there were already, along three hundred miles of the road between
that city and our Papillon Camp, over two thousand emigrating
wagons, besides a large number of nondescript turn-outs, the motley
make-shifts of poverty; from the unsuitably heavy cart that lumbered on
mysteriously with its sick driver hidden under its counterpane cover,
to the crazy two-wheeled trundle, such as our own poor employ for the
conveyance of their slop barrels, this pulled along it may be by a
little dry dugged heifer, and rigged up only to drag some such light
weight as a baby, a sack of meal, or a pack of clothes and bedding.
Some of them were in distress from losses upon the way. A strong trait
of the Mormons was their kindness to their brute dependents, and
particularly to their beasts of draught. They gave them the holiday of
the Sabbath whenever it came round: I believe they would have washed
them with old wine, after the example of the emigrant Carthaginians,
had they had any. Still, in the Slave-coast heats, under which the
animals had to move, they sometimes foundered. Sometimes, too, they
strayed off in the night, or were mired in morasses;--or oftener were
stolen by Indians, who found market covert for such plunder among
the horse-thief whites of the frontier. But the great mass of these
pilgrims of the desert was made up of poor folks, who had fled in
destitution from Nauvoo, and been refused a resting place by the people
of Iowa.
It is difficult fully to understand the state of helplessness in which
some of these would arrive, after accomplishing a journey of such
extent, under circumstances of so much privation and peril. The fact
was, they seemed to believe that all their trouble would be at an end
if they could only come up with their comrades at the Great Camps.
For this they calculated their resources, among which their power of
endurance was by much the largest and most reliable item, and they were
not disappointed if they arrived with these utterly exhausted.
I remember a signal instance of this at the Papillon Camp.
It was that of a joyous hearted clever fellow, whose songs and fiddle
tunes were the life and delight of Nauvoo in its merry days. I forget
his story, and how exactly, it fell about, that after a Mormon's full
peck of troubles, he started after us with his wife and little ones
from some 'lying down place' in the Indian country, where he had
contended with an attack of a serious malady. He was just convalescent,
and the fatigue of marching on foot again with a child on his back,
speedily brought on a relapse. But his anxiety to reach a place where
he could expect to meet friends with shelter and food, was such that
he only pressed on the harder. Probably for more than a week of the
dog-star weather, he laboured on under a high fever, walking every day
till he was entirely exhausted.
His limbs failed him then; but his courage holding out, he got into his
covered cart on top of its freight of baggage, and made them drive him
on, while he lay down. They could hardly believe how ill he was, he
talked on so cheerfully--"I'm nothing on earth ailing but home-sick:
I'm cured the very minute I get to camp and see the brethren."
Not being able thus to watch his course, he lost his way, and had to
regain it through a wretched tract of Low Meadow Prairie, where there
were no trees to break the noon, nor water but what was ague-sweet or
brackish. By the time he got back to the trail of the High Prairie, he
was, in his own phrase, 'pretty far gone.' Yet he was resolute in his
purpose as ever, and to a party he fell in with, avowed his intention
to be cured at the camp, 'and no where else.' He even jested with them,
comparing his jolting couch to a summer cot in a white washed cockloft.
"But I'll make them take me down," he said, "and give me a dip in the
river when I get there. All I care for is to see the brethren."
His determined bearing rallied the spirit of his travelling household,
and they kept on their way till he was within a few hours journey of
the camp. He entered on his last day's journey with the energy of
increased hope.
I remember that day well. For in the evening I mounted a tired horse
to go a short errand, and in mere pity had to turn back before I had
walked him a couple of hundred yards. Nothing seemed to draw life
from the languid air but the clouds of gnats and stinging midges; and
long after sundown it was so hot that the sheep lay on their stomachs
panting, and the cattle strove to lap wind like hard fagged hunting
dogs. In camp, I had spent the day in watching the invalids and the
rest hunting the shade under the wagon bodies, and veering about them,
like the shadows round the sun-dial. I know I thought myself wretched
enough, to be of their company.
