old and helpless, and worked 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 remaining articles
of personal property which a few had still retained.

In a kindred spirit of fraternity, others laid out great farms in the
wilds and planted the grain saved for their own bread; that there might
be harvests 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 each, carefully planted with
grain, with a hamlet of comfortable log cabins in the neighborhood of
each.

Through all this the pioneers found comfort in the thought that their
own suffering was the price of immunity from similar hardships their
friends at home, in following their trail, would otherwise have had to
pay. 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 until
the emigrants were supposed to be gone on their road too far to return
to interfere with them, and then renewed their aggressions.

The Mormons outside Nauvoo were indeed hard pressed, but inside the city
they maintained themselves very well for two or three months longer.
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 freewill 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 an artist has for his own
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 the summit of its lofty spire. As a
closing work, they placed on the entablature of the front, like a
baptismal mark on the forehead, these words:

THE HOUSE OF THE LORD:

BUILT BY THE CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS.

HOLINESS TO THE LORD!

Then, at high noon, under the bright sunshine of May, the next 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 travelled furtively from the camp of Israel in the wilderness, and,
throwing off ingenious disguises, appeared in their own robes of office
to give it splendor.

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,
hieroglyphs, 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 removal, the building was dismantled.

This day saw the departure of the last of the 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, they were to be seen
looking back, like banished Moors, on their abandoned homes and the
distant temple and its glittering spire.

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 set 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.

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 a unanimous resolution 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.

The host again moved on. The tents which had gathered on the hill
summits, like white birds hesitating to venture on the long flight over
the river, were struck one after another, and the dwellers in them and
their wagons and their cattle hastened down to cross it at a ferry in
the valley, which they made by night and day. A little beyond the
landing they formed their companies and made their preparations for the
last and longest stage of their journey.

Though the season was late, when they first crossed the Missouri, some
of them moved forward with great hopefulness, full of the notion of
viewing and choosing their new homes that year. But the van had only
reached Grand Island and the Pawnee villages, when they were overtaken
by more ill news from Nauvoo. Before the summer closed, their enemies
set upon the last remnant of those who were left behind in Illinois.
They were a few lingerers, who could not be persuaded but there might
yet be time for them to gather up their worldly goods before removing.
Some weakly mothers and their infants, a few delicate young girls, and
many cripples and bereaved and sick people--these had remained under
shelter, according to the Mormon statement at least, by virtue of an
express covenant in their behalf. If there was such a covenant, it was
broken. A vindictive war was waged upon them, from which the weakest
fled in scattered parties, leaving the rest to make a reluctant and
almost ludicrously unavailing defence, till September 17th, when one
thousand six hundred twenty-five troops entered Nauvoo and drove all
forth who had not retreated before that time.