But all of that was behind them now. For the past several days, everywhere was green. Spring had come to California, even though back in Nauvoo the Mississippi was likely frozen over and there would be snow on the ground. The gently rolling hills were covered with grass and wild oats that were a foot high. They marched through valleys where thousands of wild cattle, ducks, geese, deer, and other animals roamed freely. The air was delightfully cool and the sun’s rays welcome. About noon of this day they had passed a beautiful Spanish mission on a slight rise that made it stand out like a beacon and reminded Josh of the Nauvoo Temple. Even its name was beautiful—Mission San Luis Rey. His spirits had lifted so much now that he felt like whistling.
And as if all of that weren’t enough, two nights before, as they were making camp, a rider came in with a message from General Kearny. They were not to march to Los Angeles. They were to go directly to San Diego, which was no more than fifty miles away. The war with Mexico was over in this part of California. There would be no calls to battle, no mustering for war. It was stunning news for the men. Brigham Young had been right. They had not been called upon to fight. The Battle of the Bulls was the only “combat” they would see.
He lifted his head as he heard a commotion up ahead of him. A cluster of men had stopped and were pointing. Others were hurrying up to see. He saw Sergeant Luther Tuttle waving for him to come up. Curious, he broke into a trot and ran to join the others.
He stopped, transfixed. They were on a hilltop and the ground fell away before them. About two miles ahead of them the emerald hills gradually ended, and there, for as far as the eye could see, deep blue water, as beautiful as anything Josh had ever seen, stretched away to the horizon.
“There it is, boys,” Colonel Cooke said from his mount. “The Pacific Ocean. That’s what we’ve been waiting for.”
There were no cheers, no applause. Everyone just stood there, staring at the beautiful sight before them, moved as much by the knowledge of what it meant as by the sight itself.
Josh looked away, suddenly filled with emotion. “Dear God,” he said beneath his breath, “I thank thee. I thank thee for bringing us here safely. In the name of Jesus, amen.”
By the first of February, 1847, the Saints along the Missouri River had largely changed from a community on the move to a residential one. Though from its very inception, the plan was to make the settlement a temporary one, the Saints fell to work with their usual industry and determination to make the best of what was an otherwise difficult situation. The first order of business had been to prepare winter hay for the vast hordes of cattle the Mormons owned, their only real wealth of any kind. They had an estimated ten thousand head. Just south of Winter Quarters a huge stockade was built, where a large part of the herd was kept. An even greater herd was taken north a few miles into the lowlands, where there were lots of rushes on which the cattle did well. In addition, the Saints cut an estimated fifteen hundred to two thousand tons of meadow hay and stacked it for the winter.
Once that was taken care of, Brigham Young, with his vast ingenuity and his enormous organizational skills, set the people to work building settlements. Winter Quarters was started on the west side of the Missouri River on the border between Omaha and Otoe tribal lands. On the eastern side of the river, near Council Bluffs, another major settlement was also under way. It was the largest settlement on the Iowa side. The population of these two centers quickly swelled until they both neared a peak of about four thousand each. But there were more than twelve thousand Latter-day Saints up and down the Missouri, and dozens of lesser settlements had sprung up everywhere. Still others waited out the winter at the way stations of Garden Grove and Mount Pisgah in the newly formed state of Iowa.
Winter Quarters became a well-laid-out city with some thirty-eight city blocks. Except for those right along the bluffs, each block had twenty lots. The people were instructed to build their homes at the front of the lot on the streets and use the rest of the space for gardens. This provided a feeling of openness and encouraged a sense of community, as neighbors could easily associate with each other. There were not to be more than five wells per city block. Outhouses had to be put at the very back of the property and dug no more than eight feet deep.
Most of the houses were small and crudely built, made either of logs or sod bricks. There was virtually no access to shingles, and so roofs were covered with a loose base of rafters and planking, then covered with sod. There were some innovations. Willard Richards built an octagon-shaped house with a square office on the front of it for conducting Church business. A large Council House was immediately begun in Winter Quarters, and a log tabernacle was started across the river at Miller’s Hollow in Council Bluffs. These were to provide meeting facilities for larger groups. Thousands were still without adequate shelter as winter finally began to loosen its hold on the Great Plains. Hundreds of wagons were used throughout the winter as family dwellings. Others dug holes in the riverbank and lived there in miserable squalor.
In those conditions, it was not surprising that death was no stranger along the “Misery River,” as many called it. The combination of exhaustion, constant exposure to the elements, inadequate diet, and unsanitary living conditions made for difficult living. By February, the known death toll since the Saints’ arrival was approaching a thousand, but this was only what was known. Some families did not report deaths, especially of children, but would simply bury deceased loved ones nearby and mourn in silence. The smaller, outlying settlements didn’t keep good records or report the numbers of their losses to the Church authorities.
Chills and fever were usually listed as the most frequent cause of death, with black canker, or scurvy, as the next most frequent. The ratio of deaths from each of these two dreaded sicknesses changed as winter came on. Once the first frost came, ague dropped off sharply, but with the coming of winter, the Saints no longer had access to the fresh berries, wild fruits, and edible greens that had been abundant along the river bottoms. Blackleg quickly set in as salted meat and parched corn became the primary diet for most families. So called because the disease hit first in the ankles and then quickly turned the legs black, blackleg, or black canker, was extremely painful and often fatal.
Children constituted the largest number of victims, with more than half of the total deaths coming among children ten and under. Many a family stood before open graves as their little ones were laid to rest. Some were especially hard hit. The Utley family lost a seven-year-old, a nine-year-old, a fourteen-year-old, a sixteen-year-old, and their mother all within a two-month period. Stillman Pond left Nauvoo while he and most of his family were gravely ill. He was so sick that he drove the last one hundred and fifty miles lying down in the wagon, holding the reins up and over the driver’s seat and looking through a knothole. By spring he had lost not only his wife, Maria, but eight children as well.
