He preached a moving sermon that day from a text of Samuel: “As thy sword hath made women childless, so shall thy mother be childless among women.” And when he was done the congregation had made the little dimly lighted meeting-house at Parowan ring with a favourite hymn:—
“Up, awake, ye defenders of Zion!
The foe’s at the door of your homes;
Let each heart be the heart of a lion,
Unyielding and proud as he roams.
Remember the wrongs of Missouri,
Remember the fate of Nauvoo!
When the God-hating foe is before ye,
Stand firm and be faithful and true.”
Chapter XVI.
The Order from Headquarters
He left Parowan the next morning to preach at one of the little settlements to the east. He was gone three days. When he came back they told him that the train of Missourians had passed through Parowan and on to the south. He attended a military council held that evening in the meeting-house. Three days of reflection, while it had not cooled the anger he felt toward these members of the mob that had so brutally wronged his people, had slightly cooled his ardour for aggressive warfare.
It was rather a relief to know that he was not in a position of military authority; to feel that this matter of cutting off a wagon-train was in the hands of men who could do no wrong. The men who composed the council he knew to be under the immediate guidance of the Lord. Their names and offices made this certain. There was George A. Smith, First Counsellor to Brigham, representing as such the second person of the Trinity, and also one of the Twelve Apostles. There was Isaac Haight, President of the Cedar City Stake of Zion and High Priest of Southern Utah; there were Colonel Dame, President of the Parowan Stake of Zion, Philip Klingensmith, Bishop from Cedar City, and John Doyle Lee, Brigham’s most trusted lieutenant in the south, a major of militia, probate judge, member of the Legislature, President of Civil Affairs at Harmony, and farmer to the Indians under Brigham.
When a call to arms came as a result of this council, and an official decree was made known that the obnoxious emigrant train was to be cut off, he could not but feel that the deed had heavenly sanction. As to worldly regularity, the proceeding seemed to be equally faultless. The call was a regular military call by the superior officers to the subordinate officers and privates of the regiment, commanding them to muster, armed and equipped as directed by law, and prepared for field operations. Back of the local militia officers was his Excellency, Brigham Young, not only the vicar of God on earth but governor of Utah and commander-in-chief of the militia. It seemed, indeed, a foretaste of those glorious campaigns long promised them, when they should go through the land of the Gentiles “like a lion among the flocks of sheep, cutting down, breaking in pieces, with none to deliver, leaving the land desolate.”
The following Tuesday he continued south to Cedar City, the most populous of the southern settlements. Here he learned of the campaign’s progress. Brigham’s courier had preceded the train on its way south, bearing written orders to the faithful to hold no dealings with its people; to sell them neither forage for their stock nor food for themselves. They had, it was reported, been much distressed as a result of this order, and their stock was greatly weakened. At Cedar City, it being feared that they might for want of supplies be forced to halt permanently so near the settlement that it would be inconvenient to destroy them, they were permitted to buy fifty bushels of wheat and to have it and some corn the Indians had sold them ground at the mill of Major Lee.
As Joel’s informant, the fiery Bishop Klingensmith, remarked, this was not so generous as it seemed, since, while it would serve to decoy them on their way toward San Bernardino, they would never get out of the valley with it. The train had started on, but the animals were so weak that three days had been required to reach Iron Creek, twenty miles beyond, and two more days to reach Mountain Meadows, fifteen miles further south.
Here at daybreak the morning before, Klingensmith told him, a band of Piede Indians, under Lee’s direction, had attacked the train, killing and wounding a number of the men. It had been hoped, explained Klingensmith, that the train would be destroyed at once by the Indians, thus avoiding any call upon the militia; but the emigrants had behaved with such effectiveness that the Indians were unable to complete the task. They had corralled their wagons, dug a rifle-pit in the center, and returned the fire, killing one Indian and wounding two of the chiefs. The siege was being continued.
The misgiving that this tale caused Joel Rae he put down to unmanly weakness—and to an unfamiliarity with military affairs. A sight of the order in Brigham’s writing for the train’s extermination would have set his mind wholly at rest; but though he had not been granted this, he was assured that such an order existed, and with this he was obliged to be content. He knew, indeed, that an order from Brigham, either oral or written, must have come; otherwise the local authorities would never have dared to proceed. They were not the men to act without orders in a matter so grave after the years in which Brigham had preached his right to dictate, direct, and control the affairs of his people from the building of the temple “down to the ribbons a woman should wear, or the setting up of a stocking.”