thed 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 stimul