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 the 17th day of September,
when 1,625 troops entered Nauvoo, and drove all forth who had not
retreated before that time.
Like the wounded birds of a flock fired into toward nightfall, they
came straggling on with faltering steps, many of them without bag or
baggage, beast or barrow, [F] all asking shelter or burial, and forcing
a fresh repartition of the already divided rations of their friends. It
was plain now, that every energy must be taxed to prevent the entire
expedition from perishing. Further emigration for the time was out of
the question, and the whole people prepared themselves for encountering
another winter on the prairie.
Happily for the main body, they found themselves at this juncture among
Indians, who were amicably disposed. The lands on both sides of the
Missouri in particular, were owned by the Pottawatamies and Omahas, two
tribes whom unjust treatment by our United States, had the effect of
rendering most auspiciously hospitable to strangers whom they regarded
as persecuted like themselves.
The Pottawatamies on the eastern side, are a nation from whom the
United States bought some years ago a number of hundred thousand acres
of the finest lands they have ever brought into market. Whatever the
bargain was, the sellers were not content with it; the people saying,
their leaders were cheated, made drunk, bribed, and all manner of
naughty things besides. No doubt this was quite as much of a libel
on the fair fame of this particular Indian treaty, as such stories
generally are; for the land to which the tribe was removed in pursuance
of it, was admirably adapted to enforce habits of civilized thrift. It
was smooth prairie, wanting in timber, and of course in game; and the
humane and philanthropic might rejoice therefore that necessity would
soon indoctrinate its inhabitants into the practice of agriculture.
An impracticable few, who may have thought these advantages more than
compensated by the insalubrity of their allotted resting place, fled
to the extreme wilds, where they could find deer and woods, and rocks
and running water, and where I believe they are roaming to this day.
The remainder, being what the political vocabulary designates on such
occasions as Friendly Indians, were driven--marched is the word--galley
slaves are marched thus to Barcelona and Toulon--marched from the
Mississippi to the Missouri, and planted there. Discontented and
unhappy, they had hardly begun to form an attachment for this new soil,
when they were persuaded to exchange it for their present Fever Patch
upon the Kaw or Kansas River. They were under this second sentence of
transportation when the Mormons arrived among them.
They were pleased with the Mormons. They would have been pleased with
any whites who would not cheat them, nor sell them whiskey, nor whip
them for their poor gipsey habits, nor bear themselves indecently
toward their women, many of whom among the Pottawatamies, especially
those of nearly unmixed French descent, are singularly comely, and
some of them educated. But all Indians have something like a sentiment
of reverence for the insane, and admire those who sacrifice, without
apparent motive, their worldly welfare to the triumph of an idea. They
understand the meaning of what they call a great vow, and think it the
duty of the right-minded to lighten the votary's penance under it. To
this feeling they united the sympathy of fellow-sufferers for those who
could talk to them of their own Illinois, and tell the story how from
it they also had been ruthlessly expelled.
Their hospitality was sincere, almost delicate. Fanny Le Clerc, the
spoiled child of the great brave, Pied Riche, interpreter of the
Nation, would have the pale face Miss Devine learn duets with her
to the guitar; and the daughter of substantial Joseph La Framboise,
the interpreter of the United States,--she died of the fever that
summer,--welcomed all the nicest young Mormon Kitties and Lizzies, and
Jennies and Susans, to a coffee feast at her father's house, which was
probably the best cabin in the river village. They made the Mormons at
home, there and elsewhere. Upon all their lands they formally gave them
leave to tarry just so long as should suit their own good pleasure.
The affair, of course, furnished material for a solemn council. Under
the auspices of an officer of the United States, their chiefs were
summoned, in the form befitting great occasions, to meet in the dirty
yard of one Mr. P. A. Sarpy's log trading house, at their village.
They came in grand toilet, moving in their fantastic attire with so
much aplomb and genteel measure, that the stranger found it difficult
not to believe them high born gentlemen, attending a costumed ball.
