History of Utah, 1540-1886 - Brigham Young University

234 EXPULSION FROM NAUVOO.
" While the people for the most part were ill with
chills and fever," says Wells, "quail fell into camp and
were picked up with ease. 37
This supply was looked
upon as miraculous by the half-famished people. So
long had they been lashed by the fierce winds of
misfortune, that now they accepted with gratitude
this indication of providential care.
Wagons were sent from Winter Quarters for the
removal of the people from Poor Camp; and gradually
all reached the various stations in which the Mormons
had gathered. 38
Of their long journey many painful incidents are
recorded. Weakened by fever or crippled with rheumatism,
and with sluggish circulation, many were
severely frost-bitten. Women were compelled to
drive the nearly worn-out teams, while tending on
their knees, perhaps, their sick children. The strength
of the beasts was failing, as there were intervals when
they could be kept from starving only by the browse
or tender buds and branches of the cotton-wood, felled
for the purpose. 39
At one time no less than two thousand wagons
could be counted, it was said, along the three hundred
miles of road that separated Nauvoo from the Mormon
encampments. Many families possessed no wag-
3T ' On the 9th of October, while our teams were waiting on the banks of the
Miss, for the poor saints. . .left without any of the necessaries of life, . . .and
nothing to start their journey with, the Lord sent flocks of quail, which lit
upon their wagons and on their empty tables, and upon the ground within
their reach, which the saints, and even the sick, caught with their hands
until they were satisfied.' Hist. B. Young, MS., 1847, 9. This phenomenon
extended some 30 or 40 miles along the river, and was generally observed.
The quail in immense quantities had attempted to cross the river, but it being
beyond their strength, had dropped into the river boats or on the bank.'
Wells, in Utah A'otes, MS., 7.
38 See The Mormons: A Discourse delivered before the Historical Society of
Pennsylvania, March 26, 1S50, by Thomas L. Kane. Philadelphia, 1850. A
copy of it will be found at the end of Orson Pratt's Works, and in Mackay's
The Mormons, 200-45. The story of the Mor.mon exodus, as handed down
to us by a man of Colonel Kane's powers of observation, would have been a
valuable record were it not plainly apparent that truth is too often sacrificed
to diction. Among Mormon writers we find no detailed narrative of this
exodus, and among others little that is not borrowed from the colonel's discourse.
39 Snow's Biography, 89.