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 poorhouse, nor friends to offer them any.  They could not minister to the needs of their sick; they had no bread to quiet the fractious, hungry cries of their children.  Mothers and babes, daughters and grandparents, all alike were clothed in tatters, lacking even sufficient covering for the fever-stricken sufferers.

These were the Mormons, famishing, in Lee County, Iowa, in the fourth week of the month of September, 1846.  The deserted city was Nauvoo, Illinois.  The Mormons were the owners of that city and the smiling country around it.  And those who had stopped their ploughs, who had silenced their hammers, their axes, their shuttles and the wheels of their workshops; 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 grain—­these were the keepers of their dwellings, the carousers in their temple, the noise of whose drunken rioting insulted the ears of the dying.

They were, all told, not more than six hundred forty persons who were thus lying on the river-flats.  But the Mormons in Nauvoo and its environs 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?”

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.