were not
directed against himself.

The early months of 1846 witnessed a third Mormon exodus. Driven out of
Illinois, these Latter-day Saints crossed the Mississippi in organized
bands, with Council Bluffs as their first objective. Through the winter
and spring some fifteen thousand Mormons with three thousand wagons
found their way from camp to camp, through snow, ice, and mud, over the
weary stretch of four hundred miles to the banks of the Missouri. The
epic of this westward migration is almost biblical. Hardship brought out
the heroic in many characters. Like true American pioneers, they adapted
themselves to circumstances with fortitude and skill. Linn says: "When a
halt occurred, a shoemaker might be seen looking for a stone to serve as
a lap-stone in his repair work, or a gunsmith mending a rifle, or a
weaver at a wheel or loom. The women learned that the jolting wagons
would churn their milk, and when a halt occurred it took them but a
short time to heat an oven hollowed out of the hillside, in which to
bake the bread already raised." Colonel Kane says that he saw a piece of
cloth, the wool for which was sheared, dyed, spun, and woven, during the
march.

After a winter of sickness and deprivation in camps along "Misery
Bottom," as they called the river flats, during which malaria carried
off hundreds, Brigham Young set out with a pioneer band of a hundred and
fifty to find a new Zion. Toward the end of July, this expedition by
design or chance entered Salt Lake Valley. At sight of the lake
glistening in the sun, "Each of us," wrote one of the party, "without
saying a word to the other, instinctively, as if by inspiration, raised
our hats from our heads, and then, swinging our hats, shouted, 'Hosannah
to God and the Lamb!'"

Meantime the first emigration from winter quarters was under way, and in
the following spring Young conducted a train of eight hundred wagons
across the plains to the great valley where a city of adobe and log
houses was already building. The new city was laid off into numbered
lots. The Presidency had charge of the distribution of these lots. You
may be sure they did not reserve the worst for their use, nor did they
place about themselves undesirable neighbors. Immediately after the
assignments had been made, various people began at once to speculate in
buying and selling according to the location. The spiritual power
immediately anathematized this. No one was permitted to trade over
pr