History of Utah, 1540-1886 - Brigham Young University

248
.
AT THE MISSOURI.
readily as the most expert backwoodsmen of their
day. 24
During the summer and autumn months of 1846,
the Papillon camp, near the Little Butterfly River,
in common with the others, was stricken with fever,
and with a scorbutic disease which the Mormons
termed the black canker. In the autumn drought, the
streams that discharge into the Missouri at this point
are often little better than open sewers, pestilential
as open cesspools, and the river, having lost more than
half its volume, flows sluggishly through its channel
of slime and sedge. Of the baked mud on either bank
is formed the rich soil on which lay the encampments,
the site being called, in their own phrase, Misery
Bottom. In the year previous the Indians in this
neighborhood had lost one ninth of their number;
and now that the earth was for the first time upturned
by the plough, the exhalations from this rank and
steaming soil were redolent of disease and death.
In the camp nearest to Papillon more than one
third of the company lay sick at the beginning of
August; elsewhere matters were even worse; and as
the season advanced there were in some of the encampments
not one who escaped the fever, the few who
were able to stagger from tent to tent carrying food
and water to their comrades. For several weeks it
was impossible to dig graves quickly enough for the
burial of the dead, 25 and one might see in the open
tents the wasted forms of women brushing away the
flies from the putrefying corpses of their children.
Through all these months building was continually
going on at Winter Quarters. 26 The axe and saw were
24 ' There were among them many skilled mechanics, who could work at forge,
loom, or turning-lathe. A Mormon gunsmith is the inventor of the excellent
repeating rifle that loads hy slides instead of cylinders; and one of the neatest
finished fire-arms I have ever seen was of this kind, wrought from scraps
of old iron, and inlaid with the silver of a couple of half-dollars.' Kane's The
Mormon^ 36.
-'° At the camp situated on the site of the town of Florence, there were over
600 burials. Kane's The Mormons, o 1
K ' Here we suffered terribly from scurvy, for want of vegetables. I was
a victim, and even my little children as young as three years of age. The