BRIGHAM YOUNG AND HIS MORMON EMPIREBy Frank J. Cannon and George L. Knapp Copyright 1913, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY CHAPTER 13 A LONESOME REVELATION THE wretched victims of mob intolerance remained on the malarial flats opposite Nauvoo, from September 18, 1846, to October 9. The place of their sojourn was well named "Poor Camp." Many were sick before leaving Nauvoo; and after a few days in camp there were none who could be accounted well. Without supplies, without tents, without clothing, without cattle, without strong leaders to arouse and lead them on, they huddled in misery, and waited to see whether help or destruction would reach them first. Crazy shelters were rigged to protect the sickest of their number, and tents made of bedquilts gave some screening to women in childbirth -- for such there were, even in this gathering of desolation. The elders who remained at Nauvoo to sell property did all they could; a small subscription was taken up for the Poor Camp fugitives at Quincy; but nothing effective was done until messengers who had been sent West could return with wagons and supplies. Help arrived from the west October 9; and with it a miracle. As the Saints were preparing to take up their westward march with but the scantiest of provisions, the Lord sent great flocks of quail which fell among the wagons and boats of the refugees, so exhausted that they could be knocked over with sticks or picked up alive with the hands. "Tell this to the nations of the earth! Tell it to the kings and nobles and great ones!" exults Brigham in recounting this instance of Divine favour. It is worthy of remark that the leaders of the party would not permit indiscriminate slaughter of the food supply thus miraculously placed in their hands; and after enough quails had been gathered to vary and replenish their scanty larder, the rest of the birds were allowed to go free. "If we kill when we cannot eat, we shall want to eat when we cannot kill," said Brigham on another, but similar, occasion. It is regrettable that the Indian philosophy thus expressed did not become current among other white men than Mormons. There were now nearly twelve thousand Mormons scattered across Iowa, or in camp across the Missouri river in what is now Nebraska. About four thousand Saints were at this latter place, under the direct command of Brigham Young. Nearly as many more were gathered at Mount Pisgah; and the rest of the total given were distributed at other and smaller camps, some being as far east as Garden Grove. In addition to these, some of the eastern brethren had assembled at New York, to sail for California by sea, and there join the overland migration; for there was a general though not authoritative impression that the Mormons would colonize the Pacific coast. Finally, there were hundreds of young Mormons who had gone down among the Gentiles in search of work, and whose wages, aside from the pittance needed to support their families, went into the emigration chest. Finer or more steadfast loyalty to a cause and a chieftain never was seen than these exiled, outcast men gave to Mormonism and Brigham Young. The chief camp on the Missouri was known as "Winter Quarters." It was the winter home of a scant third of the Mormons on the march; but it housed Brigham Young; and that was enough to make it seem a dwelling of a host. It occupied the ground where now stands the town of Florence, Nebraska. So long as the Saints remained in any region where unhealthful sites existed, they managed to find one; and Winter Quarters was no exception. The low-ground along the Missouri was christened "Misery Bottoms"; and the illness there engendered was not slow in spreading to the slightly higher ground where the camp was pitched. Stagnant pools near the stream were a choice breeding-ground for mosquitoes; and malaria greeted the travellers almost at once. Besides malaria, there was another disorder, obscure in nature though resembling scurvy, which the Mormons called "black canker." Indeed, there may have been many different infections in this unlucky camp, for descriptions of disease written by laymen are no great help in historical diagnosis. For three centuries, it is doubtful if any English-speaking lad has received a proper education in the doings of his race without wishing he might have been with Drake, or Hawkins, when they sailed to "barter bold their English steel for Spanish gold" on the shores of the Caribbean. Strong-hearted youth can encounter with a laugh such dangers of those early adventures as are commonly recounted in history. The brave but inept Spaniards were victims, rather than enemies. The real foe of the buccaneers was disease. It was so with the migrating Mormons. The Gentiles who bombarded them with cannon and proclamations killed, all told, barely twoscore of their number; the Indians, whom the Mormons held in no small awe, did not dangle the scalp of a single Saint from their belts for years. But at Nauvoo, at Poor Camp, at Winter Quarters, disease slew them by hundreds. Colonel Thomas L. Kane says that there were more than six hundred deaths in Winter Quarters before the beginning of winter, and that even so late as December one-tenth of the population of the camp were on the sick-list. At Papillon camp, on the Little Butterfly river, the sickness was even worse. Kane himself was ill with the fever at this point, and at one time in August a third of the people in camp were sick. There were not enough well persons to bury the dead; and not enough lumber to supply coffins. On the Missouri river, as in a few cases during the march across Iowa, the Mormons adopted the Indian plan of winding their dead in bark stripped from a tree. Before