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Show Page 129 precipitous first company had set up camp February 4 in a creek bottom on the Iowa shore. Orson himself had worked incessantly in the temple until the very last moment, dispensing the mysteries of the endowment to hundreds of Saints and receiving in the sacred sealing ordinance a fifth plural wife, Sarah Louisa Chandler, a young convert not more than twenty-four years old. "Louiza," as Orson called her, was a New Hampshire girl of tender health - she would not last the journey. The temple, for so many months the center of Orson's life, stood at his back now, but his experiences there had left him fundamentally and forever transformed in both theology and family. And for these beliefs he joined hundreds of Latter-day Saints, in the tradition of his spiritually independent ancestors, once again in exile. Despite the freezing northwesterly, Orson managed to persuade the ferrymen to venture across with his family; the flatboats bucked the flailing waters and the Pratts soon set foot in Iowa territory, leaving the States of the Union behind in search of a "location in the vast interior wilds of the West, - far from the abodes of what is falsely termed civilization and Christianity." Here they found their friends half-buried in snow and mud, and a temporary refuge at the home of Jonathan Harrington, who was Sarah's uncle, some three miles from the Sugar Creek encampment. Parley P. Pratt crossed the Mississippi the same day and holed up with his family 3 in an abandoned cabin in the same gully. For three days the apostles met and discussed; a letter arrived from Sam Brannan in New York, carrying a proposition from certain congressmen that the Mormons occupy California and deed it over to them in exchange for "protection" from the national government. Orson and the others rejected this at once. But it was clear that they would have to get moving - Brigham Young, cloistered with all the charts available in |