Poor Merryman had all that heat to bear, with the mere pretence of an
awning to screen out the sun from his close muslin cockloft.
He did not fail till somewhere hard upon noon. He then began to grow
restless to know accurately the distance travelled. He made them give
him water, too, much more frequently; and when they stopped for this
purpose, asked a number of obscure questions. A little after this he
discovered himself that a film had come over his eyes. He confessed
that this was discouraging; but said with stubborn resignation, that
if denied to see the brethren, he still should hear the sound of their
voices.
After this, which was when he was hardly three miles from our camp, he
lay very quiet, as if husbanding his strength; but when he had made, as
is thought, a full mile further, being interrogated by the woman that
was driving, whether she should stop, he answered her, as she avers,
"No, no; go on!"
The anecdote ends badly. They brought him in dead, I think about five
o'clock of the afternoon. He had on his clean clothes; as he had
dressed himself in the morning, looking forward to his arrival.
Beside the common duty of guiding and assisting these unfortunates, the
companies in the van united in providing the highway for the entire
body of emigrants. The Mormons have laid out for themselves a road
through the Indian Territory, over four hundred leagues in length,
with substantial, well-built bridges, fit for the passage of heavy
artillery, over all the streams, except a few great rivers where they
have established permanent ferries. The nearest unfinished bridging
to the Papillon Camp, was that of the Corne a Cerf, or Elkhorn, a
tributary of the Platte, distant maybe a couple of hours' march. Here,
in what seemed to be an incredibly short space of time, there rose the
seven great piers and abutments of a bridge, such as might challenge
honors for the entire public spirited population of lower Virginia. The
party detailed to the task worked in the broiling sun, in water beyond
depth, and up to their necks, as if engaged in the perpetration of some
pointed and delightful practical joke. The chief sport lay in floating
along with the logs, cut from the overhanging timber up the stream,
guiding them till they reached their destination, and then plunging
them under water in the precise spot where they were to be secured.
This the laughing engineers would execute with the agility of happy
diving ducks.
Our nearest ferry was that over the Missouri. Nearly opposite Pull
Point, or Point aux Poules, a trading post of the American Fur Company,
and village of the Pottawatamies, they had gained a favorable crossing
by making a deep cut for the road through the steep right bank. And
here, without intermission, their flat-bottomed scows plied, crowded
with the wagons and cows and sheep and children and furniture of the
emigrants, who, in waiting their turn, made the woods around smoke with
their crowding camp fires. But no such good fortune as a gratuitous
passage awaited the heavy cattle, of whom, with the others, no less
than 30,000 were at this time on their way westward: these were made to
earn it by swimming.
A heavy freshet had at this time swollen the river to a width, as I
should judge, of something like a mile and a half, and dashed past
its fierce current, rushing, gurgling, and eddying, as if thrown from
a mill race, or scriptural fountain of the deep. Its aspect did not
invite the oxen to their duty, and the labor was to force them to
it. They were gathered in little troops upon the shore, and driven
forward till they lost their footing. As they turned their heads to
return, they encountered the combined opposition of a clamorous crowd
of bystanders, vieing with each other in the pungent administration of
inhospitable affront. Then rose their hubbub; their geeing and woing
and hawing, their yelling and yelping and screaming, their hooting and
hissing and pelting. The rearmost steers would hesitate to brave such
a rebuff; halting, they would impede the return of the outermost; they
all would waver; wavering for a moment, the current would sweep them
together downward. At this juncture, a fearless youngster, climbing
upon some brave bull in the front rank, would urge him boldly forth
into the stream: the rest then surely followed; a few moments saw them
struggling in mid current; a few more, and they were safely landed
on the opposite shore. The driver's was the sought after post of
honor here; and sometimes, when repeated failures have urged them to
emulation, I have seen the youths, in stepping from back to back of the
struggling monsters, or swimming in among their battling hoofs, display
feats of address and hardihood, that would have made Franconi's or the
Madrid bull-ring vibrate with bravos of applause. But in the hours
after hours that I have watched this sport at the ferry side, I never
heard an oath or the language of quarrel, or knew it provoke the least
sign of ill feeling.
