The first companies of the Mormons commenced crossing the Mississippi on the 3rd February, 1846. They amounted to 1,600 men, women, and children, and passed the river on the ice. They continued to leave in detachments, or companies of similar magnitude, until July and August, travelling by ox-teams towards California, then almost unknown, and quite unpeopled by the Anglo-Saxon race.

The anti-Mormons asserted that the intention of the Saints was to excite the Indians against the commonwealth, and that they would return at the head of a multitude of the Red Skins to take vengeance upon the white people for the indignities they had suffered. Nothing appears to have been further from the intentions of the Mormons. Their sole object was to plant their Church in some fertile and hitherto undiscovered spot, where they might worship God in their own fashion, unmolested by any other sect of Christians. The war against Mexico was then raging, and, to test the loyalty of the Mormons, it was suggested by their foes that a demand should be made upon them to raise five hundred men for the service of the country. The Mormons obeyed, and five hundred of their best men enrolled themselves under the command of General Kearney, and marched 2,400 miles with the armies of the United States. At the conclusion of the Mexican war, they were disbanded in Upper California. The Mormons allege that it was one of this band who, in working at a mill, first discovered the golden treasures of California; and the "Saints are said to have succeeded in amassing large quantities of the precious metal before the secret was made generally known to the "Gentiles."

But faith was not kept with the Mormons who remained in Nauvoo. Although they had agreed to leave in detachments, they were not allowed the necessary time to dispose of their property; and, in September, 1846, the city was besieged by their enemies, upon the pretence, that they did not intend to fulfil the stipulations made with the people and authorities of Illinois. After a three day's bombardment, the last remnant was finally driven out by fire and sword. The details will be found in the following chapter.

California, another party chartered the ship Brooklyn, at New York, and sailed round to the Pacific by Cape Horn. This party was amongst the earliest of the arrivals in California, and its members were exceedingly fortunate at the "diggings," and amassed large quantities of gold.

But the great bulk of the Mormons proceeded overland to the Valley of the Great Salt Lake; a remarkable pilgrimage, which has not been paralleled in the history of mankind since Moses led the Israelites from Egypt. The distance to be traversed was enormous— the perils of the way were great-the whole circumstances were highly interesting and peculiar, and the zeal and courage of the sect were as remarkable as their faith. It is fortunate that a record of these events of the Mormon exodus was kept by a person who knew how to use his eyes, his understanding, and his pen; and that he has been induced to give it to the world. The following narrative of Colonel Kane, who accompanied the Mormons from Nauvoo to the Salt Lake, has all the interest of a romance. It was originally delivered as a lecture before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and is here produced from the American edition :

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A few years ago (said Colonel Kane), ascending the Upper Mississippi, in the autumn when its waters were low, I was compelled to travel by land past the region of the Rapids. My road lay through the Half-Breed Tract, a fine section of Iowa, which the unsettled state of its land-titles had appropriated as a sanctuary for coiners, horse thieves, and other outlaws. I had left my steamer at Keokuk, at the foot of the Lower Fall, to hire a carriage, and to contend for some fragments of a dirty meal with the swarming flies, the only Scavengers of the locality. From this place to where the deep water of the river returns, my eye wearied to see everywhere sordid, vagabond, and idle settlers; and a country marred, without being improved, by their careless hands.

I was descending the last hill-side upon my journey, when a landscape in delightful contrast broke upon my view. Half encircled by a bend of the river, a beautiful city lay glittering in the fresh morning sun; its bright new dwellings, set in cool green gardens, ranging up around a stately dome-shaped hill, which was crowned by a noble marble edifice, whose high tapering spire was radiant with white and gold. The city appeared to cover several miles; and beyond it, in the background, there rolled off a fair country, chequered by the careful lines of fruitful husbandry. The unmistakeable marks of industry, enterprise, and educated wealth everywhere, made the scene one of singular and most striking beauty.

It was a natural impulse to visit this inviting region. I procured a skiff, and rowing across the river, landed at the chief wharf of the

city. No one met me there. I looked, and saw no one. I could hear no one move; though the quiet everywhere was such that I heard the flies buzz, and the water ripples break against the shallow of the beach. I walked through the solitary streets. The town lay as in a dream, under some deadening spell of loneliness, from which I almost feared to wake it; for plainly it had not slept long. There was no grass growing up in the paved ways; rains had not entirely washed away the prints of dusty footsteps.