Their aristocratically thin legs, of which they displayed fully the
usual Indian proportion, aided this illusion. There is something too
at all times very Mock-Indian in the theatrical French millinery tie
of the Pottawatamie turban; while it is next to impossible for a sober
white man, at first sight, to believe that the red, green, black, blue
and yellow cosmetics, with which he sees such grave personages so
variously dotted, diapered, cancelled and arabesqued, are worn by them
in any mood but one of the deepest and most desperate quizzing. From
the time of their first squat upon the ground, to the final breaking
up of the council circle, they sustained their characters with equal
self-possession and address.
I will not take it upon myself to describe their order of ceremonies;
indeed, I ought not, since I have never been able to view the habits
and customs of our aborigines in any other light than that of a
reluctant and sorrowful subject of jest. Besides, in this instance, the
displays of pow wow and eloquence were both probably moderated, by the
conduct of the entire transaction on temperance principles. I therefore
content myself with observing, generally, that the proceedings were
such as every way became the grandeur of the parties interested, and
the magnitude of the interests involved. When the Red Men had indulged
to satiety in tobacco smoke from their peace pipes, and in what they
love still better, their peculiar metaphoric rhodomontade, which,
beginning with the celestial bodies, and coursing downwards over the
grandest sublunary objects, always managed to alight at last on their
Grand Father Polk, and the tenderness for him of his affectionate
colored children; all the solemn funny fellows present who played
the part of Chiefs, signed formal articles of convention with their
unpronounceable names.
The renowned chief, Pied Riche--he was surnamed Le Clerc on account of
his remarkable scholarship,--then rose, and said:
"My Mormon Brethren,
"The Pottawatamie came sad and tired into this unhealthy Missouri
Bottom, not many years back, when he was taken from his beautiful
country beyond the Mississippi, which had abundant game and timber and
clear water everywhere. Now you are driven away, the same, from your
lodges and lands there, and the graves of your people. So we have both
suffered. We must help one another, and the Great Spirit will help us
both. You are now free to cut and use all the wood you may wish. You
can make all your improvements, and live on any part of our actual land
not occupied by us. Because one suffers, and does not deserve it, is no
reason he shall suffer always: I say. We may live to see all right yet.
However, if we do not, our children will.--Bon Jour."
And thus ended the pageant. I give this speech as a morsel of real
Indian. It was recited to me after the Treaty by the Pottawatamie
orator in French, which language he spoke with elegance. Bon Jour is
the French, Indian and English Hail and Farewell of the Pottawatamies.
The other entertainers of the Mormons at this time, the Omahas, or
Mahaws, are one of the minor tribes of the Grand Prairie. Their Great
Father, the United States, has found it inconvenient to protect so
remote a dependency against the overpowering league of the Dahcotahs
or Sioux, and has judged it dangerous at the same time to allow them
to protect themselves by entering into a confederation with others.
Under the pressure of this paternal embarrassment and restraint,
it has therefore happened most naturally, that this tribe, once a
powerful and valued ally of ours, has been reduced to a band of little
more than a hundred families; and these, a few years more, will
entirely extinguish. When I was among them, they were so ill-fed, that
their protruding high cheek bones gave them the air of a tribe of
consumptives. The buffalo had left them, and no good ranges lay within
several hundred miles reach. Hardly any other game found cover on their
land. What little there was, they were short of ammunition to kill.
Their annuity from the United States was trifling. They made next to
nothing at thieving. They had planted some corn in their awkward Indian
fashion, but through fear of ambush dared not venture out to harvest
it. A chief resource for them, the winter previous, had been the
spoliation of their neighbors, the Prairie Field Mice.