But in spite of the grimness of their existence, the Latter-day Saints developed a remarkable sense of community and for the most part endured their circumstances cheerfully. Mingled with the tears for the sick and the dead were the squeals of happy children, the laughter of young people enjoying a dance, the soft murmur of those who were courting, the singing of choirs, the chatter of women gathered around a quilting frame or some other project. Schools sprung up everywhere, though for the most part they were held out-of-doors under small boweries and were therefore dependent upon the weather.
Especially popular with both youth and young adults were the singing and dancing schools. When Brigham Young received a revelation from the Lord on the fourteenth of January, 1847, among other instructions came these: “If thou art merry, praise the Lord with singing, with music, with dancing, and with a prayer of praise and thanksgiving.” It was counsel that many of the Saints were already practicing. By the end of 1846, Stephen Goddard’s singing school had become so popular that Winter Quarters could boast of a large choir that frequently performed and offered concerts. Hiram Gates taught various dance steps to individuals of both sexes and of all ages. Square dances, cotillions, reels, and rounds were among the dances that he taught. There was a dance nearly every evening in the Council House. These were called the “promiscuous universal dances,” meaning that dancers exchanged partners with those they knew well, they refrained from any alcohol, and the bishops or other Church leaders were there as chaperones.
Not all agreed that this was a good thing. Alpheus Cutler questioned the propriety of having dances carried on in the camp while others were languishing on their beds of sickness. And when more and more “Gentiles” started coming upriver from the trading post, Elder Wilford Woodruff wondered what it would look like when the angels of heaven recorded that the Saints spent more of their time fiddling and dancing than they spent in prayer and praise to their God.
Perhaps it was so, but the most widely attended activity in all the settlements was Sunday worship services. There were the usual large convocations in the Council House, or out-of-doors when the weather was mild, but these were more like conferences and were not held on a regular basis. A new development began to emerge from the organization of wards in the two largest centers—Council Bluffs and Winter Quarters. Each Sunday, the smaller, more intimate ward groups would meet both Sunday morning and evening in someone’s home, or outside when the weather permitted. The Saints prayed, sang, exhorted one another, and as they partook of the sacrament covenanted to remember the Savior. Led by the bishop and his two counselors, these meetings were used to conduct ward business, including the receiving of updates on who was in need of temporal help, finding out who was sick, and other practical matters. Other ordinances, such as the blessing of children or the confirmation of older children after they were baptized, also began to take place in the ward setting.
With so many of the men off to work, on missions, or with the battalion, a heavy load fell on the women of the settlements. The Relief Society had stopped functioning as a formal organization after Joseph’s death. When Emma Smith strongly opposed Brigham Young’s leadership and refused to go west with the Saints, the Twelve were concerned that as president of the Relief Society she might use the meetings to sow discord among the sisters. So the organization was discontinued. But that was only the formal organization. The women continued to function much as they had before in terms of the compassionate service they rendered to others.
The sheer demands of survival and of running a household required many varied activities—spinning wool, churning butter and cheese, sewing and mending clothing, tending a garden, caring for the children, finding food and preparing meals, doing the laundry, milking the cows, hunting for stray animals, giving birth to children or, in too many cases, burying them. Through all of that, the women found time to build sisterhood. Often they would band together to perform their duties. The need to survive only seemed to strengthen the bonds which bound them. As sickness and death became more commonplace, it was largely women who became the physicians and nurses to those in need. Often, women fresh from their own tragedies could be found walking up the street to take a neighbor a warm loaf of bread or an extra set of mittens for the little ones.
That was not to say that all was perfect harmony among the Latter-day Saints. Human nature being what it is, it was inevitable that there would be tension and disagreements. There were, as there would be in any large group, the lazy and the industrious, the slothful and the careful, the whiners and the stoics, the sour and the sweet, the disgruntled and the satisfied.
When Parley P. Pratt returned from Fort Leavenworth with more than five thousand dollars contributed by the battalion members from their clothing allowance, Brigham gave about a fourth of the money directly to the battalion families, then used the rest to purchase badly needed provisions for the whole community. Some of the battalion wives complained. Some even wrote their husbands and told them not to give any more of their salaries, since it wasn’t coming directly to them.
With his usual acerbic response to what he saw as lack of faith, Brigham noted that the battalion members had received about twenty-two thousand dollars from their clothing allowance, and yet had sent back only about six thousand of that. Rather than writing letters grumbling against the Twelve, he suggested, perhaps the wives should say something to their dear husbands who had kept back about seventeen thousand dollars to spend on themselves.
These, however, were the exceptions, the minority. For the majority of the Saints, there was a remarkable sense of community, a willingness to put everything into the common pot—assets and liabilities, sufferings and successes—to be shared equally. So with joy and gladness, misery and complaints, love and heartbreak, sickness and song, dancing and murmuring, the Saints slowly moved through the winter of 1846–47, waiting for the weather to break, signaling that it was time at long last for the Saints to depart for the Rocky Mountains.
In spite of a horrendous administrative load and problems that would have crushed ten lesser men, Brigham Young never lost sight of the fact that Winter Quarters was but a momentary respite in the great gathering of Israel to their new home. Virtually every council meeting spent at least some time on one topic—when would they start west and what needed to happen before that time came? There were a thousand questions to answer. What day should they leave? How many would go? What kind of men were needed? How long would it take? How many wagons? How many teams to pull them? Should they be oxen or horses or mules? Could they make it in time to plant sufficient crops to help sustain a group through a Rocky Mountain winter? What organization should be used to govern? Which was the best route? Were there places to resupply along the way?