“Here’s wishing that all the mobocrats of the nineteenth century were in the middle of the sea, in a stone canoe, with an iron paddle; that a shark would swallow the canoe, and the shark be thrust into the nethermost part of hell, with the door locked, the key lost, and a blind man looking for it!” Chapter IX. Into the Wilderness Onto the West at last to build the house of God in the mountains. On to what Daniel Webster had lately styled “a region of savages and wild beasts, of deserts, of shifting sands and whirlwinds of dust, of cactus and prairie-dogs.” The little band of pioneers chosen to break a way for the main body of the Saints consisted of a hundred and forty-three men, three women, and two children. They were to travel in seventy-three wagons, drawn by horses and oxen. They knew not where they were to stop, but they were men of eager initiative, fearless and determined; and their consolation was that, while their exodus into the desert meant hardship and grievous suffering, it also promised them freedom from Gentile interference. It was not a fat land into which they were venturing; but at least it was a land without a past, lying clean as it came from the hand of its maker, where they could be free to worship God without fearing the narrow judgment of the frivolous. Instructed in the sacred mysteries revealed to Joseph Smith through the magic light of the Urim and Thummim, and sustained by the divine message engraved on the golden plates he had dug up from the hill of Cumorah, they were now ready to feel their way across the continent and blaze a trail to the new Jerusalem. They went in military style with due precautions against surprise by the Lamanites—the wretched red remnant of Abraham’s seed—that swarmed on every side. Brigham Young was lieutenant-general; Stephen Markham was colonel; the redoubtable John Pack was first major, and Shadrach Roundy, second. There were two captains of hundreds and fourteen captains of tens. The orders of the lieutenant-general required each man to walk constantly beside his wagon, leaving it only by his officer’s commands. To make the force compact, the wagons were to move two abreast where they could. Every man was to keep his weapons loaded. If the gun was a caplock, the cap was to be taken off and a piece of leather put on to exclude moisture and dirt; if a flintlock, the filling was to be taken out and the pan filled with tow or cotton.