These interesting little people, more industrious and thrifty than
the Mahaws, garner up in the neat little cellars of their underground
homes, the small seeds or beans of the wood pea vine, which are black
and hard, but quite nutritious. Gathering them one by one, a single
Mouse will thus collect as much as half a pint, which before the cold
weather sets in, he piles away in a dry and frost proof excavation,
cleverly thatched and covered in. The Omaha animal, who, like enough,
may have idled during all the season the Mouse was amassing his
toilsome treasure, finds this subterranean granary to give out a
certain peculiar cavernous vibration when briskly tapped upon above the
ground. He wanders about, therefore, striking with a wand in hopeful
spots: and as soon as he hears the hollow sound he knows, unearths the
little retired capitalist along with his winter's hope. Mouse wakes up
from his nap to starve, and Mahaw swallows several relishing mouthfuls.
But the Mouse has his avenger in the powerful Sioux, who wages against
his wretched red brother an almost bootless, but exterminating warfare.
He robs him of his poor human peltry. One of my friends was offered for
sale a Sioux scalp of Omaha, "with grey hair nearly as long as a white
horse's tail."
The pauper Omahas were ready to solicit as a favor the residence of
white protectors among them. The Mormons harvested and stored away for
them their crops of maize; with all their own poverty, they spared them
food enough besides, from time to time, to save them from absolutely
starving; and their entrenched camp to the north of the Omaha villages,
served as a sort of breakwater between them and the destroying rush of
the Sioux.
This was the Head Quarters of the Mormon Camps of Israel. The miles of
rich prairie enclosed and sowed with the grain they could contrive to
spare, and the houses, stacks, and cattle shelters, had the seeming
of an entire county, with its people and improvements transplanted
there unbroken. On a pretty plateau overlooking the river, they built
more than seven hundred houses in a single town, neatly laid out with
highways and byways, and fortified with breast-work, stockade and
block houses. It had too its place of worship, "Tabernacle of the
Congregation," and various large workshops, and mills and factories
provided with water power.
They had no camp or settlement of equal size in the Pottawatamie
country. There was less to apprehend here from Indian invasion; and the
people scattered themselves therefore along the rivers and streams,
and in the timber groves, wherever they found inviting localities for
farming operations. In this way many of them acquired what have since
proved to be valuable pre-emption rights.
Upon the Pottawatamie lands, scattered through the border regions of
Missouri and Iowa, in the Sauk and Fox country, a few among the Ioways,
among the Poncahs in a great company upon the banks of the L'Eau qui
Coule, or Running Water River, and at the Omaha winter quarters;--the
Mormons sustained themselves through the heavy winter of 1846-1847. It
was the severest of their trials. And if I aimed at rhetorical effect,
I would be bound to offer you a minute narrative of its progress, as
a sort of climax to my history. But I have, I think, given you enough
of the Mormons' sorrows. We are all of us content to sympathise with a
certain extent of suffering; but very few can bear the recurring yet
scarcely varied narrative of another's distress without something of
impatience. The world is full of griefs, and we cannot afford to expend
too large a share of our charity, or even our commiseration in a single
quarter.
This winter was the turning point of the Mormon fortunes. Those who
lived through it were spared to witness the gradual return of better
times. And they now liken it to the passing of a dreary night, since
which they have watched the coming of a steadily brightening day.
Before the grass growth of 1847, a body of one hundred and forty-three
picked men, with seventy wagons, drawn by their best horses, left the
Omaha quarters, under the command of the members of the High Council
who had wintered there. They carried with them little but seed and
farming implements, their aim being to plant spring crops at their
ultimate destination. They relied on their rifles to give them food,
but rarely left their road in search of game. They made long daily
marches, and moved with as much rapidity as possible.
Against the season when ordinary emigration passes the Missouri, they
were already through the South Pass; and a couple of short day's travel
beyond it, entered upon the more arduous portion of their journey. It
lay in earnest through the Rocky Mountains. They turned Fremont's Peak,
Long's Peak, the Twins, and other King summits, but had to force their
way over other mountains of the rugged Utah Range, sometimes following
the stony bed of torrents, the head waters of some of the mightiest
rivers of our continent, and sometimes literally cutting their road
through heavy and ragged timber. They arrived at the grand basin of the
Great Salt Lake, much exhausted, but without losing a man, and in time
to plant for a partial autumn harvest.
