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Show Page 34 served a brief mission alongside Lyman Wight, a new convert who had previously headed Rigdon's experimental farm on the Morley homestead. Communitarian enthusiasm was just beginning in the Church, however, and the news from the Indian mission fired the Mormons with a desire for a "permanent inheritance" where they could await the coming of the Lord and live the new"law of the Church." The Indian borders had great theological significance for the Mormons - the thirteenth chapter of First Nephi made the redemption of the Indians a divine imperative, and, in Mormon theology, the frontier of Indian territory became the "line running 16 directly between Jew and Gentile." Thus, the geographical center of the continent became also the "center place of Zion," the site of the first intensive Mormon mission and the focal point of the millennial world the Saints looked for so anxiously. Unfortunately, Zion would not just fall into their hands, as many of them believed. Andrew Jackson's America, the Mormon promised land, rang with conflict and barely subdued bitterness. Jackson had endeavored to partition the territory of the United States into two great enclaves, one white, one Indian, with the 95th meridian as the dividing line. The tribes indigenous to the East had been displaced wholecloth to the prairielands west of the Missouri state line. As the newcomers, mostly woodlanders, faced an inevitable struggle with the natives, so did the Mormon incursion draw the wrath of a rough, pro-slavery frontier population of whites. Along with many Mormons who filtered west for the inauguration of the new Zion, Orson and Parley Pratt had been directed by revelation to make the journey to meet the Prophet in Missouri, preaching by the way. Parley later wrote of the heat, the hunger, and thirst the two brothers suffered in this, the longest trek by far that Orson had ever made. At nineteen, |
