The Life of John Taylor: Third President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day SaintsRoberts, B. H. (Brigham Henry)
History
The Life of John Taylor: Third President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
Roberts, B. H. (Brigham Henry)
Latter Day Saint churches; Taylor, John, 1808-1887
Elder Taylor had left a large, two-story brick house well furnished,
with a brick store on one side and a new brick building that he had
erected for a printing office on the other, and a large barn in the
rear. This lot and the buildings were worth $10,000. In addition to
this property, a short distance east of Nauvoo he had a farm of 106
acres of unimproved land, another of 80 acres, 40 of which was under
cultivation and the remaining 40 timber. He also had a corner lot 101
x 85 feet on Main and Water street, opposite the Nauvoo Mansion. All
this--to say nothing of breaking up his printing and book-binding
establishment--he had been compelled to leave with but small hope of
ever receiving anything for it; while he himself was driven forth an
exile to wander, perhaps to perish, in the wilderness, a victim of
religious intolerance.
This was in an age of boasted enlightenment--in the 19th century! In
the great American Republic--the vaunted asylum of the oppressed!
To facilitate travel and for the better regulation of the people, the
exiles were divided into companies of from seventy to a hundred wagons;
but these companies followed each other so closely that they formed an
almost unbroken procession across the Territory of Iowa.
To tell in detail the story of that journey from Nauvoo to Council
Bluffs--how the Saints struggled on through trackless prairies
converted into vast bogs by the spring thaws and rain and sleet which
seemed to fall continuously; how the bleak winds from the pitiless
northwest were more cruel than the sharpest frosts; how the young and
strong left the main companies to go into Missouri and districts in
Iowa remote from their line of march to exchange household furniture
for corn or flour; how those who had merely enough provisions for
themselves--no one had a surplus--divided with those who had none;
how heroically they struggled against weakness and disease brought on
through exposure; how they laid away their dead in nameless graves--to
tell all this would fill a volume of itself, and belongs rather to a
history of the whole people than to this biography.
The 5th of June found Elder Taylor with his company at Mount Pisgah,
in Iowa, about one hundred and sixty miles from Nauvoo, where the
companies under Brigham Young and Heber C. Kimball had encamped and
were putting in crops for those who would come on later to harvest.
From Mount Pisgah to the "Bluffs" he met numerous squads of
Pottawattomie Indians, all of whom he treated kindly, and generally
distributed tobacco among them, a thing with which they were highly
pleased. These Indians had been removed from their lands east of the
Mississippi some years before, and were themselves exiles. Perhaps it
was that fact which led them to treat kindly the exiled Saints. At any
rate they gave them permission to pass through their reservation, and
finally permitted them to settle for a time upon their lands and use
what timber they needed to build temporary abodes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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