Another party started after these pioneers, from the Omaha winter
quarters, in the summer. They had 566 wagons, and carried large
quantities of grain, which they were able to put in the ground before
it froze.
The same season also these were joined by a part of the Battalion and
other members of the Church, who came eastward from California and the
Sandwich Islands. Together, they fortified themselves strongly with
sunbrick wall and blockhouses, and living safely through the winter,
were able to tend crops that yielded ample provision for the ensuing
year.
In 1848, nearly all the remaining members of the Church left the
Missouri country in a succession of powerful bands, invigorated and
enriched by their abundant harvests there; and that year saw fully
established their Commonwealth of the New Covenant, the future State of
DESERET.
I may not undertake to describe to you in a single lecture the
Geography of Deseret, and its Great Basin. Were I to consider the face
of the country, its military position, or its climate and its natural
productions; each head, I am confident, would claim more time than
you have now to spare me. For Deseret is emphatically a New Country;
new in its own characteristic features, newer still in its bringing
together within its limits the most inconsistent peculiarities of
other countries. I cannot aptly compare it to any. Descend from the
mountains, where you have the scenery and climate of Switzerland, to
seek the sky of your choice among the many climates of Italy, and
you may find, welling out of the same hills, the Freezing Springs of
Mexico and the Hot Springs of Iceland, both together coursing their way
to the Salt Sea of Palestine in the plain below. The pages of Malte
Brun provide me with a less truthful parallel to it than those which
describe the happy Valley of Rasselas or the Continent of Balnibarbi.
Let me then press on with my history, during the few minutes that
remain for me.
Only two events have occurred to menace seriously the establishment at
Deseret: the first threatened to destroy its crops, the other to break
it up altogether.
The shores of the Salt Lake are infested by a sort of insect pest,
which claims a vile resemblance to the locust of the Syrian Dead Sea.
Wingless, dumpy, black, swollen-headed, with bulging eyes in cases like
goggles, mounted upon legs of steel wire and clock-spring, and with a
general personal appearance that justified the Mormons in comparing him
to a cross of the spider on the buffalo, the Deseret cricket comes down
from the mountains at a certain season of the year, in voracious and
desolating myriads. It was just at this season, that the first crops of
the new settlers were in the full glory of their youthful green. The
assailants could not be repulsed. The Mormons, after their fashion,
prayed and fought, and fought and prayed, but to no purpose. The "Black
Philistines" mowed their way even with the ground, leaving it as if
touched with an acid or burnt by fire.
But an unlooked for ally came to the rescue. Vast armies of bright
birds, before strangers to the valley, hastened across the lake from
some unknown quarter, and gorged themselves upon the well fatted enemy.
They were snow white, with little heads and clear dark eyes, and little
feet, and long wings, that arched in flight "like an angel's." At first
the Mormons thought they were new enemies to plague them; but when
they found them hostile only to the locusts, they were careful not to
molest them in their friendly office, and to this end declared a heavy
fine against all who should kill or annoy them with firearms. The gulls
soon grew to be tame as the poultry, and the delighted little children
learned to call them their pigeons. They disappeared every evening
beyond the lake; but, returning with sunrise, continued their welcome
visitings till the crickets were all exterminated.
This curious incident recurred the following year, with this variation,
that in 1849, the gulls came earlier and saved the wheat crops from all
harm whatever.
A severer trial than the visit of the cricket-locusts threatened
Deseret in the discovery of the gold of California. It was due to a
party of the Mormon battalion recruited on the Missouri, who on their
way home, found employment at New Helvetia. They were digging a mill
race there, and threw up the gold dust with their shovels. You all
know the crazy fever that broke out as soon as this was announced. It
infected every one through California. Where the gold was discovered,
at Sutter's and around, the standing grain was left uncut; whites,
Indians, and mustees, all set them to gathering gold, every other labor
forsaken, as if the first comers could rob the casket of all that it
contained. The disbanded soldiers came to the valley; they showed their
poor companions pieces of the yellow treasure they had gained; and the
cry was raised: "To California--To the Gold of Ophir, our brethren have
discovered! To California!"
