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Show Page 130 the "historian's tent," mapped out the route of "the camp of Israel." As the cold grew more intense, the Pratts moved down to Sugar Creek to be near the main encampment. On February 26, the mercury dropped to a cruel five degrees. Meanwhile, the Twelve desperately negotiated with surrounding settlers for feed corn and grain sufficient to fuel the westward migration. Orson pulled out his instruments and made the first measurements of the journey; he marked their Sugar Creek position at 40 32' latitude and reflected in his journal that the quadrant's inadequacy at determining longitude could lead the company as much as thirty miles off course at any given point. Added to his worries was the possibility of mis-directing the entire encampment, due to his lack of a proper sextant. Orson was characteristically upset that a telescope was lacking as well, for he was unable to observe "the immersions and emmersions of Jupiter's 4 satellites." By March 1 the camp had swelled into the thousands. The Twelve had finally obtained several hundred bushels of corn, and the time had come to start. The spectacle of several thousand exiles moving with their white-top wagons through a vast prairie of mud and snow was not a new one for Brigham Young and the others of the Twelve; they had seen it before in Missouri during the winter of '39. Now, several leagues to the north of their former misfortunes, they were leading a vastly increased number of Mormons, not into the warm and hospitable homes of Quincy, Illinois, but into the territory of the Sioux and onto the forsaken winter waste of the Great 5 Plains. They made five miles the first day. After making camp that night, Orson was visited by two Iowa men who offered him three hundred dollars worth of supplies for his new brick house in Nauvoo. The next day he inspected the supplies and eventually traded his two-thousand-dollar holdings in Nauvoo for four yoke of oxen, |