These were dreary waitings upon Providence.  The most spirited and sturdy murmured most at their forced inactivity.  And even the women, whose heroic spirits had been proof against the severest cold, confessed their tempers fluctuated with the ceaseless variations of the barometer.  They complained too that the health of their children suffered more.  It was the fact that the damp winds of March and April brought with them more mortal sickness than the sharpest freezing weather.

The frequent burials discouraged and depressed the hardiest spirits; but the general hopefulness of human nature was well illustrated by the fact that even the most provident were found unfurnished with burial necessaries, and as a result they were often driven to the most melancholy makeshifts.

The usual expedient adopted was to cut a log of some eight or nine feet long, and slitting the bark longitudinally, strip it off in two half-cylinders.  These, placed around the body of the deceased and bound firmly together with withs made of alburnum, formed a rough sort of tubular coffin, which surviving relatives and friends, with a little show of black crape, could follow to the hole or bit of ditch dug to receive it in the wet ground of the prairie.  The name of the deceased, his age, the date of his death, and the surrounding landmarks were all registered with care.  His party was then ready to move on.  Such graves mark all the line of the first years of Mormon travel—­dispiriting milestones to failing stragglers in the rear.

The hardships and trials which they had suffered developed a spirit of self-sacrifice among these indomitable people.  Hale young men gave up their own food and shelter to the old and helpless, and worked their way back to parts of the frontier States, chiefly Missouri and Iowa where they were not recognized, and hired themselves out for wages, to purchase more.  Others were sent there to exchange for meal and flour, or wheat and corn, the table-and bed-furniture and other remaining articles of personal property which a few had still retained.

In a kindred spirit of fraternity, others laid out great farms in the wilds and planted the grain saved for their own bread; that there might be harvests for those who should follow them.  Two of these, in the Sac and Fox country and beyond it, Garden Grove and Mount Pisgah, included within their fences about two miles of land each, carefully planted with grain, with a hamlet of comfortable log cabins in the neighborhood of each.

Through all this the pioneers found comfort in the thought that their own suffering was the price of immunity from similar hardships their friends at home, in following their trail, would otherwise have had to pay.  But the arrival of spring proved this a delusion.  Before the warm weather had made the earth dry enough for easy travel, messengers came in from Nauvoo to overtake the party with fear-exaggerated tales of outrage, and to urge the chief men to hurry back to the city that they might give counsel and assistance there.  The enemy had only waited until the emigrants were supposed to be gone on their road too far to return to interfere with them, and then renewed their aggressions.