On this and other occasions shortly following, these volunteered to go: George D. Watt, Samuel Bent, Joseph A. Kelting, David Fullmer, James Emmett, Daniel Spencer, Samuel Rolfe, Daniel Avery, Samuel W. Richards, Almon L. Fuller, Hosea Stout, Thomas S. Edwards, Moses Smith and Rufus Beach. There were also others. It is also a fact that on the evening of June 22, 1844, because of persecution, the Prophet Joseph Smith, his brother Hyrum and a few others crossed the Mississippi river with the intention of going to the Rocky Mountains, beyond the persecutions of their enemies. The following day they were accused of cowardice by false friends who declared that they were fleeing from the flock in time of danger. This falsehood so wounded the Prophet who had stood in the breach from the beginning to protect the Saints, that he returned to Nauvoo, and gave himself up declaring that if his life was of no value to his friends, it was of none to himself. Four days later he suffered martyrdom, sealing his testimony with his blood. Mr. George Derry, himself a Reorganite, in the Saints' Herald for January 31, 1906, in reply to the editor who doubted that any such intention as a settlement in the West was contemplated by Joseph Smith, wrote the following: "In reading the article in Saints' Herald, No. 46, 'The Editor at Home,' I got the impression that the writer was in doubt as to the correct statement of S. W. Richards that he was one of twenty-five men that were selected by Joseph Smith, Jr., to go out west to try to find a location for the Saints beyond the reach of mobs--a condition no doubt desirable in those trying times. S. W. Richards was president of the Church in the British Isles while I lived in London. I was president of a branch there and I was often brought in contact with other presiding officers as they met in council every month. The London conference was composed of forty-two branches, was often visited by the president of the mission and his counselors. I well remember S. W. Richards and others making the same statement at one of our monthly meetings, for they frequently dwelt at considerable length on the persecutions and trials of the Saints in that day. I believed the statements then--fifty-three years ago. I have no reason to reject it now. I have never heard it disproved. The testimony of S. W. Richards is as true in 1905 [See Era, Vol. 7, 927] as it was in 1853, that the company was organized. Recording the facts would not add to their _truthfulness_. I never heard that the company went west, but the company was _organized_, although conditions were changed.