Some of you have perhaps come across the half ironic instruction of the
heads of the Church, to the faithful outside the Valley:
"THE TRUE USE OF GOLD is for paving streets, covering houses, and
making culinary dishes; and, when the Saints shall have preached the
Gospel, raised grain, and built up cities enough, the Lord will open up
the way for a supply of gold to the perfect satisfaction of His People.
Until then, let them not be over-anxious, for the treasures of the
earth are in the Lord's storehouse, and he will open the doors thereof
when and where he pleases."--II. Gen. Epistle, 14.
The enlightened virtue of their rulers saved the people and the
fortunes of Deseret. A few only went away--and they were asked in
kindness never to return. The rest remained to be healthy and happy, to
"raise grain and build up cities."
The history of the Mormons has ever since been the unbroken record of
the most wonderful prosperity. It has looked, as though the elements
of fortune, obedient to a law of natural re-action, were struggling to
compensate to them their undue share of suffering. They may be pardoned
for deeming it miraculous. But, in truth, the economist accounts for
it all, who explains to us the speedy recuperation of cities, laid
in ruin by flood, fire and earthquake. During its years of trial,
Mormon labor has subsisted on insufficient capital, and under many
trials--but it has subsisted, and survives them now, as intelligent and
powerful as ever it was at Nauvoo; with this difference, that it has
in the meantime been educated to habits of unmatched thrift, energy
and endurance, and has been transplanted to a situation where it is
in every respect more productive. Moreover, during all the period of
their journey, while some have gained by practice in handicraft, and
the experience of repeated essays at their various halting-places,
the minds of all have been busy framing designs and planning the
improvements they have since found opportunity to execute.
The territory of the Mormons is unequalled as a stock-raising country.
The finest pastures of Lombardy are not more estimable than those on
the east side of the Utah Lake and Jordan River. We find here that
cereal anomaly, the Bunch grass. In May, when the other grasses push,
this fine plant dries upon its stalk, and becomes a light yellow straw,
full of flavor and nourishment. It continues thus, through what are
the dry months of the climate, till January, and then starts with a
vigorous growth, like that of our own winter wheat in April, which
keeps on till the return of another May. Whether as straw or grass,
the cattle fatten on it the year round. The numerous little dells
and sheltered spots that are found in the mountains, are excellent
sheep-walks; it is said that the wool which is grown upon them is of an
unusually fine pile and soft texture. Hogs fatten on a succulent bulb
or tuber, called the Seacoe, or Seegose Root, which I hope will soon
be naturalized with us. It is highly esteemed as a table vegetable by
Mormons and Indians, and I remark that they are cultivating it with
interest at the French Garden of Plants. The emigrant poultry have
taken the best of care of each other, only needing liberty to provide
themselves with every other blessing.
The Mormons have also been singularly happy in their Indian relations.
They have not made the common mistake of supposing savages insensible
to courtesy of demeanor; but, being taught by their religion to regard
them all as decayed brethren, have always treated the silly wicked
souls with kind-hearted civility. Though their outlay for tobacco,
wampum and vermillion has been of the very smallest, yet they have
never failed to purchase what goodwill they have wanted.
Hence, it happens, that in their Land of Promise, they are on the
best of terms with all the Canaanites and Hittites, and Hivites, and
Amorites, and Girgashites, and Perizzites, and Jebusites, within its
borders; while they "maintain their cherished relations of amity with
the rest of mankind," who, in their case, include a sort of latest
remnant of the primaeval primates, called the Root Diggers. The
Diggers, who in stature, strength and general personal appearance, may
be likened to a society of old negro women, are only to be dreaded for
their exceeding ugliness. The tribes that rob and murder in war, and
otherwise live more like white men, are however numerous all around
them.