The Saints were hard at work all the winter making wagons. The people that came into the city were astonished to see the hundreds and thousands of wagons that were turned out in a few months.
In February, 1846, the authorities took the lead, crossed the river Mississippi with a large camp, and stopped some seven or eight miles from the water on the other side, waiting for the snow to go off, which just then had fallen heavily. In consequence of this they had no food for their cattle, and being at the end of regular settlements, had great difficulty in procuring any food, but as soon as possible they were on the move.
When the general emigration of the main body of the Church came on, it was pretty much all at once. On the Nauvoo side of the river two or three hundred wagons were waiting at one time for the ferry. In these wagons the Saints had to sleep, cooking their food on the beach.
Although all the boats and ferries that could be had were employed, this state of things continued for upwards of a month.
All the opposite shore was covered with wagons in which the Saints were living, but multitudes were without any protection from the weather, except tents made with blankets, under one of which a whole family had to live.
A scene of human suffering and endurance for the gospel's sake, on so large a scale, has seldom if ever before been seen on the earth. The sufferings of the Saints during their expulsion from Missouri, and their entrance to Nauvoo, were perhaps more intense, but not so many Saints endured them.
Picture, dear reader, to yourself, the case of thousands—they had been mobbed and plundered in Missouri, had escaped only as fugitives, and had arrived at a new location, Nauvoo, only to see their families die off around them by the fever and ague of that place.
After surviving these troubles, cheering up, beginning life afresh, and seeing this abode of death converted, by incessant toil, into a garden of health and prosperity, fancy to yourself the feelings of the Saints when called upon to resign these blessings, made doubly valuable by being so dearly paid for, and to exchange them for a barren wilderness, a prospect of a thousand miles' journey across untracked plains and mountains, and the probability of death on the journey, or of starvation afterwards.
Will the annals of history present a similar case? The exodus of Moses and his bands was not equal to it, for he had a goodly land to promise his hosts—a land flowing with milk and honey, to cheer their spirits up. They only had to enter upon the already cultivated land of their enemies. But here were twenty thousand people starting to locate a thousand miles beyond the borders of civilized life, over what had always been considered impassable mountains.
Reports had arrived of Colonel Fremont's exploration, and the hardships he had suffered, but here were not only men, but thousands of women and children, starting on the same hazardous journey, not only temporarily to endure these difficulties, but proposing to make a settled home in those dreary wilds, and live where they were told not a spear of wheat could be raised.