The Mormons: A Discourse Delivered Before the Historical Society of PennsylvaniaKane, Thomas L. (Thomas Leiper)
History
The Mormons: A Discourse Delivered Before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania
Kane, Thomas L. (Thomas Leiper)
Latter Day Saint churches
It is an error to estimate largely the number of Mormons dead of
starvation, strictly speaking. Want developed disease, and made
them sink under fatigue, and maladies that would otherwise have
proved trifling. But only those died of it outright, who fell in
out-of-the-way places that the hand of brotherhood could not reach.
Among the rest no such thing as plenty was known, while any went an
hungered. If but a part of a group was supplied with provision, the
only result was that the whole went on the half or quarter ration,
according to the sufficiency that there was among them: and this so
ungrudgingly and contentedly, that till some crisis of trial to their
strength, they were themselves unaware that their health was sinking,
and their vital force impaired.
Hale young men gave up their own provided food and shelter to the
old and helpless, and walked their way back to parts of the frontier
states, chiefly Missouri and Iowa, where they were not recognized, and
hired themselves out for wages, to purchase more. Others were sent
there, to exchange for meal and flour, or wheat and corn, the table and
bed furniture, and other last resources of personal property which a
few had still retained.
In a kindred spirit of fraternal forecast, others laid out great farms
in the wilds, and planted in them the grain saved for their own bread;
that there might be harvests for those who should follow them. Two of
these, in the Sac and Fox country and beyond it, Garden Grove and Mount
Pisgah, included within their fences about two miles of land a-piece,
carefully planted in grain, with a hamlet of comfortable log cabins in
the neighbourhood of each.
Through all this the pioneers found redeeming comfort in the thought,
that their own suffering was the price of immunity to their friends at
home. But the arrival of spring proved this a delusion. Before the warm
weather had made the earth dry enough for easy travel, messengers came
in from Nauvoo to overtake the party with fear-exaggerated tales of
outrage, and to urge the chief men to hurry back to the city that they
might give counsel and assistance there. The enemy had only waited till
the emigrants were supposed to be gone on their road too far to return
to interfere with them, and then renewed their aggressions.
The Mormons outside Nauvoo were indeed hard pressed; but inside the
city they maintained themselves very well for two or three months
longer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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