THE MORMONS.
A
DISCOURSE
DELIVERED BEFORE
THE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
OF
PENNSYLVANIA:
MARCH 26, 1850.
BY THOMAS L. KANE.
PHILADELPHIA:
KING & BAIRD, PRINTERS, SANSOM STREET.
1850.
DISCOURSE.
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.
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 back ground,
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 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.
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
work-bench 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, heart's-ease 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 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.
On the outskirts of the town was the city graveyard. But there was no
record of Plague there, nor did it in anywise 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.
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
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 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 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 defence, 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.
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. Beside these, they led me to see a
large and deep chiselled 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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 oft 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 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.
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 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 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.
I think it was as I turned from the wretched night-watch 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.
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?
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.
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. [A] 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 travellers; 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.
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.
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, [B]
and sought cheerfulness in earnest prayings for the Spring,--longed for
as morning by the tossing sick.
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 half a mile from the place they left in the morning. The heavy
rains raised all the water-courses: 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 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.
The frequent burials made the hardiest sicken. On the soldier's march,
it is a 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 quick-step. 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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
In a kindred spirit of fraternal forecast, others laid out great farms
in the wilds, and planted in them 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 a-piece,
carefully planted in grain, with a hamlet of comfortable log cabins in
the neighbourhood of each.
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.
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 splendour 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 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,
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 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 travelled 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 splendour.
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 to the bare walls.
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, were to be seen looking
back, like banished Moors, on their abandoned homes, and the far-seen
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 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.
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.
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.
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 head-quarters 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
averred, 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 averred
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 traveller 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.
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 for
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;
somewhere not far from which, in the Pottawatamie country, they were
sure I would encounter one of their advancing companies.
I had bad weather on the road. Excessive heats, varied only by repeated
drenching thunder squalls, knocked up my horse, my only travelling
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 objects of my search.
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.
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 hillsides. 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 particolored calicoes, and hanging them to bleach upon
a greater area of grass and bushes than we can display in all our
Washington Square.
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
trousers, 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.
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, [C] "like the great ocean washes upon
its frontier shores," 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 it its own especial
incident, fruitful in the illustration of habits and character.
It was during the period of which I have just spoken, that the Mormon
battalion of 520 men was recruited and marched for the Pacific Coast.
At the commencement of the Mexican war, the President considered it
desirable to march a body of reliable infantry to California at as
early a period as practicable, and the known hardihood and habits of
discipline of the Mormons were supposed peculiarly to fit them for
this service. As California was supposed also to be their ultimate
destination, the long march might cost them less than other citizens.
They were accordingly invited to furnish a battalion of volunteers
early in the month of July.
The call could hardly have been more inconveniently timed. The young,
and those who could best have been spared, were then away from the
main body, either with pioneer companies in the van, or, their faith
unannounced, seeking work and food about the northwestern settlements,
to support them till the return of the season for commencing
emigration. The force was therefore to be recruited from among fathers
of families, and others whose presence it was most desirable to retain.
There were some, too, who could not view the invitation without
jealousy. They had twice been persuaded by (State) Government
authorities in Illinois and Missouri, to give up their arms on some
special appeals to their patriotic confidence, and had then been left
to the malice of their enemies. And now they were asked, in the midst
of the Indian country, to surrender over five hundred of their best men
for a war march of thousands of miles to California, without the hope
of return till after the conquest of that country. Could they view such
a proposition with favor?
But the feeling of country triumphed. The Union had never wronged them:
"You shall have your battalion at once, if it has to be a class of our
elders," said one, himself a ruling elder. A central 'mass meeting'
for Council, some harangues at the more remotely scattered camps, an
American flag brought out from the storehouse of things rescued, and
hoisted to the top of a tree mast--and, in three days, the force was
reported, mustered, organized and ready to march.
There was no sentimental affectation at their leave-taking. The
afternoon before was appropriated to a farewell ball; and a more
merry dancing rout I have never seen, though the company went without
refreshments, and their ball-room was of the most primitive. It was the
custom, whenever the larger camps rested for a few days together, to
make great arbors, or Boweries, as they called them, of poles and brush
and wattling, as places of shelter for their meetings of devotion or
conference. In one of these, where the ground had been trodden firm and
hard by the worshippers of the popular Father Taylor's precinct, was
gathered now the mirth and beauty of the Mormon Israel.
