Owing to their gross and abounding iniquities, the Lord on several occasions visited the Jaredites with partial destruction. These judgments came in the shape of fratricidal war, pestilence, drought and famine. In the days of Heth there was a great dearth in the land, through which the inhabitants were destroyed exceedingly fast, while poisonous serpents came forth "and did poison many people." These serpents drove the flocks and herds south, and then congregating at the narrow neck uniting the two great divisions of the land, hedged up the way so that the people could not pass, thus adding another factor to their misery, for their crops were not only destroyed through the lack of rain, but the resource of animal food was taken from them. Thus they became a broken people, but when through their miseries they had sufficiently humbled themselves before the Lord, he sent the long desired rain, and there began to be fruit in the north countries and in all the countries round about. Other desolations at various times came upon them because of their defiant disobedience to the behests of Heaven. The war which ended in the entire destruction of the Jaredite race was one of the most blood-thirsty, cruel and vindictive that ever cursed this fair planet. Men's most savage passions were worked up to such an extent that every better feeling of humanity was crushed out. The women and children armed themselves for the fray with the same fiendish activity, and, fought with the same intense hate, as the men. It was not a conflict of armies alone; it was the crushing together of a divided house that had long tottered because of internal weakness, but now fell in upon itself. This war was not the work of a day; it was the outgrowth of centuries of dishonor, crime and iniquity. And as this continent was once cleansed of its unrighteous inhabitants by the overwhelming waters of a universal Deluge, and only eight souls left, so this second time, as a flood, through the promises of the Lord to Noah, was no longer possible, instead thereof the wicked slew the wicked until only two men remained, the king and the historian: the one to wander wounded, wretched and alone, until found by Mulek's colony; the other to record the last dreadful throes of his people for the profit of succeeding races, and then to be received into the loving care of his Father and his God. Both the Nephites and ourselves are indebted to him for our acquaintance with the earlier history of this continent, which otherwise would have been entirely shut out from our knowledge.