The only recognition given by the Legislature to this pathetic appeal, this soul-harrowing recital of "bitter, burning wrongs," enough to melt a heart of stone,
"To stir a fever in the blood of age,
And make the infant's sinews strong as steel,"
was the appropriation of the paltry sum of two thousand dollars, to be distributed among the people of Daviess and Caldwell Counties, "the Mormons not excepted."
O lavish generosity! Two thousand dollars for a city sacked and pillaged, fields and farms laid waste, and homes given to the flames; not to mention murders, rapes, expulsions and other outrages nameless for their enormity, committed upon a helpless people by a ruthless mob, in the sovereign name of the state of Missouri!
"THE MORMONS NOT EXCEPTED!"
O world-wide philanthropy! Magnanimity unparalleled! As though the Mormons had not been the main, and well-nigh only sufferers from this horrible and hellish invasion. Indeed, the only other losses sustained—barring those inflicted by the oppressed people in sheer self-defense—were from depredations by the mobocrats themselves upon their own sympathizers, committed in such a way as to seem the work of Mormons, who were falsely accused of the devilish deeds and the public mind thus inflamed against them.
And then, the manner of distributing this princes' ransom! Surely the tactics of the average Indian agent and post-trader there had their origin. The notorious Judge Cameron had charge of the distribution; a wretch whose unpitying gaze had surveyed complacently the wrongs and cruelties heaped upon the helpless Saints, his serene equanimity of temper being disturbed only by the patience and superhuman cheerfulness of the brethren when compelled at the point of the bayonet to sign away their property to pay the expenses of the war waged against them. He was assisted by a man named McHenry.
Says Heber C. Kimball:
"Judge Cameron drove in the hogs belonging to the brethren (many of which were identified) shot them down in the streets, and, without further bleeding they were half-dressed, cut up and distributed by McHenry to the poor, charging four or five cents per pound; which, together with a few pieces of refuse calicoes, at double and treble price, soon consumed the appropriation."
And thus did the great state of Missouri redress the wrongs of ten thousand innocent people, robbed and trampled on without provocation by its mob militia, led on and fired to their deeds of blood and plunder by political demagogues and hireling priests of Christendom. And this in the broad daylight of the nineteenth century, in a land of religious liberty, on soil consecrated by the blood of patriots— ancestors of the people thus trampled on and despoiled—and in the presence of American judges, magistrates and priests, affecting the calling, but disgracing the name, of Christian!