If anything told the Mormons had been bred to other lives, it was the
appearance of the women, as they assembled here. Before their flight,
they had sold their watches and trinkets as the most available resource
for raising ready money; and hence, like their partners, who wore
waistcoats cut with useless watch pockets, they, although their ears
were pierced and bore the loop-marks of rejected pendants, were without
earrings, finger-rings, chains or brooches. Except such ornaments,
however, they lacked nothing most becoming the attire of decorous
maidens. The neatly darned white stocking, and clean bright petticoat,
the artistically clear-starched collar and chemisette, the something
faded, only because too well washed, lawn or gingham gown, that fitted
modishly to the waist of its pretty wearer,--these, if any of them
spoke of poverty, spoke of a poverty that had known its better days.
With the rest, attended the elders of the church within call, including
nearly all the chiefs of the High Council, with their wives and
children. They, the gravest and most trouble-worn, seemed the most
anxious of any to be first to throw off the burden of heavy thoughts.
Their leading off the dancing in a great double cotillion was the
signal bade the festivity commence. To the canto of debonair violins,
the cheer of horns, the jingle of sleigh-bells, and the jovial snoring
of the tambourine, they did dance! None of your minuets or other
mortuary processions of gentles in etiquette, tight shoes, and pinching
gloves, but the spirited and scientific displays of our venerated and
merry grandparents, who were not above following the fiddle to the
Fox-Chase Inn or Gardens of Gray's Ferry. French fours, Copenhagen
jigs, Virginia reels, and the like forgotten figures, executed with
the spirit of people too happy to be slow, or bashful or constrained.
Light hearts, lithe figures and light feet, had it their own way from
an early hour till after the sun had dipped behind the sharp sky line
of the Omaha hills. Silence was then called, and a well cultivated
mezzo-soprano voice, belonging to a young lady with fair face and dark
eyes, gave with quartette accompaniment a little song, the notes of
which I have been unsuccessful in repeated efforts to obtain since,--a
version of the text, touching to all earthly wanderers:
"By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept."
"We wept when we remembered Zion."
There was danger of some expression of feeling when the song was over,
for it had begun to draw tears; but breaking the quiet with his hard
voice, an Elder asked the blessing of Heaven on all who, with purity
of heart and brotherhood of spirit, had mingled in that society, and
then, all dispersed, hastening to cover from the falling dews. All, I
remember, but some splendid Indians, who in cardinal scarlet blankets
and feathered leggings, had been making foreground figures for the
dancing rings, like those in Mr. West's picture of our Philadelphia
Treaty, and staring their inability to comprehend the wonderful
performances. These loitered to the last, as if unwilling to seek their
abject homes.
Well as I knew the peculiar fondness of the Mormons for music, their
orchestra in service on this occasion astonished me by its numbers
and fine drill. The story was, that an eloquent Mormon missionary had
converted its members in a body at an English town, a stronghold of
the sect, and that they took up their trumpets, trombones, drums and
hautboys together, and followed him to America.
When the refugees from Nauvoo were hastening to part with their
table-ware, jewelry, and almost every other fragment of metal wealth
they possessed that was not iron, they had never a thought of giving
up the instruments of this favorite band. And when the battalion was
enlisted, though high inducements were offered some of the performers
to accompany it, they all refused. Their fortunes went with the Camp
of the Tabernacle. They had led the Farewell Service in the Nauvoo
Temple. Their office now was to guide the monster choruses and Sunday
hymns; and like the trumpets of silver made of a whole piece 'for the
calling of the assembly, and for the journeying of the camps,' to knoll
the people in to church. Some of their wind instruments, indeed, were
uncommonly full and pure toned, and in that clear dry air could be
heard to a great distance. It had the strangest effect in the world,
to listen to their sweet music winding over the uninhabited country.
Something in the style of a Moravian death-tune blown at day-break, but
altogether unique. It might be when you were hunting a ford over the
Great Platte, the dreariest of all wild rivers, perplexed among the
far-reaching sand bars and curlew shallows of its shifting bed:--the
wind rising would bring you the first faint thought of a melody; and,
as you listened, borne down upon the gust that swept past you a cloud
of the dry sifted sands, you recognized it--perhaps a home-loved theme
of Henry Proch or Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn Bartholdy, away there in the
Indian Marches!
