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Show Page 36 return to Ohio, after several weeks in bed, to rejoin the Prophet. Still shaking from the "ague," he walked back over the same trail, "preaching by the way, as commanded of the Lord through the Prophet," in the company of one Asa Dodds. October and November passed, Dodds dropped out in Indiana, but by the close of the year Orson had reached nhe Prophet's seat at Hiram, Ohio. From the exultation of his baptism on his nineteenth birthday, Orson had proved himself an intensely single-minded disciple, suffering his twentieth in a sickbed on the western frontier. The discipline and endurance evinced in this arduous journey were to push Orson Orson Pratt literally across the world in the cause of Mormonism. Eager to be about the work, Orson accompanied Elder Reynolds Cahoon on an "excommunication foray," authorized to cut off those in the neighborhood of Painesville and Kirtland who had fallen "out of harmony" with the Prophet. This task he apparently accomplished as methodically as ever. In the company of Elder Lyman E. Johnson, Orson attended a momentous conference at Amherst, Ohio, on January 25, 1832, and he and Johnson preached around this country for a week, the same area Orson knew so well from his sojourn there in 1827. While preaching in the region, he may have contacted the Redingtons, his hosts during the winter of his sixteenth year, and possibly his old teachers and classmates. When the conference convened, the Church underwent some careful reorganization. So that everyone would know his place in relation to the coming kingdom, some were called to preside - Joseph Smith was "acknowledged," or sustained, President of the High Priesthood, while Orson found himself designated to lead the "elders' quorum" - as the first elders' president of the Church, Orson now prepared to embark on what was to be a two-year 20 mission to the Eastern States. A revelation of January 25 appointed Orson Pratt and Lyman E. Johnson |