After the sorrowful word was given out to halt, and make preparations
for winter, a chief labor became the making hay; and with every day
dawn brigades of mowers would take up the march to their positions in
chosen meadows--a prettier sight than a charge of cavalry--as they laid
their swarths, whole companies of scythes abreast. Before this time the
manliest, as well as most general daily labor, was the herding of the
cattle; the only wealth of the Mormons, and more and more cherished by
them, with the increasing pastoral character of their lives. A camp
could not be pitched in any spot without soon exhausting the freshness
of the pasture around it; and it became an ever recurring task to guide
the cattle, in unbroken droves, to the nearest places where it was
still fresh and fattening. Sometimes it was necessary to go farther,
to distant ranges which were known as feeding grounds of the Buffalo.
About these there were sure to prowl parties of thievish Indians;
and each drove therefore had its escort of mounted men and boys, who
learned self-reliance and heroism while on night guard alone, among
the silent hills. But generally the cattle were driven from the camp
at the dawn of morning, and brought back thousands together in the
evening, to be picketed in the great corral or enclosure, where beeves,
bulls, cows, and oxen, with the horses, mules, hogs, calves, sheep and
human beings, could all look together upon the red watch fires, with
the feeling of security, when aroused by the Indian stampede, or the
howlings of the prairie wolves at moonrise.
When they set about building their winter houses, too, the Mormons went
into quite considerable timbering operations, and performed desperate
feats of carpentry. They did not come, ornamental gentlemen or raw
apprentices, to extemporise new versions of Robinson Crusoe. It was a
comfort to notice the readiness with which they turned their hands to
wood craft; some of them, though I believe these had generally been
bred carpenters, wheelwrights, or more particularly boat builders,
quite outdoing the most notable voyageurs in the use of the axe. One
of these would fell a tree, strip off its bark, cut and split up the
trunk in piles of plank, scantling, or shingles; make posts, and pins,
and pales--everything wanted almost, of the branches; and treat his
toil from first to last with more sportive flourish than a school-boy
whittling his shingle.
Inside the camp, the chief labors were assigned to the women. From the
moment, when after the halt, the lines had been laid, the spring wells
dug out, and the ovens and fire-places built, though the men still
assumed to set the guards and enforce the regulations of Police, the
Empire of the Tented Town was with the better sex. They were the chief
comforters of the severest sufferers, the kind nurses who gave them in
their sickness, those dear attentions, with which pauperism is hardly
poor, and which the greatest wealth often fails to buy. And they were a
nation of wonderful managers. They could hardly be called housewives in
etymological strictness, but it was plain that they had once been such,
and most distinguished ones. Their art availed them in their changed
affairs. With almost their entire culinary material limited to the milk
of their cows, some store of meal or flour, and a very few condiments,
they brought their thousand and one receipts into play with a success
that outdid for their families, the miracle of the Hebrew widow's
cruise. They learned to make butter on a march, by the dashing of the
wagon, and so nicely to calculate the working of barm in the jolting
heats, that as soon after the halt as an oven could be dug in the hill
side and heated, their well kneaded loaf was ready for baking, and
produced good leavened bread for supper. I have no doubt the appetizing
zest, their humble lore succeeded in imparting to diet which was both
simple and meagre, availed materially for the health as well as the
comfort of the people.
But the first duty of the Mormon women was, through all change of
place and fortune, to keep alive the altar fire of home. Whatever
their manifold labors for the day, it was their effort to complete
them against the sacred hour of evening fall. For by that time all
the out-workers, scouts, ferrymen or bridgemen, roadmakers, herdsmen
or haymakers, had finished their tasks and come in to their rest.
