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Show Page 35 Orson was tasting the hardships Mormonism would exact of him throughout his life, but the opportunity to accompany his brother opened up to him the methods of the greatest proselyter the infant church knew. All through their exhausting journey, they baptized and organized across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, before arriving in upper Missouri at the end of a three-month trail. Their health collapsed in the summer heat; first Orson went down, and then Parley, with fever and chills - for neither one had been exposed before to the torrid Southern climate constantly threatening cholera and other plagues. The two staggered on and finally arrived at Jackson County, after a thousand miles and some 17 fifty wayside meetings. Independence, Jackson County, Missouri, was the westernmost settlement of the United States in 1831. A frontier town with a few huts, haunted by Indian agents and squatters, Independence probably showed few signs of being the new earthly paradise; by the time the Pratts arrived in September, however, a revelation had designated this town as the site of the 18 New Jerusalem. The Mormons had been busy holding conferences, buying land, issuing manifestoes, and setting the cornerstone for a temple, on a prominence near the county courthouse. Orson's friends of the Colesville branch had, the month previously, claimed their "inheritance" in Zion, a tract of land some twelve miles west of Independence near the great southerly dip of the Missouri that now marks the business district of Kansas City. Here, at the edge of the Great Plains, this westernmost clan of Mormon pilgrims awaited the messianic age in a moving spirit of sacrifice and peace. Parley, soon incapacitated with fever, wintered here for the second time, now in the care of the "little church in the wilderness." In the depth of his illness, he was blessed with a dream, a vision of himself 19 Dartaking of the whiteness and glory of the New Jerusalem. Orson chose to |
