"These were the Mormons, famishing in Lee county, Iowa, in the fourth week of the month of September, in the year of our Lord, 1846. The city, it was Nauvoo, Ills. The Mormons were the owners of that city, and the smiling country around, and those who stopped their plows, who had silenced their hammers their axes, their shuttles and their workshop wheels, 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, whose drunken riot insulted the ears of their 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 had numbered the year before 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 fortune!" Just a word to let the reader know of Col. Kane's first coming to our people. One day, while we were still encamped at Council Bluffs, a delicate-looking stranger rode up on horseback. The young man was Colonel Thomas L. Kane, son of Judge Kane of Philadelphia, and brother of Dr. Kane, the celebrated Arctic explorer. Soon after reaching our camp he was stricken with fever. The best medical talent we had watched him unceasingly; and to the joy of the whole camp, he recovered. Never was watching, nursing, and praying better requited by man than he repaid to the Mormon people. As soon as his returning strength would allow, he hastened back east, and unsolicited by us delivered in his native city and in Washington some of the most truthful, vivid life scenes of the suffering of our people that have ever been published. Chapter 5. Daniel H. Wells.--Baptism for the Dead.--Lorenzo D. Young's Mission.--Wilford Woodruff.--Saved by Prayer. The little band of one hundred twenty-five men who for three days defended the city of Nauvoo against fearful odds, are to me patriots and heroes, and their names and deeds should be handed down in history; for the wealth of history is the noble ideals it creates. Had there never been an angry Jewish mob, we should not have the martyr Stephen. Had there been no Gesler to hoist his cap on a liberty pole, there would have been no William Tell. Had there been no George III., there would have been no Patrick Henry nor Lafayette; and had there been no battle of Nauvoo, we should have had no Daniel H. Wells, as noble a patriot, and as true a lover of justice and liberty, as ever lived.