And before the last smoke of the supper fire curled up reddening in
the glow of sunset, a hundred chimes of cattle bells announced their
looked-for approach across the open hills, and the women went out to
meet them at the camp gates, and with their children in their laps sat
by them at the cherished Family meal, and talked over the events of the
well-spent day.
But every day closed as every day began, with an invocation of the
Divine favour; without which, indeed, no Mormon seemed to dare to lay
him down to rest. With the first shining of the stars, laughter and
loud talking hushed, the neighbor went his way, you heard the last hymn
sung, and then the thousand-voiced murmur of prayer was heard like
babbling water falling down the hills.
There was no austerity, however, about the religion of Mormonism. Their
fasting and penance, it is no jest to say, was altogether involuntary.
They made no merit of that. They kept the Sabbath with considerable
strictness: they were too close copyists of the wanderers of Israel in
other respects not to have learned, like them, the value of this most
admirable of the Egypto-Mosaic institutions. But the rest of the week,
their religion was independent of ritual observance. They had the sort
of strong stomached faith that is still found embalmed in sheltered
spots of Catholic Italy and Spain, with the spirit of the believing
or Dark Ages. It was altogether too strongly felt, to be dependent on
intellectual ingenuity or careful caution of the ridiculous. It mixed
itself up fearlessly with the common transactions of their every-day
life, and only to give them liveliness and color.
If any passages of life bear better than others a double
interpretation, they are the adventures of travel, and of the field.
What old persons call discomforts and discouraging mishaps, are the
very elements to the young and sanguine, of what they are willing to
term fun. The Mormons took the young and hopeful side. They could make
sport and frolic of their trials, and often turn right sharp suffering
into right round laughter against themselves. I certainly heard more
jests and Joe Millers while in this Papillon Camp, than I am likely to
hear in all the remainder of my days.
This, too, was at a time of serious affliction. Beside the ordinary
suffering from insufficient food and shelter, distressing and mortal
sickness, exacerbated, if not originated by these causes, was generally
prevalent.
In the camp nearest us on the West, which was that of the bridging
party near the Corne, the number of its inhabitants being small enough
to invite computation, I found, as early as the 31st of July, that 37
per cent. of its inhabitants were down with the Fever and a sort of
strange scorbutic disease, frequently fatal, which they named the Black
Canker. The camps to the East of us, which were all on the eastern side
of the Missouri, were yet worse fated.
The climate of the entire upper 'Misery Bottom,' as they term it, is,
during a considerable part of Summer and Autumn singularly pestiferous.
Its rich soil, which is to a depth far beyond the reach of the plough
as fat as the earth of kitchen garden, or compost-heap, is annually the
force-bed of a vegetation as rank as that of the Tropics. To render
its fatal fertility the greater, it is everywhere freely watered by
springs and creeks and larger streams, that flow into it from both
sides. In the season of drought, when the Sun enters Virgo, these dry
down till they run impure as open sewers, exposing to the day foul
broad flats, mere quagmires of black dirt, stretching along for miles,
unvaried, except by the limbs of half buried carrion tree trunks, or
by occasional yellow pools of what the children call frog spawn; all
together steaming up thick vapours redolent of the savour of death.
The same is the habit of the Great River. In the beginning of August,
its shores hardly could contain the millions of forest logs, and tens
of billions of gallons of turbid water, that came rushing down together
from its mountain head-gates. But before the month was out, the freshet
had all passed by; the river diminished one half, threaded feebly
southward through the centre of the Valley, and the mud of its channel,
baked and creased, made a wide tile pavement between the choking crowd
of reeds and sedgy grasses and wet stalked weeds, and growths of marsh
meadow flowers, the garden homes at this tainted season of venom-crazy
snakes, and the fresher ooze by the water's edge, which stank in the
sun like a naked muscle shoal.
