Under the most favoring circumstances, an expedition of this sort, undertaken at such a season of the year, could scarcely fail to be disastrous.  But the pioneer company had to set out in haste, and were very imperfectly supplied with necessaries.  The cold was intense.  They moved in the teeth of keen-edged northwest winds, such as sweep down the Iowa peninsula from the icebound regions of the timber-shaded Slave Lake and Lake of the Woods.  Along the scattered watercourses, where they broke the thick ice to give their cattle drink, the annual autumn fires had left but little firewood.  To men, insufficiently furnished with tents and other appliances of shelter, wood was almost a necessary of life.  After days of fatigue their nights were often passed in restless efforts to prevent themselves from freezing.  Their stock of food also proved inadequate; and as their constitutions became more debilitated their suffering from cold increased.  Afflicted with catarrhal affections, manacled by the fetters of dreadfully acute rheumatism, some contrived for a while to get over the shortening day’s march and drag along some others.  But the sign of an impaired circulation soon began to show itself in the liability of all to be dreadfully frost-bitten.  The hardiest and strongest became helplessly crippled.  About the same time the strength of their draught animals began to fail.  The small supply of provender they could carry with them had given out.  The winter-bleached prairie straw proved devoid of nourishment; and they could only keep them from starving by seeking for the “browse,” as it is called, this being the green bark and tender buds and branches of the cottonwood and other stunted growths in the hollows.

To return to Nauvoo was apparently the only escape; but this would have been to give occasion for fresh mistrust and so to bring new trouble to those they had left there behind them.  They resolved at least to hold their ground, and to advance as they might, were it only by limping through the deep snows a few slow miles a day.  They found a sort of comfort in comparing themselves to the exiles of Siberia, and sought consolation in earnest prayers for the spring.

The spring came at last.  It overtook them in the Sac and Fox country, still on the naked prairie, not yet half way over the trail they were following between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.  But it brought its own share of troubles with it.  The months with which it opened proved nearly as trying as the worst of winter.

The snow and sleet and rain which fell, as it appeared to them, without intermission, made the road over the rich prairie soil as impassable as one vast bog of heavy black mud.  Sometimes they would fasten the horses and oxen of four or five wagons to one, and attempt to get ahead in this way, taking turns; but at the close of a day of hard toil for themselves and their cattle, they would find themselves a quarter or a half a mile from the place they left in the morning.  The heavy rains raised all the watercourses; the most trifling streams were impassable.  Wood, fit for bridging, was often not to be had, and in such cases the only resource was to halt for the freshets to subside—­a matter in the case of the headwaters of the Chariton, for instance, of over three weeks’ delay.