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Show Page 72 Exhausted and hungry, Parley had made his way directly north toward the town of Paris and then eastward along the Salt River. By good fortune, he found a Mormon family who warned him away from the main ferry and encouraged him northward toward Quincy. Upon fording the Salt River he found himself on the Mississippi heath not far from Hannibal, Missouri. After a week of "living death," sleeping in snake-infested bushes by day, stumbling along half-awake by night, he paid a devious little boy with a canoe to deposit him on a large island in the river. At length, the same boy rescued him from the island and canoed him across to the Illinois shore, where Parley knelt and 45 feverishly kissed the ground. Once refreshed, Parley went with Orson up to Commerce. The unbreakable Pratts were determined that the mission to England be fulfilled, so they spent several days buying up land and improving it to sell again at a profit. In one day Heber Kimball and Parley constructed shanties on a woodland acreage a mile from the river, and Orson moved his wife and two children into one of them. In such narrow quarters the Kimball and Pratt families were suddenly prostrated with the malarial fever which swept each summer through the sweating Mississippi Valley. Steeling themselves against the crisis which now descended upon the camp of refuge, the Pratt brothers, like the Prophet Joseph Smith, shook the sickness off "by the power of God." They now girded themselves to help their neighbors - with the Prophet they traversed Nauvoo and Montrose, laying hands on the malarial Saints and watching as multiple miracles of healing quietly but forcefully tightened the faltering confidence of the Mormon community in their priesthood - and in their peculiar election both to salvation and to suffering. Among the healed was Elijah Fordham, a missionary associate of Orson Pratt in |
