Dreadful indeed was the suffering of these forsaken beings. Cowed and
cramped by cold and sunburn alternating as each weary day and night
dragged on, they were, almost all of them, the crippled victims of
disease. They were there because they had no homes, nor hospital, nor
poorhouse, nor friends to offer them any. They could not minister to the
needs of their sick; they had no bread to quiet the fractious, hungry
cries of their children. Mothers and babes, daughters and grandparents,
all alike were clothed in tatters, lacking even sufficient covering for
the fever-stricken sufferers.
These were the Mormons, famishing, in Lee County, Iowa, in the fourth
week of the month of September, 1846. The deserted city was Nauvoo,
Illinois. The Mormons were the owners of that city and the smiling
country around it. And those who had stopped their ploughs, who had
silenced their hammers, their axes, their shuttles and the wheels of
their workshops; those who had put out their fires, who had eaten their
food, spoiled their orchards, and trampled under foot their thousands of
acres of unharvested grain--these were the keepers of their dwellings,
the carousers in their temple, the noise of whose drunken rioting
insulted the ears of the dying.
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