Part 48 (1/2)
The illness was diagnosed as, the usual malarial fever, accompanied in many cases with s...o...b..tic symptoms, which they called ”black canker,”
due to a lack of vegetable food. In and around Winter Quarters there were more than 600 burials before cold weather set in, and 334 out of a population of 3483 were reported on the sick list as late as December.
The Papillon Camp, on the Little b.u.t.terfly River, was a deadly site.
Kane, who had the fever there, in pa.s.sing by the place earlier in the season had opened an Indian mound, leaving a deep trench through it. ”My first airing,” he says, ”upon my convalescence, took me to the mound, which, probably to save digging, had been readapted 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.”
But amid such affliction, in which cows went unmilked and corpses became loathsome before men could be found to bury them, preparations continued at all the camps for the winter's stay and next year's supplies. Brigham Young, writing from Winter Quarters on January 6, 1847, to the elders in England, said: ”We have upward of seven hundred houses in our miniature city, composed mostly of logs in the body, covered with puncheon, straw, and dirt, which are warm and wholesome; a few are composed of turf, willows, straw, etc., which are comfortable this winter, but will not endure the thaws, rain, and suns.h.i.+ne of spring.” * This city was divided into twenty-two wards, each presided over by a Bishop. The princ.i.p.al buildings were the Council House, thirty-two by twenty-four feet, and Dr. Richard's house, called the Octagon, and described as resembling the heap of earth piled up over potatoes to s.h.i.+eld them from frost. In this Octagon the High Council held most of their meetings. A great necessity was a flouring mill, and accordingly they sent to St. Louis for the stones and gearing, and, under Brigham Young's personal direction as a carpenter, the mill was built and made ready for use in January. The money sent back by the Battalion was expended in St. Louis for sugar and other needed articles.
* Millennial Star, Vol. IX, p. 97.
As usual with the pictures sent to Europe, Young's description of the comfort of the winter camp was exaggerated. P. P. Pratt, who arrived at Winter Quarters from his mission to Europe on April 8, 1847, says:--
”I found my family all alive, and dwelling in a log cabin. They had, however, suffered much from cold, hunger, and sickness. They had oftentimes lived for several days on a little corn meal, ground in a hand mill, with no other food. One of the family was then lying very sick with the scurvy--a disease which had been very prevalent in camp during the winter, and of which many had died. I found, on inquiry, that the winter had been very severe, the snow deep, and consequently that all my four horses were lost, and I afterward ascertained that out of twelve cows, I had but seven left, and, out of some twelve or fourteen oxen, only four or five were saved.”
If this was the plight in which the spring found the family of one of the Twelve, imagination can picture the suffering of the hundreds who had arrived with less provision against the rigors of such a winter climate.
CHAPTER V. -- THE PIONEER TRIP ACROSS THE PLAINS
During the winter of 1846-1847 preparations were under way to send an organization of pioneers across the plains and beyond the Rocky Mountains, to select a new dwelling-place for the Saints. The only ”revelation” to Brigham Young found in the ”Book of Doctrine and Covenants” is a direction about the organization and mission of this expedition. It was dated January 14, 1847, and it directed the organization of the pioneers into companies, with captains of hundreds, of fifties, and of tens, and a president and two counsellors at their head, under charge of the Twelve. Each company was to provide its own equipment, and to take seeds and farming implements. ”Let every man,” it commanded, ”use all his influence and property to remove this people to the place where the Lord shall locate a Stake of Zion.” The power of the head of the church was guarded by a threat that ”if any man shall seek to build up himself he shall have no power,” and the ”revelation” ended, like a rustic's letter, with the words, ”So no more at present,” ”amen and amen” being added.
In accordance with this command, on April 14* a pioneer band of volunteers set out to blaze a path, so to speak, across the plains and mountains for the main body which was to follow.
* Date given in the General Epistle of December 23, 1847. Others say April 7.
It is difficult to-day, when this ”Far West” is in possession of the agriculturist, the merchant, and the miner, dotted with cities and flouris.h.i.+ng towns, and cut in all directions by railroads, which have made pleasure routes for tourists of the trail over which the pioneers of half a century ago toiled with difficulty and danger, to realize how vague were the ideas of even the best informed in the thirties and forties about the physical characteristics of that country and its future possibilities. The conception of the latter may be best ill.u.s.trated by quoting Was.h.i.+ngton Irving's idea, as expressed in his ”Astoria,” written in 1836:--
”Such is the nature of this immense wilderness of the far West; which apparently defies cultivation and the habitation of civilized life.
Some portion of it, along the rivers, may partially be subdued by agriculture, others may form vast pastoral tracts like those of the East; but it is to be feared that a great part of it will form a lawless interval between the abodes of civilized man, like the wastes of the ocean or the deserts of Arabia, and, like them, be subject to the depredations of the marauders. There may spring up new and mongrel races, like new formations in zoology, the amalgamation of the 'debris'
and 'abrasions' of former races, civilized and savage; the remains of broken and extinguished tribes; the descendants of wandering hunters and trappers; of fugitives from the Spanish-American frontiers; of adventurers and desperadoes of every cla.s.s and country, yearly ejected from the bosom of society into the wilderness.... Some may gradually become pastoral hordes, like those rude and migratory people, half shepherd, half warrior, who, with their flocks and herds, roam the plains of upper Asia; but others, it is to be apprehended, will become predatory bands, mounted on the fleet steeds of the prairies, with the open plains for their marauding grounds, and the mountains for their retreats and lurking places. There they may resemble those great hordes of the North, 'Gog and Magog with their bands,' that haunted the gloomy imaginations of the prophets--'A great company and a mighty host, all riding upon horses, and warring upon those nations which were at rest, and dwelt peaceably, and had gotten cattle and goods.”'
”What about the country between the Missouri River and the Pacific,”
asked a father living near the Missouri, of his son on his return from California across the plains in 1851--”Oh, it's of no account,” was the reply; ”the soil is poor, sandy, and too dry to produce anything but this little short gra.s.s afterward learned to be so rich in nutriment, and, when it does rain, in three hours afterward you could not tell that it had rained at all.”*
* Nebraska Historical Society papers.
But while this distant West was still so unknown to the settled parts of the country, these Mormon pioneers were by no means the first to traverse it, as the records of the journeyings of Lewis and Clark, Ezekiel Williams, General W. H. Ashley, Wilson Price Hunt, Major S. H.
Long, Captain W. Sublette, Bonneville, Fremont, and others show.
The pioneer band of the Mormons consisted of 143 men, three women (wives of Brigham and Lorenzo Young and H. C. Kimball), and two children. They took with them seventy-three wagons. Their chief officers were Brigham Young, Lieutenant General; Stephen Markham, Colonel; John Pack, First Major; Shadrack Roundy, Second Major, two captains of hundreds, and fourteen captains of companies. The order of march was intelligently arranged, with a view to the probability of meeting Indians who, if not dangerous to life, had little regard for personal property. The Indians of the Platte region were notorious thieves, but had not the reputation as warriors of their more northern neighbors. The regulations required that each private should walk constantly beside his wagon, leaving it only by his officer's command. In order to make as compact a force as possible, two wagons were to move abreast whenever this could be done.
Every man was to keep his weapons loaded, and special care was insisted upon that the caps, flints, and locks should be in good condition. They had with them one small cannon mounted on wheels.