VIEWS CONCERNING ZION—MOB VS STORM.
As soon as the camp was reorganized at Salt River, Parley P. Pratt and Orson Hyde were sent as delegates to wait upon Governor Dunklin, at Jefferson City, and request him to call out a sufficient military force to reinstate the saints in the possession of their homes. In the interview the governor frankly admitted the justice of the demand, but expressed fears that if he should so proceed, it would excite civil war, and deluge the whole country with blood. He advised these delegates to counsel their people, for the sake of peace, to sell the lands from which they had been driven. To this the delegates refused to consent, saying:
We will hold no terms with land pirates and murderers. If we are not permitted to live on the lands we have purchased of the United States, and be protected in our rights and persons, they will at least make a good burying ground in which to lay our bones; and we shall hold on to our possessions in Jackson County, for this purpose at least.
The governor could not and did not blame them; but he trembled for the country, and dared not carry out what he admitted to be the plain, imperative duties of his office.
Elders Pratt and Hyde rejoined the camp not far from the line of Ray County. As soon as they arrived, the Prophet Joseph, his brother Hyrum, Lyman Wight, and some others repaired to a grove, and heard their report.
"After hearing our report," says Parley P. Pratt, "the President (Joseph Smith) called on the God of our fathers to witness the justice of our cause, and the sincerity of our vows, which we engaged to fulfill whether in this life or in the life to come. For, as God lives, truth, justice, and innocence shall triumph; and iniquity shall not reign."
As the brethren approached Richmond, threats were made that they should not pass through the town, and rumor had it that a force of men was in waiting to intercept them. Daylight of the nineteenth of June saw them, in spite of the threats, quietly passing through the streets of the sleeping town. When they broke camp in the morning, they designed reaching Clay County that day; but they met with so many reverses in the day's march, such as wagons breaking down, wheels running off, etc., that they failed to accomplish it. Early in the evening they went into camp between two forks of Fishing River.
A plan had been laid for the complete destruction of "Joe Smith's army," as Zion's Camp was called by the Missourians; and now the time for its\ execution had arrived. A mob of two hundred men had been raised in Jackson County, which was to cross the Missouri into Clay County, about the mouth of Fishing River, where a man named Williams kept a ferry. This mob was to be joined at the fords of Fishing River by a party of sixty from Richmond; and still by another mob, seventy in number, from Clay County. Indeed, it looked as if Zion's Camp was to be annihilated forthwith.
While the brethren were making preparations for the night, five men armed with guns rode into camp, and insolently told the brethren they would "catch hell before morning." "And their oaths," says Joseph, "partook of all the malice of demons."
The Jackson mob assembled opposite the mouth of Fishing River, and one scow-load—forty in number—was sent over. By this time the sun was but little more than an hour high, and the camp observed a small cloud coming up from the west. "It wasn't any larger than your hat when I first saw it," said one [A] who was present, and described the occurrence to me; "but in about twenty minutes the whole heavens were inky blackness, which now and then seemed split by the vivid streams of lightning." All the artillery of heaven seemed to be in action. The wind blew and the rain and hail fell in torrents. The hailstones—unusually large ones—cut down the corn crop and other vegetation. Large limbs were wrenched from sturdy oaks and twisted into withes by the fierce wind.