Tullidge says: "'The Mormons were setting out under their leader from the borders of civilization, with their wives and their children, in broad daylight, before the very eyes of ten thousand of their enemies, who would have preferred their utter destruction to their 'flight,' notwithstanding they had enforced it by treaties outrageous beyond description, inasmuch as the exiles were nearly all American born, many of them tracing their ancestors to the very founders of the nation. They had to make a journey of fifteen hundred miles over trackless prairies, sandy deserts and rocky mountains, through bands of war-like Indians, who had been driven, exasperated, towards the West; and at last, to seek out and build up their Zion in valleys then unfruitful, in a solitary region where the foot of the white man had scarcely trodden. These, too, were to be followed by the aged, the halt, the sick and the blind, the poor, who were to be helped by their little less destitute brethren, and the delicate young mother with her newborn babe at her breast, and still worse, for they were not only threatened with the extermination of the poor remnant at Nauvoo, but news had arrived that the parent government designed to pursue their pioneers with troops, take from them their arms, and scatter them, that they might perish by the way, and leave their bones bleaching in the wilderness. * * * In the centuries hence, when the passing events of this age shall have taken their proper place, the historian will point back to that exodus in the New World of the West, as one quite worthy to rank with the immortal exodus of the children of Israel.' "Bancroft says: "'Of their long journey many painful incidents are recorded. Weakened by fever or crippled by rheumatism, and with sluggish circulation, many were severely frostbitten. Women were compelled to drive the nearly worn-out teams, while tending on their knees, perhaps, their sick children. The strength of the beasts was failing, as there were intervals when they could be kept from starving only by the browse or tender buds and branches of the cottonwood, felled for the purpose. "'At one time no less than two thousand wagons could be counted, it was said, along the three hundred miles of road that separated Nauvoo from the Mormon encampments. Many families possessed no wagons, and in the long processions might be seen vehicles of all descriptions, from the lumbering cart, under whose awning lay stretched its fever-stricken driver, to the veriest makeshifts of poverty, the wheel-barrow or the two-wheeled trundle, in which was dragged along a bundle of clothing and a sack of meal all of this world's goods that the owner possessed.