CHAPTER V. — THE PIONEER TRIP ACROSS THE PLAINS
During the winter of 1846-1847 preparations were under way to send an organization of pioneers across the plains and beyond the Rocky Mountains, to select a new dwelling-place for the Saints. The only "revelation" to Brigham Young found in the "Book of Doctrine and Covenants" is a direction about the organization and mission of this expedition. It was dated January 14, 1847, and it directed the organization of the pioneers into companies, with captains of hundreds, of fifties, and of tens, and a president and two counsellors at their head, under charge of the Twelve. Each company was to provide its own equipment, and to take seeds and farming implements. "Let every man," it commanded, "use all his influence and property to remove this people to the place where the Lord shall locate a Stake of Zion." The power of the head of the church was guarded by a threat that "if any man shall seek to build up himself he shall have no power," and the "revelation" ended, like a rustic's letter, with the words, "So no more at present," "amen and amen" being added.
In accordance with this command, on April 14* a pioneer band of volunteers set out to blaze a path, so to speak, across the plains and mountains for the main body which was to follow.
* Date given in the General Epistle of December 23, 1847. Others
say April 7.
It is difficult to-day, when this "Far West" is in possession of the agriculturist, the merchant, and the miner, dotted with cities and flourishing towns, and cut in all directions by railroads, which have made pleasure routes for tourists of the trail over which the pioneers of half a century ago toiled with difficulty and danger, to realize how vague were the ideas of even the best informed in the thirties and forties about the physical characteristics of that country and its future possibilities. The conception of the latter may be best illustrated by quoting Washington Irving's idea, as expressed in his "Astoria," written in 1836:—
"Such is the nature of this immense wilderness of the far West; which apparently defies cultivation and the habitation of civilized life. Some portion of it, along the rivers, may partially be subdued by agriculture, others may form vast pastoral tracts like those of the East; but it is to be feared that a great part of it will form a lawless interval between the abodes of civilized man, like the wastes of the ocean or the deserts of Arabia, and, like them, be subject to the depredations of the marauders. There may spring up new and mongrel races, like new formations in zoology, the amalgamation of the 'debris' and 'abrasions' of former races, civilized and savage; the remains of broken and extinguished tribes; the descendants of wandering hunters and trappers; of fugitives from the Spanish-American frontiers; of adventurers and desperadoes of every class and country, yearly ejected from the bosom of society into the wilderness.... Some may gradually become pastoral hordes, like those rude and migratory people, half shepherd, half warrior, who, with their flocks and herds, roam the plains of upper Asia; but others, it is to be apprehended, will become predatory bands, mounted on the fleet steeds of the prairies, with the open plains for their marauding grounds, and the mountains for their retreats and lurking places. There they may resemble those great hordes of the North, 'Gog and Magog with their bands,' that haunted the gloomy imaginations of the prophets—'A great company and a mighty host, all riding upon horses, and warring upon those nations which were at rest, and dwelt peaceably, and had gotten cattle and goods."'
"What about the country between the Missouri River and the Pacific," asked a father living near the Missouri, of his son on his return from California across the plains in 1851—"Oh, it's of no account," was the reply; "the soil is poor, sandy, and too dry to produce anything but this little short grass afterward learned to be so rich in nutriment, and, when it does rain, in three hours afterward you could not tell that it had rained at all."*
* Nebraska Historical Society papers.
But while this distant West was still so unknown to the settled parts of the country, these Mormon pioneers were by no means the first to traverse it, as the records of the journeyings of Lewis and Clark, Ezekiel Williams, General W. H. Ashley, Wilson Price Hunt, Major S. H. Long, Captain W. Sublette, Bonneville, Fremont, and others show.