Their more interesting occupations, however, were those growing out of their peculiar circumstances and position. The chiefs were seldom without some curious affair on hand to settle with the restless Indians; while the immense labor and responsibility of the conduct of their unwieldy moving army, and the commissariat of its hundreds of famishing poor, also devolved upon them. They had good men they called Bishops, whose special office it was to look up the cases of extremest suffering: and their relief parties were out night and day to scour over every trail.
At this time, say two months before the final expulsion from Nauvoo, there were already, along three hundred miles of the road between that city and our Papillon Camp, over two thousand emigrating wagons, besides a large number of nondescript turn-outs, the motley make-shifts of poverty; from the unsuitably heavy cart that lumbered on mysteriously with its sick driver hidden under its counterpane cover, to the crazy two-wheeled trundle, such as our own poor employ for the conveyance of their slop barrels, this pulled along it may be by a little dry dugged heifer, and rigged up only to drag some such light weight as a baby, a sack of meal, or a pack of clothes and bedding.
Some of them were in distress from losses upon the way. A strong trait of the Mormons was their kindness to their brute dependents, and particularly to their beasts of draught. They gave them the holiday of the Sabbath whenever it came round: I believe they would have washed them with old wine, after the example of the emigrant Carthaginians, had they had any. Still, in the Slave-coast heats, under which the animals had to move, they sometimes foundered. Sometimes, too, they strayed off in the night, or were mired in morasses;—or oftener were stolen by Indians, who found market covert for such plunder among the horse-thief whites of the frontier. But the great mass of these pilgrims of the desert was made up of poor folks, who had fled in destitution from Nauvoo, and been refused a resting place by the people of Iowa.
It is difficult fully to understand the state of helplessness in which some of these would arrive, after accomplishing a journey of such extent, under circumstances of so much privation and peril. The fact was, they seemed to believe that all their trouble would be at an end if they could only come up with their comrades at the Great Camps. For this they calculated their resources, among which their power of endurance was by much the largest and most reliable item, and they were not disappointed if they arrived with these utterly exhausted.
I remember a signal instance of this at the Papillon Camp.
It was that of a joyous hearted clever fellow, whose songs and fiddle tunes were the life and delight of Nauvoo in its merry days. I forget his story, and how exactly, it fell about, that after a Mormon's full peck of troubles, he started after us with his wife and little ones from some 'lying down place' in the Indian country, where he had contended with an attack of a serious malady. He was just convalescent, and the fatigue of marching on foot again with a child on his back, speedily brought on a relapse. But his anxiety to reach a place where he could expect to meet friends with shelter and food, was such that he only pressed on the harder. Probably for more than a week of the dog-star weather, he laboured on under a high fever, walking every day till he was entirely exhausted.
His limbs failed him then; but his courage holding out, he got into his covered cart on top of its freight of baggage, and made them drive him on, while he lay down. They could hardly believe how ill he was, he talked on so cheerfully—"I'm nothing on earth ailing but home-sick: I'm cured the very minute I get to camp and see the brethren."
Not being able thus to watch his course, he lost his way, and had to regain it through a wretched tract of Low Meadow Prairie, where there were no trees to break the noon, nor water but what was ague-sweet or brackish. By the time he got back to the trail of the High Prairie, he was, in his own phrase, 'pretty far gone.' Yet he was resolute in his purpose as ever, and to a party he fell in with, avowed his intention to be cured at the camp, 'and no where else.' He even jested with them, comparing his jolting couch to a summer cot in a white washed cockloft. "But I'll make them take me down," he said, "and give me a dip in the river when I get there. All I care for is to see the brethren."
His determined bearing rallied the spirit of his travelling household, and they kept on their way till he was within a few hours journey of the camp. He entered on his last day's journey with the energy of increased hope.
I remember that day well. For in the evening I mounted a tired horse to go a short errand, and in mere pity had to turn back before I had walked him a couple of hundred yards. Nothing seemed to draw life from the languid air but the clouds of gnats and stinging midges; and long after sundown it was so hot that the sheep lay on their stomachs panting, and the cattle strove to lap wind like hard fagged hunting dogs. In camp, I had spent the day in watching the invalids and the rest hunting the shade under the wagon bodies, and veering about them, like the shadows round the sun-dial. I know I thought myself wretched enough, to be of their company.