The battalion gone, 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 ply 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. It
was a more serious matter to cross the mountains then than now, that
the thirst of our people for the gold of California has made the region
between them and their desire such literally trodden ground.
Thanks to this wonderful movement, I may dismiss an effort to describe
the incidents of emigrant life upon the Plains, presuming that you have
been made more than familiar with them already, by the many repeated
descriptions of which they have been the subject. The desert march, the
ford, the quicksand, the Indian battle, the bison chase, the prairie
fire:--the adventures of the Mormons comprised every variety of these
varieties; but I could not hope to invest them with the interest
of novelty. The character of their every-day life, its routine and
conduct, alone offered any exclusive or marked peculiarity. Their
romantic devotional observances, and their admirable concert of purpose
and action, met the eye at once. After these, the stranger was most
struck perhaps by the strict order of march, the unconfused closing up
to meet attack, the skilful securing of the cattle upon the halt, the
system with which the watches were set at night to guard them and the
lines of corral--with other similar circumstances indicative of the
maintenance of a high state of discipline. Every ten of their wagons
was under the care of a captain. This captain of ten, as they termed
him, obeyed a captain of fifty; who, in turn, obeyed his captain of a
hundred, or directly a member of what they call the High Council of
the Church. All these were responsible and determined men, approved of
by the people for their courage, discretion and experience. So well
recognized were the results of this organization, that bands of hostile
Indians have passed by comparative small parties of Mormons, to attack
much larger, but less compact bodies of other emigrants.
The most striking feature, however, of the Mormon emigration, was
undoubtedly their formation of the Tabernacle Camps and temporary
Stakes, or Settlements, which renewed in the sleeping solitudes
everywhere along their road, the cheering signs of intelligent and
hopeful life.
I will make this remark plainer by describing to you one of these
camps, with the daily routine of its inhabitants. I select at random,
for my purpose, a large camp upon the delta between the Nebraska and
Missouri, in the territory disputed between the Omaha, and Otto and
Missouria Indians. It remained pitched here for nearly two months,
during which period I resided in it.
It was situated near the Petit Papillon, or Little Butterfly River, and
upon some finely rounded hills that encircle a favorite cool spring.
On each of these a square was marked out; and the wagons as they
arrived took their positions along its four sides in double rows, so
as to leave a roomy street or passageway between them. The tents were
disposed also in rows, at intervals between the wagons. The cattle were
folded in high-fenced yards outside. The quadrangle inside was left
vacant for the sake of ventilation, and the streets, covered in with
leafy arbor work and kept scrupulously clean, formed a shaded cloister
walk. This was the place of exercise for slowly recovering invalids,
the day-home of the infants, and the evening promenade of all.
From the first formation of the camp, all its inhabitants were
constantly and laboriously occupied. Many of them were highly educated
mechanics, and seemed only to need a day's anticipated rest to engage
them at the forge, loom, or turning lathe, upon some needed chore of
work. A Mormon gunsmith is the inventor of the excellent repeating
rifle, that loads by slides instead of cylinders; and one of the
neatest finished fire-arms I have ever seen was of this kind, wrought
from scraps of old iron, and inlaid with the silver of a couple of half
dollars, under a hot July sun, in a spot where the average height of
the grass was above the workman's shoulders. I have seen a cobbler,
after the halt of his party on the march, hunting along the river bank
for a lap-stone in the twilight, that he might finish a famous boot
sole by the camp fire; and I have had a piece of cloth, the wool of
which was sheared, and dyed, and spun, and woven, during a progress of
over three hundred miles.
Their more interesting occupations, however, were those growing out
of their peculiar circumstances and position. The chiefs were seldom
without some curious affair on hand to settle with the restless
Indians; while the immense labor and responsibility of the conduct of
their unwieldy moving army, and the commissariat of its hundreds of
famishing poor, also devolved upon them. They had good men they called
Bishops, whose special office it was to look up the cases of extremest
suffering: and their relief parties were out night and day to scour
over every trail.