Yet I went about unchecked. I went into empty workshops, rope-walks, and smithies. The spinner's wheel was idle; the carpenter had gone from his work-bench and shavings, his unfinished sash and casing. Fresh bark was in the tanner's vat, and the fresh-chopped lightwood stood piled against the baker's oven. The blacksmith's shop was cold; but his coal heap, and ladling pool, and crooked water horn, were all there, as if he had just gone off for a holiday. No work-people anywhere looked to know my errand. If I went into the gardens, clinking the wicket-latch loudly after me, to pull the marygolds, heart's-ease, and lady-slippers, and draw a drink with the water-sodden well-bucket and its noisy chain; or, knocking off with my stick the tall heavy-headed dahlies and sun-flowers, hunted over the beds for cucumbers and love-apples-no one called out to me from any opened window, or dog sprang forward to bark an alarm. I could have supposed the people hidden in the houses, but the doors were unfastened; and when at last I timidly entered them, I found dead ashes white upon the hearths, and had to tread a-tiptoe, as if walking down the aisle of a country church, to avoid rousing irreverent echoes from the naked floors.

On the outskirts of the town was the city graveyard; but there was no record of plague there, nor did it in any wise differ much from other Protestant American cemeteries. Some of the mounds were not long sodded; some of the stones were newly set, their dates recent, and their black inscriptions glossy in the mason's hardly dried lettering ink. Beyond the graveyard, out in the fields, I saw in one spot hard by where the fruited boughs of a young orchard had been roughly torn down, the still smouldering remains of a barbecue fire, that had been constructed of rails from the fencing round it. It was the latest sign of life there. Fields upon fields of heavy-headed yellow grain lay rotting ungathered upon the ground. No one was at hand to take in their rich harvest. As far as the eye could reach, they stretched away-they sleeping, too, in the hazy air of autumn.

Only two portions of the city seemed to suggest the import of this mysterious solitude. On the southern suburb, the houses looking out upon the country showed, by their splintered wood-work, and walls battered to the foundation, that they had lately been the mark

of a destructive cannonade. And in and around the splendid Temple, which had been the chief object of my admiration, armed men were barracked, surrounded by their stacks of musketry and pieces of heavy ordnance. These challenged me to render an account of myself, and why I had had the temerity to cross the water without a written permit from a leader of their band.

Though these men were generally more or less under the influence of ardent spirits, after I had explained myself as a passing stranger, they seemed anxious to gain my good opinion. They told the story of the Dead City: that it had been a notable manufacturing and commercial mart, sheltering over 20,000 persons; that they had waged war with its inhabitants for several years, and had been finally successful only a few days before my visit, in an action fought in front of the ruined suburb; after which they had driven them forth at the point of the sword. The defence, they said, had been obstinate, but gave way on the third day's bombardment. They boasted greatly of their prowess, especially in this battle, as they called it; but I discovered they were not of one mind as to certain of the exploits that had distinguished it; one of which, as I remember, was, that they had slain a father and his son, a boy of fifteen, not long residents of the fated city, whom they admitted to have borne a character without reproach.

They also conducted me inside the massive sculptured walls of the curious Temple, in which they said the banished inhabitants were accustomed to celebrate the mystic rites of an unhallowed worship. They particularly pointed out to me certain features of the building, which, having been the peculiar objects of a former superstitious regard, they had, as matter of duty, sedulously defiled and defaced. The reputed sites of certain shrines they had thus particularly noticed; and various sheltered chambers, in one of which was a deep well, constructed, they believed, with a dreadful design. Beside these, they led me to see a large and deep chiselled marble vase or basin, supported upon twelve oxen, also of marble, and of the size of life, of which they told some romantic stories. They said the deluded persons, most of whom were emigrants from a great distance, believed their Deity countenanced their reception here of a baptism of regeneration, as proxies for whomsoever they held in warm affection in the countries from which they had come. That here parents “went into the water" for their lost children, children for their parents, widows for their spouses, and young persons for their lovers; that thus the Great Vase came to be for them associated with all dear and distant memories, and was therefore the object, of all others in the building, to which they attached the greatest degree of idolatrous affection. On this account, the victors had so diligently desecrated it, as to render the apartment in which it was contained too noisome to abide in.