Thomas L. Kane's Description of the City of Nauvoo, and the Exiled
Mormons.
And now I wish you to read the graphic lecture of Thomas L. Kane before
the Historical Society of Philadelphia:
"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 falls, 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 backgrounds,
there rolled off a fair country chequered by the careful lines of
fruitful husbandry. The unmistakable marks 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
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
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, yet I went about unchecked. I went into
empty workshops, rope walks and smithies. The spinner's wheel was idle,
the carpenter had gone from his work bench and shavings, his unfinished
sash and casings, fresh bark was in the tanner's vat, and fresh chopped
light wood 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 for a holiday. No work
people looked to know my errand. If I went into the garden clinking
the wicket latch loudly after me, to pull the marigolds, heartease and
lady-slippers and draw a drink with the water sodden well bucket and
its noisy chain, or, knocking off with my stick the tall, heavyheaded
dahlias and sunflowers, hunted over the beds for cucumbers and
loveapples, 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 tip-toe as if walking
down the aisle of a country church, to avoid arousing 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 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 around it. It was the latest
signs 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. Only two portions of the city seemed to
suggest the import of this mysterious solitude. On the eastern suburb
the houses looking out upon the country showed, by their splintered
woodworks and walls battered to the foundation, that they had lately
been a mark of 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
why I had the temerity to cross the water without a written permit from
the leader of their band. Though these men were 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 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 finally
been successful only a few days before my visit, in an action fought
in front of the ruined suburb, after which they had driven them 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 a resident
of the fated city, whom they admitted to have borne a character without
reproach.
"They also conducted me inside the wall--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 a matter
of duty sedulously defiled and defaced. The reputed site 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 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
emigrants from a great distance, believed their Deity countenanced
their reception here for 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 noisome to abide in. 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 pure day, close to the scar of
divine wrath 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 I afterwards learned the use with pain.
"It was after nightfall when I was ready to cross the river on my
return. The wind had freshened after 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. 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 creatures, whom my movements roused
from uneasy slumber upon the ground. 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 vendors of apples and peanuts, and which
flaring and fluttering 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 enjoy 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
a measured sip 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 upon a piece of driftwood outside.
Dreadful indeed, were the sufferings of these forsaken beings, bowed
and cramped by cold and sun burn, 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 hospitals,
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.
"These were the 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, Ills. The Mormons were the owners of that city,
and the smiling country around, and those who stopped their plows,
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 grain, these were the keepers of their dwellings,
the carousers in their temple, whose drunken riot insulted the ears
of their 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 had numbered the year before 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 fortune!"
Just a word to let the reader know of Col. Kane's first coming to our
people.
One day, while we were still encamped at Council Bluffs, a
delicate-looking stranger rode up on horseback. The young man was
Colonel Thomas L. Kane, son of Judge Kane of Philadelphia, and brother
of Dr. Kane, the celebrated Arctic explorer. Soon after reaching our
camp he was stricken with fever. The best medical talent we had watched
him unceasingly; and to the joy of the whole camp, he recovered. Never
was watching, nursing, and praying better requited by man than he
repaid to the Mormon people. As soon as his returning strength would
allow, he hastened back east, and unsolicited by us delivered in his
native city and in Washington some of the most truthful, vivid life
scenes of the suffering of our people that have ever been published.