Lieutenant Colonel Cooke, of the Second Dragoons, with whom Governor Cumming was making the trip, had a harrowing experience. There was much confusion in organizing his regiment of six companies at Fort Leavenworth, and he did not begin his march until September 17, with a miserable lot of mules and insufficient supplies. He found little grass for the animals, and after crossing the South Platte on October 15, they began to die or to drop out. From that point snow and sleet storms were encountered, and, when Fort Laramie was reached, so many of the animals had been left behind or were unable to travel, that some of his men were dismounted, the baggage supply was reduced, and even the ambulances were used to carry grain. After passing Devil's Gate, they encountered a snowstorm on November 5. The best shelter their guide could find was a lofty natural wall at a point known as Three Crossings. Describing their night there he says: "Only a part of the regiment could huddle behind the rock in the deep snow; whilst, the long night through, the storm continued, and in fearful eddies from above, before, behind, drove the falling and drifting snow. Thus exposed, for the hope of grass the poor animals were driven, with great devotion, by the men once more across the stream and three-quarters of a mile beyond, to the base of a granite ridge, which almost faced the storm. There the famished mules, crying piteously, did not seek to eat, but desperately gathered in a mass, and some horses, escaping guard, went back to the ford, where the lofty precipice first gave us so pleasant relief and shelter."
The march westward was continued through deep snow and against a cold wind. On November 8 twenty-three mules had given out, and five wagons had to be abandoned. On the night of the 9th, when the mules were tied to the wagons, "they gnawed and destroyed four wagon tongues, a number of wagon covers, ate their ropes, and getting loose, ate the sage fuel collected at the tents." On November 10 nine horses were left dying on the road, and the thermometer was estimated to have marked twenty-five degrees below zero. Their thermometers were all broken, but the freezing of a bottle of sherry in a trunk gave them a basis of calculation.
The command reached a camp three miles below Fort Bridger on November 19. Of one hundred and forty-four horses with which they started, only ten reached that camp.
CHAPTER XIII. — THE MORMON PURPOSE
When Colonel Johnston arrived at the Black's Fork camp the information he received from Colonel Alexander, and certain correspondence with the Mormon authorities, gave him a comprehensive view of the situation; and on November 5 he forwarded a report to army headquarters in the East, declaring that it was the matured design of the Mormons "to hold and occupy this territory independent of and irrespective of the authority of the United States," entertaining "the insane design of establishing a form of government thoroughly despotic, and utterly repugnant to our institutions."
The correspondence referred to began with a letter from Brigham Young to Colonel Alexander, dated October 14. Opening with a declaration of Young's patriotism, and the brazen assertion that the people of Utah "had never resisted even the wish of the President of the United States, nor treated with indignity a single individual coming to the territory under his authority," he went on to say:—
"But when the President of the United States so far degrades his high position, and prostitutes the highest gift of the people, as to make use of the military power (only intended for the protection of the people's rights) to crush the people's liberties, and compel them to receive officials so lost to self-respect as to accept appointments against the known and expressed wish of the people, and so craven and degraded as to need an army to protect them in their position, we feel that we should be recreant to every principle of self-respect, honor, integrity, and patriotism to bow tamely to such high-handed tyranny, a parallel for which is only found in the attempts of the British government, in its most corrupt stages, against the rights, liberties, and lives of our forefathers."
He then appealed to Colonel Alexander, as probably "the unwilling agent" of the administration, to return East with his force, saying, "I have yet to learn that United States officers are implicitly bound to obey the dictum of a despotic President, in violating the most sacred constitutional rights of American citizens."
On October 18 Colonel Alexander, acknowledging the receipt of Young's letter, said in his reply that no one connected with his force had any wish to interfere in any way with the religion of the people of Utah, adding: "I repeat my earnest desire to avoid violence and bloodshed, and it will require positive resistance to force me to it. But my troops have the same right of self-defence that you claim, and it rests entirely with you whether they are driven to the exercise of it."