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Show Page 67 gathering place should be established in this sanctuary by the Mississippi. Illinois Governor Thomas Carlin had offered safety to the Mormons, and within two weeks the apostles rode northward to visit a swampy promontory known as Commerce. They envisioned at this point a settlement straddling the river, inasmuch as the state of Iowa had also offered protection to the Missouri exiles. Orson and his family thus moved into a miserable fourteen-foot-square room in Montrose, Iowa, along with the family of Wilford Woodruff. These tentative settlements clung with trepidation to the borders of states and to the river's natural escape route. The siege-minded Mormons had lost the "center place," partially because, as Joseph Smith continually reminded them and as their own smarting retreat proved to them, they had claimed a righteous pre-eminence to which they were not fully entitled. The beatings and drivings had stunned them into an acute awareness of their vulnerability; they realized as they lay miserable in the fever swamps of the Mississippi that their inheritances would have to be redeemed against impossible odds. Cramped into an old army barracks on the river bluffs, Orson Pratt set himself to the even greater task of helping to redeem a church shattered in spirit as well as in property, seemingly poised for dissolution. May and June of 1839 were hence occupied in the establishment of a new gathering place. Joseph Smith's indefatigable faith constructed a new city around the hamlet of Commerce - and this prosaic designation soon disappeared in favor of a more exalted name drawn from the lexicon of 38 Joshua Seixas - "Nauvoo." This Hebrew word for "beauty" embodied Joseph Smith's emphasis on order, harmony, and his theological romance with the landscape. The choice must have pleased Orson Pratt, who had taken such pride in his mastery of Hebrew, and he and the others of the Twelve |