This is that famous battalion which marched through more than two thousand miles of a trackless waste on foot, and helped to take and maintain California—some of the members of which first discovered the gold mines of that country, and thus turned the world the other side up.

The lateness of the season, the poverty of the people, and, above all, the taking away of five hundred of our best men, finally compelled us to abandon any further progress westward till the return of another spring. The camps, therefore, began to prepare for winter.

The place for winter quarters was finally selected on the west bank of the Missouri River, in what is since known as the territory of Nebraska. This was a beautiful town site. The land sloping up from the immediate banks of the river sufficiently high to be secure from high water, and then stretching away in an unbroken plain to the hills, which swelled up at less than half a mile distant in beautiful rounded grassy points, or in rising benches, one above another.

Vast quantities of hay was cut and secured, and some seven hundred log cabins and one hundred and fifty dugouts (cabins half under ground) were built in the course of the autumn and winter. Other large settlements were also formed on the other side of the river, and back into the country.

President Young also caused the erection of a good flouring mill on a small stream which here entered the river.

This city, which was known by the name of Winter Quarters, is Florence, and is becoming a thriving place in Nebraska.

While the camps lay in these parts, and soon after I had, with my teams and family, crossed the Missouri, Presidents Orson Hyde, John Taylor and myself were appointed a mission to England. The reason for this mission under the present distressing circumstances was this: Elder R. Hedlock, who was then presiding in England, was in transgression, and was engaged in a wild scheme of financing, by which he obtained vast sums of money from the Church in a kind of joint stock organization, which professedly had for its object the emigration of the Saints to America, while in reality the money was squandered by himself and others in any and every way but to do good. Our mission was for the purpose of breaking up this scheme of fraud, and displacing him and regulating all the affairs of the Church in the British Isles.

July 31.—I bid a solemn farewell to my family and friends, then dwelling in tents and wagons on the west side of the Missouri River, and started for England. I met Elders Hyde and Taylor as agreed upon, and we took passage down the river in an open scow, or flat boat, in company with a family of Presbyterian missionaries who had been residing on the Loupe fork of the Platte River, among the Pawnee Indians, and who were now bound for St. Joseph, Missouri. We floated or pulled the oars for some days, tying up and sleeping on shore at night. Arriving at St. Joseph, the missionaries landed and sold the boat to us. We then continued down the river to Leavenworth, where we found the Mormon Battalion, who were just receiving money for clothing, etc., preparatory to their long march thence to California.

We visited with them a day to two, and they contributed several hundred dollars to aid us on our mission to England.

They also made up a purse of between five and six thousand dollars for their families and friends at the Bluffs, and furnishing me a horse, it was finally agreed by my two brethren that I should return to the Bluffs with this money. Accordingly, I took leave of Elders Hyde and Taylor and the brethren of the battalion, and started on horseback for the camp of the Saints. I rode with all speed, and in less than three days reached home—distance one hundred and seventy miles. Unexpected as this visit was, a member of my family had been warned in a dream, and had predicted my arrival and the day, and my family were actually looking for me all that day.