"Dreadful, indeed, was the suffering of these forsaken beings; bowed and cramped by cold and sunburn, alternating as each weary day and night dragged on, they were almost all of them, the crippled victims of disease. They were there because they had no homes, nor hospitals, nor poorhouse, nor friends to offer them any. They could not satisfy the feeble cravings of their sick; they had not bread to quiet the fractious hunger-cries of their children. Mothers and babes, daughters and grandparents, all of them alike were bivouacked in tatters, wanting even covering to comfort those whom the sick shivers of fever were searching to the marrow. These were 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, Illinois. The Mormons were the owners of that city and the smiling country around. And those who had stopped their plows, who had silenced their hammers, their axes, their shuttles, and their workshop wheels; those who had put out their fires and eaten their food, spoiled their orchards and trampled under foot their thousands of acres of unharvested bread--these were the keepers of their dwellings, the carousers in their Temples, whose drunken riot insulted the ears of their dying." They had the added agony of camping on the snow covered ground without shelter, in plain sight of their confiscated possessions and desolated hearthstones. Another writer thus describes the awful scene: "Out into the trackless American wilds, into an Indian country, the 'Mormons' wended their way, weary and destitute, for more than fifteen hundred miles, their pathway being marked by the graves of their dead. The history of their privations and suffering is harrowing in the extreme. The {198} lives of not less than a thousand of their number were sacrificed in the relentless persecutions connected with the exodus from Illinois." Need we be surprised that a feeble protest was raised against the too zealous enforcement of laws framed to this very end, or that a sense of injustice should be the result of such vigorous treatment? We hear nothing nowadays of the battalion furnished by the Mormon refugees, for the defense of the flag in California and Mexico, at a time, too, when every able-bodied man was needed for defense against hostile Indians, hunger and all the other dangers attendant upon pioneer travel. In answer to this demand, Brigham Young said: "You shall have your battalion, Captain Allen; and if there are not young men enough, we will take the old men, and if they are not enough, we will take the women." In three days the force was mustered and ready to march. And again to the assembled people: "I say unto you, magnify the laws. There is no law in the United States, or in the Constitution, but I am ready to make honorable."