his illness at Papillon, Colonel Kane had opened an old Indian burial mound. When he recovered, he found that his Mormon host had put the mound to its ancient uses. The trench he had cut through was filled with loosely-covered bodies, and the ground around was furrowed with graves like a ploughed field. Colonel Kane was destined to perform the classic function of a diplomat for his friends, the Saints, on more than one future occasion. His accounts of Mormon trials and virtues never suffer from lack of either rhetoric or figures. But we know from other sources that the loss and suffering were frightful, and that the sickness had its way unrestrained until cold weather partially checked its ravages. Faith cure was one of the stock properties of Mormonism when it began; and some leaven of it lingers even to this day. Faith may may have moved mountains, and certainly has moved multitudes; but plague and cholera and yellow fever and typhoid and malaria seem still to require grosser material means for their eradication. In the matter of safeguarding health, Brigham Young at this time was as ignorant as any of his followers. But in every other varied need and duty, he was a master. "He sleeps with one eye open and one foot out of bed," declared his admiring followers; and the description seemed true. His finger was on every move the Saints made; and nearly always, it was his finger that pointed the movement. A little city of seven hundred log and turf huts was thrown up at Winter Quarters. The impromptu town was divided into twenty-two wards, each presided over by a bishop. Schools were established -- whatever their attitude towards higher learning, the Mormons have been as insistent on primary education as the old New Englanders. Missionaries were sent to England and a few -- a very few -- to promising points in the eastern states. Machinery for a carding-mill was ordered from Savannah, and later was carried across the plains. Materials for a flour-mill were bought at St. Louis; and when they arrived at Winter Quarters, Brigham, as carpenter, superintended the mill's construction. The forty-horsepower working capacity which had won him his supremacy never was better shown than in this death-haunted camp on the banks of the Missouri. It is as much a tribute to his watchful foresight and keen knowledge of human nature, as to the compelling power of religious zeal, that despair never seems to have visited a Mormon camp during this heart-searching winter. If there was a desertion at this time of Saints who had remained faithful hitherto, the fact has escaped record. Work and prayer, dancing and schooling, alternated in regular order throughout the cold season. Every camp had some sort of musical organization, and the post of musician in a Mormon community entailed steady work, then as now. At Mount Pisgah, Lorenzo Snow was in command most of the winter, and during his term of office he gave a grand party. Snow rejoiced in the possession of a log cabin, fifteen feet by thirty, "with a dirt roof, ground floor, and sod chimney." Here he housed his family of four wives, three of whom bore him children during their stay at this place. For the party, sheets were hung to cover the walls; clean straw was strewn on the floor; and turnips, hollowed out to hold candles, furnished the required candelabra. There were music, recitations, and at the end a dance. This tale has been told as evidence of a lack of delicacy among the Mormon exiles. The implication may be true, so far as it concerns the giving of a grand ball in such quarters at such a time -- a hovel housing a husband and four wives, of whom three were about to become mothers or had just emerged from that travail. But the tale shows as well a determined courage, an habitual cheerfulness, and a serene confidence in the outcome of their adventure, despite the troubles that lay so close behind their adventure and towered visibly ahead. These qualities, on an expedition of the sort that engaged the Mormons, are worth more than even a modest reticence and a nice perception of the proper time to give parties to friends. Ever since Brigham had taken command of the church, he had been asked to give revelations, after the manner of Joseph. He had resisted this demand at Nauvoo, he had resisted it during the march across Iowa. But now, in Winter Quarters, with spring approaching, in which the next stage of their migration must be undertaken, Brigham had things to say which he thought best to cast in the form of a revelation. It was the only one he gave during his life, and we present it here entire:
It will repay a little study, this revelation. The first eighteen verses, aside from the necessary prelude, constitute a military order; and a very wise, keen-eyed, and comprehensive one. The nineteenth verse contains a thinly veiled warning against any ambitious creatures who might seek to infringe Brigham's monopoly of communion with the Lord, and his yet more cherished monopoly of dictating to the Saints. The twentieth to thirtieth verses, inclusive, give some sound social directions, interlarded with a little wholesome grandiloquence, and closing with a counsel of good cheer. From the thirty-first verse to the end, the tone, if not the style, is Joseph's. The explanation of this reversion to type is not far to seek. The same scribes who took down the multifarious outpourings of Joseph now sat to receive and write down the sparing sentences of Brigham. When he had finished the matters about which he really cared, they added the frills without which the document would not have looked like a revelation to them -- nor, perhaps, to those for whom it was intended.
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