Then the plague raged. I have no means of ascertaining the mortality
of the Indians who inhabited the Bottom. In 1845, the year previous,
which was not more unhealthy, they lost one-ninth of their number in
about two months. The Mormons were scourged severely. The exceeding
mortality among some of them, was no doubt in the main attributable to
the low state to which their systems had been brought by long continued
endurance of want and hardship. It is to be remembered also, that they
were the first turners up of the prairie sod, and that this of itself
made them liable to the sickness of new countries. It was where their
agricultural operations had been most considerable, and in situations
on the left bank of the river, where the prevalent south-west winds
wafted to them the miasmata of its shores, that disease was most rife.
[D]
In some of these, the fever prevailed to such an extent that hardly any
escaped it. They let their cows go unmilked. They wanted for voices to
raise the Psalm of Sundays. The few who were able to keep their feet,
went about among the tents and wagons with food and water, like nurses
through the wards of an Infirmary. Here at one time the digging got
behind hand: burials were slow; and you might see women sit in the
open tents keeping the flies off their dead children, sometime after
decomposition had set in.
In our own camp for a part of August and September, things wore an
unpleasant aspect enough. [E] Its situation was one much praised for
its comparative salubrity; but perhaps on this account, the number of
cases of Fever among us was increased by the hurrying arrival from
other localities, of parties in whom the virus leaven of disease was
fermented by forced travel.
But I am excused sufficiently the attempt to get up for your
entertainment here any circumstantial picture of horrors, by the
fact, that at the most interesting season, I was incapacitated for
nice observation by an attack of Fever--mine was what they call the
Congestive--that it required the utmost use of all my faculties to
recover from. I still kept my tent in the camp line; but, for as much
as a month, had very small notion of what went on among my neighbors.
I recollect overhearing a lamentation over some dear baby, that its
mother no doubt thought the destroying angel should have been specially
instructed to spare. I wish too for my own sake, I could forget, how
imperfectly one day I mourned the decease of a poor saint, who by
clamor rendered his vicinity troublesome. He no doubt endured great
pain; for he groaned shockingly till death came to his relief. He
interfered with my own hard gained slumbers, and--I was glad when Death
did relieve him.
Before my attack, I was fond of conversing with an amiable old man, I
think English born, who having then recently buried his only daughter
and grandson, used to be seen sitting out before his tent, resting his
sorrowful forehead on his hands, joined over a smooth white oak staff.
I missed him when I got about again; probably he had been my moaning
neighbor.
So, too, having been much exercised in my dreams at this time, by the
vision of dismal processions, such as might have been formed by the
union in line of all the forlornest and ugliest of the struggling
fugitives from Nauvoo, I happen to recall as I write, that I had some
knowledge somewhere of one of our new comers, for whom the nightmare
revived and repeated without intermission the torment of his trying
journey. As he lay, feeding life with long drawn breaths, he muttered:
"Where's next water? Team--give out! Hot, hot--God, it's hot: Stop the
wagon--stop the wagon--stop, stop the wagon!" They woke him;--to his
own content--but I believe returning sleep ever renewed his distressing
visions, till the sounder slumber came on from which no earthly hand or
voice could rouse him; into which I hope he did not carry them.
In a half dreamy way, I remember, or I think I remember, a crowd of
phantoms like these. I recall but one fact, however, going far in
proof of a considerable mortality. Earlier in the season, while going
westward with the intention of passing the Rocky Mountains that summer,
I had opened with the assistance of Mormon spades and shovels, a large
mound on a commanding elevation, the tomb of a warrior of the ancient
race; and continuing on my way, had left a deep trench excavated
entirely through it. Returning fever-struck to the Papillon Camp, I
found it planted close by this spot. It was just forming as I arrived;
the first wagon, if I mistake not, having but a day or two before
halted into place. My first airing upon my convalescence took me to
the mound, which, probably to save digging, had been re-adapted to its
original purpose. In this brief interval, they had filled the trench
with bodies, and furrowed the ground with graves around it, like the
ploughing of a field.
The lengthened sojourn of the Mormons in this insalubrious region was
imposed upon them by circumstances which I must now advert to.