The Autobiography of Parley Parker Pratt: One of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Embracing His Life, Ministry, and TravelsPratt, Parley P. (Parley Parker)
Religion
The Autobiography of Parley Parker Pratt: One of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Embracing His Life, Ministry, and Travels
Pratt, Parley P. (Parley Parker)
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints -- Apostles -- Biography; Pratt, Parley P. (Parley Parker), 1807-1857
He was still able to speak, but he died that evening in the
triumphs of faith. The young Obanyon also died about the same time.
The others recovered of their wounds, but one of them named Hendrix
is still a cripple. Patten and Obanyon were buried together, under
military honors; a whole people, as it were, followed them to the
grave. All wept, whose feelings were not too intense to find vent
in tears. He was the only member of the Quorum of the Twelve who
had as yet found a martyr's grave. He was a great and good man, and
one who chose to lay down his life for the cause of truth and
right; for this privilege he had diligently sought and prayed;
"for," said he, "I had rather die than live to see it thus in my
country."
But, to return to the main thread of my narrative: having
conveyed the wounded to their place of hospitality, the _posse
_ hastened to Far West, and delivered the spoils of the enemy
to the colonel of the regiment, who afterwards delivered them to
the higher civil or military authorities of the State.
These several defeats of the insurrectionists in Daviess County,
as well as in Caldwell County, checked for a time their ruinous
ravages. They saw that it was impossible to conquer a people who
were fighting for their homes, their wives and children, as well as
for their country and conscience, unless they could come against
them with some show of authority; for it had become an established
fact that the people of the Saints never resisted authority,
however abused.
The next exertion of the enemy was to spread lies and falsehoods
of the most alarming character. All our acts of defense were
construed into insurrection, treason, murder and plunder. In short,
the public were deceived by bigotry, priestcraft, and a corrupt
press, and made to look upon all our acts of defense precisely as
they would look upon the same acts performed, without cause or
provocation, upon peaceable citizens. Murderous gangs were
construed into peaceable militia in the State service, and to
resist them was, on the part of the Saints, murder, treason and
robbery. And, finally, the whole was treated abroad as the "_
Mormon insurrection_,"--"_Mormon war_," etc.
And, as if this were not enough, parties set fire to their own
houses, or that of their neighbors, and then laid it to the Saints.
Whole neighborhoods were falsely alarmed, or rather really alarmed,
by the doings of these bandits; and in their fright they fled to
more distant places of security, and clamored loudly to the State
authorities for protection from the "_Mormons_," whom they
represented as burning, plundering, and destroying all before them.
While they were simply standing on their own ground and maintaining
the defensive, and this, too, in the last extreme, and not till
they were abandoned by every department of the State Government.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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